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Every year, Super Bowl advertisers pay millions to appear on screens for a minute or less. The ad slots tend more toward the upbeat than the controversial. But even by the low bar of Super Bowl advertising, this year was rather risk-averse. Sweet animals and mascots abounded. Multiple ads featured vaguely old-timey montages. At a certain point, the commercials started to blend together. (The two different ads featuring flying hair certainly did.)

In past big games, some companies have attempted to speak to the zeitgeist by addressing civic or political themes in their ads. In 2017, just after Donald Trump was inaugurated for the first time, some major Super Bowl advertisers addressed politics head-on: Budweiser released an ad portraying the founder of the company encountering discrimination as he immigrated to America. Airbnb’s spot that year seemingly criticized Trump’s then–travel ban.

In the past decade or so, in particular, some brands have embraced explicitly political marketing, giving credence to the idea that consumers “vote with their wallets.” Some shoppers have said that they do: A 2018 survey from the communications firm Edelman found that nearly 60 percent of American consumers would buy or boycott a brand “solely because of its position on a social or political issue,” up 12 points from the year before. Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, many consumers (and employees) demanded that major corporations, even those whose businesses didn’t directly relate to social issues, take a stand on topics such as race, voting rights, and abortion—even if some suspected that companies were responding to pressure rather than acting on genuine principle.

This year’s Super Bowl advertisers showed little interest in going near any of that. Few made explicit reference to politics (excepting nonprofits). Timothy Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern, told me that he sees the 2023 Bud Light imbroglio, in which the company faced massive backlash over partnering with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a social-media video, as a shift. By 2023, Americans had started to soften on their interest in companies taking a stand on social issues, according to Gallup. Flickers of a move away from political ads were apparent last year; during both the 2023 and the 2024 games, Budweiser made a nostalgia play, focusing its ads on the brand’s classic Clydesdale horses.

The NFL, for its part, decided this year to remove the message “End Racism,” which had been stenciled onto the edge of the end zone for the past four Super Bowls, and replace it with “Choose Love.” Donald Trump attended the game, the first sitting president to do so; the league has denied that the timing of the change was related to the president’s attendance.

Super Bowl ad space was available for purchase well before the presidential election: Skechers, back in May, became the first brand to confirm that it had bought a national spot. By mid-2024, about 85 percent of the ad units were sold out, and by early November, all of the slots had sold. A bit of reshuffling followed—State Farm pulled its ad after the Los Angeles–area fires—but for the most part, companies have been prepping for many months. Still, Calkins told me, every advertiser likely took a closer look at their cuts after the election, to make sure that nothing would spark too much controversy, given the new administration.

Super Bowl ads cost so much—more than $8 million this year for some national slots, nearly double what they cost a decade ago—and a misstep can pose a dire risk for companies. But many still find the huge audience, a rarity in our fractured media environment, worth the potential treachery, Calkins told me. The challenge for brands going forward, he said, is to find the balance of being “safe” without losing creativity. This year, lots of ads were uncontroversial—and uninspired. Maybe next year, more of them will surprise us.

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What Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show Said

By Spencer Kornhaber

The Super Bowl halftime show is an opportunity for big, dumb fun: explosions, laser shows, left sharks. But big, dumb fun isn’t Kendrick Lamar’s thing. The 37-year-old Los Angeles rapper and Pulitzer Prize winner prefers subtlety, smarts, and fun that’s tinged with danger and unease. Amid tough, tense circumstances, he put on a tough, tense—and quite satisfying—show.

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Culture Break

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Laugh (or don’t). A new biography of the Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels profiles the unfunny man who became the arbiter of funny, James Parker writes.

Read. The Finnish writer Tove Jansson was the outsider who captured American loneliness, Lauren LeBlanc writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Taking stock of your life can be simpler when you’re half a world away from home. For Tove Jansson, arguably Finland’s most famous writer of the 20th century, a vacation in 1971 marked an unexpected turn following a tumultuous year. After more than two decades of acclaim thanks to her fictional creatures, the Moomins, Jansson, then 57, was on the brink of potential burnout. Instead of coasting on her reputation as a beloved children’s author, she was trying something new, writing novels for adults. In the middle of this career pivot, in 1970, her mother died, compounding Jansson’s feeling that her life was changing irrevocably. “I am going around in a great sense of unreality, calm, but so alien,” she wrote to friends. She needed an escape.

That vacation—culminating in a long trip to the United States—upended her outlook on the balance of work and life, as well as on the key subject of her fiction: a sense of home. Throwing out a packed work schedule, Jansson submerged herself in not only an entirely new landscape, but also an alien culture undergoing post-’60s social upheaval. This experience changed the tenor of her work, and it helped her become the author Americans continue to discover more than 50 years later.

Though Jansson’s global fame still derives from those cheeky Moomins captured in comics and illustrated novels, her books for adults are rich and complex, revealing the stickiness of human coexistence. Jansson conveys a wry, layered empathy rooted in her Nordic traditions, informed by her queerness, and tested by her encounters with American morals and migratory habits. Thanks to a steady parade of recent reissues with introductions by Ali Smith, Lauren Groff, and others, this mature work has quietly developed a readership in the United States. A recent film adaptation of her sweet autobiographical novel The Summer Book may win new converts, but true enthusiasts will seize on the latest rerelease, Sun City, which explores an aspect of American life—the isolation of the aging—that often goes unseen.

Before her American journey, Jansson had been living a life both idyllic and in many ways restricting. She’d been raised by well-known Finnish Swedish artists and remained inseparable from them, leaving art school in Stockholm at 19 to return home to Helsinki, where she would continue her education while writing and creating commercial artwork to better support her family. By 1970, she was tending to her aging mother, Ham, and in a relationship with her longtime partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, that was technically illegal. In Helsinki, the couple lived separately in neighboring studios, though they spent summers in a house on the island of Klovharun, where they could live together in relative privacy. Within a year of Ham’s death, homosexuality was decriminalized in Finland. Jansson felt as though a chapter of her life had ended.

Fulfilling an old dream, Jansson and Pietilä took an eight-month journey. Beginning with a business trip to Japan, they gradually made their way to the continental United States. In New Orleans, Jansson completed The Summer Book, which idealized her spartan life on Klovharun. The next book she wrote, mostly after returning from the U.S., couldn’t be more different: Sun City depicted a Florida retirement home with none of the sentimental warmth of Finland.

[Read: What you should be reading this summer]

Sun City was inspired by a stay in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the couple had gone to see the ship used in the film Mutiny on the Bounty. Charmed by the town during what was supposed to be a short visit, the couple checked into a guesthouse called the Butler Arms. The perspective of distance, the novelty of the southern United States, and the break from routine presented unexpected creative gifts.

What began as a short story evolved into a novel about loneliness and contrived community. Sun City renders St. Petersburg as a place where “streets lie empty in their perpetual sunshine.” Setting the novel in the fictionalized Berkeley Arms, Jansson follows people on the margins who are reaching the end of their life without strong communal ties. Residents have drifted from all over the country into this boardinghouse arrangement. Among these loners, miscommunication abounds and short tempers flare. One guest tearfully reflects, “Distrust was a poison that made a person shrink up and lose all contact with real life.” This false Eden, sunny but stark, feels like a photonegative of Jansson’s cozy but rugged Klovharun (lovingly rendered in another recent reissue, the nonfictional Notes From an Island).

Sun City operates as a series of vignettes without a strong unifying plot—appropriate for a work about idiosyncratic humans who may share a pretty veranda lined with rocking chairs but occupy hermetically sealed worlds of their own. A proud woman named Rebecca Rubinstein dines alone with a cab running its fare outside the restaurant. She muses about her fellow residents: “We are also afraid, but we don’t show it, and we don’t open up to anyone. Our bodies no longer express anything. We have to get along entirely with words, nothing but words.”

Americans are often said to prize their personal space, but from Jansson’s perspective, the distance among these residents is a chasm, which prevents them from connecting with others. Their private histories remain fixed in amber rather than coalescing into a collective culture. After the sudden deaths of two sisters, one resident reflects, “None of us liked them and none of us wanted to know about their lives. We are being admonished to be more careful with each other.” No heartwarming community rises from these ashes. There’s too little time and not enough at stake.

The Berkeley Arms is a stately hotel run by Miss Ruthermer-Berkeley and Miss Catherine Frey. Ruthermer-Berkeley is 93, reflecting back on her life. Frey is her harried employee, whose patience is wearing thin. Linda, a young immigrant from Mexico, maintains the guest home as best she can. Linda’s distracted lover, Joe, works on the famous ship—the Bounty—and cruises around town on his motorcycle. She dreams of a passionate rendezvous in the marshes, while he anxiously awaits word from a group of Christians in Miami who promise him that Jesus is coming to whisk them away. The lovers talk past each other; neither shares the other’s innermost desire.

[Read: The antisocial century]

If Sun City represents Jansson’s thoughts on American society—particularly the way it treats its elders—it feels less like a quirky collection of tales, of the sort that made her famous, and more like a moral indictment. It may well be a product of extreme culture shock.

Jansson was not oblivious to the dangers of displacement before she visited Florida. Her best friend moved away to the U.S. during World War II; her father’s shocking sympathies with the Nazis could be traced to the trauma of the Finnish Civil War; her Swedish-born mother was homesick even after decades of building a home in Finland. Ham had supported the family with commercial work while her husband pursued his artistic ambition as a sculptor. Witnessing these marital compromises, Jansson was sure that she would never marry or have children. Yet she seems to have taken the stability and interconnectedness of family life as a given. Though she’d endowed her Moomins with freedom and rootlessness, the precarious independence she described in Sun City felt new in her mature, realist work.

The months-long break that spawned the novel didn’t represent a rupture from Jansson’s earlier life—or not exactly. But after the experience, she became a different kind of writer, partner, and person. Sun City, her third novel for adults, proved that she was not merely a whimsical artist and storyteller, but also a keen cultural critic who could transpose her observations into powerful prose. It served as a response to skeptics who may have considered her literary work delightfully regional but not globally significant.

Rethinking her many obligations after her trip, Jansson delegated some of the work that had been weighing her down (including the Moomins; she never wrote another Moomin-centered novel after her return). More broadly, she began to find a more harmonious balance between love and work, devotion and freedom.

The best evidence for this evolution lies in a work published 15 years after Sun City, the quasi-autobiographical novel Fair Play. When, at the close of the book, the main character’s partner—clearly based on Pietilä—leaves Helsinki for a year’s work in Paris, the couple’s resilience is tested. But this is not a road to alienation, American-style. It’s only a temporary fissure, leading to a more profound connection for both partners. In Fair Play, Jansson allows herself to envision a far more satisfying kind of independence than what she’d wrought in Sun City. As her fictional stand-in reflects: “She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.”

For the past three years, Russia has used missiles and drones to locate and destroy vital infrastructure in Ukraine—power plants, dams, electrical-transmission lines. Everyone understands that these attacks are acts of war, no matter how steadfastly President Vladimir Putin describes them as part of a “special military operation.” When Russia targets other European neighbors, though, the West resorts to its own euphemisms to avoid directly acknowledging what Putin is doing.    

Last month, the undersea power cable Estlink 2, which connects Estonia with fellow European Union and NATO member Finland, was suddenly cut. The EU’s top foreign-policy official described the incident somewhat dryly and without explicitly blaming Russian agents: It was, she said, merely “part of a pattern of deliberate and coordinated actions to damage our digital and energy infrastructure.” Obviously, cutting a power line is a less overt form of aggression than the full-scale invasion that Putin launched in Ukraine. The common thread, though, is that Russia is using force to undermine a recognized country’s independence and its ability to fight back.

Undersea cables have been vital to the sovereignty of Estonia, a former Soviet republic that borders Russia and desperately needs to maintain power and communications channels that are free from Moscow’s control. Soon after Estlink 2 was sabotaged, Finnish authorities seized the oil tanker Eagle S, which was en route from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Egypt. Registered in the Cook Islands in the Pacific Ocean, the ship is likely part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet—a collection of foreign-flagged tankers that Putin’s regime uses to sell Russian oil and skirt international economic sanctions imposed after his invasion of Ukraine.

[Read: What Europe fears]

The Eagle S, however, apparently had a covert military purpose as well: Investigators discovered that the vessel was crammed full of advanced surveillance equipment, which used so much power that the ship suffered from periodic blackouts. Finnish authorities concluded that the Eagle S had dragged its anchor across the Baltic Sea bed for “dozens of kilometers” in an attempt to break the Estlink 2 line.

Still, in this and other cases across the continent, European officials seem terrified of admitting what is happening. Authorities in multiple countries are investigating parcels that spontaneously caught fire or exploded in the custody of cargo airlines, perhaps in preparation for a broader operation that would threaten many large aircraft. Saboteurs have targeted a number of other strategically significant assets in Europe—munitions factories, crucial rail lines—along with civilian infrastructure such as warehouses and malls.

Investigators believe that Russia is behind the attacks. In December, the EU imposed sanctions on certain Russian individuals and entities in response to recent sabotage. Still, the official announcement declined to use the word war to characterize Moscow’s activities outside Ukraine. Instead, the EU condemned Russians’ “destabilising” and “malicious actions.”

The inability to describe acts of war as acts of war is part of a culture of distortion and denial regarding the subject of state-sponsored violence. Over generations, policy makers have created many subclasses of conflict: cold wars, police actions, hybrid wars, cyber wars. Different euphemisms serve different purposes. Putin prefers special military operation because he doesn’t want to publicly admit that he is waging a brutal war on Ukrainians. Many in Europe avoid describing Russia’s sabotage campaign outside Ukraine as war because they’d rather not have to do anything in response.

European officials would be better off honestly admitting the reality of what they are confronting. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is only the most conspicuous part of what looks like an ever more globalized war. Late last month, an Azerbaijani passenger jet was shot from the sky over Russia and forced to land in Kazakhstan. North Korean troops have been transported thousands of miles to fight and die on European soil. European governments have dithered over how much to help Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion, and they have no clear strategy for deterring or limiting the sabotage campaign now happening on their own soil. Acknowledging that Russia is engaging in acts of war would not oblige the EU or individual countries to immediately retaliate with military force. But the term war has a way of concentrating the mind—and using it might make European leaders think much harder about defending themselves when they cannot rely on the United States.

[Read: The most consequential act of sabotage in modern times]

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and arguably since the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, democratic Europe has been predisposed to think about war as an issue for Washington to handle, not as a problem requiring their own leadership. European states might provide some soldiers and equipment but do not have the burden of any serious planning or strategizing. That lax attitude is no longer tenable. Every leader on the continent needs to understand that Putin wishes to upend the entire European order—and that the United States is no longer trustworthy as a long-term ally. President-Elect Donald Trump is openly disdainful of many governments in Europe and seems willing to walk away from America’s role as the continent’s protector.  

Although European leaders have largely refused to think about war, the EU’s member nations and other democracies on the continent still have all the prerequisites for military power. Although the economies of the United States, China, and many developing countries are growing much faster, the EU, Britain, and other European democracies together have a population of about half a billion people and account for about one-fifth of world GDP. EU member nations maintain military forces with some of the most advanced equipment in the world. The combination of Putin’s aggression and Trump’s indifference should be an opportunity for Europe to take charge of its own defense. The first vital step in this realization is to acknowledge what’s already happening: Call a war a war.

Finland seized Eagle S tanker carrying Russian oil on suspicion that it damaged the Finnish-Estonian Estlink 2 power.