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.”
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