Wage growth in the c-suites of corporate America is slowing down, but it’s still much faster than that of the typical U.S. worker.

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We had to correct her, and we knew how to do it by now. We would not sit quietly in our white-bodied privilege, nor would our corrections be given apologetically or packaged with niceties. There I was, one of about 30 people attending a four-day-long Zoom seminar called “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” hosted by the group Education for Racial Equity.

An older white woman whom I’ll call Stacy had confessed to the group that she was ashamed of being white, and that she hoped in her next life she wouldn’t be white anymore. This provided us with a major learning moment. One participant began by amping herself up, intoning the concepts we’d been taught over the past two days: “Grounding, rooting, removing Bubble Wrap.” Then she got into it. “What I heard you say about wanting to come back as a dark-skinned person in your next life was racist, because as white people we don’t have the luxury of trying on aspects of people of color.”

“Notice how challenging that was,” our facilitator, Carlin Quinn, said. “That’s what getting your reps in looks like.”

Another woman went next, explaining that Stacy seemed to see people of color as better or more desirable, that her statement was “an othering.” Quinn prompted her to sum it up in one sentence: “When you said that you wish you would come back in your next life as a dark-skinned person, I experienced that as racist because …”

“That was racist because it exoticized Black people.”

“Great,” Quinn said. She pushed for more from everyone, and more came. Stacy’s statement was romanticizing. It was extractive. It was erasing. Stacy sat very still. Eventually we finished. Stacy thanked everyone, her voice thin.

The seminar would culminate with a talk from Robin DiAngelo, the most prominent anti-racist educator working in America. I had signed up because I was curious about her teachings, which had suddenly become so popular. DiAngelo’s 2018 book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, had been a best seller for years by the time I joined the toxic whiteness group in May 2021. But during the heat of the Black Lives Matter protests, her influence boomed. She was brought in to advise Democratic members of the House of Representatives. Coca-Cola, Disney, and Lockheed Martin sent their employees through DiAngelo-inspired diversity trainings; even the defense company Raytheon launched an anti-racism DEI program.

In the DiAngelo doctrine, the issue was not individual racists doing singular bad acts. All white people are racist, because racism is structural. To fix one’s inherent racism requires constant work, and it requires white people to talk about their whiteness. Seminars like hers exploded as anti-racism was shifted from a project of changing laws and fighting systems into a more psychological movement: something you did within yourself. It was therapeutic. It wasn’t about elevating others so much as about deconstructing yourself in hopes of eventually deconstructing the systems around you.

[Read: Abolish DEI statements]

Anti-racism courses are less popular today. This may in part be because more people have become willing to question the efficacy of corporate DEI programs, but it’s surely also because their lessons now show up everywhere. In March at UCLA Medical School, during a required course, a guest speaker had the first-year medical students kneel and pray to “Mama Earth” before saying that medicine was “white science,” as first reported by The Washington Free Beacon. The course I took was just a preview of what’s come to be expected in workplaces and schools all over the country.    

DiAngelo and her fellow thinkers are right in many ways. The economic fallout of structural racism persists in this country—fallout from rules, for example, about where Black people could buy property, laws that for generations have influenced who is rich and who is poor. The laws may be gone, but plenty of racists are left. And the modern anti-racist movement is right that we all probably do have some racism and xenophobia in us. The battle of modernity and liberalism is fighting against our tribal natures and animal selves.

I went into the workshop skeptical that contemporary anti-racist ideology was helpful in that fight. I left exhausted and emotional and, honestly, moved. I left as the teachers would want me to leave: thinking a lot about race and my whiteness, the weight of my skin. But telling white people to think about how deeply white they are, telling them that their sense of objectivity and individualism are white, that they need to stop trying to change the world and focus more on changing themselves … well, I’m not sure that has the psychological impact the teachers are hoping it will, let alone that it will lead to any tangible improvement in the lives of people who aren’t white.

Much of what I learned in “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness” concerned language. We are “white bodies,” Quinn explained, but everyone else is a “body of culture.” This is because white bodies don’t know a lot about themselves, whereas “bodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.”

The course began with easy questions (names, what we do, what we love), and an icebreaker: What are you struggling with or grappling with related to your whiteness? We were told that our answers should be “as close to the bone as possible, as naked, as emotionally revealing.” We needed to feel uncomfortable.

One woman loved gardening. Another loved the sea. People said they felt exhausted by constantly trying to fight their white supremacy. A woman with a biracial child said she was scared that her whiteness could harm her child. Some expressed frustration. It was hard, one participant said, that after fighting the patriarchy for so long, white women were now “sort of being told to step aside.” She wanted to know how to do that without feeling resentment. The woman who loved gardening was afraid of “being a middle-aged white woman and being called a Karen.”

A woman who worked in nonprofits admitted that she was struggling to overcome her own skepticism. Quinn picked up on that: How did that skepticism show up? “Wanting to say, ‘Prove it.’ Are we sure that racism is the explanation for everything?”

[John McWhorter: The dehumanizing condescension of White Fragility]

She was nervous, and that was good, Quinn said: “It’s really an important gauge, an edginess of honesty and vulnerability—like where it kind of makes you want to throw up.”

One participant was a diversity, equity, and inclusion manager at a consulting firm, and she was struggling with how to help people of color while not taking up space as a white person. It was hard to center and decenter whiteness at the same time.

A woman from San Francisco had started crying before she even began speaking. “I’m here because I’m a racist. I’m here because my body has a trauma response to my own whiteness and other people’s whiteness.” A woman who loved her cats was struggling with “how to understand all the atrocities of being a white body.” Knowing that her very existence perpetuated whiteness made her feel like a drag on society. “The darkest place I go is thinking it would be better if I weren’t here. It would at least be one less person perpetuating these things.”

The next day we heard from DiAngelo herself. Quinn introduced her as “transformative for white-bodied people across the world.” DiAngelo is quite pretty, and wore a mock turtleneck and black rectangular glasses. She started by telling us that she would use the term people of color, but also that some people of color found the term upsetting. She would therefore vary the terms she used, rotating through imperfect language. Sometimes people of color, other times racialized, to indicate that race is not innate and rather is something that has been done to someone. Sometimes she would use the acronym BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color), but she would then make a conscious grammatical mistake: “If I say ‘BIPOC,’ I find that’s a kind of harsh acronym. I usually add people at the end to humanize it a bit, even though grammatically that’s not correct,” she said.

Language is a tricky thing for the movement. The idea is that you should be open and raw when you speak, but you can get so much wrong. It’s no wonder that even Robin DiAngelo herself is worried. (At one point she recommended a book by Reni Eddo-Lodge—“a Black Brit,” DiAngelo said. For a moment she looked scared. “I hope that’s not an offensive term.” Quinn chimed in to say she thought it was okay, but DiAngelo looked introspective. “It sounds harsh. The Brit part sounded harsh.”)

DiAngelo wanted to remind us that she is white. She emphasized the wh—, giving the word a lushness and intensity. “I’m very clear today that I am white, that I have a white worldview. I have a white frame of reference. I move through the world with a white experience.”

She introduced some challenges. First was white people’s “lack of humility”: “If you are white and you have not devoted years, years—not that you read some books last summer—to sustained study, struggle, and work and practice and mistake making and relationship building, your opinions while you have them are necessarily uninformed and superficial.”

“Challenge No. 2 is the precious ideology of individualism, the idea that every one of us is unique and special.”

She prepared us for what would come next: “I will be generalizing about white people.” She was sharing her screen and showed us an image of middle-aged white women: “This is the classic board of a nonprofit.” She threw up a picture of high-school students in a local paper with the headline “Outstanding Freshmen Join Innovative Teacher-Education Program.” Almost all the teenagers were white. “This education program was not and could not have been innovative. Our educational system is probably one of the most efficient, effective mechanisms for the reproduction of racial inequality.” Lingering on the picture, she asked, “Do you feel the weight of that whiteness?”

[From the September 2021 issue: Robin DiAngelo and the problem with anti-racist self-help]

Another image. It was a white man. “I don’t know who that is,” she said. “I just Googled white guy, but most white people live segregated lives.”

When someone calls a white person out as racist, she told us, the white person will typically deny it. “Denying, arguing, withdrawing, crying. ‘I don’t understand.’ Seeking forgiveness. ‘I feel so bad, I feel so bad. Tell me you still love me.’” She paused. “Emotions are political. We need to build our stamina to endure some shame, some guilt,” she said. Quinn broke in to say that intentions are the province of the privileged. But consequences are the province of the subjugated.

Someone who has integrated an anti-racist perspective, DiAngelo told us, should be able to say: “I hold awareness of my whiteness in all settings, and it guides how I engage. I raise issues about racism over and over, both in public and in private … You want to go watch a movie with me? You’re going to get my analysis of how racism played in that movie. I have personal relationships and know the private lives of a range of people of color, including Black people. And there are also people of color in my life who I specifically ask to coach me, and I pay them for their time.”

I was surprised by this idea that I should pay Black friends and acquaintances by the hour to tutor me—it sounded a little offensive. But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward.

When DiAngelo was done, Quinn asked if we had questions. Very few people did, and that was disappointing—the fact that white bodies had nothing to say about a profound presentation. Silence and self-consciousness were part of the problem. “People’s lives are on the line. This is life or death for bodies of culture.” We needed to work on handling criticism. If it made you shake, that was good.

One of the few men in the group said he felt uncomfortable being told to identify as a racist. Here he’d just been talking with all of his friends about not being racist. Now he was going to “say that I might have been wrong here.” He noticed he felt “resistance to saying ‘I’m racist.’”

Quinn understood; that was normal. He just needed to try again, say “I am a racist” and believe it. The man said: “I am racist.” What did he feel? He said he was trying not to fight it. Say it again. “I am racist.”

“Do you feel sadness or grief?”

“Sadness and grief feel true,” he said.

“That’s beautiful,” Quinn said.

Some members of the group were having a breakthrough. Stacy said she was “seeing them finally … Like, wow, are there moments when this white body chooses to see a body of culture when it isn’t dangerous for them?” One woman realized she was “a walking, talking node of white supremacy.” Another finally saw how vast whiteness was: “So vast and so, so big.”

For a while, a dinner series called Race to Dinner for white women to talk about their racism was very popular, though now it seems a little try-hard. The hosts—Saira Rao and Regina Jackson—encourage women who have paid up to $625 a head to abandon any notion that they are not racist. At one point Rao, who is Indian American, and Jackson, who is Black, publicized the dinners with a simple message: “Dear white women: You cause immeasurable pain and damage to Black, Indigenous and brown women. We are here to sit down with you to candidly discuss how *exactly* you cause this pain and damage.”

One could also attend a workshop called “What’s Up With White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege Over Lunch,” hosted by the authors of What’s Up With White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege in Pursuit of Racial Justice (the authors are two white women). Or you could go to “Finding Freedom: White Women Taking On Our Own White Supremacy,” hosted by We Are Finding Freedom (a for-profit run by two white women). The National Association of Social Workers’ New York City chapter advertised a workshop called “Building White Women’s Capacity to Do Anti-racism Work” (hosted by the founder of U Power Change, who is a white woman).

So many of the workshops have been run by and aimed at white women. White women specifically seem very interested in these courses, perhaps because self-flagellation is seen as a classic female virtue. The hated archetype of the anti-racist movement is the Karen. No real equivalent exists for men. Maybe the heavily armed prepper comes close, but he’s not quite the same, in that a Karen is someone you’ll run into in a coffee shop, and a Karen is also someone who is disgusted with herself. Where another generation of white women worked to hate their bodies, my generation hates its “whiteness” (and I don’t mean skin color, necessarily, as this can also be your internalized whiteness). People are always demanding that women apologize for something and women seem to love doing it. Women will pay for the opportunity. We’ll thank you for it.

[Tyler Austin Harper: I’m a black professor. You don’t need to bring that up.]

After DiAngelo, I went to another course, “Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism.” That one was more about what my white flesh itself means and how to physically manifest anti-racism—“embodying anti-racism.” Those sessions were co-led by Resmaa Menakem, a therapist and the author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.

Menakem stressed how important it was not to do his exercises with people of color, because it would wound them: “Do not have bodies of culture in a group of white bodies. White bodies with white bodies and bodies of culture with bodies of culture.”

The harm caused by processing your whiteness with a person of color had also been stressed in the previous course—the book DiAngelo had recommended by Reni Eddo-Lodge was called Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. But at the same time, Quinn had said that we should talk with people of different races about our journey and let them guide us. It all seemed a bit contradictory.

One participant had a question for Menakem about community building. She was concerned because she had a mixed-race group of friends, and she wanted to be sure she wasn’t harming her Black friends by talking about this work.

“There’s no way you’re going to be able to keep Black women safe,” Menakem said. “If you’re talking about race, if race is part of the discussion, those Black women are going to get injured in the process.”

“That’s my worry,” she said. The problem was that she and her friends were actually already in “like, an anti-racism study group.” Menakem was definitive: “Don’t do that,” he said. “I don’t want white folks gazing at that process.”

A few years have passed since I was in these workshops, and I wonder if the other participants are “better” white people now. What would that even mean, exactly? Getting outside their ethnic tribe—or the opposite?

At one point Menakem intoned, “All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture. Everybody say it. ‘All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture.’” We said it, over and over again. I collapsed into it, thinking: I am careless; I am selfish; I do cause harm. The more we said it, the more it started to feel like a release. It felt so sad. But it also—and this seemed like a problem—felt good.

What if fighting for justice could just be a years-long confessional process and didn’t require doing anything tangible at all? What if I could defeat white supremacy from my lovely living room, over tea, with other white people? Personally I don’t think that’s how it works. I’m not sold. But maybe my whiteness has blinded me. The course wrapped up, and Menakem invited us all to an upcoming two-day workshop.

This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.

The switch to our self-driving future has been far from smooth so far. In San Francisco, restless natives have come out in force against the rollout of autonomous taxis, Tesla has given self-driving capabilities a bad name with the hundreds of crashes linked to its autopilot systems and governments around the world…

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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.  

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.

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.

Even by the standards of Congress, the past few weeks have been a lesson in hypocrisy. Last Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed legislation that will require TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban in the United States—all over concerns that the Communist Party of China uses the app for surveillance. Yet just a few days earlier, Biden had renewed a law synonymous with American surveillance: Section 702.

You may never have heard of Section 702, but the sweeping, George W. Bush–era mandate gives intelligence agencies the authority to track online communication, such as text messages, emails, and Facebook posts. Legally, Americans aren’t supposed to be surveilled through this law. But from 2020 to 2021, the FBI misused Section 702 data more than 278,000 times, including to surveil Americans linked to the January 6 riot and Black Lives Matter protests. (The FBI claims it has since reformed its policies.)

The contradiction between TikTok and Section 702 is maddening, but it points to lawmakers’ continued failure to wrestle with the most basic questions of how to protect the American public in the algorithmic age. It’s quite fair to worry, as Congress does, that TikTok’s mass collection of personal data can pose a threat to our data. Yet Meta, X, Google, Amazon, and nearly every other popular platform also suck up our personal data. And while the fear around foreign meddling that has animated the TikTok ban has largely rested on hypotheticals, there is plenty of evidence demonstrating that Facebook, at least, has effectively operated as a kind of “hostile foreign power,” as The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance put it, with “its single-minded focus on its own expansion; its immunity to any sense of civic obligation; its record of facilitating the undermining of elections; its antipathy toward the free press; its rulers’ callousness and hubris; and its indifference to the endurance of American democracy.”

[Read: The largest autocracy on Earth]

Congress has largely twiddled its thumbs as social-media companies have engaged in this kind of chicanery—until TikTok. ByteDance is hardly a candidate for sainthood, but who would want to beatify Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? Abroad, America’s surveillance draws much of the same political condemnation Congress is now levying at China. The privacy advocate Max Schrems repeatedly sued Facebook to stop the company from sharing Europeans’ data with the U.S., where the information could be searched by intelligence agencies. He won multiple times. Last year, European Union regulators fined Meta $1.3 billion for transferring Facebook user data to servers in the United States.

Congress’s tech dysfunction extends well beyond this privacy double standard. The growing backlash to platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is not aimed at any of the substantial issues around privacy and surveillance, such as the ubiquitous tracking of our online activity and the widespread use of facial recognition. Instead, they’re defined by an amorphous moral panic.

Take the Kids Online Safety Act, an alarmingly popular bill in Congress that would radically remake internet governance in the United States. Under KOSA, companies would have a duty to help defend minors from a broad constellation of harms, including mental-health impacts, substance use, and types of sexual content. The bill might actually require companies to gather even more data about everything we see and say, every person with whom we have contact, every time we use our devices. That’s because you can’t systematically defend against Congress’s laundry list of digital threats without massive surveillance of everything we say and every person we meet on these platforms. For companies such as Signal, the encrypted-messaging app that political dissidents rely on around the world, this could mean being forced to operate more like Facebook, WhatsApp, and the other platforms they’ve always sought to provide an alternative to. Or, more likely, it would mean that companies that prioritize privacy simply couldn’t do business in the U.S. at all.

Perhaps the biggest protection Americans have against measures such as KOSA is how badly they’re designed. They all rest on proving users’ age, but the truth is that there’s simply no way to know whether someone scrolling on their phone is a teen or a retiree. States such as Louisiana and Utah have experimented with invasive and discriminatory technologies such as facial recognition and facial-age estimation, despite evidence that the technology is far more error-prone when it comes to nonwhite faces, especially Black women’s faces.  

But these misguided bills haven’t completely derailed lawmakers pushing real reforms to U.S. mass surveillance. Within days of the House passing the TikTok ban and Section 702 renewal, it also passed the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, which closes the loophole that lets police pay companies for our data without getting a warrant. Yet the bill now finds itself in limbo in the Senate.

Regulating technology doesn’t have to be this hard. Even when the products are complex, solutions can be shockingly simple, banning harmful business and policing practices as they emerge. But Congress remains unwilling or unable to take on the types of mass surveillance that social-media firms use to make billions, or that intelligence agencies use to grow their ever-expanding pool of data. For now, America’s real surveillance threats are coming from inside the house.

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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.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: One simple key to joy doesn’t exist, Isabel Fattal writes. There are some subtler truths about American happiness.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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