On Wednesday morning, in Highland Park, Los Angeles, dawn never broke. The morning light that normally streamed into my rental house simply shifted from pitch-black to gradations of orange-brown as smoke from the Eaton Canyon fires billowed over the hills. Outside my window, a woman used the flashlight on her phone while walking her dog. My own dog and I barely made it around the block; the soot-filled air was dry and pungent, and the winds—those relentless winds—smacked us with a combination of dry pine needles, fallen bark, and chunks of ash. Most of my neighbors wore masks as they loaded their cars with shopping bags and suitcases. By the time we got back, all the phones in my house were buzzing with evacuation alerts.

We were a full house: three middle-aged adults, a 6-year-old, and a naughty dog (mine). The night before, after losing power in her home in Altadena, my best friend and my goddaughter went to kill time in classic L.A. style: by driving through their local In-N-Out. Power outages from the Santa Anas are not unusual in L.A., and despite the Palisades Fire raging across town, they were trying to act normal—perhaps the only way to psychically survive in a city prone to fires is to push the constant threat of imminent natural disaster out of your mind. In any case, by the time they got their burgers, the street was illuminated by flames, the night sky hot yellow from Eaton Canyon, just a few blocks away. They drove the 15 minutes to my house, where we immediately lost power too. Her husband hunted down every candle he could get his hands on in a drivable radius.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

In my living room, we texted friends and neighbors, checking on their homes and kids and evacuation plans. Outside, the sound of the wind was terrifying—because of the howling, but also because of the danger it represented, each gust potentially carrying embers this way, taking out homes and businesses and, eventually, in the case of Altadena, most of a community.

Altadena is an unincorporated community of about 40,000 residents nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Having spent a lot of time there, I get the appeal—even something as mundane as putting the trash out, at the right time of day, is a chance to experience majestic levels of beauty. When people think of life in the hills around Los Angeles, they tend to think of millionaires and movie stars—and, for sure, there are some splendid homes and a sprinkling of celebrity residents, such as Mandy Moore, there. But Altadena is racially and economically diverse, and middle-class life remains at its center.

It was founded by two well-off brothers from Iowa in the late 1880s, and workers with jobs in the nearby city of Pasadena moved there. After a long battle against redlining, Black homeowners began arriving in the 1960s. This made Altadena one of the first integrated middle-class communities in Los Angeles, and residents today are particularly proud of this history. (One of those residents was Wilfred Duncan, the first Black fireman in Pasadena.) In 1960, Altadena was 95 percent white; in 2024, it was 46 percent white, and the bulk of the rest of the population was made up of Black and Hispanic residents.

This was partly why, when my best friend and her husband decided to move back to her native California to raise their Black and Latina daughter, they chose Altadena. The other parents they met at their daughter’s school included local business owners, house cleaners, and government employees. They made friends with their neighbors, including an older public-school teacher who’d raised her family across the street. On Tuesday night, her house burned to the ground.

In recent years—and particularly since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when the rise in remote work let people live farther from downtown and West Los Angeles—home prices in Altadena have soared. But newcomers haven’t been house flippers or private-equity firms running Airbnbs; they’ve been families looking to set down roots—like my best friend. A remarkable 78 percent of the households are owner-inhabited; it’s not unusual to meet people who’ve lived in Altadena for decades or even residents whose ties to the town go back a generation or two. That’s part of the strong community atmosphere. Neighbors make cookies for neighbors and invite one another over for drinks. Kids trick-or-treat down the streets in unchaperoned groups, and families have post-parties after the Rose Bowl parade.

The local economy was also exactly that: local. Minus a few fast-food joints and big chain pharmacies, the neighborhood was as close to mom-and-pop as one can find today. For 25 years, kids from Altadena and Pasadena have studied with Sipoo Shelene Hearring at Two Dragons Martial Arts. Locals who met at the Rancho, Altadena’s premiere dive bar, became so close that they were known to spend holidays together. If you were bored, you could take your family to the Bunny Museum and browse more than 30,000 items of collectible rabbit memorabilia.

Every single one of those businesses burned to the ground this week. One local official told NPR that “probably half of our small businesses are gone.” Five of Altadena’s public schools suffered substantial damage, as did a couple of private schools, a senior center, a public golf course, a country club, several houses of worship, and a yet-to-be determined number of homes and apartment complexes. So far, more than 5,000 structures have been reported as lost.

[Read: The particular horror of the Los Angeles wildfires]

An unofficial Google Doc tracking the destruction has been going around, and the pace at which it was being populated on Wednesday was terrifying. Each new address correlated to a person you knew or a business that made you love where you lived. On Facebook, a woman was looking for an older man named Willie who lived near a particular intersection. “I don’t know his last name,” she wrote. ”I speak to him on my daily walks. I’d like to make sure he’s alright.” Neighbors were texting one another videos of block after block of devastation.

So many people are in the same situation as my friend: evacuated and unsure whether their house will still hold. Ten hours after she and her family arrived at my house, they learned they’d have to flee again, when my neighborhood was evacuated too.

I’d always judged people who, faced with a natural disaster, chose to stay in place. But experiencing the situation firsthand, I understood. We were a ragtag group. Who would take us in? But how could we split up? For almost an hour, we stared at one another, paralyzed. Eventually, we heard from a generous friend in Palm Springs who had room for us. Into the cars we went.

But others did stay, or have dared to venture back. They hose off the lawns of the absent to keep the floating embers from catching, offer to break into homes at risk and grab personal photos or other belongings, and take pictures of the damage that’s left behind.

As we drove past the halo of black smoke over L.A., we saw tractor-trailers turned sideways by the wind. Text messages continued flooding in, announcing home losses and relocation plans. Most hope these moves will be temporary, but, depending on insurance payouts and school closures, they might wind up being permanent. “We hope to see you all again one day,” a father wrote to my friends’ dad group. His family was heading up north to stay with relatives and knew that they might not be able to return. Some kids leaving town with no return date in sight FaceTimed classmates to say goodbye. Still other children don’t yet understand what’s happened to the place they call home.

All of Los Angeles, regardless of socioeconomic class, is sharing in one deep, traumatic loss. Schools, cultural institutions, the businesses that make hometowns feel like home—so many have burned. But there’s a secondary sadness hovering over middle-class Altadena, and certainly over anyone on the margins of poverty. Altadena will build itself back. But how? And for whom?

[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]

On the Altadena Facebook group, residents are attempting to guide one another through FEMA applications and encouraging everyone to file their insurance claims quickly. But in one-on-one conversations, no one is naive. Everyone anticipates pushback from insurance companies, and payments that will be a fraction of what their homes were worth or would cost them to rebuild. Will the teachers whose homes burned down still be able to afford to live there? What about the firemen? Where will all these people go in a region that is already plagued by a shortage of affordable housing?

Even if one isn’t familiar with Naomi Klein’s term disaster capitalism, most Americans are, by now, well versed in its hallmarks. A natural disaster occurs, locals are forced to evacuate, and small businesses close. Their returns are delayed sometimes indefinitely by failures to restore infrastructure such as schools and electricity quickly enough. They might be stymied by red tape and bureaucracy. Needing stability for their family, they are forced to build a life elsewhere, to stop “waiting” to go home. In their place, developers and private equity swoop in, reshaping these areas for the rich and ultrarich.

This happened after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and Superstorm Sandy in the coastal areas of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Los Angeles’s economy is already in a precarious state, with a housing crisis and a glut of workers in the TV and film industry. I can easily imagine that, without government intervention and intentional counterplanning, something similar will happen here. Surviving financially in Los Angeles was already challenging; how many families can manage not to just get by, but to completely rebuild their lives?

When my best friend moved here, I was immensely depressed to lose her from my life in Brooklyn. But in the subsequent two years, I’ve visited many times, sometimes for weeks-long stints. I’d come to love it here so much, I’d call it Brooklyn West: It had that same neighborly generosity and quirky moxy that had gotten squeezed out of my hometown, one Blank Street Coffee and luxury high-rise at a time. It’s painful to imagine that Altadena could now, in this moment of speculative opportunity, suffer the same fate.

Accusations of local-government incompetence are flying around this week, nearly as forceful as the winds. But the local government has work to do now. Federal aid is crucial, but so is getting schools reopened quickly, and expediting the rebuilding of established small businesses. Altadena needs not vultures seeking to maximize profit, but creative developers who can protect and expand the kind of community Altadena was.

When they are done with mourning, I know the residents will do their part.

*Sources: Library of Congress; Getty; Justin Sullivan / Getty; Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty; Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty; Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times / Getty

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Few things are more satisfying than watching a show pull off a clever and high-octane episode. For those looking to revisit some greats, our writers and editors answer the question: What do you think is a perfect episode of TV?

The following contains spoilers for the episodes mentioned.

“The Panic in Central Park,” Girls (streaming on Max)

Maybe this is the former theater critic in me coming out, but the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center. Girls, which revolves around four friends in New York City, has always been brilliant at this, and never more so than with “The Panic in Central Park,” a Marnie-centered episode that deals with the particular moment in young adulthood when fantasy becomes untenable.

“The Panic in Central Park,” like the best Girls episodes, is written by Lena Dunham and directed by Richard Shepard. It begins with Desi mournfully reproaching his “cruel” new wife, Marnie, for declining to go get a scone, ends with her asking for a divorce, and riffs on film history, romance, and codependency in between. The high-strung Marnie, out on a walk to clear her head, encounters her ex, Charlie, who’s almost unrecognizable. He whisks her away on a whirlwind New York City adventure involving a consigned red cocktail dress (Millennial Williamsburg’s answer to Pretty Woman), a fake identity, Italian food, a rowboat in Central Park, a robbery, and—finally—the revelation that Charlie is addicted to heroin. A sadder, wiser Marnie walks home barefoot, having accepted the idea that no one is going to save her. The episode is beautiful and incisive about the allure of the stories we wrap ourselves in and the power of shaking them off.

— Sophie Gilbert, staff writer

***

“If It Smells Like a Rat, Give It Cheese,” Survivor: Micronesia (streaming on Hulu and Paramount+)

If I could erase my brain in order to watch anything for the first time again, I would do it for the penultimate episode of Survivor: Micronesia. The 16th season of the reality game show is famously one of the best, and this episode is why. Watching it is like witnessing Alex Honnold climb El Capitan without ropes—except instead of sheer athleticism in the face of seemingly impossible odds, you’re seeing how master manipulators exploit social dynamics to get what they want. It’s the Olympics for those who prefer politics or gossip to sports.

People who haven’t watched Survivor often assume that it’s about “surviving” the wilderness, but it’s always primarily been about surviving human nature. Driven by power and social capital, the show has more in common with Game of Thrones than Naked and Afraid. Explaining exactly what happens in this episode would be like explaining an inside joke; you need to watch the whole season to get why it hits. Just know that it features Red Wedding–level of gameplay, setting the bar high for how far people will go to get ahead.

— Serena Dai, senior editor

***

“C**tgate,” Veep (streaming on Max)

Unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way. But the element of surprise may be why I remember “C**tgate” so many years later. In this episode of Veep, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) orchestrates two tasks that are both impossibly monumental and petty. She has to decide if she is going to bail out a bank owned by her current boyfriend, and she must find out who on her staff called her a “cunt” so loudly in public that it was overheard by a reporter.

These interweaving plots alone would make a perfectly satisfying episode. What makes it golden are two of the funniest, most unexpected subplots in Veep’s run. One involves a focus group for the bumbling White House liaison Jonah Ryan, now running for Congress in New Hampshire, who is workshopping an ad. The second is a surprise announcement by Selina’s daughter, a recurring sad sack who can never get her mother’s attention. Guess who she’s dating?

— Hanna Rosin, senior editor

***

“Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” The X-Files (streaming on Hulu)

If you’re seeking out a perfect episode of TV, the richest cache to search is the “case of the week” entries of The X-Files. The show wove an elaborate arc about aliens on Earth but saved most of its best material for the smaller stuff. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” written by Darin Morgan, is a gothic short story, following FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigate a murder with the help of a tetchy local psychic named Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle).

This being The X-Files, Mulder is immediately taken with Bruckman’s clairvoyance, while Scully is skeptical—but Morgan’s script resolves each of Bruckman’s predictions about the future in clever, tragicomic ways, reinforcing Mulder’s belief while also finding ways to affirm Scully’s cynicism. It’s funny, dark, and beautifully acted—particularly between Anderson and Boyle—with an elliptical plot structure that feels wonderfully complex even by today’s TV standards.

— David Sims, staff writer

***

“It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” Grey’s Anatomy (streaming on Netflix and Hulu)

I’ve previously written that after more than 20 seasons, it’s time for Grey’s Anatomy to come to an end. But in its early days, the series was responsible for some of the most memorable episodes of television: The second season’s two-part storyline, “It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” demonstrated the show’s mix of humor and drama at its best.

Colloquially known as the “bomb in the body cavity” episodes, they tell the story of a patient who comes in with live ammunition in his chest. At the same time, the show’s powerhouse resident Dr. Miranda Bailey goes into labor, and two other characters perform surgery on her husband, who crashed his car on his way in. In the midst of some very suspenseful plotlines, the dialogue explores the relationships among, and vulnerabilities of, the characters in a beautifully human way. On a show that’s known for putting people in harm’s way, this pair of episodes focuses as much on the emotions as on the drama: the fear of losing someone you care about, and what it really means to be in love.

— Kate Guarino, supervisory senior associate editor

***

Season 2, Episode 10, The Mole (streaming on Netflix)

The Season 2 finale of Netflix’s reboot of The Mole is made perfect if you first watch all of the other episodes. The show’s formula is simple: 12 people collaborate on Indiana Jones–style missions to earn money for a prize pot, but one of them is a “mole” hired by the producers to sabotage the other contestants. Elimination isn’t based on your performance in missions. It’s about how accurately you identify the mole, according to your answers on a quiz given each round.

What results is sumptuous chaos, set among abandoned buildings and real explosives that make you wonder what the release form for this show must look like. Everyone is pretending to be the mole (to mislead others) while testing their fellow players (to figure out who the mole is) and still, somehow, trying to collect money for the prize pot. Oh, and did I mention that Ari Shapiro of All Things Considered fame is this season’s host?

I won’t spoil the finale, but it involves minefields and three equally mole-like characters. There’s not a single weak link in this episode, and if you correctly guess who the mole is, you’ll have bested much of the internet.

— Katherine Hu, assistant editor

***

“Chocolate With Nuts,” SpongeBob SquarePants (streaming on Paramount+)

At about 11 minutes per segment, SpongeBob SquarePants doesn’t have much room to play around with. But its best episodes use that brevity to their advantage, stuffing in visual gags, one-liners, callbacks, goofy voice acting, and witty repartee. “Chocolate With Nuts,” from the third season, is the greatest example of the show’s “run out the clock” ethos: SpongeBob and his best friend, Patrick, become chocolate-bar salesmen to achieve “fancy living.” Their ensuing door-to-door journey introduces them to a cavalcade of bizarre Bikini Bottom dwellers, including a seemingly immortal, shriveled-up fish and a man who feigns “glass bones” syndrome in one of many efforts to dupe the boys into buying chocolate from him instead.

More than most episodes of this kids’ cartoon, “Chocolate With Nuts” threads the needle between the juvenile hijinks and some more adult themes: the empty promise of the good life, the uphill battle of entrepreneurship, the fallacy of “trust thy neighbor.” That headiness is all conveyed through SpongeBob’s elastic face and Patrick’s gobsmacking vacuousness—the best way to explore any nuanced concept, in my view.

But the primary reason I have been rewatching this episode for more than 22 years now is its unassuming density. SpongeBob is wonderfully breezy, but its hidden strength is how layered each joke is: I laugh at different things every time—a certain line delivery, a certain facial expression—and impulsively repeat its most memorable quotes. “Chocolate,” says the pruned old-lady fish, wistfully. “Sweet, sweet chocolate. I always hated it!”

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The anti-social century The army of God comes out of the shadows. The agony of texting with men

The Week Ahead

September 5, a drama film detailing an ABC Sports crew’s efforts to cover the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich (in theaters nationwide Friday) Season 2 of Severance, a sci-fi series about a corporate employee who agrees to surgically “sever” his personal life from his work life (streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday) The JFK Conspiracy, a book by Josh Mensch and Brad Meltzer about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Jackson Gibbs

Parents Are Gaming Their Kids’ Credit Scores

By Michael Waters

Several years ago, Hannah Case decided to examine her personal credit history. Case, who was then a researcher at the Federal Reserve, hadn’t gotten her first credit card until she was 22. But as she discovered when she saw her file, she’d apparently been spending responsibly since 14.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The reason The Brutalist needs to be so long The payoff of TV’s most awaited crossover What to read when the odds are against you September 5 captures a crisis becoming must-watch TV. The bizarre brain of Werner Herzog The film that rips the Hollywood comeback narrative apart

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Trump’s sentencing made no one happy. Trump is right that Pax Americana is over, Charles A. Kupchan argues. Why “late regime” presidencies fail

Photo Album

A man watches as flames from the Palisades Fire close in on his property in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Ethan Swope / AP)

The Palisades Fire grew quickly in California, burning many structures and sending thick plumes of smoke into the air. These photos show parts of Los Angeles scorched by the wildfire.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Juli Gittinger keeps a bag packed with iodine pills and a machete. “It’s good for getting through brush,” she explained to me recently. Gittinger’s mind churns with images of a future in which she might have to flee her home with just a backpack, bushwhacking her way through rural Georgia to safety. She has enough water in her house to last 30 days, and enough food to last 100 days.

Gittinger, a religious-studies professor at Georgia College, is a prepper, but unlike the stereotype that term commonly conjures—a bunker-bound, right-wing conspiracist—Gittinger is liberal. She began prepping after Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Among her prepping supplies are Plan B emergency contraceptive pills that she’s bought ahead of Trump’s second inauguration, in case his administration introduces new restrictions on reproductive health care.

Gittinger is representative of a small number of preppers who oppose Trump and who are gearing up for whatever disasters the next four years might bring. Across Reddit boards and Facebook groups, they are stocking up on and freeze-drying food—and say that others should be too.

[Read: Why liberals struggle to cope with epochal change]

Precise numbers on prepping are hard to come by, but the United States has likely millions of preppers of all political persuasions, says Michael Mills, a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, in the United Kingdom. Liberals make up a small percentage—about 15 percent, according to Mills. Like their conservative counterparts, liberal preppers are worried about the stability of the economy and the power grid, but unlike the conservatives, they also worry about climate-change-induced disasters and the potential that Trump will weaken America’s security through foreign-policy snafus. Mills is skeptical that the number of liberal preppers has dramatically increased, but the moderators of several liberal-prepping forums told me they’ve seen a spike in interest and activity since Trump’s reelection, in November. Several preppers I interviewed mentioned getting current on their vaccines, in case the new administration alters the rules for vaccine insurance coverage, or updating their passports, in case they feel they have to leave the country.

In addition to being a prepper herself, Gittinger has studied prepper groups and written about them in an academic book, American Apocalyptic. Starting in 2018, Gittinger surveyed several hundred liberal preppers (and a few conservatives) on Facebook. When she asked what got them into prepping, 31 of the 300-some respondents mentioned the election of Trump, and 35 mentioned “political anxieties.” Among the calamities they feared would strike were both the politically driven—economic and societal collapse, an attack from a foreign power—and the completely random: a pandemic, a natural disaster. “The country is so divided that anything could ignite riots like we haven’t seen before,” one respondent told her.

Lots of Americans are doing some version of prepping for Trump’s second term, even if they don’t call it that. Some providers of Plan B and abortion pills say they noticed an increase in orders immediately after the election. The election prompted many to rush to buy electronics, cars, and other goods ahead of Trump’s promised tariffs. Spending on vehicles, auto parts, and appliances rose in November, The Washington Post reported. Along with stocking up on food and water in anticipation of tariffs, Gittinger recently bought a new phone, and Zoe Higgins, another liberal prepper, bought a new car.

Genevra Hsu, a moderator of the Leftist Preppers subreddit, grew up learning survivalist techniques from her father, but she began prepping in earnest around 2013, when she moved to a rural area of Virginia. Some of her friends got into gardening, and she would give them tips. She now has six months of meals on hand—she does her own pressure-canning, dehydrating, and freezing. She’s at high risk of complications from COVID, so when the pandemic started, the stores provided an “animal comfort that comes from knowing there’s enough on the shelf that I don’t have to go anywhere,” she told me. Recently, she has started dehydrating and freezing powdered eggs in case of a bird-flu pandemic. On the subreddit, preppers discuss stocking up on toothpaste with fluoride, which Trump’s chosen health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., opposes adding to tap water. They’re buying up birth control and medical textbooks for treating vaccine-preventable diseases.

[Read: What going ‘wild on health’ looks like]

The line between prepping and emergency readiness is hazy. Indeed, some of the liberal preppers I interviewed seem more worried about act-of-God disasters such as hurricanes than a Handmaid’s Tale–type dystopia. KC Davis, the author of How to Keep House While Drowning, moved to Houston after 2017’s Hurricane Harvey and became concerned about flooding and losses of power. Now she keeps canned water, headlamps, thermal blankets, life jackets, rechargeable lanterns, and 30 days of emergency food on metal racks in her garage. She also has a generator, which fired up while we were talking.

In New Orleans, Higgins has a month’s worth of freeze-dried spaghetti, beef stroganoff, chicken alfredo, and other meals. She’s procured flashlights, headlamps, waterproof matches, fire starters, water-purification tablets, camping stoves, and propane tanks, along with something she calls a “bug-out binder” containing 400 pages of emergency checklists and instructions. Some preppers admit that the gear they’ve accumulated is less a preparation for a specific, Trump-related emergency and more a consequence of prepping gradually becoming a hobby, with ever more complicated gadgets for ever more outlandish scenarios. Among Gittinger’s prep is a Faraday bag—a backpack that blocks electromagnetic signals, in which Gittinger keeps a spare phone and a computer—to be used in case of an extreme solar flare.

Over and over, liberal preppers told me that they differ from their conservative counterparts because they are less conspiracy-minded and more concerned with helping their community rather than only their immediate family. (Gittinger wouldn’t need Plan B herself, but she bought it for other young women who might.) But like their right-wing counterparts, liberal preppers do tend to own guns, according to Gittinger: 121 of the 198 people who answered her survey question about weapons said they owned a firearm. Whom, exactly, they would use them against is less clear. “I think a lot of that is just out of a response to general uncertainty,” Hsu told me.

Another major commonality between liberal and conservative preppers is a distrust of the government, a feeling that institutions won’t help you if the worst comes to pass. For liberal preppers, this feeling has grown only more pronounced since the first Trump presidency. The rise of Trump, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and Republican victories in the states have given liberals the sense that they are on the ropes. “My general feeling, especially about Texas, is that there’s not a lot of community safety-netting when it comes to emergencies,” Davis says. “It feels like sort of every man for himself.”

Her sentiment fits with what the pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson calls a “cross-partisan rise in distrust” of institutions. Republicans and Democrats now share similar levels of distrust of Congress and big business. Americans on both the left and the right feel unsupported; preppers are just doing something about it. “There’s this common thread that I think unites preppers of all political persuasions, which is a lack of faith in political progress as a whole and a skepticism towards political leadership,” Mills told me. Conservative preppers were once worried about Barack Obama, and liberals are most worried about climate disasters, but they both worry that the government doesn’t have your back.

[Jonathan Chait: How liberal America came to its senses]

Some of my conversations with liberal preppers served as good reminders to buy bottled water and flashlights in case of a natural disaster, but some of them had an air of paranoia. Many of their worst-case scenarios seemed unlikely to ever take place. What are the odds that American citizens would actually be banned from international travel? What is the likelihood that Republicans would outlaw not just Plan B, but also birth control, which is used by 82 percent of reproductive-age women?

Then again, we live in outrageous times, during which a reality-TV host can become president, for the second time, after a failed coup attempt. That president picked another TV host to be in charge of the nation’s defense. His chosen health secretary has urged parents to ignore the CDC guidelines for childhood vaccinations. Abortion is completely banned in 12 states. There really has been a global pandemic that shut down much of the world for years. There’s a sense that literally anything can happen, so you’d better be prepared.

Gittinger pointed out that when the coronavirus pandemic broke out, she had N95 masks on hand. Who’s too paranoid now?

Updated at 11:11 a.m. ET on January 13, 2025

In 1900, a former schoolteacher named Carrie Nation walked into a bar in Kiowa, Kansas, proclaimed, “Men, I have come to save you from a drunkard’s fate,” and proceeded to hurl bricks and stones at bottles of liquor. The men, interested less in spiritual salvation and more in physical safety, fled to a corner. Nation destroyed three saloons that day, using a billiard ball when she ran out of bricks and rocks, which she called “smashers.” She eventually—and famously—switched to a hatchet, using it across years of attacks on what she considered to be the cause of society’s moral failings. She referred to this period of her life as one of “hatchetation.”

By comparison, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, an internist of mild disposition perhaps best known for raising alarm about the “loneliness epidemic,” has taken a gentler approach to the obstinate challenge of alcohol. His recent call to add cancer warnings to alcoholic products was made without violence or yelling. But the recommendation, if followed, would be the most significant action taken against alcohol since at least the 1980s, when new laws set the national drinking age at 21 and mandated warning labels concerning, among other things, alcohol’s pregnancy-related risks. Murthy’s proposal is part of ever-grimmer messaging from public-health officials about even moderate drinking, and comes during a notable shift in cultural attitudes toward alcohol, especially among “sober-curious” young people. In 2020, my colleague Olga Khazan asked why no one seemed interested in creating a modern temperance movement. Now that movement has arrived with a distinctly 21st-century twist. Carrie Nation was trying to transform the soul of her country. Today’s temperance is focused on the transformation of self.

The movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries—which eventually brought about Prohibition—went hand in hand with broad religious revivalism and the campaign for women’s rights. It considered alcohol to be unhealthy for women, families, and the general state of humanity. The depth of the problem posed by alcohol in pre-Prohibition America is hard to fathom: In 1830, Americans drank three times the amount of spirits that we do today, the equivalent of 90 bottles of 80-proof booze a year. As distilled liquor became widely available, men were wasting most of their wages on alcohol and staying out all night at saloons, and what we now call domestic abuse was rampant, the food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson told me. Members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union saw themselves as a progressive group helping the disadvantaged. “They were protecting the home, protecting the family, and protecting the nation by getting rid of alcohol,” Dan Malleck, a health and sciences professor at Brock University, told me. In the latter half of the 19th century, young people signaled their moral virtue by taking temperance pledges.

Today’s sober-curious, by contrast, post on Instagram about how Dry January has reduced their inflammation, sharpened their jawline, and improved their sleep score. The sanctity of the home, or the overall moral health of society—not to mention the 37 Americans who die in drunk-driving crashes every day—appears to be less of a concern. (To be fair, this focus on health is partially a response to research on moderate alcohol consumption’s detrimental effects on heart health, cancer risk, and lifespan.) In a 2020 Gallup poll, 86 percent of respondents said that drinking alcohol was morally acceptable, an increase from 78 percent in 2018. By contrast, more than half of young adults surveyed in 2023 expressed concerns about the health risks of moderate drinking.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: America has a drinking problem]

Colleen Myles, a professor at Texas State University who studies how alcoholic drinks change cultures, told me that such responses don’t mean that the national conversation about alcohol has abandoned morality—simply that Americans’ ethical center of gravity has drifted. She considers modern teetotaling to be steered by a great moral project of our age: self-optimization. In her book Sober Curious, Ruby Warrington wrote that lower alcohol intake “is the next logical step in the wellness revolution.” Myles said that choosing not to drink in an alcohol-soaked culture is seen as an act of authenticity or self-care; social change, but enacted through the individual. In 2019, a nonalcoholic-spirit producer, who calls her product a “euphoric” instead of a mocktail, almost echoed Carrie Nation when she told The New York Times, “Alcohol is a women’s lib issue, an LGBTTQQIAAP issue, a race issue.” But her vision of temperance was much less socially minded: Sober-curiosity, she said, was about a person’s “freedom to choose.” One can hardly imagine Congress or a radical activist like Nation attempting to restrict that freedom by outlawing the sale of espresso martinis. The proposed warning label, however, with its nod to individual health (and absence of radical social action), is more fitting for our age of wellness. It won’t cure society of all its ills, but it at least has a shot of persuading some people to tone down their drinking.

The original temperance movement’s end result—Prohibition—was more ambitious, and took place at the societal level. Prohibition didn’t make the personal act of drinking illegal, but rather the sale, purchase, and transport of alcohol. After Congress proposed the Eighteenth Amendment in 1917, it allowed seven years for the measure to pass; thanks to widespread enthusiasm, the states ratified it in only 13 months. The amendment and the Volstead Act, the law that enforced it, passed in 1919, and Prohibition officially kicked off in 1920.

In this century, “I don’t think we’re going to have Prohibition again,” Myles said, not least because the sober-curious are not advocating for policy change at this scale. Instead, neo-temperates are shifting social and, yes, moral norms about alcohol by emphasizing its effects on health. They also, crucially, are creating markets for nonalcoholic drinks and spaces. The original temperance movement similarly popularized a number of new beverages, such as sodas and fruit juices. But unlike the modern version, it directly attacked the alcoholic-beverage industry. In 1916, the United States was home to 1,300 breweries that made full-strength beer; 10 years later, they were all gone.

[From the April 1921 issue: Relative values in Prohibition]

Alcohol consumption, and the deaths associated with it, decreased significantly during Prohibition. But many people continued to buy alcohol illegally or make it themselves. Part of the reason the temperance movement didn’t usher in utopia, Malleck said, is that it failed to recognize how drunkenness could be fueled by still other societal problems, such as low wages or 12-hour workdays in factories where you were liable to lose a limb or have to urinate in a corner. These issues persisted even when alcohol was outlawed. In 1933, during the Great Depression, legislators decided the country needed the economic boost from alcohol sales and repealed Prohibition. President Herbert Hoover called Prohibition a noble experiment, but many historians consider it a failure. Today, about 60 percent of Americans drink, and that figure has held steady for more than four decades.

And yet, over the past several years, signs have appeared that fewer young people are drinking. If bricks and hatchets couldn’t convince Americans to transform their relationship to alcohol, perhaps the promise of finding your best self through phony negronis and nonalcoholic IPAs will.

This article originally misstated Colleen Myles’s title and the name of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.