Illustrations by Jan Robert Dünnweller

On a late summer’s day in Cambridge, England, the writer Ali Smith sat with me on a wooden bench in a patch of garden across from the brick rowhouse where she works. Her new novel, Gliff, was due out before long; she described it as a “dystopian pony book,” clearly pleased to have invented a new genre. She flashed impatience when I suggested that she frequently expresses political views both in her fiction and outside it. After a tart “Do I?” she continued, “I think I’m always in the realm of fiction.” A pause before she allowed, “Well, I’m a citizen.” At that moment, I knocked over the water glass I’d carelessly balanced on one arm of the bench. It shattered, and Smith said merrily, “See what happens when you talk politics?” I apologized, and she told me, “If you want to break another one, I’ll break one with you.”

Funny, cheerfully provocative, at once friendly and sharp-elbowed: That’s Smith in person, and also in her copious fictional output (13 novels and six story collections over the past 30 years). Her books are challenging—experimental and unabashedly literary—yet welcoming to all, eminently readable even when they’re disorienting; they engage the reader, demanding collaboration. (Her fifth novel, published in 2011, has a fill-in-the-blank title: There but for the.) Most writers with a foot in the avant-garde achieve cult status at best; Smith collects awed reviews at home and abroad, wins prizes and honors, and sells lots and lots of books to avid fans.

She breaks rules with gleeful abandon, mocking convention, asking her publisher to do things that the industry instinctively abhors. After Gliff will come Glyph—a pair of homophone titles guaranteed to trip up booksellers and buyers for years to come. (Smith adores wordplay, the quirks of language: puns, rhymes, bizarre etymologies, neologisms, contronyms—words that have developed contradictory meanings.) According to her publisher, the two books will “belong together.” Could she tell me more about Glyph ? “Absolutely not”—she hadn’t yet started writing. I backed off, reminded of a line from Artful (2012), a novel first delivered as a series of Oxford lectures, much of it literally ghostwritten (that is, written by a ghost): “Sequence will always be most of the word consequence.”

I’ve been thinking about Smith for more than 20 years. In 2006, just after her third novel, The Accidental, was named Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I reviewed it, and did a little research. I found a short essay by her fellow novelist Jeanette Winterson in which Smith asks, rhetorically, “Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?” This is what Smith does: First, she confuses you—Who’s talking? When did this happen? Where am I?—then she hooks you with a flash of storytelling genius or a dazzling formal innovation. You read on, and the world seems strange to you, and you seem strange to yourself. The flimsy illusions offered up by conventional literature seem hollow (life is stranger than fiction), as do the certainties you live by (are you yourself truly a coherent character?). You have been reskinned.

The hook sometimes looks like a gimmick. It’s not. At Smith’s behest, her obliging publisher hurried each of the four books of the Seasonal Quartet (2016 to 2020) onto bookstore shelves only about six weeks after she’d delivered each manuscript—an unthinkably quick turnaround. Smith’s ambition, from the time she conceived the project in the 1990s, had been to graft the rush of current events onto the everlasting cycle of the seasons. Soon after she finally sat down to write the first book at the end of 2015 came the United Kingdom’s Brexit crisis. Galvanized by the shock result of the referendum, she told herself as she began to write, “This book has to meet the contemporary head-on, or there’s no point to this sequence of books.” Hence the superfast schedule: Autumn appeared just four months after the vote.

[Read: Ali Smith’s Autumn is a post-Brexit masterpiece]

Although the press labeled it “the first Brexit novel,” the word Brexit is never uttered in the book. A seemingly random yet oddly menacing chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and security cameras, is erected near an ordinary English village. A woman battles bureaucracy to renew her passport at the local post office; the petty hurdles are dismaying, ominous, comical. Spanish tourists visiting England are heckled at a train station: “This isn’t Europe … Go back to Europe.” Appalled, a sympathetic witness realizes that “what was happening in that one passing incident was a fraction of something volcanic”—a compact summary of Smith’s narrative strategy.

At the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2018, Nicola Sturgeon, then first minister of Scotland, interviewed Smith onstage—since when does a nation’s leader host an experimental novelist at a literary festival?—and read aloud a passage from Autumn that for her perfectly captured the post-referendum mood:

All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won. All across the country, people felt they’d done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland.

The echo of Dickens (the first line of Autumn is “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times”) carries on and on: 46 consecutive sentences begin with “All across the country.”

Every volume of the Seasonal Quartet was a best seller in the U.K.; the most conspicuously topical of the four, Spring (2019), tackled the “migrant crisis” and reached the top of the Sunday Times best-seller list. Migration has been one of Smith’s abiding concerns. “We’re ignoring it,” she said in an interview more than a dozen years ago. “As our countries and our world become smaller … we’re bordered, everything is about the stranger.” She eventually went to see for herself what detainees in the U.K. are put through and was shocked to find “a razor-wire fence so high and encircling such a tiny yard space that it would pass as a literal example of surreality.” In Spring, a brutal Immigration Removal Centre is described in distressing detail—but Smith also imagines a kind of underground railroad for migrants anxious to avoid the authorities.

Bad guys versus good guys? Part of Smith’s appeal is that she shows us warm-hearted progressive ideals in action, a spirit of inclusion feeding hope and healing hurt. As one character in Spring puts it, “What looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open.” But nothing in Smith’s fiction is that simple. In Winter, two sisters are mourning the death of their mother. One says, “It takes a death sometimes to make us all live a bit more.” The other thinks, “Platitude, cliché.” If your sympathy is divided, that’s because with Smith, every either/or is complicated by a both/and. A maxim from The Accidental : “The word and is a little bullet of oxygen.”

[Read: Ali Smith spins modernity into myth in Winter]

The stories she tells spill out of stories that spill out of other stories. She’s an inveterate flouter of chronology—a timeline for almost any of her books, including the quartet, would look like a manic Etch A Sketch scribble: Rather than plot or the forward sweep of the clock’s hands, it is Smith’s voice, her many voices, that propels the reader. As though on a whim, she’ll take an unexpected detour into art history or natural history or literary criticism. Finger-on-the-pulse backdrops are balanced by cultural or historical or scientific deep dives. Against the grim tidings of the day, news of pain inflicted by strangers on strangers, she pits, in Spring, the oddly charming tale of Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke spending several weeks in 1922 in the same small Swiss town—and never meeting. A hack screenwriter wants to rework that non-anecdote into an erotic TV costume drama, the two writers screwing in a swinging cable car high above a picturesque snowy valley. Appalled, the director he hopes to hire flees and ends up in the Scottish Highlands, where he crosses paths with the network of people dedicated to helping migrants.

Like every Smith novel, Spring is about human connection, how hard it is—how damned important it is—to acknowledge humanity in the other and embrace it. Yet Smith has talked about how she loves the spirit of alienation in Mansfield’s writing: “Distance, foreignness, knowing you’re out of place or in limbo … and however much you feel at home, you’re fooling yourself, and however strange you feel in the world … it’s natural, it’s the most natural thing.” Sometimes there simply is no connection. Force it, and you get schlock.

When I interviewed Smith for The Paris Review in 2017, a few years after the Scottish-independence referendum, she told me, “I like edges but not borders.” Born in Inverness in 1962 and raised by an Irish mother and an English father, she calls herself “Scottish by formation” (quoting another of her heroes, the Scottish-born Muriel Spark). “I grew up on the margins,” she said. “I inherited all the value of the margins.” Her working-class parents brought her up in council housing. She was much younger than her four siblings, and looking back, she recognized that she’d had “a remarkably lucky childhood, cosseted and bullied both in that lovely family way, with nobody following me, no rivalries.” Her parents had both won scholarships, but had been obliged to leave school to go to work. They were adamant that their children would be educated. All five graduated from university.

“I was a proficient, happy, versatile child,” Smith told me. She went to Roman Catholic primary school, then a state-run high school. She read all the time. “I thought of myself as a poet through my teens,” she confessed to another interviewer. “I was pretty dreadful.” At the University of Aberdeen, she studied English literature and language, graduating with highest honors. She then spent five years studying for a Ph.D. at Newnham College, Cambridge. Alongside her studies, she wrote plays; Sarah Wood, who became her life partner, directed five of them. The doctorate, meanwhile, never materialized. Her examiners requested changes to her dissertation on three Modernist masters (James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams); she refused. She was nevertheless offered two teaching jobs, and accepted the one at the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow.

That stint lasted 18 months, cut short by a debilitating bout of chronic fatigue syndrome. At the time, the illness felt “like I’d been hit from the back with a baseball bat—after which I … went into a kind of physical breakdown.” Smith returned to Cambridge to recover, but the symptoms lingered, resurfacing intermittently. Though she found it painful to write longhand, she scratched out her first collection, Free Love and Other Stories (1995), which scooped up a couple of prizes. She persuaded her publisher, Virago, to take a chance on her debut novel, Like (1997), and from then on, she was a writer only.

Her second novel, Hotel World (2001), was shortlisted for both the Booker and Orange Prizes, success of the kind that heralds a major career. In The Guardian, the novelist Giles Foden wrote, “I have never seen the tenets of recent literary theory (the impossibility of the coherent subject, or substantive character, for instance) so cleverly insinuated into a novel.” It begins with the voice of a ghost. A teenage chambermaid working at a fancy hotel in a dour northern city has fallen down a dumbwaiter shaft to her death. Her ghost, itching to feel again (“What I want more than anything in the world is to have a stone in my shoe”), would like to know how long it took her to fall:

(and this time I’d throw myself willingly down it wooo-

hooooo and this time I’d count as I went, one elephant two eleph-ahh) if I could feel it again, how I hit it, the basement, from four floors up, from toe to head, dead. Dead leg. Dead arm. Dead hand. Dead eye. Dead I, four floors between me and the world, that’s all it took to take me, that’s the measure of it, the length and death of it, the short goodb—.

A classic, manically ludic Smith passage, grim and comical, pushing at the edge of too much, yet as easy to swallow as a spoonful of honey.

Having given voice to the dead, Smith takes it away; the ghost girl is losing her ability to speak, losing language. Her last message to the living:

Remember you must live.
Remember you most love.
Remainder you mist leaf.

When I asked Smith about the legion of ghosts in her fiction, she shrugged and said, “I just don’t think death makes that much difference.” Sounding like Gertrude Stein, she elaborated: “We carry with us all the people who have made us and the people we make and the lives we make, and the world we make continues on from what we make of it.”

The realm of fiction where Smith says she “always” dwells is mostly populated by family and friends, the people we’re most comfortable with, who also drive us crazy. Often the setting is the home we long for and can’t wait to escape. The premise of The Accidental—borrowed from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film, Teorema—is the reskinning of an unhappy bourgeois family: mother, son, daughter, and stepfather. In musical notation, an “accidental” changes the pitch. In the novel, the accidental—the catalyst—is a mysterious character who rings the doorbell and announces, “Sorry I’m late. I’m Amber. Car broke down.” Though she’s very much flesh and blood (her flesh is desired by every family member, young, old, male, female), this uninvited guest might as well be a ghost, an inexplicable apparition with uncanny powers. The daughter thinks of Amber as “the kind of superheroine that can draw things to her and repel them away from her at the same time.”

Jan Robert Dünnweller

The reader watches as the family’s world disintegrates, and the idea, I believe, is that the reader molts in sympathy. The daughter, in her old skin, needs everything to be mediated, filtered, distanced. A bright, lonely 12-year-old, she’s obsessed with her video camera (and has a verbal tic, using i.e. ad nauseam). Amber drops the girl’s camera from a pedestrian bridge onto a busy highway below—deliberately. Amber does everything deliberately. In her new skin, the younger girl accepts that “her responsibility” is about “actually seeing, being there.” That may sound like a New Age mantra, but the transformation, slight and subtle, is also plausible and moving. The parents fare less well; the fractured family will never be whole again. (Smith doesn’t do happy endings.)

In my mind, the 12-year-old from The Accidental reappears, four years older and much sadder (her mother has died), in my favorite Smith book, How to be both (2014), a novel in two parts published in vice-versa editions: with the same cover, but with the order of the parts reversed—in effect, different novels packaged identically and released simultaneously. This older girl, George, is also bright and lonely, and she’s pedantically fixated on correct grammar—“a finite set of rules,” she insists. George, too, will be reskinned. Among other things, she slowly discovers her erotic love for another girl. Her evolution is watched over by the ghost of an actual Italian quattrocento painter from Ferrara, Francesco del Cossa.

One part of How to be both is narrated by the bewildered painter, who can’t comprehend 21st-century England and decides he’s in an afterlife “purgatorium,” condemned to traipse after George, whom he mistakes at first for a boy. The other part is told from George’s perspective, close third-person. She remains unaware of the ghostly observer who’s following her around. Which part you read first depends on which edition you happen to have bought, and to discover which sequence works best, you’ll have to reread. Should the tale of a 600-year-old artist, with its technical asides on the art of the fresco, come before the tale of modern-day teenage angst? Do the parts of the puzzle fit either way?

The painter’s confusion about George’s gender is an ironic echo (or foreshadowing) of the backstory Smith has invented for him: He was born a girl but disguised himself as a boy to become a painter. (“Nobody will take you for such a training wearing the clothes of a woman,” warned his father, a brickmaker.) The adventures of this talented cross-dresser make a mockery of binary ideas about gender. What the painter learned centuries ago in Ferrara, what George learns in 21st-century London, is that no finite set of rules applies.

Back on the sunny Cambridge bench, Smith told me about the origins of Gliff, which is full of characteristic quirks and revisits her abiding concerns—gender, boundaries, the importance of unmediated engagement with the world. But it’s darker fiction, with some acutely painful passages. It began as a short story written “very fast” in August 2023, a commission for an anthology: “I was supposed to write something that was tangentially Kafkaesque,” she explained, after which she turned to work on a new novel. But she was ambushed by a “horrendous” bout of insomnia, “three months of almost no sleep,” and realized that she was writing the wrong book, and that the short story “was not going away, was waiting, rather like characters do, at the back of your head.”

Where did the title come from? “I was playing about online one day thinking, Is this a nonsense word or not? And I looked up the word that sounded like glyph but was spelled differently, and found out it wasn’t a made-up word—it was actually a northern word, a Scottish word.” It has many meanings, among them a glimpse, a sudden fright, or a brief moment. It’s also the name of the horse in this dystopian pony book, but we’ll get to that.

A glyph is a mark—as Smith said, “The smallest unit of meaning,” a scratch on a cave wall, an ornamental carving on a primitive tool. In the Paris Review interview, when I asked about the building blocks of her prose, Smith explained that “the rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it—the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.” Now she’s taken the next step, training her attention on the gesture that precedes even the syllable. In Gliff, she shows us prehistoric cave art and the head of a horse carved many thousands of years ago onto a rib bone.

She also steps for the first time into the near future: A brutal totalitarian state has been rounding up, interning, and reeducating people whom the regime deems “unverifiable.” The climate is as much Orwell as Kafka: 24/7 surveillance, grotesque euphemisms, justified paranoia. Britain’s not quite there yet—but, Smith insisted, “could be.” She added, sitting up taller, “If we just raise our heads from thinking it’s not happening, we’d see that most of the book is happening right now somewhere.”

The authorities have started drawing red lines around the unwanted unverifiables—literally. They have a comically low-tech machine called a “supera bounder” that applies paint around houses, around vehicles. Demarcated houses are demolished, vehicles towed away: rapacious capitalism combining punishment and profit.

Two siblings, a young teenager and a younger sister, more or less abandoned in an empty house, find themselves on the wrong side of the red line. The older sibling—our narrator, Bri, cautious and protective—worries about the meager supply of canned food, and tries hard to lift the spirits of the younger one, who finds seven horses in a nearby field, one of which, a gray gelding, she adopts (or is adopted by). She gives him his name.

Gliff the horse is the moral center of Gliff the novel, and also the occasion of some arresting descriptions:

The grey horse’s bones were close to its skin all over it and it seemed huge even though it was quite a small horse, the smallest one in this field. It moved with laidback strength and with a real weightiness though it wasn’t weighty at all, it was as spare as a bare tree …

The eye was shocking.

It was really beautiful.

You could see light in its dark, and it also had in it, both at once, two things I had never seen together in one place, gentleness, and—what?

Five years later, in a moment of crisis, Bri realizes that the missing word is “equanimity.”

When Smith was a child in Inverness, about 4 or 5 years old, she discovered a stable behind an ice rink. “Between the age of 7 and 11,” she said, “I went every Saturday in the summer and hung out. We did do a little grooming—very small ponies in my case. What I know about horses all comes from that place at the back of the ice rink, where 12 or 13 horses lived in the field.” She paused. “You know, being on the back of a horse teaches you everything about everything.”

The writing about Gliff the horse does more than bring the living creature into focus. “His mouth was decisive without force, a soft lipped line. It made him look resigned, noncommittal, but also poised, as if waiting.” That “soft lipped line” is the antithesis of the supera bounder’s garish, excluding red. Yet Smith is in the business of complicating binaries as well as erasing boundaries; she won’t tolerate a simple dichotomy.

Which brings us back to the two siblings. The younger one is Rose, wild, fiercely loyal, fiercely stubborn. Bri, kind and caring and, like so many of Smith’s characters, obsessed with words and their meaning, is also Briar or Brice. (“Why did I myself really like having more than one name, as if I had more than one self?”) When asked, bluntly but without malice, “Are you a boy or a girl?,” the answer is, “Yes I am.”

Flash-forward five years and—a spoiler follows—Bri now serves the state. Reeducated? Lured by the promise of elevated status? Tortured? It’s not clear what has happened, but Bri is complicit in the horrors of the regime, and this lover of words has been silenced: “That’s as much of that story as I care to tell. One line about it is more than enough.” The unspoken, the unspeakable, is more frightening than anything else in the novel.

Four cats patrol the alley next to where Smith and her partner live and work. The cats came and went, occasionally pausing near our bench to lick a paw and ignore us ostentatiously. I wondered which ones were hers, and she said, approvingly, “They kind of live everywhere.”

[From the April 2023 issue: Adam Begley on why you should be reading Sebastian Barry]

I asked again about politics, suggesting mildly that sometimes she deploys her dazzling skills in the service of ideology. In Winter, she quotes Keats: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” Does she agree? “Fiction’s only agenda is to be fiction,” she replied, “but lies have an agenda.” Her soft, lilting voice was buttressed by quiet conviction: “All you do is tell the story. What you do is write and write, and you tell the story that arrives—and it really is like being on the back of a horse.” But what about the wild complexity of her narratives, the abrupt swerves and unannounced excursions? As though to allow for nuance, she said, “Of course it will be political when it’s written, because everything is. But I believe deep in my own bones that story is about something that cancels division between us.” She added, “We cross those lines every time we listen to someone or are heard by someone.”

Some early reviewers of Gliff have complained that it feels too “on the nose.” The book’s horrors—climate catastrophe, internment camps, genocidal wars, high-tech surveillance—are too familiar to serve as prophecy. Is it fair to complain that the future is almost already upon us? Who needs prophecy when dystopia is now? The novel thrums with Smith’s urgent need to tell a story about where our divided present could lead us. “We cannot look away at the moment,” she said to me. “We must not look away from the darkness. And if I didn’t look at the dark, what kind of a writer would I be?”

* Lead-image sources: Lorentz Gullachsen / Contour by Getty; Leonardo Cendamo / Getty.

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

Photographs by John Francis Peters

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

The clips were created by Jubilee Media, a booming entertainment company that has built a huge young following by turning difficult discussions into shareable content. Launched in 2017, it has produced videos with titles including “Flat Earthers vs Scientists: Can We Trust Science?” (29 million views), “6 Vegans vs 1 Secret Meat Eater” (17 million views), along with hundreds of others in which delicate subjects—Middle East politics, parenting strategies, penis size—are explored by strangers in gamelike scenarios. During an era of ideological chaos, when all consensus seems in flux, Jubilee has become a phenomenon by insisting that it’s okay, even fun, to clash. In doing so, it represents a challenge to traditional media: Jubilee’s founder, Jason Y. Lee, told me he’s hopeful that the company can host one of the presidential debates in 2028.

Jason Y. Lee (left) watches a taping of Surrounded. He relaunched Jubilee in 2017 as an effort to bridge national divisions revealed by Donald Trump’s election. (Photographs by John Francis Peters)

That idea shouldn’t sound far-fetched. The 2024 election demonstrated the influence of YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, and other online forums in fostering discussion that’s less regulated than what journalistic norms allow. Gen Z’s rightward swing since 2020, combined with its high rate of independent party identification, suggests a remarkable openness to persuasion from across the political spectrum. Basic policy shibboleths, such as the efficacy of vaccines, are being questioned by all sorts of constituencies; once-predictable public-opinion trend lines—regarding feminism, LGBTQ rights, democracy itself—are going wobbly. As Jubilee’s former creative director John Regalado told me, the internet is “updating our tolerance for disagreement—and disagreement on a lot of things that we thought were in the can.”

Jubilee has proved adept at mining this new paradigm for views. Its video with Shapiro was the fifth-most-watched bit of election-related content on YouTube, just a few spots down from Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump; that “1 Woke Teen,” the fledgling TikTok commentator Dean Withers, was invited to the White House after his performance. The company’s offerings also include dating shows, a forthcoming dating app, and a card game to provoke interesting interactions with friends. Students at high schools and colleges have held Jubilee-inspired events to mimic the debates they see on-screen. Lee said he’s trying to build “the Disney of empathy”: a media empire that teaches people how to connect, listen, and healthily disagree—an ambitious, even fanciful-sounding notion in a time of cultural fracturing and political polarization.

Pursuing that goal has meant emphasizing seemingly old-fashioned media ideals—neutrality, fidelity, hearing from all sides—in ways that can seem extreme. Moderators, when they’re involved at all, take only the lightest touch in steering conversations, which can mean letting misinformation and misdirection fly. (Fact-checks happen after filming and are provided by another start-up, Straight Arrow News, which pitches itself as “Unbiased. Straight Facts.”) Cast members tend to seem like regular, if colorful, folks who speak off-the-cuff. The point isn’t to change participants’ minds—full-on ideological conversions almost never happen in the videos. Rather, Regalado said, Jubilee thinks of its efforts as a “practice” or a “ritual.” The awkward or upsetting moments that inevitably arise are part of the product. “That rawness and that authenticity is what young people desperately are seeking,” Lee told me.

Jubilee’s critics, however, contend that the company is simply manufacturing ragebait and platforming dangerous ideas in order to pull eyeballs. Regalado noted that angry viewers often leave comments joking that Jubilee might do “Holocaust Survivors vs. Holocaust Deniers” next—but in the company’s logic, that’s really not an outrageous idea. “Internally, Jubilee has argued about whether or not we would do that episode,” Regalado said, adding that he himself would “want to see that dialogue happen” so long as the Holocaust survivors understood what they were getting into. “I don't think it’s good for society to deny an opportunity for discourse.”

Jubilee’s headquarters have the rumpled, run-and-gun energy of a newspaper office. The ceiling panels are scuffed, the walls are decorated with movie posters, and the desks are dotted with equipment, knickknacks, and struggling houseplants. I visited on a Friday, when most of the staff was working from home, save for a casting director making calls from a private booth. Lee explained that, because Jubilee makes around 200 videos a year, finding participants is a constant chore. “One day we’ll be like, ‘Hey, we need to get nuns,’” he said. “The next day we’ll be like, ‘We need 50 gang members.’”

Lee took me into a corner office with a sweeping view of the Los Angeles International Airport’s tarmac. Using a dry-erase marker to write on the glass tabletop we were sitting at, he drew a graph. One axis was labeled “value” (as in social value) and the other “savvy” (as in business savvy). He wants most of Jubilee’s content to fall in the top-right quadrant, meaning it’s highly benevolent—informative, uplifting, helpful—but also highly entertaining and, therefore, profitable. He pointed to a sign on one wall that said Provoke Understanding and Create Human Connection. That’s Jubilee’s mission statement, whose acronym, PUCHC, is pronounced puke, so people “actually remember it,” he said.

Participants crash into one another while rushing to the debate chair. (Photograph by John Francis Peters)

Sporting a tastefully mussed mullet and canvas pants, Lee sounded like a start-up founder who has delivered countless pitches about his company’s significance. Clearly, however, his desire for impact is deeply rooted. Raised in Kansas by Korean-immigrant parents, Lee is a devout Christian. His résumé bears the hallmarks of can-do Millennial idealism: an internship on Barack Obama’s 2007 primary campaign; five months in Zambia working for the Clinton Health Access Initiative. In a 2017 TEDx Talk, Lee said that he grew up wanting to be a police officer in order to help people.

On Lee’s 22nd birthday, in 2010, he saw news reports about an earthquake devastating Haiti and felt a need to contribute in some way. He went to a New York City subway station and started busking for donations to relief efforts while filming himself. He came up short of his $100 goal for the day. But when he posted the video of his busking online with a pledge to donate a penny each time the video was viewed, something strange happened: He went viral, or at least more viral than any random guy warbling Coldplay on shaky footage could have expected. He then founded the Jubilee Project, a nonprofit to create socially conscious videos; two years later, he quit his six-figure consulting job at Bain & Company to run the project full-time.

The early version of Jubilee was very much a product of its time—a moment when the internet was widely assumed to be a force for progress. The Arab Spring, Kony 2012, the Ice Bucket Challenge: All were early-2010s mass mobilization efforts for a better world, fostered by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Peppy infotainment start-ups—BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Vox—were proliferating, and legacy brands were “pivoting to video,” believing that traditional journalistic values could persist in new shapes.

Really, though, those values were being tested. The dynamics of the internet in those days encouraged newsgatherers to communicate with a clear point of view; the ability to drive traffic by targeting specific audiences, who could in turn orchestrate social-media backlash to coverage, helped make so-called both-sidesism distinctly unfashionable. The rise of Donald Trump, campaigning on what would be later called “alternative facts,” added to the widespread sense that media organizations would play a more active role in refereeing democracy. Traffic boomed, but cultural fracturing worsened as MAGA created its own information ecosystem via independent outlets and forums like Facebook.

After the 2016 election, Lee was disturbed by the divisions he noticed among his acquaintances. Back home in Kansas, people couldn’t fathom why anyone voted for Hillary Clinton; in L.A., they couldn’t do so for Trump. He felt pained to realize that the Jubilee Project’s PSA-like content—about topics including school bullying and global poverty—mostly seemed to be preaching to people who already thought as he did. He relaunched Jubilee as a for-profit company, pitching it as an effort to bridge ideological silos.

Lee and his team devised a set of “shows”: repeatable formats that could liven up discussions about any topic. Middle Ground asks two seemingly opposed factions—minimum-wage workers and millionaires, sex workers and clergy—to try to come to some sense of agreement through discussion. In Odd One Out, a group of similar people tries to root out a mole, thereby examining individual stereotypes (for example, a group of straight guys tries to identify the secretly gay one). Jubilee’s dating videos force people to “swipe” through potential mates in real life, which highlights biases, preferences, and the general inhumanity of apps such as Tinder. Surrounded, which encircles one expert debater with 20 to 25 rivals, is intended to showcase “the many versus a mighty,” Regalado said.

At best, the videos are eyeball-scorching documents of human behavior. The 2024-election hit “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative? (Feat. Charlie Kirk)” had a carnivalesque feel, showcasing all sorts of people trying out all sorts of rhetorical strategies—nitpicking; filibustering; even, from time to time, building logically sound arguments. Conversations got cut maddeningly short and insults flew to and fro, but that made it all the more satisfying when, for example, a nose-ringed student named Naima incisively landed a complex point about structural racism. Over 90 minutes, an odd kinship seemed to develop between Kirk—a slick and buttoned-up pundit who’s made a career out of “owning” liberals—and his opponents, almost like they were all in on a joke.

Sometimes the chemistry among Jubilee participants becomes poisonous. Last year, the company posted one of its most controversial installments, “Is Being Fat a Choice? Fit Men vs Fat Men.” It featured Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster, who repeatedly referred to overweight people—four of whom were in the room with him—as “fat asses” who should be put in a fitness “concentration camp.” Social media lit up with outrage directed toward Jubilee for giving voice to a vicious troll. Lee told me he felt that criticism was fair: Strong voices are good, but voices that hijack the conversation with an agenda and dehumanize other participants are not. “Every year, we put over 2,000 people in our videos,” he said. “I’m not gonna lie; there have been certain videos [where] I’m like, Oh, we might have gotten this balance off.”

Participants in Surrounded can raise red flags, signaling a vote to replace the current debater with someone else from their side. (Photographs by John Francis Peters)

Balance is a word that comes up often in the many, many takedowns that have been aimed at Jubilee over the years. Every issue may have two sides, but not all sides are equally valid, and some are even dangerous. Lee told me that Jubilee has a “harm clause” against featuring groups that openly want to hurt other groups. Harm, of course, is a relative—and ever-expanding—term. Jubilee’s team mostly resolves contentious programming decisions through internal discussion and debate, which seems fitting. For example: Lee told me he disagrees with Regalado about potentially doing a “Holocaust Survivors vs. Deniers” video. Certain topics are just “beyond the realm where people will give us any benefit of the doubt.”

Yet Jubilee’s success suggests why deplatforming—the strategy of blocking bigots and liars from public stages—has proved ineffective. Audiences can always follow provocateurs to alternative platforms; a billionaire can buy the old platform and raise up once-canceled voices. “An anti-vaxxer is about to be part of the Trump administration, and that’s not because of a Jubilee video,” Regalado said. “That’s because information is accessible to people in a new way, and ideas are being resurrected because of our relationship to the internet.” (He was referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump selected to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.)

Lee declined to comment on his own political beliefs, but he said that his staff generally leans left; Regalado, who exited his full-time role at the company in 2023 but still contributes as a consultant and podcaster, told me he’s “a little bit more liberal than conservative.” Both men suggested to me that progressive critics of Jubilee, who believe that political debates on the platform tend to end up favoring the conservative side, may be reacting to an imbalance in the wider political culture. In the pugilistic, digressive arena of a YouTube debate, advocates for the right are just more experienced at getting their point across.

“Something that people will ask us quite a bit is like: You featured Ben Shapiro and you featured Charlie Kirk. Why aren’t you featuring those people on the left?” Lee said. “And usually the question I ask is, Who are you talking about?” The only establishment Democrat to sit down for a Jubilee video this past cycle was Buttigieg; other liberal Surrounded anchors were a TikToker (Withers) and a video-game streamer (Destiny). Of course plenty of other camera-tested Democrats exist, but they tend to be native to mainstream TV news, which hasn’t been a forum for robust, sustained argument since Jon Stewart shamed Crossfire off the air 20 years ago. Regalado characterized liberals as suffering from “a reluctance to meet the moment that we have.” He added, “Their ideas have suffered for it.”

The day after I visited Jubilee’s offices, I arrived at an industrial building in South L.A. for a taping of Surrounded that would pit 25 Christians against one atheist. In a circle of folding chairs sat youthful theologians with tattoos, a midwestern pastor in a fleece vest, and one blond-bearded Mormon in a suit. At the center was a blue-blazered 25-year-old named Alex O’Connor, who had come to argue that God probably wasn’t real and that Jesus probably didn’t rise from the dead.

At first, the mood was tense. O’Connor would state an assertion, and Christians would sprint up to debate him, sometimes crashing into one another on the way. A large countdown clock enforced 20-minute time limits on each round; as the conversations went on, the other participants started to raise red flags, signaling a vote to kick out the current champion of their faith and install a new one.

And yet, despite the gladiatorial trappings, the discussions turned out to be heady and technical—largely focused on disputes over interpreting specific biblical passages. At one point, the shoot’s director, Suncè Franičević, tried to create some sparks by urging participants to not be afraid to share personal experiences. Lee, watching the shoot alongside me, referenced the graph he’d drawn at Jubilee’s headquarters. This episode was shaping up to land high on the do-good side of the spectrum but possibly lower on entertainment value. “The question is,” he asked, “do you think people will watch it?”

Surrounded, which encircles one expert debater with 20 to 25 rivals, is intended to showcase “the many versus a mighty,” Regalado says. (Photograph by John Francis Peters)

As civil as the debate was, I felt the same thing I always feel while watching Jubilee content: squirming discomfort with confrontation but also amazement at the eagerness of the young participants to dive into thorny subjects. I’ve long thought that what Stewart said on Crossfire was correct—that bickering on camera just feeds division and sows confusion. But I’m also of a generation whose worldviews about religion and politics and so much else were, for many of us, set long ago, in the TV-news era. We then gorged on the internet’s wealth of sharp and smart commentary designed to tell us what we already thought. Jubilee, however, is largely being consumed by people who came up in the fractured aftermath, scanning comment-section flame wars and social-media controversies, trying to figure out where they fit.

I spoke with O’Connor afterward. He’s a rising YouTube star and podcaster who has participated in rollicking discussions with the likes of Piers Morgan, Jordan Peterson, and Richard Dawkins. Many of the Christians at the shoot recognized him from the internet and said they were, in spite of his atheism, big fans. He started his influencer career as a teenager ranting at the camera, but over the years, he told me, he’s learned to tone down the vitriol and show more humility. Commenters on his channel sometimes grouse that he’s gone soft, but his viewership numbers keep going up: He just hit 1 million subscribers on YouTube.

O’Connor’s trajectory made me think of something Lee had told me. In the time since the company was founded, online discourse has hardly become more empathetic, and America’s divisions haven’t healed. But Lee has faith that Jubilee’s influence will be felt in years to come, in the words and deeds of people who grew up watching the company’s videos, honing their sense for what productive—and not-so-productive—conversation looks like. “I am confident that we are nudging us towards better,” he said.

I asked O’Connor whether he bought into the idea that Jubilee really was teaching people how to become better thinkers and speakers. “I don’t know,” he said, choosing his words with the same care and precision that he had during the taping. “I think that kind of is an empirical question.”

The only evidence that he could offer was this: He’d been an atheist arguing with a room full of Christians, “and afterwards, we all went out to the pub—and we had a wonderful conversation.”

The Atlantic has hired Griff Witte as a managing editor to lead its growing politics and accountability team. Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg writes in an announcement, shared below, that Witte’s “experience on the democracy beat, in particular, will help us in our coverage of the various challenges to the American way of governance.”

Witte is currently the senior politics and democracy editor for The Washington Post, and in his 23 years at the paper has reported from across the United States and in more than 30 countries, including as bureau chief in Kabul, Islamabad, Jerusalem, London and Berlin.

The Atlantic has announced a number of new writers at the start of the year: Caity Weaver as a staff writer, who will begin with The Atlantic next month and comes from The New York Times Magazine; staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, both recently of the Post (see their first report, “The Tech Oligarchy Arrives,” from Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday); and contributing writers Jonathan Lemire and Alex Reisner.

Below is the announcement from Jeffrey Goldberg:

Dear everyone,

We’re very happy to let you know that Griff Witte is joining The Atlantic as a managing editor. Griff, who is currently the senior editor at The Washington Post in charge of political and democracy coverage, will be leading our growing politics and accountability team. As many of you know already, Griff is a journalistic force, who has led his 50-person team at The Post with energy, creativity, smarts and ambition. His experience on the democracy beat, in particular, will help us in our coverage of the various challenges to the American way of governance.  

Griff comes to us after a storied, 23-year run at The Post, where he spent much of his time as a foreign correspondent. As a stalwart of the foreign desk, he covered insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, wars in Gaza, the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, the return of autocracy in central Europe, and the dawn of the Brexit era in Britain. His reports on refugees crossing into Europe, and on hate-preachers radicalizing followers in Britain, were recognized, respectively, by the National Press Foundation and the Overseas Press Club. In between international postings, Griff served as the newspaper's deputy foreign editor and guided prize-winning coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In his new role for us, Griff will help build and lead our coverage of politics and democracy, with a special focus on government accountability and investigations. In addition to his own impressive track record of reporting stories on these broad beats, Griff has earned the admiration of his reporters for his ability to edit the sort of complicated, scoop-driven, and otherwise revelatory stories that will be critical to our mission as we try to cover and explain the actions of the Trump Administration. Griff is highly collaborative and fearless, qualities that will serve The Atlantic well in the months and years ahead.

Griff’s decision to join The Atlantic represents an intergenerational homecoming, of sorts. His father, the legendary artist Michael Witte, illustrated covers and made other art for The Atlantic in the 1980s (and if we’re lucky, we'll get him drawing for us again).

Witte will report to deputy executive editor Yoni Appelbaum and work closely with deputy editor Juliet Lapidos and other editorial leaders.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

The Arab Spring did not bring democracy to the region, but it remains a beacon of hope for struggling Arabs.