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Amid the parade of outrages, what we’re feeling isn’t numbness. It’s more like airsickness.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s money problems are becoming a crisis for the entire country. Cows have almost certainly infected more than two people with bird flu. OpenAI should have gone way beyond Scarlett Johansson.

The Nation Shrugs

“At what other moment in American history,” Anne Applebaum recently asked, “could a presidential candidate praise a fictional serial killer, and inspire almost no reaction at all?”

Even by the standards of the times, what she was referring to did seem a vertigo-inducing moment. Amid an anti-migrant tirade at a rally earlier this month in New Jersey, Donald Trump gave a shout-out to the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter, referring to the fava bean–loving cannibal played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs as a “wonderful man.”

And the nation shrugged, because this was simply the latest in a long list of 2024’s bizarre and disorienting moments (including an earlier recent reference to cannibalism from the president himself). “The scale of the abnormality is so staggering,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos argued recently, “that it can actually become numbing.”

But Americans’ reaction is less like numbness and more a response to something like airsickness, which results when we experience a disconnect between our senses—a nausea-inducing conflict between what we know and what we see. Motion sickness is caused by a discrepancy between what the inner ear detects and what the eye sees. The effect can be vertiginous—so the way people avoid being nauseated is by trying to ignore the dissonance.

We’ve been led to believe that things work in a certain way, that there are mores and norms. We thought our world was right side up, but it now feels as if it’s been turned upside down. Words don’t mean what we think they do. Outrage is followed not by accountability, but by adulation. Standards shift, flicker, vanish. Nothing is stable.

More than a century ago, Émile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, described what he called “anomie,” a condition of instability “resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.” Anomie could result from a conflict of belief systems, leading to a breakdown of social ties and a “shared moral order.”

Call it anomie or call it airsickness—we find ourselves in a land of confusion. Trump pays off a porn star and yet is hailed as a champion of Christian values. He mocks prisoners of war and calls dead soldiers “suckers,” and his MAGA base is thrilled by his patriotism. And, as Tom Nichols notes in The Atlantic today, Trump brags about his tight relationship with America’s implacable adversary, Vladimir Putin, claiming that the Russian president will release detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich “for me, but not for anyone else.”

To hear conservative Christians argue that personal character doesn’t matter, or to witness self-described constitutional conservatives defend a relentless attack on the rule of law, is disorienting. To see advocates of law and order embrace rioters who attacked the Capitol and beat police officers is baffling. To watch the party of Ronald Reagan embracing isolationism and following Trump in truckling to the Butcher of Ukraine, Putin, is bewildering. Mind-bending, also, is that, despite Trump’s fire hose of lies, 71 percent of Republicans describe him as “honest and trustworthy.” Recent polls suggest that Trump is leading President Joe Biden in the swing states that will decide the November election.

Maybe that’s why following the news these days feels like swallowing crazy pills. You don’t have to be a particularly cynical observer of American politics to recognize that, past a certain point, no norms endure that cannot be abandoned, and that any position can be flipped if doing so is expedient.

Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse and defaming his victim. He incited a violent attack on the Capitol, called for terminating rules in the Constitution, dined with a neo-Nazi, and floated the idea of executing the nation’s most senior general. He has been fined for fraud on a massive scale, faces more than 80 felony charges, and is accused of withholding and sharing top-secret national-security documents.

Faced with all of this, the Republican Party says, Yeah, we want four more years of that. GOP leaders wearing red ties make lockstep pilgrimages to his felony trial in New York to show their fealty, while wannabe running mates mimic his rhetoric and echo his lies about the 2020 election. And now there’s Nikki Haley, who has called Trump “unhinged,” “toxic,” “diminished,” and unqualified. Yesterday, she said that she would vote for him anyway. The alleged frauds, adultery, sexual assault, threats, and possible felony convictions don’t matter. Close to half the electorate seems to agree.

Which brings us back to our chronic airsickness. Most of us took it for granted that Americans by and large shared certain ethical assumptions. Despite our differences, we imagined, we all used roughly the same moral compass to judge right and wrong.

But what if that’s not true anymore?

What if the guardrails of the U.S. legal system turn out to be illusory or broken beyond repair? What if we have exhausted our reservoirs of democratic values and shared norms? And what if the constant turbulence buffeting our sense of reality is a sign that we are in a different world, one whose values we don’t understand?

I suspect that the great thinker Hannah Arendt would recognize some of the aspects of that world. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she described the annihilation of truth and the collapse of moral reasoning:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.

Or, to paraphrase the immortal line of Bette Davis’s character, Margo Channing, in All About Eve: Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy year.

Related:

Trump claims he can free an American detainee—if he’s reelected. The voters who don’t really know Donald Trump

Today’s News

The Louisiana legislature passed a bill that would classify abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances. The legislation would make it a crime to possess the drugs without a prescription, punishable with jail time and fines. The Justice Department and 29 states filed a lawsuit against Ticketmaster’s parent corporation, Live Nation, in an attempt to break up the company over its alleged monopoly in the live-entertainment industry. The Supreme Court ruled that Republicans in South Carolina did not engage in racial gerrymandering when they moved thousands of Black voters out of a congressional district that Republicans currently control. The decision allows the state to continue using its current congressional map.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Who was Michael Field? The pseudonym was an open secret, used by two women who composed subversive and arresting poems together, Walt Hunter writes. Work in Progress: Joe Biden’s new tariffs on Chinese goods mark the decisive rejection of an economic orthodoxy that dominated American policy making for nearly half a century, Rogé Karma writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Scientists Are Very Worried About NASA’s Mars Plan

By Marina Koren

For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, whirring and crackling on the otherwise quiet planet. The robot, a rover named Perseverance, has deposited some of the samples on the Martian surface in sealed tubes. The others, about two dozen so far, remain stored inside the rover’s belly.

Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth … Some scientists hope the dusty fragments will contain tiny fossilized microbes that would prove life once existed on Mars. Those tiny life forms will have been dead for who knows how long—but still would be evidence of a second genesis in our own backyard.

If, that is, the samples ever make it back to Earth.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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In the Martian lowlands, one rocky crater is dotted with small holes, winding from the floor to the rim like breadcrumbs. Their clean and cylindrical appearance is distinctly unnatural, suggesting the work of aliens—which it is. For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, whirring and crackling on the otherwise quiet planet. The robot, a rover named Perseverance, has deposited some of the samples on the Martian surface in sealed tubes. The others, about two dozen so far, remain stored inside the rover's belly.

Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth. The Mars Sample Return mission, known as MSR for short, is one of the boldest undertakings in NASA history, as consequential as it is complicated. The endeavor, which involves sending an extra spacecraft to the red planet to retrieve the samples, serves as a precursor to getting future astronauts home from Mars. It’s a test of whether the United States can keep up with China’s space program, which is scheduled to return its own Mars samples in the 2030s. It could uncover new information about our planetary neighbor’s history, and reveal a picture of the cosmic wilderness that was the early solar system. Some scientists hope the dusty fragments will contain tiny fossilized microbes that would prove life once existed on Mars. Those tiny life forms will have been dead for who knows how long—but still would be evidence of a second genesis in our own backyard.  

If, that is, the samples ever make it back to Earth. NASA officials recently announced that the sample-return effort has become too expensive and fallen worryingly behind schedule. The latest estimated cost of as much as $11 billion is nearly double what experts initially predicted, and the way things are going, the samples won't arrive home until 2040, seven years later than expected. At a press conference last month, NASA chief Bill Nelson repeatedly called the state of the Mars Sample Return mission "unacceptable," a striking chastisement of his own agency, considering that MSR is an in-house effort. Officials have put out a call—to NASA’s own ranks and to private space companies—for “quicker and cheaper” plans that don’t require “huge technological leaps” to bring the samples home.

[Read: Scientists really, really want a piece of Mars]

NASA officials say that they remain committed to the return effort, but researchers—including the agency’s collaborators who work on the project—are concerned. “The path forward is not clear,” Aileen Yingst, a geologist at the Planetary Science Institute who works on the Perseverance mission, told me. Scientists who study Mars are worried that the mission will be downsized. Scientists who don’t study Mars—and a few who do—are frustrated, because MSR consumes so much of NASA’s budget. Scientists can’t imagine NASA giving up on the mission entirely, but the debacle has even prompted some whispered jokes about China coming along and claiming the tubes on the surface before NASA can fly them home. Last year, an independent review ordered by NASA ominously warned that “by abandoning return of Mars samples to other nations, the U.S. abandons the preeminent role that [President John F. Kennedy] ascribed to the scientific exploration of space.”

If and when the MSR tubes come home, their contents could dramatically shift our understanding of Mars. The first NASA spacecraft to land on Mars, in 1976, carried instruments designed to examine Martian soil for evidence of tiny, metabolizing life forms but didn’t find anything conclusive. Some bits of Martian rock, ejected by colliding asteroids, have made it to Earth as meteorites. (And scientists have tried to find proof of life in these, too). But such fragments arrive scorched by atmospheric reentry, their composition altered and contaminated from the journey. Pristine samples are far more tantalizing.

MSR would deliver Martian dirt straight from an area that scientists believe holds a promising chance at containing signs of life from 3.5 billion years ago. The Perseverance rover is exploring the shores of what scientists believe was once a lake, at a crater called Jezero, where the sedimentary rock may bear signs of a once-habitable world, or preserved life itself. The samples might also offer hints about Earth’s origin story. The rocks that existed here 4 billion years ago, when the solar system was just getting started, have since been crushed, melted, and eroded away. But Mars, a world lacking plate tectonics and serious weather, still bears rocks from the time of its very formation.

[Read: The most overhyped planet in the galaxy]

The promise of such samples has been a top research priority for planetary scientists for over a decade. The original plan to do so, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is accordingly ambitious, involving several different spacecraft to retrieve the capsules, launch them into Martian orbit, and fly them back to Earth. No astronauts are involved, but Mars scientists have likened the mission choreography to the Apollo program in terms of complexity.

That plan was apparently destined to unravel from the start. NASA’s independent review found that MSR had “unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning" and was "organized under an unwieldy structure," with "unclear roles, accountability, and authority.” Technically ambitious missions always cost more, and MSR is arguably one of the most complicated that NASA has ever undertaken. But the scientists who help NASA set exploration priorities have no control over the budgets of the resulting programs—Congress does.

Last summer, some congressional appropriators briefly threatened the entire MSR effort with cancellation. This February, facing uncertainty over the money that Congress would allocate for MSR in the next fiscal year, the JPL laid off more than 500 employees. (Congress has since allocated a fraction of what NASA spent on the mission last year.) Thanks to budget concerns, NASA has delayed the launch of a telescope that would monitor potentially hazardous asteroids near Earth, and put on hold a proposed mission to study Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.

Some scientists fear that MSR will draw resources away from other potential projects to search for life in places that they now believe to be far more promising than Mars. The search for alien life in the solar system has long been guided by water, and in the 1990s, when NASA kicked off a golden age of Mars missions, the red planet’s ice regions seemed appealing. But in the years since, other celestial bodies have become more compelling. A moon of Saturn, Titan, is the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has bodies of liquid on its surface, even if that liquid is methane. Two moons of Jupiter, Europa and Enceladus, are likely icy worlds with subsurface oceans; on the latter, cracks in the ice release plumes of salty water, hinting at something like deep-sea hydrothermal activity on Earth. NASA is launching an orbiting mission to Europa later this year, and the latest survey of planetary scientists advised NASA to start working on another to Enceladus. “If I could go anywhere, I would go to Enceladus,” Brook Nunn, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, told me.

[Read: Mars’s soundscape is strangely beautiful]

Even some Mars scientists believe that Mars is no longer the top candidate. Darby Dyar, a planetary geologist at Mount Holyoke College, has spent decades studying Mars. “If anybody should be enthusiastic about the returned samples, it’s me, and I am,” she told me. But now she works on a NASA mission to Venus, a planet that might rival Mars as a candidate for extraterrestrial life, and she says she wouldn’t prioritize MSR over her current research.

For scientists who support Mars exploration, MSR is a problem, siphoning funds away from other efforts to study it. “There’s so many aspects to studying a planet that do not involve analyzing small amounts of rocks in the lab,” says Catherine Neish, a planetary scientist at Western University, in Canada, who’s working on an international mission to map the ice deposits on Mars’s polar regions. NASA pulled its financial support from that project in 2022, citing MSR’s cost as part of its motivation. Planetary scientists have recommended prioritizing a mission to drill deep into the ice at the Martian poles, far from Perseverance’s domain, where conditions could be just comfortable enough to support small life forms now.

NASA is well aware of the all-consuming nature of MSR. As the mission is redrawn, officials have said they are even willing to consider proposals that would bring home just 10 sample tubes, one-third of the amount initially planned. Lindsay Hays, a program scientist at NASA’s planetary-science division, told me that NASA will seek input from the science community about which sample tubes to return. “NASA has a responsibility to use taxpayer funds in the most effective and efficient way possible,” she said. “But it’s also part of our mandate to the nation to do things that have never been done before.”

[Read: Too much of a good thing at NASA]

Most planetary scientists aren’t happy with a potentially scaled-back approach either. “You’ve decimated the science, because now you’re not going to get the diversity that you could have if we brought back the full suite of samples,” Phil Christensen, a geologist at Arizona State University who co-chaired the community’s latest decadal survey, told me.

A badly delayed sample-return mission would fracture NASA’s grand vision for its Martian future. By the 2040s, NASA intends to be focused not on the red planet’s soil, but on sending astronauts there and, crucially, bringing them back. That operation relies on having successfully practiced launching off from Mars, which NASA hasn’t yet managed with MSR. Instead, the agency is back at the drawing board, hoping to find a way out of an $11 billion pit. Officials expect to finish reviewing new proposals and come to a decision on the mission’s future in the fall. Meanwhile, Perseverance chugs along, excavating the mythical oasis of Jezero Crater with each curated tube.