Gilad Edelman | The Atlantic

The Cure for Snoring

2026-03-15T07:00:00-04:00

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For the past few months, in pursuit of better sleep, I have been setting aside 15 minutes a day to lick my phone. This is as undignified as it sounds. But then, nothing about snoring, or the bewildering range of real and sham treatments for it, is particularly dignified. With our slackened tongues and uncontrollable snorts, snorers are at our most annoying right when we’re at our most passive and vulnerable. Our spouses toss and turn while we drone on, until a strategically placed elbow—or our own snuffling—jolts us awake.

Breathing while sleeping should not be complicated. “I could do that in my sleep,” we say, of something easy. What’s easier than breathing? And yet, for many of us, the simple task of staying alive through the night is not straightforward. At least 25 percent of adults snore regularly. The problem is more prevalent among men, which means that the closely related problem of wanting to murder one’s bed partner is more prevalent among women.

Regular snoring becomes more likely as you age. For me, the condition seems to have emerged about five years ago, in my early 30s, although it’s hard to pinpoint the precise beginning because I was asleep for it. Last summer, I finally did the responsible thing and took an at-home sleep study. My snoring turned out to be a symptom of obstructive sleep apnea, a condition that causes many snorers to wake up throughout the night to restart our breathing.

My dentist presented three treatment options. (Many dentists dabble in sleep medicine, a function of the anatomy involved.) I could try a continuous-positive-airway-pressure machine, better known as a CPAP, an effective but awkward gas-mask-like contraption. Or I could get a mandibular-advancement device: a kind of specialized retainer that forces your lower jaw forward, creating more space for air to flow.

Most intriguing was option three: orofacial myofunctional therapy. By performing certain mouth and throat exercises, my dentist explained, I could train myself not to snore. “Are you saying I can do physical therapy to cure snoring?” I asked. “Basically, yeah,” she said.

The idea that snoring could be alleviated with exercise was news to me. But then, I had never given snoring much thought. Once I began to look into it, I learned that snoring is an immensely complicated phenomenon—one with a baffling range of potential treatments. If you snore, there’s a good chance a cure is out there for you. Good luck finding it.

Scientifically speaking, snoring is just a vibration. When you breathe, your chest cavity expands, which lowers the pressure inside your lungs. Air then rushes into your nose (or, less optimally, your mouth); past your throat, voice box, and windpipe; and into your lungs. Then the chest contracts and the process repeats in reverse. When everything is functioning properly, this is a quiet process.

Snoring is the sound of everything not functioning properly. Between the nose and the larynx, something is getting in the way. The obstacle could be a deviated septum. It could be overly large tonsils or adenoids. Most likely, it’s the collapse of muscle somewhere in the upper airway. When you’re awake, your tongue and throat know how to stay clear of your breath. When you sleep, they relax. Your tongue might fall back into your throat, or the throat itself might relax too much, narrowing the aperture for air to get in and causing any number of the surrounding structures to vibrate.

Snoring serves no evolutionary purpose. It does not help attract mates, to say the least, and noisily broadcasting your location to potential predators while you’re unconscious is a big Darwinian no-no. Eric Kezirian, an otolaryngologist and sleep-medicine doctor at UCLA, told me that snoring is probably a by-product of several other adaptations that were useful. Walking on two feet freed our hands, but introduced a bend into our airway. The development of language required more neck space to house the anatomy associated with speech. This combination—air taking a right angle to go down the throat, plus having to pass through a longer neck—“is not helpful from a breathing perspective,” Kezirian said.

[From the August 2025 issue: Why can’t Americans sleep? ]

Modern life has created the conditions for a snoring epidemic. We live longer than our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, and our muscles lose tone as we age. We inhabit a more calorie-rich environment, giving us more fat tissue in the throat to press upon the windpipe. Some experts believe that modern child-rearing practices are also to blame. Premodern children grew up chewing tough food, which contributed to jaw development. The shift away from prolonged breast-feeding and toward mushy baby food has led to smaller jaws with less room for the tongue. Kevin Boyd, a pediatric dentist in Chicago who specializes in breathing issues, told me to ask my mom whether I was weaned onto Gerber early. Turns out, I was. So, on top of everything else, snoring might give our spouses another reason to resent their mothers-in-law.

Snoring on its own is not generally viewed as a medical condition requiring treatment. It mainly brings about what doctors call “social consequences,” and what I call “getting woken up by my wife, then being too mad to fall back asleep.” If the blockage keeps some air from getting to your lungs, however, you have obstructive sleep apnea—literally “breathlessness,” from the Greek apnous. This affects as many as half of snorers. If untreated, moderate and severe cases can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, or heart attack. Even if the sleeper is getting enough oxygen, apnea might cause them to wake up throughout the night, depriving them of adequate sleep. This is why daytime drowsiness is one of the main symptoms.

In his 2017 book, The Mystery of Sleep, the eminent sleep doctor Meir Kryger writes that apnea “has been around as long as there have been obese people.” But the condition was not formalized as a clinical diagnosis until the 1970s. (Before that, scientists called it “Pickwickian syndrome,” after an overweight Charles Dickens character who can’t stay awake.) Estimates of its prevalence are all over the place. Different sources use different thresholds to define the disorder, and an unknown but certainly high share of cases go undiagnosed. An analysis of the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study, which provides the most comprehensive data available, found that one in four Americans ages 30 to 70 had at least mild apnea, and one in 10 had a moderate-to-severe case.

According to my home sleep test, I scored a 10 on the “apnea-hypopnea index,” qualifying my case as a mild one. My oxygen levels were fine, but I had 149 respiratory disturbances, or mini wake-ups, over the course of the night. That sounded bad. My dentist asked if I wake up feeling tired or refreshed. I didn’t know refreshed was an option! Maybe if I treated the underlying condition, I would sleep soundly for eight hours and then spring out of bed. The bags under my eyes would disappear. Everything would be different. I just needed to figure out which treatment to pursue. How hard could that be?

The basic problem with treating sleep apnea is that different treatments work differently for different people, and finding the right solution is tedious. (Losing weight is a great place to start, but if I could manage to drop the 10 pounds I’ve put on in my 30s, I would have done it already.) To eliminate disruptions to your sleep, you have to be willing to try a bunch of things that will probably disrupt your sleep in other ways at first, and stick with them long enough to measure the results.

The gold standard for treating sleep apnea is the CPAP machine, which was introduced in the 1980s. The beauty of the CPAP is that it doesn’t care why your breathing is impaired. Whether the problem is the shape of your nose, the collapse of your throat muscles, or something else, it will use pressure to forcibly jam air into your lungs. The big drawback is the fact that the machine is obtrusive, awkward, and decidedly unsexy. According to research, the “patient adherence” rate is between 30 and 60 percent. “It’s very, very, very, very effective if it’s worn and tolerated,” Kevin Motz, an otolaryngologist and sleep-medicine doctor at Johns Hopkins, told me. “But it leaves something to be desired as far as the practicality of it.”

When Ray Fowler, a pastor in South Florida, discovered a few years ago that his lifelong snoring was a symptom of serious apnea, he knew he didn’t want to use a CPAP. So he tried almost every alternative remedy he came across online, a journey he documents in a recently self-published book, CPAP No More. The book’s takeaway can be summarized as follows: Snoring and sleep apnea can be cured without a CPAP, provided you are willing to test a wide array of solutions for at least a week at a time, record your breathing every night, and carefully study the results every morning over the course of a year.

Fowler tried all sorts of techniques and contraptions—mouth tape, oral appliances, a special therapeutic water bottle, tough Turkish chewing gum. Eventually he realized that his biggest enemy was gravity, which was pulling his tongue back into his airway. His solution was what practitioners would call “positional therapy.” Fowler, a habitual back-sleeper, learned to sleep on his side with the assistance of an air-filled backpack marketed as the Slumber Bump. A combination of a wedge and orthopedic pillow kept his head elevated. He also found benefits from daily breathing exercises.

“It’s actually pretty basic and simple, but it took a long time to figure out what was doing what,” Fowler told me. Once his apnea was cured, “all of a sudden I started dreaming again.”

I was not particularly keen on a year’s worth of trial and error. But, like Fowler, I didn’t want to wear a CPAP. And even with insurance, a custom-made mandibular-advancement device would cost several hundred dollars, which was a lot to pay for something that might not work.

Physical therapy was more appealing. In the ’90s, Brazilian researchers began integrating orofacial exercises into sleep medicine. The basic idea is that many apnea and snoring cases are caused by the tongue and throat muscles losing tone while sleeping. Exercises that increase those muscles’ strength and endurance might therefore help keep the throat open and unrestricted during sleep.

In a randomized controlled trial published in 2009, the Brazilians reported that a set of mouth-and-throat exercises led to significant decreases in snoring volume and frequency, sleep quality, and apnea severity. This was probably the most important study establishing the legitimacy of this emerging field, but it is not my favorite. My favorite is the 2006 paper in which scientists in Switzerland reported significant results from 25 minutes of daily didgeridoo playing. More recent meta-analyses have bolstered the case for treating apnea with airway workouts.

Even so, some medical experts think that myofunctional therapy can border on snake oil. “There is no scientific evidence that myofunctional-therapy practices in the United States have any proven benefits for adults with obstructive sleep apnea,” Kezirian, from UCLA, told me. All those meta-analyses purporting to show that the treatment works, he said, are “completely outrageous” because they lump together studies involving different sets of exercises.

Kezirian wasn’t totally against myofunctional therapy, however. The Brazilian randomized controlled study, he said, was legit. So was the didgeridoo study. And, he said, “there’s a cool app out there that has much more evidence” behind it. “It’s a specific set of exercises, not this grab bag.”

This was a tremendous relief to hear, because by the time I spoke with Kezirian, the app in question was looking like my best bet. It was designed by Carlos O’Connor Reina, a Spanish otolaryngologist. Reina’s research suggests that one of the most common causes of sleep apnea is a lack of muscle tone in the upper airway, which he refers to as “the hypotonic phenotype.” In experiments, he has found that myofunctional therapy can cause measurable changes in the anatomy of the upper airway. He and colleagues created the Airway Gym app as a cheap way to get the treatment to the masses.

That is how, just after Thanksgiving, I came to spend my free time licking my phone. This experience feels just as ridiculous as it sounds—actually, more so. The app includes nine exercises, four of which involve pressing your tongue in different movements against your phone screen. (The app recommends protecting the screen with plastic wrap, for hygienic reasons.) The others require pressing the phone with your jaw or cheeks. Most are performed for five-second bursts, in sets of 15.

This seemed even less likely than didgeridoo practice to improve my snoring. And yet, to my great surprise, it did. Over Thanksgiving weekend alone, my wife had felt the need to wake me up multiple times for noise violations. After less than two weeks of training, hostilities ceased almost completely. According to the recordings logged on my tracker app, my snoring had dropped in frequency and volume by about half. I didn’t notice feeling more energetic, but at least I wasn’t torturing my wife as much.

[Arthur C. Brooks: An evening ritual to realize a happier life]

Unfortunately, my progress hit a plateau. And keeping up with the app day after day became a grind. You can’t do it in public—far too shameful—and you can’t multitask while doing it, because you’ve got to hold your phone up against your face the whole time. I already had a stack of health habits I was supposed to be attending to: weight lifting, cardio, physical therapy for my balky knees. Finding time for yet another regimen wasn’t easy. When my life got busier in January, I gave up.

Big mistake. A few weeks after bailing on Airway Gym, a loud noise woke me with a start. I looked around wildly, my heart racing. It was, of course, my own snoring. A few days later, I noticed that I was feeling exhausted even after a full eight hours of sleep. That night, I recorded my snoring. It was as bad as ever. The therapy had improved my sleep quality, just too gradually for me to notice. Only by going off the treatment did I discover its full benefits.

Now I’m back to daily training. I really have no choice. For years, I never felt guilty about snoring. I couldn’t be blamed for what happened while I was unconscious. But if a viable treatment existed and I chose not to do it, then my snoring could be said to be my fault. Tongue exercises are tedious, and I don’t look forward to doing them for the rest of my life, but they’re worth it to get better sleep. My wife, meanwhile, guards against the occasional loud snort with one of the oldest and most elegant anti-snoring technologies ever devised: earplugs.

What Everyone Assumes About Jeffrey Epstein

2026-02-07T07:00:00-05:00

In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, association seems to imply guilt. And so the release of the so-called Epstein files is generating a wave of firings, resignations, and public apologies.

The health influencer Peter Attia had to resign from a protein-bar company after emails showed him participating in crude banter with Epstein. CBS News, where Attia was recently hired as a contributor, pulled a 60 Minutes segment featuring him. Brad Karp, who in one email to Epstein gushed, “You’re amazing,” is stepping down as chair of the law firm Paul Weiss. Queen’s University Belfast has announced that it is removing former U.S. Senator George Mitchell’s name from its peace institute and his bust from its campus. Mitchell, who is now 92 years old, presided over the negotiation of the Good Friday agreement in 1998 and served as the school’s chancellor for a decade. But the files suggest that Epstein had scheduled a meeting with him as recently as 2013. Los Angeles officials are calling for the city’s Olympic Committee chair to resign because he exchanged flirtatious emails with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s accomplice, in 2003. The number of people who have put out statements insisting that they did nothing illegal and apologizing for having ever known Epstein is in the dozens and rising quickly.

Nothing comparable happened in the cases of other high-profile sex criminals. The many famous friends of Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby generally did not issue public apologies. Epstein is different because, under a certain set of assumptions, an individual’s presence in the files is presumptively damning. Epstein is known to have paid or coerced dozens, possibly hundreds, of teen girls, some as young as 14, to perform sexual acts. Beyond what has been proved, the conventional wisdom holds that Epstein built his network by trafficking teen girls to other powerful men, whom he then blackmailed to generate his mysterious wealth; that his private plane and island were essentially brothels; and that even friends who didn’t participate in his crimes were surely aware of them, and chose to consort with him anyway.

Those assumptions are all widely held—but poorly substantiated. The Epstein files reveal plenty of powerful people to have tolerated or participated in disgusting and shameful behavior. Far from shedding light on a grand conspiracy, however, the files bolster the case that although terrible crimes were committed, there never was a larger conspiracy to begin with.

For anyone who has only passively kept up with the Epstein story, this is hard to wrap one’s head around. The notion that Epstein routinely trafficked teen girls to other men aboard the Lolita Express is widely accepted as fact. But the accusations that led to his initial criminal conviction were specific to Epstein himself. The notion of other abusers arose later, largely owing to explosive allegations first made in 2014 by Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre, who committed suicide in 2025, claimed that Epstein had trafficked her to some of his friends, including the nobleman formerly known as Prince Andrew and the defense attorney Alan Dershowitz. She may have been telling the truth—we do not know—but her claims, which later grew to include more men, have never been substantiated. She dropped the accusation against Dershowitz, saying she “may have made a mistake,” after he sued for defamation. (Andrew settled a case with Giuffre out of court while maintaining his innocence.)

[Kaitlyn Tiffany: America will be reading the Epstein files for decades]

The attorney Brad Edwards has represented more than 200 Epstein victims in civil lawsuits. As someone who earns money by suing perpetrators, he is perhaps the last person on earth with an incentive to downplay the culpability of Epstein’s rich friends. Last week, Edwards told the BBC that one of his clients says Epstein flew her to the United Kingdom for sex with Andrew. But in an interview with ABC News last year, Edwards nonetheless dismissed the idea that Epstein had run a trafficking ring. “Jeffrey Epstein was the pimp and the john. He was his own No. 1 client,” he said. “Nearly all of the exploitation and abuse of all of the women was intended to benefit only Jeffrey Epstein and Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual desires.” (Maxwell was convicted of trafficking girls to Epstein.) Edwards allowed that “a select few” of Epstein’s friends might have “engaged in sexual acts with a select few of the girls that Jeffrey Epstein was exploiting or abusing,” but argued that Epstein otherwise lived a double life. In one, he hobnobbed with artists, billionaires, and politicians. In the other, he abused women and girls. “For the most part,” Edwards said, “those two worlds did not overlap.”

The theory that Epstein was blackmailing his rich contacts was also always based on speculation. As an exhaustive New York Times Magazine investigation recently explained, Epstein built his fortune mainly by insinuating himself as a wealth manager for a few superrich old men and drawing hefty fees. One of those men, Leslie Wexner, has said that Epstein “misappropriated” $46 million of his money.

Nor is it obvious that Epstein’s friends necessarily knew about his crimes. Some surely did—Brad Karp, the Paul Weiss chair, kept emailing with Epstein through 2019, after his offenses had become national news—but plenty might not have. His 2008 plea deal is scandalous precisely because he was allowed to admit to the lesser offense of soliciting underage prostitution, rather than rape or child sexual abuse. He spent only a year in jail and continued to move in polite society once he got out. Acquaintances might have taken all that as evidence that whatever he had done wasn’t so bad, or they may not have known about it at all. He surely did not go around telling them the truth.

Inversely, having been friends with Epstein before his conviction is no proof of ignorance. Donald Trump, for example, insists that he fell out with Epstein in the 2000s, before the guilty plea. But in 2002, he told New York magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy” before noting, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” The notorious birthday book that was released well before the most recent document dump makes clear that many of Epstein’s powerful friends knew about and celebrated his interest in girls.

Epstein has been dead for much longer than he was a household name. Although he had appeared in the news over the years, few Americans knew who he was until November 2018, when the investigative reporter Julie K. Brown published her now-legendary exposé in the Miami Herald. Less than eight months later, the Department of Justice charged Epstein with sex trafficking, and in August 2019—less than a year after the story broke—his lifeless body was found hanging in the Brooklyn jail cell where he was awaiting trial.

In death, Epstein has taken on far more significance than he did in life. Some Americans were already primed to believe in international pedophilia rings. Bonus points if they were run by wealthy Jews—Jews who were perhaps on the Mossad payroll, as many conspiracists have insisted Epstein was. Especially potent was the notion of a “client list” naming everyone in Epstein’s trafficking ring. This idea seemed to explain why he’d received a lenient deal in 2008 (to protect his powerful clients) and why he had supposedly been murdered in jail (to keep him from talking).

This was all a natural fit for members of the MAGA right, some of whom already believed that Trump had been sent by God to expose pedophiles. Even though Trump was president when Epstein died in federal custody, and had enjoyed a well-publicized friendship with him in the period when Epstein is known to have been abusing teen girls, the MAGA movement nurtured the idea that Democrats were covering up “the Epstein files” to protect their own. Trump himself said that he would release the files if he won a second term. During a Fox News interview in February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that the client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review. That’s been a directive by President Trump.”

Then Trump abruptly backtracked, declaring the whole Epstein matter to be a “witch hunt.” Suddenly, Release the files was just about the only thing this nation could agree on. Trump’s explanations for the reversal were so bizarrely unconvincing that it was hard to believe the files wouldn’t contain damaging information about him. The longer Trump delayed, the more explosive the files seemed destined to be. Could the client list include Trump himself?

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Epstein denials are ever so slightly unconvincing]

The truth seems to be that there never was a client list. The Epstein files encompass millions of documents in the Department of Justice’s possession, including seemingly every email to or from Epstein’s account over a period of years. To say that someone is “in the Epstein files” therefore doesn’t mean much on its own. Some names are discussed by Epstein and his assistants, but are not attached to any correspondence. Others appear only in news clippings. Trump does appear, many times, but in the third person. (Trump famously does not like to use email.) The most explosive claims against him are unvetted allegations submitted to the government.

Many of the emails are newsworthy. Some of Epstein’s male friends seem to have relied on him for introductions to young, but not underage, women who were either sex workers or aspiring sugar babies. In one email, Epstein tells Andrew, then 50, about a beautiful 26-year-old Russian woman that Epstein thinks he should meet. Andrew replies that he’d be “delighted.” In others, Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants, solicits information about potential sex partners from Epstein, at points asking for clarification on whether they’re a “working girl” or “civilian.” (Both Andrew and Tisch have denied any wrongdoing.) Peter Mandelson, who was recently removed from his role as British ambassador to the United States over his Epstein ties, not only emerges as one of Epstein’s closest and creepiest confidants, but also appears to have fed Epstein financially valuable information from meetings with government officials. Noam Chomsky, the linguist and political theorist, is seen advising Epstein on how to manage the fallout from his conviction.

Other documents contradict what prominent people have said about their connections to Epstein. Elon Musk, for example, is one of the world’s foremost purveyors of Epstein conspiracism. He posted last fall that Epstein “tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED.” In fact, as The New York Times has reported, the files suggest that Musk was eager to go: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” he emailed Epstein in 2012. Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, has claimed that he vowed in the mid-2000s to “never be in a room with that disgusting person ever again.” The files show him emailing Epstein in 2012 to arrange a family visit to Epstein’s private island.

More unseemly or even criminal material may well come out. Perhaps evidence will even emerge to prove that Epstein systematically trafficked minors to other men or blackmailed them over legal but secret liaisons. But so far, none has.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Circles of Epstein hell]

Because the Epstein conspiracy theory is treated as reality by so many, however, merely appearing in the files seems to be grounds for suspicion. And because Epstein cultivated as many high-profile contacts as possible, that leaves a whole lot of people potentially exposed to unfounded insinuations. A Daily Beast headline over the weekend, for example, declared of the journalist Nellie Bowles, “MAGA-Curious CBS Boss’s Wife Busted Ingratiating Herself With Epstein.” In fact, the files show Bowles, who is now married to CBS News head Bari Weiss, emailing with Epstein to interview him for a New York Times story. An Inside Higher Ed article published Tuesday lists nine academics who appear in the files and notes that this puts “pressure on those named to explain their communications”—as many of them then do, in statements to their campus newspapers. A sure way to get engagement on social media is to extrapolate recklessly from suggestive nuggets of information. J. K. Rowling evidently felt compelled to issue a statement contradicting files-based accusations that she had invited Epstein to the opening of her Harry Potter musical.

Epstein committed horrific acts against a staggering number of women and girls, but, judging from the available evidence, he was not at the center of a global pedophilia ring that included dozens of criminal co-conspirators. The apparent truth is somehow even more depressing. Smarmy jerks can get obscenely wealthy in this country just by managing other people’s money. Men who sexually abuse women and children can be charming. The most accomplished people in our society can be terrible judges of character. They can, in the pursuit of proximity to wealth and power, ignore or downplay what’s right in front of them. The Epstein files show us that the world is an ugly and unfair place. But we already knew that.

Will Google Ever Have to Pay for Its Sins?

2026-01-14T18:13:14-05:00

If the story of journalism’s 21st-century decline were purely a tale of technological disruption—of print dinosaurs failing to adapt to the internet—that would be painful enough for those of us who believe in the importance of a robust free press. The truth hurts even more. Big Tech platforms didn’t just out-compete media organizations for the bulk of the advertising-revenue pie. They also cheated them out of much of what was left over, and got away with it.

As someone who has written quite a bit about this dynamic over the years, I was interested to learn that The Atlantic filed an antitrust lawsuit yesterday accusing Google of illegally depriving the company of advertising revenue over the past decade. (The editorial team had no involvement in the decision, and I learned of details through public court filings.) Like similar cases filed by publications including Slate, Business Insider, and—just today—Vox, along with the publishers McClatchy and Advance, this one builds off of a federal judge’s ruling last year that Google had illegally established a monopoly in ad tech.

[Kate Lindsay: Something went terribly wrong with online ads]

I will now attempt to explain the concept of an ad-tech monopoly with as little legal or technical jargon as possible. We’re talking about the ads that load when you open an article page, like the one you’re reading right now. The process of delivering those ads turns out to be extraordinarily complex. In general, whichever ad you see had to win an automated auction to reach your eyeballs. On one side of the transaction are advertisers, who bid to show their ad according to how valuable they think a particular reader is, based on data about them and what they’re looking at. On the other side are publications, such as The Atlantic, that use a publisher-side ad platform to list their ad space and hope to sell it for the highest possible price. The two sides meet in an ad exchange, which runs the auction in a fraction of a second in order to match advertisers with available ad-space inventory.

In theory, to maximize revenue, a publisher can use any number of platforms to put its ad inventory up for sale and can solicit bids via any number of exchanges. In practice, as Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia found in her ruling last April, Google has made doing that extremely difficult. Google accounts for more than 50 percent of the global ad-exchange market and 90 percent of the publisher ad-platform market, making it by far the dominant player at each layer. This creates a clear conflict of interest—as if “Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE,” in the words of one Google employee—and one the company has routinely exploited. (Meta and Amazon are also huge players in the ad business, but not in the type of advertising at issue here.)

The simplest example is Google requiring publishers that want to receive bids through Google’s exchange to use its publisher platform. This is called “tying” in antitrust law, and as Brinkema ruled last year, it’s illegal, because it unfairly uses dominance at one level of a market to lock out competition at another level. (The famous 1990s antitrust case against Microsoft also revolved around tying.) As The Atlantic’s legal complaint alleges, the publication “does not have an alternative way to access advertising spending from the long tail of small- or medium-sized advertisers who buy mostly, or exclusively, through Google Ads.” It has no choice but to use Google’s platform. This prevents rivals from competing on price or quality, which helps explain that 90 percent market-share number.

Google in turn uses its control of the publisher side to entrench the dominance of its ad exchange, called AdX. The key thing to understand is that a digital-ad auction occurs in two steps. First, advertisers place bids through various exchanges. Second, those exchanges each submit their respective winning bid. In a fair market, those winning bids would be treated equally. But because publishers are all using Google’s platform, Google can give its own exchange special advantages—and it does. Broadly speaking, this prevents other exchanges from increasing their market share and lets AdX win auctions with lower bids than it would have to submit in a competitive market. That, in turn, costs publishers money in the form of lost ad revenue.

In a statement, Google told me, “These allegations are meritless. Advertisers and publishers have many choices and when they choose Google’s ad tech tools it’s because they are effective, affordable and easy to use.”

Brinkema reached a different conclusion, however, in her ruling in a case brought by the Department of Justice and 17 states. Her opinion describes many self-preferencing schemes that Google has deployed over the years, including: giving AdX the right to place an ad before any other exchanges can bid on it, letting AdX peek at the bids submitted by rival exchanges in supposedly sealed auctions, and selectively lowering its commission rate just enough to undercut what would otherwise be another exchange’s winning bid. These and other techniques, Brinkema concluded, have helped Google preserve its dominant position even as it charges a high average commission and rolls out product changes over publishers’ objections. Neither of those things should be possible in a competitive market. (Google plans to appeal Brinkema’s decision.)

Whether Brinkema’s ruling leads to any real change is still an open question. Consider what happened in a separate antitrust case against Google. In 2024, a different federal judge, Amit Mehta, ruled that Google had illegally monopolized the search-engine market, including by paying Apple and Samsung to be the default search engine on their phones. But when the time came to impose legal remedies—such as breaking up the company—Mehta essentially let Google off with a warning. He could have forced the company to spin off its Chrome browser or its Android operating system, but he didn’t. He didn’t even ban it from paying to be the default search engine. Instead, he imposed only the most minimal requirements, such as limited data-sharing.

In his ruling, Mehta suggested that the emergence of generative-AI firms was putting so much competitive pressure on Google that going any further would be unwise. In fact, the AI market is already heavily concentrated among the handful of firms with the resources to invest in it, and Google’s overlapping monopolies have set it up to dominate the AI economy too. On Monday, Apple announced a partnership making Google’s technology the foundation for Siri and other AI products. The news pushed Google’s market cap above $4 trillion for the first time.

[Richard R. John: The tech giants’ anti-regulation fantasy]

Brinkema has yet to rule on the proper remedy for Google’s ad-tech monopoly. For now, individual publishers can seek compensation in individual civil cases, as The Atlantic is doing. (The Atlantic lawsuit also accuses Google of having lied about how its ad products work; Google denies the allegation.) Winning meaningful redress for a decade’s worth of ad-tech-related harm would be a big deal for publishers. Aside from the financial upside, it would set a precedent after all these years that Big Tech companies can be held accountable for their actions.

And yet, in some ways, the ad-tech cases might be fighting the last war. As Mehta seemed to only half-grasp, generative AI is where the real action is. The damage caused by Google’s ad-tech abuses has been eclipsed by the growing threat of AI to journalism’s business model. Google’s pivot to showing users AI-generated search results, instead of links, has been a disaster for traffic. Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly preparing to get into the advertising business. A number of publishers, most notably The New York Times, have sued OpenAI, alleging that the company broke the law by training its models on copyrighted materials. (Other publications, including The Atlantic’s corporate leadership, have instead signed deals in which OpenAI pays for access to their content. The Atlantic’s editorial team does not report to the CEO, and corporate partnerships have no influence on stories, including this one.) OpenAI argues that the training counts as legally permissible “fair use.” Such litigation will take years to play out. Perhaps a federal judge will rule a decade from now that a monopolistic AI firm owes money to media organizations. One hopes that media organizations are still around to collect it.

A Horseshoe Theory of Trump

2026-01-05T07:00:00-05:00

After the inauguration of Andrew Jackson, in 1829, thousands of his supporters poured into the White House to celebrate. The crowd overwhelmed the staff and trashed some of the furniture before the party was relocated to the White House lawn. The episode earned Jackson the nickname “King Mob” and became a symbol of his man-of-the-people persona.

Donald Trump is often compared to Jackson, but the events he has hosted since his second inauguration carry a different sort of symbolism. In May, he held a dinner at one of his golf courses for the 220 people who had spent the most money—$148 million, collectively—to buy his $TRUMP crypto meme coin. In October, he hosted a White House dinner for the rich individuals and corporate executives who had donated to his White House–ballroom project.

For the past decade, Trump has supposedly been on the verge of breaking from the laissez-faire economics of the Reagan GOP—otherwise known as neoliberalism—in favor of pro-worker populism. And in some ways, he really has succeeded in casting out the ghosts of Reaganomics by embracing hands-on market interventions. The New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin has called Trumponomics a form of “state-sponsored capitalism.” A recent essay by Scott Lincicome, the vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, calls 2025 “the year America went (kinda) socialist,” and describes Trump’s approach as “state corporatism.”

What these accounts leave out is the fact that Trump has simultaneously steered economic policy in an even more pro-business direction than his Republican predecessors, including his own first-term administration. When they aren’t personally being shaken down by the president, corporations and billionaires are being left to do as they please in pursuit of profit. Greed has never been this good.

[Derek Thompson: The era of step-on-a-rake capitalism]

The result is a strange contradiction that the term socialism doesn’t begin to capture. Trump’s economic management combines two theoretically incompatible tendencies. It is at once libertarian, because the state is doing less to protect consumers and workers, and authoritarian, because the government sometimes lawlessly interrupts the workings of the free market in service of the personal and ideological interests of Trump and his allies. This makes MAGA economics a seemingly impossible hybrid: libertarian authoritarianism.

One might have expected Trump’s first term to have put to rest any dreams of a pro-worker GOP policy revolution. With rare exceptions, his economic agenda catered to the super-wealthy, corporate America, and anti-government activists. He passed an enormous tax cut that disproportionately favored corporations and rich individuals. His National Labor Relations Board took positions favored by employers, narrowed workers’ ability to organize, and rolled back a rule expanding eligibility for overtime pay.

Some supporters still insisted that Trump had the common man’s interests at heart. They had an explanation for the disappointments of his first term: Trump had been surrounded by traditional Republican staffers who carried water for Big Business and sabotaged any effort to break from neoliberalism. The likes of Steve Mnuchin weren’t true MAGA. Once Trump had a team of loyal soldiers around him, everything would be different. “We’re done catering to Wall Street,” J. D. Vance declared at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

We now have a year’s worth of data by which to judge the accuracy of such predictions. No one can deny that Trump is doing what he wants, and what he wants is slashing clean-air regulations, rolling back consumer protections (such as a rule requiring airlines to compensate passengers for canceled flights), shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, extending corporate tax cuts, attempting to ban state-level AI regulation, pardoning financial scammers, letting the crypto industry run wild (while Trump himself gets in on the action), allowing betting companies to brazenly flout state-level gambling bans, and so on. The NLRB as of this writing doesn’t even have a single member. Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, recently argued on cable news that the regulations imposed on the banking sector after the 2008 financial crisis were too strict and must be rolled back. Stacks of earnest pro-worker policy proposals from “New Right” think tanks sit untouched.

What makes things confusing is that Trump is breaking from neoliberalism in many ways—they just have very little to do with economic policy per se, and much more to do with increasing Trump’s personal power. Antitrust is one domain where progressive Democrats and MAGA diehards have found common ground. But under Trump 2.0, enforcement is down (libertarianism) even as the administration seems to steer corporate consolidation in Trump’s favor (authoritarianism). The Federal Communications Commission, for example, didn’t approve Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount until after CBS News, a Paramount subsidiary, agreed to pay $16 million to Trump’s presidential-library fund to settle a personal lawsuit filed by the president. Skydance also committed in writing to various ideological reforms, including appointing an anti-bias ombudsman at the network. More recently, referring to Skydance’s effort to outbid Netflix to acquire Warner Bros., Trump told reporters, “I’ll be involved in that decision.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission has abandoned its defense of a Biden-era rule banning employers from using noncompete clauses, a practice that research has shown suppresses worker wages. At the DOJ, two top antitrust officials were fired after protesting the department’s decision to allow Hewlett Packard Enterprise to acquire one of its biggest competitors. One of those officials, Roger Alford, later gave a speech in which he suggested that America was being governed not by the rule of law but by “the rule of lobbyists”—a nod to accusations that the deal had been pushed through because the parties had paid the right MAGA influencers to push for it.

Another post-neoliberal innovation by Trump 2.0 is the extraction of tribute payments from corporations with business before the government. Trump has required companies including Intel, U.S. Steel, and Nvidia to give the federal government various degrees of ownership stakes in their business, and more such deals are expected. As Lincicome, the Cato vice president, points out, no one has offered any strategic rationale for doing so. “We should take stakes in companies when people need something,” Trump has said. If this is socialism, it is socialism without a proletariat, central planning without a plan.

Even Trump’s massive global tariffs have almost no logical connection to the major critiques of free trade—or, as far as anyone can tell, to any consistent policy objective at all beyond allowing Trump to alpha-dog America’s trading partners. Experts from across the political spectrum have argued that carefully targeted tariffs can bolster key domestic industries, particularly manufacturing, and protect the subset of workers whose jobs are most threatened by cheap imports. Trump instead chose to impose indiscriminate tariffs on almost every country on Earth, for almost every category of import. Economists warned that this approach would hurt domestic manufacturing by raising the price of raw materials. They appear to have been right: Employment in the manufacturing sector has trended down ever since “Liberation Day.”

The counterargument that Trump’s economic-populist defenders fall back on is that the president has kept his pledge to America’s common man where it matters most: immigration. They argue that illegal immigration suppresses wages and job opportunities for native-born workers. Trump’s crackdown is thus a huge blow struck in favor of the American working class, and against corporate overlords who prefer to have a steady supply of cheap labor.

[Scott Lincicome: America’s Perón]

As my colleague Rogé Karma explained last year, however, essentially the entire weight of empirical economic evidence suggests that this theory has never been true in practice. (Immigrants don’t just increase the labor supply; they also increase demand for labor, because they consume goods and services.) And indeed, according to the most recent federal jobs report, the unemployment rate rose from 4.0 percent in January to 4.6 percent in November—the highest jobless rate since September 2021—and was higher year-over-year for native-born workers specifically.

Even if the theory were correct, that wouldn’t explain Trump’s actual policies. Detaining a Turkish graduate student who criticizes Israel does not open up any jobs for native-born construction workers. Neither does shutting down citizenship proceedings for lawful immigrants from 19 countries or restricting the asylum program mostly to white South Africans. Trump’s immigration policies don’t make sense as a pro-worker agenda, but do make sense as a way of silencing dissent and keeping out nonwhite immigrants.

The idea that Trump’s immigration policy is designed to help the American worker would be easier to take seriously were he not simultaneously giving every possible concession to the industry most likely to cause mass job loss in the near future. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 71 percent of Americans said they worried about AI “putting too many people out of work permanently.” Yet the Trump administration, with its close ties to Silicon Valley centibillionaires, is assiduously removing any obstacles to the growth of the AI sector. After Congress failed to include a moratorium on state-level AI regulation in a spending bill, Trump issued an executive order directing the DOJ to sue states that dare to pass laws protecting their citizens from the technology.

Authoritarianism and libertarianism are commonly thought of as opposites—two poles on a political spectrum. It is a sign of Trump’s distinctive political genius that he has managed to combine the two concepts. By tearing down generally applicable restraints on corporate behavior while selectively exerting direct influence to reward his allies and punish his critics, he has managed to preserve all the flaws of the old Republican economic approach while introducing new ones that are even worse.

Enough With the Brussels Sprouts Already

2025-11-25T08:30:00-05:00

Brussels sprouts are played out. Kale was a mistake. This winter, embrace cabbage. Affordable, delicious, and astoundingly versatile, it has much more to offer than its reputation suggests.

It is a cliché of food writing to refer to a vegetable as “humble”—the humble carrot, the humble potato—but in the case of cabbage, the cliché is apt. Mark Twain wrote that “cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” Lewis Carroll’s walrus and carpenter discuss topics so unalike from one another that they talk of “cabbages—and kings.” Cabbage, a staple of peasant cuisine across Eurasia, is not merely humble, but the very symbol of humility.

Two thousand years before Twain considered the subject, however, Cato the Elder offered a different view. “Brassica est quae omnibus holeribus antistat,” he wrote: “The cabbage surpasses all other vegetables.” Setting aside the specifics of his argument, which to modern ears will sound oddly focused on the urine of cabbage-eaters, the overall sentiment is spot on.

By weight, cabbage is among the cheapest foods you can buy. (For simplicity’s sake, I’m focusing exclusively on standard-issue green cabbage, and not other wonderful varieties such as savoy and napa.) A USDA database ranked 93 different vegetable categories by price as of 2022. Green cabbage came in at No. 93. Because it is so dense, a single head produces an astonishing amount of food. It lasts in the refrigerator almost indefinitely, long past the point when kale begins to stink and carrots go limp. And it is almost impossible to overcook.

[Read: What home cooking does that restaurants can’t]

Cabbage lends itself to endless preparations. This is a good thing, because if you buy one average-sized head, you will have to figure out how to use it all. You can roast, grill, or pan-sear it. This will produce something with a meaty texture and rich, nutty flavor. You can turn it into cole slaw, which is fabulous on a leftover-turkey sandwich, or go in a more vinegar-based direction and call it a cabbage salad. It’s great sautéed or stir-fried, or braised until practically melting in the bottom of a pan underneath a roasting chicken or Thanksgiving turkey.

Despite its many virtues, cabbage has yet to inspire the kind of enthusiasm directed at some other members of the Brassica oleracea species, including kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower, which collectively have been on an astounding culinary trajectory over the past three decades. (Yes, they are all the same species, a bit like how Great Danes and dachshunds are both Canis familiaris.) These plants, also known as cruciferous vegetables, were long synonymous with healthy but unappetizing food that kids must be forced to eat. During one challenge to the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court, much of the oral argument turned on the hypothetical question of whether Congress could pass a law requiring Americans to eat broccoli.

If the idea of a “broccoli mandate” now doesn’t seem like such a threat to liberty—if cruciferous vegetables have become less menacing—it’s largely because America has gotten better at cooking them. When I was a kid, in the 1990s, the dominant way to prepare them was steaming or, worse still, boiling. So backwards was the national approach to veggies at the time that a 1993 New York Times article by Florence Fabricant reads like a dispatch from another planet. In the essay, Fabricant alerted readers to a new and unfamiliar culinary trend: roasting. Chefs in fancy restaurants, she wrote, were beginning to use the technique not just for big cuts of meat but for other foods, including vegetables. “Instead of boiling beets or carrots,” Fabricant suggested, readers should “try roasting these foods.” Over time, home cooks would heed the call. Cooking veggies with high heat, oil, and salt turned out to work wonders for both flavor and texture. Many of my Atlantic colleagues report that their young kids happily eat roasted broccoli.

This century, several breeds of Brassica oleracea have taken their turn as the “it” vegetable. In the early 2010s, thanks in part to endorsements from such celebrity proto-influencers as Gwyneth Paltrow and Beyoncé, kale went from obscurity to sudden ubiquity. Bon Appétit declared kale the trendiest vegetable of 2012 and named one Brooklyn restaurant’s kale salad its dish of the year. Unless expertly prepared, kale salad tastes like something you might use to insulate the walls of your house, a fact that only bolstered its claim to “superfood” status. Surely something so palpably fibrous must have borderline medicinal properties.

Cauliflower followed not long after, less as a superfood than as a toothsome shape-shifter. The Atlantic contributing writer Rachel Sugar observed in 2018 that Twain’s college-educated crucifer had begun appearing as a meatless, grain-free stand-in for all sorts of other foods. Suddenly you could buy cauliflower-crust pizza in the frozen-food aisle and order fried Buffalo cauliflower bites at the sports bar.

But no crucifer’s rise has been as stunning and total as that of brussels sprouts. “What’s the difference between brussels sprouts and boogers?” a joke from my childhood began. “Kids don’t eat brussels sprouts.” Two things made the vegetable’s subsequent reputational reversal possible. First, in the 1990s, a Dutch scientist identified the chemical compounds that made it bitter. This allowed growers to gradually breed versions of brussels sprouts with less and less of those compounds. However you cook them, modern brussels sprouts taste better than they used to.

Second, chefs started doing something that now seems obvious but at the time was novel: serving charred brussels sprouts with bacon. David Chang’s Manhattan restaurant Momofuku is widely credited with starting the trend, in 2004. Now you can order crispy brussels sprouts at Red Lobster. Eventually the mini cabbages caught on among home cooks, who realized that they could be good even without bacon, and became a staple of many a Thanksgiving table.

At this point, brussels sprouts have become overexposed—and their flaws have become harder to ignore. They are rather tedious to prepare. The bottoms must be cut off one by one, and then each sprout must be cut in half. Some fancy recipes even involve individually pulling all the layers of leaves off each one, which sounds like some kind of boarding-school detention.

[Read: Eat your vegetables like an adult]

Cooking sprouts just right is also difficult. If you’re roasting them, you need to brown and crisp the outsides before the insides overcook and turn to mush. But you don’t want the bottom to blacken while the interior remains crunchy. As with french fries, the window for eating roasted brussels sprouts closes quickly. Once they’ve been sitting for a few minutes, no matter how well you cooked them, they lose their crispiness and go mealy. (By the way, those “roasted” sprouts served at restaurants are typically not roasted but deep-fried. You have to drown them in oil to achieve similar results at home.)

And so the time has come to give brussels sprouts a break and let cabbage have its close-up. According to a 2024 Times article, this process has already begun at hip restaurants. But cabbage has yet to catch on widely among home cooks, who in fact have been buying steadily less of it since the turn of the century. This might be because they find it intimidating in its bulk and density. Cabbage is the only vegetable that could plausibly fill in for a bowling ball. As a result it can be a bit hard to slice open, and it takes time to become tender.

These challenges are easily overcome. It is important to have a well-sharpened knife. Cut from one direction, and if you get stuck, rotate the cabbage and finish the cut from the other side. Don’t cut your pieces too thick, and have patience. Get your cabbage going early and give it the time it needs to cook through while you handle other kitchen tasks. If you’re roasting, slice it into wedges about 1.5 inches thick at the widest point, get some oil on it, and wait. Once the bottom is nice and charred, flip and repeat on the other side. Or use cabbage to make something even easier: soup. I must say that this is my personal favorite use case. Brown some ham and add onions, celery, carrots, white beans, and a finely chopped half-head of cabbage, then let it all simmer until the cabbage is nice and soft, perhaps 45 minutes. The result is sweet, savory, and a little smoky.

What other vegetable, cruciferous or otherwise, can play so many roles with such aplomb? The truth about the humble cabbage is that it is fit for a king.

The ‘Easy Way’ to Crush the Mainstream Media

2025-11-17T07:00:00-05:00

Updated at 3:22 p.m. on November 17, 2025

The scandal that briefly made Brendan Carr a household name this fall was an outlier several times over. For one thing, FCC chairmen rarely make news. More than that, Carr usually knows better than to draw too much attention to himself. A seasoned bureaucrat, he has a knack for pulling the strings of power in ways that escape public scrutiny. But when he issued a mob-style threat over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue that Republicans didn’t like—“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”—he made the Trump administration’s appetite for censorship unignorable.

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Most of the administration’s efforts to manipulate the media up to that point had retained at least a patina of deniability. Here, by contrast, was an uncomplicated threat of government interference—one that prompted Disney, ABC’s parent company, to fall in line by suspending Kimmel’s show. This was too much even for some of the Trump administration’s biggest cheerleaders; Senator Ted Cruz called Carr’s comments “dangerous as hell.” After a few days of public outcry, Kimmel was back on the air.

The whole episode was an unusual misstep by a skilled Washington operator. The hallmark of Carr’s tenure as chair of the Federal Communications Commission has been the exploitation of bureaucratic procedure to consolidate ownership of communications infrastructure in Trump-friendly hands, while keeping those actions out of both the court of public opinion and the literal courts. To liberals, this is an obvious attempt to rig the media. To conservatives, however, it is a long-overdue unrigging. Why should the national networks devote airtime every night to liberal comedians who incessantly mock Republicans? “For those that benefited from a two-tier system of justice, today’s even handed treatment feels like discrimination,” Carr posted on X in March, paraphrasing the economist Thomas Sowell. The left, in other words, got so used to controlling the media that it doesn’t even notice the bias.

“The public airwaves belong to the public, and yet for the past 40 or 50 years, they have been used and abused as a propaganda tool for one party’s political agenda,” Daniel Suhr, the president of the Center for American Rights, a conservative litigation nonprofit, told me. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re watching NBC, ABC, CBS, or PBS; you’re going to get the same left-wing viewpoints permeating both the news and the entertainment shows.”

Conservatives have been complaining about media bias for decades, but Republican officials were long averse to interfering with the decisions of private companies. Then came the second Trump administration, and its willingness to wage cultural warfare in more intrusive ways. Carr’s role in that effort is not to tell networks what to air and whom to fire. It’s to get to the point where he doesn’t have to.

[Adam Serwer: The Constitution protects Jimmy Kimmel’s mistake]

Carr is bald, with a trim white beard and rimless glasses, which makes him look older than his 46 years. A D.C. lifer, he was born in the capital, went to college at Georgetown, and got his law degree at Catholic University. He joined the staff of the FCC in 2012, while in his early 30s, and never left. In 2017, President Donald Trump nominated him to serve as one of the five commissioners. (Carr did not respond to multiple interview requests, and the FCC press office did not reply to a request for comment.)

During this period, Carr was not considered particularly ideological. “He and I started at the FCC around the same time, and he was pretty much a typical Republican staffer,” Gigi Sohn, a Democrat who was nominated but not confirmed for a seat on the commission during the Biden administration, told me. Colleagues from both parties found him smart, funny, and pleasant to work with. “I’ve always had an excellent relationship with Brendan, and I always respected his intelligence,” Tom Wheeler, who chaired the agency under Barack Obama, told me. “He used to call me up after I left office: ‘Let’s go get lunch.’”

The current version of Carr—outspoken, politically ambitious, highly partisan—seems to have emerged in 2020. That May, Trump directed the FCC to “clarify” the meaning of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that shields internet platforms from liability over their content-moderation policies. Republican dogma held that the major tech platforms were censoring conservatives, but the party remained divided over whether the government should get involved. “We should all reject demands, in the name of the First Amendment, for private actors to curate or publish speech in a certain way,” said Mike O’Rielly, one of the other Republican commissioners, in public remarks that summer. A few days later, the White House pulled his nomination for another term on the commission. (O’Rielly did not respond to interview requests.)

Carr took a different tack. In op-eds and at conferences, on cable news and podcasts, he advocated for Trump’s idea, even though most legal experts agreed that the FCC had no authority to reinterpret Section 230. He also began “embracing a flavor of distinctly Trumpian rhetoric,” as Politico put it in June 2020, “that could help him leapfrog his way to the chairmanship of the five-member regulatory agency.” Carr earned attention and retweets from the president by taking rhetorical shots at a range of real and perceived Trump foes, including the World Health Organization (“beclowned”), Adam Schiff (running a “secret and partisan surveillance machine”), and the “far left” in general (going “from hoax to hoax to hoax to explain the loss at the ballot box”).

“He obviously has a natural talent for messaging and doing the press, which has surprised a lot of people who knew him way back when he was in the doldrums of the FCC,” Evan Swarztrauber, a telecom-policy consultant who worked as an adviser to Carr during the first Trump administration, told me.

During the Biden administration, while in the commission’s minority, Carr contributed a chapter to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation manifesto that has served as a blueprint for much of the second Trump administration. Compared with other parts of the document, Carr’s contribution isn’t particularly radical. It focuses mostly on countering the threat of Chinese technological espionage and reining in Big Tech by reforming Section 230. (As chair, Carr has pursued the first part of that agenda energetically; the preemptive capitulation of the princes of Big Tech rendered the second part unnecessary.) The chapter contained almost no mention of what has turned out to be the most important power he would actually wield.

Media regulation in the United States has historically been a hands-off affair. For the most part, the First Amendment lets the FCC police “obscenity, indecency and profanity,” and little else. Until recently, if the agency made headlines, it was probably because something naughty, such as Janet Jackson’s exposed right breast, had made its way onto the airwaves.

The FCC normally focuses more on the infrastructure of communications. Its docket is stuffed with such vital but dry topics as 5G coverage and rural broadband. Even the controversy over “net neutrality,” which inflamed internet-policy nerds for years, turns on the achingly technical question of whether ISPs are properly classified as “information services” or “telecommunications services” under federal law. The FCC does not print money, bring lawsuits, or command armed agents. A pamphlet published by the agency in 2010 analyzes some of the “most critical” decisions in its history. These include “spectrum allocations and color standards for over-the-air television in 1945 and 1952,” “authorizing customers in 1968 to attach equipment to their telephone lines,” and “adopting technical standards for high-definition and digital television in 1996 and 1997.”

Beneath the mountains of tedium, however, lies real power. Whoever controls communications infrastructure can shape the informational environment. Using that power to advance political objectives requires someone with both technocratic know-how and the ambition to use it. According to friends and detractors alike, Carr is that person. “He knows the law very well, and he knows how to get results under the law without running afoul of it,” Swarztrauber told me.

The FCC’s authority arises from its control of a scarce public good. Because wireless spectrum is a finite resource (only one radio station can occupy a given frequency in a given location, for example), the federal government allocates and regulates its use: not just for radio but also for broadcast television, satellites, and cellphones. “Spectrum is the most valuable asset that the government owns in the information economy, period, end of story,” Blair Levin, a former FCC attorney who oversaw the Obama administration’s National Broadband Plan, told me.

Recipients of FCC broadcast licenses are required by law to operate in “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Only once, however, has the FCC revoked a license on these grounds, in a court-ordered 1969 decision concerning a southern TV station that refused to air news about the civil-rights movement. More recently, in 2018, a group of Democratic senators urged the agency to investigate Sinclair, then the country’s biggest TV-station owner. The company had ordered dozens of local-news anchors to read identical scripts repeating Trump talking points about media bias and “fake stories.” In a letter, the senators warned that Sinclair might be “deliberately distorting news by staging, slanting, or falsifying information,” putting its licenses at risk. But the letter was a transparent messaging exercise. Ajit Pai, the agency’s Republican chair, was never going to revoke Sinclair’s licenses. Neither did his successor, the Joe Biden appointee Jessica Rosenworcel.

[James Surowiecki: Nexstar and Sinclair lost their game of chicken]

Carr, by contrast, has made no secret of his desire to make aggressive use of the public-interest standard. “Broadcast licenses are not sacred cows,” he declared on X in November 2024. One of his first acts as chair was to reopen a previously dismissed complaint accusing CBS News of “news distortion” over its editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, along with complaints against ABC and NBC. These proceedings were unlikely to go anywhere. Broadcast licenses belong to individual stations, not the big networks that produce the programming. Even if the FCC tried to revoke a station’s license over claims of partisan bias, that move would likely be overturned in court.

But Carr has another method available with the advantage of being legally unreviewable. The FCC must approve any merger that involves the transfer of broadcast licenses. If the agency were to vote to block a merger for ideological reasons, the companies involved could sue—perhaps on First Amendment grounds, perhaps on the grounds that the agency’s reasoning violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which forbids “arbitrary” and “capricious” policy making. But if the merger never comes up for a vote, there’s nothing to challenge. And whether that happens is the chair’s call.

“Being chairman of the FCC is one of the best jobs in Washington because you run the agency,” Wheeler told me. “There are four other commissioners, but those commissioners never get a chance to vote on something that the chairman hasn’t already decided they should put on the agenda.”

When Carr reopened the CBS News complaint, the network’s parent company, Paramount, was in the process of being bought by Skydance Media, controlled by David Ellison, the son of the billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison. The informal 180-day window for the FCC to approve the license transfers came and went without Carr putting the deal on the agenda. Finally, on July 1, CBS News agreed to pay $16 million to Trump’s presidential-library fund to settle his personal lawsuit over the 60 Minutes interview. Trump insisted that this had nothing to do with the merger, but a few weeks later, the acquisition was approved. Carr denied having slow-walked the deal, but proudly announced that the network’s new owner had been required to commit to various ideology-focused reforms, such as appointing an ombudsman to watch out for bias. “One thing that CBS has agreed to do as part of this transaction is to bring more fact-based, objective, unbiased coverage to their newsrooms,” Carr told PBS. Ellison has since hired Bari Weiss, the founder of the conservative-leaning publication The Free Press, to head CBS News.

Democrats who knew Carr from his early days at the FCC were appalled. “What’s going on here is using the power of a so-called independent agency to make the president happy and resolve his grievances,” Gigi Sohn said. “And that’s absolutely not what the agency is supposed to be about.” Conservative activists, however, were thrilled. “I think what Chairman Carr accomplished through the Paramount proceeding is a great example of how we move toward more balance, more ideological diversity, and in doing so really serve more customers,” Daniel Suhr, whose organization filed the news-distortion complaint, told me.

The key point is that if Carr indeed delayed a vote on the merger until CBS News made its concessions, his decision could not be challenged in court. “He has perfected a technique where avoiding the process of the Administrative Procedure Act gives him unappealable power,” Wheeler said. “It’s a hell of a technique.”

If the Skydance-Paramount merger doesn’t strike you as sufficiently technical and bureaucratic, consider the case of Charlie Ergen and Elon Musk. In 2019, as part of a merger approval, the government required Sprint to sell some of its wireless-spectrum licenses to Ergen’s satellite-TV company, Dish Network. Dish, which Ergen has since merged into a company called EchoStar, would have until 2025 to build out a new national cell network, or it could be forced to forfeit the valuable spectrum it had purchased.

In 2024, the Biden FCC granted the company an extension. But Musk coveted some of the spectrum that EchoStar controlled—specifically, on the 2-gigahertz band, which is ideal for “direct-to-cell” satellite service. In April, his company SpaceX sent a letter to the FCC accusing EchoStar of not meeting its build-out obligations and urging the agency to take action.

One month later, Carr sent Ergen a letter suggesting that the FCC might overturn the extension that his company had already received. Some of the letter’s key passages consisted of impenetrable jargon. “I have also asked agency staff to issue a public notice seeking comment on the scope and scale of MSS utilization in the 2 GHz band that is currently licensed to EchoStar or its affiliates,” Carr wrote. But the message was clear. “The FCC threatens such severe sanctions that they put EchoStar’s financial viability in question and threaten to kill the company,” Nathan Simington, a fellow Republican who had recently resigned his seat on the commission, wrote in an op-ed criticizing the investigation.

Ergen tried to meet with Carr, to no avail. Finally, Chris Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax—grateful that Dish had kept his right-wing network on the air when other broadcasters had not—brokered a White House meeting with Trump, according to the New York Post. The president arranged a deal: EchoStar would sell some of its spectrum to AT&T for $23 billion, and some to SpaceX for $17 billion. Trump’s largest campaign contributor got the spectrum he craved, and Ergen got an enormous payout.

Carr hailed the agreement as “a potential game changer for the American consumer.” But an editorial by the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board decried the backroom deal, arguing that the administration’s “rampant regulatory intervention in markets on behalf of businesses that do their bidding is giving Democrats the evidence to build a case that Republicans are the new kings of crony capitalism.”

If Carr had tried to formally order Ergen to give up the spectrum, Ergen might have successfully sued. But that would have taken years, by which time he would have long gone bankrupt. Instead, the deal was brokered behind closed doors, with no agency vote for anyone to challenge. “Brendan Carr is smart,” Sohn said. “He’s been at the FCC since 2012, so he knows how these things work. None of these things are reviewable.”

Through September, Carr’s tenure was marked by an unflashy use of the levers of bureaucratic power to deliver wins for Trump and his allies. Then came l’affaire Kimmel. A few days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Kimmel falsely implied that the killer was a Trump supporter: “We hit some new lows over the weekend,” he said in his opening monologue, “with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

A right-wing campaign arose to get Kimmel taken off the air. Two days after the offending monologue, Carr, in an interview with the right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, made his famous “the easy way or the hard way” comment. This was widely interpreted as a threat directed at ABC, which airs Jimmy Kimmel Live, and the broadcast affiliates around the country that carry it. Later that day, Nexstar and Sinclair, which together operate about a quarter of the country’s ABC affiliates, announced that they would replace Kimmel with other programming. (Nexstar is considered conservative-leaning, though less aggressively so than Sinclair.) Soon thereafter, ABC announced that Kimmel was suspended indefinitely. Carr gloated by sharing celebratory GIFs on X. In a CNBC interview the day after the suspension, he evaded questions about whether he was responsible for taking Kimmel off the air while suggesting that he would have been justified for doing so. “Broadcast is different” from online speech, he explained. “They’ve got a license, and they’re free to go on the internet and do whatever they want. But if they want to keep access to those valuable airwaves, I’ve been clear: We’re reinvigorating the FCC’s enforcement of public interest.”

[Paul Farhi: Brendan Carr’s half-empty threat]

Carr might have underestimated how much backlash the move would generate. Less than a week after suspending him, Disney abruptly put Kimmel back on the air. As public opinion turned, Carr and his allies offered a mix of defenses: Kimmel had in fact been suspended because of poor ratings; Democrats had done worse, anyway, such as with the 2018 letter accusing Sinclair of news distortion; how could the suspension have been censorship if Kimmel was back on the air a few days later? These did not quell the outrage. Carr seemed to dial back his media appearances. His X inbox, which had been open to DMs from anyone, went private. He kept a low profile as, inevitably, the public’s attention moved on.

Carr has not gone away, however. (Indeed, just last week, he reposted a Truth Social post in which Trump called for NBC to fire the late-night host Seth Meyers.) If anything, the episode only proved his point that the national networks have too much leverage over local broadcast affiliates. Sinclair and Nexstar had wanted to extend the Kimmel boycott, but they couldn’t. ABC, with its control of must-have properties such as Monday Night Football, held the advantage.

Shifting that balance of power seems to be Carr’s next big project. At the time of the Kimmel controversy, it was widely observed that Nexstar was seeking FCC approval to acquire Tegna, another large chain of affiliates, for $6.2 billion. This fact actually understates the FCC’s leverage. Under federal law, no company can own TV stations that reach more than 39 percent of American households. The Nexstar merger would take the combined company all the way to 80 percent. “The deal that Tegna and Nexstar signed is an illegal transaction,” Wheeler told me. “Yet they still went ahead and did the deal, because Carr has been indicating that he will change that rule.” As of late October, Carr said he hadn’t decided whether to raise the ownership limit. But Tegna and Nexstar clearly believe they have good reason to think the change will go through.

Carr has also long been suspicious of local ownership limits. Currently, one company can own up to two stations within a given market. On September 30, the FCC announced the first step of the process to amend those rules. (Both changes will require commission votes and thus are sure to be challenged in court. The 39 percent national cap is written into statute; whether the FCC can change it without an act of Congress is disputed.)

Carr has a perfectly nonpartisan rationale for these moves. He argues that allowing more mergers will make broadcasters more efficient and resilient, giving them more bargaining power against the ABCs of the world. “The agenda that I’m trying to run at the FCC is to empower those actual local television stations to serve the public interest,” he told CNBC in May. “Because what we’ve seen is, you’ve got national news media—ABC, NBC, CBS—and they’re exercising more and more control over those local TV stations. I don’t think that’s a good thing for the country, so we’re trying to reverse that.” According to Swarztrauber, Carr’s professed concern for local broadcasters is sincere. “I was working for him in 2018, and he believed that broadcasting was going to go the way of the newspaper if the FCC didn’t deregulate it,” he told me. “He was saying that in 2018.”

Still, allowing more mergers will, by definition, concentrate the “local” TV market even more heavily in the hands of a few national companies—companies that just so happen to have a rightward slant. They will know whom to thank for their good fortune. In the age of cable, social media, and streaming, broadcast TV is of course far less consequential than it once was. But even as it declines, it still commands a significant audience, especially among older Americans. As Carr himself is very fond of pointing out, local news enjoys much higher levels of trust than the rest of the media.

And broadcast TV is just one part of a multipronged effort. Skydance, fresh off of absorbing Paramount, is the favorite to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in a mega-deal that would give the Ellison dynasty control over dozens of cable networks, including CNN. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and Larry Ellison’s Oracle are among the investors expected to have control over the American version of TikTok; Oracle would oversee the algorithm that recommends videos to users. (The final details of the pending Trump-brokered deal with China remain hazy.)

Developments such as these, along with Silicon Valley’s rightward shift and the ideological concessions in higher education, bring the MAGA movement closer to realizing a long-held dream: using state power to achieve cultural power. Many Republicans believe that media bias has given Democrats an unfair political advantage, and that once they correct that imbalance, they will reap electoral rewards.

They might be right about that. If you can shape what people see and hear, you can influence their beliefs. But the relationship between culture and politics is not always so straightforward. Liberal hegemony within media, education, and entertainment might very well be the reason the Democratic Party finds itself so out of touch with, and disliked by, broad segments of the American public. Carr and his allies might someday discover that being the establishment is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Something Feels Different About the Economy

2025-11-14T07:00:00-05:00

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Numbers are too big now. Just before Halloween, Nvidia made headlines for becoming the first $5 trillion company in history. A week later, Tesla’s shareholders approved a pay package for Elon Musk that could be worth about $1 trillion in a decade. At a certain point, figures this large become uncomfortably meaningless. A million dollars is a lot of money. A billion dollars is a heck of a lot—so much that if you had it, you’d be a billionaire. Now try to imagine how rich you would be if you were pulling in $8 billion every month for the next 10 years, as Musk is effectively about to do. It’s impossible. “The numbers are so big, they are hard to comprehend,” Jeff Sommer recently wrote in The New York Times. And he’s the paper’s finance columnist.

Sommer was referring to the stock market, which has been on an outrageous tear, with the gains concentrated among a tiny number of unfathomably valuable companies. The S&P 500 has doubled since October 2022, which is impressive on its own, but the combined market cap of the Magnificent Seven—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—has more than quadrupled. These firms are all heavily invested in generative AI, a technology based on training computers to make connections among quantities of data that are completely beyond human understanding. Large numbers are generating large numbers.

Records are being broken before they’ve had time to sink in. Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation last month surpassed the first-ever $4 trillion valuation, which was also achieved by Nvidia, in July. The planet didn’t even have a single trillion-dollar company until Apple hit that milestone in 2018. This was considered a big deal at the time. Now the equivalent of the most valuable corporation in history circa 2018 can be generated in three months.

[Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel: Here’s how the AI crash happens]

These wild numbers make all other sums sound trivial, even when they aren’t. On Tuesday, the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank disclosed that it had sold its entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia to fund other investments. That was important enough to make news basically everywhere. But we’re talking about one one-thousandth of Nvidia’s market cap here. Is $5.8 billion a lot, or is it lunch money?

As a species, we aren’t ready for this. People basically can’t tell the difference between any number that ends in -illion, and the more zeros you add, the worse things get. One experiment at the University of Richmond asked a group of students and graduates to plot numbers on a line. Half of them thought it made sense to evenly space 1,000, 1 million, and 1 billion. Another study asked people to rate the effectiveness of proposed COVID-relief packages. Responses differed sharply when the options were presented in per-capita amounts (giving everyone $1,200 was deemed much less effective than $24,000) but hardly at all when they were presented as total amounts ($100 billion versus $2 trillion), even though the ratio was the same in each case.

As the numbers grow, our understanding of reality dims. This is true even for some of our most influential thinkers. On Monday, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States would forfeit $2 trillion in revenue should the Supreme Court strike down his tariffs. The very next day, the president claimed that the number was $3 trillion. Even the smaller number would, if true, have been enough to completely wipe out the federal deficit. In fact, the U.S. has raised only about $200 billion in customs duties in the past fiscal year. The total U.S. debt, meanwhile, has risen to $38 trillion, a number so self-evidently absurd that the mind resists dwelling on it. It must be funny money. If it weren’t, it could never have gotten so big.

[Rogé Karma: The debt is about to matter again]

The prospects for democratic self-governance are not good. Raising and spending money is one of the most fundamental functions of government. If neither citizens nor their leaders can wrap their heads around these numbers, how will anyone make informed decisions about how the country is run? A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

Nor can our age of hyper-numbers be easily dismissed as the familiar product of inflation. Everyone grows up hearing about how cheap things were when our parents were kids—how you could buy a new Chrysler back then for the cost of a mattress today. Then you get older and have the same experience, puzzling over how movie tickets could possibly cost $16. But economic growth is generally understood to be exponential. The nature of exponential change is that it looks just like non-exponential change, right up until it doesn’t. Economists model growth as a constant percent, such as 3 percent annually. This sounds innocuous but leads to absolute numbers that elude our comprehension. If you plot out the value of an economy that grows by just a few percentage points a year, and you set a long-enough time frame, your chart will look like a plateau that suddenly explodes into a vertical line.

That is exactly what linear graphs of the U.S. stock market look like right now, which suggests that we have achieved escape velocity and entered the vertical part of the curve. (The geniuses who put historical stock-market graphs together tend to conceal this fact by using a logarithmic scale, which makes big jumps look much smaller.) The bigger the numbers get, the faster they grow in absolute terms. In just a few years, a $5 trillion valuation might sound as quaint as a $2,000 two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn does today. The recent stock-market surge has brought about this moment sooner than it otherwise would have arrived, and a bursting bubble could defer it, but not forever. Nvidia could lose half of its value, and it would still be worth $2.5 trillion.

One solution, childish in its simplicity, is for the government to unilaterally deflate the currency by decreeing that all dollar figures will henceforth be reduced by an order of magnitude—that is, they will drop a zero—like a stock split on the dollar. This would render Nvidia a mere $500 billion company and buy us all some time to absorb that fact. This technique is known as redenomination. It has been used to reduce nominal prices in countries experiencing out-of-control inflation, but to my knowledge, it has never been deployed to ease the cognitive burden of a stock market that is performing too well. Alas, like all perfect ideas, this will never happen. Instead, the numbers will keep growing, faster and faster, and we will remain strapped against our will to this exponential rocket, hurtling into the Milky Way, which contains only about 400 billion stars, tops. But who’s counting?

What Chris Murphy Learned From the New Right

2025-06-24T06:00:00-04:00

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.

The unincorporated town of Saxapahaw, North Carolina, is a 300-mile drive from Washington, D.C. It’s about twice as far from Connecticut, the state that Chris Murphy represents in the United States Senate. So what was he doing hosting a town hall there, of all places, one evening this past April? One answer is that he was trolling Saxapahaw’s congressional representative, who had recently advised Republican colleagues to stop doing town-hall events. Another is that Saxapahaw is somewhere, and these days, Murphy seems to be everywhere.

Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Murphy has emerged as one of the most vocally freaked-out Democrats in Washington. He has become a fixture of cable news and highbrow politics podcasts, as well as a prolific poster of five-alarm-fire social-media content. (His biggest hit so far is a March video of a Senate speech titled “Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is on Its Way to Being the Most Corrupt in U.S. History,” which has been viewed more than 5 million times on YouTube.) He recently launched a political action committee, the American Mobilization PAC, that focuses on funding grassroots opposition to Trump.

This behavior is consistent with a politician attempting to raise his profile ahead of a run for higher office, a theory that Murphy dismisses. (The dismissal is itself consistent with the theory.) It also befits a politician who genuinely believes that Trump poses an immediate threat to the survival of American democracy, a premise that Murphy very much endorses.

“You cannot be guaranteed today that there’s a free and fair election in 2026,” Murphy told me before going onstage at the Haw River Ballroom, where about 1,000 local voters, mostly silver-haired, had packed the venue to hear him speak. It was the first of several conversations I would have with him about how he thinks the Democratic Party should respond to the second Trump term. Just that morning, the president had directed the Department of Justice and Department of Treasury to investigate ActBlue, the primary Democratic Party fundraising platform, for supposedly facilitating election fraud. This, Murphy told me, was “a crystal-clear signal that their agenda is nothing less than the destruction of the opposition.” In light of those threats, he said, he felt a moral responsibility to rally public opposition. “I think we are getting close to the point where we are going to have to see hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets, not tens of thousands of people.”

To help spur that mass movement, Murphy, who until recently was best known for his gun-control advocacy, is making a Bernie Sanders–style argument about money and power. Onstage, he told the crowd that Trump’s antidemocratic actions were designed to neutralize resistance to a pro-billionaire economic agenda. “If you are engaged in something as unpopular as the most massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class,” he declared, “the only way you can get away with that is by destroying the means of accountability.”

This raises another question: Why is a standard-issue Northeast progressive who parts his hair so neatly and has worked in politics his entire life suddenly talking like a would-be class warrior? Over the past three years, Murphy has been on an intellectual journey, influenced as much by the Trumpist right as by the Sanders left. He has come to think that the Democratic Party can regain working-class support only by calling out the powerful corporate villains who he believes are to blame for the country’s problems.

[Read: Is this how Democrats win back the working class?]

Now, even as he is seeking to muster opposition to Trump, he’s trying to persuade fellow Democrats to follow him down the populist path. This might not be easy. After President Joe Biden’s experiment with new economic ideas ended in an electoral rout, the party’s free-market wing has been feeling vindicated and ready for some infighting. Meanwhile, Murphy, whom National Review recently called the “Most Boring Politician in America,” is not an obvious vessel for a rousing appeal to the working class.

Murphy knows that the party brand—out of touch, too focused on social issues, too judgmental—is desperately in need of a reboot. If he is the walking embodiment of Generic Democrat, perhaps that makes him the guy for the job.

Democratic Party politics sometimes feel like a struggle between an old guard and an upstart youth movement. Murphy somehow belongs to both camps. He has held elected office since the Clinton administration, but at 51, he’s still the fifth-youngest Democrat in the Senate.

He was just 25 when he won his first election, to the Connecticut state legislature, and 33 when he successfully ran to represent Connecticut’s Fifth Congressional District. That district includes Newtown, where, on December 14, 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered six adults and 20 children. Murphy, whose two sons were 1 and 4 at the time, was with some of the Sandy Hook parents when they learned their kids had been killed.

By that point, he was already on his way to the Senate. He had been elected five weeks earlier, defeating Linda McMahon, the future education secretary. Murphy, who was 39 when he took office, would focus for the next decade on passing gun-control legislation.

As the junior senator from Connecticut, Murphy rarely drew national attention. One exception came after the 2022 schoolhouse massacre in Uvalde, Texas. “What are we doing? What are we doing?” Murphy demanded of his colleagues in an emotional speech on the Senate floor. “Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate—why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority—if your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing?”

Murphy went on to partner with Senate colleagues on bipartisan gun-control legislation that passed the following month with 15 Republican votes. The law was modest, but it was the first significant federal gun legislation since 1994.

Even as Murphy was building toward his first concrete achievement on a signature issue, he was undergoing a kind of reinvention from gun-control advocate to economic populist. In October 2022, he published an essay in this magazine in which he argued that decades of free-market economic policy, embraced by both parties, had led to a host of ills: the hollowing-out of communities, a rise in loneliness, a sense of lost control and meaning. The Trump movement, he wrote, fed off these frustrations. It was the first of several articles he would publish on the theme.

Murphy’s interest in these ideas seemed to come out of nowhere. Other politicians and commentators had been making similar arguments for years, but Murphy was never part of that crew. How had the gun-control guy suddenly become the economic-populism guy?

I recently put that question to him during an interview in his Senate office. Murphy still looks young for a senator, but he has aged out of the boy-wonder era. His face, once doughy, has grown narrow and lined. He recently began sporting a scruffy beard, perhaps in a bid for a more working-dude aesthetic (a suggestion he denied with a laugh). “I watched the economy get better according to all of the metrics we think measure economic health,” he told me. “And then I listened to the people I represent, and people all across the country, tell me how shitty the economy was. And that seemed to be a real problem in general, but for Democrats specifically, because at the time, we were running on a growing economy and low unemployment, and we thought we were going to get credit for that if we just kept telling people that the economy was good.”

I found this answer unsatisfying. Every Democrat discovered, at some point, that voters were unhappy with the Biden economy. Most did not make the turn that Murphy did. A few weeks later, in a follow-up interview, I asked the question more pointedly.

“Probably the most important thing that happened to me was a decision in the summer of 2022 to go down a deep new-right rabbit hole,” he told me. Murphy started with Why Liberalism Failed, by the Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen. In the book, Deneen argues that liberalism, with its emphasis on individualism and free markets, has sown the seeds of its own demise by undermining traditional social structures and neglecting deeper sources of human flourishing.

“I dog-eared and highlighted the crap out of that book,” Murphy said. “While I don’t go to all the places Deneen goes, it opened my eyes as to how the market fundamentalism that had creeped into the Democratic Party had really corrupted the country’s soul.”

“But then I went a step further,” Murphy continued, “and started spending time listening to the Red Scare, and reading Curtis Yarvin, and going through the stuff that the Claremont Institute was producing.” He came to feel that the new right—skeptical of free-market libertarianism and eager to use state power to impose its values on American institutions, including Big Business—was asking the right questions, even if its answers were alarming. “What I was hearing and what I was reading was a conservative movement that was actually spending real time trying to understand the spiritual crisis that the country was in,” Murphy said. “Listen: Blake Masters is a creepy weirdo, but a lot of the stuff he was getting into in 2022—about the emptiness of American life when all that matters is how much you buy and how good a consumer you are—really, it spoke to me.”

[Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism]

Where Deneen critiqued liberalism as such, Murphy, like others on the left, saw the culprit as neoliberalism, the philosophy that favors private-sector solutions and defines good policy largely in terms of total economic growth. Neoliberal Democrats, according to their critics, had placed too much faith in free markets, relied too heavily on welfare programs to compensate the economy’s have-nots, and overlooked the political perils of concentrated wealth. The Biden administration thus sought to break from neoliberal ideas in key ways: reviving tough antitrust enforcement and consumer protection, strongly supporting labor unions, and directing huge sums of public money into domestic manufacturing. In his Atlantic essay, Murphy argued that this agenda provided Democrats a way to defeat Trump by selling “a new, winning message of actionable economic nationalism.”

This is not quite what happened.

Opinions differ on why the 2024 presidential election went so wrong for Democrats. One school of thought holds that Biden had been a fool to reject neoliberalism in the first place. “Policymakers should never again ignore the basics in pursuit of fanciful heterodox solutions,” Jason Furman, an influential centrist Democratic economist, wrote in a postelection essay titled “The Post-Neoliberal Delusion.”

The other possibility is that the theory was sound, but the implementation wasn’t. Perhaps voters would have rewarded the Biden administration if they hadn’t been so upset about inflation—a post-pandemic phenomenon that triggered anti-incumbent backlash in democracies around the world and that the administration was slow to recognize as an emergency. Or perhaps what sank Democrats was the fact that, thanks to the slowly turning gears of government, most of Biden’s concrete achievements—new infrastructure, reduced drug prices, and so on—had not materialized by the end of his term. (We can set aside the obvious problem of having a president so ravaged by age that he had to abandon his reelection campaign. Opinions don’t really differ about that.)

Murphy believes that the decisive factor was communication: The administration failed to sell its own record. “Nobody knew what Lina Khan was doing,” he told me, referring to the Biden-appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission whose aggressive agenda drew the enmity of much of corporate America (and for whom I briefly worked before joining The Atlantic). “Nobody understood that the president actually was in the process of breaking up concentrated corporate power.”

[David A. Graham: Independent agencies never stood a chance under Trump]

As the nominee, Kamala Harris seemed unwilling to lean into a populist economic message. Two moments crystallized the lost opportunity for Murphy: One was when rumors swirled that Harris intended, as president, to reward her Silicon Valley supporters by firing Khan—rumors that Harris did not dispel. Another was when Harris proposed a ban on supermarket price gouging as a way to address voter anger over food costs. That plan was mocked by many economists and pundits, including liberal ones, who insisted that capping the prices businesses can charge for essential goods would lead to Soviet-style shortages. The campaign subsequently downplayed the proposal.

Ali Mortell, the director of research at Blue Rose Research, a leading Democratic-strategy firm, told me that a campaign ad in which Harris promised to “crack down on landlords who are charging too much” and “lower your food and grocery bills by going after price gougers” was in the top 1 percent of effectiveness among the many thousands of ads her firm has tested. But for whatever reason, the ad “was not necessarily what received the most airtime,” Mortell said. An analysis published by Jacobin found that Harris mentioned economically populist themes and policies less and less as the campaign went along. When asked during her first and only 2024 presidential debate whether Americans were better off financially than they had been four years earlier, Harris offered a stultifyingly dry sales pitch for what she called her “opportunity economy,” which seemed to consist exclusively of tax cuts.

In Murphy’s diagnosis, Democratic politicians must adopt a more confrontational style in which “you tell people who’s screwing them”—which is to say, giant corporations that wield their power to raise prices, nickel-and-dime consumers, and corrupt the government (and, in the case of tech companies, to addict our children to harmful social-media feeds). For Harris, that would have meant addressing grocery inflation by talking about collusion among monopolistic food companies. Instead, the administration “chose to just take it on the chin, over and over again, on inflation,” Murphy said. I asked why he thought that was. He was silent for a moment before saying, in an almost pained whisper, “I don’t know.”

If pugilistic economic populism is such effective politics, shouldn’t Bernie Sanders be president right now? Maybe his problem was the S-word. Maybe a type of populism that aimed at fixing capitalism, rather than replacing it with socialism, would perform better—except that’s what Elizabeth Warren tried in 2020. For her troubles, she got to split a New York Times endorsement with Amy Klobuchar and finished behind Sanders in the primary.

But a lot of other things were going on back then. Social-justice issues dominated Democratic politics. Warren and Sanders were among the 2020 primary candidates who declared their support for unpopular left-wing positions such as decriminalizing border crossings, banning fracking, and abolishing private health insurance. To this day, the public overwhelmingly perceives the Democratic Party as caring more about progressive social causes than economic ones.

Murphy puts forward a version of an argument that has been advanced by the likes of Steve Bannon and J. D. Vance: that millions of working-class Americans of all ethnicities are to the left of the GOP on economics and to the right of Democrats on social issues, and whichever party can occupy that sweet spot will reap major benefits. “The race is really a matter of whether Republicans become more genuinely economically populist before Democrats open up their tent and accept in folks who aren’t with us on every single issue, from abortion to climate to guns,” he said. This approach cuts against both the economic self-interest and the cultural preferences of much of the Democratic donor base. But it seems to have worked for some swing-district Democrats, including Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Representative Pat Ryan of New York, social moderates who emphasized anti-corporate themes and ran far ahead of Harris in their congressional districts last year.

[Read: Can you really fight populism with populism?]

The political writer Matthew Yglesias has accused Murphy of “dog whistle moderation” for implying that Democrats are too “woke” without actually saying anything anti-woke. It’s true that Murphy does not offer any particular culture-war takes that defy progressive orthodoxy, perhaps because his record as a blue-state liberal makes this improbable. His critique is more about tone and emphasis.

“It’s not just about that specific message of attacking corporate power,” he said. “It is also about having the discipline to spend 80 percent of your time on that message.” This is hard for Democratic politicians, who are much more comfortable talking about social issues. “Climate, guns, choice, gay rights, voting rights: Every single one of those issues is existential for an important community. But I think right now, if you aren’t driving the vast majority of your narrative around the way in which the economy is going to become corrupted to enrich the elites, then you aren’t going to be able to capture this potential realignment of the American electorate that’s up for grabs.”

“And listen—I own part of that responsibility,” he added. “I spent a lot of time trying to convince my party to spend more and more time talking about guns.”

In my conversations with him, I got the sense that Murphy was better at making the case for populism than at actually doing populism. Perhaps because he came to it relatively recently, he seems at times to still be trying on the ideas. Unlike Sanders or Warren, he doesn’t slip naturally into detailed, outraged explanations of how the economy has gone wrong. Even in his essays, he tends to hover at the level of abstract ideas.

And Murphy’s economic argument, given its overlap with the intellectual movement surrounding Trump, exists in some tension with his effort to whip up opposition to the real-life Trump agenda. Murphy recognizes this dynamic. “I struggle with the question of how much time to be explaining that tariffs aren’t always bad,” he said. “That seems like wasted energy right now, because the way he’s doing them is definitely bad.” To the wing of the party that thinks Bidenomics was a catastrophic blunder, agonizing over whether Trump has a point on the downsides of free trade is political insanity. Yglesias, for example, argues that Murphy’s embrace of “pseudoeconomics” is the exact wrong way to broaden the Democratic tent. Better to celebrate cheap goods as the key to prosperity and return to the more corporate-friendly, growth-oriented approach of the Clinton and Obama eras.

Murphy is trying to prevent his colleagues from giving in to that temptation. But he faces skepticism from a party that is still uncomfortable with class-conscious politics. “There has always been a resistance to what very rich people call the demonization of wealth,” he said. “Part of the pushback is the idea that it’s a mistake to talk about the dangers of concentrated wealth, because it feels like that’s an attack on wealth, and people want to be wealthy. I think that’s a legitimate criticism, but I think we have to explain that the current structure of power in this country is a barrier to people becoming wealthy. I’d like to have fewer billionaires and a lot more millionaires.”

Recently, Murphy made his case at a policy retreat for Democratic senators. I asked how it went over.

He responded, “I wouldn’t say that I’m winning.”

Just Don’t Call Her Unqualified

2025-05-09T16:23:00-04:00

Donald Trump has been widely ridiculed for staffing his administration with unqualified partisan hacks recruited from Fox News. This is not quite fair. Yesterday, Trump named Jeanine Pirro as the new interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. Pirro is a partisan hack recruited from Fox News, but she’s a qualified one.

Millions of Americans know Pirro as a prolific conservative-television pundit, most recently as a member of Fox News’s afternoon talk show, The Five. Even compared with other right-wing TV personalities, Pirro’s record of unwavering Trump support, including at his most vulnerable moments, is distinctive. She came to his defense in 2016 after the release of the Access Hollywood tapes, declaring, “I have been involved in a million situations with him and his children. He has always been a gentleman.” She has been urging Trump to send the Department of Justice after his supposed enemies, including Hillary Clinton, since 2017. And she promoted Trump’s stolen-election conspiracy theories so vigorously that, in 2021, she was named as a defendant in a multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuit brought by the voting-machine manufacturer Smartmatic.

Before all that, Pirro had a legal career that—at least on paper, and by the feeble standards set by Trump’s other appointments—prepared her for her new job as D.C.’s top prosecutor. After stints as an assistant prosecutor and a state judge, she served from 1994 to 2005 as the elected district attorney of Westchester County, New York, a jurisdiction larger than Washington, D.C. This distinguishes her from Ed Martin, her immediate predecessor in the D.C. role, whose tenure ended this week after Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina shot down Martin’s prospects of getting confirmed on a permanent basis. Unlike Martin—a former defense attorney who had no prosecutorial experience before being appointed—Pirro has tried cases, made charging decisions, and managed an office full of prosecutors.

Whether that is good news or bad news is not a straightforward question. The U.S. attorney for D.C. has a big job. The role combines the functions of a federal prosecutor (that is, enforcing federal law) with those of a district attorney: prosecuting everything from low-level misdemeanors to the most serious felony cases. The office also has the power to bring—or decline to bring—cases against the many elected officials and government appointees who live and work in the nation’s capital. Someone with an actual prosecutorial background might be more effective at using the legal system to persecute Trump’s enemies and protect his allies than a similarly devoted but less experienced lackey.

Perhaps Pirro will throw herself into the nitty-gritty work of fighting crime in a big city that has plenty of crime to fight. (Even there, her record of bigoted comments—which in at least one instance, aimed at Representative Ilhan Omar, led Fox News to “strongly condemn” her remarks—does not bode well for her ability to administer justice in a majority-minority jurisdiction.) Then again, perhaps not. Everything suggests that she was chosen for other reasons. Consider the fate of Jessie Liu, whom Trump appointed to the same job in 2017. A traditional pick, Liu had elite conservative-legal credentials and substantial relevant experience. In 2019, Trump nominated her for a top role at the Treasury Department. But her nomination was dropped, and her government career ended, after activists convinced Trump that Liu was not to be trusted. Among her sins: overseeing the prosecution of Trump’s ally Roger Stone and declining to indict former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, one of the MAGA movement’s most reviled “deep state” villains.

One struggles to imagine Pirro being dismissed for such reasons. The question is less whether she intends to faithfully execute Trump’s will and more whether she’ll be any good at it. Martin’s failure to keep the job stemmed in part from a certain guilelessness: He spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally on January 5, 2021, and has appeared more than 150 times on RT and Sputnik, the Russian propaganda networks. After assuming the interim D.C.-prosecutor role, he proudly described himself as one of “Trump’s lawyers.” And he seemed to genuinely believe that his position entitled him to act as a roving inquisitor on behalf of Trump, sending buffoonishly unconstitutional letters to the likes of Chuck Schumer, Georgetown Law School, and even the American College of Chest Physicians’ medical journal demanding explanations for insufficiently MAGA-compliant exercises of free speech. Any actual cases brought along those lines would have been laughed out of court.

The politicization of law enforcement works best when the parties involved pretend not to be doing it. Pirro will presumably bring a higher degree of legal competence and a good deal more media savvy to the tasks at hand than Martin did. The tasks themselves, however, may prove all too similar.

The ‘Gulf of America’ Is the Wrong Fight to Pick

2025-02-15T06:00:00-05:00

The executive order rechristening the body of water known internationally as the “Gulf of Mexico” is not an easy document to take seriously. Portions of it read like a child’s research paper: “The Gulf is also home to vibrant American fisheries teeming with snapper, shrimp, grouper, stone crab, and other species.” The import of this and other facts is never quite explained. Perhaps the snapper will taste better now that it comes from the “Gulf of America.”

So, no, this is not a serious document. Is it an illegitimate one? The Associated Press, one of the world’s premier news-gathering organizations, appears to think so. Last month, a few days after Donald Trump issued the order, the AP announced that it would continue using the name “Gulf of Mexico.” This week, the Trump administration retaliated by barring the AP’s reporters from covering White House events, placing the agency in an unenviable bind. The AP argues, convincingly, that denying access to a media outlet because of its choice of words violates the First Amendment. To cave now would be to surrender on the constitutional issue. But this is a fight that Trump is clearly happy to have—especially to the extent that it draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the rule of law. And it’s a fight that the AP probably should never have picked in the first place.

A huge share of Trump’s actions over the past four weeks fall somewhere on the spectrum from “legally questionable” to “plainly unconstitutional.” The “Gulf of America” rebrand is not one of them. A federal law passed in 1890 and updated in 1947 empowers the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to “standardize” how the federal government refers to places. The board answers to the secretary of the interior, who answers to the president. That’s the same legal authority under which the Obama administration changed the name “Mt. McKinley” to “Denali.”

[David Frum: The ‘Gulf of America’ is an admission of defeat]

In fact, if Barack Obama hadn’t done that, we probably wouldn’t be talking about the body of water between Mexico and Florida today. In physics, every action generates an equal and opposite reaction. In the Trump era, every progressive action generates an opposite MAGA reaction—but not an equal one. Trump’s executive order on “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” began by changing “Denali” back to “Mt. McKinley.” Then, like an infomercial pitchman—but wait, there’s more—Trump tossed in the “Gulf of America” change, almost as a bonus.

Substantively, the stunt has nothing in common with the Obama administration’s decision on Mt. McKinley. The state of Alaska formally requested the change back in 1975, hardly a time of rampant woke excess, on the basis that “Denali”—the mountain’s historic name, still widely used by Alaskans—was a much better fit than “Mt. McKinley,” after a president who had never set foot in the state. Still, at a certain level of abstraction, Trump’s campaign to rename (and re-rename) mountains, gulfs, and military bases follows the same logic as the progressive version. Renaming a base named for a Confederate general, or a school named for a racist ex-president, is a declaration that values have changed since the days when those names were seen as acceptable. But in a democracy, values are determined by majority rule, and they don’t shift in only one direction. They can shift back.

The more that politicians mess around with place names, the more important it becomes for avowedly apolitical institutions to respond according to consistent principles. This is not so easy to do. In its style-guide update, the AP said that it would continue using “Gulf of Mexico” because the Gulf is an international body of water that has been known by that name for 400 years. “As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world,” it said, “the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.” It would, however, honor the change back to “Mt. McKinley” because, it said, “the area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.” (The Atlantic’s style guide matches the AP’s on this matter.)

But the federal law giving Trump the power to rename Denali applies explicitly “to both domestic and foreign geographic names.” If the AP is going to follow the federal government’s legally valid naming conventions, then it should go along with “Gulf of America” by default, no matter how stupid it sounds. Carving an exception because of the Gulf’s 400-year history is arbitrary—the same sort of appeal to tradition that reactionaries make to prevent progressive-coded changes. Why, indeed, should modern society continue to honor a name imposed by Spanish conquistadors? Nor is it uncommon for different countries to call a shared body of water by different names: What Americans call the “Rio Grande,” Mexicans call the “Rio Bravo.” This has not caused any kind of breakdown of the collective geographic imagination.

News organizations routinely change how they refer to places, and many of these decisions carry the whiff of politics. In 2019, the AP announced that the Ukrainian city of Kiev would henceforth be spelled “Kyiv.” (Chicken Kiev would remain untouched.) “To many Ukrainians,” the AP explained, “the former spelling Kiev appears outdated because it is associated with a time when Ukraine was part of the Russian and Soviet states, rather than an independent country.” That is a perfectly understandable reason for making the change, but it is also, on its face, a political one. By contrast, news organizations have resisted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s request to refer to his country as “Türkiye”—even after the U.S. State Department agreed to do so in 2023.

[Read: A Super Bowl spectacle over the gulf]

These sorts of principled judgments are, as I said, hard to make. Trump makes them harder still by blowing past all standards of reasonableness or good faith, leaving high-minded institutions struggling to adapt. Even the best-designed rules break down when one side starts playing a completely different game. What if our president had decided to call it the “Gulf of Trump”? What if he had tried to rename the Atlantic Ocean? The man forces us to contemplate the previously unthinkable, because there is no norm or tradition that he won’t abrogate. For 134 years, “follow the Board on geographic names” was a simple, commonsense rule to follow. Then Trump got his hands on the Board.

None of this means that the Gulf of Mexico is now actually the Gulf of America in any kind of objective or even linguistic sense. Trump controls the Department of the Interior but not the English language. More than 12 years after it was renamed for Governor Hugh L. Carey, New Yorkers still refer to the passage between Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn as the “Battery Tunnel.” Washington, D.C.’s airport was named for Ronald Reagan in 1998; many if not most residents still call it “National.” The American people can decide for themselves whether to go with the “Gulf of Mexico” or the “Gulf of America.” And if you ever find yourself at a loss, here’s a tip: You can always just call it the “Gulf.”

Just Say No to Terrible White LEDs

2025-01-27T07:00:00-05:00

God said, “Let there be light”—everyone knows that. But God did not specify what color light, and this would eventually prove problematic.

In the age of the LED light bulb, consumers have an unfathomable range of lighting options. This has, perversely, made the task of pleasantly illuminating our homes harder, not easier. The culprit is not LED technology per se, but the bafflingly unhelpful way in which LED bulbs are labeled.

Walk into a well-stocked hardware store, and you will find two main types of bulbs to choose from: “soft white” and “daylight.” (Let’s ignore the existence of Wi-Fi-enabled smart bulbs, which are a solution in search of a problem.) Soft white sounds like it will be the whiter of the two, when in fact it is the more golden option. Daylight sounds like it should be warm and natural; it is instead cold and ugly. The confusing nomenclature has led an untold number of people astray, condemning them to harsh lighting that makes everything in a home, including its residents, less attractive.

[Read: The shopping method that isn’t going anywhere]

For about 99 percent of human history, all artificial light was incandescent, meaning the by-product of heating something to the point that it emits visible radiation. First came fire; then oil lamps, candles, and gaslight; and, finally, Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb, which operates by heating a filament until it glows. The light produced by an incandescent bulb has a yellow-orange color to it, which we accordingly describe as “warm.” In John Updike’s 1960 novel, Rabbit, Run, Harry Angstrom looks through his neighbors’ windows at dusk and sees, past the pale glow of their black-and-white televisions, “the warm bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the backs of caves.”

Incandescent lighting, however, is inefficient: It literally generates more heat than light. This is why budget-conscious institutional settings have long tended to use fluorescent light, which looks awful but uses much less energy. And it is why Congress passed legislation in 2007 mandating the phaseout of incandescent bulbs in favor of LEDs, which use even less. (Donald Trump rolled back that mandate, and then Joe Biden unrolled it; in his second term, Trump is all but assured to un-unroll it.) An LED light works under a wholly different principle from an incandescent one. Instead of heating a filament to the point where light is produced as a by-product, LEDs send electricity through a semiconductor in a way that causes energy to be released as visible photons.

“The first generation of LED lights were just heinous,” Bevil Conway, an artist and a neuroscientist who specializes in color perception, told me. The bulbs emitted a harsh blue-white light by default, creating a terrible first impression for the technology. But the industry has figured out how to “tune” LEDs to generate essentially any color or shade, including something very close to the warm yellow-white of a classic bulb. LEDs still have their share of issues—as I write this, the light in my apartment’s entryway is flickering erratically, as if haunted—but they can glow as warmly as the incandescents of old, while lasting much longer and using much less energy.

If, that is, you can figure out which one to buy.

LED light bulbs are not generally labeled as “warm” or “cool”; that would be too easy. That information is typically buried in the fine print on the side or back of the box. Instead, they have those perplexing labels—remember, “daylight” is cool (despite sounding sunny); “soft white” is warm (despite sounding pale)—and a color temperature, which is measured on the Kelvin scale. You might intuitively think that a higher Kelvin number corresponds to warmer light, but listening to your intuition would be a mistake. In fact, higher-energy light appears cooler. The “soft white” label generally corresponds to 2,700-kelvin light, while “daylight” is usually applied to 5,000-kelvin.

What we have here is a classic case of marketing that makes sense to the people selling the product, but not to the people buying it. Indirect natural daylight is, technically, pretty blue. (Perhaps you are familiar with the sky.) When the light-bulb industry labels its 5,000-kelvin bulbs “daylight,” it’s trying to helpfully indicate that you’re getting a blue light—never mind the fact that a dinky white light bulb does not actually approximate the feeling of sunlight. As for soft white, that “goes back to the incandescent era, where the light emitted from your standard household [bulb] was marketed as ‘soft white light,’” Tasha Campbell, a senior product marketing manager at Signify, which sells Philips-brand light bulbs, told me.

Cold white might have its uses—interrogations, morgues—but the home is not one of them. If you live in an urban area, you can see what I mean by walking around after dark and looking at the windows of an apartment building. If your neighborhood is like mine, most will emit a cozy, warm glow, like fires at the backs of caves. But a troubling share—perhaps one in 10, or one in five—will instead emit a grim, sickly pallor. Those are the daylight apartments.

Bizarrely, some of these apartments are inhabited by people who were not tricked into purchasing terrible lighting, but actively chose it. These are the victims of an extensive body of online propaganda. One popular theory holds that daylight bulbs have a special capacity to help you focus on what you’re doing. “Daylight bulbs are perfect for areas where specific work or detail-oriented tasks are performed,” advises The Spruce, in an example typical of the genre. “These rooms include kitchens, offices, and basements. Bathrooms may also be a good place for daylight bulbs, providing ample light for getting ready.”

The implication is that, until LEDs were invented, everyone was fumbling around in dangerously warm light, unable to chop an onion without losing a finger or read a book without going blind from eye strain. This is preposterous. High-quality cool light can have some advantages for rendering color and detail, which is why it might make sense for, say, an art museum. But if Marcel Proust could write In Search of Lost Time by incandescent lamp, you don’t need 5,000 kelvins to write an email.

[M. Nolan Gray: Why dining rooms are disappearing from American homes]

A related theory, popular within the lighting industry, holds that daylight bulbs are “energizing.” A video on the Philips website, for example, says, “Use ‘daylight’ to create a bright, energizing setting for improved concentration.” There’s a kernel of plausibility here. Manuel Spitschan, a professor at the Technical University of Munich who has studied the effects that different-color temperatures have on humans, told me that light suppresses the pineal gland’s production of melatonin, the hormone that tells our brains it’s time to get sleepy, and that blue light suppresses it more than yellow light. The daylight-bulb theory is that cool artificial light will mimic the sun’s “melanopic daylight illuminance” more than warm light will, thus keeping us more alert.

The hitch in this theory is that the pineal gland produces melatonin only when it’s dark out. This means that to the extent that cooler bulbs suppress melatonin, they do so mainly in the time when our bodies are trying to help us get ready for bed, not during business hours. Moreover, Spitschan said that the intensity of light “has a much stronger effect than the color temperature.” When it comes to alertness, very bright beats very white.

Because the world is a big and varied place, I’m willing to believe that some people genuinely prefer a cooler bulb, just as some people presumably prefer Bob Dylan’s most recent albums to his 1960s masterpieces. Good for them, I guess. For everyone else, let there be light—but, for God’s sake, let it be warm.

The Man Who’s Sure That Harris Will Win

2024-10-16T06:00:00-04:00

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If you follow politics, you can hardly escape Allan Lichtman, the American University history professor known for correctly forecasting the victor of all but one presidential election since 1984. In a whimsical New York Times video published over the summer, the 77-year-old competes in a Senior Olympics qualifying race—and confidently declares that Kamala Harris will win the race (get it?) for the White House. You might also have recently seen Lichtman on cable news, heard him on the radio, or read an interview with him.

In an era of statistically complex, probabilistic election models, Lichtman is a throwback. He bases his predictions not on polls, but rather on the answers to a set of 13 true-or-false questions, which he calls “keys,” and which in 2016 signaled a Trump victory when the polls said otherwise. He has little patience for data crunchers who lack his academic credentials. “The issue with @NateSilver538 is he’s a compiler of polls, a clerk,” Lichtman posted on X in July, as part of a long-running spat with the prominent election modeler. “He has no fundamental basis in history and elections.”

Lichtman’s complaint isn’t just with polls and the nerds who love them. In his view, almost everything that the media and political establishment pay attention to—such as campaigns, candidate quality, debates, and ideological positions—is irrelevant to the outcome. An election is a referendum on the incumbent party’s track record. “The study of history,” he writes in his book Predicting the Next President, “shows that a pragmatic American electorate chooses a president according to the performance of the party holding the White House, as measured by the consequential events and episodes of a term.”

[Anne Applebaum: The danger of believing that you are powerless]

According to Lichtman, the standard account of how presidential campaigns work is a harmful fiction. “The media, the candidates, the pollsters, and the consultants,” Lichtman writes, “are complicit in the idea that elections are exercises in manipulating voters,” which stymies political reform and meaningful policy debate. That argument contains a touch of the conspiratorial, but there’s a big difference between Lichtman’s worldview and a conspiracy theory: His predictions actually come true. If Lichtman is wrong about how elections work, how can he be so good at foretelling their outcomes?

One possible answer is that, in fact, he isn’t.

Lichtman developed his method in 1981 in collaboration with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Russian mathematical geophysicist. Lichtman had a hunch, he told me, that “it was the performance and strength of the White House Party that turned elections.” He and Keilis-Borok analyzed every election from 1860 to 1980; the hunch bore out.

Each of the 13 keys can be defined as a true-or-false statement. If eight or more of them are true, the incumbent-party candidate will win; seven or fewer, and they will lose. Here they are, as spelled out in Predicting the Next President:

1. Incumbent-party mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections.

2. Nomination contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.

3. Incumbency: The incumbent-party candidate is the sitting president.

4. Third party: There is no significant third-party or independent campaign.

5. Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

6. Long-term economy: Real annual per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the two previous terms.

7. Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.

8. Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.

9. Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.

10. Foreign or military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.

11. Foreign or military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

12. Incumbent charisma: The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

13. Challenger charisma: The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

Lichtman says that keys 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 13 are true this year: just enough to assure a Harris victory.

Although some of the keys sound extremely subjective, Lichtman insists that they are not subjective at all—assessing them simply requires the kind of judgments that historians are trained to make. The charisma key, for example, doesn’t depend on your gut feeling about a candidate. “We are talking about the once-in-a-generation, across-the-board, inspirational, truly transformational candidates, like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan,” he told me.

I can attest that applying the keys is challenging for those of us without a history Ph.D. The keys must be “turned” consistently from election to election without regard to polls, but in practice seem to be influenced by fluctuating public-opinion data. The Democratic nominee in 2008, Barack Obama, qualified as charismatic, but the 2012 nominee, who was also Barack Obama, did not, because of his diminished approval ratings. The “third-party challenger” key cuts against the incumbent if a third-party candidate is likely to get 5 percent of the vote—but this is only knowable through horse-race polling, which we’re supposed to ignore, or after the fact, in which case it’s not a prediction.

Lichtman insists that voters don’t change their minds in response to what the candidates say or do during the course of a campaign. This leads him to make some deeply counterintuitive claims. He has written that George H. W. Bush’s attacks on Michael Dukakis in 1988—which included the infamous Willie Horton ad—accomplished nothing, and actually hurt Bush’s subsequent ability to govern, because he already had enough keys to win and should have been focused on his policy agenda. He implies that JFK, who edged out Richard Nixon by less than two-tenths of a percentage point in 1960, would have won even if he had had the personality of, say, his nephew Robert, because he had eight keys in his favor in addition to charisma. And this past summer, Lichtman told anyone who would listen that Joe Biden should stay in the race, despite his difficulty completing a sentence, because replacing him on the ticket would mean the loss of the incumbency key. If Democrats persuaded Biden to drop out, he wrote in a July 3 op-ed, “they would almost surely doom their party to defeat and reelect Donald Trump.” (He changed his mind once it became clear that no one would challenge Harris for the nomination, thus handing her key 2.)

Arguments such as these are hard to accept, because they require believing that Lichtman’s “pragmatic electorate” places no stock in ideological positions or revelations about character and temperament. Lichtman is unperturbed by such objections, however. All arguments against the keys fail because they suggest that the keys are in some way wrong, which they plainly are not. Lichtman has written, for example, that the infamous “Comey letter” did not tip the 2016 election to Trump, as poll-focused analysts such as Nate Silver have “incorrectly claimed.” How does Lichtman know the claim is incorrect? Because the keys already predicted a Trump victory. The proof is in the fact that the system works. This raises the question of whether it actually does.

Going nine for 10 on presidential predictions is not as hard as it sounds. Only four of the past 10 elections were particularly close. Most campaign years, you can just look at the polls. Lichtman predicted a Biden victory in 2020, for example, but you probably did too.

To his credit, Lichtman has made many accurate calls, in some cases well before polls showed the eventual victor in the lead. Even in 2000, the election that he is generally considered to have gotten wrong, the system worked as advertised. As he explains in Predicting the Next President, the keys “predict only the national popular vote and not the vote within individual states.” (Lichtman has devoted considerable energy to proving that the election was stolen in Florida by the GOP, and that he has thus really gone 10 for 10.)

Lichtman’s most celebrated feat of foresight by far, the gutsy call that supposedly sets his keys apart from mere polls, was his 2016 prediction. Calling the race for Trump when the polls pointed the other way was reputationally risky. After Lichtman was vindicated, he was showered with praise and received a personal note of congratulations from Trump himself. “Authorities in the field recognized my nearly unique successful prediction of a Trump victory,” Lichtman told me in an email. He quoted the assessment of the political scientist Gerald M. Pomper: “In 2016, nine of eleven major studies predicted Clinton’s lead in the national popular vote. However, by neglecting the Electoral College and variations among the state votes, they generally failed to predict Trump’s victory. One scholar did continue his perfect record of election predictions, using simpler evaluations of the historical setting (Lichtman 2016).”

Oddly, no one seems to have noticed at the time what seems in hindsight like an obvious problem. By Lichtman’s own account, the keys predict the popular-vote winner, not the state-by-state results. But Trump lost the popular vote by two percentage points, eking out an Electoral College victory by fewer than 80,000 votes in three swing states.

Lichtman has subsequently addressed the apparent discrepancy. “In 2016, I made the first modification of the keys system since its inception in 1981,” he writes in the most recent edition of Predicting the Next President. In “my final forecast for 2016, I predicted the winner of the presidency, e.g., the Electoral College, rather than the popular vote winner.” He did this, he writes, because of the divergence of the Electoral College results from the popular vote: “In any close election, Democrats will win the popular vote but not necessarily the Electoral College.”

[Peter Wehner: This election is different]

But the gap that Lichtman describes did not become apparent until the results of the 2016 election were known. In 2008 and 2012, the Electoral College actually gave a slight advantage to Obama, and until 2016, the difference between the margin in the popular vote and in the Electoral College tipping state was typically small. Why would Lichtman have changed his methodology to account for a change that hadn’t happened yet?

Odder still is the fact that Lichtman waited to announce his new methodology until well after the election in which he says he deployed it. According to an investigation published this summer by the journalists Lars Emerson and Michael Lovito for their website, The Postrider, no record exists of Lichtman mentioning the modification before the fact. In their estimation, “he appears to have retroactively changed” the predictive model “as a means of preserving his dubious 10 for 10 streak.”

This is a sore subject for Lichtman. Whether he got 2016 totally right or merely sort of right might seem like a quibble; surely he was closer to the mark than most experts. But a forecaster who changes his methodology after the fact has no credibility. When I brought the matter up with Lichtman in a Zoom interview, he became angry. “Let me tell you: It steams me,” he said, his voice rising. “I dispute this, you know, When did you stop beating your wife? kind of question.”

Lichtman directed me to an interview he gave The Washington Post in September 2016. (When I tried to interject that I had read the article, he cut me off and threatened to end the interview.) There and elsewhere, Lichtman said, he clearly stated that Trump would win the election. Trump did win the election, ergo, the prediction was accurate. Nowhere did he say anything about the popular vote.

Later that evening, Lichtman sent me a follow-up email with the subject line “2016.” In it, he described Emerson and Lovito as “two unknown journalists with no qualifications in history or political science.” As for their claims, he pointed once again to the Washington Post interview, and also to an article in the October 2016 issue of the academic journal Social Education, in which he published his final prediction.

Here is what Lichtman wrote in the Social Education article: “As a national system, the Keys predict the popular vote, not the state-by-state tally of Electoral College votes. However, only once in the last 125 years has the Electoral College vote diverged from the popular vote.”

This seemed pretty cut-and-dried. I replied to Lichtman’s email asking him to explain. “Yes, I was not as clear as I could have been in that article,” he responded. “However, I could not have been clearer in my Washington Post prediction and subsequent Fox News and CBS interviews, all of which came after I wrote the article.” In those interviews, he said nothing about the popular vote or the Electoral College.

I got another email from Lichtman, with the subject line “Postriders,” later that night. “Here is more information on the two failed journalists who have tried to make a name for themselves on my back,” Lichtman wrote. Attached to the email was a Word document, a kind of opposition-research memo, laying out the case against Lovito and Emerson: “They post a blog—The Postrider—that has failed to gain any traction as documented below. They are not qualified to comment on the Keys, the polls, or any aspect of election prediction.” The document then went through some social-media numbers. Lichtman has 12,000 followers on Facebook; The Postrider has only 215, and the articles get no engagement. One hundred thousand followers for Lichtman on X; a few hundred for Emerson and Lovito.

[Gilad Edelman: The asterisk on Kamala Harris’s poll numbers]

I ran these criticisms by Emerson and Lovito, who were already familiar with Lichtman’s theory of the case. After they published their article, he emailed them, cc’ing his lawyer and American University’s general counsel, accusing them of defamation.

To the charge of being less famous than Lichtman, they pleaded guilty. “It’s true that a public intellectual who has been publishing books since the late 1970s and is interviewed every four years by major media outlets has a larger following than us, yes,” they wrote in an email. “But we fail to see what relevance that has to our work.” Regarding their qualifications, they pointed out that they each have a bachelor’s degree in political science from American University, where Lichtman teaches. (Emerson is a current student at American’s law school.) “As for this story on the Keys, we spent months reading and reviewing Professor Lichtman’s books, academic papers, and interviews regarding the Keys. If we are not qualified to comment at that point, he should reconsider how he publicly communicates about his work.”

In a December 2016 year-in-review article, the journalist Chris Cillizza looked back on the stories that had generated the most interest for his Washington Post politics blog, The Fix. “The answer this year? Allan Lichtman. Allan Lichtman. Allan Lichtman … Of the 10 most trafficked posts on The Fix in 2016, four involved Lichtman and his unorthodox predictions,” Cillizza wrote. “Those four posts totaled more than 10 million unique visitors alone and were four of the 37 most trafficked posts on the entire WaPo website this year.”

Americans love a prediction. We crave certainty. This makes the life of a successful predictor an attractive one, as Lichtman, who has achieved some measure of fame, can attest. But a professional forecaster is always one bad call away from irrelevance.

Give Lichtman credit for making concrete predictions to which he can be held accountable. As he always says, the probabilistic forecasts currently in vogue can’t be proved or disproved. The Nate Silvers of the world, who have unanimously labeled the upcoming election a toss-up, will be correct no matter who wins. Not so for Lichtman. A Trump restoration would not just end his winning streak. It would call into question his entire theory of politics. We are all waiting to find out how pragmatic the electorate really is.

The Asterisk on Kamala Harris’s Poll Numbers

2024-08-22T07:00:00-04:00

One month since she entered the presidential race, Kamala Harris has a small but clear lead over Donald Trump, if the polls are to be trusted. But after the past two presidential elections, trusting the polls might feel like a very strange thing to do.

The 2016 election lives in popular memory as perhaps the most infamous polling miss of all time, but 2020 was quietly even worse. The polls four years ago badly underestimated Trump’s support even as they correctly forecast a Joe Biden win. A comprehensive postmortem by the American Association for Public Opinion Research concluded that 2020 polls were the least accurate in decades, overstating Biden’s advantage by an average of 3.9 percentage points nationally and 4.3 percentage points at the state level over the final two weeks of the election. (In 2016, by contrast, national polling predicted Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote margin quite accurately.) According to The New York Times, Biden led by 10 points in Wisconsin but won it by less than 1 point; he led Michigan by 8 and won by 3; he led in Pennsylvania by 5 and won by about 1. As of this writing, Harris is up in all three states, but by less than Biden was. A 2020-size error would mean that she’s actually down—and poised to lose the Electoral College.

The pollsters know they messed up in 2020. They are cautiously optimistic that they’ve learned from their mistakes. Of course, they thought that last time too.

How did the polls get worse from 2016 to 2020, with everyone watching? In the aftermath of Trump’s surprise 2016 victory, the public-opinion-research industry concluded that the problem was educational polarization. If pollsters had made a point of including enough white people without college degrees in their samples, they wouldn’t have underestimated Trump so badly. During the 2020 cycle, they focused on correcting that mistake.

It didn’t work. Even though polls in 2020 included more white non-college-educated voters, they turned out to be disproportionately the white non-college-educated voters who preferred Biden. The new consensus is that Republican voters are less likely to respond to polls in the first place, even controlling for education level. (To put it more nerdily, partisan preference correlates independently with willingness to take a poll, at least when Trump is on the ballot.) Don Levy, the director of the Siena College Research Institute, which conducts polls on behalf of The New York Times, calls the phenomenon “anti-establishment response bias.” The more someone distrusts mainstream institutions, including the media and pollsters, the more likely they are to vote for Trump.

[Read: The polling crisis is a catastrophe for American democracy]

Levy told me that, in 2020, the people working the phones for Siena frequently reported incidents of being yelled at by mistrustful Trump supporters. “In plain English, it was not uncommon for someone to say, ‘I’m voting for Trump—fuck you,’” and then hang up before completing the rest of the survey, he said. (So much for the “shy Trump voter” hypothesis.) In 2020, those responses weren’t counted. This time around, they are. Levy told me that including these “partials” in 2020 would have erased nearly half of Siena’s error rate.

That still leaves the other half. Another complication is that most pollsters have given up on live calls in favor of online or text-based polls, meaning they have no angry partials to include. And so pollsters are trying variations of the same technique: getting more likely-Trump voters into their data sets. If a lower percentage of Republican-leaning voters respond to polls, then maybe you just need to reach out to a larger number.

This might sound obvious, but it entails an uncomfortable shift for the industry. Public pollsters have traditionally stuck to the politically neutral categories found in the census when assembling or weighting their samples: age, gender, race, and so on. The theory was that if you built your sample correctly along demographic lines—if you called the right number of white people and Latinos, evangelicals and atheists, men and women—then an accurate picture of the nation’s partisan balance would naturally emerge.

“In 2016, the feeling was that the problem we had was not capturing non-college-educated white voters, particularly in the Midwest,” Chris Jackson, the head of U.S. public polling at Ipsos, told me. “But what 2020 told us is that’s not actually sufficient. There is some kind of political-behavior dimension that wasn’t captured in that education-by-race crosstab. So, essentially, what the industry writ large has done is, we’ve started really looking much more strongly at political variables.”

Pollsters were once loath to include such variables, because modeling the partisan makeup of the electorate is an inexact science—if it weren’t, we wouldn’t need polls in the first place. But after its failure in 2020, the industry has little choice. “There’s no avoiding coming up with a hypothesis as to the composition of the electorate,” Matt Knee, who runs polls and analytics for Republican campaigns, told me. “Choosing to throw up your hands on the most important predictor of how someone’s going to vote, and saying ‘That’s not a valid thing to include in my hypothesis,’ just doesn’t make sense.”

[Read: Return of the people machine]

Some pollsters are leaning on state-level voter files to get the right balance of Democrats and Republicans into their samples. Another approach is to use “recalled vote”: asking people whom they voted for in 2020 and making sure that the mix of respondents matches up with the actual results. (If a state went 60 percent for Trump, say, but only 50 percent of the respondents say they voted for Trump, the pollster would either call more Trump-2020 voters or weight their responses more heavily after the fact.)

Each technique has its limitations. Party registration doesn’t match up perfectly with voting preferences. Some states, including Michigan and Wisconsin, don’t even have party registration, meaning pollsters have to rely on modeled partisanship based on factors such as age, gender, and religion. Recalled vote might be even shakier: Quite a lot of people misremember or lie about their voting history. Many say they voted when they in fact did not, and some people who voted for the loser will claim that they voted for the winner. Levy told me that when Siena experimented with using recalled vote in 2022, it made some results less accurate.

Still, pollsters see signs for hope. “People who told us they voted for Trump in 2020 are responding at the same rates as people who told us they voted for Biden in 2020,” said Jackson, from Ipsos, which “suggests we’re not having a really strong systemic bias.” The New York Times poll master Nate Cohn made a similar observation in a recent interview with The New Yorker: Democrats were much likelier to respond to Times polls in 2020, but this year, “it’s fairly even—so I’m cautiously optimistic that this means that we don’t have a deep, hidden non-response bias.” Another difference between 2020 and now: There is no pandemic. Some experts believe that Democratic voters were more likely to answer surveys in 2020 because they were more likely than Republicans to be at home with little else to do.

What’s clear at this point is that the election is close, and Harris is in a stronger position than Biden was. Natalie Jackson, a Democratic pollster at GQR Research, told me that if Harris’s numbers were just a result of energized Democrats being in the mood to answer polls, then Democrats would be seeing a comparable bump in generic congressional polls. The fact that they aren’t suggests that the change is real. “Trump’s numbers haven’t moved,” Jackson said. “This is all shifting from third party or undecided to Democrat.”

Like Olympic athletes, political pollsters spend four years fine-tuning their craft, but don’t find out whether their preparations were adequate until it’s too late to do anything differently. The nonresponse bias that bedeviled the polls in 2020 is not an easy thing to fix. By definition, pollsters know very little about the people who don’t talk to them. If Trump outperforms the polls once again, it will be because even after all these years, something about his supporters remains a mystery.

The Walz-Vance Inversion

2024-08-07T10:35:55-04:00

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Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have now selected vice-presidential nominees who hail from the Midwest, have humble backgrounds, and bear the expectation of appealing to white working-class voters. But the choices also serve as wagers on two very different theories of electoral politics. The case for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is that the progressive base will like his policy agenda and swing voters will like his style. For Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, it’s the inverse: The MAGA base will like his style and swing voters will like his policy agenda.

Over the past few weeks, as the Harris campaign publicly considered a range of middle-aged white men, Walz emerged as the preferred choice of not only the online left and Bernie Sanders, but also Democratic Party leaders including Nancy Pelosi, according to The Hill. The selection even drew lavish praise from Joe Manchin, who issued a statement calling Walz “the real deal.” To the Sanders wing of the party, Walz’s appeal stems largely from his policy track record: After Minnesota Democrats won a rare trifecta in 2022, Walz jammed through a host of progressive laws, including universal free school lunch and paid family and medical leave. Meanwhile, pragmatists like Pelosi and centrists like Manchin see a salt-of-the-earth white guy from rural America who can win over Trump voters.

This makes Walz something of a bizarro Vance, electorally speaking. Vance, too, appeals in theory to both his party’s base and up-for-grab voters in the center, but in his case, the roles of policy and style are flipped: His style plays to the base and his economic policies play to the middle.

[Read: Progressives are excited about Tim Walz. Should they be?]

Vance, who first became famous as a Trump critic, has bet his political fortunes on MAGA maximalism, binding himself as tightly as possible to Trump, to the point of claiming with a straight face that the 2020 election was stolen. But Vance isn’t a pure mini-Trump, because unlike the former president, he appears to have genuinely populist policy objectives. “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street,” he declared in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. “We’ll commit to the working man.” As a senator, while making headlines with harsh rhetoric on Fox News, he also quietly teamed up with Democrats to introduce legislation that can fairly be described as progressive, including bills that would restrict bank-CEO pay, end tax breaks for corporate mergers, and tighten rail-safety regulations. He may have taken arch-conservative positions on abortion and other social issues, but he is part of an emerging Republican faction that believes it can poach Democratic voters who are economically liberal and culturally conservative. In a 2019 interview, he told me, “What I would really like to do is lose one white educated Silicon Valley employee for every two middle-class Black Americans that we pick up.”

Let’s stipulate that trying to predict the electoral consequences of a VP pick is silly. As one student of the presidency recently said, “Historically, the vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact—I mean, virtually no impact.” (This was, of course, Trump himself, responding to a question about Vance, perhaps with a twinge of buyer’s remorse.) Still, if you’re going to try to boost your odds at the margins, then Walz seems like a safer play than Vance. Most voters don’t pay very close attention to the fine details of candidates’ policy positions. This goes doubly for undecided voters, who almost by definition either don’t know or don’t care about the candidates’ differences on policy matters. (If they did, they wouldn’t be wavering between Trump and Harris to begin with.) A case can be made for connecting on ideological grounds with the politically engaged base, while appealing to swing voters with affect and vibe.

[Elaine Godfrey: Kamala Harris’s white-boy summer]

Does Walz in fact have that appeal? On paper, sure. Unlike the stereotypical Democratic pol—a cosmopolitan Ivy League–educated lawyer who watches Succession—Walz grew up in a rural small town, coached high-school football, and in 2016 hung on to a congressional seat in a district that Trump won by 15 points. “His midwestern plainspokenness and bluntness,” my colleague David A. Graham observes, “may be an asset to a party that has become negatively associated with technocratic coastal elites.”

But the possibility remains that Walz is, as the National Review editor Rich Lowry put it on X, an “MSNBC anchor’s idea of a folksy politician who can appeal to Middle America.” The Democratic Party doesn’t have the strongest track record here. Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot, was once supposed to be the next big thing in Kentucky politics. She lost to Mitch McConnell by nearly 20 points in 2020. On the flip side, if you predicted that Sanders, a socialist Jew from the Northeast, would do better in the 2016 Democratic primary than Hillary Clinton among voters who leaned more conservative, then you’re a clairvoyant who should go into day trading. This is to say nothing of the affinity that white working-class voters show for Trump, a New York City real-estate tycoon who unironically patterns his residences after Versailles.

Perhaps the lesson from those examples is that voters respond less to a candidate’s life story than to their style and temperament. Vance really is a son of the working class, and he’s much less popular than Trump, including among Republicans. This may be because he comes across as what he in fact has become: a Yale Law–educated intellectual from the right-wing speaker circuit. He and Walz might both drink Diet Mountain Dew, but if Walz ends up being the better VP pick, it might be because only he seems like the kind of guy who drinks Diet Mountain Dew. To imagine otherwise—to expect undecided voters to carefully parse the vice-presidential nominees’ policy positions—would just be, well, weird.

Donald Trump’s Theory of Everything

2024-06-30T11:03:30-04:00

At Thursday’s debate, while Joe Biden struggled to put a sentence together, Donald Trump struggled to utter any sentence that wasn’t about illegal immigrants destroying the country.

Harsh rhetoric—and policy—on migrants and the border has long been a pillar of Trump’s political identity, but it used to slot into a much wider range of grievances. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump railed against free trade, vowed to get revenge on China for ripping America off, and accused corporate executives and Wall Street of enriching themselves unfairly. This time around, however, Trump has all but dropped his other preoccupations in favor of a monocausal theory of every problem America faces, and even some problems it doesn’t: an apocalyptic onslaught of immigrants, welcomed to the country by Biden, who are “killing our people in New York, in California, in every state in the Union, because we don’t have borders anymore.”

[David A. Graham: Trump’s campaign has lost whatever substance it once had]

Asked about his role in stoking a violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, Trump declared, “And let me tell you about January 6: On January 6, we had a great border, nobody coming through, very few.” How about solving climate change? “What [Biden] is doing is destroying all of our medical programs because the migrants coming in.” Any plans for making child care more affordable? Biden “wants open borders. He wants our country to either be destroyed or he wants to pick up those people as voters.” What about preserving the solvency of Social Security? “But Social Security, he’s destroying it. Because millions of people are pouring into our country, and they’re putting them onto Social Security; they’re putting them onto Medicare, Medicaid.” Racial inequality? “As sure as you’re sitting there, the fact is that his big kill on the Black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border.”

During a Democratic-primary debate in 2007, a younger, more verbally adroit Biden memorably lampooned Rudy Giuliani, at the time the Republican front-runner, for trying to build an entire political persona around his leadership after the September 11 attack. “Rudy Giuliani—there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9/11,” Biden quipped. “I mean, there’s nothing else!”

If Biden were as sharp as he once was, he might have made Trump’s immigrant obsession look foolish and cruel. He might have noted that for all Trump’s talk of violence, violent crime—which surged in 2020 and 2021—has plunged over the past two years and is falling even faster this year, including in cities that have recently taken in large numbers of migrants. (As of last week, the city of Boston had experienced only four murders in all of 2024, compared to 18 by this point last year.) He might have observed that border crossings are down by half since December. And he might have mocked the absurdity of Trump’s claim that migrant workers are draining Social Security, when in fact, by paying Social Security taxes without receiving benefits, they do the exact opposite.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: The specter of family separation]

In the event, Biden did not do that. Trump’s dark and bizarre portrait of a nation on the verge of civilizational collapse at the hand of migrant hordes went mostly unchallenged. It remains up to the voters to decide what the greatest threat to their way of life really is.

Why Crypto Just Won’t Die

2024-03-05T11:50:00-05:00

Can someone remind crypto that it’s supposed to be dead? The digital asset market, widely written off as a bubble that burst two years ago, is having one of its wildest rallies ever. The price of bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, has risen by nearly 60 percent in the past month. This morning it reached a new all-time high of about $69,000, breaking the previous record, set in November 2021. The rest of the crypto market isn’t far behind.

This feels impossible. Fifteen years into its existence, the technology has yet to demonstrate any serious use case. Its value surged during the pandemic, when investors with easy access to money and plenty of idle time fueled many a speculative frenzy. Then the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, and the crypto market abruptly tanked. Sam Bankman-Fried, whose face used to gaze out from full-page New Yorker ads, now awaits sentencing for fraud from a Brooklyn jail. Celebrities who shamelessly hawked crypto exchanges and NFT collections have gone quiet, in some cases under legal duress. The 2022 Super Bowl felt like one long crypto ad; by this year’s game, the world had moved on to other speculative fads—generative AI, Taylor Swift—and crypto seemed like just another faded relic of the zero-interest-rate era.

And yet even after innumerable crypto scandals and lawsuits, the prices of bitcoin, ethereum, and other major currencies never fell below late-2020 levels. They had been steadily regaining their value long before the recent super-spike. The fact that no one can agree on what crypto is even for hasn’t kept the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies from surpassing $2.5 trillion. Indeed, its utter pointlessness may have even helped. The lack of consensus about crypto’s purpose might be the very reason it never dies.

The present surge has two immediate causes. The first is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s reluctant decision to begin approving bitcoin exchange-traded funds, which has opened the sector to traditional financial institutions and given it a new sheen of legitimacy. The second is that bitcoin is approaching one of its periodic “halvings”—moments, programmed into its source code, when the rate of new bitcoin production gets cut by 50 percent, which reliably causes demand to jump. But neither of these factors explains the deeper mystery: How is crypto even still a thing?

[Annie Lowrey: Is crypto dead?]

Crypto’s staying power is in part a consequence of its design. No central bank was needed to verify who owned how much bitcoin. Thanks to cryptography and some clever game theory, the network itself could keep track of that. Technologically, it has no single point of failure: Every computer in the network maintains a complete record of every transaction, which means no single entity can shut it off. This was a huge part of bitcoin’s early appeal. It was decentralized, but could still be trusted as a store of value. But to what end? What was it for?

Over the years, any number of answers have been offered. An early one was crime: A currency beyond the reach of government, whose every transaction was anonymous, seemed to lend itself to illegal business. Another early dream for bitcoin was that it would replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s global reserve currency. In theory, bitcoin’s scarcity—its total supply asymptotically approaches 21 million—makes it inflation-proof, unlike a paper currency printed by central bankers.

As cryptocurrencies proliferated and mutated over the years, so did the justifications for their existence. Newer, non-bitcoin digital assets, built with more technological features, promised to be more than just a form of money. Crypto would be a boon for the developing world by making it easier and cheaper to send cross-border payments to relatives back home. Crypto would be the basis of something called Web3, a new, decentralized version of the internet built on the blockchain and immune to dominance by Big Tech oligarchs. Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, financed by crypto would enable new forms of collective action to benefit mankind.

All of these theories had obvious flaws. Conducting business on a public database that logs every transaction in perpetuity turns out not to be the smartest way to commit crimes. With its wild price fluctuations, crypto looks nothing like currency—in El Salvador, where bitcoin was adopted as legal tender in 2021, few people actually use it—and has proved an unreliable inflation hedge. Crypto remittances are useless if they can’t be redeemed for local currency. Web3 is clunky and confusing and has done nothing to undermine Big Tech. DAOs are neither decentralized nor autonomous, if they are even organizations. And so on.

[James Surowiecki: How crypto disappeared into thin air]

The trouble is that convincingly debunking all the pro-crypto rationales at the same time is impossible. Each rebuttal can itself be rebutted, and by the time you finally wrap your head around why, say, the technical complexity of interacting with blockchains inevitably creates demand for the very intermediaries crypto is supposed to obviate, you will have forgotten whether you believe the hype around zero-knowledge proofs or Layer 2 blockchains. Crypto’s profusion of half-baked rationales, long a source of derision and mockery, turns out to be perhaps its most powerful secret weapon. Different constituencies have different reasons for buying in, which makes the argument for crypto resilient. It, too, has no single point of failure.

People trying to explain crypto’s staying power often compare it to other assets that, like gold, diamonds, or fine art, have little intrinsic value apart from collective societal delusion. But gold, diamonds, and fine art are status symbols. Crypto is not, which is why its owners sometimes trade it in for Lamborghinis and yachts, which are. Crypto is built on a different sort of collective delusion: that whatever its price may be today, someone will be willing to buy it for more tomorrow. Which is turning out to be not much of a delusion at all.

The Best Small-Talk Topic

2024-02-20T06:00:00-05:00

The other day, a colleague came by my desk to chat about the weather. The sky outside was dark and menacing, and the meteorologists, she told me with widening eyes, were predicting gale-force winds, a fact that we both found intriguing (what even qualifies as a gale?). We were having a perfectly nice conversation at the end of a long day, from my perspective. And then she ruined it. “Sorry,” she said. “I know talking about the weather is boring.”

Many innocent people around the world suffer from this misapprehension. We are taught that discussing the weather is the epitome of meaningless drivel and the mark of a poor conversationalist, the vocal equivalent of a sign declaring I am an uninteresting person. But this stigma is based on a simple analytical error. In the paradigmatic example, two people, perhaps sharing an elevator or waiting for a bus, find themselves at a loss for what to talk about, but feel compelled to fill the air. One of them says, “It’s supposed to rain tonight.” Is that a boring scenario? Perhaps, although I must say that I, for one, would be grateful to learn about the forecast. But let’s think about what’s really happening. The problem here is not that the weather is boring. The problem is that the people have nothing else to talk about, and once the topic of the evening’s precipitation is exhausted, the conversation will sputter out awkwardly. Perversely, the weather becomes the symbol of a limited conversational repertoire, when it was in fact the most interesting subject available.

The literature on talking-about-the-weather is not large, but authors who consider the matter almost invariably include a reference to the Oscar Wilde quote “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” What Wilde actually said is that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, which is much more clever and has nothing to do with the weather. (In a letter toward the end of his life, Wilde also wrote, “The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun.” A grim sentiment, but not the words of a weather-shamer.) The persistence of this apocryphal quote is telling: The speaker who misquotes Wilde is guilty of the very consistent lack of imagination supposedly displayed by us amateur meteorologists.

[From the October 1955 issue: Weather or no]

Let’s consider the possibility that people turn so incessantly toward weather talk because it is interesting—not Oscar Wilde’s–letters interesting, but not bad. We want to talk about the weather because it is on our minds, and it is on our minds because it matters. It determines how we dress, the plans we make, what we’ll cook for dinner, whether we catch that flight. It is erratic and mysterious. Today, photons blasted from a nearby star refract in the Earth’s atmosphere, projecting a dome of blue; tomorrow, invisible molecules of water vapor will condense overhead into microscopic ice crystals that coalesce into ethereal flakes and drift earthward. It’s magic. It affects our emotions more powerfully than most drugs. Bonding over a sunny day spreads joy. Commiserating over gloom builds solidarity. This is all to say nothing of the ever more palpable effects of climate change.

Weather talk can be boring, of course, as any subject can be in the wrong hands. But compared with what? In Berkeley, California, where I recently lived for two years, the weather is nice pretty much every day, which mostly eliminates it as a topic of conversation. Instead, people in the Bay Area will talk your ear off about the adventurous things they like to do in the nice weather—bike rides, camping trips, ayahuasca—which is actually quite boring. Who cares about someone else’s hobby? Maybe it’s not a coincidence that Californians are ever so slightly duller, on average, than East Coasters; what we lose in climate, we gain in personality.

When evaluating conversational topics, you have to consider the alternatives. If you’re not going to talk about the weather, what are you going to talk about? Your kids? Your dog? Are you sure that’s the gripping material you think it is? I’d much rather talk about how much snow is in store this weekend—the subject of a lively text thread I’m part of as I write this, it so happens—than hear about any of these supposedly not-boring subjects. Talking unapologetically about the heat or the cold or the humidity or the rain or the snow gets people animated. They have opinions. And this is the key to good small talk: It must be participatory. Going on about yourself is the surest way to be boring. The beauty of the weather is that it is inherently collective. If I’m hot and sweaty, you probably are too.

The stakes of this issue are higher than you might imagine. As my colleague Derek Thompson recently wrote, Americans are hanging out less and spending more time alone than at any point on record. This seems to have something to do with rising levels of depression and anxiety. The weather may be entrancing, but in our hearts there is no sun. In this context, the taboo against discussing the weather is not merely inane; it is a threat to public health. We must do whatever we can to encourage casual socializing, including tearing down artificial barriers to low-stakes chitchat. Go ahead and talk about the weather, for America’s sake.

The English-Muffin Problem

2023-12-21T06:00:00-05:00

The economy is hot, but the people are bothered. Americans think the country is in dreadful economic shape despite strong wage growth, low unemployment, and steadily declining inflation. We know this from survey after survey. What we don’t really know is how people formed those judgments. To find out, The Atlantic commissioned a new poll. When the results came in, one finding jumped off the screen: Americans are really, really unhappy about grocery prices.

Working with Leger, a North American polling firm, we asked 1,005 Americans how they felt about the economy. As with other recent polls, this one painted a gloomy picture. Only 20 percent of people said that the economy has gotten better over the past year, compared with the 44 percent who said it has gotten worse. (There was a big partisan split, but even among self-identified Democrats, only 33 percent said the economy has improved.) Then we asked them to choose, from a long list, what factors they consider when deciding how the national economy is doing. The runaway winner was “The price of groceries for your home”: Twenty-nine percent of people picked it as their top choice, and 60 percent of people selected grocery prices among their top three. Other than “inflation” itself, nothing else came close—not gas, not housing, not interest rates, not the cost of major purchases. And when we asked what people had in mind when they reported that their personal finances were getting worse, 81 percent chose groceries.

Americans’ economic attitudes used to track official statistics, including the inflation rate, pretty closely. That changed in 2020. When the pandemic hit, both the indicators and sentiment plummeted. But then, even as the economy recovered, sentiment remained low. Something broke the relationship between metrics and perception during the pandemic, and housing struck me as the likely culprit: Home prices, which are not included in the consumer price index, have gone absolutely bananas since 2020, rising far more than overall inflation in that time period.

[Annie Lowrey: Inflation is your fault]

But although the cost of housing may dominate the psyche of people like me—Millennial professionals who rent apartments in super-expensive cities such as Washington, D.C., and wonder whether we can ever afford to buy a house—nearly two-thirds of American households already own their homes, and a spike in prices makes them wealthier. “For a large share of households, the increased cost of housing prices is an increase in equity in their homes,” Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan, told me. “They’re not really complaining that the value of their house has gone up.” Housing costs are a real pain, but only for some people.

The poll cast doubt on a few other popular hypotheses. On the left, one argument posits that Americans are unhappy because they miss the generous government welfare payments enacted during the pandemic, such as the stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit. But only 17 percent of our poll respondents said their finances were better during the pandemic. (Fifty-five percent said they were doing better before the pandemic, and 28 percent said they’re doing better now.) People with children at home were generally more positive on the economy than people without kids. That isn’t what you’d expect if Americans were fuming over the expiration of the expanded child tax credit.

What about the contagious power of negative vibes on social media? This is very hard to test, because people might not be good judges of what shapes their worldview. But, for what it’s worth, we asked where people get their news on the economy, and those who chose Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok expressed more positive views than people who didn’t. So, too, did those who say they read national and financial newspapers. The most negative sentiment was generally among older people, not Gen Z TikTokers, which is consistent with other surveys.

No single poll is definitive, and you can get answers only to questions you think to ask. We didn’t ask about restaurant prices, for example, or the cost of child care. What’s clear is that the biggest cause of America’s current economic discontent is the fact that prices are higher than they were before the pandemic. And groceries are, at the very least, one of the things that people are most upset about. Grocery prices increased by 11.8 percent in 2022, far ahead of the overall rate of inflation, which was 6.5 percent. And unlike with housing, few ordinary Americans benefit from higher grocery prices. Everyone buys groceries, but unless your last name is Kroger or Walton, you probably don’t sell them.

Knowing that grocery prices drive negativity doesn’t, on its face, solve the puzzle of why sentiment has diverged from the economic indicators. Most Americans are making more money, even adjusting for inflation, than they were before the pandemic. If they were coldly rational, they would recognize that their income more than offsets higher grocery prices—they’re spending more, but they still have more left over.

Or maybe it isn’t much of a puzzle at all. We haven’t seen inflation like this since the 1980s; food prices in particular haven’t risen so fast since the late ’70s. The models, in other words, have been trained on four decades of low inflation. Asking them to accurately predict what happens when prices finally, suddenly jump doesn’t make a lot of sense. “Collectively, there’s still this coming to grips with the idea that we’re never going back to 2019,” Joanne Hsu, the director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan, told me. “We’re in a new normal now, and we’re still adjusting to what that new normal feels like.” In this unfamiliar post-inflationary territory, people seem to care more about how much things cost than about how much money they have, even if economists insist that those things are symmetrically important.

[Rogé Karma: The 1970s economic theory that needs to die]

I should confess that I’m among the many Americans who experience prices as an atmospheric economic condition and income as something I earn. Early in the pandemic, I got in the habit of making an egg-and-cheese sandwich for breakfast pretty much every day. I recall a six-pack of Thomas English muffins costing about $3.50 at the time. Today, one costs $5.59 at my nearest Wegman’s and $5.29 at the nearest Safeway and Harris Teeter. An economist would probably say I shouldn’t worry about it. After all, since the start of the pandemic, I have changed jobs twice, and my income has risen more than enough to easily cover the extra $2 a week on English muffins. Still, I can’t bring myself to buy them. My higher income feels like something I accomplished through hard work and patience, but the higher price of English muffins just feels wrong. I settle for cheaper, inferior brands while waiting in vain for Thomas to go back under $5. (Or I grab them when I’m at Target, where for some reason they’re still only $3.49.) Unlike most poll respondents, I don’t conclude from this that the economy is bad. On the very specific dimension of egg sandwiches, however, I suppose I do feel worse off.

But perhaps not for long. Grocery prices seem to have finally stopped rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. In fact, according to the most recent government data, they have basically flattened out, increasing by only 0.1 percent in October. The bad news is that, once prices hit a certain level, they tend to stay there. According to Hsu, consumer sentiment has made up about half the ground it lost from the eve of the pandemic to its nadir in June 2022, when inflation was at its peak. How quickly we close the rest of the gap may hinge on how long it takes Americans to stop pining for 2019 prices that are never coming back. Personally, I still can’t wrap my head around paying $5.29 for six English muffins. Ask me again in six months.

I Saw a Sports Miracle

2023-07-01T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 12:03 p.m. ET on July 1, 2023

The game seemed destined to be utterly forgettable. The New York Yankees have underwhelmed this season, especially since their best player got hurt, and the Oakland Athletics are the worst team in baseball. Intent on moving the team to Las Vegas, the A’s owner seems to have given up trying to field a watchable product, like a real-life version of the villain in Major League. The stakes, on a Wednesday night in June, were almost pathetically low.

But I’m a Yankees fan living on the wrong coast, and I like to see them in person when I can. As my train pulled into the Oakland Coliseum, a dreary concrete slab of a ballpark, I checked the starting lineups on my phone. When you go to a baseball game, you hope to see one of your team’s best pitchers. Alas, the Yankees’ starter was Domingo Germán, an undistinguished 30-year-old who was booed off the mound by his own fans in his previous outing. Not a lot of star power. Oh well: I’d drink a few beers, eat some popcorn, and watch some meaningless baseball.

There’s a religious quality to attending any baseball game, no matter how uneventful, like taking your seat in a church or synagogue. You’re part of a crowd observing a set of rituals established more than a century ago. The basic rules of the game have barely changed since the 1890s. It’s not quite nostalgia, which implies a longing for something lost. It’s more like stepping outside time entirely.

[From the July/August 2023 issue: Moneyball broke baseball]

If your standard ball game is vaguely religious, a perfect game—when a pitcher gets through the entire contest without allowing a man on base—has a touch of the miraculous. Before Wednesday, in the 154-year history of professional baseball, there had only been 23 of them. Germán was an unlikely candidate to pitch the 24th. He has never made an All-Star Team. His salary is one-14th that of his teammate Gerrit Cole, the Yankees’ pitching ace. And he’s at best a flawed hero. A few years ago, he served an 81-game suspension for domestic violence, and earlier this season, he was suspended for 10 games after using a foreign substance to improve his grip on the ball. Then again, no one has ever been a likely candidate to pitch a perfect game. Although most perfect games are thrown by great pitchers, most great pitchers never throw one. Since 1880, more men have been elected president of the United States than have pitched a perfect game. Before Wednesday night, no one had done it since 2012.

For the first few innings, nobody seemed to notice that Germán was churning through the A’s batters. It felt normal, because they’re terrible. After the fourth inning, however, I turned to the friend sitting next to me. Do you realize Oakland hasn’t had a base runner yet? Still, we didn’t make much of it. A perfect game for Domingo Germán? In a half-empty Oakland ballpark, in a trivial midsummer game between two crummy teams? After each inning, almost as a joke, I would nudge my friend. He’s perfect through five! He’s perfect through six! I was savvy enough to know Germán wouldn’t pull it off. Still, it was funny to pretend that he might.

If you don’t follow baseball, it might not be clear why perfect games are so rare. Even the very best hitters get on base less than half the time, giving the pitcher the advantage in any individual at-bat. But to pitch a perfect game, the pitcher must retire 27 batters in a row. (That’s three outs per inning over nine innings.) The A’s hitters have an average on-base percentage of .300, meaning they make an out 70 percent of the time. The chance of something with 70 percent probability occurring 27 times in a row works out to about one in 15,000. That’s close to the actual historical rate of perfect games, which have occurred about once every 10,000 games, according to the website Baseball Reference. Even against the worst team in baseball, those odds are unfathomably long.

The eye observes what the numbers prove. Once a batter makes contact with the ball, the outcome is largely random. A hard-hit ball might fly straight into a fielder’s glove for an out, while a scuffed ball could bloop its way into an empty patch of grass for a hit. Every time an Oakland hitter put the ball in play, the New York fans in the crowd braced for it to drop onto the grass or scoot between infielders. And every time, the ball found its way to the glove of a Yankees fielder, who calmly made the play. By the eighth inning, we were roaring with each Oakland out. By the ninth, we were on our feet. When the Yankee third baseman, Josh Donaldson, fielded the final batter’s ground ball, we erupted. Even the poor Oakland fans, aware that they had witnessed something extraordinary, seemed more surprised than upset.

[Chris Beneke: Baseball is speeding up again]

Baseball provides irresistible fodder for metaphor and moral instruction. If a guy like Germán can achieve immortality through one night of perfection, what does that mean for the rest of us? Do we all have within ourselves the potential for just one moment of transcendence, no matter how much we struggle? It’s nice to think so, but—no, probably not. Germán might not be a star, but as a professional baseball player, he is already one of the best and most successful athletes on the planet. In fact, he threw six no-hit innings in his very first Major League start. He’s not really an everyman.

Maybe, then, we should think of Germán’s perfect game as a testament to the role of luck and privilege in any individual achievement, no matter how impressive. In the most pivotal play of the night, the Yankees’ star first baseman, Anthony Rizzo, made a slick grab to stop a hard-hit ball from making it to the outfield. Rizzo has won four Gold Gloves, the award for the best defensive player at each position, and makes $17 million in annual salary. Would his counterpart on the A’s, who earns the league’s minimum salary of $720,000, have made that stop? Maybe not. The Oakland fielders bungled quite a few easy plays that night. If Germán had been pitching for them, bad fielding would have ruined his perfect game early on.

That’s all true enough, but I prefer a third interpretation. You will probably not achieve any miracles. But if you get lucky, you might just witness one.

This article originally misstated the Yankees player who recorded the final out of the game.

Authenticity Just Means Faking It Well

2019-04-25T06:00:00-04:00

Does Hillary Clinton really keep hot sauce in her purse? How can Bernie Sanders truly be a socialist if he’s a millionaire? Are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s humble roots, featured prominently in her campaign video, enough to prove her authenticity?

“Be authentic”—there may be no more ubiquitous piece of advice to candidates for office. Yet there’s little agreement on what authenticity actually means, perhaps because the concept is often applied in ways that seem contradictory. An authenticity deficit was widely seen as one of the reasons Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012. Four years later, it contributed to Hillary Clinton’s defeat to Donald Trump. How can the same quality account for the success of two figures as different as Trump and Obama? How can Trump in particular—an inveterate fabricator born to fabulous wealth who poses as the self-made tribune of the working class—come across as so authentic to so many?

The answer is that, when we talk about authenticity in politics, it turns out we’re usually describing something specific: Candidates from Obama to Trump to the Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg seem authentic to the extent that they seem to be saying what they’re really thinking, rather than what they’re “supposed” to say. The key word here is seem.

[Peter Beinart: There’s a reason many voters have negative views of Warren—but the press won’t tell you why]

In a paper published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the academics Rachel Gershon and Rosanna K. Smith described the results of a variety of tests showing that listeners perceived speakers to be less authentic when they were told that the speakers were repeating themselves. Self-repetition, they argue, “confronts observers with the performative nature of the interaction” and challenges our assumption that “social interactions, even those that are typically performed and repeated, are assumed to be unique.”

In other words, we’re wired to assume that all speech is extemporaneous. When that assumption is revealed to be false, we penalize the speaker. This is true, the authors found, even in contexts where it makes no sense to expect speakers not to repeat themselves, such as listening to a tour guide or a stand-up comic.

This finding helps make sense of the Obama-Trump paradox. Authenticity is not about being honest; it’s about seeming unscripted. If you sound rehearsed, then you can’t possibly be saying whatever you’re thinking right now; you’re saying something you decided to say at some moment in the past. Obama and Trump both have an uncommon ability to avoid that pitfall—even if they do so in very different ways.

As a candidate and as president, Obama had the gift of seeming unrehearsed. He could deliver scripted speeches with the emotion, humor, energy, and surprise of someone articulating his ideas for the first time. Recall that one of the ways Republicans tried to bring him down was to point out that he was reading from teleprompters: They sought to undermine his authenticity by puncturing the illusion that he was speaking off the top of his head. (Indeed, a major thread of the conservative reaction to Obama, including Trump’s birther conspiracy theory, was to avoid engaging with him on substance and instead insinuate that he was not what he seemed—that he was inauthentic.)

At the other end of the spectrum we find Hillary Clinton. Despite her obvious qualifications, she was hamstrung as a presidential candidate by an inability to sound like a normal person when addressing large audiences. Her performances in the major televised contexts in which most Americans saw her in 2016 were generally robotic and awkward—filled with strange pauses and painfully delivered jokes, drained of spontaneity. That, as much as anything, explains why voters were so primed to entertain questions about her authenticity and trustworthiness. (Clinton, to be sure, was also held to unfair standards because of her sex. But her problem was a variation of the same one that male candidates such as Al Gore and John Kerry faced before her.)

[Read: Elizabeth Warren doesn’t want to be Hillary 2.0]

Trump achieves authenticity in a more unusual way. First, of course, he brazenly violates all kinds of taboos—against racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and so on. This scans as authentic because, even if it’s a calculated play to his supporters’ worst instincts, it’s clearly not what any political consultant would tell a candidate to do. Second, even more uniquely, Trump really does speak extemporaneously. In his rallies and TV appearances, he ad-libs and rambles wildly off topic. (Ditto his Twitter feed.) This is why, as so many others have noted, Trump is at his least Trump-like when he’s reading a scripted speech like the State of the Union address. It also may be why aspiring mini-Trumps haven’t been particularly successful at the ballot box: When standard Republicans try to rebrand as MAGA diehards without re-creating Trump’s gonzo showmanship, voters don’t buy it.

So the paradox of a serial liar such as Trump coming across as authentic isn’t much of a paradox at all. Trump lies authentically. He is so committed to saying whatever he feels like that he doesn’t let the truth get in the way.

Of course, authenticity isn’t exclusively about public speaking. A candidate’s biography, political positions, and track record all play a role. But public speaking has outsize importance, at least at the national level, simply because voters overwhelmingly get their input about a candidate’s personality by seeing them give a speech or interview or participate in a televised debate.

What does that tell us about the 2020 race? Among the current crop of presidential hopefuls, several have the knack for authenticity. Bernie Sanders paces the field with his ragged self-presentation and his blunt criticism of the wealthy and capitalism itself. Kamala Harris has an effective natural style. But the candidate who most fully embodies the Obama brand of authenticity-as-effective-performance—and whose surprising prominence is utterly inexplicable without it—is Buttigieg. If you’ve heard anything about the South Bend, Indiana, mayor, it’s probably that he’s awfully smart. But there are plenty of highly intelligent people in the race, and it’s not clear that Buttigieg is truly smarter than any of them. For all his stated commitment to “bringing forward good ideas,” he has yet to make an original policy argument, unlike many of his rivals; he recently proposed a tax credit for child care, something he could literally have pulled from Clinton’s 2016 campaign site.

[Peter Beinart: Nobody knows anything about ‘electability’]

What sets Buttigieg apart as a political talent, then, is not really his intellect. It’s his ability to give a speech, or answer questions onstage, in a way that makes it seem as though he’s earnestly thinking through his beliefs in real time. “Like Obama before him, like [Bill] Clinton before that, he ruminates in public,” said the journalist Ezra Klein by way of introducing Buttigieg to his podcast audience. “Unlike a lot of politicians, he’s willing to say quite a bit.” Klein probably understands, on some level, that these men aren’t really ruminating; Clinton and Obama were deeply calculating politicians, and all indications are that Buttigieg—a former Rhodes Scholar and McKinsey consultant who took seven months away from his mayoral duties to serve in the Navy Reserve in Afghanistan—is one too. But just as Trump’s most loyal voters can’t help but be taken in by the billionaire president’s man-of-the-people routine, well-educated liberals can’t help being drawn to someone who plays the part of the thoughtful intellectual.

This raises an obvious question: If the art of authenticity resides in making the scripted seem spontaneous, doesn’t that make it fundamentally inauthentic?

Short answer: yes. Great orators such as Obama—or Ronald Reagan, literally an actor—have the gift of obscuring the artificiality of political communication. Most normal people, ironically, would come across as spectacularly inauthentic if forced to give a campaign speech, because they would be stiff and rehearsed. “In reality, all politicians are strategic about the image and behaviors they present to voters,” wrote the political scientist Brendan Nyhan in 2015. “Some just hide the artifice better than others.”

That doesn’t mean we should ignore authenticity entirely, however. Convincing illusions have real-world effects. When a magician makes a card vanish and reappear, you know deep down that your eyes have been fooled; still, your brain can’t help but perceive the illusion as real. Authenticity is like political magic. The best you can do is remind yourself it’s a trick.