Morgan Ome | The Atlantic

Behold the Demon Scream

2023-07-14T07:30:00-04:00

A couple of months ago, a fan named Sydnee Tallant pointed her phone camera at a Jumbotron showing Suga, the BTS rapper now on a solo tour, as he performed at the Kia Forum, outside Los Angeles. But in the concert footage she posted on TikTok, you can barely make out what he’s singing, because Tallant was wailing at the top of her lungs the whole time. “I sound like a beast,” the 19-year-old told me later. In another recent video, a young woman at a Taylor Swift tour stop in Arizona swivels the camera away from the stage, capturing her own face as she screams the bridge to “Cruel Summer.” The clip has been viewed 2.6 million times.

As many artists embark on their first tours since before the coronavirus pandemic, a lot of the concert clips flooding TikTok capture not the live music itself, but a behavior that some fans self-deprecatingly describe as “demon screaming”—raspy noises emitted at ungodly pitches, as if the screamer were possessed. Some people accuse Gen Z and its preferred social-media platform of ruining concerts. A Refinery29 headline asks, “Is TikTok to Blame for the Demise of Concert Etiquette?” “Loud Singing at Concerts Is Dividing the Internet,” declares Thrillist. I sympathize with the Swift fan who complained—in a viral TikTok video, naturally—about spending $3,000 for a front-row seat and having to listen to someone else scream the whole time. And yet, when I saw Swift in Philadelphia in May, I yelled many of the lyrics until I felt winded, and I wasn’t doing it for TikTok.

[Read: Why fangirls scream]

Are fans simply having fun, or is their behavior too extreme? Versions of that question have been debated for decades. In 1966, the Beatles stopped touring, partly because they couldn’t hear themselves over their fans’ cheers. At a 2016 concert, Justin Bieber asked audience members to tone down their screaming, calling their behavior “obnoxious.” The recent complaints, in other words, are nothing new. But if the screams today are indeed louder and more intrusive than those of the past, the rise of TikTok does make a likely suspect; demon screaming is easy to dismiss as yet another social-media fad—one more way in which the appetite for viral fame has changed daily life.

Still, another possible explanation comes to mind. The young music fans now entering prime concertgoing age spent a large chunk of high school or college away from friends, and missed out on a lot of joy. “Please scream inside your heart,” a sign at one Japanese amusement park infamously asked guests during the first pandemic summer. Now, as more big-name musicians are reclaiming the stage, music fans are finally able to let loose—and set their screams free. In other words, if Swift fans’ demon screaming sounds like an exorcism, it’s because that’s what it is.

Tallant, who lives in Fullerton, California, said that experiencing her favorite artists up close feels like a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” She and I had exchanged Instagram handles in late 2021 after sitting next to each other at a BTS show. When I called her recently to ask about her TikTok concert videos, she mentioned that she had picked up extra shifts at her two jobs and sold old clothes and books so that she could afford sound-check VIP tickets for Tomorrow X Together, a South Korean group known for their energetic emo-pop tracks. Her efforts paid off in May, when she saw the five members live for the first time. “It was surreal,” she told me. “I screamed screams I didn’t think I was capable of.”

“Screams, no matter what context they are given in, elicit interest and attention,” Harold Gouzoules, a psychology professor at Emory University who studies screaming, told me. Screaming has a unique acoustic trait that researchers call “roughness,” which can make the sound especially grating to certain ears; screams change volume at much higher rates than regular speech, activating the brain’s fear center, the amygdala. (That some screams express joy, not distress, doesn’t make them any easier for other people to listen to. Gouzoules said that study participants often have difficulty differentiating between screams of fear and those of excitement.)

Gouzoules also explained that many animal species scream to ward off attacks from predators and to call for help. At concert venues, the purpose of screaming is more opaque—it’s not for survival purposes, for sure. But when emotions are running high, screaming can become contagious. Gouzoules said that such contagion has been observed in a lot of animals, including flocks of birds who start screaming when one member is under attack. Gouzoules suspects that the screaming initiates mostly from fans seeking attention from the artists they idolize. “You’ve got these highly attractive individuals. They’re all on the stage; all the attention is directly at them,” he told me. “The screaming, in essence, says, ‘Look at me, look at me!’”

Some commentators suspect that an intensifying competition among fans, for scarce tickets as well as for musicians’ attention, is eroding concert etiquette—or that the youngest fans never learned it in the first place. At a show featuring the British pop star Louis Tomlinson—a former One Direction member—a Gen Z fan named Devon Hunt saw behaviors that struck him as dangerous rather than simply irritating: pushing and shoving on the floor, blocking others’ views with large signs, throwing objects at the performer. In a TikTok video on the subject, Hunt, who is 22 and lives in Fresno, California, wondered if the pandemic has stunted young people’s social skills.

[Read: The day the live concert returns]

That hasn’t stopped Hunt from going to concerts, even ones hours away in the Bay Area or Los Angeles. “Yes, there’s bad concert etiquette that I’ve experienced,” he told me, “but I wouldn’t change anything.” He thinks most concertgoers understand that screaming “comes with the territory,” especially for people who choose to buy floor tickets. Demon screaming may not end up as a permanent fixture at concerts. If it’s merely a social-media trend, it’ll pass. Gouzoules raised the possibility that, if the behavior is caused by the pandemic, it might recede to a pre-pandemic baseline, if one ever existed.

In the meantime, concerts don’t have to be unpleasant experiences for the scream-averse. Earplugs and a sense of humor can go a long way. When I saw Tomorrow X Together in Washington, D.C., one girl in another section of the arena was screaming “Soobin”—the name of the group’s leader—so loudly from the nosebleeds that he probably did hear her. But I resisted the impulse to judge her. After the Swift show, a friend showed me videos of myself yelling along, embarrassingly off-key, to “My Tears Ricochet” and “Tolerate It.” But these were songs that had kept me company during the most isolating days of the pandemic, songs that I could only dream of seeing live one day, and they were being played right before my eyes. It was hard not to scream for that.

Five Books That’ll Fit Right Into Your Busy Schedule

2023-07-03T09:48:00-04:00

As much as I love falling into a book and letting it consume an entire day, my free time doesn’t always arrive in uninterrupted stretches. Instead, it might be sprinkled throughout a hectic schedule: 10 minutes while I’m waiting at the doctor’s office, another 15 minutes riding the train, 30 minutes before falling asleep. These pockets of idle time could be spent scrolling on TikTok or answering emails, but I find that they are perfect for sneaking in reading—particularly short-story and essay collections, which you can enjoy in starts and stops.

Last month, I revisited the Pulitzer-winning volume Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri, and its intimate vignettes of the Indian diaspora. Lahiri’s short fiction focuses on characters, young and old, confronting the pangs of assimilation and alienation; each narrative conjures a rich and vivid world of its own. I decided that a concrete, achievable task would be tackling one story every night. They welcomed me in for a brief stay before releasing me to a dinner reservation, to my unfinished laundry, or to sleep. When reading starts to feel impossible, turn to books that you can work through at your own pace. These five titles can be consumed over days, weeks, or even months—ready for you whenever you want to dive back in.

3 Hole Press

Cooking as Though You Might Cook Again, by Danny Licht

In the time it takes to boil water for pasta, you can finish several of Licht’s delightful hybrid recipe-essays. The 78-page zine-like book encourages home cooks to view the task of preparing a meal not as a chore but as an act of emotional nourishment. Just as Licht prompts his readers to slow down and appreciate the process of assembling ingredients and letting them meld, his conversational language is best savored unhurriedly. The instructions for the simple Italian-ish dishes—a pot of beans, a creamy lemon risotto, pasta with braised chuck roast—cultivate an intuitive and meditative approach to putting food on the table. “Cooking does not need to be a race to the table, and it does not need to have an upper limit on what is possible or what is delicious or even what is beautiful,” Licht writes. “Instead, it can be a drama in parts, each act vital, and each giving way to the next. It can be like life itself.”

Algonquin Books

Cursed Bunny, by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur

Squeamish readers beware, because no one does body horror like Chung. Her frightening stories force you to sit in discomfort: A family seeks revenge on an unscrupulous businessman through a supernatural bunny lamp that destroys everything around it; a woman begins taking birth-control pills, but they fertilize a surreal, immaculate pregnancy, and she’s forced to look for a husband; a boy escapes Promethean torture at the hands of a monster, only to be further abused by the people who rescue him. For some, the subject matter may actually necessitate taking breaks. Thankfully, moving through the collection at a measured pace allows Hur’s straightforward translation—and the macabre scenarios that Chung creates—to feel fresh on every visit.

[Read: You can read any of these short novels in a weekend]

Riverhead

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, by Danielle Evans

Deliberately reading Evans’s 2010 debut allows the collection’s tenderness and warmth to wash over you the same way a conversation with an old friend does: Secrets are divulged, and old memories start to creep into the present. Her best stories—“Snakes,” “Virgins,” “Harvest,” and “Robert E. Lee Is Dead”—focus on the complicated and intense relationships between young women, many of whom are Black. Evans’s characters betray and uplift one another, sometimes simultaneously, and are infused with humor and generosity. Some of her plots deal with major coming-of-age milestones, like a first pregnancy or the end of high school. But in her deft hands, a night at the club or a summer with Grandma can also be a defining moment, one whose weight might not be realized until much later.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks

During his career as a neurologist, Sacks studied people with the most curious brain abnormalities, such as Dr. P., the titular man who could not accurately identify objects (or other humans). This collection of neurological case studies moves beyond clinical descriptions and focuses on the humanity of Sacks’s patients. The 24 essays are grouped by theme—“Losses,” “Excesses,” “Transports,” and “The World of the Simple”—but they don’t have to be read chronologically, as they are all discrete accounts. Sacks combines explanations of psychological theory, as well as snippets of dialogue between him and his subjects, to create nuanced portraits of people facing extreme medical challenges. What may be abnormal for much of the audience is normal for Sacks’s patients, and seeing through their eyes generates a renewed recognition of the tenacity of the human spirit—a feeling worth sitting with.

[Read: The adults who treat reading like homework]

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, by Hisaye Yamamoto

Yamamoto’s 1988 collection captures the dignity and disillusionment of the Japanese community in America during and after World War II. Together, the stories create a snapshot of a group during a transitory phase in the United States. But reading them separately, as singular narratives, allows for a greater appreciation of the ordinary people who lived through this sweeping and weighty moment in history. The title story, “Seventeen Syllables,” highlights how the realities of immigration—such as a language barrier and shifting cultural norms—contribute to the divide between a mother and a daughter. Despite being written in the second half of the 20th century, Yamamoto’s stories about anti-Asian racism, sexual harassment, and generational estrangement transcend their period; they could easily be transplanted to the current day, thanks to her ability to make the mess of daily life resonate across the decades.

What Reparations Actually Bought

2023-06-10T07:30:00-04:00

In 1990, the U.S. government began mailing out envelopes, each containing a presidential letter of apology and a $20,000 check from the Treasury, to more than 82,000 Japanese Americans who, during World War II, were robbed of their homes, jobs, and rights, and incarcerated in camps. This effort, which took a decade to complete, remains a rare attempt to make reparations to a group of Americans harmed by force of law. We know how some recipients used their payment: The actor George Takei donated his redress check to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. A former incarceree named Mae Kanazawa Hara told an interviewer in 2004 that she bought an organ for her church in Madison, Wisconsin. Nikki Nojima Louis, a playwright, told me earlier this year that she used the money to pay for living expenses while pursuing her doctorate in creative writing at Florida State University. She was 65 when she decided to go back to school, and the money enabled her to move across the country from her Seattle home.

But many stories could be lost to history. My family received reparations. My grandfather, Melvin, was 6 when he was imprisoned in Tule Lake, California. As long as I’ve known about the redress effort, I’ve wondered how he felt about getting a check in the mail decades after the war. No one in my family knows how he used the money. Because he died shortly after I was born, I never had a chance to ask.

The author’s grandfather (second from left) and other family members when they were incarcerated at Tule Lake (Courtesy of Morgan Ome)

To my knowledge, no one has rigorously studied how families spent individual payments, each worth $45,000 in current dollars. Densho, a nonprofit specializing in archival history of Japanese American incarceration, and the Japanese American National Museum confirmed my suspicions. When I first started researching what the redress effort did for former incarcerees, the question seemed almost impudent, because whose business was it but theirs what they did with the money?

Still, I thought, following that money could help answer a basic question: What did reparations mean for the recipients? When I began my reporting, I expected former incarcerees and their descendants to speak positively about the redress movement. What surprised me was how intimate the experience turned out to be for so many. They didn’t just get a check in the mail; they got some of their dignity and agency back. Also striking was how interviewee after interviewee portrayed the monetary payments as only one part—though an important one—of a broader effort at healing.

[From the June 2014 issue: The case for reparations]

The significance of reparations becomes all the more important as cities, states, and some federal lawmakers grapple with whether and how to make amends to other victims of official discrimination—most notably Black Americans. Although discussions of compensation have existed since the end of the Civil War, they have only grown in intensity and urgency in recent years, especially after this magazine published Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” in 2014. In my home state, California, a task force has spent the past three years studying what restitution for Black residents would look like. The task force will deliver its final recommendations—which reportedly include direct monetary payments and a formal apology to descendants of enslaved people—to the state legislature by July 1.

In 1998, as redress for Japanese American incarcerees was winding to a close, the University of Hawaii law professor Eric Yamamoto wrote, “In every African American reparations publication, in every legal argument, in almost every discussion, the topic of Japanese American redress surfaces. Sometimes as legal precedent. Sometimes as moral compass. Sometimes as political guide.” Long after it ended, the Japanese American–redress program illustrates how honest attempts at atonement for unjust losses cascade across the decades.

In February 1942, following the attacks on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the incarceration of more than 125,000 Japanese Americans mostly on the West Coast. In the most famous challenge to the legality of Roosevelt’s order, Fred Korematsu, an Oakland man who had refused to report for incarceration, appealed his conviction for defying military orders. The Supreme Court upheld Korematsu’s conviction in its now notorious decision Korematsu v. United States. Families like mine were forced to abandon everything, taking only what they could carry.

After the war, many former incarcerees, weighed down with guilt and shame, refused to speak about their experience. But as their children—many of them third-generation Japanese Americans—came of age during the civil-rights movement, calls for restitution and apology grew within the community. In 1980, Congress passed legislation establishing a commission to study the issue and recommend appropriate remedies. After hearing testimony from more than 500 Japanese Americans—many of whom were speaking of their incarceration for the first time—the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded that “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership” had been the primary motivators for the incarceration. The CWRIC also recommended that $20,000 be paid to each survivor of the camps.

At the same time, new evidence emerged showing that the government had suppressed information and lied about Japanese Americans being security threats. In the 1980s, lawyers reopened the Korematsu case and two similar challenges to E.O. 9066. All three convictions were vacated. By 1988, when reparations legislation was making its way through Congress, the legal proceedings and the CWRIC’s findings provided the momentum and public evidence for Japanese Americans to make the case for reparations. The 1988 Civil Liberties Act authorized reparations checks to all Japanese American incarcerees who were alive the day the act was signed into law. (If a recipient was deceased at the time of payment, the money went to their immediate family). The Department of Justice established a special body, the Office of Redress Administration, to contact and verify eligible recipients. The CLA also provided for a formal government apology and a fund to educate the public about the incarceration: safeguards against such history repeating itself.

[Read: Two Boy Scouts met in an internment camp, and grew up to work in Congress]

Ever since, reparations advocates have invoked Japanese American redress as a precedent that can be replicated for other groups. Dreisen Heath, a reparations advocate and former researcher at Human Rights Watch, told me Japanese American redress proves that “it is possible for the U.S. government to not only acknowledge and formally apologize and state its culpability for a crime, but also provide some type of compensation.” In 1989, then-Representative John Conyers introduced H.R. 40, a bill to establish a commission to study reparations for Black Americans. Proponents have reintroduced the bill again and again.

In 2021, as the House Judiciary Committee prepared to vote for the first time on H.R. 40, the Japanese American social-justice organization Tsuru for Solidarity submitted to the panel more than 300 letters written by former incarcerees and their descendants. The letters described how the reparations process helped Japanese Americans, psychologically and materially, in ways that stretched across generations. (In addition to drawing on that rich source of information for this story, I also interviewed family friends, members of the Japanese American church that I grew up in, and other former incarcerees and their children.)

In one of the letters, the daughter of an incarceree tells how the $20,000, invested in her family’s home equity and compounded over time, ultimately enabled her to attend Yale. “The redress money my family received has always been a tailwind at my back, making each step of the way a tiny bit easier,” she wrote. Just as her family was able to build generational equity, she hoped that Black Americans, too, would have “the choice to invest in education, homeownership, or whatever else they know will benefit their families, and, through the additional choices that wealth provides, to be a little more free.”

The redress effort for World War II incarcerees has shaped California’s task force in highly personal ways. Lisa Holder, an attorney who sits on the task force, first saw the idea of reparations become concrete through her best friend in high school, whose Japanese American father received a payment. The only non-Black member of the task force is the civil-rights lawyer Don Tamaki, whose parents were both incarcerated. Tamaki, like many other people I interviewed, acknowledges that incarcerees have different histories and experiences from the victims of slavery and Jim Crow—“there’s no equivalence between what Japanese Americans suffered and what Black people have gone through,” he told me—but he also sees some parallels that might inform the reparations debate.

Tamaki’s life, like that of many Japanese Americans, has been shaped by his family’s incarceration. As a young lawyer, he worked on the legal team that reopened Korematsu. Tamaki is now 72. In January, he and I met at the Shops at Tanforan, a mall built atop the land where his parents, Minoru and Iyo, were incarcerated. Next to the mall, a newly opened memorial plaza honors the nearly 8,000 people of Japanese descent who lived there in 1942. Neither Don nor I had previously visited the memorial, which happens to be near my hometown. In middle school, I bought a dress for a dance party at the mall’s JCPenney.

In 1942, Tanforan was an equestrian racetrack. After Roosevelt issued his internment order, horse stalls were hastily converted into living quarters. Minoru, who was in his last year of pharmacy school, couldn’t attend his commencement ceremony, because he was incarcerated. The university instead rolled up the diploma in a tube addressed to Barrack 80, Apt. 5, Tanforan Assembly Centre, San Bruno, California. “The diploma represents the promise of America,” he told me. “And the mailing tube which wraps around this promise—the diploma—constrains and restricts it.” Don still has both.

When the checks arrived in the mail in the ’90s, the Tamakis gathered at Don’s house. His parents spent one check on a brown Mazda MPV, which they would use while babysitting their grandkids. They put the other check into savings. “They didn’t do anything extravagant,” Don told me.

To talk about reparations is to talk about loss: of property and of personhood. In 1983, the CWRIC estimated Japanese American incarcerees’ economic losses at $6 billion, approximately $18 billion today. But those figures don’t capture the dreams, opportunities, and dignity that were taken from people during the war. Surviving incarcerees still feel those losses deeply.

[Read: What my grandmother learned in her World War II internment camp]

Mary Tamura, 99, was a resident of Terminal Island off the coast of Los Angeles. “It was like living in Japan,” she told me. Along with the island’s 3,000 other Japanese American residents, she celebrated Japanese holidays; learned the art of flower arranging, ikebana; and wore kimonos. Then, on December 7, 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor was attacked, the FBI rounded up men and community leaders, including Tamura’s father. Two months later, Terminal Island residents were ordered to leave within 48 hours. Tamura, who once dreamed of teaching, instead joined the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps. On Terminal Island, Japanese homes and businesses were razed.

Lily Shibuya was born in 1938 in San Juan Bautista, California. After the war, her family moved to Mountain View, where they grew carnations. Shibuya’s older siblings couldn’t afford to go to college and instead started working immediately after they were released from one of the camps. Her husband’s family members, also flower growers, were able to preserve their farmland but lost the chrysanthemum varieties they had cultivated.

Shibuya told me that with her reparations check, she bought a funerary niche for herself, paid for her daughter’s wedding, and covered travel expenses to attend her son’s medical-school graduation. Tamura used part of her redress money for a vacation to Europe with her husband. The other funds went toward cosmetic eyelid surgery. “It was just for beauty’s sake—vanity,” Tamura told me.

Many recipients felt moved to use the $20,000 payments altruistically. In a 2004 interview with Densho, the then-91-year-old Mae Kanazawa Hara—who’d given an organ to her church—recalled her reaction to receiving reparations: “I was kind of stunned. I said, ‘By golly, I’ve never had a check that amount.’ I thought, Oh, this money is very special.” Some recipients gave their check to their children or grandchildren, feeling that it should go toward future generations.

The notion that recipients should use their money for noble purposes runs deep in the discussion about reparations. It helps explain why some reparations proposals end up looking more like public-policy initiatives than the unrestricted monetary payments that Japanese Americans received. For example, a 2021 initiative in Evanston, Illinois, began providing $25,000 in home repairs or down-payment assistance to Black residents and their descendants who experienced housing discrimination in the city from 1919 to 1969. Florida provides free tuition to state universities for the descendants of Black families in the town of Rosewood who were victimized during a 1923 massacre. But if the goal of reparations is to help restore dignity and opportunity, then the recipients need autonomy. Only they can decide how best to spend those funds. (Perhaps recognizing this, Evanston’s city council voted earlier this year to provide direct cash payments of $25,000.)

[Ibram X. Kendi: There is no middle ground on reparations]

Not every Japanese American whom I interviewed deemed the reparations effort helpful or sincere. When I arrived at Mary Murakami’s home in Bethesda, Maryland, the 96-year-old invited me to sit at her dining-room table, where she had laid out several documents in preparation for my visit: her yearbook from the high school she graduated from while incarcerated; a map of the barracks where she lived in Topaz, Utah; a movie poster–size copy of Executive Order 9066, found by her son-in-law at an antique shop.

She first saw the order nailed to a telephone pole in San Francisco’s Japantown as a high schooler, more than 80 years ago. A rumor had been circulating in Japantown that children might be separated from their parents. Her mother and father gave each child a photo of themselves, so the children would remember who their parents were. They also revealed a family secret: Atop the highest shelf in one of their closets sat an iron box. The children had never asked about it, and it was too heavy for any of them to remove, Murakami recalled. Inside the box was an urn containing the ashes of her father’s first wife, the mother of Murakami’s oldest sister, Lily.

The government had told them to take only what they could carry. The ashes of a dead woman would have to be left behind. Murakami and her father buried the box in a cemetery outside the city. With no time or money to prepare a proper tombstone, they stuck a homemade wooden marker in the ground. Then they returned home to resume packing. They sold all their furniture—enough to fill seven rooms—for $50.

Murakami’s family, like the Tamakis, went to Tanforan, and then to Topaz. “The most upsetting thing about camp was the family unity breaking down,” Murakami told me. “As camp life went on, we didn’t eat with our parents most of the time.” Not that she did much eating—she recalls the food as inedible, save for the plain peanut-and-apple-butter sandwiches. Today, Murakami will not eat apple butter or allow it in her house.

After the war, she did her best to move forward. She graduated from UC Berkeley, where she met her husband, Raymond. They moved to Washington, D.C., so that he could attend dental school at Howard University—a historically Black school that she and her husband knew would admit Japanese Americans.

Absent from the documents that Murakami saved is the presidential letter of apology. “Both Ray and I threw it away,” she told me. “We thought it came too late.” After the war ended, each incarceree was given $25 and a one-way ticket to leave the camps. For Murakami, money and an apology would have meant something when her family was struggling to resume the life that they had been forced to abruptly put on pause—not more than 40 years later. She and her husband gave some of their reparations to their children. Raymond donated his remaining funds to building the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism in Washington, D.C., and Mary deposited hers in a retirement fund.

A $20,000 check could not reestablish lost flower fields, nor could it resurrect a formerly proud and vibrant community. Still, the money, coupled with an official apology, helped alleviate the psychological anguish that many incarcerees endured. Lorraine Bannai, who worked on Fred Korematsu’s legal team alongside Don Tamaki, almost never talked with her parents about the incarceration. Yet, after receiving reparations, her mother confided that she had lived under a cloud of guilt for decades, and it had finally been lifted. “My reaction was: ‘You weren’t guilty of anything. How could you think that?’” Bannai told me. “But on reflection, of course she would think that. She was put behind barbed wire and imprisoned.”

Yamamoto, the law professor in Hawaii, stresses that the aims of reparations are not simply to compensate victims but to repair and heal their relationship with society at large. Kenniss Henry, a national co-chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, told me that her own view of reparations has evolved over time. She sees value in processes such as community hearings and reports documenting a state’s history of harm. “It is necessary to have some form of direct payment, but reparations represent more than just a check,” she said.

The Los Angeles community organizer Miya Iwataki, who worked toward Japanese American redress as a congressional staffer in the 1980s and now advocates for reparations for Black Californians, sees the checks and apology to World War II incarcerees as essential parts of a larger reconciliation. In 2011, Iwataki accompanied her father, Kuwashi, to Washington, D.C., to receive a Congressional Gold Medal for his World War II military service. Throughout their trip, he was greeted by strangers who knew of Kuwashi’s unit: the all-Japanese 100th Battalion of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, known for being the most decorated unit of its size and length of service. As the Iwatakis settled into their seats on the return flight, Kuwashi told Miya, “This is the first time I really felt like an American.”

The author’s grandfather (far left) and family during World War II (Courtesy of Morgan Ome)

For decades, former incarcerees have kept memories alive, and now that task falls to their descendants. Pilgrimages to former incarceration sites have resumed since the height of the pandemic, and new memorials, like the one at the Tanforan mall, continue to crop up. “The legacy of Japanese American incarceration and redress has yet to be written,” Yamamoto told me.

In January, my mom and I drove to Los Angeles for an appointment at the Japanese American National Museum. We were there to see the Ireichō, or the sacred book of names. The memorial arose out of another previously unanswered question: How many Japanese Americans in total were incarcerated during the war? For three years, the Ireichō’s creator, Duncan Ryūken Williams, worked with volunteers and researchers to compile the first comprehensive list, with 125,284 names printed on 1,000 pages.

I was stunned at the book’s size, and even more moved by the memorial’s design. On the walls hung wood panels with the names of each incarceration camp written in Japanese and English, along with a glass vial of soil from each site. My mom and I were invited to stamp a blue dot next to the names of our family members, as a physical marker of remembrance. When the museum docent flipped to my grandfather, Melvin, I was reminded that I’ll never be able to ask him what he experienced as a child. I’ll never learn what he thought when, in his 50s, he opened his apology letter. The only additional detail that I learned about him while reporting this article was that, according to my grandmother, he mistakenly listed the $20,000 as income on his tax return.

But through my conversations with surviving incarcerees, many of whose names also appear in the Ireichō, I could see how a combination of symbolic and material reparations—money, an apology, and public-education efforts—was essential to a multigenerational healing process. For Melvin, a third-generation Japanese American, this might have looked like receiving the check. For me, in the fifth generation, placing a stamp next to his name helped me honor him and see his life as part of a much larger story. The project of making amends for Japanese American incarceration didn’t end with the distribution of redress checks and an apology. It might not even finish within one lifetime, but each generation still strives to move closer.

Photo-illustration sources: Buyenlarge / Getty; Corbis / Getty; Dorothea Lange / U.S. War Relocation Authority / Getty; History / Universal Images Group / Getty; Library of Congress; Stephen Osman / Getty; Bancroft Library / UC Berkeley

Blinken: I Understand Why Zelensky Is Demanding That the U.S. ‘Do Even More and Do It Even Faster’

2023-02-24T06:00:00-05:00

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One year ago, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, escalating aggression that began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been at the center of the U.S.’s involvement in the war, relaying intelligence to President Volodymyr Zelensky and working with allies to provide aid to the Ukrainian military. Today, Blinken spoke with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, about foreign policy in the post–Cold War era, deterring similar aggression from China across the Taiwan Strait, and what a Ukrainian victory might look like. “There is more convergence now over the last couple of years with our partners in Europe, but also in Asia, than I’ve seen any time in the last 30 years,” Blinken said. “For me, that tells us that America’s place in the world and ability to confront these challenges is much stronger than it’s been.”

Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Jeffrey Goldberg: We’re talking on or about the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion, but the invasion actually began in 2014. The first question I have is actually a very simple one: What is the most surprising event of the past year, excluding the fact that Russia launched a full-scale invasion thinking that it could take Kyiv in a matter of days? What is the most surprising development to you over the past year, either in the Ukraine theater or globally?

Antony Blinken: Well, Jeff, first, let me just say, it’s great to be with you. It’s great to be with the entire Atlantic community. As you’ll notice, my voice is a little bit hoarse. I think I left it somewhere along the way in Munich last week, or maybe Turkey. I’m debating whether it’s God’s way of telling me that I need to be listening even more and talking a little bit less. But we’ll leave that. I hope that’s right.

First of all, we were, of course, not surprised, unfortunately, by the reinvasion of Ukraine—the second shot, as you put it—because as everyone knows, we had extraordinary information for many months leading up to it. And while part of you wanted to believe that Vladimir Putin would simply not pull the trigger at the end, unfortunately, all the information was tracking that way. But once he did, while many months of work that we put into this, through diplomacy, to build a strong coalition, to build strong partnerships in advance—which, by the way, was the big difference from 2014—we had a run-up, and we were able to use diplomacy to bring countries together, both in terms of the support they provide to Ukraine, the pressure they put on Russia, and the strengthening of our NATO alliance in a defensive way. And having done all that work, nonetheless, we weren’t 100 percent certain that the center would not only come together but would hold. And it has.

What we’ve seen a year in is not just an alliance but a broader partnership that is strong, that is solid, that is standing up, providing the support to Ukraine, keeping the pressure on Russia, taking steps to strengthen our alliance. And you see that reflected all the way from the UN to the NATO theater itself and around the world. And finally, Jeff, this resilience has been all the more remarkable because, from energy prices to food scarcity and prices, inflation more generally, all exacerbated by Putin’s war of aggression—despite that, there’s been incredible resilience. And we’ve seen countries coming together and working together to deal effectively with those challenges that were, as I say, put in overdrive by the aggression.

[Read: How and when the war in Ukraine will end]

Goldberg: How surprised were you that Ukraine was able to withstand and then even go on the offensive in certain cases against the invasion of a seemingly overpowering force?

Blinken: I think we’ve had a couple of signs of this in the lead-up. First of all, if you go back before the reinvasion, the re-aggression, for many months, we had been working quietly to make sure that Ukrainians had in their hands what they would need to repel the initial assault, which we did see coming right at Kyiv. And if you go back to Labor Day before the aggression, President Joe Biden did an initial drawdown of military support for Ukraine, things like Stingers and Javelins. And an even bigger one in December, again before the March invasion. So in that sense, they were prepared.

Second, we have been working very closely with them to help them see what was coming and encourage them to make the necessary preparations beyond having some of this weaponry and just getting organized. And they did that and they did that a little bit quietly, because one of the concerns that President Zelensky had was the more that we talked out the possibility of an aggression—before the aggression—the more we all risk talking down his economy and foreign investment. People might be scared off. So he was trying to walk a careful line between being prepared and not raising too many concerns publicly. So it may be that in part because of that, people were a little surprised at how well the Ukrainians did initially. Having said all of that, I’ve got to say we have been in awe of their courage, their resilience, their strength, and their effectiveness. I think it has in some ways gone beyond what we might have anticipated.

Goldberg: Right. Before I get to some even bigger questions, go to this question of President Zelensky and his leadership. We had, in our minds, a model from Afghanistan of a president fleeing in the face of an onslaught and aggression, in this case in a civil war. But President Zelensky stayed. And I’m wondering if you could encapsulate your feelings about him, your analysis of his leadership, and obviously fold into that your understanding of how President Biden understands the performance of President Zelensky over the past year.

Blinken: Right man, right place, right time. Someone who stood up to this moment in history.

I had the almost surreal experience of being asked to tell him on the margins of a summit meeting in Europe back in October that we believed it was likely that his country was going to be invaded in the months ahead. I had the intelligence information that I shared with him. And we were sitting alone in a small room off of this summit meeting and almost two to three feet apart. And I shared this with him, and he took it very stoically, very seriously, brought in some of his advisers so that we could discuss it with him. And I think, from that moment on, he certainly was seized with the very real prospect that this was coming and, as I said, did a lot of work, some of it very quietly, to get ready.

But I think we’ve seen ever since that he’s become an extraordinary figure on the world stage as well, all to the benefit of his country. And, of course, he cajoles, he encourages, he prods us to do even more. If I were in his shoes, I’d be doing exactly the same thing. I think President Biden has a lot of admiration for him, a lot of respect for him. And I think that was on full evidence when the president was in Kyiv, standing side by side with President Zelensky, in a Kyiv that remains free and part of a strong, independent Ukraine.

Goldberg: Take us back to this for one minute. It’s a very interesting diplomatic-craft question. How do you take a president of a sovereign nation aside at a meeting and say, “Hey, listen, by the way, you’re about to be invaded by a superpower?” How do you say that in a way that gets the message through without seeming panicky or without seeming Chicken Little–ish? How does it actually work?

Blinken: Quite simply, in this case, what I shared with President Zelensky was that President Biden asked me, because we were going to be at the same meeting, to share with him the information that we had about Russia’s plans and intentions. Everyone saw the massing of Russian forces along Ukraine’s borders. That wasn’t a secret. Ukrainians saw it. We saw it. Europeans saw it. But what we had uniquely, in addition to that, was very explicit information about what the Russians were actually thinking and what they were planning and what they were plotting to do with those forces, as well as other things that they were going to bring to this fight. And so, in a very direct, deliberate way, I laid out the information that we had. And of course, President Zelensky asked me a number of questions about it but, as I said, took it very seriously and very stoically. And that’s when he brought in some of his advisers. We walked them through it as well. And he said, in effect, “Well, we need to work closely together to make sure that we’re prepared.”

At the same time, we were engaged in intense diplomacy with Russia to try to prevent this from happening both directly through NATO, through the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, because, of course, what we most wanted was to try to stop this. And unfortunately, when Russia’s objectives and Putin’s objectives became crystal clear, it was never about NATO enlargement. It was never about some threat to Russia’s security. It was all about Putin’s vision that Ukraine should not be an independent country and should be absorbed back into Russia.

Goldberg: Right. You alluded to a certain level of tension that exists between the Zelensky administration and the Biden administration around the subject of the types of arms and the speed at which Ukraine is being armed. Do you think the United States is going fast enough?

Blinken: Jeff, I do. But again, if I were in President Zelensky’s shoes, I would probably be doing and have done exactly what he’s done, which is to continuously prod the international community, not just the United States, to do even more and do it even faster. And of course, this has been an evolutionary process in a few ways. First, the battlefield itself has shifted dramatically, first from Kyiv, where, as I said, a lot of the work we did months before the aggression helped the Ukrainians repel that aggression with the Stingers, with the Javelins, with other systems. But then, of course, everything moved east and south. The very nature of the conflict changed. What the Russians were doing, where they were doing it, how they were doing it changed. And we had to make sure that we were changing with that. And we did.

Many months ago, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin set up a very effective process we call the Ramstein process—because the first meeting and subsequent meetings were held in Ramstein, Germany—to bring together all of the allies and partners in this effort so that we were coordinated and could make sure that we were delivering what was needed as quickly as needed. And that process has worked very well. But this is what’s really important. And again, I’d refer you to the secretary of defense, chairman of the joint chiefs, who are the real experts in this. It’s not just the individual weapons systems that count. And of course, we tend to get focused on one at any given time, and it becomes a story in the media.

What matters as much is, can the Ukrainians effectively use that system? And as we’re providing more NATO standard systems to them, it requires training, because these are not things that they’re used to using. Second, can they maintain them? Because if you give them something and it falls apart in a week because they can’t maintain it, it’s not going to do you a lot of good. And third, can it become part of a cohesive battle-plan maneuver, as our military experts call it, that brings to bear various elements all at the same time, at maximum effect? And that, too, requires training and advice. And we’ve now been doing, with a number of other countries, unit-level training. So it’s just not as simple as some people portray this: “Oh, yes, let’s give them this. Flip the switch. They’ll have it. And that’ll be that.” That’s not how it works.

Finally, we’re very focused on what it is that they’ll need in the months ahead to have the maximum effect possible. But even as we’re doing that, we’re thinking about their longer-term defense posture, because at some point, when this is over, what’s going to be very important is to do everything we can to make sure that Russia can’t repeat the exercise a year later, two years later, five years later. And that means building up Ukraine’s longer-term deterrent and defense capacity. So all of those things are being worked on at the same time. We’re running and chewing gum at the same time.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Time is on Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s]

Goldberg: I want to come to this question of what “over” looks like in a moment. But let me just stay on this question of arming and escalation. The American defense establishment has a certain level of anxiety around the danger of inadvertently entering into an escalatory cycle that could end conceivably, God forbid, in the use of at least battlefield nuclear weapons. How worried are you that the United States and its allies will cross a line that will provoke Putin into doing something dire?

Blinken: Well, Jeff, first of all, any administration has to factor in the possibility of escalation into what they’re doing, what they’re providing, and how they’re helping. And, of course, President Biden has been very clear from the start that our support for Ukraine is fundamental, and we’re with them for as long as it takes. But we also don’t want to broaden this war and certainly don’t want to do anything to create a wider conflagration. So the president has had to factor both of those things into the decisions he’s made. And by the way, he’s the one who makes the decisions. The rest of us, we can give him advice, recommendations. If you’re not in government, you can opine and criticize, which is always what’s needed to make sure we’re doing the best that we can. But ultimately, as the saying goes, the buck stops with him. And that’s something that he takes very seriously.

Now, what we’ve seen, at least thus far, is that some steps that we’ve taken that some might have been concerned could be escalatory have not proved to be so. And I think there’s one powerful reason for that, and that is the last thing that Vladimir Putin needs is a wider war, and one that brings in NATO in order to defend itself—which is NATO’s purpose, not to attack Russia. It never has been, never will be, but to defend the countries of NATO who are very concerned about Russia’s aggressive posture. If Putin did something that created escalation and brought NATO in, that’s really the last thing he wants, because as it is, we all know, he is struggling mightily in Ukraine right now. He’s got about 80-plus percent of his land forces committed in Ukraine. And in fact, in an almost perverse logic, because he is falsely concerned that NATO poses a threat to Russia, he has to keep some things in reserve lest there be a conflict that he creates with NATO. So I think that’s been the biggest deterrent against escalation.

Now, there have been moments where the concern has been a little bit heightened. For example, when the Ukrainians went on a counteroffensive last spring and had very significant success, there was some concern that Putin might react even more irrationally. And there was language coming out of Moscow that suggested that he would look to the use of tactical nuclear weapons. So that was a concern. But what we did in that case was to not only message him very directly—I was engaged with my counterpart, Mr. Lavrov; others were engaged with theirs—but we urged and, I think, successfully, other countries that might have a little bit more influence with Russia these days, like China, but also other countries, like India, to engage him directly about their absolute opposition to any use of nuclear weapons. And we know that they conveyed those messages. And I think that had some effect. It’s something we always have to look at, but again, the track record to date suggests that the escalation that some feared has, at least to now, not happened.

Goldberg: Mr. Secretary, you mentioned China. Let me pivot to Asia for a moment, if I may, and ask you this: Do you think that the U.S. and its allies will have more success convincing China to limit its involvement in this conflict, meaning not supply arms to Russia, than the West had in trying to convince Russia not to invade or reinvade Ukraine in the first place? We’re at a very sensitive moment, obviously, in your campaign to keep the Chinese out.

Blinken: Jeff, I certainly hope so and ultimately believe so, but the proof will be in the pudding.

Goldberg: Why do you believe so?

Blinken: I’ll tell you why, but let me give you the background to this first, because it really goes back to the beginning of the aggression. You’ll remember that just weeks before the aggression took place, President Xi Jinping and Putin had a summit meeting in which they talked about a partnership with “no limits.” Well, a phrase like that is of concern. And a couple of weeks into the aggression, President Biden was on a videoconference with President Xi and said to him very directly, very clearly, that any Chinese military support for Russia in this conflict—or, for that matter, the systematic evasion of sanctions—would be a serious problem for the relationship between the United States and China. And on subsequent occasions over the months, the president has repeated that message, and others of us have done the same thing.

What we’ve seen to date is China basically holding that line, which is to say there has been some nonlethal dual-use-type support coming from “Chinese companies” that almost certainly was approved by the state, because there’s really no difference. But there has not been lethal military support, and similarly, we haven’t seen to date systematic sanctions—but we also have picked up information over the last couple of months that strongly indicates that China is now considering doing that. And that was one of the reasons that, in the meeting that I had with the senior Chinese foreign-policy official Wang Yi, in Munich, I again directly told him this concern, what we were seeing, and reminded him of the many conversations between President Biden and President Xi, and reminded him that this would be a serious problem in the relationship.

I’m hopeful, but in a very clear-eyed way, that China will get that message, because it’s not only coming from us; it’s coming from many other countries who do not want to see China aiding and abetting, in a material way, Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. And so, to the extent China is trying to engage in a charm offensive these days to reengage with other countries as it comes out of COVID, I don’t think it wants to be in the business of further alienating them by providing lethal support to Russia. The jury’s out. We’re watching it very, very carefully. We’ll see how they react.

Goldberg: Does the Ukraine reinvasion over the last year make it more likely or less likely that China will do something precipitous against Taiwan in the future?

[Read: Taiwain faces its Ukraine moment]

Blinken: One of the reasons, I think, that other countries far beyond Europe joined this effort is because they understood the consequences, the repercussions, the implications for issues well beyond Europe. And so, for example, Japan has been one of our staunchest partners in this effort from day one. South Korea and others. And there’s, of course, the fundamental principle here that if aggression is allowed to go forward with impunity, it could open a Pandora’s box where other would-be aggressors conclude that they can take matters into their own hands and get away with it.

So I think the fact that so many countries have come together in the way they’ve come together has to be something that China factors into its own thinking about Taiwan, including, at some point in the future, any potential use of force. And not just of the support to Ukraine itself, but, of course, the sanctions, the export controls that have been imposed on Russia and that are doing serious damage—damage, by the way, that’s going to accumulate, not decrease, in ways that we can get into. So I think that that’s something that China has to factor into its thinking about the future. I think it has to factor into its thinking the huge reputational cost that Russia has incurred. Now, how all of that nets out, I can’t tell you.

But there’s something else that’s really important, and I know we may want to get on to this later if we have time. But one of the reasons that the world is so concerned about a crisis across the Taiwan Strait is because this is not an internal matter, as China would have it, based on its sovereignty. It’s a matter of concern to quite literally the entire world. Fifty percent of the commercial container traffic goes through that strait every day. A big majority of the semiconductors that the world needs for anything from our smartphones or dishwashers or automobiles are produced in Taiwan. If there were a crisis in Taiwan as a result of China’s aggression in some fashion, that would have, I think, disastrous consequences for the world economy and for countries around the world. And that’s the message that Beijing is hearing.

Goldberg: Very large question for you: Are we in a new cold war?

Blinken: I really resist labeling things, including using labels like the Cold War that are in some ways easy to pull out and give people a frame of reference. But I don't think it reflects the current reality in a few ways. First, when it comes to China, of course, we are in so many ways so much more integrated than we were with the Soviet Union. And not just us—countries around the world. And we also continue to have some fundamental interests in common, although eliciting Chinese cooperation on them is challenging—everything from climate to global health to counternarcotics to the macro economy.

But of course, we are in a fundamental competition, and it’s a competition really to shape what comes next, what comes after the post–Cold War era, which is over. And China’s vision for a world order is fundamentally different from ours: Ours is based on the ideal of having a liberal world order; China’s is an illiberal one. They need an order. They want an order. But it’s profoundly illiberal, not liberal. But at the same time, the complexity of the world is such that we’re not dividing it into ideological blocs. There are many countries in the world that have different systems, different ideologies, different approaches, that nonetheless want what we infamously call a “rules-based order,” an order that functions on the premise of international law. And there’s a good reason for that: These very same countries came together after two world wars to try to put in place understandings, rules, norms, standards, common understandings, to try to make sure that a third world war wouldn’t emerge. And the countries that came together in the UN Charter or, for that matter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights weren’t just the Western countries; it was countries from all sorts of different ideologies, backgrounds and perspectives—including, by the way, China, including countries that, again, are not democracies as we would call them.

So I think our challenge now is to make sure that all countries—that believe that we have to have an international system that functions on some basic rules and understandings and hopefully themselves will make the full transition to democracy, but nonetheless already believe in the need for rules—stand together and help put those rules in place, update them as necessary, update the international organizations where many of those rules are decided and applied, and come together in that way. That’s fundamentally what this is about.

Goldberg: I want to push back a little bit on this Cold War answer, at least in the Russian context, because it seems, to me at least, as if the United States and Russia are not merely in a cold war reminiscent of the old Cold War. This period seems to be reminiscent of the most tense periods of the Cold War of the late 1940s to 1990 or so. Talk about the state of Russian-U.S. relations and put this in context historically for us.

Blinken: Jeff, in a funny way, you’re right. It may even be in one sense worse. For example, take the news this week that Russia is suspending participation in the new START agreement. It’s the one remaining arms-control agreement that’s clearly to the benefit of both countries but also to the world. It’s a profoundly irresponsible action, and one that I think the world sees as yet another deeply negative step. And even during the Cold War, by the time we got around to forging these arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union, we both abided by them, even in some of the worst moments.

But having said that, this conflict between many countries and Russia over Ukraine is not about ideology, as the Cold War was. It isn’t communism versus the free world. It is about an imperialist power that is seeking to aggress another country and to aggress the principles at the heart of the UN Charter that are there to try to keep the peace around the world, and many countries standing up against it. So in that sense, I don’t see it as a cold war. I see it as a large part of the world united in standing up against aggression, and standing up against aggression because it not only poses a threat to Ukraine and its people, but to peace and security around the world, to the extent that other would-be aggressors get the wrong message from what Russia’s doing.

Goldberg: Let’s stay on the subject of the alliance. There are obviously many, many countries in the alliance that you’ve helped to construct. And quite obviously, NATO is reinvigorated by what is happening. However, you see a lot of countries—many, many countries, including U.S. allies, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, even Israel—staying on the sidelines or not engaging to the level that certainly Ukraine would love them to engage in. And then you have a whole basket of countries, including some surprising ones—South Africa, for instance, but also India and so on—that are behaving in ways reminiscent of the old nonaligned bloc during the actual Cold War. And I’m wondering whether you’re surprised by the extent to which many countries are staying on the sidelines and seeing which way the wind blows—and what you’re doing about it.

Blinken: I think you have to disaggregate and pull some of these threads apart, because first, what are we seeing? In the body that brings together the entire world—the United Nations General Assembly—on two occasions, 141 and then 143 members voted, stood up, and spoke out against the Russian aggression. And that’s two-thirds of the world’s countries or more. So I think that speaks very powerfully to public-square opinion around the world on what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Second, if you look at it, there are different baskets of support for Ukraine: military support to help them defend themselves and take back their territory, but also economic support, humanitarian support, support for their electricity grid that’s being systematically targeted by Russia, support for the refugees who have fled out of Ukraine in the face of the onslaught. And what you see is different countries participating in different ways—some in all of those baskets, some in one or two. But all of that is good.

And then, finally, there are countries that have long-standing, decades-long relationships with Russia, with the Soviet Union before, that are challenging to break off in one fell swoop. It’s not flipping a light switch; it’s moving an aircraft carrier. India, for decades, had Russia providing military equipment to it and its defenses. But what we’ve seen over the last few years is a trajectory away from relying on Russia and moving into partnership with us and with other countries, France and so forth. But you can’t do that again by flipping the switch. South Africa has, again, a long-standing relationship going back to the apartheid years, where the Soviet Union was supportive of the freedom forces in South Africa. More than unfortunately, the United States was much too sympathetic to the apartheid regime.

So that history also doesn’t get erased overnight. It’s a process. But I think you see that process moving with those kinds of countries as well as with the support that many are providing in different baskets. One last thing: Some countries are doing this quietly, not advertising. That’s okay, as long as it gets there.

Goldberg: You’re well aware that it’s much harder to build a coherent foreign policy when American politics is incoherent. And we’re in a moment now when parts of the Republican Party, at least, are more isolationist in orientation than they certainly were during the Cold War. I’m wondering how that affects your ability to sustain what could be a very, very long and costly campaign to keep Ukraine fighting effectively and then to help Ukraine protect itself for years to come.

Blinken: Jeff, I just came back from Munich, the security conference there, which is a big gathering moment for many of us involved in these issues. But I was not the only American there. Obviously, the vice president was there leading our delegation. But so, too, was what I believe was the largest bipartisan, bicameral congressional delegation that Munich has ever hosted. And before we went to Munich, I sat down with leader Mitch McConnell and other leading Republicans who were off to Munich. I talked to Mike McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who also brought a number of members with him. And in my conversations with leading Republicans who are leading their party in both the Senate and the House, I find the support to be very strong and ongoing for Ukraine.

The fact that this strong bipartisan congressional delegation was in Munich spoke very powerfully to the Europeans who were there and to the Ukrainians who were there, because it is indicative of the ongoing support, the fact that the center is holding. Now, of course, you hear voices that are questioning the support for Ukraine, and they’re there. But I think that the best way to answer them is to continue to show success, continue to help the Ukrainians show success. And also, there is an important issue that we’re very focused on and which I respect from some who raised questions or who are critical, and that is the need to make sure that the incredible generosity of American taxpayers is being used the way it’s intended, that the money that funds the weapons being provided is not in any way misused or diverted. And we are very focused on that. I think the steps President Zelensky has taken in recent weeks to crack down on corruption in some of his ministries, including by firing people, is very welcome, because it demonstrates Ukraine is committed to that too.

Goldberg: Let me ask you one last question—I would do this all day, but I’m afraid for your vocal cords. The last question is the biggest of all: What does victory look like to you?

Blinken: On one level, there’s already been a victory in the sense that Putin’s first objective, his primary objective, was to erase Ukraine from the map, to end its identity as an independent country, to absorb it into Russia. That has not happened; that clearly will not happen. So in that sense, in terms of Putin’s fundamental objective, he’s already failed. It’s also important that there be an end to the fighting, but in ways that are both just and durable. By just, I mean an outcome that reflects the basic principles of the UN Charter when it comes to things like territorial integrity and sovereignty. Durable, in a sense that when this ends, the way it ends is found in a way that makes it much less likely, if not impossible, that Russia will simply repeat the exercise a year or five years later. So the actual contours of that, exactly where the lines are drawn, when they’re drawn—that really is fundamentally up to the Ukrainians. But we have a shared interest in making sure that we can confidently say that the result is a just and durable one.

Goldberg: Is it victory, though, if Russia remains in any part of Ukraine, including those parts it seized in 2014?

Blinken: The success that’s already been achieved in ensuring that Ukraine remains an independent sovereign country, that’s fundamental, and that’s already there. But it’s really, I think, vitally important that exactly where this settles, as I said, is basically just and durable. That’s up to Ukrainians to decide. They may decide that they rightly believe that one way or another, every part of Ukraine needs to be made whole. “One way or another” could be by continuing the fight on the ground. “One way or another” could include negotiations at some point over what remains. All of that is basically up to them. And our job is to make sure that, for example, if it does come to a negotiation, they’re in the strongest possible position from which to negotiate, which is why we are maximizing the efforts that we’re making now to help them regain territory that was taken from them, whether it’s since February or since 2014.

Goldberg: Let me throw one more bonus question on you. It’s a very important anniversary. It’s not a question about what surprises you, but what have you learned as an American about the nature of history? I don’t want to misinterpret Frank Fukuyama, who didn’t actually say what people think he said. But there is this idea that—and when you were involved in diplomacy in the 1990s, big issues were Middle East peace, Bosnia, the Balkans, but now we’re talking the U.S., Russia, and China. We’re talking about enormous systems colliding with each other in ways that are at least reminiscent of a bipolar, tripolar world of the second half of the 20th century. What is the biggest lesson for you about history and authoritarianism today?

Blinken: The first thing that comes to mind, Jeff, is that those who forget history are condemned to retweet it. So I think we do have to be guided by history but not imprisoned by it. And I mean this by that: First, history suggests—if you look at modern Russian history—that unfortunately, there is a thread that runs throughout it. Go back to George Kennan’s long cable. That’s all there. In fact, if you read Kennan today, if you read the passages from that cable today from 1947, you could literally insert Russia and Putin for what he says about the then–Soviet Union. So I think it’s wise not to forget that even though, of course, we went through a very hopeful period where our entire focus was on trying to integrate Russia into the international community—and I think that was a well-placed hope, but obviously did not factor in, in some ways—some of these enduring threads in Russian history now come back to the fore.

Second, history also suggests that when a power is rising as China is, that can produce significant friction in the international system. And we’ve seen that particularly in recent years, as China has become both more repressive at home and more aggressive in its region and around the world in a variety of ways—not just militarily, but economically, diplomatically, etc. So that’s an important lesson of history. And in part, it explains the moment we’re in of renewed superpower competition. But we also can’t be imprisoned by it, because we have in other ways a vastly different and vastly more complicated world where the challenges that people are facing in their daily lives come in part from big transnational challenges like climate change, like global health, like food insecurity. We cannot, and we are not, ignoring those, because these are things that actually have a direct impact on people’s lives all over the world, including, of course, our own citizens. And they are interconnected with the superpower competition, because that competition in one way or another can actually exacerbate those problems by the actions, in this case, of Russia or China—or hopefully can help address them, including, one would hope, if China sees self-interest in doing that. There’s only so much that we control.

We can’t fundamentally control the decisions that Putin makes or that China makes, but we can shape the environment in which those decisions will be made. One of the ways we’re doing that is by making historic investments in ourselves. If you look at the trifecta of the Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, with its focus on climate, you put these things together, and that is showing to the world that the United States is dead serious about its competitiveness. It’s dead serious about making ourselves as strong as possible to deal with the issues that our people need us to deal with and that the world needs us to deal with. And as a result, we are getting the second side of the coin that’s so important in being successful in the world, which is greater alignment with allies and partners in dealing with global challenges, whether it’s competition from Russia or China, or whether it’s these transnational issues. There is more convergence now over the last couple of years with our partners in Europe but also in Asia than I’ve seen any time in the last 30 years. For me, that tells us that America’s place in the world and ability to confront these challenges is much stronger than it’s been. And you see that coming together both in dealing with Russia and dealing with China.

The Other Climate-Change Art Protest

2022-11-20T07:00:00-05:00

“What is worth more: art or life?” That was the provocative question that the demonstrator Phoebe Plummer asked onlookers at London’s National Gallery last month. Seconds before, Plummer—along with another activist—had splattered tomato soup across Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, superglued one hand to the wall, and kneeled in front of the painting, facing museumgoers in a shirt emblazoned with JUST STOP OIL. In the subsequent weeks, more climate activists defaced other famous works of art at museums across Europe in stunty attempts to draw attention to the climate crisis. “A lot of people, when they saw us, had feelings of shock or horror or outrage,” Plummer told NPR. “Where is that emotional response when it’s our planet and our people that are being destroyed?”

The protesters may have succeeded in grabbing headlines, but their logic was puzzling. As my colleague Robinson Meyer has written, pitting concern for the climate against concern for protecting famous paintings makes little sense. In posing a false choice between art and the environment, the soup protesters backed themselves into a corner, attracting support from neither art lovers nor climate-movement sympathizers.

[Read: The climate art vandals are embarrassing]

A better connection between art and climate change exists, and the people who know this best are those who live and work at its intersection: the niche community known as eco-artists.

Capturing the climate crisis in their work requires eco-artists to confront the daily realities of drought, heat, wildfires, and pollution. These conditions converge dramatically in the western states of the U.S., a region that has become synonymous with hazy tangerine skyscapes, charred remnants of forest, and cracked mosaic riverbeds. These images remind us that climate change is about loss—of species, of livable conditions, of beauty. The climate crisis has inspired visual artists to create works that challenge viewers—and themselves—to move beyond shock and outrage, and toward action.

In Colorado, where wildfires are increasing in both intensity and frequency, Anna Kaye has used the changing landscape as reference scenes for her drawings and paintings. After moving to the state in the mid-2000s, she has repeatedly visited the burn zones of the 2002 Hayman Fire—one of the largest in Colorado’s history—to document the wreckage. In Kaye’s watercolor Bluebird and Mountain Dandelion, abstract streaks of brown, black, and green stand in for a tree reshaped by fire, while a detailed mountain bluebird and an orange dandelion perch atop the branches. “It’s incredible to see those slivers of grass that come back out and fight for life, and the roots that resprout and become new plants,” she told me. “There’s power in witnessing that regeneration.”

Bluebird and Mountain Dandelion (Courtesy of Anna Kaye)

In contrast with her vibrant, delicate watercolors of the flora and fauna that repopulate burn zones, Kaye has also created large-scale charcoal drawings of fires that she’s witnessed, such as the Indian Gulch Fire, which destroyed 1,700 acres in 2011. “Fire is a challenging [subject] because with it comes trauma,” she said. The resulting drawings inspire optimism less readily; instead, they navigate the friction between the grandeur and terror evoked by large-scale flames.

For Kaye, painting and drawing are the practices that she believes allow her to process living through the climate crisis, but eco-art can also encompass music, poetry, dance, and literature. Perhaps America’s most famous eco-artist is the writer Rachel Carson, whom many consider the mother of the modern environmental movement. In 1962, Carson’s book Silent Spring laid out the harms that human pesticide use was wreaking on the natural world. But as Anelise Chen wrote in The Atlantic, Carson’s body of work was equally focused on inspiring awe at nature’s beauty. People need to feel invested in protecting what they love about the planet, not just sad about its destruction. Silent Spring’s publication may have been a much-needed wake-up call 50 years ago. Today, many people already recognize that climate change is a serious, pressing issue, yet scientists warn that humanity is not moving fast enough to mitigate the worst effects of the crisis. Eco-artists are now faced with a new challenge: How do you move people past their fatigue and grief, and galvanize action?

[Read: What it would take to see the world completely differently]

Kim Abeles has made a career out of trying to answer that question. For 35 years, she has produced art from molecules of Los Angeles smog by layering stencils over glass, wood, or fabric outside on her studio’s rooftop and allowing particulate matter to accumulate. Over time an image emerges, providing a snapshot of the air quality during a particular stretch of days, weeks, or months. Abeles refers to these works as “smog collectors.” One of her motivations, she told me, is to make visible the pollutants that people breathe into their lungs every day. Abeles’s first smog collector, from 1987, traces the silhouette of the San Gabriel Mountains, 50 miles northwest from downtown L.A., which are often obscured by pollution. Over the decades that she’s lived in the L.A. metro area, the mountains have continued to fade in and out of sight, a reminder that Abeles’s work is never truly done.

From the beginning, criticism has been a core objective of Abeles’s smog collectors. Her 2019 addition, World Leaders in Smog, features smog portraits of 10 politicians alongside quotes from their environmental speeches, subverting the notion of “personal responsibility” in combatting climate change. Yes, every person can work to reduce their carbon footprint but, Abeles feels, those measures pale in comparison with the harms that governments and fossil-fuel companies inflict on the Earth. “World leaders, corporate leaders—they’re individuals too,” she said. Former President Donald Trump’s portrait is accompanied by words from his 2017 speech withdrawing from the Paris climate accords: “The United States, under the Trump administration, will continue to be the cleanest and most environmentally friendly country on Earth.”

World Leaders in Smog (Courtesy of Kim Abeles)

More than just protest or condemnation, Abeles told me, she wants to use her art to achieve tangible outcomes. Beyond museums, she has displayed her smog collectors in community centers and other public spaces. In the ’90s, the California Bureau of Automotive Repair commissioned her to create and display new smog collectors to encourage drivers to test their emissions and share rides. In another project, making smog collectors with Colorado middle schoolers, Abeles tried to encourage parents to stop idling their cars during afternoon pickup. “Typical data and graphs—how we’re often given material—doesn’t ever hit the emotional part that we really need to tap into,” she said. “I’m not trying to decorate this problem,” Abeles told me.

Indeed, eco-art doesn’t need to be housed in galleries or institutions to reach its intended audiences. For more than a decade, Michelle Glass has held textile workshops with residents of California’s Central Valley, where some of the most polluted cities in the country are located and where poor air quality and water contamination have jeopardized residents’ health. In recent years, the region has had the highest rates of asthma and asthma-related hospitalizations in the state. Like Abeles’s smog collectors, Glass’s works (made of natural dyes and fibers) strive to educate residents about the environmental harms in their backyards and then move them toward change. In her workshops, Glass uses local plants and tap water to dye fabrics—relying on the environment itself as the medium. She told me she finds art to be the most effective way to communicate with the women who attend her workshops—many of whom are older immigrants from Mexico—because it transcends language barriers. “You get the color story of the land. If you’re living in a healthy environment, the colors will be very rich and vibrant,” Glass said. “If you’re not … those colors will be very muted and dull.”

Residents of Kern County gathering to display tapestries they made for We Are Here/Estamos Aqui. (Courtesy of Michelle Glass)

In early 2020, Glass started working on a project titled We Are Here/Estamos Aquí in collaboration with several environmental-justice organizations. Their goal was to make residents conscious of the dangers of living with pollution, and to harness that awareness into individual- and policy-level changes. More than 2 million California residents live within 2,500 feet (nearly half a mile) of an oil or gas well; the Central Valley’s Kern County, where Glass works, produces more than 70 percent of the state’s oil. Living near oil production sites can be hazardous to residents, with drilling exposing them to increased concentrations of air pollutants and wastewater from oil extraction contaminating groundwater sources. When this project started, the organizations had spent nearly 10 years lobbying state legislators to create a buffer zone between oil drills and residential communities without success.

[Photos: The urban oil fields of Los Angeles]

Over the past two years, Glass and the workshop participants created more than 400 fabric panels stretching 2,500 feet: the distance of their proposed setback. They used reds, yellows, and greens—the colors of the air-quality index—and, on Earth Day this year, carried the tapestry in a procession along the Kern River Oil Field. Glass told me that though she believed the demonstration was a culminating moment, the workshops were equally meaningful, as residents learned the truth about their environment, reflected on ways they could reduce their own climate footprints, and contacted their representatives. In September, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that will create a buffer zone of 3,200 feet between new oil wells and residents. The California Independent Petroleum Association has already raised $8 million to try to reverse the legislation. “The oil and gas companies and the large businesses are banking on the fact that we’re going to get tired,” Glass said.

But because Glass and other eco-artists believe that the well-being of entire communities and the planet is at stake, they’re committed to pressing ahead. The climate museum protesters don’t seem to be stopping anytime soon, either. Just this past Friday, activists threw flour over a sports car painted by Andy Warhol in Milan. As they become more frequent, the novelty of the museum protests will fade. Creating art, though, can still be a useful tool for the climate movement. “If you just alarm people or critique, we’re only complaining,” Abeles told me. “You have to give people somewhere to go.”

How I Learned to Eat Alone and Not Be Lonely

2022-06-12T07:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

Updated at 2:45 p.m. ET on June 12, 2022.

Eating alone began as a matter of circumstance.

In the spring of 2020, as my world shrunk to the square footage of my apartment, food became a mode of injecting pleasure and delight into an otherwise bleak and lonely period of my life. I frequently ordered pizza from my favorite local spot in Washington, D.C.; I sampled different brands of instant ramen; I baked loaves of banana bread. In some ways, this routine was familiar. In high school, after my parents separated, I would cook dinner for two—my mom and me—but she worked late and I would eat alone before she got home. For much of the pandemic, though, no one came through the front door.

As time passed, I wondered when, or if, I’d get to dine with friends and family again. I entered a state of despair. As 2020 went on and my mental health declined, daily tasks became more difficult to complete. My meals soon transformed from an escape into a chore. I resorted to low-effort dishes like scrambled eggs and vegetable curries, for which I had little appetite. I relied on books, Netflix, and even work to distract myself at dinner. Eventually I downloaded TikTok, and then that became my new dining companion.

[Read: Something is changing in the way people eat at home]

I began seeing myself mirrored on my “For You” page, which served up videos of other people eating alone. In the videos, creators talked to their presumed audiences in animated voices: “I’m so proud of you for eating today,” “No matter what, you deserve to nourish your body,” or “I’m going to take a bite, and then you take one.” Why were these people filming an ordinary, solitary experience and sharing it online? And why were millions of strangers, myself included, watching them every night?

On TikTok, the hashtag #eatwithme has more than 3.4 billion views. The category includes foodie tours of Disney World, instructions on how to make cauliflower nachos, and ASMR compilations of people biting into crispy chicken wings. The Korean phenomenon mukbang—a portmanteau of the words for “eating” and “broadcast”—heavily influences the genre, with an emphasis on consuming large portions and highlighting audio elements, such as crunchy texture, through sound. But this is not mindless entertainment: Many of these videos are designed to encourage viewers, especially those with eating disorders or mental-health diagnoses, to eat in tandem with the creator.

I never sought these videos out. They found me, in the strange way that the TikTok algorithm knows you better than you know yourself. One account that I visited frequently was @foodwithsoy, run by Soy Nguyen, a food influencer based in Los Angeles. With her signature neon-blue hair and apple-cheeked smile, Nguyen starts every video with the same introduction: “Hey, it’s another ‘eat with me’! If you’re having a hard time eating, feel free to use this video.” The phrasing is intentionally open-ended, she told me, to invite anyone to join her, whether they are mourning the loss of a loved one, recovering from an eating disorder, or feeling homesick. Nguyen started her “eat with me” series in November 2020, when, she told me, she was overwhelmed by uncertainty brought on by the election, living on the opposite coast from her family, and pandemic anxiety. She had been building a career on TikTok by showcasing her favorite local restaurants in Los Angeles, but had been losing the motivation to eat. So Nguyen decided to film herself and post it, in hopes that someone else felt similarly.

To date, Nguyen has made more than 40 “eat with me” videos, most of which follow the same blueprint. After the introduction, she launches into a reflection on a chosen topic, while a video montage plays. Take, for example, a video from August 2021, where Nguyen sips ramune soda and samples sushi rolls overflowing with fillings. She describes how reaching an emotional low forced her to take her mental well-being more seriously: “I had a moment this past week where I didn’t feel like I wanted to exist,” she reveals. Even as she directs her words to the viewer—“I hope you stay kind and patient to yourself”—it’s clear that she is also extending magnanimity toward herself. Nguyen told me she hopes that by being vulnerable—sharing her own struggles with anxiety and depression, talking about her mom’s breast-cancer diagnosis—she can document her own mental-health journey, and encourage others to share theirs without fear or stigma. “Videos are, in a sense, like, my own journals,” she told me. “I thought, Okay let me open that up to the world.”

[Read: I’m scared of the person TikTok thinks I am]

Some “eat with me” videos are monologues. Others try to be conversational. Marisa, a 22-year-old TikToker from Miami who uses the handle @ris.writes, asks “What are you eating?“ or “Which fast-food chain makes the best fries?” and pauses for dramatic effect, as if to allow the viewer to respond. (Marisa asked to be identified by her first name only for privacy reasons.) She started making “eat with me” videos at the request of a viewer; the first video of hers I came across was tied to National Eating Disorder Awareness Week.

When Marisa was 14, she found her way into communities on Tumblr known as “pro-ana,” which glorify anorexia and share dangerous tips on how to eat as little as possible. At the time, her family was dealing with unexpected death, illnesses, and financial instability. “In retrospect, I was looking for something that made me feel a little bit more in control,” she told me. “The emotional relationship that I developed with food at that time was that it was not a necessity.” Getting professional help made her recognize pro-ana Tumblr’s dangerous misinformation, but she still struggled with bingeing and body-image issues throughout high school and college. She learned that having a “positive distraction” can quiet feelings of shame and discomfort brought up by meals.

A few years ago, Marisa discovered mukbangs on YouTube, and found herself drawn to them. She liked seeing other people enjoying eating in a casual way. “I remember being mystified by how intuitive their relationship with food was. And I remember thinking, I want that for myself. I don’t want to be thinking about trying to restrict or feeling guilty because I’m bingeing,” she said. Her experience is echoed by data; a 2020 study from researchers at Nanyang Technological University, the University of Calgary, and the University of Toronto found that “sense of connectedness, vicarious pleasure, and spectacle” motivated many mukbang viewers’ watching habits. Marisa told me that by the time she started making “eat with me” videos, her relationship with food had healed significantly. Still, I thought that things had come full circle—Marisa had become the positive distraction she had sought during her own challenging times.

Reading the comments on Marisa’s videos is like glimpsing diaries. “Today I ate an [sic] yoghurt without being sick. I’m proud of myself,” one reads. “I’ll use this in the morning, to have someone to start my breakfast with, thank you (trying to recover rn so it’s double nice),” another user writes. These confessions may seem like the tiniest of victories, but for people struggling with disordered eating or mental-health problems, they are accomplishments. The videos can also balance out messages pushing diet culture and weight loss, says Jaime Sidani, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Pittsburgh. There are real concerns that apps like TikTok can serve as a conduit for harmful eating behavior and poor body image. In 2016, Sidani published a study showing an association between social-media use and eating concerns, but she told me that the type and quality of the content should be the real focus. Sidani, who struggled with an eating disorder in the past, wished she had “eat with me” videos while growing up. Deborah Glasofer, a clinical psychologist and professor at Columbia University’s Center for Eating Disorders, told me that these videos could be beneficial for those in recovery, but only if creators are modeling “normal eating behavior” such as eating balanced meals and healthy portion sizes. Her patients have shared that they find value in having external support—from therapists, friends, and family—during mealtimes.

People battling eating disorders may benefit most from watching others eat, but even for those without disorders, the videos can be affirming. Shawn Thomas, a 23-year-old in Dallas, Texas, known on TikTok as @hellomynameisshawn, told me he films “eat with me” videos specifically for this purpose. Although Thomas has not had an eating disorder before, he has, at times, had a negative relationship with food. “In high school, I was a raging perfectionist who always put success over my own well-being,” he told me. If he struggled to eat three well-balanced meals each day, then surely others with more stressors than him did too. He has fond memories of praying before and after meals with his South Indian family. “The dinner table was not just a place where I sat and ate,” he said. “It was where I shared my latest news, my successes and failures, with my family.” He hopes his videos mimic that sense of communion in an online space, even though he knows that watching people eat online cannot be a true substitute.

One night in November 2020, I cooked a nice steak with chimichurri sauce, a baked potato, and green beans. I was so proud of my efforts that I even took a photo and texted it to my dad. Coincidentally, he was also making steak for dinner, and replied with a photo of his own plate. Staring at the pictures, something in me cracked: Our food could exist—we could exist—together in a text thread, but not in real life. I started crying. But I also felt embarrassed. People were dying and I was sad that I had to eat alone? I ate quickly, barely pausing to swallow before loading up the next bite. Later I thought, what a waste that I didn’t even enjoy the food.

And yet, when I remember the end of 2020, I also think about a different meal that served as balm. Unable to fly home to be with family for Christmas, a friend and I quarantined for two weeks (testing before and after—remember those days?) so we could spend the holiday at her house. When she picked me up on the 24th, we embraced fiercely, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time that I had been hugged. She drove us to H-Mart, where we bought groceries and seaweed soup for my birthday the next day, and then picked up pizza with jalapeño, pineapple, and ham. After being starved of companionship for so long, I appreciated the table set for two, the laughter, the way our conversation flowed easily between bites. The following June, after 18 months away, I finally flew to California to see my family. My mom picked me up from the airport, and we stopped at my favorite Mexican restaurant. It felt simultaneously like the most miraculous and most ordinary thing to be sitting across from her, eating enchiladas and licking salt from the rims of our glasses.

[Read: Why we eat together]

Two years have gone by, and I wouldn’t say I enjoy solo meals. But eating alone is something I’ve learned how to do, much like going to therapy each week. Sometimes I dread it; other times it’s not too bad. When I eat, I still watch Netflix, read books, and scroll through TikTok, where I continue to see “eat with me” videos on my “For You” page. They haven’t shrunk in popularity, although presumably, more people are eating with others than they were two years ago.

Now that the weather is warmer, I like to eat outside when I can. I’ve found myself returning to “third places”—libraries, churches, parks, and other community spaces outside of work and home—to feel enveloped in something other than my own thoughts. Recently, I picked up a chicken-shawarma bowl and sat by the fountain at Dupont Circle. I noticed that I was surrounded by other solo diners, munching on burritos and salads, reading books or listening to music. For two years, I’d dined face-to-face with other people in the internet’s liminal space. Now we sat side by side in the real world, eating together.

This article previously misstated Deborah Glasofer’s title.

What the Labor Movement Can Learn From Its Past

2022-05-06T07:00:00-04:00

Essential, fed up, in demand: These are terms often used to describe American workers in the COVID era. Companies have laid off millions of people; the coronavirus has killed many others. Panicked employers have scrambled to raise wages and offer perks in response to the “Great Resignation.” More than 100,000 workers either striked or threatened to during October 2021, which some dubbed #striketober.

Throughout the pandemic, Kim Kelly, a labor journalist and organizer, has reported on these shifts, following coal miners, grocery-store workers, and Amazon-warehouse employees. In her new book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, Kelly turns her focus away from the present to highlight past protests, strikes, and struggles. Synthesizing Kelly’s own reporting with archival and scholarly research, the book serves as a primer to introduce readers to historical events that are not widely known or taught in schools.

I spoke twice with Kelly about the growth of unions during the pandemic and what the labor movement can learn from past struggles. Our conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Morgan Ome: Some historians have criticized the subtitle of your book, which is The Untold History of American Labor. How would you respond to their concerns that other scholars have worked to tell this history?

Kim Kelly: I know there’s been criticism, and I think it’s entirely valid and very fair. I wasn’t really aware of how loaded that term is, specifically within academia. I wanted to pay homage to this book from the ’50s called Labor’s Untold Story, by historian Herbert M. Morias and writer Richard O. Boyer. Obviously, these stories have already been told: first by the workers, next by archivists and documentarians, then by historians and academics and scholars who dug into all of the existing material. I really can’t express enough gratitude for the people who’ve done this work. I wanted to synthesize the information in an accessible, intersectional way and build off the work they did by showing the ways that these different struggles intersect and how they relate to current issues.

What I hope to do with this book is to show people that whatever you’re dealing with right now, someone else was dealing with this same problem 50, 100, 200 years ago, and they did something about it. The history of labor in this country is so complicated, bloody, sprawling, heartbreaking, and incredible. We can take those lessons and apply them to the future and hope we get a little closer to where we want to be.

[Steven Greenhouse: Is organized labor making a comeback?]

Ome: What are some of the parallels you’ve noticed between the current moment and the history you were researching for your book?

Kelly: People are embracing this idea of solidarity and organizing across linguistic, social, racial, and gender lines, which is what has kept the labor movement going. It makes me think of the Great Sugar Strike of 1946, in Hawaii. The workers were predominantly Asian and Puerto Rican immigrants on massive sugarcane plantations owned by white people who were growing rich off of the workers while treating them like garbage. The bosses separated workers by language, culture, and country of origin in order to prevent those workers from communicating and finding common ground. But during that strike, workers found ways to foster real, multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual solidarity in a way that allowed them to win. That same kind of history is being made right now, with Amazon workers in Alabama and Staten Island, and with Starbucks, and they didn’t come out of nowhere.

Ome: You spent a lot of time in Bessemer, Alabama, reporting on the Amazon-warehouse union drive last year. What are the differences between that unionization effort, which failed, and the union’s success in Staten Island?

Kelly: With Staten Island, they didn’t follow the established playbook. They organized organically, worker-to-worker, to build an independent union. In Bessemer, they chose to organize with a more established labor union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The first time around, they couldn’t anticipate COVID-19 preventing organizers from holding meetings or door-knocking or really getting close to anybody. That had a big impact.

Amazon was able to pull this classic “third party” maneuver where they said, “These people from New York City came down, and now they’re trying to mess with your money. They’re trying to force you to join this union.” I can see why you would be scared or intimidated by anti-union propaganda. In addition, RWDSU organizers and other union organizers were not able to go inside to talk to workers. They couldn’t connect the way that workers inside the facility at Staten Island were able to.

Ome: Can this type of organizing be replicated at other Amazon warehouses or even at other companies?

Kelly: When I think about what happened in Staten Island, I think about what Dorothy Bolden was able to accomplish in the 1960s with the National Domestic Workers Union. She didn’t have any paid organizers. She didn’t have any playbook. She just talked to her fellow workers and organized them by relating to them. And they won.

The folks at Staten Island weren’t necessarily coming out of the labor movement. And I think we’re seeing that replicated in another way with Starbucks. And that’s why over 200 Starbucks locations in the country have announced their intention to unionize. The fact that these efforts have been so public and so visible has the potential to inspire other workers: I know these brands. I order stuff from Amazon. I buy coffee at Starbucks. And if they’re taking on these kinds of giants, maybe I can go talk to my boss; maybe I can talk to my co-workers. Maybe we can form a union, too. Visibility is such an important piece of all of this, because you don’t know what’s possible until someone shows you. That’s why it’s so important to know our history and to make those connections. And you know, we’re never going to figure out where we need to be if we can’t look back and see how far we’ve already come.

[Adam Serwer: The Amazon Union exposes the emptiness of ‘woke capital’]

Ome: Is solidarity enough to inoculate organizers against tactics such as Amazon banning certain words on its worker chat app, or Starbucks hanging up flyers with fake tweets from the union account?

Kelly: I would love to see some action from the government to limit egregious, blatant union busting that is allowed to flourish. One thing I’m really excited about is the way that the National Labor Relations Board, under General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, has grown some teeth. It’s probably the most pro-worker NLRB I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, because it’s actively and very publicly pushing back against established anti-worker norms. Last month, Abruzzo put out a memo basically saying we should get rid of captive-audience meetings. [Editor’s note: Employers hold these mandatory meetings during working hours to try to dissuade workers from joining a union.] That matters. The NLRB can only do so much, but it could do a lot if it had the proper funding and the proper staffing.

Ome: It’s interesting that you bring up Abruzzo, because President Joe Biden has portrayed himself as a very pro-union president, even saying that he intends to be the most pro-union president in history. President Donald Trump seemed to broadcast cultural affinity for union members and for certain unions, even. But at the same time, he opposed pro-union legislation and made it really difficult for people to unionize.

Kelly: That’s the classic Republican playbook: using certain kinds of workers as props and then completely abandoning them once they ascend to power. When I was covering the Warrior Met Coal strike in Alabama, the miners’ elected officials are Republican as heck, and none of them showed up. Republicans want to use certain types of working people as foot soldiers in their culture war. Trump wanted to wear a hard hat and beep a big truck horn, but he didn’t want to actually talk to people who work.

Ome: Not all Americans have the desire to be in a union. Is there danger in assuming that those workers are simply misinformed or misled, rather than considering the reasons behind their opposition?

Kelly: You’re right; not everyone wants to join a union. What organizers need to be asking is: You’re anti-union. Why? Have you been in a union before and had a bad experience? Have you heard bad things from your friends who are in unions? Do you not know very much about them, but distrust them? Where is it coming from? Then, when you know what their reasons are, you can work to address them.

Unions are not infallible. They’re not a monolith. And they’re made up of people. Sometimes people don’t work in other people’s best interests. There’s a very long history of unions not standing up for everyone and excluding or discriminating against certain workers. I think it’s important that if these questions and these challenges are being thrown our way—toward the organized-labor movement—that we’re ready to answer them honestly and be frank about the issues within the movement and about the shortcomings, but also be clear about the massive benefits that come from a union contract and a union job.

Ome: Many of those coal miners are Christian, conservative Trump supporters. Does the split between the parties on labor issues make bringing those workers into the labor movement difficult or impossible?

Kelly: Unions are a really fertile state of collaboration where workers who may come from different backgrounds realize, Okay, we have this common ground. One reason that I’ve covered the Alabama coal strike so closely is that some of the folks involved have shifted their political perspectives. There are some folks who I met at the very beginning who would happily describe themselves to me as a conservative Republican. But throughout the strike, they’ve seen who is ignoring them: basically all of their Republican state representatives. Some folks met with Bernie Sanders, collaborated with the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter on mutual-aid efforts, and describe themselves as socialists now. Some folks have stayed exactly the same. People aren’t a monolith. But they know what it looks like to rely on their communities and their families and the labor movement instead of looking at things through this binary Democrat-Republican lens. A lot of people live in that gray area of the middle, and that’s where the change and progress come from.

Ome: Pro-union sentiment among Americans is at its highest point since 1965, at 68 percent. At the same time, union membership remains low: 10.3 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the same as in 2019. Why haven’t organizers been able to translate this level of public support into meaningful, lasting legal changes that would strengthen the labor movement?

Kelly: Many people want to get involved, but labor laws still exclude a lot of people from organizing, including agricultural workers and independent contractors. We’re dealing with the Reagan-era hangover of virulently anti-worker legislation, right-to-work laws, and pervasive anti-union propaganda. Perhaps we need to think outside the box a little bit. If it’s this hard for workers to join traditional labor unions, there are still things we can do. Many worker-led, independent efforts have sprouted up, such as the Amazon labor union in Staten Island and the Haymarket Pole Collective, a group of Black, Indigenous, and trans sex workers in Portland, Oregon, who have put together an incredibly robust mutual-aid program.

Many people have not grown up in a union household. I’m third-generation union, but not a lot of people are able to say that anymore.

Ome: You highlight the 1981 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike, and Ronald Reagan’s response, as a turning point for weakening the power of unions and their ability to threaten strikes to demand action. What would need to happen for unions to regain the strength they had pre-PATCO?

Kelly: I think that as always, progress has to come from below the executive and legislative branch. There have been times when certain administrations have done more to help in those ways, but by and large, all of the progress has come from the working class and the poor. And I think it’s going to stay that way.

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The Rise of Déjà Zoom

2021-12-02T07:00:00-05:00

If 2020 was a year of isolation, 2021 has been a year of reunions. Hugging and sharing meals with loved ones you haven’t seen for months is great. But seeing someone in the flesh can feel weird if you previously knew them only from virtual meetings and videochats. Meeting Zoom friends in real life reveals how much is omitted when your computer’s graphics card renders someone: their height, whether they sustain or avoid eye contact, what they look like outside their kitchen. Uncanny vibes abound. Seeing our virtual friends in person produces something like a pandemic-induced déjà vu. Call it déjà Zoom.

If déjà vu is the feeling of familiarity toward something foreign and jamais vu is the feeling of foreignness toward something familiar, déjà Zoom lies somewhere between the two. “It felt like I was just seeing people again, rather than meeting them,” David Jones, a 35-year-old in Washington, D.C., told me of his first real-life encounters with Zoom friends. Déjà Zoom can be jarring or awkward, calling into question the degree to which we really know the people we met in quarantine. But it’s also a testament to how close we’ve grown to people we’ve never physically met before.

[Read: The pandemic has remade friendship]

Jones made new friends during the pandemic thanks to his love for theater. When Broadway shut down in the spring of 2020, he decided to reach out to an actor in Phantom of the Opera, his favorite musical, to see if she might offer virtual voice lessons in her newly freed-up schedule. She agreed, and also began teaching group classes, where Jones made several friends, including a woman who invited him to monthly Zooms that she organized for virtual table readings of musicals and films. He’s since traveled to New York and Florida to meet people from his classes and the table reads. In October, he—along with friends from the classes—went to see Phantom of the Opera during its reopening weekend to support his teacher.

In pre-pandemic times, Jones had a handful of friends, but he said he struggled to make new ones. “I don’t have a ton of confidence in myself, and I try to not take up much space in the world,” he said. “Zoom, I think, kind of made everything feel like a level playing field.” He was more comfortable being himself on video calls because there was no obligation to see people again if they didn’t hit it off. During script readings, the group’s shared love of theater, plus the performance element of the Zoom gatherings, created a sense of connection and vulnerability. Since the pandemic started, Jones has met 25 people he initially became friends with over Zoom. A lot of them were shocked by his height (he’s 6 foot 2).

Not all of Jones’s Zoom friendships have lasted. One woman whom he talked with for more than a year stopped speaking with him after they had an awkward in-person meetup. This is common, says Amy Johnson, a communications professor at the University of Oklahoma who studies long-distance friendships. Most people avoid conflict in digital communication because it’s normalized as a face-to-face interaction (think the preference for breaking up with someone in person rather than via text message, or even a phone call). In the absence of conflict, people can idealize their online relationships and fill in any missing information about the other person positively. Meeting in real life, then, can cause us to feel less close if the person doesn’t match our idea of them. This gap in closeness doesn’t need to be treated as a red flag as long as people recommit to getting to know each other on an intimate level, Johnson told me.

Another defamiliarizing aspect of bringing Zoom friendships into the real world is learning other people’s nonverbal habits, which are sometimes conveyed poorly or not at all over video. This lack of cues can cause interruptions or stilted conversation during virtual group meetings, and it can also lead to feelings of unease or surprise when we finally meet in person. (It’s also not normal to look at your own face when getting to know someone.) Interacting with a person on Zoom is like seeing them with one eye, Jeremy Bailenson, a Stanford communications professor, told me. But in person, where we use all of our senses, we can add small yet rich layers of detail to our understanding of who other people are and how we perceive them. Bailenson felt disoriented when he first met a student in his lab after seeing her only on Zoom for months. That feeling soon faded, though. “You just have to put in the time to relearn a new way of being with someone,” he said.

[Read: We need to stop trying to replicate the life we once had]

Videochat cannot completely translate nonverbal cues, spatial awareness, or physical touch. Other forms of remote presence offer more promise. This summer, Bailenson taught a class almost entirely in virtual reality; his students wore headsets and interacted with one another as avatars. He sees benefits to having more lifelike ways to communicate virtually even beyond the pandemic, especially when traveling is unnecessary or challenging. But he still loves real, face-to-face meetings with students and friends too.

Meeting even very close friends after long Zoom friendships can be challenging. Raz Bar-Ziv, a researcher at UC Berkeley, met his friend Tal, a scientist living in Germany, for the first time in Israel this summer, after a year of daily Zooming, talking on the phone, and exchanging WhatsApp voice memos. The two had connected through ScienceAbroad, a network of Israeli scholars living around the world, and got to know each other as they planned an online symposium. When they discovered they’d both be in Israel over the summer, they decided to meet. Bar-Ziv told me that it took him a while to comprehend that Tal was real. Here was this person he knew so well, but when she was sitting in front of him, he felt odd, like she was a stranger. Bar-Ziv was even unsure if they should hug, but when they did, it “was like we met many times before. We very quickly behaved like that.”

I also spoke with a group of Zoom friends who initially bonded over their self-described shared identity as Latino comedy writers. They were first brought together by Jorge Thomson, who had invited four others whom he knew from various fellowships and workshops. He was hoping to create a space for Latino comedy writers to network and trade notes on the projects they were working on. When the group started meeting weekly at the start of 2021, it was scattered across the country in New York, California, Illinois, and Florida. Over the summer, the group met for the first time at a park in Los Angeles after being fully vaccinated. “We’re from a culture where the intimacy is organic but immediate,” Annelise Dekker-Hernandez, a member of the group, told me. “You feel like you’re all distantly family, and so we were very comfortable with each other from the jump.”

Learning one another’s comedy styles and life stories through the process of workshopping helped the writers build trust. Thomson told me that their shared identity means he doesn’t have to overexplain his scripts, and he feels comfortable asking questions such as “Is there too much Spanish in the script?” and “How do you feel about this representation of our community?” Henry Alexander Kelly, another member, told me that the group was intrigued to discover how many mutual friends and connections they share. “We literally ran around each other for years,” he said. “Out of nowhere, Zoom meetings for Latinx comedy is what ends up bringing this relationship together.”

Perhaps the most surprising thing about déjà Zoom is that it’s nothing new. People were making friends online pre-pandemic via Reddit and Twitter, and their predecessors MySpace and AOL. Even before the internet, people became acquainted with strangers as pen pals. Focusing on the novelty of online friendships might be missing the point, Joanna Yau, a researcher at the University of Southern California, told me. Core aspects of meaningful relationships are present in both online and offline friendships, but they manifest differently, she explained. Most people want to feel connected to others, validated, like they belong. We use texting, Snapchat, and Zoom differently, but we use them for the same reasons. Even with grainy video and choppy audio, we can still share our hopes, our fears, and our secrets.

In Netflix’s Squid Game, Debt Is a Double-Edged Sword

2021-10-01T17:51:15-04:00

For the chance to escape severe debt, the characters in Netflix’s hugely popular survival drama Squid Game would risk anything, even death. Take the protagonist Seong Gi-hun. Unemployed, he spends his days in Seoul gambling on horse races and has signed away his organs as collateral to his creditors. His deficits, both financial and personal, hurt the people closest to him: He hasn’t paid child support or alimony to his ex-wife; he mooches off his elderly mother. On his daughter’s birthday, Gi-hun can afford to buy her only tteokbokki (spicy rice cakes) and a claw-machine toy. He has little left to lose.

In order to win back his dignity and family, Gi-hun accepts a mysterious offer to play a series of six traditional children’s games for the chance at winning millions of dollars (45.6 billion won, to be exact). He finds himself among 456 contestants who are also in extreme financial distress, including his childhood friend Cho Sang-woo, now a disreputable businessman; Abdul Ali, an undocumented worker from Pakistan; and Kang Sae-byeok, a North Korean refugee. At one point, Gi-hun says to Sang-woo, a graduate of the prestigious Seoul National University, “I was slow, crazy incompetent … But you’re with me in this place. Isn’t that interesting?” The messaging is not subtle: Anyone, whatever their background, can be humbled by debt. In this arena, every player has a supposedly equal opportunity at striking gold if they successfully complete the games, which have a bloody twist to them. But the show suggests that humans are constantly in a state of indebtedness to a cruel system—whether that’s a macabre competition or a punishing societal structure.

Squid Game fits into a category of South Korean works that grapple with economic anxieties and class struggles, which are rooted in the country’s concerns but resonate globally. Like Bong Joon-ho’s movie Parasite, the show indicts the rich for propagating a false sense of upward mobility and the poor for buying into it. Like BTS’s song “Silver Spoon,” it speaks to the physical pains that people face when trying to rise above their prescribed stations. And like Lee Chang-dong’s film Burning, it captures the isolation and resentment of those left behind by rapid development. Squid Game uses the popular survival-game genre—reminiscent of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, and the video game Fortnite—to tell an even more universal story, and to make its allegories to real life particularly stark.

[Read: Parasite and the curse of closeness]

Writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk does this, in part, with stunning aesthetics. The first game’s arena is a room painted to look like an open field, creating the illusion of freedom. A giant, glass piggy bank filled with stacks of bills looms over the players’ heads, constantly reminding them of what they have to gain. The intricate, candy-colored sets and the players’ green tracksuits are often streaked and splattered with blood, reflecting the perverse way that modern suffering is frequently presented as a spectacle. (When a friend asked how violent the show is, I likened it to Midsommar.)

Players are reduced to the numbers on their shirt; they wear identical uniforms; they form alliances and rivalries. But the veneer of parity is misleading. As in real life, people lie and cheat; they also take advantage of the disabled, elderly, and female. In the second episode, the players briefly venture back to the outside world, but after being reminded of how desperately they need money, many decide to return to the arena. “Out here, the torture is worse,” says a character who goes by 001, sharing soju and ramen with Gi-hun outside a convenience store. But the literal Korean translation is a bit different from the Netflix subtitles: “This place is more of a hell.” That difference in meaning is important: “Torture” might end, but “hell” is eternal. For the players, the daily humiliations of being poor are a worse fate than risking death.

Youngkyu Park / Netflix

But although the weight of unpaid debts can create a living hell, Squid Game surprisingly explores another form of indebtedness: being responsible for other people. This is most apparent in Gi-hun, played by Lee Jung-jae with crinkly-eyed warmth and wide-eyed empathy. Gi-hun creates moments of genuine tenderness, acting as a surrogate moral backbone within the arena, despite starting off as a lousy father and son. He befriends and protects an old man. He insists on getting to know the other players’ names, not just their numbers. “You don’t trust people in here because you can. You do it because you don’t have anyone else,” he tells Sae-byeok when she’s reluctant to make alliances.

Certainly, friendships within the arena are formed out of necessity, but they aren’t solely transactional. (Think Katniss and Rue in The Hunger Games.) These bonds reveal a deeper truth: that individual success is a myth. No one who survives does so on their own, but because of the sacrifices of others. In one scene, this message is represented through a game of tug-of-war, in which players are physically chained to the rope, and to one another. But it’s also highlighted through the backstories of the supporting characters. Indeed, most are there to help their family in the outside world. Ali hopes to provide for his wife and baby. Sae-byeok needs funds to rescue her brother from an orphanage and pay to smuggle her mother across the border. Sang-woo wants to care for his aging mother. Everyone’s community needs and personal financial obligations are intertwined. Debt to a cruel system is inescapable and dehumanizing, the show constantly reminds us. But beneath the hyper-violence, it also suggests that our obligations to other people can be a source of meaning, compassion, and—just maybe—salvation.

Rubio: I’m Not Sure We’re Better Off Than We Were Under Trump

2021-09-30T19:53:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here.

Despite the whirlwind in Washington this week, Marco Rubio isn’t worried—at least not for his own party. As of now, Democrats have reached a deal to stave off a government shutdown until December, but they still need to prevent another crisis: a first-ever default on the national debt. Rubio is among the Senate Republicans who blocked efforts to raise the debt ceiling, effectively forcing Democrats to make the move on their own. “If you’re going to make a decision to ram your agenda down our throat, then you’re going to have to do the debt limit by yourself as well,” the Florida Republican told Kelly O’Donnell, a White House correspondent for NBC News.

In Rubio’s eyes, the Democrats are trying to “radically transform the role of government in our country”—something he doesn’t believe they have a mandate to do. He’s also not sure that the nation is in a better place than under the previous administration, accusing President Joe Biden’s government of mishandling the pandemic, the border, and the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Rubio spoke with O’Donnell during The Atlantic Festival today. Their conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Kelly O’Donnell: We’re coming together on a day that is not just an ordinary day in Washington. It’s the end of the fiscal year for the federal government. There’s a lot happening on Capitol Hill. Do you expect that the issue of simply keeping the government open, government funding, will that be resolved before the deadline?

Marco Rubio: I think so, and it could have been resolved a month ago, a week ago. I think it will be resolved today. I’m not sure. I don’t know anyone here who is in favor of the government shutting down. The debates have been about issues attached to it, not to the actual issue of funding the government. So I—if I were to—we’re going to vote it out of the Senate today. And I imagine the House will take it up and send it over to the president before midnight.

O’Donnell: That’s a good thing that we can take that off the list of many things that are sort of crashing together at the same time on Capitol Hill. What is your view about your own responsibility as a senator representing Florida when it comes to the debt ceiling? There is a lot of debate about this being a bipartisan issue. Republicans like yourself have said, no, Democrats need to do this on their own. Why do you hold that view?

[Read: Marco Rubio makes his move]

Rubio: The cost [of the reconciliation bill] is significantly higher than $3.5 trillion. And they’ve known the whole time. Look, if you’re going to do $3.5 trillion spending all by yourselves, we’re going to have no input into the size of it, or what it’s on—if that’s what you’re going to do, then you can do the debt limit by yourself as well. And that’s a position that we took very early. They’ve known that for months. You can’t say, “We want you to help us raise the debt limit, but together. But when it comes to spending the money, we’re going to do it by ourselves and we’re going to decide how money is spent.” It doesn’t work that way. It’s certainly not going to work for us here. And so we’ve told them that for months; they’ve known it. So the reason why we’re reaching this deadline with so much uncertainty is because they either didn’t take it seriously or didn’t care.

Watch: Kelly O’Donnell in conversation with Marco Rubio

O’Donnell: Even though the debt ceiling is about past spending, not the 3.5 trillion or whatever number they finally settle on for infrastructure, climate, and other programs?

Rubio: Well, that would be a more legitimate argument for them to make if this was about the status quo. But it’s not about the status quo. They want to raise the debt limit because it allows them to spend even more. And they know they’re going to have to borrow money to do it. The debt limit, by and large, is something that should be worked out. I don’t think anyone wants the nation to default. But if you’re going to make a decision to ram your agenda down our throat with 51 votes, you have no input on it. You’re going to have no say on it, then you’re going to have to do the debt limit by yourself as well. If they were really interested in working this out, then they would have worked with us on a budget agreement. They would have allowed us to have input on the budget agreement. We don’t own the budget agreement, because they didn’t allow us to have any input on it, and they passed.

O’Donnell: So, Senator, is the debt limit a political tool, in your judgment?

Rubio: I think it’s a commonsense conclusion. Look, in Congress they have a decision to make about how they’re going to run the institution. One way, you can say, is “Okay, we’re 50–50 in the Senate; we need a vice president to break a bunch of ties. And so 50 Republicans are going to have to have some input into the things we do.” [Democrats have] chosen not to do it that way. What they’ve chosen to do is to say, “We have an agenda; we’re going to pursue this agenda; and we’re going to run you over with this agenda.” So if you make that decision, you can’t then come back and say to that minority, and in the case here, the 50 Republicans, “We want you to be a part of it.”

O’Donnell: Turning to Afghanistan, you have been outspoken on your views. We’ve now had a chance to hear from Secretary [Lloyd] Austin, General [Mark] Milley, and General [Kenneth] McKenzie. You had previously called for General Milley to step down based on some of the reporting coming out about his conversations with China during the end of the Trump administration. Have your views on the status of General Milley changed at all now that you’ve heard that he cleared that call, that he briefed his superiors about that and so forth?

Rubio: No, they haven’t. After that hearing, we know for a fact that he was now the source. Not only that, but he’s talked to multiple reporters. I don’t know of any other chairman of the Joint Chiefs that has spent that much time talking to reporters about books regarding the previous administration. This is not a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman. This is the current and acting one. And it really begins to inject military and military officials into a place that is very dangerous for them to be. And so I can reach only two conclusions: Either (a) this was nothing but a normal call to the Chinese and him exaggerating to these reporters, or (b) him actually undermining the chain of command because he decided that the direction the president was going was dangerous. It’s one of those two. And neither one of them is good. And I don’t think that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should be a position that is this politicized. We shouldn’t be talking about him in these things that much. And the reason why we are? It’s because he decided to sit there and give these lengthy interviews on background, by the way, not just to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa but apparently multiple other reporters working on books as well.

O’Donnell: I’m going to move along to politics. You will be a candidate for reelection on the ballot next year. You’re in the national conversation. What role do you think President Trump has in the Republican Party today, and going forward?

[David Frum: There is no defense—only complicity]

Rubio: Donald Trump is the most popular, most widely supported, most influential Republican in the country. That itself is explanatory about what role he can play and is going to play. What role he wants to play is up to him to decide. But you can’t have someone who’s the most popular, the most well known, and the most influential Republican not be a factor in these races. There are a lot of people out there, including in my party, that strongly support the president, because even though they don’t agree with him on every issue, they view him as someone who was willing to fight, someone who was willing to take the slings and arrows of those who are unfair in the coverage of the conservative movement. I also think that in retrospect, some of the disasters we’ve seen over the last six to eight weeks in the current administration have allowed people to draw a point of comparison. You look at the migratory crisis at the border, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, a series of things, and you say to yourself, Donald Trump tweeted things I didn’t agree with or did—said—this or said that, but we didn’t have that sort of policy chaos that we’re now seeing in place after place under the current administration. But to answer your question, I think Donald Trump is the most influential and popular Republican in the country right now. Public polling says it. Common sense tells me that.

O’Donnell: And is he using that influence, Senator, in a way that you think is constructive: the way he talks about January 6, the way he talks about the election that he lost to Joe Biden, the way he talks about COVID? Is he using that influence to help the country? He does not espouse vaccinations beyond acknowledging he got vaccinated. He has many followers who have not sought vaccination. He talks about the insurrection and the events on January 6 as if that didn’t happen. Is he using that influence in a way that you think is good for the country?

Rubio: He certainly has strong opinions, and he’s giving those strong opinions. And some people agree with him and some people don’t.

O’Donnell: Do you?

Rubio: I believe people should be vaccinated, for example. I’ve been vaccinated. I’ve repeatedly said I think people should be vaccinated. What I don’t believe is that I or any other government official should have the power to force people to get vaccinated. And I think it’s ironic that we are in a country where a Border Patrol agent who is unvaccinated can be fired, but someone who migrates here illegally from another country can enter the country without being vaccinated and is released into the general population. Americans are being fired from their jobs, but foreigners can enter the country illegally and not be vaccinated. That’s an absurd outcome.

O’Donnell: In your home state right now, the case count is going down after a very, very difficult period. In the last week, it has dropped in terms of COVID-positive cases. But Florida remains in the top 10 for the rate of death. Is there more that you or other Republican officeholders could do to encourage vaccination? You don’t blink about saying you’ve been vaccinated and you believe in vaccinations, but is there something more you could do to try to get those who have not gotten vaccinated to be open to that?

Rubio: I don’t know how else we can encourage more vaccination other than to tell people it’s safe and effective and they should be vaccinated. But there’s a difference between encouraging vaccination, which I don’t think anyone disagrees with, and certainly I don’t, and mandating it and telling people “We’re going to fire you if you don’t.” At the end of the day, there is something called personal responsibility in this country. I wish people exercised more. I wish people would lose weight. I wish people would monitor their blood sugar so they don’t have a diabetic episode that can cost them their lives down the road. But just because we think that’s the right thing for people to do, there are some things we can’t force people to do. I personally know people that haven’t been vaccinated, and because I care about it, it frustrates me. But I have to separate that from the idea that I’m going to try to punish, persecute, stigmatize them, because in many cases that becomes highly counterproductive. I’m not sure why there is this hysteria about forcing people to get vaccinated. And I think practically it doesn’t work. It becomes counterproductive, and it creates an additional irritant in an already deeply divided country.

[Read: Marco Rubio’s lonely fight]

O’Donnell: And do you think politics has hardened people’s choices, where there are some who believe they’re in one tribe that says “We don’t like mandates; therefore I’m not going to get vaccinated”? Do you think that kind of conversation has actually made it more difficult to get people to that choice of protecting themselves, their family, their loved ones?

Rubio: I’m giving you an opinion that’s anecdotal, but I know people that may get vaccinated at some point, but they don’t want to be told they have to be and almost react negatively to being told they have to be vaccinated. It’s a strange situation, because I believe people should be vaccinated. On the other hand, I hear so many stories about people that are about to lose their jobs unless they allow someone to stick a needle in their arm, not once but twice, and put something into their body that’s only a year and a half old. I don’t agree with them; I have to respect that point of view. And for me to try to bash them over the head is only going to create a point of friction that makes it harder to find cooperation on a bunch of other things as well.

O’Donnell: You’re going into another election season. There’s been so much focus on the past election, where the country stands on election security, on people’s belief and their faith in the process. Do you think damage has been done to the public in Florida and elsewhere, [to their] believing that our elections work and that the outcomes are in fact valid?

Rubio: Yeah, and it’s a long time building. I have a lot of experience in this issue, being from Florida. I was in the Florida legislature. My first year there was right after the 2000 election, where there were people that openly argued that George W. Bush was not a legitimate president because of what happened in the state of Florida. I come from a community in Miami where we’ve had a long history, unfortunately, of all sorts of electoral problems that forced us to change state laws. There was a time in Miami, Florida, where we had Republican operatives and Democrat operatives that were collecting and harvesting ballots at senior centers. And there were court cases about how some of the ballots were tampered with or thrown away, and things of that nature. So we passed laws to fix all of that.

There are two things that are important about elections. The first is that the results be accurate, and the other is that there be public confidence. And it doesn’t take much for people to lose public confidence in an election’s legitimacy, even if it’s only 10 examples, and the margin of victory was 10,000 votes. That’s all it takes, especially in this environment, and especially with foreign operatives driving some of this misinformation, to undermine public confidence in elections. So that’s why election-integrity laws are so critical and why they need to be in place. And I don’t think it helps anyone to go around equating requiring an ID or putting a limit on the deadline for when you can register, when the ballot has to be in, to Jim Crow–era laws. I think that is frankly absurd and offensive. I’m a Hispanic man. I am perfectly capable of producing an ID in order to go vote, just like I have to in order to get on an airplane or cash a check or do a bunch of other things. We can require people to prove they’re vaccinated with a card. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.

O’Donnell: Do you have any concerns as a candidate for reelection that your election will in fact be valid and the public should trust the results?

Rubio: No. Florida has great election laws and great election systems. In 2018, we had two counties that had very serious problems on how they administer those elections. And, frankly, one of the problems was a ballot-design problem, which may have cost Democrats thousands of votes and very close races. By and large, Florida has a very good election system. It’s been improved even now, with new laws. And I think the reason why we have such a good election system is because we’ve had such a history of close elections, and obviously, in the case of the 2000 election, one that became the center of national attention for a period of time.

O’Donnell: I first met you after your election to the Senate in 2010. That was a year of the Tea Party energy in the Republican Party. We’ve seen your home state vote for Barack Obama and then vote for Donald Trump in successive elections. We saw the momentum of how Donald Trump changed the party. As you go into 2022, what will define the energy and the atmosphere of what this election will be remembered for?

Rubio: We can never predict something that’s going to happen. A pandemic couldn’t have been predicted at this scale and nature. And we hope not to have international crises, but those things are always possible. But a couple of things are on the horizon. Inflation is going to be a big issue. I’m not sure people realize yet how much more expensive retail products are going to be very soon. The cost of producing things that are on their way are substantially higher, 20 to 25 percent higher than they were just a few months ago. And that’s going to be reflected when people go Christmas shopping this year and into the new year. The other issue is that Democrats today had a three-vote majority in the House. They have a 50–50 Senate and a narrow victory in the presidency. And yet they’re governing like they got a mandate to radically transform the role of government in our country. That’s sort of out of touch with reality. And I think some of the incompetence of the current administration—I think the border situation is going to get far worse. There are between 90,000 and 120,000 migrants from Haiti alone that are all desiring to come towards the United States. And right now, the Biden administration is doing very little about it. There are multiple other countries as well that are contributing to this. So we’ve got a border crisis. We have inflation. And I hope I’m wrong, but I do think that we are going to see a counterterrorism threat emerge from Afghanistan at some point in the near future as well. And on a broader perspective, I would just say that we are living through a time of extraordinary economic, social, and geopolitical transformation, and public policy is struggling to keep up.

Pelosi: ‘Make No Mistake: This Is the Biden Agenda’

2021-09-29T10:10:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here.

Nancy Pelosi is juggling a series of looming deadlines. House Democrats must avoid a government shutdown and federal default, and they need to reach a consensus on advancing President Biden’s agenda through two different bills. This week, Pelosi announced that she would move to vote on the $1 trillion infrastructure bill on Thursday, even as progressives vowed not to support it unless a $3.5 trillion spending bill also passes. But despite the bind that Democrats are in, the House Speaker is still confident that her party can meet the moment. “We have to find a common ground, build our consensus, and win the day,” Pelosi says.

During The Atlantic Festival on Tuesday, Pelosi spoke with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, about divisions within the Democratic Party, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and threats to American democracy. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I’m hoping that since we have a little bit of time we can talk about some deep things, but let’s talk about some issues of the moment. Can you give us the state of play, as of today, in terms of both the infrastructure bill and its apparent decoupling from the larger domestic-policy spending bill? Where do things stand with you?

Nancy Pelosi: Well, first, let me thank you again for the opportunity to chat. As I’ve said to you all before, when I was in high school, which is, you know, a while ago, I subscribed to The Atlantic Monthly, as it was called then. I loved reading it. And one of the reasons that, in our school, we all had to subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly was because we wanted to be good writers, and we were told we couldn’t be good writers unless you read good writing. So it wasn’t only about the substance and what we learned, but it was also to learn by reading good writing. So thank you, The Atlantic, for being an inspiration for all these years.

Okay, this is a very eventful week. We have four things on our plate right now. As you know, the debt ceiling is a matter of a couple of weeks, but we want to address it as soon as possible. The shutdown of the government is a matter of days. That would be September 30th. The infrastructure bill has a September 30th deadline for highway authorization and the rest, and of course the Build Back Better Biden initiative. President Biden said that he was happy and pleased to work in a bipartisan way to find common ground on infrastructure. But he would not confine his vision for America to what could be achieved in that way. We had to again build back better, and that is the reconciliation deal.

In the course of that time, as you know, there were those who said that number was too high. So we’re waiting to see what an adjusted number would be. We hope that that will be imminent and that we can then take that legislation to the floor. It’s called legislating. We have to find a common ground, build our consensus, and win the day.

[Read: The progressives have already won]

Goldberg: Well let me ask you a question about the legislating. You have said or suggested that a lot of what’s going on—the drama between Senators [Joe] Manchin and [Kyrsten] Sinema on the one hand, and the Progressive Caucus in the House, the Squad—is kind of the kabuki of legislating, and that it’s all going to work out in the end. But there is a lot of anxiety on the Hill that this is too unwieldy, that you’re not going to be able to rein this in and get most of what you want. How confident are you that you’re going to end up with, if not $3.5 trillion in domestic spending, something that’s fairly revolutionary, something that’s as dramatic as you want?

Watch: Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg in conversation with Nancy Pelosi

Pelosi: Well, the president’s number is what we built our bill around. It isn’t the last bill we will ever pass. There are some adjustments we can make in timing, length of program, and the rest. The president said it perfectly. He said, what’s the top line? Zero, because it’s all paid for. This is about creating good-paying jobs. It’s about lowering costs for families. It’s about tax breaks for the middle class. And it is all paid for. How do we, if we have to, come down? It’s not about a number. It’s about the values. What would you cut? Would you cut child care, child tax credit, family medical leave, universal pre-K, home health care? You could cut investments in protecting the planet—which is a health, jobs, security, and moral issue.

It’s not if we just take what it is, then we arrive at a number. But it isn’t starting with the number and starting cutting. It’s about building back better.

And let me just say: I think it’s, with all the respect in the world for the reporting on this, I think that there has been an appetite for saying there’s big division in the Democratic Party. There isn’t—I’ve never seen our caucus so organized, so unified. And I say that with a long history of, shall we say, trying to make sure we had the vote on something, over 95 percent of our caucus is fully behind, and that’s the moderates in the party, the New Democrats, the rest—they share these values as we go forward. Somehow or other, it’s been decided to make this a thing about moderates—and the moderates are overwhelmingly in support of President Biden in this legislation, as well as the progressives. So it may be fun to have that be kind of a thing, but that’s not what’s happening in our party. I’m so proud of our members, because they understand what is at stake and what we have to get done.

Goldberg: Well let me just stay on that point you made earlier that it’s all paid for. I mean, obviously, you believe that. Equally obviously, some of your moderates—Senators Manchin and Sinema—don’t necessarily believe that. And obviously you have no margin right now in the House—you’ve got to hold that entire caucus together. How do you convince them?

Pelosi: Well this is not even subjective. This is an objective fact. Leader [Chuck] Schumer and I met with Secretary [Janet] Yellen, Secretary of Treasury, the other day to agree on a framework of revenues that we could pull in. Now, it depends on the number. If the number is lower, then we deal with it one way. But the fact is, this is it. Some of the people out there—I’m not talking about members—some of the people out there are saying, “Oh, it’s too big.” Then we say, “We’re shrinking it, and it’s paid for.” When we say it’s paid for, you’d think they’d say “Glory, hallelujah.” And they say, “Oh my God, you’re going to raise my taxes.” No: We’re going to have people pay their fair share. So this isn’t even subjective, with all due respect to your question. It is objective fact. This will be paid for, and it is really exciting. That’s why the president said the top line is zero: because it’s paid for. And any arguments about inflation, or this or that, are dispelled by the fact that it is paid for. So some people say, “Well, I don’t want a number so high because I don’t want to tax this that or the other thing,” but that’s a different argument. The fact is the tax possibilities are there, whether people want to pay a tax, increase the corporate rate or capital gains or tax the high-end individuals. Just their share: not punitive. And of course, also to have the IRS be able to collect taxes that are illegally being avoided. It’s a big number: hundreds of billions of dollars.

Goldberg: We, the media, we tend to in this instance, and probably in other instances, spend more time thinking about the number than what’s in the package. And I want to get to that. But can I enter that question by putting this idea to you: That, in fact, the progressives have already won, because the argument is about a number and not the nature of the programs that are being discussed? Do you feel like the progressive wing is fully ascendant?

Pelosi: You may ask that question, but this is President Biden’s vision. This is his agenda, which is fully supported by House Democrats across the board.

Goldberg: So maybe the question is: Are you surprised that Joe Biden has become a progressive after spending three and a half decades as a moderate?

Pelosi: Well, as I said: In our caucus, when you divide nine people versus the 210 people, our caucus is very united. We’re very respectful of everybody’s views because we’re a big tent, and we respect that. But this is his agenda that is receiving big support across the board. The fact that the press want to play this as Democrats versus moderates—no, the moderates in the Congress overwhelmingly support this. So this is about Joe Biden. And I appreciate the articulate and eloquent presentations of what’s in the bill by some on our progressive side—I consider myself there, representing San Francisco as I do proudly in the Congress. But make no mistake: This is the Biden agenda. Clearly this is something that is a consensus within our caucus, following the lead of a president of the United States. What is fantastic is that we have this—now people compare him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That, oh my gosh, this is comparable to the New Deal. President Roosevelt had 319 Democrats in the Congress when he put forth his agenda. Not that it wasn’t transformational—but this is transformational, too, with a smaller margin.

Goldberg: Do you think that this is the equivalent of a New Deal if this goes through this week or later on? Is it as dramatic as that?

Pelosi: Of course the New Deal was dealing with such a depression in our country that there were so many things that went into it. But in terms of being transformational—this takes leverage to the people, children, poor people, people with disabilities, women. And so not in terms of size, or number of agencies established, or some of that, but in terms of changing the dynamic, building up rather than trickling down, spreading from the middle—rather than again enhancing the high end. And it is time. It is as needed now as what was needed then, because we were on a path of such incredible economic disparity in our country that led to a caste system. The wealthy—now, again, this is not to not appreciate the success and achievement of those, but they have to pay their fair share.

[Read: The Democrats are already losing the next election]

Goldberg: I want to come to the small subject of the future of American democracy in a moment. But I wanted to pivot to a couple of national-security and foreign-policy questions. We’re seeing reports today that 220 female Afghan judges have gone into hiding for fear of the Taliban. We see universities in Afghanistan banning women. Give us your view, a few weeks out of the Afghanistan withdrawal, of the way it was done and its impact on women.

Pelosi: Well, the impact on women in Afghanistan is probably one of the reasons that there was public support for us staying there so long. I think that President Biden made the exact right decision. It was long overdue. We should have stayed longer in the beginning to get the job done, instead of going to Iraq. But that’s another conversation. We had to leave. The timing was established by President Trump. Don’t forget, 120,000 people evacuated, not just us, but working with our allies. Sadly, we lost 13 of our military who were patriotically trying to get them out. Could that have been done better? Yes. And now it continues to be done better. The fate of women in Afghanistan—I’ve been there many times. Mothers’ Day, to visit mothers across the country: in our military and in their community. I wear this ring, which is made by Afghan women. I have many mementos from them, about them. And what they had made. Their fate was something that was very important to all of us. And I visit them. Not just judges and the rest in Kabul—and that’s very important judges, professionals, heads of universities, doctors, etc.—but the poorest of the poor in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. And to see those girls go to school—I mean, we did something very transformative, and for 20 years they benefited from that. And we have to keep our eyes [on Afghanistan]. The fate of the women is important to the fate of Afghanistan.

Goldberg: So what should we be doing for the women who we told life would get better? What should we be doing? What do we owe those women now?

Pelosi: It did get better. There’s no turning back on the education of those girls and the rest. But we have to keep a bright, shining light on Afghanistan and the Taliban, so that they know we’re watching what’s happening with that. And that if there are things that they need—they will need cooperation internationally—that it is contingent on how women are treated. It’s a very dangerous situation. There’s no question. There’s no minimizing. But we have to use a possibility that we have for the women of Afghanistan. That’s why it’s important to pass that continuing resolution to keep the government open: of course to meet the needs of those affected by Hurricane Ida, but also a significant resource to help the transition of Afghans into our society.

Goldberg: One other foreign-policy question. Last week, there was a little bit of an eruption around the funding for the Iron Dome anti-missile system. And there are a lot of people who are arguing that, well, even though it passed, this is further proof that the Democratic Party is moving away from support for Israel. Can you take a minute to frame out that discussion within your caucus?

Pelosi: First of all, I totally disagree with your characterization—not yours, but that you referenced. It’s a Republican tactic. The support for Israel has been and will always be bipartisan. Some of our members do not support the Iron Dome here. It’s going to be in our bill. It’s already in our appropriations bill, which passed in Congress. Just because some members didn’t vote for that doesn’t mean they don’t support our relationship with Israel. Just take that out of the equation. It’s a Republican tactic. It is bipartisan and will continue to be bipartisan. And again, it’s in our larger appropriations bill. The argument was really: “Do we need to move this up sooner?” When they might not even be ready until later.

I’ll talk to you about my credentials on Israel. My father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., speaking on the floor of the House when he was a New Deal Democrat, criticized the administration for not doing enough for Jewish people in Europe during the Holocaust, saying that this information was known by the administration in the archives of the State Department. He worshipped at the shrine of Franklin Roosevelt, but he disagreed that the administration wasn’t moving quickly enough to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. So I come to this in the DNA, and I resent any characterization about what the Democrats are when it comes to Israel. It’s in our national interest to support Israel. It’s in our value system to do so, as well.

Goldberg: Let me go to this question about democracy, if I can. We’ll end on this. But it seems as if we’ve entered, possibly, a new phase in American history in which one of the two major parties no longer is predisposed to accept the verdict of the popular vote and the Electoral College vote. Are you worried, come 2024, that if a Democrat were to win fair and square, that the Republicans will simply not accept that outcome? I mean—if you could, this is a hard question in a way—what is your biggest anxiety about that: what I would call the decomposition of democratic norms and standards?

[David Frum: Trump may not have to steal 2024 ]

Pelosi: Well, thank you for your question, Jeff, and your concern and characterization of it. Here’s the thing. On January 6, there was an assault on the Capitol—a day fraught with meaning in terms of the Constitution, because that’s the day we accept the numbers of the Electoral College. So that’s why they came. They assaulted the Capitol: the symbol of democracy to the world. They assaulted the Constitution. They assaulted our democracy. It was horrible. So now we can hold a presentation about that. But every single day since, they continue to try to undermine our democracy with legislation across the country to suppress the vote, to nullify the vote. And we cannot let that happen. I say to my Republican friends: “Take back your party. You are the Grand Old Party. You’ve done great things for our country.” I’ve said that in presentations before. “Do not be hijacked by a cult that is now not just a difference of opinion or policy or governance or science, but is undermining the sanctity of the vote, which is fundamental to our democracy.” So we have to pass legislation to nullify those voting-suppression bills across the country. We have to do so soon. We have the legislation in the Senate, but we also have to win in the courts. And we have to win in the court of public opinion. People have to know our democracy is at stake. This is no fearmongering. This is an actual fact. And again, it’s a situation where for one person in denial about the election result, if you go down that path, you are going to autocracy. We must protect and defend. At the beginning of our country—and Jamie Raskin’s always proud of quoting Thomas Paine—Thomas Paine said, “The times have found us.” Times found us to win independence, to fight a war, to win it, and to write our documents. Thank God they made amendments. Times found them to establish this great country. Times found Lincoln to preserve the unity of the country. And he did so. Times have found us to preserve it. Not that we place ourselves in a category of greatness, like Lincoln and our Founders—but the urgency of the assault on our democracy is real, and we must prevail. And again, we fight them every step of the way. And again, it makes politics seem almost trivial here. This next election is not just about Democrats or Republicans, or “Do you believe in climate change or not?” This is about “Do you believe in our democracy or not?” If they ever got the gavels, what they would do to our democracy is crushing. And we see it every day here. A lot of Republicans across the country—although they mistrust the results of the election, they believe a president when he says something. But that president—what’s his name—was not worthy of the trust the people placed in him because he is undermining our democracy in a way that caused death, damage, trauma, so much. And that’s important, but nothing as important as our democracy. We take the oath to protect and defend the Constitution.

Why Are People Nostalgic for Early-Pandemic Life?

2021-09-29T05:00:00-04:00

It’s easy to forget about the toilet-paper shortages, the empty streets, and the disinfected groceries. The first days, weeks even, of the pandemic felt like a twisted novelty. You could try out a TikTok trend: whipping together sugar, instant coffee, and a little bit of warm water, then laying that fluffy meringue over milk—dalgona coffee. In the fridge, your sourdough starter looked mushy and gassy. Later, you’d go for a socially distanced walk, but for now you’d make some progress on that loan you owed Tom Nook in the Animal Crossing universe. You didn’t know what a variant was. You’d never heard of a “Fauci ouchie.” And you thought you would probably return to school or your office in a couple of weeks. This was March 2020.

Deep in the throes of the late-stage pandemic, millions of young people have grown to miss this time early last year. Their longing is captured in TikToks and YouTube videos that romanticize the trends, obsessions, and sounds of 18 months ago. These “early-pandemic aesthetic” creators have built an online community tied together by a yearning for a time when the world seemed united in facing an uncertain future.

James Ikin, a 25-year-old in London, jumped onto the pandemic-nostalgia TikTok trend last October, using a soundtrack that mashed together the most viral songs from quarantine, including “Say So,” the disco-infused pop track from the L.A. rapper and singer Doja Cat. (The video has more than 3 million views, and a similar video he made in February has more than 450,000.) “Back then it was just pure and simple,” Ikin told us. “You’re locked down, and this is what life is going to be for the foreseeable future for absolutely everybody. Whereas now you’re trying to plot a path forward … and it makes life more complicated again.”

@james_ikin
Things move so quickly on this app it’s honestly incredible #tiktoksongs #tiktoksounds #fyp #tiktok #tiktokaudios #lockdown
♬ original sound - Aujonta

[Read: We have to grieve our last good days]

The genre of videos that Ikin and other young TikTok creators fueled cropped up in the summer and winter of 2020, when people dreaded the fact that the temporary emergency might drag on indefinitely. More people hopped on the trend in March, a year after the first shutdowns. Even now, new videos continue to trickle out as students and young professionals return to the classroom and office.

Sophie Feldman, a 22-year-old college student from Chicago, remembers scrolling through TikTok one day in August 2020 and catching the first few notes of Benee’s “Supalonely.” “It showed up on my ‘For You’ page [the continuous feed of videos at the heart of the app], and it just immediately brought back all of those memories,” she told us. Lying in bed, she turned on her camera and recorded what became one of the most popular videos of the genre: While a camera filter cycles through red, violet, cyan, and yellow flashes of light, Feldman rolls her eyes and stares into the distance, blinking blankly. Referencing the evocative power of a single song, a caption above her head reads, “This sound screams whipped coffee, forced family walks, toilet paper shortage, banana bread, and tiger king.”

“It just sounds like a fever dream, like time isn’t real,” Feldman said. The cultural moments she calls out in her video felt like distant memories, but they had started just a few months before. Apparently more than 1 million other TikTok users felt the same sense of wistfulness (the clip has more than 4 million views and more than 1 million likes). “Ahh the hopeful part of quarantine” and “Why do i kinda miss it,” read the top replies. Scanning the comments, Feldman saw note after note of melancholy. “We were just feeling nostalgic for this period of time where we felt such togetherness, even though we were physically isolated,” she said. “And I feel like that has dissipated over the past year and a half.”

Why do these videos resonate? According to David Newman, a researcher at UC San Francisco, nostalgia is a natural response to uncertainty and dissatisfaction. At its root, the word breaks down into the Greek nostos (“return home”) and algos (“pain”). In Newman’s studies on nostalgia, he has found that on a day-to-day basis, most people feel nostalgic when they’re also feeling lonely or isolated. Whether because of the return of masks, electoral turmoil, or the recent Delta surge, people may be longing for a time when the gravity of the situation hadn’t fully set in. As time passes, we may forget negative memories and hold on to the positive ones, Newman and other psychology experts told us.

The pandemic’s historical significance may also have fostered a specific kind of nostalgia: anticipatory nostalgia, or the feeling of missing the present before it has even passed. Most people are acutely aware that they will remember the pandemic for years to come, and are perhaps living and documenting their days with that perspective in mind. Social media certainly encourages this kind of premature yearning—or at least a sense that the current moment needs to be captured for posterity. In the Netflix special Inside, the comedian Bo Burnham chronicles his own downward spiral throughout 2020, compiling and synthesizing moments of loneliness, mania, and introspection into a portrait of pandemic life. Inside is contradictory to pandemic-nostalgia TikToks in that it doesn’t romanticize the past year, but the artistic intent is similar. In a 2018 interview, Burnham described the way that social media shapes young people’s conception of their own memories by encouraging “living an experience but at the same time hovering behind yourself and watching yourself live that experience, being nostalgic for moments that haven’t happened yet, planning your future to look back on it.”

[Read: Is that nostalgia you’re feeling?]

The responses to pandemic-nostalgia videos, though, show occasional criticism mixed in with agreement: For every batch of commenters reminiscing about the early pandemic, someone is angry that they are glamorizing the spread of a deadly disease. (Vox’s Rebecca Jennings has challenged the solipsism of some videos, writing that “this brand of perverse nostalgia for quarantined life is both myopic and dishonest,” even though a degree of ironic trolling underlies most of TikTok.) Parents, essential workers, and medical professionals did not have the privilege of a restful early pandemic, and class and race dynamics played a role in who had the time or mental energy to sit around at home growing scallions and watching Tiger King.

Amanda Gordon, a YouTuber and senior at NYU who made a series of videos subtly pushing back on the pandemic-nostalgia trend, is surprised that people genuinely miss March and April 2020. “I wouldn’t say I was miserable,” she told us. “I feel like I honestly try to be an optimistic person.” But her circumstances at the beginning of the pandemic were less than ideal. NYU’s campus shut down and she had to move back in with her family in upstate New York. Her summer internship fell through. She began to question job prospects in the film industry. While logging on to Zoom classes, she worried whether an online education was worth the thousands of dollars she was racking up in student debt.

This was a period not of rest and relaxation, but of questioning whether her present and future would be worthwhile. Gordon spent hours brainstorming video ideas and ways to grow and monetize her YouTube channel (she now has more than 200,000 subscribers). She applied for a scholarship and got a job at her local grocery store so she could work toward paying off student loans. In a video titled “My Life Is Not a Movie,” Gordon attempts to depict her daily routine without an aesthetic sheen, in contrast with the “day in my life” videos that celebrate the mundane. This isn’t to say that Gordon completely rejects videos that glamorize life—she’s played around with harnessing her own “main-character energy” and trying to capture the cottagecore aesthetic.

Emotional and existential stressors can end up generating positive memories and motivations in the future, says Andrew Abeyta, a psychology professor at Rutgers University at Camden who studies nostalgia and memory formation. In fact, nostalgia can help people process traumatic experiences in a healthy way. “Reminiscing about good things and bad things that came out of the pandemic, for some people, is their way of sort of making sense of and growing from the experience,” Abeyta told us. Though not as grave as deaths, the losses many young people experienced in the past year and a half have generated their own kind of latent grief. A generation of young people has missed important milestones: graduations, moves to college or new cities, 21st birthdays, first jobs. Traditional markers of adulthood were replaced with days at home, under the eye of family and in childhood bedrooms.

As much as the people we spoke with may miss the suspended animation of those early days, they’re also worried about the even more uncertain fall and winter. Some have returned to in-person classes or work, but don’t expect it to last and dread the idea of going remote again. Others are still working from home, and can’t stand it. In that context, pandemic nostalgia is an understandable reaction to pandemic fatigue, and as the coronavirus moves toward eventually becoming endemic, it seems like the early days of quarantine won’t easily fade into the recesses of society’s memories. For many Americans, March 2020 will become a shared reference point; they already remember where they were when professional sports went on hiatus, when Broadway shut down, when they were told they’d have to go home.

Looking for a space to process their feelings of loss and grief, young people go where they often do: the internet. There, memories of early-pandemic life can end up serving not only as a way to feel connected to others, but also as a way to cope with that sadness. The guilt that comes with pandemic nostalgia is a consequence of people trying to glean value from a generally terrible time. And while nostalgia may be an effective crutch for the time being, it alone may not lead to the meaningful, lasting healing that people crave.

When Your Yard Can Kill You

2021-08-11T07:00:00-04:00

“I’m worried I’m going to fail,” my mom told me over the phone the night before her fire inspection. It was April, and she had been preparing for months, cutting branches, pruning hedges, and removing dead weeds in her backyard. She had learned how to use an array of garden tools—three saws, including a chain saw, and four different kinds of clippers—and even considered buying a wood chipper before deciding that machine was too dangerous for an amateur like herself.

In California, state and local laws have long required that people who live in areas at high risk of wildfires create buffers of “defensible space”—land cleared of vegetation and other flammable material—around their homes. Local fire departments and Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency, are tasked with going door-to-door to inspect the properties of the estimated 2.7 million Californians who live in these zones. And as the state’s fires have gotten worse, local communities have begun enforcing the law more aggressively. Only in the past year or so has Hillsborough, the small Bay Area town where my mom lives, started to inspect every high-risk property for compliance. My mom wanted to be ready. I told her not to worry about passing the inspection, and that she could hire tree trimmers to work on the branches that were out of reach, but I knew she was concerned about the cost.

[Annie Lowrey: California is becoming unlivable]

Even though my mom had tried her best to cut back the lush backyard, her weekend landscaping was not nearly enough to create the defensible space required. During the inspection, my mom learned that much of her yard would have to go. The oak branches were hanging too low over the roof; the thicket of acacia trees was too dense; the smaller redwood limbs needed to be at least six feet off the ground. The biggest problem was her brambly oak hedge, which lined the driveway and stood at least seven feet tall. It provided privacy, but the inspector explained that if it caught fire, my mom would have no pathway to escape.

That was all it took to persuade my mom to make substantial changes. She still remembers the morning last September when she thought she’d woken up on Mars. The sky was a hazy, burnt tangerine; the sun was nowhere to be seen. Thinking about the orange, smoke-filled sky made pushing away vanity easier. Who cares about having an ugly hedge if it means saving your life?

After the inspector left, my mom called several tree-trimming businesses to figure out how much the clearing would cost. The lowest estimate was $4,500; the highest was upwards of $10,000. She had 30 days to make the modifications before the inspector returned, so she hired a company that spent three days cutting down trees and feeding the branches into a wood chipper. My mom texted me live updates throughout the process, expressing horror at how unruly the yard looked. By the end of the third day, whole sections of the yard were cleared; the hedge was three feet shorter and knobby-looking, and the fence surrounding the property was actually visible. My mom was lucky that, with help from family, she was able to afford the tree trimmers. She passed the second inspection.

Personal, direct effects of climate change—having to conserve water during drought season, install air-conditioning to combat rising temperatures, and clear vegetation from yards and gardens to protect against wildfires—are the new normal in California. But individuals and policy makers are still figuring out how to share those burdens equitably. Although studies indicate that homes surrounded by defensible space are less likely to be damaged by fires, making sure that homeowners follow the law is not always easy. Local fire departments and Cal Fire units have fallen behind on completing annual inspections because of staffing shortages. And homeowners like my mom have to cover the high costs of fireproofing their backyard.

[Leah C. Stokes: How can we plan for the future in California?]

Those costs are the most significant challenge to achieving compliance with California’s fire-protection laws, Jennee Kuang, an environment program fellow at the Hewlett Foundation, found in a 2019 study of 49 defensible-space programs in California. “It’s an expensive thing to incorporate into your budget as a new annual line item,” she told me. The difficulties of complying with fire ordinances can vary based on a person’s wealth and age too. People with disabilities and elderly homeowners on limited incomes, for example, face greater obstacles to making modifications to their properties, and to paying for them. The Los Angeles Times interviewed a 94-year-old in San Diego who could neither clear the yard on his own nor foot the $14,000 bill for removing trees on his property. His neighbors eventually helped him apply for aid, but financial assistance isn’t always widely available.

Although some counties, such as Humboldt, on the far north coast, reimburse homeowners on a per-acre basis, many residents rely on grassroots organizations that may have access to the state and federal grants that individuals can’t apply for. Some local fire-safety groups have dedicated funds to help those in need, or organize days on which people can use a community wood chipper for free. Within areas that Cal Fire inspects, the average rate of compliance in 2021 has been 85 percent, according to John Morgan, the defensible-space division chief at the Office of the State Fire Marshal. Kuang found that districts with strict enforcement penalties—such as fees or property liens—had the highest compliance rates.

But expecting residents to absorb the costs, time, and labor of protecting their homes can make people resistant to creating fire-resilient communities, says Annie Schmidt, a program specialist at the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network, a fire-safety education organization. Vegetation modifications and home-hardening improvements, such as replacing roofs with fireproof material, are crucial to protecting neighborhoods but “may not be perceived as beneficial enough to warrant investment,” she told me over email.

With 95 percent of California experiencing severe drought and the typical fire season growing hotter and longer each year because of climate change, the question may no longer be if fire will reach a community, but when. Fires can’t be eradicated—at least not completely—and the state’s longtime strategy of suppressing fire has created ever more dangerous conditions. Wildfires are inevitable. But the destruction of Californians’ homes and lives doesn’t have to be. What’s needed, then, is not only assistance for residents in fireproofing their homes but also recognition among residents of the real and imminent dangers that wildfires pose.

Californians may be starting to better understand that threat. Last year’s fires were a “wake-up call” for many people in Hillsborough, Christine Reed, the fire marshal at the Central County Fire Department, which oversees Hillsborough, told me. Most homeowners have been on board with scheduling inspections and making the necessary modifications, and the department aims to finish inspections by the end of the year. “When you’re driving on the highway and you’re seeing a big column of smoke in the distance, it hits home. It’s a reminder that it can happen here,” Reed said. “I see so many more people working on their lots when I traverse areas of the state,” Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley professor specializing in fire management, told me.

I also felt a shift when I arrived home in June. I could hear chain saws and wood chippers throughout the day. When I drove into Palo Alto, I saw a herd of goats on the side of the road, diligently chewing through a field of dead grass. On July 4, I heard my neighbors lighting fireworks and panicked over whether calling the police would make me a responsible citizen or a Karen. (To my relief, they hosed down the fireworks before I had to make a decision.) On a walk around the neighborhood, my mom pointed out patches of overgrown grass, piles of dry brush, and mounds of mulch. In just a few months, her mind had been primed to look at the world in terms of what could burn. At first, I found her new outlook alarming. But I realized this was just a consequence of learning to live with the threat of fire.

[Read: The simple reason that humans can’t control wildfires]

I asked my mom whether she had ever considered leaving California and living somewhere else. Wouldn’t she like to go to sleep without worrying about needing to escape in the middle of the night? Wouldn’t she like to avoid waking up to another hazy, orange sky? Her answer was an immediate no. “I was born and raised here,” she said. “And our family is here.” Besides, where else would she go? Natural disasters and extreme weather conditions caused by climate change are affecting people everywhere, not just in California. And the personal costs of climate change are becoming more apparent: higher insurance premiums, higher electricity bills for air-conditioning, higher prices for food and gas. You may not have to worry about clearing vegetation from your yard. But climate change’s bills will come due for you too.

Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different

2021-03-17T17:48:00-04:00

“The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported,” the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Hong, 44, is the daughter of Korean immigrants and was raised in Los Angeles. Although she has written about race in her poetry, Minor Feelings is her first nonfiction book, a blend of memoir and cultural criticism. Her essays explore the painful and often invisible racial traumas that Asian Americans experience—traumas that have become impossible to ignore over the past year, as reports of anti-Asian racism and violence have increased.

Yesterday, a gunman killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women, at massage parlors in the Atlanta area. Hong told me by email that she was grateful to see an outpouring of sympathy from people outside the Asian American community, but also expressed the concern that police and commentators would downplay the significance of the event. “I’m already seeing media trying to whitewash this incident,” she wrote, “saying it’s not racially motivated, taking words of the police over the stories of these women.”

Earlier this year, several attacks on elderly Asians in the San Francisco Bay Area were captured on videos that went viral. One victim, 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee, died from his injuries. Although authorities in many cases have not determined—or are reluctant to say—whether these attacks are racially motivated, the overall pattern of violence is stark. Since March 2020, about 3,800 racist incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been reported to the group Stop AAPI Hate. Last Thursday, President Joe Biden condemned “vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans, who have been attacked, harassed, blamed, and scapegoated”—marking a contrast with his predecessor, who referred to the COVID-19 pandemic as “the Chinese virus” and “kung flu.”

[Read: What it’s like when racism comes for you]

Hong’s work captures the peculiar spot that Asian Americans occupy in America’s racial hierarchy. The political scientist Claire Jean Kim has described this dynamic as “racial triangulation”: Neither Black nor white, Asians are simultaneously stereotyped as model minorities and perpetual foreigners, and thus used as a wedge between Black and white people. But with overt attacks apparently on the rise across the country, Americans of Asian descent are demanding attention to the racism they face.

I spoke with Hong in detail last week, before the Atlanta-area shootings. We discussed why reports of violence and hate have galvanized so many Asian Americans, across ethnicities, in the past year. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Morgan Ome: Racism toward Asian Americans is not new. But recently, it feels as though more Asian Americans have been speaking up and protesting. Why?

Cathy Park Hong: A few years ago, David Dao, a Vietnamese doctor, was assaulted and dragged from a United Airlines flight. I remember the media did not talk about his identity. The story was just about him being a middle-class man who was dragged out of the airplane. Whereas when I saw that, I thought, I bet he wouldn’t have been treated that way if he were white. But no one was saying that. A lot has changed between then and now. It’s hard to say exactly what the reasons are. Part of it is because of Donald Trump. There has been a real retrenchment of identities, and people have been much more up-front in talking about race and structural racial inequities in this country. And that has resulted in a lot of Asian Americans speaking up.

When Black Lives Matter [gained force] in 2014—after Ferguson—I saw an increase in Asian American organizing and allyship. And last summer, people really internalized the Black Lives Matter protests and the conversation about social justice. Now, because of the anti-Asian racism that’s been happening, Asian Americans have been more moved to vocalize and organize—from writing commentaries in The New York Times to organizing groups to escort the elderly in Oakland’s Chinatown.

Ome: Has there been a moment like this before? The closest parallel that I could think of was the killing of Vincent Chin in 1982, which led to an outcry among Chinese and Japanese Americans. Other historical examples, such as Japanese internment during World War II, didn’t persuade Asians to protest on a mass scale. The damaging of Korean-owned businesses during the L.A. riots didn’t result in a lot of non-Koreans speaking up for the Korean community.

Hong: It’s true. You didn’t see other Asians coming in to support the Korean community after the L.A. riots. The difference now is that the people who are being attacked run the gamut. Even if they are thought to be Chinese, a lot of times they are Filipino or Vietnamese or Korean. One of the symptoms of racism is that you get all lumped together.

Another historical parallel was after 9/11, when Muslims were being attacked and persecuted. Or when Trump became president, there were talks about detaining Muslims. Americans were attacking Muslims or people who vaguely looked Muslim, including Hindu Indians, Sikh Indians—whoever looked brown. I believe that did galvanize the South Asian community and the Muslim community. We’re seeing that happen now. There is more aggressive activism among East Asians, Southeast Asians, and South Asians. It doesn’t really matter which group is being targeted.

Ome: Do you see any similarities between what’s happening now and what happened after the L.A. riots?

[Read: Looking back on the L.A. riots through five documentaries]

Hong: Similarly to the L.A. riots, there was an economic division between working-class African Americans and working-class Asian Americans. Many Black people resented Korean immigrants for coming into their neighborhood and opening stores they couldn’t open themselves, because they were redlined. At the same time, these Korean immigrants were barely scraping by. They didn’t have any insurance. But they were the next step up [from Black residents on the economic ladder]. There’s still a lot of that resentment from the L.A. riots, and memories of Latasha Harlins, who was killed by a Korean immigrant.

What’s very charged and tricky to talk about today are the optics of a Black or brown person assaulting or attacking the Asian elderly, like the Thai grandfather, Vicha Ratanapakdee. There’s a huge difference between the way second-generation or younger Asian Americans think about race and the way Asian immigrants think about race. Many younger Asian Americans are very sensitive to anti-Blackness in the Asian community, and about policing. With older Asian immigrants, these crimes may reaffirm their anti-Blackness and drive them toward the right.

What I fear is that these crimes are sowing deeper divisions between Black and Asian Americans, and that white people will not hold themselves accountable. Whenever I say on social media, “These attacks are symptomatic of white supremacy,” white people say, “How is it white supremacy when it’s not white people committing the crimes?” Claire Jean Kim has this really great racial-triangulation theory that talks about the relationship between Black, Asian, and white people. You saw that in the L.A. riots, and I see the same kind of dynamics being played out today.

Ome: So how do we move forward?

Hong: I don’t want to overcomplicate this. There are two ways of talking about this. The act of violence itself is wrong. You cannot excuse it. I think many Asian Americans have never talked about it, and so white people still don’t believe that Asian Americans face racism. Because we’re invisible, the racism against us has also been invisible. This is why it’s important that people are speaking up to show: “Actually, this has been happening, and there’s been a spike. But at the same time, this has been going on for a long time. We just haven’t really talked about it. And now we’re talking about it, and you have to pay attention.”

But it gets really tricky when the video [of an assault] becomes viral and we start talking about solutions beyond amplifying it. Part of the reason there’s a spike in anti-Asian violence is that people are angry and desperate. I’m not saying that we should excuse that. I’m just trying to think of the reasons why it’s happening to Asians. Earlier today, I was having a conversation where an interviewer told me that a police officer—who is Asian—said that he doesn’t believe [that recent attacks] are anti-Asian hate crimes.

Ome: The officer didn’t believe they’re racially motivated? What was his explanation?

Hong: Yes—that these assaults against Asians are just part of rising crime. I disagree with him. There have been plenty of incidents where the victims weren’t burglarized—they were attacked for no reason at all—and called racist slurs. I know people who live in Manhattan, specifically Asian American women who live alone, who are scared to go out by themselves, because they are followed and harassed and called all kinds of racial slurs. So this is not just some kind of hallucination.

Ome: Do you think that the events of the past year have forced this country to take racism against Asian Americans more seriously?

Hong: We have far to go. This is typical of this country, to not really focus on racism unless it’s sensationalized in some way, unless there’s a viral video, or someone gets murdered. I wouldn’t be surprised if Americans just forget and think, Onto the next news cycle. It’s great that white people and other non-Asians are picking up on this, but we can’t trust them to continue to train their attention on what’s happening to Asian Americans. We need to continue vocalizing who we are and our role in this country.

Ome: In Minor Feelings, you wrote about the difficulty of using the pronoun we because Asian Americans are such a diverse population. Do you still think Asian American is a meaningful descriptor?

Hong: It’s what we have right now.

Ome: Maybe I can clarify. The term Asian American was coined in 1968 by radical student organizers who were envisioning a pan-Asian, anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement. Is their notion of being Asian American just an ideal? Or is it a real identity-based coalition that you see forming?

Hong: People forget that history. I forget that too. Asian Americans came together because there was no term for us. Before, we were called Oriental, or by our nationalities. What created the name Asian American was the Vietnam War and the Black Power movement. Keep in mind, those Asian American organizers were second generation, maybe even third generation. They were Filipino, Chinese, Japanese. Quite a few of them had family put in internment camps. They were working-class. So they had a lot to be angry about.

It was really powerful, and it got written out of history. Part of it was because of the immigration patterns in America. After the late 1960s, there was this huge influx of Asians coming in from all different nations. We got way more diverse: Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees, Koreans. A lot of those immigrants now have children who consider themselves American, but realize that they still have secondary status as Americans because of the color of their skin and because their voices don’t have the kind of reach that white people do.

Part of the new awareness and consciousness is because there are a lot more of us. And there are more of us who have been here long enough to demand that we need to be part of this country. More so than when I was in my 20s or even 30s, the younger generation is so much fiercer, so much more involved, and so much prouder of being Asian American. The rhetoric has changed from We want more Asians in Hollywood. It’s not just about representational politics. It’s also about confronting class inequity among Asian Americans and trying to build solidarity with other people of color.

What I like to say about Asian Americans is that if we think of Asian Americans as less of an identity, and more as a coalition, then maybe Asians will feel more comfortable identifying with it, because it allows room for all of our kind of national, economic, and regional distinctions.

[Read: What stories of racial trauma leave out]

Ome: In your book, you wrote, “Since the late sixties, when Asian American activists protested with the Black Panthers, there hasn’t been a mass movement we can call our own.” Why do you think that is?

Hong: Some people disputed that and said there has been a lot of activism since then. I would say that it was more fractured. But I think it’s really important to build a cross-cultural community among Asian Americans, and also bridges between Asian, Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities. And right now, we’re not really there yet.

If we want to fix the structural inequities, reform the criminal-justice system and the police, and have health care for all, it’s very important to also talk about our racial identity, because people feel intimately close to that. You can’t just say, like Andrew Yang does, that people are getting too much into identity. If white people are misusing identity or race to pit us against each other, we have to address that. In terms of getting what we want, and being proud of being [in the United States], and speaking out against violence, we need to build community. That means building an Asian American identity that’s beyond loving boba tea and K-pop.

Ome: What do you think about some of the solutions that have been put forth for combatting anti-Asian violence? Last April, Andrew Yang encouraged Asian Americans to show their patriotism. This year, President Biden issued a memorandum to condemn racism and intolerance toward Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. On the community level, there are calls for neighborhood patrols and other nonpolice safety measures.

Hong: I’m not an organizer. I’m not an activist. So I don’t know if I can tell you exactly what needs to be done. Maybe we should go back to what happened after the L.A. riots, and look at how people tried to rebuild, and see how it failed.

There was a campaign to funnel resources into South Central. There were Korean Americans who called for people to pay attention to the fact that most of their businesses burned down and they had no insurance. There were attempts at interracial community building. And they were abandoned. That’s usually what happens: Whenever there’s a crisis, the media and politicians pay attention. And then they abandon it. Right now, we need to continue amplifying these hate crimes. But I don’t think policing is the answer. Asking for more policing is not going to solve anti-Asian hate crimes and bias incidents. The reason being that the police right now have all the money and are completely militarized, and [violence against Asian Americans] is still happening.

Ome: In Oakland’s Chinatown, not everyone favors neighborhood patrols instead of policing. Some people want more policing. So even within a community, it’s hard to persuade everyone.

Hong: If you’re the one who has a store or is an employee in Chinatown, and you’re being harassed, and someone’s telling you, “We need to defund the police as a way to protect you,” that kind of language doesn’t work. We have to find a way to talk to each other and with other people of color in our communities. But we also have to figure out a way to talk to our parents and listen to them, because they’re the ones whose lives are most in danger.

I want to listen. That’s really the policy that all of us should have right now: Listen to the stories and the hardships that Asian immigrants are going through, and also listen to the Black and Latinx people who are living in the same neighborhood.

Ome: Is there anything else you want to add?

Hong: As cynical as I sometimes sound, the fact that anti-Asian violent incidents are being documented, and that people are talking about them, is progress. Because that wasn’t happening before, not when I was growing up. A lot of Asian Americans are more vocal, organized, radicalized, and progressive. And we’re not going to go back.

Snow Days May Never Be the Same

2021-03-08T07:00:00-05:00

Snow days are uniquely beloved by kids in wintry climates. After a night of hoping, children earn a blissful surprise: a morning spent sleeping in and a day of playing outside. As Cindy Burau, a fourth-grade teacher in Lake Tahoe, California, put it: Snow days are “like gifts from the heavens that we all need: a sigh, a moment.” The pandemic has threatened this tradition. For students who attend school remotely every day, bad weather no longer affects their ability to attend class. And schools that have returned to in-person teaching or hybrid models likely still have remote-learning setups that they can turn to. With virtual school available as an alternative to canceling class, some schools have seen fit to put an end to the snow day as generations of children have known it.

On the one hand, students are falling months behind after losing classroom time because of COVID-19. (This is more likely to be the case for students of color and students living in low-income communities.) Some educators argue that students can’t afford to miss more school this year—even when it snows. On the other hand, kids love snow days, and many parents welcome even a short break from the daily grind of helping with Zoom classes. The products of a practical need to keep students at home during dangerous travel conditions, snow days’ primary purpose has become bringing children joy. The pandemic has taken so much away from kids, snow-day advocates say. Do we have to take this away too?

[Erika Christakis: School wasn’t so great before COVID, either]

But snow days were endangered even before COVID-19 hit. Over the past five years or so, some districts in Maine, Minnesota, Ohio, and other states have opted for students to work remotely when the weather has made travel dangerous. The coronavirus has accelerated this trend. Because of the pandemic, about 40 percent of school districts have replaced traditional snow days with remote-learning days, while only 20 percent have preserved the days off, according to a November survey from Education Week. (The remainder of those surveyed were either undecided or located in climates where school isn’t likely to be canceled for weather.)

Whether these schools are making a temporary decision for the duration of the pandemic or a more permanent change is still unclear. In the coming years, although climate change will likely affect U.S. snowfall patterns, schools in many regions will still need to deal with winter weather. And during true emergencies, such as the recent winter storm and resulting infrastructure disaster in Texas, even remote school will have to be canceled. But in less extreme cases, adjustments made for the pandemic have given schools more choices.

Cheryl Logan, the superintendent of Omaha Public Schools, had been quietly considering the possibility of holding classes remotely during snow days for several years. The pandemic sped up her plans: Her teachers grew accustomed to teaching virtually, and the school district provided her students with iPads that have mobile connections. Suddenly she had solutions for all the logistical hurdles that had held her back. In November, Logan announced that traditional snow days are gone forever in her district. Still, she was quick to correct us when we asked about the decision to permanently cancel them: “We don’t like to use the word cancel. We like to use repurpose.” She has chosen a hybrid model, in which students will sign on for a few hours in the morning and take the afternoon off. She’s mindful of children’s need to play and the nostalgia factor associated with snow days. “It makes complete sense that folks are yearning for anything that feels more like what we have been accustomed to,” she told us. But as an educator, she wants to ensure that inclement weather doesn’t lead to students falling too far behind in school.

[Read: Why did we ever send sick kids to school?]

For Jen Homann, a software engineer and parent to a third grader in Omaha, the decision has been slightly disappointing. Although her son is mostly back to in-person school, he requires help on remote snow days—because her husband has to go into the office, and she works from home, that burden falls largely on her. In districts such as hers that permanently replace snow days with online learning, parents will have to not only juggle their jobs and the logistics of child care when the weather keeps kids home, but also deal with remote school even after the pandemic ends.

This would add an extra burden to days that were already logistically complicated for many working parents. For example, Jenn Ragan, a mom in Lake Tahoe, owns a snow-removal business, so she’s always been busiest when it snows. “There’s more that goes into a snow day than just kids playing. Teachers, parents, everyone—they’re shoveling or blowing their driveways,” she told us.

But not all families are sad to lose traditional snow days. Melissa Siig, a mom of three kids in Lake Tahoe, told us that, during the pandemic, a snow day is “not as exciting and special as it used to be. It was almost like Christmas.” Many students have now spent almost a full year mostly stuck inside, and a snow day—once an excuse to stay home and relax—is not very different from a typical pandemic day. Siig’s daughter, Kaya, 14, said that her school sometimes adds days to the end of the year to compensate for snow days, so doing away with them could mean an earlier summer vacation.

Their district, which has partially returned to the classroom in a hybrid model, is responding to bad weather with both distance-learning days and traditional snow days, depending on how bad that weather is. During a big storm in January, Carmen Diaz Ghysels, the superintendent of the Tahoe Truckee Unified School District, called three snow days: the first two as distance learning, and the last a traditional one to accommodate teachers who had lost internet access. Ghysels is unsure whether the district will continue to have remote-learning “snow days” post-pandemic, since the state’s board of education has not announced whether distance learning is approved for the next school year. She’s also aware that many community members feel strongly about preserving the days off, and wants to hear from them before making a decision.

Other superintendents, such as Bondy Shay Gibson of Jefferson County Schools in West Virginia, are also attuned to their community’s feelings toward snow days. In December, Gibson canceled classes so that students could enjoy the first snow of the school year and take a break. In the future, however, Gibson told us, students may be asked to attend classes remotely on snowy days. “You have to have some balance,” she said. “We have huge expectations of kids these days, and every once in a while, you’ve just got to put grace before grades and let them enjoy being a kid, because it goes by pretty fast.”

[Read: My child is near tears every day—and so am I]

For many, including Gibson, saving a beloved tradition has turned out to be good press. On social media, thousands of people shared the letter Gibson wrote announcing the December day off, which declared that in a difficult year, “this is one thing our kids won’t lose.” A superintendent in Indiana jokingly assigned students snowball fights as homework for their day off. The Mahwah school district in New Jersey announced that it would keep snow days to “maintain the hope of children.” Campbell’s Soup made the effort corporate with a #SavetheSnowDay campaign. The company, which has partnered with Mahwah, aims to “preserve and protect our most magical of winter birthrights,” and, of course, peddle canned goods at the same time.

Before its campaign to save snow days, Mahwah had seriously considered canceling them, according to Lisa Rizzo, the district’s director of special services. But ultimately, those in favor of preserving them won out. Since then, the fervor for snow days (powered by social-media support) has grown, and Mahwah administrators have churned out impassioned pro–snow day videos and emails. “We will find a way to get to the math, get to the reading,” Dennis Fare, the assistant superintendent told us. Rizzo added, “Children have lost so many rites of passage. The first-day-of-school photograph at the bus stop was gone. Birthday parties are reduced to signs on your front lawn and friends driving by, honking horns. This is one place where we can maintain the integrity of childhood.”

Snow days are, of course, only a couple of days a year. But they represent so much more. Anticipating snow days is part of the fun, as children try to summon them with superstitions such as flushing ice cubes down the toilet, wearing their pajamas inside out, and sleeping with spoons under their pillows. They celebrate them by spending time outside, away from screens. Burau, the fourth-grade teacher, told us that snow days bring the whole community together: Kids go sledding, high schoolers dig cars out for extra cash, and parents take time to play in the snow too. If nothing else, snow days offer children a temporary break from the modern school culture of constant homework. During a year of loss, saving the snow day has come to represent protecting children from the harms of the pandemic—Zoom fatigue, grief, and monotony—and preserving moments of joy.

Dear Diary: This Is My Life in Quarantine

2020-08-06T12:43:00-04:00

The time we’re living through will one day become history. This is always true, of course, but the coronavirus pandemic has, perhaps more than any other event in living memory, made people hyperaware that their present will be remembered in the future. And this new, strange sensation has compelled many to capture the moment for posterity.

The urge hit Janis Whitlock, a research scientist at Cornell University, when she was walking outside in early March. She was reading news about Italian cities going into lockdown and started recording herself, speaking her thoughts into her phone. “I was thinking I would like to somehow chronicle these moments because I know they are history in the making—deep, deep stuff,” she said in that first voice memo from March 9. “So this is my start. I don’t know if I’ll do it every day, but I’m going to try to do it as much as I can, just so some flavor of this time is captured.”

[Read: The power in writing about yourself]

In the following weeks, many American cities issued stay-at-home orders, patients flooded hospitals, and colleges and universities, including Cornell, abruptly closed. Students in Whitlock’s Translational Research class scattered across the globe. She wanted to give her students an assignment that would allow them to not only practice data analysis, but also capture their pandemic life. Journaling was the answer.

“This is a pivotal moment in history,” Whitlock told me. “We’re in it right now. We have an opportunity to chronicle it.” She’s referring not only to the pandemic, but also to the Black Lives Matter protests, accelerating global warming, and the upcoming presidential election. The fear—and thrill—of recognizing history as it’s occurring inspired Whitlock to expand her classroom assignment into a global project called “Telling Our Stories in the Age of COVID-19.” Since the project launched online in March, more than 500 people in more than 30 countries have signed up and answered journal prompts that Whitlock and her team email to participants. Though responses have declined as the pandemic has drawn on, Whitlock said she still gets one or two new entries each day. She plans to compile these collective experiences into a “snapshot” of pandemic life around the world.

Across the United States, researchers like Whitlock at universities, historical societies, and local publications have started collecting physical and digital journal entries. They are a rich source for historical records, providing unfiltered glimpses into the minds of ordinary people. During the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, media outlets (including The Atlantic) examined journals from the 1918 influenza pandemic to get a sense of how people’s lives were upended during a similar crisis. These diaries describe moments of daily life, such as a teenager’s joy over school being canceled or a patient drinking castor oil to treat painful symptoms. Diaries from the coronavirus era will also help preserve details that may fade from public memory over time.

Scholars rely on diaries like these and other primary sources—newspapers, documents, and artifacts that provide firsthand accounts of an event—to construct historical narratives. This kind of archival work often happens many years after an event has passed, but historians are now proactively seeking out writing and photos from a diverse array of Americans. The New York Times recently reported that several museums are already collecting mementos and artifacts from this year to prepare for future exhibitions on the pandemic and protests.

But institutions aren’t the only ones working to preserve pandemic journals. In May, Jamie Halper, a recent Harvard graduate, started an online archive for students at her hometown high school in Minneapolis. Halper had noticed that several colleges, including her own, were asking students to donate their journals, and she wanted a place to preserve the voices of high schoolers, too. She worked with a teacher at her alma mater and asked students to submit writing, photos, and artwork. Their journals, Halper told me, contained common experiences, such as the difficulties of remote learning and the awkwardness of wearing masks. (She collected submissions before George Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests, so these events weren’t mentioned in entries.) Although the entries have been published on a website that Halper set up, she hopes to house them with a state or university archive in the future. Halper said that journaling allowed students to “work through their thoughts, and also know that someone in the future can look back and hear what they have to say.”

[Read: The value of remembering ordinary moments]

The dual nature of journaling—as a marker of the present and a remnant of the past—has attracted many writers to the practice of chronicling their pandemic days. “I thought it would be cool to have something written down for my kids later on, when they ask me what happened in 2020 during the coronavirus,” Leo Ramirez, a 19-year-old in El Paso, Texas, told me. Hannah Kuo, a 24-year-old nurse in Columbus, Ohio, initially wrote entries after her hospital shifts to track changes in the ways “we treat other people, and how hospitals [form] policies and procedures.” But after a month, Kuo stopped. She told me that her journal entries started to look the same, and she found other activities, such as exercising, to help alleviate stress. Still, she is glad to have a snapshot of her first month as a health-care worker during the pandemic.

Others approach their diary less as a record for the future, and more as a tool to help them live through the present. Justyn Williams, a 29-year-old actor in Los Angeles, hadn’t journaled since 2015, but when he moved in with his mom and found himself out of work, he decided to pull out a notebook and pen. He described journaling as a way to “check in with an invisible therapist” and told me he now writes twice a day for his mental health. As a Black man, he said that the George Floyd protests have weighed heavily on him, in addition to the ambient stress of the pandemic. Williams said that on paper, he’s able to process difficult emotions while also capturing happy memories. He added that journaling “brings a very real tangibility to being able to look back and see what was happening on a day, or what I was thinking” during a certain part of his life.

Across the country, in Dutchess County, New York, 27-year-old Angela DePalma has also discovered a new appreciation for journaling. “I used to just journal about what happened in my day-to-day life,” she told me. “But since we can’t go anywhere, or see anybody, I’ve found that my journal entries have been getting longer because I’ve been reflecting inward.” Writing has been a source of comfort, especially when her grandmother got the coronavirus (she has since recovered). And it’s helped her better understand her life and what she wants from it. Reading over her entries, DePalma noticed that they consistently captured unhappiness and stress from work. So she decided to quit her job. And she’s begun to talk more openly about racism and her own privilege with friends and family. DePalma told me that she wouldn’t have had these conversations with other people, or herself, before she started reflecting regularly in her journal.

[Read: How a history textbook would describe 2020 so far]

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

The Surprisingly Fraught Question of Who Pays for Birth Control

2020-02-19T10:00:00-05:00

In 2017, Taylor Kay Phillips was debating two things: whether she wanted to switch from the pill to an IUD, and, if she did, whether she should ask her boyfriend, Felipe Torres, to help pay for it. At the time, Phillips—now a comedy writer in New York City—was unemployed, and her insurance plan wouldn’t cover the $1,100 bill. But she was hesitant to ask Torres to pitch in. Phillips didn’t know anyone else who had split the cost of birth control with a partner, and she had questions. If her boyfriend paid for part of her IUD, would that mean she had less autonomy over her own body? They had been dating for only a few months, and copper IUDs, the type that Phillips wanted, typically last for up to 12 years; if she and Torres broke up, would she need to reimburse him? But when they sat down to talk about the IUD, he offered to pay for half before she could ask. “It just seemed like the fair, right thing to do, since I was also reaping the benefits,” Torres told me.

During their conversation, they acknowledged that while both of them would be responsible for an unwanted pregnancy, much of the burden—physical, but also emotional—would fall on Phillips. They wanted to balance out that burden, financially. Although I wasn’t able to find any statistics on the exact number of couples who share the cost of contraception, many of the researchers and individuals I spoke with said that, in their experience, cost-sharing is not the norm among heterosexual couples.

[Read: The different stakes of male and female birth control]

Under the Affordable Care Act, many women in the United States have gained access to free birth control, but some still have to pay in certain circumstances. Insurance companies don’t need to cover brand-name contraceptives, just generic versions. Short-term, often low-cost insurance plans aren’t required to cover contraception at all. Religious employers can apply for an exemption that allows them to drop contraceptive coverage from their plan. And women without insurance have no choice but to pay for birth control out-of-pocket, or go without.

Nearly 65 percent of women ages 15 to 49 currently use some form of contraception, according to the most recent available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The cost of birth control can vary dramatically depending on the type. According to Planned Parenthood, IUDs can cost up to $1,300, and hormonal pills can cost up to $50 a month, or $600 a year. When factoring in the cost of an annual visit to a gynecologist or other doctor, the bill can be even higher.

Many common forms of birth control can be obtained only through a doctor, and as a result, many women bear the brunt of the costs, in terms of both time and money, including setting up appointments, getting refills, and paying for contraception. These burdens are even heavier for poor women, especially those living in “contraceptive deserts,” areas with limited access to birth-control clinics. Sharing the cost of contraception with a partner can help alleviate some of that financial strain and symbolically demonstrate that a couple views preventing pregnancy as a joint responsibility. When Torres and Phillips decided that they were going to split the cost of Phillips’s IUD, they devised a payment plan in which Torres would Venmo Phillips $200 each month, for three months. Phillips told me that while she views sex as a “shared endeavor,” the duty to prevent pregnancy is “fundamentally unequal,” in that she “can get pregnant and he cannot.” She added: “I had to go in and have a legitimate medical procedure, cramp up, and bleed extra for a year. And he got to have condomless sex with, basically, abandon.”

Katrina Kimport, a medical sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco, told me it’s not surprising that few heterosexual couples share the cost of birth control. She studies women’s experiences with abortion and contraception, and pointed out that the most highly effective, long-acting, and commonly used forms of birth control—for example, IUDs and oral contraceptives—physically operate in women’s bodies. In her research, Kimport has found that even when women visit family-planning clinics, medical professionals frame preventing pregnancy as a female responsibility. As a result, both partners in a relationship may assume by default that women should be in charge of maintaining, and paying for, contraception.

Financial costs are just one of the burdens of preventing pregnancy. There are also mental, physical, and emotional tolls to consider. “It takes time to go to the doctor, go through the physicals, and go to the pharmacy,” Julie Fennell, a sociologist at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., told me. “It’s not a huge deal, but it is something that adds up, especially if you’re poor and you have limited access to these things.” Even after acquiring a prescription or getting an IUD insertion, the work isn’t done—a person may have to remember to take a pill at the same time every day or go to the pharmacy once a month. There are common side effects such as depression, weight gain, and irregular bleeding, and rare, debilitating ones such as pelvic inflammatory disease, blood clots, and ovarian cysts. “I don’t think there’s any broad social discourse that encourages empathy for the difficulty that some women face in successfully contracepting,” Kimport said. In fact, she has observed “an overall downplaying of the effects of side effects and how disruptive they can be.”

For couples whose contraception is covered by insurance, the issue of cost-sharing may still come up when discussing another common type of birth control: condoms. In a 2016 survey by Trojan and the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, 65 percent of women said they had never bought condoms, although 68 percent of women didn’t think that providing them should be solely a man’s job.

However, some men, such as William, a 23-year-old researcher living in Bethesda, Maryland, view buying and supplying condoms as a male obligation. William says he has never been with a female partner who bought or offered to buy condoms. (William asked to be identified by his first name only so that he could discuss his sex life openly.) He told me that when he and his current partner started having sex, they had a formal discussion about how they would pay for birth control. William’s partner pays for the pill since she takes it for noncontraceptive reasons, while he buys the condoms. He has also offered to pay for Plan B, should they ever need it, because if the condom were to break, “it’d probably be my fault,” he said. If he and his partner shared other costs such as rent or food, William said that dividing their expenses by total cost, and not by item, would make more sense. But William stressed that he wasn’t opposed to doing so in the future. “As a concept, I would be open to helping pay for it if asked. I don’t really have any strong reservations against that,” he said.

Samantha McDonough, a 51-year-old living in Virginia, approaches cost-sharing differently. She is polyamorous but currently in a long-term relationship with one partner. Though she has had her tubes tied, she still uses condoms, and typically takes turns buying them with her partner. When she was seeing multiple partners, condom use was even more nonnegotiable, and she made sure that both she and her partners had them.

McDonough has two daughters, and she has tried to encourage them to be proactive about using protection. Yet she told me that she “didn’t want to give them the impression that they should carry the cost on their own. I just wanted to let them know that they had to make sure that they thought about protecting themselves first and didn’t rely on someone else to do that.” She believes that while everyone, especially women, should do their part to have safe sex, looking at contraception as a shared expense has many benefits.

[Read: Why are young people having so little sex?]

Cost-sharing isn’t the only way that couples reallocate responsibilities surrounding pregnancy prevention. In 2007, before the ACA passed, Fennell interviewed several heterosexual couples for a paper she titled,“Men Bring Condoms, Women Take Pills: Men’s and Women’s Roles in Contraceptive Decision Making.” While some men gave their female partners money to help pay for contraception, others set alarms to remind them to take the pill at a specific time, or went with their partners to doctor appointments. Still, Fennell said that although many women wanted their male partners to take a greater interest in contraception, most still “wanted to be the [one] making the final decisions,” because they felt uncomfortable with the idea that their partners had sway over what they did with their body.

Even couples who do share the cost of birth control, such as Phillips and Torres, are hesitant to prescribe it as something that every couple should do. For Phillips, splitting the cost for contraception felt natural, as they were already thinking about their finances jointly—she helped Torres, an immigrant from Colombia, pay for his visa and lawyer fees. In late 2019, they got engaged—both the IUD and the relationship have lasted. Kimport noted that cost-sharing “may not work for everyone,” and may not resolve feelings of inequality within a relationship. But, she said, “it is still a creative way of disrupting this idea that because most popular contraceptive methods operate in female bodies, they should be exclusively women’s responsibility.”

The Christmas Baby’s Dilemma

2019-12-25T10:00:00-05:00

When my mother went into labor on December 24, 23 years ago, she begged the doctor to deliver me before midnight. A December baby herself, she knew that being born during the holiday season was difficult, and wanted to spare me from being born on an actual holiday. She also wanted to get the labor over with, as she tells it, so she could rush home to prepare Christmas dinner for all of the cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles who were gathered at our house. Despite her best intentions, however, I was born on the 25th of December. Thus began a lifetime of “You must’ve been your parents’ favorite gift” jokes and “Wow, a Christmas baby” comments whenever I get carded.

Rather than making Christmas doubly exciting, being a Christmas baby put a damper on the holiday. My birthday felt like an afterthought when millions of other people were celebrating at the same time. But even if my feelings toward the 25th itself were complicated, I still loved the Christmas season.

In the week leading up to Christmas, my parents would buckle me into my car seat one evening, tune into the holiday radio station, and drive through our neighborhood, slowing down in front of the houses with the best decorations. Pressing my face against the glass, I would marvel at the twinkling kaleidoscope of lights, the inflatable snowmen, the wire reindeer on rooftops. How lucky I am to be born at such a magical time of the year, I’d think.

I relished the jaunty carols, the endless supply of sugar cookies, even the red-and-green color scheme, and on Christmas morning, I would wake up elated. But after opening presents, my parents’ attention quickly turned to preparing to host Christmas dinner. I would hope to be excused from cooking or cleaning, lounging around in pajamas for most of the day, but no—I was expected to help. Now I don’t mind this so much, but as a kid, I would spend at least a little bit of my birthday in a sour mood. I spent all year seeing my friends and cousins have special days all to themselves, and I felt cheated out of an experience that everyone else enjoyed.

A journal entry from Morgan’s mother on December 23, 1996. (Courtesy of Morgan Ome)

My parents, to their credit, tried their best to separate my birthday from Christmas (even though they didn’t exempt me from hostess duties). They’ve always had two distinct presents for me to open on Christmas morning—helpfully labeled with “Merry Christmas, Morgan!” and “Happy Birthday, Morgan!” (They also instructed Santa to do the same.)

Christmas babies’ challenge is to find a way to distinguish their birthday from the holiday. My parents let me choose when to celebrate with my friends, and over the years I’ve had birthday parties in January, February, even March. Other Christmas babies shared with me some of the unique ways they’ve tried to harmonize the two celebrations. Bradley Lawson, a 28-year-old in Wasilla, Alaska, told me that his parents would wake him and his siblings up at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning to open presents, then go back to sleep. After a midday nap, Lawson’s birthday activities would commence. He explained that his parents’ philosophy was “Let’s get everyone taken care of and then you can have your excitement in that second part of the day.” In middle school, he said, his family got creative and decided to celebrate his half-birthday, in June. “None of us liked it,” Lawson said. “It wasn’t what I was used to.”

Jennifer Fowlie, a 29-year-old in Geneva, was never bothered by the timing of her birthday when she was a child growing up in Scotland. She got to decide the menu for Christmas dinner—usually pizza—and loved the celebratory mood of the holiday season. However, for the past few years, Fowlie has spent Christmas with her fiancé, who is German, and his family. “They celebrate Christmas on the 24th,” she told me, so “the 25th is just my birthday now, which is very weird, actually.”

Many of the Christmas babies I spoke with said that while they wished they could celebrate with friends on their actual birthday, they enjoyed having guaranteed family time. Anna Marquardt, a 39-year-old Christmas baby living in Washington, D.C., told me that several of her relatives also have birthdays near Christmas. When the extended family gathered for the annual Christmas Day festivities, her youngest sister (born in August) would ask, “Why do those guys get a tree at their birthday and I don’t get any tree?”

[Read: How one Atlantic editor is spending her holidays this year ]

Even though Marquardt now appreciates her birthday, she still recognizes that the day is often overshadowed by festivities, and the namesake of Christmas himself. A few years ago, she wrote a song called “Born on Christmas Day,” which has the hilariously memorable chorus of “Stop stealing my thunder, Jesus!” Marquardt explained to me that “the song is really very tongue in cheek, because it makes it seem like I don't like my birthday, but I actually really do.”

Like Marquardt, I started to embrace my birthday more as I grew older. But I spent years disliking my birthday, especially after my parents separated, when I was 12. After that, the holidays just served as a stressful reminder that our family had split. But on my 17th birthday, a confluence of circumstances meant I finally got to spend the day on my terms.

That year, all I wanted was to sleep in, eat junk food, and watch the Doctor Who Christmas special. But my mom had planned for us to go to Los Angeles to see relatives, so none of those were options. Then I came down with a terrible cold on Christmas Eve. I spent the day in a cold sweat, swaddled under the covers. On Christmas Day, my fever still hadn’t broken, so I stayed in the hotel while my mom and grandma went to join the rest of our family. I ordered some soup and faded in and out of sleep. In the evening, I turned the TV on and watched Matt Smith in his final Doctor Who appearance.

I’d never been alone on my birthday before. At first, I felt giddy, even though I was sick. This was exactly what I wanted, I thought. But looking around the room, I felt the absence of Christmas: no smell of evergreen, no gaudy yet cheery decorations, no sound of the table being set. I missed my family. By getting what I wanted for my birthday, I was missing out on Christmas. That day I decided I didn’t want to make that trade-off again.

Morgan and her obachan at Christmas time. (Courtesy of Morgan Ome)

For my 18th birthday, I invited all my friends over to make ornaments and decorate the Christmas tree one day in mid-December. As we blasted Christmas carols and hot-glued popsicle sticks together, suddenly the fact that I could have a joint Christmas and birthday party made me feel lucky and unique. Some of my friends told me that it was like having double Christmas, and my Jewish friends were excited to get a taste of the holiday.

That year, on the 25th, my parents also started a tradition of having Christmas dinner as a family. We invite any friends or relatives who are in the Bay Area, and my obachan makes a big plate of Spam musubi to snack on while we cook dinner together. My parents are still separated, but it’s comforting to be able to come together for a holiday and celebrate.

For many people, birthdays are the ultimate celebration of the individual. What do you want to do today? Whom do you want to see? What do you want to eat? I’ve craved that experience my whole life. But there is something humbling about being born on Christmas, about approaching the day as one of family and community, rather than one focused on the self.

Since moving to the East Coast five years ago, I don’t get to take part in all the traditions I looked forward to in childhood. By the time I get back to my hometown in late December, the Christmas-tree lots are mostly picked through and my mom has already decorated the house with tinsel and fake snow. But I still get that cozy family feeling that reminds me that I was born into a community that loves me. In the days to come, I know my mom’s house will be full of people, and my stomach will be full of roast beef and gravy. My dad will stick candles in a Yule-log cake at the end of the meal. And I still take an evening to drive through the neighborhood and admire the lights. In those moments, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything at all.