This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

A new president has taken office, elected in response to widespread economic dissatisfaction. Now he’s trying to make big changes to the government, and some voters are upset. They’re angry at the president’s party for backing the changes, and they’re angry at the opposition party for not doing more to stop it.

That’s a fitting description of what’s going on now, but I was thinking of 2009, when the Tea Party movement erupted amid Barack Obama’s attempt to pass major health-care reform. Over the past week, some signs have emerged of a shift in the national mood that feels similar to what the country experienced back then. As the effects of Elon Musk’s rampage through the federal government are starting to be felt, some people are getting angry. Trump’s net approval rating is slipping slightly. Americans are upset that he’s not doing more to fight inflation. A small number of Republican elected officials are timidly voicing their concerns about certain Trump moves. And at town halls across the country, members of Congress are getting earfuls.

“How can you tell me that DOGE, with some college whiz kids from a computer terminal in Washington, D.C., without even getting into the field, after about a week or maybe two, have determined that it’s OK to cut veterans’ benefits?” a man who described himself as a Republican and an Army veteran asked Representative Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma.

“Why is the supposedly conservative party taking such a radical and extremist and sloppy approach to this?” a man asked Representative Rich McCormick of Georgia. (He’s the congressman who recently suggested that students should work to earn school lunches.)

“The executive can only enforce laws passed by Congress; they cannot make laws,” a lawyer from Huntsville, Texas, chided Representative Pete Sessions. “When are you going to wrest control back from the executive and stop hurting your constituents?”

All three of these districts are strongly Republican, but Republicans aren’t the only ones taking flak. Democratic voters’ frustration with their party’s leaders, who are widely seen as either flat-footed or acquiescent, is growing. At a town hall in New York, a man told Democratic Representative Paul Tonko that he was happy to see him demonstrating outside the Department of Education, but he wanted more. “I thought about Jimmy Carter and I thought about John Lewis, and I know what John Lewis would have done. He would have gotten arrested that day,” the man said. “Make them outlaw you. We will stand behind you; we will be there with you. I will get arrested with you.”

For anyone who was paying attention during the rise of the Tea Party, the echoes are unmistakable, although the screen resolution on cellphone videos of these encounters has improved in the past 16 years. With Democrats out of the White House and the minority in the House and Senate (and with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court), many on the left have been wallowing in despair. Now some are seeing signs of hope. The Tea Party helped Republicans gain six seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House in the 2010 election. It changed the trajectory of Obama’s presidency, launched the careers of current GOP stars including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and paved the way for Donald Trump.

If this is progressives’ 2009 moment, though, what would a Tea Party of the left look like? Simply attempting to create an inverse of the original Tea Party seems to me like a fairly obvious loser—no one wants a cheap dupe. In 2010, liberal activists formed something they called the “Coffee Party USA.” That got plenty of press attention but didn’t have nearly the impact (or organic reach) of the Tea Party.

To recover their mojo, Democrats need some sort of organizing principle, real or purported. The Tea Party claimed to be concerned with fiscal discipline and limited government—activists organized around the Affordable Care Act. In retrospect, that premise is hard to take at face value. Many Tea Party supporters and prominent politicians ended up being Trump supporters, even though he blew up the national deficit and has made dubious promises not to cut social-insurance programs. (More interesting are figures such as Senator Rand Paul, an early Tea Party star who continues to sometimes clash with Trump on topics including foreign policy, spending, and intelligence.) What connects the Tea Party and Trump is racial backlash to Obama, the first Black president. Polls and studies found a connection between Tea Party support and racial-status anxiety, resentment, and prejudice.

One challenge of creating a liberal version of the Tea Party is that what liberals want right now is so basic. The opposite of what Trump has done in his first month in office is good governance—careful, measured administration. But that doesn’t make a good bumper sticker, and it doesn’t inspire crowds.

Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat, has warned against Democrats trying to offer voters a “Diet Coke” version of Trumpian populism. “Voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don’t want a Diet Coke,” he told the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently. “There are two different parties. We have to start by understanding who our voters are not and then understanding who our voters could be—and go and try to win them over. If you’re walking to the polls and your No. 1 issue is guns, immigration, or trans participation in sports, you’re probably not going to be a Democratic voter.” Auchincloss said Democrats need to focus instead on voters who are worried about the cost of living.

One possible rallying point for progressives is Elon Musk. Unlike Trump, he has no voter constituency, and polls show that he’s unpopular. Watching the world’s richest man sack park rangers, firefighters, and veterans in the name of bureaucratic efficiency is ripe for political messaging. Anecdotal evidence from town halls suggests widespread anger at Musk. But there are risks to homing in on Musk. Democrats’ attempts to paint Trump as a plutocrat haven’t done much to blunt his populist appeal. Besides, if Musk gets bored or Trump tires of him and pushes him out, the movement will have lost its focal point.

Another option is a revitalization of the anti-Trump resistance that defeated the president in 2020 and led to poor Republican performance in 2018 and 2022. Trump won the 2024 election not so much because the resistance failed but because it dissolved amid frustration with Joe Biden. Key constituencies—suburban white women, Latino voters—that moved toward Trump in the most recent election might turn back against him if they’re reminded of his flaws. Then again, voters who are disgusted with the Democratic Party aren’t guaranteed to return simply because they’re also disgusted with Trump.

Ultimately, Democrats will return to viability only if they’re able to learn from and absorb grassroots energy. One reason the Tea Party was so successful—electorally, at least—was that it capitalized on frustration with Republican leaders but ultimately became subsumed into the GOP. Old leaders such as House Speaker John Boehner were swept out; new candidates ran for offices from school board and dogcatcher up to senator, governor, and president. Democrats could certainly use an infusion of fresh ideas—and new leadership.

Related:

The opposition is already growing. Why isn’t Congress doing anything?

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The great resegregation Jonathan Rauch: One word describes Trump. Anne Applebaum: Putin’s three years of humiliation The real goal of the Trump economy

Today’s News

Elon Musk requested on Saturday that federal workers email a bullet-point list of things they did last week. Donald Trump added today that workers who do not reply by the midnight deadline tonight will be “sort of semi-fired” or fired, though the Office of Personnel Management told agency leaders that responses are “voluntary.” America voted against a United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Russia for the war in Ukraine. The Christian Democratic Union of Germany, a conservative German party led by Friedrich Merz, and its sister party, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, won Germany’s snap election yesterday. The far-right party Alternative for Germany doubled its vote share from 2021, according to preliminary results.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal compiled Atlantic articles on the art of splitting up and what comes after heartache.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty; Stephane Cardinale / Corbis / Getty.

How to Lose an Oscar in 10 Days

By Shirley Li

For months, the actor Karla Sofía Gascón had been reaping the rewards of leading a prestigious film. She plays the title character in Emilia Pérez, about a Mexican cartel boss who transitions into a woman and seeks to build a more virtuous life. The Spanish-language musical has faced waves of backlash since its release last year—but it has also found a devoted fan base among awards bodies …

But her momentum soon came to a halt.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The internet’s favorite sex researcher The obvious inefficiency of Elon Musk’s new order A man who actually stands up to Trump How America wasted its most powerful economic weapon COVID broke the rules of virus evolution.

Culture Break

Neon

Read. These six books were rescued from oblivion in recent years—and deserve their second life.

Watch. The Monkey (out now in theaters) is a horror movie that has fun with the inevitability of death, David Sims writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This week, Donald Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war against a much larger neighbor, inviting invasion and mass death. At this point, Trump—who has a history of trusting Russian President Vladimir Putin more than he trusts the Americans who are sworn to defend the United States—may even believe it. Casting Ukraine as the aggressor (and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” which Trump did today) makes political sense for Trump, who is innately deferential to Putin, and likely views the conflict as a distraction from his own personal and political agendas. The U.S. president has now chosen to throw America to Putin’s side and is more than willing to see this war end on Russian terms.

Repeating lies, however, does not make them true.

Russia, and specifically Putin, launched this war in 2014 and widened it in 2022. The information and media ecosystem around Trump and the Republican Party has tried for years to submerge the Russian war against Ukraine in a sump of moral relativism, because many in the GOP admire Putin as some sort of Christian strongman. But Putin is making war on a country that is mostly composed of his fellow Orthodox Christians, solely based on his own grandiose fantasies.

The most important thing to understand about the recent history of Russian aggression against its neighbors, and especially against Ukraine, is that Putin is not a product of “Russia” or even of Russian nationalism. He is, in every way, a son of the Soviet Union. He is a man of “the system,” the kind of person who, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., was sometimes called a sovok, which translates roughly into “Soviet guy”—someone who never left the mindset of the old regime. (This is a man who, for example, changed the post-Soviet Russian national anthem back to the old Soviet musical score, with updated words.)

Some in the West want to believe that Putin is merely a traditional player of the game of power politics. This is nonsense: He is a poor strategist precisely because he is so driven by emotion and aggression. His worldview is a toxic amalgam of Russian historical romanticism and Soviet nostalgia; he clearly misses being part of an empire that dared to confront the West and could make the rest of the world tremble with a word from Red Square. (This Sovietism is one reason for his bone-deep hatred of NATO.) He sees himself as the heir to Peter the Great and Stalin, because the greatest days of his life were the mid-1970s, when he was in his 20s and the Soviet Union he served so faithfully looked to be ascendant over the declining United States.

Putin’s Soviet nostalgia prevents him from seeing the other nations that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet collapse as actual countries. He knows that their borders were drawn by Stalinist mapmakers in Moscow (as were those of the current Russian Federation, a fact that Putin ignores most of the time), and he resents that these new states fled from the Kremlin’s control as soon as they were able to leave. He is especially stung by the emergence of an independent Ukraine; back in 2008, he made a point of telling President George W. Bush that Ukraine was not a real country.

For years, Putin claimed that he had no interest in reconstituting the U.S.S.R. or the Russian Empire. He may have been lying, or he may have changed his mind over time. But when Ukrainians deposed a pro-Russian leader in 2014 and drove him out of the country, Putin lashed out in fury, ordering the seizure of Crimea, a Russian-majority area that was historically part of Russia but was transferred to Ukraine during the Soviet period. This was the true beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

The Russians camped on these territories for years, “freezing” the conflict in place while Ukraine and the West tried carrots and sticks, eventually realizing that Putin was never going to cede any of the ground he’d stolen. The situation might have remained in stasis forever had Putin not decided to try to seize the entire Ukrainian nation of some 40 million people and almost a quarter of a million square miles.

Why did Putin throw the dice on such a stupid and reckless gamble? Trump and many of his supporters answer this question with chaff bursts of nonsense about how the Russians felt legitimately threatened by Western influence in Ukraine, and specifically that Ukraine brought this nightmare on itself by seeking to join NATO. The Russians, for their part, have made similar arguments. NATO membership has for years been an aspirational goal for Ukraine, one that NATO politely supported—but without ever moving to make it happen. (Once Putin invaded, NATO and Ukraine sped up talks, in another example of the Russian president bringing about events he claimed to be stopping.)

Putin himself tends to complicate life for his propagandists by departing from the rationalizations offered by the Kremlin’s useful idiots. Trump and other Western apologists would have an easier time of explaining away the war if the man who started it would only get on the same page as them; instead, Putin has said, many times, that Ukraine is Russian territory, that it has always been and will always be part of Russia, that it is full of Nazis, and that it must be cleansed and returned to Moscow’s control.

One possibility here is that Putin may have dreamed up a quick war of conquest while in COVID isolation, where only a tight circle of sycophants could regularly see him. These would include his defense and intelligence chiefs, along with a small coterie of Russian clerics who have for years been trying to convince Putin that he has a divine mission to restore the “Russian world” to its former greatness, a project that dovetails nicely with his constant anger about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In any case, the Russian president’s decision to go to war was his own, a plot cooked up in the Kremlin rather than being the unforeseeable result of some kind of ongoing geopolitical crisis. Here, Putin was the victim of his own form of autocratic government: No one around him had the courage (or perhaps even the proper information) to warn him that his military was in rough shape, that the Ukrainians had improved as fighters since the seizure of Crimea, and that the West would not sit by the way it did in 2014. Western experts got some of this wrong too—back in 2022, I was very worried that Russia might win the war quickly—but Putin was apparently fed a farrago of reassuring lies about how Russian troops would be greeted as liberators.

All anyone needs to know about “who started it” is in the conflict’s timeline: In 2014, Putin vented his rage at Ukrainians for actually choosing their own form of government by seizing large swaths of eastern Ukraine—thus ensuring that the remainder of the country would become more united, pro-Western, and anti-Russian than ever before. Eight years later, the Russian dictator came to believe that Ukraine was ready to fall into his hands, and he embarked on a war of conquest. When Ukraine held together in the face of the 2022 Russian invasion and began to inflict severe casualties on the Russians, Putin resorted to war crimes, butchering innocent people, kidnapping Ukrainian children, and attacking civilian targets as a way of punishing Ukraine for its insolence.

This is the reality of the Ukraine war. Some Republicans, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Roger Wicker, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, know all this, and have told the truth. If only Donald Trump knew it too.

Related:

The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine. Listen closely to what Hegseth is saying.

Today’s News

The Trump administration rescinded federal approval of New York’s congestion-pricing program, which went into effect last month. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Trump lives in a Russian-constructed “disinformation space.” In response, Trump called Zelensky “a Dictator without Elections.” A federal judge held a hearing about U.S. prosecutors’ attempt to dismiss the corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Trump could start a new pipeline fight, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Trump hands the world to China. New York belongs to Trump now. Intimidating Americans will not work. The NIH memo that undercut universities came directly from Trump officials. Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity

Evening Read

Illustration by Julia Rothman

Flaco Lives

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).

He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life. I went on opening day, in the middle of business hours, and found the space packed with Flaco fans.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Hélène Blanc

Read. Haley Mlotek’s new book is a divorce memoir with no lessons, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

Watch. The third season of Yellowjackets (streaming on Paramount+). The show is more playful and ridiculous than ever before, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome to The Daily’s culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Shayla Love, a staff writer who has written about how sobriety became a tool of self-optimization, the ways invisible habits are driving our lives, and how RFK Jr. is seducing America with wellness.

Shayla’s recommendations include a 1967 British television series that starts out like The Good Place, a “Page Six–esque thriller” about the Sigmund Freud Archives, and an “eclipse-viewing” experience that takes place entirely indoors.

The Culture Survey: Shayla Love

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The 1967 British television series The Prisoner starts out remarkably similar to The Good Place: A person wakes up in an idyllic town that caters to their every need and also torments them. But in The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan, the show’s creator and star, isn’t dead; he’s a retired British intelligence agent called Number 6 who refuses to submit to the will of the “Village.” He is put through a series of surreal and futuristic tests by a rotating cast of characters named Number 2 while trying not to be killed by a murderous white bouncing ball. A perfect low-stakes, high-octane episodic mystery. And who is Number 1?

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: The best eclipse I saw last year was not the solar eclipse in April but the Instant Eclipse at Novelty Automation in London. For a few coins, you shut yourself inside a broom-closet-size box, look up, and experience an automated eclipse—no path of totality required. It was made in 1999 by Tim Hunkin, an engineer and artist who created dozens of strange and ingenious arcade machines. When I crammed into the contraption with my boyfriend, we heard audio of a noisy crowd that abruptly silenced when the “sun” vanished. We were surprised by how much wonder we felt as the artificial sky lit up with stars. [Related: The most dazzling eclipse in the universe]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: In the Freud Archives is Janet Malcolm at her best. She turns academic drama into a Page Six–esque thriller that you won’t be able to put down. And just when you think the ride is over, there’s a stunning afterword in the NYRB edition that takes you through the messy aftermath of her reporting.

Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki is my fiction pick. Read this book if you have sisters, if you’ve ever been crushed by a crush, if you have authority problems, or if you feel overwhelmed by a family’s capacity for secrets.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: To see Pink Mist (Space Division) by James Turrell, you have to wait. You walk into a completely dark room, hands outstretched, blindly searching for a bench. You sit, feeling lost, staring into pitch black. Then, it appears: a pinkish-red rectangle hovering in front of you. The shape doesn’t move or change colors, but it’s a successful optical trick; it changes you. Once your eyes have adjusted, you can’t unsee it. All of the pieces in the Turrell retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art toy with both your perception and your patience.

Something I recently revisited: I rewatched the entire Canadian sci-fi series Orphan Black with my boyfriend, who had never seen it before. I realized how much this show is a part of my DNA—biomedical patents, an utopian island, longevity, nature versus nurture. Tatiana Maslany plays a handful of characters you’ll be convinced are different people by the end. [Related: The slow creep of uncanny television]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher,” written in 1996 by Dmitri Tymoczko. I’ve returned to this piece dozens of times. The psychologist William James’s interest in altered states of consciousness through nitrous oxide is well known, yet this piece chronicles the lesser-known story of the rogue autodidact philosopher and mystic Benjamin Paul Blood, who inspired James. An Atlantic classic that is still relevant when thinking about drugs and their role in meaning-making or religious belief.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Robert Hass’s translations of three great Japanese haiku poets: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. Hass has so few words to work with, and he picks exactly the right ones.

Like his verb choice in this Bashō haiku:

         A bee
staggers out
        of the peony.

Or how he preserves the humor and lightness of Issa:

        Even with insects—
some can sing,
       some can’t.

Two more, the first from Bashō, the next from Issa, to celebrate the end and start of a year:

         What fish feel,
birds feel, I don’t know—
        the year ending.

           New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom!
          I feel about average.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Amanda Knox: “My last trial” Evangelicals made a bad trade. Jonathan Chait: There is no resistance.

Today’s News

During a tour of North Carolina to survey the damage of Hurricane Helene, President Donald Trump described plans to overhaul or eliminate FEMA. He proposed an alternative scenario in which the federal government pays “a percentage to the state” to aid in disaster response. Hundreds of undocumented immigrants, including those who have been convicted of crimes, were flown out of the country last night on military aircraft, according to the White House. The Senate plans to vote later this evening on whether to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Earlier this week, Trump unveiled perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure project in history—and all but dedicated it to Sam Altman, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka suggests what to read in the face of disaster.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

January 6ers Got Out of Prison—And Came to My Neighborhood

By Hanna Rosin

On Monday, Stewart Rhodes, the eye-patched founder of the far-right militia known as the Oath Keepers, was in prison, which is where he has been since he was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. By Tuesday afternoon, he was taking a nap at my neighbors’ house.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Who will stop the militias now? Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn What the fires revealed about Los Angeles culture

Culture Break

Simon Mein / Thin Man Films Ltd / Bleecker Street

Debate. Have we been thinking about loneliness all wrong? Americans may not feel any more desolate than they did in the past, Faith Hill writes.

Watch. Hard Truths (out now in theaters) takes an astonishingly sensitive approach in telling the story of difficult people, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

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

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Americans are spending more and more time alone. Some are lonely. But many people—young men in particular—are actively choosing to spend much of their time in isolation, in front of screens. That proclivity is having a profound effect on individual well-being and on American’s “civic and psychic identity,” my colleague Derek Thompson writes in our new cover story. I spoke with Derek about what he calls our anti-social century.

Lora Kelley: The pandemic was obviously very disruptive to people’s social lives. How much is it to blame for this trend toward aloneness?

Derek Thompson: I never would have written this story if the data showed that Americans were hanging out and socializing more and more with every passing year and decade—until the pandemic happened, and we went inside of our homes, and now we’re just slowly getting back out. That’s not a story about America. That’s a story about a health emergency causing people to retreat from the physical world.

The anti-social century is the opposite of that story. Every single demographic of Americans now spends significantly less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the 21st century, when some people already thought we were in a socializing crisis. Overall, Americans spend about 20 percent less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the century. For teenagers and for young Black men, it’s closer to 40 percent less time. This trend seems, by some accounts, to have accelerated during the pandemic. But as one economist pointed out to me, we were more alone in 2023 than we were in 2021.

Lora: We’ve talked a bit about shifts in isolation for young people. Where do older Americans fit into this? Are we seeing similar dynamics play out for that cohort?

Derek: Aloneness is rising across the board—for every age group and for every ethnicity and for every type of education—but it’s rising slower for old people and faster for young people.

Older people have always spent more time alone than young people. They don’t go to school from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.; they’re not legally forced to be around people the same way that many young people are. They aren’t in college, and they are often unemployed, so they aren’t in offices.

The solitude inequality that used to exist between different age groups—where old people were very alone, and young people were very social—is shrinking. You could say young people are acting more like old people.

Lora: What would you say to someone who thinks: Well, what’s wrong with spending time alone? If people are doing what they want to do, and pursuing their idea of a good life, why not spend more time in the house?

Derek: I don’t want this article to be a criticism of introversion, and I certainly don’t want this article to be a criticism of quiet. I myself am somewhat introverted and love a bit of quiet time. But what’s happening in America today is not a healthy trend of people simply spending more time being happy by themselves. Many researchers who looked at the rise of alone time have come to the conclusion that Americans self-report less satisfaction when they spend lots of time alone or in their house.

I think a certain amount of alone time is not only acceptable; it’s absolutely essential. But as with any therapeutic, the dosage matters, and people who spend a little bit of time taking moments by themselves, meditating, or decompressing are very different from people who are spending more hours, year after year, isolated.

Lora: To what extent is the rise of isolated lifestyles an individual issue—one that’s concerning because it’s making people sadder—versus a civic issue that’s causing a shift in American politics?

Derek: This pullback from public life started with technology, with cars and television, and ultimately smartphones, allowing Americans to privatize their leisure. But I absolutely think it’s becoming a political story.

I think we don’t understand one another for a reason that’s mathematical, almost tautological: Americans understand Americans less because we see Americans less. More and more, the way we confront people we don’t know is on social media, and we present an entirely different face online—one that tends to be more extreme and more negative and more hateful of the “out” group. I don’t think there should be any confusion about why an anti-social century has coincided with a polarized century.

Lora: You write in your article that “nothing has proved as adept at inscribing ritual into our calendars as faith.” How do you think about the way that so many Americans use technology—things like phone reminders and calendar tools and self-improvement apps—to inscribe rituals into their personal routines?

Derek: We haven’t just privatized leisure. We’ve privatized ritual. Modern rituals are more likely to bind us to ourselves than to other people: Meditate at this time alone. Remember to work out alone, or around other people with noise-canceling headphones.

It’s profoundly ironic that a lot of people are optimizing themselves toward solitude. The anti-social century is about accretion. It’s about many small decisions that we make minute to minute and hour to hour in our life, leading to a massive national trend of steadily rising overall aloneness.

Related:

February cover story: The anti-social century Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days Stop the (North Carolina) steal. Mark Zuckerberg wants to be Elon Musk.

Wildfires are ravaging Southern California, scorching thousands of acres and forcing more than 70,000 people to evacuate. Below is a collection of our writers’ latest reporting on the fires:

The particular horror of the Los Angeles wildfires The Palisades were waiting to burn. Photos: The Palisades Fire scorches parts of Los Angeles.

Today’s News

Federal prosecutors said they plan on releasing the part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report that details Donald Trump’s election-interference case if the court order blocking them is lifted. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot warned Trump against taking over Greenland, Denmark’s autonomous territory. Trump asked the Supreme Court to halt the sentencing hearing in his New York criminal hush-money case, which is scheduled to take place on Friday.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: BFA / Alamy; Roadside Attractions / Everett Collection; Pablo Larraín / Netflix.

The Film That Rips the Hollywood Comeback Narrative Apart

By Shirley Li

[Demi Moore’s] fame, when contrasted with some of her forgettable films—The Butcher’s Wife, The Scarlet Letter—turned her into an easy punch line. As the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane sneered at the start of his review of the latter: “What is the point of Demi Moore?”

Look at Moore now.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why poor American kids are so likely to become poor adults Mark Zuckerberg is at war with himself.

Culture Break

Marcus Brandt / Picture Alliance / Getty

Try something new. The unique awfulness of beef’s climate impact has driven a search for an alternative protein that’s ethical and tasty, Sarah Zhang reports. Is the answer ostrich meat?

Read. Recent entries into the literature of parenting offer two different ways of understanding fatherhood, Lily Meyer writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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