For a few hours, Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense was the most disturbing act of Donald Trump’s presidential transition. Surely the Senate wouldn’t confirm an angry Fox News talking head with no serious managerial experience, best known for publicly defending war criminals, to run the largest department in the federal government. Then, in rapid succession, Trump announced appointments for Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The appearance of these newer and even more aberrant characters, like a television show introducing a more villainous heel in its second season, muted the indignation over Hegseth.

Obscured in this flurry of shocking appointments is the fact that Hegseth’s drawbacks are not limited to his light résumé or to the sexual-assault allegation made against him. Inexperienced though he may be at managing bureaucracies, Hegseth has devoted a great deal of time to documenting his worldview, including three books published in the past four years. I spent the previous week reading them: The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically. He may be no less nutty than any of Trump’s more controversial nominees. And given the power he is likely to hold—command over 2 million American military personnel—he is almost certainly far more dangerous than any of them.

Hegseth began his involvement in conservative-movement politics as a Princeton undergraduate. He then joined the Army and quickly developed a profile, when not on active duty, as a budding Republican spokesperson. He testified against Elena Kagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court (on the grounds that, while dean of Harvard Law School, she had blocked military recruiters from campus in protest of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) and lobbied in favor of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. As the Republican Party’s foreign-policy orientation changed radically under Donald Trump, Hegseth’s positions changed with it. But his devotion to the party remained constant. After stints running the advocacy groups Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, and a failed Senate campaign, he finally settled at Fox News, where he joined a chorus in support of Trump.

Along the way, Hegseth has written five books. The first, extolling Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy, revolves around ideas that Hegseth has since renounced after converting to Trumpism. Another is simply a collection of war stories. The other three, all published in the past four years—American Crusade (2020), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and The War on Warriors (2024)—lay out his worldview in florid, explicit, and often terrifying detail.

A foundational tenet of Hegseth’s philosophy, apparently carrying over from his Roosevelt-worshipping era, is a belief in the traditional masculine virtues and the potential for war to inculcate them. Hegseth maintains that boys require discipline and must aspire to strength, resilience, and bravery. His preferred archetype for these virtues appears to be Pete Hegseth, whose manful exploits either on the basketball court (he played for Princeton) or the battlefield are featured in all three books.

[David A. Graham: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

Hegseth complains that society no longer gives veterans like him their proper measure of deference. “Being a veteran no longer demands respect of the coastal elites or reverence from large swaths of the public,” he writes—an observation that will sound strange to anybody who has ever attended a football game or listened to a speech by a politician from either party. “In previous generations, men had to find ways to salvage their honor if they didn’t get to fight in a war.” (The single strongest piece of evidence for Hegseth’s thesis—the popularity of lifelong coastal elitist, proud war-avoider, and POW-mocker Donald Trump—goes unmentioned).

Hegseth’s demand for greater respect grows out of his belief that he personally succeeded in the face of forbidding odds. “I had been an underdog my whole life,” he writes. “I persisted. I worked my ass off.” But the woke military, he complains, doesn’t reward that kind of individual merit and grit. Instead, it has grown so obsessed with diversity that it promotes unqualified minorities and allows women in combat, reducing its effectiveness and alienating hard-working, meritorious soldiers such as, well, him. He also frets that the inclusion of women in combat erodes traditional gender norms. “How do you treat women in a combat situation,” he asks, “without eroding the basic instinct of civilization and the treatment of women in the society at large?”

(The treatment of women by Hegseth specifically happens to be the subject of a recently disclosed police report detailing an alleged sexual assault of a woman at a 2017 political conference. Hegseth denies the allegation and says that the encounter, which took place while he was transitioning between his second and third wives, was consensual. He paid the alleged victim an undisclosed sum in return for her signing a nondisclosure agreement.)

One episode looms especially large in Hegseth’s mind as the embodiment of the wokification of the military and its abandonment of traditional merit. In 2021, Hegseth, an active National Guard member, wished to join the Washington, D.C., unit protecting incoming President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The National Guard, however, excluded him from the detail because he was deemed a security risk on account of a bicep tattoo of the “Deus Vult” symbol—a reference to the Crusades that is popular with some far-right activists.

The logic of the snub was straightforward. Biden’s inauguration took place in the immediate aftermath of an insurrection attempt that had included many members of the armed forces, some operating within far-right networks. But to Hegseth—who protests that the Deus Vult tattoo is simply an expression of his Christian faith, not a white-nationalist symbol—the decision was an unforgivable personal affront.

He expresses indignation at the notion that he could even be suspected of harboring radical ideas. “I fought religious extremists for over twenty years in uniform,” he writes. “Then I was accused of being one.” This is not as paradoxical as Hegseth makes it sound. Many of the people most eager to fight against extremists of one religion are extremist adherents of another religion. An example of this would be the Crusades, an episode that Hegseth highlights in American Crusade as a model to emulate.

In any case, evidence of Hegseth’s extremism does not need to be deduced by interpreting his tattoos. The proof is lying in plain sight. In his three most recent books, Hegseth puts forward a wide range of familiarly misguided ideas: vaccines are “poisonous”; climate change is a hoax (they used to warn about global cooling, you know); George Floyd died of a drug overdose and was not murdered; the Holocaust was perpetrated by “German socialists.”

Where Hegseth’s thinking begins venturing into truly odd territory is his argument, developed in Battle for the American Mind, that the entire basic design of the public education system is the product of a century-long, totally successful communist plot. Hegseth is not just hyperventilating about the 1619 Project, Howard Zinn, or other left-wing fads, as conservatives often do. Instead he argues that the entire design of the U.S. education system is a Marxist scheme with roots going back to the founding of the republic. The deist heresies of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he writes, laid the groundwork to implant communist thought into the school system. Then, “American Progressives in the late 1800s blended the idea of Marxist government with aspects from the Social Gospel and the belief in an American national destiny in order to make Marxism more palatable to Americans.”

The nefarious plan to turn America communist involves steps that appear anodyne to the untrained eye. “Yes, our modern social sciences—like ‘political science,’ previously known as ‘politics,’ and ‘social studies,’ previously known as individual disciplines like ‘history, economics, geography and philosophy’—are byproducts of Marxist philosophy,” he writes. “Let that sink in: the manner in which we study politics, history, and economics in American schools—public and private—today is the product of Marxists. That was always the plan, and it worked.” Hegseth will no longer sit back and allow communist indoctrination to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

The Marxist conspiracy has also, according to Hegseth, begun creeping into the U.S. military, the institution he is now poised to run. His most recent book calls for a straightforward political purge of military brass who had the gall to obey Democratic administrations: “Fire any general who has carried water for Obama and Biden’s extraconstitutional and agenda-driven transformation of our military.” Trump appears to be thinking along similar lines. He is reportedly working on an executive order that will fast-track the removal of officers “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” and compiling a list of officers involved in the Afghanistan retreat, who will likewise be shoved out.

To what end? Trump has already signaled his interest in two revolutionary changes to the Defense Department’s orientation. One is to legalize war crimes, or at least cease enforcement of the rules of war. The president-elect has enthusiastically endorsed the use of illegal military methods and has pardoned American soldiers who committed atrocities against detainees and unarmed civilians, following a loud campaign by Hegseth on Fox News.

[Graeme Wood: War crimes are not difficult to discern]

In The War on Warriors, Hegseth makes plain that he considers the very idea of “rules of war” just more woke nonsense. “Modern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he writes. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.” He repeatedly disparages Army lawyers (“jagoffs”), even claiming that their pointless rules are “why America hasn’t won a war since World War II.” (Ideally, the secretary of defense would be familiar with historical episodes such as the Gulf War.)

Writing about his time guarding prisoners at Guantánamo Bay—where, as even the Bush administration eventually admitted, most detainees were innocent men swept up by American forces—Hegseth describes calls for due process as a stab-in-the-back against brave soldiers like himself. “The nation was dealing with legal issues (mostly led by weak-kneed, America-hating ACLU types) concerning enemy combatants, ‘international rights’ of illegal combatants, and the beginnings of extrajudicial drone attacks,” he writes. “Not to mention the debate about the ‘rights’ of assholes (I mean, ‘detainees’) at Gitmo.”

Trump’s second and even more disturbing interest in having a loyalist run the department is his enthusiasm for deploying troops to curtail and if necessary shoot domestic protesters. His first-term defense secretaries blanched at these demands. Hegseth displays every sign of sharing Trump’s impulses, but in a more theorized form.

The clearest throughline of all three books is the cross-application of Hegseth’s wartime mentality to his struggle against domestic opponents. American Crusade calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left,” with the goal of “utter annihilation,” without which “America cannot, and will not, survive.” Are the Crusades just a metaphor? Sort of, but not really: “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” (Emphasis—gulp—his).

Battle for the American Mind likewise imagines the struggle against the communist educational plot as a military problem: “We are pinned down, caught in an enemy near ambush. The enemy has the high ground, and is shooting from concealed and fortified positions.”

And The War on Warriors repeatedly urges Hegseth’s readers to treat the American left exactly like foreign combatants. Describing the military’s responsibility to the nation, he writes, “The expectation is that we will defend it against all enemies—both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)” The Marxist exception swallows the “not political opponents” rule, because pretty much all of his political opponents turn out to be Marxists. These include, but are not limited to, diversity advocates (“They are Marxists … You know what they are? They’re traitors”), newspapers (“the communist Star Tribune”), and, as noted, almost anybody involved in public education.

Lest there be any ambiguity, Hegseth incessantly equates the left to wartime enemies. “They do not respect cease-fires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy—and then total control,” he writes at one point. At another, he argues, “We should be in panic mode. Almost desperate. Willing to do anything to defeat the ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American military and end the war on our warriors.”

Hegseth’s idea of illegitimate behavior by the domestic enemy is quite expansive. Consider this passage, recalling his time advocating for the Iraq War: “While I debated these things in good faith, the Left mobilized. Electing Obama, railroading the military, pushing women in combat—readiness be damned. The left has never fought fair.” The most remarkable phrase there is “electing Obama.” Hegseth’s notion of unfair tactics used by the left includes not only enacting administrative policies that he disagrees with, but the basic act of voting for Democrats. The inability or unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political opposition likely endeared Hegseth to Trump, who shares the trait.

A Defense Secretary with a tenuous grip on reality, who can’t differentiate foreign enemies from domestic political opponents, and who seems to exist in a state of permanent hysteria is a problem that the United States has never had to survive. The main question I was looking to answer when I started reading Hegseth’s collected works was whether he would follow a Trump command to shoot peaceful protesters. After having read them, I don’t think he would even wait for the order.

When I was taking German in college in the early years of this millennium, I once stumbled upon a word that appeared foreign even when translated into English: Diphtherie, or diphtheria. “What’s diphtheria?” I wondered, having never encountered a single soul afflicted by this disease.

Diphtheria, once known as the “strangling angel,” was a leading killer of children into the early 20th century. The bacterial infection destroys the lining of the throat, forming a layer of dead, leathery tissue that can cause death by suffocation. The disease left no corner of society untouched: Diphtheria killed Queen Victoria’s daughter, and the children of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and Cleveland. Parents used to speak of their first and second families, an elderly woman in Ottawa recalled, because diphtheria had swept through and all their children died.

Today, diphtheria has been so thoroughly forgotten that someone like me, born some 60 years after the invention of a diphtheria vaccine, might have no inkling of the fear it once inspired. If you have encountered diphtheria outside of the historical context, it’s likely because you have scrutinized a childhood immunization schedule: It is the “D” in the DTaP vaccine.

Vaccine breakthroughs over the past two centuries have cumulatively made the modern world a far more hospitable place to be born. For most of human history, half of all children died before reaching age 15; that number is down to just 4 percent worldwide, and far lower in developed countries, with vaccines one of the major drivers of improved life expectancy. “As a child,” the vaccine scientist Stanley Plotkin, now 92, told me, “I had several infectious diseases that almost killed me.” He ticked them off: pertussis, influenza, pneumococcal pneumonia—all of which children today are routinely vaccinated against.

But the success of vaccines has also allowed for a modern amnesia about the level of past human suffering. In a world where the ravages of polio or measles are remote, the risks of vaccines—whether imagined, or real but minute—are able to loom much larger in the minds of parents. This is the space exploited by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the nation’s foremost anti-vaccine activists and now nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. It is a stunning reversal of fortune for a man relegated to the fringes of the Democratic Party just last year. And it is also a reversal for Donald Trump, who might have flirted with anti-vaccine rhetoric in the past but also presided over a record-breaking race to create a COVID vaccine. Kennedy has promised that he would not yank vaccines off the market, but his nomination normalizes and emboldens the anti-vaccine movement. The danger now is that diseases confined to the past become diseases of the future.

Walt Orenstein trained as a pediatrician in the 1970s, when he often saw children with meningitis—a dangerous infection of membranes around the brain—that can be caused by a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b or Hib. (Despite the name, it is not related to the influenza virus.) “I remember doing loads of spinal taps,” he told me, to diagnose the disease. The advent of a Hib vaccine in the 1980s virtually wiped these infections out; babies are now routinely vaccinated in the first 15 months of life. “It’s amazing there are people today calling themselves pediatricians who have never seen a case of Hib,” he says. He remembers rotavirus, too, back when it used to cause about half of all hospitalizations for diarrhea in kids under 5. “People used to say, ‘Don’t get the infant ward during diarrhea season,’” Orenstein told me. But in the 2000s, the introduction of rotavirus vaccines for babies six months and younger sharply curtailed hospitalizations.

To Orenstein, it is important that the current rotavirus vaccine has proved effective but also safe. An older rotavirus vaccine was taken off the market in 1999 when regulators learned that it gave babies an up to one-in-10,000 chance of developing a serious but usually treatable bowel obstruction called intussusception. The benefits arguably still outweighed the risks—about one in 50 babies infected with rotavirus need hospitalization—but the United States has a high bar for vaccine safety. Similarly, the U.S. switched from an oral polio vaccine containing live, weakened virus—which had a one in 2.4 million chance of causing paralysis—to a more expensive but safer shot made with inactivated viruses that cannot cause disease. No vaccine is perfect, says Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist and the president of the Atria Academy of Science & Medicine, who himself developed severe tinnitus after getting the COVID vaccine. “There will always be risks,” he told me, and he acknowledges the need to speak candidly about them. But vaccine recommendations are based on benefits that are “overwhelming” compared with their risks, he said.

The success of childhood vaccination has a perverse effect of making the benefits of these vaccines invisible. Let’s put it this way: If everyone around me is vaccinated for diphtheria but I am not, I still have virtually no chance of contracting it. There is simply no one to give it to me. This protection is also known as “herd immunity” or “community protection.” But that logic falls apart when vaccination rates slip, and the bubble of protective immunity dissolves. The impact won’t be immediate. “If we stopped vaccinating today, we wouldn’t get outbreaks tomorrow,” Orenstein said. In time, though, all-but-forgotten diseases could once again find a foothold, sickening those who chose not to be vaccinated but also those who could not be vaccinated, such as people with certain medical conditions and newborns too young for shots. In aggregate, individual decisions to refuse vaccines end up having far-reaching consequences.

Evolutionary biologists have argued that plague and pestilence rose in tandem with human civilization. Before humans built cities, back when we still lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, a novel virus—say, from a bat—might tear through a group only to reach a dead end once everyone was immune or deceased. With no one else to infect, such a virus will burn itself out. Only when humans started clustering in large cities could certain viruses keep finding new susceptibles—babies or new migrants with no immunity, people with waning immunity—and smolder on and on and on. Infectious disease, you might then say, is a necessary condition of living in a society.

But human ingenuity has handed us a cheat code: Vaccines now allow us to enjoy the benefits of fellow humanity while preventing the constant exchange of deadly pathogens. And vaccines can, through the power of herd immunity, protect even those who are too young or too sick to be effectively vaccinated themselves. When we get vaccinated, or don’t, our decisions ricochet through the lives of others. Vaccines make us responsible for more than ourselves. And is that not what it means to live in a society?

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

For anyone who teaches at a business school, the blog post was bad news. For Juliana Schroeder, it was catastrophic. She saw the allegations when they first went up, on a Saturday in early summer 2023. Schroeder teaches management and psychology at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. One of her colleagues—­­a star professor at Harvard Business School named Francesca Gino—­had just been accused of academic fraud. The authors of the blog post, a small team of business-school researchers, had found discrepancies in four of Gino’s published papers, and they suggested that the scandal was much larger. “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data,” the blog post said. “Perhaps dozens.”

The story was soon picked up by the mainstream press. Reporters reveled in the irony that Gino, who had made her name as an expert on the psychology of breaking rules, may herself have broken them. (“Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings,” a New York Times headline read.) Harvard Business School had quietly placed Gino on administrative leave just before the blog post appeared. The school had conducted its own investigation; its nearly 1,300-page internal report, which was made public only in the course of related legal proceedings, concluded that Gino “committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” in the four papers. (Gino has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.)

Schroeder’s interest in the scandal was more personal. Gino was one of her most consistent and important research partners. Their names appear together on seven peer-reviewed articles, as well as 26 conference talks. If Gino were indeed a serial cheat, then all of that shared work—and a large swath of Schroeder’s CV—was now at risk. When a senior academic is accused of fraud, the reputations of her honest, less established colleagues may get dragged down too. “Just think how horrible it is,” Katy Milkman, another of Gino’s research partners and a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. “It could ruin your life.”

Juliana Schroeder (LinkedIn)

To head that off, Schroeder began her own audit of all the research papers that she’d ever done with Gino, seeking out raw data from each experiment and attempting to rerun the analyses. As that summer progressed, her efforts grew more ambitious. With the help of several colleagues, Schroeder pursued a plan to verify not just her own work with Gino, but a major portion of Gino’s scientific résumé. The group started reaching out to every other researcher who had put their name on one of Gino’s 138 co-authored studies. The Many Co-Authors Project, as the self-audit would be called, aimed to flag any additional work that might be tainted by allegations of misconduct and, more important, to absolve the rest—and Gino’s colleagues, by extension—of the wariness that now afflicted the entire field.

That field was not tucked away in some sleepy corner of academia, but was instead a highly influential one devoted to the science of success. Perhaps you’ve heard that procrastination makes you more creative, or that you’re better off having fewer choices, or that you can buy happiness by giving things away. All of that is research done by Schroeder’s peers—­business-school professors who apply the methods of behavioral research to such subjects as marketing, management, and decision making. In viral TED Talks and airport best sellers, on morning shows and late-night television, these business-school psychologists hold tremendous sway. They also have a presence in this magazine and many others: Nearly every business academic who is named in this story has been either quoted or cited by The Atlantic on multiple occasions. A few, including Gino, have written articles for The Atlantic themselves.

Francesca Gino (LinkedIn)

Business-school psychologists are scholars, but they aren’t shooting for a Nobel Prize. Their research doesn’t typically aim to solve a social problem; it won’t be curing anyone’s disease. It doesn’t even seem to have much influence on business practices, and it certainly hasn’t shaped the nation’s commerce. Still, its flashy findings come with clear rewards: consulting gigs and speakers’ fees, not to mention lavish academic incomes. Starting salaries at business schools can be $240,000 a year—double what they are at campus psychology departments, academics told me.

The research scandal that has engulfed this field goes far beyond the replication crisis that has plagued psychology and other disciplines in recent years. Long-standing flaws in how scientific work is done—including insufficient sample sizes and the sloppy application of statistics—have left large segments of the research literature in doubt. Many avenues of study once deemed promising turned out to be dead ends. But it’s one thing to understand that scientists have been cutting corners. It’s quite another to suspect that they’ve been creating their results from scratch.

[Read: Psychology’s replication crisis has a silver lining]

Schroeder has long been interested in trust. She’s given lectures on “building trust-based relationships”; she’s run experiments measuring trust in colleagues. Now she was working to rebuild the sense of trust within her field. A lot of scholars were involved in the Many Co-Authors Project, but Schroeder’s dedication was singular. In October 2023, a former graduate student who had helped tip off the team of bloggers to Gino’s possible fraud wrote her own “post mortem” on the case. It paints Schroeder as exceptional among her peers: a professor who “sent a clear signal to the scientific community that she is taking this scandal seriously.” Several others echoed this assessment, saying that ever since the news broke, Schroeder has been relentless—heroic, even—in her efforts to correct the record.

But if Schroeder planned to extinguish any doubts that remained, she may have aimed too high. More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied. The rot in business schools runs much deeper than almost anyone had guessed, and the blame is unnervingly widespread. In the end, even Schroeder would become a suspect.

Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected—and it was one that she herself had helped write.

The work, titled “Don’t Stop Believing: Rituals Improve Performance by Decreasing Anxiety,” was published in 2016, with Schroeder’s name listed second out of seven authors. Gino’s name was fourth. (The first few names on an academic paper are typically arranged in order of their contributions to the finished work.) The research it described was pretty standard for the field: a set of clever studies demonstrating the value of a life hack—one simple trick to nail your next presentation. The authors had tested the idea that simply following a routine—even one as arbitrary as drawing something on a piece of paper, sprinkling salt over it, and crumpling it up—could help calm a person’s nerves. “Although some may dismiss rituals as irrational,” the authors wrote, “those who enact rituals may well outperform the skeptics who forgo them.”

In truth, the skeptics have never had much purchase in business-school psychology. For the better part of a decade, this finding had been garnering citations—­about 200, per Google Scholar. But when Schroeder looked more closely at the work, she realized it was questionable. In October 2023, she sketched out some of her concerns on the Many Co-Authors Project website.

The paper’s first two key experiments, marked in the text as Studies 1a and 1b, looked at how the salt-and-paper ritual might help students sing a karaoke version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” in a lab setting. According to the paper, Study 1a found that people who did the ritual before they sang reported feeling much less anxious than people who did not; Study 1b confirmed that they had lower heart rates, as measured with a pulse oximeter, than students who did not.

As Schroeder noted in her October post, the original records of these studies could not be found. But Schroeder did have some data spreadsheets for Studies 1a and 1b—she’d posted them shortly after the paper had been published, along with versions of the studies’ research questionnaires—and she now wrote that “unexplained issues were identified” in both, and that there was “uncertainty regarding the data provenance” for the latter. Schroeder’s post did not elaborate, but anyone can look at the spreadsheets, and it doesn’t take a forensic expert to see that the numbers they report are seriously amiss.

The “unexplained issues” with Studies 1a and 1b are legion. For one thing, the figures as reported don’t appear to match the research as described in other public documents. (For example, where the posted research questionnaire instructs the students to assess their level of anxiety on a five-point scale, the results seem to run from 2 to 8.) But the single most suspicious pattern shows up in the heart-rate data. According to the paper, each student had their pulse measured three times: once at the very start, again after they were told they’d have to sing the karaoke song, and then a third time, right before the song began. I created three graphs to illustrate the data’s peculiarities. They depict the measured heart rates for each of the 167 students who are said to have participated in the experiment, presented from left to right in their numbered order on the spreadsheet. The blue and green lines, which depict the first and second heart-rate measurements, show those values fluctuating more or less as one might expect for a noisy signal, measured from lots of individuals. But the red line doesn’t look like this at all: Rather, the measured heart rates form a series going up, across a run of more than 100 consecutive students.

DATA FROM “DON’T STOP BELIEVING: RITUALS IMPROVE PERFORMANCE BY DECREASING ANXIETY” (2016), STUDY 1B (Charts by The Atlantic. Based on data posted to OSF.io.)

I’ve reviewed the case with several researchers who suggested that this tidy run of values is indicative of fraud. “I see absolutely no reason” the sequence in No. 3 “should have the order that it does,” James Heathers, a scientific-­integrity investigator and an occasional Atlantic contributor, told me. The exact meaning of the pattern is unclear; if you were fabricating data, you certainly wouldn’t strive for them to look like this. Nick Brown, a scientific-integrity researcher affiliated with Linnaeus University Sweden, guessed that the ordered values in the spreadsheet may have been cooked up after the fact. In that case, it might have been less important that they formed a natural-­looking plot than that, when analyzed together, they matched fake statistics that had already been reported. “Someone sat down and burned quite a bit of midnight oil,” he proposed. I asked how sure he was that this pattern of results was the product of deliberate tampering; “100 percent, 100 percent,” he told me. “In my view, there is no innocent explanation in a universe where fairies don’t exist.”

Schroeder herself would come to a similar conclusion. Months later, I asked her whether the data were manipulated. “I think it’s very likely that they were,” she said. In the summer of 2023, when she reported the findings of her audit to her fellow authors, they all agreed that, whatever really happened, the work was compromised and ought to be retracted. But they could not reach consensus on who had been at fault. Gino did not appear to be responsible for either of the paper’s karaoke studies. Then who was?

This would not seem to be a tricky question. The published version of the paper has two lead authors who are listed as having “contributed equally” to the work. One of them was Schroeder. All of the co-authors agree that she handled two experiments—labeled in the text as Studies 3 and 4—in which participants solved a set of math problems. The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino’s at Harvard Business School.

From the start, there was every reason to assume that Brooks had run the studies that produced the fishy data. Certainly they are similar to Brooks’s prior work. The same quirky experimental setup—in which students were asked to wear a pulse oximeter and sing a karaoke version of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”—­appears in her dissertation from the Wharton School in 2013, and she published a portion of that work in a sole-authored paper the following year. (Brooks herself is musically inclined, performing around Boston in a rock band.)

Yet despite all of this, Brooks told the Many Co-Authors Project that she simply wasn’t sure whether she’d had access to the raw data for Study 1b, the one with the “no innocent explanation” pattern of results. She also said she didn’t know whether Gino played a role in collecting them. On the latter point, Brooks’s former Ph.D. adviser, Maurice Schweitzer, expressed the same uncertainty to the Many Co-Authors Project.

Plenty of evidence now suggests that this mystery was manufactured. The posted materials for Study 1b, along with administrative records from the lab, indicate that the work was carried out at Wharton, where Brooks was in grad school at the time, studying under Schweitzer and running another, very similar experiment. Also, the metadata for the oldest public version of the data spreadsheet lists “Alison Wood Brooks” as the last person who saved the file.

Alison Wood Brooks (LinkedIn)

Brooks, who has published research on the value of apologies, and whose first book—Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves—is due out from Crown in January, did not respond to multiple requests for interviews or to a detailed list of written questions. Gino said that she “neither collected nor analyzed the data for Study 1a or Study 1b nor was I involved in the data audit.”

If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder’s audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino’s suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest. “The goal was to protect the innocent victims, and to find out what’s true about the science that had been done,” Milkman told me. But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren’t linked to Gino. That would mean Schroeder had another colleague who had contaminated her research. It would mean that her reputation—and the credibility of her entire field—was under threat from multiple directions at once.

Among the four research papers in which Gino was accused of cheating is one about the human tendency to misreport facts and figures for personal gain. Which is to say: She was accused of faking data for a study of when and how people might fake data. Amazingly, a different set of data from the same paper had already been flagged as the product of potential fraud, two years before the Gino scandal came to light. The first was contributed by Dan Ariely of Duke University—a frequent co-author of Gino’s and, like her, a celebrated expert on the psychology of telling lies. (Ariely has said that a Duke investigation—which the school has not acknowledged—discovered no evidence that he “falsified data or knowingly used falsified data.” He has also said that the investigation “determined that I should have done more to prevent faulty data from being published in the 2012 paper.”)

The existence of two apparently corrupted data sets was shocking: a keystone paper on the science of deception wasn’t just invalid, but possibly a scam twice over. But even in the face of this ignominy, few in business academia were ready to acknowledge, in the summer of 2023, that the problem might be larger still—and that their research literature might well be overrun with fantastical results.

Some scholars had tried to raise alarms before. In 2019, Dennis Tourish, a professor at the University of Sussex Business School, published a book titled Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. He cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they’ve encountered fabricated or falsified data. Even that alarming rate may undersell the problem, Tourish told me, given all of the misbehavior in his discipline that gets overlooked or covered up.

Anonymous surveys of various fields find that roughly 2 percent of scholars will admit to having fabricated, falsified, or modified data at least once in their career. But business-school psychology may be especially prone to misbehavior. For one thing, the field’s research standards are weaker than those for other psychologists. In response to the replication crisis, campus psychology departments have lately taken up a raft of methodological reforms. Statistically suspect practices that were de rigueur a dozen years ago are now uncommon; sample sizes have gotten bigger; a study’s planned analyses are now commonly written down before the work is carried out. But this great awakening has been slower to develop in business-school psychology, several academics told me. “No one wants to kill the golden goose,” one early-career researcher in business academia said. If management and marketing professors embraced all of psychology’s reforms, he said, then many of their most memorable, most TED Talk–able findings would go away. “To use marketing lingo, we’d lose our unique value proposition.”

It’s easy to imagine how cheating might lead to more cheating. If business-school psychology is beset with suspect research, then the bar for getting published in its flagship journals ratchets up: A study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out. Such incentives move in only one direction: Eventu­ally, the standard tools for torturing your data will no longer be enough. Now you have to go a little further; now you have to cut your data up, and carve them into sham results. Having one or two prolific frauds around would push the bar for publishing still higher, inviting yet more corruption. (And because the work is not exactly brain surgery, no one dies as a result.) In this way, a single discipline might come to look like Major League Baseball did 20 years ago: defined by juiced-up stats.

In the face of its own cheating scandal, MLB started screening every single player for anabolic steroids. There is no equivalent in science, and certainly not in business academia. Uri Simonsohn, a professor at the Esade Business School in Barcelona, is a member of the blogging team, called Data Colada, that caught the problems in both Gino’s and Ariely’s work. (He was also a motivating force behind the Many Co-Authors Project.) Data Colada has called out other instances of sketchy work and apparent fakery within the field, but its efforts at detection are highly targeted. They’re also quite unusual. Crying foul on someone else’s bad research makes you out to be a troublemaker, or a member of the notional “data police.” It can also bring a claim of defamation. Gino filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Harvard and the Data Colada team not long after the bloggers attacked her work. (This past September, a judge dismissed the portion of her claims that involved the bloggers and the defamation claim against Harvard. She still has pending claims against the university for gender discrimination and breach of contract.) The risks are even greater for those who don’t have tenure. A junior academic who accuses someone else of fraud may antagonize the senior colleagues who serve on the boards and committees that make publishing decisions and determine funding and job appointments.

[Read: Francesca Gino, the Harvard expert on dishonesty who is accused of lying]

These risks for would-be critics reinforce an atmosphere of complacency. “It’s embarrassing how few protections we have against fraud and how easy it has been to fool us,” Simonsohn said in a 2023 webinar. He added, “We have done nothing to prevent it. Nothing.”

Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred. (Harvard Business School’s head of communications, Mark Cautela, declined to comment.) Her efforts to address the issue through the University of Pennsylvania’s Office of Research Integrity likewise seemed fruitless. (A spokesperson for the Wharton School would not comment on “the existence or status of” any investigations.)

Retractions have a way of dragging out in science publishing. This one was no exception. Maryam Kouchaki, an expert on workplace ethics at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and co–editor in chief of the journal that published the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper, had first received the authors’ call to pull their work in August 2023. As the anniversary of that request drew near, Schroeder still had no idea how the suspect data would be handled, and whether Brooks—or anyone else—would be held responsible.

Finally, on October 1, the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper was removed from the scientific literature. The journal’s published notice laid out some basic conclusions from Schroeder’s audit: Studies 1a and 1b had indeed been run by Brooks, the raw data were not available, and the posted data for 1b showed “streaks of heart rate ratings that were unlikely to have occurred naturally.” Schroeder’s own contributions to the paper were also found to have some flaws: Data points had been dropped from her analysis without any explanation in the published text. (Although this practice wasn’t fully out-of-bounds given research standards at the time, the same behavior would today be understood as a form of “p-hacking”—a pernicious source of false-positive results.) But the notice did not say whether the fishy numbers from Study 1b had been fabricated, let alone by whom. Someone other than Brooks may have handled those data before publication, it suggested. “The journal could not investigate this study any further.”

Two days later, Schroeder posted to X a link to her full and final audit of the paper. “It took *hundreds* of hours of work to complete this retraction,” she wrote, in a thread that described the flaws in her own experiments and Studies 1a and 1b. “I am ashamed of helping publish this paper & how long it took to identify its issues,” the thread concluded. “I am not the same scientist I was 10 years ago. I hold myself accountable for correcting any inaccurate prior research findings and for updating my research practices to do better.” Her peers responded by lavishing her with public praise. One colleague called the self-audit “exemplary” and an “act of courage.” A prominent professor at Columbia Business School congratulated Schroeder for being “a cultural heroine, a role model for the rising generation.”

But amid this celebration of her unusual transparency, an important and related story had somehow gone unnoticed. In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she’d blown the whistle on herself.

That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she’d found “an issue” with one more paper that she’d produced with Gino. This one, “Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-Control,” came out in 2018 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; its author list overlaps substantially with that of the earlier “Don’t Stop Believing” paper (though Brooks was not involved). Like the first, it describes a set of studies that purport to show the power of the ritual effect. Like the first, it includes at least one study for which data appear to have been altered. And like the first, its data anomalies have no apparent link to Gino.

The basic facts are laid out in a document that Schroeder put into an online repository, describing an internal audit that she conducted with the help of the lead author, Allen Ding Tian. (Tian did not respond to requests for comment.) The paper opens with a field experiment on women who were trying to lose weight. Schroeder, then in grad school at the University of Chicago, oversaw the work; participants were recruited at a campus gym.

Half of the women were instructed to perform a ritual before each meal for the next five days: They were to put their food into a pattern on their plate. The other half were not. Then Schroeder used a diet-tracking app to tally all the food that each woman reported eating, and found that the ones in the ritual group took in about 200 fewer calories a day, on average, than the others. But in 2023, when she started digging back into this research, she uncovered some discrepancies. According to her study’s raw materials, nine of the women who reported that they’d done the food-arranging ritual were listed on the data spreadsheet as being in the control group; six others were mislabeled in the opposite direction. When Schroeder fixed these errors for her audit, the ritual effect completely vanished. Now it looked as though the women who’d done the food-arranging had consumed a few more calories, on average, than the women who had not.

Mistakes happen in research; sometimes data get mixed up. These errors, though, appear to be intentional. The women whose data had been swapped fit a suspicious pattern: The ones whose numbers might have undermined the paper’s hypothesis were disproportionately affected. This is not a subtle thing; among the 43 women who reported that they’d done the ritual, the six most prolific eaters all got switched into the control group. Nick Brown and James Heathers, the scientific-integrity researchers, have each tried to figure out the odds that anything like the study’s published result could have been attained if the data had been switched at random. Brown’s analysis pegged the answer at one in 1 million. “Data manipulation makes sense as an explanation,” he told me. “No other explanation is immediately obvious to me.” Heathers said he felt “quite comfortable” in concluding that whatever went wrong with the experiment “was a directed process, not a random process.”

Whether or not the data alterations were intentional, their specific form—flipped conditions for a handful of participants, in a way that favored the hypothesis—matches up with data issues raised by Harvard Business School’s investigation into Gino’s work. Schroeder rejected that comparison when I brought it up, but she was willing to accept some blame. “I couldn’t feel worse about that paper and that study,” she told me. “I’m deeply ashamed of it.”

Still, she said that the source of the error wasn’t her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused. She said that two RAs, both undergraduates, had recruited the women at the gym, and that the scene there was chaotic: Sometimes multiple people came up to them at once, and the undergrads may have had to make some changes on the fly, adjusting which participants were being put into which group for the study. Maybe things went wrong from there, Schroeder said. One or both RAs might have gotten ruffled as they tried to paper over inconsistencies in their record-keeping. They both knew what the experiment was meant to show, and how the data ought to look—so it’s possible that they peeked a little at the data and reassigned the numbers in the way that seemed correct. (Schroeder’s audit lays out other possibilities, but describes this one as the most likely.)

Schroeder’s account is certainly plausible, but it’s not a perfect fit with all of the facts. For one thing, the posted data indicate that during most days on which the study ran, the RAs had to deal with only a handful of participants—sometimes just two. How could they have gotten so bewildered?

Any further details seem unlikely to emerge. The paper was formally retracted in the February issue of the journal. Schroeder has chosen not to name the RAs who helped her with the study, and she told me that she hasn’t tried to contact them. “I just didn’t think it was appropriate,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like it would help matters at all.” By her account, neither one is currently in academia, and she did not discover any additional issues when she reviewed their other work. (I reached out to more than a dozen former RAs and lab managers who were thanked in Schroeder’s published papers from around this time. Five responded to my queries; all of them denied having helped with this experiment.) In the end, Schroeder said, she took the data at the assistants’ word. “I did not go in and change labels,” she told me. But she also said repeatedly that she doesn’t think her RAs should take the blame. “The responsibility rests with me, right? And so it was appropriate that I’m the one named in the retraction notice,” she said. Later in our conversation, she summed up her response: “I’ve tried to trace back as best I can what happened, and just be honest.”

Across the many months I spent reporting this story, I’d come to think of Schroeder as a paragon of scientific rigor. She has led a seminar on “Experimental Design and Research Methods” in a business program with a sterling reputation for its research standards. She’d helped set up the Many Co-Authors Project, and then pursued it as aggressively as anyone. (Simonsohn even told me that Schroeder’s look-at-everything approach was a little “overboard.”) I also knew that she was devoted to the dreary but important task of reproducing other people’s published work.

As for the dieting research, Schroeder had owned the awkward optics. “It looks weird,” she told me when we spoke in June. “It’s a weird error, and it looks consistent with changing things in the direction to get a result.” But weirder still was how that error came to light, through a detailed data audit that she’d undertaken of her own accord. Apparently, she’d gone to great effort to call attention to a damning set of facts. That alone could be taken as a sign of her commitment to transparency.

But in the months that followed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that another theory also fit the facts. Schroeder’s leading explanation for the issues in her work—An RA must have bungled the data—sounded distressingly familiar. Francesca Gino had offered up the same defense to Harvard’s investigators. The mere repetition of this story doesn’t mean that it’s invalid: Lab techs and assistants really do mishandle data on occasion, and they may of course engage in science fraud. But still.

As for Schroeder’s all-out focus on integrity, and her public efforts to police the scientific record, I came to understand that most of these had been adopted, all at once, in mid-2023, shortly after the Gino scandal broke. (The version of Schroeder’s résumé that was available on her webpage in the spring of 2023 does not describe any replication projects whatsoever.) That makes sense if the accusations changed the way she thought about her field—and she did describe them to me as “a wake-up call.” But here’s another explanation: Maybe Schroeder saw the Gino scandal as a warning that the data sleuths were on the march. Perhaps she figured that her own work might end up being scrutinized, and then, having gamed this out, she decided to be a data sleuth herself. She’d publicly commit to reexamining her colleagues’ work, doing audits of her own, and asking for corrections. This would be her play for amnesty during a crisis.

I spoke with Schroeder for the last time on the day before Halloween. She was notably composed when I confronted her with the possibility that she’d engaged in data-tampering herself. She repeated what she’d told me months before, that she definitely did not go in and change the numbers in her study. And she rejected the idea that her self-audits had been strategic, that she’d used them to divert attention from her own wrongdoing. “Honestly, it’s disturbing to hear you even lay it out,” she said. “Because I think if you were to look at my body of work and try to replicate it, I think my hit rate would be good.” She continued: “So to imply that I’ve actually been, I don’t know, doing a lot of fraudulent stuff myself for a long time, and this was a moment to come clean with it? I just don’t think the evidence bears that out.”

That wasn’t really what I’d meant to imply. The story I had in mind was more mundane—and in a sense more tragic. I went through it: Perhaps she’d fudged the results for a study just once or twice early in her career, and never again. Perhaps she’d been committed, ever since, to proper scientific methods. And perhaps she really did intend to fix some problems in her field.

Schroeder allowed that she’d been susceptible to certain research practices—excluding data, for example—that are now considered improper. So were many of her colleagues. In that sense, she’d been guilty of letting her judgment be distorted by the pressure to succeed. But I understood what she was saying: This was not the same as fraud.

Throughout our conversations, Schroeder had avoided stating outright that anyone in particular had committed fraud. But not all of her colleagues had been so cautious. Just a few days earlier, I’d received an unexpected message from Maurice Schweitzer, the senior Wharton business-school professor who oversaw Alison Wood Brooks’s “Don’t Stop Believing” research. Up to this point, he had not responded to my request for an interview, and I figured he’d chosen not to comment for this story. But he finally responded to a list of written questions. It was important for me to know, his email said, that Schroe­der had “been involved in data tampering.” He included a link to the retraction notice for her paper on rituals and eating. When I asked Schweitzer to elaborate, he did not respond. (Schweitzer’s most recent academic work is focused on the damaging effects of gossip; one of his papers from 2024 is titled “The Interpersonal Costs of Revealing Others’ Secrets.”)

I laid this out for Schroeder on the phone. “Wow,” she said. “That’s unfortunate that he would say that.” She went silent for a long time. “Yeah, I’m sad he’s saying that.”

Another long silence followed. “I think that the narrative that you laid out, Dan, is going to have to be a possibility,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a way I can refute it, but I know what the truth is, and I think I did the right thing, with trying to clean the literature as much as I could.”

This is all too often where these stories end: A researcher will say that whatever really happened must forever be obscure. Dan Ariely told Business Insider in February 2024 : “I’ve spent a big part of the last two years trying to find out what happened. I haven’t been able to … I decided I have to move on with my life.” Schweit­zer told me that the most relevant files for the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper are “long gone,” and that the chain of custody for its data simply can’t be tracked. (The Wharton School agreed, telling me that it “does not possess the requested data” for Study 1b, “as it falls outside its current data retention period.”) And now Schroeder had landed on a similar position.

It’s uncomfortable for a scientist to claim that the truth might be unknowable, just as it would be for a journalist, or any other truth-seeker by vocation. I daresay the facts regarding all of these cases may yet be amenable to further inquiry. The raw data from Study 1b may still exist, somewhere; if so, one might compare them with the posted spreadsheet to confirm that certain numbers had been altered. And Schroeder says she has the names of the RAs who worked on her dieting experiment; in theory, she could ask those people for their recollections of what happened. If figures aren’t checked, or questions aren’t asked, it’s by choice.

What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. “The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth,” Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. “It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it.”

Pablo Delcan

Some degree of disillusionment was common among the academics I spoke with for this story. The early-career researcher in business academia told me that he has an “unhealthy hobby” of finding manipulated data. But now, he said, he’s giving up the fight. “At least for the time being, I’m done,” he told me. “Feeling like Sisyphus isn’t the most fulfilling experience.” A management professor who has followed all of these cases very closely gave this assessment: “I would say that distrust characterizes many people in the field—­it’s all very depressing and demotivating.”

It’s possible that no one is more depressed and demotivated, at this point, than Juliana Schroeder. “To be honest with you, I’ve had some very low moments where I’m like, ‘Well, maybe this is not the right field for me, and I shouldn’t be in it,’ ” she said. “And to even have any errors in any of my papers is incredibly embarrassing, let alone one that looks like data-tampering.”

I asked her if there was anything more she wanted to say.

“I guess I just want to advocate for empathy and transparency—­maybe even in that order. Scientists are imperfect people, and we need to do better, and we can do better.” Even the Many Co-Authors Project, she said, has been a huge missed opportunity. “It was sort of like a moment where everyone could have done self-reflection. Everyone could have looked at their papers and done the exercise I did. And people didn’t.”

Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, she said. “The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we’ll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

“On my optimistic days, I believe it.”

“Is today an optimistic day?”

“Not really.”

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “The Fraudulent Science of Success.”

A close friend—someone whom I’ve always thought of as an optimist—recently shared his theory that, no matter what time you’re living in, it’s generally a bad one. In each era, he posited, quality of life improves in some ways and depreciates in others; the overall quotient of suffering in the world stays the same.

Whether this is nihilistic or comforting depends on your worldview. For instance, plenty of Americans are currently celebrating the outcome of the recent presidential election; many are indifferent to national politics; many others are overwhelmed with anger and despair over it. Looking at the bigger picture, I think the upsides of contemporary life—antibiotics, LGBTQ acceptance, transcontinental FaceTime—outweigh the horrors more often than not. I’ll also concede that this decade comes with a continuous drip of bad news about ghastly acts of violence, erosion of human rights, and climate disaster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2023 Gallup poll found that rates of depression in the United States have hit a record high.

What can people turn to when the itch to burn everything down, or to surrender to hopelessness, feels barely suppressible? I agree with the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge that there is power in “naming reality”—in telling, and writing, the truth about what’s happening around us. For those who are despondent about Donald Trump’s victory and feel unable to make a difference, reading might be a place to start. This doesn’t necessitate cracking open textbooks or dense political tracts: All kinds of books can provide solace, and the past few decades have given us no shortage of clear-eyed works of fiction, memoir, history, and poetry about how to survive and organize in—and ultimately improve—a broken world.

Reading isn’t a panacea. It’s a place to begin and return to: a road map for where to go from here, regardless of where “here” is. Granted, I am perhaps more comfortable than the average person with imperfect solutions. As a clinical pharmacist, I can’t cure diabetes, for example, but I can help control it, make the medications more affordable sometimes, and agitate for a better health-care system. Similarly, these seven books aren’t a cure for rage and despair. Think of them instead as a prescription.

Which Side Are You On, by Ryan Lee Wong

Wong’s novel opens with a mother picking up her son from the airport in a Toyota Prius, her hands clutching the wheel in a death grip. Wry, funny moments like this one animate Wong’s book about the dilemma of trying to correct systemic problems with individual solutions. It’s 2016, and spurred by the real-life police shooting of Akai Gurley, 21-year-old Reed is considering dropping out of Columbia University to dedicate himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. Reed wants nothing more than to usher in a revolution, but unfortunately, he’s a lot better at spouting leftist talking points than at connecting with other people. Like many children, Reed believes that his family is problematic and out of touch. His parents, one a co-leader in the 1980s of South Central’s Black-Korean Coalition, the other a union organizer, push back on his self-righteous idealism. During a brief trip home to see his dying grandmother, Reed wrestles with thorny questions about what makes a good activist and person. Later, in the Prius, Reed’s mother teaches him about the Korean concept of hwabyung, or “burning sickness”—an intense, suppressed rage that will destroy him if he’s not careful—and Reed learns what he really needs: not sound bites but true connection. Wong’s enthralling novel is a reminder that every fight for justice is, at heart, a fight for one another.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s short manifesto about the revolutionary power of hope is a rallying cry against defeatism. She begins by critiquing the progressive tendency to harp on the bleakness of societal conditions, insisting that despair keeps oppressive systems afloat. Hope and joy, by contrast, are essential elements of political change, and celebrating wins is a worthy act of defiance against those who would prefer that the average person feel powerless. Originally published in 2004 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and updated in 2005 and 2016, Hope in the Dark provides modern examples of gains on race, class, environment, and queer rights. That said, this is not a feel-good book. It does not sugarcoat, for instance, the fact that we are headed toward ecological disaster. And if you look up the latest figures on the gender wage gap, you’ll find that they’ve hardly budged from those cited by Solnit years ago. Still, her deft logic and kooky aphorisms (“Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it”) have convinced me that to give up hope is to surrender the future. Fighting for progress can be exhausting and revelatory, full of both pain and pleasure. Solnit insists that doing so is never a waste.

[Read: Trump won. Now what?]

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

The inspired-by-true-events premise of Toews’s seventh novel is literally the stuff of nightmares. In a remote Mennonite colony, women who have suffered mysterious attacks in the night learn that they’ve been drugged and raped by several men from their community. One woman is pregnant with her rapist’s child; another’s 3-year-old has a sexually transmitted infection. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the discovery, just after the men have been temporarily jailed. They are set to be bailed out in two days, and the colony’s bishop demands that the victims forgive them—or else face excommunication and be denied a spot in heaven. The women meet in secret to decide what to do: Comply? Fight back? Leave for an outside world they’ve never experienced? Even against this harrowing backdrop, Toews’s signature humor and eye for small moments of grace make Women Talking an enjoyable and healing read. The women’s discussions are both philosophical (they cannot read, so how can they trust that the Bible requires them to forgive the men?) and practical (if they leave, do they bring their male children?). Any direction they choose will lead to a kind of wilderness: “When we have liberated ourselves,” one woman says in a particularly stirring moment, “we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”

Good Talk, by Mira Jacob

Jacob’s graphic-memoir-in-conversations took major guts to write. It begins like this: The author’s white in-laws throw their support behind Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and her otherwise loving family toes the edge of collapse. Good Talk is a funny and painful book-length answer to questions from Jacob’s 6-year-old son, who is half Jewish and half Indian, about race, family, and identity. Jacob, who was raised in the United States by parents who emigrated from India, gorgeously illustrates her formative experiences, touching on respectability politics, colorism within the Indian community, her bisexuality, and her place in America. She refuses to caricaturize the book’s less savory characters—for example, a rich white woman who hires Jacob to ghostwrite her family’s biography and ends up questioning her integrity and oversharing the grisly details of her 2-year-old’s death from cancer. Jacob’s ability to so humanely render the people who cause her grief is powerful. My daughter is too young to ask questions, but one day, when she begins inquiring about the world she’s inheriting, I can tell her, as Jacob told her son, “If you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”

[Read: Hope and the historian]

The Twenty-Ninth Year, by Hala Alyan

Startling, sexy, and chaotic, The Twenty-Ninth Year is a collection of poems narrated by a woman on the verge—of a lot of things. She’s standing at the edge of maturity, of belonging as a Palestinian American, of recovery from anorexia and alcoholism. It’s a tender and violent place, evoked with images that catch in the throat. The first poem, “Truth,” takes the form of a litany of confessions: “I broke / into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar”; “I’ve seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn’t eat bread.” That Alyan is a clinical psychologist makes sense—her poems have a clarity that can’t be faked. Dark humor softens the blow of lines such as “I starved myself to starve my mother” and “Define in, I say when anyone asks if I’ve ever been in a war.” She reckons with the loneliness of living in exile and the danger of romanticizing the youthful conviction that there is something incurably wrong with you. A shallow read of the collection might be: I burned my life down so you don’t have to. But I return to the last line of the book: “Marry or burn; either way, you’re transfiguring.” There is always something to set aflame; more optimistically, there is always something left to salvage. The Twenty-Ninth Year is, in the end, a monument to endurance.

Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi

If you’re sick of books described as “healing” or “hopeful,” look no further than Riot Baby. Onyebuchi’s thrilling 2020 novella asks just how far sci-fi dystopias are from real life. Kev, a Black man born during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, California, spends much of his 20s in prison after a botched armed robbery. His sister, Ella, has more supernatural problems: She sees the past and the future and, when fury takes over, can raze cities to the ground—yet she could not protect her brother from the violence of incarceration. When Kev is paroled and a new form of policing via implantable chips and pharmaceutical infusions brings “safety” to the streets of Watts, Ella understands that the subjugation of her community is not a symptom of a broken system; rather, it is evidence of one “working just as designed,” as Onyebuchi put it in an interview. Ella must make a wrenching choice: fight for a defanged kind of freedom within such a system or usher in a new world order no matter the cost. In real life, too often, you cannot control your circumstances, only your actions. But you may find relief in reading a book that reaches a different conclusion.

[Read: When national turmoil becomes personal anxiety]

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, by Sarah Schulman

This 700-plus-page history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s New York chapter is, I promise you, a page-turner. Schulman and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard, who were both in ACT UP New York, interviewed 188 members over the course of 17 years about the organization’s work on behalf of those living with HIV/AIDS—“a despised group of people, with no rights, facing a terminal disease for which there were no treatments,” Schulman writes. Part memoir and part oral history, Let the Record Show is a master class on the utility of anger and a historical corrective to chronicles that depict straight white men as the main heroes of the AIDS crisis. In reality, a diverse coalition of activists helped transform HIV into a highly manageable condition. “People who are desperate are much more effective than people who have time to waste,” Schulman argues. ACT UP was known for its brash public actions, and Schulman covers not just what the group accomplished but also how it did it, with electrifying detail. There can be no balm for the fact that many ACT UP members did not survive long enough to be interviewed. There is only awe at the way a group of people “unable to sit out a historic cataclysm” were determined to “force our country to change against its will,” and did.