French President Emmanuel Macron got an early look at the interior of the fully restored Notre Dame de Paris.

French President Macron visits Notre Dame ahead of grand reopening

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By the time I was 19 years old, I had quit college and was working a job thousands of miles from my family. With no money, my first Thanksgiving away from home promised to be a lonely one—until a local couple invited me to spend the holiday at their house with their extended family. They warned me, however, that this gathering would also include a ne’er-do-well cousin named Jeffrey. No one saw him the rest of the year, but he always came to Thanksgiving dinner and stirred up trouble with his controversial political opinions. Not having a dog in their fight—and, sentimentally, having a brother with the same name whom I missed a great deal—I accepted the invitation without reservation.

Sure enough, Jeffrey came ready to rumble. Provocative comments from the get-go led to disagreement and annoyance, and then to personal recrimination, shouting, and even angry tears by the end.

Your Thanksgiving probably won’t be that adversarial, but you might be feeling some apprehension if, as is so commonly the case, you have relatives and loved ones with whom you differ politically. A day set aside for us to count our blessings can easily be a tense ordeal, especially at a time of intense polarization in this country. Most likely, you would prefer to avoid a bitter argument. Besides the damage that can do to relationships, you might also have noticed that even if you’re well-informed and can squash someone with facts, you still don’t “win.” As the English poet Samuel Butler wrote in 1678, “He that complies against his will, / is of his own opinion still.”

Equally, you might come off a sharp exchange frustrated, feeling that you “lost.” An apt French expression—l’esprit de l’escalier, or “staircase wit”—captures the regret of realizing too late the smart, cutting thing you should have said at the time. But if you do find yourself wishing you had a better way of replying when you hear something you disagree with, you have another option: a response that doesn’t insult or harm, preserves your relations with a loved one, and has a prayer of having some effect on your interlocutor’s thinking. And social scientists might have just the key to what you’re looking for.

[Read: How Lincoln turned regional holidays into national celebrations]

To avoid an ugly confrontation, knowing how arguments start and then escalate is important. They generally follow a fairly simple formula. Each side makes a claim, followed by some statement of evidence. So, for example, someone at dinner might say, “Donald Trump was a great president [claim]. The economy was excellent under his leadership [evidence].” Your immediate response might be: “I disagree [claim]. We’ve had more economic growth under Joe Biden [evidence].” Although the claims on one side or both might be ill-founded and the evidence flimsy, this simple exchange seems harmless enough, and certainly shouldn’t spoil dinner. Yet it can still initiate a complex neurological response that is not only unproductive but actually destructive.

To begin with, as scientists showed in a series of experiments in 2021, when people disagree about politics, their brain reacts very differently from the way that it does when the people agree. People in agreement experience what is known as neural coupling, in which their brains mimic one another; this makes social harmony possible. But that occurs to a lesser extent when people disagree. The parts of the brain most active during a disagreement are those used not for social interaction but for high cognitive function. In other words, disagreements are perceived as a problem to solve, rather than as a pleasant conversation.

Next, your brain when disagreeing immediately begins to lose its ability to assess the strength of your opponent’s argument relative to your own. As scholars demonstrated in a 2020 article in Nature Neuroscience, when you hear an opinion that diverges from yours, your posterior medial prefrontal cortex, which is a part of your brain responsible for discriminating between strong and weak arguments, displays a reduced level of sensitivity. In other words, you’re smart when making your own argument, but instantly dumber when you hear your opponent’s.

If, at this point, the argument escalates, you are likely to experience emotional flooding, in which the amygdala hijacks your powers of reasoning with anger—about what an ignorant jackass your relative is. You may now assume that no area of agreement can exist between you, a belief that in experiments is associated with the escalation of conflicts. This is when “winning” an argument seems supremely important to you, much more so than harmony at your Thanksgiving dinner. You will now find yourself emotionally disconnected from your relative, and vice versa, each of you saying things that ruin the dinner and perhaps your relationship.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to be thankful when you don’t feel thankful]

In the scenario described at the beginning, I witnessed a case study of the neurobiological algorithm. Days after the row, however, when everyone was in a cooler hedonic state, the couple who’d invited me reflected on the altercation. “You know, I don’t even really care what Jeffrey thinks,” remarked one of them. “But for some reason, I always take the bait.” This candid admission holds the key to a better Thanksgiving, if you expect a Jeffrey at your table.

1. Do a cost-benefit analysis in advance.
My friends recognized that the actual benefits of disputing with Jeffrey were nil—Who cares what he thinks?—but that the costs of an argument had been steep. Unfortunately, they did that analysis after the fact, as a postmortem tinged with regret. You can arrive at this wisdom beforehand by walking through two scenarios. In the first, you can have a meltdown, say a bunch of bitter things to show your Jeffrey how wrong he is, and then regret having lost your cool. In the second, you can incur a minor cost by disregarding Jeffrey’s objectionable opinions, move the conversation toward more pleasant topics, and then realize a substantial benefit. Go into dinner with this choice of scenarios in mind, and you will enjoy much better odds of rejecting the bait.

2. Be a social scientist.
I have conducted many studies of human behavior over the years. Never once have I been tempted to fill out one of my own surveys or participate in any of my experiments, because that would ruin the data and I wouldn’t learn anything. My objective as a researcher is to watch, listen, and learn. This also happens to be a useful mindset as you walk into Thanksgiving dinner. Now that you have read a brief social-scientific analysis of how arguments operate, think of your gathering as an opportunity to observe this fascinating phenomenon. Don’t contaminate the data by joining in an argument yourself; watch, listen, and learn. Not only will this practice save you a lot of grief, but the research also shows that when you are looking for mutual resolution of a dispute with someone, you can reduce the physiological hyperarousal you’d otherwise experience in the confrontation. The attitude of observation that you adopt might just calm others down too.

3. Don’t forget to be thankful.
My Harvard colleague Jennifer Lerner studies the effects of induced emotions on behavior—finding, for example, that sadness encourages smoking. In a recent study, she and her co-authors showed that induced gratitude—in common parlance, counting one’s blessings—made people in the study less likely to engage in risky acts. This made me wonder whether inducing gratitude might also reduce such destructive behavior as starting a fight at the Thanksgiving table. As Lerner confirmed in an email, her research has found that gratitude does in fact change how we perceive the world, and that one effect can be to make us more patient; that could include making us more tolerant, she posited, when we gather with family.

[From the January/February 2004 issue: The angry American]

You may be thinking that I haven’t offered the most obvious advice of all: Just don’t invite Jeffrey. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether excluding him from Thanksgiving is the right course of action—and that will involve weighing the strength of family ties against excluding a relative for being difficult or having what you consider to be obnoxious views.

But if what’s guiding your decision making is long experience of conflict at past Thanksgivings, you may perhaps need to consider an uncomfortable question: Is it possible that you are the combative, argumentative person in the situation? If the honest answer is that perhaps, yes, you have contributed to previous family rows, you can make a resolution: Don’t be a Jeffrey.

By the time Martha Stewart rose to fame, family life in the United States looked very different than it had during her childhood. American mothers had entered the workforce en masse, and when Stewart’s first book was published, in 1982, many women were no longer instructing their daughters on the finer points of homemaking fundamentals like cooking meals from scratch or hosting holiday gatherings. Stewart’s meticulous guides to domestic life ended up filling a maternal vacuum for many of her fans, and she inspired both devotion and envy. Oprah Winfrey, no stranger to hard work herself, once summed up the ire that many people felt about Stewart: “Who has the time for all of this? For every woman who makes a complicated gingerbread house, a million don’t even have the time to bake a cookie.”

At a moment when American women were already feeling the exhaustion of the second shift, Stewart seemed to suggest that they toil overtime to beautify their second work environment too. But despite being most famous as a homemaker, an occupation usually associated with mothers, Stewart would later appear ambivalent about motherhood itself. Before her daughter was born, when Stewart was 24, “I thought it was a natural thing,” she says in Martha, a new Netflix documentary about her life and career. “It turns out it’s not at all natural to be a mother.”

Early in the documentary, an off-camera speaker—Stewart is the only on-camera interviewee—refers to her as “the original influencer.” The label emphasizes how she shaped domestic life and purchasing trends decades before the advent of Instagram or TikTok; as one friend says, Stewart “was the first woman that saw the marketability of her personal life.” Archival images of a young Stewart exude the charming, homespun domesticity that many social-media creators now emulate. We see Stewart stooped low in her gardens, then feeding chickens in her “palais du poulet”—the French name she gave her coop (“palace of the chicken”). That visual would be right at home on the vision boards of modern influencers who broadcast their nostalgic visions of Americana to millions of followers.

But Stewart’s words, whether spoken directly to the camera or read from private letters, tell a story that diverges from tidy fantasies. Part of why Martha raises such interesting questions about motherhood, family life, and domestic labor is Stewart’s apparent doubts about the value of all three. Throughout the documentary, she seems to be confronting her own conflicting beliefs, but clearly, business—not the art of homemaking—has been the essential pursuit of Stewart’s life. And her single-minded focus on expanding her empire is what ultimately attracted the most criticism as she transformed into a gargantuan brand.

In 1987, the same year that Stewart published Weddings, a glossy guide about how to host the perfect matrimonial celebration, she and her husband separated after he had an affair with a younger woman. While Stewart promoted a book about celebrating love, she wrestled with her family’s private dysfunction—and when rumors of the affair became public, Stewart worried about the professional implications of her husband appearing absent from her carefully curated life. At one point in the film, Stewart advises young wives on how to react to their husband’s philandering: “Look at him, [say] ‘He’s a piece of shit,’ and get out of it. Get out of that marriage,” she says defiantly, cautioning today’s women not to stay, like she did, and try to work things out. (The two divorced a few years later, in 1990.)

Only when the documentary’s director, R. J. Cutler, asks about an affair that she had earlier in the marriage does Stewart concede her own actions. “It was just nothing,” she says, before decrying the messiness of divorce. “I would never have broken up a marriage for it.” It’s one thing to cheat in private, in other words, but she frowns at the public spectacle of dissolving a family unit. The moment draws attention to how tightly Stewart has attempted to control her image—and underscores how much she appears to resent the ways her accomplishments (and her misdeeds) have been judged in relation to her gender. In 1999, Stewart, then the CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, became the first female self-made billionaire in the United States. The following year, Joan Didion wrote in a New Yorker essay that the “dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”

Nearly 25 years later, Martha makes the case that Stewart was subject to different rules than her male counterparts because she disturbed conventional views of women in the corporate world. “She was ruthless,” one commentator says. “In the business world, that’s a great trait for a man. But, you know, for a woman—you know, she was a bitch.” That may be an interesting place to begin a look back at a controversial mogul, but the documentary is light on specifics about Stewart’s perceived professional shortcomings, which have included criticism that she underpaid her staff while earning millions, berated them, and sold their work as her own. Instead, we get the vague sense that some people thought she was harsh and that others found her to be an exacting perfectionist. But unlike an earlier CNN docuseries on Stewart, Martha shies away from interrogating the details of such workplace accusations in favor of rehashing how multiple powerful men underestimated or outright disliked her.

[Read: Martha Stewart must know something we don’t]

The back half of the film brings the same gender-based analysis to Stewart’s infamous 2004 trial, which began with the FBI—led by a young, ambitious James Comey—implicating Stewart in a larger insider-trading scandal. When the agency failed to indict Stewart for illegal trading, it pursued a case against her for lying to the authorities during the investigation. In the end, Stewart served five months in prison after being found guilty of charges including obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Martha presents the case as one more example of the vitriol that Stewart had long endured. To her critics, Stewart’s case punctured the veneer of her propriety; even though her prison sentence had nothing to do with her corporation, it suggested an untoward explanation for her lifestyle company’s success, one that made Stewart’s relentless drive even more unpalatable. “I’m strict and I’m demanding and I’m all those good things that make a successful person,” Stewart says in an archival clip from around the time she was sentenced.

A more nuanced view does emerge in the documentary, which later addresses how Stewart changed while serving her sentence. Her time in a West Virginia prison prompted a serious reconsideration of her enterprise—and what kinds of homes it reflected. Stewart encountered incarcerated women who’d faced much harsher realities but also wanted to turn their varied talents into viable business ventures. Hearing the other women’s stories and looking over their business plans when they sought her advice made the experience bearable for Stewart—and partially recalibrated her approach to her own work. The homecoming speech she delivered to her staff shortly after being released focused heavily on shifting the why of their work. “I sense in the American public there is a growing need to preserve human connections,” Stewart said then, adding that she had come to understand “the need to honor many, many kinds of families.”

Nearly a decade after Stewart left prison wearing a poncho crocheted by a fellow inmate, the rise of girlboss feminism popularized a style of brash, demanding leadership that Stewart embodied before her conviction. Girlboss feminism has since fallen out of favor in the corporate world, but today’s lifestyle influencers, even those who espouse traditional values, are more emboldened to openly discuss the profit-making motive of their work—especially if they look the part of the doting maternal figure. Where Stewart often succeeded in branding herself as a businesswoman before a mother, many of the most popular homemaking-content creators seem to grasp that their children are the most important emblems of the hyper-feminine fantasy they’re putting on display. As my colleague Sophie Gilbert recently wrote in an essay about a new Hulu reality series following TikTok-famous Mormon women, “the Secret Lives stars are notable for how intricately their brands are enmeshed with fertility—not the mundane reality of day-to-day motherhood but the symbolic power of sexual eligibility and maternal authority.”

These women’s popularity—and, in some cases, their families’ economic viability—is inextricably tied to how they perform sacrificial motherhood, a role that Stewart never appeared interested in. But even though the business of domesticity has shifted in the years since Stewart’s IPO, her earlier successes unquestionably primed audiences for the advent of homemaking influencers whose approach to their public image differs radically from her own. Stewart laid a foundation for an entire genre of creators who generate income by giving followers a glimpse into their kitchen—not just with her recipes but with her sheer dedication to building a brand and her unwillingness to render her labor invisible. For all the controversies Stewart has weathered, she’s always seemed to project authority because she knows what she’s doing—and she’s always behaved as though everyone would be better off heeding the boss’s advice.

The French striker missed a penalty as Madrid's loss brought them to the brink of elimination from the Champions League.

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Sometimes, at a party or on the internet, you will encounter someone who is unimpressed by human ingenuity. The pace of technological progress has stalled, they’ll say. Our art is getting dumber. We aren’t as creative as we used to be.

I suggest those people Google the phrase twist on Thanksgiving, because if they do, they will be met with thousands or possibly millions of examples of our species’ boundless capacity for invention. The Pioneer Woman recommends covering your turkey in a lattice of bacon, like a pie. Food & Wine recently published a list of 25 turkey alternatives, including timpano, salmon Wellington, and something called a “Greens-and-Cheese-Stuffed Cinderella Pumpkin.” Just now, as I was writing this newsletter, The New York Times emailed me about a cornbread-chorizo stuffing topped with esquites. As a culture, we simply cannot stop trying to chop and screw Thanksgiving.

Even The Atlantic, a publication not necessarily known for its cooking coverage, has joined in on the project of perennial reinvention. Over the years, we have published Thanksgiving recipes for cornbread and mustard-greens pudding and for baked tomatoes stuffed with creamed spinach. We’ve suggested serving ricotta gnocchi and wild mushrooms, roasting pears with fresh vanilla bean instead of making cranberry sauce, starting the meal with mushroom French onion soup, and adding black-pepper marinated beef brisket to the table “for a variety.”

“The overused phrase ‘new traditions’ is all too apt,” Sally Schneider wrote in a 2009 article that argued for replacing mashed potatoes with “unexpected purees” made from Tunisian-spiced winter squash, celery root and apple, or fennel seed and chestnut. The next year, this magazine published an article by the chef Regina Charboneau that was headlined “Reinventing Thanksgiving: Traditional Foods, Fresh Recipes.” (This mostly involved, in Charboneau’s words, “jazzing up squash.”) Five days later, we ran a column by an American living in Italy who tried to adapt the holiday’s food to suit her “husband’s Tuscan palate”; the menu included various crostini to start, mashed-up persimmons served with ricotta cream in a shot glass for dessert, and for the main course, Tuscan turkey with cornbread stuffing:

I bought a turkey breast and sliced away, making a large, not-too-neat one-inch-thick scallop. I piled plenty of stuffing in the middle, then wrapped the turkey around it and stitched loose ends together (I’m not good at sewing) to make what looked like a roast, then wrapped the whole thing in caul fat (subbing for turkey skin, adding a porky element, always a good idea). The result, when sliced, was a strip of moist turkey that surrounded the stuffing. It was a big hit.

I believe it. Trying something new—especially when it involves bread enveloped in meat—is exciting, and expanding Thanksgiving’s remit to include ingredients and preparations drawn from traditions beyond the WASPy New England canon is an undeniably good thing. For the individual home cook, reinventing Thanksgiving is a chance to impress guests you rarely see, or maybe just a way to entertain yourself amid the tedium of preparing a big meal. But for cooking media, there’s a financial incentive: Every year, food publications devote their November issues to our most cooking-centric holiday, and every year, they tell us to do something different. Magazines need to sell copies (or, more recently, persuade people to click their links), and We Did the Exact Same Thing This Year is not a particularly compelling headline. Just as U.S. News & World Report needs to find a way, each year, to slightly reorder its college rankings, food magazines need to find a way to make Thanksgiving—a holiday with roots more than a century older than this country—feel new.

Any of us would be lucky to eat one of the recipes I’ve mentioned here, even the bacon thing. But we’d also probably be just fine with old flavors and un-jazzed squashes. And yet, we reinvent. Myself very much included: Just this week, I argued for moving Thanksgiving to October—and I was completely right.

Related:

Is food getting better? (From 2022) The secrets to a successful potluck dish

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She threatens to bring down the French government, but also faces a possible ban from politics

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Thanksgiving means sharing food with friends and loved ones, which also means that many potluck guests will spend the next few days scouring the web for easy and last-minute recipes. To help inspire readers looking for suggestions, The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What’s your go-to dish to bring to a potluck?

There is a calculus to potlucks. The dish you bring must be not only tasty but also impressive, affordable, transportable, easy to serve, and not overly time-consuming—not to mention thematically appropriate. Years of doing the math led me to a simple solution: No matter the party, I bring meatballs. Roll them, bake them, and serve with toothpicks—and don’t forget the dips.

The great thing about them is that they are endlessly adaptable. A fancier gathering might call for veal-and-ricotta balls with a spiced tomato sauce; kids might prefer chicken balls with ketchup. And, of course, they can be made vegetarian.

At a previous job, I was asked to contribute to a cookie-themed potluck. Anxiety struck; I’m a deeply mediocre baker. But the math saved me once again. As I set down a plate of beef-and-pork balls next to trays of whoopie pies and chocolate-chip biscotti, my bemused colleagues waited for an explanation. I pulled out a label: “Meat truffles.” By the end of the meal, not a single one was left.

— Yasmin Tayag, staff writer

***

A staple of my family’s Thanksgiving dinners and summer barbecues is a painstaking mid-century masterpiece we call “rainbow Jell-O”: layers of red, orange, yellow, and green gelatin, partitioned by sweetened condensed milk and cut into bite-size cubes. Making the Jell-O is an all-day affair; each level needs to set in the fridge before the next can be built on top (we skip blue, indigo, and violet as a practical matter).

The recipe, scrawled by my grandmother on a now-yellowed piece of paper, comes from the Japanese American side of my family, which traces its roots through Hawaii, where rainbow Jell-O is sold in convenience stores. The origins of the Jell-O are unclear, but if I had to guess, it might be born of the islands’ unique culinary tradition of drawing magic from shelf-stable foods and wartime rations—in the spirit of Spam musubi.

Is making the Jell-O worth clearing an afternoon and a shelf in your fridge? That perhaps depends on your tolerance for wobbly foods. When one of my college roommates was passed the plate of Jell-O squares on his first Thanksgiving visit, he watched them quake from side to side and politely declined.

— Andrew Aoyama, deputy managing editor

***

I’m a self-conscious cook, even in private; I prefer to stick with minimal ingredients for my meals instead of experimenting with my seasonings and, inevitably, my sensitive stomach. My palate is pretty limited, probably as a result of my boring diet—so I also have no idea if anything I eat tastes good to the average person.

That’s why, when I’m invited to a potluck, I designate myself the Prepacked-Snacks Person. But I make it fun by leveraging my experience as an Oreo connoisseur: My potluck contribution is whatever wacky, seasonally appropriate Oreo flavor is on the market right now. It’s both something you know everyone is somewhat familiar with and more exciting than showing up with the basic snacks you get at the bodega. Plus, I would rather have my friends taste and judge my Pumpkin Spice or Coca-Cola Oreos than watch them pretend to like my homemade chili.

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

***

I’m pretty sure I first made caramel rolls for my mom’s birthday when I was in high school, but I started sharing them at a Friendsgiving potluck in college. They are basically cinnamon rolls, but instead of topping the buns with frosting, you drown them in a caramel sauce, creating a dish that is soft, sticky, and supremely sweet. Although you can use an online recipe for the bread portion, I use my grandmother’s recipe for the caramel, which lives on a bright-blue note card in a wooden box at my parents’ house, along with all of the other cooking instructions we inherited after she passed away. I’ve heard that caramel is notoriously hard to make, but I’ve never had an issue with hers, which includes two whopping tablespoons of white corn syrup. Her side of the family—my mom’s side—comes from North Dakota, so I always feel like I’m sharing a dish that’s a little folksy: simple and delicious. Caramel rolls don’t just work as a hefty addition to potlucks and as a dessert for any occasion; the leftovers can be breakfast too!

— Elise Hannum, assistant editor

***

I am a man of vanity who likes to appear impressive in mixed company; I am also a man of convenience who likes to expend as little energy as possible, if possible. In a potluck scenario, the latter instinct takes over—largely because there’s just less time and attention to spend on any one dish.

Hence my love of making pulled pork, which maxes out several factors: cheapness of ingredients, ease of preparation, quantity of yielded food, wow factor with friends. The recipe I use is perhaps not the best recipe; it is, however, one of the first recipes I found when I Googled best pulled-pork recipe a few years ago. You can really blow people’s minds by bringing along the appropriate accoutrement—pickles, barbecue sauce, buns—but even by itself, the meat goes with anything.

I first made pulled pork for a Super Bowl party, when I had a sneaking suspicion—informed by my expansive curiosity about flavor combinations, and my history of alcohol consumption—that it would pair well with chips and beer. I will be honest: Despite the ease of “slather in spices and hit the slow-cooker button,” I somehow kind of screwed it up—the cut of meat was too large for the lid to fully cover, and I didn’t let it cook for long enough. But even made poorly, pulled pork is a novel delight—everyone loved it, even as I was mildly ashamed of this inaugural effort. Made well, you’ll be the talk of the party.

— Jeremy Gordon, senior editor

***

This season of life doesn’t seem to afford much time for hobbies, but I do love baking, either solo or with the “help” of my 6-year-old daughter (she is an expert sugar sprinkler). My favorite—and most consistently delicious—thing to bake is challah. I got the recipe, adaptations, and all relevant advice from my sister; it has completely ruined all those dry store-bought versions for any purpose but making French toast.

I learned the art of baking challah during the pandemic, when everyone else was busy with their sourdough starters. Back then, my husband, my daughter, and I had no choice but to eat it all ourselves—fortunately, this recipe freezes well. That was by far not the worst part of COVID, but I prefer to share challah; Jewish food is always best enjoyed in the company of others. I never mastered the traditional braiding of the dough, so I mostly shape it into large, fluffy buns—all the better for tearing apart with your hands. Try topping the challah with everything-bagel seasoning, za’atar, or something more creative. Then bring it to a communal Shabbat or a holiday meal, and enjoy watching your loved ones go back for just one more hunk of soft, warm bread, and then another, and another.

— Janice Wolly, copy chief

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The business-school scandal that just keeps getting bigger Three ways to become a deeper thinker The Atlantic gift guide

The Week Ahead

Moana 2, an animated sequel about a village chief’s wayfinding daughter who must travel into the dangerous waters of Oceania (in theaters Wednesday) The Agency, a thriller series starring Michael Fassbender as a CIA agent who is ordered to leave his undercover life (premieres Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime) This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a collection of short stories by Naomi Wood about motherhood, femininity, and modern love (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Your Armpits Are Trying to Tell You Something

By Yasmin Tayag

The last time I sweated through my shirt, I vowed that it would never happen again. Sweat shame had dogged me for too many years. No longer would armpit puddles dictate the color of my blouse. Never again would I twist underneath a hand dryer to dry my damp underarms. It was time to try clinical-strength antiperspirant.

Read the full article.

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Those of us who first became politically homeless in 2016 have lately been in a quandary: We need to figure out who we are. If we are not to succumb to the Saruman trap—going along with populist authoritarians in the foolish hope of using them for higher purposes—then we had better establish what we stand for.

Labels matter in politics. They can also lose their meaning. There is, for example, nothing “conservative” about the MAGA movement, which is, in large part, reactionary, looking for a return to an idealized past, when it is not merely a cult of personality. Today’s progressives are a long, long way from their predecessors of the early 20th century—just invoke Theodore Roosevelt’s name at a gathering of “the Squad” and see what happens.

Even the terms left and right—derived, let us remember, from seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the early days of the French Revolution—no longer convey much. Attitudes toward government coercion of various kinds, deficit spending, the rule of law—neither party holds consistent views on these subjects. The activist bases of both Democrats and Republicans like the idea of expanding executive power at the expense of Congress and the courts. Both see American foreign policy in past decades as a tale of unremitting folly, best resolved by leaving the world to its own devices. Both brood over fears and resentments, and shun those who do not share their deepest prejudices.

[David Frum: A good country’s bad choice]

What is worse is the extent to which the MAGA- and progressive-activist worlds are more interested in destroying institutions than building them. Both denounce necessary parts of government (the Department of Justice on the one hand, police departments on the other); seek to enforce speech codes; threaten to drive those they consider their enemies from public life; and pursue justice (as they understand it) in a spirit of reckless self-righteousness using prosecution as a form of retribution. Neither group of wreckers, for example, would really like to see, let alone help rebuild, the great universities as politically neutral oases of education rather than incubators of their own partisans.

To call those made politically homeless by the rise of Donald Trump “conservatives” no longer makes sense. To be a conservative is to want to slow down or stop change and preserve institutions and practices as they are, or to enable them to evolve slowly. But in recent decades, so much damage has been inflicted on norms of public speech and conduct that it is not enough to slow the progress of political decay. To the extent that the plain meaning of the word conservatism is indeed a commitment to preservation, that battle has been lost, and on multiple fronts.

We certainly are not “progressives” either. We do not believe that progress is inevitable (and can be accelerated), or that history bends in a certain direction. Being on the right side of history is a phrase that sends chills down the spines of those of us who have a somewhat dark view of human nature. The notion that the arc of history bends inexorably toward justice died for many of us in the middle of the 20th century. Moreover, the modern progressive temper, with its insistence on orthodoxies on such specifics as pronouns and a rigid and all-encompassing categorization of oppressors and victims, is intolerable for many of us.

What we are is a kind of old-fashioned liberal—a point recently made by the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Liberal is not an entirely satisfactory term, but given the impoverishment of today’s political vocabulary, it will have to do.

What does being a liberal mean, particularly in a second Trump term, when politics has become coarse and brutal and the partisan divide seems uncrossable?

It begins with a commitment to the notion of “freedom”—that is, a freedom that most suits human nature at its finest and requires not only the legal protection to express itself but a set of internal restraints based on qualities now in short supply: prudent good judgment, the ability to empathize, the desire to avoid unnecessary hurt, a large measure of tolerance for disagreement, an awareness that error awaits all of us. We agree with Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued in Democracy in America, that it is mœurs—mores or habits of belief or norms—and not laws alone that keep America free.

If this does not sound like a partisan political agenda, that is because it is not. It is, rather, a temperament, a set of dispositions rooted in beliefs about the challenges and promise of free self-government. It is an assertion of the primacy of those deeper values over the urgency of any specific political program, and reflects a belief that, ultimately, they matter more.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, whose early-19th-century writings shaped the idea of a liberal education, famously captured these qualities in his description of the product of such an education:

He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out loud. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injury … He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust … He knows the weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its province and its limits.

These qualities will, no doubt, seem otherworldly to many. They are not the stuff of which a vigorous political party will be built; they are easily mocked and impossible to tweet. They are more the stuff of statesmanship than politics. They will satisfy neither of our political parties, and certainly none of their bigoted partisans. They will not, at least in the short run, capture the imagination of the American people. They are probably not the winning creed of a political movement that can capture the presidency in 2028, or secure majorities in the House or Senate.

[Caitlin Flanagan: The Democrats’ billionaire mistake]

But principled liberals of the modern American type can exercise influence if they are patient, willing to argue, and, above all, if they do not give up. We can write and speak, attempt to persuade, and engage. Our influence, to the extent that we have it, will be felt in the long term and indirectly. It may be felt most, and is most urgently needed, in the field of education, beginning in the early years when young people acquire the instincts and historical knowledge that can make them thoughtful citizens. It is a long-term project, but that is nothing new: The struggle to eliminate formal discrimination on the basis of race and religion in public life took a very long time as well.

True liberals are short-term pessimists, because they understand the dark side of human nature, but long-run optimists about human potential, which is why they believe in freedom. At this troubled moment, we should neither run from the public square nor chant jeremiads while shaking our fists at the heavens. We need to be the anti-hysterics, the unflappable skeptics, the persistent advocates for the best of the old values and practices in new conditions. We need to persistently make our case.

Nor is this a matter of argument only. We need to be the ones who not only articulate but embody certain standards of behavior and thought. We may need the courage that the first editor of this magazine described as the willingness to “dare to be, in the right with two or three.” For sure, we should follow the motto that he coined for The Atlantic and be “of no party or clique.” If that means journeying in a political wilderness for a while, well, there are precedents for that. Besides, those who travel with us will be good company—and may be considerably more numerous than we now think.

Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife and invited dozens of strangers to their home to rape her over a nine-year period.