I have a joke I like to make—though it’s not funny, and it’s not really a joke. Whenever I know I won’t be able to join my friends the next time they hang out, I make everyone promise to not have fun without me. Sometimes I have us go around in a circle so that each person can individually pledge to have a bad time. If I check in after my absence and ask how the night was, I expect a shrug, perhaps an assurance that It was fine, but you didn’t miss much. If someone says the time without me was great, I actually find that rude.

I don’t think I’m the center of the universe, nor do I want to get in the way of my friends’ happiness. No—I just have chronic FOMO: “fear of missing out.” I feel deeply haunted by the thought that if I don’t go to the party or the dinner or the coffee stroll, my one wild and precious life will be void of a joyful, transformative event—one I’d surely still be thinking about on my deathbed, a friend at my side tenderly holding my hand and whispering, Remember? That time we went bowling and the guy in the next lane over said that funny thing? Every year, my New Year’s resolution is to keep one night of the week free from social plans. Almost every week, I fail.

This is no way to live, you might be thinking. FOMO tends to be described as a dark impulse, something that keeps you from being present as you worry instead about what better option could be around the corner, or scroll miserably through the online evidence of what fun everyone is having without you. A quick Google search yields results nearly all about overcoming or dealing with or coping with the fear of missing out—usually by talking yourself out of it. But I suspect my FOMO may have served me well. Sometimes you need a little anxiety to push you into doing something positive. And if you don’t go on the hike or the beach trip or the roller coaster, you quite literally will miss out. Why are we all so set on pretending that’s not the case?

[Read: Americans need to party more]

When the author and speaker Patrick McGinnis coined the term FOMO, he didn’t consider the fear a sinister force. He was a wide-eyed business-school student from a small town, surrounded by intellectual, career, and social opportunities. He wanted to say yes to everything, he told me. Once, he tried to go to seven birthday parties in one night. Then 9/11 happened, and he felt an even greater urge to take advantage of every minute. FOMO was a sign of abundant potential—that he could learn, that he could have meaningful experiences, that each day might be different from the one before. “If you don’t believe there’s possibility,” he said, “why would you have FOMO?” The 2004 op-ed in which he named the phenomenon gently poked fun at his fellow business students madly juggling invites. He never guessed that more than a decade later, people would be talking about FOMO with such seriousness (nor, I imagine, studying it with grim rigor, publishing studies with titles such as “Fear of Missing Out, Need for Touch, Anxiety and Depression Are Related to Problematic Smartphone Use”).

The world has changed since 2004, though. Social media began feeding the feeling of always being left out of something. Optimization-and-productivity culture encouraged the idea that one can engineer their schedule to accommodate the ideal number of enlightening, spiritually fulfilling plans. Then, naturally, a backlash arrived. It might be best summed up by a newer term: JOMO, or the “joy of missing out.” The idea is that you should savor your solitude, fully embrace the choice to do what you want to do rather than what others are doing.

Sounds reasonable. And yet, as an introvert, I know that socializing often sounds unappealing before I actually start doing it. What I’m in the mood for isn’t a very good gauge of what I should do, or what future me will enjoy. (Let’s face it—she’s a stranger!) What is a helpful indicator is FOMO: whether I have the uneasy suspicion that if I do what’s comfortable, I might not undergo something that would have stretched me or brought me closer to people. Without it, I never would have jumped into the frigid ocean last February for a polar plunge, or gone camping in September with a group of more than 30 people, most of whom I didn’t know. I would never do anything after work, when I’m reliably exhausted.

That’s not to say you should run yourself into the ground trying to do everything. FOMO isn’t a master you need to obediently follow but, as McGinnis put it, a “tap on the shoulder” reminding you that your existence is transient and you need to decide how to spend it. He distinguishes between two types of FOMO. One is “aspirational FOMO,” which is when you identify an exciting or interesting experience—one that might make your life fuller. Simply imagining that potential reward can lead to the release of dopamine in the brain. The other is “herd FOMO,” which is the fear of getting left out of a collective encounter—a prospect so appalling that it can trigger a fight-or-flight response, complete with a rushing heartbeat and sweaty palms. “Part of the brain goes berserk,” McGinnis told me. He thinks that people should lean into the first type, the kind that’s about embracing possibility, not avoiding pain.

[Read: The easiest way to keep your friends]

Each time you act on aspirational FOMO, you get more data about what you enjoy, what matters to you, what’s worth making time for. In that sense, FOMO-driven action might lead you to feel less FOMO overall. Many college students, McGinnis said, fear missing out when they first arrive on campus—but this is what can lead them to meet people, discover interests, and ultimately have a better sense of what they don’t mind skipping. “When you’re 30 and somebody invites you to a bar and you’ve been to 4,000 bars,” he told me, “you have such perfect information about this thing that you can make a decision without even fretting.”

I am, admittedly, a FOMO extremist; on the precipice of turning 30, I still feel the need to go to the bar for the 4,001st time. Maybe that’s my herd FOMO talking. But I also think that I will never have enough data to know what any given night will be like. Every time, the conversation is a little different; every time, my knowledge of a friend is deepened or complicated, even if that change is barely perceptible. Every so often it turns out that someone really needed me there. The activity isn’t the point, after all; I’m not looking to stack my social résumé with pastimes that make it sound like I had fun. I’m trying to spend the time I have with people I love. And I do fear missing out on that.

When wildfires broke out across Los Angeles earlier this month, many publications began to frame the incalculable tragedy through the lens of celebrity news. As flames engulfed the Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood perched along the Pacific Coast Highway, a steady influx of reports announced the growing list of stars who’d lost their homes: Paris Hilton. Billy Crystal. Rosie O’Donnell. These dispatches from celebrity evacuees have broadcast the scale and intractability of the damage, underscoring something most Southern Californians already know to be true: No one, not even the rich and famous, is safe from the danger of wildfires. “This loss is immeasurable,” the TV host Ricki Lake said in an Instagram post about her home burning. “I grieve along with all of those suffering during this apocalyptic event.”

In the most basic sense, the wildfires can be understood as equalizing. An ember doesn’t choose its path based on property value or paparazzi presence, and when one part of Los Angeles burns, foreboding smoke hangs over the whole metro area. Secluded neighborhoods like the Pacific Palisades, where multimillion-dollar houses overlook the ocean, typically have far fewer evacuation routes than urban areas do. But as fires continue to ravage the area, the blazes also reflect—and exacerbate—the disparities embedded in the most mundane tenets of L.A. life. In Southern California, sights as common as a crowded freeway help explain why wildfires have become a universal threat—and why some Angelenos are less equipped than others to recover from the devastation those fires cause.

Like other extreme-weather events, wildfires are now more common and more difficult to protect against, because of climate change. The state has made some inroads in addressing greenhouse-gas emissions, which drive extreme temperatures and drought, but one of the greatest accelerants is practically synonymous with California itself. Car culture not only undermines efforts to reduce the toxic pollution that fuels climate change—it also relies on infrastructure that creates and deepens drastic inequalities among the communities that live with the consequences of climate change. Modern Los Angeles depends on cars partly because of its sprawling geography, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, an urban-planning professor and the interim dean of UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, explained to me. Yet these smog-producing cars became so central to Southern California life because of “transportation policy that has quite favored the automobile and given a tremendous amount of investment to build the freeways,” Loukaitou-Sideris said.

[Read: The GoFundMe fires]

In moments of tragedy or upheaval, not all Angelenos can take their freedom of mobility for granted, in part because of how Southern California infrastructure has developed over the past century. The multilane highways that now crisscross the area were first laid out in the late 1930s, not long after the idea of L.A. as “the city built for the automobile” emerged as a political campaign. (In the ’20s, an extensive transit network stretching from Venice well into the Inland Empire was the world’s largest electric-railway system; by the early ’60s, it had been completely dismantled to make room for freeways and buses.) Through the tail end of the 20th century, lawmakers prioritized suburban growth, enabled by car-friendly streets and expressways. Meanwhile, transit systems in urban areas—the ones that connect people in dense locations—received comparatively little funds. In the past decade, more funding has gone toward buses and rail systems, but ridership has decreased—in part because rising housing costs in transit-friendly neighborhoods have pushed out the low-income residents most likely to rely on it.

Beyond favoring only people with cars, these freeway networks created further social stratification. Developers often chose to place major highways in low-income areas because wealthy, and often white, homeowners lobbied against their own neighborhoods being disrupted. In their research, Loukaitou-Sideris and her colleagues traced the historical impacts of several L.A. County and Bay Area freeways built during the 1960s and ’70s. For many Californians, these roads represented freedom of movement. But researchers found that their construction had—and still has—incredibly damaging effects on the (often poor and/or Black) neighborhoods they run through. Californians in communities of color are typically not the most frequent drivers, but they live with the highest concentration of vehicle emissions—and traffic-related pollution compounds the health risks of inhaling wildfire smoke.

Because so many displaced residents need shelter, some landlords and real-estate agents are now attempting to list apartments with sky-high rents, despite state laws against price gouging after disasters. The rise of this illegal exploitation points to a sobering reality: For many Californians, the onset of a destructive wildfire is an economic catastrophe, too. That’s part of why Rachel Morello-Frosch, an environmental-health scientist and a professor at UC Berkeley, insists that evacuation maps alone don’t tell a complete story. She referred to what she and her colleagues have called “the climate gap”: how extreme-weather events disproportionately affect communities of color and those that are poor, underinsured, and underinvested. One of the most brutal fires hit Altadena, an unincorporated town north of Pasadena where people of color sought refuge from racist housing policies, and where the percentage of Black homeowners eclipses other parts of the metro area. Restoring Altadena, and preserving its Black and Latino residents’ connections to the place where they’ve built a distinct cultural history, will undoubtedly be a complicated task.  

Federal support for California’s efforts to prevent future wildfires is uncertain under the new administration—President Donald Trump has already signed several executive orders that undo climate regulations. During his first term, Trump reportedly refused to give disaster aid to California on partisan grounds—and changed his mind only when informed that a heavily Republican area had been affected by wildfires. Prior to Trump being sworn in for a second term on Monday, the president’s threats to place conditions on federal aid to California were said to be gaining traction, even as the fires continued to obliterate swaths of the state. In his inaugural speech, Trump lamented that the fires are “raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country.” Earlier this month, in posts on Truth Social, he cast blame on Governor Gavin Newsom for allegedly failing to deliver basic services to residents. (Newsom’s office disputed Trump’s characterization of the governor’s actions.)

But climate change poses an existential threat to all Californians, regardless of political affiliation, class, or celebrity. As I watch my home state anxiously from afar, checking my text messages constantly for updates from my loved ones, I’ve been heartened by the mutual-aid networks and community-led efforts that have sprung up. Amid so much destruction, the rare moments of hope come from seeing how many Angelenos recognize the stakes of building a different future together. Disaster response doesn’t have to look the way it did in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, when vulnerable groups were the slowest to recoup their losses (and, in some cases, never did). As Morello-Frosch put it to me, in order for Angelenos to “return, recover, and rebuild in a way that maybe helps fortify them against the next fire,” the government would need to be invested in the health and safety of all people—and proactively account for the inequities that vulnerable communities face before the next blazes hit.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences revealed the nominees for the 97th Oscars on Thursday, highlighting several smaller films that received critical acclaim but not box office success while also recognizing major hits like “Wicked” and “Dune: Part Two.”

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David Lynch famously abhorred explaining himself. “Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film,” the director once said of his esoteric debut feature, during a 2007 interview. When asked to elaborate, he replied, smiling: “No, I won’t.” The clip, which tends to make the rounds on the internet every few months, demonstrates—without actually stating—everything that anyone ought to know about the late auteur’s oblique body of work: The viewing experience itself matters much more than where the story is going, let alone what it’s “about.”

Twin Peaks was perhaps Lynch’s most robust example of this general philosophy—and revisiting the series after the director’s death last week reinforces just how effective his approach continues to be. The show, which premiered in 1990 and has since grown a cult audience, embraced many of linear television’s conventions while simultaneously defying them as often as possible. Part murder mystery, part soap opera with an urban-legend flair, Twin Peaks begins with a resident of the titular fictional Washington town discovering the dead body of a local high-school student, Laura Palmer. From there, it deliberately layers on the kitsch while gradually revealing the cosmic nightmare lurking at the small town’s center.

But Twin Peaks’ many aficionados know that this synopsis belies its true genius. Lynch and his co-creator, Mark Frost, drew on the director’s affection for both the eldritch and the ordinary to conceive this singular affair, making great use of Lynch’s ability to balance these two discordant modes. Over the course of his career, it could sometimes seem easy to take his knack for stylistic cacophony for granted—but even now, Twin Peaks’ unknowability feels appealingly distinct.

The show’s arc follows an otherworldly battle between good and evil, ostensibly a familiar setup. But every character involved has a charmingly eccentric quirk—an eye patch, an obsession with drapes, an ever-present log, an affinity for doughnuts and cherry pie. The town sheriff shares a name with a former U.S. president. The local psychiatrist displays his collection of cocktail umbrellas. The FBI agent assigned to the Laura Palmer case, Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan), is as eager to solve the puzzle of her death as he is to learn what kind of lovely trees mark the entrance to the town. (They’re Douglas firs.) These characters contribute to the overall peculiar tone, emphasizing that viewers shouldn’t expect anything to be straightforward or easy to predict.

[Read: David Lynch was America’s cinematic poet]

Audiences flocked to the show in its first season, attracted to its central premise. They were captivated by what they assumed were promised answers to the question that became Twin Peaks’ unofficial catchphrase: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” But that reveal came less than halfway into the second season—much earlier than intended, because of network pressure, according to Frost. What should have been a climactic moment instead felt, to many fans, disappointingly abrupt, as if Lynch and Frost had tossed out the truth about the teenager’s murder as an afterthought. The ratings started to decline, and viewers considered whether to keep watching Twin Peaks: Now that the show had wrapped up its biggest subplot, what was the point in watching the rest of its strange, seemingly disjointed storylines unfold over the remainder of the season?

The answer to that—and what actually made Twin Peaks so compelling, beyond its core mystery—lay in Lynch’s rejection of cut-and-dried solutions. Like all of the director’s most memorable settings, the show’s world abided by something closer to dream logic than any earthly science, obfuscating even the most integral developments. Viewers learned that what happened to Laura was a brutal act of violence, one that lacked an easy explanation; the series instead offered both a mundane and a supernatural reason for her murder. Yet after Agent Cooper named Laura’s killer and illuminated the dark forces converging on the town, viewers unfamiliar with the director’s work may have found it hard to imagine where else the show could go. What followed the presumed conclusion of Laura’s thread were 15 more episodes that tracked the affairs and schemes of everyone else in the town—instead of investigating, more linearly, the remaining secrets surrounding the murder. Mainstream audiences may not have always been ready for the task of keeping up with him, but Lynch’s desire to make these swerves is essential to the continued potency of his art.

[Read: What David Lynch knew about the weather]

Twin Peaks expresses the key duality to Lynch’s work many times over. The director enjoyed having it both ways when it came to narrative comprehension: He would break down some secrets while keeping others, giving his viewers just enough to make sense of what was happening while still leaving room to ponder the deeper meanings. Lynch was a transcendentalist who saw the innate power in the goodness of people, and a surrealist who endeavored to depict both the horror of violence and the electrifying fear of the unfamiliar. In Twin Peaks, he’d play up the Pacific Northwest community’s folksy allure in one instant, then transfix viewers by showing a demonic serial killer inching toward the camera in the next. The director refused to commit to any one truth or mood, allowing for—and encouraging—myriad understandings. He knew that within ambiguity often lay excitement.

After ending on a startlingly inconclusive note in 1991, Twin Peaks returned in 2017 to extend the story for one more season. Yet audiences who’d hoped for a traditional ending were again denied one. Again, Lynch seemed to be imploring them to stop seeking clarity and embrace the moments whose overarching connections are far less obvious. What mattered to him, it appears, was the experience itself: the feelings they evoked, the uncanny images whose significance were difficult to parse yet impossible to forget. David Lynch didn’t want to leave his viewers with an interpretation, but with something more visceral—like the taste of cherry pie and a cup of hot coffee, black as midnight on a moonless night.

Of all the people who might come to mind while watching Donald Trump deliver his inaugural address, the French postmodernist thinker Michel Foucault would not seem obvious. But it was Foucault who theorized about how “discourse” expresses power and shapes what we think of as truth. And there is no more bludgeoning use of discourse than the decision to rename the tallest mountain in America or the ninth-largest body of water in the world.

Long before the French postmodernists, the Bible made clear what the act of naming could do; it literally created the world. But Foucault understood how this power was exercised in the hands of human beings as they jostled to establish whatever reality benefited them most.

In our current culture wars, the left gets accused of playing loose with language that is supposedly eternal and universal, distorting the meaning of words in order to suit its ideology. Wish someone “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” and what you’re really trying to do, or so Fox News would argue, is erase the birth of Christ. “I’ll tell you one thing: I get elected president, we’re going to be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again,” Trump said on the stump in 2016.

But if the charge against renaming Fort Bragg or the Washington Redskins is that history can not just be waved away with a wand, then it’s notable that Trump’s first executive orders include two such discourse-altering flourishes. He is not just putting something back the way it was. He is affirming the fungibility of language, and indicating that what MAGA world wants is not so much to defund the PC police as to empower its own sheriff.

“A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” Trump said in his speech. “And we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs.” These were the more obvious acts of naming; others were more subtle and also more pervasive. He asserted that “there are only two genders: male and female” and that he was creating an “External Revenue Service,” a nifty Orwellian shorthand meant to assure Americans that instead of taxing them, Trump was going to use tariffs to tax everyone else.

[Read: How the Village People explain Trump]

The case of Mount McKinley offers a particularly telling illustration of how power shapes language—and how Trump is not just defending tradition, but happily rewriting it.

The mountain was first dubbed McKinley by a gold prospector named William Dickey in an 1897 article in The New York Sun. Dickey had a good, if selfish, reason. McKinley had just become the Republican nominee for president and supported the gold standard, which would keep the value of gold high—and Dickey’s prospecting lucrative. McKinley himself had never even visited Alaska. The name was made official in 1917. But the mountain already had a name, Denali, which was how the native Athabaskan people had forever referred to it—Denali meaning “the high one.” Alaskans continued to use the old name, and in 1975 the state’s legislature and governor requested a change back to Denali, which the federal government denied. Forty years later, President Barack Obama decided to make Denali the mountain’s official name in recognition of these facts (and as a way of rewarding the Native populations in his political coalition). Now, even as Trump looks to honor one of his favorite presidents by reverting to Mount McKinley, it’s worth noting that the two Republican senators from Alaska are opposed. The office of Dan Sullivan, one of those senators, told a reporter that he “prefers the name that the very tough, very strong, very patriotic Athabaskan people gave the mountain thousands of years ago.”

Whether Trump realizes it or not, with his name game, he is following the same playbook he has accused progressives of abusing when they have sought to change the record. The “Gulf of America” is an even more blatant example, because the new name seems to have emerged out of the whole cloth of Trump’s mind (which is probably also why Hillary Clinton couldn’t suppress her laughter at its mention). What could this be other than a symbolic vanquishing of Mexico—a malignant force in Trump’s cosmology—without having to do more than change one word? He is affirming the magic of language to affect perception, and he is changing perception to rearrange the truth. As Foucault put it in one of the interviews collected in the anthology Power/Knowledge, “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.”

From his dais inside the Capitol, in a speech meant to set the tone for his next four years in office, Trump blew the whistle on a new phase in the culture war. He confirmed something we should already know: He is postmodern. Trump and his allies might profess an allegiance to a way of thinking that is older and more foundationally American (they say they want a return to greatness), but really he is interested in writing his own new reality, using a Sharpie to draw the lines in whatever ways rebound to his power.

After Trump first announced his intention to rename the gulf at a press conference earlier this month, a meme went around mocking his magical thinking with the suggested name “Gulf of How Does This Lower Grocery Prices?” Part of the right’s anti-woke argument has always been that progressives deploy language in ways that twist natural and self-evident meaning—say, by expanding categories of gender beyond a long-accepted binary. The argument posits that this is a kind of trickery, and that people already know what they know. Trump might discover the same thing. He can call things by different names, and hope that this changes the way people think. But in the end, they know what they know. And if the price of eggs is still high, he could call it the “Gulf of Oz” and it won’t matter a bit.

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.

In today’s reading list, Atlantic journalists offer an intricate examination of those who swindle or hurt others, and those who must live with the fallout. The stories below follow a con man turned true-crime writer, a prison break facilitated by a dog crate, the spectacle of murder fandoms, and more.

The Con Man Who Became a True-Crime Writer

In his old life, Matthew Cox told stories to scam his way into millions of dollars. Now he’s trying to sell tales that are true.

By Rachel Monroe

The True Story of the Married Woman Who Smuggled Her Boyfriend Out of Prison in a Dog Crate

She wanted to escape her marriage. He wanted to escape his life sentence.

By Michael J. Mooney

They Stole Yogi Berra’s World Series Rings. Then They Did Something Really Crazy.

The childhood friends behind the most audacious string of sports-memorabilia heists in American history

By Ariel Sabar

The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t

For years, he used fake identities to charm women out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then his victims banded together to take him down.

By Rachel Monroe

The Gross Spectacle of Murder Fandom

After four University of Idaho students were killed, TikTok and Reddit sleuths swarmed the campus. The community is still struggling with the wreckage they left behind.

By McKay Coppins

The Mobster Who Bought His Son a Hockey Team

A tale of goons, no-show jobs, and a legendary minor-league franchise that helped land its owner in prison

By Rich Cohen

The Tomb Raiders of the Upper East Side

Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit

By Ariel Sabar

The Rise and Fall of an All-Star Crew of Jewel Thieves

They were highly sophisticated. The local police seemed helpless. Then a retired septuagenarian detective stepped in.

By Geoff Manaugh

The Week Ahead

Season 2 of The Night Agent, an action series about an FBI agent who is drawn into the mysterious world of the Night Action organization (streaming on Netflix on Thursday) We Do Not Part, a book by Han Kang that follows the friendship between two Korean women and the massacre on Jeju Island (out Tuesday) Presence, a horror film told from the perspective of a spirit bound to a family’s suburban home (in theaters Friday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

America Just Kinda, Sorta Banned Cigarettes

By Nicholas Florko

No drug is quite like nicotine. When it hits your bloodstream, you’re sent on a ride of double euphoria: an immediate jolt of adrenaline, like a strong cup of coffee injected directly into your brain, along with the calming effect of a beer. Nicotine is what gets people hooked on cigarettes, despite their health risks and putrid smell. It is, in essence, what cigarette companies are selling, and what they’ve always been selling. Without nicotine, a cigarette is just smoldering leaves wrapped in some fancy paper.

But if the Biden administration gets its way, that’s essentially all cigarettes will be.

Read the full article.

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In 2016, the South Korean novelist Han Kang won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian, the first of her novels to be translated into English. The novel, in which a woman who suddenly refuses to eat meat is treated as if she were mad, was read as a parable of the modern condition, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or “A Hunger Artist,” updated for the age of feminism and ecopolitics. In October, with three more of her novels now available in English and at least 20 other languages, the Swedish Academy awarded Han the Nobel Prize, elevating her to the empyrean realm reserved for writers of what is sometimes called world literature.

Internationally famous authors need no pity, but the status comes with vulnerabilities. Having been turned into global ambassadors for their culture, they are often accused of becoming deracinated and defanged. Han has dodged the charge so far. But suspicion fell on the English-language translator of The Vegetarian, Deborah Smith, when the novel was propelled into the spotlight. Smith mistranslated some words, but her harsher detractors accused her of betraying Han’s limpid, understated style, torquing it so as to hold the attention of Western readers.

Works transposed into foreign languages—and cultures—inevitably suffer omissions and distortion. That doesn’t make them less authentic. But if you’re trying to understand what Han is up to, adjudicating the stylistic accuracy of the translation is less important than deepening your knowledge of the work’s context, which, like South Korea itself, is at once decidedly Korean and very cosmopolitan.

In The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century, Adam Kirsch argues that “globalism is not just a fate thrust upon writers, but a theme that writers see it as a duty and an opportunity to explore.” What makes a novel global is not that its author has become a worldwide brand, but that it originates in a consciousness of living and writing in a world with permeable borders, and a desire to make sense of that experience. By Kirsch’s definition, Han writes global novels. Most of them deal—some more obliquely than others—with South Korea’s bloody past as a pawn in great-power politics and the war against Communism.

Perhaps that sounds didactic; rest assured that her novels foreground richly specific narratives about individual characters. History still seeps in, and all the more so when the details have largely been forgotten or obscured. Memories of horrors that younger South Koreans can no longer name produce uncanny symptoms in their bodies and dreams. Han, who is also a poet, commands an impressive arsenal of literary devices, and in her hands, the national repression of trauma—what Milan Kundera called “organized forgetting”—even affects the weather. The pathetic fallacy hasn’t been put to such good use in fiction since Wuthering Heights.

Weather plays a major role in, and may in fact be the main character of, Han’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Much of the action takes place during a massive blizzard, and the wind and precipitation and skies all have an eerie salience. The snow, though, is most saturated with meaning. It exhibits both agency and pathos, as if possessed by ghosts. Snow blocks the narrator’s way during an urgent journey. It effaces the features of people and landscapes the way amnesia erases memories, and yet it also awakens recollections, many of them unbearable, in those it falls upon. Snow clings desolately to eyelashes and noses. It even weeps, blowing into eyes and melting into tears.

We Do Not Part opens with a nightmare that torments the narrator, Kyungha, night after night, and always makes her wake up in a panic. She is standing before a plain containing vast numbers of ink-black lopped-off tree trunks. Suddenly the sea rises and starts to flood the plain. She knows, with the certainty of a dream, that the mutilated trees mark graves, and that she must stop the water, right now, from dredging up and desecrating the bones. But how?

Kyungha is a writer who published a book about a massacre that took place in a city referred to as G—. As it happens, Han wrote a novel Human Acts, about a pro-democracy movement led by students and activists in Gwangju in 1980 that was put down with extreme violence. Possibly as many as 2,000 protesters (the exact number is not known), most of them young and all deemed to be Communists, were murdered. The novel describes, among other barbaric acts, how soldiers and police threw bodies carelessly into trucks that carted them off to be hidden or burned. Kyungha’s research into G— has left her in a suicidal fugue. She has lost touch with friends; her husband has abandoned her and seems to have taken their daughter with him. Now she lives alone in a tiny rental apartment just outside Seoul, if endlessly rewriting her will and not eating or sleeping can be called living. She is as helpless in life as she is in the nightmare.

[Read: Han Kang’s transgressive art]

Kyungha comes up with a project that she thinks will exorcize it. She will collaborate with a friend, Inseon, a documentary filmmaker, on an art film. The plan is to re-create the dream, setting up dozens of tree trunks on a large piece of land, and then wait for winter and shoot the snow falling over the trunks, “as white as cloth to drape down from the skies and blanket them all.” Han doesn’t interpret the dream or its remedy for us, but we understand that the trunks and bones are meant to stand in for the unburied dead of G—, and that the snow is to serve as their shroud.

Han’s novels vary in style, but they form an unusually interconnected whole—in an interview, a member of the Nobel Prize committee noted “a continuity as to themes that is quite remarkable”—and the color white is a motif in all of them. It is mostly associated with birth and death. Han’s brief, lyrical novel The White Book, about an older sister of the narrator who died a few hours after she was born, begins with a list of “white things,” each of which then becomes the subject of a short meditation. Included on the list are “shroud” and “snow,” as well as “white bird”; along with the enshrouding snow, white birds play a role in We Do Not Part.

The temptation to read the white things of this novel as metaphors or omens is hard to resist. They do function figuratively. Looking through the window of an airplane at an approaching blizzard, for instance, Kyungha mistakes the swirling snow for “tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon.” They could be albatrosses hovering over the Ancient Mariner.

But the white things do more than symbolize. Like the snow, white birds participate in the action as full-fledged characters. Inseon, who lives alone on Jeju Island, off the coast of the Korean peninsula, is devoted to a pair of white budgerigars—a kind of parakeet—that are nominally pets, but really companions; they speak in words because that’s what parakeets do, but maybe there’s more to it than that. Kyungha is flying into a storm because Inseon, who has been evacuated to a mainland hospital after a horrible accident, has asked her to travel to her remote mountain home to rescue one of the budgies (the other died earlier). Kyungha is incredulous that she agreed to undertake such a dangerous expedition just to save a bird. As she transfers from the plane to a bus, from which she will transfer to another bus and then walk to Inseon’s house, the wind picks up and the snow falls ever more heavily.

Kyungha’s trip to Jeju Island turns out to be merely a frame narrative for a much more terrifying journey, which is into history: Inseon’s history is bound up with the history of the island, which in turn recapitulates the history of South Korea itself. Over the course of the novel, Inseon tells Kyungha how she pieced together a past that her mother had shielded her from. Han’s ability to drop references to momentous events offhandedly, as if they were part of everyday life, is on full display here. As an angry teenager who develops a passionate hatred for everything about her life, particularly her stooped, seemingly subservient mother, Inseon runs away to Seoul, falls through a snowbank into a pit, and nearly dies. When she wakes up in a hospital several days later, her mother is by her side. She had known that something had happened to Inseon, she tells her daughter, because she’d dreamed that she saw her with snow on her face.

A little later, Inseon explains why her mother would have had that dream: “When she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village.” (Most of Inseon’s stories are in italics, at least in the translation.) Inseon’s mother and her older sister had been away visiting cousins in another village; when they came home, snow had fallen on the corpses heaped on the grounds of the elementary school, covering their faces, and the sisters couldn’t figure out which were the bodies of family members. So the older sister took out her handkerchief and told Inseon’s mother that she’d wipe the faces, and “you get a good look at them.” And that, Inseon says, is how her mother, as a child, learned that when people died, “snow remained on their cheeks, and a thin layer of bloody ice set over their faces.”

[Read: A novel in which language hits its limit—and keeps on going]

As Inseon follows clues left by her mother, whom she cared for during the last years of her life, We Do Not Part turns into a mystery and a ghost story. It’s a mystery because what happened on Jeju Island—in reality, not just in this novel—is not well known in South Korea, any more than it was to Inseon: In the run-up to the Korean War, the authorities suppressed an uprising there with shocking brutality, in the name of anti-Communism. Historians still aren’t sure whether the death toll was 30,000 or upwards of 80,000, out of a population of about 300,000—far more deadly than the outcome in Gwangju. For half a century afterward, well into the 1990s, few people talked about the slaughter on Jeju Island or dared to search for the dead and missing, because to do so was a crime punishable by torture and imprisonment. In the novel, Inseon learns that her quiet mother had, over the course of decades and in the face of real danger, been active in the movement to recover the remains, inspired by the disappearance of her brother, whom Inseon had never even heard of.

The novel is also a ghost story because hauntings are involved, both the usual kind and others that are the product of Han’s singular imagination. Once Kyungha makes it to Inseon’s home, the place turns out to be suspended between life and death. Neither Kyungha nor the reader is sure whether she is being visited by the revenants of the house’s previous occupants or has already joined them in the afterlife. Outside the house, the wind howls and the snow falls and, having fallen, muffles all sound, and we grasp that the elements are animated by the restless spirits of the tens of thousands who were never accounted for or given a proper burial.

Beyond that, a very large specter broods, palpable even though it never quite comes into view. You could call it the ghost of global history. The proximate cause of the war crimes chronicled in Han’s novels is South Korea’s succession of authoritarian governments, their soldiers and police; on Jeju Island, these were joined by gangs of right-wing thugs. But some of us in the West may have forgotten who the occupying power was at the time, and those who have not forgotten may never have known the extent to which it propped up those regimes and participated in anti-Communist counterinsurgency campaigns—including on Jeju Island. I knew very little of this history when I began to read Han’s novels, nor was I aware that during the Vietnam War, the same foreign government used more than 300,000 Korean troops, essentially as mercenaries, among them soldiers later accused of committing atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. Some Korean veterans of that war were also involved in suppressing uprisings such as the one in Gwangju. These discoveries came as a shock, because the occupier I’m talking about is, of course, the United States.

With her characteristically light touch, Han alludes to American culpability only in passing. In The Vegetarian, we learn that the protagonist’s abusive father earned a medal for his service in Vietnam, but the significance of that fact is not explained. In Human Acts, a character recounts a story about Korean soldiers burning Vietnamese villagers alive and adds, “Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times.” A line in We Do Not Part informs us that American military planes released propaganda leaflets over Jeju Island promising amnesty to rebels who turned themselves in; they were arrested anyway.

People in one country often fail to realize how implicated they are in the personal histories of people in countries halfway around the world. Han’s novels never make direct accusations, but her very tact makes the implied indictment all the more devastating. She draws American readers into foreign calamities that their own forebears had a hand in creating, and then offers a very limited kind of redemption—the chance to discover, for themselves, that legacy of shame. Better yet, we do so from the edges of the drama, not the center, where so many American movies about interventions in places like Vietnam seem determined to put us. Globalization is responsible for many bad things, but as Han demonstrates, the global novel is not one of them.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Where Han Kang’s Nightmares Come From.”