Kate Cray | The Atlantic

The First Millennial Saint

2025-09-06T07:00:00-04:00

Visit the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in the Italian town of Assisi, and you’ll encounter the life-size cutout of a teen boy: the soon-to-be Saint Carlo Acutis. His real body, encased in wax, lies nearby in a brightly tiled coffin with a glass panel in the center. He’s dressed as you might expect a kid his age would be, in jeans, a zip-up jacket, and Nikes. Stone panels behind the coffin depict scenes from his life with some symbolic flourishes. In one, the logos of Facebook, Google, and other internet companies float around him.

Acutis, who is scheduled to be canonized on September 7, is unusual among saints. Born in London in 1991 and raised in Italy, he grew up with the internet—playing video games, making websites—and died at age 15, of leukemia. He’s the first prospective saint to be entombed in branded gear. He’s also the first Millennial.

The Catholic Church has embraced Acutis’s identity as an ordinary teen and internet user. “The digital world can expose you to the risk of self-absorption, isolation and empty pleasure,” Pope Francis wrote in Christus Vivit, a 2019 letter to young Catholics. “But don’t forget that there are young people even there who show creativity and even genius.” He pointed to Acutis as one example. Pope Leo also called on Acutis’s legacy in a homily at the Jubilee of Young People this summer. Vatican representatives and news outlets have described Acutis as “a computer genius,” a “tech-savvy teen,” and “a child of the Web and the digital age.” As the rector of the shrine where Acutis’s remains lie said in 2022, “His ‘normality’ attracts and is an example for many.”

Yet there’s another way to see Acutis. Sure, he played video games, but he limited himself to one hour a week—not exactly typical kid behavior. He used his computer skills not to hang out in chat rooms or make goofy websites but to help his local parish and the Vatican with web design. He was apparently so fascinated by Eucharistic miracles—stories about the bread that believers take at Communion transforming into human heart tissue or starting to bleed—that he created an in-person exhibit and accompanying website about them. A movie about his life describes him as a “teenage mystic,” a term that harkens back to figures such as Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century abbess known for her trancelike visions. According to his mother, even before his leukemia diagnosis Acutis said he knew he would die young. Timothy P. O’Malley, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame, said in a 2024 lecture, “Carlo was weird.” And recognizing that, O’Malley suggested, is the key to “unlocking his holiness.”

[Read: ‘Dumbed-down Catholicism was a disaster’ ]

To a certain extent, the tension in Acutis’s story—“He’s just like us!” but also, not like us—is part of any sainthood campaign. But the diverging understandings of Acutis also speak to an urgent question for the Church, about how to reconcile certain of the faith’s teachings with advances in science and technology. Some of the faithful resolve this conflict by rejecting the faith’s more otherworldly elements; most Catholics in the United States, for example, don’t believe in transubstantiation, which asserts that Communion bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Meanwhile, many of the most devout believers continue to embrace rituals that can seem out of place in the modern world. Still others fall somewhere in between.

Acutis has inspired devotion from both of these corners of the faith—even when they seem to clash. He represents a Church at an uncertain juncture: a contemporary, technologically fluent teenager who was also deeply interested in stories about bread turning into flesh.

Compared with other recent saints, Acutis has had a singular level of posthumous fame. One Facebook group honoring him has more than 320,000 members. More than 1 million people are reported to have visited the shrine in person last year; even more have seen its livestream. In one TikTok video, a girl films herself crying as she visits his tomb. In another, she writes that Acutis “changed my life forever.” A supposed lock of his hair sold online for 2,000 euros this year; the Catholic Church denounced the sale, but that hasn’t stopped more unverified relics from popping up. A Chicago parish has been named after him.

Acutis is set to become a saint fewer than 20 years after his death, light speed for a Church that once mandated candidates wait five decades before their cases could be considered. Such velocity isn’t unheard of, Carlo Nardella, a sociology professor at the University of Milan, told me—but the exceptions are generally prominent figures such as Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II, not ordinary people like Acutis.

The success of the campaign to canonize Acutis seems to be the result of two forces: a concerted effort by his family—a wealthy and powerful one—to share his story, and the usefulness of his identity to the Church. After Acutis died, in 2006, his mother, Antonia Salzano, who works for a Vatican organization that promotes research on martyrs, devoted herself to giving talks and speaking with journalists about him and all the miracles she believed him responsible for. She also sent his exhibit on Eucharistic miracles to more than 500 parishes, the Catholic News Agency reporter Courtney Mares wrote in her book, Blessed Carlo Acutis: A Saint in Sneakers. By 2007, an official in Milan tasked with presenting cases for sainthood said Acutis was worth looking int o. In 2011, a group of priests and loved ones formed an association to advocate for his cause, and by 2013, the inquiry into his life had officially begun.

[Read: The misunderstood reason millions of Americans stopped going to church]

Church leaders ultimately decide who becomes a saint. But campaigns for sainthood thrive on devotion from laypeople. A would-be saint needs to be proved responsible for two miracles, which happens only when enough people know about and pray to the candidate. A new population began to learn about Acutis when, in 2010, the Brazilian priest Marcelo Tenório heard of him from his godson and spread his story around the country. Tenório held services in his honor, mailed pamphlets to parishes, and befriended Salzano, who gave him a relic of Acutis’s to exhibit. In 2013, a young boy with a malformed pancreas touched that relic at a church in São Sebastião, Brazil, and prayed that he would stop vomiting. According to the boy’s family, he was eating normally when he got home that day.

In 2020, after the Church recognized the miracle, Acutis was beatified. Last year, the Church recognized a second miracle for Acutis, when a Costa Rican university student who was studying in Italy and suffering from severe head trauma said she was healed unexpectedly after her mother visited Acutis’s tomb. It was official: Acutis would become a saint.

Acutis’s story is a convenient one for the Church right now. His canonization is happening at a time when the Catholic population in the U.S. is rapidly aging. Catholicism “needs young people who are a good example of how to be devout,” Massimo Faggioli, a professor of historical theology at Villanova University, told me, “without being anti-modern, anti-society, anti-world.” Acutis fits neatly in that niche.

The people I spoke with who work with young Catholics told me that seeing oneself in a saint can draw believers in. Katherine Dugan, a professor studying contemporary Catholicism at Springfield College, in Massachusetts, said that the highly religious students she has researched “love a saint that’s married. They love talking about lay saints, saints that do normal things that they can relate to.” Kathleen Sprows Cummings, an American studies and history professor at Notre Dame and the author of A Saint of Our Own, told me, “My students are fascinated by him.” She continued, “They were talking about, like, ‘He’s wearing Nike sneakers.’ They just thought this was just the greatest thing.”

Any relatable characteristic could lure in the faithful, but, for the Church, the internet is a point of particular interest. The Vatican is certainly not against the online world; the Catholic Church was an early adopter of the internet, creating an official website in 1995. But some officials do seem wary of it. At a recent address to Catholic influencers, Pope Leo urged attendees to focus less on their follower count and more on their message. Heidi A. Campbell, a Texas A&M professor who studies technology and religion, told me, “The Catholic Church is very pro using this technology as long as it’s affirming their values.” Acutis’s digital restraint seemed to achieve this balance: The official decree recognizing his heroic virtues—an early hurdle on the path to sainthood—cites his computer use as a model.

[Read: The Catholics who have to worship somewhere else]

Acutis’s devotion to the Eucharist seems to be another helpful point. “He was an average, simple, spontaneous, likable young man,” Cardinal Agostino Vallini said in a 2020 homily. He also highlighted Acutis’s attendance at daily Mass and the time he spent in Eucharistic adoration. As an ordinary teenager who also revered Communion, Acutis offers Vatican officials a way to show how belief in the practice can coexist with contemporary life.

But not all Catholics are looking for ordinariness in their religious figures. Many devout young people in the U.S. tend to desire an “intentionally countercultural, more evangelistic Catholicism,” Katherine Schmidt, a religious-studies professor at Molloy University, told me. Molly Worthen, a religious-history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that around the world, plenty of believers have a “hunger for evidence of God’s presence” that is not satisfied by “modern rationalistic approaches to the universe.” She added: “The future of Christianity is highly supernaturalist.” Acutis appeals to this cohort too.

The push and pull between adapting to the world and standing apart from it is core not just to Acutis’s life but also to the history of Catholicism. Over the years, many in the Church have felt that it needs to change to avoid extinction. Worthen told me that in the 16th and 17th centuries, this impulse led the Vatican to tighten up the scientific rigor of its miracle-vetting process in response to reports of levitating saints. More recently, Church officials have discouraged the faithful from worshipping in Latin. At the same time, Schmidt told me, many other Catholics think that “if we don’t get really clear on what it is we believe and offer something substantive to people, then we’re gonna die.”

One unique feature of the Catholic Church, Worthen told me, has been its ability “more than maybe any other religious institution in the modern world” to keep all of those diverging beliefs “under one tent.” One day, devotees may decide whether Acutis was weird or relatable. Or they may not. For now, his story may be best for the Church if it’s left unresolved.

Parenting in America Keeps Getting More Intensive

2025-02-06T14:34:00-05:00

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

In 1933, the author Isadore Luce Smith made a bold declaration in The Atlantic: “A new type of parent has evolved.” These parents, Smith reported, hired baby specialists, pored over child-rearing books, and were obsessed with issues such as thumb-sucking. They bought only educational toys and carefully monitored their kids’ progress in nursery school. They were raising their children to be, in short, “supermen and superwomen.”

Nearly a century later, the phenomenon Smith wrote about has become an ideal for parents in America. It’s called intensive parenting, and it’s defined by the amount of time, labor, and money it demands. That work could involve anything from reviewing flash cards with a 4-year-old to buying expensive baby gear—so long as it’s all done in the child’s interest. Most experts pinpoint the mid-to-late 20th century as the moment when the method started to take over in earnest. But this parenting philosophy had critics even earlier: An unsigned 1902 Atlantic article about “strenuous parentage” expressed concern for “the poor parent!” Spending so much time with one’s kids would surely leave parents worn out, with barely any time for themselves, the writer contended. More than a century later, it’s clear that they were right.

The U.S. surgeon general has declared parental stress a public-health issue. Parents report feeling isolated, exhausted, and overwhelmed. To deal with this strain, they’ve sought advice—lots of it. “Our generation was full of respect for the printed word. We bought all the standard books in the very newest editions,” Smith wrote of parents in 1933. By the turn of the century, their devotion to expertise had only grown. In 2003, the writer Sandra Tsing Loh, then a new mother, reported for The Atlantic that parents in 1997 had five times more child-rearing books to choose from than parents in 1975. She confessed that she’d turned to the experts for guidance, too—but that her “wobbly tower of self-help books” had left her racked with anxiety. Writing for The Atlantic in 2019, the sociologist Caitlyn Collins, who’d interviewed 135 middle-class working moms, concluded that although professional advice was supposed to soothe them, it ended up “being a source of stress.”

Parents today don’t have to stop at generalized advice. In the age of tech surveillance, specific data about their children are plentiful. Now there are apps that track when babies eat, sleep, and poop, and parents can buy special devices that monitor infants’ heart rates and oxygen levels, which seem better suited for hospital rooms than nurseries. Once kids grow up, location-sharing apps follow their every move, and online gradebooks can send real-time updates to parents’ phones. Put together, this is more information than anyone could realistically metabolize.

All of this pressure and surveillance takes a toll on kids too. Smith’s essay ends on the suggestion that, in approaching child-rearing so seriously, parents risked raising a generation of kids who would turn out to be “deplorably serious-minded, or prigs, or even nervous wrecks.” Whether modern parents are turning their children into prigs is a matter of personal judgment, but Smith’s third proposal actually isn’t too far off: Childhood anxiety has been rising for years. While it’s impossible to blame a single source, there’s a compelling argument that modern parenting has played a role. “The problem with kids today is also a crisis of parenting today,” Kate Julian argued in 2020. “We have a vicious cycle in which adult stress leads to child stress, which leads to more adult stress, which leads to an epidemic of anxiety at all ages.”

Critics of intensive parenting point out that many parents in recent decades put a lot of pressure on their kids from an early age, which was bound to stress them out. And when parents are too involved, children might not get enough space to learn how to solve problems on their own. “What can feel like good parenting in the short term might, paradoxically, threaten a kid’s ability to make safe choices in the long term,” Devorah Heitner wrote in 2023.

Today the parenting pendulum seems to be swinging once again, this time from high-pressure helicopter parenting to the more emotions-focused “gentle parenting,” which largely eschews punishments in favor of working with a child to understand their feelings and behavior—a shift that many welcome. But make no mistake: Though this method may seem to promise a way around the draining nature of modern parenting, it still demands an exhausting amount of time, attention, and patience. Rather than challenging the norms of the intensive philosophy, gentle parenting merely reinforces them. Families haven’t found relief just yet.

New Yorkers Won’t Stop Complaining About Dogs

2024-12-26T14:00:00-05:00

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

“Dogs are so numerous in New York, indeed, that they have already become a nuisance,” the journalist Charles Dawson Shanly wrote in The Atlantic in 1872. He was annoyed by “all the barking … and there is a good deal of it.” Other New Yorkers feared that the dogs roaming the streets were “deleterious to health” (a reasonable concern, given the risk of rabies at the time). Eventually, Shanly wrote, anxieties escalated to the point that “weakminded people began to look upon Ponto’s kennel in the back yard as a very Pandora’s box of maladies too numerous and appalling to be contemplated without terror.”

Some 150 years later, the city’s canine population is rabies free, and you’re unlikely to see any feral dogs running around. But New Yorkers haven’t stopped complaining. “I’m sorry, dog lovers. There are too many of you,” Chloë Sevigny told Rolling Stone in January. “Why Does Everyone Hate My Dog?” a writer for New York magazine wondered earlier this year.

Dogs are everywhere in New York. They play, walk, and—controversially—poop in the same streets and parks that everyone else enjoys, just as they have for centuries. Today, they sometimes even eat in the same restaurants (whether they’re allowed to or not). Sharing public places with dogs might seem easy enough, but in a city so densely packed, space can feel zero-sum. It’s perhaps inevitable that some wonder: Why do dogs get dominion over so much of it?

Back in Shanly’s era, New Yorkers weren’t too concerned about pet dogs—but they were very worried about strays. Around the middle of the 19th century, officials devised a brutal method to deal with them: Police would round up unattended dogs, bring them to the newly created pound, and, if no one claimed them, drown whole packs at a time. “The lamentations set up by [the dogs] are pitiful to hear,” Shanly wrote after witnessing a drowning.

To some, the violence was a necessary evil; humans and feral dogs truly couldn’t safely coexist. “It is better that such should be their end than that our worthy citizens should live in fear of a bite,” read an 1855 New York Times article. But as the drownings continued, early animal-rights activists protested, and by the end of the century, New York’s pound had been replaced by the beginnings of a shelter system (though for decades, those also killed most of the dogs they took in).

With the stray-dog problem more under control, anti-canine attention shifted to pet dogs—specifically, to their excrement. The streets were filthy. Signs in the late 1930s encouraged owners to curb their dogs. The hope was that any waste on the curb would flow more easily to the gutter instead of dirtying the sidewalks.

But the city still wasn’t clean enough. In the 1970s, a new movement emerged, pushing for laws that would require owners to clean up their dog’s poop, as the writer Kelly Conaboy reported in The Atlantic last year. Some people suspected that the movement’s leader, Fran Lee, hoped to ultimately ban dogs from the city entirely, though she denied the claim. (Lee’s anti-animal ire wasn’t limited to dogs. In 1974, she complained to The Atlantic about pigeon waste: “Pigeons are dirty, dirty, dirty animals,” she told a reporter, “and every single one of them should be taken away.”) The city never banned dogs, but a law requiring owners to pick up after their dogs passed in 1978.

Today, scooping is the norm. A few skirmishes have broken out over violators (whom the Department of Sanitation pledged to crack down on in 2022, though enforcement remains minimal), but modern debates about dogs in the city are largely about more than where they go to the bathroom: Should dogs be able to play in parks alongside kids? What about if they’re unleashed, or if it’s a sports field specifically built for children? Do people really need to bring their pets with them everywhere?

In some communities, dogs can feel like a bellwether of gentrification—both proof of the changes taking place in a neighborhood and another force drying up limited resources. They may not be the physical threat they once were, but in the absence of real danger, views have grown more polarized. The dog-loving faction has perhaps never been more devoted, seeing dogs as members of their family and pushing the limits of where their beloved pets can accompany them. Meanwhile, people on the other side are subject to just as much barking, shedding, and licking as ever, sometimes in places they weren’t before. The next frontier of the dog wars may be finding a way not just to coexist, but to do so happily.

What Can Having Pets Teach You About Parenting?

2024-04-16T07:00:00-04:00

When I brought my new dog, a 4-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Grace, home for the holidays last year, I was nervous. I didn’t know how she’d react to the unfamiliar environment, so I kept scanning the floor for items she might swallow. She wasn’t perfectly house-trained yet, so I was constantly watching to see if she started to walk in circles—a sign that she has to go to the bathroom.

After a week with no trouble, my mom gently called me out. “You’re being a helicopter parent,” she said. “Grace might do better if you stopped hovering over her.” The comment jarred me. I’d always assumed that I’d be a good nurturer, but now that I was actually responsible for another creature, it seemed like I might not have the touch. I started to worry about what this meant not only for Grace but also for my future kids. Was I doomed to hover over them one day as well? Or, if I learned to let go a bit with Grace, could I carry those lessons forward when I had my own child?

The idea of a dog as a “starter kid” is a cliché at this point—but there’s a bit of truth to it. Millennials have delayed having children, adopted dogs in droves, and frequently consider those pets to be as much a part of the family as any human, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu recently reported. Many are raising a dog before they have a baby. In fact, in a 2021 survey commissioned by a pet-food brand, four in 10 dog and cat parents said that they got their pet to test whether they were ready for a kid. Of course, raising animals is in many ways not at all comparable to raising children, and no one who doesn’t actually want a dog should get one as a practice baby. That said, pet parenting does have things to teach future parents of humans. Some connections, such as “potty” training, are obvious. But on a broader level, getting a pet requires taking responsibility for another living thing’s well-being. The experience can offer insight into your tendencies as a caregiver—and, with the right amount of self-awareness, a chance to grow.

Parenting preparation is a spectrum. Reading advice books is on one end of it: You might pick up a few tips, but the learning is just theoretical. Caring for human children, perhaps by babysitting, gets you closer to the actual experience. Experts told me that it’s close to the best practice you can have, though the average person’s opportunities to do it are dwindling as teen babysitters grow rarer and families tend to be smaller, giving kids fewer opportunities to watch younger siblings and cousins. Responsibly raising pets (especially those that require more attention, such as cats and dogs) is somewhere in between; dogs are probably the most relevant, given how much work training one takes. Crucially, caring for a pet lets you learn by doing, which Susan Walker, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota who specialized in parenting education, told me is more effective than reading generic advice.

[Read: Why don’t we teach people how to parent?]

Both dogs and kids need help learning how to behave—though with dogs it’s of course more a matter of simple dos and don’ts than the morality of right and wrong we try to instill in children. But some of the principles of good dog training do translate to teaching young kids. Experts generally agree that for both groups, positive reinforcement should guide discipline. Whether the problem is a toddler coloring on the wall or a puppy chewing on your shoes, the parenting coach Elisabeth Stitt recommends responding with a quick correction followed by a warm distraction. You might say no and then give the dog a toy bone and the child a coloring book. Perhaps most important is to keep these expectations consistent and to repeat lessons over and over. “Parents will say to me, ‘I’ve told my kids a million times,’” Stitt told me. “Good. That’s what you need to do.” Grace still pulls on her leash at least once a day when I walk her—and each time I have to stop, wait for her to come back, and then give her a treat when we start back up again.

What’s more, both dogs and infants have no choice but to communicate without words. Learning to read a dog’s cues can help strengthen the skill of “perspective taking,” or the ability to see the world through another’s point of view, Gail Melson, a professor emeritus at Purdue University studying families and animals, told me. Developing that muscle might make it easier to later interpret a child’s early attempts at self-expression. Having firsthand knowledge that what seems like misconduct could actually be a signal of fear, boredom, or frustration is helpful for developing the patience required for parenting. Rather than reacting with anger, perhaps you’ll know to think, “What’s the motivation behind that behavior, and how can we meet whatever those needs are?” Shelly Volsche, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls studying human-animal interaction, explained to me.

And if you get a dog with a partner, you’ll be doing all of this learning alongside them. Think of it as a rehearsal for some of the logistics of co-parenting. “A lot of times, couples get blindsided because they don’t necessarily have a plan for who’s going to feed the baby or who’s going to diaper the baby, who’s going to get up at night,” Darby Saxbe, a University of Southern California professor studying the transition to parenthood, told me. Dogs aren’t nearly as much work, but you still have to divvy up who walks and feeds them. Doing that fairly “might set a healthy precedent” for splitting child-care duties, Saxbe said. When you do eventually have a kid, perhaps you’ll already have a framework for discussing a shared approach.

[Read: Pets really can be like human family]

But more than chore charts and discipline, raising a pet—and, to a far greater extent, raising a child—demands making sacrifices. No matter how tired you are in the morning, you have to get out of bed to soothe a crying baby or to take a dog out to pee, Saxbe explained. Workdays will get interrupted if your kid or pet gets sick. And you never get a break, unless you secure a sitter—but even in those cases, you’ll still want to be reachable in emergencies. “That is a really dramatic shift, I think, for people that have never had a baby or a pet,” Saxbe told me.

Adjusting your schedule to the rhythms of life with a dog might help make space for an eventual baby too. Perhaps you’ll have redone your budget to afford vet bills—a decision some of Laurent-Simpson’s research subjects have made. Maybe you’ll be used to staying out late less frequently to get home for your dog. You may have lined up friends who could watch a pet or a baby in a pinch; as experts told me, building community is vital for any type of caregiving.

On a deeper level, caring for a pet can spur personal reflection. You may get a window into “Who am I as a nurturer?” Volsche explained. Are you too much of a pushover? Do you dole out discipline too harshly? “The parenting styles are very similar, independent of whether we’re talking about dogs or whether we’re talking about human children, because we’re focused on the human caregiver’s behavior,” Monique Udell, a professor at Oregon State University studying human-animal interactions, told me. And, as Udell’s research has shown, the ideal parenting style—authoritative parenting—is the same for dogs and kids. Authoritative parents have high expectations—for a dog’s training or a kid’s schoolwork, say—but are caring and responsive to their dependent’s needs. Though the needs may be very different, caretakers of both pets and humans should strive for a balance of warmth and structure, Udell said.

[Read: Dogs need understanding, not dominance]

Of course, there’s no guarantee that people with pets will take advantage of the opportunity to start mastering that balance. Unfortunately, no one I spoke with knew of any research on the transition from pet parent to human parent. Sometimes people learn through a process of “generalization,” Melson explained, and apply what they pick up in one realm to another. But at other times, learning tends more toward “compartmentalization.” And we just don’t know whether pet parents are generalizing these lessons or compartmentalizing them. That said, nearly everyone I spoke with agreed that people could learn some parenting skills from having pets—especially if they approached the process with intention.

So I’ve been trying to do that with Grace, and as I’ve grown more confident, so has she. When I first got her, she was scared of almost everything: cars, going on walks, the vacuum cleaner. My lap was her safety blanket, and I was eager to soothe her. But, with practice, I’ve gotten better at tolerating my discomfort with her discomfort. Rather than preemptively comforting her when we go somewhere new, I’ve learned to practice patience, give lots of positive reinforcement (read: treats), and gently encourage her to explore; the world really has so many things to sniff. She still recoils when motorcycles pass, but at other times, she’ll chase the leaves that drift by and pounce on pine cones. I’m there if she needs reassurance, but I’m finding that she’s turning to me, trembling, less and less.

The Fairy-Tale Promises of Montessori Parenting

2024-02-27T06:30:00-05:00

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“Giving my 4-year-old a random food without explanation to see what he does,” an automated voice says at the start of a TikTok from the parenting influencer known as LauraLove. She hands her son, Carter, a container of ricotta cheese. He announces quickly: He’ll make stuffed shells.

Carter seems incredibly prepared, standing on a platform to reach the stove. He seasons the beef, cooks the pasta, mixes the filling, and stuffs the shells. Sure, his motions are clumsy and he goofs off while he works. But the end dish looks pretty good. Even more compelling, though, might be how Carter responds to his mistakes. When he drops a stuffed shell upside down, he makes a joke. When he splashes egg on himself, he doesn’t flinch. “I got a little wet,” he says. “But that’s fine. That happens when you’re cooking.”

The whole video—Carter’s demeanor, the equipment he stands on, even the choice of activity—is filled with the hallmarks of Montessori parenting. You might recognize the name Montessori from the group of schools known for prioritizing child autonomy and learning through play. Though the parenting approach is not officially affiliated with Montessori education, you can think of it as a sort of DIY descendant, in which people apply many of the same concepts in a new realm. Recently it’s become highly visible, in large part because of social media. (LauraLove, for instance, has nearly 8 million followers.) Now Montessori influences pervade the design of playrooms, popular toys, and even the general ethos of self-sufficiency that defines many modern child-rearing theories.

[Read: The Parent Test stokes American parenting’s worst impulses]

I was curious about the philosophy’s appeal, so I spoke with seven Montessori-parenting adherents. Some were stay-at-home parents; others had to balance caregiving with paid work. Many told me about being nervous first-time parents who just wanted a child-rearing style to rely on. Indeed, Mairin Augustine, a researcher who studies parenting, told me that applying Montessori educational ideas to raising kids can amount to good parenting. (Even if it is dressed up in impressive branding and comes with a whole lot of merch.) But while Montessori parenting can be rewarding, it can also be particularly expensive and labor-intensive.

Of course, TikToks like the one of Carter cooking leave a lot out. Clearly this wasn’t his first time in the kitchen. (LauraLove does have other videos where she teaches her sons to cook, and admitted in a comment that she gave Carter “a little help here & there,” but said he “remembered & did most of it on his own.”) As any parent will tell you, such videos just aren’t representative of what cooking with young kids is typically like.

“Make time for your child to do things in her own way and at her own pace,” the Association Montessori Internationale’s parenting website preaches. A lovely idea, but not exactly a practical one for many parents. When making muffins, for example, Nicole Kavanaugh, the creator of a Montessori-parenting blog and podcast, told me that she might be eager to dump the batter into the tin, “but my child might want to sit and whisk.” Waiting for a kid to finish can be logistically disruptive, but for Kavanaugh, the greater struggle was often mental. She described literally sitting on her hands to stop herself from intervening in one of her children’s tasks.

Depictions of Montessori parenting, particularly on social media, can make it seem like a prescription for idyllic family life—they suggest that your kid, too, could be cooking fancy Italian meals at age 4, and that tantrums could be easily defused by empathetic conversation, and that your home could also be effortlessly tidy, if you just adopted Montessori. But raising kids isn’t so simple, and even parents who are willing and able to invest the money, time, and emotional work in this method may find themselves disappointed when expectations butt up against reality. Ultimately, no one can escape the hard truth: No matter how hard you work to organize a playroom, you can’t eliminate chaos or uncertainty from parenting.

The Montessori approach to parenting is rooted in a respected pedagogical system started in the early 20th century by the Italian educator Maria Montessori. She preached that kids were innately orderly, focused, and self-motivated, and should be given freedom to choose what they learn. She believed that play is educational, and she filled schoolrooms with what others saw as mere toys. She found value in housework, too, and had students do chores as part of their lessons. She lamented that the world was not built to be accessible to children—and she created a school that was. Its philosophy lives on in the many modern-day schools that bear her name.

When Simone Davies, the author of the popular book The Montessori Toddler, discovered the approach about 20 years ago, Montessori schools had already started to proliferate in the U.S. Yet Davies, who is based in Amsterdam, struggled to find any books that explained how to implement these principles at home. But over the past decade, Kavanaugh told me, platforms such as Instagram and YouTube have become a “breeding ground” for Montessori parenting. Those platforms are visual, and the philosophy lends itself well to striking aesthetics: The playrooms tend to be clean and minimalist; watching a 2-year-old chop vegetables is mesmerizing. “It was just this perfect storm,” Kavanaugh said. Add the tie to a prestigious educational brand, and it’s no wonder the approach has taken off.

But much of what is labeled Montessori today has little meaningful association with the original philosophy. Because the name was never trademarked, anyone can use it. (The Association Montessori Internationale, which Maria co-founded with her son, offers certifications to schools and teachers, but those are optional.) So-called Montessori toys abound: See, for example, the Pikler triangle—also billed as a “Montessori Climber,” despite having been created by a different pioneer in early education—a sort of glorified ladder that sells for as much as $299. The Montessori aesthetic has become so heavily marketed that if you mention Montessori on a parenting board, people may think you mean beige wooden blocks, not a radical pedagogical approach that centers children’s needs.

The actual parenting philosophy is adapted from Maria’s educational principles as well as comments she made about parents’ role in child development. At its core, Montessori parenting is defined by three main features. The first, and most important, Davies told me, is a gentle and respectful way of interacting with children that does away with traditional discipline and encourages independence. The second involves creating what is known as a “prepared space”: a well-organized area for kids to play in, with child-size furniture and objects that are all within the child’s reach. The final element is facilitating specialized activities depending on the kid’s age, which can be educational play or helping with chores—like cooking.

Psychologists generally agree that the ideal parenting style is “authoritative” and is characterized by high levels of warmth and control. That means “having consistent messages about what I want from you, but knowing that I love you,” Augustine told me. Many of Maria’s ideas fit nicely under that umbrella. Certain fringe Montessori beliefs are not evidence-backed. (For instance, Maria notoriously preached that cribs, the safest place for infants to sleep, were inhumane cages.) But the overall approach is largely aligned with that authoritative-parenting ideal.

[Read: Why American moms can’t get enough expert parenting advice]

Still, Montessori parenting’s promises can be lofty. One parent claimed in a 2014 issue of the American Montessori Society’s magazine that her 3-year-old twins regularly cooked dishes such as scrambled eggs, biscuits, butter shrimp, and fried rice for the whole family—and then cleaned up afterward. “It may seem that I am talking about a magical, mythical fairyland that parents can only dream about. But this fairyland is real, and it is called Montessori,” she wrote. A similar siren call echoes through all of the pristine playrooms on social media as well as the assurances in books such as The Montessori Toddler that you wouldn’t need to punish your child if you just learn to “cultivate cooperation” with them.

The parents I spoke with who answered that call weren’t necessarily expecting perfection, nor were they completely drawn in by social media’s illusions. Still, when Montessori didn’t work as expected, they tended to be disappointed. Many blamed themselves, but few criticized the philosophy itself. Indeed, Montessori has a principle that makes it customizable but also impossible to disprove: “Follow the child”—which roughly means Be responsive to your kid. So, for example, if a kid doesn’t like a Montessori-style activity a parent spent hours creating, that doesn’t mean something’s wrong with the activity; that means the parent didn’t understand their child’s needs.

When Sara Srinivasan, a mom of three in the Detroit area, had her first child, she knew she wanted to raise him the Montessori way. She knew of some impressive adults who had gone to Montessori schools. So Srinivasan read up on Montessori-parenting principles. She made PowerPoints that mapped out how different Montessori-approved activities corresponded with a child’s developmental milestones. Then she gathered the materials she’d need to carry out these activities: an object-permanence box, a series of handmade mobiles, and more. In all, Srinivasan estimates that she spent at least four to five hours each week doing these activities with him.

The extent of Srinivasan’s labor may seem unusual, but she’s not a complete outlier. The average parent today spends hours more each week with their kids than they did a few decades ago, even as more mothers have entered the workforce. This trend, which emerged in the mid-to-late 20th century, is known as “intensive parenting.” It’s expensive, hard work and entirely focused on the child’s needs, Jenna Stephenson Abetz, a professor at the College of Charleston who has studied family communication, explained to me. Montessori parenting as it’s often practiced today could be seen as one more manifestation of this trend.

[Read: ‘Intensive’ parenting is now the norm in America]

The philosophy asks a lot of caregivers. Take the emphasis on “practical life,” which in layman’s terms means having kids do chores with you and is supposed to teach them life skills—not exactly a revolutionary idea. But carrying it out the Montessori way can be arduous. For instance, The Montessori Toddler’s section on preparing kitchens for kids is filled with lists of recommended child-size materials to buy. And this is in addition to the book’s general guidelines on organizing spaces for children, which remind parents to make sure activities—such as chores—are “beautifully arranged,” “attractive,” and “inviting.” When finally doing the task, parents should be ready with cleaning materials to wipe up any mistakes, the book recommends. The promise is that all of this will save time in the long run. But that payoff can seem awfully distant, especially after so much effort spent trying to make your most boring chores appealing to children with short attention spans.

This level of patience isn’t just for chores; it’s for everything. Successfully getting kids out of the house with shoes and jackets on, minimizing shouting, and embracing mistakes are necessary parts of living happily with kids. But Montessori parenting takes these virtues to a new level. For example, the philosophy recommends that parents let their kids use glassware; watching dishes break if they drop them is supposed to teach kids about the consequences of their actions. But is that lesson worth the danger of children cutting themselves on broken glass, or the price of repeatedly replacing cups and bowls? “Let go of your own feelings,” one Montessori worksheet advises parents. But how can one fully honor a child’s emotional state without honoring one’s own?

By the time Srinivasan had her second and third children, her approach to parenting had transformed. With her attention more divided, she didn’t feel as organized. So she did away with her firstborn’s earnest Montessori program. She noticed that her second baby was eager to play with his big brother, and her third wanted to help around the house—so she let them. She still used some of the same materials, and she still felt like a Montessori parent, even if she’d toned down the intensity. “I feel way more well versed with the spirit of Montessori,” she told me.

Srinivasan said that she thinks she created such a committed regimen for her first kid because she didn’t trust herself. “I was taken in by some of the beautiful playrooms I would see on the internet. And I wanted the same sort of peaceful, orderly place,” she said. But, as Srinivasan came to learn, that isn’t always attainable.

Indeed, for new parents, Montessori’s appeal seems to lie in its structure. Parenting is messy; Montessori is orderly—and the implication is that it can bring order to your life, too. Make your surroundings harmonious, and your kids can then carry out elaborate, enriching activities. And nothing can disrupt this peace for long, because if your child is unruly, you can follow a Montessori-inspired series of steps to—respectfully—quiet their tantrum.

These expectations quickly crumble in real life: Of course Montessori can’t eliminate chaos. But approached realistically, Montessori’s principles can serve as a trusted playbook for coping with the chaos, as Srinivasan and many other parents I spoke with discovered.

[Read: Why don’t we teach people how to parent?]

Kathryn Rucker, a film editor and mom living in Chicago, also relied on Montessori principles to help her deal with the stresses of being a first-time mom. When her 2-year-old son threw a tantrum every time she turned off the TV before dinner, Rucker responded with Montessori-style scripts, which encouraged her to play it cool instead of getting angry. (Although many adherents agree that Maria Montessori probably would have recommended banning screens, Rucker allows them in moderation.) But no matter what she did, the tantrum recurred each day. “For a long time, I was like, ‘This can’t be working,’” she told me.

However, as Rucker observed her son and attempted to understand his perspective—to follow her child—she realized: Her most annoying tasks made her grumpy every time she had to do them. The same thing was happening with her son. “Why wouldn’t he get more grace than me?” she wondered. When Rucker noted this, her son’s outbursts no longer seemed so concerning; instead, they felt almost natural. This epiphany hasn’t put an end to the tantrums, but she does feel as though she understands her son better.

Montessori is remarkable for the extent to which it takes children seriously, involving innovations small (art hung at kids’ eye level in their own rooms) and large (putting play at the center of children’s education). The parenting style encourages kids to express themselves—and sometimes, for toddlers, that self-expression involves throwing fits. No amount of respect for your children’s emotional life can change that. The implication that Montessori would make parenting orderly and predictable was always doomed to fail. But the philosophy does give parents something to steady themselves while living through the havoc of helping someone else grow up.

Semi-Retirees Know the Key to Work-Life Balance

2023-05-31T07:00:00-04:00

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The same day that Gayle and Mark Arrowood retired from their jobs at a Department of Energy lab, they drove to Sun Valley, Idaho, to start their next chapter: ski-resort bartending. Mark had a shift that very night.

Their previous roles had been intense: Over multi-decade careers, Mark had worked his way up from a janitor to a manager, and Gayle had gone to night school and become a scheduler for the lab’s projects. Because of how far away they’d lived from the lab, they had needed to wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. to make it in on time. They’d enjoyed aspects of the work, but their days had also been filled with office politicking and an itch to work for the next promotion.

The married couple had started working at the ski resort on weekends years ago, after they’d decided to go to a job fair on a whim. They ended up loving their co-workers and customers, so when they retired in 2017, they saw no reason to stop; although their old jobs could be draining, they actually looked forward to their shifts at the bar. “We were desk jockeys, secretarial admin, management, and now we’re hucking ice and cases of wine. We were six-figure employees, and now we’re making minimum wage,” Gayle told me. “And we love it.”

The Arrowoods’ transition happened amid a strange economic shift in the United States: Over the past 20 years, at the same time as labor-force-participation rates have dropped for younger people, they’ve risen among older adults. Some are simply postponing their exodus from work. But for many, the line between employment and retirement is muddier. In the past month, 13 percent of retired Americans worked for pay, which could mean a one-off gig or a dedicated part-time job. Others are “un-retiring” after a period away.

[Read: The problem with the retirement age is that it’s too high]

For far too many, the decision to continue working is driven by financial necessity—an especially concerning reality given how few healthy years the average poor American has left by the time they reach retirement age. But this trend doesn’t reflect only people who can’t afford to quit. According to one 2014 survey, 80 percent of semi-retirees say they’re employed because they want to be; working after retirement is actually more common among workers with higher socioeconomic status. Though some of them might appreciate the extra income, many seem to also find these jobs enjoyable and fulfilling.

The idea of a retirement purposely filled with work might seem dismal—proof that we’ve prioritized achievement over happiness for so long that we can’t even stop in our 60s. But there might be a less pessimistic way to look at those who actively choose semi-retirement. After all, they represent a rarity in the labor market: the truly empowered worker. Examining what they get from the jobs they don’t need could illuminate what a career can offer the rest of us, helping us reimagine our relationship to work long before it’s time to retire.

At first glance, lazing on the beach might sound more appealing than the Arrowoods’ bartending gig. But days can be long and boring without work to fill them. Joe Casey, who coaches people through retirement, told me that many of his clients are scared of what will come after they leave their career. Most jobs provide structure, socialization, and even basic physical activity. “When you work, there’s a reason to get up in the morning,” Nancy K. Schlossberg, a retirement expert and professor emerita of counseling psychology at the University of Maryland at College Park, explained. When people lose the community and challenge their work provided, their health—both physical and cognitive—can suffer. Of course, there are other ways to keep your brain and body healthy, such as volunteering or pursuing a hobby. But lots of jobs can be surprisingly good for you.

Crucially, the jobs many semi-retirees choose aren’t as demanding as the careers of their youth—or at least not in the same way. Take the Arrowoods: At the ski resort, they have no desire to move up the management ladder. They work on a seasonal schedule that gives them plenty of vacation time to take advantage of last-minute flight deals. They enjoy perks such as free ski passes, and they consider themselves “surrogate grandparents” to their co-workers’ kids. Maybe most importantly, knowing they could quit at any time gives them a sense of autonomy. “This isn’t a job of necessity,” Mark told me. “This is a job of desire.”

[Read: Why the old elite spend so much time at work]

The experts I spoke with told me that semi-retirees tend to look for roles that grant a sense of purpose, the ability to keep learning, and, perhaps more than anything, flexibility. “Most jobs come as full-time, five-day week, 40 hours at least, or more—typically more. And they don’t want to work that way. They want to work differently,” Phyllis Moen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, told me.

Those lucky enough to be able to do so might use this period to pursue niche passions, fulfill lifelong dreams, or find new ones that their younger self would never have thought of. Reporting this story, I heard about an engineer who got involved in the National Park Service, a congressional researcher who trained as a massage therapist, and the vice president of a manufacturing-equipment company who started hawking hot dogs at baseball games. Others might just scale back on hours at their current jobs or step away and come back later. In fact, a full 40 percent of employed people 65 and older were previously retired. But even a temporary retirement, rather like a sabbatical, can give people time to recharge and reevaluate what they want from a career, if they want one at all. If they return—even to a traditionally ambitious role—it might not be because they have to, but because they want to.

The types of flexible gigs that many retired people look for have, historically, been hard to come by. If they weren’t, perhaps even more people would be semi-retired: One study found that about half of retirees would consider returning to work if a good opportunity came their way. But the current tight labor market is forcing some employers to be less rigid. Other trends, such as the push for a four-day work week and the popularity of remote work, can also make employment more appealing to semi-retirees. And companies that are generous to older employees tend to help younger workers too. In her research on age-friendly workplaces in the Twin Cities, Moen found that when companies were more open to accommodating different scheduling needs or giving workers chances to learn, “it opened up opportunities for everyone.”

Of course some of the benefits of semi-retirement are available only to certain people—those who can afford to work in the way they actually want. And part of the magic of semi-retirement is its role as a capstone to a long career. When I asked the Arrowoods whether they regretted their previous work, both said no; those jobs got them where they are today. They got to be recognized for their achievements—and to bolster their savings—before they turned to a role that was simply fun.

As today’s young Americans stare down a future in which it may be common to work 60 years or more before retiring, they’d do well to figure out what they actually enjoy in a job. And plenty of them, it seems, are trying to do just that. More than 50 million people in the U.S. quit their jobs in 2022, many in search of something better—less taxing, more fulfilling, less all-consuming. Even those still striving, then, to create a career they’re proud of might look to semi-retirement as a model of what work could look like—flexible, meaningful, and with the potential for reinvention at any age.

Make Room for More Voices in Philosophy

2023-04-28T11:41:17-04:00

In her new book, How to Think Like a Woman, the journalist Regan Penaluna zooms in on four overlooked female philosophers. Focusing on them is valuable not just because of the luminosity of each one’s thinking but also because of the argument implicit in such a choice: that women have an indispensable role to play in the male-dominated field of philosophy, Sophia Stewart wrote last week.

One’s understanding of the world is invariably shaped by one’s experience in it, so when only certain people become philosophers, the resulting canon is correspondingly narrow and warped, Stewart continued. Some of the most exciting revelations in philosophy have come from efforts to include new voices. For example, the women in Penaluna’s book laid the groundwork for modern feminism. Another consequential development came when the rebellious and anti-authoritarian thinker Johann Gottlieb Fichte argued that philosophy should be accessible to the masses, Andrea Wulf writes in her book Magnificent Rebels. Fichte’s ideas, particularly his assertion that all people have free will, are still foundational to virtually all modern Western thought.

With a wider pool, enlightenment could come from anywhere. For example, many Americans got their introduction to moral philosophy not at a college seminar but on television, by watching The Good Place. The sitcom guides viewers through some of the most famous names in the discipline: One episode title in the last season ingeniously twists the French playwright Jean-Paul Sartre’s declaration that “Hell is other people” into something much more tender that might be seen as the show’s overall message—help is other people.

Kids are another source of unexpected profundity. Their natural curiosity, if taken seriously, can guide adults through philosophical quandaries, as Scott Hershovitz demonstrates when he follows his own children down this path in the book Nasty, Brutish, and Short. And these early ruminations, if nurtured, can lead to even more wisdom later on. Just look at the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s intense dedication to the value of individual freedom, which, if her autobiographical novel Inseparable is any indication, has roots in her childhood.

Acknowledging the value of such diverse philosophical contributions can be humbling. Doing so involves admitting that intelligence doesn’t always look like what we thought it did. But it can also be a freeing reminder that there is so much left to learn—and so many places to learn from.

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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What We’re Reading

Illustration by Matt Chase / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; “Mary Wollstonecraft,” John Opie, 1790–91.

Philosophy’s big oversight

“If philosophy is concerned with the nature of human existence, then a canon dominated by men, to paraphrase Joanna Russ in her 1983 book How to Suppress Women’s Writing, is not just incomplete but distorted.”

📚 How to Think Like a Woman, by Regan Penaluna

Katie Martin / The Atlantic; Getty

Where our sense of self comes from

“When the French revolutionaries declared all men equal, they promised a new social order founded on freedom and the power of ideas. Philosophy left the ivory tower and provoked ordinary people to action. Words and ideas could change the world more fundamentally than could weapons and monarchs.”

📚 Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf

NBC

The Good Place was a metaphor all along

“The NBC sitcom disguised itself as one thing (a comedy about a woman who accidentally got into heaven) before revealing that it was actually something else: a comedic appraisal of philosophy, morality, and the meaning of life.”

🎥 The Good Place, created by Michael Schur

Oliver Munday / The Atlantic

Why kids make the best philosophers

“Every kid—every single one—is a philosopher. In fact, they’re some of the best around.”

📚 Nasty, Brutish, and Short, by Scott Hershovitz

Denise Bellon / AKG images

The philosopher who took happiness seriously

“Inseparable foreshadows a core idea in de Beauvoir’s fiction, as well as her philosophical writing to come: an ongoing, conscious practice of—or negotiation for—freedom by every individual.”

📚 Inseparable, by Simone de Beauvoir

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is Happy Place, by Emily Henry.

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ChatGPT Will Change Housework

2023-04-17T07:00:00-04:00

ChatGPT is revolutionizing work. The AI-powered chatbot, which can write sophisticated responses to just about any prompt and has passed an MBA exam, is holding its own as a coder and is already helping with professional writing. In the few short months since its public launch in 2022, it’s transformed the future of white-collar labor, and provoked an intense debate: Will AI steal our jobs? But during this same period, ChatGPT has also begun quietly shaping work in another, less heralded—but equally influential—realm: the home.

Just as workers have been trying out the software to see how it might make office tasks easier, others have been experimenting with how it might lighten the burdens of unpaid domestic work. Many are using it to plan meals and generate grocery lists. For some it has become an ad hoc family-trip planner and scheduling assistant. Others are testing its ability to budget for a house and make up bedtime stories.

ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI are poised to become a fixture in American homes, similar to other virtual assistants like Alexa. While chatbots could change how certain household tasks get done, it’s less clear whether they could really make a dent in our most persistent domestic challenges: the significant amount of time still spent on chores and the inequality in how that labor is divided.

[Read: Alexa, should we trust you?]

Folks who have started using ChatGPT for their personal to-do lists have found it incredibly useful, especially for one-off tasks. For Raina Kumra, the founder of the company Spicewell and a mother of two in Santa Monica, California, lining up summer camps for her kids each year has been “an entire job.” Many camp options she’s interested in last only one week, so finding enough that didn’t conflict with one another—to cover all of summer vacation—involved making spreadsheets, researching options, and cobbling together a calendar. After all that, she still had to register online, coordinate carpools as needed, find child care for the afternoon if the camp was a half day, and pay all the fees for both of her kids, which could amount to thousands of dollars. This year, she was dreading it. “I turned to AI to help simply out of desperation,” she told me. Within seconds of entering her query, the software generated a comprehensive schedule that (with a few edits) she actually plans to use. It included a good range of activities, from traditional options like sports, art, and nature, to more unexpected choices, such as robotics, cooking, and yoga. This saved her dozens of hours of work, she said.

Unfortunately, there were still dozens of hours of work left to do. Although the AI found the summer camps and made the schedule, it couldn’t complete any of the other steps—including perhaps the biggest one of driving her kids to camp each day. As much as ChatGPT can do, there’s so much it can’t touch. It might share recipes, but it can’t cook meals. It can make a chore chart, but it can’t wash the dishes or take out the trash. Even the steps that it does help with still need oversight. Most people would want to scrutinize a ChatGPT-generated financial plan before implementing it, for example. And despite the clever scheduling it did for Kumra, some of the summer-camp names it gave her were slightly off —she was still able to find them online, but it took more Google sleuthing. Some people who have used the software for family-vacation planning have complained about clichéd suggestions and recommended spots being closed (perhaps because the software has “limited knowledge” of the world after 2021).

In the coming years, many of these kinks will likely be sorted out. But Ekaterina Hertog, the leader of the University of Oxford’s ongoing DomesticAI research project, which is examining what AI has done (and will do) to household labor in the U.K. and Japan, points out that more advanced AI won’t necessarily directly translate to time saved on housework. The introduction of new technology into the home shapes chores in both intentional and unintentional ways. Take washing machines, which seemed like they would easily slash the time people used to spend cleaning clothes by hand. And they did reduce the burden of laundry, but not as much as you might expect, because after their introduction, hygiene standards shot up, and people began to clean their garments more frequently.

[Read: ChatGPT is about to dump more work on everyone]

Hertog suspects that a similar situation could play out with AI. It will likely take practice to learn to write prompts that get the most relevant and helpful responses. And if the software becomes embedded in home life, how much work will it be to teach kids to use it (and to supervise them to make sure they’re doing so safely)? Even more immediately, will having easy access to novel meal plans raise our standards for variety in our diets, leading to more time cooking and shopping?

That second scenario seems to already be playing out for Carole Alalouf, the owner of an animation company who lives in Montreal with her two teens and her husband. Because she has a family of picky eaters—she’s on a Mediterranean diet, her husband is keto, and two of her family members don’t eat pork or shellfish—she cooks the same things over and over, which “drives me bananas,” she told me. ChatGPT instantly gave her some fun new ideas. One of her favorites was Saganaki, a Greek dish featuring fried halloumi cheese, which she has enjoyed at restaurants but never thought to make at home. But though it can spare you from having to search for recipes and make a grocery list, AI-assisted meal planning risks adding some of those hours back in time spent tracking down tough-to-find ingredients or preparing unfamiliar meals more slowly.

If ChatGPT can save even an average of a few minutes a day, that would be significant progress given that on a population level, the time devoted to housework hasn’t meaningfully budged in more than two decades, Melissa Milkie, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, told me. Plus, because women do so much more housework than men—moms in heterosexual marriages do 1.7 times as much as their husbands, for example—they also stand to benefit more from any reduction. Kumra thinks “ChatGPT is 100 percent going to help moms with all our unpaid labor,” she told me over email.

But time is only one part of the gendered inequality in domestic work. According to Eve Rodsky, the author of the book Fair Play, a task has three components: The first is conception, or noticing what needs to be done; then comes planning; and then comes execution, or actually doing it. ChatGPT is great for planning and can be useful in execution too. But as of yet, it really doesn’t help with conception. “It will never be able to tell you that your second son needs his adenoids taken out. It will never be able to help with the noticing that your child’s bangs have grown out into their eyes,” Rodsky told me. Noticing and keeping track of everything that needs to be done is “where the mental load really lives.”

One common way of thinking about how domestic labor plays out with many heterosexual couples is that women tend to act as managers and men as helpers, assigned chores by their wives. ChatGPT is perhaps best seen as another helper. It will—sometimes clumsily and sometimes brilliantly—complete the tasks delegated to it, but an AI is no substitute for an equal partner. Rather, it’s merely a reflection of the culture that created it. The software’s occasionally sexist outputs are proof that it sometimes mirrors back our worst impulses. But for couples who work to create a fair distribution of labor in their household, it could also have the potential to mirror back our best intentions. The best-case scenario is for artificial intelligence to become a home helper who reports to two equal managers.

Learn Your Family’s History

2023-03-24T10:00:00-04:00

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Flipping through old photo albums, enjoying long conversations with grandparents—these experiences are familiar and treasured parts of family life. But they can have a significance that transcends personal connection as way of creating and preserving a precious historical archive.

This work is vital. Learning about our elders doesn’t just connect us with our roots; it also opens us up to bygone ways of living, Elizabeth Keating argues in her book The Essential Questions. Plus, listening to this lore is good for kids’ development, Elaine Reese, the author of Tell Me A Story, wrote in The Atlantic in 2013. It helps children understand emotions, deepens their sense of identity, and makes them better at constructing their own narratives.

The value of these archives becomes even more stark when they’re threatened. Megan Buskey, who wrote Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet, couldn’t access secret-police files about her older relatives when Ukraine was under Soviet control. Only after a new government took over could she see the files and think, “So this is what my grandfather’s handwriting looks like.” Now, she writes, if the archives don’t survive the war, others won’t be able to do the same. But even after the most destructive conflicts, people find ways to remember. Daniel Loedel, the author of Hades, Argentina, whose half-sister was disappeared during the Argentine Dirty War, has long cherished the photos of her that remain: a blown-up yearbook portrait; a snapshot of her with her boyfriend, “smiling mischievously”; pictures of her as a child with “round cheeks, light hair, searching blue eyes.”

Indeed, mundane images and stories can be powerful. “They remind you that they were a person, not a stat, not a little side note, not a little entry in a genealogical chart. They were a real, living, breathing human being,” Noah Lewis told Clint Smith in 2021 of his reaction to hearing his great-great-grandfather’s account of daily life under enslavement. Too often, Black Americans in particular are depicted in one-note ways—as either under violent attack or utterly exceptional. Everyday snapshots, such as those gathered in Black Archives by the artist Renata Cherlise, offer an alternate portrayal. The photos in Cherlise’s book show no pain or pretensions of eminence. Rather, they capture the simple pleasures of living—the tenderness, the fun, the togetherness.

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What We’re Reading

Smith Collection / Gado / Getty; The Atlantic

The questions we don’t ask our families but should

“Whole ways of life were passing away unknown. A kind of genealogical amnesia was eating holes in these family histories as permanently as moths eat holes in the sweaters lovingly knitted by our ancestors.”

📚 The Essential Questions, by Elizabeth Keating

Arben Celi / Reuters

What kids learn from hearing family stories

“What most parents don’t know is that everyday family stories ... confer many of the same benefits of reading—and even some new ones.”

📚 Tell Me A Story, by Elaine Reese

Matt Chase / The Atlantic. Source: LOC.

The secret-police files that revealed my family’s history

“Given the Soviet tradition of warping the truth, history research in Ukraine has an important political function: It allows what was hidden to finally be known.”

📚 Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet, by Megan Buskey

Courtesy of Daniel Loedel / The Atlantic

My sister was disappeared 43 years ago

“The search for ghosts, the effort to prevent the dead from being entirely disappeared, is inevitably a communal one, a strange multigenerational game of telephone. And, as in that game, all you get and have to pass on is a whisper.”

📚 Hades, Argentina, by Daniel Loedel

Reprinted with permission from Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life, by Renata Cherlise

What ordinary family photos teach us about ourselves

“The pleasure of viewing photographs in Black Archives derives mainly from the fact that none of the images are abstract, and they don’t engage in righteous protest, defending, or rebelling against cultural and social erasure. The book’s pages are dedicated to familiar joys and listless days, to the sense of personhood that remained intact while the war for civil rights continued just outside the frame.”

📚 Black Archives, by Renata Cherlise

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson.

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How Should We Teach the Story of Our Country?

2023-02-24T10:00:00-05:00

The past few years have seen an intensifying of the ways politics can intervene in education, including the censorship of books. Lawmakers in Texas have made repeated pushes to restrict the books that kids can access in schools. Leaders in other states across the country have done the same, including in Tennessee, where one local school board infamously banned Maus, a graphic novel that brutally—but honestly—depicts the Holocaust. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has passed sweeping laws that limit what schools can teach about topics such as gender, sexuality, and race. In January, the state even opposed a whole course, AP African American Studies. (The class’s curriculum has since been revised; Florida has not yet said whether it will actually impose the ban.)

The central issue in many of the recent restrictions is how to teach our country’s history. Although memorizing dates and names can lead students to believe that the subject comprises a series of simple facts about clear-cut events, the truth about the past is much more tangled. Textbooks have long been skewed or have contained errors: In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen analyzes the flaws in a dozen major U.S. history textbooks and provides a sharper retelling of the moments those textbooks distorted. DeSantis also clings to his own version of our past. Take his book, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, which minimizes the role of slavery in America’s founding and idealizes the men who first governed the country. As David Waldstreicher writes, DeSantis seems to advocate for “never bringing up slavery or race except to praise those who ended it.”

Florida professors are already beginning to worry about how restrictions on what they can teach might threaten their syllabi, whether they cover the Harlem Renaissance or William Faulkner; at least one professor has canceled two of his courses entirely. What students are—and aren’t—taught influences the world in ways that ripple far beyond any one seminar discussion. As the historian Carter G. Woodson put it in his book The Mis-education of the Negro, “There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.”

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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What We’re Reading

Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis / VCG / Getty

Book bans are targeting the history of oppression

“What these bans are doing is censoring young people’s ability to learn about historical and ongoing injustices.”

📚 Maus, by Art Spiegelman

Marion Doss / Flickr

History class and the fictions about race in America

“In history class students typically ‘have to memorize what we might call “twigs.” We’re not teaching the forest—we’re not even teaching the trees,’ said [James] Loewen, best known for his 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. ‘We are teaching twig history.’”

📚 Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen

Octavio Jones / Getty; The Atlantic

The forgotten Ron DeSantis book

“His entire reading of American history is enveloped in both unquestioning fealty to the Founders and an insistence that the role of slavery, and race more broadly, in that history does not seriously change anything about how we should understand the birth and development of our country.”

📚 Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, by Ron DeSantis

Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic

‘Most important, we must not upset DeSantis’

“DeSantis isn’t trying to expunge ideology from education, only ideologies he dislikes, ones that see racism as woven through American institutions or that emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion instead of merit and color-blindness.”

📚 Go Down, Moses, by William Faulkner

Getty; The Atlantic

The book that exposed anti-Black racism in the classroom

“What does it mean to base the education of Black students on an interpretation of human experience and a set of philosophies and ethics that justified the plunder of Africa and the enslavement of Black people?”

📚 The Mis-education of the Negro, by Carter G. Woodson

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty.

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How Do You Adapt a Book Into a TV Show?

2023-01-20T10:00:00-05:00

Literary adaptations are ruling the small screen: Scouts are turning to publishers for show material. TV deals are being negotiated at the same time as print ones. In 2020, for the first time ever, more books were made into TV series than into movies. Clearly, translating stories from the page to television is popular. But have we figured out the key to pulling it off?

Sometimes adaptations are a breeze; there are tales that seem made for television. “Episodic plots, ensemble casts, and intricate world-building” are all signs that one might succeed, the scholars Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath, and J. D. Porter argued in an article for The Atlantic. Think of books with lots of twists and turns, such as the comic-book series The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, which takes full advantage of a full TV season’s long runtime to follow the source material’s narrative shifts. For other works, however, moving to television can drain the introspection out of the story. The Hulu rendition of Conversations With Friends, for example, loses the darkness and humor of Sally Rooney’s narration and replaces it with … nothing. The Apple TV+ miniseries based on Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko also lacks the novel’s intimate feeling—perhaps because of the decision to restructure the narrative in a way that distanced viewers from the book’s most central character.

But when the risk of adapting a title that doesn’t seem like a natural fit for television pays off, the resulting shows can both stand on their own and offer new ways of looking at the original. Take Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults, a novel characterized by its narrator’s fragmented and sometimes unreliable perception. TV cannot convey the holes in her discernment, so instead, the show immerses the viewer in close-up shots of faces and moody soundscapes that brilliantly evoke the feeling of being inside the protagonist’s mind. The adaptation of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere takes another approach to depicting literary ambiguity: by making a bold choice. Although Ng’s novel leaves the race of a few key characters unclear, the network casts Black actors in those roles, bringing the tensions simmering below the book’s surface to the forefront. You won’t read it the same way after watching—nor should you.

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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What We’re Reading

Netflix

Netflix’s The Sandman is a fan’s dream. Is that good enough?

“Devotees of The Sandman such as myself will have much to exult in with Netflix’s version, but I wonder what the show will mean to newcomers.”

📚 The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman

Enda Bowe / Hulu

How Hulu’s Conversations With Friends got Sally Rooney so wrong

“To watch Conversations is to watch [Rooney’s] acerbic words detailing the agony of the Millennial experience—so performative! so insecure!—get watered down until they argue nothing at all.”

📚 Conversations With Friends, by Sally Rooney

Apple TV+

Pachinko is moving and sublime—and at odds with itself

“As gorgeous and masterfully made as the series is, that tapestry comes loose through many alterations. Taken cumulatively, they weaken the novel’s emphasis on ... the subtle influences history can have on one person’s life.”

📚 Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee

Eduardo Castaldo / Netflix

The calamitous lies of adulthood

“At times, [the TV adaptation of The Lying Life of Adults is] maddening. But it’s also stunning in a way that nothing has really been since Mad Men, with each frame its own tightly composed showpiece.”

📚 The Lying Life of Adults, by Elena Ferrante

Erin Simkin / Hulu

When a TV adaptation does what the book could not

“The series [Little Fires Everywhere] captures the relationship dynamics as illustrated in the novel and furthers them.”

📚 Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller.

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How Children Conjure a Snow Day

2023-01-04T07:00:00-05:00

Snow days felt magical when I was a child—and not just because of the wonder of waking up to a world transformed or the gift of a day without school. They felt magical because I believed that I had helped to conjure them.

As soon as the forecast hinted at snow, my brothers and I would get to work. First came the ice cubes, upended from their trays and flushed down the toilet, one for each inch of snow. Then our pajamas, put on early (for good measure) and inside out (no matter how itchy the seams). Finally, three spoons, selected with care, stowed under each of our pillows. We knew our classmates had also followed these steps, because we’d all game-planned together at recess the day before. And, chances were, so had other students in schools across the district—maybe even the state, depending on the reach of the storm. We were joining an army of children who for generations, armed with nothing but household supplies, have believed they could change the weather.

Some of the kids from other schools likely added extra superstitions too, such as putting white crayons on the windowsill; others may have remixed the practices I was familiar with, perhaps licking the spoon before putting it under their pillow. But the larger tradition of trying to summon a snow day has persisted among children in the Northeast and Midwest for at least several decades, though the specific history is hard to trace and it’s unclear exactly how widespread it is. The rituals might seem frivolous, but they draw from a rich folkloric heritage, offering camaraderie, hope, and even a sense of control to kids—a group that can often feel powerless.

[Read: Why did we all have the same childhood?]

In my younger years, that promise of power intoxicated me, so much so that I never really wondered about what interests me most now: Where did these practices even come from? When I asked Elizabeth Tucker, a professor at Binghamton University and the author of Children’s Folklore: A Handbook, she pointed me to a few age-old magical principles. Take flushing ice cubes down the toilet or putting white crayons by the window: That’s textbook “sympathetic magic,” or the idea that “like produces like”—that a cold ice cube or white crayon could lead to cold, white snow. This type of occult logic just makes sense to children. The ice cube “goes down to the ocean and it freezes up the ocean,” one 8-year-old Virginian told the Associated Press in 2006. Similarly, Tucker told me, wearing pajamas inside out is a classic “ritual of reversal” meant to overturn the existing order—to replace boring classes with a day spent playing outside, in this case. This works by confusing the “snow gods,” one girl explained to her mom in 2014.

Kids may have reasoned their way to these principles on their own—they’re common because they’re intuitive—or they may have borrowed the ideas from grown-up lore. Adults have been turning their clothes inside out for a long time, possibly for centuries, to ward off curses from fairies, and later to ensure good luck for their sports teams. Or, in the case of putting spoons under pillows, children might be picking up on the mystical place silverware has long occupied in the American imagination. Putting a knife under the bed of a woman in labor has been said to reduce delivery pains. And legend has it that dropping cutlery means guests are on their way; the specific utensil that falls can even tell you who’s coming. (A spoon indicates a child.) Kids aren’t always perfect translators of this more mature sorcery. But all oral traditions change over time. Folklore is a continent- and generation-spanning game of telephone—what may have started as an intricate incantation can eventually become shouting “SNOW DAY!” into your freezer at the top of your lungs.

But when exactly did this game of telephone begin? At what point in the chain did the rituals that we know today arise? Unfortunately, folklore doesn’t offer simple answers. “We don’t care about an original. We don’t care about an author,” Tok Thompson, a folklorist and a professor at the University of Southern California, told me. Finding the ur-child who made the earliest decree that spoons must rest below pillows on the eve of snowfall is not only impossible; it’s just not what folklorists are interested in. Identifying a first depends on record keeping—the antithesis of the person-to-person spread that defines folk legends. By the time something’s been written down, it’s most likely already an established tradition, Thompson said.

The closest you can get to a start date, Thompson told me, is what’s known as the terminus ante quem—a Latin phrase meaning “the point before which.” This is the latest possible date something could have emerged, commonly determined by the first recorded reference to it. According to The Buffalo News, for the snow-day customs we know today, this point may have come in 1994, when a New Jersey newspaper reported on kids wearing their pajamas inside out to summon snow. But if you broaden the scope beyond these specific practices, adult ceremonies to control the weather have been around for millennia. This metaphorical game of telephone echoes back further than we can even fathom.

[Read: Snow days may never be the same]

It might seem strange that these traditions have persisted throughout so much of history. But their longevity begins to make more sense when you consider how they satisfy the basic human desire for control in a life where nothing is certain. The idea that you could ensure the outcome you want if only you, say, wear your pajamas a different way than usual is incredibly alluring, Stuart Vyse, a psychologist and the author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, told me. Doing something feels better than doing nothing—even if you’re a skeptic. People think, “I know this is silly, but I’ll just feel better if I do it,” Vyse explained. Young kids, who have fertile imaginations and difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality, tend to truly believe in magic—so the hold these ideas have on them is even stronger. Plus, children encourage one another’s beliefs. The communal fun of carrying out a superstition helps sustain it, and having a shared conviction bonds the kids doing it even closer together, Vyse explained.

Superstitions, especially ones that have lasted as long as these, reveal a lot about the people who hold them: their values, frustrations, and fears. It’s significant, then, that kids’ lore has a spirit of rebelliousness. “Children are told what to do a lot,” Thompson explained. Told to stop playing, to do their homework, to go to school. So of course they’re drawn to rituals that promise a chance to disrupt that order and dictate their own destiny. “Now it’s just silly, but when I was a kid I felt powerful,” one person who was interviewed for USC’s digital folklore archive explained. “Like I could control the weather even though I was just throwing ice cubes out a window.” I remember this feeling well. After our nighttime ceremonies, my brothers and I would usually fall asleep to a powder starting to dust the ground. When we woke up and saw the walls of ice fortifying our house, we knew: We had won. We had made our sacrifices, and fate had answered.

What’s Wrong With Following a Recipe?

2022-12-23T10:00:00-05:00

Editor’s note: This week’s newsletter is a rerun.

We’ll be back with a fresh newsletter soon.

Naz Deravian, the author of the cookbook Bottom of the Pot, grew up in a family that shunned recipes in favor of spontaneous cooking—an attitude that initially impeded her effort to write a cookbook. However, as she wrote in an article for The Atlantic, the specificity and certainty of following a recipe eventually became a source of comfort for her, especially as she grappled with national and personal stressors.

Even for those who are not facing such upheaval, recipes can be reassuring safety nets. Spontaneity has become a glamorous ideal in the food world (see, for example, the editor Sam Sifton’s recent work The New York Times Cooking No-Recipe Recipes). But at-home cooks tend to need more guidance before they’re prepared for complete freedom. Recipes can provide that. So can guidebooks, such as Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Nosrat’s work, which my colleague Joe Pinsker called a “metacookbook,” not only teaches readers how to prepare specific dishes but also helps them to develop the culinary intuition needed for successful experimentation in the kitchen. And that knowledge comes with another added benefit: efficiency. Rather than seeking out complex dishes with long prep times, intuitive cookers can follow their instincts to prepare something quick and delicious.

Still, when one does have the time, nothing beats the meditative calm of slowly preparing a longer recipe. The experience reminds us that, as Michael Pollan, a chef and the author of Cooked says, “This process we’re being told is pure drudgery is actually interesting and gratifying and satisfying.”

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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What We’re Reading

Eric Wolfinger

Writing an Iranian cookbook in an age of anxiety

“As the world thundered, I paved a new, diplomatic relationship with my measuring cups and timer, finding solace in their certainty. Whereas only months before I’d felt restricted by the written recipe, I now relied on it.”

📚 Bottom of the Pot, by Naz Deravian

Katie Martin

When did following recipes become a personal failure?

“Well-meaning but uninspired cooks—and believe me, we have been legion since the dawn of time—long for specifics.”

📚 The New York Times Cooking No-Recipe Recipes, by Sam Sifton
📚 The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by Fannie Farmer
📚 The Joy of Cooking, by Irma Rombauer
📚 Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book
📚 That Man in the Kitchen, by Malcolm LaPrade
📚 A Man’s Cookbook, by Raymond Oliver
📚 The I Hate to Cook Book, by Peg Bracken

Wendy MacNaughton

The why of cooking

“[R]ecipes, for all their precision and completeness, are poor teachers. They tell you what to do, but they rarely tell you why to do it.”

📚 Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samin Nosrat
📚 How to Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman
📚 On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee
📚 The Science of Good Cooking
📚 Cooking for Geeks, by Jeff Potter
📚 The Food Lab, by J. Kenji López-Alt
📚 How to Read a French Fry, by Russ Parsons
📚 The Improvisational Cook, by Sally Schneider
📚 Ruhlman’s Twenty, by Michael Ruhlman

Lebrecht / Corbis / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

The myth of ‘easy’ cooking

“The decision to cook from scratch may have many virtues, but ease is not one of them. Despite what we’re told, cooking the way so many Americans aspire to do it today is never fast, and rarely easy compared to all the other options available for feeding ourselves.”

📚 The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François
📚 How to Cook Everything Fast, by Mark Bittman
📚 Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes, by Peter Meehan
📚 The Glamour Magazine After 5 Cookbook, by Beverly Pepper
📚 In & Out of the Kitchen In 15 Minutes or Less, by Anne Willan

Netflix

Michael Pollan and the luxury of time

“Americans are transfixed with the culture of food, but not with the actual cooking of food.”

📚 Cooked, by Michael Pollan

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is An Ordinary Age, by Rainesford Stauffer.

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Political Lessons From America’s Past

2022-11-11T10:00:00-05:00

Claims of voter fraud. Hyper-partisanship. Anxious waiting for results. So much of what has characterized the recent midterms has felt distinctly modern. But considering the election solely from the vantage point of this week can actually obscure the historical roots of our malaise. Reading about the past widens the lens, in a way that both explains the present and hints at what the future might hold.

The most useful books offer clarity on issues that have animated debate for years. For example, Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight, a broad account of the aftermath of the U.S. joining the First World War, highlights the nativist sentiment that radicalized some Americans against immigrants then, just as it does today. One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, by Jia Lynn Yang, by contrast, shows what it takes to combat such feelings—offering a road map for contemporary life by chronicling the long struggle to remove ethnic quotas from our country’s immigration policy.

Looking to the past is instructive; it proves that we need to go deeper than this week's voting patterns to understand our political landscape. Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans, Dana Milbank’s The Destructionists, and Matthew Continetti’s The Right all make the case that although the modern Republican Party’s extremism appeared to surprise many, it’s actually been bubbling below the party’s genteel surface for years. And Stacey Abrams’s Our Time Is Now, which offers a history of voter suppression, is a reminder of how crucial protecting universal suffrage is.

As the poet Stephen Vincent Benét wrote in “Litany for Dictatorships” in 1935, “Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon’s teeth. / Our children know and suffer the armed men.” These works illustrate how the roots of so much political rot can be found in the past. But they can also offer guidance about what to do in the face of “dragon’s teeth” and “armed men.” Just look to the policy makers Yang wrote about in One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, who made the politically risky push to reform an unequal system—and, ultimately, succeeded.

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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What We’re Reading

NYPL; Getty; Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

America has had it worse

“One value of reading history at a moment like this is to be reminded of the many ways that the past was actually worse—that progress is possible.”

📚 American Midnight, by Adam Hochschild

Stock Montage / Getty

What’s the one book that explains American politics today?

“Atlantic staff and contributors are offering reading suggestions for what feel like unprecedented times. Some of their choices are works of history; others lie more in the realm of theory; some deal with other countries’ systems.”

📚 One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, by Jia Lynn Yang

Illustration by Paul Spella

The long unraveling of the Republican Party

“All three books portray a conservatism that was fraught with tensions long before [Donald] Trump’s emergence. Their goal is to explain why the current incarnation of the GOP shouldn’t come as a surprise.”

📚 Partisans, by Nicole Hemmer
📚 The Destructionists, by Dana Milbank
📚 The Right, by Matthew Continetti

Dey Street Books / Viking / Hachette Books / Harper / Henry Holt & Company / The Atlantic

The 10 best political books of 2020 by Black women

“This fight to be heard remains one of the animating descants of Black women’s political literature.”

📚 Our Time Is Now, by Stacey Abrams

Miki Lowe

“Litany for Dictatorships”

“We thought we were done with these things, but we were wrong.”

📚 “Litany for Dictatorships,” by Stephen Vincent Benét

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

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The Simple Pleasures of Baking

2022-10-07T10:00:00-04:00

To me, the true sign of fall isn’t apple picking, fuzzy sweaters, or leaves turning new colors. It’s the sudden urge—which typically emerges on sleepy weekend afternoons—to dig up a cookbook and start measuring and mixing ingredients for sweet treats. The practice can be a salve for anxiety and provides comfort in stressful moments. It’s also just really cozy. Plus, you end up with something delicious at the end—such as Alison Roman’s salted chocolate-chunk shortbread cookies from Dining In.

In addition to offering recipes, cookbooks can also be literary feats. The best ones offer context about what you’re preparing by delving into a dessert’s history or a region’s food culture. For example, Rudy Lombard and Nathaniel Burton’s Creole Feast outlines the pivotal role Black chefs played in shaping Creole cuisine; it’s the perfect reading companion for your next evening spent making pralines. Carol Field’s The Italian Baker contains not only the secrets to making breads such as ciabatta, but also references to religion and mythology that give readers a peek into Italian society. And Aleksandra Crapanzano’s Gâteau goes beyond recipes to make a bigger argument about how ease and simplicity define French baking culture. This type of learning both enriches the process of making meals, and turns you into a better and more knowledgeable cook.

If you want a soothing baking experience but don’t have time for cleanup, consider The Great British Baking Show: Contestants roll out dough, pipe cream into pastries, and are generally really nice to each other. Of course, you can’t actually eat their creations, so just make sure you have some store-bought treats on hand to beat the hunger.

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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What We’re Reading

Jennifer A Smith / Getty

The rise of anxiety baking

“Young Americans’ long work hours might mean they’re less likely to come home every night in time to roast a chicken instead of ordering takeout, but many of them seem to have turned to weekend baking as a salve for the ambient anxiety of being alive.”

📚 Dining In, by Alison Roman

Gerald Herbert / AP

The history behind one of America’s most beloved desserts

“Creations like the praline fossilize a history of black pioneering in this country.”

📚 Creole Feast, by Rudy Lombard and Nathaniel Burton

Ten Speed Press

Remembering the Italian baking expert Carol Field

“Field brought a new rigor to historical background in a cookbook.”

📚 The Italian Baker, by Carol Field

Getty; The Atlantic

The simple secret of French baking

“Having lived in Paris for many years as a child, I knew that the French bake at home far more than we imagine. But perhaps more important, they bake far more simply than we imagine, and mostly from a range of classics that lend themselves to seasonal riffing and improvisation.”

📚 Gâteau, by Aleksandra Crapanzano

Netflix

The Great British Baking Show and the meaning of life

“To watch The Great British Baking Show is to believe that the average guy and gal can do remarkable things, that good nature is compatible with excellence, that high achievement will be recognized, that honest feedback can lead to improvement, that there are things to life beyond work.”

🎥 The Great British Baking Show, on Netflix

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin.

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Against the Fun Fact

2022-09-12T13:44:00-04:00

Nothing is less fun than a fun fact. The mandate to share one about yourself, typically posed as an icebreaker in schools, offices, and other formal settings, is deeply constraining. The form demands a tidbit that’s honest without being overly revealing, interesting but never indecent, unique but not weird. Within such parameters, it’s virtually impossible not to come off as either hopelessly boring or a complete fool. And the stakes for striking the right balance are high, given that the fact someone shares may very well be the most personal information their co-workers (or fellow students or teammates) ever learn about them.

The goals of such an exercise may be noble, aiming to let group members get to know one another in a more human way before they have to work or study together. But rather than putting people at ease, too often these prompts only create more discomfort. Work and school are already stressful, and the pressure to make a good impression is high. When it’s required, fun just isn’t that fun anymore.

Psychology can lend some insight into why such activities can feel so painful. For one, people typically aren’t given much time to prepare. Having something sprung upon you—especially something that you might be judged for—without warning can incite stress and perhaps trigger the fight-or-flight response. Even after you’ve decided what you’ll say, the act of sharing is essentially an instance of public speaking: a major source of anxiety for many people. When we meet a new person, we’re constantly trying to gauge how they’re reacting to us, Erica Boothby, a lecturer in the operations, information, and decisions department at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. Introducing yourself to a group demands that you evaluate how every single member responds to you—an overwhelming task. You’re unlikely to come to positive conclusions. “When people have a conversation with someone new, they tend to overestimate, basically, how harshly they’re being judged by those people,” Boothby explained. This phenomenon is known as the liking gap, and it’s even stronger in shy people.

[Read: Teens are protesting in-class presentations]

Seen another way, the liking gap can be comforting: People like you more than you suspect they will. This means your listeners probably didn’t find your fun fact as inane as you feared, and likely enjoyed getting to know you. “We’re the most social of all primates,” Nick Epley, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, told me—but still, “people tend to underestimate just how social others are.” Epley pointed out that even basic self-disclosures through fun facts could facilitate bonding.

Indeed, liking one’s co-workers does enhance career satisfaction; people who have friends at work tend to enjoy their role more. But trying to make connections while under the boss’s eye has a way of stripping all of the enjoyment out of the process. As the management scholar Stephen Fineman wrote, “Fun typically gains its ‘funness’ from its spontaneity, surprise, and often subversion of the extant order”—the exact opposite of following your manager’s orders, in other words.

Although icebreakers might not always be pleasurable, some research does indicate that they can be good for workplace productivity. One 2000 study found that playing name games actually helps people remember others’ names, which makes working together easier. Another showed that sharing embarrassing stories about oneself led to more creative brainstorming—perhaps because the activity preemptively alleviated any fears of humiliation that might have kept people from sharing their most daring ideas.

Turning forced humiliation into something employees actually enjoy might be unrealistic, but, under the right conditions, it is possible to have a good time with office games. Ethan Mollick and Nancy Rothbard, two professors at Wharton, found that when employees consent to an activity, partaking in it does make them happier—something that has been true in my own experience as well. A colleague I used to work closely with loves starting meetings with inventive ice-breaking prompts—the weirder, the better. But I actually enjoyed her icebreakers, for a few reasons. For one, she wasn’t my boss, and she used these in small groups where we all already knew one another—so the pressure to perform was low. She also always ran a couple of ideas past the group; we’d settle on one together. In response to her prompts, I’ve revealed my Starbucks order and argued the case for which pasta shape I most embody and why. Never once did she dare suggest that we merely share a bland fun fact about ourselves.

The idea that requiring each member of a group to volunteer a fun fact about themselves is the only way to kick off a class or corporate retreat or sports practice is a delusion. We need to dispense with these awkward, forced personal disclosures. I doubt anyone would mind simply sharing their name, saving themselves the pressure of coming up with something extra to say and instead just getting their work done more quickly. Research shows that the single most important factor driving employee morale is making meaningful progress, and if skipping an icebreaker means ending the day a bit early, no one would complain.

[Read: The surprising benefits of talking to strangers]

But after we liberate ourselves from fun facts, there might be some room to get to know one another in a way that’s more genuine and comfortable for all involved. When I asked Mollick, who teaches at Wharton, whether he’d ever opened a course with an icebreaker, he admitted that he does use them—reluctantly. But he likes more creative prompts, such as asking what item a student would bring to a desert island; sometimes he even has his class play a video game together. Similarly, although Boothby and Epley both eschew traditional icebreakers, they encourage their students to get to know one another. Boothby tends to open her courses by arranging one-on-one conversations between seat neighbors; she gives few instructions, allowing them to talk about whatever they want. During a business-school orientation, Epley paired off classmates to discuss three or four intimate questions, based on the evidence that people much prefer deep talk to small talk.

I wouldn’t mind a game like Mollick’s, and I genuinely enjoy one-on-one conversations with someone new. Beyond the confines of the fun fact, which demands that you be interesting without offering any appeal of its own, I’m not a complete grinch. People are wonderful and weird, and I love getting to know them—especially when it’s on our terms.

A New Way to Think About Our Filing Systems

2022-08-19T10:00:00-04:00

In The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information, Craig Robertson chronicles the history and influence of the titular 19th-century invention that revolutionized offices. The machine—for it was advertised as a piece of high-tech equipment rather than as a mundane furniture item—promised corporations a new level of capitalist efficiency. All company information could be quickly classified and stored according to a rigid system, and then just as easily retrieved.

Of course, managing knowledge could never really be that simple. Today even computerized folders and advanced tools such as Google Search cannot tame the mammoth reach of our digital filing cabinets. This infinite sprawl is changing how we interface with the world, according to L. M. Sacasas, the author of The Frailest Thing. Sorting through this morass might seem too overwhelming to even consider—unless we shift how we think about the purpose of organizing information: What if the end goal was not efficient retrieval? What if, instead, the sorting process itself was imbued with meaning?

Take Roget’s Thesaurus. Its layout is meticulous. Yet its true power comes not from its utility as a tool of reference but rather from the awe its rich pages inspire: “a shimmering, unfolding, occasionally scarifying million-petaled experience, a miraculous nest of emergent relationships,” as my colleague James Parker described it. Book indexes can similarly be misunderstood as rote, but that view ignores their capacity for interpretation, whimsy, and intelligence, which Dennis Duncan explores in his book Index, A History of the.

The writer Leslie Kendall Dye applies this spirit to the arrangement of her bookshelves. Their order follows no outwardly legible organizational principle; works are instead placed together “for companionship, based on some kinship or shared sensibility that I believe ties them together.” On her labyrinthine shelves, unexpected connections abound, tying together works such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Moss Hart’s Act One or Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs and Eric Myers’s Uncle Mame. The placements are at once a literary argument and a personal confession, revealing just as much about the arranger as about books themselves.

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What We’re Reading

Bettmann / Getty; Tom Kelley Archive / Getty; The Atlantic

The logic of the filing cabinet is everywhere

“If the filing cabinet, as a tool of business and capital, guides how we access digital information today, its legacy of certainty overshadows the messiness intrinsic to acquiring knowledge—the sort that requires reflection, contextualization, and good-faith debate.”

📚 The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information, by Craig Robertson

Getty

Confessions of an information hoarder

“Infinite storage and effortless search changes our relationship to our information.”

📚 The Frailest Thing, by L. M. Sacasas

Tim Lahan

An ode to my thesaurus

“A thesaurus—here it comes—is for increasing one’s aliveness to words. Nothing more and nothing less. By going into the buzzing and jostling hive of words around a word, we get a purer sense of the word itself: its coloration, its interior, its traces of meaning.”

📚 Roget’s International Thesaurus

The Atlantic

The pleasures that lurk in the back of the book

“Indexes offer the reader multiple ways in and through the text, freeing them from the confines of an ineluctable narrative.”

📚 Index, A History of the, by Dennis Duncan

Getty; The Atlantic

The organization of your bookshelves tells its own story

“The complexity of the human heart can be expressed in the arrangement of one’s books.”

📚 The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
📚 Act One, by Moss Hart
📚 Memoirs, by Tennessee Williams
📚 Uncle Mame, by Eric Myers

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is I’m Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy.

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The Dark Side of Tourism

2022-07-29T10:00:00-04:00

Vacations are often depicted as escapes in which one leaves the stresses of home and travels to a blissful paradise, unburdened by worry. Yet, as the best literature about tourism makes clear, there’s a cost to believing that any destination could be uncomplicated.

Sarah Stodola’s The Last Resort, which traces the ocean-side hotel over time, easily exposes the dark side of this fantasy. In a history that starts with the murder of a Roman emperor’s mother and extends to the modern-day erosion of Hawaii’s beaches, she shows the clear human and ecological damage these complexes wreak. Barry Lopez’s hybrid travelogue-memoir Horizon demonstrates how these concerns extend to virtually all trips. Though his descriptions of far-off places are breathtaking, his writing is shot through with climate-induced existential dread and an acute awareness of the locals whose needs too often come second to the demands of tourists.

This dark outlook infuses fictional works, too. Take the introductory montage of HBO’s The White Lotus. In it, the camera zooms in on the tacky wallpaper of the show’s titular resort, showing rows of illustrated tropical plants and animals, which then slowly start to bleed. Yun Ko-Eun’s satire The Disaster Tourist, which centers on a company that guides its customers through places struck by catastrophe, is even more literal in its violence. To entice more visitors to a less successful destination, several people associated with the company work together to manufacture a disaster, matter-of-factly accepting that, in the process, locals will die.

In Here Comes the Sun, Nicole Dennis-Benn takes a realist approach, directing her focus to the lives of the Jamaican hospitality workers whose labor obscures the island’s poverty from its visitors. Her deep care and attention underscores the dull, psychic toll of constantly being exoticized.

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What We’re Reading

María Jesús Contreras

Beware the luxury beach resort

“For catastrophists like me, the luxury beach resort raises a whole new set of psychological torments on top of those provided by more ordinary beaches. The entire time that we’re in our ostensible paradise, I’m busy obsessing over the unintended consequences of our stay, such as the environmental degradation caused by bringing wasteful tourists to delicate ecosystems and the racist and classist issues of displacement.”

📚 The Last Resort, by Sarah Stodola

Pablo Cozzaglio / AFP / Getty

How climate change has influenced travel writing

“[Barry] Lopez is gripped by an urgency to tell ‘a coherent and meaningful story’ about the threat of humanity’s extinction as a result of climate change and societal declension, and the ways he believes it can be prevented.”

📚 Horizon, by Barry Lopez

Mario Perez / HBO

The leisure class always wins

“The guests of the White Lotus assume that the world revolves around them. The resort’s decor, gaudy and grim, proves them right.”

🎥 The White Lotus, on HBO Max

Peter Marlow / Magnum

This is what happens when society ‘has to function’

“Yun [Ko-Eun’s] late-capitalist satire makes the case that the identity we find through work is almost always shaped by how we have been exploited—or how we have exploited others.”

📚 The Disaster Tourist, by Yun Ko-Eun

Frances F. Denny / The New York Times / Redux / Paul Spella / The Atlantic

A novel that weighs the costs of love and motherhood

“Women—especially mothers—make cruel choices in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novels.”

📚 Here Comes the Sun, by Nicole Dennis-Benn

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante.

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The Awkward Intimacy of Therapy

2022-06-17T10:00:00-04:00

When Lori Gottlieb, the author of The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column, started her first therapy session, her client started crying almost immediately. The experience was “simultaneously awkward and intimate,” Gottlieb wrote in her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone—and a reminder of the ultimate humanity of the therapeutic relationship. Although Gottlieb entered the room concerned about “how to apply the numerous abstract psychological theories I’d studied over the past several years to the hundreds of possible scenarios that any one therapy patient might present,” she left with a more basic imperative—to be authentic and to sit with the patient in their suffering.

At its core, therapy is about the healing power of hearing and being heard, even though such acts require vulnerability between patient and practitioner. Barbara Taylor, for example, describes the intense emotions she developed for her analyst in the memoir The Last Asylum. From the other side of the chair, Stephen Grosz captured the burden of bearing witness to such painful confessions in The Examined Life. More recently, reality shows such as Couples Therapy have promised viewers an unfiltered glimpse into these typically confidential conversations. Though watching shows like those is no substitute for actually going to therapy, they can help viewers to see their problems in a new light or simply remind them that they are not alone. In fact, some tragedies, especially those that impact whole communities, actually demand communal healing, Resmaa Menakem argues in My Grandmother’s Hands.

If watching and reading can help you heal by letting you see yourself in others, then it follows that writing might let others see themselves in you. Perhaps it is for this reason that writing can be another way of “reducing the pains of living,” as Melissa Febos puts it in her book Body Work, “or if not, at least making them useful to myself and to others.”

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What We’re Reading

Sarah Wilkins

How I bombed my first therapy session

“Unless you’ve sat alone in a quiet room with a sobbing stranger, you don’t really know how simultaneously awkward and intimate it feels.”

📚 Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb

Adam Maida / The Atlantic

And how do these books make you feel?

“There’s both threat and promise in the therapeutic encounter: the ineffable, fallible, and intimate play between two strangers, one witnessed and one witnessing, talking it out.”

📚 The Last Asylum, by Barbara Taylor
📚 The Examined Life, by Stephen Grosz

Showtime

Therapy voyeurism really might be doing some good

“Therapy voyeurism is not real therapy—but that doesn’t mean it’s totally pointless either.”

🎥 Couples Therapy

Matt Chase

The self-help that no one needs right now

“In spite of their popularity, trauma books may not be all that helpful for the type of suffering that most people are experiencing right now.”

📚 The Body Keeps Score, by Bessel van der Kolk
📚 My Grandmother’s Hands, by Resmaa Menakem

Najeebah Al-Ghadban

Trauma is everywhere. Write about it anyway.

“When trauma is a near-universal experience, is that trauma still interesting? It is—of course—but it can be hard to feel that. To find the creative spark in a difficult moment can be extraordinarily liberating.”

📚 Body Work, by Melissa Febos

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she just finished is Body Work, by Melissa Febos.

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Listening to America’s Kids After Uvalde

2022-06-06T08:00:00-04:00

On Wednesday, May 25, teachers across the country found themselves facing a newly common kind of pedagogical dilemma: how—and whether—to address the fact that the day before, an 18-year-old gunman had entered a classroom not unlike their own and opened fire, killing 19 children and two teachers. “No one prepares you to sit in front of a fourth-grade class after a fourth-grade shooting and try to explain what happened,” Bess Murad, a teacher at a Zeta charter school in Upper Manhattan, told me.

But many of the teachers I spoke with felt that talking was important, to ensure that students got support without needing to ask for it, and information that was factual and age-appropriate, relayed by a trusted adult. They described anger, confusion, and sadness as their students tried to process what had happened. Some kids had personal experiences with gun violence; others didn’t know about the shooting, and their teachers had to break the news to them. The students were scared and had a lot of questions: How many people died? Did teachers die? How old were the kids who died? “It went on for a very long time,” Alex Lewis, a third-grade teacher in Brooklyn, New York, told me. Miranda Pellicciotti, an eighth-grade math teacher, and Stephanie Harmon, a seventh-grade science teacher, both working at a middle school in Pemberton Township, New Jersey, said that their students were fixated on how they would stay safe if a shooter came to their school, despite all the active-shooter drills they’d done. “We had kids asking about, ‘We have cabinets, can I move this cabinet? Can we turn the desks?’” Pellicciotti told me. “‘What would we do if there was a shooter on our bus on our way here or on our way home?’”

Murad and Carolina Hernandez, who co-teach the same class, found that their students’ confusion and fear gave way to feelings of anger and ultimately determination after they asked the students to write letters to Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Though the teachers first had to explain what a governor was (and why governors couldn’t be fired), students quickly grew passionate. As the kids wrote, they asked for spelling help, and the two teachers began writing the requested terms on the board: greedy, injustice, responsibility.

Below, find excerpts from those letters and others written by students in response to this tragedy. (All student names have been withheld to protect their privacy, and parents have been notified of their child’s participation.) Some are addressed to legislators, while others speak directly to the families of those killed in Uvalde.

In New Jersey, Miss Pellicciotti asked her eighth-grade class and Miss Harmon asked her seventh-grade class to write notes to the bereaved.

In Brooklyn, Miss Lewis and her co-teacher, Ms. Jazmin Matos, asked their third graders to write letters to Governor Abbott.

In Seattle, Ms. Morgan Flake asked her high-school class to write letters to Texas legislators.

And in Upper Manhattan, Ms. Hernandez and Ms. Murad asked their fourth-grade class to write letters to Governor Abbott.

Submissions have been edited for length and legibility. Handwriting is students’ own. Opening quote courtesy of Miss Lewis and Ms. Matos’s third-grade class, second quote courtesy of Ms. Hernandez and Ms. Murad’s fourth-grade class.

Motherhood’s Impossible, All-Consuming Demands

2022-05-20T10:10:14-04:00

The short story “Go, Team,” by Samantha Hunt, traces a series of conversations within a group of mothers after a woman disappears into the woods during a children’s soccer game. They aren’t sure if the vanished woman is a mom, though they wonder if she might be. But even when it’s only suspected, motherhood is such an all-consuming identity that the possibility suffuses every element of their discussion. Her potential death would be a tragedy, one implies, because “she might have been somebody’s mother.”

Maintaining one’s independent selfhood while also having children can seem impossible. Penelope Mortimer’s 1958 novel, Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, illustrates this challenge by offering a portrait of a woman who, after an unwanted pregnancy, finds herself withering under the rigid expectations of parenting. The label renders all else irrelevant; talent, she remarks, is “as useless … as a dying limb” once one has kids. Moms do, of course, regularly defy this stereotype. But across the media, those who continue to embrace their talent after their children are born are often demonized. In the horror film Hereditary, this demonization is literal, but the theme is present in literature, too—just look at The Seagull, by Anton Chekhov, or Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee.

Nuanced portrayals of women who preserve a sense of self outside their kids are rare, but refreshing. One such example is Julie Phillips’s The Baby on the Fire Escape, which profiles several prominent mother-artists and considers how they managed to balance two identities that are often at odds. Another is Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, which Maggie Gyllenhaal recently adapted into a film. The work’s protagonist, Leda, abandoned her daughters for a period while they were young, because although she loved them deeply, she was unable to devote herself to them entirely at the cost of her own personhood. For this reason, Leda believes that she is an “unnatural mother”—though readers may see that what is truly “unnatural” are the demands we place on moms.

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What We’re Reading

Peter Marlow / Magnum

“Go, Team”

“Are you making a joke of this? This woman might have died. She might have been somebody’s mother.”

📚 “Go, Team,” by Samantha Hunt

Getty; The Atlantic

The calamity of unwanted motherhood

“To deprive women of the ability to choose when and whether they become parents, [Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting] insinuates, is to deprive them of the ability to ever be or become fully human in their own right.”

📚 Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, by Penelope Mortimer

Reid Chavis / A24

Hereditary and the monstrousness of creative moms

“Movies like Hereditary see something threatening about the artist-mother who is too individualistic and too rigidly professional, who creates for herself and the public while closing out her family.”

🎥 Hereditary, directed by Ari Aster
📚 The Seagull, by Anton Chekhov
📚 Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee

Getty; The Atlantic

On trying to create art when the baby’s crying

“When a new child arrives, it’s as if two strangers have moved into your house. The first is the child. The second is yourself as a mother.”

📚 The Baby on the Fire Escape, by Julie Phillips

Netflix

The movie that understands the secret shame of motherhood

“Leda actively tests society’s definition of a mother—she loves her daughters, but she can’t devote her entire self to them—and for that she carries both pride and shame.”

📚 The Lost Daughter, by Elena Ferrante
🎥 The Lost Daughter, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is Either/Or, by Elif Batuman.

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Keeping a Diary at the End of the World

2022-04-15T10:00:00-04:00

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets began to journal about her experience living in Kyiv. The resulting account, which she published online in real time, provides insight into the conflict that more straightforward news coverage has failed to capture. It is, as she put it in an interview with my colleague Gal Beckerman, “a very complex picture of reality at a moment when war has turned everything incredibly awful.”

Belorusets’s urge to document and reflect when catastrophe strikes is not unique. Anne Frank’s diary of her time in hiding during the Holocaust is perhaps the most famous example. More recently, the early days of COVID spurred multiple public and private journaling projects, as individuals grappled with the awareness that they were living through history. Some hoped to supplement the eventual archive, while others simply desired an outlet for their anxiety. Regardless of intent, the resulting works are strange, quotidian reports shot through with deep fears about the surrounding tragedies. Reading the Dear America series, which features fictionalized diaries from young girls living through significant moments in American history, the value of this type of writing becomes clear: It models how to live in moments when global anxieties butt up against mundane concerns.

After 800,000 words and 25 years of regular journal entries, Sarah Manguso became an expert in this type of writing. Rather than limit her reflections to critical moments in history, she’s written continuously, sometimes dangerously obsessed by a need to create a record of her life for the times when her memory failed her. Though at moments this compulsiveness turned the impulse into a vice, overall the practice was, as she told my colleague Julie Beck in 2015, “the most useful tool I had in just trying to live thoughtfully, carefully, and responsibly.”

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What We’re Reading

Yevgenia Belorusets

Her world began to collapse, so she started keeping a diary
“There might be some sense of responsibility among people who are working with ideas to preserve a very complex picture of reality at a moment when war has turned everything incredibly awful.”

📚 Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets

David Polonsky / Pantheon / The Atlantic

The quandary of illustrating Anne Frank
“Frank’s diary became one of the most famous narratives of the Holocaust, and because it’s written from the perspective of a normal adolescent living under the most abnormal circumstances, it humanized war and genocide.”

📚 Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, by David Polonsky and Ari Folman

Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

Dear diary: This is my life in quarantine
“For now, writing these diaries is a comfort to their authors. Future generations may use them to understand what daily life was like during the pandemic—what Americans’ mask-wearing habits were, how much (and how safely) people socialized, or how they entertained themselves at home. These journals will provide history with the intimate details that make it come alive, and show us that even the most world-shattering events are made up of precious, individual lives.”

Scholastic / Amazon

Dear America: Reading through history
“Dear America didn’t spark my interest in history or even form the basis of my third-grade historical knowledge; but it showed me, forcefully, what history could be. It happens quickly, unplanned for. You can go to school on a Tuesday morning with the usual back-to-school butterflies and go to bed that night with a litany of new vocabulary words: terrorist, hijacking, rubble. The landscape of your childhood can change in a few minutes, and with it the significance of everyday acts. Very often, it takes a while to make sense, even to adults.”

📚 A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl, Belmont Plantation, Virginia, 1859, by Patricia C. McKissack
📚 Dreams of the Golden Country: The Diary of Zipporah Feldman, a Jewish Immigrant Girl, New York City, 1903, by Kathryn Lasky
📚 My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck, Long Island, New York 1941, by Mary Pope Osborne

Brad Greenlee / Flickr / The Atlantic

When diary-keeping gets in the way of living
“It brought me great solace to write things down and to make sense of them. ... Every exchange that I had with another person, everything that I observed, every little throwaway moment I had on the subway observing this and that, the denseness of experience just seemed unmanageable without writing it down. After I wrote it down, it was a great relief to just have at least made that much sense of it in translating it into prose. So I guess it was a low-level constant anxiety attended by a simultaneous gentle relief. But it was a long time before that anxiety dissipated almost entirely, which is where I am now.”

📚 Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, by Sarah Manguso

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is The Copenhagen Trilogy, by Tove Ditlevsen.

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The Books Briefing: The Fight Over What Kids Can Read

2022-04-08T09:37:00-04:00

Editor’s note: This week’s newsletter is a rerun.

We’ll be back with a fresh newsletter next week.

After the Capitol riot, Matt Hawn, a teacher from Tennessee, brought an Atlantic essay to class for his students to analyze: “The First White President,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Earlier the class had discussed a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin; later in the year, they watched a performance of Kyla Jenée Lacey’s poem “White Privilege.” Hawn told my colleague Emma Green that he didn’t have an ideological bent in choosing these works; he merely wanted students to evaluate their claims. “For a lot of my students, this is the first time they’re getting the opportunity to even assess something like that,” he said. Before the end of the school year, Hawn was fired. (He’s since appealed his termination; representatives from his school district declined Green’s request for comment on the incident but emphasized in his hearing that they don’t condone racism.)

Hawn’s firing comes at a time when many legislatures—Tennessee’s included—are moving to ban critical race theory in schools. These debates rely on what the Atlantic contributing writer Ibram X. Kendi (whose book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You has also been censored) argues is an imagined conservative idea of the concept that ignores how those who developed it actually define it. States such as Texas have taken specific aim at Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, a searing New York Times report arguing that slavery is central to our country’s founding. As my colleague Adam Harris writes, these bans and proposed bans “would effectively prevent public schools and universities from holding discussions about racism.”

This moment may be particularly dangerous for students’ intellectual freedom, but restricting what kids read is nothing new. Take Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which has been targeted for its depiction of child abuse. Keeping that work out of children’s hands also keeps readers from what Morrison herself calls a depiction of one of “those most vulnerable, most undescribed, not taken seriously little Black girls.” Another book, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, was banned for its use of racial slurs and a “white savior” protagonist. Adults may be right to question its portrayal of race, but when the book is taught well, young people can join in reevaluating the legacy of the novel’s much adored, though deeply flawed protagonist—work that Lee herself did in the sequel, Go Set a Watchman. More recently, censorship of Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give has shut kids out of discussions about the deeply personal hurt of police brutality.

It’s no accident that these works consider issues such as race, gender, and disability; a whopping 52 percent of banned or challenged books from 2006 to 2016 included “diverse content.” Rather than protecting children, this practice harms those who are already marginalized by spreading a message that their lives are dangerous and inappropriate, the professor Paul Ringel argued in The Atlantic. Only by encouraging students to discuss difference can we empower them to find self-understanding and acceptance.

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What We’re Reading

Matt Hawn; The Atlantic

He taught a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay. Then he was fired.

“I believe my kids can handle this difficult subject material. It does them a great service academically.”

📚 “The First White President,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Raquel Zaldivar / Chicago Tribune / Getty / The Atlantic

Why conservatives want to cancel the 1619 Project

“The work of [Nikole] Hannah-Jones and others suggests ... that present-day inequalities have been shaped by deliberate political and policy choices. What appears to be an argument about reexamining history is also an argument about ideology—a defense of the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.”

📚 “The 1619 Project,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Deborah Feingold / Corbis / Getty

Remembering the peerless Toni Morrison

“Since the publication of her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970, Morrison has been established as one of the most powerful and distinct voices in literature, a lyrical chronicler and witness to the African American experience.”

📚 The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Go set a legacy: the fate of Harper Lee

“Will [Lee] be remembered for Jurist Atticus, or Racist Atticus? Will she be remembered as the author of a book so beloved, and so revered, and so culturally dilute, that it seems wrong to call it simply a ‘book’? Or as the author of the work that complicates Mockingbird’s tidy vision of right and wrong?”

📚 To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
📚 Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee

Balzer + Bray / HarperCollins

The Hate U Give enters the ranks of great YA novels

“[Angie] Thomas’s debut novel offers an incisive and engrossing perspective of the life of a Black teenage girl as [the protagonist] Starr’s two worlds converge over questions of police brutality, justice, and activism.”

📚 The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura.

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Anne Applebaum: Social Media Made Spreading Disinformation Easy

2022-04-07T18:48:55-04:00

Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, an expert on Eastern Europe, has long watched social media’s power with great concern. Yesterday, at Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a conference hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, she spoke with David Axelrod, the founding director of the Institute of Politics, about the dangers these platforms pose to democracy. They discussed Russia’s disinformation efforts, what makes some conspiracy theories so successful, how institutions can rebuild trust, and more. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

David Axelrod: Anne, I’ve been reading all your wonderful pieces lately, scary exhortations at times, about where we are right now. You live in Poland, right across the border from Ukraine, and we’ll get to that. But you just wrote a piece called “Why We Should Read Hannah Arendt Now.” I raise that not just because she taught here and we’re very parochial, but because your first line of that very good piece was: “So much of what we imagine to be new is old; so many of the seemingly novel illnesses that afflict modern society are really just resurgent cancers, diagnosed and described long ago.” We heard Maria Ressa speak earlier about part of what is new, but I’d love you to sort it out. In the struggle between autocracy and democracy, what is old and what is new?

Anne Applebaum: When the founders of the United States of America were writing our Constitution, one of the things that they were worried about was demagogues, who might come to power by abusing the trust of the mob. That was more than two centuries ago. When they were having those discussions, most of what they were reading was about the Roman republic, which was a subject of widespread curiosity in colonial America. So what we’re talking about when we speak about autocrats and the appeal of autocrats is extremely old. It is maybe the oldest political idea in humanity.

Axelrod: It was addressed in “Federalist No. 1.”

Applebaum: “Federalist No. 1,” and Alexander Hamilton was reading about Julius Caesar. So many of these questions have been discussed and discussed over and over again. And it’s important to keep remembering that, because some of what is new is technology’s ability to draw out and amplify some of those human emotions and desires. What seems to me to be new is the way that we communicate and the ways in which that communication now amplifies, creates, and uses the desire for autocracy—or the fear and anger that lead people to demand autocracy. Nothing is new about the emotions. What is new is the ability of internet platforms to evoke them and amplify them.

Axelrod: What about the deployment of these technologies by autocrats, not just in their own countries, but as an offensive weapon? We’ve always had those efforts, but they’ve sort of been turbocharged now.

Applebaum: So in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union wanted to create a piece of disinformation, a conspiracy theory—and this is a true story—

Axelrod: How do we know it’s true?

Applebaum: Well, the story of how they did it is true. They wanted to seed the conspiracy theory that the CIA had created the AIDS epidemic. And they did it in a very specific way. An article appeared, I believe, in an Indian newspaper through a friendly journalist speculating that this might be true. Then another one in an Italian newspaper. Then they found another couple of papers that would print it, and sometimes those papers would then quote one another. At one point, they found an East German scientist who appeared in public and said he’d found some evidence that this was true. And they built the case for the idea that the CIA had created AIDS over several years. Now they can do exactly the same thing, except that it takes 10 minutes. You can have a network of fake or even semi-fake websites that will take articles that have been seeded or prepared in advance. They will then echo each other. People will then see, “Oh, look, there’s several sources repeating this story over and over again.” You can then create a botnet of trolls or even real people who you’ve organized to spread the story. And you can then move the story around the internet in 10 minutes, and you can give the impression that there’s a wave of conversation and discussion about something, even though it doesn’t exist and it’s not true. So what’s different is the scale and the speed.

Axelrod: Maria was discussing how this has been applied in the elections in the Philippines, but we experienced it with Russia—and others, but Russia primarily—interfering in our election. How new is that?

Applebaum: In a way, this is the dark side of globalization, namely that we all now live in the same information market. Whereas in the past the Russians or the Soviet Union would have had to try and get something going in the Indian market and then the Italian market and then somehow seed that into the American market, it’s now essentially one market. There’s an ease with which they can, first of all, study American politics and understand it in a way that wasn’t possible before, because they can use the same microtargeting and research tools that marketers use. They can tailor messages to different groups in specific ways, again, in the same way that marketers use. The people who are selling soap powder or washing machines—they also have ways of targeting particular audiences, changing the message whether you’re in Illinois or Florida or Wyoming, or whether you’re rich or poor. And the Russians took those tools and they used them to target Black Lives Matter activists in one part of the country and immigration activists in another part. Of course, it’s important to understand that what they did was no different from what American political campaigns do. The tools were available. And where those kinds of tools, in the past, wouldn’t have been available to outsiders or foreigners, now they are because everything’s available. They can reach into our markets and send whatever messages they want.

We’ve never tried the same in reverse. We know very little about the Russian internet, for example. I don’t think we spend a lot of time thinking about which groups in Russia would be interested in hearing our messages or the kind of language we could use to send them. But they spent many years actually studying us, and 2016 was the result of a long process.

Axelrod: Maria showed us a nuclear explosion twice, actually. That’s the thing about nuclear weapons. Once you use them, it’s hard to control. But this is a pretty cheap and efficient way to really throw a sort of a Stuxnet worm into the workings of democracies. Putin’s army may be being proved deficient right now, but they have a pretty efficient cyberarmy of a much smaller nature that doesn’t cost much to create a lot of havoc.

Applebaum: One of the oddities of the current war and one of the reasons why many people didn’t believe it would take place—despite the intelligence that the U.S. had gathered and was sharing with European colleagues—was that, up until now, the Russians had always been very cautious. Their tactic was to dismantle the enemy before you have to fight with the enemy. In other words, they seemed to want to avoid direct military conflict with the West because they believed they could disarm and undermine the West in other ways.

It wasn’t just through the use of the internet and Facebook. It was also through the funding of political parties in, really, almost every European country and democracies around the world. It was through the use of bribery but also just business contacts. They sought to create influence operations inside specific countries using mainstream businesspeople and mainstream journalists. I had a conversation with an Italian journalist a couple of days ago who wanted to talk about the Italian far right and Russian influence. I said, “Why don’t you talk about the Italian business community?” They were just as important in shaping Italian views that “We must be pragmatic, we must deal with Russia,” and so on. The same is true in Germany. So Russia had multiple ways of looking to influence conversation. Remember that their ultimate goal wasn’t just to win a popularity contest or a propaganda war. Their ultimate goal was to dismantle the European Union, to undermine NATO, and to persuade the United States to leave Europe. They had very clear strategic goals, and the information piece of it wasn’t PR; it was a part of those goals. It was an attempt to achieve them without actually fighting.

Axelrod: Yes. And in fact, it wasn’t to promote their own image; it was to destroy it.

Applebaum: This is the big difference between modern Russian propaganda and Soviet propaganda. There was no attempt—or very little—to sell Russia as an ideal society. There was no communist paradise that was being offered. Their goal instead was to undermine us and to convince Russians that Europe is degenerate, that America is falling apart and that there is nothing to admire or to seek in democracy. Putin’s main goal was to prevent Russians from wanting democracy, because he perceived his main political challenge as coming from the democracy movement and democracy activism in Russia that once or twice during his rule has seemed to have a lot of power and force. And so, first of all, convincing Russia that democracy is nothing. It’s all cynical. It’s all fake. It’s not true. And then, secondly, seeking to reach people inside democracies and convincing them of the same. And of course, because we have those strains of our own, because our own societies are full of people who are angry or cynical or disappointed with the nature of modern America or modern Europe, he found—it’s not as if he invented Marine Le Pen, the opposition leader in France, or he didn’t invent Donald Trump. He simply found them, and they were useful vectors. And he sought to amplify them. So, in that sense, it was an amplification project rather than creating something from scratch.

Axelrod: Nor did he create the fissures that were there. He mined them. He took advantage of them.

Applebaum: He did, and then many others copied him. I do think that the Russian actions in 2016 were important partly because they showed others how it could be done, and also because of the use of leaked material from the DNC. That was a tactic that I’d seen used before. So when you leak secret information, even if the information is completely anodyne‚ which most of that was—I think all of it was, in fact—the public is attracted to the idea that something secret has been revealed. And then you can use that to create conspiracy theories and hysteria. And I saw that done in Poland earlier on. I saw it done in other countries as well.

Axelrod: Well, and you saw it done to you.

Applebaum: Yes.

Axelrod: After your critical reporting on the invasion of Crimea, all of a sudden you became the object of attention.

Applebaum: Yes. So there was a brief and very strange moment when a very odd journalist, who was in fact probably a former KGB agent in the United States, began writing slanderous things about me. And this is actually how I learned about how this works, because one is always more interested in the slanderous things written about oneself. It sort of catches your attention. And then you start following it around the internet. Where is it coming from? This is exactly what you just described. You see it: Oh, look, it’s on Ron Paul’s website. Who knew the libertarians were interested in me? And then it appears in another place, and you begin to see how they echo one another. And in my case, the sort of height of it, and this is about 2015, was when Julian Assange tweeted something about me being a paid agent of—I can’t remember whether it was the Polish government or the CIA, but something like that. Why is Julian Assange tweeting that about me?

Axelrod: To his 4 million followers.

So obviously 2016 was 2016, but you became very interested in this early on, and, in fact, you and a colleague started a think tank.

Applebaum: Yes, I became interested in this in 2013 and especially 2014. We’re all so proud of ourselves now that we’re resisting Russian propaganda and the Russian description of the war, but actually, in 2014, Russian propaganda was quite successful, in both the cover-up and when soldiers without uniforms marched into the Crimea and announced that they weren’t invading—there was maybe some kind of civil war starting or they were just there to protect people. Quite a lot of people in the Western world were confused. I was in London at the time and I went repeatedly on television and the radio saying, “This is a Russian invasion force.” And people said, “How do you know? They’re not wearing uniforms. Maybe they’re Ukrainian separatists.” And for a good few weeks there was a lot of confusion, and they were very successful in portraying this invasion as a non-invasion. The other thing they were successful at doing was smearing the Ukrainians. “They’re Nazis. They’re far right. They’re ethnic nationalists.” And there was a certain purchase for that view in mainstream circles in London and Washington and elsewhere.

Axelrod: What about it creating fissures between eastern and western Ukraine?

Applebaum: Russia’s been trying to do that for two decades. The point of Russian propaganda inside Ukraine was to create and amplify these divisions, whether they were over language or whether they were over interpretations of history and different ways of seeing the world. That has been their modus operandi there. And one of the effects of 2014 and the last two Ukrainian presidencies has really been to bring a lot of that to an end. And I think their invasion now is partly a recognition that the information war failed in Ukraine, and Ukraine was, partly thanks to them, unifying and rebuilding its state and rebuilding its army. It was not so easy to divide using slander and political games as it had been before.

Axelrod: So let’s go back to your journey. So you began paying a lot of attention to this all over Europe.

Applebaum: So my colleague Peter Pomerantsev and I started a think-tank program, and then we moved it to the London School of Economics, and it’s now at Johns Hopkins. Originally we were investigating: How does Russian propaganda work? And we tried to track it in different ways. We worked with a lot of other different groups who were doing this. We tried to track it. We tried to understand it. We did a couple of publications on the Swedish elections, on German elections. We also looked at various solutions, checking and so on. One of the things that we pretty quickly learned was that fact-checking doesn’t work, because you have to trust the fact-checker. And if people don’t trust the fact-checker, then they don’t believe the fact-checker either. And so, so much of what we were talking about, in fact, was about creating communities of trust. How do you build those for people?

Axelrod: And that’s exactly what Maria was talking about in the project that she’s working on in the Philippines.

Applebaum: Exactly. So how do you create communities of trust? Also, how do you get to the underlying problems of division and polarization? How can you heal polarization? How can you bring people together? Because if you want people to believe something that’s true, you almost have to build a community around it. One of the other effects—and this isn’t just about the internet, and this is beautifully described by Jonathan Rauch in his recent book called The Constitution of Knowledge—is that we’ve had a decline in belief in truth and facts and science more generally. It’s not just in politics. Part of that is to do with the fact that we never really think very consciously about why it is that we think things are true. But there’s a whole ecosystem—here at universities, there’s a scientific method and there are peer-reviewed papers and there are arguments among colleagues. And there is a conversation that leads people to conclude that something is true and you arrive at it through a series of institutions. That’s true in journalism. It’s true in academia. It’s true in government. You have ombudsmen and inspectors and so on, and you reach conclusions based on these networks. If you disrupt those networks and make people feel no sense of faith in those networks—they hate universities, they hate journalists, they hate the government, they hate bureaucrats—then you suddenly find that what is true and what is not true is disputed. And so part of the solution to this problem, and I think there are some regulatory solutions, but there’s also a problem of re-creating communities of trust, and this may be something that both media and philanthropy can think about.

Axelrod: I want to get to solutions, but I want to continue on your journey. Part of that journey, once you formed this think tank and once you started doing these studies, took you here to the U.S. You met with policy makers within the government in 2016, and you tried to call their attention to—

Applebaum: This was slightly earlier, in 2015. So we did a big investigation into Russian disinformation, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe. And we pulled together all the existing evidence at that time. We put it into a report by Peter Pomerantsev and Edward Lucas, another colleague. Then we took the report to Washington and we took it around the Hill and we went to the State Department and elsewhere. We showed how it was working and how it was influencing politics. And the reaction we got—and remember, this was April 2015—was, “Well, this is all very upsetting and distressing, and it’s really too bad for Slovakia that they have this terrible problem. Maybe we’ll think of a State Department project that can help the Slovaks.”

Axelrod: This goes to your point, Maria, that Americans tend to think they’re immune.

Applebaum: Even I thought Americans would be immune. And as the 2016 election unfolded, I watched my jaw dropping as I saw slogans that I knew had originated in the Russian media appearing in the U.S. election campaign.

Axelrod: Talk a little bit more about that. What did you see in 2016 that you thought was symptomatic of what you knew were patterns of behavior?

Applebaum: There were several things. One of them was, there were these slogans. “Hillary Clinton will start WWIII.” “Obama created ISIS.” These are slogans and ideas that originally ran in the Russian press, and then Trump would use them in his campaign speeches. And so I could see this direct connection there. But there were also tactics that looked familiar to me. So this leak of not-very-interesting people’s emails from the Democratic National Committee. And then the spinning of those emails into a million different conspiracy theories. As nobody probably remembers now, Pizzagate was one of those. Pizzagate came out of the emails because some of the emails referred to meetings at a pizza restaurant.

Axelrod: This was that story about a pedophilia ring, right?

Applebaum: And “cp,” “cheese pizza,” is meant to be a symbol for “child pornography.” And so people read into the emails this story about child pornography at this particular pizza restaurant in Washington. And, as we know, at the height of the madness a poor guy from North Carolina drove up to Washington with a shotgun and came to the restaurant to free the children who were in the basement. And then he discovered there was no basement.

Axelrod: Well, remind me to order sausage next time.

Applebaum: But the technique: Create this idea that there is something secret that has been revealed and then spin off. There was a kind of Catholic conspiracy theory that came out of that. There were a whole bunch of things. This is something I’d seen before. This happened in Poland in 2014, 2015 as well. So I knew somebody was learning something from someone.

Axelrod: I should ask you: Your husband was the foreign minister in Poland and is still a member of European Parliament. What was his experience like as a member of government?

Applebaum: Well, mostly his experience was very good, but he was famously taped at a restaurant along with other people. And these tapes of conversations were released, and in none of the conversations was any crime committed. There was nothing illegal in any of them. But the off-the-record commentary was—again, it was exactly the same thing. It was twisted into complex conspiracy theories. And the tapes were made by somebody who had connections to the Russian coal industry.

Axelrod: And as you pointed out, you did studies in a number of different countries. What were the threads of commonality that you saw between them?

Applebaum: When you look at the Russian efforts in political campaigns, they’re often very similar. In some European countries, they support both the far left and the far right. And to some extent, they may do that here, too. It was a combination of funding for far-right parties, and sometimes particular people or the creation of business opportunities for them. One of the funders of the Brexit campaign, for example, in the U.K., had a business opportunity created for him by the Russians. That doesn’t mean he was bribed and he’s not a KGB agent, but these opportunities would be presented to you. And this clearly happened in the circles around Matteo Salvini, in Italy and other places. And then the disinformation tactics would often be about getting people to focus on whatever it was that made them afraid. So fear of immigration, fear of Muslim terrorism, which was very important in 2015–16 in Europe. Fear of immigration, even in countries that didn’t have any immigrants. One of the countries where this was done most successfully—and this was not Russia; this was its own thing—was in Hungary. And Hungary is not a country with very many Muslim immigrants, but the fear that they were coming and this narrative that we need to protect Hungarians from this outside threat was extremely effective. It was effective in other places, too, focusing on that and also looking for ways to divide people over gender and LGBT culture wars. This is something that the Russians have also consistently done inside Russia, but also in other countries.

There was a very brilliant study of Russian television, around about 2016, ’17, ’18, which looked at how Europe was portrayed on Russian TV. And the study found, to make a long story short, that there were lots and lots of news articles about Europe on the three main Russian channels, and they were all negative—maybe one or two exceptions. Almost invariably the implication was: Europe is degenerate, and crazy things are happening. In Germany, gay couples are allowed to take children away from straight couples. Gay couples have more rights than straight people. Sometimes these things would be based on real incidents, sometimes not. But always the distortion was that there’s a moral threat coming from Europe. But this is exactly the same kind of language that was used inside Germany or France—that there’s a moral threat coming. It’s an existential threat to your way of life. And it’s connected to the institutions of your country and of your democracy, and so what you need to do is resist those institutions.

Axelrod: Are you talking about Germany and France in the 20th century, or currently?

Applebaum: This is current. Another tactic that’s very important to understand is the conspiracy theory. Sometimes they work; sometimes they don’t. Usually they work because they play on something deeper and something real that people do fear. And so in this country, a very, very successful conspiracy theory was that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and therefore he’s not American, and therefore he’s an illegitimate president.

Axelrod: I have some recollection of that.

Applebaum: I didn’t take it seriously. “Okay, some crazy people believe this.” But up to 30 percent of Americans did believe it at some point or another. And if you do believe that, think about what it means. It means our president is illegitimate. And that means that the White House and Congress and the FBI and the CIA and the media are all lying to us. The institutions of the state have made someone illegitimate into the president, and that means that the whole system is rotten. The whole country is falling apart. It’s not what it’s meant to be. It’s been taken over by enemies, and it’s not real or it doesn’t represent us anymore. And it was actually a very powerful and important moment of change, I think, in the American public. There’s a very similar version of this that happened in Poland. It was a set of conspiracy theories around a plane crash that killed one of the presidents. And for similar reasons, it had a very deep echo. People in Poland were spooked by it. The crash happened in Russia. Had the Russians plotted it? Was there a cover-up? And this was not just that people thought something crazy had happened, but it undermined faith in the whole system. So if you find the right conspiracy theory and if it has enough purchase and it echoes enough with things that people really are afraid of, then you can undermine people's trust in democracy. And this is a tactic that the Russians have used over and over and over again.

Axelrod: In that sense, the same dynamic that causes this to be a profitable strategy for social-media platforms makes it a profitable strategy for political insurgency.

Applebaum: Conspiracy theories spread because what the good ones do—

Axelrod: A good conspiracy theory.

Applebaum: Successful ones. Effective ones. What they do is they seem to provide an explanation for mysterious facts or things that seem strange to people. And so they function as a story that gives people the sensation Now I understand it, this thing that was bothering me, that I couldn’t understand. You know: How did a Black person with a strange name become president of the United States? That makes no sense. Here’s the explanation: “He’s not.” Or: How did this plane crash kill the president of Poland? It couldn’t have been an accident. Here’s the explanation: “There was a secret plot.” And people find it very satisfying, and they click on it and they pass it on, and, as Maria has just brilliantly described, the architecture of Facebook is such that the things that make people angry or afraid are the things that move fastest.

Axelrod: Well, let’s talk about solutions. You started down that road, and Maria was very specific about her ideas about what we needed to do. You’ve done a series of studies. Your think-tank arena has done a series of studies. In each study, you offer prescriptions that suggest themselves from the research that you’ve done. Just, first of all, briefly say how you do that research. And talk about the solutions that you think are most important.

Applebaum: So the research is always a group of partners, people who study the internet. We usually try to bring together different groups. Sometimes we do a lot of polling, trying to understand divisions. Sometimes we use people who can follow Twitter bots across the internet. We’ve tried different kinds of things. So they’re usually projects that bring people together. This is, I should stipulate, fairly small-scale. There are other people who do these things that are much bigger-scale than we do.

The solutions, I think, go in two or three categories. I think there is a regulatory solution. We’re not there yet, in that our Congress is not yet prepared to talk about it. Our lawmakers aren’t yet there. One or two of them are, but not as a group. And this would be the regulation not of content—we’re not going to create a ministry of information that reads every Facebook page and takes things down. But it would be a way of regulating the algorithms. Opening up the black box, looking at what they are and how they work, and giving some people outside of the companies ways to understand that. And if you think that’s impossible because the platforms are too powerful, remember that once upon a time it was considered impossible to regulate the food industry. The food industry was only eventually regulated because socially concerned scientists began doing experiments, measuring food, and then they began publishing the results of their work. And in some cases they created newsletters or things focused on consumers. They raised public awareness, and now we have food regulation, which we all think is totally normal. And it wouldn’t occur to us that we shouldn't have it. And so we’re still at that phase. We could get there. It’s not technologically impossible. And there are computer scientists who are working on this in some universities.

The second solution that is worth thinking about would be putting a lot of thought into what a public-interest social-media project would look like. And by this I don’t mean the BBC website. If you were to have online conversations that were good and useful and fruitful, how would they be designed? What algorithms would they be based on and what would they seek to do? And this is also a huge area of research and experimentation, and there are many examples, in fact, of people who’ve tried versions of this. The Taiwanese are very interested in this, for obvious reasons. The Taiwanese are very interested in democracy and how to protect it. For example, there’s a platform called Polis, where you can essentially hold an online debate, except that instead of everybody shouting at each other and being angry, it sorts people into groups, so that you become clear where the areas of consensus are. So could you create consensus online? Could you find other ways of talking online? Could you create a social media that has slightly different rules, in the ways that you have rules for a town hall or rules for Wikipedia, which is a great example, actually? Could you have an online conversation that had rules? Maybe the rules would be that no one can be anonymous. Everybody has to be identifiable as a real person. So there are no bots. Maybe some of the rules are that when you post things, you have to wait six hours before it appears, so that when you are really mad and you post something, you have three hours to think about it and take it back.

There’s a thing called frontporchforum.com in Vermont, which works a little bit like this. There are a few other things. And then the challenge would be finding ways to finance it. Finding ways to persuade people to communicate on that and not on Facebook. But it’s not impossible, and this is, again, a great area of really interesting research.

Axelrod: You mentioned Wikipedia significantly. It isn’t supported by advertising. And this is enormously lucrative. So I don’t have a lot of faith that the platforms are going to regulate themselves.

Applebaum: No, they will not. They could. They know a lot about what spreads and what doesn’t spread. Facebook has even told us that after January 6, they were much more cautious about what kinds of things they allowed to go forward and how information was spread. And when I heard that they’d done that, I thought, Well, if they could do it at that moment, why didn’t they do it before? So no, they are not going to regulate themselves. They don’t have any interest in regulating themselves. Appealing to them to be nicer or more public-spirited seems quite pointless to me. And that’s why I hope eventually we could get to a conversation about some kind of regulation, because it seems to me that there is a bipartisan interest in this. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, I’ve had this conversation with him a couple of times, and he does think it’s impossible. And so he has another idea, which is that at least we could create something called middleware, which would at least allow us to choose our algorithms, so we would have some control over what kind of information we see. And that’s another kind of technical solution.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a conference jointly hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. Learn more and watch sessions here.

The Fight for Our Attention

2022-03-11T10:00:00-05:00

In one early scene in Lauren Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts, the narrator snoops through her boyfriend’s phone. His apps are arranged in an unfamiliar way, and looking with fresh eyes makes all the colorful options—a camera, an internet browser, two ride-sharing services—immediately overwhelming. “The effect was to prevent the eye from focusing without exactly exhausting it either, making you feel that you were seeing too much and nothing at all,” she observed in a section of the novel adapted for The Atlantic.

The remark is an encapsulation of what it feels like to be on the internet—or just about anywhere—nowadays. This situation is relatively new. As the scholar Tim Wu chronicles in his book The Attention Merchants, newspapers were the first to advance the idea that a captive audience might be a lucrative product. Now, that notion is everywhere, and we must fight our way through a deluge of forces competing to be noticed. Leila Chatti captures this experience in her poem “Attention.” Distractions as varied as a truck sputtering outside and an engagement album on Facebook accumulate like a never-ending to-do list, until the speaker must submit “to the most persuasive god, the most recent.”

Chatti’s words invoke the wisdom of another poet, Mary Oliver, who wrote that “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” and whose body of work serves as an argument that where we fix our gaze matters. As a growing set of books argue s, it could even be instrumental for the fate of democracy. After all, Hannah Arendt wrote, propaganda doesn’t need to persuade in order to be successful; it simply needs to confuse, to exhaust—to distract.

Two years into a pandemic that has literally warped our brains, reclaiming concentration may seem like a tall order. But the literature of attention can offer lessons. Oliver’s essay collection Upstream models how to notice, and in Julie Otsuka’s novel The Swimmers, the titular characters turn to mundanity in the face of crisis, consumed by the rhythm of “stroke, stroke, breath.” And Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is a vital reminder about the value of distractedness—so long as it’s mindfully embraced rather than forced.

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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What We’re Reading

Arsh Raziuddin

“Discovery”

“At first there was too much information to take anything in; I felt frantic, like I had just entered a Walmart with the whimsical idea that I might get some socks, maybe a magazine, maybe a new kind of frozen burrito, and instead was confronted by the overwhelming vagueness of my desires.”

📚 Fake Accounts, by Lauren Oyler

Wikimedia

Does advertising ruin everything?

“The 21st century’s most successful industrialists, like Facebook and Google, harvest another commodity as abundant as wheat or crude oil. In the new industry, the fields are media and entertainment, the harvesters are advertisers, and the crop is attention.”

📚 The Attention Merchants, by Tim Wu

Christopher Anderson / Magnum

“Attention”

“All day, the world makes its demands. There’s so much of it, world, / begging to be noticed.”

📚 “Attention,” by Leila Chatti

Mario Anzuoni / Reuters

‘Attention is the beginning of devotion’

“[Mary Oliver’s] final collection of essays was called Upstream. In the title piece, she remembers getting separated from her parents in the woods as they stroll along a creek. But what she recalls isn’t the trauma of being lost, but the attentiveness she achieves in that charged moment of aloneness.”

📚 Upstream, by Mary Oliver

Adam Maida / The Atlantic

The great fracturing of American attention

“Recent years have seen the rise of a new mini-genre of literature: works arguing that one of the many emergencies Americans are living through right now is a widespread crisis of attention. The books vary widely in focus and tone, but share, at their foundations, an essential line of argument: Attention, that atomic unit of democracy, will shape our fate.”

📚 Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari
📚 How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell
📚 The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt

Zara Pfeifer / Connected Archives

The big secret in our small routines

“Life often happens without much incident, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth paying attention to.”

📚 The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

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