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“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” then–CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves cackled in February 2016, as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign churned forward. “The money’s rolling in and this is fun … It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going.”

Moonves appeared merely ghoulish then. He now looks both ghoulish and wrong. Trump has not been good for CBS, and the steps and statements he’s made since returning to the White House show that his campaign promises to restore and defend free speech were balderdash. His goal is to protect the speech that he likes and suppress what he doesn’t.

On Sunday, Unelected Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk attacked CBS’s flagship program. “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election,” he posted on X. “They deserve a long prison sentence.” This would seem less threatening if Musk weren’t running roughshod over the federal government, or if the president disagreed. But earlier this month, Trump said that “CBS should lose its license” and 60 Minutes should be “terminated.”

The source of their anger is an interview that the program conducted with Kamala Harris—remember her?—during the presidential campaign last year. Trump alleges that 60 Minutes improperly edited the interview. CBS denies any wrongdoing and declined to comment on Musk’s post. CBS said in a filing this week that it intended to seek information on Trump’s finances if the lawsuit proceeds. Even so, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is considering whether to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement with Trump to resolve a suit seeking $20 billion in damages. Interpreting such a move as anything other than paying off Trump to leave CBS alone is very difficult—in other words, it’s a protection racket. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reports that executives are concerned they could be sued for bribery if they settle. (Moonves is long gone; he was forced out in 2018 over a series of accusations of sexual assault and harassment. He denies any wrongdoing.)

Trump initially filed his suit last October and has since amended it. The crux of the claim is that CBS aired two different snippets from the same Harris answer about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Like many past lawsuits from Trump, this one reads more like a political memo than a legal brief. He claims, without any evidence, that CBS edited the interview to help Harris’s electoral prospects. (Like other MAGA lawsuits, it was filed in a specific Texas court so as to draw Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has delivered sweeping fringe rulings in the past.) The suit doesn’t make a great deal of sense. If CBS was trying to hide something Harris said, why did it broadcast the clip?

The Federal Communications Commission initially rejected a complaint about the interview, but Brendan Carr—Trump’s newly appointed FCC chair—reopened it and demanded that CBS release the transcript of the interview. CBS did so, and to my read, the transcript establishes that CBS’s use of the clips was not manipulative. (Judicious editing is essential. I’ve interviewed many politicians, and much of what they say is incurably dull, nonsensical, or both, sometimes by design.)

The charge of “election interference” doesn’t make any sense, either—especially coming from Musk, who both is the owner of a major media platform and spent nearly $300 million to back Trump and other Republican candidates. The position of the Trump GOP appears to be that spending any amount of money on politics is free speech, but press outlets covering the campaign are interfering with it.

The bombardment of CBS is part of a wide-ranging assault on free speech. Last week, the White House barred an Associated Press reporter from the Oval Office because editors there have opted not to adopt Trump’s renaming of the body of water long known as the Gulf of Mexico. In December, ABC settled a defamation suit with Trump even though almost no media lawyers thought the network would have lost; critics charged that ABC was trying to curry favor with the president-elect. (ABC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Carr, the FCC chair, recently wrote a letter to NPR and PBS suggesting that by airing sponsors’ names, they may have violated rules against noncommercial stations accepting advertising, although the FCC has not objected to this practice in the past. He noted that the answer could help Congress in deciding whether to defund NPR and PBS. That’s a tight vise grip: Don’t take funding or we might take your funding.

Not all criticism of the press is media suppression. Politicians are free to criticize the press, just as all Americans are free to criticize their elected officials. And besides, if political leaders aren’t upset about at least some of the coverage they’re receiving, journalists probably aren’t holding them to account. At times during the Trump era, some members of the media have overreacted to flimsy provocations, like Trump’s posting a silly GIF that superimposed the CNN logo over someone being body slammed. Vice President J. D. Vance snarkily replied to the journalist Mehdi Hasan on Monday, “Yes dummy. I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!”

Even if you’re willing to grant Vance’s premise that banishing the AP is no big deal—I am not—there’s a lot of territory between that and jailing people, and that’s the ground that Trump is occupying: using the power of the government to intimidate. Paramount, for example, is currently awaiting FCC approval for a merger with Skydance Media. A Paramount Global spokesperson told me the lawsuit is “separate from, and unrelated to” the merger, but the company’s leaders would be reasonable to be afraid that Trump might block the deal if they don’t cooperate. During his first term, Trump tried to block the acquisition of CNN’s parent company. Speaking about the AP’s banishment, one journalist told CNN’s Brian Stelter, “Everyone assumes they’re next.”

Threats to the press are not new for Trump, who has been critical of press freedom for years. But during his most recent campaign, he criticized “wokeness” and argued that he would be a voice for free speech by pushing back on what he characterized as attacks on constitutional rights from, for example, social-media companies that blocked or throttled content (such as suspending his accounts after January 6). On the first day of his new term, Trump signed an executive order purportedly “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and announced that he was a “free speech absolutist,” but quickly disproved that, suspending reporters who criticized him and cooperating with foreign governments to suppress speech.

A news outlet that is afraid of the government is an outlet whose speech is only partly free. When media companies are afraid that the president will use regulators to punish their business, owners are anxious to protect non-media commercial interests. When journalists are wary of becoming targets for petty retribution, they may pull punches or shape coverage in ways that do not—and are not intended to—serve the public interest. Jeff Bezos’s decision to spike a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s attacks on his own newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, both look a lot like this, though the two owners insist otherwise.

Over the past few years, Trump, Vance, and others complained loudly about the government studying mis- and disinformation or pointing out instances of disinformation to social-media companies. They charged that this was censorship because even if the government wasn’t requiring those companies to do anything, its power made this an implied threat. Now that they are in office, they’ve had a change of heart. They’re perfectly happy for the government to try to tell private companies what opinions are acceptable and which ones aren’t. They never believed in anyone’s free speech except their own.

Related:

Intimidating Americans will not work. What conservatives mean by freedom of speech

Today’s News

The Senate confirmed Kash Patel as FBI director in a 51–49 vote. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell announced that he would not be seeking reelection.

The Trump administration removed protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians in America, which puts them on track to be targeted for deportation this summer.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: “The first time I watched an opera on a screen was in the Dallas Cowboys football stadium,” Kat Hu writes. “As persistent as the desire to televise opera is the debate over whether—and how—to do it.”

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Evening Read

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The Fantasy of a Nonprofit Dating App

By Faith Hill

Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re too picky. It could be—oh God—that you simply don’t pull like you thought you did. But sometimes, whether out of self-protection or righteous skepticism of corporate motives, you might think: Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Listen. Americans are stuck. Who’s to blame? Hanna Rosin talks with Yoni Appelbaum about the end of upward mobility in the United States.

Read. “The Moron Factory,” a short story by George Saunders.

“Is true: our office odd. No one stable. Everyone nuts in his/her own way. Usually, at work, I keep to self. Don’t socialize. Just do my work, head straight home.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Threats to free speech aren’t just a national problem, and they’re not just about the press—they’re about the public’s right to hear from and be involved in government. I was struck this morning by two different, appalling stories out of Mississippi. The Mississippi Free Press reports on how a chancery court judge has ruled that the state legislature is not a public body and therefore not subject to open-meetings laws. If the elected lawmakers of a state aren’t a public body, what is? Meanwhile, The New York Times reports on another judge in the state ordering a local paper to remove an editorial from its website criticizing Clarksdale officials for not issuing a public notice before a special meeting. The headline on the article: “Secrecy, deception erode public trust.” Perhaps the judge would have been well served to read it himself.

— David

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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May 1, 9 a.m., was once the hour of chaos in New York City. In a tradition dating back to colonial days, leases all over the city expired precisely at that time. Thousands of tenants would load their belongings on carts and move, stepping around other people’s piles of clothing and furniture. Paintings of that day look like a mass eviction, or the aftermath of some kind of disaster. In fact, that day represented a novel American form of hope. Mobility, or the right to decide where you wanted to live, was a great American innovation. But lately, that mobility is stalling, with real consequences for politics, culture, and the national mood.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor and the author of the new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum explains how, over the decades, several forces combined to make it harder for the average American to move and improve their circumstances. And he lands at some surprising culprits: progressives, such as Jane Jacobs, who wanted to save cities but instead wound up blocking natural urban evolution and shutting newcomers out.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

I have moved many times in my life: across continents, across the country, back and forth across D.C., which is where I live now. And I didn’t think much about it. I just chalked it up to restlessness—until I read Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, which is also the March cover story in The Atlantic. The book is called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

Appelbaum argues that there is and always has been something quintessentially American—and also, quintessentially hopeful—about moving. In the 19th century, Moving Day was, like, a thing—a holiday celebrated across different American cities at different times, when everybody would just up and move. To quote Appelbaum: “Nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day.”

But moving isn’t happening so much anymore. As Appelbaum writes: “Every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to.” So what happens to a country—geographically, culturally, politically, and, in some ways, psychologically—when mobility starts to stall?

[Music]

Rosin: Can you read this from your intro, these couple of sentences?

Yoni Appelbaum: “The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they happen to be born—is America’s most profound contribution to the world … The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets; it’s a lethal threat to the entire American project.”

Rosin: Okay. Let’s start with the second half: Why is mobility the thing that defines the American project?

Appelbaum: It is the thing that defines the American project, because it was the first thing that anyone who got here from Europe noticed. People would come to the United States and gawk. They saw this as either our greatest asset or our great national character flaw. But they were amazed at how often Americans moved. And they were particularly amazed that the Americans who were moving were not moving out of desperation, that Americans tended to be doing okay in one place and to still want something more for themselves—want something better for their children—and to move someplace else in pursuit of it.

Rosin: And you’re not just describing something geographic. You’re describing something psychological.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I’m talking about an attitude that Americans believed that they could change their destinies by changing their address, that they could move someplace new and do better than they were doing. And also—and this is the second half of the answer—Americans believed that they were not defined by the circumstances of their birth. That was the great gift that mobility gave us. And that had really profound implications that took me a while to unravel.

Rosin: Right. Because it’s not just about geography. It’s not just about money.

It’s about a sense of yourself as having infinite possibilities. Like, you could just move and move. You weren’t class-bound in any way.

Appelbaum: Here’s the thing about American individualism: We are individuals, in the sense that we have the ability to construct our own identities, but we define ourselves by virtue of the communities that we choose to join.

Throughout the world, communities tended to choose their members. Even in the early United States, in the colonial era, if you tried to move in someplace, you could be warned out. The town had the right to say, Hey. You may have bought property here. You may have leased a building. You may have a job. We don’t want you here. And not surprisingly, they disproportionately warned out the poor. They warned out minorities. Really, American communities, for the first couple hundred years of European settlement, were members-only clubs.

And then in the early 19th century, there’s a legal revolution. And instead of allowing communities to choose their members, we allow people to choose their communities. You could move someplace and say, I intend to live here, and that was enough to become a legal resident of that place.

Rosin: So just in numbers, can you give a sense of where we are now? What’s the statistic that shows most starkly the decline in mobility now?

Appelbaum: In the 19th century, as best I can calculate it, probably one out of three Americans moved every year.

Rosin: Every year?

Appelbaum: Every year. In some cities, it might be half. In the 20th century, as late as 1970, it was one out of five. And the census in December told us we just set a new record, an all-time low. It’s dropped over the last 50 years to one out of 13. It is the most profound social change to overcome America in the last half century.

Rosin: It’s so interesting, because if you told me that someone moved that many times in a year, I would not associate that with upward mobility. I would associate that with desperation and problems.

Appelbaum: For a long time, that’s exactly what historians thought too. There was this guy, Stephan Thernstrom, who set out to investigate this, and thought what he had discovered, in all this moving about, was what he called the “floating proletariat,” right? Here was evidence that, in America, the American dream was chimerical. You couldn’t actually attain it. There was this great mass of people just moving from one place to another to another.

And several decades later, as we got better data-mining tools, we were able to follow up on the floating proletariat and find out what happened to them. The people who had stayed in one place, Thernstrom saw—they were doing a little better than they had before. But when we could track the people who had left, it turned out, they were doing much better, that the people who relocate—even the ones at the bottom of the class structure—across every decade that historians can study, it’s the case that the people who move do better economically. And this is really key: Their kids do better than the people who stayed where they were.

Rosin: It’s like Americans are, in their soul, psychological immigrants. Like, that we behave the way we think of immigrants behaving, and the more robustly we do that, the better off Americans are. The most evocative image that you draw is something called “Moving Day,” from an earlier era. I had never heard of that. Can you paint a picture of what that is?

Appelbaum: We’ve got these wonderful accounts of Moving Day from people who came over, more or less, just to see it. By law or by custom, in most cities and in most rural areas, all unwritten leases expired on the same day of the year. And this actually gave renters an enormous leg up in the world in most times, in most places, because it meant that an enormous number of properties were potentially available to them. They could go back to their landlord and say, If you want me to stay for another year, you gotta fix the leaky sink. Or they could try someplace better.

And they would all pile their possessions down at the curb. First thing in the morning, they’d hire a cart to take them across town or down the lane, and then they would push past the family that was moving out of some other apartment or townhouse or home. As they were taking their stuff out, they’d be moving their stuff in. But between sunup and sundown, a quarter, a third, half of a city might relocate. And there are these descriptions of trash lining the gutters as things fell out of the carts or there wasn’t room for it in the new apartment, and people would go scavenging through the gutters, trying to find, out of the trash, their own treasures.

It was raucous and wild, and respectable Americans always looked down on it. And yet, for the people who participated in it, it was a way to have their home be kind of like an iPhone or a car: You keep the one you have for a year or two, and then you trade up for a newer model.

Rosin: So upgrades. Now, where is this happening? Is this happening in cities of a certain size, in immigrant communities? Like, who is doing all this chaotic moving?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s one thing that really upset the upper crust.

Rosin: And who are they? Let’s define all the sides. Who are the respectable Americans?

Appelbaum: The respectable Americans are those of long-standing stock who are trying very hard to impress the European cousins. And they are appalled that this defect of their national character—that people don’t know their place. They don’t know their station. They’re always moving around looking for something better for themselves, and they write about it in those kinds of moralistic terms.

But the people who are participating in it, it’s very broad. I mean, when you’re talking about half the city moving, what you’re talking about is activity that’s as much a middle-class and upper-middle-class activity as it is a working-class activity. As long as you are adding a good number of fresh new homes to the market every year, pretty much everybody who moved could move up, because the wealthy were buying brand-new homes that had just been erected.

But they were vacating, you know, homes that were a few years older or apartments that they were moving out of, and those became available to the upper-middle class, right? And you’d get a chain of moves. You can trace this, you know, a dozen, 15 moves, one family succeeding another, succeeding another—and everybody moving up to something a little bit better than they had the year before. And, you know, just like an iPhone or a car, they’re chasing technological innovation. One year, you move into a new apartment, and it’s got running water. And, you know, two years later, the water runs hot and cold, and it’s a miracle, right? So everybody is constantly moving up in the world as they constantly relocate.

Rosin: So there are decades of massive amounts of mobility. It’s considered respectable enough. And then, at some moment, a few forces start to slow this all down. So can you tell the story of what happens in Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah. It’s sort of a sad story when you look closely at it. Lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, is like no place that’s ever existed before or since. It is so dense. People are living in tenements at a sort of rate per acre, the way demographers measure this, that is multiples of any place in Manhattan today.

Rosin: Do you remember the numbers? Because I think they’re extraordinary. Maybe I’m just remembering this from going to the Tenement Museum, but when you actually look at the density numbers, they are just hard to get your head around.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I think it’s, like, 600 per acre. It’s really, really, really high. There’s no place in Manhattan today that’s even a third as dense, even though the buildings are now much, much taller. So they’re really squeezed in there. And reformers are appalled. And there are real problems with some of these, you know—what they’re really appalled about, it turns out, is less the housing conditions than the presence of so many immigrants, with their foreign ways, foreign religion, foreign languages, weird foods, odd smells, right?

They’re looking at this, and they are not happy that this is invading their city. They’re not subtle about it. They’re quite clear that they think that apartments are themselves degrading. This is the original progressive era, and there’s a tight intertwining between the reformers and government, and they move fluidly among them.

Rosin: Wait. Like, who is the “they”? Are we talking about city planners? Just, this is a really interesting moment. So I just want to—because it’s unexpected, this part of the history.

Appelbaum: Lawrence Veiller is sort of Mr. Tenement Reform. He’s the guy who will write most of the reports, who’ll serve on the commissions, who’ll move in as the first deputy commissioner of the Tenement Office when New York creates one. Like, he is both a government official and a reformer, and that was pretty typical. They move fluidly among these jobs. And he is the guy who really goes on a crusade against tenements.

And maybe the most remarkable moment in my research was stumbling across a speech he gave at a conference, where somebody had asked, How do you keep apartments out of your city? And he says, Well, you know. The problem is: If you put it to a vote, you can’t keep them out of your city, because people actually like living in apartments. They serve a useful function. So what you have to do is solve it the way I’ve done it in New York: You call it fire-safety regulation. And you put a bunch of regulations on the apartments that make them prohibitively expensive to build. But be careful not to put any fire-safety regulations on single- or two-family homes, because that would make them too expensive. And as long as you call it “fire safety,” you can get away with keeping the apartments and their residents out of your neighborhoods.

And it’s one of those moments where, you know, you just sort of gape at the page, and you think, I can’t believe he actually said it. I was worried, maybe, I was reading too much into some of the other things that he’d said. But here he is straightforwardly saying that much of the regulatory project that he and other progressives pursued was purely pretextual. They were trying to find a whole set of rules that could make it too expensive for immigrants to move into their neighborhoods.

Rosin: So we’re in a moment of just resistance to tenements and apartments and crowdedness. How does this, then, become encoded? What’s the next step they take?

Appelbaum: You know, the problem with building codes is that, ultimately, there are ways around them. People are developing new technologies. It’s not enough to keep the apartments back. It’s not enough to pen the immigrants into the Lower East Side.

And there’s a bigger problem, which is that the garment industry in New York is moving up Fifth Avenue. And on their lunch breaks, the Jewish garment workers are getting some fresh air on the sidewalks, and this infuriates the owners of the wealthy department stores on Fifth Avenue, who say, You’re scaring off our wealthy customers. And they want to push them out. They try rounding them up and carting them off in police wagons. They try negotiating with the garment-factory owners. But, of course, these workers want to be out on the sidewalk. It’s their one chance for fresh air, and it’s a public sidewalk. So there’s a limit to what they can do, and they finally hit on a new solution, which is: If you change the law so that you can’t build tall buildings near these department stores, then you can push the garment factories back down toward the Lower East Side.

Rosin: You know, anytime you step into the history of the technical and possibly boring word zoning, you hit racism.

Appelbaum: You know, the thing about zoning, which is sort of the original sin of zoning—which is a tool invented on the West Coast to push the Chinese out of towns and then applied—

Rosin: —in progressive Berkeley! That’s another thing I learned in your book, is how Berkeley, essentially, has such racist zoning origins.

Appelbaum: It’s a really painful story, and zoning, ultimately, is about saying there are always laws, which said there are things that you can’t do in crowded residential areas. But zoning was a set of tools, which said, Some things are going to be okay on one side of the tracks and not okay on the other. And given that that was the approach from the beginning, it was always about separating populations into different spaces.

And so New York adopts the first citywide zoning code. And at first, this is spreading from city to city. The New Deal will take it national.

Rosin: And what does—the zoning code is not explicitly racist? What does it actually say in the government documents?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s the brilliance of the zoning code. The courts have been striking down explicit racial segregation. But if you wrote your ordinance carefully enough and never mentioned race, you could segregate land by its use. You could figure out how to allow in some parts of your city only really expensive housing, or in other parts of your city, you could put all of the jobs that a particular immigrant group tended to have.

Rosin: Like the Chinese laundromat on the West Coast. Like, No laundromats. That’s the famous one.

Appelbaum: Exactly. That’s the original zoning ordinance: We’re gonna push all the laundries back into Chinatown. And if you push the laundries into Chinatown, you’re pushing their workers into Chinatown. So there were ways to effectively segregate—not foolproof, but effectively segregate—your population without ever having to use any racial language in the ordinance, and so it could stand up in court but still segregate your population.

Rosin: Okay, so we have zoning laws, we have government complicity in kind of dividing where people live, and then we have someone who comes in as a supposed savior, particularly of Lower Manhattan. Maybe not a savior, but someone who appreciates the diversity in the city as it is, and that’s Jane Jacobs. And you tell a very different story of the role she plays in all of this, which really brings us to the modern era. So can you talk about who she is and what role she played in transforming Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah, it’s a little heartbreaking sometimes to look closely at your heroes and find out that the story you thought you knew is not the one that actually played out. Jane Jacobs was a woman who saw clearly what it was that made cities great, at a time when almost nobody wanted to recognize that.

She saw the diversity of their populations, of their uses, the way that people mixed together as being not, as the progressives had it, something that needed to be corrected with rational planning, but as a strength that needed to be recognized and rescued and reinforced. And she stood tall against urban renewal, against the notion that the way to save cities was to knock them flat and to rebuild them with all the uses very carefully segregated out.

And she wrote this brilliant book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that laid out these principles, and she saved her own neighborhood from urban renewal and became, in the process, sort of the patron saint of urbanism. And her great lesson that she took from all of these experiences was that you needed to empower individuals with a deep appreciation of urban life, with the tools to stop governments. And that was the gospel that she preached. And in many ways, it was necessary at that moment, at the peak of urban renewal. But what she didn’t understand at the time—maybe couldn’t have understood at the time—was that she was going to create problems that were even worse than the problems that she was trying to prevent.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: how Jane Jacobs inadvertently contributed to the stuckness of America.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay, so here we have Jane Jacobs. She moves into—what street was that that she moved into?

Appelbaum: She moves into 555 Hudson Street.

Rosin: Okay, she’s on Hudson Street. That’s an amazing place to live. What had been all around her was—who was living there at the time? It wasn’t other people like her.

Appelbaum: No, it mostly wasn’t. She and her husband are two working professionals in Manhattan who are able to pay all cash for a townhouse on this block that is mostly filled with immigrant families. And it’s changing at the time. She’s not alone in coming in, in that way.

But it’s mostly been a neighborhood of immigrants, the children of immigrants. It’s got tons of street-front retail, and she writes about this beautifully, which activates the street front. The eyes on the street keep them safe during the day. She writes about the intricate ballet of the sidewalk as people dodge around each other, and people each pursuing their own tasks are able to live in harmony, in concert. She writes about this block absolutely beautifully, even as she is killing all of it.

Rosin: So if we freeze her there, then she’s a heroine of the city who appreciates it in all its diversity. So then what happens? How does the tragedy begin?

Appelbaum: You know, I tracked down the family that was in that building before she bought it. It was a man named Rudolph Hechler. Two of his adult children and his wife were working in a candy store on the ground floor. So they were renting, living above the shop that they operated, and that shop was everything that Jacobs says make cities great. It was a place where you could go and drop your keys if you’re going to be out for a while, and your kid could come pick them up and let themselves into the house. It was a place where you could just stop and talk to your neighbors.

It was the kind of thing that Jacobs praised, but when she buys the building, she gut renovates it. She tears out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home. She rips off the facade of this historic building and replaces it with modern metal-sash windows. She so thoroughly alters the appearance, presents a blank front to the street, where before there’d been a lively storefront, that when they eventually, at her urging, historically landmark the block, they find that the building that she lives in has no historic value whatsoever.

And so here, you have somebody who has written this ode to the way people are living around her but buys a building within it and changes it to suit her own family’s need—which was a reasonable thing, I should say, for her to do under the circumstances—but then landmarks the block, which prevents people from building new buildings in the way that that block had always had. So there’s a couple buildings right next to hers that have been torn down and turned into a six-story apartment building before she moves in. But her changes make it so that nobody can do that again. And if you’re not building new buildings to accommodate growth, what you’re going to have in response to mounting demand is rising prices.

Rosin: So the counterfactual history with no Jane Jacobs—I understand that this is imaginary—is what? You just build bigger, taller apartment buildings that more people can afford to move into, and you maintain it as a mixed neighborhood, which is partly immigrant, partly young professors?

Appelbaum: Yeah, the counterfactual is that her neighborhood and other urban neighborhoods throughout the country continue to do what they had done right up until about 1970, which is that they evolve. Sometimes the buildings get taller; sometimes they get shorter. I lived in a neighborhood once that had seen lots of buildings have their top stories shorn off when demand had fallen.

Cities morphed; they changed. And yes, in response to mounting demand, you would have had to build up. You have to make space for people to live in cities if you want to continue to attract new generations and give them the kinds of opportunities that previous generations have had. But she did not want that. And in fact, almost nobody ever wants that, which is a real challenge.

Rosin: And is this aesthetic? Is it just that it’s historic preservation? Is it just about: People arrive at a place, and they have an aesthetic preference, and that’s what ends up freezing change? Like, that’s what ends up preventing change?

Appelbaum: Well, let’s go back to the beginning of the 19th century, when we get this legal change, which says, You can just move someplace and establish residence. The reason that states make that change is because they are looking around at communities, and they see that communities individually are walling themselves off to new arrivals, even though, collectively, it is in the interest of the individual states and the United States to let people move around.

They take that right away from communities. They recognize that if you let communities govern themselves, they will always wall themselves off. Change is really hard. It is uncomfortable. Even if a lot of changes leave you better off, while you’re going through them, you may not welcome them. And if you give communities the power to say, We’re going to pick and choose what we allow. We’re going to pick and choose who can live here, then those communities will almost always exercise that power in exclusionary ways.

And this is even worse: The communities that exercise it most effectively will be the ones that are filled with people with the time and the money and the resources and the education to do that. And so you’ll separate out your population by race, by income. That’s what happens. That’s what was happening in the United States when we opened ourselves up to mobility. And we reversed that, and for a long stretch, we were this remarkable place where people could move where they wanted.

And as we’ve switched that and given the tools back to local communities to make these decisions, the communities are behaving the way that local communities have always behaved, which is with a strong aversion to change and a disinclination to allow the interests of people who might move into the community to trump the interests of those who are already there.

Rosin: And I guess the communities who are less willing to see themselves that way, because it goes against their sense of themselves, or progressive communities—like people who are interested in historic preservation, who say they love cities, who are interested in urban renewal—like, those are not the same people who think of themselves as complicit. I mean, your subtitle is accusatory. It’s like, “breaking the engine of opportunity.”

Appelbaum: It is, and it’s led to a lot of uncomfortable conversations with friends. But when I look out at the country, what I see clearly is that the people who believe that government can make a difference in the world, the people who believe that through laws and collective action, we can pursue public goods—they want government to do things like preserve history, protect the environment, help historically marginalized populations. Well, they create a set of tools to do this. They’re inclined to see government use those tools. When, invariably, those tools get twisted against their original purposes and get used, instead, to reward affluence, it is the most progressive jurisdictions where this happens to the greatest extent.

I’ll give you a statistic from California that blew my mind, which is that for every 10 points the liberal vote share goes up in a California city, the number of new housing permits it issues drops by 30 percent.

Rosin: You talked about how this changes our framework on certain things, like a housing crisis—that we tend to say there’s a housing crisis, but that isn’t quite right.

Appelbaum: Yeah. We talk a lot about an affordable-housing crisis, but what we’ve got is a mobility crisis. And the distinction is twofold: One, there’s a lot of cheap housing in America. It’s not in the places where most people want to live. Housing tends to get really, really cheap when all the jobs disappear. I would not recommend relocating large numbers of Americans to those communities. Their prospects will be pretty bleak. You want the housing to be where the opportunities are rich. And so if all we’re trying to do is make housing affordable, without an eye on where that housing is located, on what kinds of opportunities it opens up, we’re pursuing the wrong solutions.

We also often—and this is the other side of it—create solutions. If we think of it as an affordable-housing problem, you can do something like build a lot of new public housing. But we’ve never in this country managed to build enough public housing to meet demand. Usually, if you manage to get in, it’s like a winning lottery ticket. Why would you ever give that up? Which is to say that you are stuck in place. You are tied to the place where you happen to be lucky enough to get the rent-controlled apartment, to get the public-housing unit, to get your voucher accepted after months of fruitless searching. And then you’re really disinclined to leave, even if staying in that place puts you and your family at all kinds of disadvantages.

And so if we have policy that’s focused on allowing people to live where they want, rather than policy that’s simply focused on affordability, we’re likely to return not just the kind of social and economic dynamism that have made America a wonderful place to live, but we’re also likely to return the sense of personal agency.

Rosin: Okay. Last thing: In reading this book and having this conversation, what struck me is that, essentially, you’re making a defense of America—its rootlessness, America’s infinite choice. And right now, those two things—our rootlessness and our infinite choice—are things which we think of as cursing us. The words we often use now are loneliness, lack of community, bowling alone—however you want to call it. We talk a lot about our spiritual collapse as related to the same mobility and rootlessness that you describe as a positive force in the book. And I wonder how you’ve talked about that or reconciled it.

Appelbaum: If you take a graph of when Americans joined a lot of clubs—the Bowling Alone graph, right, where Americans belong to a lot of voluntary associations and when they didn’t—and you match it against the graph of when Americans have moved a lot and when they haven’t, they line up really well, and they line up in a surprising way.

When we’re moving a lot, we’re much likelier to build really vibrant communities. When you leave someplace and start over, you’re gonna go to church on Sunday to try to find friends and build connections. Or if church is not for you, maybe you go to the local bar. Maybe you join the PTA. It depends on the phase of life that you’re in. But when people relocate, they tend to be much more proactive in seeking out social connection. Over the course of time, we fall into familiar ruts. We tend not to make as many new connections. We tend not to join as many new organizations. And people who have been a resident for a long time in a place—they may list a lot more things that they belong to, but they’re less likely to be attending them, and they’re less likely to add new ones.

The peak of American communal life comes during our peaks of mobility. When we’re moving around a lot, we’re creating a really vibrant civil society that was the envy of the world. And over the last 50 years, as we’ve moved less and less and less, all of those things have atrophied. And there’s one other side, too, which is: It’s not just about measuring the health of voluntary organizations. If you’re moving a lot, you’re giving yourself a chance to define who you want to be, to build the connections that are important and meaningful to you, as opposed to the ones that you’ve inherited.

We know something about how that works psychologically. People who are trapped in inherited identities tend to become more cynical, more embittered, more disconnected over time. People who have the chance to choose their identities tend to be more hopeful. They tend to see a growing pie that can be divided more ways, and therefore they’re more welcoming of strangers and new arrivals. They tend to be more optimistic. And if you restore that dynamism, it doesn’t mean that you’ve got to leave behind your inherited identities. It means that committing to those inherited identities becomes a matter of active choice too.

And so the United States, traditionally, was a country that was much more religious than the rest of the world, because people could commit to those faiths that they were adopting or sticking with. Americans were expected to have a narrative of, like, Why do I go to church? It wasn’t something which was really comprehensible to somebody who came from a country where everybody had the same faith. You didn’t have to ask yourself, Why am I Muslim? Why am I Catholic? In America, you always did.

And so our faith traditions tended to be particularly vibrant. So it’s not some sort of assault on tradition. I’m not advocating that we dissolve our social ties and each new generation negotiate new ones. I’m saying, the thing that has made American traditions very vibrant, the thing that often made American immigrants more patriotic than the people in the lands they left behind, and American churchgoers more religious than they had been in the old world was precisely the fact that they got to choose.

And even committing to your old traditions and your inherited identities became a matter of active choice, and something that was much more important to folks. And so you got the vibrancy both ways—both the new affiliations that you could create, the old traditions that you chose to double down on. But it all stemmed from individual agency. You have to give people the chance to start over so that their decision to stay is equally meaningful. If you choose to stay, that’s great. If you feel like you’ve got no choice, that’s really terrible.

Rosin: All right. Well, thank you, Yoni, for laying that out and joining us today.

Appelbaum: Oh, it’s a pleasure.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Yoni Appelbaum. His book, again, is Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

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Neko Case is best known as a lead vocalist for the Canadian indie-rock band the New Pornographers and a solo career that doesn’t quite fit any genre (“country noir” and “odd rock” are two labels she has suggested). Her songs feature unusual protagonists, many of whom are animals, and critics and fans have been puzzling over her lyrics for years. Recently, Case published a memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which suggests possible source material for her vivid and sometimes alarming imagination. In the memoir, she writes mostly about her experience growing up as the child of teenage parents who, in her telling, never came around to wanting a child. And about finding an alternative home in the music scenes of the American Northwest and Canada.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Case about men, music, her own sliding sense of gender, the impossibility of being a musician in the age of streaming, and most important, how not to suffer for your art. After a lifetime of thinking about her parents, she also has good advice on when not to forgive.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Just a quick note: This episode contains some cursing that you might not usually hear on this show.

Neko Case is one of those musicians that people have really strong personal attachments to, especially indie music lovers of a certain generation. Like, I know two people who have named a child after her.

Neko Case is a lead vocalist of the indie-pop collective the New Pornographers, and she’s also had a long solo career. But what’s most distinct about her are her lyrics, which are often oblique. Like, a song seems to be about a car crash, but maybe it’s really about incomplete grief. You have to listen a few times before you get closer to it.

[“Star Witness,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then there are lots of times when Case seems to be writing about herself, but it’s not entirely clear.

[“Things That Scare Me,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Last month, Neko Case peeled back some of the mystery. She’s written a memoir called The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which shares part of the same title as one of her albums from 2013.

She writes about growing up poor and neglected. Her parents were teenagers when they had her, and her guess is that neither of them ever wanted a child. By the end of her sophomore year in high school, she asked her mom for emancipation. She writes: “She couldn’t sign it quickly enough; she didn’t even have to think it over.”

And so Case hid a lot behind her music.

[Music]

Rosin: One of my favorite scenes is you as a kid in the school library. Like, you remembered that the beanbags were corduroy. The image was so perfect. It was such a perfect image from that era. And you were hiding out with your headphones on. I think you mentioned listening to “Atomic,” by Blondie.

Neko Case: Over and over and over and over, like only a neurodivergent ADHD kid can do.

Rosin: Right. Right. (Laughs.) Like, just a million times. Do you have words for what that was like for you? Because it felt like, Okay, that’s the moment that she discovers the power of music. In a movie, that would be the scene in which you discover what music is for and what it does to you.

Case: Music was always just there. And I took it for granted, but I also leaned really heavily into it. I did not make a connection that music was something I would want to do or I would do, because I was just a girl. And I did not make a connection between myself and Blondie, or myself and the Go-Go’s. I just knew I really loved them.

Rosin: So why did it take so long, do you think, for you to open your mouth and sing? You played in bands, but you didn’t really sing for a while.

Case: Well, I was raised to be female in the United States of America so, you know, I wasn’t raised with a lot of self-confidence.

Rosin: So what was the point where you were like, Oh I can do this?

Case: It wasn’t so much deciding I could do it. It was just that I couldn’t help but to do it, because the desire was so intense.

Rosin: Now, the desire is the desire to make music, to write music, to sing? What was the desire?

Case: Even just to sit near it. Anything. Anything I could have.

Rosin: In the book, you complain about your voice. You write that it was neither pretty nor powerful. And that’s—

Case: Oh that’s not a complaint.

Rosin: It’s not a complaint. Okay, okay, okay.

Case: No, no, no. It’s not powerful, and it’s not pretty. Like, those are things that—you know, I wish it were powerful. I don’t care that it’s not pretty. I very much enjoy hearing women singing in ways other than being pretty. And singing is an incredible physical feeling. It’s like your mouth is a fire hose, and you can twist your insides and make a powerful thing come out to the point where your feet levitate ever so slightly off the floor.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Case: It gets so physical. It is so athletic, and there’s nothing else like it.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Well, even in this just few minutes that we’ve been talking, you describe a little journey from a point where the world gives you a set of expectations and tells you, you can and can’t do things. And you seem to sort of find your way out of that, either through your voice or how you experience music, or even the way you write about institutions. Like, you write the country-music institution was limiting in some ways.

Case: Oh it’s straight up misogynist and racist and hateful. We don’t even have to sugarcoat that one. The current country-music scene of radio music in Nashville is absolutely heinous. And I watch young women try to get in there, and I love them so much, and they’re trying, and I’m like, Don’t even bother. Let that thing die. That thing is poison. Come over here. Let’s make the other thing.

Rosin: And is the other thing, like, you inventing your own genres? You’ve given them names over the years that are—“country noir” or “odd rock,” and things like that. Like, is that the way out? Is that what you tell women?

Case: I think that what it is, is the gatekeepers of country music are absolutely terrified that it might evolve, whereas the gatekeepers of rock and roll don’t have a problem with evolution. But there’s something very white supremacist about how country music works. And they’re really, really dialing down on it now.

Rosin: So you don’t mean just then. You’re talking about then, and now there’s a resurgence. Because there was a great moment—

Case: I think it’s worse now. I think it’s far worse now than it has been in a long time.

Rosin: I mean, there was a good moment for women—it was a brief good moment for women in country music.

Case: There have been a couple.

Rosin: Yeah.

Case: Sometimes, people are so talented that they’re undeniable, and not even the gatekeepers can keep them out.

Rosin: Well, it’s good Beyoncé made that country album then.

Case: We’re lucky to have Beyoncé doing a lot of things. That’s all I’m saying.

Rosin: That’s true. That’s true. (Laughs.) I think reading your memoir, for me, changed how I heard your music, and I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing or not the intended thing. Is that something you explicitly thought you were doing? At times, I almost read it like, Oh this is a key to some lyrics, and I wasn’t sure if that was correct or not correct.

Case: I tried to not give away the songs as much as possible. Like, there was a couple times where I kind of went into them, but I don’t like to ruin songs for people. You know how you will hear the lyrics of a song one way, and then you find out it’s not the lyric that you thought it was, and then you’re like, Oh. It’s not as good anymore?

If you think you know what a song’s about, and it makes you feel connected emotionally to it, and it becomes a little chapter heading in your life, you don’t want to ruin that for people.

Rosin: Yeah. But I don’t know if it’s ruin it. I think it’s just complicate it. I’ll give you an example—and maybe just indulge me, and you can walk me through the process. I’m the listener. You’re the singer. When I read the book title, of course, I immediately thought of your 2013 album—

Case: Yes.

Rosin: —The Worst Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, for obvious reasons. Because of the song “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” which has run in my head for 10 years—

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —which starts with the kid at the bus stop, and then the perspective is quickly shifting, so it’s hard to keep up with who’s the you and who’s the me.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then that kind of devastating line about, “My mother, she did not love me.”

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: In your mind, is that line related to the book in any way?

Case: Well, that song was a real event. I was really at a bus stop in Honolulu, fleeing Hawaii. And I saw it happen, and I just felt so helpless.

Rosin: You felt helpless to protect the kid?

Case: Yeah. But the kid, also, was being very resilient, and she was entertaining herself. She was very spunky and cute. And her mom was just an asshole.

Rosin: I mean, reading your book, I did think, Oh that line resonated with Neko for a reason, because of struggles with your own mother. Do you mean for people to read the memoir that way?

Case: Well, I mean, I told the story. I just—I’ve never written a book before, and I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I wanted to write fiction, but it was at the height of the pandemic, and Hachette said, We’ll pay you to write a memoir, though. And I was like, Okay. A memoir it is. And that’s not a complaint or, you know, they didn’t hold my heels to the fire or anything. I just thought, Okay, well, it’ll just be a little challenging, because, you know, talking about yourself or writing about yourself to yourself isn’t the most exciting thing ever.

You spend a lot of time with yourself. So I don’t think of myself as like, Oh people are really going to want to know this. So I mean, that’s one of the reasons I tried to pick more interesting stories from childhood that were scenes, maybe, of good things, too, because I didn’t want it to just be, Oh poor me, especially because it’s not unusual. It’s most people’s experience.

I mean, my situation with my mother is pretty bizarre. But neglect or abuse or things like that—those are most people’s experiences. Or growing up really poor—that is most people.

Rosin: I think your experience is actually pretty unusual.

Case: Yeah. It’s pretty damn weird.

[Music]

Rosin: “Pretty damn weird” it is.

When Case was in second grade, her father told her that her mother had died of cancer, which was surprising because Case didn’t even realize she was sick. And then a year and a half later, her dad said to her one day: I don’t want you to think your mom’s a ghost, but she came home.

As Case recalls in her memoir, the story was that her mother had had terminal cancer and gone to Hawaii to recover but didn’t want Case to see her so ill. And Case—who, remember, was a little kid—believed her. She had her mom back. She was happy.

It only occurred to her later—after many, many years and another disappearing act from her mother—that she might never have been sick in the first place.

Rosin: It’s one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever heard. I mean, it is a little shocking and hard to forget. And I’m not sure if you knew that or recognized it in that way.

Case: I didn’t know that until I was in my early 20s, and I told somebody I knew that my mom faked her death. And then they were like, That’s the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, and I was like, Oh yeah. That is actually pretty weird, isn’t it? But you know kids. Kids just think what’s happening to them is what happens. So it didn’t occur to me.

Rosin: So where did it register for you? Because now I see that what I am assuming about that song isn’t actually how you move through the process. I just assumed you had that in your head when you wrote the lyrics, “She did not love me.”

Because that lyric is haunting, even the way you sing it and the pacing of it. I just assumed you had that in your head, but maybe you didn’t. Maybe you just had it in your subconscious somewhere.

Case: It’s in me all the time. And, you know, it’s just not my fault.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Case: She didn’t love me. And it’s just the fact.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: When you work out memories and pains in song, is cathartic a banal word to use here? Does it do something for you to work it out and learn?

Case: Only in a super-nerdy, kind of neurodivergent-slash-Virgo way where I’m like, Oh! I’m taking all the things, and I’m organizing them in this box. And so now I can put this box over here like a hard drive, so my brain has more room in it. And it’s all color-coded, and I know where it is. That’s, like, Virgo organization.

Rosin: Interesting.

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Because I feel like one glib way to read a memoir like this is, Oh from family trauma and a mother who didn’t love you comes immense creativity. How wonderful! What’s wrong or right about that interpretation?

Case: Well, the mythology of people needing to suffer to make beautiful things or just art or creative things, in general, is not true.

Rosin: You mean they don’t need to suffer? Because it feels like, reading this book, your suffering is related to how you think and work through things and organize things.

Case: No. If I had had a supportive upbringing, I would be able to read music and play instruments and would probably be a lot further along. You don’t need that.

Rosin: So to you, it just feels like pure baggage. It’s, like, a thing you’ve had to tolerate, but you could have been a singer some other way.

Case: Oh it’s an absolute trunk of shit.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Case: The things that I admire about myself are despite those things. You know, like, I still am a trusting person. I still really want to see the good in people, and sometimes I will make mistakes and trust people I shouldn’t. And I could beat myself up about that, or I could just go, No. You still want to believe people are good. And I think that’s a more important quality than whether or not you’re wily enough to spot a jerk a mile away—you know what I mean?

Rosin: Yeah, I was more thinking, like, you had this life, and you had to escape this life and find your family elsewhere, and you had a huge, strong motivation to do that, and so you found music.

Case: Yes.

Rosin: But that’s just another way of saying trauma made you a great musician.

Case: No. Music is the only thing that never let me down. But trauma did not make me a great musician. I am a journeyman, at best, and, you know, I’m broke. I don’t know—I think great musicians do other things.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wait. Did you just say you were broke?

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Do you mean financially broke or personally broke?

Case: Financially broke.

Rosin: Really? How is that possible? I think your fans would be shocked.

Case: The confluence of my house burning down, COVID, and streaming—those three things together.

Rosin: Wow.

Case: And I cannot catch up.

[Music]

Rosin: When we come back—more with Neko Case on politics, on forgiveness, and a recent experience with a friend’s death that she said felt like getting on the spaceship to go to the moon.

Case:  I felt absolutely unafraid. And I was seeing an actual moment of grace in life, and I couldn’t believe it.

Rosin: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: I wanted to ask you about gender, because the way you write and sing about gender is very much the way a lot of people talk about gender now. And I’m curious how you have watched the evolution of how people inhabit and think about gender, like in your lyrics to “Man”—

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —you don’t mean that literally. What do you mean by “I’m a man”?

Case: I do mean it literally.

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Case: I mean, I am of the species. I am a man. Like, whatever’s going on downstairs doesn’t matter. I have all my faculties. You can call a female or a male lion a lion, and they’re still a lion. I’m a man in that same way.

And I am so thrilled and proud and excited by generations younger than mine who are not backing down from who they think they are and the idea that they get to be who they are. That has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever witnessed, and it has given me so much more insight into myself because I never felt like a girl or totally a guy. I’m more of a gender-fluid person.

Rosin: And when you say it’s taught you so much about yourself, what do you mean? Because in the book, there is one way in which you very much inhabit the experience of a woman of that generation, just at the hands of careless and arrogant and brutal men, like a teacher, older brothers, fellow musicians. And then there’s a sense, I imagine, of being trapped in that.

So what have you learned about yourself in this era of gender fluidity? How do you think about yourself?

Case: As neither. I am neither. I still call myself she/her. I’m used to it. It doesn’t bother me. And partly because the world hates women so much, I will not abandon it. I just won’t. But I also understand that the world hates gender-fluid people and trans people, LGBTQ people, and I understand the importance of not abandoning that, either.

Rosin: So you see the world as making some cultural progress and how we think of what’s a man and what’s a woman in some corners, but not a lot of progress politically or socially.

Case: Politically, we are fucked. Socially, I don’t think what the president and his people represent, represents the American people. I don’t believe that Americans, in general, have a hatred or a problem with people who are not white, who are LGBTQ, who are immigrants. I just don’t think they do.

Rosin: To shift away from politics, since we get a lot of it over here in D.C., although this is related, the thing—

Case: Well, I mean, a human being’s right to be is—I mean, that’s just everyday life. Like, politics and everyday life just—they just aren’t separate, not that I want to talk about politics, specifically. Because I just refuse to be afraid.

Rosin: Do you feel like that’s something you found at this age? Because you’ve said there are times in your life where you haven’t had self-confidence, you’ve been depressed, or you’ve kind of lost your mind, even, in one section of the book. Is it easier to not be afraid now?

Case: Well, I have really benefited from menopause. And a lot of people who menstruate who don’t anymore have said the same things about, you know, the hormone shift. Like, you don’t care anymore what people think of you.

And also, I just came from seeing one of my best friends die. And sitting with her body for four days as—you know, she was an organ donor, and she had a massive aneurysm. And her partner just heroically did CPR, and then the paramedics came and kept her pulse going and got her to the hospital, and they stabilized her, despite the fact that she had no brain activity.

And you cannot be an organ donor unless you die on a respirator in the hospital. Like, it’s very, very specific. And then you have to wait for all the tests. There are barrages of tests that happened to make sure that you’re healthy and that your organs can really save someone else’s life and not be rejected. And so we spent days just with her and talking about her life and what a selfless person she was. And we joked a lot about how she was going to work, even in death. She was all about service.

And then the day came. Right on the way to the OR, what they do is they do a thing called an “honor walk.” And we went down what seemed like miles of corridors behind her hospital bed, behind the doctors. And the corridors were lined with doctors and nurses and hospital staff honoring her. And it seemed like one of those movies where you see the people going down the corridor in slow motion to get into the spaceship to go to the moon or whatever, and everyone’s saluting them, and it seems so important. And I think I actually saw that in real life.

And I just thought, All those things that I worry about and the injustices—we are so right to fight for them. And I was there watching this incredible thing happen, and these beautiful people from all over the world—many of the doctors are immigrants—and it was a mix of people of all colors from all over the world and all different cultures. And I felt so utterly galvanized against the fear and so utterly galvanized in that joy is the way forward.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Case: Loud-ass, exuberant joy.

Rosin: I mean, one of the things I took most from your book is how you write about forgiveness. It’s related to this. I mean, you definitely acknowledge the beauty of forgiveness, but then you say this other thing, and you could read this in a lot of different ways, which is the “trust your contempt” paragraph. Do you remember that? You don’t have the book in front of you, right?

Case: I don’t. But I do talk about this, occasionally.

Rosin: Yeah. Dissect it if you can. If something doesn’t stir anything but contempt in you, then there’s a reason. Don’t canonize your contempt, but don’t ignore it.

This is the part that I love. It’s so good: “Sometimes bad things are just senseless brutality that finds you. You do not deserve or ask for these things. They are not always teaching you a lesson.”

Where would you say you are—you know, you have a lifetime of songs; you have this memoir; it sounds like you have friends—on this path? Is it different for different people? Like, forgiving members of your family, people who have hurt you in the past?

Case: Oh yeah. I mean, relationships with people are all very different, and some are very complicated, and some are not.

Rosin: So you would say you’re at different places with different people?

Case: Oh yeah.

Rosin: What about your dad? I was curious about him because he plays a kind of shadow role in the book, not quite with the extravagant cruelty of your mother. Maybe neglectful—maybe—is the right way to read that.

Case: I have a lot of compassion for my dad and a lot of sadness because I feel like his development was arrested completely. And he had to be an adult man and head of the family and all these things, and he was just a kid inside. And he didn’t know how to handle it. He maintained it with drugs and drinking for a long time, but then it catches up with you.

And the kind of pain from that—he didn’t use what happened to him to manipulate anyone. His forward path was genuine. He wasn’t doing a great job, but he was also a 19-year-old kid when he had me. And he didn’t want me, but he ended up with me.

Rosin: Yeah. And ended up raising you.

Case: Not really.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. Ended up housing you under the same roof.

Case: Sometimes.

Rosin: Sometimes. Yeah, there was that moment when you guys reconnect over a car. You speak car talk with each other—

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: —which is very familiar to me. I come from a family of mechanics and car people. And so I found that very peaceful. It was a tiny second of peace in a very rocky journey.

Case: Yeah, it was nice because when I was a little girl, I would have loved to have had him show me how to do things, because he was always fixing the car or the truck or whatever, and it would have been nice to have been included. I mean, when I was a kid, I thought he wanted a boy, and I thought he was really disappointed. But he just didn’t want any kid.

Rosin: You know, I’ve just been nonstop listening to your music to prepare to talk to you and sort of tuning into the different moods of different albums. And I wonder, from you: What’s the song you wrote when you were happiest? Or even when you listen to it now, it makes you happy. Like, it just makes you feel good.

Case: Probably “Hold On, Hold On.” It’s melancholy, but it feels very much like I am in charge of myself. And I make good decisions in it.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: So it’s, like, a song that makes you feel like all of this pain and trauma—like you can handle it.

Case: Partially. It’s a moment of actually seeing yourself clearly. It doesn’t mean the moment’s going to last.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Case: I think I also partly feel that way because I wrote it with the Sadies, and I have such a loving relationship with them. And it’s always made me feel good to play it. And my dear friend Dallas Good passed away a couple of years ago, way too young. And so now it takes on a new sort of heaviness, but it’s a heaviness that feels good to carry somehow.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Thanks again to my guest, Neko Case.

[Music]

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Genevieve Finn fact-checked.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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.

The following contains spoilers for some of the episodes mentioned.

Recently, I tasked seven Atlantic writers and editors with selecting a perfect episode of TV. What emerged was a list that spans genres, generations, and cultural sensibilities. Their recommendations, which include the Veep episode “C**tgate” and a SpongeBob episode that examines “the empty promise of the good life,” are proof that identifying good TV is, at its core, a gut instinct. A perfect episode must find a way to burrow itself in the viewer’s mind, ready to be recalled in today’s crowded field of television.

When I posed the same challenge to The Daily’s readers earlier this week, I was met with enthusiasm and exasperation. “This is an impossible question,” Eden wrote back. “It’s like asking for the perfect song, the perfect movie, or the perfect book.” That being said, “I can think of five off the top of my head!”

Eden’s list includes “Forks” from The Bear, “Through the Looking Glass” from Lost, “The Suitcase” from Mad Men, and “Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us. And that doesn’t even cover “Friday Night Lights, or The Wire, or Insecure, or Derry Girls, or The Sopranos, or The Wonder Years, or My Brilliant Friend, or Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Eden added. I can sympathize—the breadth of options is dizzying.

Maybe some criteria would help. Our culture writer Sophie Gilbert wrote that “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.” Radio Atlantic’s podcast host, Hanna Rosin, argued that, “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.” And Suzanne, 59, offered her own formula: “The script must be: (1) tense or funny; (2) warm and loving to the viewers, performers, and crew; and (3) move the overall story forward.”

Of course, the benchmarks for what makes an episode perfect are as subjective and varied as viewers’ selections. But a thorough analysis of The Daily’s reader responses has uncovered some patterns. At least five people named a West Wing episode: Two readers nominated “Two Cathedrals,” which shows “the effects of death on time,” wrote David, from Chicago; L. Hawkins, 70, recommends “Noel,” adding that viewers should “listen for the sirens as the episode fades out.”

“Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us was mentioned by both Eden and Bob—it offers “a lesson that love may find you at any time, any place, and under the most unexpected circumstances,” Bob wrote. Two readers agreed with Atlantic film critic David Sims, who insisted in our recent roundup that “the richest cache [of perfect episodes] to search is the ‘case of the week’ entries of The X-Files.” Lisa, 47, wrote that she was thrilled to see “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” in our list (she also recommends the series finale of Derry Girls).

Other readers highlighted examples of good comedy. In only 22 minutes, “Remedial Chaos Theory” from Community “tells seven different stories, with each timeline building on the last,” E.F., 46, wrote. “The Ski Lodge” from Frasier stands out to Bruce, 52, who said that the episode is “riddled with quotable laugh-out-loud lines.” And L.M., 61, laughed until she cried watching a loopy Steve Martin in Only Murders in the Building’s “Open and Shut.”

For some, a perfect episode tells a story that reverberates throughout their life. Sharon, from California, wrote about an episode she remembers watching on Hallmark Hall of Fame, which follows a grief-stricken child who reads a story about magical silver shoes. To his astonishment, he finds skates that look identical, which he puts on to go skating in hopes of bringing back his dead parent. “As life went on and I became the mother of a child who lost his father in childhood, I’ve recalled the episode more than once,” Sharon wrote. “Now, at 80 years old, it still breaks my heart.”

Related:

Eight perfect episodes of TV The 13 best TV shows of 2024

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler The last days of American orange juice America’s “marriage material” shortage

The Week Ahead

Captain America: Brave New World, a Marvel action movie starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford (in theaters Friday) Season 3 of Yellowjackets, a thriller series about a girls’ soccer team whose plane crash-lands in the wilderness (premieres on Paramount+ Friday) Beartooth, a novel by Callan Wink about two brothers near Yellowstone who agree to commit a heist to settle their debts (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic

ADHD’s Sobering Life-Expectancy Numbers

By Yasmin Tayag

When I was unexpectedly diagnosed with ADHD last year, it turned my entire identity upside down. At 37, I’d tamed my restlessness and fiery temper, my obsessive reorganization of my mental to-do list, and my tendency to write and rewrite the same sentence for hours. Being this way was exhausting, but that was just who I was, or so I thought. My diagnosis reframed these quirks as symptoms of illness—importantly, ones that could be managed. Treatment corralled my racing thoughts in a way that I’d never before experienced.

Read the full article.

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Catch Up on The Atlantic

The government’s computing experts say they are terrified. Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago. Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play, Russell Berman writes. How Trump lost his trade war

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Take a look at these photos of Maha Kumbh Mela, a religious festival in India that’s also the largest gathering in the world.

P.S.

I realize it’d be a bit unfair to make everybody else share their perfect episode without naming mine: the series finale of Fleabag. There are many good things I can point out about this episode—Claire’s mad dash to happiness, Fleabag’s final confession, the Alabama Shakes song that plays over the show’s last moments. But above all else, it moved me, reminding me that love can outlast the person who prompted it.

— Stephanie

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

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Sometime on Tuesday evening, the USAID website was taken down and replaced with what looked like a beta page from the internet of the 1990s. There were no affecting photos of American government officials distributing food and medicine overseas. Instead, a box of text explained that nearly all USAID personnel would be placed on administrative leave, globally. With administrative assistance from Elon Musk, President Donald Trump seems to have wiped out the world’s largest donor agency in just a few days. It was a radical act, but maybe not as politically risky, in the domestic sense, as other plans in the grand project of dismantling the federal government. USAID has important beneficiaries, but most of them are not Americans and live overseas.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we discuss where Trump and Musk seem to be headed and the obstacles they are likely to encounter in the future. What happens when Trump starts to face challenges from courts? What happens when Musk goes after programs that Americans depend on, particularly those who voted for Trump? What new political alliances might emerge from the wreckage? We talk with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics. And we also talk with Shane Harris, who covers national security, about Trump’s campaign to purge the FBI of agents who worked on cases related to the insurrection at the Capitol.

“I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends,” Harris says. “I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Today is the deadline for some two million federal employees to decide if they want to type resign in response to the now infamous “Fork in the Road” email. The email, of course, is one in a list of things that Elon Musk, empowered by President Trump, has been doing in order to “disrupt” the federal government.

Donald Trump: We’re trying to shrink government. And he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better.

Rosin: For example: gain access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system—

News anchor: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly granting Elon Musk’s DOGE team access to the federal government’s payment system, which handles trillions of dollars in payments.

Rosin: —dismantle USAID, of which Trump is not a fan—

Trump: And we’re getting them out. USAID—run by radical lunatics.

Rosin: —and neither is Musk.

Elon Musk: If you’ve got an apple, and it’s got a worm in it, maybe you can take the worm out. But if you’ve got actually just a ball of worms, it’s hopeless. And USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple, you’ve just got to basically get rid of the whole thing.

Rosin: All of these efforts are unusual, maybe even unprecedented, norm-breaking—even for Trump. But are they unconstitutional? And could they fundamentally change the character of the country?

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

[Music]

News anchor: At the FBI, some agents have started to pack up their desks as fears of mass firings grow.

Rosin: In the second half of the show, we’re going to focus on a special case inside the government, which presents a different set of potentially history-changing problems—the FBI—with staff writer Shane Harris.

But first, we are going to discuss what’s at stake, more broadly in this overhaul, with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics for The Atlantic.

[Music]

Rosin: Jon, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Chait: Thank you, Hanna. I’m delighted to be here.

Rosin: So, Jon, of all the unorthodox things that Trump has authorized Elon Musk to do with the federal government, which one strikes you as pushing constitutional limits the most?

Chait: Attempting to eliminate or cut spending for agencies that have been authorized by Congress. This is just a totally revolutionary step in terms of the structure of our government. And it’s kind of shocking, to me, how far he’s been able to go, and how much permission he’s received from the Republican Party.

Rosin: And is there another time in history when a president tested this limit between what Congress authorizes and what the president can do with that? And how has it worked out in the past?

Chait: That’s a great question. You had a struggle with Andrew Jackson over the Bank of the United States. That was a real constitutional struggle between him and his enemies as to how much power the president had vis-à-vis Congress and whether the president had just total authority to do what he wished. And Andrew Jackson was sort of known for pushing the boundaries of the office to or past their limits, and saying if the Supreme Court ruled against him, he would just do what he wanted, anyway. He did the same thing with his attempts to ethnically cleanse Native Americans to take their land. He just fundamentally didn’t care if he had authority from Congress.

That’s the kind of struggle we’re, I think, heading into right now. And Richard Nixon tried a smaller version, I think, of what Trump is doing now. He basically said, Congress has authorized certain kinds of spending, and I’m just going to impound it. But the Supreme Court ruled against him, and Congress passed the Impoundment [Control] Act that formalized the fact that Congress has this authority, and the president doesn’t, and if Congress authorizes spending, with very limited exceptions, the president has to carry it out. And if the president objects to certain forms of spending that Congress enacted, he has to persuade Congress to pass a law to change it.

Rosin: Got it. Okay. So that’s the line we’re working with. So it’s the Impoundment Act. It’s been defined by the Supreme Court. Can we talk about examples of, say, how far an administration can go in resisting a previous administration’s policies, but not pushing against this constitutional line? What would be something we’ve seen before? And what would prompt what people would refer to as, say, a legal or constitutional crisis?

Chait: Just in the big picture, the executive branch has been asserting more and more authority, over decades, as Congress has gotten more and more dysfunctional. The use of the filibuster has risen. Congress has gotten less and less able to fulfill its constitutional obligation to really direct national policy the way the Constitution imagined it. And so the executive branch has really kind of filled in this gap in a lot of ways. So you’ve seen presidents of both parties creatively exerting their authority.

You had Trump doing this with immigration, where he, you could say, couldn’t or just barely even tried to get Congress to fund the wall that he wanted. So he just basically redirected funding from the Pentagon to the border by calling it an emergency. And Trump is doing the same thing with tariffs.

Now, Congress basically ceded the president emergency authority to declare tariffs for various national-security emergencies, thinking that this would just be used in the case of something like a war or an international conflict, but it let the president decide what an emergency is. And so Trump can just say, well, an emergency is whatever he wants, and that’s on Congress.

And Biden has kind of pushed the limit in a lot of ways, I think most controversially with student loan forgiveness, where the executive branch has control over student loans, and so Biden just kind of forgave those loans on a kind of sweeping basis. Now, he was challenged legally. But when you’re in power, your party has a pretty strong incentive to interpret executive power in the most sweeping way.

So there’s a way in which both parties have really been engaged in this, but I really think what Trump and Musk are doing now has totally breached the walls of normal and is just turning the Constitution into a farce.

Rosin: Okay. So the reason that’s true is mostly because of appropriations? Because from what you’ve said, presidents are pushing this line constantly. So what are they doing that doesn’t just break norms or traditions, but actually is pushing into constitutional crisis?

Chait: Article I of the Constitution, which is really just, like, the guts of the Constitution, says that Congress has authority over spending.

So Congress establishes an agency. Congress sets its spending levels. And throughout our history, with the exception we’ve described for Nixon, which was slapped down, the presidents have to follow that because that’s the law, right? Now, the president has a role in that. The president can veto some of these laws. If Congress proposes spending that the president doesn’t want, the president can veto it, and then Congress can override it, or Congress can make a deal with him. But whatever emerges from that is the law, and the president has to follow the law.

Rosin: Okay. And does the Trump team have any creative arguments for how to get around this Impoundment Act?

Chait: So far, Elon Musk is just operating in this totally chaotic legal gray zone. So his first target has been the United States Agency for International Development. And one thing they’ve made this argument is that, Well, that was just established by an executive order by the president, John F. Kennedy, 1961, so it can be ended by an executive order. The problem is: After it was established by executive rule, it was later established by Congress. Congress voted to make the United States Agency for International Development an agency.

So after Congress established the United States Agency for International Development, it had the force of law. And so saying, We’re going to eliminate this agency, is just a violation of the law. It’s pretty simple.

Rosin: Okay. I can see the argument. So can we play out both scenarios? The first scenario is: The courts push back on Trump. You know, they enforce the Impoundment Act. They say, You cannot do this. You can’t end USAID. Elon Musk has to stop roaming around the federal government and making these decisions that violate this constitutional balance of power. What happens then? Does it call Trump’s bluff?

Chait: It might, but I wouldn’t count on it, for a couple reasons. Number one: Musk is moving much faster than the legal system can move. And it’s a lot easier to destroy something than it is to build something. So once you’ve basically told everyone they’re fired, and they can’t come to work, they can sit and wait for the courts to countermand that while they’re losing their income and their mortgage is going under, or they could just go find another job somewhere.

Rosin: I see. So it’s just, like, facts on the ground change, so that even if the legal reality doesn’t budge, you’ve already disintegrated the actual infrastructure.

Chait: You lose the institutional culture. You lose the accumulated expertise. And by the time the courts have stepped in, rebuilding it is difficult to do, even if the president wanted to. And obviously, they’re not going to want to anyway. Second of all, it’s not totally clear that they’re going to follow the law, that the law has any power over them.

I mean, remember: Donald Trump established on the first day of his administration that he believes that people who break the law on his behalf can get away with it when he pardoned the entire—or commuted the sentences of the entire—insurrectionists, right?

Rosin: Yeah.

Chait: So Elon Musk knows full well that if he violates the law, Trump is going to have his back. So I think that’s also shaping the behavior of everyone involved in this episode.

Rosin: Right. So it sounds like you pretty strongly believe there is no brake to this. b-r-a-k-e. There is no stop to this. I was thinking that maybe the courts or something to, you know, put some hope in to stop this. But it sounds like no.

Chait: Well, in the long run, the courts can have an effect by saying, You don’t have the authority to eliminate this agency. It still exists, meaning that when the Democrats win back the presidency, if that ever happens, it’ll still be there, and then they can actually rebuild it.

Rosin: So in other words, in that scenario, there’s temporary dismantling, but the balance of powers remains in place, is affirmed by the courts, and things get slowly rebuilt.

Chait: Right. Although, you know, you’ve lost all your talent, you’ve lost your institutional memory, and then you’re probably rebuilding this agency from scratch.

And keep in mind, USAID is just the test case. I think they’re just picking on the most politically vulnerable agency. It deals with foreign aid, right? So most of the people affected by this right now are mostly living in other countries, who won’t get, you know, drinking water and food. And people are going to starve and die of diseases, but they’re not going to be Americans. They can’t vote, so they’re politically weak and vulnerable.

So that’s the target that they’ve picked to establish this principle that the presidency can pick and choose what spending is real and what isn’t. So then they’re going to start to go on to do domestic targets. But then, I think, once they’ve started attacking domestic targets, then they’re going to start dealing with political blowback in a way they’re not facing when they’re going after foreign aid.

Rosin: I see. So that’s a different political—so if that starts to happen, if we enter a period where you have people who have stake in this in the U.S., can you see any interesting alliances that could come out of that moment?

Chait: It’s really hard to see where they’re going, because Elon Musk is not proceeding from an accurate map of reality.

So to just explain what I mean by that, he said that he wants to cut—first he said—$2 trillion from the fiscal-year budget, from one year. Then he revised it down to $1 trillion. So right away, you know, when you’re just picking these random round numbers, you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about. But he said, like, basically, there’s a trillion dollars in just, you know, waste and improper payments—and there just isn’t. There’s nothing close to that by even the most expansive possible definition. So Musk thinks he’s going to just go through the budget and find waste, and just kill it and add up to a trillion dollars. And he’s obviously not.

So the question is: What happens when his fantasy starts to run into reality? Does he start to just attack social-welfare programs and end payments of food stamps and Medicaid reimbursements and programs like that to people? Does he realize that he didn’t know what he was talking about and he’s in way over his head? We don’t know how it’s going to go, but I think that is the question you’ve got to answer before you start to figure out what the politics look like.

Rosin: Right. And there’s also military budgets. Like, if you think where the giant spending is, you’re running up against budgets that will face a huge amount of resistance if you slash them in the way that he’s slashed other things.

Chait: Right. Yeah. If they start going after the Pentagon, I think you, obviously, cut pretty deeply into the Republican coalition pretty fast. I even think they’re probably starting to accumulate small amounts of domestic political targets with USAID, right? They cut off funding to a Lutheran charity, but, you know, those are midwestern religious conservatives who are operating those programs who are being targeted. Now, most of the money is going overseas, but you’re still hurting people in the United States of America. And I think that pain is going to start to spread more widely if they keep going.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so you’re describing a realistic scenario in which this whole operation does encounter resistance. There are many policy researchers—on the left, even—who have argued that the government does, in fact, need an overhaul and, more specifically, isn’t equipped for a digital age. Is there a chance that in all of this, you know, Elon Musk could usher in a more efficient, tech-friendly kind of government?

Chait: Yeah, well, that was the initial hope that some people who specialize in government reform were hoping for. Jennifer Pahlka is an expert in what’s called “state capacity,” which is just the ability of government to function and to bridge the gap between its ambitions and its actual ability to meet those ambitions.

And part of that is fixing the way government hires and fires people.

But the problem is: Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be interested in that in any way whatsoever. He’s just holed up with a bunch of engineers who don’t seem to have any expertise in government or state capacity whatsoever. And they’re just finding programs that people within this kind of right-wing bubble in which he resides think sound radical and just, you know, saying, Delete it! Delete it! and getting cheers on social media for it.

It’s just so completely haphazard. There doesn’t seem to be any interest in actually making the government, you know, operate better.

Rosin: Yeah. And I suppose Twitter did not become a better, more profitable, you know, smoother-functioning company after Elon Musk took it over. It just became a kind of tool of the culture war—like, an effective tool of the culture war.

Chait: Right. It became smaller, less profitable—jankier, but more conservative.

Rosin: Right, okay. All right. One final thing. So project far into the future. Let’s say that your blowback scenario is real. What political alliances can you see reforming? Like, if you had to predict a political realignment some years down the road that includes a reaction to everything that’s going on now, what does it look like?

Chait: Well, the Trump coalition has really been built on winning multiracial, working-class voters back from the Democrats—and those voters are disproportionately to the right on social policy—and they’ve exploited some of those progressive stances on social policy that the Democratic Party has adopted over the last decade, but they’re still relatively to the left on economics. Maybe they don’t believe in government, in the abstract, but in the specific, they really rely on programs, like nutritional aid and Medicaid, Obamacare.

And every time the Republicans have gone after those programs, their coalition has splintered. That was really a major element in killing George W. Bush during his second term. He decided to privatize social security, and that was a major cause of the decline of his popularity that made him politically toxic, along with the Iraq War and Katrina, social security privatization.

You know, you could see a version of that happening with Trump, but I wouldn’t take for granted that it’ll play out that way because we live in a different world in a lot of ways.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Jonathan Chait.

After the break: Donald Trump also has his eyes set on the FBI. We hear from The Atlantic’s Shane Harris about what that might mean.

[Break]

Rosin: Shane, welcome to the show.

Shane Harris: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Sure. So the president asked the FBI to turn over the names of every agent who worked on the Capitol riots. What do you read into that request?

Harris: Well, I think you don’t even have to read that closely between the lines. You can just read the lines as they were sent in the order that we now have seen publicly, that went from the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, of course, who had been one of Donald Trump’s lawyers as a private citizen, telling the acting director for the FBI, Look—we want the names of these people because they believe in the words that he has put, that they can no longer have trust that these FBI employees will implement the president’s agenda faithfully.

So what they are saying is that these are individuals who they don’t think are on board with Trump administration policies. And then of course, you know, we can do a little bit of inference, which is, you know, why would he go after the people who investigated January 6 and his role in it? Which was, by the way, the biggest FBI investigation in the country’s history. You know, these are the agents who interviewed and ultimately gave evidence that created the charges for the Capitol rioters—who were sent to prison, who Trump then later pardoned and who are now free—who investigated his own activity around January 6 and efforts to impede the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration.

So these are the FBI agents who did that case. And you know, what Trump is making very clear here is that, you know, he wants to identify them. He doesn’t trust them. He doesn’t trust the leadership that oversees them, and either wants them removed or moved, or we’ll see what the disciplinary action is. But some of them, he’s actually said he wants them fired immediately. He’s made pretty clear how he feels about these people and why he’s going after them, I think.

Rosin: Now, that must have landed in a very particular way at the FBI. You know the agency better than I do. As far as I understand it, I mean, you are assigned a case; you work on that case. So how have leaders in the agency responded to that request?

Harris: I think it’s been really interesting. I mean, there’s been this mixture from people I’ve talked to of: On one level, people are not surprised that Donald Trump went after FBI personnel, because it was expected that he would go after senior-leadership-level type people. I mean, he had essentially pushed out the FBI director, Christopher Wray, who—remember—became the FBI director when Donald Trump fired the previous FBI director, James Comey, in his first term.

But people were genuinely stunned by the scope of this demand to know the names of all of these agents who worked J6—and then there’s one other related case—because it’s, you know, potentially 4,000 to maybe even 6,000 personnel if you’re taking in FBI agents, analysts, people who play a support role.

But then something really fascinating has happened: There has been this—I hesitate to say the word defiant—but there are senior leaders at the FBI, including the person who is serving as the acting director right now, who essentially are saying, No, you cannot just fire agents for this reason, for no real cause. These people have protections under civil-service rules. They have due-process rights. And what’s more, some of the advocates for these folks are saying, Look—you can just read the plain language of the order that I just read to you and see that this is a retaliatory response, that what the president is doing is going after people because he doesn’t like their opinions or what they did.

As you pointed out, these thousands of agents didn’t pick to be on the case. I mean, it’s not like they raised their hand and said, Yes, please. I would like to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. They were assigned these cases. So the leadership has actually really kind of dug in here, some of them, and essentially is saying, There’s a process for this. This isn’t fair.

Now, we’ll see how long they can resist the White House on this, but we’re seeing some real institutional pushback from the FBI, which personally, I think, is encouraging.

Rosin: I want to get more into the pushback, but I’m curious what we know about this group of agents. There’s a few thousand. Because, yes, I followed the January 6 cases. I know that it was the biggest investigation in history, but who are they? Like, if you think about losing these 4,000, is why I’m asking, what’s their expertise, and what do they generally do?

Harris: If we take that group of the J6 investigators, the agents themselves, these could be people who were pulled in from all over the country. So this could include agents that were investigating national-security-related matters, counterterrorism matters, transnational crime, narcotics. The universe of these agents, as you know, was so big because the case was so big and demanding.

Trump, though, has zeroed in, more particularly, on some individuals, including some very senior-level officials that have the title of executive assistant director, and he actually named some of these in this order. And those people were involved in things like, for instance, the Mar-a-Lago investigation, when Donald Trump took classified documents from the White House and stored them at his estate in Florida—offenses for which he was later charged under the Espionage Act.

Some of these people—one of them was the special agent in charge of the Miami Field Office, which participated in the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Others had supervisory and leadership positions on intelligence and counterintelligence matters. It was a counterintelligence squad at the Washington Field Office in D.C. that handled the Mar-a-Lago case. So, you know, he understands that there are people who, individually, separate from J6, worked on the Mar-a-Lago case, as well, and those people are being singled out too.

Rosin: Right. I mean, there are two things here. One is, we’ve talked about this in terms of other agencies, like USAID, which is: What vast institutional knowledge would you lose? So these people worked on individual cases, but also, they have a lot of expertise in counterterrorism. They just must have a large, you know, body of knowledge and experience that you could lose.

Harris: Absolutely. So let’s just take, for instance, the squad at the Washington Field Office that did the Mar-a-Lago investigation. They work in the counterintelligence division of the FBI. So when those folks are not investigating, you know, Donald Trump’s removal of classified documents, they’re looking at things like spies operating inside the United States trying to maybe steal government secrets or recruit agents in the United States. They’re looking at people who might be mishandling classified information. They look at people who might be leaking to journalists as well.

These are folks who work on highly specialized counterintelligence cases. This isn’t just something that you, you know, kind of step into, and on day one, you know how to do it. These are different kinds of tradecraft. They’re very sensitive. These people all will have high-level security clearances. They will have been vetted for these jobs. So folks who are in positions like that, when you eliminate them, you know, it’s not entirely clear to me that there is just then, like, a backup bench of people who can come in to do these really important national-security cases.

And the same would go for anyone who’s working actively on counterterrorism, you know. I mean, Donald Trump has talked a lot about his concern that there are, you know, terrorists making their way inside the United States, taking advantage of, you know, weak border security or other ways of getting into the U.S. Well, it’s FBI agents who do counterterrorism cases that investigate things like that.

So if you’re suddenly moving people with this level of expertise off their jobs, or you are creating a real disruption and distraction while they’re trying to do their jobs, I think that arguably weakens national security, it creates vulnerabilities, and it distracts the FBI from doing its job, which is to go out and not just investigate crimes but to try and stop violent crimes and bad things from happening to Americans and to the U.S. government.

Rosin: Right. So you can see the future crisis. Like, you can project a future crisis where we are vulnerable to terrorism or something like that because we’ve lost a huge amount of this expertise.

Harris: I think that’s right. Yes. It doesn’t seem to me like he is thinking through the consequences of hobbling the FBI at this moment. What he is interested in is retribution. He’s interested in payback. And he is putting, you know, not only the country, but he’s putting his administration at grave political risk by doing that.

Rosin: Okay, Shane. Here’s something else that I was wondering about. Since when did the FBI come under so much suspicion from the right? I’ve always thought of the FBI as an agency conservatives can get behind, and Trump’s attacks feel like they upend all that. It’s confusing.

Harris: Oh definitely. And this has long been one of the more baffling aspects of Donald Trump’s critique of the FBI, as he’s painting them as this kind of leftist deep state.

I mean, the FBI—I’m speaking in general terms, of course, I mean—it is a generally conservative institution, both because I think that the people who work in it are often politically conservative or just sort of dispositionally conservative. It’s a law-enforcement agency. I mean, it does everything by the book. There are jokes in the FBI about how it takes, you know, five forms that you have to fill out before you can make a move on anything. It is a very hidebound, bureaucratic, small-C conservative organization. I mean, these are cops.

Rosin: Right. Right.

Harris: Okay? It’s a bunch of cops, right? This is like, if you want to think in generalities, like, you know, USAID is like, Oh, yeah, it’s people who want to get to charities, and they worked in the Peace Corps, and they’re all about humanitarian causes. And that, too, is kind of a broad brush.

But, you know, when I talk to people who have worked in the bureau, if you knew these people, these are not people who you would associate with progressive causes. That doesn’t mean that they are sort of reactionary right-wingers. I don’t want to make that impression either. They’re very much following the rule of law. It’s a conservative institution. It is very hidebound and steeped in tradition and in regulation.

And, you know, Trump just has this image of it as this out-of-control left organization. And he has persuaded large numbers of his followers and Americans that this is true. And I have to tell you, in the 20-plus years that I’ve covered national security, one of the most fascinating and bewildering trends that I have seen is this change in political positioning, where now, people who tend to be on the left, sort of—I don’t want to say revere the FBI and the intelligence agencies but—hold them up as models of institutions of government that we need to have faith and trust in, and they’re there to try and protect people. When it was a generation ago, people on the left who were deeply skeptical of the CIA and the FBI because these agencies were involved in flagrant abuses of civil rights and of the law in the 1950s and ’60s.

And now it’s people on the right who, particularly after 9/11, used to be so reflexively defensive of the CIA and the FBI and counterterrorism and Homeland Security, who now have sort of swapped political positions with the critique on the left that see these institutions as, you know, run through with dangerous, rogue bureaucrats who want to prosecute their political enemies. I mean, it’s just like the people have switched bodies.

Rosin: Let me ask you a broader question about this. As someone who’s been tracking Trump’s attempts to rewrite the history of January 6 for a while, I could say I was a little surprised by the blanket pardon of insurrectionists, maybe a little more surprised by this effort to go after the agents who investigated them. Because—and tell me if this is an exaggeration—to me, that could send a message to supporters: If you commit violence on my behalf, not only will you not get punished, but anyone who tries to go after you will be in trouble. Which, if I continue that logic, seems like, potentially, a blank check to commit violence on the president’s behalf. Is that paranoid?

Harris: No. It’s not. It’s not. That is, I think, one of the clear risks that we face with the president behaving in the way that he has. And I would take it one step further, which is to say: The message is that if you are an FBI agent, or maybe more to the point, an FBI leader, someone in a management position, there are certain things that you should just not look into and investigate.

And not to say, like, now that the president enjoys, you know, presumptive immunity for all official acts. I mean, who knows what the FBI is even going to investigate when it comes to Donald Trump. But how good would you feel being assigned a case to look into Elon Musk or, you know, Trump campaign donors who may have engaged in illegal activity or influence peddling, the whole universe of people connected to Trump?

What he is saying by pardoning these J6 rioters is that If you are on my side, I will come protect you. And I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends. I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.

The FBI is there to investigate crimes objectively, regardless of who may have committed them. And what the president is doing now is essentially saying there’s a whole category of people who, if not outright exempt, are people that are going to fall under his protection, and for the people who might dare to investigate them, there will be consequences.

Rosin: Well, Shane, thank you, but no thank you, for laying that out in such a clear and chilling way. I appreciate it.

Harris: My pleasure, Hanna. Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

There he was, running from his home in northern Gaza, one of his granddaughters in his arms, as bombs dropped. There he was again, now in the driver’s seat, shielding his face as a car in front of him exploded.

Marwan Bardawil, 61, a Palestinian engineer who has devoted his life to the management of water, recounted these and other episodes over months of conversations via phone and sometimes WhatsApp. It was with a sense of relief and almost disbelief that I finally laid eyes on him in person this past fall: lean and wiry in a gray suit, standing on the doorstep of a terraced Cairo apartment, backlit by the waning afternoon sun.

As an administrator—until recently, the head of the Gaza Program Coordination Unit of the Palestinian Water Authority—Bardawil has for 30 years had one main focus: the water system of the Gaza Strip. In cities around the world, an intricate lattice of pipes connects homes, businesses, and public facilities to sophisticated systems that deliver clean water and take away dirty water. Turn on a tap, and water flows. Flush a toilet, and water disappears. All of this is at once an engineering feat and a mundane luxury. But it was always precarious for the 2.2 million people crowded into Gaza’s 140 square miles. Now, after 15 months of war between Hamas and Israel, the water system in Gaza has gone from hardscrabble and tenuous to virtually nonexistent. The announcement last month of a cease-fire dangles the prospect of hope, though cease-fires are fragile. President Donald Trump’s proposal this week for a U.S. takeover of Gaza, the relocation of everyone living there, and the building of a “Riviera of the Middle East,” adds a bizarre and dangerous new variable.

[Read: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

Engineers in Gaza have no time for bluster and fantasy about the place they know as home. They must deal every day with the damage already done, knowing that it cannot easily be undone. For Gaza’s civilians, the half-life of war is long.

In Cairo, Bardawil gestured with a cigarette. “I don’t think that people … they are not interested in my personal difficulties and problems,” he said. “This will not make a value for anyone.” I had heard this sentiment from him before. No one wants another sad story from Gaza, he would say. He didn’t want to talk about politics. He wanted to stick to the “professional side”—that is, how Gazans get their water.

Bardawil is Gazan by birth and before the war had been living in a town named Rimal. It lies seven miles northwest of Kibbutz Be’eri, the Israeli community across the border where some 100 civilians were killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023; all told, the Hamas attacks that day took the lives of almost 1,200. On October 12, amid Israeli air strikes, Bardawil and his adult children and two young grandchildren fled their home. He said they’d made the decision to flee in an instant. “When you left, you left under the threat of losing your life, so you just jump out with what you wear.” The short journey from northern Gaza to a house in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, took days: It was safer to proceed on foot—cars are targets—and intense fighting often forced the family to shelter in place overnight along the way. Despite cellphone service that was frequently jammed, Bardawil remained in contact with his own staff and that of an independent partner, the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility. All of them were contending with the worst engineering crisis of their lives.

Bardawil’s managerial career began soon after the signing, in 1993, of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The agreement created the Palestinian Authority; under it, the Palestinian Water Authority was established to oversee water resources.

Bardawil had a degree in mechanical engineering and hydraulics, and had been teaching and working in Libya. The Oslo Accords drew him back to Gaza. He was an idealist who believed in the peace process, but he was also a technocrat who understood how to make pragmatic improvements. Bardawil and the water authority’s dozen other engineers in Gaza worked out of a hotel room at first. They made long-term and short-term plans, hopeful that “what we are doing on paper,” as he put it, would someday become real. In time, the water authority matured into a functional agency.

Illustration by Mel Haasch. Sources: Marwan Bardawil; AFP / Getty

And it made progress, despite severe obstacles. Gaza was poor and crowded, and its politics were unstable. Violence was part of the environment, and it came both from inside and outside. The PWA never enjoyed real autonomy. The Oslo Accords formalized the significant control over water that Israel had exercised since occupying the West Bank and Gaza after the Six-Day War, in 1967. The water authority had to operate according to Israeli regulations. Permits for new facilities needed Israeli approval. The relationship with Israel was never one of equals—Bardawil referred once to an omnipresent “umbrella of superiority”—but engineer to engineer, it more or less worked. Importantly, the Palestinians were able to leverage international help—from the European Union, Canada, the United Nations, Oxfam—in building new facilities.

The system they patched together had three components. The first depended on water purchased from Israel, which gets some of its own supply from the Coastal Aquifer Basin running beneath Gaza and extending far beyond. The water arrived through three separate connection points and accounted for about 10 percent of Gaza’s total supply. The second part of the system consisted of three large desalination plants positioned along the Mediterranean. Together, these solar-diesel hybrids—built with help from the EU and UNICEF—provided perhaps 7 percent of Gaza’s water. The rest of the water supply—more than 80 percent—came from groundwater accessed by hundreds of wells, some of them with pumping stations. Because of pollution, depletion, and seepage of water from the sea, the groundwater was of poor quality—brackish and salty, with a high level of chemicals. But it was accessible.

From these sources, the population of Gaza in normal times was able to utilize about 80 liters of water—roughly 21 gallons—per person a day, a third of the amount typically available to Israelis and about a quarter of the water available to the average American. Eighty liters is barely above what the World Health Organization considers to be a safe level. The people of Gaza made do.

Through it all—elections, intifadas, attacks—Gaza’s engineers kept the system running. For the most part, they did not involve themselves in politics. In 2006, Hamas wrested control of Gaza from Fatah, the secular party of the Palestinian Authority. (Fatah remains in power in the West Bank.) The engineers and civil servants stuck close to their expertise and tried to focus on maintaining a basic level of service, inadequate though it was.

Everything changed when Hamas breached Gaza’s fortified border with Israel on October 7. In addition to the large number killed, some 250 people were taken hostage. Israel responded with a military campaign—a sustained aerial bombardment and then a ground invasion. Gaza was placed under siege. On October 9, then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared: “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.”

[Read: The war that would not end]

Israel’s onslaught has taken the lives of tens of thousands of civilians—the exact number is hard to know and politically charged. The Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza has put the total number of civilian and militant deaths through January at about 47,000. It is a count that the United Nations has relied on and that the Israeli government has criticized as exaggerated. There has also been at least one independent attempt to capture the number of people killed. A peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet estimated the total number through last summer at a minimum of 55,000. Lethal force aside, Israel’s capabilities are significant. It can cut off or reduce the availability of outside water and electricity for Gaza. It can restrict fuel supplies and disrupt communications. Access to clean water has been among the gravest challenges. At the worst moments during the war, the average person in Gaza was getting a little less than a gallon of water a day.

The PWA engineers watched as the water system they’d created was torn apart. I began speaking with Bardawil, alongside my colleague Hanna Rosin, and those conversations became the basis for a podcast episode of Radio Atlantic. He described to me the wrenching experience of having to ration water for his own granddaughters. When we met in Cairo, he tried to sum up his feelings: “To see plans jump from paper to become realistic projects, and then to witness the destruction of these facilities, and how the people are impacted, is …” But he never finished the thought, shifting back to his “professional side.”

Also on October 9, the Israeli water company Mekorot shut off the supply flowing to Gaza through the three major junctions. Bardawil remembered the numbers falling: “One of the pipes goes down from 700 cubic meters per hour to zero. Other line—800 cubic meters per hour—goes to zero. The third one—1,400 cubic meters per hour—goes to zero.” It would take more than a week, and international pressure, before water from any of these connection points was restored, but never again would it flow at the original capacity.

Meanwhile, the vascular network of smaller pipes that bring water to homes and businesses, schools and hospitals—a network built over three decades—collapsed under Israeli bombardment. A grim pattern was established: Pipes would be destroyed, repaired, and then destroyed again. Communication between Gaza engineers and their Israeli counterparts went from perfunctory to disjointed. At times, the Israelis would unexpectedly open the taps, only for the water to reach the damaged tributary pipes and then gush wastefully into the sand or the streets.

Gaza’s three large desalination plants started to fail; the Israelis had halted deliveries of diesel fuel and solar components, fearing that Hamas would redirect both to military use. Gaza’s six sewage-treatment plants, which operate on diesel as well, also began to fail.

[Read: Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented]

In theory, the more than 80 percent of the water supply that comes from groundwater, by means of local wells, was less subject to disruption. But as the Israeli invasion continued and entire regions were leveled, roughly half of Gaza’s population was pushed from north to south; many people crowded into tent cities. The forced migration put groundwater sources in the north beyond reach while doubling the burden on resources in the south.

Those resources are vulnerable. In July, Israeli forces destroyed or damaged wells and other water-related sites across southern Gaza. An Israeli soldier posted a video on social media of the Israel Defense Forces fixing explosives to pipes at one of the wells, as well as footage of the well exploding. A caption read “in honor of Shabbat.”

The groundwater was by now heavily contaminated—a catastrophic consequence of the sewage plants’ failure, poor sanitation in the tent cities, and the onset of heavy rains. By summer, some 70 percent of what had been Gaza’s sewage system either didn’t work or no longer existed. So much sewage flowed uncollected that none of the systems could not keep up with the level of groundwater contamination.

As of August, Gaza had nearly 600,000 documented cases of acute diarrhea, a condition attributable to contaminated water. It had 40,000 cases of hepatitis A. And that month, a 10-month-old baby—paralyzed—tested positive for polio, the first confirmed case in Gaza in a quarter century.

Leaving Gaza had not been Bardawil’s intention, but his superior at the Palestinian Water Authority encouraged him to get out. He himself also realized it was time to go: Using Gaza as a base of operations was becoming too difficult and too dangerous. In April, Bardawil had been driving home from a water facility that needed repairs when the car in front of him blew up. Bardawil was wounded when shrapnel from the blast smashed his windshield. Weeks later, he left with his family, using an Egyptian company that specializes in facilitating the passage of Gazans into Egypt. (The price is $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child.) They joined the more than 100,000 other Gazans who have fled to Egypt. Bardawil’s job now is to coordinate with donor countries and international organizations. From Cairo, Bardawil looked back with resignation on the legacy of the past three decades: “All that we planned, all that we implemented, all that has been invested in—it’s totally gone.” It was as if his life, he said, had been “for nothing.”

But that wasn’t true. During nearly a year and a half of war, Bardawil and the other engineers had worked to salvage what they could. Part of the task involved reconfiguring pipelines and water mains—the conduits from Israel, from the desalination plants, from smaller facilities—so that water would follow the population as it moved south. Another part involved fixing the damage to pipes and wells caused by bombs and artillery. All of this was never-ending, often futile. Every day, every hour, was consumed by desperate acts of coordination and repair. Cellphones were unreliable. Attacks proved lethal. In June, an Israeli air strike on a building in Gaza City killed five municipal workers as they operated local wells. In October, four water engineers were killed when their car was bombed while they were on their way to make repairs near Khan Younis. According to Oxfam, their vehicle was marked and their movements had been coordinated with the Israeli government.

Life in Gaza has been sustained by intermittent convoys of water tankers and trucks with cargoes of plastic bottles. Images of children standing in line with yellow water jugs half their size have become a staple in news reports and on social media. Plenty of water is available outside Gaza. Moving it into Gaza has required continual, vexing diplomacy by the water authority. The process for other commodities has been even more complicated. Bardawil recalled the PWA spending 10 days trying to persuade Israel to release enough diesel to power the generators that pump the wells in Gaza City.

[Read: Israel never defined its goals]

My visit with Bardawil this past fall coincided with Cairo Water Week, a yearly conference where economists, engineers, and diplomats gather to discuss policy and innovations in water management. In 2022, Bardawil had attended the conference and talked about a pilot program he’d been proud of—how the PWA had helped connect a small wastewater-treatment plant and an agricultural project run by women. A year into the war, the plant and the project were gone. What is essential now, he explained during this year’s conference, is getting big, solar-powered water-treatment units into Gaza. He was hoping for 25 of them—each the size of a shipping container. This number, he believed, would be enough to ensure some measure of stability—collectively providing as many as 1 million Gazans with as much as two and a half gallons of water a day. That’s not a permanent solution, or even close, but units such as these are common in many parts of the world. They are relatively inexpensive, and they work.

Under the terms of the cease-fire announced in January, Hamas would begin releasing hostages, and Israel would expand the size of relief convoys permitted to enter Gaza. Since the cease-fire took hold, the amount of water available to each person in Gaza has been about seven to 10 liters a day—about two and a half gallons at most. Israel had already started providing electricity to one of the desalination plants. But most of Gaza’s water infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed. The Palestinian Water Authority has put together a six-month plan with the overarching goals for Gaza that one would expect: restore the water connection from Israel; get the desalination plants working; do something about sewage. The full list of what needs to be done is impossibly long. And many of the very people planning the reconstruction of the water system are themselves struggling to reconstruct their own lives.

Bardawil told me that he looked forward to a time when war would end, and killing would end, and people in Gaza could rebuild their lives and their hope in one another. “I’m not sure that I will witness that day,” he admitted. But seeing the arrival of 25 desalination containers would be a start.