For a brief moment earlier this month, I thought an old acquaintance had passed away. I was still groggy one morning when I checked my phone to find a notification delivering the news. “Obituary shared,” the message bluntly said, followed by his name. But when I opened my phone, I learned that he was very much still alive. Apple’s latest software update was to blame: A new feature that uses AI to summarize iPhone notifications had distorted the original text message. It wasn’t my acquaintance who had died, but a relative of his. That’s whose obituary I had received.

These notification summaries are perhaps the most visible part of Apple Intelligence, the company’s long-awaited suite of AI features, which officially began to roll out last month. (It’s compatible with only certain devices.) We are living in push-notification hell, and Apple Intelligence promises to collapse the incessant stream of notifications into pithy recaps. Instead of setting your iPhone aside while you shower and returning to nine texts, four emails, and two calendar alerts, you can now return to a few brief Apple Intelligence summaries.

The trouble is that Apple Intelligence doesn’t seem to be very … intelligent. Ominous summaries of people’s Ring-doorbell alerts have gone viral: “Multiple people at your Front Yard,” the feature notified one user. “Package is 8 stops away, delivered, and will be delivered tomorrow,” an Amazon alert confusingly explained. And sliding into someone’s DMs hits different when Instagram notifications are summarized as “Multiple likes and flirtatious comments.” But Apple Intelligence appears to especially struggle with text messages. Sometimes the text summaries are alarmingly inaccurate, as with the false obituary I received. But even when they are technically right, the AI summaries still feel wrong. “Expresses love and encouragement,” one AI notification I recently received crudely announced, compressing a thoughtfully written paragraph from a loved one. What’s the point of a notification like that? Texting—whether on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal—is a deeply intimate medium, infused with personality and character. By strip-mining messages into bland, lifeless summaries, Apple seems to be misunderstanding what makes texting so special in the first place.

Perhaps it was inevitable that AI summaries would come for push notifications. Summarization is AI’s killer feature and tech companies seem intent on applying it to just about everything. The list of things that AI is summarizing might require a summary of its own: emails and Zoom calls and Facebook comments and YouTube videos and Amazon reviews and podcasts and books and medical records and full seasons of TV shows. In many cases, this summarization is helpful—for instance, in streamlining meeting notes.

But where is the line? Concision, when applied to already concise texts, sucks away what little context there was to begin with. In some cases, the end result is harmful. The technology seems to have something of a death problem. Across multiple cases, the feature appears bewilderingly eager to falsely suggest that people are dead. In one case, a user reported that a text from his mother reading “That hike almost killed me!” had been turned into “Attempted suicide, but recovered.”

But mostly, AI summaries lead to silly outcomes. “Inflatable costumes and animatronic zombies overwhelming; will address questions later,” read the AI summary of a colleague’s message on Halloween. Texts rich with emotional content read like a lazy therapist’s patient files. “Expressing sadness and worry,” one recent summary said. “Upset about something,” declared another. AI is unsurprisingly awful with breakup texts (“No longer in relationship; wants belongings from the apartment”). When it comes to punctuation, the summaries read like they were written by a high schooler who just discovered semicolons and now overzealously inserts; them; literally; everywhere. Even Apple admits that the language used in notification summaries can be clinical.

The technology is at its absolute worst when it tries to summarize group chats. It’s one thing to condense three or four messages from a single friend; it’s another to reduce an extended series of texts from multiple people into a one-sentence notification. “Rude comments exchanged,” read the summary of one user’s family group chat. When my friends and I were planning a dinner earlier this month, my phone collapsed a series of messages coordinating our meal into “Takeout, ramen, at 6:30pm preferred.” Informative, I guess, but the typical back-and-forth of where to eat (one friend had suggested sushi) and timing (the other was aiming for an early night) was erased.

Beyond the content, much of the delight of text messaging comes from the distinctiveness of the individual voices of the people we are talking to. Some ppl txt like dis. others text in all lowercase and no punctuation. There are lol friends and LOL friends. My dad is infamous for sending essay-length messages. When I text a friend who lives across the country asking about her recent date, I am not looking purely for informational content (“Night considered good,” as Apple might summarize); rather, I want to hear the date described in her voice (“Was amaze so fun we had lovely time”). As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle has written, “When we are in human conversation, we often care less about the information an utterance transfers than its tone and emotional intent.” When texts are fed through the AI-summarization machine, each distinct voice is bludgeoned into monotony.

For a company that prides itself on perfection, the failures of Apple’s notification summaries feel distinctly un-Apple. Since ChatGPT’s release, as technology companies have raced to position themselves as players in the AI arms race, the company has remained notably quiet. It’s hard not to wonder if Apple, after falling behind, is now playing catch-up. Still, the notification summaries will likely improve. For now, users have to opt in to the AI-summary feature (it’s still in beta), and Apple has said that it will continue to polish the notifications based on user feedback. The feature is already spreading. Samsung is reportedly working on integrating similar notification summaries for its Galaxy phones.

With the social internet in crisis, text messages—and especially group chats—have filled a crucial void. In a sense, texting is the purest form of a social network, a rare oasis of genuine online connection. Unlike platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, where algorithmic feeds warp how we communicate, basic messaging apps offer a more unfiltered way to hang out digitally. But with the introduction of notification summaries that strive to optimize our messages for maximum efficiency, the walls are slowly crumbling. Soon, the algorithmic takeover may be complete.

Illustrations by Matt Rota

On a sunny morning in October 2023, a 90-year-old woman in a blue blazer walked slowly toward the main courthouse in Shizuoka, a city on the Japanese coast about a two-hour drive south of Tokyo. The woman, Hideko Hakamada, led a procession of lawyers and supporters carrying a broad, sky-blue banner, and as they approached the courthouse, a throng of some 300 people began clapping and chanting encouragement. A cluster of TV-news crews had set up nearby, and Hideko turned to greet them.

As she told the court later the same morning, she had come to right a wrong that had been done in that very building 55 years earlier. Hideko Hakamada is the sister of Iwao Hakamada, a former professional boxer whose long struggle for justice has become one of the most celebrated legal causes in Japanese history. He was found guilty of murdering four people in 1966, in a trial so flawed that it has become a textbook example of wrongful conviction.

Hakamada was sentenced to death, and spent the next five decades in a state of debilitating fear. Prisoners in Japan are not told when they will be executed; they listen every morning for the footsteps that could precede a key turning in their cell door and then a short walk to the hanging chamber. No warning is given to their lawyers or family members. Hakamada spent longer on death row than anyone else in history, earning a spot in Guinness World Records. He wrote eloquently about the daily mental torture he endured, and in the end it drove him mad. His agony changed the lives of many people around him, including one of the original judges, who became convinced of his innocence and spent the rest of his own life racked with guilt.

In recent years, Hakamada, who is now 88, has become a symbol in Japan not just of wronged innocence but of what is known as hitojichi shiho, or “hostage justice.” Police in Japan have the power to hold suspects and interrogate them for months without giving them access to a lawyer. The goal is to extract a confession, which Japanese prosecutors see as the centerpiece of any successful criminal case. Hakamada was subjected to brutal interrogations for 23 days—lasting up to 16 hours a day—until he signed a confession (which he recanted soon afterward).

These routine practices have led to a conviction rate of 99.8 percent for cases that go to trial. They have also led to so many accusations of coercion that there is now a Japanese word for the phenomenon—enzai, meaning “false accusations leading to imprisonment.” The system is also heavily weighted against granting retrials that might give convicted people a second chance. In Hakamada’s case, it took more than 50 years for him to receive one.

The Japanese fixation on obtaining confessions is centuries old. As Takashi Takano, a prominent Tokyo attorney and a critic of the system, explained to me, it is rooted in a belief that the state must elicit remorse from offenders in order to rehabilitate them and bolster social harmony. One of Takano’s clients was Carlos Ghosn, the former Nissan CEO, who was smuggled from Japan in a musical-equipment box in 2019 after being arrested on charges of financial misconduct and interrogated for hundreds of hours. The Ghosn case gave the outside world a rare glimpse of the power of Japanese prosecutors.

The facts of the Hakamada case were egregious enough to anger even insiders. In 2014, a judge released Hakamada from prison, granting him a retrial and delivering a stinging rebuke to the police, strongly suggesting that they had fabricated the evidence—a pile of bloodstained clothing—that had helped convict him. According to the judge, the man who supervised Hakamada’s interrogation was known among lawyers as the “king of torture.” The long-delayed retrial concluded in May, and Hakamada was finally acquitted in late September.

At this point, Hakamada may be beyond understanding what his exoneration means. He has sometimes said things that suggest he believes he was never in prison. He appears to have survived only by escaping into an imaginary world where he is all-powerful—a king, an emperor, even “the almighty God.” (Hakamada embraced Catholicism while in prison.) But the prospect of a retrial helped galvanize a reform movement led by lawyers, ex-judges, other wrongly convicted people, and even some Japanese boxers, who see Hakamada as both a figure of heroic suffering and the victim of a lingering social prejudice against their sport. These advocates have been pushing Japanese officials to rewrite the laws that undergird the practice of hostage justice. Many of them have drawn inspiration from Hakamada’s own prison writings, copied and passed around in samizdat form.

“Conscience is the only voice that protects the life of an innocent man,” he wrote in a journal entry in 1981, when he was still lucid. “The voice of conscience echoing ever louder and higher for as long as the agonizing nights last.”

When I first saw Iwao Hakamada, he was sitting at a table in the third-floor apartment he shares with Hideko, eating cooked eel and rice from a bowl. He still has the small, sturdy frame of a featherweight boxer, along with a large, sloping forehead and small eyes that give him the look of a sleep-addled bear.

Hideko, who had met me at the door, introduced me to her brother. I bowed a greeting, but Hakamada glanced up only briefly and went back to his eel and rice. The apartment was relatively large by Japanese standards, and it struck me that it must have seemed vast when Hakamada was released from his tiny cell. With Hideko’s encouragement, I said a few words about why I was there and asked my first question, about why he had become a boxer.

“Because I decided I needed to be strong,” he replied. It was a promising start for a man who was said to have lost touch with reality. But then he got up quickly and walked away, signaling that the interview was over. Hideko had warned me that her brother was no longer capable of telling a stranger his story.

Nonetheless, the long arc of his incarceration—from passionate self-defense to deepening despair to encroaching insanity—is captured in some 5,000 handwritten letters and journal entries that Hakamada produced in prison. In a sense, those pages are where his soul resides, perhaps more so than in the ghostly old man who was now sitting in a leather armchair in the next room. They were the real reason I had come.

Hideko got me a cup of tea and began carrying heavy boxes of Hakamada’s prison letters and journals to the table, brushing off my efforts to help. She is small but impressively fit for her age, with a habitual expression of resilient good humor on her face. The pages are in bound volumes, each one as thick as a bible.

She began leafing through them, showing me how Hakamada’s handwriting had changed over the years. It starts out wobbly and cartoonish; he had never been a good student, she said. He was the youngest of six siblings born to a working-class family in a village near Shizuoka, a quiet boy who loved animals and used to bring home cats and birds and give them names. Hideko was the second-youngest, by her own account a tomboy and a loudmouth. “He would imitate what I did,” she said. He began boxing when he was 19—there was a gym nearby—and turned professional at the age of 23, boxing 19 matches in a single year (a record in Japan). But he decided to retire after an injury, and eventually got a job at a small miso factory not far from his parents’ home. He married a local woman, and the couple had a child.

Hideko paused, resting her hand on one of the binders, and then told me about the night that changed everything: June 30, 1966. A fire broke out after midnight in the home of the miso factory’s director, and after the flames had been put out, investigators discovered the burned bodies of the director, his wife, and two of their children. They had all been stabbed to death. The following morning, Hakamada went to his parents’ house, where Hideko was still living, to talk about the shocking news. Meanwhile, the police settled on Hakamada as the most likely suspect among the firm’s employees, believing the crime to have been an inside job and apparently seeing his boxing skills as proof of a capacity for violence.

Matt Rota

During the 23 days of interrogation in a Shizuoka station house, the police used methods that were common in Japan when authorities were trying to extract a confession: sleep deprivation, threats, beatings. I spoke with two other people who had tried to maintain their innocence in similar circumstances, and both told me they had become so physically and emotionally spent that they would have said or signed almost anything to escape. The confession Hakamada ultimately signed is implausible on its face: He admitted to multiple scenarios, all of which seem to have been suggested to him by the police. Cash had been stolen from the home, but the police were never able to trace any of it to him.

“Please, God, I am not the killer,” he wrote in one of many letters to his mother during the first trial. “I am screaming it every day, and one day I hope people will hear my voice that reaches them through this Shizuoka wind.”

Hakamada could not have known it, but one of the judges who faced him as he first entered the courthouse in 1967 was a silent rebel against the Japanese way of justice. At 30, Norimichi Kumamoto was only a year younger than Hakamada, but in most ways their lives could not have been more different. Kumamoto was the eldest of four children, and had been recognized as brilliant from an early age. In pictures, he is austerely handsome, with creased brows and a firmly set mouth. He was well known at university, one of his classmates, Akira Kitani, told me, not just for his intellect but for his displays of brazen independence in a culture that fostered conformity. During the oral part of the bar exam, Kumamoto argued with his examiners—a shocking act of insubordination. “He won the argument, but they failed him” for talking back, Kitani, who later became a distinguished criminal-court judge, told me. (Kumamoto went on to earn the top score out of 10,000 students after he was allowed to retake the exam.)

Kumamoto also stood out for his interest in defendants’ rights. Seiki Ogata, a Japanese journalist who wrote a book about the judge, described him as an admirer of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1966 Miranda decision requiring that suspects be read their rights before being interrogated. This was an unusual perspective in a country where law-enforcement officials have openly declared their belief that, as one of them put it, “the right to silence is a cancer.”

Kumamoto appears to have sensed that something was wrong soon after Hakamada’s trial began. The prosecutors had no plausible evidence tying Hakamada to the crime and no plausible motive for him to have been involved in the killings. Years afterward, according to Ogata’s biography, the judge recalled being moved by the boxer’s air of confidence as he asserted his innocence; unlike some other defendants, Hakamada did not seem drawn by an urge to explain himself. “I rather feel that we are being judged from now on,” Kumamoto remembered telling one of the two other judges hearing the case, according to the biography. (Some serious criminal trials are handled by three judges in Japan.)

Almost a year into the trial—the Japanese justice system tends to take its time—the police claimed to have discovered a pile of bloody clothes at the bottom of a miso tank from the factory. They declared—though they could not prove—that the clothes were Hakamada’s, and that he had hidden them there after the murders.

Judge Kumamoto thought the discovery of the new evidence was far too convenient to be real. The bloodstains were oddly fresh-looking on clothes that were said to have been stewing in a miso vat for 14 months, and at trial, the clothes would be shown not to fit Hakamada. Kumamoto wanted to acquit. But according to Ogata, the other two judges on the panel, both senior to him, could not believe that the police or prosecutors had coerced a false confession.

Such faith remains common among Japanese judges. Some spend an entire career on the bench without once delivering an acquittal. “In theory, the prosecutors monitor the police, and the judge monitors the prosecutors,” Hiroshi Ichikawa, who spent almost 13 years as a prosecutor and is now a defense lawyer, told me. “But it doesn’t work like this at all. The prosecutor basically does what the police want, and the judges follow what the prosecutor wants. So the criminal-justice system is basically controlled by the police.”

Prosecutors are afraid to cross the police, who have much larger investigative resources, and often cover up their mistakes. Ichikawa startled me by disclosing that he had once, as a prosecutor, personally threatened to kill a suspect if he didn’t confess. He said his former colleagues mostly haven’t changed their ways.

In the summer of 1968, after weeks of difficult arguments among themselves, the three judges in the Hakamada trial held a vote. Kumamoto was alone in finding Hakamada not guilty. Then came a second blow: As the presiding judge on the panel, he was obliged to write the decision justifying the verdict.

Kumamoto reluctantly agreed—to refuse might have ended his career—but he produced a 350-page document that is a poignant record of a tortured conscience. He criticized the investigators’ tactics at length and appeared to be headed for an acquittal. But he then concluded that the defendant was guilty and must be executed.

Another judge who reviewed Kumamoto’s ruling many years later told me that the document was “very unusual, to the point that it’s abnormal … If you read the verdict, you can see that there was not just disagreement but serious conflict of opinion” among the judges.

Kumamoto refused to sign his own ruling. He said he tried to visit Hakamada in jail to apologize, but was not granted permission. “Kumamoto believed the higher courts would overturn the verdict, but they didn’t,” Ogata, his biographer, told me. “In the end, he felt really responsible for what happened.” That feeling would shape the remainder of his life.

The 1968 death sentence was a reckoning for everyone in the Hakamada family. Hakamada’s mother, who had been healthy and strong, fell into despair and died two months after the sentencing. His father died not long afterward. Hakamada was so attached to his parents that his siblings kept the news from him for more than a year. He continued to write to his mother regularly, and finally the siblings decided they had to tell him. “I felt a great shock, and my whole body instantly froze,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. “I could do nothing except look at my uncontrollably trembling hands. Feeling the trepidation like dark waves overtaking my body, I was taken by the urge to curse every being in this world.”

Hideko showed me more of Hakamada’s writings from the years that followed. He studied hard in prison, and his kanji characters become impressively neat and elegant, in perfectly ordered lines; they look like the work of a different person. His thoughts are more focused. He talks about the details of his case, and sometimes expounds on the nature of freedom and solitude. In a letter from December 1976, he describes feeling relief and inspiration after meeting with students from a human-rights group: “They believe I’m innocent. That’s why they support my cause. It’s clear that the verdict of the high court is nonsense … It is extremely brutal and unfair, prejudiced, to give a sentence based on a factual error.”

Hakamada also wrote a diary entry addressed to his son, who was 2 and a half years old when he was arrested. “Son, I want you to grow up honest and brave,” he wrote.

There is no need to be afraid. If someone asks how your father is, you should reply like this: My father is battling an unfair iron chain … Son, as long as you try to do good and survive by learning lessons even from this society that is full of agonies and unkindness, I will be able to return to you in good health not too far in the future. I will prove to you then that your father never killed anyone and that the police know it best, and that the judge is the one who must feel most sorry.

He seems to have been referring to Judge Kumamoto, though the entry does not say so.

Hakamada’s wife had divorced him while he was in prison. It was there Hakamada learned that the boy had been placed in an orphanage and that the letters he sent to his son never reached him, Hideko told me. She said she has not seen the boy since he was a toddler, and seemed reluctant to talk about him. But her brother sometimes still calls out his son’s name: Akira. He would be 60 years old today.

Some of the letters and meditations Hakamada produced in prison are lyrical. “For some reason, moonlight gives me hope and peace,” he wrote. “When I think that many people outside prison are also looking at the moon, I feel a sense of freedom with other people who also gaze at the moonlight.”

Although he was on death row, Hakamada remained both hopeful and angry throughout the 1970s, sure that his conviction would be overturned on appeal. At times, he wrote about other cases of wrongful conviction that he became aware of through friends or lawyers. “This scream that I have continued to vocalize has not been listened to for the past 13 years,” he wrote to a boxing commentator. “The lack of responsibility of Japan’s justice system is so serious that my skin boils from anger.”

In 1980, Japan’s supreme court confirmed Hakamada’s death sentence. Six months later, the man in the cell next to him, who had become a friend, was taken out one morning without warning and hanged. This was a period of terrible suffering, Hideko told me. She felt as if her heart would stop every time she heard about an execution on TV. Hakamada’s journal entries and letters are a dark window into his state of mind. “Death-row inmates unanimously agree they fear execution very much,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. “In fact, it’s not the execution itself they fear: They fear so much the mind that fears execution. This agony, the pain that comes from extreme anxiety, completely differs from the pain and suffering accompanied by the concept of death.”

A shadow seemed to fall over Hideko’s face as she showed me some of the pages that followed, from the 1980s. “He started to talk about people sending him signals by radio waves,” she said, pointing to the Japanese script. Later, there was talk of monkeys in his cell with him, and he started wearing bags on his head and arms to protect himself from harmful emanations.

Among the most striking letters are those in which Hakamada seems to be persuading himself that he can find meaning in his suffering. “My wish to win innocence is something that is purified and deepened when I accept loneliness,” he wrote from his cell, a concrete box about seven feet on each side. “Loneliness is certainly very sad and painful, but it is never meaningless. When one endures and humbly accepts loneliness, one will surely realize the deep meaning of the path to victory.”

But as the years passed with no hope of release—and with sudden execution a daily possibility—his mind continued to unravel. You can see it in his handwriting, which gradually loses its discipline and becomes loopy and uneven again, as if he were returning to his childhood self. At times, he seemed to hover between madness and reason within a single paragraph:

I am the king of Japan. I want to run flat out, as fast as I can. If I won my freedom, first I would make this boundless dream come true, cutting through the wind with shoulders and hips. Just thinking of it makes my body ache. Could I be champion if I just kept on running? When I was young, I used to think so. But now I have another answer ready.

All through the decades of Hakamada’s imprisonment, Kumamoto was tormented by his role in the case. He resigned his judgeship in disgust less than a year after the verdict, a shocking decision for someone who had been seen as a rising star. He found work as a lawyer and university lecturer. He also became an alcoholic. Two marriages ended in divorce. He grew estranged from his two daughters, who didn’t understand the source of his misery until many years later, Ogata told me.

According to Ogata, Kumamoto once turned himself in to the police, saying he’d committed a murder; he may have been drunk at the time. He seems to have carried Hakamada everywhere, like an accusing ghost. On learning that Hakamada had embraced Catholicism in prison, Kumamoto also embraced Catholicism. At one point, he went to a church and asked to confess his sins, because he “wanted to feel closer” to him, Ogata wrote in his book.

Kumamoto appears to have kept his belief in Hakamada’s innocence almost entirely to himself. Japanese judges are expected to remain silent about their deliberations, and stoicism about one’s suffering has long been a part of Japan’s culture, perhaps especially for men. But in 2007, while living in retirement in southern Japan, Kumamoto began hearing about an emerging movement to free Hakamada, which had attracted the attention of some lawmakers. He sent a note to one of the activists, offering to help. Soon afterward, he appeared on a public panel about the death penalty, where he discussed his role in the trial and declared that he believed Hakamada was innocent. He also made an apology. “This is the moment when something that had been stuck in my throat and was suffocating me finally disappeared,” Kumamoto later told his biographer.

Kumamoto’s comments were reported widely in Japan, partly because he had violated the judicial code of silence. He spoke again at a session of Japan’s Parliament. The story of his long-repressed guilt and grief captured the public’s imagination, and gave rise to a feature film that was released in 2010, titled Box: The Hakamada Case, in reference to Hakamada’s career as a fighter. It was not a great movie—dramatizing a man sitting alone in a cell for almost five decades is hard—but the film did help draw more attention to Hakamada’s situation, both in Japan and beyond.

Hideko met Kumamoto at the time of his public apology. She told me she was deeply grateful to him for what he had done. Her brother was still locked up, but he was no longer seen as a monster. “Since the news report went out, the world has changed,” she said. “Even strangers greeted me on the street with a smile.”

Hideko has become something of a public figure in her own right. A manga-style graphic novel about her was published in 2020. She has the kind of life force that you sense the moment you walk into a room—her head cocked slightly, her eyes gleaming with amusement. She seems immune to regret, and laughs so often that it is easy to forget what she has been through.

She was 35 when Hakamada was convicted of murder, and it turned her into a pariah, along with the rest of the family. The local papers were full of stories portraying her brother as a demon. She got hate mail from strangers. She grew lonely and depressed, and drank herself to sleep every night for three years, she told me. But she pulled herself together, recognizing that she was her brother’s only hope. She visited him in prison as often as she could. She lived alone, working long hours at a government office and then at an accounting firm. I later learned—from the graphic novel about her life—that she had been briefly married as a young woman, but she’d never mentioned that to me. In a sense, she was married to her brother’s cause.

Starting in the ’90s, with Hideko’s help, a movement to exonerate Hakamada slowly coalesced. It attracted a diverse collection of people, and some pursued the cause with the kind of nerdy obsessiveness characteristic of otaku—a Japanese term for a person with a consuming hobby. One volunteer performed meticulous experiments with bloody clothing soaked in miso over long periods to show that the prosecution’s claims in the original trial did not hold up. These experiments were so rigorous and well documented that they were cited by the defense at Hakamada’s retrial many years later.

Among the movement’s most passionate supporters were Japanese boxers. One of them, a retired bantamweight champion named Shosei Nitta, started accompanying Hideko on her prison visits in the early 2000s. Then he began going alone, once a month. “You couldn’t converse in a normal way, except about boxing,” Nitta told me when I visited him at his Tokyo boxing gym. Nitta cocked his arm, showing me how he and Hakamada would discuss the best technique for a hook punch. Dozens of champion boxers protested in front of the supreme court, calling for a retrial.

Among the many things the boxers did for Hakamada was reach out to Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the American prizefighter who was catapulted to fame after Bob Dylan wrote a song about his wrongful murder conviction. (He served 19 years behind bars before his release in 1985.) Hakamada himself had written to Carter in 1989, congratulating him on his exoneration and pledging to “follow in your footsteps.” Two decades later, a fellow boxer traveled to the United States and brought back a videotape of Carter offering his support to Hakamada, who was still on death row.

“In the boxing community, we share this mysterious bond,” Nitta told me. “But in mainstream society, it’s not really approved of. We are trying to resist this prejudice, and I think that is why Hakamada means so much to us.”

Social prejudice appears to be a common thread in many wrongful-conviction cases in Japan. One of Hakamada’s death-row companions—their cells were adjoining—was a man named Kazuo Ishikawa, who belongs to the burakumin, the descendants of a feudal caste that was consigned to low-status jobs and still suffers from discrimination. Ishikawa was convicted of a 1963 murder on the basis of a coerced confession and a ransom note, even though he was illiterate at the time. He was paroled in 1994, but has always maintained his innocence and is still, at age 85, trying to clear his name.

Hideko and her eclectic band of boxers and otaku have helped elevate a broader effort to address the flaws in Japan’s criminal-justice system. More people are coming forward to contest their verdicts, and several nonprofits have sprung up to support those they believe to have been wrongly convicted. There is now an Innocence Project Japan, inspired by the American group formed in 1992, that uses DNA evidence to challenge convictions. The movement has had some modest victories: Defense lawyers have gained more discovery rights and have pushed back against detention orders. Some police interrogations are now recorded. A “lay judge” initiative, begun in 2009, allows a mixed panel of three professional judges and an average of six citizens to decide guilt and sentencing in some serious criminal cases.

There have also been setbacks. A lawsuit challenging Japan’s long-standing practice of notifying death-row inmates only hours before their execution—which likely played a role in driving Hakamada insane—was dismissed by the Osaka district court in April.

Change of any kind comes slowly in Japan, where those who question authority are more likely to be slapped than rewarded. Most people seem to have deep confidence in the justice system, and they are not entirely wrong: Japan incarcerates far fewer people per capita than the United States, partly because prosecutors are cautious about pressing charges for less serious crimes. Sentences tend to be relatively light, especially for those who admit their guilt and express remorse. Prosecutors believe they have a responsibility to help offenders return to a useful life.

But they bridle at the notion that justice can be arrived at through a messy legal tussle, as in American courtrooms. In Japan, the legal system behaves more like some archaic deity: kind to those who accept its judgments, and merciless to those who do not.

Matt Rota

In 2014, after his legal team had spent more than 30 years pleading for a retrial, Hakamada was finally granted one by a district court. Hideko was then 81 years old and retired. She went to the prison to give her brother the good news, trailed by a film crew. As she was leaving, a guard offered her boxes full of her brother’s belongings. Hakamada then walked into the room and sat down next to her. The judge, it turned out, had ordered Hakamada’s immediate release. Hideko was totally unprepared. They had to ask for a ride from the film crew, but Hakamada, who hadn’t been in a car in decades, got motion sickness. They ended up spending the night in a Tokyo hotel before heading home to Hamamatsu, the city where Hideko now lives.

Hideko struggled to get her head around the magnitude of what had just happened. The judge had not only released Hakamada and granted a retrial; he had taken a sledgehammer to the entire case. He asserted that the investigators appeared to have faked the evidence. He cited DNA evidence, not available during the first trial, showing that the blood on the clothes from the miso tank was neither Hakamada’s nor the murder victims’.

It might have ended there. The judge had made clear that he believed Hakamada was innocent, and his ruling seemed unanswerable. Instead, prosecutors appealed his call for a retrial. As Hakamada moved in with his sister and began readapting to a world he had not inhabited since the mid-1960s, his case staggered from one false ending to another. Finally, in 2023, the Tokyo High Court affirmed his right to a retrial. Prosecutors, who were widely expected to give up, declared that they would seek his conviction for murder all over again.

There was little logic in their decision. They had no new evidence, and their chances of victory were near zero. But as Makoto Ibusuki, a professor at Tokyo’s Seijo University and an authority on wrongful convictions, explained to me, Japanese prosecutors tend to see their institution as infallible. There may have been an added spur in this instance. The prosecutors who brought the original case had been accused in the 2014 ruling of using fabricated evidence. David Johnson, an expert on the Japanese legal system who teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told me that their successors may have felt obliged to defend their reputation.

The retrial, which began in October 2023, was like a bad case of déjà vu, with the same exhibits of bloodstained clothes and miso tanks that had been used half a century earlier—though the state quietly withdrew Hakamada’s discredited confession. “The prosecutors just repeat what has already been said,” Hideko told me. “The expressions on their faces said, Why do we have to be here? ”

For all its frustrations, the retrial gave a big platform to opponents of hostage justice. The movement’s buoyant mood was on display at a memorial service I attended this past April at a Tokyo meeting hall. It was held to honor a man who had been exonerated years earlier after serving nearly three decades for murder. I found myself chatting with an 80-year-old man in an ill-fitting brown blazer who said he had served 20 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. We were standing by a big picture window, and he pointed out the headquarters of the National Police Agency across the street. He had been tortured in there for weeks on end, he said, in a basement room with no windows and no clocks. “I understand completely how an innocent man ends up writing a confession,” he said.

But much of the Japanese public does not understand. The widow of the exonerated man being honored gave a brief but powerful speech, during which she said her father hadn’t wanted her to marry a man who had been convicted of a crime, because he believed that “the courthouse never lies.”

A nonpartisan group of some 200 Parliament members now wants to make it easier for defendants to receive a retrial and is preparing to propose amendments to the law. But getting any such measure past Japan’s powerful Justice Ministry will not be easy. It is dominated by prosecutors, and has sent clear signs that it is opposed to reform.

When Hakamada got out of prison, Hideko didn’t ask him about his time on the inside. “I was waiting until he spoke,” she told me. But he never has. Occasionally, he refers obliquely to his time there as “training,” as if it had been preparation for some otherworldly combat.

He talks about being visited by the spirits of his dead friends, the ones who were led away to the execution chamber, where a prison official stands behind a blue curtain and presses a button that ends a person’s life. “When he first came here, he’d say there were spirits of the dead trapped in the closet,” Hideko told me. “He’d tap on it and try to release them.”

Hakamada’s days revolve around a long, mostly silent, drive that he is taken on every afternoon, his eyes focused on the passing streets. He believes that evil influences lurk unseen, Hideko told me, and that he alone can fight them, like the boxer he once was. “He feels very strongly that he must surveil,” she said. “He needs to go all over Hamamatsu city. To surveil and protect.”

The acquittal that arrived in September was a balm for Hideko and her supporters. But it came too late for one of them. Judge Kumamoto, the author of the 1968 decision, was already seriously ill with cancer when Hakamada was released. The two men’s lives had been deeply intertwined for decades, but they had never met outside the courtroom.

In early 2018, Hideko brought her brother to Kumamoto’s hospital bed; he was pale and skeletal, an oxygen tube strapped under his nose. He looked to be on the verge of death, though he would live for two more years.

The meeting was captured on film. The two visitors, dressed in heavy winter clothes, appear somber and dumbstruck as they gaze down at the stricken man. Her brother didn’t seem to understand whom he was looking at, Hideko told me. But Kumamoto clearly knew the face of the man he had condemned 50 years earlier.

“Iwao,” the judge said, in a scratchy whisper. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “A Boxer on Death Row.”

No surprise, I thought, as I disposed of the 12-volt charging adapter I had purchased for my car. I’d bought the thing on Temu, the Chinese low-cost-shopping app, as part of a larger haul of random other stuff that the app had marketed to me: chargers to plug into my adapter and car-seat gap-filler crumb-catchers to flank them.

The charger cost $2.43 and took weeks to arrive. Because it came from China, I knew I had no hope of returning it, but $2.43 is less than a Diet Coke these days, so who cares? It turned out I cared, because I wanted to use the gadget to charge things. So I felt disappointment, though not affront, when the gizmo’s plastic pins broke loose mere days after arrival, making the device unusable. I should have just bought a Diet Coke instead.

This week, Amazon announced a new store, Amazon Haul, that hopes to compete with Temu, Shein, and other purveyors of such items. When I opened Haul, which is available only on Amazon’s mobile app, it presented me with an array of “unbelievable finds” at “crazy low prices”: a $3.99 table runner; a pair of blue-and-white zebra-printed women’s swim bottoms for $5.99; a barrage of smartphone cases as low as $2.99; a $2.99 set of foundation brushes; a $2.99 silicone sink strainer; two dozen cork-bottomed chair-leg floor protectors for $6.99.

Temu and Shein have been popular for a long time. But Amazon’s entry into this market officially makes it mainstream. The result isn’t just “low cost” shopping, but a different kind of shopping. Now people buy low-quality goods that they don’t necessarily expect to use, and knowing full well that they’re maybe worthless, for the experience of having bought them.

Of course, people have always shopped just to shop: to hang out at the mall, to experience the relief of retail therapy, to adopt the identity of a label or a style, to pass the time between events. But the internet changed shopping. First, e-commerce made it more standardized and efficient. Instead of fingering through the garments on a rack or rummaging through a discount bin, shoppers clicked product images set against stark white backgrounds. They searched for keywords, which assumed that shopping was driven by need rather than desire. Shopping became more rational, more structured.

[Read: Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk?]

It consolidated, too. Amazon.com became a so-called everything store, and others, including Walmart.com, followed suit. They offered consumers, well, everything; people no longer needed to visit specialized websites. Then online sellers deployed algorithmic recommendations to steer shoppers toward goods that might benefit the sellers or that might lead buyers to buy more. Slowly, over years, online shopping became disorienting. When I recently searched Amazon for a 16x16 gold picture mat, I was shown a family of products, none of which was a 16x16 gold picture mat. The one I finally bought took forever to arrive—it was not eligible for Prime shipping—and was damaged in transit. I wish I’d made different choices, but which ones? I couldn’t find this product in a local store, and I wasn’t willing to pay for a custom-made one from a specialty shop. This experience is now commonplace. I buy things online that I fully expect to be unfit for purpose, necessitating their return (which has become its own kind of hell). Now shopping neither satisfies a need nor sates a desire. It burns up time and moves money around.

Haul is the perfect name for a habit that contributes to this feeling. On early YouTube, circa the mid-aughts, beauty vloggers seeking topics for vlogging started sharing the goods they had recently purchased, online or in person. They produced what became known as “haul videos.” Eventually, as vloggers gave way to influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and elsewhere, direct sponsorships, feed advertisements, and other incentives drove haul or haul-adjacent content: People would make money for posting it.

Shein started recruiting these influencers to promote its service in the West. The products it sold were so cheap, it didn’t really matter if they were any good. One decent fast-fashion top or accessory out of a $20 haul was still cheaper than Abercrombie or American Eagle. Soon enough, you couldn’t even go to those stores anyway, because of pandemic lockdowns; by 2022, Shein accounted for half of fast-fashion sales in the United States. Shopping became a kind of gambling: Roll the dice and hope that you come out a winner, whatever that would mean.

[Read: Amazon returns have gone to hell]

Showing off has always been a part of shopping, but hauls set use aside entirely, replacing it with exhibition. For the YouTuber or Instagram influencer, it wasn’t important if the clothing or skin-care products were useful or even used, just that they afforded the content creator an opportunity to create content—and, potentially, to get paid by sponsors to do so. Not everyone is an influencer, but lots of people wished to be, and dressing for the job you wanted started to entail hauling as a way of life. Shein, Temu, and now Amazon Haul encourage bulk purchases to justify low costs and minimize freight, while slipping in under the $800 threshold of U.S. import tax. These shops made the haul a basic unit of commerce.

At the same time, Chinese sellers—including some that appear to sell the very same goods found on Shein, Temu, Alibaba, and more—began to dominate Amazon’s third-party-seller platform, known as Marketplace. By 2023, Amazon acknowledged that nearly half of the top 100,000 Marketplace sellers were based in China. If you’ve ever searched for goods and been presented with weird, nonsense-name brands like RECUTMS (it’s “Record Your Times,” not the other thing), these are likely China-based Marketplace sellers. For some time now, cheap products of questionable quality and dubious fitness for purpose have dominated Amazon search results—especially because those sellers can also pay for sponsored ads on Amazon to hawk their wares.  

Amazon Haul closes the gap between normal e-commerce and the haul retail that social-media influencers popularized. Now ordinary people can get maybe-useful, maybe-garbage goods purchased for little money in bulk.

Great to have the choice, perhaps. But likely also irritating, because the phone case, table runner, or makeup brush you might purchase that way are probably garbage. Nobody is hiding this fact—thus Amazon’s carefully chosen language of “unbelievable finds” and “crazy low prices,” and not “high-quality goods.” And consumers are now ready to expect crap anyway, having spent years buying random wares from Instagram ads, TikTok shops, Shein, or the discount manufacturers that dominate Amazon itself. When I open a box that arrives at my door, I don’t really expect delight anymore. Instead, I hope that what’s inside might surprise me by bearing any value at all.

Haul might sound like the latest curiosity of concern only to the very online, but it could be an omen. Over time, Amazon has devolved from an everything store that sold stuff I liked and wanted into a venue for bad things that don’t meet my needs. Haul is just one way to shop, not the only way. But that was also true of Marketplace, which slowly took over Amazon’s listings. For now, you can still buy what you want or think you do. But eventually, hauls could take over entirely, and all shopping could become a novelty-store, mystery-grab-bag experience.

Photographs by Ross Mantle

Maybe the tell was when the mayor of Philadelphia didn’t say Kamala Harris’s name. Cherelle Parker looked out at her fellow Democrats inside a private club just northeast of Center City last night. Onstage, she beamed with pride about how, despite Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims on social media, Election Day had unfolded freely and fairly across her city. But Parker did not—could not—telegraph victory for her party. “You’ve heard us say from the very beginning that we knew that the path to the White House had to come through our keystone state. And to get through the keystone state, you had to contend with our city of Philadelphia. And I want to thank each and every Philadelphian who participated in democracy in action,” she said. Her remarks were bland, vague, safe. Soon, the mayor slipped out of the venue.

The watch party trudged along. Four ceiling fans blew hot air. Stacks of grease-stained Del Rossi’s pizza boxes filled a rear table. Anxious Philadelphians sipped $5 bottles of Yuengling from the cash bar. But no single word or phrase could encompass the swirl of emotion: anticipation, dread, denial, despair. Across two floors of what might technically be considered “partying,” attendees peered up at projection screens that showed MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki pacing and pointing. His big map was glowing red. The revelers were blue.

Early on, many partygoers were still clinging to fleeting moments of zen. Around 9 p.m., after Rachel Maddow declared Michigan “too early to call,” the venue erupted in earnest applause. The hooting grew even louder when, shortly thereafter, Maddow announced that Pennsylvania, the place that most of these voters called home, was also in toss-up territory. But by 9:30, when Kornacki showed Trump comfortably up in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, enough people could grasp that the “Blue Wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—which Harris had been counting on to win the White House—was now crumbling, brick by brick, county by county.

[Read: This was the second COVID election]

I saw genuine fear in people’s eyes when, just after 9:50, zooming in on the Pennsylvania map, Kornacki mentioned Trump and Lackawanna County. A union leader named Sam Williamson told me about all the door-knocking he’d done. He had been “really confident” Harris would win Pennsylvania. But by 10:30 or so, even the formerly blue Centre County, where Penn State University is located, had flipped red. Was this actually happening? Hardly anyone even murmured when Kornacki spoke of Harris’s success right there in Philadelphia. People were pissed. Demoralized. Many began to filter out. Democrats had spent this twisty, complex presidential campaign with a narrow path to victory, and now that path was narrowing to a close.

People gather for an election night watch party at the Ruba Club in Philadelphia, PA (Ross Mantle for The Atlantic)

Each voter I spoke with processed the night a little differently. A 38-year-old nurse named Abena Bempah conceded, somewhat sheepishly, that she had tuned out this election until late June, when President Joe Biden had his disastrous debate against former (and future) President Donald Trump. After that night, Bempah had an awakening: “It actually reminded me that I need to be an engaged citizen throughout a candidate’s entire term.” So she spent the summer and fall volunteering with the Philadelphia Democrats. She told me that to preserve democracy, people need to do so much more than vote—they need to voice their concerns to elected officials. “I think that Republicans are planning on Democrats to rest on our laurels and not be as active,” she said.

Near a billiards table, I met a father and son, Shamai and Liv Leibowitz, who live in Silver Spring, Maryland, and had driven up to Pennsylvania to volunteer. Liv, who is 21, is taking a year off from school, and had recently been canvassing in nearby Bucks County and Chester County. He wore a baseball hat with Representative Jamie Raskin’s name on the dome. “I was here for the past two weeks,” he told me with a smile. Half of the undecided voters he’d met felt that they didn’t know enough about Harris and her positions. But many, he said, were staying home because of her support of Israel.

Liv’s father, Shamai, told me that he had the gut feeling that Trump would win. Shamai had grown up in Israel, and he moved to the United States in the early 2000s. He believed that Harris was doomed in this election because she wouldn’t substantively deviate from Biden’s Middle East policy. “I’m worried right now because she didn’t come out forcefully for a weapons embargo, or even hint at a weapons embargo. We met people canvassing who told us, ‘We’re voting Green Party’; ‘We’re staying home,’” he said. Shamai knew it would have been politically risky for her to criticize Israel, but, he told me, in the end, not changing course was hurting her more.

Philadelphia, PA (Ross Mantle for The Atlantic)

I also spoke with two people who might be considered interlopers. One was a 27-year-old Swede named Gabriel Gunnarsson, who had flown to Philadelphia from his home in Stockholm just to witness the U.S. election with his own eyes. As he nursed a beer, he told me that everyone he knew in Sweden had been following our election particularly closely this year. “I’m feeling bad,” he told me. “I’m sort of dystopic about the future, I think, and just seeing this, it’s a horrible result for the world.” I asked him if he recalled one of Trump’s more vile comments from his first term in office: He’d said that America was bringing in people only from “shithole countries,” and he’d lamented that we don’t have more immigrants from places like Norway. Gunnarsson laughed and shook his head. “He did this when he was president as well: He just randomly said, ‘Look at what’s happening in Sweden!’” Gunnarsson recalled. “And we were all like, ‘What did happen?’”

[Read: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

Finally, as the evening was winding down, I met a man named Tim Brogan, who very quietly told me he was an independent, not a Democrat. Would you care to share whom you voted for today? I asked. Brogan looked down at his feet, then off to the corner, then back at me. “I voted for the other party,” he said. “I did in fact vote for Trump, yes.”

He had come out to this particular event because he lives in the neighborhood and wanted to be around some friends. He told me he works in real estate, and as a lifelong Philadelphian, he was distressed to see inflation and more crime in the city. This was, in fact, Brogan’s third consecutive time voting for Trump, even though he had previously voted for Barack Obama. He earnestly believed that Trump was the only person who could set America back on the right path. “There’s just so many things that we missed—and we’re allowing—with the Democratic Party,” he said. “I think my choice was a good direction for my beliefs.”

I asked him how he talks about politics with his friends, family, and neighbors.

“Simple,” he said. “We don’t like to get into it.”

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An aspiring fascist is the president-elect, again, of the United States. This is our political reality: Donald Trump is going to bring a claque of opportunists and kooks (led by the vice president–elect, a person who once compared Trump to Hitler) into government this winter, and even if senescence overtakes the president-elect, Trump’s minions will continue his assault on democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.

The urge to cast blame will be overwhelming, because there is so much of it to go around. When the history of this dark moment is written, those responsible will include not only Trump voters but also easily gulled Americans who didn’t vote or who voted for independent or third-party candidates because of their own selfish peeves.

Trump’s opponents will also blame Russia and other malign powers. Without a doubt, America’s enemies—some of whom dearly hoped for a Trump win—made efforts to flood the public square with propaganda. According to federal and state government reports, several bomb threats that appeared to originate from Russian email domains were aimed at areas with minority voters. But as always, the power to stop Trump rested with American voters at the ballot box, and blaming others is a pointless exercise.

So now what?

The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy. If I may invoke Winston Churchill, this is not the end or the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.

For a decade, Trump has been trying to destroy America’s constitutional order. His election in 2016 was something like a prank gone very wrong, and he likely never expected to win. But once in office, he and his administration became a rocket sled of corruption, chaos, and sedition. Trump’s lawlessness finally caught up with him after he was forced from office by the electorate. He knew that his only hope was to return to the presidency and destroy the last instruments of accountability.

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers.

After Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to make Obama a one-term president, and obstructed him at every turn. McConnell, of course, cared only about seizing power for his party, and later, he could not muster that same bravado when faced with Trump’s assaults on the government. Patriotic Americans and their representatives might now make a similar commitment, but for better aims: Although they cannot remove Trump from office, they can declare their determination to prevent Trump from implementing the ghastly policies he committed himself to while campaigning.

The kinds of actions that will stop Trump from destroying America in 2025 are the same ones that stopped many of his plans the first time around. They are not flashy, and they will require sustained attention, because the next battles for democracy will be fought by lawyers and legislators, in Washington and in every state capitol. They will be fought by citizens banding together in associations and movements to rouse others from the sleepwalk that has led America into this moment.

Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.

Related:

David Frum: Trump won. Now what?

Photographs by OK McCausland

The vibe shifted sometime around 10:30 p.m. eastern.

For several hours beforehand, the scene at the Howard University Yard had been jubilant: all glitter and sequins and billowing American flags. The earrings were big, and the risers were full. Men in fraternity jackets and women in pink tweed suits grooved to a bass-forward playlist of hip-hop and classic rock. The Howard gospel choir in brilliant-blue robes performed a gorgeous rendition of “Oh Happy Day,” and people sang along in a way that made you feel as if the university’s alumna of the hour, Kamala Harris, had already won.

But Harris had not won—a fact that, by 10:30, had become very noticeable. As the evening drew on, the clusters of giddy sorority sisters and VIP alumni stopped dancing, their focus trained on the projector screens, which were delivering a steady flow of at best mediocre and sometimes dire news for Democrats. No encouragement had yet come from those all-important blue-wall states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Somewhere between Georgia turning red and Senator Ted Cruz demolishing Colin Allred in Texas, attendees started trickling out the back.

It was starting to feel pretty obvious, even then, that Donald Trump would be declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election. And soon after 5:30 a.m. eastern this morning, he was, when the Associated Press called Wisconsin for him, giving him an Electoral College majority even with a number of states yet to declare. An across-the-board rightward shift, from Michigan to Manhattan, had gradually crushed the hopes of Democrats in an election that, for weeks, polling had indicated was virtually tied. But a Trump victory was a reality that nearly everyone at Harris’s watch party seemed to have prepared for only theoretically.

Before last night, Democrats felt buoyant on a closing shot of hopium. While Harris stayed on message, Trump had what seemed a disastrous final week: His closing argument was incoherent; his rally at Madison Square Garden was a parade of racism; he stumbled getting into a garbage truck and looked particularly orange in photos. Democratic insiders crowed that early-vote totals were favoring Harris, and that undecided voters in swing states were coming around. Then there was Ann Selzer’s well-respected poll in Iowa, which suggested that the state might go blue for the first time since Barack Obama’s presidency.

(OK McCausland for The Atlantic)

On a breezy and unseasonably warm evening in Washington, D.C., thousands of people had gathered on the grassy campus at Harris’s alma mater to watch, they hoped, history being made. No one mentioned Trump when I asked them how they were feeling—only how excited they were to have voted for someone like Harris. Kerry-Ann Hamilton and Meka Simmons, both members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, had come together to witness the country elect the first Black woman president. “She is so well qualified—” Hamilton started to say. “Overqualified!” Simmons interjected.

Leah Johnson, who works at Howard and grew up in Washington, told me that she would probably leave the event early to watch returns with her mother and 12-year-old daughter at home. “It’s an intergenerational celebratory affair,” she said. “I get to say, ‘Look, Mom, we already have Barack Obama; look what we’re doing now!’”

Everyone I spoke with used similar words and phrases: lots of firsts and historics and references to the glass ceiling, which proved so stubbornly uncrackable in 2016. Attendees cheered in unison at the news that Harris had taken Colorado, and booed at Trump winning Mississippi. A group of women in tight dresses danced to “1, 2 Step” by Ciara and Missy Elliott. Howard’s president led alumni in the crowd in a call-and-response that made the whole evening feel a little like a football game—just fun, low stakes.

Several people I talked with refused to entertain the idea that Harris wouldn’t win. “I won’t even let myself think about that,” a woman named Sharonda, who declined to share her last name, told me. She sat with her sorority sisters in their matching pink-and-green sweatshirts. Soon, though, the crowd began to grow restless. “It was nice when they turned off the TV and played Kendrick,” said one attendee who worked at the White House and didn’t want to share her name. “Just being part of this is restoring my soul, even if the outcome isn’t what I want it to be,” Christine Slaughter, a political-science professor at Boston University, told me. She was cautious. She remembered, viscerally she said, the moment when Trump won in 2016; and the memory was easy to conjure again now. “I know that feeling,” she said. She was consoling herself: She’d been crushed before. She could handle it again.

Harris herself was expected to speak at about 11 p.m., but by midnight, she still hadn’t appeared. People bit their cheeks and scrolled on their phones. There was a burst of gleeful whoops when Angela Alsobrooks beat Larry Hogan in Maryland’s U.S. Senate election. But soon the trickle of exiting attendees became a steady flow. Potentially decisive results from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were not due soon, but Michigan didn’t look good. North Carolina was about to be called for Trump.

I texted some of my usual Democratic sources and received mostly radio silence in response. “How do you feel?” I asked one, who had been at the party earlier. “Left,” she answered. Mike Murphy, a Republican anti-Trump consultant, texted me back at about 12:30 a.m: “Shoot me.”

Donors and VIPs were streaming out the side entrance. The comedian Billy Eichner walked by, looking sad, as the Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache (Jump On It)” played over the loudspeakers. A man pulled me aside: “There will be no speech, I take it?” he said. It was more of a comment than a question.

(OK McCausland for The Atlantic)

“I’m depressed, disappointed,” said Mark Long, a software salesman from D.C., who wore a T-shirt with a picture of Harris as a child. He was especially upset about the shift toward Trump among Black men. “I’m sad. Not just for tonight, but for what this represents.” Elicia Spearman seemed angry as she marched out of the venue. “If it’s Trump, people will reap what they sow,” she said. “It’s karma.”

Just before 1 a.m., the Harris campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond came onstage to announce that the candidate would not be speaking that night. The former Louisiana representative offered muted encouragement to the crowd—an unofficial send-off. “Thank you for being here. Thank you for believing in the promise of America,” he said, before adding, “Go, Kamala Harris!” The remaining members of the crowd cheered weakly. Some of the stadium lights went off.