What’s the United States’ most important problem? For the past three months, Americans have offered the same answer: immigration. More than inflation or political polarization, Americans are vexed by the influx of migrants. Republicans’ concerns spiked after the most recent southern-border crisis. But they’re not alone. In April, the number of independents who said immigration was the country’s biggest problem reached a high in Gallup polling dating back to 2014.

Scolding Americans for their alarm is pointless. The state of U.S. immigration policy is objectively chaotic. When Joe Biden became president, he rolled back some Trump-era restrictions, at the same time that migrants began to take greater advantage of loopholes in asylum law to stay in the country longer. Meanwhile, a sharp rise in crime in parts of Central and South America, combined with the strong U.S. economy, created the conditions for migration to surge. In 2022, illegal crossings hit a record high of 2.2 million. As asylum seekers made their way north, cities struggled to house them. In New York City, so many hotel rooms are taken up by migrants that it has created a historic shortage of tourist lodging.  

In a perfect world, the brokenness of America’s immigration system would inspire Congress to swiftly pass new legislation convincing voters that the U.S. controls whom we let in and keep out of the country. The basic contours of this grand bargain have been fairly clear for decades. In exchange for expanded opportunities for legal immigration—more visas, more green cards, and targeted policies to increase immigration in technology and science—liberals would agree to stricter enforcement and control at the border. But major immigration reform is stuck. Changing the law requires Congress, and in the latest example of feckless delay, Donald Trump has instructed congressional Republicans to sandbag negotiations with the White House, to avoid giving the Biden administration an election-year win. What we’re left with is the perception of immigration chaos, anger about the chaos, and dithering in the face of it.

If American politicians are ever going to think about immigration policy through the lens of long-term opportunity planning rather than immediate crisis response, they first need to convince the American people that those long-term opportunities exist. This case is actually easy to make. Cheaper and more plentiful houses, higher average wages, more jobs, more innovation, more scientific breakthroughs in medicine, and more state government revenue without higher taxes—all while sticking it to our geopolitical adversary, China—require more immigration. Across economics, national security, fiscal sustainability, and geopolitical power, immigration is the opposite of America’s worst problem. It holds clear solutions to America’s most pressing issues.

Immigration has for decades, even centuries, created a temporal paradox in American discourse: pride in the country’s history of immigration coming up against fears of its present and future. Benjamin Franklin, whose father was born in England, complained that migration from Central Europe would swarm the young nation’s Anglican culture with undue German influence. In the late 1800s, a more Germanic nation feared the influence of incoming Italians. A century later, a nation that had fully embraced Italian Americans bemoaned the influence of incoming Mexicans.

[Ari Berman: The conservative who turned white anxiety into a movement]

Although this brisk history of nativism might seem to make light of today’s anti-immigrant sentiment, ignoring the fears that people have about a sudden influx of migrants is counterproductive. The border crisis is not just a news-media illusion, or a platform for empty grandstanding. It really has endangered thousands of migrants and drained city and state resources, causing a liberal backlash even in deep-blue places. Last September, New York City Mayor Eric Adams predicted that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York.” As tens of thousands of migrants moved into Chicago, the city spent hundreds of millions of dollars to provide them with housing and education, building resentment among Black residents. What’s more, papering over anxieties about competition from foreign-born workers is not helpful. The Harvard economist Gordon Hanson asked me to think about the experience of a barber in an American city. If immigrants moving into his area open barber shops, they might reduce his ability to retain customers, raise prices, or make rent. The logic of fear is understandable: More competition within a given industry means less income for its incumbents.

Many Americans—and, really, many residents of every other nation—think about immigration through this lens of scarcity. If the economy includes a fixed number of jobs, then more foreign-born workers means less work left for Americans. If America contains a fixed number of houses, more immigrants means less space for Americans to live.

But the truth is that no nation comprises a fixed amount of work or income. Population growth, economic growth, and income growth can be mutually reinforcing. “At the national level, immigration benefits from a more-is-more principle,” Hanson told me. “More people, and more density of people, leads to good things happening, like more specialization of labor.”

Specialization of labor might sound drab and technical. But it’s a key part of why immigration can help even low-income workers earn more money over time. Last month, the economists Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri published a new paper concluding that, from 2000 to 2019, immigration had a “positive and significant effect” on wage growth for less educated native workers. The key mechanism, they found, is that, over time, immigrants and natives specialize in different jobs that complement one another. As low-education immigrants cluster in fields such as construction, machine operation, and home-health-aid work, native-born workers upgrade to white-collar jobs with higher pay. To take the example of the American barber, let’s imagine that his son decides to go to a trade school or college to increase his skills in response to intense competition for barbers. He might be better off, making a higher wage than he would have had he remained in the profession. Although such specialization can be difficult for some people who switch out of their parents’ fields, it can lead to a more dynamic economy with higher wages for all.

For the past few years, I have been thinking and writing about an abundance agenda to identify win-win policies for Americans in housing, energy, health care, and beyond. Immigration is an essential ingredient in this agenda. The U.S. must contend with a national housing shortage that has contributed to record-high living costs and bone-dry inventory in some major metros. This is a story not merely about overregulation, zoning laws, and permitting requirements, but also about labor supply. The construction industry is short several hundred thousand jobs. In the largest states—such as California, Texas, and New York—two in five construction workers are foreign-born, according to estimates by the National Association of Home Builders. “The biggest challenge that the construction industry is facing [is] that people don’t want their babies to grow up to be construction workers,” Brian Turmail, the vice president of public affairs at the Associated General Contractors of America, has said. If Americans want more houses, we might very well need more foreign-born workers to build them. Achieving clean-energy abundance requires immigrants too. One in six solar and photovoltaic installers is an immigrant, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and “23 percent of all green job workers are foreign born,” according to a report by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

The debate over low-skill immigration and its effect on the economy can get a bit technical, if you’re an economist, and emotional, if you’re an anxious native worker. But even if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on the complex macroeconomics of letting less educated migrants enter the U.S. in higher numbers, we cannot let that disagreement hold hostage the obvious benefits of expanding our recruitment of foreign-born talents into the U.S.

Immigration-as-recruitment is a particularly useful framework as the U.S. embraces a new kind of industrial policy to build more chips and clean-energy tech domestically. As The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip wrote, America’s new economic strategy has three parts. The first is subsidies to build products in the U.S. that are crucial to our national security and energy independence, such as advanced semiconductor chips and electric vehicles. The second part is tariffs on cheap Chinese imports in these sectors. The third is explicit restrictions on Chinese technology that could be used to surveil or influence U.S. companies and people, such as Trump-era laws against Huawei equipment and the Biden-era law to force the sale of TikTok.

But this newly fashioned stool is missing an essential leg. If the U.S. is going to become more strategically selfish about protecting key industries such as computer-chip manufacturing from foreign competition, we need to revamp our high-skill-immigration policy too. In fact, the new American economic paradigm doesn’t make any sense otherwise. As a rich country, the U.S. will be at a disadvantage in semiconductor manufacturing because of our higher labor costs. If we can't win on costs, we have to win on brains. That means staffing our semiconductor factories with the world’s most talented workers.

[Jack Herrera: Is Texas about to turn Latinos into single-issue voters?]

Semiconductor manufacturing requires a highly specialized workforce that is distributed around the world and concentrated in Asia. A large share of workers in advanced-chip manufacturing live in India and China. But green-card caps limit their ability to move to the U.S. As a result, we’re at risk of spending tens of billions of dollars on factories and products without a plan to staff them. “The talent shortage is the most critical issue confronting the semiconductor industry today,” Ajit Manocha, the president of the industry association for semiconductor equipment and materials manufacturers, said in 2022. This is a fixable problem. The Economic Innovation Group, a centrist think tank, has proposed a “Chipmaker’s Visa” that would annually authorize an accelerated path to a green card for 10,000 immigrants with specialized skills in semiconductor manufacturing.

What’s true for chipmaking is also true for AI development. According to the Federation of American Scientists, more “top-tier” AI researchers are born in China than in any other country in the world. But two-thirds of these elite researchers work in the U.S. The number could probably be even higher if the U.S. had a smarter, future-looking immigration policy regime. The administration has already taken small steps forward. In October, Biden issued an executive order that asked existing authorities to streamline visa criteria for immigrants with expertise in AI. More could be done with congressional help.

If the U.S. is in the early stages of a new cold war with the authoritarian axis of China, Russia, and Iran, we can’t logically pursue an industrial policy without an equally purposeful immigration policy. Immigration policy is industrial policy, because immigrants have for decades been a linchpin in our technological growth. As Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Institute for Progress, has written, 30 percent of U.S. patents, almost 40 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50 percent of billion-dollar U.S. start-ups belong to immigrants. And yet, we’ve allowed waiting times for green cards to grow, while the number of applicants stuck in immigration backlogs has gotten so large that some talented immigrants have stopped waiting and left the U.S. entirely. This is madness. Failing to solve the immigration-recruitment kludge as we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on technology subsidies is about as strategic as training to run a marathon while subsisting on a diet of donuts. When it comes to high-skill-immigration policy, we are getting in our own way.

Immigration is central to America’s national security, industrial policy, abundance agenda, affordability crisis, and technological dominance. Without a higher number of foreign-born workers, the U.S. will have less of everything that makes us materially prosperous. But none of these advantages should distract immigration proponents from the fact that failure to secure the border is a gift to immigration restrictionists. Border chaos is horrendous branding for the pro-immigration cause.

“Immigration is too important to be chaotic,” Hanson, the economist, told me. “Chaos leads to short-term policy fixes. But you don’t want a 10-month immigration policy for the U.S. You want a 100-year immigration policy.”

Taking that 100-year view leads to perhaps the most powerful case for expanding immigration. The Lancet recently published an analysis of global population trends through the end of the 21st century. By 2064, the worldwide human population will peak, researchers projected, at which point almost every rich country will have been shrinking for decades. Fertility is already below replacement level in almost every rich industrialized country in the world. In Japan and South Korea, there are already fewer working-age adults with every passing year. China’s birth rate has fallen by 50 percent in just the past decade. Within a few years, immigration will be the only dependable lever of population growth for every rich industrialized nation.

The U.S. faces a stark choice. Politicians can squander the fact that the U.S. is the world’s most popular destination for people on the move. They can frame immigration as a persistent threat to U.S. national security, U.S. workers, and the solidity of U.S. culture. Or they can take the century-long view and recognize that America’s national security, the growth of the U.S. labor force, and the project of American greatness all depend on a plan to demonstrate enough control over the border that we can continue to expand immigration without incurring the wrath of restrictionists.

All sorts of events tempt a university to make a public statement of support or condemnation: a terrorist attack on New York City and Washington, D.C. A mass shooting at a nearby elementary school. Faculty and student enthusiasm for protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. A social reckoning like #MeToo. Thugs storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the moment, the benefits of making a statement feel as though they outweigh the costs.

But the costs are real and cumulative, as Harvard has learned in the seven months since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. Alumni and students on both sides of the Gaza conflict have called on the school to condemn the atrocities of their enemies, or sympathize with their pain, or affirm their political positions, values, sentiments, or sense of morality. It could not please everyone, and its president, Claudine Gay, had to step down under pressure.

In a report released on Tuesday, Harvard has come to the wise conclusion that the institution should stop issuing “official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.”

[Robert P. George: Universities should not be ideological churches]

It will be interesting to see whether Harvard’s leaders can heed that advice and resist making statements through Election Day. Until then, other institutions would be wise to follow Harvard’s example and adopt their own policy of institutional neutrality. Universities have never possessed moral clarity. Knowledge creation requires rewarding dissent and epistemic modesty, qualities that are incompatible with institutional solidarity or real-time judgments about who is on “the right side of history.”

Institutional neutrality is most closely associated with the University of Chicago, where the Kalven report was adopted in 1967. It notes that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student,” not the head administrator or any entity that purports to express any collective view. “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” the report states.

Harvard’s new report follows a similar rationale. It says, “The integrity and credibility of the institution are compromised when the university speaks officially on matters outside its institutional area of expertise.” Its leaders, after all, are hired for “skill in leading an institution,” not “expertise in public affairs.” And when university leaders habitually release statements, they face pressure from competing sides of nearly every issue, distracting “from the university’s essential purpose.”  

It also notes that choosing a side “can undermine the inclusivity of the university community. It may make it more difficult for some members of the community to express their views when they differ from the university’s official position.” The report advises against even statements of empathy pertaining to wars, natural disasters, and persecution, because “the university runs the risk of appearing to care more about some places and events than others” and “runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others.” And “anodyne official statements may cause further distress to the very groups they are meant to comfort.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The wrong way to fight anti-Semitism on campus]

The report closes by advising that when pressure builds to make an official statement, Harvard should refer to its new policy and clarify the reason for its silence: “the belief that the purpose of the university is best served by speaking only on matters directly relevant to its function and not by issuing declarations on other matters, however important.”

As university leaders pronounce less, faculty and students should feel more free to step up and speak up, not on behalf of any collective, but as individuals who prefer constructive discourse to groupthink. For those who crave pronouncements from the top, there is still religion.

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Louisiana just became the first state to reclassify abortion pills as controlled dangerous substances. The law may signal a new strategy to curb reproductive-health-care access in post-Roe America.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Amazon returns have gone to hell. Trump has a new plan to deal with campus protests. Mark Robinson is testing the bounds of GOP extremism.

All Eyes on Louisiana

Late last week, the governor of Louisiana signed into law a bill that marks a first in the battle over reproductive rights in America: The state will categorize mifepristone and misoprostol, medication commonly used in abortions, as controlled dangerous substances. Possessing the drugs without a valid prescription will be a criminal offense that could carry up to 10 years in prison. Abortion pills in Louisiana are now in the same category as drugs such as opioids and Xanax—medicines that are thought to be at risk of abuse—even though the medical community and the FDA widely consider mifepristone and misoprostol to be safe.

The original version of the bill, introduced by Republican State Senator Thomas Pressly in March, focused on criminalizing coerced abortion. Pressly has said that he was moved to act when his sister discovered in 2022 that her then-husband had mixed misoprostol in her drinks without her knowledge. After that version of the bill had passed unanimously in the state Senate, Pressly proposed a controversial amendment that would reclassify abortion pills as controlled substances, saying in an interview with KSLA News that he wanted to “make sure they’re not put in the hands of bad actors and criminals.” The amended version of the bill received pushback but ultimately passed.

In Louisiana, where abortions have been banned in most cases since 2022, the use of mifepristone and misoprostol to induce abortions is already highly restricted—so the new legislation will largely disrupt other medical treatments. Mifepristone and misoprostol have routine medical uses, such as inducing childbirth, stopping postpartum hemorrhages, and treating miscarriages. Under the new law, doctors must have a specific license to prescribe the drugs, and the pills would need to be stored in special facilities that rural clinics may find difficult to access. Experts predict that confusion about the law and fear of prosecution will have a chilling effect on patients and health-care providers.

Medical professionals have raised alarms, with more than 200 doctors in the state reportedly signing a letter warning that Louisiana’s legislation would cause confusion and present barriers to effective care. Because physicians haven’t been prescribing the pills for abortions in Louisiana, the law will “likely have minuscule impacts on abortion and more significant impacts on miscarriage and obstetric care,” Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has written for The Atlantic, explained to me in an email. (She also noted that the legislation won’t affect people who currently receive abortion pills in the mail from organizations operating legally under shield laws, and that pregnant patients who obtain the drugs for their own use won’t be penalized.)

“Health professionals who need to prescribe the medication for any reason—even the many uses of the drug that are not termination of pregnancy—will now have to jump through many hurdles,” Melissa Goodman, the executive director of UCLA Law’s Center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy, told me in an email. “Delays are likely.” She noted that the new restrictions may drive health-care providers to leave Louisiana—a state that already has bleak maternal-health outcomes—and that this law could set a precedent for activist groups that may try to make medications such as contraceptives and mental-health treatments illegal for ideological reasons.

Mifepristone and misoprostol have become a flash point in the fight over abortion access. Last year, there were more than 640,000 medication abortions in the United States—more than 60 percent of abortions in the formal health-care system, according to the Guttmacher Institute. That was up from 53 percent in 2020, before the fall of Roe v. Wade. But these drugs have faced legal challenges across the country. Texas effectively banned mifepristone in 2023 when a judge suspended FDA approval of the drug (though an appeals court ruled to preserve access again soon after). Twenty-nine states have either outlawed abortion or have restrictions on abortion medication, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and Arizona bans the mailing of abortion pills. Currently, the Supreme Court is considering a case that would make mifepristone much harder to access, though the justices signaled in March that they would not limit access to the drug. (Some of them voiced concerns about the implications of enacting nationwide restrictions or reversing the FDA’s judgments.)

Louisiana may prove to be a bellwether, experts told me, inspiring other states to further restrict access to mifepristone and misoprostol. But Donley noted that the consequences for general health care may make the law unappealing for other states to adopt. Still, the legislation is a striking example of the lengths lawmakers may go in their attempt to curb the use of abortion pills across the country.

Related:

The other abortion pill Abortion pills will be the next battle in the 2024 election. (From 2023)

Today’s News

The prosecution and the defense presented their closing arguments in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial. Georgia’s Parliament overrode a presidential veto of a controversial bill that addresses foreign influence in media, nongovernmental organizations, and other nonprofit groups. Critics have compared the measure to Russian legislation that has been used to crack down on opposition and dissent. Ryan Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX’s Bahamian subsidiary, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison. He is the first of Sam Bankman-Fried’s executive team to receive prison time.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Exploring what therapy is capable of—and what it can’t actually solve—may help patients better understand what they’re seeking, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

No One Really Understands Clouds

By Zoë Schlanger

In the tropics, along the band of sky near the equator, clouds and wind run the show. These are juicy clouds that aggregate and disaggregate in agglomerations and that can live a long time, as far as clouds go. In the summer, when the ocean is especially hot, they can pile up high, breeding hurricanes; at all times of year, the behavior of tropical cloud systems drives global atmospheric circulation, helping determine the weather all over the world. And still, clouds remain one of the least understood—or least reliably predictable—factors in our climate models. “They are among the biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate change,” Da Yang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chicago, told me.

Read the full article.

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Even as Donald Trump relies on unprecedented support from Black and Latino voters, he is embracing policies that would expose their communities to much greater police surveillance and enforcement. The policies that Trump is pledging to implement around crime and policing in a second presidential term would reverse the broad trend of police reform that accelerated after the murder of George Floyd, four years ago today.

Trump has endorsed a suite of proposals that would provide cities with more funds to hire police officers; pressure officials in major cities to employ more aggressive policing tactics, such as “stop and frisk,” in high-crime neighborhoods; and strengthen legal protection for law-enforcement officers accused of misconduct.

“I suspect that in many places, you would see policing that is much harsher, much more punitive, [and] not nearly as concerned about the racial disparities in the way that policing happens,” Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department attorney who led multiple federal investigations of racial bias in police departments around the country, told me. “All of those things that we have been working for years to dismantle will be built up again.”

The cumulative effect of Trump’s proposals would be to push local police departments toward arresting more people. That dynamic would inevitably increase the number of Black and Latino people entangled in the criminal-justice system, after years of declines in the total number of arrests.

The magnitude of Trump’s plans on policing and crime has drawn little attention in the presidential race so far. But on virtually every front, Trump proposes to use federal influence to reverse the efforts toward police reform that have gained ground over roughly the past decade, and especially since Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 spurred the largest nationwide protests since the 1960s. “We will give our police back their power and their respect,” Trump declared in his appearance at the National Rifle Association convention last weekend.

[Juliette Kayyem: The government isn’t ready for the violence Trump might unleash]

In a campaign video last year, Trump laid out a sweeping second-term agenda on crime and policing. He promised “a record investment” in federal funds to help cities hire and train more police. He said he would require local law-enforcement agencies receiving federal grants to implement an array of hard-line “proven policing measures” including “stop-and-frisk, strictly enforcing existing gun laws, cracking down on the open use of illegal drugs,” and cooperating with federal immigration agencies “to arrest and deport criminal aliens.”

Trump has also pledged to launch federal civil-rights investigations against the reform-oriented progressive prosecutors (or “radical Marxist prosecutors,” in Trump’s terms) who have been elected in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, among other big cities. He has promised to pursue the death penalty for drug dealers and has repeatedly called on police to shoot shoplifters: “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he said in one speech.

Perhaps most dramatically, Trump has indicated that he will dispatch the National Guard and other federal law-enforcement personnel “to restore law and order” in cities where “local law enforcement refuses to act.” Trump, in fact, has said on multiple occasions that one of his biggest regrets from his first term is that he deferred to city officials, who resisted his calls to deploy the National Guard or other federal law-enforcement forces onto their streets. Trump and Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser, have also said they intend to dispatch the National Guard to major cities to participate in his planned mass-deportation campaign.

Trump has not provided detail on his crime proposals; some experts say that makes it difficult to evaluate their potential impact. “Reading over the Trump plan, I would say it is a mix of the good, the bad, the puzzling, and the incoherent,” Jens Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago’s crime lab, told me.

Trump’s most frequent promise has been his pledge “to indemnify all police officers and law-enforcement officials,” as he put in his NRA speech, “to protect them from being destroyed by radical-left lunatics who are angry that they are taking strong action on crime.”

Exactly how Trump, at the federal level, could provide more legal protection to police officers is unclear. Experts point out that police officers already are shielded by the doctrine of “qualified immunity” against litigation, which the Supreme Court has upheld in multiple cases. Even in cases where law-enforcement agencies admit to misconduct, the damages are virtually always paid by the city, not the individual police officer.

In 2021, with President Joe Biden’s support, House Democrats did pass police-reform legislation, named the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, that limited qualified immunity and would have made suing police for misconduct easier, but that bill died in the Senate. Some states and local governments have since moved to weaken qualified immunity as a defense in state courts. Trump appears to envision passing national legislation that codifies broad protection for police and preempts any state effort to retrench it.

Trump could also face problems precisely defining the policing tactics he wants to require local officials to adopt as a condition for receiving federal law-enforcement grants. Trump, for instance, has repeatedly praised the stop-and-frisk program launched in New York City by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Under that program, the New York Police Department stopped large numbers of people—many of them young Black and Latino men—and claimed to be searching for drugs or guns. But eventually a federal district judge declared that the program violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as well as its guarantee of equal protection, and the city later abandoned the tactic.

Lopez, now a professor at Georgetown University Law School, says that Trump can’t order other police departments to precisely replicate the aggressive stop-and-frisk practices from New York City that have been found unconstitutional. But, she says, tying federal aid to stop-and-frisk and the other hard-line policies Trump is promoting could nonetheless exert a powerful signaling effect on local law enforcement.

“At the federal level, you can use your influence, your dollars, your training to encourage practices that are more or less alienating to communities,” she told me. Trump’s touting of stop-and-frisk, Lopez added, is “a signal that his administration is going to really promote some of the most aggressive, alienating practices that police departments have partaken in.”

Reinforcing the funding message is the approach Trump has laid out for civil-rights oversight of policing. Trump’s Justice Department stopped nearly all federal investigations into allegations of bias in police enforcement: His administration launched only one investigation of a police department (a single unit in Springfield, Massachusetts), abandoned a consent decree that Barack Obama’s Justice Department had negotiated for reforms in Chicago, and ultimately effectively banned department lawyers from seeking further consent decrees with other localities.

Now Trump is pledging to instead pursue federal civil-rights investigations against the reform prosecutors who are challenging local policing and charging practices. That shift in emphasis would likely provide another nudge for cities toward more intrusive enforcement approaches. The rollback “in federal oversight of policing” that Trump pursued in his first term, Lopez says, “will look like child’s play if Trump is reelected.”

Public-safety analysts sympathetic to Trump’s vision say it represents a necessary course correction after the array of criminal-justice reforms that policy makers have advanced roughly since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, argues that, partly because of those reforms, policing has “become a much harder job to do.” Mangual agrees that Trump’s agenda could result in more arrests of minority young people, but says that would be an acceptable cost for improving safety in the low-income, heavily minority neighborhoods where crime is often most prevalent. “If you are talking about things like adding more police and having them be more proactive in the field, I think it is absolutely the case, especially in high-crime communities, what you are going to see is improvement on those measures,” he told me.

[Russell Berman: The voters who don’t really know Donald Trump]

But critics believe that Trump’s approach would reduce police accountability and increase incarceration rates without providing more public safety. The unifying idea in Trump’s proposals seems to be “that all we need for public safety is more enforcement and punishment,” says Daniela Gilbert, director of Redefining Public Safety at the Vera Institute for Justice, a liberal police-reform advocacy group. “If that was effective, we’d already have safer communities.”

Ludwig agrees with Mangual that low-income minority neighborhoods would gain the most from a reduction in crime. But, like Gilbert, Ludwig says it’s not clear that the agenda Trump has laid out would achieve that goal. “He’s saying two things: more policing and more aggressive policing,” Ludwig told me. “I think the more policing [is] good, the more aggressive policing—not helpful.”

Although some other criminologists disagree, Ludwig says the evidence is that hiring and training more police does lower crime, and that those benefits will be felt “disproportionately in low-income communities of color.” But, Ludwig adds, the aspects of Trump’s agenda that are designed to pressure cities to stop and arrest more people for nonviolent offenses or to participate in deportation efforts would likely prove counterproductive by heightening tension and reducing cooperation between police and minority communities.

The backdrop for this policy debate is an extremely volatile political environment on crime.

Polls consistently show that significantly more voters say they trust Trump than Biden to handle crime. Although Biden usually leads on that question among nonwhite voters, even a substantial minority of Blacks and Latinos typically say they trust Trump more to address the problem. Trump’s strength on those measures is one component of the overall racial inversion evident in polling so far about the 2024 race, with Biden largely holding his 2020 support among white voters but suffering substantial erosion to Trump among racial minorities.

A crucial question for the election is whether Trump can maintain those inroads among nonwhite voters while offering such a racially polarizing agenda across a wide range of issues. Trump’s embrace of criminal-justice and policing policies that could disproportionately affect Black and Latino communities is a prime example of that dynamic.

Biden, in a manner reminiscent of Bill Clinton during the 1990s, has tried to find a “third way” on crime between Trump and the most liberal reformers in his own party. Biden backed the sweeping police-reform bill that the Democratic-controlled House passed in 2021 and issued a 2022 executive order prescribing various reforms on federal law-enforcement agencies. But he has also touted the $15 billion he won in the 2021 COVID-recovery act to support local law-enforcement budgets, and he has continued to push for federal aid to help cities hire 100,000 more police officers.

Biden’s Justice Department has released findings of civil-rights investigations into the police departments of Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered, and Louisville, where Breonna Taylor was killed during a botched raid on her apartment, and is conducting investigations of nine other jurisdictions. But the department has not completed legal consent decrees with any local police departments, a stark contrast with the 14 that Obama reached over his two terms. Lopez, who led those efforts for Obama, praises the quality of the Biden investigations into Minneapolis and Louisville, but says the diminished quantity of agreements reflects Biden’s general sympathy for traditional approaches to policing. “I think there is much more ambivalence under the Biden administration about this work than there was under the Obama administration,” she told me.

But, as on many issues, a huge gulf still separates Biden’s careful balancing act from Trump’s sweeping plans to unshackle and unleash police. Even if Trump could not implement all the proposals he has unveiled, his overall agenda would likely encourage police to adopt more punitive tactics. “I want to think that we are all being alarmist about all this,” Lopez told me, “but I fear that it’s actually quite realistic that he is going to go much further than he did last time.”

For good or ill, the Trump effect on policing would likely be felt most acutely in the heavily Black and Latino neighborhoods of places such as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Las Vegas that may decide whether he wins a second term and the chance to reverse the past decade’s fitful advances toward rethinking policing and criminal justice.

Illustration Sources: Angela Weiss / Getty; Brett Carlsen / Getty; David Ryder / Getty; James Devaney / Getty; Jim Vondruska / Getty; Kyle Grillot / Getty*

In the summer of 1948, a young American, a Bennington College graduate visiting Paris, lost her purse in the Jardin des Tuileries. Inside it were her passport and ticket home. Many travelers in her situation would panic. She decided it was a sign that she wasn’t meant to leave France. She quit her job at Doubleday, then the biggest publisher in New York, and moved into a friend’s aunt’s apartment, where she launched a clandestine supper club to support herself. Perhaps she’d “open a small restaurant,” she wrote to her horrified parents. In another letter, she reassured her father that although she knew she’d made a risky choice, “one has to take chances and there are many advantages to be had. Anyway, I am an adventurous girl.”

That girl was Judith Jones, one of the most important editors in American history. She pulled The Diary of Anne Frank out of a slush pile during her second stint at Doubleday—in Paris this time, in 1949—a discovery for which her male boss took credit. Eight years later, she moved to Knopf, where she worked until 2013, publishing authors such as John Hersey, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. She was an avid cook—that supper club of hers was a hit—and, as an editor, single-handedly elevated the cookbook to its contemporary status, working with all-time greats including Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Edna Lewis, Irene Kuo, Claudia Roden, and many, many more.

According to The Editor, a new biography of Judith Jones by the oral historian Sara B. Franklin, Judith was also an avid worker, a visionary editor devoted to her job. (Franklin, who interviewed her at length, calls her Judith, which creates a compelling sense of intimacy on the page; I’m going to follow suit.) The Editor focuses primarily on Judith’s cookbooks, for which she is best remembered now, but more important, it draws out the connections among the varied projects Judith chose. Many of her authors, such as Plath and Olds, wrote about what Franklin calls “the frictions between women’s private and public lives,” digging into the tensions between who women were supposed to be publicly and who they were. Judith’s own life illuminates these same tensions. The Editor presents her as both a case study and an agent of change in American conceptions of femininity inside and outside the home. But it also reads, more often than not, like a love story: a great, sweeping seven-decade romance between a woman and her work.

I never met Judith, but my interest in her is personal: My step-grandmother, Abby Mandel, was one of her authors. Around the time Julia Child got famous, Abby was a divorced Jewish mother in greater Chicago. She’d been cooking for her family—siblings first, then children—since age 8, and after recruiting Child to star at a fundraiser she was hosting for her alma mater, Smith College, she grew fascinated by the idea of cooking professionally and moved to Paris for culinary school. After training at La Varenne and in kitchens across Belgium, France, and Switzerland, she returned to Chicago and began writing features and food columns for, among other outlets, the Chicago Tribune and Bon Appetit. Soon enough, those columns turned into cookbooks, edited by Child’s editor at Knopf: Judith.

Abby died 16 years ago this August, having not just written six cookbooks—including a series of Cuisinart books that taught home chefs how to use the new gadget and caused James Beard to call her the Queen of Machine Cuisine—but also founded Chicago’s pioneering Green City Market, which Alice Waters once called the “best sustainable market in the country.” Abby had, in every sense, impeccable taste. She was devoted to her projects. She was demanding, charming, generous, diligent, and rigorous about every single thing. I miss her more with every year. I, like Abby, love to work. I feel a true passion for my job, which might seem like a surprising statement in a social moment of work creep: Remote jobs, smartphones, and side hustles mean your work can follow you everywhere you go. Women in straight relationships, meanwhile, still tend to work a “second shift” at home, cleaning and cooking and caring more than their male partners. I don’t want endless labor, and yet I think of the French doors connecting Abby’s office and kitchen, remember her developing recipes with 6-year-old me perched on the counter, and wonder what advice she would have given me about braiding my work into my life.

Judith, by Franklin’s account, was constantly blending the two. She befriended her authors, tested their recipes in her own kitchen, managed their egos with the same strategy of delicate persuasion she used on her husband, Dick Jones, a writer she met while living in Paris. Judith saw no reason not to use her feminine wiles at work.

Like many powerful women of her generation, she did not describe herself as a feminist. She thought the movement encouraged women to “adopt stereotypically masculine traits in a ‘strident or angry way,’” which she considered counterproductive. She also bristled at the critique that Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, leveled at her first star, Julia Child: that cooking is fundamentally grunt work, and that by making it fun, Child was really just helping to keep women at home, working without pay.

[Read: The key to Julia Child’s success hid in plain sight]

Judith saw things quite differently. In her childhood home, a “woman of standing” was not meant to “dirty her hands” with chores, cooking included. But once she got into the kitchen, she was enamored of the “sensual richness” of even dull or challenging prep tasks; after she and Dick, also a home chef, married, cooking together became “the anchor of their domestic life.” (It also led to  domestic equality: Along with cooking, Dick did more chores than Judith did.) Franklin consistently links the physical pleasures of the kitchen to both adventurousness and adulthood; the word sensual crops up constantly (Olds, a poet famous for her writing about sex, told Franklin she was thrilled to discover, in Judith, an editor who was a “fellow sensualist”). Judith plainly felt that a grown woman should know how to enjoy getting dirty and exerting herself.

Of course, it’s a function of Judith’s whiteness and upper-class background that she got to opt into cooking. Historically, women rarely get to choose their own relationship to domestic labor, a fact Franklin draws out in more ways than one. She describes the Black southern chef Edna Lewis, one of the most talented authors on Judith’s list, fighting to make this point in The Taste of Country Cooking, which juxtaposes recipes with stories of her enslaved grandmother, who had to lay bricks all day while her children waited in their cribs. (Lewis herself, though venerated as a chef, had to hire herself out as a private cook and domestic worker well into her 60s because magazine editors and restaurant owners so habitually underpaid her.) Franklin also writes about the great suppression of women’s labor after World War II, when working women were “ousted en masse from paid jobs” so men who’d been at the front could take those roles back.

Judith came of age precisely at that moment. She had to fight to hang on to jobs in publishing; the fact that she managed to do so suggests the gap between her experience and that of working-class women her age. It also reflects her grit, her talent, and her devotion to her job. She was her household’s primary earner nearly her whole marriage; she pushed through years at Knopf when she got treated like—and referred to as—a secretary, even though she was editing Updike; she not only remained in publishing until her late 80s, but also took on the role of author, writing a handful of books at the end of her career. Franklin describes Judith’s 2009 cookbook, The Pleasures of Cooking for One, as a display of the skills—and the philosophy—Judith learned as a cookbook editor. It was a “manual for living as much as cooking.” At its core was the joy Judith took in food, which she saw as both a way toward a happily physical, unconventional, grounded life and a “worthy purpose in and of itself.”

Judith’s passion for cooking has helped countless Americans cook for fun, exploration, and connection. At the start of her career, this would have seemed highly unlikely. In the 1950s, major manufacturers pushed convenience foods using ads that cast cooking skills as “old-fashioned and obsolete” and promised to wrap everything up so the “‘poor little woman’ wouldn’t soil herself” with dinner prep. Judith decided to use her editorial power to resist—and maybe even counteract—this trend. She wasn’t against practicalities; she did, after all, work with Abby, the Queen of Machine Cuisine. But she hated the thought of cooking getting dismissed as a tired mess or what Franklin calls a “gendered trap.” Although she would not have used this language, she seems to have espoused a different kind of feminism from Friedan’s, one that embraces possibility rather than condemning anything traditionally considered women’s work. An interesting parallel with romantic love is hiding here: Although some feminists have tried to reject men, others have argued that straight relationships can be potential opportunities for radical repair and progress. For Judith, the kitchen was a place where radical progress could happen. She wanted to share her passion for food, which meant getting the American public on board with the idea of cooking as a “gateway to the wider world and a richer, more autonomous life.”

[Read: Eight cookbooks worth reading cover to cover]

Julia Child was Judith’s first companion in this project, and her most influential one. Gradually, though, Judith created a whole community of kindred spirits in her cookbook authors, nearly all of whom were women—and not “little housewives,” as Judith said to Franklin. They were a group of curious, courageous thinkers who, with Judith’s guidance, turned food into an intellectual project, writing books that, far from denigrating cooking as drudgery, presented it as a daily necessity that also, per Judith, “empowered you, that stimulated you.”

My own romance with food, which began when I was a college student with my first dorm kitchen, owes a lot to Abby—and everything to Judith. I make the biscuits from The Taste of Country Cooking all summer, every summer. My copy of Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook is held together with painters’ tape. Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food has gotten me through the holidays I’ve spent away from home. And the rest of my cookbook collection, contemporary titles that cross the country and globe, is clearly in Judith’s lineage: books that teach me cultural history along with culinary technique, that deepen my understanding of the United States and of the many diasporic communities that influence American cooking.

My daily life, too, is in a debt of sorts to Judith, something I saw plainly as I read The Editor. For me, as for Judith, food and books are routes to exploration. I garden because I cook; I walk to the farmer’s market in the D.C. summer heat because I cook; I learn about sustainable agriculture because I cook. In a way, yes, this is work on top of the work I do at my desk all day, but it’s pleasure and education, too. Just like writing, it opens my brain up. It makes me an adventurous girl, and for that, I have Judith Jones to thank.

In the tropics, along the band of sky near the equator, clouds and wind run the show. These are juicy clouds that aggregate and disaggregate in agglomerations and that can live a long time, as far as clouds go. In the summer, when the ocean is especially hot, they can pile up high, breeding hurricanes; at all times of year, the behavior of tropical cloud systems drives global atmospheric circulation, helping determine the weather all over the world. And still, clouds remain one of the least understood—or least reliably predictable—factors in our climate models. “They are among the biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate change,” Da Yang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chicago, told me.

Yang is a cloud expert—a cloud guy, really, drawn to their mysteries. He recently moved from California to Chicago, where he gets to see a lot more clouds on a daily basis. “I find clouds are beautiful to watch,” he said. “If I take an airplane, and I can see clouds down below or far away, I’m always fascinated by how rich the cloud organizations are. How they interact with each other …” He trailed off. Clouds are complex and ephemeral, which makes them difficult to fully understand. Yang listed for me key aspects of clouds for which we still lack comprehensive understanding: how they form, what determines their spatial scale, how long they can last. “Those sound like simple questions,” he said, “but they are actually at the forefront of the field.”

The cloud problem has persistently plagued climate models. Although these models do many jobs extraordinarily well—understanding the energy balance of the planet, describing a trajectory of warming from human-made greenhouse-gas pollution—they can’t seem to get clouds right. Models will sometimes produce cloud-related projections that are simply incorrect, and some models “run hot,” meaning they predict catastrophic warming, possibly because of cloud dynamics.

One major stumbling block is the resolution of climate models, or how finely or coarsely they represent the Earth; to represent individual clouds, which can be the size of a minivan or the state of Minnesota, would require models at a resolution finer than the current finest model. Climate modelers have recently begun to produce fine-scale models at the regional level, where they can zoom in on the individual details of clouds. But, Yang told me, stitching such snapshots together into a picture of the whole globe would exceed the capacity of the largest existing supercomputer.  

Even if computers did have the capacity to do these analyses, scientists would need more tools to understand the results. For that, Yang said, we need more cloud theory. “Without theoretical understanding, we would not be able to interpret the model results,” he told me. “Without these first-principal-based understandings, we don’t really know whether the model is accurate.”

Tiffany Shaw, a climate physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that some models are producing inaccurate visions of entire regions, possibly because of the cloud problem. For example, models predict more warming in the east Pacific than the west; the opposite is true in reality. Another example is the narrow belt of rainfall that rings the planet in the deep tropics and produces some of Earth’s strongest thunderstorms—and, as such, many clouds. Our planet generally has one such belt, but atmospheric-ocean climate models have been insisting for decades that it has two. This may, in part, be an issue of undercooked cloud modeling.

To Shaw, these irregularities are not a sign of something amiss; rather, they show the maturation of climate science. The field has gotten many of the big things right, and now it is learning to incorporate the smaller, more granular things into its vision of the world: things like clouds. Because of their complexity, Shaw is also excited about the possibility of using machine learning to understand them. “They’re data-hungry algorithms, and we have a lot of data,” she said.

[Read: Playing God with the atmosphere]

One big question haunts all cloud research: Scientists know that there’s a lot of uncertainty about how to predict future cloud dynamics, and that those dynamics will likely have some bearing on how climate change progresses. But how significant of a bearing? For now, initial indications point to reassuring conclusions rather than catastrophic ones. “What we’re learning is that not everything matters for climate change. Which is good!” Shaw told me. For example, losing shallow cumulus clouds as the ocean warms—which some computer models have suggested could happen—would have a destabilizing effect on the tropics, potentially provoking runaway warming. But, Shaw said, a recent observational study found that the clouds aren’t as sensitive to warming as the computer models thought; the feedback between heat and clouds does amplify global warming, but not to the extreme degree suggested.

[Read: America’s climate boomtowns are waiting]

One of the keys to reconciling modeling and reality is simply more observations. Chris Fairall, a research physicist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association, has been studying clouds since the 1970s, when he worked on fog forecasting for the U.S. Navy, in highly foggy Monterey, California. “Fog is a cloud that sits on the ground. The Navy is very interested in fog, because they don’t want their ships running into things,” he told me. Fairall has seen the field of cloud science improve dramatically, in part thanks to efforts, including his own, to measure them. In 2020, he was the lead scientist on NOAA’s ATOMIC project, which flew one of the agency’s “Hurricane Hunter” planes and sent a ship to survey cumulus-cloud formations off the east coast of Barbados, as part of a larger joint cloud project with European researchers. Over the next few years, the data from those missions will help improve cloud models. Although Fairall likes studying relatively shallow cumulus clouds, he told me that the biggest cloud questions are about deep convective clouds, the ones that go all the way up into the troposphere, where they begin to develop complex ice, snow, hail, and supercooled water interactions. Cumulus clouds are complex enough; those deep clouds “have 100 times the complexity,” he said.

In his view, the U.S. is devoting a tremendous amount of effort to cloud research; it’s only up from here, in terms of cloud knowledge. NASA, NOAA, the Department of Energy, the Navy, and the Army all have researchers working on cloud problems, he said. Clouds envelop two-thirds of the Earth in their moist embrace, and in every moment help determine our collective physical reality. Surely the quest to understand them is among the most salient scientific endeavors of our time.

In a drawer in the living room of my childhood home, you can find the drumsticks I got in elementary school, the calculator I used in middle school, and a to-do list I wrote in high school. (“Shoes—tell mom,” it reads, and, in all caps: “CUT NAILS.”) In my bedroom are prom pictures, concert posters, a photo of my round-faced teen self printed for a fake ID I never got. In the bathroom: expired acne medication; crunchy, dried-up mascara; an old retainer. My mother, who still lives in the house, would like me to clear out my stuff. I keep stalling.

The funny thing is, I’m not all that attached to these objects. I could throw most of them away after a few moments of bemused recollection; the pictures, I could take back with me to Brooklyn. But that would make it possible for my mom to sell the house, which she’s been trying to do for years. I can’t seem to stop standing in the way.

Why? If home is “where the heart is” or “wherever I’m with you,” I should be fine with my mom moving anywhere—especially to a nearby apartment, as she plans to, where she’ll doubtless have a place for me to sleep whenever I want. Instead, any mention of a future sale prompts an ache akin to the homesickness I felt as a kid at summer camp—except that now I ache for my future self. I imagine her standing outside that suburban New Jersey house, pacing back and forth, insisting that some piece of her remains in this one edifice on a certain corner of a specific street, even though she hasn’t lived there for decades.

[Read: What the suburb haters don’t understand]

It’s a weird, anticipatory grief—but it’s not unfounded. For his 2011 book, Returning Home: Reconnecting With Our Childhoods, Jerry M. Burger, a Santa Clara University psychologist, interviewed hundreds of people and found that about a third had traveled as adults to visit a childhood home; another third hoped to. The subjects who’d made the trip largely no longer had parents in the house; in many cases, they arrived unannounced, ready to knock and ask the residing strangers to let them in. Others discovered that their old home physically no longer existed. Giving up such a formative space, Burger told me, is “like a dancer losing a leg. It’s a really important part of you. And now it’s gone.” So many people cried during interviews that Burger started arriving with tissues.

You might think that only people with rosy childhood memories would feel compelled home, perhaps to relive their golden days or try to regain some of the comfort of being young. But that’s not true—some of Burger’s subjects had experienced such trauma at home that going back was probably a terrible idea; one person turned and ran out of the space immediately after setting foot inside it. Rather, Burger found, people with all kinds of relationships to where they grew up shared another motivation: They felt like a stranger to their old selves. And they wanted to reconnect.

Attempting to pull a thread between past and present is a common human impulse, what the Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams calls a search for “narrative identity”—this life story we draft as we go, trying to make sense of who we are and why. Marya Schechtman, a philosopher at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me that humans are constantly negotiating a contradiction: On the one hand, “it’s just sort of taken as a given that you’re a single individual from roughly cradle to grave.” On the other hand, this isn’t really how we experience life. Certain parts of our history resonate more than others, and some former selves don’t feel like us at all. (“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old,” Joan Didion wrote. “It would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford.”)

Many of us actively try to “make our pasts and our futures real to us,” Shechtman said. So although we eagerly make plans and envision ourselves in new places, with new people, we also flip through photo albums and reread our old journals. (Didion on keeping a notebook: “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”) But sometimes, those methods aren’t enough to really take us back. Burger kept hearing a similar story: Subjects would find photos of themselves as kids, but “they’re feeling like they can’t relate to this person in the picture,” he told me. “And it’s important to kind of get that sense of wholeness, to keep that part of yourself alive.”

Going home can be a much more effective way to time travel. Our past isn’t just preserved in knickknacks and memorabilia; it lingers in the spaces we once occupied. When we talk about our experiences, we often focus, understandably, on the people who’ve shaped us, and we “treat the physical environment like a backdrop,” Lynne Manzo, a landscape-architecture professor at the University of Washington, told me. But setting can be its own character; it colors our day-to-day, and we endow it with agency and meaning. If social interactions and relationships are the bricks constructing our identities, our surroundings are the scaffolding.

Setting is also central to how we remember. Recalling events (as opposed to information) involves “episodic memory,” which is deeply tied to location. Many researchers, in fact, believe that episodic memory evolved to help us physically orient ourselves in the world. (One very sad study—partial title: “Implications for Strandings”—found that some sea lions with damage to the hippocampus, the hub of episodic memory, get lost and wander ashore.) When you’re in a given space, your brain tends to “pull up the relevant memories” that happened there—even ones that have long been dormant, Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist and the author of Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold On to What Matters, told me. People remembering a specific moment can even demonstrate what Ranganath called a “reboot” of the brain-activity patterns they showed during the original event.

But without the physical space to visit, it can be hard to mentally transport yourself back. When the 19th-century French writer Stendhal wrote his memoir The Life of Henry Brulard, detailing a difficult and lonely childhood, he drew the places of his youth again and again, in an obsessive attempt to spur his memory. “Winding staircase—Large, cheerless courtyard—Magnificent inlaid chest-of-drawers surmounted by a clock,” he scrawled under a sketch, as if the incantation might apparate him to his grandfather’s imposing Grenoble townhouse. Yet his recollection remained, as he put it, like a fresco, solid for stretches and elsewhere crumbling apart.

[Read: Nostalgia is a shield against unhappiness]

I can relate to the yearning for preservation: If my mom leaves my childhood home, I’ll lose the particular sweet smell—I can’t even describe it—that wafts through the living room on hot days. And the pinch of acorns under my bare feet in the yard. And the specific lilt of the birdsong in the early mornings, so different from what I hear now, just over 15 miles away. I’m scared that without those sensations, the filing cabinet deep in my mind, holding all these everyday snippets of memory, will get pushed just out of my reach.

Visiting home doesn’t always clarify or heal; it won’t necessarily make the scattered fragments of your story click into place. Sometimes, it just leaves you confused. For most people, what comes up is thorny—not only because good and bad events alike occurred at home, but because as much as you might long for your old and current selves to collide, it’s strange when they do.

Going back can highlight how faulty your recollections were in the first place—and how subjective your perceptions still are. Anne Wilson, a Wilfrid Laurier University psychologist who studies identity, gave me an example: You might remember your old bedroom as large, the hallway from it running on and on, not just because the memory is from a child’s perspective but also because you associate it with enchantment—or with powerlessness. If you return to the house and find a short hallway, a tiny bedroom, it can feel disturbing. That’s not to mention material changes that might have been made to the house, which Burger said his participants reliably hated. To encounter such a familiar space transformed, and without your consent—as if someone has snuck into your memories and moved things around—is an affront. Your version doesn’t exist anymore.

Even if family still lives in your old home, returning can be unnerving. Several people have told me, in casual conversation, that they’ve felt themselves regressing on visits back—they let their mom do their laundry or address their parents like a bratty 15-year-old. That tendency has to do with relationships as much as with physical space; our habits of interaction can be stubborn. But the setting itself can cue you to act a certain way. Just think about it evolutionarily, Schechtman told me: “If you’re a bunny, and you’re in the location where the hawk was last time, you should start feeling scared”—and get out of there. When a place triggers a rush of episodic memories, you might feel the frustration, the helplessness, the loneliness you did when you were young, and lapse into old behaviors.

[Read: Welcome to kidulthood]

All of this can feel odd, maybe even a little heartbreaking. Confronting change requires confronting loss. And confronting loss, of course, means acknowledging our mortality: If our old selves have slipped beyond our grasp, our current self will too. “The moment you stop to reflect, even on the present, that moment is gone,” Ranganath told me. “Everything is in the world of memory.”

But if you can let the melancholy of that truth wash over you, you might find that it’s beautiful too. So often, I feel stranded in the present or the recent past—stricken by the dumb thing I said yesterday but unable to conjure what it felt like to be 6, or 12, or 20. It’s hard to really feel that right now is one point in a larger life trajectory, even if I know it on some level. Going home is one of the rare times I can glimpse the larger perspective.         

One of these days—after I’ve emptied the living-room drawer of the paper scraps and almost-spent gift cards—returning will be harder for me. But I can imagine my future self joining the ranks of Burger’s pilgrims, arriving on my old street looking for meaning, some story to tell about the past. That might sound sad, but such a visit isn’t just about holding on. It’s also about letting go—that thing I’ve been struggling to do.

Manzo, the landscape-architecture professor, suggested that I enact a ritual to bid farewell to my mom’s house: walk through the rooms, take pictures, pocket a stone. I could sketch like Stendahl, try to capture all the angles. I will lose some memories, but maybe I’ll come away with some sense of the wholeness that Burger said so many people seek. I keep thinking about the woman who ran out of her old home—she wanted wholeness too. Eventually, her brother bought the place and bulldozed it to the ground. She had just one more request: Where the house once stood, she asked him to plant some flowers.

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The protesters on university campuses have an image problem: They look like they are having way too much fun. In tone, the demonstrations do not match the subject matter, which they allege is genocide, the least fun of all human activities. For 20-year-olds, some activities that would be miserable to a normal person—screaming hysterically, being arrested, living in ragged encampments—are in fact an exhilarating way to spend one’s time, and certainly preferable to studying for exams. Young people like to rough it, within reason. Earlier this month, the protesters at the University of Chicago begged to be resupplied with dwindling essentials such as Chapstick and dental dams.

Most universities have delayed threats of serious punishment. Even students who are eventually arrested are likely to suffer only minor blemishes to their records. And many of these blemishes are desirable: What better way to prove you were young and alive in 2024 than to have a framed mug shot from the day you were zip-tied and booked? Such mementos will have an honored place on the desks of protesters who someday follow a square occupation, like corporate law or podiatry.

Fun does not discredit a cause, but a protester who enjoys himself has a harder time demonstrating his commitment than one willing to suffer. This weekend I spoke with one of the latter. David Chmielewski, a Princeton English major from Torrington, Connecticut, along with 11 other Princeton community members, spent 10 days on a hunger strike to call for the university to divest from Israel. “We wanted to commit ourselves to making clear how dire the situation is, with the forced famine that’s happening in the Gaza Strip,” Chmielewski said. He and the others consumed nothing but water, electrolytes, and necessary medicine. “There’s something very powerful about being able to use your body to show that commitment.” He said the group stopped on Saturday after talks with Princeton administrators yielded promising results.

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

Many have ridiculed the hunger strikers for the short duration of their fast, and for not emerging from the ordeal sallow and hollow-cheeked. (“PROTESTER WHINES OVER SELF-IMPOSED HUNGER STRIKE,” read the chyron on a Fox News broadcast.) Ten days isn’t long, but it is nine days longer than I’ve ever gone without food, so I am not inclined to downplay the unpleasantness of the experience. In fact, I respect Chmielewski. And just as it is important to ridicule protesters who have no idea what they are protesting, or who infringe on the rights of others, or who hate Jews, one should acknowledge when others press their cause, whatever its merit, in a morally faultless way.

Chmielewski said his group was inspired by hunger strikers earlier this year at Brown (where the strike lasted eight days), at Dartmouth (where it lasted 12 days), and at Harvard (half a day). “We’re also drawing on a longer tradition of the hunger strike as a nonviolent-resistance tactic,” he told me, citing the Irish-republican hunger strikes of the 1920s and those of Gandhi and others in the movement for Indian independence. The Princeton protesters, he said, have had weeks to evolve in their tactics, without having been wiped out by clashes with police. “Other student groups may not have been afforded that luxury of time,” Chmielewski said. “We’ve had a lot of time to sit and reflect on what we can do to pressure the university but also to center Palestinians.”

The language of “centering”—borrowed from the feminist theory of bell hooks and others—refers to the practice of giving credence and priority to the views of those historically ignored or victimized. It is in my opinion misguided, insofar as history’s victims are like history’s oppressors: human, and therefore flawed to the core and wrong about most things. And in the case of the Palestinians, the practice of “centering” seems to introduce a contradiction. Was it not odd, I asked Chmielewski, that centering the Palestinian perspective would lead him to adopt tactics that have never attracted a significant following among Palestinians?

Chmielewski countered that Palestinian political prisoners have gone on hunger strikes by the thousands at various points in the past few decades. That’s true, but many of those striking were doing so only because they were in prison for violent crimes, and nonviolence had become the only option available. Nonviolent resistance as a preferred tactic remains rare—and rejected completely by Hamas—even though a growing literature in political science (particularly the work of Erica Chenoweth and the late Gene Sharp) has demonstrated that it is often very effective. It is less effective when allied with organized armed resistance. Chmielewski’s peers seem content with such an alliance. “Glory to the martyrs,” his Princeton group declared in a recent social-media post. “The empire will burn.”

The question of why Palestinians have shown conspicuously little interest in the tactic that he himself has adopted is, Chmielewski told me, “better asked of a Palestinian.” “I don’t necessarily feel qualified to speak to the exact reasons for the dynamics of what tactics Palestinians have adopted historically,” he said. He was, I should add, smart and articulate, and one reason I liked him was his willingness to admit ignorance. Another was that unlike many other protesters, he did not hide behind a mask and committed himself to his cause by name.

His conclusion from the experience was not narrowly about hunger in Gaza at all. “I’m not sure I know the right word” for what he experienced by not eating, he told me. “Spiritual? Poetic? Imaginative?” He said the hunger strike, although nominally about his university’s divestment, gave him a sense that “another world is possible, because you’re refraining from material needs. Everyone tells you you need these material things.  But then stepping away from them gives you this permission to imagine other possibilities for existing in the world. It gives you permission to imagine a better world, because it’s taking you a step back from this world of … raw materiality.”

I sensed that he was getting what one should get from one’s time at university: an education. Maybe it was the ketosis talking. (Several days of not eating can leave one giddy, even energetic.) I came away persuaded less by his cause than by his dedication and the worthiness of nonviolence as a tactic of first resort. I hope there will be more who practice it—in Princeton, Gaza, and Israel.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

“During most of my early adulthood, philosophy had little appeal to me,” Elissa Strauss wrote in 2022. “As long as I treated people mostly kindly, what did it matter what I thought about right and wrong, or the nature of knowledge or the universe?”

“Until, of course, I had my first child.” Strauss’s son Augie “wanted to know things”—including the sorts of things she couldn’t find much practical use for when she tried taking Philosophy 101 in college. Kids, she soon realized, are instinctive philosophers.

Today’s newsletter takes a look at how kids speak and how to speak to them in moments of curiosity, joy, and conflict.

On Talking With Kids

Want to Understand Socrates and Sartre? Talk With Your Kid.

By Elissa Strauss

A new book asks us to consider that children might have a natural aptitude for grappling with our deepest philosophical questions. (From 2022)

Read the article.

How a Negotiation Expert Would Bargain With a Kid

By Joe Pinsker

Some tactical suggestions for managing volatile, sometimes nonsensical negotiation partners

Read the article.

Is It Wrong to Tell Kids to Apologize?

By Stephanie H. Murray

Some parents argue that forcing children to say they’re sorry is useless or even harmful. The reality is more nuanced.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

The one big thing you can do for your kids: The research shows that you probably have less effect on your kids than you think—with one major exception: Your love will make them happy. Mister Rogers had a simple set of rules for talking to children: The TV legend possessed an extraordinary understanding of how kids make sense of language.

Other Diversions

The end of the “photoshop fail” The great honeybee fallacy Prom dresses are just dresses now.

P.S.

Courtesy of Bob Nuber

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Bob Nuber, 68, from Chicago, wrote in: “Annual crane migrations, which endure despite centuries of habitat disruption by humans.”

I’ll continue to share your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.

— Isabel

I get meeting times wrong all the time. I mean to schedule an hour earlier or an hour later, but then I get mixed up. The problem is, I always have to compensate for where I am, which is in the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Greetings from the lonely, dismal heart of central standard: a land before time and, also, a land after it.

To those of you who work and live in a proper, respectable time zone such as eastern or Pacific, the full extent of my shame will be difficult to fathom. “Oh, yeah, I’m in central time, actually,” I say, as if acknowledging a terrible skin condition or an inconvenient food allergy. Everyone is polite, of course. “Ah, okay, got it,” they reply, as we all scramble to adjust our calendars. This is not respect. It is pity.

I moved here from eastern, which is the nation’s anchor time zone. I say that not because of its affiliation with New York City or Washington, D.C., but because almost half the U.S. population holds to its authority. Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Atlanta are on eastern time, along with almost all of Florida and Michigan, the whole of Ohio, and other less notable places made more notable simply by their participation in the most normal time in America.

Eastern time starts the day; it sets the pace for the nation. The stock market opens on Wall Street, corporate lawyers file into Back Bay offices, spoons swirl café cubanos in Miami. It’s morning again in America. On the other coast, where it’s three hours earlier, nobody cares. Such is the glory of the Pacific time zone, which houses a smaller sliver of the country’s population—just 16 percent or so. Some West Coasters—surfers, almond farmers, theme-park vendors—may be up during the eastern a.m. hours, though not because investment bankers or media professionals compel them. But the whole Atlantic Seaboard morning has elapsed by the time that most Pacific-time professionals have stumbled to the office, smoothies in hand. They will always be behind, no matter what they do. This is not a disadvantage; it’s a lifestyle.

[Read: China only has one time zone—and that’s a problem]

The mountain time zone is in some ways central’s partner. Its residents share our temporal confusion, living earlier than most Americans but later than some others. But the region’s sparseness spares it more embarrassment. The mountain zone is mostly empty space: Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico. Only 6 percent of the nation lives there, and almost one-third of those people are confined to Arizona, a state that doesn’t observe daylight saving time and thus LARPs as California for half the year. And unlike central time, mountain time gets to have a name that evokes thin, clear air and rugged individualism.

Here in central, we get nothing. Our name isn’t bad, but it isn’t cool. It’s just … middling. A center forms a foundation, but it can never be exceptional. Such is the fate of the average people who get averaged out within our time zone’s borders. Central time afflicts St. Louis but also Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Memphis, and New Orleans; in all, its victims live in the whole or parts of 20 states. We’re stuck together in this in-between, always just a little bit too early and a fair amount too late, our heads turning back and forth toward our betters on the coasts.

This isn’t just another form of grousing about being overlooked. Flyover country’s cultural and economic woes, or its benefits, are separate from the indignities of central time. Nobody needs to visit you in Tulsa or Little Rock to coordinate a call or set a deadline. But plenty of the people living here are obligated by professional or personal ties to connect with the many others who might crisscross the skies above our homes. This creates a special and profound malaise.

Millions of us live this way, caught between morning and afternoon. We do mathematics. When should we meet? Let me think, I’m two hours ahead of you, and so-and-so is one more ahead of me, so N your time is N+3 theirs, which makes me N+3-1. So-and-so’s day already started in Manhattan, and I’m behind; it feels more like I’m arriving late than living on a different clock. Okay, now I’m free, but it’s still too early for you guys in Santa Cruz.

Coordination is accommodation. To coordinate in space, one makes room—a seat at the table. To coordinate in time, one clears calendars. Everyone, no matter their time zone, performs some version of this daily work. But in central time, that work feels, well, central to our lives. We can never be on time, not really, because our time is not our own. It’s always someone else’s: two hours ahead, an hour behind, today, tomorrow, and forever.