“To a true collector,” the German philosopher Walter Benjamin noted in his 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library,” “the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.” This is an apt way to describe the many lives a single volume may live. On its initial printing, it may receive a flurry of attention from readers and reviewers—or none at all. Some titles go straight from best seller to well-loved classic, with no dip in demand; others, though popular in their author’s lifetime, may quickly fade into obscurity.

And then there are the “rebirths” Benjamin described: the second acts, rediscoveries, and renewals that bring older works back into circulation. Happily, unfairly forgotten treasures are in vogue. Major publishers and small presses are reissuing novels long out of print, exhuming unpublished manuscripts from celebrated writers, and championing unpopular works dismissed for their abstraction or difficulty. Reading can offer the delightful opportunity to find your present-day thoughts, worries, and emotions in a book published before you were even born. These books may also change how you think about the past, or feature prose you’d never encounter in contemporary life. The following titles are only a small selection that have, in recent years, through the efforts of obsessive editors and fans alike, found themselves justifiably rescued from oblivion.

The Maimed, by Hermann Ungar, translated by Kevin Blahut

“A sexual hell” is how the German writer Thomas Mann apparently referred to Ungar’s debut novel, The Maimed, first published in German in 1923. The tense, terse novel follows a hapless bank clerk, Franz Polzer, as he finds himself drawn into a sadomasochistic affair with his landlady. The Maimed brings Franz Kafka’s work to mind, but it is more sexually explicit on the page and made all the more claustrophobic by the introduction of Karl—a childhood friend of Polzer’s who may or may not have been his lover, and who is dying of an unnamed degenerative disease. As Polzer’s affair turns more and more violent, a murder occurs, as well as a mystery: Who is responsible for the killing? With its swirl of erotic anxiety and its ambiguous ending, The Maimed heralded the beginning of a promising literary career that, like Kafka’s, was cut short when Ungar died in his prime, in 1929, at age 36.

Fish Tales, by Nettie Jones

“You’re not crazy to me,” one character tells the narrator of Fish Tales, a 30-something Black woman named Lewis Jones. “You’re daring. Most people cannot even imagine life the way you live it.” That life includes nights out on the town in 1970s Detroit and disco-fueled Manhattan, copious amounts of cocaine, and sexual encounters both outlandish and, at times, demoralizing. This frenetic novel, first acquired by Toni Morrison and published in 1983, has become something of a cult classic, and it’s easy to understand why: It approaches relationships with raw and unvarnished honesty. A new edition forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April promises to bring additional audiences to Jones’s sharp, fast-paced look at the highs and lows of the human heart.

I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz

First published in 1995 and recently reissued by the Bay Area–based small press Transit Books, the science-fiction novel I Who Have Never Known Men, written by a Belgian psychoanalyst, has received a surprising amount of attention on social media. BookTok contains hundreds of videos of readers discovering and discussing Harpman’s haunting feminist dystopia. Told from the perspective of its young and nameless female narrator, the book follows a group of 39 women of various ages who spend their days imprisoned in an underground bunker, which is patrolled by a mysterious series of male guards. After an accident sets the women free, our protagonist finds herself suddenly wandering through a wasteland and learning, from the other women, about the world as it existed before the vault, which she has no memory of. Together, they reconstruct elements of society: devising a system of time-telling through counts of the human heartbeat, rediscovering the existence of organized religion. What stands out most is the philosophical approach Harpman takes as she renders the familiar strange.

The Long-Winded Lady: Notes From The New Yorker, by Maeve Brennan

The woman wandering the city alone has become something of a popular, even glamorous, figure. She’s a variation on the 19th century’s flaneur, seen in contemporary works such as Olivia Laing’s 2016 memoir, The Lonely City, as well as reissued novels such as Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, from 1979, and Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, from 50 years before that. The characters in those books would find common cause with the Irish writer Maeve Brennan, who from 1954 to 1981 wrote missives for The New Yorker under the pen name “The Long-Winded Lady,” a woman who witnessed all kinds of behavior from New York’s denizens at all hours of the day. The columns in this collection, first collected in 1969 and reprinted in 2016, depict, in finely rendered strokes, the minutiae of close-quarters living. “There were no seats to be had on the A train last night,” one begins; still another starts in a bookstore and veers off, at the end, into a meditation on Balzac’s favorite food (sardine paste, apparently). At a moment when the atomization of interpersonal relationships is at the forefront of public discussion, Brennan’s winsome, melancholy-streaked portraits of city life hold particular resonance.

Mr. Dudron, by Giorgio de Chirico, translated by Stefania Heim

The relationship between the artist and their audience has been analyzed and fetishized by critics ad nauseam, but Mr. Dudron provides a fresh perspective from the artist’s point of view. This previously unpublished novel by the Greek-born Italian painter de Chirico, written fitfully over decades, doesn’t have much of a plot, instead unfurling as a series of anecdotal conversations among artists and meandering, essayistic theories of painting. In lieu of a digestible arc, the reader gets a peek inside the head of de Chirico, whose off-kilter paintings of empty city squares in the early 20th century would go on to strongly influence the Surrealists. “A work of art should never force the viewer nor the maker into an act of reasoning, or criticism, or exposition,” de Chirico writes, per one early translation; instead, “it should provoke only satisfaction … that is, a condition in which reasoning no longer exists.”

Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton

“Mrs. Wharton,” reads a line in The Atlantic’s review of her 1927 novel, Twilight Sleep, “has never really descended from that plane of excellence which since its beginning has characterized her work.” Implicit in this observation: until now. Although contemporary reviewers might not have appreciated Twilight Sleep as much as they did Wharton’s previous books, her 17th novel offers an updated, Jazz Age–variation on a familiar, Wharton-esque theme: social ruin. In Roaring ’20s New York, Pauline Manford, the book’s heroine, inoculates herself from life’s unpleasantries—including her second husband’s affair with his stepson’s wife, Lita—with a busy social calendar, but when disaster strikes and the affair is discovered, not even Pauline’s unblinking devotion to rationality, truth, and progress can soothe her emotional reaction. Named after the drug cocktail given to women in the 20th century to ward off the pains of childbirth, which brings to mind the anesthetized attitude of some of its characters, Twilight Sleep was republished in late 2024.

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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.

Teaching Lucy

In the December 2024 issue, Helen Lewis wrote about how one woman became the scapegoat for America’s literacy crisis.

A heartfelt thank-you to Helen Lewis for her reporting on Lucy Calkins and the most recent phase of the “reading wars.” As a career English teacher whose mother was also a career English teacher, I have had a front-row seat to the reading wars for decades. Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast was particularly frustrating to me for its oversimplification of Calkins’s reading workshop and its all-too-typical sidelining of teachers’ voices. Wise educators have known for a very long time that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to reading instruction; effective teachers combine phonics with other strategies that help develop a student’s identity as a reader. It is shocking to none of us that the solution is “both, and” and not “either/or.” Lewis’s article was a breath of fresh air. Calkins is by no means flawless, but her Units of Study remain some of the most comprehensive and useful language-arts curricula out there in a sea of flashy, colorful nonsense.

Trish Manwaring
San Rafael, Calif.

Helen Lewis’s interesting article on Lucy Calkins sadly missed some of the substance behind the “phonics”–versus–“whole language” debate. Beginning-reading teachers immediately encounter a reality Lewis doesn’t mention: Although many other languages are highly phonetic, English is not, so an approach that relies mostly on teaching the sounds of letters can leave children confused and frustrated.

In fact, some of the most common English words are nonphonetic. For example, the words to and do do not rhyme with so or go. One and gone don’t rhyme either. And why are to, too, and two all pronounced the same? Only context and experience with real texts can help readers learn which pronunciation is appropriate.

Programs that rely mostly on phonics impose reading materials on children that tend to exclude nonphonetic words in order to make the text “decodable.” That sounds great in theory, but nonphonetic words are so common in English that when you leave them out, the resulting texts are nonsensical. Many sound so stupid that they can turn kids off from reading.

This is what Calkins was trying to avoid. This inherent challenge in teaching reading in English is studiously ignored by the Sold a Story podcast. The nature of the English language makes a balanced approach combining phonics and normal texts the most sensible strategy for teaching reading.

Nick Estes
Albuquerque, N.M.

When I was in grad school at Columbia’s Teachers College, I worked as a student teacher at P.S. 87 in Manhattan, a so-called Lucy school. I was placed in a kindergarten class and a fourth-grade class. It was apparent to me that a significant number of children were not benefiting from the curricula and needed phonics to launch them into reading. To have continued with Calkins’s method of instruction alone would have been ludicrous. You have to tailor your technique to the needs of each student.

Although some students may not need phonics instruction and may even be bored by it, others need it to succeed academically. Teachers should have the independence to make decisions about which children will benefit from which type of instruction and how much instruction they will need. It will vary from student to student—and teachers and supervisors need to be trained to recognize that and make the appropriate educational decisions.

Laurie Spear
New York, N.Y.

I began my teaching career in 1976. I was a kindergarten teacher, trained well in my California district, and I’ve watched the conflicts over reading and writing instruction ever since. At some point in my teaching journey, I learned about Lucy Calkins. I loved what she had to say. I know two things are true: Lucy Calkins has been a great contributor to the knowledge of how to teach literacy, and many of us have asked too much of her. Teachers cannot take a blanket approach to teaching literacy. Calkins provided many good things over her long career, even if she did not provide everything, and for that I am grateful. Educators and administrators should be learners, too, who understand the complexity of teaching reading. Shame on those who left Calkins hanging out to dry.

Wendy Zacuto
Playa Vista, Calif.

I appreciated Helen Lewis’s article about Lucy Calkins because it added some much-needed nuance to the conversation about reading instruction in American schools. I am a former teacher, and I attended Lucy Calkins’s trainings at Columbia. But I’ve learned a lot since then.

Our education system suffers from several problems that have made it possible for flawed instructional methods to achieve wide reach. Many states and districts push teachers to adopt curricular programs with “fidelity”—that is, without ever questioning them. Even in schools where teachers have a little more freedom, they’re rarely given the tools or time to evaluate the quality of instructional methods themselves. I remember being handed Calkins’s reading curriculum in my third year of teaching, and I wondered about the research that undergirded its methods. But the curriculum books didn’t provide much information. I didn’t know where else to look, and even if I had known where to find the facts, I didn’t have time to do research on my own, because I had just three days to set up my new classroom.

Ask any veteran educator, and they will tell you that our school systems have a knack for repeating the same mistakes. I worry that the new “science of reading” movement is being co-opted by curriculum publishers, professional-development providers, and “experts” who are seeking profits by promoting a silver bullet—just as they have with other en vogue methods in the past. My kids’ school district just adopted a new curriculum that allegedly reflects the “science of reading,” but it seems like the same type of mediocre curricula that have been peddled to big school systems for decades.

If we really want research-based instruction in our schools, we have to be humble about what we know and don’t know about effective reading instruction. We have to be wary of anyone pushing quick fixes, and we need to teach teachers how to be critical consumers of research and users of curricula. Educators can’t do this alone: We need more nuanced reporting like Lewis’s so that all of us—educators, parents, citizens—can better understand the problems we face and how we might solve them.

Jennie Herriot-Hatfield
San Francisco, Calif.

Helen Lewis replies:

I loved reading these responses, because the spread of opinions echoed what I heard while doing my reporting: that people with significant expertise can come to wildly divergent conclusions about the roots of America’s “reading crisis.” What first attracted me to this story was the idea that bad outcomes can happen without anyone involved having bad intentions. Debates over curricula make sense only in the wider context of American education— ever-changing standards, racial and class disparities, a sometimes chaotic bureaucracy, politicized decisions at the state level. Also, Nick Estes is entirely right to point out that English is very irregular. For a while, Finland’s strong performance in reading was attributed partly to its strongly phonetic language. But in the past few years, that country’s reading scores have fallen precipitously—and no one can really say what’s changed. A good reminder that this subject demands caution and humility.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “Stuck In Place,” Yoni Appelbaum explores why Americans, once the most mobile people on the planet, have become less and less apt to move to new homes in new places over the past 50 years. The decline in geographic mobility, he argues, is the most important social change of the past half century, shaping our politics, our culture, and how we relate to one another. For our cover image, the artist Javier Jaén designed an abandoned moving truck resting on concrete blocks, symbolizing a nation that has stopped moving to seek new opportunities.

— Liz Hart, Art Director

Corrections

“The Loyalist” originally stated that Kash Patel did not include the events of October 30, 2020, in his book. In fact, Patel did include a brief narrative of events for that day. “Modi’s Failure” originally stated that Narendra Modi was formerly the governor of Gujarat. In fact, Modi was chief minister.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

The rise of the American software industry in the 20th century was made possible by a partnership between emerging technology companies and the U.S. government. Silicon Valley’s earliest innovations were driven not by technical minds chasing trivial consumer products but by scientists and engineers who aspired to address challenges of industrial and national significance using the most powerful technology of the age. Their pursuit of breakthroughs was intended not to satisfy the passing needs of the moment but rather to drive forward a much grander project, channeling the collective purpose and ambition of a nation.

This early dependence of Silicon Valley on the nation-­state and indeed the U.S. military has, for the most part, been forgotten, written out of the region’s history as an inconvenient and dissonant fact—­one that clashes with the Valley’s conception of itself as indebted only to its capacity to innovate. The United States since its founding has always been a technological republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation.

But there is also another essential element of American success. It was a culture, one that cohered around a shared objective, that won the last world war. And it will be a culture that wins, or prevents, the next one.

This essay has been excerpted from Karp and Zamiska’s new book, The Technological Republic.

At present, however, the principal shared features of American society are not civic or political but rather cohere around entertainment, sports, celebrity, and fashion. This is not the result of some unbridgeable political division. The interpersonal tether that makes possible a form of imagined intimacy among strangers within groups of a significant size was severed and banished from the public sphere. The old means of manufacturing a nation—the civic rituals of an educational system, mandatory service in national defense, religion, a common language, and a free and thriving press—have all but been dismantled or withered from neglect and abuse. This distaste for collective experience and endeavor made America, and American culture, vulnerable.

The establishment left has failed its cause and thoroughly eroded its potential. The frenetic pursuit of a shallow egalitarianism in the end hollowed out its broader and more compelling political project. What we need is more cultural specificity ­in education, technology, and politics—­not less. The vacant neutrality of the current moment risks allowing our instinct for discernment to atrophy. Only the resurrection of a shared culture, not its abandonment, will make possible our continued survival and cohesion. And only by combining the pursuit of innovation with the shared objectives of the nation can we both advance our welfare and safeguard the legitimacy of the democratic project itself.

Silicon Valley once stood at the center of American military production and national security. Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, whose semiconductor division was founded in Mountain View, California, and made possible the first primitive personal computers, built reconnaissance equipment for spy satellites used by the CIA beginning in the late 1950s. For a time after World War II, all of the U.S. Navy’s ballistic missiles were produced in Santa Clara County, California. Companies such as Lockheed Missiles and Space, Westinghouse, Ford Aerospace, and United Technologies had thousands of employees working in Silicon Valley on weapons production through the 1980s and into the 1990s.

This union of science and the state in the middle part of the 20th century began in earnest during World War II. In November 1944, as Soviet forces closed in on Germany from the east, President Franklin D. Roo­se­velt was in Washington, D.C., already contemplating an American victory and the end of the conflict that had remade the world. Roo­sevelt sent a letter to Vannevar Bush, a pastor’s son who had become the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, where he helped lead the Manhattan Project.

In the letter, Roo­se­velt described “the unique experiment” that the United States had undertaken during the war to leverage science in service of military ends. Roo­sevelt anticipated the next era—­and partnership between national government and private industry—­with precision. He wrote that there was “no reason why the lessons to be found in this experiment”—­that is, directing the resources of an emerging scientific establishment to help wage the most significant and violent war that the world had ever known—­“cannot be profitably employed in times of peace.”

Roosevelt’s ambition was clear. He intended to see the machinery of the state—its power and prestige, as well as the financial resources of the newly victorious nation and emerging hegemon—spur the scientific community forward in service of, among other things, the advancement of public health and national welfare. The challenge was to ensure that the engineers and researchers who had directed their attention to the industry of war—and particularly the physicists, who, as Bush noted, had “been thrown most violently off stride”—­could shift their efforts back to civilian advances in an era of relative peace.

The entanglement of the state and scientific research both before and after the war was itself built on an even longer history of connection between innovation and politics. Many of the earliest leaders of the American republic were inventors, including Thomas Jefferson, who designed sundials and studied writing machines, and Benjamin Franklin, who experimented with and constructed objects as varied as lightning rods and eyeglasses.

Unlike the legions of lawyers who have come to dominate American politics in the modern era, many early American leaders, even if not practitioners of science themselves, were nonetheless remarkably fluent in matters of engineering and technology. John Adams, the second president of the United States, was, by one historian’s account, focused on steering the early republic away from “unprofitable science, identifiable in its focus on objects of vain curiosity,” and toward more practical forms of inquiry, including “applying science to the promotion of agriculture.”

Many of the innovators of the 18th and 19th centuries were polymaths whose interests diverged wildly from the contemporary expectation that depth, as opposed to breadth, is the most effective means of contributing to a field. The frontiers and edges of science were still in that earliest stage of expansion that made possible and encouraged an interdisciplinary approach, one that would be almost certain to stall an academic career today. That cross-­pollination, as well as the absence of a rigid adherence to the boundaries between disciplines, was vital to a willingness to experiment, and to the confidence of political leaders to opine on engineering and technical questions that implicated matters of government.

The rise of J. Robert Oppenheimer and dozens of his colleagues in the late 1930s further situated scientists and engineers at the heart of American life and the defense of the democratic experiment. Joseph Licklider, a psychologist whose work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology anticipated the rise of early forms of AI, was hired in 1962 by the organization that would become the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—­an institution whose innovations would include the precursors to the modern internet as well as the global positioning system. His research for his now classic paper “Man-­Computer Symbiosis,” which was published in March 1960 and sketched a vision of the interplay between computing intelligence and our own, was supported by the U.S. Air Force.

There was a closeness, and significant degree of trust, in the relationships between political leaders and the scientists on whom they relied for guidance and direction. Shortly after the launch by the Soviet Union of the satellite Sputnik in October 1957, Hans Bethe, the German-­born theoretical physicist and adviser to President Dwight Eisenhower, was called to the White House. Within an hour, there was agreement on a path forward to reinvigorate the American space program. “You see that this is done,” Eisenhower told an aide. The pace of change and action in that era was swift. NASA was founded the following year.

By the end of World War II, the blending of science and public life—­of technical innovation and affairs of state—­was essentially complete and unremarkable. Many of these engineers and innovators would labor in obscurity. Others, however, were celebrities in a way that might be difficult to imagine today. In 1942, as war spread across Europe and the Pacific, an article in Collier’s introduced Vannevar Bush, who was at the time a little-­known engineer and government bureaucrat, to the magazine’s readership of nearly 3 million, describing Bush as “the man who may win the war.” (Three years later, Bush published “As We May Think” in The Atlantic, praising scientists for working together in a “common cause,” and anticipating many aspects of the information age that lay ahead.) Albert Einstein was not only one of the 20th century’s greatest scientific minds but also one of its most prominent celebrities—a popular figure whose image and breakthrough discoveries, which so thoroughly defied our intuitive understanding of the nature of space and time, routinely made front-­page news. And it was often the science itself that was the focus of coverage.

[From the February 1949 issue: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘The Open Mind’]

This was the American century, and engineers were at the heart of the era’s ascendant mythology. The pursuit of public interest through science and engineering was considered a natural extension of the national project, which entailed both protecting U.S. interests and moving society—indeed, civilization—up the hill. And while the scientific community required funding and extensive support from the government, the modern state was equally reliant on the advances that those investments in science and engineering produced. The technical outperformance of the United States in the 20th century—­that is, the country’s ability to reliably deliver economic and scientific advances for the public, whether medical breakthroughs or military capabilities—­was essential to its credibility.

As the philosopher Jürgen Habermas has suggested, a failure by leaders to deliver on implied or explicit promises to the public has the potential to provoke a crisis of legitimacy for a government. When emerging technologies that give rise to wealth do not advance the broader public interest, trouble often follows. Put differently, the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. In this way, the willingness of the engineering and scientific communities to come to the aid of the nation has been vital not only to the legitimacy of the private sector but to the durability of political institutions across the West.

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social-media platforms that have come to dominate—­and limit—our sense of the potential of technology. A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—their rallying cry that they intend “to change the world” has grown lifeless from overuse—­but many of them raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-­sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.

A skepticism of government work and national ambition took hold in the Valley. The grand, collectivist experiments of the middle of the 20th century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual. The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as start-up after start-up catered to the whims of late-capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social-media platforms and food-delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait.

[Read: The divide between Silicon Valley and Washington is a national-security threat]

For decades, the U.S. government was viewed in Silicon Valley as an impediment to innovation and a magnet for controversy—more an obstacle to progress than its logical partner. The technology giants of the current era long avoided government work. The level of internal dysfunction within many state and federal agencies created seemingly insurmountable barriers to entry for outsiders, including the insurgent start-ups of the new economy. In time, the tech industry lost interest in politics and broader collaborations. It viewed the American national project, if it could even be called that, with a mix of skepticism and indifference. As a result, many of the Valley’s best minds, and their flocks of engineering disciples, turned to the consumer for sustenance.

The interests and political instincts of the American elite diverged from those of the rest of the country following the end of World War II. The economic struggles of the country and geopolitical threats of the 20th century today feel distant to most software engineers. The most capable generation of coders has never experienced a war or genuine social upheaval. Why court controversy with your friends or risk their disapproval by working for the U.S. military when you can retreat into the perceived safety of building another app?

As Silicon Valley turned inward and ­toward the consumer, the U.S. government and the governments of many of its allies scaled back involvement and innovation across numerous domains, including space travel, military software, and medical research. The state’s retreat left a widening innovation gap. Many cheered this divergence: Skeptics of the private sector argued that it could not be trusted to operate in public domains while those in the Valley remained wary of government control and the misuse or abuse of their inventions. For the United States and its allies in Europe and around the world to remain as dominant in this century as they were in the previous one, however, they will require a union of the state and the software industry—­not their separation and disentanglement.

[Read: The crumbling foundation of America’s military]

Indeed, the legitimacy of the American government and democratic regimes around the world will require an increase in economic and technical output that can be achieved only through the more efficient adoption of technology and software. The public will forgive many failures and sins of the political class. But the electorate will not overlook a systemic inability to harness technology for the purpose of effectively delivering the goods and services that are essential to our lives.

In late 1906, Francis Galton, a British anthropologist, traveled to Plymouth, En­gland, in the country’s southwest, where he attended a livestock fair. His interest was not in purchasing the poultry or cattle that were available for sale at the market but in studying the ability of large groups of individuals to correctly make estimates. Nearly 800 visitors at the market had written down estimates of the weight of a particular ox that was for sale. Each person had to pay six pennies for a chance to submit their guess and win a prize, which deterred, in Galton’s words, “practical joking” that might muddy the results of the experiment. The median estimate of the 787 guesses that Galton received was 1,207 pounds, which turned out to be within 0.8 percent of the correct answer of 1,198 pounds. It was a striking result that would prompt more than a century of research and debate about the wisdom of crowds and their ability to more accurately make estimates, and predictions, than a chosen few. For Galton, the experiment pointed to “the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment.”

But why must we always defer to the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to allocating scarce capital in a market economy? We seem to have unintentionally deprived ourselves of the opportunity to engage in a critical discussion about the businesses and endeavors that ought to exist, not merely the ventures that could. The wisdom of the crowd at the height of the rise of Zynga and Groupon in 2011 made its verdict clear: These were winners that merited further investment. Tens of billions of dollars were wagered on their continued ascent. But there was no forum or platform or meaningful opportunity for anyone to question whether our society’s scarce resources ought to be diverted to the construction of online games or a more effective aggregator of coupons and discounts. The market had spoken, so it must be so.

Americans have, as Michael Sandel of Harvard has argued, been so eager “to banish notions of the good life from public discourse,” to require that “citizens leave their moral and spiritual convictions behind when they enter the public square,” that the resulting void has been filled in large part by the logic of the market—­what Sandel has described as “market triumphalism.” And the leaders of Silicon Valley have for the most part been content to submit to this wisdom of the market, allowing its logic and values to supplant their own. It is our own temerity and unwillingness to risk the scorn of the crowd that have deprived us of the opportunity to discuss in any meaningful way what the world we inhabit should be and what companies should exist. The prevailing agnosticism of the modern era, the reluctance to advance a substantive view about cultural value, or lack thereof, for fear of alienating anyone, has paved the way for the market to fill the gap.

The drift of the technological world to the concerns of the consumer both reflected and helped reinforce a certain technological escapism—­the instinct by Silicon Valley to steer away from the most important problems we face as a society and toward what are essentially the minor and trivial yet solvable inconveniences of everyday consumer life: such as online shopping and food delivery. An entire swath of arenas, including national defense, violent crime, education reform, and medical research, appeared too intractable, too thorny, and too politically fraught to address in any real way. (This was the challenge we have aimed to address at Palantir—to build technology that serves our mos significant and vital needs, including those of U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, instead of merely catering to the consumer.)

Most were content to set the hard problems aside. Consumer apps and trinkets did not talk back, hold press conferences, or fund pressure groups. The tragedy is that serving the consumer rather than the public has often been far easier and more lucrative for Silicon Valley, and certainly less risky.

The path forward will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor. Silicon Valley offered a version of this combination. The Sunnyvales, Palo Altos, and Mountain Views of the world were company towns and city-­states, walled off from society and offering something that the national project could no longer provide. Technology companies formed internally coherent communities whose corporate campuses attempted to provide for all of the wants and needs of daily life. They were at their core collectivist endeavors, populated by intensely individualistic and freethinking minds, and built around a set of ideals that many young people craved: freedom to build, ownership of their success, and a commitment above all to results.

Other nations, including many of our geopolitical adversaries, understand the power of affirming shared cultural traditions, mythologies, and values in organizing the efforts of a people. They are far less shy than we are about acknowledging the human need for communal experience. The cultivation of an overly muscular and unthoughtful nationalism has risks. But the rejection of any form of life in common does as well. The reconstruction of a technological republic, in the United States and elsewhere, will require a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together. The technologies we are building, including the novel forms of AI that may challenge our present monopoly on creative control in this world, are themselves the product of a culture whose maintenance and development we now, more than ever, cannot afford to abandon. It might have been just and necessary to dismantle the old order. We should now build something together in its place.

This essay has been excerpted from Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska’s new book, The Technological Republic.

The Atlantic will expand its flagship event, The Atlantic Festival, to New York City for the first time this fall, and host a one-day festival event in Washington, D.C., this spring. The Atlantic Festival will take place from Thursday, September 18, to Saturday, September 20, and be anchored at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, with other venues to be announced. Additionally, the event in D.C., On the Future, will be held Tuesday, April 29, at Planet Word. The speaker lineups are to be announced.

The expansion to New York City follows 16 years of The Atlantic Festival being held in Washington, D.C., and the growth of the event in scale, ambition, and attendance. The festival is the preeminent live exploration of The Atlantic’s journalism, bringing together more than 100 speakers to take part in events that examine the state of business and tech; culture and the arts; politics and democracy; and climate and health––all moderated by Atlantic journalists. The event will also host theatrical and musical performances, book talks with authors and essayists, exclusive film screenings, and podcast tapings.

Interviewees at the festival in recent years have included U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Jamie Dimon, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Spike Lee, Kerry Washington, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nancy Pelosi, former Senator Mitt Romney, and dozens of sitting Cabinet secretaries, governors, and members of Congress. The festival has screened a number of films and series, including The Vietnam War, Boys State, and Lee, and featured live performances by Anna Deavere Smith, Yo-Yo Ma, Michael R. Jackson, and Chris Thile.

Candace Montgomery, executive vice president of AtlanticLive, says of the move: “We are thrilled to bring The Atlantic Festival to the cultural capital of the world. New York City is home to many Atlantic readers and subscribers and provides the festival with a global stage––giving us the opportunity to bring together fascinating speakers and build upon what has made the festival so successful.”

Last year was the third consecutive year that The Atlantic was awarded the top honor of General Excellence by the National Magazine Awards; this year, the magazine is adding two more print issues, returning to monthly publication for the first time in more than two decades. The Atlantic is also hiring a number of writers and editors to grow its coverage of politics, defense, national security, and technology, in addition to health, science, and other areas.

The 2025 Atlantic Festival is underwritten by Allstate, Destination DC, Genentech, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation at the Supporting Level.

Please reach out with any questions or requests: press@theatlantic.com.

On the Future: An Atlantic Festival Event
April 29, 2025
D.C.’s Planet Word, and virtually

The Atlantic Festival
September 18–20, 2025
Perelman Performing Arts Center, and virtually

Real estate broker and CEO Ryan Serhant sat down with Quartz to discuss the luxury real estate market, reality television, and his new AI venture: S. MPLE.

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Illustrations by Javier Jaén

The idea that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they are born—is a distinctly American innovation. It is the foundation for the country’s prosperity and democracy, and it just may be America’s most profound contribution to the world.

No society has ever been as mobile as the United States once was. No society has even come close. In the 19th century, the heyday of American mobility, roughly a third of all Americans changed addresses each year. European visitors were astonished, and more than slightly appalled. The American “is devoured with a passion for locomotion,” the French writer Michel Chevalier observed in 1835; “he cannot stay in one place.” Americans moved far more often, over longer distances, and to greater advantage than did people in the lands from which they had come. They understood this as the key to their national character, the thing that made their country distinctive. “We are a migratory people and we flourish best when we make an occasional change of base,” one 19th-century newspaper explained. “We have cut loose from the old styles of human vegetation, the former method, of sticking like an oyster to one spot through numberless succeeding generations,” wrote another.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, as two world wars passed, as the Baby Boom began, Americans kept on moving. And as Americans moved around, they moved up. They broke away from stultifying social hierarchies, depleted farmland, declining towns, dead-end jobs. If the first move didn’t work out, they could always see a more promising destination beckoning them onward.

These ceaseless migrations shaped a new way of thinking. “When the mobility of population was always so great,” the historian Carl Becker observed, “the strange face, the odd speech, the curious custom of dress, and the unaccustomed religious faith ceased to be a matter of comment or concern.” And as diverse peoples learned to live alongside one another, the possibilities of pluralism opened. The term stranger, in other lands synonymous with enemy, instead, Becker wrote, became “a common form of friendly salutation.” In a nation where people are forever arriving and departing, a newcomer can seem less like a threat than a welcome addition: Howdy, stranger.

Entrepreneurship, innovation, growth, social equality—the most appealing features of the young republic all traced back to this single, foundational fact: Americans were always looking ahead to their next beginning, always seeking to move up by moving on.

But over the past 50 years, this engine of American opportunity has stopped working. Americans have become less likely to move from one state to another, or to move within a state, or even to switch residences within a city. In the 1960s, about one out of every five Americans moved in any given year—down from one in three in the 19th century, but a frenetic rate nonetheless. In 2023, however, only one in 13 Americans moved.

The sharp decline in geographic mobility is the single most important social change of the past half century, although other shifts have attracted far more attention. In that same span, fewer Americans have started new businesses, and fewer Americans have switched jobs—from 1985 to 2014, the share of people who became entrepreneurs fell by half. More Americans are ending up worse off than their parents—in 1970, about eight out of every 10 young adults could expect to earn more than their parents; by the turn of the century, that was true of only half of young adults. Church membership is down by about a third since 1970, as is the share of Americans who socialize several times a week. Membership in any kind of group is down by half. The birth rate keeps falling. And although half of Americans used to think most people could be trusted, today only a third think the same.

These facts by now form a depressingly familiar litany. They are often regarded as disparate phenomena of mysterious origins. But each of them can be traced, at least in part, to the loss of mobility.

In 2016, Donald Trump tapped into the anger, frustration, and alienation that these changes had produced. Among white voters who had moved more than two hours from their hometown, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a solid six-point lead in the vote that year. Those living within a two-hour drive, though, backed Trump by nine points. And those who had never left their hometown supported him by a remarkable 26 points. Eight years later, he tapped that support again to recapture the White House.

Today, America is often described as suffering from a housing crisis, but that’s not quite right. In many parts of the country, housing is cheap and abundant, but good jobs and good schools are scarce. Other areas are rich in opportunities but short on affordable homes. That holds true even within individual cities, neighborhood by neighborhood.

As a result, many Americans are stranded in communities with flat or declining prospects, and lack the practical ability to move across the tracks, the state, or the country—to choose where they want to live. Those who do move are typically heading not to the places where opportunities are abundant, but to those where housing is cheap. Only the affluent and well educated are exempt from this situation; the freedom to choose one’s city or community has become a privilege of class.

The sclerosis that afflicts the U.S.—more and more each year, each decade—is not the result of technology gone awry or a reactionary movement or any of the other culprits that are often invoked to explain our biggest national problems. The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back, instead, to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.

Reviving mobility offers us the best hope of restoring the American promise. But it is largely self-described progressives who stand in the way.

Javier Jaén I. Moving Day

The great holiday of American society at its most nomadic was Moving Day, observed by renters and landlords throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th with a giant game of musical houses. Moving Day was a festival of new hopes and new beginnings, of shattered dreams and shattered crockery—“quite as recognized a day as Christmas or the Fourth of July,” as a Chicago newspaper put it in 1882. It was primarily an urban holiday, although many rural communities where leased farms predominated held their own observances. The dates differed from state to state and city to city—April 1 in Pittsburgh, October 1 in Nashville and New Orleans—but May 1 was the most popular. And 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.

For months before Moving Day, Americans prepared for the occasion. Tenants gave notice to their landlords or received word of the new rent. Then followed a frenzied period of house hunting as people, generally women, scouted for a new place to live that would, in some respect, improve upon the old. “They want more room, or they want as much room for less rent, or they want a better location, or they want some convenience not heretofore enjoyed,” The Topeka Daily Capital summarized. These were months of general anticipation; cities and towns were alive with excitement.

[Jerusalem Demsas: The right to move is under attack]

Early on the day itself, people commenced moving everything they owned down to the street corners in great piles of barrels and crates and carpetbags, vacating houses and apartments before the new renters arrived. “Be out at 12 you must, for another family are on your heels, and Thermopylae was a very tame pass compared with the excitement which rises when two families meet in the same hall,” a Brooklyn minister warned. The carmen, driving their wagons and drays through the narrow roads, charged extortionate rates, lashing mattresses and furnishings atop heaps of other goods and careening through the streets to complete as many runs as they could before nightfall. Treasure hunters picked through detritus in the gutters. Utility companies scrambled to register all the changes. Dusk found families that had made local moves settling into their new home, unpacking belongings, and meeting the neighbors.

In St. Louis, the publisher of a city directory estimated in 1906 that over a five-year span, only one in five local families had remained at the same address. “Many private families make it a point to move every year,” The Daily Republican of Wilmington, Delaware, reported in 1882. Moving Day was nothing short of “a religious observance,” the humorist Mortimer Thomson wrote in 1857. “The individual who does not move on the first of May is looked upon … as a heretic and a dangerous man.”

Moving Day was, The Times-Democrat of New Orleans attested, “an essentially American institution.” Europeans might move “in a sober, quiet, old-world way, once in a decade or thereabout,” the paper explained, but not annually, in the “excessive energetic manner of the nomadic, roving American.” European visitors made a point of witnessing the peculiar ritual and included accounts of carts flying up and down the streets in their travelogs.

For some, Moving Day meant trauma and dislocation. In tightening markets, landlords seized the opportunity to jack up rents. But in most places and for most people, Moving Day was an opportunity. The housing stock was rapidly expanding. You could spot the approach of the holiday, a Milwaukee paper explained, by the sight of new buildings being rushed to completion and old houses being renovated and restored. As wealthier renters snapped up the newest properties to come to market, less affluent renters grabbed the units they vacated in a chain of moves that left almost all tenants better off. Landlords faced the ruinous prospect of extended vacancies if they couldn’t fill their units on Moving Day. Tenants used their leverage to demand repairs and upgrades to their house or apartment, or to bargain for lower rent.

The habit of annual moves was not confined to the poor or the working class. Nor was it confined to local relocations. Americans moved to new territories, thriving towns, and rapidly growing cities, driven forward by hope. “That people should move so often in this city, is generally a matter of their own volition,” the journalist and social reformer Lydia Maria Child wrote of New York. “Aspirations after the infinite,” she added tartly, “lead them to perpetual change, in the restless hope of finding something better and better still.” It’s not a bad summary of the American dream.

What lubricated all of this movement was not an abundance of space but rather a desperate eagerness to put space to better use. The viability of their communities, Americans believed, rested on their capacity to attract merchants and manufacturers and, above all, residents. Land use was regulated as early as the colonial era, but the rules were sparse, and written to maximize development. A fallow field or an abandoned mine could be seized; a vacant lot could draw a stiff fine. Noxious businesses, such as tanneries and distilleries, were consigned to the margins, for fear that they would deter construction in the center. The goal was growth.

The nation’s push westward in the 1800s created new opportunities, and Americans moved toward them—dispossessing Native peoples of their land—but westward migration was never the whole story, or even most of it. The rate of migration within the East was even higher, as Americans drained away from farms and into market towns, county seats, and teeming industrial cities. There were few rules about what could be constructed on private property, and a diverse array of buildings sprang up to meet demand. A new arrival might rent a room in a private home, boardinghouse, tenement, residential hotel, or bachelors-only apartment building. Some of these structures were garish, or stuck out from their surroundings like tall weeds. Reformers were eager to manage the chaos, and cities began to adopt more extensive building codes, aimed at reducing the risk of fire and protecting the health of residents. But old buildings continually yielded to newer ones, as neighborhoods climbed higher to meet demand; the first townhouse on a block of freestanding homes might, a couple of decades later, be the last remaining townhouse sandwiched between apartment buildings.

So long as speculators erected new buildings, so long as aging houses were turned over to the rental market or split up into flats, so long as immigrant entrepreneurs built new tenements, people could reasonably expect to find a new home each year that in some way exceeded their old. And through the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th, the supply of homes steadily expanded.

Javier Jaén

Americans of that era tended to look at houses the way Americans today look at cars or iPhones—as useful contrivances that nevertheless lose their value quickly and are prone to rapid technological obsolescence. Every year, newly constructed and freshly renovated homes offered wonders and marvels: water that ran out of taps, cold and then hot; indoor plumbing and flush toilets and connections to sewer lines; gas lighting, and then electric; showers and bathtubs; ranges and stoves; steam heating. Factories created new materials and cranked out hinges, doorknobs, hooks, wooden trim, and railings in a dizzying variety of styles. One decade’s prohibitive luxury was the next’s affordable convenience and the third’s absolute necessity. A home was less a long-term investment—most people leased—than a consumer good, to be enjoyed until the next model came within reach.

The cultural implications of an always-on-the-move society were profound, and perhaps counterintuitive. As they observed the nomadic style of American life, some critics worried that the constantly shifting population would produce an atomized society, leaving people unable to develop strong ties, invest in local institutions, maintain democratic government, or build warm communities. In fact, that got the relationship between mobility and community precisely backward. Over the course of the 19th century and well into the 20th, Americans formed and participated in a remarkable array of groups, clubs, and associations. Religious life thrived. Democracy expanded. Communities flourished.

The key to vibrant communities, it turns out, is the exercise of choice. Left to their own devices, most people will stick to ingrained habits, to familiar circles of friends, to accustomed places. When people move from one community to another, though, they leave behind their old job, connections, identity, and seek out new ones. They force themselves to go meet their neighbors, or to show up at a new church on Sunday, despite the awkwardness. American individualism didn’t mean that people were disconnected from one another; it meant that they constructed their own individual identity by actively choosing the communities to which they would belong.

[Jacob Anbinder: The pandemic disproved urban progressives’ theory about gentrification]

All of this individual movement added up to a long, grand social experiment—a radical reinvention of what society could be. In the European lands that many immigrants had come from, successive generations lived in the same towns, inhabited the same houses, plied the same trades, and farmed the same land. Experience had taught them that admitting new members left a community with less to go around, so they treated outsiders with suspicion and hostility. They learned that rifts produced lasting bitterness, so they prioritized consensus and conformity. Village life placed the communal above the individual, tradition ahead of innovation, insularity before acceptance.

But when the earliest settlers crossed the Atlantic, they left behind their assumptions. They had moved once, so they should be able to move again. The Puritans soon codified into law the right to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony, likely the first time anywhere in the world that this freedom was put into writing and defined as a fundamental right. Two centuries later, as the midwestern territories competed to attract residents, they would add a complementary freedom, the right to arrive—and to stay, without the need to secure the formal consent of the community. Together, these revolutionary rights conferred on Americans a new freedom to move, enabling the American story.

Mobility was not always uncontested, of course. Waves of immigrants faced discrimination from those who had come only slightly before, turned away from communities just because they were Irish, or Italian, or Jewish. Laws excluded the Chinese, and vigilantes hounded them from their homes. Women seldom enjoyed the full privilege of mobility, constrained by social strictures, legal barriers, and physical dangers. And even after the end of slavery, Black Americans had to fight at every turn to move around, and toward opportunity, in the face of segregation and racist violence. But by the end of the 19th century, mobility was a deeply ingrained habit throughout the United States.

That habit has now been lost, and the toll is enormous. By one estimate, the decline in mobility is costing the American economy nearly $2 trillion each year in lost productivity. The personal costs may be even greater, albeit sometimes harder to recognize. Residential relocation is like physical exercise in this way: Whether you’re sitting on a couch or ensconced in a home, you’re unlikely to identify inertia as the underlying source of your problems. It’s only when you get up that the benefits of moving around become clear. People who have recently changed residences report experiencing more supportive relationships and feeling more optimism, greater sense of purpose, and increased self-respect. Those who want to move and cannot, by contrast, become more cynical and less satisfied with their lives. And Americans are shifting from that first category to the second: Since 1970, the likelihood that someone who expects to move in the next few years will successfully follow through on that ambition has fallen by almost half.

Americans of previous generations would be shocked by our stagnation. The inclination to keep moving was long the defining feature of the American character. And yet today, we’re stuck. What went wrong?

II. Who Killed American Mobility?

Blame Jane Jacobs. American mobility has been slowly strangled by generations of reformers, seeking to reassert control over their neighborhoods and their neighbors. And Jacobs, the much-celebrated urbanist who died in 2006, played a pivotal role.

In 1947, when Jacobs and her husband, Robert, moved to their new home in Manhattan’s West Village, the area was still filled with immigrants and their children, with people constantly moving in and moving out. Before the Jacobses arrived at 555 Hudson Street, the building had been rented by an immigrant named Rudolph Hechler, who lived with his family above the store they operated. A large sign read FOUNTAIN SERVICE—SODA—CANDY, and a cheerful awning added cigars and toys to the list of promised delights. Hechler had come to the U.S. from Austrian Galicia when he was 13, and spent much of his life working in the garment industry, chasing the American dream. He moved between apartments and neighborhoods until he had finally saved enough to move his family from the Bronx to the West Village and open his own shop.

Bob and Jane were different. They were young, urban professionals, Bob an architect and Jane a writer for a State Department magazine. And they came to stay. With dual incomes and no kids, they were able to put down $7,000 in cash to purchase a house, placing them among the scarcely 1 percent of families in all of Greenwich Village who owned their home.

Instead of finding a new tenant for the storefront, the Jacobses ripped it out, transforming their building into a single-family home. They cleared the bricks from the lot behind the house, turning it into a fenced-in garden. On the first floor, they installed a modern kitchen, dining room, and living room, with French doors opening onto the backyard. “The front of No. 555,” a preservation report later noted, “was rebuilt in 1950 at considerable expense, using metal sash and two-colored brick to complete the horizontality of the wide windows. It retains no vestige of its original appearance.” (The new facade, the report concluded, had been “badly remodeled,” and was “completely out of character” with the neighborhood.)

That Jacobs would later celebrate the importance of mixed-use spaces to urban vitality, drawing a vivid portrait of the remaining shops on her street, presents no small irony. But in doing as she pleased with the property she had purchased, she was only upholding a long American tradition. The larger irony involves what Jacobs did next. Although she is widely remembered as a keen-eyed advocate for lively and livable cities, her primary legacy was to stultify them—ensuring that no one else could freely make changes as she had and, most important, ruling out the replacement of existing buildings with larger structures that could make room for upward strivers.

[From the August 2019 issue: The economist who would fix the American dream]

Jacobs arrived in the West Village just as many Americans were abandoning dense, urban neighborhoods for the attractions of suburbia. For decades, city officials and reformers had worried about the spread of urban blight. They looked at the crowding, chaos, and confusion of immigrant neighborhoods like the West Village with horror. They wanted to sweep away neighborhoods that grew and decayed organically and replace them with carefully planned blocks. Urban planners sought to provide families with affordable homes, consolidate the jumble of corner stores into supermarkets, and keep offices at a distance. Everything would be rational, everything modern. They wanted to take the rich stew of urban life and separate out its components like a toddler’s dinner—the peas to one quadrant, the carrots to another, the chicken to a third—safely removed from direct contact.

In 1916, the year Jacobs was born, New York City began an ambitious effort to achieve this sort of separation: enacting the first comprehensive zoning code in the United States. By the time Jacobs moved there almost two decades later, the once-radical scheme of zoning, with sections of the city separated out for different uses, seemed less a startling change than a natural feature of the city’s environment. Urban planners had hailed it as a cure for poverty and blight; it was supposed to ensure a better future for the city. But zoning failed to produce these benefits, instead limiting the ability of New York and like-minded cities to adapt to evolving needs. Officials soon embraced a more radical scheme of urban renewal: bulldozing old, dense neighborhoods in the name of slum clearance. And Jacobs, whatever her other sins, had the courage to stand up and demand that it stop.

From her renovated home on Hudson Street, Jacobs fell in love with the city as it was—not the city as urban planners dreamed it might be. She saw shopkeepers greeting customers and schoolchildren buying candy. She watched her neighbor wheeling his handcart, making laundry deliveries to customers, in what she later described as an “intricate sidewalk ballet.” She realized that many of the things professional planners hated about cities were precisely what most benefited their residents.

And so Jacobs sat down before her Remington and pounded out The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her book, published in 1961, took aim at urban renewal and all that it destroyed in the name of progress. When, that same year, Jacobs learned that the city intended to designate her own neighborhood for renewal, she rallied a small group of residents to its defense. They wrote letters and showed up at hearings and plastered the neighborhood with flyers, creating the illusion of mass opposition. And it worked. Jacobs and her collaborators were among the first residents of a city neighborhood to successfully block an urban-renewal scheme. Jacobs’s book—its brilliantly observed account of urban life, its adages and conjectures—paired with her success as an activist to catapult her to fame. She became the apostle of urbanism, and eager disciples sought her out to learn how they might defend their own neighborhood.

But in halting the ravages of clearance, Jacobs advanced a different problem: stasis. For centuries, the built form of the West Village had continually evolved. Old buildings were torn down and larger structures were erected in their place. The three-story houses to one side of Jacobs’s, at 553 and 551 Hudson, which had once held small businesses of their own, had been bought by a developer in 1900 and replaced with a six-story apartment building. Zoning had already begun to put some limits on this evolution but had not stopped it.

Jacobs’s activism blocked efforts to add any more buildings like the one next to her house. Other three-story houses could no longer be consolidated and built up into six-story apartment blocks; the existing six-story walk-ups couldn’t be turned into 12-story elevator buildings. Such development would change the physical appearance of the neighborhood, and also risk displacing current residents or small businesses—eventualities to which Jacobs was fundamentally hostile. Before, the neighborhood had always grown to accommodate demand, to make room for new arrivals. Now it froze.

At an intellectual level, Jacobs understood that simply preserving historic buildings cannot preserve a neighborhood’s character; she warned that zoning should not seek “to freeze conditions and uses as they stand. That would be death.” A neighborhood is defined by its residents and their interactions, as Jacobs herself so eloquently argued, and it continually evolves. It bears the same relation to its buildings as does a lobster to its shell, periodically molting and then constructing a new, larger shell to accommodate its growth. But Jacobs, charmed by this particular lobster she’d discovered, ended up insisting that it keep its current shell forever.

To stave off change, Jacobs and her allies asserted a proprietary right to control their neighborhood. It belonged, they argued, to those who were already there, and it should be up to them to decide who would get to join them. Over the decades that followed, that idea would take hold throughout the United States. A nation that had grown diverse and prosperous by allowing people to choose their communities would instead empower communities to choose their people.

Javier Jaén

Jacobs’s book marked a shift in American attitudes. Where civic boosters once sketched fantastical visions of future development, competing to lure migrants their way, by the 1960s they had begun to hunker down and focus on preserving what they had against the threat of what the architectural critic Lewis Mumford called the “disease of growth.” State legislatures had authorized local governments to regulate land use at the beginning of the 20th century, but now activists pressed for even more local control—for what the writer Calvin Trillin has called “neighborhoodism.” They were justifiably concerned that unrestrained growth was degrading the environment, displacing residents, and leveling historic structures. More than that, they were revolting against the power of Big Government and Big Business, and trying to restore a focus on the public interest. They demanded that permitting processes consider more fully the consequences of growth, mandating an increasing number of reviews, hearings, and reports.

But in practice, the new processes turned out to be profoundly antidemocratic, allowing affluent communities to exclude new residents. More permitting requirements meant more opportunities for legal action. Even individual opponents of new projects had only to win their lawsuits, or at least spend long enough losing them, to deter development.

The preservation of the West Village itself, long celebrated as a triumph of local democracy, was in fact an early case study in this new form of vetocracy. What saved it from being bulldozed like other working-class areas in Manhattan was not the vitality of its streetfronts. Instead, it was saved because the displacement of working-class immigrants by college-educated professionals was already further along than the urban planners had appreciated when they’d designated it a slum. The night after the first public meeting of the Committee to Save the West Village in 1961, the activists reconvened in the apartment of a recent arrival who conducted market research for a living. He showed them how to survey residents to compile a demographic profile of the area. Jane’s husband, Bob, the architect, began looking at the condition of the existing buildings. Carey Vennema, who’d graduated from NYU Law School a few years before, began researching tax records. A sound engineer compared recordings he took in the West Village with those in affluent neighborhoods. This small group of professionals leveraged their training and expertise to mount a challenge to the planning process—a form of bureaucratic warfare unavailable to the great majority of Americans.

Their success in limiting new housing in the West Village hasn’t just kept the neighborhood from expanding; it’s helped empty it out. The neighborhood that Jacobs fought to preserve in the 1960s was already shrinking. Jacobs celebrated the fact that her neighborhood’s population, which peaked at 6,500 in 1910, had dropped to just 2,500 by 1950. This represented, she argued, “unslumming”—what today we would call gentrification. As households more than doubled the space they occupied, amid rising standards of living, the neighborhood would have needed to replace its existing townhouses with apartment buildings that were at least twice as tall, just to maintain its population. Instead, the neighborhood kept its townhouses and lost most of its population. Despite her strident insistence that not a sparrow be displaced from the Village of the ’60s, Jacobs cast the displacement of a dynamic working-class community of immigrant renters in the 1950s by a stable, gentrified population of professional-class homeowners as a triumph. “The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out,” she wrote. Jacobs prized stability over mobility, preferring public order over the messiness of dynamism.

Yet in one respect, preservation proved more lethal to the texture of the community than redevelopment. Jacobs bought her home for $7,000 in 1947, rehabilitated it, and sold it 24 years later for $45,000. “Whenever I’m here,” Jacobs told The New Yorker in 2004, “I go back to look at our house, 555 Hudson Street, and I know that I could never afford it now.” Five years after that interview, it sold again, for $3.3 million; today, the city assesses it at $6.6 million. If you could scrape together the down payment at that price, your monthly mortgage payment would be—even adjusted for inflation—about 90 times what the Hechlers paid each month to live in the same building.

Jane Jacobs, of course, is not the only suspect in the death of American mobility; there are many others. People have always been most mobile while they’re relatively young, and the country is aging; the median American was just 16 years old in 1800 and 28 in 1970, but is nearly 39 today. The rise in two-career households might have made relocation more difficult. The prevalence of joint custody makes it harder for members of divorced couples to move. More Americans own their home, and renters have always been more mobile. Some Americans, perhaps, have simply grown more successful at locating jobs and communities that meet their needs, reducing their impulse to move someplace else. Some are relying on remote work to stay where they are.

But none of these answers can possibly explain the broad, persistent decline in geographic mobility. The country may be older, but the drop in mobility has been particularly steep among younger Americans. Two-earner households may be less mobile, but their mobility has declined in tandem with that of other groups. Mobility is down not just among homeowners but also among renters, and its decline predates the rise of remote work. And there is little to suggest that staying put over the past half a century has left Americans more satisfied with their lives.

Jacobs’s activism capped a century of dramatic legal change that eroded the freedom to move. Zoning may have been adopted, eventually, by well-meaning urban planners, but the process began in 1885 in Modesto, California, where bigoted local officials were looking for a tool to push out Chinese residents. The federal courts would not allow them to segregate their city by race, but they hit on a workaround, confining laundries—whose proprietors were overwhelmingly Chinese and generally lived in their shops—to the city’s Chinatown. Over the ensuing decades, other cities embraced the approach, discovering that segregating land by its uses and the size of the buildings it could hold was a potent means of segregating populations by race, ethnicity, and income. New York, for example, first adopted zoning in part to push Jewish garment workers down fashionable Fifth Avenue and back into the Lower East Side. As zoning proliferated, it was put to a wide variety of uses, some laudable and others execrable. The housing programs of the New Deal then spread the system nationally, by limiting federal loans only to those jurisdictions that had put in place tight zoning rules and racially restrictive covenants.

But zoning alone was not enough to halt American mobility, even if it did serve to widen inequalities. Zoning had introduced a new legal reality: Putting up any housing now required government approval. It was progressives like Jacobs who then exploited this reality, creating a new set of legal tools, beginning around 1970, for anyone with sufficient time, money, and patience to challenge government decisions in court, handing neighbors an effective veto over housing approval.

Not every place in America is having its growth choked off by zoning, or by the weaponization of environmental reviews or historic-preservation laws. The opposition to mobility appears concentrated in progressive jurisdictions; one study of California found that when the share of liberal votes in a city increased by 10 points, the housing permits it issued declined by 30 percent. The trouble is that in the contemporary United States, the greatest economic opportunities are heavily concentrated in blue jurisdictions, which have made their housing prohibitively expensive. So instead of moving toward opportunity, for the first time in our history, Americans are moving away from it—migrating toward the red states that still allow housing to be built, where they can still afford to live.

[M. Nolan Gray: Cancel zoning]

It is hard to overstate how much is lost when people can no longer choose to move toward opportunity. Social-science research suggests that the single most important decision you can make about your children’s future is not what you name them, or how you educate them, or what extracurriculars you enroll them in—it’s where you raise them. But if Americans cannot afford to move to the places with growing industries and high-paying jobs, or if they can’t switch to a neighborhood with safer streets and better schools, and instead remain stuck where they are, then their children will see their own prospects decline.

Not far from where I live, in Washington, D.C., two lawn signs sit side by side on a neatly manicured lawn. One proclaims NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE FROM, WE’RE GLAD YOU’RE OUR NEIGHBOR, in Spanish, English, and Arabic. The other reads SAY NO, urging residents to oppose the construction of an apartment building that would house the new neighbors the other sign purports to welcome. Whatever its theoretical aspirations, in practice, progressivism has produced a potent strain of NIMBYism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish.

III. Building a Way Out

In December, the Census Bureau reported that the United States had set a dismal new record: The percentage of Americans who had moved in the previous year was at an all-time low. That same month, the economist Jed Kolko calculated that geographic inequality—the gap in average incomes between the richer and poorer parts of the country—had reached an all-time high. The loss of American mobility is a genuine national crisis. If it is less visible than the opioid epidemic or mounting political extremism, it is no less urgent. In fact, the despair it fosters is fueling these and other crises, as Americans lose the chance to build the best possible lives for themselves and their children.

Even partial analyses of immobility’s costs yield staggering results. Consider, for instance, just the economic growth that has been lost by preventing people from moving to where they would be most productive. The economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti recently imagined a world of perfect mobility, in which the three most productive U.S. metropolitan areas—New York, San Francisco, and San Jose—had constructed enough homes since 1964 to accommodate everyone who stood to gain by moving there. That alone, they calculated, would have boosted GDP by about $2 trillion by 2009, or enough to put an extra $8,775 into the pocket of every American worker each year. It’s a rough estimate, but it gives a sense of the scale of the distortions we have introduced, and the price we are each paying for them.

But the social costs are arguably even greater than the economic ones. Among academics, the claim that housing regulations have widened inequality is neither novel nor controversial. The economists Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag offer an illustration: If a lawyer moved from the Deep South to New York City, he would see his net income go up by about 39 percent, after adjusting for housing costs—the same as it would have done back in 1960. If a janitor made the same move in 1960, he’d have done even better, gaining 70 percent more income. But by 2017, his gains in pay would have been outstripped by housing costs, leaving him 7 percent worse off. Working-class Americans once had the most to gain by moving. Today, the gains are largely available only to the affluent.

Many of the country’s more dynamic cities, along with the suburbs around them, have continued to wall themselves off in recent years, using any means available. In Manhattan, for instance, 27 percent of all lots are now in historic districts or are otherwise landmarked, predominantly in the borough’s most affluent areas. And once a neighborhood in these areas is designated historic, new construction within it drops dramatically below the city’s already grossly inadequate rate. In D.C., where nearly 19 percent of buildings are similarly protected, residents of the well-off Cleveland Park neighborhood once stopped the construction of an apartment building by getting the old Park and Shop on which it was going to be built designated as historic; it was one of the first examples of strip-mall architecture in the country, the research of one enterprising resident revealed.

The good news is that addressing this crisis of mobility doesn’t depend on your moving anywhere, if you’d rather stay where you are. It doesn’t depend on your surrendering your single-family home, if you’re lucky enough to have one. You can keep your lawn, your driveway, your garden. Solving crises often requires great sacrifice. But the simplest solution to this one promises to leave everyone better off. All you have to do is make room for some new neighbors—maybe even new friends—to join you, by allowing other people to build new housing on their own property. Americans are generally skeptical of the hassles of development and tend to focus on the downsides of change in their neighborhood. But if you ask them about the benefits—whether they’d allow construction in their neighborhood if it meant letting people live closer to jobs and schools and family members—they suddenly become overwhelmingly supportive of the idea.

If we want a nation that offers its people upward mobility, entrepreneurial innovation, increasing equality, vibrant community, democratic participation, and pluralistic diversity, then we need to build it. I mean that quite literally. We need to build it. And that will require progressives, who constitute overwhelming political majorities in almost all of America’s most prosperous and productive areas, to embrace the strain of their political tradition that emphasizes inclusion and equality.

There are at least some signs that this message is taking root. California has enacted a series of legislative reforms aimed at paring back local zoning regulations. Cities across the country are banning zoning that restricts neighborhoods to single-family homes. Where older environmental activists rallied to block any new construction, a new generation of environmentalists sees building new housing near public transit as an essential tool in the fight against climate change. And national politicians have started to talk about our affordable-housing crisis.

These changes are encouraging, but insufficient. And sometimes the solutions on offer solve the wrong problem: Building subsidized housing in a place where land is cheap because jobs are scarce will help with affordability, but only worsen immobility.

Any serious effort to restore mobility should follow three simple principles. The first is consistency. Rules that apply uniformly across a city will tend to produce neighborhoods with diverse populations and uses, while providing equitable protections to residents. Rules that are tailored to the desires of specific neighborhoods will tend, over time, to concentrate less desirable land uses and more affordable housing in poorer areas. Just as the federal government once used its power as a housing lender to force local jurisdictions to adopt zoning laws, it could now do the same to reform those laws, encouraging states to limit the discretion of local authorities.

[From the November 1961 issue: “Moving Day,” a short story]

The second principle is tolerance. Organic growth is messy and unpredictable. Giving Americans the freedom to live where they want requires tolerating the choices made by others, even if we think the buildings they erect are tasteless, or the apartments too small, or the duplexes out of place. Tastes evolve, as do neighborhoods. The places that thrive over the long term are those that empower people to make their own decisions, and to build and adapt structures to suit their needs.

The third principle is abundance. The best way to solve a supply crunch is to add supply—lots of it, and in places that are attractive and growing, so that housing becomes a springboard, launching people forward rather than holding them back.

How much housing do we need? For 50 years, we’ve been falling behind demand. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation estimates that it would take another 3.7 million units just to adequately house our current population, with the shortfall concentrated among starter homes. Treat that as the lower bound. The trouble is, most existing units are located where regulation is loose and land is cheap, not in the places richest in opportunity; a considerable amount of the nation’s housing is in the wrong place. Another recent estimate that tries to account for that, by the economists Kevin Corinth and Hugo Dante, puts the tally above 20 million. And even that might be too low.

Here’s another way to think about what we really need: As things stand, roughly 20 percent of American workers relocate from one metropolitan area to another over the course of a decade. If all the moves that would happen anyway in the next 10 years brought people to the most prosperous regions, where productivity is highest—places like New York and the Bay Area, but also Austin and northwestern Arkansas—we’d have to add some 30 million new units, or 3 million a year. That’s, perhaps, an upper bound. It’s an ambitious target, but at roughly double our current pace, it’s also an attainable one.

These three principles—consistency, tolerance, and abundance—can help restore American mobility. Federal guidelines can make the environment more amenable, but the solutions by and large cannot come from central planning; states and cities and towns will need to reform their rules and processes to allow the housing supply to grow where people want to build. The goal of policy makers, in any case, shouldn’t be to move Americans to any particular place, or to any particular style of living. They should instead aim to make it easier for Americans to move wherever they would like—to make it equally easy to build wherever Americans’ hopes and desires alight.

That would return agency to people, allowing them to pursue opportunity wherever they might find it and to choose the housing that works best for them. For some, that might mean reviving faded towns; for others, it might mean planting new ones. Whatever level of education they have attained, whatever city or region they happen to have been born in, whatever occupation they pursue, individuals—janitors and attorneys alike—should be able to make their own choices.

The genius of the American system was never that its leaders knew what was coming next, but rather that they allowed individual people to decide things for themselves, so that they might collectively make the future.

This article is adapted from Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Stuck In Place.”

The Dream

A fine suit made just for me. From the best fabrics. By the best tailor. Paired with the best bespoke shoes.

A suit that would make me feel at ease, while declaring to others, “Here is a man who feels at ease.” A suit that would be appreciated by the world’s most heartless maître d’. A suit that would see me through the immigration checkpoints of difficult countries. A suit that would convince readers that the man in the author photo has a sense of taste beyond the Brooklyn consensus of plaid shirt and pouf of graying hair.

The suit would serve as the perfect carapace for a personality overly dependent on anxious humor and jaundiced wit, a personality that I have been trying to develop since I saw my lightly mustached punim in the mirror as a pubescent boy and thought, How will I ever find love? The suit would transcend my physicality and bond with my personality directly. It would accompany me through the world’s great salons, the occasional MSNBC appearance, and, most important, the well-compensated talks at far-flung universities. The suit would be nothing less than an extension of myself; it would be a valet preceding me into the room, announcing with a light continental accent, “Mr. Gary and his suit are here now.” Finding this perfect suit, made by the most advanced tailor out of superlative fabric, would do nothing less than transform me.

The Body

Before there is a suit, there is a body, and the body is terrible.

First there is my shortness (5 foot 5 and a half, with that “half” doing a lot of work). Being short is fine, but those missing inches are wedded to a narrow-shouldered body of zero distinction. Although I am of Russian and Jewish extraction, the continent whose clothing stores make me feel most at ease is Asia. (I once bought an off-the-rack jacket in Bangkok after the clerk examined me for all of three seconds.) However, this is not exactly an Asian body either, especially when I contrast myself with the natural slimness of most of my Asian friends. Just before my bar mitzvah, I got a set of perfect B-cup knockers and had to squeeze into a “husky” suit to perform the ritual yodeling at the synagogue. But that’s not all. Some hideously mismanaged childhood vaccination in Leningrad created a thick keloid scar running the length of my right shoulder. The shame of having this strange pink welt define one side of me led to a slumped posture favoring my left shoulder. When I finally found people to have sex with me—I had to attend Oberlin to complete the task—my expression upon disrobing resembled that of a dog looking up at his mistress after a bowel movement of hazmat proportions.

Before the Suit

The clothes before the suit were as bad as the body.

I was born in the Soviet Union in 1972 and was quickly dressed in a sailor’s outfit with white tights and sexy little shorts, then given a balalaika to play with for the camera. The fact that Russia now fields one of the world’s most homicidal armies can partially be explained by photos such as this. On other occasions I was forced to wear very tight jogging pants with a cartoon bunny on them, or a thick-striped shirt dripping with medals from battles I had never seen. These outfits did make me feel like I belonged to something—in this case, a failing dictatorship. I left the U.S.S.R. before I could join the Young Pioneers, which would have entailed wearing a red tie at a tender age, while prancing about and shouting exuberant slogans such as “I am always ready!”

Top: The author, about 6 years old, in Leningrad, dressed as a sailor and forced to play balalaika under a hanging carpet. Bottom: About a year later, in Rome, his parents buy him a normal Western sweater. (Courtesy of Gary Shteyngart)

What I wasn’t ready for, however, was immigration to Queens. I arrived in New York in 1979 with the immigrant’s proverbial single shirt, although my parents had managed to snag a cute Italian V-neck sweater during the few months we spent in Rome on our way to America, a sweater that would serve me for the next half decade (as mentioned, I did not grow much). The Hebrew day school to which I was sentenced for eight years began a clothing drive for me, and I was rewarded with pounds of old Batman and Robin T-shirts, which made me look like a Soviet-refugee poster child. It’s worth noting that, growing up, I never thought, They hate me for my clothes or my poverty or my lack of English skills. This realization would come later, in hindsight. For the longest time, I thought that I was hated for the essential state of being myself; the clothes were more a symptom than a cause. My school may have been Jewish, but I somehow found myself in the throes of Calvinist predestination. For as long as I was myself, I deserved these clothes. Around this time, the idea of becoming an entirely different person took root—How will I ever find love? This is how—an idea that would be expanded for four decades, until it finally led me to The Suit.

Growing Up Tasteless

High school found me trying to blend in with a suburban outlay of clothes that my now middle-class family could finally afford. These were surfer T-shirts from Ocean Pacific and other brands that suburbanites who survived the 1980s might remember: Generra, Aéropostale, Unionbay. Unfortunately, I did not go to high school in Benetton Bay, Long Island, but in Manhattan, where these shirts were immediately a joke. (This would become a pattern. By the time I figure something out fashion-wise, I’m already two steps behind.) At a high-school job, my boss bought me a set of colorful Miami Vice–style shirts and jackets. These proved ridiculous at Oberlin, where dressing in janitor uniforms from thrift shops was considered the height of style. (Ironically, I had worked as a janitor during the summer, at the same nuclear laboratory that employed my father.)

After college, I fell in with a crowd of artsy, ketamine-addicted hipsters, and together we managed to gentrify several Brooklyn neighborhoods during the late ’90s. One of my friends, who was especially fashion-conscious, began to dress me at the high-priced secondhand emporium Screaming Mimis. The clothes she told me to buy were very itchy, mostly Orlon and Dacron items from ’70s brands such as Triumph of California, but these tight uniforms, like their Soviet predecessors, made me feel like I was playing a part in a grander opera, while also serving as a form of punishment. On nervous dates, I would sometimes have to run to the bathroom to try to angle my acrylic armpits under the dryer.

Because I was a writer who worked in bed, I mostly did not need a suit, although when I got married, in 2012, I went down to Paul Smith to get a herringbone number that I thought was just fine, if not terribly exciting. I bought a J.Crew tuxedo for black-tie benefits. Once, I did a reading sponsored by Prada and was given a nice gray jacket, pants, and a pair of blue suede shoes as compensation. Come to think of it, there was also a scarf. As a final note, I will say that I am incredibly cheap and that shopping for clothes has always raised my blood pressure. Leaving Screaming Mimis after spending more than $500 would always end in me getting terribly drunk to punish myself for the money I had blown on such a frivolous pursuit.

The Dream Begins

When I reached the age of 50, mildly prosperous and with a small family, I met a man named Mark Cho. We discovered each other because of a mutual love of wristwatches (a costly middle-aged hobby I had recently acquired), and because I knew about his classic-menswear store, the Armoury, with locations in New York and Hong Kong. The Armoury has been called “a clubhouse for menswear nerds”; if you’re looking for, say, a cashmere waistcoat in “brown sugar,” you have found your home. I had even given one of the characters in my latest novel, a dandy from a prominent Korean chaebol family, an article of clothing from that store to wear.

[Read: The future of marketing is bespoke everything]

We met for dinner at Union Square Cafe, and I liked him (and his clothes) immediately. Mark was almost always dressed in a jacket and tie, and would often sport a vest along with spectacles made of some improbable metal. What I loved about him was how comfortable he appeared in his medley of classical attire, and how, despite the fact that all of his garments had been chosen with precision, he gave the impression that he had spent very little time and thought on which breathable fabrics to settle over his trim body. He looked like he was, to use my initial formulation, at ease.

Later, I would learn that this whole look could be summarized by the Italian word sprezzatura, or “studied carelessness,” and later still I learned of something that the Japanese had discovered and refined: “Ivy style,” which is basically studied carelessness goes to Dartmouth. For the time being, I knew that I liked what I saw, that my inner lonely immigrant—the one who is always trying to find a uniform that will help me fit in—was intrigued. Mark once gave me an Armoury safari jacket, the very same one worn by the character in my novel, and its light, unflappable linen proved perfect for my summer readings around Germany and Switzerland that year. Everywhere from starchy Zurich to drunken Cologne to cool-as-fuck Berlin, the jacket would pop out of a suitcase and unwrinkle itself in seconds, yet it was also stylish and seemingly impervious to the odors of my non-Teutonic body. It was, to use Hemingway-esque prose, damn well perfect, and I immediately knew I wanted more.

I had lived in Italy in my 30s and met many aristocrats there. Those bastards had sprezzatura to burn, but when I asked them the make of their suits and jackets, they would smile and tell me it was the work of a single tailor down in Naples or up in Milan. Ah, I would say to myself, so that’s how it is. Given my outlook on life, owning a bespoke suit was not an outcome I was predestined for. The Prada jacket I had been given, which fit me well enough, was the most that my Calvinist God would ever grant me.

But over more martinis and onglets au poivre with Mark, I began to understand the parameters of a fine bespoke suit and its accessories: bespoke shirts and bespoke shoes. I also began to timidly ask questions of a financial nature and learned that the price of owning such a wardrobe approached and then exceeded $10,000. I did not want to pay this kind of entry fee. Given my own family’s experience in fleeing a declining superpower, I try to have money saved with which to escape across the border. Unlike watches, a suit could not be resold in Montreal or Melbourne.

A brief but generative conversation with my editors at this magazine soon paved the way for my dream to become possible. At a particularly unsober dinner with a visiting Japanese watchmaker, I whispered to Mark the extent of my desires. Yes, it would take a lot of work, a lot of research, and possibly travel to two other continents. But it could be done. At the right expense, with the most elegant and sturdy of Italian-milled fabrics, and with the greatest of Japanese tailors, a superior suit could be made for anyone, even for me.

Some Thoughts on Male Fashion

In religious school, I studied the Torah and the Talmud, which were okay but failed to leave a deep impression. At Oberlin, I read Gramsci’s notebooks from prison; those were fine, but a little too carceral for my airy disposition. Mark sat me down with the foundational texts more relevant to my lived experience, as they say. Or at least the experience I hoped to live. The canonical texts of male fashion, and I urge them upon any aspiring dandy, are Dressing the Man, by Alan Flusser, and True Style, by G. Bruce Boyer (that name alone deserves a cummerbund). I would also slip in an interesting national study, Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, by the well-dressed intellectual W. David Marx, whom I would meet in Tokyo soon enough. Like the diligent student I had rarely been before, I took copious notes: American look, dart, London shrunk, natural shoulder, weft, warp. I have worn clothes all my life but never known a single thing about them. It was like not knowing the difference between freshly caught tilefish and farm-bred tilapia; each fills your stomach, but only one tastes good.

Formal male fashion traces back to two personalities: Beau Brummell, the sharp-witted proto-dandy of the early 19th century without whom the modern suit would be unthinkable (and who reportedly spent five hours a day getting dressed), and Edward VIII, the Nazi admirer and short-term king better known as the Duke of Windsor. These two insufferable assholes are mostly responsible for how men dress today. “With Brummell,” Flusser notes, “male style became a matter of impeccable fit and cut, exquisite detail, and immaculate cleanliness.” Before Brummell, the aristocracy dressed in rich, smelly materials; after, styles were adapted from military uniforms—think of the broad shoulders of a British pinstripe suit, for example. The duke took Brummell’s simplicity and “ran to Baroque elaboration,” Boyer wrote. “District checks, windowpane plaids, bold stripes, and tartans were his true métier.”

In the battle between the 19th-century dandy’s stark simplicity and the duke’s playful elaborations, I find myself choosing the former. My personality is colorful enough without tartans; let the suit merely contain it. Whatever the duke’s “district check” is, I will leave it uncashed.

Yamamoto-San Arrives

On May 24 of the fateful year 2024, a plane from Tokyo landed in New York City, carrying one of the most meticulously attired men in existence. His name is Yuhei Yamamoto, and he is the preeminent representative of Ivy style, that mode of dress that Americans appreciate yet only the Japanese fully understand.

The British suit, in all its City of London severity, morphed into different shapes around the world. The Italians made particularly interesting work of it. The Milanese suit was the most British-like, but as you traveled farther down the boot to Florence, Rome, and Naples, the tailors became more freehanded; the colors and fit became jauntier and more Mediterranean, more appreciative of bodies defined by crooked lines and curves and exploded by carbohydrates. Meanwhile, in America, as always, we went to work. The suit became a uniform that stressed the commonality and goodness of Protestant labor and church attendance without any further embellishments. It came to be known as the “sack suit.” In the 1950s, Brooks Brothers furthered this concept with an almost subversively casual look: a jacket with natural-width shoulders that hung straight from the body, and plain-front trousers. This, along with other American touches, such as denim, became the basis for Ivy-style clothes that the Japanese of the ’60s made into a national obsession, and that culminated in a wholly different approach to workwear, office wear, and leisure wear. Today, you can’t go into a Uniqlo without seeing the aftereffects of Japanese experimentation with and perfection of our “Work hard, pray hard” wardrobe ethos.

I met Yamamoto-san at the Upper East Side branch of Mark Cho’s Armoury empire. The moment I first saw him, I was scared. No one could be this well-dressed. No one could be so secure in a tan three-piece seersucker suit that didn’t so much hang from his broad shoulders as hover around them in expectation. No one’s brown silk tie could so well match his brown polka-dot pocket square and the thick wedge of only slightly graying hair floating above his perfectly chiseled face. This man was going to make a suit for me? I was not worthy.

Yamamoto-san examined me briefly and said, “Sack suit.”

The author’s chest is expertly measured by the master tailor Yuhei Yamamoto at the Upper East Side location of the Armoury. (Peter Fisher for The Atlantic)

The diagnosis stung at first. I was already aware of the provenance of the sack suit, which had clothed men up and down the very avenue (Madison) right outside Mark’s store for almost a century. Was I not more than an Excel jockey or a finance bro whose oppressive job had him ready to be put into a sack? Were my curves, at least the double trouble posed by my tatas (true, they had shrunk and mellowed with age), not worthy of something with a little bit more Florentine flair, if not full-on Neapolitan decadence?

“Sack suit,” Yamamoto-san repeated. He then explained through a translator that I was, in his eyes, “full of character.” I had heard this sentiment before, and not always in the form of a compliment, but wanted elaboration. “You’re a character,” he said. “You’re an authentic New Yorker. You transcend fashionable suits. As an authentic New Yorker, you need a sack suit.”

He and Mark began to talk about the master plan for my body. Yamamoto-san would make a drape-cut suit that would emphasize my slimness, and “flatter” my chest. The pants would accentuate my legs while making me look taller than 5 foot 5 (and a half).

“You can hide a multitude of sins with a good suit,” Mark said. The Calvinist inside me blanched.

For the first time in my life, I felt nonphysician, nonlover hands all over me—measuring, prodding, taking stock. The thousands of dollars being spent on this project were not just creating a garment; they were affording me a new level of care and involvement. It was the sartorial version of having a concierge doctor. “At the fitting stage,” Mark said, “you’ll feel like a woman getting haute couture. Why should women have all the fun?”

Yes, I thought. Why should they? We retired to the Armoury’s garden to smoke half a dozen short Davidoff cigars and discuss matters some more. “Clothing is a visual language,” Mark said. “What we have to divine is: What is a Gary Shteyngart suit?”

I puffed on my cigar, feeling seen. “Your head has to sit in a certain way on your frame,” Mark said. I pictured my head above the suit, like the dot at the top of an inverted exclamation point. The suit, according to Mark, would focus attention on my head, which was definitely where I wanted the attention to fall. After mastering English in Hebrew day school and social democracy at Oberlin, I had always made the right sounds with my head. (“I want to make a suit that accentuates my client’s character,” Yamamoto-san had told me. “I don’t want a suit that speaks more than the character.”)

“The best body type for a suit,” Mark went on, “is one that is slightly unathletic and also stoops slightly so that it hangs better.” That’s me! I thought, shocked that what I’d considered a debility had turned out to be a strength. “Yamamoto-san will make a softer, rounder, more natural shoulder,” Mark continued. “He will cut closer to the hips. You don’t want a pumpkin shape.”

“Most certainly not,” I said.

Back inside, Yamamoto-san had set the music system to his beloved Chuck Berry and had spread out ancient Esquire and GQ magazines. “I will make you a suit from the golden age of American style,” the tailor was saying. “I will make your legs even more beautiful.” We were looking at intimidating books of fabric swatches. I had signaled that I wanted the suit to be ready for nights of leisure as well as labor; drunken dinners at Frenchette as well as university readings and television appearances. This led us to the darker side of the color spectrum, until we settled on midnight blue. “Six-ply is more durable, and it travels well,” Mark was saying. “There’s more return. See how it bounces back more quickly? Fewer wrinkles.”

That all sounded great, but I was both intrigued and confused. What the hell is “six-ply”? How is yarn even made? Mark invited me to attend a fabric fair in Milan in July, then to journey to the nearby fabric mill, where the materials for my suit would be prepared. Next, we would fly to Hong Kong to have the appropriate shirts made by the fine shirtmaker Ascot Chang, and on to Tokyo for a second fitting with Yamamoto-san, as well as a fitting for a pair of shoes at the atelier of the master shoemaker Yohei Fukuda.

“Sure,” I said.

Somewhere in the heavens, my Calvinist God was preparing his lightning bolts.

The Anticipation Grows

There are many days between May and July. How many exactly I cannot tell you, as I am not a mathematician, but definitely too many when you’re waiting for a series of garments to change your life.

In the meantime, Mark threw a black-tie party to celebrate 10 years of the Armoury in New York, and I put on my J.Crew tuxedo, hoping no one would sneer at its humble pedigree. The party was sponsored by Campari, and I was soon coasting on boulevardiers and chatting with a gaggle of short menswear nerds and the attractive women who loved them. As with most Midtown parties, the mix had its share of financiers, but also included war-crimes prosecutors and museum executives. “Are you in fashion?” I overheard one attendee asking another. “No, I’m a Marxist.” (And, I later found out, an architect.)

[From the June 2009 issue: Fashion in dark times]

Alex Seo, a Korean American man dressed stunningly in a white double-breasted, peak-lapel tuxedo jacket, told me that when his grandfather, an academic, had landed in the Midwest from Korea many years ago without a proper outfit, the man who’d sponsored him had said, “Every professor should have a tweed jacket,” and then handed him his own. The story reminded me of the clothing drive that was started for me at my yeshiva, although this tale had a kinder, more midwestern ending (Alex’s father and his Armoury suit were also at the party). Looking around the room and talking to people, I realized just how many of us were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. The need for a fine suit became obvious. It was the final certificate of naturalization.

Milan and Beyond

I tried to take my mind off my desperate need for bespoke clothing. A conference brought me to Tbilisi, Georgia, and then I tooled around Istanbul, Rome, and Lucca for a bit. Finally, the fabric fair arrived, and, accompanied by my old friend, the stylish Tuscan resident, art historian, and translator Shilpa Prasad, I traveled to Milan, where Mark was waiting for us.

“We’re starting way upstream,” Mark told me, meaning that we were going deep into the nitty-gritty of how a suit is made. Amid the city’s heartless July humidity, he took us to a neoclassical palazzo, where Dormeuil, a family-run French maker of high-end fabrics, presented us with endless espresso and samples. I wasn’t here to shop, just to learn what was possible.

Testing crease-resistant fabric at Vitale Barberis Canonico, the oldest fabric mill in Italy (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

What followed was an impressive display of discernment. Mark and his colleague Jan would feel the square of a fabric swatch, then scrunch it up and watch as it regained its composure. “Fabric drives our collection,” Mark said. “For Hong Kong, this is good winter fabric,” he said of one sample. Because Hong Kong represents a large portion of his business, he is very attuned to that part of his clientele. “This one’s too hairy,” he said of another. “Hong Kong people don’t like things that are hairy.” Most people don’t, I thought, sadly.

Shilpa was amazed by how Mark and Jan knew which samples they would buy from just a cursory feel. “It’s like muscle memory,” Jan told her.

“We’ll take four meters,” Mark told the fabric salesman, and the barcode adjoining one swatch was zapped. The price for this particular fabric, which would become a three-piece suit for another client, was about 68 euros a meter. Shilpa lovingly stroked cloth flecked with gold that clocked in at 380 euros a meter, and visualized the shawl that could be made from it.

Mark explained that some fabrics are better for business suits, others for leisure suits. As an example of the former, he showed me the kind of slightly shiny wool-and-mohair blend that could have been worn by members of the Rat Pack. The fabric for my suit should bridge the gap, Mark said. It should be both beautiful and travel-resistant. “More texture, less sheen.”

The Milano Unica fair took place in a typical soulless convention center on the city’s edge. The booths where the vendors had set up shop were grouped by the type of goods they were hawking: Shirt Avenue, for example. The sellers we visited each gave us a fine cup of espresso and sometimes even a little chocolate, so that by the time I left the fair, I was orbiting Neptune.

We stopped by the esteemed Somerset cloth maker Fox Brothers, which produced the fabric that once draped Winston Churchill and Cary Grant. They favor undyed sheep’s wool and are known for their wool flannel, the kind that was used to make Fred Astaire’s trousers. The clothes made from their fabrics, one trench coat in particular, were gorgeous, but I would have needed to buy a Land Rover to complete the look.

Next we headed down the “street” to the booth for Vitale Barberis Canonico, the mill tasked with producing the fabric for my suit. After we had another coffee, the attractive representatives of the brand presented us with bolts of cloth to feel. “This reminds me of going to sari shops in Bombay,” Shilpa said as we felt our way through the sensuous wares, gasping in delight. I was reminded of Mark’s quip: “Why should women have all the fun?”

A sample of the fabric that would be used for my suit was finally presented to me—the 21 Micron. I was told that the mill’s 21 Micron is made from the wool of Argentinian and Uruguayan sheep that live high in the mountains. Regular, less important sheep are subjected to the cruelty of mulesing, where strips of wool-bearing skin are removed from around their ass, to prevent the parasitic infection of fly larvae. My sheep were not subjected to such horrors. “They are happy sheep,” one dapper representative told me with a wolfish smile.

Despite its South American origins, the fabric had a heavy British solidity. I crumpled it up in my fist as I had seen Mark and Jan do, and when I let go, the fabric opened like a flower. “21 Micron is the more exclusive fabric,” the mill’s representative told me. “It is breathable, high-twisted yarn; it will not wrinkle.” Unlike most suits, mine would be made of six-ply yarn. The fabric’s weight, exclusivity, sturdiness, and expense came from the fact that there was simply more of it.

“Six-ply is for the brave,” the dapper man assured me, a sentence I did not understand, but cherished nonetheless.

“Your suit will be business luxury,” Mark told me. “You can wear it into the ground.”

I stared into the fabric, which looked as inky blue as the eternity I hope to fall into after I expire, many fathoms deeper than the Baltic Sea by which I was born. Soon, I thought, this magical fabric will cover me from my ankles to my neck. And then, maybe, I will be another person.

The author is confronted with endless amounts of wool at Vitale Barberis Canonico. (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

The next day, Mark and I traveled west of Milan, past rice fields and solar-power farms and shirtless men yawning on balconies, to a village in the Biella region of Piedmont, where Vitale Barberis Canonico is based. The mill’s waiting room was filled with volumes that had titles such as I Am Dandy, and the magazines Monsieur and The One: Yacht & Design. Yachtless and without a French appellation, I wondered what the hell I was doing there. The executive offices surrounded a lovely Japanese garden, and as we began our tour, the members of a visiting group of fabric buyers from Taiwan, China, and Japan shyly snuck photos of Mark.

First mentioned in documents in 1663, Vitale Barberis Canonico is truly canonical, the oldest fabric mill in Italy. Our tour guides explained that the water in the Biella region has a very low concentration of minerals, making it soft, unlike the harsh water in other parts of Europe. This adds an extra softness to the fabric, much as pizza crust in Naples would be unimaginable without the city’s acqua. I touched a clump of Australian wool, and noted how superior my South American sheep was to its antipodean cousin. The seven steps for making wool fabric were explained: washing, gilling (aligning the wool fibers and removing short strands), spinning, dyeing, warping, weaving, and finishing. Giant machines are dedicated to these tasks, and they run all day, mostly without human intervention. The weaving, in which the weft, the horizontal structure, is inserted into the fabric’s vertical structure, the warp, is conducted in the world’s quietest weaving room. Touching the yarn as it was being spun by a machine was like strumming a gently weeping guitar. I was told that my six-ply yarn was the strongest that Vitale Barberis Canonico produced, and that it had been worsted to eliminate some of its hairiness (Hong Kong readers, rejoice). Finally, this exemplary fabric had been put into a massive machine called the Dolphin 1200, which finishes the fabric and prevents it from shrinking.

The author snuggling with some alarmingly soft wool at the Vitale Barberis Canonico mill (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

In the mill’s archives, we examined order books dating back to 1846, as well as a photo of King Charles III and his fun-loving wife, the Queen Consort, who both appear to be fans of the brand. I saw an advertisement for my fabric, which featured a drawing of sheep standing on a road, next to a man leaning against a sports car. A sign behind him pointed to the ruta del fin del mundo, “the route to the end of the world.” The tagline read: “21 Micron is the final destination of a long journey in search of a family of cloths of the highest quality that guarantee unparalleled strength and crease resistance.”

Is this it? I thought. Has my long sartorial journey finally come to an end?

Mom Posture

But my journey had only begun.

On the way to Asia, I watched one of Wim Wenders’s latest films, Perfect Days, and was struck with the teariness that often hits at 30,000 feet. The film follows an older toilet cleaner in Tokyo, exulting in the care with which he performs his task, the way he makes his work anything but menial. The toilet cleaner’s devotion reminded me of something Mark had said about how a true craftsman focuses on just one item, asking himself constantly, Is this as good as it can be?

In Hong Kong, Mark brought his obsession with individual crafts to a 100-year-old building off Queen’s Road Central, known as the Pedder Building. On the fifth floor, a 6,000-square-foot space called the Pedder Arcade has a distinctly Wong Kar-wai feel, punctuated by broad arches and spinning overhead fans. The Armoury may be the Pedder Arcade’s flagship store, but it is just one part of a lifestyle hub for the intelligent moneyed class, where you can buy a signed first-edition set of John le Carré’s Karla Trilogy for about $7,000. Mark himself works out of a space called “The Study,” where people feel free to drop in and smoke a cigar—some of the world’s best cigars are sold out of an anteroom, with the more intense aged Cuban variants smelling, according to Mark, “as good as God’s armpit.”

Mark is Malaysian Chinese by heritage, but grew up in London, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles and speaks perfect American English, though he will occasionally break a word like forgotten into two, adding to his charm. He got his bachelor’s degree in economics from Brown and started out in finance. We are similar in that neither of our fathers was perfectly happy with the career we ultimately chose: wordsmithing and clothes selling. In Milan, I had asked Mark how he’d resolved things with his father. “He died,” Mark said.

At the Ascot Chang factory, in Hong Kong, sewers and cutters produce about 45 meticulously made shirts a day. (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

In the island’s oppressive heat, Mark and I strolled over to a neighboring mall, where Ascot Chang, the renowned maker of shirts and suits, has one of its stores. Justin Chang, the grandson of the founder—the family has been making shirts in Hong Kong since 1953—greeted us and pulled out rolls of fabric (the store has more than 7,000 variations).

I was to have four shirts made to complement my suit. Justin and Mark talked over each other as I pawed at the crisp fabrics.

We chose four fabrics for the different shirts: a spread-collar dress shirt made in a fine cotton piqué, a traditional white oxford button-down, a vintage-1970s cotton shirt with blue stripes, and my favorite, a chambray shirt with a button-down collar whose uneven yarn gave it a cool and casual look. I reveled in the by-now familiar, almost therapeutic feel of several men pressing measuring tape against my shoulders, chest, and arms. Because I am a watch aficionado, Mark requested that the diameter of the left cuff be slightly larger to expose my timepieces. The formal shirt must not have a pocket, he said, but the easygoing chambray could have a pocket with a button on it. “What does this button convey?” I asked Mark, trying to master all the rules.

“It conveys, I have a button on my shirt.”

The author visiting Ascot Chang in Hong Kong to select fabric and be fitted for four bespoke shirts (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

One of the shirts had to be rushed for my second fitting with Yamamoto-san in Tokyo in a mere two days. Back at the Pedder Arcade, as I tried on a pair of artisanal-denim jeans, Mark told me that this was a particularly difficult task for Ascot Chang, because of my body’s many quirks. “There’s a large drop to your right shoulder,” Mark said. “It makes it difficult to dial in.”

I also apparently have something called “rounded shoulders,” which results from a forward head position and a forward pelvic tilt. When I looked up my diagnosis online, I discovered that it is also called “mom posture,” a malady that usually afflicts mothers, who have to bend down to take care of their children. I wanted to congratulate myself on my devotion as a parent, but realized that my mom posture must result from a lifetime of slouching my shoulders to hide my breasts and, possibly, from constantly nursing my other child, my phone, while walking.

As I modeled the artisanal denim, Mark and I discovered something else: I have no ass. This is why all my pants fall off me.

“No,” I said, immediately predicting what Mark would prescribe. “I can’t. It’s too Wall Street, the movie.”

“Suspenders,” he said.

The next day, we left the fancy Central district and crossed the bay for the industrial hum of Kowloon East, to see the shirt that was being rushed for our Tokyo departure. In the warm, bright light of the factory, a host of workers was making my chambray shirt. I smiled sheepishly at the men and women toiling overtime to create the special differing armholes that would compensate for my dropped shoulder. Thirty-eight workers at the Ascot Chang factory produce about 45 shirts a day. The cloth cutters are mostly men; the sewers, who do the more complex engineering, such as the cuffs and collars, are mostly women.

The author touring the Ascot Chang factory. The Chang family has been making shirts in Hong Kong since 1953. (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

The next morning, the chambray shirt was ready. I tried on my first-ever bespoke garment with trepidation. In the wooden glow of the Ascot Chang shop, I witnessed my first transformation. This was not the suit, but it was the pre-suit, an exquisite blue thing with gleaming charcoal mother-of-pearl buttons and, as I was told by Mark, “quite a strong collar for someone your size.”

But for the first time in my life, the fit was right. The fit was good. The fit was perfect. Through the industry of a thoughtful team of cutters and sewers on the edge of Asia, I had finally reached a détente with my body. I looked at myself in the mirror and there I was: a well-dressed middle-aged man.

Yamamoto-San Returns

Armed with one Ascot Chang shirt, with three more on the way, we left Hong Kong for Tokyo for the final steps of the bespoke journey—the second fitting with Yamamoto-san and a shoe fitting with Yohei Fukuda, “arguably the best shoe money can buy,” according to Mark.

Tokyo is the city for craftspeople, and I was happy to watch Mark buzz around like a hummingbird, searching for perfect accoutrements for his clients. We visited the Ginza branch of Atelier Jean Rousseau, where men in white lab coats perfected a watch strap for a customer’s Patek Philippe Ellipse. “Do you have a real rose-gold stitch?” Mark asked. “I know they cost a lot of money.”

We cabbed across Ginza to Ortus, a maker of elite bags from materials including hippo, elephant, and seal, where Mark had commissioned a briefcase for an underemployed man of means that contained nothing but a Monopoly set (the Hong Kong–tram edition, naturally, the pieces made in silver). “Does he go around Hong Kong playing Monopoly with his friends?” I asked.

“Well, he’s hoping this will make him some friends,” Mark said.

That evening I had dinner with W. David Marx, the author of the aforementioned Ametora. David is a 6-foot-4 southern WASP-Catholic-Jew hybrid, who also counts Yamamoto-san as a tailor. “It makes you look like an adult,” he told me of the suit I would soon wear. “Which is not what people want to look like anymore.”

The next morning, I climbed the steps to the second floor of Yamamoto-san’s atelier, Tailor Caid, in the hip Shibuya section of Tokyo. Welcome to Caid modern tailoring proclaimed a sign next to a silhouette of a man in a fedora toting a briefcase down an imaginary Madison Avenue. We are not fashion snobs, the sign continued, but we know a few simple rules.

Inside, Yamamoto-san was resplendent in another seersucker suit, this one light blue, a dark-blue pocket square providing contrast. A record player was spinning not just Ella Fitzgerald, but a rare Japanese edition of her work titled Ella and Nice Guys. A Harvard pennant hung in the bathroom. There were old, yellowing copies of the Japanese magazines that had made Ivy style synonymous with Japan, with titles such as Popeye and Hot-Dog Press and headlines including “We Are Real IVY Leaguers.” And, finally, I was confronted with the work in progress, draped over a wooden hanger: my midnight-blue suit held together with white basting thread.

I relieved myself beneath the Harvard pennant and, with shaking hands, put on the suit. At this stage in the bespoke process, the basting thread disfigured the jacket, dividing it into quadrants, and the buttons were nothing but stickers. But I could begin to imagine the wonder that the suit would become. The heavy six-ply fabric felt primordially satisfying, like a light suit of armor, but one that managed to cling to my body with near perfection. This second fitting would remove the near.

“There is an extended shoulder, but no pad,” Yamamoto-san explained through a translator, negating the horrors of the shoulder-pad-stricken ’80s, but also managing to support my dropped right shoulder. “There is an empty space in the chest,” Yamamoto-san pointed out. Because I stoop so profoundly, he had used the draping technique to, in Mark’s words, “give your chest a little more volume.” The jacket cleverly made my chimichangas all but invisible, while ironically providing them with new space to roam.

“Damn, this is dramatic,” the usually unflappable Mark said.

“The way you wear this,” Yamamoto-san said, “it looks like ’50s France, or Alain Delon in the ’60s.”

We talked about areas that needed improvement. I lifted my arms and turned around. “What do we do with Gary’s behind?” Mark asked as the two men searched for my ass. “Apparently you lost some butt since the first fitting.”

“He should wear his pants as snug as possible,” Yamamoto-san said. The dreaded word suspenders came up again. “When the pants are above the belly button, everything is in line.”

“He could do some squats,” Mark said, an opinion I would not dignify with a response.

We chose a beautiful turquoise lining to contrast with the outer sobriety of the suit, and also navy buttons made out of nuts. “Into each life, some rain must fall,” Ella crooned on the record player, but I was hardly listening to her.

The author with Mark Cho, the owner of the Armoury ( left), and Yamamoto-san (middle), enjoying a drink at Martiny’s bar, in New York City (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

To celebrate the suit, we retired to the tailor’s favorite bar, Le Zinc, a few minutes’ walk from his atelier. Yamamoto-san is the type of Japanese man who surrounds himself with so much perfection that it would be interesting to take him someplace awful, like Hudson Yards or Westfield Garden State Plaza. Le Zinc felt like it had floated in from a former America, too spare and beautiful to provoke nostalgia, only awe. My martini was so excellent, I struggled not to cry. “There’s a sentiment in Japan,” my tailor said. “We don’t want to come to a bar without being well-dressed. There is a sentimentalization of Western culture.”

“A Western culture that barely exists,” I said.

A few martinis and highballs into our celebration, Yamamoto-san began to talk at length. He’d idolized America since he was a child. He listened to jazz in elementary school and saw the men wearing suits, and he couldn’t wait to wear a suit as well. He fell in love with the show Bewitched, in which an ad executive named Darrin (originally played by Dick York) was married to a witch named Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery)—but more important for Yamamoto-san, Darrin worked on Madison Avenue and wore fabulous suits.

I have to pause this story for a minute. Back in Queens, when I was wearing my Robin the Boy Wonder T-shirts and watching television on my grandmother’s failing 1960s Zenith set, Bewitched had managed to bewitch me as well. My nearly pubescent eyes lightly male-gazed Samantha, but I was equally in love with Darrin and his stark but perfect suits and ties. Though separated by a continent and an ocean, the young Yamamoto-san and I had entertained the same ideas of male fashion.

“A lot of young people today are anti-aging,” he continued. “They want their clothes to show their youth. I like the idea of aging, the kind of aging you see in vintage furniture or a vintage watch. Aging is beautiful. When I see a 70-year-old man in Manhattan picking up after a dog while wearing a suit, I applaud.”

We continued our discussion over bottles of Barolo at his favorite restaurant, which featured Lucchese cuisine. I had been to the actual Lucca just a month earlier, but the Japanese version of the food, like my Ivy-style suit in progress, seemed to both canonize and elevate its inspiration. If this part reads like a love letter to Japan and its pasta makers and toilet cleaners, I assure you it is.

According to ancient Japanese custom, a night of karaoke followed, about which I recall only singing Suzanne Vega’s child-abuse classic “Luka,” to which my audience nodded politely. In the middle of the night, I tripped over the complicated stairs of my hotel suite and almost broke my nose. But I felt fine.

The Final Touch

The next day would see the last piece of my wardrobe fall into place. The back-order list for Yohei Fukuda’s shoes is so long, the atelier has stopped accepting bespoke-shoe orders from new clients. For the time being, it is near-impossible to get his shoes, so please allow me to enjoy mine by myself. Fukuda-san and his assistants make only eight pairs a month, and each takes 130 to 140 hours of work. The soles are stitched by hand, which makes them a lot more flexible. Much like Yamamoto-san, who interned with a Boston tailor, Fukuda-san attended two years of “shoe college” in Northamptonshire, England, and then worked his way up from repairing soles to creating leather masterpieces in his atelier, by Tokyo’s Olympic stadium.

Fukuda-san is perfectly bald, with a luxuriant mustache. His work has been described as “kind of British,” which means he references and perfects traditional British shoes with the same brio as my tailor’s approach to Ivy style. The British did fine; Yohei Fukuda does better.

The atelier of the shoemaker Yohei Fukuda, in Tokyo (An Rong Xu for The Atlantic)

Mark has this theory that bespoke oxfords are not really worth the money, because many fine examples can be found off the rack. But he believes in bespoke loafers. So now is the time to confess another of my body’s deficiencies: One of my legs happens to be longer than the other. Since I was a child, I’ve had to wear inserts in my shoes to account for this discrepancy, and so an easygoing loafer, the pride of America’s aristocratic New England class, is sadly not for me.

We surveyed the gleaming shoes arrayed along the length of Fukuda-san’s atelier, like icons in a church. “Derby shoes,” Mark suggested. I looked over a couple. They were not quite as formal as oxfords, nor as floppy as loafers. Unlike oxfords, they had an open-laced construction that would comfort my calloused piggies during my daily six-mile walks around the countryside.

My final row of samples to examine was rolled out, a collection of hides that would allow us to choose a color. “For derbies, the best place to start is the darkest brown,” Mark suggested. I remembered Boyer writing in True Style about how the Italians had taught the world not to be afraid of mixing brown shoes with blue suits.

“Coffee,” Fukuda-san suggested, as we flipped through the hides.

“Maroon,” Mark offered.

“Brown pepper!” I said, as I ran my hands across a suede that seemed spicier, more intense, more brown than the others. Fukuda-san measured and traced every part of my foot, as we discussed adding a big rubber heel for better traction, and a steel toe. As with Yamamoto-san’s suit, my comfort and pleasure would be the biggest factors here; there would be no room for ostentation. No one must know that these shoes cost $3,000, I thought. No one.

My derbies would be lined with forest green to remind me of the forests behind my dacha. “Would you like your shoes monogrammed?” Fukuda-san asked. I was tempted to allow this to happen, but my Oberlin education still had some sway. My shoes remain anonymous.

Yamamoto-San 3: The Transformation

Just over two months later, Yamamoto-san arrived back in New York with my suit. My shoes had emigrated through different channels.

It was November 7, two days after an important American election. I was trying to practice self-care. I couldn’t make my adopted country fall out of love with fascism, but at least I could enjoy my new shoes. Also, I suspected that our new leader would cut my taxes as he had in the past, shuffling money from his supporters into my piggy bank. As an immigrant who had moved from one failed superpower to another, I had learned to take my pleasures wherever I could.

Mark educates the author on how to tie an Old Bertie knot during his final fitting at the Armoury. (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

On the night of my suit’s unveiling, Mark threw yet another party at the Armoury’s Upper East Side location. The evening was warm, almost summery. Before I was ready to put on my suit, Yamamoto-san showed me how to steam-iron it with his beloved Panasonic travel iron. The Yohei Fukuda shoes were presented to me in a beautiful blond-wood box. “There’s no nail in that box,” one of the Armoury’s salesmen said. “Like a Jewish coffin.”

But as I put on the suit, I felt less Jewish than distinctly Christian, Episcopalian if not Calvinist; in any case, born again. I walked out of the changing room and looked into a mirror. I was contained by midnight blue, my shoulders weighed down with six-ply pleasure, each of my feet covered by what felt like the product of a heavily personalized cow.

“Yokatta! ” Yamamoto-san cried—roughly, “Thank goodness!”

“Yokatta,” Mark said, smiling.

The author stroking the iridescent lining of his suit during his final fitting (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

While I stood there yammering my gratitude, I noticed that despite the tailor’s best efforts, my pants were still sliding off the ghost of my ass. “I also have no tuchus,” the Armoury salesman who’d likened my shoebox to a Jewish coffin explained. “There’s no shelf on our bodies.”

To compensate, I was strapped into a pair of suspenders, and Mark lovingly tied a polka-dot tie around my neck in an Old Bertie knot. Even though I was at least a decade older than he was, I had started to think of Mark as my parent. He demonstrated how using a Bertie knot instead of the usual four-in-hand would benefit a shorter man like me by ending my tie at the waist, not the groin, where our returning president likes his. He thrust his index finger below the knot of my tie and explained that he was making a dimple.

“Braces and polka dots, matching, wow!” Yamamoto-san said in English. He motioned to my nearly transparent Selima Optique frames. “And with glasses color, very nice!”

We’d had many discussions about whether my pants would come with buttons instead of a zipper, to avoid the dreaded “pants tent.” But after I had demonstrated to him my love of martinis and the many bathroom visits they inspire, Yamamoto-san had relented with a zipper.

I left the fitting room and walked out into the crucible of menswear society. Although my suit felt Episcopalian, men gathered around me as if I were a bar mitzvah at the bimah. They touched the fabric; they touched my shoulders; they touched my arms and my collar. They followed me out into the Armoury’s well-lit backyard.

“It looks like it was painted on you,” one man said.

“The back is so clean.”

“Your shoulders slope, and this just hugs them.”

“The neck hugs the collar with no wrinkle.”

“The stitching adds texture and visual interest.”

“The weight helps it hang, the drape.”

“That’s a good lapel length.”

“You’re shaming us all tonight.”

The author strolling through New York with his newfound self-esteem (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

I opened up my suit, shyly and then proudly, to let folks touch the iridescent lining within. Is this what it was like to be loved in this country? Yamamoto-san took me aside and told me that I must wear my suit all the time, and wear it casually, not just for special occasions. The suit was a part of me now. “What we have to divine is: What is a Gary Shteyngart suit?” Mark had once asked. Well, now we had divined it.

“If this becomes just for special occasions, I haven’t done my job,” Yamamoto-san said.

I promised him that I would never abandon the suit. Every week, I would find a use for it.

And I have kept my promise. I wear my suit regularly and with joy. I can do the Bertie knot in my sleep now. The different Ascot Chang shirts combine with either the polka-dot tie or its less formal counterpart, a silk foulard tie, to create different personalities. “You look like a crooner from the ’50s,” my wife, Esther, said of one combination. “You look like an English deacon,” she said of another.

“Bitch! You’re ready for anything now!” Shilpa wrote from Tuscany.

“I feel like you’re walking differently than you usually do,” my friend Sarah remarked. “You’re strutting a little.”

Only my 11-year-old son, Johnny, was unimpressed. “I wear a less comfortable version of that every single day,” he told me, pulling at the collar of his school uniform.

I began to wear my suit to all my meals and to take it into consideration when I ordered. What would my suit like to eat? I would ask. The suit wanted shrimp cocktail. Even after the noon hour, the suit wanted steak and eggs with Tabasco sauce and a Bloody Mary. I traveled with my suit to give a reading at the University of Pennsylvania. The suit was a perfect companion. It sprang out of my suitcase like a golden retriever, with not even the afterthought of a crease on it.

My head floating above the perfect triangle effectuated by my lapels, I gave one of the best readings of my life. Why shouldn’t I? I had always been content with my mind, but now I loved my body. It was no longer an object of discomfort and derision. I loved the small flickering muscles beneath my chest. I loved the roundness of my posture, my settled state. Like a character out of a James Salter novel, I loved my physique, my physicality. And I loved myself.

We did a photo shoot at Martiny’s, a Japanese-style cocktail bar on 17th Street. Yamamoto-san insisted that he would help supervise. He parted the tie for me as I lay on a couch to make me look more at ease, more Ivy style. He made sure that only half of the watch I had chosen for the shoot, a gilt-dial 1963 Rolex Explorer, would flash from beneath my cuff.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Afterward, Mark and I were walking through Tribeca past an immensely popular French bistro. It was the weekend, a prime dining hour; the place looked packed.

“Let’s get a table,” Mark said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. I mentioned several other restaurants down the street that might prove a better bet.

“Just go in and try,” Mark said. “I have to make a phone call.”

I approached the beautiful maître d’ alone, but instead of the usual sniveling noises I make in these situations, the excuses for not making a reservation, my understanding that I might have to wait for an hour or more for a table to open up, I stated forthrightly that my friend and I were in need of immediate sustenance.

A microsecond passed among myself, the maître d’, and my suit. A brief nod was issued. “Would you like the dining room or the bar?” she asked.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Behold My Suit!” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

On Tuesday morning, I was at the United States Military Academy, in West Point, for a national-security conference. I was invited to observe several classes of cadets in a comparative-politics course. At the end of each class, their instructor, a young Special Forces major who had already seen a variety of conflicts during his short career, would give the students the chance to ask me questions about the “real world” Army. I find such interactions with cadets to be fun and engaging. After warming up, they always seem to get around to asking: What are the hot spots in the world, and where do you see us serving in support of our country during our career?

In answering, I give them my own history. Entering West Point in 1971, my class expected to serve in Vietnam. But by the time we’d graduated, five years later, America was out of that war. Most of us were instead sent to Europe, preparing for a clash between the Soviets and NATO that never arrived. After the Berlin Wall came down, we thought our nation would be at peace for years—but then the Army, which had trained for years to defend the border of Germany, found itself attacking Iraqi forces in Desert Storm. Then, after 9/11, we conducted counterterror and counterinsurgency fights in two distinctly different countries we’d never expected to go to.

The message for the cadets? As soldiers, prepare yourself for anything. Go where you’re sent, conduct operations to the best of your ability, serve your nation well, and follow your oath to defend the Constitution.

That night, in my hotel room, I watched the president stand next to the Israeli prime minister and suggest where the next generation of U.S. soldiers might go. Most Americans were surprised by Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would be “taking over Gaza”—that we would clear unexploded ordnance, “level the site,” deploy U.S. troops if necessary, and turn the area into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

After the press conference, I watched analysts, human-rights activists, and Middle Eastern officials condemn the proposed displacement of Palestinians, with some seeing in the proposal a violation of international law.

As stunned as I was by Trump’s announcement, my first thought was: If the military were told to deploy, how in the heck would it do this mission? As a commander, I had been assigned some tough missions. And I remembered reading that when General George C. Marshall made Dwight D. Eisenhower the commander of the European invasion force in World War II, he gave him the succinct written order to “enter the continent of Europe and defeat the Nazi war machine.” Eisenhower wrote that he was immediately overwhelmed by the scope and scale of that mission, the resources that it would require, and the operational environment—enemy, allies, terrain—the troops would face. But he started his planning, and eventually executed the D-Day landings. If the U.S. could pull that off, how much more difficult would it be for it to take over Gaza and turn it into the Riviera of the Middle East?

Answering that question requires translating Trump’s general directive into the specifics of implementation. First, consider the dimensions of the Gaza Strip. At approximately 141 square miles, it’s six times the size of Manhattan. Just razing half-destroyed structures, ridding the area of rubble, and erecting new buildings would present a daunting engineering challenge. One engineer I spoke with that night estimated that the cost would be $30 billion to $80 billion. That broadly aligns with the United Nations Development Program’s estimate of $30 billion to $40 billion.

The UN also estimates that the war has left more than 50 million tons of rubble in Gaza, and claims that clearing that debris could take more than 15 years. Given that more than 170,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed during the Israeli military’s months-long operations, replacing them would require thousands of civil, structural, electrical, and environmental engineers coordinating their various disciplines, and could take decades.

Who would do this work? One cable pundit suggested using the United States Army Corps of Engineers. That organization has only about 35,000 civilian and 700 military personnel, and is already stretched thin by its domestic responsibilities. Deploying even a portion of the Army Corps would require a considerable commitment, and extensive support for the force within the area of its operation. Such an endeavor would likely necessitate extensive coordination with international partners and private organizations to manage the substantive building effort.

What the military calls the operational environment, or OE, is something that any commander or manager must assess before committing forces to an area. The Gaza/Israel OE is fraught with dangers that would affect and impede the already-challenging rubble-removal and construction efforts. The intelligence needed to counter the activity of terrorist groups comes from a variety of agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. All of these are undergoing personnel scrubs by DOGE, which is interrupting the flow of information that would help identify, prevent, and respond to threats. Dismissing senior counterterrorism leaders at the FBI, or encouraging large numbers of CIA officers to leave the agency, will weaken international intelligence sharing, risk increasing terror activity, and heighten international-security risks.

Almost-uniform international opposition would further complicate the challenge. Palestinian leaders were quick to denounce the demand that more than 2 million Gazans leave their home. Our European allies—on whom we depend for support in the area—met Trump’s comments with skepticism and criticism. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that forced displacement would be “tantamount to ethnic cleansing.” And the proposal also aroused domestic opposition, including from some of Trump’s closest political allies.

When Eisenhower was told to storm the European continent, he could count on the support of the American people, our allies, and our intelligence services—and could draw on enormous resources made available for the task. If the Gaza mission were to be handed to the military today, it would enjoy none of those advantages.

I purposely have not provided what the military calls a troop-to-task requirement, or an analysis of the number of soldiers that would be needed to accomplish the mission. And if troops did go to Gaza as part of this operation, as the president said might be needed, some of them would likely never return—just as thousands didn’t return from storming the beaches during World War II. Before the current administration goes any further, it should take stock of that reality.