Kindness is so over. Since Donald Trump re-entered the White House, it has become apparent that America is not simply moving past the excesses of progressivism — the compulsory stating of pronouns, the hawking of anti-racism books for babies, the pretending that "Emilia Pérez" is a good movie — but beyond the idea that it's good to care for others at all.

On social media, people have rejoiced at the slashing of U.S. food aid and medicine for people suffering genocide and famine. "Frankly at this point out of f---s to give about Sudanese babies," read one post that appeared on my X timeline. Vice President J.D. Vance has invoked medieval Catholic theology to justify the shuttering of borders to asylum seekers, saying we have a moral obligation to prioritize our nearest and dearest over strangers. Never mind that do-gooding parable of the Good Samaritan stuff.

Then there's the world's richest man, Elon Musk, who can barely contain his glee as he takes a scythe to federal funding for lifesaving biomedical research ("a rip-off!") and foreign aid. Musk once told his biographer how his favorite video game had taught him the "life lesson" that "empathy is not an asset." We're now seeing what happens when that mantra becomes a governing philosophy.

Still, Musk is not entirely without empathy. When a 25-year-old engineer with his Department of Government Efficiency resigned last week after being linked to a series of racist online posts —"Normalize Indian hate," read one from last year — the billionaire benevolently declared that the ex-staffer would be rehired. "To err is human," Musk wrote on X, "to forgive divine."

Vance also called on people to show some compassion. "I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life," said the veep, whose wife, Usha, is Indian-American. So perhaps kindness isn't dead after all; it's just being down-sized, like the government. If you're a starving Sudanese kid, sorry, we just don't have the resources to care. But if you're a racist troll who's hit hard times, don't worry, we got you.

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"Do not obey in advance." In his classic book "On Tyranny," that is historian Timothy Snyder's first rule for resisting a slide from democracy into authoritarian rule. Most of the power that autocrats accumulate, he warns, "is freely given" out of fear and resignation. We are now seeing that phenomenon come to life as Donald Trump and Elon Musk attempt to seek total, unfettered, and blatantly unconstitutional control of the federal government. "Real power," Trump once said, "is fear." His second coup attempt has deeply frightened much of Washington, the nation, and our allies. Even as their constitutional authority is stolen, congressional Republicans have turned into a herd of cowed lickspittles. Owners of major media organizations such as ABC, CBS, and Facebook are settling nuisance "bias" lawsuits by making multimillion-dollar blackmail payments to Trump, hoping these tributes will persuade him to leave their businesses intact. Facebook and X are actively collaborating with Trump's agenda.

But Trump is far weaker than he seems. He won the popular vote by 1.5%; his approval rating even before this week's surreal cascade of chaos was just 47% — a record low for a modern president in the honeymoon period. Barack Obama was at 68% at this stage, and George W. Bush and Joe Biden were at 57%. Republican control of the House is razor-thin, making significant legislation unlikely. And so Trump seeks to rule by personal edict, in a blizzard of executive orders, and by empowering tech terrorist Musk to launch a blitzkrieg on the federal government. "Trump is acting like a king," Ezra Klein observed in The New York Times, "because he is too weak to govern like a president." Trump seeks to overwhelm and terrorize, so that people give up — that is, obey in advance. If they do, his autocratic pretensions become reality. But if enough Americans stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law, Trump will again prove he's manifestly unfit for the presidency, as he did in 2020, and his power will wane. Let's hope most of the damage can be undone.

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Did voters choose President Donald Trump because they hoped he would cut spending on Medicaid, lifesaving cancer research, Head Start, and Meals on Wheels? That he would send ICE into schools to terrify immigrant children and citizen children alike? That he would throw into chaos every state and local agency and charity across America that gets federal funding? Of course not. All of these actions are lifted straight from the 900-page Heritage Foundation policy tome known as Project 2025, a plan to effectively destroy most of the federal government. Ahead of the election, Trump swore up and down that he had nothing to do with the document, didn't know who wrote it, and didn't agree with its radical contents. Once he won, though, he appointed many of its authors and contributors to agency and even Cabinet posts. And now, it's his entire governing agenda. Fooled you, America.

Go through Trump's blitz of executive orders, and you'll see that nearly every one was detailed in Project 2025. Nixing the new "diversity, equity, and inclusion" programs and offices created by the Biden administration is in there, and so is overturning many of America's precious civil rights protections dating back 60 years to the Johnson era — as Trump has also done. Sending the U.S. military to assist in immigration enforcement at the southern border is on the Project 2025 wish list, as is a halt to all intake of refugees. Pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, the World Health Organization, and a global pact to tax large multinational companies? Check, check, and check. Trump's shocking proposal to abolish FEMA is in line with the document. So is even his pettiest move of all, the revoking of security clearances and Secret Service protections for appointees who later criticized him, such as Gen. Mark Milley and former national security adviser John Bolton. Still, even the Heritage Foundation didn't dream of something as blatantly unconstitutional as abolishing birthright citizenship. I guess Trump has a few ideas of his own, after all.

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Of the flurry of executive orders that President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office, there is one that I find most troubling: the effort to cancel birthright citizenship. The understanding of the 14th Amendment's grant of citizenship to "all persons born and naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" has been stable for more than a century and a quarter.

The key test came in 1898, when a Chinese-American (though back then the term would not have existed) named Wong Kim Ark was barred from re-entering the United States after a visit to China. Ark had been born in San Francisco to parents who could not become citizens because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The U.S., under President William McKinley, argued that meant Ark was not eligible for citizenship himself. The Supreme Court ruled that, whatever the status of his parents, Ark was a citizen of the United States.

It was an admirably prescient decision: While it took until 1943 for the blatantly bigoted Chinese Exclusion Act itself to be repealed, the justices of the late 19th century saw clearly that the way forward for the U.S. was to stick with the basic precept that those born on U.S. soil are Americans, full stop. This is not the typical way of the world. Most countries, including much of Western Europe, have significant restrictions on who can automatically get citizenship at birth; Ireland even eliminated unrestricted birthright citizenship in 2004.

Yet if there was ever an issue on which to say, "We'll just do it our way," this is it. The U.S. does have a legitimate interest in controlling the border; the redefinition of every border crosser as an "asylum seeker" has created a genuine crisis. But it is not one to be solved by visiting the immigration sins of the parents on another generation — especially with an executive order of showy symbolism and deeply dubious constitutionality. "Born here, citizen here," is the very essence of American exceptionalism. I would wager that today's Supreme Court, like that of 1898, will affirm that. But I am saddened that after all this time it is again being put to the test.

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Corporate America has a message for Donald Trump: We believe what you believe. In the months since the Republican's election victory, Big Business has been working frenetically to erase any evidence of "woke" or un-Trumpy tendencies. Diversity, equity, and inclusion departments have been axed; climate-change groups have been abandoned; and anything bearing a trans flag has been shredded. Executives who once spouted progressive pablum are now talking like MAGA true believers. Just hours after killing his company's DEI programs and fact-check systems last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast to bemoan how society has become "emasculated." It's a positive that America is returning to a culture that "celebrates the aggression a bit more," said Zuckerberg. "Masculine energy is good." He flexed his own masculine energy a few days later, announcing a 5 percent cut to Meta's workforce.

Some liberal Meta employees were stunned by this pivot. "What happened to the company I joined all those years ago?" one wrote on an internal message board. "Wow, we really capitulated on a lot of our supposed values," another posted. Yet you can't capitulate on values you never really held. Zuckerberg has long preached the merits of a connected world, yet is currently building a 5,000-square-foot underground bunker at his estate in Hawaii — complete with blast-proof doors and its own energy and food supplies — to keep that world out. In a 2017 speech to Harvard graduates, he dinged then-President Trump by railing against isolationists who would slow "the flow of knowledge, trade, and immigration." On Jan. 20, he sat on the dais at Trump’s second inauguration and applauded as the new president extolled tariffs and migrant crackdowns. As a surfer, Zuckerberg knows how to read the water and can see the political tide has turned in the Right's favor. But should it shift against Trump in the next few years, you can be sure the Meta CEO will be furiously paddling away, positioning himself for the next big wave.

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As the nation remembers — or chooses to forget — the events of Jan. 6, 2021, we might also spare a moment to recall what was happening five years ago this month. In January 2020, a novel coronavirus was rapidly spreading in China, and had infected its first Americans. But alarm bells were not yet ringing — at least not publicly. Trump administration trade adviser Peter Navarro privately warned the president that Covid could turn into "a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans." For months, as hospitals and morgues filled, Trump minimized the danger, telling Americans that Covid would soon "go away." He later admitted to journalist Bob Woodward he knew the virus was "deadly stuff," but "I wanted to always play it down." By the time Trump was voted out of office, Covid had killed 400,000 Americans, on its way to 1.2 million — the world's highest death toll.

Five years later, the H5N1 bird flu is spreading among chickens, cattle, and wild birds. So far, 66 people in the U.S. are known to have been infected, mostly from direct contact with animals; one, a Louisiana man who kept backyard chickens, died this week. Scientists say the risk H5N1 will trigger a pandemic remains low. But if the bird flu virus infects a person who's already infected with a human flu virus, the pathogens could swap genetic material, and H5N1 could mutate to spread easily among people through the respiratory tract, like Covid and the deadly Spanish flu a century ago. Then we're in deep trouble. And this country is actually less prepared for a pandemic than it was before Covid. That's because Trump and MAGA allies politicized mask wearing, social distancing, and even vaccination, and coded them as foolish, ineffective liberal responses. If there's a major bird flu outbreak in Trump's second term, will half the country shun vaccines and other preventative measures, with the backing of the anti-science quacks Trump appoints to critical health positions? Let's hope H5N1 does not mutate and jump species. But as we found out the hard way in 2020, hope is not a plan.

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Last week the Supreme Court heard arguments over a Tennessee law barring sex transition-related treatment for minors. The outcome of the case appears to be a foregone conclusion; the Supreme Court looks certain to uphold the Tennessee law. Many Democrats will dismiss that as the obvious result of the high court shifting sharply to the right, and perhaps it is.

It's worthwhile, though, to see this case against the legal and cultural background of the last 16 years. In 2008, California voters passed Proposition 8, amending the constitution to prohibit gay marriage. Prop 8 led to a series of lawsuits, culminating in the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell vs. Hodges that legalized gay marriage nationally. So, in seven years gay marriage went from something rejected by voters in one of the most liberal states to a national consensus. It seemed like trans acceptance may have been on a similar trajectory.

But there are some major differences. One telling quote on this comes from Chase Strangio, the ACLU attorney who last week argued the case on behalf of the parents challenging the Tennessee ban. "I find it disappointing," Strangio wrote two years ago, "how much time and resource went into fighting for inclusion in the deeply flawed and fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage." The quest for marriage equality sought parity with rights that had been taken for granted by straight people. The trans rights movement went in a different direction. Calls for inclusion evolved into ones for a wholesale overhaul of ideas about sex.

As with marriage, many progressives came to see fundamental ideas about sex and gender as flawed and violent. And the whole package, from teaching elementary school kids about "gender fluidity" to medical interventions for teens, became a central pillar of Democratic orthodoxy. Gay marriage was framed as a search for tolerance and understanding. Trans rights have turned into a broader demand to tear down and reconstruct social norms — a bigger project, to which fewer people are eager to subscribe.

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All across America, people are turning off the news. Some of them are liberals still traumatized by the election, for whom the idea of hearing about President-elect Donald Trump's latest ALL-CAPS pronouncement is just too triggering. Some are right-leaning bros, who believe that traditional media outlets have become too "woke" and that only moon landing-skeptical podcasters can be trusted to tell it like it is. But a good number of those tuning out, I'm confident, are doing so because they feel like the firehose of breaking news is drowning them. It is our curse to live in interesting times — just consider all that's happened in the past few days. There was an attempted coup in South Korea; a resumption of civil war in Syria; a U.S. president pardoning his prodigal son, after repeatedly promising not to; and a whole convoy of Trump-related happenings, from his nomination of a MAGA vengeance artist as FBI director to his suggested annexation of Canada.

In normal times, any of these stories would dominate the headlines for days. But these are interesting times, and so each shocking development gets only a brief moment on the chyron before being pushed aside by yet another world-shaking story. We are not designed to cope with such an onslaught, and so our caveman brains tell us to seek safety — or at least to switch off CNN, delete that news app, and take up whittling or some other adrenaline-reducing activity. Such a flight response is understandable but not conducive to a healthy democracy, which requires an informed citizenry. Yet being informed is not the same thing as being overloaded. Fewer of us would suffer from news fatigue if we weren't being blasted from all directions and at all hours with news alerts and updates: On our phones' home screens, in our email inboxes, on our never-ending social media feeds, and even on TVs at the bar. No news is bad news, but too much news is simply exhausting.

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An open letter to President-elect Donald Trump: Now that you will soon assume the awesome — and greatly expanded! — powers of the presidency, I'd like to join Jeff Bezos in sending my "big congratulations" on your crushing victory over the enemy within. Please let me echo Joe and Mika of MSNBC in offering to turn the page and re-establish a thoughtful, heartfelt dialogue with you, Dear Leader. Toward that end, I would like to offer my abject apologies for describing you in this space over the years as a demagogue, would-be autocrat, white supremacist, misogynist, and narcissist. Just a bit of colorful hyperbole, like JD Vance describing you before his own red-pill awakening as "a moral disaster" and "America's Hitler." No hard feelings, right? I would also like to express regret for the intemperate cover illustrations in this magazine that have depicted you as a caudillo, a human wrecking ball, a mob boss, an arsonist incinerating the Constitution, an insurrectionist, and a subservient stooge of Vladimir Putin. This, I see now, was treason — indeed, blasphemy. What were we thinking?

We just didn't realize that your bold new vision for removing constitutional obstacles enjoyed such popular (and divine) support. Nor did we understand that your admiration for autocrats like Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orban would not only promote world peace, it would inspire needed reforms of our own unruly democracy! I mean, republic. Let me congratulate you for ensuring that both Congress and the Supreme Court will not become impediments to your bold, decisive leadership, and applaud the court for declaring you immune to any additional prosecution no matter what you do in coming years. Go for it! Now that we're bros, I hope I can stop by Mar-a-Lago soon to hang with you, Elon, JD, Tulsi, Tucker, RFK Jr., and the whole fun gang. BTW, I would like to buy all remaining $60 Trump Bibles as Christmas — not, ugh, "holiday" — presents for friends and family. Deus vult, sir.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

State capture comes in many flavors. When Donald Trump won the election on a promise to punish his enemies, I expected him to follow the Hungarian model. MAGA Republicans have spoken admiringly of dissident-turned-strongman Viktor Orban, after all, and some of the elements of his transformation of Hungary into an "illiberal democracy" are already in motion here: politicize the courts, quiet the press, reward favored oligarchs.

But just days after the vote came word that Trump planned to actually follow through on the most radical measures in Project 2025. He will attempt by executive order to fire en masse "rogue bureaucrats" — aka the thousands of experts at federal agencies who keep our food unsullied and our transactions trustworthy. Worse, he will create a "warrior board" of retired officers to identify "woke generals" for sacking. That's far beyond what Hungary ever did; now we're in the realm of Turkey, where in 2016, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan used the pretext of a small, easily overpowered coup attempt to launch a mass purge. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs: everyone from teachers and lawyers to newspaper and TV reporters to generals and admirals. Those left in government must be slavishly obedient to Erdogan's every whim, whether legal or not.

The U.S. turning into Turkey overnight would be bad enough. It gets worse. Both Orban and Erdogan take their roles seriously. They favor their corrupt friends, sure, but they are still intent on governing. Trump is stocking his administration with unqualified cronies whose characters stand in opposition to their agencies: Pete Hegseth, champion of war criminals, at Defense; Matt Gaetz, accused sex trafficker, at Justice; Tulsi Gabbard, propagandist for America's enemies, at Intelligence. He's even trying to skip FBI background checks and turn these lightweights loose unvetted, to annihilate their departments. Trump is keeping his promise of retribution. But it's now apparent that what he sees as his enemy is the entire U.S. government.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

When Donald Trump announced this week that he would choose Marco Rubio as his secretary of state, it seemed for a brief moment that Trump might be making some kind of peace with the Republican Party he had shattered, humiliated, and reassembled. Yes, the "Little Marco" sobriquet that Trump gave Rubio eight years ago would be shadowing the Florida senator all the way to the State Department. But by refashioning himself as a Trump team player Rubio had regained some semblance of power and even dignity.

It looked like Trump had decided to take the win, and staff his administration with Capitol Hill players like Rubio and New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik. Rubio even gained an endorsement from the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, who seems to have understood that the country's best bet in the Trump II era was that the Cabinet would be staffed by people like Rubio.

Then Rubio, and the rest of the country, got to find out the company that he'll be keeping. First came plans for a defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, elevated directly from Fox News and a border czar, Tom Homan, godfather of the unconscionable border policy of family separation. Then came the choice of Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative and presidential candidate known for her conciliatory words for Vladimir Putin and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, for director of national intelligence. And then for attorney general, Trump has named Matt Gaetz, the congressman known for his efforts to blow up House leadership and a tawdry scandal of alleged sex trafficking.

It is hard to find anything redeeming here. Maybe the only hopeful news of the week is that GOP senators overrode Trump's request and chose John Thune (R-S.D.), an establishment Republican who opposed efforts to overturn the 2020 election, to lead their new majority. Let's hope they keep that spine. If there was ever a time for the Senate to vigorously assert its constitutional power of "advice and consent" on presidential appointments, surely this is it.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

Donald Trump won the White House with perhaps the most unlikely coalition of supporters ever assembled in American politics. There was the usual male MAGA crowd, who lapped up his macho talk of taking back America from the feminized Left. But exit polls show he also won a higher share of women this year than in 2020 and lost voters who support abortion rights by a mere 4 percentage points — even though he nominated the three Supreme Court justices who were crucial to toppling Roe v. Wade. He won with white people who approve of his plan to deport millions of immigrants, but also did 16 points better with Latino voters this time around. He won with oil and gas workers who want to "drill, baby, drill," and also with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters who want to ban hydrocarbon-derived fertilizers and plastics. And he boosted his vote share in both deep-red rural counties and deep-blue cities such as New York and Chicago — though he once likened the latter to war-torn Afghanistan — partly by nudging up his numbers with Black men. Trump's diverse coalition, in other words, looks a lot like America.

The question now is whether he can keep this unusual alliance together. Will he shed support among Latinos if, as promised, he sends the National Guard into communities to round up undocumented migrants and tear apart families in mass deportation raids? Will Trump lose women voters if, as his backers on the Christian right have requested, his administration curtails access to abortion pills or dials back reproductive rights? Can he balance the demands of a conspiracy theorist like RFK Jr. — whom Trump has promised to let "go wild on health" — with the interests of food and pharmaceutical companies, as well as those of countless Republican and Democratic parents who want their kids to be vaccinated against polio and other deadly diseases? Can he keep Tesla CEO Elon Musk on side while also slapping 60% tariffs on products from China, Tesla's biggest market outside the U.S.? I don't know the answer to any of these questions and neither, I suspect, does Trump.

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If Donald Trump is returned to power this week, it will be because millions of people did not believe him. He can't win with hardcore MAGA acolytes alone — the 43 or so percent of the electorate who thrill to Trump's vow to prosecute political opponents like Liz Cheney for treason, to deploy U.S. soldiers on the streets to suppress protests by "the enemy within," to ally America with Putin's Russia, and to hunt down and deport millions of "vermin" who are "poisoning the blood of our country." The votes Trump needs to put him back in office will have to come from people who dismiss his fascist stylings as showman's bluster. These are the voters who concede Trump is obnoxious, but just want him to close the border and somehow bring the price of eggs and gas back to 2019 levels. When Trump sounds like an unhinged authoritarian, "it could just be for publicity, just riling up the news," Trump voter Mario Fachini, 40, recently explained to The New York Times. "I think the media blows stuff out of proportion."

To dismiss Trump's ravings as shtick requires a curious form of amnesia. Just four years ago, Trump refused to accept his election defeat, and incited a violent insurrection at the Capitol. In his first term, horrified top aides repeatedly refused to carry out orders they viewed as illegal or potentially disastrous, including calling out the National Guard to shoot protesters. Gen. Mark Milley, the former joint chiefs chairman who ignored that demand, describes Trump as "fascist to the core." If Trump returns to office, he and his allies say, he'll fill his Cabinet, the Pentagon, and every agency with MAGA loyalists who will not subvert his will. Even the law will not constrain him now that a blatantly partisan Supreme Court that Trump shaped has ruled that the president's "official acts" are immune from prosecution. "Being inside Trump's White House was terrifying," said former national security official Olivia Troye. "But what keeps me up at night is what will happen if he gets back there. The guardrails are gone."

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If Donald Trump wins on Nov. 5, it will be partly because the traditional press failed to present the former president as he truly is. That's the argument put forward by many media critics, who accuse The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and other legacy outlets of "sanewashing" Trump: selectively quoting or editing his rambling, threat-filled, and profanity-laced rally speeches. This habit stems from mainstream news outlets wanting to appear "objective," the argument goes. If they did accurately cover Trump's extremism and bizarre behavior, it would look like they were in the tank for Democrats.

As a result, Trump's repeated pledge to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, whom he has called "animals" and "not human," gets labeled by the Times as "hyperbolic rhetoric" rather than 100-proof authoritarianism. And his weird disquisitions — about whether it's better to be eaten by a shark or to die from electrocution, for example — go unmentioned in many reports on campaign events, which instead focus on sane-sounding policy announcements, such as eliminating taxes on tips.

These are valid criticisms, but they vastly overplay the ability of mainstream media to shape the national conversation. Newspapers and network news have shrinking audiences, while social media is grabbing ever more eyeballs. About 50 percent of Americans now go to platforms like TikTok, X, and Instagram to get their news — where they also get a flood of disinformation served up by influencers, hucksters, and propagandists. A Russian-created fake video smearing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz with abuse allegations has been viewed some 5 million times on X. Millions more have seen bogus AI-generated images of Trump wading through the floodwaters in the wake of Hurricane Helene, feeding a Trump-backed narrative that only he — and not the Biden administration — cares about the storm's victims. Clearly, we have a reality problem, but it's one that traditional media is largely powerless to fix.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

The mailbox at the end of my driveway is crammed to bursting with political fliers. My phone chirps with text after text from pollsters and get-out-the-vote activists. Every weekend, I get stuck in the traffic overflow from yet another candidate's event. And I can't turn on the TV without seeing endless commercials for Donald Trump, for Kamala Harris, for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein (the commercials for Mark Robinson, his Republican opponent, abruptly stopped a few weeks ago, after he was outed as a fan of trans porn and a self-proclaimed "black Nazi"). That's right, I live in North Carolina, one of this year's crucial swing states.

My state started early voting this week and promptly got stampeded by candidates and canvassers. Nobody can tour the western region around Asheville, where they're still digging out from Hurricane Helene, but the rest of the state was one big rally. The Democrats gave us Harris filling the Eastern Carolina University coliseum in Greenville, then running mate Tim Walz in the central cities of Durham and Winston-Salem, and then Bill Clinton hitting a bunch of small towns on a bus tour. The Republicans sent veep pick J.D. Vance to speak in Wilmington on the coast, while Trump will swing by a suburb of Charlotte next week. It's unclear whether all this electioneering will make a difference. North Carolina is often called purple, but we're really more of a deep magenta. We haven't voted for a Democrat for president since 2008. It's true that we often split our ballots and pick a Democratic governor even when we prefer the Republican as president — but that might just be a reflection of a state GOP that is much further to the right than the average Carolinian and offers extremists as nominees

Still, the political experts seem to think it's a toss-up, so our mailboxes and stadiums and cellphones will be under siege for another month. Of course, it could be worse. At least I don't live in Pennsylvania.

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The Iran hostage crisis is my first memory of international politics. When the U.S. Embassy was seized in Tehran in 1979, I was in third grade; I would probably not have really been aware of it until it had stretched on for months. My parents watched news of it on Nightline, after my bedtime. The Iran hostage crisis gets fewer mentions now than it seems to merit. Maybe that's because Sept. 11 was the greater national trauma, but the hostage crisis was the greater national humiliation.

For more than a year, Iranian revolutionaries kept 52 Americans captive and the U.S. could do nothing. So, it's a memory that the country flinches from. In retrospect, though, that crisis may have reshaped the world even more than Sept. 11. It was the seizure of the U.S. Embassy that set Iran and its brand of religious expansion on a collision course with the United States. The project of toppling American power and replacing it with Islamic fundamentalism continues today.

Seen in this light, it's not really a coincidence that hostages are at the center of the Oct. 7 massacre and the war in Gaza and Lebanon. Hamas and Hezbollah are proxies for Iran, devoted far less to any individual interests than to prosecuting the vision of world revolution that has animated the Iranian regime from the start. Like other messianic ideologies, that vision has gathered both junior allies who see political advantage and fellow travelers who see salvation.

At home, Iran's government is out of touch with its populace and stumbling under the weight of its thorough corruption, yet among backers flooding the streets and campuses of the West, Iran's banner has never flown higher.

And so, a year after Oct. 7, the Middle East is on the verge of an even greater inferno, as the campaign that the Iranian revolutionaries initiated 45 years ago takes its course. It seems almost miraculous now that America's post-WWII conflict with the Soviet Union — played out over just about the same length of time — never led to a more direct confrontation. I fear that this time we will not be so lucky.

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Turkey began investing in Eric Adams a decade ago, when he was just the Brooklyn borough president. The Turks saw Adams as an ambitious politician "on the rise," federal prosecutors say, and provided him with luxury air travel and hotels and illegal donations for a mayoral campaign. When Adams became New York City's mayor, a Turkish businessman who helped woo him told people that "Adams would soon be president of the United States." Alas, that plan went awry and ended in criminal charges, but sometimes, foreign governments make more successful bets.

In 1987, the Soviet Union began cultivating real estate mogul Donald Trump, inviting him to Moscow to discuss business opportunities. Two months later, Trump spent $100,000 on full-page ads in The New York Times urging the U.S. to "stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves." It was Trump's first public attack on U.S. allies and NATO, but not the last. He made many subsequent trips to Moscow.

In the 1990s, Trump went bankrupt after losing nearly $1 billion on his Atlantic City casinos. U.S. banks would no longer loan him money. In the 2000s, oligarchs and mobsters from Russia and former Soviet republics rescued Trump by buying hundreds of Trump condos in New York, Florida, and elsewhere, laundering tens of millions in the process. A Russian oligarch bought a Palm Beach estate from Trump for $95 million, four years after Trump paid $41 million for it. (The oligarch never moved in.) "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008.

Moscow's investment has brought spectacular returns. Last week, Trump boasted of his "very good relationship" with the sociopathic Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and said that if Ukraine had only "given up a little bit" of territory instead of resisting Russia's brutal invasion, hundreds of thousands of people would not be dead. Trump vowed that if he wins the election, he will work out "a fair deal" for all. In Moscow, Putin was grinning that Cheshire-cat grin.

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Losing can be a beautiful thing. That's the message I took away from a New York Times report on the Chicago White Sox's historically bad season, which has seen the team match the 1962 Mets' record of 120 losses — a record they may have shattered by the time you're reading this. Times writer Sam Anderson details how the White Sox have "explored the full spectrum of losing," like "the way a jazz saxophonist probes every note in a scale." They've gone down in squeakers and in routs, on sunny days and in the rain, and in games in which the entire team played like All-Stars and in one where the White Sox "hit their catcher in the groin with the baseball three separate times in a single inning."

Despite those many humiliations, a group of dedicated fans continues to show up in Section 108 of the White Sox stadium to gripe and (occasionally) cheer. Those loyalists say they're now rooting for an all-time loss record; one is selling T-shirts that declare, "We witnessed history." Meanwhile, the players themselves have shown remarkable grace, Anderson writes, a willingness to talk about losing and then "stride forward into the next potential loss."

At this fraught political moment, the "White Sux" might be the role models America needs. In MAGA world, it has become a sin to lose. After trying and failing to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election, Trump and his allies are now aiming to head off the possibility of defeat in November by changing the rules of the game. GOP activists are attempting to toss tens of thousands of voters from the rolls in critical battlegrounds and are pushing for last-minute changes to election procedures in Georgia and other swing states.

Chaos and ugliness seem all but certain in November because our two-party democracy needs one side to admit defeat and walk away. Swallowing a loss is miserable, as the fans in Section 108 can attest. But as Anderson notes, it's also a "civic miracle that keeps us from tearing each other's heads off."

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

"I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!" That's what Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform this week. He's a little late. Most of the rest of America figured out whether they were Swifties or haters at least three albums ago. Of course, Trump wasn't referring to the billionaire pop star's music, but to her endorsement of his rival Kamala Harris. I can't imagine any other president reacting with such petulance. Nixon or Johnson might have thought something similar if a superstar opposed them, but they would never have uttered it in public.

The only former world leaders I can think of with a similar small-mindedness and lack of impulse control are would-be authoritarians: the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte, for example, who once called the U.S. ambassador a "gay son of a bitch." Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, who said a congresswoman was too ugly to be "worth raping." Or outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has labeled rivals and journalists "pimps" and "dirt." Yet even they had more self-discipline than to throw a tantrum about a singer.

I realize that this is far from the most egregious thing Trump has said in just the past few weeks. At the debate, he repeated the lie that Haitian immigrants were eating cats, while a few days later he called migrants "TERRORISTS, CRIMINALS, AND MENTALLY INSANE." But that's exactly the point. All these rants pile up, to remind us of the nonstop cycle of outrage that characterized Trump's years in office.

That's what Swift was referencing in her endorsement, when she said she thought America should be led by "calm, not chaos." And it's what she was getting at in the spoken-word portion in one of her old hits from 2012. Talking of a tedious man who keeps begging for her attention, she says, "I just, I mean — this is exhausting, you know? Like, we are never getting back together. Like, ever." The question is how many voters feel the same.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

The horseshoe theory of politics is that if you go far enough left or right you wind up at almost the same place. If you're not sure of exactly what that means, you can look at the career of Tucker Carlson, who just did a highly hyped interview with Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper. You can familiarize yourself with Cooper's take on World War II — short version: All Hitler really wanted was peace with England — if you are so inclined.

But to me the interesting part is not Cooper's view of Hitler, but of Winston Churchill, whom he calls the "chief villain" of the war. Cooper is not the first amateur historian to be driven batty by Churchill. The British prime minister has long been the ultimate bête noire for the hard left. When academics talk about "decolonization," where they want to start, just like Cooper and Carlson, is almost always with taking Churchill down a peg.

Why the animus? Churchill, a complex man with his share of faults, represents the triumph of the Western tradition, which makes him a magnet for haters. We've heard the Cooper line before. It's just "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has gotta go" with a coat of right-wing polish. The hard right watched enviously as the Left found a market for identity politics, and the conclusion of MAGA conservatives was that it looked like a good line of business.

Of course, building up the politics of grievance and identity means tearing down historical tradition. If that's the future of the conservative movement, it's dark indeed. People before Cooper have speculated about where history could have gone if the U.S. and U.K. had minded their own business and let Germany and Russia fight it out on the continent. One was an Englishman not much liked by either the Left or Right: George Orwell. He wrote a whole novel about that kind of alternate history, which also investigates just where you get to when the ends of the horseshoe meet. He called it 1984.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

My favorite book about Mars really isn't about Mars at all. A series of loosely linked short stories, Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" (1950) tells of the exploration and settlement of the Red Planet by humans who are fleeing a dying and war-ravaged Earth. It is not what genre obsessives call "hard sci-fi," with yawn-inducing disquisitions on the technicalities of space flight and the scientific challenges of terraforming an inhospitable landscape. Instead, the Mars that Bradbury's colonists discover is a dreamlike planet with blue skies and water, a breathable if thin atmosphere, and noble but doomed indigenous inhabitants. It's the kind of Mars imagined by Edwardian skygazers like Percival Lowell, who was certain that Mars was lined with canals, dug by a hardworking people (so unlike those loafers on Earth) to tap the polar ice caps as the planet dried out. Bradbury uses this fantastical tableau to explore some very human issues: our intolerance and self-destructive nature, but also our capacity for love and wonder.

Along with other sci-fi staples such as living forever and computerizing consciousness, colonizing Mars is now an obsession of our tech elite. Rocket tycoon Elon Musk has said he wants to establish a "self-sustaining civilization" of 1 million people on our neighboring planet as an insurance policy against humanity's extinction. Yet I can't help but think that, like Bradbury and Lowell before them, Musk and his fellow billionaires are really projecting their own beliefs onto Mars' red vistas. The planet is bombarded with so much cosmic radiation that it may never be habitable. Yet to Musk and co., the fourth rock from the sun represents a blank slate, a drawing board on which they can create their dream society. It's one where frustrating Earth-based problems have no gravitational pull, and where the mega-wealthy can achieve true greatness, free of pesky regulators, taxes, unions, and journalists. Just like the best science fiction, it's a fantasy that reveals more about our present than our future.

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Mass deportation. It's an Orwellian phrase we associate with the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide. Sending armed troops to pull millions of people, including babies and seniors, from their homes, forcing them into squalid camps, and then transferring them to a land where they have nothing — it sounds like something only a crazed dictator would do. Not a democratic country, certainly not my own country. But in fact, the U.S. has done it multiple times, and not just during wartime. The Trail of Tears, when President Andrew Jackson signed the 1830 Indian Removal Act to expel tens of thousands of Native Americans from their land. During the Depression, when the U.S. kicked out up to 1.8 million people of Mexican descent, half of them U.S. citizens, to preserve jobs for whites. And Operation Wetback (yes, really), when President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the Border Patrol to truck over a million Mexican laborers back to Mexico. All of these actions were popular at the time, and all were seen in retrospect as shameful chapters in U.S. history.

Yet here we are again. Studies show that deporting immigrants doesn't help the economy; it hurts it. But Donald Trump says that if he's elected president, he will expel up to 20 million people, a figure far higher than the 11 million undocumented immigrants believed to be in the U.S. now. At the Republican convention, attendees carried signs blaring "Mass Deportation Now" and chanted "Send them back!" In a June poll, 6 in 10 voters said they supported the idea, including a third of Democrats, while just under half supported mass detention centers where those arrested (some of them doubtless citizens) would be sent for processing. Do these Americans understand how traumatic such an upheaval would be? The spectacle of troops going door to door, of families being rounded up, would be heart-wrenching. The blatant racism of the endeavor — it's not Norwegians over-staying visas who would be targeted — would rip this nation apart. Mass deportation is not un-American. But it should be.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

When people recall the dot-com boom of 25 years back, what comes up inevitably are the dumb mascots, the dumb stocks, the last hurrah of America Online with its inescapable CDs. The late 1990s exist in the collective memory like the punk rock and brown suits of the 1970s — the surface is easy to recall, the feeling much harder. What gets lost is that it was in many ways a time of genuine optimism about technology. I was brought back to that time by an article from musician and writer Elizabeth Nelson. The column takes us back to what can only be called the golden age of music piracy, when everyone quit buying music en masse and instead downloaded their 500 favorite albums for free. A lot of claims were made then about how when everything shook out, music and musicians would be better off without the filter of the rapacious music industry. 

But the corporate music industry did not wither away after all. The business has done fine, as have the superstars. Music probably hasn't done so badly (I don't recall "Livin' la Vida Loca" with special fondness). What did disappear, however, was the tier of working musicians who could make a living selling their music to devoted fans. The hollowing out of the middle is paralleled in many other areas — the end of the midlist book has been the sad story of print publishing. The hope back then was that putting tools and distribution into the hands of many more people would spur a creative outpouring. Instead, success has become ever more concentrated. In so many areas, the promise of technology has not been realized. But disappointed as I have been, I think back to the optimism of the early years of the internet — formative years for me — not with the thought that we were wrong. Rather, I hope technology might still make good on those early promises of advancing creativity and democracy.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.    

When I took my mother's car keys away, she cursed at me. I'd never heard my sweet, churchgoing mom use language like that in my life, but she couldn't accept that at 85, her fading vision, hearing, and memory made her unsafe at any speed. I was reminded of the day Mom followed me to the door, shouting "Give me those #@ $&%! keys back," when Joe Biden spent several weeks insisting against all evidence that he was fit to serve four more years. Giving up the most powerful and prestigious job in the world, obviously, is more painful than losing access to the Camry. But the denial and the anger are fundamentally the same. Getting old, I've found, demands a succession of surrenders. You can accept these losses with some grace and rueful resignation — or go to war with the inevitable. Pro tip: You can't win. 

I'm still more than a decade from Biden's stage of life, but if I put on my glasses, I can see the shape of it on the horizon. Behind me, the path is long and littered with losses large and small. Joints worn out from years of running, basketball, softball, and typing take turns complaining, and the mirror reveals a graying old guy I sometimes do not recognize. Too many loved ones and friends are gone. Last year, after 22 years as editor-in-chief of this magazine, I stepped down from full-time work so I could have more time to travel, to enjoy our new home in our new community, to kayak and cycle and walk and play more, to savor the passing days and sunsets over the river. Fortunately, I still get to continue to contribute to this fine magazine. It's worked out as I hoped, but the surrenders continue. The best strategy, it appears, is to accept them and fall back behind a new line of defense, and prepare for the next assault. I know how you feel, Mr. President. When they come for my car keys, I suspect I, too, will curse.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

Even before Vice President Kamala Harris took over as the likely Democratic nominee, the 2024 election was shaping up to be a battle of the sexes. Last week's Republican National Convention was deliberately planned as a chest-beating affair that would contrast Donald Trump's macho bona fides with President Biden's more female-friendly, reproductive rights–focused campaign. Big-game hunter Donald Trump Jr. introduced J.D. Vance — a "pro-natalist" who calls women without kids "childless cat ladies" — as Trump's running mate. Dana White, CEO of the testosterone-jacked Ultimate Fighting Championship, got the honor of introducing the GOP's alpha male. "I'm in the tough-guy business," White said of Trump, "and this guy's the toughest, most resilient guy I've ever met." And pro-­wrestling star Hulk Hogan praised Trump for surviving his attempted assassination like "a warrior" — before ripping off his T-shirt to reveal a Trump-Vance tank top and hollering "Let Trumpmania run wild, brother!"  

Doubling down on hypermasculinity makes for cringeworthy viewing, but it's smart politics. Before this week, polls showed Trump leading Biden in most of the six big swing states, thanks largely to his double-digit lead among men, which was greater than Biden's single-digit lead among women. Trump's pledge to "Make America Great Again," with its implicit promise to restore traditional gender hierarchies, seems to be resonating with younger men especially. In a recent Pew survey, 40 percent of men ages 18 to 49 who support Trump agreed that women's gains in society have come at the expense of men — 11 points higher than among older Trump-supporting men. As young men shift right, young women are going left and are now 15 points more liberal than their male peers. The consequences of this gender chasm will be felt long beyond November. A nation in which men and women view one another as political foes will be one with a lot more lonely, angry people.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

Not an hour after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, J.D. Vance already knew who was to blame: Democrats. "The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs," Vance wrote on X. "That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination." Vance, a former never-Trumper now reborn Trumpier-than-thou, was rewarded for this unjustified allegation with the nomination for the vice presidency. But he wasn't the only one to leap to conclusions. Democrats and Republicans alike urged an end to political vitriol, taking as read that the apocalyptic rhetoric around the election had spurred the shooter to violence. 

In fact, we don't know why Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed up to a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, a town about an hour away from his home, to shoot Trump. But we are all far too familiar with this type of perpetrator: a white male loner who was bullied in high school and had easy access to guns. It's the profile of nearly every school shooter. The motives of these young men are a mix of suicidal mental illness, rage, and a desire to finally be seen. Killing children gets you noticed; imagine the attention you'd receive for murdering the former — and possibly future — leader of the free world and igniting massive domestic unrest. But there's a striking difference between this event and an "ordinary" school shooting. This time, our civic leaders and pundits are putting the blame on media and politicians, on the language they use, rather than where it belongs: on a society sick with guns. America leads the world in mass shootings because America leads the world in civilian ownership of weapons of war. We have nearly 400 million guns in private hands, including 20 million AR-15s, and very little regulation over who can use them. To people in other countries, these statistics are scarcely credible. If we are to end the carnage, it's not simply our rhetoric that needs to change. It's our gun laws.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

About a month before the debate that upended President Joe Biden's campaign, The Wall Street Journal published a story headlined "Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping." The story was built largely on anonymous sources, with only Republicans providing the on-the-record ballast. Though the Journal's news pages have long had a reputation for studious nonpartisanship, it was roundly slammed by a cadre of media experts, who dismissed it as a hit piece filled with innuendo. The article has aged, obviously, far better than the critiques — which raises the question: Why weren't there more stories that prepared us for the shock of the debate? One theory, of course, is that many journalists didn't want to hurt Biden. I take a generous view here. The New York Times, for instance, did do many stories about the problem of Biden's age, despite the predictable savaging it got them from the Left. But there is a difference between covering Biden's age as a campaign issue and getting the straight story on his deterioration. 

I think there is a more intricate underlying issue here of how reporting works today. The kind of reporting the Journal did, relying on deep and often anonymous sourcing, has become increasingly rare. Both editors and readers now expect hard evidence — documents, tapes, quotes from multiple named sources. Last week, the excellent reporter Olivia Nuzzi published a story in New York magazine detailing how Biden's decline was an open secret to insiders and to the reporters grimly following his public appearances. Commentators complained that the story could have been published earlier. My suspicion, however, is that before the debate any article like Nuzzi's would have been dismissed as "just vibes." Reporters once dealt freely in their own observations and the words of anonymous insiders. Now the rule is often that until there are documents or on-the-record quotes, there is no story. That has frequently made the news feel more professional and reliable. But it has also set the public up for shocking surprises.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

You feel your political tribe is losing, don't you? Nearly all Americans share that perception, regardless of whether they identify as Republicans, Democrats, or independents — or even if they don't much follow politics at all. This "bipartisan pessimism" has a substantial basis in reality, says David Lauter in the Los Angeles Times. Conservatives are, in fact, losing the culture war, as American society becomes increasingly secular and multicultural, church attendance dwindles, acceptance of gay and lesbian rights grows, and working women choose smaller families or no children at all. Progressives quite accurately feel powerless to stop conservative Supreme Court justices from rolling back reproductive freedoms, making deadly weapons even easier to get, weakening environmental and business regulations, and authorizing Republican state legislatures to use extreme gerrymandering to maintain power. As Election Day looms, both presidential candidates are warning that their defeat would trigger an existential crisis for America. 

But let's zoom out a bit. Democrats often felt dejected and shut out of power during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Republicans wondered if they'd win another national election when Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama dominated Washington. American politics has always been a swinging pendulum, an arc of action and reaction. That's why Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was wrong when he was recently taped saying of the culture war, "One side or the other is going to win." In a democracy, one side wins temporarily — until the next election, or until death reshapes the Supreme Court. Roe seemed like a final liberal victory until it was reversed 50 years later, but the fulfillment of that conservative dream has cost Republicans dearly at the polls — and the overall number of abortions has gone up. On Nov. 6, roughly 45 percent of Americans will feel crushed, frightened, and angry. But defeat will contain the seeds of future victory — albeit a temporary one.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

Vivek Murthy wants the government to stub out social media use by kids. In a New York Times op-ed, the surgeon general this week details the growing body of evidence linking TikTok, Instagram, and other apps to the mental health crisis among young people. There's the study that found adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media have double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms. Notably, the average daily use for a teenager is now about five hours. There's the survey in which nearly half of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies. And then there are the endless anecdotes from teens who don't know how to look away from apps designed to deliver a steady scroll of dopamine hits. These platforms are engineered to be addictive, so Murthy proposes slapping an official surgeon general's warning on apps — like those on cigarettes — to "regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe." 

As a worried father of two, I can only say let's do it. But why stop at warnings for kids when excessive social media use is also rotting adult brains? What about if every time Elon Musk hit post on his latest X tirade, he were to see a pop-up stating, "This message may contribute to partisan animosity and further alienate Tesla owners. Do you still want to share this thought with the world?" Or when a celebrity is about to broadcast a filter-treated beach selfie on Instagram, a banner slides across the screen cautioning, "Searching for affirmation from strangers online may only exacerbate your feelings of insecurity. Have you considered seeking the answer within?" Even passive users of social media such as myself could be targeted by such PSAs: "Your 1 a.m. doomscrolling on Reddit about impending climate apocalypse is hurting the planet. Sleep would use less power." Dr. Murthy, I'm ready for your tough medicine.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

I'm a big fan of contraception. Thanks to the blessed availability of the pill, I got to have my child when I chose to. This doesn't make me unusual: At least 90 percent of American women use contraception at some point in their lives. But what about future American women? What about my teenage daughter? The three justices that former President Donald Trump nominated to the Supreme Court have already shredded one precedent that guaranteed women reproductive freedom, and there's a real chance they will tear up another. In their confirmation hearings, each of Trump's picks swore they would treat Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. Brett Kavanaugh insisted that Roe was "settled as precedent." So did Neil Gorsuch. Amy Coney Barrett said she would "follow the law of stare decisis." All three voted to overturn the decision anyway. 

The right to abortion and the right to contraception both spring from the constitutional right to privacy grounded in Griswold v. Connecticut, the case that established the right of married couples to access birth control. It, too, is supposed to be settled law. Yet some Republicans, including Justice Clarence  Thomas, are on the record calling for that decision to be reconsidered. Conservative activists have been sowing misinformation, falsely claiming that standard birth-control methods sometimes abort, not just prevent, pregnancies. Overturning Griswold would outrage most Americans, but this court doesn't seem to care what most Americans want — after all, polls taken the very month that it overturned Roe found that a decided majority of us favored keeping abortion legal. Now that Roe is gone, my daughter is growing up in a world where she has fewer rights than I had. Her male peers don't face the same situation, since nobody is gunning for condoms, the one form of birth control that requires buy-in from men. No, they are coming for the pill, the IUD, and the morning-after pill — the measures that women alone take to ward off unintended pregnancy. A war on women, indeed.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.  

The Covid pandemic witnessed an extraordinary politicization of science. Masking up in parks became a sign of being on the right side of reason. Cities and unions insisted on keeping schools closed long after it became clear that the danger to school-age kids was minimal, claiming they were following the science. Epidemiologists warned about the dangers of mass gatherings, even outdoors, then backed away from the warnings to leave room for racial justice protests, because racism was a health emergency. Questions about the origins of Covid, most especially any suggestion that it could have been accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, were dismissed as a conspiracy theory (it isn't) and racist (it isn't that either). Any debate on lockdowns, or the projections for deaths that justified them, was shut down with "trust the science." And on the right, lawmakers recklessly dismissed the value of vaccines — a strange reversal on an actual scientific breakthrough for which the Trump administration could claim credit. 

Covid ended up killing more than 1.1 million Americans, and there is every reason to get a full accounting of the pandemic. Unfortunately, this week's congressional hearings are not giving us that. The circus of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) telling Anthony Fauci, the nation's Covid response chief, that he should be imprisoned for mass murder evidenced zero real truth-seeking effort. There is value in tracing the history of the virus and reckoning with the pandemic's failures and successes. But we are missing our chance. After the Kennedy assassination — as fertile a soil for paranoia as is imaginable — the nonpartisan Warren Commission made a heroic and largely successful effort to untangle fact from speculation. A similar Covid Commission now could go a long way toward restoring faith in science and resolving the pandemic's many lingering questions. It's a sign of just how damaged our science and politics have become that nobody has even dared to ask for that. 

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

What a coincidence. The same "Appeal to Heaven" flag that has flown outside Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's New Jersey shore home, Rolling Stone reported last week, also proudly flutters outside the Maine mansion of his close friend, Federal Society co-founder Leonard Leo. The most powerful American most Americans have never heard of, Leo is the primary architect of the court's 6-3 conservative majority. He gave Donald Trump the Federalist Society-vetted names of Neil Gor such, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, and fought to get Alito, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas confirmed. It's no exaggeration to call Leo, an ultra-conservative Catholic, a theocrat. His mission, he says, is to defeat the "unchurched" and "vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists, and bigots" whom "the devil" is using to move society away from its "natural order." In recent years, Leo has joined evangelical Christian Trump supporters in embracing the 18th-century "Appeal to Heaven" flag as a defiant symbol of their belief that America must be freed from the tyranny of secular progressives. 

Alito is again claiming his wife is "solely responsible" for flying the flag, but its message matches his stated views and rulings. Alito has said that "religious liberty is worth special protection," and that a "new moral code" — requiring tolerance for LGBTQ rights, gay marriage, and reproductive freedom — poses a threat to the "core beliefs" of Catholics like him. It was Alito, of course, who wrote the majority decision to overturn Roe — a fulfillment of Leo's four-decades-long campaign. Two-thirds of Americans disagreed with that ruling, but Alito and Leo answer to a higher authority than mere democracy. In a second term, Trump has promised to give far-right Christian nationalists even greater power. "We have to bring back our religion," Trump recently told them. "We have to bring back Christianity." Sounds like an appeal to heaven. 

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.  

Around 300 B.C., King Ptolemy I — the new ruler of Egypt and a former general of Alexander the Great — tasked an adviser with a modest mission: "to collect, if possible, all the books in the world." Over the next two centuries, the great library in the Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria would be filled with hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls: the full corpus of ancient Greek and Egyptian literature along with Buddhist, Jewish, and Zoroastrian texts. Ships would be searched for books when they docked at Alexandria, and royal agents would pay hefty sums for almost any written work. A booming market in fakes and forgeries soon emerged. Entrepreneurial scribes dashed off scrolls of supposed secret wisdom from famous thinkers — one was titled Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid — while others created books that mixed the authentic with the imagined. In Alexandria's merchant quarter, stalls that once sold vegetables and baskets were "replaced with those stacking rolls and rolls of books," writes historian Islam Issa. 

Eventually, the library had to hire experts to wade through the sea of bogus texts and identify genuine treasures. The web, our modern-day library of Alexandria, faces a similar problem. This digital repository of human knowledge is being swamped with AI-generated slop — pointless listicles, nonsensical how-to guides, and factually flawed news summaries churned out by content factories that want to grab clicks and ad revenue on the cheap. To save users the hassle of scrolling through reams of garbage links in its search engine, Google has now started showing users AI-generated answers to their queries. But those answers are sometimes wrong — one user who wanted a fix for a car's faulty turn signal was advised to "replace the blinker fluid" — and pull traffic and dollars away from useful, human-run websites. Maybe the tech giant should hire more humans to curate trustworthy collections of knowledge. It could call them "librarians."

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

You don't have to know much about rap to be riveted by last week's epic battle of diss tracks between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. It was like watching a steamroller slowly crush a Matchbox car. Drake made a few snide remarks, and then Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Lamar came back and just pulverized him. Lamar dissected Drake's insecurities about being insufficiently Black and too, well, Canadian to be a real rapper. Then he went nuclear, tearing apart Drake's family and accusing him of preying on teenage girls. And then he did the whole thing again, but to a fun dance beat, crafting a song that will probably be played at clubs all summer. The audience was repelled and delighted by this public cruelty — the last track soared to the top of the charts. Despite myself, I was one of those who listened to Lamar's' tracks over and over, awed by his multilayered poetry but also impressed by his willingness to be so profoundly mean. 

Going negative works. It grabs our attention. That's why negative political ads are more effective than positive ones, and why they now make up more than half of all campaign advertising. Allegations that the other guy is a terrible person shift more votes than noble declarations of how to improve American lives. In this current election cycle, we are already being bombarded by attack ads, not just from the presidential campaigns but from congressional and local races as well. The effect of this tsunami of negativity is to make Americans angrier at one another, more isolated, more unhappy. And all of it can lead to violence. Rappers have been killed over diss tracks in the past, while in the present, we've seen a five-fold rise in violent right-wing political attacks since 2016. We should listen to hip-hop veteran Questlove, who condemned both Drake and Lamar — and their fans. "Nobody won the war," he wrote. This was just about an "audience wanting blood."

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

The strangest long-standing misconception I ever had was that Jerry Seinfeld was Greek. I believed this for many years — this despite being myself a Jewish New Yorker, who would have been expected to recognize others of the type. In fact, I didn't really register that Seinfeld and his crew were a particular type. They just seemed like ordinary people. Self-absorbed, dishonest, scheming ordinary people. I don't remember how I got the idea of Seinfeld's Greekness, but it persisted, and when people would mention Seinfeld's Jewish humor I would mentally correct them, thinking smugly, "Actually, he's Greek." I took it for granted that the appeal of Seinfeld was universal. It came from the central law of all comedy: Thou shalt not lecture. Virtually all the behavior on "Seinfeld" was awful, but viewers were largely supposed to understand that for themselves. 

These days, Jerry Seinfeld wonders if his show would ever have gotten through all the committees set up to make sure comedy will not cause offense (see, for instance, his interview with The New Yorker). I'm not sure I would go quite that far. Seinfeld's co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus went on to serve most of seven seasons as the U.S. vice president in Veep from 2012 to 2019, and there was plenty of hilariously offensive material in that. And I'm not eager to climb on a "things were funnier in the old days" bandwagon. But I do think that comedy has gotten harder. Seinfeld came out of the age of anti-moralizing. Comedy didn't come with lessons (my senior year of high school saw the release of Heathers, the most morally suspect teen movie of all time). Recent years, though, have insistently demanded lessons from comedy (hello, The Good Place), and from other arts too. The funny thing about timeless moral lessons is that they come with a short shelf life, and Seinfeld still works because it consistently skips them. Morals change, standards change. But human folly, served without moralistic garnish, stays funny forever.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

So much for the guardrails. The first time Donald Trump assumed the powers of the presidency, apologists assured us that our democratic institutions would curb his most unhinged impulses. Trump was, in fact, impeached twice for egregious abuses of power, including an attempted coup and inciting a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, but acquitted each time by Senate Republicans plainly disinterested in the evidence. As Trump seeks a return to power, the U.S. Supreme Court made it clear last week that any remaining guardrails are gone, when it joined in his efforts to delay his federal criminal trials beyond the November election. Rather than laugh off Trump's monarchal claim of total presidential immunity, court conservatives gravely said Trump's actions to prevent the peaceful transfer of power needed to be carefully parsed, so a president's "official acts" could be protected. "I'm not discussing the particular facts of this case," Justice Samuel Alito said dismissively. 

How wonderfully convenient for the Don. In a GOP he dominates like a mob boss, even Republicans who denounced Trump in disgust after Jan. 6 are kissing the ring. Former Attorney General Bill Barr, who last year called Trump a "consummate narcissist" who "will always put his interests ahead of the country's," now says Trump will get his vote. "I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement," Barr explained. It's a commonly held view on the Right, as Americans wage a fierce cultural civil war over religion, abortion, feminism, race, and immigration. Many people — including Supreme Court justices — find urban, multicultural progressives so abhorrent that anything, even the lawless authoritarianism of a second Trump term, is preferable. In a recent interview with Time, Trump scoffed at the suggestion that his promise of autocratic rule would frighten voters away. "I think a lot of people like it," he said. About that, at least, he's not wrong.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.    

I feel like I owe some apologies. At the start of the week, this Englishman and his English wife stood in a room with a couple hundred strangers in downtown Manhattan and renounced all "allegiance and fidelity" to any foreign prince (sorry William), potentate (beg pardon Charles III), and state (forgive me Britannia) of which we had "heretofore been a subject or citizen." And after pledging to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the U.S. against all enemies, foreign and domestic, something magical happened: We became Americans. Now, outwardly expressing my joy at this metamorphosis was difficult, because a certain British stoicism — I believe the scientific term is "emotional stuntedness" — is encoded in my DNA. My natural impulse in such moments of wonder is to mutter, "Well, this is a lot of fuss about nothing," and then start talking nervously about scones or the weather. But as a newly minted American, I forced myself to enjoy the occasion, clap, and even, dare I admit it, let out a "Whoop!" 

It was an event worth cheering. Few people ever get to decide their nationality; for most it's an accident of birth. But here was a room full of Britons, Russians, French, Dominicans, Chinese, Mexicans, and many other nationalities who'd spent years and sometimes decades working through the labyrinthine immigration system to become Americans. For many, dual citizenship was not an option. Naturalizing in the U.S. meant giving up citizenship in the country of their birth. That's a remarkable sacrifice, but also a testament to the promise of the U.S. While only 67 percent of Americans now say they are extremely or very proud of the U.S. — 23 points lower than in 2003 — many people from around the world still regard this as a nation where they can work toward a better life; a dynamic democracy that is far from perfect but, as Armenian-American historian Vartan Gregorian wrote, is perfectible. For this new American, at least, that's something to be proud of.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

The only time I sat on a jury was in the early aughts, when I lived in Manhattan. It was a traffic-injury lawsuit: A man who spoke little English had apparently rear-ended a Queens woman, who was wearing a neck brace in court and was loudly irate about her injury. We the jury were the typical motley assortment of New Yorkers, from all ethnic backgrounds and income levels. The one thing we had in common was that we took our role as jurors seriously, working through the evidence until a different story of the accident emerged: The man had been stopped at a red light, and the woman gunned her car in reverse to smash into him, making it look like a rear-end collision so she could collect. It was a minor case, and the stakes were low. Even so, I came away from the experience with an extra bump of faith in the justice system and in my fellow Americans. 

So I believe that former President Trump can get a fair trial from Manhattan jurors in the hush-money case that opened this week. I expect them to take their responsibility to heart and to weigh the facts. Having said that... Would you want to be a juror on this case? I sure wouldn't. It's not merely that the stakes are high for the first former president to be charged with a crime. It's also that this particular defendant is extremely powerful and known to be vindictive. In this and the other three court cases against him, Trump has denounced the judges and prosecutors in vicious terms, all but inviting his MAGA supporters to become vigilantes — and they have done so. Death threats are now routine against the judges, their families, and their staffs. Many of these people have been swatted, and the courtroom where the trial is taking place has received multiple bomb threats. Will the jurors worry that if the evidence leads them to convict, an angry ex-president will sic a mob on them? That shouldn't be a danger in a nation governed by the rule of law, but that's how far we've fallen.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

God is the greatest / Death to America / Death to Israel / A curse upon the Jews / Victory to Islam. If you are ever at a loss to find the motivations of America's enemies on the world political stage, it's helpful to think back on the slogan that Yemen's Ansar Allah — the Houthis — put on their flag. In the Gaza war, the Houthis, who have bombed shipping in the Persian Gulf ostensibly in sympathy with the plight of Palestinians, are bit players. But their slogan nicely crystallizes the issue. Death to America / Death to Israel: The two are intertwined. After our foes are done with Israel, they can move on to the main event. In Ukraine, things are little different. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian billionaire turned exiled dissident, wrote that "Putin, in his head, has long been at war not with Ukraine, but with America." 

Putin's strategy of poisoning American debate to separate the U.S. from Ukraine is transparent. The designs of Hamas, Iran, and their fellow travelers are similar. Nicaragua, led by the repressive Daniel Ortega, last month led a bizarre genocide case against Germany at the International Court of Justice for supplying weapons to Israel. Is Ortega's target Germany, or Israel? Or is it really the United States — the country Ortega has fought with for four decades? When crowds wave signs deploring settler colonialism and the U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories takes to X to deplore the "unlawful endeavor" of "settler colonialism," the ultimate settler-colonialist state they have in mind is not Israel. Gaza has been a terrible war, and there are legitimate questions about the Israeli military's conduct. But if the U.S. fails to back its allies, and Israel in particular, that will not win us any friends. It will be seen for what it is: a defeat for the United States. And it will be an invitation to America's enemies to bring their wars ever closer to us.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

Not long ago, the great fear about Artificial Intelligence was that it would grow so much smarter than mere humans that it would seize control of the world. Maybe it still will, someday. But now that AI is out of the box and generating a tsunami of "content," we're confronting a more immediate danger: It is polluting the internet and dumbing down our culture with synthetic, soulless, error-filled, imitative junk. A backlash has begun. In the right context, AI can be an invaluable tool for sorting through vast archives of data, connecting the dots,  and helping scientists, doctors, engineers, and financial institutions do their work. But when harnessed to cheaply and quickly crank out articles, images, music, and art, AI replaces human creativity and self-expression with sterile imitation. "Great art, or even not-great art, springs out of an individual's personality/history," the author Joyce Carol Oates recently posted on X. "AI is a machine that can mimic, but has no emotional history." 

None of that matters to corporations seeking cheap content — that execrable word — to fill the vast maw of the internet and popular culture. With nothing unique or personal to express, AI churns out uncanny mashups of writing and images in its data set — often laced with "hallucinations," or falsehoods. AI-generated writing and art are to real writing and art what Hot Pockets and McDonald's are to food. It is Tang in the place of orange juice.  Every creative occupation — including screenwriters, photographers, illustrators, artists, and authors — fears replacement and intellectual theft by AI. Google is already paying newspapers to publish AI-generated "journalism," and AI summaries of real books are polluting Amazon. Before long, movie studios will feed successful scripts into AI and ask it to write a blockbuster. Instead of killing humanity off with Terminators, AI is numbing us with swarms of countless chatbots. It may diminish its creators by simply making us dumber.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

Donald Trump is trying out a bold new slogan on the campaign trail: Are you better off than you were four years ago? His hope is that voters will look back on the final year of his presidency and remember halcyon days when the economy was booming, the streets were safe, and Americans were happy. Such memories would, of course, be utterly divorced from the reality of spring 2020. As the first Covid wave swept across the country, businesses shuttered en masse, with the U.S. shedding some 22 million jobs that March and April. Meanwhile, the weekly Covid death rate surged ever higher — from dozens to hundreds to thousands — despite then–President Trump's assurances that the country had "tremendous control" over the coronavirus and that "we're winning it." 

When I cast my mind back four years, two memories leap out. The first is the 24/7 wail of sirens in my old Brooklyn neighborhood, as ambulances ferried a seemingly endless line of Covid patients to overloaded hospitals. The second, more arbitrary recollection, is of the evening when I looked around my cramped apartment and suddenly realized it was filled with desks. With New York City shut down, both my wife and I now had to work from home, which also doubled as a Zoom classroom for my 7- and 4-year-olds. Other memories seep through: crossing the street to avoid a passerby and possible pathogen-bearer, the chained and padlocked gate of the local playground, my wife stitching together cloth masks from old T-shirts. But as a whole, those early months of the pandemic seem like a blur. That's a natural response to a traumatic event — our brains often bury or scrub painful memories that could come back to hurt us — and I'm sure millions of Americans have the same fog. But if this election is going to be a referendum on whether we were genuinely better off four years ago, then we can't forget the painful reality of 2020. 

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

Ahead of Russia's farce of an election, state television aired a menacing get-out-the-vote commercial. A pregnant young woman stands in her modest kitchen, chopping vegetables and asking her husband about his day — did he remember to get groceries? Yes. Did he remember to vote? No, he shrugs, saying, "What difference does it make?" The ad suddenly shifts into horror-film mode, the lights flickering, the music ominous. The wife advances slowly toward him, brandishing her kitchen knife. She lists off all the wonderful things the Kremlin has promised for the future that they will lose if he doesn't vote — child payments, subsidized loans — and chases him out of the apartment. Off he runs to the polls, just in time. It's an entertaining spot, funny in the way of Russian black humor, but there's a subliminal message in it, too. Vote, or face violence. 

Why would Vladimir Putin bother trying to motivate voters? The outcome here was a foregone conclusion, since the candidates ostensibly running against him were Kremlin-picked non-entities who didn't even campaign against him. But holding an election allows him to pretend that Russia is a democracy, that his people support him, that his rule is legitimate. This year, with the war in Ukraine dragging on and killing tens of thousands of Russian soldiers each month, the regime resorted to new measures to compel turnout, extending the balloting for three days and introducing electronic voting. Public-sector employees were ordered to bring others with them to the polls. Coerced into voting, Russia's beleaguered opposition managed to turn the act into a protest: They showed up, but all at the same time on the final day, a silent display of defiance. While such a protest does nothing to weaken Putin's repressive hold on Russia, it shows that there is a flicker of dissent that Putin hasn't been able to snuff out.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

For a brief period four years ago, when the U.S. first declared a COVID emergency, it seemed like we were suspended in time, with everything rolling to a stop. And then the world resumed — just with all the trends in play moving faster. Whether it was political polarization or the rise of remote work, COVID made the future come sooner. And as it was for the adult world, so it was for schools and kids, only worse. Remote school brought to the forefront the increasing loneliness and confusion of American children and teenagers. The COVID years caused a measurable decline in math and reading scores, what we think of as "pandemic learning loss." But the hours of missed classroom time just scratch the surface of what has been taken away from kids. When COVID hit, we were already seeing falling reading scores worldwide, falling independence, and increasing anxiety. The underlying trend was already there, and COVID made it worse. 

It has been well over two years since the overwhelming majority of schools in the U.S. fully reopened, and we still see a doubling of absentee rates. This is not pandemic learning loss. It is a retreat of kids into their homes, into themselves, and most of all into their electronic devices. The signs of trouble are everywhere. The SAT just got rid of long reading passages, one more sign of the decline of attention. At my son's school, the plays the sixth to eighth-graders put on have gotten simpler and shorter because kids are not used to memorizing lines or acting on stage. And in the most troubling data point of all, rates of teen suicide have climbed dramatically. These are not issues that will be solved with a few more hours of time in a classroom. We have been letting our kids down for a long time. COVID just made that clear — hopefully clear enough that we can see how much better we need to do.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

From a jagged hilltop in Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, a group of hikers was marveling at the white tongue of a glacier descending through a valley to a vast blue lake. I asked our guide, a young Chilean woman from the capital city of Santiago, what it was like to live in this paradise near the tip of South America, and whether she kept up with news from the outside world. "No, I stopped paying attention," she said with a laugh. "I don't even go back to Santiago much anymore." I said I couldn't blame her. While recently vacationing in a yurt in Patagonia, my wife, Karla, and I couldn't help but think about how nice it would be to escape the anger, violence, and madness of the "civilized" world. That fantasy, it seems, is widely shared. Exhausted and heartsick, many people are tuning out the grim news about politics, Gaza, Ukraine, and climate change, and musing with friends about where to flee. 

Here's the problem with tuning out or running away, as tempting as flight might be. Demagogues, dictators, and sociopaths are relentless in their pursuit of self-serving ends, and succeed when they wear down the resistance of principled people. When evil men triumph, escape is only temporary. While we were in Patagonia, we heard two sharp cracking sounds from the glaciers — warning signs of the ancient ice's dramatic retreat amid warming temperatures. Do nothing but admire the scenery, and one day the glaciers — and so much else — will be gone. The same is true for democracy and decency. We can succumb to doomerism and let the bastards win, or stand and fight for what matters, and for the world we leave our children and grandchildren. In the gloomiest depths of World War II, as Hitler's war machine rolled over Europe, Winston Churchill had this inspiring rejoinder to despair: "Whatever the cost may be, we shall fight. We shall never surrender." P.S.: The Nazis lost.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

If I asked you to create an image in your mind of a stereotypical Nazi soldier, what would his face look like? Perhaps a jutting chin, cruel blue eyes, and — underneath that steel helmet — a head of blond hair that's been shaved on the sides and left long on top. As for skin color, we're going with white, right? Wrong, according to Google's new Gemini artificial intelligence model. Asked by users to generate images of World War II-era German soldiers, it offered up illustrations of Black men and Asian women in Wehrmacht uniforms — as well as the occasional Aryan-looking fella. Other historical queries yielded similarly puzzling results: The Founding Fathers were apparently a racially diverse bunch that included a few Founding Mothers, while the founders of Google were two Asian men, not the clearly Caucasian Sergey Brin and Larry Page. This has been manna for the "anti-woke" right, which has pointed to Gemini as evidence that Silicon Valley is trying to rewrite history to fit its preferred progressive narrative, one in which white males are largely absent.  

What's more likely is that the skewed results stem from Google's attempt to avoid the racial and gender biases that have plagued other AI models, such as chatbots that produce only white men in white coats when asked for an image of a doctor. So Gemini's architects tweaked the AI to make its output more diverse and, as Megan McArdle writes in The Washington Post, perhaps "a little aspirationally overrepresentative." That's a noble goal — but twisting history to fit modern mores only creates more problems. A middle schooler who uses such an AI for research might come away believing that white men in 18th-century America treated Blacks and women as their respected equals, rather than as their property and subordinates. If that's the case, the kid might wonder, then what was the point of the civil rights and suffragette movements? We can't learn from history by erasing it.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

Vladimir Putin has finally silenced Alexei Navalny. The Russian president likes to poison his enemies: That's how whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko was killed, how dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza ended up in a coma, and how former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was disfigured. But after Navalny survived a Kremlin poisoning with the deadly nerve agent Novichok in 2020, he refused to go into exile, instead bravely returning to Russia and certain imprisonment. So Putin had Navalny slowly tortured, starving and freezing him over months in prison, and almost certainly gave the order to kill him last week. What was Navalny saying that was so intolerable? In witty, mocking YouTube videos, he exposed the wealth that Putin had stolen from the Russian people, a dragon's hoard of palaces, yachts, private jets. "This isn't a country house," Navalny said in one video, showing Putin's $1.3 billion private resort. "It's an entire city, or rather a kingdom. It has impregnable fences, its own harbor, a church, a no-fly zone — even its own border crossing." That's the video Navalny's team posted on his behalf soon after his 2021 arrest. It racked up more than 100 million views in just two weeks and inspired protests across the country. 

Though Navalny is gone, his message will not be silenced. His Anti-Corruption Foundation is still operating (you can find it at acf.international) and will keep on exposing the crimes of Putin and the oligarchs, what Navalny called the "party of crooks and thieves." Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, says she will carry on her husband's work, and so will their daughter, Daria. They will continue to remind the world that, as Daria said while accepting the 2021 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought on her father's behalf, "the pacification of dictators and tyrants never works." Let's hope those Republicans in Congress who have effectively been serving Putin by blocking aid to Ukraine are listening.

Remember the "Varsity Blues" scandal of five years ago? If you don’t — and given everything that has happened in the world since, you very well may not — we can recap briefly: A college consultant named Rick Singer was charged (and later convicted) of bribing college admissions officers on behalf of well-­connected clients. There were fake photos of water polo competitions, ringers taking the SATs, and a cast of chief executives and Hollywood types. The actress Felicity Huffman went to jail for 11 days. As corruption goes, the stakes were pretty small potatoes. But in retrospect Varsity Blues feels like a turning point. Five years ago, the idea that spots in top colleges were available for sale fed into all the misgivings that ordinary people had about academia and power. It was a little chink in the armor of meritocracy, confirming the suspicion that entry into the ruling class just required greasing the right palm.

I think Varsity Blues would play out differently now. Merely five years ago, the value and prestige of top universities was largely unquestioned. Since then, the standing of universities has been dramatically eroded. Middle-class parents, humiliated at coming hat-in-hand to the financial aid office to find out how much of a discount they can get off colleges' outsize — and largely fictional — sticker prices, wonder what value they are getting. Conservatives dismiss universities as factories for indoctrination, while liberals believe that the whole idea of meritocratic admissions is a fig leaf for upper-class power hoarding. Some consultants still charge parents tens of thousands of dollars to get their kids into college. But increasingly, the whole edifice of American college admissions seems like a relic of a collapsing era. At the time of the scandal, no one seemed to ask, "Is it even worth it?" Now that feels like the very first question that comes to mind.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

In the early days of The Week, we splayed out a smorgasbord of daily newspapers on a long rectangular table in the center of the room. In addition to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, the staff sifted through the Miami Herald, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and several news magazines in our quest for tasty articles to curate for our readers. For a news junkie, the array of fine reporting, writing, and news presentation on that table was thrilling — tangible proof of the vital role journalism plays in our democracy. That was two decades ago, before Google, Facebook, and the internet laid waste to print newspapers and magazines. Now many of the websites that replaced them are also struggling and dying. As Elon Musk gloated last week, the implosion of "legacy media" is a boon for unfiltered, user-generated sources of information like his X, which "enables the people to define the narrative."

Ah, yes — "the narrative." How liberating to be freed from the fusty standards of evidence imposed by journalists, scientists, historians, and other obsolete sources of authority. The mainstream media, for example, would never have told you that Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, the NFL, and the deep state are conspiring to deny Donald Trump a second term. That narrative may be easy to laugh off, but in the Disinformation Age, millions of citizens have adopted equally nonsensical beliefs about vaccines, election fraud, Jan. 6, climate change, gun violence, Ukraine, and the "Great Replacement" conspiracy — with much graver implications. Expertise, evidence, and nuanced perspective are out. Now you can get alternative facts and tribal dogma from simpleminded podcasters and TikTok influencers, rage-aholic cable TV hosts, and reactionary billionaires. Dead and dying newspapers aren't coming back, but we need to think more carefully and critically about what's replacing them.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

As a teenager in small-town England in the early 1990s, I spent far too many hours hanging out in the backroom of my local pub. That musty space contained two things that were a magnetic draw for adolescent males in the pre-digital age: a pool table and a jukebox. While my friends would pump 20 pence pieces into the table, I'd feed my coins into the wall-mounted CD player. There was an art to selecting the perfect songs. They had to rock. And, because I wanted to dominate the sound system for as long as possible and get maximum value from my paper-route money, they had to be long. Wayne's World ensured that Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was a regular pick. But at 5 minutes and 55 seconds it felt, well, insufficiently epic. Metallica's "One" — the album version, natch — came in at a more respectable 7 minutes and 27 seconds. But it was Guns N' Roses' "Coma" that delivered the greatest bang for the buck, at 10 minutes and 14 seconds. Preposterously bloated? Arguably. Cost-effective? Absolutely. 

The belief that a long song was a good song was, judging from the exasperated look of other pub patrons, not widely held 30 years ago. It's even rarer today. The average single on the Billboard Hot 100 is now about three minutes, down from more than four in 1990. People on streaming sites "want to switch to the next thing," said songwriter Erika Nuri Taylor, "the next song, the next video, the next TikTok." Forced to compete in a world of distractions — and because artists don't earn royalties on Spotify if a listener clicks away in the first 30 seconds — songwriters now aim to kick off with an arresting hook and then leap straight into the chorus. There's no time for a slow build, a bridge, or, sorry Slash, a second or third guitar solo. I'd like to bemoan the shrinking attention spans of Gen Z, but the awkward truth is that their pop brevity might be exactly what we need after decades of musical inflation. The average length of a hit song in the 1950s? Two minutes and 46 seconds.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

Childbirth is fraught under the best of circumstances. A woman can be laboring in a hospital surrounded by medical professionals and still have something go seriously wrong, necessitating a 2 a.m. emergency C-section (ask me how I know). But what about a woman going through labor in a war zone? Bombs falling, nothing antiseptic or even clean, no anesthesia available for that C-section. It is an impossibly cruel situation. Yet that is the reality right now for tens of thousands of pregnant women and teenage girls in Gaza. Before the war, Gaza already had infant mortality that was seven times that of Israel; now, more than 100 days into the conflict, the statistic is unknowable. The Israeli blockade preventing most supplies from getting into the Palestinian territory has caused a hunger crisis, leaving pregnant women in Gaza malnourished and anemic — more prone to hemorrhaging after childbirth and less able to produce milk. With many hospitals bombed out of commission, Gazan women are giving birth in tents, in the cold, with rain coming in. And at least one of the Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 was reportedly some eight months pregnant. She gave birth where? In a tunnel?

The best solution for these women, of course, is an end to the fighting, and Israel and Hamas are currently discussing a cease-fire. But in the meantime, why can't women who are pregnant or who have young children be evacuated? Egypt's authoritarian president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, has said he doesn't want to open the border between his country and Gaza, because if Palestinians are once displaced they might never be able to return. Yet that is a problem for the future. Women and babies are dying right now. And nobody — not Israel, not Hamas, not Egypt, not the U.S. — is doing anything to help them.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.