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After writing about how and why Americans are depressed, I thought I’d turn things around for a change. What matters most for happiness—marriage, money, or something else entirely?

The message of W. Bradford Wilcox’s new book is right there in the title: Get Married. “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America,” Wilcox writes. “When it comes to predicting overall happiness, a good marriage is far more important than how much education you get, how much money you make, how often you have sex, and, yes, even how satisfied you are with your work.” According to survey data from Gallup, matrimony improves every flavor of well-being you can think of. Married couples experience more “enjoyment,” less “worry,” less “sadness,” less “stress,” less “anger,” and much, much less “loneliness.”

Wilcox is not unusual in hailing the salubrious effects of getting hitched. As my colleague Olga Khazan has reported, a recent analysis of General Social Survey data found that Americans’ happiness generally declined from the 1970s to 2020. The author of the paper, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman, concluded that, after adjusting for demographics, one thing explained “most of the recent decline in overall happiness”: the decline of marriage.

That would seem dispositive—the definitive answer to my question. But marriage is a lot of things at once. Legally speaking, marriage is a license. Practically speaking, marriage is love, friendship, sex, joint checking accounts, coffee routines, co-parenting, and the sheer fact of another person just being there all the time.

I focused on this last aspect when I recently interviewed Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, the director and the associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is the longest-running study of adult happiness ever conducted. In their book, The Good Life, Waldinger and Schulz proposed that the most important predictor of lifelong well-being was “social fitness,” their term for the quality of relationships in our lives, across family, friends, and community.

“Most people find that marriage provides that secure base of attachment, that sense of, ‘I’ve got somebody here when I’m in trouble,’” Waldinger told me. “But then what we discovered was that marriage provides all these benefits that are quite mundane, like somebody who gets you to remember to eat, somebody who gets you to remember to go to the doctor, to take your medication. It sounds trivial, except it turns out to really matter for whether you’re happy and whether you stay healthy.”

Social fitness isn’t marriage, exactly—it’s more like the genus under which marriage is the dominant species. Life is an obstacle course of one mess after another, Waldinger and Schulz told me; people need friends and companions to pull them through the Tough Mudder. But platonic relationships often ebb and flow over time, as people change, switch jobs, and move around. There’s no such thing as a legally binding social institution that forces platonic friends to maintain intimacy. But that’s exactly what marriage is (among other things): a legally binding social institution that encourages friends to maintain intimacy.

I’m fond of the analysis and worldview of Wilcox, Peltzman, Waldinger, and Schulz. There is something undeniably warm and comforting about the idea that other people are the core of contentment. But sometimes, I get a nagging suspicion that all this talk about companionship overlooks a crucial pillar of well-being: money.

After all, marriage and several key measures of social fitness rise and fall with income. High-income people are more likely to get married and less likely to get divorced. And, in part because marriage allows people to combine incomes and avoid redundant expenses, married people tend to be richer in their 50s and 60s, Wilcox reminded me. When it comes to social fitness, several surveys show that people with more money have more social time and are less lonely.

Maybe because high wealth is more exclusionary than marriage or friendship—it’s much easier to get married than to become a millionaire—we delude ourselves about the happiness premium of income. There is a popular idea known as the Easterlin paradox, which says that the correlation between rising incomes and rising well-being suddenly hits a ceiling around $75,000 for an individual, in 2010 dollars. But this theory is almost certainly false—and, indeed, it has been repeatedly falsified. In a 2012 paper, the economists Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers concluded that “data show no evidence for a satiation point above which income and well-being are no longer related.” Rather, the correlation weakens a bit over time, in a way that’s totally intuitive. It feels better to get a $5,000 raise if you’re earning $40,000 as a restaurant server than it does if you’re already earning $10 million as a chief executive.

Last week, I called Gallup’s principal economist, Jonathan Rothwell, and repeated a version of my initial question: What matters most for happiness—marriage, social well-being, or income? Rothwell, to his credit, told me that the question would be incredibly difficult to answer to any level of full satisfaction, but he’d give it a try anyway. A frequent writer on happiness issues, Rothwell defines happiness using a statistical measure called “thriving in well-being,” which combines current life evaluations with future life evaluations. This is because happiness is a slippery thing to define temporally. If I am having a bad day but am generally happy with my life, that’s not misery; if I am having a good week but am miserably depressed about the next five years of my life, that’s not contentment.

After a day or two crunching data, Rothwell got back to me with the results. He told me that his analyses clearly confirmed Wilcox’s theory: Marriage definitely, definitely matters, a lot. It improves well-being in every dimension, for every level of income. Overall, the average marriage-happiness premium was about 18 percent. That is, among all adults aged 30 to 50, about 41 percent of unmarried adults said they were thriving versus nearly 60 percent of married adults.

But when he compared happiness across income levels, another story emerged. Income, he said, plays an enormous role in predicting happiness as well. Low-income adults in Gallup’s survey were mostly unhappy, whether or not they were married. The highest-income adults were mostly quite happy, whether or not they are married. For example, married couples who earn less than $48,000 as a household are as likely to say they’re happy as single adults who earn $48,000 to $60,000, and a married couple who makes $90,000 to $180,000 as a household is almost exactly as likely to say they’re happy as a single person making $180,000 to $240,000.

Finally, Rothwell ran a test to isolate the correlative strength of several factors, including education, religion, marriage, income, and career satisfaction. Marriage was strongly correlated with his measure of happiness, even after accounting for these other factors. But social well-being (Gallup’s proxy for what Waldinger and Schulz call “social fitness”, which includes rating on the quality of marriages and close relationships) was even stronger. Income was stronger still. And financial well-being—that is, having enough money to do what you want to do and feeling satisfied with your standard of living—was the best predictor of Gallup’s definition of thriving.

One could draw a snap judgment from this analysis and conclude that money, in fact, simply buys happiness. I think that would be the wrong conclusion. Clever sociologists will always find new ways of “calculating” that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount. But the subtler truth seems to be that finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs in a happiness trinity. They rise together and fall together. Low-income Americans have seen the largest declines in marriage and experience the most loneliness. High-income Americans marry more and have not only richer investment accounts but also richer social lives. In this light, the philosophical question of what contributes most to happiness is just the beginning. The deeper question is why the trinity of happiness is so stratified by income—and whether well-being in America is in danger of becoming a luxury good.

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Over the past decade, sleep has become better understood as a core part of wellness. But the stressors of modern life mean that Americans are getting less of it.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Supreme Court goes through the looking glass on presidential immunity. The inflation plateau The campus-left occupation that broke higher education

Sleep No More

In the 1980s, when Rafael Pelayo was a young medical student setting out in the field of sleep research, people thought he was wasting his time. At that point, our culture was not so obsessed with the subject of rest. Now, he told me, people acknowledge that he was onto something—and insomniacs circle him “like sharks to blood” when they hear what he does for a living. Pelayo, a clinical professor at the Stanford Sleep Medicine Center, says that the “tide is changing” in how society values sleep. Over the past decade, how, and how much, we sleep has become a major health and wellness concern.

It’s a subject on Americans’ minds: Late last year, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 2001, a majority of surveyed American adults said they would feel better if they slept more; 57 percent of people surveyed said that they need to get more sleep, up from 43 percent in 2013, when the data were last gathered.

People’s self-reported quantities of sleep are also on the decline. Compared with a decade ago, fewer people report getting eight hours or more of sleep, and more people say they get five hours or less. Just 36 percent of women report getting the sleep they need—down from more than half in 2013.

As anyone who has lain awake at night knows, anxiety can affect sleep. That Americans say they are not sleeping as well as they reported in 2013 likely can be blamed in part on the stresses of the pandemic, Brynn K. Dredla, a neurologist and sleep-medicine specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, told me. “From a survival standpoint, if we’re under stress, our body thinks, Well, I have to be awake to deal with that stress,” she explained. Our brains have trouble distinguishing between acute danger, such as a bear attack, and chronic stress. “For us to sleep, we need to have a physically and psychologically safe environment,” she said. (A cold, dark, quiet room—with Instagram and news apps far away from the bed and the mind—doesn’t hurt either.)

Teenagers aren’t sleeping enough, and they’re experiencing high levels of stress—particularly teen girls. Blaming the ubiquity of the smartphone for bad sleep would be easy, but Pelayo finds that too simplistic—after all, we “had sleep issues way before the phones came out,” he noted. Teens aren’t getting enough sleep, Pelayo argued, in part because school tends to start at such an ungodly hour (he has advocated for later start times, a legislative effort that has gained momentum in states including California and Florida). It doesn’t help that adolescents are generally not great at recognizing when they are sleepy. Teens need a lot of sleep, Dredla explained, and sleep deprivation often makes them frustrated, which in turn “will lead to behaviors that actually can start promoting wakefulness,” such as napping or drinking caffeine. It’s not just teens—anyone can build up “sleep debt” and get into a cycle of sleeping poorly, stimulating themselves to stay awake, having trouble sleeping at night, and doing it all over again.

As sleep has become more central to Americans’ conception of wellness, companies have swooped in to try to package sleep as a luxury good. A cottage industry of products, including specialized pillows, apps, and pills, has sprung up in recent years promising to help people sleep better. Some simple pieces of technology—better mattresses, better cooling systems—have indeed enhanced sleep over the decades. But you don’t necessarily need to buy more stuff in order to sleep better. Savvy marketing makes people think the solution is complex, but at its core, the human body wants to sleep. “You were sleeping in utero,” Pelayo reminded me.

Of course, knowing this is not always enough to help a person struggling to get solid sleep. Pelayo advises that a good step for people having trouble sleeping is to wake up at the same time every morning. Forcing yourself to fall asleep is nearly impossible; if someone offered you $1,000 to fall asleep immediately, it might get even harder. But, he said, you can make yourself wake up consistently.

A good night of sleep consists of four factors, Pelayo explained: amount of sleep, quality of sleep, timing of sleep, and state of mind. That last one is key, he said—if you don’t look forward to going to bed, or if you dread waking up in the morning, you may have a very hard time sleeping. People tend to blame themselves when they don’t sleep well. He suggests that a better route for such people is to try to move past “that self-blame, because it’s not helpful. We want to figure out what’s happening.” It could be that you have a sleep disorder; many women, for example, develop sleep apnea after menopause.

Over the decades, Pelayo has watched sleep wellness become more valued, in parallel to many Americans beginning to internalize the benefits of eating healthy foods. “Waking up tired is like leaving a restaurant hungry,” Pelayo said. Though many Americans seem to feel that way these days, he retains hope. The good news about sleep? Everyone can do it. “It’s a fun gig as a sleep doctor, because most patients get better.”

Related:

The Protestant sleep ethic Can medieval sleeping habits fix America’s insomnia?

Today’s News

An appeals court overturned Harvey Weinstein’s sex-crimes conviction in New York, where he has been serving his prison sentence. Since he was also convicted of sex offenses in Los Angeles, in 2022, his release is unlikely. The Supreme Court heard arguments in Donald Trump’s presidential-immunity case, addressing the question of whether a former president can enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct related to official acts that took place during their time in office. The Biden administration finalized a new regulation that would significantly reduce emissions and pollution from coal-fueled power plants by 2032.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: For centuries, Jews were accused of preparing their Passover food with Christian blood. Yair Rosenberg investigates the dark legacy and ongoing body count of this ancient anti-Semitic myth.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Why Your Vet Bill Is So High

By Helaine Olen

In the pandemic winter of 2020, Katie, my family’s 14-year-old miniature poodle, began coughing uncontrollably. After multiple vet visits, and more than $1,000 in bills, a veterinary cardiologist diagnosed her with heart failure. Our girl, a dog I loved so much that I wrote an essay about how I called her my “daughter,” would likely die within nine months.

Katie survived for almost two years … [Her] extended life didn’t come cheap. There were repeated scans, echocardiograms, and blood work, and several trips to veterinary emergency rooms. One drug alone cost $300 a month, and that was after I shopped aggressively for discounts online.

People like me have fueled the growth of what you might call Big Vet. As household pets have risen in status—from mere animals to bona fide family members—so, too, has owners’ willingness to spend money to ensure their well-being. Big-money investors have noticed.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Gary Shteyngart.

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, Gary Shteyngart details his “seven agonizing nights” aboard the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship ever.

Analyze. In Taylor Swift’s “The Albatross”—a bonus track on her new album, The Tortured Poets Department—she identifies with the notorious bird from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem. Why does she see herself that way?

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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It had been clear for years that China was rising and rising—building rail lines and airports and skyscrapers at a rate that put the United States to shame, purchasing the favor of poorer countries, filling the world with its wares—when, in April 2014, I happened upon a bit of news. CNBC, citing a “new study from the world’s leading statistical agencies,” reported that China’s rapidly growing economy would rank first in the world, surpassing the United States’, by as soon as the end of the year. Our century-plus reign as the world’s wealthiest nation was over, or about to be. What a run we’d had!

But the study, which used debatable methodology, turned out to be wrong. It interested me less than something else I learned when I began poking around the internet to put it in some sort of context. I discovered that most Americans thought that China already had become our economic superior. And they’d thought that—erroneously—for several years.

In 2011, Gallup polled Americans on the question of whether the United States, China, the European Union, Japan, Russia, or India was the leading economic power in the world. More than 50 percent answered China, while fewer than 35 percent said the United States. Those numbers held when Gallup did the same polling the next year and the next and in 2014, when the portion of Americans choosing China rose to 52 percent and the portion choosing America dipped to 31 percent. That’s a whopping differential, especially considering its wrongness.

China’s economy still lags behind ours, although Americans have been reluctant to recognize that. In 2020, when China was pilloried as the cradle of the coronavirus pandemic, 50 percent of Americans indeed saw our economy as the mightier of the two. But that rediscovered swagger was short-lived. In 2021, 50 percent gave the crown back to China. Last year, Americans saw the economies as essentially tied.  

[From the May 1888 issue: What is pessimism?]

A fundamental misperception of global affairs by Americans isn’t surprising. Too many, if not most, of us are disinclined to look or think beyond our shores. But this particular misperception startled and fascinated me: We’d traditionally been such a confident, even cocky, nation, enamored of our military might (and often too quick to use it), showy with our foreign aid, schooled in stories—true ones—about how desperately foreigners wanted to make new lives here and what extraordinary risks they took to do so. We saw ourselves as peerless, and we spoke a distinctively American vocabulary of infinite possibility, boundless optimism, and better tomorrows.

American dream. American exceptionalism. Land of opportunity. Endless frontier. Manifest destiny. Those were the pretty phrases that I grew up with. We were inventors, expanders, explorers. Putting the first man on the moon wasn’t just a matter of bragging rights—though it was indeed that, and we bragged plenty about it. It was also an act of self-definition, an affirmation of American identity. We stretched the parameters of the navigable universe the way we stretched the parameters of everything else.

That perspective, obviously, was a romanticized one, achieved through a selective reading of the past. It discounted the experiences of many Black Americans. It minimized the degree to which they and other minorities were shut out from all of this inventing and exploring. It mingled self-congratulatory fiction with fact. And it probably imprinted itself more strongly on me than on some of my peers because of my particular family history. My father’s parents were uneducated immigrants who found in the United States exactly what they’d left Southern Italy for: more material comfort, greater economic stability, and a more expansive future for their children, including my father, who got a scholarship to an Ivy League school, went on to earn an M.B.A., and became a senior partner in one of the country’s biggest accounting firms. He put a heated in-ground pool in the backyard. He put me and my three siblings in private schools. He put our mother in a mink. And he pinched himself all the while.

It was nonetheless true that the idea of the United States as an unrivaled engine of social mobility and generator of wealth held sway with many Americans, who expected their children to do better than they’d done and their children’s children to do even better. That was the mythology, anyway. Sure, we hit lows, but we climbed out of them. We suffered doubts, but we snapped back. The tumult of the late 1960s, Richard Nixon’s degradation of the presidency, and the gas lines, international humiliation, and stagflation of Jimmy Carter’s presidency gave way, in 1980, to the election of Ronald Reagan, who declared that it was “morning again in America” and found an abundance of voters eager to welcome that dawn, to reconnect with an optimism that seemed more credibly and fundamentally American than deviations from it.

I don’t detect that optimism around me anymore. In its place is a crisis of confidence, a pervasive sense among most Americans that our best days are behind us, and that our problems are multiplying faster than we can find solutions for them. It’s a violent rupture of our national psyche. It’s a whole new American pessimism.

Well, maybe not entirely new. In Democracy in America, published in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville noted a perpetually unsatisfied yearning in Americans, who, he wrote, “are forever brooding over advantages they do not possess.” He found Americans unusually attuned to their misfortunes, and that made (and still makes) sense: With big promises come big disappointments. Boundless dreams are bound to be unattainable.

Even in periods of American history that we associate with prosperity and tranquility, like the 1950s, there were rumblings and disenchantment: Rebel Without a Cause, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. And the late 1960s and early ’70s were an oxymoronic braid of surgent hope for necessary change and certainty that the whole American enterprise was corrupt. There were headstrong and heady demands for dignity, for equality, for justice. There were also cities on fire and assassinations. But the overarching story—the general trend line—of the United States in the second half of the 20th century was progress.

[Read: The patron saint of political violence]

Then, in 2001, the Twin Towers fell. In 2008, the global economy nearly collapsed. By 2012, I noticed that our “shining city on a hill,” to use one of Reagan’s favorite terms for the United States, was enveloped in a fog that wouldn’t lift. In June of that year, Jeb Bush visited Manhattan; had breakfast with several dozen journalists, including me; and mused about the country’s diminished position and fortunes. Perhaps because his political life was then on pause—he’d finished his two terms as Florida governor and his 2016 presidential campaign was still years away—he allowed himself a bluntness that he might not have otherwise. “We’re in very difficult times right now, very different times than we’ve been,” he said, and while that was already more downbeat than mainstream politicians’ usual prognostications, his following words were even darker: “We’re in decline.”

In the years that followed, I paid greater and greater heed to evidence that supported his appraisal, which mirrored my own. I was struck by how tempered and tentative President Barack Obama seemed by the second year of his second term, when he often mulled the smallness, not the largeness, of his place in history, telling David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, that each president is just “part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” “Mr. President,” my New York Times colleague Maureen Dowd wrote in response, “I am just trying to get my paragraph right. You need to think bigger.”

Of course, when Obama had thought bigger, he’d bucked up against an American political system that was polarized and paralyzed—that had turned “hope and change” into tweak and tinker. Obama’s longtime adviser David Axelrod told the Times’ Michael Shear: “I think to pretend that ‘It’s morning in America’ is a misreading of the times.”

That was in 2014, when I registered and explored the revelation that so many Americans thought China was wealthier than we were. Around the same time, I also noticed a long memo by the prominent Democratic political strategist Doug Sosnik in Politico. He observed that for 10 years running, the percentage of Americans who believed that the United States was on the wrong track had exceeded the percentage who thought it was on the right track. “At the core of Americans’ anger and alienation is the belief that the American dream is no longer attainable,” Sosnik wrote. “For the first time in our country’s history, there is more social mobility in Europe than in the United States.”

That “first time” turned out to be no fleeting aberration. Since then, the negative markers have multiplied, and the negative mood has intensified. The fog over our shining city won’t lift. Almost every year from 2000 to the present, the suicide rate has increased. A kind of nihilism has spread, a “rot at the very soul of our nation,” as Mike Allen wrote last year in his Axios newsletter summarizing a Wall Street Journal/NORC poll that charted both the collapse of faith in American institutions and the abandonment of tradition and traditional values. Only 38 percent of respondents said that patriotism was very important, in contrast with 70 percent of respondents from a similar Journal/NBC survey a quarter century earlier, in 1998.

To recognize those dynamics is to understand America’s current politics, in which so many politicians—presidential candidates included—whip up support less by talking about the brightness of the country’s future than by warning of the apocalypse if the other side wins. They’re not clarions of American glory. They’re bulwarks against American ruin.

This essay was adapted from the forthcoming The Age of Grievance.

“The entire world knows exactly why the U.S. is trying to ban TikTok,” James Li declared on March 16 to his nearly 100,000 followers on the social-media platform. His video then cut to a subtitled clip of a Taiwanese speaker purportedly discussing how “TikTok inadvertently offended the Jewish people” by hosting pro-Palestinian content. “The power of the Jewish people in America is definitely more scary than Trump,” the speaker goes on. “They have created the options: either ban or sell to the Americans. In reality, it’s neither—it’s selling to a Jewish investment group.”

Li, who calls himself an “indie journalist” and subsequently posted another video blaming Israel for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, got more than 160,000 views for his TikTok theory—and the video was one of the poorer-performing entries making similar claims on the platform.

What prompted this outburst? On March 13, Congress advanced a bill that would give TikTok’s Chinese parent company six months to sell it or be banned from American app stores. The legislation passed 352–65, with overwhelming bipartisan support, and the rational observer will have no trouble understanding why.

The United States has a long history of preventing foreign adversaries from controlling important communications infrastructure. Washington spent more than a decade, under Democratic and Republican presidents, leading a successful international campaign to block the Chinese telecom giant Huawei from Western markets. Donald Trump attempted to force a TikTok sale back in 2020. The reasons are straightforward: The app has access to the data of some 150 million American users—nearly half the population—but it is owned and controlled by the Chinese company ByteDance. Like all companies in the country, ByteDance is effectively under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party, which regularly punishes and even disappears business leaders who displease it. A former ByteDance executive has said that the CCP had “supreme access” to the company’s data, and used the info to track protesters in Hong Kong, for example.

[Read: Beijing is ruining TikTok]

Recent polls show robust public support for TikTok’s ban or sale, and for years, Gallup has found that Americans see China as the country’s greatest enemy. In short, Congress has strong electoral and political incentives to act against TikTok. But spend some time on the platform itself, and you’ll discover a very different culprit behind all this: Jews.

“We were all thinking it: Israel is trying to buy TikTok,” the influencer Ian Carroll told his 1.5 million followers last month. The evidence: Steven Mnuchin, the former Trump Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs executive, has sought investors to purchase the app. “He’s not Israel, right?” continued Carroll. “Well, let’s peel this onion back one layer at a time, starting with just the fact that he’s Jewish.”

Carroll’s TikTok bio says “do your own research,” and he certainly had research to share. “The censorship is not about China on TikTok,” he explained. Rather, “as a TikTok creator who gets censored all the frickin’ time, I can tell you that the things you get censored about are the CIA and Israel.” Carroll did not address why Israel would go through so much trouble to acquire TikTok if it already controlled the platform, or why the Semitic censors somehow missed his video and its more than 1 million views, not to mention the several similarly viral follow-ups he posted.

In truth, far from suppressing such content, TikTok’s algorithm happily promotes it. I purposely viewed the videos for this piece while logged out of the platform, and it nonetheless began suggesting to me more material along these lines through its sidebar recommendations.

Characteristic of anti-Semitic online discourse, these videos and others like them interchangeably reference individual American Jews, American Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, American pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC, and the state of Israel, as though they are all part of one single-minded international conspiracy to take down TikTok. When a commenter asked Carroll to “look into universal studios pulling their music from TikTok,” a reference to the Universal Music conglomerate’s dispute with TikTok over royalties, Carroll replied, “Universal CEO is a Jewish man.”

“A foreign government is influencing the 2024 election,” the leftist podcaster and former Bernie Sanders Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray declared on X in March. “I’m not talking about China, but Israel. In a leaked recording, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt admitted that Israel had a ‘TikTok problem.’ Suddenly, a divided Congress agrees on one thing: A social media ban.” Greenblatt is an American Jew, the ADL is an American organization, the bill isn’t a ban, and the push for a forced sale predated the Gaza war, but other than that, Gray was on the money.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why Facebook and Twitter won’t ban antisemitism]

“Banning TikTok became a crucial emergency because what they saw was a bunch of young individuals, essentially people that are going to be the future leaders of America, who were not pro-Israel,” the far-right commentator Candace Owens claimed in March on her popular show at The Daily Wire. She then issued an implied threat: “If TikTok is in fact banned, there is no question that Israel will be blamed, AIPAC will be blamed, the ADL will be blamed, Jews are going to be blamed … You can see that sentiment building.” (Owens left The Daily Wire a week later following a string of anti-Semitic incidents, which included claims that Jews were doing “horrific things” and “controlling people with blackmail,” as well as her favoriting a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood.”)

At this point, it’s not uncommon to find videos about the TikTok legislation that do not even mention Jews or Israel—like this one with 1.5 million views—yet are flooded with hundreds of comments, garnering tens of thousands of likes, accusing “Zionists,” “Jews,” or AIPAC of being behind it, despite years of national-security reporting on concerns over the platform’s Chinese owners. That alleged Jewish malefactors are being assailed on TikTok even when they are not invoked explicitly in a video illustrates how widely the meme has spread.

Like many conspiracy theories, the notion that Jews are out to ban TikTok contains a grain of truth. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have raised concerns about TikTok’s failure to moderate anti-Semitic content for years, including when it pertains to Israel, but they have never called for the app to be shut down. After the TikTok sale legislation was proposed, the Jewish Federations of North America said it “appropriately balances free speech and individual rights with regulatory action” while asserting that “our community understands that social media is a major driver of the rise in antisemitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.” (Presumably, the organization arrived at this conclusion by spending 10 minutes on the app.) Researchers have found that pro-Palestinian content dwarfs pro-Israel content on TikTok, likely reflecting the platform’s young and international demographic.

But no conspiracy theories or appeals to recent geopolitical developments are necessary to understand why U.S. politicians wouldn’t want one of the most-trafficked social-media networks in America to be run by Communist China via a black-box algorithm. Just this past December, researchers at Rutgers found that anti-China posts on topics like the Hong Kong protests or the regime’s brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims were dramatically underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.

TikTok’s response to allegations that it could function as a foreign influence operation have not exactly allayed concerns. Shortly after the Rutgers study was published, the app restricted access to the tool used by academics to track its content. Last month, it sent multiple alerts to its American users falsely warning that Congress was about to ban TikTok and urging them to contact their representatives. In fact, the bill seeks to force a sale to new ownership, much as congressional scrutiny over data privacy led the dating app Grindr to be sold to non-Chinese owners in 2020.

Simply put, none of what is happening to the social-media platform is new. Neither is the tendency to blame Jews for the world’s problems—but that doesn’t make the impulse any less dangerous. Many understand anti-Semitism as a personal prejudice that singles out Jewish people for their difference, much like other minorities experience racism. But anti-Semitism also manifests as a conspiracy theory about how the world works, alleging that sinister string-pulling Jews are the source of social, political, and economic problems—and this is the sort of anti-Semitism that tends to get people killed.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-semitism]

Consider recent American history: In 2018, a far-right gunman who blamed Jews for mass immigration murdered 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. In 2019, assailants tied to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, killing three; one of the shooters had written on social media about Jews controlling the government. In 2022, an Islamic extremist took an entire congregation hostage in Colleyville, Texas, and demanded that a rabbi get a convict released from a nearby prison. These perpetrators—white supremacist, Black extremist, radical Islamist—had essentially nothing in common other than their belief that a Jewish cabal governed world affairs and was the cause of their problems.

The reality is the reverse: Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, and although they exercise influence like any other minority, they frequently disagree among themselves and do not dictate the destiny of the majority. Politicians voting against TikTok are pursuing their conception of the national interest, not being suborned to serve some nebulous Jewish interest. Remove the Jews from the equation, and the situation will be the same.

Conspiracy theorists typically claim to be combatting concealed power structures. But as in this case, their delusions make them unable to perceive the way power actually works. Thus, conspiratorial anti-Semitism hobbles its adherents, preventing them from rationally organizing to advance their own causes by distracting them with fantastical Jewish plots.

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” the Black civil-rights activist Eric Ward once told me. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance.”

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories won’t safeguard TikTok from the bill that’s currently moving through the U.S. legislature. But the more people buy into them, the more they will imperil not only American Jews but American democracy as well.

If you’ve been feeling the weight of insomnia lately, you’re far from alone. A new Gallup poll out Monday shows that a majority of American adults report not getting enough sleep — a first in the survey’s history. Though there are likely several reasons for this, many struggling with sleep also report feeling…

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As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.

More than one-quarter of Americans now identify as atheists, agnostics, or religiously “unaffiliated,” according to a new survey of 5,600 U.S. adults by the Public Religion Research Institute. This is the highest level of non-religiosity in the poll’s history. Two-thirds of nonbelievers were brought up in at least nominally religious households, like me. (I grew up in a Reform Jewish home that I would describe as haphazardly religious. In kindergarten, my parents encouraged my sister and me to enthusiastically celebrate Hanukkah—and, just as fervently, to believe in Santa Claus.) But more Americans today have “converted” out of religion than have converted to all forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam combined. No faith’s evangelism has been as successful in this century as religious skepticism.

Secularization is old news. The scientific revolution that pitted the Church against stargazers like Galileo comes from the 1600s, and Nietzsche famously declared “God is dead” in the 1880s. But even as secularism surged throughout the developed world in the 20th century, America’s religiosity remained exceptional. Seven in 10 Americans told Gallup that they belonged to a church in 1937, and even by the 1980s, roughly 70 percent said they still belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque.

Suddenly, in the 1990s, the ranks of nonbelievers surged. An estimated 40 million people—one in eight Americans—stopped going to church in the past 25 years, making it the “largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history,” according to the religion writer Jake Meador. In 2021, membership in houses of worship fell below a majority for the first time on record.

The sudden decline of religion likely relates to changes in both politics and family life. In the 1970s and ’80s, the religious right became a formidable fundraising machine for the Republican Party. As the GOP consolidated its advantage among conservative Christians, religion seemed less appealing to liberal young people, especially if they or their parents already had a tenuous relationship with the Church. In the late 1980s, only one in 10 liberals said they didn’t belong to any religion; 30 years later, that figure was about four in 10. Meanwhile, the decline of marriage, especially among low-income Americans, accompanied their move away from the Church.

That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and “instilling values in their children.”

When I read the PRRI survey, this emphasis on community is what caught my eye. As I recently reported, the United States is in the midst of a historically unprecedented decline in face-to-face socializing. The social collapse is steepest for some of the groups with the largest declines in religiosity.

For example, young people, who are fleeing religion faster than older Americans, have also seen the largest decline in socializing. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 have reduced their hangouts by more than three hours a week, according to the American Time Use Survey. There is no statistical record of any period in U.S. history where young people were less likely to attend religious services, and also no period when young people have spent more time on their own.

A similar story holds for working-class Americans. In 2019, a team of researchers published a survey based on long interviews conducted from 2000 to 2013 with older, low-income men without a college degree in working-class neighborhoods around the country. They found that, since the 1970s, church attendance among white men without a college degree had fallen even more than among white college graduates. For many of these men, the loss of religion went hand in hand with the retreat from marriage. “As marriage declined,” the authors wrote, “men’s church attendance might have fallen in tandem.” Today, low-income and unmarried men have more alone time than almost any other group, according to time-use data.

Did the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from associations and memberships in America? “It’s hard to know what the causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me. But what’s undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. “Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches, and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said.

Klinenberg doesn’t blame individual Americans for these changes. He sees our civic retreat as a story about place. In his book Palaces for the People, Klinenberg reported that Americans today have fewer shared spaces where connections are formed: churches, libraries, parks, school gyms, and union halls. “People today say they just have fewer places to go for collective life,” he said. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether.” Many people, having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.

Imagine, by analogy, a parallel universe where Americans suddenly gave up on sit-down restaurants. In surveys, they named many reasonable motivations for their abstinence: the expense, the overuse of salt and sugar and butter, the temptation to drink alcohol. As restaurants disappeared by the hundreds, some mourned their closure, while others said it simply didn’t matter. After all, there were still plenty of ways for people to feed themselves. Over time, however, Americans as a group never found another social activity to replace their dining-out time. They saw less of one another with each passing decade. Sociologists noted that the demise of restaurants had correlated with a rise in aloneness, just as the CDC noticed an increase in anxiety and depression.

I’ve come to believe that something like this story is happening, except with organized religion playing the role of alcohol. On an individual basis, people can give any number of valid-sounding reasons for not frequenting a house of worship. But a behavioral shift that is fully understandable on the individual level has coincided with, and even partly exacerbated, a great rewiring of our social relations.

And America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmo,; to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional.” Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews daven. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.

I’m not advocating that every atheist and agnostic in America immediately choose a world religion and commit themselves to weekly church (or synagogue, or mosque) attendance. But I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. Making friends as an adult can be hard; it’s especially hard without a scheduled weekly reunion of congregants. Finding meaning in the world is hard too; it’s especially difficult if the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.