Adrienne LaFrance | The Atlantic

George Saunders Has a New Mantra

2026-01-22T09:00:00-05:00

Anyone who loves George Saunders’s writing can tell you about his wicked imagination: luminous, dark, wholly original, and quite frequently supernatural. Saunders is, after all, the man who gave us Lincoln in the Bardo, about a grieving president and the chorus of ghosts he meets in the graveyard; “Escape From Spiderhead,” a Huxley-esque vision of criminal justice and personal responsibility; and “Fox 8,” about a fox who begins to understand human language by eavesdropping on people’s bedtime stories.

The twin currents that run through these and all of his works, including his newest novel, Vigil, about a spirit tending to a dying oil executive, is large-heartedness paired with unsparing wit. Saunders is funny. Hilarious even. (See also: his short story “The Moron Factory,” published in this magazine last year.) I recently spoke with him about how his ideas come to him, karma, and fiction as a source of truth. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Adrienne LaFrance: Set the scene for me: Where are you doing your writing? What tools are around you? What do you see on your desk as you write?

George Saunders: Honestly, it doesn’t matter that much to me. I have a really low threshold for vibe. Just whatever. There’s something that happens, I think neurologically, where I’m just like, Okay, this is serious now. I can be on a bus or on a plane, and it’s just like some walls go up where I’m like, Okay, we’re not going outside of this sacred space. I do think of it as sacred. But you could probably say a little more honestly that it’s just where it has to happen, this space where I made my bread and butter.

So it doesn’t really matter. But I do have these little ritual objects. Like I have a quote from Ed Ruscha: Every artist wants to make a picture that will open the gates to heaven. And then there’s a picture that our daughter took of a restaurant in New York that had—I think the restaurant was called America—and it had an inverted American flag [where the stars and stripes have switched spots]. That excites me a little bit, like, Oh yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do.

LaFrance: You’ve said before that sometimes a line of prose will come to you almost in a dream. Do you actually wake up with a sentence or character that has come to you fully formed, or does it flow to you in pieces as you’re walking around?

Saunders: This is a really good writer-talking-to-another-writer question. It’s the interview I would conduct, too! The truth is, it comes so many different ways. And I think the skill that I’ve developed over the years is that, no matter how it comes, I can vet it pretty quickly. Like, I can feel something in the quality of the idea—if it’s a bullshit idea, or one of the ideas that you think about writing but probably should never touch. And then there’s another feeling like, Yeah, maybe. Come back tomorrow. And if it comes back a few times, then I start to take it seriously. Sometimes a little fragment will appear within the wrong story and I’ll move it out. But for me, there is something about the low-intention feeling, where I’m not looking for a story, I’m not hoping to find a way to embed a theme or something. I’m just pretty much an idiot walking through the woods and something goes, Hey, I am delightful!

[Read: ‘The Moron Factory,’ a short story by George Saunders]

LaFrance: For Vigil, did you start with a character or an idea?

Saunders: It was the idea that there was a generation of people—mostly men—who had spent the best years of their lives refuting climate change when they had pretty good reason to know that it was true. I was doing some reading. And I realized that those men were getting old now. And it was also during a period—one of those almost comical periods—where the weather was going completely haywire. You know, a different disaster every week. And I thought, I wonder if a person like that, if they’re watching the weather, do they go, Oooh, shit? And then that seemed to resonate with other works of literature—of course A Christmas Carol and a lot of Tolstoy—but also it was something that I’m going through as an older person. Just like: How did you do? And how would you decide how you did? Could a person ever arrive at a place where certain truths that seemed undeniable in their youth had been overturned? I mean, I look at my own taste in music.

LaFrance: Wait, what music specifically?

Saunders: I won’t name bands, but I was so much into that real baroque art rock. Or with reading. I was a big Ayn Rand fan when I was in college. Seemed great to me! It’s lovely that your experience with your life can undermine those earlier ideas, and change them. For most of us, I would imagine those changes are kind of fun and maybe not so bad. But I was thinking, what about for people who started a war? Or delayed action on climate change for 20 or 30 years? Does that truth ever settle on them? Obviously, some people look back and just go, Nope. That’s not a good book. But could someone dislodge them? That is the question.

LaFrance: Dwelling in that mental space—How did I do?, as you put it—how did that affect how you think about your own life?

Saunders: It did something I didn’t expect. It made me resolve to, as regrets come up, just face them. Admit it. That has become a new inner mantra: Admit it. And on so many levels. If you’re reading your work and it’s not quite working, admit it.

We’ve found this with our daughters. They’re such wonderful people. And as they got older, we would have talks with them where we’d say, You know, we kind of messed that up. Sorry. And it’s amazing how that kind of just takes the wind out of any negative sails, to just admit it.

So that’s what this guy in the book can’t do at all. And it’s tragic. It was kind of fun to be him, you know, like, I’m not listening to you. But it was also sad because you keep thinking, Oh, come on, you could give a little bit here. And he’s like, If I give a little bit, I have to give all the way. It also started to make me think a little about various political positions that are very built around denial—the denial of other people’s experience, the denial of the other 50 percent of the population. Ultimately, that’s a terrible, hellish fix to get in, where part of your mind knows that you messed up and would love to repent, and the other part is too frightened. And, of course, the problem is that that combination makes people quite aggressive.

LaFrance: I think what you’re describing—both in your book and in reality—is also this culture of extreme certainty and of doubling down no matter what.

Saunders: Yes.

LaFrance: And that takes a toll on everyone, including the people perpetuating it.

Saunders: Yes, 100 percent. I would say it’s karmic in the sense of cause and effect. If you are denying something and you know that it’s true, that’s costing you something every minute in terms of your attention to the rest of the world and your ability to respond to it.

Jill Krementz

Saunders with his wife, Paula, whom he considers his “ideal imagined reader.”

LaFrance: You alluded to getting at the truth in your writing. I’ve talked to a lot of journalists who sometimes find themselves wondering, is the work we’re doing enough? Is it enough to just keep telling the truth? Of course I believe the answer is yes. But I also find myself turning to the arts for truth in a world where reality seems ever shakier. Do you think of the work you’re doing as truth-seeking at its core, or is it all just creative expression?

Saunders: I think they’re the same, actually. As a writer of fiction, you’re seeking truth, but that sounds a little lofty. For me—I’m trying to compel you to come in closer as a reader. How do I do that? Truth is a pretty good way. For example, let’s say I was writing a character, your age, and I got it just right about what high school was like—the smell and the feel of the high-school hallway. You’re leaning in. That’s a technique that writers have always used, but it’s also a form of intimacy, or honesty, to say I know you. We have the same basic brain structure. So if I talk to you about fresh-cut grass on a summer day, I’m going, You know that? And you go, Yeah. And even in times like this, if I try to become the most alert version of myself in that, and I hand it to you, and it lights up your brain, then we’ve just reassured ourselves that that’s a real thing. To reach across time and space and say, You’re not alone. And I don’t mean that in a mushy greeting-card way. You’re not alone. I’m just you on a different day.

I don’t know if you feel this, but I have felt sometimes, reading different magazines and newspapers, that in a certain way, we’re like a very polite older gentleman who’s used to talking in a certain way. And then some thug comes along and knocks him over. And he’s like, I say! It’s like our modes of fairness are getting outlapped by this ridiculousness. But in my work, what I think I’m doing is imagining all these readers who are as frustrated—and maybe even as agitated and scared—as I am, and saying, Okay, let’s resist, but let us not lose ourselves. And one way we can continue to be ourselves is to reassure ourselves that truth and love are still operative. Of course they’re still operative! Cause and effect, still operative. Sometimes I feel like I’m painting the baseboards in a house in which the roof is collapsing. But then maybe somebody would go, Oh, it’s raining in here, but nice baseboards!

LaFrance: But then the sunlight’s coming in where the roof used to be—and did you see those baseboards with all that beautiful sunlight on them?

Saunders: Right, right!

[Read: The one book everyone should read]

LaFrance: I’m curious what you’re reading now.

Saunders: I’m reading The Power Broker. It’s really humbling. Just the detail. And then the other thing I read before that, I read Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, which I also hadn’t read. And then I read—I found, in Santa Monica, they had these boxes where people put out their old books, and I found a 1960 combined edition of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. And it was mind-blowing! It was so funny. And deeply political without being political at all—I loved that.

LaFrance: Which books have you reread most over the years?

Saunders: I reread Chekhov. And I read Dead Souls [by Nikolai Gogol] often.

LaFrance: I just reread Dead Souls!

Saunders: Isn’t it weird?

LaFrance: It’s very funny. It’s also Mel Brooks’s favorite book, and I always want to read and watch everything he ever loved.

Saunders: I love that fact. That’s amazing. And, yeah, of course. It makes sense.

LaFrance: This is funny to me because there’s a quality that I ascribe to his work that I also see in yours—this insistent lightness, or even playfulness, in spite of everything else. People don’t necessarily think of Chekhov or Gogol as funny—but they really were. And your books and stories explore the darkest themes while also retaining that light.

Saunders: I do think that’s a comic view of the world. In those moments when we lose control of our lives—which thankfully don’t happen that often, but they do happen. It’s kind of like there’s this action—and this is total Gogol—that produces a reaction, but it’s off. It’s off, and then somebody reacts to the reaction and that’s off. Like life is a pool table but the billiard balls are all weighted in a funny way. That for me is the root of comedy, or at least one root of comedy.

The other one is for somebody to kind of vault over the conventional way of approaching something because those conventional truths sometimes protect power. If you vault over that, say the true thing, and the person laughs? Boom, you’ve made a connection. But maybe the simpler answer here is: I’ve always been a person who jokes.

LaFrance: This does not surprise me.

Saunders: My first girlfriend broke up with me in front of the locker room at the high school and she said, You just make too many jokes. You’re always joking.

LaFrance: Her loss.

Saunders: Yeah! And then I made a joke! And she walked off.

LaFrance: Do you remember what the joke was?

Saunders: I don’t. I know I said something funny, but I don’t remember what it could possibly have been. I think for me it’s a reflex. And sometimes it’s kind of a place to hide, you know?

LaFrance: Of course. Humor as deflection.

Saunders: But in the exact same flavor, it is when I’m feeling things the most deeply that some form of humor comes out. With Lincoln in the Bardo, I realized that humor is actually a subcategory of the thing we just might call wit. And wit is basically the alertness of the writer—being aware of where the reader might be, and then responding to that. So we’re in a really close dance. Sometimes it’s funny, but other times it can be a whole bunch of other different nuanced things where I see where you are, I move you slightly left, you know.

[Read: George Saunders on Chekhov’s different visions of happiness]

LaFrance: As you’re writing, how are you assessing what’s working or not? How much are you thinking about this dance with the reader in the moment of writing?

Saunders: You know, this is the funny thing. I’m never thinking about it, actually. What it reminds me of most is when I was in high school, I could sometimes be a good class clown. And I had one teacher who really didn’t particularly like you interrupting in class. With her, if you got it right, her face would do this thing where she just would look at you like, All right.

LaFrance: Begrudging respect.

Saunders: So I think about that still. It’s all about when you pull the switch. As a joke comes into your head, if it stays there just a second too long and then you say it, it doesn’t land. There’s an optimal launching point. When I’m typing something fresh, I’m in that mindset. And it’s the same when I’m revising.

LaFrance: The timing, the rhythm, all of it. Though comedians develop their sense over time by experiencing the audience react. With other forms of writing, it’s so solitary, but you still develop this instinct without any feedback from the audience.

Saunders: That’s right. Junot Díaz, I heard him say once that a writer is just somebody who realized rather early that language is power. That’s true of a lot of stand-up or even just comedic riffing—where if you could do it well, you could stay with the grown-ups.

LaFrance: I’ve been thinking so much about the power of language lately, with regard to artificial intelligence—just the degree to which it will change us, having machines that people assume can converse like humans, even though anybody can discern pretty quickly that these models are sycophantic fabulists. But what does it mean to have machines mimicking us in this way?

Saunders: It’s fun, on some level. It’s a fascinating thing. And I think it’s one of those moments where it’s actually as simple as it appears, at least in terms of writing: You should do it yourself. It’s honorable to do it yourself. And when you do it yourself, you put things in there that a machine doesn’t know about you or anything else, things that you learned, you know? So of course you can have a pretty good simulation, but why? What’s the value? I hear people say, Oh, but I really struggle with personal writing. And I’m like, then struggle.

When I pick up a book by anybody, I want that person’s life filtered through that particular art form to come and land on me with my particular experience of both life and the form. So I don’t see what all the fuss is. The only reason I’m afraid is—you know, if you put somebody in a world where they only heard Muzak, their aesthetics would change. Their discernment would change. And then if they listened to Mozart, it would just bother them; they wouldn’t get it. So I do worry about that. And anybody who’s been moved by a novel knows that that’s a big sacrifice. To give up your ability to be moved by a work of prose is a big loss for you.

[Read: The elite college students who can’t read books]

LaFrance: I’m an optimistic person generally, but I really do believe that despite what you hear about people not wanting to read anymore and not knowing how to read anymore—the power of the written word is undisputed. Maybe it’s not for everyone. But for the people it is for? A few weekends ago, I went to this marathon reading of Moby-Dick at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. It takes place over the course of 30 hours. I loved it so much. One of the most beautiful aspects was that as the hours went on, more and more people started showing up in the hallways, just sitting there reading Moby-Dick silently together. I left thinking, As long as people continue to gather around literature this way, humans are going to be fine. We’re going to be great.

Saunders: That’s true. You know, I do this Substack Story Club. If anyone wants to be encouraged, just look at the comments. Because people are so humane and so smart and so generous with each other. I’ve been thinking about this, that maybe the way we judge how we’re doing is wrong. Because if there’s a core of dedicated readers like there was in the hallways at the museum, they have a disproportionate influence in the world. One, because they themselves are powerful, but also because the way that the light comes to them—through a work of prose—is so much more exquisite. But I do have to say, I feel that part of our political mess has to do with cognitive degradation. The things that people say, the way they say them, the way we accept it.

LaFrance: The informational environment is a mess.

Saunders: It’s a big mess. I was thinking recently about the story about the poison well. How there’s a kingdom, and it has only one well, and if you drink from it, it makes you insane. And then the king, who has his own well, has a decision to make: Should he drink from the poison well and rule his people? Now here’s where the metaphor gets a little messy, because what I think we have to do is protect the clean well. Even if it’s just a little bit of flame in your hand, don’t let the flame go out. In the ’60s, they would talk about the silent majority. Now I think there is a silent majority—or maybe a silent semi-majority—of literary, literate people. So I take some encouragement in that.

LaFrance: Did you ever read that Carl Sagan book from the 1990s, The Demon-Haunted World?

Saunders: No, no.

LaFrance: You should take a look at it. He was extraordinarily prescient and always humane and sort of romantic in the way that some of your work is. He was very worried then about a lot of what actually has come to pass. Hearing you talk about the poison well makes me think of him—and how that little flame in our hands is not just about believing in literature but believing in empiricism and the Enlightenment, beauty and truth.

Saunders: Essentially, we’re set up to be selfish. And all those things that you just listed—beauty, truth, empiricism—if a person abides in hardship long enough, they’ll see that all those things you just mentioned are quantifiable goods. The way that they can escape from misery is to be alert to truth. I mean, if you’re in the jungle, you’d better be alert to truth, because otherwise you’ll die. And so if we see literature as just a rarefied version of truth, any sensible person would eventually gravitate toward it because it is life-enhancing, sometimes lifesaving. So it’s not like we’re trying to sell them a lofty, lacy-filigree thing. It’s like, do you want to be in touch with reality or not? Do you want it to be in touch with reality in the deepest way, or do you want to be an amateur?

LaFrance: Water, sunlight, truth, beauty. That’s all we need.

Saunders: And cheeseburgers.

Letters From John Updike

2025-10-24T12:59:20-04:00

The stacks at Harvard’s Widener Library are, I have come to believe, the best place to hide if you want to spend an afternoon reading uninterrupted but not alone. Widener has that rare charm conferred on a place only once it has been sufficiently drenched in history and filled with books—the most famous of which is certainly Harvard’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible, one of 48 still in existence. But Harvard is also home to a lesser-known literary artifact, stashed away in the school’s repository for rare books and manuscripts: an empty bag of Keystone Snacks corn chips that once belonged to John Updike.

Updike was not a hoarder the way some of the characters in his novels are (in Rabbit, Run, the Angstrom apartment is a “continual crisscrossing mess”). But he was still a collector of sorts, always in service of writerly research either directly (as with the bag of chips, part of the work that went into his Rabbit tetralogy) or indirectly (as with the various women he took to bed who were not his wife). Either way, the collecting showed up in the writing.

Selected Letters of John Updike, an immense new compendium of the American novelist’s personal correspondence spanning nearly seven decades, from the early 1940s to his death, in 2009, underscores the vanishingly short distance between Updike’s writing life and his actual life. Not that you need to read his private letters to see that—anyone who read Couples, or followed the very New England scandal it created, will readily understand that Updike wasn’t a writer who left any literary fruit unsqueezed. “An empty book is a greedy thing,” he once said in an interview. “You wind up using everything you know.”

Still, in the aggregate, Updike’s letters could constitute the outline for a never-published Updike novel. The writing is variously winking, earnest, desperate, oversexed, and ambitious.

Too many famous names flitter in and out of Selected Letters to list them all, but here is a small sampling: John Cheever, Erica Jong, Roger Angell, Norman Mailer, Italo Calvino, George Plimpton, Karl Shapiro, Lorrie Moore, Cynthia Ozick, Tina Brown, Kurt Vonnegut, Ian McEwan. In 1966, he writes to his father about having met John Steinbeck: “It all confirmed my impression that meeting authors is fun but essentially misleading; the best of Steinbeck is in the books and the real man is a rich insecure shell.” And Updike is, as ever, captivating on the page. He experiments with format: Lists are often deployed for comic effect, as are the occasional doodle, self-portrait, or caricature. An otherwise mundane detail can be, in his hands, stop-and-read-it-twice beautiful. “Do have a happy summer,” he writes to Mary Pennington, the woman who would become his first wife, in 1952. “Search out warm hollows of sand, sit with your face to the sea, arch your soft back and enfold with your hands the shells that remind you of me.”

[Read: The man who made off with John Updike’s trash]

His letters to Mary in this era are silly, intimate, and affectionate—bittersweet to read now, with the knowledge that their relationship was doomed. He addresses her, variously, as “Baby,” “My chicken,” “Moparopy,” “Sweet M,” “Dear Miss Pegasus,” “Mary, my love, my Mary!”; he signs off with declarations such as “I am indeed glad that I am capable of loving you, and do.” The same romantic spirit returns to his letters more than a decade later, as he is wooing Martha Bernhard, who would become his second wife. But now it has an edge, perhaps a vestige of the pain and failure of his first marriage. To Martha in 1974: “Flirt, fuck, is there so vast a difference? Tell me.” That same year, in a letter to Mary, he refers to himself as her “semi-ex-husband.” How Updike regarded and wrote about women has been the subject of much debate over the decades. Selected Letters offers the chance to see how he wrote to them.

Jill Krementz

It also gives readers the opportunity to witness him handling early questions about his writing on sex. Alfred Knopf suffered over Rabbit, Run, Updike’s second novel, before it was published, after Knopf’s lawyers cautioned him that it ran afoul of obscenity laws. Updike appealed to him wryly this way: “Since you are willing to publish the book as it is, it would be unforgivably gutless of me not to encourage you to do just that. I look forward to the book being published, and I even look forward to the fight if there is to be one. In the unhappy—however probable—event of a suit, I will do whatever you ask—1. Keep quiet. 2. Write pamphlets defending freedom of the press. 3. Testify in court. 4. Go to jail.” (He did eventually agree to some changes.)

Rabbit, Run is also the subject of possibly the most defensive exchange in the whole collection of correspondence. In a letter to his mother-in-law, who hated the book, Updike writes, “You wonder why I ‘had’ to write the book; I had to write it because writing is my vocation, and I chose to write this particular story because it contained in images that were alive for me a problem, or conflict, that seems real and important.” He concludes this way: “Honestly, I don’t ask you to read me. I send you the books as a token of my esteem and affection; you needn’t open them.”

Updike’s mother-in-law is not the only one to have objected to his portrayals of sex. Patricia Lockwood put it most memorably, and probably most accurately: John Updike “wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter.” This awkward-crass mode does appear in his correspondence, especially in letters to his mistresses, several of which admiringly refer to the recipient’s “cunt.” (Maybe it’s just me, but I would have advised him to stick with a line more like this one, from a 1964 letter to Joanna Brown: “May I send you my love? Love is what I feel for you now, remote star whose light may never reach me.”)

Most of the collection is not the musing of a sex robot, thankfully, but a reminder of how utterly prolific—and, yes, talented—Updike was. I was reminded, for instance, that Rabbit, Run, “A&P,” and “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” were all published within roughly a year of one another. And Updike superfans will register a small thrill when encountering the letter below, to the New Yorker editor William Shawn in September 1960:

Dear Mr. Shawn:
I’m writing, right now, a short—perhaps ten or twelve or maybe fifteen pages—“Reporter at Large” piece on Ted Williams’ last game in Boston. Of course you may not want it; but I thought I’d warn you for what it’s worth. I’ll bring it down with me Wednesday.
Yours,
John Updike

Such letters are literary history in their own right—a superstar writer pitching what would become one of his most beloved essays to a legendary editor—but also let the reader bask in the relief that of course Shawn accepted the essay in question, which all these decades later contains, in the lede, what is still probably the best description in all of sportswriting: “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.”

Jill Krementz

Updike’s lifelong obsession with The New Yorker is one of two constants across his letters. Mostly this takes the form of him expressing his desperation to be published, and his impatience with rejection—what’s remarkable is not that rejection stirs doubt in him, because it usually does not, but that he sees rejection as merely an impediment to his own inevitable success.

In June 1952, he writes to Mary that “the ice” at The New Yorker has thawed: “They snappily returned my first story of the summer with a strangely reassuring rejection slip,” he writes. “I always feel happier when I’ve received one, for some damn perverse reason.” A month later, he’s grumpier about the latest rejection. “I’m not getting younger, and my resilience is stiffening. It takes a lot out of one’s confidence and a bit of peculiar courage to trot obediently upstairs, a reject clutched in your hand, and start work on something else that you know in your heart won’t be any better than the thing rejected.” He goes on: “True, I am twenty, but I have, since I was sixteen, received about three hundred rejection slips, at least a hundred from The New Yorker, and I’m getting tired of them.” When The New Yorker finally accepted one of his poetry submissions, he sent word to his parents by telegram, on July 15, 1954. (“Duet, With Muffled Brake Drums” would appear in print some weeks later.)

Success did spook him a little, at least at first: “All in all,” he writes to his parents soon after the poem is accepted, “the last two months have been so replete with blessings that I feel somewhere an ax is going to fall. Of nights I have been thinking about death and eternity and scaring myself crazy, like I used to do when much smaller. Idleness seems to breed awareness of one’s own transience.”

The other constant in Selected Letters is Updike’s mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, a writer herself, and their rolling conversation about literature and life. Updike repeatedly said that he never would have imagined becoming a writer if not for his mother’s example. And he seems in some ways most himself when he is writing home to her and the other “Plowvillians,” as he often addresses them, a reference to Plowville, the Pennsylvania farm town where his parents and maternal grandparents lived.

But what comes through most of all in this book is Updike’s specific blend of ambition and playfulness. Take for example the one week, in March 1955, when he signed all of his letters using names of past American presidents. (Otherwise he often signed off to loved ones as “Johnny.”) Updike wanted to get his hands on the world. He could charm people easily, and he knew it. And besides, he was fairly easily charmed back.

[Read: Licks of love in the heart of the Cold War]

Upon the birth of his first child, a daughter, in April 1955, he enclosed a lovely sketch he’d made of his sleeping infant. “I cannot begin to tell you what a charming person this Elizabeth Pennington Updike is,” he writes to his parents. “Naturally, I have only given the other babies in the ward a passing look, but that look was enough to assure me that they are a pretty poor lot. Some of them look like mandarins, some like large eggs with a face drawn on, some (two premature twins) like rats saved from drowning. The baby next to Elizabeth is very naughty; he cries all the time, like a machine; you can beat time to him. Liz, though, is very quiet. In the two hours I’ve spent with her, she has only made a few crying noises. The minute after I finished this drawing, she squeaked and threw up all over herself. You can imagine how I felt.” He concludes the letter with more mundane news: “Meanwhile, the world plods on. The NYer has rejected some things of mine, all of which deserved to be, and in a very cordial way.”

Jill Krementz

Note that Updike, on the day he became a father, was still thinking about what The New Yorker did or didn’t want from him. This made him not a careerist, but rather a devoted fan of a proudly literary magazine, eager to join, in its pages, the writers he most admired, an attitude he carried with him until the end. In the weeks before his death, he put it this way in a letter to David Remnick: “I fell in love with The NYer when I was about eleven, and never fell out, and never got used to the heavenly sensations of being in print there.”

Throughout Selected Letters we get to know his favorite books (James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times; D. W. Brogan’s The American Character; Henry Green’s Loving, Living, Party Going; Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling; Miguel Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life; Knut Hamsun’s Hunger; Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; Kafka’s The Castle; and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities) and his favorite writers (Hemingway, Proust, Melville, Shakespeare, Joyce, Nabokov, Cheever, Thurber). And we see a man trying to sort out what it means to live a writing life, and what will become of writing and reading anyway. In his last years, Updike lamented that “the print revolution, beginning with Gutenberg, assigned value to precision and individuality. The Internet is characterized by imprecision and groupthink—an illusion of fellowship is created without the reality of physical presence and copyeditors. It seeks the end of authorship.”

One of my favorite letters in the book is concerned with these same questions—what to make of literature, who leaves a mark, and why. Updike wrote this particular letter, in September 1960, to Warner Berthoff, then a professor of English at Bryn Mawr College (and later a professor of Melville at Harvard). Too much of literary history, Updike writes to Berthoff, is modeled on biology when it is really more like geology. “There is not much evolution; there is a great deal of accidental thrusts and upheavals and whatnot and when it’s all over a map is drawn,” Updike writes. He continues: “And not only is the creation of masterpieces haphazard, but to a lesser degree our designation of them is. The canon of taste is volatile, though it may be some years before someone realizes that the blood has gone out of, say, Galsworthy or—blasphemy—Goethe.”

Most writing results in nothing much at all, he concludes. “In fact, the only continuous literary conveyor is the vast simmering stream of toiling mediocrity which now and then breaks forth into a fester which we are pleased, often for very selective if not perverse reasons, to admire. To thread literary history through its great names is to construct Europe from the tips of the Alps. The mark of a great writer is just this, that he cannot be followed.” It’s the postscript of this one that gets me most: “And anyway, what is tradition but a set of the best books, to be had in any public library across our glorious land?” After all, John Updike was a writer, one of the all-time greats. That’s all he ever wanted to be. But first, and forever, as Selected Letters makes clear again and again, he was a reader.

The Romantic

2025-10-12T16:32:35-04:00

When Diane Keaton was a girl in Santa Ana, she began to collect photographs of Cary Grant, placing them in a cherished scrapbook. She had just seen The Philadelphia Story, starring Grant and Katharine Hepburn, for the first time. Grant was dazzlingly handsome, of course, but something else about him had leapt off the screen and captured her imagination.

Where Hepburn was gorgeous in a high-society way—all those gowns accentuating her trim waist, the dramatic shoulder-padded jackets, her fabulous mid-Atlantic accent—Keaton couldn’t take her eyes off Grant, who seemed to be having a better time than anyone else. “He wore things like white cardigan sweaters thrown ever so casually over his shoulders after a game of tennis, or a tuxedo with a white bow tie for afternoon tea, just for the fun of it,” Keaton recalled in one of her memoirs, Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. “He wasn’t afraid of a polka-dot tie or handkerchief. He wore gray worsted wool suits with wide lapels, a waist button, a white shirt, and his collar up.” As she collated images of Grant, she also carefully recorded his fashion tips—the importance of a taut knot when tying a tie, the maxim that “Clothes make the man,” and so on. To Keaton, Grant represented a formative encounter with the elusive quality that she would spend the rest of her life chasing: beauty.

Keaton, who died yesterday at age 79, was drawn to the stage, and then the screen, in an industry that remains obsessed with a shallower definition of beautiful. But from a young age, Keaton seemed to understand that actual beauty, the timeless kind, required a degree of depth, even darkness. It demanded originality and unconventionality, as well as fierce independence. These were the qualities that captivated her most. And they are the ones that describe her best.

[Read: Diane Keaton’s very different kind of memoir]

Keaton was born in Los Angeles in 1946 as Diane Hall, and she grew up in a one-story tract house in a neighborhood that was eventually partly razed for the construction of Interstate 5. Her childhood was happy, filled with Barbie dolls, little notes from her mother with advice like “Find a reason to love yourself every day,” and social gatherings with laughing neighbors. She remembered her parents inviting everyone over to watch the swallows return to Capistrano, and the couple across the street who doted on her, piling bright red cherries into a tall glass of 7Up, a drink she loved so much she swore she’d someday drink it in heaven.

Insecurities dogged Keaton throughout her life. She worried about the shape of her eyes, the shape of her body, and about being pretty but plain. She wanted to look like Doris Day, but the only person people told her she had a striking resemblance to was Amelia Earhart—perhaps on account of her adventurous spirit. She was, as she put it, “a wild child on the cliffs of Laguna Beach, a pioneer rolling down the sand-duned banks of Death Valley.” But Keaton always saw herself as “an ordinary girl who became an ordinary woman.” The only extraordinary thing about her, she once said, was the strong will she inherited from her mother.

On screen, Keaton’s characters tend to betray vulnerability: It comes through in the crinkle of a worried brow, the gee-whiz uneasiness, the absent-minded twirling of hair. The audience might wonder how much of this was performance, and how much of it was just her. Consider Keaton as Erica Barry in Something’s Gotta Give, fumbling apologetically through her first kiss with Jack Nicholson as Harry; as Carol Lipton in Manhattan Murder Mystery, charmingly oblivious to Alan Alda’s character’s advances; as Nina Banks trying to discreetly wave over her reluctant husband, played by Steve Martin, to meet their future son-in-law in Father of the Bride; as Annie Hall wallowing in self-deprecation when she first meets Alvy Singer (“Oh God, Annie. Well, oh well. La di da, la di da, la la”); as Kay Corleone staring at her husband as the door closes in the last shot of The Godfather. All of it was acting, but all of it was unmistakably Keaton too. In her memoir Then Again, Keaton tells the story of that kiss with Nicholson, and how she lost track of whether she was herself or the character she was playing. “I forgot I was in a movie,” she wrote. She kept forgetting her lines. “The only thing I remembered was not to forget to kiss Jack.”

Diane Keaton photographed in her Manhattan apartment, in April 1977 (Jill Krementz)

Growing up, “there was always something interfering with getting things right,” Keaton recalled in Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. “A question (the wrong kind), a hesitancy, and always, always the mangling of my sentences, the stammers, the ums, the you-knows, the oh-wells, the I-don’t-knows. I was inept, inexact, imprecise.” That these same mannerisms would end up helping her professionally always surprised her. (She dedicated that book to “all the women who can’t get to right without being wrong.”) Even when she achieved superstardom, she downplayed her talent, if unconvincingly, calling it second nature for her to play “birdbrains and spoiled brats.”

Although she was a gifted actor, Keaton also cast a photographer’s eye on everything she encountered. In the 1970s, she converted a bedroom in her Upper East Side apartment into a darkroom. (This was the same apartment where she adorned one wall with a series of self-portraits she’d taken in a subway photo booth.) More recently, she told The New York Times that she was on a quest to find and purchase every book of photography ever published. “I know, I know—ridiculous. But so what?” she said. She described wanting to buy an old warehouse and turn it into a massive library of “image-driven books.” When remembering her father, the question that preoccupied her most was whether, when she gazed out at the ocean, she was seeing it the way that he once did. She once described talking to him after his death: “Dad, can I ask you something from the other side of the great mystery? How much of what you saw is what I see? It might sound crazy, but sometimes I believe I’m seeing things from inside your eyes.”

Keaton was, in other words, a romantic above all. She fell in love easily with the world around her, and with men. She remembered vividly what it felt like the first time she laid eyes on Al Pacino, at a bar in New York, before they both auditioned for the parts they would get in The Godfather: “His face, his nose, and what about those eyes? I kept trying to figure out what I could do to make them mine. They never were. That was the lure of Al. He was never mine. For the next twenty years I kept losing a man I never had.” Keaton and Pacino had an on-again-off-again romance for years. After a failed attempt to get him to marry her—which involved her giving him an ultimatum in Rome while they filmed The Godfather III—she vowed never to marry anyone, and she didn’t, although she adopted two children and raised them on her own. And while she envied those who married and stayed together their whole lives, she wrote that, for her, “my love of the impossible far overshadowed the rewards of longevity.”

Diane Keaton, in her Manhattan apartment in 1977, sits beneath a series of self-portraits she took in a subway photo booth. (Jill Krementz)

Keaton also famously dated Woody Allen and Warren Beatty. And she had a forever crush on Jack Nicholson, whom she met in her 30s. “I didn’t want to be his friend. I wanted him to kiss me. It didn’t happen,” she remembered. (Later, after they starred together in Something’s Gotta Give, they became close friends. She wrote him love letters anyway, one of which she quoted in one of her memoirs: “Looking at you for as long as I have has made it easy for me to come to the conclusion that your face is the best face I’ve ever seen.”) But there was never anyone like Pacino. (Decades after they’d broken up for the last time, she saw him in an appearance on CNN and got so distraught that she threw up, she wrote in a memoir.) “After Al, I began building a wall around my vulnerability. More hats. Long-sleeved everything. Coats in the summer. Boots with knee socks and wool suits with scarves at the beach.”

When Keaton was in her 60s, trying to come to grips with some of the indignities of aging, she occasionally tried—and failed—to challenge herself not to wear a hat out in public for once. She knew her trademark style had become a security blanket. This was Keaton in a nutshell: ferociously herself, yet never fully comfortable in her own skin. “Most of us over sixty have come to the point where we recognize that our accomplishments are diddly-squat in the grand scheme of things,” she once wrote. But she’d still wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and sigh. And she had to work to remind herself that life itself was a gift—or, in her words, “Be grateful for what you have, you big jerk.”

Beauty was everywhere to Keaton, and she learned that you sometimes had to push yourself to see it, sometimes even when it was right in front of you. “If we’re lucky,” she wrote, “we have a long time to consider what beauty means.” Beauty, to her, was the sound of Woody Allen teasingly calling her a “half-wit.” It was the unexpected thrill of running into an old friend on the street. It was Grand Central Station, a monument to humanity, both because it was built in the first place and because it survived almost being torn down. Beauty was in the misspelled, handwritten notes from her children. It was See’s Candies peanut brittle, her favorite dessert. It was the birds she could hear chirping on the telephone wire outside of her window when she was feeling down. It was Abraham Lincoln’s long face, a portrait of which she hung on her wall among photographs of her favorite men—48 all together—in a floor-to-ceiling tribute. It was her own bare feet in the mulch of a redwood forest, running toward her son. It was, she wrote, paraphrasing the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, a lifetime spent looking for something she’d never seen before.

And it was in the things she couldn’t stop seeing, even if she tried: Pacino’s dark eyes, the sound of his voice reading Macbeth to her at midnight, the way he called her “Di,” and the memory of him describing to her the autumn light on the street in the Bronx where he grew up. She saved scraps of their romance—including eight pink slips from the Shangri-La Hotel in 1987, that say, “Call from Al”—until the very end. But most of all, it was the Pacific Ocean, the same ancient body of water that she and her father could stare at for hours, “the first wonder of the world” as she once put it. Sparkling and irresistible but also deep, dark, and, above all, beautiful.

The Invention of Judd Apatow

2025-09-15T08:00:00-04:00

In the fall of 1983, Judd Apatow made his way down to a musty room in the basement of Syosset High School and stumbled upon his secret weapon—he just didn’t know it yet.

Apatow was 15 years old, deep into an infatuation with comedy, but had nowhere to channel it. Boyhood on Long Island was something like a John Hughes movie: idyllic on the outside and tormented on the inside. “A lot of what formed some aspects of my personality was that there was an enormous amount of sports happening and I wasn’t good—I would always choke and panic,” Apatow told me recently.

This happened, he emphasized, all the time: in gym class, at pickup games during lunch, after school. “Imagine not being very good,” he said, “and having to be picked close to last multiple times a day,” and then being given a position “so far out in right field that I was almost in the middle of Jericho Turnpike.”

The jocks may have been the kings of high school, but Apatow came to understand that theirs was a fleeting achievement. “I remember as a kid thinking, It doesn’t matter if you’re good at this,” he said. “You become suspicious of how everything works—power structures; whatever the caste systems are—and then you’re drawn to comedians who are always calling out the different parts in life that are bullshit.”

He worshipped Lenny Bruce, Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, Gilda Radner, George Carlin, Martin Short. He wanted a friend to talk about Saturday Night Live with every week, but couldn’t find one. Comedy wasn’t cool—at least not among the teenagers he knew. “People weren’t interested in it,” he said.

Apatow was describing all of this to me in his office in West L.A. On this particular morning, he had asked me to come by at 7:30 a.m. (Apatow is a morning person, a quality that vexes his fellow comedians.) When I arrived at 7:23, he was already outside waiting, carrying a half-eaten banana and blaring classic rock from his smartphone. Inside, we settled into a couple of chairs around the long table in his writers’ room—a writers’ room that actually has windows, he proudly pointed out—and talked about loneliness.

While his classmates were out playing baseball, he holed up in the public library, poring over microfiche of old newspapers so he could learn about Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trials. He didn’t apply the same rigor to academics. He sweet-talked his way into advanced physics, only to find himself out of his depth—he started cheating, got caught, and dropped the class. (“The teacher’s name was Richard Lesse,” Apatow told me. “So people called him Dickless.”)

But things were different at the high-school radio station. In that basement studio, he got his hands on a clunky green tape recorder that would allow him to waltz into the world of show business. WKWZ 88.5 FM was, to Apatow, a “nerd’s paradise,” though he likes to joke that the signal barely extended beyond the school parking lot. The teacher who oversaw the station, Jack DeMasi, is now nearly 80. He lovingly described WKWZ to me as a smelly “rat hole” for “misfit kids.” He remembers Apatow as an affable teen despite troubles at home. The teachers knew that his parents had gone through a hellish divorce, and that money troubles had followed.

From a young age, Apatow knew he wanted to perform. (Courtesy of Judd Apatow)

“Judd said the scariest thing that any adviser faculty member at an FM-broadcast high-school radio station could ever hear,” DeMasi recalled. “He says, ‘I want to do a comedy show.’ ” DeMasi feared that Apatow would do a show so off-color that it would get the station shut down. “One of the things about adolescent boys is that they frequently think they’re funny, and they’re just stupid,” DeMasi said. But Apatow had something different in mind.

DeMasi had long encouraged his students to go out and talk to real people. One kid interviewed Mario Cuomo, then the governor of New York; another, R.E.M. To Apatow, this was a revelation: The tape recorder in his hand could provide a direct line to the comedians he idolized. If he could just talk to them, he could ask them how they did what they did, what it took to be funny, what their lives were like—so that maybe, one day, if he worked hard enough (though he dared not admit this to anyone), he could do it, too.

[From the July/August 2023 issue: Judd Apatow’s interview with Mel Brooks]

When Apatow requested interviews, he identified himself—accurately, though misleadingly—as calling from WKWZ 88.5 FM in New York. People like Garry Shandling, Jay Leno, Harry Anderson, and Steve Allen agreed to speak with him not knowing he was a teenager, only to be (mostly) charmed when they eventually found out. Apatow tells the story of walking into Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment circa 1983 and seeing the bemusement on Seinfeld’s face. “His apartment had nothing on the walls, no books in the bookshelves—he was just there to write his jokes,” Apatow recalled in his 2022 book, Sicker in the Head. “And he looked at me when I walked in like, I can’t believe I have to do this with this child.”

Apatow’s descriptions of these early interviews are laced with self-deprecation and hero worship. (Lena Dunham told me she loves them in part because his Long Island accent, which he retains, was even stronger when he was young—audience and autograph are aww-dience and aww-tograph, and he always drops the h in humor.) But when you listen closely, what you also hear is poise—and a kid trying to chart a course for his own future. In a 1984 conversation, he asks Martin Short, “How does Second City work?” and “Did you ever do stand-up comedy, like in a club?” and “Did you go to college?” In his interview with John Candy, Apatow asks how many takes it took to get the shot where Candy gets nailed in the back of the head with a racquetball in Splash. (“Three takes,” Candy responded. “I was lucky.”) Apatow then asks Candy about a rumored three-picture deal with Touchstone Films. Candy hadn’t even signed the contract yet.

Apatow told me he can’t remember how he knew to ask about that. He would hoover up information about the world of comedy anywhere he could find it. He’d hold his tape recorder to the television so he could record, play back, and transcribe SNL sketches in an attempt to figure out what made them funny. Apatow was so obsessed, so focused on doing whatever it took to enter that world, that it wasn’t until much later that he thought to ask himself, Why comedy?

If you’ve never bombed—and I mean really bombed, bombed so badly that the crickets hear crickets—you can’t possibly know what it feels like to have a room turn on you. There are two kinds of dying onstage, both painful: The first is the quiet kind, where nobody laughs. Then there’s the loud kind, where the audience openly ridicules you. Apatow has experienced both.

While he was doing his interviews for WKWZ, Apatow was also spending as much time in comedy clubs as he possibly could. He took a job as a dishwasher at the East Side Comedy Club a couple of towns over, only to realize that he couldn’t hear the comedians onstage when he was stuck in the kitchen. (He switched to busboy.) Once in a while, Eddie Murphy, still in his early 20s, would drop by to try out new material. Apatow tells the story of a time Murphy showed up, got heckled, and quickly shot back, “I don’t care what you say, because I’m 21, I’m Black, and I have a bigger dick than you.”

This exchange might have been on Apatow’s mind the first time he ever did stand-up, when he was 17, at Chuckles, a comedy club also on Long Island. “I had thought about getting onstage for a really long time, and was really scared,” Apatow told me. “I didn’t have a cocky attitude about it. I was shitting a brick.” He had been offered a five-minute slot late at night, typical for a rookie, and brought his best friends, Ronnie and Kevin, along for moral support. Somewhere in those five minutes, Apatow floated an idea to the audience: I’m just starting out and I don’t know how to handle hecklers, so help me out by heckling me.

This was deranged. The local scene at the time was marked by an affection for a particularly brutal form of insult comedy—Don Rickles, only meaner. Comedians mercilessly mocked their audiences, and audiences liked to punch back. Apatow was not prepared for what he had unleashed. People were shouting “You suck!” and “Get the fuck off the stage!” It got so bad that Ronnie and Kevin turned around and started threatening the hecklers. Apatow can still remember hearing their voices: You better shut up or I’ll kick your ass. “They were trying to calm the room down for me,” Apatow said. “Unsuccessfully.”

Apatow is not proud of his early stand-up. Some of the material is still funny 40 years later—a joke about his back hair getting so long that he can see it in his shadow—but much of it was a product of its time. “I don’t even know what I was thinking, to tell the truth. I’m embarrassed that I was even out there, and I hope no one remembers any of it,” he told me. One recurring bit involved jamming the palm of his hand into his eye socket, something he referred to as “the eye fart.”

Apatow in his early stand-up days (Courtesy of Judd Apatow)

There would be other bad sets, but none as disastrous as that first night at Chuckles. From then on, Apatow kept a line in his back pocket for when a set started to sour: “The great Jerry Lewis said you learn nothing by being funny. You only learn by not being funny. And I have gotten a college education here tonight. Thank you.” That actually worked. The line would always bring the audience back around “no matter how bad I bombed,” he said.

After Apatow graduated from Syosset, he went to the University of Southern California to study filmmaking. When he got there, he was startled to learn that his classmates “had been watching Truffaut and Godard at home, and I’m watching Abbott and Costello.” One classmate, Matt Reeves, went on to direct movies such as Cloverfield and the forthcoming Batman II. “His films were so good, and I showed mine and I just felt like such a fool,” Apatow said.

Sophomore year he landed a spot on The Dating Game, a quiz show that involved competing against two other young men for the affections of a bachelorette who had to choose a winner without laying eyes on the contestants. As Bachelor No. 1, Apatow—all dressed up in a blazer and tie—looked like a lost uncle from Full House going for a job interview. But he was in his element, making fart noises (with his hands this time, not his eye) and generally hamming it up in a charming way. When he won the competition, and the trip to Acapulco that came with it, he took it as a sign. He was already behind on tuition payments, and was so focused on doing stand-up that he wasn’t finishing his assignments. It was either final exams or Mexico. He decided to drop out.

“I was young and so stupid,” Apatow said. “All those decisions didn’t make any sense, and I had no one to discuss them with. I don’t think I debated these moves with my parents or any friend. I had no mentor. I just was an idiot who was like, I don’t want to miss this Acapulco vacation.” He also felt that his Dating Game victory was validation that he could make it in Hollywood. It amuses him now to think of how naive that was, but at the time he really thought, “This is show business.” If he could make it on The Dating Game, maybe he could make it big.

The trip to Acapulco was “terrible”: He got sunburned on the first day, forcing him to spend the whole next day in the hotel room. And it was immediately clear that there would be no actual love connection with the bubbly, blond bachelorette. (“I’ve seen her Instagram lately, and it seems like she’s had a very happy life,” he told me.) Looking back, Apatow thinks his parents were as relieved as he was to lose the tuition pressure. Nobody even feigned an attempt to persuade him to stay in school.

[Dear Therapist: My son has an impractical, ridiculous career plan]

His grandmother lived in Los Angeles, and after he dropped out, Apatow slept on her couch for two years, toiling away at open mics and emcee gigs, where he met a couple of unknowns named Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey. (Apatow became roommates with Sandler and introduced Carrey to his manager.)

It was around this time that he hunted down the complete scripts for 42 episodes of Taxi, the classic James L. Brooks sitcom. “I would sit and outline them and study them, and I figured out that there were common structures in them,” he said. “I could see how these shows were made.” He was also spending a lot of time at the Ranch, a nickname given to the group house where a bunch of aspiring actors and comedians lived, way out in the Valley, where rent was far cheaper than it was in Hollywood. At the Ranch, he was exposed to a different breed of comedian—not the exuberant, sharp-elbowed Jews of his Long Island comedy-club upbringing, but midwesterners who were, in his telling, just as funny in a softer way.

Apatow also started writing jokes for other comedians, something he had learned was possible from the director and actor Harold Ramis, whom Apatow had interviewed back in high school. (Ramis, whom Apatow adored for Caddyshack and Stripes, had told him he’d written jokes for Rodney Dangerfield.)

Apatow was emceeing comedy shows at the Comedy & Magic Club, in Hermosa Beach. “That’s how I met a lot of my heroes,” he recalled. One of those heroes was Garry Shandling. When Shandling was doing a set one night, Apatow’s manager floated the idea to Shandling that Apatow should write some jokes for him. Shandling didn’t seem remotely interested; they had “no connection whatsoever” that night, Apatow said. But a few months later, out of the blue, he called to see if Apatow wanted to help him write a few jokes for his upcoming gig hosting the 1990 Grammys. The answer was Yes, God yes, of course yes.

Apatow stayed up all night and gave Shandling, to his surprise, a list of 100 jokes to choose from. Shandling rewrote every punch line—which, to those who knew Shandling, says more about him than it does about Apatow. The way Apatow tells it today is that they made a good team: Apatow knew way more about music, and Shandling was simply funnier. This was the beginning of one of the most important relationships in Apatow’s life.

One of Shandling’s friends, the actor-writer-director Albert Brooks, told me he remembers hanging out at Shandling’s house in the early ’90s when Apatow started coming around. “He was like Garry’s shadow,” Brooks said. “What I’ve always loved about Judd is that more than anyone, he’s a comedy savant. I would describe him as a human Friars Club. And I love that about him. Because he didn’t just love it; he knew everything. And he was funny! It was like, Who is this kid? ”

The more time Apatow spent around comedians and writers in L.A., the more he began to think he wanted to be in comedy—but not as a stand-up. “I was such a fan that I was very aware of how good people were,” Apatow told me. “I knew how funny Andy Dick was and Ben Stiller was and Jim Carrey was.” Walking away from stand-up, “there was probably a little part of me that died,” Apatow said, but it made space for something new, too.

In 1990, he and Stiller created The Ben Stiller Show, which appeared on MTV (and later Fox), and starred up-and-comers such as Andy Dick, Janeane Garofalo, and Bob Odenkirk. It produced sketches beloved by comedy nerds—see: “Legends of Springsteen”—but was barely given a chance to take off. (The show won an Emmy for outstanding writing just after it was canceled.) Furious, Apatow took a trip to Hawai‘i to wallow in the tropics, and by some cosmic turn of fate ran into Shandling near the hotel where Apatow was staying.

For comedy nerds, this photo will evoke the famous Steve Martin character “The Great Flydini,” a vaudeville magician who pulls tricks out of his pants, including, in the coup de grâce, an opera-singing hand puppet. (Apatow bought the original puppet at auction for $3,520.) (JR)

Shandling coached him on how to cope with the cancellation, and offered him a job writing for a series he was developing for HBO called The Larry Sanders Show. “Garry said writing is a way to figure out who you are,” Apatow told me. “It’s all about self-exploration. I didn’t think that. I just thought I was writing a funny wife joke for Rodney Dangerfield. I didn’t think spiritually about any of it. It was like, comedy is about knowing yourself? What? I thought it was just punching the horse in Blazing Saddles.” It wasn’t until then that he felt “some sort of calling” to write.

For the next several years, Apatow worked obsessively, toggling between writing gigs for the animated series The Critic and The Larry Sanders Show. Set behind the scenes at a Johnny Carson–style late-night show and featuring a parade of A-list comedian guest stars, The Larry Sanders Show was beloved by critics and industry insiders. It launched the careers of numerous comedians, and pioneered a documentary-style format that influenced shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, 30 Rock, and Parks and Recreation. Apatow parlayed that success into writing the 1995 film Heavyweights and producing The Cable Guy, starring Jim Carrey, in 1996. Both flopped but have since achieved cult status. This dynamic would become excruciatingly familiar to Apatow: splashy failures on projects that only grew more beloved over time.

During casting for The Cable Guy, a young actor named Leslie Mann came in to audition for the female lead, and Apatow read Carrey’s part with her. He remembers leaning over to Stiller and saying something to the effect of I can’t believe the future Mrs. Apatow just walked into the room. (The encounter was not as indelible for Mann. She doesn’t remember it at all, she told Vanity Fair years later. “Is that bad?”) By the summer of 1997, they were married. Later that year, they had their first child together—a girl named Maude. Another girl, Iris, followed.

When Maude was still a toddler, one of Apatow’s friends from the Ranch, the actor and director Paul Feig, proposed making something together. “He literally handed me a manila envelope with Freaks and Geeks in it,” Apatow said. He was astonished by what he read. He ended up developing and executive-producing the show. Around this time, the teen drama Dawson’s Creek was an enormous hit. Apatow and Feig wanted to make something that was nothing like it.

Freaks and Geeks was unusual in a number of ways. Feig and Apatow cast actors who looked like real kids, rather than finding Hollywood-ready teens grown in a lab to appear on the cover of Tiger Beat, and the characters those actors played were complex, not mere vessels for sexual objectification or moral lessons that could be neatly resolved in 22 minutes. Freaks and Geeks also collapsed the distance between pain and humor in a way that made it feel true: Going through puberty isn’t just terrible and awkward; it’s hilariously terrible and awkward.

Apatow and Feig infused the show with their own adolescent agony. The gut punch of Apatow’s life was when his parents got divorced while he was in middle school. The split was beyond ugly; it scattered the family. His brother moved in with his grandparents in California. His sister lived with his mom. Apatow lived with his dad.

One by one, all of Apatow’s friends’ parents got divorced too. They talked about divorce constantly with one another, but barely with their own parents. (Apatow’s father once left a book out on the coffee table called Growing Up Divorced but never said a word about it.) Apatow remembers he and his friends thinking, “We can’t listen to these people. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”

From top left: On the set of the Netflix series Love; on the set of This Is 40; Apatow with Lena Dunham and the cast of Girls; Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, and Apatow on the set of Knocked Up; Iris and Maude Apatow, Paul Rudd, and Leslie Mann on the set of This Is 40; Apatow with the Trainwreck stars Amy Schumer, LeBron James, and Bill Hader. (Suzanne Hanover; Universal Studios Licensing; Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty; Moviestore Collection / Alamy)

That feeling gave rise to the conviction that he had to learn to take care of himself—through comedy. “I built this obsession that I thought would free me at some point,” Apatow told me. “I had a very clear thought my whole childhood, which was: This will pay off. One day, people will be interested in this. It’s almost maniacal.”

In one of our conversations, Apatow brought up the episode in which one of the geeks of Freaks and Geeks, Neal Schweiber (played by Samm Levine), confronts his philandering father by telling hostile jokes about him through a ventriloquist puppet. “I really related to that,” Apatow said. “There was a moment where I thought, I need to learn how to juggle fire and perform at birthday parties—that desire to get a skill because you’re so traumatized by what’s happening in the house.”

One of Apatow’s closest friends, the comedian Pete Holmes, told me that he always saw Apatow as another of the geeks, Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr). In one of the series’ unforgettable scenes, Haverchuck comes home from school to an empty house, makes himself a grilled-cheese sandwich and pours a tall glass of milk, pulls out the TV table, and dissolves into laughter watching Shandling do stand-up while the Who’s “I’m One” plays over the scene. That “raised-by-television latchkey thing,” Holmes told me, “that’s Judd. That’s all you need to know about Judd.” He went on: “It’s an isolated fan who used his love of comedy to make himself not isolated.”

Today, Freaks and Geeks routinely shows up on critics’ lists of the best shows ever made. But NBC canceled it after just 12 episodes, citing low ratings. Apatow was devastated, again.

It was around this time that he began having serious panic attacks. The worst of them happened during a meeting with Lorne Michaels at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge. “We were seated in a round booth I couldn’t easily escape from,” he told me. Apatow sat in silence, screaming on the inside and wondering if he would have to fabricate a story about food poisoning to get out of the room. (“I made it through. No once seemed to notice.”)

Even when Apatow’s not panicking, his mind tends to race. He remembers sitting and watching The Merv Griffin Show as a child, tapping his toes constantly, counting the syllables of the words being said on TV. He is not prone to catastrophizing so much as compulsively planning ahead. Over the years he’s developed tactics for staying calm, first by white-knuckling it through episodes of panic and later with obscene amounts of therapy and mountains of self-help books.

[From the November 2023 issue: What is comedy for?]

After Freaks and Geeks was canceled, Apatow focused on finishing the series, even though he knew it wouldn’t be renewed. He wanted to do right by the cast of young actors, which included Seth Rogen, Busy Philipps, Linda Cardellini, Jason Segel, and James Franco, all of whom eventually became stars. Working with all of that nascent talent on one show was “like discovering a music scene,” Apatow told me. “It was like discovering Seattle or Manchester.” He told himself that if he could finish the show and know that, just once, he had gotten something exactly right, it would be enough. In the end, NBC never even aired the complete series—three of the show’s 18 episodes reached audiences only when Fox Family reran the series later that year.

In a clever act of desperation, Apatow used the show’s website to ask fans for help demanding that Freaks and Geeks be released on DVD, something that never happened for a canceled show, and which ultimately helped Freaks and Geeks find its audience.

But when the same experience happened—“almost beat for beat”—with the cancellation of his 2001 television show, Undeclared, Apatow was livid. That same year, he filmed a pilot for North Hollywood, starring Segel with the up-and-comers Amy Poehler, January Jones, and Kevin Hart, which got scrapped before it even aired. “That became the fuel,” he told me. He just kept thinking, “You’re wrong. I think all these people are great. All these writers and directors are so strong. Let’s just try to prove everybody wrong.”

When Undeclared was canceled, Time magazine had just named it one of the 10 best television shows that year. Apatow sent a framed copy of the article to the chair of the Fox Television Entertainment Group, who also happened to be the man who had canceled The Ben Stiller Show. The note said: “I don’t know if you just fucked me in the ass again or you just never took it out in 1992. Merry Christmas, Judd.”

The people who know Apatow best will tell you that his willingness to burn bridges is legendary in comic circles. “Just really tough with studio executives—like, You need to let us make this show what it is,” the comedian Mike Birbiglia told me. He went on: “When you’re in show business long enough, you start to see that there are people who are rooting for themselves, and then there are people who are rooting for the art form at large. He’s the quintessential example of ‘He’s rooting for the art form at large.’ ”

From top left: Apatow with Rogen and Katherine Heigl on the set of Knocked Up; the cast and crew of The 40-Year-Old Virgin; Apatow with Norman Lear, Mel Brooks, and Dick Van Dyke; Jason Segel and John Francis
Daley in Freaks and Geeks; Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse in Superbad; Matthew Broderick and Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy. (Universal Studios Licensing; Courtesy of Judd Apatow; Gabe Sachs; Cinematic Collection / Alamy; AJ pics / Alamy)

Apatow can also be impressively petty. Some of the same friends who expressed to me their undying loyalty to Apatow described him as sometimes “defensive” and “biting,” the kind of person you have to work to win over. He once got into a prolonged email argument with the television producer Mark Brazill that was so over-the-top, Harper’s ended up publishing the entire thing. Brazill signed off one email to Apatow with “Get cancer,” and another with “Die in a fiery accident and taste your own blood.” Apatow, ever the comedy savant, accused Brazill of stealing the “taste your own blood” line from Sam Kinison’s 1986 album, Louder Than Hell : “That’s a Sam Kinison line you stupid fuck!!!! Hypocrite!!!! J’accuse!!!!”

Yet Apatow described himself to me as someone who wants to be liked and who tries to avoid conflict. He worries about upsetting people. “Comedians are sensitive,” he said. “Comedians are aware of all the dynamics that are happening, and they’re feelers.” The only time in all of our many hours of conversations that he ever balked was when I asked him whom he considers his closest friends. “You want me to list them?” He was horrified by the idea of making anyone feel bad.

Apatow has, over time, mellowed out. One of the people who has seen this up close is Seth Rogen, who was an unknown 16-year-old when Apatow cast him in Freaks and Geeks. “He was the first boss I ever had,” Rogen told me. He was terrified of Apatow at the time, and desperate to impress him. After Freaks, Apatow asked Rogen to be a writer on Undeclared.

The first movie they made together was The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Apatow’s 2005 directorial debut and a blockbuster. Rogen remembers the moment Apatow came up with one of the scenes that drew the biggest laughs in the film, in which Steve Carell’s character awkwardly tries to relieve himself while aroused. It is “forever tattooed in my mind,” he told me. They’d been working on the script and Apatow left to pace around, get coffee. When he returned, “he was laughing so hard,” Rogen said, and he went on to describe the whole scene, with Carell’s character having to “tilt down” to pee. Rogen lost it too. “We were laughing so hard,” he said. He kept thinking, “They would have never let us do that on television.” (Apatow told me that coming up with a joke that perfect feels like you’ve “finally connected to God.”)

Apatow made the jump to directing films at precisely the right moment. Studio executives had realized that audiences actually loved big comedic films starring actors who weren’t traditional leading-man material. Will Ferrell, who in 2003 successfully leaped from SNL to the big screen with the Todd Phillips hit Old School, was a catalyst for the golden decade of big comedies that followed.

Apatow’s success, when it came, hit like a tsunami. It is difficult to overstate his influence on American comedy. Critics started using the ungainly term Apatowian to describe his imitators.

Apatow and his onetime roommate Adam Sandler (Courtesy of Judd Apatow)

Knocked Up was an even bigger hit than The 40-Year-Old Virgin, grossing nearly $220 million on a $30 million budget. The film told the story of an underachieving stoner (Rogen) and an ambitious TV reporter (Katherine Heigl) who, after their one-night stand results in pregnancy, must navigate the complexities of becoming parents while getting to know each other. It was raunchy, tender, absurd, and hilarious.

Apatow had worried that Knocked Up wouldn’t come together at all because he couldn’t figure out the casting. Eighty women had read for the lead part, and none of them clicked until Heigl showed up. When you find the right person for a role, “you almost feel relief,” he told me. “Because when people read it and they’re not right for the part, the scene doesn’t work. So you’re watching your scene not work over and over again.”

Heigl may have been perfect for the part in Apatow’s eyes, but she criticized the movie after it came out, touching off a larger debate about Apatow’s work at the time. She called Knocked Up “a little sexist,” and described the women characters he had written—including her own—as “shrews” who were “humorless and uptight.” (Apatow, clearly bruised, reacted by calling her choice of the word shrew something out of the 1600s.) To him, the argument was unfair. He is interested in flawed characters and what they have to do to become good people, a theme that runs through his work going back to Freaks and Geeks.

Amy Schumer told me she never understood people who dismiss Apatow’s work as sexist. The men in Knocked Up don’t seem to understand what the women in their lives are going through. Seen one way, that’s evidence of sexism; seen another, it’s an honest portrayal of how some men behave in their relationships. The subject seemed to exasperate Schumer: “His house is all girls, his cats are girls, he made the show Girls, he made my movie.” I will confess that I find the debate somewhat tiresome myself. Sometimes the flawed characters Apatow focuses on are men; sometimes they’re women. As Schumer noted, he guided her and Dunham toward realizing their own creative visions for Trainwreck and Girls, respectively.

Apatow has filmed almost all of his movies in Los Angeles because he didn’t want to be away from his family, especially when the girls were little, and he famously casts Mann and his daughters in his movies (Knocked Up, Funny People, This Is 40 ). This has provoked inevitable eye-rolling about nepotism, but Mann is a comedic star in her own right. She is the first person who reads his scripts. “She has come up with some of the great moments and scenes in all of the movies we’ve collaborated on,” he told me.

Apatow, Mann, and their daughters in 2018 (Jon Kopaloff / Getty)

The Apatow girls—both now in their 20s, both actors—first appeared on-screen when they still had their baby teeth. Apatow likes to point out, swelling with pride, that then-8-year-old Maude completely improvised her character’s hilarious explanation of where babies come from in Knocked Up. “I think a stork, he drops it down, and then a hole goes in your body, and there’s blood everywhere, coming out of your head, and then you push your belly button, and then your butt falls off, and then you hold your butt, and you have to dig, and you find a little baby.” Mann’s character deadpans in response: “That’s exactly right.”

After a long pause, Apatow started doing stand-up again about a decade ago, and has been doing it ever since. One of his regular venues is Largo, a gem of a comedy club in West Hollywood with the prettiest twinkle lights and the least comfortable chairs you can imagine.

The greenroom at Largo is a small shrine to great talent. Images of David Bowie and Gilda Radner are tacked up on one wall. On a recent visit I found Apatow there with Stephen Merchant, a co-creator of the original The Office. Merchant and Apatow were discussing the best place in the world to see Bruce Springsteen (Milan, they concluded), while the musician Pete Yorn stood in the hallway tuning his guitar. A few minutes later, Sarah Silverman wandered in. Ali Wong showed up after that.

Apatow had assembled this group of comedic super-talent for Judd Apatow and Friends, a semi-regular benefit he hosts that combines stand-up and live music. For each show, he picks a different lineup, and a different cause—on this night, proceeds were going to the ACLU. Apatow had with him a chaotic pile of notes—scrawled by hand, photocopied, clearly out of order, some upside down. If he was nervous, it did not show.

Apatow’s set had a relaxed, funniest-dad-at-the-barbecue feel. He got huge laughs, from both old material (the hairy-back-shadow joke) and new, much of which involved confronting the indignities of aging. (“Don’t you hate diverticulitis? Isn’t it the worst when your high-school girlfriends start dying of natural causes?”) He also recounted a story about a quasi-religious experience he’d had while tripping on ayahuasca. (He’d told me the story before. “That really did happen,” he said.)

Apatow’s style is predicated on a confessional sort of self-deprecation, while Wong’s, for example, is more brash and confrontational—she told a story about a one-night stand that was so vulgar, a man sitting near me was actually honking with laughter, which prompted the people around him to start laughing even harder.

[Read: The king of comedy is okay with not being funny]

Apatow’s approach was clearly influenced by Shandling. Like his mentor, Apatow pushes a joke to get funnier until there is nowhere left to go. When he’s directing, he’s known to shout out one punch line after the next for actors to try, and then chooses which one to use in editing. (He still stews about bits of his films he wishes he could change.)

Apatow at his office. His approach is to push a joke to get funnier until there is nowhere left to go. (Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic)

If Shandling taught Apatow to be exacting in his writing, he also helped him find ways to calm his galloping mind. It was Shandling who introduced Apatow to Ram Dass, the author of the best-selling 1971 book Be Here Now, which popularized Eastern spirituality in the West. When I first started reading Ram Dass, at Apatow’s urging, my immediate reaction was that it seemed very Los Angeles—we’re all just cosmic vibrations made to love one another, that kind of thing. It wasn’t until I listened to one of Ram Dass’s lectures that I had a revelation: Ram Dass’s belief system may have been Buddhism-flavored, but his delivery is basically a form of stand-up. He talks about going to India and meditating until he achieved transcendence. “I mean, light was pouring out of my head and I was some combination of the pure mind of the Buddha and the heart of the Christ”—here he pauses for just a beat before delivering the punch line—“which, for a Jewish boy, is not bad, you know?” The audience roars.

One of the best pieces of advice Apatow gives to other writers—which Schumer, Rogen, Birbiglia, and others all repeated back to me—is to write comedy like you’re writing a drama. The story has to work on a human level before it can be funny. “I think what he’s trying to get at almost always in all of his films and television is the vulnerability of the characters, and the comedy is secondary,” Birbiglia told me. “And because he’s so funny and he’s so comedy-obsessed, the comedy ends up being the thing he’s known for. But actually it’s the other thing that he’s extraordinary at.”

Apatow put it to me this way: “The jokes can’t work if the story doesn’t work. The whole thing will crumble. So the most important part is that you have a great dramatic story that you care about that tracks, and then you can figure out how to ornament humor where it’s needed. I think movies are usually bad when they haven’t figured that out.”

The director and Simpsons co-creator James L. Brooks told me about taking his 15-year-old son to see Superbad, a raunchy but sweet caper about a couple of teenagers trying to hook up with their crushes before they go off to college. Brooks’s son left the theater feeling like someone had “looked into his heart,” Brooks told me. Rogen, who co-wrote Superbad with his childhood best friend, told me he’d learned how to tell that story by watching Apatow (who produced the film). When you think about all of the talented actors, writers, and directors who do what they do because of Apatow, “I mean, the group of actors is big,” Brooks said. “He raised puppies.”

In the 1970s, when Steve Martin hit it big, Apatow went crazy for him. “I bought every album he put out—and couldn’t stop doing an impression of him for the next five years,” he recalled in one of his books. To a kid who worshipped the gods of comedy, Martin was the biggest of them all. So when Apatow was 13 years old, on a visit to California to see his grandmother, he persuaded her to drive him out past Martin’s Beverly Hills home. When they arrived, Apatow couldn’t believe his eyes: There was Martin, taking out the trash. He seized the moment, hopped out of the car, and asked for an autograph. Martin politely declined, saying he had to draw the line at signing autographs at his home. Apatow, ever quick-witted, suggested that they simply step into the street. But Martin insisted he could not.

When Apatow got back home, he wrote Martin an obscenity-laden, joking-but-not-joking letter, asking Martin why he treated his fans like garbage and threatening to share his home address with a Hollywood celebrity bus tour unless Martin responded with an autograph. When the reply came, it included a copy of Martin’s book Cruel Shoes. “Dear Judd,” the inscription reads, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was speaking to the Judd Apatow.”

Years later, after Apatow had broken out, he and Martin were in a meeting together and someone asked Apatow to tell the story. “I told it,” Apatow recalled in Sicker in the Head. “And at the end, they asked Steve if that was how he remembered it. And he said, ‘In my memory, I knocked on Judd’s door.’ ”

Apatow is no longer the young apprentice—he has long since become a master himself. Now comedians constantly come to him for advice. Rogen runs every big creative project by Apatow, he told me. “I, to a fault, to an inappropriate degree, run everything by him,” Schumer said. “He honestly only gives good advice,” Dunham told me. The best advice he ever gave her is that a good note of feedback can come from anywhere. She took that to mean that real artists are confident enough to release a bit of control. (“Though he did once take me to a Who concert after a long workday, and I fell asleep and he took photos.”)

And yet Apatow has lost none of his enthusiasm for studying comedy. He has a scrapbook of a memoir coming out in October, Comedy Nerd, which tells the story of his life and is filled with the many photos, studio notes, and other documents he has hoarded over the years. He has continued to interview comedians, and published two books filled with those conversations. This is how I first got to know him. I had long wanted to find a way to get Mel Brooks into the pages of The Atlantic. I knew that Apatow shared my adoration of Brooks, and figured he was more likely to pick up a call from Apatow than from me. So I got in touch with Apatow to ask if he would do the interview. He said yes right away—and Brooks said yes to Apatow.

Apatow is now making a documentary about Brooks, while also developing films about Norm Macdonald and Maria Bamford. These projects follow his documentaries The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling ; George Carlin’s American Dream; and Bob and Don: A Love Story, about the friendship between Bob Newhart and Don Rickles. The same thread runs through all of these films: a deep curiosity about how people, despite their flaws and fears, find a way to keep going.

Apatow is drawn to comedians who deal directly with suffering. He executive-produced Gary Gulman’s stand-up special The Great Depresh, as well as Ricky Velez’s special, Here’s Everything, both of which are steeped in pain. When I caught up with Gulman recently, he described Apatow to me as a hybrid of Springsteen and Hal Ashby. Springsteen because of his relentlessness; Ashby because “there’s always that gut punch in Judd’s movies,” Gulman told me. “Even the ones that are almost absurd in the amount or the concentration of comedy.” Maybe especially those ones.

Not long ago, I had a conversation with Kelly Carlin, daughter of George, about what makes someone become a comedian in the first place. She had gotten to know Apatow when he made the documentary about her father, and had known Shandling as well. It is clear to her why Shandling had taken Apatow under his wing. “I really do think he saw that Judd was a very soulful, human guy,” she said, and that his reverence for comedy was real. For people like her father and Shandling, when you make something that you hope will make people laugh, and it works, “it’s like all’s right in the universe.”

“It’s a form of church,” Carlin went on. “There’s something about that shared space. My dad used to say that when you’re laughing, your heart and your mind are open.”

Shandling, who died from a blood clot in 2016, did not come easily to the wisdom that Apatow so admired him for. He spent his life working through the childhood death of his older brother from cystic fibrosis, and struggled to maintain relationships.

Apatow has experienced his own losses. During one of our conversations, he told me what it was like to be with his mother in the hospital as she was dying. She had ovarian cancer, and had developed sepsis. It was a terrible night and everything seemed to be falling apart. Right before she died, she looked up at her son and said: “Can you believe this shit?”

“That’s what comedy is,” Apatow told me. “We just have to laugh at how hard it is, and also really enjoy when we get a good moment.” The story made me think of a page in one of Shandling’s old diaries that Apatow is obsessed with. On it, Shandling had scrawled, in all caps: “GIVE MORE, GIVE WHAT YOU DIDN’T GET, LOVE MORE.”

I once asked Apatow if he tends to juggle multiple projects at once because, on some level, he thinks about Shandling, who died at age 66, and hears a clock ticking. Apatow said that wasn’t it. (“My dad is a young 83 so I feel I am going to live long, like the Russians in the old yogurt commercials,” he said.) He works so hard because he understands that most things never get made in the first place, and that plenty more get canceled when they shouldn’t.

For all of his success, Apatow still dreads failure. It’s much harder for anyone to make big comedic films than it used to be, even for Apatow, though Universal is fast-tracking his latest—a still-untitled film he is directing about a country-music star who has hit rock bottom. He told me that, long ago, he decided he would be content as the Elvis Costello of comedy: not the person who sells out Madison Square Garden but the person who makes great art for its own sake, for an audience who appreciates it, even if that audience is smaller. But several of his friends told me that he quietly worries about staying relevant.

Recently, I told Apatow that I’d come to believe he is the most well-adjusted anxious person I’ve ever known—few people can worry as much as he does and still come off as easygoing. “That’s just a solid facade,” he told me. “That’s why I probably just am drowning in pop-psychology books and religious books—because I don’t get me at all. I just don’t.”

What Apatow has learned, what he knows for sure, is that the good and the bad will come. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you work or how talented you are, life entails suffering. But you get to choose what you do with pain. If you surround yourself with people you love and respect and believe in, if you refuse to take yourself too seriously, then you begin to see that the darkness contains more light than might seem possible.

This article appears in the October 2025 print edition with the headline “The Invention of Judd Apatow.”

Strawberries in Winter

2025-09-11T15:04:00-04:00

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Some years ago, trying to understand what it might take to break America’s fever of political violence, I asked a former federal prosecutor what she thought about the possibility of a second civil war in the United States.

Mary McCord, who has spent much of her career thinking about how to combat extremism, was worried about worsening political violence. (I favor a simple definition of political violence: actions intended to provoke or prevent change.) And like many of the people I have interviewed about political violence over the years—including top military officials, members of Congress, local and federal law enforcement, political scientists, terrorism experts, peace negotiators, and others—she told me that cycles of horrific political violence can perpetuate themselves for a generation or more after they have taken hold. Once a certain threshold is crossed, political violence tends to get worse before it gets better, in many cases cataclysmically so.

But McCord also said something in passing that I’ve thought about repeatedly since, including yesterday after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Wouldn’t most Americans, if faced with the prospect of killing their neighbors and destroying the country from within, probably still choose peace? She told me that she wished people would stop and think: “Do you really want us to be in a bloody civil war for 10 or 15 years? You’re going to see your grandkids get killed. Do you really want that?”

Perhaps, she suggested, America’s salvation would come from widespread attachment to the mundane comforts and prosperity that accompanies prolonged periods of relative peace. Americans “don’t like it when they can’t get strawberries in the winter,” she went on. “This idea of revolution. Really? Is that really what you want?” Societies that dissolve into civil war are “not having a good time,” she said. “It’s not fun.”

Even back when our conversation took place, in 2022, anyone could see that political violence was getting worse—there was the insurrection, of course, but also the hammer attack, the riots, the conspiracy theorist with the rifle in the pizza parlor, the congressman shot at baseball practice, the congresswoman shot in the supermarket parking lot, the waves of cynicism and hatred emanating from millions of tiny screens, the militiamen standing back and standing by.

[Graeme Wood: Political violence could devour us all]

You need only a glancing familiarity with American history to know that violent times almost always lead to violent crackdowns by the state, and that such crackdowns almost always entail an evisceration of basic American freedoms. Donald Trump’s speech last night about Kirk’s murder, in which the president vilified his political enemies, should frighten any American who rejects political violence, cares about civil liberties, and dislikes government interference.

That “strawberries in winter” conversation stuck with me—both because I found the example to be darkly funny, this idea that a mass desire for out-of-season antioxidants might pull America back from the brink, and also because it seemed like an impossibly fragile hope. What if people don’t actually care about the strawberries?

In the day since Kirk’s killing, I’ve noticed a pronounced difference between the people who are attempting to de-escalate and inspire calm—versus those who are lashing out and pitting Americans against each other. Those who mock or celebrate Kirk’s death are part of a cycle of worsening violence. Those who have declared war, or call their political opponents “evil,” are part of the same. “We’re not supposed to say this,” the MAGA influencer slash venture capitalist Shaun Maguire tweeted yesterday. “But the truth is we’re at War.” (Maguire made a follow-up post a day later—“I want to say this very clearly, do not respond with violence. But be loud as hell.” It did not go viral; his declaration of war did go viral, and is still being amplified.) From the far-right influencer Andrew Tate: “Civil war.” From the MAGA influencer Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok account: “THIS IS WAR.”

America is now, quite obviously, deep into this particular cycle of violence, with no clear notion of where and how it will end. Acts of political violence in the past 12 months alone have included the murder of a health-care CEO in Manhattan, an arson attack against the governor of Pennsylvania, the murder of a protester in Colorado, the murder of a Minnesota state representative in her home, and yesterday the assassination of an activist speaking at a college campus. Every deed of political violence in America is churned through the ideological and algorithmic machinery of the social web that spits out louder, uglier calls for more violence still. America’s enemies abroad—in countries hostile to democracy and American freedom—are among those who perpetuate this cycle of escalation.

But those now fantasizing about war in America, and those cheering the murder of a fellow citizen, have no earthly understanding of what truly pervasive political violence does to a society. The Civil War, our nation’s defining conflict, should only haunt us—the terrible appetite for death, the nurses in blood-drenched aprons, the flies swarming the battlefield, some 800,000 Americans dead. None of us should wish for this, or call for it. But let us also not suffer the failure of imagination that would prevent us from seeing it coming—for such negligence risks being itself a catalyst for catastrophe.

This morning, I called McCord to ask her whether Kirk’s assassination, and the reaction to it, has changed her thinking about the dangers of worsening political violence in America. I also wanted to see if she thinks her strawberries theory still holds up. She told me that she thinks about what’s happening a few different ways. First, political violence is getting worse, and that should concern everyone. The current situation is “very dangerous,” she said. And those who call for the destruction of their political enemies, regardless of their ideology, endanger everyone.

But McCord also remains convinced that most Americans do not want widespread armed conflict domestically. “I just do not believe that the vast majority of Americans would support any Civil War–type violence,” she said. Most people just want to live their lives. “There is a small group that is incredibly active on social media and cable news—and then there’s the whole rest of the population.”

Those who react to political violence by declaring war against their political enemies should understand that their outpouring of ugliness makes them not brave revolutionaries but bedfellows with the extremists who cheered for Luigi Mangione. When keyboard soldiers loudly declare war, when they characterize their political foes as malicious and subhuman, they help inspire the next violent attack. But they may not actually spur the country toward a full-fledged civil conflict. They may not even mean “war” when they use that word, but something more like a soft secession, where different coalitions of U.S. states carry out different visions of what America is and should be. (Also not a thing we should try.) Many of them have not bothered to define what they mean by “war” at all. And although both are atrocious, there is in fact a meaningful difference between targeted political violence and the amassing of armies to fight one another.

The militarization of domestic law enforcement—days ago Trump declared “war” on Chicago, and he’s sent National Guard troops to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.—is currently mashing together the scourge of political violence with the threat of a state crackdown. This, too, is part of the cycle of political violence, and it is dangerous for every American’s freedom and safety.

The thing is, “people do want to have strawberries in February!” McCord told me today. “They do want to go out after work and have some beers. They do want to go to their kids’ soccer games on the weekend. Civil-war talk is just that. It’s talk. I don’t see any significant fraction of the population that is at all interested in that. That doesn’t mean we aren’t going to have violence. And I do think it is going to increase.”

Americans must understand this. Incendiary rhetoric is exceedingly dangerous in a society already susceptible to further violence—particularly when layered atop the conditions that have made us so vulnerable already: highly visible wealth disparity, cratering trust in democratic institutions, severe partisan estrangement, aggrievement across the political spectrum, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, dehumanizing rhetoric against the “other,” and the belief among too many Americans that violence is not only called for but necessary, even righteous.

[Adrienne LaFrance: How much worse is this going to get?]

Here is what you should do today: Take note of the many Americans, especially those in positions of power, who condemn this assassination specifically, and political violence generally, full stop. Look to those who reject political violence unequivocally, regardless of whether the victim is ideologically aligned with them. The leadership of de-escalation is the leadership of democracy—and political violence will only continue without it.

Anyone who seeks to understand political violence primarily through the social web—whether via Twitter, Bluesky, or the Trump administration’s nonstop torrent of emotional posting—risks being left with the impression that most Americans are spoiling for a fight that could destroy all of us. And it’s true that the complexities of our informational environment pose real challenges to public safety and national security. But walk outside anywhere in America and you are unlikely to find someone declaring war or mocking the dead the way extremists do on Twitter. You may find people who are angry, and who disagree with each other. You may encounter protesters (peaceful protest, in addition to being protected by the First Amendment, is one of the best antidotes to political violence). But most Americans are simply going about their lives—and most, I have to believe, want nothing to do with civil war, and wish for an end to political assassinations, too.

Earlier this week, I got to talking with a National Guardsman who was walking around near The Atlantic’s office in Washington, D.C., deployed from South Carolina for who knows how long. (“I wish I knew,” he laughed.) I asked him if the citizens of D.C.—known for their vocal opposition to Trump, and to the deployment of troops in their city—had created trouble for him. Nothing like that, he said. “They just tell us what they think, and that’s okay.” He seemed to understand it perfectly: We don’t have to all agree with one another. But without peaceful disagreement, there is no freedom at all.

The Razor-Thin Line Between Conspiracy Theory and Actual Conspiracy

2025-07-17T08:00:00-04:00

Updated at 10:35 a.m. ET on July 24, 2025

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Elvis is dead. American astronauts really did leave footprints on the moon. And the end of the world has come and gone, over and over again, without the world ever actually ending. When you’re a true-blue conspiracy theorist, none of that matters. What’s real is only what you want to believe, not what the evidence shows.

But when it comes to one of the most popular conspiracy theories in American history—the explosive case of Jeffrey Epstein—the rules of conspiracism only partly apply. The Epstein story seems practically lab manufactured to appeal to conspiracy theorists (incidentally, things manufactured in labs are also something conspiracy theorists love to talk about).

The Epstein saga hits on practically every theme of every major conspiracy theory, going back for centuries: It entails allegations of horrific child abuse. There are multiple mysterious deaths involved. Missing tapes. Hidden documents. Claims about a shadowy cabal. Backtracking politicians. Celebrities. Plus, Epstein was Jewish—so the whole affair is inevitably laced with anti-Semitism, a key feature of conspiracism since the Crusades.

The thing is, only some parts of the Epstein story are conspiracy theories, and it’s surprisingly difficult to suss out which ones. Epstein really did commit awful crimes. People in positions of tremendous power really did let him off easy back in the Bush administration.

So where is the line between conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy? In an attempt to make sense of all of this, I talked with Julie K. Brown, an investigative reporter at the Miami Herald and the reporter who knows more about Epstein than almost any other person on the planet.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

News host 1: The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients. Will that really happen?

Attorney General Pam Bondi: It’s sitting on my desk right now to review. That’s been a directive by President Trump.

News host 2: Would you declassify the Epstein files?

President Donald Trump: Yeah. Yeah, I would. All right. I guess I would.

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino: I’m not ever gonna let this story go, because of what I heard from a source about Bill Clinton on a plane with Jeffrey Epstein. I’m not letting it go.

The Benny Show Podcast Host Benny Johnson: Why is the FBI protecting the greatest pederast, the largest scale pederast in human history?

Alina Habba: We have flight logs. We have information, names that will come out.

Piers Morgan: Is it gonna be shocking?

Habba: I don’t see how it’s not shocking.

Adrienne LaFrance: This is Radio Atlantic. I am Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of the Atlantic, filling in for Hanna Rosin, who is away this week.

For years, President Trump and his allies have promised to make bombshell news on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Many conspiracy-theory-obsessed Americans are preoccupied by Epstein, and MAGA world has long promised that Trump would be the one to release secret files about him. The saga is catnip for conspiracy theorists.

The thing is, there are legitimate questions about Epstein, so it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s made up. Until recently, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, repeatedly said that she had specific new information about Epstein. But over the past two weeks, things got a lot more interesting and a lot more complicated.

[Music]

News host 3: The Department of Justice and FBI released a memo today, saying there was no Jeffrey Epstein client list, contradicting previous promises to provide it.

LaFrance: Last week, the FBI released a memo, saying it had reviewed all of its evidence on Epstein, some 300 gigabytes of material, and it announced that it does not plan to release any more information. The Department of Justice now says there is no Epstein client list, and they say there’s no evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent people.

This is pretty much the exact opposite of what Trump world has been claiming all along. Now, Americans are accustomed to Trump and his allies making outrageous claims without evidence. But this particular about-face has MAGA tearing each other apart, with some major influencers turning on previous allies and many Trump supporters criticizing Trump himself for what seems to them like a cover-up.

News host 4: President Trump facing unprecedented criticism from some of his biggest supporters.

Trump: He’s dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life. I don’t understand what the interest or what the fascination is.

LaFrance: This is a wild story politically, so wild that it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that there are real crimes underlying the larger scandal. Like many people, I feel like I’m losing the thread on all of this. It’s extremely hard to understand which aspects of this are known to be true, known to be false, or somewhere in the muddy middle.

So on this episode, we’re going to try to make as much sense of this as we possibly can.

Julie Brown: This is gonna be like the [John F. Kennedy] assassination. Long after you and I are gone, there’s gonna be people that are gonna be writing and looking at this, and writing books about it. I just know it.

LaFrance: That’s Julie K. Brown. She’s an investigative reporter at the Miami Herald, and she probably knows more than anyone in the world about this case. In 2018, Julie published a series of deeply reported stories about Epstein that led to the effective reopening of the case. The next year, Epstein was indicted on federal sex-trafficking charges. Then a month after his arrest, he was found dead in his jail cell.

Julie, hi.

Brown: Hello.

LaFrance: Let me start by asking you about last week. Are you surprised by all of this drama? Or have you been basically waiting for this moment, where Trump world says, Oh, just kidding. Nothing to see here?

Brown: I’ve been waiting for this moment. I could see this like it was a train wreck that you can’t take your eyes from, because you know what’s going to happen, and this does not surprise me. What would’ve surprised me is if they had really released files, because I really didn’t think they were going to.

LaFrance: And is that because there aren’t files to release, or because of what might be in them?

Brown: Both. I mean, there are files to release, but I knew that they probably contain a lot of sensitive information and that there would be a lot of hand-wringing over what they could release, if they could release them.

The other thing is: There is an ongoing criminal appeal of a criminal conviction attached to some of these files, which are the files that contain the Ghislaine Maxwell case. And so I would think that, legitimately, there might be some things there that they probably couldn’t release, because the case is still on appeal.

But nevertheless, there’s still a lot of files that date back to probably 2005 even that they could have released if they elected to do so.

LaFrance: And the Maxwell case is the affiliate of his who is in prison now. Is that right?

Brown: That’s correct.

LaFrance: Well, let’s establish some of the basics. I find myself watching all of this unfold, and beginning to sort of lose sight of what actually is true, what is speculation. Talk about what Epstein was accused of, what he was indicted for. What do we know for sure?

Brown: Well, let’s start with something that almost no one really starts with in this whole scandal that’s been happening over the past week, and that is the victims.

Jeffrey Epstein abused probably at least 200 young girls, some of them reportedly as young as 12 years old, over a span of decades. He also sexually abused young women who are in the area of 18 to 25 years old. But this is a case about a man who used these women as pawns to further his own ambition and finances, in that he used them not only for his own sexual gratification, but also for the sexual gratification of others that he had hoped to do business with. And this was all part of the sex-trafficking operation. He had several different offices, so to speak, with this operation. He had a whole staff that helped him with this. He had legal people that helped him with this. So this was just not Epstein having sex in his mansion with a couple of underage girls. This was a whole operation.

And I think people sometimes lose sight of the fact that he was able to continue doing that because our federal government and our criminal-justice system failed these victims, and never really pursued this case with the seriousness and intensity that they should have from the very beginning. And that’s why he got away with it. It’s why he was released way back in 2009, and he was able to continue doing the same things all over again after his release from this plea deal that he initially negotiated two decades ago with the federal government.

LaFrance: Talk about that time period. When you think about the lag in taking this operation seriously, does that cross different presidential administrations in terms of the DOJ? Or is there one period in which it was particularly egregiously ignored? How should we think about that?

Brown: Sexual assault doesn’t discriminate based on political party. There were bad people on both sides of the political aisle in this story. And focusing on the political part of it misses the point. And the point is that our justice system is terribly broken. Our system is weighted unfairly in favor of people who have a lot of power and a lot of money and a lot of influence.

LaFrance: It’s such an important point. And when you hear all of these conspiracy theories, how do you sort between, you know, the theories that are just totally outrageous and you think are not worth dwelling on, versus, you know, perhaps an example of what might be called a conspiracy theory but you, as an investigative reporter, think is actually a legitimate line of questioning?

Brown: That is this scandal, in a nutshell, in that we have some competing forces here. We have the forces of truth and facts, versus the forces of conspiracy that want to fan theories in order to further some kind of agenda, whether that’s a political agenda or—there’s a million agendas. Some of these influencers, their agenda is to get more viewers or more listeners.

So there’s these competing forces here with journalism today, and it’s not just with the Epstein story, but with almost everything. And it’s a real struggle, to be honest with you. That’s why I always try to bring these questions back to what I know based on my reporting, based on court records, based on, you know, police records, based on interviews that I’ve done.

And so when I’m asked about some of these conspiracy theories, I sort of direct it toward “Here’s what I do know.”

LaFrance: Let’s talk about the client list, or what’s sometimes called the “Epstein client list.” Is it real? Where did this idea that it exists come from? What do we know?

Brown: That whole thing about the so-called list is really a red herring. I think it morphed out of sort of a phone directory that Ghislaine Maxwell actually is responsible for compiling on a computer way back in 2005, 2006. And it’s public. The phone numbers are redacted out of it, but if you Google it, you could find—they used to call it the “black book.” That was sort of the nickname that it was given. And it was these copies that were printed out from a computer, and every time Epstein or Maxwell met somebody important, they would get their contact information, and they would put it in this file. There were people like Donald Trump on that list and celebrities. But there were also his gardeners who were on that list, his hairdresser, his barbers, his electrician. I mean, it was a comprehensive list. So it was pretty clear that this was not a black book in the sense that these were all his clients. It was just a phone directory.

But the reason why they called it a black book is because when the FBI first got its hands on it, there was someone who was trying to sell it to one of the lawyers who represented the victims. He sort of circled some names on that list, of people that he was trying to say were somehow connected to Epstein in a more nefarious way, whether it was business or whether it was sex trafficking.

People just started then on social media, started to refer to something called a client list. It took a life of its own, into that, Oh, Epstein had a client list. He actually had a list of clients that he sent girls to, or that he sent women to. I never believed that there was ever a list like that, because, quite frankly, Epstein didn’t need to do a list like that. The bad actors here, the people that he sent some of these victims to, they know who they are. And he really only used this whole sex-trafficking operation as a way to pressure them to help him in some way, to either invest in, or give them his money to invest, or just to make money. So as long as they were cooperating with him and doing that, there was no reason to say, I have you on a list. That wasn’t the way he operated.

But that said, there are still names in those files, of people who were involved with Epstein’s operation. He could never have done this all by himself. He had people. We know he had assistants. We know he had lawyers. We know he had people helping him get visas for women that he was recruiting from overseas countries. So there was a network here of people that were working for him and helping him.

LaFrance: We’re going to take a quick break. More with Julie in just a moment.

[Music]

[Break]

LaFrance: Let’s talk for a moment about the Donald Trump of it all. You know, there are some conflicting data or information to reconcile here, and I’m really interested to hear how you think about this, because we’re talking about a man, in Trump, who has bragged about grabbing women without their consent, who is credibly accused of rape and sexual assault.

And so, on one hand, you have, you know, this—you point out that the Epstein list is a red herring, that, you know, Elon Musk claimed without evidence that Trump is on this list, which you’re saying probably doesn’t even exist.

On the other hand, there’s good reason, empirically grounded reason to question Trump’s record of sexual or alleged sexual abuse. And so I’m curious how you think about, you know, in this moment, when you have the Trump administration waving this away, saying, There is no list, you know, Trump saying, This whole line of questioning is boring.

What do you make of this? How should we think about how he fits in (or doesn’t) to this larger scandal?

Brown: Well, it’s hard to know. You don’t really know how he fits completely into this scandal. I was finally forced to say something during the election, when there were so many of those conspiracy theorists out there on the left who were trying to directly link him with Epstein’s crimes. And there’s absolutely no evidence that he was involved in Epstein’s crimes. There isn’t. And I’ve pretty much read almost everything that’s out there. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible. And I would say that with everything that’s happened in the past week, it certainly raises suspicions that maybe there is more to his, you know, friendship with Epstein than maybe we know.

LaFrance: Right. And to your point about them having had a relationship, you know, Trump himself has said that they were friends. In 2002, there was an interview that Trump did with New York magazine. I’m going to read this quote from Donald Trump at the time. It says—he says, quote, “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

So given that, and given everything, you know, more importantly, do you think it’s possible that Donald Trump didn’t know what Epstein was up to?

Brown: No. He had to know. Yeah, I think he absolutely knew. The reason why he knew is, one of the impetuses for their alleged falling out was: Epstein went to Mar-a-Lago at one point, and he hit on one of the young daughters of one of the other club members. And we were told by multiple sources that that’s why Trump and him broke it off, because Trump banned him from Mar-a-Lago because of that.

I honestly think, back in the culture that existed back then and to some degree, of course, still today, that some of these powerful men really believed they were helping these girls and women. They really felt that by paying them, this was a good thing: We’re helping this woman, you know. We’re helping this girl to get an education. They still sometimes look at these cases and say, What’s the problem here? The women got paid. They had to know what they were doing. There is still this cultural problem that we have in this country that powerful men who take advantage of vulnerable women or younger women don’t do anything wrong.

LaFrance: You’re someone who has spent years trying to understand the truth about all of this. If you had a magic wand and could wave it and, you know, get the question you most want answered answered, or see the document, or whatever it is, what is the thing that you most wish you could know, once and for all, about all of this?

Brown: I think the one nagging question for me—because, you know, I know so much about the case, to be honest—goes all the way back to 2008, and I wanna know the person in the Department of Justice who said, Don’t charge Epstein. If you’re gonna charge him, charge him with just something minor, and let’s get this done.

LaFrance: And that 2008 case—remind us how that came about.

Brown: Well, there was intense political pressure because, you know, initially, the case was a local police case. It was the Palm Beach police who found a litany of girls that were going in and out and having sex with Epstein at all hours of the day and night.

And they wanted to, of course, charge him with sexual battery or rape or, you know, something like that, on a local charge. And initially, the state attorney in Palm Beach County, where this happened, was completely on board with the police case and their investigation, said, Go after him. We’re gonna nail him. We’re gonna arrest him.

And then somebody got to him. Epstein lawyered up with some pretty powerful lawyers, including Alan Dershowitz, and they started getting dirt on the girls, trying to show that they didn’t live, you know, the best lives. It was intense. Epstein mounted an unbelievable pressure campaign.

And I think he thought that it would end with the local police once the state attorney—which the state attorney finally did sort of say, I am not going to charge him. But the police, to their credit, never gave up on it. They did everything they possibly could have done to try to move the needle and get him put away. And, you know, of course, at that point, once the feds took over, then Epstein had a bigger problem, and then he needed to hire more lawyers who were politically connected in Washington.

Then at that point, it rose and rose to the White House, really, where the case just kept rolling. And that was part of my—really, the biggest part of my investigation was looking at how Epstein and his lawyers manipulated our Justice Department in a big way.

They basically got almost everything they wanted, except they wanted the case to completely disappear. They wanted him to walk away without anything. And what they ultimately got was this sweetheart deal that they kept secret for a year. You know, the victims never even knew exactly what happened until a year later, when finally, a judge unsealed the agreement.

LaFrance: So for you, it’s not the Epstein list or the jail-cell video or the circumstances around his death, but really: Who was that person in the first place who decided that he should walk, basically?

Brown: Yeah.

LaFrance: That’s really interesting.

Brown: Yeah, who were the people behind that in the beginning? Because if they had done their jobs, of all these people in 2006, 2007, and 2008—if all those people working for us, the American public, had done their jobs, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now. A lot of those victims would’ve never been victimized.

LaFrance: So it sounds like under the Bush administration, primarily, or does this go into Obama’s DOJ as well?

Brown: No, it was primarily initially Bush’s administration.

LaFrance: What should happen now, if there’s any possibility of justice or truth or any sense of closure in this scandal? What is it going to take, and what do you think should happen next?

Brown: I go back to when I took up this case initially. It had been written about. A lot of people knew. There had been tons of stories about the “Lolita Express,” “Epstein Island.” You know, this conspiracy-theory cycle started way back before I even took up the investigation, but I was looking at it from a different vantage point, as a journalist, about exactly what happened.

I looked at it sort of like a cold-case detective, just pretend that I know nothing about the case and start all over. And I think at this point, that’s probably the same thing that the Justice Department, in an ideal world, should do. Because this is never going to end. This is going to be like the JFK assassination. Long after you and I are gone, there’s gonna be people that are gonna be writing and looking at this, and writing books about it. I just know it.

And so I think in an ideal world, we should just step back and look at everything from the start and examine what happened. I just don’t think there’s the courage or the political will to do something like that, because a hearing where you’re bringing a couple people before Congress isn’t going to do that, isn’t gonna get you those answers. What will get your answers if you get a really good prosecutor to really examine this.

LaFrance: I want to end where we started, which is with the victims, and we’re talking here about some 200 people whose lives are forever changed by these crimes. Have you talked to any of those victims in the past week or so? I’m curious what they’re saying now, how they’re responding to this latest drama. What have you heard?

Brown: I try not to bother them, you know, every time you call them—even one of the lawyers I spoke with who represented nine victims, I spoke with this morning, I said, Have you spoken with your clients? And he said no. He said, I do not call them unless it’s something really big, because you just open that wound every time they get that phone call.

And so I’ve been very respectful of their privacy. I rarely ever call them. I figure if they need me, they’ll call me. I did think about them after Trump made the comments that this was boring—and I can’t remember the other word he used—but I just cringed because I thought, Oh, gosh. You know, I felt their pain when he said those words. This is just a nightmare for them.

You know? This is just a horrible nightmare for them because all they want is for the government to do its job. I might get emotional here because I feel bad for them because I know them so well, some of them. And the interviews I did with them were very painful to do. And I just feel that our government is just failing them over and over again. And, you know, even though I’m a journalist, I am a human being too. And I just think that what they went through and they’re still continuing to go through is painful. Painful.

LaFrance: Well, Julie, thank you so much for all of your extraordinary reporting and, especially, for your time today.

Brown: Thank you.

[Music]

LaFrance: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered this episode and provided original music. Sam Fentress fact-checked this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/listener.

I’m Adrienne LaFrance. Hanna Rosin will be back next week.

This transcript originally misattributed a quote from Benny Johnson to Kash Patel.

How Much Worse Is This Going to Get?

2025-07-07T06:00:00-04:00

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You would be forgiven for not knowing which lesson, exactly, Americans ought to take from the bloody morning of September 13, 1859. On that day, in the mouth of a clearing by Lake Merced, in the hills of San Francisco, two men decided to settle an argument the old-fashioned way: with a pair of handcrafted .58-caliber pistols and a mutual death wish.

Theirs wasn’t the most famous duel in American history. But David Terry’s murder of his friend turned rival David Broderick that California morning is, I would argue, America’s second-most-famous duel, and possibly its most consequential.

Broderick and Terry had originally traveled westward in search of gold—Broderick from his hometown of Washington, D.C., and Terry by way of Russellville, Kentucky. Instead they found careers in public service, which is how they crossed paths: Broderick as a U.S. senator, Terry as the chief justice of the California Supreme Court. They were both Democrats, but very different kinds of Democrats, at a moment when those differences were matters of life and death. Over the years, their friendship had been badly strained by the question of slavery—Terry was for it, Broderick against. This disagreement hardened into disgust. Their relationship fell apart publicly and spectacularly. Locals were so seized by the drama that on that fateful Tuesday in September, a caravan of spectators rode out in carriages to the lake to watch the ritual unfold.

The duel ended as duels often did, quickly and irreversibly. Ten paces, wheel around, fire. Broderick had a reputation as a superior marksman. He was also given first dibs on his position at the dueling grounds. But neither advantage did him any good. The hair trigger on his pistol—the guns, with their smooth walnut handles, had been provided by a Terry ally—meant that Broderick accidentally fired too early, the bullet disappearing into the sandy soil at his feet. Terry knew he could take his time. He aimed his pistol carefully. He shot. Broderick crumpled. He died three days later.

Duels were still common in those days, and although they were not exactly popular with the public, they were tolerated. (At the time, the U.S. Navy lost two-thirds as many men to duels as to combat.) Duels were a matter of honor, and an established political rite.

Broderick’s murder changed all of that. He was the first—and still the only—sitting U.S. senator to be killed in a duel. His death made headlines nationwide, as newspapers recounted the face-off obsessively. The public was mesmerized by the coverage but also repulsed by the violence. After that, Americans still dueled here and there, but not as they had before. Today, many consider the Broderick-Terry duel to have been the last real American duel—the one that turned the nation against dueling once and for all.

I was thinking about Broderick and Terry recently after a gunman disguised as a police officer assassinated the lawmaker Melissa Hortman, along with her husband, Mark, in their Minnesota home last month. For many years I have been preoccupied by questions about political violence in America—most of all with the question of how to interrupt a cycle of political violence before more people are killed. Those who study political violence have told me that it frequently takes a catastrophe to shake a numbed citizenry to its senses about the violence all around them. Ending any cycle of political violence requires a strong collective rejection—including the imposition of a political and social cost for those who would choose or cheer on violence to get their way.

When I wrote about this subject at length for this magazine, in an April 2023 story, William Bernstein, the author of The Delusions of Crowds, told me he was not optimistic that anything other than a violent shock to the system would work against the current spasm of political violence in America. By that point it had become clear that any hope that January 6, 2021, would prompt a course correction—that it could be the event that forced Americans into a shared mass rejection of political violence—had long since evaporated. “The answer is—and it’s not going to be a pleasant answer—the answer is that the violence ends if it boils over into a containable cataclysm,” Bernstein told me at the time. What if, he went on—“I almost hesitate to say this”—but what if they actually had hanged Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi on January 6? “I don’t think it ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm,” he said. “I think, absent that, it just boils along for a generation or two generations.”

I have heard echoes of that bleak projection from many experts in the intervening years. Given that the violence in our nation is not only tolerated but often celebrated, I worry more now than I did even two years ago about how bad it will have to get for this particular fever to break.

In addition to the recent assassinations in Minnesota, Americans have in the past year alone witnessed two assasination attempts against Donald Trump; the Midtown Manhattan murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO; an arson attack at the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro; the murder of a young couple leaving the Capital Jewish Museum, in Washington; the murder of an 82-year-old woman in a firebombing attack in Colorado; and the attempted kidnapping of the mayor of Memphis. With startling frequency, Americans are attempting to resolve political disagreement through violence. And all the while, leaders at the highest levels of American government are aggressively stoking this national bloodlust, and demonstrating a willingness to carry out violence against citizens.

The president of the United States has repeatedly fantasized about violently hurting and even killing Americans. He describes those who disagree with him politically as “vermin” and has said that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.” Trump infamously mused about executing General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and proceeded to take away Milley’s security detail. (His anger was prompted by a profile of Milley by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed the numerous ways that Milley had defended the U.S. Constitution from Trump during his first presidency.)

Trump has repeatedly described, in bizarre detail, his desire to see American journalists suffer—he is specifically preoccupied with fantasies of journalists being beaten and raped in prison. According to Trump’s former defense secretary Mark Esper, Trump implored Esper to have troops shoot into a crowd of protesters. (Trump has denied this.) And on January 6, as Trump’s supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol, he angrily pushed back against those in his administration who expressed alarm, saying, “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me,” as his former aide Cassidy Hutchinson has testified. Trump promised he would act as a dictator on the first day of his second term. And on that day, he pardoned more than 1,500 people who had been convicted for their actions in the 2021 insurrection, including those with ties to various extremist groups and those who had violently attacked law enforcement at the Capitol.

One of the most chilling aspects of living through any period of intense political violence is not knowing, while you are in it, how long it will last or how bad it will get. That is in part because, somewhat counterintuitively, you can’t properly account for political violence simply by tallying attacks. As Erin Miller, the longtime program manager at the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, once told me, “There are a lot of people who are out for a protest, who are advocating for violence,” but who will never actually take violent action. “Then there’s a smaller number at the tip of the iceberg that are willing to carry out violent attacks.”

We’re not yet at the level of violence that plagued the nation during the Civil War, nor even at the level of violence that ripped through American cities in the years before and after World War I, when dynamite attacks were common. Scholars lately have been debating whether things are officially as bad as they were in the 1960s and ’70s. And many point out that America’s political-violence problem could just as easily be described as a gun-violence problem. As the legendary columnist Henry Fairlie wrote in The Washington Post shortly after the attempt on then-President Ronald Reagan’s life, in 1981: “Nothing links Lee Harvey Oswald to Sirhan Sirhan to Arthur [Bremer] to Sarah Jane Moore to Lynette Fromme to John Warnock Hinckley Jr., except guns.” No matter where you fall on the spectrum of these debates, political violence in America is clearly worsening across several key measures.

Vigilante violence is on the rise—mostly in the form of lone-wolf attacks, or what the FBI sometimes calls “salad-bar extremism.” At the same time, organized violence may be poised to resurge—not only because so many leaders of violent extremist groups recently waltzed out of prison with their golden-ticket Trump pardons, but also because of the ever more extreme tenor of political debate in America. In a recent report from a nonpartisan group at Princeton University about the biggest threats we face in 2025, researchers found that immigrant groups are at an especially high risk of political violence this year and for the foreseeable future. “Proposed bounty bills, in particular, could embolden private citizens to engage in self-styled enforcement actions targeting immigrants and their allies,” the report said.

At the same time, trust in law enforcement is down. Police killings of citizens are back up. Death threats and violent attacks against public servants are way, way, way up. And although many Americans are highly concerned about domestic political violence, many people are also moving toward violence rather than away from it. A 2024 poll shows that as many as one in five Americans believes they may have to resort to violence to get what they want. A more recent poll shows that even more Americans—one in three—believe that “because things have gotten so far off track, Americans may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

One of the challenges of addressing political violence in America lies in navigating the many intellectual cul-de-sacs—all worthy in their own right—that can distract from the task of preventing further violence. There are debates over what counts as political violence in the first place. (I favor a simple, classic definition: Political violence is violence that is intended to prevent or provoke change.) There are arguments over how bad political violence actually is. (My colleague Graeme Wood makes a persuasive argument that everyone in America should actually just calm down about all this.) And, of course, there are legitimate disagreements over when and whether resorting to violence is ever morally permissible, or even necessary (a people’s uprising against an oppressive dictator, for example). And some violence is already seen as permissible by law—acting, for instance, in self-defense.

Political violence is of course fundamentally at odds with the philosophy of democratic self-governance. This is because violence poses an existential threat to the conditions—republican independence and freedom from government interference chief among them—that allow for the people to hold power. Or as Sarah Birch, the author of Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order, has put it: “A community that will tolerate violence will get violence. A community that does not tolerate violence is much less likely to have violence.” Birch has argued that it is up to “every single citizen to condemn violence and to talk in such a way that makes it unacceptable.”

She’s right that the communities that tolerate violence will get it. They’ll get it from vigilantes, from organized extremist groups, and—most concerning of all—from the state itself. Throughout history and around the world, periods of political violence have been met with the enthusiastic opportunism of those who seek to quash democracy and seize power for themselves. Even in instances where resorting to violence gains broad public support—as when, for example, workers facing deadly conditions demand basic protections on moral grounds—the crackdown on civil liberties that often comes in response is a terrible threat to American values and freedoms, and has left many stains on our history. I don’t have to tell you that Trump seems particularly eager for such opportunities to come his way. His record speaks for itself. (See also his deployment of thousands of National Guard troops and some 700 Marines to Los Angeles in a show of force against protesters there.)

Back in Broderick and Terry’s day, public revulsion over the duel ended Terry’s political career—but not just that. His eagerness, and that of other defenders of slavery, to resort to violence doomed their cause. And so, among the several lessons that one might take from the bloody events of September 13, 1859, there is this: Nothing good can happen between two furious men pointing pistols at each other before dawn.

Also: If you believe in settling arguments with violence against those who disagree with you, you should expect to die that way.

And: If you look away while others resolve their differences violently, if you believe you can comfortably compartmentalize certain kinds of violence from a safe distance, you should expect to die for what you believe, too, because political violence does not stay contained or ideologically pure. Political violence has a way of perpetuating itself—feeding on itself, spilling ever more blood—until enough people are willing to say, “No more.”

Politicians often react to political violence by insisting that it is alien to our character, that it is not who we are. They are wrong. In just the three decades leading up to the Civil War, there were at least 70 violent skirmishes among members of Congress, according to Joanne Freeman, a scholar of political violence at Yale and the author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. That included the time when, in 1841, a brawl broke out in the U.S. House of Representatives; several members of Congress piled on top of one another, and others stood on tables. (One journalist who observed the fight described having seen several canes above the melee, “raised up as if in the act of striking.”) In 1850, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi pulled a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri on the Senate floor. (Benton was not one for de-escalation. He reportedly ripped open his shirt and shouted, “Let the assassin fire!” before onlookers successfully grabbed the pistol out of Foote’s hands.)

The congressional pile-on of 1841, with all of those canes hoisted as weapons, calls to mind another infamous tremor of political violence that I’ve been thinking about lately. This particular incident happened three years before Broderick’s death, on May 22, 1856. That day, Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, confronted Charles Sumner, a congressman from Massachusetts, over (once again) their differing views on slavery. Brooks owned slaves and wanted to keep it that way. Sumner was an abolitionist. So right there on the Senate floor, Brooks lifted his thick, metal-topped cane and beat Sumner until blood ran into his eyes and he slipped into unconsciousness. Brooks didn’t stop beating him until the cane had broken apart into bloody pieces.

Today, people remember Brooks’s attack for its terrible brutality and sheer pettiness. But in retrospect, one of its most terrifying aspects is not the violence itself—as horrible as it was—but what came next.

Sumner was permanently injured, and would spend years trying to regain basic functions. Brooks never apologized for what he did. He only doubled down. Yet after the attack, Brooks’s many supporters in Congress took to wearing fragments of the broken cane, fashioned into rings that they strung around their necks, in a gruesome showing of solidarity. And then the people of South Carolina reelected him. They began to send him new canes, more than he could ever use, bearing inscriptions such as Hit Him Again and Good Job. This wasn’t just tolerance of political violence, or forgiveness of it, but full-throated support.

Often, it is only when events recede into history that a society can see clearly what it has endured—and how close it has come to disaster. For generations, a portrait of Charles Sumner that hangs in the Capitol went mostly unnoticed. But on January 6, 2021, there it was in the background of photos showing the unthinkable: insurrectionists stalking the halls of the Capitol, 150 years after the end of the Civil War, waving the Confederate flag under Sumner’s nose. The mass pardoning of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol is a clear message: Good job. Hit him again.

Those pardons are also a signal to society that violence is in fact the way that we settle political differences in America. The president of the United States has made clear to the American people that when you want to get your way, you can do it however you want—whether with a Belgian pistol, or a cane, or the blunt end of a flagpole, or an AK-47 and a rubber mask on your neighbor’s doorstep in the middle of the night.

It need not be this way. It should not be this way. But right now, it is. And it will get worse until Americans demand otherwise—from one another, from our elected officials, from ourselves. A society in which people resign to resolve their differences through bloodshed will eventually carry that logic to every possible argument, every small town, and every last household.

This is our national paradox. Political violence is deeply, inescapably American. It has been this way since the very beginning. The first recorded duel in the New World took place in 1621, not long after the landing at Plymouth. Our nation was born in a swirl of revolution and musket smoke, and episodes of political violence can be found in every decade since we declared our independence.

Yet for us to build the country we have promised ourselves, and that we have promised our children—for the guarantee of the very freedoms our fellow citizens have fought and died for—we must find a way for America to be America without killing one another over what we want this nation to be. We must insist on resolving political differences passionately but peacefully. We must return to power only those who believe in decency, honor, and dignity—not only for their political allies but for all Americans. Two centuries ago, Americans defended their honor through acts of violence against one another. Today, Americans should defend their honor through the courage to show restraint. It is too late for David Broderick, and for Bobby Kennedy, and for Martin Luther King Jr., and for Melissa Hortman, and for every other American who was ever lynched, executed, tortured, or killed for their beliefs. But it is not too late for this nation and its citizens to choose peace.

A Ticking Clock on American Freedom

2025-04-22T06:00:00-04:00

Look around, take stock of where you are, and know this: Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. If this sounds dramatic to you, it should. Over the past five months, in many hours of many conversations with multiple people who have lived under dictators and autocrats, one message came through loud and clear: America, you are running out of time.

People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a “slide,” but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country’s democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.

Shortly after Trump was reelected last fall, I called Ressa to ask her how she thought Americans should prepare for his return. She told me then that she worried about a failure of imagination. She knew that the speed of the destruction of institutions—one of the first steps an authoritarian takes to solidify and centralize power—would surprise people here, even those paying the closest attention. Ressa splits her time between Manila and New York, and she repeatedly warned me to be ready for everything to happen quickly. When we spoke again weeks after his inauguration, Ressa was shaken. President Trump was moving faster than even she had anticipated.

[Jonathan Rauch: One word describes Trump]

I heard something similar recently from Garry Kasparov, the Russian dissident and chess grand master. To him, the situation was obvious. America is running out of time, he told me. As Kasparov wrote recently in this magazine, “If this sounds alarmist, forgive me for not caring. Exactly 20 years ago, I retired from professional chess to help Russia resist Putin’s budding dictatorship. People were slow to grasp what was happening there too.”

The chorus of people who have lived through democratic ruin will all tell you the same thing: Do not make the mistake of assuming you still have time. Put another way: You think you can wait and see, and keep democracy intact? Wanna bet? Those who have seen democracy wrecked in their home country are sometimes derided as overly pessimistic—and it’s understandable that they’d have a sense of inevitability about the dangers of autocracy. But that gloomy worldview does not make their warnings any less credible: Unless Trump’s power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back—and that’s if you’re lucky.

The Trump administration’s breakneck pace is obviously no accident. While citizens are busy processing their shock over any one shattered norm or disregarded law, Trump is already on to the next one. This is the playbook authoritarians have used all over the world: First the leader removes those with expertise and independent thinking from the government and replaces them with leaders who are arrogant, ignorant, and extremely loyal. Next he takes steps to centralize his power and claim unprecedented authority. Along the way, he conducts an all-out assault on the truth so that the truth tellers are distrusted, corruption becomes the norm, and questioning him becomes impossible. The Constitution bends and then finally breaks. This is what tyrants do. Trump is doing it now in the United States.

In the Philippines, it took about six months under Duterte for democratic institutions to crumble. In the United States, the overreach in executive power and the destruction of federal agencies that Ressa told me she figured would have kept Trump busy through, say, the end of the summer were carried out in the first 30 days of his presidency. Even so, what people don’t always realize is that a dictator doesn’t seize control all at once. “The death of democracy happens by a thousand cuts,” Ressa told me recently. “And you don’t realize how badly you’re bleeding until it’s too late.” Another thing the people who have lived under authoritarian rule will tell you: It’s not just that it can get worse. It will.

Americans who are waiting for Trump to cross some imaginary red line neglect the fact that they have more leverage to defend American democracy today than they will tomorrow, or next week, or next month. While people are still debating whether to call it authoritarianism or fascism, Trump is seizing control of one independent agency after another. (And for what it’s worth, the smartest scholars I know have told me that what Trump is trying to do in America is now textbook fascism—beyond the authoritarian impulses of his first term. Take, for example, his administration’s rigid ideological purity tests, or the extreme overreach of government into freedom of scientific and academic inquiry.)

Between the time I write this sentence and the moment when this story will be published, the federal government will lose hundreds more qualified, ethical civil servants. Soon, even higher numbers of principled people in positions of power will be fired or will resign. More positions will be left vacant or filled by people without standards or scruples. The government’s attacks against other checks on power—the press, the judiciary—will worsen. Enormous pressure will be exerted on people to stay silent. And silence is a form of consent.

The truth is, checks and balances work only when individuals are courageous enough to speak out. Many American citizens, though, have been conspicuously quiet in the early days of Trump’s second term. People like Kasparov and Ressa, who have lived through the flip to authoritarianism elsewhere, warn that this is a mistake, as do many scholars who have studied totalitarianism and dictatorships across history. At a time like this, hesitation can mean the difference between freedom and tyranny.

These are not uncertain times, not really. The trick of aspiring dictators is they tell you exactly what they’re going to do ahead of time. There’s a famous saying about propagandists—that they repeat the lie until it becomes true. But corrupt leaders use repetition effectively in other ways, too. An authoritarian repeats lies, yes, but he also repeats outrageous truths until they no longer sound outrageous, at least to some. Tell people again and again that you’re going to imprison political enemies or journalists, or otherwise take away basic freedoms, and the public becomes primed to accept the attack when it finally happens. The role of technology in the rise of authoritarianism cannot be overstated: Social platforms built for scale—and designed to reward anger, hate, and snap reactions over truth—helped Trump win the presidency, serve as networks for anti-freedom propaganda, and have assisted others like him in gaining power around the world. Technologies that could be used for democratic expression are instead used to warp public opinion and suppress dissent.

Back in 2017, Duterte’s propagandists made the hashtag #ArrestMariaRessa go viral—that was two years before he finally used a pretense to arrest her. By declaring his intent so far in advance, the president ensured that when he had his perceived enemies arrested, it would be shocking but not surprising. This is how dictators lead people to believe that something abnormal is normal, or that something illegal is permissible. This is how people come to find themselves “just following orders.” Sometimes, when you know what’s coming, that can be enough to let it happen.

Months before Duterte was elected in 2016, Ressa interviewed him for Rappler, the news organization she’d co-founded in the Philippines in 2012. Like Trump, who has sworn to root out “the enemy from within,” Duterte had taken aim at his own government. “I will stop corruption, I will stop criminality, I will fix government,” he told her at the time. He went on: “When I said I’ll stop criminality, I’ll stop criminality. And if I have to kill you, I’ll kill you. Personally.” When an authoritarian tells you he’s going to do something, believe him. Each outlandish statement is a trial balloon, one step closer to action. And when people don’t push back—or, worse, when supporters cheer him on—the boundaries for acceptable behavior permanently shift.

[Garry Kasparov: How America can avoid becoming Russia]

This is why Trump calls journalists purveyors of “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” It’s why he floats the idea of executing his perceived political foes, and doing away with the First Amendment. It’s why he has moved beyond simply wanting to deport people who are in this country illegally and now says “homegrowns are next” when he talks about his desire to send Americans to a gulag in El Salvador. And it’s why he is trying to take over universities and other once-independent institutions. In his first month back in office, Trump banned the Associated Press from the White House because it wouldn’t agree to use only the words he liked. He seized control of the White House press pool, which previously operated independently, run by members of the press. And his Pentagon told journalists that it would end long-standing tradition and do away with the press pool that has the chance to travel with—and ask questions of—the secretary of defense. Trump continues to muse, as he has done before, about crushing the press and anyone who leaks information to reporters. Trump ranted in a social-media post about anonymous sources, saying that “a big price should be paid for this blatant dishonesty” and threatening to sue reporters and news outlets. He went on: “I’ll do it as a service to our Country. Who knows, maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!”

Trump keeps moving the goalposts this way. Remember when he mused publicly that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it? He wants people to believe that they deserve to be punished, and that he deserves to do whatever he wants, with impunity. More recently, Trump put it this way: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

One key difference between Trump and Duterte, at least so far, is violence. Duterte started carrying out the extrajudicial murder of citizens within hours of taking the oath of office. He was, he said, making good on his promise to crack down on crime. (He’d previously done the same when he was a mayor, with the help of vigilantes and even police officers.) His administration, human-rights groups say, ultimately killed tens of thousands of civilians. “I’m not really a bad guy,” one of Duterte’s supporters told Patricia Evangelista, one of the reporters who worked in Ressa’s newsroom. To this man it was simple: “Some people need killing.” Ressa remembers it as a surreal time. She learned quickly that once a dictator takes power, dehumanizing forces are suddenly all around. This is how an authoritarian changes a culture: by getting supporters to cheer on grotesqueries of all manner, including the cessation of the freedoms he’s telling you he is about to seize. This is why so many Americans are horrified by Trump’s indifference to due process. Due process is important on principle—it’s a constitutional right. But doing away with it also signals that the state believes it can do whatever it wants to people.

Ressa has some advice for Americans: If you’re in a leadership position, she says, you must demonstrate that you understand the seriousness of the situation, and that you’re there to protect the people who are depending on you. But also, you have to know that not everyone is brave. Not everyone is ready to stand up for their freedom; those who are fearful are easily manipulated, and can put others at risk. When the stakes are this high, she advises, there’s no time for weakness. Remember that a weak link—be it an individual, a university, or a law firm—is a point of danger for those who need to hold the line. As I’ve written before, capitulation is contagious. But so, too, is courage.

In January 2018, Rappler received its first shutdown order from the government. Ressa and her co-founder, Chay Hofilena, immediately held a press conference to make sure that people understood that Duterte was trying to intimidate their newsroom and silence its reporting, and that it would not work. Years later, Duterte would again try to shut down Rappler’s website. But the goal was always to keep publishing no matter what—and Ressa succeeded. Preparation was everything. Her leadership team had a shutdown plan. She and her colleagues ran drills on how to bring their website back online within 24 hours, relying on servers in other countries, if the government of the Philippines shut them down. (Funnily enough, she had already positioned Rappler’s servers in the United States as a safeguard—she figured that America, home of the free, would protect the right to free press. Today, she advises American news organizations to move their servers elsewhere.)

Rappler also created a buddy system for the newsroom. “We knew that our journalists might be framed for crimes, and we warned them about that,” she told me. “We reminded them that if any altercation took place with the government, the first thing they should do is to pick up their phone and start live-broadcasting what was happening.” They did drills so that “going live” would be muscle memory for them, so that when the time came, they could be frightened and flooded with adrenaline, and start broadcasting anyway.

This practice paid off. At one point, one of Ressa’s journalists, Pia Ranada, arrived at the presidential palace for a press briefing only to be told that she couldn’t enter. She wasn’t given a reason. But she remembered her training: Ressa recalled to me that you can see in Ranada’s footage that her hand was shaking as she turned on her camera and asked why she was being kept out. The president’s security team indicated that the order had come from above, but wouldn’t say why. Even then, Ressa recalled, she and her colleagues did not know how bad it would get. “I always knew Duterte would come after the press—he told us he would!—but I failed to imagine the worst of it,” she said. “I never thought I would actually be arrested. I was wrong.” Corrupt governments use lawfare to punish people. Legal battles are expensive, and can destroy people’s reputations and livelihoods. Not everyone has the financial resources to go up against the government.

Ressa was arrested the day before Valentine’s Day in 2019, charged with “cyberlibel” over a story published before a cyberlibel law had even taken effect. In a little over a year, Duterte’s government filed 10 arrest warrants against her with a cumulative maximum prison sentence of 103 years. (Every time Ressa got arrested, Rappler’s audience and friends would step up and donate generously. “I liked to joke that this was not a sustainable business model,” Ressa told me.) Now, nearly a decade later, Ressa has defeated eight of those criminal charges in court—and Duterte is in prison at The Hague.

You find out very quickly who your true friends are when the government tries to break you. But it’s lonely, too. When Duterte was coming after Ressa, she worried that any friends who stood up for her were placing themselves at risk. There came a time when she felt she couldn’t even go out to lunch with a friend, in case that friend’s business or family would then be targeted by the government. For a time, she wore a flak jacket on her commute—roads were a favorite hunting ground for death squads, who would shoot people from their motorcycles; getting to and from places was the most dangerous part of her day. Others knew this too: At one point, a Good Samaritan offered an armored car. But Ressa eventually drew the line. As a former war-zone correspondent, she had a high risk tolerance. She also had a sense of mission: No one could stop her from telling the truth.

Dangerous times call for high levels of both calm and courage. You need to assume the worst is going to happen, and work backwards from there. People like to join the pack, and that’s not always a bad thing. Strength in numbers is real. You need to create a community around you. Not just for your own protection, but for everyone else’s. Remember that facts still matter. Every individual who speaks out, every person who calls a lie a lie, demonstrates fealty to the truth. Do not assume that your voice does not matter. It does. You also choose truth by what you read, how you choose to spend your time. If people no longer care about reality, authoritarians learn that they can do whatever they want. Put another way: If you lose reality, you lose the rule of law. You lose democracy. You are no longer free.

[Steven Levitsky: The new authoritarianism]

All you can do is hold the line. Hold the line to the standards of your industry’s ethics. Hold the line to what the Constitution says. The minute you step back, or voluntarily give up freedom, it is gone for good. Dissidents do not always win. Garry Kasparov spoke out against Putin and ultimately fled his country for America because he faced persecution at home. In the Philippines, the people were able to beat back Duterte democratically—but democracy is still extremely fragile there, certainly more so than when Duterte first won the presidency.

Basic American freedoms are already far more vulnerable today than even one month ago, even a week ago. The United States has long been a bulwark for democracies everywhere. Not so at the moment. But it is not too late. Find your people. Fight for your values. Collaborate with those who still believe in truth, and humanity, and the inalienable rights of the people.

“When I hear people ask if they should flee to some other country, some faraway land, I want to shake them. You want an escape plan? To where?” Ressa said to me recently. “If the United States of America falls, it’s the ball game.”

It is easy to dismiss warnings about the demise of American freedoms as hyperbole, or the darkest pessimism. But there’s a paradox here. Those who have the greatest sense of urgency about the need to protect democracy in the United States, those who have seen firsthand how bad it can get and how quickly freedom can be snuffed out—they are optimists in their own way. We should listen to them not only because they may be right, but because they recognize what Americans know in their bones to be true: This nation, these freedoms, they are sacred. They are ours. And it is not too late. Not yet, anyway.

The Nicest Swamp on the Internet

2025-03-04T07:00:00-05:00

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In the ever-expanding universe of obsolete sounds, few can compare to the confident yawp of a dial-up modem. Back in the early days, the internet was slow, but we didn’t know it yet. Or at least we didn’t care. And why should we have? The stuff of the web was organic, something you had to plant and then harvest. It took time. Websites popped up like wildflowers. Far-flung enthusiasts found one another, but gradually. Nobody owned the web, and everybody did. It was open, and everything seemed possible. Everything was possible. Maybe it still is.

Strange things are happening online these days. Strange bad, clearly. But also strange good. One unexpected development is that Reddit, long dogged by a reputation for mischief and mayhem, has achieved a kind of mass appeal. If you ask your friends where they’ve been hanging out online lately, you’re likely to hear some of them say Reddit, actually, perhaps with a tinge of surprise.

Reddit’s founders didn’t set out to save the web. College roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian wanted to create a mobile food-ordering service. But their idea didn’t make sense, at least not at the time. It was 2005; the iPhone didn’t exist yet. So they built something else, no less ambitious: a site that promised to be “the front page of the internet.” Reddit was a place to share all manner of memes, photographs, questions, embarrassing stories, and ideas. Users could upvote posts into internet virality, or sometimes infamy. Eventually, they built their own communities, known as subreddits.

For the first decade of its existence, Reddit was not exactly a respectable place to hang out. Like its spiritual cousin 4chan, Reddit was primarily known for, among other things, creepshots, revenge porn, abject racism, anti-Semitism, and violent misogyny. Endearing corners of Reddit existed, but you couldn’t get to them without stumbling over some seriously disturbing material.

Some of that disturbing material is still there if you look for it, but lately, the gross stuff has been crowded out by the good stuff, and more and more people have congregated on Reddit. Last year the company went public, saw a huge swell in audience, and became profitable for the first time in its history. And though its runaway growth slowed last quarter, Reddit says it now has more than 100 million daily users and more than 100,000 active communities.

The joy of Reddit comes from it being simultaneously niche and expansive—like an infinite world’s fair of subcultures, fandoms, support groups, and curiosities. There seems to be a subreddit for everyone and everything. There are mainstream subreddits with popular appeal, such as r/askscience (26 million users) and r/technology (18 million users). But there are also more esoteric forums, such as r/rentnerzeigenaufdinge, the German-language subreddit that’s devoted to context-free photos of retirees pointing at random things. (That group’s stated purpose: Hier bekommen alte Menschen die Bühne, die sie verdienen. “Here, old people get the stage they deserve.”) There’s r/notablueberry, where people share images of berries that are not blueberries, which other people often warn them not to eat. Some subreddits exist just to deliver a punch line, like r/Lurkers, a community with more than 41,000 members in which no one posts anything at all.

Asking someone where they spend time on Reddit opens a window onto their personality that can be surprisingly intimate. Here, I’ll go: I love r/whatisit, where users share photos of confusing objects they encounter; r/Honolulu, which is a mix of island news and extremely local references; r/tipofmytongue, where people ask for help finding or identifying “un-googleable” songs, movies, books, or other scraps of cultural memory; r/metropolis, dedicated entirely to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film of the same name; and r/MildlyVandalised, a place to share milquetoast visual pranks, such as a shelf of World Book Encyclopedias rearranged so their spines lined up to say WEIRD COCK. (Reddit may be less hateful these days, but it is still juvenile.)

There is a subreddit where violinists gently correct one another’s bow holds, a subreddit for rowers where people compare erg scores, and a subreddit for people who are honest-to-God allergic to the cold and trade tips about which antihistamine regimen works best. One subreddit is for people who encounter cookie cutters whose shapes they cannot decipher. The responses reliably entail a mix of sincere sleuthing to find the answer and ridiculously creative and crude joke guesses.

Not everything on Reddit is merely cute, of course. I have lost count of the number of friends who have mentioned to me that they add the word Reddit to their Google searches—a shortcut to the place where they know they’ll find the best information online. Google, once the unsurpassed King of Search, has become hostile to its users, surfacing hilariously unhelpful AI responses (including telling people to eat rocks and glue) and making it woefully difficult to retrieve credible information, even when you know exactly what source you’re looking for. Reddit, by contrast, offers truly specialized knowledge for every need. It provides travel tips to every conceivable destination and practical advice for every imaginable home-improvement project. One friend told me about using Reddit to find the right tension for his tennis-racket strings and the best embroiderer for a custom hockey jersey. And although the wisdom of the crowd is not fact-checked, Reddit’s culture tends to be equal parts generous and skeptical—meaning that good, or at least helpful, information often rises to the top.

Recently, on the r/creepy subreddit, someone posted about having found a tiny skeleton under the floorboards in their house. “Am I cursed for eternity now?” they wanted to know. The top reply came from someone who explained that they were a zooarchaeologist and could therefore be “95% certain this is a mouse skeleton,” and offered to send their own photo of a mouse skeleton for reference. “Hell yeah,” someone else chimed in. “Ask a random question and get an answer from someone who specializes in the exact niche. Amazing.”

How did this happen? How did Reddit go from being a disgusting fever swamp to an oasis of happiness, expertise, exuberance? Excising the most egregious subreddits was the first step, and not an uncontroversial one. Good and necessary free-speech debates followed. But the site has always given its users more control than other major social platforms. Reddit’s moderators are almost exclusively volunteers, and they are power users. They set the rules for the subreddits they run, and they tend to take their job seriously. The subreddit r/AskHistorians has a reputation for being one of the most heavily moderated communities on Reddit—rather than deleting some comments, it seems to delete most of them. If you don’t like that, and there are plenty of people who don’t, you can join another subreddit for history buffs. Or start your own.

On Reddit, it’s people—not the platform—who decide what any one community should be. (Reddit does still ban whole subreddits sometimes, as it did recently with a group posting violent threats.) Even the most ridiculous forums make their expectations known. In the subreddit r/DivorcedBirds, which is for sharing images of birds that “look like serial monogamists,” moderators specify the following: “Please post pictures of birds who look like they are twice divorced (or more!) and an original caption about their backstory.” Also: No photos of “human women”; no art, paintings, or Photoshop; and “no dead birds.”

Giving users this much control over a major social platform is basically unheard-of anymore. It’s a throwback to the early web, when people had to tend to the sites they wanted to be a part of, and it’s a stark contrast to the way other social-media sites have evolved.

Reddit is surging at a time when much of the rest of the social web has curdled. The mainstream platforms are overrun with a combination of bots, bigots, and bad AI, especially because platforms such as X and Facebook have declared that the substance of what people post is of no concern to them. Which is how we got to the point that Reddit, of all places, has developed a reputation as a force for good, or at least a force for reminding people of the promise of a decentralized open web.

The social giants that worship at the altar of megascale—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X—have chosen to do so at the expense of humanity. They train their algorithms to feed people the things that make them angry and afraid and keep them scrolling. Reddit has its own ambitions for exponential growth, but so far it has managed to retain a small-group feeling while still operating at scale.

The question is whether this is a sustainable model. What if this golden moment for Reddit is not a renaissance but a last hurrah—one final reminder of what could have been, before a tsunami of AI wipes out the places that once sparkled with humanity? Reddit recently unveiled its own AI product, Reddit Answers, to the disgust of many of its users. And some long-time users worry that something essential will be lost as normies flock to the platform.

[Read: Is this how Reddit ends?]

For now, though, Reddit remains wildly original and startlingly generous, which is to say, deeply and gorgeously human. It provides connection to others, stokes curiosity, and—at least in some subreddits—leaves you with a feeling of time well spent, a rarity on other social platforms. Because as different as each Reddit community is, every good subreddit is irrepressibly captivating for the same reason: the people.

Recently, someone posted a question on r/AskReddit: “What have you done on this platform that you’re most proud of?” The answers ranged from earnest to irreverent. People described feeling good about having used Reddit to read more, and to challenge their understanding of the world. Others praised themselves for not posting mean comments when they had the impulse to. One person described having spent two years on a guitar subreddit learning 100 different solos. Another described how they’d posted a cookbook of reverse-engineered Panda Express recipes to the delight of other users (though not, apparently, to the delight of Panda Express). Somebody else felt proud of having taught fellow Redditors how to open a box filled with packing peanuts without making a mess. One wrote: “I’ve been helping strangers with their various math questions for over ten years!” Another: “I make people laugh from time to time.”

What Reddit does, it turns out, is give people a space that they can create and collectively control, and where they can ask one another question after question after question, in every possible permutation. The place is flooded with expertise and genuine wisdom, and it’s filthy with rabbit holes. But the only two questions that people ever really ask on Reddit, if you think about it, are these: Am I alone? Am I okay? And after all these years, in subreddit after subreddit, no matter what the topic at hand is, the same answers keep coming: You aren’t alone. And you might not be okay. But we’re here.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Internet Can Still Be Good.”

Intimidating Americans Will Not Work

2025-02-19T12:13:30-05:00

The president of the United States is demanding that American citizens use only the words that please him, and he is punishing those who refuse to do so. This is the essence of his attacks against the Associated Press, which he has barred from the White House for referring to the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of Mexico.” He is now demanding that the news agency acquiesce to his renaming of the body of water. “We’re going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” Donald Trump said to reporters earlier this week.

This is not how it works in the United States of America. In our nation, free speech is a God-given right. It is not something that Trump, Elon Musk, or anyone else can grant or take away. Americans are born with the right to speak freely, and to publish freely. In America, as I have written previously, we are free to criticize the government, which is accountable to the people, not the other way around.

Americans for years have confused the power that techno-authoritarians exercise over the social-media platforms they operate with the responsibilities of government. This confusion in many ways presaged our present moment, and the question of who is in fact running the country—the richest man in the world or the man who was elected president. In the past, some of those who have railed against censorship on privately held platforms, such as Facebook and X, may have had good cultural reasons to gripe, but they didn’t really have a classical free-speech argument. (Mark Zuckerberg, who complained about the White House apparently pressuring him to edit and moderate his platform in accordance with its wishes, did have a reasonable free-speech complaint.)

Trump may wish to run the United States like a business, but there are key differences between what a government can do and what a private company can do. A private-business owner can kick people out of his establishment for saying things he doesn’t like. The government cannot. And while it may be Trump’s prerogative to grant access to the Oval Office only to people who will say the words he wishes for them to say, no American, no one who believes in principles established by the First Amendment, should tolerate Trump’s exceedingly un-American reaction to our most sacred freedom.

Call the Gulf of Mexico whatever you want. Call it the Gulf of America, or the Gulf of Steve Martin, or the Gulf of Flying Spaghetti Monsters. This isn’t about a single body of water, or even politicization of language or the naming and renaming of landmarks. It is about basic American principles. The president is floating a great big test balloon, looking to see just how much of an encroachment on freedom Americans will tolerate. Some Americans, like the leaders of the news site Axios, have preemptively acquiesced. (The explanation they offered—that it would use “the Gulf of America” because “our audience is mostly U.S.-based”—was conspicuously illogical and painfully embarrassing for its cowardice.) Many more Americans still remember what their freedoms mean, and what it means to fight for them.

Memorize these words: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Donald Trump may believe he has the authority to do whatever he wishes, the legislative and judiciary branches be damned. But he still has to answer to the people. Freedom of speech makes this country great. It keeps power in check. It brings truth to light. Trump has tried repeatedly to classify Americans who happen to work as journalists as “enemies” of the people. But they are the people. And it’s none of the government’s business what any of its people choose to say.

Do It for Gilda

2025-02-15T16:25:42-05:00

Before John Belushi, before Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or Dan Aykroyd—before any of them, there was Gilda.

Gilda Radner was the first performer Lorne Michaels hired for the cast of Saturday Night Live when it launched, in 1975. She was, at the time, one of the stars of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, the only woman in a cast of men destined to be famous. “I knew that she could do almost anything, and that she was enormously likable,” Michaels once said of the decision. “So I started with her.”

Television audiences immediately fell in love with Radner. How could they not? She was magnetic. She sparkled with a kind of anything’s-possible energy, and stole every scene she was in. She made everything hilarious, and more daring. That was Radner—the tiny woman with the gigantic hair having more fun than everybody around her.

Radner’s charm was so off the charts that practically every character of hers wound up with a beloved catchphrase. There was the bespectacled nerd Lisa Loopner (“So funny I forgot to laugh!”); the poof-haired newscaster Roseanne Roseannadanna (“It just goes to show, it’s always something.”); and the little old lady Emily Litella (“Never mind.”). A typical Litella rant on “Weekend Update” went like this: “What’s all this fuss I keep hearing about violins on television! Why don’t parents want their children to see violins on television! … I say there should be more violins on television!” Chevy Chase eventually leans over and corrects her: Violence, not violins. Litella, sheepish: “Never mind.” Radner based Litella on her own childhood nanny. And the portrayal, like everything she did, was shot through with love.

Radner also appeared in the now-classic “Extremely Stupid” sketch, which became one of the earliest examples of actors breaking—that is, breaking character and cracking up on live television—in SNL history after the guest host, Candice Bergen, flubbed a line. Radner used the moment to great comedic effect, turning directly to the camera to exaggerate the impeccable delivery of her own lines, while Bergen dissolved into laughter beside her.

Almost every comic who came after Radner—and certainly the ones who wound up on Saturday Night Live—counts her as a formative influence. You can see Radner in the rag-doll chaos of Molly Shannon’s character Mary Katherine Gallagher; in the total commitment to the bit of Adam Sandler’s singsong gibberish; in the weird imagination of Kristen Wiig’s universe of absurd characters (the mischievous Gilly and the tiny-handed Dooneese both come to mind); and in the master-class physical comedy of Melissa McCarthy.

Gilda Radner jokes with a person in a King Kong costume at a party on the observatory floor of the Empire State Building in New York City on August 13, 1980. (AP)

Radner herself was always drawn to classic physical comedy—among her idols were Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, anyone who was, in her words, “willing to risk it.” So it made sense that Radner parodied Ball—and the legendary chocolate-factory episode of I Love Lucy—in a sketch, alongside Aykroyd, that had her juggling nuclear warheads coming down a conveyor belt. Then there was Radner’s wordless dance routine with Steve Martin—in which the pair toggles between all-out slapstick and total earnestness—that remains a higher form of comedy, even 50 years later. Radner’s particular charisma came from this blend of bigheartedness and fearlessness. She always went for it. “There was just an abandon she had that was unmatched,” Martin has said. She’d keep going until she got the laugh, however far that took her. And she could make fun without being mean-spirited. (See: her impressions of Barbara Walters as “Baba Wawa” and Patti Smith as “Candy Slice.”)

In 1979, Radner gave the commencement speech—fully in character as Roseanne Roseannadanna—to the graduating class at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, part of which wound up on her comedy album Gilda Radner: Live From New York, released that same year. And while the delivery is pure Roseannadanna, listening to it today is also a reminder of the trail Radner herself blazed, along with SNL cast members Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman, as women in comedy in the 1970s. “Imagine, if you will, an idealistic young Roseanne Roseannadanna, fresh out of the Columbia School of Broadcasting, looking for a job in journalism,” Radner-as-Roseannadanna says. “I filled out applications, I went out for interviews, and they allll told me the same thing: You’re overqualified, you’re underqualified, don’t call us, we’ll call you, it’s a jungle out there, a woman’s place is in the home, have a nice day, drop dead, goodbye. But I didn’t give up.” Radner didn’t give up either. But her sense of purpose wasn’t about proving a point or being a feminist, but something even more straightforward. If she wanted something, she went for it. Why wouldn’t she?

Radner was famously boy-crazy. (She used to joke that she couldn’t bring herself to watch Ghostbusters because it starred all of her ex-boyfriends.) She had on-again, off-again romances with Martin Short and Bill Murray (and that was after she’d dated Murray’s brother), among others. In her own telling of her eventual marriage to the great Gene Wilder, the two wound up together only because she pursued him so relentlessly. She knew from the minute she saw him that she wanted to be with him forever. He did not share this view, not initially. An interviewer once asked Wilder if it had been love at first sight. “No, not at all,” Wilder said. “If anything, the opposite. I said, How do I get rid of this girl?”

Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder in 1982 (Adam Scull / MediaPunch / AP)

He would come around. “If I had to compare her to something I would say to a firefly, in the summer, at night,” Wilder recalled. “When you see a sudden flash of light, it’s flying by, and then it stops. And then light. And stops. She was like that.” What Wilder meant, in part, was that Radner could have the highest of highs but also the lowest of lows. In moments of lightness, the whole world was illuminated, and everything in sight seemed to bend in her direction. But other times she was anxious and sad. She grieved the death of her father, who died of cancer when she was a teenager, her whole life. She described herself as highly neurotic. She had had eating disorders more or less since she was 10 years old. And she suffered in other ways, too. She never got to be a mother, which she’d desperately wanted. And while she brought untold joy to millions of people, her short life ended tragically. At one point, toward the end, she looked back on the early SNL years and marveled. “We thought we were immortal, at least for five years,” she wrote in her memoir. “But that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Wilder and Radner were married for only five years before she died, at 42, of ovarian cancer. And today, she is remembered as much for the unfairness of her young death—like Belushi before her and Chris Farley after her—as she is for her originality and spectacular talent. In a gentler world, all three of them would still be with us. Radner and Belushi would be in their 70s, Farley in his 60s. In a gentler world, Radner could have had all the babies she wished for, made all the movies she never got to, and would still be making people laugh. When I think about Radner now, what I think about most is the way she lived, and how that ought to be a lesson to the rest of us. She had a sense of total urgency, and a willingness to do the things that terrified her. Somehow, she made it look easy. “I don’t know why I’m doing it,” she once said in an interview, about why she’d chosen to take her act to Broadway, “except that for some reason I’ve chosen to scare myself to death.”

That was Gilda Radner. Gilda, who as a child once overheard her mother saying, “Gilda could sell ice cubes in winter,” and so set up a little stand outside to do just that. Gilda, who loved work so much that she’d get impatient on the way to NBC Studios and ask her taxi drivers to speed up already. Gilda, who fell in love easily and often, and wasn’t afraid to be weird, or look ridiculous. Gilda, who could make anything funny. But her real legacy, it turns out, is something much more profound than her comedy. This is the lesson of Gilda Radner’s too-short life: For God’s sake, don’t bother with fear. Just go for the thing you want, with your whole heart. Each of us gets only so much time on this planet, and none of us knows for how long. Life can be terrible this way, and sad, and it isn’t fair at all. But it is funny, anyway. Really, really funny.

Decivilization May Already Be Under Way

2024-12-11T15:22:00-05:00

The line between a normal, functioning society and catastrophic decivilization can be crossed with a single act of mayhem. This is why, for those who have studied violence closely, the brazen murder of a CEO in Midtown Manhattan—and, more important, the brazenness of the cheering reaction to his execution—amounts to a blinking-and-blaring warning signal for a society that has become already too inured to bloodshed and the conditions that exacerbate it.

In recent days, journalists and other observers have worked to uncover the motivations of the accused killer. This is a worthy exercise when trying to understand a single, shocking event. But when attempting to understand how brutality spreads across society, studying individual ideologies only gets you so far. As violence worsens, it tends to draw in—and threaten—people of all ideologies. So if in the early stages of a violent upswing, law enforcement can see clearly that the greater threat comes from right-wing extremists, which has been the case in the U.S. in recent years, as the prevalence of violence snowballs, the politics of those who resort to it get messier. That’s in part because periods of heightened violence tend to coincide with social and political reordering generally—moments when party or group identities are in flux, as they are in America right now. As I’ve written for this magazine, eruptions of violence are not necessarily associated with a clear or consistent ideology and often borrow from several—a phenomenon that law enforcement calls “salad-bar extremism.”

We already understand many of the conditions that make a society vulnerable to violence. And we know that those conditions are present today, just as they were in the Gilded Age: highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in democratic institutions, a heightened sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based on identity, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the “other,” a sharply divided electorate, and a belief among those who flirt with violence that they can get away with it. These conditions run counter to spurts of civilizing, in which people’s worldviews generally become more neutral, more empirical, and less fearful or emotional.

[From the April 2023 Issue: The new anarchy]

One way to understand which direction a society is going—toward or away from chaos—is to study its emotional undercurrents, and its attitude toward violence broadly. Medieval Europe, for example, was famously brutish. As the German sociologist Norbert Elias wrote in his 1939 book, The Civilizing Process, impulse control was practically nonexistent and violence was everywhere. But as communities began to reward individuals for proper etiquette, adherence to which was required for entry into the most desirable strata of society, new incentives for self-restraint created substantially more peaceful conditions.

The push toward cooperative nonviolence happened organically, whereby people’s “more animalistic human activities,” as Elias put it, took a back seat to the premium they placed on their communal social life. This change in priorities required and perpetuated steady self-control among individuals across society. “It is simple enough: plans and actions, the emotional and rational impulses of individual people, constantly interweave in a friendly or hostile way,” Elias wrote. “This basic tissue resulting from many single plans and actions of men can give rise to changes and patterns that no individual person has planned or created.” And “it is this order of interweaving human impulses and strivings, this social order, which determines the course of historical change.” Often, when people choose violence, it is because they believe that it is the only path, a last resort in a time of desperation—and they believe that they’ll get away with it.

Over the centuries, humanity has become more civilized, largely drifting away from violent conflict resolution. And to be clear, I mean “civilized” in the spirit of Elias’s definition—the process by which the use of violence shifted to the state, and “decivilization” to suggest a condition in which it shifts back to individuals. Today, most Americans enjoy extraordinarily peaceful conditions in their daily life. But obviously violence has never entirely receded, and progress has been uneven; Elias’s interest in violence stemmed from his experience fleeing Nazi Germany. And it’s a fantasy to believe that an advanced democracy like ours is somehow protected by its very nature against extremism. Democracy can be self-perpetuating, but it is also extremely fragile. Complex societies, and in particular backsliding democratic nations, are often among the most violent in the world. (As the writer Rachel Kleinfeld noted in her book A Savage Order, Mexico saw more violent deaths from 2007 to 2014 than the combined civilian death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan over that same period.)

[From the September 2024 Issue: American fury]

Recent bloodshed is not new to America, not even close, yet this is still a distinctly precarious time. Along with layers upon layers of social conditions that make us especially prone to political violence, the Machiavellianism of contemporary politics has stoked both the nihilism of those who believe that violence is the only answer and the whitewashing of recent violent history. This is how a society reaches the point at which people publicly celebrate the death of a stranger murdered in the street. And it is how the January 6 insurrectionists who ransacked the U.S. Capitol came to be defended by lawmakers as political prisoners. It matters when people downplay and justify violence, whatever form that downplaying and justifying takes—whether by revising history to say something that was violent wasn’t so bad, or by justifying a murder because of the moral failures of the victim’s profession. When growing tolerance for bloodshed metastasizes into total indifference for—and even a clamoring in support of—the death of one’s political enemies, civil society is badly troubled indeed.

My colleague Graeme Wood, who has spent much of his career studying the people and societies that resort to violence, has made the case for a greater degree of sanguinity about political violence in America, given how much worse off many other countries are. In Latin America, Wood wrote earlier this year, “the violence reaches levels where even a successful assassination is barely news.” The thing is, you can’t fully understand the extent to which a society has become inured to violence by counting individual attacks or grotesque social-media posts. You have to assess the whole culture, and its direction over time. A society’s propensity for violence may be ticking up and up and up, even as life continues to feel normal to most people. A drumbeat of attacks, by different groups or individuals with different motivations, may register as different kinds of problems. But take the broad view and you find they point at the same diagnosis: Our social bonds are disintegrating.

[Read: The case for calming down]

Another word for this unraveling is decivilization. The further a society goes down this path, the fewer behavioral options people identify as possible reactions to grievances. When every disagreement becomes zero-sum and no one is willing to compromise, violence becomes more attractive to people. And when violence becomes widespread, the state may escalate its own use of violence—including egregious attacks on civil liberties.

The barrier that separates a functioning society from all-out chaos is always more fragile than we’d like to admit. It can take very little for peace to dissolve, for a mob to swarm, for a man to kill his brother. In a society that is consecrated to freedom, as ours is, the power of the people is not only a first principle but a promise to one another, and most of all a safeguard against the centralized power and violence of the state wielded against the people.

In the weeks after a sharply divided election, ahead of the return to power of a president who has repeatedly promised to unleash a wave of state violence and targeted retribution against his enemies, Americans have a choice to make about the kind of society we are building together. After all, civilization is, at its core, a question of how people choose to bond with one another, and what behaviors we deem permissible among ourselves.

You cannot fix a violent society simply by eliminating the factors that made it deteriorate. In other societies that have fallen apart, violence acts as a catalyst, exacerbating all of the conditions that led to it in the first place. The process of decivilization may begin with profound distrust in institutions and government leaders, but that distrust gets far worse in a society where people brutalize one another. There is no shortcut back to a robust democracy. But one way to protect against the worst is to force change only through processes that do not lead to bloodshed, and to unequivocally reject anyone—whether that person is sitting in the White House or standing in the street—who would choose or justify violence against the people.

The Hawaiians Who Want Their Nation Back

2024-12-11T07:00:00-05:00

Photographs by Brendan George Ko

Updated at 12:10 p.m. ET on January 23, 2025.

Read this article in Hawaiian.

At the edge of a forest on the island of O‘ahu, through two massive metal gates—if you can convince someone to let you in—you will find yourself inside the compound of the self-appointed president of the Nation of Hawai‘i.

Dennis Pu‘uhonua Kanahele came to possess this particular 45-acre plot only after a prolonged and extremely controversial occupation, which he led, and which put him in prison for a time, more than three decades ago. Since then, he has built a modest commune on this land, in the shadow of an ancient volcano, with a clutter of bungalows and brightly painted trailers. He’s in his 70s now, and carries himself like an elder statesman. I went to see him because I had, for the better part of 20 years, been trying to find the answer to a question that I knew preoccupied both of us: What should America do about Hawai‘i?

More than a century after the United States helped orchestrate the coup that conquered the nation of Hawai‘i, and more than 65 years since it became a state, people here have wildly different ideas about what America owes the Hawaiian people. Many are fine with the status quo, and happy to call themselves American. Some people even explicitly side with the insurrectionists. Others agree that the U.S. overthrow was an unqualified historic wrong, but their views diverge from that point. There are those who argue that the federal government should formally recognize Hawaiians with a government-to-government relationship, similar to how the United States liaises with American Indian tribes; those who prefer to seize back government from within; and those who argue that the Kingdom of Hawai‘i never legally ceased to exist.

Then there is Kanahele, who has wrested land from the state—at least for the duration of his 55-year lease—and believes other Hawaiians should follow his example. Like many Hawaiians (by which I mean descendants of the Islands’ first inhabitants, who are also sometimes called Native Hawaiians), Kanahele doesn’t see himself as American at all. When he travels, he carries, along with his U.S. passport, a Nation of Hawai‘i passport that he and his followers made themselves.

But outside the gates of his compound, there is not only an American state, but a crucial outpost of the United States military, which has 12 bases and installations here—including the headquarters for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Pacific Missile Range Facility. The military controls hundreds of thousands of acres of land and untold miles of airspace in the Islands.

It seems unrealistic, to say the least, to imagine that the most powerful country in the world would simply give Hawai‘i back to the Hawaiians. If it really came down to it, I asked, how far would Kanahele go to protect his people, his nation? That’s a personal question, Kanahele told me. “That’s your life, you know. What you’re willing to give up. Not just freedom but the possibility to be alive.”

Dennis Pu‘uhonua Kanahele is the self-appointed president of the Nation of Hawai‘i. (Brendan George Ko for The Atlantic)

Sitting across the table from us, his vice president, Brandon Maka‘awa‘awa, conceded that there had, in the past, been moments when it would have been easy to choose militancy. “We could have acted out of fear,” he said. But every time, they “acted with aloha and we got through, just like our queen.” He was referring to Hawai‘i’s last monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani, who was deposed in the coup in 1893.

People tend to treat this chapter in U.S. foreign relations as a curiosity on the margins of history. This is a mistake. The overthrow of Hawai‘i is what established the modern idea of America as a superpower. Without this one largely forgotten episode, the United States may never have endured an attack on Pearl Harbor, or led the Allies to victory in World War II, or ushered in the age of Pax Americana—an age that, with Donald Trump’s return to power, could be coming to an end.

Some Hawaiians see what is happening now in the United States as a bookend of sorts. In their view, the chain of events that led to a coup in Hawai‘i in 1893 has finally brought us to this: the moment when the rise of autocracy in America presents an opportunity for Hawaiians to extricate themselves from their long entanglement with the United States, reclaim their independence, and perhaps even resurrect their nation.

Keanu Sai is, today, one of the more extreme thinkers about Hawaiian sovereignty. Growing up in Kuli‘ou‘ou, on the east end of O‘ahu, Sai was a self-described slacker who only wanted to play football. He graduated from high school in 1982 and went straight to a military college, then the Army.

In 1990, he was at Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, annexing it as Iraq’s 19th province. International condemnation was swift; the United Nations Security Council declared the annexation illegal. An American-led coalition quickly beat back Saddam, liberating Kuwait. “And that’s when I went, Wait a minute. That’s exactly what happened” in Hawai‘i, Sai told me. “Our government was overthrown.” The idea radicalized him.

Before Hawai‘i’s overthrow, it had been a full-fledged nation with diplomatic relationships across the globe and a modern form of governance (it also signed a peace treaty with the United States in 1826). As a constitutional monarchy, it had elected representatives, its own supreme court, and a declaration of rights modeled after the U.S. Bill of Rights. And, as people in Hawai‘i like to remind outsiders, ‘Iolani Palace had electricity before the White House did.

Then, in January 1893, a group of 13 men—mostly Americans or Hawai‘i-born businessmen descended from American missionary families, all with extensive financial interests in the Islands—executed a surprise coup. They did so with remarkable speed and swagger, even by coup standards. The men behind the effort referred to themselves as the Committee of Safety (presumably in a nod to the American and French Revolutions) and had good reason to expect that they would succeed: They had the backing of the U.S. minister to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, John L. Stevens, who called up a force of more than 160 Marines and sailors to march on Honolulu during the confrontation with the queen. Stevens later insisted that he had done so in a panic—a coup was unfolding! It was his duty to do whatever was necessary to protect American lives and property! A good story, but not a convincing one.

Months before the coup, Stevens had written a curious letter to his friend James Blaine, the U.S. secretary of state, in which he’d posed a bizarre and highly detailed hypothetical: What if, Stevens had wanted to know, the government of Hawai‘i were to be “surprised and overturned by an orderly and peaceful revolutionary movement” that established its own provisional government to replace the queen? If that were to happen, Stevens pressed, just how far would he and the American naval commander stationed nearby be permitted to “deviate from established international rules” in their response? The presence of U.S. Marines, Stevens mused, might be the only thing that could quash such an overthrow and maintain order. As it turned out, however, Stevens and his fellow insurrectionists used the Marines to ensure that their coup would succeed. (Blaine, for his part, had had his eye on the Islands for decades.) Two weeks after the overthrow, Stevens wrote to John W. Foster, President Benjamin Harrison’s final secretary of state: “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe, and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.”

Queen Lili‘uokalani had yielded immediately to the insurrectionists, unsure whether Stevens was following orders from Harrison. “This action on my part was prompted by three reasons,” she wrote in an urgent letter to Harrison: “the futility of a conflict with the United States; the desire to avoid violence, bloodshed, and the destruction of life and property; and the certainty which I feel that you and your government will right whatever wrongs may have been inflicted on us in the premises.”

Her faith in Harrison was misplaced; he ignored her letter. In the last month of his presidency, he sent a treaty to the U.S. Senate to advance the annexation of Hawai‘i to the United States. (Lorrin A. Thurston, one of the overthrow’s architects, boasted in his Memoirs of the Hawaiian Revolution that in early 1892, Harrison had encouraged him, through an interlocutor, to go forward with his plot.)

Keanu Sai argues that the Kingdom of Hawai‘i never legally ceased to exist.(Brendan George Ko for The Atlantic)

Looking back at this history nearly 100 years later, Keanu Sai had an epiphany. “I was in the wrong army,” he said. Sai left the military and dove into the state archives, researching Hawai‘i’s history and his own family’s lineage prior to the arrival of haole (white) Europeans and Americans. He says he traced his family’s roots to ali‘i, members of Hawai‘i’s noble class. “I started to realize that the Hawaiian Kingdom that I was led to believe was all haole-controlled, missionary-controlled, was all—pardon the French—bullshit,” he told me.

That led him to develop what is probably the most creative, most radical, and quite possibly most ridiculous argument about Hawaiian independence that I’ve ever heard. Basically, it’s this: The Hawaiian Kingdom never ceased to exist.

Though Sai has plenty of fans and admirers, several people warned me that I should be careful around him. I spoke with some Hawaiians who expressed discomfort with the implications of Sai’s notion that the kingdom was never legally dissolved—not everyone wants to be a subject in a monarchy. There was also the matter of his troubles with the law.

In 1997, Sai took out an ad in a newspaper declaring himself to be a regent of the Hawaiian Kingdom, a move that he said formally entrusted him “with the vicarious administration of the Hawaiian government during the absence of a Monarch.” He had started a business in which he and his partner charged people some $1,500 for land-title research going back to the mid-19th century, promising to protect clients’ land from anyone who might claim it as their own. The business model was built on his theory of Hawaiian history, and the underlying message seemed to be: If the kingdom still exists, and the state of Hawai‘i does not, maybe this house you bought isn’t technically even yours. Ultimately, Sai’s business had its downtown office raided; the title company shut down, and he was convicted of felony theft.

It struck me that, in another life, Keanu Sai would have made a perfect politician. He is charismatic and funny. A decorated bullshit artist. Unquestionably smart. Filibusters with the best of them. (He also told me that Keanu Reeves is his cousin.) Although Sai’s methods may be questionable, his indignation over the autocratic overthrow of his ancestors’ nation is justified.

Sai says that arguments about Hawaiian sovereignty tend to distort this history. “They create the binary of colonizer-colonized,” he said. “All of that is wrong. Hawai‘i was never a colony of the United States. And we’re not a tribal nation similar to Native Americans. We’re nationals of an occupied state.”

Following this logic, Sai believes international courts must acknowledge that America has perpetuated war crimes against Hawai‘i’s people. After that, he says, international law should guide Hawai‘i out of its current “wartime occupation” by the United States, so that the people of Hawai‘i can reconstruct their nation. Sai has attempted to advance this case in the international court system. So far, he has been unsuccessful.

At one point, Sai mused that I’d have to completely rework my story based on his revelations. I disagreed, but said that I liked hearing from him about this possible path to Hawaiian independence. This provoked, for the first time in our several hours of conversations, a flash of anger. “This is not the ‘possible path,’ ” Sai said. “It is the path.”

The island of Ni‘ihau is just 18 miles long and six miles wide. Nicknamed “the forbidden island,” it has been privately owned since 1864, when King Kamehameha IV and his brother sold it for $10,000 in gold to a wealthy Scottish widow, Elizabeth Sinclair, who had moved her family to Hawai‘i after her husband and son were lost at sea.

Sinclair’s descendants still own and run the island, which by the best estimates has a population of fewer than 100. It is the only place in the world where everyone still speaks Hawaiian. No one is allowed to visit Ni‘ihau without a personal invitation from Sinclair’s great-great-grandsons Bruce and Keith Robinson, both now in their 80s. Such invitations are extraordinarily rare. (One of the two people I know who have ever set foot on Ni‘ihau got there only after asking the Robinsons every year for nearly 10 years.)

The island has no paved roads, no electrical grid, no street signs, and no domestic water supply—drinking water comes from catchment water and wells. In the village is a schoolhouse, a cafeteria, and a church, which everyone is reportedly expected to attend. One of the main social activities is singing. The rules for Ni‘ihau residents are strict: Men cannot wear their hair long, pierce their ears, or grow beards. Drinking and smoking are not allowed. The Robinsons infamously bar anyone who leaves for even just a few weeks from returning, with few exceptions.

Ni‘ihau’s circumscribed mores point to a broader question: If one goal of Hawaiian independence is to restore a nation that has been lost, then which version of Hawai‘i, exactly, are you trying to bring back?

The volcano Diamond Head, or Lē’ahi, in Honolulu, circa 1872 (left) and in 2015 (right) (Royal Geographical Society / Getty; Ergi Reboredo / VW Pics / Universal Images Group / Getty)

Ancient explorers first reached the archipelago in great voyaging canoes, traveling thousands of miles from the Marquesas Islands, around the year 400 C.E. They brought with them pigs, chickens, gourds, taro, sugarcane, coconuts, sweet potatoes, bananas, and paper mulberry plants. Precontact Hawai‘i was home to hundreds of thousands of Hawaiians—some scholars estimate that the population was as high as 1 million. There was no concept of private land ownership, and Hawaiians lived under a feudal system run by ali‘i, chiefs who were believed to be divinely ordained. This strict caste system entailed severe rules, executions for those who broke them, and brutal rituals including human sacrifice.

The first British explorers moored their ships just off the coast of Kaua‘i in 1778 and immediately took interest in the Islands. Captain James Cook, who led that first expedition, was welcomed with aloha by the Hawaiian people. But when Cook attempted to kidnap the Hawaiian chief Kalani‘ōpu‘u on a subsequent visit to the Islands, a group of Hawaiians stabbed and bludgeoned Cook to death. (Kalani‘ōpu‘u survived.)

Eventually, fierce battles culminated in unification of all the Islands under Hawai‘i’s King Kamehameha, who finally conquered the archipelago’s last independent island in 1810. The explosion and subsequent collapse of the sandalwood trade followed, along with the construction of the first sugar plantations and the arrival of whaling ships. Missionaries came too, and the introduction of Christianity led, for a time, to a ban on the hula—one of the Hawaiian people’s most sacred and enduring forms of passing down history. All the while, several waves of epidemics—cholera, mumps, measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, smallpox, and bubonic plague—ravaged the Hawaiian population, which plummeted to about 40,000 by the end of the 19th century.

During this period, the United States had begun to show open interest in scooping up the Sandwich Islands, as they were then called. In the June 1869 issue of The Atlantic, the journalist Samuel Bowles wrote:

We have converted their heathen, we have occupied their sugar plantations; we furnish the brains that carry on their government, and the diseases that are destroying their people; we want the profit on their sugars and their tropical fruits and vegetables; why should we not seize and annex the islands themselves?

[From the June 1869 issue: The Pacific Railroad—Open]

Elizabeth Sinclair’s descendants profited greatly from the sugar they cultivated, but they had a different view of what Hawai‘i should be. King Kamehameha IV is said to have sold Ni‘ihau on one condition: Its new owners had to promise to do right by the Hawaiian people and their culture. This is why, when the United States did finally move to “seize and annex the islands,” the Robinsons supported the crown. After annexation happened anyway, in 1898, Sinclair’s grandson closed Ni‘ihau to visitors.

On the other islands, everything seemed to speed up from there. Schools had already banned the Hawaiian language, but now many Hawaiian families started speaking only English with their children. The sugar and pineapple industries boomed. Matson ships carrying visitors to Hawai‘i soon gave way to airplanes. As exoticized ideas about Hawaiian culture spread, repackaged for tourists, Hawaiianness was suppressed nearly to the point of erasure.

Through all of this, Ni‘ihau stayed apart. History briefly intruded in 1941, when a Japanese fighter pilot crash-landed there hours after participating in the attack on Pearl Harbor, which killed an estimated 2,400 people in Honolulu. Ni‘ihau residents knew nothing about the mayhem of that day. They at first welcomed the Imperial pilot as a guest, but killed him after he botched an attempt to hold some of them hostage.

If the overthrow had marked the beginning of the end of Hawaiian nationhood, the attack on Pearl Harbor finished it. It also kicked off a three-year period of martial law in Hawai‘i, in which the military took control of every aspect of civilian life—in effect converting the Islands into one big internment facility. The government suspended habeas corpus, shut down the courts, and set up its own tribunals for law enforcement. The military imposed a strict nightly curfew, rationed food and gasoline, and censored the press and other communications. The many Japanese Americans living there were surveilled and treated as enemies—Japanese-run banks were shut down, along with Japanese-language schools. Everyone was required to carry identification cards, and those older than the age of 6 were fingerprinted. Telephone calls and photography were restricted. Sugarcane workers who didn’t report to their job could be tried in military court.

Martial law was fully lifted in 1944, and in 1959, Hawai‘i became the 50th state—a move the Robinsons are said to have opposed. But whether they liked it or not, statehood dragged Ni‘ihau along with it. The island is technically part of Kaua‘i County, the local government that oversees the island closest to it. Still, Ni‘ihau has stayed mostly off-limits to the rest of Hawai‘i and the rest of the world. (The Robinsons do operate a helicopter tour that takes visitors to an uninhabited beach on the far side of the island, but you can’t actually get to the village or meet any residents that way.) Those who have affection for Ni‘ihau defend it as an old ranch community on a remote island that’s not hurting anybody. The less generous view is that it’s essentially the world’s last remaining feudal society.

[From the December 1958 issue: Hawaii and statehood]

But no one is arguing that the rest of Hawai‘i should be run like Ni‘ihau. After all, the entire goal of the sovereignty movement, if you can even say it has a single goal, is to confer more power on the Hawaiian people, not less. The question is how best to do that.

John Waihe‘e’s awakening came the summer before he started seventh grade, when he checked a book out of the library in his hometown of Honoka‘a, on the Big Island, that would change his life. In it, he read a description of the annexation ceremony that had taken place at ‘Iolani Palace in 1898, when Hawai‘i officially became a territory of the United States. It described the lowering of the Hawaiian flag, and the Hawaiian people who had gathered around with tears in their eyes.

This was the 1950s—post–Pearl Harbor and pre-statehood—and Waihe‘e had never even heard of the overthrow. His parents spoke Hawaiian with each other at home, but never spoke it with Waihe‘e.

“I remember rushing back to my father and telling him, ‘Dad, I didn’t know any of this stuff,’ ” Waihe‘e told me. “He looks at me, and he was very calm about it. He said, ‘You know, son, that didn’t only happen in Honolulu.’ ” His father went on: “They lowered the flag in Hilo too, on the Big Island, and your grandfather was there, and he saw all of this. ”

Waihe‘e was floored. Even nearly 70 years later, he remembers the moment. To picture his grandfather among those watching the kingdom in its final hours “broke my heart,” he said. Waihe‘e had never met his grandfather, but he had seen photos and heard stories about him all his life. “He was this big, strong Hawaiian guy. And the idea of him crying was—it was unthinkable.” The image never left him. He grew up, attended law school, and eventually became Hawai‘i’s governor in 1986, the first Hawaiian ever to hold the office.

Waihe‘e is part of a class of political leaders in Hawai‘i who have chosen to work within the system, rather than rail against it. Another was the late Daniel Akaka, one of Hawai‘i’s longest-serving U.S. senators— a Hawaiian himself. Akaka was raised in a home where he was not permitted to speak Hawaiian. He once told me about hearing a roar from above on the morning of December 7, 1941, and looking up to see a gray wave of Japanese bombers with bright-red dots on the wings. He grabbed his rifle and ran into the hills. He was 17 then, and would later deploy to Saipan with the Army Corps of Engineers.

[Read: Adrienne LaFrance on December 7, the day “all hell broke loose”]

In 1993, Akaka, a Democrat, sponsored a joint congressional resolution that formally apologized to the Hawaiian people for the overthrow of their kingdom 100 years earlier and for “the deprivation of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-determination.” I’d always seen the apology bill, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, as an example of the least the United States could possibly do, mere lip service. But the more people I talked with as I reported this story, the more I heard that it mattered—not just symbolically but legally.

Recently, I went to see Esther Kia‘āina, who was one of the key architects of the apology as an aide to Akaka in Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s. Today, Kia‘āina is a city-council member in Honolulu. People forget, she told me, just how hard it was to get to an apology in the first place.

“Prior to 1993, it was abysmal,” Kia‘āina said. There had been a federal inquiry into the overthrow, producing a dueling pair of reports in the 1980s, one of which concluded that the U.S. bore no responsibility for what had happened to Hawai‘i, and that Hawaiians should not receive reparations as a result. Without the United States first admitting wrongdoing, Kia‘āina said, nothing else could follow. As she saw it, the apology was the first in a series of steps. The next would be to obtain official tribal status for Hawaiians from the Department of the Interior, similar to the way the United States recognizes hundreds of American Indian and Alaska Native tribes. Then full-on independence.

In the early 2000s, Akaka began pushing legislation that would create a path to federal recognition for Hawaiians as a tribe, a move that Kia‘āina enthusiastically supported. “I was Miss Fed Rec,” she said. It wasn’t a compliment—lots of people hated the idea.

Esther Kia‘āina was one of the key architects of the 1993 apology bill signed into law by President Bill Clinton. (Brendan George Ko for The Atlantic)

The federal-recognition legislation would have made Native Hawaiians one of the largest tribes in America overnight—but many Hawaiians didn’t want recognition from the United States at all. The debate created strange bedfellows. Many people argued against it on the grounds that it didn’t go far enough; they wanted their country back, not tribal status. Meanwhile, some conservatives in Hawai‘i, who tended to be least moved by calls for Hawaiian rights, fought against the bill, arguing that it was a reductionist and maybe even unconstitutional attempt to codify preferential treatment on the basis of race. That’s how a coalition briefly formed that included Hawaiian nationalists and their anti-affirmative-action neighbors.

Akaka’s legislation never passed, and the senator died in 2018. Today, some people say the debate over federal recognition was a distraction, but Kia‘āina still believes that it’s the only way to bring about self-determination for Hawaiians. She told me that she sometimes despairs at what the movement has become: She sees people rage against the overthrow, and against the continued presence of the U.S. military in Hawai‘i, but do little else to promote justice for Hawaiians. And within government, she sees similar complacency.

“It’s almost like ‘Are you kidding me? We give you the baton and this is what you do?’ ” Kia‘āina said. Instead of effecting change, she told me, people playact Hawaiianness and think it will be enough. They “slap on a Hawaiian logo,” and “that’s your contribution to helping the Hawaiian community.” And in the end, nobody outside Hawai‘i is marching in the street, protesting at the State Department, or occupying campus quads for Native Hawaiians.

There is no question that awareness of Hawaiian history and culture has improved since the 1970s, a period that’s come to be known as the Hawaiian Renaissance, when activists took steps to restore the Hawaiian language in public places, to teach hula more widely, and to protect and restore other cultural practices. But Kia‘āina told me that although the cultural and language revival is lovely, and essential, it can lull people into thinking that the work is done when plainly it is not. Especially when Hawaiians are running out of time.

Sometime around 2020, the Hawaiian people crossed a terrible threshold. For the first time ever, more Hawaiians lived outside Hawai‘i than in the Islands. Roughly 680,000 Hawaiians live in the United States, according to the most recent census data; some 300,000 of them live in Hawai‘i.

Hawaiians now make up about 20 percent of the state population, a proportion that for many inspires existential fear. Meanwhile, outsiders are getting rich in Hawai‘i, and rich outsiders are buying up Hawaiian land. Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle, owns most of the island of Lāna‘i. Facebook’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg owns a property on Kaua‘i estimated to be worth about $300 million. Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff, has reportedly purchased nearly $100 million worth of land on the Big Island. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, reportedly paid some $80 million for his estate on Maui. As one longtime Hawai‘i resident put it to me: The sugar days may be over, but Hawai‘i is still a plantation town.

At the same time, many Hawaiians are faring poorly. Few have the means to live in Hawai‘i’s wealthy neighborhoods. On O‘ahu, a commute to Waikīkī for those with hotel or construction jobs there can take hours in island traffic. Hawaiians have among the highest rates of heart disease, hypertension, asthma, diabetes, and some types of cancer compared with other ethnic groups. They smoke and binge drink at higher rates. A quarter of Hawaiian households can’t adequately feed themselves. More than half of Hawaiians report worrying about having enough money to keep a roof over their head; the average per capita income is less than $28,000. Only 13 percent of Hawaiians have a college degree. The poverty rate among Hawaiians is 12 percent, the highest of the five largest ethnic groups in Hawai‘i. Although Hawaiians make up only a small percentage of the population in Hawai‘i, the share of homeless people on O‘ahu who identify as Hawaiian or Pacific Islander has hovered at about 50 percent in recent years.

Kūhiō Lewis was “very much the statistic Hawaiian” growing up in the 1990s, he told me—a high-school dropout raised by his grandmother. He’d struggled with drugs and alcohol, and became a single father with two babies by the time he was 19. Back then, Lewis was consumed with anger over what had happened to the Hawaiian people and believed that the only way to get what his people deserved was to fight, and to protest. But he lost patience with a movement that he didn’t think was getting anything done. Today, as the CEO of the nonprofit Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, he has a different view.

He still believes that Hawai‘i should not be part of America, but he also believes that Hawai‘i would need a leader with “balls of steel” to make independence happen. “That’s a big ask,” he added. “That’s a lot of personal sacrifice.” Until that person steps up, Lewis chooses to work within the system, even if it means some Hawaiians see him as a sellout.

“There is a wrong that was done. And there’s no way we’ll ever let that go,” Lewis told me. “But I also believe, and I’ve come to believe, that the best way to win this battle is going through America rather than trying to go around America.”

Portraits of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s monarchs—from King Kamehameha (top left) to Queen Lili‘uokalani (bottom right)—hang on the wall at the nonprofit Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement. (Brendan George Ko for The Atlantic)

When I spoke with Brian Schatz, Hawai‘i’s senior senator, in Washington, he said he is most focused on addressing the moment-to-moment crisis for the Hawaiian people. Lots of Native Hawaiians, he said, “are motivated by the same set of issues that non-Native Hawaiians are motivated by. They don’t wake up every morning thinking about sovereignty and self-determination. They wake up every morning thinking about the price of gasoline, and traffic, and health care.” He went on: “They are deeply, deeply uninterested in a bunch of abstractions. They would rather have a few hundred million dollars for housing than some new statute that purports to change the interaction between America and Hawaiians.”

Ian Lind, a former investigative reporter who is himself Hawaiian, is also critical of sovereignty discussions that rely too much on fashionable ideologies at the expense of reality. I’ve known Lind since my own days as a city-hall reporter in Honolulu, in the early 2000s, and I wanted to get his thoughts on how the sovereignty conversation had changed in the intervening years. He told me that, in his view, an “incredibly robust environment for charlatans and con artists” has metastasized within Hawaiian-sovereignty circles. There are those who invent royal lineage or government titles for themselves, as well as ordinary scammers.

Even those who are merely trying to understand—or in some cases teach—the history have become too willing to gloss over some subtleties, Lind told me. It’s not so simple to say that Hawaiians were dispossessed at the time of the overthrow, that they suddenly lost everything, he said. Many people gave up farmlands that had been allotted to them after the Great Māhele land distribution in 1848. “They were a burden, not an asset,” Lind said. “People thought, I could just go get a job downtown and get away from this.”

But people bristle at the introduction of nuance in the telling of this history, partly because they remain understandably focused on the immensity of what Hawaiians have lost. “There’s a faction of Hawaiians who say that absolutely nothing short of restoring a kingdom like we had before, encompassing all of Hawai‘i, is going to suffice,” Lind said. “It’s like an impasse that no one wants to talk about.”

The whole thing reminds Lind of a fringe militia or a group of secessionists you’d find elsewhere. “It’s so much like watching the Confederacy,” he said. “You’re watching something, a historical fact, you didn’t like. It wasn’t your side that won. But governments changed. And when our government changed here, it was recognized by all the countries in the world very quickly. So whatever you want to think about 130 years ago, how you feel about that change, I just think there are so many more things to deal with that could be dealt with now realistically that people aren’t doing, because they’re hung up waving the Confederate flag or having a new, reinstated Hawaiian Kingdom.”

When you talk with people in Hawai‘i about the question of sovereignty, skeptics will say shocking things behind closed doors, or off the record, that they’d never say in public—I’ve encountered eye-rolling, a general sentiment of get over it, even disparaging Queen Lili‘uokalani as an “opium dealer”—but invoking the Lost Cause this way was a new one for me. I asked Lind if his opinions have been well received by his fellow Hawaiians. “No,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m totally out of step.”

Brian Schatz, a Democrat, grew up on O‘ahu before making a rapid ascent in local, then national, politics. I first met him more than 15 years ago, when he was coming off a stint as a state representative. In 2021, he became the chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, meaning he thinks about matters related to Indigenous self-determination a lot. He’s also on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which makes sense for a person representing a region of profound strategic importance to the United States.

Because Schatz is extremely online—he is a bit of a puppy dog on X, not exactly restrained—I wanted to know his views on an observation I’ve had in recent years. As young activists in Hawai‘i have focused their passion on justice for Hawaiians, I’ve sometimes wondered if they are simply shouting into the pixelated abyss. On the one hand, more awareness of historical wrongs is objectively necessary and good. On the other, as Schatz put it to me, “the internet is not a particularly constructive place to figure out how to redress historical wrongs.”

Two recent moments in Hawaiian activism sparked international attention, but haven’t necessarily advanced the cause of self-determination. In 2014, opposition to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the Big Island led to huge protests, and energized the sovereignty movement. The catastrophic fires on Maui in 2023 prompted a similar burst of attention to Hawai‘i and the degree to which Hawaiians have been alienated from their own land. But many activists complained to me that in both cases, sustained momentum has been spotty. Instagrammed expressions of solidarity may feel righteous when you’re scrolling, but they accomplish little (if anything) offline, even when more people than ever before seem to be paying attention to ideas that animate those fighting for Hawaiian independence.

[Adrienne LaFrance: Hawaii is a warning]

“There’s a newly energized cohort of leftists on the continent who are waking up to this injustice,” Schatz said. “But, I mean, the truth is that there’s not a place on the continental United States where that story wasn’t also told.” The story he’s talking about is the separation of people from their language, their land, their culture, and their water sources, in order to steal that land and to make money. Yet “nobody’s talking about giving Los Angeles back,” he said.

Hawaiian activism has sparked international attention in recent years, but hasn’t necessarily advanced the cause of self-determination. (Brendan George Ko)

One of the challenges in contemplating Hawaiian independence is the question of historical precedent. Clearly there are blueprints for decolonization—India’s independence following British rule may be the most famous—but few involve places like Hawai‘i. The world does not have many examples of what “successful” secession or decolonization from the United States looks like in practice. There is one example from elsewhere in the Pacific: In 1898, fresh off its annexation of Hawai‘i, the United States moved to annex the Philippines, too. People there fought back, in a war that led to the deaths of an estimated 775,000 people, most of them civilians. The United States promised in 1916 that it would grant the Philippines independence, but that didn’t happen until 1946.

Hawai‘i is particularly complex, too, because of its diverse population. Roughly a quarter of Hawai‘i residents are multiracial, and there is no single racial majority. So while some activists are eager to apply a settler-colonialism frame to what happened in Hawai‘i, huge populations of people here do not slot neatly into the categories of “settler” or “native.” How, for example, do you deal with the non-Hawaiian descendants of laborers on plantations, who immigrated to the Islands from China, Japan, Portugal, the Philippines? Or the Pacific Islanders who came to Hawai‘i more recently, as part of U.S. compensation to three tiny island nations affected by nuclear-weapons testing? Or the people who count both overthrowers and Hawaiians among their ancestors? Schatz said that when it comes to visions of Hawaiian self-determination, “I completely defer to the community.”

But he cautioned that without consensus about what this should look like, “the danger is that we spend all of our time counting the number of angels on the head of a pin, and ignore the fact that the injustice imposed by the United States government on Native Hawaiians is manifesting itself on a daily basis with bad economic outcomes, not enough housing, not enough health care.” He went on, “So while Native Hawaiian leaders and scholars sort out what comes next as it relates to Native Hawaiians and their relationship to the state and federal government, my job is to—bit by bit, program by program, day by day—try to reverse that injustice with, frankly, money.

“Because you can’t live in an apology,” he added. “You have to live in a home.”

The question of how the ancient Hawaiians survived—how they managed to feed a complex civilization that bloomed on the most isolated archipelago on the planet—has long been a source of fascination and historic inquiry. They fished; they hunted; they grew taro in irrigated wetlands.

Hawai‘i is now terrifyingly dependent on the global supply chain for its residents’ survival. By the 1960s, it was importing roughly half of its food supply. Today, that figure is closer to 90 percent. It can be easy to forget how remote Hawai‘i truly is. But all it takes is one hurricane, war, or pandemic to upset this fragile balance.

[From the October 1938 issue: Hawaii’s economy]

To understand what Hawai‘i would need in order to become self-reliant again, I went to see Walter Ritte, one of the godfathers of modern Hawaiian activism, and someone most people know simply as “Uncle Walter.” Ritte made a name for himself in the 1970s, when he and others occupied the uninhabited island of Kaho‘olawe, protesting the U.S. military’s use of the land for bombing practice. Ian Lind was part of this protest too; the group came to be known as the Kaho‘olawe Nine.

Ritte lives on Moloka‘i, among the least populated of the Hawaiian Islands. Major airlines don’t fly to Moloka‘i, and people there like it that way. I arrived on a turboprop Cessna 208, a snug little nine-seater, alongside a few guys from O‘ahu heading there to do construction work for a day or two.

Moloka‘i has no stoplights and spotty cell service. Its population hovers around 7,000 people. Many of its roads are still unpaved and require an off-road vehicle—long orange-red ribbons of dirt crisscross the island. On one particularly rough road, I felt my rented Jeep keel so far to one side that I was certain it would tip over. I considered turning back but eventually arrived at the Mo‘omomi Preserve, in the northwestern corner of Moloka‘i, where you can stand on a bluff of black lava rock and look out at the Pacific.

All over Moloka‘i, the knowledge that you are standing somewhere that long predates you and will long outlast you is inescapable. If you drive all the way east, to Hālawa Valley, you find the overgrown ruins of sacred places—an abandoned 19th-century church, plus remnants of heiau, or places of worship, dating back to the 600s. The desire to protect the island’s way of life is fierce. Nobody wants it to turn into O‘ahu or Maui—commodified and overrun by tourists, caricatured by outsiders who know nothing of this place. For locals across Hawai‘i, especially the large number who work in the hospitality industry, this reality is an ongoing source of fury. As the historian Daniel Immerwahr put it to me: “It is psychologically hard to have your livelihood be a performance of your own subordination.”

The directions Ritte had given me were, in essence: Fly to Moloka‘i, drive east for 12 miles, and look for my fishpond. So I did. Eventually, I stopped at a place that I thought could be his, a sprawling, grassy property with some kukui-nut trees, a couple of sheds, and a freshwater spring. No sign of Ritte. But I met a man who introduced himself as Ua and said he could take me to him. I asked Ua how long he’d been working with Uncle Walter, and he grinned. “My whole life,” he said. Walter is his father.

Ua drove us east in his four-wheeler through a misty rain. This particular vehicle had a windshield but no wipers, so I assumed the role of leaning all the way out of the passenger side to squeegee water off the glass.

We found Ritte standing in a field wearing dirty jeans and a black T-shirt that said Kill Em’ With Aloha. Ritte is lean and muscular—at almost 80 years old, he has the look of someone who has worked outside his whole life, which he has. We decided to head makai, back toward the ocean, so Ritte could show me his obsession.

When we got there, he led me down a short, rocky pier to a thatched-roof hut and pointed out toward the water. What we were looking at was the rebuilt structure of a massive fishpond, first constructed by ancient Hawaiians some 700 years ago. Ritte has been working on it forever, attempting to prove that the people of Hawai‘i can again feed themselves.

The mechanics of the pond are evidence of Native Hawaiian genius. A stone wall serves as an enclosure for the muliwai, or brackish, area where fresh and salt water meet. A gate in the wall, when opened, allows small fish to swim into the muliwai but blocks big fish from getting out. And when seawater starts to pour into the pond, fish already in the pond swim over to it, making it easy to scoop them out. “Those gates are the magic,” Ritte tells me.

Back when Hawai‘i was totally self-sustaining, feeding the population required several fishponds across the Islands. Ritte’s fishpond couldn’t provide for all of Moloka‘i, let alone all of Hawai‘i, but he does feed his family with the fish he farms. And when something goes wrong—a recent mudslide resulted in a baby-fish apocalypse— it teaches Ritte what his ancestors would have known but he has had to learn.

Walter Ritte has restored an ancient Hawaiian fishpond on the island of Moloka‘i. (Brendan George Ko for The Atlantic)

That’s how his vision went from restoring the fishpond to restoring the ahupua‘a, which in ancient Hawai‘i referred to a slice of land extending from the mountains down to the ocean. If the land above the pond had been properly irrigated, it could have prevented the mudslide that killed all those fish. And if everyone on Moloka‘i tended to their ahupua‘a the way their ancestors did, the island might in fact be able to dramatically reduce its reliance on imported food.

But over the years, Ritte said, the people of Hawai‘i got complacent. Too many forgot how to work hard, how to sweat and get dirty. Too few questioned what their changing way of life was doing to them. This is how they became “sitting ducks,” he told me, too willing to acclimate to a country that is not truly their own. “I am not an American. I want my family to survive. And we’re not going to survive with continental values,” he said. “Look at the government. Look at the guy who was president. And he’s going to be president again. He’s an asshole. So America has nothing that impresses me. I mean, why would I want to be an American?”

Ritte said he may not live to see it, but he believes Hawai‘i will one day become an independent nation again. “There’s a whole bunch of people who are not happy,” he said. “There’s going to be some violence. You got guys who are really pissed. But that’s not going to make the changes that we need.”

Still, change does not always come the way you expect. Ritte believes that part of what he’s doing on Moloka‘i is preparing Hawai‘i for a period of tremendous unrest that may come sooner rather than later, as stability in the world falters and as Hawaiians are roused to the cause of independence. “All the years people said, ‘You can control the Hawaiians, don’t worry; you can control them.’ But now they’re nervous you cannot control them.”

During my visit to Pu‘uhonua O Waimānalo, the compound that Dennis Kanahele and Brandon Maka‘awa‘awa have designated as the headquarters for the Nation of Hawai‘i, Maka‘awa‘awa invited me to the main office, a house that they use as a government building to hatch plans and discuss foreign relations. Recently, Kanahele and their foreign minister traveled to China on a diplomatic visit. And they’ve established peace treaties with Native American tribes in the contiguous United States—the same kind of treaty that the United States initially forged with the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, they pointed out to me.

These days, they are not interested in American affairs. They see anyone who works with the Americans, including Kūhiō Lewis and Brian Schatz, as sellouts or worse. To them, the best president the United States ever had was Clinton, because he was the one who signed the apology bill. Barack Obama may get points for being local—he was born and raised on O‘ahu—but they’re still waiting for him to do something, anything, for the Hawaiian people. As it happens, Obama has a house about five miles down the road. “I still believe that he’s here for a reason in Waimānalo,” Kanahele said, referring to this area of the island. “I believe the reason is what we’re doing.”

Outside, light rains occasionally swept over the house, and chickens and cats wandered freely. Inside was cozy, more bunker than Oval Office, with a rusted door swung open and walls covered in papers and plans. At one end of the room was a fireplace, and over the mantel was a large map of the world with Hawai‘i at the center, alongside portraits of Queen Lili‘uokalani and her brother King Kalākaua. Below that was a large humpback whale carved from wood, and wooden blocks bearing the names and titles of members of the executive branch. Another wall displayed a copy of the Kū‘ē Petitions, documents that members of the Hawaiian Patriotic League hand-carried to Washington, D.C., in 1897 to oppose annexation.

Kanahele is tall, with broad shoulders and a splatter of freckles on one cheek. He is thoughtful and serious, the kind of person who quiets a room the instant he speaks. But he’s also funny and warm. I’ve heard people describe Kanahele as Kamehameha-like in his looks, and I can see why. Kanahele told me that he is in fact descended from a relative of Kamehameha’s, “like, nine generations back.” Today, most people know him by his nickname, Bumpy.

The most animated I saw him was when I asked if he’d ever sat down with a descendant of the overthrowers. After all, it often feels like everyone knows everyone here, and in many cases they do, and have for generations. Kanahele told me the story of how, years ago, he’d had a conversation with Thurston Twigg-Smith, a grandson of Lorrin A. Thurston, who was an architect of the overthrow. Twigg-Smith was the publisher of the daily newspaper the Honolulu Advertiser, and Kanahele still remembers the room they sat in—fancy, filled with books. “I was excited because it was this guy, right? He was involved,” Kanahele said.

The experience left him with “ugly feelings,” he told me. “He called us cavemen.” And Twigg-Smith defended the overthrowers. I mentioned to Kanahele that I’d read Twigg-Smith’s account of the coup, in which he refers to it admiringly as “the Hawaiian Revolution.”

Twigg-Smith told Kanahele that his grandfather “did the best thing he thought was right at the time,” Kanahele said. When Kanahele asked, “Do you think that was right?,” Twigg-Smith didn’t hesitate. Yes, the overthrow was right, he said. Kanahele’s eyes widened as he recounted the exchange. “He thinks his grandfather did the right thing.” (Twigg-Smith died in 2016.)

Kanahele and Maka‘awa‘awa aren’t trying to bring back the monarchy. They aren’t even trying to build a democracy. Their way of government, outlined in a constitution that Kanahele drafted in 1994, is based on a family structure, including a council of kūpuna (Hawaiian elders) and kānaka (Hawaiian) and non-kānaka (non-Hawaiian) legislative branches. (The constitution was adopted by kūpuna, who also formally selected Kanahele as their leader, in the mid-1990s.) “It’s a Hawaiian way of thinking of government,” Maka‘awa‘awa said. “It’s not democracy or communism or socialism or any of that. It’s our own form of government.”

Kanahele’s vision for the future entails reclaiming all of Hawai‘i from the United States and reducing its economic dependence on tourism and defense. He and Maka‘awa‘awa are unpaid volunteers, Maka‘awa‘awa told me. “Luckily for me and Uncle, we have very supportive wives who have helped support us for years.” Maka‘awa‘awa said that they used to pay a “ridiculous amount” in property taxes, but thought better of it when contemplating the 65-year lease awarded in 1964 to the U.S. military for $1 at Pōhakuloa, a military training area covering thousands of acres on the Big Island. So about eight years ago, they decided to pay $1 a year. The state is “pissed,” he told me, but he doesn’t care. “Plus,” he added, “it’s our land.”

I had to ask: Doesn’t an independent nation need its own military? Other than the one that was already all around them, that is. Some 50,000 active-duty U.S. service members are stationed throughout the Islands. Many of the military’s 65-year leases in Hawai‘i are up for renewal within the next five years, and debate over what to do with them has already begun. I thought about our proximity to Bellows Air Force Station, just a mile or two down the hill from where we were sitting. Yes, Kanahele told me. “You need one standing army,” he said. “You got to protect your natural resources—your lands and your natural resources.” Otherwise, he warned, people are “going to be taking them away.”

I asked them how they think about the Hawai‘i residents—some of whom have been here for generations, descendants of plantation laborers or missionaries—who are not Hawaiian. There are plenty of non-kānaka people who say they are pro–Hawaiian rights, until the conversation turns to whether all the non-kānaka should leave. “We think about that,” Kanahele said, because of the “innocents involved. The damage goes back to America and the state of Hawai‘i. That’s who everybody should be pointing the finger at.”

And it’s not like they want to take back all 4 million acres of Hawai‘i’s land, Maka‘awa‘awa said. “Really, right now, when we talk about the 1.8 million acres of ceded lands”—that is, the crown and government lands that were seized in the overthrow and subsequently turned over to the United States in exchange for annexation—“we’re not talking about private lands here. We’re talking strictly state lands.”

Kanahele calmly corrected him: “And then we will claim all 4 million acres. We claim everything.”

As I was reporting this story, I kept asking people: What does America owe Hawai‘i, and the Hawaiian people? A better question might be: When does a nation cease to exist? When its leader is deposed? When the last of its currency is melted down? When the only remaining person who can speak its language dies? For years I thought of the annexation-day ceremony in 1898 as the moment when the nation of Hawai‘i ceased to be. One account describes the final playing of Hawai‘i’s national anthem, by the Royal Hawaiian Band, whose leader began to weep as they played. After that came a 21-gun salute, the final national salute to the Hawaiian flag. Then the band played taps. Eventually all kingdoms die. Empires, too.

The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom set in motion a series of events that disenfranchised Hawaiians, separated them from their land and their culture, and forever altered the course of history in Hawai‘i. It was also a moment of enormous and lasting consequence for the United States. It solidified a worldview, famously put forth in the pages of this magazine by the retired naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1890, that America must turn its eyes and its borders ever outward, in defense of the American idea.

[From the December 1890 issue: The United States looking outward]

But there were others who fought against the expansionists’ notion of America, arguing that the true American system of government depended on the consent of the governed. Many of the people arguing this were the abolitionists who led and wrote for this magazine, including Mark Twain and The Atlantic’s former editor in chief William Dean Howells, both members of the Anti-Imperialist League. (Other anti-imperialists argued against expansion on racist grounds—that is, that the U.S. should not invite into the country more nonwhite or non-Christian people, of which there were many in Hawai‘i.)

This was the debate Americans were having about their country’s role in the world when, in March 1893, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as president for the second time. Cleveland, the 24th president of the United States, had also been the 22nd; Benjamin Harrison’s single term had been sandwiched in between. Once he was back in the White House, Cleveland immediately set to work undoing the things that, in his view, Harrison had made a mess of. Primary among those messes was what people had begun to refer to as “the question of Hawaii.”

After writing to Harrison in January 1893, Queen Lili‘uokalani had sent a letter to her “great and good friend” Cleveland in his capacity as the president-elect. “I beg that you will consider this matter, in which there is so much involved for my people,” she wrote, “and that you will give us your friendly assistance in granting redress for a wrong which we claim has been done to us, under color of the assistance of the naval forces of the United States in a friendly port.”

Queen Lili‘uokalani (top) was deposed in the January 1893 coup; the insurrectionists had support from the highest levels of the U.S. government, and help from U.S. troops (bottom). (Photo12 / Getty; U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)

Whereas Harrison, in the twilight of his presidency, had sent a treaty to the Senate to advance the annexation of Hawai‘i, Cleveland’s first act as president was to withdraw that treaty and order an investigation of the overthrow. Members of the Committee of Safety and their supporters, Cleveland learned, had seized ‘Iolani Palace as their new headquarters—they would later imprison Queen Lili‘uokalani there, in one of the bedrooms upstairs, for nearly eight months—and raised the American flag over the main government building in the palace square. Cleveland now mandated that the American flag be pulled down and replaced with the Hawaiian flag.

This set off a firestorm in Congress, where Cleveland’s critics eventually compared him to a Civil War secessionist. One senator accused him of choosing “ignorant, savage, alien royalty, over American people.”

By then, the inquiry that Cleveland ordered had come back. As he explained when he sent the report on to Congress, the investigation had found that the overthrow had been an “act of war,” and that the queen had surrendered “not absolutely and permanently, but temporarily and conditionally.”

Cleveland had dispatched his U.S. minister to Hawai‘i, former Representative Albert S. Willis of Kentucky, to restore the queen to power. Willis’s mission in Honolulu was to issue an ultimatum to the insurrectionists to dissolve their fledgling government, and secure a promise from Queen Lili‘uokalani that she would pardon the usurpers. But the Provisional Government argued that the United States had no right to tell it what to do.

“We do not recognize the right of the President of the United States to interfere in our domestic affairs,” wrote Sanford Dole, the self-appointed president of Hawai‘i’s new executive branch. “The Provisional Government of the Hawaiian Islands respectfully and unhesitatingly declines to entertain the proposition of the President of the United States that it should surrender its authority to the ex-Queen.”

This was, quite obviously, outrageous. Here Dole and his co-conspirators were claiming to be a sovereign nation—and using this claim to rebuff Cleveland’s attempts to return power to the sovereign nation they’d just overthrown—all while having pulled off their coup with the backing of American military forces and having flown an American flag atop the government building they now occupied.

In January 1894, the American sugar baron and longtime Hawai‘i resident Zephaniah Spalding testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations about the situation in Honolulu. “We have now as near an approach to autocratic government as anywhere,” Spalding said. “We have a council of 15, perhaps, composed of the businessmen of Honolulu” who “examine into the business of the country, just the same as is done in a large factory or on a farm.”

The insurrectionists had, with support from the highest levels of the U.S. government, successfully overthrown a nation. They’d installed an autocracy in its place, with Dole as president.

Americans argued about Hawai‘i for five long years after the overthrow. And once the United States officially annexed Hawai‘i in 1898 under President William McKinley, Dole became the first governor of the United States territory. Most Americans today know his name only because of the pineapple empire one of his cousins started.

All along, the debate over Hawai‘i was not merely about the fate of an archipelago some 5,000 miles away from Washington. Nor is the debate over Hawai‘i’s independence today some fringe argument about long-ago history. America answered the “question of Hawaii” by deciding that its sphere of influence would not end at California, but would expand ever outward. Harrison took the aggressive, expansionist view. Cleveland took the anti-imperialist, isolationist one. This ideological battle, which Harrison ultimately won (and later regretted, after he joined the Anti-Imperialist League himself), is perhaps the most consequential chapter in all of U.S. foreign relations. You can draw a clear, straight line from the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom to the attack on Pearl Harbor to America’s foreign policy today, including the idea that liberal democracy is worth protecting, at home and abroad.

It’s easy to feel grateful for this ethos when contemplating the alternative. In the past century, America’s global dominance has, despite episodes of galling overreach, been an extraordinary force for good around the world. The country’s strategic position in the Pacific allowed the United States to win World War II (and was a big reason the U.S. entered the war in the first place). The U.S. has continued to serve as a force for stability and security in the Pacific in a perilous new chapter. How might the world change without the United States to stand up to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin?

Some people in Hawai‘i now want to plan for how to regain—and sustain—independence if the United States loses power. (Brendan George Ko)

But to treat the U.S. presence in Hawai‘i as inevitable, or even as a shameful but justified means to an end, is to disregard the values for which Americans have fought since the country’s founding. It was the United States’ expansion into the Pacific that established America as a world superpower. And it all began with the coup in Honolulu, an autocratic uprising of the sort that the United States fights against today.

Perhaps the true lesson of history is that what seems destined in retrospect—whether the election of a president or the overthrow of a kingdom—is often much messier and more uncertain as it unfolds. John Waihe‘e, the former governor, told me that he no longer thinks about how to gain sovereignty, but rather how Hawai‘i should begin planning for a different future—one that may arrive unexpectedly, and on terms we may not now be considering.

Waihe‘e is part of a group of local leaders that has been working to map out various possible futures for Hawai‘i. The idea is to take into account the most pronounced challenges Hawai‘i faces: the outside wealth reshaping the Islands, the economic overreliance on tourism, the likelihood of more frequent climate disasters, the potential dissolution of democracy in the United States. One of the options is to do nothing at all, to accept the status quo, which Waihe‘e feels certain would be disastrous.

Jon Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, another member of the group, agrees. Osorio is the dean of the Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Undoing a historic wrong may be impossible, he told me, but you have a moral obligation to try. “If things don’t change, things are going to be really fucked up here,” Osorio said. “They will continue to deteriorate.” (As for how things are going in the United States generally, he put it this way: “I wouldn’t wish Trump on anyone, not even the Americans.”)

Osorio’s view is that Hawaiians should take more of a Trojan-horse approach—“a state government that essentially gets taken over by successive cadres of people who want to see an end to military occupation, who want to see an end to complete reliance on tourism, who see other kinds of possibilities in terms of year-round agriculture,” he told me. “Basically, being culturally and socially more and more distinct from the United States.” That doesn’t mean giving up on independence; it just means taking action now, thinking less about history and more about the future.

But history is still everywhere in Hawai‘i. On the east side of Moloka‘i, I drove by a house that had a sign out front that just said 1893 with a splotch of red, like blood. If you head southwest on Kaua‘i past Hanapēpē, and then on to Waimea, you can walk out onto the old whaling pier and see the exact spot where Captain James Cook first landed, in 1778. Not far from there is the old smokestack from a rusted-out sugar plantation. All around, you can see the remnants of more than two centuries of comings and goings. A place that was once completely apart from the world is now forever altered by outsiders. And yet the trees still spill mangoes onto the ground, and the moon still rises over the Pacific. Hawaiians are still here. As long as they are, Hawai‘i belongs to them.

[Read: How to save a dying language]

Over the course of my reporting, several Hawaiians speculated that Hawai‘i’s independence may ultimately come not because it is granted by the United States, but because the United States collapses under the second Trump presidency, or some other world-altering course of events. People often dismiss questions of Hawaiian independence by arguing, fairly, that if the United States hadn’t seized the kingdom, Britain, Japan, or Russia almost certainly would have. Now people in Hawai‘i want to plan for how to regain—and sustain—independence if the United States loses power.

Things change; Hawai‘i certainly has. All these years, I’ve been trying to understand what Hawai‘i lost, what was stolen, and how to get it back. What I failed to realize, until now, is that the story of the overthrow is not really the story of Hawai‘i. It is the story of America. It is the story of how dangerous it is to assume that anything is permanent. History teaches us that nothing lasts forever. Hawaiians have learned that lesson. Americans would do well to remember it.

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “What Happens When You Lose Your Country?” It was updated to include additional context about the process by which the Nation of Hawai’i adopted its constitution and selected Dennis Pu’uhonua Kanahele as its leader.

Donald Trump’s Hatred of Free Speech

2024-11-04T07:00:00-05:00

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In the fall of 2022, pro-democracy protesters in cities across mainland China developed a clever tactic for speaking out against government forces that wished to silence them. They began holding up blank sheets of paper, as well as tacking up blank paper in public spaces, to register their disapproval of restrictive lockdown rules as well as their disapprobation of the government’s repressive censorship laws.

Observers from all over the world noted with admiration the courage and creativity of the protesters, who’d found a bold way to speak out while saying nothing at all. Chinese authorities cracked down on the dissenters, censoring online reporting about them and arresting or otherwise threatening those who have tried to remind people of the movement since then.

In America, a country consecrated to freedom, the dystopian scenes out of China seemed distant. Americans understand on a bone-deep level that, to paraphrase James Madison, absolute sovereignty belongs to the people, not the government. Americans are free to say what we believe, and free to share our ideas with our fellow citizens. We are free to criticize the government, which is accountable to the people, not the other way around. The First Amendment does not grant us these freedoms—they are an inviolable right. The First Amendment does, however, dictate that the government dare not interfere with these freedoms, that officials have no right to cut down the American people’s speech, including the people’s right to free press.

To be comfortable in these freedoms, to assume that we would never need to resort to holding up blank sheets of paper to criticize the powerful, is a luxury that Americans cannot presently afford.

The United States is on the eve of an election that could see the return to power of Donald Trump, an autocrat who vociferously and repeatedly threatens the basic freedoms of the American people—with a particular preoccupation with curbing freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Worse still, he has persuaded his followers to cheer on the demise of their own freedoms. When Trump tells people that journalists are “the enemy of the American people,” or “evil,” when he says that Americans who describe the criminal charges he faces should be investigated for treason, he is not merely denigrating a professional class; he is directly attacking the rights of all Americans. He is attacking those who happen to work as journalists, but he is likewise attacking their neighbors—every American who has the right to free speech and free press themselves.

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo in October. “We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics,” he said, using the term he often directs at American citizens who work in journalism, as well as his political foes generally. He went on: “And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

[Read: A brief history of Trump’s violent remarks]

Donald Trump does not seem to believe in free speech or the freedom of the press at all. He believes that when his fellow citizens say things he doesn’t like, he should have the power to shut them up. And he has repeatedly suggested investigating and imprisoning Americans, as well as turning the U.S. military on the American people in order to do so. No wonder Trump is so starry-eyed over China’s dictator, Xi Jinping, whom Trump often praises in effusive terms. No wonder Trump has similarly embraced the dictator and former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who bragged about leading his country to the extrajudicial killing of thousands of Filipino citizens, including those working as journalists. (“Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination if you’re a son of a bitch,” Duterte once said.) And no wonder Trump openly admires the autocrats Vladimir Putin (“genius”) and Viktor Orbán (“a great man”), both of whom he describes as being “at the top of their game, whether you like it or not.”

In a recent interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump complained about the Americans who have noticed his pattern of adulation for the brutal leaders of antidemocratic regimes, whose citizens do not have the right to free speech. “They hate when I say—you know, when the press—when I call President Xi, they said, ‘He called President Xi brilliant.’ Well, he’s a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” He went on: “Actually, we have evil people in our country.”

Trump is making it abundantly clear that dictators aren’t the problem—rather, Americans exercising their right to free speech and free press are the problem, and they are a problem that should be solved by dictatorial rule.

One person who seems to share Trump’s confusion over basic American freedoms is Elon Musk, who strangely claims to be a free-speech absolutist, all while remaking Twitter into a propaganda arm of the Trump campaign. Musk, like Trump, is fixated on tearing down American citizens and their right to free press. Musk likes to post spirited calls to action on his social platform, such as “We are the mainstream media now,” seeming to believe that he is the one who grants Americans their right to expression. (Never mind that a social platform that is truly absolutist in letting anyone say whatever they want would probably look more like 4chan than anything else—that is, it would neither delete its users’ comments nor deploy algorithms to amplify its owners’ political views.)

Musk has long aspired to be taken seriously by the news industry, and his aggrievement seems to stem, in part, from the fact that he is not. Before his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, he floated the idea of starting various news sites—including one in which users would upvote or downvote stories as part of a “credibility-ranking site for people to rate journalists and news organizations,” not realizing or perhaps not caring that truth, and therefore credibility, is not something that can be established or eliminated through the clicking of buttons on the internet at scale. (Such a system would, however, be very useful for efforts at political warfare.)

Today, Musk claims that Twitter is “the top source of news on Earth!” when, in reality, it is among the closest analogues that America has ever seen to a state-run media outlet. And although several operators of huge social platforms have floated the idea of accreditation or licensing for journalists the way lawyers take the bar and doctors take board exams, there is no special class of licensed journalists, and that is by design. Every American citizen has the right to free press. You do not need to work full-time as a journalist, or pass a test, or join a professional association to exercise this right.

One of the knock-on effects of living in a country whose citizens have the right to say and publish whatever they want is that people sometimes say abhorrent things. (And also: People can consume the information they wish. But for that to happen, your fellow citizens have to be free to offer it to you in the first place, whether what you’re seeking is Newsmax, Joe Rogan, or The New York Times.) In practice, the rights of free speech and free press are interwoven this way. And any American who consumes media, or publishes their own research, reporting, or opinions on any platform—whether on a flyer stuck to a telephone pole, in an Instagram post, or in a local newspaper—is benefiting from the protection of these rights, and would suffer greatly if they were curtailed.

Social media is miraculous in its flattening ability—people can self-publish their ideas with very little friction and no financial cost; they have the potential to reach a massive audience in an instant. These qualities are positive on their face, and sometimes mean that people mistake Twitter for an engine of free speech, when in fact it is a private company run by an illiberal man who is throwing everything he has behind an anti-free-speech politician who wants to attack his fellow Americans with their own military.

Trump’s and Musk’s most ardent supporters are fond of posting a meme that goes like this: “You don’t hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don’t.” Musk, of course, has every right to run his social platform how he chooses. If he wants to make it a forum for railing against the American right to free speech and free press, while believing he can convince people that doing so demonstrates his commitment to free speech, that’s his prerogative. If he wants to stoke hatred and partisanship, and advocate for interruptions to the peaceful transfer of power in the United States, he can.

But Musk cannot grant the American people their right to free speech any more than Trump can. The American right to free speech and free press is God-given. And the Constitution is intended to protect Americans from government tyrants who would attempt to quash our freedom in just the way that Trump is threatening to do, with Musk’s full-throated endorsement.

Trump’s threats are already effectively silencing Americans. Consider, for example, Jeff Bezos’s profound cowardice in banning The Washington Post from publishing its endorsement of Trump’s rival. (Ditto Patrick Soon-Shiong over at the Los Angeles Times.) Bezos, like Musk, is free to run his business how he chooses. But that shouldn’t shield him from criticism over his actions. In explaining his decision, Bezos blamed the American citizens who work as journalists for being hated, denigrated, and threatened by Trump. “Our profession is now the least trusted of all,” he wrote in an essay explaining himself, with no apparent trace of irony given the breach of trust that his actions represented. “Something we are doing is clearly not working.”

Something that is apparently working: Trump’s Musk-assisted campaign to tell Americans they should rail against their own right to free press and free speech. The illiberal techno-authoritarian crowd cheered Bezos on for his kowtowing, and for his chastising of the journalism industry, and Trump began using the newspaper’s non-endorsement as a campaign talking point. (It may seem odd that Trump would boast about a newspaper’s decision not to endorse his rival, given his hatred of the press, but he dismisses newspapers as “fake news” only when they criticize him.)

This is how tyranny works: Amplify praise for the dear leader, silence dissent, crack down on individual freedoms, repeat. A free society’s fall into authoritarianism does not start with citizens being forced to protest using blank sheets of paper. But it can get to that point with dizzying speed. This is the warning that people in once-free nations always repeat: You’re free until you are not. And destroying a people’s right to speak and publish freely is always one of the first moves in the autocrat’s playbook.

Centuries ago, the American colonists forging a new way of life on this continent found themselves subject to laws and restrictions on free speech that dated back to medieval England. You could not criticize the government without facing violent punishment. Public whippings were routine. One Maryland man, who called his local legislature a “turdy shitten assembly” in 1666, was sentenced to be tied to an apple tree and lashed 30 times, according to Stephen D. Solomon’s account in Revolutionary Dissent: How the Founding Generation Created the Freedom of Speech. A Virginia man who criticized the government had his arms broken and was beaten by a group of men who flogged him with their rifles. Courts sentenced others to have their ears cut off, as in the case of a Massachusetts man who denounced the Church and the government in 1631. Americans were lashed and beaten and bloodied for their right to speak freely. Eventually many of them fought and died to protect themselves, and they did so to create a free society that would protect future American citizens from such barbarism and tyrannical government overreach.

Trump would like to convince the American people that his hatred is laser-focused. He would like Americans to believe that his threats of retribution are reserved only for his political foes, for the former advisers he now deems disloyal, for the tens of thousands of American citizens who work as journalists. What Americans need to understand is that anyone who would threaten to quash the most fundamental rights of some of their fellow citizens is threatening to impinge on the rights of all Americans. The United States is still a nation consecrated to freedom. And the American people should not hand it over to anyone who would dare try to convince you otherwise.

American Fury

2024-07-23T06:00:00-04:00

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Convulsions of political violence have a way of imprinting on the national memory. They become, in retrospect, the moments from which the rest of history seems to unspool. Yet they are forever intertwined with the possibility that things could have gone exactly the other way.

What if? becomes a haunting question. What if Franklin D. Roosevelt’s would-be assassin had hit his target in Miami in 1933? What if John F. Kennedy had forgone the convertible ride in Dallas in 1963? What if Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t walked onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968? What if the bullet that pierced Ronald Reagan’s lung in 1981 had been an inch closer to his heart? What if Donald Trump had shifted his weight just before a gunman shot at him during a rally in Pennsylvania in July? What if?

Maybe it is the collision of malice and luck that makes the outcome of an attempted assassination seem simultaneously fated and wholly random. But political violence is rarely random. In fact, those who study the subject most assiduously have been warning Americans for years that threats of violence are escalating.

Our experience of political violence—the shock of an assassination attempt, how the smallest details suddenly burn bright with meaning—can obscure its true nature. Violence intended to achieve political goals, whether driven by ideology, hatred, or delusions, is broadly predictable. The social conditions that exacerbate it can simmer for years, complex but unmysterious. Again and again throughout history, and indeed today, periods of political violence coincide with ostentatious wealth disparity, faltering trust in democratic institutions, intensifying partisanship, rapid demographic change, an outpouring of dehumanizing rhetoric about one’s political foes, and soaring conspiracy theorizing. Once political violence becomes endemic in society, as it has in ours, it is terribly difficult to dissolve. Difficult, but not impossible.

As I wrote in “The New Anarchy,” the April 2023 cover story for this magazine, political violence is seen as more acceptable today than it was a decade ago by nearly every measure. Political conversation borrows the rhetoric of war. People build their identity not around shared values but around a hatred of their foes. A 2023 UC Davis survey found that “a small but concerning segment of the population considers violence, including lethal violence, to be usually or always justified to advance political objectives.” More Americans bring weapons to protests than they did in previous years. A growing number of elected officials face harassment and death threats, which has prompted many capable leaders to drop out of politics entirely.

[From the April 2023 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on America’s terrifying cycle of extremist violence]

Officials at the highest levels of the military and in the White House told me repeatedly that they believed the United States would see an increase in violent attacks as the 2024 presidential election drew near. Other experts talked about pronounced danger in places where extremist groups had already emerged, where gun culture is thriving, and where hard-core partisans bump up against one another, especially in politically consequential states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. Clearly, they were right in their warning. They further predicted that the current wave of violence would take a generation or longer to crest.

Our informational environment threatens to accelerate outbreaks of violence. Social platforms are optimized for rhetorical warfare. Their algorithms reward emotional outbursts, wild speculation, and unchecked hostility, all of which drive engagement with websites that profit off user attention but profess no real commitment to accuracy. Some of the most powerful people on the planet—the billionaire Elon Musk, various members of Congress—stoke contempt for their political adversaries, real and perceived, and encourage legions of followers to distrust the independent sources of information that try to hold them accountable.

Periods of political violence do end. But often not without shocking retrenchments of people’s freedoms or catastrophic events coming first. As I’ve written previously, governments have a record of responding to political violence brutally, and in ways that undermine democratic values and dismantle individual civil liberties. And political leaders are frequently complicit in perpetuating political violence, seeking to harness it for their own ends.

I first became interested in political violence around the time of the Waco, Texas, massacre in 1993 and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. In the years that followed, as the millennium drew to a close, the furies of that particular era appeared to cool, which I took as a sign that something had gone right. One scholar of political violence cautioned against such optimism. “The militia movement waned very quickly in the 1990s not because of anything we did, but because of Oklahoma City,” Carolyn Gallaher, who spent two years tracking a right-wing paramilitary group in Kentucky, told me. After the bombing, extremists went underground. But only for a time.

William Bernstein, the author of The Delusions of Crowds, put it in chilling terms when I asked him whether he thought January 6 would be a turning point away from violence in American politics. “The answer is—and it’s not going to be a pleasant answer—the answer is that the violence ends if it boils over into a containable cataclysm,” he said. What if, he went on—“I almost hesitate to say this”—but what if the rioters actually had hanged Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi on January 6? “I think that would have ended it. I don’t think it ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm. I think, absent that, it just boils along for a generation or two generations.”

These are poisonous days in our nation. It is reasonable to worry that the attempt on Trump’s life represents not the end of a cycle of violence, but an escalation in an era that has already seen a congresswoman shot in a supermarket parking lot, a congressman shot while playing baseball, and the U.S. Capitol stormed by insurrectionists. Some degree of cynicism is understandable. But too many Americans are allowing political exhaustion and despair to justify their own abstention from self-governance. Too many believe that screaming into the void, or clicking the “Like” button, amounts to political involvement.

The only way to minimize further bloodshed is to choose leaders at every level of society who reject political violence unconditionally, in word and in deed. This does not mean acquiescing to both‑sidesism—you can still oppose Trump’s authoritarian impulses while condemning the attempt on his life. Making it through this dark time does, however, require articulating American values worth preserving, and building consensus toward reaching them. And it requires understanding the deleterious effects of political violence. Bloodshed begets more bloodshed, and a functioning democracy can only withstand so much of it. There are no random acts of political violence in America, or anywhere else. There will be violence in our nation until Americans come together to say “Enough.”

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “American Fury.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What Kind of ‘Psycho’ Calls Dead Americans ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’?

2024-06-27T06:00:00-04:00

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Updated on Friday, June 28, 2024 at 5:06 p.m. ET

Perhaps you’ve noticed lately that Donald Trump, a man not known for subtlety, has been testing the limits of the Streisand effect. At one event after another—at a rally, then a fundraiser, in remarks on his social platform, and in at least one video that his campaign distributed online—Trump keeps reminding his supporters about his well-documented habit of disparaging America’s military service members as “dumb,” “losers,” and “suckers.”

“To think that I would, in front of generals and others, say ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’” Trump said with performative incredulity at the CNN-hosted presidential debate Thursday night. (“You’re the sucker, you’re the loser,” Biden later fired back.)

“Think of it, from a practical standpoint,” Trump had said before a crowd in Las Vegas earlier this month. “I’m standing there with generals and military people in a cemetery, and I look at them and say, ‘These people are suckers and losers.’ Now, think of it; unless you’re a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway?”

As it happens, the American people have, by now, a very clear picture of the kind of person who would say such a thing.

Recall Trump’s infamous 2015 remarks about Senator John McCain, who was tortured during his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam: “He’s not a war hero,” Trump insisted. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Then there was the time in 2016 when Trump publicly mocked and belittled Khzir and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a fallen U.S. Army officer, Humayun Khan, who had been killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004. (Trump is “devoid of feeling the pain of a mother who has sacrificed her son,” Khzir said at the time.)

Then, in 2020, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported several instances in which Trump openly expressed disgust for America’s dead service members. There was the time in Arlington National Cemetery, on Memorial Day in 2017, when Trump was standing at the grave of Robert Kelly, a young Marine officer who had been killed in Afghanistan. Trump was visiting the cemetery with his then–Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general and father to Robert. As Goldberg first reported, “Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, ‘I don’t get it. What was in it for them?’”

During a trip to France the following year, faced with the prospect of visiting another cemetery, this time to pay respects to service members killed in World War I, Trump complained: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” (Trump’s loyalists have attempted to redirect attention to the weather that day, arguing that it really was too rainy for a visit.) And, as Goldberg first reported, “in a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.”

In subsequent reporting, including his 2023 profile of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Goldberg uncovered additional incidents in which Trump disparaged American service members. At one military ceremony, for example, a wounded Army captain who’d completed five combat tours and lost a leg in an IED attack nearly tumbled over. Others, including then–Vice President Mike Pence, rushed to help the man. But Trump complained to Milley in a voice loud enough for several people to hear: “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

Trump has spent years attempting to deny these incidents—all while experienced journalists writing for multiple news organizations have corroborated The Atlantic’s initial reporting. But recently, Trump has become newly preoccupied with Goldberg (whom Trump mentioned by name and described as a “horrible radical left lunatic” at a rally last month) and with his reporting on Trump’s disdain for the Americans who volunteer to serve their country. And Trump seems preoccupied generally with denying his own record of disparaging service members. (Listening to his clumsy attempts to deny what he said, I can’t help but think of Hamlet’s Queen Gertrude—“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”—or at least the unraveling guilt of the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart.)

That Trump would lie is unsurprising. But his recent obsession is curious because it represents a rare instance in which he avoids doubling down on his own provocations. And it is revealing—presumably reflecting some sort of poll that has found that Americans don’t particularly like their war dead to be mocked by the once and prospective commander in chief. (I suppose it’s possible that on some level, Trump feels ashamed of what he said, but shame typically requires a baseline degree of self-awareness and empathy.)

“They made up a story about me with suckers and losers,” Trump said at a fundraiser in Washington, D.C., last weekend. “They made up this story about me, looking down at graves, saying ‘suckers’—they make it up. Suckers and losers. Who would? Surrounded by military people. There’s nobody that’s stupid enough to make that statement. Think of it. And I was president. I would have said that would have been justified for somebody to start taking swings at me as president. But they made it up. It’s a phrase that was totally made up by a third-rate magazine that’s going out of business, losing a fortune. I think it was The Atlantic. A magazine that nobody reads.” (The Atlantic is profitable and recently announced that it has more than 1 million subscribers.) “It’s horrible,” he later added. “Who would say it?”

Well, Trump said it. And over the past four years, several more journalists have reported as much. One day after Goldberg’s 2020 story appeared, Jennifer Griffin, a national-security correspondent for Fox News, found in her own reporting that Trump had “disparaged veterans.” One former senior Trump-administration official told Griffin that Trump said anyone who served in Vietnam “was a sucker,” she reported. “This former official heard the President say about American veterans: ‘What’s in it for them? They don’t make any money.’” Griffin also corroborated details first reported by Goldberg about how Trump did not want to include wounded service members in military parades. “Regarding Trump’s July 4th military parade, during a planning session at the White House after seeing the Bastille Day parade in 2017, the President said regarding the inclusion of ‘wounded guys’ ‘that’s not a good look’ ‘Americans don’t like that,’ source confirms,” Griffin tweeted.

Trump attacked her in response. “Jennifer Griffin should be fired for this kind of reporting,” he tweeted at the time. “Fox News is gone!” The Washington Post subsequently reported that “Trump believed people who served in the Vietnam War must be ‘losers’ because they hadn’t gotten out of it, according to a person familiar with the comments.” (The newspaper also noted that although Trump, in a tweeted response to the Atlantic story, claimed, “I never called John [McCain] a loser. I swear on whatever, or whoever, I was asked to swear on,” he did, in fact, call McCain a loser in a 2015 interview, which you can watch for yourself.)

The New York Times similarly reported that its sources verified “that Mr. Trump resisted supporting an official funeral and lowering flags after the death of Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Vietnam War hero whose military service he had disparaged.” (Ultimately, Trump relented, and the flags were lowered.) And the Times reported that “people familiar with Mr. Trump’s private conversations say he has long scorned those who served in Vietnam as being too dumb to have gotten out of it,” as Trump had done. The Times further reported that “some also recalled him asking why the United States should be so interested in finding captured soldiers” who are prisoners of war.

This past October, John Kelly publicly confirmed, in a statement to CNN’s Jake Tapper, the details that Goldberg first reported. This came in the weeks following Goldberg’s profile of Milley, and Trump’s subsequent suggestion that Milley be executed for treason. Here is how Kelly put it:

What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them.” A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.” A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family—for all Gold Star families—on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are “losers” and wouldn’t visit their graves in France … A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason—in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law. There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.

And in his new book, The Return of Great Powers, the CNN national-security reporter Jim Sciutto quotes Kelly telling him that Trump “would often say, ‘Why do you people all say that these guys who get wounded or killed are heroes? They’re suckers for going in the first place, and they’re losers.’”

On November 9, 2010, Robert Kelly stepped on a concealed bomb while leading his platoon in Afghanistan. Donald Trump, meanwhile, was somewhere in between tweets promoting his television game show, The Apprentice, and a Fox News appearance during which he dangled the prospect of running for office.

Robert Kelly was 29 when he died. He was also a newlywed. And he was a friend and brother to many more who served in the military. In an obituary, Robert’s friends and family recalled his quick wit and strong sense of duty. They remembered the charm and persistence with which he pursued his first date with the woman who would become his wife. They noted his fondness for history and for ice hockey. And they described his deep love of country. “He went quickly and thank God he did not suffer,” Kelly’s father wrote to his friends after Robert died. “In combat that is as good as it gets.” The elder Kelly described the pain of his loss as “unimaginable.”

Trump has never served in the U.S. military. “Bone spurs” won him an exemption from Vietnam. He has never had to triple-check to make sure his uniform was in regulation, or taken a combat-fitness test. He has never watched his spouse walk out the door for the last time before deployment. He has never cared for a family member who returned from war with permanent injuries. And he has never received the unfathomable news that one of his children was killed in action. Millions of Americans have. But Trump is nothing like them.

The Godfather of American Comedy

2024-04-29T07:00:00-04:00

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Somewhere in the hills above Malibu, drenched in California sunshine and sitting side by side in a used white Volkswagen bug, two teenage boys realized they were lost. They’d been looping their way along an open road, past shady groves and canyons, and in doing so they’d gotten turned around. This was the early 1960s, and the boy driving the car was Albert Einstein—yes, this really was his given name, years before he changed it to Albert Brooks. Riding shotgun was his best friend and classmate from Beverly Hills High School, Rob Reiner.

Brooks had inherited the car from one of his older brothers, and he’d made it his own by removing the handle of the stick shift and replacing it with a smooth brass doorknob. After several failed attempts to find the Pacific Coast Highway, which would take them home, Brooks and Reiner came upon a long fence surrounding a field where a single cow was grazing. Albert “stopped the car and he leaned out the window and he said, ‘Excuse me, sir! Sir?’ and the cow just looked up,” Reiner told me. “And he said, ‘How do you get back to the PCH?’ And the cow just did a little flick of his head, like he was flicking a fly away, and went back to eating.” Without missing a beat, Albert called out, “Thank you!” and confidently zoomed away. “I said, ‘Albert, you just took directions from a cow!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but he lives around here. He knows the area.’ ”

Reiner is telling me this story, dissolving into laughter as he does, to make two points. The first point is that Albert Brooks has impeccable comic timing, a quality that, among other talents, has made him a hero to multiple generations of comedians, actors, and directors who are themselves legends. The second point is that Brooks has always been this way.

Reiner remembers exactly his first impression of Brooks (Wow, this guy is arrogant ) and also his immediate second impression (This arrogant guy is mortified ). They both did high-school theater, and got to talking after their first class together. Brooks began to casually brag about the famous people he had met—they were Beverly Hills kids, after all. “He comes up to me, and in his cocky kind of way he says, ‘I know Carl Reiner,’ ” Rob Reiner told me. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I know him too. He’s my father.’ Oh my God, he was so embarrassed.” They instantly became friends, and have been close ever since—even living together for a stretch. One acquaintance described them to me as more like twins than brothers.

[Read: Adrienne LaFrance interviews Albert Brooks]

But although Brooks and Reiner pursued careers in the same industry, and both found great success, they didn’t choose the same path—personally or professionally. Brooks’s decisions over the years occasionally confounded his oldest friend, and worried him. Looking back now, however, something has become startlingly clear. If it is the case that by high school a person is already on some fundamental level the person they are destined to become—and Reiner believes this to be “totally true” of Brooks—then Brooks was fated to be not just the godfather of American comedy but also a man who would prove that humor in the face of catastrophe can sometimes save your life.

One thing you notice if you spend any amount of time with Brooks is that his manner of speaking—in musical swells that rise and fall—is not just something that his characters do, but something that he does. Think of Brooks in Broadcast News, the pitch of his voice going higher for emphasis as his character tries to persuade the woman he’s crazy about not to go out with another man: “I’ve never seen you like this with ANYbody. And so DON’T get me wrong when I tell you that TOM, while being a very NICE guy, is”—here he shifts into a whisper-shout—“THE DEVIL.” Off camera, this way of speaking, depending on the topic at hand, comes off as relieved, annoyed, insistent, or pleading. When you agree with him, he will often respond, “This is what I’m SAYing.” And when he disagrees with you, it’s “no NO,” always no twice, always with the emphasis on the second no.

The director and Simpsons co-creator James L. Brooks (no relation) spent part of this past winter directing Albert in the forthcoming Ella McCay, a political comedy set in the recent past. James told me that he knew he had to cast Albert based on just two words in the script: Sit, sit. “Which to me is very Albert,” James said. “It’s just the most Albert line.” The scene involves a classically Brooksian mode of imploring condescension—a quality deployed perfectly, for example, in the opening scene of Modern Romance, when Brooks’s character is dumping his girlfriend: “You’ve heard of a no-win situation, haven’t you? … Vietnam? This? ”

Brooks is tall, and often dresses monochromatically. A go-to outfit is black pants and a dark button-up shirt over a black tee, with a black fedora. He talks with his hands, and when he’s not gesturing with them, he fidgets. This comes off less as nervousness than as a kind of perpetual motion. When Brooks wants something, he is relentless. And he is impatient. He has a reputation for being extremely difficult to say no to. “Because he’s persuasive,” Reiner told me. “And he’s right 90 percent of the time.”

[Watch: Rob Reiner on the burden of his name]

But Brooks himself has no trouble saying no. He has repeatedly turned down the various Hollywood luminaries who asked him to star in their films—parts that ultimately went to Tom Hanks, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, and Steve Martin, and in several cases altered the trajectory of their careers. He was offered the role Hanks played in Big (1988), the role Crystal played in When Harry Met Sally (1989), and the role Williams played in Dead Poets Society (1989), to name only a few. (Brooks was somewhat reluctant to discuss this with me, as he didn’t want to sound “stuck up, because there are so many of them.”)

Instead, he went his own way, and has single-handedly shaped modern American entertainment to an astonishing degree. Pick a random moment in film or television from the past half century, and Brooks is often nearby. He was a repeat guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in the golden era of late-night television. Lorne Michaels asked him to be the permanent host of Saturday Night Live before it launched. (In declining the offer, Brooks suggested the rotating-guest-host format that has defined the program ever since.) Brooks wrote a satirical short called The Three of Us for SNL that seemed to predict the premise of Three’s Company, two years before Three’s Company existed. His first role in a big film was in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). His mockumentary (Real Life, 1979) came out five years before Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap. And for The Associates, the sitcom that gave Martin Short one of his first breaks, Brooks composed the theme music.

Brooks in 1977 during an interview with Rob Reiner, who was guest-hosting The Tonight Show (Tom Ron / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty)

Then there is the string of critical hits that he wrote, directed, and starred in, including Modern Romance (1981), about a man who breaks up with his beautiful girlfriend, then spends the rest of the film trying to get her back; Lost in America (1985), about a yuppie couple who quit their jobs to travel across the country in a Winnebago; and Defending Your Life (1991), a comedy about what happens when you die, which also starred Meryl Streep. Plus his role in Broadcast News (1987), which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He was considered a lock for another Oscar nomination after he played a vicious L.A. gangster alongside Ryan Gosling in the gorgeously shot film noir Drive (2011), but it didn’t happen. (“I got ROBBED,” Brooks tweeted the morning the nominations were announced. “I don’t mean the Oscars, I mean literally. My pants and shoes have been stolen.” What he’s actually pissed off about, he told me, is that he can’t get more roles as villains. He loves playing the bad guy.) He was the voice of the father clown fish in Finding Nemo (2003) and did the voices for Hank Scorpio and Jacques (among many others) in The Simpsons. Petey, the decapitated parakeet from Dumb and Dumber (1994), was inspired by Petey the cockatiel in Modern Romance.

[Read: James L. Brooks on journalism, the Oscars, and Broadcast News]

Although he’d wanted to be an actor since he was a child, Brooks didn’t want to be just an actor. He was and is a writer first, and tends to prefer seeing his stories to completion by acting in and directing them. Brooks is beloved, in part, for the big-eyed, wrinkled-brow, heart-on-his-sleeve quality he brings to many of his characters—part puppy dog, part … what, exactly? “You know, you’re talking about the secret sauce, so it’s hard,” James L. Brooks told me. “There’s an intrinsic vulnerability to him.” In real life, however, Brooks is far more confident—if still highly methodical. “He’s cautious about everything,” Reiner told me. “He can get obsessed about every little thing.”

Civilization-destroying earthquakes, for one, are never far from Brooks’s mind. (“Only because it’s going to happen, and I don’t know if it’ll happen in my lifetime,” he told me.) He is something of a hypochondriac. (“If I lived with a physician, they would have left me.”) He worries about an uprising of the nation’s youth against the Baby Boomers. (The plot of his 2011 novel, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, hinges on all three of these fears: A 9.1-magnitude earthquake nearly destroys Los Angeles; the superrich are the only ones who can afford decent health care; young people plot a violent revolt against “the olds.”) There are more mundane worries: He is fastidious about avoiding saying or doing things that could make him seem cocky, or stupid, or bougie. He also fears nuclear war. (“You know, I’m old-fashioned.”)

On film, death comes quickly, and hilariously, for Brooks. In Defending Your Life, which he wrote and directed, his character buys himself a new BMW on his birthday and is hit head-on by a bus almost immediately upon taking it out for a spin. He is, at the time, singing along to the West Side Story soundtrack, belting out Barbra Streisand’s rendition of “Something’s Coming.” In Private Benjamin (1980), the story begins with Brooks’s character marrying a woman played by Goldie Hawn, then dying while in the act of consummation on their wedding night, less than 11 minutes into the film (the consummation itself takes seconds). In a 2021 cameo on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Brooks throws his own funeral, so that he can watch a livestream of his friends eulogizing him while he is still alive.

While reporting this story, I talked with Brooks numerous times over many months. We met in person in L.A., we talked on the phone, we texted. For the conversations we’d planned ahead of time, he was never once late, not even by a minute. He’s the kind of person who will text you back instantly, no matter the hour or time zone. This is a quality I gather he expects from others in return. “Albert loves hyper-preparedness,” the actor Sharon Stone told me.

[Read: The brutal cynicism of Lost in America still resonates]

Stone co-starred with Brooks in The Muse, the 1999 film—which Brooks also wrote and directed—about a director who finds out that Hollywood’s best ideas all come from one woman. (Brooks’s co-writer was Monica Johnson, a close friend and collaborator who died in 2010.) Stone described Brooks to me as an “intellectual giant” who has no time for people who don’t work hard, but who never lost his temper on set. She also described him as peerless, basically. I had asked her where she would situate him among other movie stars roughly of his generation—say, Bill Murray or Steve Martin—and she told me none of them even comes close. (Murray doesn’t have the focus and Martin can’t keep his head out of the clouds, she said. Plus, neither can direct.) The only person she could think of who approached Brooks’s brilliance, she said, was Garry Shandling, who died in 2016. “There are people who have great talent,” Stone told me, “but there aren’t many people who can take that talent and have the discipline and the huge ability to be the general, and put a huge project together and then push it all the way through.”

Stone loved working with Brooks, and she particularly appreciated his bias toward action. If somebody wasn’t prepared, he would decisively and calmly move on without them—not exactly Zen about it, but sanguine. “He doesn’t have any patience if you’re not ready, if you don’t know your lines, if you don’t have your shit together,” Stone said. Later, she put it to me this way: “Albert’s a winner. And if you were running a relay race with Albert and you handed him the torch and the person next to him fell on the ground, Albert could jump over that person and run to the finish line … Someone would say, ‘You know, you jumped over that person,’ and he would say, ‘People who lay on the ground don’t win races.’ ”

I asked her if others found this quality off-putting. “People who lay on the ground would think Albert is mean,” she said. Also, she said, “he’s super bored by people who aren’t smart.” Despite his improvisational skills (see: his many voice appearances on The Simpsons, where he is a legend in the writers’ room for his riffing), Brooks is not one for winging it. Or, as he once put it to me: “Come anally prepared and let’s do the silliness on purpose when we want to.”

Another time, when I asked Brooks if it irritated him to be around people who aren’t as quick or clever as he is, he demurred, unconvincingly. A low tolerance for people who cannot keep up would be understandable. His mind gallops through conversations—there is never a missed opportunity for a joke, yet his joke-telling doesn’t come off as striving, only calibrated to the moment. One friend of his likened this quality to watching a professional athlete in a flow state. Consider this exchange, from when Brooks appeared on Larry King’s radio show in 1990, which left King gasping with laughter:

King: Do you ever order from 800 numbers late at night from on television? I get the feeling you do.
Brooks: Do you?
King: I don’t, but I think you do.
Brooks: I bought a wok and a vibrator. Actually, it was the same thing. A vibrating wok.

The people who know Brooks best still marvel at how naturally humor comes to him. James L. Brooks told me the story of a party he attended sometime in the late 1970s, where he’d noticed a small crowd gathering around a table to watch some guy doing card tricks. The guy was oozing charisma, and had charmed the people around him out of their wits. But it took him a minute to realize what was actually happening. “This guy doing card tricks had no idea how to do card tricks. He was just talking about 45 miles an hour. It was Albert Brooks. And he was just being hilarious.”

Rob Reiner told me about another party, where Brooks was so funny that people almost felt they were witnessing the birth of a new art form. “People were screaming laughing,” Reiner said. “And when he finished, it was like he’d been on a stage. He left the party, and a half hour later, the hostess of the party comes up to me and says, ‘Albert’s on the phone. He wants to talk to you.’ And so I get on the phone and I said, ‘Albert, what’s up?’ And he said, ‘Listen, Rob, you gotta do me a big favor.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘I left my keys in the house there and I can’t come back to get them.’ Because he’d finished his performance. He didn’t want to come back. So he had been wandering around for, like, 20 minutes trying to figure out what to do … That’s the way his mind works.” Reiner grabbed Brooks’s keys and went outside to find his friend.

Last year, Reiner released a documentary about Brooks’s career called Defending My Life, a project Reiner had wanted to pursue for years, inspired by My Dinner With Andre, Louis Malle’s famous 1981 film featuring the theater director André Gregory and the actor and playwright Wallace Shawn having a sprawling conversation at Café des Artistes, in Manhattan. For years, Brooks said no to the idea before finally relenting. “I’ve always felt he is the most brilliant comedian I’ve ever met,” Reiner said. The two have sometimes drifted apart, but they always drifted back together, Reiner told me. One argument in particular stands out in Reiner’s memory.

“I remember this distinctly,” Reiner said. “He would always ask me, ‘How does my hair look?’ And, you know, when he was young he had that Jew fro. And it looked the same every time. Every time he asked me, ‘How’s my hair look?’ And I would say, ‘Albert, it looks fine.’ And then one time we’re in the car and he kept asking me, ‘How does my hair look?’ And I said, ‘Albert, it looks the same! It looks the same every single time I look at it! It’s always the same!’ And he got so mad at me, he threw me out of the car. He said, ‘Get out of this car!’ He got mad at me because I wouldn’t tell him how his hair looked.”

Brooks remembers a different argument they had, decades ago, about the enduring star power of classic film actors—“the Cary Grants, the Clark Gables.” Reiner had remarked on how stars like that were immortal, the kind of leading men who “will never go away,” Brooks recalled. “And I said, ‘Everyone’s going away.’ And, you know, my kids don’t know who Cary Grant is unless I force them and say, ‘That’s Cary Grant.’ Every generation has their own people. And it’s remarkable how fast everything else goes away.”

The term comic’s comic is overused. But with Brooks, it fits. Judd Apatow, Conan O’Brien, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, and too many others to name have all cited him as a formative influence. James L. Brooks told me the story of standing in the living room at some gathering with Steve Martin when Martin spotted Brooks and got starstruck—“nervous, like a kid at Christmas,” he said.

While the critics who love Brooks often lament that his films have not enjoyed more commercial success—“Albert almost intentionally makes noncommercial movies,” Sharon Stone told me—what they miss is that he has, over the course of his career, repeatedly chosen fealty to his own artistic vision over anyone else’s desires, for him or for themselves. And he has done so with the clarity of a man racing against time, someone who knows that we only get one go-round, and tomorrow is never promised.

Big, When Harry Met Sally, Dead Poets Society—all became generational cinematic hits, as close to timeless as they come. But to Brooks, the decision to turn down these roles was obvious. With Big, he just couldn’t see himself playing a little boy. And anyway, he’d been actively trying to avoid New York City since at least the 1970s, back when Lorne Michaels had come calling. “What I really was not going to do was go to New York and stay up until 11:30 to be funny, and risk getting addicted to coke,” he told me. Later, as he read the script for When Harry Met Sally, which Reiner was directing, he knew right away that he shouldn’t do it. “I was being called ‘the West Coast Woody Allen,’ ” Brooks told me. “And I read this lovely script that felt like a Woody Allen movie—the music and everything. And I thought, If I do this, I’m Woody Allen forever.”

The Woody Allen comparisons make only a superficial kind of sense. It’s true that both Allen and Brooks write, direct, and star in their own films. Both are self-deprecating leading men. Both write unforgettably funny dialogue on a line-to-line level. (They’re also both frequently described as neurotic—an adjective that, as Brooks once acidly complained to me, is simply the lazy film critic’s code for “Jew.”)

But where Allen’s films are oriented inward—self-deprecating, yes, but also self-obsessed bordering on narcissistic—Brooks’s films radiate outward, almost galactically, an expanding universe all unto themselves. Again and again, he poses the most profound questions possible—What does it mean to live a good life? Where do we go when we die? What if we weren’t afraid?—then filters them through his sense of humor, and explodes them into a meditation on the human condition.

So New York was out of the question. And anyway, why bother starring in a film you didn’t write? Why let somebody else direct something you did write? And why direct something you can’t star in? More than that, Why wait ? Wasn’t that the lesson he learned the hard way when he was only 11 and a half?

The movie posters for Real Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981), Lost in America (1985), Broadcast News (1987), and Defending Your Life (1991) (Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection; Columbia Pictures /
Everett Collection; Geffen Pictures / Everett Collection; 20th Century Fox Film Corp. /
Everett Collection; Warner Brothers / Everett Collection)

Not many people can pinpoint the exact moment when they became who they are, the formative experience from which the rest of their life unspools. But Brooks can: November 23, 1958. The Sunday before Thanksgiving. His mother, Thelma; father, Harry; and one older brother, Cliff, left home for the Beverly Hilton to attend a roast put on by the local Friars Club, which his father helped run. The event was in honor of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Hollywood royalty whom Harry Einstein introduced—in a perfect deadpan that made the audience roar—as his very close personal friends “Danny” and “Miss Louise Balls.” (In a recording of the roast, you can distinctly hear Arnaz’s honking laugh rise above the hysterics of the crowd.)

Einstein was a superstar comedian himself, known for his dialect humor and for his popular radio alter ego Parkyakarkus (say it aloud to get the joke). Over the next 10 minutes, he had the audience members in tears. When Einstein finished, he made his way back to the dais, where he was seated next to Milton Berle. With the audience still clapping for him, the color suddenly drained from Einstein’s face, and he slumped over onto Berle. Frantic attempts to resuscitate him began right away, and in the panic, the singer Tony Martin took the microphone in an attempt to distract people with one of his hit songs. Meanwhile, a doctor in the audience made an incision in Einstein’s chest with somebody’s pocketknife, and another doctor fashioned a makeshift defibrillator by peeling the insulation off a nearby lamp cord. None of it worked. Einstein, at 54 years old, was dying of a heart attack while Martin sang a song that took on dark—and to Brooks, in retrospect, darkly funny—meaning: “There’s No Tomorrow.” Arnaz eventually grabbed the microphone: “They say the show must go on,” he said. “But why must it?” With that, the evening was over.

Although Einstein’s death was shocking—it made national headlines—it was not unexpected. He had suffered from a serious spinal issue and a related heart condition, and was by then using a wheelchair. When he did walk, Brooks remembers, he lumbered “like Frankenstein.” He looked terrible. And life in the Einstein household was largely oriented around accommodating his ill health. Brooks’s earliest memories of his father, though, are happier ones. They would take long drives out to Santa Paula, past orchards where the tree branches were heavy with oranges and lemons. Back at home, they would goof off. “Sometimes at the dinner table, he would be more like a kid and play with a fork,” Brooks recalled. “And my mother would get angry like she would with a kid. And we would all laugh.”

The Einstein household seems to have been genetically predisposed for humor. One of Brooks’s brothers, Bob Einstein, grew up to have a successful comedy career. You may remember him as his stuntman character, Super Dave Osborne, or as Marty Funkhouser on Curb Your Enthusiasm. (He died in 2019.) Their mother, Thelma Leeds, was also in show business—she and Harry met in 1937 on the set of a film they were starring in. After Brooks’s film Mother came out in 1996, Entertainment Weekly asked her to write a review, including a grade of the film. Brooks was convinced that she’d give it a middling review just to be funny. “I said, ‘Listen to me’—and this is not a joke—‘you have to give it an A,’ ” Brooks recalled. (She ended up giving it an A+++.) Despite his parents’ comedic gifts, he insists that they didn’t name him Albert Einstein as a joke. “I swear to God, it was like, ‘You know, he’s a wonderful man. Let’s give him that name.’ ”

For Brooks, the death of his father was not just a tragedy but the inevitable realization of a long-held premonition. He had been bracing for it for as long as he could remember. “From the moment I could conceive anything, this is what I was expecting. So, you know, then you start trying to fool God,” he told me. “You tell yourself, Well, I’m just not going to get close. And You’re not going to take anyone from me. I’m just not going to love him. You know, you do whatever you have to do, to make it okay. It forced early thoughts of the end before the beginning.”

“I never felt he didn’t love me,” Brooks told me later. “I just felt it was going to be quick. That, I think, colors a part of your life.”

Brooks as a child, with his father watching him from a lounge chair (Courtesy of Albert Brooks)

The actor and director Jon Favreau, who is close friends with Brooks, can relate to what he went through. Favreau’s mother died of cancer when he was a child. “The idea that catastrophe could be just around the corner is something that is baked into your psyche when you experience something that grave that early,” Favreau told me. That attitude, expressed artistically, can take many forms. “It can go different places with different people, but with Albert it definitely went to This has to be funny. I want to bring the house down. And that’s where I think somebody like Albert finds that he has a superpower. Through his intellect and through his humor and through whatever experiences made him who he is, what comes out of that machinery is laughter and amusement and human insight that allows you to deal with subjects—mortality—that are presented within the framework of something that is hilarious.” That, Favreau told me, is Brooks’s “magic trick.”

After his father died, Brooks settled into a new kind of normal. He and his friends would spend hours recording mock interviews on giant tape recorders, pretending to be radio stars like his dad was. “I was really sort of doing these shows for no one for a long time,” he told me. He played football and sometimes hitchhiked to school. He watched television—as many hours a day as he could get away with. He was also music-obsessed, and amassed a prized collection of records, building his own stereo with quadraphonic surround sound. This was in the early days of stereophonic recording, and Brooks still remembers the first stereo album he bought to show off the new technology: Stan Kenton’s version of West Side Story. “They were really doing the right-left thing,” he said. “You know, DA-dah, BA-dah, DA, dah! Right speaker! Left speaker! Right speaker! Ba-dah-dah-dah-dahhhh, ba-dah-bah-dah-ba-dah-daaaah ba-doo ba-doo. Your head would be moving like a tennis match.”

Brooks is prone to spontaneously breaking out into song, or more accurately, breaking out into sound, without the lyrics, perhaps an artifact of his theater roots. After high-school graduation, in 1965, Brooks and Reiner did summer theater in Los Angeles. After that, Brooks went to L.A. City College before winning a scholarship to attend the drama program at Carnegie Mellon (then called Carnegie Tech), in Pittsburgh. A shoulder injury from his football days kept him out of the Vietnam War, an injury he now sees as his life’s blessing. After a year in Pittsburgh, he dropped out and returned to Los Angeles.

“When he came back from Carnegie Tech, he wasn’t thinking about comedy, and I couldn’t believe it,” Reiner told me. “He wanted to change his name to Albert Lawrence—his middle name is Lawrence. And I said, ‘Albert, what are you doing? You’re the funniest guy I know. You’re going to tell me that now all you want to do is be a serious actor?’ The fact is, he is a great serious actor. But I said, ‘You can’t throw away that gift you have. You make people laugh better than anybody.’ ”

Then, in 1973, something frightening happened that left Brooks forever changed. He had just come out with a comedy album, Comedy Minus One, and was on the road promoting it—something he hated doing—with endless performances in dingy clubs and interviews with local journalists. One of these conversations, with a radio DJ, left Brooks feeling deeply unnerved. “A morning man in Boston said to me, ‘Albert Brooks, let me ask you a question,’ ” Brooks recalled. “ ‘Jonathan Winters went crazy. Do you think that’s going to happen to you?’ ” Winters, the superstar comedian and television actor, had been hospitalized years earlier after scrambling up the rigging of an old three-masted sailing ship docked in San Francisco Bay and refusing to come down, insisting that he was “a man from outer space.” Brooks remembers stumbling through an answer: “I don’t know. I hope not. I don’t—I don’t know.”

Later that night, he had his first performance at a jazz club in the Back Bay, where he was supposed to do two shows a night for a week, with an opening act by the singer-songwriter Leo Sayer, who dressed up for his performances as a 17th-century Pierrot clown, complete with heavy makeup. Sayer’s whole record company showed up, and in a surreal demonstration of devotion, “everybody in the audience was dressed as a clown,” Brooks told me. (This may sound like some sort of chemically induced hallucination, but Brooks assured me it was not. “No drugs. None,” he said.)

He did his first show and went back to his hotel across the street to get ready for the next one. But when he got there, “I had, like, a brain explosion,” Brooks told me. “I mean, something happened. All of a sudden, you know, my life was different. I don’t know how to describe it. I was standing in the bathroom. I was holding a toothbrush. And all I could think about is who invented this and why are there bristles on this end? And why are there bristles at all? And isn’t there a better way to brush your teeth? And how come there are sinks? I was starting to unravel, questioning everything. And that in turn made me really scared that I had gone nuts.”

He begged his manager, and the club owner—who by then had come across the street to see what was wrong—to let him skip the second show. The club owner told him he could cancel every other show that week, but he had to go through with the show that night. People had bought tickets! They were already sitting there, waiting in their seats. So Brooks agreed to get back onstage. “I was so detached from my body,” he told me. “Every single word was an effort and was not connected to anything. I was just standing there saying what sounded like English words.” Years later, on a trip to New York, he ran into someone who told him he’d been at the show that night in Boston, and wondered in passing if something had been off. “Did you have the flu?” the person asked. Yeah, something like that.

What actually happened, Brooks told me, is that after he somehow kept his body upright and made his mouth say words until he could get offstage again, he cracked open. After the death of his father—and, frankly, probably before that—he’d built a mental wall so sturdy that he was emotionally untouchable. This wasn’t all bad. “It was very advantageous for the beginning of my career,” Brooks said. He remembers his earliest live television appearances, when friends would be floored by his coolheadedness, his total absence of nerves. “Ed Sullivan, 50 million people live, waiting to go on,” Brooks recalled. “My heart didn’t race. I never thought of it. And I loved that. But the reason for that is I wasn’t open, and I was forced open in that one moment. It was like all the stuff you hadn’t dealt with is here. And, you know, that stuff ’s not meant to be dealt with all at once.”

Confronting the great tragedy of your life this way is suboptimal, especially if it hits you when you’re standing onstage staring at a bunch of clowns. “But it opened up my mind,” Brooks told me. “It made me question everything. It made me much more worried about everything. But it also made me deal with it. And it took a long time to, you know, deal with it.” Looking back now, he said, that night in Boston is what led to everything else. Without that experience, “I don’t think I could have written anything” that came after—at least not anything of real depth and complexity. “I think I would have been a non-nervous, pretty surface person.” Brooks never saw it coming. And there’s a lesson in that, too. “You get humbled by life in one second,” he said. If you’re lucky, the terrible thing that surprises you is something you can survive. His father didn’t get that chance. But Brooks did, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it.

Albert Brooks, for the record, is not interested in contemplating what might have been. He doesn’t believe in do-overs. He’s not into time-travel movies (though he appreciates the elegance of the original Twilight Zone, which he sometimes watches on YouTube), or imagined alternative histories, or dwelling on the past. “ ‘What if ?’ is terrible,” he told me, “because what are you going to DO with it, you know?” He swears he isn’t a grudge holder—I asked him specifically about this because I had a hard time believing otherwise. People as meticulous as Brooks sometimes struggle to let things go. “No,” he insisted, “because there’s nothing I can DO.” Worrying about the past is “the biggest waste of time,” he said. “I mean, over the years, the best thing I’ve done for myself is learn to worry about what I can fix.”

This is partly his pragmatism but also his attitude as a writer—writing, he once said, is just a series of solving one problem after the next. He doesn’t believe in writer’s block, not really. “Writing is like building a house,” he told me. “Once you start, you have to finish. It’s a funny concept that there’d be a block in other professions. If you hired an architect and a year later you said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, I was blocked.’ You’d say, ‘What?!’ ” Also, when you write, you’re fully in control. “It’s one of the last things, except maybe painting, that you can do without permission,” he said.

Thirty years ago, if you’d have asked Brooks what he was most focused on fixing, it may have been his love life. He worried, “Oh, I’ll never meet anybody,” he told me. This may seem strange—movie stars don’t typically have a hard time attracting partners—but many of his friends envisioned Brooks staying single, too. “I thought, This guy will never get married,” Reiner told me. “I find it hard to even imagine Albert married,” Sharon Stone told me, not because of how intense he can be but because he is so particular. “It’s that he can’t have this, and he doesn’t like that, and it has to be like this, and he can’t be around this, and it can’t be like that,” she said.

Brooks is a person who is comfortable alone. In the early days of his career, he would workshop jokes by just performing them to himself, in a mirror. He went through a phase when he bought one of those radios that picks up people’s phone conversations, and put it by his bed so he could listen to other people’s problems as he drifted off to sleep. (“It was the greatest soap opera,” he recalled. And also a great way to train your ear for writing realistic dialogue. “That was heaven,” he said with a laugh.) He’s gone through long stretches of solitude over the years.

Brooks likes to joke that he knew he didn’t want to get married until he met someone he could stand getting divorced from. Reiner put it another way: “I don’t know if it applies to Albert, but my mother and father were celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary, and I asked my mother, ‘What’s the secret?’ ” Reiner told me. “And she said, ‘Finding someone who can stand you.’ ”

The painter Kimberly Shlain, it turned out, could stand Brooks. She already knew and loved his films when they began dating. They were married in March 1997 at a synagogue in San Francisco. Their reception was filled with calla lilies and white tulips, and their guests ate lemon cake. For their first dance, a live band played “Someone to Watch Over Me.” (He was 49; she was 31.) The couple have two children, Jacob and Claire, both now in their 20s.

In Defending Your Life, Brooks finds the perfect woman—played flawlessly by Meryl Streep—only once he’s already dead. “We’re opening the door, God forbid, to Albert’s brain,” she said in a 1991 interview about the film. Defending Your Life tells the story of a man who dies young and finds himself among the other recently deceased in Judgment City, a version of purgatory that resembles a New Jersey office park, where you can eat whatever you want without gaining weight and see who you were in various past lives as you await a decision from a supernatural judiciary about whether you lived a good-enough life to move forward in the universe. (If not, you’re sent back to Earth to do better next time.) For Brooks’s character, the key question of his life’s trial is whether he wasted his time letting his fears dominate him. Streep said in the same 1991 interview that when Brooks had come over to persuade her to take the part—they’d first met through Carrie Fisher, a mutual friend—he paced for two hours while explaining the concept of the film to her, but wouldn’t let her read the script.

Stone told me about how after The Muse wrapped and Brooks sent her a copy to watch, she sent him some notes, as she generally did with other directors. “Albert wasn’t interested in my notes,” she said. “In fact, I don’t think he liked that I sent him my notes. I think he was a little bit offended by my notes. And I think it’s because he makes all of his decisions about his films in a quite solitary way. He’s the only director that ever sent me a film to preview that didn’t want notes … He didn’t understand. Like, what did I think I was doing, right? Why would I need notes from you, cupcake? ”

Another time, he’d gotten advice from Stanley Kubrick about how to navigate the business side of Hollywood, and the frustration that comes from having to work with people who care more about money than art. Kubrick had reached out to Brooks to say how much he loved Modern Romance, and asked to see the draft of the script Brooks was writing at the time. So Brooks sent it along, and Kubrick sent it back with notes. “He said, ‘Here, I read the script,’ ” Brooks told me. “You know what? I think he had the WORST comment in the world. And I said, ‘Gee, I don’t think I could do that.’ ”

As I reported this story, legendary comedians kept dying. First there was Norman Lear, who died within hours of a conversation Brooks and I had about how wonderful it was that Lear, at 101, was still alive. Then Richard Lewis died. (“Terrible,” Brooks texted me.) Occasionally, when Brooks experiences some unusual bodily pain, an unwelcome thought will materialize: “I worry, Is this the end? I mean, something’s going to take me down,” he said. For a while, he was just trying to reach the age his father was when he died. Turning 55 was, as a result, “very weird,” he said. When the first of his older brothers died, it was like the loss of a “genetic touchstone,” he said. He’d sometimes try to reassure himself by imagining that he got all of his genes from his mother, who lived into her 90s. He turns 77 in July. “Then you’re in no-man’s-land, you know. My father didn’t come near this age.”

[Read: Norman Lear’s many American families]

Brooks doesn’t believe in immortality, whether in life or on film. Plenty of writers and directors fool themselves into believing that what they make will last forever. Most works of art, even extraordinary ones, do not. Creatively, Brooks was never motivated by wanting to make something lasting, but instead by seeing art generally—and film specifically—as the ultimate form of human connection. Plus, there was always something beautiful to him about how making a movie and watching a movie required deliberateness on both sides of the screen. “People got in their cars, which meant there was an effort made,” he said. “The lights went down. People were there because they wanted to be there.”

Sometimes Brooks thinks back to one of the original endings he wrote for Defending Your Life. This was before Streep was cast in the film. Before he had conceived of the actual ending, which, as it turns out, is one of the great climaxes in all of film history, complete with a sweeping cinematic score, that feels both enormous and also perfectly earned. “The one I liked the best that I didn’t use was that the movie ended in a pasture, and in the distance was a cow,” Brooks told me. In this version, Brooks’s character didn’t get redemption. He didn’t fall in love. He didn’t get the girl. He didn’t overcome his fears. He didn’t move on in the universe. Instead, he lived his life, then came back to Earth … as a cow. It would have been absurd to end things that way. And funny. Because, really, who knows? But that’s not how the story went.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Godfather of American Comedy.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Humanity’s Enduring Obsession With the Apocalypse

2024-04-08T15:51:00-04:00

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Well, you have to hand it to them. Few constituencies are so ostentatiously and consistently wrong, over so many generations of human history, as the doomsayers who promise that the end is nigh.

It did seem kind of nigh there for a second, though, didn’t it? Or, as the writer Kurt Andersen put it in the days leading up to today’s eclipse, after a rare (and rather substantial) earthquake rattled New York City: “Earthquake. Eclipse. The antichrist running for president. Check.”

In many corners of the internet, people suggested the eclipse would cause humanity to shift back into a parallel-universe timeline that we apparently collectively abandoned in 2012 (another highly popular year for apocalyptic types). Others warned that the eclipse was confirmation that a second civil war in America would soon begin. Still others predicted the Second Coming of Christ. TikTok users warned, variously: “We must be alert,” and “the end of the world is coming,” and “I’m telling you right now, something is not right about this eclipse,” and “insane prophetic events are coming!” (Not surprisingly, similar sentiment emerged from the parts of Congress that resemble the internet at its most chaotic: “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, tweeted. “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens. 🙏”)

That the solar eclipse would generate some degree of collective foreboding was to be expected. Thousands of years of religious and cultural prophecies have primed us for such thinking. (Or, to quote from the Book of Revelation: “And, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.”) The human tradition of treating an eclipse as an occasion for apocalyptic doomsaying is ancient; apocalypticism is among the most enduring human obsessions, and the preoccupation with eclipses predates even the major religions that have perpetuated the most influential end-times stories.

[Read: Just you and the universe]

The oldest known depiction of an eclipse, carved into stone in Ireland, dates to 3300 B.C.E. The eclipse that Homer describes in The Odyssey is believed to be based on an actual eclipse that took place on April 16, 1178 B.C.E. Confucius warned about eclipses in his writings. As did Hindu legends. Eclipses are sprinkled throughout the literature of Christianity and Judaism. A total solar eclipse over England, on August 2, 1133, came to be known as King Henry’s eclipse because people believed that it was an omen of his death. “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us,” Gloucester warns in King Lear.

Lately, in various forums where conspiracism blossoms, the eclipse has been an object of fascination for apocalyptic thinkers. Such theories are like the dandelions of the internet—they’re everywhere, and no matter what you do, they keep coming back, resilient enough to sprout alongside any other ideas or news event, no matter how many times the apocalypse never actually arrives.

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 1831, a Baptist preacher in rural New York named William Miller began to spread the word among his neighbors that the Second Coming of Jesus was imminent. Over the years, he told people again and again: Christ would return on October 22, 1844. But when the anointed day arrived, the seconds ticked into minutes, then minutes became hours, and eventually October 23 arrived. No Jesus. Miller’s followers, known as the Millerites, came to remember that incident as the Great Disappointment. But the disappointment wasn’t great enough to shake them out of their apocalyptic worldview. Instead, they turned it into a religion that to this day has a strong eschatological focus. As I wrote in my 2020 story about the religious undertones of the conspiracy theory QAnon, the Millerites became the Adventists, who in turn became the Seventh-day Adventists, who now have a worldwide membership of more than 21 million. (That is, by the way, 1 million more members than they had in 2020.)

I watched the eclipse today from Burlington, Vermont, where the event was anticipated with festivities that included eclipse parties, eclipse memorabilia, and celebratory banners draped all over town. I made the decision to travel to Burlington years ago—within seconds of the sun reemerging after the last time I stood in the path of totality during a solar eclipse, in South Carolina, in August 2017. I still cannot believe my good fortune to have seen a total solar eclipse even once, let alone twice, let alone twice in seven years. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to be awestruck by the many ways, cosmic and mundane, that the magnificent materializes in your own life. When, at 3:26 p.m., on the shore of Lake Champlain, we finally passed into the path of totality, hundreds of people began to cheer. I overheard one young man tell his friends, in complete earnestness, “My life is changed forever.” The truth is, the wonder of totality is indescribable. You have to experience it. Please, if you ever have the chance to do so, you must.

[Annie Dillard: Total eclipse]

Just before I left for Burlington, I was in New York when The Atlantic’s office began to shake with such intensity that my colleagues and I all stood up and stared at one another, blinking. Was that an earthquake? In Manhattan? Even my most empirically minded friend, who’d texted me to check in after the quake, felt that something intangible was off: “This week has had a majorly weird vibe,” she wrote.

But maybe that’s just it. Only rarely do we have shared experiences that are cosmic in scale—whether meteor showers, earthquakes, eclipses, or comets—ones that remind us, if briefly, that we are living on a planet that’s simultaneously spinning on its axis and corkscrewing its way through the vast wilderness of outer space. It is perhaps once in a lifetime, if we’re lucky, that we can collectively relate to our earliest ancestors, and experience firsthand the same phenomena that bewildered and inspired them thousands of years ago. Sometimes it takes the ground shaking, or the sun disappearing, to remember that while the universe is very old, humanity is still very, very new.

Few ideas are as durable and as seductive as the end of the world. And although people tend to see apocalyptic thinkers as gullible or captured by fear—which, sure, many of them are—there is more to it than that. There is also a dimension of hubris and presentism to the assumption that the world would end now, after so many failed predictions, just in time for you to see it. And there is, perhaps, a desire to take comfort in the notion that the whole wide world just might expire before you do. If the apocalypse is coming, the world cannot spin on without you, as it has for every other human in all of history who has been born and died. We’re in this together, that conspiratorial voice whispers, until the very end. However nigh that may be.

The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism

2024-01-30T07:00:00-05:00

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If you had to capture Silicon Valley’s dominant ideology in a single anecdote, you might look first to Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in the blue glow of his computer some 20 years ago, chatting with a friend about how his new website, TheFacebook, had given him access to reams of personal information about his fellow students:

Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask.
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
Friend: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don’t know why.
Zuckerberg: They “trust me”
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks.

That conversation—later revealed through leaked chat records—was soon followed by another that was just as telling, if better mannered. At a now-famous Christmas party in 2007, Zuckerberg first met Sheryl Sandberg, his eventual chief operating officer, who with Zuckerberg would transform the platform into a digital imperialist superpower. There, Zuckerberg, who in Facebook’s early days had adopted the mantra “Company over country,” explained to Sandberg that he wanted every American with an internet connection to have a Facebook account. For Sandberg, who once told a colleague that she’d been “put on this planet to scale organizations,” that turned out to be the perfect mission.

Facebook (now Meta) has become an avatar of all that is wrong with Silicon Valley. Its self-interested role in spreading global disinformation is an ongoing crisis. Recall, too, the company’s secret mood-manipulation experiment in 2012, which deliberately tinkered with what users saw in their News Feed in order to measure how Facebook could influence people’s emotional states without their knowledge. Or its participation in inciting genocide in Myanmar in 2017. Or its use as a clubhouse for planning and executing the January 6, 2021, insurrection. (In Facebook’s early days, Zuckerberg listed “revolutions” among his interests. This was around the time that he had a business card printed with I’M CEO, BITCH.)

And yet, to a remarkable degree, Facebook’s way of doing business remains the norm for the tech industry as a whole, even as other social platforms (TikTok) and technological developments (artificial intelligence) eclipse Facebook in cultural relevance.

To worship at the altar of mega-scale and to convince yourself that you should be the one making world-historic decisions on behalf of a global citizenry that did not elect you and may not share your values or lack thereof, you have to dispense with numerous inconveniences—humility and nuance among them. Many titans of Silicon Valley have made these trade-offs repeatedly. YouTube (owned by Google), Instagram (owned by Meta), and Twitter (which Elon Musk insists on calling X) have been as damaging to individual rights, civil society, and global democracy as Facebook was and is. Considering the way that generative AI is now being developed throughout Silicon Valley, we should brace for that damage to be multiplied many times over in the years ahead.

The behavior of these companies and the people who run them is often hypocritical, greedy, and status-obsessed. But underlying these venalities is something more dangerous, a clear and coherent ideology that is seldom called out for what it is: authoritarian technocracy. As the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley have matured, this ideology has only grown stronger, more self-righteous, more delusional, and—in the face of rising criticism—more aggrieved.

The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values—reason, progress, freedom—but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement. Many of them profess unconditional support for free speech, but are vindictive toward those who say things that do not flatter them. They tend to hold eccentric beliefs: that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good; that you should always build it, simply because you can; that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality; that privacy is an archaic concept; that we should welcome the day when machine intelligence surpasses our own. And above all, that their power should be unconstrained. The systems they’ve built or are building—to rewire communications, remake human social networks, insinuate artificial intelligence into daily life, and more—impose these beliefs on the population, which is neither consulted nor, usually, meaningfully informed. All this, and they still attempt to perpetuate the absurd myth that they are the swashbuckling underdogs.

[From the October 2018 issue: Yuval Noah Harari on why technology favors tyranny]

Comparisons between Silicon Valley and Wall Street or Washington, D.C., are commonplace, and you can see why—all are power centers, and all are magnets for people whose ambition too often outstrips their humanity. But Silicon Valley’s influence easily exceeds that of Wall Street and Washington. It is reengineering society more profoundly than any other power center in any other era since perhaps the days of the New Deal. Many Americans fret—rightfully—about the rising authoritarianism among MAGA Republicans, but they risk ignoring another ascendant force for illiberalism: the tantrum-prone and immensely powerful kings of tech.

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The Shakespearean drama that unfolded late last year at OpenAI underscores the extent to which the worst of Facebook’s “move fast and break things” mentality has been internalized and celebrated in Silicon Valley. OpenAI was founded, in 2015, as a nonprofit dedicated to bringing artificial general intelligence into the world in a way that would serve the public good. Underlying its formation was the belief that the technology was too powerful and too dangerous to be developed with commercial motives alone.

[From the August 2019 issue: Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher on AI]

But in 2019, as the technology began to startle even the people who were working on it with the speed at which it was advancing, the company added a for-profit arm to raise more capital. Microsoft invested $1 billion at first, then many billions of dollars more. Then, this past fall, the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, was fired then quickly rehired, in a whiplash spectacle that signaled a demolition of OpenAI’s previously established safeguards against putting company over country. Those who wanted Altman out reportedly believed that he was too heavily prioritizing the pace of development over safety. But Microsoft’s response—an offer to bring on Altman and anyone else from OpenAI to re-create his team there—started a game of chicken that led to Altman’s reinstatement. The whole incident was messy, and Altman may well be the right person for the job, but the message was clear: The pursuit of scale and profit won decisively over safety concerns and public accountability.

Silicon Valley still attracts many immensely talented people who strive to do good, and who are working to realize the best possible version of a more connected, data-rich global society. Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale, are also systems of manipulation and control. They promise community but sow division; claim to champion truth but spread lies; wrap themselves in concepts such as empowerment and liberty but surveil us relentlessly. The values that win out tend to be the ones that rob us of agency and keep us addicted to our feeds.

The theoretical promise of AI is as hopeful as the promise of social media once was, and as dazzling as its most partisan architects project. AI really could cure numerous diseases. It really could transform scholarship and unearth lost knowledge. Except that Silicon Valley, under the sway of its worst technocratic impulses, is following the playbook established in the mass scaling and monopolization of the social web. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and other corporations leading the way in AI development are not focusing on the areas of greatest public or epistemological need, and they are certainly not operating with any degree of transparency or caution. Instead they are engaged in a race to build faster and maximize profit.

[From the September 2023 issue: Does Sam Altman know what he’s creating?]

None of this happens without the underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability—that is, the idea that if you can build something new, you must. “In a properly functioning world, I think this should be a project of governments,” Altman told my colleague Ross Andersen last year, referring to OpenAI’s attempts to develop artificial general intelligence. But Altman was going to keep building it himself anyway. Or, as Zuckerberg put it to The New Yorker many years ago: “Isn’t it, like, inevitable that there would be a huge social network of people? … If we didn’t do this someone else would have done it.”

Technocracy first blossomed as a political ideology after World War I, among a small group of scientists and engineers in New York City who wanted a new social structure to replace representative democracy, putting the technological elite in charge. Though their movement floundered politically—people ended up liking President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal better—it had more success intellectually, entering the zeitgeist alongside modernism in art and literature, which shared some of its values. The American poet Ezra Pound’s modernist slogan “Make it new” easily could have doubled as a mantra for the technocrats. A parallel movement was that of the Italian futurists, led by figures such as the poet F. T. Marinetti, who used maxims like “March, don’t molder” and “Creation, not contemplation.”

The ethos for technocrats and futurists alike was action for its own sake. “We are not satisfied to roam in a garden closed in by dark cypresses, bending over ruins and mossy antiques,” Marinetti said in a 1929 speech. “We believe that Italy’s only worthy tradition is never to have had a tradition.” Prominent futurists took their zeal for technology, action, and speed and eventually transformed it into fascism. Marinetti followed his Manifesto of Futurism (1909) with his Fascist Manifesto (1919). His friend Pound was infatuated with Benito Mussolini and collaborated with his regime to host a radio show in which the poet promoted fascism, gushed over Mein Kampf, and praised both Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. The evolution of futurism into fascism wasn’t inevitable—many of Pound’s friends grew to fear him, or thought he had lost his mind—but it does show how, during a time of social unrest, a cultural movement based on the radical rejection of tradition and history, and tinged with aggrievement, can become a political ideology.

In October, the venture capitalist and technocrat Marc Andreessen published on his firm’s website a stream-of-consciousness document he called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a 5,000-word ideological cocktail that eerily recalls, and specifically credits, Italian futurists such as Marinetti. Andreessen is, in addition to being one of Silicon Valley’s most influential billionaire investors, notorious for being thin-skinned and obstreperous, and despite the invocation of optimism in the title, the essay seems driven in part by his sense of resentment that the technologies he and his predecessors have advanced are no longer “properly glorified.” It is a revealing document, representative of the worldview that he and his fellow technocrats are advancing.

Andreessen writes that there is “no material problem,” including those caused by technology, that “cannot be solved with more technology.” He writes that technology should not merely be always advancing, but always accelerating in its advancement “to ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.” And he excoriates what he calls campaigns against technology, under names such as “tech ethics” and “existential risk.”

Or take what might be considered the Apostles’ Creed of his emerging political movement:

We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity …

We believe in adventure. Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community …

We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.

Andreessen identifies several “patron saints” of his movement, Marinetti among them. He quotes from the Manifesto of Futurism, swapping out Marinetti’s “poetry” for “technology”:

Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.

To be clear, the Andreessen manifesto is not a fascist document, but it is an extremist one. He takes a reasonable position—that technology, on the whole, has dramatically improved human life—and warps it to reach the absurd conclusion that any attempt to restrain technological development under any circumstances is despicable. This position, if viewed uncynically, makes sense only as a religious conviction, and in practice it serves only to absolve him and the other Silicon Valley giants of any moral or civic duty to do anything but make new things that will enrich them, without consideration of the social costs, or of history. Andreessen also identifies a list of enemies and “zombie ideas” that he calls upon his followers to defeat, among them “institutions” and “tradition.”

“Our enemy,” Andreessen writes, is “the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.”

The irony is that this description very closely fits Andreessen and other Silicon Valley elites. The world that they have brought into being over the past two decades is unquestionably a world of reckless social engineering, without consequence for its architects, who foist their own abstract theories and luxury beliefs on all of us.

[From the May 2022 issue: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid]

Some of the individual principles Andreessen advances in his manifesto are anodyne. But its overarching radicalism, given his standing and power, should make you sit up straight. Key figures in Silicon Valley, including Musk, have clearly warmed to illiberal ideas in recent years. In 2020, Donald Trump’s vote share in Silicon Valley was 23 percent—small, but higher than the 20 percent he received in 2016.

The main dangers of authoritarian technocracy are not at this point political, at least not in the traditional sense. Still, a select few already have authoritarian control, more or less, to establish the digital world’s rules and cultural norms, which can be as potent as political power.

In 1961, in his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation about the dangers of a coming technocracy. “In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should,” he said, “we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system—ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”

Eight years later, the country’s first computers were connected to ARPANET, a precursor to the World Wide Web, which became broadly available in 1993. Back then, Silicon Valley was regarded as a utopia for ambitious capitalists and optimistic inventors with original ideas who wanted to change the world, unencumbered by bureaucracy or tradition, working at the speed of the internet (14.4 kilobits per second in those days). This culture had its flaws even at the start, but it was also imaginative in a distinctly American way, and it led to the creation of transformative, sometimes even dumbfoundingly beautiful hardware and software.

For a long time, I tended to be more on Andreessen’s end of the spectrum regarding tech regulation. I believed that the social web could still be a net good and that, given enough time, the values that best served the public interest would naturally win out. I resisted the notion that regulating the social web was necessary at all, in part because I was not (and am still not) convinced that the government can do so without itself causing harm (the European model of regulation, including laws such as the so-called right to be forgotten, is deeply inconsistent with free-press protections in America, and poses dangers to the public’s right to know). I’d much prefer to see market competition as a force for technological improvement and the betterment of society.

But in recent years, it has become clear that regulation is needed, not least because the rise of technocracy proves that Silicon Valley’s leaders simply will not act in the public’s best interest. Much should be done to protect children from the hazards of social media, and to break up monopolies and oligopolies that damage society, and more. At the same time, I believe that regulation alone will not be enough to meaningfully address the cultural rot that the new technocrats are spreading.

Universities should reclaim their proper standing as leaders in developing world-changing technologies for the good of humankind. (Harvard, Stanford, and MIT could invest in creating a consortium for such an effort—their endowments are worth roughly $110 billion combined.)

Individuals will have to lead the way, too. You may not be able to entirely give up social media, or reject your workplace’s surveillance software—you may not even want to opt out of these things. But there is extraordinary power in defining ideals, and we can all begin to do that—for ourselves; for our networks of actual, real-life friends; for our schools; for our places of worship. We would be wise to develop more sophisticated shared norms for debating and deciding how we use invasive technology interpersonally and within our communities. That should include challenging existing norms about the use of apps and YouTube in classrooms, the ubiquity of smartphones in adolescent hands, and widespread disregard for individual privacy. People who believe that we all deserve better will need to step up to lead such efforts.

[From the July/August 2023 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on defending humanity in the age of AI]

Our children are not data sets waiting to be quantified, tracked, and sold. Our intellectual output is not a mere training manual for the AI that will be used to mimic and plagiarize us. Our lives are meant not to be optimized through a screen, but to be lived—in all of our messy, tree-climbing, night-swimming, adventuresome glory. We are all better versions of ourselves when we are not tweeting or clicking “Like” or scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

Technocrats are right that technology is a key to making the world better. But first we must describe the world as we wish it to be—the problems we wish to solve in the public interest, and in accordance with the values and rights that advance human dignity, equality, freedom, privacy, health, and happiness. And we must insist that the leaders of institutions that represent us—large and small—use technology in ways that reflect what is good for individuals and society, and not just what enriches technocrats.

We do not have to live in the world the new technocrats are designing for us. We do not have to acquiesce to their growing project of dehumanization and data mining. Each of us has agency.

No more “build it because we can.” No more algorithmic feedbags. No more infrastructure designed to make the people less powerful and the powerful more controlling. Every day we vote with our attention; it is precious, and desperately wanted by those who will use it against us for their own profit and political goals. Don’t let them.

This article appears in the March 2024 print edition with the headline “The Despots of Silicon Valley.”

Welcome to Time-Travel Thursdays

2023-11-16T10:42:00-05:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.

Human excellence can take many forms—electric-guitar solos, French braiding, organic chemistry, and the throwing of pizza dough all come to mind—but when it comes to predicting the future, our species is basically an embarrassment. People tend to have little self-awareness about the blinkers of their own presentism. They fear change. They are generally terrible at accurately determining risk. And their views are too often driven by emotion rather than empiricism or even well-informed instinct.

A slightly more charitable assessment is that people actually are good at predicting the future—just less good at predicting when and how any particular future will finally arrive. (The famous shorthand for this mismatch: “Where’s my jetpack?”) The passage of time has meant the emergence of an unintended genre of film and television that underscores this incongruity, in which past depictions of far-off futures are eventually revealed as off base. (Think Back to the Future II’s vision of 2015, filmed in the 1980s, now quickly receding into the past. Or any number of episodes of the original Twilight Zone.)

One of the many things I love about The Atlantic, now in its 167th year of continuous publication, is that our archive is filled with centuries’ worth of imagined futures—the ones that materialized and those that very much did not (or at least haven’t yet). Our newest newsletter, Time-Travel Thursdays, is a portal to these many past possible futures. Some weeks, we’ll share one great story from the vault. Other weeks, we’ll excavate a long-lost debate, mystery, or scandal, or trace the trajectory of a big idea across time.

Over many generations, our writers have made predictions about, among other things, the impecuniosity of the American railways (1860); the decline of the novel (1874); the worsening of the wealth gap (1879); the wholesale replacement of human workers with machines (also 1879); the rise of modern meteorology (1880); the use of electricity to transmit photographs over great distances (1882); the creation of audio books (1889); the end of musical criticism (1903); the need to affix airplane-landing docks to America’s skyscrapers (1921); and, conversely, the belief that air travel would never be adopted by the masses (1928). In our pages people have mused about whether Paris would become “a halfhearted and second-rate New York” (1929); the future of super-guerrilla warfare (1936); the “infinite faith in the future” required to fight against dictators for the future of democracy (1941); and the question of whether and how all life on Earth might be eliminated (1951). Atlantic writers predicted the hyperlinked architecture of the web (1945), and advances in surgery that would make spare-parts banks for human organs as commonplace as auto-supply stores (1980). They have also suggested that someday soon everything will be made of chickpeas (2019).

Among the many considerations Atlantic writers have given to the future, an old favorite of mine is the 1861 essay “Concerning Future Years,” by the Scottish writer A. K. H. Boyd, who urges the reader to appreciate the precious and finite quality of their “one life, the slender line of blood passing into and passing out of one human heart.” In doing so, he contemplates the future not in terms of technological, political, or civilizational change, but on a simultaneously more intimate and universal level. (As was The Atlantic’s style at the time, the essay does not actually carry his byline, but Boyd is listed as the author in various accounts and indexes.)

“Concerning Future Years” feels remarkably contemporary more than 160 years after it was first published. Boyd sees the future as something that an individual moves through time to reach, inextricably tied to the experience of living. He cautions against taking for granted even the most ordinary of life’s pleasures—the climbing of trees, the taking of walks, the presence of a child making daisy chains. “In this world there is no standing still,” he writes. “And everything that belongs entirely to this world, its interests and occupations, is going on towards a conclusion. It will all come to an end … Many men of an anxious turn are so eagerly concerned in providing for the future, that they hardly remark the blessings of the present. Yet it is only because the future will some day be present, that it deserves any thought at all.”

I’m drawn to Boyd’s essay, 19th-century lilt and all, in part because I am a sap when it comes to earnest acknowledgments of the good luck we are given with every new second of every new day—but also because it orients the reader toward the reason for the cultural obsession with time travel in the first place, a preoccupation that I share: that is, we are all time travelers, moving through our lives and through history, bearing witness to forces of tremendous change much greater than we are, mostly oblivious to the malleable quality of time even as it bends around us, far more connected to the individuals who came before us than we sometimes realize. When you stop to contemplate the sweep of what’s changed, and study the history of ideas, you inevitably find a connection through time—and perhaps through the pages of a very old magazine—to the travelers who have come before. And in doing this you will find you are sometimes lucky enough to receive unexpected wisdom and insight from another age. Or at the very least, a swell of gratitude for the people and world around you, just as they are right now.

Albert Brooks Everlasting

2023-11-11T09:00:00-05:00

There are two observations in Defending My Life, the new documentary about Albert Brooks by his lifelong friend and fellow filmmaker Rob Reiner, that perfectly capture the imprint that Brooks has made, and continues to make, on American culture.

The first comes from Conan O’Brien: “Albert broke the sound barrier,” the talk-show host says. It was through Brooks’s now-legendary mix of originality, absurdity, exuberance, and sheer brilliance that comedians realized what comedy could be—that “there’s this other place you can go,” as O’Brien puts it. For Brooks, that place entailed beloved bits on late-night television—his celebrity-impressions kit, the mime who describes everything he’s doing as he’s doing it, the elephant trainer who lost his elephant—as well as films like the spoof documentary Real Life and the romantic comedies Modern Romance, Lost in America, Broadcast News, and Defending Your Life.

People have repeatedly compared Brooks to other superstars (Woody Allen, Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman, Steve Martin, and Charlie Chaplin all come to mind), but the truth is that there was no one like him before he arrived, and there has been no one like him since. Few artists have been so consistently ahead of the cultural zeitgeist for so many decades—which leads to the second observation, from Chris Rock: “He’s so good, you can’t steal it. If you stole it, you wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

Defending My Life, which is streaming on Max, will undoubtedly charm the Brooks completists. It showcases the warmth in his friendship with Reiner and the abundant adoration of his comedic peers and progenies, all while taking the viewer on a lively, riotous (and at times moving) tour through Brooks’s life. But even those who only loosely know his work will find value in the film for how it reveals the extent to which his fingerprints are all over American comedy. I caught up with Brooks yesterday about where his ideas come from, the particularities of his writing process, and the art of the ending. Our conversation has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Adrienne LaFrance: Hi, Albert. You got me out of a really boring meeting just now, so thank you for that.

Albert Brooks: Oh! Well, we should just hang up and count a win.

LaFrance: Okay, okay. I once heard that the first time you did The Tonight Show, you did the talking mime and nobody laughed. Did that really happen?

Brooks: I don’t think that was my first time. I didn’t do The Tonight Show ’til I’d done, like, 100 variety shows. The Tonight Show was just another show. I think it might have been the second time.

LaFrance: I ask because the notion of people not laughing at that bit seems foreign to me—and obviously they eventually got it. But something else that’s in this documentary is Rob Reiner talking about how you’re the only comedian who would test out your new material for the first time on national TV. You never tried it out for anybody else first—which is astounding to other comedians.

Brooks: That’s true. I never went to a club until years into this, when I was headlining them. So I didn’t ever have that kind of trajectory. I would be at home. I had an apartment and I had a mirror in the bathroom—I didn’t have a lot of mirrors—so I would use that mirror often and sort of come up with something. And when I liked it, I went down [to one of the TV shows] and did it. And I was fortunate that I lived in an era where that was okay, because the longer it all went on, the more these shows were, Well, what are you going to do? You want to give us a hint? Back then, nobody cared. And I kept doing it my way, but over the years there were more guards at the gate of television.

LaFrance: Throughout your career, you have been very selective and deliberate about what you’ve done. You’ve really trusted your own creative vision and had to fight for it at times. I’m curious how you learned to trust your creative instincts that way.

Brooks: That’s exactly how you do it. I mean, in school, I seemed to be the one that was getting the laughs. I could make my friends laugh. So you start early on—something occurs to you in your brain, and it works. Then that starts to expand, like you don’t know if you can do that on film, and you find out. And then it’s like, Well, gee, if I write this and point the camera here, it seems to be funny to me. It was all about thinking that it was funny. I can’t say I didn’t care what the audience thought, because of course I did. But I didn’t not do something again if it didn’t go well, if I really liked it. And, you know, I don’t know how you can continue and make comedy films if you don’t have that.

There’s a whole other kind of person, and some of them are really good, that do it for the studio. They keep doing it to get the green light, to ring the bell. The studio will say, This didn’t work. Let’s reshoot that. This didn’t work. Let’s reshoot that.

But I only did all of this to get an idea across. And once the idea was across, I felt okay. If you liked the idea, that was great.

LaFrance: Where do your ideas come from?

Brooks: Well, ideas for films were generally bigger thoughts. Real Life, the whole point of that was that here was this emerging way of capturing people’s lives, and I thought, Oh, wait a minute. There’s something more there. I know what this is; I know what that more is.

I always had the simplest part of the idea to start a screenplay. Modern Romance was: “on again, off again, on again, off again, on again, off again.” For Lost in America, it was “life decisions that go badly quickly.” That’s what tickles me. Defending Your Life was a little tougher because I knew it was about a non-heaven story. But I wasn’t sure about the ending.

LaFrance: That’s so funny because I was going to ask you about endings generally, and Defending Your Life specifically. When it came out, some people who knew your work were surprised by the ending. How did you decide how you wanted it to go?

Brooks: I tried a lot of other endings. And most of them involved coming back [to life]. The one I liked the best that I didn’t use was that the movie ended in a pasture, and in the distance was a cow.

LaFrance: And it was you coming back as a cow!

Brooks: Yeah. [Laughs.] But you know, the love story got interesting, and then you have new ideas.

LaFrance: So ideas for films are one thing, but I’m also wondering about ideas for bits—like the one where you claimed to have discovered the long-lost lyrics to Ravel’s Boléro, which is hilarious. Do you remember how you came up with that?

Brooks: Oh yes. That was all off of a concept album called A Star Is Bought. That was a documentary about me making a big hit record. It was sort of patterned after The Motown Story. So I was interviewed in it, and lots of people were interviewed—I was going with Linda Ronstadt at the time, and she was interviewed—and the conceit of the album was that I was going to make a cut for every kind of radio station, so this album would become a smash. So this was my classical-music attempt—I claimed to have found the long-lost words to Boléro. [Editor’s note: Pair the main melody with the lyrics “Nowww, we are both standing in the nude! I don’t want to be too rough. Or do anything too crude.”]

LaFrance: Thinking of your bits from that era, and especially the elephant trainer with the frog and the ventriloquist who talks more than the dummy, there’s this absurdist quality to your early work. Do you find that you’re drawn to that quality in the art more broadly?

Brooks: No, no, not necessarily. I am drawn to an individual person who I think is talented and go from there. As a matter of fact, in my opinion, when it’s not done right, it’s annoying.

LaFrance: I guess that’s true for most art.

Brooks: Yeah, but that art especially. I remember Garry Shandling about three months before he died—he was going down to these clubs, and he called me one night and he said, “I think I’ve discovered something, an art form.” I said, “What?” He said, “I get up there and I talk and there’s never a laugh.”

LaFrance: The art of bombing.

Brooks: Yeah. [Laughs.] I said, “Garry, it’s called drama.” It’s the other side of that famous mask!

LaFrance: When’s the last time you did stand-up?

Brooks: A long time ago. I do things occasionally. This was a long time ago, but I did this big event for Mort Sahl—that was 3,000 people. But stand-up as, in the simplest form, I don’t know. It’s been forever.

LaFrance: Do you ever get the itch to show up at the Comedy Store? Do you still have the desire to do it?

Brooks: I do get the desire to do it. Not at the Comedy Store, though. I mean the Comedy Store is a viable question because that’s where people get up—but only once in my life after I was established, and I mean like 20 years in, after not doing it for a while, I went to the Improv. Somebody said, “Come down here! All your friends are here!” And I got up onstage and there was a crowd of people and it was uncomfortable. It was like, Oh God. What am I doing here? But I have been thinking about it lately, because it’s nice when it goes well.

LaFrance: It’s a good feeling.

Brooks: And it also is like the only place where the guards go away. It is the most direct communication.

LaFrance: There’s something pure.

Brooks: And just quick.

LaFrance: I remember reading once that for a while in your 20s, you were hanging out with John Lennon. You called him the funniest Beatle, which always stuck with me.

Brooks: Well, I always thought he was a frustrated comedian. This is what it seemed to me. He obviously could write these amazing songs, but his personality, and the people he liked—this was a guy who wanted to be a comedian. He was cynical and satirical and just responded to anything that was outside of what was expected—this is what he loved. I thought he was a great guy.

LaFrance: Tell me a little bit about your writing process, whether for scripts or jokes or books.

Brooks: Well, the book was different. The scripts were pretty consistent: I would write on tape, and I would play all of the parts and do the screen direction also. And so, dictating like this: Adrienne picks up the phone. No one’s there. It’s a bad connection. Albert’s on the other line wondering if they’re going to talk at all. All of a sudden, the phone rings. Adrienne: “Hey, are you there?” Albert: “Oh, good. At least now I didn’t miss my breakfast for nothing”—that kind of thing. So I could go like that for long runs, then I would have somebody type it up and then it would be in a script form. And then I could take a pencil to it and then I could read it, and I would redo it. The book I did on a computer—because it was way too complicated to dictate a novel. You just can’t, you can’t do it. And I loved that. I loved it.

LaFrance: Judd Apatow has talked about how he really does not like to write with a computer. He prefers dictation because it feels so final to type—like the words on the page look too official or something. You said you loved the experience of writing your novel, 2030, but did it feel more permanent as you were writing?

Brooks: Not at all, because I did the same thing. I wouldn’t go back and read as I went. I would really write almost the whole novel in a first pass. Then the laborious part is going back and doing it again, and then again, and then again. And where you don’t like it, you retype it.

LaFrance: In the documentary, at one point, you refer to “the Albert Brooks character.” Talk about what you meant by that.

Brooks: Well, when I’ve played my own name, I’m not that person—it’s the Albert Brooks character in Real Life. You know, I’m sort of a version of a Hollywood guy. He’s just a guy who has way more, uh, confidence that’s unearned.

LaFrance: Well, and you play an Albert Brooks character on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry David said that you were nervous at first on Curb. Were you?

Brooks: Yeah, well, that was his opinion. I don’t know that I was nervous. I think that was at the height of COVID. So everybody was nervous that they were gonna go straight from the set to the hospital.

LaFrance: So that must have been how you came up with the COVID hoarder plotline, where you’re revealed to be stockpiling hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes.

Brooks: That was Larry’s story, so I have to say, he called me with this idea. I thought it was okay. I could do that. And, you know, I hadn’t worked with him. So I was a little wondering exactly how that process worked. I wanted it to be good; if I was going to show up, I wanted to do it right. So I brought as many ideas as I could, and then, inevitably, it’s their choice what to use. But it’s a nice way of working. It saves a lot of time writing.

LaFrance: James L. Brooks, among others, has compared you to both Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin. I wonder what you make of those comparisons—and also who you would say is the artist or artists you most admire.

Brooks: There’s a very small number of people who make comedy movies that they’re in, that they write, that they direct. It’s not nobody, but it’s a small group. And it takes a certain kind of—I don’t know what it takes—head-butting or determination.

LaFrance: Well, and creativity.

Brooks: Exactly. So in that case, it’s a lovely thing to say because those people are all interesting. I admire a lot of people. I thought Stanley Kubrick was as good as this art form can get. Fascinating. And I was so thrilled that he had some reciprocal feeling. It made me, it made me feel sane. In my life, early on, seeing what movies could be, I don’t think that anybody topped Kubrick.

LaFrance: I have to ask you about Broadcast News. Did you ever wish that it ended differently, that you ended up with Holly Hunter’s character?

Brooks: I didn’t wish it. You know, James tried an ending with them together, and he tried an ending with them alone. And none of it worked for him. So I sort of liked, actually, I thought it was sort of gutsy, what did happen. I sort of liked that.

LaFrance: More realistic, too.

Brooks: It is, and quite frankly, I don’t know that either of those relationships would have worked, because of their careers. It would have been very difficult to stick together.

LaFrance: I will confess I’ve watched Broadcast News infinity times. It’s one of my favorites. What are the films that you rewatch over and over? Or any comfort TV shows?

Brooks: Well, I can’t say that I go to a movie over and over to feel comfortable, but—and this will sound corny because I think most people say this—but I was on an airplane a year ago, and it was a long flight, and what am I doing? I’m watching The Godfather.

LaFrance: You can’t not.

Brooks: The Godfather is the godfather of films you watch over and over and over. I’d have to give that the trophy of the rewatch.

Hawaii Is a Warning

2023-08-10T13:33:46-04:00

In November 1886, at a royal jubilee in honor of his 50th birthday at ʻIolani Palace in Honolulu, King David Kalākaua showed off a rather remarkable object that had recently come into his possession: a smooth, oblong calabash, made of koa and kou woods and wrapped with decorative brass, known as the Wind Gourd of La‘amaomao.

As legend has it, the gourd contained all of the winds of Hawaii—winds that could be summoned only by a person who knew what to chant to each one. The gourd itself was named for Laʻa Maomao, Hawaii’s benevolent goddess of the wind.

I found myself thinking of the gourd earlier this week as I observed uncommonly fierce winds whipping through the palm trees on the island of Kauai, more intense than I could recall ever having seen in Hawaii, and then again hours later as an emergency warning siren screeched out, alerting me to the horrific fire that those same winds had stoked on Maui, about 190 miles to the east. By the time the evacuation order came, Maui’s historic Lahaina town had no hope of being saved from obliteration. Officials now say that at least 36 people have died. And the whole thing happened incomprehensibly fast—so fast that people leaped out of the flames and into the ocean to try to save themselves.

[Read: Climate collapse could happen fast]

Back when I lived on Oahu, in a small bungalow at the foot of Diamond Head and near the surf break Tonggs, so close I could hear the waves through my bedroom window, I would often fall asleep with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center website open on my phone, glowing like an amulet under my pillow. I liked to see the green banner across the top of the site—no tsunami warning, advisory, watch, or threat—just before drifting off. But it never occurred to me to worry about a wildfire in the islands.

“Lucky we live Hawaii” is a common saying here, one that can seem treacly but is in fact an expression of earnest gratitude, deeply felt: an appreciation for the goodness of Hawaii’s people, for the abundance of the land, for the quality of the light, and for the overall softness of the place—the paintbrush needles of the ironwoods, the trees heavy with ripe mangoes, how the evening sky looks more purple in winter.

Terrible things happen here, like anywhere, and not just the horror of this week’s fires. Locals sometimes bristle, and for good reason, when people call it “paradise.” More than once, fellow journalists from the East Coast, learning that I was a reporter in Honolulu, said something like Wow, what do you cover? Hula dancing and mai tais? Comments like that made me realize how deeply ignorant people who believe themselves to be curious can be. They made me angry at what they could have discovered but never bothered to learn.

Hawaii is a place of tremendous complexity, as anyone who loves it can tell you. Maybe this is why it was so surprising that Lahaina could just burn to the ground, all at once, even when it shouldn’t have.

Ordinarily, Hawaii feels close-knit, like everyone knows everyone. After anything big happens, it feels even smaller. I spent much of yesterday talking and texting with friends across the Islands and with various Hawaii expats, all while Maui and the Big Island still burned. One friend told me about a friend of his who’d taken off for Maui overnight to fight the fires. Another’s young son was with his grandparents on Maui—everybody was fine, but they hadn’t had power or reliable communication for 24 hours. Another, a friend who’d spent her whole childhood in Lahaina before moving to Upcountry Maui, texted to confirm that her ohana, her family, is all okay and accounted for. The clear theme running through all of these messages—other than, over and over in both directions, Thank God you’re okay—was a pronounced sense of having been blindsided. I talked with several friends, all born and raised here, and none could remember a fire like this, or even contemplating one. Late-summer brush fires happened but were always easily contained. Like me, none could recall ever worrying about fire at all.

In Hawaii, children are taught to respect nature—the ancient fury of the volcanoes, the immense power and infinite return of the ocean. Hurricanes churn their way through the Pacific like clockwork each summer, but through the cosmic grace of physics and chance, rarely do they hit. (Hurricane Iniki, which devastated Kauai as a Category 4 storm in 1992, and Hurricane Iwa, which pummeled the Islands as a Category 1 storm in 1982, were the awful exceptions that proved the rule.) A week ago, when I saw that Hurricane Dora was still gathering strength and on track to pass several hundred miles south of the archipelago as a monster storm, I said a silent prayer of thanks and then promptly forgot about it. Hawaii was in the clear. But like everywhere else, it was only in the clear until all of a sudden it wasn’t. Here’s the question people keep asking one another in Hawaii: Since when do hurricanes start wildfires?

[Read: The era of climate change has created a new emotion]

Californians hate it when people are stunned by fire. I was one of the many wildfire rookies on the East Coast earlier this summer when the sky turned orange and the early-morning light cast evening shadows and whole cities smelled like campfires. And that was just because of the clouds of smoke drifting over from Canada. Still, the experience was newly apocalyptic to me. We’ve been living like this for years, the Californians complained. We told you it was coming for you too. They were right, of course. I wish they hadn’t been.

We live in an age of too much emotion, too much performative reaction, too much certainty, and entirely too much pessimism. All this shouting at one another has the effect of drowning out what actually deserves attention and concern, to say nothing of how it hurts our ability to come together and solve existential problems. But also—and this is a by-product of human resilience and adaptability, qualities that otherwise serve us well—sometimes understanding a phenomenon intellectually is not enough; it’s just not the same as the perspective you get when the flames are licking at your own door.

People in the Islands know in their heart of hearts that Hawaii is different from the rest of the United States. You can trick yourself into thinking that this will somehow protect it from the indignities of suffering elsewhere in the country, or the world. (La‘a Maomao, by the way, translates literally to “sacred distance.”) Sometimes this magic actually works. This time, however, it did not. And in the near future, sometime far too soon, another place will again feel viscerally the knowledge that we’ve all already absorbed intellectually for many years now—that we are running out of time to protect ourselves, and that when something beautiful burns, you can never truly get it back.

The Elegant, Utterly Original Comedy of Alex Edelman

2023-06-22T18:37:00-04:00

In the long and checkered history of possibly terrible impulse decisions, here’s one for the ages: A few years ago, the comedian Alex Edelman decided on a whim to show up uninvited to a casual meeting of white nationalists at an apartment in New York City, and pose as one of them. Why? He was curious. He wanted to see what it would be like to be on the inside of a gathering that would never have knowingly included him, given that he is Jewish. The events of that night became fodder for his one-man show Just for Us, which has toured across the United States and overseas in recent years, and opens on Broadway tonight.

I first saw Just for Us in December, and have often thought of it since then, not only because it is hilarious, which it is, but also because I have rarely encountered a piece of comedy so sophisticated—or, as the comedian Mike Birbiglia put it to me, one with such an “elegantly light touch.” Birbiglia produced the show’s most recent run, off-Broadway. He never had any intention of producing, but felt he had to help make it possible for more people to see Edelman. “You can’t have a story that good and not have everyone hear that story,” Birbiglia told me. “It’s the only show where I’ve recommended it to probably 300 people and not a single person has said they don’t like it.”

One of the things Birbiglia admires about Edelman is “his tenacity for considering revision or rethinking things that already work,” he told me. “Most people, when their show is really well received, they’re like, ‘I’m done.’ I always admire people who never view work as done.” I recently sat down with Edelman to talk about the mechanics of writing, what makes something funny, and the best advice he’s gotten from his comedic heroes. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Adrienne LaFrance: I want to ask you about your writing process, but first let’s talk about Broadway.

Alex Edelman: Oh my God.

LaFrance: It must feel surreal.

Edelman: People are like, “Is this a lifelong dream?” And I’m like, “Yes.” But also, I never dreamed of this.

LaFrance: It never would have even occurred to you.

Edelman: It would be like if you were jogging and someone’s like, “Do you want to jog … on the moon?” You’d be like, “What.”

LaFrance: So you’re hilarious, which is of course a prerequisite. But what struck me about Just for Us is the quality of the writing—how layered it is, and the sophistication of how you return to various jokes over the course of the show. I’m curious how you approach the writing process.

Edelman: So laughs are No. 1. Laughs have to go into everything. Everything else can go. So then you’re like, Okay, I’m getting laughs. I’m still doing the show. What else do I want? Mike Birbiglia saw the show in its old form, and he was like, “B+.” And I was like, “B+?!” And he was like, “You need to think more deeply about XYZ.”

LaFrance: What was the XYZ for him?

Edelman: The story of the meeting is the star. But Mike said, “Find what it says about you.” So imagine you’re writing a poem and you’re trying to service the subtext. Or imagine—sometimes TV writers will say, “Okay, here’s the plot of the episode, but what is the episode about?” Like, what is Seinfeld about? People are all like, “Seinfeld’s about nothing.” But Seinfeld is not about nothing. Seinfeld is about the relationships between complicated people. Seinfeld is about what it’s like to live in a city, what it’s like to be an uncompromising personality in a world where that’s not suitable. There are so many different things that a thing can be about, right? So you start thinking about what it’s about, and then you sort of gently buttress the thing with clauses. And if the clauses can be funny, then, oh my God. So I started massaging things, and—I’m sure you’re like this too—I love a well-written line. A line that just nails you. A line that just gets you right here (Gestures between the ribs). For everyone that line is different, but I love to try to hit everyone in the John Updike bone.

LaFrance: Do you think it all comes down to surprising people?

Edelman: I think so. Or just being really apt. But yes, I think surprise is a big part of it. I won’t do a joke if I don’t think it’s surprising. Low-hanging fruit is anathema to me. It makes my teeth itch.

LaFrance: I ask about surprise because it’s something Mel Brooks told Judd Apatow in an interview Judd just did for The Atlantic. They’d been talking about Blazing Saddles and Judd asked Mel, in effect, whether he set out to be shocking. And Mel says it was never about shocking people, it was just about always getting the biggest laugh—and getting the biggest laugh means surprising people.

[Read: The immortal Mel Brooks]

Edelman: It’s true. Comedy at its finest is a high-wire act. If you take Blazing Saddles, for example, I can’t believe how off-the-wall it is, but I also can’t believe how clear it is in its intention, right? Like when the railroad bosses are singing “Camptown ladies,” it shows you right away who the joke is on.

LaFrance: That level of moral clarity is signature Mel Brooks.

Edelman: It is. But watching Blazing Saddles as a comedian, you can go, I can’t believe how clear it is. I can’t believe how funny it is. I can’t believe how many different perspectives there are. I can’t believe how off-the-wall it is. I think every show that you watch, you should walk out marveling at it.

LaFrance: That’s a high bar.

Edelman: I went to the New York Theater Archives last week, and I was watching the late playwright and performer Spalding Gray. And he did this really compact movement—and there was something so efficient about the compactness of his movement.

LaFrance: You have to think about that too—how you move across the stage.

Edelman: There are two aspects of stand-up comedy: what you say and how you’re saying it. The content and the aesthetic. In the best shows, they inform each other: The content and the aesthetic overlap.

LaFrance: Who are your comedic heroes?

Edelman: Oh my God. Steve Martin.

LaFrance: I love him so much.

Edelman: When he came to the show, I exploded. I also love Judd Apatow. I love Mel Brooks. I love the writer and director Chris Morris. He made a movie called Four Lions, which is like a Muslim Blazing Saddles. Jesse Armstrong, who wrote Succession. Lucy Prebble. Nathan Englander. And of course Jerry Seinfeld and Billy Crystal. Elaine May. Tom Lehrer—he’s an old comedy brain. And Mike Birbiglia and John Mulaney.

[Read: No, really, I’m awful]

LaFrance: What kind of advice are you getting from these legends who have all come to your show?

Edelman: Do you know I ask everyone who comes for a note? Billy Crystal’s note was huge. He said stop using one of these (Gestures as if holding a handheld mic.); start using one of these (Gestures to his ear as if wearing an earpiece mic.). We did it.

LaFrance: Is it in fact better?

Edelman: So much better. Because you can do free range. You can embody the characters. You can play the characters in a smaller way. It’s really, really not something I liked doing, but he was right. Steve Martin offered a tag. Jerry Seinfeld offered me a thing that bummed him out that came out of the show—he said just don’t address the audience’s reaction to a joke. It was a really good note. Stephen Colbert told me a place in the show to find some more stillness, which was wise.

LaFrance: That’s very Colbert-y.

Edelman: Birbiglia has given about 50 notes on the show, and each one of them is the best note you’ve ever heard. It’s like one of the heads of my Mount Rushmore produced my show and then all of the other heads started coming to see it. So yeah, I ask for notes. And I want notes from people who are not comedy legends who come to see the show. I’m a big, big fan of notes because I don’t take most of them.

LaFrance: Even then, it’s still interesting to hear how people are receiving what you’re doing.

Edelman: You know what’s interesting also is that sometimes a note means that you’re being ambiguous about something that you don’t mean to be ambiguous about. So it can either be changed with one word or where you put something. If I get the same note again and again, it means I’m being ambiguous.

LaFrance: How many times have you performed it now?

Edelman: I’m going to say probably around 300 times. When you perform it every night, it’s very intentional. You are performing it every night with a capacity to change it. You, in your brain, have a chance to—

LaFrance: You can do whatever you want.

Edelman: You can do whatever you want! It’s crazy.

LaFrance: That’s fun.

Edelman: Um.

LaFrance: That’s scary?

Edelman: Scary. Yeah. Fun and scary.

LaFrance: Do you get nervous before going on?

Edelman: I get a certain feeling that’s somewhere between nervousness, excitement, disbelief, gratitude, anger—

LaFrance: Anger?

Edelman: Sadness.

LaFrance: So all the feelings.

Edelman: My feelings are—I don’t think I’ve talked about this—but there’s a moment right before you go onstage where it’s dark. It’s, like, really dark. And you are standing in complete darkness and you’re waiting to go into the brightest light you can stand in. In front of a lot of people. There’s a really profound ritual to that.

LaFrance: Do you feel loneliness in that moment?

Edelman: I always ask to have someone there with me. My stage manager or the assistant stage manager always stands next to me. Sometimes I go, “Can I put my hand on your shoulder?” And I put my hand on their shoulder. So I am reminded that there’s someone else. It’s not nervousness, but it’s also not not nervousness. It’s like, What if everything goes wrong? Or maybe everything is going wrong. But also I get to go onstage and do this.

LaFrance: What about nights when you’re not in the mood to do it? Does that ever happen, where you just have to power through?

Edelman: You owe people a good time and you owe people the best you can. And audiences surprise you and give you energy. And also it’s a conversation. It’s not just me. Sometimes you don’t feel like having a conversation but then the other person sort of bucks you up a little. I’ve gone onstage not wanting to do it, and then a second into it I’m like, This is fucking great. I worked my ass off to get here. I’m going to do a good job. I’m not mailing this shit in. I can’t believe that it’s going on Broadway. I am trying to be grateful. And also I’m very sad. I developed the show with this guy Adam Brace—if not my closest friend, certainly the person who understood me the best. And he died about five weeks ago.

LaFrance: Right, I remember. I’m so sorry.

Edelman: I’m hoping this will make me feel closer to him. Also, there’s no mailing the show in now! Not that I would anyway. But this show is his show, too. He’d be really fucking—pardon my language—he’d be really annoyed if I was just, I’m tired.

LaFrance: I know you keep telling me you’re not famous, but it seems you’ve reached a certain escape velocity.

Edelman: What does that mean?

LaFrance: You’re the kind of person who people see perform and then they say, Oh, he’s going to be very famous. I think you’re going to be very famous. Sorry to be the one to tell you this.

Edelman: I think you’re out of your mind.

LaFrance: I am not out of my mind.

Edelman: I’m serious; I don’t see it happening.

LaFrance: But you must feel the difference lately. You have Steve Martin giving you tags—

Edelman: Proximity to fame and fame are not the same thing.

LaFrance: Of course they’re not. But clearly you understand that there is momentum to the work you’re doing.

Edelman: Being successful and being appreciated are amazing. And I want those things very badly. Fame, you can keep.

LaFrance: Well, this is why I ask. Does it feel weird now?

Edelman: I want my work to be appreciated. I want all the awards. I want all of the people to come to see it. It’s a good show and it’s entertaining and people like it and I’m proud of it. And I have these amazing conversations with people after the show. By the way, if you’re reading this and you’re a thoughtful person, please come to the show and talk about it with me, because I want conversations with as many people as I possibly can. But it’s a little disarming to be here (Gestures around the restaurant we’re in.) and have people walk up to me. Also because of Adam, my director who died, there have been moments these past few weeks where I have been out in public but am not looking to talk. And people are like, “Hey!” I went and saw Parade and it broke me wide open. I didn’t know it was about Leo Frank. I was raised on Leo Frank’s story—this lynching of a Jewish man. And at the intermission, I’ve got my head against the wall, and I’m crying so, so, so, so, so, so hard. Like, cannot breathe and—

LaFrance: Someone pops out like, “Hey!”

Edelman: Genuinely. Someone was like, “Hey, Alex! I saw your show downtown!”

LaFrance: Were you like, “Excuse me, I am sobbing right now”?

Edelman: They saw me crying and they were like, “Oh yeah, it’s super sad.” And I was like, Can you leave me alone? But also I’m not famous. And also, I have lots of complex, thoughtful conversations about really difficult subjects. People who are famous don’t live lives that are heavy on nuance. I’d love to retain the distance. You know, a lot of the stuff that you and I are talking about loving has to do with transgression. I’m not out here to offend anyone, ever. I think if someone offends somebody else, it’s usually a craft failing. I’ve told jokes in the past where I’ve hurt people’s feelings. I have jokes that I won’t do now that aren’t taboo yet, but they will be in five years.

LaFrance: Tell me one.

Edelman: I had a joke—there was a line about someone’s weight. And then I read this book called The Elephant in the Room by this guy Tommy Tomlinson.

LaFrance: Oh, of course, we ran an excerpt of it. He’s a brilliant writer.

[Read: The weight I carry]

Edelman: He’s a gorgeous writer. And halfway through that first page, there’s a line that’s like, Those are the numbers and this is how it feels. And I thought, I will never make a joke about someone’s weight ever again. Or until I can tackle it with empathy or complexity. Because there is funniness in the inherent contradictions between someone being like, “Fat is beautiful!” and “Good for you; you lost all that weight!”

LaFrance: The cultural piece of it.

Edelman: Right, and in that gray area, that’s where there’s comedy. There’s comedy in human frailty. There’s comedy in failure. There’s comedy in success and in the things that success doesn’t buy you.

Peter Garritano for The Atlantic

LaFrance: How did you get into comedy in the first place? You’re from Boston.

Edelman: I started comedy shortly before graduating high school. I would go to open mics. I was a comedy-club boy.

LaFrance: What made you want to go onstage and tell jokes?

Edelman: It looked like fun. The comedians all had fun with each other. They all knew each other. They were co-workers. It was a space where you could be a weirdo. The first show I ever saw was called “Comics Come Home.” It was in a huge arena. Denis Leary hosted it. And everyone looked like they were having such a good time. I was, like, 13. I went because I was a big sports fan and I had worked in sports before I was a comedian. I worked for the Red Sox, the Dodgers, and one sad summer for the Brewers.

LaFrance: So you’re a baseball guy—but are you a big Boston sports fan?

Edelman: I’m a huge Boston sports person. The biggest. But you know, I’m largely agnostic. Sometimes I’ll say that onstage and people will boo in New York. And I’m like, Guys, are we really taking this seriously? Come on. We’re all grown-ups. I think we’re all in a place where we can just be chill.

LaFrance: I’m a Phillies fan.

Edelman: Boooooo!

LaFrance: Can we at least both hate the Mets?

Edelman: I kind of like the Mets because they don’t like the Yankees. But also I like the Yankees because I don’t care anymore. I really don’t care that much anymore, but I’m a huge fan. I love sports.

LaFrance: I used to live right by Fenway on Bay State Road.

Edelman: I know exactly where that is.

LaFrance: It was great because I could sit on my little fire escape and hear the game and it was just the most magical thing.

Edelman: So that’s what I love. I’m a connection junkie. And baseball makes great connection. That hum of the crowd. Oh my God. There’s nothing like a hum of the crowd. I love that.

LaFrance: Okay, so even before you leave high school, you knew you wanted to be a comedian.

Edelman: I didn’t really. It was a hobby. It’s still a hobby. I love it, but I’m not super jaded yet. I’m not jaded at all, actually. It’s my one—the one thing I have going for me is curiosity, I guess. Also, Ira Glass likes to talk about how when you’re young, you have a taste. You have a thing that you like. You’re 18 or 20 and then hopefully grow into it. So I’m still trying to grow into my taste.

LaFrance: Right, that’s the classic bit of Ira Glass wisdom about how you know what quality art is before you have fully developed the skills to make it. Do you have a theory of why so many great comedians are Jewish?

Edelman: I think literacy has a lot to do with it. I think it has to do with comedy being slightly déclassé. Jews have always done well in arenas that are slightly déclassé, or unfashionable. If you read that book An Empire of Their Own, by Neal Gabler, it’s all about the Jews who were pioneers in early Hollywood because they desperately wanted to get on Broadway and they couldn’t.

LaFrance: Well, well, well, now they can!

Edelman: Yes, this is the first Jewish show on Broadway; I’m not sure if people are aware. There has never been another Jewish show on Broadway. There certainly aren’t four at the moment, right now. But I don’t know that a bunch of the comedians that you’re talking about are exactly lighting candles on Friday nights or something. Not to say that comedians who are culturally Jewish don’t feel their Judaism deeply or aren’t deeply invested and engaged with it.

LaFrance: One of the major themes of your show is white nationalism. The show is so funny but the subject matter is intense, obviously. Do you ever feel exhausted by it?

Edelman: I don’t offend easily. I read this really great book called Conflict Is Not Abuse, by Sarah Schulman. But you know what is tough, a little bit? Everyone wants to tell me their anti-Semitism story.

LaFrance: Is that like the people who want to tell you the dream they had last night?

Edelman: The funny thing is, I’ve heard every single one. Once every week, I hear a new one. And, you know, there is still a guy from Boston who calls me “Yarmulke Boy.”

LaFrance: Ugh, really?

Edelman: Yeah.

LaFrance: Who?

Edelman: I won’t say who he is. But he calls me “Yarmulke Boy” and he’s not Jewish and it’s not appropriate. He’ll text me, like, “Hey, YB.” A lot of the comics I grew up admiring in Boston were not good people. I thought I had to be a certain way as a comedian. Turns out I don’t have to be that way. What a relief to find out I didn’t have to be a low-grade bully onstage. My influences were not always sterling. But there are some great ones, too.

LaFrance: That’s very much the Boston comedy scene, especially in that era.

Edelman: I think one of the things about the show that people appreciate is that it eschews easy things, and one of the things it eschews is victimhood. I don’t feel like a victim all of the time. When the Kanye West thing happened, people were like, “I’m so sorry.” And I’m like, “About what? He’s an idiot. He’s such a lackluster anti-Semite.”

LaFrance: Okay, but anti-Semitism has gotten really bad—it’s gotten worse—so I get the impulse for someone to want to say sorry.

Edelman: Oh it’s awful. And I want people to take anti-Semitism seriously. But you know what? Judaism is a tapestry of grief. And it is too complex to be reduced to this prepackaged notion of a turn on the victim wheel for a couple of days. Does that make sense?

LaFrance: It does. Kanye is one tiny piece of this much bigger problem.

Edelman: This much bigger problem we should all be talking about. Which isn’t to say I’m dying to work with Kanye West. In fact, I don’t really want to hang out with him. But also I am curious to sit down with someone like that to ask, “What is going on with you? And also, if you have these notions, I’m happy to talk to you about how you feel.”

LaFrance: That’s very generous.

Edelman: Well, it’s not, though. I don’t think acknowledging someone’s existence is the same thing as cosigning them completely.

LaFrance: Of course not. But a desire to talk to someone is different than just saying, “This person’s an idiot and I’m not going to engage with this at all.”

Edelman: I didn’t engage with the Kanye thing. I didn’t tweet about the Kanye thing. Someone said to me, “You haven’t said anything about Kanye.” I was like, “Do you not know where I would stand on that?” You don’t need to be a mind reader to figure out how Alex Edelman is going to feel about Kanye West.

LaFrance: I’ve talked to so many comics about comedy in this cultural moment—this question of what you can say, whether you can really tell jokes anymore.

Edelman: You can, you absolutely can. I do think that there are a bunch of people who can be too sensitive about jokes. I wrote something for a TV program, and they said, “We can’t put this on. Our audience will be offended.”

LaFrance: What was the joke?

Edelman: It was about how there’s one holiday that’s so dominant in the winter that all the other religions’ holidays struggle to be seen and that holiday, of course … is Hanukkah. And right now it’s really hard because you go to the supermarket and Hanukkah’s everywhere. And there’s also another holiday called Christmas and Christmas is this holiday that celebrates the birth of Santa Claus. It was all very heavy on irony. And they were like, “Our audience will think you’re bashing Christmas.” And I was like, “No.” So I do think there is some of that—irony that is taken at face value. But I also think that tension and comedy are natural partners. And also, by the way, things that are acceptable now won’t be acceptable in a couple years.

LaFrance: But comedy is not supposed to age well. It’s supposed to be ephemeral.

Edelman: A big part of working on this show and keeping it alive is pruning things out of it that seemed okay in 2021 but now seem a little staid, or that seem relevant now—like a clause that acknowledges the present moment that we’re living in. I think of the show, truly, as a story that I’m telling to a group of people. I mean this, Adrienne, it’s a story. It’d be the same thing as if 20 people were sitting around this table with us and Mike Birbiglia said, “Alex, tell us your story.” If I had a reference to something from 2018 in there, everybody would be looking around like, What the fuck is going on?

LaFrance: They’d be like, Is he okay?

Edelman: Right, like Jared Kushner is invoked in the show and now I say, “Trump’s Jewish son-in-law,” because now it’s not a given that everyone knows who Jared Kushner is. There were so many jokes cut from the show or added into the show. It’s a living thing. It is a story I am trying to tell. Not to be pretentious about it.

LaFrance: Do you think that comedy is the highest form of truth?

Edelman: No. Obviously not. Obviously not.

LaFrance: Fine, fine, but—

Edelman: It can make a point in an oblique way that addresses a fact that you can’t make in a straightforward way.

LaFrance: You’re a real theorist. What I mean is—as with novels or great works of visual art, isn’t there truth you can access from great comedy that is otherwise inaccessible?

Edelman: Yeah, but the fact that you asked that question with a bit of an eye roll does speak to the fact that comedy is a really effective Trojan horse for truth, or a great way to hold two contradictory truths at the same time.

LaFrance: A way of acknowledging complexity in the world.

Edelman: But there’s no such thing as a form of truth telling. It’s like saying, “Is an oven the most effective way of communicating heat?”

LaFrance: Come on, an oven’s pretty good at communicating heat.

Edelman: Wait until you meet open flame. Open flame kicks oven’s ass.

LaFrance: Are you an extreme extrovert?

Edelman: Noooo. Are you kidding?

LaFrance: No, I’m not kidding! Because you said you wanted to be out talking to people.

Edelman: I’m an extrovert who needs to recharge an introvert battery a lot. And I like safe spaces. And by safe spaces I mean conversations with people who I can say anything to. Where I can say “I’m worried” or “What do you think about this?” I think there’s a real thing where if I have questions about a world I don’t know about, or a perspective I don’t understand, I have lots of friends where I can go, “Hey, can I get your perspective on this thing I don’t understand?”

LaFrance: That’s a very journalistic posture, you know.

Edelman: I really love intense conversation.

LaFrance: Why do you think you’re funny—what made you funny?

Edelman: I think there’s something about wanting to make points in interesting ways.

LaFrance: So wanting to be effective at getting your point across?

Edelman: I don’t know that I crave funniness, really. I crave originality. I crave surprise.

LaFrance: Getting a reaction out of people.

Edelman: The right reaction. Also, I crave connection, and there’s nothing that connects people like funny.

LaFrance: Do you have funny family members?

Edelman: Yes, my grandfather was funny. My grandfather on my father’s side was the funniest. Also my grandmother. My parents are both funny in different ways. My mother will be like, “This is the funniest thing,” and you’ll be like, “It’s a coincidence is what you mean.”

LaFrance: Why do you think so many comedians are emotionally tortured?

Edelman: Everyone’s tortured.

LaFrance: Everyone?

Edelman: Show me a nontortured person; we’re not going to get along. But I’m not tortured! I have shpilkes.

LaFrance: I don’t know what that is.

Edelman: I have anxiety but not, like, clinical anxiety. I just want things to go well. This is a real cliché, but if you’re paying attention, and your job is to be attuned to things, it’s kind of hard not to wrestle with the complexities of that.

LaFrance: Tell me about the art you consume—books, movies, TV.

Edelman: I love Simon Rich. I love Succession and anything else that Jesse Armstrong has done.

LaFrance: Didn’t Adam McKay also produce Succession?

Edelman: He did. I love Adam McKay–style comedy.

LaFrance: I was just telling a friend of mine about a sketch he wrote for SNL—this must have been 20 years ago—called Neil Armstrong: The Ohio Years. The whole premise of it was Neil Armstrong, later in life, and how he never got over how awesome it was to have gone to the moon. And he’s going about his daily life but you hear his internal monologue constantly going, Moon!

Edelman: Do you know my Neil Armstrong joke?

LaFrance: Tell me.

Edelman: I did it on Conan a couple years ago. It’s about meeting Neil Armstrong—and this is true—at the USS Intrepid. I asked him to sign an autograph and he wouldn’t sign an autograph for me. So I start yelling at him. And I said, “Neil Armstrong took a step away from me, and it was a small step for Neil Armstrong.” The joke is also about how no one knows who Michael Collins is. Neil Armstrong: one of the most famous men in American history. Michael Collins, third guy on the mission: not even the most famous Michael Collins! There’s a movie called Michael Collins. It’s about a different guy. I love doing that joke. And I love Adam McKay. I love funny. I love funny but good. I’m not into stuff that isn’t propulsive. I said to Jason Robert Brown, the composer who wrote the music and lyrics for Parade, that Parade is like Schindler’s List if Schindler’s List slapped.

LaFrance: This is true about your own writing—it’s very tightly wound.

Edelman: It should be riveting. Fun has become a dirty word. My shows are fun. It doesn’t mean they’re light. It doesn’t mean they’re not thoughtful or thought-provoking. They need to be fun. Every drama should be fun. Every comedy should be fun. I’m not sitting through anything ever again unless it pulls me in. Ever! I’m done.

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The Coming Humanist Renaissance

2023-06-05T07:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

On July 13, 1833, during a visit to the Cabinet of Natural History at the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson had an epiphany. Peering at the museum’s specimens—butterflies, hunks of amber and marble, carved seashells—he felt overwhelmed by the interconnectedness of nature, and humankind’s place within it.

The experience inspired him to write “The Uses of Natural History,” and to articulate a philosophy that put naturalism at the center of intellectual life in a technologically chaotic age—guiding him, along with the collective of writers and radical thinkers known as transcendentalists, to a new spiritual belief system. Through empirical observation of the natural world, Emerson believed, anyone could become “a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of our condition”—finding agency, individuality, and wonder in a mechanized age.

America was crackling with invention in those years, and everything seemed to be speeding up as a result. Factories and sugar mills popped up like dandelions, steamships raced to and from American ports, locomotives tore across the land, the telegraph connected people as never before, and the first photograph was taken, forever altering humanity’s view of itself. The national mood was a mix of exuberance, anxiety, and dread.

[From the June 2018 issue: Henry A. Kissinger on AI and how the Enlightenment ends]

The flash of vision Emerson experienced in Paris was not a rejection of change but a way of reimagining human potential as the world seemed to spin off its axis. Emerson’s reaction to the technological renaissance of the 19th century is worth revisiting as we contemplate the great technological revolution of our own century: the rise of artificial superintelligence.

Even before its recent leaps, artificial intelligence has for years roiled the informational seas in which we swim. Early disturbances arose from the ranking algorithms that have come to define the modern web—that is, the opaque code that tells Google which results to show you, and that organizes and personalizes your feeds on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok by slurping up data about you as a way to assess what to spit back out.

Now imagine this same internet infrastructure but with programs that communicate with a veneer of authority on any subject, with the ability to generate sophisticated, original text, audio, and video, and the power to mimic individuals in a manner so convincing that people will not know what is real. These self-teaching AI models are being designed to become better at what they do with every single interaction. But they also sometimes hallucinate, and manipulate, and fabricate. And you cannot predict what they’ll do or why they’ll do it. If Google’s search engine is the modern-day Library of Alexandria, the new AI will be a mercurial prophet.

[From the May 2018 issue: The era of fake video begins]

Generative artificial intelligence is advancing with unbelievable speed, and will be applied across nearly every discipline and industry. Tech giants—including Alphabet (which owns Google), Amazon, Meta (which owns Facebook), and Microsoft—are locked in a race to weave AI into existing products, such as maps, email, social platforms, and photo software.

The technocultural norms and habits that have seized us during the triple revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web are themselves in need of a thorough correction. Too many people have allowed these technologies to simply wash over them. We would be wise to rectify the errors of the recent past, but also to anticipate—and proactively shape—what the far more radical technology now emerging will mean for our lives, and how it will come to remake our civilization.

Corporations that stand to profit off this new technology are already memorizing the platitudes necessary to wave away the critics. They’ll use sunny jargon like “human augmentation” and “human-centered artificial intelligence.” But these terms are as shallow as they are abstract. What’s coming stands to dwarf every technological creation in living memory: the internet, the personal computer, the atom bomb. It may well be the most consequential technology in all of human history.

People are notoriously terrible at predicting the future, and often slow to recognize a revolution—even when it is already under way. But the span of time between when new technology emerges and when standards and norms are hardened is often short. The Wild West, in other words, only lasts for so long. Eventually, the railroads standardize time; incandescent bulbs beat out arc lamps; the dream of the open web dies.

The window for effecting change in the realm of AI is still open. Yet many of those who have worked longest to establish guardrails for this new technology are despairing that the window is nearly closed.

Generative AI, just like search engines, telephones, and locomotives before it, will allow us to do things with levels of efficiency so profound, it will seem like magic. We may see whole categories of labor, and in some cases entire industries, wiped away with startling speed. The utopians among us will view this revolution as an opportunity to outsource busywork to machines for the higher purpose of human self-actualization. This new magic could indeed create more time to be spent on matters more deserving of our attention—deeper quests for knowledge, faster routes to scientific discovery, extra time for leisure and with loved ones. It may also lead to widespread unemployment and the loss of professional confidence as a more competent AI looks over our shoulder.

[Annie Lowrey: Before AI takes over, make plans to give everyone money]

Government officials, along with other well-intentioned leaders, are groping toward ethical principles for artificial intelligence—see, for example, the White House’s “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” (Despite the clunky title, the intention is for principles that will protect human rights, though the question of civil rights for machines will eventually arise.) These efforts are necessary but not enough to meet the moment.

We should know by now that neither the government’s understanding of new technologies nor self-regulation by tech behemoths can adequately keep pace with the speed of technological change or Silicon Valley’s capacity to seek profit and scale at the expense of societal and democratic health. What defines this next phase of human history must begin with the individual.

Just as the Industrial Revolution sparked transcendentalism in the U.S. and romanticism in Europe—both movements that challenged conformity and prioritized truth, nature, and individualism—today we need a cultural and philosophical revolution of our own. This new movement should prioritize humans above machines and reimagine human relationships with nature and with technology, while still advancing what this technology can do at its best. Artificial intelligence will, unquestionably, help us make miraculous, lifesaving discoveries. The danger lies in outsourcing our humanity to this technology without discipline, especially as it eclipses us in apperception. We need a human renaissance in the age of intelligent machines.

In the face of world-altering invention, with the power of today’s tech barons so concentrated, it can seem as though ordinary people have no hope of influencing the machines that will soon be cognitively superior to us all. But there is tremendous power in defining ideals, even if they ultimately remain out of reach. Considering all that is at stake, we have to at least try.

[From the June 2023 issue: Never give artificial intelligence the nuclear codes]

Transparency should be a core tenet in the new human exchange of ideas—people ought to disclose whenever an artificial intelligence is present or has been used in communication. This ground rule could prompt discipline in creating more-human (and human-only) spaces, as well as a less anonymous web. Any journalist can tell you that anonymity should be used only as a last resort and in rare scenarios for the public good. We would benefit from cultural norms that expect people to assert not just their opinions but their actual names too.

Now is the time, as well, to recommit to making deeper connections with other people. Live videochat can collapse time and distance, but such technologies are a poor substitute for face-to-face communication, especially in settings where creative collaboration or learning is paramount. The pandemic made this painfully clear. Relationships cannot and should not be sustained in the digital realm alone, especially as AI further erodes our understanding of what is real. Tapping a “Like” button is not friendship; it’s a data point. And a conversation with an artificial intelligence is one-sided—an illusion of connection.

Someday soon, a child may not have just one AI “friend,” but more AI friends than human ones. These companions will not only be built to surveil the humans who use them; they will be tied inexorably to commerce—meaning that they will be designed to encourage engagement and profit. Such incentives warp what relationships ought to be.

Writers of fiction—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Rod Serling, José Saramago—have for generations warned of doppelgängers that might sap our humanity by stealing a person’s likeness. Our new world is a wormhole to that uncanny valley.

Whereas the first algorithmic revolution involved using people’s personal data to reorder the world for them, the next will involve our personal data being used not just to splinter our shared sense of reality, but to invent synthetic replicas. The profit-minded music-studio exec will thrill to the notion of an AI-generated voice with AI-generated songs, not attached to a human with intellectual-property rights. Artists, writers, and musicians should anticipate widespread impostor efforts and fight against them. So should all of us. One computer scientist recently told me she’s planning to create a secret code word that only she and her elderly parents know, so that if they ever hear her voice on the other end of the phone pleading for help or money, they’ll know whether it’s been generated by an AI trained on her publicly available lectures to sound exactly like her and scam them.

Today’s elementary-school children are already learning not to trust that anything they see or hear through a screen is real. But they deserve a modern technological and informational environment built on Enlightenment values: reason, human autonomy, and the respectful exchange of ideas. Not everything should be recorded or shared; there is individual freedom in embracing ephemerality. More human interactions should take place only between the people involved; privacy is key to preserving our humanity.

Finally, a more existential consideration requires our attention, and that is the degree to which the pursuit of knowledge orients us inward or outward. The artificial intelligence of the near future will supercharge our empirical abilities, but it may also dampen our curiosity. We are at risk of becoming so enamored of the synthetic worlds that we create—all data sets, duplicates, and feedback loops—that we cease to peer into the unknown with any degree of true wonder or originality.

We should trust human ingenuity and creative intuition, and resist overreliance on tools that dull the wisdom of our own aesthetics and intellect. Emerson once wrote that Isaac Newton “used the same wit to weigh the moon that he used to buckle his shoes.” Newton, I’ll point out, also used that wit to invent a reflecting telescope, the beginnings of a powerful technology that has allowed humankind to squint at the origins of the universe. But the spirit of Emerson’s idea remains crucial: Observing the world, taking it in using our senses, is an essential exercise on the path to knowledge. We can and should layer on technological tools that will aid us in this endeavor, but never at the expense of seeing, feeling, and ultimately knowing for ourselves.

A future in which overconfident machines seem to hold the answers to all of life’s cosmic questions is not only dangerously misguided, but takes away that which makes us human. In an age of anger, and snap reactions, and seemingly all-knowing AI, we should put more emphasis on contemplation as a way of being. We should embrace an unfinished state of thinking, the constant work of challenging our preconceived notions, seeking out those with whom we disagree, and sometimes still not knowing. We are mortal beings, driven to know more than we ever will or ever can.

The passage of time has the capacity to erase human knowledge: Whole languages disappear; explorers lose their feel for crossing the oceans by gazing at the stars. Technology continually reshapes our intellectual capacities. What remains is the fact that we are on this planet to seek knowledge, truth, and beauty—and that we only get so much time to do it.

As a small child in Concord, Massachusetts, I could see Emerson’s home from my bedroom window. Recently, I went back for a visit. Emerson’s house has always captured my imagination. He lived there for 47 years until his death, in 1882. Today, it is maintained by his descendants and a small staff dedicated to his legacy. The house is some 200 years old, and shows its age in creaks and stains. But it also possesses a quality that is extraordinarily rare for a structure of such historic importance: 141 years after his death, Emerson’s house still feels like his. His books are on the shelves. One of his hats hangs on a hook by the door. The original William Morris wallpaper is bright green in the carriage entryway. A rendering of Francesco Salviati’s The Three Fates, holding the thread of destiny, stands watch over the mantel in his study. This is the room in which Emerson wrote Nature. The table where he sat to write it is still there, next to the fireplace.

[From the October 1883 issue: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts’]

Standing in Emerson’s study, I thought about how no technology is as good as going to the place, whatever the destination. No book, no photograph, no television broadcast, no tweet, no meme, no augmented reality, no hologram, no AI-generated blueprint or fever dream can replace what we as humans experience. This is why you make the trip, you cross the ocean, you watch the sunset, you hear the crickets, you notice the phase of the moon. It is why you touch the arm of the person beside you as you laugh. And it is why you stand in awe at the Jardin des Plantes, floored by the universe as it reveals its hidden code to you.

This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “In Defense of Humanity.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The New Anarchy

2023-03-06T06:00:00-05:00

“Blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all this … may be among honest men only. But this is not all. Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion.”

— Abraham Lincoln, letter to the Missouri abolitionist Charles D. Drake, 1863

I. ON THE BRINK

In the weeks before Labor Day 2020, Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, Oregon, began warning people that he believed someone would soon be killed by extremists in his city. Portland was preparing for the 100th consecutive day of conflict among anti-police protesters, right-wing counterprotesters, and the police themselves. Night after night, hundreds of people clashed in the streets. They attacked one another with baseball bats, Tasers, bear spray, fireworks. They filled balloons with urine and marbles and fired them at police officers with slingshots. The police lobbed flash-bang grenades. One man shot another in the eye with a paintball gun and pointed a loaded revolver at a screaming crowd. The FBI notified the public of a bomb threat against federal buildings in the city. Several homemade bombs were hurled into a group of people in a city park.

Extremists on the left and on the right, each side inhabiting its own reality, had come to own a portion of downtown Portland. These radicals acted without restraint or, in many cases, humanity.

In early July, when then-President Donald Trump deployed federal law-enforcement agents in tactical gear to Portland—against the wishes of the mayor and the governor—conditions deteriorated further. Agents threw protesters into unmarked vans. A federal officer shot a man in the forehead with a nonlethal munition, fracturing his skull. The authorities used chemical agents on crowds so frequently that even Mayor Wheeler found himself caught in clouds of tear gas. People set fires. They threw rocks and Molotov cocktails. They swung hammers into windows. Then, on the last Saturday of August, a 600-vehicle caravan of Trump supporters rode into Portland waving American flags and Trump flags with slogans like TAKE AMERICA BACK and MAKE LIBERALS CRY AGAIN. Within hours, a 39-year-old man would be dead—shot in the chest by a self-described anti-fascist. Five days later, federal agents killed the suspect—in self-defense, the government claimed—during a confrontation in Washington State.

What had seemed from the outside to be spontaneous protests centered on the murder of George Floyd were in fact the culmination of a long-standing ideological battle. Some four years earlier, Trump supporters had identified Portland, correctly, as an ideal place to provoke the left. The city is often mocked for its infatuation with leftist ideas and performative politics. That reputation, lampooned in the television series Portlandia, is not completely unwarranted. Right-wing extremists understood that Portland’s reaction to a trolling campaign would be swift, and would guarantee the celebrity that comes with virality. When Trump won the presidency, this dynamic intensified, and Portland became a place where radicals would go to brawl in the streets. By the middle of 2018, far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer had hosted more than a dozen rallies in the Pacific Northwest, many of them in Portland. Then, in 2020, extremists on the left hijacked largely peaceful anti-police protests with their own violent tactics, and right-wing radicals saw an opening for a major fight.

What happened in Portland, like what happened in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, was a concentrated manifestation of the political violence that is all around us now. By political violence, I mean acts of violence intended to achieve political goals, whether driven by ideological vision or by delusions and hatred. More Americans are bringing weapons to political protests. Openly white-supremacist activity rose more than twelvefold from 2017 to 2021. Political aggression today is often expressed in the violent rhetoric of war. People build their political identities not around shared values but around a hatred for their foes, a phenomenon known as “negative partisanship.” A growing number of elected officials face harassment and death threats, causing many to leave politics. By nearly every measure, political violence is seen as more acceptable today than it was five years ago. A 2022 UC Davis poll found that one in five Americans believes political violence would be “at least sometimes” justified, and one in 10 believes it would be justified if it meant returning Trump to the presidency. Officials at the highest levels of the military and in the White House believe that the United States will see an increase in violent attacks as the 2024 presidential election draws nearer.

In recent years, Americans have contemplated a worst-case scenario, in which the country’s extreme and widening divisions lead to a second Civil War. But what the country is experiencing now—and will likely continue to experience for a generation or more—is something different. The form of extremism we face is a new phase of domestic terror, one characterized by radicalized individuals with shape-shifting ideologies willing to kill their political enemies. Unchecked, it promises an era of slow-motion anarchy.

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Consider recent events. In October 2020, authorities arrested more than a dozen men in Michigan, many of them with ties to a paramilitary group. They were in the final stages of a plan to kidnap the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and possessed nearly 2,000 rounds of ammunition and hundreds of guns, as well as silencers, improvised explosive devices, and artillery shells. In January 2021, of course, thousands of Trump partisans stormed the U.S. Capitol, some of them armed, chanting “Where’s Nancy?” and “Hang Mike Pence!” Since then, the headlines have gotten smaller—or perhaps numbness has set in—but the violence has continued. In June 2022, a man with a gun and a knife who allegedly said he intended to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was arrested outside Kavanaugh’s Maryland home. In July, a man with a loaded pistol was arrested outside the home of Pramila Jayapal, the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She had heard someone outside shouting “Fuck you, cunt!” and “Commie bitch!” Days later, a man with a sharp object jumped onto a stage in upstate New York and allegedly tried to attack another member of Congress, the Republican candidate for governor. In August, just after the seizure of documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, a man wearing body armor tried to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati field office. He was killed in a shoot-out with police. In October, in San Francisco, a man broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer, fracturing his skull. In January 2023, a failed Republican candidate for state office in New Mexico who referred to himself as a “MAGA king” was arrested for the alleged attempted murder of local Democratic officials in four separate shootings. In one of the shootings, three bullets passed through the bedroom of a state senator’s 10-year-old daughter as she slept.

[Gretchen Whitmer: The plot to kidnap me]

Experts I interviewed told me they worry about political violence in broad regions of the country—the Great Lakes, the rural West, the Pacific Northwest, the South. These are places where extremist groups have already emerged, militias are popular, gun culture is thriving, and hard-core partisans collide during close elections in politically consequential states. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia all came up again and again.

For the past three years, I’ve been preoccupied with a question: How can America survive a period of mass delusion, deep division, and political violence without seeing the permanent dissolution of the ties that bind us? I went looking for moments in history, in the United States and elsewhere, when society has found itself on the brink—or already in the abyss. I learned how cultures have managed to endure sustained political violence, and how they ultimately emerged with democracy still intact.

Some lessons are unhappy ones. Societies tend to ignore the obvious warning signs of endemic political violence until the situation is beyond containment, and violence takes on a life of its own. Government can respond to political violence in brutal ways that undermine democratic values. Worst of all: National leaders, as we see today in an entire political party, can become complicit in political violence and seek to harness it for their own ends.

II. SALAD-BAR EXTREMISM

If you’re looking for a good place to hide an anarchist, you could do worse than Barre, Vermont. Barre (pronounced “berry”) is a small city in the bowl of a steep valley in the northern reaches of a lightly populated, mountainous state. You don’t just stumble upon a place like this.

I went to Barre in October because I wanted to understand the anarchist who had fled there in the early 1900s, at the beginning of a new century already experiencing extraordinary violence and turbulence. The conditions that make a society vulnerable to political violence are complex but well established: highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in democratic institutions, a perceived sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based on identity, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the “other,” a sharply divided electorate, and a belief among those who flirt with violence that they can get away with it. All of those conditions were present at the turn of the last century. All of them are present today. Back then, few Americans might have guessed that the violence of that era would rage for decades.

In 1901, an anarchist assassinated President William McKinley—shot him twice in the gut while shaking his hand at the Buffalo World’s Fair. In 1908, an anarchist at a Catholic church in Denver fatally shot the priest who had just given him Communion. In 1910, a dynamite attack on the Los Angeles Times killed 21 people. In 1914, in what officials said was a plot against John D. Rockefeller, a group of anarchists prematurely exploded a bomb in a New York City tenement, killing four people. That same year, extremists set off bombs at two Catholic churches in Manhattan, one of them St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In 1916, an anarchist chef dumped arsenic into the soup at a banquet for politicians, businessmen, and clergy in Chicago; he reportedly used so much that people immediately vomited, which saved their lives. Months later, a shrapnel-filled suitcase bomb killed 10 people and wounded 40 more at a parade in San Francisco. America’s entry into World War I temporarily quelled the violence—among other factors, some anarchists left the country to avoid the draft—but the respite was far from total. In 1917, a bomb exploded inside the Milwaukee Police Department headquarters, killing nine officers and two civilians. In the spring of 1919, dozens of mail bombs were sent to an array of business leaders and government officials, including Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

All of this was prologue. Starting late in the evening on June 2, 1919, in a series of coordinated attacks, anarchists simultaneously detonated massive bombs in eight American cities. In Washington, an explosion at the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer blasted out the front windows and tore framed photos off the walls. Palmer, in his pajamas, had been reading by his second-story window. He happened to step away minutes before the bomb went off, a decision that authorities believed kept him alive. (His neighbors, the assistant secretary of the Navy and his wife, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, had just gotten home from an evening out when the explosion also shattered their windows. Franklin ran over to Palmer’s house to check on him.) The following year, a horse-drawn carriage drew up to the pink-marble entrance of the J. P. Morgan building on Wall Street and exploded, killing more than 30 people and injuring hundreds more.

From these episodes, one name leaps out across time: Luigi Galleani. Galleani, who was implicated in most of the attacks, is barely remembered today. But he was, in his lifetime, one of the world’s most influential terrorists, famous for advancing the argument for “propaganda of the deed”: the idea that violence is essential to the overthrow of the state and the ruling class. Born in Italy, Galleani immigrated to the United States and spread his views through his anarchist newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva, or “Subversive Chronicle.” He told the poor to seize property from the rich and urged his followers to arm themselves—to find “a rifle, a dagger, a revolver.”

Galleani fled to Barre in 1903 under the name Luigi Pimpino after several encounters with law enforcement in New Jersey. He attracted disciples—“Galleanisti,” they were called—despite shunning all forms of organization and hierarchy. He was quick-witted, with an imposing intellect and a magnetic manner of speaking. Even the police reports described his charisma.

Left: Mug shot of the anarchist leader Luigi Galleani, 1919. Right: The aftermath of the Wall Street bombing outside the J. P. Morgan building, 1920. (Paul Spella; source images: Paul Avrich Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections, Library of Congress; Bettmann / Getty)

The population of Barre today is slightly smaller than it was in Galleani’s day—roughly 10,000 then, 8,500 now—and it is the sort of place that is more confused by the presence of strangers than wary of them. The first thing you notice when you arrive is the granite. There is a mausoleum feel to any granite city, and on an overcast day the gray post-office building on North Main Street gives the illusion that all of the color has suddenly vanished from the world. Across the street, at city hall, I wandered into an administrative office where an affable woman—You came to Barre? On purpose?—generously agreed to take me inside the adjacent opera house, which, recently refurbished, looks much as it did on the winter night in 1907 when Galleani appeared there before a packed house to give a speech alongside the anarchist Emma Goldman.

Galleani almost certainly could have disappeared into Barre with his wife and children and gotten away with it. He did not want that. In his own telling, Galleani’s anger was driven by how poorly the working class was treated, particularly in factories. In Barre, granite cutters spent long hours mired in the sludge of a dark, unheated, and poorly ventilated workspace, breathing in silica dust, which made most of them gravely ill. Seeing the town, even a century after Galleani was there, I could understand why his time in Vermont had not altered his worldview. In the foreword to a 2017 biography, Galleani’s grandson, Sean Sayers, put a hagiographic gloss on Galleani’s legacy: “He was not a narrow and callous nihilist; he was a visionary thinker with a beautiful idea of how human society could be—an idea that still resonates today.” For Galleani and other self-identified “communist anarchists” like him, the beautiful idea was a world without government, without laws, without property. Other anarchists did not share his idealism. The movement was torn by disagreements—they were anarchists, after all.

In Galleani’s day, as in our own, the lines of conflict were not cleanly delineated. American radicalism can be a messy stew of ideas and motivations. Violence doesn’t need a clear or consistent ideology and often borrows from several. Federal law-enforcement officials use the term salad-bar extremism to describe what worries them most today, and it applies just as aptly to the extremism of a century ago.

When Galleani had arrived in America, he’d encountered a nation in a terrible mood, one that would feel familiar to us today. Galleani’s children were born into violent times. The nation was divided not least over the cause of its divisions. The gap between rich and poor was colossal—the top 1 percent of Americans possessed almost as much wealth as the rest of the country combined. The population was changing rapidly. Reconstruction had been defeated, and southern states in particular remained horrifically violent toward Black people, for whom the threat of lynching was constant. The Great Migration was just beginning. Immigration surged, inspiring intense waves of xenophobia. America was primed for violence—and to Galleani and his followers, destroying the state was the only conceivable path.

The spectacular violence of 1919 and 1920 proved a catalyst. A concerted nationwide hunt for anarchists began. This work, which culminated in what came to be known as the Palmer Raids, entailed direct violations of the Constitution. In late 1919 and early 1920, a series of raids—carried out in more than 30 American cities—led to the warrantless arrests of 10,000 suspected radicals, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants. Attorney General Palmer’s dragnet ensnared many innocent people and has become a symbol of the damage that overzealous law enforcement can cause. Hundreds of people were ultimately deported. Some had fallen afoul of a harsh new federal immigration law that broadly targeted anarchists. One of them was Luigi Galleani. “The law was kind of designed for him,” Beverly Gage, a historian and the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded, told me.

The violence did not stop immediately after the Palmer Raids—in an irony that frustrated authorities, Galleani’s deportation made it impossible for them to charge him in the Wall Street bombing, which they believed he planned, because it occurred after he’d left the country. Nevertheless, sweeping action by law enforcement helped put an end to a generation of anarchist attacks.

That is the most important lesson from the anarchist period: Holding perpetrators accountable is crucial. The Palmer Raids are remembered, rightly, as a ham-handed application of police-state tactics. Government actions can turn killers into martyrs. More important, aggressive policing and surveillance can undermine the very democracy they are meant to protect; state violence against citizens only validates a distrust of law enforcement.

But deterrence conducted within the law can work. Unlike anti-war protesters or labor organizers, violent extremists don’t have an agenda that invites negotiation. “Today’s threats of violence can be inspired by a wide range of ideologies that themselves morph and shift over time,” Deputy Homeland Security Adviser Josh Geltzer told me. Now as in the early 20th century, countering extremism through ordinary debate or persuasion, or through concession, is a fool’s errand. Extremists may not even know what they believe, or hope for. “One of the things I increasingly keep wondering about is—what is the endgame?” Mary McCord, a former assistant U.S. attorney and national-security official, told me. “Do you want democratic government? Do you want authoritarianism? Nobody talks about that. Take back our country . Okay, so you get it back. Then what do you do?”

III. CREEPING VIOLENCE

In another country, and in a time closer to our own, a sustained outbreak of domestic terrorism brought decades of attacks—and illustrates the role that ordinary citizens can sometimes play, along with deterrence, in restoring stability.

On Saturday, August 2, 1980, a bomb hidden inside a suitcase blew up at the Bologna Centrale railway station, killing 85 people and wounding hundreds more, many of them young families setting off on vacation. The explosion flattened an entire wing of the station, demolishing a crowded restaurant, wrecking a train platform, and freezing the station’s clock at the time of the detonation: 10:25 a.m.

The Bologna massacre remains the deadliest attack in Italy since World War II. By the time it occurred, Italians were more than a decade into a period of intense political violence, one that came to be known as Anni di Piombo, or the “Years of Lead.” From roughly 1969 to 1988, Italians experienced open warfare in the streets, bombings of trains, deadly shootings and arson attacks, at least 60 high-profile assassinations, and a narrowly averted neofascist coup attempt. It was a generation of death and bedlam. Although exact numbers are difficult to come by, during the Years of Lead, at least 400 people were killed and some 2,000 wounded in more than 14,000 separate attacks.

As I sat at the Bologna Centrale railway station in September, a place where so many people had died, I found myself thinking, somewhat counterintuitively, about how, in the great sweep of history, the political violence in Italy in the 1970s and ’80s now seems but a blip. Things were so terrible for so long. And then they weren’t. How does political violence come to an end?

No one can say precisely what alchemy of experience, temperament, and circumstance leads a person to choose political violence. But being part of a group alters a person’s moral calculations and sense of identity, not always for the good. Martin Luther King Jr., citing the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” that “groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.” People commit acts together that they’d never contemplate alone.

[From the August 1963 issue: Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from Birmingham Jail]

Vicky Franzinetti was a teenage member of the far-left militant group Lotta Continua during the Years of Lead. “There was a lot of what I would call John Wayneism, and a lot of people fell for that,” she told me. “Whether it’s the Black Panthers or the people who attacked on January 6 on Capitol Hill, violence has a mesmerizing appeal on a lot of people.” A subtle but important shift also took place in Italian political culture during the ’60s and ’70s as people grasped for group identity. “If you move from what you want to who you are, there is very little scope for real dialogue, and for the possibility of exchanging ideas, which is the basis of politics,” Franzinetti said. “The result is the death of politics, which is what has happened.”

In talking with Italians who lived through the Years of Lead about what brought this period to an end, two common themes emerged. The first has to do with economics. For a while, violence was seen as permissible because for too many people, it felt like the only option left in a world that had turned against them. When the Years of Lead began, Italy was still fumbling for a postwar identity. Some Fascists remained in positions of power, and authoritarian regimes controlled several of the country’s neighbors—Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey. Not unlike the labor movements that arose in Galleani’s day, the Years of Lead were preceded by intensifying unrest among factory workers and students, who wanted better social and working conditions. The unrest eventually tipped into violence, which spiraled out of control. Leftists fought for the proletariat, and neofascists fought to wind back the clock to the days of Mussolini. When, after two decades, the economy improved in Italy, terrorism receded.

The second theme was that the public finally got fed up. People didn’t want to live in terror. They said, in effect: Enough. Lotta Continua hadn’t resorted to violence in the early years. When it did grow violent, it alienated its own members. “I didn’t like it, and I fought it,” Franzinetti told me. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara who lived in Rome at the time, recalled: “It went too far. Really, it reached a point that was quite dramatic. It was hard to live through those times.” But it took a surprisingly long while to reach that point. The violence crept in—one episode, then another, then another—and people absorbed and compartmentalized the individual events, as many Americans do now. They did not understand just how dangerous things were getting until violence was endemic. “It started out with the kneecappings,” Joseph LaPalombara, a Yale political scientist who lived in Rome during the Years of Lead, told me, “and then got worse. And as it got worse, the streets emptied after dark.”

A turning point in public sentiment, or at least the start of a turning point, came in the spring of 1978, when the leftist group known as the Red Brigades kidnapped the former prime minister and leader of the Christian Democrats Aldo Moro, killing all five members of his police escort and turning him into an example of how We don’t negotiate with terrorists can go terrifically wrong. Moro was held captive and tortured for 54 days, then executed, his body left in the back of a bright-red Renault on a busy Rome street. In a series of letters his captors allowed him to send, Moro had begged Italian officials to arrange for his freedom with a prisoner exchange. They refused. After his murder, the final letter he’d written to his wife, “my dearest Noretta,” roughly 10 days before his death, was published in a local newspaper. “In my last hour I am left with a profound bitterness at heart,” he wrote. “But it is not of this I want to talk but of you whom I love and will always love.” Moro did not want a state funeral, but Italy held one anyway.

Top: A bodyguard slain by the Red Brigades during the kidnapping of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, 1978. Bottom: Graffiti in Milan supporting the Red Brigades, 1977. (Paul Spella; source images: Gianni Giansanti / Gamma-Rapho / Getty; Adriano Alecchi / Mondadori Portfolio / Getty)

The conventional wisdom among terrorism experts had been that terrorists wanted publicity but didn’t really want to kill people—or, as the Rand Corporation’s Brian Jenkins put it in 1975, “Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” But conditions had become so bad by the time Moro was murdered that newspapers around the world were confused when days passed without a political killing or shooting in Italy. “Italians Puzzled by 10-Day Lull in Terrorist Activity,” read one headline in The New York Times a few weeks after Moro’s murder. “When he was killed, it got a lot more serious,” Alexander Reid Ross, who hosts a history podcast about the era called Years of Lead Pod, told me. “People stopped laughing. It was no longer something where you could say, ‘It’s a sideshow.’ ”

The Moro assassination was followed by an intensification of violence, including the Bologna-station bombing. People who had ignored the violence now paid attention; people who might have been tempted by revolution now stayed home. Meanwhile, the crackdown that followed—which involved curfews, traffic stops, a militarized police presence, and deals with terrorists who agreed to rat out their collaborators—caused violent groups to implode.

The example of Aldo Moro offers a warning. It shouldn’t take an act like the assassination of a former prime minister to shake people into awareness. But it often does. William Bernstein, the author of The Delusions of Crowds, is not optimistic that anything else will work: “The answer is—and it’s not going to be a pleasant answer—the answer is that the violence ends if it boils over into a containable cataclysm.” What if, he went on—“I almost hesitate to say this”—but what if they actually had hanged Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi on January 6? “I think that would have ended it. I don’t think it ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm. I think, absent that, it just boils along for a generation or two generations.” Bernstein wasn’t the only expert to suggest such a thing.

No wonder some American politicians are terrified. “We’ve had an exponential increase in threats against members of Congress,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, told me in January. Klobuchar thought back to when she was standing at President Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, two weeks after the attempted insurrection. At the time, as Democrats and most Republicans came together for a peaceful transfer of power, she felt as though a violent eruption in American history might be ending. But Klobuchar now believes she was “naive” to think that Republicans would break with Trump and restore the party’s democratic values. “We have Donald Trump, his shadow, looming over everything,” she said.

This past February, Biden sought to dispel that shadow as he stood before Congress to deliver his State of the Union address. “There’s no place for political violence in America,” he said. “And we must give hate and extremism in any form no safe harbor.” Biden’s speech was punctuated by jeers and name-calling by Republicans.

IV. A BROKEN SOCIAL CONTRACT

The taxonomy of what counts as political violence can be complicated. One way to picture it is as an iceberg: The part that protrudes from the water represents the horrific attacks on both hard targets and soft ones, in which the attacker has explicitly indicated hatred for the targeted group—fatal attacks at supermarkets and synagogues, as well as assassination attempts such as the shooting at a congressional-Republican baseball practice in 2017. Less visible is the far more extensive mindset that underlies them. “There are a lot of people who are out for a protest, who are advocating for violence,” Erin Miller, the longtime program manager at the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, told me. “Then there’s a smaller number at the tip of the iceberg that are willing to carry out violent attacks.” You can’t get a grip on political violence just by counting the number of violent episodes. You have to look at the whole culture.

A society’s propensity for political violence—including cataclysmic violence—may be increasing even as ordinary life, for many people, probably most, continues to feel normal. A drumbeat of violent attacks, by different groups with different agendas, may register as different things. But collectively, as in Italy, they have the power to loosen society’s screws.

In December, I spoke again with Alexander Reid Ross, who in addition to hosting Years of Lead Pod is a lecturer at Portland State University. We met in Pioneer Courthouse Square, in downtown Portland. I had found the city in a wounded condition. This was tragic to me two times over—first, because I knew what had happened there, and second, because I had immediately absorbed Portland’s charm. You can’t encounter all those drawbridges, or the swooping crows, or the great Borgesian bookstore, or the giant elm trees and do anything but fall in love with the place. But downtown Portland was not at its best. The first day I was there I counted more birds than people, and many of the people I saw were quite obviously struggling badly.

On the gray afternoon when we met, Ross and I happened to be sitting at the site of the first far-right protest he remembers witnessing in his city, back in 2016; members of a group called Students for Trump, stoked by Alex Jones’s disinformation outlet, Infowars, had gathered to assert their political preferences and provoke their neighbors. Ross is a geographer, a specialty he assumed would keep him focused on land-use debates and ecology, which is one of the reasons he moved to Oregon in the first place. After that 2016 rally, Ross paid closer attention to the political violence unfolding in Portland. We decided to take a walk so that Ross could point out various landmarks from the—well, we couldn’t decide what to call the period of sustained violence that started in 2016 and was reignited in 2020. The siege? The occupation? The revolt? What happened in Portland has a way of being too slippery for precise language.

We walked southwest from the square before doubling back toward the Willamette River. Over here was the historical society that protesters broke into and vandalized one night. Over there was where the statues got toppled. (“Portland is a city of pedestals now,” Ross said.) A federal building still had a protective fence surrounding it more than a year after the street violence had ended. At one point, the mayor had to order a drawbridge raised to keep combatants apart.

On the evening of June 30, 2018, Ross found himself in the middle of a violent brawl between hundreds of self-described antifa activists and members of the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, a local pro-Trump offshoot. Ross described to me a number of “ghoulish” encounters he’d had with Patriot Prayer, and I asked him which moment was the scariest. “It’s on video,” he told me. “You can see it: me getting punched.” I later watched the video. In it, Ross rushes toward a group of men who are repeatedly kicking and bludgeoning a person dressed all in black, lying in the street. Ross had told me earlier that he’d intervened because he thought he was watching someone being beaten to death. After Ross gets clocked, he appears dazed, then dashes back toward the fight. “That’s enough! That’s enough!” he shouts.

By the time of this fight, Patriot Prayer had become a fixture in Portland. Its founder, Joey Gibson, has said in interviews that he was inspired to start Patriot Prayer to fight for free speech, but the group’s core belief has always been in Donald Trump. Its first event, in Vancouver, Washington, in October 2016, was a pro-Trump rally. From there, Gibson deliberately picked ultraliberal cities such as Portland, Berkeley, Seattle, and San Francisco for his protests, and in doing so quickly attracted like-minded radicals—the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, Identity Evropa, the Hell Shaking Street Preachers—who marched alongside Patriot Prayer. These were people who seemed to love Trump and shit-stirring in equal measure. White nationalists and self-described Western chauvinists showed up at Gibson’s events. (Gibson’s mother is Japanese, and he has insisted that he does not share their views.) By August 2018, Patriot Prayer had already held at least nine rallies in Portland, routinely drawing hundreds of supporters—grown men in Boba Fett helmets and other homemade costumes; at least one man with an SS neck tattoo. In 2019, Gibson himself was arrested on a riot charge. Patriot Prayer quickly became the darling of Infowars.

Paul Spella; source image: Nathan Howard / Getty

The morning after I met Ross, I drove across the river to Vancouver, a town of strip-mall churches and ponderosa pine trees, to meet with Lars Larson, who records The Lars Larson Show—tagline: “Honestly Provocative Talk Radio”—from his home studio. Larson greeted me with his two dogs and a big mug of coffee. His warmth, quick-mindedness, and tendency to filibuster make him irresistible for talk radio. And his allegiance to MAGA world helps him book guests like Donald Trump Jr., whom Larson introduced on a recent episode as “the son of the real president of the United States of America.” Over the course of our conversation, he described January 6 as “some ruined furniture in the Capitol”; suggested that the city government of Charlottesville, Virginia, was secretly behind the violent clash at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally; and made multiple references to George Soros, including suggesting that Soros may have paid for people to come to Portland to tear up the city. When I pressed Larson on various points, he would walk back whatever he had claimed, but only slightly. He does not seem to be a conspiracy theorist, but he plays one on the radio.

Larson blamed Portland’s troubles on a culture of lawlessness fostered by a district attorney who, he said, repeatedly declined to prosecute left-wing protesters. He sees this as an uneven application of justice that undermined people’s faith in local government. It is more accurate to say that the district attorney chose not to prosecute lesser crimes, focusing instead on serious crimes against people and property; ironically, the complaint about uneven application comes from both the far left and the far right. When I asked Larson whether Patriot Prayer is Christian nationalist in ideology, the question seemed to make him uncomfortable, and he emphasized his belief in pluralism and religious freedom. He also compared Joey Gibson and Patriot Prayer marching on Portland to civil-rights activists marching on Selma in 1965. “What I heard people tell Patriot Prayer is ‘If you get attacked every time you go to Portland, don’t go to Portland,’ ” he told me. “Would you have given that same advice to Martin Luther King?”

Gibson’s lawyer Angus Lee accused the government of “political persecution”; Gibson was ultimately acquitted of the riot charge. Patriot Prayer, Lee went on, is “not like these other organizations you referenced that have members and that sort of thing. Patriot Prayer is more of an idea.” Gibson himself once put it in blunter terms. “I don’t even know what Patriot Prayer is anymore,” he said in a 2017 interview on a public-access news channel in Portland. “It’s just these two words that people hear and it sparks emotions … All Patriot Prayer is is videos and social-media presence.”

The more I talked with people about Patriot Prayer, the more it began to resemble a phenomenon like QAnon—a decentralized and amorphous movement designed to provoke reaction, tolerant of contradictions, borrowing heavily from internet culture, overlapping with other extremist movements like the Proud Boys, linked to high-profile episodes of violence, and ultimately focused on Trump. I couldn’t help but think of Galleani, his “beautiful idea,” and the diffuse ideology of his followers. One key difference: Galleani was fighting against the state, whereas movements like QAnon and groups like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys have been cheered on by a sitting president and his party.

When I met with Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, at city hall, he recalled night after night of violence, and at times planning for the very worst, meaning mass casualties. Portlanders had taken to calling him “Tear Gas Ted” because of the police response in the city. One part of any mayor’s job is to absorb the community’s scorn. Few people have patience for unfilled potholes or the complexities of trash collection. Disdain for Wheeler may have been the one thing that just about every person I met in Portland shared, but his job has been difficult even by big-city standards. He confronted a breakdown of the social contract.

“Political violence, in my opinion, is the extreme manifestation of other trends that are prevalent in our society,” Wheeler told me. “A healthy democracy is one where you can sit on one side of the table and express an opinion, and I can sit on the other side of the table and express a very different opinion, and then we have the contest of ideas … We have it out verbally. Then we go drink a beer or whatever.”

When extremists began taunting Portlanders online, it was very quickly “game on” for violence in the streets, Wheeler said. In this way, Portland stands as a warning to cities that now seem calm: It takes very little provocation to inflame latent tensions between warring factions. Once order collapses, it is extraordinarily difficult to restore. And it can be dangerous to attempt to do so through the use of force, especially when one violent faction is lashing out, in part, against state authority.

Aaron Mesh moved to Portland 16 years ago, to take a job as Willamette Week’s film critic, and since then has worked his way up to managing editor. He is sharp-tongued and good-humored, and it is obvious that he loves his city in the way that any good newspaperman does, with a mix of fierce loyalty and heaping criticism. Like Wheeler, he trained attention on the dynamic of action and reaction—on how rising to the bait not only solves nothing but can make things worse. “There was this attitude of We’re going to theatrically subdue your city with these weekend excursions,” Mesh said, describing the confrontations that began in 2016 as a form of cosplay, with right-wing extremists wearing everything from feathered hats to Pepe the Frog costumes and left-wing extremists dressed up in what’s known as black bloc: all-black clothing and facial coverings. “I do want to emphasize,” he said, “that everyone involved in this was a massive fucking loser, on both sides.”

It was as though all of the most unsavory characters on the internet had crawled out of the computer. The fights were enough of a spectacle that not everyone took them seriously at first. Mesh said it was impossible to overstate “the degree to which Portland became a lodestone in the imagination of a nascent Proud Boys movement,” a place where paramilitary figures on the right went “to prove that they had testicles.” He went on: “You walk into town wearing a helmet and carrying a big American flag” and then wait and see “who throws an egg at your car or who gives you the middle finger, and you beat the living hell out of them.”

Both sides behaved despicably. But only the right-wingers had the endorsement of the president and the mainstream Republican Party. “Despite being run by utter morons,” Mesh said of Patriot Prayer, “they managed to outsmart most of their adversaries in this city, simply by provoking violent reactions from people who were appalled by their politics.” The argument for violence among people on the left is often, essentially, If you encounter a Nazi, you should punch him. But “what if the only thing the Nazi wants is for you to punch him?” Mesh asked. “What if the Nazis all have cameras and they’re immediately feeding all the videos of you punching them to Tucker Carlson? Which is what they did.”

The situation in Portland became so desperate, and the ideologies involved so tangled, that the violence began to operate like its own weather system—a phenomenon that the majority of Portlanders could see coming and avoid, but one that left behind tremendous destruction. Most people don’t want to fight. But it takes startlingly few violent individuals to exact generational damage.

V. THE COMPLICIT STATE

America was born in revolution, and violence has been an undercurrent in the nation’s politics ever since. People remember the brutal opposition to the civil-rights struggle, and recall the wave of terrorism spawned by the anti-war movement of the 1960s. But the most direct precursor to what we’re experiencing now is the anti-government Patriot movement, which can be traced to the 1980s and eventually led to deadly standoffs between federal agents and armed citizens at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, and in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Three people were killed at Ruby Ridge. As many as 80 died in Waco, 25 of them children. Those incidents stirred the present-day militia movement and directly inspired the Oklahoma City bombers, anti-government extremists who killed 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995. The surge in militia activity, white nationalism, and apocalypticism of the 1990s seemed to peter out in the early 2000s. This once struck me as a bright spot, an earlier success we might learn from today. But when I mentioned this notion to Carolyn Gallaher, a scholar who spent two years following a right-wing paramilitary group in Kentucky in the 1990s, she said, “The militia movement waned very quickly in the 1990s not because of anything we did, but because of Oklahoma City. That bombing really put the movement on the back foot. Some groups went underground. Some groups dispersed. You also saw that happen with white-supremacist groups.”

A generation later, political violence in America unfolds with little organized guidance and is fed by a mishmash of extremist right-wing views. It predates the emergence of Donald Trump, but Trump served as an accelerant. He also made tolerance of political violence a defining trait of his party, whereas in the past, both political parties condemned it. At the height of the Patriot movement, “there was this fire wall” between extremist groups and elected officials that protected democratic norms, according to Gallaher. Today, “the fire wall between these guys and formal politics has melted away.” Gallaher does not anticipate an outbreak of civil strife in America in a “classic sense”—with Blue and Red armies or militias fighting for territory. “Our extremist groups are nowhere near as organized as they are in other countries.”

Because it is chaotic, Americans tend to underestimate political violence, as Italians at first did during the Years of Lead. Some see it as merely sporadic, and shift attention to other things. Some say, in effect, Wake me when there’s civil war. Some take heart from moments of supposed reprieve, such as the poor showing by election deniers and other extremists in the 2022 midterm elections. But think of all the ongoing violence that at first glance isn’t labeled as being about politics per se, but is in fact political: the violence, including mass shootings, directed at LGBTQ communities, at Jews, and at immigrants, among others. In November, the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin warning that “the United States remains in a heightened threat environment” due to individuals and small groups with a range of “violent extremist ideologies.” It warned of potential attacks against a long list of places and people: “public gatherings, faith-based institutions, the LGBTQI+ community, schools, racial and religious minorities, government facilities and personnel, U.S. critical infrastructure, the media, and perceived ideological opponents.”

The broad scope of the warning should not be surprising—not after the massacres in Pittsburgh, El Paso, Buffalo, and elsewhere. One month into 2023, the pace of mass shootings in America—all either political or, inevitably, politicized—was at an all-time high. “There’s no place that’s immune right now,” Mary McCord, the former assistant U.S. attorney, observed. “It’s really everywhere.” She added, “Someday, God help us, we’ll come out of this. But it’s hard for me to imagine how.”

The sociologist Norbert Elias, who left Germany for France and then Britain as the Nazi regime took hold, famously described what he called the civilizing process as “a long sequence of spurts and counter-spurts,” warning that you cannot fix a violent society simply by eliminating the factors that made it deteriorate in the first place. Violence and the forces that underlie it have the potential to take us from the democratic backsliding we already know to a condition known as decivilization. In periods of decivilization, ordinary people fail to find common ground with one another and lose faith in institutions and elected leaders. Shared knowledge erodes, and bonds fray across society. Some people inevitably decide to act with violence. As violence increases, so does distrust in institutions and leaders, and around and around it goes. The process is not inevitable—it can be held in check—but if a period of bloodshed is sustained for long enough, there is no shortcut back to normal. And signs of decivilization are visible now.

A pro-Trump demonstrator at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists stormed the building (Paul Spella; source image: Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty)

“The path out of bloodshed is measured not in years but in generations,” Rachel Kleinfeld writes in A Savage Order, her 2018 study of extreme violence and the ways it corrodes a society. “Once a democracy descends into extreme violence, it is always more vulnerable to backsliding.” Cultural patterns, once set, are durable—the relatively high rates of violence in the American South, in part a legacy of racism and slaveholding, persist to this day. In The Delusions of Crowds, William Bernstein looks further afield, to Germany. He told me, “You can actually predict anti-Semitism and voting for the Nazi Party by going back to the anti-Semitism across those same regions in the 14th century. You can trace it city to city.”

Three realities mark the current era of political violence in America as different from what has come before, and make dealing with it much harder. The first—obvious—is the universal access to weaponry, including military-grade weapons.

Second, today’s information environment is simultaneously more sophisticated and more fragmented than ever before. In 2006, the analyst Bruce Hoffman argued that contemporary terrorism had become dangerously amorphous. He was referring to groups like al-Qaeda, but we now witness what he described among domestic American extremists. As Hoffman and others see it, the defining characteristic of post-9/11 terrorism is that it is decentralized. You don’t need to be part of an organization to become a terrorist. Hateful ideas and conspiracy theories are not only easy to find online; they’re actively amplified by social platforms, whose algorithms prioritize the anger and hate that drive engagement and profit. The barriers to radicalization are now almost nonexistent. Luigi Galleani would have loved Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram. He had to settle for publishing a weekly newspaper. Because of social media, conspiracy theories now spread instantly and globally, often promoted by hugely influential figures in the media, such as Tucker Carlson and of course Trump, whom Twitter and Facebook have just reinstated.

The third new reality goes to the core of American self-governance: people refusing to accept the outcome of elections, with national leaders fueling the skepticism and leveraging it for their own ends. In periods of decivilization, violence often becomes part of a governing strategy. This can happen when weak states acquiesce to violence simply to survive. Or it can happen when politicians align themselves with violent groups in order to bolster authority—a characteristic of what Kleinfeld, in her 2018 book, calls a “complicit state.” This is a well-known tactic among authoritarian incumbents worldwide who wield power by mobilizing state and vigilante violence in tandem.

Complicity is insidious. It doesn’t require a revolution. You can see complicity, for example, in Trump’s order to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in the months ahead of January 6. You can see it in the Republican Party’s defense of Trump even after he propelled insurrectionists toward the U.S. Capitol. And you can see it in the way that powerful politicians and television personalities continue to cheer on right-wing extremists as “patriots” and “political prisoners,” rather than condemning them as vigilantes and seditionists.

Americans sometimes wonder what might have happened if the Civil War had gone the other way—what the nation would be like now, or whether it would even exist, if the South had won. But that thought experiment overlooks the fact that we do know what it looks like for violent extremists to win in the United States. In the 1870s, white supremacists who objected to Reconstruction led a campaign of violence that they perversely referred to as Redemption. They murdered thousands of Black people in terror lynchings. They drove thousands more Black business owners, journalists, and elected officials out of their homes and hometowns, destroying their livelihoods. Sometimes violence ends not because it is overcome, but because it has achieved its goal.

Norbert Elias’s warnings notwithstanding, dealing seriously with society’s underlying pathologies is part of the answer to political violence in the long term. But so, too, is something we have not had and perhaps can barely imagine anymore: leaders from all parts of the political constellation, and at all levels of government, and from all segments of society, who name the problem of political violence for what it is, explain how it will overwhelm us, and point a finger at those who foment it, either directly or indirectly. Leaders who understand that nothing else will matter if we can’t stop this one thing. The federal government is right to take a hard line against political violence—as it has done with its prosecutions of Governor Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers and the January 6 insurrectionists (almost 1,000 of whom have been charged). But violence must also be confronted where it first takes root, in the minds of citizens.

Ending political violence means facing down those who use the language of democracy to weaken democratic systems. It means rebuking the conspiracy theorist who uses the rhetoric of truth-seeking to obscure what’s real; the billionaire who describes his privately owned social platform as a democratic town square; the seditionist who proclaims himself a patriot; the authoritarian who claims to love freedom. Someday, historians will look back at this moment and tell one of two stories: The first is a story of how democracy and reason prevailed. The second is a story of how minds grew fevered and blood was spilled in the twilight of a great experiment that did not have to end the way it did.

*Lead image source credits from left to right: Kathryn Elsesser / AFP / Getty; Michael Nigro / Sipa USA / Alamy; Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / AFP / Getty; Alex Milan Tracy / AP; Michael Nigro / Sipa USA / Alamy; Michael Nigro / Sipa USA / AP; Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / AFP / Getty; Mark Downey / ZUMA / Alamy; Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / AFP / Getty

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “The New Anarchy.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.