Rebecca J. Rosen | The Atlantic

The Law as Justice Gorsuch Sees It

2024-08-05T05:31:00-04:00

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During his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, in March 2017, Neil Gorsuch laid out his views on what makes for a “good” judge. “My personal views,” he said, “belong over here,” and he gestured to his right. “I leave those at home.”

But of course he does have personal views—ones that are quite deeply felt. In a new book, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, co-written with the legal scholar Janie Nitze, now-Justice Gorsuch describes what he sees as a pervasive and destructive overreach of federal law, which, he says, ensnares far too many Americans in a capricious and complex web.

[Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze: America has too many laws]

I spoke with Gorsuch by phone last week to ask him why he thinks America has “too much law,” and whether there’s any way to fix that problem without creating worse ones. The transcription of our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca J. Rosen: What was your core purpose in writing this book?

Justice Neil Gorsuch: I’ve been a judge for a good spell now, and over time I kept seeing cases in which ordinary, decent, hardworking Americans who were just trying to do the right thing found themselves caught up in a legal maze, and in ways that they couldn’t reasonably have expected. And I wanted to learn more about why that was the case, where it came from, and to explore some of the stories behind the cases I see, whether it’s fishermen in Florida, monks in Louisiana, a magician in Missouri. I wanted to explore the human stories behind these cases.

What I found was that, simply put, law has exploded in just my lifetime. And of course, law is vital to keeping us free and to our aspirations for equal treatment of all persons. But it also contains an irony—too much law can threaten those very same ideals and aspirations. James Madison wrote about this 200 years ago, and the need to find a golden mean between those two extremes, and I just wanted to reflect on my experiences as a judge about where we stand in that aspiration, that goal.

Rosen: Parts of your argument will really appeal to liberal readers, and parts will be very intuitive to conservative readers. I can just imagine a person reading the book and saying, Okay, I definitely agree with him about, say, criminal law and immigration law, but I’m less convinced on environmental law or financial regulation—areas where I think what we need is more regulation. Can you say why you think the quantity of law is the right framework for assessing the law’s danger, as opposed to maybe the precision of law, or even qualitative measures of whether our laws produce the outcomes we want?

Gorsuch: Of course, both things are very important. And I’m glad you identified that there is a common thread here, and the concern with the scope and the reach and the number of our laws is something that has always been of concern to the American people on a bipartisan basis. The Trump administration had a rule that if you put in a new regulation, you have to get rid of two others. The Obama administration had a big deregulatory initiative too. President Barack Obama had said in one State of the Union that, for example, when it came to salmon, the Interior Department regulated them when they’re in fresh water, the Commerce Department when they’re in saltwater, and it got even more complicated when salmon were smoked—and that got big laughs, and the fact-checkers got busy thinking maybe he had exaggerated. But they rated it as mostly true because he’d actually understated the complexity of the regulation.

If I’m looking for an example of the bipartisan spirit in which I tried to write this book with Janie Nitze, I point you to my good friend Steve Breyer. Before he became a justice, he and Senator Ted Kennedy eliminated an entire department of the federal government—the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). Back before they adopted their legislation in the 1970s, no new airline could come into existence without the federal government’s approval; no existing airline could pursue a new route without the federal government’s approval; they couldn’t change their fares without the federal government’s approval.

Justice Breyer and Senator Kennedy held a hearing in which the only people who supported that regime, it turned out, were the agency and the airlines. Nobody thought they could make the change. George Stigler, the famous economist, said that it was an intractable problem, and that the industry and the agency were too powerful to make any change. Of course, if you know Breyer, you know that that’s a challenge for him, not a stop sign. And they did it, and now the American people have met much lower fares, and flocked to the skies in numbers that were unimaginable in my youth. (By the way, the bipartisan nature of these concerns is nothing new. Before Breyer and Kennedy’s reform of the Civil Aeronautics Board, James Landis and William O. Douglas—both fathers of the New Deal—came to be concerned about agency power too, something we write about in the book.)

[Read: Biden says goodbye to tweezer economics]

So one thing I point to in terms of your question about crime versus, say, environmental regulation, I’d offer just a couple of anecdotes and facts for everybody to consider, all Americans, of whatever political stripe. Currently we have one in 47 Americans subjected to some form of correctional supervision. There are more people serving life sentences today in prison than there were serving any term of incarceration in the 1970s. I think that’s something everybody has to think about, on the one hand.

And then when it comes to environmental regulation, just for example, on the other hand, I tell the story of Butte, Montana, in the book. In the 1800s, Butte and the region around it was one of the richest places on the planet. They discovered copper there, and it was vital to our telegraphs and our telephone wires. In World War I, it was vital for bullets—so important that they sent General Omar Bradley to guard the mine. And by the time of the 1980s, the plant had closed and Butte had become an impoverished area, and they discovered that all that melting copper had resulted in arsenic being deposited in a 300-square-mile region of Montana—a huge area.

A cleanup effort was started, and the EPA did a very good job with industry, but they set the cleanup standards at 250 parts per million in private yards. And the people of Butte said, Well, hold on. In a lot of municipalities, you can’t even put into the waste dump materials that contain over 100 parts per million. The EPA said, Yeah, yeah, but we consider 250 parts per million an acceptable cancer risk. The people of Butte tried to sue the company; they wanted to clean up their own yards. And the industry—as you can understand—opposed that effort and said, Well, we’re just doing what the EPA says. And the EPA came in on the side of industry.

In Atlantic Richfield Co. v. Christian, our Court held—and quite understandably, it’s a reasonable interpretation of the law; I don’t take issue with it, though I did dissent in part—that the people of Butte, Montana, couldn’t clean up their own yards without the federal government’s permission. Of course, we all want clean air, clean water, clean lands. We want a safe environment for all of us, whether it involves technology or cars or anything else. But is there room for consideration about how we’re doing in achieving that golden mean? Where, yes, We have expertise brought to bear, and the federal government plays a role, but maybe the people and the states also have a role to play?

Rosen: The Butte story comes up in the book as an example of the too-powerful federal government diminishing the capacity of states and municipalities and citizens to experiment on their own. But, reading it, I wondered whether maybe this isn’t only an example of federal overreach, but also one of just poor regulation. So I could just as easily see making an argument that what we need here is not less regulation, but better regulation.

Gorsuch: I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said.

Rosen: You also mentioned a case where you said you dissented, but you could understand the argument and respected the decision. In your book, you write that sometimes as a judge, you feel that it’s not your role to do anything about this problem of too much law. I was curious if you could just talk more about what you mean by that, and if there have been times where you felt like you had to decide a case against how you would perhaps act if you were a legislator?

Gorsuch: Yeah, as a judge, I apply the laws and the regulations lawfully adopted under them as I find them. That’s my role. That’s my job. I think that’s what you want me to do. I don’t think you really want me to legislate ideas from the bench. Nine people in Washington can hardly rule the country as well or as wisely as the American people, in whom sovereignty is vested in our Constitution. There are three magic words that start our constitution: We the people. What a radical idea that was at the time, and still is—that the people can rule themselves and do so wisely. It’s their responsibility—it’s all of our responsibility—to ask these questions about the role of law in our lives, and whether we got it right at the moment. And all I can offer as a judge is my unique vantage in watching cases come before me over the course of almost 20 years.

Rosen: In your book, you list 34 examples of “seminal legislation” that you say do “vital work,” including the Clean Air Act and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Additionally, many of the anecdotes of egregious overreach that you cite came under laws that many Americans consider essential. You mention a fisherman arrested under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which many people believe is necessary for avoiding certain types of financial fraud, and an outdoorsman prosecuted for riding a snowmobile in a protected wilderness area while trying to get to safety during severe weather conditions. Obviously, many people support wilderness protections, even if they would understand the outdoorsman’s decision in that moment. In an effort to reduce regulation, how do we protect the baby while throwing out the bathwater here? How do we protect the good aspects of our law?

[From the March 1970 issue: Job discrimination and what women can do about it]

Gorsuch: On that, we’re in radical agreement. All of those laws do vital work. The question that the book seeks to pose is: How do we balance that against some of the excesses? Let’s just explore one of these examples—the fisherman.

Let me just flesh out that story. John and Sandra Yates were high-school sweethearts. They moved to Florida, where John pursued his lifelong passion of fishing. He became a commercial fisherman. He worked his way up from deckhand to be captain of his own small boat with a small crew. And they’re out one day, for red grouper. They’d actually been out for quite some time, and they had thousands of pounds of red grouper in their hold. And an official comes up and says, I want to measure all of your red grouper.

The official spent the whole day measuring thousands of pounds’ worth of fish. He finds 72 that were undersize. The limit then was 20 inches. All of them were longer than 18 inches, but there were 72, he thought, that were undersize. John disputed that, because he said that the agent didn’t know how to measure the lower jaws of the red grouper appropriately, but put that aside. The agent tells John to segregate the 72 fish in a crate, and he’ll deal with them when he gets back to dock in a few days. That happens, and they come back to dock, and the agent measures the fish again. This time he finds only 69 red grouper that are undersize, and he’s suspicious. But nothing happens—for nearly three years.

Three years later, agents surround his house, and Sandra notices them, looking out the window while she’s doing the laundry. They come looking for John. He’s out crabbing; she calls him in. They arrest him. Sandra and John have no idea what this is about, three years later. They take him two hours away and book him in Fort Myers. And there they revealed that they’re charging him with violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was adopted after the Enron accounting scandal—an important law that does vital work in that field.

What’s their theory of the case? That law says that it’s a federal felony subject to up to 20 years in prison—federal prison—for anybody to intentionally destroy financial documents, accounting records, or other tangible objects that might impede a federal investigation. And apparently the government’s theory of the case is that John threw overboard 72 undersize fish and replaced them with 69 still-undersize fish, and that these were tangible objects in violation of Sarbanes-Oxley.

By the time the case goes to trial, guess what the size limit for red grouper is? It’s 18 inches. They still pursue their charges. John winds up spending a very short period in prison—but still, time in jail, over Christmas. He and his wife are at that time trying to raise two young grandchildren. He loses his job and his means of supporting his family. Sandra becomes the primary breadwinner. They live in a double-wide trailer now.

But Sandra won’t give up. She says, What was done to us here shouldn’t happen to other people. They pursued the matter all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. They win 5–4. And they win all the vindication someone can win in our court system. But have they really won? Look at what happened to their lives, the destruction that was wrought upon them.

Rosen: There’s clearly a problem here. But where is the problem? Is it with Sarbanes-Oxley? Is it something about the Commerce Department? Is it in the psychology of this one agent who pursued this so far? It seems like there were so many points in this story where this could have been stopped. Why did this even make it to trial?

Gorsuch: If you’re asking those questions, we succeeded in the book.

We have so many crimes today in the federal system that people have lost count. Somebody in the Department of Justice tried to count them all in the 1980s and gave up—it took years. There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you go into the federal regulations, there are by some estimates north of 300,000 federal crimes.

Madison wrote about this. This is not a new problem. He, the father of our Constitution, and the other Founders, they wanted written law. They wanted people to know what their rights and their responsibilities were. But they also knew that when you have too much law, you actually wind up instilling fear in people and disrespect for our legal institutions, and you undermine the rule of law. And, worse than that, maybe just as bad as that, who can live in a world with so much law? Who can maneuver best? Madison said that the moneyed and connected are the ones who will succeed best in that environment, and it’s the ordinary person who will get caught up in the law more frequently.

And it’s certainly true that large institutions can lobby for rules, that their employees sometimes move in and out of government. They can even sometimes capture regulatory institutions.

Rosen: This term, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference. As a result, a lot of regulatory disputes will move from administrative-law judges to the courts. But you seem very sensitive to the concern, as you write in the book, and as you were just saying, that we have an access-to-justice problem in the courts. What if the courts also have their downsides? What if they empower people who know how to work the system, and turn out not to be a sympathetic venue for the little guy after all?

Gorsuch: There’s a lot packed into that question. Let’s start with Chevron, then I’ll try and address access to justice. So, what is Chevron? Chevron was basically a rule that when a law is ambiguous, the agency gets to interpret it rather than a court.

What I saw as a judge in my experience, and what many other federal judges reported, and the Court ultimately found, is that Chevron places a systemic weight on the scale of justice in favor of the government against individuals. Lady Justice outside our Court sits with a blindfold on, with the scales of justice evenly tilted. And when judges are asked to interpret laws, we’re supposed to do it without respect to persons. That’s what the judicial oath says. All people who come before us are supposed to get a fair shake and stand on equal footing in a court of law. And the government isn’t entitled to systemic bias in its favor.

[Read: The plan to incapacitate the federal government]

What I saw as a lower-court judge, what persuaded me that Chevron needed to be revisited, was how it impacted ordinary people. I tell the story in the book of Alfonzo De Niz Robles, who’s an immigrant to this country, who is married to an American citizen, and who has four American children. He faced two statutes, one of which said that someone in his shoes could apply for relief immediately. Another one of which said that somebody in his shoes had to leave the country and stay out of the country for 10 years before applying for admission to the country.

My court at the time, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, had issued a decision saying that, looking at those two statutes as fairly as we could, the first statute controlled. Relying on that judicial interpretation, Mr. De Niz Robles applied for immediate relief, as any sane person would. Six years later, after sitting on his application, the Board of Immigration Appeals comes back and says, No, the second statute, the one requiring an individual to leave the country for 10 years, controls. The Tenth Circuit got it wrong. And under Chevron, we’re entitled to deference to our views now. That meant Mr. De Niz Robles faced a 16-year-plus odyssey to have his application permission reviewed. I saw case after case after case like that, where the systematic bias in front of the government yielded those kinds of results for ordinary people.

Now, turning to the second half of your question, access to justice. That’s something I’ve written about, Janie’s written about in the past, and it’s terribly important. We need to rethink our legal system in which lawyers charge so much money for ordinary legal services that nobody can afford them. I as a lawyer couldn’t afford my own hourly rate. And that—that’s a problem. The book explores several potential solutions or ideas that might help.

You raise a question that is whether appearing in front of an administrative-law judge helps somebody, as opposed to appearing in front of a court. Well, when the government’s come after you, would you rather appear in front of a judge with life tenure, who owes no obligation to a political party or anybody else, and is charged with applying the law as fairly and neutrally as he or she can, and you’re entitled to a jury of your peers? Or would you rather go before an official of the very agency that is coming after you? Somebody who is employed by the same agency, where you don’t have a right to a trial by jury, and where the procedures look very, very different than they do in court? It’s no secret that the agencies prevailed before their own administrative-law judge much more often than they do in court. And I just asked, which of those would you rather face when the crosshairs are on you?

Rosen: You have written this whole book about law’s overreach. Nowhere in the book do you talk about abortion. For some people, that’s a textbook example of government overreach into a personal decision. So I’m just wondering how you think about abortion in the context of what you’re saying in the book.

Gorsuch: I’m just a judge. And I’m charged with applying the Constitution and the laws of the United States. And one important thing that judges have to keep in mind is their limited role in a country where we the people are sovereign. And what in the Constitution entitles me to make those decisions—very complex, difficult decisions? What entitles nine people in Washington to decide them instead of the American people? And the answer the Court ultimately reached is that there isn’t anything in the Constitution that speaks to this question.

And in those circumstances, it is for the American people to decide. I have more faith in the wisdom of the American people to decide those questions thoughtfully, and I know that that’s where the right to decide those questions belongs, under our Constitution. And I point out that most Western democracies can resolve these questions in just that way—through democratic processes. We shouldn’t be afraid of taking control of our own lawmaking processes as a people, rather than relying on nine people in Washington to decide those questions for us.

How to Show ‘Wise Compassion’ to Struggling Loved Ones

2021-08-02T07:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: With Lori Gottlieb on book leave, Rebecca J. Rosen, the editor of “Dear Therapist,” is filling in as The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” archivist, pointing readers to some of Lori’s most beloved columns.

Many of the letters Lori receives come from people who are in pain and struggling to understand a difficult episode in their life. But other letters come from those who love the person who’s in pain—friends, parents, spouses, and siblings seeking advice on how to support someone going through a hard time.

In many of these cases, what Lori lays out in response is a choice. As she writes to one woman whose friend is in an abusive relationship, “There are two kinds of compassion. One is what’s known as ‘idiot compassion,’ which is what we offer when our main concern is to avoid rocking the boat, even though the boat needs rocking, and which leads to your compassion being more harmful than your honesty would have been. Its opposite is ‘wise compassion,’ which means caring about a person but also giving her a loving truth bomb when needed. In the strongest friendships, wise compassion is highly valued.”

What is wise compassion? Lori guides many of these letter writers through establishing a dynamic that is loving and supportive—without taking away their loved one’s agency. “What he needs most,” she writes to one person, “is to be able to hear himself—not you—clearly.” The best way to help is to be a sounding board, Lori says, because, as she puts it in another column, “the most powerful truths are the ones we come to, little by little, on our own.”

The catch is that wise compassion is hard—as is being the friend, parent, or sibling of someone who is deeply hurting. To be a true support requires strength, patience, self-knowledge, and discipline. Lori advises many of the people trying to help someone to seek out therapy themselves. This, she notes, can have a dual purpose: not just helping the helper but sending a message to their loved one—that “we all go through difficult times and that when we do, we can empower ourselves by getting the help we deserve.”

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: I Don’t Know How to Help My Angry, Unmotivated, Adult Son

My 26-year-old son has been through a lot. Is it possible to support him emotionally and financially while nudging him toward independence?

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: If My Sister Won’t Leave Her Awful Boyfriend, I’m Done With Her

My sister is beautiful, talented, and successful, and I don’t understand why she’s wasting her time with this guy.

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: My Best Friend’s Wife Cheated on Him

I don’t want to be cruel to her, but I cannot be her friend.

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: My Sister Is a Mess and I Don’t Know How to Help Her

My younger sister is constantly anxious whenever she comes to visit, and I want to help without completely draining myself.

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: A Professor Is Abusing My Friend

Her relationship shows all the typical signs of emotional manipulation and physical harm, but she refuses to admit that there’s a problem.

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: I’m So Upset by My Kids’ Middle-School Drama

I’m not sure why I’m reacting so strongly to hearing about conflicts at school.

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: I’m Growing Exhausted Dealing With My Sister’s Anxiety

How can I balance her need for support with my own need for boundaries?

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: My Mom Needs Help

I don’t think a day has gone by that she hasn’t cried.

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: My Best Friend Can’t Find a Job Because of COVID-19

She’s been having anxiety ever since the pandemic began.

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Why In-Law Relationships Can Be So Challenging

2021-07-05T07:00:00-04:00

A marriage is the union not merely of two spouses but of two families—each with its own beliefs and ways of being in the world. The resulting relationships can be some of life’s richest, but, for a lot of people, they can also be some of the most confounding. The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” columnist, Lori Gottlieb, receives many, many letters about in-laws and the various challenges they can present.

The troubles go in all directions. Parents struggle with their sons- and daughters-in-law; those sons and daughters struggle with their parents-in-law—and also with their brothers- and sisters-in-law. As Lori writes in one column, “You say this is an issue with your husband and your son-in-law, but as you describe it, the issue involves the entire family. Each of you, in your own ways and to various degrees, seems to feel resentful.”

Relationships between two people are complicated enough on their own. But in-law relationships happen through someone else. These are relationships that, by their very nature, tie multiple people together. Any conflict will touch all of them, and they’ll all bring their own feelings to it.

Lori’s task in advising her readers about in-law relationships is to guide them through this complexity. She writes about how to deal with many different participants in a family system and how to have tough conversations with each of them—not only the in-law causing whatever conflagration is at hand but also one’s own spouse, and sometimes other adults involved too. Each conversation requires effort to hear and be heard; each provides opportunities for pain and conflict, but also for growth and healing. And that growth and healing can go a long way: Because these relationships involve so many people, any improvement won’t touch solely one person and their in-laws but the whole combined family—for generations to come.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Had a Great Relationship With My In-Laws. Then Everything Changed.

They are judging me for not being a good mom, for not having a job, and for not losing my pregnancy weight fast enough.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Can’t Stand My Sister-in-Law

Everything about her rubs me the wrong way.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Sister-in-Law Said the Most Painful Thing to Me, and I Can’t Let It Go

She told me she would never want a child like my daughter.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Daughter’s Family Asks So Much of Us Without Giving Anything in Return

Any time I want to talk with my daughter about an issue between us, she tells me she doesn’t have time and it’s not a priority for her.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Family Takes Offense at Everything My Husband Does

I can’t help but think he’s the cause of the growing rift with my relatives.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Mother-In-Law Didn’t Mean to Ruin My Wedding, but I’m Still Angry With Her

After a weekend of not speaking to me, she collapsed and cut my wedding night short, and I don’t know how to deal with the resentment I still feel.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Don’t Approve of My Daughter-in-Law’s Parenting

I think my grandson needs some help, but I’m not sure how much advice I’m allowed to give as a grandparent.

The Paradox of Grief

2021-06-07T07:00:00-04:00

To grieve is to encounter a paradox. Loss is an inescapable human experience; most people—and certainly most adults—have endured the death of a loved one. And yet, loss can feel utterly isolating, a solitary cell without a window.

Lori’s columns on death are written for anyone inside that cell, or those just outside who are trying to help. People ask her, “What will make this pain go away?”

In her responses, Lori guides them away from that question. “Healing doesn’t mean that the pain goes away. It means that the pain becomes a sacred part of you that you carry inside forever. Often grieving people come to me hoping I can help them find ‘closure,’ but I’ve always felt that closure was an illusion,” she writes. “Besides, how can there be an end point to love and loss? Do we even want there to be?”

But if the hope is not to feel closure, what is it? Lori cites the work of the grief psychologist William Worden, who’s said that one of the “tasks” of grieving is “to integrate the loss into our lives and create an ongoing connection with the person who died—while also finding a way to continue living.”

For many people in the depths of grief, that advice might feel incomprehensible, like no way forward at all. But in reading through these columns, one theme emerged: The first step is leaving that isolated cell. As Lori writes, “being alone in one’s grief greatly compounds it.”

So reach out of that cell, or open the door for those reaching in. Doing so, Lori writes, was what most helped her through her own loss. Her therapist, and her memories of her father’s advice before he died, “couldn’t take away my pain,” she writes, “but they sat with me in my loss in a way that said: I see you, I hear you, I’m with you.”

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist Writes to Herself in Her Grief

My father died, there’s a pandemic, and I’m overcome by my feeling of loss.

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: Will I Ever Get Over My Wife’s Death?

We were married for 47 years, and I can’t picture life without her.

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: I Can’t Accept My Father’s Death From COVID-19

I was not there for his last breaths. I was not there for his last words. I’m trying to combat my guilt.

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: My Husband Accidentally Caused the Death of Our Family’s Dog

My son blames his father and won’t speak to him, but my husband is making matters worse by not apologizing.

12 Pieces of Advice for Better Parenting

2021-05-03T07:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: With Lori Gottlieb on book leave, Rebecca J. Rosen, the editor of “Dear Therapist,” begins another month as The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” archivist, pointing readers to some of Lori’s most beloved columns.

For this month’s “Dear Therapist” roundup, I’ve gathered together a set of columns on one of the topics Lori covers often: parenthood.

Parents write to Lori frequently. They seek advice on how to help their young kids who are struggling socially or emotionally, are acting in confounding ways, or are coming out of the closet. Older parents write in asking about adult kids who have adult problems of their own—unhappy marriages, financial strain, loneliness, addiction. Regardless of age, the question parents ask is usually the same: What is my role here?

That makes sense, because in some ways, that’s the central question of being a parent. Parenting is not like friendship or marriage—relationships whose fundamental structures remain stable over time, even as the dynamics change. Parenting, by contrast, is constantly evolving, as children grow from babies to toddlers to adolescents to adults. At each stage, parents have to recalibrate what their role is—how much control they have, how much protection and support they should offer, how much to stand back and let their child fly or flail. This does not always come naturally, and can even be quite painful. “One of the hardest aspects of being a parent is the reality that if you raise your child well, that child becomes an adult who will go on to make her own life decisions,” Lori writes to one advice-seeker who is upset about her daughter’s choice to live far away. “If we love our children, we must ultimately let them go.”

That’s the paradox Lori guides parents through: Try to hold your children too close, and you won’t be able to see them for who they are. Give them room to grow, and you just might find the intimacy you were looking for.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Don’t Understand Why My Son Won’t Talk to Me

My husband and I live close to him, but he rarely visits us.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I’m So Upset by My Kids’ Middle-School Drama

I’m not sure why I’m reacting so strongly to hearing about conflicts at school.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Am a Single Man. My Daughter’s Friends Aren’t Allowed to Visit My House.

I have extended a standing invitation to her friends to visit for playdates or sleepovers, but none has ever come.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Son Has an Impractical, Ridiculous Career Plan

He wants to be a stand-up comedian. I don’t want him living in my basement at age 35.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I’m Worried the College-Admissions Process Is Rigged Against My Son

He has grades and test scores that I think should qualify him for the Ivy League—but he’s also white and upper-middle-class.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I’m Scared of Having Kids

I feel a rush of longing when I see a cute baby, but I can’t tell if I’m ready to have one of my own.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: Should I Give My Adult Children More Money?

They’re both angry at me, and I want to mend our relationship.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: Is My Middle Child a Monster?

I’m so tired of people seeing only her bad traits.

Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: My Daughter Doesn’t Care That I Want Her to Live Closer to Home

I don’t think she truly understands the impact that seeing her only once or twice a year is having on us.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Daughter Moved Back Home and Treats Me Like a Roommate

She’s been bringing a steady stream of men back to my house, and her behavior is testing my patience.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: Do I Need to Have ‘the Talk’ Again With My Daughter?

She just told me she’s gay. I’ve already talked to her about sex with boys—how do I talk to her about girls?

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Love My Trans Daughter, but I’m Still Struggling

I don’t know how to process what I’m going through.

9 Pieces of Advice to Help You See Relationships More Clearly

2021-04-05T07:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: With Lori Gottlieb on book leave, Rebecca J. Rosen, the editor of “Dear Therapist,” begins another month as The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” archivist, pointing readers to some of Lori’s most beloved columns.

For this month’s look-back at “Dear Therapist” columns, I’ve decided to turn not to a specific theme, but to a handful of columns that have been reader favorites over the years.

Rereading them, I understand why. Though the topics they cover are disparate—among them the loneliness of singledom, the shame brought on by abuse, the difficulties of extended family—each does something that I think of as typical Lori: providing readers (and the letter writers themselves) with a whole new framework for thinking about a problem.

One letter, to a woman who has a troubled relationship with her sister-in-law, stands out to me as paradigmatic. “Unfortunately, I can’t stand her,” the letter writer says. “Everything about her rubs me the wrong way. She sees the world in black and white, while I see infinite shades of gray.” How should she build a relationship with someone she so detests?

Lori replies by (gently) blowing apart the entire question. “When people have very strong reactions to others, I wonder how much of that vehemence is a direct response to the qualities of the person who triggers it, and how much is about something else.” She continues, “Take where you write that you ‘see the world in infinite shades of gray’ whereas your sister-in-law operates only in ‘absolutes.’ If you step back a bit, you might see something different: that you, too, can get stuck in absolutes.”

Other reader-favorite columns share this quality. People ask their question, and Lori gives them an answer, but it isn’t always an answer to the question they thought they had. In some cases, Lori helps readers see the situation from another person’s point of view; in others, she gives them the language they need—“ambiguous grief” or “help-rejecting complainers”—to name a situation, and understand why they are struggling so much. The result is not just greater clarity, but a way forward.

I like to think Atlantic readers have impeccable taste, and that shows in the columns below; they are a really special set. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: It’s Hard to Accept Being Single

Listening to my friends talk about their relationship problems is getting really tough.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Sister Constantly Complains, but Won’t Do Anything to Change

I want to have a good relationship with her, but I feel overwhelmed by her negativity.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Girlfriend Had an Affair With My Co-worker

I’ve forgiven her, but I can’t forgive him.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Wife’s Sister Touched Me Inappropriately

Her behavior toward me crossed the line, and my wife doesn’t take my concerns seriously when I express my discomfort.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Roommate Is Cheating on Her Boyfriend With Me

She wants to have a casual relationship with me while staying with him and I’m afraid to leave her.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Mom Won’t Stop Pressuring Me to Get Better Grades

I’ve wanted to address this with her for a while now, but I’m afraid she’ll scold me.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Can’t Stand My Sister-in-Law

Everything about her rubs me the wrong way.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Boyfriend Is Going Through a Divorce

As he and his ex are nearing the end of their divorce process, I’m not sure how much I can actually trust him.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Boyfriend’s Wealthy Family Isn’t Fair With Their Money

His parents give a lot of financial support to his twin brother and sister-in-law, and I wish they’d do the same for us.

Dear Therapist’s Guide to Dealing With Regret

2021-03-02T11:56:00-05:00

This week marks the start of March, the third month of Lori’s book leave. March is always a time of rebirth, a time when we look ahead to spring. This year, with the emergence from the COVID-19 pandemic on the horizon, those feelings are all the more intense.

Read: The most likely timeline for life to return to normal

But moving forward doesn’t mean leaving the past behind—it means figuring out how to make sense of it in the present. In this month’s “Dear Therapist” retrospective, we look at the advice that Lori has given to readers who are dealing with feelings of regret. One theme emerges: Don’t run away from your pain, but toward it.

This article was featured in The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

This isn’t to say that you should keep punishing yourself by obsessing over your past. But you do need to address it. For those who have hurt someone close to them, Lori, in one of my favorite “Dear Therapist” passages of all time, offers coaching on what a true apology looks like—a rare and astonishing sight:

You can start with a sincere apology. A sincere apology is heartfelt and empathic and entirely about the person receiving it. A letter in this spirit might go something like this: “I owe you an apology, and I wish I’d offered it much sooner. I know that I’ve hurt you deeply, and I’m truly sorry for that. I would like to know more about your experience, because I’ve come to realize that I failed to see earlier that I put you through a lot of pain. You may be so hurt and distrusting of me that you don’t want to open up lines of communication, but I want you to know that I love you deeply and I’m committed to really listening to you and hearing you in a way I should have long ago. One idea I have is that maybe we could talk about some of this, at least initially, with a therapist of your choice. Of course, I love and miss you very much, but I also want to respect where you are. I hope that at some point you’ll be willing to talk with me about this. Whatever you decide, I want you to know that I’m starting to see my role in your pain, and am so sorry for it.”

But sometimes we have regrets that can’t be fixed with outreach or atonement; or, sometimes, our regret is for the harm we have done to ourselves. In these scenarios, too, Lori advises readers: work to understand your pain, and then use what you learn to be better—better to those around you, and better to yourself. As Lori writes in response to one letter she received, “The good news is that this letter is the key you’ve been holding. Use it to set yourself free.”

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Will Probably Take the Secret of My Sexuality to the Grave

I’ve gone through life pretending, and my heart aches.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Daughter Hasn’t Wanted a Relationship With Me for 25 Years

I want to reestablish our connection, but she won’t even acknowledge me at family events.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Blame Myself for My Son’s Death

I can’t stop thinking about how much he suffered—and my own inability to save him.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I’m Ashamed of How I Treated My Dying Husband

In his final days, I didn’t show him the love and care he deserved.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: Should I Give My Adult Children More Money?

They’re both angry at me, and I want to mend our relationship.

Dear Therapist’s Guide to Love and Relationships

2021-02-01T07:00:00-05:00

Lori Gottlieb continues to work on her book, and I continue to bring you some “Dear Therapist” wisdom in her stead. This month, I’m exploring the theme of relationships: having them, not having them, and having them fall apart.

Choosing just four columns was quite a challenge. No surprise, many readers write to Lori with questions about their relationships; sex, heartbreak, children (and whether to have them in the first place), and how to take care of a suffering partner are all struggles of the most common sort. This isn’t to say that they are banal, but the opposite: The desire to find and sustain love is an essential part of being human—something nearly everyone has, in the deepest sense, in common.

As I read through Lori’s columns on relationships, one central theme emerged: the necessity of honest, vulnerable communication. That doesn’t mean making one’s case, but doing the work required to understand one’s own feelings, to express them in ways that are respectful and truthful, and then to stop talking and listen, without being defensive and without judgment. “Bring honesty into all of your relationships,” Lori advises, “knowing that it’s the soil from which everything healthy grows.”

Talking honestly and openly won’t necessarily save a troubled relationship, but doing so can clarify whether one can and should be saved. Communicating, in this sense, is a process of both connection and self-discovery.

In the four columns I’ve selected below, Lori coaches readers in the conversations they need to have to get through tough situations. My hope is that these examples can be models for anyone needing, in this time of pandemic isolation, to feel closer to a partner or a friend or family member, as certainly this advice is not relevant only to those in romantic relationships. Because when communication works, it connects—and that connection to another human fulfills us and lifts us.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I’m Afraid My Boyfriend’s Sexuality Will End Our Relationship

He says he’s bisexual, but I’m worried he’s actually gay.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Husband and I Don’t Have Sex Anymore

I miss the closeness we had before our baby was born.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Boyfriend Loves Me, but He’s Not Affectionate Enough

I’m tired of feeling like I’m putting more effort into our relationship than he is.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I’m Having an Affair and I’ve Never Been Happier. Should I Confess?

I feel incredibly guilty and am worried that if we come clean, we will lose the respect of our children and become pariahs in our community.

Dear Therapist’s Guide to Starting Over

2021-01-04T07:00:00-05:00

The start of this new year is bringing one change that will disappoint many Atlantic readers: Our much beloved “Dear Therapist” column is going on hiatus for a few months, while its author, Lori Gottlieb, works on her next book.

In her stead, as the editor of “Dear Therapist,” I have been tasked with revisiting some of Lori’s best work to keep us thinking about emotional health until she returns. Each month I’ll be pulling together a set of “Dear Therapist” columns on a specific theme. This month, for the new year, the theme is “starting over”: How do we hold on to who we are—and keep those around us close—during times of profound change?

This is a question I’m sure many of us can relate to as we look to the year ahead, and try to put 2020 far, far behind us. In her columns, Lori has given advice to many readers who are going through a major transition, or are trying to make sense of a relationship with a friend or family member who is. Feeling lost in these moments is normal, Lori writes; we can experience grief, mourning a past that once was or a future we had hoped for; jealousy, envying those close to us for their happiness; and loneliness, finding a disconnect between ourselves and those who are supposed to be there for us.

While each situation is different—“Everyone goes through this experience in his or her own way, and … feelings rarely follow a neat narrative,” Lori writes—her advice to each reader always comes back to one central value: compassion, both toward yourself and toward those around you. Change can bring on a mixture of feelings; compassion is how you navigate them. By trying to understand why we feel the way we do, and why our partners or friends act the way they do, we can come to accept and even appreciate behavior that had previously been confounding or hurtful.

In the four columns I’ve selected below, Lori responds to readers who find themselves confronting a new era of their lives. Perhaps as we all face the new year ahead, these lessons can help us find our way.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Divorced My Dying Wife Once She Was No Longer Lucid

After five years of being her caregiver, I couldn’t bear the emotional or financial costs alone any longer.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Love My Trans Daughter, but I’m Still Struggling

I don’t know how to process what I’m going through.

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: I Survived Cancer, but Now I’m Afraid My Husband Resents Me

He regrets retiring early to take care of me when I was diagnosed.

Bianca bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: My Friend Treats Me Differently Since I Lost Weight

I want to keep up a relationship with her, but she keeps making hurtful comments about my appearance.

The Children Who Desegregated America’s Schools

2020-09-29T05:05:00-04:00

In 1954, the Supreme Court decided that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional—but it was thousands of children who actually desegregated America’s classrooms. The task that fell to them was a brutal one.

In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, vicious legal and political battles broke out; town by town, Black parents tried to send their children to white schools, and white parents—and often their children, too—tried to keep those Black kids out. They tried everything: bomb threats, beatings, protests. They physically blocked entrances to schools, vandalized lockers, threw rocks, taunted and jeered. Often, the efforts of white parents worked: Thousands upon thousands of Black kids were barred from the schools that were rightfully theirs to attend.

But eventually, in different places at different times, Black parents won. And that meant that their kids had to walk or take the bus to a school that had tried to keep them out. And then they had to walk in the door, go to their classrooms, and try to get an education—despite the hatred directed at them, despite the knowledge that their white classmates didn’t want them there, and despite being alone. They changed America, but in large part, that change was not lasting. As they grew older, many of them watched as their schools resegregated, and their work was undone.

Those kids are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s now. Many of them are no longer with us. But those who are have stories to tell.

Here are five of them.

Hugh Price and his family fought for him to be one of the first Black students at his all-white high school in Washington, D.C. But once he was there, he “couldn’t wait for it to be over.”
Jo Ann Allen Boyce and 11 other students desegregated their high school in Clinton, Tennessee. Then the riots came.
Sonnie Hereford IV desegregated Alabama’s public schools in 1963. He was only 6 years old.
Millicent Brown changed Charleston, then watched it stay the same.
Frederick K. Brewington’s education came at the end of a bitter civil-rights battle that engulfed New York State, more than a decade after the Court’s Brown v. Board decision.

The President Can’t Stop Talking About Carnage

2019-01-13T21:27:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.

Right from the start, the Trump presidency was different. Donald Trump said as much in his inaugural address, casting his swearing-in as the start of a new era, one in which power over government would be returned to “the people.” Of course, that sort of rhetoric is normal new-administration bluster. But the real meat of the speech in no way resembled an American president’s inaugural address. And that’s where Trump expressed his distinctive view of the country he would lead.

With evocative imagery, he described a broken, defeated America. “Mothers and children” were “trapped in poverty,” he said. “Rusted-out factories [were] scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” The school system, despite being “flush with cash,” was leaving children “deprived of knowledge.” And then Trump came to the darkest image of all: “And the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

[Read: What does Trump actually think about gun control?]

American carnage. It was an arresting phrase. Inaugural addresses have long produced memorable, occasionally beautiful oratory. Lincoln’s soars above all: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” But even the average remarks have conveyed a love of this country and espoused a basic idealism about its role on Earth.

Trump’s did not.

The distinction goes well beyond Inauguration Day. Throughout his presidency, Trump has imparted a grim assessment of the country’s purpose and welfare. In this, he stands out among American presidents, a group that has tended to take a sunnier view of things. Ronald Reagan saw “morning in America.” George H. W. Bush vowed to “keep America moving forward.” Bill Clinton imagined a bridge to the future. George W. Bush displayed an uncomplicated patriotism. Barack Obama was full of hope.

And then there is Trump. Trump, whose Twitter feed quakes with anger, whose response to school gun violence is to arm teachers, whose campaign slogan can imagine a bright future for this country only by reaching back into its past.

[Read: An American president bends to the demands of terror]

But his darkest appraisals have been reserved for the situation America faces at its borders, where men and women and children are attempting to enter the country. There are other ways to see this story, to see a country that is a beacon, that draws people in with the hope of something better. Even those who advocate for stricter immigration laws have typically focused their concerns on how immigrants affect wages or employment.

Trump has a more violent read: Immigrants are a threat to American lives. It is a theme he has returned to since the start of his campaign, in the days before the midterm election, and, most recently, in his fight for a border wall. In his first address to the nation from the Oval Office, on January 8, 2019, Trump recounted in gory detail murders he believes could have been prevented with a tougher approach at the border. American carnage, again and again.

Survivors of Human Trafficking, in Their Own Words

2018-03-12T08:00:00-04:00

Last June, The Atlantic published “My Family’s Slave,” a harrowing reflection by the journalist Alex Tizon on his experience of being raised by Eudocia Tomas Pulido, or, as she was known to Tizon, “Lola.” Pulido wasn’t in chains, Tizon wrote, yet “no other word but slave encompassed the life she lived.” The story moved millions of readers.

Today, as part of our special report about forced work, “The Unfree,” and with assistance from the nonprofit National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), The Atlantic is presenting three essays written by women who have survived human trafficking. Here are their stories:

Nena Ruiz tells of her modern-day slavery in California: “I had to brush the dogs’ teeth, clean their ears, and give them vitamins each day. But I had to sleep on a dog bed in the living room.”
Natalicia Tracy recalls the self-doubt and coercion that enabled her traffickers to keep her in servitude: “I was a fixture in the house; a robot there to do things for them. I felt invisible, dispensable, and alone.”
Judith Daluz recounts how she became tago nang tago, an undocumented survivor of human trafficking: “In the Philippines, I was independent and knew everyone in my neighborhood. In the U.S., I had become isolated—a shadow of myself.”

These stories offer glimpses of the cruelty faced by the desperate and powerless. But they are also tales of an astonishing sort of human resilience, which, as NDWA’s director Ai-jen Poo writes, “brings us face to face with the most painful aspects of humanity, so that we may collectively become more humane.”

Toys Aren’t Us

2017-09-19T15:15:59-04:00

In a year of constant bad news across the retail sector, Toys “R” Us has become a little engine that couldn’t, filing for bankruptcy in a federal court in Virginia Monday night. As part of its bankruptcy plan, the company will continue to operate most of its stores through the holiday season, when the company has traditionally pulled in the most revenue.

The bankruptcy marks a new phase for a chain that has struggled to find its way online, a vulnerability for a company whose primary customers are parents. While the convenience of online shopping is a boon to most consumers, for parents it may be even more of a draw. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the vast majority of households do not have a stay-at-home parent. After a full day of work, there’s dinner to be served, baths to be drawn, and bedtime rituals to be undertaken at length. Squeezing in a trip to the store is often impossible.

(Exhaustion aside, parents may dread merely entering a Toys “R” Us with a child in tow, as it is a guaranteed way to forfeit the next 20 minutes of one’s life to saying no to an ever-escalating series of requests. The best way to avoid this, all parents know, is to avoid this. Another option is to tell your children that the store is not a store at all but a museum, as my parents did to me. The problem with this is that children will not believe you.)

Companies like Toys “R” Us are left with two options: Build a great online shopping experience or remake the stores to offer something beyond just plain, old shopping.

On the first count, Toys “R” Us has been in a financial situation that constrained its options. Back in 2005 the chain was bought out by Vornado Realty Trust and two private-equity firms, Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which saddled the company with an enormous debt. That debt left Toys “R” Us unable to invest substantially in online retail. In a June 15 conference call, the company’s CEO noted the kludginess of its baby-gift registry tool and the absence of a subscription option for items like diapers and formula. Ultimately this meant that it ceded millions of customers and billions of their dollars to competitors like Amazon; according to The Wall Street Journal, Amazon brought in $4 billion in toy sales last year, up 24 percent over 2015. Making matters worse for Toys “R” Us, it’s difficult to compete on price against an enormous, deep-pocketed company like Amazon that can afford to sell its products at very low prices and ship them for free.

As for remaking its stores, Toys “R” Us is going to try: According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the company will convert “its remaining locations … to be more experienced-based, incorporating amenities such as in-store play areas,” a gambit to be not just a place where parents can get things for their kids but one where they can entertain them. This move places the store in line with many other retailers in this moment, claiming they are not, in the end, shopping destinations but places to have “experiences”—something Millennials are believed to prefer. As my colleague Joe Pinsker reported last week, retailers from Apple to Starbucks to Nordstrom are pivoting to providing spa services, classes, restaurants and cafes, and so on.

Catering to Millennial parents is not an impossible task, says Jeff Fromm, a partner at the ad agency Barkley and the co-author of Millennials With Kids, a book on how to market to Millennial parents. For example, Trader Joe’s has made itself wildly popular with this demographic by offering unique goods and a personal, charming consumer experience while still being relatively price competitive. If Toys “R” Us could have reinvented itself with more one-of-a-kind products and a high degree of customer care, Fromm says, it might have found a way to survive. Millennials, he argues, will “pay a small premium for exceptionally easy-to-use brands, exceptionally strong brands—brands where they feel like, ‘They get me.’”

That, of course, is tough to do when working under a giant debt burden and investors who want to see a quicker return. Most Millennial parents just aren’t going to pass on the convenience and prices offered online, even for a brand whose aisles seemed like heaven when they were growing up.

Neal Katyal: Senate's Obstruction of Merrick Garland 'Was Unforgivable'

2017-06-27T15:25:03-04:00

In March of last year, then-President Barack Obama nominated the federal appeals-court judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Spring passed. Summer passed. Fall passed. Senate Republicans, under the leadership of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, refused to hold a hearing to consider him, let alone schedule a vote. In November, Donald Trump was elected president and in short order named his own nominee. Within three months of Trump’s inauguration, the Senate confirmed Neil Gorsuch to the Court.

Speaking Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, the Supreme Court attorney and former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal sharply criticized this sequence of events, calling the GOP’s Garland blockade “unforgivable.” Katyal said:

Merrick Garland was the most qualified nominee, not just in our lifetimes but perhaps in the history of the United States Supreme Court. The chief judge of the D.C. Circuit for 20 years, the nation’s second-highest court. Never once been overruled by the Court in his 20 years. He was extraordinary. It was unforgivable, and a really sad thing for our system.

Katyal’s remarks were not couched as a criticism of Gorsuch or of the Supreme Court’s recently completed term. Katyal also noted that he had, in fact, supported Gorsuch’s nomination—despite criticism from some liberal advocates—on the grounds that he believed Gorsuch was qualified for the job. “I was very upset when Republicans voted against our Democratic nominee[s], Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, who I thought were extraordinarily qualified and would be great,” Katyal said. “And I felt like the same yardstick should apply to the other side.”

The Supreme Court just wrapped up its first term with Gorsuch on the bench, and he has already proven himself to be one of the most conservative justices. Katyal said that it’s too early to make judgments about his tenure. “Let’s wait and see. We have a lot of time with Gorsuch on the Court,” he said. But his panelmate at the event, the former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, was ready to make one call: “Well I would imagine Trump is pretty pleased with his nominee at this point,” she said.

Is the Problem With Tech Companies That They're Companies?

2017-06-27T11:45:53-04:00

What news do people see? What do they believe to be true about the world around them? What do they do with that information as citizens—as voters?

Facebook, Google, and other giant technology companies have significant control over the answers to those questions. It’s no exaggeration to say that their decisions shape how billions see the world and, in the long run, will contribute to, or detract from, the health of governing institutions around the world.

That’s a hefty responsibility, but one that many tech companies say they want to uphold. For example, in an open letter in February, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the company’s next focus would be “developing the social infrastructure for community—for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”

The trouble is not a lack of good intentions on Zuckerberg’s part, but the system he is working within, the Stanford professor Rob Reich argued on Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

Reich said that Zuckerberg’s effort to position Facebook as committed to a civic purpose is “in deep and obvious tension with the for-profit business model of a technology company.” The company’s shareholders are bound to be focused on increasing revenue, which in Facebook’s case comes from user engagement. And, as Reich put it, “it’s not the case that responsible civic engagement will always coincide with maximizing engagement on the platform.”

For example, Facebook’s news feed may elicit more user engagement when the content provokes some sort of emotional response, as is the case with cute babies and conspiracy theories. Cute babies are well and good for democracy, but those conspiracy theories aren’t. Tamping down on them may lead to less user engagement, and Facebook will find that its commitment to civic engagement is at odds with its need to increase profits.

The idea that a company’s sole obligation is to its shareholders comes from a 1970 article in The New York Times Magazine by the economist Milton Friedman called “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” In it, Friedman argued that if corporate executives try to pursue any sort of “social responsibility” (and Friedman always put that in quotes), the executive was in a sense betraying the shareholders who had hired him. Instead, he must solely pursue profits, and leave social commitments out of it. Reich says that these ideas have contributed to a libertarian “background ethos” in Silicon Valley, where people believe that “you can have your social responsibility as a philanthropist, and in the meantime make sure you are responding to your shareholders by maximizing profit.”

Reich believes that some sort of oversight is necessary to ensure that big tech companies make decisions that are in the public’s interest, even when it’s at odds with increasing revenue. Relying on CEOs and boards of directors to choose to do good doesn’t cut it, he said: “I think we need to think structurally about how to create a system of checks and balances or an incentive arrangement so that whether you get a good person or a bad person or a good board or a bad board, it’s just much more difficult for any particular company or any particular sector to do a whole bunch of things that threaten nothing less than the integrity of our democratic institutions.”

Reich said that one model for corporations might be creating something like ethics committees that hospitals have. When hospitals run into complicated medical questions, they can refer the question to the ethics committee whose members—doctors, patients, community members, executives, and so on—represent a variety of interests. That group dives deeply into the question and comes up with a course of action that takes into account various values they prize. It’s a complicated, thoughtful process—“not an algorithm where you spit out the correct moral answer at the end of the day,” Reich said.

‘We Have to Have a Massive Revolution in Public Education in the United States’

2017-06-26T17:13:28-04:00

Over the last four decades, the percentage of Americans who are solidly in the middle class has shrunk, from 61 to 50 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Some of those who have left the middle class are doing better, and others are doing worse. As the Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson put it, “The extremes grow at the expense of the center.”

The Harvard professor and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr. says that the problem stems from the American education system having failed to adapt to the 21st century’s highly globalized, highly technological economy. For those who get top-tier training, there’s opportunity for prosperity. But for those who go to poor schools and don’t graduate from college, the traditional pathways to the middle class—in particular manufacturing jobs and small-business ownership—are usually unavailable. Instead, service work has grown in its share of overall employment, and service work tends to provide very poor wages and few opportunities for growth. Though these dynamics are affecting both black and white Americans, Gates said, black Americans in particular tend to attend under-funded schools and struggle to build middle-class economic security.

To better equip people of any race, “We have to have a massive revolution in public education in the United States,” Gates said on Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

Gates discussed two of the ways the U.S. could get there. His first: Move dollars, not people. “Bus the dollars from the rich school districts to the poor districts,” he said. “We need to allocate the same amount of money per student per school.” Gates’s comments are a response to research that has shown that the majority of states have “flat or regressive funding schemes” for their schools. Aggravating this is the ability of richer, whiter school districts to raise huge amounts of money via their parents’ organizations, on top of whatever public funds they have been allocated.

Gates’s second idea goes beyond equal funding: hardship pay for talented, motivated teachers to work in the worst-performing school districts. Across the country, teacher shortages affect high-poverty, high-minority schools disproportionately, often the result of teacher attrition. Financial benefits—such as a hardship-pay bonus like Gates suggested—could be used to deter attrition and keep teachers, particularly experienced ones, on the job.

The question that haunts Gates’s big idea is whether more-equal schools can translate into the return of a strong middle class, or whether structural changes in the economy—technological progress, globalization, corporate consolidation—inhibit the kind of widespread economic improvement that America saw in the middle of the 20th century. But even if that end remains elusive, there are plenty of other reasons to hope for a fairer, more equitable school system of the kind Gates imagines.

Sheryl Sandberg’s Advice for Grieving, Cont’d

2017-06-01T13:42:39-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed the Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg about her new book Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, which describes how she learned to move forward in the wake of her husband’s sudden death. Katherine Shear, of the Center for Complicated Grief, responds:

I read your article “Sheryl Sandberg’s Advice for Grieving” in The Atlantic and I want to thank you for writing about this topic. I am a Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University School of Social Work and I spent the last two decades studying complicated grief. There is no question that Sheryl Sandberg has done the world a great service by speaking about her painful grief with “forward-looking optimism.” People need to follow Sandberg’s lead—to share our grief stories, bear witness to each other’s pain, and choose Option B. Except when Option B isn’t an option.

As Sandberg’s story illustrates, acute grief is a very intense and disorienting experience. It’s a testament to human resilience that most people adapt to painful losses and move forward in their lives with a sense of meaning and purpose and possibilities for happiness. In Sandberg’s terms, they choose Option B. However, not everyone can do this. About 10 percent of bereaved people get caught up in ruminating over troubling aspects of the loss, engaging in extensive avoidance of reminders of their loved one’s absence, or feeling overwhelmed by seemingly unrelenting emotionality. These people have a recognizable syndrome called Complicated Grief that affects an estimated 10 million people in the United States. They want to choose Option B, but they can’t.

Fortunately help is available for people with complicated grief. We developed a short-term (16-session) intervention that focuses on fostering adaptation. We collaborated with colleagues across to country to test it in three large studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. Results showed a very high response rate and were published in major medical journals (e.g JAMA, NEJM). Additionally, colleagues worldwide have published hundreds of other studies of this condition.

In spite of this extensive documentation, information about complicated grief has not yet reached much of the grieving public. Many mental health professionals also remain unaware. Sandberg and her co-author, the psychologist Dr. Adam Grant, don’t mention this condition. People need to understand that Option B is not always an option. Professionals need to know how to recognize people with complicated grief and what can be done to help. The good news is that CG sufferers do still have options.

Find out more about those options from the Center for Complicated Grief, which offers resources for health professionals and for those struggling with CG.

Sheryl Sandberg's Advice for Grieving

2017-04-28T05:00:00-04:00

Sheryl Sandberg’s new book is not an easy read. Well, in a sense, it is: The pages fly by. But the book is tough, full of the raw, painful emotions that followed the sudden loss of her husband Dave Goldberg when he was just 47 years old. What followed was, for Sandberg, a process of figuring out what life could look like when it wasn’t at all the life she had planned.

The book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, is somewhat framed as advice for people who are grieving. Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and the author of Lean In, recommends avoiding what the psychologist Martin Seligman termed the “three P’s”—personalization (“this was my fault”), pervasiveness (“this affects everything”), and permanence (“nothing will ever be the same again”)—and finding support in community.

But it’s also a book for the friends and families of the bereaved—which is to say, nearly everyone—people who may not know what to say or do in the wake of a tragedy. “I got it all wrong before,” Sandberg told me, referring to her earlier efforts to comfort those who were grieving. “I used to say, ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I used to say, ‘How are you?,’ or not say anything. Every mistake that someone else made with me, I’ve made.”

I sat down with Sandberg and her co-author (and friend) Adam Grant, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, at The Atlantic’s offices in Washington, D.C., to talk about death, grieving, and resilience. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Rebecca J. Rosen: This is a book about loss and grieving, the hardest times we face. But it’s also a deeply optimistic book, framed around the question, what’s next? How do you come to that forward-looking optimism after suffering a terrible loss?

Sheryl Sandberg: Well, I didn’t come to it naturally, and I still don’t come to it every day. It’s work. It’s work. One of my favorite quotes in the book is, “Joy is a discipline.” I thought I would feel the way I felt in the beginning forever. Every minute. I wrote in my 30-day Facebook post that I would never feel another moment of pure joy again.

Adam Grant: I hated that line.

Sandberg: He argued with me—

Grant: Take it out!

Sandberg: But I was like, nope, this is true; I’m publishing it. And, look, I don’t come to optimism every day. There are lots of hard days. Expected ones, like my anniversary last week, and unexpected ones. But I have to move forward.

Everyone asks, “How do you do it?” I’ve got two kids. I have to get out of bed. They have to go to school, and I want to go to work, because I still love my job. I just met another woman who’s an artist and a widow, just like me—well, I’m not an artist, but I’m a widow. And someone asked her how she kept doing her work, and she said, “Because the rest of the parts of me didn’t die.” She said, “I’m a widow, but I’m still a mother, and I’m still an artist.”

Grant: One of the things I learned from Sheryl is that we really become resilient for other people, not for ourselves. I think the moment she really started to see the possibilities for hope and joy was when she said, “Look, if I don’t find a way to move forward, then my kids are going to have a harder time recovering.”

Sandberg: Adam kept saying that to me. He kept telling me, “If you don’t stop apologizing, and personalizing this, your kids can’t recover. If you can’t find moments of joy and let yourself be happy, your kids can’t be happy.”

Rosen: You write about post- and pre-traumatic growth, ideas that are going to be new for a lot of readers. Can you talk about what they mean?

Grant: When psychologists started studying resilience, they thought there were two paths. One was to be broken by tragedy or hardship, to walk away with post-traumatic stress disorder, debilitating depression, and severe anxiety, and the other was to try and bounce back and return to the state you were at before the event.

They were really surprised to discover that many people end up with a third response, which is not just bouncing back but bouncing forward, and that’s about emerging with some positive change from a negative event. That’s not to say that the grief or sadness goes away, or that anyone is happy that it occurred. But alongside those negative emotions often come improvements in people’s lives, where they’re able to say, “I’m stronger. I lived through that, I can live through anything. I’m more grateful,” like Sheryl has talked about. “I have new relationships, or my relationships are deeper because people have helped me in ways that I never thought possible, and I’ve become closer to them because of that.”

For a lot of people, post-traumatic growth is about a stronger sense of meaning in life—having a purpose, which is often about helping people in the way that you suffered, which not only gives your life meaning but gives your suffering meaning.

When we talk about pre-traumatic growth, for us, that means, can you experience all those gains without the tragedy? Can you bring more gratitude into your life, more meaning into your life, a greater sense of perspective and personal strength, without having had to suffer? And what Sheryl’s really trying to figure out and help other people figure out is that it’s possible to learn these lessons without having someone that you love die.

Sandberg: Post-traumatic growth doesn’t mean that it’s overall more positive. I would trade all the growth to have Dave back. But I’m closer with my parents than I was. I’m closer with my closest friends than I was. I have more appreciation. I have more perspective.

My son’s team lost the basketball playoffs and a lot of the other boys were crying. I asked him, “Are you okay?,” and he said, “Mom, it’s sixth-grade basketball.” I wouldn’t wish that perspective on anyone. But actually having perspective on what’s important and what’s not is good.

Appreciation: I am having this conversation with you, and I am not wanting to lie on the floor. Two years ago, I would have been lying on the floor. I am appreciating that I’m here, that I live today. I remember the day that I lived longer than Dave did, which happened in March. I appreciate, my God, I’m alive; fingers crossed, I’m going to turn 48 in August and Dave never did.

I have appreciation and those things are deep. And there is pre-traumatic growth too—the growth without the trauma. I’ve said to people, you know those jokes we make about growing old? Stop making those jokes. Growing old is such a gift. What if people saw that as a gift? People can grow before the trauma and maybe in preparation for the trauma (but hopefully not).

Rosen: In your book you draw on social-science research, but you also draw from a variety of religious traditions. I’m wondering if you could talk a little about the different values you've found in these two different sources of comfort.

Sandberg: I mean, when you’re this down, you just look for comfort everywhere—as much as possible, as much wisdom and comfort as you can get. And I think, like everyone, I drew on everything I could find. And then there were moments where I couldn’t draw on anything at all, and I just had to lean into the suck and let it happen. But Judaism ... Judaism helped me know when to bury him and where to bury him and what prayers to say, and there is something comforting in that, and it was the same prayer that people have said over people who have died for thousands of years.

And Buddhism, which universalizes—I shouldn’t speak on Buddhism, I’m not an expert—but Buddhism makes us feel like our suffering is not unique. And social science, which told me that my kids and I needed to establish a new family unit. And other people’s experience, like Carole Geithner, a close friend and social worker, who told me that my kids were going to cycle in and out of grief, and so I shouldn’t be shocked if they were hysterical on the floor one minute and playing the next—something that, had no one told me, I would have been like, “What’s going on here?,” and been so worried about them.

Grant: We’ve gotten a lot of emails from rabbis and reverends and monks, even—occasionally, they don’t send many emails—religious leaders from all different traditions. They’ve read what Sheryl wrote about the three P’s and said, “Oh, we can trace this back to ...,” and they give us a religious text that makes the same point. I think the most meaningful lessons were the ones that are reinforced by both ancient religion and social science.

Rosen: Both this book and Lean In are fundamentally intended to help people—help them move up at work or help them deal with the loss of a loved one. Is there a thread here for you?

Sandberg: I know that with Lean In, what I desperately wanted was a more equal world, and I still want it. I mean, I still believe so deeply that five percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and 20 percent, 21 percent of Congress and 11 countries is not enough. And I really believe that women can come together, support each other, and we can do a good job, maybe a better job, in some of those leadership circles.

With this—look, Dave was really giving. But now he’s not here to do good. But I think, if something good can happen in his name, I’m keeping Dave’s memory alive a little bit—extending it.

Without doing something like this, it’s just death and a father who died before his children graduated from elementary school. If I try to do something with it—and look, we have over 4,000 people in Option B groups. A mother whose son died by suicide three years ago got on the site earlier this week, and was in communication with someone who she thinks she might have helped. She said it’s the first positive thing to have come from her son’s death. And that makes a huge difference for people. It is so isolating. Nobody knows what to say. Kicking those elephants out of the room, bringing people together, is just huge.

Can the Country Survive Without a Strong Middle Class?

2017-03-21T12:37:14-04:00

The U.S. Constitution, it is fair to say, is normally thought of as a political document. It lays out the American system of government and the relationships among the various institutions.

But in a powerful new book The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, the Vanderbilt legal scholar Ganesh Sitaraman argues that the Constitution doesn’t merely require a particular political system but also a particular economic one, one characterized by a strong middle class and relatively mild inequality. A strong middle class, Sitaraman writes, inspires a sense of shared purpose and shared fate, without which the system of government will fall apart.

I spoke with Sitaraman about his book last week at The Atlantic’s offices in Washington, D.C. A transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity, follows.

Rebecca J. Rosen: Your new book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, is premised on the idea that the American Constitution is what you call a middle-class constitution. What does that mean?

Ganesh Sitaraman: The idea of the middle-class constitution is that it’s a constitutional system that requires and is conditioned on the assumption that there is a large middle class, and no big differences between rich and poor in a society.

Prior to the American Constitution, most countries and most people who thought about designing governments were very concerned about the problem of inequality, and the fear was that, in a society that was deeply unequal, the rich would oppress the poor and the poor would revolt and confiscate the wealth of the rich.

The answer to this problem, the way to create stability out of what would have been revolution and strife, was to build economic class right into the structure of government. In England, you have the House of Lords for the wealthy, the House of Commons for everyone else. Our Constitution isn’t like that. We don’t have a House of Lords, we don’t have a House of Commons, we don’t have a tribune of the plebs like they had in ancient Rome.

At the time, people debated having a wealth requirement for entry into the Senate, but that didn’t happen. That would have been a common thing in the generations and centuries prior to the creation of the U.S. Constitution. So there’s actually a radical change in our Constitution that we don’t build economic class directly into these institutions. The purpose of the Senate, with its longer terms, is to allow representatives to deliberate in the longer-term interest of the republic, and that’s the goal of the Senate.

What we have is a constitutional system that doesn’t build class in at all, and the reason why is that America was shockingly equal at the time in ways that seem really surprising to us today.

Rosen: Of course, the point here isn’t only that class is ignored, or left out of the Constitution, but that the Constitution actually relies on a kind of equal society in order to function. Could you explain the premise there?

Sitaraman: That’s exactly right. The idea is that the Constitution relies on a relatively equal society for it to work. In societies that are deeply unequal, the way you prevent strife between rich and poor is you build class right into the structure of government—the House of Lords, House of Commons idea. Everyone has a share in government, but they also have a check on each other.

In a country that doesn’t have a lot of inequality by wealth, you don’t need that kind of check. There’s no extreme wealth, there’s no extreme poverty, so you don’t expect there to be strife, to be instability based on wealth. And so there’s no need to put in some sort of check like that into the Constitution.

That’s how our Constitution works. The reason why it works this way is that when the founders looked around, they thought America was uniquely equal in the history of the world. And I know that seems crazy to say, but when you think about it, it makes sense. If you imagine in the late 18th century, America is a sparsely populated area, just on the coast of the Atlantic, with some small towns and cities, and lots of agrarian lands, and it’s really at the edge of the world, because the center is western Europe. It’s London, it’s Paris, and when Americans look across the ocean at those countries, what they see is how different it is. They see that there’s a hereditary aristocracy, something that doesn’t exist in America. There’s feudalism, which doesn’t exist in America. There’s extreme wealth, there’s extreme poverty, neither of which really exists in America. As a result they don’t need to design a House of Lords and a House of Commons, they don’t need a tribune of the plebs in order to make their constitution work.

Rosen: Of course, there was slavery at the time—and it was built directly into the Constitution.

Sitaraman: We have to distinguish between two separate things. The first is what I’m calling the tradition of the middle-class Constitution, and the idea here is that to have a republic, you have to have relative economic equality, and that’s within the political community. But there’s another question which is, who is in the political community? And that’s a question that’s been fiercely debated over our history, fiercely contested over our history.

There’s a second tradition that we call the tradition of inclusion, which over time has fought to expand the community to include minorities, to include women. The challenge for anyone who’s interested in continuing both of these traditions is, how do they work together? I think the key thing is, when you expand the political community, you have to make sure that every member of the political community then has the opportunity to join the middle class, or else you can't maintain the structure of the republic and the preconditions for having a republic. So that’s how I see these two things fitting together.

Rosen: You talk a lot about a British philosopher James Harrington and how his ideas influenced the founders. For people not familiar with him, who was he? What was his impact?

Sitaraman: James Harrington is one of the most important political philosophers that no one’s ever heard of. In the 17th century in England, James Harrington writes a book called The Commonwealth of Oceana, and it’s a pivotal book, extremely important in the history of political thought. What Harrington argues is that the balance of power in politics in any society will inevitably mirror the balance of property in society, and he talks a lot about property. We can think about that as wealth, because at the time, most wealth was property.

What Harrington noticed in his own country, England, was that there had been a serious shift. The king had tried to play the nobles off of the people and had allowed a number of people to own greater property than they had before, and this created a rising middle class in England. Soon enough, the middle class wondered, why can’t we have a stake in governing? And this resulted in revolution and ultimately the civil wars in England leading to the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to lead England in the middle of the 17th century. What Harrington does is he explains this by saying that power has to follow property.

Many of the American founders had read Harrington, and his views were well known in the time period. In fact, more so than being known, they were just believed by everyone. Everyone embraced them, in some cases without even necessarily knowing their source, although throughout the founders’ writings they list Harrington as one of the great political thinkers who can comment on what it means to create a republic. So when the founders look around and they think about the equality that they see, their muse, if you will, their intellectual fountain, is Harrington, who suggests that, if you have an equal society, it is possible to have what he called a commonwealth, or a republic. And in an unequal society, the only possible government you could have would be some sort of aristocracy or monarchy.

Rosen: You have some data that shows how much flatter society was at the time. But change was coming, and you quote Tocqueville who warned “friends of democracy” about the inequality that could come from manufacturing, which would take off over the course of the next century. Could you take us through the history from that revolutionary period through industrialization and how that changed us forever?

Sitaraman: Starting in the early republic, even as early as the 1820s and 1830s, commerce is increasing, and by the late 19th century, industrialization has reached full force. We see a massive shift in the nature of the economy—the urbanization, the closing of the frontier, the shift from artisanal work and agricultural work to wage work within factories. These are all huge changes in the economy, and they put serious pressure on the economic foundations of the Constitution.

The assumption of our original Constitution was that society would be relatively equal, and this was because most workers would either be artisanal workers or would be agricultural, and there were vast lands available to the west, which meant that any white man—it was limited to white men at the time—could be yeomen farmers and independent economically.

What happens by the end of the 19th century is that these economic changes create huge pressure on our constitutional system. There’s increased inequality, and economic power is turning into political power. There’s a feeling among people during the Gilded Age that the robber barons and plutocrats are now running the government for themselves instead of running it for the people, and that this is a threat to the republic, a threat to the constitutional system. The response that starts really in full force in the populist era of the late 19th century and moves into the Progressive Era is to try to combat both economic power and to prevent economic power from turning into political power.

People in this time period do a lot of extraordinary things. They invent antitrust laws to try to break up concentrations of economic power. They pass a constitutional amendment to create an income tax so that people who are wealthier and have a greater ability to pay will pay more. And then, to prevent economic power from turning into political power, they passed the first campaign-finance regulations and they passed a constitutional amendment to require the direct election of U.S. senators. These factors, these actions, both economic and political, were designed to create what Teddy Roosevelt called an economic democracy that was necessary as a precondition for political democracy. The battles over the Constitution, the economic battles over the Constitution, continue through the Progressive Era and into the New Deal.

Rosen: You argue that the middle of the 20th century is a pivotal period. What happens in the middle of the 20th century, and how does it shape our idea of government and what its role is?

Sitaraman: After World War II, something changes. In this period, post-World War II, the idea that economic equality is necessary for our constitutional system falls out of the consciousness of most people.

I think it happens for three reasons. The first is that we experience a huge economic boom. This is a period that economists call the Great Compression. GDP goes up, median wages go up, we build America’s middle class during this period. And there are a lot of things that contributed to this. Many of them are policy things. First, we regulated the financial industry through the Securities and Exchange Commission, Glass-Steagall during the Great Depression. We also invested a lot in the kinds of things that would build a strong middle class. We sent a generation to college through the GI bill. We invested in infrastructure, which created jobs. We invested in research and development, which created the foundation for future jobs and future businesses. We also encouraged homeownership, and in addition to all of that, we also undertook policies that would help the people who were worst-off in society: Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start. Together, these things meant that we created a society that was more equal economically than we had seen in generations.

The second thing that happened during this period is that constitutional debates over the economy waned, because the New Dealers won the fight over the Constitution. Debates about economic policy now just moved into regulatory terms. There was no question that the Constitution empowered the federal government to be able to regulate and operate within the economy.

The third big factor is the Cold War. Prior to World War II, most generations of Americans were very familiar with the experience of aristocracies. The founders left a monarchy and aristocracies in Europe and rebelled against them to create the United States. Generations of immigrants fled those same aristocracies and monarchies in Europe to come to the United States, a republic. They knew the difference between a republic and an aristocracy, and it was very clear to them that there was a stark difference. After World War II, the contrast is now between capitalism and communism, not between republics and aristocracies. As a result, the egalitarian tradition in America wanes because of the fear of communism.

Rosen: The fear becomes more about the government doing too much and less about it not doing enough.

Sitaraman: The fear in that period switches from a fear over aristocrats, oligarchs, and plutocrats to a fear of becoming too much like the Soviet Union and too much like the communists.

Rosen: What do you see as the consequences of that?

Sitaraman: Well, what happened, I think, is that we first had a period of about 30 years where things went really well. We had a growing middle class, an expanding middle class; in fact, it was in this period that we first made serious efforts to make our country more inclusive. But then, just at that moment, we started turning in a different direction and undermining many of the policies that had actually built the middle class. So over the last generation, we’ve significantly reduced taxes on the wealthy, we’ve abandoned a serious antitrust policy, we’ve started investing less in the things that create a broad middle class—education, infrastructure, research. And the result of all of this was the stagnating middle class that we’ve seen, that everybody’s experienced in this country, increased debt, and then eventually the greatest financial crash in two generations.

Rosen: Why does having a strong middle class matter?

Sitaraman: One of the important things about having a large middle class for society is that there’s a sense of everyone being part of the shared project. No one’s so different from each other when there’s a large middle class. People don’t have different economic interests, and as a result, they often don't have very different social interests. People send their kids to the same public schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, they shop in the same places, they play on the same sports teams. As a result, everyone feels like they’re part of the same community.

When the middle class starts to crumble, people increasingly see themselves as different from others. They sort themselves by wealth, by education level, and the result is that there’s an increasing fracturing of society, a loss of the solidarity that comes with having a large middle class. And that can be very destructive to a republic, because part of what makes our system work well is that we have a shared sense of who we are as a people, and that we see each other as part of a shared project that’s called America.

Rosen: But even during that mid-20th-century period when the middle class was growing the most, the country wasn’t exactly a picture of social harmony. This is the same period when the fights over redlining and school segregation were at their most intense. What evidence is there that a strong middle class can surmount racial divides?

Sitaraman: I think throughout our history, you see big divergences between the tradition of inclusion and the tradition of the middle class. In some cases, they overlap. The Reconstruction Republicans fought very strongly for both racial equality and economic opportunity for the freed slaves. In some cases, they diverged; the Jacksonians were interested in economic opportunity but not in racial equality at all. These two things don’t necessarily have to go together. I think the most interesting moments in our history, though, are when there were people who understood that these two things had to go together, and in fact tried to build movements around them. The Civil Rights Era is a good example of that. We often forget that when Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech, the March on Washington was the March for Jobs and Freedom. It’s economic and political. At the end of his life, he focused heavily on the poor people’s movement, again, focusing on economic opportunity.

The same thing was true even in the Populist Era. There was a movement, small and short-lived but a serious movement, to try to build a biracial coalition, blacks and whites, in the South, of working-class people, to try to push against the economic elites, who their leaders said were oppressing both races. That project ended in part because of force and fraud and violence, but partly also because of racism. There was a divide-and-conquer strategy that the elites used to try to break the power of the working class that was trying to have economic reforms that would help both African Americans and whites in the South. So I think what we need is to think about how important a middle class is not just for one group or another but for everyone, because in fact the economic concerns, the economic insecurity that we face today is shared by people across all racial groups, gender, and any other kind of identity.

Rosen: In your book you say that thinking of the Constitution as requiring a certain economic order is not a new idea but a very old one. What has this looked like historically and what would it mean for today?

Sitaraman: One of the most exciting things about writing this book is discovering how often throughout our history people talked about the Constitution in economic terms. Throughout our history there was a deep sense that to have a republic, to have our Constitution work, we had to have economic equality, and that the Constitution in fact relied on this and in some cases even required action from political leaders to fulfill this economic equality.

You see this in a wide variety of time periods. In Reconstruction, in the Jacksonian Era, the populists, the progressives, the New Dealers. Throughout our history, there is a strong tradition of people who believe this. We’ve largely forgotten this tradition, and I think our constitutional debates are impoverished because of it.

Today with economic inequality the important topic that it is, I think the time is ripe for people to go back and think about, and be inspired by, the people who have come before us over many many generations, who saw that the Constitution required thinking seriously about economic inequality. And there’s lots of places we could think about this in our Constitution today. To take a simple example, a case like Citizens United uses the First Amendment in order to stop efforts, it seems, to make our political and economic system more equal by enabling corporations and wealthy people to have outsized power over the political process. We could think about a wide variety of constitutional provisions differently if we took this seriously—the Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment, the 13th Amendment, which was seen by the Reconstruction Republicans as not just ending slavery but also empowering Congress to create economic opportunity for people who were struggling economically.

Rosen: It’s clear from your book that you see today’s extreme inequality as a threat not only to our economic well-being but to or ability to self-govern. Can you explain how this threat is playing out and may play out in the decades ahead?

Sitaraman: Even going back to the ancients there was a fear that economic power would turn into political power and undermine the republic. That’s an oligarchy. The way this happens is through two pathways. First, the wealthy start believing that they’re better than everybody else, that they’re more virtuous, that they deserve to govern. The second thing that happens is that the wealthy now have different interests than everybody else. The things that are good for them aren’t actually in the common good, so when they do govern, they start pursuing policies that improve their well-being and wealth at the expense of everyone else. This creates a vicious cycle, because you now have the wealthy creating a system that allows them to keep more wealth and earn more wealth, and that wealth in turn allows them to continue to take over the political system, and the cycle perpetuates. This is what’s so challenging and so terrifying about what one commentator’s called the “doom loop of oligarchy”: once you start down this path, it’s very hard to get out of it.

The problem with the vicious cycle that leads to oligarchy is that people are smart, and they see it happening, and they know, and they feel that the system is rigged against them. And in that context, people revolt against the system. This doesn’t happen through some sort of mass uprising. What the people do is they look for a leader, they look for someone who will help them overthrow the oligarchy. There’s a great Broadway star that you may have heard of, his name is Alexander Hamilton, and he was very worried that the main threat to the liberty of republics would be that some leader would pay what he calls “obsequious court to the people” and then become a demagogue and eventually a tyrant. The threat for unequal republics is on the one hand oligarchy and then on the other hand tyranny. That is a pretty unfortunate fate in either direction.

The Ambition Interviews: A Table of Contents

2016-12-19T09:54:08-05:00

Today The Atlantic is presenting a short series of essays we’re calling The Ambition Interviews.

The Ambition Interviews began as a project between two friends, Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace, who had attended Northwestern University in the early ’90s. What had happened, they wondered, to all of their brilliant, hard-working friends from their college days? Had life come together as they had hoped? They reached out to 37 other members of their sorority’s graduating class, and those conversations became the foundation of the essays we now present.

We recommend starting with Hana’s introduction essay, which details the project, and from there the essays—listed here—can be read in any order.

What Happens to Women's Ambitions in the Years After College
An introduction to The Ambition Interviews.
Having It All—and Hating It
For so many women with kids, one question weighs on them: “How can I find a job that gives me growth, but I’m not pushed over the edge by it?”
When Women Choose Children Over a Career
“I went to a job interview after my first daughter was born and cried the whole way home.”
Rethinking What Success Looks Like
For women who left the workforce, their ambitions didn’t disappear so much as found a new target.
How Much Ambition Can a Marriage Sustain?
Power couples are a rarity. Instead, many high achieving women have husbands who do their own opting out.
Beyond Maternity Leave
For all the focus on parental leave as a barrier to women’s professional ascent, women’s real struggle with work-parenting balance grew—alongside their children—years after their maternity leave ended.
The Sexism They Faced
One colleague’s constant refrain: “When are you going to have babies and quit?”

The women of this study are not by any means a representative sample of America, and, in particular, Hana writes that the group was not racially diverse. What makes this group interesting is not that it tells the story of women in America, but that it tells the story of a group of women who by all measures were in a position to rise to the highest echelons of any industry. Why some did—and why many didn’t—reveals much about what stands in the way of greater gender equality in the workplace today.

We’d love to hear from you and your own experiences in pursuing both career and family and the tradeoffs they each demand. Email us at hello@theatlantic.com.

'That's Called Business, by the Way'

2016-09-27T17:11:26-04:00

In 2006, two years before the crash that would destroy the livelihoods of millions of Americans, Donald J. Trump said he “sort of hope[d]” for that eventuality. He stood to make money.

Confronted by Hillary Clinton with that comment at Monday’s debate, Trump did nothing to disavow it. To the contrary, he defended it: “That’s called business, by the way,” he condescended.

Together these remarks showcase a callous indifference to other people’s hardships—an indifference that, my colleague Conor Friedersdorf writes, “may matter little for a Manhattan mogul, but matters very much for someone asking to be entrusted with representing every American.” No reasonable person who has followed along over these last few months could view such an attitude as an aberration. Rather, it fits in precisely with Trump’s long and documented history of putting himself first, even when it means demolishing those who are in his way. Here is a person, a person who may very well become the next president of the United States, who is seemingly unable to imagine what it’s like to be someone else.

But these comments represent another failure of the imagination as well, and that is a total deference to an idea of “business” to be obeyed as though it were handed down to Moses at Sinai. “Business” is not some eternal, naturally occurring phenomenon. It is socially constructed, guided by the laws and cultures of a given time and place, and the sort of business that Trump reveres is in fact very specific to America over the last four decades or so.

During the 20th century up until the 1980s, it was common for business leaders to see the purpose of their endeavors as including contributing to the public good. Corporate mission statements of this era often contained objectives such as providing good jobs for people and a responsibility to “the communities in which we live and ... the world community as well,” as Johnson & Johnson’s did in 1943. It is only in recent years that corporations have pursued a singular aim above all else: to bring returns to shareholders, even when doing so comes at the expense of jobs or investing in research.

Trump is emblematic of the values of this particular variety of capitalism, prizing profits over any social purpose. This has made him incredibly wealthy, he says. Lucky Donald. Now he has ridden that wave to the presidential debate stage, whatever the wreckage of human lives left in his wake. But all is justified under the mantle of “business,” in Trump’s telling; greed and cruelty are fine—in his estimation, often brilliant, I suspect—in the name of profit.

This is a contested view, to say the least. There are, in the pages of history and in the news, countless examples of business and political leaders who have sought to reform markets and the economy in service of some higher purpose. But Trump isn’t interested, and dismissing his erstwhile hope for economic catastrophe with a quick “that’s called business” line is to fail to engage in the question of what business is or what it could be, to assume that no other way is possible.

The Best Business and Economics Books for Summer

2016-07-02T08:00:00-04:00

In an ideal world, summer would mean endless days of leisurely reading on the beach. But even if all you have is a long weekend, there are some books that are just too good to miss.

Here are The Atlantic’s Business editors top picks for business and economics books you should definitely make time for this summer.

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Viking

White Trash | Nancy Isenberg

What’s it about? A social history of white poverty in America over the past 400 years.

Why should I read it? Isenberg traces the treatment (and mistreatment) of poor, white Americans back to the time of British colonization, discussing how ideas of class and economic inferiority have manifested. The book argues that poor white Americans have always played a large political role, and that class injustices of this particular group challenge fundamental American beliefs of meritocracy and social mobility.

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Crown

Evicted | Matthew Desmond

What’s it about? The role that evictions play in the continuation of cycles of poverty.

Why should I read it? It’s a staggeringly in-depth account of just how common and devastating evictions are in the lives of poor Americans. Desmond’s work shows the stark inequalities that come into play when it comes to who gets displaced and how that displacement can prevent a family from ever making a better life for themselves. For more than a year, Desmond shadowed two landlords (and lived in properties they owned) in order to tell both sides of the eviction story. What he uncovers about the role of housing in American life, and how access to it is denied, is unnerving. (Read our interview with Desmond here.)

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Hachette

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble | Dan Lyons

What’s it about? An aging journalist gets laid off and goes to work in the industry he has long written about.

Why should I read it? Lyons—one of the writers behind the HBO series Silicon Valley—heads to HubSpot after being laid off and finds himself immersed in a world of flowing venture capital, playground-like offices, and internet idealism. His artful reporting from the inside makes for a funny and thoughtful account of the current culture surrounding technology startups. But in addition to entertainment, Lyons’s book is also flush with analysis of those the entrepreneurs that founded these companies and the myriad firms that fund them.

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Doubleday

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right | Jane Mayer

What’s it about? A writer for The New Yorker traces the secretive political donations of the Koch brothers and the rise of the “radical right.”

Why should I read it? For anyone fascinated by the political influence of the billionaire Koch brothers, Jane Mayer gets closest to uncovering their web of financial contributions to a variety of political causes. As the 2016 presidential race moves forward, and conversations about economic inequality remain prominent, this book touches on subjects that are both timely and critical to understanding this important point in history.

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Harper

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley | Antonio García Martínez

What’s it about? A former Facebook and Twitter employee gives readers an inside look into the drama inside two of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies.

Why should I read it? García Martínez has quite the resume, having worked at major firms in both tech and banking. He’s also developed quite a reputation for being a bit of a wild card. In his insider-tells-all book, García Martínez discusses everything from goofy stories to cultural secrets about some of the country’s most powerful and influential businesses.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating | Moira Weigel

What’s it about? A history of dating in America, that shows how it’s always been tied to the market forces of their era.

Why should I read it? It’s nice to read a book about dating that’s not a memoir or self-help book. Weigel’s research is extensive, and her framing of dating in relation to work in America is fascinating. In a world where social rituals and human behavior are increasingly relegated to data points for companies and scholars, Weigel remembers that—despite how seemingly badly every generation is in its approach to finding love—we’re all only human. (Read our interview with Weigel here.)

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Mark and the Void | Paul Murray

What’s it about? A novel about an Irish banking crisis.

Why should I read it? Murray’s novel is a comedy, but the timing probably can’t be beat. With Brexit and 2016’s global economic uncertainties, it’s a timely novel that manages to make working at an an investment bank in a European economy on the brink of collapse incredibly funny. That’s largely due to the characters and various super-meta subplots Murray uses. At the very least, it makes investment banking and bankers a fun and fascinating read.

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Harper

The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland | Dan Barry

What’s it about? How a group of intellectually disabled men were forced into years of servitude in Iowa.

Why should I read it? Barry first debuted the stories of these men in The New York Times. Here, he expands upon the devastating, shocking, and heartbreaking tale of how this group of men wound up living in a decaying schoolhouse and working physically damaging jobs at a turkey processing plant—earning only about $65 a month—for 30 years. It’s an important story about the horrors of slavery and exploitation that can happen to vulnerable people anywhere.

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Crown Business

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business | Rana Foroohar

What’s it about? Veteran journalist Rana Foroohar argues that finance has come to dominate the American economy to a degree that’s not just unfair, but dangerous as well.

Why should I read it? This is a topic that deserves a book-length treatment (or many) and we’re lucky that Foroohar was the one to do it. She writes clearly about something that is quite complicated, and even puts forth a set of five smart proposals for what to do about it. This is a phenomenon that has its tentacles all over the economy, and Foroohar shows exactly why that’s hurting Americans so much.

A Strong Middle Class Doesn't Just Happen Naturally

2016-06-29T16:56:53-04:00

A strong middle class is, for many people, central to the American idea. There are other core values too, of course—freedom, political representation, individualism, etc.—but an economy in which families can feel economic security, live comfortably, and build up wealth is definitely on the list.

But that’s not the economy America has today. The middle class is getting smaller by the year: According to Pew, the percent of adults in solidly middle-income households has fallen to 50 percent in 2015, from 61 percent in 1951. And belonging to the American middle class doesn’t guarantee financial security either: 44 percent of Americans making between $40,000 and $100,000 say they can’t come up with $400 in the event of an emergency without borrowing money. For black and Hispanic middle-class families, that figure is 58 percent, compared with 40 percent for whites.

This isn’t how it has to be, said María Teresa Kumar, the founding president and CEO of Voto Latino, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. The strong middle class of the 20th century, she argued, “was a choice. It was a policy choice; it was an American choice.”

Kumar argued that government policies following the two world wars—the G.I. Bill, investments in infrastructure and education, the establishment of Social Security—made the middle class. It’s true, she noted, that “Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, and African Americans were excluded from that,” but the fact that the government did it, and that it worked, stands as proof of what is possible—and what kind of investment is required. “A lot of the issues that I hear about today about where are we are going this century, we’ve actually grappled with them last century—we doubled down with less knowledge, and less resources.”

The question now, Kumar said, is whether the country will pull together and do that for a new generation of Americans—one, she emphasized, that is less white. How the country answers that question will reveal much about its character, and will determine the future of millions.

The On-Demand Society

2016-06-28T19:19:40-04:00

When today’s consumers want to watch a TV show, they can watch it when they want on Netflix. When they want to buy household goods, they can order them from Amazon, even when the stores are all closed. And when they want a car, they can just book a Zipcar or hail an Uber, without owning a car.

This is what Deborah Borda, the president and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, called the “on-demand society” at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. And it’s a “major challenge” to arts institutions, she said.

“In the old days, my parents would buy 10 Tuesday nights to the New York Philharmonic and they would go,” Borda said. “People don’t subscribe anymore. It’s an on-demand society. It’s a society where … we decide I want to do this right now, I’m going to get the best bargain I can get, I’m going to have the most flexibility.”

Besides the financial problems the on-demand society presents to arts institutions that rely on subscribers, Borda said there are programmatic challenges as well, particularly for musical institutions.

“When you go to a museum, you can walk through a museum at your own pace, you can dress however you want to dress. When you go to a concert, it’s a much more ... confining experience,” she explained. “This is one of the major challenges that arts institutions face, but especially musical institutions. Because so much of what we do takes away some freedom, because we do choose the programs.”

‘Return on Investment’: The Narrow, Short-Sighted Finance Concept That Has Taken Over Society

2016-06-28T17:01:56-04:00

What’s a good use of money?

For investors, that question comes down to a relatively straightforward calculation: Which of the available options has the greatest expected return on the investment?

But investors are far from the only people who are using the “return on investment” framework to weigh different options. “This has become a very, very powerful tool for decision making, not only in business, but in our culture as a whole,” said Moses Pava, an ethicist and a dean of the Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. In particular, Pava sees this kind of thinking dominating the world of education, both on the part of students in choosing schools and majors, and on the part of school in how they market themselves to potential enrollees. This, he says, will not end well for liberal arts schools.

Undergraduate business schools have a pretty strong case to make for their value—if by value people mean an average starting salary right after graduation. Now, Pava says, a lot of liberal arts schools are trying to make that same case, saying they too provide a high return on investment. “But the bad news for the liberal arts people,” Pava argued, “is that once they’ve entered that conversation with [business schools] and started comparing themselves to us, they’ve lost the game, because they’re using our metaphor and they’re using our way of framing the question and they’ve kind of lost their soul.”

The fundamental problem with return-on-investment thinking is that it reduces the value of an experience to some sort of quantifiable, short-term outcome. Pava says he sees this in “assessments of learning,” which seek to measure what information students are absorbing. But such assessments miss some of the most profound learning, the kind that takes years to sink in. “The reality is,” Pava said, “the most important thing I ever learned—I went to Brandeis—I remember vividly sitting on the grass studying Martin Buber’s I and Thou. I had no idea what I was reading! But the seed was planted, and I’ve gone back to it every five years, and it’s become one of the ways that I look at the world.”

Pava believes that a “rational” model has a place: “If you’re buying potatoes for tonight’s dinner,” he said, “the rational model is fine.” But for the bigger things in life, “it’s really crazy. I ask my students, when you’re thinking about a spouse, do you make decisions in rational terms? Because if so, your marriage probably isn’t going to last very long.”

After all, he said, “Most of the best things in life cannot be measured, can’t even really be compared.”