The Atlantic is continuing its expansion in audio and podcasts with the launch of a new weekly interview podcast, Good on Paper, hosted by Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas. With Good on Paper, Demsas will explore some of the most important questions of the day, with each episode examining an idea or development that challenges the conventional wisdom in policy or politics. A trailer is out now, with the show launching on Tuesday, June 4, and episodes coming out each Tuesday.

Good on Paper is a policy show that will challenge popular narratives—ideas that are “good on paper” but don’t always pan or prove out. The show asks: What if the commonly held beliefs driving our public discourse aren’t quite right? What if new evidence on housing or immigration or relationships flies in the face of what we believe? What if the policies we support give us results we don’t like? Each week, a different expert will join Demsas to better examine ideas rigorously and honestly, allowing listeners to deepen their understanding of topics and gain a new way of considering an idea and navigating its complexity.

The podcast builds upon Demsas’s acclaimed reporting for The Atlantic, which includes stories on housing and homelessness, economics, urban development, and democracy. She has recently written the articles “Why Americans Hate a Good Economy,” which offers several explanations as to why Americans report negative assessments of the economy; “Why America Doesn’t Build,” which explores how even green-energy projects get quashed by local opposition; and “Americans Vote Too Much,” about how no one can be a full-time political animal.

Good on Paper joins a growing network of audio journalism at The Atlantic and can be found in a new audio landing page along with all podcasts and narrated articles. The Atlantic’s flagship show, Radio Atlantic with host Hanna Rosin, relaunched last spring, and yesterday, the first episode dropped for How to Know What’s Real, the sixth season of our social-science franchise, hosted by Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez.

The audio team at The Atlantic announced the recent hiring of Jinae West as a senior producer, who came to The Atlantic from New York magazine and Vox, where she was a founding producer of the pop-culture podcast Into It. Dave Shaw has also joined The Atlantic’s podcast team as an editor. Shaw has more than 20 years of experience in editing, newsroom management, and show development, and most recently worked at The New York Times, where he launched new shows and was a supervising editor for The Daily.

The trailer for Good on Paper is now available, and listeners can subscribe here or wherever they get podcasts.

The House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act last week in a bipartisan vote of 320 to 91. “Antisemitism is on the rise,” it declares, and is “impacting Jewish students.”

Bigotry against Jews is vile and warrants the nation’s attention. As President Joe Biden said Tuesday at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, “This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world and requires our continued vigilance.” But the Antisemitism Awareness Act is the wrong way to fight those ills. If passed by the Senate and signed into law, it would codify a controversial definition of anti-Semitism (among its 11 specific examples of anti-Semitic rhetoric: “The existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”). And it would direct the Department of Education to consider that definition when judging complaints against colleges under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which says that no person, on the grounds of race, color, or national origin, can be “excluded from participation” in a program, denied its benefits, or “be subjected to discrimination.”

Interpreting Title VI has always been difficult and contested, particularly when speech that is protected by the First Amendment is alleged to be discriminatory as well. The act should be rejected by the Senate. Its definition of anti-Semitism is too expansive to serve as a unifying standard in academia, and it doubles down on an approach to antidiscrimination that chills free speech while failing to reduce hate.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free-speech culture]

Title VI wasn’t originally intended to apply to Jewish students. Passed during the civil-rights movement to address resistance to basic equality for Black Americans, the law does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion, and Jews were not considered a race. Jewish students nonetheless confronted anti-Semitism on campus, and concerned observers began to argue that, when Jewish students were targeted as members of an ethnic group rather than as a religious group, Title VI should protect them.

Kenneth L. Marcus helped make that happen. In 2004, while heading the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, he issued policy guidance to colleges clarifying that Jews would be subject to Title VI protections insofar as they were mistreated on the basis of ethnicity rather than religion. Shortly thereafter, in a law-review article fleshing out what would and wouldn’t violate the Title VI rights of Jewish students, he set forth standards that did not seem to threaten free speech, noting that things that students and teachers do or say on campus, “although arguably anti-Semitic, do not rise to the level of harassment.” These included “anti-Israel or anti-Zionist academic literature, Holocaust denial, anti-Zionist bias in programs of Middle East studies,” and “anti-Israel boycotts.” Student-on-student harassment “may be actionable,” he added, if it is “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive,” and negatively affects the “ability to receive an education.”

Extending Title VI protections to Jews proved a positive and enduring civil-rights achievement. The Obama administration later endorsed it, as did President Donald Trump and President Biden. But over the years, general changes in how the Civil Rights Act is interpreted by bureaucrats have lowered the threshold for violations. “The Obama Administration pushed schools to address harassment before it ‘becomes severe or pervasive’ to prevent the creation of ‘a hostile environment,’” the Brookings Institution wrote in a 2020 analysis of Title IX, another section of the Civil Rights Act giving rise to jurisprudence that informed Title VI enforcement.

Meanwhile, people intent on protecting Jewish students evolved in their thinking about anti-Semitism. They perceived a rise in attacks on Jews that were disguised as attacks on Israel. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a working definition of anti-Semitism that offered 11 illustrations of it. It contained consensus examples, such as “calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews,” as well as more controversial examples that pertained to Israel, including:

Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

During the Trump administration, the Department of Education started using this new definition in Title VI complaints. That didn’t make it unlawful to say anything on campus defined as anti-Semitic. Rather, when studying whether a Jewish student had been mistreated because of their ethnicity, or for some reason not covered by Title VI, bureaucrats considered whether speech deemed relevant to the case met the definition of anti-Semitism.

Still, free-speech advocates had good reason to worry. Suddenly, college administrators intent on minimizing exposure to Title VI investigations had a new incentive to crack down on even protected speech that the state defined as anti-Semitic. The IHRA definition was further entrenched in 2019, when Trump issued an “executive order on combating anti-Semitism” that told the government to adopt it. Biden did not rescind the order.

If the Antisemitism Awareness Act passes, that approach, including the reliance on the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, will not only continue but will also be codified in law rather than subject to revision by future appointees at the Department of Education.

Earlier this week, the Department of Education published a “Dear Colleague” letter suggesting that protected speech alone can give rise to a hostile campus environment that requires administrators to respond in some way, even if they cannot punish the speech in question. It states that “a university can, among other steps, communicate its opposition to stereotypical, derogatory opinions; provide counseling and support for students affected by harassment; or take steps to establish a welcoming and respectful school campus.” This seems to create an incentive for preemptive crackdowns on protected speech by administrators who want to avoid federal investigations. The guidance could lead to the hiring of still more administrators assigned to police speech, manage student concerns about it, and lead DEI-style initiatives aimed at anti-Semitism as distinct from anti-racism.  

That’s my prediction regardless of whether the Antisemitism Awareness Act becomes law. When the House voted to pass it, proponents sought to alleviate concerns by noting that its definition of anti-Semitism has been used by bureaucrats for years. Although true, that raises a tough question for the bill’s supporters: If the Department of Education has deployed that definition for six years, even as anti-Semitism exploded on campuses, why is putting that definition into law a promising way forward? It has clearly failed to prevent Jewish students from experiencing a hostile climate.

So why entrench it, given the free-speech concerns? The law professor David Bernstein, a defender of the act, believes it would help address a double standard. Currently, he observes, Title VI is used as “an excuse to try to censor speech that offends woke sensibilities,” whereas “antisemitic speech that might contribute to a hostile environment is treated with much more equanimity.” That double standard is “illegal discrimination against Jewish students,” he writes. “Things won’t get any better,” he thinks, “unless the left is forced to apply the standards it pushes in favorable contexts to contexts it doesn’t like.”

But this logic will only lead to escalation. The First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh offers a hypothetical example in a post explaining why he opposes the Antisemitism Awareness Act. Imagine that Kamala Harris is president, he writes, and enacts a statute that codifies examples of anti-Palestinian discrimination––such as denying Palestinians their right to self-determination, and comparing Palestinian attitudes toward Jews to those of the Nazis. Many people would be concerned that these examples “were likely to (and probably intended to) deter people from expressing their political views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Volokh points out.

The Antisemitism Awareness Act is similarly objectionable. And if it passes constitutional muster, an analogous law to define anti-Palestinian bigotry is not only presumably lawful––it is, I think, likely to be proposed and passed into law one day. Both sides in the American debate over Israel and Palestine will have an ongoing incentive to lobby for new antidiscrimination standards, both to satisfy their understandable desire for equal treatment and to chill the speech of their rivals.

“Antisemitism should be treated like other forms of bigotry,” Cathy Young argues in an essay for The Bulwark. “But the remedy for double standards is to move away from policies that police and penalize controversial or even offensive but non-harassing campus speech, not to extend those policies to more varieties of speech and more identities.”

I agree.

University administrators are constantly regulating speech that is protected by the First Amendment. In the name of antidiscrimination, deans at Ivy League universities have tried to police matters as trifling as edgy Halloween costumes and slang on law-school party flyers. I favor opposing discrimination. I favor protecting speech. Colleges are too inept at both projects to excel at either when vague, constantly reinterpreted regulations prompt continuous monitoring of speech.

What if, instead of defining and suppressing mere speech about Israel and Palestine that crosses some threshold of bigotry, Americans recognized that colleges in a pluralistic, multiethnic society include lots of students who hold all sorts of discriminatory beliefs? And that part of being an educated person is learning how to respond to people with wrongheaded viewpoints, and even to persuade those people to abandon them?

[Conor Friedersdorf: Free speech is not just for conservatives]

After all, the problem is that people hold bigoted views, not that they say them aloud. Whatever happens with Title VI, and the Antisemitism Awareness Act’s attempts to entrench a particular approach to enforcing it, lots of people aligned with Palestine will continue to hold positions that many Jews understandably interpret as hostile. Lots of people aligned with Israel will continue to hold positions that many Palestinians understandably interpret as hostile. How could it be otherwise? If hostile-feeling positions become unsayable on campus even as they are widespread in society, academia will become irrelevant in a vital debate, denying all students the benefits of an uncensored education.

That isn’t to denigrate all Title VI protections. Institutions of higher education that receive federal funds should treat all students, including Jews, equally, regardless of race, color, or national origin––and, for that matter, regardless of characteristics that Title VI does not address, such as religion, height, weight, attractiveness, partisan affiliation, dominant hand, and more. No student should be harassed each day, or blocked from walking across a quad, or shouted down when trying to participate in class discussions, for any reason.

But when exposure to highly offensive speech or ideas is conflated with "severe” or “pervasive” harassment that prevents equal access to education, that false equivalence threatens the university itself. It destroys an institution’s ability to address the matters that most divide us.

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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.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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.

More From The Atlantic

America’s worst time zone Our once-abundant Earth Should the hawthorn be saved? A family story about colonialism and its aftereffects

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.

Play our daily crossword.

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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