Two years ago, I happened to come across an interview with David McCullough in the Vineyard Gazette, his hometown newspaper. I still have it, printed out and placed in a folder in my desk drawer. I kept it because, as was so often the case, McCullough had said something that I wanted to remember. “There are any number of ways to begin a book,” he had told the interviewer while they sat on the back porch of his house on Martha’s Vineyard. “I like to begin with somebody on the move.”

The first book I read by McCullough was John Adams, one of his many masterworks that begins with men on the move. “In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter,” he wrote, “two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north.” For me, that was all it took. I wanted to know who these men were, where they were going, what was going to happen next. I did not care that the book was nearly 800 pages long. I was hooked.

For writers of nonfiction, there are subjects, and then there are stories. McCullough always told stories. In 2003, in an electrifying speech titled “The Course of Human Events,” which he gave for the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, McCullough famously said that “no harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.” History, he believed, was for everyone. It affected us all, so it belonged to us all. It could begin or prevent wars; expand or distort human understanding; connect us to other cultures, other times, other species. It was important, but that did not mean that we had to grit our teeth and set out on a forced march through the past. On the contrary, we should be sucked in from the first page.  

McCullough’s books, his hundreds of interviews and articles, his words of wisdom to struggling writers, the irresistible stories he told his legions of loyal readers, left an indelible mark on my own writing, and I am far from alone. Since the publication of his first book, The Johnstown Flood, in 1968, when he was 35 years old, narrative nonfiction, as it has come to be known, has grown exponentially, giving rise to such accomplished and dazzling writers of biography and history as Erik Larson and Laura Hillenbrand, Isabel Wilkerson and David Grann. Those of us who admire these authors have, in many ways, McCullough to thank for their riveting work. He opened a door and they walked through, carrying us along.  

[Read: A 1977 review of David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas]

For most of his life, McCullough wrote in a small, book-lined backyard shed, which he called “the bookshop.” “Nothing good was ever written in a large room,” he argued in a 1999 interview with The Paris Review. Inside the bookshop, on a small desk, sits a green banker’s lamp above a Royal typewriter, which he bought for $25 in 1965. “When I was setting out to write my first book, I thought, ‘This is going to be business, McCullough. You ought to have one of these at home,’” he said. “Everything that I’ve ever written, I’ve written on that typewriter . . . And after a while, I began to think, maybe it’s writing the books. So I didn’t dare switch.”  

As loyal as he was to his typewriter, McCullough was exacting when it came to his subjects. He did not have to love them, but he did have to be able to live with them. “It’s like picking a roommate,” he said, explaining why he had decided not to write a biography of Pablo Picasso, even though he himself loved to paint. “After all you’re going to be with that person every day, maybe for years, and why subject yourself to someone you have no respect for or outright don’t like?”

The many books that did survive McCullough’s careful review, pounded out on his trusty typewriter, told wide-ranging deeply human stories that inspired a new generation of writers. He mesmerized us with tales of the astonishingly brave and slightly insane men who built the Brooklyn Bridge and the bicycle-selling brothers who found first flight. We studied his young Theodore Roosevelt, born into aristocracy, galloping into history, and marveled at the incredibly crowded and complicated presidency of Harry S. Truman, a quiet, piano-playing haberdasher from Independence, Missouri. “History is human,” McCullough said. “It’s about everything. It’s about education. It’s about medicine. It’s about science. It’s about art and music and literature, and the theater. And to leave [all that] out is not only to leave out a lot of the juice and the fun and the uplifting powers of human expression, but it is to misunderstand what it is.”

From David McCullough we learned that it is never enough to simply describe the past. To read one of his books is not just to understand the people who populate its pages, but to feel like you know them. As a reader, the only way to achieve that kind of intimacy is to find a writer like McCullough, whose own fascination with his subjects is palpable in every word he wrote. Unfortunately, there is no other writer like McCullough. We have lost one of the greats, but how lucky we were to have learned from him, and to know that, every time we reach for one of his books, we are setting off on an adventure. Be ready to hit the ground running because somebody’s going to be on the move.

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Sign up for The Weekly Planet, Robinson Meyer’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.

Yesterday, President Joe Biden signed into law one of the most significant investments in fighting climate change ever undertaken by the United States. The new act will boost efforts to manufacture more zero-carbon technology in America, establish a new federal office to organize clean-energy innovation, and direct billions of dollars toward disaster-resilience research.

No, I’m not talking about the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark Democratic climate and taxes bill that passed the Senate on Sunday along party lines. I’m talking about a different piece of legislation: The CHIPS and Science Act.

Since it sailed through Congress last month, the CHIPS Act has mostly been touted as a $280 billion effort to revitalize the American semiconductor industry. What has attracted far less attention is that the law also invests tens of billions of dollars in technologies and new research that matter in the fight against climate change.

Over the next five years, the CHIPS Act will direct an estimated $67 billion, or roughly a quarter of its total funding, toward accelerating the growth of zero-carbon industries and conducting climate-relevant research, according to an analysis from RMI, a nonpartisan energy think tank based in Colorado.

That means that the CHIPS Act is one of the largest climate bills ever passed by Congress. It exceeds the total amount of money that the government spent on renewable-energy tax credits from 2005 to 2019, according to estimates from the Congressional Research Service. And it’s more than half the size of the climate spending in President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. That’s all the more remarkable because the CHIPS Act was passed by large bipartisan majorities, with 41 Republicans and nearly all Democrats supporting it in the House and the Senate.

Read: [The best evidence yet that the climate bill will work]

Yet CHIPS shouldn’t be viewed alone, Lachlan Carey, an author of the new analysis and an associate at RMI, told me. When viewed with the Inflation Reduction Act, which the House is poised to pass later this week, and last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law, a major shift in congressional climate spending comes into focus. According to the RMI analysis, these three laws are set to more than triple the federal government’s average annual spending on climate and clean energy this decade, compared with the 2010s.

Within a few years, when the funding has fully ramped up, the government will spend roughly $80 billion a year on accelerating the development and deployment of zero-carbon energy and preparing for the impacts of climate change. That exceeds the GDP of about 120 of the 192 countries that have signed the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, Carey said.

By the end of the decade, the federal government will have spent more than $521 billion—nearly half a trillion dollars—to accelerate the development and deployment of zero-carbon energy and to prepare for the impacts of climate change, he added.

The CHIPS Act is not a comprehensive climate bill in the same way that the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, is. Unlike the IRA, the CHIPS bill isn’t supposed to drive immediate reductions in carbon pollution or subsidize the replacement of fossil fuels with cleaner alternatives. It probably won’t help the United States get closer to achieving its 2030 target under the Paris Agreement.

Instead, the bill’s programs focus on the bleeding edge of the decarbonization problem, investing money in technology that should lower emissions in the 2030s and beyond. That’s an important role in its own right. The International Energy Association has estimated that almost half of global emissions reductions by 2050 will come from technologies that exist only as prototypes or demonstration projects today.

To get those technologies ready in time, we need to deploy those new ideas as fast as we can, then rapidly get them to commercial scale, Carey said. “What used to take two decades now needs to take six to 10 years.” That’s what the CHIPS Act is supposed to do, at least in theory.

The law, for instance, establishes a new $20 billion Directorate for Technology, which will specialize in pushing new technologies from the prototype stage into the mass market. It is meant to prevent what happened with the solar industry—where America invented a new technology, only to lose out on commercializing it—from happening again, Carey said. Although the directorate will focus on broad improvements across technology, such as AI and high-performance computing, two of the directorate’s 10 new focus areas are climate or clean-energy related. Congress has explicitly tasked the new office with studying “natural and anthropogenic disaster prevention or mitigation” as well as “advanced energy and industrial efficiency technologies,” including next-generation nuclear reactors.

Read: [Why America doesn’t really make solar panels anymore]

The bill also directs about $12 billion in new research, development, and demonstration funding to the Department of Energy, according to RMI’s estimate. That includes doubling the budget for ARPA-E, the department’s advanced-energy-projects skunk works. (ARPA-E is modeled on DARPA, the Defense Department lab that helped give rise to GPS, the internet, weather satellites, and some mRNA vaccines.)

And it allocates billions to upgrade facilities at the government’s in-house defense and energy research institutes, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Berkeley Lab, which conducts environmental-science research.

RMI’s estimate of the climate spending in the CHIPS bill should be understood as just that: an estimate. The bill text rarely specifies how much of its new funding should go to climate issues. So whenever possible, Carey and his colleagues extrapolated from existing agency spending. For instance, the National Science Foundation has spent about 5 percent of its budget on climate and clean-energy research over the past few years, so the team assumed that about that portion of the NSF funding in CHIPS would go to those topics, he said.

Regardless of exactly how much new climate spending CHIPS ends up generating, the broader trend is clear. When you add CHIPS, the IRA, and the infrastructure law together, Washington appears to be unifying behind a new industrial policy, focused not only on semiconductors and defense technology but clean energy. The three bills combine to form a “a coordinated, strategic policy for accelerating the transition to the technologies that are going to define the 21st century,” Carey said.

For the past few years, scholars and experts have speculated about whether industrial policy—the intentional use of law to nurture and grow certain industries—might make a comeback to help fight climate change. Industrial policy was central to some of the Green New Deal’s original pitch, and it has helped China develop a commanding lead in the global solar industry.

But with these three bills, little doubt remains about the direction of the U.S. economy, Carey told me. “Industrial policy,” he said, “is back.”

Eve Babitz was one of the truly original writers of 20th-century Los Angeles: essayist, memoirist, novelist, groupie, feminist, canny ingenue. By the time of her death at the end of last year, she was enjoying a renaissance. Two essay collections, Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company, were back in circulation; I Used to Be Charming, a gathering of previously uncollected pieces, was released in 2019. That same year, Lili Anolik published her deliciously fangirlish biography, Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. A half-century after her major-magazine debut at Rolling Stone, Eve Babitz was being introduced to a new generation of readers by writers who had sharpened their craft by reading her.

If you know only one thing about Eve Babitz, it’s probably that in 1963, at the age of 20, she was photographed at the Pasadena Art Museum playing chess with Marcel Duchamp—in the nude (elle, not il). In March of this year, the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, less than four miles from the venue of that chess match, announced the acquisition of the Babitz archive—a few dozen bankers boxes of manuscripts, original works of art, journals, photographs, and correspondence.

I was lucky enough to be granted early access to the archive. A longtime admirer of Babitz’s work, I could hardly believe my good fortune. As a teenager, my point of entry was her writing about rock and pop: If you know only two things about Babitz, the second is probably that she’s the L.A. woman in the Doors song. (One of the archive’s nice surprises: an unpublished story called “… Coming Closer …” based on her relationship with Jim Morrison.) I was overwhelmed with curiosity about what her papers might reveal. What could the personal documents of a writer who was so public about her private world teach us about her work? How much of that persona was a performance and how much a reflection of her real anxieties and ambitions?

One of the oddities of the archive is that when it comes to her letters—I spent time in just two boxes, which mostly contained correspondence—one doesn’t know whether any of these notes were ever sent to their putative recipients: These are not carbons but original drafts, many of them signed. Babitz comments elliptically on this peculiar epistolary practice in a letter to her friend Carol Grannison-Killorhan: “Today I’m going to mail the letter I write to you instead of sticking it into a file of unmailed letters I’ve started because they’re practically a diary.” I read this, of course, in a file of unmailed letters.

If you know three things about Babitz, you probably know that Joan Didion gave her her first big break as a writer. Babitz’s actual friendship with Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was more complicated, however, as friendships always are. A little over halfway down the second page of the eight-page (!) dedication in her first collection, Eve’s Hollywood, Didion and Dunne  get a pretty sideways thanks: “And to the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not.” Just ambiguous enough to be glossed over? But privately, Babitz nursed some old wounds: In an undated note from the early 1980s, she remembers, years earlier, “John [Gregory Dunne] asking if Dan [Wakefield, a boyfriend] had written my stuff.”

[Read: Joan Didion’s magic trick]

In an extraordinary letter, likely from 1972, that was almost certainly never sent, Babitz takes Didion to task for hiding behind her various forms of privilege in order to opt out of feminism. The letter begins with Babitz voicing her frustration that she can’t get Didion to read Virginia Woolf, and proceeds to deftly turn the argument of A Room of One’s Own against her: “For a long long long time women didn’t have any money and didn’t have any time and were considered unfeminine if they shone like you do Joan.” Didion benefited from the ways that the literary establishment changed in response to Woolf’s critique, Babitz suggests, but Didion is unwilling to acknowledge the debt or pay it forward. “And so what you do is live in the pioneer days,” Babitz continues, “putting up preserves and down the women’s movement.”

Part of the reason that Didion can do without feminism, Babitz suggests, is that the 5-foot-2, 95-pound Didion didn’t loom as a physical presence—didn’t make men uncomfortable. “Just think, Joan, if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff—people’d judge you differently and your work,” Babitz writes in that same letter. “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?”

Babitz was four inches short of that 5 foot 11, but she had other attributes that made her presence, and her femininity, impossible to ignore. Her most explicit attempt to address this challenge was “My Life in a 36DD Bra, or, the All-American Obsession,” a piece she wrote for Ms. in April 1976. Babitz felt that the disembodied prose of Didion simply wasn’t possible for her. Evidence of her bodily self-consciousness punctuates the correspondence. In an undated manuscript, she suggests that, as a woman working in the music industry, she’s every bit as threatened by typecasting as a Hollywood starlet: “I’m just a sex symbol, nobody thinks I can really act just because I took my clothes off in my first movie!” In a 1972 letter, she wonders why men so freely dismiss her: “Big tits, I suppose, they think they have a right because of that.”

Eve Babitz’s diary, 1975.(The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens)

Babitz’s response to this situation was characteristically complex. It’s summed up in the two-sentence letter of introduction she sent to Joseph Heller in 1961: “I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.” As a grammar nerd would tell you, it’s the parataxis that’s doing the interesting work here: I’m both of these supposedly mutually exclusive things, and I insist that you acknowledge both; neither is subordinate to the other. Wrap your head around that. Not surprisingly, her correspondence is full of references to Marilyn Monroe and Babitz’s anger at the men who surrounded her who, dazzled by Monroe’s sexuality, would not take her seriously.

A series of letters from the fall of 1972 comment on her relationship to her body and its effect on her sense of self. Her concerns about her weight, and her adoption of various diets, are mentioned across the entire corpus of the letters—but that fall, she took up running and began to see results in both her waistline and, more significantly, her legs. In “My Life in a 36DD Bra,” Babitz deploys the “leg man/tit man” binary to her own shrewd rhetorical ends, but in these letters, she’s thrilled that getting in better physical shape means getting recognized for her legs (which in one letter she likens to Betty Grable’s) rather than her breasts. Her breasts (“tits,” she frequently insists on calling them) were given, not made; those toned legs were something that she had created herself. If she was going to be admired for what evolutionary biologists call “supernormal stimuli”—and from the age of 15, she knew that she would be—she preferred that it be for what she’d labored for rather than what she’d simply been blessed (and cursed) with.

It’s clear that throughout her career, Babitz’s writing was underrated (or ignored) by powerful men in the publishing industry. Often, it was dismissed as “gossip.” In an undated letter to Heller, she thinks through the gendered implications of that term: “‘Serious’ people just don’t think that gossip, the specialité de ma maison, is ‘serious.’ Whereas I know that nothing on earth overjoys people the way gossip does. Only I think that because it’s always been regarded as some devious woman’s trick, some shallow callow shameful way of grasping situations without being in on the top conferences with the ‘serious’ men, the idea of ‘gossip’ has always been considered tsk tsk. Only how are people like me, women they’re called, supposed to understand things if we can’t get into the V.I.P. room.” Gossip, Babitz suggests, is a different, subaltern way of knowing—disdained by the (male) structures of power, but with a power (and an appeal) all its own.

Eve Babitz in 1983, photo Suzanne Tenner. (The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens)

One of Babitz’s characteristic habits of thought is not to reject such criticism, but to embrace it. In a 2000 letter introducing herself to a new editor at the Los Angeles Times, Babitz writes, “Basically, fun is my subject—and I can at least make some attempt to write about Los Angeles as interesting, no matter what bad things they say about it in more civilized quarters of the world, where they know they’re right.” Writing to the Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, she explains the fundamental mistake that the editors of his Los Angeles Flyer project are making: “See, those guys insist that they want hard news, but what they don’t understand about Los Angeles, is that we don’t like news, we like artifice.” Indeed, in one letter to a friend, Babitz goes further, essentially denying that gossip is distinct from information and data: “My friend Earl says I like information too much. Data. But I love data and information—it’s such a ballet—it’s such a morality play—everything is always so perfect and people seem to be dancing in the same mirrored ballroom where—like a kaleidoscope—just when you think every thing’s falling apart—it’s just going into another beautiful design.” Gossip is made in the eye of the beholder.

“Information”: those 22 bankers boxes contain lots of information, both data and gossip. But as one sits in the Huntington’s Ahmanson Reading Room, poring over files and folders and photos, something even more interesting, “another beautiful design,” gradually emerges: a portrait of an artist in the process of inventing herself. If the first page of a Google image search is littered with Babitz playing chess with Duchamp, here, we’re privileged to look in on Eve Babitz playing a character called Eve Babitz, in the way that Oscar Wilde fashioned, and then played, Oscar Wilde. Most thrillingly, perhaps, this is what the archive as a whole delivers to its readers: an experience of watching Eve Babitz drafting, revising, perfecting, becoming.

On an otherwise sleepy Saturday morning, cars were parked bumper to bumper along a suburban street. Couples formed a line around the block, nervously sipping coffee and double-checking paperwork. They were there to see a charming but decidedly modest house—early-’90s suburban, vinyl shutters, holly bushes—that had just come on the market. Twenty-four hours later, the home had sold for 20 percent above the asking price and $100,000 more than it had sold for in 2006 at the height of a so-called housing bubble.

That’s a story we’re used to hearing about the frenzied housing markets of coastal suburbs such as Orange County and Long Island. But this house wasn’t far from where I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky—a midsize city where local boosters are given to bragging about affordability. It’s a scene that’s playing out in more and more cities across the country, especially in regions once accustomed to a low cost of living, such as the South and the Mountain West.

At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the shift to remote work was supposed to ease the long-festering housing crisis in “superstar” metros such as Los Angeles and New York. Prices would fall as workers once tethered to offices in Century City or Midtown Manhattan left for affordable suburbs near Las Vegas or Orlando—or so the thinking went. In reality, two years later, housing costs in those superstar metros are at record highs, while the wave of pandemic-era migrations has helped spread the affordability crisis nationwide.

Absent deep reforms to the way we plan cities, it’s only going to get worse.

2021 was always going to be a horrendous year for housing markets.

Let’s start with the demand side. As pandemic restrictions wound down, consumers found themselves with a glut of savings. A shift to remote work—likely here to stay—made a finished basement or an extra bedroom even more tantalizing. And for many prospective buyers, plunging interest rates made those upgrades affordable.

[Derek Thompson: Why your house was so expensive]

These factors might sound good for consumers seeking better housing, but paired with a snarled supply side, they spelled disaster. A nationwide labor shortage hit right as high tariffs and chaotic supply chains made building materials unavailable. By one estimate, a quarter of all construction positions remain unfilled, a situation unlikely to change anytime soon. Meanwhile, prices for key materials skyrocketed: Softwood-lumber prices, for example, increased nearly 500 percent from March 2020 to 2021.

Supply-side problems were especially apparent in major cities such as Atlanta, where residential permitting hit lows not seen since the Great Recession. Yet even where permitting remained steady, an unprecedented number of projects were scuttled. Within a block of my Los Angeles apartment, two half-built apartment buildings sit empty, casting shadows over tent encampments. With interest rates back up and the economy sputtering, the gap between permits and completions is almost certain to persist.

You don’t need to study economics to know that surging demand amid stagnant supply causes prices to rise. According to the Case-Shiller Index, nationwide home prices jumped by nearly 20 percent last year alone. That’s the highest rate since 1979, another year of crippling inflation and economic uncertainty.

Rents followed suit. The national median rent for a one-bedroom apartment also surged nearly 20 percent over the course of 2021. The average renter in any major U.S. city now spends more than a third of their income on housing, qualifying as “rent burdened” under federal standards. In Miami and Los Angeles, the typical renter now spends more than half of their income on rent.

If the problem were simply low interest rates or international-trade hiccups, we could reasonably expect prices to come back down. For all their faults, markets have a way of solving issues like those. But the current housing crisis is a symptom of something much deeper.

We walked into the coronavirus pandemic with a national housing crisis already brewing. According to a recent report by Up for Growth, a group advocating for solutions to the national housing shortage, the United States was short 3.79 million homes in 2019, a 130 percent increase over 2012. Researchers estimate that 169 metro areas—from Boston to San Diego—weren’t building nearly enough housing to keep up with demand, up from 100 metro areas in 2012.

[M. Nolan Gray: Cancel zoning]

At the start of the pandemic, many eagerly predicted that the “death of the city” would help solve this. A shift to remote work, the story went, would cause a wave of migration out of high-cost cities in the Northeast and on the West Coast—long suffering from self-imposed housing shortages—and into low-cost cities in the South and the Mountain West. This would benefit everyone, easing pressure on housing prices in the former regions while spurring economic growth in the latter.

It didn’t quite work out that way. Yes, places such as Manhattan and San Francisco lost some of their population. And pre-pandemic migration patterns—from California to Texas, for example, and from New York to Florida—ramped up. By one measure, approximately 360,000 people moved out of the Golden State last year, many of them going to states such as Nevada and Arizona in a kind of a modern exodus to the desert.

But if prices are any indication, these migrations were too little, too late: Rents in most high-cost coastal cities are rapidly rising, while home prices in California have never been higher. Even with unprecedented population losses, demand so exceeded supply that prices are unlikely to come down without a building boom. If you lose 360,000 residents but have a housing shortage of 978,000 units—as Up for Growth estimates for California—don’t expect home prices to fall by much.

That’s not to say that these migrations didn’t affect housing. On the contrary, all of those migrating households carried the crisis with them. The fastest home-price appreciation last year was in Phoenix and Tampa, where populations grew and prices increased by nearly a third. Apartments followed a similar trajectory, with rents in Florida’s four largest cities increasing by 25 to 55 percent. In Mountain West cities such as Boise and Bozeman, planners are now scrambling to accommodate an unprecedented surge in new arrivals.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a family moving from a coastal hub to relative peace in states like North Carolina or Colorado. But if they’re moving because housing shortages have priced them out of their community, that’s a policy failure. Worse yet, if they’re moving to a place with many of the same constraints on housing development, they might well be displacing the next generation of locals, spreading—rather than solving—the problem.

The COVID-19 reshuffling of Americans was supposed to buy us time in tackling the housing shortage. Instead, it likely took the crisis nationwide.

We’ve become used to hearing about arbitrary constraints on housing growth in “superstar” cities and their suburbs. (I wrote a whole book on it.) Policies such as segregationist apartment bans in the Bay Area, onerous parking mandates in Southern California, and community-input requirements leading to raucous public hearings in New England have made those regions prohibitively difficult to build in. If we want to contain the spread of high housing costs, these constraints have to go.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Community input is bad, actually]

But what about all the “affordable” destination cities? Restrictions there are, in most cases, just as bad. Duplexes and fourplexes are banned in 84 percent of residential neighborhoods in Charlotte. In Salt Lake City, minimum-parking mandates mean that apartments can’t be built without either towering garages or huge lots. In Austin, naysayers have successfully delayed a liberalizing zoning overhaul for a decade. And even in pro-growth states such as Georgia, California-style NIMBYism stands in the way of new housing in most suburbs.

To the extent that these cities were ever affordable, it was because they had undeveloped land on their periphery, where developers could build low-density residential subdivisions—just about the only thing that zoning doesn’t prohibit. But as Dallas is discovering, you eventually run out of vacant land within a reasonable commute of job centers. In Miami, local policy makers are even rolling back flexible-zoning rules in a brazen attempt to block new infill development.

Until recently, policymakers in states like Utah or Tennessee were used to dismissing housing affordability as a coastal issue. If they thought about it at all, they certainly weren’t looking to the coasts for solutions. But as the housing crisis comes to more places, they’ll soon find that they have a lot to learn from states such as California, where policymakers have streamlined approvals for affordable housing and legalized fourplexes over the past few years. The silver lining of being further along in a crisis is that you’re also further along in solving it.

There’s an apocryphal Mark Twain joke: “If the world ends, I’ll just head on down to Kentucky, because they’re always 20 years behind.” When it comes to housing, our grace period is over.

The neglected or endangered child—the orphan, the vagrant, the waif—is a character with deep roots in the Western canon. Beginning perhaps with the binding of Isaac in the Bible, this figure appears everywhere: in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, in Charles Dickens’s oeuvre and, more recently, in Toni Morrison’s. These stories captivate young and old readers, provoking thrill and worry. Children who are lost fill us with grief, kids who wish to rise above their tough circumstances or go on an epic adventure bring us the highest joy, and we seek these narratives out in books as disparate as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy. Why? Because each of us knows, in some measure, what they’re feeling.

We all understand what it means to feel abandoned, ignored, or underestimated. Some of us may have experienced it for just a moment, or a day; others may have felt it for a decade, or a lifetime. Regardless, we carry those memories for the rest of our lives, and we have been trying to express those feelings for as long as we, as a species, have known how to express anything.

In the sea of great literature that tells these tales, here are some of the titles that helped me write about my own complex childhood in my new memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts. Their circumstances are varied, but their depictions of the unique ways kids feel delight and pain will resonate with any reader.

W. W. Norton and Company

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn

To not mention this book—and to not mention it first—would be a crime. Flynn’s memoir is about his family’s struggles with alcoholism and with one another; it’s set in Boston and centers on a homeless shelter where Flynn himself worked. When I first read it, I was surprised by the number of places, emotions, and even experiences that overlapped between the author’s life and my own: addiction, mental illness, generational trauma. I was spellbound by how Flynn structured the narrative, which was inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. In that novel, the reader is aware of the titular white whale for most of the story through hearsay, with the giant beast appearing only in the final pages. In the same way, Flynn’s father casts a shadow over his own family history and life, without being present during his childhood. Only after meeting his father does Flynn begin to work on himself. When I finished it in my early, early 20s, I remember thinking, That’s the type of book I want to write—vulnerable, poetic, kind.

Grove Atlantic

The Yellow House, by Sarah M. Broom

What I love about this memoir, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2019, is its incredible sense of place. Broom’s story is submerged in one of the most lionized—and complex—cities in America: New Orleans. More specifically, she focuses on New Orleans East and the yellow shotgun house that the author’s steadfast mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961, and where Broom grew up as the youngest of 12 siblings. The Yellow House takes on history and structural racism while also telling small, intimate stories that show how families, like neighborhoods and cities, are evolving, living things that shift and affect their members in an endless dance. Broom’s brilliant book demonstrates that context and setting are crucial to telling a story, and will ring true for anyone who also grew up in a house that loomed large over everything that happened to their family.

[Read: How to write the book no one wants you to write]

Picador

Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle

In this novel, the wounds of youth are carried for a lifetime. Its author is the man behind The Mountain Goats, a band I’ve adored for more than two decades. Wolf in White Van tells the story of Sean Phillips, who suffered a disfiguring injury when he was 17 and became a recluse. When we meet him, he has invented an intricate, mail-based role-playing game to allow for a modicum of human connection. But when something terrible happens to a couple of teenage players of the game, he is forced to enter the real world again. Wolf in White Van is a master class in restraint. Darnielle paints a picture of isolation and loneliness, but by not giving away the whole truth of what happened to Sean until the very end, he dares the reader to figure out the complexities of the novel in almost the same way they untangle the complexities of the game. It encouraged me to not turn away from the anger in my younger years—and to keep some of its causes unseen until the last pages of my own book.

Scribner

Heavy, by Kiese Laymon

This memoir is incredible. The writing talent on display is undeniable, and every sentence sings. “My body knew things my mouth and my mind couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, express,” Laymon writes early in the book. That sentence hit my heart; it was something I knew to be true, but had never been able to articulate. At the book’s center are Laymon’s relationships with his mother and with his own body. Who among us has not had difficulty with our body? With our mother? (If you haven’t, I’d love to hear your secret.) What truly inspires is not the book’s universal themes, but instead Laymon’s incredible striving. Here is a man trying to find the truth, to communicate something to his parent and find common ground or, if not that, an understanding of what their relationship has become and why. To do so, Laymon examines sex, gambling, racism in America, and himself. Digging into how he grew up becomes a way to finally say aloud what he’s always carried with him—and to hope for a better future.

[Read: The personal cost of Black success]

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray

In the opening pages of this raucous novel filled with unforgettable characters, Skippy, a hapless 14-year-old pupil at a fancy boys’ school, writes a mysterious message in jelly filling on the floor of a doughnut shop and drops dead. But this mystery wasn’t what drew me to the book, nor the fact that it focuses on adolescents who attend a boarding school, as I did. The core of Murray’s writing is its humor: Skippy’s experience at his school, Seabrook, is raunchy, searching, and complex, but always deeply funny. Told from numerous different perspectives, stretching across a wide variety of subjects—string theory, organized religion, folklore, poetry—Skippy Dies is a tutorial in the ability to find laughter in the bleakness of growing up.

Anchor

The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead

This 2020 Pulitzer Prize–winner is tragic and unrelenting. A report released in 2016 documented more than 50 skeletons buried on the grounds of the Dozier School for Boys, in Florida, which operated from 1900 to 2011 housing orphans, wards of the state, and children convicted of crimes. Whitehead uses that real-life horror to weave an incredibly powerful novel about the cruel, racist abuse suffered in the name of rehabilitation at the titular Nickel Academy. At the center of the story are two young boys, Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, who both end up there in the 1960s. The Nickel Boys is about how the smallest bit of bad luck can have a rippling effect throughout one’s entire life—but it’s also about how the people we love can change us in ways we might not ever be able to imagine.

[Read: What is crime in a country built on it?]

Little, Brown

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

One of the biggest titles of the past decade, The Goldfinch, a kaleidoscopic achievement, covers so much ground. It’s the story of Theo Decker, whose mother is killed during a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Young Theo slips away from the explosion with a painting by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius, the titular Goldfinch. The whole book is masterful and has indelible moments in both New York City and Amsterdam, but the section that I absolutely love is set in the sandy outskirts of Las Vegas, in the novel’s middle. Here, Theo and Boris Pavlikovsky, two friends without much parental supervision, forge the bonds of young rascals; they drink, take drugs, and try to figure out what to do with Theo’s stolen, priceless painting. As someone who grew up playing violent games in the woods with real BB guns and turning old hair-spray cans into flamethrowers with my friend, I can attest that The Goldfinch artfully displays the reckless abandon that comes from a feral, unsupervised youth.

Library of America

The Collected Breece D’J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters, by Breece D’J Pancake

This assemblage of Pancake’s work—especially its 12 bleak, beautiful stories about trilobites and coal country and truckers and also tenderness, in their way—is a fundamental stepping-stone in my evolution as a reader. Pancake writes about Virginia and West Virginia, places that I had never been when my father gave me my first copy. But here was writing that reflected my own experiences growing up in a low-income area in North-Central Massachusetts: people in trailers. Hunting. Rural isolation. The joys and hardships that come from living in the woods. The prose is unpolished, yet Pancake’s lyricism somehow manages to shine, whether it’s describing a pregnant farm wife or a snowplow driver with a secret. The mythos of the collection is also part of its pull. Pancake died by suicide at 26; I have grappled with suicidal ideation, and this galvanizing book convinced me that my account might also have some value.

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Donald Trump is not known as a man of his word, but he’s worked hard to follow through on his promise of retribution against Republicans who voted to impeach him in 2021. Of the 10 GOP House members who voted for impeachment, four retired rather than face likely losses, two lost primaries, and a third, Liz Cheney, is almost certain to lose hers later this month.

Two of the others, Daniel Newhouse and Jaime Herrera Beutler, are representatives of Washington State. Their primaries were on August 2, but votes are still being counted. Herrera Beutler conceded her race yesterday, but Newhouse managed something that none of the other pro-impeachment Republicans has: He triumphed in his primary, likely clinching another term in D.C., because his very Republican district is unlikely to send a Democrat. This gives him a good chance at being the only Republican House member to vote for impeachment and manage to win election to the 118th Congress.

So what can Newhouse’s win and Herrera Beutler’s loss teach? Here’s a clip-and-save guide for other Republicans looking to survive without allying themselves with the former president.

1.     Don’t Make It About Trump

One advantage for Newhouse was that he was arguably the most anonymous of the gang of 10 from the start: Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio (retiring) is a former NFL player; Adam Kinzinger of Illinois (retiring) had already become known as a chronic Trump critic; Liz Cheney is a Cheney. Newhouse, by contrast, doesn’t have much profile at all outside central Washington. A hop farmer and former state legislator, Newhouse’s vibe is cool grandpa, not political brawler. He has slicked-back white hair, a carefully trimmed beard, and rimless glasses. When I went to his campaign-kickoff event in Yakima, Washington, in May, he arrived in a Jeep adorned with American-flag decals and a No Shoes Nation sticker.

Some of the pro-impeachment Republicans, such as Kinzinger, Cheney, and Peter Meijer of Michigan (who lost his primary last week), made opposing Trump a part of their political identity, knowing it might end their careers. Herrera Beutler didn’t do that, but she didn’t shy away from her vote, either. After the January 6 insurrection, she said that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had begged Trump to intervene but that the president had refused. Her claims have since been vindicated, but they also attracted Trump’s ire and made her a target for him. Another Republican, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, didn’t vote for impeachment but castigated Trump; she managed to survive a primary against a Trump-backed opponent, but only by doing everything she could to tie herself back to Trump.

By contrast, Newhouse made little fuss about his vote then and hasn’t said much about it since. During his speech at the kickoff luncheon, Newhouse didn’t mention Trump a single time, positively or negatively—though everyone I talked with at the event brought it up unprompted, praising Newhouse’s stand on principle while acknowledging that it had made his political life difficult. Newhouse even managed to enlist Trumpists to support his campaign, luring Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, a rising Republican star and a close ally of Trump’s, to speak at the luncheon. (When I tried to speak with Banks about this curious pairing, he refused to be interviewed and quickly hustled away.)

2.     Keep It Local

The old axiom that all politics is local may not be dead, but it’s dying. As the University of Washington political scientist Jacob Grumbach explains in his new book, Laboratories Against Democracy, national politics has begun to seep into state and local institutions. At one time, elected officials could easily be at odds with national leaders of the party on certain issues while remaining in good standing, but that is harder and harder to do.

Newhouse, however, was able to do it. The Fourth District is “the most solidly Republican district in the state,” Kevin Pirch, a political-science professor at Eastern Washington University, told me. “It’s conservative, but more of an agribusiness conservatism than a social conservatism.” At the May luncheon, Newhouse talked a lot about local issues—he defended dams that central-Washington agriculture depends on for irrigation and called for immigration reform, because farmers in his district need labor—but what struck me even more was how much of his speech was devoted to shouting out local grandees in the crowd, from the lowest elected offices up to former state-GOP chairs. In a rural district with distinctive politics, it’s still possible to keep it local.

3.     Run in a State With Favorable Election Laws

Newhouse also benefited from Washington’s unusual primary system. Rather than having separate Republican and Democratic primaries, as most states do, Washington has a single primary. All the candidates run together, and the top two vote-getters move on to the general election, even if they are in the same party. (In practice, the system usually produces a Democrat and a Republican, as it did in the Fourth, where Newhouse will face Democrat Doug White in November.) Instead of parties picking a standard-bearer, candidates declare a “preference” on the ballot. That means the state parties are weaker, which tends to produce larger fields of candidates and allow incumbents such as Newhouse to run against the field instead of taking on a single candidate.

“One argument put forth when we went to the system was this was going to encourage more moderate candidates,” Pirch said. “There’s no strong incentive to become an extremist in the primary—to be the most Republican Republican or the most Democratic Democrat.”

Not coincidentally, Meijer lost to John Gibbs in a traditional primary in Michigan, but David Valadao of California came second in his state’s nonpartisan primary, punching a ticket to the general election. (Valadao faces a dauntingly blue district in November, so Democrats may yet finish what Trump couldn’t and force him out.)

4.     Get Lucky in Your Opponents

In a tough election environment, it’s good to have either weak opponents or lots of them so that they split the vote. Newhouse got both. He and White, the Democrat, each ended up with barely a quarter of the primary vote, while six other Republicans split the remainder. The third-place candidate was Republican Loren Culp, who won Trump’s endorsement and took 21 percent of the vote. Notwithstanding the former president’s backing, Culp was a weak candidate. In contrast to Newhouse’s deep local roots, Culp had relocated to the district just to run against him. Prior to that, he was trounced as the Republican gubernatorial nominee in 2020 (he refused to concede despite losing by 13.5 percentage points), and before that, he was the sole police officer in a tiny Washington town. Newhouse had ample fundraising and outside help, while Culp had to run on a shoestring.

Herrera Beutler was not so lucky, drawing fewer and stronger rivals—particularly fellow Republican Joe Kent, who placed second in the primary and will become the favorite against Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. (Democrats have made several unsuccessful attempts to flip the seat in recent years.) Culp comes off as a crackpot, whereas Kent, another Trump endorsee, is a handsome, square-jawed veteran—which helps distract from his own crackpot views about stolen elections and deep-state provocateurs.

The problem with this playbook is that it isn’t much of a playbook at all. Nearly everything had to go right for Newhouse to win—he had to be the perfect local candidate, in the right district, with the right existing election laws, and with good luck in his rivals. But even with all of that, his success may prove hard to replicate as American politics continues to polarize. Washington is a consistently blue state, though not by wide margins. That has created an unusual state Republican Party—moderate in outlook, agricultural in alignment, and unified largely by opposition to the dense, liberal areas around Puget Sound and Seattle that make the state a Democratic stronghold.

Distinctive state parties used to be a typical feature of American politics. “One would think that a Republican in Washington State should look different from a Republican in the South or Midwest,” Grumbach told me. “But both parties are becoming more homogeneous. The way ordinary members and voters understand politics is as a national battle with the other team.”

Newhouse’s victory shows that the old way isn’t dead—but he’s one of a very few remaining who can pull it off.

Photographs by Jedrzej Nowicki

History has turning points, moments when events shift and the future seems suddenly clear. But history also has in-between points, days and weeks when everything seems impermanent and nobody knows what will happen next. Odesa in the summer of 2022 is like that—a city suspended between great events. The panic that swept the city in February, when it seemed the Russian invaders might win quickly, already feels like a long time ago. Now the city is hot, half empty, and bracing itself for what comes next.

Some are preparing for the worst. Odesa endured a 10-week German and Romanian siege during the Second World War, then a three-year occupation; the current mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, told me that the city is now filling warehouses with food and medicine, in case history repeats itself. On July 11, Ukrainian security services caught a Russian spy scouting potential targets in the city. On July 23, Russian bombs hit the Odesa docks, despite an agreement reached just the previous day to restart grain exports. The beautiful waterfront, where the Potemkin Stairs lead down to the Black Sea, remains blocked by a maze of concrete barriers and barbed wire. Russian-occupied Kherson, where you can be interrogated just for speaking Ukrainian, is just a few hours’ drive away.

[Graeme Wood: The torment of Odesa]

In the meantime, pedestrians stroll past the Italian facades in Odesa’s historic center and drink coffee beneath umbrellas. The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov recently wrote that “I used to pay a lot of attention to time, using it as effectively as possible.” Now, instead, “I pay attention to the war.” In Odesa, people also pay attention to the war, obsessive attention; some of those I met have installed apps on their phones that echo the air-raid sirens. But then they switch off the sound when their phones start to howl. Fear becomes normalized, until eventually it becomes another part of the background noise. My hotel had an air-raid shelter, a windowless room, but no one went there during air raids. “You’ll be lucky or unlucky,” the porter told me. No point in trying to escape fate.  

Odesa’s city garden.

Those who can’t endure life in suspended animation are abroad, wondering if they should come back; some who remain wonder if they should leave. Companies have shut down—I was told about one that closed in the first week of the invasion; the owners fired everyone and moved to Spain—and investments are on hold. None of this is accidental. The Russian strategy toward Ukraine is designed to demoralize and demotivate.

It works. Except when it doesn’t.

For the languor of Odesa is the backdrop, not the story: Not everyone there is afflicted with apathy, anxiety, or the fear of losing. On the contrary, even in this strange moment, when time doesn’t seem worth measuring, some people are intensely busy. Across the city, students, accountants, hairdressers, and every other conceivable profession have joined what can only be described as an unprecedented social movement. They call themselves volonteri—volunteers—and their organizations, their crowdfunding campaigns, and their activism help explain why the Ukrainian army has fought so hard and so well, why a decade-long Russian attempt to co-opt the Ukrainian state mostly failed, even (or maybe especially) in Russian-speaking Odesa.  

In a paralyzed landscape, in a stalled economy, in a city where no one can plan anything, the volonteri are creating the future. They aren’t afraid of loss, siege, or occupation, because they think they are going to win.

Out of almost nothing—out of a beat-up apartment building at the back of an empty courtyard—Anna Bondarenko has already created a community, a refuge from the war. The offices of her Ukrainian Volunteer Service (UVS) are in old rooms with high ceilings; the largest, lined with desks, has the words A good deed has great power painted on one of the walls. Other rooms contain a kitchen—often, the team eats meals together—and some bunk beds for those who need them. Bondarenko told me that at age 15, she spent a year as an exchange student at an American high school, where she found herself for the first time having to explain where Ukraine is, and what it is, and, though she came from a Russian-speaking family, she discovered that she liked the idea of being Ukrainian. She also encountered the concept of community service. She volunteered at her host family’s local church, at a national park, at an animal shelter. She remembers entering a contest, trying to accumulate 150 hours of community service in order to get a certificate signed by Barack Obama. (Hers, alas, was signed by someone else.)

[Elliot Ackerman: Ukraine’s three-to-one advantage]

She came home wanting to continue volunteering and signed up to work on a couple of festivals, including one marking Ukraine’s independence day. But in between festivals, she and her friends couldn’t find organizations that inspired them. Eventually, she set up the UVS, an organization designed to solve that problem, matching people who want to volunteer with other people who need help.The team created a clever website, made contact with a few like-minded people around the country, and organized training weekends for people who wanted to be volunteers or promote volunteering. They raised a little bit of money (including a small grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, whose board I serve on).

Then the war started. Demand exploded.

No one on Bondarenko’s UVS team is over the age of 30, and some are under 20. Bondarenko, at 26, is one of the oldest people in the room. Nevertheless, since the early hours of the morning of February 24, UVS has fielded thousands of requests, creating a set of websites, chat sites, and chatbots that eventually matched more than 100,000 people—accountants, drivers, medics—with more than 900 organizations across the country. Ukrainians find UVS via Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, TikTok; when you type I want to volunteer into a Ukrainian Google search, UVS is the first organization to come up. Bondarenko’s team has sent volunteers to help distribute food packages to people who lost their homes, clean up rubble after bombing raids, and, for those willing to take real risks, to drive cars or buses into war zones and pull people out. People wrote to them for advice: How should we make Molotov cocktails? How should we evacuate? And the volunteers tried to find experts who could give them answers.

Sometimes they rescue their own colleagues. Lisa is a UVS team member from Melitopol, a Ukrainian city occupied during the first part of the war. I am withholding Lisa’s surname because her parents remain in a Russian-controlled village in southern Ukraine, but I can tell you that Lisa has long reddish hair, white fingernail polish, and a sheaf of wheat, a Ukrainian patriotic symbol, tattooed on her forearm. When she was still in occupied Melitopol, Russian patrols would stop her and ask her, as they ask everyone, to show them her tattoos. She kept the wheat sheaf hidden beneath long-sleeved shirts, but every time this happened, she was terrified. Still, she was responsible for distributing food in a part of the city cut off from the center, and so she stayed until someone from a partner organization called Bondarenko to warn her that Lisa was on a list to be arrested or kidnapped. UVS helped Lisa leave within hours.

Lisa now coordinates volunteers in the occupied territories using encrypted-messaging apps and Telegram channels. So does Stefan Vorontsov, a UVS coordinator from Nova Kakhovka, another town behind Russian lines. He, like Lisa, remained for more than a month after the invasion, trying to be useful. He and his colleagues scraped together some funds, bought food and medicine, and distributed it to people who had lost houses and jobs. The volunteers in the town tried to protect themselves by wearing red crosses on their arms, but doing so had the opposite effect: The symbols attracted the attention of Russian soldiers, who stopped anyone wearing them for questioning and sometimes arrest. By the time Vorontsov escaped Nova Kakhovka, volunteers had learned to wipe their phones clean every day before leaving the house and to have carefully prepared answers for the Russian soldiers who stopped them constantly. I spoke with Vorontsov by video link; he is now living in Georgia. “People are leaving all the time,” he told me. “Pretty soon there will be no one left to help.”

The main reception and humanitarian aid point for internally displaced people in Odesa.

In one sense, the Russian suspicion of people like Vorontsov and Lisa is well founded. Although most of the volunteers on the ground are engaged in purely humanitarian work, there really is a link between participation in public life—any kind of participation in public life—and Ukrainian patriotism. This link is not new. Whatever it was that motivated people to contribute their time to their communities before the war, whether in the name of music, art, or animal shelters, the same impulse pushes them toward an idea, perhaps an ideal, of democratic Ukraine, and makes them want to help the war effort now. Serhiy Lukachko, who also works out of the UVS office, runs a website called My City, which was once dedicated to supporting cultural events and other projects in Odesa. Now he and a colleague have put their fundraising talents to the aid of a Ukrainian army brigade. Through crowdfunding, they purchase body armor, extra uniforms, and the four-wheel-drive SUVs that are in such high demand at the front. “We talk once a week,” Lukachko told me. “They give me a checklist.”

It could be a gloomy place, this building full of very young people, some of whom are still going through the trauma of displacement and all of whom have friends or relatives in grave danger. Lisa has an arranged time to speak for a few seconds with her parents every day, just to make sure they are ok. Bondarenko has a boyfriend in the army. Later, over dinner at a Crimean Tartar restaurant, Bondarenko told me that she has already lost friends to the war. The first time she learned of such a death, she spent the evening weeping. The second time it happened, she resolved to mourn everybody at the end, when the war is over, “after we have won.”  

[Anne Applebaum: Russia’s war against Ukraine has turned into terrorism]

Right now, she is busy. So is everyone else in her immediate vicinity, and that energy creates its own momentum, becomes its own inspiration. Nobody in the world of Odesa community organizations is competing for funding anymore. Nobody is jockeying for position or worrying about prestige. “Everybody just kind of tries to help each other,” Bondarenko said, “and it feels really different.” And that is what she wants Odesa, and Ukraine, to be like in the future.  

Bondarenko and her team were inspired by American practices of community service—well-designed websites, clever social-media posts—but other cultural influences are at work in Odesa too. One of them is toloka, an old word used in Ukrainian, Russian, and certain Baltic languages to describe spontaneous community projects. When someone’s house burns down, the village gets together to rebuild it. That’s toloka. When a man dies, the village helps the widow harvest her crops. That’s toloka too. Kurkov, the Ukrainian novelist, has defined toloka as “community work for the common good,” and it helps explain why so many people have given up so much to pitch in.

Dmytro Milyutin Dmytro Milyutin’s shop filled with supplies.

Dmytro Milyutin, for example, lives in a world that bears no resemblance to an old-fashioned Ukrainian village. He runs a parfumerie, a shop in central Odesa where he sells famous perfumes as well as oddities, bottles containing the scent of smoke or of apple pie. He designs fragrances for individuals and says he considers himself a connoisseur “not just of scents but of emotions.” But since the war began, he has sold a fifth of his perfume collection and taken out a loan to provide sophisticated military clothing to Ukrainian soldiers fighting near Odesa. The Ukrainian army distributes basic uniforms, but not the pocketed vests specially designed to carry guns and first-aid kits, or the light backpacks that American soldiers take for granted. Milyutin got a local fashion designer to put aside his dressmaking business and start sewing together canvas and velcro strips to make things easier for soldiers on the move. He too keeps in touch directly with commanders.

While Milyutin and I speak, two women in heels and full makeup come in to buy perfume. They spray different scents onto little sticks and wave them in front of their nose as Milyutin keeps talking about the design of the backpacks that are gathered on the floor beneath the bottles. The ladies don’t mind the backpacks, because that kind of thing, like the air-raid sirens, is normal now too.

Around the corner from Milyutin’s shop, Olexander Babich’s office also now contains piles of sleeping bags, ground mats, binoculars, and night-vision goggles, bought using donations, now being sorted for distribution. Babich is a well-known historian and the author of Odessa 1941–1944, a book about daily life under the fascist occupation, about how people survived, and, he writes, about “how people befriended the enemy, or opposed them.” When the war began, he drove his family across the border, came home, and began to prepare to oppose the new enemy. He and some historians from Kherson, now living in his apartment, track down, import, and distribute the equipment that is now stacked up against the bookshelves. They go to shooting ranges themselves, too, just to keep in practice. In a very real sense, they are already supporting Ukrainian soldiers the way an old-fashioned resistance movement would, except tha they use the internet to raise money and purchase equipment.  

Alexander Babych

Nor are they alone. In a half-abandoned building in a different part of town, Natalia Topolova introduced me to a group of women that, funded by a patriotic florist, weave special camouflage blankets and suits for snipers. These “spider ladies,” as they call themselves, come when they can—after work, when children are in school—to sew strips of multicolored cloth onto fabric and nets. At a street café, two Odesa engineers explained to me how they had worked,  again, with officers they know, in order to identify exactly the right optical technology that Ukrainian soldiers needed to make their weapons work better. Then they raised money and started importing it from America and Japan.

In his elegant gallery in the city center, Mikhail Reva, a renowned Ukrainian sculptor who designed several notable monuments around Odesa, has also been seized by the spirit of toloka. His Reva Foundation, originally created to fund artistic education and urban design in Ukraine, has been redirected to purchase first-aid kits for soldiers. The various international contacts Reva has accumulated over years—a friend in San Diego who used to live in Odesa, other artists and designers around the world—have also helped him pay for a training program designed to teach soldiers how to use the first-aid kits, especially the tourniquets that can stop someone from dying in the field. He has drawn not just on Ukrainian civil society to support the Ukrainian army, but civil society in many countries.

[Read: Liberation without victory]

“House of The Sun,” a bronze sculpture by Mikhail Reva, located at Langeron Beach on the Black Sea coast.

The scale of these efforts surprises outsiders, but it shouldn’t. Too often, in America and Europe, our definition of civil society is cramped and narrow. We use the term to mean “human-rights groups,” or confuse it with nonprofits, as if civil society consists solely of organizations with HR departments and neat mission statements. But civil society can also have an anarchic, spontaneous character, coming into being in response to an emergency or a crisis. It can look like the Odesa schoolroom temporarily packed to the ceiling with canned food, paper towels, childrens’ diapers, bags of pasta, where Natalia Bogachenko, a former businesswoman, runs a distribution point for humanitarian aid (“controlled chaos,” she calls it). It can look like the two chic Kyiv restaurants from which Slava Balbek started a food kitchen for the territorial army during the first days of the war, eventually organizing 25 restaurants and two bakeries into a cooperative that cooked thousands of meals every day.

Balbek is best known as an architect, the founder of the most successful design company in Ukraine; he has motifs from a Kazimir Malevich painting tattooed on his arm, adding a different twist to the Ukrainian tattoo. But although Balbek is normally surrounded by artists and architects, although he has designed hotels and offices in China and California,  he told me that the cooks, bakers, and volunteers in those strange, panicky days produced a special kind of creative energy, pulling together something from nothing, innovating and adjusting. “Oh, we only have eggs to cook with, they would say: Let’s make breakfast all day today!” In the end, he said, “your fellow volunteers become like a second family.” And you never forget them.

There is a darker side to this story. If the Ukrainian army were better equipped, after all, or if Ukraine were a wealthier or better-run country, or if so many Ukrainians had not wasted so much time over the past 30 years creating corrupt schemes or battling them, then maybe this enormous social movement would not be necessary. The volunteers emerged precisely because Ukrainian soldiers don’t have first-aid kits, Ukrainian snipers don’t have the right uniforms and the Ukrainian state doesn’t have the capability to distribute these things either. Many of the volunteers succeed because prominent or entrepreneurial people can break bureaucratic import rules, can raise money more nimbly than the state, and can then deliver equipment directly to officers in the field or to refugees in a war zone. “Without volunteers, it would be impossible to continue this war,” says Milyutin, the connoisseur of exotic scents.But that too is worrying, since the adrenalin required to sustain this level of activity is now running low. Even volunteers need to pay their rent.

Natalia Topolova, who makes special camouflage blankets and suits for snipers.

But even if it was inspired by the deficits of the Ukrainian state, many hope this wave of activism will wind up reshaping that state, just as popular activism during the Orange Revolution in 2004–05 and the Euromaidan protests in 2013–14 also changed Ukraine. Precisely because Odesa is a Russian-speaking city with a cosmopolitan history, precisely because Odesa has a living memory of occupation, the volunteer movement here will jolt many of the city’s inhabitants abruptly in the direction of “Ukrainianness,” as well as in the direction of the things that term nos represents: democracy, openness, and European identity.

[Anne Applebaum: Ukraine must win]

In Odesa, this process has begun. Bogachenko, the activist who runs the refugee-aid center, told me that she speaks Russian but has no doubt about who she is: “Greek, Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian—if you have a Ukrainian passport, you are Ukrainian.” Reva, the sculptor, went to art school in Russia (in what was then Soviet Leningrad) but describes today’s war as a contest between good and evil, in which choosing sides is not remotely hard. The Russians, he says, among them many former friends and colleagues, “want to destroy everything and make us slaves.” Trukhanov, the mayor, who has been accused of secretly holding a Russian passport and maintaining deep Russian connections, spent a good part of our conversation denying vociferously that this is the case, even though I didn’t ask him about it. He has now made a clear choice, for Ukraine and against Russia, and he wants everyone to know it.

Natalia Bogachenko, who runs a collection point for humanitarian aid.

The life experiences of these Ukrainians have already created a wide gap between them and their Russian neighbors. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, likes to talk about how Russians and Ukrainians are the same nation, the same people. But Ukraine’s civic and military mobilization around the war is the best possible illustration of how much and how quickly nations and people can diverge. For although a few online efforts to raise money for the military in Russia are under way, there is nothing on the scale of what is happening in Ukraine, no mass civic mobilization, no teams of volunteers, no equivalent to the Kalush Orchestra—the Ukrainian band that won the Eurovision Song Contest this year, auctioned off its trophy for $900,000, and used the money to buy three PD-2 drones for the army.

And no wonder: Following in the steps of the Soviet leaders who preceded him, Putin has systematically destroyed whatever civic spirit emerged after the Soviet Union’s collapse, squeezing everything spontaneous and everything self-organized out of Russian society, silencing not just independent newspapers and television but also historical societies, environmentalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Lenin was deeply suspicious of any group or organization, however apolitical or mundane, that was not directly dependent on the Communist Party. Putin has inherited a similar paranoia.

In order to prevent people from organizing themselves—in order to convince people that there is no point in doing anything, or changing anything—the Russian state and its propaganda machine have for two decades promoted fear, apathy, and cynicism. Every night, television news mocks the West and regularly threatens nuclear war, even promising the “annihilation” of Britain or New York. The result is that Russians don’t protest in large numbers against the war, but they also don’t spontaneously organize huge campaigns in support of it either. The somewhat mysterious “Z” campaign (Why Z? No one has really explained) is visible on social media and television, but not much pro-war fervor or Z activism is evident in the streets.

On the contrary, the only real grassroots activists in Russia right now are the anonymous teams of brave people, all around the country, who are quietly helping the Ukrainian refugees forcibly deported to distant parts of Russia return home. A few weeks ago, I met an exiled Russian activist who described the chain of connections she had used to help a Ukrainian woman with a small baby and no passports or visas—they had been lost in the chaos—escape the far east of Russia and cross the country’s western border into Estonia. But the activist’s efforts put her in the dissident minority. She had left Russia even before the invasion; her colleagues on this modern underground railroad work in secret.

In Ukraine, she would be a leader of an established and respected organization. In Russia, she risks arrest as an enemy of the people. That paradox alone explains how the two countries have become so different.  

I began this article with the ambivalence that hangs in the sultry air of Odesa, and I should end with a reminder that this sentiment has not gone away. Participation in the volunteer movement, though widespread, is not universal. Ukraine is not a nation of saints. Not everyone with a Ukrainian passport is fighting for the country, or even planning to remain in the country. Not everyone is active, brave, or optimistic. A New York acquaintance describes a Ukrainian working on Wall Street whose reaction to the war was: I need to get my family out, and then I am never going back there again. On the train from Warsaw to Kyiv, I met a woman returning home from exile whose skepticism about Ukraine’s leaders led her in the direction of various conspiracy theories: How come my apartment was damaged but the houses of the rich were spared?

But what matters is what comes next, and voices like those will not be the decisive ones in postwar Ukraine. That role will go to those who stayed, those who volunteered, those who built the ad hoc organizations that became real ones, who made the effort to link bakers and taxi drivers and medics to the war effort. The volonteri will create Ukraine’s postwar culture, rebuild the cities and run the country in the future. They will resist Russian influence, Russian corruption, and Russian occupation because the modern Russian state threatens not just their lives and property but their very identity. They have defined themselves against a Russian autocracy that suppresses spontaneity and creativity, and they will go on doing so long after the war is over.

Odessa National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, covered in sandbags.

Odesa remains a city suspended between great events. As I write this, I don’t know what will happen next. All I can tell is that the activists and the volunteers, in Odesa and across the country, believe that the next great event will be not another calamity, but a Ukrainian victory.

Today’s most elderly bats aren’t supposed to exist. Ounce for ounce and pound for pound, they are categorically teeny mammals; according to the evolutionary rules that hold across species, they should be short-lived, like other small-bodied creatures.

And yet, many of Earth’s winged mammals buck this trend, sometimes blowing decades past their anticipated expiration date. One species, Brandt’s bat, which weighs just four to nine grams as an adult—all the heft of a quarter—has been recorded surviving to the age of 41 in the wild, almost as long as a standard four-ton Asian elephant, and nearly 10 times as long as its body dimensions might otherwise predict. “That’s just amazingly long-lived for their size,” says Jerry Wilkinson, a biologist at the University of Maryland. “Longer than any other mammal.”

No single factor can explain the astounding longevity of bats. They are clever and collaborative, and their superpowered immune systems help them tolerate viruses that make other animals disastrously sick—traits that undoubtedly help them survive. But one of their anti-aging tricks, among the most biologically elusive in the world, is to simply put off getting older for months out of every year.

[Read: What humans can learn from nature’s biggest hibernators]

As fall dips into winter, the little mammals huddle into caves, trees, and mines, folding up their wings and hanging feet over head. Their body temperature plunges, sometimes approaching freezing; their heart rate slows to a handful of beats per minute; they barely take any breaths at all. “They basically shut down their entire body, drastically reducing all the functions that we typically associate with life,” says Aline Ingelson-Filpula, a biologist at Carleton University. Stretches of hibernation like these have long been understood as almost suspended animation, used to conserve the body’s resources in times of great need. For bats, Wilkinson and his colleagues have found that it may also drastically extend their tenure on Earth.

Time, per se, isn’t really what kills us; it’s how we spend it that does us in. For most creatures, the calendar of days and months progresses in lockstep with the internal process of aging. But bats, and likely other hibernators as well, are effectively able to uncouple those clocks, advancing their biological age only when they’re active and awake—even as their chronological timepiece ticks on. “Think of hibernators as just being turned off,” says Hanane Hadj-Moussa, a biologist at the Babraham Institute. “They don’t get as damaged as an organism that has to just deal with life.”

Many scientists think of aging as what happens when the body accumulates life’s wear and tear—the costs of metabolizing food and burning through daily energy demands, the gunky buildup of cellular waste. Hibernation brings those burdensome processes to a near halt. Animals that manage it are “barely doing anything metabolically, and they’re very cold,” says Jenny Tung, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. It’s caloric restriction and cryopreservation rolled into one, a slowdown that preserves physiological battery life, like toggling an iPhone into low-power mode.

Scientists were first clued in to the notion that hibernation might be a way to temporarily delay death in the early 1980s, when a team of medical researchers at Harvard found that Turkish hamsters that spent an especially long time in seasonal pseudo-slumber perished later than their peers. In the years that followed, researchers quickly identified several other creatures that belonged to the Wake Less, Live More Club. Among them were ground squirrels, bats, marmots, and lemurs—all of which outlast similar species that don’t hibernate, clear hints that the hibernators were somehow “cheating the game,” says Gabriela Pinho, a biologist at the Ecological Research Institute in São Paulo, Brazil.

[Read: The never-aging ants with a terrible secret]

But definitively nailing hibernation as an anti-aging ploy is tough. If animals are holed up in dens for months of the year, they’re also usually better hidden from predators and more sheltered from the elements. To confirm that these stints of dormancy were actually, on a molecular level, hitting the “Pause” button on animals’ inevitable march toward death, Tung told me, scientists needed a way to “start asking what’s going on within the cells themselves.”

This year, two groups of researchers, led by Pinho and Wilkinson, respectively, published some of the most convincing data on that front to date, on yellow-bellied marmots and big brown bats. Both studies scoured the genomes of the little mammals, looking for epigenetic modifications—molecular punctuation marks that annotate stretches of DNA, making them more or less easy to read. These marks get shuffled and more scattered as we age, and researchers have studied them closely enough to read their patterns, almost like tree rings, and determine how far our tissues have progressed along the path to old age. When researchers then compare that with the actual number of years an animal has lived, they can get a sense of whether a creature is, molecularly speaking, particularly spry for its chronological age, says Danielle Adams, a biologist at Towson University who worked with Wilkinson on the big brown bats.

By inspecting marmot and bat genomes at different times of the year, Pinho, Wilkinson, Adams, and their colleagues were able to show that in the winter, the animals’ biological aging effectively stalled, even as they accumulated months of chronological time—then rapidly picked back up in the spring as they roused. The differences in DNA modifications were stark enough between the seasons that they were visible “within six months in the same individual,” says Isabel Sullivan, who was part of Wilkinson and Adams’s team.

Hibernation, to be clear, didn’t manifest just to fill nature with geriatric marmots and bats. Its primary purpose is to rescue animals from almost-certain death during resource-poor and often chilly times of year. “It’s a mechanism for survival, just making it to the next stage,” says Liliana Dávalos, a biologist at Stony Brook University. Maybe it was a happy accident that these freeze-frames also doubled as a fountain of youth.

Humans have other ways of making it through rough winters—we’ve never needed hibernation to survive. But the prospect of mimicking the act still tugs at our brains. It could buy time for emergency surgeries. It could enable far-reaching space travel, keeping astronauts alive ’til they reach their destinations, while largely eliminating the need to pack tons of food. If longevity is a perk as well, some people would likely line up.

[Read: You can probably hibernate]

Still, “I’d be cautious about saying if we hibernate, we could just double our life span,” Wilkinson said. Plenty of species hibernate and still die at about the age their body size would predict. And as cushy as hibernation might sound, it threatens to exact a tax. While inactive, animals’ brain function fizzles, their weight plummets, and their digestive tract shrivels. They cease nearly all movement, and their reflexes slow, making them easy prey for predators that chance upon them, and raising the risk of their muscles atrophying and their bones demineralizing. The immune system’s potency also ramps way down, making bodies super-susceptible to infection. (That’s one huge reason that droves of bats have, in recent years, been felled by white-nose syndrome, a lethal fungal disease that hits hibernators hard.) Creatures that have evolved to hibernate have also cooked up many strategies to counteract its costs, allowing them to bounce back each spring. Humans, however, have not—which means the toll would be that much greater on us.

Even the prep for hibernation is arduous. In the fall, pre-hibernation squirrels and bears have to eat themselves into a diabetic coma to stockpile several months’ worth of fat. Yellow-bellied marmots, which can hibernate for up to eight months of the year, have just “four to five months to basically double their weight and reproduce,” Pinho told me, condensing their most important tasks into the brief stretches during which they’re awake. (Their offspring, too, must frantically chow down shortly after they’re born, or risk dying in their first winter underground.)

Hibernation can’t guarantee restful slumber, either. Most mammals must rouse themselves—usually once every couple of weeks or so—to eliminate waste, perhaps sip a bit of water, and, ironically, sleep. These wake-ups are massively expensive: “Every single arousal that a squirrel does takes about 5 percent of the energy that it uses over the entire hibernation season,” Ingelson-Filpula, of Carleton University, told me. The etiquette of torpor is also … different. Some male bats will rouse themselves in the dead of winter to have sex with still-dormant females, which may wake weeks later to find themselves toting around a stranger’s sperm.

And then there’s all the FOMO. Hibernation “would be a way to see the world at a future time, and that’s kind of appealing to think about,” Wilkinson told me. “But then you lose the opportunity to see things now.” Tung, too, wouldn’t want to forgo any chance “to watch my parents age or my kids grow.” Hibernation might be thought of as getting as close to death as possible without fully succumbing to it. If that’s indeed the price bats and marmots must repeatedly pay to prolong their years, maybe they aren’t really living that much longer at all.

If Donald Trump committed crimes on his way out of the White House, he should be subject to the same treatment as any other alleged criminal. The reason for this is simple: Ours is a government of laws, not of men, as John Adams once observed. Nobody, not even a president, is above those laws.

So why did I feel nauseous yesterday, watching coverage of the FBI executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate?

Because this country is tracking toward a scale of political violence not seen since the Civil War. It’s evident to anyone who spends significant time dwelling in the physical or virtual spaces of the American right. Go to a gun show. Visit a right-wing church. Check out a Trump rally. No matter the venue, the doomsday prophesying is ubiquitous—and scary. Whenever and wherever I’ve heard hypothetical scenarios of imminent conflict articulated, the premise rests on an egregious abuse of power, typically Democrats weaponizing agencies of the state to target their political opponents. I’ve always walked away from these experiences thinking to myself: If America is a powder keg, then one overreach by the government, real or perceived, could light the fuse.

Think I’m being hysterical? I’ve been accused of that before. But we’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans abandon their faith in the nation’s core institutions. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans become convinced that their leaders are illegitimate. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans are manipulated into believing that Trump is suffering righteously for their sake; that an attack on him is an attack on them, on their character, on their identity, on their sense of sovereignty. And I fear we’re going to see it again.

[David A. Graham: The Mar-a-Lago raid proves the U.S. isn’t a banana republic]

It’s tempting to think of January 6, 2021, as but one day in our nation’s history. It’s comforting to view the events of that day—the president inciting a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election—as the result of unprecedented conditions that happened to converge all at once, conditions that are not our national norm.

But perhaps we should view January 6 as the beginning of a new chapter.

It’s worth remembering that Trump, who has long claimed to be a victim of political persecution, threatened to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, throughout the 2016 campaign, reveling in chants of “Lock her up!” at rallies nationwide. (Republicans did not cry foul when the FBI announced an investigation into Clinton just days before the election.) It was during that campaign—as I traveled the country talking with Republican voters, hoping to understand the Trump phenomenon—that I began hearing casual talk of civil war. Those conversations were utterly jarring. People spoke matter-of-factly about amassing arms. Many were preparing for a day when, in their view, violence would become unavoidable.

I remember talking with Lee Stauffacher, a 65-year-old Navy veteran, outside an October Trump rally in Arizona. “I’ve watched this country deteriorate from the law-and-order America I loved into a country where certain people are above the law,” Stauffacher said. “Hillary Clinton is above the law. Illegal immigrants are above the law. Judges have stopped enforcing the laws they don’t agree with.”

Stauffacher went on about his fondness of firearms and his loathing of the Democratic Party. “They want to turn this into some communist country,” he said. “I say, over my dead body.”

[David Frum: Stuck with Trump]

This sort of rhetoric cooled, for a time, after Trump’s victory. But then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible collusion. And the subsequent arrests of some of the president’s closest confidants. Then came the first impeachment of Trump himself. By the time his reelection campaign got under way, Trump was fashioning himself a wartime president, portraying himself on the front lines of a pitched battle between decent, patriotic Americans and a “deep state” of government thugs who aim to enforce conformity and silence dissent.

On December 18, 2019, the day he was impeached for the first time, Trump tweeted a black-and-white photo that showed him pointing into the camera. “THEY’RE NOT AFTER ME … THEY’RE AFTER YOU,” read the caption. “I’M JUST IN THE WAY.”

As I hit the road again in 2020, crisscrossing the nation to get a read on the Republican base, it was apparent that something had changed. There was plenty of that same bombast, all the usual chesty talk of people taking matters into their own hands. But whereas once the rhetoric had felt scattered—rooted in grievances against the left, or opposition to specific laws, or just general discomfort with a country they no longer recognized—the new threats seemed narrow and targeted. Voter after voter told me there had been a plot to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start, and now there was a secretive plot to stop him from winning a second term. Everyone in government—public-health officials, low-level bureaucrats, local election administrators—was in on it. The goal wasn’t to steal the election from Trump; it was to steal the election from them.

“They’ve been trying to cheat us from the beginning,” Deborah Fuqua-Frey told me outside a Ford plant in Michigan that Trump was visiting during the early days of the pandemic. “First it was Mueller, then it was Russia. Isn’t it kind of convenient that as soon as impeachment failed, we’ve suddenly got this virus?”

I asked her to elaborate.

“The deep state,” she said. “This was domestic political terrorism from the Democratic Party.”

This kind of thinking explains why countless individuals would go on to donate their hard-earned money—more than $250 million in total—to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. It explains why others swarmed vote-counting centers, intimidated poll workers, signed on to shoddy legal efforts, flocked to fringe voices advocating solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the union, threatened to kill elections officials, boarded buses to Washington, and ultimately, stormed the United States Capitol.

What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.

“The Obama FBI began spying on President Trump as a candidate,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted this morning. “If they can do this to Trump, they will do it to you!”

“If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”

“If there was any doubt remaining, we are now living in a post constitutional America where the Justice Department has been weaponized against political threats to the regime, as it would in a banana republic,” the Texas Republican Party tweeted. “It won’t stop with Trump. You are next.”

[Adam Serwer: Conservatives believe Trump is above the law]

It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall. Investigations of President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, were already more or less guaranteed; the question now becomes how wide of a net congressional Republicans, in their eagerness to exact vengeance on behalf of Trump and appease a fuming base, cast in probing other people close to the president and his administration.

Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee. If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.

“Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. “Because one day what goes around is going to come around.”

And then what? It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries. Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”

It’s hard to see how any of this gets better. But it’s easy to see how it gets much, much worse.

We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.

Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.

In some corners of MAGA-land, a new civil war is getting under way. The FBI’s arrival at Mar-a-Lago yesterday evening to collect evidence in a criminal investigation related to former President Donald Trump is the trigger that some of his supporters needed to suggest that violence is imminent. Predictably, the unverified Twitter accounts of armchair revolutionaries circulated claims such as “I already bought my ammo” and dark talk of “kinetic civil war” and “Civil War 2.0.”

Not to be outdone, the National Rifle Association posted an image of Justice Clarence Thomas above an indignant quotation from a majority opinion he wrote: “The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second class right.’” Verified right-wing influencers got in on the martial rhetoric, too. “Tomorrow is war. Sleep well,” Steven Crowder promised.

The bad news is that much of this talk is sincere. It is intended to intimidate the people investigating Trump’s many abuses of power, and to galvanize and organize his true believers—some of whom already proved on January 6, 2021, that they will commit violence in his name. The latest such propaganda is shocking to read, mostly because the talk of violence comes so casually to Trump’s apologists. It is all out in the open now.

The good news is that some threats remain merely threats. A violent movement either grows or shrinks. Its ideology is not defeated; it simply stops motivating people to action.

[David A. Graham: The Mar-a-Lago raid proves the U.S. isn’t a banana republic]

Trump has a hold on a party that has been offered plenty of exit ramps from its relationship with him, but he is not Voldemort. He has been isolated and humiliated. Many of the individuals who used violence to support him on January 6 are now in jail. His audiences have dwindled. Even on the night of the FBI search, in the area of Florida that he now calls home, an impromptu roadside demonstration in support of him attracted “roughly two dozen” supporters, the Miami Herald reported. “Roughly two dozen” isn’t a revolution. It isn’t even a rally.

For many Americans who wish for a peaceful democracy and remain frustrated about Trump’s continuing influence in Republican primaries, hope springs eternal that someone or something—Robert Mueller, two impeachment drives, and now criminal investigators—will definitively erase his power. But expecting saviors to intervene is the wrong way to think about how the threat of violence from Trump’s supporters might dissipate. Rather, the danger will be over when violent MAGAism becomes a rallying cry for a limited pool of adherents whose online anger fizzles upon contact with the real world.

A win, at this stage, isn’t that Trump’s troops make an apology. It is that they remain an online threat, a cosplay movement, a pretend army that can’t deliver, whose greatest strength is in their heads rather than reality.

[David Frum: Stuck with Trump]

Trump, as a former president of the United States, may be a rather unique leader of a violent insurrection, but that doesn’t make the ongoing, multiyear strategy any less effective. The January 6 committee has adopted a counter-insurrection strategy by portraying Trump squarely as the leader of a violent movement, and not simply the leader of the GOP. But some of his more extreme followers are now turning on one another. Members of the Oath Keepers, for example, have spoken to FBI investigators about matters connected with the Capitol riot—a sign that at least some fear legal penalties more than they fear the consequences of breaking with Trump. If the former president’s legal jeopardy deepens, he will in all likelihood try to raise the level of agitation in the days ahead; he knows how to use language that incites followers to violence without giving them specific instruction.

But allow me at least a glimmer of optimism. “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come,” the poet and author Carl Sandburg famously wrote. And the decline of MAGA looks something like that—just a smattering of people respond to the overheated rhetoric of Trump and his allies. If Trump’s supporters only end up cosplaying a civil war, that itself is a small victory.