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“Another thing the Gentiles said about us was that we used the blood of murdered Christian children at the Passover festival,” the Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin wrote in The Atlantic in 1911. “Of course that was a wicked lie. It made me sick to think of such a thing.” Antin grew up in the Pale of Settlement, an area spanning from modern-day Russia through Ukraine and Poland where Jews were permitted to reside from 1791 to 1915 but deprived of citizenship. Antin’s vivid essay describes her childhood there before coming to America, including the vibrancy of Jewish life at the time as well as its tribulations under the brutal Russian empire.

According to Jewish tradition, during the evening Passover meal, or seder, children are called upon to ask four ceremonial questions about the holiday, prompting explanations from their elders about the festival’s observance. As Antin noted, this practice meant that as a small child, she knew more about Passover than the adult anti-Semites who assailed her co-religionists in ignorance. “When I asked the Four Questions, about the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs and the other things, and the family, reading from their books, answered me, did I not know all about Passover, and what was on the table, and why?” she observed. “It was wicked of the Gentiles to tell lies about us. The youngest child in the house knew how Passover was kept.”

A Jewish youth might have known in the early 1900s that Jews did not prepare their Passover food with Christian blood, but for centuries, this point has been far from obvious to others. The allegation of Jewish ritual murder of non-Jewish children, often linked to Passover, is known as the “blood libel,” and it originated in medieval Europe in the 12th century. Initially condemned by church authorities, the charge gained legitimacy in 1475, after the murder of a toddler named Simon of Trent led to the torture and conviction of the city’s Jewish residents—some of whom were burnt at the stake—and the establishment of a Christian cult to venerate their alleged victim.

The Fordham University historian Magda Teter follows the spread of these deadly allegations, which exploded after the successful Trent prosecution, in her 2020 book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth. The work’s accompanying maps trace more than 100 such accusations, delineating them by criteria such as whether there were “legal proceedings” (73 yes, 30 no) or “Jews killed” (31 yes, 55 no, 13 unknown). In 1911, the same year that Antin was published in The Atlantic, a Jewish man named Menachem Mendel Beilis was accused of the murder and mutilation of a 13-year-old boy in Kyiv. Over more than two years, he was imprisoned and tried by the Russian government. Ultimately acquitted, he died in New York in 1934.

Dismissing all of this as ancient history would be comforting. But it’s not. In 2019, a far-right gunman stormed a synagogue in California on the last day of Passover, killing one congregant and injuring several others. The murderer left a manifesto: “You are not forgotten Simon of Trent,” he wrote, “the horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven.” In 2014, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer confronted the Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan on air with archival footage of him declaring, “We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians in order to mix their blood with their holy matzos,” the Passover flatbread. “This is not a figment of the imagination or something taken from a film; it is a fact acknowledged by their own books and historical evidence.” Hamdan said that his comments were misconstrued but did not recant them—“Will it hurt peace process?” a CNN show subsequently asked on Twitter—and 10 years later, he still holds his official role in Hamas. (That’s job security for you.) Today, you don’t have to look far to find updated Jewish-ritual-murder accusations on social media.

Actual Passover fare, of course, is far more prosaic. In 2010, The Atlantic published its own Passover menu. Disappointingly, none of the entrees included Christian blood. In 2011, Yoni Appelbaum unpacked the origins of Manischewitz, the sickly sweet wine popular on Passover, dubbing the beverage “the 11th plague.”

So much for the blood libel. But fear not. There’s one Passover conspiracy that might be true: that “Passover” may be a mistranslation, and not the real name of the holiday after all.

Here are a few things that Donald Trump’s lawyer says a president ought to be immune from prosecution for doing:

selling nuclear secrets employing the U.S. military to assassinate a political rival launching a coup

During a Supreme Court hearing this morning, John Sauer, representing the former president, argued that each of these actions could be understood as an “official act” of the president, and that no current or former president may be charged with crimes for doing them.

These are shocking arguments, no less so for the fact that Sauer was already asked about the assassination during arguments at an appeals court and took the same position. And they clarify that in the case before the justices—whether Trump can be federally prosecuted for his attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election—immunity really means something very dangerous: impunity.

“Without immunity from criminal prosecution, there can be no presidency as we know it,” Sauer said at the outset of arguments. Sauer repeatedly complained that no president had faced a criminal prosecution before Trump, an argument that seemed to find favor among conservative justices. But one explanation for this is that no prior president has ever tried to remain in office after losing an election. An alternative way to frame the argument, as the Justice Department lawyer Michael Dreeben noted, was whether the rule of law applies to the president. That’s an important backward-looking question, with regard to Trump’s attempted coup, but also an important one for future administrations, especially if Trump wins back office in the 2024 election.

The justices appeared reluctant to accept the argument quite as broadly as Sauer made it. For example, Trump’s lawyers have argued that a former president could face charges only after first being impeached and convicted. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was perplexed: How can a president be both absolutely immune and also prosecutable after impeachment?

[Read: Trump’s presidential-immunity theory is a threat to the chain of command]

Some of the Court’s liberals, notably Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, seemed content to agree with the appeals court that a president is simply not criminally immune. Jackson conceded that the president faces special pressures, but noted that so do many other people who do their jobs with the possibility of indictment if they break the law. Why should the president be different?

But the Court’s more conservative members appeared more willing to accept that some of the president’s actions—the “official” ones—ought to be beyond prosecution. That wouldn’t settle the matter, though; if the Court does conclude that a president enjoys criminal immunity for official acts, then the question becomes what Justice Clarence Thomas asked near the very outset of the hearing: “How would we determine what an official act is?” The argument did not provide a clear answer or a clear indication of how the justices might answer.

Sotomayor asked if acts done for personal gain could still qualify as official acts. Sauer said yes, to Sotomayor’s chagrin. “You’re asking us to say a president is entitled, not to make a mistake, but is entitled for total personal gain to use the trappings of his office—that’s what you’re trying to get us to hold—without facing criminal liability,” Sotomayor said. Justice Elena Kagan asked about some of the particular acts alleged in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment. Was calling the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee and asking her to establish slates of false electors an official act? Sauer said yes—even though, as Kagan noted, he could have done that just the same as a candidate who was not in office.

What about calling state officials to try to interfere with their election processes? Once again Sauer said yes, stating that it was within the president’s official duties to try to defend the integrity of a state election. This is, of course, a complete inversion of what Trump actually did after the election, which was seeking to corrupt state elections.

That was not the only moment in which the hearing went through the looking glass. Justice Samuel Alito fretted that if former presidents do not enjoy immunity, they could face the danger of prosecution by their successors, which would pose a challenge to the stability of the republic. In short, Alito was arguing that if Trump is prosecuted for a direct assault on American democracy, it might result in indirect damage to American democracy later on.

It seems unlikely that so sweeping a view will carry the day, but if the justices rule that presidents are immune in some cases, they must come up with a heuristic for deciding which ones. Courts would also need to resolve whether Smith’s team can bring forward evidence that stems from official actions, if those official actions are part of a criminal case against Trump for personal actions.

These deep divisions and tough questions suggest that the justices could take some time to rule. And that is why, in a sense, Trump has already won the case. He won by persuading the Supreme Court to even hear the matter, and he wins even bigger if they must take weeks to hammer out a decision—not to mention that the decision itself could then create the potential for further rounds of litigation. Each of those delays makes it less likely that Trump will face a trial before the election. If he wins the election, he will have the power to end the federal cases against him—rendering any questions about immunity even more academic than the discussion in Court today.

In the pandemic winter of 2020, Katie, my family’s 14-year-old miniature poodle, began coughing uncontrollably. After multiple vet visits, and more than $1,000 in bills, a veterinary cardiologist diagnosed her with heart failure. Our girl, a dog I loved so much that I wrote an essay about how I called her my “daughter,” would likely die within nine months.

Katie survived for almost two years. My younger son joked that Katie wasn’t going to let advanced heart failure get in the way of her life goal of never leaving my side, but the truth was that I was the one who wouldn’t let her go. Katie’s extended life didn’t come cheap. There were repeated scans, echocardiograms, and blood work, and several trips to veterinary emergency rooms. One drug alone cost $300 a month, and that was after I shopped aggressively for discounts online.

People like me have fueled the growth of what you might call Big Vet. As household pets have risen in status—from mere animals to bona fide family members—so, too, has owners’ willingness to spend money to ensure their well-being. Big-money investors have noticed. According to data provided to me by PitchBook, private equity poured $51.6 billion into the veterinary sector from 2017 to 2023, and another $9.3 billion in the first four months of this year, seemingly convinced that it had discovered a foolproof investment. Industry cheerleaders pointed to surveys showing that people would go into debt to keep their four-legged friends healthy. The field was viewed as “low-risk, high-reward,” as a 2022 report issued by Capstone Partners put it, singling out the industry for its higher-than-average rate of return on investment.

[From the December 2022 issue: How much would you pay to save your pet’s life?]

In the United States, corporations and private-equity funds have been rolling up smaller chains and previously independent practices. Mars Inc., of Skittles and Snickers fame, is, oddly, the largest owner of stand-alone veterinary clinics in the United States, operating more than 2,000 practices under the names Banfield, VCA, and BluePearl. JAB Holding Company, the owner of National Veterinary Associates’ 1,000-plus hospitals (not to mention Panera and Espresso House), also holds multiple pet-insurance lines in its portfolio. Shore Capital Partners, which owns several human health-care companies, controls Mission Veterinary Partners and Southern Veterinary Partners.

As a result, your local vet may well be directed by a multinational shop that views caring for your fur baby as a healthy component of a diversified revenue stream. Veterinary-industry insiders now estimate that 25 to 30 percent of practices in the United States are under large corporate umbrellas, up from 8 percent a little more than a decade ago. For specialty clinics, the number is closer to three out of four.  

And as this happened, veterinary prices began to rise—a lot. Americans spent an estimated $38 billion on health care and related services for companion animals in 2023, up from about $29 billion in 2019. Even as overall inflation got back under control last year, the cost of veterinary care did not. In March 2024, the Consumer Price Index for urban consumers was up 3.5 percent year over year. The veterinary-services category was up 9.6 percent. If you have ever wondered why keeping your pet healthy has gotten so out-of-control expensive, Big Vet just might be your answer.

To get a sense of what might happen when the profit-seeking dial gets turned up too high in veterinary medicine, we need look no further than human health care. An extensive body of research shows that when private equity takes over a hospital or physician practice, prices and the number of expensive procedures tend to go up. A study found serious medical errors occur more frequently after private equity buys the hospital. Another study found that costs to patients rise, too, sometimes substantially. And that’s in a tougher regulatory environment. In veterinary medicine, there is no giant entity like Medicare capable of pushing back on prices. There is no requirement, in fact, to provide care at all, no matter how dire the animal’s condition. Payment is due at the time of service or there is no service.  

Whenever I told people I was working on this article, I was inundated with Big Vet complaints. Catherine Liu, a professor at UC Irvine, took her elderly pit-bull mix, Buster, to a local VCA when he became lethargic and began drooling excessively. More than $8,000 in charges later, there was still no diagnosis. “Sonograms, endoscopy—what about just a hypothesis of what the symptoms could be? Nothing like that at all was forthcoming,” Liu told me. Shortly before Buster died, a vet in private practice diagnosed him with cancer. The disease, Liu said, had not once been mentioned by the vets at VCA. (Mars Petcare, VCA’s parent company, declined to comment on the episode.)

I don’t mean to single out VCA here—in fact, I should note that a VCA vet’s medical protocol was almost certainly responsible for my dog’s longer-than-expected life. One reason Mars-owned chains attract outsized attention for their high costs and customer-service failures is that the company actually brands its acquisitions. That’s unusual. A study conducted by the Arizona consumer advocate Todd Nemet found that fewer than 15 percent of corporate-owned practices in the state slap their own brand identity on their vets; most keep the original practice name, leaving customers with the illusion of local ownership. (When I asked Thrive Pet Healthcare, a chain majority-owned by TSG Consumer Partners, about why the company doesn’t brand its clinics, a spokesperson replied, “We realize the value of local hospital brands and are committed to preserving and supporting them.”)  

Indeed, some pet owners told me that they realized that ownership of their vet had changed only after what they thought was a routine visit resulted in recommendations for mounds of tests, which turned out to have shot up in price. Paul Cerro, the CEO of Cedar Grove Capital, which invests in the pet industry, says this issue is frequent in online reviews. “People will say, ‘I’ve been coming here for four years, and all of a sudden I’m getting charged for things I’ve never been charged for,’ and they give it one star.”

[Read: The great veterinary shortage]

Big Vet denies charging excessive prices. VCA Canada, for instance, recently told The Globe and Mail that prices can increase after an acquisition because “the quality of the care, the quality of everything we offer to them, goes up as well.” A spokesperson for Mars told me, “We invest heavily in our associates, hospitals, state-of-the-art equipment, technology, and other resources.” NVA, which is planning an initial public offering in 2025 or 2026, did not directly answer a question about why veterinary prices were rising so rapidly, instead sending me a statement saying, in part, “Our vision is to build a community of hospitals that pet owners trust, are easy to access, and provide the best possible value for care.”  

Do rising prices really just reflect higher-quality care? There may be some truth to this, but there is also evidence to the contrary. A study published last year in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, for example, found that vets working for large corporations reported more pressure to generate revenue, whereas veterinarians working for independent practices reported higher levels of satisfaction for such things as the “ability to acquire new large equipment” and the “ability to get new/different drugs.” Preliminary research by Emma Harris, the vice president of Vetster, a veterinary telehealth start-up, found significant differences in pricing between corporate and privately owned veterinary clinics in the same geographic region. Usually, she told me, the increases “occurred immediately after the sale to a private-equity-owned group.”

All of this doesn’t sit well with many in the sector. Vets tend to be idealistic, which makes sense given that many of them rack up six figures in student-loan debt to pursue a profession that pays significantly less than human medicine. One vet, who worked for an emergency-services practice that, they said, raised prices by 20 percent in 2022, told me, “I almost got to the point where I was ashamed to tell people what the estimate was for things because it was so insanely high.” (The vet asked for anonymity because they feared legal repercussions.) Others described mounting pressure to upsell customers following acquisition by private equity. “You don’t always need to take X-rays on an animal that’s vomited just one time,” Kathy Lewis, a veterinarian who formerly worked at a Tennessee practice purchased in 2021 by Mission Veterinary Partners, told me. “But there was more of that going on.” Prices increased rapidly as well, she said, leading to customer complaints. (Mission Veterinary Partners did not respond to requests for comment.)

The combination of wheeling-and-dealing and price increases in the veterinary sector is beginning to attract the government’s attention. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission required, in 2022 consent decree, that JAB seek prior approval before purchasing any emergency or specialty clinic within 25 miles of one it already owns in California and Texas for the next decade. In her written comments, FTC Chair Lina Khan said she feared these one-by-one purchases could lead to the development of a stealth monopoly. (JAB denied any wrongdoing.) And in the United Kingdom, where corporate ownership is higher than in the United States (even the practice originally owned by the author of the classic veterinary novel All Creatures Great and Small has been rolled up), government authorities are moving forward with an investigation into high prices and market concentration after an initial inquiry drew what regulators called an “unprecedented” response from the public.

Pet owners used to have an easier time accepting the short lives of domestic animals. Few people were taking the barnyard cat or junkyard dog in for chemotherapy or ACL surgery, to say nothing of post-op aquatic physical therapy. “When we started out over 20 years ago, you had to live near a veterinary teaching hospital to have access to something like an MRI,” Karen Leslie, the executive director of the Pet Fund, a charity that aids people with vet bills, told me. “Now it’s the standard of care. It’s available basically everywhere—but that starts at $2,000.”

Big Vet, in Leslie’s view, helped fuel an increase in expensive services. The same medical progress that’s helped humans beat back once-fatal diseases is doing the same for cats and dogs, extending their life spans to record lengths. But only if you have the money to pay for it. Some pets—my late Katie, Liu’s late Buster—receive one expensive test or treatment after another, sometimes helpful, sometimes not. Other equally loved pets may go without basic care altogether, or even fall victim to what the industry calls “economic euthanasia,” where they are put down because their owners can’t afford their medical bills. (Pet insurance, widely promoted by the industry, is unlikely to help much. Uptake rates are in the low single digits, a result of relatively high costs and often-limited benefits.)

[Watch: Volunteer veterinarians in Ukraine]

The American Veterinary Medical Association’s tracker shows that vet visits and purchases of heartworm and flea-and-tick medications are down compared with this month last year, even as practice revenues are up, suggesting that some owners are having trouble affording routine, preventative care. The market researcher Packaged Facts found that a full third of pet owners say that they would take their animal to the vet more often if it were less expensive. Shelter Animals Count, an animal-advocacy group, reports that the number of pets surrendered to shelters rose in the past two years. Carol Mithers, the author of the upcoming book Rethinking Rescue, told me that some people give up pets because they believe the shelter system will provide them with necessary medical treatment—something that is, heartbreakingly, not true.

The veterinary past is easy to romanticize. The truth is that pets have never received all the needed care, and that wealthy pet owners have always had access to more care. But the emergence of Big Vet and the injection of cutthroat incentives into a traditionally idealistic, local industry threatens to make these problems far worse. It portends a future in which some pet owners get shaken down, their love for their pets exploited financially, while others must forego even basic care for their pets. I don’t think Katie, who loved all animals, would approve. I certainly don’t.

The scrolls lay inside glass cases. On one, the writing was jagged; on others, swirling or steady. I was at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, admiring centuries-old Chinese calligraphy that, the wall text told me, was meant to contain the life force—qi—of the calligrapher expressed through each brushstroke. Though I couldn’t read the language, I was moved to see the work of writers who lived hundreds of years ago, whose marks still seemed to say something about the creators long after they’d passed.

I’m using my fingers to type this now, but every letter is perfectly legible and well spaced. Today, the human body behind the written word is less apparent. When I’m composing an email, Gmail makes suggestions I can deploy in one click: “Awesome!” “Sounds great!” “Yes, I can do that.” Artificial intelligence can produce instantaneous sentences. That a person is responsible for text is no longer a given.

Last year, Alex Reisner reported in The Atlantic that more than 191,000 books had been absorbed into a data set called Books3, which was then used to train generative-AI large language models that may someday threaten to take the place of human writers. Among the books in question was my debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, which took me five years to complete. My new novel, Real Americans, took even longer: I began working on it in December 2016, and it’s being released at the end of April, seven years and four months later. Those numbers don’t even account for the years of reading, practice, and education (both formal and self-directed) that preceded the writing itself. Now ChatGPT and other LLMs, trained on a wide store of human-generated literature, stand on the cusp of writing novels in no time at all.

[Read: What ChatGPT can’t teach my writing students]

This seems, initially, discouraging. Here is an entity that can seemingly do what I do, but faster. At present, it “hallucinates” and gets basic facts wrong, but it may soon be able to generate text that can seamlessly imitate people. Unlike me, it won’t need sleep, or bathroom breaks, or patience, or life experience; it won’t get the flu. In fact, AI embodies hypotheticals I can just imagine for myself: If only I could write all day and night. If only I were smarter and more talented. If only I had endless knowledge. If only I could read whole libraries. What could I create if I had no needs? What might this development mean for writing?

Considering limitlessness has led me to believe that the impediments of human writers are what lead us to create meaningful art. And they are various: limits of our body, limits of our perspectives, limits of our skills. But the constraints of an artist’s process are, in the language of software, a feature, not a bug.

Writing is a blood-and-guts business, literally as well as figuratively. As I type with my hands, my lungs oxygenate the blood that my heart pumps; my brain sends and receives signals. Each of these functions results in the words on this page. In the Middle Ages, monks in the scriptoria wrote: “Two fingers hold the pen, but the whole body toils.” Typing this now, my upper back hurts. I am governed by pesky physical needs: I have to drink water and eat; my mind can’t focus indefinitely. My hands are too cold, and because I haven’t moved it, one foot is going numb. On other occasions, illnesses or injuries have affected my ability to write.

The sensitivities of our fragile human bodies require that our labor takes time. Nothing is more discouraging when I am trying to complete a draft. But this exchange—my finite hours for this creative endeavor—imports meaning: It benefits the work, and makes it richer. Over weeks, months, and years, characters emerge and plots take surprising turns. A thought can be considered day after day and deepened.

While revising my forthcoming book, one of my thighs erupted into a mysterious rash. Sparing gruesome details, let’s just say it disturbed and distracted me. But it also led me to a realization: I’d been approaching the creation of my novel as though it could be perfectible. In reducing my entire self to my cognition alone, akin to a computer, I’d forgotten the truth that I am inseparable from my imperfect body, with its afflictions and ailments. My books emerge from this body.

In his book How to Write One Song, the musician Jeff Tweedy writes: “I aspire to make trees instead of tables.” He was talking about songs, but the concept was revelatory to me as a novelist. Unlike a table, the point of a novel isn’t to be useful or stable or uniform. Instead, it is as singular and particular as its creator, shaped by numerous forces and conditions. In spite of its limits and because of them, a tree is an exuberant organic expression. Though costumed in typeset words, a novel is an exuberant organic expression too.

[Read: My books were used to train meta’s generative AI. Good.]

AI is creating tables out of our trees. Its infinite iterations are pure veneer: bloodless and gutless, serviceable furniture made of the deforested expanse of human experience. A large language model doesn’t require experience, because it has consumed ours. It appears limitless in its perspective because it writes from an extensive data set of our own. Though writing comes out of these experiences and perspectives, it does not follow that unlimited quantities of each beget maximally substantial work. I believe that the opposite is true.

Compared with AI, we might seem like pitiful creatures. Our lives will end; our memory is faulty; we can’t absorb 191,000 books; our frames of reference are circumscribed. One day, I will die. I foreclose on certain opportunities by pursuing others. Typing this now means I cannot fold my laundry or have lunch with a friend. Yet I believe writing is worth doing, and this sacrifice of time makes it consequential. When we write, we are picking and choosing—consciously or otherwise—what is most substantial to us. Behind human writing is a human being calling for attention and saying, Here is what is important to me. I’m able to move through only my one life, from my narrow point of view; this outlook creates and yet constrains my work. Good writing is born of mortality: the limits of our body and perspectives—the limits of our very lives.

I can imagine a future in which ChatGPT works more convincingly than it does now. Would I exchange the hours that I spent working on each of my two books for finished documents spat out by ChatGPT? That would have saved me years of attempts and failures. But all of that frustration, difficult as it was in the moment, changed me. It wasn’t a job I clocked in and out of, contained within a tidy sum of hours. I carried the story with me while I showered, drove—even dreamed. My mind was changed by the writing, and the writing changed by my mind.

[Read: Prepare for the textpocalypse]

Working on a novel, I strain against my limits as a bounded, single body by imagining characters outside of myself. I test the limits of my skill when I wonder, Can I pull this off? And though it feels grandiose to say, writing is an attempt to use my short supply of hours to create a work that outlasts me. These exertions in the face of my constraints strike me as moving, and worthy, and beautiful.

Writing itself is a technology, and it will shift with the introduction of new tools, as it always has. I’m not worried that AI novelists will replace human novelists. But I am afraid that we’ll lose sight of what makes human writing worthwhile: its efforts, its inquiries, its bids for connection—all bounded and shaped by its imperfections—and its attempts to say, This is what it’s like for me. Is it like this for you? If we forget what makes our human work valuable, we might forget what makes our human lives valuable too. Novels are one of the best means we have for really seeing one another, because behind each effort is a mortal person, expressing and transmuting their realities to the best of their ability. Reading and writing are vital means by which we bridge our separate consciousnesses. In understanding these limits, we can understand one another’s lives. At least, we can try.

Fifty-six years ago this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university: stop funding military research, and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby Black neighborhood. After a week of futile negotiations, Columbia called in New York City police to clear the occupation.

The physical details of that crisis were much rougher than anything happening today. The students barricaded doors and ransacked President Grayson Kirk’s office. “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up,” Mark Rudd, the student leader and future member of the terrorist Weather Underground, wrote in an open letter to Kirk, who resigned a few months later. The cops arrested more than 700 students and injured at least 100, while one of their own was permanently disabled by a student.

In other ways, the current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s. Why can’t students imagine doing it some other way?

Perhaps because the structure of protest reflects the nature of universities. They make good targets because of their abiding vulnerability: They can’t deal with coercion, including nonviolent disobedience. Either they overreact, giving the protesters a new cause and more allies (this happened in 1968, and again last week at Columbia), or they yield, giving the protesters a victory and inviting the next round of disruption. This is why Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, no matter what she does, finds herself hammered from the right by Republican politicians and from the left by her own faculty and students, unable to move without losing more ground. Her detractors know that they have her trapped by their willingness to make coercive demands: Do what we say or else we’ll destroy you and your university. They aren’t interested in a debate.

[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance. At the heart of this spirit is free speech, which means more than just chanting, but free speech can’t thrive in an atmosphere of constant harassment. When one faction or another violates this spirit, the whole university is weakened as if stricken with an illness. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who tried and failed to mediate a peaceful end to the Columbia occupation, wrote afterward:

In a community one cannot regain authority simply by asserting it, or by using force to suppress dissidents. Authority in this case is like respect. One can only earn the authority—the loyalty of one’s students—by going in and arguing with them, by engaging in full debate and, when the merits of proposed change are recognized, taking the necessary steps quickly enough to be convincing.

The crackdown at Columbia in 1968 was so harsh that a backlash on the part of faculty and the public obliged the university to accept the students’ demands: a loss, then a win. The war in Vietnam ground on for years before it ended and history vindicated the protesters: another loss, another win. But the really important consequence of the 1968 revolt took decades to emerge. We’re seeing it now on Columbia’s quad and the campuses of elite universities around the country. The most lasting victory of the ’68ers was an intellectual one. The idea underlying their protests wasn’t just to stop the war or end injustice in America. Its aim was the university itself—the liberal university of the postwar years, which no longer exists.

That university claimed a special role in democratic society. A few weeks after the 1968 takeover, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter gave the commencement address to a wounded institution. “A university is a community, but it is a community of a special kind,” Hofstadter said—“a community devoted to inquiry. It exists so that its members may inquire into truths of all sorts. Its presence marks our commitment to the idea that somewhere in society there must be an organization in which anything can be studied or questioned—not merely safe and established things but difficult and inflammatory things, the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” This mission rendered the community fragile, dependent on the self-restraint of its members.

The lofty claims of the liberal university exposed it to charges of all kinds of hypocrisy, not least its entanglement with the American war machine. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who became a guru to the New Left, coined the phrase repressive tolerance for the veil that hid liberal society’s mechanisms of violence and injustice. In this scheme, no institution, including the university, remained neutral, and radical students embraced their status as an oppressed group.

[Charles Sykes: The new rules of political journalism]

At Stanford (where my father was an administrator in the late ’60s, and where students took over a campus building the week after the Columbia revolt), white students compared themselves to Black American slaves. To them, the university was not a community dedicated to independent inquiry but a nexus of competing interest groups where power, not ideas, ruled. They rejected the very possibility of a disinterested pursuit of truth. In an imaginary dialogue between a student and a professor, a member of the Stanford chapter of Students for a Democratic Society wrote: “Rights and privacy and these kinds of freedom are irrelevant—you old guys got to get it through your heads that to fight the whole corrupt System POWER is the only answer.”

A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.

The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?”

A Columbia student, writing to one of his professors in a letter that the student shared with me, explained the dynamic so sharply that it’s worth quoting him at length:

I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept in to every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen.

The muscle of independent thinking and open debate, the ability to earn authority that Daniel Bell described as essential to a university’s survival, has long since atrophied. So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.

[Adam Serwer: The Republicans who want American carnage]

And when the shrewd and unscrupulous Representative Elise Stefanik demanded of the presidents of Harvard and Penn whether calls for genocide violated their universities’ code of conduct, they had no good way to answer. If they said yes, they would have faced the obvious comeback: “Why has no one been punished?” So they said that it depended on the “context,” which was technically correct but sounded so hopelessly legalistic that it led to the loss of their jobs. The response also made nonsense of their careers as censors of unpopular speech. Shafik, of Columbia, having watched her colleagues’ debacle, told the congresswoman what she wanted to hear, then backed it up by calling the cops onto campus—only to find herself denounced on all sides, including by Senator Tom Cotton, who demanded that President Joe Biden deploy the United States military to Columbia, and by her own faculty senate, which threatened a vote of censure.

The right always knows how to exploit the excesses of the left. It happened in 1968, when the campus takeovers and the street battles between anti-war activists and cops at the Democratic convention in Chicago helped elect Richard Nixon. Republican politicians are already exploiting the chaos on campuses. This summer, the Democrats will gather again in Chicago, and the activists are promising a big show. Donald Trump will be watching.

Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.

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The United States has long had a great deal of religious diversity, and was built on the idea of religious tolerance. But one type of belief was always rare: none. Until recently, that is. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who profess no religion (as opposed even to having one that they rarely or never practice) has risen from 16 percent in 2007 to 29 percent in 2021. (Back in the early 1970s, only about 5 percent of Americans espoused this position.)

This phenomenon of declining belief is of great concern to many religious leaders, as one can easily imagine. The Catholic theologian and bishop Robert Barron has built an enormous internet-based ministry in no small part by seeking to reach these so-called nones. Rather than simply railing against a secular culture, Barron turns the criticism around and calls the growth of this disavowal “an unnerving commentary on the effectiveness of our evangelical strategies.”

The growing phenomenon of the nones, however, is not evidence of a lack of interest in spiritual life. Many today who previously fell away from their faith—or never had one to begin with—are seeking something faith-like in their life. They are open to thinking about such commitments, but just don’t know what to look for. Maybe this describes you. If so, ironically, the research data on why people say they became nones in the first place might hold the answer of what to focus on to set you on your spiritual path.

In tracking the rise of the nones in American religious life, Pew has also studied people who had faith in childhood but left it in adulthood. In 87 percent of the cases, this came down to one of three reasons: They stopped believing (49 percent), they felt too uncertain (18 percent), or they didn’t like the way the faith was practiced (20 percent). More concisely, most people leave their faith because of belief, feeling, or practice.

[Derek Thompson: The true cost of the churchgoing bust]

These are the reasons people quit religion, but we can also infer that these same three aspects of religious experience are central to maintaining faith—or to finding it anew and then keeping it. You might say that belief, feeling, and practice are the macronutrients—the necessary elements—of healthy faith. With only one of them, you will be spiritually malnourished: Belief alone is desiccated theory; by itself, feeling is unreliable sentimentality; practice in isolation is dogmatism. To build a new, sustaining spiritual diet, you need to focus on all three.

Many great thinkers have made essentially this point. For example, the ardently religious Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote in his book of daily pensées, A Calendar of Wisdom, that in times of trouble, “you have to embrace what the wisdom of humanity, your intellect, and your heart tell you: that the meaning of life is to serve the force that sent you into the world.”

Feeling is fundamental to religious experience, as scholarship on emotion has shown. Some religions elevate trancelike states of ecstasy, such as samadhi in both Hinduism and Buddhism, which involves complete meditative absorption. Most faiths emphasize the role of the emotional adoration of the divine, as in the Prophet Muhammad’s teaching that believers should “love Allah with all of your hearts.” One cannot rely on feeling alone, however, because it is so mutable. As the 16th-century founder of the Jesuit Order, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, noted, faith features feelings of not only consolation but also desolation, at moments when God feels absent from one’s life.

The second element of faith is belief, which are tenets you have accepted as truths, at least provisionally. These truths are not testable as scientific propositions are, so, in Thomas Aquinas’s definition, they are the “mean between science and opinion.” These are the propositions that you learn from reading and listening to other believers, and that you ultimately choose to accept; examples would be God’s laws for the Jewish people or the Eightfold Path to enlightenment for Buddhists.

Accepting such beliefs as truth does not mean they’re impossible to revise. In fact, research has shown that spiritual people are generally open to reflection on existential questions and willing to modify their views. But these tenets of faith are based on considered arguments, rather than feelings, so they tend to be stable and enduring.

[Peter Wehner: David Brooks’s journey toward faith]

Finally, religious practice offers a set of actions and rituals that you commit to observing in order to demonstrate your adherence to the faith for yourself and others. This is the element of faith that takes it out of the realm of abstraction and makes it part of your real, physical life. You can say you believe in the ideas of Zen, but Zen itself will not become a meaningful part of your life until you practice Zen meditation. Similarly, you can say you believe in the divine inspiration of the Quran, but that doesn’t mean much if you don’t actually read it.

You might assume that any practice requires both belief and feeling—entailing that, for example, you would feel impelled to go to a political demonstration only if you already believed in the cause. But you may have noticed the opposite occurring in your life: If you go to a demonstration uncommitted, you may find that the experience stimulates feelings and belief, which might then lead you to go to future demonstrations.

This is a basic form of what academics call “path dependence,” a phenomenon in which past decisions lead to similar actions in future. The concept is usually used by economists and political scientists to explain institutional inertia or resistance to organizational change, but the same principle can suggestively be applied to individual human behavior. Such path dependence can be affected by both positive and negative feedback, the sense either that people’s choices elicit increasing returns or that they are self-reinforcing or “locked in.”

That feedback loop can be a problem if your religious practice makes you become rigid in your ideology; economists, for example, have modeled that voter path dependence might be one of the causes of our increasing polarization. As it pertains to faith, the trick, then, is to be wary of your path dependence if it results in negative feedback: If you feel or behave like a “locked-in” party-line voter, you might be too rigid in your belief. Yet if you use path dependence on your faith exclusively for positive feedback—that is, your belief elicits increasing returns, perhaps boosting your altruism, community ties, or sense of meaning in life—then you will be using it as a force for good.

Put simply, be completely honest with yourself about why you’re practicing your faith; if your belief spurs positive feedback, carry on.

[Faith Hill: The messy line between faith and reason]

A healthy faith thus requires all three sources of spiritual nourishment. The data suggest that when one or more of those elements—of belief, feeling, and practice—are missing, people fall away. So if you’re looking for faith in your life, you need to seek all three.

Here is an optimal way to do so. In Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, he quotes an ancient Chinese proverb: “Those who know the rules of true wisdom are baser than those who love them. Those who love them are baser than those who follow them.” In other words, to develop a healthy faith, practice is more important than feeling, and feeling is more important than belief. This implies the reverse of what most people do to develop a spiritual life: They read and think to acquire knowledge and opinions—that is, beliefs—then they see if they “feel” their faith, and only then will they move on to practicing it. But as the proverb implies, this order of priorities won’t work very well.

The right approach is to start practicing, notwithstanding your current state of belief and feeling. If the practice evokes sentiment in you, then study the faith to develop knowledge and opinions. This is an experimental, hands-on approach, much in the manner of how many inventions and innovations come about: An inventor tries something, sees whether it works, and then figures out precisely what’s going on.

In a faith context, this means that you might go to a service of worship a few times. Then you could interrogate your feelings as to whether the services stimulated something deep within (or, alternatively, whether they left you cold). Finally, if the former feels true, you could start investigating the belief system intellectually.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]

The three elements of faith can be useful to apply to many parts of life, not just your spiritual quest. Consider marriage, for instance: Without the feelings of love and affection, a relationship is dead; without knowledge and opinions about your spouse, it has no depth; without practicing the rituals of love, your partnership will wither. This same algorithmic progression of faith can also map out your path to marriage. You start out with practice in the form of a date; you continue the relationship if you feel attraction and the beginnings of love; the pairing develops as you gain knowledge and form favorable opinions about your partner.

Obviously, this connubial example is not a random one. To find faith is to find a form of love—a love of the divine, or a rapturous spiritual connection with the universe. But like all good and worthwhile things in life, faith and love merit deep thought and serious effort.

How do you get the albatross off your neck? You know, your albatross. Your own dank collar of bird carcass, bespoke feathery deadweight of shame/rage/neurosis/solipsism/the past/whatever, the price of being you as it feels on a bad day … How do you let it drop?

In Taylor Swift’s “The Albatross”—a bonus track on her new double album, The Tortured Poets Department—the albatross is a person. A woman, to be precise. “She’s the albatross / She is here to destroy you.” Which could be a trope from some slab of 1970s misogynist boogie, Bad Company or Nazareth howling about a faithless woman and her evil ways, etc., etc., but—because this is Taylor Swift—it isn’t.

Let me quickly locate myself in the Taylorverse. I’m a “Bad Blood”/“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” guy. I like the bangers, the big tunes. Midnights was not my cup of tea: overdetermined as to lyrics (too many words), underpowered as to melodies (not enough tunes). For me, it was as if she’d taken the DNA of a maundering, heavy-breathing, medium-Swift song like Reputation’s “Dress” and unraveled it over a whole album, abetted by the soupy skills of Jack Antonoff. But what do I know? Midnights was one of the biggest albums of all time. And now, less than two years later: The Tortured Poets Department. And: “The Albatross.”

[Read: Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues]

Sonically, musically, we’re in Folklore territory with this song: the strings; the wending, woodwindy vocal line; the tender electronica; the muted mood; the pewter wash of tastefulness. Chamber music, if the chamber in question has been decorated by Bed Bath & Beyond. Is there a tune? I mean, kind of. Not one you’re going to be bellowing in a toneless rapture at the wheel of your car, but it’s there.

Lyrically, however, things are more lively. There’s this woman, the albatross: a bad habit, a bad relationship, a self-ensnaring situation, a bundle of familiar negatives (“Devils that you know / Raise worse hell than a stranger”). People have warned you about this person. She’s bad news! And Swift, ever-alert to the opprobrium of the herd, cannot help identifying with her. The voice shifts to the first person: “Locked me up in towers / But I’d visit in your dreams.” Reputation-style vibes of slander and persecution are felt: “Wise men once read fake news / And they believed it / Jackals raised their hackles …” As always, the Swifties are speculating: Who’s this song for? Who is it about? Joe Alwyn? Travis Kelce—and the warnings he got when he started dating Swift? Is she his own stubborn albatross?

By the end of the song, the singer herself has assumed the form of the albatross, and is flapping in to perform a “rescue.” “The devil that you know / Looks now more like an angel.” Embrace your shadow? Embrace your albatross? Embrace your partner with your own long-feathered and doom-laden albatross wings?

This is not how it usually goes with albatrosses.

[Read: Travis Kelce is another puzzle for Taylor Swift fans to crack]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the source, the fons et origo, of the albatross metaphor. In the Rime, a sailor shoots an albatross, and brings a curse upon his ship. Why does he shoot the albatross? No reason, or none given in the poem. Maybe it’s the old existentialist acte gratuit, more than a century early: Maybe he does it because the sun is in his eyes, like Meursault in Camus’s L’Étranger. He shoots it, anyway, prangs it with his crossbow, and the wind drops, and the ship slides into a hell-sea, and the dead bird, as punishment and emblem of shame, is hung around his neck.

Back, then, to our question: How do you get rid of the albatross?

Coleridge, fortunately for us, was very clear on this: You bless the water snakes. It’s all in Part IV of the Rime. The ship is becalmed, the sea is rancid, the crew are dead, and the Mariner—albatross slung Björk-ishly around his neck—is sitting on the deck in a state of nightmare. Meaning, purpose, a following wind: all gone. Perished with his shipmates. Now he’s in a scummy realm, a realm of mere biological outlasting. “And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I …”

But. However. And yet. With nothing else to do, with no phone to look at, he watches the slimy things as they writhe and flare in the water, super-white in the moonlight, darker and more luxuriously hued when in the shadow cast by the ship itself. And something happens. His heart opens. Or perhaps it breaks. He is mutely, selflessly stirred and awakened. With his core, from his core, he spontaneously exalts what is before him: He blesses the water snakes.

And with a complicated downy loosening, and maybe a glancing clang from its beak, the albatross—fatal baggage of a bird—falls off into the sea.

Taylor Swift is not the first musician to engage with albatrossness. There’s Fleetwood Mac’s beautiful instrumental “Albatross” from 1968—slow celestial wingbeats, bluesy exhalations over a dazzling sea. There’s Public Image Ltd’s trudging, splintering “Albatross” from 1979, interpersonal, more in the Swift vein: “I know you very well / You are unbearable.” Corrosion of Conformity’s “Albatross” is a kind of sludge-rocking, negatively charged “Free Bird”: “You can call me lazy / You can call me wrong … Albatross, fly on, fly on.”

But for the full Coleridgean thing, the full voyage, nothing beats Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The live version, preferably. This is a straight-up workingman’s adaptation of the poem, 14 minutes of galumphing rock opera, Coleridge’s words doggedly paraphrased by Maiden bassist–vision guy Steve Harris, and it succeeds spectacularly. Especially at the water-snakes moment, which the band orchestrates to perfection: a flicked and rushing pattern on the hi-hat, a trebly-warbly melodic figure on the bass, palm-muted chug-a-chug of one, then two (then three?) guitars, the tension blissfully building until Bruce Dickinson, with soaring all-gobbling theatricality, sings it out. “Then the spell starts to BREAK / The albatross falls from his NECK / Sinks down like LEAD / Into the SEA / Then down in falls comes the” [King Diamond–style infernal androgynous scream] “RAAAAAAIIN!!”

So what are the water snakes? Coleridge’s Rime is not, for me, an allegory, so the water snakes are not representing or symbolizing something. They are something. A coiling and uncoiling beautiful-terrible, playful-awful force that breaks the surface in snaky loops and flashes. Wonderfully indifferent to us, horrifyingly indifferent to us. But mysteriously in relationship with us, because it is in our eyes that these water snakes, these incandescent reptiles, these limbless creatures of the deep, are made holy. We are the ones who can bless them.

And you can’t decide to bless the water snakes, that’s the point. It’s not about gratitude. It’s not about improving your mental health. No squint of effort, no knotting or unknotting of the frontal lobes will get you there. The blessing arises by itself, or it doesn’t arise at all. Total brain bypass: a love so simple and helpless it barely even knows what it’s loving.

[Read: James Parker on the Rick Rubin guide to creativity]

So it becomes a question of orienting oneself to the possibility of this love. How to do it? I’m out of my depth here—which is just as it should be, for here we are in the zone of the mystics and the mega-meditators. We are full fathom five, where your feet don’t touch anything, because there’s nothing to touch. If you’re the Ancient Mariner—or perhaps if you’re addicted to opiates, as Coleridge was—you’ll have to go through it, all of it. You’ll have to be carried to the end of yourself. The blessing of the water snakes happens at the Mariner’s clinical bottoming-out: when he’s utterly isolated, on a suppurating sea, besieged by the forces of death.

The rest of us, maybe we don’t have to go—or be taken—that far. Maybe there are other, less drastic, more everyday opportunities and invitations for us to be broken down and opened up. For our grip on the albatross to be unclenched. For the love to pour through us like Iron Maiden. For the albatross itself to wrap its angelic Taylor Swift wings around your inner Travis Kelce.

One way or another, though, sooner or later, gently or with loud sunderings and burstings, it’s going to happen. Life, thank God—it’ll get you and get you again.

This article has been adapted from James Parker’s upcoming book, Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes: Odes to Being Alive.

Just a few months ago, America seemed to have licked the post-pandemic inflation surge for good. Then, in January, prices rose faster than expected. Probably just a blip. The same thing happened in February. Strange, but likely not a big deal. Then March’s inflation report came in hot as well. Okay—is it time to panic?

The short answer is no. Core inflation (the metric that policy makers pay close attention to because it excludes volatile prices such as food and energy) is stuck at about 4 percent, double the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. But that’s a long way from the crisis of 2022, when core inflation peaked at nearly 7 percent and the price of almost everything was going up dangerously fast. Instead, we seem to be facing a last-mile problem: Inflation has mostly normalized, but wringing out the final few percentage points in a handful of categories is proving harder than expected. There are two conflicting views of what exactly is going on, each with drastically different implications for how the Federal Reserve should respond. One camp worries that the Fed could lose control of inflation all over again; the other fears that the central bank will—whoops— unnecessarily bring the U.S. economy to its knees.

The “vanishing inflation” view is that today’s still-rising prices reflect a combination of statistical quirks and pandemic ripple effects that will almost surely resolve on their own. This camp points out that basically all of the current excess inflation stems from auto insurance and housing. The auto-insurance story is straightforward: Car prices spiked in 2021 and 2022, and when cars get more expensive, so does insuring them. Car inflation yesterday leads to car-insurance inflation today. That’s frustrating for drivers right now, but it carries a silver lining. Given that car inflation has fallen dramatically over the past year, it should be only a matter of time before insurance prices stabilize as well.

[Annie Lowrey: Inflation is your fault]

Housing, which made up a full two-thirds of excess inflation in March, is a bit more complicated. You might think that housing inflation would be calculated simply by looking at the prices of new homes or apartments. But for the majority of Americans who already own their home, it is calculated using a measure known as “owners’ equivalent rent.” Government statisticians try to determine how much money homeowners would reasonably charge for rent by looking at what people in similar homes are paying. This way of calculating housing prices has all kinds of flaws. One issue is that inflation data are calculated monthly, but most renters have one- or two-year leases, which means the official numbers usually lag the real housing market by a year or more. The housing market has cooled off considerably in the past year and a half, but the inflation data are still reflecting the much-hotter market of early 2023 or late 2022. Sooner or later, they too should fall. “The excess inflation we have left is in a few esoteric areas that reflect past price increases,” Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at Yale’s Budget Lab, told me. “I’m not too worried about inflation taking off again.”

The “hot wages” camp tells a very different story. Its members note that even as price increases appeared to be settling back down at the beginning of 2024, wages were still growing much faster than they did before the pandemic. When wages are rising quickly, many employers, especially those in labor-intensive service industries, raise prices to cover higher salary costs. That may show up in the data in different ways—maybe it’s groceries one month, maybe airfares or vehicle-repair costs another month—but the point is that as long as wages are hot, prices will be as well. “The increase in inflation over the last three months is higher than anything we saw from 1992 to 2019,” Jason Furman, the former director of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic advisers, told me. “It’s hard to say that’s just some fluke in the data.”

Adherents of the “vanishing inflation” idea don’t deny the importance of wages in driving up prices; instead, they point to alternative measures that show wage growth closer to pre-pandemic levels. They also emphasize the fact that corporate profits are higher today than they were in 2019, implying that wages have more room to grow without necessarily pushing up prices.

Although this dispute may sound technical, it will inform one of the most pivotal decisions the Federal Reserve has made in decades. Last year, the central bank raised interest rates to their highest levels since 2001, where they have remained even as inflation has fallen dramatically. Raising interest rates makes money more expensive for businesses and consumers to borrow and, thus, to spend, which is thought to reduce inflation but can also raise unemployment. This leaves the Fed with a tough choice to make: Should it keep rates high and risk suffocating the best labor market in decades, or begin cutting rates and risk inflation taking off again?

If you believe that inflation is above all the product of strong wage growth, then cutting interest rates prematurely could cause prices to rise even more. This is the view the Fed appears to hold. “Right now, given the strength of the labor market and progress on inflation so far, it’s appropriate to allow restrictive policy further time to work,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a Q&A session following the release of March’s inflation data. Translation: The economy is still too hot, and we aren’t cutting interest rates any time soon.

[Michael Powell: What the upper-middle class left doesn’t get about inflation]

If, however, you believe that the last mile of inflation is a product of statistical lags, keeping interest rates high makes little sense. In fact, high interest rates may paradoxically be pushing inflation higher than it otherwise would be. Many homeowners, for instance, have responded to spiking interest rates by staying put to preserve the cheap mortgages they secured when rates were lower (why give up a 3 percent mortgage rate for a 7 percent one?). This “lock-in effect” has restricted the supply of available homes, which drives up the prices.

High rates may also be partly responsible for auto-insurance costs. Insurance companies often invest their customers’ premium payments in safe assets, such as government bonds. When interest rates rose, however, the value of government bonds fell dramatically, leaving insurers with huge losses on their balance sheets. As The New York Times’s Talmon Joseph Smith reports, one reason auto-insurance companies have raised their premiums is to help cover those losses. In other words, in the two categories where inflation has been the most persistent, interest rates may be propping up the exact high prices that they are supposed to be lowering.

The Fed’s “wait and see” approach comes with other risks as well. Already, high rates have jacked up the costs of major life purchases, made a dysfunctional housing market even more so, and triggered a banking crisis. They haven’t made a dent in America’s booming labor market—yet. But the longer rates stay high, the greater the chance that the economy begins to buckle under the pressure. Granted, Powell has stated that if unemployment began to rise, the Fed would be willing to cut rates. But lower borrowing costs won’t translate into higher spending overnight. It could take months, even years, for them to have their full effect. A lot of people could lose their jobs in the meantime.

Given where inflation seemed to be headed at the beginning of this year, the fact that the Federal Reserve finds itself in this position at all is frustrating. But given where prices were 18 months ago, it is something of a miracle. Back then, the Fed believed it would be forced to choose between a 1970s-style inflation crisis or a painful recession; today it is deciding between slightly higher-than-typical inflation or a somewhat-less-stellar economy. That doesn’t make the central bank’s decision any easier, but it should perhaps make the rest of us a bit less stressed about it.

In January, the writer Gary Shteyngart spent a week of his life on the inaugural voyage of the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship ever. Like many a great novelist before him, he went in search of the “real” America. He left his Russian novels at home, bought some novelty T-shirts, and psychically prepared to be the life of the party. About halfway through, Shteyngart called his editor and begged to be allowed to disembark and fly home. His desperate plea was rejected, resulting in a semi-sarcastic daily log of his misery.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Shteyngart discusses his “seven agonizing nights” on the cruise ship, where he roamed from mall to bar to infinity pool trying to make friends. He shares his theories about why cruise lovers nurture an almost spiritual devotion to an experience that, to him, inspires material for a “low-rent White Lotus.” And he shares what happened when cruise lovers actually read what he wrote about their beloved ship.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Gary Shteyngart: Hi.

Hanna Rosin: Hi. It’s Hanna.

Shteyngart: Hi, Hanna. How are you?

Rosin: Good.

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

Shteyngart: It’s cloudy here.

Rosin: It is? In a good way? In a way that makes your hair look full and rich?

Shteyngart: Oh, yeah. (Laughs.) It does add fullness to my hair, which is always a good thing at this point. I think spring has finally sprung. And I teach in the spring semester, and I’m like, God, I just want this to be over. I just want to go out and play.

Rosin: You teach fiction?

Shteyngart: Yeah. I can’t teach rocket science.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Shteyngart: Cruising technology.

Rosin: This is writer Gary Shteyngart.

Rosin: There’s just a Russian stereotype.

Shteyngart: (Laughs.)

Rosin: I’m like, You could teach astronomy or physics. I don’t know.

Shteyngart: Chess.

Rosin: Chess. Exactly.

Rosin: Gary Shteyngart grew up in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S. when he was 7. He’s written several award-winning novels, and he was a “literary consultant” on Succession, the HBO show.

Mostly, he is known for his satire, which can range from gentle to deadly. So who better to write an article about the inaugural voyage of the largest cruise ship ever built?

Shteyngart: This whole thing came about because I was on Twitter, and I saw a tweet that just showed the—may I use salty language here?

Rosin: Yes.

Shteyngart: The ass of the ship is how I describe it. I don’t know any of these terms, but, you know, with all the water parks and crap on it. And so I reposted the tweet, and I said, If somebody wants to send me on this cruise, please specify the level of sarcasm desired.

Rosin: Really? (Laughs.)

Shteyngart: And then—God bless The Atlantic—within seconds, I had an assignment.

Rosin: That ass belongs to the Icon of the Seas, a ship that can hold more than 7,000 passengers and 2,000 crew. It has 20 decks with seven swimming pools and six waterslides. The ship itself is about five times bigger than the Titanic. And I’m pretty sure the Titanic did not have a swim-up bar, much less the world’s largest swim-up bar.

In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Gary describes it this way: “The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots … This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.”

To prepare for that voyage, Gary wore a meatball T-shirt he found in a store in Little Italy. More specifically, the shirt read: “Daddy’s Little Meatball.”

Shteyngart: You know, I grew up in Queens and, being a spicy meat-a-ball, I thought it was funny. A lot of cruisers were angry. They thought I was being sexual or sexualizing. It’s very interesting because I thought that T-shirt was the bond between a child and his daddy or her daddy.

Rosin: (Laughs.) You thought it’d just be a conversation starter.

Shteyngart: I thought it’d be a conversation starter. If they had a “Mommy’s Little Meatball” T-shirt, that would’ve been preferable. I feel much more a mommy’s little meatball. But they only have daddy.

I actually thought, My expectations are low, but I bet I’m going to run into awesome people. And I love to drink and chat, and this is—I guess that’s what you do on a cruise ship. And I knew I was going to have a suite, so I was like, Maybe I’ll throw a suite party.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Shteyngart: Invite some people over. On land, I really am quite sociable. I remember I was just leaving a Columbia—I teach at Columbia—leaving a Columbia party, and somebody was saying, Well, there goes 75 percent of the party.

Rosin: Oh, that’s a compliment.

Shteyngart: It’s a compliment. I’m kind of a party animal. So I was super—I thought, you know, Look, 5,000 people. I’m going to find a soulmate or two.

Rosin: Great writers before Gary have deluded themselves in this way before. Most notably: David Foster Wallace, who ended up spending much of his cruise adventure alone in his cabin. They venture out, looking to swim with some “real Americans.” And instead, they are quickly confronted by the close-up details, like the nightly entertainment—

Shteyngart: There was a kind of packaged weirdness in the shows. Goddamn—the ice-skating tribute to the periodic table. What the hell was that?

Rosin: The food—

Shteyngart: It did not have the consistency of steak. It was like some kind of pleathery, weird—like this poor cow had been slapped around before it died.

Rosin: And the physical touch of an actual “real American.”

Shteyngart: He’d throw his arms around them drunkenly, and they’d be like, Ehh.

First of all, I just want to say, Royal Caribbean—the people that run it are geniuses. The CEO’s name is—I’m not making this up—Jason Liberty.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Shteyngart: His name is Liberty! I mean, I don’t know. What the hell? Like, exactly, if I was to write a novel character with, you know, Jason Liberty, people would be like, Oh, he’s being pretentious. But no. That’s his actual name.

I think they know the tastes of their clientele so well and are able to mirror it back to them, but also to give them this feeling that they’re awesome for doing something like this. One of my favorite slogans—you get all this literature—This isn’t a vacation day spent. It’s bragging rights earned.

Rosin: Mmm. It’s velvet ropey, like you’re in a club.

Shteyngart: It’s a velvet ropey situation. You are an adventurer. You’ve earned this. You have bragging rights. But when you enter the ship, you’re in a mall. And the mall is large and multileveled, and you can buy a Rolex at three times what it would cost on land and all this other crap.

And then there’s all these neighborhoods, and you can do whatever the hell you want. You can get trashed or have sex, which, whatever—I mean with your spouse, although there were some swingers on board. But you could do whatever you want in a way that you can’t on land, in a way, I think, because so many of these people are just working their asses off.

Rosin: Right.

Shteyngart: That was a topic of conversation that came up. People were like, Yeah, I work 90 hours a week, and this is my chance to just, you know, be blotto.

Rosin: You’re hinting at this. Part of being on a ship is being inducted into the language and the levels of the ship, and can you walk us through that? You mentioned, for example: You walk in, you’re in a mall. But I bet, eventually, you start to see more. What are the neighborhoods? You said the word neighborhoods. What does that even mean? And what are the distinctions?

Shteyngart: I think this ship and other Royal Caribbean ships of this size—although this is the biggest—try to create this idea of a city, like you’re in a city that happens to be at sea.

One of the funniest neighborhoods is called Central Park, which is literally another mall but with a couple of shrubs growing out here and there. I thought that was really funny—also, using a New York City landmark in one of the least New Yorkiest milieus in the world.

Rosin: I guess it just has to be terms—a word—people recognize. And people vaguely recognize it. They don’t need to know about Olmsted or live in Brooklyn.

Shteyngart: (Laughs.) No, no.

Rosin: They just vaguely recognize Central Park.

Shteyngart: It’d be funny if I asked—boy, would I get a lot of flak if I came up to a cruiser and be like, I don’t think this really matches Olmsted’s vision of Central Park. I don’t know. Meatball not happy. Maybe I should have used a Russian accent. Like, Hello. I am Meatball.

Rosin: Meatball not happy.

Shteyngart: Meatball not happy with Olmsted. So there’s that. There’s Surfside, which is a very funny kind of Disneyland for kids with—

Rosin: And are you walking—like, I still don’t get it. So you go in, and how big is a neighborhood? And then how do you get to the next neighborhood?

Shteyngart: Right, so everything’s on decks, so you take these elevators. I think I spent half the cruise on elevators just going from one place to another.

Rosin: Yeah.

Shteyngart: But I thought I would be in the Suites neighborhood. Because this whole thing—and Royal Caribbean is also brilliant at this. These people—really, a Nobel Prize in Economics. It’s a constant scramble. You constantly want a higher status, especially if you’ve been cruising forever. You want to reach Pinnacle status, which you have to do after 700 days (or nights, rather) on the ship, which is two years, right? Almost.

Rosin: Wow. And so what does that get you?

Shteyngart: So the Pinnacles have their own—I mean, there’s some priority things they get. Like, I was not allowed to go into one dining room at one point, and the guy—I didn’t know what Pinnacle was, so I thought the guy was saying, It’s just pendejo dining. He had a thick accent. I was like, I’m wearing a meatball T-shirt. I am the essence of pendejo. And he was like, No, no, pendejos only. But he was trying to say Pinnacles, I guess. So that kind of stuff.

They have their own little lounge, which I wasn’t allowed into. And some of the other cruisers who are not Pinnacles but have somehow gotten into the lounge, they’re very angry about being denied. And they’re like, There’s nothing in there. There’s just a coffee machine in there.

But the other thing is the suite status, which I had because by the time The Atlantic commissioned this piece, almost all the cabins were sold out. Everybody wanted to be on this ship, and all that was left was a $19,000—Jesus Christ—$19,000 suite that didn’t even look out on the sea.

Rosin: Wow.

Shteyngart: It looked out on the mall or whatever. But it looked like the Marriott, in a way, which—I like Marriotts—I’m just saying.

Rosin: So it’s just a plain—it’s like a hotel room.

Shteyngart: It’s like a hotel room.

Rosin: With a window.

Shteyngart: And I had two bathrooms.

Rosin: For yourself?

Shteyngart: Just for myself, I know. Well, I think the idea of these suites is that more than one person goes on them, right?

But there’s this—the Royal Bling. The Royal Bling is the jewelry store, such as it is, on board. And they introduced this thing called the something chalice. It’s a $100,000 chalice, and it entitles you to drink for free on Royal Caribbean once you’ve bought it.

So this thing is hilarious. Just the concept of it is insane. Everyone’s trying to figure out: Should I buy this? What’s up with this? Should I get it for my 28-year-old kid? Will it earn out? How much does he drink? How much can I drink?

So I talked to the wonderful Serbian sales lady. Everyone’s country of origin, if you’re on the crew, is listed on their tag.

Rosin: Really?

Shteyngart: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rosin: That’s weird.

Shteyngart: So you’re like, Oh, it’s Amir from Pakistan, or whatever.

Rosin: That’s so weird.

Shteyngart: Yeah. And she was, I don’t know, something Olga from Serbia, and she was amazing. They’re all amazing. Every crew member is excellent.

And she was like, Well—she was trying to sell me the $100,000 chalice. I said, It’s really gold? And she’s like, No, it’s gold-plated. We couldn’t afford. She said, If it was really gold, it would be, like, a million dollars. I’m like, Okay. And then it has diamonds, and she’s like, Well, they’re actually cubic zirconia, again, because it would cost, like, $10 million if they were diamonds. I’m like, All right, this thing is sounding worse and worse.

And then she said, But, you know, if you already have everything, this is one more thing you can have. And I thought that was almost like a Zen haiku, but about the American condition. If you already have everything, this is one more thing you can have.

[Music]

Rosin: So the ship has neighborhoods and levels and status in a very explicit way. And cruisers care about that. They care about it in a very deep, almost spiritual way that Gary didn’t quite appreciate until after he’d written the story.

Shteyngart: One of the funniest things—somebody was telling me to look this up on, I guess, Reddit.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Shteyngart: There’s a huge cruising community. I think half a million people are on that thing and, boy, were they pissed!

Rosin: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: During his time on the Icon of the Seas, Gary Shteyngart met a few memorable characters. There was the younger couple he called, “Mr. and Mrs. Ayn Rand,” who he drank with a few times. And the couple’s couple friends, he described as quote: “bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.” And then, there was “Duck Necklace.”

Shteyngart: He’s fascinating. He was drunk all the time, and he was being arrested—there is a security force—for photobombing.

Rosin: I wonder if the laws are different on the ship. Like photobombing is a felony.

Shteyngart: I’d love to do Law & Order: Icon of the Seas. That would be amazing.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right.

Shteyngart: But then he went on this long, drunken, very elegiac thing about, Well, I’m 62, and if I fall off the ship, I’m fine with that. I just don’t want a shark to eat me. And I believe in God, and the Mayans have a prophecy. He just went on and on. And then I looked him up and, when not drunk and getting arrested on a ship, he’s the pillar of his community in North Chicago. There’s so much more to this guy. So he was my favorite, I think.

Rosin: So maybe the ship creates a space where, if you’re grinding and working every day and being a pillar of the community, the ship is your space to contemplate and be philosophical or be an idiot or whatever it is you can’t be elsewhere.

Shteyngart: Yeah. And I think you’re right. And I think a couple of people, especially older people—I mean, 62 isn’t that old—but a couple of the older people were trying to summarize their lives through their cruising experiences, including, for one woman, realizing that she wanted to divorce her husband. All these things happened on cruises.

It’s like the cruise is the time when they’re—the way people say when you’re off land, it’s the rules of the sea. You’re in international waters; you can do whatever you want. I think for some people, the cruise affords them some weird way to look back on their lives and to make large decisions or to celebrate either happy moments or sometimes almost-elegiac moments. There were all these people who looked like they were about to die.

Rosin: Literally?

Shteyngart: Literally about to die, clearly coming off of chemo or on an oxygen tank. Or they had T-shirts celebrating a good cancer remission. So definitely there’s—and I hope this article, despite its very satirical tone, lends some of that poignancy. Because people are people, and this is the kind of stuff that they want to do, either to make an important moment in their lives or to think on the things that have happened to them.

But I think that’s one of the reasons people were so butt hurt on that Reddit—to use a term of art—because I wasn’t just going after a hobby or something. I was going after something that is so key to their identity.

Rosin: That’s interesting that people perceived it so badly. You both appreciated the earnestness of it and made fun of it at the same time. It was satirical but also present.

Shteyngart: I don’t know. I think people really wanted a quote-unquote “journalist” to give an honest review of the ship. But look, I got this assignment by saying, What level of sarcasm do you want? But I didn’t deliver 11 on the sarcasm scale. I think it was, like, six or seven.

I realized the humor part of this—and this is what I talk about in my humor class—the human comedy is that no one understands quite who they are. So I may go around thinking I’m a giraffe, and I keep talking about, Oh, I’m so tall, and I eat leaves off of tall trees. But in reality, I’m an aardvark. I’m a small furry creature, burrowing in the bush.

And that, to me, felt like a lot of what people were saying on the ship. People would say, I feel like I’m on an adventure. And I’m like, Yes, but we’re in a mall, as you say this, that’s slowly steaming to all these islands. But many of the passengers wouldn’t even get off on these islands. They love the ship so much they wouldn’t leave.

And I’ll say this, also: One of the most important things that happened to me—I was in Charlotte Amalie, which I guess is the capital of the U.S. Virgin Islands or Saint Thomas, and I’d wandered off the beaten path. And this elderly Rastafarian gentleman looked at me, and with the most—I’ve never been talked to like this—but with a sneer beyond anything, he said, Redneck.

And I guess I did have a red neck at this point, and I was wearing this vibrant cap with the Icon of the Seas Royal Caribbean logo. But I realized, also, that people hate these cruisers. They hate what they do to their islands, their environment, everything. There’s just so much more happening here than just a bunch of drunken Americans on a ship.

And this also goes to the fact that, obviously, there’s all these people, mostly from the global South, working below decks. They work nonstop. And it’s interesting because a lot of the passengers, they would say, Wow, these people work so hard, with a kind of like, Oh, I wish everybody back home would work so hard, or something like that. But at the same time, I was listening to a comedy act, and the comedian was making fun of quote-unquote “shithole countries.”

So there’s definitely a kind of—even though cruisers keep talking about how much they love the people on the ship, it doesn’t translate.

Rosin: It doesn’t translate. It doesn’t translate into politics.

Okay, I’m turning it back on you—your story. You came into the boat with the story that Gary is a party guy, and Gary’s gonna have parties in Gary’s suite. So what did you realize along the way?

Shteyngart: Yeah, it was like being an immigrant all over again. And, for me, assimilation into America was a very, very long process. So the meatball, or the lack of success of the meatball, really reminded me of that, too—like I’m always a step behind.

And this did feel like, Oh, I was always a step behind. People would have casual conversations in the elevators, just shooting the shit, and I would try to banter with them. But I would always get it a little bit wrong, and I would realize it, too. Like, there was a lot of wind one day, and I was like, Oof, the frost is really on the pumpkin.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Shteyngart: But I realized that that’s probably said in the fall, right? Before Thanksgiving. Is that right? The pumpkin is, you know—

Rosin: So Immigrant Gary comes roaring back in those moments.

Shteyngart: Oh, my god.

Rosin: You want to be, like, Sophisticated Writer Gary.

Shteyngart: Absolutely. So I was always sweating bullets. Like, I want to get into the conversation. And this was a big thing because there was a big contest, several contests—the semifinals or something? Quarterfinals? I don’t know—between the big teams. And I had no idea what the hell was going on, but everybody was talking about it. And everybody was wearing paraphernalia—that’s the other thing.

Rosin: Paraphernalia. (Laughs.) You’re referring to team T-shirts.

Shteyngart: But also everything! I don’t know. Name it: hats, T-shirts, all kinds of crap. And I had nothing. I had meatball, you know.

Rosin: Right.

Shteyngart: Look, the preparation for this article should have—I should have bought T-shirts with sports.

Rosin: (Laughs.) T-shirts with sports.

Shteyngart: And then I should have talked to people about all the rules of football. Maybe there’s a documentary that I can watch, something like that. And then maybe that would have been it.

Rosin: Okay, so I’m reading this essay about this cruise ship, which has a little bit of politics, a little bit of cult, a little bit of status obsession. What am I understanding about America?

Shteyngart: Well, I think we are, in some ways, a country that has been losing religion for a while. I know this is a strange approach to it, but people are looking for something to fill the void. Especially, among the hardworking middle class I think is where you feel it quite a bit. And I think because Americans are never satisfied, everyone’s always looking for, What’s my ancestry? Where do I come from? Somehow just the term American is not enough to fulfill people’s expectations of what life is.

Rosin: Of what they belong to. Like, what they’re rooted in. Yeah.

Shteyngart: And for me, this is an easier question because I actually just want to be an American. I’m an immigrant who just wants to be an American, right?

So, on this ship, what I was seeing was people desperately trying to belong to some kind of idea. And I feel like the cruising life, because these people are so obsessed with the cruises that they wear these—half the people or more were wearing T-shirts somehow commemorating this voyage on the first day of the cruise. So I think I really offended a religion. I insulted not just a strange hobby that people engage in, but a way of life.

And I think that’s the future. Trying to understand America today is to try to understand people desperately grasping for something in the absence of more traditional ideas of what it means to an American, right? And this is one strange manifestation of that. But it was, for me, an ultimately unfulfilling one.

[Music]

You know, God bless David Foster Wallace for being brilliant enough to start the genre, although there were a couple pieces before him, but the modern incarnation of this. Let’s stop this. I did not solve the question of what America is. None of that got solved.

Rosin: So what are we R.I.P.ing? We’re not just R.I.P.ing the cruise ship piece? I just want to end the episode this way. R.I.P. what?

Shteyngart: No, no, no, no. I don’t have that kind of cultural might.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Isabel Cristo, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Rosin: But was there a monkey on the ship?

Shteyngart: No, there wasn’t. The monkey was on Saint Kitts.

Rosin: Oh, okay. I remembered that wrong.

Shteyngart: No, no, no. The Royal Caribbean did not spring for a monkey. They had a golden retriever, and he wore, like, a cap or something? But see, so everybody was going gaga, and I’m like, You’ve never seen a golden freaking retriever? What kind of lives do you live on land?

Rosin: Right, right. But it’s an Icon golden retriever, so it’s different.

Shteyngart: It’s an Icon golden retriever, and he’s, like, I guess, an emotional support dog for these people.

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.

For the past couple of years, scientists have watched with growing concern as a massive outbreak of avian flu, also known as H5N1 bird flu, has swept through bird populations. Recently in the U.S., a farm worker and some cattle herds have been infected. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covered the virus’s spread in North America, about the risk of human infection and how, for animals, this has already been “a pandemic many times over.”

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Welcome to the TikTok meltdown. The Republicans who want American carnage Columbia has resorted to pedagogy theater.

Not a Five-Alarm Fire

Lora Kelley: How does this bird-flu outbreak compare with previous ones?

Katherine J. Wu: When we’re considering the toll on nonhuman animals, this is the largest, most deadly H5N1 outbreak that has been recorded in North America. It has been unfolding slowly for about two and a half years now, but it’s become a gargantuan wave at this point.

Lora: Wow—how alarmed are you by that?

Katherine: I’m medium concerned—and I have been medium concerned for a couple of years now. It’s difficult to gauge the amount of alarm to feel, because it’s so unprecedented. Still, most H5N1 outbreaks in the past have totally fizzled without much consequence, especially in this part of the world.

I am worried because so many species have been getting sick. A huge number of wild birds have been infected, including species that haven’t been affected in the past. And we’ve seen these massive outbreaks in domesticated chickens, which are packed together in farms.

Avian flu is known to be a bird problem. Beyond that, we’ve been seeing these outbreaks in mammals for a couple of years now, which is more concerning because, of course, we are also mammals. Humans seem to be potentially susceptible to infection, but at the same time, it would take quite a lot for this to become another big human-flu pandemic.

Lora: Should we be concerned about getting sick?

Katherine: People should be vigilant and paying attention to the news. But right now, as you and I are talking, there is still not a huge risk to people. You don’t get a pandemic unless you have a pathogen that spreads very, very easily among people, and there’s no evidence so far that this virus has mutated to that point.

There have been some human cases globally so far, but it’s a very small number. They seem to have been cases where someone was highly exposed to the virus in domesticated animals. People got sick, but they didn’t pass it to someone else.

I’m definitely not saying that person-to-person transmission can’t happen eventually, but there’s a pretty big chasm between someone getting infected and someone being able to efficiently pass the virus on. It is concerning that we continue to see more mammal species affected by H5N1, including species that have a lot of close contact with humans. But this is not a five-alarm fire so far.

Lora: How will people’s lives be affected?

Katherine: The virus has already affected our lives. Egg prices went completely bonkers in 2022 and early 2023, and over the course of this outbreak, more than 90 million domestic poultry have died. It’s not that all of those birds got sick—when this virus breaks out on chicken farms, it’s generally considered good practice to cull the chickens to halt the spread. Still, when you have that many chickens dying, egg prices are going to go up.

We’re probably not on track to see that with cows anytime soon. Even though this virus has now been detected in dairy cows, they aren’t getting wildly sick, and transmission doesn’t seem as efficient. I don’t think we’re going to be in a situation where we’re killing all of our dairy cows and no one can get milk.

Lora: The FDA announced yesterday that genetic evidence of this bird-flu virus had been found in samples of pasteurized milk. Is it still safe to drink milk?

Katherine: So far, the answer is: generally, yes, if it’s been pasteurized. Pasteurization is a process by which milk is treated with heat so that it will kill a whole bunch of pathogens, including bacteria and viruses, and H5N1 is thought to be vulnerable to this. Also, researchers have been working to test cows so they can figure out which ones are sick. Only milk from healthy cows is authorized to enter the general food supply, though the trick will be finding all the cows that are actually infected. For now, the main ways that this virus will affect us will be indirect.

Lora: Is there anything that can be done to curb the spread among wild animals?

Katherine: For the animal world, this has already been a “pandemic” many times over. It has been truly devastating in that respect. So many wild birds, sea lions, seals, and other creatures have died, and it’s difficult to see how people can effectively intervene out in nature. There have been very few cases in which endangered animals have received vaccines because there’s a real possibility that their populations could be 100 percent wiped out by this virus.

For most other animals in the wild, there’s not a lot that can be done, except for people to pay attention to where the virus is spreading. The hope is that most animal populations will be resilient enough to get through this and develop some form of immunity.

Lora: Responses to COVID became very politicized. How might the aftermath of those mitigation measures shape how people respond to this virus, especially if it becomes a greater threat to humans?

Katherine: We’re so fresh off the worst days of COVID that if people were asked to buckle down or get a new vaccine, I suspect that a lot of them would be like, Not again. There is still a lot of mitigation fatigue, and many people are sick of thinking about respiratory viruses and taking measures to prevent outbreaks. And, certainly, people have lost a lot of trust in public health over the past four years.

That said, H5N1 is still a flu, and people are familiar with that type of virus. We have a long history of using flu vaccines, and the government has experience making a pandemic vaccine, keeping that stockpile, and getting it out to the public. That gives me hope that at least some people will be amenable to taking the necessary preventative measures, so any potential bird-flu outbreak among humans would not turn into COVID 2.0.

Related:

Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choice. Bird flu has never done this before.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden signed into law a bipartisan foreign-aid package that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, and a measure that forces TikTok’s parent company to sell the social-media app or face an outright ban. The U.S. Supreme Court seems divided over whether a federal law can require hospitals to provide access to emergency abortions and override state-level abortion bans. George Santos, the embattled former New York representative facing multiple charges of fraud, ended his independent bid for a U.S. House seat on Long Island.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Tesla is not the next Ford, Matteo Wong writes. It’s the next Con Ed.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani

Why Did Cars Get So Expensive?

By Annie Lowrey

Inflation, finally, has cooled off. Prices have increased 2.5 percent over the past year, down from increases as high as 7 percent during the early pandemic. Rents are high but stabilizing. The cost of groceries is ticking up, not surging, and some goods, such as eggs, are actually getting cheaper. But American consumers are still stretching to afford one big-ticket item: their cars.

The painful cost of vehicle ownership doesn’t just reflect strong demand driven by low unemployment, pandemic-related supply-chain weirdness, and high interest rates. It reflects how awful cars are for American households and American society as a whole.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A Democrat’s case for saving Mike Johnson How baseball explains the limits of AI

Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Ashok Kumar / Getty.

Listen. Taylor Swift’s music often returns to the same motifs: pathetic fallacy, the passing of time, the mythology of love. Her latest album shows how these themes have calcified in her work, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Look. Take a photo tour of several of Chile’s national parks, which protect many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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