The list of air-travel fiascos this past year reads like a verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: A chunk of plane fell off mid-flight. Boeing workers went on strike. A CrowdStrike software issue grounded thousands of planes worldwide. A major airline merger was blocked. Passengers were terribly unruly.

And yet, in roughly that same time period, much about the experience of air travel actually went pretty well: Cancellations in the first half of this year (even with that software outage) were way down from the chaos of 2022, even amidst record-breaking travel days, and last year was by some metrics the safest on record. The Biden administration implemented new requirements for airlines to give passengers refunds for canceled or significantly changed flights and announced a new rule to crack down on airline junk fees. Flights are more affordable than they were decades ago, adjusted for inflation.

An air-travel paradox has emerged. As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote earlier this year, “although air safety is getting markedly better over time, the experience of flying is arguably worse than ever.” Flying in 2024 is safe and relatively consumer friendly but also quite annoying, especially for the customers unwilling or unable to tack on the perks or upgrades that make it more pleasant. In most economy flying situations, seats are cramped, snacks are expensive, storage space is tight, tensions are high. Airlines are seeing record demand; the TSA is predicting that this week will be the busiest Thanksgiving travel week on record. But staffing shortages persist, adding to inconvenience for fliers.

Many of these frustrations are the fault of individual airlines. But a presidential administration’s approach to consumer welfare can play a meaningful role in the experience of flying (and what happens when things, inevitably, go wrong). Under President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the federal government pushed to block mergers that it saw as concentrating the industry in a way that might hurt consumers, and generally focused on consumer protections (sometimes to the ire of the industry). The Trump administration will likely take a more “business-friendly” approach, Henry Harteveldt, an industry analyst, told me. Former Representative Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, Trump’s pick to replace Buttiegieg as transportation secretary, used to be an airline lobbyist. Meanwhile, Project 2025 (which Trump has denied affiliation with) has identified airline consumer protection as a “problematic area.” And many Trump allies have also harshly criticized Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s approach to antitrust policy. Trump—even if he doesn’t fully undo the regulations introduced under Biden—could curb some of the actions that are currently in motion but have not yet made their way to Congress, Harteveldt predicted.

In his first term, Trump’s administration bailed out the airline industry in the early days of the pandemic. And on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 2020, Trump’s Transportation Department quietly announced a new rule that redefined what counted as deceptive practices, to the benefit of airlines over consumers. The airline industry has high hopes for Trump’s next term: Delta’s CEO celebrated the end of an era of “overreach,” and Southwest’s CEO said he is optimistic that the next administration is “maybe a little less aggressive in terms of regulating or rule-making.”

The full scope of Trump’s plans for the airline industry isn’t yet clear, but in a statement announcing his transportation-secretary selection, Trump said that Duffy “will make our skies safe again by eliminating DEI for pilots and air traffic controllers.” Aviation officials have expressed concern that clean-fuel programs will be stymied under Trump, who has promised to repeal parts of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. And another initiative Trump floated during his first term—privatizing air-traffic control—may be revived in his next term (the overworked and sometimes dysfunctional Federal Aviation Administration is presently funded with federal dollars). If air-traffic control does indeed become run by a private company, consumers likely wouldn’t see a big difference in ticket prices, Harteveldt said, but it would be a huge change to the way the travel industry operates.

So much about travel is unpredictable, especially during busy weeks like this one. Will your flight be delayed? Will your boarding area be crowded with “gate lice” trying to skip the line? Will your seat be double-booked, and will the Wi-Fi work? Some of this uncertainty is just the reality of human experience—you could be seated next to a crying baby no matter who is president—but some of the experience will be shaped by the administration’s approach in the next four years. As Trump and his allies attempt to balance the interests of consumers and corporations in a massive, complicated, and closely watched industry, a big question is who will get priority.

Related:

All airlines are now the same. Flying is weird right now.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Good on Paper: Is ambivalence killing parenthood? A guide for the politically homeless Thanksgiving should be in October.

Today’s News

Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire deal, which will take effect tomorrow and pause fighting in the region, President Joe Biden announced. President-Elect Donald Trump said yesterday that he would impose a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10 percent tariff on imports from China. Boris Epshteyn, a top Trump aide, allegedly asked potential nominees for Trump’s second administration to pay him consulting fees if they wanted him to advocate for them to Trump, according to a review by the president-elect’s legal team. Epshteyn has denied the allegations.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Americans need to put down the vacuum and get off the tidiness treadmill, Annie Lowrey writes.

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The AI war was never just about AI. “Dear James”: My home is a horror of unfinished tasks. The sense that most defines a culture The road dogs of the American West

Evening Read

Kimberley French / A24

A Horror Movie About an Atheist Who Won’t Shut Up

By McKay Coppins

This article contains spoilers for the movie Heretic.

When I was a Mormon missionary in Texas in the early 2000s, my companions and I used to get strange phone calls from a man with a British accent named Andrew. We didn’t know who he was, or how he’d gotten the numbers for a bunch of Church-owned cellphones, but the calls always went the same. He would begin in a friendly mode, feigning interest in our lives and work. Then, gradually, the questions would turn confrontational as he revealed his true agenda: to convince us that everything we believed was wrong.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Dave Free.

Listen (or skip). On Kendrick Lamar’s new album, GNX, a rapper who is obsessed with excellence tries to entertain the masses, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Watch. Jimmy O. Yang spent years stuck in small, clichéd roles. Now, starring on Interior Chinatown (streaming on Hulu), he’s figuring out who he wants to be.

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P.S.

As the Swifties and/or Black Friday die-hards among you may know, Taylor Swift is releasing a book this Friday at Target. For The Atlantic’s Books section, I wrote about what Swift’s decision to self-publish means for the publishing industry. Have a great Thanksgiving!

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Mid is a perfect bit of new slang for a culture in which quantity is crushing quality, in which you can stream endlessly and feel nothing. What’s also fitting is that the word has become a favorite diss in the rap world, the musical genre that has helped pioneer what mediocrity means today. To be clear: Hip-hop is our era’s most dynamic art form. But it’s also a content template, an expressive mode, that invites anyone with a mic and some talent to spam the internet with raw thoughts set to beats. According to some accounts, the term mid jumped from weed slang to the mainstream in 2021, in reaction to one of the many overlong and underdeveloped albums that Drake—the Spotify era’s defining rapper—has released like so many tadpoles into a lake.

Kendrick Lamar has long styled himself as an enemy of midness. The 37-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner makes statement albums thick with meaning and detail. He tells cohesive stories by unpredictably varying his flow, voice, and production ideas; he challenges audiences with noise-jazz interludes and intricate wordplay. This musical ambition matches his persona: that of a disciplined justice seeker taking on the wickedness within himself and in the world around him. When he missteps—as he did in parts of 2022’s sprawling Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers—it’s from caring too much, trying too hard, and losing the listener while chasing difficult truths.

The expectations he’s set for himself make his new, sixth album a bit surprising. Released without any warning on Friday, the 12-track GNX is terse, punchy, and, to an almost disconcerting degree, easy to digest. It polishes familiar Lamarisms and West Coast hip-hop touchstones—wheezing keyboards, drawling flows, the brittle bounce of Bay Area hyphy. The results come off as populism with a point: Lamar slightly compromising his standards in an attempt to raise everyone else’s.

The album can’t be understood without revisiting his battle with Drake, which unfolded earlier this year. The two rappers volleyed unverifiable allegations of pedophilia and domestic abuse in scathing diss tracks, but beneath that was a war about aesthetics. Lamar portrayed Drake as a vapid, exploitative pop star. Drake labeled Lamar as an egghead: “You better have a motherfuckin’ quintuple entendre on that shit,” he taunted. Lamar answered with “Not Like Us,” a witty and wild takedown that became a radio smash and arguably the song of the summer. Its killer ingredient was its catchiness, proving Lamar’s skills not just as an egghead but also as an entertainer.

GNX’s opening track, “Wacced Out Murals,” surveys the aftermath of that episode in a tone of despair, accompanied by baleful mariachi singing and strings. Lamar was widely celebrated as the victor over Drake, but he feels that the compliments he received were “back-handed,” and that the lessons of his victory—basically, be better, morally and artistically—went unheeded. “All of y’all is on trial,” he says, clocking hip-hop’s present surplus of artists with private-life skeletons and “old-ass flows.” The most surprising line: “Fuck a double entendre, I want y’all to feel this shit.” Clearly, he doesn’t want his message to be lost this time.

[Read: It’s not a rap beef. It’s a cultural reckoning.]

To that end, he styles himself as a sage, “writin’ words, tryna elevate these children”—meaning both his fading peers and the younger generation who might build on his legacy. The chorus of “Murals” preaches hard work and self-determination to an imagined striver who wants to achieve Lamar’s success. Later on the album, he advises listeners to turn Madden off, not get lost to social media, and handle disagreements in private. The final song, “Gloria,” scans as a love song about a relationship’s ups and downs—but he’s actually rapping about his own romance with his pen. At a time when literacy rates are falling and mumble-rap reigns, Lamar wants to make writing sexy again.

The album’s straightforward sound serves that mission. Adopting an amusing variety of delivery techniques—rasping staccato on “Peekaboo,” Snoop-like butteriness on “Man at the Garden”—Lamar blasts through verses and hooks that will sound great at the Super Bowl halftime show next year. He alternates among jittery bangers, swaying R&B anthems, and big-important-message songs with cinematic orchestration. On “Squabble Up,” the beat bubbles like a witch’s cauldron as Lamar reworks a classic call-and-response refrain. “Heart Pt. 6” glides through Lamar’s early-career memories over a shimmering neo-soul sample. In the instant classic “TV Off,” Lamar shouts out Mustard in the manner of a soccer announcer bellowing “gooooaaaal.”

Some of the music, however, comes off like a diet version of Lamar’s best work. Many of the beats have a pillowy, thudding quality that might be attributed to the involvement of pop’s vibes mastermind, Jack Antonoff. Certain lines rely on overly clunky allusions, half-baked metaphors, or both. “I put a square on his back like I’m Jack Dorsey,” he raps, a lyric that wouldn’t be out of place on one of those Drake albums that Lamar disdains.

The tensions of the album’s approach are exemplified by “Reincarnated,” on which Lamar imagines himself having lived a series of past lives as brilliant but doomed musicians. As Lamar raps in furious counterpoint with a sizzling Tupac sample, the music telegraphs big drama ahead. But ultimately, the track feels minor in the larger context of his career. The concept he’s using—staging an intense inner dialogue about the state of his soul—has previously pushed him to heights of extreme emotion and thematic knottiness. Here, the payoff is oddly tidy: “I rewrote the Devil’s story,” Lamar concludes, summarizing what he just said for anyone who didn’t get it.

Still, if the album’s goal is to fortify Lamar’s standing and evangelize his values, then it’s mostly a success. He’s still an agile, characterful rapper who’s able to dart among styles and land punch lines. Most hearteningly, some of the album’s best moments belong to relatively obscure L.A. rappers given a moment to flex. Each of them has a distinctive sound—Peysoh murmurs murderously; YoungThreat whispers off the beat—and delivers bars that hit as hard as any of Lamar’s. Their presence makes the case that his ethos can be passed on, and that we are not doomed to a future of pure mid.

The rapper says Universal Music and Spotify conspired to boost the popularity of Lamar’s diss track.