The woman and her sister had been out jogging by the river when they saw the bird fall from the sky. At first, they mistook it for a falling leaf, but the angle and speed of descent suggested a weightier object. They squatted down like children to inspect the body. A pale-green bird with a cream-colored breast, too delicate for a city bird. They saw nothing above them. No trees or obstructions, just a red fog of diffuse and muddled light.

Poor bird. Why would a bird fall out of the sky like that? It was small enough to have balanced on a single blade of straw. They knew almost nothing about the daily lives of birds, save the pigeons who scampered about, pecking at urban detritus. During mating season, the males chased the females up and down the sidewalks, hopping on, hopping off.

If they had seen the dead bird in a state of decay, they would have simply sidestepped it. But because they’d witnessed the moment it struck the ground, they felt somehow responsible, as though it were a piece of trash that had blown out of their hands.

Shouldn’t we at least put it off to the side, the woman wondered aloud.

Don’t do it, her sister warned. You don’t know what it has.

They left the body, casting a few backward glances. The brief stop made it more difficult to continue running, so they walked for a stretch. The path along the Hudson River was almost empty at that hour. A flock of seagulls bobbed on the water, penned in by a rhomboid of lamplight. A crow perched mutely on a wire.

Before the interruption, she had been telling her sister about the artist. You know, the artist. I profiled him in the magazine several years ago, she reminded her sister, when he was working on the windmill installation? Remember, I shadowed him for a week, and then we took that trip to Montauk? Now he’s back in town to install a new show in Chelsea. Some kind of sculpture—a machine.

The woman’s sister was staring at her phone. She frowned at the lit screen, typing rapidly. What is it? the woman asked, waiting. The concentration on her sister’s face made her wonder if everything was all right. What happened? Her sister finally looked up.

Oh, we ordered a mattress online and now it’s arrived.

The screech of wet bicycle brakes. Water slapping against rock. Her sister was saying, Honestly, it took us forever to decide. Weighing the environmental impact of a new foam mattress versus a used one, cost versus expediency and guilt.

A plane roared overhead, lower than normal, heading to LaGuardia, perhaps. The sky was so woolly, she imagined the runway materializing at the last minute, filling up the entire windshield. A plunge of faith before the tires hit tarmac. The pilot must have a way of knowing where the ground is, she thought. Or the plane’s apparatus must know.

What were you saying just now? her sister asked. Oh, yeah, the artist. The artist who’s coming to town. What about him? I can’t believe you’re still talking to that creep.

In a rare confluence of irregular schedules, the woman and her husband were having dinner together at home, discussing the details of his upcoming birthday party. It was an unremarkable middle-age birthday, and he didn’t want to make a fuss. A small gathering at the German beer hall, he finally decided, and friends could drop in as they wished.

So, I’ll tell everyone Wednesday, he said, because Thursday I have class and Friday I’ll be gone.

What’s on Friday? The woman looked up.

I already told you. I’m going to Connecticut with Miriam.

The woman’s phone buzzed on the table. Her sister: I Googled the dead bird.

But I can’t Wednesday, the woman said. I told that artist I’d see his installation.

Apparently migratory birds get confused by high-rises that emanate light. The storm exacerbated things.

Her husband, scraping off the dishes: Come when you’re finished, then. Can’t take that long to—

A muffled notification pinged on his phone, and he reflexively put a wet hand to his back pocket.

The one we saw could’ve been some kind of warbler. Or vireo?

Okay, don’t steal my idea, but listen to this, he said, picking up the spatula again. Office hours, but for dating.

Birds navigate by feeling the pull of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Why keep up this fake pretense that each date is somehow brand-new, virginal? Line them up. Drop-in model. Thank you, next. He was gesticulating wildly for effect.

Are you experiencing such a volume of matches on your app that you’re wishing for a more expedient model of vetting and exploiting people?

The 9/11 memorial endangers thousands of birds every year.

Very funny.

What’s the arrangement you have with Miriam now, after your little incident? I’m not judging; I’m just curious if she requires you to get tested regularly.

The birds fly around the light, unable to extricate themselves.

We said we wouldn’t talk about details.

They waste precious energy and can die of exhaustion.

And I wonder how you’ll explain to everyone why you’re spending your birthday weekend with her, not with me.

I’ll tell them my wife is very principled; she doesn’t believe in the birthday industrial complex. She believes only in radical transparency, and in emotional blackmail when it suits her.

Put homing pigeons in a dark cage, take them out to sea, and spin them around and around until they’re sick. They’ll still find their way home.

Why do you insist on going through with this?

You were the one who wanted this, not me.

I guess if you want something badly enough, you generally find a way. Throat gonorrhea be damned.

Her husband threw the dish towel on the counter and went into the other room. The woman watched him leave, and wondered whether memory had once served as a kind of homing mechanism. Pillars of light. Remembering how things used to be.

Her mother had told her, over and over, Don’t look at your phone in a dark room. It’s terrible for your eyes. If you have to read, turn on the lights. She looked over now at her husband’s sleeping form, his back turned against her. She dimmed the phone’s brightness to the lowest possible setting. She swiped through various screens but could not retain much of what she saw. Tropical storm, six-foot surge, 150 awaiting rescue. Friend struggling into skinny leather pants in a dressing room. Death toll rising. Waterlogged areas. Urgent closing date upcoming. Dear members of the media—please find attacked the early-preview invitation and other press materials. She stared at the typo. Attacked. She chuckled audibly and took a screenshot. This confrontational language slipped out of people unexpectedly, breaching the surface for oxygen. The other day, a friend wrote to say that she would defiantly be at the café—

The restaurant fan on the roof of their building revved to life. The walls shuddered; a coin on their nightstand began vibrating at an irritating frequency.

Are you kidding me? her husband said, smothering his own head with a pillow. At this fucking hour.

So he hadn’t been asleep.

I’m going to throw myself out the window. I swear to fucking God.

Ass me! they typed on accident, and the occasional Go tit! never got old. Sometimes, meaning to type Done! with her hands in the wrong home position, she typed Die! instead. She eagerly opened the email with the press materials, but before it could fully load, she suddenly remembered what she had wanted to read.

Birds and the Urban Environment: Did you know that the Miracle on the Hudson accident, in which Captain Sully had to perform an emergency landing in the Hudson River, was caused by a bird strike? A bird strike happens when one or many birds collide with a plane. Sometimes birds will be ingested into the jet engine and cause catastrophic engine failure.

Another common problem for birds is called fatal light attraction. You might not know this, but the majority of migrating birds travel at night and utilize the moon and stars for navigation. However, these days, migrating at night has become deadly. Light pollution from urban centers can work alongside fog and storms to disorient birds. Imagine being distracted while you’re trying to complete a marathon or an Ironman event! Even worse, birds often crash into reflective windows, perceiving them as a continuation of the sky. This is one reason it will sometimes “rain birds” after a storm.

Help us! Have you seen these birds?

She’d opened up another article, which mentioned the case of a strange tropical bird, with a flat, “lizard shaped” head, that could not leave Times Square. It was most likely an escaped species from a collector’s menagerie. Otherwise it had blown in from somewhere. Tourists pointed and gawked as it slammed helplessly into glass doors and flapped against the panels of glowing screens.

Still up?

Hey! Here finally?

I’m really looking forward to seeing you.

As though on cue, a pink aura—a kind of sparkling rainbow mash—appeared on the borders of her vision. She clicked her screen closed.

You don’t find instant connections easily, an elderly man on the bus had once told her, unsolicited.

Five or six times in a lifetime, that’s all.

The phone glowed again.

Will I see you at the gallery tomorrow?

Yes, of course.

Then nothing. Perhaps he was going through customs, or the reception was weak. She stared at the window expectantly. When the text came through, it was a picture of him with an inflatable travel pillow around his neck.

Was a selfie always an invitation for another selfie? Impossible in the dark, here, in bed. She could send a joke in response. Or the screenshot of the gallery’s typo. She opened her sister’s chat window to work out the text draft there, so he wouldn’t see her typing.

Who are you talking to? Please. I’m begging you. I have to get to campus early, her husband said.

My sister. I’m almost done.

We forgot to do the laundry. Tomorrow, okay?

She sent her screenshot, clicked off the phone, and shoved it under her pillow. She imagined vibrations against her ear but forced herself not to look.

This is a momentary infatuation and it will dissipate soon, she thought. I have nothing to confess.

Sweetie, you’re obsessed with being good, her friend had said once, to tease her. Secret feelings aren’t the same as actions.

In her daily life, nothing that was felt could be acted upon; what could be acted upon followed routines of inertia or necessity. To be an adult was to feel a thing and walk away from it. To feel anxiety and know its baselessness, to feel jealousy and chalk it up to insecurity. To feel the need to run out of the train, screaming, yet remain completely still, unruffled.

Her husband began snoring.

She closed her eyes and put her hand into her underwear.

Before she fell asleep, she thought about the Mandarin duck that had appeared one day in a pond in Central Park. The duck was dazzling, with high-contrast plumage reminiscent of a Peking-opera mask. Its arrival had felt like a very special occasion, like a visit from a prime minister. Now, according to the articles, the duck paddled around with the common mallards, circling idly for crumbs of bread. Visitors flocked to take its photo. Beautiful things want to be replicated, so philosophers say. Was this visitation beautiful? The unfathomable longing of this wayward bird that wakes one day in a man-made pond, alone among strangers.

The woman spent most of the next morning in bed. In the middle of the night, the artist had sent an audio file—no subject, no body, just a recording of himself playing scales on the guitar. Higher, faster, changing keys, breaking off into riffs and climaxes. The file had gone on for 10 minutes. She hadn’t understood his intention, but her gut had kicked so violently that she’d had to take several shits.

After she’d listened to the file, she’d dug around online for his past interviews, trying to summon his actual voice. She’d found a short documentary on public television, but the green of his shirt had put her off. Next, she’d scrolled through Google Image search, looking for new pictures, then the tagged photos on his social-media profile, and had found one of him looking at the camera with a dreamy, postcoital expression. She had masturbated to this and now she was late, speed-walking to the gallery.

She was sweaty in the unseasonable humidity, and her hair was wilting. She could feel the sting of salt in the fresh wound in the corner of her mouth. Getting ready, she’d picked at a patch of dead skin until it bled.

Miriam just picked up the cake! Can’t wait to see you all!

She approached the gallery and saw a block of text pasted on the white wall at the entrance. Underneath was his name in big black lettering.

APORIA
PETER FANG-CAPRA

Inside, workers on ladders with buckets of black paint were brushing an enormous contraption of pneumatic valves and tubes and elbows. She saw him up there, craning his neck and pointing a finger along a ribbed piece that linked to a mechanical lung. The artist looked the way she’d remembered … perhaps more diminutive.

Her voice was lost in the din. Hey, do you guys need some help?

He climbed down from the ladder.

Look who’s here, at the very end of the day.

She stiffened in his embrace.

I thought you would show up earlier. Come. We tried to save some of the work so you could see.

Gripping her forearm, he led her underneath some scaffolding, and they stood before a maze of freshly oiled pieces, on a blue tarp, that had yet to be lifted into the sculpture. He gestured toward a metal chamber. An organ? The apparatus seemed to follow the logic of utility, but if one looked closely, the structure had no observable function. Where things ended or began was impossible to say. Head, tail, mouth, or anus. She took out her phone to take photos.

We’re here by the bathrooms. Got two tables. Taking all bier and wurst orders!

By the way, I’m sorry about that file I sent, he said. Please don’t listen to it. I play scales when I’m nervous, and it helps calm me down.

Too late. I listened to the whole thing on repeat when I went for a run this morning.

I’m so embarrassed.

You’re really good at the guitar.

Abruptly, he grabbed her by the shoulders and leaned in, his lips brushing her ear.

Don’t turn now. My gallerist is walking rapidly toward us with a very determined expression. Pretend we’re invisible. Oh God, she’s looking for me. She’s quite mad. I’ll have to be right back.

She watched as he danced off to intercept a tall, finely dressed woman. They retreated into a back office and closed the door behind them.

The woman looked again at her phone.

dang you dense girl
homeboy turning up the charm so you’ll write a good review
that simple
heard a thing or two about him
be careful kk love

Alone, the woman tried to look preoccupied and circled the machine, as though studying its craftmanship. She had long reached the end of her observations. She took out her phone again, scrolled through her email, and opened up the press materials.

“Is my death possible?” asks Jacques Derrida in Aporias. How can one experience that which is impossible to experience? In this new sculptural work, Fang-Capra asks whether the future itself is aporetic, a pipe dream or a mirage. Materials of modernity comprise this convoluted structure; discourses of biopolitical and emotional disaster are limned by discarded pipes and sheet metal. What would a machine of the impossible look like? The enfolding tensions of late capitalism are shaped into a coherent yet discomfiting whole.

She went outside and walked toward the corner bodega. Once there, she bought a can of seltzer and considered the bodega’s neon display of CBD gummies. An LED sign flashed:

HELLO VAPE WORLD
MILE HIGH CLUB
ITS YOUR YEAR
YEAR TO QUIT

She bought a pack of regular cigarettes and looked for a socially sanctioned place to smoke.

I’m an analog kind of girl too, said a blue-haired woman who was also smoking in the piss-scented alleyway. They exhaled their respective clouds of combustion and pulled their arms more tightly around themselves.

She nodded. We evolved around the communal fire; think about that.

She didn’t like to inhale too deeply anymore.

Hey babe. Ordered u a yummy fleischsalat.

She finished her cigarette and went back inside the gallery. Two other writers she recognized had also come to preview the installation. She waved hello and approached them, catching the last fragments of their conversation.

Dude must have paid a shit ton to ship all this metal. Wonder how he harvested these car parts.

Probably dispatched a crew of interns to a Third World junkyard, then mobilized another crew to receive them in Berlin, where they breathed toxic fumes and shaved off years of their life for vague proximity to art-world fame.

That envy talking? I’m feeling a takedown coming.

A slammed door.

The artist walked out, shouting, Yes, yes, I know. See you at breakfast. Good luck.

The two critics congratulated him, patting him amiably. Thank you, thank you, the artist said, shaking his head. All of you are much too kind.

Everything okay? She asked.

They really need me to get dinner with this Saudi prince. A collector they’re courting.

Don’t you have to go? Big payday, no?

There are so many princes. Can’t keep track of them all.

Hey, you. Aren’t you taking me somewhere? He suddenly prodded her, as though they had been interrupted mid-conversation. Aren’t you taking me out for a drink to talk nuts and bolts and hammered grommets?

Her phone lit up in her palm.

Cake is about to have a meltdown, lol. When u coming????

Only if now’s a good time for you …

No no, she protested, typing fast.

Honey don’t wait for me

She looked up.

Seriously. Do you have somewhere to be?

The cab driver turned north onto the West Side Highway. I can’t stand these screens, the artist said, jabbing at the mounted tablet in front of them. What trash. The touch screen was desensitized with a filmy layer of grease, the cumulative tapping of many dirty hands. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. he said, pressing hard. The sound muted, he settled back into his seat and turned toward her. His hands floated up and down his legs.

Everyone wants your attention, she said. Royalty, technology. How do you manage?

Yes. I do need to get away from it all. He sighed in a melodramatic way. Well, that’s the life of a world-famous artist.

Another one of his jokes. She cracked a smile.

Don’t I manage to give you my undivided attention?

Not really, she said. But I don’t expect it from you.

He mimed a punctured heart and smiled that winning smile.

It might not appear as such, he said, but I’m an insanely jealous person. I am very aware of this flaw in myself. I don’t like to have any distractions.

He pulled her closer.

What have you been thinking about? Ever since you arrived, your mind seems elsewhere.

He was smiling even more broadly now, and she was smiling, and they were both smiling at each other like two dumb dogs. A wide, shit-eating grin is how someone would have described it. Had her mouth ever stretched this wide. Had she ever felt this turned on. Had anything ever been this real.

He licked his lips. She could see a coating of white at the corners of his mouth, the kind of thick saliva that accrues after too many drugs, or too much talking and not enough water. She pulled slightly away but he grabbed her chin and held it fast as he worked his mouth up and down her neck. Eventually he settled on a spot above her collarbone, attaching and sucking, round and full, like a lamprey on aquarium glass.

It hurt a bit; her eyes fluttered open. Behind his head, next to the rear window, was a message for her.

Where are you?

More and more, whenever she sees a flash of blue—a blue sheet of paper, a framed square of sky—she mistakes it for her phone. Electricity jolts through her entire body.

This time, the dangling seat-belt buckle had reflected the blue from the Chelsea Piers sign.

Yesterday, I was reading about birds, she wanted to say. That’s what I was doing. Have you ever thought about how a bird is like a kind of machine?

One clammy hand was already under her shirt, flicking her nipple through her bra. The other hand crawled up her thigh, a thumb pushing against the nub of her clit.

Birds are automatons with a repertoire of preprogrammed behavior. They do everything by instinct. Fly, feed, migrate, mate. An osprey will return to nest in the same place even if it happens to be in the middle of a traffic intersection. A guinea fowl accustomed to flat terrain won’t know to fly over a low mesh fence to get to the other side. It may simply keep running into the barrier, over and over again.

You’re ready for this, he moaned. You’re so ready.

A bird hardly knows what it’s in love with. A baby cuckoo will push the other baby birds out of the nest, and the parents will keep feeding the parasitic chick. Goslings will bond with whatever moving thing they see in their first minutes of life. I once saw a pigeon guard its nest while its dead mate lay nearby.

I’ll be there soon.

I’ll be late.

I’ll be so late I won’t arrive.

Let’s have a drink on the roof at your place, she could say. See the tops of the trees in Central Park. Birds congregate there because there’s little other refuge for miles around, to land, to rest …

Don’t wait up for me.

Imagine the sheer density in that sliver of green.

The driver coughed a few times. She opened her eyes and saw, as they idled at a light, a spectacle of starlings feasting on a fried chicken wing from the garbage. She wanted to look away. Their adaptivity made them repulsive. They could use their intelligence for problem-solving. They could eat anything and live anywhere. They could learn new habits of being.

Midtown was fading in the rearview mirror, a cloud of light rising above Times Square. Dots of pink and white, flashing, scintillating.

Dizzy with desire, she gazed up at the camera flashes, at the neon tickers. She struggled against the car door, her forehead knocking against glass. He was shoving her out of the cab and through the revolving doors of the hotel.

Upstairs, the hotel room was rimmed with glass. She felt the whoosh and boom of being orbited on all sides by a monsoon of light. She approached the window.

Isn’t it curious how people always want to be high up and have a bird’s-eye view of things? As if we can’t see what we’re doing down there every single day.

Looking down, she thought of a woodcock, with its large, depthless eyes that see better behind than ahead. In her mind’s eye, she saw the patch of field by the schoolyard, where pink-and-white clover grew. Decades ago, she had lost herself in them, pinching stems to string into a necklace. She remembered the green grass, the blue sky, the brown mud, her teacher’s face looming suddenly so close to hers, asking, What do you see? She’d pointed. The iridescent blue of a butterfly’s wing. The woodcock lies quietly on the sidewalk, paralyzed, its neck snapped in two. The heels of commuters click busily around it.

But I will learn to adapt, the woman thought. I will be a city bird.

In his contentious confirmation hearing, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, affirmed that his mission is “to bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defense.” It is a terrible idea.

The archetype of the Western warrior is Homer’s Achilles. Superbly fit, the “swift runner” Achilles is magnificent in battle. He is an individualist, with dazzling armor and a troop of admiring Myrmidons who would follow him anywhere. His prowess in combat is unsurpassable. He is brought down only by a poisoned arrow (a sneaky weapon if ever there was one) fired by the wimpy Paris, whose seduction of Helen had started the Trojan War.

He is also the man who comes close to killing his boss, Agamemnon, over a favorite concubine; sulks in his tent; and weeps when he feels dishonored until his mother (a goddess) comforts him. In a rage over the death of his friend Patroclus in a fair fight, Achilles not only kills the Trojan prince Hector but then drags his body around Troy for his horrified parents and widow to see. An intervention by the gods is all that prevents the body from being ripped apart by this treatment, although Achilles’s initial hope (snarled at the dying Hector) was that dog packs and birds would rend the corpse of the man who fought to defend his city from the horrors of a sacking.

Achilles is a warrior, not a soldier. History has had plenty of warrior types, including some (think Geronimo) whom we celebrate even after vanquishing them. But let us remember that the brave (and yes, they are brave) ghazi fighters of the Islamic State and the mercenary killers of the Wagner Group had and have warrior cultures. Warriors are people who exult in killing, who prize individual courage and daring, who obsess about honor (often in self-destructive ways), who frequently take trophies from the bodies of their enemies, and whose behavior on and off the battlefield often veers into atrocity.

Soldiers are different. They are servants of the state. In well-governed countries, they are bound by discipline, the rule of law, and commitment to comrades and organizations—not to self-glorification. Their virtues are obedience, stoicism, perseverance, and competence. They serve a common good, and duty, not glory, is their prime motivation.

The distinction matters. If Europe and the United States overran large parts of the planet, it was because they deployed disciplined soldiers against, in many instances, more numerous warriors. Even well-organized warriors—think of Shaka’s Zulus, or the Iroquois confederacy—could rarely defeat well-drilled infantry. The British General C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars, a manual on imperial warfare, explains the outcomes of those and many other fights far better than Homer’s Iliad.

To be sure, these are ideal types, and in reality they may coexist, although with one set of qualities predominating. Arguably, for example, the armies of the Confederacy were more like warriors (the rebel yell, J. E. B. Stuart’s plumed hat, Pickett’s death-defying charge), and the Union more like soldiers (repeating rifles, rumpled Ulysses S. Grant, an ever-tightening naval blockade). We know how that turned out. It is no coincidence that one book that tries to explain the Confederacy’s exceptionally high losses, particularly among general officers, bears the title Attack and Die. Southern warriors liked to charge with the bayonet. And atrocities such as the Fort Pillow massacre of African American troops and the cruelty and mismanagement of Andersonville Prison had a lot to do with nonsoldierly behavior.

The infatuation with warrior culture—the strut and swagger, the desire to battle mano a mano—is not atypical of a certain kind of junior officer, which is what Hegseth was in the National Guard. It is a world apart from how the armed forces operate at scale, and from the extraordinarily complex business of the Department of Defense.

You don’t want Achilles in a nuclear submarine, you don’t need El Cid maintaining your stealth bomber, and you surely do not want Crazy Horse presiding over the urgent problem of renovating the American defense industrial base.

I have known some great soldiers (using the term to include sailors, airmen, and Marines), and by and large they are wary of warrior culture. They know that violence on the battlefield can easily spin out of control; they know that a very large part of their duty is the orchestration of large and intricate organizations and complex technologies. They prefer steadiness to impulse, calculation to intuition, and, above all, thoughtfulness about their profession to raging glorification of bloodshed. Jim Mattis and David Petraeus (to mention just two) are readers (and writers) of books; the special operators Stan McChrystal and William McRaven are anything but yellers and screamers.

And those are just the military people. Secretaries of defense are civilians, or should be. The appointment of Mattis in the first Trump administration could be supported on the grounds that an erratic new president needed someone in that position who would temper his wilder instincts. Typical for Trump though, he was disappointed to learn that Mattis was not, in fact, known as “Mad Dog” and hated the president’s use of the nickname. The appointment by President Joe Biden of another retired general, Lloyd Austin, was but one of a number of unforced errors that made his administration in many respects a failure.

The civilian secretary of defense should be tough and highly experienced—Bob Gates or, earlier, Melvin Laird—as well as a capable organizer, a respected counselor, a shrewd politician, and a forceful leader from outside military culture. The defense secretary’s job is often to represent civilian values to the military (think racial integration and acceptance of homosexuals in military service) and military values to the civilian world. They must administer a sprawling department with millions of civilian and military members, set an enormous range of policies, and, most important, exercise the consistent civilian oversight of military operations, which a president cannot. They are not in the warrior business. Indeed, some of the most effective secretaries have had negligible military experience, or none whatsoever.

Hegseth, quite apart from his turbulent personal life, has no qualifications for this position. The organizations he ran failed or lost considerable sums of money; his testimony (before an admittedly less-than-exacting set of interrogators) revealed broad areas of ignorance about defense. He seems to have gotten the nod because of his servility to Trump, and the tough-guy bluster of a resentful junior officer raging against higher-ups—an altogether common type throughout history, a trope rather than a qualification.

And this warrior-culture rhetoric is potentially dangerous. In his first term, President Trump reversed a number of decisions that the military made to enforce discipline—restoring rank and the coveted SEAL trident pin to Eddie Gallagher, and pardoning other officers convicted of or headed to trial for war crimes. Trump could do much worse with a secretary of defense who thinks his job is to free up the tough guys to do tough-guy things. Hegseth’s sneers at judge advocate general officers—military lawyers—were not merely juvenile but dangerous.

The real peril here is not a plot to destroy American liberties but fecklessness and ignorance about what it takes to build, strengthen, and direct a military that is powerful but not, in relative terms, as dominant as it once was. Half a century ago, the great student of management, Peter Drucker, said that running the Department of Defense might well be impossible. Perhaps, but it is most certainly impossible in the hands of someone whose idea of leadership of that organization is a jutting jaw, bravado, and war paint.

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President Joe Biden still imagines that he could have won. Asked by USA Today’s Susan Page whether he could have beaten Donald Trump if he had stayed in the race, Biden responded: “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes.”

Reality thinks not.

Of course, we’ll never know for sure, but the evidence (including polling) suggests that he would have been crushed by an even larger margin than Kamala Harris was. Biden’s answer is a reminder that his legacy will be tarnished by his fundamental misreading of the moment and his own role in it.

To be sure, Biden can point to some impressive successes. He leaves behind a healthy and growing economy, a record of legislative accomplishment, and more than 230 judicial appointments, including a Supreme Court justice. And then there were the failures: the chaotic exit from Afghanistan; a massive surge of migrants at the border in 2023. Although Biden was not solely to blame for inflation—factors included the Federal Reserve’s low-interest-rate policy and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—his spending policies contributed to the problem. And even though he rallied Europe to the defense of Ukraine, critics suggest that he also misread that moment—Phillips Payson O’Brien argued in The Atlantic in November that the Biden administration “treated the conflict like a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won.” Ukraine’s uncertain fate is now left to Biden’s successor.

A charismatic and energetic president might have been able to overcome these failures and win a run for reelection. Some presidents seize the public’s imagination; Biden barely even got its attention. He presumed that he could return to a Before Times style of politics, where the president was a backroom bipartisan dealmaker. Whereas Trump dominated the news, Biden seemed to fade into the background almost from the beginning, seldom using his bully pulpit to rally public support or explain his vision for the country. Trump was always in our faces, but it often felt like Biden was … elsewhere.

Biden also misread the trajectory of Trumpism. Like so many others, he thought that the problem of Trump had taken care of itself and that his election meant a return to normalcy. So he chose as his attorney general Merrick Garland, who seems to have seen his role as restoring the Department of Justice rather than pursuing accountability for the man who’d tried to overturn the election. Eventually, Garland turned the cases over to Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought indictments. But it was too late. With time running out and a Supreme Court ruling in favor of broad presidential immunity, Trump emerged unscathed. And then came the sad final chapter of Biden’s presidency, which may well overshadow everything else.

When he ran for president in 2020, Biden described himself as a “transition candidate” and a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders. But instead of stepping aside for those younger leaders, Biden chose to seek another term, despite the growing evidence of his decline. With the future of democracy at stake, Biden’s inner circle appeared to shield the octogenarian president. His team didn’t just insist that voters ignore what was in front of their eyes; it also maintained that the aging president could serve out another four-year term. Some Democrats clung to denial—and shouted down internal critics—until Biden’s disastrous debate performance put an end to the charade.

Even then, Biden stubbornly tried to hang on, before intense pressure from his own party forced him to drop out of the race in July. Now he is shuffling to the end of his presidency, already shunted aside by his successor and still in denial.

As the passing of Jimmy Carter reminds us, presidential legacies are complicated matters, and it is difficult to predict the verdict of history. But as Biden leaves office, he is less a transformational figure than a historical parenthesis. He failed to grasp both the political moment and the essential mission of his presidency.

Other presidents have misunderstood their mandate. But in Biden’s case, the consequences were existential: By his own logic, the Prime Directive of his presidency was to preserve democracy by preventing Donald Trump’s return to power. His failure to do so will likely be the lasting legacy of his four years in office.

Related:

Biden’s unpardonable hypocrisy How Biden made a mess of Ukraine

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The army of God comes out of the shadows. “The Palisades Fire is destroying places that I’ve loved.” Why “late regime” presidencies fail

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Former President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral took place in Washington, D.C. Carter’s casket was flown to Georgia after; he will be buried in his hometown of Plains. At least five people are dead in the wildfires that have spread across parts of the Los Angeles area. More than 2,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed. New York’s highest court denied Donald Trump’s request to halt the sentencing hearing in his criminal hush-money case.

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Time-Travel Thursdays: Early-career poetry often poses a tantalizing question: How did this poet start off so terrible—and end up so good? But a writer’s final works are compelling for a different reason, Walt Hunter writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

You’re Going to Die. That’s a Good Thing.

By Arthur C. Brooks

Death is inevitable, of course; the most ordinary aspect of life is that it ends. And yet, the prospect of that ending feels so foreign and frightening to us. The American anthropologist Ernest Becker explored this strangeness in his 1973 book, The Denial of Death, which led to the development by other scholars of “terror management theory.” This theory argues that we fill our lives with pastimes and distractions precisely to avoid dealing with death …

If we could resolve this dissonance and accept reality, wouldn’t life be better? The answer is most definitely yes.

Read the full article.

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Has anyone described the fear of dying more vividly than the 19th-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilyich? In that novella, published in 1886, the protagonist lives the conventional, prosperous life of a Russian bourgeois. With little thought about life’s deeper meanings, he fills his days with the preoccupations of his family’s social position, his professional success, and his personal amusements.

But then Ivan Ilyich develops a mysterious ailment, which gradually worsens, confining him to bed. When it becomes apparent that he is dying, he is thrown into a profound existential crisis. “He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of an executioner, knowing there is no escape,” writes Tolstoy. “And he felt that with every minute, despite his efforts to resist, he was coming closer and closer to what terrified him.” The story describes the horror and sadness of Ivan’s predicament with astonishing precision.

Death is inevitable, of course; the most ordinary aspect of life is that it ends. And yet, the prospect of that ending feels so foreign and frightening to us. The American anthropologist Ernest Becker explored this strangeness in his 1973 book, The Denial of Death, which led to the development by other scholars of “terror management theory.” This theory argues that we fill our lives with pastimes and distractions precisely to avoid dealing with death. As Tolstoy’s novella chronicles, this phenomenon is one of the most paradoxical facets of human behavior—that we go to such lengths to avoid attending to a certainty that affects literally every single person, and that we regard this mundane certainty as an extraordinary tragedy.

If we could resolve this dissonance and accept reality, wouldn’t life be better? The answer is most definitely yes. We know this because of the example of people who have accepted death and, in so doing, have become fully alive. With knowledge, practice, and courage, you can do this too.

[From the November 1891 issue: Count Tolstoy at home]

A commonly held belief is that if and when someone learns that they are going to die, psychologically they deal with the grief involved in a series of clear, ordered steps: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This sequence comes from the famous work of the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who devised this model for her 1969 best seller, On Death and Dying. This study had such extensive impact that the New York Public Library named it one of its “Books of the Century” in the mid-1990s.

As influential as it was, Kübler-Ross’s formula for coming to terms with dying did not actually make death easier for people to accept. One problem was that her model was interpreted in overly mechanistic and prescriptive ways by popularizers who suggested that you had to march through these stages in the fixed order. Another problem is that the experience, in her telling, is a progression of pretty much unrelieved negativity: It’s all grief, and even the final acceptance sounds essentially like a grim kind of resignation. From this, you might well conclude that distraction is indeed the best strategy—why face death unless and until you have to?

More recent work does not support the “fixed order” interpretation of the Kübler-Ross model. To begin with, researchers have shown that not everyone passes through all of her stages, and that people frequently regress in them and jump around—a point that Kübler-Ross herself made later in her career. In a paper published in 2007 in the journal JAMA, scholars found that denial or disbelief occurred only rarely, and that acceptance was where most dying people spent most of their time.

These findings also hold true for those who experience grief after losing a loved one, according to researchers writing in The British Journal of Psychiatry in 2008 who conducted a 23-month study of “bereaved individuals.” Initially after a bereavement, an individual experienced a higher level of yearning, depression, and anger, but after four months on average, these feelings declined steadily. From the start, however, the participants also displayed a level of acceptance that was higher than any of these negative emotions, and this rose continuously as well. By the study’s end, peaceful acceptance far outweighed all other feelings.

Other research confirms that many people facing death are far more positive about the prospect than almost anyone would expect. In a 2017 study titled “Dying Is Unexpectedly Positive,” my Harvard colleague Michael I. Norton and his co-authors showed that people with a terminal illness or on death row wrote about their predicament in more positive terms and using fewer negative words than people who were not in that situation but were asked to write about it as if they were.

Several factors explain why a positive acceptance of impending death may be so common. One 2013 Spanish study found that terminally ill patients tended to reevaluate their life and experiences in a positive light while also embracing acceptance. Many of these patients enjoyed new forms of personal growth in their final months, through placing greater value on simple things and focusing on the present.

Interestingly, the potential benefits of facing death directly can also be found among a very different group of people: those who have had near-death experiences. As a rule, these survivors had no chance to arrive at a calm acceptance of death—typically because, unlike terminal-cancer patients, they had no time to do so in a sudden life-threatening emergency. What they had in common, though, was being confronted with their mortality—and finding that paradoxically positive. One study from 1998 showed that after a near-death experience, people became less materialistic and more concerned for others, were less anxious about their own death whenever that time would come, and enjoyed greater self-worth.

[Read: Doctors don’t know how to talk about death]

One irony about death, then, is that it remains most fearsome when most remote: When we are not forced to confront it in the immediate future, mortality is a menacing phantasm we try not to think about. But such avoidance brings no benefits, only costs. When the prospect of dying is concrete and imminent, most people are able to make the fact life-enhancing through acceptance. The real problem with death is that it messes up our being alive until it’s right in front of us.

So what if we were able to realize the benefit of facing death without it actually being imminent? Or, put another way: How can we use a positive acceptance of death to help us be more alive while we still have the most life left?

In theory, we should all be able to do this, because we’re all in a terminal state. We are all going to die; we just don’t yet know when. Lacking this precise knowledge is probably what makes it hard for us to focus on the reality of our ultimate nonbeing, and we have a good idea as to why: Neuroscientists have shown that abstract worry about something tends to mute the parts of the brain responsible for evoking vivid imagery. When your demise seems in some far-off future, you can’t easily grasp the granular fact of it, so you don’t.

The secret to benefiting from your death right now, therefore, is to make it vivid and concrete. This is exactly what Buddhist monks do when they undertake the maranasati (“mindfulness of death”) meditation. In this practice, the monks imagine their corporeal self in various states of decline and decomposition while repeating the mantra “This body, too, such is its nature, such is its future, such its unavoidable fate.”

The Stoic philosophers had a similar memento mori exercise, as Seneca urged: “The person who devotes every second of his time to his own needs and who organizes each day as if it were a complete life neither longs for nor is afraid of the next day.” Catholics hear a comparable spiritual injunction when they receive a mark made with ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

No matter what religious or philosophical tradition you adhere to, a practice like one of these is worth incorporating into your own routine. You can write your own maranasati or memento mori, say. Or, as an easier way to start, on your birthday or an annual holiday, work out roughly how many you may have left and ask yourself whether you’re really spending your scarce time the way you want.

Being mindful of mortality in this more vivid, concrete way will help you find a greater measure of that positive acceptance—and use that to be more fully alive right now. And this will help you make choices that affect other people besides yourself: At your next family gathering, consider how many more such reunions you’d want to spend with your parents or other aging relatives. Think of an actual number. Then think of what you would need to do to increase that number—by making more of an effort to travel, or by moving to live closer, or by hosting the occasion yourself?

[Read: Death has two timelines]

Tolstoy’s genius was not just in his ability to depict the terror of Ivan Ilyich’s death; he was also able to make real the bliss of his ultimate acceptance of death. As the weeks of his decline went by, Ivan began to see his wife’s efforts to keep up with society’s proprieties and conventions as trivial and tiresome, and he no longer regretted missing any of that. Finally, “he searched for his accustomed fear of death and could not find it,” writes Tolstoy. Ivan’s death is no tragedy at all, but the most natural thing in the world.

Even then, though, Tolstoy is not done; he ends with a true coup de grâce. At the very moment of his death, Ivan has an epiphany that might be the most consequential insight of all. As he is fading, he hears someone say, “It is finished.” In this last flickering moment of consciousness, Ivan considers what exactly is finished. Not his life, he decides, for it dawns on him: “Death is finished … It is no more!” And then, in peace, he slips away.