Kevin Townsend | The Atlantic

Rupert Murdoch Gets His Succession Finale

2025-09-11T10:00:00-04:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

He was, after all, the eldest boy.

The family drama that inspired HBO’s Succession ended this week with a settlement that ensures Rupert Murdoch’s conservative-media empire will pass to his oldest son, Lachlan. Three of Murdoch’s other children will each reportedly receive $1.1 billion as part of the agreement. The saga’s finale also seems to cement the politics of the news conglomerate.

Before the deal, a persistent question dangled over the empire: What might happen to Fox News and the many other right-wing Murdoch properties if Rupert’s more politically moderate children took over?

With the keys going to Lachlan, the most conservative of the siblings, that question is answered. New ones follow: What does a post-Rupert News Corp mean for The Wall Street Journal and how the outlet covers President Donald Trump? How might Lachlan differ from his father? And, ultimately, what were the decades of family strife for when it all ended in a buyout anyway?

Staff writer McKay Coppins profiled the family’s second son, James, for The Atlantic’s April cover story. McKay joins Radio Atlantic to share insights from his year of reporting on the family and what he thinks now that the real-life Succession has ended.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Mylee Hogan (from 7News Australia): It is Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan pitched against his other three children Prudence, Elisabeth, and James.

Carrington Clarke (from Australian Broadcasting Corporation): Rupert Murdoch took three of his children to court to ensure his media empire remains in the hands of eldest son Lachlan and a conservative force.

Jim Rutenberg (speaking to 7News Australia): Given the outsize influence that Rupert Murdoch’s empire has and its role in being a sort of clarion of right-wing populism … this is about all of us; this isn’t only one family’s drama.

Hanna Rosin: The HBO show Succession ended over two years ago. But the real-world family saga that inspired it continued on. Rupert Murdoch, patriarch and media mogul of all media moguls, has always said that he wanted his conservative empire to stay in the family after he died. As he entered his 90s, the question of which child would lead it became more urgent.

But as the HBO show dramatized, succession is no simple thing. The empire is held by a family trust, and Rupert didn’t get to dictate its fate. The siblings fought, battled each other in court; family secrets spilled out in legal documents.

Staff writer McKay Coppins wrote The Atlantic’s April cover story about the Murdochs, and he spoke extensively with one brother, James. By that point, the succession battle was between James and his older brother, Lachlan.

Lachlan is more conservative, more self-consciously modeling himself on their father. James, meanwhile, is more politically moderate, but he also spent two decades in the family business.

Who would take over and steer a news empire that includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and a myriad of outlets across the world? Would it remain an important force in the right-wing media ecosystem?

This week, we got our answer. The two sides came to a deal, and the chosen heir is Lachlan. The Murdoch news empire remains conservative. James and his two older sisters reportedly get $1.1 billion each—but no stake in the company’s future.

So that’s the finale. But the implications go far beyond the Murdochs themselves. McKay Coppins spent a year reporting his story and knows all the twists and turns, and so when the news broke, we were eager to sit down with him. Here’s our conversation.

McKay, welcome to the show.

McKay Coppins: Thanks for having me on.

Rosin: So the moment has arrived. (Laughs.)

Coppins: Yes.

Rosin: The drama has ended, which has been going on for decades. How do you summarize how it ended?

Coppins: In some ways, it’s basically a cementing of the status quo, right? Lachlan—the chosen heir apparent, Rupert’s favorite son, the one he has always wanted to run his empire when he was gone—is now firmly established as the king-in-waiting and will have full control of these companies when Rupert dies, without any threat of a challenge from his siblings.

In some ways, I feel like it’s a fascinating moment because this succession drama has really defined the Murdoch empire for decades. It is the single element of these companies that has continued to pop up in coverage, in speculation, in scrutiny—inside the companies and outside. And so I almost wonder if the Murdochs now have to kind of wonder, What are we about now? You know?

Rosin: (Laughs.) That’s such a good point. Like, this is their meaning, and now they’ve lost their meaning, so—

Coppins: Right, and I’m sure it’s a—look, it’s a sigh of relief for Rupert. He got what he wanted, Lachlan gets what he wanted, and the other three kids walk away each a billion dollars richer. And so, in a way, you could say that this was a development that led to everybody getting what they want, but in reality, it’s kind of the finale of a story that has really, in very serious ways, wrecked this family and, for better or worse, defined this very powerful and influential media empire.

[Music]

Coppins: The thing that most surprises me is that they were able to come to the table at all at this point, because when I left off, right after I stopped reporting in February of this year, the two sides were really far apart. And the legal battle over the family trust had been incredibly personally bitter and angry and painful, and it had surfaced years of kind of family secrets and scheming and manipulation. And James, at least, the youngest son, did not seem eager to settle anything—and for what it’s worth, neither, really, did Rupert or Lachlan. And so I am, I guess, a little surprised that they were able to work something out. But I’m not really surprised that it ended up in Lachlan’s hands, because as far as Rupert [was concerned], this was always how the story was going to end.

Rosin: Can you lay out the battle lines for us? Because I think, I mean, you’ve obviously followed it closer than most of us, and the rest of us probably have it confused with HBO’s Succession in our heads. And you can understand why that happens: The similarities are uncanny.

Kendall Roy (from the show Succession): Oh, hey, Dad, I like those stories you planted about me. That was … (Makes the “okay” hand gesture.)

Logan Roy: Yes. You forced my hand.

Shiv Roy: There it is.

Logan Roy: What you kids do not understand, it’s all part of the game.

Rosin: Anyway, lay out the battle lines in the real-life Murdoch drama: Who wanted what, and what had developed over the past many years?

Coppins: Right, so the players here are Rupert, of course: the man who built the empire, the either visionary or supervillain, depending on your politics and what you think of (Laughs.) the Murdoch media assets. And he had always built this empire with the idea that he would pass it on to his children.

And at various points, he had favored different kids to take over when he was gone, but really, it was always supposed to be Lachlan. Lachlan is his oldest son, the one who kind of most self-consciously emulates his father, also the one who appears to share his father’s conservative politics. In fact, according to my reporting, Lachlan is actually more right-wing than Rupert and more aligned with kind of the Trump-era populist conservatism than Rupert ever was.

Then there was James, the younger son, who at some points was kind of the backup—the spare, to use some royal terminology. He’s the one that I spent a lot of time profiling for The Atlantic. And he was more moderate in his politics, a little more liberal, also more contrarian, and he spent 20 years working in the family business as an executive but would often criticize the way it was managed internally. And then once he left his executive perch, increasingly, he spoke out publicly and then, in my interviews with him, was very, very public about his complaints and criticisms of the family empire. And sort of aligned with him were his two oldest sisters, Prudence and Liz.

And so, in this latest episode of the succession battle (Laughs.), the latest episode of Succession, you had James and his sisters on one side, Rupert and Lachlan on the other. And what Rupert was trying to do was, essentially, to rewrite the family trust in such a way that would make it so that rather than dividing control of the empire equally between these four children, it would secure control completely with Lachlan and cut out the other three.

And so that was what the—over the last year or more, there’s been this very pitched legal battle taking place in a Reno, Nevada, probate court over whether Rupert could do this. This was supposed to be an irrevocable trust; he wasn’t supposed to be able to change it. Rupert and Lachlan developed this whole secret plan that they called “Project Family Harmony,” where they were trying to, basically, assert their will without cooperation from the other three.

And they failed in court initially, but a judge had to sign off on the final decision by the probate commissioner. And in the interim, a lot of things happened, including the publication of our cover story, that seemed to introduce a degree of uncertainty in the kind of legal machinations here. And it seems like, eventually, that’s what led everybody to come back to the table and see if they could make a deal without the courts, and they did.

Rosin: And when you say that’s what led them to ultimately come to the table. What’s the “that”? The exposure of all the secrets, the bruising from the litigation—what is it that finally pushed them to end the drama?

Coppins: Well, I think from James and his sisters’ perspective, they thought that they had won, and they had, by all accounts. The probate commissioner had ruled very decisively in their favor, and as far as they were concerned, it was over. A few things happened, though, after that commissioner’s decision was released.

A judge had to sign off on it, and the judge was supposed to just kind of rubber-stamp whatever the probate commissioner decided. Rupert and Lachlan and their lawyers tried to argue that the decision was “clearly erroneous,” that the judge should reconsider it. And during this period, in February of earlier this year, The Atlantic published the profile of James that I had been working on for the past year, which appeared to give both the probate commissioner and the judge reason to believe that James had violated a court order to not talk publicly about certain court proceedings. So all of a sudden, there was this kind of element of uncertainty about whether the decision would actually become final.

It’s a little strange for me to talk about this because it’s this meta level of the story where our reporting seems to have had some influence on things. That’s what The New York Times reported this week, and I’ve subsequently confirmed it: that our story did seem to influence the parties’ willingness to reconsider.

The family, both parties, were faced with a choice: They could face the prospect of many more months or even years of litigation, or they could see if they could come back to the table and just come to an agreement that would satisfy everyone. And it seems that the agreement was a dollar figure.

Rosin: Okay, wow. I have two things. One is, as you’re talking and you get kind of into the legal weeds and the small maneuvering, I’m literally parsing each of the things you say into an episode.

Coppins: (Laughs.)

Rosin: (Laughs.) I’m like, Okay, well, that episode would look like this, and here’s where they would film it and in which house. Every move is an episode.

Second, McKay, wow. I had no idea how much your Atlantic story ended up being a part of the story. Was it something in the content of what you wrote? I recall that James called his father a “misogynist,” and that got a lot of attention. Was it the fact that they accused James of violating confidentiality and therefore that could open up more years of legal maneuverings that everyone was just too exhausted to deal with? What was the influence?

Coppins: It was kind of both. Well, part of it was that he was extremely critical of his father, his brother, and the way they were running these companies. Again, I don’t know exactly what the legal ramifications would’ve been there, but it did raise the question of whether he had the company’s best interests at heart. James, of course, I should say, would argue that his criticism was coming from a place of wanting to turn around, salvage, reform these companies.

But then the other part of it was that he, basically, was being accused of sharing information with a journalist, me, that was supposed to be under seal in this private court case. And I do want to just say one thing about this.

I think that, since The New York Times story broke, there’s been some speculation in the world of Murdoch watchers that James started talking to me in an effort to mount this attack on his family, and I just think maybe a little context would be helpful here because the reality is, I approached him in January of last year totally on a lark. I had no idea any of this was happening. The legal battle was not public yet, and I just thought he might be an interesting profile. And it wasn’t until I started talking to him that I found out about this. And even then, he was pretty careful about what he was willing to say at first. And I think that some people have the impression that James was secretly colluding with this journalist to go after his family as part of the legal battle. And in reality, it was sort of serendipitous timing for me and unfortunate timing for him that I happened to approach him right as this kind of climactic moment in the Murdoch succession battle was taking place.

Rosin: McKay, you mention that Lachlan—who, I should say, declined to be interviewed for your story, along with Rupert—might be more aligned with Trump politics than his father, or at least as conservative. And Rupert himself once said that his companies acted as, quote, “protector of the conservative voice in the English-speaking world.” So what does the choice of Lachlan mean for how the media empire’s positioned politically? Does nothing change?

Coppins: Yeah, I mean, there had always been this hope among sort of liberals and centrists and, frankly, even some people inside these companies that, when Rupert finally stepped back or died, that James and his sisters would come in, kind of link arms—because they all have more liberal politics—oust their more right-wing brother, and then defang Fox News and reform the Murdoch press, right? That they would make these outlets more responsible, slightly more moderate in their politics. And I talked to James about this, and he was always a little wary of getting into too much detail, but he did say that he considered Fox News a blight on his family name, a threat to democracy. He said that their model is essentially lying to their viewers.

So he was very clear-eyed about what he thinks the problems are at Fox News, in particular, and some of the other Murdoch media assets as well. And I think that if things had gone a different way, we might have seen a real effort by James and his sisters to do this. But with this resolution, what it essentially means is that James and his sisters have nothing to do anymore with these businesses. And with control of these companies firmly in Lachlan’s hands, I think we can expect, at the very least, for them to continue on the political path they’ve been on and, if anything, to maybe even become more aligned with sort of this new populist right-wing movement that has taken over conservative politics, at least in the English-speaking world.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: how the Murdoch media empire tore apart the Murdoch family.

[Break]

Rosin: From the beginning, Rupert Murdoch insisted on running his media empire like a family business. But as McKay has reported, the business took precedence over the family, not the other way around.

Coppins: Lachlan was chosen early on as the heir apparent and then, in 2005, after a big dispute with Roger Ailes and various other lieutenants of his father, quit in a huff and moved to Australia and actually stayed out of these companies for 10 years, while James was kind of grinding away in Asia and Europe and kind of building his résumé—

Rosin: That would be Season 3. (Laughs.) which would take place half in Australia—

Coppins: (Laughs.) That’s right—

Rosin: —and it would be the moment that James could possibly take over, the moment when it seemed as if James was gonna be the heir apparent.

Coppins: And that moment literally happened in 2015. James thought he was on the verge of becoming CEO, and he kind of got blindsided at this lunch where his brother showed up and they just told him, Hey, surprise, your brother’s coming back, and you’re going to report to him.

And James was completely blindsided. He left the lunch. He basically threatened to quit. And then Rupert, kind of scrambling to control the damage and keep both of his sons in the fold, came up with this arrangement where they would both run the company together—James as CEO, Lachlan as executive chairman.

It was kind of a disastrous experiment. They didn’t get along at all. They were based on opposite coasts. Every major decision had to be signed off on by both of them. And they often couldn’t get in touch with each other, or Lachlan would kind of stop responding to texts. It was a real kind of comedy of errors or farce, depending on your view of things.

This also happened to coincide with the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit, a major kind of shift in Western politics that really left James feeling like he was totally misaligned with the mission of these media assets. And so he found his way out. He left in 2019—still, at first, retaining a board seat, then giving it up. But it really isn’t until right now that his involvement in the company is completely erased. Even after leaving his role in an official capacity, he still had these shares. He had these votes in the family trust that he was waiting to kind of be able to use when his father was gone. And now, with this buyout deal, he has no influence at all.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. I want to ask you about The Wall Street Journal because they broke the story about Trump’s alleged birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, which the president denies writing and called a “fake.” Trump tried to intimidate them, take legal action and, unlike some other media organizations, they didn’t buckle. What role do you think Rupert played in standing firm, and what does that say about the company and everything we’ve been talking about?

Coppins: Yeah, I think you’re touching on the most interesting dynamic and the most interesting question about this kind of media empire once Rupert’s gone. Because Rupert has always been kind of divided between these two impulses, where he is a political operator, and he’s been very deft about accumulating political power through the media assets that he owns, first in Australia, then in Britain, then across Europe and the U.S. He has a very well-documented pattern of, basically, using his outlets to endorse or champion certain politicians and then cashing in on that influence by being able to further expand his empire, often by clearing certain regulatory hurdles with his political allies’ help.

So on one hand, he’s a political operator, right? And after some early squeamishness, Fox News and even The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, certainly, kind of got behind Trump early on, and Trump was sort of an ally. But the other part of Rupert Murdoch is that he sees himself as a newsman, right? And he loves newspapers. His lifelong dream, or I don’t know “lifelong,” but for a very long time was to acquire The Wall Street Journal, and it took a lot of maneuvering and a lot of flattering and a lot of money, and he finally got it, and it was this trophy of his. It’s his most prestigious newspaper asset, certainly in America, you could argue in the world.

And so when he came into conflict with Donald Trump over this story, and Trump is saying, I’m gonna sue you, and he reportedly got on the phone with Rupert and tried to convince him not to run the story, I think Rupert’s newsman instinct kicked in. And he, as a media mogul, as a news guy, sort of sensed blood in the water—also probably sensed, This is a great story—and backed his reporters and his editors, as a newsman should do, as a good media mogul should do.

And so I don’t think he’s—he certainly hasn’t been perfect in this regard. He’s constantly politically conflicted, and he’s not a 100 percent champion of the free press. But when push came to shove in this incident, he backed his newsroom, and he came into conflict with a president that he helped get elected.

My question is, when Rupert dies—he’s 94 years old—will Lachlan have the same stomach for that kind of fight? If he’s in a similar situation five, 10 years from now, and a president that his audience loves and that his media outlets have helped champion is upset about a story and pounding down the door, calling Lachlan, telling him, You need to retract this or not publish it, will Lachlan have that same newsman instinct that is coming into conflict with the political power player instinct, the profit-obsessed executive instinct?

I don’t know. That’s a genuine open question. By all accounts, he does not seem to have the same kind of delighted love for journalists and being in a newsroom that Rupert seems to have. And so I don’t know if Lachlan will be able to kind of play the role of the good media mogul the same way that his dad has.

Rosin: Yeah, I’m assuming—well, one, Rupert’s father was a newsman, so he has that respect. It might not just be a question of stomach; it might also be a question of taste. It sounds like Lachlan doesn’t necessarily respect that, didn’t grow up in that, doesn’t necessarily care about that.

Coppins: Well, one interesting piece of context here is that, back in 2018, 2019, when Rupert started to talk to Bob Iger about selling their film division to Disney, James was basically in favor of it, in part because he believed that, strategically, it didn’t make sense for Fox to try to compete in the streaming wars. They weren’t big enough. Also because he sensed that they were in a very good seller’s market for this stuff; every big streamer was trying to accumulate more library, and so they were saying, Oh, we can sell you all this IP. He ended up being right about that—they sold at an insanely high price that now everybody, every analyst, would say they got the best price they ever possibly could have gotten.

But during all of that, Lachlan did not want to sell. He was actually based in L.A.; his office was on the Fox lot in Los Angeles. And he really was much more interested in the glamorous Hollywood element of the media business than the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, slumming it in the newsrooms element of the business.

Rosin: Right, right, right.

Coppins: And so I do think Lachlan was really upset that they sold. Since then, you’ve seen him kind of try to make moves to edge their way back into the entertainment world. And I just—I think that Lachlan, like you said, it might be a matter of stomach, it might be a matter of what’s in his DNA, but he doesn’t seem to care about reporting and journalism and news the same way that his dad does. He’s much more interested in going to the Super Bowl when Fox is airing the Super Bowl or going to the Oscars or whatever. That’s kind of more his world.

Rosin: Okay, so the family now. First of all, have you talked to James since this happened?

Coppins: Not yet. He’s being very quiet.

Rosin: Okay. What is your sense of what their relationship is like? So they all had to come back to the negotiating table, moment of harmony—that name is hilarious: “Project Family Harmony.” And then, is your sense that it’s just their islands? It’s chilly?

Coppins: Yes, that’s definitely my sense. I mean, this is where I have to basically speculate on recent conversations I’ve had with the family but not since this development.

Last year, around Thanksgiving, the initial trial in this legal battle had ended, they were waiting for the probate commissioner’s decision, and James and his sisters were feeling kind of sentimental. I think they were also hedging their bets a little. And they actually got together and sent a letter to their father, basically saying, Look, this has been incredibly painful for all of us. We don’t know what the decision is going to be, but before the damage is really done, what if we put down our weapons, called off the lawyers for a minute, and why don’t we try to see if we can make a deal? Can we just try to come to terms as a regular family, right? Let’s get in a room and talk about it. And Rupert wrote back and just totally brushed them off. He said, If you wanna talk, talk to my lawyers. He said, actually, I feel more confident than ever that I’m right about what needs to happen to these companies.

And I remember talking to both James and his wife, Kathryn, and Liz about this and basically saying, Is there any coming back from this? What does it look like to try to heal this family after this incredibly bitter, pitched legal fight that has become so personal? And none of them really had a good answer. None of them were like, Oh yeah, we can get past this. And so it is hard for me to imagine that they’re all gonna be hanging out on Christmas together. I think that they are more divided, bitterly, than ever before, and while they have come to this resolution, the initial reporting at least suggests that it wasn’t all of them getting into a room; it was their various lawyers and representatives. And so, to me, that suggests that they remain fairly estranged from each other, or at least some of them.

Rosin: Then this is my ultimate question, and it’s also the ultimate question of the show Succession: Why? Why did Rupert conduct himself this way? Was it the love of a conservative voice in media? Was it something he believed in for the world? Or was it just the love of watching his children sort of dangle like puppets and fight against each other and just the fun of the manipulation?

Coppins: This was the question that I had the entire time I was reporting the story and talking to James, because I would often finish a long conversation with James and Kathryn, and they would be kind of recounting all these painful episodes in the family, and I would be riding the train back to Washington, reviewing my notes, and just being like, This is incredibly twisted and sad, and it seems so unnecessary.

Rupert could have put an end to this succession drama years and years ago. He also, by the way, probably could have had this exact deal, where he gave each of his children $1.1 billion to buy them out, a year ago, three years ago, five years ago, longer. But he wasn’t willing to do it; Lachlan wasn’t willing to do it. And I think that a couple things were at play here.

[Music]

I think that Rupert, as much as he said he wanted to build this family business and pass the empire on to the next generation, I think the truth was that he was always obsessed with his own legacy, right? And the whole idea of a dynastic empire can often be very fraught in this way, where the next generation—the heirs—are seen by the patriarch more as kind of reflections of himself, walking nodes of kind of immortality, right? Like, he wanted immortality.

He wanted to ensure that the empire would continue to be run as if he was still there, and so he picked the successor he was most confident would do that: the one who was most eager to please him, the one who built his entire life around trying to seem like a younger version of him.

The tragic irony in all of this—and in some ways, I do feel like this whole story is kind of a cautionary tale—is that he ended up wrecking his family in the process. He built the family empire, he succeeded, and he lost three of his children along the way.

Rosin: Well, McKay, thank you so much for coming on and explaining this to us.

Coppins: Thank you.

[Music]

Rosin: McKay’s story is called “Growing Up Murdoch.” I recommend you read it. It goes way deeper on the succession drama than we could here in this episode. We will link to it in the show notes.

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

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

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

The Devil’s Bargain of Sports Betting

2024-07-25T13:00:12-04:00

After a 2018 Supreme Court decision kicked off a wave of legalization across America, gambling has become an integral part of how fans consume sports and how leagues make money. But with high-profile athletes caught up in betting scandals, a windfall welcomed by the sports industry also poses serious risks. Leagues now have to walk the line of advertising the next bet while banning athletes who gamble.

On this episode of Radio Atlantic, the sports journalist and Atlantic contributor Jemele Hill joins guest host Adam Harris to discuss the mess that sports betting may create.

Hill fears that “a lot of the worst-case scenarios are happening behind closed doors that we haven’t quite seen yet … Once you start focusing on it, you’re gonna find the culprits. And that’s just gonna make it look like it’s a widespread, uncontrollable problem.”

And while athlete scandals get attention, the deeper problem posed by sports betting is for the fans themselves. Gambling is sold as a harmless way to enjoy sports, but Hill compares it to the tobacco industry, especially in relation to young people. “I think, much like with tobacco, we’re going to look up five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever time period, and it’s going to be a real public-health crisis.”

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: There was a time, not too long ago, when you could turn on the TV and watch sports without ever thinking about gambling. But now it feels impossible to escape.This is where the speaker Bio goes

Ad: Put a little BetMGM action on it, and now any game becomes the game.

Ad: For same-game parlays on FanDuel, you can bet on how your favorite players will do.

Ad: ESPN Bet is here. Finally a sportsbook from your favorite sports brand.

Ad: Download the DraftKings sportsbook app. Bet just $5 to get $200 in bonus bets instantly.

Harris: In 2018, a Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates to sports betting. It’s now legal in three out of every four states. Last year, Americans placed nearly $120 billion in legal sports bets. And earlier this year, the Super Bowl was held within view of the Las Vegas strip.

[Music]

Harris: I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week: sports and gambling.

The two industries have rapidly become tied together in a way they’ve never been before in America. And we’re still scrambling to understand what that means for both fans and athletes. Sports leagues of course are always trying to make more money, but what they don’t want are headlines about the ills of gambling addiction, and they especially don’t want people thinking that bets are affecting how athletes themselves perform.

2024 is likely to be another record year in sports gambling, with betting expanding further into college sports and with the first in-person Summer Olympic Games since that Supreme Court decision.

To help us predict where things go from here and what impact gambling may have, I’m joined by sports reporter and Atlantic contributing writer Jemele Hill.

Hey, Jemele. How’s it going?

Jemele Hill: It’s going good. Thanks for having me.

Harris: Absolutely. So I mentioned athletes. At the same time that leagues are embracing gambling, they have to police players. This year has seen a number of betting scandals, none bigger than the one surrounding the highest-paid athlete in the world: Shohei Ohtani.

Newscaster: Now to the illegal gambling scandal that has rocked Major League Baseball. The game’s biggest star, Shohei Ohtani, addressed the media for the first time.

Newscaster: The plot thickens in the Shohei Ohtani gambling scandal.

Newscaster: Millions from the Japanese star to pay off illegal gambling debts.

Harris: Shohei Ohtani is the biggest star in baseball. He has the biggest contract in history. Throughout the winter, people thought that was going to be the story, but his name over the last couple of months has been in the news mostly for a betting scandal. So for folks who haven’t followed it, can you sort of take us through the last nine months or so?

Hill: I mean, it was certainly not the scandal that Major League Baseball ever wants associated with someone who many people consider already to be sort of the face of the league.

Shohei Ohtani, especially moving to the Los Angeles market—I mean, it’s a really crowning achievement for a sport that sometimes has struggled to mainstream some of its bigger stars.

So essentially what happened is his interpreter was linked with an illegal gambling ring. From the looks of it, I think when it first got reported, it was easy to make the leap, like, Okay, what was Shohei Ohtani’s involvement? But it turns out that he was the victim of what was a massive fraud by his interpreter. And the interpreter basically bilked him for millions, which he used to fund his gambling addiction.

This was just such an unsavory look for Major League Baseball. Anybody who’s followed the sport knows that sort of the legacy of gambling, and what it has meant in that sport has been especially damning—from Pete Rose, who is still not in the Hall of Fame because of his ties to illegal gambling; of course, everybody knows about the infamous Black Sox team. So there’s, you know, a history there—not that it’s happened frequently, but when it has happened, it’s certainly been worth the money, so to speak.

And so everybody, of course, was wondering: What was Shohei Ohtani’s role? Was he involved? Was the interpreter really placing bets for him? And none of that, from what we know from any of the evidence, ever has suggested that Shohei Ohtani was placing any bets whatsoever. He was just the victim of an elaborate scam by somebody who was his best friend.

Harris: You know, that actually raises an interesting question, right? Because this is an individual case that is incredibly outside of the norm. But if you think about sports betting as an enterprise, right—California, it’s illegal, but more than 30 states have some form of legalized sports betting at this point.

How big is legal sports betting in the United States at the moment?

Hill: I mean, it’s massive. It’s a billion-dollar industry. I mean, it was massive before then, but because it’s now so much more widely available, that has made it substantially bigger than it was before. And you’re seeing the effects of that at so many levels, particularly at the college level.

And, you know, now all of a sudden—it used to be, gambling was that sort of cardinal sin that sports leagues didn’t touch—and now you not only have sports leagues promoting it through various gambling sites; you also have Las Vegas. Las Vegas was supposed to not be the city that ever was going to really have professional sports.

And now they’re going to have, you know, professional baseball. They have a WNBA team. They have a football team—NFL team—as well. And most people anticipate Las Vegas will be getting an NBA team. And so the ties to professional gambling, at the professional level, has just gotten that much deeper.

And it’s come, of course, you know, with the infamous court decision to open up sports gambling everywhere. And so now, you know, just anecdotally, my husband and I talked about this not too long ago, but friends of his who, say, 10 or 15 years ago would only maybe gamble when they made a trip to Vegas—now they’re doing parlays. Now they’re all in on those every single week, and especially during the NFL or in the NBA, just daily. It’s just really consumed sports to the highest degree that we’ve ever seen.

Harris: I guess, have you been surprised by how quickly gambling has been accepted by these leagues?

Hill: You know, when you’re a journalist, nothing should ever surprise you, but this actually did. And I guess what was most surprising, it wasn’t the public’s appetite for it. The surprising factor has been seeing so many player scandals involving gambling. And I don’t know why that should surprise me, because, of course, they’re going to be susceptible to a lot of the same things the rest of the society is, and they have more money to be able to be involved with these things.

So the player-involvement part has been extremely surprising. But in terms of the public, you know, we saw something—and a lot of people look at it as harmless; I certainly have done it, and I did it for years until I retired years ago—but fantasy football. Fantasy football was the perfect gateway drug to what we’re seeing now.

Because it was sort of disguised gambling. I mean, yes, you weren’t really, because most people who are in leagues, you know, you have a pot at the end that somebody takes, and you have a second place and all that. But that’s kind of what you’re doing it for. It’s like you’re doing it for the glory. You’re doing it for the win.

But every week it’s teaching you how to individualize player performance in a way that is not necessarily always healthy when you’re screaming about why Davante Adams doesn’t get you another catch or 10 more yards or another touchdown so you can win your fantasy game.

It’s like priming you for this time. And so the pervasiveness of it has been a little surprising. Friends of mine who I just would never have considered them to be into gambling are like really in it now. And then you look at what’s happening with women’s sports with it.

The WNBA gambling is crazy. Like, I was on Twitter and somebody was complaining about—I think they had bet the over on Caitlin Clark, and they were complaining that she didn’t reach whatever point total that she was supposed to reach. And I’m just like, Oh my goodness. I mean, granted, yeah, I guess it’s great because it’s more interest in the women’s game. But at the same time, there’s going to be a level of, shall we say, degenerate interest in the women’s game, as well, because of this.

So just how quickly the public has really involved themselves in gambling has been a little surprising. Because I think there was even, with the public, a perception about gambling, like, That’s something you did in Vegas. If you were betting illegally, you know, people looked at you like you kind of had a problem, but now that it’s available and so widespread, it’s so much more accepted and socially acceptable to be gambling.

Harris: You know, it’s funny, I was talking to a colleague recently, and they were saying they went to a sports bar. I think it was actually around the NBA finals. And the games were on, and everyone was in there watching the games, incredibly interested. And it was like, Oh, wow, I didn’t know that there were this many Dallas Mavericks fans and Celtics fans, and they weren’t in Boston; they weren’t in Dallas.

But then he said everybody was looking at their phones, trying to check on their parlays, and it really has become like a new way to experience sports. Do you think that this is just how we experience sports now?

Hill: Yeah, I think it’s just considered by most people to be sort of harmless. But I guess if you look at it from a league perspective, they’re clearly enjoying it. Because, you know, we joke, especially among the media, like, Oh, the NBA or the NFL or whatever league doesn’t want these two teams meeting in the championship or this combination of playoffs involving these teams, because, you know, that means half the country’s not going to pay attention if it’s Dallas and Boston. Like, you know, Nobody cares in this part or this part. But now with gambling, everybody cares because somebody has something at stake.

And what it does is it makes the sports experience actually less personal. And a lot of us who began watching sports, we began watching for a personal reason—be it because you had a father or mother who introduced you to sports, being that you played sports and that was your connection.

It was always built on something that was emotional and personal, be it your hometown team—like in my case, being from Detroit, you know, I’m a forever Tigers fan because the Tigers won in ’84, and I was eight years old when they won. And that’s something that sticks and that lasts. And I still remember that whole team. And I remember my mother would lie to me and tell me that school was out for a day, and we would just sneak to go see the Tigers game and get a $5 bleacher seat—because, yes, I was the nerd who never wanted to miss school, and she would have to lie to me and tell me that school was out that day in order for us to go to opening day, right?

And so sports always came from an emotional place. But with this, it allows you to be impersonal about it. It’s like you don’t care really about the team; you care about who’s on the back of the jersey and what they’re doing and, more specifically, their performance.

So it’s actually building less loyalty in fans and less connection as they are gambling on these games.

Harris: Yeah. So how important has betting become to the bottom lines of the leagues and the networks now? How entrenched is it?

Hill: Oh, I mean, now they’re thick as thieves. You know, just in the network I used to work for—I worked at ESPN for 12 years—if when I got there in 2006, you would have told me that ESPN will one day have a show devoted to gambling and gambling segments, I’d have told you, you were crazy. I’d have told you, Give me that bet. Yeah, I’ll put a hundred on it.

Harris: That’s the smart money.

Hill: That’s the smart money because they wanted no parts about gambling. And, in fact, when I was there, it was a little bit of a running joke about how you couldn’t mention parlays or gambling. Like, you were not supposed to mention that on air at all because if somebody loses, they don’t want them, like, suing ESPN. Well, you know, Scott Van Pelt told me to bet this on that. And so that’s why I did it.

It was just never a thing that was supposed to happen. Now ESPN has a daily gambling show. Now, when I turn on the SportsCenter, they have gambling segments. You know, Scott Van Pelt—I mentioned him for a reason. He has a whole segment called “Bad Beats.”

And so you’re seeing, increasingly, and especially when you’re watching games and during the games, certain stats pop up because that’s for the gamblers, right? That’s what they’re doing that for. So even the way you watch sports is built on how a gambler would watch sports.

And it’s a relationship that I never thought would be this cozy, but if the networks want to maintain interest, especially in games that may not on the face of it look like big-ratings blockbusters, gambling is the way. And I’ll take it a step further: You know, these sports gambling sites—like, you know, FanDuel, DraftKings—I never thought I would see the relationship between gambling and sports media in the sense that gambling is funding a lot of sports media that’s happening right now.

Harris: You know, at some point, it’s not only an experience of the game; it kind of becomes an addiction, right? So how big of a problem is gambling addiction for fans?

Hill: So the only industry I can liken it to—and it’s going to sound like I’m being alarmist, and if I am, I’ll take that—I can only liken it to tobacco. And the reason why I think that comparison is there is that part of the way that tobacco became ingratiated in American culture is that it was sold as a lifestyle.

Harris: Hmm.

Hill: I think we’re seeing something similar with gambling, that gambling is being sold as: This is just how you’re supposed to watch and enjoy the game. This is how you enjoy sports: Lay 10 bucks on whether or not Angel Reese will have another double-double. Like, that’s how you watch the game. That’s how you get yourself more involved.

And I think, much like with tobacco, we’re going to look up five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever time period, and it’s going to be a real public-health crisis because you now have young people. And I know what the rules say about when you’re supposed to gamble, but as we know with cigarettes, ain’t nobody following them rules. And I can tell you that as a kid, I used to walk and buy my mama cigarettes at the store all the time, and nobody carded me once.

It’s going to be very similar. A younger and younger age group is going to be in on gambling and especially, you know, by the time they get to college, where I have a feeling the atmosphere has really amped up when it comes to gambling. We’re going to be looking at generations that are hooked on this, and especially with the technology there to support the addiction. I can’t imagine what cigarette usage would’ve looked like if Uber Eats existed, you know, 35 years ago, you know what I’m saying?

But it does in the form of gambling, when you just have to pop up an app and boom—there it is. You can lay money on any game happening with any sport in the country. And so, you know, I do realize for a lot of people, it’s fun, but I also see—and especially, again, when you see players doing it, that’s how you know that this is going to be a real problem in the future.

[Music]

Harris: All right, we’re going to take a short break. When we come back, we talk about how sports betting is affecting athletes themselves, especially as we see leagues giving out lifetime bans in recent months. That’s in a moment.

[Music]

Harris: All right, we’re back. So, Jemele, how are leagues supposed to manage this sort of mess of banning athletes who gamble while their businesses are so fundamentally tied up in advertising sports betting? To go through a couple of examples: Like, Tucupita Marcano, you know, baseball player, banned for life in June. NBA player Jontay Porter, banned for life in April.

Internationally—it’s not just an American phenomenon—England’s top professional men’s soccer league had three players over the last year who have been wrapped up in betting scandals, two of whom have received bans. So how do leagues manage that? That sort of, We need betting to fill out our bottom line, and also players to stay as far away from it as possible?

Hill: Yeah, I mean, they’re trying to make something really dangerous safer. And I don’t know if that’s actually possible. Like, I’m thinking about the NFL when it came to head trauma and concussions. It’s like they need the violence, because the violence sells, but they don’t need the violence, because the violence also is costly, I should say, because of what it does to players.

So to your point, they need gambling because, of course, as more and more rights fees with sports get more and more expensive, and as leagues look to diversify ways that they can make money, they need gambling to be big, if not bigger, in order to support interest in their league.

At the same time, they don’t need players involved with it, because, of course, they don’t want the product itself to lose integrity, which would have an impact on what fans thought of the game. But I’m glad that you mentioned the players that were banned, because here’s the thing that I also saw that has definitely changed with the proliferation of gambling: The lifetime ban isn’t the deterrent people think it is.

When Pete Rose was banned for life, and not just banned. It was two components: banned and kept out of the Hall of Fame, which you know players care about. They care about both. They want to play their sport and, certainly, if they’re remotely good at it, they want that Hall of Fame recognition. It means everything to them. And it was an amazing deterrent. Pete Rose was the banner case, where athletes would look at that and say, I don’t want to go out like Pete Rose. But now that you have seen it so commonly, the deterrence has sort of lost its luster.

And the stigma isn’t there like it used to be. And, you know, you can’t bet on your sport, but you can bet on other sports. And, see, that’s the other slippery slope, too, is that once that gateway is open with any gambling, especially if somebody develops an addiction, they’re going to go to the thing that they know best. The thing they know best is the sport that they play. So eventually, it may today start off on betting on soccer and betting on the WNBA or betting on tennis, and tomorrow it’s going to be their own sport that they’re betting on. And you mentioned Jontay Porter. I mean, he lost millions of dollars. He clearly had an addiction. And it was that addiction that drove him to do something where the automatic ban for doing what he did wasn’t enough of a deterrent.

So I don’t know how leagues are actually going to be able to prevent this. I think they’re just going to have to live with the fact that there’s going to be constant examples of players losing their careers to it.

Harris: And actually, can we explain the Porter case a little bit, because he had gotten to the point, allegedly, where he was literally sitting out parts of games or he would say that he wasn’t healthy for parts of games, as to satisfy bets. So can you just explain that case a little bit?

Hill: Yeah, I mean, so the thing that made his unique is that what he was doing was he—on a parlay, you either bet over or under—and what he was doing, he not only placed bets on games and bets on his team, including a bet on his team to lose, which is very important; he also falsely claimed that he was sick in at least one game. And realize: He started the game, but he claimed he was sick and he stopped playing. So all those gamblers who bet that he would do the under and underperform, they all won. And so, like, he was adjusting his performance accordingly.

So that’s what made it dangerous. And it gave people a very unsavory window into how a player can manipulate betting. You know, because for whoever is caught, you already know it’s 10 other people who haven’t been caught that are doing the same thing. And, of course, this is something that gambling sites don’t want to see, because they’re not trying to lose money, and they certainly want to have the confidence that players aren’t rigging games. And so his entire case was kind of a very stark example of the worst-possible scenario, or among the worst-possible scenarios that could happen.

Harris: Yeah, I thought it was interesting because he said that he did it to get out from under large gambling debts. So his argument’s like, I was crossing that bright red line because I had to get out of this debt that I had from this addiction that I have. And so that Porter case is like the most clear-cut example of gambling influencing a player. But it doesn’t have to be that extreme for it to be a problem, right?

Hill: Yeah, I mean, even something as simple that I’m sure a lot of players wouldn’t look at it as being particularly harmful, is that even telling your friends inside information, you can’t do that. Okay, you know, like, if you’re just like, Oh, I know for sure LeBron ain’t playing Thursday. It’s like, What? Like, you can’t do that, necessarily, especially for people, you know, who are gambling.

And so what it does is that it becomes, even for athletes, a tricky landscape to navigate because, as it is, they’re bombarded with people who want to take advantage of them in a thousand ways. And if somebody is in their circle or in their camp who is betting—because, just by osmosis, being around this player, they are privy to a lot of inside information—it’s something that can come back on them because they can be looked at as a co-conspirator.

And so not only is the league figuring this out in real time, but so are players. They’re going to be confronted with situations where somebody comes to him and says, Hey, any info you can give me, I’ll give you a cut. That’s easy money. You know what I’m saying?

And so I just fear that, like, a lot of the worst-case scenarios are happening behind closed doors that we haven’t quite seen yet. And many of them, I think, will be coming to light because the leagues are gonna have to toughen up, and they’re gonna have to police it more. And they’re already doing that, but I think it’s gonna require even more of their resources to do it. And, as you know, once you start focusing on it, you’re gonna find the culprits. And that’s just gonna make it look like it’s a widespread, uncontrollable problem.

Harris: Yeah. We’ve been talking about these professional leagues, where the athletes are already making a significant amount of money. What does this mean for college sports, right? Because over the last couple of years, student athletes have been taking universities to court, where the universities have been losing, and it’s all been about compensation, right? Whether or not students can use NIL, which is short for “name, image, and likeness,” in order to sign brand partnerships and receive some sort of profit from the work that they’ve been doing in playing their sport. What does this sort of growth of legalized sports betting mean for college sports?

Hill: We’re already seeing the scandals happen at the college level too—I mean, widespread gambling rings, where players are being drawn into the same sorts of temptations. And to your point, I know that NIL, that people think that’s the complete answer to the exploitation that happened in college athletes at that level, but it’s not.

I mean, number one, everybody isn’t making the same amount of money. So some guys on the team are able to make millions of dollars. A lot of guys on the team aren’t. And so the ones that aren’t and the ones that see an opportunity, they’re especially vulnerable to these kinds of temptations.

And, you know, it’s even harder to police at the college level because the NCAA just does not have the enforcement to be able to take on this problem. And I think they’re also considering how the NCAA has been massively whooped in court cases lately when it comes to student athletes. I think that they’re going through a period where they are thinking twice. And more than that, when it comes to how to police certain behaviors of student athletes because they have lost so resoundingly in court, they have to reshape, as it is right now, the entire financial structure of college sports.

And because that is taking precedence, I don’t even think they have the manpower, the wherewithal, or, frankly, the bandwidth to be able to also take on gambling. So, you know, there I could easily see a far more doomsday scenario than I could in the pros because, as of now, the money is not being evenly distributed.

Harris: You know, I wonder if we might see a micro example of that this summer, right? Because college athletics has always been seen as maybe more pure than professional sports, right? These are people who are doing it for the love, and they’re amateurs. But even further on that purity scale has kind of been the Olympics, right?

The Summer Olympics, I think of boxing as an example: amateur boxers are not allowed to make money. You can’t do brand endorsements. You can get, like, a stipend or prize money if you’re on the national team, but that’s kind of about it. Where you have prize fighters on the other side, where it was always about the money. What will betting around the Olympics look like this summer?

Hill: I think it’s gonna be huge. This is the Olympics where everything’s fully back, so to speak. It was supposed to be in 2020. It had to be delayed to 2021. And I think there was a lot of uncertainty around the Olympics.

But now it’s 2024, and everybody’s in full swing. And I think there’s going to be heavy action placed throughout the Olympics on everything. And you wonder if, six months down the road, are we going to hear about it? Because, as you mentioned, one thing that sports has not done a good job of is really admitted and dealt with the true impact of capitalism on what they’ve produced.

It’s like, as much as I know everybody loves the whole amateur, rags-to-riches story—and I get it; emotionally, it tugs at people—but that’s not the case anymore. When the Greeks were creating the Olympics, they did not envision it would become a billion-dollar television product.

And so you have to act accordingly. And often what catches these leagues off guard is that they’re holding on to old ideals and principles, mostly out of greed because they want to keep as much money as possible. But also, they just have not really, fully come to terms with the fact that you cannot, in this day and age, have a model, have a system where people don’t get paid. If you have a system and a model where people don’t get paid what they’re worth, or at least have a shot of getting paid what they’re worth, you’re inviting all the unsavory, seedy elements that you don’t want in your game.

And so it would not surprise me if, down the line—you know, months from now, a year from now—you heard about some Olympic athlete who decided to test it and decided to say, You know what? I see these parlays. I see what these bets are. I see these prop bets. Why wouldn’t I? I had this sort of crazy thought myself because there’s no regulation on it.

I was like, Man, if I were somebody who sang the national anthem and were doing it at sporting events, I would, especially the major ones, I put money on myself every single time. Because they always have a prop bet about how long the national anthem would go. And I’m like, Why would you not do this?

Harris: Two minutes and 40 seconds. I got you. (Laughs.)

Hill: You know what I’m saying? You’re a singer. You know exactly how long this is gonna be. (Laughs.) I was like, I would bet on myself every single time. So if I’m thinking that way about the national anthem, you mean to tell me there’s not at least dozens of athletes in the Olympics not thinking like, I kind of know what I could do. Why not? You know what I’m saying? (Laughs.)

Harris: I haven’t run under a 10.1 since high school.

Hill: It’s too tempting. And I don’t want to make this seem like the majority of athletes are this way. I know a lot of athletes. Most of them, there is a certain integrity in sports that they truly do believe in.

But there’s also a great number of athletes who are sick of being exploited and who want to be able to make money off the thing that they love to do. And that doesn’t make them a bad person. And, unfortunately, where we are with sports, we can’t unwind the clock and make it have less exploitation. Like, that toothpaste is not coming back into the tube. And so that’s why I say these governing bodies and these leagues are just going to have to come to terms with the fact that those old exploitation models are going to lead to their own demise and lead to them losing the very thing that they hold dear that binds the sport and makes it what it is.

Harris: Well, thank you so much for talking with me, Jemele.

Hill: I appreciate it. Anytime.

[Music]

Harris: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Susan Banta. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Hanna Rosin is the host of Radio Atlantic and will return next week. I’m Adam Harris. Thanks for listening.

gd2md-html: xyzzy Thu Jul 25 2024

Biden Steps Aside. How Might Harris Step Up?

2024-07-21T22:42:17-04:00

With barely 100 days to go before the general election in November, President Joe Biden has announced that he won’t run for a second term, and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket.

Staff writer Franklin Foer, who wrote a book on the Biden administration, and staff writer Elaina Plott Calabro, who profiled Harris for this magazine, discuss this extraordinary moment in a bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. They share their unique knowledge of these two politicians and where this chaotic election might go next.

What does a Harris campaign look like? How might the struggles of her 2020 run become the strengths of her sudden 2024 campaign? And how well (or not so well) did Biden prepare Harris as the “bridge” president he promised to be?

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Franklin Foer: Hello. I’m Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer, and I’m coming to you on this bonus episode of Radio Atlantic because earlier today, President Joe Biden announced that he’s abandoning his bid for reelection. He’ll finish his current term, but he’s endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the 2024 Democratic nominee.

Presidents have backed out of reelection in the past, but this is truly a surreal and unprecedented moment in American politics: a frenetic three weeks after a disastrously revealing debate performance, ending in the president stepping aside with barely 100 days to go before people vote. So as we speak on Sunday, there is a lot we don’t know.

But with me to discuss where Democrats and the 2024 race go from here is my colleague Atlantic staff writer Elaina Plott Calabro. Hey, Elaina. Thanks for talking with me.

Elaina Plott Calabro: Hey, Frank. Yeah, not a lot to talk about these days.

Foer: God. Day from hell for political journalists; the Sunday bomb drops, and off we go. So let’s just start at the very beginning, Elaina. What do we know about this decision from Biden?

Plott Calabro: The reporting that’s come out that I’ve seen since the decision has been pretty remarkable, which I sort of was clued into with the fact that about 10 minutes after he made his announcement, I received in my inbox a Biden-Harris fundraising solicitation, which I think just kind of reinforced that this decision was not something that was planned days in advance.

For example, this was not something he and his team were drafting, you know, five days ago or whatnot. The New York Times, I think, reported that as late as last night, a Democratic delegate was receiving calls from Biden aides about wanting this delegate to stress their support publicly. So I think this was something that caught a lot of people, even within the White House, off guard and has gone to show, I think, sort of the futility of a lot of these roundtables we’ve seen the past couple of weeks—of, you know, What is Biden going to do? When is he going to do it? This has always been just about him and his innermost circle and the precise moment that they made a decision.

Foer: Yeah, I’m just struck by the utter claustrophobia of it and how the circle just kept getting more and more claustrophobic—that you have all these aides within Biden world who’ve been with him since the 1980s, or maybe not quite as long, but they’ve been with him for decades, and they think of Biden as a father figure.

But a lot of them started to get frozen out for various reasons. And then, so you were stuck with the people who were basically just reinforcing what Biden himself wanted to hear. Biden desperately wanted to hear that he is an indispensable man who’s got to run, got to slay Donald Trump for a whole variety of reasons.

And it ended up being his family itself, which became the innermost inner circle. And then you have Biden stuck with COVID out in Rehoboth Beach as he’s making this decision, where he’s literally, not just metaphorically, isolating himself. And he arrives at this lonely decision at this incredibly lonely moment where he’s got no choice but to give up this mantle that he desperately wants to cling on to to Kamala Harris, who’s somebody he doesn’t especially care for as a successor.

So, really, where do we go from here? What’s your sense of what the next couple of weeks are going to look like? Is there anybody who’s going to step forward to throw their hat in the ring? Or is this just a fait accompli at this point?

Plott Calabro: I think harkening back to just everything about the past three weeks in American politics, I would hesitate to call anything a given at this point. But, of course, what you did see quite immediately after Joe Biden endorsed Kamala Harris as the nominee: You had the Congressional Black Caucus come out. You had several progressive members, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. A lot of people lining up rather quickly behind Kamala Harris—Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.

President Obama notably came out with a statement that seemed to endorse an open convention process.

Foer: So what does that mean? Does it mean that their support was lined up in advance or that they’ve just been thinking about these decisions for so long because Biden had been twisting in the wind so long that they had internally arrived at a moment where they knew they were going to do this when the moment came?

Plott Calabro: I think that’s a great question. And based on my reporting, a lot of members were prepared for that possibility. So in a recent piece, I spoke to several members of Congress, especially within the Congressional Black Caucus, who made quite clear to me that Kamala Harris would be the person they endorsed as the nominee.

Foer: So when she tweeted herself about what was about to happen, she said that she wanted to earn the nomination. She believed that she could win it, but it needed to be earned. How do you interpret her use of that phrase?

Plott Calabro: I mean, I think a lot of it is just politicianspeak. I think that she and her team, at this point, are just very prepared to have the nomination. I frankly don’t know what the mechanics of a Democratic National Convention would look like in terms of it actually seeming like Kamala Harris, quote, unquote, “earned this nomination” if there’s not somebody who puts their hat in the ring and the rules are opened up to let this person actually have it out, as it were.

Foer: So Kamala Harris—you profiled her. You were one of the few magazine writers in America to have any bit of sustained access, and you have, you know, real insights into the way in which her brain works.

So let’s just talk about her as a political persona and the woman who is about to step into the ring to go toe to toe with Donald Trump. Do you think that she has a good sense, at this stage, of what her persona is going to be as a politician headed into the homestretch of this election, where she’s done basically nothing to lay the predicate for what’s to come about herself?

Plott Calabro: You know, ironically, as insane as this moment feels and is in a lot of ways—and would be for any candidate having to take on the mantle of a party’s nomination three months in advance of the election—I actually think this is where a politician like Kamala Harris is best positioned to thrive.

And why do I say that? Let’s think back to her presidential primary bid in 2020, which was just an absolute disaster. She was somebody who never quite landed on a story about herself, her vision for the American people. And it was why, in the first months of her vice presidency, every kind of catastrophic interview that she did—specifically to Lester Holt one—it really filled a vacuum because Americans did not have a sense of who she was as a person, what her agenda was.

And for that reason, any missteps she made within that first year, and there were many, came to have a definitive quality to her. But what I think in this moment, where she is perhaps better positioned than anyone else, is that three months out from the election, the mandate is not necessarily to sell Americans on a story about yourself; it’s to sell Americans on a story about the candidate you’re trying to beat.

And that’s where I think that her background as a prosecutor—which, you know, it’s become cliché at this point, prosecuting a case against Donald Trump. But having gotten to know her as I have, and having had several conversations with her, the moments I really felt her settle into just a clearly comfortable role when we were talking was when she had turned the questions back on me. You’ll see that with Q&As that she does across the country, whether it’s at a college campus or just at a convention center of some sort.

I think those moments when she can kind of feel she has control of the conversation and she’s making a case for or against something in particular, rather than sort of going 30,000 feet and talking about, you know, the state of democracy or the future of it or gauzy things like that. That’s where she doesn’t thrive.

But I think when she gets on a stage and she can pointedly talk about what she thinks Donald Trump hasn’t done for the American people, that’s where I think that, you know, she could really excel.

Foer: Yeah. Well, one thing that I’m very curious about is that Biden was running a bad campaign based on everything before the debate, that he was doing a bad job of defending his record, which I think there’s a compelling record that they could run on. And he was unable to articulate even the most basic bumper-sticker explanations of what he accomplished or what his vision will look like.

Do you have a sense of how not only will she defend the Biden record but she’ll be able to talk about what she would do affirmatively as president, not just all the horrors of Trump that she would be stopping?

Plott Calabro: So for one, she will actually be able to be in the arena to do that in a way that he has just not been. I think it’s important, you know, when I would talk to Republicans, really before this campaign got underway, one reason they felt so optimistic was that, in their view, 2020 for Joe Biden was a campaign by Zoom, essentially, which is really what in Senate races a lot of candidates had to do with the COVID restrictions and whatnot.

But they felt that because of that, Americans hadn’t really seen what a real Joe Biden campaign could or should look like, and we’ve sort of seen that, right? We’re talking about a bedtime at 8 p.m., and this is not somebody who’s barnstorming the country, necessarily, for campaign events.

But Kamala Harris has been barnstorming the country, really, even if people haven’t been paying attention, for much of the past two years. And so I think that fact alone is going to really elevate her in the minds of Americans because it’s such a contrast already from Joe Biden.

Foer: Has she gotten better at the barnstorming than when she began?

Plott Calabro: Yes, absolutely. Even in the short time that I was with her, I feel I saw that over time. I think she has gotten better with controlling conversations from where she sits and sort of massaging whatever the topic is to be something that she actually wants to talk about, as opposed to what she’s actually being asked—which I just think is a hallmark of a talented politician. That was not something I think she excelled at, at all, at first. But especially the last few events I went to her with, you sort of saw in real time, Oh, this person is really understanding more about what this game is and what it means to answer the question you want to answer, not necessarily the one you’re asked.

I think she has just gotten clearer in her communication. I think she does not get lost in the weeds as much. You know, if you look at some of her earlier campaigns, like when she was running for D.A. of San Francisco, she had a much better sense of the immediate impact of the work she was doing.

When you’re running for an office like D.A., especially when you’re an incumbent, when she ran the first time, she said: The incumbent’s conviction for felonies is X percent. I’m going to raise it. And she did do that as a prosecutor. She did that successfully. What translates so compellingly on the campaign trail when she was running again for a second term was that she was able to say, Here’s somebody’s life I was able to change because I was able to get those conviction rates up.

Now, when you get higher and higher in levels of national politics, your connections to those individual stories necessarily become much more distant. And I think that, to me, was something that she struggled to figure out her place in early on as a vice presidential, presidential-like figure, because it becomes a lot more difficult to say, you know: Here is Sam and Fred, and here was their life before this policy. Here is their life afterward. And I think without those really specific moments to latch onto, she struggles to tell a larger story of how America writ large perhaps has changed because of the policies.

Foer: That’s interesting because in policy debates, one place where I would hear people talk about a commonality between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was that their interjections in policy debates, the questions that they asked were very similar. Because they were very gritty questions they would ask about, Oh, how does this grandmother access this policy here? How does she learn about these benefits? And so that was something that I heard people saying was an area of overlap between the two of them.

One thing that I would hear about the way that she would prepare for policy decisions or for appearances, which was interesting to me and felt very distinctive, was that she liked to stage debates—that if there was a question about Afghanistan or a question about Gaza, she would bring in two experts, and she would say, Okay, you’re affirmative, you’re negative, and you’re going to have this debate out here in front of me. It was kind of gladiatorial-style, argumentative combat, which I think she really enjoyed.

But I found it to be a very interesting thing to learn about her because it kind of indicated to me that for ways that are both good and ill, she wasn’t necessarily coming to a lot of questions with first principles or predetermined ideas about where she stood. She wanted to be guided to them.

Does that track with the Kamala Harris that you know?

Plott Calabro: I think that really, Frank, is so much of the story with her, and I think this becomes apparent with her primary bid in 2020. People say all the time, she never found a lane for herself. And that’s really true. And one reason I think is that she came in, and her instinct, as it would be for most politicians, is to talk about what they’ve accomplished in the past, what their background is.

And Kamala Harris’s background was, essentially, in law enforcement. And in 2020, that was not a popular background to have. And she had people around her, especially her sister, Maya Harris, saying that, you know, We don’t need to highlight this aspect of your background so much. And her response, of course, was, But it is my background. You know, this is who I am.

But she’s very persuadable when it comes to, Well, this is not what the base wants to hear right now. And as David Axelrod told me for my profile of Harris last fall, you know, voters can sense that when it seems like you’re just trying to say maybe what they think you want to hear, as opposed to where they’re actually coming from, deep down, at an issue.

And I think, going to her preparation style, I mean, she wants to be sold on an argument herself. She’s not necessarily going to advisers: This is what my instinct is. Help me get there to make the case for that.

Foer: But some of that sounds like it would be very virtuous from the perspective of policy-making. But the question of, like, What is your lane when you’re running for president? What is your political identity? becomes much more heightened. And if you don’t know who you are as a candidate, it becomes harder.

And so maybe she falls back into this prosecutor mode, which is very comfortable for her. And, look, Trump is there to be prosecuted, as he is being prosecuted, actually, in the courts themselves. But then there’s this other question about: Who do you appeal to? Who do you feel most comfortable appealing to, you know, as you think in a more granular sort of way about the electorate and how to cobble together a winning coalition?

And I remember hearing stories about her that were about—at the beginning of the administration, she was like, Okay, I’m going to win over white, working-class dudes. And so I’m going to talk to them directly. And then I remember hearing from people in the administration being like, Wait a second. Do you know what you’re up against there? You’re never going to win these guys over. Why aren’t you going around making appeals?

And there was a sense that maybe the Dobbs decision, and the role that she played, helped settle her into a place where she started to know who her natural constituencies were, and she knew how to talk to them. What’s your sense of the political identity that she’s going to bring and how that will affect, maybe, electoral political strategy for the Democrats?

Plott Calabro: So I think the truest display we’ve ever gotten of who she really is as a politician and where her priorities lie was at the very, very end of her campaign in 2020. Again, I know it feels like a lifetime ago. But right before everything sort of imploded, she had landed on this idea of the 3 a.m. issues: What are the issues that voters—that keep them up in the middle of the night? You know, keeping food on the table, their water bill. Things like that.

That, to me, I mean, she really is a pretty pragmatic politician, I think, at heart. And it’s one reason, I think, that a lot of people around her were actually pretty optimistic about her partnership with Joe Biden, because their policies were not actually especially far apart.

She was not so much further to the left than he was on a lot of issues, in a way that I think she’s been sort of caricatured. And so I think Dobbs: One reason that was such a great moment for her was it allowed her to step into this more base-friendly role in a way that was also authentic to her.

Reproductive rights, these are important issues to her. This is not something where she is speaking in a way that she just thinks will kind of help curry favor with the base. It is actually authentic to how she feels. And so you did have sort of this kind of perfect confluence of a lane for, you know, an appeal to those sort of voters but also an issue that was actually true to what she felt comfortable talking about, if that makes sense.

Foer: It does make sense. It does make sense.

All right, so there’s one question that I would struggle to come up with a very good answer for—and I don’t know if she can come up with a good answer for—which is, it’s often posed like, What have you accomplished as vice president? What has Kamala Harris done as vice president, successfully and independently, other than the Dobbs work that she’s done? which is important.

Plott Calabro: So I have a lead into this, Frank, and I’d be especially interested to hear your take on it. I think I have talked to you about this before. But I think one major failure of Joe Biden in these past four years has been his inability to really set Kamala Harris up for success.

And one reason I identify that as such a particular failure: A lot of people will come back to me and say, Well, you know, what other past president has tried to do that for his Vice President? Well, not especially many, but not a lot of presidents have gone in before and specifically said, I am a transitional candidate. I am a bridge builder. I am setting up to be a handoff, essentially, as a president.

He’s never really done that for Kamala Harris. And, you know, let’s look at the very first issue that she was saddled with and the way it came about. You know, there was no great vision for her vice presidency from either of them going into it. And then you have early in the administration, she’s sitting in a meeting with Joe Biden, Ron Klain, his then chief of staff, other advisers. And they’re talking about these so-called root causes of the border crisis—so issues like poverty and violence in Central American countries that cause migrants to flee north to begin with.

And Joe Biden’s listening to Kamala Harris offer suggestions for, you know, helping with those structural issues. And he says, Oh, you know, these are pretty good. Why don’t you take this on? And she’s sort of just awkwardly—I mean, what do you do? Well, Yes, Mr. President. And then, Ron Klain is telling me this, that after the meeting, she approaches him and says, you know, I’m honored to be asked, but I kind of put those out there so somebody else could be thinking about them, not as something that I should take on.

Here is, I think, the disconnect between, maybe, a Biden and a president who is really thinking seriously about positioning his VP for success. Biden saw it as a show of respect. That was in his issue portfolio when he was vice president for Barack Obama. And so in his calculation, it’s, Well, this is, this is a show of confidence that I have in you, that I would give you this issue that I myself took on. But it’s totally divorced from: Is this actually a way to get Kamala Harris a win early in her vice presidency, when, you know, a lot of people are looking to see what kind of leader she will be?

I mean, what, at the end of the first year, Kamala Harris will have solved El Salvador? I mean, you know, the metrics just don’t make sense at all. And then, of course, right after that it was voting rights, which was an issue she wanted. But that was—again, the strategy never made sense to a lot of people because, absent getting rid of the filibuster, a voting-rights bill was never getting on Joe Biden’s desk.

Foer: By the way, they didn’t actually want to give her the voting-rights issue. She had to fight—

Plott Calabro: Really, really lobby for it. Yes, exactly.

Foer: Yeah, no, I think that this is—I mean, you’re getting at a couple of big problems. The first is that Joe Biden, I don’t think, ever actually really believed that he was the bridge. Clearly.

Plott Calabro: Yeah, that’s the upshot here.

Foer: And then, secondly, his whole framework for understanding the vice presidency was his historic personal experience of the vice presidency.

And so he was avoiding replicating what he thought were the slights that Obama inflicted upon him. And so, ostensibly, he thought he was treating her with great respect. But, really, he wasn’t giving her any meaningful chunks of policy where she was set up to be successful. There was not really any mentoring that actually went on, and just this sense that she was going to tag along.

I mean, a lot of it, at the beginning of the presidency, she was tagging along. Like, he was—it was COVID. They were stuck in the White House. It was hard to travel. She would come to meetings. He would run the meetings in his Joe Biden–type way. She would chime in with questions that kind of mirrored the type of questions that Joe Biden himself would ask in meetings.

And I’m sure that actually was an important learning and growth opportunity for her, but it didn’t leave her with this long list of accomplishments that she could point to where: I went off, and I did A, B, and C things that showed my ability to govern.

Plott Calabro: And so, yeah, a few more things about that: One is that it was not just Joe Biden. So other than his chief of staff at the time, Ron Klain, she also didn’t have a lot of huge champions in the West Wing itself. So you didn’t have a ton of people saying to Joe Biden, Hey, we should be doing a little bit more work to promote her and showcase the work that she is doing, that she could be doing. That started to change a bit, I think, when you saw him tap her to be the U.S. representative at the Munich Security Conference, which is also, as you know, something that he did as vice president and took very, very seriously.

Foer: That was in the run-up to the Ukraine war, where she actually—it was a very pivotal moment.

Plott Calabro: Exactly. And she met with Zelensky there, and her advisers were telling me they thought it would be the last time she ever saw him. I mean, it was a hugely, hugely, you know, watershed moment when it came to just those, you know, moments right before the war broke out. And she’s continued to serve in a pretty impressive capacity in a diplomatic sense.

However, it’s not something that a lot of Americans pay attention to. I mean, Americans just really haven’t paid much attention to their leaders’ diplomatic skills abroad. So it’s another area where her advisers can tout what she did in that respect, but is that message actually getting to the American people? And they themselves will admit to you: No, it’s not.

And so going back to the Dobbs decision, what’s remarkable about that is it’s the closest thing she’s had to sort of an anchor, a substantive anchor to her vice presidency, but it was entirely by happenstance, right?

Foer: It’s the fact that Joe Biden is Catholic and does not enjoy talking about the issue.

Plott Calabro: And the decision happened when it did. And it just happened that, you know, the No. 1 isn’t comfortable talking about that on the campaign trail, so it was ceded to her. She took up the mantle, but it was not necessarily sort of a premeditated visionary sense of, Okay, this is what we’re positioning you for.

Foer: Yes. Well, and also, the other thing that people don’t really understand about her work on Dobbs is that it’s assumed that this is a rhetorical political thing that she’s done—where she goes off, and she gives a lot of campaign-like messaging on Dobbs. But she’s been in charge of a lot of the coordination that’s happened and a lot of the legal work, and there is actually substantive policy stuff attached to it. It’s not just going off and giving campaign speeches that Joe Biden can’t deliver.

Plott Calabro: Right.

Foer: Okay, I want to ask a few questions to get your personal sense of them. And they’re kind of unfair questions to ask of a reporter, that I would hate to get asked of me.

Plott Calabro: Oh, great. (Laughs.)

Foer: I feel like there’s a way to answer it that is true to your journalistic self. The first is: Personally, there’s been all these memes and all these things that make her out to be an unlikable person. Like, the way that she laughs has been memeified by Republicans. The way that she repeats certain lines has been memeified. And it feels, to me, that once you’re in that realm, it’s distant from an actual flesh-and-blood character.

I’ve only had very limited interactions with Kamala Harris, but I found her to be a very warm person when I’ve interacted with her and very different from the presence on the stump. Just give me your sense of her as a person and kind of how you feel in a conversation with her in her presence.

Plott Calabro: Yeah, so a few elements to this. I am coming at this as a journalist. I think she is a pretty guarded person by nature, a pretty private person, and she is especially going to be, you know, the first time she’s around a member of the media, somebody who is quite literally standing there evaluating her.

And so we had three pretty long interviews for my profile last fall. The first two—I wrote this in the story—it sort of felt like tiptoeing around glass, like you didn’t quite know at what moment your question would have pushed her too far.

The third interview, though, we actually did it at the vice president’s residence. She took me on a tour of the residence, you know, clearly proud of the way that she had redesigned it. And once we, you know, really settled into that conversation in her space, I thought she was quite warm. And she’s even maternal. And I talk about this all in the piece. You know, at one point she’s giving me marriage advice, basically, that I didn’t ask for. But, again, that was just sort of seeing those ways that she’s suddenly taking control of the conversation.

What I will say is that one-on-one with the voters, she is incredibly warm. She really lights up with voters, just on a rope line or whatnot. And I’ve covered a hell of a lot of politicians who hate that stuff more than anything else, who they hate the photo line or, you know, coming off the plane and meeting with the people, the school groups who are there to send them off or whatnot.

She really thrives in that environment, and it doesn’t feel phony in a way that it does with a lot of politicians. So I think that’s on a one-on-one level that I would describe it. Where I think that this sense of unlikability or inauthenticity: One, we have those things bound up in a lot of just racist and sexist stereotypes that exist.

Putting those aside, though, she—what I learned covering her is: When she gets onstage, she actually gets quite nervous. When you are up close with her and she is onstage, you can hear at first her voice quivering. She is not somebody who is just kind of striding in and feeling immediately in her element.

Foer: Talk about what that means and what that reveals about her.

Plott Calabro: So she said to me once: My career was not about giving lovely speeches; it was about the work. And I know she meant that as a way of saying, I’m focused on what I’m doing for the American people, not giving lovely speeches. Well, if you can’t communicate that work in a lovely speech, you know, it’s like: A tree falls in a forest, and no one’s around to hear it. Did it really fall? So, especially at her level, lovely speeches are really a lot of the ball game.

Foer: I’m just now flashing forward to her convention speech, like the biggest speech she’s going to give in her life, where she’s going to have to really introduce herself to the American people in prime time and make this case. Do you see her seizing up in that moment, or do you think that she’ll come closer to delivering?

Plott Calabro: I think she will come closer to delivering because I don’t think she will feel as defensive as I think she often does, especially because her first year and a half of her vice presidency just really did go so poorly. I mean, her favorably ratings were the lowest that NBC had recorded of any vice president in the history of the poll.

And what I sensed was that she would get up there, and she felt like she was trying to prove something, which is just never really a great head space to be in a setting like that. But I think that what you saw—especially after Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, people suddenly looking at her, saying: Where has this Kamala Harris been?—is you saw a politician on the offense, I think in a way that really excites her and motivates her, I think in a way that makes her feel like she’s maybe in a courtroom again.

So I’d be hesitant to say that or predict that her convention speech could mirror a lot of other big speeches I’ve seen her give in the past, just because I don’t think she’s, in the moment, really feeling as defensive about herself anymore.

Foer: So one obvious thing we need to hash through is: If Harris manages to be the nominee, which we think that she will be, who does she pick to be her Kamala Harris? Who would her vice-presidential nominee be?

Plott Calabro: So, you know, just in the past few hours, calling and texting with Democratic strategists and outside advisers to the White House—I mean, clear disclaimer that nobody knows at all at this point. People are mentioning North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper because she has been spending quite a bit of time with him, just on the trail in the past week or so. But also you have names like Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

So it’s a lot of kind of the more moderate cut of Democratic—executive, I think, is the consistent theme of the names that you’ll hear. But, you know what, Frank, at this point, I just don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows anything.

Foer: Okay. We’ll submit to that humble answer and leave it there. One last question: There was clearly a whole campaign apparatus, a whole set of messaging that the Republicans had developed to demolish Joe Biden. And it was pretty effective, I think we need to say. And Joe Biden let it be effective. So there’s talk that they’ve got all these plans on the shelves for attacking Harris. What’s your sense of what the main lines of attack against her would be from the Republicans?

Plott Calabro: So I will say that even though, I mean, obviously, their campaign apparatus has been oriented around Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, they haven’t been caught flat-footed, apparently, by Kamala Harris standing in for him, or the idea that she almost certainly will. You saw that Trump’s super PAC immediately dropped an ad, I mean, within minutes of Joe Biden coming out, saying that he endorsed Kamala Harris—an ad out attacking her and specifically calling her the “border czar” and trying to sort of misrepresent what her job actually was when it came to the border and saddling her specifically with responsibility for the border crisis. So I think you’ll see a lot of attack lines like that continue.

But, obviously, at this point, because she is somebody who can be on the campaign trail and be a lot more nimble in her response to those attacks, I just think the Trump campaign is going to have a lot harder time. They can’t bank on the fact anymore that there might be a three-to-five-business-day delay until Joe Biden can get back to them with a response on whatever that latest attack line was.

Foer: Yeah, you know, I think that one thing that I’m curious—I just want to see out of her: So much of the Republican attack about Joe Biden’s age is really about a guy in an administration that are governing over a world that’s spinning out of control. Whether it’s inflation or the wars or the border: Things are spinning out of control. He’s too old to be able to exert control. That’s why we need strength. That’s why we need—

And I think that her prosecutorial style projects a certain amount of strength. But whether voters buy that, whether she’s able to package herself in a way that counters that line of attack, which I think will still be pretty potent if she’s not able to demonstrate that.

Plott Calabro: Absolutely. It’s such a great point. It’s not even the communication, but to what extent, you know, has her posturing in the past four years just been emblematic of Biden’s? And to what extent might we see something a bit more independent emerge in the coming months?

Foer: And as the proverbial political reporting ending says, only time will tell. We shall see.

Plott Calabro: It all comes down to turnout.

Foer: It all comes down to turnout.

Plott Calabro: (Laughs.) Turnout and time.

Foer: Yeah. Okay. Though, thanks so much for talking. Always so much fun to kibitz with you about politics.

Plott Calabro: You too, Frank. Thanks so much for having me.

Foer: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by executive producer Claudine Ebeid. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor, and Hanna Rosin is the host of Radio Atlantic. I’m Franklin Foer. Thanks for listening.

Trump’s Wholesale Renovation of the Republican Party

2024-07-18T07:50:06-04:00

The Republican Party gathers in a triumphal mood in Milwaukee. Polls favor the GOP in 2024. The long-awaited vice-presidential pick has been made. And Donald Trump prepares to accept the nomination again, just as President Joe Biden faces calls across his party to step away from another run. Four months before the election, the contrast between the two parties is stark.

Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta is in Wisconsin for the Republican National Convention and sees a confidence there unlike anything he’s witnessed in his years covering the GOP. It is now the party of Trump, and as Alberta has reported, his campaign is planning for a landslide win. But after two prior runs, what is different about the Trump campaign of 2024?

On this episode of Radio Atlantic, Alberta joins guest host Adam Harris from the convention hall to give an inside view of the party. Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: What a week in American politics. The Republican Party has gathered in Wisconsin to renominate Donald Trump for president. The convention follows a near-miss assassination attempt on Trump and the announcement of Ohio Senator J. D. Vance as his pick for VP. All the while, President Biden faces calls from within the Democratic Party for him to step aside.

I’m Adam Harris, and this is Radio Atlantic. Hanna Rosin is still away, working on a special project. For this episode, I’m hoping to understand what’s different about Trump’s 2024 campaign, and what, if anything, Saturday’s assassination attempt has changed. To do this, I’m joined by staff writer Tim Alberta from the RNC convention hall. Hey, Tim.

Tim Alberta: Adam. What’s happening, man?

Harris: Not too much. Thanks for coming on. You’ve covered Republican politics for a while now. You’re currently in Milwaukee covering the RNC. What’s the feeling there?

Alberta: The feeling here is like an Election Night victory party that started four months early. I’ve been to a lot of Republican conventions. I’ve spent a lot of years covering Republican politics, and I can safely say I have never been around a more confident—even cocky—bunch of people who are just entirely convinced that this campaign is already over and that they are marching to victory in November, the only question being: How big of a victory is it?

Harris: You know, leading into this week, we all thought that the big news was going to be the announcement of Trump’s VP pick. So what was the reaction to Trump picking Ohio Senator J. D. Vance?

Alberta: You know, from what I can see, the reception has been pretty enthusiastic. You know, this is a really self-selecting group here in Milwaukee. I mean, the party as an institution has been completely remade by Donald Trump from the top down.

You know, Donald Trump picking someone who is seen as kind of an heir apparent to this populist, America First empire that Trump has created is, of course, going to be received really well in a place like this. The question obviously is, for folks who exist more in the center-right—you know, moderate, establishment, business-friendly lane of the Republican Party—there is, I think, some hesitancy, some doubt about J. D. Vance, particularly not just even from the moderate wing but from the defense-hawk wing of the party.

And the J. D. Vance pick is a pretty concrete signal that, to the extent there’s been a civil war inside the Republican Party—over foreign policy, national-security issues, the fights over funding Ukraine, obviously, in this past year—I think that those questions and those criticisms do exist here, but they’re very much on the margins, because this is, at the end of the day, Trump’s party.

Harris: Yeah. Coming into this national convention was a little bit different, right? There was always something that was looming over it, and that is the events of Saturday. And so what impact has the assassination attempt on Trump had on Republicans?

Alberta: The thing that is most striking, Adam, is there’s sort of an added layer of invincibility to Trump. If you thought that the party was already sort of a cult of personality and that there were already some of these kind of subtle undertones of a messianic complex attached to Donald Trump, then certainly the events of Saturday—and, you know, specifically the sort of getting up, bleeding from the assassin’s bullet, defiantly pumping the fist, and saying to fight—I think it’s created this sense of Trump as invincible, Trump as immortal, Trump as, you know, You can’t kill Trump. They tried. Right?

Like, so there is almost an added supernatural dimension to the conversation. And we’ve heard that from some of the speakers this week: People, you know, stating very plainly that God has his hands on Trump, that God wants Trump alive, that God kept Trump alive, and that he has a plan for him. So I would say that is a pretty discernible shift in tone and sort of an escalating of the ways in which Trump is sort of lionized by the party faithful at an event like this.

Harris: Yeah. You know, you’ve covered conventions before. How does that kind of cockiness compare to conventions that you’ve covered in the past or that you’ve seen in the past?

Alberta: There’s really no comparison. If you think back to 2008 and then 2012, Republicans did not think they were going to beat Barack Obama. I mean, especially in ’08 but then even in ’12, there was just really—there was some enthusiasm around Romney, but there wasn’t a lot of swagger there. There wasn’t really any discernible confidence.

And then 2016, look, Donald Trump—half the people at the convention in Cleveland in 2016 were anti-Trump. They were delegates who were bound to cast their votes for Trump because of how he had performed in their states, but they were not happy about it. And they had come to the convention, some of them, to make a stink about it and really were hoping for a floor fight to try to even stop Trump from becoming the nominee.

So, certainly, the idea that he was going to go on to win, that was just kind of fantasy at that point, much less go on to win and be renominated in ’24 and become the face of the party. Nobody could have imagined that.

So I think what feels different about this moment is not just the confidence but the wholesale renovation of the Republican Party to become such a distinctly Trumpian entity. And I think the confidence, in some ways, flows from that. It flows from a sense of, like, We know who we are as a party now. We weren’t entirely sure with McCain or with Romney or even with Trump in ’16. But now, with his third time being nominated, we know who we are.

And I think probably more importantly, Adam, they know who they’re facing. And they’re facing Joe Biden, who is just, objectively speaking, a very vulnerable and diminished candidate from the man that Donald Trump faced just four years earlier.

Harris: Considering where Biden is in his campaign at the moment, what are Trump’s people thinking as they sort of watch the drama unfold around him?

Alberta: The great source of confidence inside of the Trump campaign has much more to do with Joe Biden than it has to do with Donald Trump. The fact is: Joe Biden is, in many ways, sort of a dream opponent for Donald Trump to run against because some of Trump’s own glaring deficiencies—his, at times, incoherent ramblings from the stage, his age, his own visible decline—are sort of neutralized and almost forgotten because, relative to Biden, Trump looks young and sprightly and energetic.

I think there’s also a fundamental contrast—a visual contrast—that the Trump campaign, from day one, has been deeply invested in drawing out, which is strength versus weakness. This is really what animates everything they talk about in the campaign and everything they do. From the voters that they’re targeting to the digital content that they’re creating, the mailers that they’re going to be sending out, everything the Trump campaign is doing is meant to focus on this contrast of strength versus weakness.

And they just believe that when you’re talking about the Southern border, when you’re talking about dealing with the geopolitical craziness happening in the world, when you’re talking about inflation—whatever it may be—that Donald Trump is perceived as sort of an alpha, even to people who don’t like him, and that Biden is perceived as feeble, even to people who like him.

And so all of that, Adam, I have to emphasize: All of that was the theory of the case before the debate, when Joe Biden looked like he had one foot in the grave already, and it was before the assassination attempt of Donald Trump. And so what the Trump campaign now has are the two most vivid moments of this campaign.

Both of them are directly in service of this contrast that they’ve been trying to push. And so the Trump people, now all they can do is cross their fingers and say their prayers and hope that Joe Biden remains their opponent because, from their vantage point, there’s no way he can win.

Harris: What would they think if he dropped out of the race?

Alberta: It would be a fire drill. They have spent the past year and a half engineering this campaign to run a very specific race against a very specific opponent in Joe Biden. And listen, the people running Trump’s operation will say, You know what? Doesn’t matter. Bring them on, whoever it is, that, you know, any Democrat is going to be saddled with Joe Biden’s baggage.

But that’s not true. And they know it’s not true. They recognize that if Biden were to step down, and if someone else were to be at the top of the ticket, it would, in some fundamental ways, send them back to the drawing board and force them to reimagine the messaging, reimagine the targeting, reimagine how they think about the contrasts in this campaign.

It would also represent sort of a reset moment for a Democratic Party that has been in a sort of free fall of late. And Republicans are entirely content to sit back and pop some popcorn and enjoy the show. They feel like there’s nothing that they need to do right now, because the Democrats are doing the hard work for them. But if Biden were to suddenly get out, then that changes everything.

Harris: You know, you recently wrote a deep dive on the campaign with the headline, “Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win.” So what is different about Trump’s 2024 operations and strategy?

Alberta: Boy, where do I even start? Look, Adam, Trump in 2016 didn’t even have a campaign. I mean, sure, I suppose technically he did but, like, there was no real infrastructure. There was no real organization. It was just a couple of guys who were sort of making it up as they went along. And it was kind of almost an elaborate prank, in some ways. I mean it was sort of the reality-TV-show experiment of a campaign for the presidency.

And when Donald Trump became the nominee, that’s really when the Republican National Committee, which was led at the time by Reince Priebus, basically stepped in and ran the campaign for him because Trump didn’t have any sort of a get out the vote. You know, it was a totally nonexistent political operation in 2016.

And then in 2020, you know, Trump’s the incumbent president. So he’s got a lot of money and, on paper, they’re building something out that looks more professional and more conventional, something that we’re used to seeing, but it was a horribly run campaign. They burned through tons of money. And the campaign wasn’t run by very experienced people, and they paid a price for it.

This time around, you’ve got some of the shrewdest and sharpest and most-cutthroat people in the Republican Party who are in charge of the campaign, and they have, from day one, stressed efficiency. They’re really sort of focusing on some of the core competencies of the campaign.

And I think the most important thing, Adam, that this campaign has been able to do is that Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who are the co-architects of the campaign—and they are managing it together as a partnership—they’ve really been able to move Trump to a better place, in terms of his own capabilities, his own actions as a candidate.

He is embracing mail voting. He is overseeing a campaign now that is actually using some pretty cutting-edge technology to solicit absentee votes. Whereas four years ago, he was forbidding his own Republican voters from using the mail. So there are a lot of ways in which this campaign is just sort of light years beyond either the 2020 or the 2016 operations.

Harris: And, you know, one of the reasons why, in that last campaign, Trump was effectively saying that, you know, We don’t want mail voting. We don’t want absentee voting, was because Republicans have kind of viewed it as a gamble, right? When there’s more early voting, it typically favors Democrats.

So is that a sort of gamble that they’re taking in this election by emphasizing mail voting, absentee voting? What sort of gamble are they taking with this new approach to the Trump campaign?

Alberta: Well, here’s the thing: We have become very accustomed, those of us who cover politics, to thinking that if turnout is high, that automatically benefits Democrats, because the lower-propensity voters, the lower-engagement voters—and we’re talking about young people; we’re talking about particularly young Black men, young Latino men—we talk about certain demographics that are just traditionally far less likely to turn out and vote.

And the assumption has always been, Well, if you see higher turnout, that means that those people are coming out to vote, and those people are traditionally Democratic constituencies. Therefore, it’s bad for the Republican Party. This election, I think, could really be remembered as a bit of a watershed, Adam, because what we see in all of the publicly available data, as well as what we’re told is in a lot of the private data—the polling being done by both parties right now—is that, for the first time that anyone can remember, a lot of these low-engagement and low-propensity voters are breaking heavily in favor of Donald Trump, breaking heavily in favor of the Republican Party.

And if that bears out come November, I think it’s going to force the Democratic Party to sort of fundamentally reassess and recalibrate their approach to a whole host of issues but primarily just to this question of: How could it be that Donald Trump, the guy who would seemingly be the least likely to penetrate key pieces of the Democratic coalition and steal them away, how could it be that he’s the one who does this? And to be clear, Adam, there are still some skeptics, both in the Republican Party and in the Democratic Party, people who look at the polling and who say, I just don’t buy it. I don’t buy that Trump is going to wind up winning, you know, 20 to 25 percent of the Black vote. I don’t believe it, right?

And until we see it, some of that skepticism is certainly warranted. But I think part of the reason that the Trump campaign has been so confident in making this play—and in emphasizing the vote by mail and the absentee [voting] and trying to connect and engage with some of these voters who have a history of using nontraditional voting means—is because their modeling, they feel like it’s airtight.

Their modeling shows that these people who have been reliably Democratic in the past, that if they vote, they’re voting for Trump. And there’s just no overstating what a sea change that would represent in our politics.

Harris: All right, we’re going to take a short break. We’ll have more with Tim Alberta in a moment.

[Music]

Harris: You know, early on, coming into the campaign, we knew who the candidates kind of were, right? The primary felt like it was already predestined, preordained, that you would have another Trump versus Biden. And Trump was the one coming in with the baggage, right? It’s hard to talk about him without talking about the cases that were looming over him, without talking about the conviction.

But on Monday, just as the RNC began, the federal judge in Florida overseeing his classified-documents trial dismissed the case. What do you make of that news, and what impact will Trump’s legal issues have on this campaign?

Alberta: Well, first of all, I’m sure that the timing was totally coincidental, right? I’m sure that Judge Cannon had no idea that it was the first day of the Republican National Convention.

You know, it’s interesting, Adam, because this thing that was perceived to be a great vulnerability, potentially the albatross around his neck that could prevent him from winning the presidency, it suddenly feels almost like a nonissue. I mean, between some of the court cases getting bumped and bumped and bumped back again to help him scheduling-wise, this one being dismissed, you know, the conviction in Manhattan creating a financial windfall that had actually pushed him ahead of Joe Biden in the fundraising race—and just to pause on that point for a minute, Adam.

Trump was getting trounced financially for the first year of this campaign. He was way, way, way behind, and his cash reserves were really depleted because they had to keep paying all these legal bills. Well, suddenly, he gets convicted in Manhattan, and he raises these record-setting sums of money in the two or three days that follow.

And wouldn’t you know it? We checked the FEC filings, and Trump is entering the month of July with more cash in the bank than Biden is. So it’s really remarkable how, again, this thing that was supposed to be his greatest liability has sort of evaporated and, if anything, almost seems to very strangely have become an asset.

There’s been this long-simmering sense among Trump’s lieutenants that he is a target, that he is persecuted, that he is an enemy of the state, and that they won’t stop at anything to take him down.

Harris: You know, that language of persecution is important here, because I want to ask you about something you’ve written a great deal about, that we’ve talked about at length. That’s this sort of intersection of faith and politics.

You wrote a book about your journey as an evangelical Christian and as the son of a pastor. And in this election cycle, you’ve warned about how the forces of Christian nationalism are on the rise, both inside the church and inside the Republican Party.

So from your view at the epicenter of the party this week, how do you expect those forces to affect the Trump campaign?

Alberta: You know, this is a really interesting historical moment we’re approaching because this is our first post–Roe v. Wade presidential election. For 50 years, you’ve had single-issue voters—you know, conservative Catholics, evangelical Christians—who really don’t have any appetite for partisan politics and who would otherwise be inclined to just ignore all the noise come every 4th November. But they have been convinced that because presidents appoint Supreme Court justices, and because the Supreme Court—and only the Supreme Court—can ultimately strike down Roe v. Wade, that you have to vote in a presidential election, and you have to vote for the Republican.

I think what we’re about to find out is what number of those single-issue, highly committed, pro-life advocates suddenly find themselves recognizing that the issue is now defederalized, that it’s no longer a presidential issue, it’s no longer a Supreme Court issue and decide that they’re going to stay home because they can’t stomach voting for Donald Trump again.

So I think that is kind of a question mark, Adam, looming over the proceedings here that’s gotten very little attention. But it’s something that I’m going to be really focusing on in the months ahead, especially in light of the changes to the Republican platform that were, I think, obviously very upsetting to some in the social-conservative movement, effectively stripping out what had been the traditional language around the abortion issue.

And also it shouldn’t go ignored, stripping out the language around marriage being between one man and one woman. So there’s a feeling among some of the evangelical activist leaders that they are sort of being pushed to the side. And that’s because they are, in some sense, Adam.

Here’s the thing: Donald Trump and his campaign, they have made a calculation that these folks, the evangelicals, they’re not going anywhere. What, are they going to go vote for Joe Biden? Right? Like, that’s the level of confidence that they have. And so I think some of these decisions, at least at a tactical level, are riskier than I think many people realize. And if this winds up being a close election, there really could be a price to pay for some of these maneuvers that have been made here.

And, Adam, let’s be clear: If Trump is elected, he is going to have some people in his administration, in his cabinet, in his West Wing who are self-described Christian nationalists. I mean, there’s just no question about it. So I don’t think that the threat that I’ve been writing about is diminished in any way or any less relevant.

I just think that the Trump folks are actually pretty smart and savvy in recognizing that the Christian-nationalist menace that has been sort of drawn into the public’s attention, that it is a huge liability for them politically. You know, you see the Handmaid’s Tale memes that go around the internet, right? Like, I think the Trump folks recognize that they need to head that off, and they need to distance themselves from any of that narrative. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t loom large and play a really critical role in his administration.

Harris: So yeah, thinking further about Trump and the Christian right, he’s leaned into an image of himself as a persecuted martyr, and now he’s nearly been killed. What impact do you think the assassination attempt will have for people on the Christian right? Or what impact has it already had for people on the Christian right?

Alberta: You know, it’s hard to say, because this is all moving so quickly. Just being here in Milwaukee this week, Adam, I mean, it’s apparent. And you’re hearing it from the stage. You’re hearing it from delegates on the floor. You’re hearing it just in casual conversations with people, like, in the line for coffee. There’s definitely a sense of the sort of supernatural presence and this divine intervention that has spared Donald Trump and made him into even more powerful a figure than he was just a week ago.

You sense that from others. My big question is will we get it from Trump himself? I have spent as much time as any reporter in America at Trump rallies, listening to him, dissecting his words, kind of studying any evolution in his thinking, even his just one-off riffs, trying to understand, you know, how he might be approaching things in a new or different manner.

I’ve got to say that this acceptance speech he’ll be giving at the Republican convention is, to me, probably the most significant speech he’ll ever give. Because if, in fact, there is any real change in the man based on the events of last week, if some of his advisors are to be believed, he has been talking in kind of strangely spiritual terms and has been invoking God in ways that he has really never been known to do privately.

If there is some kind of meaningful change in Donald Trump himself—forget about the grassroots; forget about the party officials, all of his supporters—I mean, that could have, I think, really significant implications, politically and otherwise, for the party and for the country. So I think that’s the biggest piece of the puzzle here that everyone in Milwaukee is sort of waiting on and wondering: Are we going to hear from the same guy who we’ve been hearing from all these years, or is this going to be something a little bit different?

[Music]

Harris: Absolutely. And we’ll be watching for that. Tim, thank you so much for talking with me today, and good luck at the convention.

Alberta: Adam. My pleasure, man.

Harris: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Hanna Rosin is the host of Radio Atlantic and will return in a couple of weeks.

Until then, I’m Adam Harris, and thank you for listening.

gd2md-html: xyzzy Thu Jul 18 2024

A Crisis for Democrats

2024-07-11T09:00:00-04:00

Was anyone in America excited for a rematch of Trump versus Biden? Two unpopular and aging figures repeating the bruising 2020 race? Both entered with historic flaws: Donald Trump as the first convicted felon to run for a major party, and Joe Biden as already the oldest president when he first took office.

But while the Republican Party has remade itself ever more as the party of Trump, Democrats are now openly discussing whether they should renominate the incumbent president.

After his disastrous debate performance in June, Biden faced calls from Democratic lawmakers and power brokers to step aside. But with the president firmly committed to staying in the contest, what recourse does the party have? How would the Democratic Party replace the presumptive nominee? Would such an extreme step be possible? And would it ultimately help against Trump?

On this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, contributing writer and guest host Adam Harris is joined by staff writers Mark Leibovich and Elaine Godfrey to discuss. The political reporters examine the bind that the party is in and what options, if any, it might have.

Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Hey. This is Hanna Rosin, and I’m here in the studio today with Adam Harris. Hi, Adam.

Adam Harris: Hey. How are you?

Rosin: Good. Adam is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and the last time you were in this studio was when we were talking about the Supreme Court and affirmative action.

Harris: Yes. Race-conscious admissions.

Rosin: Yes. It was such a long time ago, and yet that is our new reality.

Harris: It really is. So much has changed in the last year.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, I feel like so many things have become our new reality. That’s the state of the world. It’s like, it’s like, Oh, abortion. That’s our new reality. Race-conscious admissions: gone. That’s our new reality. It’s just like we keep ratcheting them up one at a time.

Harris: Absolutely. There’s always something new.

Rosin: Yeah. Anyway, so, Adam, you write about a lot of different things, primarily education. You’re writing a book.

Harris: I am.

Rosin: But this month, you’re doing me a favor: You’re going to guest host this show, which I’m very excited about.

Harris: Yes. I’ll be guest hosting the next couple of episodes off and on, and I’m really excited.

Rosin: Good. Good.

Harris: We should tell people why you’re gonna be stepping away for a bit.

Rosin: Yes. That’s a good idea. I am spending the next few weeks working on a big project for The Atlantic. It’s an audio project. It’ll come out in September.

Harris: I can’t wait to hear that.

Rosin: Thanks. So Adam, I’m turning it over to you. So what’s your first episode? What do you got for us?

Harris: So this week we’re going to be talking about politics, the debate performance from President Biden, the state of the race, and where we go from here with Mark Leibovich and Elaine Godfrey.

Rosin: Excellent. There is nothing else to talk about pretty much.

[Music]

Harris: This race between Trump and Biden is one between two historically flawed candidates. One is a convicted felon, facing multiple prosecutions, some about his attempts to steal the prior election. The other candidate is already the oldest president in history, and after a disastrous debate performance, calls for him to step aside have grown within the Democratic Party.

I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic, and with me to help us understand the state of the race are staff writers Mark Leibovich and Elaine Godfrey.

Hi, Mark.

Mark Leibovich: Hi, Adam.

Harris: Hi, Elaine.

Elaine Godfrey: Hi, Adam.

Harris: We won’t exclusively talk about Biden, but his age is on everyone’s mind now. It’s been no secret that he is 81 years old. So, Mark, what do you make of the crisis Democrats are going through right now?

Leibovich: Yeah, I mean, if it was a secret that he was 81 years old, you know, I think the debate kind of put that to rest. He is certainly 81 years old and, I think worse: He kind of seems to be acting like someone who has lost some of his capabilities and is not as sharp as he once was.

Look, I think age has been the biggest issue for Biden, the most vulnerable part of his campaign from the start. This puts it all up to 11, and I don’t think in the last couple of weeks much doubt has been eased around how Biden has proceeded, what he has said, and so forth. Also the president’s handling of it, frankly, which has basically been to continue to be bunkered, has only exacerbated it.

So I think it’s an extremely deep hole. Clearly the Democrats are divided. I think the fact that Donald Trump has managed to somehow remain disciplined and stay out of the news and not interrupt the Democrats’ train wreck indicates how ecstatic they are about this whole thing. And however this is resolved, I think Democrats are going to be in a major hole if Joe Biden remains their nominee.

Harris: I guess we’ve known that he was going to be 81 for like this whole race, right? It was the sort of thing that was sitting in the background. Why did it take the debate for these conversations to come to the forefront?

Leibovich: Well, I mean, the conversations have been going on. They’ve just been going on quietly. And basically the answer that people close to the White House have been giving has been: Just get on board. Relax. Calm down. We got this. And he’s going to be there like he was in 2020. He will deliver.

I think what the debate exposed was how bad he’s actually been. And when you start from a position of really bunkering a president and really, you know, not giving many interviews at all, having very few opportunities to see him in an unscripted setting, something like that hits even harder.

Harris: And, Elaine, now that this is sort of out in the open, what do we know about the calls to replace the president? How real are those paths to actually replacing him?

Godfrey: Well, like Mark said, it’s extremely mixed. You know, you have Kamala Harris. She came out right after the debate to emphasize support for Biden. Most top Democrats have stuck to this line that he had a tough night, but you can’t judge him on just one night.

However, as the days and weeks have gone on now, we have a few House Democrats, in particular, who are speaking out and saying, Actually, maybe we do need a different nominee.

I think on the Senate side, it’s been a little more tight-lipped. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia had reportedly scheduled this meeting to air his concerns, but that meeting was, I guess, canceled because they were worried about leaks.

He issued a statement recently that he changed his tune and said, you know, We’ve gotten this far. Let’s back Biden, basically. So it’s definitely mixed. But under the surface, there are all these rumblings that feel like the dam is about to burst, but it’s felt that way for two weeks, I would say.

Harris: Yeah, and we’ve seen people, like Senator Patty Murray, who have said, you know, He has to show us that he still has what it takes to be the candidate on the ticket.

What would showing the American people actually look like for those people who were sort of on the fence about him continuing his candidacy?

Godfrey: Yeah, I think the president tried to show us by calling into Morning Joe earlier this week, which was a very Trumpian move, actually, to call into a show and talk to the hosts and sort of rant about it. But the thing about what Biden is doing right now is he is not making the case for Democrats, and for his platform to the American people, really talking about Trump much at all. He’s sort of making an entirely defensive case about his own age and his own fitness and, I know I can do this. I want this.

It’s very I, I, I, and I think that has turned off a lot of people, at least a lot of people that I talked to. They’ve said, Okay, but what about Trump? What about us? You know, in this interview he gave on ABC with George Stephanopoulos, George asked him, How will you feel if, at the end of all this, you lose? And Biden said, Well, I’ll know that I gave it my all. I did my best. And when you’re a candidate who’s saying that democracy hinges on this election, that cannot be your answer, and I think that voters are really disappointed about that.

Harris: And, Mark, you mentioned that he’s been sort of bunkered down and kind of does these scripted events. If you’re going out, and you’re doing the big rallies, and you’re doing calls into Morning Joe, has he really been that bunkered down?

Leibovich: Yeah, I mean, I think if in, say, the four or five days after the debate, if he had basically just gone out and done a kind of free-flowing give-and-take with the media in his own White House briefing room, a few times a week, half hour each day, done a bunch of interviews—I mean, the Morning Joe thing should be a bare minimum. But that’s like almost two weeks in they say, Hey, look. I just did a rally. But I mean, guys like Joe Biden can do a rally and read from a teleprompter pretty much in his sleep.

And, it looks like his strategy has just been to run out the clock. It’s like, Okay, I’m going to give you the Stephanopoulos interview a week from the debate. That’ll reassure everyone. It’ll reassure no one. And then we’re going to have this NATO press conference. And so that’s another week.

So, you know, it looks like they are just kind of playing with their food and hope that, you know, in the next few days—and it could come to pass—Donald Trump reclaimed center stage with his running mate, with a Republican convention, and this argument will recede into a level of resignation that is just more sleepwalking into what looks like a very likely disaster for Democrats, Joe Biden, and the country.

Harris: What are the actual chances that he steps aside?

Leibovich: I mean, that’s been kind of the big question. I mean, I think in some ways, if you put it to a vote of Democrats in Congress, Democrats in the Senate, Democrats in general, he’d have a tough time winning that vote. If you put it to a vote of all voting Americans, he’d be swamped.

The fact is that Biden has all the power here. I mean, it’s basically his decision. And he controls not only the decision but also the clock. And every day that passes where he is not saying, Okay, that’s enough, you know, I would say it’s a monumentally selfish and reckless and irresponsible decision, but Democrats are stuck with him.

Harris: This seemed like a race that we sort of knew what the script was, we knew who the candidates were. We’ve known that for a long time. And this, actually, feels like a legitimate monkey wrench in the campaign. Trump, of course, was a bit ahead of Biden in the polls before the debate. What does that sort of look like now?

Godfrey: Yeah. So Trump was already ahead of Biden. Democrats were already really nervous, freaking out. That is the reason that the debate has sent everyone into overdrive.

I think what we can say about the polls two weeks after the debate is that they’re not fundamentally different. But Trump has gained a couple of points basically everywhere we look—nationally and in swing states. But so far, we’re still seeing Biden with a bit of a lead in Wisconsin and Michigan. But the other swing states are either toss ups or Trump is winning them by a significant amount.

Pennsylvania, for example: Trump, I think, is up by six or seven points, according to several polls. But again, these are polls. It’s hard to say. It’s a snapshot in time. And Joe Biden doesn’t have to win that many swing states to win this election. He needs to win the blue-wall states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. So I wouldn’t say that things have changed significantly.

What has changed is, as Mark was saying, many, many more voters are uncomfortable with Biden as the nominee. They think he’s too old. They think he’s unfit. However the question is phrased, something like 75 percent of voters, according to most polls, do not think this should be the Democratic nominee.

And I think that in the coming days, I mean, if I was Biden and Biden’s team, I’d be looking at the head-to-head polls that show Kamala Harris tying Trump in a head-to-head or beating him. I’d be thinking about that, I think, if I was Team Biden.

Harris: Mark, you mentioned earlier that this has been sort of unlike anything that you’ve covered. You’ve covered several elections. So what has been going through your mind over the past couple of weeks as you’ve reported on this?

Leibovich: I think it’s been pretty depressing, actually.

I mean, I guess I have a horse in this, in that, you know, I’ve written the story for a while that I think Biden’s too old. But I also think it would be just unbelievably healthy for the country, the party, but also for the cause of winning to get on with the future. I mean, I think the idea, whether it’s Kamala Harris or Newsom or Whitmer or whoever, of just some kind of change that just takes the exhaustion of this gerontocracy off the table—the question of Biden’s age, just the exhaustion factor around Biden—is itself just kind of psychically invigorating. I mean, Harris obviously has some baggage going in. She’s not terribly popular, hasn’t been. But if you look at polls, she’s actually kind of outperforming Biden a little bit.

I mean, basically what these two weeks and the historic nature of this comes down to is something pretty basic, which is the known versus the unknown. The unknown is, obviously, potentially very exciting but also very scary. The known is Joe Biden, and it looks very likely to be a recipe for defeat and, possibly, a really bad defeat, and then everything that would follow on that.

So, it’s depressing, I guess, as someone who has always kind of been depressed by the kind of lemming-like mentality around politics in general. Whether it’s Republicans falling into line behind Donald Trump and now Democrats, you know, maybe falling into line behind someone that they clearly know is not fit to be president, or most of them know isn’t fit to be president beyond January 20, 2025, is itself dispiriting.

But I think what’s fascinating about the story is just that you see the dynamic forces playing out, and actually kind of creeping out in a debate happening about the future that has, frankly, been overdue for a number of years and kind of put on hold because of the unique threat of Donald Trump.

But, you know, to some degree, I think, it was cast in very sharp relief after the debate. The Democrats actually had some time. That was June. We’re now well into July. And there’s a very good possibility that nothing will change, which itself is depressing.

Harris: Yeah.

Godfrey: Yeah, technically, the Democratic delegates are not legally bound to vote for Biden. They’re sort of morally bound at the convention. They made a commitment to their party. They were elected to do this thing.

But they could, in theory, vote for Kamala Harris. That is extremely unlikely though, getting all of these, you know, 4,000 people together to get on the same page here. I mean, I don’t know any other sort of scenario that would replace Biden unless he just steps down.

Now, if Biden were to be chosen, be nominated at the convention, and then either step down or, God forbid, die before the election in November, there’s actually a process in place where the DNC, the national committee, could choose his replacement. So Jaime Harrison would suddenly become very powerful.

Leibovich: Oh, that’s interesting. So basically the Democratic National Convention is not the end game here.

Godfrey: It is not the end game. So if he were to be nominated and then step down, the natural pick, I think, would again be Kamala Harris. I think that would sort of have to be the case.

Leibovich: So I guess that mechanism does exist out there.

Godfrey: Yes, it exists. Has it ever happened before? No. There’s not really a road map.

Leibovich: And then there’s also ballots. Because presumably there’ll be a “Biden-Harris” on the ballot by that point. It’s a mess no matter how you look at it.

Harris: So yeah, it would effectively put us in uncharted waters.

Godfrey: Yeah, it doesn’t really feel like there’s time to make a different choice now. Like, it feels like there is only one option and that option is: Democrats go with this nominee, and all of these concerns just sort of have to be bottled back up, you know.

And I’ve talked to voters about this, or I should say delegates. I was interviewing DNC delegates about this prospect, and they talked a lot about the known versus the unknown, and most of them were saying, I’d prefer the unknown. Like, let’s do something new and different and get excited about something.

On the other hand, I guess the known is: You know how Republicans and Trump will come for Biden if he’s the nominee. You know the baggage. You know going in. But is that the best we can do in our politics?

Leibovich: Beyond the frustration with Biden and clearly the alarm that the debate set off, I think there’s a lot—an increasing amount—of anger at him. I mean, I think he’s acting in a very reckless, hubristic, and kind of pigheaded way.

And as Elaine noted earlier, that response to Stephanopoulos about, As long as I give it the old college try—Adam Schiff actually mocked that on Meet the Press on Sunday—to me, that was one of the most appalling answers he could have possibly given. And it’s the essence of putting oneself ahead of the country. And that was essentially what Democrats were running against in the worst possible way.

Harris: All right, well, we aren’t just going to talk about Joe Biden. After all, Donald Trump is a deeply concerning candidate as well, albeit for very different reasons. So, after the break, we will talk about Trump, the coming Republican National Convention, and what the Supreme Court win would mean for a second Trump term. We’ll be back in a moment.

[Music]

Harris: All right. So, Mark, everyone focused on Biden after the debate. What did you make of what Trump did in the debate and how his campaign is sort of shaped up?

Leibovich: Yeah, I mean, I think what’s perhaps also chilling about this whole period since the debate has been that Donald Trump has largely stayed out of the way, which is not usually his instinct on this. It seems like he’s probably delayed announcing his running mate just to sort of maximize Biden and Democrats being the story.

I mean, essentially for the last several months, one of the articles of faith around this race is if the focus is on Donald Trump, that’s great for Biden; if the focus is on Joe Biden and his age and inflation or whatever, that’s great for Donald Trump. Donald Trump has either wised up to this or has people around him to guide him in this way. But clearly, I mean, every day that this story goes on is a huge win for Donald Trump, and it’s sort of Politics 101 that you don’t want to interrupt the other side when they’re in the middle of their car crash.

Harris: As you mentioned, it’s been a really good stretch of weeks for Trump’s campaign. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump has some immunity from prosecution. What does that ruling mean for the cases against him right now and for what he might be able to do in the second term?

Leibovich: I mean, unclear, but very scary. I’m not a Supreme Court or legal expert by any means, but it does seem like, first of all, a lot of people, when this question came down several months ago, thought it was a no-brainer: They were just going to dismiss this quickly. Maybe the delay in Trump’s legal team sort of going to the Supreme Court will help him put off the Jack Smith cases until after the election.

But now, I mean, I think the court has gone even further and not only, almost certainly, ensured that there’s going to be no other court cases going on between now and the election for Donald Trump but also that he could actually enjoy an even greater level of immunity, unaccountability to do basically what he pleases.

I mean, that’s a level of indulgence he enjoys already in the Republican Party, certainly. He won’t be bound by needing to seek a second term. He won’t be bound by a House and Senate that has grown-ups in it, a White House that has grown-ups in it. I mean, none of those quasi-safeguards that were in place during his first term would exist now.

So yeah, it just added to the level of potential catastrophe that could be in store and why it’s so important that Democrats get their act together.

Harris: Elaine, next week, the Republican National Convention starts in Milwaukee. We’ve talked about the Democrats replacing Biden but, especially after January 6, Trump was the candidate people didn’t really expect to be nominated again.

What do you make of the journey that the Republicans have been on over the last four years that we’ve arrived back at this point where the former president is now the Republican candidate for the presidency?

Godfrey: Yeah, I think the journey since January 6 has been a slow—and then suddenly very fast—entire party embracing Trump and Trumpism.

I think after January 6, maybe there were a couple of months, maybe weeks, where we thought, Okay, that’s kind of it for Trump. And that clearly is not the case and was not the case. And since then, I mean, it’s really been Trump’s party, despite the fact that Trump’s candidates in 2022 lost broadly. He has not had a super-great track record as an endorser of candidates.

Since then, Lara Trump was chosen by Trump to lead the RNC with Michael Whatley, the former North Carolina GOP chair. It’s actually a bigger deal than people maybe think. Someone leading the Republican National Committee is a member of the Trump family, not just an ally of Trump’s. Trump is also not even the incumbent president, and he got to choose that person, right? So that shows you how much of a leader in the party he is right now.

I mean, there is virtually no room in the party now—no room in the party’s organizational apparatus, fundraising apparatus—to oppose Donald Trump. That just isn’t a thing anymore. It’s not really a possibility.

Trump nominated Mike Pence to be his VP in 2016. That was a real move to help appease the evangelicals who were suspicious of Trump. Now here’s Trump out there saying, you know, Let’s leave abortion laws to the states. Evangelicals haven’t left him. They’re mad, but they’re still voting for him in the primary. They’re still going to be defending him.

The RNC’s new, proposed platform says virtually nothing about abortion. It says, you know, We oppose late-term abortion, however they define that. But it says nothing that they removed any mention of federal abortion laws—supporting federal abortion laws—a human-life amendment added to the Constitution. Those things had long been in the Republican platform. At Trump’s urging, they changed that. It’s just such a good example of the power that he has over this party now.

Harris: What are the big moments that could change the race over these next couple of months?

Leibovich: I think the Republican convention itself is important in that if Republicans go out and are overconfident and are talking in a kind of unhinged way, thinking that they can basically say whatever they want and they’re still going to cruise to victory, it could have a serious backlash effect that hurts them.

I remember in 1992—yes, I am a little older—George Herbert Walker Bush was a fairly struggling incumbent president, yet they were still pretty confident of reelection because incumbents almost always win. And Pat Buchanan comes out. He had primaried Bush, and he gave this really, really right-wing, rabble-rousing speech. It was really out there, and it really wound up hurting Republicans. So I think, in this moment, in their confidence, they could perhaps overreach a little bit in Milwaukee.

Then you have the Democratic convention. Can Democrats, if Biden sticks around, rally around him in a way that’s somewhat convincing and even persuade people who have real doubts about him, which will be a lot of people? Obviously, his acceptance speech is going to do that.

You know, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what could happen. I mean, Trump is always going to make news. The question is: Is some of the news going to be even more toxic to the swing voters that he already has a hard time reaching? Obviously then the next debate: That’s, I think, the biggie. Expectations will be low for Biden. You know, he just can’t have a repeat of what happened a few weeks ago, and I think that’s pretty much it.

Godfrey: Glomming on to that, I think Trump does have a problem, which is that a lot of his base doesn’t often turn out in a general election. That’s something that they had been worried about before the debate. They’re sounding a lot less worried now but, like Mark said, you don’t want to be overconfident in a race like this. They have a turnout problem too. A lot of Trump voters are low-propensity voters.

Leibovich: I would point out one thing though, which is that: Yes, Republicans have had a turnout problem. Certainly it was in special elections. But when Trump is actually on the ballot, and it’s only been twice, his voters have turned out. I mean, he won in 2016, and he really overachieved in 2020.

And that election was not supposed to be as close. I mean, Biden was up five, six points in a lot of the late polls. He wound up winning by considerably less. We know how close it all was. And also, they overperformed the House and also the Senate a little bit because they had those voters coming out. So yes, they wound up losing that election, but that was in some ways a beating-expectations election for Republicans.

And, obviously, Trump will be on the ballot in November for Republicans.

Harris: So as we move towards the election, what should people be looking out for over the next couple of months?

Godfrey: If I’m Biden, I’m approaching November with, like, this renewed sense of focus. Like, I need to do as many events as possible that are unscripted. I think that’s going to be really hard for him to do. I think he’s not good at unscripted events, but: That’s what I’m doing. I’m scheduling press conferences, meet and greets. I’m doing as much of that as possible.

And it’ll be really interesting to see if we end up having another debate. After the June debate, pundits were like, Well, there goes the second debate. Definitely not doing that. I don’t know if Biden can not do that if he’s the nominee. I don’t know if he can say, Never mind. I did so bad last time. I’m not doing it now. Like, I just think that would be a bad look.

I’ll also be watching, like—you know, we have Trump’s VP pick coming up. I don’t think it’s going to make a huge difference politically at all. But I guess it could, and it’ll just be an interesting new sort of addition to the race, I guess. If anything, it will give reporters something new to write about.

Leibovich: Seeing how, obviously, Biden gets out of this mess because he’s a weak candidate, and I think the question is: Can he transform himself? Which seems quite unlikely at this stage. But maybe he can surprise people by actually pulling off a series of unscripted give-and-take, impressive events—and again, not scripted, not telepromptered, not the set-piece, receiving-line kinds of things that Joe Biden has been doing since he was basically in kindergarten. So I would say that.

But Democrats have a very weak hand with him. It’s like: Okay, he might not be fit, but the other guy is worse. And I think there’s a fundamental fact here, which is that the anti-Trump coalition in this country is far bigger than the pro-Biden coalition.

And if Democrats are unable, and Biden is unable to see that a person carrying the mantle for a very unpopular incumbent—getting more so—is a good idea, I mean, I think that’s kind of their own fault. And they’re kind of walking the rest of us into this.

But, you know, look: You could not have a more winnable race and a more beatable opponent in this day and age than Donald Trump, and yet he could win anyway. He looks likely to win anyway, and it might not even be close.

So again, I hope I’m wrong. I don’t think I am, but I really hope I’m wrong.

Harris: Well, Mark, Elaine, a lot of uncertainty now for a race that has felt like it has had few surprises. So thank you so much for talking with me today.

Leibovich: Thanks, Adam.

Godfrey: Thanks, Adam.

[Music]

Leibovich: And we’re all gonna die. (Laughs.)

Godfrey: Mark’s a real downer in that conversation. (Laughs.)

Harris: All morbid today.

Leibovich: David Downer over here.

[Music]

Harris: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Hanna Rosin is the host of Radio Atlantic, and she’ll be back in a matter of weeks. In the meantime, I’m Adam Harris and thank you for listening.

What Cities Can Teach Us About Life Online

2024-06-13T07:00:00-04:00

Digital life is a social experiment full of contradictions. It can connect people while alienating them; embrace difference while policing change; span huge distances but feel small.

Humanity’s transition to life online is disorienting, but perhaps not without comparison. According to the researcher danah boyd, people faced similar challenges in the transition to city life, meaning that the history of urbanization can offer lessons for humankind’s more recent mass digital migration.

And if the rules and ways of cities have become clearer over the years, maybe there’s hope that the same can be said for life online.

Boyd’s work is the focus of a recent episode of The Atlantic’s podcast How to Know What’s Real, with co-hosts Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez. This week, Radio Atlantic is showcasing that episode, with an introduction by host Hanna Rosin.

Listen to the episode here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic, and today we’re going to do something special. I’m going to introduce you to our latest season of The Atlantic How To podcast. This season is called How to Know What’s Real. And with me today in the studio is one of the hosts of the new season, Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber. Hi, Megan!

Megan Garber: Hi. Glad to be here.

Rosin: So, Megan, I’m going to tell you a story.

Garber: Okay. Oh, yes, please.

Rosin: The other day, I was sitting in a giant, urban food hall, and I was sitting there with my partner. It was like Saturday or Sunday. It was very crowded. And she’s telling me an incredibly, like, heated story about somebody who she got into a fight with.

And it’s like, she’s getting kind of like more and more heated up and it’s like: F-bomb! F-bomb! F-bomb! She has a loud voice anyway, and somebody—a total stranger—sits down at the table next to us with her children, who were teenagers, not kids.

Garber: Uh-oh.

Rosin: And she looks over, and she says, “Could you stop cursing?”

Garber: Ooh.

Rosin: Exactly. And I spent a week thinking about this. Like, what are the rules in that situation?

Garber: (Laughs.) Yeah. Ooh.

Rosin: This is a giant, urban environment. Like, you are supposed to come into contact with strangers. The rules of how to behave are totally unclear. My partner can tell whatever story she wants in whatever way she wants.

And, like, here is the mom coming in and making this request. And it was just very complicated, I suddenly realized, to navigate this crashing of strangers into each other.

Garber: Oh, yes. And can I ask: What did you do in that moment? Did you respond to the woman? Did, or did your partner—

Rosin: God, I mean, if you met my partner, you would know the answer to this question. (Laughs.) She was like, Hell no, and you can move over there if you want to, because this is a public— and I was, like, just hiding under the table.

Garber: (Laughs.) That’s right. I’m going to go get some water. Okay. Bye.

Rosin: Exactly. That’s how that story ended. Anyway, Megan. The reason I’m telling you this story is because it turns out that navigating cities and all of these complicated dynamics that happen in cities is a lot closer to navigating an online space than a lot of people realize.

Garber: Yes, exactly. And I think that’s also in part because, you know, the web is in some ways so new, so unprecedented, right? But in other ways, the challenges it presents—despite all the new technology—are challenges that people have faced before, right? They’re sociological challenges, really, in kind of fundamental ways—questions about how people see each other, or fail to see each other, or make space for each other, or can’t make space for each other.

And so I love this idea of history as almost giving a little bit of context and perhaps a little bit of hope, too, in terms of how we can navigate these really big, new questions that are, in some ways, very old questions, too.

Rosin: How does this specific episode fit with the wider goal of this season?

Garber: So much of this season really is about making these connections between things that might seem separate at first. So, you know: fantasy and reality, the web and the physical worlds, cities and the web.

My co-host, Andrea Valdez, and I wanted to really put the web, and all the questions it brings up, into a new kind of context and perspective. And spoiler: We are not going to fully answer how to know what’s real. But we’re hoping that we can help to clarify where the reality is among the things that might not seem fully real.

Rosin: So, listeners, here’s Episode 2 of the latest season of How To: “How to Live in a Digital City.”

[How to Know What’s Real episode audio]

Rosin: So that was Episode 2 of the new season of The Atlantic’s How To podcast.

Links to subscribe are in the show notes for this episode, or you can search your podcast app for How to Know What’s Real.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend, edited by Claudine Ebeid, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Russia’s Psychological Warfare Against Ukraine

2024-05-23T07:00:00-04:00

After months of struggle with little movement, the war in Ukraine may be nearing a crucial point. The fight has not been going well for Ukraine. With American aid stalled, tired fighters on the front lines faced ammunition shortages just as Russia brought new sources of recruits and weapons online.

But although painfully delayed, military support from the United States is on its way. The aid package passed in April is the first since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives more than a year ago, but it’s also the largest yet. Now the question is: Will it make a difference in time?

The Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum joins host Hanna Rosin on Radio Atlantic to discuss the state of the war and how the fight extends well beyond the battlefield itself.

According to Applebaum, the psychological toll Ukraine faced from the aid holdup is only the beginning. Russia may not be able to occupy Ukraine’s cities, but it can wage a kind of psychological warfare to make them unlivable.

She also describes an information war Russia has brought much closer to home for Americans. Her June cover story in The Atlantic chronicles the “new propaganda war” that Russia, China, and other illiberal states are waging on the democratic world, and how that war can shape the fate of Ukraine.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

News clip: Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine, including a major offensive near Ukraine’s second-largest city.

News clip: President Zelensky has warned that Russia’s latest push in Ukraine’s northeast could be the first wave of a wider offensive.

News clip: Congress approved $60 billion in military aid for Ukraine in April. The approval came after months of dire warnings from Ukraine that its troops are running out of weapons and losing ground to Russian fighters.

Hanna Rosin: The news out of Ukraine has recently turned bleak. Russia broke through critical lines in the north, and the Ukrainian side seems depleted of manpower and weapons. Now, a major part of what changed the dynamic was the halt in U.S. aid. The aid was stalled since Republicans took over the House of Representatives, although a month ago they passed the first aid bill in over a year, which may or may not be too late to turn things around.

Now, I know that there is a connection between what happens on the battlefield in Ukraine and U.S. politics. But I did not truly grasp how deep that connection was and how it could affect not just the upcoming election but all of American culture, until I talked to staff writer Anne Applebaum. Anne is the first person I always want to talk to in these moments when major shifts are under way, because she can read between the lines.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic, and this week: how Russia has brought its war much closer to home than Americans may realize.

Anne has a new book coming out this summer called Autocracy, Inc. And in it, she’s been putting together the pieces: how the war in Ukraine is not just a fight for ground but a fight for psychological territory—in Russia, in the U.S. election, and pretty much all over the world.

[Music]

Rosin: So things have shifted on the battlefield in Ukraine. I know that much. Can you explain exactly what happened?

Anne Applebaum: So, in essence, there are two different stories. There’s a story about the front line in northern and eastern Ukraine. And there we see what’s now a full-scale, very large Russian offensive.

Rosin: All of a sudden? Like it just—all of a sudden?

Applebaum: It’s been pushing for a while, but there was a relaunched attack in recent days and weeks against the city of Kharkiv, which is in the far north—quite near the Russian border, sort of northeast Ukraine—as well as in the east, in the sort of Donetsk region.

The Russians moved tens of thousands of troops into the area, supposedly 50,000 east of Kharkiv, and redoubled their attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. That seems to have been a plan, and it seems to have been timed to happen now.

Rosin: And why was it suddenly successful? Like, I feel like it’s been stalled and stalled and stalled for almost a year.

Applebaum: The Ukrainians have been running out of ammunition for a long time, and during the six months in which we weren’t helping them and the European ammunition was also still on its way, the Ukrainians were holding ground but were losing weapons and equipment. And during that same period, the Russians regathered their forces. And in the last few days, they decided to push forward, as I said, in those two places.

Rosin: And did anything change on the Russian side, like new strategy, new something?

Applebaum: A couple things changed on the Russian side—one was the recruitment of more soldiers. They now pay people a lot of money to be in the army. And in very poor parts of Russia, they will now go and fight. Also, there’s a kind of constant, back-and-forth electronic warfare, drone warfare. The Russians got better at using drones and better at blocking Ukrainian drones and equipment.

That’s one of these things where they do one thing and then the Ukrainians learn another thing. So there’s a kind of constant spiral, and that’s changing all the time. But they did recover from an earlier phase in the war when the Ukrainians could beat them using high tech a lot more easily.

I should say there’s another piece of the war, however. The second piece of the story is that the Ukrainians are now using long-range weapons—some European, some American, some stuff they’ve been given recently—to hit targets in Crimea and also in Russia itself. They hit an airfield. They’ve been hitting gas and oil storage facilities, production facilities.

And they’ve supposedly taken out perhaps as much as 10 percent of Russia’s oil-refining capacity. They’ve hit major military targets in Crimea. And so this is their new form of innovation—is to block Russian efforts from farther back. It’s almost like a separate war from the war on the front line.

Rosin: I see. So the traditional battlefield that we report on and have been tracking and monitoring looks bleak, but there’s other things happening elsewhere. Okay. That’s good to know.

A last battlefield question: What’s the importance of the cities, the particular cities and places where Russia has made incursions?

Applebaum: So the attack on Kharkiv, which is sort of Ukraine’s second city—it was actually, at one point in history, it was the capital of Ukraine. It’s a major cultural and industrial center.

The fact that the Russians are now so focused on it—focused on taking out their power stations, taking out their infrastructure, seemingly in order to force people out, to make people leave Kharkiv—is a pretty major shift in the war. They weren’t attacking Kharkiv earlier in the war.

Rosin: Tactically or psychologically? Because it’s such an important city.

Applebaum: I think it’s probably psychological. The idea is to make it unlivable. And my guess is that that’s really the Russian strategy for all of Ukraine, is to make it unlivable. They can’t capture it. I mean, capturing Kharkiv would be a kind of six-month Stalingrad-like urban battle. That would be my guess.

And they probably don’t want to do that. So what they probably want to do instead is force everyone to leave. If there’s no electricity and there’s no water and the center is bombed out and you can’t live there, then that’s a different kind of victory.

Rosin: Okay. I understand the strategy so much better. You mentioned U.S. aid. Everybody talks about U.S. aid. I feel like you, for months, have been warning: U.S. aid is critical. Please pass an aid bill. Looking back on this year, how critical is or has U.S. aid been to this shift in momentum?

Applebaum: So U.S. aid and the argument in the U.S. over the aid were hugely important—both for real reasons, in that, you know, the U.S. aid provides ammunition and bullets and guns on the ground, and for psychological reasons.

Because what the Russians are trying to do is to exhaust Ukraine, to convince people that Ukraine can’t win, to convince Ukrainians that they have no allies, and thereby to get them to stop fighting. And so the Russians are hoping to win through a psychological game as much as a military game.

Rosin: Interesting. Okay, so it’s not just literal weapons—and I mean, it’s also literal weapons.

Applebaum: It’s also literal weapons, but it’s not only the literal weapons.

Rosin: It’s: You are friendless and alone.

Applebaum: You’re friendless and alone, and your major supplier, which is the United States, or your big friend in Washington, isn’t going to help you anymore. And, you know, this had some impact on Ukrainians.

I mean, there’s a certain scratchiness that Ukrainians now have about the U.S. You know, We relied on them. And then, you know, U.S. domestic politics undermined that. You know, remember Biden went there and, you know—first U.S. president to visit a war zone in a place where the U.S. didn’t even have troops on the ground—and promised them he would stand by them. And then he didn’t. And, okay, it wasn’t his fault. And it wasn’t him alone. But nevertheless, that was experienced by a lot of people as a kind of betrayal.

That was very psychologically damaging. It meant that there were soldiers on the front line who didn’t have anything to shoot back with.

Rosin: So when you say “scratchiness,” that’s what you mean? Just a mistrust?

Applebaum: Mistrust. Doubt. The sense of being part of a big, friendly alliance is chipped away quite a bit. I mean, it has to be said that during this time, there have been a bunch of new European projects to give them aid.

There was the so-called Czech ammunition initiative. The Czechs are major producers of ammunition and weapons and have been for many decades. And there are a number of big European projects that are just getting off the ground to make new weapons, to make ammunition and so on. So other things have been happening, but the U.S. aid was expected to carry Ukraine over for six months, and it wasn’t there.

Rosin: Right. So, U.S. aid was literally important, and it was meant as a bridge. So it’s like there is no more bridge.

Applebaum: Yes. Yes. I mean, it’s fixed now, in other words, so the aid is coming. It’s hard for me to tell from outside how fast it’s coming. It seems some things got there right away. These long-range weapons got there right away. Other things seem to be taking longer.

So that’s hard for me to tell, but there was some damage that was done by the delay. So, both psychological damage and damage in terms of lost territory and lost ability to fight.

Rosin: Can we look at this from the U.S. side for a minute, since there is about to be an election? Do you just look at it as standard deadlock, or do you see some isolationism rising up in a more powerful way than it had before? How do you read the long delay from the American side?

Applebaum: So I don’t think isolationism is the right word to use. I think what we were seeing was something different, which was a concerted effort to block aid that was coming from Donald Trump and people around Trump and was supported by people inside the Republican Party who are actually pro-Russian.

So I don’t think it’s just that they want America to withdraw and live in splendid isolation. I think there is a piece of the Republican Party that actively supports Russia. There are members of Congress who repeat Russian propaganda on the floor of the House and of the Senate, and who actively spread Russian propaganda on social media. Those people aren’t isolationists. I mean, there’s something a little bit more than that happening.

Rosin: Okay. So that sounds conspiratorial to the uninitiated. So, prove yourself!

Applebaum: So to unpack—I mean, so first of all: Don’t listen to me. Listen to the various Senate and House leaders who have also said this. So, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Tom Tillis, who’s a Republican Senator—they’re all people who have said on the record, on TV, in the last few weeks and months, have talked about their colleagues repeating Russian propaganda.

There’s one specific story. For example, there’s a story that circulated on social media a few months ago that said that President Zelensky of Ukraine had purchased two yachts, and there were pictures of the yachts that came in some kind of post.

Obviously, President Zelensky has not purchased any yachts. Kiev is landlocked. What does he need the yachts for anyway? It was a completely made-up story that nevertheless was passed around the sort of MAGA-Russian echo chamber, which are more or less the same thing.

That story: During the debate about Ukraine aid, Senator Tillis said he heard his colleagues in the Senate—Republican colleagues in the Senate—cite that story and say, for example, We shouldn’t give Ukraine aid, because Zelensky will just spend it on his yachts.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Applebaum: So that is a direct example of a false story that comes from the swamp of the internet, that is being passed around, and that is then repeated by a member of the United States Senate as a reason why we shouldn’t help Ukraine.

You couldn’t get a more pure example of how fever dreams created in some troll’s brain or on somebody’s phone then become a part of the conversation in Congress.

And there’s another set of arguments that are coming from Donald Trump’s camp, and Trump himself says some of it in public. He says he wants to do a deal with Russia. And there have been little leaks about what that deal might look like. And perhaps the deal includes some kind of negotiation over the border. Perhaps the deal includes some new U.S. relationship with Russia. Perhaps the deal includes some kind of deal to do with fuel prices, oil prices.

There’s clearly an interest in the Trump camp to have some kind of alliance with Russia. And some people also in the Trump orbit talk about breaking up Russia and China: We need a relationship with Russia in order to oppose China, which is one of these things that sounds great until you remember how much Russia and China have in common and that the reasons why they’re in alliance have nothing to do with us.

But that’s a separate topic. But there are enough people in that world who are looking for reasons why we should be allied with Russia and not with Ukraine that it’s not some kind of coincidence.

Rosin: I see. Okay. So what I’m taking from that is it’s not a totally coherent plan or motivation. There’s a little bit of pro-Russia business interests. There’s a little bit of Trump magic. There’s a whole bunch of interests, but somehow the result is that there’s a repeating of propaganda.

Applebaum: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, and 99 percent of it is visible to the naked eye.

I’m just quoting you things that people have said. And it’s simply a desire by a part of the Republican party to have a different role in the world. Like, we don’t want to be the country that aids struggling democracies. We want to be the country that does deals. We’re going to do a deal with Russia. We’ll do a deal with whoever we can do deals with.

The idea is that the United States isn’t a leader of NATO. The United States isn’t the leader of the democratic world. Instead, the United States is one power among many who does transactional deals with whoever it deems to be in its interest at that moment.

And that was Trump’s foreign policy in the first term. He was restrained in it. He was prevented from doing everything that he wanted to do. He wanted to drop out of NATO, but he was talked out of it by John Bolton and others. But that’s not a new phenomenon. That’s the way a part of the party is going.

Rosin: And interestingly, that faction did not win. There was U.S. aid—U.S. aid was delivered. How critical do you think the new infusion of aid is or will be?

Applebaum: So the new infusion of aid is critical. Again, I’m not on the ground, and I can’t tell you what exactly has got there and what exactly it will be doing. But, psychologically, it means the Ukrainians know more stuff is coming. So they’re not being shot at on the front lines with no help arriving.

So they have: Something is coming. It’s on the way. That’s very important. And then also some of the new weapons we’ve already seen in effect. So the hits on Crimea and on some of the other places on the front lines seem to be effective because of some of the new U.S. weapons.

[Music]

Rosin: All right. So that’s the situation in Ukraine. When we come back: Russian propaganda—how surprisingly effective it’s been, and how it’s taken root far from Moscow, both in the United States and elsewhere, and what that means for the future of democracy everywhere.

[Music]

Rosin: So where we are now: There’s this critical moment in the war, and then there are all these shifting, underlying alliances that we saw come out in the debate over aid. And a lot of them have to do with shifting propaganda and messaging, which is really interesting. How is Vladimir Putin messaging this moment? Like, what’s he saying?

Applebaum: So, Putin’s messaging—what Putin himself says—is of no significance. Russian messaging and Russian propaganda comes through a lot of different channels.

So it comes through proxies. It comes through some Russian ambassadors. There’s of course Russian TV. There’s RT. And some of it is laundered through—it’s called information laundering—it’s laundered through other kinds of publications that have links to Russia that you can’t see.

So there will be newspapers or websites in Africa or Latin America, which look on the surface like they don’t have anything to do with Russia but, in fact, they have links to Russia.

Rosin: This is why we have you, Anne Applebaum, to draw these lines.

Applebaum: I mean, I’m actually very interested in how it works in Africa, which I think is more interesting than how it works in the U.S., but that’s a separate story. But, you know, some of it, as we know, comes through trolls on social media. Twitter is now pretty much awash in different kinds of Russian trolls.

It’s hard to say if they’re really Russians or they’re just people who like Russia or they’re being paid.

Rosin: Who knows.

Applebaum: Who knows. But there’s a lot of it. So a lot of the attempts that social media companies made a few years ago to control some of this stuff, some of them don’t work as well anymore, especially on Twitter, but not only.

So the messages come in different ways. And I should also say that the other new factor is that the messages are sometimes amplified by other autocracies. So in addition to Russian messaging, you now have Chinese messaging, some of which echoes Russian messaging. You have Iranian messaging—same thing. Venezuelan messaging—same thing.

Rosin: What do you mean, “Same thing”? Like, same message about the Ukraine war?

Applebaum: Same messages about the Ukraine war.

Rosin: What’s the message?

Applebaum: The message is: The Ukrainians are Nazis. The Ukrainians can’t win. The war is America’s fault. This is a NATO war against Russia that was provoked by NATO.

There’s another strand alongside it that also says, you know, Ukraine is decaying and chaotic and catastrophic. The United States is also decaying and divided and catastrophic. These are all losing powers, and you shouldn’t support them.

I’m being very, very over general, but there is now a kind of authoritarian set of narratives, which more or less are all about that, and they’re now repeated by lots of different actors in different countries. I mean, there are some specific things about Ukraine.

In a cover story I wrote for The Atlantic, I describe a story that was very important at the very beginning of the war: the so-called biolabs conspiracy theory, which was an idea that the U.S. is building biological weapons in laboratories in Ukraine, and that somehow that’s a reason for the war. This was completely fake. It was debunked multiple times, including at the UN.

Nevertheless, it was repeated by Russian sources. It was repeated by Chinese sources. It went out—China has a huge media network in Africa. That whole story went out on that network. You could find it all over, you know, Ecuador and Chile and so on.

And that was a story that was so prevalent at the beginning of the war that something like 30 percent of Americans saw it and may well have believed it. And, certainly, a lot of Africans and Latin Americans also saw it and may well have believed it.

Rosin: You’re speaking, and I’m feeling utterly defeated. I mean, that’s the truth. I feel utterly defeated by these washes and washes and washes of information coming from all corners that are going to snag in some people’s minds and sort of corrode them. Like, that’s the image I had as you were talking.

So in a moment like this, all that is the groundwork. What you just described is the groundwork that’s been going on since the Ukraine war began.

Applebaum: It’s been going on for a decade.

I mean, it has to be said, the Ukrainians are also good at messaging, and they have resisted that pretty well. And they were very good at it in the first year of the war. The majority of Americans still support Ukraine. And the majority of Europeans still support Ukraine. So it’s not as if the Russians are winning everywhere all the time. It’s just that it turned out they had affected a key part of the Republican Party, which, actually, by the way, took me by surprise.

When the aid didn’t pass early last autumn, I was initially surprised.

Rosin: Surprised that this broader message was seeping up into—

Applebaum: It was the broader message and the degree to which Trump didn’t want it passed and was blocking it, and that therefore—first it was Kevin McCarthy, later Mike Johnson—were also willing to block it. That was not something I expected.

Rosin: Because you, in your mind, are used to like: Okay, there’s some isolationist strain. But the idea that the argument itself has taken on all kinds of force, motivation—

Applebaum: The idea that they had that much power at the top of the Republican Party. Because many senior Republicans, the leaders of all the important committees in the House, are all people who have been to Ukraine, who have been very pro-Ukraine, who understand the significance of Ukraine and the war in the world and were willing to help. And so none of the congressional leadership were buying any of this Russian propaganda. But then it turned out that it still mattered. Because of Donald Trump.

Rosin: I’m trying to wrap my head around this global propaganda war that you’re describing. I’m used to thinking of propaganda, I guess, in an old-fashioned way, which is something that happens over there in countries that are autocracies, and the autocrats impose it on their beleaguered citizens, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Like, it’s something I anthropologically witnessed.

Applebaum: That’s very 20th century. That’s the 20th-century idea. So in the 20th century, when you think of what was Soviet propaganda, it was posters with tractor drivers, and they had square jaws, and they were digging lots of wheat, and there would be overproduction in the steel industry and so on—

Rosin: And we might buy them in a campy way—

Applebaum: We might buy them in a campy way. I’m sure I own some. So that was 20th-century Soviet propaganda, which ultimately failed because it was so easy to compare that with reality. So even when I first went to the Soviet Union in the ’80s, people could see that wasn’t true. That was the major flaw of that form of propaganda.

What happens now, led by the Russians, and this has been true for a decade—modern Russian propaganda, and now other autocracies echo it, is not focused so much on promoting the greatness of Russia. Sometimes there’s a bit of that. Mostly, it’s focused on the degeneracy and decline of democracy. So the idea is to make sure that Russians don’t imagine there’s something better anywhere else.

Rosin: Because they wouldn’t know. Like, you can tell that Russian propaganda about Russia is a lie because you’re actually waiting on a bread line. So you know that it’s not as good as the posters are showing, but you don’t necessarily know.

Applebaum: But you haven’t been to Sweden or the United Kingdom or wherever. And a lot of it was—the implication of it was—now I’m just paraphrasing, but it was: Okay, not everything in Russia is perfect. And, okay, we may have some corruption, and we have some oligarchs. But look over there at the hideous decline of, you know, England and France and Germany and America. You wouldn’t want to be like that.

And the purpose of this is that the main opponents of Putin and Putinism were people—and over the last two decades, have been people—who used the language of democracy and transparency and anti-corruption.

Rosin: And freedom.

Applebaum: And freedom.

Rosin: Yeah.

Applebaum: And that kind of language was also aligned with an idea that there were better societies—like, you know, in Europe and North America—and Russia could be like them.

And remember that many Russians in the ’90s did hope that their country would become a democracy and believed well into the 2000s that it was still a possibility and were used to the idea that these countries are our friends.

And so what Putin has set out to do is to poison that idea—so poison the idea that there’s anything better—and to poison the idea of the ideas, poison the language: democracy, freedom, transparency, rule of law, anti-corruption. All those things have to be shown to be false.

And this has been done in various ways. So there’s a version of this inside Russia, and there’s a version abroad. But inside Russia, it’s been part of an anti-LGBT campaign. You know, The Western world is degenerate. Putin has said it himself: There are many different kinds of genders. Who even knows what happens over there anymore. An implication of degeneracy. Here we still have some kind of clean, more traditional way of life.

Rosin: Men and women.

Applebaum: Exactly. And that was mostly originally designed for the Russian audience. But it also had a certain echo and an appeal to a far-right audience in the United States and in Europe.

You know, the Russians do it because they want to weaken the United States. They want the U.S. to leave Europe. They want, you know, American decline to accelerate. And Americans do it because they want to take over the government and replace it with a different kind of government.

And so many of the people who will repeat Russian propaganda have been repeating some of those same ideas also for decades.

I mean, this story goes back probably 20 years, so this is nothing especially new, but it became much more turbocharged in 2014 during the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Rosin: It sounds like what you’re saying is: We are vulnerable. I mean, it seems like their propaganda war is winning, the autocrats. Like, I feel like the Americans are duped in this scenario.

Applebaum: I mean, first of all, it’s not clear yet that they’re winning.

I mean, again, a majority of Americans support Ukraine, and a majority of Americans support the idea that the U.S. should be a democracy. So, we’re not finished yet. It’s a very delicate thing.

I mean, are we being manipulated and duped by foreigners? Or is it elements in our own society that are seeking to manipulate us and dupe us?

In other words, the farthest thing I want to do is say that somehow the Russians are intervening in our politics and changing it. I think it’s more complicated than that. I think we have a very important element of U.S. politics that believes the same things and uses the same tactics and is very happy to be amplified by the Russians for its own ends.

So usually what happens is that Russian propaganda doesn’t invent things that are new. So, for example, in France, the Russians did not invent Marine Le Pen, who’s the French far-right leader. She’s been part of French politics for decades. They just amplify her. In her case, they gave her some money.

In Spain, there’s a Catalan separatist movement, which has also been supported by the Russians in different ways. Did they invent that? No. It was already there. It’s been part of Spanish politics for decades.

What they do is they take an existing fault line or an existing division, and then they help it get worse. So whether that’s through, you know, social media campaigns, in some cases through money, in some cases through helping particular individuals, they seek to amplify.

Rosin: So it’s almost like there’s this coalescing global division and on one side a sort of autocracy and nostalgia.

Applebaum: Except that it’s—

Rosin: And the other side is what, like, freedom and democracy?

Applebaum: Except that it’s more complicated because there is no—it’s not the Cold War. There’s no geographic line. There’s no Berlin Wall, and good guys are on one side and bad guys are on the other.

These are struggles that are taking place within each democracy and actually within each autocracy. I’m leaving out the fact that there are democrats in Russia and movements in Iran and in China, for example, that have also wanted greater freedom, greater autonomy, rule of law.

A lot of it’s about transparency. You know, We want to know where the money is. How did our leaders become so rich? That’s what the Navalny movement was about, for example, in Russia.

Rosin: Right, right.

Applebaum: And so there is a battle going on between two worldviews, but the divisions aren’t geographical. They’re in people’s heads.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so with Ukraine and this whole propaganda war in mind that you’re describing, what are the stakes for the 2024 election?

Applebaum: I think the stakes for the 2024 election are really stark. Is the United States going to remain allied with other democracies? Is it going to continue on the path of the struggle against kleptocracy, which is finally beginning to gain a little bit of traction? So against money laundering and anonymous companies and so on. Is the United States going to militarily resist Russian incursions in Europe? And this is a package of things. Is the United States going to maintain its alliances with Japan and South Korea and Taiwan?

Or is the United States going to become a transactional power whose friends one day might be Russia, another day might be North Korea, who no longer leads a recognizable democratic alliance, either on the ground in the world or mentally?

I mean, are we still going to be seen as a country that stands for a set of ideas—as well as a country that respects language about human rights and human dignity and so on—or are we going to become a transactional power like so many others?

And that’s one of the questions that’s on the ballot in November.

Rosin: Well, that is very clear. Anne, thank you for helping us put all these pieces together. That was very helpful.

Applebaum: Thank you.

[Music]

Rosin: To read more of Anne Applebaum’s work, check out her June cover story of The Atlantic, “The New Propaganda War.” And look for her upcoming book, Autocracy, Inc., this summer.

This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Radio Atlantic: What AI Means for Search

2023-03-02T10:50:19-05:00

With Google and Microsoft releasing new AI tools, it feels like the future is now with artificial intelligence. But how transformative are products like ChatGPT? Should we be worried about their impact? Are they a new Skynet or just a new Clippy?

Staff writers Charlie Warzel and Amanda Mull discuss.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Charlie Warzel: It feels like we’re moving toward this search paradigm where search is going to get a little more fun, a little more entertaining, and, possibly, not any more accurate.

And instead, the debates that we’re going to have about who gets to decide what are being entrusted to huge complicated machine-learning models that we have no idea how they’re trained or what they’re gonna do. It kind of sounds like a nightmare.

Amanda Mull: Welcome to Radio Atlantic. I’m staff writer Amanda Mull and I’m here with fellow staff writer Charlie Warzel, who writes about technology for us. Lately, Charlie’s been considering the nascent AI arms race between Google and Microsoft and why, as he put it in a recent piece, Clippy has touched the face of God. Charlie, it’s great to have you.

Warzel: Happy to be here. Happy to talk about Clippy.

Mull: Great. Great. So, Charlie, lately you’ve been writing about and reporting on AI now that Bing and Google have mutually decided to make all of us think about AI. But first I want to talk about finding a bookcase.

Warzel: Let’s do it. Let’s let Bing be our search butler here.

Mull: What I would like to find out is if the Ikea Kallax bookcase—a classic—can fit in the back of a 2002 Volkswagen Jetta.

Warzel: Okay. Alright, it’s searching, it’s still kind of creaking and groaning under the weight of your search. Okay.

Hello. This is Bing. The Ikea Kallax bookshelf has a height of 30 inches or 77 centimeters with a 58 inches, or 147 centimeters and a shelf depth of 15 inches or 39 centimeters. The 2002 Volkswagen Jetta has a trunk space of 47 inches wide, 42 inches deep and 22 inches tall. Based on these dimensions, it seems unlikely that the bookshelf can fit inside the trunk of the car. You may need to disassemble the bookshelf or use another vehicle to transport it.

Mull: It seems like we need to ask Bing to use the packaging dimensions and not the assembled dimensions.

Warzel: Ooh. Okay. It’s searching …

Hello, this is Bing, I apologize for my mistake. The Kallax packaging dimensions are not clearly stated on the IKEA website. However, based on some online reviews and forums, it seems the package size is about 60 inches long, 16 inches wide and six inches thick. The weight of the package is about 70 pounds. I hope this helps you plan your transportation better.

Well, I’m gonna say, “So, can it fit in the back of my 2002 Jetta?” Okay.

It might be possible to fit the package in the back of your 2002 Jetta if you fold down the rear seats and slide it in diagonally. However, it might be a tight fit and you should measure the space more carefully before attempting it. Alternatively, you could use a roof rack or trailer to transport the package more safely and easily.

Based off of me reading that back to you and that being your first presumably AI-chatbot experience. Is that underwhelming? Is that overwhelming? Is that whelming?

Mull: Honestly, it did work a little bit better than I expected for that kind of query.

Warzel: But I also didn’t feel like I was living in the future, right? Like I was kind of just like, Okay, cool.

Mull: Right. But I didn’t expect it to quite so efficiently respond to the query. Honestly. Just straight up.

Warzel: Yeah. So you know, points for Bing.

Mull: Yeah, it’s strange, after hearing so much hype about AI and about the promise of AI search and about how this could change the internet and change our experience with the internet, to finally go through the process of using it and end up like, Oh, that was okay.

Warzel: Yeah.

Mull: Can you tell me in basic, straightforward terms, what it is that these services are doing?

Warzel: So it’s kind of a couple of things that are happening at once that give it this feeling of the smart robot who’s returning your every query. You have the GPT-3, GPT-4, whatever style text model, which is completing based off of all of this information it’s absorbed, completing what’s coming next. Then layered on top of that, you have all that Bing can do or that Google can do with its chatbot in search in general, and it’s kind of mashing those two together. So when we say “Can I fit this IKEA bookshelf into my Jetta?” it’s just doing kind of raw Google searches.

Mull: Yeah.

Warzel: And instead of even giving you links, we’re just going to give you the definitive answer. And that to me feels a little like, Yes, this is helpful. Are we also sort of missing the bigger picture of what people are actually looking for when they’re trying to search?

Mull: Right. It seems like Microsoft and Google in their AI-search efforts are perhaps trying to provide us with God’s perfect Redditor. This is the guy who knows the answer and it’s an AI chatbot who has looked at all of Reddit and condensed it for you.

Warzel: This is honestly one of my big concerns about AI-enabled search in general, which is that we’ve been doing this since, I don’t know, like 2016. Having these really furious debates over content moderation and who gets to say what. And in the world of search, there are all these different ideas about what websites Google is going to elevate. You know, “Is it going to be third parties that Google hires to evaluate the quality of different links when it comes to financial information, medical information, news, or is it going to be engineers at Google themselves? Is Google going to be the arbiter of truth here?”

That was in an environment with search where it was still, “We’re going to give you a slew of links,” right? And then it’s choose-your-own-adventure. This is a new paradigm that essentially says, “We’re going to give you a canonical, definitive answer.” The machine is going to scroll through and it’s going to talk to you like a human being, it’s going to speak really confidently, and it’s going to give you the information to the best of its ability and as we know, these machines right now are really good at confidently lying or bullshitting.

Mull: Yeah. It seems like this has enormous capacity to sort of obscure what is happening in a way that seems not helpful. What do you mean by B.S.? Can you give us an example?

Warzel: There are so many examples of people typing stuff in. “Write me a book report about Animal Farm,” [or] some book, and it will come back with very confidently stated false facts. Someone described it as—and I really like it—“spicy autocomplete.” Which is just that these models have scanned billions and billions of pieces of information from books to commentary to literally everything and it’s just predicting, based off of that, what should come next. And so it’s not necessarily trained to give you these canonical definitive answers. The confidence and the sophistication with which it gives you an answer leads you to believe that the machine’s telling you the truth when it’s stating something that’s false.

Mull: We’re going to take a short break and we’ll be right back.

Mull: Are there any good examples that we’ve seen so far in the extremely early days of these tools that demonstrate what some of the potential pitfalls are?

Warzel: A good early example is that in Google’s demo of its own search chatbot tool, it apparently, in one of its promos, surfaced something about the James Webb Space Telescope that was incorrect.

And Google’s stock price slid by like 8 percent on that day. But then online there was this whole series of people—like astrophysicists—who were debating, “Actually like technically … maybe the Google answer was right.”

And so you kind of got this preview almost of what the future of all this is going to be, which is that, you have the machine confidently stating something and then all these different people arguing about whether or not this was true or false and meanwhile, everyone’s gaining and losing fortunes in the stock market based off of it. It was a very kind of dystopian preview.

Mull: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that when it comes to shopping, recommendations, confident recommendations, [are] a big existential problem in online commerce. Because we have this vast array of options on the internet and they are too many and too confusing for people to make meaningful sense of them and feel confident in purchasing things, often. So the tone of AI and the confidence with which it says things gives it an opportunity to be especially manipulative in a lot of ways, but with commerce in particular, because often what people go to Google for when they’re trying to figure out if they should buy something is to hear someone confidently tell you, “This will work for you.” It seems like this can be exploited by all the same forces making your Google results now absolutely unusable in a lot of ways.

Warzel: Yeah, I mean, to me what’s really tough to wrap my head around is that the whole promise of these large language models that generative AIs are built off of is that it has read the internet and it has read every great book and it has read every … it’s trained off of more information than you could ever even imagine cramming into a million people’s brains.

And if you start monetizing this, what you’re doing then is you’re, in essence, retraining this thing that is supposedly transformative to say, “Yes, we know that like you are the modern Library of Alexandria. But we would really love it if you put this canine chew toy at the top of the stack,” right?

There’s something that’s so corrupt about that premise that you have the totality of the world’s information at your disposal. And this product is actually the thing that you need to show above everything else because somebody paid for it.

And it’s also, to me we’re adding a whole other level of opacity to this. These models are really hard to understand. And then it’s gonna be very difficult to unravel where the money is coming from, and Google right now, it’s just like, “Hey, this thing this box is green around it and it says paid or it says ad.”

You just, even if you click on it, you kind of know, Oh yeah, that’s how the game works. This could be totally different and sort of insidious and maybe not nefarious, but it’s like the virus of capitalism, infecting the host of the AI or something like that, you know?

Mull: Right, right. When some fundamental structure of the internet—and how regular people use the internet—changes, there’s always so many unintended and unpredictable consequences. Even people who are not particularly interested in tech can look at social media and go, Yeah, the advent of these platforms fundamentally changed the way that a lot of people interact with their friends, interact with politics, interact with information.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which this doesn’t have just sort of all kinds of messy, unintended consequences that we probably can’t predict right now. The signal that I think these companies are picking up on is that in order to solve problems, people generally want to interact with other people. You want to be able to walk into a store and ask a question of a salesperson. You want to be able to get someone on the phone to fix a problem for you. You want to ask a knowledgeable individual about something you’re unsure of and benefit from their expertise. It seems like they’re just fundamentally misdiagnosing the actual solutions that people want, which is to have more of their life mediated by interactions with other people than interactions with layers of technology.

Warzel: This is, I mean really and truly always what you butt up against with people who are pushing technological change forward. It is seen as a challenge, right? To create an artificial general intelligence.

That has been the stuff of computer-science dreams for decades and decades and it’s sort of this quest to do this thing that feels almost unthinkable, right? And then of course it’s like, Oh well we need to commercialize it, and then you get into this kind of territory.

Mull: Yeah.

Warzel: One of the true fears that a lot of people have, that I think is very well-founded if we are actually entering a new epoch or whatever you wanna call it of life dominated by artificial intelligences, is that there’s going to be this stratification, this class stratification, where it’s like, “Congratulations, you will be able to see an AI doctor anywhere, as soon as you want and it’s going to do like a fairly reasonably good job of diagnosing you with whatever,” right? It’s going to be a really competent thing.

Meanwhile, the people who have the means and the power and the money, they’re going to have the in-person doctor experience, right? They’re going to actually have the person lay hands on them and look at them and talk to them and ask them those questions and use that expertise and have the bedside manner and all those things. Whereas the rest of us are going to get …

Mull: Doc bot.

Warzel: Doc bot. Exactly, and so I think that that’s a very real thing that goes just beyond even the experience of online consumption to buy products or to get information. It goes to like the very heart of very important services, right?

I would love to not trust my taxes to an AI accountant no matter how good it gets. Or have an AI financial adviser who is responding faster than any other human could to algorithmic triggers in the stock market to buy, sell, and trade. But also, a great thing about a financial adviser who’s not responding instantaneously to algorithmic shocks is they have … they have the ability to be patient, to wait, to use their creativity or their knowledge, all these things. I think that’s the scariest part about the era, is that it does take so much humanity out of what we’re headed toward.

And the human interaction becomes even more and more of a luxury. The fanciest technology billionaires don’t let their kids have screen time because they’re terrified of what the screens are doing to them. That kind of thing repeats, and with the AI it’s weird and possibly quite consequential.

Mull: Yeah, nobody should be going to an AI doctor that’s not widely used by billionaires themselves. I’ll let the VCs go first.

Charlie, thank you so much. This was fascinating and unsettling. I appreciate you walking me through all this.

Warzel: “Fascinating and unsettling” is my wheelhouse. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Mull: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez, Theo Balcomb, and Kevin Townsend. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic. Thanks for listening.

Radio Atlantic: This Is Not Your Parents’ Cold War

2023-02-17T17:07:50-05:00

During the Cold War, NATO had nightmares of hundreds of thousands of Moscow’s troops pouring across international borders and igniting a major ground war with a democracy in Europe. Western governments feared that such a move by the Kremlin would lead to escalation—first to a world war and perhaps even to a nuclear conflict.

That was then; this is now.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is nearly a year old, and the Ukrainians are holding on. The Russians, so far, not only have been pushed back, but are taking immense casualties and material losses. For many Americans, the war is now just another conflict in the news. Do we need to worry about the nuclear threat of Putin’s war in Europe the way we worried about such things three decades ago?

Our staff writer Tom Nichols, an expert on nuclear weapons and the Cold War, counsels Americans not to be obsessed with nuclear escalation, but to be aware of the possibilities for accidents and miscalculations. You can hear his thoughts here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Tom Nichols: It’s been a year since the Russians invaded Ukraine and launched the biggest conventional war in Europe since the Nazis. One of the things that I think we’ve all worried about in that time is the underlying problem of nuclear weapons.

This is a nuclear-armed power at war with hundreds of thousands of people in the middle of Europe. This is the nightmare that American foreign policy has dreaded since the beginning of the nuclear age.

And I think people have kind of put it out of their mind, how potentially dangerous this conflict is, which is understandable, but also, I think, takes us away from thinking about something that is really the most important foreign problem in the world today.

During the Cold War, we would’ve thought about that every day, but these days, people just don’t think about it, and I think they should.

My name is Tom Nichols. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. And I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. For 25 years, I was a professor of national-security affairs at Naval War College.

For this episode of Radio Atlantic, I want to talk about nuclear weapons and what I think we should have learned from the history of the Cold War about how to think about this conflict today.

I was aware of nuclear weapons at a pretty young age because my hometown, Chicopee, Massachusetts, was home to a giant nuclear-bomber base, Strategic Air Command’s East Coast headquarters, which had the big B-52s that would fly missions with nuclear weapons directly to the Soviet Union.

I had a classic childhood of air-raid sirens, and hiding in the basement, and going under the desks, and doing all of that stuff. My high-school biology teacher had a grim sense of humor and told us, you know, because of the Air Force base, we were slated for instant destruction. He said, Yeah, if anything ever happens, we’re gone. We’re gone in seven or eight minutes. So I guess the idea of nuclear war and nuclear weapons was a little more present in my life at an earlier age than for a lot of other kids.

It’s been a long time since anyone’s really had to worry about global nuclear war. It’s been over 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I think people who lived through the Cold War were more than happy to forget about it. I know I am glad to have it far in the past. And I think younger people who didn’t experience it have a hard time understanding what it was all aboutand what that fear was about—because it’s part of ancient history now.

But I think people really need to understand that Cold War history to understand what’s going on today, and how decision makers in Washington and in Europe, and even in Moscow, are playing out this war—because many of these weapons are still right where we left them.

We have fewer of them, but we still have thousands of these weapons, many of them on a very short trigger. We could go from the beginning of this podcast to the end of the world, that short of [a] time. And it’s easy to forget that. During the Cold War, we were constantly aware of it, because it was the central influence on our foreign policy. But it’s important for us to look back at the history of the Cold War because we survived a long and very tense struggle with a nuclear-armed opponent. Now, some of that was through good and sensible policy. And some of it was just through dumb luck.

Of course, the first big crisis that Americans really faced where they had to think about the existential threat of nuclear weapons was the Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962.

I was barely 2 years old. But living next to this big, plump nuclear target in Massachusetts, we actually knew people in my hometown who built fallout shelters. But we got through the Cuban missile crisis, in part because President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev realized what was at stake.

The gamble to put missiles in Cuba had failed, and that we had to—as Khruschev put it in one of his messages—we had to stop pulling on the ends of the rope and tightening the knot of war. But we also got incredibly lucky.

There was a moment aboard a Soviet submarine where the sub commander thought they were under attack. And he wanted to use nuclear-tipped torpedoes to take out the American fleet, which would’ve triggered a holocaust.

I mean, it would’ve been an incredible amount of devastation on the world. Tens, hundreds of millions of people dead. And, um, fortunately a senior commander who had to consent to the captain’s idea vetoed the whole thing. He said, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I don’t think they’re trying to sink us, and I do not consent. And so by this one lucky break with this one Soviet officer, we averted the end of the world. I mean, we averted utter catastrophe.

After the Cuban missile crisis, people are now even more aware of this existential threat of nuclear weapons and it starts cropping up everywhere, especially in our pop culture. I mean, they were always there in the ’50s; there were movies about the communist threat and attacks on America. But after the Cuban missile crisis, that’s when you start getting movies like Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe.

Both were about an accidental nuclear war, which becomes a theme for most of the Cold War. In Dr. Strangelove, an American general goes nuts and orders an attack on Russia. And in Fail Safe, a piece of machinery goes bad and the same thing happens. And I think this reflected this fear that we now had to live with, this constant threat of something that we and the Soviets didn’t even want to do, but could happen anyway.

Even the James Bond movies, which were supposed to be kind of campy and fun, nuclear weapons were really often the source of danger in them. You know, bad guys were stealing them; people were trying to track our nuclear submarines. Throughout the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s nuclear weapons really become just kind of soaked into our popular culture.

We all know the Cuban missile crisis because it’s just part of our common knowledge about the world, even for people that didn’t live through it. I think we don’t realize how dangerous other times were. I always think of 1983 as the year we almost didn’t make it.

1983 was an incredibly tense year. President Ronald Reagan began the year calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” And announced that the United States would start pouring billions of dollars into an effort to defend against Soviet missiles, including space-based defenses, which the Soviets found incredibly threatening.

The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union had just completely broken down. Really, by the fall of 1983, it felt like war was inevitable. It certainly felt like to me war was inevitable. There was kind of that smell of gunpowder in the air. We were all pretty scared. I was pretty scared. I was a graduate student at that point. I was 23 years old, and I was certain that this war, this cataclysmic war, was going to happen not only in my lifetime, but probably before I was 30 years old.

And then a lot of things happened in 1983 that elevated the level of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union to extraordinary levels. I would say really dangerous levels. The Soviets did their best to prove they were an evil empire by shooting down a fully loaded civilian airliner, killing 269 people. Just weeks after the shoot-down of the Korean airliner, Soviet Air Defenses got an erroneous report of an American missile launch against them. And this is another one of those cases where we were just lucky. We were just fortunate.

And in this case, it was a Soviet Air Defense officer, a lieutenant colonel, who saw this warning that the Americans had launched five missiles. And he said, You know, nobody starts World War III with five missiles. That seems wrong.

And he said, I just, I think the system—which still had some bugs—I just don’t think the system’s right. We’re gonna wait that out. We’re gonna ignore that. He was actually later reprimanded.

It was almost like he was reprimanded and congratulated at the same time, because if he had called Moscow and said, Look, I’m doing my duty. I’m reporting Soviet Air Defenses have seen American birds are in the air. They’re coming at us and over to you, Kremlin. And from there, a lot of bad decisions could have cascaded into World War III, especially after a year where we had been in such amazingly high conflict with each other.

Once again, just as after the Cuban missile crisis, the increase in tension in the 1980s really comes through in the popular culture. Music, movies, TV puts this sense of threat into the minds of ordinary Americans in a way that we just don’t have now. So people are going to the movies and they’re seeing movies like WarGames, once again about an accidental nuclear war. They’re seeing movies like Red Dawn, about a very intentional war by the Soviet Union against the United States.

The Soviets thought that Red Dawn was actually part of Reagan’s attempt to use Hollywood to prepare Americans for World War III. In music, Ronald Reagan as a character made appearances in videos by Genesis or by Men at Work. That November, the biggest television event in history was The Day After, which was a cinematic representation of World War III.

I mean, it was everywhere. By 1983, ’84, we were soaked in this fear of World War III. Nuclear war and Armageddon, no matter where you looked. I remember in the fall of 1983 going to see the new James Bond movie, one of the last Roger Moore movies, called Octopussy. And the whole plot amazed me because, of course, I was studying this stuff at the time, I was studying NATO and nuclear weapons.

And here’s this opening scene where a mad Soviet general says, If only we can convince the West to give up its nuclear weapons, we can finally invade and take over the world.

I saw all of these films as either a college student or a young graduate student, and again, it was just kind of woven into my life. Well, of course, this movie is about nuclear war. Of course, this movie is about a Soviet invasion. Of course, this movie is about, you know, the end of the world, because it was always there. It was always in the background. But after the end of the Cold War, that remarkable amount of pop-culture knowledge and just general cultural awareness sort of fades away.

I think one reason that people today don’t look back at the Cold War with the same sense of threat is that it all ended so quickly. We went from [these] terrifying year[s] of 1983, 1984. And then suddenly Gorbachev comes in; Reagan reaches out to him; Gorbachev reaches back. They jointly agree in 1985—they issue a statement that to this day, is still considered official policy by the Russian Federation and by the United States of America. They jointly declare a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.

And all of a sudden, by the summer of 1985, 1986, it’s just over, and, like, 40 years of tension just came to an end in the space of 20, 24 months. Something I just didn’t think I would see in my lifetime. And I think that’s really created a false sense of security in later generations.

After the Cold War, in the ’90s we have a Russia that’s basically friendly to the United States but nuclear weapons are still a danger. For example, in 1995, Norway launched a scientific satellite on top of a missile—I think they were gonna study the northern lights—and the scientists gave everybody notice, you know, We’re gonna be launching this satellite. You’re gonna see a missile launch from Norway.

Somebody in Russia just didn’t get the message, and the Russian defense people came to President Boris Yeltsin and they said, This might be a NATO attack. And they gave him the option to activate and launch Russian nuclear weapons. Yeltsin conferred with his people, and fortunately—because our relations were good, and because Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton had a good relationship, and because tensions were low in the world—Yeltsin says, Yeah, okay. I don’t buy that. I’m sure it’s nothing.

But imagine again, if that had been somebody else.

And that brings us to today. The first thing to understand is: We are in a better place than we were during the Cold War in many ways. During the Cold War, we had tens of thousands of weapons pointed at each other. Now by treaty, the United States and the Russian Federation each have about 1,500 nuclear weapons deployed and ready to go. Now, that’s a lot of nuclear weapons, but 1,500 is a lot better than 30,000 or 40,000.

Nonetheless, we are dealing with a much more dangerous Russian regime with this mafia state led by Vladimir Putin.

Putin is a mafia boss. There is no one to stop him from doing whatever he wants. And he has really convinced himself that he is some kind of great world historical figure who is going to reestablish this Christian Slavic empire throughout the former Soviet Union and remnants of the old Russian empire. And that makes him uniquely dangerous.

People might wonder why Putin is even bothering with nuclear threats, because we’ve always thought of Russia as this giant conventional power because that’s the legacy of the Cold War. We were outnumbered. NATO at the time was only 16 countries. We were totally outnumbered by the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact in everything—men, tanks, artillery—and of course, the only way we could have repulsed an attack by the Soviet Union into Europe would’ve been to use nuclear weapons.

I know earlier I mentioned the movie Octopussy. We’ve come a long way from the days when that mad Russian general could say, If only we got rid of nuclear weapons and NATO’s nuclear weapons, we could roll our tanks from Czechoslovakia to Poland through Germany and on into France.

What people need to understand is that Russia is now the weaker conventional power. The Russians are now the ones saying, Listen, if things go really badly for us and we’re losing, we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons. The difference between Russia now and NATO then is: NATO was threatening these nuclear weapons if they were invaded and they were being just rolled over by Soviet tanks on their way to the English Channel. The Russians today are saying, We started this war, and if it goes badly for us, we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons to get ourselves out of a jam.

This conventional weakness is actually what makes them more dangerous, because they’re now continually being humiliated in the field. And a country that had gotten by by convincing people that they were a great conventional power, that they had a lot of conventional capability, they’re being revealed now as a hollow power. They can’t even defeat a country a third of their own size.

And so when they’re running out of options, you can understand at that point where Putin says, Well, the only way to scramble the deck and to get a do-over here is to use some small nuclear weapon in that area to kind of sober everybody up and shock them into coming to the table or giving me what I want.

Now, I think that would be incredibly stupid. And I think a lot of people around the world, including China and other countries, have told Putin that would be a really bad idea. But I think one thing we’ve learned from this war is that Putin is a really lousy strategist who takes dumb chances because he’s just not very competent.

And that comes back to the Cold War lesson—that you don’t worry about someone starting World War III as much as you worry about bumbling into World War III because of a bunch of really dumb decisions by people who thought they were doing something smart and didn’t understand that they were actually doing something really dangerous.

So where does this leave us? This major war is raging through the middle of Europe, the scenario that we always dreaded during the Cold War; thousands and thousands of Moscow’s troops flooding across borders. What’s the right way to think about this? Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that this really is a war to defend democracy against an aggressive, authoritarian imperial state.

The front line of the fight for civilization, really, is in Ukraine now. If Ukraine loses this war, the world will be a very different place. That’s what makes it imperative that Americans think about this problem. I think it’s imperative to support Ukraine in this fight, but we should do that with a prudent understanding of real risks that haven’t gone away.

And so I think the Cold War provides some really good guidance here, which is to be engaged, to be aware, but not to be panicked. Not to become consumed by this fear every day, because that becomes paralyzing, that becomes debilitating. It’s bad for you as a person. And it’s bad for democracies’ ability to make decisions—because then you simply don’t make any decisions at all, out of fear.

I think it’s important not to fall victim to Cold War amnesia and forget everything we learned. But I also don’t think we should become consumed by a new Cold War paranoia where we live every day thinking that we’re on the edge of Armageddon.

Our Strange New Era of Space Travel

2022-12-29T11:00:00-05:00

In December of 1972, the astronaut Eugene Cernan left his footprints and daughter’s initials in the lunar dust. In doing so, he became the last man to set foot on the moon. Now, after 50 years, humanity is going back. But in the half century since Apollo 17, a lot has changed in how we explore space—and how we see our place in it.

While those early missions were all run by governments, much of modern spaceflight is the domain of billionaires and their private companies. Commercial space travel has brought a new way of thinking about trips outside Earth’s gravity, with tourism turning space into a vacation and something of a status symbol. It’s also widened the range of people who go to space from the clean-cut white male astronauts of the Apollo era.

New visitors bring new perspectives to space, and that diversity could well change our relationship to it. A year ago, at 90 years old, the actor William Shatner rode one of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spacecraft. But as he told staff writer Marina Koren, his time in space didn’t line up with the optimism of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk.

Koren and fellow staff writer Adam Harris discuss our changing relationship with space on an episode of the podcast Radio Atlantic. They also listen to some of Koren’s interview with Shatner. You can hear their conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris.

Marina Koren: And I’m Marina Koren.

Harris: This week on the show, we’re talking about space. We just heard some of our colleagues’ kids talking about space. As a parent myself, it feels like the images of space are inescapable. One of the first T-shirts I remember buying for my daughter was a NASA T-shirt. We have blankets in our house that have moons and rocket ships on them. Is that your recollection of childhood?

Koren: Definitely. I had those glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. Occasionally one would fall off and spook me, but I recently got a set for my 3-year old nephew. This is a go-to source of wonder and excitement for kids, for sure.

Harris: And I should say that we are both staff writers, but you are the one on the space beat.

Koren: Yes, I am The Atlantic’s outer space bureau chief.

Harris: (Laughs.) And it’s been a big year to be a space reporter, right?

Koren: It has, yeah! We are definitely in this strange new era of exploration. It’s been 50 years since the last time human beings have set foot on the moon. 1972 was Apollo 17, the final moon landing.

I think the universe is a lot more familiar to us now, because we’ve come such a long way. But something that’s really different now is that you have commercial companies that are doing the work that was traditionally done by governments. There’s SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s venture.

And even 10 years ago, if you told someone that SpaceX will be launching people to the International Space Station, they might have laughed at you. It seemed ridiculous, but this is the reality now.

It feels like we’re in this strange sci-fi future where space travel is something you can buy. It’s a type of vacation. And it’s become a status symbol in a way.

But now people can go to space and come back and tell everyone: “Well, I’ve been to space. I’ve done something that only about 600 or so people have done in the history of humankind.”

Harris: Before private space travel, [when you think of people going to space,] you think of folks like John Glenn or Buzz Aldrin. It’s someone with military training who has studied to be an astronaut like their entire life. What does it mean that that’s no longer the only type of person that’s going into space?

Koren: I think that spaceflight is about to get really, really interesting because the stories that we’ve heard from spacefarers have come from a specific group of people. These were, more often than not, white men with military backgrounds, trained in a certain workplace culture that values “the Right Stuff.” It values being stoic and unafraid in the face of something dangerous.

But in this new era of commercial spaceflight, you’re gonna be seeing a wide range of participants. There will hopefully be more women, more people of color, people from underrepresented groups, from different educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, and people with just a wide range of experiences.

Harris: And what are the stories that we’ve already heard about the experiences in space, right? These professional astronauts, when they come back, what do they say space was like?

Koren: Yeah, there are a few common themes. So people, when these astronauts have gone to space and they’ve seen Earth from that perspective, they have been overcome with emotion at the beauty of Earth. And it suddenly becomes very clear just how thin our atmosphere is. And that is the only thing that really protects our planet from everything else. They’re struck by the fragility of the planet.

And then something else also happens to a lot of astronauts when they go to space—they suddenly feel a sense of connectedness with their fellow human beings down below. Because from space, you can’t see any national borders. It’s just continents and seas and clouds. And so, many astronauts have come home and described these feelings. And the stories are indicative of a cognitive shift, almost, that is known as “the overview effect.”

And I’ve talked to astronauts who say that they were taken aback by the borderless world and how beautiful it is, how it made them feel like: Why are we at war? Why is there conflict? We’re one planet. It made them feel whole.

I’ve also talked to one academic who did an extensive study of astronauts—and she couldn’t reveal this astronaut’s name to me—but she said that this person, when he went into space, he took one look out the window and was convinced that humanity was going to destroy itself in some hundred-number of years. And so that experience could be profound and inspiring to one person, but it could also actually make another feel despair.

And what’s happening now with space tourism and private spaceflight is that the people going into space now have heard these stories of the overview effect. It’s a thing. And so they’re expecting to feel a certain way when they go to space. They’re expecting to have a profound change on their perspective of the world, and even maybe on their personalities. And so I wonder if we’re kind of over-hyping that. And I have talked to a few professional NASA astronauts who agree. They worry that these spaceflight companies and their sales pitches to customers are overselling the effects of the overview effect. It’s not a guarantee. It’s not a gift from the universe. It’s something that a person experiences and feels individually. And your mileage will vary.

Harris: Yeah. And you said these flights are like a couple of minutes. Is that enough time to change you?

Koren: That is a great question. So I talked to Frank White, the author who coined the term “the overview effect.” He came up with it when he was flying on a plane—so, not in space, but he had a pretty good view—and he got to thinking: Future generations of humans who might be living and working in space would have this distant view of Earth all the time. And they would have these insights that regular earthbound people lack.

And he was surprised that people who were flying on Blue Origin and having a few minutes of weightlessness were coming home and talking as if they had had this profound experience. They were saying it changed them. And he was surprised because he thought that in order to really get the full hit of the overview effect, you had to spend some time in space. Weeks to months in orbit around Earth, or even all the way out on the moon.

So, that’s kind of the literature that we’re working with here. And I think that’s what’s going to change in this era of commercial spaceflight, because you are going to have people who are not like the Apollo astronauts. And they’re going to be coming home with different stories and really widening the overview effect that we’ve become familiar with as a public.

And the future participants won’t be restricted by some of the constraints that the professional astronauts were. If you were a professional astronaut and you went to space and you didn’t have a great time, I don’t think you could say that once you came back from space, because that could potentially affect your future flight assignments. You had to have a certain response on your way home. And so I think we’re about to hear some of the most honest stories of spaceflight that we’ve ever heard before.

Harris: Is the overview effect real? If we only have this limited pool of stories to pull from, is that theory a real thing? Have all of the folks who have gone up to space shared that view?

Koren: That’s a great question. And I think the way we talk about the overview effect, it becomes like this mystical, magical thing. Astronauts are revered people. Even when I’ve interviewed astronauts, when they walk into the room in their full flight suits with all their mission patches on the fabric, you can’t help but feel intimidated. Because you think: Wow, this person has seen something that I’ve never seen.

And so we think of the overview effect and the experience that people should have in space as something that the universe gives us. But it’s actually a cultural phenomenon. It has been shaped by a certain group of people working under a certain set of pressures who wanted to make sure that they could fly again.

So they couldn’t say anything outrageous. And the overview effect also came out of a certain time and place. Many of these stories come from the midst of the space race, in the middle of the Cold War. That definitely shapes a person’s perspective. So I would say that seeing Earth from space is not a one-size-fits-all reaction.

Harris: What are some of the interviews that stuck out because they may have differed from this idea of an overview effect?

Koren: So I spoke with William Shatner about his space flight. He was 90 years old when he took that trip. I recorded some of my conversation with Shatner. And he said it was a really transformational experience, but not for the reasons that we’re used to hearing.

Harris: So you got to talk to Captain Kirk?

Koren: I did, yes! I will admit: I have never seen Star Trek before.

Harris: So we have a space reporter who’s never seen Star Trek?

Koren: (Laughs.) I haven’t. But you’ve seen it, right?

Harris: I have seen Star Trek. It was playing pretty frequently on our TVs when I was a kid. My dad rarely missed episodes or reruns. [But] for people like Marina who don’t know who Captain Kirk is: He’s the captain of the starship Enterprise on Star Trek in the 1960s. The original captain. And he was this really optimistic figure—this really sort of classical hero. [But] what did Shatner have to say about going to space? Actually being there?

Koren: When I talked to him, it was about a year after his experience, and the flight was still really fresh in his mind. I asked him how he was feeling a year out, and he dove right into a Shatner-esque monologue about going to space.

William Shatner: We had emerged from the film of air that surrounds the Earth, and we’re weightless. I got out of my five-point harness and made my way to the window. I saw a wake of air. Like a submarine might leave in the water.

And then I looked to my right, which was facing space. When I looked up there, I saw nothing but blank, palpable space. The blackness was so overwhelming. My immediate thought was: My God, that’s death.

And then I looked back, and I could see with great clarity the beginning of the circumference line of the Earth. The color of the desert that I had just left, which was beige. The whiteness of the clouds. The blueness of the air. And those three colors in deference to the blackness—I was overwhelmed by the sense of death and overwhelmed by the sense of nurturing by the Earth.

Koren: When Shatner came back from his quick trip to space, he’s standing outside the capsule; there’s other people around him. Jeff Bezos is there. Bezos is popping champagne like a frat boy. And Shatner is just standing there, super still.

Shatner: I didn’t know what I was feeling, but I was weeping, and I didn’t know why. Everybody else was celebrating. It took me a couple of hours sitting by myself to understand that what I was feeling was grief. And the grief was for the Earth.

Koren: He is overcome with emotion. He is weeping, and then he starts saying how he was just taken aback by the blackness of space, the ugliness of space, how it looked like death.

So Shatner was super, super honest about his experience. And when I talked to him, he said that that grief was still with him. Earth was beautiful and gleaming and delicate from that perspective, but it just reminded him of everything that’s wrong on the ground and particularly made him think about how unstoppable climate change feels.

And so for him, this was in many ways a negative experience. And Shatner was starting to cry when we were talking about it, because the experience is so fresh in his mind and nothing about climate change and the prognosis there has really changed in the last year since he went to space. So that grief was still with him.

Harris: How was his experience different from what he may have imagined that he would feel after going up to space?

Koren: He told me that he expected to see Earth and just be reminded of how beautiful and wonderful this planet is. I think he expected it to be reaffirming in a positive way. And it’s interesting to think of this man who played a character who was this really big space optimist in real life going to space, and his initial emotional reaction to that is grief and sadness and all kinds of negative emotion.

I think what Shatner shares with other astronauts is: When people have gone to space, they have felt an overwhelming desire to take care of the planet. You really see that this is all there is. This is all we know, at least. And if this is our one home on this floating ball of rock in the void, then we should take care of it.

And so, you know, there’s a case to be made that the more people go up into space, that feeling will trickle down and lead to some type of meaningful improvement on Earth.

Harris: If somebody gives you a ticket on a $20 million flight, you’re not gonna be able to say, “Well, that wasn’t exactly what I expected it to be.” But Shatner was able to do something different. Why was his experience different from others who have been up to space and came back down and just said, “Oh, it was great. Thanks, Jeff Bezos, for putting me on this flight”?

Koren: I mean, William Shatner is William Shatner, right? He was 90 years old during his space flight. He’s Captain Kirk. I think he doesn’t owe Jeff Bezos anything. Yes, Bezos comped his ticket, and that’s lovely. But someone like William Shatner going into space can come back and say what they want, because the public looks at them in a different way. If a very wealthy person decides to comp the tickets for an electrician [or] for a nurse, and they go up and come down, can they speak their minds very freely? I don’t know.

Harris: Say a billionaire called you up and was like: “Hey, Marina, love your stories. You wanna go to space?” Would you go if you got the opportunity?

Koren: Oh man, well, there would be some conversation about journalistic ethics. But would I ever go to space? I’m gonna say no.

Harris: Really?

Koren: Because spaceflight is risky. You never know what might happen, what could happen. I don’t wanna die on the job not having filed my story. Like, if something happens—if I’m somehow incapacitated, I come back and I can’t write the story—that will haunt me. (Laughs.)

Planes freak me out. I still can’t believe that we can get planes off the ground and land them back in one piece. And, you know, space is not at that level yet, but maybe someday it will be. And that’s pretty wild to think about.

Harris: Actually, to that point, thousands of people fly at high altitudes every day. Do you think that there’s a future where spaceflight is going to feel as sort of commonplace as taking a flight to LaGuardia?

Koren: I think that future is possible. I think what we have to be careful about is making too many promises. If you listen to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos talk about spaceflight right now, they’re suggesting that this future is happening, like, next week. And I don’t think that future will happen that quickly. It’s true that more people than before are going to have the opportunity to go to space now. I’m not sure if in my lifetime there are going to be spaceships full of people going to the moon.

I mean, there might be. SpaceX and Elon Musk are working really, really hard to make that future reality. SpaceX’s next-generation moon rocket could reach orbit as early as next year. SpaceX has already sold tickets to people to go on a trip around the moon. These things are happening. How quickly they become reality, I don’t know. Maybe 50 years from now when we’re a hundred years out from the Apollo-program anniversary, maybe it will feel a bit more mundane, just like a plane ride.

Harris: Is some of the mystique fading from space, or space travel? Are we sort of becoming desensitized to space travel? Those first couple of commercial flights, it was all 24-hour news cycle. They broadcast all of them. But that sort of slowed down. Are we sort of becoming desensitized to the awe and wonder of space travel?

Koren: I think that’s possible. I think of the Earthrise picture taken by the Apollo 8 crew in 1968. That picture was mind-blowing to people. They’d never seen Earth like this before. Fifty years later, I think our brains are so spoiled by special effects that I do wonder if the sight of Earth from space is going to be that shocking. Especially when you have so many people going into orbit and coming back and posting on Instagram like: “Here’s what it looks like.” I do wonder if we’ve seen so much incredible CGI, if our modern brains might be less impressed by the view than maybe people were in the 1960s. But I also don’t know if that’s just some dumb Millennial take.

Harris: It’s like if somebody goes up, and they’re like: “This isn’t what Interstellar looked like.”

Koren: (Laughs.) “Where’s the wormhole?”

Harris: “I was expecting a wormhole.” And all they see is, as Shatner said, this great blackness of space.

The Republican Party Is in a Strange Place

2022-12-15T14:00:24-05:00

The GOP is in a strange place. After falling short of expectations in the midterms, some Republicans blame Donald Trump, and some want to anoint a challenger for 2024. But with Trump already announced and a GOP-controlled House set to spend two years investigating Joe Biden, is the party at all likely to move on from Trump?

The Atlantic staff writers Mark Leibovich and Elaina Plott consider that question, as well as the ascent of Marjorie Taylor Greene as Congress prepares for its 2023 session, on this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Mark Leibovich: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Mark Leibovich, staff writer for The Atlantic. I’m joined today by my colleague, Elaina Plott Calabro, who is also a staff writer who covers politics. Elaina, hi!

Elaina Plott Calabro: Hi!

Leibovich: The Republican Party is in a strange place. The 2022-midterm losses stunned the GOP and created calls for a 2024 challenger to Donald Trump.

But can the party move past the man who dominated it for six years? Now we’re actually going on seven years, almost eight years, right? It just keeps going and going. So, hi, Elaina—tell us everything.

Plott: Yeah. As I sit here, I am reflecting on the most recent midterm elections, and I would say that, for me, the biggest takeaway and what I’d love to hear your thoughts on is: When we were counting down to see if somebody like Kari Lake in Arizona, also someone like Blake Masters in Arizona, would end up pulling it out for the Republicans, what that would say about the party. Masters and Lake, of course, were huge proponents of the stolen-election theory.

But it didn’t work in the end. And I think the kind of immediate takeaway, at least that I was seeing among centrist-minded people but also people on the right who are vaguely anti-Trump, was that this was a lesson that the party is very ready to move on from Donald Trump.

Had somebody like Kari Lake won, maybe the message would’ve been the inverse. But I was a little reluctant to embrace that take for the reason that even if candidates who were all in on the stolen-election theory ultimately lost their general election, they still won the primaries—in many cases, quite handily.

I did not see the midterms, then, as a rebuke, necessarily, of Donald Trump’s Republican party—just as a message that independent-minded voters and centrist voters and soft Republicans, so to speak, are over Donald Trump, are very much over Donald Trump. But when it comes to a primary, I don’t know that anything has changed post-November. But I’d love to know your thoughts.

Leibovich: I could not agree with you more. I mean, I’m quite amused, as I suspect you are too, by the “Republicans are ready to move on from Donald Trump” notion that people like John Cornyn, John Thune, Mitch McConnell, any number of political operatives [of the opinion that:] “Oh my gosh, what do we do now people, because we’ve so underachieved in these midterms, let’s scapegoat Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair.” Democrats were supposed to lose seats. They actually wound up gaining a seat. The House of Representatives was a major underachievement. What could possibly happen?

Okay. So what happens when Donald Trump goes and endorses Republican X tomorrow? I’m guessing he or she will win a decisive majority in Ohio district Y. And so, Republicans have a terrible “candidate quality” problem. I mean, Mitch McConnell used those words explicitly, referring to the fact that Herschel Walker, Blake Masters, go down the list, are not great candidates, and that will hurt Republicans.

Now, in the aftermath of the midterms, a lot of people say that “We have an RNC problem,” “We have a Ronna McDaniel problem,” “We have a Mitch McConnell problem.” What are we missing here? I think what we’re missing here and, and we can talk about this more, is who picks these candidates, right?

Plott: The problem is that Republicans don’t have a Trump problem. They have a voter problem. It was the voters who picked Kari Lake and Blake Masters. Perhaps it was independents and centrist Republicans who showed up on general-election day and did not vote for them. But when it came to the primaries, these candidates won—in many cases, pretty handily.

Just because they have lost in November doesn’t mean those voters themselves have changed. And by voters, I mean, really, the base of the Republican party, the ones who are going to show up and vote in primaries. Their preferences, what I think the midterms showed us, have not changed at all.

Leibovich: Right. And part of it is that there’s no language for this. Like, no one can get up there and say, “Hey, by the way, voters, we have a voter problem.” I mean, that’s not what any would-be leader would ever say. And unfortunately, it’s really, really hard to talk about what is in the hearts of a good number of voters. That gets you to some ugly words like racism or antisemitism—things that no one wants to be called, whether you’re a voter or a non-voter, whether you’re political or unpolitical. I mean, it’s ugly.

But Donald Trump has been pretty unshy about appealing to a lot of the impulses that are quite ugly and even now will not disavow these incredibly ugly elements that he’s eating dinner with.

Anyway, we are essentially talking about a lot of the same things, which is voters—radicalization of voters and Republican voters—which is actually a perfect segue into Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, as rendered in Elaina’s profile, is a deliciously kind of mundane, lost, suburban decadent soul. But I guess the larger question I would ask Elaina is: How is Marjorie Taylor Greene emblematic of these voters that we’re talking about?

Plott: I love that you used the word mundane to kind of describe the atmospherics of that story and how she came to power. Because I think that was what was so shocking to me, was the ease with which one in America can slide into that kind of radicalism.

Marjorie Taylor Greene was entirely apolitical, really, before she discovered Trump and QAnon in late 2016 going into 2017. So this is not someone who had these latent political thoughts churning and then Trump ignited them. She was someone who had tried to anchor her identity in various things throughout her adult life, whether it was evangelical Christianity or CrossFit, where she spent a lot of time.

As her interest in those things sort of started to taper off, it just so happened that it was right when Trump came onto the stage, and she says very explicitly in an interview at one point that Trump reminded her of “men like my dad.” And it was as though she had found the anchor she had finally been looking for for her identity.

Again, going back to just the ease with which it can tumble from a typical midlife crisis to total radicalization. She’s on Facebook one day and, based on my reporting from people who really knew her at that time, she found the #SavetheChildren hashtag. And it was as though a portal opened and she kind of stepped into the looking glass.

And for listeners who may not remember, the #SavetheChildren hashtag fed into this conspiracy theory called “Pizzagate” that there was a ring of pedophilia being run by Democrats in the basement of a DC pizza shop. And the potency of this conspiracy theory was such that there was a man from North Carolina who actually came down with a rifle, you know, bent on avenging these mythical children living in this pizza shop, and fired inside of this restaurant.

You know, it was a horrific incident, but I think for a lot of America, it was a wake-up call just in terms of how these conspiracy theories that, you know, a lot of people might talk about and just sort of wave off as silly are really taking root in, you know, certain segments of the population.

And people like Marjorie Taylor Greene did not log off. The deeper she got, the more deeply she became convinced that Democrats were sort of this soulless apparatus who were trying to, alongside people like the Rothschilds and George Soros, control the world in a nefarious way. And her purpose, as she saw it, sort of became to combat this.

So she ran for office. I take you all through that kind of long and rambling journey just to say that there was nothing really especially remarkable about it. She was a relatively normal person, a suburban housewife who had some time on her hands and had an internet connection. And here we are today.

Leibovich: I mean, wow, the utter unremarkableness, the mundanity of it, the conventionality of it makes it so spectacularly familiar.

You know, I talked to a number of fairly mainstream Republican members of Congress who are, most of them, not in Congress anymore, because Trump kind of drove them out. But they talk about their parents, especially their parents sitting down in Florida or wherever.

Plott: And some even siblings. It’s so close to everyone.

Leibovich: And they sit. They watch hours of Fox News a day, and [they say,] “Our biggest problem is all of these pedophiles running through our streets or these antifa gang members marauding through our streets—like, that’s, like, our biggest problem. And if we don’t stop this, you know, caravan over the border”—I mean, you know, sort of pick your menace of the week, right?

So, very conservative Republican Congressman X says, like, “Every week, I say, ‘Mom, just knock it off. Turn off the TV. Go outside. Take a walk. Go bowling. Do something. Like, this is not your religion. You talk about this more than you talk about anything else.” And I think when you get older, and when people get older, and this is largely still, you know, a lot of the Fox-watching population and a lot of consumers of this, you know, you become sort of fixed into the daily routine.

Your echo chambers get smaller. And again, it’s part of the completely unremarkable day-to-day radicalization that we’re talking about. And you know, now they’re becoming very, very vocally represented in Congress.

Plott: But I think what has become so different, especially since Trump came onto the stage, is that you have political leaders literally in the West Wing who are affirming these people and these beliefs, who aren’t telling them to knock it off or whatever. You know, it’s very different, even if your son is a congressman, to hear it from your son. But when you have someone in the White House saying, “No, no, no. He’s leading you astray. Keep watching it.” I think that’s a huge part of it.

And going back to Marjorie Taylor Greene, this is why I think a congresswoman like her is so dangerous. Because at this point, it almost doesn’t matter if she actually believes in it deeply anymore, any of those things, because she has made it so essential to her brand.

And what she understands is that she can kind of vaguely flirt with disavowal, as she did on the House floor in her maiden speech before she got stripped of her committee assignments. She said, you know, essentially, There were some things I believed that were not true. At no point did she say, QAnon on is full of falsehoods. It’s extremely dangerous to society. I wish I’d never fallen prey to it, and I hope anyone listening to this knows that—you know, this, it’s not the way forward. She did nothing of that sort. I mean, this is what I think people don’t appreciate about her. She is a shrewd person. She’s a shrewd politician, and she understands that her supporters who were listening to her that day, who continue to listen to her, still like QAnon, still are flirting with the edges of it, if not the very depths of it. So she’s never going to outright disavow it. And the problem with that is, and I’m going to jump briefly to pre–January 6, when I would cover Congress — you’d go on the Hill and you would ask, “What did you think about Trump’s latest tweet?” or whatever.

And they all hated that question. They hated it so much. They said, The tweets are meaningless. It means nothing. This is just trivial. I didn’t see it. I don’t get on Twitter. Nobody’s reading that stuff. And at times I could kind of empathize, you know, it would suck to be asked about this barrage of his 140-character thoughts at all times.

But the thing is, Americans were reading them. They were paying attention. And I think that all would’ve punched people in the face with the truth of that on January 6th, that there was a large cohort of people who had been listening to every single thing that Trump was saying.

And I think the same is true with Marjorie Taylor Greene. Even if she doesn’t believe the things she’s saying anymore, or the things she’s insinuating with or flirting with, the people listening to her do, and what they do with that can change the political landscape, as it did on January 6, in ways that we just can’t quite fathom.

Leibovich: No, we can’t. You know, if you do sort of look at the recent trajectory, I mean, we’re still in the Trump Age. The extremely fashionable thing to say and repeat these days is what we said before: The Republicans are ready to move on.

What would that look like? John Cornyn, John Thune, and Mitch McConnell say all that. Let’s have them start a rally in Ohio and see if they get more than a hundred people.

Plott: [Laughs]

Leibovich: Donald Trump could have a rally down the street, and I’m guessing the crowd would be substantially bigger. So now the fashion is: Oh, well, Ron DeSantis is sitting down in Florida. We’re all waiting for him. He’s the alternative. He is the anointed one.

But no, I don’t think so. I think DeSantis is very likely to be part of a long line of overhyped presidential candidates who are going to get into the race, be an 800-pound gorilla, and start dominating like Rick Perry did in 2012, or Scott Walker in 2016. I mean, go through the list of non-presidents. The only anointed Republican governor who got in, rolled to the nomination and eventually the presidency was George W. Bush.

And DeSantis, I get the same vibe here, with one exception: Donald Trump’s right there. And Donald Trump does not like Ron DeSantis for one reason and one reason only: He’s taken the spotlight away. He maybe wants to beat him.

And so, you have a situation with the two of them going at it. And then Mike Pence is waiting to run for president his whole life and defers to Ron DeSantis in Florida? No, he’ll say, “I’m going to try.” And Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger or Larry Hogan—someone who’s in the Never Trump lane—they’re going to say, “Yeah, I’m not going to be scared off by Ron DeSantis.”

So, next thing you know, there are seven candidates in Iowa. One of them is Trump. Forty percent of the Republicans in Iowa are rock solid for Trump. He wins. And off we go. DeSantis, after a few second-place finishes, decides that he’s got a big future and maybe Trump will make him his running mate. So he goes and, in the most obsequious and cringey way, starts sucking up to him again, like he’s built his entire recent political career on. He stops being the alternative. We all revert to form. And all of a sudden, it’s 2024, and here we are again.

Plott: Mhm. DeSantis is not at all positioned to go into a race where suddenly he is having to talk about all the bad things Trump has done. It’s just been antithetical to how he’s built his own brand [if you consider] the campaign commercial he did where he was teaching his child to “build the wall” with Legos or something like that. I’d love to hear more about what you think his style is and maybe what the fanfare around him is missing about him.

Leibovich: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that the fanfare is missing is that he’s not a terribly charming dude. That’s sort of overstated, but people who served with him in Congress, Republicans who served with him in Congress, Republican governors I’ve spoken to who were on various RGA-related things, Republican Governors Association-related things, do not speak well [of his personal charm].

And also, people who worked with him in Florida—his friends, or ostensibly his friends, or people who will probably support him—say that he’s got kind of a heavy lift as far as being an appealing look-you-in-the-eye kind of politician. I mean, if he tries to start a charm offensive, he would begin unarmed. This is not something you learn overnight. And I do think that Donald Trump does tend to do particularly well against people who are not terribly comfortable in their own political skin, who can’t think on their feet.

Plott: Such a good point.

Leibovich: We all remember putative frontrunner Jeb Bush and superstar Marco Rubio. Go down the list. Trump basically reduced them to puddles, just sort of bulldozed right over them. DeSantis’s biggest problem, for now, is Trump, [because] he’s basically a Trump derivative.

I just think that DeSantis is fool’s gold until proven otherwise. I mean, yes, he’s got some nice poll numbers. Donors seem really excited about him. Let’s see him plunk himself down in the middle of Iowa or Ohio or Texas or somewhere and get a crowd like one-tenth the size of what Trump could do if he tried that tomorrow.

Plott: Well, let’s talk, then, about Larry Hogan. Totally different kind of Republican. What is he thinking?

Leibovich: I mean, Larry Hogan’s kind of a generic “Hey, I’m a popular Republican governor in a blue state, and I don’t like Donald Trump. Vote for me.” He talked about challenging Trump in 2020, showed up in New Hampshire and Iowa, and the press was like, “Ooh, what a coincidence.”

Then he said, Well, I’m not going to launch a suicide mission against Donald Trump.

So Larry Hogan, like a lot of Republicans of various statures—Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan—did a big speech at the Reagan Library, in Simi Valley, and he talked about, you know, we have to be positive, we have to be Ronald Reagan again. The idea is that they’re just going to return to the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan. I remember Hogan gave this speech in Simi Valley, and that exact same night, J. D. Vance won his primary in Ohio, and he is standing at a podium in Cincinnati singling out Marjorie Taylor Greene for her great contribution and Donald Trump.

Look, Larry Hogan’s making all kinds of noises about running. He’s term-limited. He’s about to be an ex-governor. I’m sure he’s got a case he could make. You know, again, I would send him to Iowa. I bet his rally wouldn’t be all that much to watch live on Fox, CNN. I don’t think he’d probably get a very big crowd, but hey, maybe we’re completely missing the boomlet.

Plott: The Larry Hogan boomlet.

Leibovich: [Laughs] It’s about to explode. Now, look, I mean, look, it’s a great argument. It’s perfectly sound. It just doesn’t really exist in the real world of today’s Republican Party.

Plott: Yeah. Shining city on a hill. Time for being positive. It made me think of while I was reporting this Marjorie Taylor Greene piece, she did a radio show, and this woman called in and was saying, I’d love to talk to you about, you know, really extreme position on abortion, and clearly just wanted to have a back-and-forth with the congresswoman. And [Greene] immediately, it’s just, like, all defenses ready. She says, and I’m paraphrasing, but she’s essentially saying, Based on the sound of your voice, it doesn’t sound like you’ll be getting pregnant anytime soon, so I don’t know that this question is actually relevant to you. And [the caller] keeps trying to cut in again politely: But can we talk about the policy? And Marjorie Taylor Greene just shuts her down entirely. And I remember texting one of her advisers: “Do you think that she would have a better chance at bringing people to her side if she actually tried to engage with them, or soften in any way?”

And they said no. The time for Bill-Buckley-firing-line-type discourse is over. It’s war now. That’s, he said, that. He said that,—this adviser that I was talking to—it’s just, it’s total war now. And I think that, to me, defines so much more of the Republican base right now than the idea of, you know, Reaganism—like, tomorrow’s going to be better than today.

Leibovich: There was a really interesting piece in The New York Times about turnout, because everyone says, “Oh, okay, well, Republicans weren’t excited. They didn’t vote. And turnout was depressed.” In fact, Republicans had a serious turnout advantage over Democrats, and the conclusion there was: not all Republican voters voted for Republicans.

Plott: Mm-hmm.

Leibovich: Republican voters who actually made a point of coming out made a point of coming out because they wanted to vote against Kari Lake or vote against Herschel Walker, or vote against Doug Mastriano or any other number of people who were just so offensive—even to Republicans and certainly a lot of independents—that that turnout didn’t necessarily translate to Republican victories, even though the high numbers of these people turning out were in fact Republicans.

Plott: And Warnock. I mean, that was an explicit part of his strategy too, which is where I think Stacey Abrams really erred. Her strategy in this most recent gubernatorial race that she lost in Georgia was built around trying to get the Democratic voters and the young voters who typically stay home. Whereas Warnock took a completely different tack, which is to say: “Let’s go get the soft Republicans or the centrists who maybe have always been registered Republicans but can’t stomach Herschel Walker as their senator.” And it worked out really well for him.

Leibovich: Yeah. What I think the larger point here that we’re talking about is that persuasion still does matter. I mean, there’s been this conventional wisdom around turnout elections, which is: If you can get your base out and get your base excited, you’re going to win.

And no, not necessarily. We’ve learned that there are nuances in the middle that can be determinative. And I think that’s hopeful. I think persuasion and serious debate and serious voters are all a good thing for the democracy that we’re all fighting for. That was one of the takeaways that I think that maybe is hopefully some kind of trend line that’s moving in a positive direction.

Plott: But it’s all in the general election. We have to remember: As long as Republican candidates and officials continue to feel just shackled by the basest instincts of their base voters, they’re never going to be in a position in a Georgia, say, or a North Carolina, even, to be the ones persuading successfully.

Leibovich: It’s true. And look, we’re pretty soon going to be in a presidential cycle, and Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, whoever, are not going to be in a persuasion mode …

Plott: Exactly.

Leibovich: … as far as finding these sort of centrist suburban women who have become the wild card in these races.

Plott: Absolutely.

Leibovich: We should talk about the bread and circus that is the House Republican caucus that will be in charge. The House will soon be in Republican hands. The question is: Who will lead that House? Kevin McCarthy has been working many, many years to be the next speaker of the House. He has very thin margins, has a number of potential dissenters from within the Freedom Caucus, and rumblings of opposition from Andy Biggs of Arizona.

It looks like it will be a really, really messy process for the next few weeks. And I would guess, maybe because of default and because there’s no clear alternative, Kevin McCarthy maybe pulls this out. But man, this is going to be a really, really dicey caucus to try to lead, even if you can get the speaker’s gavel and have the title for the rest of your life.

Elaina, how do you see this play outing? I feel like we’re trying to predict an avalanche, but how’s the avalanche look?

Plott: You mentioned how many years Kevin McCarthy has been waiting for this moment, to actually be installed [as] speaker. In my admittedly brief adult life, this will be the third time that Kevin McCarthy has come close to the speakership only to have something, whether it’s John Boehner suddenly deciding to retire or the election being postponed or any number of events that have seemed to conspire to make sure that he doesn’t actually get the gavel.

And now here we are again with the Freedom Caucus saying they don’t love the idea of Kevin McCarthy. In 2015, of course, that was when Paul Ryan was brought in to do this, and the Freedom Caucus gave him a hard time too. There were a lot of negotiations and deals that had to be worked out before they gave him their blessing. And I don’t know how that’s going to happen this time around.

But speaking of Marjorie Taylor Greene, he does have her on his side trying to rally people around him. I think where that may be falling short is that everybody understands that it’s a quid pro quo in the sense that McCarthy has made clear she will have a seat on the Oversight Committee, should she vote for him for speaker.

And there’s a lot she wants to do with that position. She wants to investigate Hunter Biden. She’s filed no fewer than five impeachment resolutions against Joe Biden. There are also cabinet secretaries that she wants to go after. She said the other day that she wants to defund the DOJ. And with a position on Oversight, she will have the latitude to at least perform a theater of sorts.

And, I think we can expect things like that immediately, regardless of whoever is Speaker, just because there really does not seem to be a Republican agenda among the House conference to do anything else. I mean, Kevin McCarthy has said [that] on the very first day of the new Congress, he is going to have the Constitution recited on the House floor. But beyond that, I think it is anyone's guess. It’s almost like we can’t even think about that so much, because it is still actually kind of dicey as to whether he gets the gavel anyway.

Leibovich: There are so many layers of unknown between now and when the leadership of the next Republican majority in the House is set. And I think, as we’ve been saying for years, a lot is being driven by the base of the Republican party, whatever that looks like—whatever that morphs into in the next year or two. Wherever we go from here.

This COVID Winter Will Be Different

2022-12-01T16:30:00-05:00

December is here and with it comes the third winter of the pandemic. With holiday travel and indoor family gatherings, the season has brought tragic spikes in COVID cases the past two years. Are we in for more of the same, or will this winter be different?

The Atlantic deputy editor Paul Bisceglio talks with the staff writer Katherine Wu about what to expect. Will a new variant accelerate infections as Omicron did a year ago? What does a wave of other viruses mean for the season? And after years of vaccines, masking, and testing, how can we help those who are most at risk this year?

Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Paul Bisceglio: Hello, this is Radio Atlantic. My name’s Paul Bisceglio. I’m a deputy editor at The Atlantic, where I oversee our health, science, and technology coverage. With me today is one of our staff writers who reports on health and science, Katie Wu. Katie, hello.

Katie Wu: Hello, Paul. How are you?

Bisceglio: It’s good. It’s good. The last time I saw you was in person for the very first time.

Wu: Which is appalling because we have worked together for almost two years now. And, you know, you neglected me for most of those two years.

Bisceglio: (Laughs) How dare you. Not true. So I had to nudge you. But no, I mean, we’ve been in this for a while. This is in part because of what we’re here to talk about today, which is the pandemic. You know, the holidays are coming up. People want to be prepared and safe. And there’s a big question here: How worried should we be that things are going to get worse again?

Wu: Oh gosh. I mean, it depends what you mean by worse. I would say things are already pretty bad right now, depending on where your threshold is. A lot remains really unclear. And I certainly don’t want to get into the business of predicting the future. You know, first, some perspective. I think there’s a lot to be thankful for this year if we sort of compare this to past winters. You know, we have vaccines, we have treatments. And a lot of people are gearing up for a holiday season that could feel a lot like the ones that we had before the pandemic started. I mean, I’m certainly looking forward to that. At the same time, though, there are still people dying from COVID, and there are a lot of other respiratory viruses really hitting the country hard right now. And it’s kind of unclear how quickly that’s going to abate. I think that is really going to cast a bit of a shadow over the holidays this year.

Bisceglio: Why don’t we sort of step back and kind of take stock of where we’re at in the pandemic and what we might be able to say about where all this is headed? Let’s talk about variants. I think anybody listening should be forgiven if they’ve sort of lost track of variants at this point. Do you think you could give us a quick sort of encapsulation of the trajectory of variants? You know, we’ve gone through a couple in the past and we’ve been sort of stuck in the year of Omicron.

Wu: Yeah. So it’s actually helpful, I think, if we sort of break the pandemic down into three very, very, very rough phases. If we remember all the way back to 2020, we were, for the most part, just dealing with one version of the virus. You know, there were a couple of mutations here and there that made the virus more transmissible. But, you know, we can sort of call that the OG virus, and that really carried us through much of 2020. That was the one causing all that early chaos in that sort of pre-vaccine phase. Then right around the time we got our first mRNA vaccines, that’s also around the time when the Alpha variant first appeared. This was way more transmissible. It basically took the world by storm, especially, you know, in parts of Europe. And, you know, we saw it a bit here in the U.S., and a lot of 2021, we had these sort of single-Greek-letter variants taking over one by one by one, you know, depending on where you were looking in the world. You had Alpha, Beta, gamma—Delta really hit us here last summer. And then, of course, a little over a year ago, we got Omicron. But then things started to sort of change again in 2022. For this entire year, we have stuck with that single Greek letter, Omicron. And that’s marked a sort of phase three in all of this. We’re no longer swapping through this alphabet soup. We’re getting, you know, little riffs on Omicron: BA1, BA2, BA4, BA5. And now the sort of big bads that are taking over from BA5 are BQ1 and BQ1.1. Honestly, if I am starting to sound like, you know, a Twitter bot trying to spew out handles at this point, I don’t blame you. Honestly, it’s not—I don’t know if it’s the most worthwhile trying to keep track of individual variants right now. The sort of main takeaway here is that we’re in this Omicron era that’s lasted for more than a year at this point, but the virus is continuing to sort of riff on this motif.

Bisceglio: Like you said, we’re hitting the year anniversary of the beginning of the Omicron spike, when we hit by far the highest caseloads that we’ve experienced in the pandemic, a major spike in deaths, huge overcrowding in hospitals, and just really one of the worst moments, if not the worst moment, we experienced in the pandemic, a couple of years after everybody was hoping it would already be done. One big question of where that leaves us, especially given that we just hit that year anniversary: Should we be worried about getting Omicron’d again?

Wu: Yeah, it’s a great question. And I think a lot of experts have sort of been waiting for the other Greek-letter shoe to drop for a while. I mean, it’s bizarre to have stuck on Omicron for the past year. Like, when is Pi showing up? Why have we stuck here so long? I don’t think there’s anything to say that we won’t eventually get Pi. In fact, I think if you sort of ask researchers to bet, they think Pi will eventually show up. But we don’t know if that’s going to be tomorrow, a month from now, even potentially a year from now. But, you know, in short, to get, quote-unquote, Omicron’d again, I think we would have to see a much larger jump in terms of the virus producing something that looks immensely different. The sort of irony of Omicron sticking around for so long, you know, this entire past year is that it’s also just really difficult for another version of the virus, you know, some would-be Pi, to outcompete Omicron. Like Omicron is only getting better at being itself. And so for another version of the virus to completely steal Omicron’s thunder, that’s a huge ask.

Bisceglio: Yeah, and is that good news? I mean, is the takeaway there that because we are likely to keep existing with Omicron for some time, we just don’t need to be as worried about another winter spike?

Wu: Oh, that is complicated. I don’t think we’re out of the woods in terms of this really causing us some serious issues. In one sense, you know, we do have a sense of what Omicron is all about, but it’s not like all these subvariants are the same thing, right? Even if we’re still calling them the same Greek letter and that may seem familiar, even comforting to a degree, knowing that there’s a lot of ways to riff on the Omicron template means that reinfections are still happening. People are still getting sick. And even if you look at some of the models that are forecasting what’s ahead for this winter and even a little bit beyond, we don’t actually need the arrival of a Pi for a big surge in cases and hospitalizations, even deaths, to unfold this winter, because we also know that our defenses against infection especially are kind of fragile. And so if big waves of disease are sort of the product of the virus’s offense, as well as our defense, the virus doesn’t necessarily need to up its offense for there to be kind of a mismatch.

Bisceglio: With defenses, similar to everything else about the pandemic, there’s good news and there’s bad news. We’re in a time when vaccines are widely available. We have boosters tailored to Omicron. We have masks, we have tests, we have antivirals. We have greater scientific advances in understanding them than we had this time last year. So that’s a lot of good news. At the same time, there’s bad news as well. The state of boosting in America is not great. Roughly 11 percent of Americans who are eligible right now have gotten the latest boosters available.

Wu: Yeah, so this is an unfortunate thing. I think with every additional shot that Americans have been asked to get, there has been a pretty disappointing drop-off in interest, which, you know, to some extent is understandable. People are tired of it, especially when the recommendations keep changing. But this is a little scary to see. I mean, we know that because immunity is not permanent and because the virus keeps changing, there is a need to sort of refresh our defenses. The way that I sort of think about it is: It’s like we’re about to take a huge exam, and a lot of people are using an old version of a textbook that they haven’t read for almost a year. And if, you know, a big winter surge is that exam that’s coming up, we’re just going in incredibly unprepared. This is also a tricky time for that to be happening because, you know, we’re heading deep into December. People are going to be gathering; people are going to be wanting to see each other. Generations, all the way from grandparents and great-grandparents down to little infants, may be in the same room. And winter is already a time when we expect a lot of respiratory viruses to spread pretty easily.

Bisceglio: So I have received four COVID shots now. Does my immune system—do I just get stronger and stronger every time I get more shots? How is this working?

Wu: So it actually helps to think about your immune system like a gas tank or a battery. The general thinking right now is that if you, I guess, take your COVID-fighting part of the immune system fresh out of the box, you might need three or so charges to bring you up to full charge. So your primary series of the mRNA vaccines and then maybe one booster after that, and then after that, you know, you sort of go along and as time goes on, the battery starts to drain a little bit. And so every once in a while, you’re going to have to plug your immune system into a socket, you know, get another vaccine. And annual would seem to be enough. You know, this understanding is, I think, still a working definition. But what’s really helpful about that is we can maybe start to think about not, like, how many shots you’ve gotten so far. I know you’re still keeping track because you just said four; that’s also where I’m at. But honestly, I’m kind of relieved that there may be a future in which I don’t have to be like, Hey, I just got my 15th COVID shot, and instead just say, Hey, I’m up-to-date because I got my annual COVID shot, just like I got my annual flu shot.

Bisceglio: I mean, I think a lot of folks right now are in a place where many people are boosted. Millions of Americans have been infected at this point. So are we just collectively at less risk right now than we were a year ago?

Wu: I think it’s difficult to say collectively and it’s difficult to say we. I think if you sort of look at the range of outcomes that are happening with the virus, the sort of extreme ends of the scale are important to look at. The people who are in the best position to do well with the virus are in a better position than ever. I think they have treatments available to them. They’re up-to-date on their vaccines. They’re young. They’re healthy. Most of them probably don’t have much to worry about if they get infected with this. (Huge, huge, huge asterisk of us not fully understanding the risks of long COVID, though vaccination does seem to at least reduce that risk to some degree.) For other people, though, it’s still really, really difficult to be living in a COVID world. I think it’s especially tough for people who are immunocompromised, because one thing that I have been worried about a lot lately is that we’re already looking at a group of people for whom vaccines may not work as well. And some of the only things that we had to protect immunocompromised people, these monoclonal antibody treatments that can sort of serve as, like, surrogate immunity for them, giving them antibodies before they get exposed so they might have defenses to fight off the virus should it infect them—those monoclonal antibodies are getting rendered obsolete by some of the new variants that are showing up. Some doctors have already pulled some of those monoclonal antibodies off the shelf because they can’t be used as treatments. And there’s this big worry that Evusheld, which is a hugely important therapy for immunocompromised people, may be completely obsolete by the middle of winter.

Bisceglio: Yeah, you know, for me, I think that’s been one of the hardest elements of the pandemic to wrap my mind around at this stage in our third pandemic winter, which is that there is a real and large spectrum of risk that people are facing right now. And it's both true that there is an enormous part of the population that is young, not dealing with any health conditions, vaccinated, and can very justifiably, in my view, feel quite at ease right now, do not have reason to believe they on an individual level are at significant, serious risk. At the same time, existing right alongside everybody is another diverse and large group of folks who are still at risk and who are affected by the decisions of everybody around them. So let’s try to get more practical and direct on this, right? Like, given that reality, that there is the spectrum of risk, what should people be doing? You know, a lot of folks are going to be traveling throughout the winter, spending time indoors. How should we start thinking about risk and protecting each other when it’s both true that so many of us actually don’t have that much to be concerned about at this point, and so many others of us do?

Wu: I think the key is flexibility here. As we head into the holidays, if anyone is feeling sick, even if it’s not COVID, that is a sign that, you know, you should maybe be rethinking your plans. We don’t want anybody to be getting anything right now. And there’s a lot of stuff circulating at this time. If people haven’t gotten their flu shots or their bivalent COVID shots, now is a great time to do that. There’s still a couple of weeks before a lot of holiday celebrations get going in earnest. Testing has come down, but tests are still available to people who can afford them. It's a good time to stock up on some of those tests. And, you know, if you’re feeling worried in the days before you travel or before people are coming to you, it’s not a bad idea to take some tests, get a sense of whether you might be asymptomatically infected. Those tests might be able to pick up on that. And if you are traveling, not a bad time to at least to wear a mask so that, you know, you can be a little bit more confident that if you’re gathering with your family, you can take that mask off and feel a bit better about lowering your risk of infecting someone else or vice versa.

Bisceglio: Yeah, I’ve kept my line of questioning pretty focused on COVID, but to the point that you just raised: It’s not all about COVID right now this season, and in fact, the COVID conversation has become inextricable from the conversation involving many other viruses that are coming back rather strong this season. The term triple-demic has been tossed around by the media a lot to describe the state we’re in. How concerned should we be about non-COVID viruses this season?

Wu: Yeah, you know, it’s kind of interesting because a lot of the people that I talk to right now, their biggest concern is not COVID when it comes to infectious disease, it’s flu, it’s RSV. And the big vulnerable group this winter is kids, which is a big departure from how we’ve been talking about risk these past couple of years. So flu and RSV tend to be the other two viruses that people are talking about when they talk about this triple threat or triple-demic. I do have to pause here and say that I don’t love the term triple-demic, especially if people are using it to imply triple pandemic. Of those three, we have the COVID pandemic and then we have more local epidemics of RSV and flu. Not to minimize the other two, but just to be clear, COVID is happening on a wider scale. And it's not just flu and RSV. There’s also rhinovirus, enterovirus, parainfluenza, all of these other things that people may not have been thinking a lot about for the past few years. But, you know, it is this enormous slurry of viruses that’s kind of all hitting the population in the Northern Hemisphere at the same time. And that is the big problem. I think it’s not just one thing at a time, but everything all at once. It’s overwhelming pediatric hospitals. Kids are getting sick all over the country, some of them very seriously so. And you know, even adults are getting sick. And certainly older people, especially over the age of 65, are super susceptible to these viruses, too. I would say this is by far the worst winter in terms of respiratory viruses writ large that we’ve had since before the pandemic.

Bisceglio: Is this exact scenario, this avalanche of different viral infections, something we’re going to have to deal with every winter from now on, forever?

Wu: Returning to my reluctance to predict the future, I think my main point here has to be I don’t know, but I and a lot of the people that I’ve been talking to are optimistic that this is not going to be the template for every single winter that’s to come. And the thinking is that part of the reason we’re having such a rough go of things right now is because there is kind of a backlog of kids who entered the season without a lot of the typical immunity against these viruses that you would normally expect them to have. So, you know, think back to pre-pandemic times if you can. Winter was always a rough time for kids. You know, they would go to day care; they would go to school. They would spend a lot of fall and winter sick with infection after infection. And you know, that was kind of crummy. But they also had the opportunity to build up immunity to these viruses. You know, it’s thought that by the time most kids reach toddlerhood, they have gotten RSV and flu and their bodies have banked knowledge of those viruses and have a better sense of how to fight them off the next time. But because of the pandemic, you know, all these mitigation measures we took, masking and distancing, they did an amazing job of tamping down the levels of these other viruses. And that meant a lot of kids started off the season having never seen flu or RSV before. And so just the population of susceptible kids is a lot bigger. I do want to make sure here that I am not implying here that masking was a bad thing, that distancing was a bad thing. That was necessary. And in fact, it showed us how to tamp down on levels of these respiratory illnesses. I think it’s just that because we entered fall with so many of those mitigations all of a sudden gone, these viruses found ample opportunity to spread, and they hit us all at once. But to return to your idea about, you know, whether this will be the case next year, I think the hope is that more kids will be caught up this year just because there is going to be a lot of transmission, and next year will hopefully be easier, and the year after that even easier.

Bisceglio: Long COVID is, I think, always the complicating factor in these conversations, and in some ways, the way that the conversation inevitably has to end. We can always look at the positives of the defenses we’ve built up. And then there’s always this lingering factor. This stage into the pandemic, three years in, how worried should people be about the effects of long COVID?

Wu: I will say that from my personal perspective, I remain very worried about long COVID. It’s difficult to even sort of quantify the risk for it. Scientists are still figuring out just how much immunity can protect us from long COVID, whether, you know, drugs like Paxlovid can reduce the likelihood that you develop long COVID, if you take Paxlovid early enough. And we still don’t have a good slate of treatments for long COVID. And, you know, because this is a chronic condition, it’s pretty scary. You know, you can get it from an infection of any severity and you could be dealing with it for years to come. And I think that’s why I still don’t feel comfortable saying, you know, we can declare victory over this virus. Why I still don’t feel comfortable saying that the pandemic is anywhere near over. This is an unusual virus in the sense that it can cause these long-term conditions of all sorts that can infect all kinds of body systems. And we really are still just starting to grapple with the long-term implications of that. Like, it really has only been three years. We don’t know what we might detect 10 years from now, 20 years from now. And there are even some scientists worried that long COVID or something similar to it could be affecting our experience with other respiratory viruses now in this current season. I think we have to have some humility here and acknowledge that we still don’t fully understand this. So that’s a big part of the reason why I’m still masking when I go out into public, when I’m traveling, but I’m trying to introduce other things back into my life that just make things feel more normal. I want to be able to see the people that I love. I want to be able to interact with them. But things like masking and testing make me feel more confident about doing those things.

Bisceglio: Katie, it was great talking to you. It’s always awesome catching up.

Wu: Thank you so much for having me. It was—oh gosh, can I call this fun? It was kind of a dark conversation, but I still had a good time. And I hope your holidays are the best they’ve been in at least three years and you get to enjoy some time with your cat.

Bisceglio: Right? I wish you the best holidays of the pandemic, too.

Wu: Thank you.

Bisceglio: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Theo Balcomb. It was fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio. I’m Paul Bisceglio. Thanks for listening.

What’s at Stake for Election Workers

2022-11-03T18:30:04-04:00

Poll workers serve an essential, if usually uncelebrated, role in American democracy. Organizing and tabulating is the basic business of elections. Or, it was until 2020.

When then-President Trump refused to accept his loss and spread falsehoods about a stolen election, vote-counters were among the first people to face blowback. Poll workers endured combative protesters, threats, and harassment while completing their work. In the two years since, the Big Lie has only grown more central to the Republican brand. In next week’s election, the majority of Americans will see an election-denier on their ballot.

With America’s voting system facing a crucial pressure test, Atlantic staff writers Mark Leibovich and Tim Alberta spoke on the podcast Radio Atlantic to better understand the stakes for the 2022 midterm elections.

Joining them is Chris Thomas, an election administrator who spent nearly four decades leading the elections division in the office of Michigan’s secretary of state. He recounted his experience running Detroit’s 2020 process amid protests and conspiracy theories, and offers a warning about the “downward spiral” that may already be underway.

Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Mark Leibovich: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic, where I cover politics. And with me is my colleague Tim Alberta, who is also a staff writer at The Atlantic. Tim, how are you doing?

Tim Alberta: Mark, I am okay. How are you?

Leibovich: Good. Situate yourself in this time-space continuum. You are sitting in Michigan, I believe.

Alberta: That’s correct. The center of the political universe.

Leibovich: Well, the 2022 midterms are only days away. But for this episode, we’re gonna focus on the underappreciated part of every election, which is the election administrators that run them.

This is an area that Tim has done some extremely great reporting and deep dives into, particularly in Michigan, which is not only a hotly contested swing state, but also a focal point of where the country is and the tipping points that are affecting a lot of elections.

So what I would ask off the top, Tim, is—election workers. This is usually kind of the plumbing of elections, [and] we as political reporters tend to focus on the campaigns themselves. What was it that got you interested in election workers themselves and wanting to talk to them and learn more about them?

Alberta: Election-administration folks are a little bit like offensive linemen. You don’t really notice them until they do something wrong. And oftentimes, when they do something wrong, there are big and devastating consequences.

So here we are looking ahead to the midterms next week, and we’re already seeing accusations of voter fraud and enormous pressure being put on the system. And I think to understand where the system is right now and just how bad things could get, we need to rewind back to a couple of recent elections.

A major test for how we administer our elections today was back in 2000. Of course, we all remember the hanging chads and the butterfly ballots in the sheer chaos that engulfed the state of Florida, and really the entire country, with Bush v. Gore. And after that experience, we tried to clean up the system. We invested in better machines. We invested in more training for election workers, and tried to bring our system of election administration into the 21st century.

And we had a lot of success in doing that. I think the challenge we face now is much steeper. What we really face is a crisis of confidence in the public. The public no longer trusts in our elections—no matter how secure, how transparent we’ve made them. And that crisis of confidence really began with the election of Donald Trump.

News Archival [Donald Trump]: Remember: We’re competing in a rigged election. This is a rigged election, folks, okay?

Alberta: It’s easy to forget now, but even in 2016, long before he was the Republican nominee, Donald Trump was claiming that the Iowa caucuses were stolen from him.

News Archival: Trump accusing Cruz of stealing the Iowa caucuses by engaging in dirty tricks.

Alberta: He was pressuring the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party to throw out the results.

News Archival: Trump is demanding either a do-over in Iowa or that the Cruz victory there be thrown out altogether.

News Archival [Trump]: They even wanna try to rig the election at the polling booths. So many cities are corrupt, and voter fraud is very, very common.

Alberta: And of course, once he’s in office, and as the pandemic is just arriving in 2020, the president of the United States is using his bully pulpit to tell the world that this election will be stolen from him, that it will be rigged against him.

News Archival [Trump]: The only way we’re gonna lose this election is if the election is rigged; remember that. It’s the only way we’re gonna lose this election.

Alberta: And so, what I spent a lot of time doing in 2020 was just traveling around the country, meeting with local elections officials—most of them Republican partisan election officials—to try and understand from their vantage point what was happening on the ground, what Trump was inspiring in their local communities. Was there a chance that there was some sort of funny business afoot? With the pressures of conducting an election with new policies being implemented on the fly due to COVID, and huge backlogs of absentee ballots needing to be counted after the fact, was there a possibility of mass inaccuracies, if not mass fraud?

And watching these people do that work under so much pressure, under so much scrutiny, was incredibly eye-opening. To see them do that work and withstand that scrutiny and produce what the courts and what watchdog groups and what election supervisors have deemed to be one of the most transparent and secure and accurate elections we’ve ever seen is really quite remarkable given all of that context.

Leibovich: I read about the sort of siege that election workers are under, and I wonder: Why would anyone do this? You focused on one poll worker in particular who was really interesting: Chris Thomas.

Alberta: That’s right.

Chris Thomas: I’m Chris Thomas. I’ve been in election administration in the state of Michigan for 40 years.

Alberta: Almost 40 years as the director of the elections department inside the Michigan secretary of state’s office. This is a guy who’s just sort of a walking encyclopedia on all things election administration. Chris is really good at what he does, which is running elections and counting votes. He’s not a public speaker, he’s not an orator, and he’s not somebody who’s gonna send chills down your spine while he’s describing the process. However, Chris is, in my experience, one of the—if not the foremost—nonpartisan authorities on election administration in the country.

Thomas: There’s a degradation going on. And I’m not predicting that this could be the last election that any of us would see, but I am saying that each one can be a big nail in the coffin of the democracy that we have enjoyed.

Alberta: He retired prior to the 2020 election. Then the pandemic arrives in 2020, and Donald Trump starts spouting these conspiracy theories about the election being stolen from him, and Chris Thomas kind of knew that he couldn’t stay on the sidelines.

Thomas: I woke up about 4 in the morning, just flummoxed about: How are they gonna pull this election off?

Alberta: Of all assignments to accept, he accepts an assignment in the city of Detroit. And for anyone familiar with the decades of racially tinged allegations of voter fraud and attempts at voter suppression in America, Detroit might just be Exhibit A.

Chris Thomas decides to do this against a backdrop of chaos and conspiracy-theorizing and fear-mongering, not to mention new laws that had been implemented prior to the 2020 election that he knew were gonna make things very complicated on Election Day.

Thomas: We ended up with 174,000 absentee ballots. How do you move all of them through the system and get ballots to voters with enough time for them to turn them around, and then for us to count them? That was really the challenge.

News Archival: One of the reasons Donald Trump was able to win nationally in 2016 was a razor-thin margin for him in Michigan.

News Archival: When the margin in 2016 was less than 11,000 votes, you can find that margin in a lot of different places across our state.

News Archival: Polls open at 7:00 a.m. today, not just to allow people inside, but crucially, that is when we could start counting absentee ballots.

Leibovich: In 2020, many of us became familiar with a term known as the “Red Mirage.” This is essentially the idea that Republican voters—or Trump voters in 2020—would be more likely to vote on Election Day. Thus, their ballots would be counted in real time and tabulated in real time, and so the early returns would look better for Republicans.

And then as early voting and absentee voting trickled in, Democrats would gain more votes. Because they would be seen as more likely to vote not on Election Day, through early voting and absentee voting.

Alberta: And Democrats were far more likely in Michigan and elsewhere to take advantage of casting their vote absentee. But in Michigan, those absentee ballots were not allowed to be opened and counted until Election Day.

News Archival: This is that Red Mirage that we heard people talk about. The idea that certain states, and we’re seeing this in Michigan and Wisconsin right now…

News Archival: We’re not calling this fairly large Trump lead for the president, because we haven’t gotten the results from mail-in ballots and the early voting.

News Archival [Trump]: We’re winning Michigan by … I’ll tell you, I looked at the numbers … I said, “Wow, that’s a lot.” By almost 300,000 votes. And 65 percent of the vote is in.

News Archival: And so that’s what he’s trying to do here, is he’s stepping out and saying, “Look, I’m winning.” … But at the end of the day, once all those votes are counted, it may be that all those mail-in ballots go to Joe Biden, and he’s put out a false narrative that many people will now believe. That’s what’s troubling about it.

Thomas: So around midnight, most of his votes were counted. And the mirage starts to disappear by 3, 4, 5 in the morning, as the urban centers start reporting their mail-in voting. And I think by mid-morning, Biden had reached the Trump numbers and started to surpass him.

News Archival: Omar Jimenez, live for us in Detroit, really the center of the political universe at this hour because of the breaking news—which is that, as of minutes ago, Joe Biden has vaulted into the lead in the crucial swing state of Michigan.

Thomas: And of course, at this time, all the folks with their big boards on cable news were pretty certain where all the remaining votes were sitting. And they weren’t sitting in Republican strongholds.

News Archival: It isn’t a lot right now, but it is a trend we have seen over the last several hours, and it has major implications on the path to 270 electoral votes. Because we also saw this happen in Wisconsin, where Joe Biden’s clinging to a narrow lead.

Thomas: I really was not following the election. You’d hear a little bit here and there. It was mid- to late morning when people started saying: “Oh, Biden’s surpassed Trump. He moved into the lead.” And I’m thinking: Well, okay, we still have a heck of a lot of work to do here. Let’s just keep going.

Alberta: By the early afternoon hours, it’s clear that there’s no turning back. That Biden’s lead is just gonna keep growing, based on the precincts where these votes are coming out of. And that’s when things get really messy.

Thomas: Around noon, there was quite a disturbance in a hall as new challengers rolled through the door.

Alberta: That’s when the poll challengers on the Republican side turn combative and confrontational and downright hostile.

News Archival: Some of the voting challengers told us that there was not an equal number of Democrats and Republicans in this room ... It led to some shoving matches or some fighting matches.

Thomas: And then it became pretty evident, quite quickly, that we had a problem on our hands.

News Archival: The tensions in that room began when Republican poll watchers had taunted poll workers. By talking, taking off their masks, getting too close to the workers, or being even verbally aggressive.

Thomas: These folks had come in with little to no training. I think the training didn’t amount to much more than showing them where the door was to get into the hall.

Alberta: Republican leaders start spreading misinformation and using scare tactics to say they’re being locked out of the counting room, that the rules are being violated, that you need to get down to Detroit right now and make your voice heard.

Thomas: All they wanted to do was stop the vote. And they even had, you know, a few minutes of a little bit of chanting going on to stop the vote.

News Archival: [chanting] Stop the count. Stop the count.

Alberta: And the next thing you know, all hell is breaking loose inside the big downtown building called the TCF Center, where they were counting these votes in Detroit, where suddenly you’ve got people streaming into the building, banging on the windows, demanding to be let in.

News Archival: [chanting] Stop the count … This was the scene in Detroit. Protesters started banging on the windows, as you can see. Police in fact had to be called to the scene.

Alberta: Then you have poll workers inside covering up the glass. And of course, the clips of that go viral all over social media and air on Fox News. And there’s talk in real time of a cover-up happening in Detroit.

News Archival: You have video from Fox News of individuals boarding up the windows in violation of the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

News Archival: There were some windows back here that allowed for observation that were covered up with paper and posters. That led to even more confusion and outrage, as protesters pounded on these windows demanding the ability to see inside.

Thomas: We covered the windows only because of the fear of glass breaking. There were workers in fairly close proximity to those windows. Trying to work when people are just banging on the windows—it was bizarre. I mean, these people knew they were playing to the media. But once you start explaining, you’ve already lost the moment. And it was great footage for the conspiracy folks.

News Archival: Breitbart reported on poll workers in Detroit covering windows as onlookers outside tried to watch as ballots were being counted.

News Archival [Trump]: One major hub for counting ballots in Detroit covered up the windows.

News Archival: Election workers in Detroit have been caught covering up windows at an absentee-ballot counting center, trying to prevent anyone seeing what’s happening in the vote-counting process.

Thomas: So there were times where this could have really gotten outta hand. We had some real incidents I had to step in the middle of, with many of these challengers where people were close to fisticuffs.

News Archival: Vote-challengers early on Wednesday attempted to photograph or videotape the counting process, which The Detroit Free Press reports left ballot-counters feeling intimidated.

Thomas: It was a disgraceful display. And, while they weren’t using racial terms, it was clearly a race issue in terms of what they thought was going on. It just did not smell well at all.

Alberta: And we saw this in other places around the country, like in Milwaukee or in Philadelphia, where you have an overwhelmingly Black city surrounded by overwhelmingly white suburbs. And, coincidentally or perhaps not so coincidentally, whenever there are these allegations of mass voter fraud and an election being stolen by a Democratic machine, it focuses on these Black cities.

News Archival [Trump]: Our campaign has been denied access to observe any counting in Detroit. Detroit is another place I wouldn’t say has the best reputation for election integrity.

Alberta: And the next thing you know, Detroit becomes the epicenter of election conspiracy-mongering from coast to coast.

Thomas: The Detroit police were excellent. They removed the rabble-rousers. It was an incredible sight for me. It was surreal. The next example I had of a surreal situation was sitting on my couch on January 6th.

People just thought they could let go of their emotions and do what they will, and that’s when problems happened. And I’m pleased that in Detroit, the problems did not emerge. They could have happened in that explosive a situation.

Alberta: That acting outside of the bounds of our civic norms seems to be a new normal, because here we are in 2022, heading toward Election Day 2022—and some of the behavior, some of the rhetoric, some of the political opportunism that led to the events of Election Day 2020 and the events of January 6th, 2021, are here, and they are proliferating.

Leibovich: I mean, in a weird and almost perverse way, it sounds like a triumph. Because for all that Chris endured in 2020, he is still reporting for duty next week during the midterms. Does he go into this with a sense of immense dread?

Alberta: I think, from Chris’s perspective, it can’t get any worse than it was in 2020, if for no other reason than the fact that you don’t have a single ringleader who’s at the center stirring all of this up, sort of inciting people to wage these attacks and to intimidate and to harass and to physically try to lay siege to some of these vote-counting centers.

I think in that sense, he’s not too worried. But I do think there’s a generalized dread. That the genie’s out of the bottle now, and you are going to have individuals up and down the ballot who are losing their races by comfortable margins—five, six, seven points, 10 points—who are still going to cry foul. They’re not going to concede. They’re going to say that it was stolen. I mean, you had a guy in the gubernatorial primary here in Michigan, Ryan Kelley, who lost by 25 points and refused to concede.

The cancer of election denialism has spread, and Trump has inspired copycats who are running for office all around the country. Including three statewide candidates in Michigan—for governor, for attorney general, and for secretary of state—all of whom claim that the last election was stolen.

That’s what causes him that generalized dread. Realizing that, no matter how clean an election they run, no matter how accurate the count is, no matter how transparent they are, people are still going to say that it was stolen from them. And they’re still gonna have an audience for saying that.

Thomas: You know, it’s not just the election. It’s what comes after the election. In other words: who’s elected. To my mind, the election-denier status that these candidates have is really hard to overcome. Because they have bought into a conspiracy that is not based on any facts.

And they can’t alter the way elections are run, but they can confuse things. Litigation after litigation, one case after another. If it’s always conflict, if everything that this office holder’s doing is a conflict situation, that degrades confidence at some point.

People believe something’s wrong. That’s the long-term effect. And so, does this become a downward spiral? That’s the big question. And it may well.

Alberta: And look: I can tell you, having spent the last couple of years covering this as closely as just about anyone, having talked to a lot of these people, having looked into the legal actions taken, having studied the way in which they’ve approached the question of the legitimacy of this last election, the great majority of these election-deniers who are running for office—building their campaigns on this lie that the last election was stolen—they don’t actually believe it. They don’t.

And let’s be clear: The great majority of the Republicans in Congress who voted to decertify the election results in those two states, they didn’t believe it. They did it because it was politically expedient. They did it because it was an act of self-preservation. They did it to stay on the right side of a bullying president and an angry political base.

I think almost all of them—probably all of them—categorically can say that they know how an election works. They know that some votes are counted later than others. They know that when 15 or 20 percent of the returns are in, they can’t declare victory just because they’re up three points. That’s not how any of this works. But that’s in the Before Times. 2020 in so many ways just feels like the beginning of a new era, because the old way of doing things, of respecting some of those norms and playing by some of those established rules, there’s just no benefit to it anymore.

Even if you wind up losing the election, it’s not just that claiming victory preemptively helps you fan the flames of conspiracy-theorizing and makes people think that you were cheated. It helps you raise money. It helps you stay relevant. It helps you maintain something of a political apparatus in the afterlife of losing that election.And that’s what most of these people want. There was a moment there on November 5th when Donald Trump came to speak in the White House…

News Archival [Trump]: Good evening. I’d like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts to protect the integrity of our very important 2020 election.

Alberta: …where he itemized every instance, every example of where the election had been stolen from him, and how Democrats in the deep state were sabotaging him, and basically announced to the world that America was a banana republic.

News Archival [Trump]: We were up by nearly 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania, won Pennsylvania by a lot, and uh, that gets whittled down to, I think they said now we’re up by 90,000 votes. And they’ll keep coming and coming and coming. They find them all. And they don’t want us to have any observers. They’re trying to rig an election, and we can’t let that happen. Detroit and Philadelphia, known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country…

Alberta: And I remember thinking then that this was going to have cascading generational effects. That there was just no telling how far-reaching the implications of this would be, because when any prominent powerful leader is making declarative, dramatic statements like that, people are going to listen.

But when you have a leader like Donald Trump, who had so effectively cultivated this fervent, undeviating following of people who believed him to be this sort of singular figure made for this moment in history—and frankly, for a lot of people, there are major spiritual implications wrapped up in this. This is good versus evil, and trying to bring down America as we know it.

In some sense, I’m almost relieved that it’s not worse today.

You know, January 6th was a horrible event; don’t get me wrong. But I think we also got incredibly lucky that more people didn’t die that day. If members of the Capitol Police had opened fire on some of the individuals who were assaulting them—which, by the way, some people believe would’ve been well within their rights—imagine if that had happened.

There would’ve been dozens of these rioters, maybe even more, killed at the Capitol that day. And then, what would the reaction, the retaliation to that have been? This really could have sparked a scalable civic violence that we haven’t seen in a very long time in this country.

And if we look back at just the past week, three men were convicted of plotting to kidnap the governor here in my state, Gretchen Whitmer. And of course in San Francisco, you had an apparent attempt to kidnap and torture Nancy Pelosi. This is the speaker of the House. Breaking into her personal home, finding her husband, attacking him, hitting him in the head with a hammer, knocking him unconscious, sending him to the ICU. I mean, these are just horrific events. And something I think we should take from them is that we have to be more imaginative about how bad this could get, and maybe how lucky we’ve been that it hasn’t gotten worse already. Instead of talking about foiled kidnappings, we could be talking about assassinations.

For how bad these things have been, I do think that they could have been a lot worse. And at some point our luck probably is going to run out if we’re not careful with how we navigate all of this moving forward.

Leibovich: When you wrap in both the very real issues on the ballot in this election—the abortion issue, inflation—coupled with the mechanics of elections being thrown into some doubt, what should we be mindful of as we’re looking to this day with a combination of dread and anticipation?

Alberta: One thing that really strikes me, Mark, is that voters have this astonishing ability to compartmentalize. I talk with a lot of traditionally Democratic voters about their concerns with the Republican party—the sort of extremist nativist, racist elements of the Republican party—that they find personally threatening.

They will go chapter and verse in describing that. And then effortlessly transition into why they’re going to vote Republican this fall because of the Democrats’ obliviousness to their economic concerns, as one example.

And if you broaden that out, it’s obvious in my conversations with a lot of voters, and with Democrats in contested parts of the country, that these appeals to small-d democratic norms, it doesn’t always land. It’s not that no one cares. It’s just that they don’t rank as a priority for a lot of voters.

Leibovich: Right.

Alberta: Even people who say that they’re really bothered by January 6th, who found it really disturbing, they’re not voting based on that. It’s almost impossible to find somebody who is. And, actually, I think the flip side of that is even you see the same thing with the abortion issue. Yes, you will see some single-issue folks on both sides of the abortion matter come out to vote because they’re really fired up.

In Michigan especially, Proposal 3 on the ballot would enshrine into the state constitution a right to an abortion. It’s very controversial. It’s very polarizing. And it’s going to drive massive turnout. But even there, you will talk to voters who are kind of tired of Democrats only talking to them about abortion. They’re really concerned that their cost of living has risen dramatically, that they can barely afford to put gas in their car, that food prices are through the roof. And they don’t know how they’re going to get by, moving forward, if these price increases continue. This is everyday stuff, and the compartmentalization that I wonder about. I’ve never really bought into this idea that we saw a couple of months ago that Democrats were staging this dramatic comeback and that they were going to defy the historical headwinds facing them.

I don’t know that this is gonna be some massive 2010-style wave that comes crashing over Washington. But it’s really hard to see in this environment how any of these Democratic appeals—be it to a woman’s right to choose, to the health and stability of our democracy, or to the election denialism that tears at the fabric of our democratic institutions—I just don’t know that any of it, even though some of it resonates with voters, I don’t know that it is ultimately what dictates the outcomes when voters step into the ballot booth.

Leibovich: I think you’re right. You know, when you’re sort of sitting where we are, what looks like cognitive dissonance really does make perfect sense. It is a perfectly reasonable—and I would say even mainstream—view for someone to be appalled by the direction of the Republican Party and also having no interest in voting for what the Democrats have served up.

One thing I’ve been saying for a number of months is: I’m putting certainty on hold until we actually have some numbers and some certifications. I don’t have a great deal of trust in polls and speculation. So, on that note, thank you for doing this, Tim. I know you’re very busy. These are crazy times, and it’s great to talk about this with some kind of … I don’t know about dread, but at least some sort of informed anticipation for what we might see in a few days, and hope for the best.

Alberta: Informed anticipation; I like it. Mark, it’s a pleasure chatting with you.

The Review: Knocked Up

2022-05-19T17:00:00-04:00

Fifteen years on, what can we learn from how the movie Knocked Up treated abortion, pregnancy, and women’s bodily autonomy? And what does it say in the era of a leaked Supreme Court opinion that could overturn Roe v. Wade as we know it? Join The Review as Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Hannah Giorgis dissect Judd Apatow’s 2007 film.

Listen to the discussion here:

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Sophie Gilbert: This week on the show, we’re rewinding back to 2007 to talk about the Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up. The film turns 15 on June 1, but this anniversary also arrives at a unique moment for the movie’s subject. The recent leak of a draft decision revealed that a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is willing to overturn Roe v. Wade. The final decision won’t arrive ’til June, but as it stands right now, it’s fair to expect that abortion rights around the country will be severely curtailed.

So we wanted to use this episode to explore how Hollywood shapes our conversations about pregnancy and abortion. And we thought Knocked Up in particular is an interesting way to look at this subject. It’s a massively successful movie about an unwanted pregnancy in which the word abortion never actually appears. Megan, you wrote an amazing piece about Knocked Up and its many flaws. Do you remember what you thought of it years ago compared with watching it again in 2022?

Megan Garber: It’s funny; I don’t remember seeing Knocked Up in 2007, whether it was in a theater or a Netflix DVD, but what I can definitely say is that I was very much struck in this viewing by its pernicious myths in the guise of comedy.

Hannah Giorgis: Yeah, very much the same. I have no distinct memories of it, and yet rewatching it, I had moments of déjà vu that made me wonder how I thought about it at the time.

Gilbert: Before we get into it, let’s do a brief rundown of the movie: Katherine Heigl plays Alison Scott, a producer on E! Television, who gets promoted to on-air talent. I should say that’s a hilarious scene with Kristen Wiig, and one of the highlights of the movie. If we’re going to be ruthless about Knocked Up, I should say I really love that scene.

Garber: So good.

Giorgis: And while celebrating out in a club one night with her sister, played by the director Judd Apatow’s real-life wife, Leslie Mann, she meets Ben Stone, played by Seth Rogen. It makes no sense that they talk to each other, let alone have sex. But they do. And eight weeks later, Alison finds out that she is pregnant.

And, Megan, what I took away from your piece is the weird absence of Alison as a character with any desires, motivations, dreams, goals. She’s very passive. She lives in her sister’s pool house. She gets promoted by no apparent effort of her own. She gets pregnant, and there’s no real discussion of her thoughts about what to do. What do the two of you make of Alison? Is she just a foil for the men in this movie to have a cool, fun time around?

Garber: That is definitely how I saw it. I think that’s a pretty good summary. This movie is a rom-com, a buddy comedy, a raunch comedy. It’s a lot of things at once. And in the movie’s defense, these aren’t just characters; they are tropes. There’s a lot of turning these people into ideas, and I wouldn’t mind that so much if the terms weren’t so sort of unevenly split. To your point, Sophie, you might think in a movie about pregnancy, the character who is centered and elevated and celebrated would be Alison. And in fact, it is Ben. The movie’s empathy and gravity are aimed at him. He’s this sort of man-child slacker who’s very charming but kind of stuck in arrested development.

And the question in this movie—as in so many of Judd Apatow’s films—is about growing up. But the question is not: Will Alison grow up? The question is: Will Ben grow up? And I think one of the things that I found pretty pernicious in my viewing of the movie this time around is that Alison serves as a kind of a vessel, a means to help Ben grow up, to help Ben become an adult and a father. She is written out of so much because her role is fundamentally just to be an instrument for someone else’s development.

Giorgis: Yeah, it’s strange the extent to which the movie equates Ben growing up—and becoming a man because he is going to become a father—with Alison’s need to loosen up. They’re charted as two equally urgent needs, two equally urgent paths of growth. And if you step back for a second, it’s like: Hold on, something is not quite right here.

There’s a moment as the birth scene is imminent when Ben recites a fact that makes it become clear that he’s read a single thing about pregnancy and what’s happening to Alison’s body, which she—and the film by proxy—really celebrates. And I remember feeling like that seems a little bare minimum to me.

It is really striking that his growth arc is: learning some stuff about pregnancy and adulthood. And hers is: learning to congratulate him for learning some stuff about pregnancy and adulthood.

Gilbert: I went back to a profile of Judd Apatow that came out in 2007. And it was a very thoughtful profile. He seemed like a strikingly troubled man at the time for someone who was 39, the toast of Hollywood, and happily married with two gorgeous kids. Which is not to say that those things don’t allow you to have anxiety and to suffer with self-image issues, but the thing I really took away from the profile is the way he was talking about the fantasy involved in the kinds of films that he makes, the kinds of films that Knocked Up exemplified at the time.

His quote was: “I think there is a nerd’s fantasy involved in many of these films. We all wish that somebody would take the time to get to know us, and love us, warts and all.” And I thought that was really telling. Because the message in this movie is not that Ben needs to change, necessarily. He does grow up in the end. He embraces fatherhood, gets an apartment, and gets a job to have the capacity to pay for things with money. He is fairly bad at life in the beginning of the film. But the message of the movie is not that men like this need to change. It’s that women need to take the time to excavate the diamonds that they can be from underneath the mess of marijuana haze and arrested development.

The other thing that struck me watching the movie again is that there’s no single woman in this film that you would want to hang out with in real life. Alison’s fine. She’s not super chill or funny. She’s not really given anything entertaining or charming to do in the movie. Her sister is incredibly uptight. And the contrast in the scenes between when Alison is having lunch with her mother to discuss the pregnancy, and her mother is like, “Honey, just get rid of it. Your step-sister did and then she had a real baby.” And then contrast that with Ben talking to his dad, played by the beloved Harold Ramis, who’s just like, “I’m going to be a grandfather!” It just exemplifies the contrast in the movie: The men in it are adorable. And the women are pretty bad all around.

Garber: That contrasting pair of scenes also gives Ben the line: “I had a vision for how my life would go, and this definitely is not it.” That’s a very powerful line in talking about this impending pregnancy, and it’s very striking that the line was given to Ben and not to Alison. The film presents those conversations between parents and children as part of a sequence that tumbles over the aftermath of Alison’s realization that she is pregnant. We never get the scene where Alison actually decides to keep the baby. That’s just completely edited out.

That scene with Alison and her mom also starts something that this movie does, which is to metabolize Alison’s anxieties about the pregnancy through discussions of weight. Again and again in the movie, Alison doesn’t say “I’m fearful about this process” or “I’m nervous about what this is going to mean for my life.” Any of the things she might be feeling about becoming a parent is processed as “Oh no, I’m going to get fat.”

And it was fascinating to see the movie do that, not just in the scene between Alison and her mother but throughout the film. It’s a very male gaze-y way of processing fears about parenthood.

Giorgis: And it could have worked and said something insightful about the nature of her work as on-air talent. There’s a world in which it could have served something, and yet it just extends so far. Even her big apology to Ben toward the end includes her saying, “And my ass got so fat.” And it’s like that made her behave in this way that we’re supposed to believe is irrational because she was distraught and angry about, of all things, her ass getting fat.

Looking back at this after 15 years, after the way that the body and self-image trends have shifted, it feels particularly ridiculous to hear. Of all the things she’s listing as reasons she might have been under duress in this incredibly complicated, difficult time in her life, the thing she lands on is that this changed her weight. It’s not about her child but her desirability and the way she’s supposed to look as a woman. And particularly as a white woman.

Gilbert: Right, she’s not worried about money. She’s not like, How am I going to pay for this? Who’s going to be the nanny? Where am I going to live? Where will the baby sleep? All these practical things that you completely lose your mind over. It’s purely through the lens of weight.

The other thing that really struck me rewatching is that when she finds out she’s pregnant, the first thing she does is go to the doctor and the doctor immediately does a sonogram, which is a very emotional thing. It’s something that lots of states compel women who are seeking abortions to do, precisely because it’s so emotional. It is different to consider a pregnancy once you have seen and heard a heartbeat.The film is shifting into what I want to say is a culturally conservative gear, where it’s like: But look, there’s a baby. There’s a heartbeat. There’s a tiny thing right there. And that fact precedes any discussion from Alison about what she’s going to do. It’s just so strange to me now. And it’s also after that crazy pregnancy-test montage. One test isn’t enough! We have to buy 700 because that’s what women do!

Giorgis: And that’s one of those things where, if that were in the context of a character who otherwise has interesting thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams and ambitions, it could have just been a weird stunt. It’s a comedy. It could have just been one montage that gives way to some quasi-serious treatment of this big thing that’s happening to her. And instead it’s just a way of establishing how weird and strange this thing happening is without giving us any insight into what she might want or think about it.

Gilbert: There are so many warning signs that are like: Run away! He doesn’t have a phone! He doesn’t have a job! When she calls him to tell him that she wants to see him again, every one of his friends makes porn noises and pretends to hump each other.

I just want to briefly address the ludicrousness of this setup. There’s just no world in which this would happen. There’s no world in which these two people meet at a club … I mean, maybe there’s a world in which they go home together, but there is no world in which every step of this movie plays out exactly the way it does. Like you wrote, Megan, it’s an inverted fairy tale. It’s fantasy from a male point of view.

Garber: Well, and I was just remembering back to what is my least favorite scene in this movie. It doesn’t just sort of present Ben as a slacker. It also presents him as just a thoroughly, almost aggressively good guy. And I think goes out of its way to almost acrobatically justify and rationalize everything he does. And the scene I’m thinking of is the one where the pregnancy actually happens.

They are together at Alison’s pool house. Ben is fumbling with the condom, and Alison has one of her first moments of utterly illogical shrewishness that just kind of flips all of the sudden into her character. She says “Just do it already,” very impatiently. And he says “Okay” and throws the condom away. She had clearly meant: “Please just hurry up with the condom.” And this is the elemental misunderstanding that informs the rest of the plot.

And the fact that the movie puts all of the consequences and moral weight of that scene on Alison being impatient and a little bit of a shrew is very revealing about what it’s up to, particularly when it comes to Ben. She clearly did not mean “Throw away the condom.” That is a massive violation. And yet the film presents it as just another joke. And it has to happen for the plot to play out, but it also has to happen for the film to preserve the idea that Ben is fundamentally a good guy. He’s just doing what she asked and being accommodating, like he will be throughout the rest of the movie. And it’s interesting to me how much it had to contort to rationalize Ben and keep him in the sort of good-guy frame of things.

Gilbert: Yeah, and when Ben tells Alison what happened, his reaction is very angry. It’s very hostile. “Could you not tell there wasn’t a condom?” “Why didn’t you stop me once we started?”

Gilbert: It’s really hostile. We’re still expected to root for this guy who essentially just [didn’t use a condom without consent] and is now angry at [his partner] for having become pregnant?

Giorgis: Yeah, and essentially called her “stupid,” right? He’s weirdly graphic and hostile, as you’re saying, Sophie. It felt gross to watch. And I was thinking about that in contrast with Catastrophe, the British series that also starts off with an unintended pregnancy that brings two very different people together. And Catastrophe would not work as a premise if Rob were even 10 percent less good a guy. I don’t think the show paints him as being good in a way that’s unfair or overly virtuous. But it’s really remarkable to think about how differently he behaves as opposed to Ben. And granted, they’re in very different positions in life. But also, that should factor into the plot! And into how the women in these works respond to these men.

Gilbert: I did want to talk about the two movies from that year that treat abortion as a kind of non-option, and about the film industry’s treatment of pregnancy and abortion around that time. Because later in 2007 came Juno, Diablo Cody’s movie about a pregnant teenager played by Elliot Page, who ultimately decides to go through with the pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption to a very nice lady played by Jennifer Garner.

It was debated at the moment that both these movies made specific choices. And it really wasn’t until seven years later that Jenny Slate made the movie Obvious Child, which presented, shall we say, a different choice. Hannah, I know you rewatched that movie recently. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Giorgis: Yeah. In Obvious Child, Jenny Slate plays an aspiring stand-up comedian who is recently dumped by her long term boyfriend and in the fallout of that meets a stranger. It’s a similar setup to Knocked Up: What starts as a short-term encounter turns into a pregnancy. And we spend a decent amount of the movie talking through the potential ways forward, and then navigating the logistics of it. And ultimately, the film ends with her having the abortion. It’s not a big, dramatic thing. And after, she and the man who got her pregnant end up watching television together.

It ends with them just as people at home together as she’s recovering from a medical procedure that she’d had earlier in the day. There’s not a big to-do about it all. And she has a conversation about what this would have looked like if this had happened to her 40 or 50 years ago. But even that isn’t super heavy-handed. It’s just like: Here’s a woman who obviously is not prepared in any number of ways to be a mother at this exact moment. And so she makes the decision that makes sense for her at that time.

Gilbert: I wanted to talk about the “shma-shmortion” scene. I don’t really know how to bring it up. It’s so telling that this is a movie in which abortion is like Voldemort. People can’t even say it out loud. It’s a Very Common Medical Procedure That Shall Not Be Named.

Garber: I mean, it very much might be just marketing and generally capitalistic concerns, but to take the movie on its own terms, this is a really conservative film. The upshot is: Family is wonderful. Anything that gets you to family is good. And you could say: This is just a comedy. Why are you paying so much attention to just a comedy? It doesn’t matter.

But I think it’s really revealing that in this comedy that is so self-consciously a comedy, Judd Apatow’s daughters are actors in this movie. His wife is an actor in the movie. Its end credits show family photos of cast and crew, either as children or with their own children. The final scene of the movie proper shows Alison and Ben with their daughter as treacly music plays and shows family photos. The notion is: Everything worked out because there is now a new baby in the world. And I think that’s the fundamental message of this film.

And so, if that tracks to both of you, then you can’t mention abortion aloud in that context. If your assumption is Baby equals good, and that is the beginning and end of the discussion, you can’t really allow or entertain anything that would get in the way of that message.

There’s also, of course, just cultural notions of shame that are still part of the abortion conversation, despite all the progress that’s been made in mass culture. The way abortion is talked about always gets a little bit of a caveat, a little bit of a euphemism invoked. And so I think there’s a lot happening with the absence of the word, but I think the movie is structured in a way that wouldn’t allow it to talk about abortion as a legitimate or simply medical option.

The Frenetic Basketball Nostalgia of Winning Time

2022-05-15T15:40:00-04:00

The 1980s Los Angeles Lakers were one of the most dominant teams in sports. At a time when professional basketball was on its heels, the Lakers brought new excitement: Magic Johnson versus Larry Bird, Jerry Buss and the glitzy Forum Club, and an up-tempo flow offense. That’s the story of HBO’s big-budget series Winning Time, whose Season 1 finale aired on Sunday, May 8.

David Sims, Vann R. Newkirk II, and Ross Andersen—three of The Atlantic’s biggest basketball fans—get together to discuss the series. What do they make of the accusations from former players that the show is inaccurately over-the-top? Does the producer Adam McKay’s style energize and streamline the show—or just add distraction on top of the glut of story lines? And how do you dramatize a history with a well-known outcome?

Listen to their discussion here:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for the first season of Winning Time.

David Sims: We’re here to talk about Winning Time, the HBO series about the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, whose first season just wrapped up. It’s set during the team’s 1979–80 championship season. And it’s about Jerry Buss. It’s about Magic Johnson. It’s about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It’s about a million other things. It has so many people in the cast. It’s got maybe a dozen major story lines that it’s jumping around on. It’s caused Jerry West to say he wants to sue HBO all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s one of the most hyped shows of the year. Were you guys pumped for it?

Ross Andersen: I felt like I was in The Truman Show and someone had made a special pop-cultural product that was just for me. I love the Showtime Lakers. That’s where my Laker love started. My kids both wear 32 in youth basketball for Magic Johnson. We are a Magic Johnson household. So yeah, I was pumped.

It’s also funny. I know we’re going to get into this a bit later, but a lot of the controversy about how these guys were depicted … I guess I didn’t fear that so much because, to me, a lot of this stuff seemed priced into their reputations already. I certainly didn’t have any fear going in that these heroic figures of my youth were going to be unmasked or anything like that.

Sims: Right? Plenty has been written over the years about the drama of the Showtime Lakers. It’s not like any of these figures are seen as innocent heroes, right?

Vann Newkirk II: I mean, the Jeff Pearlman book the show is based on is not not juicy. For my part, I was interested. Before I had kids, whenever I was bored, I’d turn on Hardcourt Classics, so this is obviously a show that’s tailored to my interests as well. As a Charlotte Hornets fan, I’m a big Lakers hater, so I also got a chance to see all the things about the Lakers mythology that I’ve hated forever. But I’m also a big Magic and Kareem fan. It’s hard to find more things in a show about basketball on HBO Max that are going to get me to watch.

Sims: This is exactly how I felt. I mean, yes, I’m a Knicks fan, not a Lakers fan. The Showtime Lakers are before my basketball-watching days, but it’s certainly the mythology you’re taught as you’re getting into basketball. So much of that mythology comes from around this time. When the show premiered and got kind of mixed reviews, the initial buzz was so much about what they’re getting wrong or why they’re telling something a certain way that I actually avoided it for a few weeks. Then I started bingeing it and found I did find it incredibly watchable. I don’t know how you guys felt, by and large, but it at least was always an easy thing to have on.

Newkirk: Yeah. I’ve never had a real urge to turn it off. And I have real reactions to lots of current TV. If I don’t like it, I really don’t like it. (Laughs.) I’ve always made the case for the comeback of mediocre TV. Regular TV. Average TV. And I feel like this was it for me.

Sims: Yeah, I would agree with that.

Andersen: Yeah, I found it eminently watchable. I don’t know if we’re ready to get into our deep impressions of the show, but it has left me surprisingly cool throughout, given the subject matter. I’m in the Venn diagram for the target audience. And I don’t know if that’s the sort of Adam McKay-ness of it—with the Instagram filters they’re using to retro-ize it, which strikes me as weird—or what. I feel like one of the pleasures of period television is getting the cinematic treatment of an era that you didn’t inhabit. And so, seeing it through a kind of grainy VHS thing is weird. But on the flip side of that, the pace is really kinetic. I was never ready to flip away.

[Read: Why are people so mad about Don’t Look Up?]

Sims: Yeah, the pilot is directed by Adam McKay, the Oscar-winning filmmaker. Everyone knows him from his comedies and then his more recent style that he shows off in The Other Guys and Vice, where someone would look into the camera all of a sudden and be like: “Hey, my name is Magic Johnson.” Or the film would switch with jump cuts for no reason. There’ll be a freeze frame. For instance, someone might say they’ve never done cocaine and there’s a freeze frame saying, “Oh yes, he did.” I’m making this up, but that is the general vibe, I would say. There was a time when that was different and intriguing, and now it’s gotten a little tiring. It’s especially tiring on a weekly television show, compared to a movie where you’re locked in with it.

Newkirk: Among Adam McKay’s work, it felt the most like The Big Short to me. And I think the things that did it for me in The Big Short, especially when they do the asides to explain all the complex financial mechanisms or whatever, is that you understand there’s a bit of magic there. You don’t really have to understand it to get the story. And I feel like that was a bad approach for talking about basketball. Do you really have to explain a fast break? You’ve got to have a little bit of faith in the audience. We’re not talking about CDOs here. We’re not talking about, like, credit default swaps. We’re talking about putting the ball in the hoop.

Sims: And we’re talking about the most famous basketball team of all time! Arguably. We’re not even talking about some obscure part of the NBA. This is Magic and Kareem. This is the Showtime Lakers. But, just to sort of give the basic setup, it’s about essentially Jerry Buss’s first season owning the team, Magic’s first season on the team, and the Lakers’ 1980 championship. (Spoiler: The Lakers won the title.)

It’s structured a little oddly. There’s a lot of setup about Jerry buying the team, about who they’re going to draft, about Magic fitting in, about the coaching situation. And this is always a challenge I find with true-story narratives. I know they’re going to draft Magic Johnson. I know that he’s going to be good. I feel like this show, especially early on, finds itself needing to juice things up wherever they can.

Andersen: I had the same sense. Even though I was super excited about the show, it didn’t really pick up for me until four episodes in, when they were in Palm Springs for training camp. The Jack McKinney story line, out of all the elements of the show, was probably the one I knew the least about. He’s the architect of the Showtime style of play. And the show portrays him as complicated: sympathetic in certain ways, but also kind of a jerk in others. That’s where it really came alive for me.

But, David, speaking of there being so many story lines in this show, it does seem like they don’t know what arc to pursue at the center of it, which is why I found that middle stretch of episodes, where we’re focused on McKinney and then the succession with Riley and Westhead, to be the most interesting sustained arc for me.

Newkirk: Up until Palm Springs, you’ve got, essentially, what I would say is a bunch of shorts about the Lakers. And then you get a little bit of narrative cohesion with how Showtime was actually built, which is what this season is about. And you hit all the beats: He’s a jerk. People aren’t buying into the approach. And then they realize that he’s got something there. And even as played and trite as that is, it works. It actually pulls together a story that’s not present in the beginning, but it also kind of falls apart at the end.

Sims: I’m just going to try to lay out the major story lines of the season. And I agree with you a bit, Ross. This show can’t quite settle on what it should be about. In my opinion, the Magic-Kareem dynamic is probably what it should be about. But I do think it’s just that there’s so much other stuff that it’s easy to get distracted by that they kind of flit around.

First, you’ve got Jerry Buss, played by John C. Reilly, who is the guy who bought the Lakers in 1979. There’s a story line about him building the plane in midair and trying to keep everything solvent and revamp the team. And you follow his mother, played by Sally Field, and his daughter Jeanie.

Then you’ve got Magic Johnson, played by Quincy Isaiah. His drafting; his future wife, Cookie; his sexual misadventures; his fitting into the team; you’ve got all that. You’ve got Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who’s played by Solomon Hughes, who’s sort of the established star. He’s obviously one of the most famous basketball players of all time, and it follows him dealing with the fact that he sort of hates stardom, and he has a lot of problems with the way America is.

Newkirk: Fair enough.

Then you’ve got Jerry West, played by Jason Clarke, who is a former Lakers star and the old coach, who is eaten up by anxieties and insecurities. Then you’ve got Jack McKinney, played by Tracy Letts, the new coach who has this Shakespeare-quoting assistant in Paul Westhead, played by Jason Segel, and then Pat Riley, an old coach played by Adrien Brody. There’s so much going on, and I do feel like I’m missing stuff! It’s extremely overwhelming. There’s so much going on.

Newkirk: Paula Abdul is in the show.

Sims: Yes, right! The origin of the Laker Girls is even in it. The cast is incredible, and the amount of story lines they can dip into is as well. But the issue with the first season of the Showtime Lakers is that it doesn’t actually end with Magic and Larry facing off. The Lakers ended up playing the Philadelphia 76ers in the finals, so it can’t quite do the Magic-versus-Larry arc and maybe that’s why the show couldn’t quite settle down on one thing.

Andersen: Let’s talk about Kareem a little bit. I share your sense, David, that Kareem is one of the most interesting figures in American sports. Full stop. And the show doesn’t do much with him, actually. He has a lot of screen time. He never really does anything surprising. They settle into that sort of flat Kareem-as-unapproachable-captain thought.

Sims: Right. Especially in the first half of the season, he really is quite backgrounded.

Andersen: Yeah. And Kareem is someone who’s under-dramatized in pop culture. I wanted to see more out of that and don’t feel like I got it.

Newkirk: Yeah, as much attention as they’ve gotten about not being faithful to reality, this actually felt like a point where they were not taking risks, maybe in service of not getting people upset. I feel like he’s strangely flat. And to me that does feel like a symptom of them playing it safe. With that said, I do love how he seems to be upset at even being in the show.

Sims: What about Quincy Isaiah as Magic Johnson? Magic is presented as the opposite of Kareem. He’s always smiling, he’s happy, he’s cheerful. He wants to get the whole team involved. He’s just looking to have a party.

Newkirk: I do think his acting is invigorating. What dragged me through the parts of the show that I wasn’t too enthusiastic about was that I just really enjoy watching him play Magic. And on archetypal stories that resonate: Somebody going to Hollywood, having to adjust, and getting caught up in the life is one that’s still interesting to me.

Andersen: Yeah, I thought Quincy Isaiah was pretty great. Sometimes casting for physical likeness can go disastrously wrong. I think this works really well. He does look remarkably like Magic, especially in profile. The actress that plays Cookie is also really incredible. As the season progresses, that’s where you saw Quincy Isaiah come alive, in those really intimate settings. Have you guys watched the new documentary on Apple TV+ about Magic?

It’s called They Call Me Magic. And you could tell from the title, it’s a five-hour commercial for Magic Johnson. Except, they do get pretty deep on the Cookie stuff and it makes the stuff in the show frankly look like hagiography of Magic.

Sims: Everything about Winning Time is pretty peppy. Even when it’s dealing with darker or more fraught material, it’s still a very glossy, fizzy show. Even when it’s about Spencer Haywood struggling to stay alive and stay awake on the court. Do you think they thought it was just too dramatic? Too much of a bummer?

Andersen: The full depth of Magic’s portrayal unfolds over 10 years. And a lot of the most awful stuff hasn’t happened yet, to be fair, but they show him wrestling with it in a way that I think does Magic some favors in Winning Time. Whereas the documentary—which again, oddly, the rest of it is just like: Here’s Magic Johnson, the greatest winner that ever lived—does really go deep on the Cookie stuff in a way that’s really unflattering. I watched it with my 12-year-old son who worships Magic Johnson, and he was bumming about Magic after that.

Sims: I mean, Magic is quite open about that stuff. I guess, to his credit. And the thing you’re bringing up here, Ross, that I think is interesting is that this show has come under a lot of scrutiny for, “How close to the truth is it? How much is it inflating things just to create some drama for serialized television?”

But then on the opposite end, I do feel like sports documentaries are starting to tilt toward a lot of these things being produced by the person it’s about. Even The Last Dance in 2020, which was so much fun to watch, couldn’t quite escape the fact that Michael Jordan was deeply involved in its making. It was never trying to be like: “This is the real story and this is everything.” But when you’re working with the subject, you’re going to have that kind of conflict come up. Is there a way to chart a middle path on this?

[Read: The mythos of Michael Jordan continues]

Newkirk: Yeah, as much as I loved The Last Dance, it’s totally house-approved. And the reason it was so popular is because it tells us a story we already know and we get to relive it. We get to be nostalgic for it. It’s a narrative created by his team, by the NBA, by Nike and the Jordan brand.

We got to dip into that anthology. And that was what people needed at that time in the pandemic. And I think that’s actually sort of where a lot of these documentaries—not just sports documentaries, but just the form as content—collide and merge into one. We’re basically going to be injecting it directly into our brain stems soon enough. It’s the same way with the Kanye West documentary, Jeen-Yuhs. As much as I loved watching it, it was totally approved by Kanye. He’s a producer on the thing. The footage comes very intimately from him. You get the sense that, although it does run up against the controversies, if it had gone too far, it wouldn’t have ever seen the light of day. And that’s kind of the vehicle now. It’s very effective. But I don’t know if there’s a middle path.

Andersen: Yeah, and for people who aren’t NBA heads like the people on this podcast, The Last Dance did complicate the figure of Jordan for people who had only seen him as a kind of commercial symbol of excellence their entire lives. The Magic doc just doesn’t do that. As for a middle path, we see this in our tiny little industry. Stars have their own access to social media, so it’s hard to get them to sit down for something like a really objective magazine profile. It does seem like the trend is leading there.

Sims: The magic of The Last Dance is that, sure, you have to deal with Michael Jordan being involved in producing it, but you’re going to get this trove of footage that is just so compelling that it’s worth the access, right? Like that’s absolutely worth the access. But on the other side of things, you have Winning Time, where it’s fine to compress things or occasionally insert a character who’s a composite, like these sort of docu-shows and movies do all the time.

But with Jerry West, who’s someone who has talked in very real terms about the depression he struggled with as a player and as an executive, the show has him as this loud pain in the ass who was always breaking golf clubs and quitting in front of everyone. I do feel like it has to cartoonize him a little bit just to make things a little poppier. But are we losing something in that? I don’t know. He’s alive and can go out there and say it’s inaccurate. That’s fine. I don’t think the Supreme Court is going to be interested in this case, but what do you guys make of that aspect of things? Is it trivializing or is it just kind of necessary for good TV?

Newkirk: On the one hand, it’s good TV. Well, it’s regular TV, as I described earlier. There was no way, I think, to even justify including him in the story at this point if you didn’t have this part of the arc of his character. There’s no reason to be paying attention to Jerry West in 1980. He resigns. He’s out the door. They have a new coach. It’s Showtime. That’s the beat.

And if you want to have a reason to care about him when, spoiler alert, he comes back to the Lakers in the upcoming seasons, you have to establish some reason to care about him now. And so, just from a storytelling perspective, that’s how that cookie crumbles. He’s also right to be upset about it if it’s not true to his life. I would be upset about it if they made a fictionalized version of The Atlantic and I was throwing things out of windows. I wouldn’t love it, but that’s the medium.

Andersen: I was really sympathetic to Jerry West’s claims when I’d only seen the season opener. Those episodes weren’t my sense of Jerry West. But as the season progressed, I felt like they complicated his character in interesting ways and he actually comes across as pretty sympathetic.

Sims: Yeah, I would agree. It’s the early episodes where they had the biggest problem of needing complications, when the actual complications are not that severe. Jerry’s going to buy the team. Magic is going to get drafted. Kareem is the aloof kung-fu master who no one could really understand, and Magic is the happy, smiley guy who had too much fun sometimes. And Jerry is the guy who won the MVP of a Finals that he didn’t win. He’s the eternally tortured guy who only climbed the mountain once, so I understand why they slot him into the role he’s got as a slightly more tortured guy. But it does smooth out by the end. Everything in this show kind of settles down by the end.

Andersen: I just feel like Jerry is probably mad that they haven’t fast-forwarded to the scene where he traded Vlade Divac to Vann’s Hornets for Kobe Bryant.

Newkirk: Oh, goodness, I still dream about it.

Sims: The coaching thing though, you said, Ross, is the story I knew the least. I didn’t really know about Jack McKinney, who was the coach of the Lakers essentially for around 13 games in 1979. He installed the proto-Showtime system that’s going to become how they play basketball. It’s a more run-and-gun system. And then he injured himself in a bike accident and never really came back. He recovered, but was seriously injured, so he had all these memory problems. And the tactics of the Showtime Lakers were genuinely revolutionary, so I appreciate the show digging into that.

Andersen: Yeah, that’s right. If the NBA comes up at a dinner party, one of my famous trolls is to say that Magic Johnson is the greatest player ever. And the only real argument in my quiver is that he made the game beautiful. That Lakers team made it a game of flow and movement, as opposed to locking down in the half-court, throwing it into a big man, and then swinging around Princeton-style.

Newkirk: I wanted them to make more use of Dr. J. That was my main gripe. He is truly, to me, one of the most fascinating people in NBA history. Everybody focuses on the Magic and Bird rivalry. Everybody focuses on them as the two polar opposites in the league, which is good stuff. But also, I think there’s so much to wring out of Dr. J being the stylistic predecessor for Magic and Showtime, creating this brand of basketball that was considered to be too Black for mainstream viewers at the time.

Sims: “Too flashy.” “This isn’t how you play basketball.” Blah, blah, blah.

Newkirk: Yeah, I wanted more of that.

Sims: I get that if you’re making a show about the Lakers, you want Magic and Kareem at the forefront, but I would be fascinated by something that zeroed in on the nitty-gritty of the tactical evolution that’s going on behind the scenes. What McKinney thought about had to be revolutionary to a player like Kareem who did not play fast.

Andersen: What do you all hope for in Season 2? They leave us with a bit of a bread crumb with the Kareem-finals-MVP bit. They had resolved the kind of Kareem-Magic tension so utterly before the season even wrapped that you’re like: “Oh, there’s not much to wring out here in future seasons, because these guys now have total mutual respect and are perfect teammates together having heart-to-hearts.” And so they teased a little bit of how this conflict could reassert itself in the next season. Obviously, the Celtics are going to loom large because they’re going to have their moment in the sun. We’re going to get the ascent of Pat Riley. But what do we want to see in Season 2?

Newkirk: I do think Season 2 is going to have one of the most dramatic moments in Showtime history, which is, before Riley, we have to figure out how Westhead gets out the door.

Andersen: Yeah.

Newkirk: And that’s an absolutely bonkers moment in real life. So I think that’ll be fun.

Sims: And that’s something where, in retrospect, Magic sort of took the blame at the time and now it’s seen as more complicated than people thought.

Newkirk: That’ll be fun. We’ve got two more seasons of going against the Sixers before we even get into the Celtics drama though?

Sims: I have to imagine, since they’ve ordered a second season of this show, that Season 2 is going to have to compress things.

Newkirk: The next season, I think it’s unavoidable. They have to lose to the Celtics in the next season. It has to fast-forward to 1984. I don’t think there’s any viable way to tell the story without that being in the second season.

Sims: So it’s sort of the dark season of ups and downs with the Celtics on the rise.

Newkirk: Right.

Andersen: Well, this season opens with Magic at Cedars-Sinai, foreshadowing the HIV diagnosis. Presumably they want to land there. David, you know more about the business of Hollywood than we do, and the odds of this show getting to three or four seasons. It feels to me like you could see a three-season arc where they lose to the Celtics in ’84 at the end of Season 2, they come back and have the glory of the later championships, and then they end on Magic’s HIV diagnosis, his pivot to a new life, and ultimately the end of Showtime.

Sims: I would say at least three seasons. The show has been a ratings success. It’s had the kind of numbers I think HBO was probably really thrilled with, in that it’s grown its audience over the season. It didn’t open big and then shrink. It’s actually grown. So I have to assume that indicates good word-of-mouth. And this is a big glitzy streaming show that I assume costs a ton of money to make. This thing has a huge cast with a lot of famous people in it. Nothing about it looks particularly cheap.

So I don’t know. I wonder how you get the stakes feeling clear when we know the future of this team. But I also am someone who will flick on a 30 for 30 that I’ve seen before. There’s something comforting about taking trips down memory lane.

Why the Puzzle-Box Sci-Fi of Severance Works

2022-05-08T08:00:00-04:00

At a time when the American office is anywhere a Zoom window can be opened, the notion of truly separating work and home is an alluring one. Take that thought to its furthest extreme and you have the Apple TV+ thriller Severance. The dystopian sci-fi starring Adam Scott makes “work-life balance” an actual divide in its characters’ consciousnesses; a special surgery allows them to switch between their work and home selves on their elevator commutes to and from their shadowy employer’s basement.

The show is a fresh approach to the very present anxieties about office life. It’s also another in a long line of puzzle-box science-fiction stories that leave the audience trying to piece together the rules of the game. But where Lost and Westworld’s mysterious islands spawned endless fan theories before spinning out into the wider world, Severance exists in a mercifully contained universe.

Its characters are physically hemmed in, apparently able to exist as their work consciousness only among the white hallways and spartan cubicles of Lumon Industries. They never see the sun or know anything but the workday, and they are compensated with desk toys and conference-room parties that would embarrass even Michael Scott.

Life at Lumon is an absurdist existential nightmare. And while its bleak humor calls to mind Office Space alongside its Westworld-esque premise, Severance benefits from leaning into the darkness of both influences, building a fresh critique of workplace life for our strained “return-to-office” era.

For an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review, three staff writers discussed the first season of Severance. Spencer Kornhaber, Sophie Gilbert, and David Sims talk about sci-fi dystopias, the show’s commentary on white-collar work, and what it says about the strange new landscape of streaming television. Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Spencer Kornhaber: The Apple TV+ show Severance, a dystopian sci-fi psychological thriller, has perhaps become the most acclaimed show of the year. What do you think, Sophie, as our TV critic—is it the TV show of the year?

Sophie Gilbert: I would say it is the one that has gathered the most hype over the course of its run. It was certainly the one that I’ve seen people talking about more than anything else, which in part could just be the strangeness of the show, but it’s also gathered a lot of fans for justifiable reasons.

Kornhaber: Yeah, the finale was last month, but it feels like people are still catching up on the show and still becoming obsessed and talking about it. So we’re going to try to sort through why it’s become this obsession and what it says about workplace culture today. Sophie, do you think you could explain what the heck this show is?

Gilbert: I wish I could. [Laughs.] I will try. It begins with a woman passed out on a conference table. She, and we the viewers, have no idea what’s going on. And it turns out her name is Helly R. and she has undergone a process called “severance,” which is explained through our protagonist Mark, played by Adam Scott.

They both work for a very mysterious company called Lumon Industries, which has implanted a chip in their brains with their permission. It divides their memory and perception, such that, every time they step into the elevator to the “severed” floor of Lumon, it triggers the chip and their memories reset, geospatially separating into their work and home selves. So Work Mark has no idea what his life is like outside the office. And Outside Mark doesn’t know what Work Mark does. And honestly, Work Mark doesn’t seem to know what Work Mark does either.

Whatever is happening at Lumon? There are bottle-fed goats. There are endless corridors. There is a cult of personality run around the company’s founders, the Eagan family. There’s a lot going on. And so, while it may seem that Mark has achieved the goal of work-life balance, what he’s actually done, as we see in the show, is essentially enslaved a version of himself who never gets to leave the office. I wrote about this in my review, but it’s kind of the opposite of what we’ve all gone through during the pandemic, which is work bleeding into home life.

[Read: Severance makes the workplace eerily dystopian]

Kornhaber: Yeah. It’s as if, whenever you turned on Zoom, you suddenly forgot what was happening in the kitchen you were in. David, do you like Severance?

David Sims: Yes, I love the show deeply. And I can be a bit of a grump about television these days. I think Netflix ruined television forever. But this show reminds me of the halcyon days of the early 2000s, when TV was good in my, you know, stupid opinion. It reminds me of the joyful discovery of sci-fi serials like Lost where we were all in it together trying to figure it out. The act of seeing all this creativity on-screen, chatting about it with each other, and trying to figure out what it could mean.

I can’t think of another show that’s excited me as much in recent memory. I get that feeling of: “Ooh, we get to watch a Severance!” It’s rare these days that you’re like: “It’s Friday; we get to see another one!” I just never have that feeling anymore.

[Read: Devs and Westworld mine the data dystopia]

Gilbert: It reminds you of so many things while watching it. Obviously it has Charlie Kaufman–style pieces. And it reminds me a lot of Black Mirror. And there have been a lot of shows recently thinking about free will and consciousness. There was Devs on FX and Hulu, Alex Garland’s very bleak show about data programmers. HBO’s Westworld had robots that aren’t in charge of their own destiny, and last season played with the idea that human beings perhaps aren’t either. And among the mood board of things the creators were inspired by when making Severance, there was also this five-minute-long Sizzler commercial from 1991 that we’ve all now watched.

Sims: It’s pretty good.

Kornhaber: It’s so good. It’s like the architects of Too Many Cooks and all the Adult Swim post-ironic entertainment about corporate propaganda.

Gilbert: We’ve been so worried about free will all this time and freedom was right there at Sizzler. Spencer, did you like the show?

Kornhaber: I think you are both chipped. I think this show is not that great. I mean, I hear everything you’re saying. Love the mélange of influences. Think it’s working with such wonderful, weighty media ideas. But the pacing is excruciating. Ben Stiller has never met a hallway or car that he does not want to depict every moment of someone moving through it or exiting that car. I think it’s such a wonderful concept, severance, and I wish that it explored the idea a little more straightforwardly instead of making it just a pretext for another show about an evil corporation with a shadowy conspiracy that’s trying to reengineer the human experience. But I’m glad that you both like it.

Gilbert: That’s okay. I hear you. I acknowledge the you that you are. I do think that the show in the first few episodes is kind of sluggish in pacing. The thing that set it apart for me from other shows with shadowy, nefarious corporations was its sense of humor, which is just so absurd and wacky. Lumon is such a strange place. There are goats, waffle parties, and defiant jazz. Everything is done with such perfect seriousness, and yet it is on its face completely absurd.

Kornhaber: It’s making humor out of internal propaganda and the false bonhomie that you have to have at work, the feeling when your boss tells you “We’re all family” when really they’re exploiting you. But that’s the territory of Office Space and many workplace comedies, so it felt rehashed to me.

[Read: The Netflix bubble is finally bursting]

Sims: What you’re describing was my fear. In that opening episode with Adam Scott walking through the long hallways, my wife asked, “Is this going to be one of those shows that every episode is an hour and nothing happens?” To me, that’s basically all prestige TV now. Like you have to wait for episode nine for the premise to be established. I thought this show was going to slowly peel back the nightmare, but almost immediately it’s like: “No, if this technology existed, these people would live in a nightmare from which there is no escape.” I was just thrilled that the show was about how insane a sci-fi premise this is rather than being a light satire of office culture. It is a nightmarish satire of office culture. It just escalated far faster than I thought it would.

Gilbert: And the contrast between Helly and Mark is pretty perfect. We don’t see Helly’s outside life until the finale, but we see all of Mark’s. We see his despair after his wife’s death and how his “outie” self is profoundly miserable. And what I find so intriguing in the first episode is you see him in the elevator, you hear the elevator ping, you see his eyes suddenly flicker and suddenly ... he’s free. Inside the office he’s free from this awful burden of sadness and drinking wine in front of the TV until the morning. They work so well as characters together because they’re coming from opposite perspectives. For one, severance is an absolute torture. And for the other, it’s an escape.

And there are a lot of weird shows that you’re just never going to get answers in, like Twin Peaks or The Leftovers. There are theories and hints but you basically have to let the mystery be. And with Severance, I really do feel like there are answers and you get enough of them throughout the course of the first season that you can have faith that one day you will find out what’s going on.

Kornhaber: But isn’t this a trap that we’ve fallen into before? These shows never pay off. It gives me a lot of Westworld vibes where this technology seems like a limited application at first, but then these overlords are there, thinking about how they’re going to change everyone on Earth with it. I hope they pull it off, but we’ve seen so many times before how this is just not a sustainable mode of storytelling.

Sims: You’re describing the experience of Damon Lindelof shows like Lost or The Leftovers. But I take Severance creator Dan Erickson at his word when he says he’s got an ending. The problem with Lost was the island had everything on it. And so it became this very difficult task of: How on earth do you tie the polar bear to the Egyptian statue? You’ve just thrown everything into the blender. How could you possibly create a grand unified theory here? Whereas with Severance: There’s a company. They’re up to no good. Now we know a little of what they’re up to and we’ll learn more next season. It does feel a little more focused to me.

Gilbert: This show says so many things about late capitalism and our experience of work as mandated by large corporations with boards that tend not to see humans necessarily as individuals with complex personal lives and interiority, but as a vast, amorphous pool of workers to be drawn from as need be. It’s really fascinating to me that this show is airing on Apple.

Sims: This show is really making fun of Apple.

Gilbert: There’s a cult of personality with a founder.

Sims: Everything’s all white and retro.

Gilbert: There are things that feel directly drawn from real things big tech companies have done to their employees. It’s so subversive in such an intriguing way. And you definitely don’t expect to find something like this, necessarily, on Apple’s streaming platform.

Kornhaber: Yeah, how is Apple doing in the streaming race?

Gilbert: I myself may be guilty of this, but I remember when Apple TV+ launched, there was such a sense of like: “Who needs another streaming platform?” We made jokes about it. In Season 2 of The Morning Show, the fictional network launched a streaming platform and the reaction is: “Not another one! This is too much TV!” And when Apple launched, it didn’t have the back catalog that Netflix or HBO had. There was no preexisting Apple content. So the shows that it launched with were the shows that you got when you signed up.

And the first flush of shows that it came out with were not super compelling. But then came Ted Lasso, which I think now is everyone and their dad’s and their mom’s and their sister in-law’s favorite comedy. And now the new shows coming out, like Slow Horses, which is the Mick Herron spy adaptation with Gary Oldman, are really well crafted. And it does make the case for Apple as actually, if you’re into quality television, one of the most successful streaming networks out there right now. I don’t know what that says for it in terms of its success financially. David, maybe you know more about that than I do.

Sims: When Apple TV+ started to get off the ground, they brought in Richard Plepler, who worked at HBO for 27 years and is one of the big architects of what we think of as HBO’s golden era. In the late 1990s through the 2010s, they really emphasized a new HBO show as being an event. They didn’t flood the zone. HBO would usually just have a new episode on Sundays.

But it was real water-cooler stuff. Everyone you know would be discussing it the next day. The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, True Blood. Boardwalk Empire, The Newsroom, Veep, Big Little Lies, True Detective—all this kind of stuff. And he moved on from HBO when it got sucked into the corporate structure of AT&T and they wanted to do lots more. HBO Max is going to have lots of shows and try to imitate Netflix.

And I feel like Apple TV is now trying to slide into that space where an Apple show is an event. It’s this very glossy, impressive star-laden product that is going to come out weekly and is going to be much discussed. Now, has that worked yet? I think in bits and pieces. The Morning Show was so star-laden that it definitely had some moments where people were talking about it. Then I feel people fell off in the second season. But then Ted Lasso and Mythic Quest were these surprise small-scale comedies that became buzzy. And Severance feels like one of the first ones where friends of mine are asking about it and it’s spreading through word of mouth.

[Read: HBO CEO Richard Plepler resigned. Here’s what it means.]

Gilbert: I think the quality-versus-quantity argument is a really interesting thing to consider. Because I do think HBO used to be very distinctive in what it green-lit and what it put on television. And now it feels much more like there’s just a bunch of stuff on HBO Max. I think it’s kind of depending on the idea that people will log into HBO Max like they do with Netflix and just browse for shows, whereas Apple seems to be picking its content more selectively. And it doesn’t entirely always pay off. But you are also getting shows like Severance and Ted Lasso, which I think many people would agree are worth paying money for. The thing is though, I’m not sure if it’s a sustainable financial model for any company other than Apple, which has all the money in the entire world to throw at content.

Kornhaber: And meanwhile, David, you just wrote about how Netflix is starting to deflate.

Sims: The whole magic of Netflix is this company that spends wildly and borrows money wildly and keeps expanding wildly with this promise that they’ve always made to their investors that the numbers of subscribers are going to just keep going up. And since that has basically been true for 10 years, the argument has made a certain sort of sense. And now, after just one quarter of their subscriber numbers going down a little bit, it’s burst the weird reality bubble around that company.

And now I feel like everyone in the industry within Netflix and outside of it is having this reckoning moment where it’s: “Oh, okay, so is that not the strategy anymore? Are we not all just going to try to flood the zone with television to keep up with everyone else?” I mean, it’s a podcast unto itself what’s happening with Netflix right now. But I agree, maybe a more curated approach is best. But like Sophie says, it does help that Apple is worth so much. Netflix doesn’t sell phones.

Kornhaber: Do we think this show has anything new to say about the workplace?

Gilbert: I’d say it does, just because the workplace has changed so much in the last few years. With Slack and the tyranny of always being online—just a phone beep away from something horrible that you forgot to do at your job. And the information we’ve recently learned about the ways in which big corporations treat employees and keep tabs on them in strange ways.

Sims: The whole thing has the vibe of every corporate horror story you’ve heard about, just dialed up.

Gilbert: The nature of the office comedy or the workplace drama hasn’t really changed. But at the same time, everything is just so much higher tech now. There’s so much more information and data than ever before. And in that sense, I think this show is brilliant. The idea of bifurcating your brain kind of neatly gets at the idea that you are two selves. You are your work self and you are your free self.

I very much love my job and find creative fulfillment in it, but there are still pieces of this that resonate, if not necessarily with me, then with the idea that we’ve all felt during the pandemic that companies want to own more of you than just your 9 to 5. The broader experience of what work means, what a career means, what a job means has been slightly tweaked in ways that we’re still coming to terms with. And so you see these pieces about burnout and professional malaise and everyone just being exhausted all the time because it feels like, for a lot of people, work never ends. There’s no delineation anymore between when you’re doing work and using that part of your brain and when you’re not. And now I will go and watch three hours of TV for work. [Laughs.] Just kidding. Wine. Wine is my delineation. When you have a glass of wine, you know you’re no longer at work.

Kornhaber: I think we’re really in for a turbulent chapter of history if we no longer believe work provides any meaning in people’s lives and is just a reason to get a paycheck.

Gilbert: Well, I don’t think Severance is saying that. I think it’s more like an attempted corrective to the narrative that we’ve had for the last few decades that work is everything. It’s your identity; it’s your friends circle; it’s your meaning as a human being. I don’t see Severance as pushing a message that we should all quit and go start subsistence farms upstate or whatever. But I do think it’s an interesting reminder to be slightly more aware of what we ourselves have come to accept about work.

The Northman’s Surprising Twist on Male Heroism

2022-04-30T08:00:00-04:00

In the director Robert Eggers’s brutal $90 million Viking epic, a prince seeks revenge on the uncle who killed his father and married his mother. If the plot sounds familiar, it’s because the Scandinavian source material of the legend of Prince Amleth was also the inspiration for Hamlet. And like so much of Shakespeare’s work, the story has been told and retold across centuries. The iteration in The Northman achieves a kind of feral animal violence exceeding even the version starring lions. It’s also a film that uses that mythmaking in unexpected ways.

Like in his prior films The Witch and The Lighthouse, Eggers marries bleak historical realism with matter-of-fact fantasy. Characters inhabit a world of both period-accurate hardship and mythical threat—be it witch, mermaid, or simply the divine power of Viking vengeance. This blend serves to ask the question: What happens when the heroism of legend confronts the reality of its time?

The Northman’s unsentimental portrait of Prince Amleth answers with a twist that serves to undermine the particular heroism of masculinity in all its self-righteous violence across legend.

The movie joins a minor recent trend in reevaluating medieval tales with historical context, especially those whose male point of view occludes the reality of the time. Movies like The Green Knight and The Last Duel also dissect masculine heroism to great effect, and books such as Lauren Groff’s Matrix recenter the women of the era.

Staff writers David Sims, Shirley Li, and Sophie Gilbert discuss this trend on an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review. (They also have a lot of fun attempting to summarize the growling, barking, farting madness that is the plot of The Northman.) Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for The Northman.

David Sims: Today we are here to talk about The Northman, the new Robert Eggers movie that opened in theaters this past weekend, the $90 million art-house Viking epic from the director of The Witch and The Lighthouse. How to describe this … our producer Kevin wrote, “Shakespeare for people who love CrossFit.” I thought that was funny.

Shirley Li: (Laughs.)

Sims: Everyone is indeed in very good shape. My takeaway from The Northman is that I would not be able to keep up with these guys. But how else do you expect to row across the North Sea? You’ve got to have a really engaged core. (Laughs.)

The Northman is based on the legend of Prince Amleth, a famous Scandinavian legend that is the loose inspiration for Hamlet. And it follows the same basic beats to the extent that our editor, Jane, when she was editing my review of the movie, noted that it sounds like Hamlet or The Lion King. And I was like, “Amleth is literally Hamlet.”

It’s about a young princeling of a Viking kingdom in the late ninth century and early tenth century. He is the son of King Aurvandil, played by Ethan Hawke. And just as Amleth is getting his rite of adulthood, his father is killed by his Uncle Fjölnir, played by the Danish actor Claes Bang. The boy flees, vowing revenge against the man who killed his father and married his mother, played by Nicole Kidman. And the film is about two hours of Amleth stewing and preparing for his glorious vengeance. Its tension is in whether he’ll be diverted from this track, or is it his ultimate destiny? He’s made himself a creature of revenge. Is he going to pull it off? And of course Willem Dafoe’s shrunken head is there. He fights the skeleton at one point.

Li: (Laughs.) I feel like we’re doing a disservice to this film even trying to describe what happens in it.

[Read: The Northman is an unsentimental portrait of a hero]

Sims: I should say: This is, like, my favorite movie of the year. I love this movie.

Li: Yes, I do too. I feel like we should just be grunting and barking to explain the film.

Sophie Gilbert: We should be drinking horse blood at the bottom of a cave. (Laughs.) I mean, this is the interesting thing: Clearly the people who made this movie are fascinated with these Viking myths, and I am interested in why. Like, what is the point of this story of ritual blood drinking, blood smearing, disempowerment, decapitation, and death for everybody?

Li: I don’t know, Sophie. Don’t you ever get the urge to be feral and earthy and magical? My interpretation is that Robert Eggers has been cooped up for a while and he got a lot of money to do what he loves doing, which is treat historical texts and myths with absolute zeal and make everything onscreen almost tangible. You can almost smell how dirty everything is, or taste the blood and the smoke in the air. It’s grimy and it’s dirty and I don’t know if there’s a point aside from the maximalism. I mean, the last movie he did was about two guys cooped up in a lighthouse, and it also blurred the lines between myth and reality. This is the space that he likes playing in.

Sims: I’ve interviewed Robert Eggers. He is the kind of guy who wants to know what kind of spoon a Viking ate soup with. He’s obsessed with the most minute detail. It would be easy to make a Viking movie with guys in big horned helmets drinking and yelling at each other. It could be Hägar the Horrible, right?

Li: Or Thor.

Sims: Right, we’ve had a lot of pseudo-Scandinavian myth in our superhero films for quite a while now. And The Northman isn’t trying to convey a nastier, grittier Viking story; it’s trying to tell these kinds of tales with a little more respect and context for the actual world that they are talking about and not just making it the cover of a heavy-metal album.

Li: Yeah, I realize we’ve been laughing about it a lot, but Eggers also takes it completely seriously.

Sims: But in a good way.

Li: Exactly.

Gilbert: Though this is not a film that contains humor.

Sims: Yeah, it’s pretty light on the laughs, which is interesting because The Lighthouse is pretty much a straightforward comedy.

[Read: A man moves into a lighthouse. Strangeness ensues.]

Li: I find The Lighthouse hilarious.

Sims: And I don’t think that’s a mistake. It’s kind of a weird romantic comedy between those two characters. But this film is more reminiscent of his earlier film The Witch, which felt like a story a Puritan was telling me about a family that left town and got messed with by witches. It’s not a metaphor or a nightmare. There’s a witch out there in the woods. And The Northman seems to have a similar straightforwardness to it about Viking times. There are moments of fantasy where he fights a skeleton, and you’ll see it’s maybe a little inflated in Amleth’s head, but it’s a movie where magic and gritty warfare are kind of on the same playing field.

Gilbert: It is a little disconcerting to see this while we’re in the middle of this huge war for no reason in which, you know, tens of thousands of people are dying. It just feels like we really haven’t evolved.

[Read: Robert Eggers discusses how The Witch became a story of Thomasin's female empowerment]

Li: The film isn’t an overt celebration of the violence, though. It points out how stupid it is.

Gilbert: It’s just kind of matter-of-fact. Nihilistic, almost.

Sims: I would say it has a bit of a point of view. Amleth goes off and becomes Alexander Skarsgård—a dream we’ve all had—with time flashing forward to him being this super-ripped warrior raiding coasts and putting villages to the sword. And he finds out his uncle and mother are living in Iceland, no longer kings of a vast kingdom but a farm, essentially.

Gilbert: Kind of a comedown.

Sims: He’s spent his whole life plotting his glorious revenge and honing himself into a living weapon and all that. And he finally gets there and there’s a sense of, What was it all for? So now I’m going to kill a farmer? And he tries to rescue his mother and she’s like, “Your dad was annoying and I never liked him. And I totally encouraged your uncle to kill him. And I’m better off, so go away.”

Li: (Laughs.)

Sims: Like, “Thanks, not interested.” And so there’s nothing particularly powerful about what he is eventually enacting, except that he pulls it off. There is a hollowness to his fate. And I do think Eggers is interested in the push and pull between whether you have to do what you’ve spent your whole life wanting to do, or [whether you can] diverge from your path. And he comes down on the side that we’re mostly stuck on these tracks.

Gilbert: I think one of the reasons I didn’t love The Northman is I’m just exhausted with masculinity running wild right now. It’s not the same time period, but I kept thinking about it in congress with a book about medieval nuns in the 12th century, called Matrix. To me, that is the exact opposite of this movie. It’s similarly dank, chilly, and mired in mud. It’s set in England. It’s cold and freezing and gory, but it’s an island of women. The author, Lauren Groff, wrote it after Donald Trump’s election because she was exhausted by the spectacle of masculinity every day, everywhere you go.

She wanted to imagine this matriarchal community. And it’s really fascinating to think about it next to The Northman, which has these men fulfilling their manly urge to rape and pillage and conquer and stab. And then, in Matrix, you have these women thinking about how they heal. I would recommend reading it, but it did highlight for me the issues I have with the, shall we say, slightly toxic masculinity at the core of this movie.

Li: Masculinity: It’s directionless!

[Read: A conversation with Lauren Groff about her writing process]

Gilbert: We’ve made it this far without getting into his mantra. No one has said it once. And my favorite thing about The Northman was that after I went to see it, Shirley sent me a message that was three sentences, all in caps: “I WILL AVENGE YOU FATHER. I WILL SAVE YOU MOTHER. I WILL KILL YOU FJOLNIR.” (Laughs.)

Li: It’s a great mantra, but there are limits to it. You go from being a princeling to being Alexander Skarsgård and you think it’s all you want. And then the reality hits you and you don’t know what to do, so you just start pulling pranks on this farm.

Sims: Right, the opening has this little Viking bar mitzvah with Ethan Hawke, which is a lot of fun. It’s all trippy and weird and Willem Dafoe is there. And then the end of the movie is the big showdown. But the middle of the movie is this weird, ambiguous section because Amleth does seem guided by mystical fate. He’s seeing visions of Björk telling him where to go. He fights the skeleton to claim a magic sword. And he talks to Willem Dafoe’s head, which is obviously a reference to Yorick.

But at the same time, when he’s on that farm with his uncle and he’s pretending to be an enslaved person while trying to get the lay of the land, I’m immediately just thinking, What is gained by you trashing this place? Essentially, you’re going to kill a bunch of randos. What is your purpose here in this place?

Li: Yeah, he doesn’t have direction, really. He has three things in mind, but that’s not enough. Masculinity is not enough. On that thought, should we talk more about the medieval films of the past year?

Sims: I do feel like The Green Knight and The Last Duel, even though they’re hugely different films, are both trying to recontextualize life in these worlds. They’re trying to give it a little more than just the usual costume-drama treatment. The Last Duel especially is very much about how medieval courts in France had these preening egos and how warfare, when seen from another perspective, just seems ridiculous and pointless. It’s a really good movie.

Li: I really like The Last Duel. We talked a little bit about it on an episode last year. We haven’t talked about The Green Knight, but I like all three of these films. They’re all playing in the medieval space in ways that you don’t expect.

Gilbert: I like this trend. I know I’ve been talking rather boringly about books, but what do you think is the interest driving creatives to think about the medieval era?

Li: I think there’s an interest in these time periods and genre because we’ve been living in a world where rules don’t feel like rules. And medieval times, for better or worse, functioned by rules. There was a way to be honorable and there was a way to be decent. And it was all spelled out in black and white. And there’s something appealing about playing in that world.

Gilbert: Can we talk about Nicole Kidman? Because this was a part of the movie that I genuinely loved.

Li: I mean, she’s the main twist, right? Like, past that confusing middle section, she ties everything back together because she proves that one of Amleth’s target goals was futile the whole time. She doesn’t want to be saved. I love this Kidman performance. This is the Kidman I want.

Gilbert: It’s very iconic.

Li: It is. It’s Queen Nicole doing her thing.

Gilbert: And I do love that she and Claes Bang actually seem perfectly matched as this very hot, ageless couple living on a farm, not being sad that her ex-husband and son are gone.

Sims: When we see Ethan Hawke as the king early on, we’re seeing him through the eyes of this little boy who idolizes his dad. And Ethan Hawke is fairly inherently lovable, but when Nicole Kidman gives this big monologue later in the film, it’s not hard to look at him in a different light: “Right, of course a Viking king might not have been the easiest hang in the world. Like, that guy who’s always going off and conquering other towns may in fact have been a fairly unloving husband.”

Gilbert: This was the moment I particularly appreciated, because there’s the implication that she herself was enslaved, and then she bore him a son so she became his queen. She was raped by him, this paragon of kings, as he’s held up at the beginning of the movie. And there’s been a lot of this kind of historical reevaluation in fiction, particularly as it transcribes to myth.

There have been a lot of books recently telling the story of the Trojan War from the women’s point of view, which is not one that Homer truly paid that much attention to. There’s been this sort of this trend in reimagining, say, Achilles from the point of view of the women who were raped and enslaved.

And The Northman’s take on this was not subtle. It’s not done in a lot of textual depth. But it was such a good twist. It’s a really good subversion of this otherwise very standard masculine tale.

Li: I’m not familiar with the original epic transcribed by Saxo Grammaticus in The History of the Danes, so I don’t know how accurate this adaptation is, but it is Shakespearean in its DNA.

Sims: Absolutely, though Gertrude in Hamlet is not quite so nakedly happy to be married to Claudius. She accepts it, but there’s ambiguity in Hamlet as to what the situation is there. Because obviously, you’re with Hamlet through the whole play and—God love him—he’s a bit of a nutter, to use an English-ism. It does seem like part of the thing that’s driving him crazy is that he can’t understand why his mother would put up with being married to his usurping uncle.

Li: Yeah. Nicole Kidman’s character is not a complete copy of Gertrude, and Anya Taylor-Joy’s character, Olga, is not a copy of Ophelia.

Sims: Yeah, though there’s a mirroring that does happen. And Olga is the character who offers him a path from his fate. She and Amleth fall in love and are on their way to the Orkney Islands to raise a family together. And there’s this moment where he realizes she’s pregnant and he has a vision of his children as part of this family tree he’s hallucinated before.

And he’s like, “You know what? As long as my uncle is alive, we’ll always be in danger. I got to go.” That’s his excuse. He leaves her and he goes off to fight his uncle. And, spoiler alert, they both kill each other in an epic volcano fight. But I also think he has the sort of subliminal self-awareness that he’s just like his father. He’s only good for one thing. And at the end of the movie, when he’s dead, you see him entering Valhalla on a goddamn Pegasus, and he’s so happy.

And, watching this movie, I enjoyed it the whole time, and I found myself choking up. Like, he did it! The crazy bastard did it! He got to Valhalla; he got what he wanted. And it’s kind of the only fate he could have, even if it’s entirely in his head and he’s actually just a corpse melting on a volcano.

Gilbert: He lives on in legend.

Li: I do appreciate that the film does make a point not to cast him as the hero. His mother is not happy to see him. He’s directionless. He ends up finishing his revenge and you’re like, Oh, man, this fool. If you take away from this film that he’s a hero and the idea that he’s powerful, you’re missing what the film is saying about the foolishness of this endeavor.

Everything Everywhere All at Once Is Multiverse Storytelling at Its Best

2022-04-23T09:00:00-04:00

What’s better than a Marvel Cinematic Universe? A Marvel Cinematic Multiverse. Once limited to theoretical physics and comic-book plot conveniences, the notion of a multiverse has been an essential tool for Hollywood. Whether it’s a role that’s been cast and recast, a franchise character that gets a spin-off when the larger story ends, or simply a reboot telling a new story without upending its origins, the answer to any big movie problem is often: multiverse.

Despite being filmmaking’s crutch du jour, the idea of a multiverse is also at the center of one of the most heartfelt and ambitious movies of the year. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a runaway critical and commercial hit, but its success doesn’t stem from how it dials up the reality-bending. It comes from how it manages to use the trope to tell a much sillier and much simpler story.

The film follows a Chinese American family making their way through mundane, messy problems. Evelyn (played by Michelle Yeoh) runs a struggling laundromat and faces an IRS audit. Her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), is sweet, if a bit distracted, but he’s unhappy in their marriage. And their daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is growing distant as her parents fail to include her girlfriend in their lives.

But what begins as family drama rapidly becomes absurdist action comedy. Using an alternate reality’s “verse jumping” technology, the family members find themselves fighting with fanny-pack nunchucks, encountering Ratatouille-style raccoon chefs, and playing the piano with their feet (because they have hot-dog fingers, of course). The essential magic of the movie is that the ridiculous multiverse plot is in service of the everyday story.

Every choice, big or small, is an alternate reality unto itself. Everything Everywhere All at Once succeeds by spinning those choices out to the furthest logical extremes. What comes back is a surprisingly affecting metaphor, one that’s discussed in depth on an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review.

Listen to Shirley Li, David Sims, and Spencer Kornhaber in conversation about the film here:

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Shirley Li: This film arrives in an era of the multiverse-as-plot-framework with all the Marvel films and shows. After Endgame wrapped in 2019, multiverses abound in shows like Loki and WandaVision, and movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

So we’re used to the multiverse as fan-service franchise building, but what EEAO does that these superhero movies don’t is that it uses the multiverse as metaphor. For the immigrant experience, for the chaotic what-ifs of our lives.

Spencer Kornhaber: How much of a multiverse boom are we actually in? Because the word multiverse feels very current, but the idea of there being multiple realities goes far back to works like The Twilight Zone. I personally wrote a piece five years ago about how multiverses were common across pop culture at the time, with Westworld, The OA, and Stranger Things.

David Sims: Yeah, the multiverse is how you explain that both Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck play Batman, right? Comic books publish for decades. Things change, new writers come in, and things get revamped. It’s how you explain everything.

But as this multiverse concept has gone on long enough, it becomes acceptable to sell to audiences that Tobey Maguire is going to get to shake Tom Holland’s hand in a movie. If you told me 10 or 20 years ago that that was going to happen, I would have considered it too nerdy or inscrutable for a mainstream film, but families go to see it and it makes sense to them.

What I like about how Everything Everywhere All at Once treats the multiverse is that it’s the road-not-taken idea. They obviously had a lot of fun creating these windows into silly worlds with the hot-dog-fingers stuff and whatnot, but the thematic purpose is really effective. It’s that feeling anyone’s had of: “What if I hadn’t married this guy?” Or “What if I hadn’t taken that job?” If you could jump right into that body and find out, that’s an appealing and scary and dangerous and dramatically weighted concept.

[Read: Everything Everywhere All at Once is a mind-bending multiverse fantasy]

Kornhaber: The remarkable thing about the structure of this movie is that, however wild its channel-flipping, it’s essentially working you through a logic problem about the point of life. The characters’ lives feel like a problem to them. And it gives you different hypotheses for how the universe works. You have the villain, the fabulously outfitted Jobu Tupaki, who’s also Evelyn’s daughter in other universes. She represents nihilism. She thinks that she’s seen every single possible thing that happens in the universe. And so nothing matters; why not just suck us all into a vortex and get it over with?

And then it swings around to something more hopeful and redemptive. It’s almost crude how it works, circling around these essential emotional questions, but nonetheless it feels comprehensive and convincing. And when you arrive at that synthesis moment—which comes in the form of Michelle Yeoh throwing googly eyes at all her enemies and hugging them—that’s when the dam broke for me. Life is about fighting with silliness and just having a good time or whatever. It does seem trite for the answer to be love, but the movie makes the most sweeping case for it. It’s just astonishing to me.

Li: It’s a film that has something profound to say, but it doesn’t say it in a pretentious way. I think that’s what caught us all off guard. David, what did you take away from this movie?

Sims: I was very charmed by it. I had liked Swiss Army Man, the first film by this directing team called Daniels, made up of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. My biggest takeaway here, though, was what strong affection I had for the leads, and how bowled over I was by those two performances, especially Quan. He’s a performer everyone knows, but obviously not someone we’ve thought about in a while. He hasn’t really acted for many years, and I was so stunned to see him give this incredibly heartfelt and expansive and clever and funny performance. And then, obviously, Michelle Yeoh is a wonderful movie star who I adore.

As I got further from the movie, I also appreciated it as sort of a good fleshing-out of how a lot of people feel right now, like we all have attention-deficit disorder after being locked up for so long. That’s maybe trite or facile to say, but I do understand that feeling of being unable to concentrate or feel settled these days. And it was sort of amazing how this movie captured it.

Li: The benefit of making a film with these insane visuals is that you can go a little corny. You’re hedging that point by saying that it’s facile, but the movie’s only able to make that work because it’s using raccoons and hot-dog hands and butt plugs. (Laughs.) Spencer, I’m really curious what you thought of the movie.

Kornhaber: Well, I didn’t like it. Because it made me cry. And I don’t like feeling that way. [Laughs.] No, I loved it. It provoked a strong emotional reaction in me, but it took me a little while to get into it. It starts on a really small scale. It feels like a dramedy about this family running a laundromat and the generational disconnect between the parents and their daughter, Joy, who is queer.

And at first, it seems like a somewhat familiar generational-clash indie movie—tolerance, acceptance, immigration, etc. And then the wheels start coming off. More and more psychedelic things start happening, and there comes a point where you’re just like: Wait, this movie is doing something similar to a lot of things I've seen, but I’ve also never seen anything like this before.

It goes to places of absurdity and extremity, but also sweetness and sentimentality and darkness. It’s this vortex that draws you in, swirls you around, and spits you out at the end to say: “That was fucking awesome.”

[Read: How Hollywood’s weirdest filmmakers made a movie about everything]

Li: Has Everything Everywhere All at Once expanded what multiverses can do in a film?

Kornhaber: It’s the kind of movie that no one else would dare to make, because it’s sort of a basic exploration of the idea: It’s not set with the backdrop of a dystopian world like The Matrix. It’s not about some superhero meta story or whatever. There’s not even the rom-com twist like in Sliding Doors, the Gwyneth Paltrow classic. This movie takes it in every direction, but still manages to tie it in a bow.

Sims: As a comic-book fan, I’m so used to the notion of parallel universes. But I’ve always been dismissive about them for that reason, because it’s often a way to justify resurrecting someone or having some kind of cute adventure. Sure. Jean Grey died, but we’ll just get the Jean Grey out of this universe! And this movie is a little more thoughtful in how it’s reckoning with all that. And so I appreciate that.

Li: David, you mentioned the Daniels’ previous film, Swiss Army Man, which was one of the strangest films to come out in recent memory. What can you tell us about the directors?

Sims: They’re originally music-video guys. They’ve directed a lot of music videos, including the incredible “Turn Down for What” video, which Daniel Kwan also stars in. But Swiss Army Man was a Sundance movie that everyone at the festival was like: “Did you know there’s like a farting-corpse movie at Sundance this year?” It stars Paul Dano as a guy who washes up on an island. He finds a corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe and starts communicating with it and using it like a Swiss Army knife to survive and escape the island.

When you describe it, it sounds patently ludicrous, but if that actually translates on-screen and works visually, you can see how that would be compelling. But it’s tough to go this high-concept and then figure out what to do next. And what they did with Everything Everywhere All at Once was double down on everything people like about them. It’s heavy on world building. And much like Swiss Army Man, it’s trying to arrive at this intimate, emotional conclusion. Everything that I’m describing is not easy to do, but if you do it well, you’re going to become the kind of cult sensation that this movie has.

Li: I think my favorite joke is indicative of why this film works. I love the universe with “racca-cooney,” the one built off of Evelyn misremembering the movie title for Ratatouille and then pushing it so far that there is in fact a universe that exists where a raccoon manipulates a chef like the rat in Ratatouille.

Kornhaber: It is such a perfect example of what is genius about this movie. There’s that throwaway joke midway through that you enjoy, but then they do a callback to it as an actual universe. Because that’s at the root of the movie: Every single thing you think of that could happen is happening. You think it’s just a funny callback, but as the movie progresses, you see an actual story line in that world and, by the end, you are cheering and shouting for the way it resolves. It’s a beautiful moment. This little tangential thought could spiral out for a whole movie if it wanted to. It’s ridiculous, but the Daniels manage to make it work through personality and visual panache.

[Read: Everything Everywhere All at Once is a masterpiece]

Li: The core conflict in this film is Evelyn not being able to cross the generational barrier and accept her daughter Joy as queer, or, to borrow Jerrod Carmichael’s language, to love without that “despite.”

Sims: It’s her relationship with Joy and her own regrets for the choices she made in her own life. That’s what’s being reflected in her story: She’s being tantalized with this idea of what if you had done X or Y. Emigrating from China. Starting a business. Having a kid.

Li: Thinking about why it resonates so much with me, there’s so much detail in this film that is very specific to the Asian immigrant experience. In one scene, the grandfather played by James Hong suddenly speaks perfect English. (And he’s the one Evelyn is afraid of revealing the fact that Joy is gay to.) In that moment, it underlined something for me about the film that I don’t know if viewers necessarily pick up on, which is the idea of the multiverse as a metaphor for code-switching. And not just code-switching, but the different worlds that you and your family exist in.

The more I think about this movie, the more I think about the space that my grandparents exist in right now. They’re locked down in Shanghai, and I can’t communicate with them the way that I want to.

When we talked about Turning Red last week, we made a point that there are a number of films about Chinese immigrant families in North America right now. And I made a joke that there are too many, because that’s naturally where we, as Asian immigrants go: We’re making too much noise. Don’t notice us. But it’s wonderful having a lot of these stories. It pushes against a bruise you’re perhaps vaguely aware of. And in moments like these, you wish there really was a universe where I spoke perfect Mandarin and my grandparents spoke perfect English.

The movie is also wish fulfillment, right? Right? The Alpha Waymond is a martial-arts master. He also brings it back to the pandemic for me. You can’t just label variants other Greek terms. You have to move on to terms that sound like Elon Musk’s children’s names, a Universe BA.2 maybe?

Kornhaber: (Laughs.) You’re making me think about the booms in dimension-switching multiverse movies and shows. There was a crop of them that came up around the 2016 election, and the common thing to say about them was: “Oh, we all feel like we’re living in a simulation now.” Something happened in the world. Reality is broken.

But the interesting thing about this movie is: It’s less about something happening in the world that shoved us all into a different dimension. It’s more about how personal choices create these different dimensions. And the immigrant experience in this case is a perfect vessel for exploring that idea because it really honors the choice to create a better life. That’s the bet being made when someone uproots their life and moves somewhere else. You’re entering a different world, but there’s always uncertainty about the life you left behind.

The Post-villain Era of Animation

2022-04-15T07:00:00-04:00

Few characters are as strikingly memorable as a classic Disney villain. Sleeping Beauty’s haughty sorceress, Maleficent; The Little Mermaid’s operatically campy sea witch, Ursula; The Lion King’s melodramatically evil Scar—each one so charismatic they tend to obscure their movie’s protagonist. (Quick: What is the princess’s name in Sleeping Beauty?)

But despite their prominence in classic films, animated villains have slowly disappeared from screens over the past decade. Recent movies such as Turning Red and Encanto certainly have drama, though instead of defeating a cackling evildoer, the main character now typically has an internal battle made external. The conflict in both films involves a broken relationship with a loved one, made cinematically epic by way of magical metaphor. Turning Red, like The Little Mermaid before it, arrives at its climax with the antagonist blown up to kaiju proportions. But while the 1989 Disney movie ends with behemoth Ursula skewered on a ship, the 2022 Pixar film finds its dramatic peak in a quieter moment of mother-daughter understanding.

Animation didn’t do away with villains all at once. Early iterations in the trend, such as Frozen, had classically good-and-evil setups, but subverted them as the films went on. And with Moana and later films, children’s animation shed predictable tropes of hero/villain plotlines while also centering cultures that don’t have much representation in the depths of the Disney vault.

Turning Red is the latest and certainly among the most culturally specific animated works. While films such as Raya and the Last Dragon create fantasy-pastiches of cultural context, Turning Red follows a real 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl living in Toronto in 2002—who just happens to turn into a giant red panda sometimes.

Spencer Kornhaber, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz discuss Turning Red and the state of the animated villain on an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review. Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for Turning Red.

Spencer Kornhaber: This week, we’re talking about Turning Red, the latest Disney/Pixar release. It’s been out for a while, debuting on Disney+ about a month ago, but we wanted to talk about it because, well, there’s been some discourse around the movie. It’s had an odd kind of staying power. It’s doing well in the streaming numbers. And also, I think we all kind of love it and want to just fawn over it. It’s really a remarkably specific animated film. It’s about a Chinese Canadian 13-year-old girl living in Toronto in 2002.

All Meilin Lee wants to do is hang out with her friends, go to a boy-band concert, and, most importantly, make her somewhat overprotective mother proud. Then one day she wakes up and she finds out that she turns into a giant adorable red panda whenever she loses control of her emotions. As director Domee Shi put it: “The panda is a metaphor for magical puberty.” Shirley, what did you think of Turning Red?

Shirley Li: I love this movie. It is absolutely a film about magical puberty, but it’s about many other things, too. The first time I watched it, I was surprised by how wonderfully it pulled off all these different elements. One is the coming-of-age puberty element. Another is the specificity of a Chinese Canadian 13-year-old and what her life is like. And there’s also the element of dealing with parents.

I walked away from this film really impressed by how well it juggled all of it. I went in incredibly stoked for Domee Shi. This film is her debut, and it makes her the first woman to direct a Pixar feature. She’s also the first woman to direct a Pixar short: her Oscar-winning film Bao, which played in theaters before Incredibles 2.

Kornhaber: It’s about an edible dumpling child, right?

Li: It is about a steamed bun that becomes an anthropomorphized child to this mom who’s suffering from empty-nest syndrome. As a director, Shi has really quirky ideas and draws from a lot of different animation styles. I was really excited to see what her first feature film would look like, and when I saw the animation for the lead character, I got really worried because she looked exactly like me. (Laughs.)

Lenika Cruz: (Laughs.)

Li: And she’s obsessed with pop culture, or an element of it. And it really felt like, maybe in all these years of asking to be seen on-screen, maybe things went too far. And here is this embarrassing rendition of who I am. (Laughs.)

Cruz: Really embarrassing for you. (Laughs.)

[Read: What the controversy over Turning Red misses]

Li: Anyway, that’s where I was coming from with this film. And I could gush all day about Domee Shi. I think she’s such a genius. She is fearless about creating a fearless character with unabashed primal energy in this teenage girl, and pulling from all these different visual styles. It’s pushing what a Pixar film is.

Cruz: I, too, love this movie. It’s super funny. It’s sweet. It gets at the emotional realities of being a 13-year-old girl. When I heard that it was going to be set in 2002, I was like, Oh no, this is going to tap into a time in my life when I was just so earnest and embarrassing. But at the same time, I feel like, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less embarrassed of myself at that age. This movie made me think a lot of PEN15, which I know some of us are big fans of, not just because of the cringey, embarrassing element, but also because, while it’s funny, it doesn’t make fun of what it’s like to be that age and be so full of excitement and uncertainty and enthusiasm.

It gets at the psychological depth of kids at that age. And so I liked that this was a film that wasn’t at all making fun of teenage girls or the things they love. And, Shirley, I actually hadn’t seen Bao when it first played, but I watched it in between my first and second viewings of Turning Red. And even though I knew I knew what would happen, I was still in tears by the end. And you do notice the similar themes to this movie, where you have this mother character who clearly really loves her child and wants to spend all her time with them, but once the child starts breaking off to go on their own, the protective instinct turns dangerous. There’s an edge to it, where the mother wants to do anything to keep her child close, even if that means maybe hurting them.

[Read: Pixar’s Turning Red has the cleverest take on puberty]

Kornhaber: This is a movie that is so, so funny and so charming, because it’s about being extra. It’s about going into the red in all these different ways. I was so taken with it from that very first stretch of narration, where the voice actress who plays Meilin, Rosalie Chiang, is basically shouting her lines. (Laughs.)

She monologues in this kind of stentorian “I am a 13-year-old, but I am basically an adult and this is what I like, and this is what I don’t like.” And my reaction was: I know this girl. I recognize that she’s not an adult. She’s a child, because she is able to express herself and is completely authentic in this over-the-top way. Because what is childhood other than an escalating experience of becoming more and more playful and imaginative … and then running into this wall of puberty where other people start to notice you as an autonomous creature in the world and start to make you feel embarrassed about who you are?

And, in this movie, there’s also this other layer of that brought by the parents, who have their own experiences in life that caused them to get across this idea that you need to watch yourself, to quiet down, and to be careful about how you present to the world. But unfortunately, there’s a family curse that turns you into a gigantic red panda if you aren’t able to control your emotions. And there’s also a magic ritual to turn you into less of who you really are.

The other thing I love about this movie is that it’s completely unpredictable to me. I did not feel prepared for every story beat in the way I’m used to with movies where a villain is defeated. And it does feel like we’re in this moment where children’s animation at least is really far away from the movies that we grew up with.

Li: Yeah, Disney+ released a documentary called Embrace the Panda about the making of Turning Red. And in it, Domee Shi talks about how she didn’t necessarily start with the idea to make a movie about a Chinese Canadian 13-year-old, or to make a movie about dealing with an overprotective mother, or anything like that. She started with just thinking that red pandas were cute and wanting to illustrate them.

And as she learned about red pandas, she learned that they’re quite individualistic, that they eat bamboo even though it doesn’t provide nutrients for them. So she imagined them like a lazy teenager eating chips and sleeping all day. And so she applied a story to it, and found red pandas to be a good metaphor for something she wanted to explore more of. And maybe that’s why the film has its own sense of discovery. She didn’t approach it with a story in mind. She didn’t begin with a heroine and a villain. She just started with the fact that red pandas are really cute, and she wanted to draw them! But this film does fit into a recent spate of Pixar films where there isn’t really a tangible villain: Encanto, Raya and the Last Dragon, Frozen II.

[Read: The flawed fantasy world of Raya and the Last Dragon]

Cruz: Yeah, even a movie like Moana has a plot that’s harder to predict, because there wasn’t an obvious antagonist. Moana wants to save her island. In Encanto, they want to save the house. And then in Turning Red, she wants to go to a concert, but still make her mom happy as this obedient daughter.

And I guess we should set up how the panda is first triggered, because the mom doesn’t expect it and doesn’t prepare her for it. Meilin basically sees a cute boy one day and, after denying to herself that she thinks he’s cute, she finds herself at her desk absentmindedly doodling pictures of him. She gives him biceps and a cute smile, and suddenly she finds herself drawing these sexy drawings of her crush. And then her mom finds the drawings and doesn’t once think that her daughter might actually be enjoying them. She assumes her daughter is being victimized in some way and goes off to embarrass her by confronting the boy. It’s the most embarrassing scene ever.

Kornhaber: Even hearing you describe it hurts.

Li: I’m sweating, just hearing this. (Laughs.)

Cruz: I know! She draws him as a merman. It’s like everyone’s worst nightmare, no matter how old you are. But then, that night, she goes home and tells herself to push all of this down and not disappoint her mother again. She starts berating herself in the mirror. And this is one of the first moments where she’s aware of these desires being stigmatized, something she needs to control and contain and bury. And she wakes up the next morning, and—poof—she is the cutest, biggest, fluffiest red panda. And that’s kind of where the trouble begins.

But what I was surprised by was: In a lot of transformation stories, the fact of the transformation itself is a problem that lasts for most of the film, and I was shocked by how quickly it went from being a secret to being something that she just kind of went with. She’s making money at school taking pictures with people. It goes from being embarrassing to being celebrated so quickly. And I really liked that. If turning into a red panda is a metaphor for puberty and growing up, the movie didn’t treat it as something that the entire world looked at as bad. It was mainly her mother’s idea of how she should be.

Kornhaber: I’m so sick of narratives where, the whole time, you as a viewer are stressed about the protagonist’s secret coming out. There are so many movies like that, and I was concerned this movie would follow that path—but there’s such a relief when her friends join her in the secret and it becomes a totally different kind of movie, where you use your superpowers to have fun.

Cruz: Yeah, it feels so much more realistic to how, if one of your friends were to turn into a giant panda, that’s what you would do. (Laughs.)

Kornhaber: It’s a movie that has conflict, but it’s not gut-wrenching. The real conflict is just: How do I be myself, but also keep my parents happy? She’s a straight-A student. She’s always done what she’s told. That incredible cringe moment you mentioned, Lenika, where the mom marches into the convenience store and confronts the 17-year-old boy Meilin had a crush on— what teenager would not fly off the handle over that? But that’s part of the specificity of this movie. In this family, she really will not say one negative word to her mom. And that’s another way in which it’s telling a story that is less rote than you expect but, I also imagine, true to how a lot of people have lived their lives. It’s certainly true to what appears to be the case for her mom.

Li: Yeah, what’s so special about this film is that all of these supernatural elements work because the rest of it is so specific and rooted in the real. It can borrow from anime visuals and make her eyes go all sparkly when she sees her crush, but at the same time, this is a story that’s not taking place in a fantasy world. It takes place in Toronto in 2002. She has a core group of friends that I think a lot of viewers could see themselves being a part of. And the real conflict, even though there are supernatural elements, is being unable to communicate with a parent.

Something a lot of people have taken away, and something specific about this film, is that the immigrant experience does come with this feeling of needing to live up to your family’s expectations. They’ve sacrificed so much to make it over here. You better do your job and be a perfect child, or else you are disappointing not just your parents, but your entire lineage. But the film is also really just about not being able to communicate with your mom.

Kornhaber: Yeah, it really does feel like a companion piece to Encanto, the other huge Disney streaming hit this year, which is set in Colombia but is also about a family with supernatural powers that are undergoing a crisis that is ultimately resolved by communication and understanding and compromise. It really is a remarkable crop of movies. They’re not slaying a dragon. It’s doing something much more subtle and real. Why do you think Disney is trying to make movies like this right now? Or, rather, why does the culture want these movies? Because they are hits.

[Read: The biggest reason “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is a hit]

Li: I think there are a couple of different factors at play. The first is that Frozen was such an unexpected hit for Disney—and it was a hit that actually retooled the villain story line that we were talking about. Elsa was supposed to be the scary, wicked queen who runs her ice castle away from Arendelle, but the story got retooled to be about sisterhood, with Elsa not as this big bad, but just someone who can’t get a handle on her powers. And, of course, that’s a story beat we see in later Disney animated films.

Frozen was such an unexpected smash hit—but at its core, it is about family. It didn’t have an explicit villain throughout, and I think Disney started tapping that well because they saw how popular it was. Along with that, I think there’s been a push in recent years for more culturally specific stories. There’s been this recognition of culturally specific stories as universal and resonant and, rather than something to be avoided, something that has an audience.

And as animators at Disney and Pixar started recognizing that, they turned to writing those stories and green-lighting those stories. And, behind the scenes, there’s been more female leadership. And because of that, there are more stories that I think women storytellers realize haven’t been told as much. When you think about it, teenage girlhood isn’t really often depicted in stories for children, even in stories for adults.

Kornhaber: What did you make of this movie’s portrayal of someone who’s the child of immigrants? Because I just saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, the incredible science-fictional, multiverse-tripping, make-you-cry-and-barf movie that is currently shaping conversation—and it’s also about a Chinese immigrant family.

[Read: How Hollywood’s weirdest filmmakers made a movie about everything]

Li: I just had this conversation with a friend where we were like, “Are there too many? Is it weird that there are all these Millennial stories about immigrant children?” And this friend of mine was like, “This is the most Asian-immigrant thing we could be saying right now, asking if there’s too much and if we should stop.” (Laughs.)

That said, I do think Asian casts and Asian storytellers have been finding their moment recently. And I don’t mind there being a wave.

Cruz: I’m happy that we have gotten to this point where representation can be a small part of a bigger conversation. For a little while, it felt like every time there was a movie that starred protagonists of color, there was a reaction like: “Ooh, representation! Is this going to fix Hollywood’s diversity problem?”

And it feels like the tenor of the conversation has changed a lot. These movies are super popular despite the complaints that they would only resonate with certain kinds of people. In Turning Red’s case, there was the viral review that said this movie was just made for the director and her immediate family. But the fact that so many people are watching it is proof of the opposite.

Kornhaber: Do movies like this mean that we’ve moved past being able to talk about actual villains in our culture? There are real Scars and Jafars out there. (Laughs.) Is it that, as these stories move into these more real-world stories, it would be politically dicey for Disney to try to identify who are maybe the villains in real-world scenarios? Or at least it would be a bit dark and disturbing?

Cruz: It makes me think a little of the discourse around Zootopia and how people were trying to draw these clear political parallels, but it just wasn’t so easy. And I feel like that was maybe the closest we’ve gotten to people reading into these films. I think Disney and Pixar maybe don’t want to make antagonists that correspond too closely to real life. Especially in these more culturally specific stories.

Li: Yeah. And I don’t want all future animated films to eschew villains. I think there’s a place for an all-out meanie, especially if it brings back those excellent villain songs.

Kornhaber: Yeah, the villains are some of the best things in children’s entertainment of years past.

Li: I do think the idea to complicate certain villains is a good one. Instead of having the mother be all-out terrible, encouraging kids to think about how their parents view them and what their parents were like as children seems positive. But there are also other stories that don’t require developing sympathy. I’m thinking of the live-action Cruella, which we definitely didn’t need.

Kornhaber: Yeah, we love a lot of old Disney villains, but the company has famously had this tendency for creating queer-coded villains. Whether that’s Ursula or Jafar or Scar, the baddie is usually someone who’s kind of campy and of marginal identity. And if these movies were made now, it’s almost impossible to imagine them getting away with not presenting that character’s side of the story a little more, showing whatever traumas cause them to be just so devilish. And honestly, I understand the impulse to move away from opening that can of worms. It’s a lot more about conquering your inner stuff and working things out with the people around you.

Pop Music’s Nostalgia Obsession

2022-04-08T17:32:33-04:00

The Grammys have always been more than a bit old-fashioned. The ceremony typically consists of exciting new artists covering the songs of yesteryear, interspersed with awards going to established acts over those same exciting new artists. But though reforms at the Recording Academy, which hands out the awards, have led to better representation in recent years, this past week’s Grammys renewed debate about whether they’re still too stuck in the past.

Few artists have dominated a year of music the way Olivia Rodrigo did 2021. Her song “Drivers License” had such a rare crossover pop appeal that Saturday Night Live had a whole sketch about how well it had connected with unlikely audiences. Many expected this past week’s Grammys to be a coronation for Rodrigo. And while she had a few key wins, some of the biggest trophies went to more throwback sounds. Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year went to Silk Sonic and Jon Batiste for soul albums that are magnetic but also undeniably retro.

It’s not just the Grammys though. Modern music as a whole is going through a nostalgic phase.

What explains our love of throwback sounds right now? Are we comfort-listening through hard times? Or is the industry just finally able to see (and monetize) a type of listening we’ve always done?

Spencer Kornhaber, Shirley Li, and Hannah Giorgis assess the state of pop music following the Grammys on an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review. Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Shirley Li: In case you didn’t see, the 64th Grammys were this weekend. There were some surprise wins and some possible snubs, but we wanted to check in on music in general this week on the podcast. Spencer, the last time you and I talked about music on this podcast, we were talking about how pop music was in its breakup era.

It was all big, cathartic emotions. Adele’s latest album had just dropped, and it was dominating the charts. Taylor Swift was going through her rerecord phase. Billie Eilish was Happier Than Ever rather than playing the “Bad Guy.” And, of course, Olivia Rodrigo was the story of 2021 with the ballad “Drivers License” and her subsequent single-spawning album Sour. But the story of the Grammys wasn’t really about all that catharsis.

There seemed to be a theme to the evening that’s run throughout recent pop music, and that is nostalgia. The Grammys have always been kind of old-fashioned, but even the big artists themselves have been in a nostalgic phase, and we saw that over the weekend. Spencer, where did we see nostalgia on Sunday night?

Spencer Kornhaber: Right, a lot of people expected the Grammys would be the evening of Olivia Rodrigo, who is 19 years old and mostly unknown—except for viewers of Disney TV programming—prior to her song blowing up in 2021. Sometimes people think that music has no future and no new ideas, that we’ve stopped making culture-uniting pop stars.

And Olivia comes along and she’s like: “What if we had a Disney Channel star who grew up listening to Taylor Swift and emo music, with a really good pop sensibility and who’s really good at social media? What if this is the next sound in pop music?” And everyone was like: “Yes, let’s do that. That sounds great.”

Li: (Laughs.)

[Read: Olivia Rodrigo's Sour demystifies the breakup album]

Kornhaber: And so this year’s Grammys were expected to be a kind of victory lap for Rodrigo. And they were, sort of. She won Best New Artist, which is a big prize. But she didn’t win Record of the Year, Song of the Year, or Album of the Year. Those prizes went to artists who make pleasant, throwback, wedding-ready soul music.

And I want to tread lightly here because I do not want to come for Bruno Mars or Anderson .Paak of Silk Sonic, who are very talented musicians and put out a hilarious single with “Leave the Door Open,” which won Record and Song of the Year. And I don’t want to come for Jon Batiste, an amazing jazz pianist and bandleader who—besides also being a great guy and the music director of The Atlantic—won Album of the Year.

But it was a little surprising that this kind of very familiar sound, the sound that you could have heard at the Grammys or really at any point in the last 50 years, was what won out over arguably more vital and dynamic and innovative artists like Olivia and some of the other nominees. And that was a little deflating for some people, but also: Grammys are going to Grammy. (Laughs.) What did you think, Hannah?

[Read: How Jon Batiste’s Album of the Year win broke Grammys expectations]

Hannah Giorgis: You know, I thought for the first time in a while, it did actually feel like music’s biggest night. (Laughs.)

Kornhaber: Really?

Giorgis: Yeah; I mean, nostalgically, yes, in the sense that you had this big, sweeping performance from Olivia Rodrigo, you had a few things gesturing toward pop music of now and of the future, but the night also tied in music that’s palatable to people across multiple generations.

Li: I agree with you both. It is really hard to judge all of music and package an awards show that appeals to everyone. You have someone like Lil Nas X take the stage doing “Industry Baby” and then you’ve got Lady Gaga doing her 1940s cosplay. You’re trying to hit all the beats, but when you look at the Grammys as a whole, there was certainly a preference for Silk Sonic. They had wrapped the previous year’s show and they opened this year’s show. But if we zoom out from the Grammys, there’s also been a lot of nostalgia in the sound that we hear.

It’s interesting that we can talk about Olivia Rodrigo as a new, shiny pop star, but she is also borrowing a lot of the sounds from her past. And if we look at the other pop stars on the scene, they’re similarly borrowing from the past. Dua Lipa, for instance, is in the middle of a disco revival. And so I wonder whether the two of you agree that nostalgia is shaping the biggest hits of our current era.

Kornhaber: It’s a perennial debate in popular music, but it’s become a little more pronounced this year. There’s been a number of artists in this super explicit retro phase. For instance, The Weeknd came out in January with this impeccable concept album about, basically, dying in a car crash in 1984 and living in the radio station of that moment. It’s excellent, and it’s completely pastiche.

And you’re right; I was just saying Olivia Rodrigo is so innovative, but if you listen to her single “Good 4 U,” it’s so close to Paramore’s “Misery Business” that they had to give the band a writing credit. I was just listening to it, actually, and the very last seconds of the song have the exact same guitar stabs as Green Day’s “Brain Stew.” Her music is absolutely this pastiche of things we’ve heard before, but on the other hand, that is what pop music always is!

What’s maybe different right now is that, due to streaming, we are very aware of how much people are listening to what they’ve always listened to. Perhaps it feels like there’s a bit less of an appetite for the new, though. Are you feeling that in your own life, Hannah?

[Read: Is old music killing new music?]

Giorgis: Definitely. I also don’t drive anymore, so all the time that I’d normally spend organically discovering music by virtue of New York DJs is gone. Radio doesn’t occupy as big a place in people’s music diet as it used to. And so, when you listen to Olivia Rodrigo now, [you’re on streaming where you] can immediately listen to Paramore after and get stuck on their albums. It’s a very different way of discovering music. I also think we’re seeking out the familiar during a time when we’re all perhaps still actively seeking comfort.

Kornhaber: And streaming has done something similar to Hollywood, hasn’t it? There’s an appetite for comfort-viewing and for rehashes.

Li: Right. When it comes to television and film, companies are trying to keep you in their streaming libraries by showcasing their previous hits. Audiences have a warmth toward something they’ve seen before. It’s safe watching.

I want to mention Jon Batiste’s speech from Sunday night though, when he said music “reach[es] people at a point in their lives when they need it most. When a song or an album is made, it almost has a radar to find the person when they need it the most.” It’s a profound statement, and it almost goes against what we’re saying about streaming pulling us into our old habits. What’s out there finds us when we need it.

Kornhaber: Yes, and this March, Steely Dan found me.

Li: (Laughs.) But going off of that, I did want to ask you specifically about Batiste’s win. What did you make of it? Was it the Grammys Grammy-ing again, or does it capture a moment that we’re feeling?

Kornhaber: Well, the album peaked at 86 on the Billboard charts and Rolling Stone only gave it a one-sentence review. It wasn’t this momentous thing in the musical discourse. But Batiste is a fixture. He’s on TV every single night on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which tons of people watch. He did the soundtrack for the Pixar movie Soul and won an Oscar for it. He’s a good industry guy. He plays instruments. He leads a band. There’s a lot of reasons for why the general body of the Recording Academy, which is made up of other people in the music industry, might see his name on a list of 10 people and say, “I like that guy the most,” and vote for him.

There’s also a structural factor. This year, the Academy expanded the nomination pool to 10 nominees, which is a lot of people. And what it means is that you have someone like Olivia Rodrigo, who perhaps seems like the consensus pick, but is competing against Billie Eilish and other Grammys favorite Taylor Swift. And the three of them are going to split a lot of votes because they appeal to similar sensibilities. And when you go down the list, you see a couple of different acts that may cancel each other out.

Someone might vote for Doja Cat, or maybe they’ll vote for Lil Nas X, but you’re not going to get the plurality because they’re both competing against each other. And so vote-splitting may help explain some of Jon Batiste’s win, too, and there’s no scandal in that. But you end up with this slightly older-style, not really in-the-conversation album winning, which is something that’s happened again and again in Grammys history. But it’s not his fault.

[Read: Lil Nas X isn’t a fad. He’s the future of pop.]

Li: That’s so interesting. So to win a Grammy today, a supernova like Olivia Rodrigo might not have the advantage you’d expect next to, say, more of a north star like Jon Batiste. And that’s not a knock against him.

Giorgis: Spencer, you called him “one of the most visible working musicians in America.” And it’s not just that he’s on late night and that he did the music for Soul: I’m curious if the Academy sees something particularly valuable in awarding someone who’s so publicly working and putting the hours into the craft in a way that we don’t necessarily see as vividly or as clearly with someone like Olivia Rodrigo or Billie Eilish.

Kornhaber: Yeah, it’s an old-school idea of musicianship. He literally presses the keys on a piano and creates sounds that move through the air. And that’s different from Olivia and her producer laying down tracks in a studio. And it speaks to how it takes time for people to adjust their rubric for the work going into a lot of pop music, but also other genres such as hip-hop, which has always struggled at the Grammys. People often don’t understand that the musicians in those genres can be working just as much as Jon Batiste, who they see on TV every night sweating it out.

Li: Yeah, it’s a bit like how we honor acting, where these big, histrionic performances tend to be the ones that get Oscars because that’s what we think is capital-A Acting. It can be hard to explain the subtleties that go into an actor’s work. But if you’re seeing someone actively plinking on a piano, that’s a display of musicianship that’s different than just stepping up to a mic. I think that’s probably why Justin Bieber, after his performance at the Grammys, was crying.

Giorgis: (Laughs.)

Kornhaber: Well, he cries a lot. You don’t know why he’s crying.

Li: (Laughs.) I was just wondering if maybe he was like: I finally showed them!

Kornhaber: (Laughs.) I mean, that performance is hilarious. It’s the song “Peaches,” which is a sex metaphor about eating peaches. It’s also about smoking weed and getting the hot girl. It’s this laid-back R&B-inflected song, but he did it on the piano so slowly, it was like he was singing a Celine Dion song. But that is the Grammys. That is pop musicians trying to create this aura of respectability so that they can be seen as traditional working musicians in addition to these celebrity supernovas.

Giorgis: And it’s particularly incredible because Justin Bieber has had a following for what feels like forever now, but that’s a TikTok song! That’s a song that found the majority of its footing with people consuming it on TikTok. And that’s not necessarily a knock against it. There’s plenty of music that comes to me from TikTok. But there is a particular dissonance to seeing him sit down with that level of drama to perform this little TikTok jingle.

Li: Especially when TikTok capitalizes on your short attention span, and here he is extending it as long as possible. But going off of that, what do you think the reputation of the Grammys is today? Has it changed because the Academy did expand its membership?

It was trying to break the mold. And, if you look at the results this year, the big four winners were people of color and there were some breakthrough winners and nominees.

Giorgis: I mean, they managed to feel less irrelevant than usual, which I know is a pretty tepid endorsement. It’s true that we didn’t see Olivia Rodrigo win awards people thought that she was going to win, but it’s also a show that finally honored Jazmine Sullivan, where we got to see BTS do this incredible, delightful performance!

Li: Yes! Where they took off their suits and used them as air guitars!

Giorgis: Right! And I have trouble imagining that happening in 2017 or 2018. Maybe that’s me having a bias against those years from this distance, but they did feel a bit different. It felt a little fresher. The moment when Megan Thee Stallion and Dua Lipa were getting ready to introduce the Best New Artist award and did that “Oh, you’re in the same outfit as me” thing. I was like: “Oh, this is 1998. This is Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. And also we’re doing it in Megan and Dua’s young, boisterous way.” But I don’t know that I’d say the Grammys as an institution is kind of barreling toward the future. More of a slow crawl.

Kornhaber: The deal with the Grammys is that they’re this notoriously hated institution because they have, over and over again, just completely missed the ball on awarding what was the most significant and historically memorable album of that year. And this goes way back. I was just reading Variety asking “Was 1992 the Worst Grammys Ever?” because that was the year that Natalie Cole’s album [of 40-year-old songs written by her father, Nat King Cole] won Album of the Year. Nirvana’s Nevermind wasn’t even nominated.

Fast-forward to 2008—which was the last time a Black person won Album of the Year—and that was Herbie Hancock’s album of Joni Mitchell covers. I’m sure it was musically luminous, but it seems a lot less significant in retrospect than Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. And that’s happened over and over again. And so there’s that track record that it’s always going to be fighting against, which you can’t really say that it shook off this year.

But the other thing about the Grammys is that it was run for a long time by the same group of dudes. And one dude in particular, Ken Ehrlich, had produced the show since 1980 until two years ago. All those years of ceremonies with bizarre mashups of artists, of young musicians covering 50-year-old songs, of Elton John performing with Eminem or J.Lo doing the Motown tribute for some reason—all these weird Grammy-specific performances that make you ask: “Why am I seeing this instead of, like, actually the song that defined this year?” For me, that was mostly from Ken Erlich chasing these Grammy moments. But really, we’re in a completely new era now.

Li: The Grammys have been criticized over the years for being nostalgic, as has pop music in general. In this very publication, our colleague James Parker wrote a piece in 2011 saying: “Our obsession with musical nostalgia is strangling pop.” And in January, we also had a piece from Ted Gioia that asked: Is old music killing new music?

Kornhaber: Yeah, that piece got a lot of attention online. He presented data showing that, in the past two years, listenership for catalog songs, i.e., songs older than 18 months old, was outpacing listenership for new songs. And that’s a shocking statistic that people extrapolated a lot from. But one thing it represents is that streaming is allowing us to quantify the things that we were listening to already.

And so, for example, when I listen to Steely Dan’s “Black Cow,” that goes on the ledger in a way that it wouldn’t have gone on 10 years ago when I was just listening to it on CD or vinyl or whatever. There’s also this very noticeable trend of reissues, remixes, sampling—very overt interpolation of old hits going on in the charts.

It’s a tough thing to talk about because the only things that ever succeed in pop music are a blend of novelty and familiarity. That’s the case in all sorts of arenas, but it’s especially true in pop music. You can only iterate a bit on what’s been done before without going into the realm of being too experimental, too far off the curve or too indie to catch the ears of audiences. I mean, when you get obsessed with a new song, it’s not because that song confused you.

So it has to really be on that edge of old and new. But we’re definitely in a moment where we’re very aware that we have these playlists of songs that we all listened to at summer camp in 1998 that we’re going to keep returning to. And that’s being reflected back to the industry and where they are trying to monetize it.

Why The Dropout Succeeds Where Other Scammer Shows Fall Short

2022-04-02T07:00:00-04:00

A familiar voice opens the latest episode of The Dropout, Hulu’s series about the fall of the infamous blood-testing start-up Theranos: “You founded this company 12 years ago, right? Tell them how old you were.” It’s former President Bill Clinton, praising the company founder and figurehead, Elizabeth Holmes, as played by Amanda Seyfried. “I was 19,” Seyfried replies in Holmes’s near-parodic baritone, to a wave of admiring laughter and applause.

Clinton isn’t played by an actor. It’s the actual former president. And he isn’t the only one on tape praising Holmes, with Seyfried there as digital stand-in. Then–Vice President Joe Biden also gets screen time, wisecracking about the innovative wunderkind. Even Charlie Rose, the since-disgraced interviewer, appears beside Seyfried, his trademark black background mixing with Holmes’s all-black wardrobe to make her appear almost Oz-like as a floating head.

By using real tape of the three men, The Dropout doesn’t just remind us of how close Holmes was to the arbiters of power in America. The show blurs the same lines the founder herself did.

What is fact and what is fiction? When does fake-it-until-you-make-it become simply fraud? And as that fraud is sold as a Silicon Valley fairy tale, where do the boosters of a hopeful mission become complicit in hurting people?

Holmes’s interviews with Clinton, Biden, and Rose were all in the summer of 2015. By October, though, she and Theranos were reeling after The Wall Street Journal reported that the company’s technology simply didn’t work. Seven years later, Holmes is awaiting sentencing after conviction of fraud.

The Dropout isn’t alone in chronicling scammers these days, though it’s perhaps the most compelling and nuanced entry in the genre. Three other recent shows with star-studded casts follow wealthy grifters from the 2010s: WeCrashed, starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as the WeWork founders; Super Pumped, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Uber’s Travis Kalanick; and Inventing Anna, featuring Julia Garner as the fake socialite Anna Delvey.

Why are these stories dominating our screens right now? And what does this moment reveal about American culture? Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Shirley Li discuss while recapping what they’ve appreciated about The Dropout:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Sophie Gilbert: We are here to talk about The Dropout. The Hulu series stars Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, the infamous tech company that crashed rather famously starting around 2015 and was revealed to essentially be a multibillion-dollar fraud. But that isn’t the only scammer show on television these days. There’s Apple TV+’s WeCrashed about WeWork’s husband-and-wife founders Adam and Rebekah Neumann. There’s the Showtime show Super Pumped about the rise and fall of Uber’s founder. And of course, there’s Netflix’s Inventing Anna about the socialite scammer Anna Delvey.

Why are we so fascinated with the rise-and-fall, scammer narrative these days? And what do these shows reveal about American culture at the moment? Before we get into that, though, let’s start with The Dropout. Megan, could you remind people a little bit about who Elizabeth Holmes is and what exactly happened to Theranos?

Megan Garber: Theranos was a blood-testing company that Holmes founded in 2003 which, at its peak, was valued at $9 billion. The company’s product was devices they developed—or, as it would turn out, claimed to have developed—where they could run more than 200 diagnostic tests with, as one of the taglines went, “a single drop of blood.”

A big part of the mythology of Theranos had to do with Elizabeth Holmes herself. She founded the company as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout and was quickly hailed as a business icon. She was treated in a lot of places as the next coming of Edison or Tesla or Steve Jobs. But in 2015, The Wall Street Journal came out with a really damning article that Theranos’s central technology simply did not work. And the company, both as a business and as a myth, fell apart. Holmes and the company’s COO, Sunny Balwani, were indicted for fraud. Balwani’s trial is actually taking place right now, and at her own trial two months ago, Holmes was convicted of fraud. She’s currently awaiting sentencing.

Gilbert: A long time ago, I watched the Alex Gibney documentary on Theranos, but I don’t think I was fully aware to what extent it was a complete and utter scam from the beginning. And so I appreciated The Dropout’s elucidation of that fact, while also appreciating the fact that it’s created by Liz Meriwether, who created New Girl. It’s a lot funnier than I was expecting! Shirley, what did you think of the show?

Shirley Li: The Liz Meriwether factor is also something I love about it. Some review called Elizabeth Holmes an “adorkable” character, much like Miss New Girl herself.

Gilbert: Oh no. (Laughs.)

Li: But what did I think of the show in general? When I first started it, I didn’t find it as compelling as I would find it later in the season, especially in relation to all of the other scammer shows. For one thing, it is really busy. Just listening to Megan try to sum up what happened with Elizabeth Holmes … There’s so much there. But as I watched all of these other shows at the same time, I liked The Dropout more than I thought I would. It had a good balance between focusing on Elizabeth Holmes and on the impact this company had, which is something a lot of these other scammer/start-up-culture shows often miss in favor of highlighting the founders.

[Read: The comedies that understand what Peak Scammer TV does not]

Gilbert: I’ve had an uneasy feeling watching The Dropout—in large part because of Amanda Seyfried’s performance—of liking Elizabeth more than I should. And I think it brings up a question, which is: Do these kinds of shows risk glamorizing the scammer and the art of the scam? Did you have that feeling with any of these shows?

Li: I felt that way about Inventing Anna. The show kept putting her in a wardrobe that was more put together than the real Anna Delvey/Anna Sorokin, whereas I feel like The Dropout did a better job of keeping [Holmes’s] hair looking not quite together and her costuming just a little bit frumpy. She wasn’t glamorous. We were projecting something onto her.

Gilbert: That’s a really interesting point about Elizabeth Holmes in this show. She didn’t style herself as such an obvious construction by herself. She was told by other people that she needed to be that to be a success. And so in some ways, she’s less transforming herself to sell an image than she is trying to fit an image that she’s trying to sell.

[Read: Netflix's Inventing Anna writes a check it can't cash]

Li: In the case of all of these figures, they had a vision of themselves as something: Travis Kalanick wanted to be an asshole, wanted to create bro culture at Uber. He slicked back his hair. He creates an image for himself. Anna Delvey certainly had an impression of what she wanted to be. Elizabeth Holmes went in thinking that she could follow the playbook of all of these other college dropouts before her—she thought she could just dress as casually as Mark Zuckerberg, and if she followed that playbook, people would respect her. She had to be told that there’s a double standard for women. She’s clever enough to follow a new playbook once it’s presented to her, but she did not come up with this persona on her own until she realized that there was another one that she should be exploiting instead.

Garber: When we say Elizabeth Holmes, do we mean the character as presented on the show or do we mean the real-life character? One of the things that’s so interesting to me about these shows is that the lines between fact and fiction really are blurring together. The creative decisions made with these shows so often seem to live in the aesthetics of melodrama and camp. But they’re taking these stories that happened in real life and with real victims and real people.

That was such a big part of the Theranos reporting when it first came out. They were inflicting their lies on real medical patients, and that was part of the outrage. And so we’re talking about these real-world stories, and yet we’re watching them rendered as styles that are as far removed from reality as possible. So you’re seeing these shows play out as melodrama and everything feels hyper-real and larger than life and a little bit cartoonish. And obviously, that was intentional on the part of the creators. But I also wonder what it was intended to do and what it was maybe intended to skirt a little bit, because when you put this real story in the realm of camp, you’re letting yourself kind of have it both ways. You’re telling the true story and you’re capitalizing on the interest in these news stories, but you’re also giving yourself freedom to just do whatever you want to with the narratives in question.

Li: These are people who succeeded off of the images that they sold, images that got amplified through magazine covers and wishy-washy awards about breaking the status quo or the glass ceiling or whatever. And then their downfall has yielded even more stories being written and reported. And then it all got filtered back to Hollywood, thus tethering them further to the narrative of celebrity. It’s odd when a show makes me feel like I’m supposed to be rooting these people on but also condemning them at the same time.

What I appreciate about The Dropout is that the show does have a heightened kind of humor to comment on how weird Elizabeth Holmes is, but also how weird start-up culture is. And as the show goes on, it gets a little bit more somber and becomes less about her awkward social skills or how weird Silicon Valley is. It ultimately gets to a point where it’s not just about her; it’s about the impact.

[Read: The scams are winning]

Gilbert: With so many companies with so many scams, celebrity is really inextricable from success. “Fake it ’til you make it,” right? And perhaps Theranos was only as successful as it was because of the kind of mystique around Elizabeth Holmes, which urges questions about giving these people television shows. Inventing Anna has a Martin Shkreli character! (Laughs.) Are we adding to the pile? Are we risking further giving scammers a high profile they want?

Garber: It’s hard because the point of so many of these shows is that these quaint divisions we have between reality and branding fade away at a certain point. I found myself thinking about this book, The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova, which is fascinating. It’s all about the history and the psychology of scammers. And she points out that confident people tend to particularly thrive in times of turmoil, times of disruption, times when people feel especially vulnerable and unsettled. Scammers will often feel the need that people have to feel reassured, to feel that the world is coherent and whole and sensible. And through whatever lies they choose to tell, they will give that sense of security.

And so these are also questions of vulnerability and precarity. Part of why we’re seeing such a flood of these shows right now—even though, like you said, Sophie, we’re also creating it, too, by being audiences—is because we have this other blurred line between producer and consumer now. And these scammer shows are flooding us all at once because they get at these questions of why the world in general feels precarious and uncertain. They’re trying—sometimes with mixed results—to interrogate those questions and acknowledge that kinetic sense of uncertainty that viewers feel.

Gilbert: For a lot of these shows, the period they focus on is the Lean In early 2010s, the moment of Sheryl Sandberg and the “girlboss.” We had this slightly baffling, girlboss adaptation of Cruella at the end of last year, which really harkened back to a theme that I think we hadn’t thought about for a while, which was this idea of the high-achieving, burning-people-in-her-wake heroine who was was lauded in the 2010s as sort of the archetype of female success. Three of these series have women at the center: Julia Garner plays Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna. Anne Hathaway plays Rebekah Neumann in WeCrashed, and Amanda Seyfried plays Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout. So let’s unpack this. How do we feel about the girlboss now? Is there anything left to root for?

[Read: The cowardice of Cruella]

Li: The girlboss identity is certainly a deeply flawed one. And you see through these series and the real-life stories they’re based on that the people who were able to exploit that narrative were people who already had a leg up. The girlboss identity was something that white wealthy women could exploit. And they could tell themselves that what they were doing was furthering modern feminism.

And I think something that’s been interesting about these shows—even if they convey it in ways that are better in some shows and worse in others—is the idea that all of these women and all of these other scammers had messiah complexes because they were rising at a time when people really believed that if you never quit, if you leaned in, if you got over your imposter syndrome, you could succeed.

Gilbert: The thing that we have seen more recently—after the time period these shows are set in—is the rise of influencer culture. When you talk about the backlash to this specific brand of feminism that the girlboss movement enshrined, it made me think about Kim Kardashian’s recent comments, which were vilified very quickly. She was interviewed about being an entrepreneur and she said: “Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” And the response was, shall we say, not generous. (Laughs.)

She is a woman of enormous privilege and beauty. She comes from her wealthy family. Obviously, she’s had hard moments in her life, as everyone has, but it felt a little dismissive of all the women who are working “effing hard,” shall we say, without the benefits that she had. And it’s fascinating to me to see the backlash to that image so quickly, because it was something that anyone could have said 10 years ago and not had the same response.

Li: It shows that the women who are able to become girlbosses already had the means to become girlbosses. But it also shows the cruelty of the idea itself, that if you didn’t work hard enough, then there was something wrong with you. If you didn’t become a girlboss, then you were doing something wrong. And I think that’s perhaps one of the reasons the whole structure collapsed. It’s not just about speaking up at meetings. It isn’t about blowing past imposter syndrome and ignoring it. It’s harmful to think that if you didn’t follow those girlboss rules, you were failing all of feminism somehow.

Gilbert: It’s fascinating to watch these shows after two years of the pandemic, too, because one thing we’ve seen in that time is the flattening of ambition for women. They’ve had to do so many other things during this time, like double as teachers and coronavirus-test administrators. And all the extra pressures have basically made work difficult. I mean, I’ve certainly felt some of it myself. Ambitions we used to have professionally have crumbled under the need to just cope and get through the day. And so it’s interesting to confront this girlboss idea now, this idea that if you can’t, you’re just not wanting it bad enough. You’re just not trying hard enough.

Garber: One element of The Dropout that I’ve found myself retroactively appreciating is the way that so much of the Elizabeth Holmes mythology was built on the fact that she already had access to power structures. There’s literally an episode called “Old White Men.” And she did work hard. For sure. But she did that within the context of already having access to privileges that most women could never even dream of having. She exploited that power, and she was in turn exploited.

You could argue that a lot of those people saw in her kind of an easy token. Or she reminded them of their daughters and granddaughters. Perhaps they saw someone slightly vulnerable and in need of help. There’s just a lot going on that I think The Dropout, to its credit, really does explore. And Elizabeth Holmes the character as presented on the show has this interesting tension. She really does work hard. She really does have ambition. But she is also immensely helped by all of these wealthy, powerful, mostly white people who have decided to take her under their wing. And I find that tension really fascinating in the show.

Li: Yeah. The girlboss identity was maybe inspiring for some people, but it was ultimately an excuse for a lot of these men to sign on to her board and demonstrate their own allyship.

Gilbert: Have we learned anything from this glut of scammer television? Is there any redeeming lesson that we can take away? Or is this scam just integral to American art? I mean, it’s Harold Hill. I was reading Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country this year, and I had to put it down because Undine Spragg is so awful. And that is going to be a TV show eventually on Apple TV+, directed by Sofia Coppola. Content is king. It is this tale as old as time that we keep not learning from. It’s just perpetuated again and again in different forms. Is there anything to take from The Dropout?

Garber: I’m really interested in the questions these shows are trying to get at, so I do appreciate the fact that they exist. We’re reminded every day about the totalizing power that lies themselves have. We have Trump’s Big Lie. We have conspiracism, which has always been an element of American culture but has so much power right now—more than it used to. And then you have sort of subsidiary questions about branding and influencers and the lines between what’s real and what’s fake, especially in digital worlds. These are the elemental anxieties of this moment that we are all navigating together. And I appreciate when art and entertainment try to tackle them, even when I want it to be more nuanced.

Gilbert: Yeah, this is one of the fundamental questions of our time. And in that sense, I don’t think it’s wrong to expect slightly more focused interpretations rather than big chaotic, scammy fun. And I think The Dropout succeeds more than the other three scammer shows. It knows the stakes of the story it’s dealing with.

West Side Story Needed an Update

2022-03-31T06:00:00-04:00

Updated at 1:00 p.m. ET on March 31, 2022

West Side Story is a work with some huge names behind it: Leonard Bernstein wrote the musical, Stephen Sondheim the lyrics, and Shakespeare the source material, Romeo and Juliet. And 60 years after the classic 1961 film dominated the Oscars, another name has been added to that list: Steven Spielberg.

The creative forces behind West Side Story don’t just have status in common though; they’re also all white men telling a story of Puerto Rican migrants in New York City. And that lack of diverse perspectives is painfully evident in the original film. The Puerto Rican characters are portrayed by white actors, often in broad stereotypes and brownface. Even Rita Moreno, who portrayed Anita and was born in Puerto Rico, had to wear dark makeup.

The 2021 update escapes many of the dated aspects of the 1961 version by grounding the film in real history. Spielberg and the screenwriter Tony Kushner used the period setting of slum-clearance-era New York to give the rival gang members more real-world motivation than the original’s stereotyping. In doing so though, the remake loses some of the kaleidoscopic dreaminess that made the old-Hollywood original a classic.

David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Kornhaber compare the two versions. Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for West Side Story.

Spencer Kornhaber: Today we’re talking about West Side Story. The classic 1961 film based on the classic Leonard Bernstein musical was remade by none other than Steven Spielberg last year. It’s nominated for seven Oscars, and it’s one of the last big films up for Best Picture that we haven’t discussed on the podcast. We haven’t had our knock-down, drag-out fight about it yet, but we’re about to. The reception to it hasn’t been quite what many people in Hollywood expected. Some people love this movie, and some people didn’t see this movie. So we thought we’d break it down a bit. David, can you explain why we have a West Side Story remake in 2021?

David Sims: Sure. That’s actually a great question, because musicals in Hollywood don’t often get remade. There are just so few musicals these days. And West Side Story is already probably the most well-known, classic movie musical.

Kornhaber: It’s this and Cats.

Sims: (Laughs.) Well, one day we’ll have another Cats. I’m sure someone will take a swing at it. In fact, Steven Spielberg considered making Cats long ago, but he wanted to do it animated and Andrew Lloyd Webber didn’t like that. But at the end of the day, that might have been a good idea, considering what eventually happened.

Kornhaber: I want to live in that reality.

Sims: But on why West Side Story was remade, reason one is that Steven Spielberg has never made a movie musical. He’s an older guy, and he seems to be knocking off things he’s never done before. And so he wanted to make a musical and he wanted to make his favorite musical. West Side Story was a movie he has talked about glowingly as getting him into movies.

Then the other reason is the original filmed West Side Story is, in my opinion, a masterpiece. It’s a great film. It won Best Picture at the Oscars. But it’s also a bit of a tough watch today, especially in high definition. It’s really tough to see this great, iconic film put together with people who are very obviously wearing brownface, wearing thick makeup to look Latino when they are not. And so, yes, of course it’s a classic, but one could also argue for an update.

[Read: Spielberg’s West Side Story is an undeniable triumph]

Kornhaber: Right, so it’s a bit of a passion project, but also someone had to remake this at some point to fix that problem. Sophie, you are a connoisseur of the musical as an art form. What did you think of the remake?

Sophie Gilbert: Oh boy, I am conflicted because, like David, I loved the original, while finding aspects of it tough to take these days. And I have to say there were things about this remake that I loved, particularly the dance sequences. Spielberg is so good at what he does. David can talk more about the artistry of the musical scenes, but they’re just spectacular. This was a movie I wish I’d seen in the theater.

But at the same time, I had some issues with this movie, and they mostly revolve around the central love story. Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics for West Side Story, and his impression of it was always that it wasn’t supposed to be a kind of piece of sociological realism. It was a love story. And more than anything, it’s a love story to theater and what theater can do. It can sweep you up in this great collaboration of dance and music and storytelling and really pull you in with that.

And yet in remaking the movie, I think for relatively obvious reasons, Tony Kushner, who wrote the script, decided to enhance the realism of it. [He wanted] to get really at the heart of the gentrification of the West Side and socioeconomic reasons behind the gangs, their discontent, and why they wanted to fight each other, I suppose. But for me, what was lost was the love story.

Kornhaber: Spielberg really pulls out from the original story, which is a pretty self-contained and stylized take on a real-world situation. The original movie was a series of music videos, really. Kind of dreamy.

Sims: It’s very abstract.

Kornhaber: Abstract, absolutely.

Sims: Yeah. It’s not set in a definable place. Obviously it’s the West Side. (Laughs.) And it has that opening sequence from the original movie that was shot on location. But almost everything else is soundstages. It’s very obviously in film studios.

Kornhaber: Yeah. And so Spielberg wants to pull out and be like, “No, this is actually a story taking place at a particular time.” There’s social commentary to be brought out from that setting, a sense of realism to be inserted, and a sense of scope and scale that wasn’t in the original. He really wants you to feel like you’re in this giant neighborhood of Manhattan that’s been decimated by gentrification. But in doing that, he’s roaming all over the place, and the gemlike, dreamy quality of the original musical numbers gets a bit lost.

[Read: How Stephen Sondheim changed musical theater]

Gilbert: It’s a good ambition to sort of “reform” the movie—that’s not an ideal word, I suppose—but at least to make it less problematic or give its Puerto Rican characters greater depth and visibility on screen, and more historical context and more accuracy … Those are really great ambitions to have. It’s just a very tricky existing product to expand those sociological parts of it, because, again, it’s not what the story was supposed to do. I mean, there’s a whole number in it with “Gee, Officer Krupke” that makes fun of those kinds of readings of characters. Sondheim said they serve to remind the audience that this is entertainment, not a social treatise. And so if you try to make it more of a social treatise—which I think is definitely a positive motivation—it keeps butting up against what the musical was designed to do.

I want to talk about the origins of it because I find them so fascinating and funny. Originally, Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, and Leonard Bernstein, who wrote the music, and Jerome Robbins, who directed the movie and did the choreography—didn’t they originally plan it as about New York Irish Catholics and New York Jews in conflict? I think in the week between Easter and Passover?

Sims: Yes, it was going to be set on the Lower East Side.

Gilbert: (Laughs.) And then one day, Laurents and Bernstein were hanging by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, as you do, and I think one of them read a new story about gangs in Los Angeles and they were like, “This is where we go with this one!” It was that much of a pivot, right?

Sims: Well, the other thing that no one remembers anymore is that there was a very popular show at the time called Abie’s Irish Rose, which was about an Irish-Jewish romance, another star-crossed romance like Romeo and Juliet. But it was indeed going to be called East Side Story, and then somebody was like, “Well, wait a second. What’s over on the West Side, though? Let’s go 12 blocks that way.”

Gilbert: (Laughs.)

Sims: And it was Laurents who I believe said he knew a lot more about Puerto Rican people in Harlem than about—I think it was originally maybe going to involve Mexican gangs? It is funny how they were just sort of swapping in and out different subcommunities. And obviously, the final version of the Jets is not an Irish gang or an Italian gang; it’s just a white gang with white guys. And I think if you’re going to do West Side Story in 2021, it’s going to be uncomfortable and much more threatening to have a movie where your main characters are in a white gang that is trying to keep nonwhite people out of a neighborhood that essentially has been declared blighted. So Kushner thought hard about this, and something he hit on was that the turf they were fighting over had already been marked for clearance to build Lincoln Center.

That was the days of New York City when people would just circle various city blocks and be like, “Everyone’s got to move because the future’s here, baby!” And I think that is a good way, in my opinion, to update a musical like West Side Story without doing what, say, Ivo van Hove did on Broadway, where he was really trying to consciously make it about today, to bring the story into the 21st century. This movie isn’t that; it’s just giving everything a little more context about the tensions of the time without sacrificing the period setting, without letting go of the fact that this is the late ’50s, early ’60s.

Gilbert: But the problem is that the central love story is such a fantasy that if you bring in too many realistic elements beneath the surface, it all falls apart. Because suddenly I’m like, “You guys can’t fall in love! You don’t have any money! Where are you going to go?!”

Sims: (Laughs.)

Gilbert: What are their plans? You’ll hate each other in five years when Maria has five kids and you have no job! You know what I mean? It takes me out of the fantasy, whereas there’s something about the original musical where, as wooden as they may be, you see Tony and Maria as this kind of magical love that only happens in Hollywood movies from the ’50s and ’60s. You see these two people meet for a second at a dance and it’s supposed to be the greatest love that has ever happened. You’re supposed to buy that they are completely consumed with each other to the point that when he, spoiler, murders her brother, she’s like, “It’s fine. We’re still in love.” (Laughs.)

And I just did not feel that with this pairing. I thought Rachel Zegler was so fantastic, but in the scene in the gym where they meet each other, Ansel Elgort, who plays Tony, looks like he’s looking at a train timetable. Everything about the changes to that scene threw a real wrench in it for me. And after that, I just couldn't believe in the story, which I think makes the musical fall apart.

[Read: Why West Side Story abandoned its queer narrative]

Kornhaber: I think a lot of conversations about this movie do start with Ansel being sort of a dead fish on screen. To me, he’s so distractingly bad. He really poisons the well with just this thudding impersonation he’s giving of Marlon Brando or something.

Sims: Yeah, a little bit of Brando.

Kornhaber: He’s just completely doing that thing where he seems like he’s thinking about his role rather than just embodying it. And it hurts to watch.

Gilbert: It’s just a lot more banal, the romance in this movie. In the scene when they meet in the original, her first line is, “You’re not thinking I’m somebody else?” as if she senses the connection between them, and he feels it too. It’s beautiful. She assumes he knows her because suddenly it feels like they know each other at this very primal level. And then the first line in the remake version is, “It’s funny, I wasn’t planning on showing up tonight.” Like, okay, cool guy. It’s just a lot more quotidian, and I think I was really longing for this moment of phantasmagorical souls meeting in the night and I just didn’t get that.

Sims: I get all of that in the visuals though, not so much in their performances. She’s very luminous. I think Rachel Zegler is great.

Gilbert: She’s gorgeous. She is wonderful.

Sims: He’s fine. There’s just instant-star stuff with her where, the second you see her on screen, you’re rooting for this person, right? She hasn’t even said a word yet and I’m like, “Oh, I’m on this person’s side.”

Gilbert: She’s so charming.

Sims: But in the gym scene, which is maybe my favorite sequence in the movie, it’s Spielberg who’s giving you the romance. It’s the lens flares and the bodies moving and the way the camera is taking the space of the viewer and all that. That’s where my blood’s running. And obviously, Spielberg clearly reveres the movie musical. I mean, there’ve been more musicals of late, I would say. It had gone really dead. In the past decade, there have been things like Cats—well, let’s forget Cats—but we’ve had La La Land, The Greatest Showman, Jersey Boys, the Mamma Mia movies, Mary Poppins Returns, In the Heights last year, which was actually really good, Dear Evan Hansen last year, which was really bad …

There’s been a lot of swings at good musicals, I would say, and I like some of those movies, but they are horrifyingly directed. They are so—they’re so poorly put together. Even someone like Rob Marshall—who made Chicago, which was a pretty strong movie musical and who has a background in choreography. Rob Marshall made Into the Woods and Mary Poppins Returns, but he stages these musical numbers where you have lots of people dancing and the camera is cutting constantly into the action, cutting to one person. And I’m like, “Let me see people dancing! Please stop cutting!”

And Steven Spielberg—God bless him—holds on a wide shot and moves his camera around fluidly. He lets you actually see gorgeously choreographed musical numbers that transport your brain into a place of pure pleasure and bliss. And I wish more musicals would do that in film.

Gilbert: I would agree with that.

Kornhaber: Yeah.

[Read: When a hit musical becomes a bad movie]

Sims: Another sequence I really love in this movie that is very different from the original and from the stage production is how they do “Cool” as a dance between Riff and Tony, and they emphasize the weird connection between those two characters. They’re going through a sort of breakup. It’s not just that Tony is turning his back on the Jets or whatever. It’s that his connection with Riff is being severed as he’s growing closer to Maria. And the way they’re dancing and fighting at the same time, I think that’s all really well done.

Kornhaber: “Cool” was my favorite as a kid watching West Side Story.

Sims: I mean, it’s so good in the original.

Kornhaber: Yeah, absolutely. And there were a number of transmutations made in this movie with musical numbers where I missed the original, but with “Cool,” I have to say, they went from one incredible staging of it to a different one.

And I thought that was a good example of how to bring the darkness and violence of the story into the musical number, where they’re throwing the gun around. They’re not beating each other up like they end up doing in the rumble, but it’s a very tense and scary scene, and still a beautifully choreographed musical number.

Sims: “America” is obviously the most invigorating number in the show too. And they do that very well. Again, you are up against perfection. Spielberg basically says as much. The sequence in the original is unbeatable. There’s nothing better than that in movie musicals, but I do like their take on it as well, bringing it out into the street.

Kornhaber: Yeah, you have the original in a contained space on that rooftop, with people just interacting with each other while the camera kind of stays in one spot. And that’s what makes “America” so amazing in the original. And in this one, they run all over the streets, popping through fruit stands or whatever. And, to me, that felt like the expected choice. That’s what you would see in a recent movie musical, this sense of the camera on a crane doing a lot of work. And to me, that lost the sort of self-contained quality that made the original so good.

Gilbert: I’ve never loved “I Feel Pretty” as a song, but I loved the staging of it here in the department store. Rachel Zegler’s enthusiasm and charm is so contagious. It’s just really beautifully done with the costumes and the fanciful nature of it. But I do have a problem with the placement of it, because it’s right after you’ve seen these two characters brutally die! And that’s not how it’s ordered in the original movie.

Sims: It’s actually been returned to its original place in the show.

Gilbert: Yes, but in the musical, if you saw this in the theater, there would be an intermission. You would have time to process this horrible scene of violence. And then you’d get Maria’s sweet, loving excitement for her new romance. And now there’s none of that. Suddenly, it’s just like this very drastic tonal shift. I found it really hard to take. As much as I did love it.

Sims: It’s a strange number, and Sondheim despises it. Or, rather, despised it—Sondheim is no longer with us. And Spielberg also was going to cut it, because he had the exact same reaction you had, which was, “How can you have this after the rumble?” And Kushner basically put his foot down. You absolutely have to be with Maria in this glimpse of happiness before she finds out about her world crashing down around her, or else she’s just a one-note, tragic character. You need to understand why she’s going to throw it all away.

Kornhaber: And you get that in the original’s placement of it earlier in the movie. And there’s that Stephen Sondheim anecdote about that song. He felt bad because he didn’t think the character would be singing words like witty, right? He thought he was being a little too cute for the character.

Sims: He was a grump sometimes. I love Sondheim, but his whole thing with West Side Story was that it’s not realistic. And Sondheim spent his whole career upending the conventions of Broadway—which is great, and I love him; he’s the greatest. But at the same time, it’s funny that he thought West Side Story was kind of corny, and it’s like, “Yeah, it’s the greatest corny musical ever written. So congratulations, Stephen.”

Kornhaber: Sophie, you wrote a beautiful obituary for Stephen Sondheim. How does West Side Story fit into his pantheon?

Gilbert: Well, it’s interesting because it was one of his earliest gigs back when he was still very much trying to make his name. He always wanted to write his own music and lyrics. And so I think he felt that if he did West Side Story, he would be pigeonholed as just a lyricist. And he certainly was for a while. It’s not a typically Sondheim-ian musical, I would say. There are elements where he really comes out, like the song “Maria,” when Tony sings, “I sing it loud and there’s music playing / Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.” That line is really beautiful. But yeah, “I Feel Pretty” he felt was too twee, too charming. He didn’t feel like Maria as a teenage girl would be saying things like “it’s alarming how charming I feel.”

Sims: I adore him, but he was a bit of a grump.

Gilbert: We love him so much. It surprised me because he’s such a notorious grump, but he told Stephen Colbert that he really loved the 2021 West Side Story.

Sims: I think this was what he wanted. That’s the vibe I get from that. And he was there through filming.

Kornhaber: Apparently, he told Rachel Zegler right before she filmed “I Feel Pretty” something like, “I really dropped the ball in the song. It’s no good.” And she’s like, “Okay, thanks.”

Sims: (Laughs.) I think there was also something like, “It’s nice to have people who can sing,” obviously referring to the fact that Natalie Wood was dubbed.

Gilbert: I do want to say it's obvious that the creative team really did their work. They really wanted to do a better job with representation than the original.

Sims: The amount of subtitled Spanish in the film is kind of impressive and invigorating.

Kornhaber: It’s amazing how well it works.

Gilbert: It’s fantastic. But at the same time, it’s still a creative team exclusively made up of white men. Which makes you see that things have actually not changed that much since years ago. When you think about the people with the power to shape the ways that stories are told, the difference is that they may be listening harder and trying harder to incorporate voices and experiences that aren’t their own. But at the same time, they’re still sort of the same subset of guys, which is a little depressing.

Kornhaber: Yeah, it’s completely true. Well, what do you think of what they did with Rita Moreno?

Gilbert: She sort of felt Shakespearean to me, almost, as a character, like the elder stateswoman who's almost like the nurse. Less comic, but she’s there to opine on the way things are and support the characters of Tony and Maria. She really is the best thing about the 1961 movie, playing Anita. Her dancing is just extraordinary in that film, and she brings so much to the role. She is the one who really, I think, makes Anita like the timeless character that she is, and Ariana Debose has carried on that tradition.

And it was a nice note of, like, “Sorry we put you in this horrible makeup all these years ago, and yet you were still so amazing and carried this movie. And now you can have this really great role to acknowledge your underserved fantasticness.” Because Hollywood didn’t get her the roles that she deserved throughout her career. She’s such an amazing performer.

Sims: Yeah, she’s the best. And she seems very invested in this film, which is nice. She’s been cheerleading for actors like David Alvarez and Ariana DeBose and Rachel Zegler.

Gilbert: David, do you think that this version of West Side Story will win Oscars?

Sims: It is hotly tipped to win Best Supporting Actress for Ariana Debose, who’s very good. And obviously, Anita is a killer role, but she’s really, really great. That seems to be the only spot where I think it’s probably guaranteed a victory. But I do think this movie, when it screened for critics, the raves were so big that there was this brief moment of thinking it might be the new Oscar frontrunner, because it’s been a bit of a weird year where there’s no juggernaut. And then the film didn’t do very well, box-office-wise. And there was sort of this backlash of, “Why didn’t Steven Spielberg save cinema?” So I guess it’s a disappointment that it didn’t cause everyone to rush to the theater in the middle of the Omicron wave or whatever. And it’s gotten seven nominations. Obviously, voters like it, but it does seem like it’s going to be mostly an also-ran when it comes to wins.

Kornhaber: It does have this weird reputation for underperforming. And you chalk that up to the novel coronavirus, as you tend to say?

Sims: That darn novel coronavirus! Obviously, some movies did very well over Christmas, but films aimed at a broader audience—more of a family or older audience—underperformed. It just kind of felt like the game in town during the second wave was young people because they felt more comfortable going to a theater. But because it’s Spielberg, and because it’s West Side Story, there was kind of the expectation that this’ll be it. This will be the one that makes everyone fall back in love with the movie theaters, and instead it kind of underperformed.

Gilbert: So does this mean that there’ll never be another big movie musical again?

Sims: It’s a good question. I mean, 2021 was a tough year in that regard because you had this underperform. You had In the Heights also kind of underperform ticket-wise despite the buzz over the summer. And then you have things like Dear Evan Hansen that underperformed in every sense. Hollywood has these trends come in bunches, so maybe it’ll be a few years.

Why Robert Pattinson’s Grim Batman Is Cause for Optimism

2022-03-19T12:08:43-04:00

In The Batman, Matt Reeves’s long and grim superhero epic, Robert Pattinson plays a brooding sophomore of a dark knight. He wears mascara. He journals. He is vengeance. He is the shadows. But despite all the memes and fanboy hand-wringing generated from the Twilight actor’s casting, Pattinson’s is a back-to-basics Batman. He isn’t the tired, aging crimefighter played by Ben Affleck, nor is The Batman the umpteenth pearl-scattering origin story for the character.

Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is young and still figuring out his role in Gotham. He pummels streetgangs in clown makeup like any Batman, but he also plods around looking for clues with Jeffrey Wright’s Jim Gordon. The pair makes for a melancholy Holmes and Watson, gumshoeing around a city whose mob boss has fallen but where crime only seems to get worse.

It’s a new kind of Batman, but also possibly the most comic-accurate film portrayal ever. After all, the caped crusader emerged from 1930s detective comics, pulpy noir stories about sleuths and gangsters instead of world-conquering supervillains. But despite Batman’s comic billing as “The World’s Greatest Detective,” past screen versions of the character haven’t relied on his mystery-solving so much as his gadgets and the haunted inheritance that paid for them.

In making The Batman a noir-mystery, Reeves showed both the limits and possibilities of today’s big-budget filmmaking. If you want to make an epic movie, the stars need to be wearing capes. But with audiences so used to superheroes, the film’s success shows there may be room to experiment within the genre.

Staff writers David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss The Batman on The Atlantic’s culture podcast The Review. What does The Batman show us about the state of superhero movies? How does Pattinson’s Batman compare to past iterations? And, most importantly, is this Batman emo or grunge? Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for The Batman.

Sophie Gilbert: Today, we’re here to talk about The Batman. The newest film iteration of the Caped Crusader is directed by Matt Reeves and stars Robert Pattinson as Batman/Bruce Wayne. The movie is already the highest-grossing film of 2022, but surprisingly, it’s the first stand-alone Batman movie in a decade. The Dark Knight Rises came out all the way back in 2012, which makes me feel really old. There’s been no shortage of comic-book movies in that time, it is true, but it’s interesting to reconsider Batman now and think about the genre without all the weight of universe building and connected franchises. So with this in mind, David, maybe you can share some thoughts on this subject to kick us off: What does The Batman say about the state of superhero movies right now? What should we read from the success of this film?

David Sims: As you say, it’s not like we’ve been in a Batman-free zone since the Christopher Nolan saga came to a close 10 years ago. Ben Affleck’s Batman has kicked around the DC Universe; there was a Lego Batman … We’ve had plenty of Batman conversations, but there is a feeling at the same time like, wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry about what Aquaman is doing right now? To not have to think about an entire universe of crossovers? Of cosmic chaos and portals opening in the sky? The issue with the cinematic-universe approach to comic-book storytelling is that the stakes always have to be galactically high by the end of the movie, because it’s hard to top yourself when you’re the 24th entry in a series, right? And here we are with a movie that’s not that.

Spencer Kornhaber: The stakes are only municipally high.

Sims: (Laughs.) Exactly! They do try to make things a little more epic at the end, but even that feels a little forced. This is mostly about a guy plodding around looking at clues.

Gilbert: Detective Pikachu, but Batman.

Sims: He even has pointy ears like Pikachu.

Gilbert: To me, it’s liberating. As much as I enjoy the [Marvel Cinematic Universe], it’s exhausting. When you want to see a movie, you feel like you have to see absolutely everything to comprehend it, so this film is at least lighter work for the viewer.

Kornhaber: But even this sets up sequels!

Sims: That’s the pitfall, of course. You could never plausibly, truly say this is going to be the only one. All these things are designed to be followed up on, even the Joker movie, which ends about as definitively as one of these things could. Now they’re talking about making another one. But if you make a billion dollars, that’s what happens.

[Read: Robert Pattinson's Batman is wonderfully grim]

Gilbert: I want to talk about Robert Pattinson. Spencer, what did you make of his performance? I’m asking you because you’re the emo kid in residence.

Kornhaber: It is a good chance to talk about the differences in waifish white men who listen to rock and roll. I appreciate that Nirvana is his band. So not quite an emo kid. The Batman felt like it was going deeper back to some truly traumatic times of the early ’90s, whereas Suicide Squad is very emo. It has a very Panic! at the Disco aesthetic.

Sims: Right, very Hot Topic.

Kornhaber: Yeah. And as someone who wishes he was from the ’90s, I thought Pattinson completely worked. You love him in this. You just want to cuddle his skeletal frame and tell him it’s going to be okay. You can tell that when Bruce Wayne steps out of the house for a rare funeral, the city’s paparazzi are obsessed with him. Pattinson is one strong ingredient in a movie made up of many that combine to somehow make three hours go by very quickly and absorbingly. He did a great job. This movie is really gnarly.

Gilbert: Yeah, it’s grungy, for sure. And on the paparazzi, there was a sort of Kennedy subtext to the Wayne family that I hadn’t really picked up on any previous outings. The old footage of Thomas Wayne brought Bobby Kennedy to mind. The mother and her unhappy childhood.

Sims: Absolutely, sort of a Rosemary Kennedy thing.

Gilbert: Yeah, I found that really fascinating. But yes, it was gnarly as hell. David, what did you think about Robert Pattinson as Batman?

Sims: You know, I’m a major fan of R-Pats.

Gilbert: Very handsome.

Sims: I think he’s very handsome. I think I’ve had the same journey with him as a star that a lot of people have, where I actually think his performance in the first Twilight is incredible and worth revisiting. He seems baffled by the material and it’s basically like: This is like a freak, right? It’s a Nicolas Cage–level, committed, bananas performance. The only problem is that in the subsequent Twilight movies, he’s clearly quite bored and has a lot less to do because those movies background him after a while. He’s just kind of standing there glowering.

People sort of gave up on him as being a truly promising actor as he was confined to that series for a while. And then he’s had this very interesting phase in the past few years where he’s been taking all these interesting parts, working with very committed, artistically whole directors like the Safdies and Robert Eggers.

And then when he popped up in Tenet a couple of years ago, the Christopher Nolan movie, it was this reminder that this guy is super charming and charismatic and handsome, right? And so when he was cast in The Batman, I thought, Sure, he’s got a bit of an edge. He’s a little emo, a little grungy, whatever you want to call it. He’ll be a good Bruce Wayne. And then this movie barely cares about him as Bruce Wayne. He’s mostly Batman. But I said this in my review: Playing Batman is all about lips and chin. That’s all you’ve got to work with. You’ve got a big mask on your face; you’ve got black eyeliner on. And he’s really good at the scowling and the grimacing and the pouting. He’s very locked in, in my opinion.

[Read: The grimy, chaotic thrills of Good Time]

Kornhaber: To me, he wasn’t very expressive, and that was kind of the point. His whole take on Batman is that he’s conquered fear, and it seemed like he was making a very deliberate choice not to give the sort of hammy George Clooney frown.

Sims: If I could do a very brief Batman rant …

Gilbert: (Laughs.) Please! Where else but here?

Sims: If you’re talking about the various people who’ve played this role, the pathology of each is really different. Michael Keaton’s take was that this is a fairly bored, rich guy who just cannot wait for the Bat-Signal to go up in the sky. Christian Bale is more this light-and-dark thing. When he’s Bruce Wayne, he’s giving this sort of performance in and of itself as a playboy fool. And when he’s Batman, he’s giving this increasingly bananas performance as the scariest monster you’ve ever met. (Growls.)

Kornhaber: (Laughs.)

Sims: This is a guy who doesn’t totally even know if he’s a person anymore. He’s always acting. And Pattinson’s take seems to be: This guy is sublimating himself into this role, into this work. He’s a fairly young Batman. He’s still kind of figuring it out. So he’s good at glowering and, like you say, Spencer, locking it all down. But it doesn’t seem like he’s figured out what he wants out of all of this right at the start of the movie. He’s good at being Batman and hitting criminals, but I feel like he’s still in search of the larger mission.

[Read: How Batman & Robin changed the superhero movie for the better]

Gilbert: I found his Batman very entertaining. I found his Bruce Wayne slightly perplexing. There was one scene where he mournfully chews on a berry, which made me laugh out loud in the cinema. Which may be very popular. The tone of the movie is so humorless, though, that when things were funny, you wondered, Is this intentional levity? Or am I just laughing because everything is so dire?

Sims: I think mostly the latter. The only person in this movie who gets to have any fun, really, is Colin Farrell.

Gilbert: (Laughs.) I do not believe it’s Colin Farrell. I don’t believe it’s Paul Dano. I think they got jobbing actors to just wear the makeup and then they franchise the movie-star names.

Sims: Right, when you first see Farrell buried under all that makeup, you think, Why even cast a well-known actor? But then you see the performance and he’s clearly giving a 5,000-percent performance in this because he’s so constrained that it will come off over-the-top, even if he’s way over-the-top.

Kornhaber: It’s a beautiful corrective to House of Gucci. If Colin Farrell’s 5,000-percent over-the-top, Jared Leto in his own fat suit was a million-percent over-the-top. I love the Penguin. He’s funny.

Gilbert: He felt like an ad for Goodfellas Pizza. (Laughs.) Let’s talk about Detective Batman though. I did not know until we were prepping for this that “DC” stands for “Detective Comics.” What did you think of the orientation of Batman as a sleuth? A noir-ish private eye on the case in this very dark, very bad city?

Kornhaber: I guess I’m not that familiar with Batman’s detective origins.

Sims: He’s the world’s greatest detective, Spencer!

Kornhaber: But I’m someone who has only known Batman glancingly in popular culture over the years, so it was sort of random when the movie acknowledges him as a detective. But of course, part of what is very effective about the movie is that it’s a highly competent detective story. It works in a way that’s very familiar to the obvious David Fincher–directed inspirations like Se7en and Zodiac. I imagine it’s playing with old film-noir beats very competently. But I do need to hear your spiel about why he is a good detective, because it’s not in the canon that dummies like me have absorbed over the years.

Sims: It’s never been too crucial to his cinematic canon, but certainly part of it. He’s got his Batcave, with the computers, of course. But when the character was at his original height in the ’40s, the peak era of the noir, Superman was the big flying hero who fights people in the daytime and Batman was the creepy-crawly guy lurking around at night. Batman’s fighting criminals rather than supervillains. He eventually gets supervillains in his rogues’ gallery, but originally he was really a guy fighting mobsters. That was sort of his conception. And he debuted in a series called Detective Comics, of course.

Gilbert: Like Dick Tracy?

Sims: Yeah, or The Shadow. The sort of pulpy villain-heroes of the ’30s.

Kornhaber: On that note, is the crime-ridden, drug-addled, city-of-1970s-and-1980s cinema back? Did it never go away? I grew up being very frightened of the city because of movies like [Tim Burton’s] 1989 Batman. What portrayals of cities have we had recently that are full of Sweetgreens and condos, because that’s sort of the reality?

Gilbert: (Laughs.)

Sims: That’s the vibe of the Marvel movies. Those are set in recognizable cities, but then Marvel has its monochromatic gray slate for fights that take place in parking lots because that’s an easy place to dump everyone for the special-effects shots. The Batman is a little more reminiscent of a grimy ’70s movie, which is a fun throwback.I like this movie, but it is a little pummeling. I don’t mind though. Director Matt Reeves picked his bit. It’s a serious mystery with a Gotham that’s dark and moody.

The problem with Batman movies—and Matt Reeves has talked about this—is that you always have your first Batman movie about a billionaire whose parents were killed and he becomes Batman, right?

Gilbert: Which I did appreciate him leaving out, mercifully, from this movie.

Sims: Right. But then by the second movie, Batman’s whole deal has been completely settled. He is Batman. And so the sequels are always just villains’ showcases. They take over the movie. And Reeves wanted to do a movie about a Batman who’s still figuring things out, without making the audience watch pearls fall on the floor for the umpteenth time.

Gilbert: (Laughs.) Right.

Sims: We don’t need to deal with all that over and over. And so with this film next going to do a TV series with Colin Farrell’s Penguin, that’s great. That means there’s space for villains to pop up. You can explore more Gotham marginalia, and give a little sense of the city of crime. And then when we go back to The Batman 2, we can have a rich world for Pattinson to play around in. I’m not, like, pumping my fists for a Penguin show, but I could imagine how it would be interesting.

Gilbert: I’m not against the idea of more villains, but I do find Penguin the least interesting of all of them. (Laughs.) How do you do a 10-hour series about a man whose defining characteristics seems to be a silly accent?

Kornhaber: What is Penguin’s power? He uses umbrellas and he also has children in the wells or something?

Sims: That’s all Tim Burton’s take. In the comics, he’s just a gangster who maybe has some fun bulletproof umbrellas. Burton is the one who is like, “This guy should be half penguin.”

Gilbert: He was raised by penguins at the Gotham Zoo right?

Sims: Right, he was an orphan. It’s the classic Batman thing. Catwoman fell into a vat of cats; he fell into a vat of penguins.

Kornhaber: (Laughs.)

Sims: The funniest thing about this movie is it is so damn realistic, but they’re trying to make toys out of the Colin Farrell Penguin. It’s like, “Here, kid, have ‘Middle-Aged Guy in Suspenders.’ Happy Christmas!”

Kornhaber: (Laughs.)

Sims: What kid is going to enjoy any of this? “Here’s Gimp-Suit Riddler; I hope you like it!”

Gilbert: (Laughs.) Okay, but let’s extrapolate what superhero movies are going forward a bit. Because to me, this movie was a well done but predictable iteration of a big superhero-Batman movie. There weren’t too many surprises. Is this sort of where we’re going with this field now?

Kornhaber: I’m not the superhero-movie guy, but I will say that this movie and the last Spider-Man movie, which we talked about on the podcast, were amazing times in the theater for me. I really enjoyed both of them. It felt like filmmakers playing in a well-defined sandbox but doing really creative, high-quality stuff within them. And it just brings me this sort of sad feeling that this is the only opportunity that filmmakers have to use the budget and the resources and the attention to do something ambitious. Matt Reeves has talked about how, in another era, could he have gotten all these actors together into a different kind of movie. Superhero movies are kind of the only game in town if he wants to do ambitious auteur work. And so it’s cool that we got this kind of a Batman movie, but maybe someday we can have just the good Matt Reeves blockbuster of his dreams.

Gilbert: What’s David Fincher doing these days, David?

Sims: Well, David Fincher is a perfect example of what we are talking about, in that he is a very successful filmmaker who’s been nominated for Oscars and has made many hits. And after Gone Girl, another hit that worked really well and had movie stars in it, Hollywood was basically like, “Your movies are too expensive and do not seem to be about superheroes at all.”

And so he became this perfect example of the celebrated auteur who needs a lot of money and time to play around with. David Fincher is probably not going to go off and make a movie for $15 million. He needs a big, expansive budget because he’s meticulous. And so studios just sort of stop bothering with him. The same thing happened to Martin Scorsese. Obviously anyone wants to be in the Martin Scorsese business, but Paramount, his classic studio, wouldn’t give him $200 million to make The Irishman even though [Robert] De Niro and [Al] Pacino were involved. It’s a lot of money for a movie that’s not going to play overseas, that isn’t going to have a sequel or anything like that.

And so where are they all now? They’re at the streamers who want the prestige and who will pony up the money. So David Fincher made Mank for Netflix, and now he’s making a movie called The Killer for Netflix. Martin Scorsese made The Irishman at Netflix. He’s making a movie for Apple right now. Unfortunately or fortunately, those are the companies right now willing to take financial risks on movies that aren’t necessarily going to be tentpoles.

Gilbert: That doesn’t feel fully economically sustainable to me, though, to spend this amount of money, right? Netflix had a share-tumble crisis a few months ago. Will they be happy to do this forever? It does make you wonder what happens to this kind of movie.

Sims: I think Netflix and Co. will always be happy to pony up for a couple projects from very major filmmakers like Fincher. It’s more the Matt Reeves types who are obviously good at their jobs, and quite celebrated, but aren’t the juggernaut names. That’s who I worry about in the grand financial scheme of things. And maybe Matt Reeves has dreamed about making a Batman movie. He probably likes Batman, and he probably wanted to make a Batman movie. But he might have other projects that he’d love to do and he’s either going to use this Batman clout to get it done or he’s going to have to make it for a lot less money.

Only Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, the absolute big boys, are the types who could go to a studio and be like, ”I’m in charge. You’re putting this movie in theaters. You’re giving me as much money as I want. And it’s going to be about whatever I want.” There just aren’t a lot of filmmakers left like that. And maybe the death of big-ego male filmmakers isn’t the worst. Maybe Hollywood is just evolving. I’m not saying “Woe is David Fincher,” but how many Batman movies have there been? And I like Batman!

Gilbert: It is depressing that Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man movies are the ones that truly rake in the cash. But at the same time, I do want to see them! And we talk about them and have fun. There is something about the reliability of the familiar storytelling structure, the familiar hero. When you’re exhausted and tired and stressed about the world, it feels safe in a way that a fully novel story maybe feels like too much work. It’s a little sad, but that’s also the paradox.

A Film That Finally Captures Murakami’s Writing

2022-03-16T16:17:32-04:00

Drive My Car is a special movie. It’s a film about language, but its silences carry the most powerful moments of communication. It’s a three-hour drama about grief, but the experience of watching it is breezily loose and oddly comforting. And it’s one of very few adaptations of the renowned Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s work, although the moments that best capture his style were invented by the director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.

Together, these contradictions make Drive My Car an electrifying watch, but a difficult one to properly summarize. Now streaming on HBO Max and competing at the Academy Awards, it’s finding wider audiences that can experience its magic for themselves.

That awards attention marks another revealing contradiction: Despite Japan’s rich film history, including the filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, Drive My Car is the country’s most-nominated movie ever at the Oscars and its first to get the nod for Best Picture. It’s also the first non-English-language film from any country selected as Best Picture by all three major American critics groups.

The recognition comes at a time of tentative hope for the future of international film. Drive My Car won Best Non-English Language Film at the Golden Globes, an award whose last two winners were Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Minari’s nomination was controversial as a film set in Arkansas that deals with very American experiences around immigration and isolation. Despite having a script in both English and Korean, Minari was nonetheless relegated to the foreign-language category.

With international films making halting, hopeful progress toward recognition outside the old categories then, will they also find audiences? Will they—as Bong famously urged in 2019—“overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles”?

Listen to David Sims, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz discuss on an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast The Review, where they break down Drive My Car, Haruki Murakami, and the state of international film:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for Drive My Car.

Lenika Cruz: Drive My Car is based on a Murakami short story of the same title. It follows a theater actor, playwright, and director named Yūsuke Kafuku as he directs an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya for a festival in Hiroshima. He suffers a loss at the beginning of the story and ends up forming this connection with a young woman who the festival hired to drive him in his red Saab 900. He resists this at first. But he’s won over by this quiet young chauffeur named Misaki Watari, and the two of them develop this interesting, quiet friendship.

This is a film by a Japanese director based on an original work by a Japanese writer, but the play at the center is multilingual. The actors cast in it speak their native tongue: Japanese, Mandarin, Tagalog, and Korean Sign Language. And so the notion of people reaching across the distance of language is baked into the plot. It’s about the fundamental question of how we relate to one another: To what extent can we be comfortable with the things we don’t understand about one another and still feel empathy?

David Sims: Right, it’s digging into the gulfs between people that are spoken and unspoken. It is a difficult movie to summarize and yet, once you’re watching it, it’s not an inscrutable film at all. It’s not the kind of art film that feels very distancing. It is a very human drama about humans.

Cruz: Yeah, the basics are pretty straightforward, but what sticks with you goes beyond the plot. It’s about the things that are not said, often between characters in the same scene. It’s the things that they intuit from the silences in between their words. It’s a really magical film.

[Read: Drive My Car pushes the limit of language]

Sims: It is so fascinating to watch Kafuku’s acting process play out. He’s dealing with actors who at times grow frustrated because they don’t know what their acting partner is saying. They don’t know what to react off of. The style seems to be shutting down traditional models of communication, but Kafuku just tells them to do the work and it’s all going to make sense. What was your takeaway from his method and what the movie’s saying about language?

Shirley Li: The rehearsal scenes became really meditative for me. The actors were just reading instead of emoting. That felt like a moment when Hamaguchi was actively saying, “This is what you need to pay attention to. Pay attention to the spaces.” For a couple of years now, we’ve been talking about how foreign-language films are accessible. Bong Joon Ho said that great line about how subtitles are just a one-inch barrier that we need to get over. I appreciated that this film didn’t try to indicate what language was even being spoken in the subtitles. Even if I looked away, I still understood the scene as it was playing out because I wasn’t trying to focus on exactly what was being said.

Cruz: And at no point does it explain the plot of Uncle Vanya or what parallels it might have to Drive My Car, because it’s not about that. Kafuku is constantly telling the actors to let the text live within you. Just be the vessel for the text and say the words. And once you get the rhythm of the words, some transformation will happen.

Li: It’s about the creative process and how you reach the core of a character. Reading interviews, I found one from 1990 where Murakami said he didn’t want his works to be adapted.

Sims: Yes, he’s against his novels being adapted.

Li: “It’s enough for a book to be a book,” he said. And I take the rehearsal scenes as a direct argument against that. You can make a Chekhov play absolutely understandable just through emotions and spaces and intonation, rather than the language itself.

Sims: I am a bit of a Murakami superfan. I have read the short story “Drive My Car,” which is in the collection Men Without Women. And this movie also pulls from another couple of stories in that collection. But none of the stories have the high-concept Uncle Vanya. That’s one of the many embellishments Hamaguchi is throwing onto this movie.

And what I was amazed by when I first watched this movie is that it’s very difficult to nail the slightly removed, aloof tone of Murakami. It is not something that feels automatically visual and cinematic. And Hamaguchi really just understands that atmosphere better than anyone else I’ve seen try to do it. And I really do like some of the work on the adaptations. What do you think?

Cruz: I’ve enjoyed Haruki Murakami. I’m glad you mentioned the short story. In it you see Kafuku’s backstory unfold through these conversations with his driver. But Hamaguchi chose not to use flashbacks. He wanted people to see the entire story from the beginning. And it’s so effective, I think, because, with a lot of stories about grief and loss, those flashbacks act as explanations for why a character is the way they are. But if you are just there from the beginning and you see this relationship with his wife as a living, breathing person before she dies, that simmers underneath the rest of the text and the rest of his interactions with people. You’re waiting for it to bubble up as opposed to having him just tell you. This is a movie that really shows, and tells very little. You’re constantly reading between the lines. And I think that creates a little bit of that remove you’re talking about, David. It doesn’t feel forced or cold. It’s a very warm and humane movie. And so I was also impressed by how he managed to get that tone.

Li: Yeah, he doesn’t adapt Murakami in a way that you might expect, considering the way Murakami plays with memory and nested realities, but the visuals of this film are evocative of Murakami. It’s kind of a film that I think traffics in a lot of contradictions. It’s dealing with all of these intangible emotions and ideas, and yet it feels so grounded. It earns its long running time because it needs you to immerse completely into the reality of the story itself so that you start reading between the lines. There’s one scene in particular that I think we should talk about: in the back seat of the car, when Kafuku talks to the man he’d seen his wife cheat on him with.

Now, on the surface, you could sum it up as a conversation between two men who share a love for the same woman. But the way Hamaguchi films it, the way the shadows move across the younger man’s face and across the older man’s face, and the way that you see the landscape continue to move around the car, it becomes spooky. It becomes much richer. And that’s what Murakami gets at: something very simple on the surface, but thoroughly rich and complicated.

Sims: It’s very meditative.

Li: Yes!

[Read: An electrifying adaptation of Murakami’s Drive My Car]

Sims: When I was a teenager, I was in a bookstore and I picked up a book called Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is the first Murakami book I ever read. It’s still my sentimental favorite, even though I think he’s written better novels. When I was 15 years old, I was excited about a cool noir, sci-fi plot, but there’s a very early scene where a character in an elevator talks about the difference between understanding that the elevator is moving and not moving. Murakami has always been very good at framing this meditative space your brain can enter even in a mundane moment. And in Drive My Car, Kafuku’s resistant to having someone else drive his red Saab 900 because clearly—like his wife does when they have sex in the early parts of the movie—he enters this kind of peaceful fugue state in the car. That’s where he is at his most balanced.

And so he’s not sure if he wants Misaki Watari to drive him around. But then—and it’s a scene I love; it’s the lede of my review—early on at dinner with the theater festival people, Kafuku is asked about her driving and he says, “I think it’s great. When she speeds up or slows down, it’s very smooth and doesn’t feel heavy at all. I sometimes forget that I’m even riding in a car. I’ve ridden cars driven by other people, but this is the first time it’s been this comfortable.”

That’s the Murakami vibe! He’s saying it out loud! I went to the short story and tried to find that line, but it’s not in there. Hamaguchi just gets what is so important about that frame of mind. That’s what this character is craving and that’s why he forms this unspoken bond with Watari. Ah! This movie is so good!

Cruz: It’s so good! I’ve watched it multiple times, and each time, new things jump out at me. There are so many little paths you can go down with this movie, all equally fascinating and rich. You could be talking about each of them for hours. One of the characters I found mesmerizing was Lee Yoon-a, the nonverbal actress cast in the [Uncle Vanya] role of Sonya. She’s introduced during the audition phase and her scene almost brought me to tears. It’s fairly short, but the way she communicates with her body and with her eyes—you can see immediately why she was cast.

She’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about with language and how we can say things without the traditional modes of communication. I just feel like I could talk about this movie forever.

Sims: Right, there are little eddies you can explore every time you watch it. This movie is obviously smaller than The Batman or whatever, but it is a movie that was given a shot during Omicron—a tough time for theatrical exhibition in general—and people went to see it. Critics and awards bodies highlighted it. Oscar voters paid attention. It’s a three-hour movie with subtitles. It seems like a tougher sell than it actually is. If people see it, they get it.

Read: How Haruki Murakami’s translators shaped his early novels

I love Murakami unreservedly. I know he’s got his faults, but he was big for me as a younger reader. But he is often like, “I smoked my 18th cigar and poured my 14th glass of Cutty Sark.”

Cruz: (Laughs.)

Sims: “I put on a sonata and fed my cats some sardines … And then I went to the kitchen to make some meal that sounds completely fabulous using whatever was in the cupboard … And then I reminisced on some insanely hot sex I had with someone.”

Li: (Laughs.)

Sims: “… And then the phone rang and it was a secret agent!” (Laughs.) Like, he’s got his vibes. And this movie zeroes in on the particular melancholic aspects of Murakami. It’s a little less cool. I mean, it is cool, but no one owns a jazz club or anything like that.

Cruz: I watched this film before I read the story. And if you’ve read Murakami, you know that when Misaki Watari’s character appears for the first time, he probably wrote something like “a very quiet and unassuming young woman” and probably described her in great physical detail. And indeed, the story is like, “She was a very plain and homely young lady.” And so there are some obvious Murakami elements to it, but I’m glad that Hamaguchi did not include the material in the first few pages of the short story where Kafuku expresses how he thinks women aren’t great at driving.

Sims: Right, and the character is supposed to be won over by this female driver. I’m now thinking of other Murakami adaptations. I assume you’ve seen Burning, which was a wonderful Korean film from a few years ago that’s also based on a short story. Almost everything is based on a short story. I’ve never seen the Norwegian Wood annotation, which is his only novel I know of that’s been adapted. Murakami was not thrilled with that movie, though.

Li: He’s thrilled with this one.

Sims: Yeah, he likes Drive My Car?

Li: Yeah, he’s said that he likes this one. And Bong Joon Ho also loves it. He said, “I would compare this to the sound of a bell that resonates for a long time.”

Sims: Bong Joon Ho, who is of course the director of Parasite, which won Best Picture a couple of years ago. And in terms of the Oscar conversation for this movie—and we talked about this a little bit on the Power of the Dog episode, how the voting membership’s clearly changed—there have been efforts to diversify and young-ify the voting pool, which have reaped very interesting rewards. Do you think there’s a change in how audiences are approaching international film?

Cruz: The year after Parasite, when Minari came out, the comparisons were made. It now feels like each year for the past few years, there’s a hot non-English-language Best Picture contender. And I’m grateful for that, if only for the fact that these movies are more in the spotlight.

Read: Minari and the invisible stars of Asian-led movies

Li: I largely feel the same way, Lenika. I think it’s great that there’s room at the Oscars for foreign-language films to be recognized. Sometimes we may be too hasty to see a film like Parasite winning as a harbinger for everything being great from here on out though, you know? For last year’s Golden Globes, Minari was only nominated for Foreign Language Film.

Sims: Right, because the Golden Globes have a sort of annoying rule where if it counts as a Foreign Language Film, it doesn’t count as a drama or comedy.

Li: Right, and Minari is also a deeply American story, so we saw there was a lot of debate around that. I just think it’s great that there’s a space for foreign-language films to be recognized on this level, but I also don’t think they should only be seen as foreign-language films.

Sims: Japan has one of the richest cinema histories of any country. And so it’s sort of shocking that this is the first Japanese film to get a Best Picture nomination. It’s great that the Oscars are expanding, but it does feel like there’s only space for a movie or two to break out in that way. It’s still baby steps.

It’s not just that this is a foreign-language film; it’s that this is a very quiet, very spare, three-hour emotional drama about feelings slowly being drawn out, car ride after car ride. The Oscars used to have some real middle-of-the-road tastes, and Drive My Car is in the left lane, baby!

Li: (Laughs.)

The Western Mythmaking of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog

2022-03-05T12:15:07-05:00

In the past 30 years, two Westerns have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and both redefined that most American of genres. When Clint Eastwood’s brutally revisionist Unforgiven won in 1993, it marked a turning point for films that had long idealized frontier violence. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men then won in 2008, defining modern Westerns beyond the typical 19th-century setting.

And now, in 2022, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is the most Oscar-nominated film of the year and may yet mark the third Best Picture–winning Western in as many decades. But front-runner status invariably means criticism. This week, the actor Sam Elliott went off on the film, denouncing its gay story line and New Zealand photography as untrue to the Western.

Filming in the American West is no prerequisite for great Westerns of course (the term spaghetti Western exists for a reason), but more importantly, the genre’s power was never in its familiar tropes. Westerns aren’t about gunfights or stagecoaches. They’re about how an extreme landscape boils human storytelling down to the essentials: man versus nature, man versus man, man versus society. The Western is Greek tragedy for America’s rugged individualism—and also for its machismo.

The genre has endured through its flexibility to contain action, drama, and comedy, but it also relied on a fairly fixed relationship to masculinity, one defined by stoic icons such as Gary Cooper and John Wayne. That inflexibility is where Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog draws its exquisite tension. Despite its sweeping photography, the film is ultimately a claustrophobic psychodrama orbiting Benedict Cumberbatch’s Phil Burbank—a bullying rancher whose performative masculinity is a not-so-subtle cover for his closeted sexuality.

Set in 1925, well into the twilight of the Wild West, The Power of the Dog is about the mythmaking of the American frontier in more ways than one. Cumberbatch’s character never bathes, costuming himself as a hypermasculine cowboy in a world where that lifestyle is fast fading into myth.

But while Campion’s film follows past Westerns by stretching the boundaries of the genre into sexual psychodrama, does it fall into a different kind of storytelling trope? Namely, does The Power of the Dog—as Spencer Kornhaber has written—have a queer problem?

Listen to Spencer Kornhaber, David Sims, and Shirley Li debate the film on The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for The Power of the Dog.

Shirley Li: Today we are talking about The Power of the Dog, the Jane Campion–adapted–and–directed drama set in the American West in the 1920s. This is Campion’s first film in more than a decade. Her last film was the period drama Bright Star, and in the time since, she’s been working on the TV series Top of the Lake. The Power of the Dog came out on Netflix in November and has since become this year’s Oscar front-runner, sweeping many of the precursory awards and racking up the most Oscar nominations of any film this year. It’s also a movie that requires a lot of unpacking.

This film is ostensibly a Western. It traffics in a lot of classic Western imagery, yet beneath that aesthetic resides this claustrophobic psychodrama. And as Spencer has written, the story itself perhaps has a queer problem. So today, I’m hoping you can dive into this question: Is The Power of the Dog an incisive study of masculinity, or is it a collection of queer clichés? But before we get too far into that, let’s do some setup. David, can you give us a refresher on what this film is about?

David Sims: Yes, The Power of the Dog is a Western set at a ranching operation in 1925 Montana, but it’s mostly about these four characters and the interplay between them. We’ve got Jesse Plemons and Benedict Cumberbatch playing the brothers George and Phil Burbank. George is nice, and Phil is mean. And I would say that’s sort of their vibe, although there’s a lot more going on. Plemons’s George is a fairly pleasant, civilized fella who runs this ranch and seems to desire a settled life. And Phil is a dirty old meanie who bites everyone’s head off and really values what an impressive man of the wild he is. He’s castrating bulls by hand, and he is, you know, making his own rope and so on.

And they meet a widowed innkeeper named Rose, played by Kirsten Dunst, and her son, Peter, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee. George marries Rose after a brief, melancholy little courtship, and they all move in together in the brothers’ gothic ranch house, this giant mausoleum-like building in the middle of nowhere in Montana. This film was actually shot in New Zealand, but it’s got these big, epic landscapes. And Phil shows his unhappiness at his new family by menacing them and bullying them, especially Rose. He has a more complicated dynamic with Peter, who is sort of effeminate, but the initial judging-a-book-by-its-cover reads you might have on these characters is not the whole story as things unfold.

Li: The film is about this unhappy family and its four characters, but really, there’s one prominent character. Phil is the central figure, and everyone else orbits around his nastiness and his secrets.

Spencer Kornhaber: I want a movie about George going to town in his funny porkpie hats, running some lovely errands and having a nice frontier business life.

Sims: (Laughs.) Although there’s a reason George is doing that, I’d argue. It’s not just to keep his character out of the action. George is trying to ignore all of the obvious toxic things going on under his roof, in my opinion.

Li: We should also mention the fifth character in this ensemble who we never see but is named Bronco Henry, who has since become a meme.

Kornhaber: (Laughs.)

Sims: Hell yeah. (Laughs.) Yes, there is an unseen mentor to the two brothers named Bronco Henry, whom Phil talks about with absolute reverence.

Kornhaber: And I guess that’s the name in the book, Bronco Henry?

Li: It is. This is based on a book by Thomas Savage, written in 1967. And since you’ve mentioned Jane Campion, I do want to bring up a quote from her. The Power of the Dog is her first Oscar nomination in almost 30 years, after her last one for 1993’s The Piano. And she said:

“I’m quite used to not getting them, so I’m used to both sides of it. I mean, I’ve made quite a few films since The Piano, and they didn’t get that kind of recognition, even though I felt like I was trying just as hard. It’s really mysterious what people connect to and what they don’t, and I’m certainly not the knower of that, you know?”

So I wanted to know from both of you, when you were watching The Power of the Dog, what did you connect to and what didn’t you?

Kornhaber: I did not connect to too much in this movie. I don’t hate this movie. I think it’s a worthy movie—and it’s a fascinating movie to talk about—but I mostly connected to a curiosity of what kind of movie this is. All these pieces are in position and then it idles for a while, so you’re left speculating, Where is this you’re going? And you do get an answer in the last two minutes. And the answer is: sneaky queer revenge murder, not sneaky queer love story.

The Western is one of the great archetypal movie genres in film history. It feels comfortable and familiar. And so you’re left waiting for what exactly the twist will be. You get small twists along the way, but the grand flourish about what she is trying to accomplish with this story only comes at the very end. And rewatching it again recently somewhat improved the viewing experience, but I don’t quite get the hype.

Sims: I went into this film very excited that one of my all-time-favorite filmmakers had finally made a movie again. I like Top of the Lake, but she hadn’t made a movie since Bright Star. And I think I had the reaction that a lot of people had, which was what you’re describing, Spencer: I was on tenterhooks the whole damn time being like, Where is this going?

Obviously, I was very transfixed by the characters and swept up in the visuals. But I kind of didn’t understand how I was supposed to feel about everyone, and Phil in particular—and about the dynamic building between Phil and Peter. And then the last five minutes of the movie are this crazy, crushing plot blow. And you walk out of the theater unpacking it all.

Li: Part of the magic of this film is that when you rewatch it, it reveals itself to be trickier and thornier and nastier. And I walked away from my second viewing even higher than I had been after the first viewing. In both viewings, though, I did feel like it was telling a profound story. And it sounds to me like, Spencer, you saw these characters as, well, less profound.

Kornhaber: There’s a way that we could talk about this that would make it sound like I am offended by the movie. But it’s not so much that. Early on, when Phil starts bullying Peter in that first scene—he kind of cocks his wrist and he looks at Peter with a sort of malevolence but also interest—I groaned. Please don’t let this be a movie about a gay cowboy bullying an effeminate queer kid in the West.

To me, there is nothing particularly shocking or novel about the mean old cowboy who lives alone, ostracizing himself from society. “Maybe he has a secret, and maybe it’s that he’s gay.” Everything that goes along with that, the whole notion that various manly archetypes we have in our society are often cover for people who are vulnerable in one way or another, or are trying to hide some portion of themselves, or are gay—to me, that feels super played out.

It’s not that revelatory. And so for the first hour of the movie, it’s relying on your curiosity about what the deal is with Phil. And for me, I was like, Is that where this is going? Come on. This is not where it’s really going. Come on. And then he goes to this beautiful glen and he walks by the naked men bathing in the river. And it’s revealed that he has Bronco Henry’s neckerchief and he has this sort of masturbatory ritual. And then we find out that he has skin mags hidden away in case we needed further confirmation.

Li: I see where you’re coming from, Spencer. When Thomas Savage wrote this book in 1967, these ideas of repression and queerness probably felt revolutionary. And these days, it does feel like translating that to film could easily seem reductive. Making the twist be that this character is gay makes him feel like a stock character. But my take from this film is that the dog in the title is not queerness; it’s machismo. It’s masculinity. Yes, he’s repressed. Yes, he’s queer. And he’s surrounded by all of these notions of masculinity. I found there to be more to this than just saying, “Phil Burbank is gay, and therefore he’s what he is.”

Kornhaber: Absolutely. There’s a lot that can be strung out of the tropes this movie’s playing with, and perhaps Campion is saying, “Yeah, maybe this is a trope, but I’m going to take this character as a person worthy of portraying, as someone you can empathize with, and who can be seen anew.” But by the end of the movie, I didn’t feel like it had fully gotten to some place of showing us something that we haven’t really seen before, other than a pretty straightforward twist. You spend the second half wondering if Phil’s change toward Peter will turn into a love affair, or maybe Phil’s going to kill the kid for finding out about him. They’re scripts that we’ve seen play out and stories about the same subject matter as before. And then the kid kills him as a kind of preemptive strike because this guy has been horrible to his mom and is only going to make her life worse.

Sims: Which is an accurate read? Yeah, you’re right.

Kornhaber: That’s cool. But also then you’re just like, okay, so it’s like a David-and-Goliath story.

Li: But in my mind, it’s actually not so much about killing the dog. It’s about Peter transforming into a dog himself, right? He has killed, technically, a family member and someone whom he has kind of seduced. Obviously, there’s something toxic about poisoning a man to death, but he has also adopted a different form of masculinity and machismo. “You can’t kill the dog” is what they walked away with.

Sims: What is so offensive to Phil about Peter, as soon as he enters with the napkin draped over his arm and with the paper flowers, is not that he’s flamboyant but that he is clearly unashamed. And so Phil unleashes on him. And to me, it’s not so much that he’s gay—although that’s obviously something that’s boiling away inside of him—but it’s also this whole American concept of intelligence and machismo not being able to interact with each other. We learn Phil went to Yale and was this prodigy. Everyone talks about how smart he is. “Phi Beta Kappa in classics!”

And Phil’s almost disgusted by it but lets little glimmers through when he’s trying to wound someone. And that’s why Cumberbatch, who is a sort of upper-class British actor, is such good casting, because he feels like someone who is a little bit playing a cowboy. You believe the performance, that this is a guy you wouldn’t want to tangle with, but you also feel like he’s putting something on here.

Kornhaber: Right. It’s drag.

Sims: Exactly. And the meanness leans in a little too much. And that’s why the dynamic with Peter is more interesting than the usual bullying, because Peter is getting under Phil’s skin in this unexpected way by not giving a shit.

Kornhaber: But that is what bullying is! That’s almost the canonical reason to bully someone. You recognize something in them that you don’t like in yourself, right? To me, that’s just the starting place for understanding this story. The movie shows layers upon layers of the things that society forces people to hide, as well as the way that people come together. After Peter learns his secret, Phil tests him for a while, maybe as a keep-your-enemies-closer instinct, but perhaps because he could find a real connection that he is so desperate for.

And that’s about the cowboy, about the lone man in America … How do people who are not allowed to have connections finally, maybe, allow themselves to connect to others? And then it turns into this deadly trap because there’s this other layer on top of it, where Peter is doing a chivalrous thing. He’s being the trigger man, protecting his mom. And so I do think this movie is something of a beautiful jewel box, or a Rube Goldberg machine of the different ways that masculinity is keeping people on these tracks and denying them true love or connection.

You end up feeling bad for Phil. And this is a Campion thing, right? Not judging anyone. Becoming enamored and empathetic toward people who are freaky and perverted and are so ruled by some indescribable desire that they offend society around them. I’ve only seen The Piano and Bright Star, but she seems to be a champion of the freaks.

Li: Yeah, this is very much in her sweet spot.

Sims: She is maybe the greatest filmmaker of all time at depicting human interaction, in my opinion. The interactions she depicts—their subtlety, their quiet little bits of manners, the way emotion can switch between characters in a conversation—they’re so powerful.

Her first film is called Sweetie, which she made in New Zealand, and it’s very similar to The Power of the Dog in a lot of ways. It is about having a person in your house who you just cannot deal with.

Li: (Laughs.)

Sims: And she keeps going back to those kinds of personal dynamics. Except with The Power of the Dog, she’s trying to understand something about American masculinity and what a gossamer facade it is, these silly, academic, European colonizers just sort of marching into town being like, “Well, I could pull the balls off a bull better than any of you, so I must be the toughest!” I’m sure that’s why she connected to this book about a sensitive-seeming kid who wanders into the situation. And you worry about the kid, but instead, he’s playing a chess game with Phil that Phil doesn’t even know he’s in.

I also just want to point out—and this is something I didn’t know until recently—this book by Thomas Savage is not a well-known book. It was more discussed in the 1960s when it came out. But Thomas Savage, which I didn’t know recently, when he was a young boy moved to a ranch with his mother, and the brother of the man that his mother married was this great chess player who went to Yale, who was also a really hardened cowboy and a mean, terrible bully. So if that sounds familiar, it’s because you just watched The Power of the Dog, and clearly he poured his coming-of-age into this book that was a minor piece of sort of modern Western writing when it came out.

It’s also an acknowledged influence on Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx’s book. She said it was a big influence on her. But obviously, then you have this sort of funny thing where Brokeback Mountain at this point is old hat.

Li: I am really curious about what you think when you compare the legacy or, you know, potential legacy of this film versus the one that Brokeback Mountain had, just in terms of films about queerness and cowboy imagery. When I think about Brokeback Mountain, I think about its take on American identity more than masculinity, and I think I walk away feeling like it’s more tragic than The Power of the Dog, probably because the score is so lush and sweeping, and it’s about a love story. But I wonder what your take is there.

Sims: They’re very different movies. They really have a setting in common, obviously.

Kornhaber: But there was that Guardian piece that called The Power of the Dog the cold-souled Brokeback Mountain. And that seems right. It’s the inverse of it. Brokeback Mountain is important because it set that template, or at least brought that template to public acclaim and visibility. It made people feel ravished by a gay romance, swept up in the desire of it and then in the tragedy of how repression can shape a relationship. It’s an emotional movie in a big-hearted way.

And The Power of the Dog is not an emotional movie. It’s a very mental movie. It’s pointing out the other side of how a story like that can go. And that’s fine. That’s neat. But I did not go to the The Power of the Dog knowing it was a queer movie. And I don’t feel like people are talking about it that way. I’ve even seen some people say it has “queer subtext.“ Like, what?

Sims: No, that’s the text of the movie. (Laughs.)

Kornhaber: And it’s interesting that, whether it’s how the film has been marketed or that we don’t find out about Phil until halfway through the movie, it’s just not discussed much in those terms. And I wonder if that will change as Oscar season wears on.