Shortly after becoming the first former American president to be convicted as a felon, Donald Trump told reporters outside a Manhattan courthouse that the verdict was a “disgrace,” a “rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.”

There is a simple, foolproof way to predict when Trump will describe something or someone as rigged or corrupt: when he doesn’t get what he wants. Elections he loses are fraudulent, legal decisions that go against him are rigged, and anyone who opposes him is corrupt. In every single instance, Trump is decrying not a corrupt individual or rigged process, but a person or process that is not corrupt or rigged enough to give him the results he seeks.

Trump’s attorneys did not offer much in the way of a defense during the trial, relying instead on a “haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks,” as the former prosecutor Renato Mariotti put it in The New York Times. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump with falsifying business records in an attempt to cover up a sexual encounter with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels, in order to prevent news of the incident from breaking during the final, crucial weeks of the 2016 election. As my colleague David A. Graham writes, the payments were made through Michael Cohen, a former Trump operative turned prosecution witness, who paid Daniels $130,000 for her silence. The defense failed to convince the jury that Cohen was not a credible witness to Trump’s crimes despite a past record of dishonesty.

[David A. Graham: Guilty on all counts]

Instead, Trump and his allies spent most of their efforts putting the trial on trial, attacking the presiding judge and the process itself in bombastic press conferences outside the courtroom. Trump was far from being unfairly treated—anyone else engaging in such behavior would have been jailed for contempt; rather, Justice Juan Merchan bent over backwards to overlook his antics. Trump violated gag orders by attacking witnesses and attempting to intimidate Daniels during testimony that “at times seemed to be describing nonconsensual sex,” and attacked the judge’s daughter as a “Rabid Trump Hater.” Yet Merchan told Trump, “The last thing I want to do is put you in jail.” In this trial and others, Trump has received special treatment precisely because he is an important political figure.  

Many political writers originally reacted with disdain to Bragg’s charges, treating them as a sideshow to the much more serious state and federal charges regarding Trump’s alleged theft of classified records and unlawful attempt to seize power after losing the 2020 election. It is true that compared with potentially exposing nuclear secrets to foreign spies and attempting to end American democracy, trying to cover up his encounter with Daniels seems like a much less serious crime. But that cover-up, prosecutors said, was also an attempt to influence an election, and the jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts relatively quickly, after two days of deliberation—a sign of the strength of Bragg’s case and a smoothly run trial. Not every jury gets it right, and not every trial is fair. But few of the Republican objections even contest that Trump did the things he was convicted of doing; they simply amount to demands that Trump be able to commit crimes with impunity, because anything less would be political persecution.

Republican lawmakers have settled on rhetoric attacking the trial itself, alleging that, as House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “Democrats cheered as they convicted the leader of the opposing party on ridiculous charges.” That is not what happened. The document-falsification charges Trump faced are relatively common in New York, even if the theory that they could be upped to felonies because of their connection to an attempt to influence a federal election was novel. Trump was convicted, as the Constitution demands, by a jury of his peers in the city where his crimes were committed, in a process Thomas Jefferson described as “the only anchor, ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” The American Founders considered trial by jury one of the core ideals of the American Revolution, in part because royal judges were considered too beholden to the King.

Republicans are attacking the New York trial because that court was seen as insufficiently beholden to their king. That prosecution proceeded relatively smoothly because right-wing judges lacked the ability to sabotage or delay the process. My colleague David Frum wrote that “it says something dark about the American legal system that it cannot deal promptly and effectively with a coup d’état.” But the culprit here is not “the American legal system.” Trials for the more serious federal charges against Trump have been delayed by a sustained attack on the rule of law carried out by right-wing legal activists embedded in the judiciary who are committed to postponing any trial long enough for Trump to potentially win an election and then dismiss the charges himself. Put simply, Trump is unlikely to be tried for these more serious charges not because of vague problems with the American legal system, but because a lot of federal judges are Republicans who want the leader of their party to get away with committing federal crimes.

The Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon has, as The New York Times reported, “effectively imperiled the future of a criminal prosecution that once seemed the most straightforward of the four Mr. Trump is facing.” She “has largely accomplished this by granting a serious hearing to almost every issue—no matter how far-fetched—that Mr. Trump’s lawyers have raised, playing directly into the former president’s strategy of delaying the case from reaching trial.”

The conservative-dominated Supreme Court, of which fully a third of the justices are Trump appointees, has also gone along with Trump’s legal strategy of delaying a trial as long as possible. “In recent years, the Roberts Court has shown greater and greater impatience with criminal defendants’ efforts to forestall punishment,” the law professor Aziz Huq wrote in February, noting that “a general hostility to foot-dragging in criminal cases is a through line in the court’s docket.” Not so with Trump.

“The reason Trump has nevertheless sought to slow down the immunity appeals process is obvious: to postpone the trial date, hopefully pushing it into a time when, as president, he would control the Department of Justice and thus could quash the prosecution altogether,” Andrew Weissmann and Ryan Goodman wrote in The Atlantic in March. “The Supreme Court has shamed itself by being a party to this, when the sole issue before the Court is presidential immunity.”

Trump’s legal theory that former presidents are immune to prosecution for crimes committed while in office unless impeached for those crimes is so laughably broad that it would allow a president to assassinate a political rival and then avoid impeachment by threatening to slaughter every lawmaker in Congress. Yet the right-wing justices, sworn to uphold a constitutional order in which no one is above the law, seemed strangely intrigued by this assertion of imperial power during oral arguments earlier this month. Justice Samuel Alito, who has not denied that a flag supporting Trump’s attempted coup was flying outside his house just days after it happened, wondered out loud if prosecuting former presidents who try to overthrow democracy might harm democracy.

The right-wing justices are acting like Republican politicians who believe they are obligated to delay the trial of their party leader as long as possible and potentially prevent it from happening. This is not simply my jaded assessment. Today, Speaker Johnson told Fox News, “I think that the Justices on the Court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight.”

Even if the justices reject Trump’s absurd legal theories, their dawdling may still prevent a trial from taking place before November. This gamesmanship by the justices on behalf of the party that appointed them bears far more resemblance to a corrupt or rigged process than a trial by a jury of one’s peers does. And that’s precisely the issue: In a Manhattan courtroom, facing 12 ordinary American citizens, Trump could not count on right-wing legal elites to skew the proceeding in his favor. Trump is not angry because the Manhattan trial that convicted him was rigged; he is angry because it wasn’t.

One should take a moment to appreciate the absolute failure of the Republican elite, who have repeatedly refused to hold Trump accountable. Twice Trump was impeached by Congress for interfering in American elections—once by trying to blackmail a foreign government into falsely implicating his political rival in a crime, and once for trying to keep himself in power by fraudulent schemes and violence. Both times, Republican senators spared Trump the consequences by acquitting him.

Whether they did so out of fear of Trump and his followers or because they are on board with his authoritarian project, the result is the same: The head of the GOP is a convicted criminal who holds democracy in contempt and whose objective is seizing power in order to keep himself out of prison. Republicans have only themselves to blame for this outcome.

[Read: The twisted logic of Trump’s attacks on judges]

As the writer Osita Nwanevu noted in March, “The only people who've ever held Trump meaningfully accountable over the last nine years have been ordinary Americans and they've spent that entire time being lectured to and berated by elites who've failed to do anything.” This is overbroad—Democrats impeached him twice—but there is something to it nonetheless. Republican senators voted to acquit twice knowing that Trump was guilty. Most Republican politicians and conservative media figures kissed Trump’s filthy ring rather than ruin their career or even defend their family from his degrading insults. Right-wing jurists have adapted their supposedly ironclad judicial philosophies to fit Trumpist imperatives.

The 12 jurors who convicted Donald Trump will not have taxpayer-funded bodyguards for the rest of their life. They are not protected by reverence for their office or by their connections to power or money. They surely understood that by convicting Trump, they could be subject to harassment and violence, much as others who have refused to do Trump’s bidding have been.

Yet those 12 random New Yorkers showed more courage in convicting Donald Trump, knowing that they could be hounded for doing so, than nearly the entire conservative elite has in the past decade. Small wonder that this same elite is so terrified of the possibility of Trump facing another jury of his peers, an American institution that has so far proved itself resistant to Trump’s corrupting influence.

In meandering address resembling campaign speech, Trump repeats unfounded claim President Biden behind hush-money trial.

Less than an hour after former president Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York, his presidential campaign’s fundraising website crashed due to heavy traffic.

Read more...

For 30 intense, liminal minutes yesterday, the world felt on edge between two possible futures. The jurors in the New York trial of Donald Trump hadn’t taken all that long to deliberate, at it for only two days, and now they were preparing to deliver their verdict.

Any seasoned trial attorney or courtroom reporter will tell you that a quick verdict is usually bad news for the defendant—and yet, Trump had escaped seemingly intractable situations so many times, and with such ease.

As the foreperson of the jury pronounced him guilty on each count, Trump transformed. He was no longer a man to whom gravity no longer applied, but a defendant in a courtroom like any other, one who now faces the indignities of sentencing—potentially including prison time. He has said that he plans to appeal, and an appeals court could eventually toss out the conviction—but that would be a long way away, almost certainly after voters have finished casting their ballots in November. And even if an appeal succeeds, there is no undoing the moment when the country first saw a former president convicted of crimes in a court of law.

In the fall of 2016, the writer Jesse Farrar made a joke on Twitter that would soon prove prophetic. “Well, I'd like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!” he wrote, assuming the voice of an overconfident pundit. The tweet then proceeds to describe Trump easily dodging catastrophe. “Ah! Well,” the imaginary pundit continues. “Nevertheless.”

In the years since, Trump has survived a series of events that for any other politician could well have been career-ending: a special-counsel investigation, two impeachments, an attempted coup, and multiple indictments. Somehow, he was always able to escape consequence. But now, with a verdict against him in New York convicting him of 34 felony counts, Donald Trump is finally facing real consequences.

[David A. Graham: Guilty on all counts]

The conviction is a major win for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who faced criticism from commentators across the political spectrum when he first announced the charges against Trump in March 2023. The case didn’t seem serious enough, the arguments went. Instead of addressing the most pressing, important misconduct by Trump—his effort to illegitimately hold on to power following the 2020 election—it focused on a grubby scheme by Trump and those around him to quash negative stories during his 2016 campaign. But over the past six weeks, as prosecutors set out their case in a dingy Manhattan courtroom, the structure of their legal arguments and the strength of the evidence against Trump came into focus. While Trump sat scowling alongside his defense lawyers, Bragg’s team laid out the trail of documents and testimony implicating him in what prosecutors argued was a conspiracy to improperly influence the 2016 election.

The story involves a series of lies and cover-ups, each nested within the other like matryoshka dolls. Trump and his associates, prosecutors argued, coordinated hush-money payments to women who threatened to go public about their past sexual interactions with the candidate. Then Trump agreed to orchestrate a series of payments to his fixer Michael Cohen to conceal the initial payments. The structure of the charges themselves was matryoshka-like: 34 counts of falsification of business records, elevated to felonies on the basis that Trump intended to violate New York election law, which itself became criminal only because he allegedly relied on an array of different “unlawful means.” Throughout the trial, Trump complained on Truth Social that the charges were baseless and legally confused, as if he could once again talk himself out of trouble. In the courtroom, though, he remained silent. And the jury had the last word.

[Read: Wrong case, right verdict]

Elsewhere in the justice system, Trump’s legal strategy of running down the clock until the election seems to be serving him well. Arguably the most serious case against him, the federal charges regarding January 6, remains stalled while the Supreme Court dithers on the question of presidential immunity. A guilty verdict in that case might carry more historical weight, but there’s nevertheless something appropriate about how the New York trial, in all its grimy mundanity, went first. The facts of the matter are so essentially Trumpian, all stemming from his foundational belief that the rules—of U.S. and New York election law, of state requirements concerning recordkeeping, of basic decency toward other people—do not apply to him. They also speak to his willingness to push past the line of acceptable behavior—sometimes by a great deal—in order to win and hold on to power. And sometimes, it turns out, that conduct will constitute criminal behavior in the eyes of a jury.

The New York case, like all the Trump prosecutions, has always been shadowed by the presidential race. Following the jury’s announcement of its verdict, Justice Juan Merchan scheduled Trump’s sentencing for July 11—just days before he is set to formally accept the GOP’s nomination for president at the Republican National Convention. Trump’s political appeal has always been tied to perceptions of his invincibility. He was a force of nature, the godlike manifestation of the people’s will unbound by law. Now, though, the Trump balloon has been punctured. The Übermensch is not so über. When Trump stepped out of the courtroom after the verdict to deliver remarks to the press, he walked with hunched shoulders, declaring his innocence in a flat, exhausted tone, as if he was struggling to summon his typical reserves of fury. He had a new look about him, unseen even after the 2020 election, when he lost but claimed victory; he looked defeated.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The courtroom dress code for most witnesses and defendants is modest, quiet attire—clothing that no one will be talking about. But when celebrities and politicians are in the mix, it’s not that simple.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

David Frum: Wrong case, right verdict Harvard’s golden silence The maternal-mortality crisis that didn’t happen

Dressing the Part

When Stormy Daniels walked into court for her first day of testimony in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, she wore a subdued black jumpsuit. At first glance, the simple outfit was an unremarkable choice. But the garment told a story: As the fashion critic Vanessa Friedman noted in The New York Times, that jumpsuit was the same one Daniels wore for her cameo in a satirical 2021 film about Trump selling his soul to the devil.

For most people, appearing in court involves trying not to make a splash. Conventional wisdom says that those involved in trials, whether as a witness or as a defendant, should stick to a default of “sensible, down-to-earth attire—nothing too flashy, obviously expensive or overly sexy,” Richard T. Ford, a law professor at Stanford and the author of Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History, told me in an email. Suits, slacks, and blouses are common fare, as are dark colors. But for participants in high-profile cases, the courtroom can serve as a mini stage—a place to express one’s identity or values, or to send a winking message. Earlier this week, Ryan Salame, a former top FTX executive who was just sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, reportedly showed up in court wearing (not for the first time) socks emblazoned with the bitcoin logo—a pointed choice for someone heading to prison for crimes related to his work at a now-infamous cryptocurrency exchange.

Clothing can also shape jurors’ perceptions of a defendant—a truth that is both well documented and, to some extent, enshrined in the laws of the land. The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that a defendant cannot be forced to wear prison attire on the stand, because the clothing could lead jurors to presume that the person is guilty. Jurors’ biases related to race, class, and gender can play a real role in how they perceive the people on the stand, and defendants may use clothing and accessories to try to cut against those preconceptions. In 2012, The Washington Post reported on an instance of five Black male defendants wearing nonprescription glasses to court—a tactic recommended by some lawyers as part of what one called a “nerd defense.” The article mentioned a 2008 study that found that students considered fictitious Black male defendants who wore glasses to be more honest and intelligent than those who didn’t; the same did not prove true for white suspects.

Celebrities and politicians—masters of image formation—sometimes use courtroom clothing in more calculated ways, to highlight or paper over elements of their image. “A high-profile trial is a good way to promote a personal brand,” Ford told me. Trump, for example, stuck throughout the trial with his usual uniform of a suit and large, usually red tie, continuing to project his businessman image; the outfit also makes him look, as one writer put it, like the human equivalent of an American flag. Other well-known defendants use their days in court to pivot away from signature looks—when on trial for fraud charges, Elizabeth Holmes ditched her trademark black turtlenecks for collared shirts, and Sam Bankman-Fried traded in cargo shirts and shaggy hair for a suit and clean haircut in court last fall.

When it comes to the courtroom wardrobe, the line between making a statement and appearing inauthentic is thin. By going too far in the latter direction, defendants can actually undermine their credibility. In a setting where believability is paramount, a whiff of fakeness is a problem. Still, the courtroom is a site of performance. As Ford explained to me, “A trial attorney is telling a story.” Those who appear in court are “characters” in that story, “and the attorney wants those characters to dress the part.”

Related:

What it takes to be a trial lawyer if you’re not a man Finding jurors for an unprecedented trial

Today’s News

The Supreme Court unanimously cleared the way for the National Rifle Association to continue to pursue its First Amendment lawsuit against a New York official who encouraged some companies to stop working with the NRA after the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. Chief Justice John Roberts declined to meet with Democratic senators about the issue of Supreme Court ethics and the scandal embroiling Justice Samuel Alito. In Hong Kong, 14 prodemocracy activists were convicted and face prison time for national-security charges. They are part of a group of 47 individuals who were charged in 2021 with conspiracy to commit subversion; 31 people pleaded guilty, and two others were acquitted.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: In 1906, just as today, people loved New York less for its beauty than for its vibrant energy, Conor Friedersdorf writes. Work in Progress: Americans are thinking about immigration all wrong, Derek Thompson writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Stop Wasting Your Fridge Space

By Yasmin Tayag

My refrigerator has a chronic real-estate problem. The issue isn’t leftovers; it’s condiments. Jars and bottles have filled the door and taken over the main shelves. There’s so little room between the chili crisp, maple syrup, oyster sauce, gochujang, spicy mustard, several kinds of hot sauce, and numerous other condiments that I’ve started stacking containers. Squeezing in new items is like simultaneously playing Tetris and Jenga. And it’s all because of three little words on their labels: Refrigerate after opening.

But a lot of the time, these instructions seem confusing, if not just unnecessary … Ketchup bottles are a fixture of diner counters, and vessels of chili oil and soy sauce sit out on the tables at Chinese restaurants. So why must they take up valuable fridge space at home?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A devil’s bargain with OpenAI To have or not have children Why it’s nice to know you Photos: An island community displaced by climate change

Culture Break

Pierce Derks / IFC / Shudder

Watch. In a Violent Nature (out now in theaters) is a slasher film from the point of view of the silent predator. It might seem like a purely aesthetic exercise, but its experimentation elevates an all-too-familiar genre, David Sims writes.

Listen. The latest episode of Radio Atlantic features an interview with the drag queen Sasha Velour, who won RuPaul’s Drag Race and now stars in her own HBO reality show, We’re Here.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Nothing has disappointed me yet this year quite like Eric, a series that promises extraordinary actors (Benedict Cumberbatch!), ambitious storytelling about municipal crime and corruption (1980s New York!), and thrilling strangeness (there are puppets!). The trailer focuses tightly on the show’s central mystery: When a 9-year-old boy goes missing one day on the way to school, his father—the misanthropic co-creator of a Sesame Street–style children’s series—fixates on the idea that creating a new puppet will help bring his son home. Layering ABBA songs, frenetic crosscuts, and grim visual fragments, the teaser seems to denote something potentially wild and creatively bracing.

So why is the show itself such a letdown? Over six episodes, Eric is dour, messy, and stuck in a format that’s so well-trodden by crime drama at this point, it’s touching bedrock. The puppets, it turns out, are a quirky misdirect—the equivalent of the most boring man at a party wearing a tuxedo T-shirt. Eric wants instead to be the kind of show that uses a precipitating tragedy and a multifaceted ensemble narrative to parse systemic societal failures, but it lacks the animating anger or the exhaustive intimacy with its setting required to pull it off. Written by the British playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, The Split), the series ends up feeling imitative and unsatisfying. It’s flat-pack, prestige-ish television: easy to assemble from familiar narrative pieces, but fundamentally soulless.

[Read: Prestige TV’s new wave of difficult men]

To the show’s credit, the direction, by Lucy Forbes, is superb. Set in New York during the inflection point of the early 1980s, when the dual crises of the AIDS epidemic and gentrification were beginning to take shape, Eric is immersive and almost nostalgic in how attentively it re-creates the era’s jittery feeling. The backdrop is an erratic landscape of decrepit streets, disco fabulousness, and high-ceilinged apartments with Marcel Breuer chairs. A couple of days before the boy, named Edgar, goes missing, he visits his father, Vincent, at work, on the set of Vincent’s beloved series, Good Day Sunshine; the show’s motto is “Be good, be kind, be brave, be different,” as if to counteract the grim realities that kids are absorbing outside the studio. Vincent (played by Cumberbatch), his hand lodged halfway up a puppet version of himself, smiles with genuine pleasure when he sees his son. Around others, though, Vincent is nasty and sour, scoffing at a producer’s attempts to update the show and muttering sexualized insults at a co-worker. At home, he drinks himself into rages, picks on his child, and slurs hateful things at his wife, Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann). Later, Vincent finds drawings on Edgar’s desk of an alcoholic puppet named Eric: a pathetic, purple, morose monster.

Watching Vincent, I found myself longing for the last time Cumberbatch played a damaged, brittle artist with virulent addiction issues, in Showtime’s Patrick Melrose (which, algorithmically but unflatteringly, arrives on Netflix the day before Eric). Both characters are calcified in self-pity and narcissistic indulgence, but Patrick is mordantly funny, insulating himself from reality with irony and bleak one-liners. Vincent is often simply unbearable, and Eric offers only the thinnest explanations as to why. The neglected son of a wealthy real-estate tycoon (The Wire’s John Doman) who’s razing single-room dwellings to build unaffordable skyscrapers, Vincent seems to have struggled with his mental health, which the show sometimes conflates with both creativity and trauma. Tasked by Cassie with walking Edgar to school one day, Vincent lets him go alone instead. But the boy never arrives.

[Read: Patrick Melrose is a lacerating tour de force]

Over the first few episodes, Eric does exactly enough to remind you of better storytelling, cultural works that tend to be described as “novelistic” on-screen. The era and setting recall The Deuce, David Simon’s HBO drama about the sex trade in ’70s and ’80s Times Square—a show that also used the city as an access point to think about corruption, gentrification, and racism more broadly. Simon’s early-2000s tour de force, The Wire, also seems influential to how Eric weaves together its subplots and supporting characters across the city’s social strata. Ledroit, the closeted cop investigating Edgar’s case (McKinley Belcher III), searches for both Edgar and another child whose disappearance has drawn far less attention; at home, his partner is dying of AIDS. The superintendent for Vincent and Cassie’s building, George (The Wire’s Clarke Peters), has provided refuge to Edgar during his parents’ fights, but is potentially a suspect. The show throws in scheming politicians, corrupt cops, sanitation workers, pimps, predatory reporters, scornful bosses, and—most questionably—a whole city of unhoused people living amid the subway tunnels, who suffer the most from Eric’s minimal characterization and focus on Vincent.

The breadth of the show’s universe is ambitious. Morgan seems to want to draw out the connected extremes of the city that Edgar is being raised in—the wealth of his grandfather drawn from the deprivation of so many other New Yorkers, leaving those stuck in the middle to fight among themselves for scraps. New York, it’s made clear, cares much more about some children than others. But the show’s approach to its ancillary characters can come off as mawkish, a cartoonish and Gotham-inflected portrayal of people as either guileless innocents or grubby, sneering villains. The scenes in the tunnels beneath the city, where a woman nods out as she breastfeeds a baby and a desperate character wonders how much to sell a child for, smack of exploitative prurience. We’re supposed to wonder why we can’t keep all children safe, as the show indicts fighting parents, societal deprivation, and outright evil with the same broad brush. The idealized puppet world of Good Day Sunshine—artificially warm, clean, and kind—points out how far both the city and Vincent have fallen.

But the sloppiness of the story makes it impossible to buy what Eric is selling. Edgar’s parents are supposedly demonized by the tabloid press for letting him walk the two blocks to school alone, as though leaving kids to do things on their own wasn’t a key tenet of ’80s parenting. A crucial plot point hinges, rather unbelievably, on a character getting TV reception via an antenna in a camp deep below the city. The hardest-working delinquent in New York is a drug dealer by day and a pimp by night, as if the show has space for only one menacing criminal. Generally, Eric is vague where it needs to be specific, and sketchy with its characters when they should be finely drawn. The lead actors are terrific, but they can’t animate what isn’t there. Even the ultimate significance of puppets is hard to parse. “What is it about puppets, Lennie?” Cassie asks Vincent’s creative partner in the third episode. “They get to say the things that we can’t,” Lennie replies, a comment that might be meaningful if Vincent himself wasn’t such an uninhibited spigot of insults and id.

I craved more detail, and more humanity, for characters such as Yuusuf (Bamar Kane), a graffiti artist with a Basquiat-inspired crown tag, whom Edgar idolized before his disappearance. Even Hoffmann’s Cassie, who gets a lot of screen time, is given little to do except chain-smoke and sink into thousand-yard stares. Shouldn’t performers this good have more to work with? Cumberbatch’s cantankerous father, as selfish and pitiful as he is, isn’t rich enough in layers to make the many scenes of him swilling vodka and frowning feel worthwhile. Instead, in a city of creeps and monsters, he’s just that most familiar and disappointing of bad guys: a man failing his family.

Growing up in a Catholic family, I spent a lot of my teen years being lectured to about the downsides of premarital sex. At their best, these talks, usually delivered in sex-segregated groups, contained a message that, looked at sideways, might have been described as feminist: Dating someone did not entitle them to your body, and a man’s libido was never to be favored over your own (spiritual) well-being. At their worst, they were objectifying and cruel; one speaker advised a group of middle-school girls to envision our purity as an apple that we would one day offer our spouse.

Now I have two daughters of my own. I want to offer them sexual guidance that recognizes the value of caution, but I also want to spare them the sort of shaming my peers and I were subjected to. Yet I’m not confident I know where the line between caution and shame lies. This ambivalence was heightened recently when I read an opinion article in The New York Times about the rise of sexual choking among young people. The practice, relatively rare 20 years ago, has lately become fairly common among college-age kids, according to research by Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health at Bloomington and the author of Yes, Your Kid: What Parents Need to Know About Today’s Teens and Sex. The majority of female college students surveyed at one large American university said that a partner had choked them during sex; 40 percent said they were under 18 when it first happened; and, according to the Times article, most said their partners “never or only sometimes asked before grabbing their necks.”

This development is troubling for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being that choking is incredibly dangerous, regardless of how it is done. Even when it isn’t deadly (and it is, occasionally), repeated asphyxiation restricts blood flow to the brain, which research suggests can result in brain damage not unlike the sort caused by recurrent concussions. The second reason is that the emergence of choking and other “rough sex” behaviors has a decidedly gendered arc, with women overwhelmingly on the receiving end. Some women insist that they enjoy being choked. But there is little evidence that the practice’s newfound popularity has led to an increase in women’s pleasure (they still report reaching orgasm far less often than men), nor has it been matched by an uptick in other practices that might (the idea of using vibrators still seems to give some young men the ick).

Even kink communities—a pretty adventurous lot—have cautioned against choking and articulated that there are limits to what consenting individuals can safely do together. And anyway, doing kink ethically requires a lot of communication about personal desires and boundaries, discussions that young people don’t seem to be having.

In considering all of this, I at first found myself wondering whether the chastity proselytizers of my youth were right to encourage some degree of sexual restraint. The boundless sexual exploration endorsed by a more liberated culture seems to have inadvertently trapped young people in sexual dysfunction—that is, acceptance of sexual variety has morphed into an expectation of sexual violence. Some, no doubt, have discovered a genuine taste for a rougher variety of sex. But it seems that many feel they have no other option. In fact, Herbenick suspects that the violent nature of modern sex is one reason young people are having less of it.

But after talking with researchers, I realized my initial hunch wasn’t quite right. It’s not that an ethos of sexual freedom has backfired; it’s that “freedom” was never really possible in the first place.

We often talk about sex as an exploration, or a discovery, as if an individual’s sexuality—the ways in which they derive thrill and gratification from sex—is something fixed and internal, there for the finding if they are brave enough to look. There is likely some truth to this, Elizabeth Morgan, a psychology professor at Springfield College, told me. Evidence suggests that individual physiologies can predispose people to different sensitivities, Morgan said, and biology “governs certain places on our body that produce different sexual responses.” Even the satisfaction some people seem to derive from choking has a biological explanation: Asphyxiation can produce euphoria. Yet sexuality isn’t fixed; people can “learn to connect physical pleasure with all sorts of different things—people, objects, places, parts of the body, or whatever else,” Morgan said. And these tastes are inevitably shaped by culture.

Young people gather information about whether they should be having sex, and what it ought to involve, from a diversity of sources—subtle and not—over years. Taken together, these data form the “sexual scripts” they rely on in the uncertainty and vulnerability of a sexual encounter. “Teens are not being raised in a vacuum, and they are exposed to a variety of images and messages and song lyrics and pictures and magazines and TikToks and social medias and friends,” Morgan told me. “All of that is shaping their formation of what, when they get maybe alone with one other person, what they’re supposed to be doing.” And it happens whether people realize it or not. In a study published in 2006, Morgan found that among 334 undergraduate students, those who watched dating game shows were more likely to hold gamelike, adversarial beliefs about dating. Some participants reported watching the shows to learn about relationships, while others insisted they watched just for fun—but both groups seemed to internalize the game’s messages about dating as a brutal competition.

[Read: The nudes internet]

The sudden popularity of sexual choking makes a lot more sense when you recognize the social influences guiding sexual behavior. Of the many young men and women Herbenick has interviewed, there were only a few she believes would have found their way to the practice had they been born in another era. Most are “engaging in choking because of the influences around them,” Herbenick told me, including peers, pornography, social media, and TV shows that “tell them that this is what sex is like today.”

The prevalence of rough sex is evidence of the degree to which porn in particular and the internet in general have hijacked the sexual formation of young people—and how dysfunctional sexual dynamics can get as a result. Much of the sex that porn depicts is, well, fake. It is ordered not toward the pleasure of those who appear in it, but toward the titillation of those watching it. And the way that sex unfolds on-screen—without much discussion, as though everything that’s happening is intuitive, expected, and welcomed—creates the impression that it is okay to proceed, without asking, with the expansive list of behaviors it depicts, including the violent ones, Emily Rothman, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, told me.

[Read: The problem with being cool about sex]

The result is that porn and pop culture haven’t so much mainstreamed kink as unkinked it. Young people are arriving to the bedroom with divergent expectations, at a time when many more options for sexual play are on the menu—choking is “just kind of what you do when you have sex,” Herbenick said—which means that if you do not want to be choked or slapped or spit on in bed, you have to say so ahead of time.

This is a problem much bigger than any individual parent can solve, but it’s also not one parents can simply ignore. They can attempt to delay their children’s exposure to porn or steer them toward a better version of it, Morgan told me. But given the easy visibility of rough sex in general—in pop culture and on social media—there’s no getting around the need for parents to talk with their kids about what they’re seeing, even if it requires the adults to push through their own discomfort.

At baseline, that means offering kids context: Explain that the spontaneous, nonnegotiated sex they see on-screen is not real life, that it does not offer a good model for how to engage in sexual behavior, and that the rules of porn don’t necessarily align with the law. Strangling someone without their explicit permission is assault—and even with permission, it could land you in legal trouble if it ends in injury or death. Herbenick told me that many of her students express surprise when she shares articles about young men who have been charged with murder for sexual choking gone wrong: “They say, ‘But it’s consensual, right?’ And I’m like, ‘Does it matter? She’s dead.’”

Equipping kids to navigate this confusing sexual landscape is a delicate task that requires raising children who feel entitled to consent, consideration, and respect within their partnerships, but who are also prepared for the eventuality that those things won’t be offered to them. These conversations will inevitably be awkward, but in such a confused sexual landscape, they are also essential. Rothman told me she has counseled her daughters that there is a decent chance a sexual partner will one day attempt to choke them, that it’s not safe, and that it is on them to state clearly: “I don’t do that.”

Although parents don’t have the power to set the ethical framework guiding modern sexual behavior, we can offer children the one we would like to see take root, ideally one that goes well beyond the boundaries of consent. “We want them to be thinking about good sex, mutually pleasurable sex, intimacy, human connection, care, compassion,” Herbenick said. “Not just ‘Did this person say it’s all right?’”

In other words, there was perhaps one seed of truth in the offensive apple metaphor I heard when I was in middle school. It is good to take your partner, whether present or future, into consideration as you explore your own sexuality—but not to ensure your desirability in someone else’s eyes. Rather, you should care that the sex you want to have is the sort a partner will enjoy, because they, like you, are human. It shouldn’t be a turnoff to treat them like one.

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Jurors found Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts in the former President’s hush money trial in New York on Thursday, according to The New York Times. He is the first American president to become a felon. The 12 Manhattan residents who sit on the jury reached a verdict after their second day of deliberations.

Read more...

The wrong case for the wrong offense just reached the right verdict.

Donald Trump will not be held accountable before the 2024 presidential election for his violent attempt to overturn the previous election. He will not be held accountable before the election for absconding with classified government documents and showing them off at his pay-for-access vacation club. He will not be held accountable before the election for his elaborate conspiracy to manipulate state governments to install fake electors. But he is now a convicted felon all the same.

It says something dark about the American legal system that it cannot deal promptly and effectively with a coup d’état. But it says something bright and hopeful that even an ex-president must face justice for ordinary crimes under the laws of the state in which he chose to live and operate his business.

Over his long career as the most disreputable name in New York real estate, Trump committed many wrongs and frauds. Those wrongs and frauds are beginning to catch up with him, including his sexual assault upon the writer E. Jean Carroll, and then his defamation of her for reporting the assault. Today, the catch-up leaped the barrier from the civil justice system to the criminal justice system.

The verdict should come as a surprise to precisely nobody. Those who protest the verdict most fiercely know better than anyone how justified it is. The would-be Trump running mate Marco Rubio this afternoon shared a video on X, comparing American justice to a Castro show trial. The slur is all the more shameful because Rubio has himself forcefully condemned Trump. “He is a con artist,” Rubio said during the 2016 nomination contest. “He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy—his entire career.” Rubio specifically cited the Trump University scheme as one of Trump’s cons. In 2018, Trump reached a $25 million settlement with people who had enrolled in the courses it offered.

Eight years later, Rubio has attacked a court, a jury, and the whole U.S. system of justice for proving the truth of his own words.

We’re seeing here the latest operation of a foundational rule of the Trump era: If you’re a Trump supporter, you will sooner or later be called to jettison any and every principle you ever purported to hold. Republicans in Donald Trump’s adopted state of Florida oppose voting by felons. They used their legislative power to gut a state referendum restoring the voting rights of persons convicted of a crime. But as fiercely as Florida Republicans oppose voting by felons, they feel entirely differently about voting for felons. That’s now apparently fine, provided the felon is Donald Trump.

What has been served here is not the justice that America required after Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election first by fraud, then by violence. It’s justice instead of an especially ironic sort, driving home to the voting public that before Trump was a constitutional criminal, he got his start as a squalid hush-money-paying, document-tampering, tabloid sleazeball.

If Trump does somehow return to the presidency, his highest priority will be smashing up the American legal system to punish it for holding him to some kind of account—and to prevent it from holding him to higher account for the yet-more-terrible charges pending before state and federal courts. The United States can have a second Trump presidency, or it can retain the rule of law, but not both. No matter how much spluttering and spin-doctoring and outright deception you may hear from the desperate co-partisans of the first Felon American to stand as the presumptive presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party—there is no denying that now.

A New York jury convicted former US President Donald Trump on all 34 charges in his ‘hush money' trial.