CASA DEL SOLE TV — Informazione libera e indipendente Il nostro lavoro è possibile solo grazie al vostro sostegno. Casa del Sole TV non ha editori forti né finanziamenti pubblici: siamo sostenuti da voi, il nostro pubblico. Se credi nel valore di un’informazione che non tace, aiutaci a continuare. Dona tramite bonifico bancario: IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: LA CASA DEL SOLE EDIZIONI Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV Dona tramite PayPal: paypal.me/casadelsoletv Sostegno ricorrente: casadelsole.tv/sostienici Anche un piccolo contributo fa la differenza. Grazie di cuore!
Reflect Orbital continues to make progress on placing giant mirrors in Earth orbit to produce and sell sunlight after dark. On October 10, the space startup set up spotlights near Lone Pine, California to simulate the illumination its proposed satellites could provide. The plan by Reflect Orbital is to build and operate orbital mirrors that […]
One of the paradoxes of our moment is that the excesses of Donald Trump’s presidency seem to demand our obsessive attention, while Trump himself obviously thrives on that attention—and all of the social division that comes with it. What if the clearest way out of our political crisis is taking politics less seriously? In this episode of The Permanent Questions, David Brooks speaks with his old friend (and new boss), Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, about the pleasures and pitfalls of a life spent covering politicians, the limits of partisanship, and the need to see life from the redwood’s perspective.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Brooks: Our topic today is politics. What role should politics play in your life? How much of your spiritual, emotional, and mental energy should you devote to politics?
Now, I am something of a political junkie. I grew up as a political correspondent covering people, and I can say there’s nothing more fun in journalism than going to a rally in Iowa or New Hampshire or anywhere people are campaigning, talking with the folks, watching them scream, watching the passion. It’s just Americana in all its glory, both good and bad.
So I really care about politics. I really care about politicians. I admire them in general. They’re good people in rotten circumstances. And yet I also feel that we’ve over-politicized our society. Everything is red or blue. Where you live is red or blue. What car you drive is determined by red or blue. The TV shows you watch are determined by red or blue. Who you marry and befriend, how you think about the WNBA.
When you make politics your religion, you think you have a sense of belonging, but you really don’t. You’re not sitting with your community members; you’re just hating the same people. You have the illusion of righteous action. You’re doing something good for the country. But you’re not feeding the poor or sitting with the widow; you’re just hating people on social media. It gives you the illusion of all the things that you get in a real community or a real faith or a real philosophy, but you just end up in a cultural war.
I’m trying to figure out: How do I care about politics without over-caring?
My guest today is Jeffrey Goldberg. You probably know him as the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine. As you watch or listen to this conversation, you will notice that Jeff and I know each other. We’ve known each other for 25 years. You’ll see that we have, as all old friends do, a certain way of talking to each other. We have a certain banter, which involves a lot of interruption. That’s our conversational style.
What you are about to witness is us at our most slow paced, our most earnest, our most serious. Jeff and I will be talking about what role politics should play in our lives. But in order to get there, I thought we’d compare notes about our careers, the politicians we’ve covered, what we’ve thought about them, what’s been important, what’s been unimportant.
Jeffrey Goldberg, welcome to The Permanent Questions.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Thank you.
Brooks: This must be—
Goldberg: I’m very wary.
Brooks: —a thrill for you. You do edit a magazine, you’ve won some prizes, but this really is pretty much the pinnacle of your career.
Goldberg: You know, I applied to Yale, and I got rejected. I didn’t even get wait-listed. They were just like, “What, are you joking?” So I consider this getting into Yale. Aren’t you a professor at Yale?
Brooks: I’m a faculty member at Yale.
Goldberg: What does that mean? What’s the difference between a professor and a faculty member?
Brooks: Professors know what they’re talking about.
Goldberg: Good one.
Brooks: We’re going to talk politics, if we can get on track here, which is highly unlikely.
Goldberg: It’s really deeply unlikely.
Brooks: We’ve spent our lives covering this stuff.
Goldberg: Isn’t that sad?
Brooks: I know. So I’m gonna ask you, I want to get your political origin story.
Goldberg: My political origin story?
Brooks: When did you first have a brush with politics?
Goldberg: My first brush with politics was when, as a 2-year-old, I urinated on Al Shanker’s lap.
Do you remember Al Shanker?
Brooks: Of course. He was head of the American Federation of Teachers.
Goldberg: He led the 1968 teachers’ strike. My father was one of the leaders of the teachers’ strike. And the story is told that they were having a meeting in their Brooklyn apartment, and I was seated on Al Shanker’s lap, and I pissed all over him.
Brooks: Really?
Goldberg: I grew up in that kind of household with posters on the wall with quotes: “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.” That was by the bathroom, I remember.
Brooks: I had a similar upbringing, weirdly.
Goldberg: It’s not that weird, actually.
Brooks: My parents volunteered for Ed Koch back when he was a liberal member of Congress.
Goldberg: He was a liberal reformer. He was fighting Carmine DeSapio and the remnants of the Tammany machine.
Brooks: I think also Watergate—I don’t know, I’m slightly older than you, but when I saw the Watergate hearings, I thought, That is so cool., I wanted to be—I was on the side of G. Gordon Liddy and the Watergate co-conspirators.
Goldberg: I have recollections of it being on constantly in the house. And just a general and deep loathing of Nixon in the cohort of my parents and their friends, which later on I realized was overdone. I don’t take the Lynyrd Skynyrd position on Watergate. But—
Brooks: Wait, what is the Lynyrd Skynyrd position?
Goldberg: “Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you?” But I just think Nixon is much more interesting. In the full light of what we know now about the possibilities in American politics, I think Nixon is a very interesting character. But at the time, he was Satan incarnate, which is kind of funny in retrospect.
Brooks: Now, did you have heroes? I remember when I got a little older, and I became more politically aware, when I was in high school—this is the kind of kid I was—I had a Hubert Humphrey poster on my wall. It was not Joe Namath or Tom Seaver.
Goldberg: You’re such a loser.
Brooks: It was Hubert Humphrey. But it had the saying: “Some people talk change. Others cause it.” And I knew even then I wanted to be the kind of person who only talks.
Goldberg: Some people just don’t even open their mouths. They just think about it.
Brooks: I was like a mainstream Democrat. Scoop Jackson was big in our household, and Birch Bayh.
Goldberg: Scoop Jackson became a hero of mine later, in college, but not then.
I think I was just very, very influenced by what was hanging on the walls of the house. There was a famous, very moody photo of JFK and RFK consulting with each other.
Brooks: One difference between us: I’ve always had a political ideology. I’ve always had a label that I’ve labeled myself. When I was a kid—or in college, even, I was a socialist. I had read John Reed.
Goldberg: Who wasn’t, though? You read John Reed?
Brooks: Yeah, he wrote a book called Ten Days That Shook the World.
Goldberg: I just waited for the movie. I watched the Warren Beatty movie.
Brooks: Yeah, there’s a movie called Reds—Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton—which was one of my favorite movies. I was like, “Yeah, revolution.” And I loved The Communist Manifesto.
Goldberg: Wait, how could a Hubert Humphrey poster and The Communist Manifesto coexist?
Brooks: Because I swung left in college. I just hung out in the library. I didn’t go to classes. I just hung out. And I read a magazine called the New Masses, which was a communist magazine from the 1920s and ’30s. I became in love with magazines.
There was a historian named Richard Pells, who basically argued that all of human history is controlled by The New Republic, and he covered American history as if it was The New Republic. So it gave me the conviction, which I have to this day, that ideas matter more than anything else in politics, and that small magazines in particular drive the intellectual debate.
Goldberg: It’s funny, I read the Old Masses, which was a pro-Cossack magazine, at the same time.
Brooks: Lessons on how to chase down Jews. (Laughs.)
Goldberg: I’m a reporter. I’m not like you. I didn’t read the New Masses.
Although I did go to the library and read a lot of magazines. I read The New Republic, definitely. I wasn’t really a New Yorker guy or an Atlantic guy. More Atlantic in high school than New Yorker. But I was definitely—when I started reading The New Republic, and I guess this was the Kinsley era, so after college, I really had this kind of feeling. I was like, “Who are these people? How do they know so much? Why do these words shine off the page?”
Brooks: Was it my writing that caused this a lot?
Goldberg: I didn’t remember your pieces personally. I’m sure someone read them, but it wasn’t me. You wrote for The New Republic in that period?
Brooks: Occasional freelance. I was more a National Review guy.
Goldberg: I read the National Review just because I just went for—this is sort of the way I am, I guess, why I fell into magazines—I would privilege in my mind good writing over almost anything.
That’s why George Will’s my favorite columnist. I don’t agree with him on everything, but the man can write. I mean, next to you, he’s my favorite. But you’re not a columnist anymore; you’re more of a video personality.
Brooks: I’m a talk show host. I’m a game show host. Bob Barker.
Goldberg: You’re like Phil Donahue. You’re not going to ask me about my feelings in this session?
Brooks: No, don’t worry. I’m going to your intellectual life. That void is big enough.
Goldberg: Yes, it is. (Laughs.)
I’ve written about this; it’s no secret. I was a self-identified socialist Zionist at 15. Actually, this is true: With a group of friends, we once marched in St. Mark’s Place, in the village. We once were at a rally carrying the banner “Socialist Zionists for Animal Rights.” Huge constituency.
Brooks: Now did you ever have a book or an event that shifted your political view?
Goldberg:Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. I’m serious.
Brooks: Is that true, really?
Goldberg: Yeah, I became a vegetarian out of that, until I realized that I really like hamburgers too much.
I read deeply in socialist theory and Zionist theory, and there was a kind of almost Bolshevik inevitability to my early path. I ended up living on a kibbutz that was still organized like a kibbutz in the kind of collectivized sense. And then I realized that socialism is ridiculous.
Brooks: For what reason?
Irving Kristol went to the army and decided if we became socialists, the people he was serving with would turn it into a racket. So he said, “Oh, I can’t be for socialism.”
Goldberg: It just seemed to go against—I mean, I’m making a very broad statement here—human nature. People like things. They like to acquire things, like to acquire status. You can tell them, “That’s wrong. Don't be like that.” But I’m also like that. I like to have acquisitions. I like to collect things. I like the material world also. And I like to see people being rewarded for working harder than other people. I believe in equality, but I don’t believe in equity in the sense that I don’t think that people are born with the same level of skill.
Maybe I’m straying too far away from the point of this. What is the point of this session?
Brooks: The role politics plays in your life. But we’re starting out with the ideas of politics.
Goldberg: There just seems something unnatural about socialism, this overwhelming desire. It seemed resentment based a little bit too much for me. “There should be no such thing as a billionaire”—I’m not in that camp. I’m in the camp that there should be a lot of millionaires. I don’t want to cap anybody’s success. I would bring the floor up.
I don’t think that makes me a socialist or a Democratic socialist. I think this makes me a common-sense, non-cruel believer in some kind of meritocratic possibility.
Brooks: It’s somewhat similar. I read Edmund Burke in college, and that was a shock. He just said: The world’s really complicated. If you think you socialists can plan reality, good luck with that.
Goldberg: Socialism doesn’t survive first contact with humans and all of their ridiculous complexity.
Brooks: And a lot of my heroes became the neoconservatives, like Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. They were lefties who grew up in Brooklyn, but they also grew up immigrant kids, and they looked at their parents and how they had made it in America, and it was hard work. It was bourgeois values. It was education. And they looked at the hippies and think, What are you guys doing?
Goldberg: They’re destroying, because they could either make or destroy, and so they were in the destruction phase.
Brooks: We both, early in our careers—you way more than me—reported from abroad. I was abroad basically the first six years of the ’90s.
Goldberg: And you count Belgium as abroad, don’t you?
Brooks: I was covering the Soviet Union—that’s abroad. I was covering South Africa—that's abroad. I was covering the Middle East.
Goldberg: Yeah, that’s true.
Brooks: These are abroad places.
Goldberg: Those are abroad.
Brooks: As far as I know. I wasn’t in Greenland, like most parts of America.
Goldberg: I mean, I’m just saying that, you know, Brussels is not—
Brooks: Okay, Mr. Obscure Foreign Correspondent.
Goldberg: I’m just saying, it’s a direct flight. Anything with a direct flight …
Brooks: That’s fine.
Goldberg: And a wide selection of cheese ...
Brooks: To me it was the daring adventures with waffles. That’s what I had in Brussels.
Did you have your worldview shaped by events—as you call them—abroad, where there’s no direct flights?
Goldberg: The first thing I think of is coming home from Pakistan. I spent part of the late ’90s, early 2000, up to 9/11, going in and out of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I don’t think I’ve ever really articulated this before, but part of my belief system is that America is better than any other place.
I’m American. I love America. I recognize all the flaws, especially right now, but I’m American. Another observation I would make—these all kind of marry up—is that there’s too many journalists in America, or commentators or whatever you wanna call them, who see America as the locus of evil in the world, and that everything that happens in the world that’s bad is somehow caused, directly or indirectly, by the United States. And I just don’t buy that.
Does that send me down a more conservative pathway? In one superficial sense. But I think that the broadening experience of seeing how tens of millions of people live and realizing that we built something pretty good for ourselves gave me some perspective and some appreciation that sometimes, let’s say, people who come out of the Ivy League don’t really have.
They think that America is the locus of all bad in the world, and I have no patience for that anymore.
Brooks: You had a much more—
Goldberg: I’m not saying things are going so great, by the way.
Brooks: I just want to establish that, just to show that we’ve spent our lives on the importance of politics, both foreign and domestic. And I really care about politics.
I think that my favorite person I ever covered was John McCain.
Goldberg: Yeah, probably me too. Just to be around him.
Brooks: He was just so much fun. People forget that. He took me to casinos to teach me how to play craps.
Goldberg: He once introduced me to a group of Hungarian right-wingers as, “This is Jeff Goldberg. He’s a communist reporter.” You know? Whatever happens, happens. And I was like, “Jesus, man. Will you just stop?”
Brooks: But I ask you all this because we’ve spent a lot of our life in politics. And obviously politics matters a lot, both foreign and domestic.
Goldberg: Or does it?
Brooks: I’m now of a mood that we’re over-politicized as a country. I have this line: “We’re over-politicized and under-moralized.” We spend too much time paying attention to whatever cable TV is covering that particular hour and less about the things that really matter.
Goldberg: When you say “we,” what do you mean?
Brooks: We as a national society.
Goldberg: I don’t know about that. If you add up all the people who watch cable news, it adds up to a very, very small percentage of the American population.
I think most people aren’t, and most people are probably healthier than the people who do pay inordinate attention to politics or are involved in politics. Is the reality the general perception of reality, or is the reality something deeper? I do think that most people in America don’t pay day-to-day attention to it. We’re just around people who do.
If you’re asking in my own life, I’ve come to realize—here’s where everybody quotes the late Breitbart: We all understand now that “politics is downstream from culture.” But I would say that, especially now, culture is downstream from psychiatry and theology and tribalism and anxiety and resentment and a whole basket of sometimes inchoate human impulses and emotions that are buried deep in our lizard brains. You know what I mean?
To go upstream, you’ve got to be a salmon now in politics, if you’re writing about politics, and go as far upstream as you can go. That’s where you’re going to find out some possibly meaningful truths.
Brooks: I agree with Breitbart, though I should say Gramsci got there first, and a lot of people wrote about culture first.
Goldberg: Your old socialist roots coming out.
Brooks: My theory is that people are emotionally and spiritually quite disturbed right now, and they don’t go to church, and so politics has become the religion for a lot of people.
Goldberg: That’s why I stopped a long time ago falling in love with politicians. Because falling in love with anything human—any movement or anything that’s human created—is going to lead to disappointment.
I don’t mean falling in love with a human. You know my wife. She’s perfect.
Brooks: She’s now throwing her shoes at you, metaphorically.
Goldberg: I don’t know if she listens to your podcast.
Brooks: I’ll send her this part.
Goldberg: She knows you. She can just call you if she has to find out what you’re thinking at any given moment.
There are humans I love. But humans involved in public life who you fall in love with—that’s bad.
Brooks: I don’t know if I agree with that. I was deep into McCain and Obama.
Goldberg: Is there any politician who hasn’t disappointed you in some way in your 80 years in politics?
Brooks: All people except my kids and my wife have disappointed me, except my boss has never disappointed me.
Goldberg: Your new boss, not the old boss. The old bosses were terrible.
Brooks: But I’ve still gotten enthusiastic about various campaigns. It really mattered to me that Obama, McCain—the 2008 election was really tough on me, because I admire these two guys the most.
Goldberg: I wish they could’ve run the country together. If you melded some of McCain’s instincts and impulses with Obama’s thoughtfulness and analytical heft, you would’ve had a really interesting president.
Brooks: They would’ve killed each other.
Goldberg: No, I mean, in the one person, if you could just combine that.
David Brooks: I still want to believe in politics, and I still do believe in it. And I think most politicians are in it for the right reasons. The problem comes to me when people say they wouldn’t marry somebody from the other party, and that’s a very high percentage right now.
Goldberg: This is why religion is important. One of the many reasons religion is important. It says that humans are limited. Humans are broken, and humans are deeply imperfect. Any system of thought that demands some level of humility …
This is what I can’t stand about politics—the certainty of everybody. Because everybody needs religion. Human beings need religion. Some people just make politics their religion.
Brooks: My argument is that it gives you the simulation of religion without the actual religion. It gives you a simulation that you belong to a group, but you’re not really in a community. You’re just hating the same people.
Goldberg: You’re not in a community, and you’re accepting only half of what religion has to offer. You engage in judgment, but you don't really engage in mercy. That’s what our politics is like. It’s judgment without mercy.
It matters to me so little now what a person’s positions are on a set of issues compared to their character and to their core beliefs about themselves, their family, their community, their country, the world system that we have.
I don’t care that much if someone believes X about Y bill.
Brooks: This is why I think being over-politicized is not just a small group of people. I think what you just expressed—another way to say it is when you're looking at a candidate, the first lens is: Are they a good person? Are they a trustworthy human being?
Goldberg: Are they mentally stable?
Brooks: That would be nice.
Goldberg: I like to look at someone who’s committed to his or her family.
Brooks: And also, do they have good judgment? A lot of politics is just looking at the world, seeing what matters here. The third lens should be: Do they agree with me? Are they on my team?
But if you look at, say, the Texas primary race, where Ken Paxton beat John Cornyn, I don’t think people are applying the character frame or the judgment frame. They’re applying the partisanship lens.
Then for the Democrats, Graham Platner up in Maine. Even after a lot of his scandals got out, a lot of Democrats were willing to stay because he’s on the team.
Goldberg: This is a cliche already, but partisanship does make you stupid. Partisanship, excessive partisanship especially, turns you into a robot. Or, put it this way: It turns you tribal. What’s amusing, leftists who believe in universal principles and universalism get pretty tribal as well. Tribalism makes you kind of dumb.
Brooks: Have you lost friends over Trump?
Goldberg: Have I lost friends over Trump?
You’re assuming that I have friends and not a series of shifting alliances.
Brooks: Well, we’re momentarily friends.
Goldberg: Again, shifting alliances.
Have I lost friends over Trump? No.
I have more Republican friends than the average Washington-based “mainstream” journalist, but my Republican friends are disproportionately anti-Trumpers who’ve become so committed to it. It’s like, all right already with Trump. You know what I mean?
It’s funny. This is a possible insight into The Atlantic. The Atlantic is meant to be the magazine of the American idea. The American idea posits that you have a strong liberal group and a strong conservative group battling it out in public for primacy of their ideas, and you have to convince the public that your ideas are right.
I think it’s very important to have conservatives and liberals writing and arguing in the pages of The Atlantic. So I try to get as many conservatives as we can. Unfortunately, all they want to do is write about Trump. Every so often I have to remind a conservative writer, “Can you just come out against abortion randomly or something to remind our readers that you have positions?”
I understand how personal it is for them. I understand what it must be like to see the party that they believed in become a cult of personality around an individual, rather than a place for the ventilation of conservative ideas.
Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent, but that’s a long way of saying: I can’t say I lost friends over that.
Brooks: I don’t believe in losing friends over politics. I just think that’s a misalignment.
Goldberg: Well, it doesn’t really matter what you believe. It matters what your friends believe.
Brooks: I grew up in the conservative movement, so I have a lot of conservative friends. I have conservative family members—MAGA conservative types. And they’ll occasionally say, “How much do I have to pay you to stop writing?” They don’t like what I write, but we have fun with it, and we argue all the time about it.
Goldberg: Here’s the thing. This is what makes me most nervous about America. The thing that will keep the United States united is nothing more and nothing less than the ability, the willingness, of Americans to consciously impose restraints on themselves. Restraints on how far they will go, rhetorically and otherwise, to express their differences with their fellow Americans.
You have to start from a position: No American is my enemy. I don’t have to like him, I don’t have to agree with him, but no American is my—I mean, the way Trump talks about enemies of the people is obviously horrible—enemy. And I will impose restraints on myself. I have the First Amendment right to say whatever I want, but I don’t need to exercise that right to the detriment of the American project.
That’s how we get out of this. We don’t get out of it through legislation, we don’t get out of it through constitutional amendment, we don’t get out of it through demography. We get out of it because people decide that more unites us than divides us.
Brooks: I used to think we needed a war against Canada, but now we may actually get a war against Canada.
Goldberg: I think that the liberals, for good reason, would be like, “Why are we having a war against”—I mean if Canada, like, sucker punched us. Martians maybe.
Brooks: I just mean some common foe. Martians would be a good one.
Goldberg: But I think it’s almost deeper than that. In the Middle East, there’s very obvious existential wars. We don’t have—there’s very little chance that China just attacks the United States in a Pearl Harbor–style way.
China might very well attack Taiwan, and that causes a huge discussion in the American public about: Do we defend or do we not defend? But I don’t see an outside party coming in and unifying the American people in the way that the shock of Pearl Harbor unified the American people.
Brooks: I would go back to what we talked about earlier. My experience in the ’90s abroad made me so pro-American. I just love all Americans. You can’t love America and hate half the country. I love going to Trump areas, I love going to—Brooklyn I have problems with, but—
Goldberg: Depends on what part of Brooklyn. Brooklyn is wildly diverse.
Brooks: But my fear is not only that there are no limits to how we exercise our partisanship, but that we’ve lost faith in the art of persuasion.
I have this weird pet peeve when politicians say we’re going to fight. When they use that word fight, which is now omnipresent, I want to say, “Fighting is for fascists. Democracy is about persuasion.”
But I know a lot of journalists, opinion journalists, who don’t believe in persuasion.
Goldberg: You’re going to make a lot of money as a political consultant, by the way.
Brooks: It is about persuasion.
Goldberg: Of course. Persuasion is the coin of the realm in democracies, and coercion is the coin of the realm in autocracies.
I don’t like coercion. I would love to be persuaded. I think it’s actually healthy for your brain to allow it to be persuaded by evidence. It means that the pistons are functioning.
Brooks: But there’s a lot of people in our business—and there are economic incentives to be—in the mobilization business, not in the persuasion business.
Goldberg: Huge. And yet it’s not as if 350 million Americans have to wake up tomorrow morning and say, “Persuasion, not coercion. No American is my enemy. I will impose restraint on the way I talk in order to make sure that my fellow Americans understand that I do not consider them enemies.” I understand that’s a hard one. There are structural ways, there are algorithmic ways, of lowering the temperature.
If we had non-sociopaths running social media companies, they might program for unity or fact as opposed to programming for anger. But here we are.
Brooks: Tell me if I’m being an old fogey.
Goldberg: You’re an old fogey.
Brooks: Thank you. I appreciate that. That was a bit of emotional bath that I needed.
I used to admire politicians more as people, and I don't know if the politicians are getting lesser or if the system is getting lesser, or some of the people I admired—I was just down in Georgia and I met Sam Nunn’s daughter. Sam Nunn was a senator, and he knew so much about defense policy. He was a deeply knowledgeable guy, as much as any policy wonk.
We talked about McCain and Obama. They struck me as bigger. Ted Kennedy was just a great, great legislator. I think the two best legislators of my lifetime have been Ted Kennedy, who really knew what everybody in the room needed, and Nancy Pelosi.
Goldberg: Seemingly every Republican in the Senate in Ted Kennedy’s long tenure there had a bill with Ted Kennedy.
Kennedy would always find something to agree with someone on and then legislate to their mutual advantage. It was an amazing thing to watch.
It’s funny, when you talk to old senators who are like, “I co-sponsored that with Ted Kennedy.” And then they’re like, “And I know you’re surprised by this.” No, it’s not surprising.
He was also so secure as a liberal icon. If Ted Kennedy said, “I’m doing something with Orrin Hatch,” the liberals of Massachusetts would say, “Oh, wow, you’re a great legislator,” not, “What are you doing with Orrin Hatch?”
Brooks: But there was a skill to being a legislator, which they really worked on. Now, it’s a skill that’s getting on TV, but the skill of politics—
Goldberg: It’s just performance now. I think it’s the social media temptation. The ability to express your feelings 24 hours a day instantaneously is not a good thing. You could spend all day long trying to maintain your filters, and you can’t. Even people of dignity succumb.
I would really like the next president to be just a dignified person who doesn’t rise to the bait all the time and just explains to the American people over and over again, “This is what a president does; this is what a president doesn’t do. I’m not gonna do the things that presidents don’t do.”
Brooks: Okay, let’s talk about the future. I’m going to tell you why I’m optimistic about America, and you can tell me why my theory is ridiculous.
Goldberg: What’s second prize? (Laughs.)
Brooks: We decline the fall of the Roman Empire. In 2020, I’m reading a book, I’m sitting at home, during COVID, and I’m reading a book by Samuel Huntington, The Promise of Disharmony.
The Promise of Disharmony is the subtitle. The title was American Politics. And he says every couple of generations, America goes through a moral convulsion. People get disgusted with established power, high distrust, they want to burn everything down. There’s a new passionate generation comes on the scene, new form of communications technology.
He says this happened in the 1770s, the revolutionary period; 1830s, Andrew Jackson populist era; 1890s, the Industrial Revolution, which leads to the progressive era; and the 1960s. And these periods, he says, are brutal to live through.
So he’s writing this in 1982, and he says, “If the pattern holds sometime around the second decade of the 21st century, America will go through another moral convulsion.” And I’m like, “Well done, Professor Huntington.”
But the good news is you come out of them. We’ve been through this six or seven times before.
Goldberg: The question is: How do we come out?
Brooks: I think we come out of them the way we’re coming out of them right now, which is you have a cultural shift, a value shift, and then that leads to a politics shift. And we’ve gone through a period of brutal nihilism.
And I think—I look at the Fred Rogers movies, where people are weeping in the theater because they want to see a good person. Or you go to Ted Lasso. People loved it because they wanted to see a good person, upbeat. I just saw Devil Wears Prada 2. The Anne Hathaway character’s a good person.
I think most of Zohran Mamdani’s policies are horrific, but he smiles when he talks. He’s a happy guy, and I think he’s a brilliant politician.
To me, this is all part of a buildup of a cultural-value shift, a vibe shift as big as we’ve seen in any of these other moral convulsions. It makes total sense to me that that’s what’s about to happen, and we’re seeing the early days of it.
Goldberg: It’s funny, because my perfect president would combine the best qualities of Anne Hathaway and Zohran Mamdani. How did you know that?
How do you read my mind like that? How do you do that? I’m perfectly open to the idea that this is a midlife crisis, or whatever you want to call it, and that we’re coming out. I’d prefer not to think that it’s a terminal illness.
I think that there’s one huge—Put aside AI, which I don’t know how that ball bounces, right? But social media generally, I don’t know what you can do contemplatively in an age of social media.
All that being said, if people on the right accept the basic undergirding principles of creedal nationalism, which is: We all swear allegiance to a constitution, and we love the flag, and everybody lives here together, and we’re a big multicultural democracy, and the American idea is that no one is better than me, and I’m not better than anyone. And people on the left have to not talk about identity and division all the time and try to divide based on resentment categories, right?
On the right, downplay the nativist impulses that are universal. And on the left, downplay the things that divide and up play the things that unite.
Because—you and I both know this, because we’ve traveled around the world—when you meet an American outside America, it’s the greatest thing in the world. Doesn’t matter where you’re from, you're just so ineluctably American, and you’re so excited. Doesn’t matter that you’re from Brooklyn, and this one is from Montana—you’re American.
That’s what I love about America. It’s a shame that sometimes you have to go outside of America to get that feeling among Americans. I don’t have a prescription for how to make people understand these things, and I hope that we can find our way to these things the easy way and not the hard way.
But at the end of an easy way or a hard way is this renewed understanding, I think.
Brooks: I think nations decline not when they go through turmoil but when they run out of energy. And we have not. We have all this mishigas around us, but we haven’t run out of energy, that’s for sure.
Goldberg: No, we haven’t run out of energy for the mishigas. But at a certain point, these things, you forget. I was in Cyprus once, and you cross the DMZ, and you talk to people on both sides, and they’re like, “I don’t know. I don’t remember.” Like, “What’s the last crazy thing that happened here?” “I don’t know.” And you’re like, “If it went back to Greece, would you care?” “No.”
Things burn out. You know? But we’re not at that burn stage yet.
Brooks: I want to bring us home here with this question—
Goldberg: Did we accomplish anything in this podcast?
Brooks: We did.
Goldberg: Is this a podcast?
Brooks: This is a pointillist painting by Seurat. And we have had so many points that all add up to one beautiful picture. And that picture is to me—
Goldberg:The Atlantic magazine.
Brooks:The Atlantic magazine, embodied truth.
There was a guy, Abraham Kuyper, and he had a theory of the spheres, that there are a lot of different spheres in society. There’s a political sphere, there’s a religious sphere, there’s a capitalist sphere, there’s a family sphere. And it’s really important to keep them apart, and to know that the logic of one sphere does not pertain to the logic of other spheres.
His argument was that we’ve collapsed all the spheres, and we’ve taken the logic of politics and applied it to the logic of education. Our higher ed, at least, is super politicized. Our logic of popular culture, that’s super politicized.
Every scandal that breaks up, it breaks down immediately on partisan lines. Everything is seen through that lens, and so we’ve broken down the spheres, and that’s a problem for all of us.
Goldberg: I think we have to segregate the impulses of politics away from the other parts of life that are more complicated and more—you know, politics can make you inhuman.
Brooks: And you know, to get down to your daily life—
Goldberg: I’m getting older, so I attribute this to chronology, but I’m more in the nature, spiritual religion. I think part of it is—and this has been a theme of this conversation, I will try to organize a coherence to this conversation—I think that the older you get in journalism, and maybe politics too, I think now I’ve seen most things.
Many of the things that I’ve seen in politics and journalism I’ve seen three or four or five times. Nothing’s new under the sun, to borrow from Ecclesiastes. Nothing is new, and that makes it a little bit more boring, so you’re trying to find the thing that’s actually transcendent out of this.
On one hand, it leads to what our friend Ruth Marcus calls “calm mastery.” It’s like, Okay, I’ve been through that crisis already. I did that. I know what happens. But on the other hand, you’re looking for something more.
I read more Emerson than I used to. I read more Bible than I used to. I read Psalms more than I used to. I try very deliberately to go into nature more than I used to. I was just last week out in the redwoods, and there’s nothing like it: Go right up to a redwood and look up.
You’re really going to think that some fight on MS Now or Fox is important? Standing next to a 1,400-year-old redwood? It’s just putting things into perspective and understanding that not much matters. The things that matter, matter hugely, but not much actually matters.
I’m sorry, I’m getting on a—
Brooks: No, this is why The Permanent Questions is here for you.
Goldberg: Oh, that’s good.
Brooks: That’s what we’re doing. This is what—
Goldberg: So if I listen every week, I will understand?
Brooks: We are the verbal equivalent of a redwood. And I just wanted to express—so the point of this podcast—
Goldberg: You’re one of the shorter redwoods I’ve ever met, by the way.
Brooks: Spiritually tall.
Goldberg: But spiritually your canopy shades us all.
Brooks: Ultimately, your decision to hire me was a wise one. I think that’s why we’re here.
Goldberg: As wise as a redwood.
Brooks: Jeffrey Goldberg, thank you for being on The Permanent Questions.
Goldberg: Thank you.
Brooks: There were times when I was covering political campaigns and I would be deep in political everything, and I would take time off to read an essay written by the essayist C.S. Lewis. He talked about how medieval people looked at the night sky. We see the night sky, and we see balls of gas. They looked at the night sky, and they just saw enchantment. His description of the way they saw the world as enchanted always used to lift my spirit. In the midst of a political season, I needed something to lift my spirit.
So I resonated when Jeff talked about the redwoods—that maybe as you get older, or maybe we just are exhausted by the politics of the last 10 years, when Jeff talked about going out to the redwoods, sitting under a redwood and looking up, suddenly the world is enchanted again. Or he talked about reading the Bible, reading spiritual books, reading deeper literature. Suddenly, in the midst of the random flux of political debate, it’s important to care about the permanent things.
That’s one of the reasons that motivated me to do this podcast, frankly. I was tired of the daily bounce of politics. I wanted to step back at what really mattered. And I think with Jeff’s conversation, we saw how important that is.
Thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg.
The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe at The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, on Spotify, on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you want to support this work or the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. See you next week.
Due sabati fa siamo partiti dal volo Flydubai e dall’«11 settembre sventato» evocato da Netanyahu: come si scrive un copione prima dei fatti. Sabato scorso siamo scesi nella mente: perché crediamo anche a ciò che non è vero, e chi decide la «gabbia di realtà» dentro cui discutiamo. Stasera facciamo il passo successivo, quello che ci eravamo promessi: quando la cronaca somiglia a un brutto film di fantascienza, dove finisce la realtà e dove comincia la sceneggiatura? Ne parliamo con Stefano Re, esperto di comunicazione e metacomunicazione, e Roberto Quaglia, scrittore e commentatore culturale e geopolitico. Intervista a cura di Jeff Hoffman
Affrontiamo insieme: Realtà e fantascienza: quando la distopia smette di essere un genere letterario La gabbia di realtà: chi la costruisce, e perché ci discutiamo dentro anche quando non ci crediamo Il potere dei media: crederci più di quanto crediamo ai nostri occhi Hollywoodismo: l’ideologia invisibile che arriva prima dei telegiornali Censura delle piattaforme: account sospesi, reportage cancellati, Parlamento che non parla.. Sovranità rovesciata Governare per post: guerre annunciate sui social e kit di sopravvivenza in borsetta Autodifesa cognitiva: diffidare soprattutto delle storie che ci piacciono
I libri degli ospiti
Stefano Re Mindfucking. Dai manuali segreti della CIA al marketing, le tecniche di condizionamento mentale (Arianna Editrice) Mindfucking 2 (con Lorenzo Ait) La Scienzah. Quando la scienza si trasforma in fanatismo religioso (Arianna Editrice) Femdom
Roberto Quaglia Guerra e pace e zombi. Democrazia totalitaria contro mondo multipolare, Youcanprint, 2025
Hollywoodism. The Invisible Ideology, Youcanprint, 2025 Il fondamentalismo hollywoodista. Viaggio in Iran alla scoperta dell’invisibile ideologia dell’Occidente, Youcanprint, 2020 Il mito dell’11 settembre. I versetti satanici della democrazia occidentale, Youcanprint, 2020
Iscriviti al canale e attiva la campanella Scrivi nei commenti: qual è la narrazione che secondo te va smontata per prima?
SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV
Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente autofinanziato. Nessun editore, nessun partito.
Per donazioni:
IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590
Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni
Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV
A military-backed operation shut down a major illegal gold mining site in Gashaka-Gumti National Park, driving more than 4,000 miners from Nigeria’s largest national park, according to the Africa Nature Investors Foundation (ANI). The miners had already fled by the time Nigerian soldiers arrived at the Kila mining area in July, according to Tunde Morakinyo, executive director of ANI, a Nigerian conservation organization working with the government to manage Gashaka-Gumti. He said no shots were fired during the operation, and bulldozers were brought in to fill the mining pits and shafts. As world leaders and conservation practitioners head to Armenia for the U.N. biodiversity summit Oct. 19-30, with the goal of protecting and conserving 30% of land and waters by 2030, the crackdown spotlights the complexity of safeguarding some of the most biodiverse places on the planet. Gashaka-Gumti is a stronghold for one of the rarest primates in the world: the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti). The park is also home to more than 1,000 plant species and hundreds of bird and butterfly species, with some of the highest rates of endemism on the continent. A ranger patrols Nigeria’s Gashaka-Gumti National Park, where the Africa Nature Investors Foundation says it employs more than 180 rangers to help protect the park. Image courtesy of Africa Nature Investors Foundation. The operation followed years of growing friction over mining in the park. Tensions came to a head in late 2025. Two rangers were killed by miners in October 2025, according to Morakinyo. The…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Russia’s Cosmos-2612 satellite has made a series of maneuvers that have made it almost perfectly co-planar with the radar satellite ICEYE-X36. ICEYE is natively European, founded in Finland. Bart Hendrickx, a longtime observer of the Russian space program, reports that, in the past two days or so, the Russian spacecraft has made a further orbit […]
Un aereo che precipita per migliaia di piedi, un movente che cambia ogni giorno, un premier in campagna elettorale che incontra gli eroi davanti alle telecamere. E un’Europa che chiama pace la prossima tornata di sanzioni. Dopo aver visto come si fabbrica il consenso, entriamo nella sala di montaggio delle notizie di queste settimane: dove la cronaca prende la forma di un film d’azione e lo spettatore riceve il copione prima ancora dei fatti. Quando il cinema ha smesso di ribellarsi? Che ne è stato delle lezioni di Kubrick? Ne parliamo con Federico Povoleri, regista, documentarista e autore della trilogia Sub Limen e di Enigma Kubrick. Intervista a cura di Jeff Hoffman. Di cosa parliamo: Il volo Flydubai FZ1073: lite tra piloti, pista iraniana, radicalizzazione, lupo solitario. Quattro generi narrativi in 48 ore. Eroi, cattivi e “11 settembre sventato”: la grammatica hollywoodiana applicata alla cronaca. Più armi e più sanzioni per arrivare alla pace: come si costruisce una contraddizione che nessuno nota. Qualcuno seguirà l’esempio di Kubrick e dei grandi registi italiani di una volta? George Orwell lo chiamava bipensiero: credere contemporaneamente a due cose opposte senza avvertire il conflitto. Oggi non serve più un Ministero della Verità. Basta un buon montaggio. LIBRI DELL’OSPITE Enigma Kubrick. Cosa raccontano davvero i suoi film? Sub Limen. La tua vita è un inganno (ARPOD / PlaceBook Publishing) Sub Limen 2. Alla conquista delle menti. Il lato oscuro di Hollywood (ARPOD / PlaceBook Publishing, 2022, prefazione di Massimo Mazzucco) Sub Limen 3. La Tana del Bianconiglio LE PRECEDENTI INTERVISTE A FEDERICO POVOLERI Come ti fabbricano il consenso • Come ti fabbricano il consenso Federico Povoleri: la fabbrica della guerra • Federico Povoleri: la fabbrica della guerra Il nuovo mondo tra genocidi, trucchi mediatici e simboli esoterici • Federico Povoleri: il nuovo mondo tra geno… Realtà artificiale nella manifattura del consenso • Realtà artificiale nella manifattura del c… CASA DEL SOLE TV: informazione libera e indipendente Casa del Sole TV non ha editori forti né finanziamenti pubblici: siamo sostenuti da voi, il nostro pubblico. Se credi nel valore di un’informazione che non tace, aiutaci a continuare. Bonifico: IBAN IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: LA CASA DEL SOLE EDIZIONI. Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV PayPal: paypal.me/casadelsoletv Sostegno ricorrente: casadelsole.tv/sostienici Membership YouTube / @casadelsoletvchannel — Analista Multipolare €5/mese — Inviato della Verità €15/mese — Architetto del Futuro €25/mese I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN BRICS Scacco Matto (in italiano, inglese, russo) Anche un piccolo contributo fa la differenza. Grazie di cuore! #FedericoPovoleri#Propaganda#Narrazioni#Flydubai#Netanyahu#GuerraCognitiva#ManifatturaDelConsenso#SubLimen#EnigmaKubrick#Deepfake#Disinformazione#Multipolarismo#CasaDelSoleTV#JeffHoffman
The founding of America. The shaping of Europe. We still live in a world that bears the imprint of Whitefield and the Great Awakening. The question is, for how long? Very few people today know who George Whitefield was. The message he preached is becoming decreasingly familiar. Men have forgotten Whitefield. Now they are forgetting... Continue Reading
The 2026 US midterm elections are rapidly bearing down upon us, with plenty of major implications for Americans and for the world. I want to take a moment here to offer my thoughts on this pressing matter, and maybe suggest a line of thinking for all those would-be voters out there.dearAs a writer, researcher, and...
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
The botched execution of Christa Pike, who survived two injections of what was intended to be a lethal dose of pentobarbital on September 30, is—horrifically—not unique: As my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, it wasn’t even the first botched execution in Tennessee this year. The fact that officials tried twice to kill her is somewhat more unusual, but not without precedent.
Consider the case of Margaret Dickson, a Scottish woman of the early 1700s. Estranged from her husband, Dickson took up work as a domestic in the town of Kelso, where she conceived a child out of wedlock but hid the pregnancy for fear of being shunned. She testified that she’d disposed of the baby after it was stillborn, but the body was found, and she was arrested. Under Scottish law at the time, concealment of a pregnancy was considered evidence of intent to commit infanticide. Dickson was convicted and sentenced to hang in Edinburgh in 1724.
Following what was then the practice, Dickson’s execution was public. She was hanged; her body was placed in a coffin and carted away for burial (by some accounts following a tussle with body snatchers who hoped to procure the corpse for dissection by medical students). Along the way, the burial party stopped for a beer, at which point noise was heard from inside the coffin. The lid was pried off, and Dickson was found alive, though confused. Dickson’s survival became an object of fascination and Dickson herself a sort of folk hero, the historian Mikki Brock, the author of a forthcoming book about Dickson, told me. Authorities in Edinburgh initially sought to rehang her, but they were never able to marshal enough support to do so. Dickson, who came to be nicknamed “Half-Hangit Maggie” (that is, half-hanged), lived into the 1750s.
Or take Joseph Samuel, a criminal who was sent from England to a penal colony in Australia. Once there, he was implicated in the murder of a police officer investigating a robbery. Samuel was convicted and sentenced to hang in September 1803, also publicly. It didn’t go well. On the first try, the rope around Samuel’s neck snapped. On the second, the noose unraveled. By then, the crowd was growing restive; a hasty third attempt also ended with a broken rope. Observers at the scene concluded that the mishaps were a sign from God that Samuel should not be killed, and the governor apparently concurred, commuting Samuel’s sentence to life imprisonment. (Three years later, Samuel disappeared at sea during an escape attempt with other convicts and was presumed drowned; perhaps God’s view was not as clear as it seemed at the gallows.)
A third celebrated case was that of John “Babbacombe” Lee, who was convicted of the 1884 murder of his employer and sentenced to die. (By that point, executions in Britain had moved out of the public and into prison yards.) Just like Samuel, Lee was spared by malfunctioning equipment: A trapdoor under the gallows, meant to release the condemned and snap his neck, had been tested, yet it failed three times to open. Lee’s sentence was commuted to life by the British home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, who said, “It would shock the feelings of anyone if a man had twice to pay the pangs of imminent death.” Lee was eventually paroled in 1907. Now infamous as “the man they couldn’t hang,” he wrote an autobiography and was the subject of a 1912 silent film, but he then faded from the historical record. He appears to have died in the 1940s, perhaps in Milwaukee.
When I first heard the stories of Half-Hangit Maggie and Babbacombe Lee as a child, I knew they were historical, but they seemed to belong more to the realm of myth or fairy tale. Hangings, mysterious mechanical failures, assertions of divine intervention—all of these seemed like things out of fiction. It was easy to chuckle at quaint details, such as the apocryphal tale that Dickson was required to remarry her husband because she’d been declared dead. And though I’d read about the beheadings of Charles I and Louis XVI, the specter of public execution felt distant enough from modern civilization to be faintly unreal.
Now all of these things seem much less remote. Until President Trump reversed course yesterday, the Defense Department planned to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who massacred comrades at Fort Hood in 2009. Pike’s fate is up in the air after her twice-failed execution. Pike, who was convicted of a brutal murder in 1995, has returned from a hospital to prison. The state official who oversaw capital punishment has resigned, and the governor has temporarily paused all executions in Tennessee. Her lawyers have requested that her sentence be commuted to life in prison.
The doctor and ethicist Lydia Dugdale writes in The Dispatch that U.S. history offers a grim precedent. In 1946, a 16-year-old boy confessed to killing his employer and was sentenced to die via electrocution. A first attempt failed, and his lawyers sought to block a second. The Supreme Court ruled against them, and he was killed that year. But Dugdale argues that this precedent should not apply here. “From Pike’s markedly swollen and chemically burned arms, to her profound cognitive impairment (the severity of which remains unknown), the state has already inflicted a cruel and unusual punishment on Christa,” she writes. Setting aside the law, “as a matter of sheer ethics, if the state has vowed not to punish prisoners cruelly but has inadvertently done so, the state ought not attempt the same method of execution again.” (In this year’s other botched Tennessee case, Tony Carruthers’s failed execution left him partially paralyzed. He received a one-year reprieve, and advocates have called for his sentence to be commuted.)
The historical cases of the men and women they couldn’t hang feel much closer to the present day than they once did. And although some of the visceral details still sound like the stuff of myth, the pragmatic and humane outcomes of these situations stand out more against the backdrop of the recent news. Support for the death penalty has dropped since the 1990s, barely topping 50 percent today. Views are closely correlated with religion—white Protestants are far more likely to back it than any other group, according to polling from the Public Religion Research Institute. For religious supporters of capital punishment, the idea that a failed execution is a sign from above might not be so far-fetched. Among the nonreligious, many people may flatter themselves to believe that contemporary society possesses greater reason and logic than our forebears. Just as we try to understand our ancestors by how they handled cases such as those of Dickson, Samuel, and Lee, future generations will judge our society by its actions.
President Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was fired after less than a week in the role, according to three people familiar with the matter. Her dismissal followed criticism of her first press briefing on Tuesday and questions about her legal credentials.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez donated $1 million to support Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign in Michigan. El-Sayed is running against Republican Mike Rogers in a race that could determine control of the Senate in November.
Dispatches
Over/Under: Gamblers are more likely to lose money than make it—yet they keep coming back, Will Gottsegen writes. In the first edition of Over/Under, he explores why bettors return to casinos and prediction apps even when it’s not in their financial interest.
Big Tech Oligarchs Have a Terrible Plan for Humanity
By Bernie Sanders
Should human beings remain in control of planet Earth? Or should we be replaced as the dominant species? As absurd as these questions may sound, and as obvious as the answers may seem, the Big Tech oligarchs funding the artificial-intelligence revolution have responded in ways that should alarm all of us.
In Silicon Valley, some of the wealthiest people on Earth believe that they have the power to create a superior species. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, wrote in 2017 that AI would allow humans to become “the first species ever to design our own descendants.” What this means for humans, however, remains unclear. According to Altman, we will either jump-start digital intelligence “and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.” In other words, humans have a choice: face extinction or merge with machines. “I believe the merge has already started,” Altman added, and is “probably our best-case scenario.”
A great folk hero needs a good nickname, which is why Billy the Kid and “Pretty Boy” Floyd endure. Babbacombe Lee—the name comes from the site of the murder—belongs to that tier. I first encountered it on the strange, entrancing cover of an album, a 1971 “folk-rock opera” by the English band Fairport Convention. I wouldn’t rank “Babbacombe” Leeas prime Fairport, but it’s an entertaining listen. As for Half-Hangit Maggie, anyone visiting the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, the site of her execution, can have a pint at her namesake pub, Maggie Dickson’s. Just don’t expect it to produce any miraculous resuscitations.
— David
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
For Nyaradzo Auxilia Hoto, one of the most memorable moments of becoming a wildlife ranger was a trip to town. She and her fellow recruits walked through the streets in their new uniforms, on their way to open bank accounts. Soon, they would receive their first salaries. For a woman who had struggled to make ends meet in rural Zimbabwe, it was an extraordinary moment. “We were very proud,” she recalled. Hoto, 34, grew up in Huyo, a village in Zimbabwe’s Lower Zambezi Valley, where her family depended largely on growing and selling vegetables. Money was scarce, and although she had done well at school, she could not afford to continue her education beyond secondary school. Marriage, she hoped, might offer a better life. Instead, she says, she endured nearly four years with a violent husband before deciding to leave. She returned to her parents’ home with her young daughter and resumed working in the family garden. Her fortunes changed in 2017, when the International Anti-Poaching Foundation began recruiting local women for Akashinga, a new wildlife protection initiative. Hoto was among 16 women selected from roughly 100 applicants. Many men in her community doubted that women could confront poachers or withstand the demands of ranger work. She went anyway. Within a few years, she had become a ranger sergeant, leading other women on patrol. She later returned to university, graduating in 2023 with a degree in wildlife, ecology and conservation. Today, she works as a biodiversity officer with Akashinga, using…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Il governo italiano scrive in un tribunale che il Paese è dentro una guerra mondiale. In piazza, chi quella guerra la paga viene chiamato reato e teppismo. Oggi il Consiglio di Stato ha dato torto all’Agenzia delle Dogane, che per nove mesi ha negato a una giornalista il dato sulle armi passate dal porto di Ravenna. Per difendere quel no, gli avvocati del governo, l’Avvocatura dello Stato, avevano scritto nero su bianco: è in corso «una guerra mondiale ibrida e a pezzi che coinvolge anche l’Italia». Il giudice ha risposto: pericolo «astratto e ipotetico». I dati vanno consegnati. Ma la frase resta agli atti, e quella guerra il Parlamento non l’ha mai dichiarata. Intanto il Sud è fermo da due settimane: Calabria, Sicilia, Puglia, Campania, Basilicata. Un pieno di tir da 1.500 a 2.500 euro. In Puglia 150 distributori Eni su 300 a secco. Lo sconto sulle accise è scaduto il 6 ottobre. Cinquemila agricoltori con i trattori a Bari chiedono lo stato di crisi. La Regione mette 30 milioni, il governo nazionale non compare. Oggi gli studenti in piazza in tutta Italia: «soldi alla scuola, non alla guerra». Il ministro Valditara: «teppismo politico». Meloni: «ci stiamo interrogando». Salvini: «studiamo da mesi». Lollobrigida: «bloccare le strade è un reato». In Francia 70.000 studenti in piazza e 504 arresti in un giorno a Parigi. In Albania 143 giorni di proteste, ministeri assaltati, contro Rama e il resort da 4 miliardi di Jared Kushner. L’Europa che si riarma è la stessa che non sa più pagare il gasolio e le scuole, e che risponde alle piazze con la polizia. A Levante questa sera, venerdì 16 ottobre 2026, conduce Jeff Hoffman. Ospiti: Moni Ovadia, attore, musicista, scrittore, voce ebraica contro la guerra e contro l’uso politico della memoria; Margherita Furlan, giornalista e analista geopolitica, fondatrice di Casa del Sole TV. Affrontiamo insieme: Il caso Ravenna: chi ha scritto «guerra mondiale» e chi ha detto no L’articolo 78 della Costituzione: la guerra la deliberano le Camere Dal «reato» di Lollobrigida al «teppismo» di Valditara: le parole del potere contro chi protesta Il Sud fermo e il prezzo del gasolio: la guerra lo alza, il governo non lo attutisce Dal ddl antisemitismo alle piazze: la stretta sul dissenso è un disegno? Parigi, Tirana, Roma: tre Paesi, una sola scena LIBRI DEGLI OSPITI Moni Ovadia, «Un ebreo contro», Edizioni Gruppo Abele Margherita Furlan, «BRICS Scacco Matto» (disponibile in italiano, inglese, russo) SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente, autofinanziato da sei anni, senza editori e senza partiti. Per donazioni con bonifico: IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni Causale: Erogazione liberale Casa del Sole TV Membership YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CasadelSoleT… Analista Multipolare €5/mese Inviato della Verità €15/mese Architetto del Futuro €25/mese SEGUI CASA DEL SOLE TV YouTube: @CasadelSoleTVChannel Sito: casadelsole.tv #Levante#CasadelSoleTV#MargheritaFurlan#MoniOvadia#Geopolitica#Multipolarismo#caroGasolio#accise#Ravenna#NoMeloniDay#AvvocaturadelloStato#ConsigliodiStato#sciopero#Europa
– Italia, la piazza sfida il riarmo di Margherita Furlan – Avvocatura dello Stato: è guerra mondiale ibrida di Jeff Hoffman – La Francia ferma i suoi figli di Jeff Hoffman – Tirana in fiamme, Rama non cede di Jeff Hoffman – USA e UE sempre più distanti di Gionata Chatillard – Due stretti in fiamme, l’Europa paga di Jeff Hoffman – Taiwan cerca alternative a Hormuz, Trump si inserisce di Ivan Bodyan – Buon giro intorno al Sole A cura di Margherita Furlan Con la collaborazione di Gionata Chatillard, Ivan Bodyan e Jeff Hoffman Editing di Mario Ferdinandi CASA DEL SOLE TV — Informazione libera e indipendente Il nostro lavoro è possibile solo grazie al vostro sostegno. Casa del Sole TV non ha editori forti né finanziamenti pubblici: siamo sostenuti da voi, il nostro pubblico. Se credi nel valore di un’informazione che non tace, aiutaci a continuare. Dona tramite bonifico bancario: IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: LA CASA DEL SOLE EDIZIONI Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV Dona tramite PayPal: paypal.me/casadelsoletv Sostegno ricorrente: casadelsole.tv/sostienici Anche un piccolo contributo fa la differenza. Grazie di cuore! CasaDelSoleTV, CasaDelSoleTG, MargheritaFurlan, GiuliettoChiesa,censura, russofobia, Trump, NATO, Crisi, Transizione, Ucraina, Kiev, EuroMaidan, Crimea, Donbass, Donetsk, Syria, Iran, PardonSnowden, Nuova Via Della Seta, Pechino, Putin, Libano, guerra, mondomultipolare, multipolarismo, Mosca, XiJinping, Levante, Medio Oriente, Palestina, Gaza, MiddleEast, BRICS, Hormuz
When he was in charge of Apple, Steve Jobs was notorious for projecting a “reality distortion field.” That was the jokey way his employees described Jobs’s mix of charisma and bravado and his demanding management style—which would lead people to accept seemingly impossible deadlines, or to promise that they could fix unfixable problems. A malfunctioning version of the same phenomenon once surrounded Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the failed medical start-up Theranos. She worshipped Jobs, imitating his style and unnerving confidence, even while presiding over an imploding enterprise. Her promises of a device that could affordably perform rapid medical tests with only a drop of blood were, at best, fantastical; once valued at $9 billion, Theranos collapsed into nothing. In 2022, Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding her investors.
In the new documentary You Can See Everything, the comedian and television auteur Nathan Fielder steps into Holmes’s reality-distortion field. Fielder, accompanied by his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, and a small camera crew, essentially moved into Holmes’s abode for the 34 days before she reported to federal prison. The team received fairly unfettered access to her, her two small children, and her partner, the entrepreneur Billy Evans, who professes obsessional devotion to Holmes. What Fielder was expecting to find while staying at the family’s Del Mar, California, rental is unclear, but he ends up in an odd and unsettling game of cat and mouse: He’s trying to suss out whether Holmes is a master manipulator or someone so deeply convinced of her own genius that she can’t distinguish fiction from fact.
The film capturing that experience is an odyssey of human perception. Fielder knows that no matter how intimate his time with Holmes is, the minute the camera is trained on her, both he and the audience will be consumed by the question of whether she’s giving yet another performance. The movie unfolds and evolves over nearly three hours, spanning both the month ahead of Holmes’s May 2023 incarceration and the years following; throughout, Fielder pores over his interactions with not just Holmes but also the people around her, sifting for kernels of authenticity. What emerges is a transfixing portrait of a phenomenon most viewers will understand—a deep desire to empathize, even as we are horrified by what’s occurring or suspect we’re being lied to.
Holmes would disagree about that last part. Early on, she plainly states to Fielder that she has never told a lie, a statement so bewildering that it cracks his reliably deadpan expression. Watching him work to make sense of what she could mean by that, I thought of Jobs’s strange force of personality. Holmes has saucer-shaped, striking blue eyes, and she repeatedly meets Fielder’s squinty gaze with an unblinking stare and gauzy smile. Holmes may indeed be flatly misleading her interviewer, but she comes off as unnervingly sure that she’s being honest; she’s perhaps deceiving herself alongside the people in her orbit.
Evans is a vital part of her new facade, which has morphed from the elite-businesswoman persona of her CEO days to that of a loving mother and partner. Holmes often has a child draped over her, and she seems profoundly attached to her worshipful partner. Yet at other times, Evans gives off a controlling air. He plucks a bowl from her because she’s not stirring eggs quickly enough. When Fielder’s questions probe too close to an uncomfortable topic, Evans will show up, put his hands on Holmes’s shoulders, and softly try to shut down the conversation. The claustrophobic proximity between Fielder and his subjects comes across visually: Oppenheim shoots them all with zoom lenses, holding on their faces for a discomfitingly long time as they wince, frown, and grin. Like his co-director, he’s searching for the truth by getting as physically close as he can. Given Holmes’s past, however, the task of uncovering anything feels impossible.
Fielder is obviously uninterested in relitigating the details of Holmes’s case; she appears firmly assured that she did nothing wrong, and he knows there’s nothing he can do to tell her otherwise. Instead, he pokes at how she takes in the world, and how Evans is helping to feed her surreal self-image. It also becomes apparent that the pair are working on a new version of Theranos, chatting to investors and patent lawyers on the phone with abandon. When the harsh reality facing her—that she’ll soon have to leave her children behind—peeks through, her devastation seems genuine. But those moments then flit by as Holmes and Evans try to ponder a brighter future.
The first half of the movie consists of captivating fly-on-the-wall footage. The second half, which Fielder and Oppenheim have begged critics not to spoil (and I do think it’s fun to experience it cold), establishes You Can See Everything as one of the best films of the year. That portion finds Fielder fixating on his brief time with Holmes and the untoward influence Evans had over it: He brings in other perspectives to consult, re-creates scenes to better understand them (something he’s wont to do, especially on his fascinating HBO show, The Rehearsal), and, most important, reckons with his role in telling this chapter of Holmes’s life story.
Fielder is smart enough to know that his celebrity presence further pierces the bubble around how we perceive ourselves and one another. But he quickly developed a sort of emotional intimacy with Holmes, even as he sought to remain objective. You Can See Everything is a bold title, an invitation from Holmes that she is unlikely to follow through on. Can Fielder see everything that’s going on in her head? Beyond that, can he be an effective audience surrogate so viewers can see what he sees? The true question of this documentary isn’t just whether Holmes—who has been a figure of societal fascination for more than a decade—is putting on another performance, but also whether that’s all we, the viewers, crave from Holmes anyway.
Login
CASA DEL SOLE TV — Informazione libera e indipendente Il nostro lavoro è possibile solo grazie al vostro sostegno. Casa del Sole TV non ha editori forti né finanziamenti pubblici: siamo sostenuti da voi, il nostro pubblico. Se credi nel valore di un’informazione che non tace, aiutaci a continuare. 