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

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

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A Red Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump’s willing accomplice The validation brigade salutes Trump.

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

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Evening Read

Tony Evans / Getty

We’re All Reading Wrong

By Alexandra Moe

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

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

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Photo by my wife, J. F. Riordan

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

— Charlie

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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The Shot Read ’Round the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Evening Read

Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection

The Godfather of American Comedy

By Adrienne LaFrance

Somewhere in the hills above Malibu, drenched in California sunshine and sitting side by side in a used white Volkswagen bug, two teenage boys realized they were lost … This was the early 1960s, and the boy driving the car was Albert Einstein—yes, this really was his given name, years before he changed it to Albert Brooks. Riding shotgun was his best friend and classmate from Beverly Hills High School, Rob Reiner.

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

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Rageh Omaar, 56, was hosting the News at Ten when he appeared to struggle to read the bulletins.

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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.

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For the past couple of years, scientists have watched with growing concern as a massive outbreak of avian flu, also known as H5N1 bird flu, has swept through bird populations. Recently in the U.S., a farm worker and some cattle herds have been infected. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covered the virus’s spread in North America, about the risk of human infection and how, for animals, this has already been “a pandemic many times over.”

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Not a Five-Alarm Fire

Lora Kelley: How does this bird-flu outbreak compare with previous ones?

Katherine J. Wu: When we’re considering the toll on nonhuman animals, this is the largest, most deadly H5N1 outbreak that has been recorded in North America. It has been unfolding slowly for about two and a half years now, but it’s become a gargantuan wave at this point.

Lora: Wow—how alarmed are you by that?

Katherine: I’m medium concerned—and I have been medium concerned for a couple of years now. It’s difficult to gauge the amount of alarm to feel, because it’s so unprecedented. Still, most H5N1 outbreaks in the past have totally fizzled without much consequence, especially in this part of the world.

I am worried because so many species have been getting sick. A huge number of wild birds have been infected, including species that haven’t been affected in the past. And we’ve seen these massive outbreaks in domesticated chickens, which are packed together in farms.

Avian flu is known to be a bird problem. Beyond that, we’ve been seeing these outbreaks in mammals for a couple of years now, which is more concerning because, of course, we are also mammals. Humans seem to be potentially susceptible to infection, but at the same time, it would take quite a lot for this to become another big human-flu pandemic.

Lora: Should we be concerned about getting sick?

Katherine: People should be vigilant and paying attention to the news. But right now, as you and I are talking, there is still not a huge risk to people. You don’t get a pandemic unless you have a pathogen that spreads very, very easily among people, and there’s no evidence so far that this virus has mutated to that point.

There have been some human cases globally so far, but it’s a very small number. They seem to have been cases where someone was highly exposed to the virus in domesticated animals. People got sick, but they didn’t pass it to someone else.

I’m definitely not saying that person-to-person transmission can’t happen eventually, but there’s a pretty big chasm between someone getting infected and someone being able to efficiently pass the virus on. It is concerning that we continue to see more mammal species affected by H5N1, including species that have a lot of close contact with humans. But this is not a five-alarm fire so far.

Lora: How will people’s lives be affected?

Katherine: The virus has already affected our lives. Egg prices went completely bonkers in 2022 and early 2023, and over the course of this outbreak, more than 90 million domestic poultry have died. It’s not that all of those birds got sick—when this virus breaks out on chicken farms, it’s generally considered good practice to cull the chickens to halt the spread. Still, when you have that many chickens dying, egg prices are going to go up.

We’re probably not on track to see that with cows anytime soon. Even though this virus has now been detected in dairy cows, they aren’t getting wildly sick, and transmission doesn’t seem as efficient. I don’t think we’re going to be in a situation where we’re killing all of our dairy cows and no one can get milk.

Lora: The FDA announced yesterday that genetic evidence of this bird-flu virus had been found in samples of pasteurized milk. Is it still safe to drink milk?

Katherine: So far, the answer is: generally, yes, if it’s been pasteurized. Pasteurization is a process by which milk is treated with heat so that it will kill a whole bunch of pathogens, including bacteria and viruses, and H5N1 is thought to be vulnerable to this. Also, researchers have been working to test cows so they can figure out which ones are sick. Only milk from healthy cows is authorized to enter the general food supply, though the trick will be finding all the cows that are actually infected. For now, the main ways that this virus will affect us will be indirect.

Lora: Is there anything that can be done to curb the spread among wild animals?

Katherine: For the animal world, this has already been a “pandemic” many times over. It has been truly devastating in that respect. So many wild birds, sea lions, seals, and other creatures have died, and it’s difficult to see how people can effectively intervene out in nature. There have been very few cases in which endangered animals have received vaccines because there’s a real possibility that their populations could be 100 percent wiped out by this virus.

For most other animals in the wild, there’s not a lot that can be done, except for people to pay attention to where the virus is spreading. The hope is that most animal populations will be resilient enough to get through this and develop some form of immunity.

Lora: Responses to COVID became very politicized. How might the aftermath of those mitigation measures shape how people respond to this virus, especially if it becomes a greater threat to humans?

Katherine: We’re so fresh off the worst days of COVID that if people were asked to buckle down or get a new vaccine, I suspect that a lot of them would be like, Not again. There is still a lot of mitigation fatigue, and many people are sick of thinking about respiratory viruses and taking measures to prevent outbreaks. And, certainly, people have lost a lot of trust in public health over the past four years.

That said, H5N1 is still a flu, and people are familiar with that type of virus. We have a long history of using flu vaccines, and the government has experience making a pandemic vaccine, keeping that stockpile, and getting it out to the public. That gives me hope that at least some people will be amenable to taking the necessary preventative measures, so any potential bird-flu outbreak among humans would not turn into COVID 2.0.

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Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choice. Bird flu has never done this before.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden signed into law a bipartisan foreign-aid package that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, and a measure that forces TikTok’s parent company to sell the social-media app or face an outright ban. The U.S. Supreme Court seems divided over whether a federal law can require hospitals to provide access to emergency abortions and override state-level abortion bans. George Santos, the embattled former New York representative facing multiple charges of fraud, ended his independent bid for a U.S. House seat on Long Island.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Tesla is not the next Ford, Matteo Wong writes. It’s the next Con Ed.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani

Why Did Cars Get So Expensive?

By Annie Lowrey

Inflation, finally, has cooled off. Prices have increased 2.5 percent over the past year, down from increases as high as 7 percent during the early pandemic. Rents are high but stabilizing. The cost of groceries is ticking up, not surging, and some goods, such as eggs, are actually getting cheaper. But American consumers are still stretching to afford one big-ticket item: their cars.

The painful cost of vehicle ownership doesn’t just reflect strong demand driven by low unemployment, pandemic-related supply-chain weirdness, and high interest rates. It reflects how awful cars are for American households and American society as a whole.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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

Listen. Taylor Swift’s music often returns to the same motifs: pathetic fallacy, the passing of time, the mythology of love. Her latest album shows how these themes have calcified in her work, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Look. Take a photo tour of several of Chile’s national parks, which protect many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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An attempt to simplify federal financial-aid forms led to a bureaucratic mess. That may shape where students go to college—and whether they enroll at all.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The unreality of Columbia University’s “liberated zone” The new quarter-life crisis Why a dog’s death hits so hard

A Botched Rollout

Even under the best conditions, applying to college is rarely easy. But this year, the process became an extraordinary source of stress for many American families when the planned rollout of a simplified Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form devolved into a series of delays and website glitches that left students in limbo.

The plan to simplify the FAFSA process has been a few years in the making: In 2020, as part of a massive spending bill, Congress ordered the Department of Education to create a shorter version of the FAFSA form; the new application reduces the maximum number of questions from 108 to 36. The goal was to make things easier for applicants and increase the number of students who could receive federal aid—“a rare win for bipartisan, commonsense governance,” my colleague Rose Horowitch wrote. But in recent months, the new FAFSA rollout has met roadblocks and delays at almost every turn. The form was supposed to launch in October, but it didn’t open up until the very end of December. Even after the soft launch, many families encountered various lockouts and issues, and students whose parents don’t have Social Security numbers struggled to submit the form.

By late last month, around the time when many students were receiving admissions decisions, some 2 million FAFSA forms were in purgatory, Rose reported. The FAFSA fiasco, my colleague Adam Harris told me, is “a result of the administration overestimating the resources it would have at its disposal—time, people, money—in order to complete an inherited overhaul.” That lack of resources, he explained, combined with missed contractor deadlines and miscommunication, led to a bungled process.

The botched rollout has posed problems for students who want to compare financial-aid offers before they commit to a university, Sandy Baum, an expert on higher-education financing and a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told me. But the stakes are even higher for students who are on the fence about enrolling: This fiasco may “transform the life of somebody who just says, Well, I guess I’m not going to be able to go to college at all.”

As of April 12, only 29 percent of high-school seniors had completed their FAFSA forms, down from more than 46 percent last year at the same time, according to data from the National College Attainment Network (NCAN). Baum suggested that some of the dropoff was because people ran into so many roadblocks that they gave up. But others were also likely scared away from even trying. “Everybody has heard about this problem,” she said. The decline has been especially stark at schools where many students of color and low-income students are enrolled, according to NCAN.

None of this is likely to help the perception among some students that college is out of reach. Recent news stories reported that certain colleges are on the brink of costing six figures a year, including tuition, housing, and personal expenses. Many students at public and private institutions don’t actually pay the sticker price after factoring in grants, loans, and other aid, and most colleges don’t charge nearly that much—but not everybody knows that, Baum said.

The FAFSA debacle collides with a number of other higher-education issues, Laura Perna, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. In 2022, the number of young students enrolled in college dropped by roughly 1.2 million from its 2011 peak, and polling shows that many people are questioning the value of higher education. Perna worries that this year’s financial-aid fiasco might diminish trust in the FAFSA system, which requires families to submit a huge amount of personal information.

As May 1, the traditional college-commitment deadline, approaches, many people are scrambling to figure out what financial assistance they might get. Some colleges have already extended their deadlines, though many are leaving the situation in students’ hands. Baum is optimistic that in the long run, the simplified FAFSA process will mean more people are eligible for federal aid. Still, this year’s senior class is bearing the brunt of many bureaucratic failures and missteps. “If students don’t go to college this year, will they go next year or will they just never go?” she wonders. “That’s something we don’t know yet.”

Related:

Colleges are facing an enrollment nightmare. How the Biden administration messed up FAFSA

Today’s News

During Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial in New York, the former publisher of The National Enquirer tabloid testified that he and Trump had a “highly confidential” arrangement that included buying and burying negative stories about the former president. The Federal Trade Commission voted to ban noncompete clauses, which prevent workers from joining rival companies or starting their own competing business. The Justice Department reached a $138.7 million settlement with more than 100 victims of Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics physician currently serving an effective life sentence for sexual-abuse and child-pornography convictions.

Evening Read

Courtesy of Kidipadeli75

A Dentist Found a Jawbone in a Floor Tile

By Sarah Zhang

Recently, a man visiting his parents’ newly renovated home recognized an eerily familiar white curve in their tile floor. To the man, a dentist, it looked just like a jawbone. He could even count the teeth—one, two, three, four, five, at least. They seemed much like the ones he stares at all day at work.

The jawbone appeared at once very humanlike and very old, and the dentist took his suspicions to Reddit. Could it be that his parents’ floor tile contains a rare human fossil? Quite possibly. It’s “clearly hominin,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who also blogged about the discovery, told me in an email. (Hominin refers to a group including modern humans, archaic humans such as Neanderthals, and all of their ancestors.) It is too soon to say exactly how old the jawbone is or exactly which hominin it belonged to, but signs point to something—or someone—far older than modern humans.

Read the full article.

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The passage of the Ukrainian aid package by the House this past weekend is an extraordinary sign of political courage. But in the party of Donald Trump, this win for democracy may soon seem like a mirage.

(For further reading on Mike Johnson’s speakership and what the weekend’s victory could mean for him, I recommend Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile, “The Accidental Speaker,” published today in The Atlantic.)

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The politics of pessimism What Donald Trump fears most Boeing and the dark age of American manufacturing

A Political Mirage

The mirages known as fata morgana, named for the character Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend, are extraordinary sights. When atmospheric conditions are just right, rays of light bend, transforming boats, islands, mountains, and coastlines before the viewer’s eyes. Despite their beauty, though, these mirages soon fade away—which brings me to this weekend’s remarkable scene in the House.

On Saturday, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson faced down the threats from his party’s Trumpist isolationist wing and delivered a resounding bipartisan victory for the forces of democracy. The $61 billion Ukrainian aid package passed with more than 300 votes—the final total was 311–112—including 101 GOP votes and the support of every Democrat in the House. The bill, which is expected to be approved quickly by the Senate and signed by President Joe Biden, will provide the embattled Ukrainians with crucial support at what seems a decisive moment in the war against Vladimir Putin and his army of invaders.

The vote was a stinging rebuke to MAGA world and its leader. “Ukraine won,” David Frum wrote in The Atlantic this weekend. “Trump lost.”

We also got a vanishingly rare glimpse of political courage. For months, Johnson dithered over legislation to aid Ukraine, and his delays contributed to the unconscionable loss of Ukrainian lives as Russia rained death on Ukraine’s cities. His conversion was as welcome as it was astonishing. Although his ideological shift has been described as an evolution, it felt more like a road-to-Damascus moment. Having played the role of Neville Chamberlain for months, Johnson suddenly sounded almost Churchillian.

“History judges us for what we do,” he said last week. “This is a critical time right now. I could make a selfish decision and do something that’s different. But I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.”

Unlike his party’s maximum leader, Johnson paid attention to foreign-policy experts, listened to the pleas of American allies, and believed the intelligence community rather than Putin. “I really do believe the intel,” Johnson said. “I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Baltics next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.”

Johnson knew that the decision could cause him to lose his speakership. In this era of GOP political cowardice, his stand felt profoundly countercultural.

So did the House’s rare display of bipartisanship. The House Republican leadership (with the notable exception of New York Representative and vice-presidential wannabe Elise Stefanik) worked with Democrats to stand by Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

After years of dominating the public narrative, the GOP’s most extreme performers found themselves isolated and outvoted. Marjorie Taylor Greene had humiliation after humiliation piled on her; her amendments (including one funding “space laser technology” on the southern border) were widely mocked and then overwhelmingly defeated. Even Fox News seemed to turn on her, publishing a scathing op-ed calling her “an idiot” who is “trying to wreck the GOP” with “her bombastic self-serving showmanship and drama queen energy.”

The isolationists were left to vent their rage at displays of support for Ukraine, which included waving Ukrainian flags on the House floor. “Such an embarrassing and disgusting show of America LAST politicians!” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado posted. “You love Ukraine so much, get your ass over there and leave America’s governing to those who love THIS country!”

And yet, for a few hours, congressional Republicans almost looked like a functioning, rational, governing political party, one that saw the United States as a defender of democracy against authoritarian aggression. It was a party that Ronald Reagan would have recognized. But restrain your exuberance, because we most likely witnessed nothing more than a political fata morgana.

This is, after all, still Donald Trump’s party.

In the days before his legislative defeat, Trump tried to soften his message a bit, posting on Truth Social that he, too, favored helping Ukraine. “As everyone agrees,” he wrote, “Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us!”

Frum noted in his recent article that Trump’s statement “was after-the-fact face-saving, jumping to the winning side after his side was about to lose.” (Perhaps the most bizarre spin came from Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham, who went on Fox News to insist that “this would not have passed without Donald Trump.”)

But there should be no doubt what Trump’s election would mean for Russia, Ukraine, or NATO. And we have precious little evidence that the GOP would ever push back against a President Trump, who would side with Putin against our allies and our own intelligence agencies.

The directional arrow of the GOP remains unchanged: A majority of House Republicans voted against aiding Ukraine (the vote among Republican representatives was 101 for and 112 against); a majority of Senate Republicans is likely to vote no as well.

And the backlash on the right is just beginning. On cue, the flying monkeys of the MAGAverse came out quickly against Johnson and the Ukraine package. After the vote, Greene declared that Johnson was not merely “a traitor to our conference” but actually “a traitor to our country,” whose speakership was “over.” She continues to threaten to bring a motion to vacate the chair, which could plunge the GOP back into chaos and dysfunction.

Senator Mike Lee railed against what he called “the warmonger wish list” passed by the House. Denunciations of Johnson’s “treason” and demands for his removal flooded right-wing social media. Donald Trump Jr. fired a barrage of attacks against Johnson and the Ukraine bill, which he’s called a “garbage bill,” while posting his support for Greene’s attempts to derail it.

Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, the rumpled consigliere of Republican anarchy, is escalating his attacks on Republicans who voted for the package. “Traitors One and All,” the former White House aide wrote on his Gettr account. Bannon called Johnson a “Sanctimonious Twerp” who had “Sold Out His Country to Curry Favor with the Globalist Elites.”

The Trump ally Charlie Kirk railed: “Not only is the DC GOP collapsing the country by their anti-American actions, they are participating in the end of the constitutional order as we know it.”

In a rational party, these would be voices from the fringe. But Greene, Don Jr., Kirk, and Bannon still represent the id of the GOP, because they have Trump’s ear and remain far closer to the heart of the MAGA base than internationalist Republicans such as Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney, and Mike Pence—all of whom have been thrown into Republican exile. In a recent Gallup poll, just 15 percent of Republican voters said they think the United States is not doing enough to help Ukraine, while a strong majority—57 percent—think we are doing too much.

Despite the illusion of a rational foreign policy and this past weekend’s flash of courage and independence, Johnson and the rest of the GOP conference are all but guaranteed to rally to support Trump. Even as he stands trial on multiple felony charges, Republicans are lining up to pledge their fealty to the former president whether or not he is convicted; New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and former Attorney General Bill Barr are merely the latest Republicans to bend the knee.

In just a few months, my hometown of Milwaukee will host the GOP’s re-coronation of Trump, affirming once again his absolute grip on the mind and soul of the party. By then, what happened this weekend will seem like a distant mirage.

Related:

Trump deflates. The accidental speaker

Today’s News

Lawyers in Trump’s hush-money trial in New York made their opening statements today. The head of the Israeli military’s intelligence directorate resigned, citing his department’s failure to anticipate Hamas’s attack on October 7. Hundreds of members of the teaching staff at Columbia University held a walkout to protest the administration’s decision last week to call in police officers, who arrested more than 100 students involved in a pro-Palestine demonstration.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Being busy has become a status symbol, Isabel Fattal writes. What do we miss when our focus is on staying productive above all else?

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Evening Read

Cavan Images / Alamy

It’s Really Hard to Rebuild a Marsh

By Erica Gies

The water in California’s San Francisco Bay could rise more than two meters by the year 2100. For the region’s tidal marshes and their inhabitants, such as Ridgway’s rail and the endangered salt-marsh harvest mouse, it’s a potential death sentence …

To keep its marshes above water, San Francisco Bay needs more than 545 million tonnes of dirt by 2100. Yet for restorationists looking to rebuild marshes lost to development and fortify those that remain, getting enough sediment is just one hurdle: The next challenge is figuring out a way to deliver it without smothering the very ecosystem they’re trying to protect.

Read the full article.

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“At the long edge of the screen door keeping most of the flies out. / At the classroom door, smooth and tight fit.”

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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More than a decade after Tinder introduced the swipe, many Americans are sick of dating apps. As I explored in a recent article for The Atlantic, the cracks are starting to show in what looked to be the foundation of modern dating. Now young people are yearning for a version of dating they may have never experienced—and that may have never truly existed, my colleague Faith Hill wrote recently. I spoke with Faith this week about how dating has evolved, and what people misunderstand about the purpose of dating apps.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Columbine-killers fan club Democrats’ unproven plan to close Biden’s enthusiasm gap Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues.

The Mysteries of the Heart

Lora Kelley: In your article, you wrote that young people are longing for serendipitous connections or meet-cutes. Why is that?

Faith Hill: Many young people dating now have never dated without the apps. But we have all these romantic comedies where people are meeting strangers and falling in love, and young people are still hearing stories, sometimes from their parents, about how couples met. We still have a romantic ideal that does not involve dating apps. It’s easy to idealize spontaneous “meet-cutes” both because they’re so romanticized in our culture and because they’re kind of the opposite of online dating.

Apps are quite practical. You go out and you seek something intentionally. That gives you some agency, but it also takes away the appealing mythical element at the heart of the meet-cute: this idea that your relationship was meant to be.

Lora: How does living in a world of apps affect people’s understanding of what dating is?

Faith: For one thing, we’re now used to reducing the risk of rejection. Apps let you confirm someone is interested, to some degree, before you meet up—and that also creates a kind of built-in layer of consent, however imperfect.

Dating apps also give people more options. That’s good and bad. We should expect a lot from our partners and not just feel stuck with the only prospect. But it can also create the feeling that there’s always someone better out there.

Lora: To what extent have shifting norms around flirting with strangers reshaped how people meet and date?

Faith: People do still meet out and about. But it’s not an amazing fit for today’s culture. We have this idea of meeting someone in a grocery store while reaching for the same cantaloupe or whatever. But many of us don’t actually want strangers talking to us in the grocery store—that can feel like an intrusion. And I think it’s a good thing that we are more sensitive now to what might feel pushy or creepy. What seemed normal to characters in TV shows such as Sex and the City probably wouldn’t fly today.

Lora: While I was reporting my article on dating apps, a researcher suggested to me that even if all of the apps were to go bankrupt overnight, something similar would pop up in their place, because people have come to really value having this type of dedicated way to meet. What do you make of this?

Faith: People will keep finding a way to meet romantic interests, and companies will try to innovate. Our society has become more structured and less spontaneous in many areas, including dating. Even though many people are getting frustrated with dating apps, they do like having a structured way to meet people who are eligible and looking to date. You can see that with speed dating and the resurgence of matchmakers.

Lora: A lot of the main dating apps are trying to get users to pay for extra features and subscriptions. But even the most expensive dating-app algorithm or service cannot guarantee that you will meet someone you like. Is the root of the problem just that people are people, and it’s hard to pair individuals who will actually like each other?

Faith: It’s hard to predict whether two people will be compatible, partly because that sort of connection comes about as two people interact. How two people feel about each other can unfold from what they happen to talk about in a conversation, whether they hit on something that they have in common or both find funny. We keep trying to find a way to figure love out, but the truth is that it’s difficult, and it takes luck.

Lora: The mysteries of the human heart are great.

Faith: Yes, and that’s true both on and offline. Honestly, apps are a way to meet people, not a way to date people. Once you have met, your relationship becomes its own thing—and it’s not so different from if you had met in a bar.

The enigma of other people isn’t a bad thing, though. People don’t really want love to be a totally solvable science. Meet-cute nostalgia speaks to that. On the one hand, we like the idea of an algorithm that’ll give us someone who is great for us, but on the other hand, we still have this hunger for love being weird and complicated and hard to pin down.

Related:

America is sick of swiping. “Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had”

Today’s News

Israel launched a strike that hit a major air base near nuclear sites in central Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran’s nuclear sites were not damaged. The House voted to advance a foreign-aid package that would send aid to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, and includes legislation that could lead to a nationwide ban of TikTok. A man set himself on fire near the New York City courthouse in which Donald Trump is on trial for criminal charges.

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The Books Briefing: Cookbooks are full of hidden wisdom—and some of them are worth reading cover to cover, Emma Sarappo writes. Atlantic Intelligence: The generative-AI boom will look very different for non-English speakers, Matteo Wong recently wrote.

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Evening Read

The Atlantic / Getty

The Problem With Counterfeit People

By Daniel C. Dennett

The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, known for his musings on free will, religion, and evolution, died earlier today. We’re revisiting his 2023 essay on the “immoral act of vandalism” committed by companies that use AI to create fake people.

Money has existed for several thousand years, and from the outset counterfeiting was recognized to be a very serious crime, one that in many cases calls for capital punishment because it undermines the trust on which society depends. Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the “passing along” of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.

Read the full article.

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Are young people turning away from the Democratic Party in 2024? Will turnout be as high as it was last time around? What about the gender gap? Today I’ll do my best to address some pressing questions about how young folks will behave in November. But first, here are three stories from The Atlantic:

The bone-marrow-transplant revolution Radio Atlantic: The crucial factor of the Stormy Daniels case Abolish DEI statements, Conor Friedersdorf argues.

The “Realignment” Mirage

What are the youths up to this election cycle? several readers asked me via email last week. Well, lately, they’ve been giving Democrats heart palpitations.

A handful of surveys from late last month suggested that Trump is performing better among young voters than he did in 2020—even, in some cases, better than Joe Biden. Some Democrats are worried about what Politico recently called a “massive electoral realignment.” For decades, Democratic candidates have secured younger voters by big margins. In the 2020 presidential election, for example, voters ages 18–29 broke for Biden by more than 20 points. So if young voters were to turn toward Trump, that would be an enormous deal.

But before Democrats freak out or Trump fans get too excited, let’s all take a nice, deep breath. Several other youth-voter polls from last month showed Biden on par with Trump, and even beating him.

“Following recent polls of young voters has been a bit like reading a choose-your-own adventure book,” Daniel Cox, the director of the nonpartisan Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, told me via email, when I asked him what he makes of the surveys that point to a realignment. “You can craft a completely different narrative,” he says, depending on which poll you see.

These surveys vary so much, in part, because polling young people can be tricky. Getting young people on the phone via the traditional cold-call method is a nightmare, because they don’t tend to answer (I get it: These days it seems like every call is a scam.) Lately, younger voters have been eschewing traditional party labels, and they’ve grown more cynical about the entire political system. These phenomena make it difficult to both identify younger voters by party and to get them to participate in a poll.

It’s unlikely that a total realignment is happening, Cox and other pollsters told me. Let’s not forget which voters we’re dealing with: Young adults today are less religious, more educated, and more likely to identify as LGBTQ than prior generations, Cox noted, which are all characteristics generally associated with left-of-center political views. “It’s hard to see this completely changing over the course of a single campaign.”

A brand-new poll from Harvard throws even more ice-cold water on the “great realignment” theory: Biden leads Trump by 19 points among likely voters under age 30, according to the poll, which was published today and is considered one of the most comprehensive surveys of young voters in the country. Biden is definitely underperforming among young people compared with this point in the 2020 election, when he led by 30 points. But today’s poll showed no hint of a Trump lead.

Instead, the bigger threat to Biden will be third-party-curious young people. In a recent survey of young voters from the nonpartisan polling organization Split Ticket, Biden led Trump by 10 points, and the young voters who did abandon Biden weren’t going to Trump—they were going to independent candidates like RFK Jr.

The real themes to watch in 2024, experts told me, are youth turnout and the growing gender divide.

Young people are less likely to vote than older Americans—that’s true. But the past three national elections have actually had really high young-voter turnout, relative to past cycles. In the 2020 general election, 50 percent of eligible voters under 30 cast a ballot, according to estimates from CIRCLE, a nonpartisan organization that studies youth civic engagement. Will more than 50 percent of eligible young voters show up to the polls again this November? Maybe: About 53 percent of young Americans say they will “definitely be voting,” according to the Harvard poll published today. That’s about the same as it was around this time in 2020, when 54 percent said they’d vote.

But some experts say that matching 2020 levels is a long shot. Biden and Trump are historically unpopular presidential candidates among all age groups. Given that, Lakshya Jain, who helped design the Split Ticket poll, doesn’t think young-voter turnout will be “nearly as high as it was in 2020.” That cycle was special, he says: “a black swan of events” during one of the most tumultuous times in America. The election followed four years of a Trump administration, and the start of a global pandemic. “I see this environment as much more like 2016,” Jain said, when turnout among young people was closer to 40 percent.

The other important trend is gender. More American men than women support Trump—and that gap is growing. Now it seems like the same phenomenon applies to young people. Among likely young women voters, Biden leads Trump by 33 points in the new Harvard poll; among young men, he only leads by six. (In 2020, Biden led young men by 26 points.)

This gender chasm may not actually be reflected in November’s outcome. But that, pollsters say, will be the possible realignment to watch. “It will make the youth vote less Democratic for one,” Cox said. And “a longer-term political gender divide could transform the character of the political parties.”

Related:

Are Gen Z men and women really drifting apart? Generation Z doesn’t remember when America worked (From 2022)

Today’s News

Twelve jurors were sworn in for Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial in New York; the selection of alternate jurors will resume tomorrow. A commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said that it is “possible and conceivable” that Iran will reconsider its nuclear policies if Israel attacks Iranian nuclear facilities. In a new package of bills dealing with aid to Israel and Ukraine, the U.S. House revived legislation that would force TikTok’s owner to either sell the social-media platform or face a national ban.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Supercheap electric cars from China or an American industrial renaissance? Pick one, Rogé Karma writes. Time-Travel Thursdays: Helen Keller was funny, smart, and much more complex than many people know, Ellen Cushing writes.

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Evening Read

Investigation Discovery

The Uncomfortable Truth About Child Abuse in Hollywood

By Hannah Giorgis

During Nickelodeon’s golden era, the network captivated young viewers by introducing them to an impressive roster of comedic talent—who happened to be kids, just like them … For nearly two decades, the network dominated not just kids’ programming, but the entire cable-TV landscape.

A new docuseries argues that at least some of this success came at a great cost. Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV explores troubling allegations of child abuse and other inappropriate on-set behavior during this run at Nickelodeon. The documentary builds on a 2022 Business Insider investigation into programs led by the prolific producer Dan Schneider, and on details from a memoir published earlier that year by the former child star Jennette McCurdy. (McCurdy, who doesn’t identify Schneider by name in her book but describes an abusive showrunner widely believed to be him, was not involved with the documentary.) Over its five episodes, the series offers an important record of how the adults working on these shows—and Hollywood as a whole—repeatedly failed to protect young actors. But Quiet on Set also, perhaps unintentionally, ends up creating a frustratingly tidy narrative that elides some crucial complexities of abuse.

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Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

Read. Our Kindred Creatures, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, explores why Americans love certain animals and are indifferent toward many others.

Pace yourself. Scott Jurek ran a 2,189-mile ultramarathon—the full length of the Appalachian Trail, Paul Bisceglio wrote in 2018. What can extreme athletes tell us about human endurance?

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

In case you haven’t heard, it’s Pop Girl Spring! And tonight is the big night: Taylor Swift is releasing her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. I’m thrilled, because I love a breakup album, and this one promises to be moody and campy in equal measure. (The track list includes songs called “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and “But Daddy I Love Him”!) For a really thoughtful unpacking of the album, I recommend tuning into the Every Single Album podcast from The Ringer, hosted by Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard. They have a preview episode up now, and a new one will be out in a few days.

Even if Taylor isn’t your cup of tea (gasp!), their other episodes covering new music from Beyoncé, Maggie Rogers, and Kacey Musgraves are delightful and informative, too.

— Elaine

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the election-reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The October 7 rape denialists Finding justice in Palestine Biden’s safe, polite campaign stop in Scranton

New Rules

This past weekend, I was on a panel at the annual conference of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, in beautiful downtown Austin. Several journalists discussed the question: Are we going to get it right this time? Have the media learned their lessons, and are journalists ready for the vertiginous slog of the 2024 campaign?

My answer: only if we realize how profoundly the rules of the game have changed.

Lest we need reminding, this year’s election features a candidate who incited an insurrection, called for terminating sections of the Constitution, was found liable for what a federal judge says was “rape” as it is commonly understood, faces 88 felony charges, and—I’m tempted to add “etcetera” here, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? The volume and enormity of it all is impossible to take in.

The man is neither a riddle nor an enigma. He lays it all out there: his fawning over the world’s authoritarians, his threats to abandon our allies, his contempt for the rule of law, his intention to use the federal government as an instrument of retribution. Journalists must be careful not to give in to what Brian Klaas has called the “Banality of Crazy.” As I’ve written in the past, there have been so many outrages and so many assaults on decency that it’s easy to become numbed by the cascade of awfulness.

The former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer points out a recent example in his newsletter: On a radio show earlier this month, Donald Trump bizarrely suggested that Joe Biden was high on cocaine when he delivered his energetic State of the Union address. It was a startling moment, yet several major national media outlets did not cover the story.

And when Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, it didn’t have nearly the explosive effect it should have. “I had expected every website and all the cable news shows to lead with a story about Trump demanding the execution of the highest military officer in the country,” this magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, told The Washington Post. “If Barack Obama or George W. Bush had done so, I’m sure [the news media] would have been all over it.” (Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic published a profile of Milley by Goldberg.)

In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome. There has, of course, been some progress. The major cable networks no longer carry Trump’s rallies live without context, but they still broadcast town-hall meetings and interviews with the former president, which boost ratings. NBC’s abortive decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a contributor, despite her role in spreading lies about the 2020 election, highlighted the disconnect between this moment and much of the national media.

And then there is the internet. It is certainly possible that richer, more insightful media will emerge from the digital revolution, but we’re obviously not there now. Back in 2016, we worried that social media had become a vector for disinformation and bigotry, but since then, we’ve seen Elon Musk’s extraordinary enshittification of X. In 2016, we worried (too late) about foreign interference and bots. In 2024, we are going to have to contend with deepfakes created by AI.

This year will see some of the best journalism of our lifetime. (You’ll find much of it here in The Atlantic.) But because both the media and their audiences are badly fractured, much of that reporting is siloed off from the voters who need it most. Because millions of Americans are locked in information bubbles, half of the country either won’t see important journalism about the dangers of a second Trump term or won’t believe it.

As Paul Farhi notes in The Atlantic, MAGA-friendly websites have experienced massive drops in traffic, but social media continues to thrive on negativity and providing dopamine hits of anger and fear. And of distraction—last week, the most-liked videos on TikTok about the presidential race included a video of a man singing to Biden and Trump’s visit to a Chick-fil-A.

To put it mildly, the arc of social media does not bend toward Edward R. Murrow–style journalism.

So what’s to be done? I don’t have any easy answers, because I don’t think they exist. Getting it right this time does not mean that journalists need to pull their punches in covering Biden or become slavish defenders of his administration’s policies. In fact, that would only make matters worse. But perhaps we could start with some modest proposals.

First, we should redefine newsworthy. Klaas argues that journalists need to emphasize the magnitude rather than simply the novelty of political events. Trump’s ongoing attacks on democracy may not be new, but they define the stakes of 2024. So although live coverage of Trump rallies without any accompanying analysis remains a spectacularly bad idea, it’s important to neither ignore nor mute the dark message that Trump delivers at every event. As a recent headline in The Guardian put it, “Trump’s Bizarre, Vindictive Incoherence Has to Be Heard in Full to Be Believed.”

Why not relentlessly emphasize the truth, and publish more fact-checked transcripts that highlight his wilder and more unhinged rants? (Emphasizing magnitude is, of course, a tremendous challenge for journalists when the amplification mechanisms of the modern web—that is, social-media algorithms—are set by companies that have proved to be hostile to the distribution of information from reputable news outlets.)

The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal. And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.

The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance. (An exaggerated report about Biden’s memory lapses, for example, should not be a bigger story than Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade European countries.)

In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally. (This includes Trump’s trial drama, the party conventions, and even—as David Frum points out in The Atlantic—the debates.) Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.

And, finally, the Prime Directive of 2024: Never, ever become numbed by the endless drumbeat of outrages.

Related:

Political analysis needs more witchcraft. Right-wing media are in trouble.

Today’s News

The Senate dismissed the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and ruled that they were unconstitutional, ending his trial before it got under way. House Speaker Mike Johnson will proceed with a plan, backed by President Joe Biden, to vote on separate bills to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. The proposed move has raised criticism from some conservative representatives. Four Columbia University officials, including the president, Nemat Shafik, testified in a congressional committee hearing about student safety, free speech, and anti-Semitism on campus.

Dispatches

The Trump Trials: The first days of the criminal case against Donald Trump have been mundane, even boring—and that’s remarkable, George T. Conway III writes. The Weekly Planet: The cocoa shortage could make chocolate more expensive forever, Yasmin Tayag writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads

By Ellen Cushing

On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food.

We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi-dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce … Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with “CAE” on one tongue and “SAL” on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Hulton Archive / Getty

Look. These photos, compiled by our photo editor, show the importance of bicycles in World War II.

Read. “The Vale of Cashmere,” a short story by Benjamin Nugent:

“What I liked about your father was that he helped me find my contact lens.”

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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