Passing judgment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was never going to be simple for the International Criminal Court. Even harder than acting fairly and impartially would be appearing to have done so, in a conflict that stirs fierce passions the world over.

On top of that, equality before the law is a basic principle of justice, but until this point, the ICC has mainly prosecuted authoritarian and non-Western leaders. Almost all of the court’s top funders are Western democracies or their allies. Now, for the first time in its history, the ICC would be asked to assess the actions of a democratically elected government allied with the West, and to show that it could do so without special favor.

Last Thursday, the ICC rose to this challenge. A three-person panel at the court approved arrest-warrant requests for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The Israeli officials are accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the murder and starvation of Palestinians.

[Eugene Kontorovich: The International Criminal Court’s folly]

Back in May, prosecutors also asked for arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, who stand accused of extermination, murder, rape, and sexual assault against Israeli citizens during the attacks of October 7. Two of the three (Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar) have since been killed by Israel. The ICC issued the arrest warrant for the third, Mohammed Deif. Israel claims to have killed him too, but Hamas has not confirmed his death.

The three judges who made the decision hail from Benin, France, and Slovenia, but were elected by all 124 member states of the ICC and went through a rigorous vetting process. Their months-long deliberations included engaging with the Israeli government and assessing its claim that its own courts could handle the matter.

Since its foundation, in 2002, the ICC has investigated crimes all over the world. It is limited in both the types of crimes it can investigate (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression) and its territorial jurisdiction (restricted mostly to its member states, which include countries in the European Union, Latin America, the antipodes, and half of Africa). Yet it has managed to levy charges for crimes committed in 17 countries and issue arrest warrants for despots such as Vladimir Putin, Muammar Qaddafi, and Omar al-Bashir.

For years, however, many non-Western leaders have accused the court of having a pro-Western bias. The arrest warrants against Israeli leaders offer the ICC an opportunity to prove otherwise. But much will depend on how seriously countries allied with Israel take the court’s orders.

The court’s members include the majority of Western countries, which will now be obligated to arrest Netanyahu or Gallant if either sets foot in their territory. Canada, one of the court’s biggest funders, was among the first to commit to doing so. Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Norway, Australia, Spain, Liechtenstein, the Czech Republic, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Slovenia have followed suit. Most other Western countries have treated the warrant with vagueness, generally agreeing that it is valid without committing specifically to arresting Netanyahu and Gallant.

Initially, only one EU member, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, a self-described “illiberal democracy,” outright opposed the warrant and even asked Netanyahu to visit. But on November 27, France declared that it considered Netanyahu immune from the ICC’s order because Israel is not a member of the court. If this principle is to be applied elsewhere, Putin, too, should be considered immune, given Russia’s non-membership in the ICC. The United States is also not a member of the court and is in fact openly hostile to its operations. The Biden administration has declared its disagreement with the arrest warrants, and surrogates of President-Elect Donald Trump have accused the court of anti-Semitism, promising a much tougher approach when Trump comes into office.

Netanyahu, like many others wanted by the court, will probably never appear before it. But that doesn’t make the ruling meaningless. International law has always been aspirational, in part because the world lacks an international law-enforcement agency (Interpol serves only to coordinate among various national police forces). But international justice has more significance in the world today than at any previous time in human history. Dozens of treaties obligate countries around the world and are referenced every day in national and transnational courts, sometimes leading to real results for victims and perpetrators. Viewed from a long historical perspective, this is a grand achievement. And last week’s ruling, by demonstrating an equal application of international law to a Western country, advances that cause.

In Governing the World: The History of an Idea, the historian Mark Mazower writes that the quest for a global court began before the First World War, with an enthusiastic, international group of peace activists who hoped that arbitration could bring an end to war. President Theodore Roosevelt, an ardent supporter of that movement, helped give tooth to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, founded in 1899 at The Hague. But advocates’ hopes soon crashed into the gory realities of the 20th century. The First World War killed millions. The League of Nations, created in its aftermath, was soon overtaken by events: Liberalism retreated behind fascism and communism in the 1930s, and a Second World War followed the first, culminating in atrocities with little precedent in human history.

[Arash Azizi: The problem with boycotting Israel]

Still, the quest for international justice did not die. The defeat of Nazi Germany and of Japan, and the revelation of the extraordinary extent of their crimes, led to international trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo and the foundation of the United Nations.

Nearly a century later, the International Criminal Court was founded during the optimistic period that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Democracy appeared ascendant, maybe even inevitable. The genocides in Rwanda and the territories of the former Yugoslavia tempered that period’s hopes—but they were met with international tribunals, which held out the promise that war criminals could no longer expect impunity. A United Nations conference in 1998, attended by representatives of 161 states, adopted the Rome Statute, which established the ICC four years later.

Many of the legal professionals who went to work for the ICC had been shaped by the experience of working for the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, which were relatively successful in delivering verdicts against human-rights offenders. For example, the Iranian Canadian lawyer Payam Akhavan served as a legal adviser at the tribunals for both Rwanda and Yugoslavia and then argued cases before the ICC, where he represented post-Qaddafi Libya as the country attempted to bring officials of the former regime to justice. In his book, In Search of a Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey, Akhavan describes the establishment of the ICC as the consummation of the idea of justice propounded at Nuremberg.

But the ICC has been bedeviled by controversy for much of its short life. In its early years, the court focused largely on African war criminals, because many of its member states were African. This led to allegations of bias. In the years since, it has expanded its operations across the world. And yet, most people live in countries where the court has no jurisdiction. Powerful nations such as China, India, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia never joined. The United States, Israel, and Russia signed the Rome Statute but then withdrew their signatures. The year the court was founded, the United States adopted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, in which it promised to take any necessary measures to release “any U.S. or allied personnel” detained by the court.

A far simpler way of denying the court’s authority is to ignore it. In 2015, South Africa refused to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir despite an ICC warrant. Earlier this year, Mongolia all but rolled out the red carpet for a visit from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the ICC’s warrant for his arrest notwithstanding.

But none of this means that the court, or the quest for international justice more broadly, is ineffectual. Putin has had to skip many an international summit (he skipped the recent Group of 20 meeting in Brazil, just as he did last year’s BRICS meeting in South Africa). And the ICC’s legal work can be used by other courts to prosecute alleged perpetrators. In the case of Israel, Netanyahu and Gallant are unlikely to ever be tried in The Hague, but the world has become much smaller for them. The warrants also provide an opportunity for Israel’s judicial system to prove its mettle: The ICC has declared that if Israel chooses to prosecute the allegations in its national court system, the warrants will be dropped.

The quest to have human conflicts decided by men and women in robes and wigs, and not just those in berets and boots, should resonate deeply with Israel’s founding ideals. The state’s declaration of independence in 1948 promised that it was “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” But it anchored this right in international law, pointing to the newly formed United Nations, which is mentioned seven times in the declaration.

Israel’s first government was led by nationalists and socialists. But the country’s first justice minister, and the architect of its judicial system, was one of the few signatories of the declaration who defined himself primarily as a liberal. A Berlin-born lawyer, Pinchas Rosen had moved to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1926, at the age of 39, having earned law degrees in Germany before the country’s liberal traditions were destroyed by Nazism.

Israel was hardly a liberal paradise in its early years. It enforced a military rule over its Arab citizens until 1966. But Rosen did establish a robust court system and was adamant that the State of Israel was to be a state of law. The country joined the United Nations and, with such legendary diplomats as the British-educated Abba Eban, overcame the isolation of its early years to establish a seat for itself at the table of international law. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 has rightly called that commitment to the law into question; but it has also been the subject of contestation within the country.

[Gershom Gorenberg: Israel’s disaster foretold]

Practically all of Israel’s political leaders have condemned the ICC’s decision. But some voices of dissent are audible. Naama Lazimi, a progressive member of the Knesset, called Thursday “a sad day for Israel” and put the blame for the decision on Netanyahu, not the court. “This was unnecessary,” she wrote on X, adding that it could have been avoided if the Israeli government had undertaken an independent inquiry and pursued a settlement to end the war and return the hostages held by Hamas. “But Netanyahu chose and still chooses his own position and cynical and personal interests,” she concluded: “The Hague has come out against Netanyahu, Netanyahu against Israel.” The Israeli organization Peace Now has taken a similar position, blaming the country’s leadership.

The long-term interests of Israel and those of enthusiasts for international law need not diverge. As a small country with many ill-wishers, surrounded by militias that clamor for its destruction, Israel often feels itself under siege and classifies any action against it as an unforgivable betrayal. But the country owes much of its past success to its recognition under international law and its membership in the community of democratic nations. Illegally occupying the Palestinian territories, and disregarding competent international forums such as ICC, serve to undermine that status. A world where liberal democratic norms, such as respect for international legal institutions, are more prevalent will ultimately be a safer one for Israel, especially if it wishes to fulfill the dream of its founders to be a Jewish and democratic state.  

The call from The Hague should thus be seen as an urgent message that the country needs to correct its course and step back from the campaign it has pursued since October 2023. True friends of Israel are not those who attempt to shield it from international justice. They are those who remind it that as a sovereign nation, it has the right to defend itself—but not the right to be immune from legal judgment.

For almost two years now, the world’s biggest tech companies have been at war over generative AI. Meta may be known for social media, Google for search, and Amazon for online shopping, but since the release of ChatGPT, each has made tremendous investments in an attempt to dominate in this new era. Along with start-ups such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, their spending on data centers and chatbots is on track to eclipse the costs of sending the first astronauts to the moon.

To be successful, these companies will have to do more than build the most “intelligent” software: They will need people to use, and return to, their products. Everyone wants to be Facebook, and nobody wants to be Friendster. To that end, the best strategy in tech hasn’t changed: build an ecosystem that users can’t help but live in. Billions of people use Google Search every day, so Google built a generative-AI product known as “AI Overviews” right into the results page, granting it an immediate advantage over competitors.

This is why a recent proposal from the Department of Justice is so significant. The government wants to break up Google’s monopoly over the search market, but its proposed remedies may in fact do more to shape the future of AI. Google owns 15 products that serve at least half a billion people and businesses each—a sprawling ecosystem of gadgets, search and advertising, personal applications, and enterprise software. An AI assistant that shows up in (or works well with) those products will be the one that those people are most likely to use. And Google has already woven its flagship Gemini AI models into Search, Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, the Play Store, and YouTube, all of which have at least 2 billion users each. AI doesn’t have to be life-changing to be successful; it just has to be frictionless. The DOJ now has an opportunity to add some resistance. (In a statement last week, Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, called the Department of Justice’s proposed remedy part of an “interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership,” including the company’s “leading role” in AI.)

[Read: The horseshoe theory of Google Search]

Google is not the only competitor with an ecosystem advantage. Apple is integrating its Apple Intelligence suite across eligible iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Meta, with more than 3 billion users across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, enjoys similar benefits. Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, has garnered little major attention but nonetheless became available to the website’s U.S. shoppers this fall. However much of the DOJ’s request the court ultimately grants, these giants will still lead the AI race—but Google had the clearest advantage among them.

Just how good any of these companies’ AI products are has limited relevance to their adoption. Google’s AI tools have repeatedly shown major flaws, such as confidently recommending eating rocks for good health, but the features continue to be used by more and more people simply because they’re there. Similarly, Apple’s AI models are less powerful than Gemini or ChatGPT, but they will have a huge user base simply because of how popular the iPhone is. Meta’s AI models may not be state-of-the-art, but that doesn’t matter to billions of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users who just want to ask a chatbot a silly question or generate a random illustration. Tech companies without such an ecosystem are well aware of their disadvantage: OpenAI, for instance, is reportedly considering developing its own web browser, and it has partnered with Apple to integrate ChatGPT across the company’s phones, tablets, and computers.

[Read: AI search is turning into the problem everyone worried about]

This is why it’s relevant that the DOJ’s proposed antitrust remedy takes aim at Google’s broader ecosystem. Federal and state attorneys asked the court to force Google to sell off its Chrome browser; cease preferencing its search products in the Android mobile operating system; prevent it from paying other companies, including Apple and Samsung, to make Google the default search engine; and allow rivals to syndicate Google’s search results and use its search index to build their own products. All of these and the DOJ’s other requests, under the auspices of search, are really shots at Google’s expansive empire.

As my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, selling Chrome might not affect Google’s search dominance: “People returned to Google because they wanted to, not just because the company had strong-armed them,” he wrote last week. But selling Chrome and potentially Android, as well as preventing Google from making its search engine the default option for various other companies’ products, would make it harder for Google to funnel billions of people to the rest of its software, including AI. Meanwhile, access to Google’s search index could provide a huge boost to OpenAI, Perplexity, Microsoft, and other AI search competitors: Perhaps the hardest part of building a searchbot is trawling the web for reliable links, and rivals would gain access to the most coveted way of doing so.

[Read: Google already won]

The Justice Department seems to recognize that the AI war implicates and goes beyond search. Without intervention, Google’s search monopoly could give it an unfair advantage over AI as well—and an AI monopoly could further entrench the company’s control over search. The court, attorneys wrote, must prevent Google from “manipulating the development and deployment of new technologies,” most notably AI, to further throttle competition.

And so the order also takes explicit aim at AI. The DOJ wants to bar Google from self-preferencing AI products, in addition to Search, in Chrome, Android, and all of its other products. It wants to stop Google from buying exclusive rights to sources of AI-training data and disallow Google from investing in AI start-ups and competitors that are in or might enter the search market. (Two days after the DOJ released its proposal, Amazon invested another $4 billion into Anthropic, the start-up and OpenAI rival that Google has also heavily backed to this point, suggesting that the e-commerce giant might be trying to lock in an advantage over Google.) The DOJ also requested that Google provide a simple way for publishers to opt out of their content being used to train Google’s AI models or be cited in AI-enhanced search products. All of that will make it harder for Google to train and market future AI models, and easier for its rivals to do the same.

When the DOJ first sued Google, in 2020, it was concerned with the internet of old: a web that appeared intractably stuck, long ago calcified in the image of the company that controls how billions of people access and navigate it. Four years and a historic victory later, its proposed remedy enters an internet undergoing an upheaval that few could have foreseen—but that the DOJ’s lawsuit seems to have nonetheless anticipated. A frequently cited problem with antitrust litigation in tech is anachronism, that by the time a social-media, or personal-computing, or e-commerce monopoly is apparent, it is already too late to disrupt. With generative AI, the government may finally have the head start it needs.

Hopes of rescuing 16 people missing after a tourist boat sank in the Red Sea on Monday were fading.

This past summer, a U.S. district court declared Google a monopolist. On Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed its proposed remedy. This plan—the government’s “proposed final judgment,” or PFJ—must be approved by the judge who is overseeing the case. But it outlines changes the government believes would be sufficient to loosen Google’s grip on the search market.

Notably, the DOJ has proposed that Google sell off its Chrome web browser—which currently accounts for about two-thirds of the browser market—and stay out of that business for five years. That proposal may seem righteous and effective, and stripping Google of its browser does make the government look bold. The proposal also seems to right a cosmic wrong from more than two decades ago, when the DOJ tried (and failed) to get Microsoft to unbundle its own Internet Explorer browser during a prior antitrust enforcement. This time around, the government’s lawyers insist that wresting Chrome from Google’s mitts is necessary to prevent Google from setting a default search engine for the majority of internet surfers, and pushing those same people to other Google products too. (By the same logic, the PFJ prevents Google from paying rivals such as Apple for default-search placement.)

This is a mistake. Google’s control of Chrome has surely benefited its market position and its bottom line. But Chrome might remain a boon for Google even if it’s under outside ownership. Instead, why not force Google to strip Chrome of its Google-promoting features, and let the browser be a burden rather than a tool for market domination?

In August, I argued that declaring Google a monopoly might not matter, because the company had already won the search wars. Searching the web effectively via text typed into input boxes was Google’s first and perhaps only innovation; the competitors that arose—DuckDuckGo, Bing, and so on—offered their own takes on Googling, which became the generic term for searching the web. People returned to Google because they wanted to, not just because the company had strong-armed them.

[Read: Google already won]

Google did incentivize competitors to maintain that status quo. Mozilla’s Firefox browser offers a case study. The foundation’s most recent annual report lists $510 million in royalty revenue for 2022, some of which surely comes from Google in the form of referral fees for Google searches. The PFJ appears to prohibit these kinds of payments, and whatever revenue they generate for Mozilla. If those are off the table, browser companies may end up letting users choose their own default search service. But the results could ultimately look very much the same: People who like and are familiar with Google might just choose it again.

Google built the Chrome browser in part to steer web users to its services—Search (and the ads it serves), Gmail, Google Docs, and so forth. Search was, of course, the most important of these. (Chrome was the first major browser to integrate web-search functionality directly into the address bar, a design known as the omnibox.) But over time, other Google features have become more and more entwined with Chrome’s operation. When I opened my Chrome browser in order to write this article, it presented me with a user-profile screen, strongly encouraging me to log in to my Google account, which gives Google insights into what I do online. That facility also offers me seamless access to Google Docs and Gmail, because I am already logged in.

Given that Chrome accounts for so much of the web-browser market, a more effective way to quash Google’s bad tendencies might involve sabotaging its browser rather than selling it off. Instead of making Google divest Chrome, the DOJ could have it keep the browser running (and secure) while stripping it of all the features that make Google services ready to hand. Killing the omnibox would be the boldest of these acts, because search, which basically means Googling, would no longer be presented as the default act on the web. Likewise, removing the tight Google-account integration and associated benefits for Google’s services and data collection would frustrate the company’s monopoly more effectively than a spun-off browser ever could.

My immigrant parents—my father especially—are ardent Christians. As such, my childhood seemed to differ dramatically from the glimpses of American life I witnessed at school or on television. My parents often spoke of their regimented, cloistered upbringings in Nigeria, and their belief that Americans are too lax. They devised a series of schemes to keep us on the straight and narrow: At home, we listened to an unending stream of gospel music and watched Christian programming on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. The centerpiece of their strategy, however, was daily visits to our small Nigerian church, in North Texas.

I quickly discerned a gap between the fist-pumping, patriotic Christianity that I saw on TV and the earnest, yearning faith that I experienced in church. On TV, it seemed that Christianity was not only a means of achieving spiritual salvation but also a tool for convincing the world of America’s preeminence. Africa was mentioned frequently on TBN, but almost exclusively as a destination for white American missionaries. On-screen, they would appear dour and sweaty as they distributed food, clothes, and Bibles to hordes of seemingly bewildered yet appreciative Black people. The ministers spoke of how God’s love—and, of course, the support of the audience—made such donations possible, but the subtext was much louder: God had blessed America, and now America was blessing everyone else.

In church, however, I encountered an entirely different type of Christianity. The biblical characters were the same, yet they were evoked for different purposes. God was on our side because we, as immigrants and their children, were the underdogs; our ancestors had suffered a series of losses at the hands of Americans and Europeans, just as the Israelites in the Bible had suffered in their own time. And like those chosen people, we would emerge victorious.

Over time, I learned that Christianity is a malleable faith; both the powerful and the powerless can use it to justify their beliefs and actions. This is, in part, the message of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Sister Deborah, which was published in France in 2022 and was recently released in the United States, in a translation by Mark Polizzotti. Set in Rwanda in the 1930s, the novel spotlights a group of recently arrived African American missionaries who preach a traditional Christian message about a forthcoming apocalypse, but with a twist: They prophesize that “when everything was again nice and dry, Jesus would appear on his cloud in the sky and everyone would discover that Jesus is black.” These missionaries are a destabilizing influence in a territory dominated by another version of Christianity, established and spread by the colonizing Belgians, that emphasizes the supremacy of a white Jesus.

[Read: A family story about colonialism and its aftereffects]

The most vital force in the novel is Sister Deborah herself. She is the prophetic, ungovernable luminary of the African American contingent, and possesses healing powers. Over the course of her time in Rwanda, she develops a theology that centers Black women; as a result, she is eventually castigated by her former mentor, Reverend Marcus, a gifted itinerant preacher who serves as the leader of the missionaries. Sister Deborah is a novel about the capaciousness of Christianity but also the limits of its inclusivity—particularly for the women in its ranks.

Those limits are evident throughout the novel. The first section is narrated by a woman, Ikirezi, who recalls her childhood in Rwanda. She’d been a “sickly girl” who required constant attention, yet her mother had avoided the local clinic: She had “no confidence in the pills that the orderlies dispensed, seemingly at whim.” Ikirezi’s mother eventually determines that her child’s chronic illness comes “from either people or spirits.” So, in a fit of desperation, she decides to take her to Sister Deborah. She doesn’t know much about this American missionary except that she is a “prophetess” who possesses the gift of “healing by laying on hands.” Upon learning of his wife’s plans, Ikirezi’s father explodes:

You are not going to that devil’s mission. I forbid it! Didn’t you hear what our real padri said about it? They’re sorcerers from a country called America, a country that might not even exist because it’s the land of the dead, the land of the damned. They have not been baptized with good holy water. And they are black—all the real padri are white. I forbid you to drag my daughter there and offer her to the demon hiding in the head and belly of that witch you call Deborah. You can go to the devil if you like, but spare my daughter!

Through Ikirezi’s father’s outburst, Mukasonga deftly sketches the two opposing Christian camps in the novel—one that depends on the Bible to protect its status, and the other that uses the Bible to attain status. The white padri (priests) seek to maintain their spiritual control of the local population by labeling the African American missionaries as evil interlopers. The missionaries, for their part, have positioned themselves as an alternative religious authority, and they begin to attract many followers, especially women, who are drawn to their energetic services and Sister Deborah’s supernatural abilities.

Ikirezi’s mother defies her husband and takes Ikirezi to see Sister Deborah. They arrive at the American dispensary, where Sister Deborah holds court “under the large tree with its dazzling red flowers, sitting atop the high termite mound that had been covered by a rug decorated with stars and red stripes.” She asks the children who are gathered before her, Ikirezi among them, “to touch her cane while she lay her hands on their heads.” Afterward, Ikirezi recalls “that under the palms of her hands, a great sense of ease and well-being spread through me.” Ikirezi’s depiction of Sister Deborah remains more or less at this pitch through the rest of this section: deferential and mystified, studied but also somewhat distant. As time passes, Ikirezi’s reverence for Sister Deborah only grows, forming a scrim that obscures the healer in a hazy glow.

The novel then pivots to Sister Deborah’s point of view; she expands on and revises Ikirezi’s portrait of her life. As a child in Mississippi, Sister Deborah discovered that she had healing powers. Her mother pulled her out of school, dreading “people’s vindictiveness as much as their gratitude” for her daughter’s gift. Shortly afterward, Sister Deborah is raped by a truck driver, which shifts the trajectory of her life dramatically. She has a profound religious experience when she visits a local church, and soon after falls in with Reverend Marcus.

Reverend Marcus initially sees Sister Deborah as a tool to advance his own ambitions. He is concerned about the suffering of Black people around the world: “the contempt, insults, and lynchings they endured in America; the enslavement, massacres, and colonial tyranny forced upon them in Africa.” His theology is focused not only on their salvation but on their ascendancy as well.

Sister Deborah begins to perform healings during Reverend Marcus’s revival services, and eventually, he brings her along on a missionary trip to Rwanda. There, the reverend and Sister Deborah initially work in harmony, attracting devoted new converts. But their partnership begins to fray when a divine spirit informs Sister Deborah that a Black woman, not a Black Jesus, will save them. Reverend Marcus’s response is both a warning and a prophecy: “If we follow you in your visions and dreams, we step outside of Christianity and venture into the unknown.”

Although the reverend initially accepts Sister Deborah’s “vision” of female power, he eventually uses it to undermine her, condemning her as a witch. Even within his progressive and radical theology, Reverend Marcus believes that women must serve men; in Mukasonga’s telling, he is a man whose shortsightedness and thirst for power eventually overwhelm his generally good intentions. His behavior reflects a reality that many Christian women have experienced, Black women in particular. In Rwanda, Sister Deborah is contending with a caste system that installed white men at the top and placed Black women at the bottom. Sister Deborah’s claim that the savior is a Black woman undermines that status quo. And the reverend’s response reveals a contradiction that many Black Christian women have faced: They are encouraged to seek spiritual freedom but are still expected to remain subservient.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

What Reverend Marcus doesn’t realize, however, is that his warning about “ventur[ing] into the unknown” has also given Sister Deborah a route for her own liberation. Like the women in Mukasonga’s prior work—a collection of accomplished memoirs, novels, and short fiction—Sister Deborah explores and then occupies unfamiliar realms. Unfamiliar, that is, to men, who create hierarchies in which they can flourish and then mark any territory beyond their reach as benighted. Yet it is in those benighted spaces, Sister Deborah comes to believe, that Black women can thrive. A group of women begins to follow her, and she changes her name to Mama Nganga. Little girls collect “healing plants” for her. She treats local sex workers, and invites homeless women to stay with her. She constructs an ecosystem of care and protection for women and proudly claims the label that Ikirezi’s father placed on her at the beginning of the novel: “I’m what they call a witch doctor, a healer, though some might say a sorceress,” she declares. “I treat women and children.” For Sister Deborah, Reverend Marcus’s Christianity is inadequate because it prioritizes dominance over service. She abandons that approach in favor of pursuing the true mission of Jesus: to uplift and care for the most vulnerable.

Mukasonga’s slim novel is laden with ideas, but perhaps the most potent and urgent is her assertion that sometimes, Black women cannot achieve true freedom within the confines of Christianity. By exposing how even progressive interpretations of the faith can uphold patriarchal norms, Mukasonga invites her reader to question the limitations imposed on marginalized believers. In Sister Deborah, real liberation lies in eschewing conformity to any dogma, even the Bible. But the novel is more than a critique of religious institutions: It is a call to redefine faith, perhaps even radically, on one’s own terms.

File this under something that should have been self-evident: When it came time for the artist known as Cher to finish her memoir, she discovered she had too much material. Where to even begin? Decades before Madonna had reinventions and Taylor Swift had eras, Cher had comebacks—triumphs over decline in which she’d reemerge stronger, shinier, and more resolute than ever. “It’s a thousand times harder to come back than to become,” she writes in the first volume of her autobiography, titled—naturally—Cher. And yet something in her soul seems to always relish the challenge. A walking, singing eye roll, Cher has never met an obstacle without theatrically raising a middle finger. Consider the gown she wore to present at the Academy Awards in 1986 after having been snubbed for her performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask: the cobwebbed, midsection-baring, black sequined supervillainess outfit that became known as her fuck the Oscars dress. Radiantly moody, she glowered her way right into awards-show history.

But much of that later timeline is for the second volume, supposedly arriving next year. Cher, which documents the four decades between her birth, in 1946, and the start of her serious acting career, in 1980, is concerned with the essentials: where she came from, who she is, all the incidents that helped her become one of music’s most indelible mononyms. I guarantee that, as you read, you’ll be able to conjure the sound of her voice in your mind, velvety and sonorous. (“You couldn't tell who was singing the baritone parts,” The New York Times noted in 1988 about “I Got You, Babe,” her duet with Sonny Bono, “but you had the disturbing feeling that it probably wasn't Sonny.”) And likely her face, too: her doll-like features, sphinxlike smile, and black, black hair. More than anything, though, Cher has come to stand for a brassy, strutting kind of survival over the years, and on this front, her memoir is awash in insight and rich in details.

Cher is a bracing read, peppered with caustic quips and self-effacing anecdotes, but fundamentally frank. This, you might agree, is no moment for nostalgia. (She does not—forgive the cheap gag—actually want to turn back time.) “Ours was a sad, strange story of Southern folk coming from nothing and carving out a life after the Great Depression,” Cher writes. “It wasn’t pretty and it was never easy … Resilience is in my DNA.” Her grandmother was 12 years old when she became pregnant with Cher’s mother, Jackie Jean; her grandfather Roy was a baker’s assistant turned bootlegger who beat his new wife, made his daughter sing for pennies on top of the bars he’d drink at, and once tried to murder both his children by leaving the gas stove on. For much of Cher’s infancy—she was born Cheryl Sarkisian but changed her name in 1978—she was raised by nuns, after her father abandoned her 20-year-old mother. Later, her mother, who had a muted acting career, cycled through seven or eight husbands and two illegal abortions that almost killed her. Although Jackie was a talented performer and luminously beautiful, “my mom missed out on several major acting roles because she refused to sleep with men who promised her a break,” Cher notes. The stepfather who was kindest to young Cher was also a nasty drunk, to the point where, even now, “I still can’t stand the sound of a belt coming out of pant loops.”

From early childhood, Cher was a dynamo—singing perpetually into a hairbrush, dancing around the house, and peeing her pants during a screening of Dumbo rather than miss any of the movie. She dreamed of being a star, and, less conventionally, of discovering a cure for polio. (“When Jonas Salk invented a vaccine, I was so pissed off,” she writes.) Because of her mother’s erratic relationships, she moved constantly, all over the country. By 15, she was living in Los Angeles, where she recounts being leered at by Telly Savalas in a photographer’s studio and spending a wild night or two with Warren Beatty. At 16, she met the man who’d become her partner in all senses of the word: a divorced, charming, slightly squirelly 27-year-old named Sonny Bono. “He liked that I was quirky and nonjudgmental,” Cher writes. “I liked that he was funny and different. He was a grown-up without being too grown up, and I was a sixteen-year-old lying about my age.” Their relationship was platonic at first—when she found herself homeless, she moved in with him, the pair sleeping in twin beds next to each other like characters in a 1950s sitcom. One day, he kissed her, and that was that.

If Cher’s early life is a Steinbeckian saga of grim endurance, her life with Bono is a volatile scrapbook of life in 20th-century entertainment. Thanks to Bono’s connections with Phil Spector, she became a singer, performing backing vocals on the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” When Cher and Bono formed a duo and became wildly famous in 1965 with “I Got You, Babe,” the American musical establishment initially deemed her too outré in her bell bottoms and furs, and then—as the sexual revolution and rock music caught fire—too square. In her first flush of fame, the recently widowed Jackie Kennedy requested that Sonny & Cher perform for a private dinner party in New York. The fashion editor Diana Vreeland had Cher photographed for Vogue. At a party in his hotel suite, Salvador Dalí explained to her that an ornamental fish she was admiring was actually a vibrator. (“I couldn’t drop that fish fast enough.”) Having entrusted all the financial details of their partnership to Bono, she was stunned when he revealed that they owed hundreds of thousands in back taxes, right as their musical success was stalling.

[Read: What Madonna knows]

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” Marcel Proust declared in In Search of Lost Time. Show-business memoirs can be gritty—Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy recounts a similarly bleak childhood—but I’m hard pressed to think of another celebrity author so insistent on dispensing with rose-tinted reminiscences. Cher wants you to know that for most people—and absolutely for most women—the 20th century was no cakewalk. She loved Bono, and is the first to admit how enchanting their dynamic could be. But the partner she describes was controlling, vengeful (he reportedly burned her tennis clothes after he saw her talking to another man), and shockingly callous. When she left him, she discovered that her contract was one of “involuntary servitude”—he owned 95 percent of a company called Cher Enterprises, of which she was an employee who never received a paycheck. (His lawyer owned the other 5 percent.) Their divorce was finalized in 1975, a year or so after women were granted the right to apply for credit cards in their own names.

Promoting her book, Cher told CBS Sunday Morning, “I didn’t want to give information, ’cause you could go to Wikipedia [for that]. I just wanted to tell stories.” And she does, but in a form that can’t help doubling as a broader history—an account of all the things women have suffered through (casting couches, financial ruin, humiliating public scrutiny) and fought for (authority over their own bodies). Unlike her mother, Cher was, via carefully coded language, offered a legal abortion in her doctor’s office in 1975, during a period when her life was in flux. (Her second husband, the musician Gregory Allman, was addicted to heroin and had deserted her; she was about to return to work on her CBS variety show, also titled Cher.) “I needed to be at work on Monday,” she remembers. “I needed to be singing and dancing. I had a child, mother, and sister to take care of. I knew I had to make a choice, and I knew what it was. It made it harder that I didn’t have Gregory to talk to about it, but I made my decision and I was so grateful to my doctor’s compassion for giving me one.” (Cher and Bono's son, Chaz Bono, had been born in 1969. By 1976, Cher and Allman had reconciled, and Cher gave birth to Elijah Blue Allman.)

Gratitude. Compassion. Choice. What is resilience reliant on if not all three? We have to wait for book two for Cher’s account of her ups and downs in the ’80s and ’90s—her new acting career, her Best Actress Oscar for Moonstruck, her turn to infomercials for income after a severe bout of chronic fatigue syndrome, her auto-tuned path with “Believe” to one of the best-selling pop singles of all time. But in Cher, she offers a persuasive, wry, rousing account of what made her, and what she was able to make in turn. “I’ve always thought that whether you get a break or not is purely down to luck,” she writes, adding, “These were the key moments that changed my luck.” But that read of things understates her sheer force of will—her outright refusal, as with the Oscars dress, to ever be counted out.

Edinburgh University wants the two women's descendants to help decide what happens to their remains.

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One of the most wonderful, and frustrating, things about Google Search is its inefficiency. The tool, at its most fundamental level, doesn’t provide knowledge. Instead, it points you to where it may, or may not, lie. That list of blue links can lead you down rabbit holes about your favorite sports team and toward deep understandings of debates you never knew existed. This tendency can also make it impossible to get a simple, straightforward fact.

But the experience of seeking information online is rapidly changing. Tech giants have for almost two years been promising AI-powered search tools that do provide knowledge and answers. And last week, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google made announcements about their AI-powered search products that provide the clearest glimpse yet into what that future will look like. I’ve spent the past week using these tools for research and everyday queries, and reported on my findings in an article published today. “These tools’ current iterations surprised and, at times, impressed me,” I wrote, “yet even when they work perfectly, I’m not convinced that AI search is a wise endeavor.”

The promise of AI-powered search is quite different from Google’s—not to organize information so you can find it yourself, but to readily provide that information in a digestible, concise format. That made my searches faster and more convenient at times. But something deeply human was lost as a result. The rabbit holes and the unexpected obsessions are what’s beautiful about searching the internet; but AI, like the tech companies developing it, is obsessed with efficiency and optimization. What I loved about traditional Google searches, I wrote, is “falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity.”

Illustration by The Atlantic

The Death of Search

By Matteo Wong

For nearly two years, the world’s biggest tech companies have said that AI will transform the web, your life, and the world. But first, they are remaking the humble search engine.

Chatbots and search, in theory, are a perfect match. A standard Google search interprets a query and pulls up relevant results; tech companies have spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars engineering chatbots that interpret human inputs, synthesize information, and provide fluent, useful responses. No more keyword refining or scouring Wikipedia—ChatGPT will do it all. Search is an appealing target, too: Shaping how people navigate the internet is tantamount to shaping the internet itself.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

The AI search war has begun: “Nearly two years after the arrival of ChatGPT, and with users growing aware that many generative-AI products have effectively been built on stolen information, tech companies are trying to play nice with the media outlets that supply the content these machines need,” I reported this past summer. Google is playing a dangerous game with AI search: “When more serious health questions get the AI treatment, Google is playing a risky game,” my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote in May.

For nearly two years, the world’s biggest tech companies have said that AI will transform the web, your life, and the world. But first, they are remaking the humble search engine.

Chatbots and search, in theory, are a perfect match. A standard Google search interprets a query and pulls up relevant results; tech companies have spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars engineering chatbots that interpret human inputs, synthesize information, and provide fluent, useful responses. No more keyword refining or scouring Wikipedia—ChatGPT will do it all. Search is an appealing target, too: Shaping how people navigate the internet is tantamount to shaping the internet itself.

Months of prophesying about generative AI have now culminated, almost all at once, in what may be the clearest glimpse yet into the internet’s future. After a series of limited releases and product demos, mired with various setbacks and embarrassing errors, tech companies are debuting AI-powered search engines as fully realized, all-inclusive products. Last Monday, Google announced that it would launch its AI Overviews in more than 100 new countries; that feature will now reach more than 1 billion users a month. Days later, OpenAI announced a new search function in ChatGPT, available to paid users for now and soon opening to the public. The same afternoon, the AI-search start-up Perplexity shared instructions for making its “answer engine” the default search tool in your web browser.

[Read: The AI search war has begun]

For the past week, I have been using these products in a variety of ways: to research articles, follow the election, and run everyday search queries. In turn I have scried, as best I can, into the future of how billions of people will access, relate to, and synthesize information. What I’ve learned is that these products are at once unexpectedly convenient, frustrating, and weird. These tools’ current iterations surprised and, at times, impressed me, yet even when they work perfectly, I’m not convinced that AI search is a wise endeavor.

For decades, the search bar has been a known entity. People around the world are accustomed to it; several generations implicitly regard Google as the first and best way to learn about basically anything. Enter a query, sift through a list of links, type a follow-up query, get more links, and so on until your question is answered or inquiry satisfied. That indirectness and wide aperture—all that clicking and scrolling—are in some ways the defining qualities of a traditional Google search, allowing (even forcing) you to traverse the depth and breadth of connections that justify the term world-wide web. The hyperlink, in this sense, is the building block of the modern internet.

That sprawl is lovely when you are going down a rabbit hole about Lucrezia de Medici, as I did when traveling in Florence last year, or when diving deep into a scientific dilemma. It is perfect for stumbling across delightful video clips and magazine features and social-media posts. And it is infuriating when you just need a simple biographical answer, or a brunch recommendation without the backstory of three different chefs, or a quick gloss of a complex research area without having to wade through obscure papers.

In recent years, more and more Google Search users have noted that the frustrations outweigh the delight—describing a growing number of paid advertisements, speciously relevant links engineered to top the search algorithm, and erroneous results. Generative AI promises to address those moments of frustration by providing a very different experience. Asking ChatGPT to search the web for the reasons Kamala Harris lost the presidential election yielded a short list with four factors: “economic concerns,” “demographic shifts,” “swing state dynamics,” and “campaign strategies.” It was an easy and digestible response, but not a particularly insightful one; in response to a follow-up question about voter demographics, ChatGPT provided a stream of statistics without context or analysis. A similar Google search, meanwhile, pulls up a wide range of news analyses that you have to read through. If you do follow Google’s links, you will develop a much deeper understanding of the American economy and politics.

Another example: Recently, I’ve been reading about a controversial proposed infrastructure project in Maryland. Google searches sent me through a labyrinth of public documents, corporate pitches, and hours-long recordings of city-council meetings, which took ages to review but sparked curiosity and left me deeply informed. ChatGPT, when asked, whipped up an accurate summary and timeline of events, and cited its sources—which was an extremely useful way to organize the reading I’d already done, but on its own might have been the end of my explorations.

I have long been a critic of AI-powered search. The technology has repeatedly fabricated information and struggled to accurately attribute its sources. Its creators have been accused of plagiarizing and violating the intellectual-property rights of major news organizations. None of these concerns has been fully allayed: The new ChatGPT search function, in my own use and other reports, has made some errors, mixing up dates, misreporting sports scores, and telling me that Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is bigger than Manhattan’s (much larger) Central Park. The links offered by traditional search engines are filled with errors too—but searchbots implicitly ask for your trust without verification. The citations don’t particularly invite you to click on them. And while OpenAI and Perplexity have entered into partnerships with any number of media organizations, including The Atlantic—perhaps competing for the high-quality, human-made content that their searchbots depend on—exactly how websites that once relied on ad revenue and subscriptions will fare on an AI-filtered web eludes me. (The editorial division of The Atlantic operates independently from the business division, which announced its corporate partnership with OpenAI in May.)

[Read: AI search is turning into the problem everyone worried about]

Although ChatGPT and Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite their sources with (small) footnotes or bars to click on, not clicking on those links is the entire point. OpenAI, in its announcement of its new search feature, wrote that “getting useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you. Now, chat can get you to a better answer.” Google’s pitch is that its AI “will do the Googling for you.” Perplexity’s chief business officer told me this summer that “people don’t come to Perplexity to consume journalism,” and that the AI tool will provide less traffic than traditional search. For curious users, Perplexity suggests follow-up questions so that, instead of opening a footnote, you keep reading in Perplexity.

The change will be the equivalent of going from navigating a library with the Dewey decimal system, and thus encountering related books on adjacent shelves, to requesting books for pickup through a digital catalog. It could completely reorient our relationship to knowledge, prioritizing rapid, detailed, abridged answers over a deep understanding and the consideration of varied sources and viewpoints. Much of what’s beautiful about searching the internet is jumping into ridiculous Reddit debates and developing unforeseen obsessions on the way to mastering a topic you’d first heard of six hours ago, via a different search; falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity.

The issues with factuality and attribution may well be resolved—but even if they aren’t, tech companies show no signs of relenting. Controlling search means controlling how most people access every other digital thing—it’s an incredible platform to gain trust and visibility, advertise, or influence public opinion.

The internet is changing, and nobody outside these corporations has any say in it. And the biggest, most useful, and most frightening change may come from AI search engines working flawlessly. With AI, the goal is to keep you in one tech company’s ecosystem—to keep you using the AI interface, and getting the information that the AI deems relevant and necessary. The best searches are goal-oriented; the best responses are brief. Which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising coming from Silicon Valley behemoths that care, above all, about optimizing their businesses, products, and users’ lives.

A little, or even a lot, of inefficiency in search has long been the norm; AI will snuff it out. Our lives will be more convenient and streamlined, but perhaps a bit less wonderful and wonder-filled, a bit less illuminated. A process once geared toward exploration will shift to extraction. Less meandering, more hunting. No more unknown unknowns. If these companies really have their way, no more hyperlinks—and thus, no actual web.

More than 200 people are dead and dozens more still missing after torrential rain earlier this week.