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Somewhere in the back of my closet sits a strange relic: a virtual-reality viewer made of cardboard. The only thing I remember watching on it, in 2017, was a 10-minute adaptation of George Saunders’s Booker Prize–winning debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. Produced by The New York Times, this 3-D, 360-degree experience was effectively a staged excerpt of the book—which features Abraham Lincoln, his freshly dead 11-year-old son, and a chorus of grotesque ghosts—that could be viewed in full only by constantly swiveling one’s head. Google Cardboard, as this tech was known, was discontinued long ago; a decade later, the most notable thing about this experiment is that it was not the first or the last unconventional incarnation of Saunders’s highly unconventional novel. This week, the Atlantic senior editor Talya Zax admired the boldness of the book’s latest adaptation, an “excellent” and “bizarre” staging at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Her essay inspired me to dip into the Bardo audiobook, which is memorable for being packed with 166 narrators, many of them celebrities. Spoiler: It holds up.

First, here are six new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

• The rise of the sexy-cozy autumn read
• Celebrity has become a jobs program.
• The Greek island that taught me the art of living
• “Peeling the Orange,” a poem by Howard Altmann
• Democrats are sounding more like Republicans.
• How the American Girl doll lost its way

Zax argues that Bardo benefits from opera’s “freedom to be outlandish,” and that a film version would have to contend instead with Hollywood’s “risk-averse studio system.” The book is surreal, full of overlapping dialogue, madcap characters, and descriptions that defy any visual logic. This much is immediately clear, however: Willie Lincoln, the president’s deceased son, is in a sort of graveyard purgatory, which he must escape before it destroys him. Helping him are three oddly contorted ghosts—a mysteriously damned reverend, a priapic printmaker who never consummated his marriage, and a gay man who died by suicide. Telling the story of Lincoln’s grief at the height of the Civil War, Saunders alternates between snippets from the historical record and the cemetery’s giant cast of specters. This is certainly the stuff of opera. It is also fodder for an audiobook that rises above its stunt casting.

The recording’s collection of notables resembles the slate of an animated Disney movie motivated by star power: Susan Sarandon, Julianne Moore, Ben Stiller, Don Cheadle, Bill Hader, Lena Dunham, Carrie Brownstein, and Keegan-Michael Key all voice characters. The A-listers get the plum roles, of course, and many of them do effectively dramatize the material; Dunham’s teenage girl is affectingly tormented, Key’s enslaved shade righteously wrathful, Hader’s low-class brawler fabulously profane. The documentary snippets are less effective, voiced largely by colleagues and friends, including 60 employees of Saunders’s publisher, Penguin Random House. Then again, this may have as much to do with the doldrums in those segments of the book as the talent of the cast.

The standout performances, however, are from Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, and Saunders himself as Willie’s three helpful ghosts. They have the best material, including sections in which they inhabit the (technically nonspeaking) president’s thoughts. And they showcase what’s best about any effective audiobook. It’s a dramatic rendering, to a degree, but it preserves the interiority and verbal dexterity that only a novel can hold. The banter among this trio is crisp, funny, and layered with meaning, and the soliloquies reminded me that this is Saunders at the height of his power, balancing satire and pathos better than almost any writer I can think of. This eccentric recording is mainstream in one important way: It delivers on its promise of rendering the book faithfully and with a generous dose of flair.

The Best Kind of Book Adaptation

By Talya Zax

A new opera based on George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo makes some fantastically shocking choices.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Beloved asks readers to imagine something as pure and perfect as love—a mother caring for her child; two broken people trying to make something beautiful—in the face of absolute misery and ugliness. That’s where the book’s potency comes from: the tension between the darkness and the light. Sethe, its main character, has committed unspeakable violence toward her own daughter, but she was motivated by maternal devotion. Having survived that transformational tragedy, she has to decide whether she can allow anyone to love her again. Beloved evokes both the peril of motherhood and its singular power. Reading it, I wanted to fold myself into the pages and then fall out of my skin. It’s painful, but what’s even more devastating is that the novel is one of the most banned books in America. How dare we rob the next generation of its greatness?  — Jenisha Watts

From our list: 50 unforgettable love stories

Out Next Week

📚 How to Be Less Useful, by Priyanka Mattoo

📚 West of Loveland, by Tom Drury

📚 The Channel, by Jana Prikryl

Your Weekend Read

Why Are Political Candidates Emailing Like Ex-Boyfriends and Car Salesmen?

By Sophie Haigney

The text, sent from an unknown number, prompted a jump scare when I saw it as an iMessage preview: “About last night …” The night before: Hadn’t I been at yoga? When I clicked on the message, I was relieved and then annoyed by the next words: “—Jon Ossoff,” under an image of the senator from Georgia staring into the middle distance, handsomely. “Last night I took the stage to debate my MAGA extremist opponent Mike Collins,” “Ossoff” went on to tell me. The text message continued over the course of several paragraphs and ended, as these missives tend to, with an ask for cash.

Read the full article.

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Sir Patrick Stewart—an officer of the Order of the British Empire, a Laurence Olivier Award–winning alumnus of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the owner of an era-defining voice—was not ashamed to be most famous for being the lead on a 1980s science-fiction spin-off television show. As he wrote in his 2023 memoir, “I shall forever be known first and foremost, by most people, for playing Jean-Luc Picard”—the stern and steely captain of the starship Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

This wasn’t always the case: “There was a time when I was uncomfortable with this reality, when it seemed incompatible with my background and reputation as a serious stage actor,” he wrote. But by the time he walked onto the stage for his first-ever appearance at a Star Trek convention, and faced a crowd of thousands of fans all thrilled to see him, that sense of wounded pride had vanished. The actor, who died on Wednesday at 86, knew that the material on The Next Generation didn’t measure up to the verses of the Bard, but his attitude toward that role—the lack of chest-puffing ego, the pride in a job well done—echoed the virtues of his best-known character, who was distinguished by wisdom and sophistication, not virility and brawn. Those virtues, now falling out of fashion, are worth celebrating.

When The Next Generation was first coming together, Stewart was a journeyman actor who’d performed on Broadway and scored some roles in BBC miniseries; he didn’t know anything about Star Trek. The idea was to revive the 1960s space-adventure show, about an intergalactic federation attempting to reach new planets and species, with a new ensemble cast and new dilemmas. Success was not guaranteed: Although it had become a cult classic with an outsize pop-culture footprint, the original Star Trek ran for only three seasons. And Stewart—unmuscled, bald, middle-aged—was a strange choice for the revival’s main character. Although the first show had envisioned an egalitarian future without money or scarcity, it was still in large part a story about a good ol’ boy from Iowa, Captain James Kirk (played by a dashing young William Shatner), shooting cool aliens with laser guns and bedding the ladies.

Picard, by contrast, was not a champion fighter or an action hero, but an amateur archaeologist and unrepentant aesthete. His interests included classical music and viniculture; his favorite beverage was hot tea. On The Next Generation, Picard was far more likely to invite combative extraterrestrials on his ship for a civil, if clipped, debate. In the wrong hands, he might have come off as a flimsy stereotype of an effete Frenchman. But Stewart’s performance, which he took as seriously as any Shakespearean role, turned Picard into a valiant lead for the ages.

Today, Picard is still seen all over the internet, eternally face-palming in exasperation or exclaiming in confusion while a Klingon lurks awkwardly in the back of the frame. Those GIFs and memes of Stewart emoting traveled so widely because his performance was typically so controlled and cerebral. Instead of screaming or swaggering, as Shatner did before him, Stewart rumbled like thunder. Picard wasn’t flashy, but Stewart played him with plenty of sex appeal—except the women who fell for him were taken in by his intelligence and respectful demeanor, not his alpha-male vigor. In rare, memorable scenes, Stewart would allow Picard’s composed mask to drop: In the 1992 episode “Chain of Command,” Picard is captured and tortured, and told again and again that five lights are shining directly into his face. But Picard refuses his enemies: “There are four lights,” he bellows, as determined as King Lear in the thunderstorm.  

Picard didn’t fraternize with his crew, and he could be a disciplinarian. But he was a charismatic, astute leader, one worth trusting. Late in the series, a trickster entity allows Picard to revisit his past, and we see him as a brash, violent young man who instigates a bar fight and is stabbed in the heart. (This being the 24th century, he recovers.) Ashamed of his impetuousness, Picard tries to rewrite events—only to find himself back in the present as an undistinguished junior officer, largely due to his risk aversion. Picard needed to face the consequences of his actions, the episode suggests, in order to become the man he is: one who respects the value of a life, who’s willing to hazard danger when it’s required and avoid it when it’s not.

This, I think, is a rather noble kind of masculinity—and not one that’s very popular right now. Men are being told by influencers of all stripes that they must dominate and humiliate others to get ahead; that they’ll never find love without well-defined muscles, sharp jawlines, and full heads of hair; that cheating and lying are acceptable if doing so produces the desired outcome; that leaders are men who burnish their own images at the expense of the people they’re meant to serve.

[Read: Revisiting Star Trek’s most political episode]

When so many people are adopting that boisterous attitude, the version of manliness Stewart embodied—both on television and in his real life—is all the more worthwhile. By his own account, he came onto the set of The Next Generation determined to lead the cast toward professionalism; at one point, he upbraided his colleagues for having “too much fun.” But he quickly realized the error of his ways. He ended up having a blast playing Picard—so much so that he happily starred in a revival series, Picard, for three seasons beginning in 2020.

Why pretend otherwise—why act like a formidable Shakespearean is “supposed” to? A great actor could be someone who was proud of his run on a seven-season television show; a great man could be someone who led with humility, not grandiosity. And a great captain could be someone with no hair, the mind of a diplomat, and the build of a cyclist, who wears red-and-black pajamas while exploring space.

Don Davis was born in Snow Hill, a small town on the coastal plains of North Carolina. Growing up, he spent Sundays worshipping at the local Presbyterian church and summers working in the surrounding tobacco fields. At 29, he was elected Snow Hill’s youngest-ever mayor. He went on to represent the town of about 1,500 in the state legislature and then in Congress. The Democrat is now running for a third term, but in a very different district: If he wins, his constituents will no longer include his wife, his kids, or anyone else in Snow Hill.   

Davis is used to having to figure out exactly who can vote for him. The first time he was elected to Congress, in 2022, he triumphed in a district that slightly favored Democrats. The North Carolina legislature redrew it to favor Republicans, and Davis won reelection in 2024 by less than two percentage points.

Then, in the summer of 2025, President Trump called for the GOP to gerrymander as many seats as it could to protect the party’s House majority, even though redistricting is typically done only once a decade, after a census. Democrats in some states retaliated with their own gerrymanders. North Carolina was one of seven states, both red and blue, to hastily redraw its maps after Trump’s demand; four more redistricted after the Supreme Court’s April Louisiana v. Callais decision gutted the Voting Rights Act. Many of the incumbents being targeted for defeat by Republicans are Black Democrats. Davis, who had his home and base of support in surrounding Greene County cut out of his district, is one of them. But the gambit may not succeed as planned.

Republicans are forecast to gain fewer than half of the seats they expected when they redrew the maps, in large part because voters are mad—over inflation, over corruption, over the Iran war. Here in North Carolina’s First Congressional District, many have an additional cause for anger: their gerrymandered map. The state, which is among the most politically divided in America, already has district lines that give Republicans a significant edge. The congressional delegation includes just four Democrats out of 14 representatives. The GOP-dominated legislature wants to cut that to three, and has drawn lines tailored to end Davis’s congressional career. If the new boundaries of his district had existed in 2024, Trump would have won the area by almost 12 points. (He carried the old district by just three.)

The new map removed four counties with large Black populations and added six Republican-leaning ones near the state’s coast. Under the new map, the proportion of Black voters in the First District dropped from about 40 percent to about 32 percent. After the redistricting, the Cook Political Report labeled Davis “the most vulnerable House Democrat in the country.” He seemed like a goner. But recent polls show a close race, with both parties spending eye-popping amounts of money—more than $52.9 million in total, making it the most expensive House general election on record, according to the data-tracking firm AdImpact.

Democrats have represented North Carolina’s First District since 1899, but Davis has been touting his centrist voting record in Congress. He often reminds voters that he has spent nearly all of his life in eastern North Carolina. “These are tobacco-cropping hands,” he told me, holding up his palms. (Federal law requires congressional candidates to live in the state, not the district, in which they are seeking office.) Davis is running against Republican Laurie Buckhout, a retired Army colonel whom he narrowly beat in 2024. Buckhout is now trying to capitalize on the more deeply red composition of the district. “We are Republican-majority districts,” she told a crowd at a rally with President Trump and a Republican candidate in a nearby district last week. “That’s simple math. There are more of us. All you got to do is get out the vote.” After she left the stage, Trump turned to her: “You’re running against Don Davis? I hear he’s a total disaster.”

It’s unclear if Trump’s support will help her. His popularity has cratered in the state; a recent poll from Elon University shows that only 34 percent of North Carolinians approve of the job he’s doing, despite the fact that he won 51 percent of the vote in 2024. Ben Lindemann was among the North Carolinians who voted for him. But the 49-year-old told me he will likely vote for Davis this year, in part because of the way Trump has governed. “I just don’t like the way he’s ruining our country,” Lindemann said.

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

In the past, Davis could count on votes from Greene County, where he ministers at the church he grew up attending. Now he needs to win over unaffiliated voters who may have never voted for a Democrat before in areas where he is less well-known. Billboards with his face line the highway: Don Davis supports lowering costs. Thank you Representative Davis, for supporting our veterans. There’s no mention of the Democratic Party; Davis, an Air Force veteran, is running as a brand unto himself. He often cites the times he’s crossed the aisle to vote with Republicans, including to end last year’s government shutdown, to fund ICE, and to condemn “socialism in all its forms.” In 2024, the website GovTrack, which assesses politicians’ voting records, ranked Davis the most conservative Democrat in the House.

The district is among the most rural and agricultural in the state; seemingly endless fields of sweet potatoes and cotton line the sides of country roads. Davis was one of only 14 Democrats who voted in favor of this year’s Republican-sponsored Farm Bill, arguing that it would provide necessary support for the district’s economy. Farmers—particularly those who cultivate row crops such as tobacco and cotton—have been squeezed by tariffs and soaring operating costs. Thomas Joyner, a sweet-potato farmer, told me Davis is the only Democrat he’s ever voted for, because he “genuinely wants to help agriculture.” Richard Anderson, a 63-year-old who grows tobacco, told me Trump’s trade war with China destroyed the crop’s profitability by leaving a glut of product. He said he’ll be voting for Davis, even though he voted for Trump in 2024 and identifies as an independent. “I think that his district is proof that people will cross the aisle,” Anderson said.

The gerrymander has given voters another reason to back Davis. People are angry about the redrawn lines, especially Black voters who feel the redistricting targeted them. Early votes cast by Black voters in North Carolina as of Wednesday were up 57 percent compared with the same date in 2022, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida. Voting-rights advocates have said that a backlash against redistricting is driving a surge of African American turnout across the South.

At the “Unapologetically Blue” banquet thrown by the Nash County Democratic Party earlier this month, more than 400 people showed up—the most in the event’s history, according to organizers. As I wandered among the crowd, attendees kept bringing up the unfairness of redistricting. “We fought hard for our rights. All of us did,” said 69-year-old Ernestine H. Stephenson, who is Black. Cynthia Pitchford told me that she grew up in the 1970s cropping tobacco; there were, she said, few other job options available for Black people in eastern North Carolina. Decades later, when Pitchford heard Davis was running for Congress, one of the first things she liked was their shared country background. This year, she decided to volunteer for him because she was so upset about the GOP’s gerrymandering. “I knew it was a ploy to try to pull votes away from him,” she said.

[Read: The arc of the Voting Rights Act ]

I heard the same at the homecoming game of Elizabeth City State University, a historically Black university, where Davis walked the stands of the school’s football stadium in a driving rain, shaking hands with fans. He told me that people bring up redistricting all the time. “I believe the general feeling is that no one’s really asked for this,” Davis said. “I mean, people feel that they’re left out.”   

Buckhout lost to Davis in 2024 by only about 6,000 votes, and has since worked in a senior cyber-policy role in the Pentagon. She did not respond to my request for an interview, but when I talked with her supporters around the district, many said they believed she would fight socialism, which they said represents an existential threat to the country. Others applauded her military background and sense of patriotism. Buckhout spent decades in the Army and commanded an 800-person battalion in Iraq. “She’s strong and truthful,” said Rhonda Flood, a 61-year-old who has been volunteering for Buckhout’s campaign. Flood said the people she’s met while canvassing “know she’ll fight for the country, because she has.”

Buckhout faces the same problem as many other Republicans this cycle—if your message is that the country is on the right track, how do you motivate voters who are unhappy with the state of the nation to show up? Early-voting numbers indicate that, so far, Republican turnout in North Carolina is lagging. Buckhout’s answer has been to campaign hard on fears about socialism and transgender issues. At the rally with Trump, she referenced ongoing unrest in France, warning that similar chaos could come to America if voters stop choosing Republicans. “I have fought against those people, and this is no joke,” she said to cheers. (When I asked the Buckhout campaign whom she meant by “those people,” the answer was “violent extremists.”)

Buckhout has reminded voters that Davis in 2023 sponsored the Equality Act, which, if it had passed, would have banned discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. She also criticizes him for being the only member of the House to vote “present,” rather than yay or nay, on a 2025 bill that would have effectively banned trans student athletes from playing in federally funded girls’ school sports. (Davis said the issue should be left up to states, not the federal government.) Several Republicans I spoke with said they are voting for Buckhout because of her opposition to transgender athletes. (Davis has said he supports North Carolina’s ban on transgender athletes.) In 2025, Davis was one of only three Democrats who supported former Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors. When I asked Davis if he still supported the Equality Act, he said his support had “evolved.”

Davis opposed last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—which Buckhout has touted on the campaign trail for its tax cuts and other help for working families. But as I traveled North Carolina, voters told me that the cost of living is surging at a relentless pace, and they were seeing little relief.

[Read: Going hungry in Trump’s economy]

The district once seemed an easy flip for Republicans. But in a year when the price of gas has spiked, tariffs are squeezing businesses, and some undecided voters are still trying to get to know the candidates, a redistricting plan that appeared to be a sure thing could backfire. If it does, Davis said he will leave Snow Hill and find a house within the district’s new lines.

In retrospect, 2016, the year that Angela Duckworth published Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, may have been a high-water mark for the dogged go-getter‑ism she was selling. Her book landed just as Hillary Clinton, that avatar of tenacity, seemed poised to win the presidency and Alexander Hamilton was rapping on Broadway about not giving up his shot. You could still just barely discern within each of the billionaires who bestrode Silicon Valley the dork with unusual willpower who had made it. And among the books clustered near Grit in airport bookstores—where the American self is apparently at its most moldable—were other pitches for individual hardiness, including efforts to make Stoicism hot again.

When I read Grit now, it feels to me like a taunt. Economic mobility has stalled, nonhumans are encroaching on our jobs, and COVID has scarred us with the knowledge that the unforeseen can creep up at any moment. You can be as gritty as sandpaper and still feel trampled on.

Duckworth herself now seems ready to concede that our mind alone can’t control the direction of our life, that it doesn’t all happen “from the inside out,” as she put it in Grit. Back then, she arrived at the not-quite-mind-blowing conclusion that to be “the best of the best”—as accomplished as Olympic swimmers, Scripps National Spelling Bee champions, the president of Cinnabon—you had to really care about winning and work hard at it. “Today I wake up every day asking the same question that led me to psychology in the first place: Why are some people more successful than others?” she writes in her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. “But I no longer believe that a complete answer begins and ends with the individual.”

Adam Grant, another best-selling psychologist, appears to have hit a similar wall. In Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, his sixth book, he departs from his relentless focus on self-transformation and looks instead at “the quality of connection between people.” For an author whose previous books are mostly about remaking yourself in the image of superachievers (he, too, has a thing for elite swimmers), this new endeavor feels like a departure: to consider that mercurial thing that happens between us and other people.

Duckworth and Grant are colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania (he is at the Wharton School). They are also both associated with positive psychology, the field created by Martin Seligman at the school in the late 1990s—Seligman was Duckworth’s dissertation adviser. He rejected psychology’s focus on mental illness and wanted to identify the conditions under which human “flourishing” happens. Positive psychology was, at least in its own self-understanding, trying to apply empirical science to the ancient philosophical question of how to live a good life; Seligman wanted, as he recently wrote, to see if the field could “make the world a better place.”

But the approach underwent something of a corporate transformation as it migrated into business schools and HR departments. One of Duckworth’s first grit studies examined the kind of cadet who thrives at West Point, and Grant looked at businesses such as Google and Facebook. Their evidence base, case studies, and examples continued to be drawn overwhelmingly from schools, companies, elite performers, and athletes (all those swimmers). What they were measuring was how you maximize performance, which is some distance from Aristotle.

By the time the psychologists each strapped on a microphone and took to the TED stage in the 2010s with compressed, bullet-point versions of their research, they were ready for the self-help-book section. Their arrival helped give a glow-up to an enterprise that has thrived from the start on the notion that your inner resources alone, properly unearthed and deployed, will propel you to become the most successful version of you. In Self-Help (1859), the book that gave the genre its name, the Scottish journalist Samuel Smiles wrote that “help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.” What method did advice-givers deploy? Extract formulas for inner drive from vivid models of extraordinary achievement, and never mind how much gets left out—those pesky forces of genetics and upbringing, economics and history, not to mention luck. Duckworth and Grant joined in, and their best sellers got blurbed by the business and media elite (Mark Cuban, Oprah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg, Arianna Huffington).

Yet now they seem to be swerving onto more unruly terrain. Are their new books, I wondered, prepared to question some of the tenets of the venerable self-made-man myth? A person’s social world, the one outside their control that impinges on them at every turn, would seem to be key to understanding a rise or fall. Is that what Situated and Vibe, products of a disorienting moment, would do: look around and realize how little power we actually have over the course of our own lives?

That isn’t what these books do. Grant does acknowledge the “uncertainty, complexity, and conflict” that characterize most of our encounters once we leave the confines of our mind. “Like it or not,” Duckworth now pauses to observe, “our every thought and action is profoundly shaped by our peers and mentors, by our culture, and even by the objects in our personal space.” Entire centuries-old fields of social science, as the authors both know well, have detailed how such forces influence us. But recognizing constraint and limitation is not what this genre is about. Its goal is to reassure us that we have ultimate control over our fate.

Grant’s focus is on vibing, a word he uses to describe that ephemeral state when people or a group connect deeply—when “conversations pulse with energy. Thoughts soar. Trust grows. Time flies.” He insists that this is a “skill set that can be learned and taught,” and that it is crucial to one’s success. What follows is an assortment of studies to establish the ideal conditions for generating this crucial synergistic energy. In one of them, the same woman approached two different groups of male hikers trekking through a rainforest and, after asking them to fill out a questionnaire, she tore off a piece of paper, wrote down her number, and handed it to each of them. She met the first group on an ordinary bridge, and only one in eight men later called. But half of the men in the second group, which she encountered on a narrow suspension bridge swaying 230 feet above churning rapids, called her.

The takeaway? What deepens a relationship is being in an “emotionally intense situation.” Again and again, Grant plucks broad lessons from social-psychology experiments so odd that I came away wondering how big the sample size could possibly be, whether correlation and causation were getting confused—and, not least, how to apply the findings. Grant proposes engineering a group outing to such a bridge or a haunted house or, God help me, an improv-comedy class.

Unlike his earlier books, which are largely about shifting one’s mindset, there is only so much you can do to master your environment or other people, though Grant makes lots of suggestions. Throw dinner parties, but ensure that they are “carefully choreographed.” For example, ask guests to each throw one shoe in a pile and then take turns grabbing a shoe and holding it up for the owner to claim. “At dessert time, I prompted people to play musical chairs,” he proudly reports. I guess trust grew during these pre-K games? Often Grant slips into a style that reads like a manual for robots learning how to act like humans. “Laughing during and after disagreements,” he advises, “is one of the most effective ways to maintain a healthy bond.”

But you can’t really reverse engineer something like vulnerability or attentiveness or love. Grant’s attempt to script and quantify the ineffable connections among “associates, allies, pals, and companions”—his byzantine taxonomy of vibers—just seems condescending. Isn’t it the truest of truisms to say that “relying on our first impressions is shortsighted”? His tendency to end sections on a sententious note only adds to the patronizing tone. “A strong bond can last for years,” he intones, “but forming one doesn’t have to take years. Sometimes a little heat is enough to build a blazing fire.”

Duckworth’s approach is more schematic, conveyed succinctly by a “Three Boxes Model”: “Situation,” “Thoughts,” and “Response.” To take her most basic example, if you put your workout clothes where you can see them (situation), exercise will come to mind (thoughts), and because “changing your thoughts, in turn, automatically changes your behavior,” you’ll go for a jog (response). At a small scale, sure, this works: If you want to eat better, place carrots and apples around the house.

But Duckworth goes bigger. In Grit, she made the case for personal agency; here, she’s introducing “situational agency.” “Like the best of the best, you, too, can proactively seek out situations optimized to achieve your fullest potential,” she writes. If you don’t like the culture in which you’re embedded, if it’s cramping that potential, go elsewhere. Rearrange your environment for maximum grittiness.

Yet her guidance is strangely out of touch. Among her case studies, she focuses on, who else, an Olympic swimmer, Léon Marchand, and his decision to move from France to Tempe, Arizona, so that he could train with a world-renowned coach. Keep in mind that both of Marchand’s parents, as well as an uncle, were Olympic swimmers; that he had joined a swim club at age 6; and that he had already placed sixth in the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo before his move. From this fine-tuned trajectory—he went on to win four gold medals—Duckworth concludes that anything is possible for any of us if we just change our location: “In those moments when your challenge seems daunting, ask yourself, what would Léon do? And remember what he did do: Léon Marchand got on a plane.”

Never mind that relocating is hardly simple for anyone. Is our own situation always so clear to us? And if you change it, how do you know you’re making it better and not worse? Duckworth advises parents who want to improve their children’s opportunities to consider moving to school districts with better teachers and more resources, even if it means living in a smaller home. What if the child gets bullied at that new school? What if they resent having to share a room with their annoying sibling? Every circumstance in a person’s life is multidimensional. Describing the many factors at work is daunting enough, but pinpointing what can (and should) be changed is like trying to yank a tablecloth from a set table without breaking any dishes.

Duckworth doesn’t see the problem. She has yet more boxes, these for items labeled “uncontrollable” and “controllable,” as if the two can always and easily be parsed. The effects of “the modern world” and “your genes” (uncontrollable) get put in one category, and “the culture of where you work and live now” and “your mindset” (controllable) get put in another. I did a double take when I saw these neat divisions. Had Duckworth just cracked the great mystery of nature versus nurture?

One of the more nonsensical studies she cites found that growing up in a household with 500 books had the equivalent effect on a child’s “lifetime educational attainment” as having college-educated parents. How did this study even work? Can you isolate the effects of the books? Who else but college-educated parents would fill their house with that many books? Duckworth is not concerned with such details. The lesson lies in having books around (controllable), and she lectures parents accordingly: “Situationally wise parents don’t rush out to buy their children the latest iPhone. Instead, they purchase as many books as they can afford, line their walls with bookshelves and not TV screens, and take their children to the library on weekends.”

Duckworth and Grant have fallen into the same self-help trap. Situated and Vibe gesture at the realm beyond our immediate power, but they are still about how we can flex our willpower for the sake of more and more success. Duckworth refers approvingly to the Serenity Prayer, but she seems to miss what actually makes it meaningful. This is a prayer for people working on accepting their smallness and fallibility—it was popularized by recovering alcoholics. It is a prayer of realism, not ambition. The possibility of change exists, but only once you recognize and embrace the notion that many things will always be impossible to change.

Every self-help book is also an autobiography, even if unintentionally so. Why should we listen to such writers if they haven’t faced and overcome the problems they purport to solve? Both Duckworth and Grant reveal themselves as obsessive overachievers. Both went to Harvard. Duckworth was a consultant at McKinsey, then had stints teaching middle and high school before getting her Ph.D. in psychology. Grant’s friends called him Mr. Facts as a kid—he was the boy who fired off baseball statistics when they were just trying to trade cards. Despite his fear of heights, in high school he became a springboard diver good enough to be in the Junior Olympics. He got his master’s and doctorate in three years.

There’s nothing wrong with being driven. But compulsively performance-oriented people—in my experience, at least—find it hard to resist monitoring their behavior until there are zero unknowns. Grant hinted at this internal struggle in a 2013 New York Times Magazine profile: “For me, in my moments of idleness, I experience the most existential anxiety, so I like that every moment is scheduled, even when it’s having on my calendar that I’m going to watch a television show with my wife. It means my brain is engaged in other things, and it’s not going to be a terrifying evening.”

This frantic need to conquer uncertainty comes through in his books. He starts with humility, but what follows is an intense self-surveillance, a search for objective measures of how he’s doing. As he began writing for a popular audience, he has recalled, he pined for his diver days, when he was meticulously rated on the size of the splash as he entered the water. So he assembled colleagues to rate every new article and book chapter he produced on a scale of zero to 10.

Look around at all that resists being easily tweaked toward “excellence”—not least other people and reality itself—and the limits of self-help appear unavoidable. Duckworth reveals this at one point in Situated, in a way that I’m not sure she even realizes. In a genuinely vulnerable moment, she recounts a marital crisis after a lifetime of assuming that, with enough grit, she could manage everything. When her husband’s real-estate-development company encountered hard times, their relationship frayed; she cried herself to sleep every night and contemplated separation. Following the advice of her book, Duckworth reports that much of the solution lay in shifting the elements in box one, altering their schedules and restructuring their work life to create a new situation: Now they could “sleep, exercise, and laugh a little every single day.”

But that doesn’t seem to be what really saved them. She also describes all the therapy they undertook, with “tremendous reluctance” on her part—and with three therapists: one for her, one for her husband, and another for both of them. This is not changing the situation. Therapy is about better understanding yourself within a situation, tracing your patterns, learning to see others better as well. The work entailed is not optimization. It’s about dropping illusions. For Duckworth and her husband, it meant articulating the “messy bits,” the “sadness, confusion, fear, and doubt that each of us had been carrying in silence.” Doing what Léon Marchand would do—get on a plane to another city—was precisely not the point.

Every time I toggled between reading these books and opening the newspaper, I was reminded of just how inadequate their self-help message feels for this moment. When Duckworth and Grant talk about “culture”—which they do, a lot—they’re often referring to the highly controllable, measurable, top-down cultures of sports teams, tech companies, consulting firms. Their books’ neatness does not leave room for the feeling of being completely stuck, individually and collectively, and also buffeted by a world swirling out of our control. Most days, I feel like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, strapped into a chair, eyelids held open, forced to watch norms collapse, economies rupture, ecosystems crumble.

Personal or situational agency sounds great, but maybe what we really need is moral agency. Grant has occasionally garnished his stories of start-up successes with mentions of such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, to curiously dispiriting effect: The struggle to reshape values and society blurs into having a good pitch deck and some move-fast-and-break-things gumption. It’s the abiding ethos of expediency and mastery that limits the self-helpfulness of these new books—their emphasis on getting somewhere quickly and knowing with total certainty that you have arrived. Is that the point of fulfilling work, of satisfying family life, of friendship, of really anything worth doing?

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “Self-Help Needs Help.”

The Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey issued a Halloween-themed warning to her audience last week: Don’t watch scary movies. “How many times do we read throughout Scripture: ‘Do not fear,’” Stuckey wrote in a post that got more than 1 million views. For a Christian to “purposely consume content that is meant to make us scared,” she said on her show, amounts to “a direct contradiction of Jesus’s command to not fear or be anxious about anything.”

She eventually deleted the post—even many fellow conservative Christians found her argument overly simplistic—but she’s not the first person to make a religious case against the horror genre. After The Exorcist, in which two Catholic priests help a young girl possessed by a demon, came out in 1973, the televangelist Billy Graham said in an interview, “The devil is in every frame of the film” and likened it to “spiritual pornography, pandering to man’s innate superstition.” Christianity Today dismissed the film as “shrewd” and “obscene.”

I understand the criticisms: The genre’s frequent depictions of the occult or demonic can feel irreverent or profane. But many horror films are in fact quite open to theological ideas; the best ones are some of the most religious movies I’ve ever seen.

[Read: A religion that’s very ready for aliens]

Not all horror films take up deep questions about God, of course. Heretic, my colleague McKay Coppins wrote when it came out, was way too infatuated with “Reddit-level ideas about religion.” Jordan Peele’s excellent Get Out went light on religion and heavy on more contemporary social concerns. Sometimes, the horror elements themselves—the jump scares, the gore—can distract the viewer from any theological message that the film might be trying to send. If Saw is trying to tell me something about God—some viewers have referred to it as a morality play—I missed the message amid the slash-fest.

Still, many movies in the genre explore foundational religious concepts. Timothy Beal, a religious-studies professor at Case Western Reserve University, has written that horror movies resemble ancient texts such as Enuma Elish and the Book of Revelation, in which a god or gods overcome chaos brought by monstrous forces and establish cosmic order. Many of these films, Beal told me, are about experiencing “disorientation and threat to order.” Examples include the original Godzilla, about a building-crushing monster, or Dracula, about a cunning vampire who preys on naive mortals. Horror movies, moreover, propose that good and evil are real, not relative, ideals. Evil is out there, made concrete in the monster or demon or killer on the loose. So too is good, acknowledged in an audience’s desire for the villain to be tamed, caught, or cast out.

Many of these movies also don’t mind getting moralistic, and when they do, their moral code tends to skew traditionalist. The Exorcist presents substance abuse, parental neglect, and economic inequality as human failings that cause suffering just as evil supernatural forces do. Premarital sex has deadly consequences in so many horror movies—Halloween, Friday the 13th, and It Follows, to name just a few—that a character in the original Scream pokes fun at the trope. (“There are certain rules one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie,” the character explains. “No. 1: You can never have sex. Sex equals death.”)

Some of the best horror movies suggest that reality is more than mere matter, and that humans encounter supernatural forces that they do not see or understand. Father Ryan Duns, a professor at Marquette University, and the author of Theology of Horror, told me that these films can demonstrate that “the world is more than what can be measured and managed.” His point reminded me of the masterful 2024 remake of Nosferatu, which is not an explicitly religious film but does take belief in the spiritual world seriously. It depicts the residents of a 19th-century Transylvanian hamlet who believe that evil beings exist and can be kept at bay through magic rituals. The wealthy, sophisticated urbanites who treat the townsfolk as simpletons, by contrast, are caught flat-footed when the vampire brings torment and death to their city. They misdiagnose his wrath as a common plague and try in vain to fight it with medicine and quarantines. “We have been blinded by the gaseous light of science,” says an unorthodox professor, one of the few characters who recognizes the actual source of the city’s misery. He continues: “If we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists.”

[Read: ]Carrie, with kid gloves

When Stuckey told her listeners to avoid horror—and when Graham and Christianity Today warned people away from The Exorcist—they missed the point and failed to acknowledge that Christian ideas of redemption can be visible in even the darkest places. The Exorcist, for example, might seem like a story about a demon, but it’s really about trust in God. At the beginning of the film, the protagonist, Father Damien Karras, is having a crisis of faith. He’s become aloof toward others. A homeless man in a New York City subway station asks him, “Father, would you help an old altar boy?” Father Karras walks on, keeping the man’s suffering at a distance. He seems to fear it.

The exorcism referred to in the film’s title changes him. In ministering to the young Regan MacNeil, Father Karras watches her projectile-vomit, make violent outbursts, and, most famously, spin her head 360 degrees. Rather than turn away from the muck and frenzy of true terror, Father Karras confronts it. “Take me,” he tells the demon that has possessed the girl. He offers his life so that the body and soul of a vulnerable child might survive.

As the movie ends, we’re told the girl has no memory of being possessed or, presumably, of the man who cast the demon out. When she runs into another priest, however, her eyes focus on his clerical collar. She leans up and kisses his cheek. Something deep inside her senses that God was at work in putting an end to her horror story.

Here’s a tip if you ever want to ruin a Halloween party. Seek out the most squeamish-seeming adult or child you can find in the act of consuming candy corn. Then tell them they just filled their mouth with bug secretions.

If this fact alarms you—or if you’re an inveterate hater of candy corn and thus think that you have been spared—I regret to inform you that by eating many classic Halloween candies, you are, to some extent, eating bugs. More precisely, you are eating a bug by-product that is in many cases listed on the package as “confectioner’s glaze.” This glaze is used on jelly beans, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Whoppers, Lemonheads, and Sugar Babies, to name a few.

This sounds innocent enough, until you understand that the glaze is shellac—a shiny, moisture-blocking resin that’s the product of lac bugs’ lifelong work. As the female lac bug pierces a tree with her needlelike mouthparts and sucks the sap out, she secretes a goo, also called lac, from a gland on her abdomen to form a cocoon of sorts. (Male lac bugs don’t do much besides mate and die after about four days.) Inside her lac coating—which hardens on contact with the air much like, well, a candy shell—she spends her life feeding and laying eggs, safe from predators. If all goes well, she completes her life cycle and dies in her resinous home.

The amount of resin produced by each insect is virtually microscopic, but over time, enough of the bugs cluster on one branch to make an amount worth pouring over a batch of Raisinets. The process has been the same for thousands of years: Strip the resin from the bark, melt it down, remove any impurities (translation: bits of wood and bugs), let it harden, and break it into shards. One pound of finished shellac requires the secretions of 100,000 insects. For every shiny candy you eat, roughly a quarter of 1 percent is this bug by-product, Michelle Frame, a candy scientist, told me.

Humans are still harvesting shellac because it’s not really like anything else—man-made, bug-made, or otherwise. Most adhesives that are strong enough to coat surfaces or give them such a high gloss aren’t food-safe. Shellac is. It also has an appealing reddish color, thanks to the naturally occurring laccaic acid in it, which can be used as a dye. Depending on the alcohol or solvent that shellac is mixed with, it can be used as a furniture polish, as nail polish, or to make hair spray shine. It’s sprayed on some fruits to extend their shelf life and used to coat many pills, both to slow the rate of absorption in the stomach and to mask the taste of bitter medicines.

None of this is a compelling advertisement for shellac as a candy ingredient. “People sometimes panic, like, It’s in your furniture!” Frame said. But all of those uses are evidence of shellac’s versatility, not a nefarious plot to get Americans to eat wood polish. Even if you restrict its applications to candy making, shellac, which is both natural and tasteless, is more useful than any alternative. For example, zein, a protein derived from corn, can be used as a vegan candy coating. But Frame, like many other food scientists, believes that zein is not as strong as shellac, nor is it as good at keeping moisture out. (It also smells like a wet dog while the candy is being made, she said—even though the smell does go away once it dries.)

Really, the fact that so many candies contain a product made by insects shouldn’t be a surprise. “Even highly industrialized societies are heavily dependent on the products of other species,” Edward Melillo, the author of The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World, told me. (Melillo readily acknowledged his own dependence: “I love candy corn personally, so I eat a lot of shellac,” he said.) People eat meat and wear wool, silk, and leather. A beeswax candle might be burning in your house (or in your jack-o’-lantern) right now. Corn syrup, used in many candies, is extracted from a grass that humans selectively bred into a monster version of itself, then processed into sugar in industrial laboratories. People have used red dye that’s sometimes called carmine or cochineal extract, made from crunched-up cochineal bugs, for more than 2,000 years. The substance is responsible for the vibrant red in Nerds Gummy Clusters, some Airheads products, Good & Plenty, and other candies. Meanwhile, squishy treats such as marshmallows and gummy bears—and candy corn—still largely use gelatin made from animal collagen, found in bones, skin, and ligaments.

Whether any of this counts as icky is, of course, a matter of taste. Plenty of people eat insects and ligaments on purpose and with aplomb. And whatever your personal threshold, we’re all eating bugs and other perhaps undesirable animal bits all the time. Insects, rodent hairs, and droppings are so unavoidable in many agricultural products that the FDA has a list of legally acceptable defects allowed in popular foods; chocolate is permitted to have 60 insect fragments and one rodent hair per 100 grams. (According to Frame, even this is not so alarming: “A bug leg is just a bit of protein that will go through you anyway,” she said.)

As much as you may want to avoid thinking about it, virtually all Halloween treats are creations worthy of Frankenstein. Why not consume a little bug goo on the side?

Each October, after the last of the tobacco has been harvested and the apple jam canned, Amish communities begin celebrating the months-long “wedding season.” Twice a week, hundreds of celebrants pack into a home to watch a young couple wed and share a meal. These gatherings, however joyful, add to the worries of Roberta Devers, a home-birth midwife in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. At her prenatal appointments, she’s been asking mothers-to-be: With all of the celebrations, how are you going to keep yourself safe from measles?

In Pennsylvania, at least 1,398 people have been infected with measles this year, according to recent estimates from the state health department; the Amish community, which has significantly lower vaccination rates than other Pennsylvanians, has been especially hard hit. Experts caution that the actual number of infections is likely much higher. “Every house that I go into, either my pregnant mama has it, her husband has it and she’s going to get it, or a family member has it,” Devers told me last week as she drove from one patient appointment to another through Lancaster County’s rolling farmland. Measles can be especially dangerous during pregnancy, leading to low birth weight, early labor, and miscarriage; one of Devers’s patients recently miscarried at 17 weeks while she was fighting a measles infection.

If more pregnant women get measles, the number of newborns who have measles will almost certainly rise too. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, historical reports suggest that about a quarter of children born to mothers who are sick with measles in the days leading up to labor will likely acquire the disease. No data on the current rate of measles acquired in utero, which is known as congenital measles, are publicly available yet. But health-care providers working in Pennsylvania say it’s on the rise—perhaps at a scale not seen in decades, if ever.

Before the measles vaccine was licensed in 1963, roughly 95 percent of Americans contracted the disease in childhood, making them immune by the time they entered their reproductive years. But people who are of childbearing age today have lived through historically low measles rates. That means that a number of unvaccinated adults, including pregnant ones, never caught measles in childhood and are therefore not immune—and are now contracting the virus during large outbreaks. About two-thirds of the cases reported in Pennsylvania this year have been in adults ages 18 to 49, some of whom appear to be passing on the disease during childbirth.

In an October 19 advisory, the Pennsylvania Department of Health noted that congenital measles had been identified in the state for the first time in decades. “It’s gone from something we never see to something that we are now commonly seeing,” John Goldman, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Harrisburg, told me. The Atlantic’s Tom Bartlett reported in August that an infant in Lancaster County, born to a mother who was severely ill with measles, was declared dead within 30 minutes after birth.

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

Documenting an increase in congenital-measles cases is challenging. Case reports date back to at least the 1930s, but “no one has done any kind of systematic collection” of data, Adam J. Ratner, an infectious-disease pediatrician in New York, told me. The Pennsylvania Department of Health cannot release measles patients’ personal information, including their precise age, in order to protect their privacy, the deputy press secretary Stephanie Nojiri told me, and even if they could, no national definition for congenital measles exists to standardize tracking. Historically, doctors have diagnosed congenital measles when they observe a measles rash and other typical symptoms of the disease within the first 10 days of a newborn’s life. But that definition may unwittingly count some infants who contract measles in their first days of life outside the womb and miss counting infants with milder cases who do not present with a rash, Ratner said.

Because congenital measles has historically been so rare, doctors know very little about its effects. Measles is known to wipe a person’s immune memory, making survivors highly susceptible to infections for years to follow; a 2019 study in children found that the virus demolished anywhere from 11 to 73 percent of antibodies and memory cells. And all people who contract measles are at risk of developing a rare but almost always fatal brain inflammation, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, that can occur a decade or more after they contract the disease. But newborns can react to viruses differently than children even a few months older, which could mean that the effects of congenital measles deviate. That dangerous brain inflammation, for example, appears to occur more commonly and more quickly in congenital cases than in cases acquired after birth.

For now, doctors are trying to pool what they do know. Ratner, who is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases, helped assemble new AAP guidance on how to treat congenital measles; he and his colleagues consulted doctors in Canada, which saw congenital-measles cases during an outbreak last year, but also had to extrapolate from how pediatricians treat measles in older children. John Goldman told me that he and other physicians had been following that guidance, as well as the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s, and recommending both vitamin A, which can help limit the severity of an infection in children with a deficiency, and a dose of antibodies, which can help prevent an infected mother from transmitting the virus to her child at all. “There’s not a lot of good data on how you treat it,” Goldman said. But, he added, Pennsylvania may soon end up with the country’s largest data set of congenital-measles cases, which could help doctors treat those cases more effectively in future outbreaks.

The best way to prevent a congenital-measles infection is, of course, to prevent a mother from getting measles before she gives birth. The best way to do that is with the measles vaccine, which is typically given shortly after a person’s first birthday. One of the few times an adult can’t get vaccinated is, crucially, during pregnancy—just when protection is most necessary.  

To help shield unvaccinated pregnant women, Roberta Devers argued that the providers who interact with them most often—in many cases, midwives—should be allowed to inoculate the other members of their household. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul has allowed licensed midwives to administer the measles vaccine as part of a recent disaster declaration responding to the state’s growing outbreak. Pennsylvania, however, does not allow vaccines to be provided by traditional midwives, many of whom study through apprenticeships rather than attending nursing school and are not licensed by the state. Christian Macedonia, a maternal-fetal-medicine physician in Lancaster County, told me that’s for good reason: Providers who have not gone through formal medical training, he said, should not be distributing shots.

But he also acknowledged that midwives are “really at the front line” of the congenital-measles crisis. In insular religious communities, such as the Amish one in Lancaster County, which have seen the largest measles outbreaks over the past couple of years, midwives may be the only medical professionals with whom families regularly interact. “We have intimate relationships with these families,” Devers said. “We want to be able to carry the vaccine, because our families started to request it.”

Devers knows that many of her patients still distrust the formal health-care system. At a recent postpartum appointment, she talked with a mother who questioned the motives of pop-up vaccination clinics—she was suspicious of the shots being offered for free. As she spoke, the mother cradled her feverish 12-week-old baby, who had measles.

The most important decision facing California voters this year is not which candidates to support for higher office, but whether to approve a wealth tax on the state’s approximately 250 billionaires. The ballot initiative that would impose the tax has plenty of enemies, among not only the superrich but also the many Californians, including Governor Gavin Newsom, who worry about losing the superrich to other states. But thanks to a deviously cynical electoral maneuver by the measure’s opponents, the people who ultimately doom it might include some of those who vote for it.

Proposition 40 was spearheaded by Dave Regan, who leads California’s large and powerful health-care workers’ union, in response to the Medicaid cuts in Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. If approved, the initiative would create a onetime 5 percent tax on all billionaire wealth, and the proceeds—perhaps as much as $100 billion—would be earmarked mostly for state health-care spending. To make sure the superrich don’t flee before they can be taxed, the policy would apply retroactively to anyone who lived in the state at the start of 2026.

Predictably, some of the billionaires in question are seeking to defeat the initiative. The Google co-founder Sergey Brin preemptively moved his residence and businesses to Nevada in 2025 and seeded the new political organization Building a Better California with $102 million from his stash. (That might sound like a lot, but the tax would have cost him about $12 billion.) Thanks to the donations of other tech tycoons, the group has raised more than $333 million in total.

[Read: If you tax them, will they leave?]

Plan A is to convince voters that Proposition 40 is unwise via a barrage of TV and social-media ads. In case that doesn’t work, the opponents have come up with Plans B and C: Propositions 41 and 42. These initiatives take advantage of a feature of California law: If two conflicting ballot measures pass in the same election, the one with more votes prevails. On the surface, both look innocuous and unrelated to the wealth tax. Proposition 41 is being pitched as a fiscal-responsibility measure, and Proposition 42 is ostensibly about protecting voters’ retirement savings. But the initiatives are designed to directly conflict with the wealth-tax measure. Proposition 41 would institute audit requirements for new special taxes and void any programs that are exempt from the state’s existing spending limit, which the new wealth tax would be. Proposition 42 would prohibit both retroactive taxes and any taxes on non-real-estate property, each of which describes Proposition 40.

This tactic is completely legal, and efforts to change the rules could have unfortunate downstream consequences. For instance, if counterproposals were disallowed, then a group that caught wind of an upcoming initiative could block it simply by being the first to gather enough signatures. Still, the rule can, perversely, lead to antimajoritarian outcomes by preventing proposals supported by more than half of the population from becoming law if another proposal on the ballot happens to, or is designed to, negate it.

Propositions 41 and 42 also take advantage of the possibility that voters will not realize that the measures conflict, and will vote yes on more than one of them. They might think that audits are sensible and that spending limits should be observed, or that personal property such as cars and engagement rings and 401(k)s shouldn’t be taxed, and fail to understand that these principles stand in the way of their belief that billionaires ought to pay a wealth tax.

Other voters might prefer audits to a wealth tax even though they’d be perfectly fine with both; in that sense, the countermeasure forces them to choose between two policies that could coexist. Still other voters are likely to be overwhelmed or annoyed by having to parse so many measures and decide to oppose all of them: Political scientists have found that the longer the ballot, the more likely people are to vote no.

[Read: The one tax the rich can’t escape]

Historically, Californians are not easily fooled by this type of gamesmanship. But in a close contest, only a small subset of voters needs to fit into the above categories for the countermeasure strategy to work. Imagine that 51 percent of voters want a wealth tax and 49 percent oppose it. If all of those who oppose it vote for Proposition 41, knowing that the measure will negate Proposition 40, and just 3 percent of the electorate votes for both, then Proposition 41 will pass with 52 percent of the vote, nullifying the wealth tax that 51 percent of Californians voted to approve.

Polls indicate that this outcome is possible. A September survey by the Public Policy Institute of California had the wealth tax passing 52–46, Proposition 41 passing 51–44, and Proposition 42 passing 54–43, which would result in only Proposition 42 (the one about taxing property) going into effect. (A more recent poll by the same organization showed the wealth tax at only 46 percent support.) A poll from UC Berkeley found that a larger slice of the electorate was undecided about the countermeasures than about Proposition 40, suggesting that some voters don’t realize the measures conflict.

At the turn of the 20th century, many western-state legislatures were captured by the owners of local railroad and mining monopolies. Progressives and populists introduced ballot measures as a way to circumvent those plutocrats and return power to the people. But, as the fight over Proposition 40 shows, that works only if voters can withstand plutocrats’ efforts to capture the ballot-measure process too.

In a speech to the nation in July, Donald Trump said that reports from intelligence agencies showed that American elections were profoundly vulnerable to foreign interference. China had “bought, stolen, or hacked” voter data in 18 states, he said, and he implied that foreign operatives had somehow been able to manipulate actual votes. Reports by the CIA and other agencies that he made public that day did not back up his most extravagant claims. But Trump suggested that a foreign government may have stolen the 2020 election from him, and that it could strike again.

Democrats consider that speech a dress rehearsal for next week’s elections. For years, Trump has claimed that foreign governments possess the power to hack electronic voting machines to change the outcome of a race. Election-security experts and lawmakers told me that they expect him to trot out the same claims again if Republicans lose large numbers of seats in the House and Senate. And they’re concerned that he’ll use classified intelligence reports as a pretext for trying to seize ballots or stop vote-counting by the states.

“We start with the premise that the president is going to do that,” Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters last week. But according to the most recent intelligence that Himes said he had seen about foreign threats to the election, U.S. adversaries haven’t changed votes. “We have never seen an operation to actually interfere,” he said.

Years of reporting from intelligence agencies and election-monitoring groups backs Himes up. Foreign governments disseminate propaganda and try to undermine confidence in the political process, and they seek to influence policy, sometimes through espionage. But there is a big difference between influence and interference, which experts define as manipulation of an election with the aim of altering the outcome. Top Trump officials have sought to prove that foreign actors worked with Democrats and other “deep state” interests to deny Trump a second term in 2020, only for their theories to come up empty. Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard went so far as to obtain voting machines from Puerto Rico and test them for evidence of tampering. Her probe found none.

One reason voting machines are so secure is that they’re not connected to the internet. “It would be extremely hard for a foreign or outside actor to reach the actual vote,” Lawrence Norden, the vice president of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center, told me. “And we have a paper backup of almost every vote that is cast in the United States at this point,” he added. So even if a hacker managed to flip a vote from one candidate to another on a computer tally, election officials could spot the discrepancy. Norden said that, in his view, foreign governments aren’t the major concern this season. Instead, the dominant source of worry is closer to home. “The new threat in this election is the administration,” Norden said.

Real limits constrain Trump’s ability to interfere in the midterms, even if he tries to do so. The Constitution gives states the power to administer elections, and U.S. law prevents a president from carrying out what many experts consider a nightmare scenario of “nationalizing” the vote. “A mere declaration by the president is not going to be enough legally to justify going in and trying to seize voting machines or ballots,” Richard Pildes, a professor at NYU School of Law, told me. Federal agents would need a warrant to take control of election equipment or ballots, and first they’d need to persuade a judge there was probable cause that a crime had occurred. Any classified intelligence reports might have to be shown to a judge, Pildes said. Even if the government was successful, it cannot legally remove the ballots themselves from state custody, and must rely on copies or images of them, he added. “There’s certainly no power in the executive branch to take over or nationalize the election process,” Pildes said.

A White House spokeswoman told me that Trump was focused on prosecuting election crimes, including voter fraud, and on strengthening election infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security has offered physical security and cybersecurity services to states and localities. “The only ‘concerns’ about election security are being caused by radical Democrats refusing to enact basic election security measures, supported by the majority of Americans, including voter ID and citizenship verification to ensure only Americans are electing America’s leaders,” the spokeswoman, Laruen Biss, said in a statement. “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.”

[Read: Trump still hasn’t found what he’s looking for]

Should Trump claim that foreign operatives are changing votes, Himes and his counterpart on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, told reporters they would call the president’s intelligence advisers and ask for the underlying facts. Himes said that he told CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, “When the president makes that announcement, you will answer your cellphone to give us information about what’s happening.”

A spokesperson for Clayton’s office told me that since he was confirmed this summer, he “has made it clear” to the leadership of the House and Senate committees “that he is available to them 24/7 on any issue.” A CIA spokesperson told me, “Director Ratcliffe is responsive to CIA’s Oversight Committees and will continue to be available as appropriate.”

Recently, House committee members met with career staff in Clayton’s office who monitor threats to election security. It’s a smaller group these days, after cuts by the administration, Himes said. “But we got a lot of confidence that they are doing their job, that if the president were to demand that they make something up, one way or another, we would learn about that,” he said.

The threat profile from U.S. adversaries this fall is similar to what it’s been before other major U.S. elections in recent years. Russia continues to spread misinformation aimed at undermining public confidence in the political system, voting machines, and Democrats in particular, according to lawmakers and election-security experts. In some cases, Moscow-aligned actors are making deepfake videos with the help of AI to spread false allegations of misconduct. China has focused more on local races and influencing specific policies, often by recruiting agents in the United States. (In May, a former mayor of a Los Angeles suburb pleaded guilty to acting as an illegal foreign agent, primarily by promoting Chinese propaganda.) As for the Iranians, who historically have tried to influence U.S. elections, they appear more focused this year on keeping gas prices high by disrupting traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

Foreign influence has been a prominent feature of American politics for a decade now, since Russia used propaganda and selectively leaked emails to divide voters and denigrate Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. But true interference would be novel, alarming, and contradicted by U.S. intelligence agencies’ best estimates about what foreign adversaries actually hope to achieve.

Norden said that both before the election and just after, Russian influence groups are likely to again sow divisions and political discord. One Russian propaganda group in particular, Storm-1516, was active in the 2024 election and could come on the scene again, he said. But peddling misinformation, however corrosive, is not the same thing as flipping votes. Meanwhile, Norden said, the Trump administration has laid the foundations to undermine the public’s confidence in the outcome of the election. That is its own kind of influence operation.

[From the October 2026 issue: The election deniers’ long game]

Intelligence officials seem aware of that particular risk. Back in July, when Trump tried to suggest that China might have had a hand in his loss, the declassified documents that the White House put on its website didn’t substantiate those claims. One CIA document that garnered significant attention from lawmakers and security experts contained a summary of China’s aggressive efforts to exert influence on American politics and economic policy. But it didn’t claim that China had ever interfered and changed votes.

If any renewed claims of foreign interference by Trump next Tuesday, or in the days that follow, are to be believed, they will require the sort of evidence that he has so far been unable to supply.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Last Halloween, I answered a knock on the door to find a young trick-or-treater dressed as a toilet. Not just any toilet—Skibidi Toilet, a disembodied head that pops out of a toilet and is a villain of the eponymous YouTube miniseries about an army of such creatures conquering Earth. I was visibly puzzled and asked him a series of questions. Was Skibidi his first name and Toilet his surname? Was he a man stuck in a toilet, or a new, hybrid organism? He looked at his friends and laughed; I smiled awkwardly as I distributed Airheads.

When I was a kid, Halloween featured a reliably recognizable cast: Darth Vaders, Little Mermaids, and plenty of Spidermen. But the internet’s memes have inevitably bled into costumes. For every zombie, there is now also a John Pork (an anthropomorphic pig in a red flannel that keeps calling your phone), a Ballerina Cappuccina (a cappuccino that performs ballet in a pink tutu), and a Tung Tung Tung Sahur. (Sahur is an AI-generated bipedal kentongan drum with a human face that wields a baseball bat. He’s also Italian.)

Wearing a costume that successfully confounds grown-ups could be considered a harmless act of Halloween rebellion on a day known for mischief. This holiday has long marked an occasion for kids to assert an us-versus-them mentality toward adults. In 2012, Emily Chertoff compiled a history of the Halloween pranks for The Atlantic, recounting how the antics once got so out of control that in 1923, Omaha’s “police commissioner came up with a solution: he would recruit 500 of the city’s ‘worst boys’ to serve as ‘special policemen’ on Halloween, turning over to each a badge and a beat.” Soon enough, “every boy in the city” wanted to qualify, according to an anonymous author in The New York Times.

For decades, cities introduced creative solutions to quell the discord on All Hallows’ Eve. In 1938, “Boston’s police commissioner gave ‘engraved awards’ to ‘the three schools in districts which showed the “least vandalism” on Halloween,’” Chertoff noted. She explained that after World War II, trick-or-treating took off as one of the most successful interventions to actually stem Halloween’s mayhem. It also led many people to lament the death of the holiday. “The children who come to my door will remember All Hallows’ Eve as a night when they sold their right to rebellion for some sugar in expensive wrappings,” Lois Phillips Hudson wrote in this magazine in 1962.

The rebellious spirit of Halloween wasn’t gone, though. Costumes were another battleground between kids and grown-ups, and the freedom to express oneself was at the center of this clash. “On Halloween a boy can’t wear anything feminine. The idea of lipstick horrifies a father,” Evelyn Goodenough Pitcher quoted one mother saying in The Atlantic’s March 1963 issue. The generational divide has taken on a new form in today’s algorithm-inflected celebration. In 2024, Kate Lindsay argued against such niche costumes. “The meme invasion threatens the spirit of Halloween,” she wrote in The Atlantic. “The costumes aren’t intended for my—or any other partygoer’s—consumption. They’re for our phones.”

Indeed, at a Halloween party I attended in Bushwick, I bumped into someone dressed as the grandfather who ate paint thinking it was yogurt (a real person whose image became a meme). Last year, photos went viral of adults donning “six-seven” outfits at Halloween, sounding the death knell for the meme. Children, though, aren’t always performing for the algorithm. Maybe their real Halloween joy comes from laughing at a perplexed adult holding a candy bowl on their porch.

Although pranks have faded from Halloween’s traditions—the “trick” has surrendered to the “treat”—little rebellions remain. The mischief-makers of the early 20th century might have been pleased to see legions of giggling Tung Tung Tung Sahurs roaming the streets, while mystified parents ask one another: What’s your kid dressed as?

Many Democrats have a post-midterm dream that goes something like this: Pete Hegseth, the push-up-loving, beardo-mocking former Fox News host who has led the Pentagon for almost two years with bombast and theatrics, is either fired or hauled before their new majority in the House to face impeachment—which would make him just the third Cabinet secretary in history to face such a sanction. “One of the first things we’re going to do in the majority, we’re going to run Pete Hegseth out of town,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who is in line to be speaker of the House should the Democrats win that chamber, declared at a rally this month, the closest he’s come to saying the I-word.

Many of his colleagues feel the same. Hegseth helped steer the U.S. into war with Iran, and then failed to deliver victory. He initiated strikes against speedboats allegedly carrying narco-traffickers off the coasts of South and Central America that many Democrats view as extrajudicial killings. He pushed out scores of seasoned generals, many of whom were held in high esteem on Capitol Hill. All the while, he has flouted any notion of congressional oversight. His acidly partisan approach to Hill relations dates back to his contentious 2025 confirmation process, when he broke tradition by declining courtesy calls with most Democratic senators. And he has, in his political opponents’ view, brought a macho crassness to the job, railing against “fatties,” “weirdos,” and “beardos” and introducing hormone supplements to ensure “high T” troops. Former President Obama last weekend mocked the well-coiffed Hegseth for focusing on “the jawlines and testosterone levels of our troops” and for being consumed by vanity. “How much time,” Obama asked, “do you think this defense secretary spends looking at himself in the mirror in the morning?”

From a Democratic standpoint, what’s not to impeach? Yet precisely because Hegseth and his behavior present such a ripe target for House Democrats, they might ultimately decide against pursuing that measure. After all, even if a Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Hegseth, and even if the Democrats win a majority in the Senate and convene a trial, Hegseth almost certainly would retain enough support in the upper chamber to fall short of the required 67 votes for conviction. The alternative is for Democrats to try to rein in Hegseth without the spectacle of impeachment, relying instead on the aggressive pursuit of their more traditional oversight mechanisms—hearings, investigations, and conditions attached to the annual defense budget. If Democrats are going to go to war, as it were, with the self-styled secretary of war, they may prefer to fight a battle they think they can actually win.

If Thomas Massie has his way, Hegseth’s impeachment wouldn’t wait until the new Congress convenes in January. The outgoing Republican representative from Kentucky has said he plans to bring the articles of impeachment he filed this fall against Hegseth up for a vote during the House’s lame-duck postelection session. His eight draft articles include accusations that Hegseth plotted to conduct an illegal war in Iran (a conflict for which President Trump never sought congressional authorization) and that he approved the “kidnapping of a sovereign foreign leader,” a reference to the January seizure of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Massie told Puck he thinks other Republicans who are poised to leave Congress may rally behind him. The vote to proceed with impeachment and the impeachment itself require a simple majority in the House.

[Read: Here’s who Democrats want to impeach next]

Democrats would likely welcome Massie’s move, even if it did no more than force Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump to come to Hegseth’s defense. A recent Politico poll showed that 63 percent of Democratic midterm voters would support impeaching the defense secretary. (Only Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a more popular target for impeachment, with 65 percent support.) And, should Massie’s effort fail, the Democrats have their own draft articles at hand. Representative Yassamin Ansari of Arizona filed impeachment articles against Hegseth in April. Her draft articles are similar to Massie’s but also include accusations of obstructing congressional oversight and mishandling classified information (in March 2025, Hegseth shared sensitive war plans in a Signal group that included The Atlantic’s editor in chief). Her effort has 16 co-sponsors, all of them Democrats, but she sees the ground shifting and holds out hope that Trump will get rid of his defense secretary before Congress has the chance to act. “The calls against Hegseth’s leadership have increased dramatically on both sides of the aisle,” Ansari told us. “We are really strongly pushing the president to replace Hegseth.”

The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told us in a statement that Trump strongly supports Hegseth. “Secretary Hegseth is doing a great job leading the Pentagon,” she said. Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson called Hegseth a “transformative leader” who has “slashed bureaucracy, unleashed innovation, and delivered for our warfighters every step of the way.”

The House has impeached only two Cabinet secretaries: William Belknap, the secretary of war, in 1876; and Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, in 2024. (In both cases, the Senate did not convict.)

Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat and former Army Ranger, was one of the seven impeachment managers during Trump’s first impeachment trial in the Senate, in 2020. He told us the party needed to be cautious in considering a third presidential impeachment. But he is far less squeamish about trying to remove Hegseth. “Pete Hegseth and the corruption he’s brought to the Department of Defense is at the top of my list,” Crow said.

[Read: The Top Gun: Maverick theory of Pete Hegseth]

Representative Adam Smith, who would lead the House Armed Services Committee should Democrats take over, told us that he and his colleagues will have limited powers even in the majority, especially if the administration rebuffs congressional requests for documents or witnesses. The Justice Department, for instance, under Trump’s onetime personal attorney Todd Blanche, may decline to enforce congressional subpoenas. That would make even lawmakers like Smith, typically more inclined to dig into the arcana of acquisition reform than stage a made-for-TV trial, more likely to consider the toughest sanction.

“Do we try to work in a reasonable place or do we go right for the jugular here?” Smith said, referring to Jeffries’s desire to see Hegseth removed from office. “Personally I think there’s no reason to expect that Trump and Hegseth are going to cooperate with us in any way. So I think that Hakeem may well be right.” The decision could amount to an early test of Jeffries and his ability to corral the different factions in the Democratic caucus. Even as he has talked lately about running Hegseth out of town, Jeffries hasn’t explicitly endorsed an impeachment strategy. “Pete Hegseth needs to be pushed aside by the president,” he told MS NOW this week, “or we’re going to have to deal with the situation if he is not.”

GOP grumbling about Hegseth’s performance has intensified over the past year. Representative Mike Rogers and Senator Roger Wicker, the chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, respectively, have objected to administration plans to cut the U.S. military presence in Europe and to Pentagon delays in providing aid to Ukraine. Senator Susan Collins and others complained when Hegseth fired respected military leaders, including Generals Randy George and Chris “C. D.” Donahue. Mike Johnson panned Hegseth’s plan to livestream an execution by firing squad. (Trump ultimately quashed the livestream.) Outgoing Senator Thom Tillis has described his vote to confirm Hegseth as the “biggest regret” of his career. Still, even those Republicans unimpressed with Hegseth have been loath to cross the president, and they continue to support most of Hegseth’s plans, including a boost in defense spending to $1.5 trillion.

[Read: How Pete Hegseth’s plan for a reality-TV execution imploded]

That suggests an uphill push for a conviction in the Senate—and a trial would provide Hegseth with a prominent, televised perch from which he could lambast the effort, secure in the knowledge that his prospects of conviction are remote. That may be all the more desirable for him as Trump enters his lame-duck years and the MAGA faithful search for a worthy successor. The spectacle of Hegseth in a congressional hearing room defending his troops and hitting back against Democrats could boost the presidential ambitions he is said to harbor. Trump’s two impeachments ultimately helped his political standing by giving him a clear foe; Republicans might welcome a similar dynamic with the secretary of defense in the dock.

Should Democrats decide against impeachment proceedings, they are likely instead to resort to more common oversight measures. Riders to the defense-spending legislation could compel the Pentagon to comply with congressional mandates barring troop drawdowns around the world. Admiral Mitch Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, will likely face questions over a September 2, 2025, air strike that killed two men clinging to maritime wreckage in the Caribbean. Democratic lawmakers also want to declassify the Office of Legal Counsel memo that lays out a legal rationale for those operations, and potentially bring in military lawyers to testify. Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, could be asked about casualties from the Iran war—those of American troops and Iranian civilians—and damage to U.S. bases in the region. But all of these efforts would be politically fraught for Democrats, whom Republicans are sure to accuse of going after the troops.

Lawmakers told us they still don’t know the true state of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and other facilities that have been attacked, other than that they have sustained real damage. When Democratic Senator Chris Murphy made a fact-finding trip to Qatar this month, the Pentagon denied him permission to visit Al Udeid, the military’s regional air hub, which was struck by Iran, and barred military officials from briefing him. Lawmakers will push Hegesth on whether the military was negligent in protecting U.S. forces from Iranian drones and missiles—21 service members have died and more than 800 have been wounded in the conflict—and subjecting sailors to a record-breaking stint at sea. “My north star is anything jeopardizing the immediate safety and well-being of our troops,” Crow told us. “Are they getting equipment they need? Why is he firing the top ranks of the Army? There are a lot of questions.” The Pentagon may also be pressed to provide details of business deals made as part of Hegseth’s race to move the military into the age of artificial intelligence or to purchase Venezuelan oil.

All of that presumes, of course, that Hegseth remains in office. Trump has shown no inclination to fire him, though the White House may look for scapegoats in the event of a midterm drubbing. The Cabinet official most closely associated with the Iran war could fit the bill. Or Trump could find an off-ramp for Hegseth. Rumors abound at the Pentagon that the president will prevail on Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee to name Hegseth to her vacant seat should she win her race for Tennessee governor, as she’s expected to do. A spokeswoman for Blackburn’s campaign said the senator would not have any discussions about a potential replacement “until the appropriate time”; the Pentagon’s Wilson said the Blackburn idea was “nothing more than Beltway gossip by anonymous sources.” The White House declined to comment on the idea. Were it to happen, Democrats might be satisfied that Hegseth is out of the Pentagon—but less pleased to have him as a colleague.

Unto every season is given a certain kind of book. When the new year beckons a new you, self-help thrives. Breezy beach reads rule the summer. Cookbook recommendations abound in the lead-up to Thanksgiving. Curiously, publishers told me, Easter is big for picture books (which are easy to stick in a basket next to the chocolate bunny). And Halloween is for horror. Time to bust out some Shirley Jackson (or perhaps some Stephen King or Edgar Allan Poe).

Yet the days of decorative gourds and darkening evenings have also become a boom season for romance novels—not just any romance novels, but ones targeted at both Halloween and fall more broadly. These books exist on a spectrum of snuggly to spooky: on one end, crispy foliage and adorable bookshops; on the other, the growing subgenre of horror romance. In the middle lie Halloweeny but still-sweet stories of witches brewing love potions, grim reapers falling for guardian angels, and regular old humans getting entangled with creatures of all kinds. This trend results from a brew of ingredients that include market forces, social-media trends, and readers yearning to escape the real world for a cozier one with more regular seasons.

Autumnal romances are not an entirely new phenomenon, but they have really taken off in the past two to five years. Winter-holiday-themed romances used to be published around the end of September, according to Leah Hultenschmidt, the publisher of Hachette Book Group’s romance-focused Forever imprint. “People talk about the Christmas creep. But we were really creeping it,” she told me. Now, she said, holiday books are being pushed back because “fall has become its own selling season.”

[Read: The publishing industry’s most swoon-worthy genre]

Taylor Capizola, the general manager of the romance bookstore The Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles, told me that The Ex Hex by Erin Stirling was the first “overtly autumnal, overtly Halloweeny” book she noticed catching on. That book—about a witch who curses her ex-boyfriend—came out in 2021. That same year, Jeannie Chin released the small-town romance novel The Inn on Sweetbriar Lane. It’s set in fall, and features a pumpkin festival. But Chin told me that at the time, she wasn’t thinking of it as a seasonal romance, and her publisher wasn’t really planning to market it that way. (The cover, with its pink flowers, actually looks pretty spring-y.) “As it came out, I think, is sort of when this ‘fall is the new Christmas’ thing started,” she said. “So we sort of pivoted with the marketing a little bit to take advantage of the fact that it absolutely is a fall book.”

Interest has escalated since then. Whereas in the early part of this decade, Capizola might have seen five or so Halloweeny books come into the shop in the fall, by last year The Ripped Bodice was unpacking “boxes and boxes and boxes,” she said. “Just a massive amount.” One of the fall-themed novels that came out this year was Chin’s. With The Cozy Nook Bookshop, “the idea of putting that fall cozy piece front and center was there from the beginning,” Chin said. This time, it has pumpkins on the cover.

To be fair to fall, it is very romantic. The leaves, the chill, the steamy beverages, and the beckoning of the fireplace all set the mood for what many hopeful singles call “cuffing season.” The beloved rom-com You’ve Got Mail famously takes place in fall, with Tom Hanks rhapsodizing about “a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils”—a quote that makes the rounds on social media every autumn.

But there’s romance set in the fall, and then there’s fall romance. “We are giving them something seasonal on purpose,” Hultenschmidt said of her publishing imprint. And seasonal romances can be very on the nose. Take Emily Henry’s 2020 romance, a beach read titled Beach Read, that is set at a lakeside beach town and stars an author who writes beach reads. Cindy Hwang, the editorial director at Berkley, which publishes Henry, told me she thinks that the popularity of Beach Read helped launch the trend of highly literal seasonal romances. Some of these fall books practically grab you by the collar, shove a pointy hat on your head, and pour a pumpkin-spice latte down your throat. For instance, last September, Amazon published a collection of short stories for Kindle and audiobook called Scared Sexy, one of which is about a sexy sleep-paralysis demon. All of the stories feature creatures, and most mention Halloween in some way. A couple of these stories were among Kindle’s most-purchased romance books of 2025, according to the blog Romancing the Data, which tracks romance best sellers.

For the same reason someone might watch scary movies or carve a pumpkin, they pick up sexy Halloween books to get into the spirit of the season. But why is seasonality something readers are particularly craving now? It may partly follow from the rise of “spooky season” as a concept. The phrase doesn’t seem to have been used much before 2018 or so, according to Google Trends. It’s invoked as a way of extending the playfully scary energy of Halloween throughout the fall, and giving adults an excuse to partake in seasonal delights along with kids.

Hultenschmidt suggested that the whole snuggly-to-spooky spectrum could be explained by the sense of uncertainty and instability pervading the culture right now. In the face of economic anxiety and political tension, people may seek safety in the comfort of a romance novel and its guaranteed happily-ever-after. Or “they want the terror of a horror novel to be like ‘Oh, well thank God it’s not this bad,’” she said. This might also explain the appeal of hybrid horror-romance books like this year’s Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison, about a woman trapped in a time loop at her best friend’s wedding, with a masked killer on the rampage and a handsome wedding guest to help her fight back.

[Read: The dark reality behind ‘cozy mysteries’]

I also wonder if some of the appeal is a result of climate change. Seasons other than summer are getting shorter, and all seasons are becoming more unpredictable. When I spoke with Hwang earlier this month, the high in our respective East Coast cities (D.C. and New York) was nearly 80 degrees. If I wanted to catch that classic fall feeling in mid-October this year, I would’ve been better served by cracking open a book than by going outside.

In addition to the comfort and the spookiness, all of the attention on fall stems from one more thing: marketing. Romance and autumn may go together these days like apple cider and cinnamon sticks, but that’s in part because each is having a moment that businesses have seized on.

Retailers have greatly expanded their lines of fall-coded decor, food, candles, and more. Cozy as a marketing aesthetic caught on during the pandemic and never quite left. Seasonal swag is a built-in yearly sales opportunity, no less so in publishing than in any other business.

At the same time, romance has become so successful that it could be said to be propping up the entire publishing industry. The genre is also a particularly fast-paced business. Many romance readers read a lot—Capizola told me some of her customers can read two novels in a day—and romance writers oblige their fans’ appetites with a regular supply of new books. Take Christina Lauren, the pen name of two best friends who co-write their books. Some years they have released two or even three full-length novels. This pace may make it easier to jump on trends relatively quickly, compared with genres where longer lead times are the standard. “Romance as a genre is currently driven in many ways by online trends,” Jamie Fortin, the founder of Friends to Lovers bookstore in Alexandria, Virginia, told me. (The exploding category of romantasy—romance plus fantasy—owes a lot to social-media hype, as well.)

[Read: The fan-fiction friendship that fueled a romance-novel empire]

It certainly helps that a seasonal read lends itself well to social media. TikTok and Instagram often favor books that evoke a recognizable aesthetic. On book covers, “you see the palettes are orange and yellow and purple,” Hultenschmidt said, in part so that everything looks “harmonious and beautiful” in recommendation-roundup posts. Some of these books seem to be aimed directly at the “cozy, witchy reads for fall” videos that pop up on BookTok. And when they hit their mark, they really hit it.

The Pumpkin Spice Café by Laurie Gilmore won the TikTok Shop Book of the Year award in 2024, seemingly on the sheer strength of its autumn aura. (Having read it, I don’t think it could have been on the strength of the prose, plot, or characters.) On StoryGraph and Goodreads, many readers proclaim they read it “for the vibes.” And it does check just about every trope box: pumpkin-spice lattes, a small-town “fall festival” complete with a Halloween costume contest, a possible haunting, a sexy, flannel-wearing farmer.

The danger of the fall-book boom (insofar as comfort reads can possibly be dangerous) is that chasing trends can lead to shallower art. Capizola put it diplomatically: “It becomes something more like a collectible than it is actually just about the content within the book itself.” But the best seasonal romances are more than a jumble of poorly executed tropes in a trench coat—they manage to fuse vibes with craft and heart.

A good example is Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, which was originally published in the lead-up to spooky season 2022. It’s the story of a witch who is lonely by occupation—witches aren’t supposed to gather for fear of attracting unwanted attention. Nonetheless, she takes a job as a tutor to three charming, rambunctious young witches who are illicitly living together at an enchanted estate in the English countryside. She bands together with the quirky caretakers of the home—including a grumpy, hot librarian—to protect the children from impending disaster. It’s totally charming.

This book seems to be living the dream of any seasonal romance—I’ve noticed it bubbling back up on social media and StoryGraph’s most popular list every fall since it was published. When something is pegged to fall, it has a short retail window, “but you have the opportunity to promote year after year,” Hultenschmidt said. But to become a perennial, a title needs to be pretty special, or at least lucky enough to capture attention quickly, because these books’ time in the waning fall sunlight is limited. By just a couple of weeks ago, when I was doing interviews for this story, Christmas romances were already hitting the shelves.

All Halloween candy is the same now. Nothing stands out, apart from the quantity of candy dumped out on the floor back home. Every house seems to buy a variety bag of seemingly random candy, and consequently every stop metes out a little more of the same treats as the previous one did or the next one will. A harvesttime holiday that evolved from traditional reflections on death is now merely another household chore to carry out on the way to mortal life’s certain end.

In my memory, the trick-or-treating procedure used to go down like this: An older lady or stern man made some idle chatter about costumes and then dispensed one or three candies into my bag directly from their basket. The candy provided was particular and intentional: You got a Hershey’s Special Dark mini and a wee Mr. Goodbar, perhaps, or a few Smarties cylinders, or, alas, a handful of Bit-O-Honeys. Children identified houses by what they dispensed: Don’t miss the quiet bungalow that yielded a surprising payload of Rolos, but don’t bother with the big, well-manicured property on the corner where only Brach’s Jelly Nougats are on offer. Such impressions sometimes became sufficiently evocative—the Rolo house—to characterize a street’s residences at other times of the year.

Not anymore. Kids’ hauls at each house are bigger than ever, but also more similar. Back when the seasonal candy was more diverse, it communicated something about the trick-or-treatee’s aesthetics and even their values. Hershey’s bars or Tootsie Roll Pops suggested traditionalism. So did shortened tubes of Necco wafers (in an esoteric way), or cellophane-wrapped, spherical hard candies (in an antiquated one). Baby Ruth or Butterfinger insinuated indulgence, moderated—Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups meant it immoderately. A miniature box of Nerds or a Blow Pop would have come across as progressive, at least during my youth. A packet of Pop Rocks would have felt positively punk rock.

[Read: A Halloween myth that can finally die]

Kids might share intelligence about the house offering Boston Baked Beans (actually good, but considered undesirable by peers) or Red Hots (symbolically righteous but actually underwhelming). A handful of Sixlets—previously unheard-of—implied a larger universe than a pre-internet child might have imagined possible. Some houses matched a kid’s unexplained taste in quiet, affirming ways. For me, Spree was a peculiar pleasure, and Chuckles jelly candies, and 3 Musketeers bars, with their gentle, whipped nougat. Some doors suggested eccentricity or extremism. Even after the razor-blade panic and Tylenol scare, some homes still gave out plastic-wrapped, homemade popcorn balls, an earnest but unwelcome attempt to retain the disappearing past. Others came off as unhinged. Dentists sometimes offered pencils or crayons instead of candy, for obvious reasons. My parents insisted on throwing handfuls of nickels into awaiting pillowcases, a practice that caused me enormous shame despite the fact that some neighborhood children appreciated it.

This opportunity to express distinctiveness at the Halloween stoop, and to receive it, has become much harder. In part, that’s because trick-or-treating has declined in general. The reasons are many: The total number of trick-or-treat-age children has decreased by a quarter since 1970; community trunk-or-treats or school events in the days leading up to Halloween started supplanting the door-to-door tradition; parents and kids decamp for “better” neighborhoods, whose betterness begets ever-increasing Hallows’ Eve inequity. Neighborhoods are less connected in general, and some municipalities enforce nanny-state ordinances around the practice.

But the candy has also changed. Like soda or fast food, candy was largely regional until well beyond the middle of the century. The Oh Henry! Bar, for example, was invented around 1920, by one account named after an exclamation a clerk at George Williamson’s Chicago candy store uttered to a frequent patron named Henry. But consolidation came to the candy industry. Hershey bought Reese’s in 1963, then Almond Joy and others. Mars ended up with M&M’s, Snickers, Twix, Milky Way, and many more. These days, those two companies account for around two thirds of the U.S. chocolate market. Along the way, products such as Oh Henry! fell by the wayside. That bar changed hands four times from 1965 to 2019, when it was taken off the market in the United States. Now no American child needs to ask a parent what the heck an Oh Henry! bar is, because they definitely won’t receive one in their plastic jack-o’-lantern.

October retail flyers of the past reveal much greater choices. In 1970 and 1985, Kmart advertised bags of Milk Duds, Whoppers, Dots, Sugar Daddy, Good & Plenty, and Junior Mints, among others. A 1988 coupon ad from the Leaf candy company (once the fourth-largest North American confectioner, most of whose brands were bought by Hershey in 1996) sold packs of Chuckles (my heart!), Slo Poke, Good & Fruity, Zagnut, and Rain-Blo bubble gum. Even products from companies that have survived brand acquisitions used to be more varied: Hershey’s Kisses were a common trick-or-treat offering, for example, and Tootsie Roll Industries sold bags of Tootsie Roll Pops. Now, at my local supermarket, Haribo Goldbears represent the sole independent exception.

More often today, Halloween candy comes in those nefarious variety bags. This practice isn’t entirely new; a variety of Hershey’s minis—Milk Chocolate, Special Dark, Krackel, and Mr. Goodbar—were a tradition of office reception desks as much as dark neighborhoods on October 31. Now assortments are the norm. This year, I found several nearly identical Hershey’s bundles at my local Dierbergs, each containing its namesake chocolate bars along with Reese’s cups, KitKat, Almond Joy—and then an oddball from the farm leagues, such as Milk Duds, Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme, or Rolo. Reese’s Pieces, a candy that E.T. once made unique, were available only in a package with KitKat, Reese’s cups, and two types of Jolly Rancher gummies. Mars has its own versions with Snickers, Milky Way, and two kinds of M&Ms.

The industrial consolidation has turned Halloween candy into an anonymous murk. That mix probably pleases every trick-or-treater a little, but it also risks making every house’s offering essentially identical.

Across the street at Costco, the situation was even more dire. Enormous bags of Kirkland Signature Favorites were on offer, each containing a fusion of the other fusions: Mars and Hershey and Haribo candies all mixed together. The collection was so haphazard and homogeneous, Costco felt obliged to emblazon a large disclaimer on the packaging’s front: “This bag may not include all varieties listed.” A handful of candy an adult might dispense from the Costco superset is identical to one taken from a child’s overall plunder.

The point is clear: Nobody should care what kind of treats they buy or receive anymore. All Halloween candy is what economists call a perfect substitute for other candy. Throw a bag in the cart and get the candy-having done with—then hold out the basket of whatever came in the bag and let the kiddos get the candy-taking done with too.

Perhaps the indifference counts as apathy rather than disdain. Candy might just not be as important as it used to be. Changing tastes have led to an ever-widening set of options for, and conceptions of, treats: sweet beverages, frozen desserts, snack products, yogurt-alikes, breakfast cereals and bars, cookies and cakes. Sweet coffeehouse beverages, limited-edition cookies and snacks, and endless brand collaborations have also created more options and greater surface area for candy alternatives. Competition, combined with a long moral and dental disapproval of sweets, has contracted candy’s charm.

[Read: The costume I can’t persuade my husband to throw away]

Almost a decade ago, in one of the most unpopular opinions I have ever published, I wrote that full-size candy bars have no place on Halloween. My argument was that big candy bars counted as normal ones, and that Halloween (understood as a holiday of sweets rather than death) was best experienced by amassing and experiencing the treats in a novel and different form. But even all those years ago, I failed to understand how far candy bars had fallen. Full-size ones had already become unfamiliar, such that discovering them on Halloween counted as the novelty that fun-size diversity had represented. Once, a neighborhood’s children could steer one another toward the house with the Reese’s Pieces, or away from the one with the Mounds (sorry, Mounds). But now the only possible take on candy is that yours is better because it is bigger, and you are therefore better because you are more affluent: That house has full-size bars!

So this year, amid the bulging plastic duffels of candy at the Costco, I found myself reconsidering the wickedness of big bars. My wife and I searched our memories of youth, ever more distant, for precedents. Big bars were rarer then, but not unheard-of. When available, we recalled, they did not typically suggest wealth but modesty matched to tribute: mostly big, plain Hershey’s bars, offered by older couples for whom the candy bore particular meaning, because Hershey had transformed chocolate from an unattainable luxury into a cheap, accessible staple.

Then, just beside the anonymous mixed bag, boxes of full-size bars stacked on pallets met my eye. Costco was selling 30 to a box, with Hershey’s, Hershey’s With Almond, the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup two pack, and the four-fingered KitKat. Even the full-size bars had been relegated to an assortment.

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Horror has been a particularly vital playground in the movie world of late. As studios make fewer and fewer mid-budget dramas and comedies, major names such as Jordan Peele and Ari Aster have made inroads via low-budget horror. Recently, promising new filmmakers (along with some more established veterans) have come out with an especially exciting crop of movies in this genre. I haven’t written about many of them yet, so here are my 10 favorite horror flicks from this year thus far, presented in reverse order.

10. Buffet Infinity (streaming on Shudder and AMC+)

This is one of the strangest entries I’ll be recommending, but it’s a fascinating movie to throw on at home. Simon Glassman’s debut film imitates the experience of a local TV broadcast, playing out as a series of commercials and news segments with an ’80s aesthetic. At first, it’s all cheap fuzzy graphics, tinny music, and useless-sounding products, but as the movie goes on, a plot begins to emerge—inexplicable events are happening in Westridge County, Alberta, where rival businesses work around a mysterious sinkhole within which something evil may lurk. It’s a bit of a challenge to latch on to, but if you can get on its wavelength, the creepy ending is very rewarding.

9. Hokum (streaming on Hulu and Disney+)

I have really enjoyed the work of the Irish horror-meister Damian McCarthy. His first two films, Caveat and Oddity, were low-budget tidbits of modern folk horror that were effective and spooky. Hokum has the same vibe on a slightly bigger scale, starring Adam Scott as a cynical writer who shacks up at a countryside hotel in Ireland to finish what he intends to be his final novel. Guess what? The hotel is haunted! But it’s haunted in a fun and peculiar way, with multiple beautifully designed scares built into its architecture. Although Hokum has one too many plots (there’s a whole strand of the protagonist’s backstory that should have been completely excised), the film has some truly creative thrills in its high-octane final act.

8. Obsession (streaming on Peacock)

I confess: The box-office phenomenon that is Obsession caught me by surprise this summer. The director, Curry Barker, who was previously known for his YouTube skits, has created a wily piece of horror with a darkly comic twist. The protagonist wishes his crush loved him more than anyone; quickly, that turns into a never-ending nightmare as she pursues him with monstrous intensity. The film works, I think, because Inde Navarrette’s performance as the supernaturally “obsessed” Nikki is so sympathetic, but I found the movie more unpleasant and discomforting than scary on my first viewing. It went on to make more than $500 million (roughly 500 times what it cost to produce) and will be getting a major Oscar campaign, so I probably owe it a second viewing.

7. It Ends (available for rent online)

I reviewed It Ends when it was released in August, and still think quite highly of it. It’s another low-budget indie that does an exceptional job stretching its dollar to maximize its scares, which are mostly of the existential sort. The film follows a group of friends who get stuck driving on a road they can’t get off of, frozen in a weird limbo that makes them all go mad in differing ways. Where some indies find innovative approaches to gore and others lean into shocking jump scares, It Ends sources terror from mounting dread and aimless uncertainty.

6. Exit 8 (streaming on Shudder and AMC+)

Liminal horror has become the latest trend in the genre, and video-game adaptations are also all the rage. The Japanese film Exit 8 delivers both, re-creating a well-received adventure game in which the player is trapped in an eerie, endlessly repeating subway station with no way out and a confusing puzzle to solve. Imposing a narrative on something so vague and mysterious can be challenging, but the director Genki Kawamura does that well, effectively using this bizarre scenario as a metaphor for his protagonist feeling stuck on a major life decision. Be warned, though—things get pretty yucky by the end.

5. Backrooms (streaming on HBO Max)

The most popular liminal-horror hit of the summer was the adaptation of a viral YouTube series from the distressingly young Kane Parsons (who was, no kidding, 20 years old when he made it). Backrooms was such a box-office success that studios are now scrambling to copy it, snapping up the rights to every spooky “creepypasta” video they can find. But I think the movie will not be so easily imitated; it’s effective because of Parsons’s incredible control of mood and tone through his production design and visual effects, throwing the viewer and his characters into weird, looping hallways and jumbled-together office spaces that feel like half-remembered dreams.

4. Resident Evil (in theaters now)

Even though this is yet another video-game adaptation, Resident Evil takes a big swing at the most famous horror-video-game intellectual property that exists. Zach Cregger (who has become a huge name in the horror genre) constructed a film that is intense, action-packed, and very creative with its CGI gore. But I like it most of all because it captures the sweaty experience of gaming, making its hero (played by Austin Abrams) a lovable avatar for any of us who’ve struggled through waves of zombie attacks on our consoles at home.

3. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (streaming on MUBI)

Jane Schoenbrun’s knowing satire is a horror movie about horror movies, particularly the ways that both corporate studios and devoted fans try to remake and reinterpret them for new generations. This film succeeds by never feeling too academic or self-reflexive, partly because of its sharp script and partly because of the outstanding chemistry between its leads: Hannah Einbinder, who plays a young filmmaker obsessed with a moribund slasher franchise, and Gillian Anderson as that franchise’s reclusive, retired lead actor.

2. Chronovisor (in select theaters now)

This movie has been the find of the year for me. It’s a bizarre debut from Jack Auen and Kevin Walker about an academic who stumbles across an odd urban legend in her research, a “time viewer” that allows the viewer to see events from the past (such as the Crucifixion). As she delves deeper and deeper into the writing on this topic, the texts she’s reading flash on-screen, along with snippets of videos; it’s like a found-footage movie, but most of the footage has been written down. (Trust me, it’s spookier than it sounds.) The ending is impossible to describe and a wonder to behold. The movie is touring around the country right now—if you can catch it in a cinema, I can guarantee a unique viewing experience.

1. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (streaming on Netflix)

For me, no horror movie has quite compared with the thrilling rush I got from seeing Nia DaCosta’s entry in the 28 Days Later series. The Bone Temple is a sequel to Danny Boyle’s excellent 28 Years Later, centering on that film’s best supporting character, a kindly doctor named Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who is cultivating a sculptural memorial to the Rage Virus’s victims decades after the pathogen turned Britain into a zombie apocalypse. The Bone Temple has some harrowing material (focused mainly on a roving gang torturing its way across the British Isles), but it’s also lovely and, in its hard-rock third act, genuinely rousing.

An Essay I Enjoyed

Music for the Movie-Brained

By Spencer Kornhaber

In the video, the 20-something Canadian wears a purple hoodie and wired earbuds to work out in a dimly lit Sheraton gym. No music-video freakiness happens—it’s not like the stationary bike turns into a Harley. But [Sophia] Stel just seems so blissed-out as she sweats to lyrics about being interesting and hot (“I’m tortured, you love it, you hate it / You think about me naked”). At the end, she bounds out into a beige hallway—her inner self changed, her outer world not.

The video helps explain how Stel earned the distinction of being one of the first artists signed to A24 Music. Yes, A24, as in the movie studio behind dozens of acclaimed indies, including Moonlight, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and this year’s mind-bending hits Backrooms and You Can See Everything. Since launching in 2012, A24 has become so revered that its branded baseball hats are now hipster totems. In 2025, the record label that it had previously used to distribute soundtracks started to sign singers with no apparent connections to its films. The studio’s press-shy leaders have maintained mystery about their intentions, but Stel’s music, at least, fits the larger trend that A24 has helped drive: a cultural rethinking of the meaning of cinematic.

Read the full article.

Coming Attractions

Halloween week is among the slowest at the box office, as studios take a pass on trying to compete with the holiday. But there are still fun releases out there—Clayface, Other Mommy, The Devils—for viewers looking to catch up on spooky stuff. That said, the in-theater experience people seem to be seeking out the most right now is Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s outstanding documentary, You Can See Everything, which has reached a rare level of saturation among my casual moviegoing pals: Parents at my daughter’s school are hiring babysitters to go see it, the highest compliment one can pay. The film even saw its box-office gross go up last weekend (partly because it expanded to more screens), and that trend will likely continue, opening up the possibility that it’ll be the first documentary nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, a milestone that its distributor, A24, is certainly gunning for.

Meanwhile, the Skydance merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. continues to have the expected shrinking effects on the already shrinking world of big studios. The company is mandating five days in office and offering voluntary buyouts as it reorganizes into a new conglomerate (coming on the heels of Netflix cutting around 1,000 jobs earlier this month).

What Else I’m Watching

• There aren’t many new releases to recommend during Halloween week, but there are plenty of smaller indie titles getting released in more theaters that are worth a look. Last week I shouted out Wildwood and Wicker. This week I want to highlight The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, a finely observed New York thriller about an old-fashioned small-time thief (played by John Turturro) who gets in over his head with some very new-school gangsters. Turturro’s melancholy performance is the must-see element here, but this film, from Noah Segan, is also a throwback of sorts—it feels like the kind of fun little flick audiences used to enjoy all the time in the ’90s.
• I also want to highlight some of the films that readers have recommended after I offered up my list on the most decade-defining movies thus far. Obviously, I wasn’t exactly proffering my favorites there—it was more of a survey of some of the 2020s’ biggest tone-setters—but some of the best titles that got shouted out included Challengers (from Gareth R. and Alexander M., among others), Sinners (Wade P.), Barbarian (Justin H.), One Battle After Another (John P.), The Secret Agent (Pat K.), The Zone of Interest (Katrina R.), Titane (Elias B.), and Another Round (Tom C.). If there are 2026 horror gems that I have missed out on, please send in recs—I’ll try to check them out for future newsletters!

The Atlantic will host “Election Night at The Atlantic,” a live-broadcast special episode of its flagship podcast Radio Atlantic, on Tuesday, November 3 from 9 to 11 p.m. ET, bringing together many of the magazine’s esteemed staff writers to debate the big ideas shaping American politics. The show is an Election Night first for The Atlantic, and will stream from its homepage and in the app, on YouTube, and across social media on Instagram, Facebook, and X.

Elections are about more than just who wins or loses: They’re a contest of ideas. This will be what animates The Atlantic’s livestream as the results come in––the ideas that are resonating with Americans, and the future direction for both major parties, institutions, and democracy. Radio Atlantic co-hosts Hanna Rosin and Adam Harris will anchor the live show, and will be joined by staff writers David Frum and Tom Nichols to discuss the future of the Republican Party, Tyler Austin Harper and Mark Leibovich on the state of the Democrats, and Anne Applebaum on what the night’s results mean for American democracy.

The livestream is part of The Atlantic’s ongoing and extensive midterm and politics coverage, which has taken its writers, events, and podcasts around the country to cover key races, issues, candidates, and policy implications. Coverage will publish across the site and on The Atlantic’s audio network.

Also timed to the midterms, Anne Applebaum returns with a fourth season of the Autocracy in America podcast, launching November 10. This season will examine whether we can repair the American institutions President Trump is breaking. Anne will speak with leaders about their plans to work with the administration, to restore international relationships, and to fix the damage done to our economy, as well as what it could look like to retrain and restrain ICE, rescue our cultural institutions, and keep our elections safe.

Press Contact: Anna Bross | press@theatlantic.com

The text, sent from an unknown number, prompted a jump scare when I saw it as an iMessage preview: “About last night …” The night before: Hadn’t I been at yoga? When I clicked on the message, I was relieved and then annoyed by the next words: “—Jon Ossoff,” under an image of the senator from Georgia staring into the middle distance, handsomely. “Last night I took the stage to debate my MAGA extremist opponent Mike Collins,” “Ossoff” went on to tell me. The text message continued over the course of several paragraphs and ended, as these missives tend to, with an ask for cash.

Politicians in both parties now text and email in ways that make them sound like pleading ex-boyfriends, stern but loving baseball coaches, and representatives from a rental-car company trying to sell me on their loyalty program. Intimate greetings and overfamiliarity have become hallmarks of political groveling, as perennial as yard signs and far more omnipresent. Some recent text messages I have received: “Its James Talarico. Can you please please please please pretty pretty please rush in even just $1?” and, “from” Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, “UPGRADE For: Sophie You’ve been tapped for MAGA Gold Status!” All of this despite the fact that I have donated exactly $0 to political candidates this midterm-election cycle.

The text-and-email-blitzing strategy is not new, but the frequency of these messages has been rising over the past decade. The Scoop’s Political Email Archive, a database that compiles campaign-fundraising emails, shows a sharp spike in political emails in the past six years. The open-source archive, created by the journalist and developer Derek Willis, collected 22,097 fundraising emails in 2020 and 135,153 in the next midterm year, 2022. This year, so far, it has archived 106,713. That’s exactly the number of emails and texts it feels like I, personally, have received that say some version of: Sophie please please you’ve impressed me it’s an EMERGENCY give me money please.

These messages are not unlike the happy-birthday emails you might get from a makeup brand, employing a personal touch so you’ll click and consider buying yourself a little present. “People’s favorite word is their own name,” Marty Santalucia, a Democratic fundraiser and partner in Vector Political, a political-technology firm, told me. He said the “rule of thumb is that more personalization is better.” Any fundraising communication has a minuscule click-through rate, and an even smaller donation yield, so every possible boost matters to campaigns.

But the resulting experience for voters and would-be voters is strange: We’re now on the receiving end of a glut of so many similar messages that personalization loses its luster. We’re being made to feel like the Josh Shapiros and Ted Cruzes and Mary Peltolas of the world are all personally reaching out to us, while knowing simultaneously that they’re obviously not. Anyone who has ever given a dollar to a campaign anywhere is probably getting these texts. We live in a world in which our name, email, and phone number are continually bought and sold as data; this is why, despite living in New York and possessing a San Francisco area code, I’m getting messages from Tennessee and Texas.

Within this crowded landscape, campaigns and organizations working on politicians’ behalf have employed more and more creative—and bizarre—attempts to get your attention. Some eschew political language altogether in subject lines, adopting folksy shorthand: “How’s that workin’ out for ya?” Sheri Biggs, a Republican representative from South Carolina, emailed her list. Some seem to be borrowing the online slang of influencers and podcasters, or at least trying to. Last week, the fundraising team for Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, sent an email whose subject line was simply: “woah.” A survey of The Scoop’s archive of emails doesn’t reveal major overarching differences between the two parties’ approaches to email and text: For both Democrats and Republicans, it is the most important election ever, and you need to give money to them right this second.

[Read: The limits of Trump’s midterm trickery]

These communications occasionally have the whiff of phishing attempts. When you get a text that begins “Its James Talarico” you might wonder: Is someone trying to steal my credit-card number? (Despite the grammatical error, this donation link to Democratic PAC ActBlue does appear to be genuine—though it’s not a direct message from his campaign, as many of these emails and texts are not.) In their attempts to dazzle you, some missives employ bright colors and random capitalization, giving them the frenzied, scammy quality of chain emails from the AOL era. An email from ActBlue, its text tinted light blue, said:

Hi—we’re so sorry … this is such a hard email to write. We texted. We emailed. We begged. We’ve been warning you for MONTHS that Trump is trying to DESTROY ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform. Because Democrats just aren’t stepping up like we hoped. Trump’s House Majority is on the brink of collapse so he’s attacking ActBlue to steal the upcoming elections. It reeks of desperation, but if we don’t step up now, Donald Trump will win. We’re on our KNEES pleading with you to rush just $5 (200% -MATCHED) to elect a WAVE of Democrats, flip the House, and STOP Trump’s agenda. Chip in $5 to BOLD Democrats NOW>>

What? For me, this trumped-up urgency has the opposite of its intended effect. I don’t like the sensation of being tricked, the bait and switch of opening a text I thought was from someone I knew only to find out it’s Fake Bill Hagerty; at a time when only 17 percent of the U.S. population trusts politicians, according to a Pew Research Center survey, this sort of ruse is certainly not helping. The endless stream of messages telling me the election is an emergency makes me feel, paradoxically, numb. There may be a lot at stake, but the more politicians text me “EMERGENCY,” while telling me I’m special, the less it will seem like one.

Some people may very well want to build a parasocial relationship with candidates. They might want to hear a personal message from Talarico’s mom, as I did this week, just as they might want to watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s egg-freezing journey, or hear about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s diet. In this way, political superfans can feel like they’re having a metaphorical beer with the candidate, even if they’re only watching them drink one on-screen.

Perhaps that’s the direction in which things are headed: toward greater and more precise personalization, with the help of artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, Santalucia and Vector Political launched a new AI-assisted texting platform that works with Democratic campaigns and causes. What Vector Political calls its “engine” goes further than personalization, by generating digital assistants that will text you back instantly. The platform has sent more than 3 million texts so far in this election cycle; Santalucia claims it has higher click-through and donation rates than traditional one-way texting. If what you dream of is fewer texts from Jon Ossoff, all of this is not a great sign for 2028.

Santalucia put me on the list of one of their clients—an advocacy group for court integrity—so I could see how it worked. The AI introduced itself as a digital assistant and asked me, in part: “We would rather hear it from you than guess: if you could tell the people fighting to restore the integrity of the courts one thing right now, what would it be?”

I texted back that I was actually a journalist writing about the phenomenon of political texting. After trying to gently steer me back to the subject of the courts, it asked me what I had noticed.

“Well,” I wrote, feeling as silly as I always do when I address LLMs as though they’re people. “A lot of texts from someone like Jon Ossoff seem overly personal even though I know they’re automated. Have you noticed that?”

“That’s a fair observation,” it told me. “Striking that balance is genuinely tricky. Thanks for sharing what you’re working on, Sophie.”

That last line reminded me of exactly how it feels to be addressed by everyone this election cycle—the dropping of my name, the automated attempt to reach me in particular but really everyone in general. I had to think: You’ve really outdone yourselves, candidates.

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For years, Latino voters reliably voted for Democratic presidential candidates, in many cases by double-digit margins. Then in 2024, they roughly split their vote, becoming a key swing group for Donald Trump’s return to power—perhaps because they liked his style, or they perceived him as an outsider, or they agreed that the border had gotten out of control. In 2026, though, polls are indicating that they may be over him.

One of the best test cases for the shift is the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, right along the southern U.S. border. The area was a Democratic stronghold for decades before it went for Trump in 2024. It’s dominated by working-class Latinos, mostly Mexican American. In the immediate post-pandemic years, the area saw an unprecedented number of illegal border crossings, and voters seemingly punished Joe Biden for the chaos. But their desire for order wasn’t a desire for what the administration delivered: ICE raids that have seemed random, law-abiding friends and family who have been deported, and treatment that has felt dehumanizing.

The Atlantic staff writer Nick Miroff traveled to the Rio Grande Valley and talked with people whose family members or employees had been targeted by ICE. He talked with politicians and candidates about how they’ve shifted their strategies, and he talked with people who had the same concerns as any middle-class American, about how much everything costs now. On Radio Atlantic, Miroff discusses the wild political swings in the Rio Grande Valley and what they might reveal about the statewide Texas races and the Latino vote in the rest of the country.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: One of the big surprises of the 2024 presidential election was how much Latino voters had shifted right. A bloc that has voted Democratic consistently, for decades, had helped reelect Donald Trump, which led to lots of gloating from Republicans about their new diverse coalition and angst from Democrats about what they’d gotten wrong.

Well, the punditry came too soon. In the upcoming midterms, it seems like Latinos are shifting back again, which you can see very clearly in Texas and especially in the Rio Grande Valley.

Nick Miroff:  So the RGV, the Rio Grande Valley, is to me one of the most fascinating parts of the United States. And this is an area that is more than 90 percent Hispanic.

Rosin: Staff writer Nick Miroff, who covers immigration, recently did some reporting in South Texas.

Miroff: Got the sound of a guy welding, welding a cattle trailer.

[Music]

Miroff:  This is an area that has been a Democratic Party stronghold for decades—or was up until this past election.  And that was a real seismic shift in politics, and it was fundamental to the kind of coalition that Trump was able to put together in 2024.

And I wanted to go back and talk to voters there now to see how they’re feeling about the way the country is going, about their lives, and how they plan to vote in the midterms.

Miroff: Are you gonna vote for Talarico?

Benny Melendez: Yeah, definitely.

Miroff: All Democrats?

Melendez: All Democrat, yeah.

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Today on the show, we are taking a closer look at the Rio Grande Valley, because it could reveal what’s about to happen in Texas more broadly, but also possibly the whole country.

For next week’s midterms, Latinos might end up being the critical voting bloc. But here’s the thing: What Nick learned from visiting the Rio Grande Valley—what maybe everybody should have learned from the last presidential election—is that the mistake is to think of them as any kind of unified ethnic voting bloc at all.

In the story he wrote, Nick, for example, rechristened them the “Big-Ass Truck Vote” because love for big trucks and the high cost of filling up their tanks seemed higher on the list of motivators than undying party loyalty. Anyway, back to the valley.

[Music]

Rosin: Now, I’ve never been there. What does it look like? Like, can you just describe it? Is it rural? Is it farmland? What are people doing? How close is it to Mexico? How big is it? I’m just curious to get a picture in my head.

Miroff: Yeah. Well, the first thing I think is that calling it a valley is a bit of a misnomer. It’s more like this is the part, you know, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s really like a floodplain, so it’s flat. It’s very hot and muggy. And this was an area that was a big agricultural region for generations, but over the past several decades has been changing rapidly, predominantly after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994.

These towns—Brownsville, McAllen—became kind of operational-logistics hubs for trade with Mexico. And so for many years, this has been an area that immigrants, as well as, you know, Hispanic Americans living in South Texas viewed, I think, as a place of opportunity, where the jobs were plentiful and where people could live a kind of—you know, aspire to a middle-class life.

This is an area where you have big, wide streets and brand-new subdivisions, but also many pockets of poverty, communities known as colonias that are kind of on unincorporated land.

Miroff: We’re in a colonia—lots of fences; lots of yard ornaments, beware of the dog signs, trampolines, junked cars.

Miroff: It’s really an area that’s been transformed, in particular, over the past, I would say, about 15 years by migration from Mexico and drug violence in northern Mexico, because the cartel wars sent so many middle-class and even upper-middle-class, you know, Mexicans fleeing for somewhere safe.

And a lot of them went to the Rio Grande Valley, and they brought this kind of new dynamism to that area. But as one of the candidates that I spent time with talked about, you know, it also brought a kind of integration with a lot more mixed-status families.

Rosin: Right. Okay, I think I’m getting the picture, and it’s an interesting picture, and now I see why you went there. It used to be agricultural. Now it’s maybe suburban or emerging suburban and—

Miroff: Yeah.

Rosin: —and still fast evolving, and so there’s a lot of different kinds of people. It’s not just, like, one flat demographic. There’s people of different socioeconomic levels, probably different relationships to Mexico, different relationships to immigration policy, kind of all in this one space.

Miroff: Yeah. This is a very kind of aspirational place with a lot of working-class, upwardly mobile families and people who have found jobs in oil and gas, driving to the oil and gas fields. A lot of people have found work in federal law enforcement, working for the Border Patrol, and of course now working for ICE, and also for, you know, cross-border trade.

And so this is a place that has for many years really thrived off of its relationship with northern Mexico, with the big assembly plants just south of the border and around the Monterrey, Mexico, region. And so these have been the drivers of the growth for so many years, and these are some of the industries that are also being squeezed by Trump’s presidency.

Rosin: Okay. So you get there. You have these thoughts in your head. There’s this very interesting, you know, in the polls, showing this demographic shift, where you’ve got, like, 2016 heavily, heavily Democratic; 2024 goes for Trump. Now the polls are saying: shifting Democratic again. What’s the first thing you see that’s surprising or that catches your eye?

Miroff: Well, given how pivotal the Rio Grande Valley is to this election cycle, it’s no surprise that political-advertising money and super-PAC money is just inundating the whole area. And so there are campaign signs lining the highways at all the intersections. And one of the first that caught my eye, actually, was a campaign sign showing this guy Eric Flores.

Now, he’s the Republican candidate for the Thirty-Fourth Congressional District, which stretches from Brownsville, kind of hugging the Gulf Coast, all the way up toward Corpus Christi. And most of the campaign signs for Eric Flores just show him with a thumbs-up and his bio. It says he’s an infantry officer, a prosecutor, a father. And they’re very striking ’cause they’re bright red.

And then there’s a second set of signs for Flores, and they look just like the first set—they’re also red—but they show him with President Trump. And Trump and Flores are giving the thumbs-up, and it says, across the top of the sign, Trump Endorsed, and below that it says Support ICE.

And I saw that sign and I was like, Why would a Republican candidate in the Rio Grande Valley want “Support ICE” on their sign? Well, if you look at the fine print at the bottom of the sign, it says Paid for by Northern Cameron County Democrats.

Rosin: Right.

Miroff: The Northern Cameron County Democrats are making these signs that show Flores with Trump and that said Support for ICE.

[Music]

Miroff: And so this is a negative sign that the Democrats have put up that just shows the Republican candidate with President Trump on it. And so, you know, that says, I think, everything in this area that voted for Trump two years ago. Running attack ads by just showing the candidate next to the president is, for these Democrats, the most important and effective messaging.

Rosin: So what do you read into that strategy? One, you have to distance yourself from Trump, even though he won the election. What else? Like, what else are we learning about ICE or about Trump from a sign like that?

Miroff: Well, ICE is overwhelmingly unpopular. It’s no big surprise in an area with a 90 percent Hispanic population. But I think you have to dig a little deeper, and one of the reasons that Trump won in 2024 was his promise to secure the border. This was an area where an overwhelming quantity of migrants arrived under Biden’s presidency. These are some of the communities that were strained the worst by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people in the first years of Biden’s term. And the perception that he couldn’t really get the situation under control, that the White House wasn’t interested in doing anything about it—these communities were intensely frustrated with that and with the government’s inability to respond, and that was one of the things that helped Trump a lot. But that doesn’t mean that people want ICE officers arresting their friends and family and the ordinary people in their community that don’t have criminal records.

And so what I heard over and over again is that, We thought Trump was gonna come for the worst of the worst. We thought he was gonna come in and arrest the criminals. We’re glad that he’s got the border under control, but this is going too far. And so ICE overreach has been a big one there, and then the other thing, which I think is probably the biggest issue for the voters I talked to, is the cost of living and affordability.

Rosin: I wanna listen to some of the people that you talked to. One of them was Benny Melendez.

Miroff: Do you mind if we switch over to English, Benny?

Melendez: No, that’s fine. Let me know.

Miroff: For the interview? Cool.

Melendez: Yeah, that’s fine.

Rosin: Can you talk about that conversation? What did he tell you?

Miroff: Yeah, so Benny Melendez is a contractor who asked me to meet him at his job site. And I drove out to this kind of half-built subdivision in the outskirts of McAllen.

Miroff: So what are we doing right here, Benny? What is this? Is this a house you’re building?

Melendez: Yeah, this is one of my custom homes.

Miroff: Okay.

Miroff: Benny was there, and he was in this house where his crews had not shown up that day, he said, because word had gone out earlier in the morning that there were ICE officers on patrol in the area, making arrests.

Miroff: But there’s nothing happening to this home today? No, you don’t have a crew here?

Melendez: No. No, there’s no one here. There’s no—and I called them. I did call them. They told me they were scared, that they were not gonna come today.

Miroff: How many guys?

Melendez: Mm, let me see. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Miroff: And they saw some ICE vehicles? Or did that, was that on social media, where they—

Melendez: Social media, yeah. And the news. They saw it in the morning, so they decided to take the day off. So the ICE agents, they start—if you have a ladder on your truck, they’ll start following you, and they’ll stop you. And if you’re illegal, they’ll arrest you.

Miroff: Benny is 32 years old. He grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, and he started his home-building business about seven years ago. And he voted for Trump, and he said he’s just been galvanized by the past two years by ICE arresting—and he said ICE has arrested and deported 15 of the guys that he used to work with. And he said that not only has it made home-building in the Rio Grande Valley much more difficult; it’s really kind of destroying the housing market, he said.

It’s the combination of high interest rates, the rise in costs, but also just the inability for homes to get built. He said that he used to be able to get a house built in about four months. Now it takes eight months to a year.

[Music]

Miroff: And so, you know, he said that this has become the issue for him, and he’s gonna do everything he can to get Democrats elected and to send a strong message about the Trump administration going too far in the Rio Grande Valley and arresting people who, you know, in his view, shouldn’t be the target for ICE.

Melendez: Yeah, it is difficult for me to hear a 40-, 50-year-old guy cry in private with me, telling me he’s afraid that ICE is gonna take him, ’cause he has to attend this meeting two weeks from now and potentially be deported. Así está pone. That’s how they write it. Potentially be deported. Oh, man, are you gonna be able to sleep in the next two weeks?

Rosin: I see why you chose him, ’cause there’s so much in there. Like, he does represent some of the central shifts. I’m curious, you know, when you were talking with him, did you ask him or get the impression that he identifies with either party? Like, does—he thought of himself as a Republican; now he thinks of himself as a Democrat? Or it doesn’t work like that? Like, it’s not about attaching yourself to a party in some way?

Miroff: It doesn’t work like that at all, and I think for guys like Benny, there was a certain degree of rebellion in voting for Trump and in bucking, you know, the older generation in the valley that just kind of voted Democrat out of habit.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Miroff: Like many other young men in the valley, I think, and I’m talking about the Rio Grande Valley, there was something a little bit transgressive about voting Republican that signaled that you were an independent thinker. And so he said he’s voting very much against Trump and against the Trump administration and the Republicans this cycle, but he says, you know, very clearly that Democrats are gonna have to earn his support in the future, and that, you know, he’s not taking anything for granted, and he’s gonna vote for whoever he thinks is gonna deliver for the community and is gonna be best for him and his family.

Rosin: Yeah. I guess that’s why they’re known as swing voters. That’s literally what they are. Like, they care about a wide range of things, and sometimes those things can be vibes, like, I wanna be transgressive in this election, but sometimes they can be extremely concrete, like, You fired all my workers, and I can’t build homes anymore, you know?

Miroff: Yeah. I think one of the takeaways I had from this trip is that even if the Democrats end up doing well in this cycle because there’s so much anger at Trump, it isn’t as if all of these voters are just gonna go back to voting Democrat out of habit, the way they used to.

Melendez: Because before voting for Trump, and before voting for the Republicans, I voted for Biden, and I voted for other Democrats, and they have done nothing for my people. Nothing.

[Music]

Miroff: These voters are gonna be up for grabs every single time. Yeah. And they’re gonna go for whichever candidate is really gonna be able to deliver better lives for them and their families.

Melendez: What are you gonna do different this time? Are you gonna do the same thing you did when Biden was president? Nothing for my people? I mean, yes, the Republicans, it’s bad with them, but is it better with the Democrats? We’re in a lose-lose situation here.

Rosin: After the break, Nick takes us inside a key congressional race in Texas where one Democrat might have a fighting chance against a Republican incumbent in a district that was redrawn by state Republicans.

More in a minute.

[Break]

Rosin: Another person you talked to was Bobby Pulido. Who is Bobby Pulido?

Miroff: So Bobby Pulido is the Democratic candidate in McAllen area. This is the Fifteenth Congressional District. And Bobby is one of the most fascinating stories of, I think, the entire midterm cycle. And Bobby is a Tejano-music star, and that is a kind of a particular style of South Texas music that is a blend of, kind of, country and pop and, you know, in Spanish.

And Bobby had a hit song in the 1990s. He’s a two-time Latin Grammy winner.

Rosin: What was the hit song? Just curious.

Miroff: It’s called “Desvelado.”

[“Desvelado,” by Bobby Pulido]

Miroff: Which kind of means, like, “sleepless.” It’s about, and the video is really striking. It shows—it was filmed on the streets of San Francisco, and he’s, like, in his early 20s. And he’s kind of going around San Francisco, and he’s thinking about the woman he loves, and he’s just restless.

[“Desvelado,” by Bobby Pulido]

Miroff: That song was a huge hit. You know, he was already a star in the Rio Grande Valley before he announced his candidacy, and it’s no wonder that the Democrats recruited him. He comes from a prominent political family down there. And I spent some time driving around the suburbs where he grew up in Edinburg, right outside McAllen.

Miroff: So you guys are delivering signs?

Campaign staffer: Yep, yep, yep. We try to do this. Obviously we don’t have as much time as we used to.

Miroff: And he and his team were delivering yard signs to supporters that had called and, you know, wanted a yard sign. So he was chatting with everybody. He was, you know, knocking on doors and, you know, people were coming out, and they said, Hey, you know, we went to high school together, and, Oh, I remember you, and, Oh, I saw your concert, you know, at so and so.

Pulido: Hello. How are y’all doing?

Woman: Good. How are you?

Miroff: He’s just run this, like, very intensive kind of ground-game strategy to go out and meet as many people as possible. And his opponent, Monica De La Cruz, the incumbent, she got in in 2022, and she made, I think, probably a tactical mistake early on when she kinda tried to dismiss Bobby Pulido as almost like a washed-up quinceañera singer—

Rosin: Yeah, yeah.

Miroff: —like the guy who plays at the parties for 15-year-old girls.

Monica De La Cruz: This election isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera. It’s about who you trust with your family’s future.

Miroff: And he took that and he said, Okay, well, I’ll start—if you want me to, just give me a call, and I’ll come and play at your quinceañera. And so he started going around playing for free at all these quinceañera parties.

Bobby Pulido: Buenas noches, Alinah.

Miroff: He pointed out, you know, he says people are already—they’ve had something to drink, they’re already in a good mood, they’re feeling great, and he gets to, you know, perform and meet hundreds of people. And they see him, and they know he’s running.

Pulido: Thank you so much. My name is Bobby Pulido, and I’m running for Congress in District Fifteen. Thank you. Gracias.

Rosin: And then what are each of their lines politically? Besides just being fun, like, what is Bobby Pulido’s political line that he’s taking, and then what is Monica De La Cruz’s line in terms of distancing or aligning herself more with Trump?

Miroff: Yeah, it’s been very interesting. Pulido has been laser-focused on the affordability issue and ICE overreach. And so he has been the one who, probably more than anyone in the Rio Grande Valley, has highlighted these cases in which, you know, ICE officers have detained U.S. citizens, you know, or outrageous arrests.

Pulido: This immigration thing is not just for immigrants. It’s anti-American, because down here, we’ve integrated with them. There’s so many mixed-status families in the Rio Grande Valley—you have no idea. And that’s gonna be the hurricane that’s coming down here, because they’re freaking pissed.

Miroff: Pulido’s opponent—the incumbent, Monica De La Cruz—she has, I think, tried to distance herself from Trump’s immigration-enforcement policies. I sat down with her for an interview.

Miroff: I wanna start by just asking you, and how much time do you have to answer? Okay. I’ll be pretty succinct.

De La Cruz: Sure.

Miroff: She said that she believes in a common-sense approach and wants to be kind of a moderate voice.

De La Cruz: I have been direct with leadership in saying that enforcement should focus on the criminals and the cartels, not hardworking families that are trying to navigate the complex immigration system. That being said, when I call Washington, D.C., for one of these families, guess what? They pick up the phone, and they answer my calls, and we look for real solutions, not only in immigration.

Miroff: But she, as did all the other Republicans, voted for two funding packages that have given the Department of Homeland Security nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars for immigration enforcement. And that includes more than $100 billion for ICE, more than 10 times its annual budget. And so she’s tried to kind of distance herself from Trump’s immigration-enforcement policies and highlight some kind of the affordability messaging that she thinks is gonna be a winner, like around her support for the no tax on tips.

De La Cruz: No tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime.

Miroff: But, you know, in her campaign literature, she doesn’t, like, you know, appear alongside the president. And so she’s one of the Republicans that’s also, I think, trying to put some distance between her and the White House.

Miroff: I’m down with what—I mean, there’s a dog on the porch.

Roel Garza: Oh, yeah. Okay.

Miroff: But he’s not barking at us.

Rosin: You also went door-knocking with a canvasser for Democrats. Did you learn anything from talking to voters that way?

Miroff: I did. You know, it was really fascinating. This was a young man, a 20-year-old student named Roel Garza.

Miroff: Are you a college student, or are you older?

Garza: I just graduated. I’m 20. I just graduated from college, but I’m doing my master’s now, my M.B.A.

Miroff: You know, he had the addresses of people who had voted in the last election and, you know, he had an interesting strategy. He would go and knock on their door and ask them, What are the issues that you care about? What are the problems in your community that you wanna see fixed?

He would take their answers, and then he would try to describe the solutions that Democratic candidates were proposing for some of the things that mattered to them, as a way to kinda steer them to the candidates, you know, before he would hand them some campaign literature endorsing very much the Democratic ticket.

Garza: And you could go vote at any polling location in Hidalgo County.

Woman: Okay.

Garza: So these are the candidates that we’re endorsing—James Talarico, Bobby Pulido—and in the back you have some more.

Miroff: It was really eye-opening. It was a good reminder that a lot of people who are busy, who have busy lives, are not paying that much attention, not as much attention to politics as, you know, reporters and candidates. And it was also interesting to hear from working-class folks who voted for Trump last time, you know? I think one of the things that struck me the most was that there’s still a degree of kind of sympathy for Trump himself, that people think they sort of see him as this kind of outside figure who has shaken things up.

And I was also struck by the degree to which they were kind of confused about the candidates, and they had seen so much negative advertising that they really didn’t know what to believe.

[Music]

Miroff: And so I think there’s a lot of confusion. I think there’s a high probability that a lot of these people are just gonna end up splitting their tickets and are gonna vote for candidates with whom they think they can be comfortable with regardless of their party affiliation.

Rosin: So what we know about the pattern is: In 2024, as we discussed, Trump won a more diverse coalition than anyone expected. Then Democrats had their reckoning. It sounds like that’s all playing out in the places where you visited. If there was a swing back to Democrats now, what do you think would be the correct thing to understand about it, and what would be a misunderstanding about it?

Miroff: Well, I do think the two most salient issues are the cost of living. You know, think about how many Hispanic families in the United States are blue-collar, who aspire to, you know, joining the middle class. And so if they’re getting squeezed, I think that that is really gonna hurt, you know, whichever candidate is gonna take the blame for that or gonna be associated with that. But then the big one also is overreach on immigration enforcement.

And again, you know, people voted for border security. Border security is broadly popular in the United States. People do not like images of chaos and disorder along the border, but that doesn’t mean that they want intense ICE enforcement on the streets. And, you know, what they see on the streets of, you know, U.S. cities with ICE arrests also looks chaotic and ugly.

And whenever people see what immigration enforcement looks like, they often kind of recoil from it. And so for Hispanic families who feel like they’re being targeted, and that the people who are backing the president who are his core supporters are speaking in just openly racist terms, it once more, I think, questions for them whether the Republican Party wants them in the United States.

Rosin: Yeah.

Miroff: I mean, if you’re a minority in this country and one of the parties is speaking in a way that makes you feel like they consider you less American and even less human, then why would you vote for them? You know, to the extent that these are kind of unresolved tensions within the Republican Party—I’m wondering if this midterm result, especially if there’s a blue wave and it’s driven partly by Hispanic voters—if this forces some kind of reckoning within the Republican Party about whether or not you really want racists openly part of your coalition if it’s gonna drive away so many other voters.

Rosin: Well, Nick, thank you again for joining us.

Miroff: Oh, my pleasure. Anytime.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West with help from Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Fact-checking by Gisela Salim-Peyer and Sam Fentress. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And in case you haven’t heard, this Tuesday night, November 3, we’re going to host a special Election Night livestream. I’ll be joined by my Radio Atlantic co-host, Adam Harris. We’ll talk with Atlantic staffers about midterm results as they come in and what new directions the country could be headed in. We’ll have familiar guests like Tom Nichols, David Frum, and Anne Applebaum, among others. We’ll be live for two hours starting at 9 p.m. eastern.

And, as always, listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

In the Texas race for U.S. Senate, Republicans keep coming back to the same insult: that James Talarico, the Democratic candidate, does not eat meat. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has referred to his opponent as “Tofu Talarico.” Donald Trump has repeatedly called Talarico a vegan—sometimes pronouncing it “vay-gan,” and sometimes embellishing it with the assertion that Talarico does eat meat, but that afterward, he “throws up all over the place.” At one October rally, the president said of Talarico, “In Texas he talks about, I’m a vegan, I’m a vegan,” and then helpfully explained, “vegan meaning he likes lettuce.”

For the record, Talarico is not a vegan. He has denied being one repeatedly, and as a visual rebuttal, his campaign posted a picture of him chomping on a turkey leg. His critics may be basing their attacks on some statements Talarico made during his 2022 campaign for reelection to the Texas House of Representatives. In one speech, he said that reducing meat consumption is the “moral thing to do,” and that his campaign had become a “nonmeat campaign” that was buying only “vegan products from our local vegan businesses.” But he has said his current campaign “basically runs on barbecue,” and unless he means tempeh burgers, this means it is not vegan. Nevertheless, Senator Ted Cruz played a clip of the 2022 speech on a recent podcast episode and cited it as evidence that Talarico wants to “destroy oil and gas and destroy cattle ranching.” The conservative commentator Sean Hannity said on his podcast last month that Talarico is running a “vegan campaign.”

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The plant-based criticisms seem to be less about Talarico’s diet and more an attempt to undermine his masculinity. Manliness is still a trait that many American voters look for in their male leaders, and a beefy corpus of psychological literature reveals that people subconsciously associate meat-eating with masculinity. And although this bias exists almost everywhere, it’s particularly prevalent in Texas, the nation’s biggest cattle-producing state, where brisket is such a way of life that Texas Monthly magazine has a “barbecue editor.”

Studies conducted across more than a dozen countries, and with excellent titles such as “Eating Meat Makes You Sexy,” have found that people consider meat eaters to be more masculine than vegetarians, and especially more so than vegans. These studies have concluded that eating meat makes men “feel like real men”; that women prefer omnivorous men and rate them as more attractive; and that men who want to be seen as more masculine are less likely to consider giving up meat. “There is a metaphoric relationship between mammal muscle meat and maleness” is how one such study vividly put it. In the United States, women are more likely to be vegetarian or vegan than men are. Even female vegans think male vegans are more feminine than meat-eating men, which shows how “deeply rooted in our consciousness” these stereotypes are, Dominika Adamczyk, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences who has conducted several studies on meat-eating and perceptions of masculinity in Poland, told me.

Veganism might seem female-coded because it connotes empathy and a concern about animal welfare, which may be positive qualities in general but are not exactly Texas tough. Vegan men seem to violate the stereotype that men should be strong, ruthless killers. The accusations that Talarico is a vegan invoke “this idea that compassion, particularly with animals, is kind of incompatible with masculinity,” Rob Velzeboer, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia who has co-authored a review of the meat-masculinity studies, told me. Veganism seems more socially acceptable when men pursue it for health reasons rather than animal-welfare reasons, Velzeboer added.

Politicians seem to be well aware of what their diet implies about their manliness. Men running for office from both parties have long made sure to ostentatiously eat meat on camera. George H. W. Bush liked to order a rare T-bone steak while campaigning. In 2003, John Kerry chowed on a cheesesteak in Philly (though, controversially, with Swiss cheese rather than Cheez Whiz) a few weeks before he announced he was running for president. And practically all Oval Office hopefuls stop by the Iowa State Fair to gnaw on a pork chop. Meanwhile, the mere suggestion of salad can lead to an entire news cycle: After Barack Obama remarked on the high price of arugula in 2007, during his campaign for president, a spokesperson for his Republican rival John McCain derided him as an “arugula-eating, pointy-headed-professor type.”

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Like Obama before him, Talarico may overcome this attack. But the stereotype that a good, strong leader eats meat will likely stick around. On some lizard-brain level, many people appreciate a man who seems like he can slay a bison and drag its carcass back to the cave for dinner. Reading the psychological literature, I was shocked by just how many people around the world have an innate association between animal protein and machismo.

But perhaps I shouldn’t have been: Many years ago, I visited Russia, my birthplace and another culture that insists on manly meat-eating. One day my husband, Rich, and I sat down with my Russian cousin at a mostly vegetarian St. Petersburg restaurant for lunch. Scanning the menu, my cousin grew more and more uneasy. “I don’t know if this place will have the right food for Richard,” she said. “A man must eat meat.”