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American voters have never been more polarized—except, perhaps, when it comes to the shared belief that shooting a puppy is wrong. Has Kristi Noem’s admission of such an act doomed her political future?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

David Frum: “The plot to wreck the Democratic convention” America lost the plot with TikTok. Touch screens are ruining cars. Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk?

The Shot Read ’Round the World

Say this for Kristi Noem: She has an eye for literary detail.

The South Dakota governor is one week out from the publication of her new book, No Going Back (more on that title later). On Friday, The Guardian reported on one of the anecdotes Noem shares with her readers. In the book, the governor recalls the day she realized that her puppy, Cricket, had crossed the line from poorly behaved menace to, well, a problem that needed solving. Noem led Cricket to a gravel pit. Then she pulled the trigger. “It was not a pleasant job,” the governor writes. “But it had to be done.”

It’s the phrase gravel pit that stands out most—imagery fit for a Cormac McCarthy novel. Typically, campaign books don’t scream “literature.” They’re more or less marketing tools meant to showcase a politician’s character and leadership skills. Noem likely believed that recounting this saga (in addition to a story about killing a goat) would serve as a testament to her courage and her rural bona fides, endearing her to millions of potential voters. Instead, Noem publishing these sentences may one day be remembered as the gravest mistake of her career.

The backlash has been swift. Beyond Democrats and liberals seizing on the moment, even some Republicans and conservatives have offered condemnations. “Omg - now my blood is boiling,” the right-leaning social media influencer Catturd told his 2.4 million followers on X. “Remember, I’m a country boy who lives on a ranch. There’s a huge difference between putting an old horse down who is suffering, than shooting a 18 month dog for being untrainable.” In reality, Cricket appears to have been 14 months old. According to The Guardian, the puppy had attacked other animals, and Noem maintains she decided to put the dog down because it showed “aggressive behavior toward people by biting them.”

With some scandals, members of the American public have notoriously short memories, or at least they may be more inclined to forgive. But certain images never leave the collective psyche—especially when they involve dogs. This fundamental truth transcends politics. Michael Vick was one of the most dazzling NFL quarterbacks of the past quarter century, but you probably remember him first and foremost as the dog-fighting guy. The act of shooting a dog, as Noem did, is, for some, impossible to stomach. (Though once a dog has attacked a human, that calculus changes for others.) Canine execution was once the dark joke of the January 1973 death-themed issue of National Lampoon, the cover of which featured a man holding a revolver against a floppy ear along with the warning “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” (The pup in question, Mr. Cheeseface, looks bewildered.)

What is it about dogs, in particular, that tugs at our core? In a recent essay for The Atlantic, Tommy Tomlinson, the author of the new book Dogland, offered his own unique admission: “By any measure, I loved my mom more than our dog. If I could bring one back, I’d pick her 100 times out of 100. So why, in the moment of their passing, did I cry for him but not for her?” Many dogs, even the bad ones, are seen as unimpeachable. Elected officials, not so much.

Noem is (was?) considered to be among former president Donald Trump’s top prospects for a 2024 running mate. Now she’ll have to fight to escape being branded the woman who once killed her own puppy. Many people seem to want her to express some form of contrition. On Friday, Noem posted a screenshot of the Guardian article, writing, “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm.” Then she plugged her book. “If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping, preorder ‘No Going Back.’”

Yesterday, with the online fervor still raging, Noem released a second statement, standing by the idea that shooting the puppy, rather than, say, putting it up for adoption, was the “right” thing to do. “I can understand why some people are upset about a 20 year old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book—No Going Back,” her statement read. “The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons learned … Whether running the ranch or in politics, I have never passed on my responsibilities to anyone else to handle. Even if it’s hard and painful. I followed the law and was being a responsible parent, dog owner, and neighbor. As I explained in the book, it wasn’t easy. But often the easy way isn’t the right way.”

No Going Back’s subtitle—The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward—is the exact sort of phrase you expect to read in a studied politician’s carefully curated treatise. Many of these books are often quite rote, devices meant to serve as the starting point of a national campaign. A lot of them, but not all of them, are bland by design. Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father is perhaps the most notable exception to the rule, but there are others. Jason Kander, once seen as an heir to Obama’s Democratic Party, published a memoir in 2018 about his time serving in Afghanistan and working in state politics that largely fit the political-book mold, right down to the title: Outside the Wire: Ten Lessons I’ve Learned in Everyday Courage. But four years later, he returned with a second memoir, Invisible Storm, showcasing edges of his life that he had sanded down in his first outing. The result was an honest and radically candid look at the depths of his PTSD.

Typically, but not always, political books are produced with the help of a ghostwriter. Noem’s publisher did not respond to my request for comment as to whether Noem used one.

This morning, I called the journalist Maximillian Potter, who collaborated with Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado on his political memoir, The Opposite of Woe, and served as an editorial consultant on the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s memoir, The Power of One. (Potter is also the co-author of an Atlantic investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by the Hollywood mogul Bryan Singer.) He was careful to note that the Guardian report may not include the chapter’s full context; still, Noem has not refuted any of the details. What stood out most to Potter was how Noem, according to the report, writes that she “hated that dog.” “I’ve never heard anyone refer to a pet or an animal with hate. As a collaborator, that’s the word I would have discussed,” Potter told me. “I think part of a ghost or a collaborator’s job on projects like this is to not discourage the author from sharing their truth; it’s to be a thought partner and help them think through what it is they’re really trying to say.”

Potter also brought up an old political idiom, often attributed to Robert F. Kennedy (senior), later popularized by Chris Matthews: “Hang a lantern on your problem.” Maybe that’s what is really going on here. In the book, Noem reportedly notes that a construction crew watched her kill both the puppy and the goat. Perhaps, as her national profile grows, and as potential vetting for Trump’s VP gets under way, Noem sought to get in front of any potentially damaging story that might emerge through opposition research. (Her chief of communications did not respond to my request for an interview.)

Noem is midway through her second term as governor, and she’s ineligible for a third. No Going Back was supposed to be a prelude to her next chapter. Trump even blurbed it: “This book, it’s a winner.” But if he doesn’t pick Noem for VP, her new book’s title may have prophesied the end of her political story.

Related:

The governor who wants to be Trump’s next apprentice Pets really can be like human family.

Today’s News

A federal appellate court ruled that state-run health-care plans cannot exclude gender-affirming surgeries. Columbia University began suspending students who stayed in the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus grounds past the deadline issued by the university. A series of severe tornadoes hit parts of the South and the Midwest over the weekend, killing at least four people in Oklahoma.

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Evening Read

Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection

The Godfather of American Comedy

By Adrienne LaFrance

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 … 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.’ ”

Read the full article.

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Israel has been convicted of genocide by protesters at Columbia and UCLA, but its genocide case before the International Court of Justice is still pending. Israel remains officially aghast that it, and only it, is subject to judicial proceedings for the crime of genocide—and that the ICJ’s rulings so far have implied that the judges think Israel might be guilty of the crime of crimes. According to reports this weekend, the International Criminal Court—a separate body that hears cases against individuals—is preparing arrest warrants for Israeli officials and possibly Hamas leaders. In the ICJ, Israel stands alone.

In January, the judges stopped short of ordering Israel to stop fighting in Gaza, but they voted 15–2 to remind Israel of its obligations under the Genocide Convention. Among the judges voting with the majority was the German jurist Georg Nolte. His written opinion was curiously apologetic. He called the whole situation, including the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, “apocalyptic.” He noted, correctly, that the case before him was not about “possible violations of the Genocide Convention by persons associated with Hamas.” The ICJ hears cases between and against states, and Hamas isn’t one. “While these limitations may be unsatisfactory, the Court is bound to respect them,” he wrote. “I would like to recall, however, that persons associated with Hamas remain responsible for any acts of genocide that they may have committed.”

[James Smith: The genocide double standard]

Was this a coded suggestion? Without consideration of the October 7 attacks, something is missing from the ICJ proceedings, and Nolte is not the only one to sense an omission. The case is going forward almost as if the Gaza war were not preceded by, and in retaliation for, an attack that itself resembled genocide. Israel’s defenders, including its legal team at the ICJ, have complained that the proceedings tell only half the story, and that a full assessment of the facts would demand consideration of Hamas’s actions, too.

There is a simple remedy for this problem: Charge Palestine with genocide, and let the ICJ hear both cases at once.

The idea is not mine. I first heard it from David J. Scheffer, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served in the Clinton administration as ambassador at large for war-crimes issues. At least three of the judges’ opinions, he told me, suggested that they were “uncomfortable arriving at a determination on the merits of this case, when a large component of the entire situation is not on the table.” Nolte hinted at this view most strongly. The declarations of judges from Uganda and India also noted the absence, as did the judge designated by Israel, Aharon Barak. Scheffer said a parallel case against Palestine “would be to the advantage of the court and, frankly, facilitate their ability to reach a decision” that enjoyed a broad legitimacy.

Every international lawyer I spoke with about this idea called it wild and implausible. Foremost among the objections is the fact that the international representative of the state of Palestine is the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas. The PA is not just not Hamas—it is directly opposed to Hamas, which slaughtered PA members when it seized control of Gaza in 2007.

Irrelevant, Scheffer says. “Hamas members are nationals of the state of Palestine, which is party to the Genocide Convention.” The Genocide Convention obligates its parties (including Israel and most other countries) to prevent, investigate, and punish genocidal acts. The failure to prevent and punish was enough to convict Serbia of genocide in a case before the ICJ in 2007. If Hamas committed genocide on October 7, then Palestine was obligated to stop it and punish its culpable members. Palestine has manifestly failed to do so, with even token gestures. Palestine “is supposed to prevent you from committing genocide, even if you’re a terrorist,” Sheffer told me. “Its duty is to prevent and punish genocide. And I don’t think there’s a record of any punishment [by the PA] of any Hamas member.”

Others doubted that Palestine was even subject to the ICJ’s jurisdiction, because the state of Palestine is not a member of the United Nations General Assembly. It is a “nonmember observer state.” Sheffer points out that this question comes close to being resolved by a statement, helpfully posted on the ICJ’s website, from the state of Palestine itself, consenting to the ICJ’s jurisdiction. In 2018, Palestine went to the court to object to the Trump administration’s decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In doing so, it declared that it “accepts all the obligations of a Member of the United Nations” with respect to the ICJ. Moreover, Article IX of the Genocide Convention—which Palestine joined in 2014, and Israel joined in 1950—specifies that the ICJ will hear any cases concerning genocide.

Eliav Lieblich, an international-law professor at Tel Aviv University and a critic of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war, pronounced the idea of instituting a genocide case against Palestine “theoretically interesting” but “a political nonstarter.” Cases have to be brought to the court by a state, as South Africa did against Israel. Lieblich noted that any state bringing a case against Palestine would, in effect, be recognizing the Palestinian state. You can’t prosecute a state whose existence you deny. That catch-22 favors Palestine: Countries that recognize Palestine tend to be on Palestine’s side, and therefore disinclined to prosecute it at the ICJ.

[Graeme Wood: Israel’s bitter bind]

But plenty of countries could still bring the case. Of the 193 members of the UN General Assembly, 151 have joined the Genocide Convention. Of those, more than 100 recognize the state of Palestine. Remove from that list the countries that are so pro-Palestine that they would never bring such a case, and at least 30 countries remain, including Cambodia, Paraguay, and Poland.

Any of these countries could start proceedings. But who would want to? (“We have enough problems,” one official from a country on the list replied when I asked if his country would be game.) Longtime critics of Israel have treated South Africa as heroic for stepping up to prosecute Israel. Any country that prosecuted Palestine would probably risk the opposite effect on its reputation.

But Scheffer urges countries to think strategically about the effect of bringing a case against Palestine. Doing so would greatly influence the proceedings against Israel, he says, and that influence “is not necessarily to the detriment of South Africa’s position.” Israel’s complaint that it is lonely in the dock vanishes instantly if it has company. Judges would be more inclined to rule against Israel, Scheffer suggests, if they did not feel that they were singling out the Jewish state. “If they could also look at the evidence regarding Hamas and say there is also a violation by the state of Palestine, that would be a much more comfortable position for judges to take.”

And it is far from certain that the court would convict Palestine. Palestine could defend itself by saying that it failed to prevent genocide because it was itself prevented from doing so by Israel, through its occupation of the West Bank and hamstringing of the Palestinian Authority’s capacity to act. Eliav Lieblich noted that in other international courts, a state’s duties are lightened or relieved when its territory is controlled by another, stronger state. Israel would not relish having to observe this defense.

And, finally, the ICJ imposes very high burdens on the prosecution in genocide cases. The prosecution must demonstrate the intent to destroy a protected group, and the absence of plausible nongenocidal intents that might explain the behavior of the accused. Could a prosecutor show that the only possible rationale for Hamas’s actions on October 7 was to commit genocide against Jews? Could Palestine convince the judges that Hamas was instead attempting to resist Israel’s occupation, and that if Hamas intended genocide, it would have planned its operation differently? If so, Palestine, and by extension Hamas, would likely be acquitted.

Israel has at its disposal a similar defense. Might the death and suffering of Gazans be attributable not to an intent to wipe them from the Earth, but to a desire to free hostages and defend itself against a terror group that commits flagrant war crimes, vows to keep doing so, and uses civilians as shields? If so, Israel, too, stands a good chance of acquittal.

One frequently noted shortcoming of the International Court of Justice, and of international law more broadly, is that its justice is applied unevenly (and often by the strong against the weak). Israel is frustrated that, at the ICJ, it seems to be allowed only to lose, while its wartime adversary remains beyond judgment of any type. The verdicts would not depend on each other—one party could be guilty and the other innocent—but the ICJ’s legitimacy does seem to be tied to the willingness of the court, and the states before it, to punish potential violators of all types, and not just those vilified, rightly or wrongly, in the current wave of fashionable opinion.

When I got pregnant last year, I began reading online about parenting and found myself confronted with an overwhelming quantity of choices. On social media, how-to graphics and videos abound, as do doctrines about the one true way to discipline your children, or feed them, or get them to sleep through the night. Parent forums, blogs, and product-recommendation sites are full of suggestions for the only swaddle that works, the formula that tastes milkiest, the clicking animatronic crab that will get your tummy-time-averse baby to hold her head high. Scrolling through all of this advice can make it seem as though parenting is largely about informed, research-based decision-making—that choosing the right gadgets and the right philosophy will help parenting itself go right.

This logic can feel particularly visceral for a parent considering how to be a good steward of the environment. (Do I genuinely need a special $160 blender to avoid giving my baby prepackaged food? Or can I just mash steamed veggies with a fork?) Worrying about waste can turn into a variation on the pursuit of perfect parenting—but not worrying about it is illogical. Our children will inherit the climate crisis. Personal decisions cannot undo that fact; can, indeed, hardly mitigate it. Deciding to be a parent anyway means you had better hope that our species and societies can work out a new way to thrive on a changing, warming, conflict-riddled planet—because if not, what have you done?

Choice, the Booker Prize–nominated writer Neel Mukherjee’s fourth novel, addresses this question head-on. It’s a triptych novel in the vein of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, which use their three parts to repeatedly surprise and challenge readers. Compared with these novels, Choice is both more ambitious and less successful, harmed by the fact that its second and third sections just cannot compete with its blistering first.

But that first section is a barn burner. Mukherjee starts Choice with the story of Ayush, an editor at a prestigious London publishing house, whose obsession with the climate crisis lands somewhere between religious fervor and emotional disorder—especially as far as his kids are concerned. Ayush and his economist husband, Luke, have twin children, Masha and Sasha, and his portion of Choice is a beautiful, horrifying, detailed, and messy evocation of parenthood, full of diapers and dirty dishes and “Can you help Daddy make dinner?” It also presents having children as a moral crisis, a stumbling block Ayush can’t get past. He tries bitterly to lessen his family’s consumption—we see him measuring the exact amount of water in which to cook the twins’ pasta, boiling it in the electric kettle because he’s read that it uses less energy than a stovetop pot —but he can’t get away from the belief that Masha and Sasha are “not going to have a future anyway.” His conviction that they’re doomed weighs more and more heavily on his parenting decisions, eventually convincing him that he can no longer parent at all.

Readers meet Ayush in a scene nearly too painful to read. Home alone with his kindergarten-age twins, Ayush skips their bedtime story in favor of a documentary about an abattoir. Mukherjee describes this moment in vivid visual detail, contrasting the children’s sweet bedroom decor (cherries on the bedding; sea creatures on the night-light) to the laptop screen, which shows slaughtered pigs on a floor “so caked with layers of old solidified blood and fresh new infusion that it looks like a large wedge of fudgy chocolate cake.” Unsurprisingly, the twins sob hysterically as the video plays; their distress upsets Ayush so acutely that he cannot talk. But rather than comfort them once he regains speech, he doubles down on the decision that he has to teach them about cruelty to animals—and about their complicity in it. He puts his children to bed not with an apology or a lullaby, but with the stern reminder that “what you saw was how our meat comes to us.”

[Read: The books that help me raise children in a broken world]

Ayush seems like a monster in this scene—and not an unfeeling one, which signals to the reader that he may be as much tortured as torturer. Mukherjee swiftly makes it apparent that this is the case. We see him begging Luke to help teach their too-young children to weigh the morality of “things that don’t appear to be choices,” such as eating meat; Luke, in turn, begs Ayush to examine the roots of his unhappiness and anxiety, his compulsion to conserve energy far beyond what could reasonably be useful. Ayush yearns to “shake off his human form” and become one with nature—or, more ominously, vanish into it. At one point, Ayush takes his children to explore some woods outside London, an activity that many parents might relate to: He wants to share the wonder of the natural world with his children, both as a bonding activity and as a lesson in ecological stewardship. But he can’t focus on Masha and Sasha. What he hears instead is that the “great trees are breathing; Ayush wants to still his heart to hear them.” Mukherjee only implies this, but it seems that all Ayush’s experiences lead to this paradox: His love for the Earth makes him want to erase himself from it.

Ayush’s relationship with his children is also shaped by a desire to remove himself, as well as a significant amount of attendant guilt. He is the twins’ primary parent, despite the fact that he never wanted children—a revelation that Mukherjee builds to slowly. Ayush’s anxieties about choosing parenthood are legion. He’s upset by the ecological impact of adding to the Earth’s human population, and believes that his twins will face a future of walled cities and climate refugeeism. Having grown up South Asian in Britain, he’s frightened of exposing children to the racism he’s faced his whole life; he also has a half-buried but “fundamental discomfort about gay parenting,” of which he is ashamed. Most of all, before having children, he didn’t want to have a baby who could become like him—“a consumed, jittery, unsettled creature.” His own unhappiness, he feels, should have precluded him from having children. Yet he acquiesced, a choice he partly disavows by suppressing his memory of why he did. Not only does he go along with having children; he takes daily responsibility for raising them.

On the surface, this is the case because Ayush earns less than Luke, a dynamic the novel explores with nuance. In straight partnerships, the question of who parents more is very often gendered, which Mukherjee acknowledges: At one point, Luke, who has a big job and generational wealth, dismisses Ayush with a sexist reference to the “pin-money” he earns in publishing. But there are more layers here. Ayush, it seems, takes responsibility for his children in order to atone for not having wanted them. Luke, who pushed for fatherhood, is the more patient and affectionate parent, while Ayush is busy fretting over the environmental impact of disposable diapers. Luke is also much kinder and more open to Ayush than Ayush is to him: Although Luke is an economist, with a genuine belief in the rationality that undergirds his discipline, he’s motivated far more by his emotions than his ideas.

Ayush believes himself to be the opposite. His domestic decisions are often logical (or logical-seeming) responses to climate anxieties, but this impulse becomes more disturbing as it influences his child-rearing. Sometimes, he seems to care more about raising Masha and Sasha as environmentalists than he does about any other aspect of their upbringing—almost as though he wants to offset having had them to begin with. He doesn’t necessarily want to be this way: After the somewhat-failed forest outing, Ayush takes the twins on a walk around London and teaches them to come up with similes and metaphors to describe what they see, making a game of comparing dandelions to egg yolks and lemons. Here, he successfully keeps his attention on his children, but he still spins a tender moment into one of moral exigency. “Will this remain in their memory,” he wonders, “make them look up and out, make them notice, and, much more importantly, notice again?” For Ayush, this qualifies as optimism. He’s trying to control his children’s way of seeing the world, but he is also trying to offer them the gift of coexisting, happily, with the Earth.

[Read: The book that captures my life as a dad]

Mukherjee does give Ayush one way of communing peacefully with nature: his relationship with his dog, Spencer. The writer Joy Williams has said that any work of fiction should have an “animal within to give its blessing,” which Spencer certainly does in Choice. Mukherjee describes Ayush’s devotion to his dog in lush detail; the book’s most beautiful passages have Spencer in them. Ayush’s heart breaks when he realizes that Luke does not see “you, me, and the dog” as family enough; it breaks far more deeply when Spencer grows too old to “bound to the door … surprised by joy, impatient as the wind, when any member of his family comes in.” Among Ayush’s most treasured memories is a spring morning with Spencer: Then a puppy, he had rolled in wild flowers so that his “silky golden throat and chest had smelled of violets for a brief second, then the scent had disappeared. Ayush had sat on the ground, sniffing Spencer’s chest for another hit of that elusive perfume, but it was gone.”

Ayush plainly sees Spencer as his child, and yet the dog also gives him a way to experience the “elusive perfume” of a pleasurable connection with the planet. As Spencer ages and that link is harder to sense, Ayush’s unhappiness grows. He understands that he is grieving preemptively for Spencer, but the approaching loss of his dog—an event he cannot control or avoid—does not motivate him to snuggle with Spencer or prepare his children for the loss. Instead, it makes him want to leave his family when Spencer does—as if, without the connection to nature that the dog offers, he can no longer bear to be caged in his family home.

By the end of his section of Choice, Ayush has completely lost the ability to make rational decisions. He betrays Spencer in a scene perhaps even more painful than the book’s opening, thinking that he’s doing his beloved dog a service; he also betrays his children, his husband, his life. All of his efforts to control his family’s ecological impact, to do the right research and calculations, to impart all the right moral lessons, lead directly, maybe inexorably, to this tragic point. At the novel’s start, he tells Luke that he wants their kids to understand “choices and their consequences.” But it ultimately becomes clear that he can’t accept the consequences of his choice to have children. He can’t save the planet for his children; nor can he save it from them—and so, rather than committing to guiding them into a future he can’t choose or control, he abdicates his responsibility for them.

Mukherjee leaves Ayush’s family behind rather than linger on the aftermath of these betrayals. He moves on to two narratives the reader will recognize as parts of books that Ayush edited: first a story about a young English academic who begins meddling in—and writing about—the life of an Eritrean rideshare driver, then an essay by a disillusioned economist who describes the misery that ensues when an aid organization gives a Bengali family a cow that is meant to lift them from poverty, but radically worsens their situation instead. Mukherjee imbues these sections with a propulsive mix of anger and grace, but neither is especially complicated. Emily, the academic, has no one who depends on her, and her odd choices concerning the rideshare driver, Salim, have no real consequences for anyone but herself. Sabita, the mother of the family that gets the cow, is so wholly at the mercy of her material conditions that choice is hardly a relevant concept to her—something that she understands, though the cow-providing “people from the city” do not.

Emily’s section primarily serves as a portrait of choice amid abundance. Sabita’s, meanwhile, underscores the central idea of Ayush’s: that our efforts at control are, by and large, delusions. For parents, this can be especially painful to accept. We want our choices to guarantee our children’s safety, their comfort, their happiness. For Ayush, who believes fervently that his twins will grow up to inhabit a “burning world,” the fact that he can’t choose something better for them drives him away from them. By not showing the consequences of Ayush’s actions, Mukherjee leaves incomplete the book’s exploration of parenting. What his abdication means to Masha, Sasha, and Luke is hidden. What it means to the reader, though, is clear. In Choice, there is no such thing as a perfect decision or a decision guaranteed to go right. There are only misjudgments and errors—and the worst of those are the ones that can never be undone.

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