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Putin’s Nuclear Theatrics
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Last spring, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would station nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus. Evidence suggests that this move is imminent, but it is strategically meaningless.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Why Oregon’s drug decriminalization failed DNA tests are uncovering the true prevalence of incest. Is the destruction of Gaza making Israel any safer? Jake Tapper: Finally, justice for C. J. Rice Cold War GamesLast week, Foreign Policy reported that Putin was in the process of making good on his announcement from last spring to station Russian nuclear arms in Belarus, thus putting Russia’s nuclear-strike forces that much closer to both Ukraine and NATO. Foreign Policy attributed the news to “Western officials,” but so far, only Lithuania’s defense minister has offered a public confirmation. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko claimed in December that weapons had arrived in his country, but no public evidence confirmed that assertion, and so far, no Western governments or intelligence services have commented on this news.What intelligence analysts are likely seeing at a base they’ve been watching in the Belarusian town of Asipovichy, however, are the kinds of preparations one might expect when nuclear weapons are on the move. Nuclear warheads cannot just be stashed in an armory; their presence requires special infrastructure measures (fences, guard units, and other signs) that are relatively easy to spot.If this news is confirmed—and it is certainly possible it will be—how much would such a move change the situation in Europe, and especially Russia’s danger to the North Atlantic Alliance? And why would Putin do this at all?The answer to the first question, as I wrote last spring, is that moving short-range nuclear missiles means virtually nothing as a military issue. Right now Russia can hit anything it wants in Europe or North America without shuffling around a single weapon. The Kremlin has options to attack NATO bases with small weapons launched over a matter of a few hundred miles, or it could destroy New York and Washington with city-killing warheads launched from the heart of Russia. (The U.S. and NATO have the same options against Russia, and the same kinds of weapons.) As Rose Gottemoeller, the former deputy secretary-general of NATO, told Foreign Policy, moving Russian nuclear arms into Belarus “does not change the threat environment at all.”This may seem counterintuitive: How can moving nuclear weapons closer to NATO have so little effect on the overall threat to the West? In purely military terms, the answer lies in the nature of nuclear weapons and the systems Russia has deployed for years in the region.Nuclear weapons are not merely super-artillery with better range and more destructive power. Mounted on short-range missiles, it doesn’t matter where they begin their journey; the target nation will see them only after launch and have no chance of evading what is about to happen in only a few minutes. A missile from Russia or a missile from Belarus makes no difference; Russia already borders Ukraine and NATO, and moving some short-range missiles further west into another nation that shares the same borders is, in a strictly military sense, meaningless.More to the point, no matter where those launches come from, they can happen only with Putin’s finger on the trigger in Moscow. If Russia has placed nuclear arms in Belarus, it confirms only that Belarus really is one of Putin’s imperial holdings, and that Lukashenko is little more than a Kremlin subcontractor whose power is mostly limited to abusing Belarusians. (Consider the fate of the mutinous Russian military contractor Yevgeny Prigozhin, who rebelled against Putin and then apparently relied on Lukashenko’s word in a deal for safe passage in the summer of 2023. He was later assassinated anyway when Putin’s regime blew Prigozhin from the sky as he flew over Russia, according to U.S. intelligence.)Besides, if Putin means to start and fight (and die in) a nuclear war, he needs nothing from Lukashenko, and he gains nothing from moving some of his nuclear arsenal to Belarus. If anything, the Kremlin is buying itself some extra security and transportation headaches by moving nukes around—and doing so under the prying eyes of multiple Western intelligence agencies. It’s not a smart play, but neither was the decision to mount a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.Why, then, is Putin doing this?Putin is a product both of the Soviet political system in which he grew up and the Cold War that ended in the defeat of his beloved U.S.S.R. He is counting on anything involving the phrase nuclear weapons to provoke sweaty teeth-clenching in the West, because that’s how it was done in the Bad Old Days. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union used nuclear weapons to signal seriousness and commitment. (In 1973, for example, the Nixon administration increased America’s nuclear-alert status to warn the Kremlin off sending Soviet troops to intervene in the Yom Kippur War.)And because Putin is not a particularly insightful strategist, he probably believes that deploying short-range missiles in Belarus will serve as a kind of Jedi hand-wave that will intimidate the West and make Russia seem strong and willing to take risks. But he is drawing the wrong lessons from the Cold War: The U.S. positioned nuclear weapons in allied nations far forward in Western Europe not only to emphasize the shared risks of the alliance but also because advancing Soviet forces would place NATO in a use-or-lose nuclear dilemma. Putting nuclear weapons in the path of a Soviet invasion was a deterrent strategy meant to warn Moscow that Western commanders, facing rapid defeat, might have to launch before being overrun.No one, however, is going to invade Belarus anytime soon. No matter what happens in Ukraine, Russia’s weapons will rot in their bunkers in Asipovichy unless Putin decides to use them. And if he makes that decision, then he—and the world—will have bigger issues to deal with than whether Alexander Lukashenko is bravely joining the defense of the Russian Motherland. (Lukashenko claims he has a veto over the use of the Russian weapons. Fat chance.) At that point, Putin will have chosen national (and personal) suicide, and once again, some nuclear missiles in Belarus aren’t going to matter that much. But Putin and his circle—many of whom lived at least part-time in the West with their families before sanctions and travel bans were imposed—almost certainly fear that outcome as much as anyone else does. (Even many of the stoic Soviet generals, it turns out, were riven by such fears, as any rational human being would be.)I was one of the people who two years ago cautioned the West against doing anything that would allow Putin to escalate his way out of his disastrous bungles and string of defeats in Ukraine. A nuclear giant fighting a neighbor on the border of a nuclear-armed alliance is inherently dangerous, even if no one wants a wider war. But where this Belarus nuclear caper is concerned, the U.S. and NATO should undertake two clear responses: First, they should roll their eyes at Putin’s clumsy nuclear theatrics. Second, they should step up aid to Ukraine.Related: Putin’s rabble of “thin-necked henchmen” What’s happening in Russia is not an election. Today’s News Donald Trump and his co-defendants could not make the $464 million bond in their New York civil fraud case after failing to find an insurance company that would underwrite the bond, according to Trump’s lawyers. Putin won his fifth term in an election that was widely denounced for having an undemocratic process; he will lead Russia for another six years. The Biden administration finalized a ban on the last type of asbestos that is still known to be used in some roofing materials, textiles, cement, and automotive parts in the United States. The ban set a phaseout timeline for usage in manufacturing that will take more than a decade. Evening Read Carol M. Highsmith / Buyenlarge / Getty Scientists Are Moving Forests NorthBy John Tibbetts On a brisk September morning, Brian Palik’s footfalls land quietly on a path in flickering light, beneath a red-pine canopy in Minnesota’s iconic Northwoods. A mature red pine, also called Norway pine, is a tall, straight overstory tree that thrives in cold winters and cool summers. It’s the official Minnesota state tree and a valued target of its timber industry. But red pine’s days of dominance here could fade. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic What Caitlin Clark’s fans are missing Kanye’s creepy comeback Josh Barro: Sonia Sotomayor should retire now. A suspicious pattern alarming the Ukrainian military The drama kings of tech Why Biden’s pro-worker stance isn’t working “All we must do is survive four years.” Culture Break Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty. Read. Hwang Bo-reum’s debut novel, Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, follows a character who quits her corporate job to open a bookstore—only to discover that resisting the culture of work takes work too.Try this tip. Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel recently met a friend who gave him a key piece of advice on the smart way to order good wine at a restaurant.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Speaking of nuclear weapons—and I wish we weren’t—it’s important to understand how the Cold War shaped the arms race and produced the nuclear systems and strategies that are still with us today. I will immodestly suggest taking a look at the new Netflix documentary series Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. I say “immodestly” because I’m in most of the episodes; in my previous life, I was a professor at the Naval War College, and I’ve written books about the Cold War, Russia, and nuclear weapons. (And unlike in my Emmy-snubbed star turn in Succession, I actually speak in Turning Point.) The series has several experts and former policy makers in it, and some fascinating archival footage.Those of us who participated would probably disagree here and there on some of the points in the series, but that’s part of what makes it worth watching, especially if you pair it with a good general history of the Cold War. I would suggest something by John Gaddis or Odd Arne Westad, among others, but on nuclear issues, there’s no better and more readable history than John Newhouse’s War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, which was the companion volume to a PBS series many years ago. It’s out of print now, but used copies are still available online.— TomStephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.Explore all of our newsletters here.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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AI for the People, Courtesy of … Elon Musk?
Transparency, or the appearance of it, is the technology’s new norm.
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How Kanye West Keeps Coming Back
The funny thing about the concept of cancel culture is that its popularization coincided with the demise of the mechanisms through which a person might truly be exiled from public life. The mainstream is now fractured into pieces; former gatekeepers in the media and entertainment industry are constantly undermined; the internet has created anarchic new routes for public figures to reach an audience. When an entertainer is canceled, it mostly means that certain moneyed interests—such as a publicly traded company that must cater to the diverse sensitivities of investors or consumers—are more hesitant to work with them. But it doesn’t mean that regular people can’t, or won’t, still engage with whoever succeeds at grabbing their attention.These facts have been proved time and again in popular comebacks for disgraced figures, but the recent success of Ye, formerly Kanye West, is a particularly telling example. Las week, “Carnival,” off his recently released collaborative album with Ty Dolla $ign, became his first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 since 2011. It’s an eerily apt hit for a cultural climate charged by visions of incipient fascism and war, and a case study in how embattled artists can exploit the power of a good hook.Never an uncontroversial celebrity, Ye went even further in 2022 by repeatedly praising Hitler during an interview with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Adidas, which allegedly put up with behind-the-scenes bigotry and abuse from Ye for more than a decade, exited a profitable deal with him. Even Elon Musk, who’s hardly known for sensitivity toward the Jews, felt compelled to briefly boot Ye off X (formerly Twitter) after the rapper posted a swastika.In the run-up to his new album, Vultures 1—by ¥$, his supergroup with Dolla—Ye published an apology in Hebrew, in which he said, “It was not my intention to offend or demean.” His sincerity seemed dubious, given that he’s also recently been photographed wearing the merchandise of a neo-Nazi metal band. Vultures included collaborations with prominent hip-hop figures such as Dolla and Travis Scott, but Ye had trouble clearing samples from Ozzy Osbourne, Nicki Minaj, and the estate of Donna Summer. The album temporarily disappeared from streaming because of distribution companies’ reluctance to work with him.[Read: I’m not Black, I’m Kanye]Ye’s rapping on Vultures was far from repentant. “‘Crazy, bipolar, anti-Semite’ / And I’m still the king” went one refrain. In another line, he defended himself by using the same logic that concentration-camp guards could have used to refer to their sex slaves: “How I’m antisemitic? / I just fucked a Jewish bitch.” The music itself was grandiose, churning, and gothic—but like most of Ye’s work since the mid-2010s, it was also underwritten, poorly paced, and mostly forgettable. Yet “Carnival” did stand out, thanks to a sampled vocal of Italian soccer fans rowdily chanting the hook. In his verse, Ye riffed on his pariah status in the gasping tone of a street preacher: “Now I’m Ye-Kelly, bitch / now I’m Bill Cosby, bitch / Now I’m Puff Daddy rich / that’s Me Too me rich.”For any song to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100 these days does not necessarily mean it is an era-defining, unescapable smash. The construction of the Billboard charts factors in streaming, which allows pluralities of fans to send a song up the charts by listening to it on repeat. (Remember, before streaming, the number of times you played a song privately didn’t influence its popularity.) Gunning for the No. 1 spot has thus become like a game of capture the flag for pop fandoms and even political projects. Ye posted repeatedly about the song’s chart performance, encouraging diehards to help push “Carnival” to No. 1. But, holding strong at No. 4 on this week's Hot 100, the track is likely also catching on among a broad base of hip-hop fans.The song’s appeal is partly musical: Its adrenalizing vocal loop sits atop a bone-crushing bass line recalling Sheck Wes’s “Mo Bamba,” the 2018 song that helped set the template for a recent strain of hip-hop that seeks to create punk-rock-style mosh pits. The song also features the rage rapper Playboi Carti, a young cult celebrity who hasn’t released a full album since 2020. Ye’s own verse is situated midway through the song, among those from three other emcees (Dolla, Carti, and Rich the Kid). He’s effectively taking an edgy, subcultural sound and executing it with blockbuster production—a classic pop-star move.What’s more, Ye remains talented at linking his personal mood with a broader social climate. The mesmerizing “Carnival” music video depicts a tableau of men—some looking like skinheads, others like police troopers—brawling with one another. The imagery draws on soccer riots, but also induces thoughts of factional war, male anger, and the apocalypse. Whereas Ye’s lyrics compare him to various alleged monsters such as Cosby, the other featured rappers traffic in more standard-issue pop misogyny, depicting sex as an act of material and physical subjugation. All in all, “Carnival” really does crackle with a sense of menace, a feeling of macho alienation cohering into a mob.“This number #1 is for … the people who won’t be manipulated by the system,” Ye wrote on Instagram. He’s right, if you consider the system to be the entrenched commercial institutions motivated to ice out Nazis. But in other ways, he has used the system available to him—the levers of streaming and social media—to win this hit. And the record industry, in which moral postures are informed by money-minded risk management, may well warm to him a bit now that he’s at No. 1. For example, last week, he played at a major festival, Los Angeles’s Rolling Loud—a low-effort performance in which he essentially did karaoke onstage.To enjoy a song as catchy and powerful as “Carnival” is, of course, not to endorse any particular ideology; the song’s surging sound is an equally effective spur to lift weights, vent about work, or plan a coup. Nevertheless, the song’s popularity is being spun by Ye as vindication of his own righteousness, and will no doubt further energize the worst segments of his supporters—such as the ones who draped a banner over a highway that read Kanye was right about the Jews. Pop music ultimately succeeds or fails according to principles of pleasure, not politics, but the perception to the contrary holds its own danger.
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DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest
People are discovering the truth about their biological parents with DNA—and learning that incest is far more common than many think.
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Is the Destruction of Gaza Making Israel Any Safer?
Israeli forces are killing thousands of innocent civilians and badly damaging their country’s standing with its most important partners, including the United States. Israel has also no doubt severely degraded Hamas’s military capabilities, but the question needs to be asked: Is the country’s furious response to the Hamas invasion of October 7 making Israel any safer? At best, it’s still too soon to say—but on balance, what I see worries me.It sometimes takes years to fully appreciate the strategic significance of a conflict. Great victories look more ambiguous in hindsight, and catastrophic defeats sometimes have silver linings. That seems especially true for Israel.In 2006, Israel fought a 34-day war with Hezbollah that most observers at the time classed as a decisive victory for the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese militant group. Eighteen years later, that conflict looks instead like the moment when Israel reestablished a measure of cross-border deterrence that it had lost when it withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. The Israeli ground onslaught in 2006 may have been disjointed and underwhelming, but the aerial campaign was ferocious; memory of it has almost certainly contributed to the halfheartedness of Hezbollah’s commitment of resources to the current conflict, as well as to the years of relative peace in between.[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: It’s not too late to give Gaza a better future]Conversely, Israel’s greatest military victory—the Six-Day War of 1967, in which the country shocked itself and the world by rapidly triumphing over its three most dangerous state adversaries—also enabled the West Bank settlement enterprise, which now threatens Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish-majority democracy and makes a clean separation from the Palestinian people almost impossible.In focusing on the question of Israeli security, I don’t mean to minimize the horrific human suffering this war has caused for Palestinians, many Israelis, and countless Lebanese. Indeed, that suffering, especially the destruction of Palestinian lives and infrastructure, could directly and negatively affect Israel’s security in the future. But the United States has made a commitment, going back at least 50 years, to safeguard Israeli security—a commitment that I, as a former U.S. policy maker, was once charged with upholding. And so it seems worth asking whether this war is actually advancing that goal or hurting it.The good news for Israel and its remaining international partners is that the Israel Defense Forces still have a serious, competent officer corps—one that has fought its way through some very challenging urban terrain in Gaza with relatively minimal friendly casualties. At the beginning of this conflict, I anticipated that the IDF would struggle to design and execute such a campaign. Fighting in dense areas is very difficult for even the best-drilled units—ask a U.S. Marine what Fallujah was like in 2004—and Israel relies heavily on part-time soldiers and conscripts. But the IDF has worked its way through the territory slowly and deliberately, while preserving combat power in case Hezbollah decides to launch a full-scale attack on Israel’s north.The bad news, however, is that the IDF has made clear—repeatedly—that it does not prioritize preserving the lives of noncombatants relative to other aims. This indifference has strategic as well as moral repercussions. Biden-administration officials were reportedly horrified by the disregard that Israeli leaders showed for the deaths of more than 100 Palestinians trying to reach humanitarian aid a few weeks ago. Now Washington finds itself in the supremely embarrassing position of having to build a pier to deliver aid to Gaza, because its principal ally in the region—which receives more than $3.8 billion in U.S. taxpayer money each year—is apparently slow-rolling the delivery of humanitarian necessities to a population on the brink of famine.As a largely conscript force augmented by reservists, the IDF lacks a strong noncommissioned-officer corps—the more experienced junior leaders who provide tactical direction in many Western armies and, crucially, help instill order and discipline. Gaza has revealed the best and the worst of this structure: the best, in that the IDF has shown itself to be a truly cohesive national institution, capable of fighting together as citizen-soldiers despite the bitter political and religious divisions in Israel; the worst, because the IDF has shown itself to be undisciplined, reckless, and willing to use large amounts of artillery and white-phosphorus rounds in urban areas, tendencies that undermine the credibility of Israel’s public claims that it is doing its best to minimize civilian casualties.Israel complains that it is fighting in challenging and often subterranean conditions in Gaza, which is true. Israel also complains that it is held to a higher standard than other regional militaries, which is also true. Few in the international community spoke out, for example, when the Iraqi army leveled half of Mosul in its effort to expel the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017. But as a democracy that claims to adhere to the international conventions that protect civilians in combat, Israel must realize—as the United States realized during its own wars in the region—that its actions will be measured against those commitments.The IDF’s history of being deployed as an occupation force, particularly in southern Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, has coarsened it and led to strikingly callous and deadly applications of force. Some of its soldiers engage in crimes and abuses that may be commonplace in wartime, but whose public exposure understandably erodes international support. Pictures on social media show Israeli soldiers laughing and joking while destroying the belongings of Palestinian civilians. Those videos and images are copied, pasted, and widely broadcast across the world, giving further fuel to Israel’s opponents, embarrassing Israel’s few remaining allies, and leaving Israel ever more isolated internationally. These soldiers are no doubt operating under high levels of stress. No doubt they are also, like all Israelis, traumatized by the many acts of sadistic cruelty inflicted on the elderly, women, and children by Hamas. But understanding these pressures is not the same as excusing them. A professional army that says it holds itself to Western legal standards must not be governed by the atavistic desire for revenge.[Photos: Gaza on the brink of famine]Meanwhile, the physical destruction of Gaza—including housing, schools, and hospitals serving the population there—will make governing the Strip very difficult for whoever attempts it after the shooting stops. I don’t see Palestinians or other Arabs stepping up to take that burden off Israel’s shoulders, so most likely, Israel is making its own life harder by damaging so much necessary infrastructure. For all that Israel appears to be waging a punitive campaign against the people of Gaza, this campaign looks likely to end up punishing Israel as well.Finally, wars are fought for political ends and are therefore most often judged by their ability to achieve those ends. One week after October 7, the military strategist Lawrence Freedman wrote in the Financial Times: “Israel is trying to develop a military strategy to deal with the Hamas threat while it lacks a political strategy. For the moment it is impossible to identify a future modus vivendi with Gaza. No deals with Hamas will be trusted but nor is there a certain route to eliminate Hamas.”Five months later, the problem is the same: Israel has neither a military strategy for eliminating Hamas nor a political strategy for living with Gaza. A long-term agreement with the Palestinians is hard to imagine at a time when Israel’s left camp—already decimated by the Second Intifada two decades ago, in which Hamas and other groups launched a series of suicide bombings against civilian targets in order to undermine the possibility of a two-state solution—has seen its remaining domestic credibility shattered by the Hamas attacks. And Hamas, of course, has promised, again and again, to keep fighting until Israel is destroyed.The picture here is bleak, but this conflict could conceivably create opportunities for Israel. For example, Saudi Arabia has floated the prospect of diplomatic recognition in exchange for a Palestinian state. But Israeli domestic politics are fractious, particularly regarding the question of Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank—a crucial point for any prime minister seeking to take advantage of such opportunities.Israel is in fact headed in the opposite direction at the moment: It will need years, perhaps even decades, to recover from the traumas of October 7 before its leaders will be able to show the same courage in confronting the political right as the IDF has shown in confronting Hamas. Israeli politics are especially febrile and plastic at the moment, but the right seems unlikely to be disempowered in the near future, even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is somehow dethroned. By the time realistic politics take hold, whatever opportunities this horrible war creates for Israel may have been lost.
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Finally, Justice
C. J. Rice was first arraigned in 2011 on the 11th floor of 1301 Filbert Street, a towering, steel-framed criminal-court complex two miles from the South Philadelphia neighborhood where he’d grown up. In 2013, on the fifth floor of the same building, Rice was tried on four counts of attempted murder, found guilty, and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison. For three years, he appealed the sentence, appearing on the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. After each attempt failed, he was shuttled back to a state prison in rural Coal Township, Pennsylvania.This morning, on the eighth floor, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office announced that it no longer considers Rice a viable suspect in the shooting for which he had been found guilty. His conviction had already been overturned by a federal court in November, on the grounds that his attorney had been constitutionally deficient. In today’s decision, the D.A.’s office formally dismissed the charges against him. The D.A.’s decision fully exonerates Rice. He is now a free man. He had been imprisoned for more than 12 years.[From the November 2022 issue: Jake Tapper on his father, a Philadelphia teenager, and the empty promise of the Sixth Amendment]Rice was the subject of my November 2022 cover story for The Atlantic, “Good Luck, Mr. Rice,” which investigated his trial and the shortcomings of Sandjai Weaver, his court-appointed attorney. The case against Rice was always weak. No physical evidence tied Rice to the shooting for which he was arrested, and the single victim who identified him had told police three times that she didn’t know who had shot her before eventually changing her story. Yet Weaver failed to gather exculpatory evidence and repeatedly missed opportunities to challenge the state’s case against her client. A source with the D.A.’s office told me that Rice’s conviction likely resulted from his representation being so bad.Rice had compelling evidence of his innocence: Three weeks prior to his alleged crime, he had been shot in a separate incident that had left him hospitalized for days. When he visited his pediatrician for follow-up care, he could barely walk. That pediatrician was my father, Theodore Tapper. Six days later, the Philadelphia police announced that they sought his patient as a suspect. My father was dumbfounded. Witnesses had seen the perpetrators of Rice’s alleged crime running from the scene. “I don’t think it’s physically possible,” he told me.My father campaigned for Rice’s release for more than a decade, testifying at his trial and appeals, even marshaling a team of specialized lawyers to his defense and—after lobbying by me—allowing me to report on the story. Today’s announcement is the vindication of his efforts, the culmination of an 83-year-old physician’s commitment to a patient whom everyone else seemed to have forgotten.For Rice, now 30, it’s a chance to finally live an adult life, set his own schedule, choose his own clothes, turn lights on and off at his leisure. When he first visited 1301 Filbert for his arraignment, Blockbuster was still renting DVDs and America was still at war in Iraq. This morning, when the announcement came, Rice wasn’t even in the building. He’d spent enough time there. “That’s behind me now,” Rice said.On his last day in prison, Rice received something of a send-off: His cellblock at State Correctional Institution–Chester, the medium-security prison to which he was transferred after my story was published, was put on lockdown and he was strip-searched. Rice stood compliantly as guards and German shepherds scoured his room. He was used to the invasive procedure, but he was still irritated.Clothes off, arms straight out, then up. Behind one ear, then behind the other. A guard made him open his mouth, lift his tongue. He ran his fingers through Rice’s hair and then his beard. Rice knew the drill by then: lift his penis, then his scrotum, turn around, squat, cough.Rice had been through hundreds of these searches over the years. During lockdowns. Before and after every in-person visit. The searches were humiliating, degrading, but also routine. Nothing found. His day proceeded as usual. He went for a walk in the yard with his fellow inmates, then made a phone call to his brother.Before long, he was interrupted by a correctional officer.“Mr. Rice!” she said. “Mr. Rice!”Rice made eye contact, his brother still on the line.“Mr. Rice!” she continued, insistent.Rice said goodbye, hung up the phone, and approached her desk.“Mr. Rice, do you have a lot of property and stuff?”“No,” he said.“Well, pack your stuff, because you’re going home today.”It was December 19, 2023. After Rice’s conviction was overturned in federal court, his lawyers arranged his release from prison as the D.A.’s office weighed its next move in the case.Rice had just turned 30. He had been 17 in 2011 when he turned himself in to the Philadelphia police, having heard they wanted to talk with him. Now he was being told that he would be signing out of the Department of Corrections. “I’m ready,” he told himself.As Rice gathered his things, Amelia Maxfield, a lawyer then working with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, waited in the prison lobby. When she visited clients, guards weren’t typically effusive. Today was different. The assistant superintendent chatted with her casually. She sat through a shift change, and a number of staffers made a point to tell her how happy they were for Rice, what a great person he was. Some even waited past their shift to say goodbye to him.Rice had written to Maxfield and the Innocence Project asking for help, and the group became involved in his case not long after my Atlantic story was published. They worked with Karl Schwartz, a Philadelphia defense attorney, to file a writ of habeas corpus on Rice’s behalf, a petition in federal court challenging the legality of a person’s incarceration. Soon, Rice’s team had grown to include Nilam Sanghvi of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project; Ginger Anders, a seasoned defense attorney of the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson; and Donald Verrilli, a Solicitor General under President Obama. Verrilli became involved when I ran into him at a restaurant, got his cell number, and texted him my Atlantic story. Washington, D.C., is a town where lots of people make well-meaning but ultimately empty promises about helping people with various projects. This was not one of those instances.In his petition, Schwartz argued that Weaver had fallen short of the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to effective counsel. She’d made a number of inexplicable blunders while representing Rice: She never subpoenaed his phone records, which Rice said would prove that he wasn’t at the scene of the crime; she also failed to challenge the victim who identified Rice on why she had changed her story. In his petition, Schwartz chose to focus on one particularly egregious error: Weaver’s decision to allow the prosecution to introduce a theory that one of the victims of the shooting had shot Rice earlier that month. That narrative had no evidentiary basis, but it suggested that Rice had had a motive to retaliate.Habeas petitions are long shots, succeeding in just 0.3 percent of cases, according to one 2007 study. Ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claims are perhaps even more difficult to establish, owing to a high burden of proof set in the 1984 Supreme Court case Strickland v. Washington. But on September 22, 2023, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office conceded that the retaliation theory was “prejudicial” and that Weaver’s decision to allow it was “objectively unreasonable.” It agreed, in other words, that she had been ineffective. On October 23, a U.S. magistrate judge affirmed Schwartz’s habeas petition. The decision then went to Nitza I. Quiñones Alejandro, a district judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She officially overturned Rice’s conviction on November 27.[Andrew Aoyama: C. J. Rice’s conviction is overturned]That put Rice’s fate back in the hands of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office. Larry Krasner, elected D.A. in 2017, could either retry Rice or drop all of the charges. In the meantime, Rice was back to a legal state akin to pretrial detention. He could leave prison under a bail agreement.Rice walked out of SCI-Chester that evening with a big smile on his face. He gave Maxfield a warm embrace.“Amelia!” he shouted.“Hey!” she said.He carried a tub of his legal work, documents he’d amassed over the years as he’d attempted to prove his innocence. They walked to Maxfield’s rental car. He seemed delirious, in disbelief. He kept saying “Wow!”“Do you want to change your clothes in the waiting-room bathroom?” Maxfield asked. Rice was still wearing his orange prison sweatshirt and hat. Maxfield had brought a change for him from his girlfriend, Shawna, but the last place he wanted to go was back into SCI-Chester. So they got in the car and drove to a local diner, where Shawna was waiting.“C.J. is an incredible person, and his determination over the past 12 years has been remarkable,” Maxfield told me. “The problems that led to C.J.’s wrongful conviction—unreliable eyewitnesses, ineffective assistance of counsel, and a poor police investigation—infect so many cases in Philadelphia and across the country.” Maxfield now works for the Exoneration Project, an organization that provides free legal services to the wrongfully convicted. “We are so happy that C.J. is home and free, and we look forward to continuing the fight for those who are not.”“I’m glad to see this wrong righted,” Rice texted me once he was out. Still, his experience had destroyed his confidence in the legal system. “Can’t call it a mistake. Because the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s judicial system had at least five separate times to correct this specific situation, and chose not to act in the interest of justice,” he continued, referring to his trial and subsequent appeals. Either the Pennsylvania court system failed to seriously review his case, he said, or it did review it and “chose to allow a clear injustice to stand.”Rice knows Weaver was bad at her job, but he sees many other systemic reasons why he ended up in prison unfairly. He seems motivated to join the legal system and help others like him. He is whip smart. He should be a lawyer. (Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic). On Sunday, February 4, my father traveled from his home outside Philadelphia to meet up with Rice, who is far from the city, trying to build a new life.My father was anxious about how this reunion would go. Though freeing Rice had become one of the great causes of his life, my father hadn’t been within arm’s length of him since September 2011, when Rice came to his office and he inspected the more than two dozen staples holding his torso together after Rice had been shot. Since then, they’d spent years corresponding by mail.When my father arrived at the diner where they’d planned to meet, he emailed Rice from the parking lot, telling him he was there. A moment later, Rice appeared at his window.“I got out of my car,” my dad recalls. “We stared at one another briefly and then gave each other a huge hug.”My father took in how much Rice had changed since they’d last met. In addition to growing two or three inches, he’s put on about 80 pounds of muscle.My dad ordered French toast and sweetened raspberry tea. Rice had tea and a Mexican wrap. As had been their practice over the years they had exchanged letters, Rice shared some of his writing. He had left behind the college-ruled paper he used in prison for a new iPhone. These were his reflections on being free: It was a shock to the senses, in both a figurative and literal way. The simple act of a hug is so warming and appreciated, something I’ve become so deprived of for over the past dozen years or so. Amazing how hugs make you feel human. At the same time it feels real but I guess that’s where I ask someone to pinch me so I know I’m not dreaming. Ouch. That’s because it’s reality. Wow. A lot to take in … like I came out of the twilight zone. Overwhelmingly humble. I guess that’s the best way to try and describe the feeling. Many people who I did not get to see again, guess that’s a part of life and have to keep on keeping on. After about 90 minutes, my dad and Rice stood, hugged, and returned to their respective homes.“The ruling this morning was the correct one—except C.J. never should have been charged with any crime in the first place,” my dad said today. “The legal system churns on its own merry way, and justice is seldom found. Twelve years of C.J.’s life were taken away from him without any compensation.”That said, some of the photos from my dad reuniting with Rice show a big, relieved smile on his face, a joy that isn’t a common sight.When Rice was first arrested, in 2011, his niece Promise was just a month old; he could hold her by cupping his hands together. She’s now 12. When they talk after school, Rice says, he peppers her with questions about what’s happened during her day, what she’s learned. “You’d be surprised by how real life is out here,” he said. He’s been fascinated by food-delivery apps, streaming services.Since his release, he’s tried to spend as much time as possible with his family. Two cousins and a nephew were born while he was incarcerated. Before he was transferred to SCI-Chester, in 2023, a three-hour in-person visit required five hours of driving, round trip, from Philadelphia.This past weekend, Rice was sitting by a river, far from the city where he was found guilty and sent to prison. He counted seven seagulls flying overhead, watched a father race his three children down the riverbank. “There’s so much space out here,” he said. It was just past 4 p.m.; if he were still in prison, he noted, he’d be locked in his cell until “nighttime rec” at 6 p.m., staring at a cold, gray wall.“I’m gonna sit here for about 40 minutes and just get it together,” he said. In the future, there will be college, a career, a family. For now, he’s content to let the time pass.
theatlantic.com
What Caitlin Clark’s Fans Are Missing
A wider conversation about how many Black women athletes have been marginalized in this sport, despite their invaluable contributions.
theatlantic.com
The Drama Kings of Tech
One Tuesday last month, Mark Zuckerberg uploaded a video to Instagram, but not to his Stories, where it would quickly disappear. This one was a keeper. He put it right on his permanent grid. It shows Zuckerberg sitting on his living-room couch in comfy pants and a dark T-shirt, while his friend Kenny records him through Meta’s mixed-reality headset. Zuckerberg proceeds to rattle off a three-and-a-half-minute critique of Apple’s new mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro. His tone is surprisingly combative. At certain points, he sounds like a forum post come to life. “Some fanboys get upset” when people question Apple, he says, but his company’s much cheaper headset is not only a better value; it is a better product, “period.” CEOs of the world’s most valuable companies don’t often star in this kind of video. It reminded me of a commercial that a car-dealership owner might make about a rival.I don’t mean to moralize. Marketing is a matter of taste, and Zuckerberg is entitled to his. I mention this video only because it’s part of a larger atmosphere of chippiness in the world of Big Tech. Just last year, a slow-burn feud between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk flared into threats of violence—albeit refereed—when Musk suggested that the two face off in a cage match. “Send Me Location,” Zuckerberg replied on Instagram. In the weeks that followed, Musk, who habitually lobs sexual taunts at his rivals, called Zuckerberg a “cuck” and challenged him to “a literal dick measuring contest.” But amid the tough talk, Musk also seemed to be playing for time. He said that he’d contacted Italy’s prime minister and minister of culture, and that they had agreed to host the fight in an “epic location” among the ruins of ancient Rome. Zuckerberg implied that this was all news to him. Within days, Musk said he would ask his Tesla to drive him to Zuckerberg’s house to fight him in his backyard. He even said that he would livestream it. Alas, Zuckerberg was out of town. Eventually, both men got injured—they are, after all, middle-aged—and the whole idea was abandoned.Captains of industry have been known to mix it up on occasion. Collis Huntington, the American industrialist and railway magnate, once called Leland Stanford a “damned old fool.” Michael Ovitz said that David Geffen was part of a “Gay Mafia,” determined to bring him down. But, to my knowledge, none of them ever proposed a cage match. Even in their histrionics, the drama kings of tech aim to disrupt.Their schoolyard feuding cuts an odd contrast with the earnestness that so often emanates from Silicon Valley. We have long known, for instance, that very serious conflicting views about AI safety played a role in November’s boardroom drama at OpenAI, but it was also driven by interpersonal resentments. Last week, The New York Times reported that before Sam Altman’s ouster, Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, sent Altman a private memo “outlining some of her concerns with his behavior.” According to the Times, she told OpenAI’s board that when Altman went to sell some new strategic direction, he would put on a charming mask, but when people dissented or even just delayed, he would freeze them out. In a statement posted to X, Murati described these anonymous claims as misleading, and said that the previous board members were scapegoating her to save face. Altman reposted Murati’s post with a heart emoji, the lingua franca of reconciliation at OpenAI. Now that he’s back with a new board in place, the company line is: It’s time to move on.Musk, who cannot seem to stand the idea that there might be tech drama somewhere that does not involve him, has been trolling OpenAI relentlessly on X. Last week, he posted a doctored image of Altman holding up a visitor’s pass that read “ClosedAI,” and followed up this past Tuesday with a word-cloud image of the company’s logo, in which every word was lie. (Not his best work.) He also filed a lawsuit against the company. It alleges that by pursuing material gain instead of the good of all humanity, OpenAI’s executives have breached their “founding agreement.” The company responded with a blog post that soberly refuted some of Musk’s claims, but Altman also went to X to respond personally. He tracked down an old Musk post from 2019, in which he had thanked Altman for criticizing Tesla’s naysayers. Altman replied with “anytime” and a salute emoji, implying that Musk is now the one bitterly rooting against the high cause of innovation.Moguls in other sectors rarely put one another on blast like this in public. (They have the decency to call a reporter and do it on background.) It’s hard to know whether this performative strain in tech culture reflects something essential about the industry. Maybe its leaders are just unusually visible, because the legacy media are more interested in them, or because they figure so prominently on the social-media platforms that they operate. Or maybe a few outlier personalities—Musk in particular—are responsible for most of the soap-opera vibes. It could also be the general cultural atmosphere. Over the past 20 years, a fashion for aggrieved and confrontational behavior has migrated out of reality television into the wider entertainment and business worlds, and also into politics, in the person of Donald Trump.If the tech titans weren’t so self-serious, their bad behavior might simply blend into this broader coarsening. Folk wisdom and life experience tell us that rivalries and infighting will emerge, organically, anywhere that there is money and power. That’s why we direct our scrutiny wherever those things accumulate. But the leaders of the tech world want to wave us off, on the grounds that they are playing for higher stakes than just money and power. They tell us that yesterday’s technologists were the framers of our very civilization and that today’s are ushering in a benevolent future. They assure us that they have thought through that future’s risks and know exactly which ones to worry about, up to and including those that may be existential. They insist that they are the grown-ups. We will believe it when we see it.
theatlantic.com
Joe Biden’s Unrequited Love for American Workers
Joe Biden courted the leaders of the Teamsters this week, looking for the endorsement of the 1.3-million-member union. He will probably get it. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, calls him “the most pro-union president in history.” He’s already won the endorsement of many of the country’s most important unions, including the United Auto Workers, the AFSCME public employees’ union, the Service Employees International Union, and the main umbrella organization, the AFL-CIO.Biden’s real concern in November, though, isn’t getting the support of union leaders; it’s winning the support of union members. Labor’s rank and file were a valuable part of his winning coalition in 2020, when, according to AP VoteCast, he got 56 percent of the union vote. Today, things on this front are looking a little shakier, particularly in key electoral battlegrounds. A New York Times/Siena survey of swing states late last year, for instance, found that Biden was tied with Donald Trump among union voters (who, that same survey noted, had voted for Biden by an eight-point margin in the previous general election).That slippage is not itself a reason for Democratic panic, because it suggests that the drop-off in union support has been similar to the decline in support for Biden generally. But the softening support among union voters is striking in light of how hard Biden has tried to win their trust. He has certainly shown his love for workers during his three-plus years in office, but not even unionized workers seem to love him back.[Read: Is Biden the most pro-union president in history?]Biden has made plenty of symbolic and rhetorical gestures, including the exclusion of Tesla CEO Elon Musk from a 2021 electric-vehicle summit at the White House, most likely because of Musk’s anti-union stance, and walking a UAW picket line during the union’s strike against the Big Three carmakers last fall. He’s made support for labor, and the working class generally, a legislative priority, pushing bills that subsidize investments in infrastructure and manufacturing, protect union pension funds, fund apprenticeships, and boost wages for federal contractors. He also kept Trump’s trade tariffs, which industrial unions mostly favored, in place. And the people he appointed to the National Labor Relations Board have handed down a series of rulings that have made it easier for workers to organize and harder for employers to punish them for doing so. To give just one metric (from the Center for American Progress), the NLRB ordered companies to hire back more illegally fired workers in Biden’s first year than it did during Trump’s entire four years in office.Biden has done all of this at a time when unions are enjoying a big surge in popularity. Fifteen years ago, public support for unions, as measured by Gallup, dipped below 50 percent for the first time since it was first surveyed, in the 1930s. Today, more than two-thirds of Americans say they support unions, one of the highest marks since the ’60s, and polling found that two-thirds to three-quarters of Americans supported the recent strikes by the UAW and by Hollywood screenwriters and actors, which not only enjoyed a high profile but were also successful. Perhaps this means that Biden would be doing even worse in the polls if he hadn’t been so pro-labor. But so far, the political rewards seem to have been meager at best.[James Surowiecki: The Big Three’s inevitable collision with the UAW]Some of this can be explained straightforwardly by the fact that the same issues dragging down Biden’s popularity among voters generally, such as inflation and immigration, also hurt him with union voters. That seems particularly true for white men working in old-line industries, a segment of workers who were already disposed to support Trump. (According to a Center for American Progress Action Fund study, white male non-college-educated union workers supported Trump over Biden by 27 points in 2020, though Biden did nine points better with them than he did with white male non-college non-union workers.)On top of this, the percentage of American workers in unions has not risen over the past three years—only about 10 percent of all workers are unionized, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and in the private sector, that proportion falls below 7 percent (despite some high-profile organizing campaigns such as the one at Starbucks). So even though the public has become more supportive of labor organizations, union issues simply have less cultural and political resonance than they once did. And unions themselves are less integral to their members’ daily lives than they once were, particularly in former industrial strongholds that are now swing states, as the Harvard scholars Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol document in their recent book, Rust Belt Union Blues. That means it takes more work to reach union voters and win their support; endorsements from leaders alone won’t deliver workers’ votes.Another dimension of Biden’s limited success is that he faces an opponent in Trump who, unlike most Republican presidential candidates, has also courted union voters aggressively while selling himself as a tribune of the working class. That stand is mostly marketing: During Trump’s presidency, the NLRB was actively hostile to union organizing efforts, and when House Democrats passed a bill that would make joining unions easier for workers and significantly weaken states’ right-to-work laws, the Trump White House threatened to veto it. (The president never got the chance; the bill did not come up for a vote in the Senate.) But Trump’s rhetorical nods toward labor have helped blur the contrast between him and Biden. And the fact that Trump’s signature economic issue is raising tariffs has also helped him with union voters.[David A. Graham: Why isn’t Trump helping the autoworkers?]What that suggests, of course, is that Biden needs to do a better job of sharpening that contrast on labor policy. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. Much of the struggle over workers’ rights and interests today takes place in a courtroom or through administrative hearings or via regulatory changes. This sort of bureaucratic haggling means that it’s hard to make labor issues vivid for voters—even union voters. For all the difference in the NLRB’s record during the Biden administration compared with that under Trump, administrative-agency rulings are not the stuff of a rousing stump speech.These problems are not insurmountable—and the unions themselves will be trying to help Biden surmount them. (The Service Employees International Union, for instance, just announced that it would be spending $200 million on voter education in this election cycle.) And once the presidential campaign gets fully under way, union voters may well move back in Biden’s direction. But Biden’s difficulty in landing their support is a microcosm of his struggles with voters broadly: The way they feel about him seems disconnected from what he’s done.
theatlantic.com
The Cure for Burnout Might Be … Work?
Some of my friends and I keep an accountability tracker to help us stay on top of our goals. Most of us use it to keep tabs on our weekly freelance assignments. Sometime last year, I also started using it to monitor my reading, which is all I really do with my free time anyway. My friends couldn’t understand why these novels needed to invade our tracker—but I liked having my recreational activities on my to-do list. Although it rebranded one of my favorite hobbies as work, this seemed natural enough to me: Anything that brings joy is serious business.This murky line between labor and leisure lies at the core of Hwang Bo-reum’s debut novel, Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop. Through a constellation of characters that orbit the titular store, Hwang explores how a person might choose to counter workism without rejecting work entirely, and how a meaningful life might be built by applying oneself to even the most pleasurable pastimes.Yeongju, a former office employee in Seoul, is suffering from intense burnout: After a career-driven life in which she toiled through vacations and saw her husband in their corporate canteen more often than at home, she quits her job, files for divorce, and moves across the city for a fresh start. She doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life—but she loves to read, and uses her savings to open a bookshop in Hyunam-dong, a neighborhood she chooses because one of the characters in its name means “rest.”But Yeongju quickly realizes that her new life still involves work. She is frequently drowning in book orders, accounting tasks, and inventory checks. When she’s not treading water, she’s hosting a monthly book club or running a popular interview series with authors. Sometimes she will “stew in regret” at all of her freshly assumed responsibilities, but she finds that she usually isn’t satisfied until she completes them.Her bookshop begins to attract a group of regulars and employees who are similarly disillusioned with the corporate world. Through them, Hwang explores the different forms that hard work can take—including in the service of activities that are unrelated to making a living, but add momentum to her characters’ lives. Minjun, the store’s new barista, dropped out of the rat race after a year of job rejections and spends his days diligently studying coffee, films, and yoga. Seungwoo, a dissatisfied former programmer, is “immersing himself in the Korean language.” Jungsuh, who spent eight years as a “permanent contract” worker until “the anger destroyed [her] body,” now comes to the bookshop to meditate and crochet. Mincheol, a high-school student with seemingly little interest in life, sits riveted watching Jungsuh’s knitting needles.Each character has turned away, in one form or another, from inherited notions of success and is looking to find their own. One night, some of them gather to discuss a book with a fitting theme—David Frayne’s The Refusal of Work. The outpouring of frustration about their careers is familiar: The corporate world held no promise of stability, even for those who played the game right; there was always another goal to achieve, without the guarantee of rest. Meanwhile, their bosses kept pressuring them to identify as a “team” or “family.”[Read: The paradox of caring about ‘bullshit’ jobs]As Yeongju and her friends discover, though, true “resistance to work,” undertaken deliberately, also takes work. After the bookshop’s events become more popular, Yeongju begins fielding requests to write for various publications, including a books column for a local paper; she takes “care and pride in writing each piece, even though it felt like she had to squeeze out every last bit of her brain juices.” She feels an affinity for people who “give their utmost to a pursuit” and is initially drawn to Minjun because he begins practicing his barista skills on the bookstore’s “no barista Mondays”—his off days.Such moments underscore that Hwang’s characters don’t actually want to stop being industrious; they’re just trying to build up a more satisfying understanding of work for themselves, one that doesn’t bind their “whole identity and value” to a company. They discover, for one, the benefits of goals that are short-term, simple, and malleable. “Instead of agonising over what you should do, think about putting effort into whatever you’re doing,” Seungwoo, the programmer turned writer, tells Mincheol, the disenchanted high-schooler. Minjun “anchor[s] himself with coffee,” simply focusing on making the best cup he can. The point is not for them to clearly define what makes them happy but rather to recognize the moments in which they are. What the bookshop’s denizens come to see is that the problems with their former office environments—no matter how widespread—couldn’t always explain why they were miserable, or teach them how not to be. What they can do, as they reconsider how to spend their lives, is pay close attention to what they’re doing, and do it with care.In doing so, they bring a different meaning to the idea of “optimizing” one’s life. They may seek to be productive, but they don’t shy away from the conviction that taking life day by day—and measuring happiness without “stak[ing] everything on a single accomplishment”—can coexist with being willing to work, not necessarily toward an end goal but for the pleasure of the moment. My mother, for one, is always engaged with projects and deadlines that she has set for herself. Though she likes to think of herself as constantly “busy doing nothing,” like Minjun with his coffee, she has slowly built herself into a formidable bridge player and a prolific crochet artist. She, too, has accepted that the external pressure of success is unlikely to be satisfying, but that each game, completed scarf, or cup of coffee is a serious achievement in itself.By the end of the story, Yeongju has committed to keeping the bookshop open and acknowledged it not just as her place of rest but as her dream, her job, and her source of joy all at once. She takes a leave of absence to go on a tour of independent bookshops, planning to study what makes them thrive and return to Hyunam-dong with new ideas. Minjun assumes responsibility for the bookshop in the meantime. In her farewell note to him, Yeongju writes: I had thought of work as stairs. Stairs to climb to reach the top. Now, I see work as food. Food that you need every day. Food that makes a difference to my body, my heart, my mental health, and my soul. There is food you just shove down your throat, and food that you eat with care and sincerity. I want to be one who takes great care in eating simple food. Not for anyone, but for myself. Her words acknowledge the fundamental difference between the pressure to succeed and the instinct to improve, the difference between being a “job seeker” and searching for meaningful work. And they suggest that, perhaps, the wisest thing to do is to get up every day and treat our minor routines like they matter; to approach the various pockets of our lives, whether they are spaces of work or play, with both flexibility and commitment.
theatlantic.com
Buying Satellite Imagery of Ukraine Is Dangerously Easy
A Ukrainian military source believes that Russia’s long-range strikes are aimed using satellite imagery provided by U.S. companies.
theatlantic.com
Sonia Sotomayor Should Retire Now
On Election Day in 2006, Justice Antonin Scalia was 70 years old and had been serving on the Supreme Court for 20 years. That year would have been an opportune time for him to retire—Republicans held the White House and the Senate, and they could have confirmed a young conservative justice who likely would have held the seat for decades to come. Instead, he tried to stay on the Court until the next time a Republican president would have a clear shot to nominate and confirm a conservative successor.He didn’t make it—he died unexpectedly in February 2016, at the age of 79, while Barack Obama was president. Conservatives nevertheless engineered some good fortune: There was divided control of government, and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to the seat. Donald Trump won that fall’s election and named Neil Gorsuch to the seat that McConnell had held open.But imagine for a moment that Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, as many expected. By running a few points stronger, she might have taken Democratic candidates across the finish line in close races in Pennsylvania and Missouri, resulting in Democratic control of the Senate. In that scenario, Clinton would have named a liberal successor to Scalia—more liberal than Garland—and conservatives would have lost control of the Court, all because of Scalia’s failure to retire at the opportune moment.Justice Sonia Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. If she retires this year, President Joe Biden will nominate a young and reliably liberal judge to replace her. Republicans do not control the Senate floor and cannot force the seat to be held open like they did when Scalia died. Confirmation of the new justice will be a slam dunk, and liberals will have successfully shored up one of their seats on the Court—playing the kind of defense that is smart and prudent when your only hope of controlling the Court again relies on both the timing of the death or retirement of conservative judges and not losing your grip on the three seats you already hold.But if Sotomayor does not retire this year, we don’t know when she will next be able to retire with a likely liberal replacement. It’s possible that Democrats will retain the presidency and the Senate in this year’s elections, in which case the insurance created by a Sotomayor retirement won’t have been necessary. But if Democrats lose the presidency or the Senate this fall—or both—she’ll need to stay on the bench until the party once again controls them. That could be just a few years, or it could be longer. Democrats have previously had to wait as long as 14 years (1995 to 2009). In other words, if Sotomayor doesn’t retire this year, she’ll be making a bet that she will remain fit to serve until possibly age 78 or even 82 or 84—and she’ll be forcing the whole Democratic Party to make that high-stakes bet with her.[Steven Mazie: The Supreme Court justices do not seem to be getting along]If Democrats lose the bet, the Court’s 6–3 conservative majority will turn into a 7–2 majority at some point within the next decade. If they win the bet, what do they win? They win the opportunity to read dissents written by Sotomayor instead of some other liberal justice. This is obviously an insane trade. Democrats talk a lot about the importance of the Court and the damage that has been done since it has swung in a more conservative direction, most obviously including the end of constitutional protections for abortion rights. So why aren’t Democrats demanding Sotomayor’s retirement?Well, they are whispering about it. Politico reported in January:Some Democrats close to the Biden administration and high-profile lawyers with past White House experience spoke to West Wing Playbook on condition of anonymity about their support for Sotomayor’s retirement. But none would go on the record about it. They worried that publicly calling for the first Latina justice to step down would appear gauche or insensitive. Privately, they say Sotomayor has provided an important liberal voice on the court, even as they concede that it would be smart for the party if she stepped down before the 2024 election.This is incredibly gutless. You’re worried about putting control of the Court completely out of reach for more than a generation, but because she is Latina, you can’t hurry along an official who’s putting your entire policy project at risk? If this is how the Democratic Party operates, it deserves to lose.The cowardice in speaking up about Sotomayor—a diabetic who has in some instances traveled with a medic—is part of a broader insanity in the way that the Democratic Party thinks about diversity and representation. Representation is supposed to be important because the presence of different sorts of people in positions of power helps ensure that the interests and preferences of various communities are taken into account when making policy. But in practice, Democratic Party actions regarding diversity tend to be taken for the benefit of officials rather than demographic groups. What’s more important for ordinary Latina women who support Democrats—that there not be one more vote against abortion rights on the Supreme Court, or that Sotomayor is personally there to write dissenting opinions? The answer is obvious, unless you work in Democratic politics for a living, in which case it apparently becomes a difficult call.I thought Democrats had learned a lesson from the Ruth Bader Ginsburg episode about the importance of playing defense on a Court where you don’t hold the majority. Building a cult of personality around one particular justice served to reinforce the idea that it was reasonable for her to stay on the bench far into old age, and her unfortunate choice to do so ultimately led to Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment and a string of conservative policy victories. All liberals have to show for this stubbornness is a bunch of dissents and kitsch home decor. In 2021, it seemed that liberals had indeed learned their lesson—not only was there a well-organized effort to hound the elderly Stephen Breyer out of office, but the effort was quite rude. (I’m not sure screaming “Retire, bitch” at Stephen Breyer was strictly necessary, but I wasn’t bothered by it either—he was a big boy, and he could take it.) But I guess maybe the lesson was learned only for instances where the justice in question is a white man.One obvious response to this argument is that the president is also old—much older, indeed, than Sonia Sotomayor. I am aware, and I consider this to be a serious problem. But Democrats are unlikely to find a way to replace Biden with a younger candidate who enhances their odds of winning the election. The Sotomayor situation is different. Her age problem can be dealt with very simply by her retiring and the president picking a candidate to replace her who is young and broadly acceptable (maybe even exciting) to Democratic Party insiders. And if Democrats want to increase the odds of getting there, they should be saying in public that she should step down. In order to do that, they’ll have to get over their fear of being called racist or sexist or ageist.This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.
theatlantic.com
‘All We Must Do Is Survive Four Years’
For the venerable American Civil Liberties Union, Donald Trump’s four years in the White House had the intensity of life during wartime.The group filed its first lawsuit against the Trump administration on January 28, 2017, just eight days after Trump took office and one day after he promulgated his first attempt at banning the entry into the U.S. of travelers from several Muslim-majority nations.The pace of the organization’s legal combat against Trump never let up. Ultimately the ACLU filed more than 250 lawsuits against Trump’s administration on issues as varied as immigration, abortion, contraception, fair housing, and the rights of racial-justice protesters forcibly dispersed by federal troops around the White House.Like environmental groups, media outlets, and other institutions to the left of center in American politics, the ACLU experienced a renewed burst of relevance and visibility during the Trump years. Fueled by the demand for unstinting “resistance” from the many voters and donors stunned by Trump’s election and horrified by his actions, the group’s staff during his presidency roughly doubled, its budget nearly tripled, and its membership increased by a factor of four. The ACLU won some big cases (overturning Trump’s policy of separating migrant parents from their children and blocking his effort to add a citizenship question to the census) and lost others (the Supreme Court eventually upheld Trump’s third try at the Muslim ban after courts rejected two earlier iterations). The fights placed the ACLU at the center of the political arena, nearly 100 years after it was founded, in 1920.[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]In an interview last week, Anthony D. Romero, the ACLU’s longtime executive director, told me that he believes protecting civil liberties will be even harder if Trump wins a second term in November. I spoke with Romero about the challenges that a reelected Trump could pose to rights and liberties, how the ACLU is already coordinating with other advocacy groups to develop plans for fighting Trump’s agenda in the courts, and why Romero thinks legal battles may be less important than public protest in determining how American democracy will look in 2029 if Trump wins.The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Ronald Brownstein: When you look across both what Trump has explicitly already said and what you see unfolding in the red states as a template, what are you most concerned about in terms of civil rights and civil liberties in a second Trump term?Anthony D. Romero: Our greatest concerns have to do with the areas where Donald Trump already has a track record. Clearly, we expect him to double down on the immigration issue. It is the centerpiece of his “Make America great again” ideology. The Muslim ban was the first executive order he signed.We can expect a militarization of the border, the third-country transit ban, the shutting down of asylum. This time, he’s likely to make good on his promise to create a deportation force and enact nationwide deportations. So immigration will be front and center.A second issue will be abortion, because it is animating politics in the Republican Party. Trump is already playing with the idea of a federal abortion ban—whether it’s 14 weeks, 15 weeks, he hasn’t made up his mind yet—but it’s clear that is the direction he’s going to be pushed into by his party.Brownstein: Will he also face greater pressure in the party for executive-branch action on abortion?Romero: Correct. Whether it’s mifepristone, the Comstock Act, restrictions on the U.S. Postal Service—you bet.Certainly he will address the other culture-war grievances from the Republican Party: restrictions on gender-affirming health care for transgender individuals; attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion; the attack on birthright citizenship. He said it was a target when he was running for office the first time around, but he didn’t do anything on it; this time he is more likely to. Birthright citizenship, in addition to it being at the core of the immigration issue, is also at the core of race relations and racial justice. It was the way that America converted African slaves into U.S. citizens. It is hallowed ground for the civil-rights community, which is an invitation for him to trample all over it.The final set of buckets, I would say, would be around his weaponization of the Department of Justice to go after his political adversaries; his threatened use of the Insurrection Act to curtail demonstrations; the threat to use police and even the National Guard to deal with crime in blue cities. He’s going to want to pick a fight in blue-state jurisdictions and use the power of the federal government to do so.Brownstein: Another area, I suppose, in immigration would be allowing red states to enforce the immigration laws?Romero: I think he will endeavor to enact the restrictive policies for them. But if he gives the red states the carte blanche to do what they want, then it’s going to be hard for him to curtail the blue states from enacting sanctuary-city laws. Consistency has never been an impediment to Trump, but from a legal-theory point of view, I’m not sure he is going to want to throw away the preeminence of the executive branch by allowing the state governors to usurp the federal-government role. I think he’s going to want to fill that role himself.Brownstein: Why do you think that this term could be more difficult even than his first?Romero: I think the adults in the Republican Party are not going to get in the room with him this time. I think you will only have the most zealous and ideological of players join a second Trump administration, and the institutionalists and the establishment types who curtailed his worst abuses will be in a form of exile even while they are in power.The retirement of Mitch McConnell, health issues aside, points to this very issue: The institutionalists and the establishment Republicans are not going to populate the administration and the Cabinet the way they once did. Stephen Miller will be more like the norm rather than the exception.Then I think they are going to be smarter and more experienced and therefore more effective the second time around. They are not going to make rookie mistakes like the Muslim ban—the fact that it took them three tries to perfect it. I think you see a greater level of focus even in what he talks about on the campaign and the [lack of focus] that was endemic to Trump One might be mitigated with greater discipline and greater focus the second time around.Brownstein: In the interview where Miller laid out in remarkable detail their plans on mass deportation, he also said, We’re going to be doing so many things at once that no one can respond to, and that is part of the strategy.Romero: I don’t doubt it. And in some ways, they have finally woken up to the fact that what they have on their side is the scale of the federal government. It was always a bit astonishing to me that we could make as much progress as we could in Trump’s first term, given the awesome asymmetry between the power of the federal government and the power of civil society.Brownstein: What is your feeling about the kind of bulwark the Supreme Court will be for civil liberties?Romero: I am worried, and yet I think we must give it our best shot. At this point, all we need to do is get to five [votes on the Supreme Court], and on any case or controversy, the point is, what other two justices can you peel away [to join the three Democratic-appointed justices]? I’m not willing to give up the litigation ghost in a second Trump administration. At some level, all we must do is survive four years; we don’t have to survive eight years of Trump. All we have to do is play for his final four years, because that’s all he’s got.Brownstein: What do you consider potentially the most volatile or incendiary of his proposals? To me, the various ways in which he is talking about using federal forces in blue cities seems the most explosive.Romero: Definitely. The deportation force can implicate 11 million to 13 million undocumented people. Remember that undocumented people live in families and communities alongside many American citizens, so the level of disruption when you start ripping out people who don’t have legal papers can be extensive.[Ronald Brownstein: Trump’s ‘knock on the door’]Certainly, the power of the National Guard and use of the Insurrection Act put a lot of things at his fingertips that are incredibly worrisome. That’s why litigation, I think, will be important; litigation preserves the status quo, litigation takes time, and when you are buying time, that is a good thing.Litigation also helps focus public attention. Part of what happened in the first Trump administration is the avalanche of Trump policies and outrages became a little numbing for the public at one level, and yet with litigation, you could really focus a spotlight on key policies. Family separation is an example I would use: The litigation that we filed engendered such a public outcry that even Trump himself had to backtrack on the policy.But lawyers are going to play a much less important role in a second Trump administration, because of the specter of a much more consistent and greater assault on civil liberties and civil rights. That’s where you really have to convert the public into a protagonist and not a spectator. And you saw elements of that in the first Trump administration. The women’s marches were largely a spontaneous outburst of energy from constituents. Certainly, the George Floyd protests that happened in the summer of 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, were also an indication that people were willing to take to the streets on issues that really mattered to them. I’ve got to believe that we’ll have the potential of mobilizing the public in that way. Part of what we’ve got to do is get ready for that kind of energy and activism that will be beyond any of our control—the work we have to do as legal observers on protests, know-your-rights training.Brownstein: Is that under way?Romero: We’re beginning to map that out—what we need to do, and relationships we need to build.Brownstein: If Trump wins, I don’t know if he does everything that he’s saying. But if he does even two-thirds of what he is saying, what do blue state governors like J. B. Pritzker, Gavin Newsom, and Kathy Hochul do? What do their attorneys general do? How much pressure could Trump put on the fundamental cohesion of the country if he follows through on this idea of using federal force in blue jurisdictions?Romero: The real wild card is the extent to which it devolves into a confusing chaos or even violence, in which case Trump’s use of the executive powers will look more justifiable in the eyes of ordinary Americans. Remember the play he made around [sending federal forces to quell the 2020 protests in] Portland? There was an element of Trump’s actions in Portland that resonated with the American public. In some ways, the greatest danger is when Trump’s extreme policies tap into the commonsense reactions of the American people, when he truly is playing the populist role. That’s what I think is the most dangerous.Brownstein: How different could America look after four years of another Trump presidency? And what do you think could be the most important differences from where we are now that we might face?Romero: I think we could very much be on the brink of losing our democracy and losing certain rights and liberties that would be lost for a generation. I am not one given to hyperbole, especially in the face of real threat, but the efforts to curtail protest and demonstrations; the promise to enact gestapo-like searches and deportation forces; the enactment of federal bans on reproductive rights or gender-affirming care or diversity-and-inclusion efforts could fundamentally change the way that we think about rights and liberties in the United States.Right now, we bemoan the idea that our zip code determines our rights and liberties. That if I am 10010 in New York—my zip code—I am de facto going to have a much greater enjoyment of rights and liberties than if I were in a zip code in Alabama or Mississippi. And the challenge with a second Trump administration is that rights and liberties may be lost even in blue states. We are already living with a status quo where rights and liberties are curtailed in red states, but it’s the metastasis into blue states and liberal and progressive jurisdictions that is perhaps the most concerning.
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Extreme Heat Toasted the Caribbean’s Corals
This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.In the Northern Hemisphere, the summer of 2023 was the hottest on record. In the Caribbean, coral reefs sat in sweltering water for months—stewing in a dangerous marine heat wave that started earlier, lasted longer, and climbed to higher temperatures than ever recorded in some locations. In some places, the water was more than 32 degrees Celsius—as toasty as a hot tub. Ever since the water started to warm, researchers and conservationists have been anxiously watching to see how the debilitating heat has affected the region’s corals.For many Caribbean corals, last year’s heat proved too much to bear. The more time corals spend in hot water, the more likely they are to bleach, turning white as they expel the single-celled algae that live within their tissues. Without these symbiotic algae—and the energy they provide through photosynthesis—bleached corals starve. Survival becomes a struggle, and what was a healthy thicket of colorful coral can turn into a tangle of skeletons.Corals can recover from bleaching. But while some Caribbean corals survived last year’s bleaching, and others were unaffected, multitudes perished. And for many corals, the harrowing experience isn’t even over.Lorenzo Álvarez-Filip, a marine ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says that, for a coral, recovering after bleaching is like recuperating from a long illness. It takes time. Yet even now, several months after the water has cooled to temperatures that no longer stress corals, researchers across the Caribbean are still finding bleached corals living in limbo.[Read: How coral researchers are coping with the death of reefs]In the Bahamas, where the shallowest reefs were hit particularly hard, Valeria Pizarro, a marine biologist at the Perry Institute for Marine Science, started to see some bleached corals recover in October and November 2023, gradually regaining patches of color as symbiotic algae recolonized their still-living tissues. But as recently as January 2024, she and her team were still finding bleached corals that had yet to regain their algal allies.“Some days it’s just frustrating,” says Pizarro.Last summer’s extreme heat also bleached and killed many of the corals within parts of the Mesoamerican Reef—the Western Hemisphere’s largest barrier-reef system, which stretches from the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula south to Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. At the Mexican end of the barrier reef, calm water near shore rose to some 3 degrees Celsius warmer than normal, causing widespread coral mortality. The same was true farther south, in a shallow lagoon of the barrier reef in northern Belize.Although these shallow reefs suffered heavier losses, Álvarez-Filip says corals in the deeper reefs he surveyed also experienced widespread bleaching. Even 50 to 80 feet below the waves, “it was just bright white everywhere,” Álvarez-Filip says. “It was really hard to find a coral that was not bleached.”Many of these corals in deeper water have been left partially dead and partially alive, says Álvarez-Filip. Because each coral is usually a colony, some clones—genetic copies of the parent coral—can die while others survive, which leaves the coral with dead patches. Although grim, it’s better than the outcome in the shallow lagoon he monitored, where many corals died completely.Even amid such sweeping losses, however, not all Caribbean reefs were decimated by the heat.On certain Bahamian reefs, Pizarro says, coral survival rates were much higher. There, some corals didn’t bleach at all, while others did but have already recovered. A sprawling archipelago of hundreds of islands, the Bahamas includes broad, turquoise shallows where water is likely to overheat. But it also includes locations where currents bring cooler water into the reefs, which may have helped protect the corals.Another apparent sanctuary was Mexico’s Limones Reef, where large groups of branching elkhorn coral held on to their deep-orange color. According to temperature sensors within the reef, the water was a bit cooler than in other reefs—still warmer than normal, but not as deadly.As winter once again turns to spring in the Northern Hemisphere, researchers in the Bahamas and Mexico will be looking into how corals in some locations were able to avoid bleaching, and investigating whether those animals owe their success entirely to cooler conditions, or whether they themselves are more able to cope with heat.Mass coral bleaching was first observed in the early 1980s and has become more common, especially in years when tropical waters are heated by both climate change and El Niño, which is what happened in 2023. Although last year’s heat was more extreme than anything recorded before in parts of the Caribbean, it may be a harbinger of things to come: As the planet continues to warm, marine heat waves may become more common and more intense.But amid all the loss, “there are some corals that have energy and are resistant,” Pizarro says. “We need to keep working for them.”
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theatlantic.com
What Really Makes People Feel Safe on the Subway
It’s not cops or soldiers.
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Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed
The sponsors of the law fundamentally misunderstood the nature of addiction.
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The Smart Way to Order Good Wine
Culture and entertainment musts from Charlie Warzel
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Specimens
When I was a child, my grandmother Rachel lived in a small room next to mine.She wore what were called “housecoats” and put her hair up in “pin curls.”She raised roses.She enjoyed watching pro wrestlers on television. Her favorite was Gorgeous George.And she loved the piano player Liberace.I remember the rhinestones on his cape.She spoke very little.I assumed Rachelmust be typical of something.2Listen, the god who made youcannot knowanything about you.It can’t become distracted.It has to keep producingorchids with monkey faces,caterpillars with pink feathers,and the one who floatson her own reflection.
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