The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school, Rose Horowitch wrote in the November 2024 issue.

I’m an English teacher at a private college-preparatory school, and much of “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” sounded familiar. My students, too, now struggle to read long texts. Unaddressed in this apt article, though, are changes to the broader high-school context in which reading for homework now occurs. Today, students with elite college aspirations have extracurricular schedules that demand as much—if not more—time than school itself. These commitments are necessary, in their eyes, to gain admission to selective institutions. As a result, teachers face considerable pressure from not only students but also parents and school administrators to limit homework time—no matter if the assignment is a calculus problem set or Pride and Prejudice. In combination with considerably slower rates of reading and diminished reading comprehension, curtailed homework time means that an English teacher might not be able to assign more than 10 to 15 pages of relatively easy prose per class meeting, a rate so excruciatingly slow, it diminishes one’s ability to actually grasp a novel’s meaning and structure. I see how anxious and drained my students are, but I think it’s important for them to experience what can grow from immersive reading and sustained written thought. If we want students to read books, we have to be willing to prioritize the time for them to do so.

Anna Clark
San Diego, Calif.

As a professor, I agree with my colleagues who have noticed the declining literacy of American students at elite universities.

However, I am not sure if the schools are entirely to blame. In American universities, selection is carried out by admissions offices with little interest in the qualities that faculty might consider desirable in a college student. If faculty members were polled—something that has never happened to me in my 20-year career—I’m sure we would rank interest and experience in reading books quite highly.

Admissions decisions in the United States are based on some qualities that, however admirable, have little or nothing to do with academic aptitude. In contrast, at Oxford and Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, undergraduate admissions are typically conducted by the same academics who will teach those students. Most personal statements primarily consist of a discussion of which books the student has read and what they learned from them. Students are then expected to discuss these books in more detail in an interview. When considered alongside the undergraduate selection process, the decline in literacy among American undergraduates is totally understandable.

Ione Fine
Psychology Professor, University of Washington
Seattle, Wash.

Having taught English in a public school for 32 years, I am not surprised that colleges and universities are discovering that incoming students lack the skill, focus, and endurance to read novels. Throughout my career, primarily teaching ninth graders, I fostered student readership not by assigning novels for the whole class to read, but rather by allowing students to select young-adult books that they would read independently in class. Thousands of lifelong readers were created as a result.

Ten years ago, however, my district administration told me that I could no longer use class time for independent student reading. Instead, I was to focus on teaching skills and content that the district believed would improve standardized-test scores. Ironically, research showed that the students who read more books scored significantly better than their classmates on standardized reading tests.

I knew that many students were unlikely to read at home. So I doubled down: I found time for students to read during the school day and repurposed class time to allow my students to share their ideas; to question, respond, and react along with their peers. The method was so successful that the district adopted my approach for seventh through ninth grade, and I published a university-level textbook preparing teachers to create similar communities of readers in their own classrooms.

Whole-class novels just aren’t working: Some students will always be uninterested in a teacher’s choice, and perceive the classics as irrelevant and difficult to comprehend. But allowing students to select their books can help them fall in love with reading.

Michael Anthony
Reading, Pa.

I am an educator of 16 years living in New Hampshire. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” reflects a lot of what I’ve seen recently. But a large piece of the puzzle is public-school budgets. A major reason novels have been removed from curricula is money: Many districts cannot afford to purchase a book for every student, especially in the upper grades. Typically, districts will buy a “class set” of novels, about 20 to 30 books—that’s it. The books must be used during the English blocks for instruction and reading time. There are not enough books for students to take home and read; if they are reading them only in their class block, a novel will take months and months to finish. I knew of one district that would have teachers make copies of entire novels to share with their students; they’d take turns on copy duty to pull it off. I wish I could teach more complete novels, because students love it. But districts need budgets large enough to buy books for everyone.

Meaghan Kelly
Rumney, N.H.

When teaching my college history courses, I have polled my students to see how many have ever read a book cover to cover. Sometimes, only a few students would raise their hand.

I inquired because I always gave them the option to read a book instead of writing a 10-page research paper. They then would have a one-on-one, hour-long discussion with me about the book they’d selected. Students who chose that option generally had a good experience. But one student shines bright in my mind. In truth, I didn’t remember him well—but he stopped me at an alumni function to say thank you. He had taken my class the second semester of his senior year to fill an elective, and he had chosen to read David McCullough’s 1776. He’d devoured the book—and he’d loved our discussion. He told me that the assignment had changed his life: Up to that point, he had never read a whole book. Since that class, he has read two or three books a month, and now has hundreds of books in his own library. He assured me that he would be a reader for the rest of his life.

It was one of the most gratifying moments of my career. I hope more teachers, professors, and parents give their students a chance to learn what this student did—that books are one of the great joys in life.

Scott Salvato
Mooresville, N.C.

Rose Horowitch replies:

Anna Clark’s letter builds on an idea that I hoped to convey in the article: that the shift away from reading full books is about more than individual students, teachers, or schools. Much of the change can be understood as the consequence of a change in values. The professors I spoke with didn’t think their students were lazy; if anything, they said they were overscheduled and frazzled like never before, facing immense pressure to devote their time to activities that will further their career. Under these circumstances, it can be difficult to see how reading The Iliad in its entirety is a good use of time. Acknowledging this reality can be disheartening, because the solution will not be as simple as changing curricula at the college, high-school, or middle-school level. (And as several of these letters note, changing curricula isn’t all that straightforward.) But letters like Scott Salvato’s are a hopeful reminder of the power of a good—full—book to inspire a student to become a lifelong reader.

The Atlantic Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” David Brooks describes the failure of the United States’ meritocracy, created in part by James Conant, the influential president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant and like-minded reformers had hoped to overturn America’s “hereditary aristocracy of wealth”; instead, they helped create a new ruling class—the so-called cognitive elite, selected and credentialed by the nation’s top universities. For our cover image, the artist Danielle Del Plato placed the story’s headline on pennants she created for each of the eight Ivy League schools, which have been instrumental in shaping and perpetuating America’s meritocracy.

— Paul Spella, Senior Art Director

Corrections

Due to an editing error, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” (November) misstated the year Nicholas Dames started teaching Literature Humanities. He began teaching the course in 1998, not 1988. “What Zoya Sees” (November) misstated where in Nigeria Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi and her husband, Sunny, have a home. Their home is in Ngwo, not Igwo.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

Parts of the film were made in the United Kingdom, and British actress Cynthia Erivo, who plays the green witch Elphaba, said "she's finally back home".

Although the plight of America’s 2.2 million federal bureaucrats seldom elicits public sympathy, spare a charitable thought for their future. Not since the congressional elections of 1882 has civil-service reform received so much political attention. President-Elect Donald Trump and his allies now face a fundamental decision: Will they listen to the loudest and most extreme voices in their party and be agents of chaos and disruption in upending the civil service? Or will they adopt a more measured, incremental approach that would deliver improvements and burnish their managerial credentials? The recent appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency is a clear signal that Trump is leaning toward disruption. But the risks are significant—and the president-elect has other reform options that could be more effective at a far lower cost.  

Few would argue that the current federal civil service is perfect. In 2017 and 2018, the National Academy of Public Administration, an independent nonprofit chartered by Congress, issued a two-part white paper describing the government’s staffing system as “fundamentally broken,” with too many rules and too little flexibility. Its authors argued that firing nonperformers and attracting new talent can be too difficult. Other observers have bemoaned the bureaucracy for its cost, inefficiency, and unresponsiveness. Change is clearly needed, and would in fact be welcome in many corners of the federal government.

Although distinguished bipartisan commissions may agree on a path forward, Republican and Democratic politicians—buffeted by the interests and passions of their bases—have been unable to come together to address these problems. Under pressure from public-sector unions, Democrats have shied away from even modest reforms of their own and have focused instead on resisting GOP proposals—which have centered on removing protections from federal employees. Some on the hard right are working toward “deconstruction of the administrative state” and the “total destruction of the deep state,” as the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has put it. But most Americans—including many moderate Republicans and Democrats—do not share this animus. They value government services and simply want to see them performed better.

Efficient and effective institutions are easy to degrade, difficult to build. The United States needs to retain the benefits of technical competence and impartial advice from a meritocratic civil service while ensuring that federal employees are accountable to political oversight. There are more constructive ways to achieve the objectives that both Republicans and Democrats claim to want, while retaining a high-performing, meritocratic civil service.         

[Read: Brace for the storm]

Late in his first administration, Trump used an executive order to introduce Schedule F, which sought to remove civil-service protections from any career official with a policy-making role, giving the White House much greater discretion in hiring and firing. Currently, there are about 4,000 political positions, out of which some 1,200 are subject to congressional approval. The number of positions that could be designated as Schedule F is unknown, but estimates suggest it could be 50,000 or higher. Trump’s campaign pledged to “immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” and he himself has promised to wield this power “very aggressively.”

He will have broad support from his party, which has sought to reap political benefit from stoking public hostility toward civil servants. In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, then a presidential primary candidate, claimed that he would start “slitting throats” of federal bureaucrats from day one. Other prominent Republicans, such as Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have indicated their openness to Schedule F. During the primaries, Ramaswamy denounced the administrative state as “an unconstitutional fourth branch of government,” and proposed firing more than three-quarters of federal employees. He later revised this mass-termination plan to cover just half the federal workforce, selected randomly: “If your SSN ends in an odd number, you’re fired.” More recently, Ramaswamy has expressed admiration for Musk’s drastic staff cuts at X (formerly Twitter) as a template for reducing the federal government.

In the Senate, Florida’s Rick Scott has been the Republican most aggressively pressing for a radical restructuring of the civil service. In 2022, he rolled out his 12-point Rescue America plan, which included a proposal for many government agencies to either move out of Washington or shut down entirely. Although about 85 percent of federal employees already work outside the greater Washington, D.C., area, the idea of moving staff out of the capital has caught on in Republican circles—the Trump campaign said he would move as many as 100,000 civil-service positions “to places filled with patriots who love America.” Cutting civil-service protections is also popular with the MAGA base: The Public Service Reform Act, which Scott introduced last year, proposed to place the entire workforce in “at will” employment status, allowing them to be terminated “for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all.” (The bill has not yet passed through committee.)

And then there is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Tonally, the document is uncompromising. The federal government is a “behemoth” deployed against American citizens and conservative values; federal bureaucrats are “underworked, over compensated and unaccountable.” The project argues that the entire edifice of civil-service protections is a legacy of the American left: “Progressive intellectuals and activists demanded a more professionalized, scientific and politically neutral administration.” That statement is partly accurate but woefully incomplete. Republicans have historically been at the forefront of reform efforts, and the last major one, during the Carter administration, was a notably bipartisan affair.

Rhetoric aside, the project’s analysis of central agencies and federal personnel policy is more subtle and nuanced, grounded in a careful review of the relevant institutions and legal and regulatory frameworks. What influence Project 2025 will have on the second Trump administration remains to be seen. Tactically, the president-elect chose to distance himself from it during the campaign, but in office Trump may draw heavily on the document—as well as the personnel who drafted it.

As Francis Fukuyama has argued, the reintroduction of Schedule F will make the federal government “less competent and vastly more politicized.” The United States already has a much higher number of political appointees than any other advanced-industrial democracy—nearly 28 times the number in the United Kingdom, for example. Political appointments stretch down four or five levels of bureaucracy in some agencies (such as the Department of Defense).  

Republicans would be unwise to view Trump’s reelection as a mandate for completely uprooting the civil service. The most recent survey of public confidence in government by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service found disturbing evidence of reduced trust in government. Yet attitudes toward federal employees remain positive. A majority of respondents (55 percent) agreed with the statement that most civil servants are competent; a similar proportion agreed that most are committed to helping people “like me.” Only a quarter of respondents said that presidents should be able to fire “any civil servants that they choose for any reason,” whereas 72 percent disagreed with this statement.

[Read: Trump takes aim at Republicans]

Several measures could improve responsiveness, accountability, and performance at a much lower cost and risk than the ideas currently circulating in Republican circles. Departments and agencies should have more flexibility in managing their human resources, and be empowered to tailor their personnel policies to their particular business needs. The allocation of political appointees across the government needs regular review: A bipartisan commission should examine the current 4,000 such posts and make recommendations to the administration about streamlining and redistribution. Performance management is a key area for improvement: Currently, less than 0.5 percent of the federal workforce is rated “marginally satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” which at best stretches credence and at worst damages public trust. All government agencies ought to evaluate their staff’s performance on a standard curve, so that poor delivery is consistently identified and addressed. (Adjustments could be made so as not to penalize high-performing agencies and units.) Lastly, labor relations in the civil service need an overhaul: The processes and paperwork surrounding termination should be simplified; the window for appeals should be narrowed; and the role of unions in the grievance process for individual employees should be curtailed.

Such measures may disappoint the more fervent anti-government voices in today’s GOP. But a sober assessment would view Musk’s experience with X as a cautionary tale. Although the platform has functioned as a megaphone for its owner, it has also shed users; experienced repeated and embarrassing technical glitches; witnessed steep declines in advertising revenue; and may now be worth as little as a fifth of what he paid for it in 2022. In the private sector, such failures fall primarily upon owners and investors; in the public sector, they would affect us all. Do Americans want vital government services such as food inspection, air traffic control, or Social Security payments to suffer similar breakdowns? Dislocation and deconstruction may have a visceral appeal among elements of the MAGA base. But once the new Trump administration is in office, the American people will expect it to deliver the public goods and services they rely upon—and do so smoothly, fairly and efficiently. Disruption may sound trendy in Silicon Valley or tough in conservative think-tank circles, but delivery is what will ultimately determine the success or failure of these reforms.

Nick Cave, one of the most physically expressive figures in rock and roll, was looking at me with suspicion. His eyebrows climbed the considerable expanse of his forehead; his slender frame tensed defensively in his pin-striped suit. I think he thought I was trying to get him canceled.

What I was really trying to do was get him to talk about being a man. For much of his four-decade career fronting Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave has seemed a bit like a drag king, exaggerating aspects of the male id to amusing and terrifying effect. He performs in funereal formal wear, sings in a growl that evokes Elvis with rabies, and writes acclaimed songs and books brimming with lust, violence, and—in recent years, as he weathered the death of two sons—pained, fatherly gravitas. His venerated stature is more akin to a knighted icon’s than a punk rocker’s; he has been awarded a badge of honor by the Australian government and a fellowship in the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Literature, and was even invited to King Charles’s coronation, in 2023.

So when I met the 67-year-old Cave at a Manhattan hotel in August, before the release of the Bad Seeds’ 18th studio album, Wild God, I suspected that I might not be alone in wanting to hear his thoughts about the state of masculinity. Meaning: Why are guys, according to various cultural and statistical indicators, becoming lonelier and more politically extreme? I cited some lyrics from his new album that seemed to be about the way men cope with feelings of insecurity and irrelevance, hoping he would elaborate.

Between the long pauses in Cave’s reply, I could hear the crinkling leather of the oversize chair he sat in. “It may be a need that men have—maybe they’re not feeling like they are valued,” he told me, before cutting himself off. “I don’t want to come on like Jordan Peterson or something,” he said, referring to the controversial, right-leaning psychology professor and podcaster who rails against the alleged emasculating effects of modern culture.

Cave seemed taken aback by the idea that he himself was an authority on the subject. “It feels weird to think that I might be tapping into, or somehow the voice of, what it means to be a man in this world,” he told me. “I’ve never really seen that.” In fact, he said, his songs—especially his recent ones—“are very feminine in their nature.”

“I’m criticized for it, actually,” he went on. Fans write to him and say, “ ‘What’s happened to your fucking music? Grow a pair of balls, you bastard!’ ”

When Cave was 12, growing up in a rural Australian village, his father sat him down and asked him what he had done for humanity. The young Cave was mystified by the question, but his father—an English teacher with novelist ambitions—clearly wanted to pass along a drive to seek greatness, preferably through literary means. Other dads read The Hardy Boys to their kids; Cave’s regaled him with Dostoyevsky, Titus Andronicus, and … Lolita.

Those works’ linguistic elegance and thematic savagery lodged deep in Cave, but music became the medium that spoke best to his emerging point of view—that of an outsider, a bad seed, alienated from ordinary society. When he was 13, a schoolmate’s parents accused him of attempted rape after he tried to pull down their daughter’s underwear; at the school he was transferred to, he became notorious for brawling with other boys. His father’s death in a car crash when Cave was 19, and his own heroin habit at the time, didn’t help his outlook. “I was just a nasty little guy,” he told Stephen Colbert recently. His thrashing, spit-flinging band the Birthday Party earned him comparisons to Iggy Pop, but it wasn’t until he formed the Bad Seeds, in the early ’80s, that his bleak artistic vision ripened.

[Read: Nick Cave is still looking for redemption]

Blending blues, industrial rock, and cabaret into thunderous musical narratives, the Bad Seeds’ songs felt like retellings of primal fables, often warning about the mortal dangers posed by intimacy, vulnerability, and pretty girls. On the 1984 track “From Her to Eternity,” piano chords stabbed like emergency sirens as Cave moaned, “This desire to possess her is a wound.” Its final stanza implied that Cave’s narrator had killed the object of his fascination—a typically grisly outcome in Cave’s early songs. His defining classic, 1988’s “The Mercy Seat,” strapped the listener into the position of a man on death row. It plumbed another of Cave’s central themes: annihilating shame, the feeling of being judged monstrous and fearing that judgment to be true.

As Cave aged and became a father—to four sons by three different women—his vantage widened. The Bad Seeds’ 1997 album, The Boatman’s Call, a collection of stark love songs inspired by his breakup with the singer PJ Harvey, brought him new fans by recasting him as a romantic tragedian. More and more, the libidinal bite of his work seemed satirical. He formed a garage-rock band, Grinderman, whose 2007 single “No Pussy Blues” was a send-up of the mindset of those now called incels, construing sexual frustration as cosmic injustice. (Cave spat, “I sent her every type of flower / I played a guitar by the hour / I patted her revolting little Chihuahua / But still she just didn’t want to.”) In his sensationally filthy 2009 novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, he set out to illustrate the radical feminist Valerie Solanas’s appraisal that “the male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others.” (The actor Matt Smith will soon play the novel’s protagonist, an inveterate pervert, in a TV adaptation.)

But the Cave of today feels far removed from the theatrical grossness of his past, owing to personal horrors. In 2015, his 15-year-old son Arthur fell off a cliff while reportedly on LSD; in 2022, another son, Jethro, died at 31 after struggles with mental health and addiction. “I’ve had, personally, enough violence,” Cave told me. The murder ballads he once wrote were “an indulgence of someone that has yet to experience the ramifications of what violence actually has upon a person—if I’m looking at the death of my children as violent acts, which they are to some degree.”

Nick Cave and his early band the Birthday Party at the Peppermint Lounge in New York, March 26, 1983 (Michael Macioce / Getty)

Music beckoned as a means of healing. The Bad Seeds’ 2019 album, Ghosteen, was a shivery, synth-driven tone poem in which Cave tried to commune with his lost son in the afterlife; by acclamation, it’s his masterpiece. Wild God marks another sonic and temperamental reset. Its music is a luminous fusion of gospel and piano pop: more U2 than the Stooges, more New Testament than Old. Compared with his earlier work, these albums have “a more fluid, more watery sort of feel,” he said. “Which—it’s dangerous territory here—but I guess you could see as a feminine trait.”

On a level deeper than sound, Cave explained, his recent music is “feminine” because of its viewpoint. His lyrics now account not just for his own feelings, but for those of his wife, Susie, the mother of Arthur and his twin brother, Earl. In the first song on Ghosteen, for example, a woman is sitting in a kitchen, listening to music on the radio, which is exactly what Susie was doing when she learned what had happened to Arthur.

“After my son died, I had no understanding of what was going on with me at all,” Cave said. “But I could see Susie. I could see this sort of drama playing out in front of me. Drama—that sounds disparaging, but I don’t mean that. It felt like I was trying to understand what was happening to a mother who had lost her child.” His own subjectivity became “hopelessly and beautifully entangled” with hers. On Ghosteen, “it was very difficult to have a clean understanding of whose voice I actually was in some of these songs.”

That merging of perspectives reflects more than just the shared experience of suffering. It is part of what Cave sees as a transformation of his worldview—from inward-looking to outward-looking, from misanthrope to humanist. Arthur’s death made him realize that he was part of a universal experience of loss, which in turn meant that he was part of the social whole. Whereas he was once motivated to make art to impress and shock the world, he now wanted to help people, to transmute gnawing guilt into something good. “I feel that, as his father, he was my responsibility and I looked away at the wrong time, that I wasn’t sufficiently vigilant,” he said in the 2022 interview collection Faith, Hope and Carnage. He added, speaking of his and Susie’s creative output, “There is not a song or a word or a stitch of thread that is not asking for forgiveness, that is not saying we are just so sorry.”

On the Red Hand Files, the epistolary blog that Cave started in 2018, he replies to questions from the public concerning all manner of subjects: how he feels about religion (he doesn’t identify as Christian, yet he attends church every week), what he thinks of cancel culture (against it, “mercy’s antithesis”), whether he likes raisins (they have a “grim, scrotal horribleness, but like all things in this world—you, me and every other little thing—they have their place”).

At least a quarter of the messages he receives from readers express one idea—“The world is shit,” as he put it. “That has a sort of range: from people that just see everything is corrupt from a political point of view, to people that just see no value in themselves, in human beings, or in the world.” Cave recognizes that outlook from his “nasty little guy” days—but he fears that nihilism has moved from the punk fringe to the mainstream. The misery in his inbox reflects a culture that is “anti-sacred, secular by nature, unmysterious, unnuanced,” he said. He thinks music and faith offer much-needed medicine, helping to re-enchant reality.

[From the October 2024 issue: Leonard Cohen’s prophetic battle against male egoism]

Cave has been heartened to see so many people evidently feeling the same way. Back when Jordan Peterson was first making his mark as a public figure, Cave devoured his lectures about the Bible, he told me. “They were seriously beautiful things. I heard reports about people in his classes; it was like being on acid or something like that. Just listening to this man speak about these sorts of things—it was so deeply complex. And putting the idea of religion back onto the table as a legitimate intellectual concern.”

But over time, he lost interest in Peterson as he watched him get swept up in the internet’s endless, polarized culture wars. Twitter in particular, he said, has “had a terrible, diminishing effect on some great minds.”

The artist’s job, as Cave has come to see it, is to work against this erosion of ambiguity and complication, using their creative powers to push beyond reductive binaries, whether they’re applied to politics, gender, or the soul. “I’m evangelical about the transcendent nature of music itself,” he said. “We can listen to some deeply flawed individuals create the most beautiful things imaginable. The distance from what they are as human beings to what they’re capable of producing can be extraordinary.” Music, he added, can “redeem the individual.”

This redemptive spirit hums throughout Wild God. One song tells of a ghostly boy sitting at the foot of the narrator’s bed, delivering a message: “We’ve all had too much sorrow / Now is the time for joy.” The album joins in that call with its surging, uplifting sound. The final track, “As the Waters Cover the Sea,” is a straightforward hymn, suitable to be sung from the pews of even the most traditional congregations.

But the album is not entirely a departure from Cave’s old work; he has not fully evolved from “living shit-post to Hallmark card,” as he once joked in a Red Hand Files entry. “Frogs” begins with a stark reference to the tale of Cain and Abel—“Ushering in the week, he knelt down / Crushed his brother’s head in with a bone”—and builds to Cave singing, in ecstatic tones, “Kill me!” His point is that “joy is not happiness—it’s not a simple emotion,” he told me. “Joy, in its way, is a form of suffering in itself. It’s rising out of an understanding of the base nature of our lives into an explosion of something beautiful, and then a kind of retreat.”

A few songs portray an old man—or, seemingly interchangeably, an “old god” or a “wild god”—on a hallucinatory journey around the globe, lifting the spirits of the downtrodden wherever he goes. At times, the man comes off like a deluded hero, or even a problematic one: “It was rape and pillage in the retirement village / But in his mind he was a man of great virtue and courage,” Cave sings on the album’s title track. In Cave’s view, though, this figure “is a deeply sympathetic character,” he told me, a person who feels “separated from the world” and is “looking for someone that will see him of some value.”

As with Ghosteen, the album mixes Susie’s perspective with Cave’s. One song, “Conversion,” was inspired by an experience, or maybe a vision, that she had—and that she asked her husband not to publicly disclose in detail. “There is some gentle tension between my wife, who’s an extremely private person, and my own role, which is someone that pretty much speaks about pretty much everything,” Cave said.

In the song, the old god shambles around a town whose inhabitants watch him “with looks on their faces worse than grief itself”—perhaps pity, perhaps judgment. Then he sees a girl with long, dark hair. They embrace—and erupt into a cleansing flame, curing the man of his pain. As Cave described this moment in the song to me, he flared his eyes and made an explosive noise with his mouth. In my mind, I could see the old god, and he looked just like Cave.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Nick Cave Wants to Be Good.”

“On the record? We’re as calm as calm can be,” a European official assured me last week when I called him to ask what he thought about the reelection of Donald Trump.

His answer surprised me. I’d first met the official earlier this year when I was reporting on European allies’ view of the U.S. presidential election. Back then, almost every leader and diplomat I interviewed expressed dread at the prospect of Trump’s return to power; this same official had described the stakes as “existential” for his country. The reasons for the anxiety were obvious: Russia was waging war on NATO’s doorstep, and America, the alliance’s most powerful member by far, appeared to be on the verge of reelecting a president who had, among other things, said he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries he considers freeloaders. Yet now, the official on the other end of the line was talking optimistically about the “transatlantic cooperation” his government looked forward to fostering with its partners in Washington, and “working toward strong relationships with the new administration.”

[Read: What Europe fears]

“We approach the next Trump presidency with calm and focus, not wobbling and panic,” he confidently declared.

Then he asked if he could speak anonymously. I agreed. “Obviously,” he said, “a million things could go wrong.”

Political leaders and diplomats across Europe are clear-eyed about the threat that the next president will pose—and yet they can do very little about it. “The overall level of anxiousness is fairly high,” the official told me. “People are expecting turbulence.” America’s allies now know that they can’t simply ride out a Trump term and wait for a snap back to normalcy. So far this century, Americans have elected George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Trump again. “Predictability is gone,” he said. “The pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.”

In the short term, sources told me, the plan is to cozy up to Trump and those close to him and hope for the best. In the long term, a growing consensus has emerged that Europe will need to prepare for a world in which it no longer counts on America for protection.

Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat who has served as ambassador to the United States, is among those urging calm. He has publicly cautioned European leaders against “finger wagging” in their interactions with the president-elect, and said they should take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy. Like other Europeans I spoke with, he was relieved by the choice of Marco Rubio—who has signaled support for NATO and has traditional views of America’s role in the world—for secretary of state. Ischinger also welcomed the realism that has shaped Europe’s response so far to Trump’s reelection. “We’re just going to have to deal with him—we’re prepared to deal with him.”

European officials, who have spent years planning for this contingency, are working to deepen personal relationships with Trump’s Republican allies, Ischinger told me, and talking about gestures they could make to flatter him. But these efforts will almost certainly face resistance from the European public, which, he said, broadly finds Trump repellent and even sinister. “I see a lot of disdain and panic,” he told me.

These reactions were reflected in the postelection headlines in the European press, which greeted Trump’s return with a mix of bafflement, scorn, and Apprentice puns. “What Have They Done … Again?” asked the cover of Britain’s Daily Mirror. The Guardian plastered its cover with the words “American dread.” And an op-ed on the homepage of the German newspaper Die Zeit resorted to English to capture the moment with a four-letter headline: “Fuck.”

Behind the scenes, Ischinger told me, European leaders have discussed inviting Trump to a capital for a grand state visit where allies could roll out the red carpet and hopefully cultivate some good will. But Ischinger worries that such an attempt could backfire. “I cannot imagine any such scenario in any German-French-Spanish-Italian city where you would not have huge anti-Trump demonstrations, probably really ugly ones,” he told me. “Organizing a decent visit for Mr. Trump would really be quite a nightmare for the police.”

Ischinger told me that the return of Trump and his hard-edged “America First” policy is emboldening Europeans who have been arguing that the continent needs more independence from its most powerful ally. Ischinger himself seems to be listening. When we spoke earlier this year, he was somewhat dismissive of the idea that Europe could chart a post-America course, at least in the near term. “Dreaming about strategic autonomy for Europe is a wonderful vision for maybe the next 50 years,” he told me in March. “But right now, we need America more than ever.”

Last week, though, he spoke urgently of the need for Europe to start manufacturing more of its own weapons and get serious about being able to defend its borders. “Are we finally going to wake up to the fact that we cannot rely forever on being protected by the United States?” he asked. He said he doesn’t believe that Trump will move to withdraw from NATO, but the fact that it’s even a question puts Europe in a deeply precarious position. The U.S. has more troops stationed in Europe (about 85,000) than the entire militaries of Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal combined. It provides essential air-force, intelligence-gathering, and ballistic-missile defense capabilities; covers about 16 percent of NATO’s operating costs; and manufactures most of the weapons that are bought by European militaries. Ischinger said that the situation is untenable: It’s just too risky to rely indefinitely on American military might to deter Russian aggression in the region. “We have a war now. This is urgent—this is not just political theory,” he told me. “This is a decisive moment in European history.”

Meanwhile, some in Europe are looking beyond the immediate military implications of Trump’s election. At Faith Angle Europe, an annual conference hosted last week by the Aspen Institute in France, journalists and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic gathered in a resort on the French Riviera and, in between pastry buffets and dips in the pool, contemplated the potential end of liberal democracy in America. To many in Europe, Trump’s election looks less like a historical fluke or “black swan event” and more like the climactic achievement of a right-wing populism that has been upending politics on their continent for much of this century—the same forces that led to Brexit in the United Kingdom, brought Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy, and made Marine Le Pen a major player in France. Not all Europeans, of course, are put off by the brand of politics that Trump represents

Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist who has worked as an adviser for the ministry of foreign affairs and the European Union, predicted that Trump’s victory would “galvanize” far-right movements around the world. “They feel they really are on a roll, and they probably are,” she told attendees at the conference. “There’s a sense of legitimization … If this is happening in the heart of liberal democracy, surely you can’t make the argument that this happening in Europe is undemocratic.”

In recent years, Tocci said, far-right leaders in Europe were on their best behavior, eager not to alienate America by, say, airing their real views about Putin and Ukraine. Now that Biden, a classic transatlanticist, is set to be replaced with Trump, she said, “there’s going to be quite a lot of lowering of the masks.”

Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”

Maçães, like others I talked with, was eager not to be seen as hysterical or fatalistic. He said he didn’t think Trump’s foreign-policy appointments so far have been disastrous. But when he looked at the people Trump was naming to key domestic positions, most notably Matt Gaetz as attorney general, he found it hard to see anything other than a profound deterioration of political culture and democratic norms. “Americans have more reason to worry than the rest of the world,” he said.

In 2022, pollsters and political analysts predicted a red wave in the midterms that didn’t materialize. Last night, polls anticipated a whisker-thin election, and instead we got a red wave that carried Donald Trump to victory.

The breadth of Trump’s improvement over 2020 is astonishing. In the previous two elections, we saw narrow demographic shifts—for example, non-college-educated white people moved toward Trump in 2016, and high-income suburban voters raced toward Biden in 2020. But last night’s election apparently featured a more uniform shift toward Trump, according to a county-by-county analysis shared with me by Thomas Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University. The “really simple story,” he said, “is that secular dissatisfaction with Biden’s economic stewardship affected most demographic groups in a fairly homogeneous way.”

Trump improved his margins not only in swing states but also in once comfortable Democratic strongholds. In 2020, Biden won New Jersey by 16 points. In 2024, Harris seems poised to win by just five points. Harris ran behind Biden in rural Texas border towns, where many Hispanic people live, and in rural Kentucky, where very few Hispanic people live. She ran behind Biden in high-income suburbs, such as Loudoun County, Virginia, and in counties with college towns, including Dane County (home to the University of Wisconsin) and Centre County (home to Penn State).

Perhaps most surprising, Trump improved his margins in some of America’s largest metro areas. In the past two cycles, Democrats could comfort themselves by counting on urban counties to continue moving left even as rural areas shifted right. That comfort was dashed last night, at least among counties with more than 90 percent of their results reported. In the New York City metro area, New York County (Manhattan) shifted nine points right, Kings County (Brooklyn) shifted 12 points right, Queens County shifted 21 points right, and Bronx County shifted 22 points right. In Florida, Orange County (Orlando) shifted 10 points right and Miami-Dade shifted 19 points right. In Texas, Harris County (Houston) and Bexar County (San Antonio) both shifted eight points right and Dallas County shifted 10 points right. In and around the “Blue Wall” states, Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia County shifted five points right, Michigan’s Wayne County (Detroit) shifted nine points right, and Illinois’ Cook County (Chicago) shifted 11 points right.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

Other than Atlanta, which moved left, many of the largest U.S. metros moved right even more than many rural areas. You cannot explain this shift by criticizing specific campaign decisions (If only she had named Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro her vice president…). You can’t pin this shift exclusively on, say, Arab Americans in Michigan who voted for Jill Stein, or Russian trolls who called in bomb threats to Georgia.

A better, more comprehensive way to explain the outcome is to conceptualize 2024 as the second pandemic election. Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020. In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.

The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic. Although Americans understood that millions of people were dying in Europe and Asia and South America, they did not have an equally clear sense that supply-chain disruptions, combined with an increase in spending, sent prices surging around the world. As I reported earlier this year, inflation at its peak exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in the United Kingdom, 10 percent in Italy, and 20 percent in Argentina, Turkey, and Ethiopia.

Inflation proved as contagious as a coronavirus. Many voters didn’t directly blame their leaders for a biological nemesis that seemed like an act of god, but they did blame their leaders for an economic nemesis that seemed all too human in its origin. And the global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world. The ruling parties of several major countries, including the U.K., Germany, and South Africa, suffered historic defeats this year. Even strongmen, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lost ground in an election that many experts assumed would be a rousing coronation.

This has been a year of global anti-incumbency within a century of American anti-incumbency. Since 2000, every midterm and presidential election has seen a change in control of the House, Senate, or White House except for 2004 (when George W. Bush eked out a win) and 2012 (when Barack Obama won reelection while Republicans held the House). The U.S. appears to be in an age of unusually close elections that swing back and forth, in which every sitting president spends the majority of his term with an underwater approval rating.

There will be a rush to blame Kamala Harris—the candidate, her campaign, and her messaging. But there is no escaping the circumstances that Harris herself could never outrun. She is the vice president of a profoundly unpopular president, whose approval was laid low by the same factors—such as inflation and anti-incumbency bias—that have waylaid ruling parties everywhere. An analysis by the political scientist John Sides predicted that a sitting president with Biden’s approval rating should be expected to win no more than 48 percent of the two-party vote. As of Wednesday afternoon, Kamala Harris is currently projected to win about 47.5 percent of the popular vote. Her result does not scream underperformance. In context, it seems more like a normal performance.

[Annie Lowrey: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

A national wave of this magnitude should, and likely will, inspire some soul searching among Democrats. Preliminary CNN exit polls show that Trump is poised to be the first GOP candidate to win Hispanic men in at least 50 years; other recent surveys have pointed to a dramatic shift right among young and nonwhite men. One interpretation of this shift is that progressives need to find a cultural message that connects with young men. Perhaps. Another possibility is that Democrats need a fresh way to talk about economic issues that make all Americans, including young men, believe that they are more concerned about a growth agenda that increases prosperity for all.

If there is cold comfort for Democrats, it is this: We are in an age of politics when every victory is Pyrrhic, because to gain office is to become the very thing—the establishment, the incumbent—that a part of your citizenry will inevitably want to replace. Democrats have been temporarily banished to the wilderness by a counterrevolution, but if the trends of the 21st century hold, then the very anti-incumbent mechanisms that brought them defeat this year will eventually bring them back to power.

X has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then de-verification) of a white nationalist, and the glut of anti-Semitic hatred that roiled the platform in 2016.

But something is different today. Heaps of unfiltered posts that plainly celebrate racism, anti-Semitism, and outright Nazism are easily accessible and possibly even promoted by the site’s algorithms. All the while, Elon Musk—a far-right activist and the site’s owner, who is campaigning for and giving away millions to help elect Donald Trump—amplifies horrendous conspiracy theories about voter fraud, migrants run amok, and the idea that Jewish people hate white people. Twitter was always bad if you knew where to look, but because of Musk, X is far worse. (X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

It takes little effort to find neo-Nazi accounts that have built up substantial audiences on X. “Thank you all for 7K,” one white-nationalist meme account posted on October 17, complete with a heil-Hitler emoji reference. One week later, the account, which mostly posts old clips of Hitler speeches and content about how “Hitler was right,” celebrated 14,000 followers. One post, a black-and-white video of Nazis goose-stepping, has more than 187,000 views. Another racist and anti-Semitic video about Jewish women and Black men—clearly AI-generated—has more than 306,000 views. It was also posted in late October.

Many who remain on the platform have noticed X decaying even more than usual in recent months. “I’ve seen SO many seemingly unironic posts like this on Twitter recently this is getting insane,” one X user posted in response to a meme that the far-right influencer Stew Peters recently shared. It showed an image of Adolf Hitler holding a telephone with overlaid text reading, “Hello … 2024? Are you guys starting to get it yet?” Peters appended the commentary, “Yes. We’ve noticed.” The idea is simply that Hitler was right, and X users ate it up: As of this writing, the post has received about 67,000 likes, 10,000 reposts, and 11.4 million views. When Musk took over, in 2022, there were initial reports that hate speech (anti-Black and anti-Semitic slurs) was surging on the platform. By December of that year, one research group described the increase in hate speech as “unprecedented.” And it seems to only have gotten worse. There are far more blatant examples of racism now, even compared with a year ago. In September, the World Bank halted advertising on X after its promoted ads were showing up in the replies to pro-Nazi and white-nationalist content from accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Search queries such as Hitler was right return posts with tens of thousands of views—they’re indistinguishable from the poison once relegated to the worst sites on the internet, including 4chan, Gab, and Stormfront.

The hatred isn’t just coming from anonymous fringe posters either. Late last month, Clay Higgins, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, published a racist, threatening post about the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, saying they’re from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Then he issued an ultimatum: “All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th,” he wrote in the post, referencing Inauguration Day. Higgins eventually deleted the post at the request of his House colleagues on both sides of the aisle but refused to apologize. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want,” he told CNN later that day.

And although Higgins did eventually try to walk his initial post back, clarifying that he was really referring to Haitian gangs, the sentiment he shared with CNN is right. The lawmaker can put up another vile post maligning an entire country whenever he desires. Not because of his right to free speech—which exists to protect against government interference—but because of how Musk chooses to operate his platform. Despite the social network’s policy that prohibits “incitement of harassment,” X seemingly took no issue with Higgins’s racist post or its potential to cause real-world harm for Springfield residents. (The town has already closed and evacuated its schools twice because of bomb threats.) And why would X care? The platform, which reinstated thousands of banned accounts following Musk’s takeover, in 2022—accounts that belong to QAnon supporters, political hucksters, conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi—is so inundated with bigoted memes, racist AI slop, and unspeakable slurs that Higgins’s post seemed almost measured by comparison. In the past, when Twitter seemed more interested in enforcing content-moderation standards, the lawmaker’s comments may have resulted in a ban or some other disciplinary response: On X, he found an eager, sympathetic audience willing to amplify his hateful message.

His deleted post is instructive, though, as a way to measure the degradation of X under Musk. The site is a political project run by a politically radicalized centibillionaire. The worthwhile parts of Twitter (real-time news, sports, culture, silly memes, spontaneous encounters with celebrity accounts) have been drowned out by hateful garbage. X is no longer a social-media site with a white-supremacy problem, but a white-supremacist site with a social-media problem.

Musk has certainly bent the social network to support his politics, which has recently involved joking on Tucker Carlson’s show (which streams on X) that “nobody is even bothering to try to kill Kamala” and repurposing the @america handle from an inactive user to turn it into a megaphone for his pro-Trump super PAC. Musk has also quite clearly reengineered the site so that users see him, and his tweets, whether or not they follow him.

When Musk announced his intent to purchase Twitter, in April 2022, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein aptly noted that “Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it.” By this logic, it would seem that X is vying to be the official propaganda outlet not just for Trump generally but also for the “Great Replacement” theory, which states that there is a global plot to eradicate the white race and its culture through immigration. In just the past year, Musk has endorsed multiple posts about the conspiracy theory. In November 2023, in response to a user named @breakingbaht who accused Jews of supporting bringing “hordes of minorities” into the United States, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.” Musk’s post was viewed more than 8 million times.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government]

Though Musk has publicly claimed that he doesn’t “subscribe” to the “Great Replacement” theory, he appears obsessed with the idea that Republican voters in America are under attack from immigrants. Last December, he posted a misleading graph suggesting that the number of immigrants arriving illegally was overtaking domestic birth rates. He has repeatedly referenced a supposed Democratic plot to “legalize vast numbers of illegals” and put an end to fair elections. He has falsely suggested that the Biden administration was “flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona” and argued that, soon, “everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.” According to a recent Bloomberg analysis of 53,000 of Musk’s posts, the billionaire has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic (more than 1,300 posts in total), garnering roughly 10 billion views.

But Musk’s interests extend beyond the United States. This summer, during a period of unrest and rioting in the United Kingdom over a mass stabbing that killed three children, the centibillionaire used his account to suggest that a civil war there was “inevitable.” He also shared (and subsequently deleted) a conspiracy theory that the U.K. government was building detainment camps for people rioting against Muslims. Additionally, X was instrumental in spreading misinformation and fueling outrage among far-right, anti-immigration protesters.

In Springfield, Ohio, X played a similar role as a conduit for white supremacists and far-right extremists to fuel real-world harm. One of the groups taking credit for singling out Springfield’s Haitian community was Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group known for marching through city streets waving swastikas. Blood Tribe had been focused on the town for months, but not until prominent X accounts (including Musk’s, J. D. Vance’s, and Trump’s) seized on a Facebook post from the region did Springfield become a national target. “It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against ‘subhuman’ Haitians,” the journalist Robert Tracinski wrote recently. Tracinski argues that social-media channels (like X) have been instrumental in transferring neo-Nazi propaganda into the public consciousness—all the way to the presidential-debate stage. He is right. Musk’s platform has become a political tool for stoking racial hatred online and translating it into harassment in the physical world.

The ability to drag fringe ideas and theories into mainstream political discourse has long been a hallmark of X, even back when it was known as Twitter. There’s always been a trade-off with the platform’s ability to narrow the distance between activists and people in positions of power. Social-justice movements such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter owe some of the success of their early organizing efforts to the platform.

Yet the website has also been one of the most reliable mainstream destinations on the internet to see Photoshopped images of public figures (or their family members) in gas chambers, or crude, racist cartoons of Jewish men. Now, under Musk’s stewardship, X seems to run in only one direction. The platform eschews healthy conversation. It abhors nuance, instead favoring constant escalation and engagement-baiting behavior. And it empowers movements that seek to enrage and divide. In April, an NBC News investigation found that “at least 150 paid ‘Premium’ subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months.” According to research from the extremism expert Colin Henry, since Musk’s purchase, there’s been a decline in anti-Semitic posts on 4chan’s infamous “anything goes” forum, and a simultaneous rise in posts targeting Jewish people on X.

X’s own transparency reports show that the social network has allowed hateful content to flourish on its site. In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

Because X has made it more difficult for researchers to access data by switching to a paid plan that prices out many academics, it is now difficult to get a quantitative understanding of the platform’s degradation. The statistics that do exist are alarming. Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in just the first month of Musk’s ownership, anti–Black American slurs used on the platform increased by 202 percent. The Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic tweets on the platform increased by 61 percent in just two weeks after Musk’s takeover. But much of the evidence is anecdotal. The Washington Post summed up a recent report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noting that pro-Hitler content “reached the largest audiences on X [relative to other social-media platforms], where it was also most likely to be recommended via the site’s algorithm.” Since Musk took over, X has done the following:

Seemingly failed to block a misleading advertisement post purchased by Jason Köhne, a white nationalist with the handle @NoWhiteGuiltNWG. Seemingly failed to block an advertisement calling to reinstate the death penalty for gay people. Reportedly run ads on 20 racist and anti-Semitic hashtags, including #whitepower, despite Musk pledging that he would demonetize posts that included hate speech. (After NBC asked about these, X removed the ability for users to search for some of these hashtags.) Granted blue-check verification to an account with the N-word in its handle. (The account has since been suspended.) Allowed an account that praised Hitler to purchase a gold-check badge, which denotes an “official organization” and is typically used by brands such as Doritos and BlackRock. (This account has since been suspended.) Seemingly failed to take immediate action on 63 of 66 accounts flagged for disseminating AI-generated Nazi memes from 4chan. More than half of the posts were made by paid accounts with verified badges, according to research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

None of this is accidental. The output of a platform tells you what it is designed to do: In X’s case, all of this is proof of a system engineered to give voice to hateful ideas and reward those who espouse them. If one is to judge X by its main exports, then X, as it exists now under Musk, is a white-supremacist website.

You might scoff at this notion, especially if you, like me, have spent nearly two decades willingly logged on to the site, or if you, like me, have had your professional life influenced in surprising, occasionally delightful ways by the platform. Even now, I can scroll through the site’s algorithmic pond scum and find things worth saving—interesting commentary, breaking news, posts and observations that make me laugh. But these exceptional morsels are what make the platform so insidious, in part because they give cover to the true political project that X now represents and empowers.

As I was preparing to write this story, I visited some of the most vile corners of the internet. I’ve monitored these spaces for years, and yet this time, I was struck by how little distance there was between them and what X has become. It is impossible to ignore: The difference between X and a known hateful site such as Gab are people like myself. The majority of users are no doubt creators, businesses, journalists, celebrities, political junkies, sports fans, and other perfectly normal people who hold their nose and cling to the site. We are the human shield of respectability that keeps Musk’s disastrous $44 billion investment from being little more than an algorithmically powered Stormfront.

The justifications—the lure of the community, the (now-limited) ability to bear witness to news in real time, and of the reach of one’s audience of followers—feel particularly weak today. X’s cultural impact is still real, but its promotional use is nonexistent. (A recent post linking to a story of mine generated 289,000 impressions and 12,900 interactions, but only 948 link clicks—a click rate of roughly 0.00328027682 percent.) NPR, which left the platform in April 2023, reported almost negligible declines in traffic referrals after abandoning the site.

Continuing to post on X has been indefensible for some time. But now, more than ever, there is no good justification for adding one’s name to X’s list of active users. To leave the platform, some have argued, is to cede an important ideological battleground to the right. I’ve been sympathetic to this line of thinking, but the battle, on this particular platform, is lost. As long as Musk owns the site, its architecture will favor his political allies. If you see posting to X as a fight, then know it is not a fair one. For example: In October, Musk shared a fake screenshot of an Atlantic article, manipulated to show a fake headline—his post, which he never deleted, garnered more than 18 million views. The Atlantic’s X post debunking Musk’s claim received just 28,000 views. Musk is unfathomably rich. He’s used that money to purchase a platform, take it private, and effectively turn it into a megaphone for the world’s loudest racists. Now he’s attempting to use it to elect a corrupt, election-denying felon to the presidency.

To stay on X is not an explicit endorsement of this behavior, but it does help enable it. I’m not at all suggesting—as Musk has previously alleged—that the site be shut down or that Musk should be silenced. But there’s no need to stick around and listen. Why allow Musk to appear even slightly more credible by lending our names, our brands, and our movements to a platform that makes the world more dangerous for real people? To my dismay, I’ve hid from these questions for too long. Now that I’ve confronted them, I have no good answers.

A rare, mammoth spider species is making a comeback in the United Kingdom, but scientists say there's no need for fear.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

The thought of Election Day may bring a twinge of anxiety for some people. “A big event should prompt big feelings,” our staff writer Shayla Love recently observed. But waiting for the results also leaves plenty of downtime for many Americans, whose nerves are unlikely to abate until after the race is called. Today, The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What should you watch if you’re feeling overwhelmed by election anxiety?

What to Watch

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (streaming on Max)

When thinking of movies that ease my anxiety, election-related or not, this one is a no-brainer. Allow me to introduce you to Marcel, the shell with shoes on, who will likely give you some hope for the future.

In this mockumentary for all ages, Marcel (co-created and voiced by Jenny Slate) faces tough situations with incredible grace—something we could all aim to do right now. He takes care of his grandmother while also looking for the rest of his family and community, who all disappeared one night. But this heartbreaking situation is no match for Marcel’s relentless positivity, corny sense of humor, and cheesy-but-adorable observations (for example, he says that a documentary is “like a movie, but nobody has any lines and nobody even knows what it is while they’re making it”). And when things don’t go his way or he wants to back down, his grandmother steps in to show us where Marcel got his cheerfulness from—and to tell him to be more like Lesley Stahl from 60 Minutes.

— Mariana Labbate, assistant audience editor

The Verdict (available to rent on YouTube), Darkest Hour (streaming on Netflix)

I should probably recommend something uplifting and funny and distracting, but whenever I feel down or stressed, I return to two rather heavy movies that inspire me. Both of them are about the determination of one person to do the right thing, even when all seems lost.

Start with The Verdict, a 1982 courtroom drama starring Paul Newman as Frank Galvin, a down-and-out lawyer trying to win a medical-malpractice case against a famous Boston hospital. Once a rising legal star, Frank is now just a day-drinking ambulance chaser. But he rediscovers himself—and his sense of justice—as he fights the hospital and its evil white-shoe law firm.

After that, watch Darkest Hour, in which Winston Churchill—magnificently portrayed by Gary Oldman—fights to save Western civilization during the terrifying days around the time of the fall of France in 1940. The United Kingdom stands alone as British politicians around Churchill urge him to make a deal with Hitler. Instead, the prime minister rallies the nation to stand and fight.

No matter what happens on Election Day, both movies will remind you that every one of us can make a difference each day if we stay true to our moral compass.

— Tom Nichols, staff writer

Outrageous Fortune (available to rent on YouTube)

Bette Midler and Shelley Long star in this campy 1987 flick, which starts out as a satire of the New York theater scene before escalating into a buddy comedy slash action thriller (with a healthy dose of girl-power revenge).

Some scenes haven’t aged all that well. But the dynamic between the two stars as they careen into truly absurd situations is winning enough to carry the film. To keep track of who is who—and who mustn’t be trusted—you will need to put down your phone and focus (doubly true because some elements of the plot are slightly underbaked). The blend of slapstick antics and pulpy suspense should help take your mind off the race, as will the costume jewelry, shots of 1980s New York, Shakespeare references, and explosions. Through the plot’s various twists and turns, one takeaway is clear: The power of dance should never be underestimated. This movie may not exactly restore anyone’s faith in humanity, but it will definitely help pass the time as you wait for results to roll in.

— Lora Kelley, associate editor

The Hunt for Red October (streaming on Max)

There are three movies I’ll watch at the drop of a hat: Arrival, a genre-bender in which Amy Adams plays a linguist who learns to speak backwards and forward in time; The Devil Wears Prada, as long as we skip through the scenes with Andy’s annoying friends; and the Cold War underwater thriller The Hunt for Red October. I consider all three films a balm in anxious times, but this week, I’m setting sail with Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin.

Maybe because I write about war, I don’t consider a plotline centered on the threat of nuclear Armageddon an unusually nerve-racking experience. This movie transports me. The script is as tight as the hull of a Typhoon-class submarine. James Earl Jones is near perfect as an admiral turned CIA honcho. Baldwin was super hot then. And a bonus: The supporting performances by Scott Glenn, Courtney B. Vance, Sam Neill, and Tim Curry (Tim Curry!) are some of the most memorable of their careers. (Fight me.) If you haven’t seen this movie, treat yourself—if only for the opening minutes, so you can hear Connery, in Edinburgh-tinged Russian, proclaim morning in Murmansk to be “Cold … and hard.”

— Shane Harris, staff writer

How I Met Your Mother (streaming on Netflix and Hulu)

The right sitcom can cure just about anything. If you, like me, somehow missed out on watching How I Met Your Mother when it first aired, it’s the perfect show to transport you back to a not-so-distant past when TV still had laugh tracks and politics was … not this. For the uninitiated, the series is exactly what it sounds like, featuring a dorky romantic named Ted as he tells his kids the seemingly interminable story of, well, how he met their mother.

The roughly 20-minute episodes are both goofy and endearing. Although the plot, which follows Ted and his four best friends, centers on the characters’ romantic entanglements, the story is fundamentally about friendship. As Kevin Craft wrote in The Atlantic in the run-up to the series finale, the show’s unstated mantra is “We’re all in this together.” Over the next few days, this is perhaps the most important thing we can remember.

— Lila Shroff, assistant editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Throw out your black plastic spatula. A future without Hezbollah What Orwell didn’t anticipate

The Week Ahead

Heretic, a horror-thriller film starring Hugh Grant, about a man who traps two young missionaries in a deadly game inside his house (in theaters Friday) Season 4 of Outer Banks, a series about a group of teenagers hunting for treasure (part two premieres Thursday on Netflix) You Can’t Please All, a memoir by Tariq Ali about how his years of political activism shaped his life (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Why You Might Need an Adventure

By Arthur C. Brooks

Almost everyone knows the first line of Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece Moby-Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” Fewer people may remember what comes next—which might just be some of the best advice ever given to chase away a bit of depression:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

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The approach of the presidential election has people in both parties in doomscrolling mode. Some Republicans are creating elaborate conspiracy theories about voter fraud in swing states. Some Democrats are creating elaborate conspiracy theories about Nate Silver’s projections. Of course, this kind of internet-based obsession isn’t healthy. Although perhaps the best way to avoid a sense of impending dread about the coming presidential election is to actually participate in some form of civic engagement in the four days before November 5, those who are loath to leave their couches and interact with their fellow human beings have a well-adjusted alternative to volunteering: reading a book. As a journalist who has thought, talked, and written about electoral politics every day for as long as I can remember, I can suggest five books that might lend readers a new perspective on politics—without all the unpleasant mental-health side effects of spending hours online.

The Earl of Louisiana, by A. J. Liebling

Liebling’s chronicle of the 1959 gubernatorial campaign of Earl Long, Huey Long’s brother, who became the dominant figure in state politics in the decades after his brother’s assassination, is one of the great classics of literary journalism. Set in the byzantine world of Louisiana politics in the mid-20th century, the book is a remarkable character study of the younger Long, who served three stints as governor of the Bayou State (and was briefly institutionalized by his wife during his last term, as chronicled by Liebling). Although it’s arguably not even the best book about one of the Longs—T. Harry Williams’s biography of Huey is a masterpiece—it captures a precise moment of transition as American politics adjusted to both the rise of television and the beginnings of the civil-rights movement. Its glimpse into those changes also serves as a last hurrah for a certain type of traditional politics that seems remote in our very online age.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, by Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson’s tale of the 1972 presidential campaign has offered a rousing introduction to American campaigns for generations of teenage political junkies. His gonzo journalism is prone to treating the line between fact and fiction as advisory at best, but it also gets into the actual art of politics in a way that few others have managed. His depiction of George McGovern’s campaign’s careful management of the floor of the Democratic National Convention is genuinely instructive for professionals, while still accessible to those with only a casual interest in the field. In a year in which “vibes” have earned a new primacy in campaign coverage, reading Thompson is even more worthwhile, because he did a better job than anyone of covering the vibes of his moment.

[Read: Six political memoirs worth reading]

SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, by Ivor Crewe and Anthony King

Americans frequently complain about their two-party system and wonder why no third party has yet emerged that could somehow appeal to a broad constituency. But sustaining such mass popularity is even harder than it sounds, as shown by this history of the Social Democratic Party in the United Kingdom. Perhaps the closest thing to a full-fledged third party that has emerged in the Anglosphere in the past century, the SDP was formed in 1981 as a breakaway from the Labour Party, which seemed irretrievably in control of fringe leftists and Trotskyites; meanwhile, all the Conservative Party had to offer was Margaret Thatcher. The SDP, in an alliance with the Liberal Party (a longtime moderate party of moderate means and membership), appeared positioned to shatter the mold of British politics. In the early 1980s, it polled first among British voters. But its momentum fizzled, as Crewe and King chronicle, due to both internal conflicts and external events such as the Falklands War. The party, which now exists as the Liberal Democrats, has had varying fortunes in British politics since, but it has never reached the heights that once felt attainable in the early ’80s. Crewe and King explain why, while also outlining just how close the SDP came.

This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns

If you feel the need to reflect on contemporary American politics right now, Martin and Burns’s book on the tumultuous end of the Trump administration and start of the Biden presidency provides a smart field guide for understanding how exactly Donald Trump went from leaving Washington in disgrace after January 6 to potentially winning reelection in 2024. It chronicles the series of compromises and calculations within the Republican Party that first enabled and then fueled Trump’s political comeback, and also goes inside the Democratic Party, dissecting Kamala Harris’s rise as Joe Biden’s vice-presidential nominee as well as the missteps that hampered her role in the early days after Biden took office. Days from the presidential election, this offers the best look back at how our country got here.

[Read: What’s the one book that explains American politics today?]

On Politics, by H. L. Mencken

Journalism rarely lasts. After all, many stories that are huge one day are forgotten the next. Seldom do reporters’ or columnists’ legacies live on beyond their retirement, let alone their death. One of the few exceptions to this is Mencken, and deservedly so. Mencken was not just a talented memoirist and scholar of American English but also one of the eminent political writers of his time. Admittedly, many of his judgments did not hold up: Mencken had many of the racial prejudices of his time, and his loathing for Franklin D. Roosevelt has not exactly been vindicated by history. However, this collection of articles covers the vulgar and hypocritical parade of politics during the Roaring ’20s, when Prohibition was the nominal law of the land. The 1924 election of Calvin Coolidge (of whom Mencken wrote, “It would be difficult to imagine a more obscure and unimportant man”) may be justly forgotten today. But it produced absurdities, such as a Democratic National Convention that required 103 ballots to deliver a nominee who lost to Coolidge in a landslide, that were ripe for Mencken’s cynical skewering. Today, his writing serves as a model of satire worth revisiting.