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 Boxes of his studies on the politics of China and Southeast Asia are filed alongside his fiction manuscripts and unpublished musings on psychology.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.

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.

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

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

[James Smith: The genocide double standard]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Graeme Wood: Israel’s bitter bind]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Atacama Desert — an arid, unpopulated swath of northern Chile that is home to some of the most perceptive ground telescopes on Earth — is actually teeming with life beneath the ground, according to a team of researchers that recently scrutinized its soils.

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Walter Nixon was 20 when he served on the frontline at the Battle of Anzio in Italy in 1944.

During the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, when many countries were enacting variations of lockdown protocols, air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions decreased drastically. A meme began to spread across social media proclaiming that, with so many people spending most of their time at home, nature was healing. Images of clear canals, clean skies, and wild animals roaming empty city streets were accompanied by the phrase “We are the virus.” The memes quickly turned silly, and their core claims were roundly debunked as overly simplistic, plain wrong, and somewhat eugenicist. Beyond all this, the trend was deeply ironic: By diagnosing themselves as a pox upon the Earth, people were revealing their degree of self-obsession—a belief that humanity is so powerful and important that the briefest pause in our normal activities would have meaningful consequences for the planet.

Nearly two centuries ago, the English author Mary Shelley confronted human beings’ instinctive anthropocentrism in her 1826 novel, The Last Man, which was published eight years after Frankenstein and has recently been reissued. Even then, Shelley might already have been thinking about humanity’s impact on Earth: As the scholar John Havard writes in his introduction to this new edition of the novel, at the time of her writing, “England was already responsible for most of the world’s carbon emissions. The wheels were in motion for the kind of Promethean unleashing of fire that created today’s climate change.”

The Last Man is narrated by an Englishman named Lionel Verney, and takes place from 2073 to 2100, during which time he witnesses the beginning, middle, and end of a pandemic so deadly it appears to kill every single human on Earth except for him. Shelley’s wasn’t the first literary work to explore the notion of a lone survivor of an apocalypse; she was preceded even in her own century by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s novel, Le Dernier Homme, as well as by poems by Lord Byron and Thomas Campbell. But rather than viewing the end of mankind as the end of the world, Shelley examines the extinction of humanity on an Earth that keeps on living.

[Read: Frankenstein reflects the hopes and fears of every scientific era]

Shelley’s novel is preoccupied with how unnecessary human beings are to the planet’s continued revolution around the sun—its changing seasons, the survival of its other inhabitants. As the plague wipes out large swathes of the population, Verney mourns the loss of human relationships and creativity, but also recognizes that nature is full of its own unique bonds, rhythms, and beauty. Ultimately, The Last Man seems to celebrate the notion of life itself as worthy, whatever form it takes. Of course, we should attempt to reverse the damage we’ve wrought on the planet. But it might also behoove us to practice humility in the face of nature’s awesome forces.

Shelley’s narrator has a unique relationship to the nonhuman world. His parents died when he was a child, and he was raised as a shepherd in service to a farmer in Cumberland. There, he grew up wild, “rough as the elements, and unlearned as the animals [he] tended.”

Verney’s life changes suddenly as a teenager, when the English king’s son, Adrian, visits Cumberland. Verney’s late father had been friends with the king, and recognizing their shared history, Adrian lifts Verney up into the rarified world of the peerage. He invites the boy to live and travel alongside him, and under Adrian’s tutelage and with his resources, Verney studies poetry, philosophy, and science. Yet Shelley makes clear that Verney had never been ignorant: Having spent much of his youth laboring outdoors, he was deeply knowledgeable about “the panorama of nature, the change of seasons, and the various appearances of heaven and earth.” Given the years Shelley spent among some of the foremost Romanticists, including her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their close friend Lord Byron, it isn’t surprising that her protagonist finds, in the natural world, plenty to enrich the mind and spark curiosity.

Part one of the novel is primarily concerned with conveying the richness of Verney’s social and political life, which is to say, the importance of his human relationships. But Verney’s narration also makes heavy use of natural metaphors and lengthy descriptions of landscapes; in one scene, for instance, he describes the love of his life, Idris, as a “star, set in single splendour in the dim anadem of balmy evening.” Shelley seems keen on demonstrating that despite the comfortable life of the mind Verney now lives, he never loses his reverence for nature.

In the novel’s second part, the plague—an airborne virus with no clear pattern of contagion—makes its first appearance amid a Greek war of independence from the Ottoman empire. Beginning in Asia and spreading globally, the plague ends up turning the tide of the war as the residents of a besieged Constantinople fall ill and die quickly. One of the novel’s major characters, Lord Raymond, who is married to Verney’s sister, had traveled to the empire’s capital to join the war effort on the side of the Greeks; Verney and his cohort, including his sister, his wife, and Adrian, accompanied him there. Soon after, the plague strikes, and Verney and his circle retreat back to England, where they believe they will be safe from the disease. Before long, though, the plague arrives on England’s shores, ravaging the population.

[Read: A pandemic novel that’s oddly soothing]

Verney’s contingent survives the worst of the plague and soon leaves England in search of a climate less friendly to the disease. When they arrive in France, they find that their fellow survivors have broken into groups, including one whose extremist religious leader insists that humanity’s sinfulness is to blame for the plague’s spread. This section includes some of the novel’s most rapturous meditations on the natural world’s continued survival amid mass human death. Verney wanders among winter-stricken towns in whose buildings both wild and once-domesticated animals find shelter; watches as nature presents “her most unrivalled beauties” in lakes and mountains and enormous vistas; and, “carried away by wonder,” forgets about “the death of man.” As more and more humans disappear from the Earth, Verney and his companions are left to find solace in the planet’s ongoing cycles and the life that still inhabits it.

By the end of the novel, Verney’s entire family and his closest friends have perished. Somewhat bitterly, he watches the thriving flora and fauna around him. But instead of cursing nature’s survival even as his species is going extinct, he recognizes the similarity between himself and the nonhuman animals who keep living: “I am not much unlike to you,” he proclaims. “Nerves, pulse, brain, joint, and flesh, of such am I composed, and ye are organized by the same laws.” Even the last man, as he believes himself to be, cannot begrudge the continued turning of the Earth and the flourishing of its creatures. The Last Man is only one radical guess at a potential future, but in it Shelley reminds her readers that humans need Earth far more than Earth needs us.

A Tokyo company's satellite encounters a big lump of space debris high above the Earth.

In about five years’ time, a potentially hazardous asteroid will swing by Earth at an eerily close distance of less than 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers). During this rare encounter, Apophis will be ten times closer to Earth than the Moon and scientists want to take full advantage of its visit.

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Fifty-six years ago this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university: stop funding military research, and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby Black neighborhood. After a week of futile negotiations, Columbia called in New York City police to clear the occupation.

The physical details of that crisis were much rougher than anything happening today. The students barricaded doors and ransacked President Grayson Kirk’s office. “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up,” Mark Rudd, the student leader and future member of the terrorist Weather Underground, wrote in an open letter to Kirk, who resigned a few months later. The cops arrested more than 700 students and injured at least 100, while one of their own was permanently disabled by a student.

In other ways, the current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s. Why can’t students imagine doing it some other way?

Perhaps because the structure of protest reflects the nature of universities. They make good targets because of their abiding vulnerability: They can’t deal with coercion, including nonviolent disobedience. Either they overreact, giving the protesters a new cause and more allies (this happened in 1968, and again last week at Columbia), or they yield, giving the protesters a victory and inviting the next round of disruption. This is why Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, no matter what she does, finds herself hammered from the right by Republican politicians and from the left by her own faculty and students, unable to move without losing more ground. Her detractors know that they have her trapped by their willingness to make coercive demands: Do what we say or else we’ll destroy you and your university. They aren’t interested in a debate.

[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance. At the heart of this spirit is free speech, which means more than just chanting, but free speech can’t thrive in an atmosphere of constant harassment. When one faction or another violates this spirit, the whole university is weakened as if stricken with an illness. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who tried and failed to mediate a peaceful end to the Columbia occupation, wrote afterward:

In a community one cannot regain authority simply by asserting it, or by using force to suppress dissidents. Authority in this case is like respect. One can only earn the authority—the loyalty of one’s students—by going in and arguing with them, by engaging in full debate and, when the merits of proposed change are recognized, taking the necessary steps quickly enough to be convincing.

The crackdown at Columbia in 1968 was so harsh that a backlash on the part of faculty and the public obliged the university to accept the students’ demands: a loss, then a win. The war in Vietnam ground on for years before it ended and history vindicated the protesters: another loss, another win. But the really important consequence of the 1968 revolt took decades to emerge. We’re seeing it now on Columbia’s quad and the campuses of elite universities around the country. The most lasting victory of the ’68ers was an intellectual one. The idea underlying their protests wasn’t just to stop the war or end injustice in America. Its aim was the university itself—the liberal university of the postwar years, which no longer exists.

That university claimed a special role in democratic society. A few weeks after the 1968 takeover, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter gave the commencement address to a wounded institution. “A university is a community, but it is a community of a special kind,” Hofstadter said—“a community devoted to inquiry. It exists so that its members may inquire into truths of all sorts. Its presence marks our commitment to the idea that somewhere in society there must be an organization in which anything can be studied or questioned—not merely safe and established things but difficult and inflammatory things, the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” This mission rendered the community fragile, dependent on the self-restraint of its members.

The lofty claims of the liberal university exposed it to charges of all kinds of hypocrisy, not least its entanglement with the American war machine. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who became a guru to the New Left, coined the phrase repressive tolerance for the veil that hid liberal society’s mechanisms of violence and injustice. In this scheme, no institution, including the university, remained neutral, and radical students embraced their status as an oppressed group.

[Charles Sykes: The new rules of political journalism]

At Stanford (where my father was an administrator in the late ’60s, and where students took over a campus building the week after the Columbia revolt), white students compared themselves to Black American slaves. To them, the university was not a community dedicated to independent inquiry but a nexus of competing interest groups where power, not ideas, ruled. They rejected the very possibility of a disinterested pursuit of truth. In an imaginary dialogue between a student and a professor, a member of the Stanford chapter of Students for a Democratic Society wrote: “Rights and privacy and these kinds of freedom are irrelevant—you old guys got to get it through your heads that to fight the whole corrupt System POWER is the only answer.”

A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.

The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?”

A Columbia student, writing to one of his professors in a letter that the student shared with me, explained the dynamic so sharply that it’s worth quoting him at length:

I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept in to every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen.

The muscle of independent thinking and open debate, the ability to earn authority that Daniel Bell described as essential to a university’s survival, has long since atrophied. So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.

[Adam Serwer: The Republicans who want American carnage]

And when the shrewd and unscrupulous Representative Elise Stefanik demanded of the presidents of Harvard and Penn whether calls for genocide violated their universities’ code of conduct, they had no good way to answer. If they said yes, they would have faced the obvious comeback: “Why has no one been punished?” So they said that it depended on the “context,” which was technically correct but sounded so hopelessly legalistic that it led to the loss of their jobs. The response also made nonsense of their careers as censors of unpopular speech. Shafik, of Columbia, having watched her colleagues’ debacle, told the congresswoman what she wanted to hear, then backed it up by calling the cops onto campus—only to find herself denounced on all sides, including by Senator Tom Cotton, who demanded that President Joe Biden deploy the United States military to Columbia, and by her own faculty senate, which threatened a vote of censure.

The right always knows how to exploit the excesses of the left. It happened in 1968, when the campus takeovers and the street battles between anti-war activists and cops at the Democratic convention in Chicago helped elect Richard Nixon. Republican politicians are already exploiting the chaos on campuses. This summer, the Democrats will gather again in Chicago, and the activists are promising a big show. Donald Trump will be watching.

Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.