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.

The clearest candidate for America’s favorite fairy tale might be The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The author L. Frank Baum set the novel, published in 1900, in a fantasy land that shares core American values: self-sufficiency, personal reinvention, the exploration of wider frontiers. The book’s young heroine, Dorothy, is whisked away to Oz, where she befriends magical creatures, thwarts a witch, and leans on her newfound strength and friends in order to return home. For Dorothy, it is a land of empowerment and possibility; for Baum—who perpetuated manifest destiny’s warped ideals in his other writings—and his many readers, it was an otherworldly representation of the American expanse, a place they perhaps wanted to see for themselves.

Baum’s novel and its sequels were major literary phenomena in their day. But Oz persists primarily through the books’ many adaptations, which established the series’ enduring iconography. Baum’s world is best remembered as it has appeared on-screen, especially in the 1939 musical film starring Judy Garland as Dorothy: a place bursting with songs such as “Over the Rainbow” and visuals such as the yellow brick road, which have become the franchise’s most memorable features. And with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s 1956 entry into the public domain, allowing for new, noncanonical works, subsequent generations have iterated on these hallmarks to tell Oz stories of their own.

No transformation has been more vital to Oz’s longevity than Wicked, the revisionist origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West, one of Baum’s most recognizable villains. Based on the author Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel of the same name, Wicked’s prominence is up there with that of its source text, and yesterday’s release of the first part of the musical’s highly anticipated film adaptation will undoubtedly broaden its reach. Key to Wicked’s success—and its ability to bridge Oz’s past and future—is its canny understanding of what, exactly, makes that world work so well.

Artists across genres and mediums have, for decades, found great storytelling potential in Baum’s characters and mythology. But the mode that Oz has continued to lend itself to best is musical theater, a genre predicated on suspension of disbelief and thus well suited to conveying Oz’s odd earnestness. The Wizard of Oz’s 1903 Broadway musical debut was a hit, firing up demands for more stories, which prompted Baum to write a total of 13 sequels to his book.

[Read: The Wizard of Oz invented the ‘good witch’]

The Garland film, inspired in part by the success of the musical, cemented Oz’s connection to music, but it was The Wiz that brought it back to the theater, in 1974. The latter was the franchise’s first majorly reenvisioned entry, a celebration of Black culture that took Dorothy’s story to the 1970s. During its four-year run on Broadway, The Wiz earned several Tony wins; the (less well-received) film adaptation notably starred the then-superstars Diana Ross and Michael Jackson as Dorothy and the Scarecrow, respectively. The Wiz showed that Baum’s novel could be successfully reinterpreted within a contemporary frame, and its story and characters updated accordingly. This transposition didn’t sacrifice the core imagery and themes—Dorothy still fights off flying monkeys and dons magic slippers to make it back home—but instead retained and even grew their cultural power.

Oz hasn’t translated as well into dramatic, adult-oriented settings, despite numerous writers’ and filmmakers’ efforts. The 1985 Disney film Return to Oz reintroduced the world by utilizing lesser-known characters from Baum’s later books; although it exhibited Oz’s compelling peculiarities, such as sentient furniture and disembodied human heads, it was a critical and box-office failure, deemed too dark for young viewers. Science-fiction authors including Robert Heinlein, Philip José Farmer, and even Stephen King wrote stories incorporating Oz that received mixed reviews. The Syfy miniseries Tin Man and NBC’s one-season flop Emerald City also mostly failed to resonate. Only Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—a tale laden with adultery, murder, and slavery—has taken hold of the popular imagination. Wicked has become the contemporary Oz text, perhaps even superseding Baum’s work: It carries forward the original novels’ mix of campy magic and violent spectacle while bringing in modern literary themes. Maguire’s biggest change was recasting Baum’s antagonist as the antihero, reframing a straightforward villain as a woman misunderstood by her peers—an experience likely more relevant to today’s readers than Dorothy’s simpler tale of good versus evil.

Wicked used Oz’s whimsy and weirdness to deepen Baum’s seemingly unambiguous world, one strictly divided between right and wrong. The basic premise was a powerful one: What if the Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t so bad after all, and what if the Wizard—and the seemingly perfect society he oversaw—was the real threat? In his retelling, Maguire, an Oz fan since childhood, named Baum’s one-dimensional and green-skinned villain Elphaba Thropp; he also gave her a complicated parentage, a soapy romantic arc, and a dorm room. She attended Shiz University alongside a diverse spread of colorful, slang-talking Ozians. And, developing a darker side to Baum’s fanciful creation, Maguire also gave Elphaba a political motivation for wreaking havoc on her homeland: the oppression of its talking animals. But Maguire’s most important addition was the college friendship between Elphaba and Glinda the Good Witch (one of the Wicked Witch’s sworn enemies in Baum’s novel); the musical turns that bond into its emotional core.

[Read: Hollywood’s new crown prince of musicals]

The 2003 Broadway adaptation lent some of the Garland-led film’s sparkle to Maguire’s story and made it appropriate for an all-ages audience. By foregrounding Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship, the musical emphasized Baum’s thematic interest in friendship and self-discovery. Theatergoers could relate to Glinda’s perkiness and craving for popularity and Elphaba’s fish-out-of-water awkwardness the same way they could, in watching The Wizard of Oz or reading Baum’s novel, imagine themselves in Dorothy’s shoes, searching for home. By simplifying Maguire’s plot, the musical better captured the fairy-tale feeling of Baum’s novel. Since its opening, its appeal has proved universal—Wicked has become the second-highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time.

Its success has also translated offstage in a particularly generative fashion. Wicked is now the jumping-off point for numerous fanworks—a meta development, because the show itself is a fanwork of a fanwork. Fan fiction based on the musical has become a genre unto itself; many works imagine a queer relationship between Elphaba and Glinda. Showstoppers such as Glinda’s bubbly “Popular” and Elphaba’s anthemic “Defying Gravity” are well-orchestrated articulations of the show’s ethos, inspiring amateur and professional renditions alike. Enamored artists and theatergoers often reimagine and revisit Wicked, as do budding Broadway lovers who haven’t attended an in-person production: An abundance of bootleg recordings has made Wicked one of musical theater’s most accessible entry points. It’s also a gateway into the broader world of Oz. Wicked and its own iterations—including its long-awaited film adaptation, which has already become a cultural event—work for the same reasons Baum’s original story did: They conjure a world that is buoyant, relatable, and unforgettable.

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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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The current international order, already on its last legs due to the West's support for Israel, won't survive Trump 2.0.