Tunisia was the best case, Sudan the last hope, Syria the bloodiest of all: The countries that not long ago sparked optimism for a democratic wave in the Arab world have descended into dictatorship, and Washington shouldn’t ignore them.

As part of the deal to extend the debt limit, President Joe Biden and Congress agreed to rescind about $30 billion that had originally been allocated in 2021’s American Rescue Plan, some of which was going to be sent to state and local governments for a variety of projects. The amount isn’t that large, at least by federal-budget standards, but it is indicative of a huge change in policy. The federal response to COVID-19 included enormous amounts of mostly unconditional fiscal aid to states, cities, and other local governments. But this era of huge federal aid, and the flush state and local budgets it helped create, is over.In its place will be a period of state fiscal retrenchment. Between the huge buckets of federal aid and the strong economy of the past few years, state budgets have never been healthier. Some states and cities have used this time to address long-standing fiscal problems and to sock away significant “rainy day” funds, which will ease the coming crunch. But others have not, instead using the money to build out new government programs or cut taxes, policies that will prove hard to reverse even when budgets get tighter.[Read: Why Biden caved]And they are getting tighter. Across the country, state and local tax and other revenues are declining, and the outcome will be particularly bad for transit agencies dependent on farebox revenue where many fewer people are riding transit and for cities reliant on downtown commercial property taxes where more people are working from home. When the flow of federal money to state and local budgets runs out, some jurisdictions—including California, Illinois, and New York City—will face enormous budget gaps.People have become used to the state and local politics that were ushered in by the full budgets written amid the growing economy of the late 2010s, and the boom in state revenue around COVID. During these flush years, even some liberal politicians supported tax cuts and even some conservative ones supported increasing pay for teachers. The next few years will not look like that. Rather than new programs and tax reductions, we are going to see a number of states and localities forced to cut back. Police departments will be partially defunded not because of political preferences but because of fiscal necessity, despite worries about crime; class sizes in public schools will increase because fewer teachers will be hired. Federal efforts to encourage green infrastructure will be partially frustrated by declining state and local investment. Some places will raise taxes. And, in the medium term, we are likely to see severe fiscal crises in at least a few jurisdictions, like what we saw in Detroit in 2013.The central lesson of the past few years is that although federal aid to state and local governments can be extremely useful in heading off economic crises, it should be paired with conditions that encourage states and cities to budget responsibly. Congress could still encourage some changes in state and local fiscal policy. Achieving these reforms would have been much easier when federal money was flowing; now, however, we’ll be able to see the need for them more clearly.Federal aid for states and cities came in several packages in 2020 and 2021 and was crucial in ensuring that the economic shock of COVID didn’t turn into a giant recession. One reason the post-2007 Great Recession was so big was that it led to a huge downturn in state and local employment, substantially extending the economic decline. States and cities ended up hiding a lot of their lost revenue in underfunded public-pension systems, and the consequences persist to this day. During the Great Recession, interest rates were low and unemployment was high, which should have led to massive investment in new infrastructure, but states and cities used their borrowing capacity to accrue pension debt (ask yourself, where are the infrastructural wonders of the past 20 years?). Some jurisdictions, notably Detroit and Puerto Rico, were forced to default on their debts.In contrast, the state and local aid during the COVID recession was so substantial that it far exceeded the holes in state and local budgets created by the pandemic. It was so successful as an economic stimulus that it likely contributed substantially to inflation.Aid to states and cities during budget crises—a measure the federal government has taken intermittently since Alexander Hamilton’s plan to assume state debts in 1790—has real benefits, as it helps avoid austerity or defaults. But such aid has obvious drawbacks as well. States and cities begin to expect aid going forward, leading to irresponsible budgeting decisions. Perhaps more important, lenders to states and cities grow less concerned about the condition of their budgets, encouraging reckless fiscal policies. In some periods, these drawbacks were seen as so severe that the federal government allowed states to default on their debts, rather than bailing them out. In the 1840s, the 1870s, and the 1930s, states defaulted, leading bond markets to shun those states and limiting their ability to invest in infrastructure.The best answer is to provide aid to states and cities in a crisis, but to add explicit requirements that states and cities reform their budget processes. Conditions on aid could encourage states to take steps that are politically harmful in the short run but that will improve their fiscal sustainability.Congress had leverage to encourage these reforms when providing massive amounts of aid during the COVID emergency. But it failed to do so. Congress still can pass legislation to encourage states to budget responsibly, even though it will be harder now. [Conor Clarke: There’s no constitutional end run around the debt limit]For instance, states and cities regularly budget using the “cash accounting” method, measuring dollars in and dollars out during a given year while failing to account for the accrual of liabilities that will hurt down the road (such as underfunding pensions or failing to maintain bridges). Congress could encourage states to adopt a more reasonable approach. Here’s how: Congress gives states and cities a subsidy every time they borrow, because it has made the interest paid to lenders on state and local debt exempt from federal income taxes, meaning that lenders are willing to lend to states and cities at lower rates. Congress could say that this income-tax exemption is available only if states put a covenant in their bond contracts that they will budget in accord with generally accepted accounting principles, taking into consideration the accrual of liabilities. Even more dramatically,federal regulators could require jurisdictions to adopt “volatility caps,” or covenants not to spend money when state tax revenues suddenly spike.Congress could model these reforms on improvements made in the state of Connecticut, which until recently had been one of the nation’s most significant fiscal basket cases. Several years before the pandemic, though, Connecticut put spending limits and volatility-cap covenants into its bonds. This made the state’s fiscal rules enforceable by bondholders, and any effort to break them extremely risky. Connecticut saved an extraordinary amount of money during the pandemic, emerging as one of the true fiscal-policy success stories of recent years.Congress could also create tools to make defaults less costly if they do need to happen. After 2008, municipal bankruptcy proved a useful tool for places such as Detroit and Stockton, California, ensuring that neither one set of creditors (bondholders, public pensioners) nor today’s taxpayers would be held entirely responsible for the bad fiscal decisions of the past, balancing losses for groups of creditors with court supervision of future spending plans for sustainability. Municipal bankruptcy law could be made more functional, however, by clarifying what it takes for a government to be “insolvent,” by authorizing multiple overlapping governments (a city, a county, and a school district that all govern and tax the same people) to file all at once and thereby reducing conflicts between them, or by authorizing state governments to file themselves.But the biggest policy questions are going to happen at the state and local levels. We will need to do more with less. There is huge demand for state and local governments to make historic investments—in clean energy, in affordable housing, in transportation. Ideally, governments would have saved money during the boom so that they could continue to make investments even when revenues dry up.Where that is not the case, state and local governments simply won’t be able to make these investments unless they figure out how to reduce costs. The cost of building highways has been growing for decades, and the cost of building tunneled mass transit in America is completely out of whack with the cost in our peer countries. To get new investment during a fiscal retrenchment, we will have to focus on the drivers of those costs—bad planning practices, difficult permitting processes and environmental reviews, and refusals to negotiate with labor unions. Calls for state investment will have to lean into “supply-side progressivism” ideas that see “Yes, in My Backyard” regulatory reforms as both good in and of themselves and as tools for making state investment more efficient.[Annie Lowrey: America has wasted its chance to move the economy forward]The responsibility for these state budget problems rests on state government officials, and even more fundamentally, on us, the voters who select them. Over the past few decades, voters have used state and local elections as a way to comment on national politics—for instance, voting for Democratic state legislators if they like President Joe Biden or for Republican ones if they like former President Donald Trump. What people in state and local office actually do has mattered less and less to general-election outcomes. We have ignored state and local politics, assuming that everything will work out fine. Once federal cash stops flowing and budgets worsen, the costs of having done so will be all too clear. Whether and how we respond are up to us.

Real-life Ron DeSantis was here, finally. In the fidgety flesh; in Iowa, South Carolina, and, in this case, New Hampshire. Not some distant Sunshine State of potential or idealized Donald Trump alternative or voice in the far-off static of Twitter Spaces. But an actual human being interacting with other human beings, some 200 of them, packed into an American Legion hall in the town of Rochester.“Okay, smile, close-up,” an older woman told the Florida governor, trying to pull him in for another photo. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, had just finished a midday campaign event, and the governor was now working a quick rope line—emphasis on quick and double emphasis on working. The fast-talking first lady is much better suited to this than her halting husband. He smiled for the camera like the dentist had just asked him to bite down on a blob of putty; like he was trying to make a mold, or to fit one. It was more of a cringe than a grin.“Governor, I have a lot of relatives in Florida,” the next selfie guy told him. Everybody who meets DeSantis has relatives in Florida or a time-share on Clearwater Beach or a bunch of golf buddies who retired to the Villages. “Wow, really?” DeSantis said.He was trying. But this did not look fun for him.Retail politicking was never DeSantis’s gift. Not that it mattered much before, in the media-dominated expanse of Florida politics, where DeSantis has proved himself an elite culture warrior and troller of libs. DeSantis was reelected by 19 points last November. He calls himself the governor of the state “where woke goes to die,” which he believes will be a model for his presidency of the whole country, a red utopia in his own image.[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]What does the on-paper promise of DeSantis look like in practice? DeSantis has performed a number of these in-person chores in recent days, after announcing his presidential campaign on May 24 in a glitchy Twitter Spaces appearance with Elon Musk.As I watched him complete his rounds in New Hampshire on Thursday—visits to a VFW hall, an Elks Club, and a community college, in addition to the American Legion post—the essential duality of his campaign was laid bare: DeSantis is the ultimate performative politician when it comes to demonstrating outrage and “kneecapping” various woke abuses—but not so much when it comes to the actual in-person performance of politics.The campaign billed his appearance in Rochester as a “fireside chat.” (The outside temperature was 90 degrees, and there was no actual fire.) The governor and first lady also held fireside chats this week at a welding shop in Salix, Iowa, and at an event space in Lexington, South Carolina. The term conjures the great American tradition started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Those were scary times—grim visages of malnourished kids and food riots and businessmen selling pencils on the street. FDR’s cozy evenings around the radio hearth were meant to project comfort and avuncular authority.Sitting on gray armchairs onstage in Rochester—Casey cross-legged and Ron man-spread—the DeSanti reassured their audience that the Florida governor was the candidate best equipped to protect Americans from contemporary threats no less serious than stock-market crashes and bank closures. He was focused on a distinct set of modern menaces: “woke indoctrination” and “woke militaries” and “woke mind viruses” and “woke mobs” that endanger every institution of American life. He used woke more than a dozen times at each event (I counted).Also, DeSantis said he’s a big supporter of “the death penalty for pedophiles” (applause); reminded every audience that he’d sent dozens of migrants to “beautiful Martha’s Vineyard” (bigger applause); and promised to end “this Faucian dystopia” around COVID once and for all (biggest applause).Also, George Soros (boo).[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis]Casey talked at each New Hampshire stop about the couple’s three young children, often in the vein of how adorably naughty they are—how they write on the walls of the governor’s mansion with permanent markers and leave crayon stains on the carpets. Ron spoke in personal terms less often, but when he did, it was usually to prove that he understands the need to protect kids from being preyed upon by the various and ruthless forces of wokeness. One recurring example on Thursday involved how outrageous it is that in certain swim competitions, a girl might wind up being defeated by a transgender opponent. “I’m particularly worried about this as the father of two daughters,” DeSantis told the Rochester crowd.This played well in the room full of committed Republicans and likely primary voters, as it does on Fox. Clearly this is a fraught and divisive issue, but one that’s been given outsized attention in recent years, especially in relation to the portion of the population it directly affects. By comparison, DeSantis never mentioned gun violence, the leading cause of death for children in this country, including many in his state (the site of the horrific Parkland massacre of 2018, the year before he became governor). DeSantis readily opts for the culture-war terrain, ignoring the rest, pretty much everywhere he goes.His whole act can feel like a clunky contrivance—a forced persona railing against phony or hyped-up outrages. He can be irascible. Steve Peoples, a reporter for the Associated Press, approached DeSantis after a speech at a VFW hall in Laconia and asked the governor why he hadn’t taken any questions from the audience. “Are you blind?” DeSantis snapped at Peoples. “Are you blind? Okay, so, people are coming up to me, talking to me [about] whatever they want to talk to me about.”No one in the room cared about this little outburst besides the reporters (who sent a clip of it bouncing across social media within minutes). And if the voters did care, it would probably reflect well on DeSantis in their eyes, demonstrating his willingness to get in the media’s face.[Yair Rosenberg: DeSantis is making the same mistake Democrats did in 2020]Journalists who managed to get near DeSantis this week unfailingly asked him about Donald Trump, the leading GOP candidate. In Rochester, NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez wondered about the former president’s claim that he would eliminate the federal government’s “administrative state” within six months of a second term. “Why didn’t you do it when you had four years?” DeSantis shot back.In general, though, DeSantis didn’t mention Trump without being prompted—at least not explicitly. He drew clear, if barely veiled, contrasts. “I will end the culture of losing in the Republican Party,” he vowed Thursday night in Manchester. Unsaid, obviously, is that the GOP has underperformed in the past three national elections—and no one is more to blame than Trump and the various MAGA disciples he dragged into those campaigns.“Politics is not about building a brand,” DeSantis went on to say. What matters is competence and conviction, not charisma. “My husband will never back down!” Casey added in support. In other words: He is effective and he will follow through and actually do real things, unlike you-know-who.“Politics is not about entertainment,” DeSantis said in all of his New Hampshire speeches, usually at the end. He might be trying to prove as much.

This is an edition of 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.When we’re deciding what to eat (and what not to eat), human beings tend to rely on conventional wisdom. Junk food is bad for you. Eating too quickly is bad for you. And tasting an apple that’s been sitting alone in an office for at least 438 days? Really bad for you.These are just a few examples on a long list of commonly accepted food principles that Atlantic writers have disproved or questioned in recent years. Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream, David Merrit Johns reported in our May magazine issue. Our science writer Katie Wu recently found that fast eaters like herself aren’t necessarily “doomed to metabolic misfortune.” And, yes, our science editor Rachel Gutman-Wei tasted the apple, which was left alone at the Atlantic offices at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Although she probably wouldn’t recommend that you reach for an old-apple appetizer, she learned from experts that apples are more protected than some other fruits against water loss and microbe attacks, and that the specific apple she was studying had been preserved remarkably well.Today’s newsletter explores the many pieces of food wisdom our writers have challenged—sometimes at personal risk—in the name of science, or even just in the name of curiosity. Although I’m slightly worried about my colleagues’ self-preservational instincts, I’m also grateful to them for sharing these wild and wondrous findings.Weird Food FactsNutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result By David Merritt JohnsStudies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it.A Crumpled, Dried-Out Relic of the Pandemic By Rachel Gutman-WeiI returned to my office and found an apple that had somehow not rotted away.Eating Fast Is Bad for You … Right?By Katherine J. WuThe widespread advice to go slow is neither definitive nor universal.Still Curious? Unfortunately, some cicadas taste like nature’s gushers: If you must eat them, go for air-fried, advised the writer Haley Weiss, who tasted a variety of them when Brood X was taking over parts of the U.S. in 2021. Expiration dates are meaningless: Although there’s no perfect way to know whether food is safe or not, there are better ways than expiration dates to tell, Yasmin Tayag wrote last year. Other Diversions NASA learns the ugly truth about UFOs. The indignity of grocery shopping How to watch a movie in 15 easy steps P.S.I’ll leave you with photos of an astounding recent food event that doesn’t come with gastrointestinal risk but carries its own dangers: the annual Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake, in which participants chase a nine-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down a steep and uneven hill.— Isabel

My love of going to the movies during the day began with my job. As a magazine editor tasked in the 2010s with finding entertainment stories, I often attended film screenings for journalists, many of which were scheduled for the early morning so that we could get to writing afterward. At first, I viewed these excursions as merely a professional obligation. I would walk into the screening bleary-eyed, coffee and pastry in hand, and slump into my seat. And yet, each time I emerged from the dark theater some two hours later, I felt revitalized—ready to take on the day. If the life wisdom espoused by self-improvement columns and my grizzled colleagues was “Do the hardest thing first,” I was taking the opposite approach. I was beginning my day doing the most pleasurable thing. It was, quite literally, an eye-opener.Nearly a decade later, my soft spot for matinees remains. Although I’m no longer working as an editor, I still utilize weekends and holidays for early jaunts to the theater whenever I can. These showings have numerous advantages over their evening counterparts. The tickets are typically cheaper, for one. Daytime movie audiences also tend to be more relaxed, and to go alone. Walk into an 11 a.m. screening of Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and you’ll find yourself among kindred spirits: people in sweats who’ve chosen to start their day in the space between public and private, hiding out from the larger world while still taking part in it. Earlier in the day, before many of life’s obligations have had a chance to weigh on you, moviegoing can be an even greater sensory feast than usual: One can more easily pay attention to the flavor of rich, buttery popcorn; to the oxblood velvet of the seats; to the tiny white aisle lights, twinkling invitingly like an airport runway. The luxury of time sprawling out before you makes everything feel elevated.[Read: How my wife and I took back our Sundays]Most of all, when I get to start the day with a film, I am reminded that culture is an integral part of life. Often, my weeknight Netflix consumption is a necessary form of self-absentia, a passive consumer experience meant to rid myself of the day’s stresses. By that time, I’m just looking for a soft landing. But the rare joy of a matinee foregrounds a movie as something worth my utmost attention. I’m hardly the only one who feels this way. As a composition student at Juilliard in the 1940s, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell frequently skipped classes and instead went to the movies during the day. These trips left such an impression on Cavell that he would later write, “Memories of movies are strand over strand with memories of my life.”Many times, a movie before noon can be a guilty pleasure, like cake for breakfast. Other times, the clarity of the morning can lead to moments of genuine introspection through cinema. And then there are instances when the film itself matters less than the time that a matinee facilitates with friends and family.[Read: The guilt-free pleasure of airplane movies]Case in point: Some years ago, my father told me he’d begun experiencing lapses in his short-term memory and was contemplating seeing a doctor. A retired physics teacher who’d made his living explaining complex scientific concepts, he was starting to find even simple ideas difficult to articulate. When I gave him a book for his birthday, a bulging spy novel by the author Daniel Silva that my mother had suggested, he turned it over in his hands, seemingly confused by how it had gotten there. It would be years before we had an official diagnosis, but we knew that my once-brilliant father was in decline.People with dementia tend to be a little sharper in the mornings than at night, so my family began scheduling excursions early in the day—including going to the movies. That first winter, we avoided most of the crush of holiday movie crowds by catching a 10:30 a.m. screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. A storm had dumped several inches of snow on southeastern Wisconsin, but we still made it in time to grab coffees from the concession stand before taking our seats. Afterward, while standing on the curb and warily eyeing the icy parking lot, I asked my dad what he’d thought of the film. “Best one so far,” he said.I can’t say I agreed, but who cares? I realized, at that moment, that it didn’t much matter whether Han died or Leia lived, or even if my dad remembered who those characters were. In the comfortable silence of the theater, we had sat side by side and traveled to another galaxy, all before lunch. We stepped out, blinking in the midday sun, marveling at how much time we had left.

The view from nowhere came from somewhere.

China is a more formidable adversary than the Soviet Union ever was, and the world is less divisible.