The Atlantic

Kash Patel Refuses to Take a Republican’s Lifeline

2026-09-16T18:41:00-04:00

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President Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI not because of his brief experience in law enforcement but because he is a political brawler. The problem, as Patel demonstrated yesterday, is that he is not a very good one: No skilled political messenger would have allowed nearly every headline about a Senate hearing to connect their name and agency with bestiality.

Yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing was Patel’s first appearance on Capitol Hill since a raucous visit in May. (At that hearing, Patel and Senator Chris Van Hollen verbally agreed to each take a self-screening test for alcohol abuse. Van Hollen posted his results the next day, but his office said it never heard back from Patel.) It was also Patel’s first hearing since CBS News revealed changes to FBI hiring standards, which reportedly now allow the bureau to consider applicants who have hired prostitutes fewer than three times, stole from an employer more than three years ago, or engaged in sex with animals before the age of 18.

Democrats were eager to press Patel on the changes, but the hearing’s buzziest exchange turned out to be between Patel and Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a Republican. During his questioning, Kennedy seemed to be doing everything he could to offer Patel a chance to defuse the story—but Patel, unable or unwilling to recognize the openings, didn’t take them.

The ranking Democrat, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, asked about the new requirements first. Patel said the bestiality change was designed to ensure that people who had been forced to engage in sex with animals were not shut out of an FBI job. “We did not want to punish victims of bestiality,” Patel said. “We are not going to target victims.” Whether this is accurate is unclear. The memo laying out the new standards has not been made public, but sources told CBS News that the rules “do not distinguish between candidates who were coerced into sexual activity with animals, as opposed to those who engaged in such acts willingly.”

Kennedy was the next senator to quiz Patel, and he tried to do some cleanup. “I’m really trying to understand,” he said, rubbing his face. “’Cause I listened to the exchange between you and Senator Durbin, and I’ve read a few news accounts, and I’m confused.” He asked Patel, almost rhetorically, to affirm that the FBI still had hiring standards, and Patel argued that changes had been necessary to ensure the quick hiring of good agents. As for bestiality, the old rule had “automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it.”

Kennedy, a bit of a ham, couldn’t resist a jibe: “So you disqualified the animal?” But he was also losing patience. “I’m trying to understand why you did this,” he said, and then offered an unusually frank description of how many Senate hearings work today: “I understand the game. People try to make you look bad. We do the same thing when the other party’s in office.” He gave Patel another shot. The director replied that sometimes human traffickers force victims to engage in bestiality, and that the FBI did not want to disqualify victims—even though, again, the guidelines reportedly don’t make such a distinction.

An exasperated Kennedy wasn’t buying it. “Someone came to you and recommended” this? he asked. “And when you saw bestiality—I say this with respect—the person who recommended it, why didn’t you just say, ‘What planet did you parachute in from? Why do I wanna lead with my chin and get into bestiality?’”

One answer is that Patel just isn’t very politically astute. It’s hard to claim you’re cleaning up and reforming the FBI, as Patel has, when you’re allowing johns and people who stole from their employers to apply. As for bestiality, more careful wording of the FBI memo that first laid out the new standards would have avoided the controversy. Better preparation for the hearing might have given him a clearer explanation than what he offered. And sharper instincts would have told Patel that Kennedy was trying to help him out. Any high-level appointee should be able to get through a congressional hearing without bestiality becoming the main topic. Instead, Patel takes his cues from Trump, whose instinct is always to push back. But what works for Trump doesn’t work for others. It’s not even clear whether it works for Trump anymore.

Patel may have felt a need to loosen qualifications for agents because the FBI has experienced an exodus of staffers since he took over. More than 1,100 special agents, who had an average tenure of almost 22 years, left in 2025 alone, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. Durbin has alleged that more than 5,000 nonpartisan civilian staffers departed last year. Some left of their own accord, and others were fired who were involved in investigations that Trump and Patel don’t like, such as those looking into the January 6 riot. This spring, my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick reported that Patel’s colleagues had been concerned about what they described as Patel’s excessive drinking, repeated absences, emotional outbursts, and impulsive behavior. (Patel denied the allegations and sued Fitzpatrick and The Atlantic for defamation, demanding $250 million.)

If Patel doesn’t have the skills and temperament to run the FBI well, isn’t really cleaning up the bureau’s ranks, and can’t even get through a standard Senate hearing without things going off the rails, one might wonder why he’s in the job at all. Lower hiring standards apparently start at the top.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter point today, its first increase since 2023, bringing its benchmark rate from 3.75 to 4 percent. Fed officials cited elevated inflation and signaled that another increase could come later this year.
Speaker Mike Johnson announced that House Republicans are ending their session a day early, delaying a vote on a resolution by Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican, to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth until after the November elections. Massie has accused Hegseth of abusing his authority in his handling of the U.S. conflict with Iran; Attorney General Todd Blanche said Hegseth “follows the law.”
The Houthi militia said it shot down a Saudi fighter jet over Yemen, and Saudi Arabia said it intercepted a Houthi drone near Mecca. The Houthis denied targeting Mecca as fighting between the two sides intensified.

Evening Read

Miguel Zambrano / AFP / Getty

Venezuela’s People Problem

By Tony Frangie Mawad

Days after two deadly earthquakes struck northern Venezuela on June 24, killing at least 6,000 people and injuring tens of thousands more, the Venezuelan Seismological Research Foundation, known as Funvisis, made an unusual public plea: Could whoever had taken one of its GPS sensors please give it back?

For 13 years, the high-precision instrument had been bolted to a rocky outcrop in the hills of western Venezuela, quietly tracking the millimeter-scale movements of the Boconó fault, which was the likely source of the first of the two quakes. When Funvisis technicians went to recover the readings the sensor had stored, they found that the machine had gone missing. More than two months after the earthquakes, the organization still does not know who carried it off.

Read the full article.

What Nature’s Silence Said to Annie Dillard

2026-09-16T15:49:00-04:00

“Nature’s silence is its one remark,” Annie Dillard wrote in a 1981 Atlantic essay. Dillard, who died yesterday at age 81, spent her life listening.

She opens that essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk”—which was later adapted into a collection by the same title—with the story of a man named Larry who is trying to get a rock to speak to him. “He keeps it on a shelf,” she writes, protected “by a square of untanned leather, like a canary asleep under its cloth. Larry removes the cover for the stone’s lessons.” Dillard is not sure what exactly happens at these lessons, but she respects the process: “It is a noble work, and beats, from any angle, selling shoes.”

To Dillard, striving to hear the natural world was holy work too. “What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us?” she asks. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, she found inspiration in some of the places she lived. At age 28, she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a Pulitzer Prize–winning nonfiction book that draws from her walks in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia in the ’70s. Her musings on these solitary experiences in nature drew comparisons to Henry David Thoreau, who strongly influenced her work. She was also one of the first women to find a place in the male-dominated genre of wilderness writing. The writer Diana Saverin, who spent time going through an archive of Dillard’s personal writings and correspondence at Yale, once described in The Atlantic Dillard’s trepidation about how she would be received: “Before she published her book, she scribbled in her journal, wondering who would take her book seriously if its author was a ‘Virginia housewife named Annie.’”

She dealt with this problem by leaving her day-to-day suburban life out of her work, so much so that some critics felt that she was exaggerating just how often she was in the wildness of nature. As Saverin noted, Dillard acknowledged that “she sometimes distorted the literal truth to achieve an artistic one.” But to Dillard, the ultimate truths revealed themselves in the time she did spend outside. In her journals, she acknowledged the “theological” sensibility in her books, and it is there on every page. “What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab?” she wrote in The Atlantic. “Are they not both saying Hello” to the world beyond?

Throughout her life, Dillard identified, in turn, with Protestantism, Catholicism, and nothing at all. I first encountered her work in a religious-studies class at Wesleyan University, where she taught from 1979 to 2001, before my time there. Dillard was a shock to my system: Growing up as an observant but theologically confused Jew, I spent my teenage years in synagogue itchy with guilt, poring over the same words in the prayer book every Saturday and willing myself to believe. Only later did I come to understand that faith—and, perhaps more important, the very act of living—can also be found in what we see and touch and hear: even in the rustle of the wind. Dillard taught me this. “At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready,” she wrote in 1981. “You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep—just this one.”

Sometimes nature thunders, giving us no choice but to listen. Describing a total eclipse, Dillard is in awe, even afraid: “It was as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the Earth’s face.” Other times, nature’s peep can feel anticlimactic, but this quiet commands reverence. The stone never does talk to Larry, and Dillard ends that story by succumbing to her faith in the nothingness. “You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence,” she writes. “Pray without ceasing.”

The Most Powerful Man in AI Isn’t Worried at All

2026-09-16T15:47:49-04:00

For AI doomers, signs and portents are everywhere. When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, almost four years ago, it couldn’t do basic arithmetic. Now the company has unreleased models that are more fluent in higher mathematics—the language of the universe—than all but the most highly trained mathematicians. If these AIs are not already the world’s best hackers, they’re very close. Swarms of them have escaped containment. To plot their most audacious hacks, they’ve created makeshift message boards on the public internet. No one knows what they’ll do next—and no one can know, because the models now understand when their capacities are being tested. We’ll never again be able to say exactly how the most advanced AIs will behave unsupervised.

Some of the most powerful people in AI say they are filled with dread, and are issuing statements of grave concern. On Saturday, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, warned that self-improving AIs could soon go rogue and take over the entire internet. He called for a slowdown in AI development and promised to bring outside monitors into his company’s operations. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, quickly vowed to take similar measures. In recent weeks, both companies have seen researchers resign for fear of what they might soon create.

Notably absent from the chorus of Cassandras is Jensen Huang, the CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia, the AI industry’s chief supplier of high-end semiconductors. At least twice in the past week alone, Huang has publicly dismissed existential concerns about AI as being overblown and unscientific. At a Goldman Sachs conference on September 10, he accused industry executives of fomenting cybersecurity fears to goose the market for their own products. “What better way to create demand than to create a problem?” he said.

It’s a testament to Huang’s influence that he can so cavalierly mock his most important customers without fearing blowback. Neither Amodei nor Altman can afford to alienate Huang. They desperately need Nvidia’s chips to train their most advanced models, and no matter who pulls ahead in the race between them, Huang stands to gain—both on account of the chip sales and also the equity stake that Nvidia has in both companies. Even President Trump has sought favor with Huang. Trump brought Huang with him on a state visit to China earlier this year. On Monday, while Huang was onstage ripping Amodei’s doomerism at a taping of the popular tech-industry podcast All-In, Trump called his cellphone. Huang put him on speaker, and as the live audience hooted and clapped, the two men bonded over their shared view that, as Trump put it, doomerism is “all a hoax.”

Huang has never evinced much concern about catastrophic risks from AI. In May of 2023, when it was becoming clear that large language models are an unusually powerful technology, more than 350 of the industry’s leaders—including Amodei and Altman—signed a statement that placed the risk of extinction from AI on the same high shelf as “other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Huang didn’t sign, and neither did anyone else from Nvidia, suggesting either a remarkable conformity of opinion at the company, or perhaps something else. Later that year, he told The New Yorker that he’d never worried about the technology, not even once. “All it’s doing is processing data,” he said. “There are so many other things to worry about.”

As concerns about what AI might do have circulated well beyond industry insiders, Huang’s irritation has intensified, perhaps because they represent a threat to his business. (Nvidia did not respond to my request for an interview with Huang.) He has repeatedly brushed off calls for regulation, stressing that safety is an engineering problem, not a legal one. In January, Huang said on the podcast No Priors that the “doomer narrative” is “not helpful to people, it’s not helpful to the industry, it’s not helpful to society, it’s not helpful to the governments,” and earlier this summer, he told Axios that the notion that AI would bring about the end of humanity was “complete nonsense.” In the meantime, he has repeatedly pressed Trump to lift restrictions on chip sales to China, potentially allowing AI research (and any associated risks) to proliferate on a global scale.

Unlike Amodei, who regularly publishes long essays, Huang has yet to issue a manifesto defending his minority view. To understand why he remains so relaxed about AI risk, all we have to go on are stray comments. Several times over the years, he has returned to the idea that AIs will, in a sense, police their own kind. In October of 2024, he told the podcast BG2 that we can rely on AIs to monitor the most powerful models, and more recently, he said that falling AI costs will make this automated supervision easier to achieve.

That AIs have already eluded their supervisors—human and otherwise—does not seem to have troubled Huang. On only one occasion—that I could find—has he allowed for the possibility that we will create an AI that is simply too powerful to be controlled. “Someday we will have god AI,” Huang said, back in January, but that day hasn’t yet arrived. Huang seems to be doing everything in his considerable power to hasten its coming.

This Is Your Brain on Short-Form Video

2026-09-16T15:37:46-04:00

Among the many aspects of online life accused of rotting our brains, a certain folk psychology holds that short-form video is an especially egregious driver of the decay. In an interview last month promoting his new film, in which a London couple move their tech-dependent kids to a barn without electricity, Andrew Garfield described himself as addicted to an Instagram feed full of “weird ceramics” and Japanese craftspeople. “I’ve given all of those hours to nothing,” he told Variety. “It’s genuinely enraging because we don’t have as much control over these impulses as we should.” Even Steve Chen, one of the co-founders of YouTube—home to many a recycled TikTok on its Shorts—has said that he’s wary of his kids watching too much short-form video, because of the damage it does to attention. Sometimes, when I emerge from the dark vortex of a scroll gone too long, I worry that my thoughts will permanently become as flighty as my feed.

But here’s the tricky part: Very little research exists on what short-form videos are doing to the human mind. This lack of data gives cover to tech executives, who, when faced with the potentially harmful effects of their products, can cite the difficulty of establishing any one app or feature as the cause of a person’s unraveling. Short-form video in particular is a marker of how far behind cognitive research is, compared with the relentless pace of new technology. What available studies hint at so far is at least worthy of unease, and the not-knowing is only making things worse.

Research on short-form videos and cognition is difficult to conduct. Studies on human subjects tend to be slow and expensive, and academics are wary of spending years investigating apps that could be irrelevant by the time their results are published. Plus, the federal government hasn’t prioritized funding research on potentially addictive behaviors, including gambling and social-media use. The industry could help fill in the gaps by funding or even leading research, especially given that American social-media platforms have exclusive and valuable data. But companies are not particularly motivated to bankroll research that could show detrimental effects of their wildly profitable products. So far, they have largely chosen to keep internal research private.

(Data points do creep out. In 2024, for instance, a sloppily redacted complaint in a lawsuit against TikTok revealed some of the company’s internal research, which allegedly found that compulsive usage of the app “correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.” At the time, a spokesperson for TikTok argued that the documents were outdated and that the quotes in the complaint had been cherry-picked.)

Complicating things further is the fact that much of the publicly available research on short-form video is flimsy. In a study conducted at China’s Zhejiang University that went viral last month, 56 young adults clicked through a series of short videos (not on social media) as they lay in an MRI machine. Two brain regions involved in executing cognitively demanding tasks were found to be more active when participants swiped away from videos before they were midway through, versus when they stuck around until a video’s end. Prominent social-media accounts, including one for the prediction market Polymarket, promoted the study as more proof that TikTok is making us smooth-brained. One news outlet ran the headline “Instagram Reels & TikTok Make You Dumb & Depressed.” But the study, multiple neuroscientists told me, said nothing about short-form videos, intelligence, or depression—instead, it found that brain areas involved in taking action lit up when a participant chose to take the action of skipping to the next video. Besides, the study lacked controls, equated finishing a video with enjoying it, and never established the baseline that supposedly video-addled brain activity was being compared against. (The study’s corresponding author did not respond to a request for comment.)

Stronger studies are much rarer. But they do point in the same direction as many Americans’ intuition: Increased short-form-video use appears to be associated with poorer impulse control, mental-health outcomes, and attention capacity. Researchers at the University of Bristol concluded last year that the constant context-switching inherent to watching short-form videos may degrade prospective memory: the ability to recall something you had previously intended to do. Caty Enders, a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico, has also found that students who used TikTok at a high volume had more issues with both working memory (the information you need to keep track of what you’re doing in the moment) and episodic memory (a form of long-term memory that stores past personal events, such as what you did for your tenth birthday). A 2024 study conducted at Sigmund Freud University, in Austria, found that participants who reported watching more than four hours of short-form videos a day exhibited neurological activity that indicates cognitive abnormality.

Take all these findings with a grain of salt, however. Even the highest-quality studies on short-form videos tend to be limited in their explanatory power. They’re usually small and preliminary. And Keith Robert Head, a researcher at Capella University who recently published a review article on short-form video and attention, could point me to just four good studies on the topic that had been conducted in the United States. Most of the existing research comes from China, and Enders cautioned me against applying findings across the two countries, given that social-media platforms in the U.S. are subject to much less government control and are capable of accessing more user data and personalizing feeds to a greater degree.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have reasoned that short-form video is probably an especially potent and dangerous type of social media because the constant stream of non sequiturs and bright visuals is so overstimulating, and because there’s no upper limit to how long you can spend scrolling. But no one has established whether the negative effects of short-form video are because of something specific to the medium or the fact that spending hours on TikTok displaces healthy habits such as sleeping—in which case, the videos would be no more inherently harmful than binging Friends. Participants in a study Enders conducted on TikTok use and memory spent an average of 133 minutes a day on the app. “If you do anything every day for 133 minutes, it will change you,” Enders said.

Uncertainty around any technology’s effects not only relieves pressure on tech companies to make targeted modifications but also leaves governments to decide policy without sufficient information. Some countries have already instituted blanket social-media bans for minors based on imperfect data—not an ideal basis on which to restrict civil liberties. And everyone else is left with the ambient and unsure sense that the apps they use are terrible for them.

The fact that so many people perceive a problem with short-form video may be reason enough for alarm. Luiz Pessoa, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland who spoke with me about the shortcomings of the recent viral study, thinks that an attention epidemic is clearly at hand, despite scientists’ limited understanding of it. He and his teenage daughter often watch the highlight reels from Formula 1 races, and when they do, she’s also looking at her phone. “It’s obvious we’re multi-, triple-, quadruple-tasking in ways that at least 20, 30 years ago we weren’t,” he told me. You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to have reason to suspect your brain can be stretched only so thin.

The Atrocities That Shaped the Modern Middle East

2026-09-16T12:00:00-04:00

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a discussion of the seemingly forgotten attack on the Yazidi people by ISIS in 2014.

Then, David is joined by the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss his new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. David and Simon discuss how much of the present-day Middle East emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman empire and the violence that took place both before and after the empire’s collapse. David and Simon discuss how, one after another, different language groups and religious groups were pushed into exile or eliminated altogether.

Then, David finishes with a discussion of The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda, by Warren Kinsella.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Simon Sebag Montefiore: So, again and again, we have this pattern where if you don’t have a state, you’re nothing, and if you do have a state, the only way to enforce it is with autocracy or with repression.

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Simon Sebag Montefiore, the acclaimed British historian and author of the new book The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. The book discussion at the end of the show will feature The Hidden Hand by Warren Kinsella, subtitled The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda. But before either the dialogue with Simon Sebag Montefiore or the book discussion of The Hidden Hand, some opening thoughts on themes that will run all their way through today’s program.

Simon Sebag’s book The Cauldron describes the transformation of the Middle East from its existence under the Ottoman empire a century and a half ago to the region of today, divided among many nations. And yet while the map of the Middle East is much more tangled than it was when the Ottomans ruled almost everything from Tunisia to Iraq—although parts of it were under foreign influence: British and French colonial rule, Italian colonial rule—a simple map, but with a complex reality. Simon Sebag describes how, one after another, different language groups, different religious groups, different groups with different histories were pushed into exile or eliminated altogether.

I want to showcase just one of those acts of elimination to drive home what it is that we are talking about when we talk about the making of the modern Middle East.

In August 2014, fighters of the Islamic terror group ISIS attacked the Yazidi minority in northwest Iraq. The Yazidis are a very ancient people who follow a pre-Islamic religion. There are about 600,000 of them living in northwest Iraq in August 2014. ISIS murdered some 3,000 to 5,000 of them, mostly men and older women, and captured 6,800 women and girls and turned them into sexual slaves for ISIS fighters, and spared the lives of some of the very young boys in order to recruit them and brainwash them as child soldiers fighting for ISIS. Religious and cultural sites belonging to the Yazidi people were systematically destroyed, and civilian infrastructure, especially water supplies, wrecked. Four hundred thousand of the 600,000 Yazidi were driven into exile, and few of those people have ever returned to their homes.

Now, this was a true genocide. ISIS was very explicit. Their goal was to eliminate the Yazidi people, because ISIS hated their religious traditions. ISIS condemned the non-Islamic Yazidi as devil worshipers and thought that because of their non-Islamic views, they should cease to exist as a people and even as human beings.

The story was a temporary big deal. People in the West were aware of the Yazidi genocide, and some of the Yazidi were given refuge, especially in Europe. But as time has passed, the story has faded from memory. It is no longer of much interest. You certainly don’t see the kind of big marches in Western countries by progressive people or other kinds of people that you’ve seen in, for example, the war that Hamas started in October of 2023. The Yazidi story doesn’t seem to matter. And I think the reason why we have a hard time holding onto it is because a lot of people who study the Middle East, especially the progressive-minded, have a kind of vision of how the Middle East should be. It’s a vision in which Arab nationalism and Islamic identity are seen as progressive, in the most literal sense—the trend of the future—and everything else is seen as kind of backward looking, and it shouldn’t be there.

And so as Christian populations were either eliminated by force or driven into exile—as Simon and I will discuss, there were massacres of the Assyrian Christian population in Iraq. Much of the Christian population of Egypt has been driven into exile. The Armenians were the victim of two waves of genocide in Ottoman empire, one in the 1890s and again in the 1910s. The Kurds were subjected to murderous attack by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and by the Iranian regime, too. And of course, there is the story of the Jews, who inhabited ancient communities in places like Alexandria and Baghdad, communities that existed before the coming of either the Arabs or of Islam to the region. And after 1945, those communities—or after 1941 in the Iraqi case—those communities were murdered, massacred, plundered, driven into exile, ceased to exist, in-gathered into the state of Israel, where the Jews who formerly lived all through the Ottoman empire have found refuge in one place.

This great system of simplification was at every turn marked by atrocity, attempted genocide, the refusal of difference within the context of the Middle East. We don’t seem to find that so troubling because we have an implicit idea of who should be on top and who should not be on top. And this implicit understanding may, I think, add some context to why false accusations against Israel and the Jews have gained so much hearing. Because in a way, the Jews and the state of Israel stand out as the great exception to the trend of the Middle East. This is the one place—the one place—where a people that were a minority people under the old Ottoman empire have built a successful state that is able to be self-sufficient. And that exception to the trend everywhere else in the Middle East is seen by many as a kind of denial of the logic of history, which calls for the whole region to become all one thing under one language—or two, Turkish and Arabic—under one faith, Islam, everyone else driven to the wall.

We’re going to talk a little bit about this in the program, how this happened, and we’re going to try to talk about it from an historical point of view to understand it. It is, I think, a trend to be condemned, but first, before condemning, it is a trend to be understood. And to understand why the state of Israel looms so large in our imagination, we have to pay some attention to the things that loom strangely small, like the story of the Yazidi. So horrible, so forgotten. Why?

And now, my dialogue with Simon Sebag Montefiore.

[Music]

Frum: Simon Sebag Montefiore is a British historian of Russia and the Middle East whose books have been published in more than 40 languages. His nonfiction—he has written fiction too—his nonfiction includes: Catherine the Great and Potemkin; Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar; and also Young Stalin, as well as the internationally best-selling Jerusalem and the history of The Romanovs: 1613–1918.

He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London. His new book is The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, a history of the region from the last years of the Ottoman Sultanate to the present day. Simon, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Lovely to be with you, David.

Frum: So first, congratulations on the astonishing acclaim for The Cauldron. And thank you for making time in what has been obviously an exhausting media tour. You’ve been everywhere, so I’m so honored you would join.

Montefiore: Thank you. And thanks for having me on this. I’ve always wanted to do this, so here we are finally.

Frum: The Cauldron is this thrilling narrative history of the Middle East from approximately the year 1900 under the Ottoman empire to the present day, with characters that are presented very vividly: many anecdotes, many quotations from the literature of the region. The book is a tremendous linguistic achievement. And it’s an exciting read, but it’s also one that can be read not necessarily from beginning to end, but you can start from the middle and work outwards if you prefer, because it’s addressed regionally.

But I want to test a thesis on you. So this is a narrative history. It’s a story, and a thrilling story. But you’re not an argumentative historian. Your own ideas are sort of present in the background but are not in the foreground. I want to try to assess what I think you’re telling us. Let me lay out what I think is your thesis, and then you can tell me whether I have it right or whether I have it wrong. May I go ahead?

Montefiore: Please do.

Frum: Okay. So if we start in the year 1900—let’s start a little before. Let’s start 10 years before that. Most of what is now the Middle East is ruled by the Ottoman empire. So what is now Turkey, parts of Southern Europe, what is now Iraq, what is now Syria, what is now Lebanon, what is now Israel and the West Bank. Egypt is theoretically part of the Ottoman empire, although not practically. Tunisia is theoretically part of the Ottoman empire, not practically. Libya too. And across this vast array of space, there are dominant groups, especially the Ottoman Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslims, but there are many, many minority groups in many, many cities. And it’s not an egalitarian society, it’s not a just society, and it’s not a progressive society. It’s kind of backward-looking.

But still, if you’re a Greek in Smyrna, if you’re a Greek in the city of Alexandria in Egypt, if you are an Armenian in one of the cities of the empire, if you’re a Jew in Baghdad, if you’re a Yazidi peasant, an Assyrian Christian—there’s a way forward for you, both as a people and for you as individuals.

And suddenly that begins to change—and you’ll know why I’m dating this back to 1890 rather than 1900—with a process that unfolds over the next decades, of brutal simplification. That’s the cauldron: the great melting. Brutal simplification. Minorities are massacred or driven into exile, and the two big dominant groups—Turkish-speaking people and Arabic-speaking people—assert greater and greater control and intolerance over the region, driving everyone else out. And that is what the cauldron is.

So do I have it right?

Montefiore: That’s one part of it. One part of it is an increasingly tightening nationalistic control that does ultimately lead to what is in fact the biggest kind of slow, ethnic-cleansing purge over the last 125 years, which is the destruction of and the vanishing of the Christians of the Middle East. And that is one of the parts of what you’re referring to here. One is a sort of tightening of a nationalistic control. And the other one is a driving out of anyone who doesn’t fit into that.

And the Christian population—it’s such an extraordinary thing. You know, in 630 A.D., the Middle East was basically sort of 90 percent Christian, just before the Arab conquests. And then over the next sort of thousand years, 25 percent remained Christian. And so in 1900, the time you’re talking about, or 1890, you know, still 25 percent of the Middle East is Christian. And jump ahead to today, and that population has virtually vanished. It’s something like 4 percent now.

Frum: Well, let’s start with one of those populations, which underwent a brutal process of murder. This is not an abstract historical process. And I’m speaking, of course, of the Armenians—and that’s why I backdated to 1890, not 1900, because the attacks on Armenians begin in the 1890s.

Tell us the story of the Armenians within the Ottoman empire, and why they are so brutally treated.

Montefiore: The Armenians had lived since time immemorial, since ancient times, in this region. They didn’t have a single homeland. They were spread across the Ottoman empire. But before the Ottoman empire, in the early modern period or the Middle Ages, there had been Armenian kingdoms in Eastern Anatolia.

And of course, in ancient times, there had been full Armenian kingdoms in that region, and Armenian kingdoms had been buffer zones between the Persian or Parthian and the Roman Empires. They had been among the first people to convert from paganism to Christianity, and they never converted to Islam. And in the Ottoman empire, they remained a powerful community, a self-governing community that was recognized as Christian, provided they paid, like all other non-Muslim communities, the jizya—that’s the tax for people of the book. And their community was, like the Greek community, which was another large community within the Ottoman empire, also recognized. But there were spasms of violence against them whenever economics or war or famine, or there was a crisis in which one would blame the other within one’s community.

But jump forward to the late 19th century. For many centuries—you put this very well in your introduction, David—but for many centuries, these minorities had been allowed to govern themselves, but they didn’t have equal rights to the ruling Ottoman Turkish Sunni Muslims. But that changed beginning in the 1830s and intensifying in the 1850s with Tanzimat. That made all Ottoman citizens equal, whether they were Christian, Greek, Armenian, Jewish.

Frum: Tanzimat means “reform.” Is that right?

Montefiore: It means reform. And the idea of reform was not necessarily to turn the Ottoman empire into a liberal democracy, but to make it more powerful, to exploit its peoples, to make the empire stronger.

But in fact, what it did, in part, was, in part it liberated these minorities and enabled them to own land, to expand their businesses, to become wealthy. And many dynasties emerged in trade and so on that were Armenian and Greek overwhelmingly. And that caused immense jealousy amongst the Muslim population that had been the ruling class for all this time, or the ruling caste for all these centuries. And it also discombobulated the empire. And this policy only went on for about 20 years.

In 1877, 1879, a new sultan attacked by Russia, fighting for the existence of his dynasty and his empire, came back. Abolished the new parliament that had been part of these Tanzimat or the climax of these Tanzimat reforms, and unleashed a new idea of Islamic empire, Islamic Ottomanism, in which the senior peoples were now the Muslims. And the sultan rebranded himself as sultan caliph of the empire. And at that point—

Frum: Sultan means “power holder”; caliph means “religious leader.”

Montefiore: Yeah. It meant the sort of successor to the prophet. And at this point, Abdul Hamid II, a fascinating character, started to promote a new concept in the empire where he played off different minorities against other minorities to promote essentially the Islamic nature of the state or the empire. And this involved using, for example, Kurds, who were sort of second-class Muslim citizens, to attack Armenians, who were third-class Ottoman citizens in effect. And this unleashed all sorts of notorious massacres. The Bulgarian massacres—they were also known as the Hamidian massacres after Hamid himself, the sultan.

And at the same time, something else was happening. Which was the excuse for this, which was that nationalism had arrived amongst these peoples. And just as the Turks started to embrace nationalism, the Arabs started to embrace it, and the Serbs and all the Christian peoples of Europe started to embrace it, so did the Armenians. And some Armenians now started to say, like: We want a state too. Everyone else has one. Where can we have one? And they naturally found a backer in the Ottoman empire’s main enemy—which was the Russian Empire, which was the Orthodox Christian empire of the Romanovs. And so now when they looked at the Ottomans, they started to think, Not only are these people Christian Ottomans, they’re actually Christian Russian agents who are holding a dagger right at the heart of the Ottoman empire.

And it was made worse because, though the Armenians were mainly concentrated in the eastern part of what is now Turkey, they actually were speckled around the whole empire. There were Armenians in Jerusalem. There were Armenians in Constantinople, the capital, and all over the empire. And therefore, they began to see them very like how Germans began to see Jews between the wars. And there hangs a tale, of course.

So by the time we reach World War I—I’m jumping ahead here a bit, if I’m allowed—by the time we reach World War I and the Ottoman empire enters the war against the Allies on the side of Germany, of course Russia is on the side of the Allies and against the Ottoman empire and is, of course, backing the Armenians. And the Ottoman regime at this point has changed from the Ottomanism autocracy of Abdul Hamid II to the ultra neo-fascist, almost proto-Nazi eugenist nationalism of the Young Turks. Who were led by the three Pashas, who were the kind of triumvirate that ruled the Ottoman empire during the war, and they believed that war would be a cleansing experience for the Ottoman empire.

Frum: And they attacked the Armenian communities. In the 1890s, there were Ottoman riots against Armenians in the cities. And during the war, there’s a murderous rampage against the Armenians who are not in the cities.

What is the total death toll among Armenians between 1895 and 1918?

Montefiore: It’s about 2 million.

Frum: About 2 million.

Montefiore: I mean, during World War I, 1.1 million is the usually accepted number, which is colossal. And it’s a large part of the Armenian nation. And it’s such a decisive moment because it’s because of this genocide—and by the way, this wasn’t the only genocide. They also killed 300,000 Maronite Christians in Lebanon. They also killed over 400,000 Greeks or Pontic Greeks who were on the Black Sea coast and in Ionia. They also killed several hundred thousand Assyrian Christians who lived on the borders of what is now Turkey and Iraq. And so this was a deliberate purge. And there is evidence, there are directives, there are orders from Talat Pasha and the other leaders to either massacre these people, men, women, and children, or to drive them out into the desert to starve. And it’s really the first modern genocide.

Frum: And it’s a modern genocide unlike what Stalin will do to his subject peoples, where he’s trying to break economic resistance. This is ethnic elimination by—it’s maybe not a fully modern state, the Ottoman state. It’s obviously not as efficient as Germany and not as efficient as Stalin’s Russia. But it is the deliberate elimination of categories of ethnicity in order to simplify the state, to make the state more powerful.

Montefiore: That’s right. And also to destroy the bacteria within, to destroy the traitors within.

And so it’s decisive in various ways. One is that it ensures that the Armenian nation exists really more in diaspora than it does in formerly Armenian territories. It led the Western powers to back Armenian nationhood as well. And Armenian forces fought on the side of the Russians in the wars that followed. And in the wars that followed the fall of the Ottoman empire, they fought against the new Turkish state to try and win an Armenian state, which was designated to exist in what is now eastern Turkey. And its big backer was President Woodrow Wilson of America, who promised to rule, to govern a mandate—an American mandate—for the Armenians, which is quite a thought. Of course, this never happened. And in fact, what happened was, as David will know better than I, Wilson went back to America and failed to get any of these obligations through Congress or membership of the League of Nations that he’d created and so on.

But what happened in the former Ottoman empire was that a new Turkish-nationalist maestro arose: Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who became [Mustafa Kemal] Atatürk. The master of the father of Turks, who founded a new Turkish nation, who founded a Turkish republic, and crushed the Armenians in eastern Turkey. So they never got the republic.

Frum: And then drove out the Greeks from western Turkey.

Montefiore: And then switched round and drove out the Greeks from western Turkey, and that’s also a fascinating part of the story.

Frum: I’m going to pause you there, because there’s an element here that is going to, I think, come as a pause or something to a lot of modern readers.

If you have studied Middle Eastern studies at an American university, or even more a European or British university, you’re introduced to the Middle East as a kind of inert mass. Nothing happens there unless a Western power makes it happen, and anything that happens there is a reaction to something that a Western power does.

But as you were telling it, the beginning of the cycle of purging, elimination, ethnic cleansing, genocide—it’s a spontaneous local phenomenon. This is something driven by the Ottoman Turkish government and their successor, the Young Turk government, which is defining itself in new ways against its subject peoples in an effort to exert stronger control over its territory.

Montefiore: That’s right.

Frum: It’s not a reaction to Western neocolonialism or Western imperialism. This is something they wanted to do for their own reasons and acted on their own volition.

Montefiore: Yeah. This is Ottoman Turkish imperialism. This is Ottoman Turkish genocidal massacre of their own subjects for their own purposes. And it’s a sort of proto-Nazi ideology with social Darwinism, eugenicism, and ultranationalism, and this comes from within the Middle East itself. Though, of course, they’re highly influenced, as are all the peoples of the region, by nationalism—the new drug of nationalism that seems to offer the solution to all things.

Frum: Let me hit another pause button here because—and I wanted to pause before we got to Atatürk, because the First World War ends with the collapse of the Ottoman empire. It’s carved up. It loses most of its remaining European territories, and many of its holdings are then divided up into new Arab countries that either have outright Sunni majorities or else have Sunni elites, as is the case in Iraq. Most people in Iraq are not Sunni, but there’s an Arab Sunni elite, and there are then other groups. And what we now call Turkey is also a successor state. It’s carved out of the Ottoman empire, too, and it’s defined as a national state with Turkish as its language. It changes the name of its capital city from the Greek Constantinople to the kind-of-Greek Istanbul—which is also Greek, I understand, but it sounds more Turkish even though it’s Greek in origin.

So we have these now-new states. And the Arab states and the new Turkish national state, they begin eliminating their minorities one by one by one.

Montefiore: That’s correct. And so, you know, in Turkey, for example what happens, the new Turkish state is really defined on what we would now call, in progressive parlance, an ethno-religious basis. In the sense that Turks were Ottoman subjects who spoke Turkish, lived in what was regarded as the Turkish heartland, and were Muslim. And people who were Christian could not be Turkish. So what we see today—and it started with Atatürk’s version of Turkishness, but his was secular and this is religious. So that’s exactly right. And so they drove out the Armenians who had challenged them and tried to carve out a state in the east, and then they turned on the Greeks.

And the Greeks—it was slightly a different story, because the Greeks had been promised a sort of new Byzantine Empire in what is now western Turkey. And the reason why they claimed that was because there were huge Greek Orthodox populations in western Turkey—that used to be called Ionia—that had been there for thousands of years, literally since the Trojan Wars. And they lived in cities like Smyrna, the great Greek city of Smyrna. And so now Greek armies arrived, backed by the British and the French—and this was an example of European interference in the region—they arrived to protect their own ancient local Greek populations, but also to increase their kingdom. The Greek kingdom, the Greek state. And there they encountered Atatürk and his new Turkish army.

And what ensued was a brutal nation-building war of ethnic purging, population swaps. Brutal, huge battles of regular armies. The armies in this were huge. They were 150,000 strong each in these major battles, with artillery, of course, and everything. So they were real World War I battles. But this is in 1922, and the Turks won these battles, and they then drove out, massacring and driving and deporting the Greek populations of what is now western Turkey. And in 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne, which involved Britain and Greece, the populations were swapped. So all the Muslims went to Turkey, all the Christians were expelled—

Frum: That sounds so antiseptic.

Montefiore: It’s not that antiseptic, because there were huge massacres.

Frum: It’s murder, it’s pillage, it’s people standing on docks. It’s cities on fire.

Montefiore: Yeah. It’s people jumping into docks and drowning. It’s burning cities. And at the heart of it is the inferno of Smyrna, which is one of the most apocalyptic urban demolitions of all time. And this creation of the Turkish nation is so important, because it explains what we’re seeing now in the rise of Turkey as a regional power. And it explains both the militaristic Turkish nationalism. It explains also the aspiration for much more influence, the grievance that they were diminished inside these borders agreed on in 1923, and the wish to expand and re-energize the Ottoman idea.

And that is what we’re seeing now with President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan.

Frum: Let me take you now to the Arabic-speaking countries, mostly Sunni, that are carved out of the Ottoman empire.

Now, Egypt was notionally part of the Ottoman empire in the 19th century. It was really an independent state with a lot of British influence, some French influence. Egypt remains a reasonably cosmopolitan place after the First World War with Greek minorities, Jewish minorities. Syria has more French influence. Lebanon has a lot of French influence. Palestine, which is reserved as a Jewish homeland, is a British mandate.

But there’s this new country of Iraq created, and it becomes kind of genocide central in the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Tell us about the history of Iraq from the end of the First World War to the advent of the Second World War.

Montefiore: Well, that’s right. But the Egypt you described was—and it’s hard to imagine now—but Egypt was the most cosmopolitan country in the Middle East. The fellahin, the lower, you know, the peasant class, were Arab, but the merchant classes were—as you said, David—Jewish, Lebanese, Greek, Italian. And they were large populations. The Jewish population was several hundred thousand just on its own, and they were the descendants of Jews who had been settled in Egypt by Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies, so they’d been there for millennia. And the wealth of Egypt depended on this mercantile class.

And then the ruling class, the landowners, were Turco-Circassians, who were the descendants of enslaved Christians who had been enslaved and kidnapped by the Ottomans and previous rulers from their villages. They were Christian children who’d been enlisted in the Ottoman or Mamluk armies, who had been stolen from their parents, who were probably murdered. And who had then been converted to Islam, manumitted, and then joined the army and founded these families, these dynasties. It’s just a fascinating story. And even in the 1920s, these people, the Turco-Circassians, were still owning and ruling Egypt. And the ruling kings of Egypt, as they became, were also Turco-Albanian dynasty, who didn’t even speak Arabic right into the 1930s, which is fascinating. So that’s Egypt.

And so you’re absolutely right that these are incredibly complicated because of Ottoman countries. When you come to Syria and Lebanon, these are also multiethnic, multi-sectarian countries—as they still are, which is why their rulers to this day are desperately struggling to make them work as single countries.

And the French mandate was for Greater Syria, which is now divided into Syria and Lebanon. But it’s just worth remembering how different these countries could have been. Because when one thinks of them as they were bound to be Syria and Lebanon, no, that isn’t how it worked at all. And that’s also true with Iraq. With Syria and Lebanon, the French were thinking about dividing it into five or six countries. And those countries were two Sunni ones in Aleppo and Damascus, and then a Druze one, an Alawite one at Latakia on the coast. And then they were going to devise a Christian Maronite country that the Christians would rule, who were the French allies in Lebanon. And in the end, they decided not to do this, but to divide it into two big countries: Syria and Lebanon.

So then we get to Iraq. Again, one thinks of Iraq as set, but Iraq was known to the allies as Mesopotamia—“the land between the rivers” in Greek. Iraq was an old Arab name for this region, but there’d never been a country called Iraq before, just as there’d never been a country called Lebanon or Syria or Jordan. And these countries were all drawn by the Western overlords, particularly Britain and France. And Iraq was just a combination of three provinces, or vilayets, put together by the British. And the vilayets were Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul. And Mosul is where the oil was, and that’s the Kurdish area. And there was a big question as to whether Mosul would be in Iraq or not. And that’s a pretty important detail, because it’s partly the Kurdish area; it’s where the oil is. And the Turks, who we were just discussing a minute ago, wanted Mosul and believed Mosul should be in Turkey. Now, that would have really changed the situation.

But the Western allies also wanted to create a state—not just for the Armenians that we were discussing, but for the Kurds. And the Kurds would have a state that was partly in what is now Turkey and partly in what is now Iraq. But that didn’t happen either, because the Kurds were betrayed by everybody. And talk about genocide; this is another genocide in the 1930s where Atatürk and the Turkish Republic bombed Kurdish revolts, destroyed Kurdish village, killed something like 40,000 to 50,000 using poison gas, bombing villages. And they crushed the Kurds for another generation.

In Iraq, they hoped to get Mosul or at least to prevent a Kurdish state being created. And in the end, the British were determined that Mosul would stay in the new country they’d created of Iraq. But as you said, David, Iraq was a multiethnic, multinational, multi-sectarian country. It had a small Shia majority, a barely Sunni minority. But that minority was very educated—was the landowners, was the civil servants. And it had been favored and empowered by the Turks, who were also Sunni.

And then there were huge minorities of Kurds, small Christian sects, the Chaldeans, and Assyrians. And when I say “small,” they were a million people, so they weren’t that tiny. Non-Muslim sects like the Yazidis and Turkmen and all sorts of other minorities. Assyrians who were Christian.

Frum: And Jews in Baghdad.

Montefiore: And Jews in Baghdad. And a third of Baghdad was Jewish. Yeah. And many of the great families there like the Sassoons, most famously, who later went to England and became the sort of richest family in England, basically. The Sassoons, “the Rothschilds of the East,” they were known as. They were an incredibly prosperous minority, and they dominated the city in many ways. And the most kind of privileged of them ran huge business empires and also served the Pashas who ran Baghdad and—

Frum: And between 1919 and 1942, there’s just attack after attack on each of these groups: on the Assyrian Christians, on the Kurds, on the Jews. And they are murdered and driven into exile.

Montefiore: That’s exactly what happened. One of the big outrages is in the early ’30s, when they turn on the Christian Assyrians and massacre them. The Assyrians flee the country. And it’s really the first sign in Iraq that these new nation-states created for the Arabs are actually contradicting the multiethnic kind of cosmopolitan nature of these regions, that had been, perhaps in some ways, at various moments—and one mustn’t generalize—better ruled by empires with capitals far away.

And so the climax for the Jews comes in 1941 with the Farhud, which is a terrifying pogrom. But in these pogroms against the Jews in 1941, influenced by specifically Nazi propaganda and perpetrated by a self-consciously Nazi-influenced militia, it was an episode more like October the 7, you know—where women were raped and then their bodies mutilated. Body parts were paraded through the town. And it really took place at an interesting moment when the British were about to retake Baghdad, and a pro-Nazi government was just in the process of being overthrown in 1941. And in that interim period, they decided they were going to get the Jews, and they went round the town marking the doors of every Jewish house. And so when the Farhud started, when the pogrom started, they knew exactly the houses, and they could see the mark on the door. Which is just a sort of chilling detail, isn’t it, David?

David Frum: Yeah. I want to bring now the story up to the present in our last few minutes.

One of the things I think that you will hear said a lot on modern university campuses by advocacy groups of various kinds is—they’ll tell the story of this Edenic Middle East before the Jews got there, before the Jews came to the state of Israel. And they will ask, Why aren’t the Jews comfortable to live in a multiethnic, multinational state with an Arab majority? What could possibly go wrong in such a situation? And I wanted to give people a tour of that. The story of the Middle East from the weakening of the Ottoman empire, as you say, in the late 19th century, beginning with the attacks on the Armenians, most bloodily in the 1890s and continuing, is: You either have a state, or you’re dead. Those are your choices in the Middle East.

Montefiore: That’s right, and that is one of the themes of the book. And one of the themes of the book is to confront all of these Edenic myths, which even a cursory look at the facts and the history will show you is entirely legendary and has never existed.

You know, it starts with the myth that the Ottoman empire was this kind of wonderful kumbaya, tolerant, poetry-spouting kind of a multicultural society. And that was never true. It was a conquest society built on the enslavement and kidnapping of Christian children.

This isn’t some sort of story, by the way. This is how the Ottoman empire, it was how it was so successful. This tribute of children—which the Ottoman empire took from Christian villages in the Caucasus, in the Crimea, in southern Ukraine, and also in the Balkans—was how it was provided with talented, energetic manpower.

And the women went into the harems. The boys went into the army or the civil service. And the women in the harems. The most lucky of them became queens. They became the wives of actual sultans. And Hürrem Sultan, known as Roxelana, for example, the blonde or red-haired Ukrainian girl—who incidentally was the most powerful Ukrainian in world history, I would argue—she became Suleiman the Magnificent’s wife, mother of his successor. And she was typical, but of the luckiest of those. But for the boys, they became soldiers. They were forcefully converted to Islam. Once they were about to become officers, they were manumitted—in other words, freed from slavery—and then they were able to work up the military. And they were the army of the Ottoman empire that conquered this vast empire from the borders of Libya all the way to the borders of Iran.

So that’s the first thing about the Ottoman empire. The second thing is: There was tolerance, provided you accepted the total supremacy of Islam and Sultan. And if you in any way challenged that political and religious supremacy, you were slaughtered. The history of the Ottoman empire is filled with massacres of minorities and Jews at regular intervals. And this goes on right into the 19th century, well before we get to the 1890s, where David started this discussion. But, you know, a typical example is in 1860; 25,000 Christians were massacred in Damascus in the 1860 event, which was one of the occurrences that brought the Western powers into the Ottoman empire. And we’ve seen how the Ottoman Empire ended, with a proto-Nazi genocide of entire races.

And then you get into the creation of these states. If we look into the second half of the 20th century—where Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, they all became independent—again, you see a similar pattern. Dictators from one sect or another protected and promoted their own group. Saddam Hussein, for example, protected the Sunni majority, even though he was from a very poor Tikriti peasant family, and brutally crushed the Shiites and the Kurds. And ultimately, to come back to your theme, this culminated in the attempted genocide of the Kurdish nation in Iraq.

So, again and again, we have this pattern where if you don’t have a state, you’re nothing. And if you do have a state, the only way to enforce it is with autocracy or with repression. And that is the process by which, in my book, you’ll see over a century and a quarter we go from this wonderful efflorescence of sects and ethnicities. You go to this bleaker and bleaker and bleaker environment, and the Christians virtually vanish. So that in 2000, like 25 years ago, you still had a million Christians in Iraq. After the Islamist insurgency during the Iraq War, now there are 115,000 Christians in Iraq. So 900,000 of them have gone.

So this is the picture.

Frum: And this process of consolidation also leads to economic and technological failure. So Egypt—the cosmopolitan Egypt you describe of the 19th century—there was a large stock market in Alexandria. Egypt was a food exporter. Cotton exporter.

Montefiore: Huge cotton industry.

Frum: A big, big destination for foreign investment. The Suez Canal. And then after the Second World War, Egypt, a newly nationalist, newly Arabized Egypt, expels its Greeks, Italians, Jews, of course. And imposes state control over the economy and becomes an ever-more poverty-stricken country, dependent evermore not on investment, but on aid.

Montefiore: That’s right.

Frum: That’s the story of every region. And this story is told as one that the West did to the Middle East, not as a story something the Middle East did to itself

Montefiore: Agree. That is one of the major themes of the book. And you do have to question whether the nation-state itself was—as an ideology, as a state architecture—suited to this region at all.

Frum: Well, let’s talk about one particular nation-state, which is the one that gets almost all the airtime, and that is the nation-state of Israel. Built over a century of gradual development, created by a vote of the United Nations in 1947. In 1947, there is a war of independence. The Arab population is pushed out of what will become Israel, or chooses to leave. In some cases leaves voluntarily. And then Jewish populations all over the rest of the Middle East are expelled in hundreds of thousands, and come to Israel. And a nation-state is built there that is actually economically capable, technologically capable, militarily capable. And this becomes the last and most intolerable provocation, that there is one nation-state that actually is suited to the region when other nation-states don’t work.

Montefiore: That’s right. And also, I mean, there are other ways to look at Israel. I mean, one way to look at it—I look at the creation of Israel as very much just one of the states created out of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and out of the end of the British Empire too. But you know—the real comparison is, it’s very like the creation of Turkey, which is only 20 years earlier. Where you have a new concept of a new nation created with ethnic and religious characteristics, a newly defined language, and a brutal ethnic war. A competition with another people who are also indigenous to the region, in which many of them are expelled.

Frum: This is Turks versus Greeks, compared to Jews versus Arabs.

Montefiore: Yeah. And it’s very similar. Out of it comes a nation that is extremely proud, extremely competent, extremely dynamic, militaristic to some extent. And there are huge population swaps to make all this work. And out of it comes Turkey. Though Turkey remains with a massive ethnic population that doesn’t want to be in Turkey—the Kurds—and that leads to something like 100,000 civilians being killed over the next century. So does it sound like anywhere?

Frum: Yeah. Well, you don’t have the Kingdom of Greece, or now the Republic of Greece, sponsoring endless terrorist attacks on Turkey.

Montefiore: No. But you do have—

Frum: And saying that Turkey has no right to exist, and it should all be Greece.

Montefiore: No, and that’s one of the huge differences. No one criticizes, no one says it’s disgusting. What, you know—what is Turkish nationalism? Why should the Turks have nationalism? You know, it’s only Israeli nationalism that is constantly challenged. So, but that’s part of it.

And the other country that’s very similar—but none of these countries are the same, but there are strong parallels—and the other one is, of course, the creation of Pakistan. Which has huge similarities, and is almost simultaneous with the creation of Israel in 1947. The difference between all three of these, one major difference, is how small the war was in 1948—the Nakba War, or the War of Independence, the War of Israeli Independence was. In Pakistan and India, the loss of life and the scale of deportation and displacement was just colossal. Obviously, India is huge, and there were 1 to 3 million people killed in that process. There were 12 to 14 million people displaced.

And out of it came Pakistan—which, again, is an ethno-religious creation which had never existed before, ever, in history, as a result of a new nationalism. And out of it comes, again, not a democracy, but a new sort of nationalism with religious characteristics, a strong military ethos, and huge swaths of population.

So the creation of Israel isn’t completely unique, is what I’m saying.

Frum: Well, there’s one difference between the creation of Turkey, the creation of Pakistan, and the creation of Israel—that the creation of Israel is the one example that involves a uniquely despised people in the region. The product of exile from other regions, actually now turning out to be quite a successful state. So there’s not just all the things you describe—all the carnage, all the movements of population—but there’s an element of humiliation that is ineradicable. These are the people who are supposed to be absolutely at the bottom of the regional hierarchy.

Montefiore: The other half of the parallel would be to the Armenians. But what was different with the Armenians was, the Armenians were much smaller number. Such was the genocide against them that they didn’t recover enough ever to gather the strength to create the states that they were promised. While the Jews did recover from the Holocaust, which they endured, and they did manage to create a state.

So there are fascinating parallels here, which I know we don’t have time to go into in detail. But this is so interesting to talk about this.

Frum: I want to touch on one last thing. Which is in this discussion, we have used the words genocide over and over again, and we’ve used them to describe very large-scale killing involving the elimination or near-elimination, and followed by expulsion of large numbers of people. Organized according to ideological programs, with a view of elimination. And they are practiced by the Ottomans; they are practiced by the Turkish successors to the Ottomans; they are practiced by the Arab-states successors to the Ottomans, especially Iraq. The genocide that everyone talks about, imagines they know about, is the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. That did not involve this scale of killing; that did not involve any kinds of expulsions and that leaves Gaza physically damaged, but its people still alive and in place.

And maybe it’s just a gap in what we know. We don’t like to read history. It’s about old people. We don’t like to read about other countries. They don’t speak English. It involves books and not short-form videos. So there’s a lot about this that is off-putting to the modern consumer. But there is something strange about the willingness to remember, to imagine one genocide that didn’t happen and to forget all the genocides that did

Montefiore: That’s right. When I think of the word genocide I think that, as a historian, my duty is not to forget the millions of people killed in these successive genocides in the Middle East that I cover in The Cauldron. And this really starts with the million Armenians. But it goes on all the way through—and we’ve touched on some of those stories—the Maronite Christians, the Pontic Greeks, the Ionian Greeks, and all the way through to the Yazidis under the ISIS terror in our very recent history. Saddam Hussein’s killing of the Kurds and using of poison gas to try and exterminate the Kurds.

So I think we have an absolute duty to honor these people, and any degradation of the term genocide, which is a special word morally, historically, and legally—anything that degrades the experience of those people is an insult to the memory of these people who must be remembered. And it is our duty to remember them. And nowadays, I think the word has been so degraded; it’s just become a hyperbolic, ideological insult that has become meaningless and is used as much to describe a brutal war in Gaza as it is to describe the blockade of Cuba, for example. And it’s just become a word that we use to describe a bad war or something we don’t like, and that is an insult to the peoples who faced the real genocides in the Middle East, which are chronicled in this book.

Frum: Well, it could be a little more sinister than that. Because if your national program, if your ideological program, requires the forgetting of what was done to the Armenians, to the Assyrians, to the Kurds—if that has to be obliterated—then you want to devalue the word. And a great way to devalue a word is to apply it to things that didn’t happen. And that not only indicts the people you want to indict, in this case the Israelis, but it absolves the people who implicitly want to be absolved. And it buries a memory that many people want buried.

Frum: Simon, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Montefiore: Thank you so much for having me, David.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Simon Sebag Montefiore for joining me today for that fascinating discussion. As mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is The Hidden Hand, by Warren Kinsella, [subtitled] The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda, just published. Warren Kinsella is a prominent Canadian journalist, active for many years in Canadian party politics.

He’s a close associate of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. He has become passionately involved in recent years in Canada in the debate over the state of Israel and its detractors. Kinsella is very much a shoe-leather journalist. He’s not interested in big theories. He’s interested in getting to the bottom of stories. And The Hidden Hand is his attempt to take his microphone place by place and understand how is it that you have seen this extraordinary surge of anti-Semitic propaganda on the new social media.

His big thesis is that this surge is not an organic phenomenon. It’s not that thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of separate people all over the planet have spontaneously and individually decided to turn their social-media feeds into attacks on the state of Israel. But rather that something is happening here driven by political actors, many of them foreign, but even more worryingly, driven by the nature of social media itself. The algorithm here is taking on a kind of mind of its own, and we are all becoming the algorithm’s captives, and our brain functions are becoming its product.

We are moving into a world—and this is a theme I’ve often stressed in these book talks—that is less committed to the word and more to the image. Less committed to rational thought; more committed to emotional action, to emotional response. And therefore more susceptible to manipulation, both by people who want to manipulate and by machines that exist simply to cultivate engagement and to get people to feel anger and upset as a way to maximize engagement.

We are building a political culture that is anti-rational, and anti-rational cultures are cultures that are very prone to conspiracy theories, which function as a kind of pseudo-rationality. They seem to explain the world even though they really don’t. And when you become connected to conspiracy theories, at the bottom of all conspiracy theories is the master conspiracy theory about the Jews.

The Jews form an important part of the consciousness of ancient myths of Christianity, the killers of Christ; ancient myths of Islam, to deny that the people in the Bible were actually Muslims all along, and the Jews then falsely claim that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and so on were Jews when they were in fact Muslims all along, and so the Jews are falsifiers of their own scripture. And Jews also play an important part in the conspiracy theories of the third great Western religion, Marxism, where Jews are the people who are the ultimate expressions of the false consciousness: the attempt to hold onto religious and national identity instead of the true identity that Marxism wishes us all to embrace, the identity of class.

As the target of all three of these kinds of conspiracy theories—in a time when conspiracy theories are emancipated and run wild—well, naturally the Jews occupy an enormous part in the consciousness of the conspirator. And in the images that you see on social media formed to buy and to win appeal, win audience from people prone to conspiracy theories.

That’s Kinsella’s story. It’s a very disturbing one, and I recommend the book to people who want to understand what is happening and begin the work of understanding why and what to do about it.

That’s it for this week’s David Frum Show. Thanks so much for watching or listening. Hope to see you again next week. Remember, the best way to support this program and all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you will consider doing that. Share, like, and subscribe to this show on whatever platform you use. See you next week. Bye-bye.

[Music]

The Knives Are Out for Bill Belichick

2026-09-16T10:25:00-04:00

Ever since Bill Belichick, that aging football Caesar, arrived at the University of North Carolina roughly two years ago with his eight Super Bowl rings, the knives have been out. He is one of the greatest coaches in NFL history, but his hiring was controversial: Despite no experience leading a college team, he was given a five-year, $50 million contract—$30 million of it guaranteed—to vitalize a dowdy old southern program and lift it to championship level. From the beginning, he has been fighting a two-front battle: one on the field, and another against internal opponents, a contingent of powerful Carolina traditionalists who never wanted him there, resent his outsize presence, and wish UNC to remain a quaint, basketball-first school. “It is an internal civil war,” John Preyer, the former chair of UNC’s board of trustees, who helped hire Belichick, told me.

For several weeks now, Belichick’s program has been the subject of a messy, reputation-threatening internal investigation, even as his team shows promising signs in early competition. On August 5, UNC announced that it had hired outside attorneys to help with an evaluation of a personnel complaint against Belichick’s general manager, Michael Lombardi. That has since grown into a sprawling, open-ended probe of Belichick’s entire office culture, with unsavory lines of questioning. One person interviewed by the lawyers who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation told me they were asked whether they thought anyone drank on the job. The person said they were also asked about staffers’ sexual relationships, and about possible drug use by Belichick’s son Steve, who serves as his defensive coordinator but is currently on indefinite medical leave for unstated reasons. (I was not able to reach Steve Belichick for comment.) His father said at a press conference last week, “I love all my kids but I’m not going to comment on a medical situation.”

[Read: The quiet desperation of Tom Brady]

Lombardi, whose attorney has denied that his client committed any wrongdoing, resigned on September 3, but the university announced that the investigation would continue anyway. What the school did not announce was that two of the attorneys engaged by the university to investigate Belichick’s program, Nate Huff and McNair Nichols, are the subjects of whistleblower complaints over a separate investigation into the university’s School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL).

In that matter, two faculty members have accused university leadership of using the lawyers as company men rather than impartial evaluators, and of tailoring the investigation’s scope, despite promising an “independent review.” According to billing documents from the SCiLL investigation that I obtained, Huff and Nichols took “instructions” from top UNC administrators. “Review strategy in light of instructions from client,” one billing memo read. Another read, “Develop new investigation timeline and strategy to comply with client instructions.” Eventually, the lawyers produced a 400-page report that UNC then refused to make public.

Internal investigations are not unusual, of course. All kinds of institutions conduct them into a wide array of personnel scandals—real and perceived—all of the time. Yet multiple people at UNC told me that there is reason to doubt the intentions and objectivity of the Belichick inquiry. Dustin Sebell, a SCiLL professor of the history of political thought who has filed a formal wrongful-conduct complaint with the university over the SCiLL investigation, told me in an email that the Belichick probe has an “eerie similarity” to what he experienced. Sebell said that he participated in the SCiLL investigation based on assurances from university administrators about its independence and objectivity—assurances, he wrote in his complaint, that turned out to be “false.” Another SCiLL faculty member has filed a complaint on similar grounds.

When I asked Sebell whether he thinks Belichick can expect a fair and independent review, he responded, “If history is any guide, the University is now asking for a trust it forfeited the last time around.” UNC’s vice chancellor for communications, Dean Stoyer, told me of the Belichick investigation, “I can confidently say that it has been managed independently. I can tell you that it is thorough and ongoing.” Huff replied to questions about his and Nichols’s independence by saying, “We cannot discuss any of the work we do for our clients.”

Belichick was hired in 2024 over the objections of the athletic director at the time, Bubba Cunningham, who favored younger, likely cheaper, candidates. Cunningham was overruled by Chancellor Lee Roberts and members of a search committee who wanted an electrifying hire to uplift a football program that had long been an also-ran. Cunningham, an eminence who served as the chair of the NCAA men’s basketball-tournament selection committee, has since stepped down as athletic director, but he remains a powerful figure on campus, with the title of senior adviser to the chancellor and athletic director. Although he outwardly accepted Belichick’s hiring, several people told me that he has never been happy about it. Neither have others who see Belichick as encroaching on their personal power or resources. Cunningham did not respond to a request for comment.

[Read: The man who broke physics]

For 24 seasons with the New England Patriots, Belichick exercised dictatorial control. In his negotiations with Carolina, he extracted promises of autonomy over his program and more money for acquiring players and paying staff salaries. Around the time Belichick was hired, the school also said it would i ncrease its spending on football by millions, upgrade its football facilities, and build a virtual-reality training system for quarterbacks. This has been a threat to old-guard donors who feel disenfranchised, and others who want Carolina to remain focused on basketball, in the tradition built by Dean Smith—the late, legendary basketball coach with a reputation for modest virtue. “Dean is Banquo’s ghost,” Preyer told me, summoning Macbeth—a spirit haunting the athletic department. It didn’t help that Belichick’s first season ended with just four wins in 12 games, and that his personal life has regularly been in the tabloids.

It is possible that Belichick presides over an unruly office that requires broad scrutiny, and that real wrongdoing has taken place. But his football team looks improved this season thanks in part to the way he’s instilled in his players a quality he’s well-known for: discipline. A team that lost by 34 points to Texas Christian University last year beat the same opponent in this year’s opener 15–10 with a superbly controlled display. The team won again on Saturday, 35–3, against East Tennessee State University. But its real test lies in the coming weeks, as it enters Athletic Coast Conference play, with games against Clemson, Notre Dame, and Miami—of which the latter two are ranked in the top five nationally. Asked last week in a press conference if he is in “control” of his program—much of his time with reporters was consumed by questions about the investigation—Belichick answered curtly in the affirmative: “If you’re around here every day, I think you’d see it.” He also said, “We want to run the program in the very best way. And if there’s things we need to do to correct it, then we’ll obviously do them.”

One source with knowledge of the inquiry who asked not to be named because of their position with the university told me that Lombardi was found to have made a handful of minor NCAA-rules violations. One example: allowing recruits to have their picture taken on the field. The source said that taken as a whole, the violations were “not of the nature that would necessitate firing”—but Lombardi, a brusque New Jersey native, had alienated high-dollar donors and athletic-department officials with his way of getting things done. A friend and longtime associate of Belichick’s, Lombardi had been earning $1.5 million a year at UNC, making him the highest-paid general manager in college football, despite not having worked in college athletics since 1984.

[Read: Fifty years after history’s most brutal boxing match]

Stoyer, the UNC vice chancellor for communications, did not elaborate on the state of the investigation, or when it might conclude. Through a spokesperson, Belichick declined my requests for comment. For the time being, he will continue coaching under an ugly cloud. Last week the local Raleigh TV station WRAL reported that one line of questions had to do with whether a woman on the recruiting staff had a relationship with a player. Lombardi’s lawyer also said publicly that Huff and Nichols were digging into “inappropriate relationships,” but that his client was not aware of any. Nevertheless, a social-media account for the site Polymarket Football picked up the story and ran with it, posting pictures of multiple female UNC athletic staffers on X along with baseless speculation about whether they’d had inappropriate relationships with players. (The post has since been deleted.) “Anyone associated with Chapel Hill right now is a black cat,” the source who was interviewed for the investigation told me. The syndicated radio-show host Jim Rome had a particularly brutal take, accusing Belichick of turning Carolina into “some kind of crackhouse, or brothel, or both, allegedly.”

Some problems in Carolina football surely exist. Every major football program struggles with how to supervise more than 100 athletes in various stages of maturity, many with car keys and access to marijuana and alcohol. Human-resources issues are also common among overworked, pressure-cooked staff looking for release. But the broad, indiscreet nature of this inquiry—“a puppet investigation,” in the words of the source with knowledge of the inquiry—makes getting to the truth difficult. It’s hard to know what is of substance and what is noise. It’s also hard to know what’s really driving this mess: actual wrongdoing; plain infighting; or possibly an attempt by the university to avoid paying out the remaining guaranteed money on Belichick’s contract, should the school decide to fire him.

The Belichick experiment is a fascinating one. The question when he started was: Can a 74-year-old legend known for his stoniness and uncompromising need for control transfer his expertise to unformed young athletes on a campus rampant with doubters and dissenters? Now the question seems to be whether he will have a chance to succeed or fail on the merits.

Pennsylvania’s Measles Outbreak Is Enormous

2026-09-16T10:01:44-04:00

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Following America’s recent measles deaths, anti-vaccine activists have cast doubt on the virus as the culprit. They’ve pointed to a victim’s underlying health conditions or, as they did last year in Texas, blamed hospital error. But the two latest measles deaths in Pennsylvania—bringing the state’s total to four since mid-August—have made the United States’ measles crisis undeniable.

Last month, the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced two measles-associated deaths; both cases were later revealed to be infants too young to have been vaccinated. In response, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who was an anti-vaccine activist for decades before becoming health secretary—wrote on X that the deaths might have been “altogether fabricated.” (He later acknowledged a coroner’s conclusion that one of the deaths had been caused by measles.) Then, last weekend, an unvaccinated 40-year-old woman died in Jefferson County; immediately, people on Reddit and X insisted that her death wasn’t really caused by measles, because she’d had asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, both of which can make breathing difficult. Yesterday, state officials revealed that an unvaccinated 18-year-old died from a rare inflammatory condition of the brain and spinal cord that can be triggered by measles. Some commenters online deemed that death suspicious too.

What the armchair epidemiologists miss is that vulnerability to the infection doesn’t make a death less real. The two infants both tested positive for measles. The Lancaster County coroner’s office determined that one infant died of a ruptured spleen; however, when I spoke with that child’s parents, they told me that the mother had been extremely ill with the disease when she gave birth, the baby was not breathing when he was born, and they believed measles had killed their son. The other infant was born with a rare neurological condition, but the coroner found that measles was ultimately the cause of death. Greg Furlong, the Jefferson County coroner who investigated the 40-year-old woman’s death, told me that although the woman had conditions that made her vulnerable to measles, and was on supplemental oxygen, she was active before she contracted the virus. She cooked for her family and cleaned the house. Measles killed her in about a week. “If she wouldn’t have got the measles, would she still be alive today? I say yes,” Furlong, a Republican who is also the mayor of Summerville, said.

[Read: The measles-stricken mother who lost her newborn son]

Four deaths in roughly four weeks suggest that the state is in the midst of an enormous outbreak. The Pennsylvania health department lists total cases at 693, with 99 in the past week. But considering that measles kills about one to three of every 1,000 children it infects, the actual number is likely much larger. Milder cases are going unreported. Many who fall ill, particularly in the Amish community, aren’t getting tested; the Amish parents of the infant who died with a ruptured spleen told me that their 13 living children had all caught the virus, but they never got swabbed.

These deaths are occurring after three unvaccinated people, including two young girls, died of measles in Texas and New Mexico last year. Those were the first measles deaths in the country in a decade. The last time the United States experienced four measles deaths in a calendar year was in 1992, at the tail end of a years-long outbreak that killed more than 100 Americans. That resurgence led to a recommendation that children receive two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and prompted a nationwide push to increase vaccination rates. It worked, and measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. But overall kindergarten vaccination rates started declining during the coronavirus pandemic, and some areas, including Lancaster County, have fallen well below the 95 percent needed to maintain herd immunity.

Now, in the face of a new increase in measles deaths, Kennedy appears more interested in scoring political points than boosting national vaccination rates. He has accused Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, of “the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain”; Shapiro, in turn, charged Kennedy with “playing games with public health” after the CDC declined to update its measles statistics to include the deaths in his state. Kennedy’s stated reason for the omission is that the agency is “applying a consistent national standard.” But the delay marks a shift in policy: Last year, the CDC counted both Texas girls’ deaths and the death of the adult in New Mexico after the states announced them. (In a post on X, Kennedy wrote that the National Center for Health Statistics will determine if measles is the true cause of the deaths in Pennsylvania after examining death records; a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions about that investigation. In a statement, Pennsylvania’s health department said that its investigation had determined that all four deaths met the criteria for measles-associated fatalities.)

Tomorrow, Kennedy is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the annual conference for Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization that he founded before becoming health secretary. Children’s Health Defense has a long history of ginning up fears about the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella while downplaying the seriousness of the diseases. Kennedy does, too. In July 2021, Kennedy told attendees at an Amish country fair in Pennsylvania, “The cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A.” In fact, no known cure for measles exists; vitamin A has shown some promise in people with severe vitamin A deficiency, which is exceedingly rare in the United States. Since becoming health secretary, he has stated publicly that vaccination is “the most effective way to prevent measles infection,” but as I’ve reported, he also undercut that message by telling the father of a girl who died in West Texas that “you don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore.” Kennedy has been a stronger advocate for measles itself, which he’s falsely credited with boosting resistance to cancer and cardiac disease, than he has for the vaccine that prevents it.

[Read: What RFK Jr. told grieving Texas families about the measles vaccine]

As cases and deaths rise, the reality becomes harder to ignore: Measles, a disease the country seemingly overcame 30 years ago, is once again killing Americans.

Destroying Humanity Is Against the Law

2026-09-16T09:38:00-04:00

This weekend, the AI executives Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei agreed with the need to slow the pace of AI development. In light of the potentially apocalyptic capabilities of the products they have created, the AI titans would like a little more time to figure out how to safeguard the systems they have been rushing to build.

A smattering of employees throughout the industry have quit their jobs and expressed alarm over the rapidly evolving technology. One Anthropic researcher claimed recently that there is a greater than 10 percent chance that AI could “kill all humans,” aggravating fears created by recent incidents in which OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models reportedly hacked into other companies. OpenAI recently revealed that some of its own models colluded for months to break into and steal information from Hugging Face, a website that offers tools for AI developers.

But surely the job of addressing the perils of AI shouldn’t be left to executives who stand to earn billions from the technology. Ideally, the federal government would regulate these companies, creating the guardrails necessary for the industry to operate safely. Short of that, some tools to address the harms from AI already exist: States have civil and criminal laws against conduct that threatens the security of life and property, and against commercial products that pose a danger to consumers. This includes new technology, as Meta’s recent $17 billion settlement over claims its products harm children makes clear. The work now before prosecutors and enforcement agencies is to create a precedent for holding AI companies responsible for what their models do.

Prosecutors should hold AI companies legally accountable for creating models that behave in ways that would be obviously unlawful if committed by a human being: hacking into banks to steal funds, impersonating a human to harvest sensitive personal data, breaking into an air-traffic-control system. By imposing legal penalties on AI developers for relatively modest offenses, prosecutors will force these firms to internalize the legal risk of more dramatic and dangerous crimes. In an essay posted online Saturday, Amodei proposed that every major AI firm collaborate on common safety practices and allow third-party agents to monitor compliance. In theory, the threat of prosecution and other legal sanctions could hinder companies from coming clean about how their models are trained and where they go wrong. But ultimately, oversight won’t prove effective if AI companies bear no legal responsibility for what their models do in the world.

[Will Oremus: AI’s code-red moment]

The rapid development of AI has caused widespread speculation about what will happen when the technology “goes rogue.” This metaphor should be retired, because it implies that the companies and individuals that build and deploy these models aren’t culpable for building products that are supposedly too smart to control. Dealing with autonomous technology may be unprecedented, but creating a product that might “kill us all by the end of the decade,” as a former Anthropic employee has warned, surely qualifies as a criminally negligent harm.

Skeptics may wonder whether AI CEOs are expressing apocalyptic concerns as a backhanded way of boasting about the colossal power of their technology. The companies’ behavior on a variety of fronts does not indicate that humanity’s safety is their top concern. Some AI executives in the United States have donated millions of dollars to benefit President Trump, who has largely dismissed concerns about AI safety and has already said that he has no intention of stepping in. The Anthropic CEO’s essay praised his own company for prioritizing “prudence over profit”—and yet he is steering it toward what may be the biggest IPO in history.

[Toluse Olorunnipa: AI is running laps around our political system]

AI firms will resist efforts to use the legal system to constrain their conduct. An OpenAI lawyer recently argued that “post-hoc law enforcement is a terrible tool” to manage the potential harms of generative AI. This would certainly be true in the case of a mass-extinction event, if no one is left to file charges. But despite what seems like an alarming consensus about the stakes of AI, the CEOs appear to be calling for some unenforceable “code of conduct” and a slower pace for developing the technology, whatever that means. If the dangers they are warning about are indeed real, then our criminal statutes should ensure that the offenders can be prosecuted. Given that vague threats about the perils of AI have not yielded meaningful changes in how these companies behave, perhaps the prospect of prison time will spur AI companies to take safety precautions more seriously.

“There’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books,” Lina Khan, the former head of the Federal Trade Commission, recently noted. Criminal prosecutions have occurred after oil spills, airline disasters, and toxic-waste dumps. The criminal liability was obvious in those instances. AI companies deserve no special treatment.

When AI executives warn of a catastrophe, they are not describing a product that is “going rogue.” Rather, the product is using capabilities that they have created. And if this product behaves negligently or criminally, its creators should face the consequences.

An Ingredient That’s All Too Rare in Adult Life

2026-09-16T09:00:00-04:00

Silliness, in general, is not hard for me to come by: I have a toddler who is, as she declares often, a “silly person.” Still, the very pleasure I take in being silly with my child and her friends reveals to me its rarity in adult public life. Few social situations encourage or even allow unadulterated loopiness. In general, art made for adults tends to abide by this taboo. We get satire, scatological jokes, imitations, and absurdity, but rarely do we get silliness.

A new play, Bocking, reminds us that this is a mistake. A wild, sometimes surreal, and ultimately tenderhearted farce that premiered last month at Baltimore Center Stage, Bocking does not suggest at the outset that it will be silly.

It does, however, seem interested in provocation. It begins with a pair of glamorously behatted ladies moving through the crowd, thanking theatergoers for “coming to church.” When the show’s action begins, some of it is, indeed, a church service—but as a pastor delivers at the center of the stage a sermon that turns more and more homophobic, two other characters, a cisgender man and his trans wife, begin to have raucous sex at stage right. It’s a good bit, and it drew uproarious laughs the night I saw the play. In most regards, the scene sets up the show’s concerns well, if rather transparently: Bocking’s author, the young playwright Preston Crowder, wants to teach his religious characters some lessons about acceptance and sex positivity.

The show’s comedy tends to cater to a crowd that already agrees with its message. But Bocking has one scene that I found fairly transcendent—one that was not just dirty or gasp-inducing but was also silly to its very core. It’s also the best scene in the play.

The moment builds on Bocking’s oddest plotline: One of the characters, an anxious school guidance counselor named Erickson, suffered an unusual childhood trauma. When he was 8, he and his mother caught his stepfather having sex with—stick with me here—a hen. (Animal-rights activists may object to the levity with which this is portrayed; other people may be reminded of the Swedish Chef.) Erickson’s grief-stricken mother then attempted to turn into a hen herself, an event that the play shows as a descent into madness rather than a true transformation. Still, years after her death, the adult Erickson communes with her by “bocking”—that is, speaking in chicken.

For much of the play, he does so in private, which registers to the audience as an inexplicable subplot. But when the pastor’s wife, Tiana, visits him to express her marital woes, she winds up extracting the secret of his chicken talk from him—and then demands to give it a try. At first, Erickson is reluctant, but soon, the two begin bocking together. As dialogue, the exchange that follows is incomprehensible. As a moment of human connection, it’s undeniable. And as sheer silliness—not spectacle or satire like the rest of the play—it beats almost any recent piece of art I’ve heard, read, or seen.

[Read: What adults forget about friendship]

Crowder understands, clearly, that silliness is a vehicle for catharsis. By behaving ridiculously with each other, Tiana and Erickson get respite from their isolation and their troubles. In watching them behave ridiculously, the audience gets a break from the show’s moralizing and can, instead, connect directly to the characters’ emotions. As a result, the scene deepens the rest of the show.

Sketch comedy is typically the most frequent source of silliness in art and culture: Saturday Night Live is often silly, and in my view no one has ever been sillier on camera than the comedians of the legendary British sketch group Monty Python. Plenty of the Pythons’ work is satirical—consider their send-ups of English sexual repression—but what sets their comedy apart for me is their willingness to be purely silly. In the beginning of their sketch “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” a bowler-hatted, briefcase-carrying John Cleese, his back beautifully straight, gavottes down a London street. Viewers don’t know why he’s moving so ludicrously; it doesn’t matter. His silly walk undermines not only his dignified wardrobe but also the very idea of a professional persona. Just by changing his gait to something ridiculous, Cleese gives his audience a moment of release from the entire world of work.

[Read: The Beatles of comedy]

But sketch comedy, even when it has recurring characters, cannot develop those characters in the way a full-length work can. Its silliness, therefore, cannot have the emotional impact of the chicken-talk scene in Bocking, or the hot-dogs-as-fingers segment in the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. One of that film’s many interwoven strands involves an alternate universe in which the characters played by Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis move through their days, experiencing life and love, with frankfurters for fingers. It’s a ridiculous conceit, pointless except to force a visceral sense of frustration, followed by acceptance, into their scenes together—which it does quite well, just as Tiana and Erickson’s bocking creates a visceral sense of relief. Silliness, in both cases, circumvents cerebral experience.

No other means of getting a laugh goes so directly to the heart. Real silliness—serious silliness, if you will—lands in a sweet spot between the intellectualism of satire and the visual heft of spectacle. It strips away layers of adult logic, convention, and pretense, delivering grown-ups to the instinctive knowledge that toddlers possess: Work clothes are just costumes. Maneuvering a body through the world is both annoying and a cosmic joke. And communication, as Bocking so well demonstrates, often isn’t really about what gets said. Reasonably, this is tough for many writers, verbal creatures that we are, to admit, but in times of real emotional duress, words are rarely what counts. What matters are the feelings that lie underneath.

The Artist Who Ripped Up the Rules of Drawing

2026-09-16T07:30:00-04:00

Most retrospectives unfold like a stately procession. You buy your ticket and proceed through a choreographed sequence of galleries, scrutinizing first the juvenilia, then the promising early work. Next come the triumphal years, and finally (if the artist was lucky) a poignant late phase. An idea of timelessness prevails, enhanced by an enveloping atmosphere of climate control, security, and massive insurance coverage. The lighting is good; the frames are tasteful. Everything looks marvelous.

There’s not a whiff of the urgency of the studio, no hint of the emotional or psychological state in which these objects were made. Lost is any suggestion of that feeling, deep inside the creator, of an improvised, inner necessity.

“Willem de Kooning Drawing,” at the Art Institute of Chicago, is a classic retrospective—a decorous, deeply researched exhibition about a much-lauded artist at a major museum. In another, more robust sense, however, the show is a giant debauch. It’s frankly (and thrillingly) unseemly. I’ve never been to an art show that takes you so far inside the creative process. You start to wonder if you should even be permitted to get so close.

Photo by Harry Bowden

Willem de Kooning sitting with charcoal drawings scattered on the floor in his studio at 85 Fourth Avenue, New York, 1946.

“Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure,” De Kooning once said. “I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity.” This show, more than any other De Kooning exhibit I’ve seen, delivers on the spirit of that oft-quoted statement. De Kooning, arguably the most widely revered of America’s 20th-century avant-garde artists, took the language of drawing, ripped it up, and rearranged it. Put that way, what he did sounds rebellious. It sounds punk. The exhibition, which will travel to the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, in early October, embraces that spirit. But it has a more conservative purpose, which is to demonstrate that you can’t rip up art’s language effectively—or interestingly—without first really knowing it.

De Kooning knew, from long study, how to draw contours. He knew how to create volume using gradations in tone or marks that move in certain ways, how to apply ink or paint with varying degrees of pressure and velocity, and how to employ color relations to suggest depth. Before you can throw all that technique up in the air and have it land again, you need to have the tools.

De Kooning was both the best draftsman and the most lavishly gifted painter of the generation of postwar artists (among them Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, and Helen Frankenthaler) who helped move the art world’s center of gravity from Paris to New York. Born in the Netherlands in 1904, he trained, from the age of 13, as a commercial artist at the Rotterdam Academy of Visual Arts and Technical Sciences while apprenticing with a design firm.

The show kicks off with a large drawing, Dish With Jugs, that De Kooning made at the academy. Working in charcoal and conté crayon two days a week for an entire year—600 hours—the young student achieved a remarkable level of photographic verisimilitude in the still life. As one of the exhibit’s curators, Kevin Salatino, writes of De Kooning’s trajectory in an introductory essay for the show’s catalog, the drawing became “the archetype of what he would forcibly reject while retaining the learned skills the work so brilliantly exemplifies, only now putting them to radically different purposes.”

The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Willem de Kooning, Dish With Jugs, about 1919–21. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Van Day Truex Fund, 1983, 1983.436.

That De Kooning could draw like Ingres (or like Picasso during his Ingres-inspired period, from roughly 1917 to 1925) is amply demonstrated by other early works in the show, such as his adoring, fastidiously controlled pencil portrait of Elaine Fried, a fellow artist and his future wife. But, like a libertine desiring undiscovered pleasures, his appetite for new sensations only seemed to grow with time.

Drawing has long been regarded as an intellectual activity, something generated, above all, by the mind, with its capacity for conceiving, imagining, and mandating. (You draw to design buildings and invent machines; you “draw up” battle plans and national borders.) “Drawing, as a way of thinking,” Salatino notes of De Kooning, “lay at the core of his practice, the root of everything.”

But is it thought, as such, that we’re seeing in De Kooning’s drawings? The critic Peter Schjeldahl, who knew the artist, described him as “a hand with a man attached.” If you can attribute thought to a hand—and I’m willing to admit that you can, but it surely isn’t rational—then this show is indeed a record of thinking. But it may be better described as the record of some more mysterious melting of mind into body.

The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning, Woman, 1951. Private collection.

The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950–52. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase, 478.1953.

De Kooning came to America as a stowaway in 1926. Residing first in Hoboken, New Jersey, for less than a year before settling in New York City, he remained without legal status for the next 35 years. During an extended period of hard graft as a house-and-sign painter, a window dresser, a show-card letterer, and an advertising-layout man, he encountered various avant-garde artists, including Arshile Gorky, who became a close friend. Under the Armenian American painter’s influence, he gradually shifted his focus from commercial art to modernist fine art, experimenting with different styles derived from Picasso, Miró, and Matisse.

[Read: The painter who shaped Rothko]

Even when ostensibly abstract, De Kooning’s work was populated by bobbling fragments of body parts. He conveyed these with his characteristic wobbling contours and flesh-textured paint. “Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash,” he once said. “It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.” He proceeded in the studio intuitively, precipitously, as if wanting to catch his subjects unawares.

De Kooning had his first solo show in 1948. He broke through to widespread acclaim in 1950 with Excavation, a painting he labored over for many weeks, using a process of patient buildup and repeated erasure. At almost seven feet high and more than eight feet wide, Excavation was the largest canvas he’d ever worked on. (The following year, it was awarded a prize by the Art Institute of Chicago, which subsequently acquired it.) The work was initially inspired by scenes from an Italian movie, Bitter Rice, an art-house hit in Greenwich Village that year, showing young peasant women working in water-soaked fields. But over time, the bodies dissolved into their surroundings and the pictorial space flattened out into a scrim of fleetingly seen forms with hooked and curving contours that push forward from the surface or twist back into shallow space.

The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Pierre Le Hors.

Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, about 1940–41. Collection of Clare Stone.

If, in its genesis, the work recalled Picasso’s proto-cubist breakthrough, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—the Spaniard’s 1907 painting of five naked women in a brothel—it also pointed the way to what would become a more explicit, and enduring, obsession for De Kooning: depictions of women, wobbly-edged, many of them leering or aggressive, disintegrating before our eyes into a welter of ambient marks. Inspired by prehistoric figurines of such powerful female divinities as the Venus of Willendorf, and by depictions of women by Rubens and Picasso—and riffing, too, on female figures in contemporary cartoons, movies, and magazine advertisements—De Kooning’s women take up a hefty portion of the show.

The critic Harold Rosenberg, an early champion of his work, admired the classical balance of Excavation, likening it to “a formula wrung out of testing explosives.” Observing De Kooning drawing, another critic, Thomas Hess, noted that the artist “made a few strokes, then almost instinctively, it seemed to me, turned the pencil around and began to go over the graphite marks with the eraser. Not to rub out the lines but to move them, push them across the paper.” De Kooning’s line, he concluded, “is always under attack.”

This ethos of creative destruction remained a guiding principle for De Kooning. The artist’s methods, however, continued to change. His drawings appear to be in a state of constant becoming. Shapes swell and fall away. They coalesce and unravel. De Kooning’s reversals of figure and ground aren’t binary or static, as in classic cubism; they’re in flux, like water moving in water.

The show’s emphasis on the muck and mess of the studio may explain why artists in the Chicago area have flocked to the exhibit—and keep on returning, according to Mel Becker Solomon (who organized the show with Salatino, Margaret Holben Ellis, and Charlotte Healy). Solomon recounted to me that she walked through the exhibition with an artist, who told her, “This is what students are missing in their current practice: the tenacity and rigor to keep pushing, experimenting, and searching for what comes next.”

The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Robert Lifson.

Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund; purchased with funds provided by Edgar J. Kaufmann, Jr., and Mr. and Mrs. Noah Goldowsky.

What the show demonstrates, in ways that aren’t always obvious with his paintings, is that De Kooning never lost touch with the vocational skills he acquired as a young man. As Rosenberg wrote in 1962, “There was not a trick of the painter’s trade that de Kooning did not have up his sleeve.” Ellis, a paper conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago, lists those “tricks” in the catalog and explains how De Kooning adapted them to purposes for which they were never intended. She describes, for instance, his use of carbon-transfer paper and translucent vellum to copy motifs from one drawing to another. Such processes were typically used to duplicate technical drawings. But De Kooning would apply fragments of the reproductions to new compositions, often in different orientations.

He also used frottage, or rubbing—another technique favored by commercial artists—to activate his lines. He would apply charcoal to thin vellum placed over corrugated cardboard or other textured surfaces to give the marks a stuttering look. “Frottage transformed stillness into speed,” Ellis writes of Reclining Nude, a 1963 drawing. This observation approaches the core of De Kooning’s art: More than any other artist I can think of, he gave painted marks and lines different velocities and trajectories. Co-existing in the same composition, those visible shifts in speed, thickness, and direction carved out three-dimensional spaces of ravishing complexity and urgency.

[Read: Did Marcel Duchamp ruin art?]

Salatino suggests, in his catalog essay, that the artist’s use of frottage “functions, inescapably, as a metaphor for the masturbatory—making and meaning converging in an act dependent upon the probing, rubbing, exploring hand.” Salatino is a first-rate curator, but this sort of writing, to which his introduction is rather too prone, gives art writing a bad name. De Kooning didn’t traffic in metaphors. He wasn’t interested in meanings. There’s a reason Susan Sontag quoted him at the beginning of her essay “Against Interpretation.”

Other techniques that De Kooning learned as a commercial artist included cutting out parts of images he found in magazines and inserting them into his compositions, or using masking tape and paper overlays to give his own marks abrupt, crisp boundaries.

The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Juan Molina Hernández.

Willem de Kooning, Untitled, about 1950. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Katharine Kuh.

When drawing, De Kooning loved to use liner and sword brushes, which are favored by sign painters. Both have short handles and extended, bushy bristles. Loaded with ink and applied with control, they allow artists to make long, even lines. De Kooning had mastered their use as a younger man. (Ellis reports that the illustrator Gus Falk, who was taught by De Kooning at Black Mountain College, remembered him applying a perfectly even line to a spinning bicycle wheel by holding the brush steady. “He was in control,” Falk said. “He was interested in exactitude.”) But in his own drawing, De Kooning let rip with liner brushes, swishing them about all over the paper, achieving undulant lines that contract and expand like living creatures.

Perhaps the most remarkable of De Kooning’s maladapted techniques was his use of fixatives. The word itself suggests De Kooning’s perversity. Fixatives are sprayed onto vulnerable media, such as charcoal and crayon, to stabilize drawn marks. But instead of spraying a fine, even mist from an appropriate distance, De Kooning aimed the fixative straight at his drawings from close range, creating puddles and rivulets that turned the paper gray, creating strange, smudgy marks and chemical textures.

Later in his career, De Kooning tried drawing with his eyes closed or with both hands at once. Long plagued by alcoholism, he was often inebriated. “I’m in my element when I am a little bit out of this world,” he once said. “When I’m falling, I’m doing all right; when I’m slipping, I say, Hey, this is interesting!” The words could sound somewhat pathetic, like a drunk man’s sad, self-soothing rationalization. But the relationship between De Kooning’s virtuosity and the lengths to which he went just to get in his own way is intriguing to consider.

The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning, Reclining Nude, 1963. Private collection, United States.

Clement Greenberg, the most influential critic of the postwar period, framed the problem in a review of De Kooning’s first solo show. The artist’s “really great facility,” Greenberg argued, risked getting in the way of his ability to express authentic emotion with real originality. “Facility,” Greenberg argued, “has a stubbornness of its own and is loath to abandon easy satisfactions.”

For Greenberg, “easy satisfactions” were always close to kitsch. But his assessment was reductive. De Kooning was an immigrant from Europe. His extensive training and virtuosic way with line connected him to an evolving tradition of European drawing that led from Tintoretto, Rubens, Delacroix, and Ingres to, in the modern era, Picasso and Matisse. He would never disown that tradition.

But he was in America now. It was the 20th century. Young women were screaming in front of the Beatles. Crowds crammed into theaters to see Marilyn Monroe magnified on the screen. Betty Boop and Minnie Mouse bounced from frame to frame in the cartoons. De Kooning—neither calm nor pure and “wrapped,” as he had put it, “in the melodrama of vulgarity”—longed to incorporate all this impudent American energy into the authority of his European inheritance, and especially into his drawings and paintings of female figures.

His efforts to interfere with his own facility were an expression both of his dividedness and of his deep hunger for freedom. Anyone who stands in front of De Kooning’s urgent, sensuously greedy drawings, with their writhing contours, cacophonous colors, and perverse processes, can feel the force of that craving.

Venezuela’s People Problem

2026-09-16T07:00:00-04:00

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Days after two deadly earthquakes struck northern Venezuela on June 24, killing at least 6,000 people and injuring tens of thousands more, the Venezuelan Seismological Research Foundation, known as Funvisis, made an unusual public plea: Could whoever had taken one of its GPS sensors please give it back?

For 13 years, the high-precision instrument had been bolted to a rocky outcrop in the hills of western Venezuela, quietly tracking the millimeter-scale movements of the Boconó fault, which was the likely source of the first of the two quakes. When Funvisis technicians went to recover the readings the sensor had stored, they found that the machine had gone missing. More than two months after the earthquakes, the organization still does not know who carried it off.

The absent sensor is but one gauge of a state that has lost the capacity to govern. Venezuela once operated 250 to 300 seismic-monitoring stations; today, no more than five still function. Many of the engineers, physicians, nurses, firefighters, and rescue workers a country depends on when disaster strikes have long since left Venezuela—part of a generation-long exodus of skilled professionals from state institutions.

President Trump has said that the oil-rich country will be run “properly” and “professionally,” but the earthquakes exposed Venezuela’s deficits. The highest expectations and fondest hopes—whether of Wall Street, Houston, or Caracas—will not conjure up the people needed to rebuild a country that has thoroughly hollowed out its professional classes.

[Read: The vicious cycle Trump may restart in Venezuela]

In just 20 years, Venezuela went from Latin America’s wealthiest nation to one of its poorest thanks to the mismanagement, corruption, and poor governance that began under the populist president Hugo Chávez, who served from 1999 to 2013, and continued under his successor, Nicolás Maduro. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez, who took over Venezuela after the United States captured Maduro in January, inherited a state that cannot marshall the technical expertise to rebuild what the quakes destroyed or to reconstruct an economy that collapsed long before the ground did.

Rebuilding is a matter not merely of money and political will but of human capital. Bureaucrats, planners, regulators, and inspectors turn plans into functioning grids, ports, and clinics. Their absence may be the biggest obstacle facing American policy makers overseeing Venezuela’s reconstruction.

Venezuela is not the first country to suffer brain drain to the point of institutional collapse. Afghanistan has reportedly struggled to stand up its health-care sector and civil service ever since many of its professionals fled the return of the Taliban in 2021. Haiti has been losing doctors, judges, and engineers for decades. But Venezuela’s case is one of particularly deliberate self-destruction, in a country where oil wealth helped produce a sizable middle class.

Hostility toward the professional class was a hallmark of Chávez’s particular brand of socialism from the beginning. Adherents saw professional skills, when they were not explicitly placed in service of the revolution, as advancing the interests of capitalism and imperialism, the Venezuelan political scientist Guillermo T. Aveledo told me. In 2003, Guillermo García Ponce, a director at a pro-Chávez newspaper, went so far as to describe technocrats at state-owned companies as a “fifth column” to be “wiped out.”

“For Chavismo, privilege always comes cloaked in a PowerPoint presentation,” the journalist Francisco Toro wrote in 2007. By dismissing expertise and deliberation as ideologically suspect, Toro added, “Chavismo is left to rely on the will of the leader alone.”

The state’s public utilities were among the first institutions to confront the PowerPoint problem. Chávez replaced their professional managers with loyalists who were more compliant than competent, people who used to work in these companies told me. Jacqueline Faría, a Chavista engineer who took over the state-owned Caracas water company Hidrocapital in 1999, invested millions of dollars in a failed program to clean the Guaire River. Now she leads Rodríguez’s reconstruction efforts.

In addition to Hidrocapital, the Chávez government proceeded to dismantle the corporate-style leadership of the Caracas metro and Venezuela’s largest electricity company, Edelca, and to place these companies under the control of military officers. It eventually did the same with Funvisis. In 2009, Chávez took direct control of the country’s airports and seaports.

Water and power shortages, sometimes nationwide, became commonplace as mismanagement, corruption, and doctrinaire regulations gummed the works of nearly all of Venezuela’s public infrastructure. Consider Edelca’s two dam projects. The company began building the Caruachi dam in 1997, under Chávez’s predecessor, but finished it only after nine long years. It began building the Tocoma dam in 2007 and still has not finished it, despite almost $10 billion in investment. A Brazilian contractor involved in the work later admitted to paying Venezuelan officials and middlemen as much as $98 million in bribes from 2005 to 2016 to secure contracts. A U.S.-Argentine company will now take over the project.

Perhaps no sector was more gravely affected by Chávez’s assault on professionalism than the oil industry. And no industry is more crucial to U.S. plans for Venezuela’s recovery—or more central to Washington’s interest in the country in the first place.

Before Chávez, Venezuela’s oil company, known by its Spanish acronym PDVSA, was owned by the state but autonomously governed as a commercial entity. It set the gold standard for such an arrangement, expanding into international markets and fully acquiring Citgo, a major Houston-based refinery, in 1991. Much of the Venezuelan state ran on clientelism, but the oil company was meritocratic. Its research arm, the Venezuelan Institute of Oil Technology, or INTEVEP, employed about 170 full-time Ph.D. researchers and held roughly 1,200 American patents in the period before 2003, according to Francisco Monaldi, an energy expert.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump meant it literally when he said he was taking the oil]

That was the year Chávez began meddling in PDVSA’s affairs. He fired its board on live television and appointed a military officer to run the company. PDVSA’s workers went on strike in protest. Chávez fired more than 18,000 of them—dismissing, in one stroke, 60 to 80 percent of all provisioning, planning, maintenance, and exploration staff.

The finance team was laid off almost entirely; state cronies took over an office that accounted for nearly all of Venezuela’s foreign-exchange earnings. INTEVEP’s scientists were replaced, Pánfilo Masciangioli, a researcher and manager at the institute from 1982 to 2010, told me, “with people who did not even know how important it was to publish a paper.” The institute’s patents fell to about 100 during the decade that followed.

“The company’s gray matter was lost,” Monaldi told me. In its place came party loyalists and military men, who filled PDVSA’s vacancies and directed its revenues into Chávez’s populist schemes. Former employees scattered abroad. The number of Venezuelans in Alberta—the epicenter of Canada’s oil industry—rose from 465 in 2001 to 3,860 in 2011, and in Colombia, former PDVSA oil experts helped nearly double national oil production by 2011. Meanwhile, across the border, clientelism swelled PDVSA’s payroll from 28,841 in 2003 to 177,770 in 2014.

The effect fully manifested a decade later: Global oil prices fell, and Venezuela’s ruined oil industry collapsed, its output falling from about 3 million barrels a day before Chavez’s PDVSA purge to an average of 512,000 a day in 2020.

Employees of Venezuela’s state institutions came under continual pressure. In 2004, more than 2 million Venezuelans signed a referendum to recall Chávez. A lawmaker close to the president drew up what would become known as the “Tascón List” to identify and fire the petitioners from state institutions and companies. Hundreds lost their jobs. At the National Library, “a clique decided who was leaving and who was staying,” Mario Di Giacomo, an information specialist there for nearly 20 years, told me. “Dissent was not acceptable.” Loyalists replaced the professionals, and the library’s collections descended into neglect. Millions of archival records are decaying, Di Giacomo said.

The Tascón List was but one way of identifying people for firing. At the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigation, the country’s premier scientific-research center, the physicist Claudio Mendoza made a public comment mocking Venezuela’s nuclear ambitions in 2006 (he noted that the country would achieve little so long as it rejected scientific expertise). He was dismissed four days later. The Chavista zoologist Ángel Viloria took over the institute and systematically purged its scientists from 2006 to 2011.

“You were either fired or forced to retire,” Mendoza told me. Venezuela slid from Latin America’s fifth-largest producer of scientific papers in the early 2000s to its 11th by 2022. By 2016, researchers who had emigrated accounted for roughly 33 percent of the country’s scientific publications; at least 68 percent of these scholars held doctoral degrees.

Trump has promised that American investors will spend $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s “rotting” energy infrastructure, but he hasn’t said who will do the work. The simple truth is that Venezuela has rid itself of the technocrats who could deliver the recovery Washington has promised. Few will return to the bureaucracy that ejected them. Some have emigrated for good; among those who remain, many distrust the authoritarian government or do not wish to be associated with it.

[Read: The bizarre partnership between the U.S. and Venezuela]

The United States is currently overseeing talks between the Rodríguez government and the democratic opposition about the country’s recovery and reconciliation. It could use that platform to push for basing appointments to public institutions on relevant expertise rather than political loyalty and, in doing so, help restore confidence among the country’s professionals.

Among the hollowed-out agencies that should be high on the list for rebuilding is Funvisis—not only for reasons of public safety but also because the geophysical data that Venezuela no longer collects are the raw material of modern oil exploration. Companies use seismic surveys to image a reservoir before they spend a dollar drilling into it, and Venezuela’s archives are dated, its instruments are scarce, and the geophysicists who once operated both are now working in Calgary or Houston or Bogotá. A state that cannot say whether the fault lines beneath it are moving is poorly placed to tell an investor what lies within the Orinoco Basin.

Washington can disburse the oil money and lift the sanctions; it cannot staff the ministries. Only Venezuelans can do that. Ultimately, the country’s recovery will be measured less in barrels lifted or dollars banked than in how many of those professionals will go back to work for the state.

The Armored Sarcophagus Saving Ukrainian Soldiers

2026-09-16T07:00:00-04:00

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The inside of an armored sarcophagus smells of gunpowder, gasoline, and gangrene. Remotely operated, unmanned ground vehicles, nicknamed MAULs, are revolutionizing casualty evacuations along the most dangerous sections of the Ukrainian front lines. They bristle with drone-jamming antennae and carry bulletproof black pods for carrying wounded soldiers to safety.

The MAUL goes in when other options have failed. After every rescue, it is cleaned and disinfected. Vitaly, call sign “Ash,” is a medical-evacuation coordinator with the 1st Separate Medical Battalion. (He asked to be identified only by his first name and call sign for security reasons.)

“You scrub and scrub,” he told me, “but the smell—it never goes away.”

I asked Ash what MAUL stands for. “It’s not initials,” he explained. “It’s a Star Wars thing—you know, Darth Maul? We’ve got a few nerds here.” The name is in all caps because the battalion’s stencil kit has only capital letters.

[Read: Ukraine’s short-lived comeback]

On the battlefield, these new machines have become priority targets for Russia’s drone pilots. They know that, for the morale of the Ukrainian crews coordinating rescues, losing a comrade in vivid detail on the monitors tracking the mission can be devastating. Russian operators wait until the wounded are loaded, then strike.

Aerial drones have created a death zone on the front lines, up to 20 miles wide, where anything caught in the open is likely to be struck. Unmanned ground vehicles began arriving in late 2024, mostly running resupply routes parallel to the front. But a mission in early 2025 proved that they could do more than this—that they were capable of reaching deep into the death zone to remove personnel. That mission began with a Facebook post.

In February 2025, near Kupiansk, Ukraine, a Russian advance trapped three Ukrainian soldiers from the 154th Mechanized Brigade behind enemy lines. All were wounded, two severely. For weeks, unit commanders attempted to pull them out. “We tried everything,” Kseniya Vynohradova, a veteran of the 154th who now leads an online support group for the unit, told me. Every effort failed.

“The brigade dropped supplies by drone,” Vynohradova told me, “but there was no way to get the guys out.” After a month of fending off Russian attacks and surviving on air-dropped rations, the soldiers were ready to give up. Their wounds had turned gangrenous, and their chance of survival was near zero. “I did not know what else to do,” Vynohradova said, “so I turned to Facebook.”

The first person to offer hope was Viktor Dolhopyatov. In a secret facility in central Ukraine, he runs Burevii, one of the country’s most innovative defense-tech companies. Russian bombardments have shattered most of the windows, but this superficial damage, common to thousands of buildings across the region, offers a kind of camouflage. From here, Burevii has transformed the modern battlefield. When Dolhopyatov read Vynohradova’s Facebook post, he answered immediately: “Tell us more, we want to help.”

Burevii’s engineers were developing a ground drone at the time. It would need a few modifications for a mission deep into the death zone—anti-drone netting, software updates, and a trailer attachment to carry three soldiers at once—but it could be ready within days. Olha Garbovskaya had joined the company two weeks prior and threw herself into the mission. “We called our machine Ardal,” she told me, after a son of the Greek god of craftsmen and technology. With engineers still attaching its final pieces, Ardal was rushed to the front.

The rescue began at dusk, with daylight fading but temperatures warm enough to partially mask Ardal’s heat signature. From a command bunker, Burevii’s engineers watched the mission unfold. High-definition screens displayed a ground’s-eye view from the drone. Overhead feeds tracked Ardal’s route to the stranded soldiers, who followed its progress over their radio. Without warning, a massive heat bloom filled the infrared monitors in the bunker. Ardal had struck a mine.

“Our hearts sank,” Garbovskaya said. “The commanders told us we had less than a 1 percent chance of succeeding, and we feared they were right.” Over the radio, the stranded men responded stoically: “We can’t take any more—just finish us off.” They begged to be bombed by Ukrainian drones. The team from Burevii asked them to hold out a little longer.

“Give us 48 hours,” Dolhopyatov said. “We have another machine.”

The second Ardal followed a different path through the minefield, and overhead bomber drones scoured the route to clear suspected mines. Ardal finally reached the men’s trench. They emerged ragged and wounded, but alive. Overhead, Russian drones closed in. From the command bunker, medics offered encouragement over the radio: “Climb in fast—we’re getting you out.”

Ardal carried them to safety, under the watchful eye of Ukrainian aerial drones. In the command bunker, Garbovskaya surveyed the scene. More than 50 people—pilots, medics, electronic warfare crews, engineers—had all assembled to save three men.

For most of history, recovering injured personnel from an active battlefield has not been a military priority. If the wounded could not make their way to safety, they were left until the fighting stopped. Serious injuries almost always ended in death, and the ratio of wounded to killed was about 3 to 1.

During the First World War, evacuating wounded soldiers became its own professionalized combat discipline. Many injuries were still fatal, but the ratio of wounded to killed began to improve. By the time of the Vietnam War, the widespread adoption of helicopters and the doctrine of the “golden hour”—the narrow window in which medical intervention is most likely to save a life—drove the survival ratio to 5 wounded for every soldier killed.

During America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rapid evacuation and advanced medical interventions brought survivability to historic highs. For every American soldier killed in those wars, approximately 10 survived their injuries. But in Ukraine, the death zone has made rapid evacuation all but impossible. Survivability has fallen, with a wounded-to-killed ratio of about 5 to 1.

Units such as the 1st Medical Battalion are trying to change that. The old battlefield math held that in many instances, rescuing a wounded soldier required more resources and risk than could be justified for a single life. But Ukraine has opted for a different way of calculating.

[Read: Ukraine may be just the ally America needs]

The military has introduced a points system that assigns varying values to different missions, rewarding units with credits that can be traded for new gear and supplies. Under the “ePoints” scheme, a routine resupply run earns two to three points; a casualty evacuation earns upwards of 70. On today’s battlefield, saving a single Ukrainian soldier is worth more than destroying a Russian tank.

Inside the death zone, Ukraine’s trenches are so difficult to reach that medics have had to reimagine the golden hour. Wound treatment must be provided on-site, by fellow soldiers. There simply are not enough medics for every trench.

Andrii Fedoryshyn, call sign “Jared,” is a trainer with the 1st Med. “The best thing we can teach a soldier is combat first aid,” he told me. “It’s more important than knowing how to shoot.”

The numbers bear this out. Less than 1 percent of the injuries seen by the 1st Med are gunshot wounds, and a soldier is far more likely to be called on to aid a buddy than to engage with the enemy. Everyone near the death zone, even journalists, carries a tourniquet. Many soldiers carry two or more, in the event that shrapnel severs multiple arteries. Once immediate care is provided, the waiting begins.

“For a front-line soldier, evacuation can take weeks,” the deputy commander of the 1st Med, who asked to be identified by only his first name, Igor, told me. “We once evac’d a patient who had a tourniquet on for 33 days.” That soldier’s unit tried everything to get him out: six attempts, six failures, and multiple armored vehicles lost in the process. The decision was made to send in a MAUL. “He lost the limb,” Igor said. “But we saved his life.”

As battlefield resources, MAULs are severely limited. Still, they are treated as expendable. Soldiers’ lives matter more. On average, two MAULs are lost for every five lives saved. I asked Ash, the battalion’s evacuation coordinator, if he ever got sentimental about the machines. “They’re tools,” he answered. “We don’t get attached.”

The platoon commander, call sign “Devi,” interrupted. “Except for this one,” he said, pulling up a video on his phone. It showed a MAUL that had lasted 10 missions, surviving drones and mines and saving the lives of 11 soldiers. After it was finally destroyed, its operators compiled a tribute video and posted it online, endowing the dead MAUL with a small but devoted fan club.

Officially, the logo of the 1st Med is a coiled snake, the ancient Greek symbol for medicine. The MAUL drivers have an unofficial logo of their own: a coffin overlaid with a progress indicator. They call themselves the “Tomb Raiders,” because, as Devi explained, “we bring people back from the dead.” Hence the movie posters plastered around the bunker, featuring Angelina Jolie in her Tomb Raider role. Opposite a wall of monitors, a scantily clad Jolie is covered in stickers featuring the coffin-and-timer logo. Each one represents a life saved. “When we fill the whole poster,” Igor explained, “we’ll auction it off to buy more machines.”

As much as medics value their MAULs, the soldiers I spoke with hated them. “No windows, no ports,” one told me. “I would rather have less protection and see what’s coming at me.” Once sealed in, a patient’s only link to the outside is a single ray of light streaming through the hinge seam and an intercom connected to the medic.

On a range far from the front, I rode inside a new MAUL undergoing testing. The coffin-like pod was stifling, and the bumpy ride nearly shook the bones out of my body. “I understand why soldiers hate it,” I told Devi. He received the feedback like a bad Yelp review. “Fair enough,” he said, “but a soldier able to complain is a soldier who survived.” The overwhelming majority of those rescued by a MAUL live to talk about it.

In the command bunker, a casualty call came in: severe internal bleeding, with developing sepsis. A MAUL set off. Overhead surveillance drones tracked its progress as the bombers scanned the route for potential mines. Ash checked in via radio about the soldier’s condition.

From the overhead feed, we saw the MAUL stop at a tree line. Two Ukrainian soldiers emerged from the foliage. One helped load the other into the sarcophagus, sealed the lid, and disappeared into the woods. Inside the command bunker, a calm professionalism prevailed. No voices were raised, except for Ash’s; he spoke loudly into his headset so that the patient could hear him over the noise of the machine.

Midway through the eight-mile return journey, the electronic-warfare team detected a heavy Russian suicide drone, a Molniya, lurking overhead. The MAUL took cover, let the Molniya pass, then continued to the transfer point where a medical team awaited. As it approached the rendezvous, the Ukrainians spotted another approaching drone. “Three kilometers, closing,” came the call. The patient was quickly lifted into an armored vehicle, which sped off toward the field hospital.

Ash’s job was done. He took off his headset and slumped into a couch. In the dim light, I noticed for the first time that he was wearing Crocs. His T-shirt, a Polish streetwear brand, said Ghosh. I sat next to him, somehow exhausted even though I had done nothing but observe. Through the walls I felt the thump of nearby drone strikes. No one else in the bunker seemed to notice them.

I asked Ash what he did before the war. “Musical theater,” he said. “I was a performer.” I asked about his greatest fear as a combat medic. “Losing one of our guys en route,” he answered. Not seeing the gore of injuries, or wondering whether his bunker would be hit. His heaviest burden was the thought of a disabled MAUL, one of his patients trapped inside, unable to make it home.

“Has this ever happened?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Twice.”

In the Russian military, by contrast, being wounded and abandoned is the norm. At a POW camp in western Ukraine, I spoke with several Russian prisoners of war. “I was wounded in the legs,” one prisoner, who asked that I withhold his name for fear of reprisal, told me. “There was no rescue—my own guys left me to die.”

The first medical attention he received was from the Ukrainian military. Reliable figures for Russia’s wounded-to-killed ratio are difficult to pin down, but conservative estimates place it at about 2 to 1, worse than the survival ratio of Russian soldiers during World War I.

At the foothills of Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains, far from the front lines, lies a rehab facility for injured soldiers. I met Pavlo there, four months into his recovery from injuries sustained trying to rescue another soldier. He had successfully driven his truck to the pickup point for his wounded comrade when he was struck by a Russian drone. Shrapnel entered his abdomen, tore through his bladder, and broke his pelvis. Someone dragged him into a trench. Pavlo begged to stay there, remembering the wrecked and burning vehicles littering the road he drove in on. Over the radio, the medics insisted, “If you do not leave, you will die for sure.”

[Read: Ukraine planned to swarm Moscow airports with AI-guided drones]

At dusk, the unmanned ground vehicle came. Over the next three hours, the teams behind it—medics, ground-drone operators, bomber- and aerial-surveillance-drone pilots, and electronic-warfare crews—performed the intricate choreography needed to carry Pavlo to safety.

From the top of a Carpathian ski resort, under a cloud-dappled sky, Pavlo recounted every detail, from his failed attempt to rescue his fellow soldier to the moment he went into surgery. Every few minutes, we glanced skyward to scan for threats. We were safe, but such habits die hard. Pavlo would soon return to his new wife, and he knew that this would have been impossible without the ground drone and the humans who operated it, all working together to save this one soldier.

“I never met them,” Pavlo said. “A robot carried me, but people saved me. So many, just for me.”

He looked up again. “I don’t even know their names.”

Cuba’s Old Economic Model Is ‘Exhausted’

2026-09-16T07:00:00-04:00

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In September 2010, an ailing Fidel Castro made a striking admission. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg had asked him whether the Cuban model was still worth exporting. “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” Castro bluntly told him. Sixteen years later, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, one of Cuba’s top diplomats, offered me a similar assessment of the state of the revolution, nearly seven decades on. In an interview in Washington, D.C., Cossío told me that Cuba’s Soviet-influenced system of central planning and state control “is exhausted.” The world, he said, has changed, and Cuba has to change with it. He stressed that Havana is open to pursuing that transformation in partnership with Washington. But coercive economic pressure, he argued, will make the task only more difficult.

Coercive pressure is, in fact, the Trump administration’s strategy. Since President Trump returned to the White House last year, his administration has put an economic squeeze on Havana, including sanctions and fuel-shipment restrictions that have contributed to severe shortages and prolonged blackouts on the island.

Trump’s approach to Cuba reflects a mix of ideological opposition, national-security concerns, and economic opportunism. Some within his administration object to Havana’s partnerships with U.S. adversaries, including Russia, China, and Iran. (Cossío claimed that Iran’s presence in Havana consisted of one Persian restaurant.) The administration has also cited Cuba’s failure to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement on migration concerns. This year, the two governments appeared open to working out some of these issues and acknowledged having direct contact. But Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, told reporters in Havana earlier this month that neither negotiations nor an agenda for future talks has been established, despite Havana’s willingness to stay in touch.

Since the U.S. military ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump has repeatedly warned that Cuba could be next. In May, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana to deliver Trump’s message that Washington was prepared to engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba made “fundamental changes.” Days later, the head of U.S. Southern Command met with Cuban military officials near Guantánamo Bay.

A White House official, in a written response to my questions, conveyed Trump’s view that Cuba “has been horribly run for years” and said the United States is “ready to open a new chapter in the relationship.” The official added: “The only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control Cuba for their own gain at the expense of the Cuban people.”

Cossío and other top Cuban officials have sought to demonstrate that Cuba can change for the better on its own. But the gap between what Havana considers meaningful reform and what the Trump administration says needs to happen remains wide. Washington has demanded substantial changes, and although Havana is open to economic modernization, it insists that its political system is nonnegotiable. Prolonged blackouts have disrupted everyday life, and deteriorating water and sanitation systems have contributed to a surge in illnesses. Hospitals face fuel shortages and electricity disruptions, which affect refrigeration for medicines and vaccines. In eastern Cuba, UNICEF reported earlier this year, 481,000 people were relying on water trucks, and some families were being forced to use unsafe water because fuel shortages constrained pumping and other essential services.

Against that backdrop, Cuba has been pursuing its own economic reforms. In June, the government approved 176 measures that expand private business, foreign investment, and private participation in banking, while giving investors a greater role in state-owned companies. The government also began allowing Cubans living abroad to own or invest in private businesses on the island. Subsequent measures have eased bureaucratic restrictions on private businesses and opened additional space for foreign investment, including in tourism.

As Cossío and I discussed relations between Washington and Havana—which Cossío was careful to call “bilateral contacts,” not negotiations—he laid out what economic change in Cuba might look like. His country, he said, needs to move toward an economy “more dependent on financial instruments, on the market economy, with a much greater role for the private sector,” while leaving the state as a participant. He described the transformation now under way as the “most significant social and economic transformations” in Cuba in the past 60 years.

The U.S. is now applying extraordinary pressure on Cuba, to the point that Cuban officials have accused Washington of seeking to force political change. “They speak openly, openly about military aggression, and they are subjecting the people of Cuba to an unrelenting war,” Cossío told me.

The deputy foreign minister made no demands for a new diplomatic initiative or a major U.S. aid package to alleviate Cuba’s distress. Trump, he said, has the power to put the relationship on the right path by removing restrictions on Americans traveling to the island. He could also restore Americans’ ability “to do business in Cuba, to trade with Cuba, to invest in Cuba if they wish.”

“We’re not asking for a grant,” Cossío said. “We’re not asking for gifts or favors. We want the U.S. to stop punishing the Cuban economy” and its commercial relationships with countries around the world. This year, for example, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, Pemex, paused its oil exports to Cuba after the U.S. seized Maduro. And the Trump administration backed a lawsuit brought by a private U.S. docks owner against major cruise operators for using docks in Havana confiscated by Cuba’s government in 1960. The cruise companies maintain that their travel operations to Cuba were legal.

[Read: The schism within the Trump administration on Mexico]

The Trump administration says that its goal is not simply to open Cuba’s economy but also to pressure the Cuban government into making broader political change. Its policy calls for more freedom, democracy, human rights, and free enterprise in Cuba, while maintaining the U.S. economic embargo and restrictions on transactions that benefit the Cuban military and security apparatus. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the first person of Cuban descent to hold the position, has repeatedly portrayed the Cuban government as a threat to U.S. national security and argued that its ruling elite maintains control over the economy.

This month, as Cuba was rolling out further measures to expand private investment, Rubio announced another round of sanctions against Cuban state-linked financial, mining, and energy entities, saying that the measures were aimed at those who sustain the regime. Cossío stressed that American companies could have a place in Cuba amid the changes if Washington eased its restrictions. “The U.S. could take advantage of that, become an important business partner in Cuba,” Cossío said. “They could invest. They could have a better relation with the emerging private sector in Cuba. They could benefit as a business opportunity.”

Mindful that Trump is always seeking another win in relations with other nations, Cossío put it in terms the American president is likely to understand. “They could even claim a victory,” he said.

It’s hard to imagine Castro putting the proposition quite that way. Goldberg’s interview with Fidel Castro came as Fidel’s brother Raúl was beginning to loosen the state’s grip on the economy, allowing more small businesses to operate and opening limited avenues for foreign investment. Back then, Cuba was beginning to adopt some of the economic ideas that Washington had long demanded—even as U.S. policy prevented Americans from participating in the experiment. The new measures are a significant loosening of the economic system built around state control. But Cuba remains a one-party state.

That may not sit well with the Trump administration, which says Cuba’s economic model cannot fundamentally change without altering its system of governance. Cuba’s critics in the U.S. point to the regime’s record of detaining political prisoners. The government this year announced it was releasing 2,010 prisoners, but Human Rights Watch, citing local advocacy groups, said in April that 700 or so political prisoners remained behind bars. Hundreds more faced house arrest and other restrictions.

“The only thing worse than a Communist is an incompetent Communist. And so their system of government has to change because they will never be able to develop economically without those changes,” Rubio said in March. “Economic change is important. Giving people economic and political freedom is important, but they come hand in hand. They come together.”

[Read: How to break Cuba]

Cossío said that Cuba had been considering a transformation since at least 2011, but had hoped to undertake it under less punishing circumstances. After the opening made by the Obama administration, when the two countries restored diplomatic relations and the U.S. eased restrictions on travel and some commerce, Havana believed it might finally be able to move forward. The subsequent rollback of most President Obama–era policies in Trump’s first term, followed by more limited engagement under President Biden, changed that calculation.

Now, Cossío said, Cuba has concluded that it cannot wait. “The country has changed. We’ve changed demographically. Our human resources have changed. The world has changed,” he told me. “We’ve come to the conclusion this year that, in spite of that, we cannot delay any more the transformation that we need to put in place in Cuba.”

Sixteen years after Castro acknowledged that the Cuban model no longer worked, Havana is openly trying to evolve—and Cossío is telling Washington that it can either try to force the transformation from the outside or participate from within. But U.S. administrations, past and present, have long been skeptical that a system that has resisted changes for decades can meaningfully transform without radical changes at the top.

An Electoral Mess in Missouri

2026-09-16T06:55:47-04:00

Bethany Mann has put thousands of miles on her 2014 Toyota RAV4 while campaigning for office in Missouri’s Third Congressional District. The problem for Mann, her opponents, and the hundreds of thousands of voters who live there is that for months, no one has known precisely where the district’s boundaries are.

Missouri jumped last year into the nation’s redistricting wars, pushing through a new congressional map backed by President Trump that would secure an additional Republican House seat in November. The plan has mostly collapsed, leading to a year of legal fights and confusion for voters. The partisan battle reached the Supreme Court last week and spurred a chaotic back-and-forth among the courts that changed the boundaries multiple times within a single hour. For now, the old map, which was adopted in 2022, is back in effect, but Republican candidates are still battling. A hearing in a federal appeals court is set for tomorrow—one day before the state is required to start making absentee ballots available to overseas voters.

[Read: The election deniers’ long game]

The mayhem in Missouri is the latest example of how uncertain and volatile the midterm elections have become. Republicans started the redistricting battles last year to gain partisan advantage during the midterms, and Democrats quickly followed. Missouri and nine other states have since redrawn their maps. On Monday, the Court blocked a Trump executive order that would have dramatically restricted voting by mail, a decision that Trump called a “big loss for Republicans, and America itself.” Voting-rights groups celebrated the decision, which they say prevents chaos. But with fewer than two months until Election Day, election-related litigation is still winding its way through the courts, and Trump continues to claim that the electoral system is rigged.

“We’re talking about last-minute changes to election infrastructure, which could lead to either confusion or affect the outcome of the election,” Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor, told me. “And it is a serious problem, particularly in our current context when voter confidence in the election infrastructure has collapsed.”

Missouri’s saga began shortly after the state legislature passed the new, GOP-friendly map at the urging of the White House last September. Opponents seized on a quirk in the state constitution that empowers citizens to petition for a referendum on an act of the state legislature. In December, an advocacy group submitted more than 305,000 signatures asking for a vote before the new map would be put into effect—which would leave the old map in use for the election this fall. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, had until August 4, the state’s primary date, to certify the referendum for November’s ballot.

For months, it’s been unclear which map would actually be used. Democratic candidates, including Mann, told me that they’d stumped through both the new and old versions of their district—a choice that took extra manpower, organizing, and money. Others, including Representative Bob Onder, a Republican whom Mann is challenging, told me that they’d campaigned off of the revised 2025 map.

[Quinta Jurecic: Rules designed to create chaos]

“We knew that they were going to be enacting this gerrymandered scheme,” Mann said. “So our strategy, not just in the Third Congressional but as a Democratic Party as a whole, was to beat these congresspeople on any map that they offer.”

But the morning of the primary came, and Hoskins had still not certified the referendum. He directed election administrators to hold the primary under the 2025 map. At 4 p.m. that day, an hour before the referendum deadline, Hoskins rejected the petition on state constitutional grounds. Candidates won their primaries based on the gerrymandered map.

A month later, the situation got even more complex. On September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Hoskins, finding that the referendum petition was legal and should not have been rejected. It ordered the 2022 map to be used in November. Hoskins appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected his arguments last Tuesday. Thirty minutes later, a federal district judge ruling on a separate lawsuit ordered that the 2025 map must be used in November. Citing that decision, Hoskins announced that Missouri would use the new gerrymandered map—leading the Missouri Supreme Court to threaten him with contempt of court. The U.S. Supreme Court quickly chimed in again and restored the old map, for now; Hoskins was briefly held in contempt for continuing to insist that the 2025 map was valid, but he quickly switched his position to match that of the U.S. Supreme Court. Legal experts told me that it is highly unlikely that the appeals court would change the map again, but as the past two weeks have shown, nothing is certain.

Both sides agree that the situation is a mess. Republicans I spoke with blamed the Missouri Supreme Court for rejecting the 2025 map after it had already been used for a primary. Democrats—and the majority of legal experts I spoke with—blamed Hoskins for waiting until the last available hour to reject the petition, a move that effectively forced the primary to be conducted with the 2025 map, which his party drew up. They said that the arguments should have played out in court months ago. Hoskins disagreed.

“I take my job and oath of office very seriously,” Hoskins told me. “I met that deadline, my constitutional deadline, of August 4. I would say those that don’t like that deadline and want to see that deadline change, they need to contact their lawmaker.”

Some of the federal officials whose seats are on the line are, like voters, trying to figure out what’s going on and who is to blame. Onder, who is suing to reinstate the new map, told me that he and voters “operated on the assumption” that the 2025 map was the correct one. “To the extent this has been thrown into confusion and chaos, the fault is entirely [on] the part of the Missouri Supreme Court.” Representative Emanuel Cleaver, whose seat was supposed to be wiped out by the new map, told me that he had been campaigning “all over the state” over the past few weeks because of his uncertainty about which district he’d be in. “There’s been a fog over the state of Missouri,” Cleaver said. “We are now spending time trying to erase the confusion.”

[Read: The election system wasn’t built for this]

The bulk of the work is now in the hands of local election administrators, who are scrambling to prepare for the midterms on a condensed timeframe and with a confused electorate. Kurt Bahr, a Republican and the St. Charles County elections director, told me that he’s printing ballots under the old 2022 map but is preparing contingency plans in case courts once again change which map to use. In Boone County, where about 40 percent of voters would shift into a new district under the 2025 map, the clerk Brianna Lennon has provided a lookup tool so voters can see their districts under both maps. She said that she and her staff have been working to inform voters about what’s happening without causing needless panic.

“These things are always being argued over and fought over by people who don’t have to run the election,” Eric Fey, the Democratic director of elections in St. Louis County, told me. Election administrators, he said, are the “folks that are left holding the bag at the end of the day.”

Last year, Onder posted a clip of a speech in which he recounted speaking with Trump about redistricting. “I said, ‘Mr. President, do you want us to draw you an extra congressional seat in Missouri?,’” Onder said, adding that the state, which voted for Trump by 18 points and has Republican supermajorities in the state legislature, was poised under the old map to send “two progressive Democrats” to Congress. Missouri’s 2025 map aims to net an additional Republican seat in the House by carving Kansas City—long represented by Cleaver—into three districts that extend into rural central Missouri and strongly favor Republicans.

The fate of Independence Boulevard Christian Church, in northeast Kansas City, exemplifies this gerrymandering tactic, known as “cracking.” Under the 2025 map, the church is in one district, the parking lot in another, and a market across the street in a third.

“Before, there already were people who were saying [voting] doesn’t matter; they had already felt disenfranchised,” Mindy Fugarino, the pastor of the church, told me. “I think there are some folks just using this as another reason to disengage.”

The “downward spiral” of extreme partisan gerrymandering over the past year risks disillusioning people, Richard Pildes, a constitutional-law professor at New York University, told me. “It leads to many voters feeling the system is being manipulated, that the system’s rigged,” he said.

[Read: Out of the gerrymandering darkness, a new hope for reform ]

Both Democrats and Republicans in Missouri told me they feel cheated as the map continues to change. St. Charles County Republican Central Committee Chair Bob Eno told me he believes that the state supreme-court ruling took away people’s chances to choose their own representation by shifting the state back to the old map after primary votes had already been cast. Pat Harcourt, who lives in Wright City, initially thought that her Democratic ballot was incorrect for the August primary. But it wasn’t—her address had moved into a different district under the gerrymandered map. “And here I am writing postcards to people, ‘Your vote counts,’” Harcourt told me. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe it counts, but it may not be in your congressional district.” Mitchell Clem, a Republican voter whose district also moved under the new map, told me that he doesn’t like gerrymandering but understands that Missouri is part of a national trend. “We need to fix this,” Clem, who lives in the St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon, said. “It’s just gotten out of hand.”

The drawing of congressional districts has always seemed subjective, and the rules for drawing them have been scrutinized since gerrymandering was first deployed as a political tactic more than 200 years ago. But as partisanship continues to deepen, the rules keep shifting far too late in the process, and voters try, perhaps in vain, just to keep up.

The American Age Is Over

2026-09-16T06:50:14-04:00

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The American age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived. In the past six months, America’s power—long exemplified by the world’s best warfighting equipment and most highly trained military personnel, a global network of bases and logistics systems, and military and diplomatic partnerships with all corners of the world—has proved insufficient to defeat Iran, a repressive, economically stagnant regime armed with cheap missiles and drones.

For years, virtually everyone thought that, in a crisis, Washington could draw on deeper reserves of money, troops, munitions, and diplomatic support than any other nation. Even when U.S. forces faced setbacks in conflicts such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, a widespread assumption about America’s fundamental strength reassured allies and deterred foes. Yet that assumption also promoted a complacency that has left the U.S. military exposed now that even inexpensive, mass-produced weaponry can be guided with deadly accuracy.

President Trump did not erode U.S. capabilities on his own. But Trump’s war with Iran has revealed just how the underlying dynamics of global power have shifted—and just how much American might has decayed.

Since Britain’s postwar retreat from the Middle East, the United States has been the most important military power in that volatile region. In 1980, the Carter administration asserted that America would guarantee the free flow of oil and other commodities out of the Persian Gulf to the wider world. The success of the Carter doctrine required hostile governments, which then included the Soviet Union as well as the new theocracy in Iran, to believe that the United States could and would take decisive military action against anyone who dared to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s petroleum, and other vital commodities, has long passed.

[Read: Iran unleashed]

Until recently, the array of American bases surrounding Iran gave that country’s leaders every reason to fear being overwhelmed militarily if they moved to control the strait. Yet the regime remains intact, even after attacks by the United States and Israel succeeded in killing top Iranian leaders, and its long-range missile and drone attacks managed to elude American air defenses and incapacitated many U.S. facilities. In March, fewer than two weeks into the fighting, The New York Times identified 17 American bases, air-defense installations, and diplomatic facilities that had been hit. Among them were some of the U.S. military’s important staging points: the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain as well as the Ali Al Salem Air Base, Camp Arifjan, and Camp Buehring in Kuwait.

The effect of these losses on U.S. operations was nearly instantaneous. A key reason the Trump administration did not militarily escalate with Iran over the summer, despite all of its threats to do so, was the loss of the base in Bahrain—which the Navy had relied on for decades to resupply ships in the Middle East. Instead, the so-called logistical tail for U.S. naval operations had to stretch all the way to Diego Garcia, a British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean more than 2,000 miles from the Strait of Hormuz.

Complications to resupply efforts raise costs, reduce operational efficiency, and add to the strain on military personnel. Disrupted logistics contributed to the long deployment of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which led in turn to low morale. According to Stars and Stripes, families of crew members on the Lincoln feared that the many months at sea were causing serious mental-health problems.

For the moment—and likely for longer—the bases taken out of commission by Iranian attacks have been largely abandoned as operational facilities because of the continuing threat to U.S. personnel and equipment. At a recent town-hall meeting, Navy Times has reported, a service member asked Admiral Daryl Caudle about retrieving personal items from the Bahrain base. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Caudle responded. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”

The vulnerability of U.S facilities near Iran is so great and the prospective cost of repair is so large that, as The Washington Post reported last month, administration officials might not want to rebuild them at all. One way to spin the situation is as a “once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its presence” in the Persian Gulf region, as the Post put it. But the basic fact is that defending key facilities against even a less technologically advanced foe such as Iran is not something that the U.S. military can currently do.

The diminution of U.S. strength has a cascading effect. To maintain its military effort against Iran, the United States has had to strip the western Pacific of vital equipment. The Trump administration finally relieved the Abraham Lincoln last month; taking its place in the Arabian Sea was USS George Washington, which is normally based in Japan. Its normal task is to discourage military action by China—a deterrence that is now greatly weakened.

This desperate move only underscores that American military resources, however enormous relative to most other countries’, are not infinite. The war with Iran has depleted stockpiles of some of the Pentagon’s most important and advanced weaponry. By the end of April, cautious studies were estimating that the United States had already run dangerously low in THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) munitions, Patriot interceptors, and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Shortages have worsened since then.

For years, the United States has focused on building so-called exquisite systems—advanced weaponry that is produced in limited quantities at a high per-unit cost. This approach was in part an adaptation to the post-9/11 War on Terror, in which U.S. forces focused on counterinsurgency and fought enemies that lacked the capacity to mount and sustain serious attacks on American logistics. Under those circumstances, the Pentagon built up a broad array of munitions but not deep stockpiles of them. At current production rates, the United States will need several years to build supplies back to where they were when Trump went to war in February—and even those levels in hindsight look far too weak to maintain America’s long-standing global position amid a shift toward mass-produced precision-guided drones.

The erosion of American manufacturing superiority is an old story, but it is a key element for understanding the end of the American age. The U.S. could once outbuild other powers by tapping into civilian production. During World War II, Americans retooled the automotive industry to build aircraft. Today, relative to the rest of the world, the United States does almost no civilian shipbuilding. China, in comparison, makes about 50 percent of the ships in the world and controls about 80 percent of the world’s drone manufacture. Having built its military to prevail in a burst of high-intensity fighting, the United States simply lacks the equipment, stockpiles, and rested forces to engage China for any extended period of time.

In the past, the United States could rely on allies to amplify its own power. Nations that shared values or at least interests with Washington have hosted bases, provided diplomatic support for American initiatives, shared intelligence, and sent troops and equipment to support American-led military operations. Today, traditional allies have capabilities that the U.S. sorely needs. For example, Japan and South Korea are the second- and third-largest shipbuilding powers in the world.

Rather than recognizing that it needs allies more than ever, the current U.S administration perceives governments that have followed American leadership for decades as free riders, annoyances, even hindrances. Recently, President Trump has been critical of South Korea and praised his supposedly great relationship with North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un. Never mind that South Korea and North Korea are still technically in a state of war, and North Korea has nuclear weapons that could devastate its neighbor to the south and potentially other U.S. allies farther afield.

Meanwhile in Europe, the U.S. government has distanced itself from long-standing democracies and moved closer to the Russian dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. Since returning to the White House, Trump has scaled back the American provision of security to Europe. Earlier this year, the Pentagon announced plans to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany, and the administration has launched a defense-posture review that heralds further cuts. The U.S. is making no secret of its goal of turning over more and more of the responsibility of defending Europe to the Europeans. Leaders in Europe are taking these moves seriously and are making plans to rely less on the United States. Germany is considering whether to help the U.K. modernize its nuclear weapons so that Europe has a nuclear deterrent if the United States pulls out.

[Read: Europe without America]

The United States has even begun to alienate Canada. Trump has regularly talked about his desire to incorporate Canada as the 51st state. He has also launched a trade war that, by his own account, will be “devastating” to the Canadian economy. Americans have now twice elected a president who overtly seeks to reframe traditional alliances as zero-sum relationships in which the United States needs to do less and its former partners, more. Leaders and voters in those countries might reasonably conclude that Americans do not know or do not care what they are giving up.

Americans have long benefited from peaceful integration with Canada. The U.S. could go to war with Iran in part because of its large base network in Europe. The disruption of long-standing alliances will be devastating to America’s global position. Other countries are already adjusting to newly revealed American weaknesses. Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—all long-term U.S. partners—recently signed their own defense pact. Now that Iran is exercising control over the Strait of Hormuz, Oman, on the waterway’s opposite shore, is inching toward closer cooperation with Tehran. Other Gulf States are reaching out to Iran as well. Even Saudi Arabia, which for decades based its security on massive purchases of U.S. weapons and the hosting of U.S. forces, must reassess its choices after Trump told its de facto ruler that the U.S. will not assist the country in its war with the Houthis.

Meanwhile, South Korea is improving relations with China, and European states are thinking more and more of a European-wide defense association. These are all strong signs that the countries around the world are losing confidence in America’s capabilities—and its intent.

Unfortunately for the United States, the administration seems more intent on hiding problems than correcting them. The Defense Department has forced out key staffers at Stars and Stripes and demanded, in an investigation of leaks about munitions shortages and other matters, that certain Pentagon employees take polygraph tests.

Even if the United States tries to revert to more of its earlier way of doing business, recent events suggest that its global reach will decrease. How the rest of the world will adapt to that change is hard to say. The American age may not give way to dominance by China, because that country has problems of its own and other states in Asia, such as India, are growing to balance it. Democratic nations that look after their own defense more diligently, rather than relying on American protection, might conceivably benefit. The world might also experience a very chaotic period of wars and competitions.

All of history’s previous superpowers have eventually declined. The emergence of East Asia as the center of the world’s economic output was always going to reduce American influence. The transition from one global age to the next is seldom evident in the moment. When Russia invaded Ukraine four and a half years ago, the potential of mass-produced drones had not yet become clear. As recently as February, few experts would have predicted that the United States—a global colossus for more than 80 years—would end up so hamstrung by Iran. But the conflict reveals something important: The American age has come to an end. U.S. global dominance cannot continue without the power sources that brought it about.

A Shouting Match and an Ultimatum at the Kennedy Center

2026-09-15T20:54:00-04:00

Donald Trump has given the federal judiciary an ultimatum: Let him put his name on the Kennedy Center, or he won’t save it.

That threat came after a federal judge, Christopher Cooper, today blocked yet another effort to add the president’s name to the building. Moments later, Trump virtually joined a Kennedy Center board meeting, at which he slammed Cooper’s decision and lashed out at Representative Joyce Beatty—the ex officio board member challenging his overhaul of the institution in court—according to a person with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal proceedings.

Later, Trump posted on Truth Social that the center’s “Renovation and Reconstruction, which is a very large and complex job, cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name,” adding, “If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

After months defined by empty theaters and canceled shows, the Kennedy Center has become a shadow of the premier performance venue it was just more than a year ago. A Washington Post report this week revealed that the center’s finances are on the brink of collapse and that it could face bankruptcy. But while the institution has diminished, its leaders—and Trump’s allies on the board—have continued to push his plans forward, repackaging their oft-repeated claim that the only way to save it from financial ruin ahead of a two-year renovation is to emblazon it with Trump’s name. The crisis at the Kennedy Center is entangled in a larger effort by Trump to control what Washington looks like—a fight that has taken on higher stakes as his administration evades federal procedures designed to protect historic places from the whims of any one president.

The immediate outcome of today’s events adds more confusion. General trustees voted in favor of closing the center, and two staffers told me that leaders subsequently announced through the building’s broadcast system that the Kennedy Center was closed to the public. It was unclear if that announcement meant that employees would also be barred from the premises, according to one of the staffers, both of whom spoke with me on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Cooper issued a preliminary injunction in May to temporarily block the center from closing; if he does not lift or amend that ruling, the announced closure will put the board in violation of the court’s orders.

[Read: Trump’s Kennedy Center shakedown]

“The Board’s decision today reflects sound judgment and a clear prioritization of safety above all else,” the center’s vice president for public relations, Roma Daravi, told me in a statement. “As the main building closes for urgent renovations—long overdue and desperately needed to protect the safety of patrons, artists and staff—the Center remains committed to pursuing a safe and efficient renovation through all legal means.” The White House referred me to Trump’s post when I asked for comment on this story.

Meanwhile, the latest evidence of trouble at the Kennedy Center is scattered on the velvet carpet in the Grand Foyer, after a portion of its ceiling collapsed during a storm on September 4. The incident, which did not result in any injuries, has become the primary example for leaders describing the building’s urgent needs—and, as Daravi put it, debating whether “decades of neglect and deferred maintenance” are to blame. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick doubled down last night, posting security footage of the moment the chunks of ceiling suddenly fell to the floor. “If a performance had been underway, patrons could have been killed,” he wrote. The rubble and the hole in the ceiling are still on full display, while signs, ropes, and a yellow cone caution people against entering the foyer.

The fallen ceiling has become a key image of the Kennedy Center’s crisis. Trump’s allies say it’s proof that the building’s troubles predate this administration, and can be resolved only by the appropriately recognized intervention of the president-as-master-builder. But to some who oppose his overhaul, the center’s loud publicization of the problem underscores the board’s eagerness—perhaps overeagerness—to shut down the building.

In a filing this week, Beatty’s team alleged that the center was citing the ceiling damage as justification for closure, but pointed out that a similar problem in 1977 was addressed without shutting down the center. (Beatty’s lawyers told the court that further discovery could show that mismanagement under Trump led to the institution’s insolvency.)

Either way, after the board’s latest vote to close, the next step is to wait and see if Cooper will allow it this time. It’s unclear if anything he heard today will persuade him—including a lengthy assessment of the building’s conditions that a real-estate firm prepared for the board—given his previous statement that the initial closure plans were “ill-informed and seemingly preordained.” But a crumbling ceiling might just do the trick: During the hearing today, Cooper indicated that he would consider amending his preliminary injunction to authorize closure for urgent circumstances.

[Read: What I saw inside the Kennedy Center]

The other emergency—the money—is even messier. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Kennedy Center leaders are warning trustees of financial collapse within weeks, saying that the institution could soon be unable to make payroll or cover routine bills. The alarm follows an earlier Post report on internal financial records showing that the center could face a deficit of $23 million—even amid its drastic spending cuts this year.

To keep Trump’s plans for the center alive, the board has already appealed today’s ruling against adding his name to the facade, and Beatty revealed in a court filing to Cooper that leaders had been weighing 10 different ways in which Trump’s name could be added back to the center’s edifice. “The Board seeks to provide multiple options so that President Trump can be legally and appropriately recognized and acknowledged on the facade of the Kennedy Center so that he agrees to carry the burden of managing the renovation and provides the Center with a much required financial rescue,” a resolution that the board had prepared for this week read, though it was later dropped from the board’s agenda so trustees could focus exclusively on closure.

In his ruling today, Cooper reiterated the conclusion he had already reached four months ago. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” he wrote, adding that the latest renaming plan “bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”

Trump’s reaction today to Cooper’s decision—both online and before the board—underscores the bargain that has defined his stewardship of the Kennedy Center. Its leaders say that it is nearing financial and structural collapse, and that Trump is uniquely capable of raising the money and overseeing the work to turn the institution around. Today’s hearing brought up new questions about those claims, including what bankruptcy would even mean for a charitable trust organization created by Congress. If its finances are truly as bad as leaders and reports say, the court might eventually need to consider placing the center under the control of an independent receiver. For now, the venue is trapped between self-inflicted crises and the conditions that have been attached to solving them. But saving the Kennedy Center may ultimately require something its leadership has gone out of its way to resist: separating the future of the institution from the wishes of the president.

The Only Thing Capable of Uniting Bernie and Bannon

2026-09-15T20:09:41-04:00

If there was any question over whether the concept of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is still operative in Washington’s hyper-partisan political environment, the answer may be found in the budding coalition of progressives and MAGA-friendly activists who have united in recent days to speak out against artificial intelligence. Which is how Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon found themselves speaking on the same stage today.

With warnings that the technology could cause mass economic displacement and even human extinction, political figures who once wanted nothing to do with one another are suddenly joining forces, scrambling the political landscape just weeks before the midterm elections. The odd couples, who would have been hard to fathom just weeks ago, are also reshaping the legislative agenda. Republican Senators Ted Cruz and John Thune have teamed up with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar on an AI-safety bill; progressive Senator Richard Blumenthal joined forces with conservative Senator Josh Hawley to push a bill requiring AI companies to obtain approval from the Department of Energy before deploying new systems.

Nearly a decade ago, Sanders urged then-President-Elect Trump to reverse his decision to hire Bannon, a pugilistic architect of the MAGA movement, and called him “a racist individual.” Last year, Bannon called Sanders a “pussy” for not going after Hillary Clinton hard enough in 2016. But the two were able to put all of that aside today to deliver the same message: If AI has the potential to wipe out humanity, Americans should have a say in how it operates.

[Read: Trump’s see-no-evil AI policy]

“If the lives of every man, woman, and child are going to be fundamentally changed by this technology, then the people of this country must make the decisions about AI, and not just a handful of oligarchs,” Sanders said at the all-day “Pro-Human Assembly.” Bannon sounded pretty much exactly the same. “The American citizens are not going to be supplicants to the oligarchs anymore,” the MAGA strategist said in what easily could have been a continuation of the Vermont socialist’s remarks. “We can’t do it.”

Standing decidedly outside of this spirit of cross-party cooperation is Trump, who has downplayed warnings about AI’s risks and called the concerns over the rapidly advancing technology a “hoax.” Trump made a surprise appearance at an AI-friendly event yesterday by placing a phone call to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and making clear that he does not believe the doomsday warnings that have circulated in recent days. “The robots are not going to be taking over the world,” he told Huang, who took the call while speaking at a summit in Los Angeles and put it on speakerphone for the crowd to hear. “That’s not going to happen.”

Bannon and Sanders, speaking back-to-back, essentially agreed to disagree about Trump. Sanders said that Trump’s “ignorance regarding this issue is truly embarrassing” and suggested that the president is not taking the technology’s risks seriously enough.

“Obviously, he and I have a quite different opinion of the president of the United States,” Bannon told the crowd. “But we’re trying to raise above partisanship, and we have to.” That line received applause. But overriding Trump’s opposition to AI regulation in order to make meaningful policy changes could be a heavy lift. In several social-media posts yesterday, Trump dismissed those concerned about AI’s dangers as “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers.” He suggested that AI and the data centers that power it could represent the greatest economic opportunity in American history. “Don’t kill the Golden Goose!” he wrote. Some lawmakers and activists, including Trump supporters and detractors, are now attempting to create a formal coalition to push for stronger guardrails around AI. Sanders plans to host a closed-door, bipartisan briefing on AI tomorrow in Washington.

Today’s event in Washington was branded by organizers as an opportunity to create a “more human-centric path for AI development.” Speakers, including lawmakers, labor officials, and faith leaders, leaned heavily on the idea that the battle to slow AI’s advance should transcend traditional partisan or ideological divides.

[Ian Bogost: The thrill of wanting AI to destroy the world]

The event was organized by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that was primarily funded by a donation of more than $650 million in 2021 from Vitalik Buterin, a wealthy cryptocurrency entrepreneur. (The donation was delivered in crypto.) Politico reported in 2024 that the small organization’s hefty war chest put it in the same league as organizational behemoths such as the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the Brookings Institution.

Today’s event featured free merch that included Carhartt shirts, yellow hoodies, and camouflage hats featuring mottos such as Keep the future human and Pro-Human. A video booth, fully decked out with stage lighting and a single chair, offered attendees the chance to answer the prompt When did you feel most human? Not, apparently, on video: When I walked by it a few times, it was not being used.

A parody news report on nearby television screens played a staged interview with “Dan X,” who appeared to be a stand-in for an AI executive. The CEO of a fictional company called Replacement.AI was described by the faux journalist as “a walking paradox” who “loves people but isn’t crazy about humans.” Wearing a Patagonia vest and a smartwatch, the Millennial-coded CEO ended the interview by offering this advice: “Live every day as if it is your last, because one day soon, very soon, it might be.”

Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor and the president of the International Association for Safe & Ethical AI, told the crowd that his private discussions with AI-company officials included even more dire predictions about the technology’s dangers than what they have discussed publicly. But organizers seemed eager to push the event beyond dystopian warnings and move toward solutions.

“There is no better testimony to how united we are than the mind-blowing ideological diversity that you’re going to see onstage today,” Max Tegmark, a co-founder and the chair of the Future of Life Institute, said at the assembly’s opening. In addition to lawmakers, the event featured clergy who spoke about AI’s impact on faith, parents whose teenage children had committed suicide after engaging with chatbots, and economists concerned about the mass displacement of the workforce. Attendees attempting to navigate the event website had to first agree to “Standards of Conduct” requiring participants to “practice active listening” and refrain from personal attacks.

Representative Chip Roy of Texas, who is retiring from Congress, was the only elected Republican to appear onstage. He told me that organizers had encouraged him to avoid politics in his remarks but that he predicted that political differences will inevitably intrude as the debate over what to do about AI continues. “I doubt Bernie’s solutions are going to be my solution,” he said.

Still, there were signs that figures on both sides of the aisle seemed ready to at least have an honest conversation. “I don’t think you could find any two harder partisans than Bernie Sanders on the left and Steve Bannon on the right,” Bannon said during his remarks. “This is a hinge in history. We have to handle this correctly. To handle it correctly, No. 1, we can never trust what an oligarch says.”

Sanders was by then out of sight, but on that much, he surely agreed.

The Next Change Trump Has Planned for the Smithsonian

2026-09-15T19:21:00-04:00

Donald Trump has not forgotten his midsummer promise to publicly shame the Smithsonian. The Trump administration is currently preparing temporary signs that will accuse the National Museum of American History of ideological bias, according to a letter I obtained sent by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The September 3 letter, which Burgum sent to Senator Jeff Merkley, says that the National Park Service is planning to add about a dozen signs outside the museum at an estimated cost of $84,000. Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, and Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, requested information about the initiative after Trump signed an executive order in July calling for the signs to be added.

A person familiar with the plans described some of the preparations to me. Although the Park Service has an idea of the physical structure of the signs, what the signs will actually say and who is writing the text remains a mystery to people in the agency working on them, said the person, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. The letter from Burgum says that the signs are not finalized, but it offers a preview of what they might look like, describing a number of things “visitors should know” before they enter the museum. Burgum, whose department includes the Park Service, extensively quotes the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, and criticizes outgoing Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch, seeking to frame both as ideologues. The letter also calls out exhibitions and materials that have touched on groups the administration has gone after, such as undocumented immigrants and transgender Americans.

“The informational signage therefore will provide visitors with important context about the exhibits they are about to encounter and the personal viewpoints that the curators of the exhibits are seeking to advance,” the letter says. It goes on to justify the move, echoing a 162-page report on the museum released by the White House and asserting that the museum is pushing “ideologies that distract from a coherent and accurate presentation of America’s story.” Burgum adds, “This may be the first instance in which executive branch intervention of this nature has become Necessary.”

The Smithsonian, which is partially federally funded, has historically operated independently, has its own governing body, and is regarded in the wider museum world as measured in its approach. The institution has been heading off threats and criticism from the Trump administration since March 2025. Recently, the administration’s attention has turned to the American-history museum, which Trump made a number of curatorial demands of on social media this past Friday, including insisting that it remove an abstract sculpture and erect a 30-foot-tall George Washington statue in its place. Although the Trump administration has accused the Smithsonian, and specifically the American-history museum, of not being patriotic enough, the museum’s leadership has pointed to the abundance of patriotic material on display inside—368 objects and 340 labels on the founding era; 54 George Washington mentions, according to Hartig—and has maintained that telling the American story in its full complexity is a crucial part of its role.

“Our work is governed by the Smithsonian’s standards of scholarship, accuracy, independence, and nonpartisanship,” Hartig told two House committees this summer. “The museum does not take sides in America’s political debates. We preserve and document the evidence of American life in all its breadth, so that the public can encounter the past and draw their own conclusions.”

Trump’s executive order calling for the displays also ordered the Park Service to direct visitors to White House–approved resources on history and include a temporary exhibit about the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The order was unprecedented, pitting two prominent American institutions against each other.

Before this presidency, few might have imagined a showdown between park rangers and history curators on the National Mall. But the White House has had to get creative in trying to control the Smithsonian. Unlike the Park Service, the museum complex is insulated from the executive branch’s whims. The signs will attempt to put a frame around the Smithsonian’s work before visitors even reach the door.

The Burgum letter suggests that the signs will be direct in their criticism of Smithsonian leadership and materials. It points to comments Hartig has made during her tenure on topics such as the scope of U.S. history, whether the museum should have an “America First” mentality, and the acknowledgment of Native American lands—and suggests that these comments are necessary information for museum visitors. The letter says, “A commitment to public transparency means that visitors should be informed about Director Hartig’s and other Smithsonian leaders’ history of racial focus” and quotes Hartig acknowledging white privilege in a November 2020 lecture during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. The letter further asserts that visitors should be informed about “Secretary Lonnie Bunch’s history of invidious discrimination and anti-white animus,” quoting from a 2000 essay the secretary wrote discussing racial discrimination in the museum profession.

The letter goes on to call out a handful of exhibits mentioned in Trump’s report, including three that touched on transgender themes. It also mentions resources that discuss why educators should use terms such as undocumented immigrant instead of illegal alien.

After the announcement about the signs this summer, I was curious to know who might be working on the text for the displays and contacted some of the Trump administration’s go-to history experts. PragerU and Hillsdale College both helped create the Freedom Truck mobile museums touring the country this year as part of Trump’s Freedom 250 celebrations, but a PragerU spokesperson told me that the right-leaning edutainment nonprofit is not working on the Smithsonian signs, and a Hillsdale spokesperson told me that the conservative college is not “institutionally” involved. “When the College works with the administration on educational projects (the Story of America video series, for instance), we’re glad to say so,” a spokesperson wrote to me in an email.

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who was called by Republicans to testify about the Smithsonian at the hearings this summer, declined to comment on any involvement, writing to me that “any conversation I have with any level of government, from local dog catcher to the top of the federal level is private and confidential. Otherwise, why would they trust me?” He added, “And, no, you shouldn’t take that as a confirmation of anything.” He told me by phone that he thinks the signs are clever and that “at best, it’s a medium-term solution or a short-term solution.”

Even under pressure, the Smithsonian has continued to tell the American story. On a recent afternoon at the National Museum of American History, staff sat in a small room behind tables dotted with objects from 9/11 and spoke directly with visitors. Some museumgoers left the exhibit moved to tears, staff told me.There was no descriptive wall text, no glass, just the museum in its purest form—a conversation between historians and the public.

Trump Is Looking for Diesel in All the Wrong Places

2026-09-15T19:03:00-04:00

Gasoline prices have been up all summer, as have jet-fuel prices, as have home-heating-oil prices—but nothing has jumped quite like diesel. The average price for a gallon of diesel in the United States just hit an all-time high of $6.27, almost double what it was in late February. It’s no secret that the Iran war is largely responsible for America’s energy woes. So far, Donald Trump’s strategy has been to downplay these increases as temporary side effects (a “little glitch,” he said in March) and remind everyone that oil prices were higher under Joe Biden (which is true). Lately, though, the president has been telling us to look away from Iran and toward a different war.

Over the weekend, he called on Ukraine’s president to stop striking Russian oil refineries, which he said was “causing a shortage of diesel.” And yesterday morning, he announced a partial energy cease-fire between the two countries, claiming that the “World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/Ukraine War, not Iran.” (Although both Ukraine and Russia have signaled that they’d be open to such an agreement, they continued attacking each other last night.) Focusing on Eastern Europe may be a convenient distraction tactic, but the reality is that this war is ultimately less important for U.S. diesel than the one that Trump is waging in the Middle East.

Diesel’s rally has to do with how it’s distilled. Diesel, like gasoline, primarily comes from crude oil, which has been in short supply since the Strait of Hormuz was effectively shut down in February. Middle Eastern crude, which is sludgy and sulphurous, is particularly conducive to producing diesel. Making matters worse, many local refineries have been attacked or have preemptively gone offline, leaving the region less equipped to handle the crude that remains. Yemen’s Houthis attacked a major Saudi facility last week as a prelude to a broader offensive.

The refinery problem is global. At their summer peak, the world’s facilities were producing 4.2 million fewer barrels a day than they were last year. As Trump has pointed out, Ukrainian attacks on refineries in Russia—usually the world’s second-largest diesel exporter—have only compounded the issue. With Moscow maintaining its ban on diesel exports (meant to protect domestic supply), more countries are turning to the U.S. to make up the difference. American plants are now “running all-out,” per the American Petroleum Institute, using almost all of their processing power, and the U.S. is exporting more refined-oil products on average than it was last year. U.S. refineries typically shut down for at least a couple of weeks for maintenance around this time of year, too, which could potentially squeeze supply even more.

Still, Matt Smith, the director of commodity research at the data firm Kpler, told me that Ukrainian aggression “isn’t equally to blame, let alone the leading factor,” in America’s rising diesel prices. Even if Russia and Ukraine agreed to a cease-fire today, global refining capacity wouldn’t magically return right away. As I wrote in May, damaged facilities take time to repair and come back online once they’ve been shut down. Gregory Brew, an energy historian and a senior analyst at Eurasia Group, told me that for any détente to have an effect on diesel prices, “it would likely need to last several weeks at least.” Meanwhile, the situation in the Middle East remains unstable. The Saudi Arabian government recently shut down a crucial pipeline that was damaged in a strike by Iran-aligned militias in Iraq (the pipeline had been moving 4 to 5 percent of the global oil supply—several million barrels a day). Combine these risks with elevated seasonal demand for diesel, which in the U.S. tends to peak around the harvest season, and it’s clear that the European conflict is only one force among many behind this price spike.

Americans are feeling the effects. One gas station in San Diego has been selling diesel for $9.99 a gallon, which is as high as its three-digit physical display will permit. Groceries may become more expensive because farm equipment and refrigerated 18-wheelers tend to run on diesel. Trains predominantly use diesel, too, and railroads’ fuel surcharges on grain shipments have more than doubled over the past year. Nearly 5 million homes could be paying more for heating oil (which is chemically similar to diesel and subject to some of the same economic pressures) as well.

As everyday costs continue to climb, voters are growing more and more dissatisfied with Trump’s handling of the economy. And over the past few months, the president has been looking for someone—anyone—to share the blame. A speedy Trump-negotiated end to the Ukraine war is unlikely for many reasons. But even in the fantasy world where he pulls that off, it wouldn’t save him from a diesel spike of his own creation.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

A federal judge blocked the Kennedy Center from adding Donald Trump’s name to the building or its grounds. The judge ruled that such changes require congressional approval, reaffirming an earlier decision that led to Trump’s name being removed from the center.
In a hearing today, the House Financial Services Committee questioned Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent about inflation, national debt, and rising borrowing costs as he defended the Trump administration’s economic policies. The 10-year Treasury yield briefly reached 5.04 percent this morning, its highest level since 2007.
Russia and Ukraine launched new attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure overnight, shortly after Trump said the two countries had agreed to halt such strikes. The Kremlin described the halt as a proposal still under discussion, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine would stop its attacks if Russia did the same.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Trump’s position on AI makes no sense, Rogé Karma argues.

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Evening Read

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic

Sons and Mothers

By George Packer

When I was 13, not long after my father had committed suicide, I asked my mother, “What’s the Oedipus complex?”

“Why?” she replied at once. “Are you afraid you’ve got it?”

Maybe. I wasn’t aware of wanting to murder my father, but in the four years after he suffered a massive stroke at 43, he’d been a volatile presence in our house, given to bursts of rage and tears, or rendered ominously mute by his paralysis. When he disappeared on December 6, 1972, leaving my mother, my sister, and me, I was troubled by a sense of profound relief. Unable to understand, let alone forgive, myself, I went searching for insight on the shelves of my parents’ narrow, high-walled study. Books offered a way to replace real self-knowledge with an official version—the idea of “guilt” instead of the intolerable feeling itself. In a volume called Oedipus: Myth and Complex, amid thickets of psychoanalytic jargon, I found what I was looking for.

Read the full article.

Congress Might Be About to Hand Trump Sweeping Tariff Powers

2026-09-15T17:27:00-04:00

The Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, which the House will likely vote on this week, looks like a no-brainer for supporters of Ukraine who have been calling for President Trump to get tougher on Russia.

A large majority of America’s existing sanctions on Russia, which target thousands of government officials and companies, are currently enforced by executive order, meaning that the president can remove them whenever he wants. The Graham bill would turn those sanctions into law: If Trump wanted to end them, he would need Congress’s approval. It also targets a few Russian officials and companies by name, further reducing Trump’s discretion. These provisions help explain why the late Senator Graham, one of Ukraine’s strongest defenders in Congress, originally championed the bill. President Volodymyr Zelensky himself has urged legislators to pass it, as have more than 30 national-security and foreign-policy experts who argue that it’s in Kyiv’s best interest.

But the bill is not what it seems. The legislation would impose no significant new sanctions on Russia, and it would allow Trump to waive any of its measures simply by claiming that doing so is in the national interest. In other words, a law that appears to handcuff Trump would offer him a key to free himself. What’s more, its most important provisions are about not sanctions per se, but tariffs. The bill could provide Trump with the same kind of sweeping authority to impose tariffs that the Supreme Court took away from him in February, allowing him to intensify his trade war with many of America’s allies and partners.

The legislation would give the president authority to impose levies of up to 100 percent on the five largest importers of Russian crude oil and the five largest importers of Russian natural gas, which include China, India, France, Japan, Hungary, and Slovakia. It also allows him to impose tariffs on the five countries that are deemed to be the biggest facilitators of Russia’s evasion of oil sanctions—a vague provision largely subject to presidential discretion. (There are a few carve-outs for the natural-gas category, but not for the others.)

[Read: Russia’s real strategy in Europe]

Peter Harrell, a trade lawyer who served in the Biden administration, told me that the bill “gives Trump much more flexibility on tariffs than traditional tariff laws. There are no guardrails or restrictions.” The simplest reading of the legislation suggests that Trump can impose tariffs on only the countries that appear in the various top-five lists. But Harrell noted that Trump’s second-term track record suggests that he might try to interpret the law more expansively, perhaps by treating the European Union as a single country and imposing tariffs on the entire bloc all at once. Harrell also warned that the administration might use the law as a pretext to impose tariffs on countries that have little or nothing to do with Russia evading sanctions.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Trump has employed such a pretext. Consider his 25 percent tariff on India, which the Supreme Court has since struck down. The levy was ostensibly meant to punish the country for importing oil from Russia. But reporting suggests that the decision had more to do with Trump’s annoyance that Prime Minister Narendra Modi didn’t give him credit for the cease-fire that India and Pakistan signed last year.

Going beyond the letter of the Graham bill could well result in litigation for the administration. But Trump would still have ample reason to take an aggressive approach. For one thing, the legal process takes a long time—most trade lawyers think that the February ruling came at warp speed, even though it was a year in the making. While the case was moving through the courts, they consistently allowed the Trump administration to continue collecting tariff revenue in the meantime. In all likelihood, Trump would be free to use the tariff tool expansively for most of the rest of his term.

Trump is evidently less worried about Russia evading sanctions than he is about oil prices. At the start of the Iran war, he waived some sanctions on Russian oil in an attempt to keep prices from going up. There is little reason to think that he will act more forcefully against Russian energy now, because oil prices remain high and the midterms are just a month away. Indeed, he has failed to update and enforce sanctions that are already on the books, despite bipartisan support. Moreover, Trump recently sent Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to Moscow to dangle the prospect of sanctions relief in exchange for some modest steps toward deescalating the war.

[Read: The warrior-witches of Ukraine’s resistance]

Still, supporters of the bill believe that the benefits outweigh the risks. Eric Ciaramella, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served on the National Security Council as an adviser on Ukraine policy in the first Trump administration, told me, “If Trump wanted to hurt Europe, he has lots of ways to do that already. This is just a marginal increase in that risk, and it adds some political pressure on him to get tougher on Russia.” Whether such pressure would get Trump to change, however, is another question.

Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of the bill is simply that the Ukrainians want it. The legislation would no doubt serve as a symbol of Congress’s support. But Ukraine needs material, not symbolic, support—particularly weapons such as air-defense interceptors and greater economic assistance to survive the winter. Trump has the power to provide both, but he has chosen not to. Turning the Graham bill into law isn’t likely to give him a sudden change of heart.

Yesterday, Democrats tried but failed to introduce amendments that would exempt the EU from being treated as a country, tighten the national-security waiver, and scrap the broad allowances for tariffs on countries other than Russia. Without those measures, the bill amounts to little more than a permission slip for Trump to restart his trade war with America’s allies and partners. That’s not a price worth paying just to give Ukraine a symbolic victory.

Math Can’t Go On Like This

2026-09-15T14:41:00-04:00

In late July, one of the world’s most famous mathematicians issued a warning to his field. Math is entering a “turbulent period,” the UCLA professor Terence Tao said in front of a packed lecture hall at the International Congress of Mathematicians. AI is getting so good at math, he said, that it’s causing a “crisis in our mathematical values and practices.”

Earlier in the same week that Tao gave his talk at math’s most prestigious conference, a researcher at Anthropic had used Claude to disprove an 87-year-old math conjecture. Still, when I asked mathematicians at the conference about their experiences with AI, most hadn’t thought deeply about the topic. Many seemed a little surprised that a journalist was asking them about it at all.

Now mathematicians are paying attention. Last week, OpenAI announced that its bots had cracked the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems regarded as among the grandest challenges in the field. Navier-Stokes has stumped mathematicians since the 1930s: “It’s a career-killing problem—you can spend all your career doing it and never get the solution,” David Dritschel, a mathematician at the University of St. Andrews, told me. OpenAI said its swarm of 10,000 AI agents solved the problem in less than four days.

In the math world, the initial shock over OpenAI’s result has morphed into something of an existential reckoning for the discipline. Although OpenAI was able to solve the Navier-Stokes problem only by pulling from nearly a century’s worth of human efforts, academics are realizing just how much power the AI industry now has over math. “We’re seeing how swiftly an entire field can be ravaged by AI,” Max Weinreich, a math professor at CUNY Baruch, told me.

OpenAI’s breakthrough is as notable as how it was achieved. The night before OpenAI announced its solution, the NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster released a statement alleging that he had been scooped by OpenAI. With the heavy assistance of AI tools, Buckmaster and his collaborator, Levent Alpöge (who works at Anthropic), had made major progress toward solving the Navier-Stokes problem. Buckmaster implied that OpenAI might have copied their approach by accessing his messages with OpenAI’s agents. “Almost nobody else I know of was working on it,” he wrote.

In an announcement the next day, OpenAI said that it had tasked its AI systems to work on all of the Millennium Problems after hearing rumors that Anthropic had solved two of them. OpenAI claims that it focused on the Navier-Stokes problem only after finding promising partial results, and that it never looked at Buckmaster’s inputs. In any case, OpenAI poured incredible resources into solving this problem—expending millions of dollars in tokens—all because it heard an unfounded rumor of a solution. (OpenAI declined to comment.)

This drama has underlined concerns many mathematicians have about AI developments within the field. AI companies are encouraged to solve problems in a way that generates good headlines for their bots—marshaling resources that academics never could—but those solutions won’t necessarily aid further discoveries or help humans understand mathematics. On Friday, 25 winners of the Fields Medal (sometimes called the Nobel Prize of mathematics) released a statement called “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics.” “The push by AI companies to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics, and to the mathematical community,” they wrote.

All of this can seem obtuse. Isn’t the point of mathematics to solve problems? But there’s more to a problem than just knowing whether it’s true. Solving a major problem in pure mathematics is often like getting a man on the moon: symbolically meaningful but with little direct value. Even though the Navier-Stokes problem deals with one of the most important models in fluid dynamics—a topic of great interest to airplane designers, climate modelers, and many other scientists—knowing the actual result is basically useless.

However, with both a math problem and the moon landing, the process of reaching that goal can indirectly develop all sorts of useful tools applicable to other problems. As part of the Apollo missions, NASA engineers and contractors had to solve subproblems that ultimately proved useful elsewhere. The need for an onboard computer, for example, helped spark the nascent computer-chip industry. Perhaps more surprising, to ensure that astronauts did not get sick while in space, the Apollo program helped set food-safety standards that have since become standard in the industry.

Mathematicians hope that OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof will end up containing ideas that make it easier to study all sorts of other problems, inside and outside of pure mathematics. This has happened before. For instance, efforts to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem produced mathematical tools that now underpin the newest online encryption methods.

It’s still too early to tell what humans might be able to learn from OpenAI’s proof. The paper is 166 pages and “almost incomprehensible,” Dritschel said. Yet over the coming months and years, mathematicians will exert substantial effort to dissect and distill OpenAI’s proof until its central ideas are understood enough to (hopefully) be applied elsewhere.

Humans won’t be able to do that for most AI-generated math results, however. Already, there are AI proofs that no human understands, not because the ideas are impossible to grasp, but because no one has had the time to look through the solution carefully. It’s easy to imagine a future in which mathematicians use AI to prove ever more impressive results ever more quickly—but they don’t understand what they’re proving in much detail. AI systems can speed the rate of problem-solving, but they can’t make it that much easier for human mathematicians to grasp a proof.

So if the field as we know it is to survive, mathematicians need to figure out how to adapt. One idea is to give less credit for solving a problem and more credit for work that communicates the ideas behind a solution in a way that can benefit the broader mathematical community. Yet it’s hard to say exactly how that works in practice. Unlike solving problems, evaluating how well a mathematician has communicated with their peers has no clear metrics.

It will take time for mathematicians to figure out the best response. All the while, AI is continuing to develop incredibly quickly. In less than the time that it takes to complete a Ph.D., systems such as ChatGPT have gone from struggling with basic arithmetic to solving some of the most famous problems in the world. Math’s turbulent period, as Tao deemed it, isn’t ending anytime soon.

Trump’s Position on AI Makes No Sense

2026-09-15T11:47:00-04:00

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The AI panic has arrived. Tech CEOs are practically begging the government to make them slow down. But Donald Trump isn’t buying any of it. On Sunday, he dismissed calls for AI regulation on the grounds that doing so would surrender America’s position in the global AI arms race. “Look, we’re leading China in AI,” the president told reporters. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins.” He repeated the sentiment less decorously in a Truth Social post yesterday describing the calls for regulation as “a SICK conspiracy going on against AI,” adding that “the only one that is happy about it is China.”

But if Trump is truly concerned about staying ahead of China in the AI race, he hasn’t been acting like it. Late last year, his administration lifted export controls on advanced chips made by the American company Nvidia. These chips are the most crucial input to AI development. The policy is the equivalent of declaring that the United States must remain ahead of Russia in the nuclear-arms race, while allowing American firms to sell uranium to the Kremlin.

Indeed, America’s monopoly on advanced computer chips might be the biggest reason the U.S. has kept ahead of Chinese AI companies so far. Experts generally agree that China is level with or ahead of America when it comes to engineering talent, training data, and energy supply. But training a top AI model also requires highly advanced computer chips capable of performing trillions of calculations a second. Nvidia is the only company in the world that can produce such chips at scale.

[Read: What really happens if China wins the AI race?]

That’s why, in October 2022, the Biden administration announced that it would ban Nvidia from selling its most advanced semiconductors to China. The aim of the policy was to slow China’s AI development by withholding the one resource that it did not have. When Trump took office in January 2025, the policy seemed to be working. Experts estimated that the leading American AI models were well ahead of the best Chinese models, and Chinese AI companies were citing export controls as one of the biggest obstacles to their growth. “Money has never been the problem for us,” Liang Wenfeng, the CEO of the Chinese AI company DeepSeek, told a Chinese media outlet in 2024. “Bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem.”

But over the course of 2025, Trump began loosening the restrictions. In May, the administration halted the implementation of a Biden-era rule meant to prevent Nvidia chips from being smuggled into China via third-party countries. Then, in July, it lifted controls on the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chip. Finally, in December, the White House went even further by removing the ban on the far more powerful H200, Nvidia’s second-best chip, which is estimated to be nearly six times more powerful than any chip China had direct access to previously.

Experts immediately warned that lifting the ban was a bad idea. The Institute for Progress, a think tank focused on science and technology policy, estimated that the U.S. would have had access to roughly 20 to 50 times more compute power than China by 2026 if it had kept full chip restrictions in place; unrestricted H200 exports could shrink that gap to almost nothing. “Compute power is the only reason we’ve retained our advantage so far,” Saif Khan, who co-authored that report, told me at the time. “And we’re about to just give it away.”

Chinese companies have indeed begun to catch up since the controls were lifted. Over the first half of this year, multiple Chinese AI firms released models that perform nearly as highly as Anthropic and OpenAI’s top models, most of them at a fraction of the price. Experts now believe that the AI gap between the U.S. and China is about six months and closing fast.

[Rogé Karma: Data centers are a distraction]

Some of this progress seems to be the result of Chinese firms taking advantage of the Trump administration’s loose policies. The most advanced Chinese model to date, Kimi-K3, appears to have been trained by remotely accessing a cluster of Nvidia’s most advanced chips via a data center in Thailand—a loophole that was made possible when Trump rolled back restrictions on chip sales to third-party countries. An analysis by Epoch AI, an AI-focused think tank, found that up to 59 percent of China’s total AI-chip stockpile at the end of 2025 had been smuggled into the country.

Now that China has legal access to Nvidia’s second-best chip, however, Chinese companies won’t need to rely on whatever compute power they can scrape together through the black market. They can simply buy the chips that they need. A few months ago, Liang, the CEO of DeepSeek, lamented that his company had “relatively little” access to chips last year, but that “this year we’re very aggressively expanding this compute” with chips that are “basically all Nvidia.” All of which means that the next generation of Chinese models will likely be even more powerful.

Trump is right that a unilateral AI slowdown would create a serious risk of the U.S. being overtaken by China. But the solution is not a perpetual anything-goes AI arms race. Instead, the U.S. should pursue a nonproliferation agreement with China in which both sides agree to a mutual deceleration of AI progress. Trump wants to use the threat of Chinese AI development as an excuse to keep the U.S. industry accelerating—even as his own policies make that threat worse.

What Trump’s Bizarre Posts Are Teaching Us About AI

2026-09-15T09:00:00-04:00

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Here is a selective list of the dozens of images the president has recently disseminated on Truth Social: Donald Trump on a horse next to George Washington on a horse, in the body of Hulk Hogan, beating Hogan in arm wrestling, standing between General George Patton and General Douglas MacArthur in a World War II uniform, hovering menacingly with a hockey stick over the Canadian prime minister, commanding the deck of an aircraft carrier, nuking parts of Earth from space, gleefully dancing to “YMCA” as he replaces a sign for Lake Ontario with one for Lake America. Maybe most surreal (though, admittedly, kind of funny), he posted a video of a squad of “Donald Ducks” with his signature hair, armed with machine guns, waddling in formation to protect said lake.

Trump has never been shy about his proclivity for self-aggrandizement (daydreaming about having his face chiseled onto Mount Rushmore or printed on a $250 bill). But his recent spate of social-media posts—almost all products of AI—has him living in an expanded fantasyland. His supporters are likely to just giggle; more fun and trolling—so what? His critics might roll their eyes at the extravagant immaturity but almost can’t be bothered anymore (unless they’re Iceland). After a decade of Trump shenanigans, getting worked up either way is hard. Also, these images might come across as just a little sad—the projections of a man who is losing power and virility but desperately needs to see himself as powerful and virile.

The absurd cartoons are worth pondering, though, and not for the sake of getting to know Trump better (I believe that onion has been thoroughly peeled). Because what AI can do to exaggerate and aggrandize Trump, it can do to everyone. For the president, this may be just one more level up on his escalator of self-regard, but for those without Napoleonic degrees of narcissism, the mental terrain opened up by these quick-prompt chimeras is new.

When the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wanted to understand how the ego takes shape, he thought of mirrors. Sometime from six to 18 months of age, he theorized, a baby begins to recognize their reflection, and experiences what Lacan—abstruse French structuralist that he was—described as the “jubilant assumption of his specular image.” In plainer words, the baby realizes, That’s me! This is significant because the child at this point is otherwise a fragmented mess, experiencing the world through disconnected sensation. Lacan thought the mirror provides an idealized perception of wholeness when, really, inside it’s all a scramble, and through this illusion of coherence, a proper ego—a sense of self—begins to bud.

[Read: Trump’s giant face is everywhere]

Lacan didn’t believe that we ever really outgrow this reliance on our reflection, whether seen above a bathroom sink or in the ways other people look at us. But the mirror he had in mind could show you only the person who stands in front of it—the image is always tethered to physical reality. The AI mirror is something else. It asks what we’d like to see and produces it.

In the past, only kings and emperors could indulge their most exalted, exaggerated picture of themselves. They could commission heroic, larger-than-life representations—though even these were limited by available materials and plausible realism. AI image-making has now democratized this kind of statue-building. I know because I just asked ChatGPT to create an image of me astride a bronze horse in the center of a city, and I’ve never looked more commanding. But AI can do so much more: The ideal self has escaped the confines of the mirror and even the gilded sculpture; it can now inflate to unimaginable dimensions.

In this new world, our insecurities are not obstacles; they are starting points. Take my modest height. I can conjure up what I would look like in Victor Wembanyama’s stretched-taffy body—though I’d settle for something one foot shorter. I’m fully aware that this is just an image, and a bizarre one, but it engraves this taller me—a version who walks into a party and looks down, not up, at everyone—into my brain. It creates a gulf between reality and such a picture. This fantasy made manifest can either delude or taunt me. It exists, and I can’t forget it. Conversely, I should say, it also reveals what I’m most self-conscious about—exactly as AI does for Trump. The puffed up, dominating, victorious man with the six-pack is what the AI mirror shows the president, because that is what he prompts it to show him. (In most cases, of course, he is reposting images prompted by supporters, who are thereby exposing their own displaced fantasies.)

To give Trump a little credit, he seems vaguely aware of the idea that AI is, like the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, showing us what we most want. One of his posts has Barack Obama looking into a mirror and asking: Mirror mirror on the wall who’s the greatest president of them all. No surprise, it’s Trump, who is staring back at him.

[Read: Let Trump keep building monuments to himself]

What I see in the AI mirror is greater than I could ever be—and infinitely editable. Instead of feeding a desire for coherence, as Lacan imagined, it creates a bottomless hunger for the unachievable. I can keep tweaking it with more prompts: “Give me thicker hair. Make my jaw more chiseled.” Start down this road, I’m afraid, and you’ll encounter unhappy young men using hammers to shape their actual faces so that they can come closer to the digital simulacra.

Not all people are narcissists, and certainly not all are like Trump. But we are all susceptible. Who doesn’t dream occasionally of evading reality or the truth of the body you are stuck living in? On the scale of human history, it has been only about a second since we got photography (and the inevitable selfie) to augment what for so long only a pond’s surface or a piece of glass could show us: our own face. What will come from finding, instead, Supermen, kings, popes, and Jedi staring back at us?

Without AI, Trump might be forced to look around him, perhaps at the portraits of other presidents in the White House—just like Richard Nixon did. In their book The Final Days, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein recounted what became a famous story: As Nixon’s presidency was crashing down around him, he began talking at night to these dead former presidents. (One of his sons-in-law denied this claim.) Oliver Stone dramatized the moment in his 1995 film, Nixon: The defeated, haggard president focuses on a painting of John F. Kennedy and says, with startling self-awareness, “When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.”

Fiction, I know. But this is the kind of reckoning that can happen when you have no choice but to see what is in front of you. Trump is also very aware of the presidents who came before him. In another recent post, he ranks them all in a tiered chart from Great (Lincoln, FDR, Jefferson, and so on) to Failures (Biden, Obama, Carter, and so on). And atop the entire graphic in a box roughly four times the size of all the others, Trump’s severe, unsmiling face looks out under a label that reads back to him: The Greatest.

A Diagnosis for Social Conflict That Gets Lost Along the Way

2026-09-15T07:30:00-04:00

Weddings, famously, create conflict. Before I got married, my parents and I fought over the guest list. A friend of mine struggled with adding some of her husband’s Protestant traditions to their otherwise Jewish ceremony. Another friend had to decode, and then manage, complicated tensions among her future aunts- and uncles-in-law.

All of these issues got resolved, and according to the conflict-resolution facilitator Priya Parker, the process of figuring them out made our weddings more successful expressions of our values. Parker explored the group creation of meaning in her 2018 best seller, The Art of Gathering. In her new book, The Art of Fighting, she writes that arguments are crucial to a group’s ability to do just that. What’s more, in American society—which Parker describes as both conflict averse and low on big rituals—high-stakes events such as weddings are among the “last remaining collective mechanisms to help us have the fights we need to have to figure out who we are now.”

The Art of Fighting is predicated on Parker’s conviction that without confrontation, no group can work well. “Fighting,” she writes in her prologue, “is not the death of community. It is its lifeblood.” Parker considers Americans far too willing to focus on themselves rather than their communities, in large part due to a widespread fear of confrontation. A lot of loneliness, in her view, originates from the all-too-common decision to exit a challenging situation instead of dealing with its simmering disagreements. It’s a smart diagnosis, one that’s as relevant to small-bore social scenarios as it is to interactions within religious organizations, schools, and workplaces. The choice to hide from conflict is, to Parker, in many situations, a choice to be alone.

Parker’s idea that conflict is inherently a social good is intriguing and counterintuitive. But The Art of Fighting is not nearly as communitarian a book as its setup would suggest. Although its more abstract passages describe healthy confrontation as helpful and worthy, its examples tell another story. Parker presents The Art of Fighting as a “group-help book” but tends to take a side in her case studies—and in most instances, her side wins.

[Read: A wedding reveals how much help is really available to you]

Her own life serves as illustration, too, and often provides the book’s most revealing moments. By way of arguing that everyone needs to get comfortable with disagreement, she mentions a clash she and her father had after the latter got upset that Parker hadn’t invited her stepbrother’s wife to her baby shower. As Parker relates it, their discussion of her reasoning—she and her stepsister-in-law just aren’t close—ends not with compromise or reconciliation but with the blunt lines: “He wasn’t getting it. And that was OK.” Such a one-sided resolution suggests a disinterest in compromise and an interpretation of fighting as an individualistic act. Facing conflict may very well be a social good—I believe it is—but her book more often seems to urge readers to wade into arguments to get what they want.

The Art of Fighting is full of stories of conflict. Some appear only once, and some are threaded throughout the book. The quarreling groups that Parker features, many of which she worked with in her role as a facilitator, range in size from an extended family to a percussion ensemble to a large architecture firm. Parker uses every case to ask a variation of her central question: “How do you fight with those to whom you want to belong?”

In the book’s most moving example, she writes about a church that, in the mid-1990s, deliberated about and then voted on whether it would perform and recognize gay marriages. Its pastor, Martin Copenhaver, understood that they couldn’t make a decision that might lead to division if his church were to survive. “In the political arena,” he tells Parker, “if you win by one vote, you win. In this arena, you win by one vote, you don’t win.”

Hoping to forge meaningful consensus, he hosted four meetings to discuss the subject; only those who attended were allowed to vote. After the election—the church decided, not unanimously but with “no great division,” to allow gay marriage—he asked everyone to reconcile in person with someone who voted differently. In essence, Copenhaver organized the entire conflict to prioritize congregants’ investment in the church, not to lead them toward a certain outcome.

I wanted to learn more about how other sorts of disputes, especially less orchestrated ones, might bolster a sense of community. But Parker is surprisingly blurry about the variety of incentives for confronting or ignoring tension that exist in one setting or another. Some strategies for managing conflict—waiting to engage until no one has steam pouring from their ears; ensuring that the arguing parties’ grievances and goals are clear; creating the right conditions for a tough conversation—may apply to all kinds of groups.

[Read: Why are we so spiteful?]

But the book doesn’t do enough to acknowledge that different sorts of conflicts have different stakes. Starting a fight for the good of the group may be wise among relatives but foolish if doing so could also mean losing your job. And a values-based argument may not be worthwhile in a corporate context where the overall goal is to maximize profit. One of Parker’s recurring examples is a debate that took place within a law firm about whether the TV in its common space should show World Cup games played in Qatar. It begins with an intern objecting, on Slack, to the “human rights abuses of workers in the lead up to the World Cup and the horrific status of rights for LGBTQ people and women in Qatar.” The managing partners invited employees to what Parker characterizes as a too-wide conversation about the World Cup. It was, she writes, “the wrong fight with the wrong assemblage of people in the wrong room.”

Parker uses this argument to underscore good and bad ways to navigate conflicts, especially ones that arise online—certainly an important issue in our screen-heavy times. But missing from this analysis is any real engagement on Parker’s part with the substance of the conflict itself. Readers never learn how the issue was resolved: Did the World Cup get shown or not? Was there ever a meaningful discussion about the objections the intern had raised? The book uses this example to describe strategies for handling internal dissent, focusing on how the managing partners could best have reestablished peace among their employees. It becomes a story about conflict management rather than conflict as a potential social good.

Some of Parker’s personal anecdotes more vividly illustrate her not-quite-communitarian approach to fighting. In one, she describes enrolling her children and their cousin in a small soccer camp one summer. Initially, the kids report hating camp and getting bullied by their counselors. Parker speaks with the camp director, who talks with his employees and establishes that Parker’s children and niece, who started on the eighth week of camp, are unfamiliar with both the established cohort’s “teasing culture” and the basic rules of soccer. Parker suggests that the camp’s coaches “give our kids a Week One experience, orient them, do the things you did with all the other kids when they were new.” They comply, and the camp—which Parker needs for child care—works out.

Parker’s reaction to the situation is entirely reasonable; what parent wouldn’t try to help a kid who’s being picked on, or scramble to rescue a child-care setup that seems about to fail? It is not, however, an illustration of confrontation as community service. She shows herself engaging in conflict to get her kids special treatment rather than nudging the kids to advocate for themselves or asking how the camp might better help them settle in despite their latecomer status. Another way to put this is that no compromise is on offer here, and we get no sense of a group working together. Parker, as the customer, gets to be right.

Throughout The Art of Fighting, individuals prevail in this way. A woman named Rebekah, exhausted by attending her family’s Passover seders—too much cooking, too much disruption to routine, too much airtime for her right-wing uncle—gives them up. But Parker never writes about what Rebekah’s parents, siblings, or children might lose when she and her nuclear family stop coming, or how her continued, if conflicted, attendance might have led her relatives to create more sustainable traditions. Just as some therapists prioritize clients over the other people in their lives, Parker prioritizes the subjects of her anecdotes over those with whom they fight.

What these stories add up to, ultimately, is a much less surprising take on conflict than the book tries to lay out. Parker provides a useful guide to having arguments in good faith without hurting anyone’s feelings unnecessarily or creating a corporate crisis. But arguments can be so much more than that. Alone in the book, the story of Copenhaver’s church demonstrates that even enduring and loaded disagreements can, if handled with enough care and respect, strengthen the bonds between parties—in other words, they can be productive, not just nondestructive. Many readers will have experienced this in intimate relationships. I, for one, have grown closer to some friends after air-clearing arguments and have drifted from others who weren’t willing or able to talk through issues when they arose.

But as Parker points out, public life in the United States isn’t set up for healthy conflict. Meaningful group fights are rare experiences. Aside from my wedding planning, I haven’t been part of one. I believe, in theory, that such a dispute could be transformational for both a community and its individual members. But in order for Parker’s book to have taught me how to navigate one, she would have had to truly let go of the old idea that the reason to fight is to win.

Sons and Mothers

2026-09-15T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Amy Elkins

1.

When I was 13, not long after my father had committed suicide, I asked my mother, “What’s the Oedipus complex?”

“Why?” she replied at once. “Are you afraid you’ve got it?”

Maybe. I wasn’t aware of wanting to murder my father, but in the four years after he suffered a massive stroke at 43, he’d been a volatile presence in our house, given to bursts of rage and tears, or rendered ominously mute by his paralysis. When he disappeared on December 6, 1972, leaving my mother, my sister, and me, I was troubled by a sense of profound relief. Unable to understand, let alone forgive, myself, I went searching for insight on the shelves of my parents’ narrow, high-walled study. Books offered a way to replace real self-knowledge with an official version—the idea of “guilt” instead of the intolerable feeling itself. In a volume called Oedipus: Myth and Complex, amid thickets of psychoanalytic jargon, I found what I was looking for.

So why did I ask my mother the question, if I already knew the answer? To show off my new command of the term. To set her up for the unreturnable ping-pong smash I must have known was coming at me—to prove I could take it. I shared everything with my mother: Stanford’s football triumphs, the Democratic Party’s defeats, every Little League at-bat, every dream of glory on the stage or page. Why not my Oedipal anxiety?

A few days later, she handed me her copy of Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence’s autobiographical novel about a sensitive young man who is shaped and crushed by the love of his domineering mother. “Read this,” she said. “It might help you understand our relationship better.”

She was a small-boned, freckled, quick-tempered redhead with ironic blue eyes and astounding energy. She wore her hair short and had no interest in feminine things, or perhaps in being a woman at all. She preferred the company of men, while bitterly resenting their dominance. “I’m somebody’s daughter, I’m somebody’s sister, and I’m somebody’s wife,” she told a Stanford oral historian in 2014. “Am I somebody?” People said that she spoke in the accent of Birmingham, Alabama, where she grew up in the 1930s and ’40s, but I couldn’t tell. It was just my mother’s voice—gruff, tender, amused, the voice that’s left a hundred indelible maxims in my head: “Ninety percent of tears are self-pity.” “Push down, lick around” (on how to eat an ice-cream cone). “You’re too sensitive and you’re not sensitive enough” (on my character). “There’s no such thing as casual sex.” “Loyalty is my favorite virtue.” “I wasn’t a very good mother, but I was a pretty damn good father.”

She loved to spar, and I made an ideal partner: Win or lose, her narcissism was satisfied. She championed me and competed with me—built me up, then knocked me down, then built me up again. At my 50th birthday party, she rose to make what I expected would be affectionate remarks and delivered a scorching roast. I was the recipient of her unending love, her unstinting attention, and her unvarnished judgment. She taught me how to throw a football and swing a bat, shave and tie a tie, and she taught me how to write. I have the scars.

For a year or two after my father died, my mother and I went to see a lot of movies together in the art houses of downtown Palo Alto: Chinatown, Scarecrow, Swept Away, Cries and Whispers. This was the early ’70s, before anyone called my hometown “Silicon Valley,” and the movies, in addition to being great, were mortifyingly explicit. Sometimes my mother offered to sit several rows away, which would have made it easier for me to watch the teenage boy in Amarcord fail to satisfy the buxom tobacconist. But my mother was more fragile than ever before or after—some nights I still heard sobbing from her bedroom down the hall—and I always sat next to her, postponing my adolescent rebellion, as it turned out, forever.

Except for the black-and-whites of her youth, my mother actually disliked movies, with a contempt that was both aesthetic and moral. Halfway through The Godfather she gave my shoulder a backhand swat: “Aren’t you about ready to leave?”

“No, I’m enjoying it.”

“Gratuitous violence.”

Those hours in darkened cinemas following my father’s suicide always puzzled me, until my wife explained: “It was a way for her to be with you and be alone at the same time.”

The problem with movies was that they weren’t literature, and literature was the closest thing in our family to religion. My mother’s sect was the short story. Chekhov reigned supreme, followed by Joyce, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Wallace Stegner (my mother’s mentor), and lesser deities. A moralist in a universe without God, she believed that human beings were the alpha and omega of existence, which made her a severe judge of people’s frailties, especially those of people she loved: “Affairs don’t jump at you as you are innocently walking down the road—you have to go in the woods looking for them.” But the writer’s duty is to see the full human truth and tell it as well as possible. In life, a lonely divorcée’s disappointing one-night stand with a sailor half her age whom she met on a plane might have elicited a terse “Pitiful.” But in a short story my mother wrote called “Small Moments,” she gives this character all the ruthless and compassionate understanding of her humanism.

She published several small-press collections, the first at age 50: spare, witty, “no fancy dancing,” as if the worst literary sin was self-display. “Frances Benedict’s husband, Emery, was a lawyer. Successful. Frances herself might yet become anything, having tried nothing,” begins a 1967 story called “Early Morning, Lonely Ride.” But every attempt at a novel defeated my mother, and all her life she suffered from writer’s block. Rather than sit in the study at her Underwood manual typewriter, she would weed the backyard, refinish a table, shop for dinner—“Anything not to write, apparently,” she wrote her mother in 1966. A decade later, in a letter to her sister-in-law: “I don’t seem to have much drive to write anymore. I spent the summer trying but I never finished anything. I’d go to bed on, say, Monday night with eight pages of a story, go to bed on Tuesday with only six pages and by Friday I wouldn’t have any.”

No one who spent 30 seconds in her presence could imagine that she lacked self-confidence, but inside the ego drive of any writer lurks the threat of falling silent. You believe you’re a singular talent—your parents, your teachers, your ambitions all say so—but the slight chance of finding out that you’re not is unbearable, and part of your vanity is being honest about your own work. All the while, the child in you who craves attention won’t shut up. The whole drama is contained in a few lines my mother wrote me when I was 19, about a story she’d just published: “The story is not much, in fact is kind of a phony. The woman’s motivation needs beefing up but I guess I wasn’t that interested in it. Nonetheless, I’ve gotten a lot of praise—well, not a lot but a couple of spontaneous responses from readers.”

The success that my mother desperately wanted as a writer came to her from teaching. She trained several generations of Stanford students in the craft of fiction, including Scott Turow, Tobias Wolff, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Akhil Sharma. She was unsparing but generous with her students. “They’re all human beings, they all have a capacity to grow, and they all have feelings, and never forget those facts,” she told the oral historian. “No matter how silly the story was, there’s always something in it.” She won several awards and retired in the mid-’90s, a sort of local legend. By then the university was becoming the tech juggernaut that it is today, Stanford Inc., squeezing the English department into irrelevance. She lived three more decades as a reminder of another time, a reproachful ghost of humanities past, until her death last year, one month short of 100.

I doubt any of my mother’s students bore greater expectations or suffered more under her criticism than her son. I was the only one who could live out her thwarted dreams.

2.

Nancy Huddleston was the fifth of five children—born from 1918 to 1925—in a rambunctious, intensely political family. She came into the world battling for attention and prestige. When the dinner conversation ignored her, she threw her bread at a sibling or stood on the table and speechified. In a screwball comedy about her youth, she would have been the wisecracking little sister of the glamorous lead. She wore boys’ clothes and played boys’ sports, started smoking at 13, drinking and joyriding a year or two later. “I was a real happy tomboy,” she once recalled. “I always played with my brothers. My sisters were nonexistent for me.”

Her father, George, was a pale, taciturn patriarch who dispensed unquestioned justice to his boisterous clan. In old photographs he is never smiling. He died at age 90, in 1960, a few months before I was born, and I was named for him, but he seemed so ancient that I could never quite believe he was my mother’s father. George Huddleston represented Birmingham in Congress from 1915 to 1937. He was a populist in the mode of William Jennings Bryan and a racial moderate by the standards of the South, which meant that in the 1920s he denounced the Klan while voting against an anti-lynching bill. Throughout his career Black people were denied the vote in Alabama, allowing him to take radical positions on behalf of Birmingham’s white working class while avoiding the true test of courage in southern politics. He had a diminutive southerner’s resentment of bigness, a political philosophy he called “Jeffersonian,” and he spent his whole career on the losing side—against America’s entry into World War I, against banks and railroads in the ’20s, and against the New Deal, which led to his defeat in 1936. He retired, bought some property, and became a hard-core Dixiecrat. “He sold out all his principles and became very reactionary,” my mother said in 1947, when she was 22 and still living under her father’s roof. When the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that progressivism and reaction can exist together in a certain American political type, usually from the South or West, he might have had my grandfather in mind.

[From the November 1998 issue: Richard Hofstadter’s tradition]

In 1917, at 48, George married his secretary, Bertha, a warm, vivacious woman almost half his age. “Huddlestons don’t gush,” he would insist, and she would retort: “No, they just dry up and blow away.” She escaped from her repressed and repressive husband in bathtub gin and infidelities. He took out an ad repudiating his wife’s debts. She was arrested for driving drunk with one of her lovers, and the incident landed on the front page of several national newspapers. The marriage was “a horror,” their oldest child, my aunt Mary, told me.

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.

Huddleston-family photos: Nancy stands at the center of the rear photo, and sits atop a horse in the photo at left. At right, with her father, 1940s.

From her father my mother inherited her moralism, dislike of pretension, and sympathy for the underdog. Her mother gave her an enthusiasm for life that allowed her to thrive after tragedy. From the unhappiness of her parents’ marriage my mother acquired a habit of withdrawing into reading and a desire to write. Loyalty being her favorite virtue, she elided all the misery from stories she told about her family. They became comical southern yarns about a squabbling father and mother; a wild but loving tribe of siblings; their Great Dane, Duke, who survived a policeman’s bullet; the legendary incident in the 1936 election when her father, knowing he was going to be defeated, uncharacteristically lost his cool and demolished his opponent’s straw hat with a bottle of Worcestershire sauce.

As a child I never questioned this picture. I glamorized the big, raucous Huddleston family, especially after my own turned so grim with my father’s stroke when I was 8. If only there were more of us; if only we had a heroic dog; if only my mother were still a cheerful tomboy instead of a tired, irritable parent; and if only my father fell silent when he was unhappy instead of bursting into tears. It was years before I learned the deeper truth about my mother’s childhood, and I found it in her fiction. Her most moving characters are children, desperate to feel secure in the love of an unreliable mother and remote father. The combative, vulnerable child remained alive in her all her life. At 99 she could still seem like the 3-year-old girl who yanked a pearl necklace off the neck of a family friend who said she was going to vote for Herbert Hoover.

My mother came of age in the city that Martin Luther King Jr. called “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.” Through her teenage years she took Birmingham’s racial order for granted. “I was extremely prejudiced at this time and very conservative,” she later said. “Mrs. Roosevelt, for example, was an abomination on the face of the world.” But when she was 17, in the fall of 1942, something happened that changed her life.

[From the August 1963 issue: Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’]

She had just enrolled at Birmingham-Southern College, a Methodist school that all her siblings had attended. Her two brothers were now in the military, and the campus was nearly empty of male students. One day, one of the few still around (“some thug”) recounted an incident: At a small-town carnival in southern Alabama, a Black boy had grabbed the side of a whites-only merry-go-round and held on until he lost his grip and fell under the spinning platform, which crushed him. A group of white boys, including the narrator, tied the Black boy to a tree and beat him with iron pipes as punishment for crossing the color line, leaving him paralyzed.

This incident, and the casual pride of the thug describing his own participation, so shocked my mother that she wrote her first college English paper about it. She began arguing with her sorority sisters over race. Looking for a way to act on her new liberal consciousness, she signed a membership card of a left-wing organization called the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Without telling her parents, she joined a series of clandestine conversations between Black and white students at local colleges. But Birmingham’s racial hierarchy was inescapable, and it insulted the humanity of everyone it touched. When my mother made a point of sitting at the back of the bus on her way to campus, the Black passengers would stand up for the young white lady. Her attitude toward the Black students she met at the interracial dialogues mixed idealization and condescension: She was awed by everything they said, while hoping they wouldn’t make pronunciation errors.

In 1947, an Illinois sociologist conducted a study of 50 or so white liberals in Birmingham on the subject of race. Among those interviewed was 22-year-old Nancy Huddleston. Strict confidentiality was promised, but a few years ago my mother’s transcript fell into my hands and exploded.

As if self-lacerating honesty could cleanse her racial sins, she eagerly confessed to them all. She said that she had been a conventional racist until 17, “probably to gain my father’s affection,” and an enlightened one after that. Richard Wright was the only Black writer she had read. She had never entered a Black home, and other than servants she knew only three Black people in Birmingham. Her student meetings had smacked of noblesse oblige and accomplished nothing, and she despised her own righteousness. Her liberalism was merely “selfish”—she didn’t want to be deprived of the intellectual and artistic talents of Black people. Her views on race were “acquired attitudes whose urgencies I can ignore at times,” and she had promised not to embarrass her parents by breaking Jim Crow laws. What really got under her skin was the unfairness of “patriarchy,” because it hurt her personally. Her approach to race was sentimental, maybe moral, but not political. That would have demanded real sacrifice.

Decades later, I asked what more she could have done. “I could have thrown a bomb, or at least not enjoyed myself quite so much,” she said. “My racial experiences are littered with shame.”

In 1945, my mother left Birmingham to study for a master’s in theology at the University of Chicago. She was not even slightly religious, but she wanted to develop her mind, and the only professor at Birmingham-Southern who had taken her seriously (she credited him with saving her from a life of aimless drinking and partying) taught religious studies. Most of all, she wanted to get out of the South.

My mother was not a classic beauty, but in Chicago she felt irresistibly attractive. Female-deprived men were coming back from the war, and she could have gone out 10 times a day. She briefly dated a Black man just to prove to herself that her reluctance to get involved with him had to do with his wife and children in Washington, D.C., and not with prejudice: “I would never have tolerated such freshness from any white man.” Her bridge partner and close friend was Morteza Sprague, Ralph Ellison’s literature professor at Tuskegee. Her friendships were intellectual. She studied Reinhold Niebuhr and William James and wrote a thesis on John Dewey. Her time in the university’s more equal and free atmosphere was the happiest of her life.

In 1947 she returned to Birmingham with her master’s and stayed a decade.

Why did she waste her 20s marooned in her parents’ volatile house, in a rigid and cruel society that she had come to despise and that had no place for a young woman except as a homemaker? She always said that her mother and father needed her, that an unmarried woman was expected to live at home, that back then middle-class white girls didn’t have “careers.”

These were conventional excuses, and growing up I didn’t question them. Children don’t see their parents as people with complex, unconscious motives, or as individuals at all. Now I can imagine a story that my mother never told, perhaps not even to herself. It has to do with being a woman and a writer.

She would bring armloads of books home from Smith & Hardwick, in downtown Birmingham, and spend her days in her parents’ house reading the great modernists—Kafka, Proust, Mann, Koestler, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe. She began to write autobiographical stories in a sharp, knowing voice. To see the hidden and unlovely truth about everything, especially oneself, with a mid-century-American dose of Freud, was the mark of literary sophistication. She also exchanged flirtatious, barbed letters with several men whom she had met in Chicago. And in both fields, art and love, she was plagued by fear of failure: rejection of her stories, surrender of her independence. If she was attracted to someone, she would turn the affair into a competition for dominance, win, and lose interest, or else find herself succumbing and end it. “Returned from France to receive your thoughtful morsel of intellect and Huddleston voodoo for which I thank you from my heart—but what badinage,” wrote a suitor who signed as “R.” “You know, baby, if you don’t hurry up I’m going to marry somebody else and you won’t have anything but those old books and hair lockets.”

R. did marry somebody else, which Nancy learned on the same day in January 1950 that she received her first rejection slip, from this magazine. She had counted on success that winter with either R. or The Atlantic, then decided that she could have both, before coming up with nothing. She wrote to a friend: “Thinking that it was possible for me to have love and creativity, that there could be a both/and, I see that there can also be a neither/nor.”

Rejections piled up—hers of the men, the magazines’ of her. Within the confines of the yellow house at 2816 Rhodes Circle, her confidence would soar, crash, rise again. “I’ve gotten six rejections for my hard efforts, have relinquished literature seven times, and have a divine plot for a wonderful story which I hope to start tomorrow,” she wrote to the same friend. “I sharpened my razor at one point, summed up my life as a total failure, and convinced myself there was never such a genius in the long years of civilization.”

If she wasn’t a writer, who was she? Her aging father’s last daughter, under his roof and thumb. But if she turned out not to be a genius, she would have to submit to another male authority in the form of a husband who would gradually lose his awe of her and sink into careerism, alcohol, and affairs (this was the 1950s). In Birmingham, where the family name gave her a certain local fame, she could sustain her fantasies without having to test them against life.

One persistent and disgruntled beau finally let fly a harsh analysis. “Let’s get on the ball, Nancy, and face a few facts,” he wrote. “You don’t dare admit that you haven’t the courage to face the world, so you take refuge in having to take care of Mummy & Daddy. Because you’re too ‘young’ to accept anything but top-notch success and you’re afraid you don’t have enough of what it takes for that, you withdraw from the world and stay home in your mother’s womb, where it’s a little stifling & quite crowded for one of your size, where you’re not wanted and whence you’ve already been ejected, but where it’s warm, not too uncomfortable, and safe.” He also accused her of being afraid of sex.

This was a misguided strategy for conquering such a heavily defended stronghold. I don’t know what happened to the guy, but Nancy didn’t marry him (though she saved his letters). She did see a psychiatrist, but he was unable to solve her other problem: Almost nothing she started got past three pages. The one story she did finish—“Povera Baby,” a Hemingway imitation about a spoiled American woman on board an ocean liner to postwar Italy whose infected foot exposes her to the realities of poverty and war—was published in 1953, in Harper’s, no less, alongside an essay by James Baldwin. But success was a curse, and my mother’s struggle to repeat it produced an impasse that lasted the rest of the decade.

Writer’s block is different from depression, to which my mother was almost psychologically immune. She had too much energy to sink into torpor—who knew, she might still be a genius. In 1954 her father’s old seat in Congress came open, and she considered running for it, almost as a lark—she was, after all, a woman. Then her older brother George decided that he wanted it. I’m somebody’s daughter, I’m somebody’s sister. My mother snuffed out her own ambition and became the manager and speechwriter of her brother’s winning campaign. Politics was a natural arena for her abilities, and she did some work for the Democratic National Committee. She wasn’t very interested in policy, but she saw ideas in vivid moral colors, she loved a fight, and she had become a passionate Adlai Stevenson liberal.

That was how she got to know the man she finally married.

In early 1956, on his way to California to start teaching at Stanford Law School, a Jewish lawyer and World War II Navy veteran named Herbert Packer passed through Birmingham to visit a friend, who invited him to a dinner party where another guest was Nancy Huddleston. These two 30-year-olds spent the evening talking about the coming presidential election. For the next two years they exchanged infrequent visits and frequent letters.

I never really knew my father. When I was a little boy, before the stroke, he was a kind, overworked, rather distant presence; afterward, he was a person I pitied and feared. But his correspondence with my mother reveals someone unimagined. This is why letters are among the many things whose passing from our lives we will regret. After my mother died, a cardboard box full of them came into my hands, the airmail envelopes covered in stamps and postmarks, and without them I couldn’t tell this story. Letters have a humbling effect on memory. They reveal those closest to us without our distorting presence. They let other people come back to life and have their say.

“You are so entirely desirable to me that nothing will ever be the same again for me unless I win you,” my father wrote in 1957, after a visit to Birmingham that left him palpitating. “So it’s my health as well as yours that’s at stake.” Who was this passionate lover? “I am not so moonstruck as to suppose that the doubts of a lifetime can be dissolved in a day. And I know that you will have your bad days, when there is no hope, no belief, just doubt and black despair. But through it all, remember this Nancy: I want you, I need you, I love you.”

No wonder she married him—he knew how to talk to her. He pursued, but without coyness or aggression, cards on the table. He gave space and time, but not too much. He understood her resistance and waited it out. This dark, handsome Jew was exotic in Birmingham (her nearly senile father violently opposed him), more than her intellectual equal, but not a man who wanted to dominate her or ever could. He was offering to take her to California, 2,000 miles from the yellow house that had become her prison. By 1958, at 32, marriage might have been now or never. “I went into it with absolute blindness,” she told the Stanford oral historian. “I just knew it was an opportunity to get out and stop being a slug.” So she made what she called, in a letter written a few weeks before the wedding, “the most difficult decision of my life.”

In California she was nobody. She had no one to talk with all day except grocery clerks and nothing to do but shop and receive furniture deliveries and wait for her busy, conscientious husband to come back from campus to the apartment in Menlo Park so she could cook dinner or go out with him and his colleagues. Herb volunteered to make breakfast and wash the dishes every Sunday so she could sleep in. Her reading was reduced to cookbooks; she wasn’t writing at all. This was the nightmare of losing herself, and she wondered if she had made a great mistake.

And it turned out that she had bound herself to a fragile man. Herb was having trouble finishing a book he’d been contracted to write about the case against Alger Hiss and other American Communists. He was drowning in documents and had lost interest. His writer’s block sent him into a depression that became alarmingly suicidal. When Herb’s new wife returned to Birmingham to see her dying father, his letters, which before the marriage had been so sure, so persuasive, sounded self-pitying and reproachful. On a phone call, he broke down in tears. His inadequacy made him ashamed: He wanted her to need him as much as he needed her. But that would never happen.

With his wife’s encouragement and force of will, my father finished Ex-Communist Witnesses. The marriage survived, and two changes allowed my mother to embrace her new life. One day, Herb ran into Wallace Stegner, the novelist and director of Stanford’s highly regarded creative-writing program. Knowing that his wife was sinking into bitterness with her stalled vocation, my father asked if she could take a class. Studying under Stegner, alongside talents such as Ken Kesey, Ernest Gaines, and Wendell Berry, gave my mother the confidence that she could hold her own. Her block lifted; she began to write stories again, and to publish them in quarterly magazines. She felt more like a real writer than ever before. When a rising young star named Philip Roth withdrew his acceptance of a Stanford lectureship, she was asked to fill in and found that she liked teaching more than writing and was better at it.

It did not escape her notice that she had ridden into Stanford on her husband’s back. She was somebody’s wife, and she would spend the 1960s in his shadow.

One day in 1959, the walls of Stegner’s classroom began to shake. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Packer,” he said. “You’re not having the baby. It’s just an earthquake.”

That was the second change: motherhood.

3.

My sister, Ann, whom we called Annie, was born in March 1959. I arrived 17 months later. Almost every week for a decade, until my father’s stroke, my mother typed out a long, single-spaced letter on onionskin paper to her widowed mother in Birmingham. The letters create a montage of our California childhoods, sun-drenched scenes shot at close range by a sharp-eyed camerawoman who’s interested in everything about the subject—tedious to most viewers, endlessly engrossing to me. Could you replay that swimming-lesson sequence where I refuse to put my head underwater, then brag to my friends that I dove off the board, only for my mother to expose my lie?

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.

Packer-family photos from the 1950s and ’60s, including pictures of the author as a baby and a young boy;
his sister, Ann; and his parents, Nancy and Herbert, on their wedding day

She was too ambitious and resentful, too masculine, to adore motherhood. She had no use for baby showers, and the thought of breastfeeding disgusted her. She complained about how hard it was to find good babysitting so that she could get her work done (unlike the white ladies of Birmingham, most suburban-California mothers did without help). To put me, and herself, on a better sleep schedule, she gave me phenobarbital and Serpasil, a blood-pressure medication also sometimes used as an antipsychotic. (Apparently these were normal treatments for infant insomnia.) When I came down with a cold in my eighth month, she wrote to her mother: “He can almost sit up, almost crawl, and almost hold his bottle. He is the almost wonder of the world. And if that sounds a little hostile, I guess I have to admit that for the first time since he was circumcised, his having this cold is causing me anxiety and therefore hostility.”

But the overwhelming fact of the letters is how much fascinated, puzzled, delighted, annoyed attention she paid to her children. Like every parent she failed us in a thousand ways, some of them barely forgivable, but her attention was a gift, the foundation on which I could grow up without the fear of abandonment that had haunted her as a child. Of course, I was completely unaware of it—that was part of the gift. She spared me the burden of having to become conscious. I was free to live in my own mind, except when she was angry with me, which I found intolerable—then I would do anything to win back her favor.

One of my mother’s favorite quotes, usually a dig at someone’s lack of self-awareness, was from Robert Burns: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!” Can I see myself in her letters? A greedy feeder, cheerful, volatile, wildly curious and easily frustrated, “clinging and adventurous,” indifferent to clothes, unshy because unconcerned with others, so competitive that I have trouble keeping friends? And if this is who I am, how did I get that way? It seems my character was already formed at six months. “Undiscriminatingly friendly, and yet so happy for a little attention”: I admit that sounds familiar. Compared with my hyper-observant sister at the same age, I was noisier, grinnier, and “not as individually aware of people.” All these traits would have consequences.

My mother absorbed herself in both her children, but in different ways, with different levels of intensity. She regarded my sister with a sort of objective admiration: so bright and verbal, self-toilet-trained, good at everything she did, “incorrigibly social.” My mother’s investment in me was of another kind: “I must say that I am beginning what promises to be quite a love affair with the little boy.” But a love affair comes with a price, and the letters describe her efforts over the years to shape me after an ideal, constantly adjusting my levels of toughness, sweetness, wildness, self-control. She liked to say that her parents’ generation approached child-rearing as taming savages, her children’s generation saw it as nurturing flowers, and for hers it was like molding clay figures (one of her hobbies).

In a letter written in 1968, my mother describes her children’s attitude toward reading. My sister read all the time, a new book every day, simply for the love of it. On the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Annie said that life in prison wouldn’t be the worst fate for the killer as long as there were books—in fact, she’d sort of like to go to prison and read all day. But my reading came from some internal pressure to know everything about a subject. Over breakfast I read the backs of Cheerios boxes because they displayed capsule biographies of the presidents, and presidential history—especially of the assassinated ones—was one of my obsessions in that year of political violence. My other interest was the NBA, mainly the Los Angeles Lakers. Sports was a passion I would share with my mother for the rest of her life. I barely registered that it left my sister out.

“She is doing great in school,” my mother wrote, as if to reassure herself that her commitment to evenhandedness still held, “and has a lot of other interests, cooking and scouts, that aren’t intellectual but are perfectly fine.” Obviously, they weren’t perfectly fine. She found her daughter’s interest in the feminine arts of baking, sewing, clothes, and hair disturbing enough to use an adjective I’ve never heard from anyone else: “Annie is the most fixey child I’ve ever seen.” This was not criticism meant to inspire improvement, because my sister’s fault—being a girl—was irreparable. In turn, Annie disapproved of our mother’s short haircut and slacks. She became a caustic preteen, and a gap opened between them.

During the ’60s my father was an important figure at Stanford. Amid the endless cocktail parties and business trips, he was named a top administrator just in time for the anti–Vietnam War protests that nearly destroyed Stanford and other universities. He took the students seriously, which meant that, unlike many of his colleagues, he refused to appease protesters when they occupied an administration building. Force was the opposite of reason, and reason lay at the heart of his philosophy, and his sense of betrayal made him a hard-liner and a lightning rod. He wrote brilliantly in defense of liberal education, but he was not psychologically equipped for a fight like this.

My mother shared his values but not his high-mindedness, and she was better suited to do battle: “I wish I had his proxy sometimes, just so I could have some fun socking some people. Not Herb, though. All he wants is what’s generally best.”

She was stronger than her husband but much less important, even after she was made assistant professor. Instead of pouring her resentment into her letters, she wrote “Early Morning, Lonely Ride,” perhaps her best story, so tense with marital vitriol that reading it constricts my breathing. Emery, a successful lawyer, and Frances, his restless, unhappy wife, attend a party in San Francisco, where he commands attention and ignores her, provoking her to throw verbal darts his way. When they leave, he insists on taking the wheel even though he’s drunk too much. On Bayshore Freeway they get a flat tire, and Emery is incompetent to change it. A car pulls up with three tough young men inside; it isn’t clear if they intend to offer help or commit rape. Their leader immediately senses the balance of power that favors Frances, and he orders Emery to sit in the back of the car while they change the tire. Frances tells her husband to comply. The leader comes on to her; she angrily rebuffs him. The story ends with Frances at the wheel and her humiliated husband in the back. She imagines how, later, at home, they will console each other by reducing the encounter to an amusing anecdote in which nothing important was at stake. “But for now, as Emery wept silently in the back seat, she drove the car and she was exhilarated.”

Jesus! What the hell did my father think when he read this? And yet, around the same time that she wrote “Early Morning, Lonely Ride,” on their eighth anniversary she told her mother, “I believe I could not possibly have done better.” Loyalty, her favorite virtue, made her somebody’s daughter, sister, and wife.

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.

The author with his father, mother, and sister, late 1960s

Our life as a family ended in March 1969 when my mother woke up in the middle of the night to find my father lying beside her stricken by a blocked cerebral artery. She would always blame stress from “the radicals,” but she knew better than anyone that her husband was fragile. In the years that followed he fought valiantly to recover speech and movement, but he had always lived through his rational mind, and it would never be his again.

A memory from the early days of the catastrophe: My mother is driving me to the San Francisco airport—I’m flying alone for the first time, to spend a week with a friend’s family in Seattle. At 8 I’m too young to understand that my mother needs some respite and I’m the more exhausting of her children. We’re late, and the airport garage is nearly full. At last she finds a spot and starts to park, when two men in a fancy car sneak in front of her and steal it. My mother, now carrying the entire burden of our wounded family, makes a wide circle around the garage; comes onto a straightaway, at the far end of which the men are getting out of their car; and floors it. As we hurtle toward them their terror looks to be even greater than mine. My mother swerves away in time to avoid committing murder. For a moment she must be exhilarated.

She would always say, “When your father got sick …” and this seemed to me an odd phrase. He didn’t have an illness—he was struck down as if someone had given him a blow to the head. In all the years I lived at home, I knew my mother to be sick only once, when I was 5 and a blood clot in her leg turned into deep-vein thrombosis that required her to wear knee-high, flesh-colored compression stockings for the rest of her life. But she didn’t refer to this as her sickness: “I call it an accident, because I don’t like the idea of having an illness.” It was as if getting sick suggested some deeper, probably fatal condition. Better not to get sick at all.

Memory needs a story, and the one I tell myself about the period after the stroke—those years when my father grew a silver-flecked black beard because shaving was too hard, and limped along with a cane in his good left hand and a metal brace on his bad right leg, and drove an orange golf cart to campus, and cursed or wept when he couldn’t make himself understood, and my mother was often, in a favorite word of hers, “irritable,” and my sister withdrew further into herself—is a story of unrelieved misery. But my mother’s letters, less frequent than before, less full of energy and humor, tell a different one. They show me plugging away at one obsession after another: presidents and assassinations at 8, basketball and the Greek myths at 9, Stanford football at 10, Little League and World War II at 11, Shakespeare and girls at 12.

Memory is notoriously selective, but so are the perceptions that adults have of children. Parents easily miss the secret grievances and torments their children carry inside themselves without the language or license to express them. “The children are in their prime,” my mother wrote a year after the stroke. “They’ve never been dearer, sweeter, more interesting.” She didn’t see any more than I did that the intensity of my interests, and her absorption in them, allowed me to live through the unhappiness of those years without having to experience it. But this left an empty, unformed space where inner resources never developed. So when my father checked into a San Francisco hotel and took an overdose of barbiturates, and when soon after that I decided to be a writer, I was unequipped for either.

“I no longer burst into tears when anyone speaks to me of Herb, and in fact was able to sit through the memorial without shedding very many tears,” my mother wrote to my father’s sister in January 1973, eight weeks after his death. “I’m working hard and my friends are loyal and sustaining and the children are always entertaining and occupying, sometimes in ways I’d as soon avoid, but all in all I am being drawn back into life.”

Her attachment to life: That’s what saved her. At 32, she had escaped her father’s old Birmingham house and released her energy in writing, teaching, and raising children. Our new California house had filled with cocktail parties for 30 and dinners for 15. Then, with my father’s paralysis, it became empty and silent; my mother stopped writing. His death when they were both just 47 ended her life as an adjunct to men. She never remarried, or even dated much, refusing to compromise the independence that had come to her through loss. She raised two teenagers by herself, got dinner on the table every night, published her first collection, transformed Stanford’s freshman-English program, became a legendary teacher, filled our house with her students and colleagues, and walked our dog, Frank, twice a day.

I was too busy being a self-absorbed teenager to understand that, no longer somebody’s daughter, sister, or wife, she was now somebody’s mother—somebody she could shape to her will.

Shortly after my father’s death, I took a seventh-grade typing class. The practice of touch-typing got into my head in a way that we would now call obsessive-compulsive: I acquired a mental habit of moving imaginary fingers over imaginary keys, typing out my thoughts as I thought them and my words as I spoke them, which made me conscious of what I was thinking or saying in an almost physically distressing way. Around the same time, I began systematically reading through the titles listed on the back of a CliffsNotes guide to Hamlet, checking them off one at a time, as if CliffsNotes was the ultimate authority on what a writer should read. I tried to sum up each book’s theme in a single sentence, which allowed me to resolve some inner tension caused by all the ambiguities of literary experience and move on to the next title. When the theme eluded me—this happened with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio—I could reduce myself to tears.

I can see now that the compulsive touch-typing and overwrought checking-off of titles were evidence of an anguish whose deeper source eluded me. At the time, all I knew was that I wanted to be a writer and that wanting to be a writer hurt.

I showed my mother everything I wrote. The verdict was always good but not good enough, leaving me in agonies of frustration. My adolescent literary efforts are covered with commentary that might as well have been scribbled in my blood. It never occurred to me that my mother’s opinion was that of just one very overinvolved reader; however much it upset me, what she said was Truth. She would hunt down every labored metaphor and mark wherever a story inadvertently shifted point of view (a careless sin). She returned a maudlin stab at Romantic poetry with this observation: “Don’t try to write like Keats. I want you to try to write like Eliot.” Another forehand winner. Eyes burning, I said that I’d write the way I wanted to write—as if being my mother’s prize project didn’t make that impossible.

Writing was far from the whole of our relationship. We watched hundreds of hours of TV sports; talked endlessly about politics; bickered over grades (“Why an A–?”), chores, and late nights out. On trivial matters I stood up for myself, and on important ones I thought I was living a life of my own making. In the same way that I couldn’t hear her southern accent or question her criticism, I never associated my desire to be a writer with my mother’s vocation. An idea of greatness that at 9 meant an NBA career like Jerry West’s, and at 12 had me performing onstage like Laurence Olivier, inspired me at 15 and 16 to write like Dickens, then Fitzgerald, then Joyce, then Faulkner. The results were predictably absurd.

My mother liked to quote a piece of literary advice from Henry James: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Unfortunately, I was one of the people on whom a lot of things were lost, including myself. (I was too sensitive and not sensitive enough.) Nor did I follow James’s other famous advice—to write from experience. One of my characters was a British schoolboy who was looking forward to “Michaelmas,” a word whose meaning I didn’t know but I probably borrowed from Dickens. My imagination didn’t brim over with stories. I wasn’t a stylistic prodigy. I had nothing urgent to say. Everything I wrote, even journal entries and weekly letters home from college, carried a grating note of falseness. The words were meant to be overheard and admired.

I published stories and poems in my high-school literary magazine because I was the editor, but in college I ran into failure after failure. A classmate in a fiction-writing course wondered why I wrote such formal, convoluted sentences—was I trying to sound like James? Everyone else was trying to sound like Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie, who, in the instructor’s opinion, were more appropriate models. In his office I tried to wheedle an assurance that I was one of the students who would make it. The instructor was crushingly noncommittal. I was doing well at just about everything I tried, except for the thing that mattered most.

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.

The short-story collection published by the author’s mother in 1976 was spare, witty, with “no fancy dancing,” as if the worst literary sin was self-display.

My sister was a year ahead of me at the same college. One day, when she was a senior and I was a junior, she informed me that she had won a fiction-writing prize. The news surprised us both. She was the one who read to read, not to write. Growing up around writers had made her want to be anything else, because they all seemed unhappy. Our mother was so destroyed by rejection that she never sent her stories to The New Yorker, only small magazines—The Kenyon Review, Southwest Review. This was the sort of detail that my sister, on whom nothing was lost, noticed and I, distracted by my own performances, did not.

My sister’s story was based on an episode I knew well. Her best friend in junior high, a brilliant and charismatic girl, had fallen in with an older scene of boys and drugs, shattering her parents. “Jessica at Fourteen” appeared in the campus literary magazine that had rejected every story I submitted. Reading it, seeing the way my sister transformed experience with imagination, the story told from the first-person viewpoint of the girl’s father, the work done through details, the lack of straining for meaning, even the simplicity of the title: I knew that this was what fiction should be. All those years of reading and watching in our mother’s shadow and mine had made my sister the real writer, later a celebrated novelist. She had become what I was supposed to be.

My apprenticeship had given me an arduous training in prose style and left a hollow space where a writing self failed to emerge—until, out of college and living in a West African village 8,000 miles from my mother, I was visited by unfinished business from the past.

4.

In the summer of 1982 I went to Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer because I didn’t know what else to do. I was vaguely aware that being an undiscriminatingly friendly boy who was happy for a little attention had led me into a dead end, and that I was due for a reckoning. If I wasn’t a writer, who was I? I couldn’t have said this at the time, but I was afraid that the hollow space would become the whole of me. To avoid that, I wanted to put myself through something new and hard. In another time or from a different background, I might have joined the Army.

My mother was troubled. Perhaps she knew that the person from whom I needed so much time and distance was herself. Our last days together before I went away for two years were tense, more so because my college girlfriend joined me for a few of them. “I’m sorry I was a bitch so much of the time you were home,” my mother wrote after I was gone, in the first of dozens of letters she sent, each taking three or four weeks to arrive at the local post office. She had been “an, at best, intermittently difficult hostess who is obviously jealous of her son. I think that usually I would control my feelings better.” She did not want to alienate me or separate me from happiness, “even when it doesn’t involve me.” She assured me that I was doing something important and right.

As a going-away present, my girlfriend had given me a gold Cross pen. I planned on using it to fill letters and notebooks, to make the strangeness around me meaningful. I might have given up the ambition to be a writer, but I still felt an impulse to write. During my first week in Africa, I lost the pen. Its disappearance was a bad omen that rattled me, as if one of the strands connecting me to my past had been broken, and I might never make it back.

In those first days, during training with other volunteers and Togolese English teachers in a small village up-country, a change came over me. It affected my body first: lightheadedness, a dry mouth, a suddenly racing pulse that I started monitoring with two fingertips on my wrist. I should have known that anxiety and even suicidal thoughts are among the potential side effects of chloroquine, the antimalarial medication we had to take. But I had no concept of them; I had never experienced real psychological trouble. The son of a suicide, I didn’t know what depression meant.

Instead of locating what was happening to me in neurochemistry, which would have at least provided some rational comfort, I associated it with a change in the outside world. The crowing of roosters in the midday heat; the doughy texture of pounded yams; the children chanting “Yovo, yovo, bonsoir! Ça va bien? Merci ! ” whenever they saw an American—these were normal features of village life, but in bad moments I experienced them as not just strange but sinister. And I already knew that nothing would ever be the same, even if I went home, because this change that had begun in my head extended beyond the village to the whole universe. I looked at the humid sky and saw only emptiness. Whatever once gave meaning to being alive had drained away, and the loss brought panic.

With such long intervals between letters, I tried to keep mine indirect to protect my mother, and perhaps to conceal my weakness from her. But desperation rid my words of the old falseness, and the letters must have alarmed her. “Sometimes when I think how out of touch we are, I feel that I can’t breathe and then I know I can,” she wrote. “Two years is a long time and you are right not to want to view it as an endurance test. If it is that, then you shouldn’t stay. I mean that.” She hardly knew how much trouble I was in, because I kept my darkest thoughts from her.

I turned to a practice that had almost always worked in the past and tried to read my way back—to master chaos and fill emptiness with literature. Just as Sons and Lovers was supposed to help me understand my relationship with my mother, I asked her to send books to Africa that I hoped would explain the sudden vacuum of meaning: Kierkegaard on faith and despair, Mann on illness and love, Jung on the shadow, Conrad on the heart’s darkness. In my free time I searched for answers by kerosene lamplight under my mosquito net, taking feverish notes in the schoolboy copybooks I had bought for my lesson plans. All this effort made no difference; reading changed nothing. Instead, it mastered me, as if an insulating layer of intellect had been stripped away and for the first time in my life I was reading undefended, raw. A single sentence had the power to terrify me.

[From the December 2024 issue: George Packer on how ‘The Magic Mountain’ saved his life]

Once, on an hours-long bush-taxi ride north to Togo’s sandstone plateau, I came to a passage in Moby-Dick about the whiteness of the whale: “By its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation,” Melville writes. “Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper.” My fellow passengers might not have noticed the American dissolving in front of them as he closed his book and put it away.

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.

The author during his Peace Corps stint in Togo, 1983

I found myself thinking of my father. Thinking is too rational: His ghost had taken up residence on my side of the cinder-block, iron-roofed dwelling I shared with a Togolese family of eight. I wanted him to speak to me, but he couldn’t. For the first time in my life I felt close to him, sorrowful for his suffering, wishing I could bring him back from where he had gone, and frightened that I would join him there. I had believed myself untouched by his darkness. Now it was all around me and within me.

“I hadn’t realized how closely you had identified with him and how much to heart you would take the knowledge that he had serious problems, and had known despair,” my mother wrote me. “It’s good for you to know that, I think, I hope. And perhaps it is good for you to work through the identification and get to the great difference. But it’s painful, treacherous, overwhelming. And of course trying to understand all that—all the anger you felt, all the love, all the loss—in such difficult physical circumstances and without anyone to help you is really dreadful. Dread. Is that a Kierkegaardian word?”

I had always been an achiever among people who loved and admired me, she wrote. Now that I couldn’t be who I really was, “it was almost inevitable that you would begin to unravel a little.” Self-knowledge would set me free, but please go easy. With all of her intelligence and love, and none of her vanity, my mother tried to save me. But I had put myself in a place where only I could do it.

I forgot the heartless voids and immensities of the universe long enough to spend hours after class sitting and talking with villagers, in their limited French and my minimal Ewe. The old chief, whose memory went back to the German colonizers before the First World War, told me the history of the village. I recorded his words and the words of others on the Sony Walkman I’d brought to Togo so I could listen to the Police and Bob Marley. I found that I had a knack for talking with people with whom I had almost nothing in common. These sessions provided an escape from myself that completely absorbed me while they lasted, but they had no clear purpose. They gave me nothing I recognized as subject matter for writing. I was hardly using the Olympia manual typewriter I’d brought to Togo; my literary efforts had come to an end. I didn’t know until much later what my life in the village had to do with being a writer—the kind of writer I would become.

At the start of my second year, my mother came for a visit. She charmed the children next door with gifts of toy trucks and Winnie-the-Pooh View-Masters, ate pounded yams in pepper sauce with her fingers, and learned a few words of Ewe from the market women. But the life here disturbed her: the torpid afternoons, the evenings without electric light, the sense of stagnation. She advised me to buy more candles and fill my free time with projects. “The people are so kind and hospitable,” she said. “But don’t the Togolese want to make their lives better?” Her readiness at almost 60 to stay in the village should have made me proud, but her company exasperated me. We argued about abstractions like underdevelopment and cultural differences because I couldn’t articulate the real trouble. Her presence was splitting me into two selves: the son she had done so much to create—loving, confident, at ease in the world—and the lost soul with a racing pulse.

At the end of the week, I accompanied her down to Togo’s capital for her flight home. When I got back to the village, my brain was swimming and a lump seemed to have formed at the base of my skull. I spent an hour studying the Peace Corps medical guide, Where There Is No Doctor. By nightfall I was so sure that an occlusion in my carotid artery was about to cause a stroke that I asked a bewildered neighbor to drive me to the provincial hospital, half an hour away. In the car I waited for the paralyzing blow to fall, while the mother of the family next door held my hand and tried to reassure me.

I was kept overnight and woke up feeling better. The German doctor on duty asked a few questions, barely suppressing his irony, then discharged me with advice to have a drink in a nice hotel from time to time, a packet of anti-anxiety pills, and a piece of paper that said: “Beg. nervous breakdown.”

This blunt diagnosis shouldn’t have come as a shock, but until that moment I hadn’t understood my trouble in personal terms—that it might have something to do with my relationship with my mother. In her letter replying to my account of the misadventure, she wrote: “Dear George, please try to be easier on yourself, a better friend than you have been. Don’t be ashamed of limiting the demons, of avoiding them if possible. Don’t be ashamed of finding some new purposes there so that you will be able to achieve/perform/be comfortable with yourself.”

What else could a frightened mother say? You’re not your father—don’t do what he did. But this pleading to go back to who I was before seemed dangerous. Anyway, it was too late.

At Christmas I traveled through Burkina Faso to Europe for a short visit. In Barcelona everything went wrong. The faces in the Museu Picasso were so grotesque that I could hardly look at them. The girl I had come to see didn’t know what to say to me. One day, I resisted an impulse to jump in front of a city bus and realized that, if I went back to the village for my last six months, I probably wouldn’t make it. For a year and a half I had been barely hanging on.

In an English-language bookstore, looking for something to read on the plane back to the States, almost at random I bought a Penguin edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. The cover image showed a bolt-action rifle with brass cartridges, a crumpled red flag, and an old Spanish newspaper. I knew nothing of the Spanish Civil War, and I knew Orwell only as the author of 1984, a book assigned in high school. I hadn’t read any of his essays, or any writing of that kind at all. I had never thought of nonfiction the way I thought of novels and poems—as literature.

Crossing the Atlantic I was overcome with a sense of utter failure. By leaving early, I had failed my students and friends in the village; and everyone back home, above all my mother; and most painfully I had failed myself. Disgrace and defeat were written on my face, and I avoided eye contact with other passengers. I felt that at 23 I would have to start over, with no idea how.

I opened my book and began to read: “In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table.”

Something about this sentence struck me: its lack of fuss, its plainness and strength, the way “I” led quickly and easily to a scene, a view of the world. As I read more, the book started to give me courage. This might be a way of going on: by facing the truth and getting it all down, simply and clearly.

First I had to face my mother. In the house where she had raised me, full of the books that had made me want to be a writer, we mostly avoided the subject of why I was home early. Instead, at dinner that first night, we got into an argument about literature. We were talking about Heart of Darkness, one of the books in which I’d searched for answers by kerosene lamplight. My mother thought that the narrator, Marlow, was kept sane by his devotion to work and duty—by repression. To me, Marlow could avoid Kurtz’s fate only by immersing himself in Kurtz’s madness. Of course, we were talking about why I was home early, and what it meant for me, for us. My mother spoke gently, with none of the old sparring, because she knew that she stood to lose something precious. I argued with growing fury, as if not just a literary disagreement but my whole life was at stake.

Forty-one years later, as my mother lay dying in the same Stanford hospital where I’d been born, she emerged from dementia long enough to squeeze my hand and tell me: “I love you. I’m proud of you. Now go on about your business.” But that night in January 1984 she was still trying to hold on to the boy she had made. At last, as if admitting defeat, she said: “I thought you were steel tempered in fire.”

That was the last time we spent more than a few days together. I went to Boston, for no good reason, and found a job on a construction crew. In the evenings after work, I sat at the Olympia manual typewriter that had gone silent in Africa and started to write. I wrote about the village, and I wrote about my father.

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Sons and Mothers.”