On October 11, a confidential memo went out to military officers across Ukraine, urging them to brace for a catastrophe. Donald Trump had decided earlier that week to ease U.S. sanctions on Russia and to begin buying its diesel fuel. Based on that shift in White House policy, the memo foresaw another act of American betrayal: the loss of access to the Starlink satellite network, which Ukraine uses to operate its drone fleet.
The document warned that Elon Musk, the creator of Starlink, might soon restrict service in Ukraine, and it urged users of the technology to “keep all communication alternatives to Starlink on standby—ready for immediate use—and develop contingency plans.” Two days later, the warnings began to come true. Starlink faltered across the war zone, grounding drones and halting military operations. In one case, it led to the loss of Ukrainian naval drones in the Black Sea, according to two people familiar with that mission.
The memo predicted worse to come. It came from a nongovernmental organization called Narodnyi Starlink, or “People’s Starlink,” which helps the armed forces of Ukraine acquire and operate this technology. In the memo, the group’s founder, Volodymyr Stepanets, envisioned several ways Musk could restrict service. The worst-case scenario—a total shutoff—would result in a cascade of disasters, potentially leading to Russia’s victory in the war. One senior U.S. military officer told us that “without Starlink, the war would grind to a halt.”
Musk himself has suggested that might be his goal. In a series of posts on X over the weekend, he admitted to causing last week’s outages, and he lashed out at those who call for greater military aid to Ukraine. “I have nothing but UTTER CONTEMPT for the virtue-signaling evil warmongers who push for endless slaughter and offer no realistic solution to the conflict,” Musk wrote. “May you burn in hell.”
Since the disruption, Ukraine and its allies have scrambled to find a replacement for Starlink, which relies on the world’s largest constellation of satellites to deliver high-speed-internet access anywhere in the world. But nothing comparable exists. The most promising effort in Ukraine to build such a system faced a major setback this summer, when its architect, Dmytro Stetsenko, died of apparent heart failure at the age of 46. European attempts to replicate Starlink are years away from matching its scale, and most of these efforts depend on Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, to launch their satellites into orbit.
Russia, by contrast, has its own fleet of space rockets, and it is racing to field a network of satellites that can rival Starlink. The system, known as Rassvet, or “Sunrise,” would give Russia an “asymmetric advantage” in the war, says Andrey Liscovich, a co-founder of the Ukraine Defense Fund, which has helped secure thousands of Starlink terminals for the Ukrainian military. “They will be precise enough to fly these low-cost, jet-powered drones through a window anywhere in Ukraine,” Liscovich told us. Without Starlink, Ukraine would not be able to respond.
Vladimir Putin said today that Russia has stayed in touch with Musk about Starlink. “Elon Musk is a genius, really a genius,” the Russian leader said at a televised summit in Moscow. He praised SpaceX for taking the lead in the race to develop this technology. “We are only taking the first steps,” Putin said of Russia’s answer to Starlink. “We are in close touch with our American colleagues, including Mr. Musk, because in orbit it is very important not to get in each other’s way.”
This account of Musk’s turn against Ukraine is based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. and Ukrainian officials, military officers, drone manufacturers, and experts on Starlink. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive military operations and private negotiations. Several of them have dealt with Musk and his company directly since the start of the war, in 2022, and they have seen his views on Ukraine shift from generous support to outright hostility.
If anything can yet restrain Musk from abandoning Ukraine, it may be his own financial interests. His company has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from the Starlink terminals operating in the war zone. Liscovich estimates there are well over 250,000 of them. In the past, SpaceX, which runs Starlink, has reportedly charged the Ukrainian government $2,500 per terminal each month, and it has cut off service when bills go unpaid. Earlier this month, when U.S. military officials asked SpaceX about the outages in Ukraine, the company advised switching to an upgraded contract to restore Ukraine’s access, U.S. officials told us. (Musk and SpaceX did not respond to questions for this article.)
In June, SpaceX held the biggest initial public offering in history, earning a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion. Revenue from Starlink keeps SpaceX investors happy and bankrolls Musk’s other projects, including his obsession with colonizing Mars. If he pulls the plug on Starlink in Ukraine, other countries could deem the service unreliable and accelerate the race to build an alternative. But those projects will not be ready until next year at the earliest. Until then, the world’s richest man will be largely free to decide Ukraine’s fate.
When the war began, Musk seemed eager to help Ukraine defend itself. Russia used missile strikes and cyber weapons to take down Ukraine’s digital infrastructure in the opening days of the invasion. To keep the country online, Musk donated thousands of Starlink antennas to its hospitals, power plants, government ministries, and various humanitarian causes.
Soon, the Ukrainian military began using the service to pilot its drones and stay connected in the war zone. The service provided a critical advantage: The Russians had no access to Starlink and no way to jam its signal, which allowed Ukraine’s drones to crisscross the battlefield, dropping bombs on Russian troops.
Images of these attacks spread online in 2022, and they caused alarm at SpaceX headquarters in Texas. “More and more people became uncomfortable,” a former SpaceX engineer who worked on the system’s development told us. Some of his colleagues left the company in protest. Their team had designed Starlink to give people internet access in places where broadband cannot reach, like hiking trails and ships at sea, not to wage a war.
Musk also had apprehensions. In September 2022, Ukrainian officials asked him to switch on Starlink in the Black Sea. They wanted to use it in a sneak attack against Russian warships near the occupied region of Crimea. Musk refused. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars,” he said around that time to his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”
At the end of 2022, Musk announced the launch of a service called Starshield. Reserved for military clients, it costs far more to use than Starlink. In Ukraine’s case, the U.S. government has paid for a lot of that service, handing Musk’s company a sizable windfall. In exchange, the Pentagon gets more control over Ukraine’s access to the satellites. Colin Kahl, then the U.S. undersecretary of defense, negotiated this arrangement with SpaceX, and he later told The New Yorker that it would “prevent Musk from turning off the switch.”
But, for the most part, the Ukrainian military did not transition to using Starshield. It continued to use regular Starlink antennas, the kind available at Walmart and other retailers around the world. Their service costs as little as $30 a month, compared to as much as $25,000 for Starshield. The fine print in the Starlink user agreement bans its use for military purposes. But Musk’s company did not enforce that rule in Ukraine. It maintained the pretense that Starlink would be reserved for peaceful purposes, while the military would rely on Starshield antennas, largely paid for by American taxpayers. The reality was quite different. “They’re using it for everything,” the senior U.S. military officer told us of Ukrainian reliance on Starlink. “Drones, command and control, tactical communication on the battlefield.”
The U.S. government has not disclosed how many Starshield terminals it has provided to Ukraine. But Ukrainian officials and experts told us that they account for less than one percent of all the terminals in the war zone. The rest are regular Starlinks purchased on the retail market, including thousands bought in bulk for Ukraine by the governments of Poland and Germany. “Officially, these were supposed to be for humanitarian use,” a person who has negotiated with SpaceX on Ukraine’s behalf told us. “But everybody knew that they are going to the military.”
This wink-wink arrangement put Ukraine in a dangerous spot. To operate its drone fleet and stay online in the war zone, its armed forces had no choice but to break the rules of Starlink service. “It’s much cheaper that way, and easier to scale,” a Ukrainian official told us. The military could get as many Starlink terminals as it needed through foreign donors and the commercial market. It could attach them to drones and launch them at the Russians without thinking twice about the cost. Starshield, by contrast, is far more expensive and only available in small batches through official government channels.
This spring, the U.S. military faced a similar dilemma in the Middle East. According to a Reuters report that cited Pentagon documents, U.S. forces used Starshield to pilot their drones for strikes against Iran. When SpaceX found out, it raised the price for Starshield service in that region from roughly $5,000 per terminal per month to $25,000. The Pentagon agreed to pay.
In Ukraine, Musk could be attempting a similar upsell. By enforcing the ban on military use of Starlink, he could oblige the Ukrainian military and its foreign allies to pay much more for Starshield. Musk’s explanation for the outages this month suggest he would be fine with that approach, even though it could allow the war to continue. “Using Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes to kill people has never been allowed, nor should it be,” he wrote on X on Saturday. “That loophole was closed last week.”
The statement confused a lot of Starlink clients in Ukraine. For military users, the loophole still appears to be open and the service operational. Ukraine’s defense minister announced at the end of last week that Starlink service had returned to normal in the war zone. Two military officers told us that drones equipped with Starlink terminals have resumed their flights, including strikes on Russian forces. They realize, of course, that Musk could ground them again whenever he wants, and the next outage could last much longer—as the memo from People’s Starlink forewarned.
“We have one very serious weak spot, and that’s our dependence on Starlink,” Denys Shtilerman, one of Ukraine’s most prolific drone developers, told us. “Next year we’ll address it,” he said. “Before that, America will have enormous leverage, the ability to blackmail us.”
Developing a Starlink alternative could take much longer than a year, and it would be unlikely to succeed without Musk’s help. Roughly 90 percent of all the mass delivered into orbit travels on SpaceX rockets. Even Europe’s main competitor to Starlink, a French-British project known as the OneWeb network, relies on SpaceX to launch its satellites. Last month, the parent company of OneWeb announced plans to spend a billion euros to procure 229 additional satellites by 2034. That would bring its total to around 1,000—a fraction the size of the Starlink network, which includes more than 11,000 satellites, the largest constellation by far.
With the recent disruptions in Ukraine, Musk showed that he can cut off the service any time he wants. The memo from People’s Starlink described the several ways he has to do that. Stepanets, its author, noted that Musk could start charging more for the use of Starshield antennas, forcing the U.S. government to pay up or cancel the service.
In the most extreme case, the company could block Ukraine’s access entirely. Musk’s statements appear to countenance that. But Stepanets noted that such a move could blow up in Musk’s face. “Radical blackouts and humanitarian catastrophes make for a very bad public image,” he wrote in the memo. They would also not do much to help SpaceX’s profit margins or its stock price. Such considerations could restrain Musk’s urge to abandon Ukraine. But, either way, it will be his choice to make.
Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer contributed reporting.
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One fundamental truth of politics is that ultimately all voter decisions come down to money. That’s why Dwight Eisenhower blew out Adlai Stevenson in 1956; it’s what James Carville meant when he declared, “It’s the economy, stupid,” in 1992; and it’s the reason that Joe Biden tried in vain to convince Americans that they were doing better than they believed during his presidency.
This was also why some Democratic politicians and strategists counseled candidates not to place Donald Trump and his scandals at the center of their campaign. Better to focus on “kitchen table” issues, such as inflation and housing costs, they argued. To a great extent, this seems to have worked. Economic worries have been a consistent theme throughout the midterms, and Democrats appear poised to fare well. They’ve been helped by Trump, who has not only dismissed worries about affordability as a “hoax,” but has also gone out of his way to worsen inflation by launching a war in Iran. I wrote just last week that the economy explained GOP struggles.
Yet an interesting thing has popped up in opinion surveys over the past couple weeks. A Fox News poll finds that corruption is the top issue for voters, edging inflation, gas prices, and health care. CNBC gets the same result: “Voters are now more concerned about government corruption than any other issue, including high grocery and gas prices, according to the final CNBC All-America Economic Survey.” TheFinancial Timeshas similar findings: “About 69 per cent of registered voters, and almost 50 per cent of those who voted for the president in 2024, said they were ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ concerned about ‘corruption, self-dealing or conflicts of interest’ in the Trump administration.”
The idea that the economy alone explained Trump’s unpopularity was never entirely convincing. He has almost always had poor approval ratings, even when presiding over a strong economy. He didn’t win the popular vote in 2016; House Republicans were shellacked in 2018, when he made the election about him; he lost in 2020; and the GOP underperformed in 2022, under his influence. He was able to win only in 2024, when the elections centered on voters’ views of the Biden presidency. One big reason for these repeated voter rejections is the miasma of scandal that follows Trump wherever he goes. “When elections are clearly about Trump and MAGA, MAGA will lose,” Michael Podhorzer, a progressive strategist, told me in 2022.
Still, this finding is reassuring about voters’ discernment. My colleague Anne Applebaum has been foremost among many observers who have deemed this the most corrupt presidency in U.S. history. Even as the president and his family have made billions from his office, no single story seems to have broken through: no Teapot Dome, no Watergate, not even a Whitewater. The new polls on corruption, combined with Trump’s steadily declining favorability, suggest that rather than any single news story producing an inflection point—like the swift turn on Joe Biden after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan—voters have just been steadily souring on the president, with corruption as one main reason.
(It’s worth noting that, although the FT poll specified that Trump voters are concerned about corruption within the administration, corruption also tops lists because it means different things to different voters. Trump supporters who say they are concerned about “corruption” could be referring, for example, to “deep state” conspiracy theories.)
The polling around corruption is also an indication of the success (believe it or not) of much-maligned Democratic messaging. In February, Senator Jon Ossoff began speaking about “the Epstein class,” referring to the then-recent release of materials related to the late sex offender, which sketched a clique of wealthy, powerful people emailing and socializing around the globe. “They are the elites they pretend to hate,” Ossoff said. “Trump was supposed to fight for the working class; instead, he’s literally closing rural clinics and hospitals to cut taxes for George Soros and Elon Musk.” Democrats have been using similar lines ever since.
In making “corruption” a rallying cry, Democrats have found a way to yoke together a range of different stories, effectively sidestepping any division between economic issues and Trump scandals. It’s a big enough trend to fit any number of developments: Trump’s promotion of AI and data centers, despite wide public skepticism; his focus on projects such as the White House ballroom, which is funded by donors, many of whose identities the administration hasn’t disclosed, and an arch in Washington, D.C.; his work to undermine elections. His policy toward Ukraine appears influenced by possible business ventures in Russia. His Iran war was encouraged in part by Middle Eastern allies with whom Trump family members have business relationships. Trump seems determined to help the Democrats out by boasting about oil-company profits at a time when Americans are upset about the cost of filling up their vehicles. Republicans have also bolstered the case with nominees such as Ken Paxton, a one-man alleged-graft spree.
If an anti-corruption message does carry Democrats to victory in the House, and perhaps in the Senate, it will also point to how they might use Congress over the next two years. Even if they win both chambers, they will have little ability to enact policy—including actions that might help bring prices down. But a House majority alone would have investigatory power, and could use its reach to delve into Trump-administration actions that threaten both rule of law and voters’ pocketbooks.
At least 68 people were killed and dozens more injured when a high-speed passenger train rear-ended another train this morning in the province of Toledo, Spain, causing a derailment. Spain’s transportation minister said traffic controllers had inexplicably instructed the train to continue despite another train being stopped farther along the tracks.
Israel appears to be headed for a deadlock after its parliamentary election; neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his main rival, the former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, secured a clear path to a governing majority. With most votes counted, Netanyahu’s bloc is projected to win 53 seats, the opposition 48, and Arab parties a record 19, complicating efforts to form a coalition.
The Federal Reserve voted to leave interest rates unchanged despite inflation rising to 3.7 percent last month, driven in part by higher energy prices. Two officials dissented in favor of raising rates, while Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said the central bank needed more economic data before deciding whether to increase rates.
Evening Read
Elizabeth Renstrom for The Atlantic
How American Girl Doll Lost Its Way
By Hillary Kelly
In the early 1990s, when I was in elementary school, a fancy catalog would arrive in the mailbox of our 1950s split-level in Philadelphia four times a year, and I’d hurry to my room to pore over its elaborate spreads. Tea caddies, Windsor chairs, writing quills, ice-cream churns. We didn’t have any antiques in our home, but the lure of the past was so strong that sometimes my sisters, five and seven years older than me, crammed onto my bed to dog-ear the pages too. Most of all, we looked forward to checking in with the girls arrayed there, whose stories we knew so well: Samantha, Molly, Kirsten, Felicity, Addy, and, later in the decade, Josefina.
They were the American Girl dolls, preadolescents just slightly older than me, and I was enthralled by the pictures of their period dresses, tiny school supplies, and exotic waxed lunch foods. My own doll was the farm girl Kirsten Larson, a Swedish immigrant to 1850s Minnesota. She had come in a burgundy box, with a slim book titled Meet Kirsten tucked in beside her. I promptly begged for the five other Kirsten books; the historical-fiction series followed the same pattern for each doll, ushering her through a year’s worth of life events, tailored to her personality and time and place. I remember playing with Kirsten in the backyard and having her trace out symbols in the dirt, just as she did with her new friend, a Dakota girl called Singing Bird, in the second book, Kirsten Learns a Lesson. To have such a doll was to own a whole world and the narratives within it …
Yet as American Girl’s 40th anniversary arrives, the brand finds itself in something of a midlife crisis.
Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Source: Edward Berthelot / Getty.
Explore. After becoming a mother, Lily Meyer went on a hunt for comfortable, stylish pants—and stumbled, she writes, on a uniform for today’s cool mom.
One of the defining elements of AI slop, aside from an off-kilter feel and minimal human oversight, is volume. In recent years, mass amounts of low-quality content have buried original posts on social-media feeds, crowded out human-authored books in online stores, and saturated YouTube algorithms. Now, AI slop is clogging the app stores too.
Thanks to the rise of AI-enabled software development, otherwise known as “vibe coding,” amateur developers can create hyper-personalized products, or Notes app knockoffs and Strava derivatives, in the span of an evening. In turn, app stores are being inundated with troves of submissions across categories. Nearly 1.3 million new iOS and Google Play apps were released in the first half of 2026 alone, double the amount seen in 2025 or 2024 during the same period, according to Sensor Tower, a market-intelligence firm. At Apple’s developers conference this past June, then-CEO Tim Cook revealed that the company’s App Store was seeing more than 1,000 submissions an hour as people build “more apps than ever.”
The flood of new entries has piled up in digital storefronts: Search for Cal AI, a popular nutrition tracker that logs daily intakes of calories, protein, and fiber through images of meals, and you’ll scroll past endless pages of clones that purport to do the very same thing. In addition to look-alike user interfaces and onboarding questions, some of these dupes share the same name (or variations, such as CalAI, Cal.AI, and Calio AI), and use app icons inspired by Cal AI’s signature black-and-white apple. The bulk of them are only a year or so old—in 2024, there were 330 new calorie-related apps in the Apple and Google Play stores; in 2026, there are already more than 3,000.
The amount of time mobile users are actually spending on apps, meanwhile, has remained relatively stagnant, and downloads declined this year. Whether that’s because these newer, vibe-coded apps are of lower quality, or because the avalanche of new apps makes discoverability more difficult, Mert Demirer, an MIT economics professor researching the surge in AI-coded software, said one thing is certain: “No one is really using them.”
Jonathan Briskman, the director of market insights at Sensor Tower, told me that “you’ve got more apps competing for, essentially, the same pie.” There’s been a notable surge in productivity-related apps, such as calendars and task-focused software, he said, alongside those centered on lifestyle, health and fitness, and finance—all of which saw at least a 40 percent increase in new submissions last year in the Apple App Store alone.
Apps that used to take weeks or even months to build can now be created in an hour. That’s how long Matthew Wallace, a co-founder of an AI-software firm, recently spent making a game that lets users sort cartoon soda cans and cupcakes on digital shelves. Wallace used AI tools to generate the app’s code, background music, and artwork. “I’m pretty shocked at how easy it was to get this far,” he told me. Wallace, who is testing a beta version of the app and plans to release it soon in Apple’s store, made the app for his wife, who enjoyed playing a similar shelf-shorting game but wanted one that didn’t escalate in difficulty. Even the extremely niche world of shelf-focused online puzzles—which are designed to offer a sense of peace through the process of arranging items—is seeing a boost in the vibe-coding era: Wallace’s new app will join the roughly 260 new iOS and Google Play mobile games with shelf in their name that have been released this year, up from 106 in 2025 and only 27 in 2024.
Like Wallace’s game, a large portion of these newer apps are generated for the express use case of whoever created them, or produced on the off chance they become viral hits. Take Simon Pitt, who has three apps on the App Store that he’s vibe coded. There’s Chapters, an audiobook app with an integrated sleep timer; Command Control, which allows him to view local data on bus stops and movie times; and Hippo Flippo, a hippo-themed puzzle game. None have gained much traction in the Apple App Store, although Chapters has about 300 users (some of whom occasionally email him demanding new features). Whereas Pitt, who manages a software-development team in England, has the expertise to fiddle around with code after it is AI-generated, a large portion of the creators behind new apps appear to be amateurs: The number of iOS and Google Play apps released by first-time app developers rose by more than 44 percent and 47 percent last year respectively, according to Briskman.
In some cases, vibe coders replicate apps in order to avoid paywalls, creating replacements for apps as varied as budgeting programs and recipe keepers. Pete McPherson, an indie developer, told me that tweaks of preexisting app ideas account for roughly 90 percent of the vibe-coding projects he releases, such as a recent version of a photo-library-cleanup app he enjoyed using but wanted to access for free. “I have a hard time paying for any apps now,” he said.
Vibe coders can follow “un-slop” tutorials that offer tips on how to ensure their products look less obviously AI made. But just like with other forms of AI slop, there are common tells: Developers say that many thrown-together slop apps feature small fonts, purple-gradient backgrounds, and a plethora of emojis—the app versions of constant em dashes in writing, or the It’s not X, it’s Y construction. The overload is frustrating for users, who are fatigued by constant exposure to AI-generated apps that feel interchangeable with preexisting ones. “Every day there’s a different person thinking that their AI slop is somehow going to be revolutionary to the fitness community,” one Reddit user wrote in July, in response to yet another fitness app being posted on the Strava Subreddit.
Apple is attempting to crack down on the surge—this summer, it updated its app-store guidelines to urge developers against “opportunistically creating variants of existing app categories or popular apps,” and said it would enforce tougher barriers to entry in well-established categories such as wallpapers, sound effects, and timers. Existing companies, too, are feeling the impact of the new wave of entries. Some game developers have recently seen mobile rip-offs proliferate across app stores after demos. Others have seen the influx put pressure on their resources; in June, Strava began charging developers for access to its fitness data. In a developer program update, a Strava community manager blamed “zero-code AI tools that produce apps that hammer APIs.”
A separate concern surrounding vibe-coded apps is that the first-time developers behind them may have neither the wherewithal to check AI-written code for security issues nor the capability to create bug fixes in order to maintain these apps over time. “The moment users upload personal information, or the app connects to real data sources, the creator becomes the entire security and support team for it,” Dor Zvi, the CEO of Red Access, a cybersecurity company that has researched security issues across vibe-coded applications, told me. “Those are responsibilities most of the one-person operations behind these apps aren’t built to provide.”
The Apple and Google Play app stores seem strained by the surge of new submissions. Elon Musk, responding to an X post claiming it now takes longer for an app to be reviewed than it does to create it, has described recent iOS delays as “ridiculous.” Gernot Poetsch, a developer based in Berlin, told me that review cycles that previously took 24 to 48 hours can now last a week, and attributed delays to the “avalanche” of apps that platforms must now comb through. Google did not respond to requests for comment. An Apple spokesperson told me that the average app-review time in recent weeks has been roughly 36 hours, although some new apps can take longer if they need additional scrutiny. To keep pace with growth, Apple said it is prioritizing reviews of updates for existing apps, expanding its use of automation, and strengthening safeguards for abuse detection and repeated submissions.
Whatever happens with slop apps could be a sign for where the rest of the internet is heading. Mediocre, AI-generated content is flooding nearly everything, including academic journals, courtroom filings, and even Zillow listings. That’s forcing us to wade through a plethora of cheap content and often shoddy copycats. “The cost of producing something is falling, but the cost of trusting gets passed on to everybody else,” Paul Shovlin, a professor at Ohio University studying AI, told me. For now, at least, “the onus is on us to sift through all the detritus.”
At no point in recent history has the future seemed so uncertain. All across America, in cavernous data centers with blank facades, a new order of AIs is taking form. We are told that in the coming years, they may usher in an age of abundance, wipe us clean off the Earth, or something in between. You may wonder whether it will soon mean something different to be human. And you may have more practical questions, too—about your personal finances, for instance. On Wall Street, the quants are already sketching out the likely economic scenarios, but normal people also want to know: What should they be doing with their money, so long as they (and their money) continue to exist?
Imagine the rosiest AI-abundance scenario. The “compressed 21st century” of scientific research prophesied by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei actually materializes. Instead of killing us, the intelligent machines cure our cancers. Their superhuman productivity drives the price of most goods and services to near zero. We find ourselves encased in cocoons of unimaginable luxury. I once asked Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, what this future might look like. He told me that solar-powered robots would build us any house of our design for a trivial cost. No one would go unsheltered, let alone hungry. By today’s standards, everyone would be very rich.
Choosing the best financial strategy in a world like that won’t be an existential concern, but there will still be different levels of wealth. People might vie for what the economist Fred Hirsch called positional goods—scarce stuff whose value depends on other people not having it. Some research suggests that housing ranks highest in the hierarchy of these goods. Even if, as Altman told me, construction will be a solved problem, location is everything. There are only so many buildable lots along California’s Santa Barbara coast or in Manhattan’s West Village. Get one now, if you can, and stock up on collectibles that are verifiably rare. If you’re already rich, buy that Fabergé egg and that T. rex skeleton at Sotheby’s. And if you aren’t rich, at least save your baseball cards.
Of course, we may not get an AI utopia. Molly Kinder, a former Brookings Institution fellow, has described a “messy middle” scenario where a stretch of profound job disruption and economic chaos precedes a more settled AI future. Even comfortable white-collar workers could encounter a gantlet of financial dangers. The first thing you might notice is that you’re no longer getting raises. Your boss—and their boss—may respond to the historic level of economic uncertainty by pushing back their retirement. They may stop hiring entry-level workers. Your corporate ladder may shrink down to a few rungs. You’ll spend more and more of your workday reviewing AI output. On your way home at night, you’ll wonder when machine intelligence will be able to do your monitoring work, too.
In this scenario, you’ll still have a mortgage, tuition bills, and perhaps elderly parents to care for. You won’t want to tap your retirement accounts to make up for any shortfalls, because your middle years are prime compounding time for your 401(k) and Roth IRA. And if you claim Social Security early, you’re locked in at a lower benefit—a dicey move if AI eventually ends up extending your life, as the AI kingpins have promised. So you may just have to hold on, keeping your expenses low and being ready to relocate on short notice, anything to keep hopping from one employment life raft to another before obsolescence sets in.
That may sound grim, but things could be worse. Imagine the scenario in which AI triggers an unprecedented wealth-creation event, but only for the relative few who have significant equity in the companies that created it. Everyone else might be relegated to a permanent underclass, as some in Silicon Valley have come to fear. If you think this will be our future, try to join the elect, if not by marriage, then by shifting as much money as possible into shares in the leading frontier labs. But that may be difficult, because at least for now, OpenAI and Anthropic are still private companies. Buying their stock on the secondary market is not easy. Equity stakes in these companies have become so desirable, in fact, that one home seller in Sonoma County, California, offered a $500,000 discount to buyers who could pay in Anthropic shares.
You’ll also need to make sure you pick the right company in which to invest, and purchase a large enough stake for it to matter. If a superintelligence learns to improve itself rapidly, the race among the frontier labs might be winner-takes-all, and they currently jostle for position from week to week. Timing presents another challenge. Leopold Aschenbrenner, the former OpenAI researcher who founded the hedge fund Situational Awareness, decided to bet on companies that are likely to benefit no matter which lab wins. He may have gone in too strong and too early. His fund was up more than 400 percent earlier this year, but then during a market dip, his public-equity portfolio quickly lost more than two-thirds of its value, and he was forced to sell the bulk of it in a single trade.
Even if you pick the lab that creates the first superintelligent AI, and you’re one of the lucky few who gets unimaginably rich, you’ll still be subject to political risk. If a lot of people suddenly find themselves reckoning with a lifetime of impoverishment, they might not be delighted by your success, and they won’t be entirely powerless. Provided that democracy survives, they’ll have the vote. They may make clear to their congressional representatives that they’ll accept nothing less than a profound redistribution of the AI windfall. They might pass a bill that makes the New Deal look like Reaganomics. (A 2020 paper by the Centre for the Governance of AI urges AI companies to pre-commit to redistribution to avoid this fate.) This bill might aggressively tax all AI revenue collected by the winning lab or nationalize it outright.
And what about the really bad scenarios, in which AI goes rogue, or is used for evil purposes? If automated agents give the pillars of human civilization a good shaking, that could imperil your net worth, along with everything else. Earlier this month, Altman said that embracing this technology means accepting that “some bad things are going to happen.” Greg Jensen, the managing chief investment officer at Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, has said that the risk of a “major financial incident run by AI” or “physical disaster” in just the next few years is “way higher than anybody should be comfortable with.” Anthropic’s recent filing in advance of its IPO warned that such an incident could cause harm on a scale that no single insurer, and potentially not even the entire insurance industry, could cover.
Experts have long warned about the possibility of an AI-led cyberattack on financial institutions, perhaps one that scrambles bank balances, rendering all account records suspect. Some of these institutions have implemented backup systems to avoid a great reset of this kind. Banks may record their customers’ account data every night in a standardized, encrypted format, and then send it over to an air-gapped archive. They may also partner with a “restoration” institution that would allow depositors to see their balances and make withdrawals in case of an emergency.
But future AI agents could find some way to compromise this system too. Stuxnet crossed an air gap by way of thumb drives, and it was designed by human hackers more than a decade ago. There may be no truly satisfying hedge against this kind of attack beyond keeping paper records, spreading money across many banks and brokerages, and stashing emergency cash—in small denominations, of course—at home. Gold could be an option, too, and there is some evidence that Silicon Valley types are buying lots of it. But gold is difficult to store and prone to being stolen, and most people can’t make change against it.
Compared with some of the catastrophes that AI luminaries warn us about, a global financial cyberattack would be quite mild. Amodei has said that a superintelligence could one day help a bioterrorist engineer a new pathogen, custom-made to trigger a pandemic—perhaps one that would be far more lethal than COVID. An AI used by the military could coordinate with others to gin up a nuclear exchange. There could be some other rupture that we cannot yet imagine. Many people would likely survive these catastrophes, but civilization wouldn’t carry on as usual. For a time, the world may descend into a more Hobbesian state, in which brokerage accounts—and other aspects of the formal economy—are distant memories.
For decades, preppers have been hedging against these more extreme possibilities. They’ve secured remote parcels of land with vegetable gardens and working wells. They’ve stockpiled guns and ammunition that can be traded in a pinch. Billionaires have done high-end prepping of their own. Some are acquiring vaultlike bunkers in New Zealand. (Altman has said that his emergency retreat is in Big Sur.) These backup plans have failure points, too. Transportation to a bunker could be difficult, depending on how bad things get on the way to the airport or in the sky. Unfriendly locals may be waiting for you on arrival. Even if you get down into the bunker, your armed security may decide that, actually, the future should belong to them, not you. Some researchers have suggested that trying to wait out a catastrophe in pampered isolation may be foolish. They say that living in a close-knit, resilient human community may be the best hedge of all.
There is one extreme scenario that no one needs to bother prepping for. Unfortunately it’s the worst one: extinction. You can’t hedge against a total apocalypse, except by buying indulgences. If you think AI will usher in doomsday, spending down your nest egg might be the most rational thing you can do. Even now, there are people who have convinced themselves that because AI will kill us all, they have no future to plan for. Nate Soares, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, told my colleague Matteo Wong that he’s stopped saving for retirement. “I just don’t expect the world to be around,” he said last year. But to be clear, that’s not financial advice; none of the foregoing is, and least of all that.
In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with thoughts on the coming midterm elections and the difficult position Republicans now face. He explains the political “fork” confronting Republican candidates: Having attached themselves to an unpopular president, they risk alienating either moderate voters or Trump’s loyal base.
Then David is joined by Omar Mohammed, the formerly anonymous blogger behind Mosul Eye, to discuss his new book, Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS. They discuss life under ISIS rule, the atrocities Mohammed witnessed firsthand in Mosul, and the dangers he faced in documenting them.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of the role opera plays in our society.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Omar Mohammed: Our city was taken by the Islamic State, David, because we had no memory of anything that happened before. Because we allowed other people to be omitted. I don’t put blame on people collectively. That’s not what I do. That’s not my job. That’s not my craft. But my craft is also to understand why what happened happened.
[Music]
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 Omar Mohammed, a historian and author of the harrowing new book Mosul Eye, an eyewitness account of the ISIS reign of terror in the city of Mosul, Iraq. The book talk at the end of the show will not be about books at all. This week, I’m going to be offering some meditations on the place of opera in our culture.
But before either the dialogue with Omar Mohammed or the meditation on opera, some opening thoughts about something that has been puzzling me as we come to the end of the 2026 race, and maybe has been puzzling you as well.
As we all know, President Trump is in a lot of political trouble. He’s polling in the mid-30s: about where President [George W.] Bush was polling just before the big beating in the midterm elections of 2006, about where President Harry Truman was polling before the big Democratic beating in the elections of 1946.
One thing you might expect in a situation like this, where the president’s unpopularity is dragging down his party, is that individual members of the president’s party would try to look independent—put some distance between themselves and the president—in order to say, Look, maybe you’re mad at him, but don’t be mad at me. I did a good job for the people of my state, my district. Separate me out. Just don’t mix me in with Trump. Why are you mixing me in with Trump? I’m different. I’ve disagreed with him. I’m independent.
And you’re seeing very, very little of that kind of behavior. And the question is, why? Why won’t Republicans try to save themselves by putting some distance between them and Trump? It’s maybe late as we get into the second half of October. Why didn’t they do it before?
The explanation comes from a strategy in the game of chess. If you play chess, you are familiar with a maneuver called a fork. A fork is a tactic in which a single piece attacks two or more of the opponent’s pieces at the same time, forcing the opponent into a situation where the opponent can save only one of the threatened pieces. Republicans are in kind of this situation in this election of 2026. Yes, President Trump is unpopular. But in many places, especially in red states, the hope of survival is not by distancing from Trump but by somehow getting Republican turnout inflated to rev up the Republican base. And the way you do that is by clinging to President Trump, because as little as the rest of the country likes President Trump, his base continues to like him enthusiastically. The base is shrinking. There are fewer and fewer people who describe themselves as MAGA Republicans. But among those who do describe themselves as MAGA Republicans—and that’s a considerable number of people—the president’s support remains overwhelming, almost unanimous. So if you’re a Republican in a state like Iowa or Florida or even Texas, you’re in a situation where you think, I need to do two things. I need to find some way to bring independents back, and that requires distance from President Trump. But I need to make sure that my people, our people, turn up, and that requires clinging to President Trump. In other words, a classic fork.
And this fork is creating a kind of paralysis that may make the Republican situation in 2026 worse even than it has to be. Because instead of winning both independents and revving up the base, the Republicans caught in the fork may find themselves doing neither and collapsing in places that always had been thought about as winnable. And where this may have real consequences for the American political system and for the next two years is less in the Senate, less in the House, and more at a part of American politics that we tend not to think about as a system—we tend to think only about our own state—and that is the politics of the states.
A defining feature of American politics almost for the entire past generation has been the overwhelming dominance of the Republicans at the state level, and especially at the state-legislative level. There are 99 state legislatures, because Nebraska has only one chamber. So, 50 states; two chambers per state, except in Nebraska, you get to 99. Of those 99, Republicans have had, through most of the 21st century, an enormous majority almost all of the time. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but always they can bank on great control at the state level.
And that’s had a lot of implications, because it has been the secret weapon behind President Trump’s concentration of power at the federal level. When Trump was trying to manipulate the elections of 2020 and hold onto power in 2021 after his defeat, one of the things he had going for him is a lot of the places where the opposition to Trump might coalesce at the state level, that didn’t happen. And states often let President Trump get away with doing things that—if they were under non-Trump control, or if there was an even more even division of the parties—they would not allow.
The trouble that Republicans are in in 2026 could have big implications for state contests. Could perhaps even break the Republican majority on state legislatures, break the Republican hold on so many governor’s races. And this will have, for the final two years of President Trump’s term and for the 2028 election, implications as large as the opposite had in the first term of President Trump and in the election of 2020. He may be facing in 2028, or his party may be facing in 2028, a state system that is much more independent of the federal system than it has been before, and much less amenable to the kind of manipulation and tricks that Trump tried in 2020 and that led to the January 6th, 2021, attack on Congress.
If the Republican power subsides at the state level, Republicans will face another problem as well, and one with even longer-term consequences for the renewal of their party.
Oftentimes, when parties are beaten at the federal level—as it looks probable that the Republicans will be beaten in 2026, and as it looks very questionable that they will survive in 2028—they find renewal at the state level. And the classic example of this is the career of the president I wrote speeches for, George W. Bush.
In the 1990s Republicans in Congress and Senate sought to impeach President Bill Clinton. This move was tremendously unpopular and led to very bad Republican results in the midterm election of 1998 and to the resignation of then–Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. George W. Bush, in the same year, 1998, where Republicans did bad in congressional elections, George W. Bush won a decisive re-election as governor of Texas, with important breakthroughs in winning the Hispanic vote. And Republicans all over the country looked and said, Well, the people in Washington, the Republicans in Washington, they don’t seem to know what they’re doing. But this Republican in Texas—he seems to have the formula. And Bush began his campaign for the nomination in 2000 after that breakthrough in 1998 by presenting himself as a different kind of Republican. Different from whom? Different from Newt Gingrich, different from the people who’d impeached Bill Clinton. And so the result was that he could reinvent himself, reinvent his party. And the unsuccessful election of 1998 was followed by renewal in time for the election of the year 2000.
How do the Republicans do that post-Trump? They can’t, because they are caught in the fork. I mean, one thing you might imagine, for example, is that instead of nominating J. D. Vance or even Marco Rubio in 2028—someone closely tied with everything that Americans don’t like about Donald Trump—Republicans would say to themselves, Well, is there a state that’s an important state, a contested state, where there’s a governor who’s very popular?
What do you know? There is one. Georgia is that contested state, and Georgia has an outgoing governor, Brian Kemp, who’s had ratings of over 60 percent for much of his second term, who’s polling at about 60 percent right now, and who has done a good job of straddling the division between Republicans who don’t like Trump and Republicans who do. That’s the guy, you would think. That’s the guy. That’s our George W. Bush. That’s the guy who can break with Trump, be a Republican, be a different kind of Republican. Different from whom? Different from Trump. He doesn’t like Trump, but he’s still a Republican.
But that’s not happening, is it? It’s not happening, because Republican Party politics since 1998 has been effectively nationalized. It’s all Trump all the time; all federal, not state. And that not only defeats the attempts by Republicans at the national level to perform shenanigans; it also denies Republicans the chance to renew themselves from the place where, in American politics, renewal so often comes at the state level.
That’s a fork. It’s a fork the Republicans are not finding their way out of, and it’s a fork that will have large tactical consequences in 2026 and maybe large strategic consequences in 2028.
And now, my dialogue with Omar Mohammed.
[Music]
Frum: In June 2014, the armies of the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq’s second city. Not long after, an anonymous blog called Mosul Eye began reporting on life inside the occupied city. The executions, the expulsions of Christians and Shiites, the mass rape of Yazidi girls, the destruction of shrines and manuscripts.
For more than three years, no one outside a tiny circle knew who was writing it. Journalists relied on it, and the Islamic State threatened its author with death in its most terrible forms. In December 2017, after Mosul was retaken, the Associated Press revealed the writer’s identity. His name was Omar Mohammed, a young historian of Ottoman Mosul.
Omar Mohammed lived a double life, outwardly conforming to ISIS edicts by day and recording the truth of what was happening to his city by night, until he fled the city at the end of 2015 and continued from abroad through a network of contacts inside Mosul. His brother was killed in the final battle to liberate the city.
He has now told the full story in his own words in a new book, Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS, published by Skyhorse Press. It is, in my opinion, a work of literature about the human spirit, to stand on the shelf with Primo Levi and Czesław Miłosz. A witness to the extremes of human cruelty, oppression, and endurance.
Omar Mohammed, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.
Omar Mohammed: David, thank you for having me, and I’m humbled by the words you said about me and about the book.
Frum: I think anyone in your presence understands the courage that you showed. Your life is a rebuke to all of us of what it means to be brave, not in a dangerous second, but through the grind of minute-by-minute exposure to terror and oppression and the risk of death.
I want to talk to you about your book. For, as a book and as a witness, because the book, as I said in the introduction, is also, in my opinion, a great work of literature. It’s not just a testimony. It is a work of creative understanding of what people have gone through.
But before we talk about any of those things, let me just start with this. As you know, you spend some time in the United States now. It’s a very busy country, a very inward-looking country, a very forgetful country. You’re a historian. You devoted your career and then the risk of death to remembrance. Why is it important to remember what happened in your city in those years?
Mohammed: There are two ways of saying that also, David. It’s not just why we should remember, but also why we should not forget. Because I’ve always said I can forgive, but forgetting is dangerous.
The reason being, the past 30 to 40 years that witnessed the rise of the so-called jihad on the West or jihad on democracy, against democracy, it believes in only one objective and one outcome and one goal. And that is the destruction of the Western democracy and Western civilization. They stand against everything democracy stands for. We should never forget. We should never stop remembering that they are always planning and plotting against the Western democracy and against the West in general. And this is a way of life that they don’t think should exist, and that they believe it must be eliminated and destroyed.
So yes, it’s a fight, and it’s my task as a historian to keep reminding the people, Westerners or non-Westerners. Because, trust me, if the Western democracy is removed, no one is going to be safe, and that is exactly what they want. We should always fight back. That is my act of remembrance, and that is why I want people to always remember.
Frum: And you continue through your activism, but you also continue as a historian trying to recapture the past of what Mosul was like before ISIS, and what life was like during ISIS. I want to read from your book one of the most terrible and vivid scenes of what you saw as a witness to history.
You have, in this part of the book, you have entered the ISIS capital in Syria. You are approaching from the outskirts, and you see a man who has literally been crucified, like Jesus in the Bible. You say, “In front of it was a man nailed to a cross”—you say you’re in front of an abandoned school. “In front of it was a man nailed to a cross. He was mounted in the manner described in the scriptures: arms extended, nails through the hands, the body suspended above the ground. A piece of paper bearing his name was attached to his chest: Sulyman Ayub. The charge was apostasy, the accusation that a Muslim had abandoned his faith, one of the offenses ISIS published with the most theatrical severity. The word for death was written beneath it in Arabic. But the man was not dead. He was moving, the small involuntary shifts of a living person in agony. Below him, dogs were feeding on his legs. Not strays circling at a distance, but animals that had been allowed to reach the body and were eating from it while the man lived.”
That’s a terrible scene. You give us the man’s name, and you were the only witness to his terrible end and the reasons for it.
Mohammed: I’m sorry, David, because you just read something to me that I thought by writing I will. I heard that—I wish you did not read this text.
Frum: I’m sorry.
Mohammed: I just did not want—
Frum: I wish I had not read it either, but I have and I did because of you.
Mohammed: Yes. And you can imagine I saw that man on my way of escaping the Islamic State. I made sure that I read his name. I made sure that I record his name. I made sure I protect his name from being forgotten. I also made sure by naming him, by giving him that name, that hopefully will outlast me and outlive me, but it will definitely outlive the Islamic State. That people will know that the people who were killed by the Islamic State had names, they had dreams. But it’s also—that animalistic nature of the Islamic State has unfortunately been on many occasions being read or being treated as, Well, what if the Islamic State is just a political movement trying to regain power in its area of interest? That is absolutely absurd. The Islamic State does not use violence to achieve its goals. It uses violence because that is the end goal of its ideology.
And this is one scene, David. Not to mention what’s across the book. I just wanted people to know that those people had names, and they should never be forgotten.
Frum: Well, I hope I won’t upset you. I want to read—I’m going to be reading some more things from the book as we go, to sort of root us so [that] people can also understand what you have done. And this book, you told me, was originally written in English. It is not translated.
Mohammed: It’s in English, yes.
Frum: One of your acts of courageous witness was to masquerade as a doctor or a medical professional to gain entrance to the hospitals, to see what was going on inside the hospitals. And you tell this story. In this case, I think you were not an eyewitness. I think you had interviewed somebody. This is from page 116:
“Yazidi girls, members of an ancient ethno-religious minority from the Sinjar region, whom ISIS had enslaved en masse the previous summer, were being brought in by ISIS fighters requesting mandatory abortions and sterilizations.” That is, the fighters were demanding mandatory abortions and sterilizations. “The doctor,” to whom you were speaking, “described a girl of 17 who had been raped repeatedly by multiple men and was in a state of nervous collapse. The girl refused the procedure.” That is, I assume, sterilization. “The number of such cases at that point was between 50 and 60. At least 12 girls younger than 15 had died of injuries from the violence. I wrote it down that evening in the same compressed register I use for everything: date, location, number, source. I’m not sure I’ve ever found the right language for what it takes to apply that method to that material. I wrote it down because if I did not, it would disappear into the silence ISIS was building around everything it did to Yazidi women.”
Mohammed: I remember this very well. I remember what the doctor told me, but I also equally remember the three other young girls that were killed and shot dead by the Islamic State. As we speak today, and as I mentioned, exactly what you say—that I write it so people will remember. So they will not be forgotten.
Today in 2026, we have people questioning that even the heinous attack against the Yazidis even took place or even happened. People are denying or questioning, or people are trying to make it look like, well, we were all attacked. Why does it have to be special for the Yazidis? Because that is the risk. If we do not record what the Islamic State did, there will be other people who will come and say, they will say that it was not that bad. It was not that horrible.
And that will always—as a historian, that is always the challenge. Because as historians, we are supposed to deal with the dead. But what I wanted to do is to give life to those people who were killed, so they will be forever witnesses to what happened to them.
Frum: My colleague at The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, a great scholar of the Stalinist and communist oppression in Eastern Europe, wrote in the preface—I’m going to now forget which of her books she wrote this, I think it was maybe her book on the Gulag, the Soviet Gulag. She said, “I write this book”—I’m quoting from memory—“not so that it will never happen again, but because it will happen again.” And I think one of the things I am reminded of by you and by, as I say, the other people I imagine you standing beside on the shelf, Primo Levi and Czesław Miłosz, of just these horrors occur again and again and again. And the only remedy against them—not the remedy, the way of beginning a remedy—is through unceasing remembrance.
Mohammed: Our city was taken by the Islamic State, David, because we had no memory of anything that happened before. Because we allowed other people to be omitted. I don’t put blame on people collectively. That’s not what I do. That’s not my job. That’s not my craft. But my craft is also to understand why what happened happened.
When the Islamic State took control of [a] third of Iraq and also over [a] third of Syria—but as much as I’m concerned with the city of Mosul, which is my hometown that I unfortunately lost forever, we had no memory of what happened before. We had no memory of what happened to the Jews in the ’40s and the ’50s. We had no memory of what happened to the Assyrians in the ’50s, all of these massacres. We had no memory of what happened in the ’50s. We had no memory of what happened in the early 2000s. People unfortunately forget, David. That’s why it is easy. It’s easy to take control of their past, present, and future. And it was my job to precisely make sure that, because as you cited Anne Applebaum, yes—I do completely agree that it might happen again. My job—I might not be able to prevent it, but if it happens again, at least there will not be only one person to fight against them. But everyone will be prepared, will be ready to understand what they are and what they represent.
Frum: I want to put an asterisk beside something you said a few moments ago. You referred to what happened to the Jews in the ’40s and ’50s, and many North American listeners, many English-speaking people, will think you’re meaning about the Nazi Holocaust in Europe. But you’re actually speaking about events that happened to the Jews in Iraq.
Mohammed: That’s exactly what I was referring to: the pogrom in Baghdad in the ’40s, or known as the Farhud. But also the revocation of the citizenship, the deportation of the Jews, confiscation of their properties and lands. There is an ancient Jewish history in Iraq that was completely omitted to the extent that I myself had no idea until I grew up, until I started finding out on my own. I had no idea that we had Jews in Mosul. I had no idea that the school I used to attend was built on the ruins of a Jewish school that was completely demolished to the ground. Of course, that allows people to be okay with things to happen again and again.
Frum: Well, you both judge people, but you’re very humane in your judgments of the choices and options that are available to ordinary people. And I want to read another passage here—this is from page 65 and 66—because, look: Americans may remember the fight over Mosul, which was spearheaded by American troops with their Iraqi troops, their other coalition forces. And it was a terrible battle, and we had images from it, but not from inside. There was a very effective censorship. And it’s easy to see the people who are in that city as just part of the scenery, part of the story, and you bring this extraordinary sympathy to them. And I want to read again from your book, page 65, 66:
“The population of an occupied city does not divide into resistors and collaborators. That is the binary of people who have never lived under total control. The reality is a spectrum so compressed that the distance between cooperation and refusal can be measured in the angle at which a man places money on a counter. A father who sent his son to the rewritten school”—that is, ISIS had taken command of the schools, and it foisted this reactionary curriculum on them—“a father who sent his son to the rewritten school was not endorsing ISIS’s curriculum. He was calculating that a distorted education was less damaging than no education at all, and that a boy seen on the streets during school hours would attract the attention of the Hisba, the religious police. A shopkeeper who paid the zakat, the forced tribute, was not funding the caliphate by conviction. He was buying another day of operation with the only currency the regime accepted. A woman who wore the niqab was not submitting to the ideology. She was navigating a city in which her uncovered face was a punishable offense and her covered face was survival. These were not moral failures. They were the daily calculations of prisoners performing the routines that captors required in order to remain alive.”
Mohammed: And I believe that’s exactly how we need to look at people whose will was stripped away. They were under total control of such a brutal regime. There is another way of resistance that I had noted back then, because you mentioned the curricula and the schools. There is, in another page in the book, when the professors of the university were forced to sit inside the library that ISIS had occupied and transformed into its hub to rewrite the curricula before they destroy the library. Those professors—they knew that if they say no, they will be killed, they will be punished.
But they at least decided to take some act of resistance. Even if it’s unnoticeable; even if it’s only for themselves to notice. Which is what they did, David. They would start writing slower and slower, slowly, slowly. So what is supposed to be delivered in one week, they would deliver it in two months, because they were always in the hope—probably in one month that ISIS would be removed, ISIS would disappear. So they would just go back to themself and say, I delayed them. I did not give them what they want quickly.
So there were people who would take this type of act of resistance. I actually prepared back then an entire confidential report, which I called “The Civil Disobedience,” because I needed to understand what might be the way to get into the people in case there will be a need to form a military resistance against the Islamic State. What do I need? Because I had thought about this. I don’t believe in violence. I don’t believe in such actions. But I needed to understand the mentality of the people. That’s why I went to go deeper inside the mentality of the people. And as you said—yes, we have to be human.
Frum: Iraq is a land of fathomless antiquity. Cities are built on top of cities. Mosul, your Mosul, is the city that Bible readers will know as Nineveh. I mean, it’s got a much more ancient history than that, but it is the city to which the prophet Jonah was sent. And the shrine to the prophet Jonah figures largely in your book.
Tell us about this layered history: Christian, Jewish, pre-Islamic, Islamic, Ottoman, modern. You are a historian. You describe a city that is built on layers and where the palaces of Assyrian kings from ancient Assyria are still there to be seen.
Mohammed: I will start with a joke that goes on until today in Mosul related to Jonah.
So the people of Nineveh—as you mentioned, Mosul is across the river from Nineveh. Which is the capital of the Assyrian Empire, which was destroyed in the year 612 B.C. by the Medes and the Babylonians. And since then, the city of Mosul, which also existed back then, became more prominent, as the Assyrians kept moving to the other side. But also has the story of Jonah—and in the Bible it’s the fish, in the Quran it’s the whale, or it’s a big fish. And he arrived in Nineveh, and he started asking them to accept his message. And the joke goes—which is actually not a joke, but the people use it to say that we are the only people who were divinely protected. They say when God asked the people of Nineveh to accept his message, they told him, Give us your offer. Come back in three days; we’ll think about it. And he would come back in three days, and then they would say, Now we have contemplated; we can accept the offer. And then they were given a divine protection forever.
And that’s how people grew up in Mosul. That’s how I learned this story, from my grandmother telling me that we are the people of Yunus. We were never told that we are the people of the caliphate. We are—Yunus, it is the Arabic name—one of the names of the city of Mosul is “the city of Jonah.”
And you have this layer, and then you have an ancient Assyrian palace on top of that first layer. And then on top of the ancient Assyrian site, which has been rediscovered again, you have an ancient synagogue. And then on top of which a church was built, on top of which a tomb was built, on top of which a mosque was built. That’s how Mosul is. It’s a multilayered city. It’s as contradictory, as beautiful at once.
Frum: And Mosul is bisected by the River Tigris. And on one side is a more ancient city—an Ottoman city, I suppose. And on the other side is a more modern city with wider streets and more modern buildings. And this duality is a central feature of the book.
Mohammed: Yes. Because that is exactly what you see, and that’s exactly why I care a lot about the river. You can stand in the middle of the river. You look at the right, you see the modernity, you see modern life. But then you look at the left—everything is ancient. Wherever you step on, this is ancient. This is the oldest church in Mosul. This is the oldest synagogue. This is the oldest mosque. This is the oldest street. This is the oldest alley. Everything you mention there, you must add that first word: It’s the oldest. And wherever you step, you are surrounded by history. You are surrounded by complex history, I would say.
Because also, as much as Mosul is old and ancient, it also has multilayered society. Different religions, different faiths. But it’s also a city that has never been able to have this as a merged society. This is why we have always had in the city, what you have as the Jewish quarter or the Christian quarter or the Islamic quarter. People did not mix. But they always found a way to mix where it brought them together—which is the old market. And it can continue to live.
Frum: I’m going to read one last thing, a very vivid description of the end when the coalition forces came to expel ISIS from Mosul.
The Tigris is spanned by bridges. The coalition blew up the bridges, all but one, in order to sever the ability of ISIS to move fighters from one side to the other. ISIS then blew up, you say, the last of the bridges in order to fortify itself. And the more modern part of the city was cleared with considerable violence, but still leaving the city substantially intact.
And at that point, the fight turned to the older part of the city. And here’s what you say about that. “The West Mosul”—the West Mosul is the older part—“the West Mosul offensive was set for February 19th, 2017. What was coming would be unlike anything the city had endured in its thousands of years of continuous habitation. Not the Mongol sack of the 13th century, not the Ottoman conquests, not the British mandate, not even the fall to ISIS. What was coming was the destruction of Mosul by the forces that had come to save it. The old city, the city of shared walls and narrow alleys, and the leaning minaret, and the churches beside the mosques, and the shrines beside the markets, was about to be fed into the machinery of liberation. And the machinery did not distinguish between the enemy and the place the enemy had chosen to die inside. The time had come to end ISIS. The price of ending it was Mosul.”
Mohammed: It is the price we paid, David. Mosul in its total shape, in its total history. Mosul, that still holds the body of my brother, is the price we paid, yes.
But it’s the price we paid, and I’m willing to pay this price again if ISIS comes back again. I’m sorry. [Cries.] I did not expect myself today to—yeah, we paid Mosul as the price to end that totalitarian, brutal Islamist regime that came for the destruction of every memory we have built. Of every dream we had. Of every stone we marked, was completely erased. But it was a price worth paying, and I would give myself, and I would do it again. And I’m going to give 1,000 Mosul to ensure that no Islamic State, no caliphate would ever see the light. 1,000 Mosul, not one.
Frum: You did often put your life at risk, and at one point in a moment of gloom, you shaved your beard, you put on a red sweater. Red was prohibited for some reason I don’t understand. And you sort of walked around and waited for them to find you, and they didn’t. After you made good your escape—and this is a strange thing about the modern world—ISIS has cast Mosul back into what we would call medieval barbarity, although it was much worse than anything that ever happened in the Middle Ages.
And yet you’re able to be in contact with your family inside the city. And especially your brother, to whom you were so close, and you lose him in that last fight.
Mohammed: I insisted. I insisted on him. I kept telling him. I told him, This is not a warning I am giving you to leave where you are. I’m not telling you that I expect there is going to be a fight there. I’m telling you that I know that the fight is moving into the area where you are, and you must leave now. I did not know I was talking to a dead person. I think my brother realized he was dead. I think he understood. Because my brother, back then when he was talking to me, he was very calm. He was very sincere. He had the serenity that I have never seen before, because he is the one who was always concerned with our safety. He was always concerned, myself, my family, caring for us. But that time he was serene, he was calmer. My brother did not survive. The next day I knew. I knew that the moment I was talking to him, I knew he’s already dead.
I knew he was a dead man, and I knew that he knew he was a dead man
I just could not save my brother. It is one of my greatest regrets that I couldn’t—I should have, I should have kept calling him. I should have kept calling him. I should have sent someone to remove him from that area. I just, I couldn’t.
Frum: You lived this strange life in exile where you were once totally helpless and yet also quite powerful. Because your information was being fed into the global system that was monitoring what ISIS was doing, that was informing the forces that were gathering to destroy ISIS.
You could see, but you couldn’t touch what was going on in your city. And you could target, you could assist the coalition forces in targeting death, but you could not save anybody.
Mohammed: Yes. I could not just give up. I could not stand and do nothing. I realized that I had the power of saving people.
It was a very difficult decision to do, because it meant that I will have to be in contact with the coalition, be in contact with the Central Command. Be in contact with people that I’ve always resisted responding to. But when I realized that I had the tools that allowed me to save more lives. There were people getting killed on [a] daily basis, whether it’s by ISIS or the bombing or—it’s a battlefield. An irregular war, taking place in one of the oldest cities in the world, in which if you, not bombing a house, if you push too hard on the wall, the house is going to collapse.
People were desperate. I found the tools, I understood how it works. I used my presence in Paris back then, with that access to technology. And as I mentioned in my book, my brother I did not save, I couldn’t save. I saved 92 families, and I am always thankful that they are alive. I am always devastated that others could not make it. But I do remember that at least those lives were saved. At least others are still alive.
Frum: Let me ask you about your life in the past 10 years. So the fight for Mosul is over in 2017.
ISIS is expelled. The city is wrecked. Your identity is revealed at the end of 2017 by the Associated Press. You have now made a life; you’ve returned to your teaching and research work, and you spend your time in Paris and other cities.
What is your work like? What is your mission like in the 10 years since the book’s story comes to an end?
Mohammed: After I escaped and the moment I arrived in safety in France, I did not stop working on doing whatever I can to help the city. When it was the battle, I used every tool available to me to help the people.
And then the biggest challenge came, which is the recovery of the city. I started immediately advocating for resupplying the central library of the city of Mosul with books. People were asking, What do you want? I said, I need books. Hundreds of thousands of books were pouring from all over the world, coming, arriving in Mosul. They are all labeled “for Mosul Eye,” and the books would be immediately admitted. Someone sent us a container of 20 tons of books.
The heritage of the city—which is the memory of the city, the most visible element of our identity—was almost completely demolished to the ground by the Islamic State, so we had to rebuild it. I started advocating with the world to help the city. Projects started working on recovering the Al-Nuri mosque, which ISIS had used before to declare its caliphate. Later, they destroyed it. We had to rebuild it. A church and a synagogue.
And I have since been working on what I would call my life mission. Beside breathing life into the soul of Mosul, I realized that it cannot be completed until I make sure the Jewish history of Mosul, that was completely erased and omitted, goes back to the city itself. And this is why I began since then—I’ve been working on this in the past years, and still documenting the testimonies of the last people who were born Jewish in Mosul, who are still alive. Preserving the Jewish heritage of Mosul, but also not doing it in isolation; making it an integral part of the city’s history, so people will understand that they have a collective identity, a collective memory.
I did not stop working on doing the research on extremism and terrorism. I did not stop working—I completed my dissertation in the past 10 years or so. I have been doing everything, David, dedicating all my time for the city of Mosul. I’m not going to list things, but I’m going to say what my life was: is that I was a person on a mission. And still I am, to help the city of Mosul recover. Whether it’s the same city I am talking about or it’s a different city now, it’s a city that deserves to live.
Frum: [Novelist] Milan Kundera spoke of the struggle for freedom as being a struggle for memory and against forgetting. And you’ve talked very powerfully about the work of memory, what you’re trying to remember. The names and lives of people who were killed, the names and lives of people who were sexually abused. The city that is gone, the pre-city, or the older city that used to be there.
Let us talk a little bit now about forgetting. Because the way you and I made contact in the first place was I had spoken about this terrible simplification that has been happening across the Middle East, where ancient communities have, one by one, been expelled. The Middle East is becoming a region that was divided into so many different religions and so many different languages and so many different ways of life. Unless, like the Jews in Israel, they can find their own state, there is no survival for them in this region in this terrible simplification. And there’s a forgetting of what the Middle East was.
Can you talk a little bit about, as a historian of Ottoman Iraq and of Ottoman Mosul, what was there before? What was lost? And is there any way to recover that tolerance, that living together that was there before?
Mohammed: I think it’s conditional.
There is also, as you mentioned, there is a simplification of how the past looked like. There is a simplification of multiple definitions, including tolerance and coexistence. People assume that societies in the Middle East have lived, before even it was called Middle East, have lived in coexistence in a state of tolerance, and that is not the case.
We’ve always been through this type of on-and-off situation. When the government has no interest in attacking the non-Muslims, including the Ottoman Empire back then, people are going to be okay. They are living their life, going on in their life, and that’s it. Whenever there is a problem, it will be immediately—it depends on the context—it will be immediately blamed on either the Jews or the Christians.
But there is—in the middle of all of that, David, I’m not going to dismiss the reality. I’m not going to dismiss the fact that people have developed a model that allowed them to live in a coherent life, in a much more calmer life. But [it] was conditional with the fact that they had a space, and they had a place to communicate. And that was the market; simply the market. Because everyone who tells you that people lived in coexistence in their neighborhoods, that’s not true. In fact, the people did not communicate with each other in their residential areas. But they would always come together, and they would work, in the old markets: in a trade, in crafts. It even allowed the city to develop its own vocabularies and language, and allowed the people to work together, to live together, to contribute to the way of life together.
However, it has always been fragile, because that social contract has never been strengthened, has never been made sustainable. It will immediately break down whenever there is an issue, whenever there is a problem, whether it’s an internal or external. Whenever there is—there is always this labeling of a treacherous people or disloyal people. As long as you are not religiously part of that faith, then you have the potential of working against the nation.
There were moments in that history when things were much better. And that is during the period of what was known as, I think in the 17th through the mid of the 18th century, is “the phase of the city-states.” Meaning a family was in control of Mosul. There was the Jalili family, for example, for over two centuries in control of the city. He would have his most trusted minister in his cabinet as a Jew, and the other one is a Christian. His envoy to the Ottoman Empire was, in fact, Jewish.
People lived in harmony. People lived in coexistence. But then when that condition ended, it went back to the same situation. Jews had never had the possibility to have a school in Mosul until as late as [the 1920s], until after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Modernity came. And we understood—and this is to put it bluntly, brutally honest like that—democracy and separation of religion and the state have proven to be the only way for minorities to survive. And for people to understand that there is a way of life that is beyond history itself, that is beyond the promised caliphate, that is beyond these dangerous concepts that have been put in place for decades.
It’s a complicated history. Cannot be simplified simply by saying people have lived happily in coexistence—because it could be one year of coexistence and next year a bloody year on people, and so on. This is why it was easy, for example—we have witnessed the collapse of that system immediately after the Islamic State took control of the city. It completely collapsed. That social contract completely collapsed. We’ve seen neighbors killing or raping their neighbors, the Yazidis, kidnapping their women. We’ve seen Christian people being expelled, and some of their neighbors would steal and loot their belongings. What type of coexistence was that? It was always conditional with—you need a strong state, you need good governance. But you also need a system that is not built on the infrastructure of religion, or the idea that Muslims are the majority, so they should rule and everyone should come under their control. Because that should not be the case. That should not be the situation.
And it’s a complicated history also, because we still have conflicts we have not processed. We still have not asked the difficult questions. And David, I think I’ve already told you that some people have to get into the mud of that question and start facing them and start answering them.
People have always been asking the question, How could we live together? How could we continue to live together? But these questions always get faced with punishment, because it also has become easier to say and to simplify, Well, it’s a diverse region. It’s a beautiful, beautiful diversity. People have lived with each other. How did they live with each other? Nobody asks these questions. And I think it’s the region in the world that is becoming less diverse. A region that’s becoming less diverse. You go to Iraq today; you can easily notice: This part of the country is Shia, the other part is Sunni, the other part is Kurd. And where are the Christians? Where are the Yazidis? Where are the Jews in the middle of all of that?
This is a region that still needs some more work by its own people. I think people have to get things into their hands, matters into their hands, by facing the difficult questions. By facing the reality. For example, one of the outstanding questions: Why did ISIS happen? Why did ISIS took control of third of the country? Before that, why did Al-Qaeda even come to being? Why did people join the Islamic State? Why do people still have interest in something called caliphate in today’s modernity, in today’s fast-moving humanity? Why do you think people need a caliphate?
I think these questions need to be asked. There is nothing wrong about asking them. There is nothing directed against a religion when we ask these questions. But when certain religions, when certain texts become the source for people like the Islamic State, I think everyone has the right to ask: What’s wrong with that? What’s going wrong?
Frum: And when they ask, they will have your extraordinary work of witness and testimony as a guide to their better thinking. And maybe—possibly, let’s hope—to a better, more liberal, more democratic future.
Omar Mohammed, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.
Mohammed: David, thank you very much. And it was a little bit emotional for me. I apologize for that.
Frum: It was emotional for everyone. Thank you.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Omar Mohammed for talking today about his powerful book, Mosul Eye.
I don’t know how to make a transition to another book talk after that discussion. So I’m going to talk about something really quite completely different, which is not only not a book but an entirely different art form: opera.
I went to see this past weekend the production of La bohème by Puccini at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. This is a 2026 production, but it’s a revival of an older design by the great designer [Franco] Zeffirelli. It’s a quite legendary production. The costumes and sets are in the basement. The most famous scene, that I’d heard about all my life and wanted to see in person, was at Act Two—which is set in a café, and suddenly the curtain rises on a Paris street. And there are rooftops, and there’s an open café, and there are hundreds of choristers and children. There are even a couple of live animals, a donkey and a horse, all of them reenacting what the Latin Quarter would’ve looked like in the reign of King Louis Philippe, which is when La bohème is set, although it’s written half a century later.
I found myself thinking less about Puccini and less about La bohème than about the whole strange institution of opera.
In any major Western city, there will be, probably, an opera house. And the opera house, it will be one of many theaters and venues, but it is usually one with a certain kind of statement of importance and formality. There may be sport centers that are bigger, but they’re never as central. And there may be theaters that are almost as central, but they’re never as big. And there’s always something about the opera that sets itself apart. Often, typically, it’s on a square, not facing the street. That’s how it is in Paris; that’s how it is in Vienna. And of course, that’s how it is in New York, where there’s this kind of formation of three buildings that set back from the street with a giant plaza in between. There’s a statement of importance. And people recognize this importance, and act on it.
Very few people—almost nobody dresses up anymore to go to the theater. But people still dress up, especially women, to go to the opera. As I looked around myself, I saw women in long dresses, women wearing costume clothing that was quite different from what they’d wear not only during the day, but really to almost any other kind of evening out.
And I thought about the kind of cultural knowledge that is embedded in this strange institution, and at the cultural self-confidence it takes to put such a building on such a square in such a city, and to summon people and to say, This is something that is different, not only from other things that you do during your everyday life. This is different even from other forms of art. This is somehow higher and more important and different and more formal. More commanding; more central. And I wonder: Where do people get that confidence? Where do people get that nerve? And then I found myself thinking: Do we still have it?
Opera is kind of an ossified form. I mean, there are new operas written, but they tend not to be very popular. And it is Puccini and Verdi, and especially La bohème. La bohème seems to be the most popular opera, at least in the Metropolitan Opera’s repertoire, and this particular design has been played again and again and again. So it’s kind of an ossified form. And I wonder if the confidence behind that form is also becoming ossified too.
Now, I’m not going to make a brief for opera. You may like it; you may not. You may want to see the show, you may not. That’s not what I’m interested in. What I’m interested in is: Can we still summon the cultural self-confidence to say, of certain kinds of works of art: These are important. These are things that people should value. These are things, whether you like it yourself or not, they have a central place in your culture and your society. And the texture of your city will endorse this idea, whether or not you have ever set foot yourself inside the venue in which this cultural confidence is expressed.
And I think there will be critics who will say that kind of cultural confidence is misplaced. What about other things that other people do? Who’s to say? Who’s to say why someone has the authority to proclaim this and not that? But maybe we can’t get along without it either. Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about on my way in and out to watch Zeffirelli’s donkeys and horses in his extraordinary setting of this amazing piece of art, in this amazing venue in this great city.
Thanks so much for joining me this week on The David Frum Show. It would be a great help to spreading the word of the show if you would share, subscribe, like on whatever platform you use. As always, the best way to support the work of this program and all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll please consider doing that. Thanks so much for watching and listening. See you next week on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.
Before yesterday’s Israeli election, the only universal desire was for a conclusive result. The two possible conclusions: continued government by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or a government headed by one of his opponents. In central Tel Aviv, supporters of opposition candidates drove around the main streets and hectored pedestrians and café dwellers to go vote for anyone at all who was not Netanyahu. In Jerusalem, the opposite messaging dominated. On Jaffa Street, a large, dystopian sign showed Netanyahu’s notorious overseer of prisons, Itamar Ben Gvir, grinning and looking like a self-satisfied tardigrade next to three bound, kneeling men. At the Jerusalem train station, a flyer with the face of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had blown onto a commuter footpath. In lieu of conducting an exit poll, I loitered and watched as most people respectfully sidestepped it, a few stepped on it, and finally one woman paused to grind the toe of her Mary Jane into Smotrich’s face. I later saw her board my train to Tel Aviv.
The voting results are mostly in, and they are less conclusive than everyone hoped or than either side is willing to admit. (Both sides have said the results show that the public favors them.) Netanyahu’s current coalition can no longer form a government on its own. Neither can the opposition. Arab-majority parties are likely to hold 19 seats out of 120. Parties can form a government by: (1) negotiating a unity government, with elements of the opposition and of Netanyahu’s current coalition; (2) combining Arabs and the opposition; or (3) combining Arabs and the current Netanyahu coalition. If this election were a Magic 8 Ball, the result would be Reply hazy, try again. (In the exasperating event that no government forms, Israel will hold another election in a few months, and Netanyahu will remain in power in the interim.)
The next days or weeks will be consumed with backroom deals, to see if the parties can negotiate any of the three scenarios above. Each possibility would demand that a party give up something it previously described as nonnegotiable. In Scenario (1), the opposition might have to compromise on the main motivation for their campaign: anyone but Netanyahu. After an unusually personal election, the person the opposition existed to repudiate would likely remain in power in some form, as the leader of the largest single party in the Knesset. Under one conceivable bargain, Netanyahu would remain in office for two more years, then rotate out, perhaps in favor of Naftali Bennett, just as Donald Trump finishes his term.
Scenario (2) would require the opposition to cooperate with Arab parties. Willingness to cooperate with those parties ranges from enthusiastic (in the case of the leftmost party, the Democrats) to hell-no (in the case of Yisrael Beiteinu, on the opposition’s secular-nationalist right). The scenario would deliver a fragile majority, but only if the hell-nos, as well as many other opposition leaders who have publicly ruled out cooperation with Arab parties, are somehow persuaded to change their minds.
In Scenario (3), Netanyahu, whose coalition is widely associated with the persecution of Arabs, joins forces with Arab parties to remain in power. This is the weirdest of all, and so improbable that if it takes place, Israel will need immediate public-health announcements to assure the population that the water supply has not been spiked with hallucinogens. Mansour Abbas, the canny leader of the Islamist Ra’am party, told Israel’s Channel 12 that “the right wing” has already approached him to discuss the prospect of working together. Netanyahu made overtures to Arab parties in 2021 as well, though not on the scale that would be necessary here. The details of the right’s discussion with Abbas remain mysterious, and even if both Arab parties cooperated with Netanyahu’s party, Likud, other far-right parties that are far more hostile to Arabs would have to consent to the arrangement, or be replaced in the coalition by an opposition party. But Netanyahu’s position on the right gives him paradoxical latitude in making concessions to Arab political interests, because fewer politicians on the right will feel that they can roast him for doing so. If Netanyahu makes a deal with Arab Israelis, the deal might stick. Skepticism about this possibility is warranted. But ask yourself: Why did the Israeli right call Abbas? Out of politeness? Boredom? As a bluff, to pressure other parties?
All three scenarios would demand difficult or unlikely compromise, and some other possibilities (such as defections within the anti-Netanyahu camp) could spawn more options. Cutting out the Arab parties seems most likely. To Netanyahu’s opponents, partnering with their sworn enemy, albeit a fellow Zionist, is distasteful. But partnering with Arab parties—whose commitment to Israel’s identity as a Jewish state is half-hearted at best, and with whom most opposition parties have serious disagreements about security and other policy areas—would force introspection that is more comfortably postponed. Arab Israelis, who make up about a fifth of the population, have representatives in the Knesset. But their colleagues isolate them like some kind of contagion (and some Arabs have preferred that isolation to complicity in a Jewish-led national project).
Before the election, I spoke with Jacob Abolafia, an American University political scientist, who predicted that the Arab parties would be necessary partners if the opposition wanted Netanyahu out. “It’s the only mathematically stable way to get an anti-Netanyahu coalition,” he told me. But the opposition leaders know, he says, that if they openly court Arabs, the opposition coalition will crumble, because the electorate is permeated with anti-Arab sentiment. “Are Arabs full citizens of Israel, or are they not?” he asked. “There are internal contradictions in Israeli society that are too great to solve right now.” That may be so. But it appears that every path forward involves resolving at least one contradiction or incompatibility. It’s just a matter of deciding which.
This week, Russia will permit handpicked American journalists and influencers friendly to the Trump administration to tour Oleshky, a Russian-occupied Ukrainian town on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. There, fewer than 2,000 civilians, from a prewar population of 24,000, are trapped in a city that has been effectively under siege since December 2025—a place where they are terrorized by Russian forces, hunted by drones, and lacking reliable access to food, water, or medicine.
Now Oleshky is the site of a humanitarian cease-fire reportedly brokered by U.S. First Lady Melania Trump. Ukraine has long pressed for access to Oleshky’s civilians in order to bring them aid or help them escape to safety. Russia is allowing this only now. At the same time, Oleshky will host a propaganda tour for media visitors under Russian military escort. Whatever these journalists learn about life here almost certainly won’t be the truth.
Oleshky lies just across the Dnipro from Ukrainian-controlled Kherson, a strategically important city in the south of Ukraine. This location makes the town a useful military foothold for the Russians, who launch attacks on Kherson from it while using the presence of its civilian population to shield their positions.
I am the only foreign journalist permanently based in Kherson, where I have been reporting since 2023. Since February, I have been investigating the humanitarian catastrophe in Oleshky and the neighboring settlements. My work has drawn on evacuee testimonies, contacts inside occupied territory, official data, and verified military footage.
According to the Institute for the Study of War, Russian occupation authorities have repeatedly obstructed efforts to evacuate the town or provide humanitarian access. Regular supply deliveries stopped at the end of last year, and food and medicine have not reached Oleshky through conventional channels since May. The city is under what has come to be called a drone siege: Drones monitor all access roads, streets, and civilian movement, remotely mining them to restrict logistics. With conventional access blocked, Ukrainian forces have resorted to delivering food by drone.
“Oleshky is an artificially created hell in the midst of the civilized world,” a woman named Liudmila wrote to me. She asked that I refer to her by only her first name, out of concern for the safety of her loved ones left behind. She prefers to write, rather than speak, about the four years she endured under Russian occupation, even though her eyesight is foggy from months spent sheltering in basements.
When Russian forces entered Oleshky in February 2022, Liudmila and her husband, Andriy, decided to stay. They wanted to protect their family home on the banks of the Dnipro, and they imagined that the occupation would soon end.
Within days, Russian soldiers poisoned their dog, an Alabai, along with all the other large dogs in Oleshky. They killed Liudmila’s next-door neighbor and raped his wife. A local butcher disappeared; no one knew whether he was also killed. Some neighbors were detained and beaten. Armed, masked soldiers searched Liudmila’s home three times, confiscating the couple’s Ukrainian passports and leaving them with no documents. And yet, Liudmila and Andriy stayed. They got a new puppy, also an Alabai. Russian troops started to move into civilian houses, parking tanks in what once were gardens.
In June 2023, the Russians blew up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam, and Oleshky was swept by floods. Homes and corpses floated down the river; bodies washed up onto fences and were left in the sun—no one knew how many. Without access to municipal water or other utilities, the couple collected rainwater in summer and melted ice in winter. During one nighttime battle, Liudmila and Andriy woke to find their roof in flames. Andriy climbed up, and Liudmila handed him containers of water to extinguish the fire. After that, their water supply was gone, and the house was unlivable.
They moved to an abandoned home nearby. Russian soldiers killed their young dog with grenades. Andriy fell ill, and Liudmila prayed next to him at night as the windows trembled from explosions. Ambulances no longer came to their neighborhood, so one morning, she put Andriy in a wheelbarrow and pushed him to the hospital. But there was no medicine there, or fuel to run a generator, and the hospital couldn’t carry out an operation. Andriy died in 2025.
By then, Russian drones had started attacking civilians. Liudmila was afraid to turn on the lights at night, lest they attract drones. Sometimes drones would hover at window level for hours, seemingly spying on people inside.
Winter came, and water froze in buckets inside the house. Some neighbors froze to death. Liudmila, who was caring for her elderly mother-in-law, would push her wheelbarrow along heavily mined streets to look for food in abandoned houses. She’d wait for hours at the market for vehicles to bring supplies while drones circled over. Often, she saw dead bodies in the streets and dogs carrying human bones. When her mother-in-law died of untreated wounds, the Russian occupation authorities took her body to another town for a forensic examination. Liudmila was allowed to pick her up only a month later—from a pile of severely decomposed corpses at the morgue.
Liudmila escaped Oleshky at last this spring. From those left behind, she hears that scrounging for supplies is no longer possible. “Mines lie below; drones hover above. Death is everywhere: beneath your feet and over your head,” she wrote to me. “As you walk, you must watch every step, scan your surroundings, and keep your eyes on the sky.”
Ukraine has long sought to help Oleshky’s inhabitants either survive or escape. The country’s ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, proposed localized humanitarian cease-fires in May, July, and September of this year, but the Kremlin rejected all of them.
Now the White House has announced one that started yesterday and is credited to the first lady. The Trump administration has needed a success story on the eve of the midterm elections, and Moscow appears to have provided press access to exactly the sorts of tribunes that will give the American administration—and the Kremlin—a boost.
The right-wing television network Newsmax has said that it has been granted “exclusive television access” to accompany a delegation of Russian and Ukrainian representatives entering Oleshky this week. According to sources familiar with the arrangements, but who asked for their names to be withheld because they were not authorized to speak with the press, Fox News will also be permitted on the scene. A Russian Telegram channel suggested that Tucker Carlson plans to visit Oleshky too. Most Ukrainian and independent international journalists have been denied access.
What will happen is predictable. Journalists and influencers loyal to the Trump administration and sympathetic toward the Kremlin will likely spend a couple of hours filming Russian soldiers distributing food, assisting the elderly, and facilitating evacuations. They will be permitted only supervised interviews with preselected civilians. Dependent on the Russian occupying authorities for food, health care, and permission to leave, these people will not express themselves freely in the presence of the Russian military. And even if they try, their testimonies will be filtered through the Kremlin-supplied interpreters accompanying the Western press.
The besieged population will appear to be wholly grateful to the Russian authorities for another reason too. After months of deprivation, people perceive even basic assistance as an act of generosity. By suddenly offering food and evacuation, the Russian authorities will present themselves as rescuers rather than as perpetrators, exploiting this psychological dependency to manipulate Ukrainian civilians and international public opinion.
Ukraine is accepting the conditions of this evacuation in order to save lives, and it will maintain an operational silence also to that end. By accrediting only Newsmax and other ideologically aligned outlets, Russia has signaled that it plans to seize the opportunity to control how Oleshky is presented to the world. The participation of a few approved media outlets will be touted as real press coverage, making those American journalists tools for the legitimization of a Kremlin whitewashing operation.
That’s if Newsmax allows it. Its representatives could choose not to. They could instead make their visit to Oleshky an opportunity to practice independent journalism, challenge the Kremlin’s narrative, and expose the reality behind the humanitarian spectacle, rather than becoming a part of it.
India has been convulsed with protests that challenge Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authoritarian vision. The most recent of them are defending the franchise from an administrative action that struck millions of voters from the rolls. But the challenge to Modi’s Hindu nationalism really began over the summer, after India’s chief justice dismissed the country’s unemployed youth as “cockroaches” and “parasites.” Flipping the insult into a badge of honor, an Indian graduate student at Boston University, Abhijeet Dipke, began accounts across social media under the name “Cockroach Janta Party,” a play on Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Modi has been in power for more than a dozen years. In that time, he has faced nothing like the current level of unrest. The protests roiling the country suggest that he is vulnerable. They are also a consequence of his subversion of India’s democratic institutions: Street action has become the most potent means of contesting the Hindu-nationalist movement he leads.
The CJP held its first offline protest in June at Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory in central Delhi. By that time, its Instagram account had amassed more than 20 million followers—more than the account for the BJP itself. The CJP demanded the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, India’s education minister, on the grounds that he had sabotaged the country’s high-stakes exam system and created uncertainty for millions of students. The demand was hardly a radical one to make in a democracy. But as part of his strongman persona, the prime minister has long made a habit of refusing to concede to public pressure.
The CJP enlisted the support of some prominent figures, including Sonam Wangchuk, an educator and activist from Ladakh, a Buddhist region bordering Kashmir. In late June, Wangchuk embarked on a hunger strike, a classical Gandhian form of protest that has deep emotional resonance in India. By its third week, the crowds at Jantar Mantar had surged, and the activist had lost more than 20 pounds, shrinking his body mass by 20 percent. Public clamor about Wangchuk’s deteriorating condition mounted, and the authorities forcibly removed him from Jantar Mantar.
Far from quieting the movement, this gambit transformed it into a mass uprising. On July 20, more than 100,000 protesters turned up for the CJP’s planned march to Parliament. The epicenter of New Delhi soon resembled a war zone; paramilitary forces lobbed tear-gas shells at protesters, while the cops pummeled the crowd indiscriminately with lathis, wooden clubs used by the Indian police. A paramilitary officer fired seven rounds of a pellet gun, injuring at least 10 protesters.
The violence provoked a countrywide backlash that went well beyond the education minister: The demonstrators began targeting Modi himself with expletive-laden chants. No previous Indian prime minister in living memory had faced this kind of public vitriol. The protests spread to more than a dozen cities across the country. And on July 25, Pradhan resigned.
Where established political parties and well-known civil-society organizations had failed, the CJP had achieved something extraordinary: A weeks-old youth movement blasted through the authoritarian firewall of Modi’s India, dispelled the climate of intimidation fostered by the Hindu right, and created a new democratic opening.
The columnist Tavleen Singh, once a Modi supporter, noted that “something fundamental had changed in recent weeks” and that “people seemed no longer scared.” Jawhar Sircar, a former opposition politician, wrote that the protests had “shattered the dome of fear and re-awakened India.”
Since the Cockroach movement’s victory in late July, protests have been erupting across the country—on city streets and university campuses, outside government buildings and police stations—against the rise in crimes against women, the poor quality of government schools, and a range of other ills. On October 7, a Mumbai newspaper reported that 88 protests had taken place over the previous 10 days in the western state of Maharashtra alone.
The latest round of demonstrations concerns the election commission’s review of voter rolls, which began last year and has so far purged more than 130 million citizens. In a country whose adult population is growing, the number of eligible voters shrank by more than 10 percent; those voters expunged were disproportionately Muslim. A September 23 report in the newspaper Indian Express revealed allegations from two election commissioners that Gyanesh Kumar, India’s chief election commissioner, had taken “unauthorized and illegal” actions in relation to the revision.
Kumar is widely seen as an acolyte of India’s ruling establishment. In 2023, shortly before he was appointed, the Modi government pushed a law through Parliament giving election commissioners lifelong immunity from prosecution. This sweeping immunity does not exist for any other government official in India—not even the president or prime minister.
The Cockroach protests during the summer were primarily a youth phenomenon, but the subject of voting rights, in a country with a proud democratic history, has universal resonance. Despite being largely poor and illiterate at the time, India enshrined the universal adult franchise shortly after its independence in 1947, inaugurating one of the world’s most audacious democratic experiments. Since then, elections and voting have become something akin to a sacred rite, emanating from the founding ethos of modern India.
A large portion of the Indian public views Kumar’s actions as equivalent to treason. The protesters are demanding that he be removed, that the revision to the voter rolls be reversed, and that the law bestowing lifelong immunity on Kumar be scrapped so that he can be prosecuted.
Earlier this month, episodic mayhem took over New Delhi as protesters blocked streets, detainees on police buses smashed the windows and escaped, and demonstrators perched on the roofs of government vehicles in acts of defiance. I met Indians of varying ages, backgrounds, and political convictions at those protests: construction workers, upper-class designers, Communist foot soldiers.
But the Modi government seems to fear nothing more than the Cockroach movement. The youth group, which threatened to instigate nationwide demonstrations if Kumar did not resign, announced a protest in New Delhi on October 10, and the government panicked.
The authorities transformed New Delhi into a fortress, flying in tens of thousands of paramilitaries from the hostile borderlands where they are usually deployed. Much of the city’s subway network was shut down. Trains scheduled to arrive from all over India were canceled at the last minute, to prevent protesters from swarming the capital.
Security forces detained thousands of protesters and dozens of journalists. Right-wing militias threatened demonstrators unhindered by the police. The Cockroach leaders, who’d flown in from Mumbai that morning, were arrested aboard their airplane. Central Delhi was a militarized web of barricades and armed enforcers.
Ishrat Ansari, a 49-year-old schoolteacher, had walked two miles from her home to the barricades near Jantar Mantar. She had been detained on a police bus, where she saw a reporter beaten and was so disturbed that she vomited. The heavy-handed measures, she felt sure, were a sign of the regime’s growing fear. “They are taking away our voting rights,” she told me. “When we elected you with our vote, how can you cancel us?”
A government once confident in its ability to set the terms of the public conversation had resorted to lockdown and repression. Surely this was an admission of the failure of the Hindu right’s formidable propaganda machine to steer the narrative.
The protests have not relented. A march on October 12 from New Delhi’s commercial center to the supreme court a mile away was one of the largest protests the city has ever seen. Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s opposition, announced it and called on ordinary citizens to participate. That tens of thousands did suggests that the clampdown over the previous two days resolved nothing in the government’s favor—on the contrary, the apparent subversion of India’s democratic tradition was having a galvanizing effect on those determined to resist it.
The previous week, Gandhi had led more than 300 members of Parliament in a march toward the office of the election commission. At that time, he was stopped by the police. Now, a week later, he was leading a gargantuan crowd toward the supreme court. These two constitutional bodies were once fiercely autonomous. Under Modi, they have turned servile. Challenges to the revision of the voter rolls came before the supreme court earlier this year, and the court sided with the election commission, despite strong evidence of disenfranchisement. In an election in West Bengal, for example, Modi’s BJP won many seats by a margin smaller than the number of deleted voters.
As the march neared the supreme court, I stood roughly 20 feet away from an open-top truck painted in the colors of the Indian flag, where Gandhi was surrounded by leaders of opposition parties and civil society. The alliance recalled the diverse, umbrella coalition that had defeated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi after the Emergency, India’s previous spell under authoritarian rule in the 1970s.
Saraswati Sharma, a 60-year-old homemaker, had made the 90-minute trip from the adjacent city of Gurugram. Her name had recently been struck off the voter rolls, after she had moved from Delhi, where she had been a registered voter for decades.
The revision deleted the names of not only Muslims, but also a variety of other inconvenient populations: the residents of neighborhoods associated with the opposition, members of low-income groups that were not considered reliable supporters of Modi’s party. Any small, seemingly insignificant detail—a spelling error, having a suspiciously high number of children—could be used to question a voter’s validity and strike them from the rolls.
“We have never seen such a compromised situation,” Sharma said, lamenting the loss of legitimacy of the supreme court and the election commission. Slogans denouncing Kumar as a traitor rang out in the background, and Sharma told me the march was the first time she had felt compelled to show up at a protest in the Modi years. “This is like a freedom struggle.”
A year or so ago, a lot of women I don’t know started trying to sell me soft pants. Some of the pants had elastic waists, some drawstring; some were cotton, some linen, some silk; some of them came in practical neutrals, some in pleasing popsicle shades of blue and red. Not a single pair cost less than $100.
I put myself in the line of this marketing, to be clear. I was on a hunt. After my daughter was born, I longed for my old wardrobe, which consisted mainly of rigid vintage denim, but I had a sore Cesarean-section scar and a waistline that changed every two weeks. Once the jeans became available to me again, I discovered—and yes, I fought this—that they were incorrect for my new life. Building block towers on the floor is fun, but less so if you’re doing it in tight Levi’s 501s. What I needed were some loose clothes that read stylish yet practical. I didn’t have time to go shopping in person, so I started Googling, which led me to a swarm of clothing-focused Substacks that catered to moms.
Still, when I started seeing the same pants in the newsletters, on my Instagram feed, in the targeted ads that hound me from website to website, and in a Cut piece about how stylish moms dress, it threw me. On the one hand, the ubiquity of the pants was validating: I was relieved that my closet issues weren’t mine alone. On the other hand, the vision was so uniform. It was, in fact, a uniform. I’d gone in search of a wardrobe that worked for playdates and playgrounds and days when I go straight from work to an evening of child care, and what I found was an emerging archetype of the Cool Millennial Mom.
A Cool Millennial Mom has a small child or two. She probably lives in Brooklyn or Los Angeles, though she could be in another city or picturesque suburb. She generally has a job, but either she’s self-employed or her role is accommodating enough that she’s the parent in charge of school drop-off. Maybe she can even go to Pilates afterward, though she’s just as likely to head to a meeting. She has a lot of work and—if she’s not in the office—a lot of errands to get done, and she wants to be comfortable yet put together. Besides, she has to be presentable enough that, if the mood is right, she and her partner can take their kids out to a casual dinner rather than cooking; after all, this mom wasn’t home all day in an apron. She was running around in an expensive sweater and a chic pair of tie-waist pants. She is busy, and busyness, I have come to realize, is core to both the aesthetic and the deeper promise of the Cool Millennial Mom.
I’m inventing this woman, but not entirely. She appears, either as an online persona or a categorizabletype, in the newsletters of women with anywhere from a few thousand to 32,000 subscribers. She is featured on blogs. She is especially well embodied by the social-media persona of Alyssa Wasko Stein. Wasko Stein, who lives in Los Angeles, is the founder and designer of Donni, the clear leader of the expensive-soft-pants-selling pack (and the subject of the aforementioned Cut article). Although the company’s least expensive pair of pants is $144, I see them routinely in the wild. Also, I’ve bought them. Wasko Stein herself dresses very stylishly, in her own designs, and posts Instagram stories and carousels that beguile me with the appealing range of her weekly routine: Here she is dressing models at a shoot, here cuddling her daughter, here having Shabbat dinner. Her life, as she displays it, is an optimal advertisement for the clothes she creates.
Wasko Stein’s online presence—heavy on recommendations for niche luxuries such as Belgian shoes—also models a sense of being in the know. This is core to the idea of the cool mom; she is a woman who, as the newsletter writer and fashion journalist Maura Brannigan has put it, wears “interesting shoes to the playground” and has “good taste in both children’s books and literary fiction.”
Developing this taste takes time, energy, and an impulse toward eclecticism, which contrasts noticeably with other archetypes of motherhood: the prairie-dressed tradwife; the Mean Girls mom with her Juicy velour and cement-solid boob job; the corporate working mother trying to “have it all” in a power suit. The Cool Millennial Mom wants to have it all in another way entirely. The ideal here is of a rewarding, varied life whose parts, disparate though they are, interlock seamlessly. It’s a demanding goal, which is why she needs a versatile wardrobe. A pencil skirt is no good for coaching soccer practice; a calico dress isn’t right for a meeting; loungewear doesn’t work at a gallery. With some clever styling, though, the cool-mom pants can look right—and be comfortable—everywhere.
Of course, “clever styling” is not, in fact, effortless, even if your clothes and shoes are meant to seem as if you just tugged and kicked them on. Getting the cool-mom look right requires dedication; not for nothing does Donni teach its shoppers how to tie a shirt around their waist. When a sweater doesn’t drape right or the tie-waist pants sit too low, the look swiftly becomes disheveled or, worse, pajama-esque. The aesthetic of busyness suggests striving unrelated to clothing, but the look requires, at baseline, the exertion of learning which pants are cool, earning enough to buy them, and then wearing them such that they don’t seem like scrubs.
If it sounds like I’m making fun, perhaps I am a little, with affection. Every generation, or even every micro-generation, probably gets its own hard-to-attain and easily mockable ideal of the cool mom, and I’m glad enough that this is mine. Most mothers I know, myself included, want and endeavor for lives that can accommodate all the parts of ourselves, the ones we cultivated before having children and the ones that emerge as our kids’ personalities do. And yes, all right, we can be just as vain as we might have been pre-parenthood: We want to lead our full, overwhelming, multifaceted lives in good pants.
The couple seated next to me at the Metropolitan Opera’s latest world premiere did not stay for the second act; perhaps they didn’t appreciate the puppeteered genitalia that unfurled onstage shortly after the curtain rose. I understood their alarm. After watching a dress rehearsal a week earlier, I had texted my boyfriend: “I am shocked by the size of Hans Vollman’s puppet penis.”
Vollman is one of the central characters in Lincoln in the Bardo, adapted by the composer Missy Mazzoli and the librettist Royce Vavrek from George Saunders’s Booker Prize–winning 2017 novel of the same name. Like almost everyone else in the tale, Vollman is dead but in profound denial about that fact—in his case, because he can’t reckon with the tragedy of having expired before he could consummate his new marriage. Hence the outsize appendage: a perpetual reminder of Vollman’s unfinished business.
It may seem puerile for one of the most prominent opera companies in the world to put such effort into illustrating the undignified source of Vollman’s grief. In fact, although the puppet might make audiences laugh—or leave—it’s a striking symbol of why operatic adaptations of literature can be so exciting. At a moment when film or TV versions of novels often end up, at best, as decent airplane watches, opera, as the excellent Lincoln in the Bardo illustrates, has the potential to create something bolder and more bizarre.
Opera’s lingering reputation for being stuffy and elitist has helped obscure a fundamental truth about the medium: It’s weird. Even before modern composers started testing the limits of storytelling, operas tended to be guided by minimal logic; if you’d like to feel exceptionally confused, I suggest reading a synopsis of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser. And the form relies on artifice to function. There is nothing naturalistic about characters conversing in song with the kind of vocal power and dexterity that could make a skeptic believe in God. This means that there is effectively no such thing as a shy opera—at least not one that stands the test of time. Any opera that succeeds must quickly teach audiences to understand that what they’re going to experience won’t obey the laws of many other forms of entertainment—the kinds in which plot developments are reasonably justified, characters don’t share their every thought in repetitive and excruciating detail, and the gates of hell don’t suddenly open in a dining-room floor.
This makes opera a natural fit for Lincoln in the Bardo, a not-very-realistic novel that’s written almost entirely in dialogue. Saunders’s book is set the night after the burial of President Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, and is narrated by more than 150 voices, most of them belonging to Willie’s new neighbors in Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Some become Willie’s spiritual guides: the Reverend Everly Thomas, the frustrated Vollman, and a young gay man named Roger Bevins III. Others are stranger and more profane. Some souls have suffered greatly, most notably the enslaved people buried outside the cemetery boundaries, and some have inflicted suffering, including an enslaver whose streams of pure bigotry are difficult to read. As Thomas, Vollman, and Bevins urge Willie to leave the bardo—a space between life and the afterlife, as defined in Buddhism, that’s dangerous for children—the living Lincoln wanders among them. His grief, more than anything else, is what keeps Willie from moving on to whatever comes next.
I’ve been trying to imagine what a Hollywood adaptation of this astonishing tonal chaos could possibly look like. (One is in the works, a hybrid live-action, stop-motion film in which Tom Hanks will play the president.) In recent years, the often risk-averse studio system has favored, with notable exceptions such as the joyously bizarro Poor Things, literary adaptations that hew to basic genre constraints: status-cast thrillers with blockbuster aspirations such as The Housemaid and Verity; prestige limited series, à la East of Eden, that seem destined to wither away algorithmically as they roll off the Netflix queue; and, as ever, the endless iterations of 19th-century British novels, including the recent Sense and Sensibility and the dubious, upcoming Ebenezer. There remains room, in that milieu, for real artistry, but perhaps not for a choice as wild and possibly alienating as the Met’s X-rated puppet. Without the freedom to be truly outlandish, could an adaptation really do justice to Bardo? I can’t envision a version of the novel that waters down its most outré choices but also manages to preserve its magic.
An opera adaptation of Bardo must, of course, pare back. Many dozens of well-defined characters bounding across the stage would be exciting, but also impractical. Yet it needn’t water down: A successful opera is big, and also strange. That’s especially true now; opera companies including the Met, recognizing the need to attract younger audiences, have put more emphasis on developing new works that can make the old form seem fresh. That shift has seemed to breed greater comfort with challenging choices. Among the many contemporary operas the Met has premiered in recent years are a new version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice narrated by three stones—yes, stones—and a harsh, mind-bending adaptation of Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film The Exterminating Angel.
Lincoln in the Bardo—the opera—is hugely entertaining. It’s full of apt little musical jokes; the most spiritually harrowing scene, in which Reverend Thomas recounts his journey to the bardo, is repeatedly interrupted by the ludicrous ditties of a “doodling Pennsylvanian.” But the show also embraces, and enhances, many of the most difficult elements of Saunders’s novel. The creators have made the striking decision, for instance, to have a teenage girl named Elise Traynor, who is trapped in the bardo in a state of grisly eternal torment, be portrayed by a male countertenor. The uncanniness of watching an adult man take the guise of a young girl helps make that girl’s plight more visceral. It is a constant reminder, almost below the level of awareness, that Elise will never reach maturity. She won’t have the chance to discover what kind of adult she might be—deep-voiced or dulcet-toned, rebellious or traditional, effeminate or masculine.
That kind of layered creativity represents opera’s literary capabilities at their best. A great book creates a private emotional landscape inside the reader: a kind of internal set piece that contains the characters, the space they occupy, and the feelings they provoke. When I open the book Lincoln in the Bardo, I also travel to the tiny, three-dimensional model of it that lives somewhere between my mind and my heart. Opera, like film, can’t re-create the personal experience of reading; the characters will never look just as you pictured them. But it can create an accentuating mirror to that experience. In my imagined version of Saunders’s bardo, Elise Traynor now has a voice. Because that voice isn’t quite what I expected, I’ve started to think about the character in new, unsettling, enriching ways. Because of the opera, she’s taken on a bit more of a life of her own.
The most haunting refrain in Lincoln in the Bardo belongs to young Willie Lincoln. Unsure of where he is and why, and desperate to be reunited with his parents, he invents a credo for how he will get home: “never if weak, maybe if strong.” The audience knows his case is hopeless, but it’s impossible not to be moved by his innocent courage, or by the sweet, mournful instrumentation that accompanies it. His words also function as something like an ethos for the opera itself: To stand a chance at success, it must do the thing with bravery, no holds barred.
In the early 1990s, when I was in elementary school, a fancy catalog would arrive in the mailbox of our 1950s split-level in Philadelphia four times a year, and I’d hurry to my room to pore over its elaborate spreads. Tea caddies, Windsor chairs, writing quills, ice-cream churns. We didn’t have any antiques in our home, but the lure of the past was so strong that sometimes my sisters, five and seven years older than me, crammed onto my bed to dog-ear the pages too. Most of all, we looked forward to checking in with the girls arrayed there, whose stories we knew so well: Samantha, Molly, Kirsten, Felicity, Addy, and, later in the decade, Josefina.
They were the American Girl dolls, preadolescents just slightly older than me, and I was enthralled by the pictures of their period dresses, tiny school supplies, and exotic waxed lunch foods. My own doll was the farm girl Kirsten Larson, a Swedish immigrant to 1850s Minnesota. She had come in a burgundy box, with a slim book titled Meet Kirsten tucked in beside her. I promptly begged for the five other Kirsten books; the historical-fiction series followed the same pattern for each doll, ushering her through a year’s worth of life events, tailored to her personality and time and place. I remember playing with Kirsten in the backyard and having her trace out symbols in the dirt, just as she did with her new friend, a Dakota girl called Singing Bird, in the second book, Kirsten Learns a Lesson. To have such a doll was to own a whole world and the narratives within it.
In my blue-collar neighborhood, we lucky doll owners felt that our Boomer parents had entrusted us with a valuable possession, and they had. When they were first introduced, in 1986, American Girl dolls cost a shocking $68 (roughly $208 today). Almost every Millennial I know who once spent hours with her American Girl doll has kept it, lovingly, into adulthood.
The dolls’ hardscrabble backstories piqued curiosity about the past. Kirsten’s best friend died of cholera on the journey from Sweden; Samantha Parkington, the wealthy “Victorian beauty” living in 1904 Westchester County, New York, was an orphan; Molly McIntire’s doctor father was off serving in World War II England. Each doll confronted challenges in her young life that felt at once intimate and unfamiliar. Add well-made accessories and vivid history to the mix, and girlhood acquired an allure that Barbie seemed to bypass on her way to her plastic Dreamhouse.
Yet as American Girl’s 40th anniversary arrives, the brand finds itself in something of a midlife crisis. In 1998, Pleasant Rowland, the former teacher and textbook writer who’d dreamed up the dolls, sold Pleasant Company to an unlikely steward: Mattel, the company behind Barbie and her stilettos. A quarter century later, the heyday of preteen devotion to playmates from bygone eras seems like, well, a bygone era. Mattel’s dire balance sheets for the American Girl line confirm that the magic has faded.
Might a surge of celebratory attention to the Pleasant Company past be the secret to renewed relevance? It certainly could not be better timed, with the Millennial faithful now in their childbearing—and toy-buying—years.
With Rowland’s spare-no-effort ethos of product creation clearly in mind, Mattel has released The Making of American Girl, a chronicle of Pleasant Company’s origin story that resembles the sumptuous catalogs of my childhood, only far grander in scale. The coffee-table book is a canny paean to the dozen years of Rowland’s leadership. Extolling her “courage and conviction,” it dwells on her commitment to craftsmanship. The scrapbook-style spreads showcase mock-ups of her early brainstorming, the fabrics she insisted on, the dovetailed furniture joints and delicate details on all those teeny accessories that girls craved and parents put on their credit cards. Designed as a nostalgia trip for Millennials, it works. My 9- and 4-year-old daughters showed the book off to their playmates one weekend afternoon, but it was those girls’ 40-something mom who lingered over it with me, comparing notes on the expensive items we had known better than to ask for in childhood, such as the bisque plate and mug for Kirsten, made by the renowned Rowe Pottery Works in Wisconsin.
But what about the rest of the story of the doll that had become America’s second-most-popular by the late ’90s? That’s left to Amanda FitzSimons, a journalist who did not have the cooperation of Mattel, or of the now-85-year-old Rowland, for her smart and colorful cultural analysis, An American Girl: How a Billion-Dollar Doll and Its Unlikely Founder Changed Girlhood Forever. That means she’s free, after exploring how the dolls and books became unexpected hits, to describe how the American Girl brand’s identity eventually grew so muddled that it has become barely recognizable.
FitzSimons starts with Rowland’s big idea, conceived on a trip to Colonial Williamsburg in the early 1980s and transformed into an elaborate business plan over a weekend at her northern-Wisconsin cabin, where the woodstove and outhouse had her thinking about life in the past. The books, “for girls about girls,” came first—they were “the heart of” the American Girl collection, in Rowland’s words.
A boss who looked for tenacity in her employees as well as her dolls, Rowland liked to say that her initials, PTR, stood for “Prepare to Redo”; a researcher at the company devoted a day, for example, to conferring with poultry-science experts to determine the exact hour at which Kirsten’s hens would lay eggs. With that attention to detail, Rowland turned the business into a high-volume, high-value sensation. Over time, Pleasant Company offered ever more accessories, such as carefully constructed craft kits (I had my eye on a wooden loom for weaving a doll sash), stationery, and matching outfits for dolls and their girls. But above all, what Rowland sold was the idea that girlhood was important, in need of preservation.
Her American Girl enterprise, FitzSimons argues, was a mission to rescue an endangered phase of life. Girlhood was slipping away. The term tween, which encompasses kids as young as 8, was popularized as a marketing tool in the ’80s and quickly became shorthand for a child who didn’t act like a child. Late-20th-century girls, Rowland worried from the start, “turn on the television set and the world comes down on them hard. It’s sexually explicit, it’s dangerous and violent, it’s angry, complaining, discouraging.” By the mid-’90s, the phenomenon of kids aging out of pastimes earlier was well documented.
FitzSimons credits Rowland with an astute insight amid rising calls to shore up girls’ self-confidence: “It wasn’t that girls wanted to be older,” she writes; “it was that they wanted to be understood, feel important.” The dolls’ figures never matured, and the books didn’t include periods or crushes; friends, school, and adventure occupied the girls’ imaginations. Samantha fights back when a local menace puts salt in her birthday ice cream; colonial-era Felicity Merriman befriends the daughter of a Loyalist family despite her father’s Revolutionary politics.
In aiming to transport girls to other worlds, Rowland had more than innocent fantasy and vivid Americana in mind. Her goal was to encourage play that felt immersive and incorporated historical adversity. The books included plotlines about children working in factories and the displacement of Native people in the Midwest. Her cast expanded to include a second trio of dolls—Felicity, as well as Josefina Montoya, who lives on a New Mexico rancho in 1824, and Addy Walker, an enslaved girl who escapes to 1864 Philadelphia.
Elizabeth Renstrom for The Atlantic
Josefina
Elizabeth Renstrom for The Atlantic
Addy
The panels of scholars hired to help vet the dolls’ backgrounds and physical appearance had their socially charged work cut out for them. Lonnie Bunch, later the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, was part of the committee advising on Addy, whose development stirred plenty of debate over her storyline (whether American Girl’s only Black doll should have been born into slavery, for example) and over specifics (which hair texture was appropriate, how cheerful faces should look in book illustrations). People argued about her suitability as a possession for white girls. (Endorsed by Oprah in time for Christmas 1993, Addy was a commercial success that year.)
The original six American Girls telegraphed a spirit of optimism about the very idea of being a girl. Rowland’s characters were intrepid and resourceful but still gracious; free to be tomboyish while also engaged with feminine traditions, such as Kirsten’s quilting. Breaking down gender stereotypes wasn’t Rowland’s goal, and “feminism was never mentioned in the room,” the creative director of American Girl magazine told FitzSimons. But the “girls can do anything” spirit of third-wave feminism, cresting in the ’90s, was the backdrop of the brand’s rise: empowerment and education in one finely crafted package. As Rowland put it in a letter addressed to parents in an early catalog, “Growing up in America is, has been, and can always be an experience to treasure.”
“I don’t care if a girl grew up in Colonial times, Victorian times, in 1950, or today,” Rowland once said. “The emotional experiences of childhood are absolutely true and constant.” Thanks in part to my own exposure to her dolls’ stories, I confess I can’t quite believe that she ever really meant this. The hardships entailed in Kirsten’s months-long sea voyage stunned snack-happy 8-year-old me; I was suddenly aware of the many conveniences and freedoms that I took for granted. Our kinship was strong—we even shared a birthday (June 8)—but our attachment, I felt, was also about imagining how different my days and moods were from hers.
When Rowland sold her venture (for $700 million), the business was just expanding into American Girl stores and cafés, an old-fashioned “mecca,” she called it, for mother-daughter doll bonding (and buying). The world’s virtual horizons had barely begun to be mapped, and the looming kids-getting-older-younger landscape was soon Mattel’s problem to worry about. Over the past two decades, according to one study, the average age at which children begin to be interested in “adult-oriented topics such as fashion and technology” has decreased from age 12 to 8. In 1990, little girls were hoping for $50 nightgowns to match the one their doll wore; now they’re pining for $90 Drunk Elephant glycolic serum to slather on their faces before bed.
For Mattel at the turn of the millennium, adultified competition arrived in an unnervingly direct and provocative form: Bratz dolls, aimed at young girls. With their pillowy lips, heavy eye makeup, and distorted big-head-small-body proportions, they were mutant Barbies, accelerants for the idea that brasher and sexier were better. By 2006, they accounted for 40 percent of the fashion-doll market.
The American Girl heritage was buried as Mattel played catch-up. Except for Addy and Josefina, the original dolls were retired. Catalogs shrank; chic burgundy gave way to hot pink. Proliferating doll lines—Best Friends, Truly Me, WellieWishers—shifted the focus away from the bond between a girl and her doll, as a New Yorker article noted, and onto friendship networks. Instead of intriguing relics from earlier times—a miniature oil lamp or a friendship quilt—the Girl of the Year doll (the run is limited, so buy her fast) had plastic-tchotchke versions of things such as a cellphone and a Stanley-style water bottle.
New dolls that were added to the historical American Girl line soon hailed from more recent times; Courtney Moore, who “never met a mixtape she didn’t like,” was from 1986, the year the brand was launched. The accompanying books became perfunctory, a scattershot array of graphics and a story that gestured at history but never dove in. Even as doll prices rose, American Girl revenue cratered, reportedly falling by 61 percent from 2016 to late 2023.
In a recent Instagram post, a mom vented about a visit to the books section at an American Girl store: “Excuse me. Where are the boxed sets. Where are the SACRED TEXTS. The Library of Alexandria, again.” Mattel notably hasn’t bothered to reissue the full book series, though the six original dolls have been rereleased for the brand’s anniversary. Instead, targeting its Millennial fan base, the company commissioned a new book in the Samantha series from the best-selling historical novelist Fiona Davis, whose other work for adults features adventurous young women in glamorous and gritty 20th-century New York City.
Elizabeth Renstrom for The Atlantic
A Modern Era Kirsten doll, now with space buns and an updated dress, and the six original American Girl dolls
In Samantha: The Next Chapter, Davis locates her subject in 1920. Now 25, Samantha is down on her luck in New York (her family’s fortune has been stolen) and working as a shopgirl. But she soon finds the thieves and helps the suffragists’ cause, championed by her Aunt Cornelia in the original books. For some readers, Davis’s aim of evoking “sweet nostalgia” and inspiring “wonder at the women you’ve become,” as she has put it, may prove rewarding. Yet her American Girl audience is ambivalent, too. Reared on Rowland’s vision of boldly imaginative girls eager to play their part in an America that was constantly improving, Millennials are also dealing with disenchantment: The country they now inhabit hasn’t delivered on the optimism that powered the world of the dolls and books they loved.
Davis’s grown-up Samantha, though a tribute to the brand’s history-infused approach, is likely to disappoint. She is stuffed with generically desirable attributes of womanhood and faces conventional emotional dilemmas: She’s determined to remain independent while looking for love, forward-thinking yet happy with her lot. It’s a formula for tame likability rather than conflicted maturity.
Earlier this year, the latest American Girl catalog landed on my doorstep—it was a re-creation of the first catalog cover, which showed a girl curled up with her doll on a chintz-covered window seat, intently reading a book. But inside, after a few pages dedicated to the historical dolls, was a torrent of brand collaborations (with Hill House Home dresses, Disney princesses, Polly Pocket) and a spread welcoming the Modern Era collection—the classic dolls, now offered in shrunken, all-vinyl versions with oversize heads, and dressed up in trendy contemporary outfits.
American Girl has a tough needle to thread (the cliché seems apt): make the dolls of good quality, but not too costly; repackage American history, but don’t offend anyone; get Gen Alpha girls interested, but remember that Millennials now hold the credit cards. I’ve deemed my 4-year-old too young for a $175 doll, and my Harry Potter–obsessed 9-year-old considers my vintage Kirsten books too slender to take seriously. But when an old 1995 catalog I’d ordered for research arrived, both pored over it, fascinated by Samantha’s miniature brass lunch pail and Felicity’s coal bed warmer. I explained that the company no longer makes those items; we can get them only for astronomical sums on resale sites. “But this is all so perfect,” my elder daughter said. “It almost makes them come alive.”
This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “Kirsten’s Midlife Crisis.”
Last year, the conservative evangelical blogger Samuel Sey published an article on his blog, Slow to Write, defending the Trump administration’s plan for mass deportations from a Christian perspective. “Christian ethics do not denounce deportations,” he wrote. “They demand it.” Born in Ghana and a resident of Canada before he moved to the United States, Sey went on to write that “America doesn’t owe anything to people born outside of the country—including me.”
Last week, on October 21, ICE arrested Sey, who now faces deportation from the United States––a devastating blow to his American-born wife and three American children. A DHS spokesperson called Sey “an illegal alien” in a statement to news outlets. A statement attributed to Sey’s wife asserts that he entered the U.S. legally “and has been working ever since in good faith with a lawyer to obtain permanent legal status.” Some of his supporters have blamed his arrest on a clerical error. (The DHS spokesperson claimed in the statement that the 39-year-old Sey overstayed his legal entry by four years.)
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Arrests of this sort are nothing new in most respects. Federal-enforcement efforts in the United States’ interior have recently averaged 19,000 deportations a month. Although some deportees are doubtless unsympathetic criminals, many thousands are good people with families or friends who suffer their absence acutely. Sey is unusual, however, in being known personally to many prominent MAGA-aligned Christians, some of whom have backed a fundraiser for his family and affirmed his good character. That support has angered some within the MAGA coalition. A prevailing MAGA narrative is Illegal immigrants are members of a lawless, untrustworthy out-group that is justly hated for the significant harm that it does to America. That narrative is threatened when a member of the MAGA in-group, whose personal and professional life many MAGA allies affirmed as good for America, is accused of being an “illegal alien.”
Perhaps that’s why the debate about Sey’s arrest has been so polarizing, and why MAGA participants are finding it harder than usual to ignore the complexities of the issue and the fissures in their coalition.
Joel Berry, who has described himself as “a right-wing protestant conservative evangelical Christian Trump supporter,” is the person who created a crowdfunding effort for Sey and his family. In past commentary, Berry has called for a moratorium on U.S. immigration; stated that “if we’re going to save America, it won’t be enough to deport all the migrants”; and argued that “there’s no such thing as an ‘illegal immigrant with no criminal record’ because illegal immigration is a crime.” He once asserted that “the only due process owed to an illegal alien is deportation.” The crowdfunding appeal he launched states of Sey: “His wife is working to get him released on bail so he can fix any clerical issues that need to be addressed for his legal residence. We are raising money to help his wife and children with expenses while he’s out of work, as well as any legal fees they incur.” It concludes, “Samuel is a good man and a brother in Christ, and his ministry at SlowToWrite has been a blessing to many. Please consider helping. Thank you for standing with them!”
Many in the MAGA coalition criticized Berry for standing with someone they believe to be a lawbreaker. In response, Berry stated both that “Samuel Sey is in my tribe, and he is my brother. And he would make an excellent American,” and that “I of course believe the law should be enforced no matter who it involves.” The due process that Berry has previously dismissed is exactly what could determine whether his friend was arrested because of a clerical error or because he was in fact here unlawfully.
The debate has altered Berry’s perception of his coalition’s moral character. “This has been probably the darkest 24 hours I’ve ever experienced on social media,” he wrote. “The things being said about Samuel, his wife, and his small children are unthinkably evil. There is a segment of the so-called ‘Christian’ nationalist crowd that has given itself completely over to Satan. I’ve never had more resolve to defeat these subversive demons invading the Right and invading Christianity.”
Allie Beth Stuckey, a Christian conservative podcaster for Blaze Media and the author of Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, has criticized what she sees as “toxic empathy” in the immigration debate. People are “so focused on the hard journey of the migrant that it belittles the effect of the chaos of illegal immigration on children, innocent citizens, and victims of illegal immigrant crime,” she wrote. In her telling, “Being so empathetic toward one set of people that you’re blinded to everyone and everything else isn’t just misguided, it’s evil.”
But in Sey’s case, she urged her followers to understand and connect with his family’s feelings and perspective. “As you can imagine, his wife, who’s at home with their 3 babies, is devastated and also trusting the Lord to help them find a resolution quickly,” she wrote. “Please pray for all of the Seys.”
Megan Basham of The Daily Wire, who is also a conservative Christian, posted this after learning that Sey had been detained: “I have spoken to people close to my friend Sam Sey, and this is not a question of any deliberate law breaking. Anyone saying otherwise is not telling you the truth. And anyone rejoicing over his and his precious wife Annie’s difficulties in this situation is disgusting.”
I was struck by the contrast with a social-media exchange I had with Basham earlier this month, when I was critiquing the Trump administration for deporting dozens of Venezuelan men to a brutally abusive prison in El Salvador. She was defending it. “Should overstaying your visa in the United States carry the risk of being beaten and sexually assaulted by sadistic prison guards in a foreign dictatorship where you’ve never set foot, paid for by the US government?” I asked her, adding, “I don’t think it should carry that risk. I don’t think Jesus would think it should carry that risk either.”
She replied, “Yes, because you should go home when your visa expires. That’s how Visa’s work. If you don’t, you’re breaking the law and you run the risk of whatever penalties come along with that.”
Some commentators in the MAGA coalition seem to adopt rhetoric and positions on illegal immigration that they can maintain only when they think of illegal immigrants as an abstract “them.” When they confront one who is a concrete “us,” their rhetoric shifts significantly. They raise rather than ignore the possibility of procedural errors, extoll the value of due process, note personal circumstances, draw attention to the suffering of family members, and urge empathy rather than vilification.
Others in the MAGA coalition object to this shift. Some are bigots who use racial slurs in their posts or attack interracial couples such as Sey and his wife. Others are restrictionists who believe that mass deportations are necessary and will cease if illegal immigrants are humanized and shown empathy. I wonder how many of those attacking Sey and his humanizers are those who are triggered by the simple cognitive dissonance of hearing good things about a person who may belong to categories such as “illegal alien” or “lawbreaker”—categories that they are accustomed to coding as evil.
Many in the MAGA movement hope that uncompromising harshness toward all undocumented immigrants will result in maximizing the number of people whom the country is able to deport. But the longer that the mass deportation of otherwise law-abiding people persists, the harder it will be to maintain support for that approach: Rather than assume that deportees are mostly villains, more and more people will have personal connections to productive members of society who got deported.
Certain questions follow. Why does immigration law require someone who marries an American to spend years filling out onerous paperwork with catastrophic penalties for errors? Wouldn’t Americans benefit if the law drew more distinctions between, for example, a visa overstay by a gainfully employed, noncriminal father of American children and a serial perpetrator of violence who twice snuck into the country? A movement that genuinely prioritizes the interests of U.S. citizens would have better answers to such questions than Trump, whose approach is deportations first, not “America first.”
Since the beginning of the Gaza war, a record number of Israelis have left the country. More than 10 percent of the electorate now lives abroad, and the country generally does not allow absentee ballots: Those who want to vote in today’s election, the first since October 7, need to be there in person.
An estimated 67,000 Israeli expats have traveled thousands of miles—and spent thousands of dollars—to return home. Within Israel, the polls suggest a fairly even split between the parties that favor Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those that oppose him. But most of the expats are expected to support the opposition. The prime minister’s allies reportedly considered restricting airport capacity to limit the number of arrivals. But the flights still came.
Israelis returning from abroad expressed feelings of deep investment in this election and a belief that the outcome will affect them no matter where they live. Many are willing to travel a long way to vote for what they believe will be a better future.
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
Maya Mor Mitrani, a college student and opera singer in Philadelphia, spoke about concern for her father, who has served in the military reserves since October 7. “I just think the situation is really bad,” she said, “and I want to have at least some influence over how the government tries to solve the problems we’re facing right now. So if my influence amounts to just one ballot in the box, that’s what I’ll do.”
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
Jonathan Matkowsky was born in America, but he moved to Israel in 2012. On October 7, he barricaded his children indoors and drove south to help however he could, working as a volunteer driver for off-duty soldiers and civilians for the next four months. He later moved back to the United States. Now he has returned for the election: “It’s a meaningful vote for me because of how much trauma we’ve been through,” he said. Although he considered voting for Gadi Eisenkot because of his support for extending the draft to the ultra-Orthodox, he ultimately decided to vote for Netanyahu. He trusts the prime minister’s wisdom and experience and credits him with keeping Israel safe: “I’m proud of him. I believe in him. I think he’s a hero,” he said.
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on October 25, 2026
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
A banner that reads “This time, Eisenkot” hangs in Jaffa, Tel Aviv.
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
An organization called Fly&Vote organized expats to fly from New York to Tel Aviv on October 25.
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
Shirily Bar-Or spent years protesting in Israel before moving to Athens last year. “I didn’t give up, exactly. I just needed to breathe. I was running out of air. I hope I’ll be able to breathe again tomorrow.” What she wants, she said, is for “the country to be sane again. I want a government that works for the public good. I want democracy.” To her, this election is pivotal because, she said, what Netanyahu wants “is to destroy us just to save his own skin.”
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
Dan Galezer lives in New York and already had a trip to Israel planned, but he changed his flight to be there on election day. He said that he didn’t know which opposition party to support, but that “I’m just at the stage of saying: Get Bibi out of the seat already. His time is up.” Galezer’s family’s kibbutz was the site of one of the worst massacres on October 7. “Today, even after everything that’s happened,” he said, “I don’t rule out returning.” But whether that will even be possible, he said, may depend on the outcome of the election: “This feels like a breaking point.”
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
Arie Deizer has lived in Bucharest for 30 years and compared Netanyahu to the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. Netanyahu, he said, has “destroyed the country—he’s completely lost it now,” and Deizer hopes he’ll be “thrown out, just like Orbán.” Deizer is voting for the Democrats, in part because unlike many other opposition parties, they have not ruled out working with Arab parties, should they win. “I hope we’ll have an overwhelming majority here—70 seats—so that the Arab parties can’t be ignored.”
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
A sign on the entrance to a shop in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, reads “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.”
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
Shai Sinai hasn’t lived in Israel for 40 years, but he’s come back from Hamburg to vote in every election since Netanyahu came to power. “I was born here, I grew up here, I was educated here, I served in the army here, and my whole family—the family members who are still alive—basically lives here.” Volunteers from Fly&Vote, a nonprofit dedicated to helping expats return for the election, met him and other voters at the airport. So did members of the Democrats, a party Sinai said he will support. He hopes that the government will be replaced, he said, but “to say that I’m expecting it would be too optimistic.”
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
Volunteers and candidates from the Democrats Party came to greet Israelis as they landed in Israel to vote.
Dana Golan for The Atlantic
Election posters at the entrance to a polling station in Tel Aviv include one from Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad party that reads, “We will only fix this together.”
Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task. Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer—the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer—likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.
So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.
“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.
In an attempt to express the blend of bewilderment and despair brought on by this New York Times anecdote, I have concocted a quiz: Which is it—a question the tech industry wants me to ask AI, or something Odysseus asks upon returning to Ithaca after 20 years of absence?
Tell me, what is my son like?
Who are these people in my house?
Are any of these people my son’s friends?
Are any of these people my friends?
What makes my son smile?
What would make a good gift for my son?
Do I have anything in common with my son?
Would archery be a fun activity to do to impress my family?
Is there a quicker route home I could take next time?
What would be a nifty surprise for my wife?
What activities or items does my wife enjoy?
What activity can I do to bond with my wife and son?
Does my dog recognize me?
Is there something I can feed my elderly dog that will help him live longer?
I am told this is my home, but I don’t recognize any of these people in my house, and I don’t know what they want. I am told this is my life, but all of the intimate things that should be the most familiar feel foreign to me. Suggest a fun activity to distract me from the terrifying sense that I have hollowed out my life with my own hands, and that my absence has filled my house with strangers!
For the first time in modern American history, a sitting president is seeking to wield the force of the state to secure an electoral victory for his party. The Trump administration has attempted to undermine the widespread use of mail-in voting; demanded that states hand over voter rolls; threatened to prosecute state and local election officials; refused to rule out the idea of deploying troops or federal agents to polling places; and publicized the dramatic arrests of small numbers of people accused of voting or registering to vote as noncitizens. Many of these efforts have made little headway—either because of the administration’s incompetence, the stubborn lack of factual evidence behind President Trump’s claims of voter fraud, the federal government’s lack of legal authority, or the refusal of courts to go along with Trump’s plans.
But Trump may have a different problem on his hands. Polls show Trump’s approval falling to all-time lows in the weeks before Election Day; the percent of voters happy with his performance has now sunk into the 30s. Democrats, meanwhile, appear likely to retake control of the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate, which last year seemed well out of reach. The polls could be wrong—and high-profile-polling misses of the Trump era are hard to forget. But if the polling is right, the GOP may be in for what George W. Bush, after a disastrous 2006 midterm, ruefully termed a “thumping.” And a thumping, as opposed to a narrower Democratic victory, could render most efforts to suppress turnout irrelevant, and make it far more difficult to implement any more dramatic effort to rig the results.
To Trump’s endless frustration, elections in America are organized at the state and local level, with little role for the federal government. In a typical midterm year, almost 470 congressional seats are up for grabs across 50 different states. Though a small number of those races are actually competitive, tinkering with the outcome of the votes would still require meddling with a number of different elections, all run differently, in different jurisdictions, under different laws. A strong night for the Democratic Party would make conjuring an ersatz House majority hard for the same reason that a losing sports team is less able to cheat its way to a victory in a blowout. (Even on a very strong night for the Democrats, the Senate may still be quite a close call.)
Tight margins, by contrast, can make an election more vulnerable to efforts to undo the voters’ will. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election relied in significant part on tight margins in some swing states, sometimes with only 10,000 or 20,000 votes deciding the winner. In Georgia, the president famously pushed Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to make up his deficit against Joe Biden. As described by both the House January 6 committee’s report and Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump, Trump and his allies used close tallies in swing states, together with the slow counting of mail-in ballots, to engineer doubts over election results and provide Republican members of Congress with the tools to delay the formal counting of the electoral vote on January 6. The attack on the Capitol followed.
The memory of January 6, and the entrenchment of the election-denier movement since 2020, has led to speculation—both anxious and enthused—about the possibility of a comparable attack on election results in 2026. If, once most of the results are in, Democrats seem set to eke out a House majority by just a few seats, perhaps committed Trump allies in positions of power could make trouble in a handful of the closest districts. A local election commissioner, say, could refuse to sign off on a Democrat’s narrow victory, or the Justice Department could execute a warrant to seize ballots and thus delay or upend the counting of votes. This could create chaos on January 3, when the new House gathers for the first time: What happens if the contested seats are enough to deny the should-be-majority party the votes it needs to select a new speaker and take control of the chamber? Although this isn’t a foolproof trick for stealing control of the House, such a play could make things very precarious very quickly.
But the bigger the majority secured by Democrats, the more difficult it would be for Trump to shave that majority down—the more clerks to convince, warrants to secure, and court rulings to dodge, all over the country. “If there is a House majority in either direction that is 20, 30 seats, I think the likelihood of an attempt to engage in some kind of shenanigans around January 3 is way less than if the majority is two or three seats,” Jonathan Diaz of the Campaign Legal Center commented recently on a preelection panel convened at UCLA’s law school.
Other tricks are also less effective when the vote swings heavily in one direction. For example, Trump’s unprecedented push for explicitly partisan off-cycle redistricting may net only a few extra GOP seats rather than the double-digit gains Democratic strategists had once feared.
Political constraints matter too. Any scheme to steal the House for the GOP would depend on the willingness of congressional Republicans to vote in lockstep, with no defectors—something that the current fractious House Republican caucus can barely manage. Already, though, Republicans spooked by Trump’s bad poll numbers have begun distancing themselves from him on the campaign trail as they fight to hold on to their seats. Over the summer, Republican politicians and MAGA-friendly media outlets responded coolly to a rambling address by the president casting doubt on election integrity. If the GOP loses the House, how many Republicans concerned about their own political careers would be actually inclined to adopt the fringe message of an ever more unpopular lame-duck president? (Trump has been notably quiet recently about the possibility of running for an unconstitutional third term.)
Trump will be hard-pressed to fight against “a clear loss, coupled with the expectation of a clear loss,” Bob Bauer told me. Bauer—a longtime Democratic lawyer who played a central role in the Biden campaign’s fight against Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election—now focuses on bipartisan election-integrity work, alongside Ben Ginsberg, an election lawyer known for his past work representing the Republican Party. In 2020, Bauer said, the additional days required for the presidential race to be called after the polls closed helped fuel Trump’s claims of fraud. But now, broad public dissatisfaction has aligned with dismal polling for the GOP and a growing anticipation among both politicians and the press that Republicans will do poorly. “It would be very difficult in these circumstances, if things turn out that the Democrats do well, for him to suddenly announce that he was denied his landslide by vote rigging,” Bauer told me.
Just because such a scheme would be implausible does not, of course, mean that Trump won’t try it. Last week, the Justice Department filed a bizarre lawsuit seeking to preemptively block Alaska from certifying the results of its Senate race—but only if Republican Senator Dan Sullivan loses. (“The legal argument is one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen,” wrote the law professor Derek Muller in an analysis of the case.) DOJ also continues to pursue litigation seeking to force California to set aside mail-in ballots to voters whom the federal government claims to have identified as noncitizens. These cases are sloppy, tardy, and almost certainly doomed. But they do have the advantage of helping Trump and his allies build a narrative about the courts blocking Trump’s efforts to ensure a fair election. Likewise, if a Trump-aligned rogue local election official tried to block a Democratic candidate’s victory, whatever he or she concocted as reasoning could provide fuel for election-fraud rumors on the far right, even if the effort—as it likely would—ultimately failed.
In a wave election, some races will still be close. They may just be in different states or districts—mostly, more Republican ones—than in a year with more typical political geography. House seats in deep-red areas across the country may be newly up for grabs. In the Senate, races in Texas and Alaska stand out as potential flash points. “Any close race in the Senate is going to be hotly, hotly contested,” Bauer told me. He pointed to the bitter fight between the Democrat Al Franken and the Republican Norm Coleman over the 2008 Senate election in Minnesota, which took months to resolve and ended with the courts upholding Franken’s 312-vote victory.
In the final weeks before the midterms, election experts have seemed notably calmer than some of the the anxious rhetoric around Trump’s potential subversion of the vote might suggest. Eight experts interviewed by TheNew York Times(including Bauer) voiced worries about possible upheaval but overall confidence that officials are prepared to protect the integrity of the elections. The nonprofit publication Votebeat likewise surveyed 31 authorities on election administration and found the group to be wary but “cautiously optimistic” that the midterms will go smoothly. If the elections pass without serious disruption, a hefty margin of victory for the Democratic Party could be partly why. But the fact that such a margin may be needed to avoid chaos is itself sobering. In a healthy democracy, the opposition party should not have to win by enormous numbers to ensure victory, and voters should be able to trust that even a close election will be free and fair.
One of the curiosities of Donald Trump’s enduring (if perhaps weakening) grip on his supporters is how they praise him as someone who “tells it like it is.” Trump’s gatekeepers have similarly declared this to be “the most transparent administration in history,” pointing to, among other things, Trump’s willingness to open his sycophantic Cabinet meetings to live media coverage as proof that nothing is being obscured.
The irony of this, of course, is that Trump has been caught in more obvious lies than any president in history. Yet by making himself so ubiquitous, Trump breeds an illusion of openness. To him, a president’s ultimate power rests in his ability to always be in people’s faces—to become inescapable, if not honestly examined; to impose his own self-serving version of reality whenever he pleases, no matter how outlandish.
I kept thinking about this as I watched You Can See Everything, the blockbuster documentary that has become a source of cultural fascination since it started packing theaters a few weeks ago. This might be my Trump Derangement Syndrome showing, but I couldn’t help but view the film as a classic Trump-era parable.
You Can See Everything chronicles the disgraced Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and her fiancé, Billy Evans, during their final 34 days together, with their two young children, before Holmes begins an 11-year prison sentence for criminal fraud. In the opening scene, Evans introduces the promise of “radical transparency.” The couple have invited the filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim into their beachside rental house near San Diego. In Evans’s telling, the false narrative of Holmes as a scheming con artist has become so entrenched that they might as well raise every curtain, and allow people see her at this most vulnerable and unguarded time. They have nothing to lose and nothing to hide.
Like Trump, Holmes and Evans are rich, famous, and secure in their victimhood. No one should have to go through this, as Trump often says (“no one” meaning himself). No messianic entrepreneur either. Holmes’s aura cries out for caretaking, and not just by Evans, who assumes the role aggressively, or deviously. Her voice goes from insistent monotone at the start to plaintive and soft as her banishment approaches. Everything has been taken from her, unfairly.
Like the president, Holmes is adept at playing to reality-TV sensibilities. She seems to have an intuitive sense for when a flash of frustration or vexation can enhance a scene. The camera loves her, even (or especially) when she is melting down. Holmes recognizes the hypnotic effect of her sad, toddlerlike eyes. “It took me a really long time to be okay with letting someone see me cry,” she confides to Fielder, and then sheds a tear on cue.
Holmes operates not so much with words as with complete denial that she has intentionally hurt anyone. At one point, she claims that she’s never told a lie in her life. And how can anyone doubt her? We can see everything, after all, so maybe the problem is ours. That is the power of radical transparency. It can breed confusion in us, the audience, rather than clarity about the subject.
Fielder, who manages to convey a presence that is both empathetic and dubious, keeps suggesting that Evans and Holmes are not on the level. As the story unfolds, their promise of radical transparency unravels. It becomes evident that Evans is restricting access, manipulating facts, and perhaps exploiting what’s left of his partner’s marketable image.
Over the course of the film, Holmes’s responses to Fielder’s inquiries become mushy pleas of ignorance and confusion. If she is guilty of anything, she seems to suggest, it is of allowing herself to be badly misunderstood. She has erred not morally or legally, but in how she’s communicated. Politicians are always doing this too, placing blame not on their own shortcomings but on their (and their staff’s) failure to properly convey the greatness they’ve achieved.
Many of Silicon Valley’s most charismatic entrepreneurs are skilled at creating belief systems, around their products and themselves, as my colleague David Sims wrote in his review of You Can See Everything. Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder, is considered the virtuoso of this. Holmes fashioned herself a Jobs acolyte. She wore the same black turtlenecks and intense gaze, and modeled her seductive corporate persona after his (notwithstanding that, unlike Theranos, Apple makes products that actually work). Watching leaders—political or corporate—who project total faith in their ability to persuade and inspire can be mesmerizing. They are convinced that just by getting in front of an audience, they can bring viewers around, no matter what they say or what they are selling. Holmes seems to think this too.
Trump has at times taken his own confidence to absurd extremes. Early on in the coronavirus pandemic, he insisted on near-daily press conferences. He had no grasp of the viral menace at hand but seemed to believe that his presence alone could transcend the scary science. He might have made little sense, but he did so with total conviction. And he made himself so relentlessly visible. That had to be reassuring, right?
One of Trump’s superpowers has been his ability to outlast his skeptics. Still, reality shows can become exhausting—whether it’s two terms of Trump or three hours of You Can See Everything. Even the most compelling stories and storytellers can feel overexposed and stale. Customers eventually lose patience. Revelation gives way to repetition. Suspicion creeps in: Is this really everything? Enough already. The audience is ready for the spectacle to end and the sentence to begin.
As the Bernie Sanders road show traveled south through Maine earlier this month, the crowds grew bigger and louder with each stop. About 650 people showed up at a convention center in Bangor, then 700 packed a former church in Lewiston, and finally more than 1,000 filled a high-school gymnasium in Biddeford. Sanders was stumping for Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate, and the faithful were nodding along to the hits. He pitched Medicare for All and raising taxes on billionaires. He decried wealth disparities (“an obscenity”) and Donald Trump (“the most dangerous president” in American history) with equal fervor.
What was surprising about Sanders’s appearance in the middle of one of the nation’s hardest-fought Senate races was less what he said and more that he was there at all. Mid-October in an election year is not usually Sanders’s busy season. The Vermont senator last had a tough race in his home state during President Bill Clinton’s first term. And although Sanders can draw a crowd like few other progressive politicians, Democratic candidates typically embrace him during primaries and then stick him on the sideline for the stretch run, when they’re rediscovering their love of capitalism and bipartisanship.
This fall, however, Sanders is in far more demand than usual. He’s campaigning for Democrats in some of the most competitive battlegrounds, entrusted not only with juicing turnout on college campuses—his assigned role in earlier years—but with persuading voters in Republican-leaning areas as well. From Maine, Sanders headed to Florida and then on to Texas and Michigan.
That Sanders finds himself, a decade after his first run for the presidency, arguably at the peak of his influence is all the more remarkable given that he recently turned 85 and that Democrats have spent the past two years wringing their hands over their party’s gerontocracy. According to YouGov, Sanders is the most popular current elected official in America—only the retirees Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger have higher ratings. Many of this year’s primary candidates whom Sanders backed defeated establishment opponents in states and districts that Trump had carried in 2024, and they now appear poised to help Democrats retake a majority in the House, and possibly the Senate. And when the party’s 2028 presidential free-for-all kicks off, Sanders’s endorsement could be among the campaign’s most sought-after prizes.
“He will be seen as one of the most consequential political leaders of the 21st century,” Representative Ro Khanna of California, one of several Democrats who are likely to try to carry the Sanders mantle to the White House, told me. (Whether offering such high praise will help win Sanders’s nod is another question.) Khanna noted that Sanders’s appeal may be on the upswing precisely because he’s not running for office, and unless he intends to stay in the Senate into his mid-90s, he is unlikely to do so again.
But in interviews over the past few weeks, candidates, strategists, and voters across the political spectrum attributed Sanders’s sudden October relevance to the mainstreaming of ideas that he has championed for years. Attacks on big corporations are now a hallmark of both parties. As many as two-thirds of American voters support Sanders’s signature Medicare for All proposal, long derided by Republicans as socialized medicine, according to a recent poll. Democrats who were stung by a second loss to Trump are rethinking their assumptions about what the public really wants. “Anyone who wants to win an election right now is a populist,” Phil Gardner, an adviser to centrist Democrats, told me. About Sanders, he said: “There is an increasing realization that his ideas have more currency and popularity than people might have thought back in 2016.”
Sanders has shown few obvious signs of slowing down, either politically or physically. At each of his rallies in Maine, teleprompters that were in place for Jackson’s speech came down when it was Sanders’s turn to speak. His aides say that he checks in frequently with questions about logistics or policy. (Two of my own conversations with them were interrupted because Sanders was calling on the other line.) Sanders was also quicker than much younger politicians to recognize the public’s growing fears about AI, and he’s been one of the most aggressive leaders on the left in demanding more regulation of the industry and a moratorium on new data centers. Democrats are begging not only for his presence in key states and districts, but for his financial help as well: He’s raised millions of dollars for candidates during this election, and last week he gave $1 million to boost Abdul El-Sayed’s U.S. Senate candidacy in Michigan.
Unlike most politicians, Sanders avoids talking much about himself. During his Maine speeches, he made only glancing references to his growing influence. At one point, he noted that he’s been talking about oligarchy for a number of years. “Before I started talking about it, people would say, What the hell is an oligarch?” he told the crowd in Bangor. Then he added, to a loud cheer: “People know what oligarchy is today.”
I met Sanders after the speech, and when I asked him to explain his widening appeal, he initially shrugged as if to dismiss the question. But he could not completely hide his satisfaction with the sense that after he spent decades on the fringes of political debates, the country was moving in his direction. “I think the American people are undergoing a massive transformation in their views,” Sanders told me. “So maybe Bernie Sanders has not been all that crazy over the years.”
Sanders has always had a complicated relationship with the Democratic Party. He sought its presidential nomination twice, but he still likes to remind voters that he has run for election to the Senate as an independent. (Along with the Senate’s other independent, Maine’s Angus King, he caucuses with the Democrats.) Despite that distinction, he began his remarks in Maine by urging voters to set aside every consideration but party label when they cast their ballot. “If you want to hold Donald Trump and his disastrous policies accountable,” Sanders said, “the only way we do that is by electing a Democratic Senate.” The pitch was clearly aimed at the many independents and Democrats who have supported Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican, in previous years.
At the same time, Sanders also heaped plenty of criticism on Democrats, accusing them of deferring to corporate donors and ignoring the needs of the working class. “The Democratic Party itself is significantly responsible for the rise of Trumpism,” Sanders told me. He made clear that he hoped that the election of a slate of progressive Senate candidates—which includes Jackson, El-Sayed, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, and Angie Nixon in Florida—would force the party to pursue policies it has previously deemed too radical. All four of these candidates have also called for replacing Chuck Schumer as the Democrats’ Senate leader. Sanders is not going that far yet, but he told me that he would support a leader “who’s going to fight for Medicare for All”—a position that Schumer has yet to embrace. Sanders, too, could have more say in shaping party policy: He’s in line to become chair of the Senate’s powerful Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions if Democrats win the majority.
One reason Sanders is so much busier this fall is that so many of the candidates running in big races have him at least partially to thank for their nomination.
Sanders endorsed more than 80 candidates for federal, state, and local offices this year—a higher total, his aides told me, than he has backed in the past. By their count, nearly 75 percent of them won their primary. He had a few misfires; most notably, Sanders was an early endorser of Graham Platner’s Senate candidacy in Maine and stood by him through a series of controversies. Sanders joined Democrats in abandoning Platner after he was accused of sexual assault, an accusation which he denied. (“Let’s not get into Platner,” Sanders told me when I brought him up.)
Plenty of candidates have sought Sanders’s endorsement without getting it. Sometimes a simple Google search reveals that a candidate is not as progressive as they claim to be. Desperation is another turnoff. “The candidates that we don’t support,” he said, “are, Oh, Bernie, support me. You’re going to be my savior. I’m not doing anything [to win], but I need your name on my literature. That we don’t support.”
In some cases, a nonendorsement from Sanders can be as consequential as his blessing. During Wisconsin’s primary for governor, neither Sanders nor Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chose to endorse Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who surged into a polling lead while running on a platform closely aligned with Sanders. She also had the support of Sanders allies such as Khanna and Our Revolution, a group that sprang out of his 2016 campaign but is no longer affiliated with the senator. Hong ended up losing the primary to the establishment-backed David Crowley by fewer than 4,000 votes statewide, a result so close that a Sanders endorsement might have made the difference.
Democratic leaders, worried that Hong’s nomination would have cost the party during the general election, cheered Crowley’s narrow victory. Sanders told me he had no regrets. His focus this year, he said, has largely been on federal campaigns. “I don’t know anything about the problems facing Wisconsin,” Sanders said. (That may be true, but some of his other endorsements include people running for county supervisor in Iowa; the city council in Tempe, Arizona; and mayor of Fontana, California.)
The candidates Sanders has endorsed in U.S. House races reflect his new position closer to the center of the Democratic coalition. Several such candidates have also earned the backing of the Blue Dogs, a group that has long prioritized fiscal discipline and, in the past, likely would have steered clear of an alliance with the free-spending Sanders. What these “Bernie Dogs” have in common are a working-class background—the group includes a firefighter in Pennsylvania and an ironworker in Ohio—and a populist message.
Sam Forstag, a smoke jumper running to flip a Republican-held seat in Montana, told me that if he wins, he would join both the Blue Dog Coalition and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Forstag had been working with a group defending Forest Service workers from Trump-administration cuts last year when Sanders added a stop to his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in Missoula and asked whether Forstag, a union leader and federal employee, would speak. The rally drew a crowd of 9,000 people on a Wednesday afternoon, and soon after, Forstag decided to run for office. Forstag had nothing but praise for the man who kick-started his political career. Sanders, he told me, “is one of a very small group of people in the U.S. Senate, let alone the House, who people can tell are just speaking truth. Even if you don’t agree with everything, he is not somebody who’s bound down to a party boss, and that is far too rare in today’s politics.”
At least on the House side, Sanders is not demanding ideological purity. Democrats such as Brian Poindexter, who is challenging Representative Max Miller, a Republican in a Trump-carried district outside Cleveland, and Rebecca Cooke, a candidate in western Wisconsin, are not running on Medicare for All. Sanders told me he’s okay with that. “There’s no litmus test,” he said. When I asked him whether he worried about diluting his brand, he sounded for a moment more like a conventional party leader than an anti-establishment insurgent. Citing Cooke as an example, Sanders said: “She comes from a fairly conservative district. She knows her district very, very well, and I trust her judgement.” He added: “If she was running in New York City, maybe it would be different.”
Sanders is not the only progressive favorite campaigning in tough swing-state races this fall. Ocasio-Cortez has also stumped alongside Jackson and El-Sayed, and Jackson invited Senator Elizabeth Warren up to Maine after Sanders’s visit. Meanwhile, some Democrats still aren’t rushing to appear with Sanders in the home stretch. Forstag told me that he’d be campaigning with fellow Montanans, not Sanders, as his race draws to a close. In Texas, James Talarico, the party’s standard-bearer for Senate, did not attend Sanders’s events, and neither did the Democratic candidate for governor, Gina Hinojosa.
Whether the visits by Sanders and his progressive allies will help or hurt Democrats in the Senate battlegrounds should become clear next week. In Maine, Collins sensed an opportunity to seize the political center: As Jackson hosted Sanders and then Ocasio-Cortez, she campaigned with the former Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. “Troy certainly has every right to invite whomever he wants to campaign with him in Maine,” Collins told reporters as she stood alongside Manchin. “So far it’s been from the far left of the party.”
Jackson was betting that even near the end of Sanders’s career, he could still bring out new voters. At the rally in Lewiston, I met Robert LaGrange, a retired cook who had come to see Sanders and told me that he would be voting this year for the first time in his life. “I just didn’t think my vote counted,” he said. Others told me that they were pleasantly surprised to see Sanders during the general election. “People are more willing to listen to him now with all that’s going on,” Mary Gilman, a retired teacher from Belfast, told me. Devyn Campbell, a 26-year-old fisherman from Boothbay, said he was glad to see Democrats such as Jackson campaigning with Sanders instead of “aggressively centrist” surrogates. “It shows the Democratic Party has finally learned its lesson after the last election,” Campbell told me.
Sanders has also spent time in the past two years working with Run for Something, a group formed during Trump’s first term that is devoted to recruiting first-time candidates. Its president, Amanda Litman, has been among the loudest Democratic voices calling for the party’s older leaders to step aside; she has said that anyone over the age of 75 should not run for another term. But she sees no contradiction in Sanders’s enduring popularity in the middle of his ninth decade. “Should Senator Sanders run for reelection again? Absolutely not,” Litman told me. “That doesn’t mean he isn’t up to the moment, but part of the way I think he is proving himself up to the moment is succession planning.” I asked Litman whether she saw Sanders as passing the torch or holding onto it. She dodged: “He is using the institutional power he has to prepare to pass it,” she replied.
Sanders is now getting a warmer welcome from a party that had long held him at arm’s length—and that he has long refused to fully embrace. This renewed appreciation may have come too late for Sanders’s presidential ambitions, but the Democratic message in the twilight of the Trump era sounds more and more like his own.
The Republican Party, with one notable exception, has settled on a populist closing message: Barack Obama’s weekend joke that the president has “got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory” represents a grave insult to middle-class Americans. Alas, the sole Republican who appears unable to cooperate with this message is Donald Trump.
In reality, Obama’s crack was mainly aimed at the gaudy aesthetic shared by Trump and the former Iraqi dictator. And even if the joke had not mentioned Saddam, it is hardly a swipe at the Cheesecake Factory to suggest that its campy decor, while perfectly suitable as a backdrop for a family munching on a plate of fried macaroni and cheese, is an inappropriate sensibility for the Oval Office. And even if Obama had committed a genuine gaffe, it seems odd for Republicans to try to make the election about an opponent who is (1) not on the ballot and (2) the most popular living politician in America.
But when your party has presided over rising inflation and a failed war of choice, the messaging options aren’t great. And this pseudo-scandal does have the benefit of helping Republicans change the subject from Trump’s obsession with gilding the White House to Democratic elitism. So various GOP mouthpieces have come forward to express their indignation on behalf of the salt-of-the-earth Cheesecake Factory diners that Obama had so viciously slandered.
“It goes exactly to why Democrats lost the middle class, why they lost blue-collar voters. Because it’s kind of a guns-and-religion-clinging kind of comment, and it turns a lot of people in this country off,” explained Fox News’s Martha MacCallum. “To all of those diners in Cleveland, Grand Rapids, and beyond, here’s Mr. Obama’s message: How déclassé,” editorialized The Wall Street Journal. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, not to be outdone, appeared in front of a Cheesecake Factory and told reporters, “I would tell the Martha’s Vineyard set to give it a try,” as if Obama had criticized the restaurant’s food.
This posturing is part of a familiar ritual in American politics. Our candidate was born in a humble log cabin and has the backing of the common people, whereas your candidate is the son of privilege and represents the aristocracy. Because he is instinctively elitist, however, Trump has always struggled with the populist script.
After being elected as the leader of what pundits depicted as a populist uprising, he would sometimes bristle at the notion that his enemies constituted an elite. “Why are they elite?” he said during his first term. “I have a much better apartment than they do. I’m smarter than they are. I’m richer than they are. I became president, and they didn’t.” He would tell his supporters at rallies, “You are the elite. They’re not the elite.”
Trump seems to have an especially difficult time feigning populism when the target is Black. Asked by a reporter at the White House gaggle about Obama’s gibe, Trump attacked Obama as low-class and dumb. “He doesn’t notice dirt and filth that hadn’t been cleaned, where the walls hadn’t been cleaned for years,” Trump said. “We have to explain that to Obama because he doesn’t understand it, because he’s not a smart guy.” Attacking Obama as an out-of-touch coastal elitist, rather than a slum-dweller who dirtied up a pristine home, is a concept that Trump’s mind is apparently too racist to process.
Nor could Trump bring himself to pretend to think that the humble White House would be lucky to have decor as luxurious and dignified as the inside of a Cheesecake Factory, the veritable temple of the middle class. Instead, he delivered a 500-word monologue about the palatial renovations he had overseen.
“I fixed it with the finest artisans in the world,” he said. “I’ve reskinned the building beautifully with the highest, most talented people. Anywhere in the world, you’re not going to find more talent.” If Trump’s allies were trying to dispel the impression that the president was overly focused on improving his own residence at the expense of his other duties, Trump appeared eager to confirm it. Indeed, he emphasized the great time and expense the work had consumed.
At a rally last night, Trump returned to Obama’s Cheesecake slander, while characteristically proceeding to substantiate the gist of it. “He was very critical of me, because I spend time,” he told the crowd. He then spent several minutes walking through the renovations in tedious detail—confirming, rather than rebutting, the impression that he is obsessed with the project. He repeated his boast that he employed “the best artisans you’ve ever seen.”
And he complained that the building he inherited contained materials that looked as if they came from a store that sold home items to hardworking, ordinary Americans. “We took tile that was broken, that was—I mean, I don’t want to say from Home Depot, but it does come from a box, and it’s not for the White House.”
Not only did Trump once again fail to assail Obama as a snob and pose as the champion of the Cheesecake proletariat, but he went in the opposite direction. He dismissed Obama as such a rube that he would settle for appointing the White House with tile that could have come from a store as low-class as Home Depot.
A Seal’s Worst Nightmare. Highly Commended, Mammals. “For many years, I had been planning to photograph the most common hunting technique of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) from a seal’s perspective. In the dense pack ice at 83° N, I drilled a hole next to a seal’s breathing hole, installed my camera beneath it, and positioned a motion sensor on the ice above. Eight hours later, I spotted a polar bear in the distance heading straight for the breathing hole. By then, a thin layer of ice had formed on the water. The bear pushed its head through the ice to see what was going on below and looked straight into the camera. The bear then lay down and slept for nine hours, leaving me unable to retrieve my camera. When the animal finally moved on, I rushed over and was over thrilled to discover that I had captured my dream photo of a polar bear.”
Pretty on Pink. Highly Commended, Other Animals. “While staying in the Camargue in the south of France, we came across a group of greater flamingos (Phoenicopterus roseus) near Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. They were standing in a ditch and weren’t bothered in the least by the people walking past just a few meters away. Anyone who has ever photographed in the Camargue will know this all too well: You set up your camera, compose your image, and within seconds you are swarmed by mosquitoes. This particular mosquito was perched quite attractively on the neck of a resting flamingo.”
Water Rocket. Highly Commended, Birds. “This photograph was taken in January at the Kiskunság Lakes in Hungary. As these salt lakes are very shallow, they freeze over every winter and dry out completely in summer. They serve as important breeding and resting habitats for numerous bird species. Because of the mild winter, the ice on the lakes started melting in January. Waterbirds appeared almost immediately—mainly ducks and geese. The drone perspective offered an interesting sight as the birds churned up the mud, creating striking shapes and patterns.”
Black Wolf. Highly Commended, Mammals. “This image was taken in Yellowstone National Park in the United States, a place I have visited regularly for many years. One of the main reasons for my repeated visits is that there are few better places to observe and photograph wolves (Canis lupus). Even so, these animals are elusive and encounters are a matter of luck. Around 50 percent of the wolves in Yellowstone are black, and, although I have seen and photographed them many times before, I always felt that I had not yet captured a truly compelling image. During this particular visit, I encountered the Wapiti Pack which had taken down a bison along Firehole River and consists mostly of black individuals. It was an extraordinary experience, given that wolf sightings in Yellowstone typically last only a few minutes.”
Swan Lake. Winner, Youth Category | 14–17 years. “Out walking, I came across a lake with a large number of waterbirds, and decided to return before dawn the next morning. Well hidden, I watched as mute swans (Cygnus olor) rose majestically out of the mist in a scene bathed in gold light.”
Turbulent Feeding Patch. Runner-up, Underwater World. “Marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) are endemic to the Galápagos Archipelago, Ecuador. They are most often seen basking in the sun, their dark bodies perfectly camouflaged against the black lava rocks. As ectothermic reptiles, they rely on external heat to regulate their body temperature. This is particularly important as they dive into the cold waters surrounding the archipelago to forage, primarily on marine algae. I followed this individual into the water and watched with fascination as it propelled itself swiftly and purposefully through the powerful surf with the aid of its muscular tail. While I was tossed about by the waves, the marine iguana clung firmly to a rock with its sharp claws and began methodically grazing on algae.”
Sky Surfer. Highly Commended, Birds. “Each March, tens of thousands of seabirds return to the windswept Arctic island of Hornøya in the Barents Sea for the breeding season. This was my third consecutive visit, as in previous years I had missed this highly synchronized migration event—an experience I was determined to witness at least once. This time, everything came together. The deafening calls and the swirling movements of immense flocks passing just a few meters overhead were truly breathtaking. European shags (Phalacrocorax aristotelis) are giants compared to the smaller auks, and as I watched them weaving through the fast-moving streams of common guillemots (Uria aalge), I realised there was potential for a striking and dynamic image. When a shag came in to land, perfectly framed by countless guillemots, I was finally able to capture the photograph I had long envisioned.”
Hidden Worlds. Overall Winner. “I have been photographing hibernating bats for 13 years in restricted-access mine tunnels in the Börzsöny mountains of Hungary, and yet this particular composition was novel for me. A key characteristic of the lesser horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus hipposideros) is that, during hibernation it occasionally wakes and leaves its roost to hunt flying insects. In doing so, the bat leaves behind droppings that gradually accumulate into a continuous dark layer. And this is where the real wonder begins: in the beam of a torch, a whitish coating can be seen on the guano—a small pin mold thriving in this unusual habitat. Using a macro lens, I captured the mold in the foreground with the hibernating bats visible in the background.”
Exit Stage Right. Highly Commended, Mammals. “End of a performance in Lake Clark National Park, Alaska: The scene is over, and the grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) has had its moment in the spotlight. The animal leaves the stage without a bow, without a backward glance. Fog hangs like a flowing curtain, and the bokeh glows like fading stage lights. A gull remains behind, watching the main actor’s exit and perhaps wondering what it should do next.”
Secret Paths. Winner, Birds. “During moult, common cranes (Grus grus) lose all their flight feathers at once, rendering them earthbound for several weeks. During this period, they remain extremely vigilant and usually hide in wet forests where they can find food. At dawn, the cranes walk from their roosting sites via secret paths through reed beds to their feeding grounds and typically return via the same route.”
Tiny Giants. Highly Commended, Mammals. “This photograph was taken using a drone near the Ilulissat Icefjord on the west coast of Greenland. It shows two humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) swimming among drifting ice floes and towering icebergs. The drone was deliberately flown at a higher altitude to place the whales in the context of the wider landscape and to convey the immense scale of their Arctic habitat.”
Microcosm. Highly Commended, Other Animals. “Sunlight transforms the underside of a fungus (Pluteus atrotomentosus) into an architectural masterpiece—a tiny illuminated cathedral. Photographed from an extremely low point of view on the forest floor of Mount Olympus in Greece, the scene takes on an unexpected sense of scale and drama. Beneath the glowing gills, an ant makes its way across the fungus, a subtle reminder of the microfauna that inhabits these miniature worlds.”
Helping Hands. Runner-up, Humans and Nature. “During the mating season, capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus) sometimes lose their wariness of people, seeing them instead as rivals. That is exactly what happened at a ski resort near my home, where a capercaillie took up position on the ski slope every day throughout the lekking season to defend his patch. The bird soon became something of a local celebrity, even making the news, and crowds came daily to watch and film him. Then, one day, a ski race was held—and the bird chose the middle of the course to display. Not the safest spot. Several people stepped in, gently steering him behind the safety fence and out of harm’s way. A year later, the same bird was accidentally killed by a skier who failed to notice it. Some people care. Others simply don’t.”
Furry Ghost. Highly Commended, Other Animals. “During a nighttime photography expedition along the coast of Sardinia, I discovered this fluorescent hairy crab (Pilumnus sp.) in a rock pool, glowing in the beam of my UV torch like a shaggy ghost in the darkness.”
Rain of Fire. Highly Commended, Nature’s Studio. “During a volcanic eruption, molten lava is thrown out into the dark of night. The glowing arcs trace the paths of liquid rock, hurled skyward by explosive degassing. Shot as a long exposure from a safe distance, these natural movements appear as energy-charged lines. In the lower part of the frame, the ejected fragments cool and begin to solidify within seconds, laying down new crust.”
The Cat and a Thousand Lanterns. Winner, Mammals. “In the wild, romantic mountain landscape of Alto Mugello, Italy, a European wildcat (Felis silvestris) moves silently through the night, framed by the ethereal dance of countless fireflies. Capturing this fleeting encounter required months of preparation and an almost invisible photographic setup: a DSLR camera trap installed with meticulous care to ensure that the wildlife remained entirely undisturbed.”
Be sure to visit the GDT’s website for full coverage of the winners and honorees.
Earlier this month the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Willy Rice, called on pastors to “step up” their political activism as the midterm elections draw near. His argument is that many political issues are, at their heart, moral and theological issues that “strike at the very center of what we believe to be true and what we believe people need to know in order to flourish personally and as a culture.”
Rice named four specific issues: abortion, the redefinition of marriage, transgender identity, and illegal immigration. These are the topics that fundamentalists and evangelicals most often invoke as nonnegotiable biblical imperatives, and they are treated as tests of faithfulness. The list is so widely accepted within these subcultures that it is hardly ever questioned.
The question worth asking is not why Rice and so many other Christians focus on these issues—some of which, including abortion, I have written about and take seriously—but why they focus on them to the exclusion of others. The answer might tell us something important about what presently stirs fundamentalists and evangelicals to political action and what leaves them unmoved.
Rice insists that the issues he prioritizes have to do with human flourishing. He believes that Christians have an obligation to speak out about political and cultural matters that intersect with scriptural truth, morality, and a biblical ethic. And he would insist that the Bible defines his politics, not the other way around. But is that actually true?
In addition to the issues on which he chooses to focus, there are others on which Rice and many of those who share his worldview have been silent. Why, for example, have pastors and other Christian leaders who insist that they care about human life and flourishing not spoken out against the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, carried out by DOGE, and the disruption of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief?
According to modeling estimates by Boston University’s Brooke Nichols, in the first year alone these cuts had resulted in more than three-quarters of a million deaths, more than 500,000 of them children. A study in The Lancet projected that if the USAID cuts are not reversed, they could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including some 4.5 million children under age 5. Might not those who claim to be shaped by a Jesus ethic want to speak out and make global development a first-order concern rather than an afterthought?
Bono, the lead singer of U2 and himself a Christian, cited the Lancet study in a recent interview with TheNew York Times. “Let’s say they’re half wrong,” he said. “What Christian household, what Catholic household, what Jewish household, anyone of faith, in fact anyone of conscience, would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen as a result of these DOGE cuts? It’s unconscionable.”
The answer to Bono’s haunting question—Who would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen?—is Christians all across America.
Why the silence?
One could ask the same question about other issues. For example, since 1980, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has offered a home to people fleeing war and persecution, many of them Christians. On the first day of his second term, President Trump suspended the program. He then set the refugee ceiling for fiscal year 2026 at a record-low of 7,500, later raising it to 17,500 under an emergency determination but reserving nearly all of those slots for white South Africans, whose claims of persecution are disputed by many independent observers. Meanwhile, Christians facing some of the world’s most severe persecution, in countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, and Burma, are largely shut out. The ceiling for fiscal year 2027 remains 17,500, and has the same priority. In 2024, by contrast, the United States resettled more than 100,000 refugees.
The president of World Relief, an evangelical humanitarian organization, called the policy “heartbreaking.” He warned that the U.S. has “effectively abandoned” those fleeing horrific religious persecution. Yet very few Christians have said anything about this.
Silence has also been the reaction to the assault on medical research. According to Grant Witness, which tracks the federal government’s cancellations and reinstatements of research grants at agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, more than 5,700 NIH grants, with a total value of $15 billion, have been disrupted since April 2025. This includes scores of grants for research on cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, which touch countless families in congregations all across America. Many of those grants were eventually reinstated, but massive harm was done. Some trials can’t be completed, because of the loss of follow-up data; many research groups that come apart can’t be reassembled.
Now, ask yourself this: Why don’t these three issues—saving the lives of the world’s poorest children, offering refuge to those fleeing war and persecution, and advancing the research that brings healing to the sick—occupy more attention of politically active Christians? After all, these are not peripheral concerns; they go to the essence of what mattered to Jesus. He told his followers that whatever they did for “the least of these,” they did for him. He counted welcoming the stranger among such acts, and he spent much of his ministry healing the sick and relieving suffering.
I don’t claim that these three issues exhaust the concerns Christians should bring to public life, or that mine is the only faithful way to rank them. Thoughtful Christians will weigh things differently. But measured by the lives that could be saved, sheltered, and healed, I do think there is a strong case that they belong near the top of any list shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus.
That they so rarely make the list at all shows how deeply the grooves of decades of political activism have been worn. Some issues command instant attention, but others barely register. If Christians were willing to step out of those grooves, even for a moment, they would see how much good could be achieved. Lives could be saved through global health programs, families could find refuge and a new beginning, and cures could come for diseases that inflict suffering on countless people. The question is not whether the Bible speaks to matters of justice and healing. “Nothing about Jesus is more certain historically than that he healed,” the novelist and Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner wrote. It is whether Christians will let Jesus’s ethic define our politics.
So what explains this selectivity in deciding which political issues have a claim on the Christian conscience? The answer involves a complex mix of factors. One is the vivifying effect of being part of a culture war. Many Christians feel that they are engaged in a righteous struggle against a secular culture that they believe holds them in contempt. Some of their concerns are real and held in good faith: about religious liberty, the protection of unborn life, and the health of families. But the culture wars also offer a black-and-white, us-versus-them moral framework that is especially appealing to people who feel culturally displaced. Saving children in sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t carry the same drama; there is no progressive enemy to defeat.
Another factor is an entire media and institutional ecosystem that has every worldly incentive to focus relentlessly on cultural flashpoints, because doing so raises money and drives viewership, clicks, and engagement. Distance plays its own role too. Many people dying from preventable diseases live thousands of miles away. Global health lacks the emotional urgency of social issues that play out close to home.
Partisanship also plays a huge part. Political scientists such as Ryan Burge and Michele Margolis argue that, for many white evangelicals, party identity now drives which issues feel religiously urgent. “Politics has become the master identity,” according to Burge. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.” Even the teachings of Jesus.
The problem runs deeper than issue selection, though. It extends to how scripture itself is interpreted. Many Christians read the Bible through a set of political and cultural assumptions and then present the results as authoritatively “biblical.” The Bible is used to ratify views held for reasons that have little to do with faith.
All of us, to varying degrees, are guilty of this. No one has ever read the Bible unfiltered; everyone interprets it. How we do so is shaped by the traditions we embrace—Southern Baptist, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, nondenominationalism, Calvinism, Arminianism, fundamentalism, progressivism—and by much else besides.
Our family’s origins; the era in which we live; and our nationality, temperament, education, social circles, and psychological makeup shape what we are able to see and not see, and how we process the world. We bring our life experiences and our mental maps to the biblical text, as we do to everything else. The same passage speaks differently to a person in the fourth century or the 14th century than it does to someone in the 21st century, and it speaks differently to every person in the same pew.
In Galileo’s day, Christians read Psalm 93:1—“the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved”—as a literal statement that the Earth does not move, and the verse was invoked against the idea that it orbits the sun. Virtually no Christian reads it that way today. The text did not change; our knowledge of the world did.
The same is true of slavery. For most of Christian history, the institution itself went largely unchallenged. Christians criticized particular abuses and particular forms of enslavement, but rarely slavery per se. The most remarkable exception, a fourth-century sermon on Ecclesiastes by Gregory of Nyssa condemning slaveholding outright, had little lasting influence. The first denomination to formally condemn slaveholding was the Quakers, in 1776, more than 1,700 years after Jesus taught his followers to do unto others as they would have others do unto them. The Southern Baptist Convention itself was founded in 1845 in part to defend slaveholding, which its founders insisted that the Bible plainly permitted. The SBC took 150 years to formally repent that history.
Every reading of the Bible, and every conception of God, is to some significant degree culturally conditioned. This is a basic reality, and it was true even of the biblical writers, who wrote in the languages, genres, and assumptions of their own times. “If we are to speak of God giving the Scriptures to people,” the eminent Bible scholar John Barton has written, “it can only be in and through the human process.” None of this diminishes Scripture. God’s choice to collaborate with human beings dignifies them in a way that treating them as stenographers would not. The problem, then, comes not from our reading being shaped by our time and place, which is unavoidable, but from failing to acknowledge it.
This unwillingness comes from an understandable place. Many Christians fear that conceding the existence of cultural conditioning invites subjectivity into interpretation. But subjectivity is already there; the only question is whether we admit it. Pretending otherwise doesn’t eliminate our biases. It simply hides them, and in doing so makes interpretive mistakes much harder to correct.
Part of what makes our own subjectivity so hard to see is a belief, common in many Christian communities, that the Bible is almost entirely self-evident. A friend who attended a respected evangelical seminary once told me that 95 percent or more of scripture is clear—not difficult, not complicated, plain on its face to anyone who reads it. If that is true, then most disagreements are not good-faith differences over interpretation; they are matters of willful blindness or disobedience. If one’s own reading is simply what the Bible says, then anyone who reads it differently is rejecting God’s word.
This mindset has done enormous damage, turning honest disagreements into loyalty tests, dividing churches, and telling believers who have difficult questions that they must choose between them and their faith. And at times, it has led to far worse.
When people are certain that their reading is simply God’s truth, dissent becomes more than a mistake. It can be seen as a grave error that needs to be punished. As great a figure as Augustine defended the state’s coercion of the Donatists, a schismatic sect, and used verses from the Gospel of Luke to justify it. Thomas Aquinas went further, holding that heretics who persisted after receiving repeated warnings could rightly be handed over to the state “to be exterminated from the world by death.”
Centuries later, Voltaire fiercely criticized the intolerance and cruelty that this outlook had produced. In 1766, a 20-year-old French nobleman, the Chevalier de La Barre, was accused of failing to remove his hat as a religious procession passed, singing impious songs, and damaging a wooden crucifix. He was tortured and beheaded, and his body was burned at the stake along with a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique nailed to his chest.
The claim that the Bible’s teachings on important matters are clear and obvious is belied by the fact that, as the Bible scholar Kenton Sparks and the sociologist Christian Smith have documented, nearly every significant interpretive question yields a variety of readings. Devout Christians have reached different conclusions on baptism, church governance, the Lord’s Supper, and whether the miraculous spiritual gifts have ceased. There are disagreements about the end-times, the nature of the atonement, the role of women in ministry, the balance between works and grace, and whether Genesis offers a literal or figurative account of creation. There are differences over pacifism and just war, how to understand predestination and free will, whether a person can lose their salvation, the age of the Earth, and the nature of heaven and hell. There are thousands of Christian denominations, many of them born of disputes over what scripture teaches. As William Blake put it, “Both read the Bible day and night, / But thou read’st black where I read white.”
The apostle Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, said that “now we see through a glass, darkly.” If that was true of Paul, it is surely true of the rest of us.
None of what I’m arguing here means that all readings of the Bible are equally valid, or that some interpretive approaches don’t bring readers closer to the Bible’s truths than others. The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood what Jesus asked of his followers far better than did Ludwig Müller, the leader of the state-controlled Protestant Reich Church in Nazi Germany. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s views on slavery were much closer to the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount than were those of James Henley Thornwell, the South Carolina Presbyterian theologian who argued that slavery was part of God’s divinely ordained social order. The political theology of former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, which sees the Church as a witness within a plural society rather than a power over it, reflects the way of Jesus more faithfully than does that of Doug Wilson, a leading proponent of Christian nationalism who calls for “mere Christendom.” No one can begin to remotely comprehend the ways and words of a God who created the heavens and the Earth and a reality beyond time. But some come closer than others.
One of the things that I see more clearly now than I did when I was younger is that discernment matters at least as much as familiarity with Bible verses. It is an immensely important virtue, and an underrated one. Discernment encompasses wisdom, and it protects us from distorting scripture, which is what Satan did in the wilderness when he quoted the Psalms to tempt Jesus, getting the words right and the meaning wrong. Discernment allows us to look beneath the words to grasp their purpose. It is not primarily an intellectual skill, though intellect is involved; it is formed by practice and character, as the writer of Hebrews says of those whose powers of discernment have been “trained by constant practice.” It helps us perceive reality and understand what the moment requires of a faithful person.
Discernment also requires humility, a willingness to learn from others rather than merely argue with them, in the conviction that “iron sharpens iron” and that no one sees the whole truth alone. Humility keeps our views open to refinement. But it rarely comes easily, especially for those raised in faith communities that prize certainty.
“When you grow up believing that your religious worldview contains the key to absolute truth and provides an answer to every question,” the Christian author Rachel Held Evans wrote, “you never really get over the disappointment of learning that it doesn’t.”
The philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart, in his bookAtheist Delusions, writes about the extraordinary revision of the moral and conceptual categories brought about by early Christianity. According to Hart, there emerged from darkness into full visibility “the human person as such, invested with an intrinsic and inviolable dignity, and possessed of infinite value.”
A lot has gone wrong in Christian history, and a lot has gone wrong in the here and now. Christianity can be a faith of serrated edges. So many people have been wounded in the name of Jesus. And yet there remains, for those of the Christian faith, the true Jesus—himself a God of wounds, a person of incomprehensible moral beauty who came not to judge the world but to save it. If Christians are going to be active in public life, we would all do well to choose for our master identity Jesus over the gods of this world, who sanctify our political views and the hatreds that fuel them.
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