The ongoing outbreak of H5N1 avian flu virus looks a lot like a public-health problem that the United States should be well prepared for.

Although this version of flu is relatively new to the world, scientists have been tracking H5N1 for almost 30 years. Researchers know the basics of how flu spreads and who tends to be most at risk. They have experience with other flus that have jumped into us from animals. The U.S. also has antivirals and vaccines that should have at least some efficacy against this pathogen. And scientists have had the advantage of watching this particular variant of the virus spread and evolve in an assortment of animals—including, most recently, dairy cattle in the United States—without it transmitting in earnest among us. “It’s almost like having the opportunity to catch COVID-19 in the fall of 2019,” Nahid Bhadelia, the founding director of Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, told me.

Yet the U.S. is struggling to mount an appropriate response. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the nation’s alertness to infectious disease remains high. But both federal action and public attention are focusing on the wrong aspects of avian flu and other pressing infectious dangers, including outbreaks of measles within U.S. borders and epidemics of mosquito-borne pathogens abroad. To be fair, the United States (much like the rest of the world) was not terribly good at gauging such threats before COVID, but now “we have had our reactions thrown completely out of whack,” Bill Hanage, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and a co-director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard’s School of Public Health, told me. Despite all that COVID put us through—perhaps because of it—our infectious-disease barometer is broken.

H5N1 is undoubtedly concerning: No version of this virus has ever before spread this rampantly across this many mammal species, or so thoroughly infiltrated American livestock, Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me. But she and other experts maintain that the likelihood of H5N1 becoming our next pandemic remains quite low. No evidence currently suggests that the virus can spread efficiently between people, and it would still likely have to accumulate several more mutations to do so.

That’s been a difficult message for the public to internalize—especially with the continued detection of fragments of viral genetic material in milk. Every expert I asked maintained that pasteurized dairy products—which undergo a heat-treatment process designed to destroy a wide range of pathogens—are very unlikely to pose imminent infectious threat. Yet the fear that dairy could sicken the nation simply won’t die. “When I see people talking about milk, milk, milk, I think maybe we’ve lost the plot a little bit,” Anne Sosin, a public-health researcher at Dartmouth, told me. Experts are far more worried about still-unanswered questions: “How did it get into the milk?” Marrazzo said. “What does that say about the environment supporting that?”

During this outbreak, experts have called for better testing and surveillance—first of avian and mammalian wildlife, now of livestock. But federal agencies have been slow to respond. Testing of dairy cows was voluntary until last week. Now groups of lactating dairy cows must be screened for the virus before they move across state lines, but by testing just 30 animals, often out of hundreds. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told me he would also like to see more testing of other livestock, especially pigs, which have previously served as mixing vessels for flu viruses that eventually jumped into humans. More sampling would give researchers a stronger sense of where the virus has been and how it’s spreading within and between species. And it could help reveal the genomic changes that the virus may be accumulating. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies could also stand to shift from “almost this paternalistic view of, ‘We’ll tell you if you need to know,’” Osterholm said, to greater data transparency.  (The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.)

Testing and other protections for people who work with cows have been lacking, too. Many farm workers in the U.S. are mobile, uninsured, and undocumented; some of their employers may also fear the practical and financial repercussions of testing workers. All of that means a virus could sicken farm workers without being detected—which is likely already the case—then spread to their networks. Regardless of whether this virus sparks a full-blown pandemic, “we are completely ignoring the public-health threat that is happening right now,” Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. The fumbles of COVID’s early days should have taught the government how valuable proactive testing, reporting, and data sharing are. What’s more, the pandemic could have taught us to prioritize high-risk groups, Sosin told me. Instead, the United States is repeating its mistakes. In response to a request for comment, a CDC spokesperson pointed me to the agency’s published guidance on how farmworkers can shield themselves with masks and other personal protective equipment, and argued that the small number of people with relevant exposures who are displaying symptoms has been adequately monitored or tested.

Other experts worry that the federal government hasn’t focused enough on what the U.S. will do if H5N1 does begin to rapidly spread among people. The country’s experience with major flu outbreaks is an advantage, especially over newer threats such as COVID, Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the FDA and former member of the National Security Council, told me. But she worries that leaders are using that notion “to comfort ourselves in a way that I find to be very delusional.” The national stockpile, for instance, includes only a limited supply of vaccines developed against H5 flu viruses. And they will probably require a two-dose regimen, and may not provide as much protection as some people hope, Borio said. Experience alone cannot solve those challenges. Nor do the nation’s leaders appear to be adequately preparing for the wave of skepticism that any new shots might meet. (The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.)

In other ways, experts told me, the U.S. may have overlearned certain COVID lessons. Several researchers imagine that wastewater could again be a useful tool to track viral spread. But, Sosin pointed out, that sort of tracking won’t work as well for a virus that may currently be concentrated in rural areas, where private septic systems are common. Flu viruses, unlike SARS-CoV-2, also tend to be more severe for young children than adults. Should H5N1 start spreading in earnest among humans, closing schools “is probably one of the single most effective interventions that you could do,” Bill Hanage said. Yet many politicians and members of the public are now dead set on never barring kids from classrooms to control an outbreak again.

These misalignments aren’t limited to H5N1. In recent years, as measles and polio vaccination rates have fallen among children, cases—even outbreaks—of the two dangerous illnesses have been reappearing in the United States. The measles numbers are now concerning and persistent enough that Nahid Bhadelia worries that the U.S. could lose its elimination status for the disease within the next couple of years, undoing decades of progress. And yet public concern is low, Helen Chu, an immunologist and respiratory-virus expert at the University of Washington, told me. Perhaps even less thought is going toward threats abroad—among them, the continued surge of dengue in South America and a rash of cholera outbreaks in Africa and southern Asia. “We’re taking our eye off the ball,” Anthony Fauci, NIAID’s former director, told me.

That lack of interest feels especially disconcerting to public-health experts as public fears ignite over H5N1. “We don’t put nearly enough emphasis on what is it that really kills us and hurts us,” Osterholm told me. If anything, our experience with COVID may have taught people to further fixate on novelty. Even then, concern over newer threats, such as mpox, quickly ebbs if outbreaks become primarily restricted to other nations. Many people brush off measles outbreaks as a problem for the unvaccinated, or dismiss spikes in mpox as an issue mainly for men who have sex with men, Ajay Sethi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. And they shrug off just about any epidemic that happens abroad.

The intensity of living through the early years of COVID split Americans into two camps: one overly sensitized to infectious threats, and the other overly, perhaps even willfully, numbed. Many people fear that H5N1 will be “the next big one,” while others tend to roll their eyes, Hanage told me. Either way, public trust in health authorities has degraded. Now, “no matter what happens, you could be accused of not sounding the alarm, or saying, ‘Oh my God, here we go again,’” Jeanne Marrazzo told me. As long as infectious threats to humanity are growing, however, recalibrating our sense of infectious danger is imperative to keeping those perils in check. If a broken barometer fails to detect a storm and no one prepares for the impact, the damage might be greater, but the storm itself will still resolve as it otherwise would. But if the systems that warn us about infectious threats are on the fritz, our neglect may cause the problem to grow.

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More than 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton defied partisanship for the sake of the country’s future; if he hadn’t done so, American history might have taken a very different course. Today, Republicans face the same choice.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The Trumpification of the Supreme Court “No one has a right to protest in my home.” Columbia University’s impossible position

A Red Line

Alexander Hamilton loathed Thomas Jefferson. As rivals in George Washington’s Cabinet, the two fought over economics, the size and role of government, and slavery. They disagreed bitterly about the French Revolution (Jefferson was enthralled, Hamilton appalled). Hamilton thought Jefferson was a hypocrite, and Jefferson described Hamilton as “a man whose history … is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country.”

But starting in late 1800, Hamilton broke with his fellow Federalists and provided crucial support that put Jefferson in the White House. He was willing to set aside his tribal loyalties and support a man whose policies he vigorously opposed—a choice that saved the nation from a dangerous demagogue but likely cost him his life.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain probably never said. The quote’s attribution is apocryphal, but the point seems apt, because about 220 years later, Republicans face the same choice Hamilton did. They now have to decide whether felony charges, fraud, sexual abuse, and insurrection are red lines that supersede partisan loyalty.

Alexander Hamilton’s red line was Aaron Burr, whom he regarded as a dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and a “man of extreme & irregular ambition.” Burr was Jefferson’s running mate in the 1800 election, in which he defeated the Federalist incumbent John Adams. But under the original Constitution, the candidate with the most electoral votes became president, and the second-place finisher became vice president. Bizarrely, Jefferson and Burr each got 73 electoral votes, and because the vote was tied, the election was thrown to the House, which now had to choose the next president. Many Federalists, who detested and feared the idea of a Jefferson presidency, wanted to install Burr instead.

The result was a constitutional crisis that threatened to turn violent. “Republican newspapers talked of military intervention,” the historian Gordon Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty. “The governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania began preparing their state militias for action. Mobs gathered in the capital and threatened to prevent any president from being appointed by statute.”

Hamilton was faced with a difficult choice. He was a leading figure among Federalists; Jefferson was the leader of the faction known as Democratic-Republicans. And the 1790s were a historically partisan era. Yet “in a choice of Evils,” Hamilton wrote, “Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.” Washington, in his Farewell Address (which Hamilton helped draft and which Donald Trump’s lawyers misleadingly quoted this week), sounded the alarm about the growing partisan factionalism that he thought was tearing the country apart. Political parties, he said, could become “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” Hamilton was convinced that Aaron Burr was exactly the sort of cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled man that Washington had warned against.

Even though Jefferson was “too revolutionary in his notions,” Hamilton was willing to swallow his disagreements, because Jefferson was “yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government.” In contrast, “Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself—thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement—and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands.”

Defying his fellow Federalists, Hamilton waged a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to derail the scheme to install Burr. Jefferson was elected president on the 36th ballot after a group of Federalist congressmen flipped their votes for Burr, choosing to abstain instead.

Hamilton’s career in politics, already badly damaged by scandal, was effectively over. Burr, who became vice president, never forgave Hamilton, and on July 11, 1804, he fatally shot Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr was charged with murder but served out his term as vice president, immune from prosecution. Three years later, he was arrested and charged with treason after he allegedly plotted to seize territory in the West and create a new empire. He was acquitted on a technicality, and fled the country in disgrace.

But for Hamilton’s willingness to defy partisanship, American history might have taken a very different course.

Like Hamilton, we live in an age of fierce loyalties that make crossing party lines extraordinarily difficult. If anything, it is even harder now, especially for Republicans living with social pressures, media echo chambers, and a cult-like party culture compassed round, in the words of John Milton. Many public figures in the GOP have shown that they cannot break free of partisanship even in the face of rank criminality.

For example: Former Attorney General Bill Barr and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu acknowledge Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and his culpability in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But both men have said they would vote for Trump. Sununu has said that he would do so even if Trump is convicted of multiple felonies, suggesting that his crimes would be less important than his political differences with the Democrats. Former Vice President Mike Pence has said he would not endorse Trump, but he has also ruled out voting for Joe Biden.

Even former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who declared that Trump “is wholly unfit to be president of the United States in every way you think,” cannot bring himself to support the Democratic incumbent. We’re still waiting for Nikki Haley to say how she will vote in November.

So far, only Liz Cheney seems to be taking a position that rhymes with Hamilton’s choice two centuries ago. “There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,” she said. “My view is: I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.” Alexander Hamilton would, I think, approve.

Related:

Trump’s willing accomplice The validation brigade salutes Trump.

Today’s News

ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, released a statement yesterday asserting that it has no plans to sell the social-media app, in light of the potential national ban. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. will give Ukraine additional Patriot missiles as part of a $6 billion aid package. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. Blinken indicated that Chinese leaders had not made any promises about the U.S. demand that China cut its support for Russia’s defense industry.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: The author Adam Hochschild recommends books that vividly illustrate moments of great change. Atlantic Intelligence: As a technology, AI is “quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with,” Damon Beres writes. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explores why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?

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Evening Read

Tony Evans / Getty

We’re All Reading Wrong

By Alexandra Moe

Reading, while not technically medicine, is a fundamentally wholesome activity. It can prevent cognitive decline, improve sleep, and lower blood pressure. In one study, book readers outlived their nonreading peers by nearly two years. People have intuitively understood reading’s benefits for thousands of years: The earliest known library, in ancient Egypt, bore an inscription that read “The House of Healing for the Soul.”

But the ancients read differently than we do today. Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud. Silent reading was terribly strange, and, frankly, missed the point of sharing words to entertain, educate, and bond. Even in the 20th century, before radio and TV and smartphones and streaming entered American living rooms, couples once approached the evening hours by reading aloud to each other.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Photo by my wife, J. F. Riordan

I’m hoping to spend some quality time this weekend with Auggie and Eli, who still think they are lapdogs. That’s me under there.

— Charlie

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, it will annihilate all life on the North American continent. Siberia will become one of the safest places on Earth—which is yet another reason “the Anglo-Saxon elites” want to capture the region from Russia.  

So says Nikolai Patrushev, the second-most powerful man in Moscow. Currently the head of Russia’s Security Council, Patrushev has been a colleague of Vladimir Putin’s since the two served in the Leningrad KGB in the 1970s and is now the president’s confidant and top adviser. A general of the army and a former director of the FSB—the successor agency to the Soviet KGB—Patrushev is also the de facto overlord of the country’s other secret services. Among Kremlin courtiers, he alone appears licensed to speak for Putin on strategic matters, including nuclear weapons, the war in Ukraine, and Russia’s view of the U.S., Europe, and NATO.

Following Putin’s lead, many top Russian bureaucrats compete in conjuring up monstrous conspiracy theories. Yet even in this cracked-up crowd, Patrushev stands out for the luridness and intensity of his anti-West—and especially anti-U.S.—animus. The hyperbole of his comments would make the Soviet propagandists of my youth blush: His prominence is a reminder that, if Putin were to lose power tomorrow, his potential successors could be more warlike and expansionist, not less. Americans should worry about how much Patrushev’s outlook reinforces his boss’s—and about how his delusional, more-belligerent-than-Putin fulminations in long interviews with top-circulation Russian newspapers become the party line, which deafening propaganda then inculcates in the mind of millions of Russians.

In Patrushev’s telling, the West has been maligning and bullying Russia for half a millennium. As early as the 16th century, “Russophobic” Western historians besmirched Russia’s first czar, Ivan IV—a mass murderer and sadist better known as Ivan the Terrible. Patrushev insists that Ivan is merely a victim of a concocted “black legend” that “portrayed him as a tyrant.”  

To the Security Council chief, the West’s 20th-century siege of Russia had nothing to do with communism and the Cold War. In fact, the fall of the mighty Soviet Union made the country a softer target for the Western plotters, and the United States strove to exploit the opportunity by forcing Russia to give up its “sovereignty, national consciousness, culture, and an independent foreign and domestic policy.” The conspiracy’s final objectives are Russia’s dismemberment, the elimination of the Russian language, the country’s removal from the geopolitical map, and its confinement to the borders of the Duchy of Muscovy, a small medieval realm.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

In Patrushev’s world, the U.S. invents new viruses in biological-weapons labs to annihilate the peoples of “objectionable states,” and the COVID-19 virus “could have been created” by the Pentagon with the assistance of several of the largest transnational pharmaceutical firms and the “Clinton, Rockefeller, Soros, and Biden foundations.”

Patrushev’s greatest current fixation is “all this story with Ukraine”—a confrontation supposedly “engineered in Washington.” In 2014, by his account, the U.S. plotted the Maidan Revolution in Kyiv—a “coup d’état”—that pushed out a pro-Moscow president and sought to fill Ukrainians with “the hatred of everything Russian.” Today, Ukraine is no more than a testing ground for aging U.S. armaments as well as a place whose natural resources the West would prefer to exploit mercilessly—and “without the indigenous population.” Preserving Ukraine as a sovereign state is not in America’s plans, Patrushev claims. Afraid of attacking Russia directly, “NATO instructors herd Ukrainian boys to certain death” in the trenches. Indeed, the West is essentially perpetrating an “annihilation” of the Ukrainians, whereas Russia’s goal is to “put an end to the West’s bloody experiment to destroy the fraternal people of Ukraine.”

This is the picture of the world that Patrushev serves up to Putin. The adviser provides “a framework” for the Russian president’s vision, the prominent Russian political sociologist Nikolai Petrov has argued.

Repeated and internalized by its audience, propaganda captures and imprisons the propagandist. Patrushev said last May that Western special services were training terrorists and saboteurs for “committing crimes on the territory of our country.” Russian civilians have suffered because of that view. Weeks before Islamic State terrorists attacked a music hall in a Moscow suburb late last month, U.S. intelligence officials told the Russian government about a threat to the venue. Putin dismissed the U.S.’s warning as “obvious blackmail” and a “plot to scare and destabilize our society.”

While furnishing his compatriots with elaborately paranoid interpretations of the world, Patrushev vigorously participates in shaping it. More and more a policy maker in his own right, he frequently stands in for Putin in essential negotiations with top allies, reducing Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to ceremonial duties and the signing of meaningless treaties. As the exiled Russian journalist Maxim Glikin has pointed out, Patrushev is where foreign policy meets war. This nexus expands inexorably.

After Russia’s drubbing in Ukraine in the summer and fall of 2022, Patrushev flew to Tehran in November of that year to negotiate the sale of Iranian drones. He has traveled to Latin America to meet with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. With Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, Patrushev discussed “America-orchestrated color revolutions,” the “destructive activities” of nongovernment organizations, and the dispatching of Cuban troops to Belarus “for training.”

Patrushev works the darker side of Putin’s policies as well. He was likely involved in the 2006 poisoning in London of the FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko. The attempted killing in Salisbury, England, of the former double agent Sergei Skripal 12 years later would have required his sign-off. Patrushev is also plausibly suspected of firsthand involvement in last August’s killing of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the rebellious commander of the Wagner mercenary group. The judicial murder of the prominent regime opponent Alexei Navalny, too, could not have happened without Patrushev’s approval. Indeed, as the Russian-opposition essayist Alexander Ryklin has pointed out, the only officials who could have authorized the slow execution of Navalny were Putin and Patrushev.

Perhaps most chilling, Patrushev has some sway over Russia’s nuclear strategy. In October 2009, he announced in an interview with the national newspaper Izvestia that Russian nuclear weapons were not just for use in a “large-scale” war. Contrary to the restriction spelled out in the 2000 version of Russian military doctrine, Patrushev proposed that Russia’s nukes could be deployed in a conventional regional conflict or even a local one. He also thought that in a “critical situation,” a preventive strike against an aggressor “may not be excluded.” Four months later, Putin signed a revision of the doctrine. As Patrushev had suggested, a conflict would no longer have to be “large-scale” for Russia to reach for its atomic bombs and missiles. (Patrushev’s agitation for preventive nuclear attacks has yet to make the text of the doctrine, but Putin’s blunt nuclear blackmail in the past two years suggests that Patrushev may eventually get his wish.)  

In its efforts to understand Russia’s intentions, the United States has tried to get to know Patrushev better. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s first call to Patrushev was on January 25, 2021, five days after Joe Biden’s inauguration. Sullivan and Patrushev would go on to speak on the phone five more times, in addition to meeting in Reykjavik in May of that year. After their conversation in November, according to The New York Times, Patrushev reported discussing ways of “improving the atmosphere of Russian-American relations.” A joint statement indicated that Sullivan and Patrushev had discussed “increasing trust between the two countries.”

[Anna Nemtsova: Putin’s ‘rabble of thin-necked henchmen’ ]

Thirteen weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. One of no more than a handful of officials who’d known about Putin’s plan—and reportedly a driving force behind it—Patrushev presumably enjoyed weaving a web of dezinformatsiya around his American counterpart.

This would have been all the more gratifying because of the Kremlin’s conviction that time was on Russia’s side. In Patrushev’s view, the West is slowly expiring. European civilization has no future, he has said. Its politics are in the “deepest moral and intellectual decline”; it is headed for the “deepest economic and political crisis.”

America’s downfall is also nigh, portended not only by ashes at Yellowstone but by the nation’s basic geography. The United States is but “a patchwork quilt” that could “easily come apart at the seams.” Furthermore, Patrushev told the main government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the American South could be drifting toward Mexico, whose lands the U.S. grabbed in 1848: “Beyond doubt,” America’s “southern neighbors” will reclaim the stolen lands, and a passive U.S. citizenry will do nothing to preserve the “wholeness” of the country.

In this and many other ways, Patrushev’s worldview will seem utterly alien to most Americans. But his enormous influence underscores that Putin is far from the only force preventing Russian politics from reorienting toward a more liberal regime.   

The pendulum of Russian history has generally oscillated between brutal, bellicose regimes and softer, less repressive autocracies that retreat from confrontation with the West. But this pattern may not hold for the post-Putin future. After a quarter century under Putin, Russia’s secret services, the foundation of his regime, have degraded all other institutions and monopolized power. Patrushev, who turns 73 in July, is a year older than the president. Yet should he survive Putin, Patrushev is certain to deploy his secret army to help guide the transition and may well have a shot at coming out on top. As he likes to say, truth is on his side.  

Although much of the world is breathing a sigh of relief that Iran and Israel appear unwilling to push their exchange of missile and drone attacks further, potentially plunging the Middle East into a wider war, the danger of another escalation has not passed. Rather, the concern has shifted to a possible Israeli offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel has threatened this, and U.S. officials and others in the region fear that such a plan has been in the works for months.

For Israeli hawks, a major blow against Hezbollah has never seemed more opportune, but Washington dreads the prospect because the prime directive of American policy on the Gaza war has been containment of the conflict, particularly regarding Lebanon. The Biden administration’s worry is that an all-out Israeli assault in Lebanon could end up dragging the U.S. and Iran into not just a regional conflagration but a direct confrontation. Indeed, Washington fears that scenario may be just what some Israeli leaders want: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has for years urged but failed to effect U.S. strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Israel could launch a powerful assault on Hezbollah, hoping to damage and humiliate its most potent immediate adversary, and then withdraw behind a new buffer zone. Such a campaign is particularly tempting after the trauma of the October 7 attack by Hamas because, in contrast to the nightmarish quagmire now enveloping Gaza, Lebanon seems to offer the promise of a quick and decisive victory that can set the world aright for the badly shaken Israelis. But the assumption that such an invasion will enhance Israel’s sense of power and security could prove a ruinous folly.

[Robert F. Worth: Hezbollah goes to the theater]

The Biden administration’s diplomatic effort to manage this crisis has chiefly relied on heavyweights such as CIA Director Bill Burns, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. They have focused on the most high-profile issues of hostages, humanitarian aid, and a cease-fire, pursuing complex indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas. But a crucial role may now fall to the less well-known Amos Hochstein, who has taken the lead in trying to broker an understanding between Israel and Hezbollah that could prevent intensified hostilities. He is working with French President Emmanuel Macron to find such a formula.

Hochstein achieved an extraordinary breakthrough in October 2022 between Israel and the Hezbollah-influenced government in Beirut over maritime boundaries that should allow both countries to exploit offshore oil fields without menacing each other. Because of that success and the ties Hochstein developed among the parties, including Hezbollah, the State Department energy adviser became the point person when the Biden administration sought to manage unrest on that border.

Hochstein’s new brief is more challenging. For months, he has tried fruitlessly to achieve a limited pullback of Hezbollah’s elite border force to about five miles into Lebanon. Israel was demanding a withdrawal of more like 20 miles, to around the Litani River. Hezbollah flatly rejected the idea of redeploying from its southern-Lebanese heartland. The group justifies maintaining its own private militia—and therefore an independent foreign policy—by claiming that it is protecting southern Lebanon from Israel and trying to liberate small areas still occupied by its adversary, so Hezbollah’s national power derives from its paramilitary presence there.

From the outset of the Gaza war, Hezbollah—with Iran’s backing—has made it clear that it does not seek a broader war with Israel. Lebanon, mired in economic and political turmoil, is in no position to withstand an Israeli onslaught. Hezbollah could face a terrible backlash, including within its own Shiite constituency, if it dragged the country into a pointless and devastating conflict. Tehran needs to ensure that Hezbollah’s military capability remains intact so it can continue to serve as a deterrent against Israeli or U.S. attacks on Iran itself, especially its nuclear facilities.

For Iran, Gaza lacks any inherent strategic significance. Hamas is regarded as an unreliable partner, a Sunni Muslim Brotherhood group that fits uneasily within the largely Shiite pro-Iranian alliance. When, after 2011, civil war broke out in Syria, where the predominantly Alawi (a Shiite offshoot faith) regime soon found itself fighting Sunni Islamist rebels, the Hamas politburo was compelled to flee Damascus for Doha, in Qatar, where it remains to this day. For its part, Hezbollah feels no obligation to sacrifice its political and military strength for either Gaza or Hamas.

In any case, hawks in Tehran believe that the Gaza war has given their alliance the upper hand, and that the only way for Israel to alter the situation is to engineer a broader regional conflict. To preserve that advantage, they argue, Iran and its Arab-militia clients should take care to deny Israel any opportunity to escalate and avoid overstepping.

[Read: Israel versus Hezbollah, round three?]

Some Israeli leaders appear keen for such an opportunity. In mid-October, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and others reportedly began pressing for a major preemptive attack against Hezbollah. The group had launched rocket and artillery attacks on Israeli positions on October 8, “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack on Israel the previous day. “Our history, our guns and our rockets are with you,” a senior Hezbollah official proclaimed. Forceful objections from the Biden administration and the need to focus on Gaza prevented such an attack. But Gallant and a growing group within the war cabinet continue to push for a “northern campaign.” Because of Hezbollah’s attacks, Israel evacuated about 80,000 residents in the border region. A similar number of Lebanese self-evacuated from southern towns and villages.

The demand for war thus became centered on the insistence that these Israelis could not return to their home not just until Hezbollah ceased its cross-border barrage, but until Hezbollah’s forces were driven from the area, to prevent its immediate recurrence. This demand may be framed as a new need for border security because of the October 7 attacks, but it smacks of rationalization. The Israeli calls for a war predated the evacuations anyway, but most important, relocating Hezbollah commandos would not address the primary threat of the group’s massive arsenal of missiles, rockets, and drones. This force, estimated at about 150,000 projectiles, is capable of striking anywhere in Israel and probably of overwhelming its air-defense systems.

The conviction among some Israeli leaders that a decisive war with Hezbollah is inevitable and necessary explains Israel’s ongoing strikes against Hezbollah; Israel claims to have eliminated fully half of the group’s southern commanders. Such belligerence also explains Israel’s strike on a diplomatic facility in Damascus that killed three Iranian generals, key leaders in Tehran’s regional axis. The Iranians clearly felt the need to retaliate directly against Israel for this attack on what diplomatic norms deem its own soil.

Iran’s resolve to restore deterrence and bolster national morale took both the Israelis and the Americans by surprise, yet Iran was careful to telegraph the aerial attack well in advance. About half of its missiles and drones reportedly malfunctioned; almost all of the rest were shot down by U.S., Israeli, U.K., and Jordanian forces. Israel’s response attack inside Iran was more sophisticated but also carefully calibrated. No one was killed in either attack, and both sides have been able to declare themselves vindicated and victorious.

[Andrew Exum: The hubris of Hezbollah]

The most obvious aspect of Iran’s relative restraint was that it did not unleash Hezbollah’s daunting arsenal. This underscores the fact that Iran doesn’t want Hezbollah drawn into conflict with Israel. But the constant threat of that arsenal remains the strongest argument of Gallant and his war party for an attack into Lebanon.

Israeli leaders have a further incentive. The lack of clarity about an endgame in Gaza, and what an incontrovertible win would even look like, makes the prospect of a quick, decisive campaign against Hezbollah all the more appealing. The Lebanese militia is a much more conventional force than Hamas, and some Israelis argue that inflicting losses and degrading Hezbollah’s military machine would be more readily quantifiable, providing a rapid, needed boost for Israel’s battered national morale. In the long run, they say, degrading, deterring, and humiliating the formidable Iranian proxy is much more important to Israel’s national security than neutralizing Hamas.

The logic of belligerence, however, risks obscuring its hubris. Hochstein and his colleagues in the Biden administration might do well to remind Israeli leaders that, ever since Hezbollah was founded, following the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, each time the Israel Defense Forces have squared off against the organization, they have consistently encountered a more disciplined, organized, and competent adversary than they expected. Much, therefore, rides on Hochstein’s diplomacy to broker an Israeli-Hezbollah understanding. If that effort fails, President Joe Biden may be the only person alive who has any chance of saving Israel and Lebanon from a catastrophic and avoidable conflict.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

My colleague Derek Thompson has written about Americans’ social isolation and anxiety. But this week, he writes, “I thought I’d turn things around for a change. What matters most for happiness—marriage, money, or something else entirely?”

Reading about the key to happiness can sometimes feel like a trick: Could it really be as simple as a given expert makes it out to be? As Derek notes, “Clever sociologists will always find new ways of ‘calculating’ that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount.” But his research leads him to what he calls a “subtler truth”—a “happiness trinity” of which “finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs” rising together and falling together.

Today’s newsletter explores some subtler truths about American happiness.

On Happiness

The Happiness Trinity

By Derek Thompson

Why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?

Read the article.

Take a Wife … Please!

By Olga Khazan

Why are married people happier than the rest of us?

Read the article.

A Happiness Columnist’s Three Biggest Happiness Rules

By Arthur C. Brooks

A good life isn’t just about getting the details right. Here are some truths that transcend circumstance and time.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Ten practical ways to improve happiness: For when you need advice that goes beyond “Be Danish” What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life: “We neglect our connections with others at our peril,” Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write.

Other Diversions

Sphere is the mind-killer. We’re all reading wrong. A dentist found a jawbone in a floor tile.

P.S.

Courtesy of Karolina L.

Last week, I asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Karolina L., 26, in Warsaw, wrote: “I always look up at the moon when I’m walking at night. No matter where I am, it makes me feel at home—like I have a friend watching over me.”

I’ll continue to share your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.

— Isabel

Photographs by Siqi Li

In a decidedly digital age, the modest postage stamp seems to be slowly vanishing from daily life—no longer ubiquitous in wallets or pocketbooks, useful but maybe not essential.

They’re so overlooked that the comedian Nate Bargatze has an entire bit about how stamps make him “nervous.” “I don’t know how many you’re supposed to put on [a letter],” he says. “And they change the price of stamps, and that’s not in the news, you know? You don’t find that out on Twitter. You have to find out from old people. They’re the only people that know.” (As someone in the news, I am duty bound to report that stamps’ price increased from $0.66 to $0.68 on January 21.)

But stamps aren’t yet entirely anachronistic. Yes, the volume of first-class mail has been on the decline, but the U.S. Postal Service still sells about 12.5 billion stamps annually. Some of this is a matter of taste. “There are certain things where physical mail is still seen as the socially correct way to do things,” says Daniel Piazza, the chief curator of philately at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, pointing to mailing wedding invitations, birthday notes, and holiday cards.

But stamps serve a purpose that is not merely functional. If you look back far enough, they also tell a story about national identity, and the technological and cultural trajectory of America. Stamps “are both miniature art works and pieces of government propaganda,” Dennis Altman wrote in his 1991 book, Paper Ambassadors: The Politics of Stamps. “They can be used to promote sovereignty, celebrate achievement, define national, racial, religious, or linguistic identity, portray messages or exhort certain behaviour.”

Richard Morel, the curator of the British Library’s Philatelic Collection, put it to me more succinctly: “Stamps democratize our history and culture.” In short, the history of U.S. stamps tells a story of America.

The postage stamp as we know it today is a relatively young technology. Prior to the mid-1800s, “most letters were sent collect, so postage was paid by the recipient of the letter rather than by the sender,” Piazza told me. This turned out to be a very bad business model for the Postal Service. First, it required people to go to their post office to see whether they had mail. In fact, postmasters paid to run ads in local papers listing who had letters to collect so those people would retrieve them. (One true constant across time seems to be that people consider going to the post office a chore.) Then, if there was a letter for someone and they did pick it up, the receiver had to pay the postage, which they sometimes refused to do, given its expense. “So it’s a very cumbersome, sort of expensive system” for both the Postal Service and the receivers of mail, Piazza said.

[Read: One Thousand Stamps, All Different (1939)]

Until a breakthrough in 1840. The U.K. issued the Penny Black, the world’s first prepaid, adhesive stamp. With this stamp, people could send a half-ounce letter for a flat, prepaid rate of one penny. The Penny Black featured the face of Queen Victoria, and, in a sign of the times, some people believed that “licking the back of the queen’s head was undignified, if not potentially treasonous,” Altman wrote in his book. On a recent visit to the British Library, I was able to see the last remaining press of the type that printed the Penny Black. Displayed on the library’s upper-ground floor, the machine—which was smaller than I had imagined, given its function—looked as delicate as an antiquity of the Industrial Revolution can, with its large spindle, rope pulleys, and iron weights.

Left: The Penny Black printing press. Right: Penny Black, the world’s first pre-paid, adhesive stamp. (Siqi Li for The Atlantic)

This British innovation in stamp production set the path for other countries to follow. In the 1840s and ’50s, several other nations developed their own postage stamps. The U.S. issued its first ones on July 1, 1847: a five-cent stamp featuring Benjamin Franklin, the country’s first postmaster general, and a 10-cent stamp featuring George Washington. (Washington, distinguished in so many ways, also has the distinction of having more appearances on U.S. stamps than anyone else.)

The start of stamps in the U.S. was an unheralded affair. A postmaster in Maine mailed a letter—without a stamp, postage due—to the postmaster general to inquire whether the stamps his office had received were “genuine,” according to Smithsonian Magazine. But by 1856, all mail required federal, prepaid postage stamps, and we largely entered the state of postage stamps as we know them today. Or, as Morel put it, their invention “triggered our information revolution.”

Stamp design, however, took a little longer to develop. For decades, American stamps followed the aesthetics of coin-face design, that is, profile drawings of heads of state. In our case, primarily dead presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson. The U.S. didn’t begin issuing commemorative stamps until 1893, timed to the World’s Fair in Chicago, with a series of 16 stamps celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World. Included in the series was a depiction of Queen Isabella of Spain, making her the first woman featured on a U.S. stamp. (The first American woman on a stamp was Martha Washington, in 1902.)

In the 130 years since that first commemorative stamp, hundreds and hundreds more designs have been issued. U.S. postage stamps have celebrated momentous events, such as the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid New York, home of the first U.S. Winter Olympics Games, and the moon landing, in 1969. There have been many stamp firsts: the first Hispanic American (Admiral David Farragut, 1903), the first Native American (Pocahontas, 1907), the first African American (Booker T. Washington, 1940). Some stamps impart social messages: Prevent Drug Abuse (1971) or Alcoholism: You Can Beat It (1981). They’ve even been used to fund causes. The Breast Cancer Research semipostal has sold more than 1 billion stamps since it was first issued, in 1998, and has raised millions of dollars for the cause.

“If you compare some of the American stamp designs … to other countries’, they’re incredibly progressive much earlier on,” Morel said. There’s the Black Heritage Series, which began in 1978 with an image of Harriet Tubman and still runs today with annual new releases. Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan were commemorated on a stamp in 1980. Even designs that might now be seen as dated or insensitive were bold in their own time. In 1969, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp that featured an image of a young child gradually emerging out of a wheelchair. The language on the stamp reads, Hope for the crippled. “The language is now problematic,” Morel said, “but it’s the intent that underlies the stamp design, which is actually a positive one.”

These design decisions are not made lightly. In 1957, the Postal Service created the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, which consists of a group of people from across disciplines who consider stamp recommendations from the public. Anyone can suggest any subject to the council, which will weigh the recommendation so long as it meets its healthy list of criteria—for example, the design should honor a subject or a figure that made a significant contribution to American life, and the commemorated can’t be a living person.

Left: The Inverted Jenny. Right: Two people print a sheet of stamps at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Stamp Division, around 1890. (Siqi Li for The Atlantic)

It’s a deliberative process that can take several years—and for good reason. Nearly any stamp design is certain to irritate someone. In the early 1990s, when the Postal Service announced that it would be releasing a stamp featuring Elvis, some Americans were scandalized. They couldn’t fathom the idea of honoring someone who had addiction issues and was once considered too sexy for broadcast television. “I was appalled to see that a picture of Elvis Presley is being considered for a postage stamp,” one person wrote in a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1992. “The picture on a postage stamp should be someone or something of historical significance or an individual who has made an extraordinary contribution to the well-being of the human race … If Presley appears on a stamp, the postmaster general should be fired immediately.” The Postal Service won the day; the Elvis stamp is widely considered the most popular commemorative stamp in U.S. history. The decision to put Bugs Bunny on a stamp was also met with mild indignation. “That one probably didn’t go over as well with the serious stamp collectors,” says Jay Bigalke, the editor in chief of Linn’s Stamp News. People used it as an excuse to “write to the Postal Service and say, ‘If you can issue a stamp for Bugs Bunny, you can issue a stamp for fill-in-the-blank.’”

A reason these design choices are so freighted is that they have broad, international reach. “Trivial as they may seem, [stamps] are objects that are extremely dispersed both domestically and abroad, and which allow governments to propagate widely the official culture of a given state,” Altman wrote. Said another way, stamps let officials tell the story they want to tell. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a stamp collector himself, “nosed his way into stamp design, even sketching them out on a napkin and passing it along to the postmaster general at the time,” Bigalke told me. After Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act, he asked for a stamp promoting the law to be issued. “He just recognized the importance of the postage stamp and conveying a message,” Bigalke said.

Other countries use their stamps to tell stories too, and sometimes those stories are deeply influenced by the United States. A number of African countries have released stamps featuring Martin Luther King Jr., for example, a testament to King’s international importance and popularity. The Apollo 11 mission has been featured on more than 50 stamps in other countries. A stamp issued by Iran in 1984 featured Malcolm X. American pop culture has also infiltrated international postage stamps. In the Caribbean, St. Vincent and the Grenadines has featured both Elvis and Michael Jackson on its stamps. (Jackson has not been featured on an American stamp.)

[Read: Stamps for Me (1943)]

Stamps are also used for more expressly political or propagandist purposes. In 1969, North Korea issued a stamp called “International Conference of Journalists Against US Imperialism,” showing several pens attacking President Richard Nixon. “The very fact that [North Korea] uses stamps as a medium to attack America is, again, proof [of] the value of stamps,” Morel said. “Because if there was no value, why bother?”

Left: The Elvis Stamp. Right: A stamp issued by Iran in 1984 featuring Malcolm X (top) and a North Korean stamp called “International Conference of Journalists Against US Imperialism.” (Siqi Li for The Atlantic)

More recently, Ukraine used its stamp program as a sort of hearts-and-minds campaign. “When the invasion and the war broke out, they issued a postage stamp showing a soldier flipping off the battleship” off of Snake Island, Bigalke said. Ukraine has “been using stamps as a rallying cry in the country in a much more powerful way than any other country really has with their postage stamps,” he told me. “A lot of people have bought the stamps to help support Ukraine.”

Stamps have also been used as a sort of bilateral foreign-relations tool. A stamp commemorating joint Soviet-American efforts in space exploration was released in 1975, during the Cold War. And the U.S. and Australia jointly released stamps celebrating the latter’s bicentenary, in 1988.

Perhaps the most famous American stamp design is one the U.S. Postal Service never wanted to release. In 1918, the department issued its first airmail stamp, which featured a Curtiss Jenny biplane. Because of its two-color design, the stamp had to go through the press twice. And at some point in the printing, one of the plates was turned upside down. This run resulted in nine misprinted 100-stamp sheets. Eight of them were found and destroyed on the printing floor, but one misprinted sheet of the stamp—now known as the Inverted Jenny—found its way to the public. (In 1939, this magazine referred to such misprints as “philatelic romances.”) The Inverted Jenny has since become one of the most highly prized stamps for collectors and is a small pop-culture phenomenon. It was briefly referenced in the film Brewster’s Millions and in a joke at Homer’s expense in The Simpsons. Last year, a single Inverted Jenny stamp sold for a little more than $2 million.

Stamps provide “an amazing body of material to study the history of communication, art, design, but also humanity,” Morel said. And this study started essentially on the very first day of the modern postage stamp’s existence. The oldest surviving stamp collection dates back to 1855, by a collector from Belgium who started amassing the stamps to learn geography.

In 1943, in the midst of World War II, The Atlantic published a sort of defense of the hobby in its February issue. “So stamp collecting. It’s a vice, but most pleasant,” wrote Henry Bellamann, a poet and an author, in the article “Stamps for Me.” He later continued, “The stress of the day in which we are living is unbelievably great. We have need of releases through simple pleasures.”

Seeing stamps through the prism of history made a recent visit to my local, fluorescently lit post office edge just barely into exciting territory. I had gone to return a package and thought I might buy some stamps. A gentleman ahead of me in line asked about the particular design I wanted, and I overheard the teller say that it had sold out. So when I returned home, I decided to buy some stamps online. Scrolling through the gallery, I selected some Our Lady of Guápulo holiday stamps (issued 2020) and some Piñatas! stamps (issued 2023) to attach to invites for a party. I could just send an email invite, but knowing that nearly everyone’s mood lifts when they receive actual letters, it only feels right to choose the mailbox over the inbox.

Supported by the British Library Eccles Institute for the Americas Phil Davies Fellowship.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr gave an interview to CNN on Friday to explain why he plans to vote for Donald Trump after previously denouncing him as unfit for office. Trump might be an unfit president, Barr conceded. Trump had only recently belittled Barr personally. But President Joe Biden might overregulate kitchen stoves, Barr complained, and faced with that dread possibility, Barr had to prefer Trump as the lesser evil.

Barr feels how he feels. But as a rational matter, he’s not thinking clearly. Even for a conservative Republican such as Barr, who wants to maximize power for conservative Republicanism, Trump is a choice that makes sense only if you have no long-term imagination at all. To see how wrong that choice is, consider a hypothetical: how much better Republicans’ political prospects would look today if the Electoral College had followed the popular vote in 2016 and Hillary Clinton had won the presidency that year. Back then, someone like Barr would have thought that outcome a catastrophe. But in retrospect imagine:

Alongside a President Clinton, voters in 2016 elected a 241–194 Republican House and a 52–48 Republican Senate. A President Clinton would probably not have signed as big a tax cut as President Trump did in 2017. Her regulators would not have been as friendly to the oil and gas industry as Trump’s were. But facing such strong Republican majorities in Congress, and with a popular-vote mandate of only 48 percent, she would have been limited in her ability to advance her own agenda.

Now look at what might have happened next. In the real-life elections of 2018, Republicans got badly beaten. They dropped 40 House seats in the highest-turnout off-year election since before World War I. In our hypothetical–President Clinton scenario, Republicans surely would have added seats to their House majority in 2018, while likely holding the Senate too. The party of the president almost always loses seats in a midterm, and that’s even more emphatically true when the party of the president has held office for three consecutive terms.

In 2020, when COVID struck, a President Clinton surely would have responded more competently and compassionately than Trump did. But the pandemic still would have been a bad experience for most Americans—doubly so if riots broke out in our alternate-history 2020 as they did in the real timeline. Republicans would have been well-positioned for a massive presidential comeback that fall, very possibly with the popular-vote majority they otherwise have not won since 2004.

[Peter Wehner: Trump’s willing accomplice]

Whoever the new Republican president would have been, the GOP could have passed a big 2017-style tax cut in 2021—without having to cover for Trump’s alleged crimes. The post-COVID recovery—inflation in 2021 and 2022, followed by strong growth in 2023 and 2024—would then have put the Republican incumbent on the path to reelection in 2024.

“But what about the Supreme Court?” our Trump-skeptical Republicans might ask. Trump filled seats opened by the deaths of Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and by the resignation of Anthony Kennedy. Even if we suppose that Kennedy would not have resigned during a Clinton presidency, a President Clinton could have remade the Court majority in the liberals’ favor, as Trump did for conservatives.

But a President Clinton would not have had as much leeway on the Court as Trump did. Her nominees would have had to pass the Republican Senate. And if Roe v. Wade had been upheld under a Clinton-appointed majority, the politics might have played out better for Republicans, who have struggled in national and state elections since Roe’s overturning. So long as Roe was law, the anti-abortion position was good Republican politics. Instead, a generation of young women might be alienated from the Republican Party for the rest of their voting lives. Although some anti-abortion true believers would gladly pay the price, most Republicans are not anti-abortion true believers.

All told, victory for Clinton in 2016 would have left Republicans in a much better place in the 2020s—and without the shame and disgrace of complicity with Trump.

Now let’s think realistically about what 2024 could mean for Trump-wary Republicans.

If Trump wins in 2024, the country could plunge almost instantly into a political and constitutional crisis—especially if Democrats hold the Senate and win the House, but even if they don’t. A reelected Trump’s first priority will be to shut down all of the legal cases against him, including trials that have already begun. He’ll want to pardon himself if he has been convicted of any offenses. He’ll try to use presidential power to quash the half-billion dollars of civil judgments against him. Trump’s opponents will not passively submit to any of this. There will be upheaval, unrest, and very likely a third Trump impeachment trial.

A reelected Trump’s second priority will be to sell out Ukraine and bust up NATO. Eighty years of U.S.-led alliance structure will collapse, and the whole system of world peace and security will unravel—with who knows what consequences.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: The danger ahead]

A reelected Trump’s third priority will be to impose tariffs on China, triggering a global trade war. Consumer prices will rise, the stock market will tumble, and the world economy could slide into recession if not outright depression.

Alternatively, imagine if Joe Biden wins in November. A Biden reelection might well mean more regulation of stoves, as Bill Barr worried. Biden might do other things Barr would not like either, but even those things would be an improvement over the outlook of chaos from Trump’s attempt to overturn American law to save himself from prison. The 2017 tax cut would expire in a second Biden term, and might not be renewed. That said, President Bill Clinton signed a capital-gains tax in his second term as a cost of doing business. Biden is even more of a dealmaker.

Meanwhile, the path to Republican revival would open. Republicans could reasonably expect to score gains in the 2026 midterm elections. With Trump a three-time popular-vote loser, even his base would begin to perceive the failure of his corrupt and authoritarian leadership—and turn again to leaders whom Barr himself would much prefer to Trump or the Trump imitators who would proliferate if Trump somehow returns to power in 2025.

In Republican rhetoric, it is always five minutes to midnight. In 2011, future Speaker of the House Paul Ryan delivered a speech warning that the United States was fast approaching a “tipping point” that would “curtail free enterprise, transform our government, and weaken our national identity in ways that may not be reversible.” That way of thinking can justify extreme actions. If the choice really is between constitutional democracy on the one hand, and free enterprise and national identity on the other, that’s indeed agonizing.

But as the history of the Trump years shows, that choice is as phony as Bill Barr’s pretense of integrity. A Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016 would have left both free enterprise and national identity perfectly intact, with no worse consequences for conservatives than a four-year delay of a big tax cut and possibly the benefit of escape from their present predicament over abortion rights. A Biden reelection in 2024 will be annoying to conservatives in other ways. But compared with what Trump threatens?

Before choosing the “lesser of two evils,” Trump-skeptical Republicans must measure the choices accurately. Assessing clearly the recent past helps with that analysis. The Republican Party would today be healthier and more successful if it had lost the presidency in 2016. It will be healthier in 2032 if it loses in 2024.

In 1950, a U.S. Army psyops officer named Paul Linebarger used a pseudonym to publish a science-fiction story titled “Scanners Live in Vain” in a pulp magazine. It was about a man named Martel who works for the “deep state” in the far future as a mysterious “scanner,” or starship pilot, and whose mind is manipulated by evil bureaucrats. After a new technology called a “cranching wire” restores his true senses, he recognizes that his bosses within the government order a hit on anyone who challenges their control of space travel and the economy. Martel ultimately joins an insurrectionary movement aimed at overthrowing the regime.

If this narrative sounds like a QAnon conspiracy theory, there’s a good reason for that: Today’s dystopian political rhetoric has its roots in mid-century sci-fi. Martel’s struggle against secretive, malevolent authorities echoes in the Pizzagate shooter’s fantasy about a cabal of politically powerful pedophiles; we can also see its inspiration in Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s anti-Semitic Facebook rant about space lasers beamed at the Earth, and the Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone’s intimation that Bill Gates “played some role in the creation” of COVID-19.

Linebarger, who died of a heart attack in 1966 at age 53, could not have predicted that tropes from his sci-fi stories about mind control and techno-authoritarianism would shape 21st-century American political rhetoric. But the persistence of his ideas is far from accidental, because Linebarger wasn’t just a writer and soldier. He was an anti-communist intelligence operative who helped define U.S. psychological operations, or psyops, during World War II and the Cold War. His essential insight was that the most effective psychological warfare is storytelling. Linebarger saw psyops as an emotionally intense, persuasive form of fiction—and, to him, no genre engaged people’s imagination better than science fiction.

[David A. Graham: There is no American ‘deep state’]

I pored over Linebarger’s personal papers at the Hoover Institution propaganda collection while researching my forthcoming book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Boxes of his studies on the politics of China and Southeast Asia are filed alongside his fiction manuscripts and unpublished musings on psychology. Here, I realized, was an origin story for modern conspiracy politics, which blur the line between sci-fi plots and American patriotism—they came from a psywar operative. Put another way, an agent of what some would now call the “deep state” had devised the far-out stories that politicians like Greene use to condemn it. Perhaps, if she and others knew this, they might not be so eager to blame space lasers and vaccine microchips for what ails our nation.  

Under the pen name Cordwainer Smith, Linebarger wrote many stories about the Instrumentality, a totalitarian intergalactic empire that is toppled by rebels like Martel. Linebarger’s fiction won a cult following and was nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo, two of the most prestigious awards for science-fiction writing.

Still, Linebarger’s most significant book was undoubtedly a classified U.S. Army guide, titled simply Psychological Warfare and published under his real name. To undertake a successful influence campaign, he advised, imagine you’re inventing a character for the person you’re targeting with propaganda. Envision this subject, whom he named “Propaganda Man,” then “make up the prewar life” for him, including his “likes,” “prejudices,” and favorite “kind of gossip.” Once this Propaganda Man felt three-dimensional, as though drawn from a good story, the goal was to design a psychological operation designed to engage Propaganda Man and transmit the message that “he is your friend, you are his friend,” and “the only enemy is the enemy Leader (or generals, or emperor, or capitalists, or ‘They’).”

Previous approaches to this branch of warfare, he wrote, had relied merely on censoring the news and distributing stodgy propaganda full of “strong-faced men building dams and teaching better chicken-raising.” It would be better, Linebarger suggested, if American propaganda was as entertaining as a Laurel and Hardy movie—giving audience members a good time while teaching them that America was their ally. The character of Martel clearly resembles a Propaganda Man; the cranching wire might be the antenna on his radio, tuning in to agitprop vehicles like Voice of America that inspire him to resist his despotic overlords.

Linebarger’s military guide was foundational for the United States’ unique approach to propaganda, which has long borrowed techniques from pop culture to promote the nation’s interests. One of the early-20th-century masterminds of U.S. propaganda was a public-relations pioneer named Edward Bernays, who began his career marketing cigarettes in the 1920s and ended it helping the CIA spread misinformation about the leftist Guatemalan government in the ’50s. His idea, which shaped Linebarger’s own thinking, was that propaganda was like advertising in a popular magazine: It should push one simple message, in a persuasive and seductive style. This makes an instructive contrast with what the Rand Corporation has called Russia’s Soviet-derived “firehose of falsehood” strategy, whereby operatives inundate the media with lies and chaotic, contradictory stories to undermine the public’s faith in all information sources. If Russia’s motto is, in effect, “Believe nothing,” America’s has been “Believe us.” At the height of the Cold War, Linebarger was inventing a way to make people believe in America—using techniques borrowed from fantastical storytelling.

Linebarger’s father was a diplomat who worked closely with the Chinese-nationalist leader Sun Yat-Sen, who became the younger Linebarger’s godfather. Paul Linebarger himself spent a great deal of his childhood traveling in China, learning Mandarin and studying Sun’s political vision. As an adult, Linebarger made it his mission to topple the Communist regime and restore the republic that Sun had built. Although he did not accomplish this in fact, he could, as Cordwainer Smith, depict such a struggle in fiction—the Instrumentality can be read as a surreal version of China’s government under Mao Zedong. One way to understand Linebarger’s fiction is as psyops aimed partly at a Chinese Propaganda Man who might be induced to rise up against his Communist overlords.

Literary critics have pointed out references, in Linebarger’s stories, to Chinese classics such as Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms—which makes sense in light of Linebarger’s instruction that propaganda should imitate pop culture. He wanted his stories to be engaging for people who grew up with the adventures of Sun Wukong (also known as Monkey King, the hero of Journey to the West), as well as for those who grew up with Superman. Using the power of myth, he insinuated that liberation could come from the Christian West. In the story “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” for example, cyborg insurrectionists use legends about the Catholic martyr Joan of Arc to persuade human-animal hybrid “underpeople” to join their fight against the rulers of the Instrumentality.

Modern conspiracy influencers have taken up Linebarger’s mantle. As the NBC reporter Ben Collins told the WNYC show On the Media in 2020, the far right in particular is “very good at storytelling. It’s world building, that’s what it is really.” World building is a term that speculative-fiction authors commonly use to describe the project of creating a fantasy realm so fully realized and all-enveloping that audiences willingly suspend their disbelief.

World building in speculative fiction and game design “is political, always,” the author and critic Laurie Penny writes. Those who imaginatively inhabit fictional worlds become intensely invested in them—which helps explain how fan debates over video games morphed into the right-wing attack pile-on known as Gamergate in 2014. But influencers on the left, too, have used fantasy fictions to advance their political cause. The creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, famously described his strong heroine as “propaganda” for liberated women. In early issues of the comic, he even included historical sketches of real-life female scientists, explorers, and political leaders, to drive home his message that women were the equals of men.

A more recent example of world building for an ideological purpose would be the Left Behind series, by the Christian writer Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, a minister who established the prominent right-wing think tank the Council for National Policy. They found a winning formula in combining end-time fantasy—the Rapture, in evangelical teaching—with political conflicts drawn from recent history. Their best-selling books, which have sold more than 65 million copies and spawned a film franchise, helped popularize a brand of apocalyptic millenarian belief found among some MAGA extremists.

When Linebarger died, he left a large corpus of unpublished monographs and intelligence reports written under his own name. Most of his books for the public were science fiction, written as Cordwainer Smith (he also wrote literary fiction and thrillers, under other pseudonyms). What united these disparate interests was the mind of a person who knew that the tools of fantastical storytelling could be very effective in persuading people to build a new reality.

[Brian Klaas: In MAGA world, everything happens for a reason]

In Psychological Warfare, Linebarger instructed intelligence officers to combat America’s adversaries and woo new allies with propaganda that felt like science fiction. “It is the purpose that makes it propaganda,” he wrote, “and not the truthfulness or untruthfulness of it.” Of course, Linebarger was very clear about his purpose: to win people to the American way. But the world-building power of sci-fi storytelling that he championed can be adapted for very different purposes, as a weapon of mass disinformation.

I spoke with one of Linebarger’s intellectual heirs, a former psyops instructor for the Army, who told me that he and his colleagues worry a lot about psychological warfare’s “second- or third-order effects,” consequences that can be completely unintended. One such consequence is the ubiquity of conspiracy thinking, through which all of reality is converted into fiction—rather than Believe us, people will believe anything.

Linebarger could hardly have envisioned the Twilight Zone–esque tales that the Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell spun about election fraud in 2020. But even bad science fiction can make very fine propaganda.

Opponents of the Iraq War gathered to disrupt the Republican National Convention in 2004. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in New York City; some put the total as high as 200,000. A minority of the protesters disregarded police lines. More than 1,800 people were arrested.

Yet the convention itself proceeded exactly as planned. President George W. Bush was renominated, and subsequently won reelection. In so doing, he became the only Republican presidential candidate to win a popular-vote majority in the 35 years since the end of the Cold War. In 2014, New York City paid $18 million to settle the legal claims of people who contended that they had been wrongly swept up in the 2004 convention arrests.

Some radical opponents of President Joe Biden hope they will have better success disrupting the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this year. They imagine they can do to a political convention what they have done at America’s prestige universities. They are almost certainly deluding themselves.

Biden’s opponents have based their plans on a folk memory of events in 1968. For The Free Press, Olivia Reingold and Eli Lake reported from an activist planning meeting: “‘Have you heard that the Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago?’ [a leader] asks the crowd. ‘Are we going to let ’em come here without a protest? This is Chicago, goddamn it—we’ve got to give them a 1968 kind of welcome.’”

In 1968, a poorly disciplined Chicago police force brutalized protesters and journalists in front of television cameras. The horrifying images symbolized a year of political upheaval that smashed forever the New Deal coalition of pro-segregation, conservative white southerners; unionized workers; northern ethnic-minority voters; and urban liberals. A Republican won the presidency in 1968—and then again in four of the next five elections.

Exactly why the utterly self-defeating tumult of Chicago ’68 excites modern-day radicals is a topic I’ll leave to the psychoanalysts. For now, never mind the why; let’s focus on the how. Is a repeat of the 1968 disruption possible in the context of 2024? Or is the stability of 2004 the more relevant precedent and probable outcome?

From 1968 to today, responsibility for protecting political conventions has shifted from cities and states to the federal government. This new federal responsibility was formalized in a directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998. The order created a category of “National Special Security Events,” for which planning would be led by the Secret Service.

National Security Special Events draw on all the resources of the federal government, including, if need be, those of the Defense Department. In 2016, the federal government spent $50 million on security for each of the two major-party conventions.

Those funds enabled Cleveland, the host of the 2016 Republican convention, to deploy thousands of law-enforcement personnel. Officers were seconded from across Ohio, and from as far away as Texas and California. Federal funds paid for police to be trained in understanding the difference between lawful and unlawful protest, and to equip them with body cameras to record interactions with the public. The city also used federal funds to buy 300 bicycles to field a force that could move quickly into places where cars might not be able to go, and that could patrol public spaces in a way that was more approachable and friendly.

[George Packer: The campus-left occupation that broke higher education]

In the end, the convention was mostly orderly and peaceful—despite the presence of civilians taking advantage of Ohio’s open-carry laws to bear rifles around town. A rare moment of public-order drama was recorded on the second-to-last day of the convention, when about 200 officers faced a small group that tried to burn an American flag. One of the protesters inadvertently set his own pants on fire. A police officer was recorded yelling, “You’re on fire, you’re on fire, stupid!” The man pushed away officers as they doused the flames and was arrested for assault.

At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in 2016, police negotiated ways of permitting peaceful protest with demonstrators. At one point, dissident Bernie Sanders supporters tried to breach the convention perimeter. More than 50 were arrested; most were released without charge.

The mostly virtual conventions of the pandemic year 2020 attracted fewer demonstrators. At the one-day Republican convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, police had little difficulty turning back protesters who tried to breach the convention’s perimeter. At the Democratic convention in Milwaukee, demonstrators apparently did not even try to force a breach; instead, they marched up to the security perimeter, made speeches, then marched away again.

The widespread recent pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses have been distinguished by more rule-breaking than the convention protests of the past two cycles. But campuses are special places, lightly policed and weakly governed. Pro-Palestinian protesters have proved considerably more circumspect when they march in places where laws of public order are upheld.

On January 13, 2024, a protest sponsored by American Muslim groups drew thousands to Washington, D.C., culminating in demonstrations at the White House. Only two people were arrested. Many more arrests occurred on January 16, when a group sponsored by the Mennonite Church trespassed inside the Capitol’s Cannon House office building, but that protest involved old-fashioned civil disobedience—lawbreaking that did not threaten injury to anyone, followed by peaceful acceptance of arrest.

Pro-Palestinian groups have blocked bridges in some U.S. cities to stall traffic. But this tactic, too, has depended on tacit permission from the authorities. The 80 pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested for halting traffic on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in November 2023 escaped criminal convictions by each accepting five hours of community service. That leniency was more or less an open invitation to try it again, which they did on the Golden Gate Bridge in April.

In this country and in Europe, some have inflicted criminal violence against Jewish people. Just last week, for example, French media reported on the case of a Jewish woman in France who was allegedly kidnapped, raped, and threatened with murder by a man who told her that he sought to “avenge Palestine.” At a protest in California in November 2023, a pro-Palestinian protester inflicted fatal injuries on a Jewish man. But these crimes have occurred in the absence of police, not—as at a national political convention—in front of thousands of officers.

Where faced with clear rules backed by effective enforcement, pro-Palestinian protests on this side of the Atlantic have generally deferred to lawful authority.

Past practice is, of course, no guarantee of future behavior. A large number of people do seem to want to mess up the Democratic convention. When I spoke with Democratic Party officials involved with convention planning, they seemed acutely aware of the hazards and deeply immersed in countering the risks.

Maybe they will overlook something. Maybe protesters will discover an unsuspected weak point, overwhelm police, wreak viral-video havoc, embarrass President Biden, and thereby help Donald Trump. The better guess is that they will not only fail in that but also be unable to mobilize any large number to attack police lines and risk serious prison time.

In the meantime, however, the talk of convention disruption has achieved one thing: It has at least temporarily diverted the conversation toward the antidemocratic extremists who may assault the Democratic convention that will renominate Biden, and away from the antidemocratic extremists who will take the stage unmolested to address the Republican convention that will renominate Trump.

Somewhere in the hills above Malibu, drenched in California sunshine and sitting side by side in a used white Volkswagen bug, two teenage boys realized they were lost. They’d been looping their way along an open road, past shady groves and canyons, and in doing so they’d gotten turned around. This was the early 1960s, and the boy driving the car was Albert Einstein—yes, this really was his given name, years before he changed it to Albert Brooks. Riding shotgun was his best friend and classmate from Beverly Hills High School, Rob Reiner.

Brooks had inherited the car from one of his older brothers, and he’d made it his own by removing the handle of the stick shift and replacing it with a smooth brass doorknob. After several failed attempts to find the Pacific Coast Highway, which would take them home, Brooks and Reiner came upon a long fence surrounding a field where a single cow was grazing. Albert “stopped the car and he leaned out the window and he said, ‘Excuse me, sir! Sir?’ and the cow just looked up,” Reiner told me. “And he said, ‘How do you get back to the PCH?’ And the cow just did a little flick of his head, like he was flicking a fly away, and went back to eating.” Without missing a beat, Albert called out, “Thank you!” and confidently zoomed away. “I said, ‘Albert, you just took directions from a cow!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but he lives around here. He knows the area.’ ”

Reiner is telling me this story, dissolving into laughter as he does, to make two points. The first point is that Albert Brooks has impeccable comic timing, a quality that, among other talents, has made him a hero to multiple generations of comedians, actors, and directors who are themselves legends. The second point is that Brooks has always been this way.

Reiner remembers exactly his first impression of Brooks (Wow, this guy is arrogant ) and also his immediate second impression (This arrogant guy is mortified ). They both did high-school theater, and got to talking after their first class together. Brooks began to casually brag about the famous people he had met—they were Beverly Hills kids, after all. “He comes up to me, and in his cocky kind of way he says, ‘I know Carl Reiner,’ ” Rob Reiner told me. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I know him too. He’s my father.’ Oh my God, he was so embarrassed.” They instantly became friends, and have been close ever since—even living together for a stretch. One acquaintance described them to me as more like twins than brothers.

[Read: Adrienne LaFrance interviews Albert Brooks]

But although Brooks and Reiner pursued careers in the same industry, and both found great success, they didn’t choose the same path—personally or professionally. Brooks’s decisions over the years occasionally confounded his oldest friend, and worried him. Looking back now, however, something has become startlingly clear. If it is the case that by high school a person is already on some fundamental level the person they are destined to become—and Reiner believes this to be “totally true” of Brooks—then Brooks was fated to be not just the godfather of American comedy but also a man who would prove that humor in the face of catastrophe can sometimes save your life.

One thing you notice if you spend any amount of time with Brooks is that his manner of speaking—in musical swells that rise and fall—is not just something that his characters do, but something that he does. Think of Brooks in Broadcast News, the pitch of his voice going higher for emphasis as his character tries to persuade the woman he’s crazy about not to go out with another man: “I’ve never seen you like this with ANYbody. And so DON’T get me wrong when I tell you that TOM, while being a very NICE guy, is”—here he shifts into a whisper-shout—“THE DEVIL.” Off camera, this way of speaking, depending on the topic at hand, comes off as relieved, annoyed, insistent, or pleading. When you agree with him, he will often respond, “This is what I’m SAYing.” And when he disagrees with you, it’s “no NO,” always no twice, always with the emphasis on the second no.

The director and Simpsons co-creator James L. Brooks (no relation) spent part of this past winter directing Albert in the forthcoming Ella McCay, a political comedy set in the recent past. James told me that he knew he had to cast Albert based on just two words in the script: Sit, sit. “Which to me is very Albert,” James said. “It’s just the most Albert line.” The scene involves a classically Brooksian mode of imploring condescension—a quality deployed perfectly, for example, in the opening scene of Modern Romance, when Brooks’s character is dumping his girlfriend: “You’ve heard of a no-win situation, haven’t you? … Vietnam? This? ”

Brooks is tall, and often dresses monochromatically. A go-to outfit is black pants and a dark button-up shirt over a black tee, with a black fedora. He talks with his hands, and when he’s not gesturing with them, he fidgets. This comes off less as nervousness than as a kind of perpetual motion. When Brooks wants something, he is relentless. And he is impatient. He has a reputation for being extremely difficult to say no to. “Because he’s persuasive,” Reiner told me. “And he’s right 90 percent of the time.”

[Watch: Rob Reiner on the burden of his name]

But Brooks himself has no trouble saying no. He has repeatedly turned down the various Hollywood luminaries who asked him to star in their films—parts that ultimately went to Tom Hanks, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, and Steve Martin, and in several cases altered the trajectory of their careers. He was offered the role Hanks played in Big (1988), the role Crystal played in When Harry Met Sally (1989), and the role Williams played in Dead Poets Society (1989), to name only a few. (Brooks was somewhat reluctant to discuss this with me, as he didn’t want to sound “stuck up, because there are so many of them.”)

Instead, he went his own way, and has single-handedly shaped modern American entertainment to an astonishing degree. Pick a random moment in film or television from the past half century, and Brooks is often nearby. He was a repeat guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in the golden era of late-night television. Lorne Michaels asked him to be the permanent host of Saturday Night Live before it launched. (In declining the offer, Brooks suggested the rotating-guest-host format that has defined the program ever since.) Brooks wrote a satirical short called The Three of Us for SNL that seemed to predict the premise of Three’s Company, two years before Three’s Company existed. His first role in a big film was in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). His mockumentary (Real Life, 1979) came out five years before Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap. And for The Associates, the sitcom that gave Martin Short one of his first breaks, Brooks composed the theme music.

Brooks in 1977 during an interview with Rob Reiner, who was guest-hosting The Tonight Show (Tom Ron / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty)

Then there is the string of critical hits that he wrote, directed, and starred in, including Modern Romance (1981), about a man who breaks up with his beautiful girlfriend, then spends the rest of the film trying to get her back; Lost in America (1985), about a yuppie couple who quit their jobs to travel across the country in a Winnebago; and Defending Your Life (1991), a comedy about what happens when you die, which also starred Meryl Streep. Plus his role in Broadcast News (1987), which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He was considered a lock for another Oscar nomination after he played a vicious L.A. gangster alongside Ryan Gosling in the gorgeously shot film noir Drive (2011), but it didn’t happen. (“I got ROBBED,” Brooks tweeted the morning the nominations were announced. “I don’t mean the Oscars, I mean literally. My pants and shoes have been stolen.” What he’s actually pissed off about, he told me, is that he can’t get more roles as villains. He loves playing the bad guy.) He was the voice of the father clown fish in Finding Nemo (2003) and did the voices for Hank Scorpio and Jacques (among many others) in The Simpsons. Petey, the decapitated parakeet from Dumb and Dumber (1994), was inspired by Petey the cockatiel in Modern Romance.

[Read: James L. Brooks on journalism, the Oscars, and Broadcast News]

Although he’d wanted to be an actor since he was a child, Brooks didn’t want to be just an actor. He was and is a writer first, and tends to prefer seeing his stories to completion by acting in and directing them. Brooks is beloved, in part, for the big-eyed, wrinkled-brow, heart-on-his-sleeve quality he brings to many of his characters—part puppy dog, part … what, exactly? “You know, you’re talking about the secret sauce, so it’s hard,” James L. Brooks told me. “There’s an intrinsic vulnerability to him.” In real life, however, Brooks is far more confident—if still highly methodical. “He’s cautious about everything,” Reiner told me. “He can get obsessed about every little thing.”

Civilization-destroying earthquakes, for one, are never far from Brooks’s mind. (“Only because it’s going to happen, and I don’t know if it’ll happen in my lifetime,” he told me.) He is something of a hypochondriac. (“If I lived with a physician, they would have left me.”) He worries about an uprising of the nation’s youth against the Baby Boomers. (The plot of his 2011 novel, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, hinges on all three of these fears: A 9.1-magnitude earthquake nearly destroys Los Angeles; the superrich are the only ones who can afford decent health care; young people plot a violent revolt against “the olds.”) There are more mundane worries: He is fastidious about avoiding saying or doing things that could make him seem cocky, or stupid, or bougie. He also fears nuclear war. (“You know, I’m old-fashioned.”)

On film, death comes quickly, and hilariously, for Brooks. In Defending Your Life, which he wrote and directed, his character buys himself a new BMW on his birthday and is hit head-on by a bus almost immediately upon taking it out for a spin. He is, at the time, singing along to the West Side Story soundtrack, belting out Barbra Streisand’s rendition of “Something’s Coming.” In Private Benjamin (1980), the story begins with Brooks’s character marrying a woman played by Goldie Hawn, then dying while in the act of consummation on their wedding night, less than 11 minutes into the film (the consummation itself takes seconds). In a 2021 cameo on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Brooks throws his own funeral, so that he can watch a livestream of his friends eulogizing him while he is still alive.

While reporting this story, I talked with Brooks numerous times over many months. We met in person in L.A., we talked on the phone, we texted. For the conversations we’d planned ahead of time, he was never once late, not even by a minute. He’s the kind of person who will text you back instantly, no matter the hour or time zone. This is a quality I gather he expects from others in return. “Albert loves hyper-preparedness,” the actor Sharon Stone told me.

[Read: The brutal cynicism of Lost in America still resonates]

Stone co-starred with Brooks in The Muse, the 1999 film—which Brooks also wrote and directed—about a director who finds out that Hollywood’s best ideas all come from one woman. (Brooks’s co-writer was Monica Johnson, a close friend and collaborator who died in 2010.) Stone described Brooks to me as an “intellectual giant” who has no time for people who don’t work hard, but who never lost his temper on set. She also described him as peerless, basically. I had asked her where she would situate him among other movie stars roughly of his generation—say, Bill Murray or Steve Martin—and she told me none of them even comes close. (Murray doesn’t have the focus and Martin can’t keep his head out of the clouds, she said. Plus, neither can direct.) The only person she could think of who approached Brooks’s brilliance, she said, was Garry Shandling, who died in 2016. “There are people who have great talent,” Stone told me, “but there aren’t many people who can take that talent and have the discipline and the huge ability to be the general, and put a huge project together and then push it all the way through.”

Stone loved working with Brooks, and she particularly appreciated his bias toward action. If somebody wasn’t prepared, he would decisively and calmly move on without them—not exactly Zen about it, but sanguine. “He doesn’t have any patience if you’re not ready, if you don’t know your lines, if you don’t have your shit together,” Stone said. Later, she put it to me this way: “Albert’s a winner. And if you were running a relay race with Albert and you handed him the torch and the person next to him fell on the ground, Albert could jump over that person and run to the finish line … Someone would say, ‘You know, you jumped over that person,’ and he would say, ‘People who lay on the ground don’t win races.’ ”

I asked her if others found this quality off-putting. “People who lay on the ground would think Albert is mean,” she said. Also, she said, “he’s super bored by people who aren’t smart.” Despite his improvisational skills (see: his many voice appearances on The Simpsons, where he is a legend in the writers’ room for his riffing), Brooks is not one for winging it. Or, as he once put it to me: “Come anally prepared and let’s do the silliness on purpose when we want to.”

Another time, when I asked Brooks if it irritated him to be around people who aren’t as quick or clever as he is, he demurred, unconvincingly. A low tolerance for people who cannot keep up would be understandable. His mind gallops through conversations—there is never a missed opportunity for a joke, yet his joke-telling doesn’t come off as striving, only calibrated to the moment. One friend of his likened this quality to watching a professional athlete in a flow state. Consider this exchange, from when Brooks appeared on Larry King’s radio show in 1990, which left King gasping with laughter:

King: Do you ever order from 800 numbers late at night from on television? I get the feeling you do.
Brooks: Do you?
King: I don’t, but I think you do.
Brooks: I bought a wok and a vibrator. Actually, it was the same thing. A vibrating wok.

The people who know Brooks best still marvel at how naturally humor comes to him. James L. Brooks told me the story of a party he attended sometime in the late 1970s, where he’d noticed a small crowd gathering around a table to watch some guy doing card tricks. The guy was oozing charisma, and had charmed the people around him out of their wits. But it took him a minute to realize what was actually happening. “This guy doing card tricks had no idea how to do card tricks. He was just talking about 45 miles an hour. It was Albert Brooks. And he was just being hilarious.”

Rob Reiner told me about another party, where Brooks was so funny that people almost felt they were witnessing the birth of a new art form. “People were screaming laughing,” Reiner said. “And when he finished, it was like he’d been on a stage. He left the party, and a half hour later, the hostess of the party comes up to me and says, ‘Albert’s on the phone. He wants to talk to you.’ And so I get on the phone and I said, ‘Albert, what’s up?’ And he said, ‘Listen, Rob, you gotta do me a big favor.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘I left my keys in the house there and I can’t come back to get them.’ Because he’d finished his performance. He didn’t want to come back. So he had been wandering around for, like, 20 minutes trying to figure out what to do … That’s the way his mind works.” Reiner grabbed Brooks’s keys and went outside to find his friend.

Last year, Reiner released a documentary about Brooks’s career called Defending My Life, a project Reiner had wanted to pursue for years, inspired by My Dinner With Andre, Louis Malle’s famous 1981 film featuring the theater director André Gregory and the actor and playwright Wallace Shawn having a sprawling conversation at Café des Artistes, in Manhattan. For years, Brooks said no to the idea before finally relenting. “I’ve always felt he is the most brilliant comedian I’ve ever met,” Reiner said. The two have sometimes drifted apart, but they always drifted back together, Reiner told me. One argument in particular stands out in Reiner’s memory.

“I remember this distinctly,” Reiner said. “He would always ask me, ‘How does my hair look?’ And, you know, when he was young he had that Jew fro. And it looked the same every time. Every time he asked me, ‘How’s my hair look?’ And I would say, ‘Albert, it looks fine.’ And then one time we’re in the car and he kept asking me, ‘How does my hair look?’ And I said, ‘Albert, it looks the same! It looks the same every single time I look at it! It’s always the same!’ And he got so mad at me, he threw me out of the car. He said, ‘Get out of this car!’ He got mad at me because I wouldn’t tell him how his hair looked.”

Brooks remembers a different argument they had, decades ago, about the enduring star power of classic film actors—“the Cary Grants, the Clark Gables.” Reiner had remarked on how stars like that were immortal, the kind of leading men who “will never go away,” Brooks recalled. “And I said, ‘Everyone’s going away.’ And, you know, my kids don’t know who Cary Grant is unless I force them and say, ‘That’s Cary Grant.’ Every generation has their own people. And it’s remarkable how fast everything else goes away.”

The term comic’s comic is overused. But with Brooks, it fits. Judd Apatow, Conan O’Brien, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, and too many others to name have all cited him as a formative influence. James L. Brooks told me the story of standing in the living room at some gathering with Steve Martin when Martin spotted Brooks and got starstruck—“nervous, like a kid at Christmas,” he said.

While the critics who love Brooks often lament that his films have not enjoyed more commercial success—“Albert almost intentionally makes noncommercial movies,” Sharon Stone told me—what they miss is that he has, over the course of his career, repeatedly chosen fealty to his own artistic vision over anyone else’s desires, for him or for themselves. And he has done so with the clarity of a man racing against time, someone who knows that we only get one go-round, and tomorrow is never promised.

Big, When Harry Met Sally, Dead Poets Society—all became generational cinematic hits, as close to timeless as they come. But to Brooks, the decision to turn down these roles was obvious. With Big, he just couldn’t see himself playing a little boy. And anyway, he’d been actively trying to avoid New York City since at least the 1970s, back when Lorne Michaels had come calling. “What I really was not going to do was go to New York and stay up until 11:30 to be funny, and risk getting addicted to coke,” he told me. Later, as he read the script for When Harry Met Sally, which Reiner was directing, he knew right away that he shouldn’t do it. “I was being called ‘the West Coast Woody Allen,’ ” Brooks told me. “And I read this lovely script that felt like a Woody Allen movie—the music and everything. And I thought, If I do this, I’m Woody Allen forever.”

The Woody Allen comparisons make only a superficial kind of sense. It’s true that both Allen and Brooks write, direct, and star in their own films. Both are self-deprecating leading men. Both write unforgettably funny dialogue on a line-to-line level. (They’re also both frequently described as neurotic—an adjective that, as Brooks once acidly complained to me, is simply the lazy film critic’s code for “Jew.”)

But where Allen’s films are oriented inward—self-deprecating, yes, but also self-obsessed bordering on narcissistic—Brooks’s films radiate outward, almost galactically, an expanding universe all unto themselves. Again and again, he poses the most profound questions possible—What does it mean to live a good life? Where do we go when we die? What if we weren’t afraid?—then filters them through his sense of humor, and explodes them into a meditation on the human condition.

So New York was out of the question. And anyway, why bother starring in a film you didn’t write? Why let somebody else direct something you did write? And why direct something you can’t star in? More than that, Why wait ? Wasn’t that the lesson he learned the hard way when he was only 11 and a half?

The movie posters for Real Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981), Lost in America (1985), Broadcast News (1987), and Defending Your Life (1991) (Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection; Columbia Pictures /
Everett Collection; Geffen Pictures / Everett Collection; 20th Century Fox Film Corp. /
Everett Collection; Warner Brothers / Everett Collection)

Not many people can pinpoint the exact moment when they became who they are, the formative experience from which the rest of their life unspools. But Brooks can: November 23, 1958. The Sunday before Thanksgiving. His mother, Thelma; father, Harry; and one older brother, Cliff, left home for the Beverly Hilton to attend a roast put on by the local Friars Club, which his father helped run. The event was in honor of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Hollywood royalty whom Harry Einstein introduced—in a perfect deadpan that made the audience roar—as his very close personal friends “Danny” and “Miss Louise Balls.” (In a recording of the roast, you can distinctly hear Arnaz’s honking laugh rise above the hysterics of the crowd.)

Einstein was a superstar comedian himself, known for his dialect humor and for his popular radio alter ego Parkyakarkus (say it aloud to get the joke). Over the next 10 minutes, he had the audience members in tears. When Einstein finished, he made his way back to the dais, where he was seated next to Milton Berle. With the audience still clapping for him, the color suddenly drained from Einstein’s face, and he slumped over onto Berle. Frantic attempts to resuscitate him began right away, and in the panic, the singer Tony Martin took the microphone in an attempt to distract people with one of his hit songs. Meanwhile, a doctor in the audience made an incision in Einstein’s chest with somebody’s pocketknife, and another doctor fashioned a makeshift defibrillator by peeling the insulation off a nearby lamp cord. None of it worked. Einstein, at 54 years old, was dying of a heart attack while Martin sang a song that took on dark—and to Brooks, in retrospect, darkly funny—meaning: “There’s No Tomorrow.” Arnaz eventually grabbed the microphone: “They say the show must go on,” he said. “But why must it?” With that, the evening was over.

Although Einstein’s death was shocking—it made national headlines—it was not unexpected. He had suffered from a serious spinal issue and a related heart condition, and was by then using a wheelchair. When he did walk, Brooks remembers, he lumbered “like Frankenstein.” He looked terrible. And life in the Einstein household was largely oriented around accommodating his ill health. Brooks’s earliest memories of his father, though, are happier ones. They would take long drives out to Santa Paula, past orchards where the tree branches were heavy with oranges and lemons. Back at home, they would goof off. “Sometimes at the dinner table, he would be more like a kid and play with a fork,” Brooks recalled. “And my mother would get angry like she would with a kid. And we would all laugh.”

The Einstein household seems to have been genetically predisposed for humor. One of Brooks’s brothers, Bob Einstein, grew up to have a successful comedy career. You may remember him as his stuntman character, Super Dave Osborne, or as Marty Funkhouser on Curb Your Enthusiasm. (He died in 2019.) Their mother, Thelma Leeds, was also in show business—she and Harry met in 1937 on the set of a film they were starring in. After Brooks’s film Mother came out in 1996, Entertainment Weekly asked her to write a review, including a grade of the film. Brooks was convinced that she’d give it a middling review just to be funny. “I said, ‘Listen to me’—and this is not a joke—‘you have to give it an A,’ ” Brooks recalled. (She ended up giving it an A+++.) Despite his parents’ comedic gifts, he insists that they didn’t name him Albert Einstein as a joke. “I swear to God, it was like, ‘You know, he’s a wonderful man. Let’s give him that name.’ ”

For Brooks, the death of his father was not just a tragedy but the inevitable realization of a long-held premonition. He had been bracing for it for as long as he could remember. “From the moment I could conceive anything, this is what I was expecting. So, you know, then you start trying to fool God,” he told me. “You tell yourself, Well, I’m just not going to get close. And You’re not going to take anyone from me. I’m just not going to love him. You know, you do whatever you have to do, to make it okay. It forced early thoughts of the end before the beginning.”

“I never felt he didn’t love me,” Brooks told me later. “I just felt it was going to be quick. That, I think, colors a part of your life.”

Brooks as a child, with his father watching him from a lounge chair (Courtesy of Albert Brooks)

The actor and director Jon Favreau, who is close friends with Brooks, can relate to what he went through. Favreau’s mother died of cancer when he was a child. “The idea that catastrophe could be just around the corner is something that is baked into your psyche when you experience something that grave that early,” Favreau told me. That attitude, expressed artistically, can take many forms. “It can go different places with different people, but with Albert it definitely went to This has to be funny. I want to bring the house down. And that’s where I think somebody like Albert finds that he has a superpower. Through his intellect and through his humor and through whatever experiences made him who he is, what comes out of that machinery is laughter and amusement and human insight that allows you to deal with subjects—mortality—that are presented within the framework of something that is hilarious.” That, Favreau told me, is Brooks’s “magic trick.”

After his father died, Brooks settled into a new kind of normal. He and his friends would spend hours recording mock interviews on giant tape recorders, pretending to be radio stars like his dad was. “I was really sort of doing these shows for no one for a long time,” he told me. He played football and sometimes hitchhiked to school. He watched television—as many hours a day as he could get away with. He was also music-obsessed, and amassed a prized collection of records, building his own stereo with quadraphonic surround sound. This was in the early days of stereophonic recording, and Brooks still remembers the first stereo album he bought to show off the new technology: Stan Kenton’s version of West Side Story. “They were really doing the right-left thing,” he said. “You know, DA-dah, BA-dah, DA, dah! Right speaker! Left speaker! Right speaker! Ba-dah-dah-dah-dahhhh, ba-dah-bah-dah-ba-dah-daaaah ba-doo ba-doo. Your head would be moving like a tennis match.”

Brooks is prone to spontaneously breaking out into song, or more accurately, breaking out into sound, without the lyrics, perhaps an artifact of his theater roots. After high-school graduation, in 1965, Brooks and Reiner did summer theater in Los Angeles. After that, Brooks went to L.A. City College before winning a scholarship to attend the drama program at Carnegie Mellon (then called Carnegie Tech), in Pittsburgh. A shoulder injury from his football days kept him out of the Vietnam War, an injury he now sees as his life’s blessing. After a year in Pittsburgh, he dropped out and returned to Los Angeles.

“When he came back from Carnegie Tech, he wasn’t thinking about comedy, and I couldn’t believe it,” Reiner told me. “He wanted to change his name to Albert Lawrence—his middle name is Lawrence. And I said, ‘Albert, what are you doing? You’re the funniest guy I know. You’re going to tell me that now all you want to do is be a serious actor?’ The fact is, he is a great serious actor. But I said, ‘You can’t throw away that gift you have. You make people laugh better than anybody.’ ”

Then, in 1973, something frightening happened that left Brooks forever changed. He had just come out with a comedy album, Comedy Minus One, and was on the road promoting it—something he hated doing—with endless performances in dingy clubs and interviews with local journalists. One of these conversations, with a radio DJ, left Brooks feeling deeply unnerved. “A morning man in Boston said to me, ‘Albert Brooks, let me ask you a question,’ ” Brooks recalled. “ ‘Jonathan Winters went crazy. Do you think that’s going to happen to you?’ ” Winters, the superstar comedian and television actor, had been hospitalized years earlier after scrambling up the rigging of an old three-masted sailing ship docked in San Francisco Bay and refusing to come down, insisting that he was “a man from outer space.” Brooks remembers stumbling through an answer: “I don’t know. I hope not. I don’t—I don’t know.”

Later that night, he had his first performance at a jazz club in the Back Bay, where he was supposed to do two shows a night for a week, with an opening act by the singer-songwriter Leo Sayer, who dressed up for his performances as a 17th-century Pierrot clown, complete with heavy makeup. Sayer’s whole record company showed up, and in a surreal demonstration of devotion, “everybody in the audience was dressed as a clown,” Brooks told me. (This may sound like some sort of chemically induced hallucination, but Brooks assured me it was not. “No drugs. None,” he said.)

He did his first show and went back to his hotel across the street to get ready for the next one. But when he got there, “I had, like, a brain explosion,” Brooks told me. “I mean, something happened. All of a sudden, you know, my life was different. I don’t know how to describe it. I was standing in the bathroom. I was holding a toothbrush. And all I could think about is who invented this and why are there bristles on this end? And why are there bristles at all? And isn’t there a better way to brush your teeth? And how come there are sinks? I was starting to unravel, questioning everything. And that in turn made me really scared that I had gone nuts.”

He begged his manager, and the club owner—who by then had come across the street to see what was wrong—to let him skip the second show. The club owner told him he could cancel every other show that week, but he had to go through with the show that night. People had bought tickets! They were already sitting there, waiting in their seats. So Brooks agreed to get back onstage. “I was so detached from my body,” he told me. “Every single word was an effort and was not connected to anything. I was just standing there saying what sounded like English words.” Years later, on a trip to New York, he ran into someone who told him he’d been at the show that night in Boston, and wondered in passing if something had been off. “Did you have the flu?” the person asked. Yeah, something like that.

What actually happened, Brooks told me, is that after he somehow kept his body upright and made his mouth say words until he could get offstage again, he cracked open. After the death of his father—and, frankly, probably before that—he’d built a mental wall so sturdy that he was emotionally untouchable. This wasn’t all bad. “It was very advantageous for the beginning of my career,” Brooks said. He remembers his earliest live television appearances, when friends would be floored by his coolheadedness, his total absence of nerves. “Ed Sullivan, 50 million people live, waiting to go on,” Brooks recalled. “My heart didn’t race. I never thought of it. And I loved that. But the reason for that is I wasn’t open, and I was forced open in that one moment. It was like all the stuff you hadn’t dealt with is here. And, you know, that stuff ’s not meant to be dealt with all at once.”

Confronting the great tragedy of your life this way is suboptimal, especially if it hits you when you’re standing onstage staring at a bunch of clowns. “But it opened up my mind,” Brooks told me. “It made me question everything. It made me much more worried about everything. But it also made me deal with it. And it took a long time to, you know, deal with it.” Looking back now, he said, that night in Boston is what led to everything else. Without that experience, “I don’t think I could have written anything” that came after—at least not anything of real depth and complexity. “I think I would have been a non-nervous, pretty surface person.” Brooks never saw it coming. And there’s a lesson in that, too. “You get humbled by life in one second,” he said. If you’re lucky, the terrible thing that surprises you is something you can survive. His father didn’t get that chance. But Brooks did, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it.

Albert Brooks, for the record, is not interested in contemplating what might have been. He doesn’t believe in do-overs. He’s not into time-travel movies (though he appreciates the elegance of the original Twilight Zone, which he sometimes watches on YouTube), or imagined alternative histories, or dwelling on the past. “ ‘What if ?’ is terrible,” he told me, “because what are you going to DO with it, you know?” He swears he isn’t a grudge holder—I asked him specifically about this because I had a hard time believing otherwise. People as meticulous as Brooks sometimes struggle to let things go. “No,” he insisted, “because there’s nothing I can DO.” Worrying about the past is “the biggest waste of time,” he said. “I mean, over the years, the best thing I’ve done for myself is learn to worry about what I can fix.”

This is partly his pragmatism but also his attitude as a writer—writing, he once said, is just a series of solving one problem after the next. He doesn’t believe in writer’s block, not really. “Writing is like building a house,” he told me. “Once you start, you have to finish. It’s a funny concept that there’d be a block in other professions. If you hired an architect and a year later you said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, I was blocked.’ You’d say, ‘What?!’ ” Also, when you write, you’re fully in control. “It’s one of the last things, except maybe painting, that you can do without permission,” he said.

Thirty years ago, if you’d have asked Brooks what he was most focused on fixing, it may have been his love life. He worried, “Oh, I’ll never meet anybody,” he told me. This may seem strange—movie stars don’t typically have a hard time attracting partners—but many of his friends envisioned Brooks staying single, too. “I thought, This guy will never get married,” Reiner told me. “I find it hard to even imagine Albert married,” Sharon Stone told me, not because of how intense he can be but because he is so particular. “It’s that he can’t have this, and he doesn’t like that, and it has to be like this, and he can’t be around this, and it can’t be like that,” she said.

Brooks is a person who is comfortable alone. In the early days of his career, he would workshop jokes by just performing them to himself, in a mirror. He went through a phase when he bought one of those radios that picks up people’s phone conversations, and put it by his bed so he could listen to other people’s problems as he drifted off to sleep. (“It was the greatest soap opera,” he recalled. And also a great way to train your ear for writing realistic dialogue. “That was heaven,” he said with a laugh.) He’s gone through long stretches of solitude over the years.

Brooks likes to joke that he knew he didn’t want to get married until he met someone he could stand getting divorced from. Reiner put it another way: “I don’t know if it applies to Albert, but my mother and father were celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary, and I asked my mother, ‘What’s the secret?’ ” Reiner told me. “And she said, ‘Finding someone who can stand you.’ ”

The painter Kimberly Shlain, it turned out, could stand Brooks. She already knew and loved his films when they began dating. They were married in March 1997 at a synagogue in San Francisco. Their reception was filled with calla lilies and white tulips, and their guests ate lemon cake. For their first dance, a live band played “Someone to Watch Over Me.” (He was 49; she was 31.) The couple have two children, Jacob and Claire, both now in their 20s.

In Defending Your Life, Brooks finds the perfect woman—played flawlessly by Meryl Streep—only once he’s already dead. “We’re opening the door, God forbid, to Albert’s brain,” she said in a 1991 interview about the film. Defending Your Life tells the story of a man who dies young and finds himself among the other recently deceased in Judgment City, a version of purgatory that resembles a New Jersey office park, where you can eat whatever you want without gaining weight and see who you were in various past lives as you await a decision from a supernatural judiciary about whether you lived a good-enough life to move forward in the universe. (If not, you’re sent back to Earth to do better next time.) For Brooks’s character, the key question of his life’s trial is whether he wasted his time letting his fears dominate him. Streep said in the same 1991 interview that when Brooks had come over to persuade her to take the part—they’d first met through Carrie Fisher, a mutual friend—he paced for two hours while explaining the concept of the film to her, but wouldn’t let her read the script.

Stone told me about how after The Muse wrapped and Brooks sent her a copy to watch, she sent him some notes, as she generally did with other directors. “Albert wasn’t interested in my notes,” she said. “In fact, I don’t think he liked that I sent him my notes. I think he was a little bit offended by my notes. And I think it’s because he makes all of his decisions about his films in a quite solitary way. He’s the only director that ever sent me a film to preview that didn’t want notes … He didn’t understand. Like, what did I think I was doing, right? Why would I need notes from you, cupcake? ”

Another time, he’d gotten advice from Stanley Kubrick about how to navigate the business side of Hollywood, and the frustration that comes from having to work with people who care more about money than art. Kubrick had reached out to Brooks to say how much he loved Modern Romance, and asked to see the draft of the script Brooks was writing at the time. So Brooks sent it along, and Kubrick sent it back with notes. “He said, ‘Here, I read the script,’ ” Brooks told me. “You know what? I think he had the WORST comment in the world. And I said, ‘Gee, I don’t think I could do that.’ ”

As I reported this story, legendary comedians kept dying. First there was Norman Lear, who died within hours of a conversation Brooks and I had about how wonderful it was that Lear, at 101, was still alive. Then Richard Lewis died. (“Terrible,” Brooks texted me.) Occasionally, when Brooks experiences some unusual bodily pain, an unwelcome thought will materialize: “I worry, Is this the end? I mean, something’s going to take me down,” he said. For a while, he was just trying to reach the age his father was when he died. Turning 55 was, as a result, “very weird,” he said. When the first of his older brothers died, it was like the loss of a “genetic touchstone,” he said. He’d sometimes try to reassure himself by imagining that he got all of his genes from his mother, who lived into her 90s. He turns 77 in July. “Then you’re in no-man’s-land, you know. My father didn’t come near this age.”

[Read: Norman Lear’s many American families]

Brooks doesn’t believe in immortality, whether in life or on film. Plenty of writers and directors fool themselves into believing that what they make will last forever. Most works of art, even extraordinary ones, do not. Creatively, Brooks was never motivated by wanting to make something lasting, but instead by seeing art generally—and film specifically—as the ultimate form of human connection. Plus, there was always something beautiful to him about how making a movie and watching a movie required deliberateness on both sides of the screen. “People got in their cars, which meant there was an effort made,” he said. “The lights went down. People were there because they wanted to be there.”

Sometimes Brooks thinks back to one of the original endings he wrote for Defending Your Life. This was before Streep was cast in the film. Before he had conceived of the actual ending, which, as it turns out, is one of the great climaxes in all of film history, complete with a sweeping cinematic score, that feels both enormous and also perfectly earned. “The one I liked the best that I didn’t use was that the movie ended in a pasture, and in the distance was a cow,” Brooks told me. In this version, Brooks’s character didn’t get redemption. He didn’t fall in love. He didn’t get the girl. He didn’t overcome his fears. He didn’t move on in the universe. Instead, he lived his life, then came back to Earth … as a cow. It would have been absurd to end things that way. And funny. Because, really, who knows? But that’s not how the story went.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Godfather of American Comedy.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.