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New polling shows Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump in five out of six key swing states. Voters there say they want change—which presents a challenge for the candidate who won in 2020 on the promise of normalcy.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Biden’s weakness with young voters isn’t about Gaza. The Real ID deadline will never arrive. The Atlantic’s summer reading guide

The Battleground States

Michigan and Nevada are two very different places. As are Pennsylvania and Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia. Still, these six states share a quality of enormous consequence: They wield massive electoral influence because their voters tend to waffle on their political preferences. In swing states, a suburb here, a county there—totaling perhaps a few hundred thousand votes—may be enough to decide who will become the next president.

Earlier this week, a new set of polls from The New York Times, Siena College, and The Philadelphia Inquirer found that, among registered voters, Donald Trump leads Joe Biden in five swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania), and Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin. In 2020, Biden carried all six of those battleground states, which helped him clinch the election. Though he doesn’t need every single one this time—wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example, could help get him to 270 electoral votes—the polling signals some glaring challenges for his campaign in the months to come.

Americans are divided on policy issues—especially when it comes to the economy and Israel’s war in Gaza. But abortion is an issue that will resonate across the country at every level of the ballot, my colleague David Graham told me. And it’s one area where Democrats clearly “have an edge.”

The polling also gestured at a sweeping sense of dissatisfaction among 70 percent of respondents, who said that they want major changes in America’s political and economic system, or for it to be torn down entirely. And they don’t seem to think that Biden—who promised in 2020 a presidency steeped in normalcy—can bring that. Voters are divided on whether Trump would bring good or bad changes, but an overwhelming majority of them believe that he would indeed shake up (or tear down) our country’s political and economic system.

“If the election is a referendum on Biden, he’s clearly in trouble,” David told me. Here’s a look at the swing states and some of the issues that matter most to their voters.

Arizona

Arizona has voted Republican in all but a few presidential elections in recent decades, and its MAGA presence—though diminished in the 2022 midterms—is strong. Biden won the state by just 10,000 votes in 2020, and Trump has used this slim margin of victory to push his disproven claim that the election was stolen. Recent polling shows that the state is leaning heavily toward Trump, and Republicans are banking on people voting red in response to the rising cost of living and immigration. But abortion will be another significant concern; some Arizonans were up in arms last month after the state’s supreme court reinstated a Civil War–era law that banned most abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest. The governor has since signed a repeal of the ban—but abortion access will likely remain top of mind for some voters.

Michigan

Biden won Michigan by a smaller margin than expected in 2020, and a new confluence of factors is making his prospects there shaky. Times/Siena polling found that Biden was trending slightly ahead of Trump among likely voters, but trailing behind among registered voters. Voters in the state are worried about inflation and the economy. And as my colleague Ronald Brownstein wrote earlier this month, Biden has been “whipsawed by defections among multiple groups Democrats rely on, including Arab Americans, auto workers, young people, and Black Americans” in Michigan. About 13 percent of voters (some 100,000 people) in the state’s February Democratic primary voted “uncommitted” in protest of Biden’s handling of Gaza, signaling that Gaza is on the minds of voters in the state, which has the largest percentage of Arab Americans in the country. Adding to the mix is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has managed to get on the state ballot and could inject uncertainty into the race and siphon votes from the major candidates.

Georgia

This bedrock of modern suburban conservatism delivered a victory for Biden in 2020, when he became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. The triumph was a surprise in some ways. But it was also the culmination of a years-long crusade championed by Stacey Abrams, a former state representative, to turn the state blue. In 2020, Biden won over a coalition of voters in Georgia that included Black and Hispanic voters, suburban moderates, and young people—and he will need to try to retain their support even as their enthusiasm falters.

In a state with a restrictive six-week abortion ban, more than half of polled voters said that they thought abortion should be mostly or always legal, and issues including the economy and immigration were among their top concerns. Currently, Trump and his associates are also charged in Georgia with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election, though it isn’t clear whether their trial will take place before the election is over.

Nevada

A Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won Nevada in 20 years, but voters in the state, which has a large Latino population, are favoring Trump in recent polling. Although Biden had managed to garner support in the Sun Belt in 2020, Nevada’s economy relies on tourism and hospitality, meaning that issues such as high inflation and unemployment are on voters’ minds. The Times/Siena polls found that a large share of registered voters in the state said they trusted Trump to “do a better job” on the economy than Biden. (Though the state is notoriously difficult to survey, in part because many people there are transient and work unusual hours.)

Wisconsin

Trump won this Rust Belt state in 2016—before losing ground in the traditionally conservative areas such as Green Bay and the Milwaukee suburbs that helped deliver a win to Biden in 2020. The economy is a key issue for Wisconsin voters. And abortion may be pivotal, too: Republican lawmakers approved a controversial bill in January that would ban the procedure after 14 weeks, with exceptions for rape and incest. As Ronald noted in The Atlantic, the election of a liberal state-supreme-court judge in last November’s closely watched race could signal that broader voter support for legalized abortion “has accelerated the recoil from the Trump-era GOP.” That could bode well for Biden, but it will be a tight race: He eked ahead there among polled registered voters in the Times/Siena surveys, though he trailed slightly behind Trump among likely voters.

Pennsylvania

In the 2020 election, Biden’s win in his home state pushed him over the 270 mark. Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes, making it important to capture this time around. On his recent visits, Biden has tried to drill down on kitchen-table issues and burnish his blue-collar, all-American “Scranton Joe” image, my colleague John Hendrickson reported last month. To target working-class voters, Biden is focusing on taxes and attempting to draw a contrast with his opponent, whom he portrays as a friend to the rich. Registered voters in the state said that the economy was a top issue, along with abortion and immigration. It’s unclear whether they will coalesce around their hometown politician after going for Trump in 2016 and now showing RFK-curiosity in some areas. Among registered voters, Biden currently trails Trump by a small margin.

Related:

Biden’s Electoral College challenge How every U.S. election became existential (From 2022)

Today’s News

House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York and lambasted Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who was on his second day of testimony. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Kyiv on an unannounced visit to affirm U.S. support for Ukraine and promise more weapons shipments, as Russia ramps up its attacks on Ukraine’s northeastern border. A bus carrying farm workers crashed on a Florida highway, killing at least eight people and injuring dozens more, according to officials.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Russell Bull / Star Tribune / Getty.

The Sad Fate of the Sports Parent

By Rich Cohen

A true sports parent dies twice. There’s the death that awaits us all at the end of a long or short life, the result of illness, misadventure, fire, falling object, hydroplaning car, or derailing train. But there is also the death that comes in the midst of life, the purgatorial purposelessness that follows the final season on the sidelines or in the bleachers, when your sports kid hangs up their skates, cleats, or spikes after that last game.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The Vatican’s gamble with Beijing is costing China’s Catholics. Asteroids could fuel the clean-energy transition.

Culture Break

The Atlantic

Listen. The trailer for Good on Paper, a new Atlantic podcast (out on June 4) hosted by Jerusalem Demsas, who questions what we really know about the narratives driving public conversation.

Discover. American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation, by the philosophy professor John Kaag, traces the little-known Blood dynasty and what it reveals about the nation’s wild spirit.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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I have had cats since I was a boy, and all of them were wonderful, but one of them left a mark on my life forever.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

“What happened to Stormy Daniels is not salacious,” Quinta Jurecic writes. Israel’s PR-war pandemonium The problem with America’s protest feedback loop

A Special Presence

Almost 15 years ago, I was in bad shape. I was divorced, broke, drinking too much, and living in a dated walk-up next to a noisy bar. (It was only minutes from my young daughter, it had a nice view of the bay here in Newport, and I could afford it.) The local veterinary hospital was a few doors down; they always kept one or two adoptable animals in the window. One day, a gorgeous black cat, with a little white tuxedo patch and big gold-green eyes, showed up in a small cage. I stared at her for a while. She stared back patiently.

I wasn’t taking very good care of myself at that moment, so I decided I couldn’t take care of a cat. I walked on. For weeks, the cat sat there. For weeks, we stared at each other. One day, as I was deep in my cups, I took a walk with a friend and co-worker who also happened to be my next-door neighbor. “You look at that damn cat every day,” he said. “Just go in and get it.”

So I did.

The cat was called “RC” and she was a stray, but her preexisting spaying and good health showed that she’d once had a home. Now she was the queen of the animal clinic: Because of her gentle temperament, the staff would let her out of the cage after hours, and she would sit on their desks while they did their paperwork.

I picked her up. She looked at me as if to say: Yeah, I recognize you. You’re the doofus who stared at me for weeks. I signed the papers and took her home. She was fluffy and black-haired, so I decided I would name her after Carla Tortelli from the show Cheers; thus, she became Carla T. Nichols. She explored the apartment quietly for a day or two, and then, one afternoon, I found her on my bed, stretched out on her back, paws up, purring. Yep, she was saying. This will do.

I was still deeply depressed, but every night, Carla would come and flake out over my keyboard as I struggled to work. That’s enough of that, she seemed to say. And then we would go into the living room, where I would sit in a chair and Carla would sit on the armrest. (We’ve now both seen almost every episode of Law & Order.) Slowly, she added routine to my life, but mostly, we had lots of hours of doing nothing—the quiet time that can feel sort of desolate if you’re alone, but like healing if you have the right company.

Soon, I started to see daylight. I met a woman named Lynn. I laid off the booze. I got help of various kinds.

Lynn started to come to the apartment more often, but Carla gave her a full examination before bestowing approval: That cat was not going to let some newcomer waltz in and wreck the careful feline therapy she’d been providing. Finally, Carla climbed on the pillows one morning and curled up around Lynn’s head. Okay, she was saying. Lynn can stay.

Courtesy of Tom Nichols

My grade-schooler daughter was the other regular visitor, and Carla immediately decided that she was hers as well as mine. This was a cat who clearly had experience with children, and showed a kind of shepherding instinct whenever kids were around. She’d stay with them and circle them; she’d let them pull her tail and clumsily pat her head and other indignities most cats won’t tolerate. She loved kids, and she especially seemed to love mine.

Lynn and I soon realized that this was no ordinary cat. I’ve had smart cats, and some who were lovable but not very bright. Carla was not a prodigy, but she had a unique presence that even strangers on social media could see when I posted clips or pictures. I can attribute this only to an emotional intelligence, the bond that some animals have with people that lets them suss out who’s who and how we might be feeling. If you were sad, or sick, she was there. If the human vibes were happy, you could hear her purr from a room away.

Eventually, Lynn and I bloomed from friendship into love. Slowly, I put my life back in order, and Carla clearly thought that me getting on my feet was mostly her doing. It wasn’t that simple, but I will say this: A man blessed with a concerned doctor, a dedicated counselor, a wise priest, a few good friends, and a great love in his life can overcome much. But a man with all of those and a marvelous cat can really cover a lot of distance.

I finally bought a house, and Lynn and I married. Just as she had done with the apartment, Carla inspected the new digs and said: I approve. Instantly, it was her house.

For more than a decade, it was the three of us, and Carla became Lynn’s friend even more than mine. Much like a dog, Carla would trot around with Lynn during the day, and come if called. She would even wag her tail. (She would find this canine comparison insulting, of course.) When I would finally get up—I’m a night owl—Lynn would bring over a cappuccino and Carla would invariably accompany her, waiting for me to scoop up some foam on my finger for her to lick. Then my wife and her pal would go back to their day.

Carla had a remarkable sense of time and schedule. When I would teach in Boston, she’d sit in the window at the time she knew I’d return. She would show up at the same time every night to escort Lynn to bed; later, and always at almost the exact same time, she would meow at me until I carried her around on my shoulder while locking up the house. (Unlike some cats, she liked hugs. She would have sat on my shoulder all day if I’d let her.)

And although she had a bowl of food available all day, we shared our human dinner with her in a daily ritual. Carla would rouse from her afternoon nap and find us almost at the moment the clock struck five, with a look that asked: What are we having today? Is it steak? I like steak. Or chicken? Chicken’s good too.

Then came the day she literally saved my life—and Lynn’s.

My house was built in 1956, back before the local authorities in my small town enforced bothersome things such as building codes and safety regulations. Some genius had decided to balance the fireplace with wooden shims (which were hidden behind bricks). Over the decades, they burned away and dropped hot embers on floor beams.

The day after Christmas, six years ago, Carla jumped on our heads in bed. Wake up wake up wake up.

We figured she was just being testy about breakfast. Lynn headed downstairs—but, strangely, Carla stayed in the bedroom. A moment later, Lynn was back: “I smell smoke.” I grumbled and went two floors down to the basement, where I was startled to find a small lick of flame shooting from a ceiling panel. I grabbed our kitchen extinguisher and sprayed it; smoke gushed from the ceiling. I was minutes from being dead. I ran up to the kitchen just as the smoke alarms finally tripped on. We called 911.

Lynn dashed back upstairs looking for Carla, and there she was, calmly sitting on the bed. I told you to wake up. I wasn’t kidding. They stayed safe in the car while I ran around in the winter cold, my panic growing as I watched the fire department battle a fire that destroyed almost a quarter of my home.

The fire marshal later told us that if Carla hadn’t bought us that extra time, the fire—which hadn’t immediately tripped the smoke alarms, because it was caught between the floor and ceiling—would have broken through and engulfed the house (and us). He told us that cats are usually casualties of house fires because they hide out of fear and can’t be found in time. Carla, however, alerted us and then waited for us to come get her.

While the house was being repaired, we all spent a month in a hotel. Carla would tell you that it was the best time of her life: her people, a bed, food, and a litter box—all in the same two rooms? Kitty nirvana.

My daughter grew up, and Carla started sleeping in her room, as some cats will do once the kids they love go away. Grandchildren arrived; Carla adopted them. Our schedules changed as we all got older, and Carla began checking on me in the mornings if I wasn’t awake by a certain time. She also developed some separation anxiety: If one of us left the house or traveled, Carla would stick to the other one like a furry hunk of superglue. I don’t like this. I want to be with you both. I liked that hotel thing; can we do that again?

And then came the warning signs. Carla started to lose a lot of weight. She developed thyroid and kidney issues. The light began to go out of her eyes. The night before I took her back to the same small office where I’d found her, I made a fire—she’d become a big fan of those as her arthritis worsened—and she climbed in my lap. She purred and bumped her head into my face, and then she went and sat quietly nearby as we watched television, just like the old days. It felt like a goodbye. I think she knew.

The next day, our vet confirmed that there was little more we could do for Carla without tormenting her. I held her on my shoulder one last time as they gave her the first shot. Lynn and I stroked her head and whispered to her during the second shot, and our tears soaked her fur. And then she was gone.

We haven’t yet gotten used to a house without Carla in it. Like many who’ve lost a pet, we both still think we see her out of the corner of our eye. I still automatically look into my daughter’s room to see if she’s there. We still expect her at dinner, and Lynn still waits for her to come and say: Time for bed, let’s go. Eventually, we’ll welcome new animals into our home, and I’m sure we will love them. But Carla was a little friend unlike any I’d ever had—and I doubt I will ever owe another cat the debt that I owe her.

Related:

Why a dog’s death hits so hard Pets really can be like human family.

Today’s News

The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution that says that Palestinians qualify for full-member status at the UN. The U.S. voted against the measure. A federal appeals court upheld the conviction of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, for defying a subpoena from the House January 6 committee. Yesterday, Stormy Daniels finished her testimony in Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial; the judge also rejected a second mistrial request from the former president’s lawyers.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: ElevenLabs, an AI company that specializes in replicating voices, is ushering in a new era of deepfake audio, Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman interviews Meghan O’Rourke about her favorite books on sickness and health.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Source: Dimarik / Getty.

Against Sunscreen Absolutism

By Rowan Jacobsen

Australia is a country of abundant sunshine, but the skin of most Australians is better adapted to gloomy England than the beaches of Brisbane … A 1980s ad campaign advised Australians to “Slip, Slop, Slap”—if you had to go out in the sun, slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, and slap on a hat. The only safe amount of sun was none at all.

Then, in 2023, a consortium of Australian public-health groups did something surprising: It issued new advice that takes careful account, for the first time, of the sun’s positive contributions … “Completely avoiding sun exposure is not optimal for health,” read the groups’ position statement, which extensively cites a growing body of research. Yes, UV rays cause skin cancer, but for some, too much shade can be just as harmful as too much sun.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Did something happen to our necks? The end of the “Photoshop fail” Prom dresses are just dresses now. The future of electric cars hinges on a dongle. Many Indians don’t trust their elections anymore.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Daniel Stier.

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, our staff writer Charlie Warzel describes what happened when he cloned his own voice.

Read. All Fours, by the interdisciplinary artist Miranda July, is a female-midlife-crisis novel filled with estrangement, eroticism, and whimsy.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Caroline Mimbs Nyce, a staff writer who used to be the lead writer of The Daily. She has covered the backlash against dog-foster influencers, why AI tends to generate hot people, and the broken-gadget era of consumer AI.

Caroline is grateful for the return of Hacks, a “dry and wry” comedy series that cuts through the noise of the current era of subpar shows. She’s also prone to diving down internet rabbit holes—the danger of summiting Yosemite’s Half Dome is her latest fascination—and, as a tech reporter, she’s also been tracking the real-world fallout of the hit show Baby Reindeer.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

No one knows what universities are for. Ozempic or bust A fundamental stage of human reproduction is shifting.

The Culture Survey: Caroline Mimbs Nyce

What my friends are talking about most right now: Baby Reindeer. As a tech reporter, I’ve been really interested in the real-world fallout—the Netflix series is purportedly based on a true story about a woman who stalked Richard Gadd, the show’s creator. The internet masses have been trying to figure out more information about his actual stalker, and it’s going … about as well as you’d expect it to.

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I just got tickets to visit Luna Luna, an art amusement park from the 1980s that is now in Los Angeles. There’s even a Basquiat Ferris wheel!

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Thank goodness Hacks is back; this really was starting to feel like the era of mid TV. The Max comedy, now in its third season, is anything but. It’s essentially a platonic, intergenerational love story between a sparkly, jaded older comedian (played by Jean Smart) and a young, progressive writer (Hannah Einbinder) brought in to revamp her career. It’s dry and wry and, as my colleague Shirley Li wrote, refreshingly free of life lessons. [Related: Hacks goes for the jugular.]

The last thing that made me cry: I shouldn’t have cried at One Day! I’ve read the book and seen the 2011 movie; I know how it ends. It still got me.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I loved Birnam Wood. It’s about a group of leftist gardeners in New Zealand who sometimes trespass and secretly plant crops on private property (sticking it to the Man!). One such operation puts them directly in the warpath of a ruthless American tech billionaire. This book is far more plotty than my usual choices; the second half turns into a total thriller! The book’s author, Eleanor Catton, has been making the case for more plot in modern fiction. It’s working.

As for nonfiction, what’s more real than death? I’m on my second read of Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman, an extremely practical guide to making the most of our limited human life span (an average of 4,000 weeks, as the book’s title points out). Burkeman cleverly combines philosophy and time-management advice to help you think through choices big and small. (His newsletter is also great if you’re short on time, which, um …)

An author I will read anything by: Gary Shteyngart. When I found out we’d sent him on a cruise, I freaked.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: How about one right in the middle? Rina Sawayama’s “Bad Friend” was my most-played song of 2021, and it still shows up in my Spotify Wrapped every year. It sounds the way nostalgia feels; whenever I hear it, I smile, thinking back to the “summer of 2012, burnt in my mind.” [Related: A new generation of pop stars are dancing with the devil.]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Vann Newkirk’s 2020 article on how heat will be the defining human-rights issue of the century. With every heat wave, the story grows more prescient.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Okay, bear with me: My favorite internet rabbit hole is the debate about whether hikers should wear harnesses when summiting Yosemite’s Half Dome, a legendary rock face that sits almost 5,000 feet above the valley floor. To get to the top, many people embark on a relatively dangerous but popular hike using a cable ladder laid down by the Park Service, which helps you ascend the near-vertical parts of the slab. Hundreds of hikers require ranger assistance every year; at least nine people have died.

Prospective hikers (myself included) wonder why people don’t just wear safety equipment. Why not clip oneself to the ladder using a harness-and-carabiner system? Detractors think the physics wouldn’t work (?), and it’d just slow everybody down. I’ve spent hours reading comments on Reddit and obscure forums debating the pros and cons. I still don’t know the right answer!

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: I have six nieces and nephews, and, come to think of it, they aren’t giving me nearly enough cultural recommendations. Disappointing stuff.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: This week, John Mulaney hosted Everybody’s in L.A., a livestreamed talk show on Netflix. In one episode, Mulaney interviews a coyote expert and Jerry Seinfeld. Together. A woman calls in and tells a story about waking up to a coyote in her bedroom. “What kind of car do you drive, Eva?” Mulaney quips. “Don’t worry about it,” she replies. None of it makes sense. It’s perfect.

The Week Ahead

Back to Black, a biopic about Amy Winehouse’s tumultuous personal life and the creation of her hit album (in theaters Friday) Bridgerton, a romance series about a family of eight siblings looking for love in Regency-era England (Season 3 premieres Thursday on Netflix) Blue Ruin, a novel by Hari Kunzru that follows an undocumented grocery deliverer in the U.S. who confronts his past dream of being an artist (out Tuesday)

Essay

Luca Zordan / Gallery Stock

Prom Dresses Are Just Dresses Now

By Hilary George-Parkin

Over the past decade or so, the style divisions among age groups have become far more fluid. Social media has flattened the landscape of influence, so people of all ages are being fed similar content. Retail, meanwhile, has moved away from age-specific brands toward fast-fashion sites and online stores with wide appeal. The assimilation is especially clear in prom style. Teens will wear just about any fancy adult look to the dance, whether it be a relatively casual dress you might see at an Easter brunch, or a jumpsuit fit for the red carpet. This has spurred an existential crisis in teen fashion: What even is a prom dress anymore?

Read the full article.

More in Culture

It’s not a rap beef. It’s a cultural reckoning. Steve Albini was proof you can change. The great honeybee fallacy Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show goes too far. Six books that explore what’s out there The female-midlife-crisis novel She was no “mammy.”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

“What happened to Stormy Daniels is not salacious,” Quinta Jurecic writes. Israel’s PR-war pandemonium This is helicopter protesting.

Photo Album

Rockets fly over the bell tower of Agios Markos church during Greek Orthodox Easter celebrations on the Eastern Aegean island of Chios in 2008. (Yiorgos Karahalis / Reuters)

Each year, during Greek Orthodox Easter celebrations in the village of Vrontados, members of two rival churches hold a traditional “rocket war” by firing thousands of homemade fireworks toward each other. These images show this year’s battle, along with others from recent years.

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For the first time in 221 years, two different groups of cicadas are emerging simultaneously and screaming from the treetops. More after these three stories from The Atlantic:

This is the next smartphone evolution. Russell Berman: Attack a Democrat charged with corruption? Republicans wouldn’t dare. The fad diet to end all fad diets

Spring Awakening

The first thing to know about cicadas is that, not unlike flowers, the insects come in annual and periodical varieties. Among the annual cicadas are the dog-day cicada, that emerald-green bug you might associate with steamy summer evenings on the porch—the type you can always hear but almost never see. Periodical cicadas, on the other hand, are the bugs of legend. They make a synchronized mass appearance either every 13 or every 17 years in various parts of the country. And they are so plentiful and so loud when they come that they cannot be ignored.

Across the country, billions of these periodical cicadas, categorized by region and year as “broods,” are crawling up out of the ground to see the light of day. The first to begin emerging this spring were the members of the Great Southern Brood—the largest of all periodical-cicada groups—which came out in many states across the southeastern United States. Another big group, the Northern Illinois Brood, is now tunneling up not only in Illinois but also in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Although the two broods won’t overlap much geographically, such a simultaneous emergence is rare: The previous double brood occurred during Thomas Jefferson’s first term as president.

The cicadas we’re starting to see waited years for this moment. Now they’re here, ready to do what they do best: sing a little, mate, and die. But for humans, their extraordinary showing can provoke deep thoughts about the cycle of life and, well, the meaning of it all. At least, it does for Matt Kasson, an associate professor at West Virginia University who is studying a fungus that infects cicadas.

“So often, there’s these amazing things happening kind of hidden in plain sight, and we take it for granted,” he told me. “When you see the cicadas emerge, you not only are faced with them, but you have to think about all the time that they spent underground and what was happening in your own life. They give you a new perspective.”

The lifestyle of a cicada is a wonder. After a clutch of cicada eggs hatch, inside a small slit in a tree branch, the babies will bravely drop to the ground and delve deep into the earth. A cicada will spend most of its life underground, as a secretive burrow-dweller, sucking sap from maple and oak trees and generally minding its own business. The little nymph knows when to come aboveground only because, according to scientific speculation, she can track the changing sap cycles of a tree.

“A maple tree in the fall loses its leaves and goes dormant, and that changes the sap flow in a tree,” Kasson said. The cicada nymphs clock this. “So they keep a kind of chalkboard in their head where they are able to tally how many years they’ve been down there.” Occasionally, a cicada will make a mistake in that mental arithmetic (relatable!), coming up four years too early or too late. Unfortunately, it’s a fatal error. “They don’t have anybody to mate with,” Kasson said, “so it’s kind of a dead end for them.”

The emergence we’re seeing now goes like this: Billions of nymphs climb out of their holes, attach themselves to a tree or some other structure, and undergo an incomplete metamorphosis process that transforms them into flying adults. The process involves shedding their exuvia, the name of those ghostly brown shells you’ll find stuck to tree bark every spring. Over the next few weeks, adult males will “sing” to attract females, in a sometimes deafening cacophony. After mating, females will lay their eggs in tree branches and then die, and the whole process will start over.

This spring is a very good time to be a bird—or basically any other predator in these cicada hot spots. It’ll be a feeding frenzy out there, which means that the bird population will probably spike, thanks to the increased food source. And animals aren’t the only ones that will benefit. “When all these cicadas die, they are turned back into soil as a huge influx of nitrogen, so they act as a fertilizer for the plants as well,” Kasson said.

Although this year’s double broods mostly aren’t expected to appear in the same place, residents of one particular state should gird themselves for a Big Bug Explosion. Researchers predict that, somewhere in central Illinois, cicadas from both the Great Southern Brood and the Northern Illinois Brood will both be coming up together. It’ll be loud in Springfield this summer.

Even if you’re not lucky enough to experience a Midwestern cicada-geddon, chances are you live somewhere near one of the emerging broods. If you can’t hear them now, you should be able to soon. Go out and listen. Appreciate that new perspective.

Related:

Cicadas could make outdoor dining a nightmare. (From 2021) Unfortunately, some cicadas taste like nature’s Gushers. (From 2021)

Today’s News

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, finished his first day of testimony in Trump’s New York criminal trial. Cohen alleged that Trump was concerned about his presidential-election prospects in 2016 and ordered Cohen to pay hush money to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels. Jury selection began in Senator Bob Menendez’s federal criminal trial. The former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is charged with accepting bribes from businessmen in exchange for political favors aiding the governments of Egypt and Qatar. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced yesterday that he is replacing his minister of defense with Andrei R. Belousov, an economist and one of Putin’s close advisers.

Dispatches

The Trump Trials: The hush-money criminal case against Donald Trump cuts to the core of who he is, George T. Conway III writes. The Wonder Reader: One thing you quickly learn when speaking with a child: They’re natural philosophers, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Julian Ward / Gallery Stock

Why Do So Many Parents Think Kids Need Their Own Bedroom?

By Annie Midori Atherton

Whenever I contemplate whether to have a second child, I inevitably start worrying about housing. For me and my husband to grow our family and stay in our two-bedroom rental in Seattle, our kids would have to share a room. He did it growing up, and it would be more affordable than getting a bigger place. But I struggle to wrap my head around the idea. I grew up in a three-bedroom home near where we live now; I had my own room, as did most of my friends. Even though housing prices have skyrocketed, I still want to give my children this privilege.

When I ask my husband what it was like to share a room as a kid, he shrugs. He didn’t consider it that big a deal. But many parents I’ve talked with who live in metro areas with high costs of living feel the same as I do. Some are stretching their budgets to afford a house with more bedrooms; others are reluctant to grow their families without having more space. As I mull this over, I wonder: Why do so many of us prioritize giving kids their own room?

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Listen. Are the relationships we establish through our screens authentic? In the first episode of How to Know What’s Real, Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez explore the surprising ways a connection can be both real and imaginary—at the same time.

Have a laugh. Conan O’Brien’s true gift lies in his combination of an entertainer’s desperate desire to be liked and an antagonistic streak, Vikram Murthi writes.

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P.S.

So many readers wrote in with friendship wisdom after I asked for tips on making—and keeping—friends as an adult. I wanted to share two of my favorite pieces of advice here.

From Maxwell, a reminder that less is more: “I don’t consider anyone a true friend unless we can go years without contact and at any time pick up right back where we left off,” he wrote. “By that guideline, I’ve been lucky to keep one or two timeless friends with beautiful souls from each school and workplace, and that has honestly been plenty.”

From Bonnie, a practical tip: “I send real notes and cards with postage stamps to all my friends throughout the year. Trader Joe’s 99 cents brings a flood of happiness,” she said. “I keep a log of everyone’s birthday. A week before, there is a note on my calendar to mail—NOT EMAIL OR TEXT—a real birthday card with a note.”

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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