Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat

Drive far enough into Texas from the Louisiana border, and you’ll see the ground dry, the earth crumble into dust. Eventually, the photographer Bryan Schutmaat told me, the strip malls fade into the rearview mirror, the landscape opens, and the American West begins.

Schutmaat has long been fascinated by the West; as he toured with punk bands in his teens and early 20s, he felt himself drawn to the region and its open space. His new book, Sons of the Living, documents a decade’s worth of more recent journeys through the West and features the hitchhikers and “road dogs” he met along the way.

First in a Subaru Forester and then in a Toyota Tacoma pickup, Schutmaat would set out from his home in Austin and drive toward California. He’d weave from Interstate 10 onto the more isolated two-lane blacktop highways snaking into the remote reaches of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. When he sensed he was encroaching on the sprawl of Los Angeles, he’d turn around. All told, he spent more than 150 days on the road; many nights, he slept in his car.

At truck stops and campgrounds, Schutmaat would shoot portraits of people he encountered and offer to ferry them from one place to the next. Behind the wheel or over a shared meal or beer, he’d listen as they told their stories: One man, Tazz, had taken to the road after he’d been released from prison and struggled to find work. He had drifted far from his childhood in Maine, and his thick Down East accent clashed with his surroundings. He claimed to have once played childhood pranks on Stephen King’s home; later, he told Schutmaat, he committed more serious transgressions. Schutmaat spent several hours talking in a New Mexico Denny’s with another man, Walker, a tall traveler with resplendent facial hair; Schutmaat took his portrait in the light of a gas-station pavilion, Walker’s beard swaying in the breeze.

[From the September 1896 issue: Frederick J. Turner on the problem of the west]

Schutmaat’s work challenges a mythology of the West that has long maintained a hold on the American imagination. Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the country’s democratic culture was forged from its pacification of the western frontier; the novelist Wallace Stegner called the region “a geography of hope.” But like the Depression-era photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Schutmaat complicates rosy views of the region and its promise. The newspaper editor Horace Greeley is said to have encouraged one of his charges to “Go west, young man, go west and grow up with the country.” Sons of the Living makes clear that the West contains no guaranteed redemption.

Instead, Schutmaat’s photographs reveal what happens when a country grows old and fractured, its citizens isolated. The travelers Schutmaat photographed—widowers and addicts, migrant workers and survivalists, drifters and divorcées—are resilient, but not exactly hopeful. In Schutmaat’s images of abandoned billboards and collapsing towns, there’s a feeling not of humanity taming the wilderness, but of the wilderness steadily reasserting itself over a crumbling human presence.

When Schutmaat was traveling, he’d pull over on the side of the road at nightfall and hike up the highway embankment. He’d set up his camera somewhere elevated and leave the shutter open for five, even 10 minutes. Through his lens, the sparse sets of headlights on the road below would melt into a river of light: the road erased, a wildness restored.

These photos appear in Bryan Schutmaat’s new book, Sons of the Living.

Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, the former Army National Guard major and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has no clear policy or management experience that qualifies him to run the Pentagon. What he has instead is a reactionary streak—one that’s evident in his view that women should no longer have combat roles in the military. In his recent book The War on Warriors, he implies that women service members who have received military honors for their bravery were decorated because of “an agenda.”

These comments reflect a broader tendency among Trump and his allies to treat every evolution in social norms as a triumph of “wokeness”—a DEI project gone awry. Having women in combat roles “hasn’t made us more effective,” Hegseth said in an appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast earlier this month. It “hasn’t made us more lethal.” Hegseth seemed to suggest that women and men cannot behave professionally alongside each other. “Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated,” he said. “And complication in combat means casualties are worse.”

Hegseth’s nomination may be in jeopardy following revelations that he paid a legal settlement to a woman who’d accused him of sexually assaulting her at a conference in Monterey, California. (Hegseth has said their interaction was consensual. Local police investigated the incident at the behest of an emergency-room nurse who’d treated the alleged victim, but no charges were filed.) After Trump announced his surprise pick, supporters of women in the military were quick to criticize Hegseth’s views, albeit without naming him. In an interview with NBC News, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin repeated a well-worn defense of gender diversity: that women “make us stronger.” Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, was more emphatic. “Don’t lecture me about women in combat,” Milley said at an event Wednesday. “Women have been in combat … No one gives a shit if it’s a woman or a guy to pull that trigger; you’re still dead.”

[Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]

Yet even these well-meaning defenses of female service members’ equality sounded incomplete—like what you might expect to hear when men argue over what women can do. If the talking points are rusty, perhaps that’s because the role of women in combat hasn’t been much in the news since the final restriction was lifted in 2013. By 2012, when President Barack Obama began to consider a formal rule change, more than 130 women had died in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though they technically had not been in combat. This is because women were excluded from combat roles such as artillery and close battle, but that distinction was becoming harder to maintain as the nature of warfare changed. The Pentagon had been slowly placing women in more dangerous roles in order to address staffing needs, even allowing them onto submarines. But the military still upheld a long-standing prohibition against deploying women for “direct ground combat,” or DGC.  

[Jackie Munn: I felt more welcome in combat than I did on base]

As the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars dragged on, the Pentagon was ultimately reduced to semantic games that downplayed women’s roles, assigning them to combat troops but insisting, in accordance with DGC restrictions, that they were not waging war. The most absurd example involved the Marine Corps, which launched so-called female engagement teams to patrol among, make contact with, and gather intelligence from civilians in Muslim countries where strict cultural rules prohibit interactions between women and men. The female teams were deployed with Marine Expeditionary Units, assigned to be with or attached to combat units but technically not in combat.  

The Pentagon ended up changing the DGC prohibitions because they were no longer sustainable for military purposes. Men with higher ranks and much greater responsibility than Hegseth long ago recognized that ending combat exclusion wasn’t primarily a matter of women’s equality, but of military readiness. Besides, the distinction between combat and noncombat roles had begun to vanish. As one Army official observed in 2012, in a “nonlinear battlefield, there are no safe jobs.”

Up to now, efforts to reverse the Obama-era rule change have been quite limited, not least because women’s presence in the military hasn’t been terribly revolutionary in practice. Physical-fitness requirements continue to be rigorous. The Associated Press reported this week that only about 4,800 women are currently qualified for Army infantry, armor, and artillery jobs. The standard still demanded of the most elite combat roles means that the Navy’s Special Warfare combat crew has only two women and the Air Force’s special-operations team has three.

The numbers don’t seem to matter to a nominee who has built his reputation on a broad sense of grievance and on claims that the military is putting DEI concerns first. “The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is ‘Our diversity is our strength,’” he said on the Shawn Ryan Show. How much Trump agrees with Hegseth isn’t entirely clear, although the president-elect has complained about “woke generals” in the past. Unfortunately, that kind of rhetoric takes little account of what’s really going on: The military’s rules have changed to catch up with how military personnel operate in the real world, even if it annoys culture warriors on Fox News.

Let us extend our ethic of care to our celebrities, and in particular white celebrities, so many of whom contributed their time and talent to the Kamala Harris campaign. These people understand both justice and mercy, and their greatest concern is neither fame nor fortune, but the plight of America’s—and the world’s—most disadvantaged. Consider Mark Ruffalo.

The day before the election, he posted on Instagram a comedic short to “help Trump go bye-bye,” a compilation of clips of Donald Trump saying “Bye” or “Bye-bye.” The day before that, he’d posted a video of two young Native American people worried about the upcoming election: “We need a superhero,” one of them says and, just like that: Mark Ruffalo! “It’s scary,” he says. “Trump does not care about the Native people.”

He also posted a video he’d made with Rania Batrice, a Palestinian American who is a World Economic Forum “Exceptional Woman of Excellence.” Ruffalo, however, was the star. The video was intended for voters so angry about the war in Gaza, they were considering a protest vote for a third-party candidate over Harris: “If you’re thinking of voting for Jill Stein, please take a listen,” Ruffalo said, in his compelling, patronizing way. “I understand how devastated and angry you are,” he said. “For over a year now, many of us have been on the front lines of calling for the end of the genocide in Gaza and now the killing in Lebanon.” Who is “us”? And where was the “front line”? West L.A.? Studio City? (Ruffalo, needless to say, has not spent the past year sharing his outrage over the Hamas attacks of October 7 that took 1,200 lives and precipitated the conflict.)

“We’ve been outraged at the Biden administration’s complicity and inhumanity as the invasion has spread to Lebanon and marches closer and closer towards a forever war,” he said, and offered the weirdest political pitch in history: Show up for Harris because “we can and we will hold her accountable on her first day in office.” Even for those voters who might have shared his premises, it was a bizarre theory: Vote for a war criminal so we can frog-march her to American Nuremberg as soon as she climbs down from the podium.

[Read: America’s class politics have turned upside down]

This is one of the things that white celebrities do best: forge a bond with members of a marginalized community, and then tell them what to do. But this time, it didn’t work. What’s a superhero to do when he learns that at least half of Native Americans voted for Trump? (“Long time coming,” said a former vice president of the Navajo Nation, Myron Lizer.)

What about the gut punch of almost half of Latino voters choosing Trump? That’s something the white celebrities weren’t prepared for, and it hurt. But they had to put on a brave face. As Brad Pitt told Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” Let us respect the privacy of the white celebrities at this difficult time. Three-tenths of Black men under the age of 45 voted for Trump. There’s no one with whom white celebrities assume greater common cause than young Black men. The Black Lives Matter protests were their Tiananmen Square.

The minute it became clear that Harris had lost, reporters and panelists began offering explanations—explanations so obvious that you had to wonder why they hadn’t seen the loss coming. Of course they were correct: The results proved that millions of people don’t want to see an apparently endless flow of undocumented immigrants entering the country; they loathe the way DEI absolutism empowered an army of bureaucrats to mete out mysterious punishments for ridiculous offenses. They don’t want to hear anyone’s pronouns; they don’t want to be told that crime is down when they’re busy getting carjacked; and they never, ever want to watch The View again.

These various social causes helped win Trump the election. His narrative didn’t pass most tests of logic or economic theory and yet it was constructed on a foundation of grievances that rang true to millions of Americans, and Democrats met it with no narrative at all. It was as though the party had spent a quarter century running a very large tab, and on Election Day, the whole thing finally came due. I couldn’t really attach that vague sense of the problem to any of its component parts, so as I always do when I’m confused about the Democratic Party, I called Noah Redlich.

“How did this happen?” I asked him, and he said something that not a single aggrieved commentator or anyone on the Topanga front line had said.

“When I heard J. D. Vance say that he was in fourth grade when Joe Biden voted for NAFTA, I said, ‘We’re screwed!’”

Noah is a second-year law student at Fordham University. I’ve known him since he was 5. At 7 he could tell you the name of every U.S. senator. It wasn’t just a party trick—as he grew older, his interest in politics grew into a strong belief in the Democratic Party’s potential to improve the lives of the working and middle classes. I spend a huge amount of time talking to Democrats, some of them extremely well versed in the party’s positions on various topics. So why do I trust Noah more than these mandarins? Because more often than not, they’ll break into an argument that requires me to accept that various facts on the ground don’t exist. Noah has worked or volunteered on many campaigns, and when he would come back from a red state he would never say “Those Republican voters are scum.” He would come back saying “These voters are concerned about …”

“When Vance talked about NAFTA,” Noah said, “it had a visceral connection with a lot of people who continue to be deeply affected by it. Even the name of that agreement has deep resonance for a huge number of people from Appalachia and across the Midwest, because they saw their manufacturing jobs disappear.”

Industrial decline began long before NAFTA, of course, but it was an efficient engine for taking away jobs. Corporations did what they always do, if they’re allowed to do it, which is chase cheap labor. Their response to union efforts and worker resentment was to say, You better just keep working or we’ll send your jobs away.

“No one at the Democratic convention talked about NAFTA,” Noah said. “How could they? They’re too in love with Bill Clinton.”

Bill Clinton spent his first year in office aggressively lobbying for the passage of NAFTA. He curried favor with Wall Street, and in 1999 signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall regulations enacted after the 1929 stock-market crash, which helped lead  to the 2007–08 financial crisis and the Great Recession. He ushered in the era of the billionaire-friendly Democratic Party, which was somehow going to coexist with—and benefit—the members of its traditional stronghold: the working class.

Clinton once held a lot of credibility with the working class, but that was a long time ago. And yet the party remains so convinced of his popularity that it sent him to Michigan to campaign.

And then there’s Hillary. “Noah, why in the world is Hillary Clinton still taken seriously by the Democratic Party?”

“I have no idea! She lost an election; her entire worldview has been rejected; people don’t like endless free trade that sends their jobs overseas; they don’t like the endless wars, like the Iraq War, which she voted for. People don’t want that anymore. She’s stuck in a previous era that people have moved away from.”

And yet she wields a particular power at the most elite levels of the party. In the rooms where the rounds of toast are always spread with roasted bone marrow and the “California varietals” are always Kistler and Stag’s Leap, and where the sons and daughters are always about to graduate from Princeton or rescue an African village or marry a hedge funder or become an analyst at McKinsey—in those lovely rooms, where the doors close with a muffled click of solidity, Hillary Clinton still wears the ring to be kissed.

She was perhaps the first person to launch a woke argument during a presidential campaign, ridiculing Bernie Sanders’s intention to break up big banks by asking: “Would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” Seeing that argument in its infant form, made by a woman who several times collected $225,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, is a reminder of how stupid and morally bankrupt it is.

For that matter, why does the party keep dragging Liz Cheney everywhere like she’s Piltdown Man? Yes, there are Republicans who don’t like Trump, but they don’t hold much sway with Democratic voters. Nicolle Wallace and Bill Kristol do not a coalition make.

One thing the party needs to learn is that no one, anywhere, ever wants to be reminded of the Iraq War.

“It was disastrous to use her so heavily,” Noah told me. “She represents the establishment, the ruling class that people rejected during this populist moment. These people aren’t popular. That’s why Donald Trump runs the Republican Party, not the Cheneys or the Bushes.”

He’s a second-year law student! Why couldn’t the leaders of the Democratic Party see these obvious mistakes?

Harris’s campaigning with Liz Cheney allowed Trump to say, as he did many times, that the Democrats are tied to the Cheneys and their endless wars, and liable to send your kid off to die in a foreign conflict. Trump ran as an anti-war politician, but he certainly wasn’t one the last time he held office. He did most of the things Liz Cheney would have wanted him to do: He ripped up the Iran nuclear deal, and increased military spending numerous times. He was more hawkish on Russia than Barack Obama was, and increased sanctions against the country. I’m not saying any of these things were necessarily wrong, but it certainly wasn’t John and Yoko on a bed-in for peace.

But all of these are mere blunders when compared with the real problem. The sign that needs to be Scotch-taped to a window at the Democratic National Committee should say: It’s the billionaires, stupid. What ails us is that 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and 40 years of allowing private equity and an emergent billionaire class to have untrammeled power has created—in the country of opportunity—a level of income inequality that borders on the feudal. Changing that is supposed to be the work of the Democratic Party, but three decades ago, it crawled into bed with the billionaire class and never got out.

Billionaires are, of course, precious snowflakes, each one made by God and each one unique. But one thing unites almost all of them, be they Republican billionaires or Democratic billionaires: They want to protect a tax code that keeps their mountains of money in a climate-controlled, locked room.

Mark Cuban was a huge and very visible Harris supporter, but for a Democrat, he took some strange turns. He wanted Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, out of her post. Khan has taken on corporate monopolies that block competition and filed some of the most aggressive antitrust litigation in a generation, and has been especially critical of Big Tech. “By trying to break up the biggest tech companies, you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence,” Cuban told a reporter. The response to that was so severe that he backpedaled by saying that he was “not trying to get involved in personnel.” Personnel? She’s the chair of the FTC, not a booker on Shark Tank. Breaking up the monopolies that rule Big Tech would be very bad for Cuban, but probably give the rest of us some breathing room. (On the other team, Vance said he agreed with some of Kahn’s positions.)

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

In a populist moment, the Democratic Party had the extremely rich and the very famous, some great music, and Mark Ruffalo. And they got shellacked. Now a lot of people seemed stunned by what happened, sobered by it.

Cuban scrubbed his X account of all political posts, declared himself on “political vacation,” and joined Bluesky, where, if not absolution, then at least a less political position could be staked out. He made a bad bet (why does Bezos make all the right moves?) and now needs to retool the factory.

Ruffalo appeared at a long-scheduled awards dinner for the ACLU of Southern California five days after the election. He got a little choked up, asked everyone to stand up and hug it out, and admitted that it had been hard for him to come to the event at all—which was a relatable position, because everyone hates the Beverly Hilton, but surely it was an easier gig than the front line?

But it’s not the trans athletes or the immigrants or the wokeism that lost the Democrats this election. It’s the rigged economy that has had its boot on the throat of working people for decades. Billionaires, even our very special Democratic billionaires, care about all kinds of things—and many of them peel off a lot of dollars for worthy causes, no doubt—but their political involvement usually comes with a specific price: that the party leaves alone the tax code that safeguards their counting houses.

And, really, after all the billionaires have done for the Democrats, is that too much to ask?

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In the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements. The president-elect and his team have spent much of November baiting and trolling their opponents while throwing red meat to the MAGA faithful. (Trump, for example, has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to a nonexistent “Department of Government Efficiency,” an office whose acronym is a play on a jokey crypto currency.) And though some of Trump’s nominees have been relatively reasonable choices, in recent days Trump has put forward a handful of manifestly unqualified and even dangerous picks, reiterated his grandiose plans for his first days in office, and promised to punish his enemies.

We’ve seen this before. As I warned this past April, stunning his opponents with more outrages than they can handle is a classic Trump tactic:

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil … Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

Neither the voters nor the members of the U.S. Senate, however, should fall for it this time. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University has written that the most important way to resist a rising authoritarian regime is not to “obey in advance”—that is, changing our behavior in ways we think might conform to the demands of the new ruling group. That’s good advice, but I might add a corollary here: People should not panic and exhaust themselves in advance, either.

In practice, this means setting priorities—mine are the preservation of democracy and national security—and conserving mental energy and political effort to concentrate on those issues and Trump’s plans for them. It’s important to bear in mind as well that Trump will not take the oath of office for another two months. (Such oaths do not matter to him, but he cannot grab the machinery of government without it.) If citizens and their representatives react to every moment of trollery over the coming weeks, they will be exhausted by Inauguration Day.

Trump will now dominate the news cycle almost every day with some new smoke bomb that is meant to distract from his attempts to stock the government with a strange conglomeration of nihilistic opportunists and self-styled revolutionaries. He will propose plans that he has no real hope of accomplishing quickly, while trying to build an aura of inevitability and omnipotence around himself. (His vow to begin mass deportations on his first day, for example, is a logistical impossibility, unless by mass he means “slightly more than usual.” He may be able to set in motion some sort of planning on day one, but he has no way to execute a large-scale operation yet, and it will be some time before he has anywhere to put so many people marked for deportation.)

The attempt to build Trump into some kind of unstoppable political kaiju is nonsense, as the hapless Matt Gaetz just found out. For all of Trump’s bullying and bluster, Gaetz’s nomination bid was over in a matter of days. Two of Trump’s other nominations—Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence—might be in similar trouble as various Republicans begin to show doubts about them.

Senator James Risch, for example, a hard-right conservative from deep-red Idaho and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined over the weekend to offer the kind of ritualistic support for Hegseth and Gabbard that Trump expects from the GOP. “Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch said on Saturday. “These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

What Risch seems to be saying—at least I hope, anyway—is that it’s all fun and games until national security is involved, and then people have to get serious about what’s at stake. The Senate isn’t a Trump rally, and the Defense Department isn’t a backdrop for a segment on Fox & Friends.

Similar thinking may have led to Scott Bessent as Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury. Bessent would have been an ordinary pick in any other administration, but in Trump World, it’s noteworthy that a standard-issue hedge-fund leader—and a man who once worked for George Soros, of all people—just edged out the more radical Trump loyalist Howard Lutnick, who has been relegated to Commerce, a far less powerful department. Culture warring, it seems, matters less to some of Team Trump when real money is involved.

None of this is a case for complacency. Hegseth and Gabbard could still end up winning confirmation. The anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could take over at the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, reports have also emerged that Trump may move Kash Patel—the very embodiment of the mercenary loyalist who will execute any and every Trump order—into a senior job at the FBI or the Department of Justice, a move that would raise urgent questions about American civil liberties.

But Trump cannot simply will things into existence. Yes, “the people have spoken,” but it was a narrow win, and Trump again seems to have fallen short of gaining 50 percent of the popular vote. Just as Democrats have had to learn that running up big margins in California does not win the presidency, Republicans are finding yet again that electoral votes are not the same thing as a popular mandate. The Senate Republican conference is rife with cowards, but only a small handful of principled GOP senators are needed to stop some of Trump’s worst nominees.

The other reality is that Trump has already accomplished the one thing he really cared about: staying out of jail. Today, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss the January 6–related case against him. So be it; if enough voters have decided they can live with a convicted felon in the White House, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about that.

But Trump returning to office does not mean he can rule by fiat. If his opponents react to every piece of bait he throws in front of them, they will lose their bearings. And even some of Trump’s voters—at least those outside the MAGA personality cult—might not have expected this kind of irresponsible trolling. If these Republican voters want to hold Trump accountable for the promises he made to them during the campaign, they’ll have to keep their heads rather than get caught up in Trump’s daily dramas.

Allow me to add one piece of personal advice for the upcoming holiday: None of the things Trump is trying to do will happen before the end of the week. So for Thanksgiving, give yourself a break. Remember the great privilege and blessing it is to be an American, and have faith in the American Constitution and the freedoms safeguarded within it. If your Uncle Ned shows up and still wants to argue about how the election was stolen from Trump four years ago, my advice is the same as it’s been for every holiday: Tell him he’s wrong, that you love him anyway, that you’re not having this conversation today, and to pass the potatoes.

Related:

Pam Bondi’s comeback Another theory of the Trump movement

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Revenge of the COVID contrarians The end of the quest for justice for January 6 Caitlin Flanagan on the Democrats’ billionaire mistake

Today’s News

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed motions to drop the federal election-subversion and classified-documents cases against Trump, citing a Justice Department rule against prosecuting sitting presidents. A California judge delayed the resentencing date for Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers imprisoned for killing their parents in 1989, to give the new Los Angeles County district attorney more time to review the case. The Israeli cabinet will vote tomorrow on a proposed cease-fire deal with Hezbollah, which is expected to pass, according to a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said on Israeli Army Radio that an agreement could be reached “within days” but that there remain “points to finalize.”

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Climate negotiations at COP29 ended in a $300 billion deal that mostly showed how far the world is from facing climate change’s real dangers, Zoë Schlanger argues. The Wonder Reader: One of the most humbling parts of being alive is realizing that you might need to reconsider some long-held habits, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Everyone Agrees Americans Aren’t Healthy

By Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear Therapist”: No one wants to host my in-laws for the holidays. The right has a Bluesky problem. The leak scandal roiling Israel What the broligarchs want from Trump

Culture Break

Everett

Watch. Every generation has an Oz story, but Wicked is the retelling that best captures what makes L. Frank Baum’s world sing, Allegra Rosenberg writes.

Try out. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I often tell people to unplug from the news. (Hey, I get paid to have opinions about national events, and yet I make sure to stop watching the news now and then too.) If you’d like a break that will not only get you off the doom treadmill but refresh and recharge you, allow me to suggest binge-watching the new Ted Danson series on Netflix, A Man on the Inside. It’s charming and funny, and it might bring a tear to your eye in between some laughs.

Danson plays a recently widowed retired professor who takes a job with a private investigator as the “inside man” at a senior-citizen residence in San Francisco. (As someone who watched the debut of Cheers 42 years ago, I feel like I’ve been growing old along with Danson through his many shows, and this might be his best role.) He’s tracking down a theft, but the crime isn’t all that interesting, nor is it really the point of the show: Rather, A Man on the Inside is about family, friends, love, and death.

My wife and I sometimes found the show almost too hard to watch, because we have both had parents in assisted living and memory-care settings. But A Man on the Inside never hurts—it has too much compassion (and gentle, well-placed humor) to let aging become caricatured as nothing but tragedy and loss. It is a show for and about families, just when we need something we can all watch over the holidays.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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