Maybe you’ve seen the ad: A man and a woman are loading a shopping cart. The woman tells the man he must return a carton of eggs. “We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians.”

The woman explains that grocery prices are rising because the United States gives so much aid to Israel. “It’s costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza,” the woman explains. “Don’t they get universal health care too?” the man asks. “We’re paying for that, too, probably,” the woman responds, at which point the man puts back the bananas.

The ad was produced by an independent political-action committee to support the Senate campaign of the Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. During the Democratic primary, El-Sayed regularly denounced American supporters of Israel as a shadowy, sinister special interest. Since winning the nomination, he has distanced himself from his earlier language. Now a super PAC is reviving it for him only a week before the general election.

The legendary journalist Hunter S. Thompson explained the ad half a century before it was produced. In his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, he described “one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics,” which may have played a role in one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas:

The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

“Christ, we can’t get away calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

In the case of the ad supporting El-Sayed, the sonofabitch targeted by the false accusation is not El-Sayed’s theoretical opponent, the Republican Mike Rogers—not really. The ad concludes, “Mike Rogers is for”—ironic chuckle—“they/them.” We all know who they are, and they are the real target of the ad.

[James Loeffler: The hatred that broke American politics]

The accusation that Israel is to blame for America’s economic problems is not some unique quirk of El-Sayed supporters. During his campaign to become New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani told Politico in 2025 that the dilapidated state of the city’s housing was the fault of the same villain: “The government refuses to fund public housing, all while we continue to find billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians over more than a year now.”

That same year, Marjorie Taylor Greene drew a similar link. American aid, she charged, typically accounts for up to a fifth of Israel’s defense budget, “even though Israel, nuclear-armed Israel, has universal healthcare for their citizens and subsidized college for their citizens. Here in America, we’re $37 trillion in debt.”

On Meet the Press in August, El-Sayed insinuated that U.S. aid for weapons in Israel was somehow an impediment to health care at home. “This campaign was a referendum on whether or not we want health care here or bombs somewhere else.”

Do supporters of Israel have to deny the false accusation? Okay, here goes. U.S. military aid to Israel is set at $3.8 billion a year from 2019 to 2028—about one-20th of 1 percent of the total federal budget. In 2024, Congress approved a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and other allies—of which, nearly two-thirds went to Ukraine, about $15 billion went to Israel, and about $9 billion was directed to humanitarian relief, including assistance for Gazan civilians displaced by the war that Hamas started. (The rest went to Taiwan and other allies in the Indo-Pacific region.)

Almost all U.S. assistance to Israel takes the form of credits that Israel can use only to buy American-made equipment. This assistance provides at least two direct and immediate benefits to Americans. First, it buys the United States access to Israeli military technology. By partly underwriting the development of Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, the U.S. has gained the use of battle-tested systems that also protect American lives. Second, this assistance lowers the per-unit cost of U.S. systems. The United States buys up to 48 F-35 fighters a year. Israel has bought 75 and is considering an estimated 25 more. Foreign orders allow U.S. arms manufacturers to improve their economies of scale. At a time when other NATO allies are canceling their orders of American equipment because they no longer fully trust the U.S. as an ally or supplier, Israeli orders enhance the efficiency of American defense production.

[Helen Lewis: The firebrand]

Meanwhile, all U.S. aid to Israel amounts to a fraction of what Israel’s critics wish to spend domestically. Despite the implications of that El-Sayed ad: Americans spend $1.1 trillion a year on groceries. Canceling aid to Israel would deliver the equivalent of about 30 hours of that spending. Per Mamdani’s complaint that Israel is to blame for bad housing in New York City: The city’s housing authority estimates its backlog of deferred maintenance at almost $80 billion, or about 20 years’ worth of U.S. assistance to Israel at present levels. Expanding Medicare to cover all American citizens would cost perhaps more than $32 trillion in additional federal spending over the first decade. Covering even one month of this plan would take 70 years’ worth of aid to Israel.

By blaming the Jewish state for the price of bananas in Michigan, the super-PAC ad calls to mind political tricks older and more disturbing than the one attributed to Johnson. In 1899, Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna and one of the most notorious anti-Semites of the 19th century, gave a speech blaming the Habsburg empire’s economic troubles on its Jews. “Here in our Austrian fatherland the situation is such that the Jews have seized a degree of influence which exceeds their number and importance,” he argued. “And in this respect the Jews operate a terrorism of a kind that could hardly be worse. For us, in Austria, it is a matter of liberating Christian people from the hegemony of Jewry.”

As with the rising cost of living in the U.S., the problem Lueger was concerned with was real. His voter base of artisans and craftspeople was coming under immense pressure from factory competition. There was not much Lueger could do about his voters’ distress. But he could point them toward a politically useful target. Now, with a modest update of Lueger’s language, an outside PAC’s closing argument in one of the most watched Senate races of 2026 blames a familiar “they/them.”

On Wednesday, July 18, 2001, a freight train derailed in Baltimore’s Howard Street Tunnel. Flammable liquid ignited, causing a fire that raised the temperature in the tunnel to somewhere between 1,000 to 1,500 degrees. “We’re told some of the boxcars are actually glowing,” a fire-department spokesperson told the Associated Press. More than 100 firefighters were called to fight the blaze.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the fire but never figured out what went wrong. No one was killed, and other trains were rerouted to avoid the inferno. But more than trains navigated the tunnel’s brick-­lined walls: Several internet-service providers and telecommunications companies were running cables through it. The internet couldn’t be so easily retransmitted. The cables that wound their way through the tunnel were damaged, and web traffic as far away as Atlanta and Los Angeles slowed to a crawl. One company that measures web performance said“the internet delays were the worst it had seen,” reported the Associated Press. A single tunnel was responsible for much of the country’s web traffic, and Americans paid the price.

The internet isn’t what we think. It is physical, subject to the vagaries of nature and time, just as our bodies are. Like us, it will flicker and fade. The internet’s fragility crops up everywhere: in the sudden disappearance of a relied-­upon website, and in the endless thrum of posts, images, and videos.

In the case of the Howard Street Tunnel, the fragility became, without warning, quite obvious. As the writer Maria Farrell and the technologist Robin Berjon note in their 2024 essay titled “We Need to Rewild the Internet,” WorldCom—a ­major phone-and-internet company at the time—played an important role in the outages that followed the inferno. “WorldCom had spread web traffic over different fiber networks,” they write, but “the region’s narrow physical topography had concentrated all those different fiber networks into a single chokepoint, the Howard Street Tunnel. WorldCom’s resilience was, quite literally, incinerated. It had technological redundancy, but not diversity.” Despite dealing in the physical world—in the fiber-­optic cables that make up the real, material internet—WorldCom had somehow forgotten that the land makes its own rules.

Bottlenecks can have their benefits. Efficiencies can be found in transmitting data through companies that consolidate the services we need to be online. In 2021, Fastly, a cloud-utility provider, stopped working for an hour, taking down the websites of major news outlets including CNN, The New York Times, and The Guardian. The Verge, a technology-news site, ended up publishing updates about the outage via Google Docs while its website was down. The day of the disruption, Fastly’s stock price actually rose. “Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service,” Farrell and Berjon write. “To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit.” Fragility and profit go hand in hand, which makes some sense when you remember that corporate redundancy always carries inefficiency. Brittleness is big business, a feature and not a bug of the cloud economy.

But the cloud obscures the very real collection of companies, people, and processes that create and structure the internet. When we put something in the cloud, we don’t just offload the responsibility of maintaining our data to fickle chunks of magnetic metal alight with electricity; we also offload that responsibility to a rather limited set of fickle human institutions. You might want your family photos to live in the cloud for centuries, but “most companies do not last long,” Maxwell Neely-­Cohen wrote for the Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab. “They get acquired or split up into pieces or go bankrupt or decline into something much smaller or are upended by catastrophic geopolitical events.”

[Read: Inside the dirty, dystopian world of AI data centers]

The cloud also shrouds the cables, data centers, and transmission towers that compose the internet itself. “The cloud is made possible by a relatively small number of undersea cables that require constant maintenance,” continued Neely-­Cohen. For a medium so often praised as decentralized, for a metaphor that calls to mind something diffuse, that’s an awful lot of centralization. A small number of companies own the data centers, connected by a small number of cables also owned by a small number of companies, through which data, yet again owned by a small number of companies, flow. The internet, in this telling, looks much more like the Howard Street Tunnel than a cloud.

And now artificial intelligence has gusted in, revealing the physical infrastructure that the cloud used to hide. Ordinary people can see more clearly than ever the precarity of the supply chains and the power of the chips that fill the water-guzzling, electricity-hungry data centers that so many have come to loathe.

Just as AI reveals the physicality of our digital lives, it has also brought into sharp focus the crucial pieces of software that undergird the internet. Last week, an AI model found security vulnerabilities in PHP, a coding language used in 70 percent of websites. Despite its centrality to the modern web, I’d hazard a guess that PHP isn’t a household name. Originally named as an acronym for personal homepage, it was built to help host its creator’s résumé. As PHP grew in popularity, it shed some of that DIY spirit—and that acronym—but, like so many essential systems that keep the web online, volunteers remain an essential part of its maintenance.

[Read: ‘If anything happens to this guy … everyone is screwed’]

In a classic comic about the state of modern infrastructure, a precarious Jenga tower is held up by a single block labeled “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.” AI—swarming onto rarely used Wikipedia pages, probing poorly run government websites, discovering zero-day exploits—has shown the web to be the frail, uncanny place that it has always been. Indeed, the most cloudlike part of this state of affairs is the absence of human agency.

As users of the web, we have to pay attention to the data and infrastructure that the cloud cloaks. Hordes of flesh-­and-­blood engineers, sitting in glass-­and-­steel office buildings and water-­and-­air-­cooled data centers, attend to the systems that hold our words, pictures, and videos. What we store and what we transmit are acts of attention to a world that remains resolutely material, despite the seeming immateriality of our digital lives. Human institutions remain central to the practice of storage and transmission—an inconvenient fact, because human institutions fade, just as human bodies do. The cloud is refreshed every moment of every day by the fresh attention of humans. Just as manure, in balance, can encourage the dogwood to flower, so, too, does our care—over generations—make the internet bloom.

This article was adapted from John West’s new book, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You.

Updated at 2:27 p.m. ET on October 26, 2026

Nothing makes me more nauseated than a row of multiple-choice questions and empty bubbles. After I turned 18, I thought I’d never encounter that feeling again, outside of stress dreams about forgetting my No. 2 pencils. And yet there I was, hiding in a cubicle at work to take a test intended for high schoolers, demonstrating my understanding of apostrophe placement and verb tense, and comparing the definition of truth in passages from Nietzsche and JFK.

I was taking the Classic Learning Test, an alternative to the SAT and ACT. The test is only 11 years old, and was originally taken mainly by kids who were homeschooled or had attended private religious academies. But use of the test is growing at an astonishing pace in red states where there’s a belief that the SAT and ACT have neglected the Western canon in an attempt to become “woke.” In the past three years, public universities in Florida, Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, Indiana, and Iowa announced that applicants could submit their CLT scores in place of SAT and ACT results. Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Wyoming now allow students to use their CLT scores to qualify for state scholarships. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently called it the “gold standard” exam, and starting this year, military-service academies will accept CLT scores too. Some 200,000 kids will take the test this year. The problem is that the test is too easy.

The CLT was created by Jeremy Tate. As a remedial-English teacher at a public high school in New York, and then a college-admissions counselor in Maryland, he had become disillusioned with the American education system and what he saw as its emphasis on preparing students for the workforce. “What every other generation was doing in education was fundamentally a different kind of project,” he told me. They were doing two things: “moral formation” and the “transmission of this cultural, intellectual, Western inheritance.” College-entrance exams inform high-school curricula. Because the SAT and ACT emphasize rote reading and math skills, that’s much of what schools teach. But if students had to take a classical-learning test, Tate believed, schools would be forced to teach the Western canon.

In 2015, Tate opened the for-profit Classic Learning Initiatives and started administering the CLT. Students are recorded as they take the two-hour test online, to prevent cheating. The exam is divided into three sections: verbal reasoning, grammar and writing, and math. Most of the texts are taken from a list of classics beginning with The Epic of Gilgamesh and ending with Toni Morrison. The math section covers algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and mathematical reasoning.

Tate presents the CLT as more rigorous than the SAT and the ACT. The CLT is the only one that doesn’t allow calculators, and its reading passages are longer than those on the SAT. But his biggest sell is on the substance of the texts. The other tests, he argues, have altered their content to push “anti-Western left-wing ideology.”

(Representatives for the ACT and SAT denied that the tests had any ideological leaning, or any agenda beyond assessing college readiness. Granted, it’s been several years since I took either one, but I recall more questions about the definition of words such as zenith and benediction than any progressive polemics.)

[Idrees Kahloon: Actually, the SAT was necessary]

Tate’s objection is a bit surprising when you remember that, for years, criticism of the SAT and ACT has mainly been a left-wing phenomenon. Some progressives oppose all standardized testing as inequitable, giving an unfair advantage to children from wealthy backgrounds and cutting students with lower scores off from future opportunities, while also failing to measure qualities such as creativity and grit. During the beginning of the pandemic, in 2020, many universities, including all of the Ivy League schools, made the SAT and ACT optional for applications. But since then, most top schools have reinstated the test requirements, finding that they’re the most reliable way to predict students’ abilities. Now, suddenly, the tests are being attacked from the other side.

Eventually, Tate intends for his test to dwarf the SAT and ACT. He has a long way to go; last year, 2 million graduating seniors had taken the SAT at some point during high school, and 1.4 million had taken the ACT. More than two dozen states, about half of which have Republican leaders, have all public-school students take the SAT or ACT. But Tate believes that Americans are waking up to the testing companies’ “hollowing out and politicization” of schools. “I think word is getting out more and more among students that the SAT and ACT just aren’t really serious,” he told me. Although Harvard and MIT do not accept the CLT, Tate said that a growing number of students are submitting CLT scores to impress their admissions offices. (An MIT spokesperson told me over email that CLT scores are not considered in admissions decisions. The not was underlined.)

Tate claims that the CLT, in contrast to the SAT and ACT, is not political. Yes, Christopher Rufo, the anti-critical-race-theory activist, is on the board of Classic Learning Initiatives. But so is Cornel West, the public intellectual who calls himself a “non-Marxist socialist.” “He’s a good friend,” Tate told me. (West did not reply to a request for comment.) There’s nothing partisan, Tate argues, about valuing rigor and revering old books. Recently, the CLT’s X account posted a collage celebrating what it called “arguably the 50 most influential books in history.” The image appears to be AI-generated; it includes The Aeneid by “Virmer.”

For the first eight years of its existence, only about 20,000 students took the CLT. But in 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis got into a fight with the College Board over its AP African American Studies course, which he accused of indoctrinating students in left-wing ideology. DeSantis seized on CLT as an alternative. Florida began to allow high-school students to use their CLT score to apply to the state’s public universities and its biggest scholarship program. Among students who weren’t destined for college, those who failed Florida’s end-of-semester exams could use a CLT score to fulfill their English and math graduation requirements. Over the next two years, Florida’s high-school graduation rate increased by four percentage points.

In school-board meetings, administrators credited the CLT for the boost. The superintendent of Hillsborough County, which serves more than 200,000 public-school students, called the CLT a “pretty big bullet.” More than 70 percent of the county’s seniors who could not pass the state’s math exam were passing the CLT’s math section. For the English section, that number was more than 30 percent. Many school officials think this is a good thing, presumably, because it makes the schools look better. The CLT “allows students who never before would have gotten a high-school diploma to get a high-school diploma,” a Monroe County school-board member said in a meeting earlier this year. “It doesn’t have them college-ready, but typically those students aren’t heading to college, so this is enormous.” It’s unclear exactly how much of the rise in graduation rates can be attributed to the CLT; Florida’s Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment. But officials in at least seven other districts also claimed that the test helped students graduate, USA Today reported.

The graduation jump clearly suggests that the test is easier than the state’s own exams, but how the CLT measures up against other assessments is surprisingly hard to figure out. The Classic Learning Initiatives recently gave a team of independent researchers access to the test and the evidence behind it. The researchers—who work at Arizona State University, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Alabama, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—compared the CLT’s content with the SAT and ACT. The group didn’t set out to measure rigor overall, but it found that of the three tests, the CLT contains the highest proportion of questions about number sense and pre-algebra, which are typically taught in middle school. (The CLT had about double the proportion on the ACT and six times the proportion on the SAT.)

[From the September 2026 issue: Bring back the blue-book exam]

Noah Tyler, the CLT’s chief financial officer, told me that this finding doesn’t mean the test is easier. The math section emphasizes mathematical reasoning, he said. For example, one question asks students to determine how many numbers between zero and 400 are both odd and a perfect square. “So even if it is some quote, unquote ‘middle-school content,’ it’s extremely hard. It’s dialed up to 11.” (The independent researchers confirmed that the CLT contained a higher proportion of reasoning questions.)

The researchers found that the verbal-reasoning section was also less cognitively complex than the SAT and ACT. Some students might struggle with the exam’s classic texts, which can contain arcane references and convoluted sentence structures. But the questions themselves tend to ask for a lower level of inference and interpretation than the SAT and ACT, according to Mark Sulzer, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati and a member of the research team. Compared with the others, the CLT has more questions that direct students to a specific point in the passage and ask them to rephrase the information that’s already there, Sulzer told me.

My experience with the test confirmed this. It was daunting to start the timer and immediately plunge into a passage by Charles Dickens. But the questions—asking, for example, if a character  delivered a letter with enthusiasm, annoyance, or another emotion—didn’t demand much understanding of the author’s work.

Tyler argued that the Florida graduation rate isn’t a fair measure of the test’s difficulty. Although many students pass Florida’s graduation cutoff, few earn a high score. A perfect score on the test is 120—40 on each section. Only 43 students got a 40 on the CLT math section in 2025, Tyler said. And none of them also aced the reading and grammar. “We wanted to make sure there were plenty of differentiators at the top. And so we left it hard,” Tyler told me. “We want to set an anchor and say: Let the whole world rise to the occasion.”

That may be true, but most aren’t taking the test to aim high. The company’s internal data indicate that about two-thirds of test-takers are using the exam not to apply to college at all but to satisfy Florida’s high-school requirements. To do that, they have to earn only a combined score of 36 on the verbal reasoning and grammar sections, and a 14 on the math.

The biggest problem is that it’s not clear what a good score on the test even is. Most companies that administer standardized tests go through a standard-setting process to determine which scores classify students into different proficiency levels. The company that administers the CLT hasn’t done that, the researchers said.

The company has put the test through a “concordance” process—basically, a way to determine what, say, a score of 85 on the CLT would be roughly equivalent to on the ACT (which has 36 total points) or the SAT (which has 1,600). The Classic Learning Institute told Florida officials that a 420 on the SAT math section—considered its passing score—was equivalent to an 11 on the CLT. That’s why Florida first adopted a score of 11 as the threshold necessary for high-school students to graduate.

But researchers say there were major weaknesses in the company’s process. How the institute determined the score was “so methodologically flawed, it’s, like, shocking,” said Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, a professor of teaching and learning innovation who heads the group of researchers studying the CLT. For one, Tate’s organization used fewer than 5,000 students to determine which SAT and CLT scores are equivalent, a sample size that is 100 times smaller than the one the SAT and ACT used. The company could access official SAT and CLT scores for only about half of that group. The rest were self-reported. When the organization studied whether official scores lined up with self-reported ones for a group of students in that sample, it found that about a quarter did not match. “If they were to put any of these technical reports up for peer review, the peer reviewers would literally eat them alive,” Amrein-Beardsley told me.

Florida seems to have recognized that it set the bar too low. This year, the state raised the threshold to pass the math section to 14. The state, Amrein-Beardsley said, is just throwing spaghetti at the wall: “If it doesn’t stick again, they’ll try again,” she told me. “That’s not the appropriate way to do it, but that is the way it’s being done.”

Tyler objected to the researchers’ findings, saying that his organization hasn’t yet been given the chance to review their work. “Before really doing her homework or even releasing a draft, she’s got these grand conclusions about our project and whether we ought to cease and desist,” he told me. “That seems totally inappropriate to me.”

[Walt Hunter: Stop meeting students where they are]

Amrein-Beardsley emphasized that nothing is inherently wrong with the content of the CLT. And more standardized-testing options could be a good thing. Her conclusion is “not that the CLT can never become a good alternative, but that the current evidence does not justify placing it on equal evidentiary footing with the SAT and ACT, especially for high-stakes uses.”

The way to know for sure if a test is rigorous enough is to see how it predicts students’ college performance. But because the CLT is only about a decade old, little evidence exists to show how test-takers do once they matriculate. Currently, only three studies have examined the question. Two compared CLT scores with first-year GPAs at Grove City College and Franciscan University, private Christian schools that prepare many of their graduates for the clergy. The third looked at how 259 students did in their first year at five small Texas universities. A team of Texas A&M researchers who analyzed the CLT reported that, while there was enough data for the scores to be factored into admissions decisions, more evidence was needed before the CLT could be considered as reliable an assessment as the SAT or ACT.

A confession: I breezed through the test’s reading and grammar sections, as well as through the beginning of the quantitative-reasoning section: If there are seven male and nine female chimpanzees, and six male chimpanzees are removed, what is the probability of selecting a female chimpanzee from the remaining group? But then I got to trigonometry and realized that I had forgotten everything I’d learned in high school. I already had a degree, I remembered, and was free to quit at any time. And so I did.  

Critics on the left say that all standardized testing is tiring and time-consuming. Critics on the right say that these tests are still the best way to determine what students are capable of. I think they’re both correct. But if we’re going to require students to take these tests, we should at least make sure they’re worth the effort.

For years, red-state politicians have criticized progressives for eroding the education system in service of an ideological agenda. They’ve promised a return to high standards and accountability. And yet, more and more seem to be jettisoning their states’ best measures of accountability in order to win an ideological argument. Does anyone think this is going to work out well for students? The correct answer is no.

This article originally said that the CLT included passages from Peter Pan and Pollyanna; those passages were in a version of the test for younger students.

At 2 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, I found myself in a corner booth at the Cheesecake Factory, emerging from the fog of war.

Before me were a dozen half-empty plates, a cluster of dirty napkins, and several depleted beverages. The food had come in waves, unrelenting, like Normandy. There had been egg rolls, four ways; Roadside Sliders; a sheet tray of Factory Nachos; and something called Chicken Parmesan “Pizza Style.” Coke Zeros, I’d told the waitress at the beginning, and keep ’em coming. There had also been cake. Much cake.

I checked in with myself. I was nauseated, for sure. But another feeling, too, was detectable within the churning volcano of my digestive tract: It was something like joy.

Let’s back up. Over the weekend, Barack Obama criticized President Trump’s schlocky White House aesthetic by saying it looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” My first reaction was to laugh. It’s true! The restaurant is over-the-top opulent—as if ancient Egypt and Tuscany had a baby in Las Vegas. Any true Cheesecake Factory fan would certainly appreciate the joke, especially if they remembered the Iraq War and Saddam’s own design sensibilities.

What happened next, though, was disheartening. “Hasn’t eaten dinner that costs less than $250 in years. Has never been in a Cheesecake Factory,” the conservative commentator Scott Jennings wrote on X. “Undefeated at condescending to regular folks.” Other Republicans, and even some Democrats, logged on to police the former president’s tone. This was classic elitist Obama, they argued, making fun of the working man and his primitive taste. It was why Trump won and why Democrats will never win back blue-collar America. My “For You” page filled with commentary about which political party could more confidently claim ideological custody over the Cheesecake Factory.

Immediately, my head began to swirl like the raspberry drizzle in a Georgia Peach cocktail. My rage was congealing, like Cheddar Cheese Fondue on room-temperature Pretzel Bites. Enough! I wanted to scream. Leave the Cheesecake Factory out of your culture wars! Like any number of kitschy, charming American chain restaurants—Rainforest Cafe, Johnny Rockets, and even, God love it, Applebee’s—the Factory can obviously be mocked. But it must be mocked from a place of love. It should exist above partisan politics as a sacred third space, one of the few we Americans have left.

Quickly enough, my frustration gave way to hunger, then introspection, and then to investigatory zeal. Which is how, an hour later, I ended up at the Cheesecake Factory. (I was helped along the path by my editor, who said I could expense everything.)

My friends joined me at the restaurant, a block from the White House. No one asked why we were rushing to get a table. It wasn’t busy—just a handful of tourists and families—and we were seated quickly in a quiet corner, where James Blunt emerged softly from the speaker system. I looked around at the design, which I had seen plenty of times but never quite absorbed before: There were orange faux-marble ceiling beams, trellis-patterned dividers, and columns with faux-tile inlay. The vibe was vaguely Italian, loosely Moorish. There were no gilded trophies or signs, but I could see Obama’s point. I explained his joke to our waitress, who seemed about 20 and well adjusted enough to not be spending time on X. She laughed. “Oh, damn, we caught a stray!” she said. “That’s funny, though. Maybe that’s why we’re slow this morning.”

I knew that I loved the Cheesecake Factory before I ever went inside one. “Too expensive,” my mother would say before steering me toward the food court. But peering through the windows of the restaurant at Jordan Creek Town Center in Des Moines, I was awed by its sumptuousness: the orange, inviting glow from the knobbly chandeliers; the floral frescoes and painted columns; the generous fountain pops and the dense wedges of cake. It wasn’t attempting highbrow elegance but, rather, embracing a kind of madcap largesse, like a zany aunt who wears a lot of bracelets. Inside the Cheesecake Factory, everyone always seemed to be laughing.

[From the May 2026 issue: The best free bread in America]

Trump, Saddam, and the Cheesecake Factory share an unabashed commitment to aesthetic maximalism. To be sure, this commitment is slightly more appealing in a restaurant than in the office of a democratically elected leader of a country founded on the explicit rejection of monarchy. And there is obviously nothing appealing about Saddam’s palaces, or Saddam himself—which is why it is unfair to associate Saddam with the Cheesecake Factory in any way. I didn’t cover the Iraq War personally, being too young, but I can still promise you with a high degree of confidence that there were no Thai Lettuce Wraps on offer at the Babylon Palace. Laughter and togetherness were not, I gather, the order of the day at Qasr al-Nihayah.

Still, by all accounts, Saddam appreciated food—and especially, in spite of everything, American food. He was reportedly a great lover of hamburgers. After he was tried and convicted, but before he was hanged, his guards said he could polish off entire family-size bags of Doritos. (Nacho Cheese, I’d guess.) For breakfast, he apparently delighted in Raisin Bran Crunch. Just like my father.

Saddam might have been a happier, more reasonable dictator if he’d had a Cheesecake Factory nearby (this is what is known in journalism as a comically irrefutable assertion). The thing about the Cheesecake Factory is that the food is not simply good. It is absurdly varied, original, and, at times, totally, gloriously incomprehensible—a delicious crime against nature. The Cheesecake Factory has achieved in menu crafting what Saddam was rarely able to achieve in weapons manufacturing.

When we ordered our favorites yesterday, we tried to imagine what the Butcher of Baghdad might have enjoyed best. We had hamburgers three ways: Double Smash Cheeseburger Bites, burger sliders (which proved suspiciously similar to the Bites), and juicy cheeseburger meat wrapped in a crispy shell. We ate piping-hot macaroni-and-cheese balls, and saucy shredded chicken fried and sculpted into crunchy, almost papery triangles. Would Saddam have ordered the Buffalo Blasts? Of course he would have.

And these were just the appetizers! Later, we ate the Chicken Parm “Pizza Style” that was essentially a flattened chicken pie, topped with a coil of angel-hair pasta. We also had Chicken Madeira; a pile of thick, garlic mashed potatoes; and a grilled branzino, which I ordered because it was the dish that seemed to most resemble Saddam’s reported Iraqi favorite, masgouf, a roasted river fish. (Some other fun facts my friends and I learned in several minutes of Googling: Saddam apparently wrote a popular romance novel about himself. He was once given the key to the city of Detroit. The closest Cheesecake Factory to Baghdad is in Kuwait.)

We punctuated our meal with an alcohol-forward Lava Flow Punch, a Mai Tai, and the Georgia Peach, the Factory’s twist on a cocktail recommended by the rapper Drake. “We’re not driving today, right?” the waitress asked us at one point, looking nervous. We were not. But we were getting dessert. We requested a few of the restaurant’s namesake items, including a sprinkle-speckled Celebration Cheesecake featuring a birthday candle simply because we wanted one, plus a Chocolate Caramelicious Cheesecake With Snickers—a cake so out of control that after a single bite, one of my friends put down her spoon and exclaimed, “This is messed up!”

Indeed it was. Ultimately, it was a meal fit for a dictator, but one to be enjoyed by regular people. This, to me, is the beauty of the Cheesecake Factory. It is America at its utmost—all decadence, performance, and fun. The Cheesecake Factory is for all of us. Can’t we come together on this most American of pastimes—pursuing a deeply uncomfortable yet utterly satisfying food coma—without enlisting in the culture war?

When the going gets tough, the tough don’t get subtle. Yesterday, with polls casting doubt on his continuing as Israel’s prime minister after Tuesday’s election, Benjamin Netanyahu posted a closing argument on Instagram: an AI-generated image of Tel Aviv destroyed by a nuclear blast, with accompanying text that asked, roughly, Would you prefer to reelect Netanyahu, or be incinerated along with your family? The text—written by the commentator Yuval Bloomberg and reproduced approvingly by Netanyahu—called all of the other campaign issues a “smokescreen,” and accused Netanyahu’s opponents of being so blinded by hatred that they would rather increase their chances of being burned alive than see their country’s political maestro win another election. If you support another candidate, the Instagram post cautioned, “your hand should tremble” as you vote.

For years, Israelis both pro- and anti-Netanyahu have advised against counting him out. That advice remains sound. He has a Nixon-like ability to reemerge improbably stronger every time his political career has been declared over. It seemed over on October 7, 2023, when his government presided over an actual mass burning of Israelis. This time, the group of politicians cooperating to drive him from office is diverse and formidable. A former observer in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, retired General Gadi Eisenkot, is his chief antagonist. But two allied former prime ministers, the centrist Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett on the center-right, are enthusiastic members of the anti-Netanyahu coalition, and another ex-general, Yair Golan, is attacking him from what remains of the Israeli left. These combined efforts have reduced Netanyahu’s chances of remaining in power to one in four, as of this morning.

These relatively long odds account, perhaps, for the wild messaging from Netanyahu during the past three days. Netanyahu’s statements have been, as George W. Bush said after Donald Trump’s “American carnage” speech, “some weird shit.” In addition to warning that his opponents will be too beholden to Islamists to stop the flattening of Tel Aviv, Netanyahu’s pronouncements include the following assertions: that it is “only a matter of time” before American military assistance for Israel is “over,” that Israel will be beset by international sanctions and compelled to cope without the friends who have in the past guaranteed its survival, and that blockchain-based technologies, such as cryptocurrencies, might provide ways around sanctions.

[Read: Defeating Netanyahu means solving a math problem]

The other candidates have positioned themselves as normal people who can govern Israel competently in difficult times. Bennett replied to the atom-bomb post by calling for the “revival of our international standing,” and declaring his intention to improve the tech sector and force thousands of Israel’s 1.5 million ultra-Orthodox citizens to trade full-time religious study for military service and employment. (Netanyahu and his further-right coalition partners have refused these measures and tried to preserve draft exemptions.) Netanyahu, Yair Lapid wrote, “has gone off the rails. We must send him home.”

Netanyahu’s case is that he is an unusual man for unusual times. If the times are not unusual already, he will make them unusual, by shifting Israel’s politics and alliances preemptively—away from America and toward the United Arab Emirates, away from Western financial systems and toward crypto, in a manner reminiscent of sanctions-hobbled regimes like Russia, Iran, and North Korea. There is a logic to this frightening perspective. If you think Israel can be a liberal democracy in a familiar international order, and that competent institutions and international alliances are the way to stave off catastrophe, then vote from the menu of Netanyahu’s opponents. If you think Israel is doomed to being a pariah state, then vote for the guy posting images of his country torched in a nuclear holocaust. Today Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the secular-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party and a member of the anti-Netanyahu club, requested a treason investigation into Netanyahu for intentionally “dragging Israel into war” to improve his electoral chances.

This threat of annihilation is not, of course, wholly concocted. But Iran’s open desire to annihilate Israel can be real and still be used as a political pretext to avoid the issues that have led so many Israelis to hate Netanyahu. The same Instagram post that warns of nuclear annihilation helpfully lists these issues: alleged links between Netanyahu and the government of Qatar, reports that Netanyahu received warnings before the October 7 attacks and did nothing, and his support for welfare and draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox full-time Torah students. About 100,000 such ultra-Orthodox are liable for military service, and most instead study Talmud and are therefore too busy to cram themselves into tanks and fight in Gaza like other Jewish Israelis. Netanyahu’s response to all of these accusations is to crank up the end-of-days volume, to make even the most reasonable criticisms of his politics inaudible.

Among secular Israelis, the last of these gripes produces such bitterness that some seem willing to die rather than vote for a politician who would preserve the exemptions. The bitterness stems from the perception that Netanyahu (himself a religious novice) is eager to make unconscionable concessions to the most extreme elements of the ultra-Orthodox political machine in exchange for a few more seats in his coalition. The main ultra-Orthodox parties are Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ), both pro-Netanyahu and monomaniacal about preserving exemptions for as many Torah students as possible.

[Graeme Wood: Israel can’t postpone its reckoning forever]

The cynicism of this move is easiest to appreciate not by assaying the venom of secular Israelis but by hearing the dismay of ultra-Orthodox Israelis, also known as Haredim (those who “tremble” before God) unaligned with Shas and UTJ. Ziva Glanz, a candidate for the upstart Haredi Public party, told me with exasperation that the “legacy” parties were immune to change, and that most Haredim were ready to move on, if only the ossified political system would let them.

Her party is broadly in the Netanyahu camp, and her party is happy to support Netanyahu’s view of Israel’s security. “Existential problems are existential problems,” she said. But they nonetheless want reform, and see his government and its partners as stopping it. Her party supports reducing the number of draft-exempt Torah students. Glanz, the wife of a rabbi, says she thinks the low civilian-casualty rate in Israel’s war with Hezbollah was a miracle granted by God because of Israel’s commitment to religious study. But she says there are 12,000 Haredim who purport to be studying, and whose institutions claim government funds, when in reality they are “hanging out in pizza shops.” They should be put to work. “Our community is a success,” she said, and “with success comes responsibility.” Netanyahu’s response to this modest attempt to disrupt Haredi politics and integrate Haredim into the Israeli national project has been to tell her party to back down.

When Netanyahu first won the premiership in 1996, he successfully campaigned on “making a safe peace”—peace guaranteed through Israeli military supremacy, rather than primarily through the negotiation or diplomacy preferred by his rivals. Three decades later, a “safe peace” guaranteed through military might has become so strategically desirable that it unites his rivals—security hawks, one and all—while Netanyahu himself has moved on. He once promised to bring peace. Now he promises that his opponents will bring annihilation.

In this account, Israel’s violent devastation is so imminent that corruption, pandering, and venality become mere foibles. But what if ignoring these political vices devastates Israel in slower, less lurid ways? What if limitless draft exemptions, unwillingness to scrutinize past failures, and international isolation are themselves devastating? Tomorrow Israelis will vote, many trembling for the future of their country, no matter which candidate they prefer.

Stevie Wonder’s outfit seemed, at first, to be a strange choice. It was September 1976, and the 26-year-old Grammy winner, better known at that point for appearing on his album covers with a short afro or in cornrows and a tunic, was wearing a cowboy outfit: a collared, cream-colored shirt and matching trousers, a terra-cotta bandanna around his neck, a wide-brimmed hat. He also had a double holster wrapped around his hips, reading: NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET.

Maureen Orth, then a young writer for Newsweek, was confused. Along with a herd of other journalists, she had traveled to a 145-acre farm in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, for a listening party for Songs in the Key of Life—Wonder’s new, 17-track album, which he was releasing along with a four-track EP, for a grand total of 105 minutes of soul-stirring sound. Western iconography hadn’t been on the menu, or so she thought. “It’s like, what? Stevie, you’re a cowboy? Why?” Orth recalled on the 2024 podcast The Wonder of Stevie, which I co-created and co-produced. (Wonder executive-produced.) “We haven’t heard the songs yet, but there aren’t any cowboy songs on the record.”

Orth was right: Nothing on the album sounded remotely like a cowboy song. But Wonder’s getup wasn’t so much about communicating the content of his opus as it was about playfully claiming the context around it. And that context was that he, a uniquely brilliant symbol of American promise, had sought and captured something uniquely, brilliantly American.

Five decades later, Songs’ message—one of optimism, resolve, and self-belief in the shadow of hyper-partisan politics and communities coming apart—still feels urgent. Which makes it seem right that Wonder recently began a 17-city tour across Europe and the United States to mark the 50th anniversary of the record’s release, putting on shows in which he is playing the entire album.

A lot was going on in the country back when Songs came out. It was the United States’ bicentennial, and although the nation had reason to celebrate, people also had much to mourn: race riots, economic recession, repeated paroxysms from the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon. At the time, Wonder had been experiencing a sadness and disillusionment about politics and U.S. foreign policy so profound that he had seriously considered leaving the music business and moving to Ghana, where he planned to work with disabled children. “You can sing about things and talk about things,” he had said earlier in the ’70s, “but if your actions don’t speak louder than your words, you’re nothing.”

Wonder had gone so far as to announce a “farewell” tour. (Some believed this was a tactic to get a better deal as he renegotiated his contract with his label, Tamla, a division of Motown Records.) When Songs arrived, then, it seemed to be a reassertion of his primacy within American popular culture—and perhaps of his belief in America itself. Time magazine reported that the album took Wonder more than two years to produce. It cooked for so long that Motown executives had T-shirts made featuring a play on the phrase that Wonder kept using when asked about the project’s status: WE’RE ALMOST FINISHED. What they didn’t know was that Wonder, rather than struggling, was perfecting the simple message at the album’s heart—that to express love for America requires not only celebrating it with fireworks and flags but also acknowledging its missteps and failings.

Songs is a deeply personal album for millions of people. (The singer-songwriter India.Arie, born in 1975, has described it as a record that “feels like family.”) In fact, I’d initially thought of starting this article by describing how the record was the primary soundtrack to my early life—from the weekend afternoons of my childhood, when I studied the album’s liner notes and lyrics as my dad’s turntable crackled in the background, to one particularly tumultuous year during my 20s, when, rocked by a breakup, I shut myself in my bedroom, slid a disc into my CD player, and sang along to “I Wish,” “Joy Inside My Tears,” and “As.”

Over the years, I came to realize that the album owes much of its enduring power to its relevance as a source of personal and political optimism. It is a love letter to the listener but also a message, marked urgent, to a nation. When I say that Songs in the Key of Life—consistently voted one of the best albums of all time—is uniquely American, I mean that it is both by America and of it.

At that farm in 1976, Wonder’s outfit was a clever play on his argument about his country, but his songs provided the substance. They spoke of love and hope and faith and history and family and even fear. The first track, “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” offered a quiet opener with a devastating message: The country was veering from its imagined ideal. Hate was “goin’ ’round,” Wonder sang, “Breaking many hearts / Stop it please / Before it’s gone too far.”

The album’s third song, “Village Ghetto Land,” was where things started to get real. It was a nearly three-and-a-half-minute indictment of the economic and geographical segregation visited on America’s less fortunate, set to sober, almost mournful electronic strings. From there, the record unfolded like a map of the United States’ psyche, the soundtrack of a people (well, some people) who were wrestling with the gap between the stated promise of this country and its sobering reality.

Its eighth song, “Pastime Paradise”—which later inspired the 1995 Coolio hit “Gangsta’s Paradise”—was about coming to terms with an idealized past that had never actually existed. The lyrics chide people who glorify times “long gone behind,” those “wasting most their days / In remembrance of ignorance oldest praise.” Wonder cautions those living with a romanticized view of history against succumbing to inertia. He invites those whose nostalgia blinds them to the present to confront the truth of the past, to move toward a brighter future. “Tell me, who of them will come to be?” he sang. “How many of them are you and me?”

Then there was “Black Man,” perhaps the album’s most explicitly political track: a head-thumping, funk-inflected assertion about people of color’s contributions to the creation of America. Name-dropping figures including Squanto and Sacagawea, Benjamin Banneker and Harriet Tubman, Wonder sang:

We pledge allegiance

All our lives

To the magic colors

Red, blue, and white

But we all must be given

The liberty that we defend

For with justice not for all men

History will repeat again

It’s time we learned

This world was made for all men

For years, rumors circulated that Wonder had considered dozens or even more than 100 songs for inclusion on the record, many of which people never would have heard. So it was a delight when, on the date of the album’s anniversary this year, September 28, he surprised the music world by releasing on streaming services Songs in the Key of Life—The EP, a quartet of previously unreleased tracks from the era when he was recording the original album.

I was excited at first. But after listening to the EP a few times, I felt uninspired. I wanted more than what I’d heard (lyrics mostly about love, loss, and regret). So, I reached out to the cultural critic Wesley Morris, a Stevie stan like I am, and the host of The Wonder of Stevie. I wrote to him that one of the “new” songs (“It’s Easier”) felt a little stale, reminiscent of Wonder’s 1971 work Where I’m Coming From. “I’m Into Livin’” felt very Hotter Than July, the album that Wonder released four years after Songs in the Key of Life. And the others seemed like sentimental-bordering-on-empty attempts at saying something that—well, I couldn’t quite figure it out.

To be clear, I was in a horrible mood. The promise of America that Wonder had celebrated in Songs has been feeling, to me, further away than ever. The Trump administration has been unraveling many of the rights that previous generations worked so hard and long to ensure. It has been unleashing violent law enforcement in cities across the country; instigating political witch hunts; trying to make it harder to vote; and, contra “Black Man,” attempting to control how our national history is told, in part by downplaying the role that women and people of color have played in the political and cultural project that is America.

I was also frustrated. All this strife, all the ways in which the world has gone backwards, and Wonder had released four new songs about love? Then I remembered something that Morris had said on The Wonder of Stevie: “Anytime you hear a Black American singing about love, what you’re hearing is a choice not to be singing about a dozen other things. Being poor, getting ripped off, going to court or prison, driving your brother or your cousin to court, visiting them in prison. Talking about how affirmative action doesn’t need to end. Talking about voting rights and why that’s important.”

When these are the realities people are facing, a song about love—romance, love of people, love of community—can become its own declaration of independence. “In its own quiet way,” Morris said on the podcast, “a Black love song says, Here. Here’s my heart. And despite all of this other shit—betrayal, neglect, struggle, rage, lunacy, the pernicious old status quo,” he added, Wonder is asking: “Would you look at the world? How is it that I can know all of this and still make this gorgeous, contiguously gorgeous sound that is this whole album? This is the story of us all.”

That story evolves in fits and starts, and circles back on itself before moving forward—in a pattern somewhat similar to the cover art for Songs in the Key of Life, which to me evokes a spiral of warm, heavenly clouds. Wonder, a modern griot, understands that people need to tell stories to make sense of a complicated world, and that they need to believe in those stories to keep faith. As he sings in “Sir Duke,” the album’s fifth song and an homage to great American songwriters and singers such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald, “Music is a world within itself.” With Songs, Wonder created a soundtrack, too, a picture of the world as it was—and of what it could become.

Photographs by Moises Saman

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A priest led me up battered stairs to a tiny room at the top of a church. From the window, we gazed down at the decayed colonial villas and scattered trash fires of eastern Havana. He pointed to the yellow wall behind us, where someone had sketched a meticulous map of the local street grid.

“They posted armed guards here, to watch over us,” he said.

Cuba’s Communist government, the priest said, took over the convent, cloister, and school of Los Escolapios after the revolution of 1959, expelling the nuns and setting up a guard post—one part of the regime’s sprawling apparatus of surveillance and control. The church downstairs was virtually closed, the congregation mostly exiled or jailed in accordance with Communist Cuba’s atheist principles.

The guards are gone now, along with the portraits of Fidel Castro and the secular schoolteachers who commandeered the convent’s lower floors after the revolution. The church is in the process of reclaiming the magnificent 18th-century cloister from the state, which left it in ruins. The priest, Iván Guerra Álvarez, made clear he believes that history is approaching another turning point, and that the Communist regime will soon be gone. “The Church will play a big role in the transition,” he told me. “We are the biggest institution in Cuba outside the government.”

No one can say when or how that transition will happen. Donald Trump may or may not have “the honor of taking Cuba,” as he boasted after imposing an oil blockade on the island earlier this year. The Cuban regime has stifled any viable domestic opposition. But the withering of the state—a process that has been under way for decades—has accelerated, and is shocking to see up close. The ration cards that used to guarantee basic foodstuffs for every Cuban had been blank for weeks when I visited in August. Police and soldiers were once ubiquitous throughout the country, but I saw hardly any.

In far-eastern Cuba, I met a fisherman who told me that he and others like him, who lacked electricity for refrigeration, have gone back to traditional methods of drying and salting fish. The average monthly salary for public-sector employees in Cuba—including doctors and teachers—is about 6,500 pesos, which is less than $10 and far below the cost of a subsistence diet (a single carton of eggs can cost up to 4,700 pesos). Even getting small amounts of cash can be a trial: Banks sometimes limit withdrawals to 1,000 pesos (less than $1.50) per person per day.

The government still purports—on faded billboards, in party speeches—to meet all of the material and spiritual needs of its citizens, but it is now bankrupt in every sense. Almost no one believes in the system anymore, and many, especially outside Havana, behave as if the government simply does not exist. As in the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc during its final years, destitution is leading people back to older faiths. Afro Cuban Santeria and Catholicism have flourished, and “house churches” have proliferated, often evangelical and sometimes consisting of nothing more than a dozen folding chairs in someone’s living room.

Guerra Álvarez led me down from the church tower to the main sanctuary of Los Escolapios, an atmospheric shift he half-jokingly likened to a trip from North to South Korea. We found ourselves in a noisy crowd of more than 100 schoolchildren and worshippers. A teacher dressed as an angel, with a white beard, wig, and gown, was giving Bible lessons in the dimly lit nave. Afterward, volunteers handed out lunches of rice and beans. To see so many people looking so cheerful was striking; Cuba is now a country full of empty streets and abandoned buildings, having lost as much as a quarter of its population to migration in the past few years.

The expanded role of the churches is partly an outcome of American policy: The U.S. government has long favored the Catholic Church as an intermediary. When the Trump administration approved a $100 million aid package for Cuba in May, it was on the condition that the funds be distributed by faith-based groups and humanitarian organizations. But the rise of religion in Cuba is also a measure of the state’s withdrawal—and perhaps a hint at the island’s future direction.

I came to Cuba expecting to see suffering. What I did not anticipate was the near-total collapse of the state. This was evident even in Havana, where all-day blackouts are routine, but things are much worse in the eastern half of the island, which has long been poorer and less developed. Cuba’s religious revival has burned brightest there, especially among Pentecostal churches, whose traditions include faith healing and miracles.

[The David Frum Show: Cuba is collapsing. Will Trump invade?]

I drove to the east with the photographer Moises Saman, an 18-hour journey that sometimes made us feel as if we were traveling back in time. Weaving slowly among enormous potholes, we passed few other cars. As we got closer to Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second-largest city, we saw almost as many horse-drawn carts as motorized vehicles.

Poverty is not new in the country, but the number of street beggars I saw shocked me. On the seafront in Santiago, a mother and daughter approached me, both of them skeletally thin, to ask for money. The mother, a white-haired 76-year-old, told me that their only means of support had been her son, who had worked as a security guard and died of cancer last year. Now they spend all day begging and collecting plastic bottles in the hopes of trading them for a few pesos, she said. They get nothing from the state. Later, I visited their home, a filthy ground-floor room where they sleep on metal bed frames topped with cardboard instead of mattresses. When I asked whether there was any electricity, the mother said that they did not even have a bulb.

The failure of Cuba’s health-care system may be the most damning indictment of its Communist regime. Castro once held up the country’s network of local clinics as a model for the world, visible proof that socialism could triumph where capitalism had failed. He sent hundreds of thousands of doctors overseas, an “army of white coats” to bolster Cuba’s image and generate money for the state. (It later emerged that the doctors had been given little choice and many were victims of what has been called forced labor.)

Some doctors are still being sent abroad, but more have simply fled Cuba. On Cayo Granma, an island at the entrance to the bay of Santiago, I found a single nurse caring not only for all 870 residents but also for many people from the neighboring coastal areas. She no longer knows how many people she is responsible for, because doctors have been leaving the region so fast that she cannot keep track of the patients forced to seek new care.

Her name is Clara Luaces, a woman of 55 with a direct gaze and an air of brisk competence. Her clinic was a room the size of a large closet, hot and crowded with patients when I arrived; outside, it was almost 100 degrees. A 12-year-old boy with a fever sat on a bench, an IV drip in his arm; a girl with a skin infection sat nearby with her mother.

“We have to work miracles here,” Luaces said, answering my questions as she checked the boy’s pulse and adjusted his IV. The government had stopped piping water to the island three months earlier, she said, and the resulting lack of clean water had led to a sharp rise in bacterial fevers and skin infections. “Even young people are dying on me,” she said. She was chronically short on medicine and had very little money of her own to supplement the clinic’s supply.

The boy began moaning, and Luaces comforted him, putting a pillow under his head and calling him “sweetheart.” “I’m not going to retire,” she said, looking up at me, “because there is no one else to take this on.”

Luaces did not want to talk about politics. She confined herself to saying that she had been a student during what Castro dubbed the “special period” in the 1990s, when Cuba went through a severe economic crisis after losing its Soviet patron and the regime seemed on the brink of collapse. What is happening now, she said, is “much more special.”

Others lashed out directly at the state. Not long ago, the country bristled with informants working for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. But when I asked people about the CDR, some laughed, and few seemed worried about being overheard. One evening on a beach in Baracoa, a man in his 30s asked me what I thought about Communism. He was lying in a hammock talking with four other men, drinking cheap sugarcane rum from a plastic bottle; they had been complaining about the ever higher prices of rice, beans, and other basic foods. I told him I thought Communism was a lousy way to run a country.

He looked squarely at me and said, “I shit on Fidel Castro’s mother.” The other men laughed. He uttered a few more obscenities. Then, suddenly, all of the humor drained from the man’s face. His voice went taut with anger, and tears welled up in his eyes.

“Cuba is frozen in time!” he shouted. “There’s no hope. It’s a sad thing to be born a Cuban. That’s what I think, and I don’t care; they can send me to prison if they want.” The other men had gone silent.

Here is another measure of Cubans’ anger at their government: During nine days of travel around the island, I did not meet a single person who blamed Donald Trump or the United States for their situation. I sometimes reminded them about the blockade Trump had started earlier this year, cutting Cubans off from the cheap oil that Venezuela had been supplying before the U.S. military captured Nicolás Maduro in January. Hadn’t things gotten worse since then?

[Read: Cuba’s old economic model is ‘exhausted’]

“I don’t see any change since January,” a retired engineer named Guillermo Almeida told me. “That oil from Venezuela wasn’t reaching the people anyway.” He and others said that the more important turning point was the coronavirus pandemic, which destroyed Cuba’s tourism industry and shrank the value of remittances from family members abroad that many Cubans depend on, exposing more fully a state that had long been depleted. Another man put it differently: “It seems to us that the real embargo is inside of Cuba.”

The churches have taken on much of the Cuban state’s old role in keeping people alive. In Baracoa, I met Raul de Jesus Muñoz Munder, a Pentecostal pastor who has been evangelizing in the area for 32 years. He had seen hunger and deprivation, he said, including during the years he spent in a tiny church in the mountains, but nothing as bad as the present.

Muñoz Munder described his work almost as if it were a military operation. Every week, he said, he meets with a team of associate pastors at his church, and each man reports on the situation in his home neighborhood: who is sick and needs medicine, who needs food, and how to get it to them. The pastor’s congregation has about 1,100 regular members, but he provides aid to a much larger group. His denomination, the Assemblies of God, has expanded from two to 40 churches in the Baracoa region over the past three decades.

The growth of the evangelical movement is hard to quantify in Cuba, where the Catholic Church was once almost universal. No independent numbers on religious affiliation exist—the government has long had a lock on surveys. But everyone I spoke with, both inside and outside the country, agreed that the evangelical presence has surged in recent years.

In Baracoa, I stumbled upon several different evangelical services one Saturday evening, each of them loud and raucous, the congregation on its feet and clapping along. These kinds of scenes are still a little jarring to many older Cubans. They tend to associate church with more orderly Catholic rituals, and grew up without seeing much of the flamboyant evangelical religiosity that has become common across Latin America. But the island is changing. I heard a fair amount of God talk even on the street. One afternoon in Camagüey, a beautiful, decaying city in east-central Cuba, an elderly woman in a wheelchair called out to me as I passed her open front door.

“We have to tell people that God exists,” she said, in an urgent tone. “God’s word has to be fulfilled in its entirety.”

One of her children had left the country, and the other one, a high-school teacher, was in prison; she said he’d been given a 14-year sentence for accusing a high-ranking official of corruption. The old woman was living alone, and the only thing she had left was her faith.

In Havana, I visited a nursing home owned by the Catholic Church that was full of former civil servants and military officers. In one room I found a dozen old men, their beds lined up about a yard apart. Each had a single narrow locker for all of his earthly possessions. A nurse gave me permission to speak with residents but cautioned me that they were “very sad.” Many of them, she explained, had had distinguished government careers but had found themselves abandoned by both the state and their family at the end of their life. In many cases, their children had left the country.

One of the men, a wiry 65-year-old, had fought for two years in Angola, where Castro had sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the 1970s and ’80s to support a Communist-aligned government. The former soldier had once been a fan of the revolution; you could tell because he had a big tattoo of Che Guevara on his right arm. He’d gotten it when he was 18. He showed me several scars left over from battles in Africa, and I asked him how he felt about the situation in the country.

[From the September 1964 issue: An eyewitness account of Cuba’s fumbling Marxism]

He answered with an expletive. I asked him what should be done to make things better. Cuba needed to be bombed, he told me. Specifically, Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor, should be bombed. And Raúl’s daughter Mariela. And the prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz.

Again and again during my travels on the island, people told me: Cuba is not like this. They didn’t just mean the hunger and sickness and lack of electricity. They meant the anger, the emptiness, the absence of music and laughter.

There used to be a musical group on every corner of Santiago, an 81-year-old man who had spent 45 years as a singer in a band recalled. Now there were none.

After the 1959 revolution, Fidel Castro enshrined atheism in the new state, exiling many prominent Catholic figures and sending believers to reeducation camps. But in a sense, he did not so much banish religion as create a new cult, with its own rituals and holy martyrs. That cult staggers on today in a weird half life, abandoned by most of its people after decades of misery and repression, yet somehow defying a final collapse.

The only immaculately clean place I saw in all of Cuba was the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery, where Fidel’s ashes are held, in Santiago. The grass there is green and mowed to razor-perfection, the walkways carefully swept; not a single visitor was in sight when I went there.

As I stood looking at the rounded granite boulder that marks Fidel’s tomb, patriotic music began blaring from invisible loudspeakers, and an honor guard of soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms began goose-stepping in unison, rifles pointed skyward. They marched to the mausoleum honoring José Martí, Cuba’s great nationalist hero; presented arms; and relieved a group of similarly uniformed compatriots, who marched back. They do this changing of the guard every half hour, all day long, I was told.

Watching those perfect soldiers, you could believe for a moment that you were in another place—perhaps that far-off country Castro had dreamed of, where socialism is triumphant, no one is sick or unhappy, and everyone aspires to follow the heroic example of the man who led a glorious revolution. Then a breeze swept across the grass, carrying the acrid stench of burning garbage, and I remembered where I was.

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “How Castro’s Cuba Ends.”

Toddler parenting is an exercise in picking battles, and one I almost never pick is the battle over sugar. Quite often, my 2-and-a-half-year-old eats just a few bites of his meal before proclaiming himself “done, done, done,” yet mysteriously also desirous of dessert. Generally, at this point, I’ll give him a cookie, or whatever sweet he’s fixated on—yes, even if he hasn’t finished his healthy dinner, or if it’s almost bedtime, or if we’re somewhere I need him to behave.

I feel good about these choices because: science. For one thing, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations on added sugar are generous, allowing for more than an entire Klondike bar’s worth of it a day. For another, sugar doesn’t make kids hyper. The sooner parents internalize this, the sooner they can drop sugar policing from the dreaded mental load and reapportion that slot to some other parental drudgery, such as keeping track of spirit days.

Wherever a child is tipping over a bin of Legos or jumping on a couch, a “sugar rush” is bound to be blamed. Popular shows including The Office and Abbott Elementary have episodes in which characters eat too much sugar, go into overdrive, and crash. I’m often warned by other moms not to give my son anything sweet—by which I guess they mean any and all toddler food—before naptime.

Their admonitions, however, are misguided. “I know parents, and many people would love to be able to point the finger at sugar” when a child acts up, Jill Castle, a pediatric dietitian, told me. “But it just doesn’t hold up in the research.” A series of studies from the 1980s and ’90s, led by a prominent pediatrician named Mark Wolraich, helped break the connection between sugar and hyperactivity, which is generally defined as restlessness, poor behavior, and impulsivity.

In 1985, Wolraich and his colleagues studied 16 hyperactive boys who were fed a clinically monitored, sugar-free diet for a day, then given either a sugary or an artificially sweetened drink. The researchers found no difference in behavior or cognition between the boys who consumed the sugary drink and those who had the sugar-free one. In a 1994 double-blind, controlled trial, Wolraich found that when kids ate a high-sugar diet for three weeks, they performed no differently on a series of behavioral and cognitive measures than when they ate little sugar. In a 1995 meta-analysis, he examined the results of 23 studies and concluded that “sugar does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children.”

[Read: How baby-led weaning almost ruined my life]

For some children, sugar can have a slight sedative effect, and regularly consuming way too much can eventually put kids at risk for type 2 diabetes and obesity. The AAP recommends that kids ages 2 to 18 have no more than 25 grams of added sugar a day, the equivalent of about three fun-sized packages of M&Ms. (The guidance doesn’t apply to naturally occurring sugar, including the kind in fruit.) On special occasions such as Halloween, exceeding this limit is fine, Gwen Cook, a pediatrician at the University of Utah Hospital, told me. Many pediatricians discourage trying to eliminate sugar from a child’s diet entirely, Cook said, because doing so is “unnecessarily restrictive, especially socially.” No one wants to be the kid at a birthday party eating carrot sticks instead of cake.

Despite these findings, the sugar-hyperactivity myth has survived for decades because sugary foods tend to be served during celebrations that are otherwise chaotic and overstimulating, such as Halloween, Christmas, and birthdays. Some kids become wired at these festivities because the environment is novel and exciting, not because they’re eating chocolate. “They’re playing games; there’s music or decorations up that are different,” Cook said. “All of those things can feed into a child being more hyperactive.”

Parents may also expect kids to become hyper when they have sweets: In one study, mothers who were told that their kids had consumed a large dose of sugar rated their children as significantly more hyperactive than mothers who were told that their kids had received an artificially sweetened placebo—even though all of the kids had actually ingested the placebo. (This expectancy effect was stronger, the study authors said, for “cognitively rigid mothers.”) When kids eat sugar, parents may be more likely to interpret their behavior as wild, and attribute it to the sugar. So the myth lives on.

I also think parents persist in believing that sugar makes kids rambunctious for the same reason they believe in so many other dubious child-rearing fallacies. Parents long for an explanation for their kids’ inexplicable behavior and for a sense of control over it. If sugar really explained why kids became manic and naughty, parents could create peace by banning Skittles and soda. But sugar isn’t to blame, which leaves us to accept our kids for the frenzied, irrational beings that they are.

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Voters have consistently cited the cost of groceries as their top economic concern—and it isn’t hard to understand why. From 2015 to 2019, the average worker’s wages grew about 30 times faster than the price of groceries. Then came the pandemic. From 2021 through the end of last year, grocery prices increased faster than both overall inflation and wages. Today, the cost of food is about 30 percent higher than it was in January 2020.

Unfortunately, most ideas in circulation for how to bring down grocery costs, such as city-run grocery stores and price controls, would hardly make a dent in the issue. But a new think tank called the Kitchen Table Project, run by a group of left-leaning economists and policy wonks, is floating a more direct intervention: a public option for food purchasing.

The U.S. government already uses its buying power to purchase food directly from suppliers at low prices on behalf of military families and public schools. If the government decided to do the same on behalf of American consumers more broadly, the proposal’s authors argue, it could save the average family hundreds of dollars or more at the grocery store every year while costing taxpayers almost nothing. Despite sounding eerily like Soviet-style central planning, the proposal’s economic merits are strong. Whether it goes anywhere or ends up in the same place as a public option for health care (rather far from reality) is another matter.

Every effort to lower food prices inevitably runs headfirst into an inescapable fact: Grocery stores don’t make a whole lot of money. The average business in the United States makes an 8 to 10 percent profit every year; grocery stores typically make just 1 to 3 percent. These margins rose slightly during the pandemic, because many large retailers used inflation as an excuse to jack up prices, but they have since returned to pre-pandemic levels. The main reason grocery prices have risen so much is that, thanks mostly to pandemic-era supply shocks, retailers themselves are paying far higher food and labor costs, which are then passed on to consumers.

This creates an impediment for many progressive proposals. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has promised to establish city-run grocery stores that would charge 30 percent below market prices. But public grocers can’t sell food for much cheaper than private ones without large public subsidies, which effectively just shift the costs away from shoppers to taxpayers. Proposals to institute a version of price controls on grocery stores run into a similar issue: There just isn’t much room to lower prices without putting stores out of business. Earlier this year, the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, proposed a national price cap on a basket of grocery-store staples that it estimates would save the average family of four just $88 in the first year it could be implemented. “It’s harder for the government to intervene to lower grocery prices than in basically any other sector,” Jared Bernstein, the former chair of Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers and a co-author of that proposal, told me. “For housing or health care or child care, there are all sorts of market inefficiencies you can fix to bring down costs. But when it comes to grocery stores, there’s just not a lot of extra money lying on the table.”

[Listen: Why are groceries so expensive?]

Grocery stores are just one node in a much larger food-supply chain. It includes farmers (who grow crops and raise livestock), food processors and meatpackers (who turn those raw inputs into ingredients such as flours, oils, and ground beef), food manufacturers (who take those ingredients and turn them into finished products such as cereals, frozen meals, and snack foods), and distributors (who deliver that food to grocery stores and restaurants). These other parts of the supply chain are collectively responsible for about three-quarters of the total cost that Americans pay for food.

Although neither farmers nor grocers make very much money, many of the middlemen who operate between them make plenty of it. Egg producers such as Cal-Maine and meatpackers such as Tyson’s generally make 4 to 12 percent profits. Food processors such as Ingredion make 10 to 15 percent. Leading food manufacturers such as General Mills and Kraft Heinz make 15 to 19 percent. “If you’re trying to figure out how to reduce prices, you have to ask: Where is the actual money being made?” Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of Employ America, an economics-focused think tank, told me. “And the answer is: It’s all in the middle.”

One reason food prices rose so much during the pandemic is that many of these middlemen took advantage of supply shocks and consumer confusion to boost prices. Tyson’s beef-packing profits more than tripled from 2019 to 2021 as slaughterhouse shutdowns generated a national beef shortage. Bunge, a commodities trader, saw profits nearly quadruple from 2019 to 2023 thanks to global crop-market disruptions, such as the Russia-Ukraine war. In 2022 and 2023, food manufacturers such as Pepsi, Kraft Heinz, and General Mills embraced a strategy, known as “price over volume,” in which they actively raised their prices, leading to higher profits even as they sold less overall. From 2024 to 2025, Cal-Maine saw its profits triple as avian flu wiped out a large portion of the country’s chicken population. When the Kitchen Table Project conducted an analysis of where food-industry profit margins have increased the most since 2019, they found those increases overwhelmingly concentrated among companies that operated in the middle of the supply chain.

Many grocery stores have little choice but to accept the high prices that these middlemen charge. That is because a large portion of America’s grocers are either independent local stores or midsize regional chains that own a tiny slice of the overall market, whereas many of their suppliers are megacorporations that operate in highly concentrated markets (Tyson’s, Cal-Maine) or have strong brand loyalty (Pepsi, Kraft Heinz). A local grocer can’t afford to lose, say, Pepsi as a supplier, but Pepsi doesn’t need every single local grocer. This power imbalance gives food suppliers the ability to set prices at relatively high levels, knowing that grocery stores need their business to compete for customers.

Although some small and independent grocers have formed buying clubs to correct this imbalance, they generally continue to face much higher prices than their larger competitors. In one study, a team of food economists compared the prices of “staple foods” such as eggs, milk, and rice among 140 small grocery stores and nearby supermarkets; they found that almost every single item was anywhere from 10 to 54 percent more expensive at the smaller store. When the National Grocers Association, an advocacy organization representing 21,000 independent grocers, recently conducted a survey of its members, many of whom were part of wholesale buying associations, it found that “in many cases, the wholesale price offered to independent grocers is higher than the retail price at wholesale clubs like Costco.”

This problem extends beyond just your local mom-and-pop grocer. Only four chains own more than 5 percent of the national market: Walmart (20 percent), Costco (8 percent), Amazon (8 percent), and Kroger (8 percent). As a result, even most national supermarket chains can’t secure the same low prices as Walmart. A February analysis from Consumer Reports compared identical grocery baskets across 35 major chains and found that relative to Walmart, Meijer’s prices were 10 percent higher; Kroger’s, 15 percent; Publix’s, 20 percent; and Albertsons’, 25 percent.

One way to lower food prices, then, would be for the government to provide a public option for food purchasing. The Kitchen Table Project argues that the federal government should launch an “affordable groceries partnership” in which it would agree to purchase a basket of food staples, including eggs, ground beef, milk, produce, rice, and peanut butter. Because the government would be buying in large quantities, it would have leverage to negotiate down the prices for these food items. Then it would sell to participating grocery stores at that lower price point.

If the program were successful, then independent local shops and midsize national chains would enjoy access to the same cost savings that only the largest supermarkets currently enjoy. In exchange, the stores would have to agree to pass the great majority of the savings on to consumers. People who now shop exclusively at Walmart probably wouldn’t see lower prices; Costco and Kroger shoppers might not either; but everyone else likely would, assuming that their store of choice decided to participate in the program. And “everyone else” includes millions of Americans. (More than half of the total grocery-store market consists of businesses with less than 5 percent market share.) “You can think of it almost like a Costco card for grocery stores,” David Ortega, a Michigan State University food economist, told me. “It’s one of the more promising potential solutions to lower food costs that I’ve seen.”

The federal government already does a version of this. The Defense Commissary Agency, part of the Department of Defense, engages in direct price negotiations with food suppliers to secure grocery items for the country’s active-duty service members and their families, roughly 3 million people in total. The Department of Agriculture has a similar program for securing low-cost food items for public schools and food banks across the country. The size of these purchases gives the federal government the leverage to demand low prices, and it then passes the savings directly on to its members (along with generous subsidies that lower prices even further). Analysts at the Kitchen Table Project estimate that if the typical American family were to gain access to the same food prices that schools and military families pay now (minus the subsidies), they would save roughly $315 a year on groceries. The initiative would cost taxpayers nothing aside from the relatively small expense of administering the program.

If anything, these savings estimates are conservative. They are based on the prices the government program is able to achieve at its current size. But expanding this program to any willing private grocery store across the country would create a large national network that could rival or surpass the size of even the largest supermarket chains in the U.S. today, giving the government more leverage to demand even lower prices. “There are lots of places in the food-supply chain where margins are relatively fat because of a power asymmetry between grocers and their suppliers,” Amarnath, who helped develop the Kitchen Table Project proposal, said. “If the government can fix some of that asymmetry, then it can produce some really meaningful savings.”

[Michael Pollan: The new food movement]

The proposal could also lower prices in less direct ways. Currently, giant chains are able to secure far lower prices from suppliers than smaller retailers are, which can allow them to drive their competition out of business and dominate local markets. (A 2019 analysis found that in 43 metropolitan areas and 160 smaller markets across the country, at least half of grocery sales went to just a single retailer: Walmart). This dominance, in turn, allows those larger supermarkets to raise prices in specific markets. A study this year from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that from 2006 to 2020, food inflation was considerably higher in areas with more market concentration, because lack of competition allowed retailers to charge higher prices without worrying about losing customers.

But if small and medium-size stores could suddenly also secure lower prices from suppliers, that dynamic might change. Smaller retailers would be able to stay in business, areas dominated by a single chain would become competitive, and larger retailers would have to compete much harder in those markets if they wanted to retain their advantage. “I think we’d finally see some meaningful competition in many regional markets that currently lack it,” Claire Kelloway, a program manager for fair food and farming systems at the Open Markets Institute, told me. “And that would have knock-on benefits to the whole system that go well beyond just the initial savings.”

Although a public option for grocery buying might sound good on paper, implementing such a program would come with many challenges. It would involve scaling up a series of relatively small programs into one of the largest food-procurement systems in the world, responsible for securing food for tens of millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—of people. That would be a herculean undertaking for any government, let alone one that has had its workforce gutted over the past two years. (Between the end of 2024 and the end of 2025, USDA, the department most likely to be tasked with administering the public option, lost about 20 percent of its workforce.)

Even if the program could be successfully stood up, the list of open questions is long. Will a grocery store in a small town in Iowa or eastern Washington State get the same deal as a store in New York City or Los Angeles? Who would determine which products get priority shelf space in the grocery stores? (Right now, brands outbid one another for such space.) What happens if grocery stores try to game the system—for instance, by raising prices on nongovernmental items to boost their profits? Could the program ever hope to secure prices lower than what big chains already pay? “It’s a really interesting idea on paper,” Ortega, the food economist, said. “But there are a lot of questions you’d need to answer and details you’d need to figure out to actually make it work.”

Add to that list the politics of getting such a program passed in the first place. Sure, voters are concerned about the high cost of groceries, but that might not necessarily translate neatly to widespread support for new legislation. Here, the politics of health care provide a helpful analogy. For years, voters have relentlessly told pollsters they are upset about health-insurance costs and would theoretically support a public option to bring them down. But every effort to actually enact such a policy—most recently during the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which originally included a public option—has failed spectacularly in the face of overwhelming industry opposition. It isn’t difficult to imagine the same happening to a public option for groceries, given that several well-funded interest groups—including giant retailers, major food brands, and dominant suppliers—would inevitably team up to wage a public pressure campaign against it.

One key difference between the politics of health care and that of groceries, though, is that when it comes to health care, politicians have a range of backup options to lower costs for consumers, many of which eventually made it into the Affordable Care Act. When it comes to groceries, backups simply don’t exist; the public option is one of the only ideas that could meaningfully lower prices; even lifting President Trump’s tariffs would provide only a onetime windfall. The sheer difficulty of delivering on food affordability, in other words, may somewhat counterintuitively become the public option’s greatest asset. If there’s one thing that politicians fear more than angering Big Food, it may be failing to deliver oft-promised cost relief to seething voters.

When Eloise, a veteran who lives in Michigan, first heard about Trump Accounts last year, her mind immediately turned to other projects that had borne the name of the businessman turned president: a university, an airline, steaks, casinos. All had gone bust, and several had left creditors or investors holding the bag. Pregnant at the time, she wondered whether opening a Donald Trump–branded investment account would put her first child’s financial future at risk.

“Both my husband and I, our first reaction was like, Oh, this is a scam,” Eloise told me. Despite her initial skepticism, she did further research to determine whether to claim the $1,000 seed money the government was offering to most babies born during Trump’s second term. In the end, she decided not to accept it, opting instead to open a more traditional account to put money away for her child. She said she was skeptical that the Trump Account would work as promised and had a “moralistic” opposition to associating her newborn with the president. “Ultimately, it’s like, the man’s a con man,” said Eloise, who asked to be identified only by her middle name owing to fear of reprisals from the commander in chief.

It is rare for people to turn down free money from the government. But that’s what happens when a polarizing president attaches his name to a taxpayer-supported program originally pitched as a vehicle to help America’s children achieve financial security. An investment idea once championed by Democrats as a pathway to stability for millions of minors is now at risk of becoming yet another casualty of the country’s partisan divide. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say the program has promise. But its greatest obstacle to achieving widespread acceptance may be its name.

Tax advisers and economists told me that the president’s decision to brand the accounts in his image had become a major impediment for potential beneficiaries. “I have had personal experience where people have said, ‘I just can’t go along with something that has that man’s name on it,’” said Tom O’Saben, the director of tax content and government relations for the National Association of Tax Professionals.

[Read: The Santa presidency]

About 7 million children had been signed up for Trump Accounts by late September, before the shift to automatic enrollment. That amounted to about 10 percent of the eligible population. With the pace of enrollment lagging, the Treasury Department late last month made a few regulatory changes aimed at jump-starting things. It shifted from an opt-in system, where signing up required filling out an IRS form, to an automatic system that could enroll more than 60 million eligible minors at once. It also allowed wealthy donors and corporations to contribute individual stocks directly into children’s accounts. The efforts have boosted the program’s reach, but what might have been an uncontroversial policy initiative has still become something of a political loyalty test. In addition to naming the accounts after Trump, lawmakers and regulators have restricted the most generous federal benefits to children born during his second term. They even named the document used to sign up for the account IRS Form 4547, to correspond with the president’s two tenures in office. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called it “the most aptly named tax document of all time” during a fawning press conference in which he hailed “the president’s gift to the American people.”

A survey of pregnant women and new moms conducted for the website BabyCenter in March found that scarcely half planned to open a Trump Account, while 27 percent said they did not plan to do so. A fifth of respondents said they did not know what the account was. The numbers were notable in part because all of the women surveyed would be eligible for the $1,000 seed funding. Even with the automatic enrollment, parents and guardians must claim an account for their children to receive the money.

“I don’t trust Trump and his entire Cabinet whatsoever, and I have concerns that this money is some type of scam—like the money might magically disappear one day,” a California mother whose baby is eligible for the seed funding, told me. She asked that her name not be published, because she is locked in a fight with her relatives about Trump Accounts. She worries that the money will be heavily taxed and will somehow eventually become “more of a burden than an asset.”

O’Saben said he regularly encounters such concerns when speaking with clients at his Illinois tax office. He tries to remind them that even though the program bears Trump’s name, the funds were allocated by Congress and are sourced from American taxpayers. He said the pitch from tax advisers to skeptical parents occasionally goes like this: The president’s multiple corporate bankruptcies and history of skipping payments to contractors should not be a factor in assessing the reliability of the new government-backed investment program.

“If anyone has an image of Donald Trump sitting at his desk and writing out checks to these accounts out of his own personal account, that shouldn’t be the perception,” O’Saben said. “Nor is that what’s happening.”

The Trump Accounts, known within the tax code as 530A accounts, were part of the major tax-cut bill Republicans passed last year. They operate as a new kind of individual retirement account, designed to give children an early pathway to financial security as well as a tangible lesson about the benefits of compound interest. Although the government provides the $1,000 seed money to babies born January 1, 2025, to December 31, 2028, any U.S. citizen minor with a valid Social Security number is eligible for an account. Once a child’s parents verify guardianship and claim the account, relatives, employers, and others can contribute funds to it—up to $5,000 a year. Those funds can currently be invested only in a broad index fund featuring U.S. companies. State governments and wealthy donors can also contribute. The money cannot be accessed until the year the child turns 18, at which point it becomes a traditional IRA. The child then assumes control of the account and can withdraw funds to pay for college, a home purchase, or other approved expenses without penalty, or leave the money in the retirement account. The White House Council of Economic Advisers has estimated that a child born in 2026 could have more than $300,000 in the account by age 18 if he or she receives the annual maximum of contributions each year, assuming average historical returns in the stock market.

Democrats have traditionally supported this kind of government-led incentive to give children a head start on building a nest egg. When he ran for president in 2020, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey made “Baby Bonds” a key part of his economic platform. Under that proposal, the government would grant every child born in the United States a $1,000 savings account at birth and deposit up to $2,000 each year until the child turns 18. Children from low-income families would receive larger contributions. Booker has spoken positively about the Trump Accounts, calling them “children’s investment accounts” in a July press release that said the program had built on his idea. The release noted that the children’s accounts were “also known as Trump Accounts” but otherwise downplayed the president’s involvement. Booker did not respond to my request for comment.

Representative Ayanna Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat who partnered with Booker to introduce the “Baby Bonds” legislation, has taken a different stance on the Trump-branded version. “Trump has stolen this idea and twisted it into a regressive policy that would exacerbate wealth inequality,” she told me. Because Trump Accounts rely primarily on private largesse rather than government support, she said, the ultimate outcome will “help the rich get richer and leave poor children behind.”

Some Democrats have suggested that the accounts might not survive long enough to provide the expected benefits after Trump leaves office. Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, says he would “pass on a Trump account” if given the option, referencing the president’s namesake university that was accused of deceiving thousands of students and failing to deliver promised returns. “Trump University already taught us what happens when his name is on the brochure,” he wrote on X in July. “Does a $25 million settlement ring a bell?” Trump agreed to the settlement a decade ago to resolve lawsuits from students but did not admit wrongdoing.

The White House rejects claims that Trump Accounts will not live up to their promise. “With Trump Accounts, President Trump has secured a signature economic achievement designed to help every American child build savings and support a stronger financial future,” the White House spokesperson Matthew Middleton told me in a statement. “With automatic enrollment now complete and nearly 70 million Trump Accounts created, families have a simpler path to giving their children a jump-start on the American Dream.”

[Read: What the next phase of Trump’s presidency will look like]

During an event in the Oval Office earlier this month to celebrate automatic enrollment, Trump noted that no Democrats had voted for the legislation that created the accounts. He then pivoted to marveling at the fact that some senators had nonetheless offered praise for the program. “I may not like Trump, but I like the Trump Accounts,” the president said, attempting to capture the sentiment among his political opponents. “I have not heard anybody speak badly of it. It’s pretty amazing.” Nearby, a group of middle-school-age children stood holding a sign that read, Thank you for Trump accounts.

In August, California Governor Gavin Newsom called the program “one of the best things” Trump has done as president. He urged constituents not to “fall prey to the politics or the cynicism” and sign up for the accounts regardless of any partisan differences with the president. “It’s not Trump’s money,” he said. “It’s your child’s money.”

Democrats have slammed the tax-cut legislation that created the custodial accounts as a giveaway to the rich at the expense of the working class. Some argue that Trump Accounts do the same. “This $1,000 amounts to a bit of a gimmick,” Darrick Hamilton, an economist and the founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at the New School, told me. Hamilton, an early champion of the “Baby Bonds” program, testified about Trump Accounts at a congressional hearing last month, pointing out that with rising costs, low-income families would be hard-pressed to put any money into the savings accounts after paying their bills.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, is trying to cement the accounts as a major part of the president’s legacy. Frank Bisignano, the Social Security Administration commissioner and IRS chief executive, announced earlier this month that 26 million Trump Accounts had already been funded with $8 billion in investments, nearly double the amount from earlier in October.

The ultimate reach and durability of the program could depend on whether it gains broad acceptance. The California mother said that when family members recently asked for her son’s Social Security number, she thought they needed it for a 529 account set up for the child. She later learned that they had instead used the information to activate the child’s Trump Account and accept the $1,000 seed money. She told me that she considers herself a centrist rather than a Democrat or Republican but had still had opted against claiming the cash herself because “we don’t know what can happen to that money since Trump is so erratic and clearly corrupt.” She has since learned that her in-laws have been depositing monthly dividends from an inheritance into the Trump Account. When she tried to express how uneasy she felt about that and suggested alternative accounts, a minor family drama ensued, proving once again that divisions over Trump can seep into just about any aspect of American life—even free money for a baby.

*Illustration sources: Nora Carol Photography / Getty; Oddphoto / Getty; Yuri Gripas / Abaca / Bloomberg / Getty

Photographs by Brian Finke

Updated at 5:30 p.m. ET on October 26, 2026

Along the highways and farm roads of the southern tip of Texas, the bright-red campaign signs for Eric Flores are impossible to miss. Flores, the Republican candidate for the state’s Thirty-Fourth Congressional District, has Ken-doll looks, with gel-stiff hair and the kind of physique that Donald Trump admires. His bio appears across the top of the sign: Infantry Officer. Prosecutor. Father.

A second set of nearly identical red signs are scattered across the district, only these show Flores with President Trump giving a thumbs-up, sandwiched between the declarations Trump Endorsed and Support ICE! When I first saw these signs, I did a double take. Why would any candidate want to be associated with ICE in the Rio Grande Valley, where the population is more than 90 percent Hispanic? The answer appeared in tiny letters at the bottom: Paid for by Northern Cameron County Democrats.

The attack ad captures how much has changed since Trump won in the Rio Grande Valley two years ago. Hispanic voters—especially men—were a key part of the national coalition that put Trump back in the White House. Trump and Kamala Harris roughly split the votes of Latinos in 2024, after several cycles of Democratic presidential candidates winning the group by double digits. Exit polls in Texas estimated that Trump won Hispanic voters there by 10 percentage points. But that support appears to have evaporated. Nationally, nearly one-fifth of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 now say they do not want Republicans to control Congress, a poll earlier this month found. And a late-summer survey of Hispanic Texans who are likely to vote in the upcoming election showed Democrats with a 2-to-1 advantage.

The Rio Grande Valley had been a Democratic stronghold for decades, and the region is crucial to the party’s midterm-elections strategy. The Texas U.S. Senate race has become the nation’s most expensive contest of 2026, as James Talarico tries to become the first Democrat to win statewide office there in more than 30 years. Recent polls show him in a dead heat with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. For Talarico to win, Democrats need the Rio Grande Valley to swing back, which would make Trump’s 2024 multiracial MAGA coalition look more like a one-off.

For Republicans, a Talarico win would be a political and psychological blow, signaling a new purple era for the state made possible by a population that’s trending more urban and college educated, and less white. GOP candidates, taking their cues from the president, have been framing the election in apocalyptic terms, telling voters that a Republican loss will usher in communism, open borders, and gender anarchy. Paxton frequently says: “If we lose Texas, we lose America.” Elon Musk donated $158 million last month to the main super PAC supporting Senate Republicans to flood the airwaves with negative ads.

[Read: ‘We have not seen ugly yet’]

I spent several days earlier this month driving around the Rio Grande Valley to speak with voters and candidates. I found a fair amount of sympathy for Trump among those who voted for him two years ago. Negative ads and wild social-media claims left others unsure whom to believe. It was clear to me that the region’s political realignment remains in flux. Hispanics in South Texas, especially men, remain up for grabs in a way they weren’t before Trump came along.

Representative Vicente Gonzalez, the Democratic incumbent running against Flores, barely held his seat in 2024, winning by less than 3 percentage points. Since then, Republicans have recast the district’s boundaries, pushing farther north into the more conservative-leaning Corpus Christi. Gonzalez, a former trial attorney who was first elected in 2016, is running as a folksy, I-feel-your-pain populist, not a tough guy, with ads that flip between Spanish and English. One shows Gonzalez grilling steaks at a backyard cookout and rationing meager portions to disappointed guests as he blames Trump’s tariffs for high food prices.

I had lunch with Gonzalez and about 20 of his supporters earlier this month at Frijoles, a restaurant in Brownsville. The group was mostly men, a mix of taxi drivers and local business owners who cracked jokes about involuntarily losing weight from smaller hamburgers. Steve Torres, who operates 11 Airbnbs that house engineers working at Musk’s nearby Starbase, told Gonzalez that his electricity bills are soaring. “I’m paying more than $4,000 a month,” said Torres, who voted for Trump. Last year, he closed two restaurants that he owned after struggling to compete with franchises that could better withstand higher costs. Gonzalez told the group that 200 fishing boats are moored along the Gulf Coast in the district because owners can’t turn a profit with diesel at $6 a gallon.

Others at the table grumbled about labor shortages created by Trump’s immigration crackdown. Workers are scared to leave their homes, and ICE sightings—real and imagined—are shared widely on social media. Gonzalez said he knows a restaurant owner who had to close one of his three locations because he didn’t have staff. “I know a farmer with 15,000 acres who only planted half because he doesn’t have enough workers for the harvest,” Gonzalez told the group.

Chuck Rocha, a political consultant who is advising Democrats in the state, told me that lots of voter groups are moving away from Trump, but that Latino men appear to be doing so at a larger rate “because they were some of the biggest swingers to Trump over the past 10 years.” Rocha has helped Democratic candidates create messages appealing to what he calls “the big-ass-truck economy for Latino men.” Those voters want to provide for their families and enjoy the money they earn, Rocha said. “When I was making a TV ad a couple of weeks ago, a guy pointed to his truck in the front yard and said, That fucking thing has become a lawn ornament because I can't afford to drive it,” Rocha said.

[Read: Going hungry in Trump’s economy]

Republicans have been using their fundraising edge to saturate South Texas with ads aimed at the region’s social conservatism. The Flores campaign has put up signs claiming that Gonzalez wants taxpayer-funded “child sex changes” because he voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer. His attorney sent the billboard company a cease-and-desist letter demanding removal of the advertisements showing Flores with Trump, The Washington Sun reported.

One evening, I walked around a rough-looking colonia knocking on doors with Roel Garza, a 20-year-old business student canvassing for Democrats. Roosters erupted in several yards, and a guy in a welding mask was fixing a cattle trailer with a blowtorch, shooting sparks out of his carport. We sought out residents on Garza’s list who’d voted in previous cycles, avoiding the homes with barking dogs. One man who smelled of alcohol and had bloodshot eyes came out of his trailer to fire up a charcoal grill, and told us he’d voted for Trump but didn’t realize another election was coming up. Rosalina Saenz, a mother of six, told us she voted for Trump last time and was still happy with him. She told Garza that she was open to voting for Democrats in local races, but wasn’t sure who to support, because she’d seen so many ads “trashing” the candidates.

Garza told me that he thought a lot of people backed Trump last time because “they wanted that macho figure.” But they remain open to persuasion. It was just a matter of getting them to connect the administration’s policies with the problems in their lives. “Once people know the issues, they’re smart enough to know how they want to vote,” Garza said.

The home-building industry in South Texas is where Trump’s least popular actions have converged to squeeze men working in construction. High mortgage rates have sapped housing demand, fuel prices are driving up construction costs, and the ICE crackdown has squeezed the labor supply.

Benny Melendez, a general contractor who started his business seven years ago, invited me to a half-built house he is trying to finish outside McAllen. Melendez told me that he used to build on spec, investing his own money in a project with confidence that he’d quickly flip a sale. Now he builds only for clients who pay up front. Building a house used to take him four months, but now it takes eight to 12, he said, because he can’t find enough workers.

Melendez voted for Trump two years ago and doesn’t “hate” him. He was less generous, and more profane, about the Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who orchestrated an ICE crackdown that has become so disruptive that Melendez and other members of his trade group felt like they had to get more involved in politics. At least 15 men he used to work with have been deported, and several of them were arrested by ICE en route to a job site. “If you have a ladder on your truck, they’ll start following you, and they’ll stop you,” Melendez said. “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 going to take him.” Melendez told me that the Rio Grande Valley is best-known for having a low cost of living and being family-oriented. “And now those are the two things being taken away from us,” he said.

A crew of subcontractors working for Melendez was supposed to install kitchen cabinets at the house that day. They didn’t show. Neither did the guys scheduled to pave the driveway. ICE vehicles had been spotted that morning in the area, and alerts had gone out across radio stations and social media. Most of the ICE officers making the arrests are other Hispanic men who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, Melendez said, and as he watched video clips from construction sites, he recognized a close friend, despite his face mask. “I wrote to my friend and said, Dude, you know I love you, but you’re losing my respect,” he said. Melendez was even more disgusted when the friend told him the pay was too good to quit.

Melendez told me that construction workers across the Rio Grande Valley tune in each morning to the radio show El Zorro y Su Pandilla (“The Fox and His Gang”), which relays reports of ICE sightings. I went to see “El Zorro,” whose real name is Hector Lepe, at his home studio in Donna, where a pickup truck parked in the driveway was plastered with a promotional picture of Lepe and his wife. Lepe told me that callers often dial in to his show describing encounters with ICE and fears of what will happen to their families if they’re deported. It’s made him something of a community therapist for men who don’t have the time or money to see a professional.

Lepe, who grew up in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, said he crossed the border illegally as a young man and spent years as an itinerant farmworker until he broke into broadcasting. He obtained legal status through his marriage and became a U.S. citizen. Even though the Rio Grande Valley is a border community, and has federal immigration officers and agents everywhere, it used to be a “place where you could take your family to the movies, to the circus, to eat, to dance” without fear.

Lepe said that he’s been especially bothered by stories of recently deported tradesmen being reduced to working in low-wage Mexican assembly plants along the border. They’ve been separated from their children in the United States but try to remain as physically close as possible. “Imagine one day you get up to go to work, and they just take you,” Lepe said. He told me that he plans to launch a new project, La Rescata (“The Rescue”), for men in ICE custody to call so that someone will secure their truck and tools until a family member can safely retrieve them. He’s been encouraging listeners to register to vote if they’re eligible, and to show up for Democrats.

Flat and muggy, the Lower Rio Grande Valley is about 250 miles south of San Antonio, and for most of the past century, it was practically an island, with Mexico on one side and millions of acres of Texas cattle ranches and scrublands on the other. Its counties have some of the highest poverty rates in Texas. Their residents were reliable Democratic voters who benefitted from the social-welfare policies of the New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. The RGV was LBJ country.

The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 transformed the Rio Grande Valley into a trade and logistics hub for the manufacturing boom in northern Mexico. Its population doubled to about 1.5 million, and today the McAllen metropolitan area is the state’s fifth largest after Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. Wealthy and middle-class families from northern Mexico began arriving, too, fleeing drug-cartel violence and kidnapping-for-ransom terror. Developers gobbled up farmland to build subdivisions and faux-Mediterranean mansions not far from unincorporated colonias with dusty ranch houses and trailers. For working-class Hispanic families, the Rio Grande Valley offered a South Texas version of the American dream with big houses, cheap gas, and plentiful jobs.

Bobby Pulido, the Democratic candidate in the Fifteenth Congressional District, has been campaigning on nostalgia for that aspirational vision. “The thing that the Democratic Party doesn’t understand is you don’t get anywhere down here calling people ‘the rich,’ as if it’s pejorative,” he told me. “That’s what a lot of people here aspire to be!” We were driving around a wealthy suburb in Edinburg, not far from where Pulido grew up.

[Read: The return of the Democratic manly man]

Pulido, who is 53, was already a celebrity in the Rio Grande Valley, a two-time Latin Grammy–winning Tejano-music star whose 1995 hit “Desvelado” (“Sleepless”) featured a video of him wandering San Francisco, singing of unrequited love. Pulido’s Republican opponent, Representative Monica De La Cruz, dismissed him early in the race as unqualified, a washed-up singer from quinceañera parties. The comment backfired when Pulido started playing for free at local quinceañeras, generating publicity and easy access to large gatherings of potential voters who, Pulido notes, are already celebrating and drinking when he arrives.

Pulido’s family has long straddled music and politics. His father, Roberto, is a Tejano icon; his uncle was the top Hidalgo County executive and another uncle was its district attorney. Pulido studied political science in college, and—like Trump—is a natural showman, campaigning with swagger and a flair for spectacle. Last weekend, he played a concert to a sold-out arena. His opening act was a mariachi band that includes several members who were arrested this year by ICE.

De La Cruz won the district in 2024 by more than 14 points, but the latest polls show Pulido ahead. His campaign has focused on high gas prices, tariffs, and ICE cases that have stirred local outrage. Pulido denounced the actions of ICE last month after officers pepper-sprayed and detained two 17-year-old U.S. citizens, and this month he called attention to the government’s attempt to deport Giovanna Perez, a mother of four whose husband was at Army basic training when she tried to pick up her family’s military-ID cards at a base in Corpus Christi and was turned over to ICE.

I asked Pulido about the shifting politics of immigration enforcement in the Rio Grande Valley, where jobs at Border Patrol and other federal law-enforcement agencies have long been a path to middle-class life, especially for many Hispanic men whose parents immigrated here. Trump’s inroads with Hispanic voters two years ago were partly fueled by frustration with Biden’s inability to contain mass migration, as hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers—mostly from Central and South America—streamed into the region, overwhelming local charities and public services.

“When I was growing up, we were all Tejanos here for the most part. There were not many Mexicans,” Pulido told me. “This was a pass-through area, where people would go up north to look for opportunity.” That changed when drug-war violence sent families fleeing for safety. “Our restaurants got a lot better, because they started bringing in Mexican cuisine. Then, slowly but surely, they brought businesses, they started investing, and, man, we started booming. We started growing, and then something else happened: We started integrating with them,” he said.

The next day, I went to a happy-hour event for De La Cruz at a nearby tavern. There were about 40 people in the room, and De La Cruz, a former insurance agent, told them she got into politics to stand up for Border Patrol agents after a neighbor, the wife of an agent, had asked for donations of stuffed animals to give to children coming across the border without their parents. “I wanted to be their voice. I wanted to stand up,” De La Cruz told the crowd.

Like other Republican candidates, De La Cruz told her supporters that the implications of the midterms would extend far beyond South Texas. “This election is about making sure that your grandchildren, that your great-grandchildren, will have a free country to live in,” she said. The September 11, 2001, attacks were a galvanizing moment in her life, she noted, adding that Democrats had selected “a radical Islamic communist” as mayor of New York City “where the Twin Towers fell,” referring to Zohran Mamdani. The audience responded with cheers. “This election is about saving the soul of our country that was founded on Judeo-Christian values,” she shouted.

More quietly, De La Cruz has tried to distance herself from Trump’s mass-deportation policies, and during an interview after her speech, she told me that she supports “common-sense enforcement policy.” I asked why she voted, along with other Republicans, for two bills that together gave ICE more than $100 billion for immigration enforcement—10 times its annual operation budget. De La Cruz tried to steer the conversation to affordability and grew irritated when I pressed her about the ICE funding. She said she is candid with Republican leaders in Washington and tells them that enforcement should focus on criminals, “not hardworking families,” and that when a constituent needs help with ICE, her support for the Department of Homeland Security gives her clout that Democrats lack. “When I call Washington, D.C., for one of these families, guess what? They pick up the phone,” she told me.

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

Her campaign has been attacking Pulido for having played with a former bandmate who was a convicted sex offender. (Pulido says that he hadn’t been aware of the man’s criminal record and cut ties when he learned about the conviction.) Last week, De La Cruz seemed eager to distance herself further from the White House, and was running new ads that tout her as a corruption fighter who will stand up to members of her own party.

The next day, I went to see a Democratic candidate whose win seems like a foregone conclusion: Representative Henry Cuellar, an 11-time incumbent. Cuellar was meeting with supporters at a private residence where plates of cabrito (“kid goat”) were served around a pool. Trump had just called Cuellar a “LOSER,” and “one of the most disloyal political people on Earth!” in a Truth Social post. The president told Republicans to vote for Tano Tijerina, a former Democrat who switched parties in 2024.

In 2024, Cuellar and his wife were indicted on more than a dozen counts of bribery and corruption-related charges for allegedly taking $600,000 from an Azerbaijani energy company and a Mexican bank. Cuellar denied wrongdoing. Trump pardoned him last year, but to the president’s disappointment, Cuellar stayed with the Democratic Party.

Republicans redrew the boundaries of Cuellar’s district last year, but they used Trump’s 2024 margin of victory, rather than the closer margins of local races, to calculate their advantage. As Hispanic voters have swung back toward the Democrats, Cuellar’s district has turned bluer. The latest polls show him with a double-digit lead, and earlier this month the largest Republican House PAC essentially raised a white flag, redirecting $3 million in planned spending to more competitive races.

Cuellar’s district includes Starr County, one of the poorest in the state, which has a Hispanic population of about 97 percent. Trump lost to Hillary Clinton there by 60 points in 2016. Eight years later, Trump won it with almost 58 percent of the vote. It was the first time the county had voted for a Republican president since 1892. Cuellar told me that many of his constituents are men who work in oil and gas, and they once feared Kamala Harris would squeeze the industry. Now they’re getting crushed when they fill up their pickup trucks. “People used to tell me: El Trumpo va muy fuerte. Not anymore. The wind has changed. And the two issues are immigration and the cost of things,” Cuellar said, using the Spanish for “Trump is really strong.”

Cuellar’s district includes the border town of Roma, whose historic downtown is perched on a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The Trump administration had installed a floating orange barrier in the middle of the channel to block migrants from swimming across. It looked like a giant pool noodle.

Mass crossings into the Rio Grande Valley during Biden’s term galvanized voters for Trump in 2024. At the McAllen Country Club, I met with Judge Richard Cortez, the chief executive for Hidalgo County, who had to deal with the crisis. The golf course was under renovation, so the club looked out on a parched expanse of barren hills and construction machinery. Cortez was one of the South Texas Democrats who had urged the White House to halt illegal border crossings even if it meant angering pro-immigrant groups in the party’s base. “I knew Biden was in trouble with immigration because we were living it,” Cortez told me. He invited Biden to visit—twice, he said—to no avail.

When I asked Cortez whether he thought Trump still retained support among male voters in the district, he introduced me to a group of men drinking whiskey and playing dominoes across the bar. Cortez said they were local big shots in real estate and manufacturing. All four men said they planned to vote Republican. “The Hispanic vote has gotten more conservative here,” one of the men, Henry Temkin, told me. “People are getting a little bit more knowledgeable. They’re not voting straight Democratic like they used to. They’re analyzing what the policies are.” He said he didn’t believe the polls showing Democrats poised to win.

During my visit, I kept thinking back to something that Rocha, the political consultant, had told me: Many of these voters are not “voting for the Democrats because they love the Democrats.” The party has a lot of work to do before the 2028 presidential election, he said. 

Many Rio Grande Valley voters who supported Trump in 2024 still backed Democrat candidates in local races downballot. But the Democrats’ legacy advantage is fading in a place where families are acutely sensitive to big changes in federal policies—on immigration, taxes, inflation. Election support will be won and lost based on whether the government is making voters’ lives better, or not.

Jack Rodriquez-Vars contributed research for this story.

This article originally stated that Donald Trump and Joe Biden roughly split the votes of Latinos in 2024. The Democratic presidential nominee that year was Kamala Harris, not Biden.

The earth is red like an apple
bobbing in a river, floating on a lake.
Twilight cannot make up its mind
if day or night is blue.
From a hilltop
the drilling and the trilling are one.

By moonlight a neighbor is on her roof
brandishing a cane.
Who shall arrange the stars
to set us straight?
Songbirds on a limb
delay their flights at dawn.

And over by the museum’s new wing
a Cézanne fruit bowl is drawing crowds.
The barren tree roots for ancient wisdoms
as the ocean knows what’s true.
The earth is red like an apple
left on the ground.

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Carlos Eire arrived in Miami at age 11 in 1962, a refugee from Castro’s Cuba. Three years passed before his mother could join him, and he never saw his father again. This experience of dislocation profoundly shaped Eire’s work as a religious historian.

In his latest book, They Flew, Eire looks at early modern reports of miracles. Drawing on his own experience of moving between cultures and worldviews, he tries to imagine himself into the minds of those who claimed to have witnessed levitations, bilocations, and other impossible occurrences, and he asks what we can learn by taking these reports seriously. David Brooks talks with Eire about magic, empathy, and the past as a foreign country.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Brooks: This is a conversation about radical empathy. We live in a polarized age, often with people whose modes of consciousness are utterly alien to our own. We hear someone spew a conspiracy theory or utter an opinion that seems monstrous, and we think: How on earth can they think that way?

But being a good citizen in this sort of pluralistic society requires that kind of radical empathy. It means approaching those who are different with a willingness and an ability to stand in their standpoint, to enter into, at least a little, how they see the world.

My guest is Carlos Eire, who has been trained by life to excel at this. When he was a boy, he was airlifted out of Cuba by parents who wanted to get him away from Castro’s revolution. He worked his way through college, got a Ph.D. here at Yale, where he is now a professor of history and religious studies, and began a double-barreled career.

On the one hand, he entered into the minds of people living in the late Middle Ages, describing how they thought about death and demons. But alongside his academic work, Carlos also wrote two popular memoirs about his childhood, Waiting for Snow in Havana, which won a National Book Award, and Learning to Die in Miami.

We’re going to talk about his travels across worldviews. We’re going to spend the bulk of this time on Carlos’s recent book, They Flew. We’re going to look at the testimonies of 16th- and 17th-century religious figures who claimed they could levitate.

When I started reading the book, these claims seemed totally bonkers to me. But take the time to get inside their heads. Learn to see the world through alien eyes. I think you’ll find Carlos generously curious and gently wise. You may not leave this podcast thinking that humans can float into the ceiling, but I bet you’ll learn a few things about how to enter other people’s minds.

Carlos Eire, welcome to The Permanent Questions. Thanks so much for crossing New Haven to get here.

Carlos Eire: Thanks very much. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Brooks: Let me try to lay out what I was hoping to accomplish. I sort of see this as about empathy, about encountering people who are completely unlike yourself and trying to see the world from their point of view. This strikes me as a pretty necessary skill to have in a pluralistic society like ours.

I think for most of the time, we’ll talk about this book, They Flew, which is a history of the impossible and possibly the most audacious book I’ve ever read.

We’ll get to that, but let’s start with the leaving of Cuba. The simplest way to introduce your story is: Tell me about Operation Peter Pan.

Eire: Yes, it received that unfortunate name. It didn’t have a name for us who went through it. Between New Year’s Day 1961 and mid-October 1962, slightly over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children came to the US. The plan was always to reunite with our parents either there, if the dictatorship ended, or here.

It was well-organized chaos. There’s no other way to describe it. The 14,000 of us were sent to 48 different states eventually.

Brooks: And you were 11.

Eire: I was 11 when I left, and I left with my brother, who was 14. We went through a series of foster homes in Miami at first because we didn’t have family, not yet. And my first foster family—beautiful family, I consider them saints, Norma and Lou Chait—were Jewish, and I thought I had it made now because, at that age, I didn’t like going to church. But no, they forced me to go to church, and gave me money to put into the collection basket.

I learned English really fast because they had zero Spanish. So I ended up learning English and a few Yiddish words that I thought were English. I later discovered, when I moved to Bloomington, Illinois, that people didn’t understand what I was saying.

Long story with many ins and outs. My brother and I also ended up spending nine months in a home for juvenile delinquents because there was no other place for us. It was supposed to be temporary, but they kind of forgot about us.

Brooks: The regime was sending kids to the Soviet Union.

Eire: Yes. And it had happened before in Spain during the Civil War. There were so many Spanish immigrants in Cuba, including my grandparents, who had a vivid memory of kids who never returned. So panic set in. And also for any male over 18—military service.

Of course, these parents, my own included, it wouldn’t have crossed their minds that this would go on forever, that the regime would not collapse. That was a big surprise to everyone.

There’s no fixed statistic on how many children left whose parents were unable to leave. Mine were among them. My mom, it took her three and a half years to finally come to the US, and my father never made it out.

I never harbored ill feelings of any sort. Ever since day one, I have thanked my parents for making that choice. I know there are a few who couldn’t understand. But for me, it’s always been a sacrifice they made.

Brooks: There was a famous book written in the ’80s by a guy named David Lowenthal called The Past Is a Foreign Country. His argument is: We have to understand these people are different than us.

But his second point was that it’s not only that the past is a foreign country, but that our relationship to the past has changed. We think of it as a line. It’s moving forward; it’s not moving back. But in previous eras, you go to any art museum, they’re dressing Jesus in 16th-century garb. They’re mingling the eras. Time is going backward and forward. They have a different attitude.

So does that concept—the past is a foreign country—is that something that resonates with you, humbles you, different views of the past?

Eire: Yes. I mean, having that experience of getting off the plane at the Miami airport back in 1962, you know, experiencing all this. Definitely another country—I’m in another country. The past is a lot like that.

There are things that are difficult to understand about the past, especially cultural dimensions that no longer exist. What people could say, what people did and could do, and not only that—the worldview. The worldview above everything else, because that’s what I have focused on in all of my work as a historian is the cultural-religious dimension, the worldview that changed in the 16th century.

I did have, however, I thought, an advantage over my American colleagues when it came to studying the Protestant Reformation, which was the revolution. I understood it as a revolution. And I saw many things happening in the early years of the Protestant Reformation that to me seemed only slightly different from the present.

So it’s almost like I was a time traveler, right? And it was not a foreign country to me, for instance, to learn about the consistory in Calvin’s Geneva, which policed everyone’s behavior. I know what that’s like. And then when I went on to study the Spanish Inquisition, same thing. I’ve lived through this. People being ostracized for thinking incorrectly about some minor point—I’ve lived through that. That was not a foreign country to me.

But when it comes to big items like belief in miracles, belief in witches, belief in demonic possession, all the supernatural stuff, of course it’s changed tremendously, but not entirely. The paradoxical challenge every historian faces is that something might look very similar to you, but it ends up not being all that similar.

For instance, I spent a long time reading last wills and testaments from 16th-century Madrid. And I found one that I said, “Oh, they’re just like us.” This woman was bequeathing her little precious dog to so and so. But everyone was requesting hundreds of masses for their soul, sometimes thousands of masses. I even had a few last wills and testaments where the individual was listing as their only heir their soul.

Brooks: Oh, really?

Eire: Yes. And it sounds funny in English: The soul was the sole heir.

But honestly, yes. Including one, I said, “This is a totally different world.” One priest who put it into his will. He says, “I know my family’s going to object, but they never did anything for me. I did this all on my own. This is my money.” And then I thought, “Well, now I’m back in this world.”

So you get these mixed messages. It is very, very gratifying to find traces of human emotion like that lady willing her dog to her friend. It was a friend that she trusted.

Brooks: I read that in the Middle Ages, and your period is sort of in the late Middle Ages, the emotions were more on the surface. I don’t know if this is measurable. But when they were in joy, they were in ecstasy. When they were in despair—the emotional register was much more vivacious than ours.

Eire: It could be. Of course it depends on time and place and everything else that’s going on around people. But yes, I think that’s true.

There was a lot of violence. A student of mine ended up doing his dissertation on violence in 16th-century Spain, looking at a very small town where all the records survived. People were fighting, like physically fighting, all the time. Then I understood why I had so many wills from people who were on their deathbed with head injuries.

These emotions in the past, in one way, had to be dulled much more than with us.

For instance, executions were public. And it wasn’t a nice execution. It was usually people being beheaded or hung or tortured. People lived through this. We would think immediately: Well, everyone there watching this is going to be severely traumatized. And perhaps they were, right?

Brooks: They seem pretty happy in the accounts.

Eire: People are cheering and clapping. Another world, another country. Absolutely.

Brooks: This is one I’ve always wondered about. You’ve written about death, as you said. There’s an argument that you occasionally hear that so parents lost so many children that the loss of a child was not as emotionally crushing as it is for moderns. I sort of find that hard to believe.

Eire: I do too. I think that’s somebody in the present saying, “It must have been that way. They had to.” But no, I don’t think so.

We have plenty of evidence from diaries. There’s one diary that’s a tanner in Barcelona, 17th century, who lived through a plague in Barcelona. All his children died. And you can tell in the diary, it really hit him.

Also, bringing it to the present, he actually wrote in his diary that the one child who survived was his least favorite. And why did it have to be that way?

Brooks: There’s an argument that you raise in the book, though I don’t think you endorse it, that all these beliefs—whether in miracles, demonic possession, all that kind of stuff—it was functional for the period; it served some function.

You quote a historian, Keith Thomas: “Belief in magic and miracles was an absolute necessity in premodern times due to ‘a preoccupation with the explanation and relief of human misfortune.’” Life was so hazardous that believing in all this stuff was part of the way they handled the hazardousness of their lives.

Eire: And I think there’s truth in that, but I don’t think that’s all that’s going on. I was trained to be a functionalist. If there’s anything weird happening, anything supernatural happening, you just don’t go there. You bracket that. You don’t ask the question: Well, was this person really floating in the air or not? You analyze what function that belief served in that culture. But I have rebelled against my functionalist training.

Brooks: Yeah, I’ll say big time. We get now to They Flew, and I started this book—it’s really a story of testimonies about levitation and bilocation, which is a person saying they were in two places at once.

And I started this book with, I’m sure, the normal attitude you have encountered everywhere. One, people don’t levitate. It’s all a myth. And two, I’m not that interested. Why should I care about something that didn’t happen?

Then I start reading the book, and I’m reading the testimonies and entering that other world. My mind is blown. If I were talking to somebody and reading testimonies like this in a current U.S. court of law, I would think they were pretty compelling. So describe to us what those testimonies were like and what the circumstances were.

Eire: As a historian, I would’ve felt immensely uncomfortable arguing in any way that these things really happened if I didn’t have the right kind of testimonies. It’s all based on testimonies. Actually, for this time period that I work in, the early modern period, we have an advantage over the medieval period in that—especially in the Catholic world, the part of the world that remained Catholic—the process for identifying saints was made more rigorous in this time period.

So the canonization process, which involves several sets of inquests, interviewing the people who knew this person, they include a section on miracles. But every answer that anyone gives in that inquest is sworn testimony, and the penalty’s not just a fine or some time behind bars. It’s hell, for lying. Most of the testimonies—not most, in some cases just many—come from very, very religious people, even clerics and nuns. So are these people going to perjure themselves, if they believe in hell?

Brooks: These were not just unlettered people. Some of these testimonies are from the intellectual elite. And they’re saying, “Oh, so and so levitated.” Or they’re describing their own experiences, and there are tons of witnesses. I still don’t believe they levitated, but the testimony is …

Eire: Well, we’re faced with a conundrum, which can be explained away in various ways. I’ve read one analysis of Joseph of Cupertino, this flying friar, the guy who spent more time in the air than anyone else in history: He was an acrobat. He had trained his muscles so well, like a gymnast, that he could make these great leaps. But no, he was suspended in the air, for heaven’s sake.

And there are fakes. I have a whole section in the book about frauds, people who were caught faking all of this. Because as I said, it’s always been a case that people can fake these things. Magicians fake it all the time on stage. But faking it outdoors in the 16th or 17th century, that’s a little harder to do without ropes and pulleys or wires or anything. So we’re left with these testimonies, and what do we do with these testimonies? They are part of the past.

Almost every time I’ve spoken about this book in public, the question comes up. I’ve had other historians bring it up, and other historians who share my point of view that we should take these testimonies very seriously. There is definitely a correlation throughout history, including the present—the correlation between the matrix of belief that a culture has and the frequency with which these anomalous phenomena occur.

Brooks: What do you mean by that: “the matrix of belief”? What do you mean?

Eire: If, let’s say, belief in levitation specifically is prevalent in a culture, you’re going to get more levitations. If belief in levitations is laughed at, as it is in our culture, you’re gonna have fewer. The same goes for any miraculous event.

Brooks: I found the most compelling set of testimonies came from Teresa of Ávila. So could you tell us who she was and how she levitated?

Eire: Teresa of Ávila, 16th century, was a Carmelite nun who from her 40s on had continuous ecstatic religious experiences, mystical ecstasies.

Some of them involved levitation. She is one of the few levitators who has given us first-person accounts of what it feels like and what’s going on. So we have great detail on that from her end, from the personal end. Plus we have all these eyewitnesses, which were the nuns that she lived with and people who visited the convent, who testify to these incredible levitations.

And she actually resisted these levitations. That’s another curious twist in her story. She begged God to stop it. She came right out and said to God, “Why are you doing this? What purpose does this serve?” And they stopped. She tells us in her autobiography they stopped.

But that part of her autobiography she ended in 1562. The levitations came back again, with less frequency, but they came back again. She doesn’t write about it. She doesn’t complain about these. She’s complaining about the early ones.

Brooks: I think her testimony is not like, “Look at me and what I did.” Her testimony is just like, “Here’s what it felt like.”

I’m gonna read a few just so people get a sense: “At the highest point of rapture, one will neither see nor hear nor perceive. None of the soul’s faculties are able to perceive or know what is taking place.” So she’s describing that something goes blank. And then the resisting: “When I tried to resist these raptures, it seemed to me that I was being lifted up by a force beneath my feet so powerful that I know nothing to which I can compare it, for it came with much greater intensity than any other spiritual experience. I felt I was being torn to shreds, for it is a mighty struggle.”

So these are physically demanding, arduous things. And then she’s bothered because she’s turning into a little celebrity for floating around the rooms, and this is the last thing she wants. And so she said, “There was no way of avoiding them, even in public. And then the persecutions and the murmurings follow. Even though the soul wants to be free from fears, she is never free of them because so many people foist them on her.”

One day she’s frying eggs. She’s got a frying pan, she’s frying eggs, and suddenly she’s up in the ceiling. This of course is dangerous for her because the church could decide she’s demonically possessed, because levitation can either be a sign of your holiness or demonic possession. So this is a maximally perilous thing, and she does not wanna be talking about it. I think they force her.

Eire: She’s walking a tightrope every time she went up.

I have found some common threads linking all the levitators from this period who are eventually declared to be the genuine thing—that this is divine; this is not demonic. One of them is what Teresa describes, this cataleptic seizure, where you lose your senses, just vanish, and you don’t sense anything that’s going on around you, and then your body stiffens in whatever position. Sometimes these levitators go up, they’re praying on their knees, and they go up, and their knees are bent. And people actually try to unbend them, and they report that they can’t.

I had a conversation here at the Yale Divinity School some months ago with a neurologist about all this stuff. It’s a very interesting conversation because he pointed to this spot on his head, and he says, “I can tell you exactly where these nuns are having these experiences.” And yes, you can pathologize as much as you want. If it were just a person telling you, “I felt this,” then it would be entirely explained. No more questions asked.

But to have people say, “We saw this happen,” and to have it under oath, not just once but multiple times—then I think you need some other angle. You need to take this from another angle or another perspective and say that something is going on here that we, in our culture, none of us have been prepared to accept as a real possibility.

Brooks: One of the beauties of the book is your first job as a historian is not to judge. It’s just to witness. Just look. What are they talking about? How are they thinking about this? And that part is very admirable, but I’m trying to picture you working on this book, taking these testimonies seriously of levitation.

And I have found that the biggest bias in media, maybe in the academy too, is not a left or right bias. It’s: What do people at dinner parties that people like me go to talk about? And if you have a category outside what people like me talk about, you are rejected. So as you’re writing this book, taking this stuff seriously, you must have been aware a lot of people are gonna think you’re crazy.

Eire: Yes, but I’m used to that. And actually, back to the first part of our talk, I’m used to it because being in academia, for decades, if I could do it, I would hide the fact that I was Cuban from my colleagues. Because every time I said I was Cuban, I would get a little speech about how wonderful the revolution was. And if I said anything that was negative, all of a sudden, you’re not okay. You’re not okay. So I was used to that.

Also, any person who has a religious life of any kind, the dominant culture, it does not accept your way of living as normal with a capital N. So you get used to that after a while. But having people dislike what I have to say is something that I’m used to.

Brooks: You write at one point in They Flew: “Ask any historian why they write the kind of history they do, and if they are honest, they will tell you that when all is said and done, the history they write has everything to do with their life story, their yearnings, and their obsessions. This author is no different.”

What does that mean? How do I interpret your decision to go into late medieval history?

Eire: All my work as a historian has focused, in different ways, on the same subject, which is my obsession, which is, at bottom, the marrow of religion, as far as belief is concerned. There is some other dimension that is, for lack of a better term, more real than this, from which this dimension is derived.

Brooks: And are you testing that proposition, or are you convinced by primordial faith that this proposition is true, and you’re trying to see how it works out?

Eire: When I started out, and even now, I’ve had my ups and downs about that visceral kind of affirmation. That it’s not rational or purely intellectual. So that’s been constant, but it’s gone up and down. But the older I’ve become, the more that that has seemed very real to me.

But the fact is, yes, belief is different from knowledge that you acquire through normal cognitive processes. Which is another reason that—I’ve also been obsessed looking at the phenomenon of mysticism. It’s the ecstasies that drew me to this subject first. It’s the claim, the existential claim people make to have experienced something other, with a capital O.

Brooks: You can argue about whether people are flying up in the air, but there really are mystics. We all know people who have a mystical tongue or a mystical sense that I will never experience, but I know them and I see them, and I watch them.

Eire: It’s the same with, let’s say, a musical virtuoso or an athletic virtuoso. That’s what at this advanced age of mine I’ve come to realize—that gifts are unevenly spread. Religion is one of these. There are people who just are spiritually gifted.

And there are some who are spiritually blind and deaf, who just can’t even conceive of. I’ve often used this in my mysticism class, the believability of any mystic’s accounts of what it’s like to experience the divine. They all tell you the same thing, at least in the Christian tradition, but also in other religious traditions: “I can’t explain it to you.”

It’s like explaining color to a blind person. How do you go about explaining color? No, it’s just another perception, another way of perceiving. What I still find fascinating is when those experiences which go beyond normal cognition have some physical impact on the person having it.

Brooks: Yeah, I, I’ve seen friends who are—they’re moving, they’re kneeling. They’re not even thinking about it. They don’t know you were looking at them. They’re speaking sort of in tongues or some sort of other language. I don’t think it proves a belief in God, but it proves the existence of some sort of spiritual faculty that people have.

I wanted to talk about the context in which Teresa’s living and a lot of the people in this 16th-, 17th-century period. This is a moment when science is beginning to take off, and you get Descartes, and I suppose go a little later you get Newton. This is reason and science taking off.

Technology’s beginning to move up. It’s exactly this moment, as you make the point in the book, that these mystical experiences and these levitations begin to hit back.

And it could be that there’s just intense pressure. They’ve hit a civilizational fork in the road, and they’re either gonna go off in the rationalist direction, or they’re gonna stay the way they were. And the crass way to put it, which I don’t want to reduce it just to this, is if you’re a Carmelite nun, you think, “Okay, you guys got calculus. That’s impressive, but we fly around the room.”

Eire: I can’t argue against this way of looking at things. It makes sense, yes. I think it’s highly probable that you have this heightened sensibility toward the miraculous as a response not just to emerging science, but more immediately, at first, the Protestant Reformation, which is denying that all of these things are divine.

But then along comes the scientific revolution. And yes, it is a natural response that people focus more intensely on these things. And as I said before, there seems to be this very common linkage between the matrix of belief and the frequency of these things happening. That’s a very solid, very rational argument, but it doesn’t explain everything.

It just doesn’t. If in fact these things are happening and continued to happen, albeit with less frequency, you’re still dealing with a phenomenon.

As I have discovered lately, there’s a word now being used to describe human beings who claim to have encountered nonhuman intelligence, and that word is experiencer. That’s also used for mystics.

So in essence, a mystic telling you, “I understood the Trinity perfectly, but I can’t tell you” has the same trouble being believed as somebody who says, “This gray alien walked into my hotel room last night.”

Brooks: There’s a famous episode which is sort of this clash. Rene Descartes, he’s early 17th century, he is actually a believer, but he decides he’s gonna sweep away all this tradition and knowledge that’s built up, and he’s gonna start from scratch. He’s gonna use pure reason, just logical, follow one step after another, and he makes sure he’s shielded from emotion. God forbid he should love somebody. And he’s trying to build up the whole edifice of human knowledge.

And at exactly the same time, this other guy in France, Blaise Pascal, takes a look at what Descartes is doing and immediately hates him. Blaise Pascal is no random humanist. He was one of the greatest mathematicians to ever live. He was a technologist. He built a sort of early calculating machine. He was a scientist. He studied vacuums. So he had scientific rigor on his side, and he was saying, “I’m not against Descartes’s reason, but I have many other forms of knowledge that I use to understand the world.” The “spirit of genius” and the “spirit of finesse,” I think he called it.

And he famously said, “The heart has reasons that reason knows not of.” And so he’s saying to Descartes, “You’re taking away other ways of knowing.” And I think the clinching argument—it’s so amazing he understood this right away. We’re at this civilizational fork in the road. He says the problem with rationalism is not its admiration for reason, but its failure to recognize any other kind of knowledge. He’s saying, “You’re amputating me.” He’s talking out of his own experience of how he has studied the world.

Eire: Plus he had a mystical experience.

Brooks: Famously at the Night of Fire.

Eire: Sewn into the lining of his coat: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers. This distinction being made between these two forms of cognition.

I’m so glad you brought up Pascal because he’s a contemporary. But there’s so many. When you’re dealing with the past—again, a different country—you find anomalous synchronicities all the time.

One of the witnesses to St. Joseph of Cupertino’s levitations was a Saxon prince, Johann Friedrich of Saxony. And not just any Saxony, the Saxony that Luther had been part of. For some reason, he’s in Italy, and nobody has figured out what he was doing there. But he sees Joseph of Cupertino up in the air and he converts to Catholicism.

Johann Friedrich. Oh my God. This is the same man who hired Leibniz as his librarian. Did he and Leibniz ever meet in the hallway, so to speak? And to talk about these things?

A little thought experiment that I engage in my book: Yes, Newton and Joseph Cupertino walked the Earth, the same time. What if Newton had taken time off and done the grand tour and run into Joseph Cupertino?

They could have. Yes, but they didn’t. They just didn’t. And Newton spent much of his later life trying to figure out the law of prophecy.

Brooks: So we’re talking about this crucial time in Western history at least, where science is moving, and faith is moving in a different way. It seems to me you could look over periods of scientific advance—faith rises to respond. And so the period I know best is the late 19th century, the Industrial Revolution.

You’ve got these machines. In the late 19th century, Henry Adams, who was in the same family as John Quincy Adams and John Adams, he goes to a bunch of world fairs. And he sees what they were obsessed with in the Chicago World’s Fair. He writes a chapter in his book, which is more famous than the rest of—well, the book’s pretty famous too, called The Education of Henry Adams—but the chapter is called “The Dynamo and the Virgin.”

The Virgin, he says—different eras in time have different power sources. And in the 13th century, the Virgin was a tremendous power source in Europe, and we get all these cathedrals that they were wanting to buy ’cause the Virgin was their power source.

And he says, “That’s going away.” And he writes in that chapter—humans have a tendency to worship power sources, and people are gonna start worshiping machines. It’s not clear what he thinks about it, but at the exact same moment, there are a lot of other people, or roughly in that industrial period, who really mined it.

And then the part I hadn’t clued in until reading your book, ’cause you mentioned this, at exactly this moment, late 19th century, a lot of the world goes gaga over seances. People you wouldn’t expect, like Arthur Conan Doyle, the founder of Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Rational. You mention Abraham Lincoln’s wife. A lot of serious people were sitting around doing seances and Ouija boards and stuff like that.

Eire: And that’s kind of the tip of the iceberg because this is the same period that gives us the Latter-day Saints, the Millerites, and eventually the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Theosophy, which becomes immensely popular.

Brooks: Explain what that is.

Eire: Theosophy is a blend of Western occult mysticism with basically Hinduism and Buddhism. And it was enormously popular, here in the United States, but also throughout the world. The American Theosophical Society, which for a while was based in Philadelphia, sent missionaries all around the world.

I learned this from a dissertation I read back when I was at the University of Virginia. Otherwise, I would not have found this fact, which I find fascinating: The two most successful missions that the American Theosophical Society had were Brazil and Cuba. But they’re also immensely popular throughout Europe. Anyway, the list could be longer of all these other things.

Arthur Conan Doyle came here to New Haven during his American tour and spoke at Woolsey Hall.

Brooks: Which is the big hall here on campus.

Eire: Yes. The big auditorium. On spirit photography. And it was packed. Standing room only. This spiritualism only intensifies during and right after the First World War.

Brooks: That makes sense because there’s so many dead people.

Eire: Especially all the dead young people, and parents desperate to come to terms with this. The Society for Psychic Studies is established in London in the late 19th century. There’s such a long list of other things that emerge at this very same time, occultism and everything else. This is because, as I see it—Pascal’s complaint, which is personal, can have a social and cultural dimension to it.

When you take away belief in something that has ultimate meaning in another dimension other than this—because everybody’s body will give out on them and they will die, right? When you take that away—for lack of a better term, and I hate this term, disenchantment—you disenchant the world, the world will try to re-enchant itself.

And it always does so, or often does so in very weird ways. Sometimes in very, very bad ways. The French Revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution. The Third Reich. If you look at those three, they are aggressive attempts to re-enchant the world differently. They have religious symbols. They have feasts. They have holidays. They have rituals. You name it, but the ultimate thing is the revolution.

Brooks: The Marxist revolutions also laid claim to science too,though they were clearly secular religions.

Eire: But they still have the trappings of a religion and require belief in an orthodoxy. And in some kind of apocalyptic future, right?

Brooks: This brings me to today. So we’re in the world of AI now, and tech, and Elon Musk, and if you go to the Silicon Valley, they also have a kind of religion.

They worship a god, which is intelligence. They believe in sin, which is inefficiency. They believe in moral progress, which is optimization. They believe in eternal life, which is transhumanism. You can download your brain on a computer and live forever. And so they’ve got it all going on, even though they would deny that they are religious, but it looks very much like a religion serving assertive existential longings.

Eire: And given human instinct, that seems to be part of human history, that whenever something or someone comes along that seems to have immense power, or a combination of immense intelligence and immense power, people will venerate this.

That’s one of the threats of AI that doesn’t get much attention, but what I think is a real possibility is that if, in fact, we get artificial intelligence, which by the way, can also be called nonhuman intelligence—if we got one that’s super intelligent enough, of course you’re going to have people who will not only use it, but have their whole lives directed by it.

Brooks: You mentioned something that stuck in my head from a few minutes ago: that you don’t like the word disenchantment. Why is that?

Eire: It’s sprinkled with fairy dust. The word in English enchantment has too much of an emotional baggage attached to it. It’s got an emotional dimension to it.

But what happens when you take religion away is not disenchantment, not in that sense. It’s something much more aggressive. And what you lose is not emotion. What you lose is precisely, as Pascal complained, this other dimension. So that’s why I don’t like it.

And especially too, I have personal reasons to complain because the subject I’ve been working on throughout my entire career falls into the category of disenchantment of the world. But all the definitions of enchantment or disenchantment that have been thrown at me—some of them ridiculous. For instance, may he rest in peace, Robert Scribner, a historian of the same time period, who said, “Protestants really didn’t disenchant the world, because they still had rituals.” I said, “What do you mean? Is that your sole criterion for enchantment or disenchantment? Of course people are going to have rituals. Government have rituals, right?”

So it’s a very weak word. I wish there were a better word that people agreed on. This fuzzy word started to be used in 1930, when Talcott Parsons translated Max Weber and his phrase “Entzauberung der Welt,” with the word zauber right in the middle, which means “magic” in German.

And he was very clear throughout several of his texts—he meant magic.

Brooks: So you mentioned Max Weber. He wrote this process of rationalization, which led, I think in one translation, to what we call the “iron cage,” which is where we humans are stuck in this iron cage. And as a result, people’s spiritual lives shrivel, and in his words they become, I think it was, “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”

And I think that’s real. I live in Washington. I’m surrounded by specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.

Eire: His word for that was Entzauberung, not disenchantment.

Brooks: Okay. And what, how would you translate that?

Eire: Zauber is “magic.”

Brooks: I see.

Eire: Right? Which he also said in one sentence, that Entzauberung means taking away magie, M-A-G-I-E, which was the learned German word for magic. What he meant was that there’s no transcendent other dimension.

And he also spoke of prophets. The only way that the world can be enchanted again is through prophets. And by prophets, he meant something like mystics, who actually have a real existential connection to something larger that can then convince other people that there’s more to life than this table and this microphone.

He also spoke of the choices that people are left in this—let’s stay with disenchantment—disenchanted world. The choices that people are left with, it’s basically kind of a polytheism. Where you have to choose between different gods.

It goes back to this insight that is a constant throughout the Christian tradition, this realization that human beings have an innate need for meaning. And that meaning has to be ultimate, not just proximate. It has to be ultimate. So we do our damnedest to make it up. Or as Pascal said, we do our damnedest to keep ourselves distracted so that we don’t look at the abyss that lies just a few feet away.

Brooks: I think that distraction’s a key point. You can go through life not thinking about this stuff.

There are two things that seem to be going on. I have a friend and former New York Times colleague, Ross Douthat, who argued that as society secularizes, you don’t get atheism; you get the strangest religions you can think of. There’s a book by a woman named Tara Isabella Burton called Strange Rites, where she details all these new religions that are popping up as people try to find some meaning somewhere. And this reminds me, I hadn’t made the connection to that 19th-century upstate New York—

Eire: The burned-over district.

Brooks: —when all these new religions were popping up all over the place. But then I think there’s other things going on, which is there really is a dis—well, I don’t wanna use that word; you’ll reach across the table and punch me—but there is a materialistic mentality that is definitely more prevalent today than in the 17th century.

And I think that’s sad. So I guess my question for you is: When you’re writing all this stuff, are you partly motivated by a disquiet with the present?

Eire: Oh, definitely. Most definitely. Yes. I’m very disquieted, and I’ve been disquieted for quite some time, since childhood. But my present baggage, let’s put it that way, has to do with the way in which one can be so easily silenced or ridiculed for merely suggesting that something else should be taken seriously. That’s enough to put you in the category of an alien abductee.

David Brooks: The book came out, I think, in ’23. How has the reaction response been, both from the professional historical community and from the wider public?

Eire: Well, the professional historical community is so slow. Our book reviews sometimes take two to three years. So I have yet to see very many reviews in professional journals.

But in other venues, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. There’ve been a couple of nasty book reviews.

I expected them. One of them with a beautiful sentence: “This is a deeply unserious book.”

Brooks: That’s a compliment where I come from.

Eire: Another reviewer found it necessary, for whatever reason, to bring up the fact that I was Cuban, and therefore I’m credulous and very fond of magical realism.

Brooks: You’re Gabriel García Márquez.

Eire: Yes, I am, like all Latin Americans. Yeah. You know, we’re all a little ...

Brooks: That’s why we love you. Now I have two final topics. One is, and I wanted to ask you about this—you say there’s a supernatural mentality and there’s a material mentality. But you introduce this concept that there’s also a third way of believing in the middle there, which you say is a “vast polymorphous, variegated middle between these two extreme poles, abounding in myriad attitudes and convictions.”

As a natural temperamental moderate, that sounds good to me.

Eire: And I think that’s basically my position. When you’re faced with unknowns, what do you do? How do you make up your mind?

I just thought of this, and your question prompted this to appear—I take the same attitude to quantum entanglement and the Big Bang that I do to these phenomena.

Until I see somebody up in the air and say, “Yes, I’m seeing this,” I can’t say I’ve experienced it, in the same way that you can say about any kind of religious experience, “Yes, I have experienced this.” I’ve been to many religious services where I have been so transported, I guess is a good way to put it. I’m not there in the room. I mean, I know I’m there, but I’m not there.

And some of them have been very odd moments too. In houses of worship other than Catholic. It’s happened. That’s one thing. But seeing somebody up in the air, though.

But quantum entanglement, what do you do with this? And what do you do with the latest images from the Webb telescope telling us that the Big Bang may be something else?

Brooks: The scientists who I know, whom I admire, some of them are just arrogantly dismissive of all spiritual experience. I say, “Well, you explain how consciousness emerged from the brain, then I’ll take your arrogance as somewhat earned. Or you explain what happened before the Big Bang. You can’t do that. You explain quantum entanglement.”

You can’t explain any of this stuff. The existence of the universe and consciousness, which is our primary ways to understand the world, if you can’t explain these two things—these are the two biggest things in our world.

Eire: If I were younger, I think this is the area I would dive into next. All this work that’s being done on mind and consciousness, which is, in fact, a connecting point, a nexus, very natural nexus, religion and science. But I have so much reading to do. Can’t do it now.

Brooks: So many years have been wasted trying to solve the consciousness problem.

Okay, the final question. All of our conversation has been leading up to one question: Did they fly?

Eire: Yes.

And I don’t mean to put any qualifiers on this. I’m willing to take that testimony as one would in a court of law, although there’s no physical evidence. That’s the one difference. There’s no murder weapon, let’s say. But let me put it this way: I think it’s highly, highly likely, especially since we have reports.

What I find very annoying, though, extremely annoying, is that cameras and film have been in existence for well over a century.

Brooks: That’s the obvious rejoinder to your belief. What’s your answer?

Eire: Right. Where is it? Where is it?

Some television show tried to trick me, said, “We have film of somebody levitating. Would you watch it?”

They were doing this live. And, yeah, it was obvious this person was spinning on a highwire. I said, “Well, you’re not showing what’s at the other end here. Is there another tree or another pole?” They said, “Yeah, we didn’t wanna tell you ahead of time. We just wanted your reaction.”

Brooks: I must say, I still am not quite there where you are, but I’m struck by how much in our popular culture, how much flying there is. Superman is flying. Harry Potter is flying on his broom. There’s a lot of flying. Look, we accept this so easily when we think it’s a superhero story or fiction.

Eire: Well, we have maglev trains. It’s not like this is physically impossible. You can actually physically levitate small frogs with sound waves.

Brooks: Oh really?

Eire: Yes, that’s been done.

Brooks: It’s very unpleasant for the frogs.

Eire: Well, coins—everybody has seen coins levitate. But you can take a little tiny frog, and with acoustic, levitation can take place.

So it’s not physiologically or physically impossible. One of my early talks on the subject long, long before the book came out, there was a doctor in the audience. I always love the first question because it’s always the most troublesome: Did these people have a lot of iron in their diets, by the way?

Maybe they were magnets in the room.

Brooks: That’s a lot of iron.

Eire: I said, “No, I don’t think so.” Yeah. I don’t think so.

Brooks: Carlos, I really appreciate your taking the time, and I really enjoyed our conversation.

Eire: Oh, my pleasure.

Brooks: I’m hoping that people come away with their mind expanded, but also come away with—when in life we encounter people whose political views, religious views, whatever views seem crazy to us, we pause and we say, “Where are you coming from? Let me try to see the world from your eyes.” And that strikes me as the essence of democracy.

Eire: It is, and it’s essential for survival.

Brooks: I thought one of the most interesting moments in my conversation with Carlos is when I asked him right at the end, “Did they fly?” And he flat out said, “Yes, they did.”

Think of the intellectual courage it takes to say that. A lot of people are going to think that’s ridiculous, but he’s a man of his convictions. He thinks supernatural realities are real.

He’s also a man who’s done the work. He spent the years in the archives reading all these testimonies, so he’s got some substance behind what he’s thinking.

I personally am not quite convinced. I think if human beings had the capacity to levitate, then we’d find one video of it, or somebody would be doing it today. But I believe that the people who described their levitation sincerely believed they were flying, just the way I might sincerely believe I’m driving down the New Jersey Turnpike. And how did they believe this? I don’t know. But I respect the fact that they did it.

When it comes to humans, variability is the rule. We’ve got a lot of different mindsets out there, and people hold sincere beliefs that seem bonkers to the rest of us, but are probably worthy of our respect.

Thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Carlos Eire.

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It’s 4:26 a.m., and I’m walking around the house while my wife sleeps upstairs. I’m feeling disoriented and discombobulated, just as I have for months, since May, when AI came for math.

The leaves are ablaze here in Ithaca, fiery reds and oranges, and I saw them swirling around in my backyard yesterday, following the streamlines of an eddy described by the Navier-Stokes equations. You’ve heard of Navier-Stokes, right? By now you must have—in early September, OpenAI claimed to have solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. An internal AI model unleashed about 10,000 agents that ran for 88 hours straight and gnawed on the old problem until it yielded.

I am a math professor, and my field is in crisis. Nobody in math is ever going to forget the year 2026. Unless this is really the end of the subject, and then nobody will remember anything about math anyway. Well, the machines will remember. But for them, this is something like day one.

[Read: OpenAI just carpet-bombed mathematics ]

I’ve been trying not to talk like this. It’s really discouraging for the graduate students and undergraduates, who have been dreaming of a life as a mathematician, or maybe a math professor—a life of solving puzzles, asking questions, working with friends who love math too, thinking about our sublime, transcendently beautiful subject that is so misunderstood. Meanwhile, the wider public is confused. Don’t mathematicians want their problems to be solved?

Yes and no.

For “applied” mathematicians like me—ones who look outward and take inspiration from nature and the real world, and who hope to use math to help improve science, medicine, business, engineering, and everyday life—AI may prove to be a boon, the latest tool that lets us see further and deeper, in the tradition of the telescope and the microscope. So yes, absolutely, some of us are excited to use it.

But for many “pure” mathematicians—those who look inward at math’s most theoretical aspects, at its inner beauty and structure, using human creativity, imagination, and logic—AI feels more ambiguous because machines can discover the truths we’re seeking, at the cost of robbing us of the struggle and joy of discovering them ourselves.

Pure math is the study of ideal patterns and structures: numbers and shapes, waves and vibrations, order and chaos, symmetry and infinity. There are no perfect circles in nature, only in our minds. Except—and this is eerie—the truths of mathematics also seem to exist outside of human minds. They inhabit a mysterious Platonic realm, casting shadows on our reality.

Our species has been playing this game for at least 4,000 years. It’s as much an expression of the human spirit as music and literature. If AI continues to bulldoze pure math, it’s going to crush the hopes of the young people who were dreaming of joining this tradition.

Everyone I know is reacting in their own way. Let me tell you three stories, about what we’re gaining and what we’re losing in the aftermath of the detonation of OpenAI’s biggest bomb yet on pure math—its October 6 report that close to 400 landmark open problems had been solved by its latest model. These were puzzles that had served as beacons in the darkness, calling and challenging and inspiring us for decades. On average, the model took just three hours’ worth of computation to dispose of each of them.

Earlier this month, I was heading for my weekly lunch with my pal Alex Townsend. He’s much younger than I am—he could be my son—and he thinks a lot about the future. With fortuitous timing, we recently finished writing a book about computers and math, and what happens when humanity makes a pact with the machine to start outsourcing our intelligence to something alien and voracious.

As we walked to lunch, Alex seemed agitated. Eyes open wider than normal. Gesticulating. Shouting. He said he had collected something like 200 important unsolved problems in his subfield, numerical linear algebra. Rather than let OpenAI or Anthropic get to them first, he decided to curate the problems himself, in the hope that all of his friends and colleagues could solve them on their own (possibly with the assistance of AI) before the big companies stomped on them.

This is how Alex is reacting to the crisis: embracing the technology and making it ours. Using it to extend the frontiers of math, pure and applied, and solve problems that really matter—problems in medicine and energy and climate, hard problems that AI will help us with. That’s the message of hope he wants to give to grad students. He says we need to clear all of the existing open problems—pull out all the Excaliburs—to pave the way to a new kind of mathematics, in which the most important human contributions will be asking good questions, developing theories, interpreting machine-generated proofs, finding new applications, deciding which problems matter, and enjoying one another’s company as we explore all of this together.

So how did his colleagues feel about his plan? Many were exhilarated, but some were furious. They saw him as a collaborator with everything bad about what’s happening now. They worry that he’s helping to destroy the pipeline for training young researchers, and that he’s encouraging the premature solution of problems that should have been reserved for students.

Alex believes that resisting AI is futile. He thinks we need to adapt, radically and rapidly. He told me he was releasing even more problems—600 long-standing problems across all of applied math—for people to solve, presumably with the help of AI, so that genuinely new work can begin.

Just the day before my lunch with Alex, the whole math department—faculty, staff, and students—at Cornell was called to a town-hall meeting. The meeting was meant to provide solace and support, and to address issues such as how to assess future job candidates, and what to expect of a Ph.D. student now that an AI can solve their dissertation problem and even write their thesis for them.

At one point, one of my pure-math colleagues stood up. Justin Moore, known for his work in logic and set theory—foundational subjects for the rest of mathematics—told us about a certain problem that he has long loved and has returned to often over the past 19 years. He said that he had bought a bottle of XO cognac in Luminy, outside Marseille, back in 2010. He planned to open the bottle when the problem was solved, and to invite others who worked on it to share in the celebration.

[Read: Something weird is happening in math]

The problem had to do with something I couldn’t understand in the least—something about non-amenable groups and Thompson’s F. But it didn’t matter that it was impenetrable to many of us. He had been saving that bottle of cognac for a problem that had just been killed by a machine. It was just another trophy in OpenAI’s bag, one of hundreds, presented like severed rhino heads.

Someone asked him what he thought of the AI proof. Justin said he didn’t know. He hadn’t read the paper yet. He said he’d been “too busy.”

That astonished me. Too busy to look at a problem he had been dreaming about for 19 years? “I am genuinely busy and probably wouldn’t be able to get to reading a human’s proof immediately either,” he told me afterward, by email. “It does not help that AI does not write mathematics particularly well.”

He still planned to open the bottle, he said, “once a group of peers I trust all agree that the proof is correct, and once we collectively understand the proof.” But he added, “I have a feeling that the cognac tasting will feel more like a wake than a celebration.”

The object of our desire, as mathematicians, is a mixture of knowing and understanding. But pure and applied mathematicians don’t always see eye to eye on what AI portends for mathematics, because our communities attach different weights to the worth of knowing versus understanding.

Roughly speaking, applied mathematicians strive to discover both what’s true and, when possible, why it’s true. We use rigorous math when we can, but we aren’t embarrassed to lean on physical intuition, computers, experiments, data, analogies—anything to get to the answer and make sense of it.

Pure math, on the other hand, is all about the why. Without the reasoning behind it, mere knowledge of the right answer—to a pure mathematician—feels shallow, frustrating, and incomplete. This fixation on understanding can be hard for the public to sympathize with. If an AI model correctly predicts that you’re at heightened risk of developing breast cancer in the next five years, should you care that it can’t explain why, and neither can your radiologist? When lives are at stake, understanding becomes less urgent than just knowing the answer.

Pure mathematicians agree, but this tension is not part of their work. As Curtis McMullen, a professor at Harvard and a Fields Medalist, said to me in a recent email after he heard me make a similar observation on NPR’s On Point: “Mathematics is not radiology. It is more like art or philosophy, and in fact, human understanding is what it is all about.”

Applied mathematicians want to understand math too, because it’s mysterious, and alluring, elusive, inchoate. We’re not even sure whether math is out there in the universe—because what does out there even mean in terms of abstract concepts that live in our imagination? But we chase math anyway, and sometimes it materializes, or reveals itself to us, and then, a century or two later, it miraculously gives us GPS, and lasers for eye surgery, and remote TV transmissions, and ultrasounds for pregnant women, and all of the songs and photographs in your pocket, compressed with fantastically ingenious mathematical algorithms that people have thought up.

But that defense of math is too easy, and anyway, that’s pure math that morphed into applied math. What about pure math that stays pure, the part of math that’s more like art or music or poetry, not yet of any real use to anyone, except that it makes life worth living for the people who love it? Isn’t that useful too?

At the town hall, a student named Aria Beaupré asked something like that. What’s the point? she wondered out loud. This is a bright young graduate student. Someone that age shouldn’t be asking that question, I thought. That’s for old people like me, looking back, not for young people like her, looking ahead. We were all reeling, too numb to make sense of what had just happened.

Since then, I think I’ve groped my way toward an answer. A couple of weeks ago, during a conversation with Rachel Abrams on The Daily, the New York Times podcast, I wandered off the topic of math and AI and onto the meaning of life. Before that conversation, I would have said that the point of it all is learning what’s true, even more so than understanding why.

Now I think the point, even for math professors, may be human connection. Among the hundreds of emails I received after the episode came out, one from an undergraduate moved me deeply. The student described many failures and tribulations, and a strict but inspiring teacher. “The very human things that you expressed, and that I’ve poured into this email, are not something that AI can achieve or experience,” the student wrote, and later added, “We give these ideas and concepts meanings, and we use math to connect with one another, and bring meaning to each other’s lives and experiences. AI can’t even begin to replicate this impact, and it never will.”

[Read: Math can’t go on like this]

But is human connection really a sufficient justification for why anyone would devote themselves to math? I’m not sure it would satisfy pure mathematicians like Justin. The deeper question is whether mathematics is fundamentally a human enterprise, like art or sports, or whether it’s more like science, the study of objective truths that exist independently of us.

If mathematical truths exist outside of human minds, awaiting discovery by any intelligence powerful enough to pursue them, then AI’s achievements are surely something to rejoice about. Why should it matter who or what makes the discoveries? But if mathematics is a creative human endeavor—a way of exercising our ingenuity and sharing those experiences with other people—then something achingly precious may be lost when the machines take over and leave us behind.

“Even though my heart wants math to be like an Olympic sport going forward, I know that it’s a science,” Justin wrote recently. He finds himself torn between these competing conceptions of the subject we both love. “AI is separating those two things in an uncomfortable way and making us look in the mirror at ourselves.”

Perhaps the hardest part is that both conceptions of math can be true. Mathematical truths may exist outside of us, but the search for them has always taken us deep inside ourselves, to find the best that our minds can muster. Until now, discovery and the joy of discovering went hand in hand. Suddenly, AI is ripping them apart.

That’s why I’ve been losing sleep for months, and why Justin still hasn’t opened his bottle. Neither of us knows what comes next. Will there ever be a time for cognac again?

Lefkés, a mountain village on the Greek island of Paros, is named after white poplars that once surrounded it. Beyond a cluster of houses, a Byzantine footpath meanders toward the Aegean. According to village lore, the path is not visible from Paros’s shoreline to protect Lefkés from pirates.

In the late 1960s, my Uncle Stelios bought a dilapidated house in Lefkés and, with my father’s help, rebuilt it into a majestic dwelling. This place became our family haven. 

Lefkés took to modernity late. Narrow streets, built centuries ago, honored human scale and could never be claimed by cars. Corners of buildings were rounded so that donkeys laden with fruits and vegetables could make sharp turns. I remember when electricity first lit up the streets, the day we first had running water, and when the only phone line was in the post office, which also served as the social club for the yiayias—matriarchs who listened to every call. Word would be passed from window to doorway until the entire community knew your business. One of these ladies was known as “Mrs. Postman.” She hand-delivered everyone’s letters after reading them first, carrying the open envelopes in her leather handbag. Years later, I would photograph her clutching this precious purse on her lap.

My father’s family had left Greece when he was a young boy, after World War II, fleeing a German concentration camp. When I was still a baby, my family moved back for my father’s work as an architect. I’d peer over his drafting table while he sketched street scenes and villagers in black ink. He never used gray—only uncompromising black and white. I’m still searching for the simplicity of my father’s eye—brightness and contrast.

I would emulate him and sketch the village elders, learning to study posture and character. In 1986, I discovered photography, and the camera became my sketchbook. I returned to Paros several times a year to practice. Over time, I photographed everyone—village elders, children, priests, fishermen, farmers, shopkeepers, and the last donkey man.

Uncle Stelios loved to help me find new subjects. We traveled across Paros and her small sister island, Antiparos, to find “good quality people,” as he would say. One of my first photographs is of an old man he knew called Pandelis, who was born around 1915, though he didn’t know his birthday or exact age. I took a picture of the back of his weather-beaten neck. I also took a portrait of him sitting inside his house. Three objects hung on the wall behind him: an empty picture frame, a pincushion storing needles that he used for repairing his work clothes, and a pack of AA batteries he had found on the beach. Pandelis had no idea what the batteries were for, but because the package had a hole in it, he assumed that it was an ornament, so he hung it on a hook for display. 

Efthemios, Uncle Stelios’s closest companion, also helped me find more subjects for my portraits. I photographed his parents, and his daughter as a little girl, wearing a headscarf during a festival—then, decades later, his grandson in church among a group of altar boys.

On a recent trip, I took my wife and my teenage children, armed with Super 8 cameras—as well as a producer and a videographer—to make a film about Paros. Monique, a ceramicist on the island, led us to a house where a woman named Katerina lived with her husband, known as “the tailor.” His sewing machine had repaired villagers’ clothes since World War II. 

He had a noble face. Sadly, he was bedridden and had not left his house in years. He was overwhelmed with emotion as his small house filled with a young, appreciative film crew. I took a portrait of the two of them, Katerina’s head resting on his shoulder. She whispered, “There is no happy life. There are only happy moments.”

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A great movie soundtrack can be just as memorable as the film itself. A few notes might bring an entire scene rushing back, and an old song can find new life in the right movie. Below, six Atlantic staffers share their favorite film soundtracks of the 21st century.

One Battle After Another (streaming on HBO Max and Prime Video)

Beneath its cat-and-mouse tale about fascism and rebellion, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 Best Picture Oscar winner is a masterpiece of cadence. The story progresses in slow creeps and sudden, skittering leaps. Characters crash together and pull apart like excited molecules. The sizzling energy owes to an unusual process: Anderson hired the Radiohead multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood to compose music before shooting began and then edited Greenwood’s work. The soundtrack pairs percussive piano with drums hooked to robotic circuits to create backbeats as insistent and unsteady as hiccups. Twanging guitars and symphonic strings express unsettled, ugly-pretty chords. The effect is an astonishingly original reminder that social movements are but collections of individuals, each squiggling along their own trajectory.

— Spencer Kornhaber, staff writer

***

Darkest Hour (streaming on Apple TV and Prime Video)

I love soundtracks, but my favorites—Glory, Miller’s Crossing, Crimson Tide—are all at least 30 years old. I am a sucker for a John Williams march or an elegiac Thomas Newman moment, but when I consulted my playlist, I found that one soundtrack kept rising to the top: Darkest Hour, by Dario Marianelli (with piano by Víkingur Ólafsson). The movie follows Winston Churchill’s first days in office, in 1940, after France fell and Britain stood alone against the Nazis. The score alternates between piano meditations and orchestral flight; like Churchill, it is fussy and elegant, quiet and then bombastic. It conveys the tension and urgency in the man and the moment. The final track, “We Shall Fight,” plays over Churchill’s speech to Parliament in which he vows to never surrender to evil. It is a moving and uplifting piece, but also tragic: He knew the horrors that awaited, and he led Britain to its fate anyway.

— Tom Nichols, staff writer

***

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (streaming on HBO Max)

On the subject of movie music, much comes to mind. My single favorite piece of original movie music this century might be “The Alien,” Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s eerie composition for Annihilation; my favorite repurposed song might be Plumtree’s “Scott Pilgrim,” the lovey-dovey indie-rock namesake of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Jon Brion’s off-kilter bricolage for Punch-Drunk Love, the torch ballads of A Star Is Born, the uncut Daft Punk–ness of Tron: Legacy—all of this matters to me. However, play two seconds of “Concerning Hobbits,” and I’m back in the Shire, awaiting the appearance of a great wizard and hanging out with my vertically challenged friends. Howard Shore’s score for Fellowship, and for the rest of the Lord of the Rings series, is both transportive and formfitting, making Peter Jackson’s movie sound as epic as it looks.

— Jeremy Gordon, senior editor

***

Shrek 2 (streaming on Peacock)

When I first watched Shrek 2, I was far more interested in the movie’s ridiculous fairy-tale antics than in the music. Years later, I’ve come to appreciate that the soundtrack is every bit as good as the movie itself. The song choices, including Counting Crows’ “Accidentally in Love”  in the opening sequence, are absurdly perfect for a film about a green ogre meeting his in-laws. The soundtrack also features David Bowie, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits, but the undisputed highlight is Jennifer Saunders’s rendition of “Holding Out for a Hero” as the Fairy Godmother, which turns the climactic rescue scene into a musical spectacle that has no right to be as thrilling as it is. A villain belting out a Bonnie Tyler song while a giant gingerbread man storms a castle? As a kid, I thought it was the height of cinema. I may have outgrown some of my other childhood favorites, but I still think the Fairy Godmother deserves a Grammy.

— Rafaela Jinich, assistant editor

***

Challengers (streaming on Paramount+ and Apple TV)

Ever need to outrun a serial killer, punch a bully, or fight a bear? Have I got the soundtrack for you! Nothing gets me going quite like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s magnum opus, the soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s film Challengers. (To fans of their work for The Social Network—sorry, this one’s simply better!) The film makes the compelling argument that everything in life is about sex, except sex, which is about tennis. The pulsing, almost panic-inducing score draws on Berlin techno and ’90s rave music to heighten the anxiety of the film’s central love triangle. The frenzied sounds amplify the adrenaline that elite tennis players feel as they play (and sometimes kiss) each other. Listening to the climactic track, “Match Point,” one almost feels like the tennis ball being flung around the court. Whenever I need to crush a deadline or motivate myself to tackle a hard task, the Challengers soundtrack is my go-to. Plus, I once heard it played in a nightclub, and I haven’t been the same since.

— Madeleine Carlisle, staff writer

***

Sicario (streaming on HBO Max and Hulu)

The Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s work in Sicario has been ripped off a million times. The beautifully foreboding noises he pioneered and perfected for Denis Villeneuve’s ultra-stylish, very violent feds-versus-cartels thriller—the subterranean bass groans, the trapped-in-the-birth-canal percussion, the tinnitus-like swarms of strings—are now part of the standard kit of horror-movie soundtracking: You can hear them, in degraded form, everywhere. But Jóhannsson, unlike his imitators, had other registers, other capacities: Sicario also features the elegiac “Desert Music,” which sounds less like the industrial metal nihilists Godflesh and more like, I don’t know, Bach. Something else Jóhannsson shared with Bach? I think he was probably a genius.

— James Parker, staff writer

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

• What the U.S. is really doing in Venezuela, by Anne Applebaum
• The man who saved the internet this week
• The new food movement

The Week Ahead

1. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, a crime thriller about an aging pickpocket who steals a valuable USB drive and becomes the target of a vengeful crime family (in theaters Friday)
2. Nocturne, a crime-drama series about a Pennsylvania detective who enlists his FBI-agent protégé to catch a serial killer (streaming Friday on Apple TV)
3. The Brightness, a novel by Chad Harbach about two young women who navigate friendship, love, and ambition as they face life-changing decisions in their 20s (out Tuesday)

Essay

50 Unforgettable Love Stories

By The Atlantic Culture Desk

Centuries before bookstores had shelves labeled romance and fictional hockey players locked eyes across the ice, the love story, with all of its attendant joys and sorrows, was an organizing principle of life—and of literature. The sentiment that another person might “complete” us enchanted both Plato and Jerry Maguire, and the search for that someone, along with the desire to understand why it can hurt so bad, has animated fiction from the beginning. The list below is an effort to name those love stories: novels, of course, but also poetry, plays, and short stories—that we consider to be the most enduring. We asked a jury of scholars, librarians, critics, and authors across genres, as well as many colleagues, to name their favorite titles that were originally written in English. We thought of our own personal touchstones, deliberated over the choices, and emerged with a group of standouts: 50 titles you won’t soon forget.

Read the full article.

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Recently, an Instagram carousel by a long-lost acquaintance who was beach- and boat-hopping with a glittery squad of people I didn’t recognize crossed my feed. I figured they were moneyed Millennials with regular jobs—until I discovered that several of them had followings in the high five figures, and one had more than 3 million. As it turns out, they were neither civilians nor stars. They were “Who”s: a category of low-tier celebrities, including influencers, reality stars, and podcasters—and commonly all three at once—whose names prompt you to ask: “Who?”

The binary between “Who”s and “Them”s—the latter being A-listers your parents might recognize, such as Beyoncé and Tom Cruise—was invented by Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber. Their podcast, Who? Weekly, bills itself as a show that covers “everything you need to know about celebrities you don’t.” After a decade on the beat, the pair have distilled their insights into a new book, I Want to Be Famous: When Everybody and Nobody Is a Celebrity, which offers a comprehensive theory of how the internet and social media transformed everyone into someone—and therefore, no one.

That theory has surprising implications for the labor market at large. As social-media platforms have made it seem easy to monetize attention, professionals in industries where fame has not historically been a credential have come to face growing pressure to create and optimize their online brand. Personal branding, once almost exclusively the concern of genuine celebrities and more recently a job for social-media influencers, is now something a junior accounting executive is encouraged to think about. Sophie Bishop, a professor in media and communication at the University of Leeds, in England, calls this structural shift “influencer creep”—a phenomenon that has caused more swaths of the economy to function like the attention-hungry world that Who? Weekly dissects. No matter how staunchly we may wish to resist the fusion of work and life, we are what we do, and our job is to be a “Who.”

Who? Weekly was launched in 2016 as a lighthearted but often trenchant analysis of fame at a time when social media was beginning to democratize the concept. Finger and Weber were both young entertainment journalists; as they write in I Want to Be Famous, they wanted a venue in which to grumble about celebrities turning away from traditional media and toward social platforms, where they could exercise more image control. Finger and Weber’s real innovation, however, was the system of Whos and Thems. Whos are thirsty for the attention that Thems already have and will shamelessly do or plug anything to get it. “By the end of the 2010s,” the authors write, “it seemed like every reality star, aspiring actor or musician, and TikTok influencer was supplementing their creative income with a post promoting a vibrator, supplement, gambling service, or alcoholic beverage.”

[Read more: The celebrity clock is getting rewired]

But as I Want to Be Famous reveals, social-media culture has changed so much that even Thems can no longer resist shilling for brands online. When Jennifer Aniston joined Instagram, in 2019, her first post was a selfie with her Friends co-stars. “It was a charming (if brief) glimpse into the personal life of one of our most private celebrities,” Finger and Weber write: “The purity of her feed was short-lived, however. Today, you can see ads for SkinnyPop popcorn among those intimate photos with friends because now everyone is free to sell stuff in this brave new world, without the fear of selling out.”

Last month, another Them joined Instagram: the Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Lawrence, who in a video warned fans to be nice, or she’d quit. A couple of weeks later, Lawrence posted a carousel with grainy photos that were, in part, normal-person coded: There she was, eating a corn dog and riding the Tower of Terror. Except she was also at a Dior fashion show in Paris—right, she’s a movie star. “Thank you @dior and @jonathan.anderson for the most beautiful show ever,” she wrote in the caption. Maybe Lawrence joined the platform for the same reasons we all did: to make internet friends jealous with vacation pics. Or maybe her long-running role as a brand ambassador for Dior now requires her to broker attention online. We can’t know why anyone posts anything: for love or money, connection or commerce. But last week, Lawrence shared low-res, behind-the-scenes snapshots of her hairstyles in various movies, and updated her Instagram bio with a link to her new hair-care brand.

[Read more: The celebrity machine never dies]

Who? Weekly chronicles the rise of online attention and the decline of offline mystique. A 2024 post on the Harvard Business School blog offers an example. Branding yourself as a “financial analyst with high emotional intelligence who loves to ski,” the author argues, can help you find opportunities “that align with your authentic self.” The post also suggests that a job seeker might “promote your value” by using “a mix of paid, owned, and earned media.” What this means is that, to really get your mug in front of hiring managers and corporate recruiters, you should pay to amplify material that communicates your professional viability.

Some Gen Z job seekers are using Instagram and TikTok to pitch themselves to potential employers. A 2025 survey found that 46 percent of Gen Z respondents had landed a job or an internship through TikTok. And LinkedIn, once a straitlaced professional networking site, now also functions something like Instagram for the corporate class. The idea is that becoming a platform personality through personal posts or videos will juice the algorithm and thus woo recruiters. The rise of the LinkedInfluencer is emblematic of the act of self-promotion becoming more front-facing: As Brooke Erin Duffy, a communication professor at Cornell University, asked in a June interview with The New York Times, “What does it mean for the rest of us who are living, working and spending our time in these sites where everything we see has this ethos of self promotion?”

Companies including Starbucks and IBM have launched so-called employee-creator programs, initiatives that offer everyday workers rewards for serving as in-house posters. “We’re giving them a way to become influencers,” a July press release by Gap Inc. boasted about one such initiative. But the imperative to build followers stretches across corporate tiers. Jon Gray, the president and chief operating officer of Blackstone—one of the largest commercial landlords in the world—has gone viral on LinkedIn with relatably goofy videos of himself running; the platform’s editor in chief and vice president of content, Dan Roth, recently bragged that Gray has “become a creator.” How odd to feel sympathy for a billionaire: Somehow, he too is furiously—literally—running on the content hamster wheel.

[Read more: So a C-list celebrity is selling your house?]

Finger and Weber point out that, until recently, a professional working for a major corporation could count on a fairly linear career path. The same wasn’t true for someone like a reality star, who needed to rely on media access to sustain their fame and find new opportunities; they might start a lifestyle brand, for instance, in service of becoming what the authors call a “working Who.” Plenty of jobs don’t appear to be succumbing to this shift, at least not yet; your Instagram algorithm might surface the odd plumbing influencer, but your leaky faucet is unlikely to get fixed under the flattering glare of a ring light. Influencer culture has gone only so far in reshaping the labor market in its image, but as the corporate world adopts its practices, there is a growing incentive for you to become your own kind of “working Who”—and, in turn, to help reinforce the idea that people are products.

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Conversation, Charlie Tyson wrote in 2023, is by nature fleeting. He quotes Virginia Woolf: “It flies up the chimney,” she once said, “and is gone.” This perspective may be comforting for people who spend hours after a social interaction perseverating over that one joke that didn’t quite land. But Woolf’s remark doesn’t necessarily imply that conversation is meaningless. Understanding that conversations are temporary, that they fly up the chimney to make room for new ones, can help us talk to one another more honestly. “In the twists of talk, we open ourselves to others and allow our interior to be subtly reshaped,” Tyson wrote in his review of a book on the subject.

The benefits of conversation are constantly threatened by modern life—by the pull of a phone notification during lunch with a friend, by the impulse to text instead of call, and perhaps most dramatically, by AI’s promise to obviate the human need for talking. Woolf’s description of language might make it seem replaceable, but this transient quality is precisely what makes talking an essential part of life. Language is something we are creating, demolishing, and creating again, every second of every day—a distinctly human act.

On Conversation

The Secret to a Good Conversation

By Charlie Tyson

A new cultural history embraces talk as an open-ended source of temporary delight. (From 2023)

Read the article.

The Secret Life of 'Um'

By Julie Beck

How filler words and tiny pauses keep conversations from going off the rails (From 2017)

Read the article.

Embrace the Awkward Silence

By Michael Waters

Conversational lulls may be harder to avoid than ever—so we might as well get used to them. (From 2023)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

• How to cheat at conversation: A new AI tool promises to improve social interactions but instead makes them worse, Julie Beck wrote last year.
• Overcoming awkwardness: In the first episode of our 2023 podcast How to Talk to People, Julie Beck and Becca Rashid discuss small talk.

Other Diversions

• Stop trying to be your best self.
• 50 unforgettable love stories
• An anti-marriage marriage movie

PS

“Although we usually appreciate the beauty of trees in full leaf, I was stunned by the bare-branched symmetry of this tree on a quiet winter day in our small town,” Dorothy B. from La Conner, Washington, writes.

I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

President Trump’s dismissal of Russian aggression against Ukraine has prompted bipartisan backlash. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss what this may mean for the Ukrainians, and more.

“We have to remember that Ukraine has seen the United States pull back its support even before this,” Nancy A. Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night. In the past, the U.S. has limited the number of weapons it sends to Ukraine, and “this week, we saw the United States not delivering promised interceptors,” Youssef added.

“The challenge for Ukraine is twofold: It is the inconsistency in the United States’ support and the inability for Europe to come back and provide that support,” Youssef argued. “And that Russia is as close as it’s ever been to Washington.” These two factors make “the war harder for the Ukrainians,” she noted.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, a chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Stephen Hayes, the editor and CEO of The Dispatch; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; and Youssef.

Watch the full episode here.

The War on Terror coincided with the rise of the internet, when freshly concerning digital attacks became known as cyberterrorism. Now a new threat has appeared: AI terrorism.

Over the past few years, reports from governments, intergovernmental organizations, and think tanks have warned that AI is likely to fuel terrorist activity, demanding preparation and response. In 2021, the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism co-published a report on the “malicious use of artificial intelligence for terrorist purposes.” Cyberattacks such as malware and intrusion featured heavily, as did physical attacks via autonomous vehicles, facial-recognition spoofing, deepfakes, and—the coronavirus pandemic was still raging—engineered biological weapons. Earlier, in 2019 and 2020, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies published two reports on the risks that language models, still mostly unheard-of at the time, would pose to propaganda and radicalization. And just this week, a group of Harvard Kennedy School researchers published a working paper that assumes that the “first major AI-enabled terrorism event” is a credible threat and speculates how it might come about.

Cyberterrorism was already a confusing term, partly because hacking or disabling computer infrastructure might be carried out by state actors and without violence—properties that aren’t normally associated with terrorism. Among the reasons terrorism is bad, a very minor one is that the term has no fixed definition. In revolutionary France, it referred to violence exercised by the Jacobin state, in many cases by guillotine. By the late 19th century, it had shifted to the nonstate violence of anarchist would-be revolutionaries. Terrorism began to overlap with independence movements in the 20th century, drawing it closer to separatist conflict or guerrilla warfare. By the late 20th century, this ideological motivation for terrorism became mandatory. Terrorism amounted to violence designed to produce a psychological effect.

The hijackings and hostage crises of the 1970s exemplify this revised purpose. So do domestic attacks, such as that of Timothy McVeigh, who bombed an Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. Today, a quarter century after the September 11 attacks, terrorism often carries a political judgment instead of describing an act or a type of actor: Nearly any adversary whatsoever might be called a “terrorist” now.

Given the slippage of the term, AI is, in a way, terroristic by nature: It threatens to take your job, steal your money, ruin your children’s education, eradicate art and culture, take away your health care, colonize your town, destroy the climate, make electronics forever unaffordable. You have also been told that AI is inevitable—and that only immensely wealthy Silicon Valley companies, possibly run by sociopathic leaders, have the resources and talent to advance it (which they must do, even if it means the destruction of humankind).

But the older sense of terrorism still persists. The technology could also facilitate, in addition to the familiar chaos that AI threatens to unleash, terrorism in the sense of state- or nonstate-enacted violence or disruption, such as disabling your electric grid and unleashing a bioweapon at your workplace.

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

The people who study AI terrorism raise different concerns than those raised by whistleblowers inside the AI industry—or AI leaders themselves. Superintelligent-AI-driven extinction events do not top the list of risks, nor do the rogue AI agents that might, in theory, become autonomous. Instead, researchers, intelligence officials, and scenario planners seem principally interested in the ways that AI might allow bad actors to carry out more sophisticated activities with reduced effort. The Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber, for example, asked ChatGPT for advice about how to detonate an explosive, a use that suggests terrorists might be stupid in addition to being enterprising.

Today’s frontier AI models are powerful, cheap, and widely available. They can accomplish (or help accomplish, or appear to accomplish) many types of tasks without having been explicitly designed to do so. Criminals, terrorists, and even governments have tended to use existing communication, transportation, and industrial infrastructure to do bad things. AI offers another such tool. This conclusion is both reasonable and a bit humdrum.

Consequently, most of the reports on AI terrorism that I have read are conservative in their concerns. They stress that carrying out acts of violence or other physical attacks is difficult and that AI can’t magically solve those problems. They are, perhaps, responding to years of cyberterrorism-threat overstatement, the most famous example of which is the idea of an “electronic Pearl Harbor”—a devastating attack on digital infrastructure that incapacitates the nation. That metaphor, which has been in circulation since at least 1999, was made more concrete in 2012, when then–Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Congress about a “cyber Pearl Harbor” that “could be as destructive as the terrorist attack on 9/11.”

Many international-policy experts have argued that cyber Pearl Harbor amounts to a mixed metaphor. The attack on Pearl Harbor was an intricately planned act of state warfare, not a rogue operation. More likely, smaller cybersecurity incidents could cascade into bigger ones, or cause unpredictable secondary effects. Real, damaging cyberattacks on physical infrastructure have been possible for many years. AI’s role in cyberterrorism is likely to be the same as the internet’s: an amplified capacity to produce and disseminate propaganda, confusion, and political manipulation.

Panetta justified the warning about a cyber Pearl Harbor on the grounds that the risk was possible even if it wasn’t plausible. A similar justification appears to motivate the Harvard Kennedy School researchers in their paper. The co-authors describe their methodology as a “pre-mortem,” which involves assuming that such an event has taken place and working backwards to understand how it came about.

I asked Stephen Casper, one of the paper’s co-authors, whether artificial intelligence creates new catastrophic capabilities or simply makes existing malice easier, faster, or cheaper. “It’s more the latter,” he told me. Specifically, AI models that possess information about dangerous capabilities, such as how to disrupt infrastructure and construct a chemical weapon, could allow malicious actors to use them to nefarious ends. Max Kamachee, another co-author, told me that new models “can meaningfully assist a novice in creating a known severe biological threat absent safeguards.” Put more simply, bad people with ill intent could use AI to carry out bad acts. The paper goes into much greater detail, including making reasonable suggestions about how different types of models might be controlled or regulated to prevent harm.

The Harvard paper presents two candidates for the first major AI-terrorism event: One is a cyberattack that would cause several billion dollars’ worth of economic damage; the other, a biological-weapon attack that would kill more than 100 people. I asked Casper and Kamachee whether terrorism was the right name for the two scenarios. The paper derives these litmus tests from definitions in recent U.S. laws governing the development and management of models in the AI industry. But Casper acknowledged that those bad outcomes might not be ideologically motivated. “We call it terrorism,” he told me, but he also said that an equivalent name would be “the human-led misuse of AI for malicious ends.” Kamachee called the risk “catastrophic malicious use.”

[Adam Becker: The useful idiots of AI doomsaying]

Predicting the future is foolish, and guessing about whether truly terrible events might or might not come to pass is even worse. On the one hand, Casper and his co-authors seem justified in warning about the worst scenarios that AI could facilitate, even indirectly. On the other hand, AI terrorism risks devolving into the fearmongering rhetoric that cyber Pearl Harbor did.

I pressed Casper to connect the dots between what AI makes possible and which outcomes are likely. He cited the shockingly rapid evolution of capability in the models, along with the fact that some AI companies are directly building AI-driven-biological-research facilities. Anthropic, for example, has built wet labs for Claude-enabled DNA and protein research. Those labs could be breached, or the model weights discovered inside them could make their way out and into the wrong hands. “It’s a big world—lots of people, lots of groups, lots of states, lots of motivations,” Casper said. “The precedented misuse of current AI systems for terrorist-type activities is, you know, a pretty decent sign.” A sign of what? That the AI industry is going to experience what Caspar called “a Challenger or Chernobyl or 9/11 or Enron moment.”

And yet, those historical catastrophes are all quite different. Challenger was doomed by a structural failure that had been overlooked because of organizational mismanagement; the Chernobyl disaster was caused by a design flaw magnified by operator error and stifling bureaucracy; September 11 was an ideologically motivated nonstate attack facilitated by ease of access to expertise and realized thanks to national-intelligence blunders; the Enron scandal was accounting fraud allowed by regulatory failure and auditor complicity. Two of the examples were industrial accidents, one was an unintentional outcome of deliberate misconduct, and only one counts as a terrorist attack.

The actual risks created by AI don’t require terrorism to inspire worry, and thinking about terrorism may confuse or distance us from taking the right preventive actions. Because they act at the fringes of society, terrorists have a tendency to adopt whatever technology and infrastructure that contemporary life makes available. They choose their tools, their weapons, and their targets based on not merely what will cause harm or attract attention but also what they can get hold of. This was true of explosives such as dynamite at the turn of the 20th century and car bombs by mid-century; the newspapers, radio, and television media that would produce notoriety for attackers; commercial aviation once it became mature but not sufficiently secure; and banking exploits and off-books financial networks, among them cryptocurrency. Nobody called McVeigh a rental-truck terrorist or an agricultural-fertilizer terrorist, but those two resources proved convenient and effective for his desired purpose—which was indeed terrorism.

Throughout its history, terrorism has repeatedly appropriated civilian technologies, especially unproven or insufficiently managed ones. Conveniently, such infrastructure also tends to make the public feel danger, which accelerates our fear of vulnerability. Like terrorism that uses railways, cars, airplanes, dense urbanism, and the internet, terrorism that makes use of artificial intelligence is possible and even likely. Preparing for its contingencies is wise, if speculative. In that sense, AI terrorism is not new, even if it is still frightening.