The Atlantic

It’s Not Just Iran. Trump Is Flailing on Multiple Fronts.

2026-04-15T14:24:36-04:00

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You’ve heard the joke: The White House is going to start talking about the Epstein files to distract from how badly the Iran war is going.

Except that this reverse “Wag the dog” is based on bizarre truth: First Lady Melania Trump did bring the disgraced financier up, unprompted, late last week in an effort to distance herself from the scandal (in a move that, predictably, only shifted it back into the spotlight once again). Meanwhile, as negotiations with Iran stumble forward, the Strait of Hormuz is still in Tehran’s hands and now President Trump has authorized a risky naval blockade that will likely send prices soaring further. Moreover, Trump’s poll numbers have continued to fall, Republicans worry that both houses of Congress could be lost in November, and the president threw away a remarkable amount of geopolitical capital trying to support his now-defeated illiberal buddy Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Oh, and Trump deeply offended adherents of the world’s two largest religions in one week’s time.

Donald Trump has long ruled by fear. He demands complete fealty from fellow Republicans; he pushes around world leaders. He’s a political escape artist. But this time, he has boxed himself in without an obvious way out. The war in Iran was a conflict of his choosing, but it has not gone at all how he expected. Trump believed that it would resemble the military blitz that effortlessly snatched Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, that it would be a surgical strike lasting days or maybe just a couple of weeks. Instead, the conflict is approaching the 50-day mark. Iran is battered but emboldened, and now has greater control of the vital strait—through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes—than it did before the war, wielding it like an economic vise to squeeze the rest of the globe. Trump has demanded it be reopened, even threatening to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization if the regime did not comply. But Tehran didn’t quake in terror. Trump’s usual intimidation tactics aren’t working.

The Venezuela raid in the year’s first days altered the course of Trump’s presidency. By the closing months of 2025, the momentum of his first six months in office had dissipated and his party had suffered a series of electoral losses. He looked to some like an early lame duck. But the Caracas military operation, White House aides felt, righted the ship. Trump, though never restrained, was transformed into pure id, acting on impulse and goaded on by advisers who saw an opportunity to further expand executive power. And he fell further in love with the might of the U.S. military, telling advisers that it was an unstoppable force. Greenland. Iran. Cuba. His legacy, he believed, would be redrawing the world’s maps.

[Read: Trump is learning that his bullying has consequences]

The U.S. military has smashed much of Iran’s defenses and damaged its missile arsenal. The joint operation with Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader and many of his top lieutenants. But Iran didn’t surrender. Trump had overestimated the capacity of the Iranian people to rise up, and he had not understood the extraordinary pain that the hard-line theocratic regime was willing to accept to maintain its grip on power. Thirteen American troops have been killed. Tehran maintained the ability to strike at its Gulf neighbors and damage their energy facilities. And even though much of its navy was destroyed, it was able to seize control of the strait by wielding the threat of mines, fast-attack boats, and armed drones. Giant oil tankers avoided the danger, and prices around the world began to rise.

This is when Trump ran into the limits of his power. He was outraged that such a makeshift force would intimidate the shipping companies, demanding that they “show some guts” and force the passage. But companies balked. He urged European nations to step in, noting that they benefit more from the oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz than the United States does. But Europe refused, having not been consulted before the war began and declining to bend to Trump’s wishes just weeks after he strained transatlantic ties by demanding that the U.S. be given Greenland. They were finally standing up to the president who boasted to my colleagues that “I run the country and the world.”

Back home, some Republicans were also finally saying no. A few loud, isolationist voices—Tucker Carlson, Steven Bannon, Megyn Kelly—declared that a new war in the Middle East broke Trump’s “America First” promises. And while most Republicans begrudgingly went along with the bombing campaign in Iran, many made clear that they would draw the line on a ground invasion. The Pentagon has readied potential assaults; military leaders are still awaiting Trump’s orders. Polls showed that Americans, who never approved of the war, were deeply opposed to a ground attack. Instead, Trump went on social media the morning of Easter Sunday and unleashed an unhinged threat, demanding that Iran “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” before adding “Praise be to Allah.” Muslim leaders denounced the post as blasphemous. Two days later, he went further, threatening that “a whole civilization will die.”

[Read: Trump made a deal that gives him nothing he wanted]

Even some of Trump’s advisers were deeply dismayed, a few of them told me. Members of Trump’s inner circle had counseled him to avoid issuing deadlines; he had now set several, and looked weaker each time one passed. His post was threatening actions that would amount to war crimes—and a genocide. The president was flailing, several people close to him told me. His usual maneuvers had not worked, so he believed that his only play was to escalate. But it wasn’t strategically employing unpredictable behavior to get his way; it was desperation. He looked erratic. Republican allies and world leaders lobbied him to back off his threat, and as the deadline approached, his team seized on a cease-fire offer dangled by Pakistani negotiators. But the talks this past weekend in Islamabad did not yield a deal, prompting Trump to order the blockade. The plan was to apply pressure on Iran to open the strait and on Europe to aid the U.S. So far, neither result has been achieved.

In private moments, most Republicans have been saying for months that holding the House is likely beyond their reach. The GOP’s margin is slim, and the party out of power tends to do well in midterm elections. But at least, Republicans thought, the Senate was safe. That’s no longer the case. Democrats are looking at the map and see possible pickups in North Carolina, Maine, and even Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska. Republicans’ poll numbers are falling while prices—particularly of gas—are rising. Trump has yet to make a real case for the necessity of the Iran conflict. And even if the war were to end soon, the economic pain is forecast to last for months, well into campaign season. Before the war erupted, the White House had planned for Trump to hammer home an economic message. But now the president is distracted—and he doesn’t have good economic news to share anyway.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, continues to project confidence about both Iran and the midterms, telling me in a statement that “conflicts like this are ultimately judged by the outcome, which will be a good one for the American people, and there’s a lot of game left to play before November.”

Last summer, the West Wing’s plans to tout the economy were interrupted by questions surrounding Trump’s ties to the dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Epstein scandal has been one of the few areas in which Republicans have felt comfortable breaking with Trump, who wants the matter closed. But once again, the financier was thrust back into the headlines—this time by the first lady. Melania Trump caught many senior White House aides off guard last Thursday with her sudden statement denying ties to Epstein, a few of them told me; the president himself admitted he didn’t know what his wife was going to say. It’s led to speculation that the first lady was trying to get ahead of some sort of damaging Epstein-related story; so far, nothing has materialized. But her call for Congress to give Epstein’s victims a public hearing ensures that the story won’t die any time soon.

Hungary has added to the president’s losing streak. On Sunday, just days after Vice President Vance made a campaign appearance in Budapest with Orbán, the ruling party was routed at the polls. Orbán had been a model for many on the right; he had wielded state power to seize influence over Hungary’s media, universities, and other institutions, aligning with Vladimir Putin to undermine the European Union and NATO. Trump had invested much in Orbán’s reelection: Secretary of State Marco Rubio also made a Budapest appearance, while the president repeatedly endorsed Orbán and suggested that more U.S. funding would be on the way to Hungary if the prime minister won. The voters of Hungary had other ideas.

[Read: There’s a message for MAGA in Viktor Orbán’s defeat]

And then the president picked a fight with the pope. Pope Leo XIV has been judicious in speaking out about political matters but has been unsparing for months with his criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. When the Iran conflict broke out, the pope (as pontiffs tend to do) spoke out against war. Popes and presidents don’t always see eye to eye, but most commanders in chief opt against attacking the vicar of Christ for fear of alienating the tens of millions of Catholics in the United States—or, perhaps, to avoid any potential for divine retribution.

But Trump, of course, is not most presidents. He does not take criticism from anyone, and those close to him believe that he felt threatened by another powerful American voice on the global stage. So there the president was on Sunday, just a week after offending Muslims, slamming the pope as being “Weak on Crime” and “catering to the Radical Left.” To make it worse, Trump posted an AI image depicting himself as Jesus healing a sick man. The uproar was swift, even from some in Trump’s party accustomed to silently suffering his outrages. Trump buckled, taking down the post before improbably claiming that the image depicted him as a doctor, not as the son of God. But then, unbowed, he chided the pope again on social media late last night.

The pope, for his part, has said this week that he has “no fear” of the Trump administration. He is far from alone.

Critics Love It. But Who Wrote It?

2026-04-15T13:15:06-04:00

On a recent morning at Rockefeller Center, NBC employees strolled through the crowd with copies of Upward Bound, the latest book-club pick from the Today show co-host Jenna Bush Hager. “It’s deeply heartfelt and moving,” Hager said, after holding up the debut novel from the 28-year-old Woody Brown, “and the reason it’s so authentic is that the author understands autism firsthand.”

That understanding is indeed profound. Brown’s autism is such that he can barely speak, and he communicates mostly by pointing to letters, one by one, on a laminated board. This is also how his novel, which is already a New York Times best seller, came to be. In the recorded interview that followed Hager’s introduction, Brown’s mother, Mary, sat beside him, holding the letter board and reading his tapped-out messages.

“I never thought there could be a life like this,” he spelled, after Hager asked him to reflect on the publication of the book. Upward Bound describes the different, sadder sort of life that could have been. “I had no way of letting people know who I was,” the character who is most like Brown says in the first chapter. “My intelligence was like the rock pushed up the hill by Sisyphus. I could never get it to the top.”

The real-life Brown spelled his way through high school and, with his mother at his side, earned his bachelor’s degree, with highest honors, at UCLA. Then he earned an M.F.A. in writing at Columbia and secured a two-book deal from Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Brown described what this was like by letter-pointing during the NBC interview.

But if you watch the footage closely, and at one-quarter speed, it doesn’t look like he is spelling anything at all. Brown’s finger can be seen, at several points, in close-up, from a camera just behind his shoulder—and what he taps onto the board seems disconnected from the sentiments that Mary speaks aloud.

Katharine Beals, a linguist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania who has a son with autism, has studied Brown’s controversial method of communication since the early 2000s, and she has cataloged the ways in which it fails. She told me that she found the clip from NBC to be upsetting. Beals conceded that it can be hard in some cases to say whether such communication is real—but not in this one. “This isn’t subtle,” she said. “You can see that he’s not pointing to the letters.”

In the broadcast, Mary says: “To finally be in the room where learning was happening, I felt like I was in heaven.” But Woody’s finger seems to say: Tobgdhi nvza.

On YouTube, where the clip from NBC is posted, viewer comments are aggressive, ranging from ridicule to accusations of fraud. These are snap judgments based on a single, highly edited video; in the end, there is no way to prove or disprove from afar Brown’s capacity to write. But several professional organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, have issued formal warnings against the use of Rapid Prompting, a training method for communication from which Brown’s approach is derived. “There is uncertainty regarding who does the spelling,” ASHA says. And given that the method may mislead, “children and their families can incur serious harm.”

[Read: What we learned from autism’s first child]

I emailed Brown, directly and through his publisher, to request an interview and ask if he or his mother would explain the spelling process as it appeared on the Today show. I got an emailed statement back. “I can understand why people are curious—even skeptical—about my method of communication,” it said. The statement continues:

It is mysterious and confounding to see a severely autistic nonspeaker perform acts of scholarship and fiction writing if you don’t presume intelligence in a disabled person. I have been using the same green board since I was in middle school and I find the letters and colors very calming. A keyboard requires specific aim and is unforgiving of error. I have a distinct brain but imperfect aim. This may look chaotic but in this way I keep up a steady rhythm with my finger that helps me stay on track. I am no savant. I came to novel writing like most published authors. I have read many books, attended good colleges, and got my MFA in writing at one of the country’s best programs. The only difference is that I communicate in a different manner.

Mary Brown has elsewhere addressed the possibility that she is influencing or even formulating her son’s words. She told The New York Times that she works hard to verify that everything Woody wants to say, down to the punctuation mark, is faithfully captured by the letter board. This is why, by her account, he wrote his 188-page novel at a rate of just one paragraph a day.

I’ve done a lot of reporting on contested messaging like Brown’s, and I’ve had the chance to talk with many autistic people who can barely speak but who seem to spell out complicated messages with their parents’ help. A few of them were clearly able to produce at least some simple messages on their own. (In community parlance, they are known as “independent typers.”) I’ve heard from parents about how such communication has enabled them to connect with their children and provide a better life.

I’ve also seen the many ways in which this method can go catastrophically—and sometimes even criminally—amiss. In one case that I covered over several years, a college professor in New Jersey ultimately pleaded guilty to aggravated criminal sexual contact with a man who had been diagnosed with severe cognitive and physical disabilities. (She claimed that he’d spelled out his consent.) And my impression of the clip from the Today show was very much in line with Beals’s. The messaging looked more than just “chaotic.” It looked compromised.

Brown learned to spell words on a letter board from a woman named Soma Mukhopadhyay, who developed Rapid Prompting in the 1990s. The New Jersey case involved an earlier incarnation of the same approach, called Facilitated Communication, that works by having someone type into a keyboard, or point to letters on a board, with a helper at their side who grasps their hand or holds their arm. Upon its arrival in the United States, “FC” was celebrated as a means of liberation for nonspeaking autistic kids, whose hidden skills and inner life were suddenly revealed. In this magazine, I’ve described what happened next: FC users, working literally hand in hand with their classroom facilitators, started typing claims of sexual abuse. Many of those accusations proved to be unfounded, and parents were unjustly sent to jail.

Clinicians quickly came to understand that the method was susceptible to a very powerful “Ouija-board effect”: A facilitator could unwittingly deliver subtle and subconscious prompts—gentle pressure on a person’s wrist, perhaps—that shaped the outcome of the process. When the typers were subjected to formal “message-passing tests,” in which they would be asked to name an object or a picture that they’d seen while their helper wasn’t in the room, they almost always failed. Even kids who had produced fluid written work seemed incapable, under those conditions, of saying anything at all.

By 1994, the method was broadly disavowed. Yet a core group of true believers continued to promote its use. The New Jersey professor was among them. So was Mary Brown. In 2011, Mary posted on an autism-community website that her son’s use of facilitated communication had “helped him keep up at grade level.” The post has since been taken down, and FC has given way in recent years to its purportedly more reliable offshoots: Rapid Prompting and a similar approach called Spelling to Communicate. Now, instead of holding the speller’s hand, most facilitators hold the letter board instead. At first glance, the risk of influence seems less acute.

[Read: The telepathy trap]

Even so, spellers still require someone else’s constant presence for communication—and that leaves ample room for the Ouija-board effect. A speller’s aide may gently tilt the board in such a way that coaxes out the letters she’s expecting. Or her influence may be more direct: When I interviewed Mukhopadhyay last year, she told me that parents sometimes try to accelerate communication by guessing what their child means to say—like a human version of the “autocomplete” feature on a cellphone. I reached out to Mukhopadhyay again this week and asked her to explain the process shown in the Today show clip. “Sometimes spelling habits change over time, and film editing processes can be tricky,” she wrote in an email. “Spelling itself is a slow process.” She added, “You are free to interpret the video as you see fit—I cannot and would not ask otherwise.” Katie Anawalt, another Rapid Prompting expert who has worked with Brown, told me that “Woody uses multiple strategies and methods to communicate—not just one,” and that “what is shown in the video reflects the communication approach he and his mother have chosen for that particular moment.”

ASHA has described Rapid Prompting and Spelling to Communicate as bearing “considerable similarity” to FC and thus as “pseudoscience.” But a formal disavowal by experts simply isn’t what it used to be. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared himself a fan of these methods: Doubters are delusional, he said in 2021; they remind him of doctors who still deny the harms of childhood vaccines. In January, Kennedy appointed two letter-board users and an expert trainer in Spelling to Communicate to the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Meanwhile, an audio series about nonspeaking autistic children who allegedly display their telepathic and clairvoyant powers via letter board has been listed among Apple’s most popular podcasts for more than a year.

Sales of Upward Bound are soaring too. Following the Today show segment, Brown’s book reached Amazon’s top-10 list for books of any kind. This was preceded by a platinum-level rollout that included starred advance reviews, awestruck and largely uncritical features in The New York Times and The Guardian, and testimonials from A-list novelists including Paul Beatty, Roddy Doyle, Rivka Galchen, and Mona Simpson. This is the kind of marketing that any debut literary author would kill to have.

Critics of Rapid Prompting and related methods are aghast. “This really feels like a crescendo,” Beals said. “It’s really, really out of control.”

Upward Bound is good. I recommend it. The novel takes the form of an interlocking set of stories about the clients and staff at a day-care center for adults with disabilities in Southern California. Its 12 chapters are written from the viewpoints of eight different characters. Their voices are engaging and distinct, and their efforts at communication—the tiny social cues they either catch or miss—are cataloged in careful detail. It’s as if the book were written to refute the classic notion that autistic people’s deficits result from a malfunctioning “theory of mind.” The book is, if nothing else, a master class in making sense of mental states—a perspective-taking flex.

For someone with Brown’s diagnosis—someone who was written off by the age of 3 as “mentally retarded,” according to his mother—this sort of literary output may seem astounding. Autistic people tend to be more literal-minded in communication than neurotypical people are; they have more difficulty picking up sarcasm, irony, or even idioms such as “Could you please give me a hand?” Studies find that struggles to engage with figurative language tend to scale with broader deficits—but Upward Bound would seem to give the lie to this correlation. In the book, Brown uses metaphors in much the way that any literate neurotypical person might: The adults in a room turn their heads in unison “like a den of meerkats”; a ray of sunlight is glimpsed “flaming off the pool”; people disappearing from view leave behind “a faint streak of loss.”

That a mostly nonspeaking autistic person should have produced those lines might be unusual, Matt Lerner, a professor who studies social development at the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, told me, but it’s surely possible. He said that FC and FC-derived methods of communication can be suspect—that much has been shown through careful research—but that also, in some cases, they clearly work: “Two things are uncomfortably true at the same time.” Moreover, the old idea that a weak theory of mind defines autism is simply wrong. An autistic person might be highly skilled at perspective-taking but express it in a nontraditional way, and he might be highly capable of linguistic abstraction even if he has a disability in spoken language. “There is very much a route,” Lerner said, for such a person to write a book like Upward Bound.

[Read: What RFK Jr. doesn’t understand about autism]

And yet, history suggests that there is also a route for Brown’s letter board to convey someone else’s use of metaphor, someone else’s sense of character, someone else’s fine attunement to the art of narrative construction. According to her LinkedIn, Mary Brown holds a master’s degree in English literature from Northwestern, and for more than 20 years, until she quit her job in 2012 to care for Brown full-time, she evaluated movie scripts as a story analyst for Hollywood studios. She has been present at nearly every stage of Brown’s higher education, sitting with him in seminars, helping him write papers and stories, sharing his thoughts in class discussions. When the reporter from The Guardian asked Brown to describe his next book, Mary read his response: “It’s a bildungsroman about my search for camaraderie,” she said, before apologizing for the fact that she doesn’t even know how to say the word bildungsroman. (In a 2020 interview for a college publication, Brown spelled out with Mary’s help that he’d learned German by watching videos—and that he’d also learned Spanish, Hungarian, and Japanese.)

Was bildungsroman Brown’s word or hers? It’s an awful, awful question. To challenge his capacity for self-expression is to question who he is. To wonder if he has really written Upward Bound is to gesture at the false idea that those who cannot talk have nothing to communicate. But in the context of this book, championed as a vital work of art, acclaimed (and sold) for its firsthand authenticity, the question can’t be wished away.

Did Hogarth, Brown’s publisher, take any steps to verify the author of the text, maybe through a message-passing test of the kind that was deployed during the FC fervor of the early ’90s? Such scrutiny would have been uncomfortable but not without precedent. Less than two weeks before Brown’s book came out, a major publisher canceled the U.S. release of the horror novel Shy Girl after reviewing it for evidence of AI-generated text. (The author has denied using AI but said that an acquaintance who’d edited the novel had done so.) Hogarth would not say whether it had attempted to confirm Upward Bound’s authenticity, either before or after publication. The novel’s editor, David Ebershoff, told me via email that the book is “Woody’s” and that “it illuminates lives too often left out of society and literature. It does what some of my favorite books do—locates beauty and humanity in a place, and among a group of people, so many have underestimated and overlooked.”

The problem is, reasonable doubts about the book have been overlooked as well—by Penguin Random House and by the media outlets that have hyped it. (The dewy-eyed feature in the Times does provide, in passing, an attenuated paraphrase of ASHA's statement about Rapid Prompting.) Then there is the phalanx of established authors who have mentored Brown and endorsed his work. Those who responded to my questions told me that they’d found no reason to suspect that he had not written what they’d read. Rivka Galchen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Columbia, worked closely with both Brown and his mother across four semesters. Although it had crossed her mind, at first, that his writing might be influenced, the worry vanished over time, based on what she saw. “I’m not a doofus,” she told me. And even if some doubts had lingered, she would have felt both unqualified and disinclined to investigate the question. “Do I have students whose girlfriends write their prose? Do I have students who use AI? I have no idea,” Galchen said. “I feel like I have to take it on faith.”

[Read: How AI is creeping into the New York Times]

Mona Simpson taught Brown in two classes at UCLA and supervised his senior project, an early draft of Upward Bound. “He has a natural instinct for the shape of a story,” Simpson told me. “I truly have no doubts about Woody’s authorship.” But over the course of our conversation, she acknowledged the vagaries of collaboration—the possibility of some interpretation at play: “It could be that they’ve worked together so long that she can intuit some of what he’s intending. I don’t know.”

To these writers and the other people who have vouched for him, Brown has two, interlocking sides: an outward-facing self who loves Thomas the Tank Engine cartoons and watches them even as he sits in class or speaks with a reporter, and an inward-facing one who knows five languages, has a natural feel for story structure, and is working on a new bildungsroman about camaraderie. At one point in the feature for The Guardian, the interviewer comments on the Japanese-train design on Brown’s T-shirt. Brown says that it represents a merger of his interests: “I love trains and Murakami,” he taps out with Mary’s help. “Hence Japanese trains. Murakami’s my favourite author.”

Upward Bound provides that answer in a longer form, linking the person we observe with the intellect that dwells within. It explains the seeming contradictions of autistic people’s minds; it tries to offer a glimpse inside their brains. “I want mostly for neurotypical people to see that we have inner lives so they are more inclined to treat us like human beings,” Brown spelled, when he was being interviewed for the Today show. (In the video, he appears to point to letters spelling Wdeha brjum.)

Brown also spoke about his mother in the interview; you can see it for yourself on YouTube. He jabs his finger at the letter board. Mary speaks the words.

“Without … her … there … is … no … me.”

Is Anybody Actually Winning Trump’s Iran War?

2026-04-15T13:10:00-04:00

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In this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to the recent election in Hungary and the defeat of Viktor Orbán. David counters Orbán defenders who claim that this loss proves Orbán was never a threat. Antidemocratic leaders often face institutional constraints, and it was those institutional constraints that compelled Orbán to accept a defeat after years of abuse of power.

Then, David is joined by former U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger to discuss the current state of President Trump’s war in Iran. David and Pottinger talk about the recent failed negotiations between the two sides in Pakistan, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and what could happen next. They also discuss how the Iran war is viewed in China and how it has been a financial gain for Russia.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser in the first Donald Trump term, and we will be discussing the very uncertain, unsettled, and dangerous situation in the Persian Gulf as the United States and Iran conduct this cold truce with double blockades, each of the other. And Matt will be explaining to me and to all of us the state of play as he sees it, from his point of view, as someone who is broadly sympathetic to the agenda of President Trump, even if he is no longer directly associated with the administration.

The book this week will be Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges, a masterpiece of strange and symbolic writing from the 1940s, translated into English in the 1960s.

But before either the dialogue or the book, I wanna talk about a different subject, and that is the dramatic election in Hungary that occurred this past weekend, with this convincing and crushing defeat of the government of Viktor Orbán. Many of those who are sympathetic to Orbán, or who were sympathetic to Orbán, and who wanna see some kind of Orbán-like politics come to the United States have chosen to interpret his crushing repudiation by the Hungarian people as a repudiation also of the idea that Orbán was ever any kind of threat to freedom and democracy. What kind of dictator, they ask, leaves office because he’s rejected at the polls? What kind of dictator has an election free enough that he could be rejected in the polls? And so, yes, goodbye, Orbán, say these apologists for him and for the Trump administration and the people in the United States who like Orbán, Goodbye to Orbán, but let’s also say goodbye to the idea that Orbán was ever a threat.

And that’s what I wanna talk about, is this argument is wrong and in bad faith. Not all dictatorships are the same. Not everything is the Third Reich. Not everything is Joseph Stalin. There are many intermediate forms of corrupted power, and Orbán represented a new one. I wrote about this a decade ago; I spent some time in Hungary in 2016, and I wrote a substantial article about Orbán, which I ended up not publishing, but instead cannibalizing to use in my first major article about the Trump administration in 2017, “How to Build an Autocracy.” And I told there a story that I had heard in Hungary in 2016 about the methods that the Orbán regime used.

There would be, let us say, two restaurants. And both would have violations of the health code. The restaurant that was owned by an Orbán supporter would get away with it, and the restaurant that was owned by a nonsupporter would have to face a fine. Now, the people who were fined were genuinely guilty; they had broken the health code. But they knew that if they had aligned their politics with Orbán, they would get away without a fine, as their next-door neighbor and competitor did, and they were being punished for their politics, even though the ostensible punishment was for the thing they had genuinely done: broken the health code. And I wrote then the most important power in a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to punish the innocent; it is the power to protect the guilty. Orbán created a system where there was some law. He didn’t abolish the law; he just applied the law unfairly, in order to consolidate political power and, by the way, to enrich himself.

Now, it is true the law was still there—and this is why the regime could, in the end, be dismantled. Hungary is a small and relatively poor country embedded within larger frameworks. Its economy is embedded within the European Union, and its armed forces are embedded within NATO. That NATO affiliation is one reason that Orbán could not reasonably imagine using the military to make a coup d’état and seize power. A NATO-trained military doesn’t do that kind of thing. If it does, it may find itself on its way out of NATO, and the military attaches great value to its membership in NATO. In the same way, Hungary’s role in the European Union, from which it derives many, many benefits, meant that Orbán couldn’t throw people in prison. He’s subject, after all, to European laws on human rights and, ultimately, the jurisdiction of the European courts that enforce [the] human rights division. So he can’t just murder people and arrest people and detain people the way he might’ve wanted to. But he could rig the system in many ways, in a kind of intermediate form of what Fareed Zakaria has called “illiberal democracy.” It’s not that it wasn’t a democracy; it just wasn’t fair, and the law was not applied equally, and he used that to consolidate power.

In the end, his membership in the European Union was what doomed him. The Orbán regime in Hungary received three major benefits from the European Union. The first was that trade and investment could flow freely. The second was that people could move freely, and so that meant that anyone who was unhappy in Hungary didn’t have to become a political dissident; they could just leave. If they had portable skills, if they spoke English or German, they could just get on a train and go somewhere where the going was better than it was in Hungary. And that exit was a great safety valve for a regime that otherwise would’ve faced much more dissent at home. The dissidents just moved—they went to Munich.

But the last benefit that Hungary got—this is the thing that really precipitated the crisis—the poorer countries of the European Union received direct transfers from the European Union treasury. At their peak, Hungary’s direct transfers from the European Union amounted to somewhere between 3 and 5 percent of its gross domestic product. That’s, in other words, as big as the defense budget is to the United States. It paid for roads, it paid for many benefits, and it balanced the Hungarian budget and provided a lot of economic activity. As Orbán became more and more authoritarian, the EU froze those payments, stopping Hungarian economic growth and precipitating an economic crisis in Hungary. And it was that economic crisis that brought him down. Now, he might’ve left the European Union, but then he would lose forever the money that he got. He would lose forever access to European investment; German car factories are a major employer in Hungary. And he would’ve lost the ability of Hungarians to move back and forth, which meant the people who were unhappy would’ve been trapped at home, where they were dangerous to him, rather than moving to Munich, where they were less dangerous.

So he was in this intermediate state, and that is what set in motion the events that ultimately brought him down. But especially in the United States, where there are so many people who imagine an Orbán-like future for the United States, it’s really important to understand democracy does not go out like a light switch; it’s like a dimmer. It’s not on or off. It’s at different settings. And you can have an authoritarian leader who dims the lights without reducing the lighting entirely to zero. And that gives us hope because it means there are tools that, even in an authoritarian, illiberal democracy like Hungary, like the one Donald Trump and J. D. Vance want for the United States, the opposition is never powerless. But it’s also a warning because it means that as the lights begin to dim, the movement and the danger can be gradual rather than sudden. It’s not always 1934 and the Third Reich Enabling Act. It’s not always Stalin and the assassination of [Sergei] Kirov. Sometimes it’s what was happening in Budapest since Orbán came to power. And it is important to understand that as a method of self-defense, and as a way of saying off these excuses and apologetics that are offered in bad faith by those who want an Orbán-like future for the United States.

And now my dialogue with Matt Pottinger.

[Music]

Frum: Matt Pottinger is a former journalist, Marine officer, and senior White House official. Pottinger covered China for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal for seven years. After the 9/11 terror attack on the United States, he made a dramatic career change: He joined the Marine Corps at age 32, and completed three combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pottinger served on the National Security Council in the first Trump term, ultimately as deputy national security adviser, one of the few senior officials to serve four years in that office. Pottinger resigned on January 6, 2021.

Since leaving the White House, he has remained a prominent voice on China policy. He joined the Hoover Institution as a visiting fellow, chairs the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and serves as CEO of Garnaut Global, a strategic advisory firm. His book, The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, was published in July 2024.

I should mention we are recording this about midday on Monday, April 13, with a view to releasing on Wednesday. The stories we’re following are so dramatic and fast-changing, we are doing the best we can to keep up with them. So let me begin by asking: Matt, what’s happening?

Matt Pottinger: (Laughs.) David, it’s great to be with you.

Yeah, look, it’s Monday now. We just learned this weekend that the negotiations in Pakistan that were led on the U.S. side by Vice President J. D. Vance came to an impasse on President Trump’s red line, on the core issue of Iran’s nuclear program. And remember, that’s really the main impetus for this war, was President Trump’s determination to try to destroy Iran’s ability to build a bomb and also to try to get them to give up fissile material—it’s not yet technically fissile, but it’s very close to that; it’s 60 percent-enriched uranium, uranium that’s enriched far beyond what you would need for civilian uses. They’ve got probably around a thousand pounds of that stuff sitting around somewhere or in various places, and Iran has also not yet agreed to give up its enrichment capability.

So I don’t think that was a surprising outcome, that these talks in Islamabad did not achieve a lasting peace. The truth about negotiations is that war is an extension of politics, right? And I wouldn’t have expected the Iranians to give away in negotiation what President Trump was unable to take from them in war. And so what that means is that this cease-fire is not only tenuous, but I think that it’s technically gonna be hard to argue that we’re even in a cease-fire for much longer, if even at the current moment. And that’s because Iran is continuing with its blockade.

What you have now are dueling blockades, David. (Laughs.) Iran is basically blocking all shipping in the Strait of Hormuz unless those ships get permission from the Iranian IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and then pay a very steep toll to Iran, so what Iran is doing is basically turning an international waterway into a little Suez-like tollbooth. And so they are conducting a blockade. Now President Trump has announced a counterblockade, in which he’s going to stop ships that pay the toll to the Iranians, as well as ships carrying any Iranian oil—ships that are leaving or going to Iranian ports, those ships are now under U.S. blockade. The U.S. is gonna try to enforce that, at least in the early stages, well west of Hormuz, in the Gulf of Oman.

But blockades are acts of war under international law, under traditional conventions of the law of the sea, and so forth. So what you have are, really, an escalation in the war this weekend. But it’s not yet turning violent from the U.S. side, but it is coercive. So in that sense, we’re still at war, right? The cease-fire is there almost in name only.

Frum: All right, but one of the things that seems so baffling about this conflict is the United States and Israel appear to have achieved great operational success against Iranian defenses. They’ve killed much of the Iranian leadership. They’ve revealed that they have penetrated deeply into Iranian capabilities. But the obvious countermove in all of the how many war games [that] have occurred since 1979 is the United States, Israel strike Iran; Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. This administration seems never to have taken that countermove seriously, and as you and I speak, the price of oil is again back over $100 a barrel. And if you want immediate delivery of a physical barrel of oil in Europe today, that’s going to cost you more like $150, prices that will raise prices for everything all over the world and maybe push the developed world into a recession.

Pottinger: Yeah. Well, look, this pain is gonna deepen, okay, because what President Trump is trying to do is, in order to try to release more traffic from Hormuz, he’s going to stop more traffic, right, in order to basically try to take away the advantage of Iran’s tollbooth that they’ve set up. And so what you’re left with is, essentially, a state of war. I don’t know, but I suspect that the U.S. Navy is going to attempt to do escort operations. They haven’t been willing to do that to date, because it’s so darn dangerous. But given that we saw the news over the weekend that a couple of U.S. destroyers had moved into Hormuz, at least briefly—to my knowledge, for the first time since this war began in late February—tells me that you’re gonna have these dueling blockades and dueling attempts to break the blockades, with the U.S. trying to move traffic, potentially fairly soon, on the Oman side of the median line of this very, very narrow choke point in the water.

Frum: But that, again, suggests not having thought things through. The parallel here is back in the ’80s, during the Iraq-Iran War, missiles were flying between Iraq and Iran, endangering shipping in the Gulf. And the United States then said, Right, tankers can fly the American flag so if anybody hits you, it’s an attack on the United States, and that will deter both Iraq and Iran because they know, if you hit one of these tankers with an American flag, then we retaliate against you. But in this case, the United States got its retaliating in first. So the Iranians will just say, Can we hit an oil tanker at 20 paces with a drone? I bet they can. Can a destroyer stop a drone, or a swarm of drones, from hitting a target as big as an oil tanker? I bet they can’t. And the implicit threat—which is, If you try hitting the oil tankers, we’ll retaliate against you—well, the retaliation has been done.

Pottinger: Yeah, well, I’ve talked to U.S. sailors who—in fact, I talked to a French sailor the other day who had been on a frigate during the 1980s, during that whole operation to try to escort convoys and so forth. And that was in the ’80s, when Iranian technology was not nearly as sophisticated as it is right now. So, David, what you’re seeing right now is, in many ways, the democratization of warfare, the ability of middling states like Iran, and even nonstate actors like the Houthis, who are really sort of a proxy of Iran camped out in Yemen on the Red Sea, both of them have shown the ability to stop commercial traffic through major sea-lanes, and the United States has really struggled. And, again, the U.S. is really on its own. It’s got Israel helping. It doesn’t have any other allies yet coming to help. But nonetheless, we’re struggling. The United States Navy is struggling to keep international sea-lanes open, so we’re in a new phase right now. The nature of warfare never changes. But the character of warfare—how wars are fought—changes all the time, and we’re now having a reckoning, in many ways. People theorize, they speculate, they make assessments, but war is the great clarifier. It’s the accountant. It’s the auditor that says, No, no, here’s your real relative power, relative to the Houthi tribes in Yemen, relative to this badly wounded regime in Tehran.

But, yeah, we’re in a new phase. I’m not certain that the U.S. Navy is gonna be able to pull this off, and if the U.S. Navy has one of its warships crippled or sunk, I think you’re gonna see a very significant escalation by the White House. We’re gonna see larger, further-reaching, and temporally longer consequences of this war.

Frum: There’s a saying on Wall Street: When the tide goes out, you see who’s been swimming naked, and—

Pottinger: (Laughs.) Yeah, exactly. And look, there are positive lessons learned, as well as negative lessons, in this war from the perspective of U.S. power. And in fact, we should talk at some point a little bit about what this means for the Western Pacific, but I won’t jump ahead.

Frum: Well, no, that was going to be my very next question because, as your introduction suggested, you are known above all for your expertise on China. You speak the language. You worked there as a journalist in a more favorable time in U.S.-China relationships. And you are noted for being an early voice warning that China was not evolving into a good global citizen and the United States should take action with allies—that was your view: with allies—to contain Chinese power.

Now, many people observe, and it seems plausible, that one of the effects of this war is to hugely increase Chinese power because the United States suddenly looks like a very unreliable custodian of the security of the Persian Gulf. Twenty percent of the world’s navigable, or waterborne, oil comes from the Persian Gulf, and 80 percent of that oil goes to Asia, with China the single largest customer. The United States is imposing heavy burdens through this war not only on China, but on South Korea, Japan, and many other countries that might have been at odds with China, but now are thinking, Well, we and the Chinese are at the mercy of a United States that is launching a war it does not seem to have anticipated all the consequences of.

Pottinger: Yeah. Well, I would say that it’s still too early to say what the net strategic effect is. It’s possible that China is gonna benefit largely from this war, but it’s not clear yet. That’s not clear.

Beijing right now, you can see in its own statements, its own actions so far, that they’re sort of hedging. On the one hand, I think Beijing was uneasy with the war continuing. We’ve seen reports from the Pakistanis and others suggesting that China played a role in trying to hasten that cease-fire a week ago. On the other hand, we also learned over the weekend, probably from tactical leaks of U.S. intelligence—I only know what I read on CNN here—but that China is actually moving to supply Iran with MANPADS. MANPADs are man-portable air-defense systems, right? These are like the Chinese version of our Stinger missiles that are very effective at shooting down low-flying helicopters, low-flying aircraft. So this would be, potentially, a very serious threat to American air dominance that both the U.S. and Israel have enjoyed so far.

Frum: And the way that stacks up is: The Iranians send a drone. The countermove to the drone—because you don’t wanna hit a drone with a big, expensive missile—is you send up a helicopter with a machine gun, and the machine gun can kill the drone because the drone is moving relatively slowly and it doesn’t have any stealth. And the MANPAD then says to the helicopter, You better keep away, which means the drone can move on the tanker.

Pottinger: Yeah. They can set up ambushes, right? The F-15 that we lost and, thank goodness, recovered the two aircrew from that American F-15 that was shot down recently, I believe it was shot down by a shoulder-fired anti-air missile, just of the type that China is reportedly moving to try to sell to the Iranians. And, by the way, this is China taking a page from its playbook almost a half a century ago. You remember that when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, it was only two weeks later that the paramount Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, invited the U.S. defense secretary at the time, Harold Brown, to start collaborating in finding ways to bleed the Soviets in Afghanistan. And in fact, Deng Xiaoping said, We should cooperate in getting them stuck in a quagmire in Afghanistan. That was almost a direct quote from Deng Xiaoping.

And sure enough, the United States began buying Chinese shoulder-fired missiles and providing them to the mujahideen, guerrilla fighters, who were fighting the Soviets. And then several years after that, the U.S. started supplying Stinger missiles, an even more advanced anti-air shoulder-fired missile. And the Chinese provided the operation to get those missiles into Afghanistan. They raised thousands of mules in Western China and would put these Stinger missiles onto mules and move them over land, through Pakistan, into Afghanistan. The Russians retreated in 1988. They lost control of the air. And soon, they lost the war in Afghanistan. And a few years after that, in 1991, the Soviet Union was gone. It’s possible China is trying to extend a cease-fire while, at the same time, moving to bleed the United States and try to destroy U.S. air dominance and get us either defeated or stuck in a quagmire.

Frum: But the biggest effects may not be anything that anyone intends. So we mentioned that the Persian Gulf is a source of 20 percent of the world’s shipborne oil. Eighty percent of that goes to Asia. The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer. It’s not literally self-sufficient, because it exports some forms of oil and imports others. Gas is trapped in North America. Canada plus the United States produce a quarter of the planet’s oils, more than is exported from the Persian Gulf. So the United States is in a relatively benign situation, especially with regard to natural gas, where it’s floating on a sea of cheap gas. But if you are in Indonesia or Malaysia or the Philippines, Bangladesh, even Pakistan, India, you have to think, The Americans did not think about us at all when they started this war. We are really directly at risk. The South Koreans are having to impose all kinds of draconian energy-saving measures because they’re worried about their supplies of oil and gas. In poor countries, gas is used often as a direct heating fuel, and how will people cook? And many countries in the Western Pacific and the mainland of Asia are thinking, We look to the United States to be our security provider and to care about us, and it turns out they didn’t. And we now have to think, Maybe we have the wrong hegemon here.

Pottinger: Yeah, look, you’re right that the majority of that Gulf gas and oil moves eastward over to India and through the Strait of Malacca and into Southeast Asia and then East Asia. That’s exactly right. A big difference from 30 years ago, when we had to fight the first Gulf War, when we were heavily dependent on imports from that region. That said, no one escapes the effect of a chokehold on 20 percent of the global supply. I learned that this weekend when I was filling my car and—

Frum: There are many supplies, but there’s one price.

Pottinger: Right, right. There’s some regional effect, but not enough to overcome a 20 percent reduction in global supply. And so even though the U.S. is in a better position—we’re buffered, our oil and gas companies are in a position to benefit from higher prices, and so forth—but the strategic effects are pretty hard to contain, right? And this could affect China’s economy as well.

The Chinese economy right now is heavily, heavily dependent on exports. That’s been true for decades. It’s more true now, ironically, than it was. China has a larger trade surplus today than it had 10 years ago, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. They never built the consumer economy that people had advised and thought that they were going to move toward. The property market has collapsed in China, and it’s not really recovering, so that’s had a negative wealth effect; people don’t wanna buy things in China. So Beijing is basically saying, Okay, we’re the factory of the world. Let’s make ourselves the permanent factory and the only factory in the world. And in fact, their strategy now is to deindustrialize the Western democracies and regional democracies in Asia by making literally 100 percent of—that’s their aspiration. They don’t even have a sense of irony about it. They just wanna make everything that’s made. That’s a problem when you have a global energy shock like we’re experiencing right now, because it could lead to a significant global recession, or at least recessions in places like Europe that are major dumping grounds for Chinese excess capacity. So this could be a problem for China if Europe goes into a recession as a result of this shock.

So what you just said a minute ago, which is, it’s really hard to kind of grasp and play out all of the unintended consequences of this thing. It’s gonna take a while before we have sort of a net assessment of kind of what the effect was for China—and other countries.

Frum: You talk to leaders and businesspeople in the Pacific Rim. Do you hear from them any qualms about American leadership as compared to before the Iran war?

Pottinger: Yeah, look, I think a lot of countries are uneasy when they look at what’s happening between the U.S. and NATO—and frankly, I think both sides are at fault on this one. President Trump is exactly right that Europe needs to spend more, and of course, they’ve now made a pledge to spend as much as the United States is currently spending as a percentage of GDP on defense. That’s long overdue. That’s a credit to the Trump administration. But to then threaten the sovereignty of European states and territories, to bully NATO member Canada, to say that we’re gonna seize Greenland, these things are really, really damaging to trust. I’m just back from Asia, and talking to leaders in U.S. allied countries in the Western Pacific, yeah, they’re concerned about all of that. They view any unraveling of NATO as something that’s gonna unleash a major crisis in the form of coercion and war in their neighborhoods in ways that are gonna harm all democracies, all rule-of-law societies.

That said, I do think it’s worth noting that I see no deterioration in the, for example, U.S.-Japan relationship. I think that’s still strong. Prime Minister [Sanae] Takaichi, she doesn’t have other allies that she can really fall back on, so she’s working hard to maintain a strong working rapport with President Trump. I think that that was on display when she visited just a few weeks ago in Washington.

South Korea is still, even though you have a left-leaning government in place—usually that leads to poor or strained ties between South Korea and Japan. In fact, you’re still seeing pretty good ties between the leaders of South Korea and Japan right now. I think that that’s a stabilizing sort of dynamic. I think that’s a good dynamic. And I give credit to both President Trump’s team and President Biden’s team for all the work that they invested in keeping Japan and Korea on cooperative terms.

You see a lot more activity between sort of Australia and Japan now, right? It’s mainly concern about the People’s Republic of China and its axis friends, like North Korea and even Russia, which is active in the Western Pacific as well. But it’s also a sign that countries are nervous about American reliability. So anything that the Trump administration can do to put to rest these just insults to the sovereignty of our allies would go a really, really long way and it would pay off. And, look, now we need our allies again, right? We’re in this war. We’re trying to open the Strait of Hormuz. It would be certainly helpful and a powerful signal to Iran if they were facing a coalition of navies, not just the U.S. Navy, right there in the strait.

Frum: It goes under the heading of “another thing we should have thought about first,” but—

Pottinger: (Laughs.) Sure.

Frum: —if you say it’s too early to say whether China is a net winner from the war, it’s not too early to say that Russia is an enormous net winner from this war. They have billions of dollars—I think it’s almost a billion a day more revenue; you will know the figure better than me—but hundreds of millions more per day than they had before, at a time when the United States is expending munitions that could have been given to Ukraine, and when the relationship between the United States and European allies is so bad that President Trump is speculating about withdrawing from NATO formally. That’s probably what he had in mind with that strange truncated speech he did a couple of weeks ago where he had a big announcement and then he just sort of rambled for 20 minutes to no point.

Pottinger: No doubt, right now Russia’s benefiting from the higher oil prices. They’re benefiting from being able to sell more oil. They’re benefiting from strain in the NATO alliance. Still too early to say how all of that ultimately nets out, but if the U.S. commits an own goal by undermining or abandoning Ukraine, then we’re gonna be in a world of hurt. I haven’t seen that President Trump is turning his back on Ukraine. In fact, after the February 2025—that fateful meeting in the Oval Office when everyone thought that Trump was about to turn his back on Ukraine, in fact, the U.S. has continued its support, provided weapons. It’s required Europe to pay a much larger share of the money for those weapons, which I think is wholly appropriate.

Frum: Are you providing weapons when you’re simply selling them to the Europeans? There’s no element of gift or aid here. I think net U.S. aid to Ukraine is now almost zero. And Ukraine has a civilian economy to keep going, too, and the Europeans help support that.

Pottinger: Well, someone’s gotta pay for the weapons, and the U.S. was paying for them previously; now Europe’s paying a much larger share. The key thing is to keep that flow of weapons going, because you’ll remember, there are people who have been arguing that the U.S. shouldn’t even provide any weapons to Europe to help Ukraine. I think that that would be a huge mistake.

And take a pause for a second: The two most capable allies of the United States are not even technically defense-treaty allies of the United States. They are Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, not a defense-treaty ally of the United States, and Israel, also not a defense-treaty ally, just an informal ally of the United States. These two countries—one of them tiny, in the case of Israel; one of them just a midsized state that people thought was gonna get steamrolled by Russia—these are the two most capable countries that we have as friends right now. They’ve shown on the battlefield that they can take care of themselves. They don’t require the U.S. to join them in fighting, although it helps them, and they certainly don’t ask the U.S. to do their fighting for them. This is an amazing model. This is a model for Europe. It’s a model for Taiwan and for Japan and South Korea and Australia. It is the Ukraine model.

By the way, I would count Ukraine as the most capable military for dealing with post-2022 infantry warfare. The United States has zero. I fought in two wars not long ago, right, in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have zero experience in the current character of infantry warfare that began in 2022 with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and that’s because we are now fighting semi-autonomized drone warfare, increasingly AI-driven drone warfare, and as of December, the last NATO figures I saw, Russia was losing 1,000 men per day on the battlefield in Europe—1,000 men a day were carted away in body bags or on stretchers, and almost 90 percent of those casualties were inflicted by drones.

So only the Ukrainians, on the good guy’s side, know how to do this kind of warfare. Only the Ukrainians know how to do counter-drone warfare at the level that they’re achieving. The United States has not learned how to do this. The United States does not scale. We make about 300,000 drones a year in the United States, all in. Ukraine’s gonna make 12 million drones this year. Are you kidding me? Trump has talked about the Stone Ages—the United States is the world’s best late-20th-century military; we are not a 2020s military yet, okay? And this is why I’m grateful that President Trump has not committed ground troops to the fight. I think we would learn lessons in blood very quickly about the realities of the character of warfare post-2022.

What I’m trying to tell you is, we need countries like Ukraine and Israel, okay? So does Europe. And Europe needs to be doing more, we need to be doing more just to learn from the Ukrainians. And this applies to Taiwan as well, right? We’re nervous about what China might do next with respect to Taiwan. Taiwan should learn from the Ukrainians. They should also learn—I’m gonna say it—from the Iranians, right? Look at what Iran was just able to do: keeping this strait closed, keeping the U.S. Navy at bay, at least for the last six weeks, by using cheap, relatively expendable, portable weapons like drones, sea drones, sea mines, coastal-defense cruise missiles. So the good news for countries like Japan, for countries like Taiwan is that they now have a template, provided by Ukraine in the Black Sea and provided by Iran in the Persian Gulf, for keeping superpower navies at bay. That should enhance deterrence and encourage Taiwan.

Frum: The flip side of that is the Chinese have had a very good lesson in how they can completely quarantine Taiwan without sending any ships. All they have to do is say, Okay, we’re not going to invade you, but nothing’s going in; nothing’s going out.

Pottinger: Even though you’re right that China would be able to close down a lot of traffic around there, we’ve also learned from this war that airpower alone—so if Taiwan and Japan are able to keep China’s navy at bay using the same cheap weapons that the Ukrainians and the Iranians use, and they have the confidence that airpower alone will not subjugate them, then they can hang in there; they can show that they’re willing and able and have the resolve to fight a long emergency. And that might be enough to deter China from trying to undertake something so complicated and dangerous and unpredictable as a quarantine or a blockade or a full-blown invasion.

Frum: Okay, the logic there has some sinister implications for how the U.S.-Iran war ends. Right now, the balance sheet as we speak is the United States and Israel have done devastating damage to many of Iran’s aggressive warfare capabilities, a lot of its internal repression apparatus. The regime is less able to project power and surely wobblier than it was. On the other hand, it now is the more or less recognized owner of the Persian Gulf, which it didn’t used to be. And although the United States disputes that ownership, there doesn’t seem to be a lot that the United States can do about it. And how does the United States extricate itself from this situation? How does this war end?

Pottinger: It’s going to be decided in Hormuz, right, through a mix of war, coercive gunship diplomacy, and then negotiations. Negotiations are downstream of all the rest of that that I just mentioned, right? (Laughs.) That’s why the Iranians said, Yeah, I’ll meet you in Islamabad, and I’m telling you now, I’m not gonna give up my nukes, or my nuke aspirations. It’s obvious that they’re trying to develop a nuclear arsenal. And I think President Trump and Israel are right to be targeting that capability. We’ve had multiple presidents who’ve said that we will not stand for them having nukes—well, they were getting pretty close. They were within weeks last summer. They have not yet given up the aspiration or the materials or the tools that they would need to enrich, so I actually think that is a noble, correct strategic goal for the United States.

But as you said, we’re now pregnant with this war. You don’t get half-pregnant with these things. And what President Trump is going to try to do is try to build leverage by taking away the tollbooth from Iran. And then it’s sort of a test of wills to see which side cries “uncle” sooner, and the world economy is gonna be choking; there’s no question about it. The world economy is the one that needs that oil—everybody needs that oil.

The short answer is, I don’t know how this ends. I don’t know.

Frum: I’m gonna say something, and because of your past relationships, you may not wanna comment on this. But if it’s a test of wills, say who’s gonna come out with the upper hand: the fanatical, murderous, apocalyptic regime that believes it’s going to get its reward in heaven for all its crime on Earth; or a president with the world’s shortest attention span, who’s seeing his poll numbers at home collapsing because of high gas prices from a war he has no congressional authorization for, no public approval for, he’s never explained a case to it, and he is someone who’s famous for his short-term-edness? I think the Iranian will, although they have way less in the way of material resources, looks like the more robust side in that contest of wills.

Pottinger: When you go to war, you go to war with your military and your nation, even when you’ve got a lot of people who don’t back it. I don’t yet know where President Trump’s gonna come out. I would say the following: It became clear to me in the first term working for him that he views Iran as a separate category of threat from other adversaries of the U.S. And it’s precisely because of his assessment—and I think his assessment is right—that Iran cannot be deterred, okay? This is a country—a regime, I should say, because this is really about the regime, not the Iranian people—this is a regime that attempted to assassinate President Trump while he was running for office at least twice in 2024, according to Justice Department indictments under President Biden’s Justice Department. They attempted to assassinate much of his Cabinet from the first term. In other words, the things that Israel and the U.S. have just done to Iran were a mirror image of what Iran was attempting to do in its own regime-change strategy towards the United States.

These guys are—they’re dangerous; they’re nuts. I think that, if they had a nuclear weapon, they would be willing to take even more extreme risks, knowing that they are protected by a nuclear shield, that no other country would be willing to actually inflict retaliation on them so long as they have a nuke. Now what you’re looking at is sort of Iran conducting something closer to all-out war to try to remake the Middle East as the hegemon. If that’s where we end up with this, we’re not in a good place, absolutely.

Frum: I don’t think it’s a hard sell that Iran is an aggressive regime that’s bad at calculating risk, driven by implacable ideology. I think if you took a vote in the U.S. Senate—Iran: good or bad—there might be two or three senators who’d abstain. And there’s a long blood debt, as you know from your time in Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s a long blood debt, that Iran inflicted a lot of loss and harm on the United States, and that’s never been quite requited, although President Trump did kill Qasem Soleimani, the architect of that harm.

But the question is: Who has more staying power here? If fuel prices stay high into the summer driving season, on top of the harm done to the American economy by the tariffs that were imposed in 2025, with a president who was not that popular to begin with, whose numbers are now deteriorating, and who’s famous for his short-term-edness, it’s hard to imagine that these talks can continue in this same way into the month of May and into the month of June.

Pottinger: Yeah, I don’t think the talks are gonna settle this thing. I think that we’re now seeing the negotiation on the battlefield. And it’s still apparently sort of, kind of a cease-fire, but I think the cease-fire exists in name only because, as I said at the top, blockades are acts of war. And now you’re seeing a contest of wills again, on the seas and in the Strait of Hormuz, dueling blockades, and if the U.S. kind of chickens out, we’re gonna be in a pretty rough spot afterwards.

Frum: What happens if Congress refuses to approve the supplementals that are going to be necessary to pay for this war? There are enough Republican dissenters from the war that the supplementals can’t get through the House with Republican votes only. In the Senate, there are many procedural obstacles. You need a consensus to get these supplementals through, and they’re going to be big. What happens if they don’t get funded?

Pottinger: Yeah, well, look, Congress controls the purse. The Constitution’s pretty clear about that. I don’t know what—yeah.

Frum: I think here’s something we can say pretty for sure. There’s a tiny Republican margin in the House. There are probably half a dozen Republican defectors from any Iran war supplemental, maybe more. Once you have one or two, then there may be a lot. There are going to need to be Democratic House members voting the supplemental. Who will they be? And for a war that’s never been authorized by vote of Congress and that the public doesn’t want.

And people are assuming as if this war gets funded, but there could be a real crisis. And then President Trump may try to say, Well, you stabbed us in the back. But given how unpopular the war is, the public may say, That wasn’t a stab in the back. That was a lasso to pull you away from the land war in Iran that we seem to be heading towards.

To have a big war that has already taken a dozen lives, it’s going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and to do that, Congress may have things to say. AndPresident Trump has refused to involve them at the beginning, like the allies, and you may get some protest at the end if they weren’t there at the beginning.

Pottinger: Yeah, I’ll take your word for it. I think we’re stronger as a nation when we have the support of the Congress and the support of the people when we undertake the most grave responsibilities of government, which are those having to do with war and peace.

Frum: One thing that no one seems ever to have said to Donald Trump is, one of the reasons you involve these people is not just because it’s a nice thing to do. When you have that photograph and there is the president flanked by leaders in House and Senate, flanked by allies, and anything goes wrong and the question is, Who thought this was a good idea?, the president could say, All of us. Look at all these guys. We all thought it was a good idea. (Laughs.) If he’s just there front, center, solo and the question is, Who thought this was a good idea?, it’s him. And when it looks like not a good idea, one man to blame.

Pottinger: Fair point. (Laughs.) That’s good. It’s a fair point.

Frum: All right, I need to let you go, but I wanna press you one more: How does this end? If you were to predict, how does this end?

Pottinger: Remember, I described war as kind of an auditor. That’s not an original idea. The guy who wrote the most eloquently on that is an Australian historian named Geoffrey Blainey, who wrote a book that I wish everyone who ever went into national-security jobs would read. It’s called The Causes of War, and he’s just published a new edition of it in Australia.

This accounting that settles for everyone to see kind of who has more bargaining power, that is done on the battlefield. And I think that what you’re seeing after this weekend is that President Trump is unwilling to accept the math at the current stage, which is with Iran saying, I’m not gonna meet any of the political objectives that you demanded of me: I’m not giving up my regime. I’m not giving up my nuclear weapons aspirations. And by the way, I’ve now taken the Strait of Hormuz as my own little tollbooth. We have the cease-fire, but I don’t think that President Trump is gonna settle for that accounting, and so there’s more accounting to do. And that means the dueling blockades on the high seas. Blockades are dangerous things. They’re coercive. They could easily escalate to use of force.

And I don’t know how this ends, except I can give you an indicator. If the United States is able to convene allies and partners, a coalition of the willing, to provide more of that coercive muscle to keep the strait open, which is in everyone’s interest; this isn’t just a contest anymore between the U.S. and Iran. Everyone who’s sitting on the sidelines—and I’ll tell you, the Gulf states know this, and we have some inkling in the press of what they’re asking President Trump to do. They do not want this war to end on the current terms of Iran controlling a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies. So now’s the time to do something that is not in the muscle memory of the current White House, but which I think is necessary, and that is to actually build a coalition. It’s gonna share the burden, but more than that, it’s going to create both optics and numbers that could be more persuasive to Iran to at least back off on the Gulf.

Frum: Matt Pottinger, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Pottinger: David, thanks for having me.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Matt Pottinger for joining me today on The David Frum Show. My book this week is Labyrinths, by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. We had Italo Calvino last week, so now we’re plunging deeper into symbolic territory with the man who really introduced symbolic writing into English.

If you haven’t read Borges or are unfamiliar with his work, I have to prepare you for a very strange world. Labyrinths is the book that made Borges famous in English. It was published in 1962, but it’s a translation and anthology of stories Borges wrote in the 1940s.

Maybe you need to begin with knowing something about the very unusual career of this man. Borges was born in 1899 in Argentina. He was from a well-to-do and very literate family, and he learned many languages at an early age. He spent his 20s in Europe during the First World War in Switzerland and then in Spain, in neutral countries, returned to Argentina, where he began as a poet. In the year 1938, he suffered a traumatic head injury that left him doubtful about his own sanity. And to test his wits, he abandoned poetry and tried instead short stories, and he wrote some very, very strange ones over the next years.

He found himself on the outs with the ruling authorities in Argentina when Juan Perón came to power. Borges was an Anglophile conservative, a traditionalist, and did not like at all the populist regime of Perón, and he lost a job, and he found himself making a living by lecturing on English literature. But the stories came to greater repute, and Borges himself was politically rehabilitated and ending up as director of the Argentine National Library, ironically at exactly the moment that he began to lose his eyesight to a hereditary condition, another predicament that you might find in a Borges short story.

Borges never won the international claim that really ought to have come his way. He was the sort of person who ought to have won a Nobel Prize, but because of his right-of-center politics—he accepted a medal from Augusto Pinochet in 1976—he flunked the political test that is always there in the Nobel considerations. But the stories are bigger than politics and stand the test of time.

Let me tell you about one of the most bizarre of those in the book Labyrinths—published, as I said, in 1962. This is the very first story, the story that he turned to after his crisis in 1938, and it’s called “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” The story is a fictional obituary by a pompous, pedantic, and quite bigoted obituarist of a fictional French writer, Pierre Menard. Pierre Menard had a very obscure imaginary career, and in the later part of his career, in the 1930s, he sat down to write his masterwork, and what he resolved to do was to rewrite Don Quixote in exactly the same words and exactly the same lines as the original Don Quixote. Now, he was not copying Don Quixote, said Pierre Menard, the imaginary author. He was instead drawing on his experience as a 20th-century Frenchman to rewrite Don Quixote from the beginning, exactly the same way as [Miguel de] Cervantes wrote it in the 1600s. And he wrote two chapters and a little fragment of a third chapter—two noncontinuous chapters—each of them drawing on his own inspiration to produce exactly the same book as Cervantes did. And the imaginary obituarist says, When you compare them side by side, they seem identical, but actually, Menard’s version is a lot better because it’s more ironic and written by someone to whom 17th-century Spanish is a second language and not a first language, as it was for Cervantes. The story is humorous, but it raises some very profound questions about the relationship between authors and texts of a kind that have inspired a lot of thought.

Another of the stories in the book is a story called the “Three Versions of Judas,” meaning Judas Iscariot. This is, again, an imaginary essay about an imaginary essayist who wrote an imaginary theology of Judas Iscariot, arguing that Judas Iscariot was, in a way, the true founder of Christianity through a series of very heretical beliefs. And it’s a play on philosophy. It’s a play on meaning. It’s a play on this double game, or this removal game, of imaginary author of an imaginary text about an alien subject, all of which is designed to challenge us to think.

And the reason I draw this to your attention, if you’re not already a Borges fan, is I wanna return to a point I keep making about why I do these books and about what we are losing with the loss of literary culture. Video culture, and especially the kind of short, instant videos we are surrounded with today, encourage us to take the world literally, to be a passive consumer of created objects for us. Literary work, at its best, challenges us to be individuals, to think for ourselves, and understand that text is treacherous. The story of Pierre Menard, a 20th-century writer who rewrites Don Quixote but as a new book, as if it were new, and claims that his version is better, well, that’s a literary game. That is a philosophical problem. That is an invitation on you to think for yourself and be more fully human.

I’m not a Luddite. I enjoy an Instagram Reel as much as the next person—well, maybe not as much as the next person, but I enjoy them. I watch them. But we are losing something. And it’s something that not only changes the world in its loss, but changes ourselves. We need to grab on to it. And meeting Jorge Luis Borges in his Labyrinths is a great place to start.

Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As always, the best way to support the work of this program and of all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you will like and share the program as well. Thank you for watching and listening. See you next week here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

[Music]

Jared Kushner’s Mysterious Role in the Trump Administration

2026-04-15T09:46:20-04:00

In 2021, shortly after he left his role as a senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner let it be known that he had loved his job but disliked the scrutiny and disclosure that came with being a top U.S. government official. He set up a private-equity firm and took a $2 billion investment from a Saudi fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He proclaimed that he was embracing private life. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner said in a 2024 interview. If President Trump “calls you on November whatever and says, ‘I’d like you to come back to D.C.,’ you say, ‘Thanks, but I’m good’?” the interviewer, Dan Primack of Axios, pressed. “Yes,” Kushner responded.

But Kushner did come back. Two days before the United States and Israel attacked Iran this past February, he was in Geneva in a negotiation of the highest possible stakes. Over the weekend, he traveled with Vice President Vance to Islamabad to participate in failed peace talks with Iran. Without title or remit or any kind of official designation—only “presidential son-in-law”—Kushner has in the first 14 months of the second Trump administration sat down with world leaders including Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Volodymyr Zelensky, along with Saudis and multiple other actors from the Middle East.

[Vivian Salama: The end of diplomacy]

Yet Kushner also did not come back. While carrying out public business for his father-in-law, he has continued to pursue his private interests and declined to disclose any information about them. There’s a carve-out designation in ethics laws known as the “special government employee,” which allows businesspeople to perform work for the government. Elon Musk was a special government employee, and so was Corey Lewandowski. But Kushner has not been designated one. He is both outside and inside government—a “volunteer,” the White House calls him. And he is vaulting over strictures that were put in place to defend the mechanisms of government from becoming tools of foreign or private interests.

Nobody’s pointed out any instances, Kushner told 60 Minutes last fall, where he’s “pursued any policies or done anything that have not been in the interest of America.” But it’s impossible to know, from the available shreds of information, where Kushner’s economic interests lie. He tried, for example, to raise $5 billion for his firm, Affinity Partners, in Davos, The New York Times reported, where he was also part of the official U.S. delegation presenting a plan for Gaza’s future. When I asked Affinity about this, it sent over a statement from its chief legal officer, Ian Brekke: “Affinity had early conversations with its anchor investor and does not intend to take in any additional capital while Jared is volunteering for the government. An SEC-registered investment firm, Affinity has abided by all laws and regulations and will continue to do so. Jared Kushner has complied with all applicable laws and requirements, and any suggestion otherwise is false. Jared has always operated in the best interests of the United States.”

In a wave of post-Watergate reforms, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act in 1978, and soon set up the Office of Government Ethics to uphold the principle that the “American people could see the financial holdings of the most senior officials in the executive branch, and use this information to ensure those officials were free from conflicts of interest.”

But Kushner isn’t filing any ethics disclosures. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that he “is acting in his capacity as a private citizen; therefore, he is not subject to disclosure requirements.” She added, “Mr. Kushner has been generous in lending his valuable expertise when asked. He does so in his capacity as a private citizen, and the entire administration appreciates his willingness to step away from his family and livelihood in order to help address these complex problems.”

Kushner may not have a title, but there is no question that he is a senior person in Trump’s hierarchy and is acting as a senior official would. He has traveled the globe with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff—who founded a cryptocurrency business with his two sons and the Trumps just weeks before the 2024 election, and who officially became a government employee last summer and filed a disclosure form that showed he still held shares in that crypto outfit, World Liberty Financial. (In February, the White House counsel told The Wall Street Journal that Witkoff had divested from World Liberty.)

This is leagues more transparent than Jared Kushner has been.

“Kushner’s role is no different than Witkoff’s,” Donald Sherman, the president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. “So they should have to explain why he is being held to a different ethics standard than someone who has the same job.”

Ethics disclosures are highly imperfect. They are crowded with names of limited-liability companies that shroud officials’ business associates; different rules apply for publicly traded holdings and privately traded holdings; adult children are exempted from disclosure; the forms can run to excessive lengths. One Trump official filed an 1,878-page disclosure form, nearly nine times as long as the president’s 234-page form.

Yet Kushner has not filed even an imperfect form. He has dismissed the concept of conflicts as it applies to him and Witkoff. “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world,” Kushner told 60 Minutes after he and Witkoff negotiated the Gaza cease-fire. “If Steve and I didn’t have these deep relationships, the deal we were able to get done, that freed these hostages, would not have occurred.”

[Listen: How crypto is used for political corruption]

Kushner has a reputation for being a serious negotiator. And he has a direct line to the president. But his political dealings are ineluctably intertwined with his businesses. Kushner is related by marriage to the president, one who smiles on those who do business with his family, and the 2021 Saudi investment in Affinity Partners was made despite the Saudi fund’s own finding that the company’s operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Kushner has defended the deal, saying that the Saudi fund “is one of the most prestigious investors in the world.”

Trump is now on his fourth ethics chief. He has fired most of the presidentially appointed inspectors general and replaced them with loyalists, and the Department of Justice, which would ordinarily prosecute criminal conflicts of interest, is pliant to his will. Amid this wreckage in the ethics landscape, insisting on disclosure for Kushner may seem quaint, or at least not the top priority.

But the Framers of the Constitution believed that the threat of corruption—which they associated with European royalty—was as great as the threat of war. They believed that it was human nature to respond to financial interest, so their solution was to put in place structures to limit temptation and remove incentives to commit corrupt acts. It’s why they wrote into the Constitution the emoluments clause, which prohibits a president from taking a gift from a foreign leader without congressional approval.

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” George Washington wrote in his 1796 farewell address, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

Centuries into our democratic experiment, this is still true.

A New Kind of Hybrid Car Is About to Hit America’s Streets

2026-04-15T07:30:00-04:00

Two hours into a road trip in my Tesla, I start to get twitchy. By that point, the battery in my 2019 Model 3 has dipped to an uncomfortably low percentage. If I can’t reach the next plug, I’m in trouble. This is the kind of problem that Ram’s electric pickup truck—the first of a new breed of EV to arrive in the United States—is intended to solve. When the range starts to dwindle, the truck automatically fires up a hidden gas engine that refills the giant battery. The “electric” vehicle keeps on chugging down the highway, hour after hour; pit stops are once again decided by the need for bathroom breaks rather than battery range.

The Ram 1500 REV, set to debut later this year, is what’s called an “extended-range electric vehicle,” or EREV. In essence, it is an electric vehicle that burns gas. There’s nothing revolutionary about a half-gas, half-electric car, of course. Hybrids have been a mainstay in the United States since the Toyota Prius broke through two decades ago, and automakers have released more efficient plug-in hybrids—allowing drivers to charge up for about 30 miles of electric driving, just enough to accomplish daily errands without fossil fuels. An extended-range EV is a different kind of beast. The engine burns gasoline for the sole purpose of replenishing the battery—it never actually pushes the wheels. In the Ram, the battery can run for about 150 miles of electric driving, and the whole setup delivers enough range to travel nearly 700 miles between stops.

EREVs are the car industry’s new hope for quieting the doubts of American drivers who are wary of going electric. “It takes away the range anxiety,” Jeremy Michalek, the director of the Vehicle Electrification Group at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. “When you want to go on a long trip, you can still put liquid fuel in it and continue to drive for longer distances.” But for all the upside, gas-burning electric cars are not quite the future that we were promised. Just last year, the Ram truck was slated to be fully electric, with no gas engine to be found. Ford recently killed the electric F-150 pickup truck and is now promising to bring it back as—you guessed it—an EREV.

[Read: The hybrid-car dilemma]

These new hybrids are the latest sign that the electric revolution has not exactly gone according to plan. Sales of EVs, true electric vehicles, had been growing slowly in the United States, but they’ve slid in the past six months, plagued by high prices and attacks from the Trump administration. Automakers have responded by canceling and delaying new EV models. Last month, for example, Honda announced that it would halt the development of three new EVs; a few days later, Volvo said it would discontinue its affordable electric SUV, citing “shifting market conditions.” Other car companies, having invested billions into building EVs, are trying to find new ways to persuade Americans to take a chance on big batteries and electric motors. That’s where extended-range EVs come in.

By throwing in a backup generator, the car industry hopes that it can finally appeal to pickup drivers, who have been especially resistant to going electric. Of the 16 EREVs that are set to hit the market within the next three years, all are trucks or SUVs. “For American brands at the moment, I think it’s an admission that maybe, especially for big trucks and SUVs, EVs can’t deliver the type of utility and the performance that their customers demand,” Joseph Yoon, a consumer-insights analyst at the car-buying site Edmunds, told me. Indeed, electrifying the full-size American pickup truck has proved to be a particularly tough problem. Because these vehicles are so big and heavy, electric versions need colossal batteries to move them. That raises the price, and drivers are still sometimes left with subpar performance: Towing a boat or trailer severely dings their battery range.

There is good reason to believe that EREVs will assuage some of these concerns. Consider Scout Motors, a Volkswagen-owned brand that is making electric versions of the boxy trucks and SUVs from the 1960s and ’70s. Of the 150,000 reservations the company collected as of January, 85 percent of customers have chosen the version with the backup engine over its battery-only cousin. Scout began with an all-electric focus, Ryan Decker, the vice president of strategy and brand, told me. Then the company received feedback that prospective drivers wanted more than they believed all-electric could deliver. Pivoting to an extended-range EV let Scout build on the work that went into manufacturing an electric vehicle, he said, while giving customers “confidence of packaging a gas engine on top.”

However, the curse of any hybrid is compromise. EREVs aren’t likely to solve the biggest reason Americans are not going electric: cost. Though Ram has yet to announce the price of its new extended-range pickup truck, Car and Driver estimates that the vehicle will run at least $60,000. Ram’s gas-powered truck, meanwhile, starts at $42,000. The price difference is partly because an extended-range EV still has a big, expensive battery in addition to carrying around a gas engine with its thousands of chugging belts and spinning gears. That leads to other downsides. EREVs require plenty of upkeep, unlike fully electric cars that have just a few dozen moving parts. In the six and a half years that I’ve owned my Tesla, I’ve done basically nothing but replace the tires and the small backup battery.

[Read: The backlash against car prices is here]

The problem that these buzzy new hybrids do solve isn’t as relevant as you might think. For those who aren’t doing any heavy-duty driving—which includes lots of American pickup-truck owners—range anxiety is a vanishing concern. New electric cars can now run for 300 or even 400 miles a charge, which is more than enough to pull off a road trip without having to make lots of extra stops. High-speed charging is also getting more common and more reliable: Tesla now has more than 3,000 Supercharger stations in the United States, and competitors such as IONNA and EVgo have accelerated the previously slow pace of installing new plugs. (The Trump administration tried to freeze billions in federal funding for EV charging, but courts have ruled against that move.)

Two things are clear about electric vehicles: They are far cleaner in the long run, and people who buy them typically don’t return to gas. Perhaps extended-range EVs are the training wheels that hesitant drivers need, providing the benefits of electric cars—instantaneous torque, quiet driving, fewer planet-killing carbon emissions—alongside the comfort of knowing there’s a gas station at every freeway exit. Seen another way, though, a built-in backup generator is poised to prolong the inevitable transition to true electric cars. Because designing and building new cars takes years, many EREVs won’t actually arrive in dealerships for quite some time. Ford’s extended-range F-150 is launching next year; Scout won’t launch its SUV until 2028 and its truck until even later. Considering that vehicles tend to stay on the road for a decade or more, these trucks are likely to be still burning fossil fuels deep into the 2040s. Any driver who buys an EREV to go mostly electric is one who could have gone fully electric and never picked up a gas pump again.

The Paradox of Modern Medicine

2026-04-15T07:30:00-04:00

In her first year of medical school, Diana Cejas discovered a lump in her neck. She went to the student medical center to have it evaluated and was told that it was likely benign. But the lump kept growing, and she returned to her doctors, who reassured her that it was just a large lymph node. One night, following a 36-hour shift in her residency, the lump hurt so much she couldn’t sleep. The next day, after she begged for help, a doctor finally ordered a CT scan. She looked up her results on the hospital computer system. There, on the screen, was a large mass in her neck. It turned out to be cancerous. Even as she had been learning how to correctly diagnose others, she had not been able to get an accurate diagnosis herself.

Cejas was a victim of what Alexandra Sifferlin, in her new book The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis, calls “multiple kinds of diagnostic error—both incorrect and delayed.” These types of errors are surprisingly common; an estimated 5 percent of Americans—about 13 million people—experience a diagnostic error each year. A 2023 study concluded that more than three-quarters of a million Americans are permanently disabled or die each year as the result of a misdiagnosis.

Diagnosis is, as Sifferlin writes, “the most important piece of medical information a person can receive.” In light of this, the health-care system’s failure to seriously investigate diagnostic error—which can include a wide range of mistakes—is both mystifying and dismaying.

In 2015, a landmark report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine found that most people will be incorrectly diagnosed at least once in their lifetime. The report was intended to catalyze reform, much as a groundbreaking 1999 analysis of medical errors led health-care institutions to reduce mistakes in areas such as surgery. But more than a decade after the NASEM report, little has changed, and Sifferlin writes that no major U.S. health system tracks diagnostic error systematically. When Hardeep Singh, a physician and patient-safety researcher, tried to start a national diagnostic-error-measurement program, he was able to get only nine hospital systems to sign up.

You might think that AI, with its copious processing power, would help solve this problem. But it’s unlikely to do so in the absence of a broad reimagining of how medicine engages with patients. Misdiagnosis, The Elusive Body shows, is not just an occasional glitch in the system but the result of several interrelated and intrinsic flaws—flaws that are, in surprising ways, the product of medical science’s evolution over the past century and a half.

[Read: Hypochondria never dies]

Chief among these weaknesses are the system’s obsession with metrics and testing and its expectation that patients’ bodies will behave roughly alike. The advent of germ theory in the 19th century introduced the idea of diseases as specific entities that cause distinct symptoms and antibodies, and new technologies such as the X-ray and laboratory blood work gave physicians the means to identify them. This was a marvelous advance. It brought us longer lives and eventually led to the idea of evidence-based medicine. But it turned testing into the focal point of the diagnostic process. The result is that doctors are less attuned to what patients describe than to what tests determine.

This problem is compounded by the system’s reluctance to engage in self-reflection, and the myth of the infallible doctor who just knows things. As Sifferlin documents, medical schools fail to teach doctors to be aware of their propensity for error; one study found that more than half lack a curriculum that addresses the fact that physicians frequently make cognitive mistakes. And according to a 2020 survey to which Singh contributed, “Clinicians were significantly less comfortable discussing diagnostic issues than other medical errors,” likely because acknowledging the possibility of such mistakes cuts to the core of who doctors think they are (and in a litigious culture, it can expose them to lawsuits). Without built-in feedback loops—patients rarely return to say You got it wrong—doctors operate in a system that rarely reckons with its own fallibility.

On top of this, as Sifferlin documents, doctors are overwhelmed by the demands of hospital systems and profit-driven insurance companies that reward speed over attention: 15-minute appointments, denied insurance claims, bureaucracy that erodes time with patients. Squeezed on all sides, physicians must make critical decisions under conditions that all but guarantee mistakes. One study at Johns Hopkins University found that the medical school’s first-year interns spent a mere 13 percent of their time in patients’ rooms.

The physical exam—once the key to diagnosis—is in decline; doctors almost immediately default to ordering tests in its stead. Yet a 2011 study suggested that at least 80 percent of diagnoses could be made by using basic clinical skills: Reporting on a bedside-medicine program at Johns Hopkins, Sifferlin documents a retired doctor with heart disease who served as a teaching patient. The intern tasked with diagnosing him wanted to order lab tests, an EKG, and an echocardiogram; her supervisor showed her that with a careful physical exam—checking his pulse, listening to his chest—and a look at his medical history, she could reach the diagnosis on the spot, with 99 percent certainty, as opposed to slowing down the path to diagnosis by deferring to tests.

In the public imagination, conditioned by the 20th century’s embrace of expertise (and pop medical mysteries such as House), diagnostic challenges are in many cases thought to revolve around rare diseases—a zebra where you should expect a horse. But Sifferlin reveals that the problem may be worse, paradoxically, when dealing with everyday illnesses—because it is more widespread. The larger crisis concerns patients such as Cejas, people with treatable problems that were missed because no one listened long enough to think again. As Sifferlin reports, “Between 65 and 80 percent of diagnostic errors can be attributed to breakdowns between the doctor and patients during clinical interactions.”

Still, beyond these unforced errors, there are more zebras than physicians are often willing to admit. Perhaps the worst mistake a doctor can make is not their believing that they know everything but their acting as if everything is known. Today, millions of people live with poorly understood chronic illnesses—myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune diseases, long COVID—that don’t fit cleanly into established categories or show up on tests in their early stages. Sifferlin quotes from the work of the anthropologist Abigail Dumes, who has argued that the rise of evidence-based medicine had the unintended effect of excluding these conditions from “the trappings of medical legibility.”

[Read: The making of a diagnostic mind]

By learning to see inside the body, that is, medicine also learned to overlook patients whose illnesses aren’t already well studied. Gulf War veterans, for example, were told that their symptoms were caused by stress before researchers showed that nerve-gas exposure had caused real biological damage. And long-COVID patients still routinely have their symptoms ascribed to anxiety, despite rapidly growing evidence of the disease’s physical pathology. In such cases, uncertainty leads to dismissiveness. A medical system that can’t yet quantify what is wrong concludes that nothing is wrong, that it’s just in your head—even though, as doctors now hasten to add, the symptoms you are feeling are real.

It has become fashionable, in some medical-humanities circles, to question the importance of diagnosis itself. At a talk I gave about searching for a diagnosis as a patient living at what I called “the edge of medical knowledge,” a professor asked me, “What is the point of a diagnosis, anyway?” I know what he meant: A diagnosis is not the last word, just a step on a complicated journey. But as someone who went without one for more than a decade, I also know that getting a diagnosis matters. In our bureaucratized medical system, it unlocks treatment, insurance coverage, clinical-trial eligibility, and—perhaps most fundamental—recognition, a validation of your illness. In a study that Sifferlin cites, a woman searching for a diagnosis put it simply: “I just want permission to be ill.” So a better question is not Why do we care so much about diagnosis?, but rather Why isn’t the system doing more to get diagnosis right?

Sifferlin suggests that the answer isn’t primarily technological. The Undiagnosed Diseases Program, a program at the National Institutes of Health that identifies rare, new diseases, works not because its providers can sequence genomes at the NIH—though they do—but because of the time devoted to each case, and because of the collaboration and ferment that results from experts conversing outside of their silos, honing and exercising their clinical judgment. But most doctors today are not trained in a system that allows them to work this way.

In her book How Doctors Think, the medical-humanities scholar Kathryn Montgomery defines this kind of judgment as “an intellectual capacity carefully cultivated through the rigors of a long apprenticeship spent dealing with radical uncertainty.” But Brian Garibaldi, who directs the Center for Bedside Medicine at Northwestern University, tells Sifferlin that some medical students make it all of the way through their training without ever having been supervised while examining a real patient. Sifferlin describes an intern who aces an ultrasound assessment but fails to do a basic check on a patient’s reflexes; he didn’t spot the reflex hammer in the exam room.

Many people believe that artificial intelligence—with its extraordinary ability to assimilate information, identify patterns, and make quick judgments—will be just the thing to fix the diagnosis crisis. It is true that AI, by transcribing appointments, frees up doctors from sitting behind their computers and taking notes. It can also help physicians overcome unconscious bias, as the UC Berkeley researcher Ziad Obermeyer and others have shown. But The Elusive Body suggests (correctly, I think) that AI won’t be a panacea—at least not on its own. Obermeyer’s work also shows that AI as easily replicates existing bias as corrects it. Technology is deployed according to human values. The values that our medical system currently rewards—speed, volume, cost reduction—are the same ones that created the crisis we are now in.

[Read: The diagnosis trap]

Today, Diana Cejas works in pediatric neurology. Her experience changed the kind of doctor she is. “Sometimes it’s all I feel like I do, listen to patients. I just let them talk,” she tells Sifferlin. Her experience of misdiagnosis left her in a paradoxical position: “I want my patients to trust me. At the same time, I have a hard time trusting physicians.”

The word diagnosis comes from the Greek for “knowledge.” To offer a diagnosis is not just a medical act but an epistemological and moral one—a bridge from the world of the well to the world of the sick. Diagnosis requires recognition—the willingness to say: I believe your body is telling us something, even if I don’t know what it is. The crisis that Sifferlin documents—and that I’ve experienced as a patient—is that the system has made this act of witness, a foundational act of thousands of years of medicine, exceedingly difficult to perform.

The Elusive Body shows that it doesn’t have to be this way: The solutions are around us, and all that they require is a new orientation toward uncertainty, attention, and time—as well as the political will to solve the problem. Under the current federal assault on science, and in a moment when AI threatens to make each encounter even more remote, that person-to-person reorientation feels long overdue.

The High-Risk, Low-Reward Blockade of Hormuz

2026-04-15T07:28:50-04:00

The Trump administration’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has made the waterway one more testing ground in a battle of wills. The question isn’t whether Iran or the United States has the more powerful navy, but which country can endure economic pain and military casualties longer—the United States, which has been waging an unpopular war of choice in the Middle East, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is fighting for its survival.

Since the beginning of the war, Tehran has allowed vessels of its choosing to pay a toll to pass through the strait. In this way, it has been able to continue selling its oil at a high price while also profiting from the tolls. Iran is now demanding that any ship that wants to transit the strait must also deviate from the normal lanes into Iranian waters near Qeshm Island and be inspected by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In its counterblockade, the United States is stipulating that no ship that pays a toll will be allowed through. It is also denying transit to ships that enter or leave Iranian ports, which would presumably include those that deviated from the normal routes so as to be inspected in Iranian waters. Ships that comply with U.S. demands risk being attacked by Iran, and ships that comply with Iranian demands risk being detained by the United States. Complying with both is impossible. And on top of that, Iran has likely laid mines in the channels most commonly used for passage.

[Read: Trump pivots to ‘least bad option’ on Iran]

Enforcing the blockade could be complicated and risky for the United States diplomatically. The U.S. may have to decide, for instance, whether it will detain a Chinese-flagged vessel, or even one escorted by the Chinese, Pakistani, or Indian navies. If the United States were to board such a ship, the Chinese or other powers could retaliate economically, including through tariffs or by stepping up military or economic assistance to Iran.

Enforcement could also put American service members at risk. Visit, board, search, and seizure (VBSS) teams are tasked with inspecting vessels. They tend to use small, inflatable boats with a rigid hull, which are deployed from larger ships, such as destroyers and frigates. Vessels being boarded are supposed to come to a complete stop. But some ships attempting to run the blockade might refuse to be boarded and instead continue speeding ahead. The U.S. Navy would then have to decide whether to board the ship without the crew’s cooperation, which requires special training, or to disable the vessel by firing on it.

Other vessels might attempt to avoid capture by staying close to Iranian waters, which would expose the destroyers, and especially the VBSS small-boat teams, to enemy fire. Iran still reportedly possesses most of its “mosquito fleet” of small boats, which could swarm American assets that come near its coast. The Iranians could lay ambushes for VBSS teams onboard certain vessels, thereby turning seemingly compliant boardings into deadly firefights in hostile territory.

The U.S. has also pledged to disable mines that Iran has placed in the strait. This is a painfully slow process that will require teams in small boats to operate underwater drones in search of mines and then send divers to deactivate them. Mine-clearing teams may be even more vulnerable to attack than those seeking to board ships.

The U.S. warships from which all of these missions will be dispatched will have to operate much closer to Iranian territory than they did before the blockade. Iran has unmanned surface drones that can cause immense damage to warships, as Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated. The best defense against Iran’s mosquito fleet and drones is airpower—using the MH-60R helicopters onboard Navy destroyers, say. But China has reportedly sent modern shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. Those could be used to shoot down helicopters. Just one drone, one cruise missile, one mine, or one suicide boat that gets through American defenses could put a billion-dollar guided-missile destroyer out of action for years. This has happened to U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf in the past.

[Missy Ryan: Trump ditched hearts and minds in the Iran war]

Those are the risks. They must be measured against the uncertainty of the blockade’s rewards. Iran has proved adept at evading sanctions for decades, and it will undoubtedly attempt to continue moving goods over land, via airlift, and potentially via pipelines to Pakistan. The Iranians may also avoid sanctions by using ships flagged by other countries, or those that lie about their destinations inside the Gulf. They could use small craft such as a dhow, the traditional boat in the region, which are difficult to track and impossible to stop when they travel in large numbers. VBSS teams would have to board each one.

If, in spite of all of these obstacles, the blockade does successfully shut down Iranian oil revenue, the U.S. and Iran will find themselves racing against an economic clock. Iran entered the war with a precarious economy. Oil revenue accounts for 9 percent of the country’s GDP. Total Iranian exports through the strait amount to $435 million a day—roughly a third of Iran’s GDP. An extended, successful blockade would jack up the country’s inflation rate within weeks. But it would also raise the price of gas, food, pharmaceuticals, and electronics globally. Oil futures have been held down by President Trump’s repeated hints that an end to the conflict is just around the corner. But those statements can’t indefinitely postpone the consequences of removing 20 percent of the world’s oil from the market.

The American public was never sold on the war with Iran, and Trump’s popularity has taken a hit in the lead-up to the 2026 midterms. How the blockade ends may depend on just how many casualties and how much economic pain each country and its leaders can endure. The advantage in this contest belongs to Iran—because it is not a democracy, because it is fighting near its own territory, and because its regime will do anything necessary to survive.

We Shouldn’t Need Accountants

2026-04-15T07:00:00-04:00

If you are anything like me, you have spent a lot of time over the past few weeks opening letters, finding receipts, requesting PDFs, scanning documents, and going through your credit-card statements line by line. It’s tax season. And in the United States, taxes are a DIY affair.

This is the case even though Washington could probably do your taxes for you. If you earn a salary or an hourly wage, the Internal Revenue Service already knows how much money you make. It likely knows how much you owe or how big your refund should be too. Nine in 10 households take the standard deduction, making their liability easy to glean from payroll and banking data.

Yet Uncle Sam demands that Americans fire up TurboTax, head to a storefront preparer, hire an accountant, or sit down with a sharp pencil and a strong cup of coffee to get their taxes done each spring. The average filer spends 13 hours on their 1040—a time tax that many of our wealthy peer countries have reduced to a couple of minutes, if that. Prepopulated documents and return-free systems are common everywhere but here. Sweden lets residents file by text. Canada prefills paperwork. Japan sends households a document summarizing their tax contributions. If everything looks copacetic, many workers get to do a blissful nothing. Denmark, Estonia, Spain, and Norway have similarly simple processes.

The United States imposes a cost in cash, as well as in effort. A majority of Americans, whether wealthy or poor, pay for help with their return, spending an average of $290 annually. Add up the amount that people spend out of pocket, and you would have a sum 12 times larger than the IRS’s budget. The situation is needless, as well as annoying. It’s far past time for it to end.

To be fair to the IRS, the situation is not its fault. The country’s politicians have created a tax code with 10,000 sections and innumerable carve-outs. It includes deductions for medical expenses, tips, overtime earnings, prescription-drug costs, state income and sales taxes, mortgage interest, charitable giving, gambling losses, student-loan-interest payments, alimony payments, and retirement contributions, as well as write-offs for property destroyed by or stolen during a natural disaster. (A favorite Kafkaesque fillip of mine: The cost of tax preparation is often itself deductible.) The tax code offers credits to parents and low-income Americans, as well as to people paying for child care, job-training programs, and college. Families taking the standard deduction don’t have to substantiate the $500 that they tithed to their church or the “Don’t worry about it, sweetie” funds that they lost in Vegas. But they do need to demonstrate to the IRS that they had a kid or enrolled in a vocational-training program.

At the same time, politicians have woven safety-net initiatives into the tax code. The IRS has become a shadow social-insurance agency, requiring the painstaking vetting of family finances and the ginning up of all kinds of fussy contingencies and phase-ins. If the United States scrapped the child tax credit and opted for universal child care, tax season wouldn’t be so onerous. Tax filing would be simpler if Washington covered college tuition instead of subsidizing student loans. Things would be easier if the country had a single-payer health-insurance system instead of an employer-sponsored, tax-subsidized omnishambles.

But tax expenditures tend to fly through Congress, whereas social-spending bills tend to get stuck. Tax initiatives can be pinpoint-targeted to households with specific earnings and work situations, whereas universal programs are universal. And tax programs are cheaper for the government to administer than direct services are. As a result, Washington keeps layering complicated provisions into the code, and letting individual families do the work.

The IRS could take over, as tax experts have suggested for three decades. Complexity does not pose an insurmountable obstacle. A few years ago, the IRS built a TurboTax competitor—a free, public system that could help families fill in lines and check boxes on the 1040, and calculate their liability. Direct File aided half a million households with simple tax situations in 2024 and 2025. Most people got their taxes done in less than an hour. Americans loved it.

The tax-preparation industry did not, and neither did many Republicans. A group of attorneys general asserted that Direct File was an affront to the Americans who choose to hire “small businesses in our states to file their taxes at an affordable cost.” More than 30 members of Congress argued that the IRS was acting as “assessor, collector, preparer, and enforcer—all in one,” a “deeply concerning” situation and “a clear conflict of interest.” Although the IRS wanted to expand Direct File, Donald Trump killed it.

Direct File was neither deeply concerning nor a clear conflict of interest. The tax returns that it generated were more accurate than those created by other filing tools. Families were under no obligation to use it, either. They could hire a storefront preparer or do their taxes by hand if they wanted, and they could adjust the government’s tabulations.

As a general point, the IRS prepopulating returns would not create opportunities for graft or amp up the risk of error. The agency’s commissioner isn’t getting a bonus for denying a low-income mom a refund. And automatic filing would lower many households’ tax bill by ensuring that they get all of the subsidies and credits they qualify for. (Many families miss out because they do not file a return or do not fill out the paperwork correctly.)

Of late, Washington has taken a few steps toward efficiency: expanding the standard deduction, signing young men up automatically for the draft. Yet mostly, it has sprinted backwards: gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, adding work requirements to Medicaid and SNAP, axing Direct File. Many Republicans remain resolute in their opposition to actual administrative elegance. And Jackson Hewitt and the like retain their billion-dollar interest in ensuring that the IRS doesn’t become like Denmark’s Skattestyrelsen or Japan’s Kokuzei-chō. The company behind TurboTax has spent millions of dollars on a “sophisticated, sometimes covert war” to keep tax season excruciating, a ProPublica investigation found.

Washington has gotten used to providing substandard services, and Americans have gotten used to accepting them. This spring, the government is giving households 7 billion migraine-blinded hours’ worth of needless homework, and is forcing them to hand billions of dollars over to rent-seeking accountants as they hand over trillions of dollars to the IRS. If Denmark and Japan can make tax filing painless, so can we.

What Viktor Orbán’s Opponents Sacrificed to Beat Him

2026-04-15T06:00:00-04:00

To the outside world, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán began his rule as a pariah—an obstreperous, often lone dissenter from European Union policies, especially over migration. Then he became a prophet to new-style “national conservatives”—the anti-immigration, anti-elite right-wing movement that has reshaped the politics of the West. After resoundingly losing national elections held on April 12, Orbán has become a parable for how populism can be defeated.

His political demise was hardly inevitable. It had to be shrewdly engineered by politicians and voters who put aside their ideological differences to defeat him. In politics, there is no natural law of self-correction.

From 2010 until now, Orbán and his Fidesz party transformed Hungary into a new kind of state, which he proudly proclaimed as an “illiberal democracy.” He and his allies rewrote the constitution to entrench his power, centralizing control over civil society and countervailing institutions such as courts and universities. Péter Magyar, the presumptive next prime minister, triumphed against a tilted electoral system—gerrymandered districts, government influence over traditional media and even over the country’s billboards—designed to keep Fidesz in power. Magyar understood that such a regime does not simply collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and mismanagement.

Magyar was an unlikely agent for Orbán’s undoing, because he was until recently an apparatchik in the Fidesz machine. But that also meant that Magyar’s criticism of Fidesz corruption could not be so easily dismissed. Two years ago, he released an embarrassing tape of his former wife, then the justice minister, speaking about Orbán officials attempting to tamper with documents in a major corruption case. That was the beginning of the ultimately successful campaign to unseat the ruling party. Tisza, Magyar’s party, barely existed two years ago. Now it has won a parliamentary supermajority capable of turning back Orbán’s constitutional changes.

Crucially, Magyar’s brand of anti-Orbánism was not stridently progressive. He did not repudiate Orbán’s hostility to migration. Quite the opposite: He labeled Orbán a hypocrite for being outwardly hostile to immigration while maintaining a large guest-worker program. Magyar pledged to continue “zero tolerance for illegal immigration” and to keep Fidesz’s opposition to the EU’s migration pact. Magyar avoided being drawn into debates about Orbán’s policies on gay rights, such as the constitutional amendment passed last year that is aimed at shutting down Pride parades. He shunned attempts by foreign reporters to profile him.

[Isaac Stanley-Becker: There’s a message for MAGA in Viktor Orbán’s defeat]

One of Tisza’s most illuminating campaign slogans was “Not left, not right, only Hungarians”—which promised an ideologically diverse movement to roll back Orbán’s corruption and cronyism. Emmanuel Macron’s party deployed a similar slogan, “Neither left nor right,” in 2017, when it also quickly went from nowhere to complete power in France. In the United States, the party duopoly is more entrenched, but you could argue that Barack Obama executed the trick in 2008 when he convincingly pitched himself as president for neither red America nor blue America.

Magyar directly campaigned all throughout Hungary, including in rural constituencies that tended to go unvisited because they were considered Fidesz’s heartland. Benjamin Novak, a former journalist and an analyst of Hungarian politics, told me that after years of scandal and inflation and slow growth in the country, Magyar’s indictment of the Orbán regime resonated widely. “The lived experience of Hungarians was that Hungary is falling apart,” Novak said. “And these guys are so corrupt that they have no idea what they’re doing.” Magyar’s momentum persuaded other opposition parties across the political spectrum to stand down to avoid splitting the anti-Fidesz vote. Factionalism was effectively suspended. In American terms, the rallying behind Magyar (whose name is the Hungarian word for “Hungarian”) would be like an ex-MAGA Republican named Peter American winning the Democratic nomination with the endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Until now, Orbán had succeeded through us-versus-them politics—Budapest against Brussels, Hungarians against Ukrainians, citizens against globalists. But instead of taking the opposite of Orbán’s side on the wisdom of EU bureaucracy, trans rights, or the Russia-Ukraine war, Magyar constructed an entirely different debate focused on the ruling party’s corruption, inflation, and neglect of public services. (In political-science terms, Magyar succeeded because his party achieved “transformative repolarization” rather than “reciprocal polarization.”)

The parties that have had the most success against the populist right have shown similar messaging discipline. In Poland, the nationalist, conservative Law and Justice Party lost in 2023 to a broad coalition led by Donald Tusk—a centrist former president of the European Council who nevertheless opposes current EU migration policy and makes statements such as “If we are open to all forms of migration without any control, our world will collapse.” In Denmark, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the leader of the center-left Social Democrats, has maintained power for seven years in part by championing strict laws on asylum and assimilation that might exceed even the imagination of Stephen Miller (for example: tearing down homes in neighborhoods that had too many “non-Western” residents). In each case, mainstream parties learned to adapt in ways that made them more competitive against radical ones.

In the United States, many of Donald Trump’s most fervent critics do something rather different: When the president and Fox News criticize an idea, Democrats declare themselves to be for it. This dynamic not only allows MAGA Republicans to set the terms of the American political debate but also boxes Democrats into backing unpopular policy positions: defunding the police; limiting immigration enforcement, even for criminals; insisting upon allowing the participation of trans women in women’s sports. Roger Scruton, the late British conservative philosopher, brought to prominence the idea of “oikophobia”—that is, a feeling of embarrassment about one’s home country and of affection for foreign societies that arises as a reaction to xenophobia. This affliction is not uncommon among American Democrats, and it concedes the field of patriotism to Republicans. This is an error that successful anti-populists such as Magyar and Tusk do not fall into.

Because Orbán was the preeminent national conservative, many of his critics might hope that his political demise will be contagious. He not only established Hungary as the prototype but also used government resources to foster organizations devoted to promoting this ideology abroad. Magyar has pledged to eliminate these state-sponsored sinecures, and a minor repatriation of ideological warriors back to America, Britain, and the rest of Europe may soon commence. Rod Dreher, a conservative American writer who has been living in Budapest (and who has since announced that he will move to Vienna), rationalized Orbán’s defeat not as a loss for the national conservative movement but as “a loss to the idea that you can govern as a populist with three years of no economic growth, and with indifference to insiders connected to you getting rich off of cronyism.” In his view, what Magyar offered voters was “Orbán, but without the corruption.”

[Anne Applebaum: Illiberalism is not inevitable]

Dreher’s warning is apt. Anti-populists might be tempted to think that the arc of history is finally bending back toward liberalism. Yet in Europe and America, populist parties and factions are not inexorable, but they remain powerful.

Populism, a set of appeals that pits the common man against the corrupt elite, is neither intrinsically authoritarian nor confined to the right. The fundamental drivers of populism—cultural anxiety about migration, the decline of state capacity, the loss of social trust—remain. It would be unsurprising if AfD (Alternative for Germany) secured wins in regional elections in Germany later this year, and if those were followed next year by the victory of Marine Le Pen’s party in the French presidential elections, followed sometime later by a victory for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the British general election.

Temporarily embarrassed populist parties have not been permanently vanquished. “You can’t overcome dictatorship without winning an election,” Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton who has studied Hungary since the fall of communism, told me. But prevailing at the ballot box is only the first step, she said. “The more entrenched these institutions get,” Scheppele went on, “the harder it is to undo the damage.”

Scheppele pointed me to two recent examples. In Poland, Tusk successfully dislodged the Law and Justice Party from power but has struggled to implement his “iron broom” strategy to remove vestiges of the old system. His preferred candidate lost the 2025 Polish presidential election, meaning that Tusk’s constitutional reforms will probably be blocked until at least 2030. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the former nationalist president whose supporters staged a coup after he lost the election, is serving a long prison sentence for inciting that event. But Flávio Bolsonaro, his son, has now become the candidate of his father’s party—the next presidential election will be in October—and has rapidly gained in the polls.

In America, Democrats have been experiencing their own painful populist rebound ever since Trump returned to the presidency. Whether they are actually learning from that experience is doubtful.

Trump’s Logic for Blockading the Blockaders

2026-04-14T18:28:00-04:00

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Over the past seven days, Donald Trump has adopted two contradictory positions on the Strait of Hormuz. A week ago, he wrote that a “whole civilization” would “die” if Iran didn’t make certain concessions—among them, allowing ships to resume their normal courses in and out of the Persian Gulf. This weekend, though, after marathon peace talks between the United States and Iran ended without an agreement, Trump announced a blockade of Iranian ports, essentially doubling down on restrictions in the waterway.

Why blockade the blockaders? The tactic is all but guaranteed to aggravate the ongoing energy crisis, which has been a pain point for Trump since the start of the war. But it also inflicts a new level of punishment on Iran: a trade-off that, for the president, appears to be worth making.

Since late February, Iran has been threatening to attack most ships passing through the strait, and the resulting drop-off in traffic has created the worst threat to global energy security in history, per the International Energy Agency. American gas is averaging $4.12 a gallon, and prices for commodities such as fertilizer and helium are way up. But Iran’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz has always had a few carve-outs. Its own ships can pass safely, as can foreign ships that comply with the country’s terms for passage, which include the payment of tolls (reportedly in cryptocurrency or Chinese yuan) and the use of new shipping lanes closer to Iran’s coast. The U.S. blockade, which went into effect yesterday morning, is intended to prevent Iran from exporting its oil, choking the country economically.

So far, the precise scope of the U.S. blockade has been somewhat unclear. According to international law, a full blockade must be applied impartially. Total enforcement would mean that all vessels intending to travel to and from Iranian ports in the region would be prevented from doing so. The Navy has indicated that non-Iranian ships will be allowed to transit the strait; U.S. forces have the right to visit and search any ship, and the right to seize ships that they deem to be carrying contraband in support of the Iranian war effort. How the U.S. will determine which ships meet that criterion is uncertain, and Atlantic reporting suggests that even military officials have been struggling to understand how the blockade is being implemented.

In his social-media post on Sunday morning announcing the blockade, Trump wrote that the Navy will “seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.” But the official notice from U.S. Central Command later that day didn’t mention any plan to halt ships that had paid the toll—in fact, it explicitly stated that U.S. forces would uphold freedom of navigation, allowing neutral ships to pass. The blockade will likely be tested in the coming days. Centcom said this morning that U.S. forces have already successfully directed six merchant vessels “to turn around to re-enter an Iranian port.”

The lingering question of the war’s legality could further complicate the situation. “If the war is not legal, then the blockade also isn’t legal,” Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at the think tank Defense Priorities, told me. Our allies are hesitant too. Despite Trump’s claims that other countries would be “involved,” the United Kingdom has refused to lend its support, and Spain’s defense minister said that the blockade “makes no sense.”

Up until this week, the Trump administration had been focused on easing restrictions on some Iranian oil as a way of lowering energy prices. Now, with U.S. intelligence reportedly indicating that Iran’s economy could be more fragile than it appears, Trump has decided that attacking the country’s exports is more important: The plan is to force Iran back to the negotiating table, in a weaker position than before. In the lead-up to America’s blockade, Iran had been making an estimated $139 million (not necessarily paid out in U.S. dollars) each day through its oil exports. Inhibiting its ability to ship oil from its ports amounts to a direct hit on the country’s war chest. Plus, the chaos in the strait has the potential side effect of boosting U.S. energy exports.

But Iran has also displayed extreme resilience in past weeks, both in its ability to withstand the U.S. and Israel’s relentless bombing campaign and in its determination to assert control over the strait. Claire O’Neill McCleskey, who previously led the compliance division at the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, explained that Iran has a sophisticated capacity for so-called dark maritime activity, which could subvert the blockade: Its “shadow fleet” is able to switch off its tracking devices and broadcast false tracking information to authorities.

If the U.S. Navy does manage to stop Iranian ships from leaving the Gulf, the disruption will have a real impact on China, which buys roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported oil (the Chinese foreign ministry has called the blockade “dangerous and irresponsible”). China has in recent years maintained close relationships with nations throughout the Gulf, and reportedly played a role in Iran’s recent decision to accept a two-week cease-fire. Chinese officials “don’t want to have a war with the United States in the Middle East,” Kavanagh said, but they also “don’t want to be seen as bowing to the United States.” How China might continue to respond over the coming days (and whether it might be more inclined to pressure Iran to reach an agreement with the U.S. and Israel) is an open question. “It’s what everyone’s watching,” Kavanagh said.

The White House’s latest move comes at an important cost. Already, the blockade is pushing up oil prices. In clamping down on Iranian exports, the administration is intentionally tightening the global supply of oil and worsening the energy crisis that it had until recently been looking to end. Iran and China aren’t the only nations that will bear these costs; in imposing this blockade, Trump is effectively toying with the global economy. The United States isn’t immune—on Sunday, the president told Fox News that oil and gas prices might stay the same or even go “a little bit higher” by the time of the midterm elections, in November. Iran has shown that it can withstand enormous punishment, including the assassination of top government officials. Meanwhile, America may be punishing itself.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Israeli and Lebanese officials met in Washington, D.C., today for rare direct talks, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio; their focus was on reaching a cease-fire in Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah.
Representative Eric Swalwell of California said yesterday that he plans to resign from Congress after sexual-assault and misconduct allegations prompted a House Ethics Committee investigation and bipartisan calls for him to step down.
Representative Tony Gonzales said yesterday that he will step down from Congress following a House Ethics Committee investigation into a relationship with a former aide and ahead of a possible expulsion vote.

Evening Read

Justin Sullivan / Getty

Don’t Just Replace Chavez—Rethink Monuments

By Carolina A. Miranda

Almost every day, I drive along a street named after Cesar Chavez, past a mural of Cesar Chavez that shows the labor leader, who died in 1993, clutching the billowing flag of the United Farm Workers with one arm and a group of anonymous laborers with the other. For years, I’ve been struck by the work’s ardent theatricality: Chavez appears sturdy and powerful, whereas the figures look like they’ve fainted. In Los Angeles, where I live, Chavez is everywhere. Within a mile of that mural are two others. A multitude of municipal sites, both grandiose and mundane, bear his name. The transfer station downtown where I wait for the bus is named for Chavez. So is a city park in San Fernando, on the northern fringes of L.A., where a naturalistic bronze statue always looked as if it was about to break into a rally speech.

I now look on those tributes with horror and dismay.

Read the full article.

A Blasphemous President

2026-04-14T15:16:00-04:00

Donald Trump’s recent outbursts at the pope—“WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” he said in one of his Truth Social posts—have renewed questions from observers about the president’s cognitive fitness and his apparently limitless capacity for blasphemy. His attacks also echoed old-fashioned fears about the Vatican as an insidious rival to American power. But more than anything, Trump’s post betrayed a gross and fundamental misunderstanding of who the pope is and what Catholics believe he is empowered to do.

The proximate cause of Trump’s ire was apparently a Saturday peace vigil the pope hosted at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, during which Leo—the first pope born in the United States—prayed for a kingdom of “dignity, understanding, and forgiveness,” to serve as “a bulwark against that delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.” Although the pope did not mention Trump by name, his reference to delusions of omnipotence could be seen as a clear rebuke of the president’s hubris in launching war with no real explanation to the public and no clear end in sight.

Trump’s fury was predictable, but his assumption that Leo was merely offering political commentary revealed a lack of regard for Christian fundamentals. Pretensions to omnipotence that rival God’s unlimited powers underlie the faith’s narratives about sin: Satan fell from grace after trying to usurp God’s throne for himself; Adam and Eve conspired to steal divine wisdom reserved only for God. When Leo advised the faithful—in statements that were addressed to everyone, not just to the Trump administration—to reject the mistaken impression that they can assert boundless control over the world, he was advocating for spiritual humility, a foundational element of Christianity.

[Francis X. Rocca: The Iran war showed a new side of Pope Leo]

Perhaps no quality is more alien to Trump than humility, spiritual or otherwise. Trump reinforced this point by following his tirade against the pope with a Truth Social post containing an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, dressed in flowing robes and illuminated by a heavenly glow, ministering to a sick, bedridden man against a backdrop of soldiers and an American flag. Seemingly created to challenge the pope, this image handily insulted not just Catholics but Christians more broadly: Irreverently depicting oneself as Jesus is a fairly clear-cut instance of profaning the sacred. Even Trump’s religious backers have rushed to declare their sense of betrayal. Douglas Wilson, the Calvinist pastor who counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth among his followers, promptly called the image “blasphemy.”

The most generous reading of Trump’s decision to post the image is not that he intentionally dreamed up a fresh heresy, but that he acted without actually thinking about Christianity and its tenets whatsoever—despite the fact that Republicans have spent decades building political alliances with conservative Christians. Likewise, when Trump inveighed against the pope, he probably did not consider what this might mean for Catholics, including those who have doggedly supported him—such as Vice President Vance, who will soon release a book about his own Catholic faith. Trump has managed to alienate many of the Christians who brought him to power by revealing the limits of his understanding, not just of Catholicism but of Christian theology writ large. (Perhaps chastened by this response, the president quickly deleted the image and insisted he thought it depicted him as a doctor.)

Catholics believe we are governed by a hierarchy that takes its mandate directly from the word of God. The pope’s role is not to impose his personal will upon the masses, but to teach the faithful how to follow Jesus in their own life. Apostolic succession—the idea that the witness of the 12 apostles has been passed down by bishops in an unbroken chain, linking today’s Catholic leaders with the original leaders of the Church—is a core Catholic doctrine, and it directly links the pope back to those who knew Jesus personally and carried on his teachings. Trump may jealously lash out at any authority that rivals his own, but for Catholics the pope is not a king but a servant—the servus servorum Dei, or servant of the servants of God.

Teaching the faithful is an element of that service. Biblical texts supply principles for leading good lives and making good decisions, but those lessons are often abstract, and life presents innumerable situations in which the proper Christian choice is not clear. Part of the Church’s role is to help Christians understand how the dictates of the faith translate into concrete ethical matters, and politics is merely a branch of applied ethics. Therefore the pope is not only entitled to comment on political matters but obligated to, and indeed popes always have. Pope Leo XIII, who served at the turn of the 20th century and whose pontifical name inspired that of the current pope, famously wrote the encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed industrialization by rejecting unbridled capitalism and defending the needs of workers. In 2003, Pope John Paul II condemned the Iraq War as a “defeat for humanity.” Pope Leo XIV’s remarks follow in that tradition.

[Read: The parable of the president]

Trump probably could not predict just how profoundly insulting his posts were to the Christian faithful and Catholics in particular, but the leaders of the Catholic Church in America, including those who have loyally supported Trump, instantly saw that the president had crossed a line. Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement saying that he was “disheartened that the President chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father” and defending the pope as “the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls.” Bishop Robert Barron, a longtime supporter who smiled indulgently at a White House Easter gathering when Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, favorably compared the president to Jesus, likewise condemned Trump’s outburst as “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful,” adding, “It is the Pope’s prerogative to articulate Catholic doctrine and the principles that govern the moral life.”

Pope Leo, for his part, responded to Trump’s tirade with composure. He told reporters aboard the papal plane yesterday that he does not fear the Trump administration and will not “shy away from announcing the message of the Gospel,” then invited all people to look “for ways to avoid war any time that’s possible.” He added that speaking out about the message of the Gospel “is what the Church works for.” This, he implied, is a battle that Trump won’t win.

Trump, accustomed to playing the bully to forge deals, is perhaps discovering that his tactics make little sense against a power that has little need for currying favor. The Vatican is a 2,000-year-old global institution with a divine remit. The 250-year-old United States is still only a footnote, and this president’s term is barely a thought.

The Guitar Sounds New Again

2026-04-14T14:59:15-04:00

Every now and then, music gets a guitar hero—a player who makes the instrument sound like something other than itself. Jeff Beck transformed it into something like the human voice singing; Jimi Hendrix, a psychedelic swirl. Fans are always looking for the next player who will make the same six-string instrument sound new again. And now Mk.gee has hit the scene.

A 29-year-old from New Jersey whose real name is Michael Gordon, Mk.gee released his debut album, Two Star & the Dream Police, in 2024. On it, his guitar sounds at various points like an orchestra, a snarling animal, a wildfire, a person shouting, and a radio playing at the bottom of the ocean. Critics declared Mk.gee a guitar hero; he played on a Bon Iver album and worked on two Justin Bieber records. This past weekend, he performed with Bieber at Coachella. Listen long enough, and you’ll realize that Mk.gee’s grungy extraterrestrial sound is everywhere.

The quest to achieve the “Mk.gee tone” spawned a series of “How Does He Make His Guitar Sound Like That?” YouTube videos; musicians compared notes on Discord servers and Reddit threads. They also did what they’ve always done—gone to concerts and looked at the stage floor to see what gear the other guy’s got—and eventually, someone posted a photo of Mk.gee’s stage setup. There on the ground, surrounded by cables, was a large black box adorned with knobs and sliders and, in a cheesy futuristic font straight out of a ’90s bowling alley, the name: VG-8.

That Reddit post was probably the most fame the Roland VG-8 (short for virtual guitar) had gotten since the ’90s. Released in 1995, the VG-8 was designed to be a toolbox filled with essentially every existing guitar sound, Chris Bristol, the former chair and CEO of Roland U.S., told me. Players could make their guitar sound like a different model, and electronically switch amplifiers, microphones, and even the acoustic environment. Push some buttons, and the guitar might sound like an Eric Clapton–style Fender Stratocaster played in a small club; push some others, and get a Jimi Hendrix–esque fuzz distortion in a stadium. The VG-8 also comes with dozens of synthy sounds and guitar effects—which, if Reddit and my ears are correct, are a big part of Mk.gee’s tone.

They were for Joni Mitchell’s too. My father, Fred Walecki, owned a musical-instrument shop, Westwood Music, where Mitchell was a customer, and he procured a VG-8 for her in 1995, when she told him that she was going to quit music. Her songbook uses more than 50 tunings, and she was tired of constantly retuning dozens of guitars on tour. Dad got her a VG-8 because with it, she could keep her guitar in standard tuning and let the device produce her more unusual ones. Because of the device, she kept touring, and the sounds of the VG-8 itself brought to her music “a freshness and distinctiveness that’s almost orchestral, it’s so rich,” she told a Billboard reporter at the time. “I wanted to blow chords up in size the way Georgia O’Keeffe blew up the flowers in her paintings, and now that’s possible.”

[Read: My father, guitar guru to the rock gods]

Other musicians followed: Reeves Gabrels used the VG-8 extensively in his work with David Bowie; Sting wrote most of his 1998 album, Brand New Day, on it. He told Revolver magazine that the device “gave me a shot in the arm about being creative on guitar.” But the VG-8 retailed for about $3,000, and “because of the price, it was a very elitist, expensive technological product,” Paul Youngblood, the former president of Roland’s U.S. BOSS division who helped develop the VG-8, told me. It also came with a 118-page document closer to a textbook than a user manual. A few influential musicians loved it for a while; then, for about 30 years, VG-8s collected dust.

Now they’re making a comeback. VG-8s were selling only occasionally, and for $200 or so, before Mk.gee released Two Star & the Dream Police, according to data provided to me by the music-gear marketplace Reverb. In the months following his debut, demand for the VG-8 rose—and so did its prices, reaching $1,200 in early 2025. Kevin Murrell, a musician who performs under the name kevm, has seen them for $2,000 and sometimes $3,000. (Accounting for inflation, that’s still roughly half the price it was in 1995.) The competition for VG-8s is steep enough that Murrell set up alerts on his phone for new listings—“Pray for me yall,” he wrote on the VG-8 channel of a Mk.gee Discord server. A caption on a Mk.gee-fan Instagram account reads, “Men want one thing and it’s a vg8.”

The VG-8’s appeal is as much about what it can’t do as what it can. Music technology in 1995 “wasn’t anywhere near what it is today,” Youngblood said. Play too hard or too loud, and the VG-8 will spit out something choppy and explosive; even though the device was advanced for the time, it still “had a lo-fi kind of sound to it.” The noise that the VG-8 makes, simply because it’s old, has become a genre in itself thanks to Mk.gee. The guitar track on Lorde’s 2025 song “Shapeshifter” sounds more like a gritty string quartet than it does a guitar—that’s Mk.gee’s touring band member Andrew Aged on the VG-8. (Mk.gee declined to comment for this article.)

Mk.gee himself plays a Fender Jaguar, which had a similar resurgence in the ’90s among players in the grunge scene, because “you could find one at a pawn shop for dirt cheap,” Cyril Nigg, the senior director of analytics at Reverb, told me. Gear revivals are part of the life cycle of music: A soon-to-be-famous player comes across forgotten equipment “and picks it up because it’s cool and inexpensive, and it ends up having a huge influence on their sound and then the culture at large,” Nigg said. In one way, though, the VG-8’s current popularity is a slightly newer phenomenon. Vintage-gear crazes are usually around analog devices, as a kind of rebellion against digitization and technology, Steve Waksman, a rock musicologist at the University of Huddersfield, told me. But the VG-8’s recent rise represents “nostalgia for a time when digital was still new.” Music sounds so digitized now that even just an earlier digital device feels like it has more character.

Roland recently came out with the VG-800, a modernized version of the VG-8. Marcus Hidalgo, a guitar player in Nashville who performs under the name toast, told me he’ll take it on tour because it’s more portable. The newer model, though, is a little too clean, a little too digital. When he saw a VG-8 for sale on Facebook Marketplace in Tampa, Florida, he texted his friend in Orlando, “Dude, I will give you all the gas money, I will give you lunch, whatever you need, if you just drive to Tampa for me and pick up this random old 90s unit from this random guy.” He prefers the VG-8 and the “weird noises” it makes. “I feel like I just started to learn how to play the guitar again,” he said. Like any tool, the VG-8 is only as good as the musician using it, but it holds the promise that there are still new sounds out there to find—even if they’re in a device from 1995.

SpaceX Is Basically a Huge Meme Stock

2026-04-14T14:19:00-04:00

Elon Musk likes to do everything on a grand scale. When he takes SpaceX public in the coming months, it will likely be the biggest initial public offering in history. Although SpaceX’s recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing for the IPO was confidential, indications are that the conglomerate is looking for a valuation of $2 trillion. That would instantly make it the sixth-most-valuable U.S. company. By conventional standards, SpaceX isn’t worth anything close to $2 trillion. The company is in fact relatively small and losing money. Yet there is little doubt that Musk will get the valuation he wants. He is one of the finest corporate dream weavers we’ve ever seen, and he has a dedicated following of fanboy investors who will happily buy whatever he’s selling.

SpaceX has a collection of interesting businesses—its rocket business was responsible for more than 80 percent of all commercial rocket launches in the United States last year, its healthily profitable Starlink division provides high-speed satellite-internet service to more than 9 million subscribers, and after a merger in February, the company owns xAI, Musk’s artificial-intelligence firm, which owns X, formerly Twitter. But all of this adds up to what is still a modestly sized company: SpaceX’s annual revenue last year was less than $20 billion, and it lost nearly $5 billion, according to a new report from The Information, mostly because of xAI’s huge capital costs. At a $2 trillion valuation, then, SpaceX would be trading at more than 100 times its annual sales. By contrast, other trillion-dollar companies in the market have price-to-sales ratios of 21 (Nvidia), 10 (Alphabet), and nine (Apple) while also being enormously profitable. In other words, SpaceX will be, by a large margin, the most expensive big stock in the market.

[Ross Andersen: Why doesn’t anybody realize we’re going back to the moon?]

This is not how IPOs usually work. Historically, companies have gone public when they’re younger and growing very fast, and their resulting market capitalizations are relatively small. That’s changed some of late—companies are staying private longer, leading to a rise in the number of what are sometimes called mega-IPOs: Facebook, Airbnb, Snap, and Uber have all gone public at hefty valuations. But we’ve never seen anything like what SpaceX is trying to do.

So why is everyone so sure that Musk will be able to pull off this magic trick? In part because that is basically what he’s been doing with Tesla for years. Tesla is one of the world’s 10 most valuable companies today, despite earning less than $4 billion last year. (Alphabet, by way of comparison, earned $132 billion.) Instead of making more money year over year, which would seem to be what an investor would want, Tesla has been making less; its price-to-earnings ratio is now above 300, up from about 35 in December 2022. But the company is still worth well over $1 trillion, because investors believe in Musk’s vision of Tesla’s future, which includes tens of millions of electric vehicles sold annually, millions of self-driving robotaxis, and billions of Optimus robots in homes across the world. Tesla shareholders are essentially indifferent to the company’s current costs and benefits. Their eyes are entirely on what Musk is saying Tesla will become.

Musk is plainly assuming that SpaceX shareholders will feel the same way. Shares in hot IPOs are typically doled out mainly to big institutional investors such as banks and mutual funds, but SpaceX reportedly may allocate as much as 30 percent of the IPO shares to retail investors (i.e., fanboys). Individual investors are usually more volatile than institutions, not less, but when those individuals are true believers, they’re more likely to hold on to shares than flip them.

Such retail investors, Musk trusts, will also not be doing a rigorous discounted cash-flow analysis of SpaceX’s prospects. Instead, they’ll be betting on him and his wild visions of the future, which include, most notably, a plan for SpaceX to launch and run up to 1 million AI data centers in space, beaming the data back to Earth. Not one such data center exists yet, and even if Musk can solve the massive technical and cost hurdles involved, putting up 1 million of them would cost trillions of dollars. But the whole premise of the SpaceX IPO is that those are mere details—in the end, Musk will find a way to make it happen.

[Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong: Elon Musk cannot get away with this]

And maybe he will. SpaceX’s rocket-launch and satellite-internet businesses are enormously profitable near-monopolies. The problem is that in taking SpaceX public at such a hefty valuation, Musk is setting himself an almost impossible task. All of the good news the company could possibly deliver for years to come will already be incorporated into the stock price, making it unlikely that Musk could ever give investors the kind of return he’s delivered in the past. Tesla’s stock, for instance, is up roughly 31,000 percent since it went public, in 2010; a similar rise for SpaceX would put its market cap at more than $600 trillion. Let’s just say that’s not going to happen. (Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, has a market cap of $4.6 trillion.) The track record of other recent mega-IPOs also instills little confidence. Snap, Uber, and Airbnb have all underperformed the S&P 500 since going public.

That doesn’t mean you should bet against Musk getting that $2 trillion valuation. He has an enormously powerful reality-distortion field, along with millions of true believers. But if, as Saint Paul wrote, faith is the “evidence of things not seen,” the SpaceX IPO will be the biggest act of faith in investing history.

Trump’s Latest Meltdown

2026-04-14T13:16:47-04:00

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On many recent nights, Donald Trump has been posting obsessively on his Truth Social site into the wee hours. The president, of course, has never been one for a solid night’s sleep—or restrained and temperate commentary on social media—but his emotional state seems to be fraying: This weekend, he attacked Pope Leo XIV, presented himself as Jesus Christ, and then jabbed at his phone until dawn.

Judging from those posts, the commander in chief is in distress. No one can say for sure what is causing the president’s bizarre behavior. Perhaps Trump’s narcissistic insistence that he is always successful in everything he undertakes is feeling the sting and strain of multiple public failures, including the collapse of his campaign to dislodge the Iranian regime, plummeting approval ratings, the decline of the U.S. economy, and, on Sunday, the crushing defeat of one of his favorite fellow authoritarians, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

But whatever is driving this decline in Trump’s self-control, Americans must not shrug off the president’s latest implosion. They should recover their ability to be outraged; more to the point, they must demand that their elected representatives ask questions about the course of the war and whether Trump still has the capacity to fulfill his constitutional duty as commander in chief. Too much is at risk to dismiss his outbursts as just another idiosyncrasy: U.S. forces have been at war for almost six weeks, and China is reportedly helping Iran rearm. Even if all other problems, including the economy, were holding steady—and they are not—America cannot keep ignoring the dysfunction of the commander in chief, the sole steward of the codes to a massive nuclear arsenal.

[David A. Graham: The parable of the president]

Trump has always gotten lost in his own public statements, splashing about like a poor swimmer trying to reach the shore of a fast-moving river. But the president is now flailing in blacker and deeper waters. Genocidal threats against the the Iranians, with whom America is at war, are bad enough, but his defenders will excuse them as part of the Trumpian bulldozer approach to international negotiation; aiming long screeds at the pope, as if he, too, is an enemy of the United States, is not only unhinged but entirely pointless. Trump’s fusillade against the first American pope was not only politically incomprehensible—20 percent of Americans are Catholics, and most of them voted for Trump—but it was yet more evidence that the president is sinking into rage and confusion.

Why was Trump angry with Pope Leo? For the same reason that Trump ever gets mad at anyone: The Holy Father dared to criticize him. Last week, the president of the United States posted an expletive-filled threat—on Easter Sunday, no less—to destroy the ancient civilization of Iran. His supporters wrote this off as a clever gambit to bring an end to the war (which it has not). Leo called the threat “unacceptable,” blasted the “delusion of omnipotence” that led to the war, and said: “Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!”

Of course, Trump wasn’t going to take that kind of talk from some former Chicago science teacher just because the guy is now the Bishop of Rome. So a few minutes after nine on Sunday night, Trump posted a salvo of more than 300 words on Truth Social. According to the White House’s official schedule, he had just landed at Joint Base Andrews after his trip to Miami, and was likely posting from the plane. His post was, in every way, bonkers. The president accused the pope of being “Weak on Crime” and “Weak on Nuclear Weapons.” He said that Leo “wasn’t on any list to be Pope” and that he likes Leo’s brother Louis much better because “Louis is all MAGA.”

And so it went, sentence after sentence of boorishness and whiny self-regard. Leo was only chosen, you see, to deal with Trump: If not for the 47th president, “Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” The president is not a Catholic (and neither am I), but he claims to be a Christian, and an ordinary follower of Christ might pause a moment before concluding that Trump, personally, motivated the Holy Spirit to guide Rome’s cardinals toward a particular successor to Saint Peter.

But Trump wasn’t finished. He had recommendations for the pontiff about how to be a better Vicar of Christ, saying he “should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.” Again, Trump is not a Catholic—he has referred to Communion as a “little wine” with some “little crackers”—and his track record both as a president and a person is replete with the seven deadly sins (and probably a few more that haven’t made the list yet). He is also now officially the most unpopular modern president ever, so the pope might understandably pass on accepting either his secular or spiritual advice.

This one screed against the leader of a billion and a half Catholics was worrisome enough, but for Trump, it was just the beginning of a long night. Only 45 minutes after flaming the pope, Trump—now back at the White House—posted an AI-generated image of himself as (apparently) Jesus Christ, healing a sick man while soldiers and nurses and other worshipful white people gaze in awe and military jets fly overhead. You have to see the image to really grasp its weirdness, and to take in how offensive, even heretical, it might be to Christians of any mainstream denomination. (Trump has since taken that post down, claiming that he thought it depicted him as wearing a doctor’s outfit—a denial that is not only laughable, but is also hardly reassuring about his cognitive health. “I do make people better,” he said yesterday, “and make people a lot better.”)

Five minutes after this sacrilegious nonsense, Trump posted a mock-up of a Trump Tower on the moon. (Sure, why not.)

Twenty minutes after that, at 10:10 p.m., Trump shared a silly meme about how Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden all look old after so many years in office, unlike himself. Twelve minutes later, he posted a clip from Newsmax’s Rob Carson Show. Twenty minutes later, he posted yet another Newsmax clip from the same show.

Relative calm then overtook Trump’s phone until 12:43 a.m., when he announced that the U.S. Navy would be blockading Iranian ports in the morning—as if it were just another stray factoid to share in his news feed.

Then, a bit more than two hours later—at 2:35 a.m.—he posted a link to a right-wing news site that approved of his Iran actions. At almost the same time, he posted another news story from the site about the Biden family and Ukraine. Two minutes later, he posted an article about Eric Swalwell leaving the California governor’s race. A few minutes later, he posted the same Biden story, again.

[Ali Breland: Iran out-trolled the troller in chief]

Within another minute, Trump posted a link about an appeals court ruling that he could keep building his beloved ballroom until April 17. Finally, after a brief pause, he wrapped things up by posting a laudatory article from the New York Post—at 4:10 a.m., not long before dawn.

This is not the behavior of a stable, healthy leader. Pope Leo, for his part, said he has “no fear” of the administration and will continue to preach the messages of the Gospel. The rest of us, however, should be very worried about a commander in chief who is trying to govern the country between social-media binges, who attacks religious leaders in narcissistic frenzy, and who imagines himself as a deity. If an elderly parent did such things, most people would be concerned. The president doing such things is far more alarming.

The American people must not look away, as they have done so often in the past. They must pay attention to the president’s deterioration, and insist that the House and Senate start acting like functioning branches of the government by asking the White House to explain what is happening, without insults or evasions, before the eyes of the country and the world.

What Does Lena Dunham Want to Tell Us?

2026-04-14T11:51:00-04:00

Recently, idly researching, I happened upon a Vanity Fair video from about a decade ago in which a 29-year-old Lena Dunham, wearing a shiny olive blazer with her cropped hair swept into a quiff, speculates what the future will bring. “In 2025, I think that feminism is no longer a dirty word,” she says confidently. “I think that we’re probably on our second female president? If our president’s not female, they’re definitely down with calling themselves a feminist because they recognize it’s the sexy thing to do and it’s gonna get them laid. Our first female president’s gonna be Hillary Clinton, unless there’s a real last-minute dash by Viola Davis.”

It might be enough to make you weep: the blithe optimism, the cutesy cheek, the BuzzFeed-esque title (“Lena Dunham: 8 Thoughts on Feminism”), the corporate–meets–Hot Topic styling, the ease with which Dunham proclaims that things will only get better. Were we ever so young?

When the video was published, Dunham’s precocious HBO show, Girls, was heading into its penultimate season, its creator having long since become an avatar for bratty, clumsy Millennial feminism in a way that obscured her talent. Her second memoir, Famesick, which is out this week, is a fascinating shift from her first, Not That Kind of Girl, which was published in 2014 and drew scorn from every imaginable direction: critics, who argued that the book failed to live up to its reported $3.5 million advance; Dunham’s feminist peers (“this vein of narcissism—every bit of the world existing only to make you feel some kind of way—would be unpleasant at any age and any gender,” a mixed Jezebel review argued); and, most cruelly, right-wing writers, who seized on confessions Dunham had made about her curiosity regarding her baby sibling to argue in the worst possible faith that she was a child molester. The internet of the 2010s was a shooting range for prominent and imperfect women, and Dunham was an impossibly popular target.

Why? Because she simply cannot contain herself. She’s unbridled id, pouring herself all over the page, the screen, the extended Instagram caption. “I want to tell my stories, and more than that, I have to in order to stay sane,” she wrote in the introduction to Not That Kind of Girl. I know more about her uterus, at this point in time, than I do my own. She’s unabashed about her appetites, her desires, her cravings. (Food is an underexplored feature in the first few episodes of Girls; never forget that Hannah Horvath’s erstwhile memoir in Season 1 is titled Midnight Snack.) Feminists have always abraded and enraged people, other feminists chief among them, and Dunham was an obvious stand-in during the 2010s for a confrontational frankness and joyful arrested development that many people found infuriating. Her public profile superseded her art, which is a shame, because her art can be sublime.

Rewatching Girls, as many people have been doing, is clarifying: Dunham’s show, which debuted when she was 25 years old, is sharp, profound, and acutely funny, confessionally tender about the state of 21st-century young adulthood. She has an extraordinary gift for observation, noting the specificity of her surroundings and drawing out the absurdity. She’s the native child of a scene that often comes close to parodying itself, and yet Dunham does it better than anyone else. (See Hannah in Girls, observing the shaggy, guitar-toting Desi: “He looks like someone in, like, the Pacific Northwest knit a man.”) Her goal as a writer, she noted in 2014, was to obliterate “the expectation that my femininity, my body, or my work should conform to any set of rules, any aesthetic other than my own.” More than a decade later, having endured a kind of mass apoplexy and even outright hate as a result, Dunham is now trying to share with us what that endurance cost.

“I’ve spent much of the last ten years sick,” she writes in the introduction to Famesick, which is not, she now knows, “a truth that anyone wants to hear.” (She’s referring to her diagnoses of endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and fibromyalgia, and her experiences with chronic pain.) She’s also “spent the last ten years famous,” which even fewer people have been able to sympathize with. The rough thesis of Famesick, as the title implies, is that these two dominant conditions of her life have come hand in hand, equally toxic and equally debilitating. Once again, she seems entirely propelled by an impulse she can’t quite control; she describes it herself as “an unrelenting drive toward self-expression.” I would argue, though, that Dunham has actually learned from her garrulous and unfiltered excesses—she’s got stories to tell in Famesick that blow the roof off, but she’s wielding them with precision this time around.

God bless a memoir that drops names—the more bold-faced and braggadocious the better. (Cher by Cher is beneficent on this front, with its nods to David Geffen and his self-actualization workshops and Salvador Dalí’s pet ocelot, Babou.) Famesick begins with Dunham on summer break from Oberlin College in the latter half of the 2000s, casting her family in a short film that she debuts at the Slamdance Film Festival to a room of about 10 people. (The screening that follows is a much more impressive title featuring puppets that just happens to have been directed by Josh and Benny Safdie.) Dunham graduates, and noodles around with a web series while sharing office space with Greta Gerwig.

She eventually writes a feature—2010’s Tiny Furniture—that’s bullied into existence by Dunham’s mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, who rolls up her sleeves and calls friends for investment. (“It was this dogged belief, this clearing of the path, that has made every aspect of my life possible,” Dunham writes, and while she’s long been skewered for her “privilege”—the term nepo baby did not exist prior to the 2020s—you get the sense that she’s benefited even more from her mother’s sheer force of character than from inherited connections.)

Tiny Furniture, much like the HBO show that succeeded it, was a loosely autobiographical account of a liberal-arts graduate floundering in sexual abjection and undefined creative ambition. It starred Dunham, her mother, and her sibling, and was filmed in her parents’ Tribeca apartment. Entire scenes, Dunham notes, were taken directly from a sadistic relationship she’d been having with a man whom she says gagged her with her own pantyhose, verbally abused her, and then watched cheerfully while verbatim chunks of his own obscene dialogue were brought to the big screen. (“People just like to feel seen,” Dunham shrugs.) Tiny Furniture won the Grand Jury Award at South by Southwest, and Dunham—thanks in part to a prescient early profile by the New York Times’ David Carr, became a hot commodity at 23. In a meeting with HBO, she pitched a series that would be a deglamorized version of Sex and the City, set in the interim phase where, as she told executives, “we’re having sex fueled by the availability of porn, and we’re feminists who don’t know how to live our politics. I want to see my friends on TV.” HBO offered her a blind pilot deal, and the rest is history.

[Read: Romance on-screen has never been colder. Maybe that’s just truthful.]

For everything that was written about Girls across its six seasons—and there was a lot—nothing has offered the access and insight that Dunham provides in Famesick. For example: She cast the show in six weeks, and auditioned actors including Elisabeth Olsen, Cristin Milioti, Dakota Johnson, and Amy Schumer. The suggestion to employ the straight-edged Allison Williams as Marnie came from the show’s godfather/producer Judd Apatow, who thought her normalness would gel well with Dunham and Jemima Kirke’s bohemian quirk. As for Apatow, he struck Dunham less as the Hollywood fixture he was than as “Howie, the Long Island exterminator my mother’s cousin Eileen was briefly married to, and to whom my father referred as ‘the insect assassin.’”

Knowing that Dunham would need a supervisor to help school her in the structure of television writing, HBO set up a meeting with Jenni Konner, who would become Dunham’s best friend and longtime collaborator. Famesick also ultimately paints her as its biggest villain, suggesting that she milked Dunham’s talent for profit and tossed her aside once her illnesses rendered her unserviceable. (In 2018, Dunham and Konner announced that they were pursuing individual projects, saying in a joint statement, “We have had one of the most significant relationships together in our adult lives and we respect each other’s choices.”)

There’s also Adam. Introduced as Hannah’s boundary-less hookup, inspired by Dunham’s unpleasant ex, but defined by the actor who eventually played him, Adam is one of the true gifts of Girls, extravagantly strange and inexplicably charismatic. Dunham’s revelations about Adam Driver, “all ears and nose, gangly and pigeon-toed,” whom she cast after an audition in which he bit her shoulder and then left without farewell or explanation, will likely dominate much of the discussion of Famesick. As brilliant an actor as Driver was (and is, and a ferociously private person to boot, in a way that charges these reminiscences with something like betrayal), Dunham writes that he ploughed through boundaries in search of his character, turning his and Dunham’s first choreographed sex scene into “something intimate, confusing, and primal.” He had a tendency, she writes, to spit and throw chairs when he was angry. The pair’s closeness almost crossed lines one night, as he arrived at her apartment after calling her to say, by her recollection, “I’m warning you, if I come up, I’m not leaving this time.” (Showing uncharacteristic instincts for self-preservation, Dunham refused to let him in, knowing that “however it went, my heart—bruised but improbably not yet broken—would crack.”)

What Dunham shares during Parts 1 and 2 of the book is the best possible combination of weighty and esoteric. Williams bought Dunham a tank top that said ALWAYS AND FOREVS, DOWN FOR WHATEVS. Zosia Mamet, who played Shoshanna, and Kirke, who played Jessa, moved in together, but their relationship fell apart when “Zosia began to casually date someone Jemima had claimed dibs on, despite the fact that she was married with a child.” Dunham started dating the musician and producer Jack Antonoff, who was as weird and “cozy” and neurotic as she was. The show became a very palpable hit, and almost immediately drew accusations that it was too white, too privileged, too popular.

As Dunham’s career took off, her health started declining: She suffered a bout of acute colitis a few weeks before Girls started filming, then excruciating pain she eventually realized was from endometriosis; her body gave her other “noisy signals” that the stress she was internalizing might not be sustainable. (Years later, after getting an email from a stranger who’d read about her issues, Dunham would be diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder that can cause joint issues and chronic pain.) Antonoff began working with someone Dunham identifies only as a teenage pop star, who refers to Dunham as “Aunt Lena” (she’s using a walker, following a surgery for her endometriosis), and whose closeness with Antonoff becomes fodder for a very viral PowerPoin t analyzing signs of their supposed affair. (Yes, Dunham writes, she has seen it.)

It’s interesting to think about who Dunham names in this book and who she doesn’t; who is mentioned lovingly in the acknowledgments (“TayTay,” for “the music that makes the whole world feel seen”) but kept otherwise private; who’s quite ruthlessly excavated for copy and who’s only lightly alluded to. In her first book, Dunham’s intimate, highly confessional style spoke directly to the reader—she was sharing all of this with us, she explained, because “if I could take what I learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine was worthwhile.” For all the book’s erratic and random inclusions—Dunham’s diet journals and fantasy revenge emails among them—that sense of connection justified the oversharing.

The revelations in Famesick feel much more loaded, as though Dunham is settling scores, but also justifying herself. She seems to really want to communicate that she has suffered, both from extreme chronic pain and at the hands of people she trusted. She is a confessedly calculated narrator. A version of the book shared with me by the publisher a couple of weeks ago features, perhaps by accident, the same scene twice—Dunham posing for the photographer Annie Leibovitz on the Brooklyn Bridge while a man jumps to his death behind her—but offers two different versions of how the crew reacted, that they “stopped in their tracks and gasped” and that they “just carried on, moving lights, holding umbrellas over Annie,” as though she’s experimenting with which version will land better for the reader. (In the published version, the bridge scene appears only once.) She cites something she says Bruce Springsteen once told her: “You don’t owe it to people to be honest about every little thing. That doesn’t mean you lie—it just means you can have secrets. You only owe it to them to show ’em how your mind works.”

This is, I’d argue—with apologies to the Boss—bad advice for a memoirist. We know how Dunham’s mind works. We know her sharp eye, her self-deprecation, her skill with bathos. We know that the line between her life and her art, insomuch as a line exists, is porous to the point of chicken wire. What I longed for more of, in Famesick, was what the writer Leslie Jamison has called “the infinitude of any given life as a site of reckoning and truth.” The paradox of Famesick seems to be that the more famous you become, the less you have to defend turning yourself into a subject. And so largely missing from the book is a quality I’ve always loved about Dunham’s work, across Tiny Furniture and Girls and the books and the essays: her impulse to make broader meaning out of her experiences. “I am already in mourning, but I am not in doubt,” she wrote in an essay for Vogue, about the pain so life-altering that it led her to have an elective hysterectomy in her early 30s, evoking an ocean of nuance about choice and dreams and physical limits.

[Read: The wistful, sharp return of ]Girls

I’m not quite sure what the meaning of Famesick is, beyond getting certain things on the historical record. It is, in parts, riveting. Dunham is still among our funniest living writers. (Her mother’s diminutive psychic, Dunham notes in Famesick, once wrote a book called Small Mediums at Large; Dunham’s uterus, after its removal, is characterized as “the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws.”) She is generous to many of her collaborators, and to her father, who emerges in the book as a beautiful soul and a wag for all time. (“Since you were five,” he tells Dunham, “you’ve been walking around like you killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.”)

Yet as the second half of the book spins out stories of very dubious new boyfriends and Dunham’s growing reliance on painkillers, something crucial seems to be absent. It feels unfair to call a memoir self-indulgent, but this one can be, at least for an artist with such talent—Famesick has a tendency in later chapters to read more like glib stenography than rigorous self-interrogation. And for someone who was once considered an era-defining feminist voice, Dunham writes nothing substantive about Donald Trump’s election and nothing at all about the overturning of Roe or the significance of #MeToo. She spends several pages explaining the context behind one of her most widely criticized acts, a statement she and Konner issued in 2017 defending the Girls writer Murray Miller from an allegation that he had sexually assaulted the actor Aurora Perrineau. (Miller denied the accusation.) Dunham had only just been released from the hospital at the time, she writes, was heavily medicated, and has no memory of drafting anything, let alone “a careless, blithe, and damaging” note that remains the one thing about which she still feels “genuine shame.”

All of which perhaps explains why she chooses her targets and her subjects so carefully in Famesick. When you’ve been a lightning rod for almost all of your public life, maybe you learn that having strong opinions about subjects outside of oneself offers minimal gain, that very little you could say might make a difference, anyway. And that the best you can do is just keep trying, as Dunham has, to find ways “to do this job I love.” Her persistence, in that sense, is the best possible rejoinder to her haters—regardless of circumstance and to her credit, Dunham will always have her word.

The Strange Origin of AI’s ‘Reasoning’ Abilities

2026-04-14T11:38:00-04:00

In July 2020, 4chan’s video-game discussion board looked much like the rest of the notorious online forum. There were elaborate, libidinal fantasies involving “whores” and “dragon cum,” and comments on how long a gamer had to wait “before my dick can get up for another beating,” as one put it.

And yet, as the gamers discussed such things, they were also making a discovery of significance to the AI industry. Some of them were playing AI Dungeon, a new text-based role-playing game that was essentially an AI version of Dungeons & Dragons. In endlessly generated fantasy-world scenarios, players described actions like “pick up the sword” or “tell the troll to go away,” and the computer responded with the action that followed.

In addition to asking the game’s characters to engage in various sex acts (naturally), the 4chan gamers also asked them to do math problems. That sounds strange, of course, but AI Dungeon was powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3, and the gamers knew that they were among the first people to probe the capabilities of this new large language model. This was more than two years before the release of ChatGPT, and the model was famously bad at math. It frequently failed at simple arithmetic. But when they asked a character in the game to do a math problem and provide a step-by-step explanation, one of them wrote, the LLM was “not only solving math problems but actually solves them in a way that fits the personality of the fucking character.”

The players had come upon a new feature—what’s known in AI today as “chain of thought.” Essentially, it means that the model explains the steps required to solve a problem, in addition to giving an answer. Asking the model for a chain of thought also seems to improve the accuracy of its answers to certain kinds of problems. The gamers on 4chan recognized the significance immediately, and posted examples on Twitter.

Recently, the tech industry has promoted chain of thought as a revolution in technology, and a reason to get excited about AI all over again. Researchers at Google claimed in a paper to be “the first” to elicit a “chain of thought” from a general-purpose LLM, more than a year after the 4chan gamers shared their findings. (This claim was removed from subsequent versions of the paper, which still did not acknowledge the gamers, though at least one other research paper has.) And in the past couple of years, companies have begun to claim that their chatbots are not just getting math problems right; they are actually thinking about them. OpenAI wrote in 2024 that its “o1” model “thinks before it answers,” and Google claimed that Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental was “capable of showing its thoughts.” Companies started referring to their models as “reasoning models,” ostensibly a new kind of product from an LLM.

Amid all this hype, the 4chan history is instructive. 4chan gamers, for all their brash language, have tended to speak in more levelheaded—and accurate—terms than the AI industry about how the models work. Last year, for example, Anthropic published a long and serious-looking article, “On the Biology of a Large Language Model.” Its visual presentation mimicked scientific publications, with sophisticated-looking diagrams and equations. But on every topic, the article described the operation of the LLM in terms of a human mind. It said the LLM “plans” its writing in advance, “generalizes” its knowledge, and can be “unfaithful” to its chain of thought (meaning, the article explains, the LLM is occasionally “bullshitting”).

Contrast this with a guide written in 2024 by people on 4chan, which begins with the heading, “Your bot is an illusion,” and proceeds with a clear, detailed description of how companies use an LLM to construct a chatbot that responds to questions and has a personality. It describes an LLM’s most important technical features and shows how the model’s outputs correspond to its various inputs. The guide is a useful reminder of the most basic truth about large language models: The only thing they can do is imitate their training data.

LLMs can output explanations of math because they were trained on explanations of math. Some of those explanations come from textbooks, but companies also train their so-called reasoning models on text that conveys the act of thinking. I dug into some open-source AI-training data sets and found hundreds of thousands of meandering solutions to math problems that included language such as “Wait, no. The question is,” “First, I should parse the input correctly,” and “Wait, but in cases where …” As far as I’ve seen, companies acquire this text either by paying workers to write it or generating it with other AI models. (Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.)

Models trained on such utterances are not actually reasoning; they are predicting what reasoning might look like. There isn’t even necessarily any connection between a model’s reasoning steps and its final answer. Researchers have shown that models can provide incorrect chain-of-thought text but still arrive at the correct result.

Some people have argued that if a computer can imitate human reason well enough to fool us every time, then how can we say it isn’t doing the real thing? Researchers at Apple have explored this question, and their findings are insightful. For example, they discovered that a model might answer a math word problem correctly, but then answer the same problem incorrectly after the wording was changed slightly. Specifically, they found that state-of-the-art reasoning models performed up to 65 percent worse when irrelevant information was added to a question, even when the wording of key facts was left unchanged. Apple researchers have also shown, in a paper titled “The Illusion of Thinking,” that although the reasoning models do better than standard LLMs on certain problems, they are also worse at others.

The reason the chain-of-thought trick does often work is fairly simple. The additional words in the chain of thought give the model more context, which guides its word-predicting process in a better direction, as Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas explained in a 2024 interview. This is analogous to the common advice about being specific when asking an LLM a question on any topic. The more details you give, the more you push the LLM toward the relevant words in its memory.

Some of the 4chan gamers appeared to understand this immediately. As one explained back in July 2020: “It makes sense since it is based on human language that you have to talk to it like one”—that is, like a human—“to get a proper response.”

In addition to the gamers, another AI enthusiast discovered the chain-of-thought trick at almost the exact same time. A computer-science student named Zach Robertson, who also came to GPT-3 through AI Dungeon, wrote a blog post in July 2020 about “how to amplify GPT3’s capabilities” by breaking math problems into multiple steps. That September he gave a presentation that showed how the steps could be “chained” together. Robertson, who is now a Ph.D. student in computer science at Stanford, told me on a video call that he was not aware of the 4chan gamers. In fact, he wasn’t even aware he could be considered a co-inventor of chain of thought. I’d seen his blog post cited in a research paper, but when I first mentioned it in an email, he was unsure what I was talking about. He’d removed the post from the internet a couple of years ago when migrating his blog to a new site. (He restored it after we spoke.)

I thought Robertson might be proud to learn he was a pioneer in an area of such enthusiasm within the AI industry. But he seemed only mildly tickled. Those early experiments with AI Dungeon were what got him interested in AI, he told me, but he’s since moved on to other topics. Chain of thought was a remarkable trick, but that’s also all it was.

The 10 Things the Bezoses Are Almost Certainly Grateful for Each Morning

2026-04-14T10:09:00-04:00

“On a typical day, the newlyweds wake up around 6 in their new, roughly $230 million compound on Indian Creek, an exclusive private island in Miami often called ‘Billionaire Bunker.’ They don’t touch their phones. Instead, they begin each day by listing 10 things they’re grateful for—and they can’t repeat what they named the day before.” — The New York Times

Monday, 6 a.m.

1. Money.

2. Our new, roughly $230 million compound on Indian Creek, an exclusive private island in Miami often called “Billionaire Bunker.”

3. Our stunning physical appearance, both natural and man-made.

4. Our close, continuing friendship with Leonardo DiCaprio, someone with whom we are able to discuss the travails of yacht ownership. A subject not everyone understands!

5. Jared Kushner. A friend close enough that he’s invited to our wedding!

6. How much less bad news there is to read anymore! Especially in that one paper—what’s it called?

7. The great view we had of Donald Trump’s inauguration, right on the stage and everything! Everyone should see J. D. Vance up close before they die.

8. Not having to worry that anyone we meet will tell us their honest opinion. There is a certain net worth above which you will never hear an honest opinion from anyone ever again, and we crossed that threshold $120 billion ago.

9. Family. Family, of course.

10. Access to the best air—the really good, fancy air.

Tuesday, 6 a.m.

1. Narwhals.

2. A thing I didn’t know about myself until I had this much money was how charming I was, how good all my ideas were, and how everything I had to say was interesting. And … I’m grateful for that.

3. ~~Money~~ We said “money” yesterday. Love.

4. The yacht, of course.

5. How much cake there is to eat in the world. More people should try cake.

6. That I haven’t had that awful dream in a long time. The one from which I wake up screaming.

7. Early access to the Melania documentary! Some things money can’t buy, but … that is not one of them.

8. The ability to leave the planet sometimes, if we want! For a girls’ trip, even!

9. Sydney Sweeney!

10. The things that money can’t buy, which it turns out money can buy, if you have enough money. Or is that “money” again?

Wednesday, 6 a.m.

1. Money

2. Our wonderful seats at the inauguration, and the little golden eggs they served there.

3. That I could pee in a bottle if I wanted, but I never have to.

4. My coffee mug that says Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again and my coffee mug that says Hunk.

5. Hors d’oeuvres!

6. Anna Wintour’s respect.

7. What’s the word for never having to go anywhere you don’t want to go or do anything you don’t want to do?

8. Never having to smell a subway again!

9. The knowledge that although now we are saving the narwhals, if one day we were suddenly to decide that we wanted to destroy the narwhals, we could do so just as easily, and no one would stop us.

10. That there’s so much beauty in the world. Especially the higher and farther away from it you get.

Thursday, 6 a.m.

1. In the dream everything smelled like burning hair, and I was flailing in dark water while missiles exploded overhead, and all I wanted was to protect my family, and I couldn’t, because the people who were in charge of everything couldn’t see me, couldn’t hear me, were so high up in their helicopters and so secure in their bunkers that they didn’t think my life had anything to do with them. I’m grateful for getting to wake up from that dream and lie next to you!

2. Our new $230 million compound on Billionaire Bunker!

3. Cake.

4. Helicopters!

5. The Met Gala!

6. All the bad news we don’t know about, and all the good news we do!

7. How thick the gate is at our compound!

8. How well trained our security officers are!

9. How nice everything is. Just nice, all the time.

10. Money! No. We said that yesterday.

The Atlantic’s May Cover: Caity Weaver Finds the Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

2026-04-14T08:15:33-04:00

“Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.”

In The Atlantic’s May cover story, staff writer Caity Weaver takes readers on a delightful and poignant journalistic quest––and takes no prisoners along the way––to reveal to America the truly perfect free restaurant loaf within its midst. This was a question that dogged Weaver on dinners out with her husband, enjoying what she considered at the time to be the best free bread: “It seemed incredible, but also possible, that this really could be the best free restaurant bread in America. What if it was? Even more dizzyingly, what if it wasn’t? What if—unfathomable—someone else was giving away an even better bread for free? The thought drove me crazy. I begged for the opportunity to investigate.”

Over the course of many months, Weaver pursued this mission: “How would I determine the best free restaurant bread in America? Simple: I would ask every single person I encountered, ‘What is the best free restaurant bread in America?’; travel to the most likely candidates; and try the bread myself.” She writes about the highs (ordering all 16 loaves offered as part of a $525 tasting meal at Joël Robuchon in the MGM Grand Las Vegas) and the accessible (her family’s eternal favorite, Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits). Weaver grouped those she asked into three categories: the truly happy in life who can immediately rattle off their favorite bread; those who can’t or won’t be bothered to think of a single free bread they’ve enjoyed; and those who feel too much pressure to answer the question. She writes: “I am astonished that only a minority of people can summon an answer quickly. My mental filing cabinet devoted to cataloging free restaurant breads is one of the largest and most scrupulously maintained in my neocortex; I’ve discarded the contents of other filing cabinets (‘Visuospatial Reasoning,’ ‘First Aid’) to make room for it. What occupies the free-bread space in others’ minds?”

Caity Weaver’s “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

Press contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com

The Eighth Deadly Sin

2026-04-14T08:00:00-04:00

Sometimes, staring brainlessly into my laptop in the trough of a weekday afternoon, experiencing myself as a kind of online shadow, a thing of fidgets, a half-being hollowed out by roaming spectral appetites—for destruction, for gratification, for the email that never comes—it occurs to me to ask: Now, which of the seven deadly sins is this ?

Anger’s in there somewhere, sure, a kind of generalized psychic road rage, but not enough of it to qualify. Same with envy, pride, gluttony, lust—just floating shards. Avarice? Nah. Of the seven, sloth probably comes closest, that enigmatic void state known to the early Christians as “acedia.” But not even acedia, bottomless as it is, can quite comprehend this plugged-in groundlessness, this ether-sweeping emptiness, this interstellar elongation of the spirit. Sin, the theologians tell us, is whatever separates us from God. Whatever blocks the beams of divine love. And at 3:23 p.m. in Caffè Nero, I am all but unreachable by heavenly radiation; I can feel it wavering, honey-colored, at the fringes of my soul. So have we done it at last—you, me, the kids? Have we invented an eighth deadly sin?

I thought initially that the title of Peter Jones’s Self-Help From the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living was an oxymoron. Self-help is our thing, after all, our exemplary piece of circular modernity, our little closed circuit—the distressed subject coming to its own aid. The medievals, more vertical in their thinking, would have counted on the down-rushing swoop of God’s grace.

But Jones, a medieval historian, shows us that the High and Later Middle Ages (1100 to 1500, roughly) were every bit as goofy as we are about human nature and behavior, and equally hooked on buzzwords, listicles (Catherine of Siena’s five different types of tears, Thomas Aquinas’s five varieties of gluttony), and junk science. To explain the inexplicable (that is, themselves), the medievals used the 12 signs of the zodiac, the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm—and the seven deadly sins. Jones takes the seven one by one, a chapter for each, arguing that this gnarly old taxonomy represents not only a timeless decoction of human wisdom but something of a moral map for our present wanderings. I think I agree with him, but let’s see.

It turns out that there were eight, at least in the beginning. Evagrius Ponticus was one of the world-abandoning superstar Desert Fathers of fourth-century Egypt. Influencer-like, he stood in freezing wells and subsisted on bread and oil, and after much torment and cogitation, he drew up a list of what he called “generic thoughts,” or routine invaders of the spirit: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, sloth, vainglory, and pride. Subsequent spiritual engineers made their tweaks to Evagrius’s system, but the decisive overhaul was performed 200 years later, by Pope Gregory the Great. He rolled sadness into sloth, vainglory into pride, added envy, and voilà: the seven deadly sins.

[From the November 2024 issue: Hillary Kelly on Oliver Burkeman’s unlikely approach to self-help]

Now the sins were characters. They could be personified, and artists went to town. An illustration for Guillaume de Deguileville’s 14th-century poem “The Pilgrimage of Human Life” depicts avarice as a woman whose arms have been cut off (she retains the stumps) and replaced with allegorical limbs—feathered claws for rapaciousness, hands holding begging bowls and scales for moneylending, and so on. And is her tongue hanging out? Is she drooling with money-lust? It looks like it. Giotto painted envy as a woman—yes, the medievals, like us, were misogynists—a slanderous monster with a snake squirming out of her mouth, turning back, and reentering her head at the eyes. Also, she has huge, swiveling, batlike ears. And her feet are on fire.

Ghastly as they are, these allegorical images don’t really touch us moderns, or not deeply. Much more disturbing and relatable, in Giotto’s case, are the sour-faced onlookers and eavesdroppers who lurk at the edges of his frescoes in the Arena Chapel, in Padua: the servant watching in disaffection as an angel tells Anne that she is going to give birth to the Virgin Mary; the scowling, black-veiled woman overhearing Anne tell her husband, Joachim, that she has conceived. To be one of these characters, Jones writes, is to be a “bitter witness.” We know these people. We are these people. Social media: a cloud of bitter witnesses! This is envy—invidia—as it lives inside us, shriveling our spirits and kindling our meannesses.

Because this is 2026 and everything’s got to be personal, Self-Help From the Middle Ages prefaces each chapter, each sin, with a reminiscence from the author’s time teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia. Hemmed in by the cold, under laboratory conditions as it were, Jones self-examines in the lurid light of the seven deadlies. His transgressions are meek—a bit of ogling at the hot springs (lust), a snippy comment in a faculty meeting (anger). He doesn’t trash the common room in an alcoholic blaze or crucify a colleague’s cat. But this is precisely the point: The sins are quotidian, undramatic, regular human business. You can do all seven without leaving your house. The trick is to recognize the sins, to “name” them (in a modern but very appropriate locution). They offer a kind of diagnostic prism, refracting the black, primordial beam of sin into lesser rays of the identifiably and manageably human. And once you know what you’re dealing with, you can summon its opposite. If pride is getting the better of you, engage humility; if gluttony, moderation; if envy, compassion; and so on.

Otherwise they’ll hold us, they’ll dominate us, these sins. While I was reading the chapter on anger, I experienced a surge in understanding as to the nature of sin itself. Sin is subtle, seductive, addictive, of course: The medical encyclopedia The Property of Things (circa 1240) describes anger very perceptively as a “wave of bliss.” (Oh, the white-hot elation of righteousness, carrying me away!) But it’s also rigid and carceral, a system of control. Jones gives us the 13th-century Catalonian doctor Arnaud de Vilanova, who, after limited success treating anger with the miracle drug theriac (made from viper’s flesh sweetened with honey, a distillation of lilies, and about 40 other ingredients), fell to pondering the character of the malady itself. As Jones writes, “Fury pulls the mind away from reason (ratio), Arnaud reflected, and losing yourself in anger is like letting a puppeteer take control of your brain as well as your limbs.”

A puppeteer controlling your brain? Heavy-metal fans know where this is going—straight to the primary text of compulsion and merciless soul-negation, Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”: “Master of puppets, I’m pulling your strings / Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams / Blinded by me, you can’t see a thing / Just call my name ’cause I’ll hear you scream.” This is where the personification of the seven deadlies comes in handy: You, you naughty person, you libertine, rage beast, sybarite, whatever, might think that you’re committing a sin. But it’s the sin, the master of puppets, that is committing you. Unless you can turn, look it in the face, and summon the right ally.

As for the eighth sin, the new one—having Wi-Fi—is there anything to be done about that? Naturally, excessive online-ness has its counter-impulses: the digital detoxes and the dopamine fasts, all in the fine old spirit of medieval asceticism. You can go online right now and learn about how to be offline. But to free ourselves from this one, to even have the beginnings of a program to free ourselves, I think we’re going to have to do the truly and terrifyingly medieval thing. We’re going to have to get on our knees and pray.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “The Eighth Deadly Sin.”

Don’t Just Replace Chavez—Rethink Monuments

2026-04-14T07:30:00-04:00

Almost every day, I drive along a street named after Cesar Chavez, past a mural of Cesar Chavez that shows the labor leader, who died in 1993, clutching the billowing flag of the United Farm Workers with one arm and a group of anonymous laborers with the other. For years, I’ve been struck by the work’s ardent theatricality: Chavez appears sturdy and powerful, whereas the figures look like they’ve fainted. In Los Angeles, where I live, Chavez is everywhere. Within a mile of that mural are two others. A multitude of municipal sites, both grandiose and mundane, bear his name. The transfer station downtown where I wait for the bus is named for Chavez. So is a city park in San Fernando, on the northern fringes of L.A., where a naturalistic bronze statue always looked as if it was about to break into a rally speech.

I now look on those tributes with horror and dismay. Late last month, The New York Times published an investigation that detailed harrowing allegations of sexual abuse by Chavez, including the grooming and assault of minors. Chavez’s longtime colleague Dolores Huerta alleged that he had raped her. The response has been swift: Statues, monuments, and murals of Chavez have been obscured or removed—including the bronze in San Fernando, which was wrapped up and carted away the day after the Times story ran. California lawmakers also scrapped a state holiday in his honor, replacing it with the more inclusive “Farmworkers Day.” For now, Chavez’s name still clings to libraries, schools, and streets. But this difficult process highlights all of the ways in which memorializations of the farmworker movement have missed the mark. The focus has frequently been on Chavez—at the exclusion of the many organizers and workers who helped make the UFW’s campaigns to raise working standards a success. No movement is built by one man alone.

The reassessment of Chavez coincides with a volatile debate over public memorials and the forms they take. We live in a reactionary moment: The Trump administration has resuscitated a monument to a Confederate general in Washington, D.C., and installed a statue of Christopher Columbus on the White House grounds, while generally promoting a vision that prizes the heroic and the classical. (Think: man on a plinth.)

But this is also a time when communities and designers are radically reimagining what a monument can be. In 2022, a project honoring the Navajo Nation dispensed with the usual statuary in favor of hiking trails woven around Dinétah, the territory that marks the traditional Navajo (Diné) homeland. “Some monuments are not entities that we as humans have to build,” the artist and curator Sháńdíín Brown wrote of the project, “but something that the creator has already gifted to us.” The removal—and possible replacement—of tributes to Chavez will be fraught; it will also open up possibilities.

No matter what happens next, Chavez’s vanishing profile leaves a gap that won’t be easily filled. A 2021 study published by Monument Lab, a nonprofit research-and-design studio, showed that among the top-50 historical figures most frequently honored with memorials in the United States, there is not a single U.S.-born Latino. The highly visible Chavez has therefore been an important symbol around which to rally. “He’s part of the iconography of the 1960s,” Eric Avila, a cultural historian who teaches at UCLA, told me. “Bobby Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X—there is this canon of people we study as symbols of different social movements and symbols of that time in American history. And for Mexican Americans, Chavez became that figure.” Chavez’s fall from grace feels especially shocking today, when policy makers are targeting immigrants, and violent ICE raids are a staple of social media. “It hurts to think about the victims,” Avila said. “It also hurts to think about this gaping absence in the iconography of a movement.”

[Read: The dethroning of Cesar Chavez]

As the memorials come down, some people have called for replacing images of Chavez with those of Huerta. Muralists in L.A. and Philadelphia have already done so on existing artwork, painting over the disgraced leader with depictions of his former colleague. Huerta has publicly stated that she doesn’t want streets and buildings named after her, and that memorials should instead focus on “UFW martyrs, organizers, farmworkers, and families who sacrificed everything to build something bigger than any one person.” Huerta deserves her flowers—she was an important coordinator of the nationwide boycotts that made the UFW effective. But she’s right. Now is the moment to reconceive such tributes entirely.

And that begins with asking the right questions. “It’s not just who is deserving of a monument, but how do we commemorate, and how do we reflect history to its fullest capacity?” Paul Farber, the director of Monument Lab, told me. “If you have a vision of power that is expansive, collective, from the ground up, you will see the need to make monuments not just to the singular figure, but to put that figure in the context of how they were elevated.”

AAron Ontiveroz / The Denver Post / Getty

The bust of Cesar Chavez after its removal from Cesar Chavez Park in Denver, Colorado last month.

Substituting one bronze for another does not necessarily achieve that. In fact, it might even perpetuate the elisions of the past. The 1965 Delano grape strike, for example—an event that helped spark the modern farmworker movement in California’s Central Valley—wasn’t led by Chavez and the UFW; it was organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, a union made up primarily of Filipino workers and led by the Filipino organizer Larry Itliong. Also crucial to the history of the movement was the work of Bert Corona, the founder of the activist group Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, which fought for the rights of undocumented workers—something the UFW initially resisted. (At one point, Chavez even launched an “Illegals Campaign” that encouraged union members to report “wetbacks” to immigration authorities.)

Organizers such as Corona and Itliong should certainly be remembered. (In 2024, a park in Delano was named for the latter activist, a belated recognition.) And communities will likely continue to erect tributes to such individuals, because personal histories are powerful tools for storytelling. But even those types of monuments can be designed in ways that incorporate other stories. The bronze statue of Chavez in San Fernando, for example, was accompanied by a mural that featured workers and other activists.

“Especially when we’re talking about labor and social movements,” Farber said, “how do you make room for more protagonists?” This question should be asked more broadly. Martin Luther King Jr. is the fourth-most-popular subject of monuments in the U.S., according to the Monument Lab audit; he is a potent symbol of the collective fight for Black civil rights. Yet in many places, he is depicted alone. King deserves to be honored for his work. But in focusing exclusively on him, the designers of those tributes have left out the other activists who made his gains a reality—including Bayard Rustin, who helped plan the 1963 March on Washington. A memorial based on the great-man theory of history is a tale only half told.

[Read: The real fight for the Smithsonian]

There are elegant ways to pay tribute to groups of people. Maya Lin’s groundbreaking Vietnam Veterans Memorial, unveiled in 1982—a minimalist, V-shaped black-granite wall cut into the land—sought to honor not an individual soldier or general but all of the war dead. (It’s powerful not just for what it does—listing names—but for what it is: a scar on the earth.) More recently, a pair of remarkable monuments to labor have taken like-minded approaches. Completed in 2020, the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, at the University of Virginia, consists of an austere granite circle, open on one end. Carved within are the names of those who were forced to work at the institution; for people whose name remains unknown, a small line cut into the granite creates a record of their existence. And at Bryn Mawr College, outside Philadelphia, a 2025 design by Nekisha Durrett transformed a campus courtyard into a site of remembrance. The work consists of looped footpaths with paving stones that bear the names of the Black people who once labored at the college. The paths echo underground servant tunnels to which those workers’ travels were often confined. At night, some of the stones are illuminated from within, creating a sparkling, lantern effect. There are also monuments that push at the boundaries of what a monument is: the Ireichō, which first went on view in 2022, is a book that contains the name of every person of Japanese ancestry incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II.

In 2012, President Obama traveled to Keene, California, to announce the creation of Cesar E. Chavez National Monument, which protects the bucolic 116-acre site in the Tehachapi Mountains where the UFW once maintained its headquarters. Known as La Paz, it is where Chavez is buried and his office preserved, complete with its original furnishings. It’s also—chillingly—where some of the sexual abuse is reported to have taken place. Less than a week after the Times published its exposé, two Republican senators, John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy, introduced a bill to close the park.

A better tactic would be to reimagine the monument to tell a more complete story about the farmworker movement—and about Chavez. “It’s a super complicated story, and the complexities have been glossed over,” Avila said. “It’s a good thing that we are reckoning now with the real history, which is not as pretty as we would like it to be. But that’s what history is.” In this case, the history is ongoing; farmworkers still face low pay and punishing working conditions aggravated by climate change, often laboring through toxic wildfires and extreme heat. The movement was—and is—much bigger than Chavez. It’s time the monuments caught up to that vision.

The Challenge the Artemis II Crew Gave the Rest of Us

2026-04-14T07:26:44-04:00

As a reporter covering NASA during the early 1980s, I quickly grew accustomed to close encounters with real-life space legends. All part of the job. But a chance sighting at the Kennedy Space Center one evening reminded me of the magic of leaving Earth.

I had just finished anchoring a broadcast of the space shuttle’s first nighttime launch along with Gene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17 and the last man to leave his footprints on the moon. Gene regularly joined me to add his expertise and eloquence to our coverage. As we left the booth, he stopped, pointed skyward, and said, “Lynn, you see that spot there, the left eye of the man in the moon?” I looked up and nodded. Gene continued: “That’s where I landed.”

Whoa. That face was a real place. The man next to me had stood there. I couldn’t stop staring.

Last week, the goosebumps returned. At a moment that perfectly dovetailed with many Americans’ yearning for a personal mental-health day (just one?), Artemis II, the first moon-bound mission with humans since 1972, delivered an unusually emotional escape. The magic, this time, wasn’t just the smooth launch and the “perfect, bullseye splashdown,” as NASA’s Rob Navias commented, but the palpable awe radiating from four extraordinary Earthlings as they showed the rest of us what we were missing.

“You’d fall in straight to the center of the moon if you stepped in some of those,” the pilot Victor Glover reported about the vast field of craters, never seen before, that pockmark the other side of the moon. He described islands of light, valleys that looked like black holes. Our moon not only has a face; it has a spine.

Commander Reid Wiseman delivered a play-by-play of active meteoroid strikes on the lunar surface: “I saw two, and Jeremy [Hansen, the Canadian mission specialist,] has seen one,” Wiseman began; the science adviser Kelsey Young literally jumped out of her chair back at mission control. “Oh, Jeremy saw two.” These are valuable scientific observations—crucial information for future settlements on a celestial body with no atmosphere. But I couldn’t stop grinning either as Young smacked her forehead in delight.

The solar eclipse also provided invaluable data, thanks to the astronauts’ giant, magnified view as the moon blocked the sun. They reported subtle color nuances, photometry, and other details that might explain the evolution of the lunar surface. Understanding its origins could help us learn where we came from too, and, more important, where we are going. Or at least provide some answers to all those times we lay on the grass as kids and stared up into the night sky, wondering.

Wonder. It’s a hard experience to translate. And Commander Wiseman wasn’t shy about admitting that everything they’d seen had worn out his supply of adjectives. “Houston,” he radioed down, “if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow, that will help my vocabulary out a bit.”

I’d never heard astronauts so candid, so uninhibited. Their excitement was profound, their enthusiasm contagious. When I emailed Marsha Ivins, a retired astronaut pal, to ask about her reaction to the mission, she admitted that when Integrity left the relative safety of Earth orbit—essentially flying without a net for anything requiring urgent attention—she had “one of those wonder/horror/amazement/buzzy/pride/respect-for-the-physics moments.” In other words: Ain’t science grand.

And what Artemis saw from Integrity (talk about a perfectly timed choice of name) is quickly rewriting the science books. It’s been a minute since we as a nation had a moment like this, in which our scientific prowess shone bright—a minute since we showed proper reverence for all those equations and computations and codes, the “little ones and zeroes,” as Cernan, an engineer, used to tell me. The facts that matter, that make you feel: Wow!

Ivins also reminded me, though, that Wow! works only when it’s put in motion by human beings. Don’t forget, she said, “the years of dedicated work the entire team has spent getting to these magical 10 days.”

Early on, the mission specialist Christina Koch was asked about living and working in a capsule about the size of a very large hot tub covered over with a seven-foot ceiling. It was so tight, Koch confessed, smiling, that even in the more spacious setting of microgravity, every movement was “a four-person activity.” This was not a complaint. They actually liked their group hugs. When Koch returned to Houston, she was asked to define the word crew. She didn’t hesitate: “a group that is in it all the time, no matter what, that is stroking together every minute, for the same purpose.” Then, in what I’d call a hopeful, if not generous, plea for global cooperation, she extended the metaphor to the rest of us. When she looked out the spacecraft’s windows and saw the home planet, she said, “Earth was just this lifeboat hanging, undisturbingly, in the universe … Planet Earth, you are a crew.”

If only.

People used to ask me why I liked covering the space program, and I never had to think twice: My other beat was politics, and it was more than satisfying to deal with individuals for whom spin described how a satellite moved when launched, not how to cover up a story. NASA is, of course, a public agency, and no journalist should ever give it a pass—should ever exonerate the deadly decisions and misguided management, for example, that led to the loss of 14 human beings in the hideous accidents that destroyed first Challenger, then Columbia. But today’s journalists seem, at least, to have a relationship with NASA management that’s strikingly different from that of their peers in other government agencies. With no media access of my own, I watched much of the activity on NASA’s TV feed, where the back-and-forth at press conferences was consistently cordial and sane. The questions ranged from tough to just informative, but no one on the podium belittled any reporter with a scornful slur. And almost every journalist bookended the question with a gracious “Thank you.”

I don’t know if this civility means that NASA is operating on its own planet, but I do find it appealing. And perhaps this concern—among the astronauts, between the crew and mission control, between the agency and the press—is how this very human mission accomplished so much. How four people traveled farther from their home planet than anyone, ever, and came back safely.

Maybe everyone was simply caught up in the seductive power of what the capcom Jacki Mahaffey teasingly called “moon joy.” The crew was smitten. They cooed openly about what they saw, about their families, about one another. Ground control was captivated. Management agreed.

“If you can’t take love to the stars, what are we doing?” Amit Kshatriya, the NASA associate administrator, asked at a press conference. “Like, why are we even going? That’s why we send humans instead of robots sometimes.”

That was, I repeat, a NASA official, speaking publicly. Love. Bring it on. Can the glow from this 10-day burst of joy possibly be sustained?

Maybe that’s not the right question. This mission humanized the moon. Now we should ask, can that glow ever reflect back on Earth?

Trump Ditched Hearts and Minds in the Iran War

2026-04-14T07:15:00-04:00

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When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the war in Afghanistan in 2009, he concluded that U.S. forces’ tactics were causing unnecessary civilian deaths and would lead to America’s defeat. McChrystal issued a directive calling for more restraint in the use of force so as not to alienate locals. What was required, he told troops, was a “clear-eyed recognition that loss of popular support will be decisive to either side.”

McChrystal was no softy. As the head of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, he had overseen some of the most aggressive operations of the Iraq War. His troops had killed or captured thousands of militants in high-risk raids. But in Afghanistan, McChrystal made a different calculation: By showing what became known as “courageous restraint,” U.S. forces would claim the moral high ground, starve the Taliban of popular support, and win the war. In a counterinsurgent fight, hearts and minds were more important than bombs and bullets.

McChrystal’s mandate was widely resented by frontline troops who believed that the new rules put them in greater danger. Commanders safely ensconced on bases, they complained, were reluctant to order air support for troops in the field out of fear of derailing their careers by ordering attacks that came with a high potential for collateral damage. Service members had to approach militant positions on foot instead of by launching artillery strikes, exposing themselves to increased enemy fire. Some veterans came to see rules like McChrystal’s as a defining failure of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: The United States lost, they believed, because the military pulled its punches.

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, a former National Guardsman, is among those critics. He has promised to unleash the American military in ways that haven’t been done in decades. He has fired military lawyers and empowered low-level commanders. “No stupid rules of engagement,” he declared after President Trump launched his war with Iran in late February.

This war—now subject to a two-week cease-fire and U.S.-Iranian standoff in the Strait of Hormuz—is America’s first major conflict of the post-counterinsurgent era, one that poses a test of how the U.S. military will perform in conflicts among states that are expected to dominate the future. What consideration will be given to hearts and minds in those wars? Initially, the president appeared stirred to action by Iranians’ protests against the regime; he promised protestors support as they demanded greater freedom. But Trump’s aspirations for ending the Islamic Republic’s repressive rule didn’t last. His focus became defeating Iran’s military, preventing its nuclear-weapons development, degrading its missile capabilities, and potentially taking its oil. As for Iran’s people, Trump proposed leaving them without electricity, drinking water, and the ability to travel. Then he threatened to wipe them out entirely, saying that “a whole civilization will die tonight” unless Tehran opened the Strait of Hormuz. It was a wild overcorrection from the “hearts and minds” ethos of days past.

Experts in military and international law told me that Trump’s threats to destroy power plants and bridges could be permissible under the laws of war if officials determined that the military value of their destruction outweighed the cost to civilians. But that doesn’t mean that the United States should go ahead. “If you want to establish a lasting peace,” Todd Huntley, a retired Navy lawyer who advised Special Operations units and now teaches at Georgetown University Law Center, told me, “you still need to be concerned about hearts and minds.”

So how should the U.S. military fight its wars?

In 2021, the Army’s top lawyer, Lieutenant General Charles Pede, warned of a looming crisis for America’s military. After two decades of counterinsurgent, or COIN, wars, troops had internalized restrictions like those McChrystal decreed for Afghanistan. Although sensible for that conflict, the rules would prove dangerous in a large, conventional-combat operation in which troops were attacking a foreign military from afar rather than fighting insurgents dispersed among a population. To succeed in a war against Iran, China, or Russia, he warned, Pentagon leaders needed to close the gap between the requirements of the laws of war and the stricter rules that U.S. leaders had layered on top. They needed to cure what Pede and his co-author, Colonel Peter Hayden, writing in a military journal, described as the “COIN hangover.”

Over the years, the authors noted, the COIN-era rules of engagement were embraced by civil-society groups and legal commentators who wanted the new principles codified. These advocates urged military leaders to use precision bombs exclusively and to forswear the use of explosive weapons in crowded urban areas. More worrying, in Pede and Hayden’s view, an entire generation of troops now confused those elevated COIN guidelines with the laws of war. (A lieutenant who had led a platoon in the early days of the Iraq War might now be a colonel.) In a war against a major modern military, units couldn’t always afford to verify whether civilians were nearby before returning enemy artillery fire. Neither could troops expend the time to ask the chain of command for permission to use more potent munitions, they wrote. And commanders might no longer have the luxury of observing an adversary for hours to ensure his identity and rule out the potential for causing collateral damage before striking.

Troops “must always be mindful of their legal and moral obligation to minimize suffering of civilians and to avoid unnecessary damage of civilian objects,” the co-authors wrote. “But they are not required to discard considerations of military necessity or to forget their mandate to accomplish their mission.”

Their observations resonated. In simulations of large-scale conventional operations in 2023, one officer wrote about his experience with the “hangover.” Brigade combat teams exercising in Germany regularly lost most of their combat power because of concern about causing civilian casualties. Troops hesitated to fire on an enemy force in a civilian area because of their mistaken belief that any civilian casualty was unlawful, Major Jason Young, a coach and observer at the Hohenfels training center, wrote. Staff officers, confusing a maneuver’s potential impact on civilians with its legality, sometimes wouldn’t even present a potential target to a commander if striking it might result in noncombatant deaths. “Mistaking old policies for law has had disastrous consequences” in preparations for those future battles, he wrote.

Majid Saeedi / Getty

The Karaj B1 bridge in Karaj, Iran, was destroyed by U.S. airstrikes on April 2. Iranian authorities said eight people were killed and almost 100 injured when the bridge was bombed.

The Pede and Hayden concept of a COIN hangover is circulating at the Pentagon as Hegseth pushes for greater lethality and a reversal of what some troops describe as the “feminization” of the military. Leadership is emphasizing that “the military is for killing people and crushing things,” one person familiar with the issue told me.

In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth wrote about telling his platoon in Iraq to disregard the rules of engagement briefed to them by a military lawyer, known as a judge advocate general, who had told them that they couldn’t shoot at a militant holding a grenade launcher until he aimed at them. (Several former JAGs told me that such guidance, if Hegseth’s account is correct, constituted bad legal advice.) Hegseth routinely uses aggressive language to make his point. “Our war fighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it,” Hegseth told reporters recently. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

[Read: The Pentagon’s lawyers are now under review]

For Hegseth and other veterans, the effort to win hearts and minds is entangled with the military quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, the failures of nation building, and what they saw as an exaggerated sensitivity toward civilian populations at the cost of U.S. lives. “Restrictive ROE increase the likelihood of American deaths,” one senior Pentagon official told me, using a shorthand to refer to rules of engagement. “We do see both sides of the argument, but we come at it from backing the war fighter on the ground and making sure they come home alive.”

The official cited America’s history of “total war” in World War II, including the scorched-earth tactics used in Dresden and Hiroshima. Hegseth and some other veterans like to invoke that era’s battlefield victories, when they believe that men were men, the rules of engagement were loose, and the U.S. was indisputably the good guy.

In this century’s counterinsurgent conflicts, the United States has targeted some civilian sites—including banks and oil trucks commandeered by the Islamic State—but sparingly and after extensive internal debate. Despite those precautions, the military killed thousands of civilians in its air war against ISIS. The record of that conflict, which I covered in detail as a reporter covering the military, produced new safeguards for civilians. (The Trump administration rolled back some of those restrictions, but others remain.) The widespread destruction of bridges, power plants, and drinking-water facilities in Iran, if carried out, would represent a departure from recent military practice but may be legally permissible. This defines the gap that Pede, Hayden, and other military theorists argue must be closed.

But the argument that military leaders need to either be so cautious as to endanger American troops or else jettison all concerns about civilian lives presents a false choice and is probably strategically unsound. If hospitals can’t function and drinking water is unavailable, civilians may rally around the regime you are trying to weaken. And some national-security experts question just how severe the COIN hangover is.

Scott Anderson, a lawyer who formerly worked at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, pointed to strikes that killed scores of civilians during the close of the war against ISIS, before the COIN era ended. A secretive Special Operations unit with its own rules of engagement conducted those attacks. “My concern still is that it’s all too human and natural to pivot to something much more barbaric when a person is under threat,” Anderson told me. “That’s why we need laws of war in the first place, to constrain that impulse.”

When the U.S. enters into conflicts alongside allies, these questions become even more complicated. Israel and the United States have conducted parallel (but not joint) operations against Iran. I have spent weeks trying to disentangle which nation bombed what targets, and what legal and operational limits each country has set, because they have released only limited information. The Pentagon under Hegseth has denied journalists the access they had in previous wars. Human-rights groups estimate that at least 1,700 Iranian civilians have been killed since the conflict began.

[Read: The real intelligence failure in Iran]

For most of the conflict, the U.S. and Israel have maintained a clear division of labor, suggesting that their militaries are operating under different rules of engagement. The U.S. struck military targets, including missile launchers and weapons depots, along with drone factories. Israel struck military sites but also targeted nonmilitary infrastructure, including steel plants, power facilities, and banks. And Israel assassinated senior Iranian leaders, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, National Security Council Chief Ali Larijani, and multiple Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders.

I asked an Israeli military official about images of damaged and smoking apartment blocs that were apparent targets. The official told me that the IRGC embedded workshops or other facilities in or under residences. She added that the Israel Defense Forces attempt to use precision weapons to minimize damage. “If an armed organization uses a building, it doesn’t matter what that building is; it automatically turns into a military subject,” she said.

U.S. and Israeli officials told me that the two countries worked closely together, deconflicting flights, sharing intelligence, holding daily video conferences, and coordinating on a target list. Israeli liaison officers are stationed at Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, and vice versa. But a U.S. official emphasized that each military has its own operation—Epic Fury for the U.S. and Roaring Lion for Israel. At times, Israel has struck targets beyond those on which it briefed the U.S., one U.S. military official told me. (The IDF declined comment.) Several weeks into the war, Trump rebuked Israel for a strike on an Iranian natural-gas site on territory that extends into Qatar that prompted Iran to hit back at a Qatari energy facility.

But that was before the Pentagon, in the week leading up to the cease-fire, also hit a bridge and a gathering of Iranian officials. (The U.S. has provided few details about those strikes.) Then Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s core infrastructure and erase its civilization. The president had clearly left the struggle for hearts and minds behind.

While critics believe that the restrained COIN approach diminished America’s chances of victory in the wars of the past, Trump’s and Hegseth’s more bare-knuckled rules haven’t resulted in success in this war either. And the moral posture that McChrystal advocated for in Afghanistan is among the conflict’s many casualties.

I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

2026-04-14T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Hugo Yu

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Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.

I encounter on this quest three types of Americans, because only three types exist. The type that you are—or the type that you are dealing with—is revealed in response to the question “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?”

The American people, alas, have grown skittish about answering plain questions. An unconscionable number ask what I mean by this, as if the words might have an obscure double meaning. To be clear: Any bread from any restaurant in America is eligible, so long as it is free to all customers. The contents of the basket set on the table before the meal arrives, the cost of which is invisibly diffused throughout other menu items. Rolls that arrive unbidden. Popovers, if everyone gets a popover no matter what. You know what I’m talking about. Free restaurant bread.

The first type of American: people who joyride the day’s updrafts like marvelous, glossy crows. They easily recall the locations of treats encountered over their lifetime. They answer this question Glock-shot fast, as if they have been waiting to be asked it. They are happy.

The second type: fairly certain that they have consumed bread at some point; allows that a portion of that consumption could have occurred within the confines of a restaurant, or a restaurant-like environment; will grant that some pieces of said bread were perhaps free and/or enjoyable to ingest. But they profess to have retained no specifics. Their personal histories are inscribed in chalk, regularly power-washed with jets of deterging Time. They resent the implication that they could ever derive meaning from the pale, abstract remnants of narrative that constitute their internal autobiographies, and, with a few kindhearted exceptions, will not attempt to. Many, in fact, will appear oddly furious to have been asked this question, and will invent wafer-thin excuses as to why they are unable to spend two seconds considering it.

The third type: a tragic, paranoid (though occasionally brilliant) figure. Ask this person, “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” and their eyes shimmer with panic. These individuals live with the terrific knowledge that there is a best free restaurant bread in America, and the awful conviction that they are incapable of identifying it. It is not a lack of contenders that prevents them from volunteering an answer—the prison of their mind teems with memories of free restaurant breads—rather, they are silenced by a hallucinatory fear of nebulous consequences that could befall them should they personally misidentify the best free restaurant bread in America, even in private conversation. Asked this question, such people refuse to answer. “It’s too much pressure!” they insist. Whence this pressure, of what force, applied to what possible end, is never explained. Men and women with advanced degrees are overrepresented in this type.

Though it strikes the ear as an insoluble query, there is a correct answer—right now, known only to God (and to me, an agent of his will), but erelong to the steadfast reader.

Here is where the notion for the undertaking came from: Tucked within the viscera of the continental United States is a restaurant that gives away superb free bread. Every time I have eaten it (before this past year, three times total), I have said aloud (to my husband, who did not care), “This is the best free restaurant bread in America.” The thought made me feel the way you do when you realize you were just a half a moment away from being plowed by a car, and were spared only by a chance nanosecond of dawdling before stepping into the street: giddy and flabbergasted and grateful to be alive. It seemed incredible, but also possible, that this really could be the best free restaurant bread in America. What if it was? Even more dizzyingly, what if it wasn’t? What if—unfathomable—someone else was giving away an even better bread for free? The thought drove me crazy. I begged for the opportunity to investigate.

[From the November 2025 issue: Caity Weaver on what it takes to be a Revolutionary War reenactor]

Naturally, I told my superiors, this investigation would bring me into contact with the entire arc of human history. People have been eating bread—in many places, eating mostly bread—for millennia. We can’t say for certain that the individuals who fled their burning homes on the shore of the Sea of Galilee 23,000 years ago (leaving behind baskets they’d woven, tools they’d carved from bones, and sleeping areas they’d turned snug and cozy) ate bread, but we know from microscopic barley and oat remnants embedded in a grindstone abandoned to the flames that they were, at least, processing flour. (To situate these folks in time: Cats would not be domesticated for another 14,000 years or so.)

Once people began munching bread, they never stopped. (Or, at least, they never stopped until very recently.) The word bread can also refer more generally to food, sustenance, or livelihood—not just in English, but in languages from Russian to Hindi. Breadcrumbs are scattered throughout our language. The word lord is derived from a compound word in Old English—hlāfweard—translating, roughly, to “loaf guard” or “loaf keeper” (breadwinner could be seen as a modern fraternal twin); lady comes from hlæfdige : “loaf kneader.” The arm bones of Neolithic women, researchers have found, were 11 to 16 percent stronger than those of the women’s rowing team at the University of Cambridge, likely from grinding grain for hours every day.

[Read: What bread tasted like 4,000 years ago]

(Of course, eventually, my investigation would lead me back to the site of the bread that inspired it, thereby accomplishing my secret personal mission: procuring a fourth basket of free bread from that restaurant. Unfortunately, what happened to me on my return visit was so shocking and abominable, I was tempted to re-pitch this article as “What Is the Restaurant in America That I Hate, That I Will Never Go Back to, That Has Made of Me an Enemy for Life Due to Its Psychotic Soda Policy”—on which, more upsetting details to follow.)

How would I determine the best free restaurant bread in America? Simple: I would ask every single person I encountered, “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?”; travel to the most likely candidates; and try the bread myself.

The $725.32 Free Bread

Sixteen splendorous bread varieties are yours for claiming off the three-tiered lacquered rolling cart at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas. You can have as many as you want, all for free, with your meal. My meal was the Degustation Menu, which costs $525 per guest. The breads range from the fanciful (surprisingly pointy bacon-and-mustard pods, heart-stoppingly yellow saffron focaccia) to the nearly indistinguishable (classic baguettes, traditional baguettes). There are flaky spirals and poofy cubes and bread with the gently rounded profile of a tasteful breast implant. There is olive bread; rosemary brioche; basil focaccia; walnut raisin; one miniature croissant; two cheese breads; a third kind of baguette that is exactly the same as one of the other baguettes, only smaller. There is country loaf. Sixteen.

The three-Michelin-star Joël Robuchon is located within the abyss of the MGM Grand Las Vegas, directly adjacent to a Cirque du Soleil–themed gift shop, though it seems determined to ignore this fact. The MGM’s more than 5,000 rooms colluded to make it the Earth’s largest hotel when it opened in 1993; it has since lost that ominous distinction without shrinking in square footage. Roaming its purgatorial interior, you could be wandering a mega–cruise ship beached in the desert, or vacationing amid the elevator banks of a parking garage containing every car in the world. It is as all-encompassing as the world of a nightmare. In addition to Joël Robuchon, at the time of my visit, the MGM’s droves of restaurants included a Netflix-themed chow palace, Netflix Bites—where screens over the bar silently flashed random trailers for Netflix original programming, interspersed with Stranger Things and Bridgerton screen savers (Netflix Bites has since closed)—and a restaurant inspired by the Jonas Brothers’ great-grandmother, Nellie’s Southern Kitchen: A Jonas Family Restaurant.

Unlike at Netflix Bites, there are no hot-pink signs reading I’D BON APPETIT HIM inside Joël Robuchon; it is a refined place, its cream facade evoking the stately grandeur of Haussmann’s Paris. Chandeliers, plural, are visible through the glass doors. The Robuchon dining room is peculiar within the MGM in that it was built to human scale; it feels like a rich person’s living room, down to the smattering of black-and-white framed snapshots of Nicolas Cage and Celine Dion. I am seated on a velvet couch of Tyrian purple, opposite a tabletop trio of pink roses and in front of a Nic Cage photo. My black napkin is of a material lovelier than my dress; to sleep beneath sheets stitched from such napkins would be the apex of indulgence.

The concept of an elegant chuck wagon buckling beneath the weight of its cargo of bread is not unique in Las Vegas to Joël Robuchon, but the Robuchon grain trolley is esteemed as one of the finest. To ensure that I will be hungry enough to sample the totality of its breads at my 9:15 p.m. reservation, I consume nothing after a modest breakfast. This will prove to be a mistake. By afternoon, counting down the hours in my MGM hotel room ($39.20 a night before fees, a little more than 5 percent of my dinner bill), I pay more serious consideration to a can of Sour Cream & Onion Pringles—which I do not even like—than I did to the paperwork when I bought my car. I gaze, too, upon a lavender can next to the potato chips, envisioning the sugarplum delights it might enclose. Upon closer inspection, it turns out to contain a vibrator, two condoms, and personal lubricant (could this be edible as a kind of syrup?). By the time I am shown to my purple couch, I am hungry enough to eat the tablecloth.

The army of waitstaff who attend to each patron at Joël Robuchon is classy. When I confess to my headwaiter that I would, if possible, prefer not to have lamb for one course, he thanks me as if I have paid him a compliment. These professionals, many of whom have worked here for decades, would never make a woman eating a $525 meal alone at 9:15 on a Monday night feel bad for any request. But still. It is impossible to lock eyes with a Frenchman, after he has just spent minutes delicately extolling the virtues of 16 different breads, and ask, “Could I do one of each?” without feeling ridiculous, no matter how evenly he responds, “Absolutely!”

A selection of the 16 varieties of bread presented to the writer on a three-tiered rolling cart at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

Unaware that every passing second escalates the odds that they will lose a silver button, a finger, or even a limb to my ravenous maw, the waiters continue the pageantry of the bread service. “Butter from France!” one trumpets as he wheels over a second cart, this bearing a hoodoo of butter beneath a spotless glass cloche large enough to contain a human head. A spoon in each hand, he shaves off a translucent spiral, which he confetties with salt. I am so dangerously close to eating the butter plain, like a scoop of ice cream, that I hear him announce, “Olive oil from Alicante!” only faintly, as a cry from a distant ship.

At last, 20 impeccably choreographed minutes after my arrival, my first round of breads is placed before me: 12 oven-warmed rolls crammed into a silver bowl. For one light-flooded second, I am a doe in high beams, paralyzed by everything that could happen next. Then I grab the bacon-and-mustard roll and throw it into my mouth so fast that I forget to taste it. I am about to snatch a second roll, any roll, when a waiter materializes at my elbow to tell me a story.

It is the history of what he calls “a beautiful dish”—a beautiful dish he has recklessly placed between myself and my breads. It is a shallow bowl of mesmerically arranged dots: three concentric rings of molar-size white dots, each topped with a little green dot, converging, as if in worship, upon a perfect circle that is itself an agglomeration of still smaller black dots—all suspended in straw-colored jelly. It looks like something from the biology lab at Liberace University. These, I am informed, are chlorophyll-kissed cauliflower pearls surrounding a caviar disc. The caviar is flecked with 24-karat gold leaf. I scarf it down like my dog inhales breakfast, in order to get back to the bread.

The saffron roll tastes of nothing. The pale-green basil focaccia looks like bread from the morgue. Some of the pickings are quite tasty, but the sheer number of rolls dilutes the impact of each. When the headwaiter asks if I have a favorite “so far,” I humiliate myself by describing a square bread covered in cheese that does not exist. He instantly identifies the two rolls I have conflated—an ethereal marshmallow-size cube made with milk instead of water, and a sphere crowned with crunchy, oven-toasted Gruyère that tastes like cheese-flavored air—and brings out more of these for me to confirm. I accept; I could eat 60 to 600 more!

Another mistake. I had meant to merely sample the breads; instead I am consuming each in toto. The remaining 13 courses are whisked out to me at a relentless pace. There are triangles of many colors; foam; a leaf that is a cake; a ladybug that is candy; gold foil distributed with such apparent abandon—festooning a truffle; smeared on the rim of a glass—that it may simply be drifting through the kitchen’s HVAC system like ash from a phoenix’s nest. “I’m eating so much gold,” read my notes.

As I challenge the elastic limits of my gastric wall, distending it with hundreds of dollars’ worth of fabulous things in rare shapes, and also rolls, I rely more and more on the chemical burn of Diet Coke to excoriate my palate between bites. Joël Robuchon’s Diet Coke is crisp and cold, and swims right up to the brim of the voluptuously curved glasses they serve it in; it devours my tongue like a cleansing fire. Feeling sheepish, and also sluggish, and also like I will never be hungry again, I ask the maestro of the bread cart if I might have my second round. It is time for the loaves.

At 10:46 p.m.—90 minutes after my arrival; I’m exhausted, unable to eat another bite of anything—I calculate how many courses I have left. Five?! I am given a plate of Ibérico ham. It tastes exquisite: nutty, salty, rich. I force it down like I am eating packing peanuts. I notice that I have begun shivering slightly, probably because of the frosty Diet Cokes. “I love Diet Coke!” I write in my notes. Tendrils of conversation from other diners drift to my table. “This was such a good dinner!” one woman declares—a demented way to describe what has happened here tonight; this is dinner in the same way that Australia is an isle. I impel myself to eat all of the foie gras I am served, because I know it is made inhumanely. It is 20 minutes to midnight by the time my posh experience draws to a close. I prefer the traditional baguette to the classic baguette.

What’s the Point of the Article?

“What’s the point of the article?”

This is the question an exasperated William Rubel, the author of Bread: A Global History, demands of me. Rubel is an American who was made a Chevalier of the Ordre National du Mérite Agricole by France’s minister of agriculture for contributions to agricultural knowledge. He is a scholar affiliated with no university. His objective is the total comprehension of a small portion of culinary history—aptly, because, with his untamed thatch of shoulder-length white hair and woolly-caterpillar brows, he looks like someone who could have been alive at any point in the era of man. He also founded a children’s literary magazine.

“Fun article for people to read,” I tell him glumly.

Rubel’s knowledge of bread is so comprehensive—and mine so nonexistent—that he is quickly, if cantankerously, becoming my own hlāfweard : the curmudgeonly warden of all loaf understanding. I came to him originally with a question to which I could find no answer: Why did restaurants start giving away bread for free?

“It’s the opposite of what you asked,” Rubel says. “It’s not ‘When did they begin giving away bread for free?’ Because no one could have imagined sitting down at the meal and not eating bread. It was not possible.”

In the timeline of Western civilization, restaurants are a brand-new trend. The United States had batteries before it had a restaurant. Delmonico’s began operating in New York City in 1837 as a novel kind of dining space: one where patrons could purchase individually priced items off a menu. Prior to the importation of this French-style concern, a person who wished to be served a meal away from home was pretty much restricted to an oyster saloon (where they could have oysters) or an inn or a tavern (where a flat fee purchased whatever meal everyone else was getting—not necessarily oysters). To say that a 19th-century American tavern meal included bread would be like remarking that a 21st-century restaurant meal includes cutlery. We know that America’s first restaurants offered bread to patrons because it would have been unthinkable not to.

People have judged restaurants on the quality of their free bread from the institutions’ earliest days. In what is possibly America’s first restaurant review (a madcap meta-account published in The New York Times in 1859), the bread at New York’s Astor House is deemed “the best bread in the universe.” And although dozens of poll respondents insisted to me that complimentary bread, as a concept, has been lately abandoned in this country—that “every” restaurant charges for bread “now” (not true)—in fact, people have been complaining about vanishing complimentary rolls for at least a century. In 1912, the Times devoted days of coverage to outrage over a new 10-cent charge for bread and butter: “HOTEL DINER BRINGS IN HIS OWN BREAD,” read the headline of an article that described one man’s attempt to skirt the fee.

In the days of tavern dining, proprietors would have wanted customers to fill up on as much bread as possible, so that they would consume less of the more expensive ingredients to which they were entitled. À la carte restaurants perhaps felt themselves grandfathered into what had become a mark of hospitality. Chefs I consult attest to free bread’s ability—a finite ability—to make kitchens run more smoothly (by slowing down orders). It also makes customers less whiny: Restaurants give you free bread “just so that you have something to do with your hands and your mouth,” Richard Horner, a New Orleans chef and restaurateur, tells me.

Horner lays bare the strategic timing of this generosity. Ideally, free bread should not hit the table until after customers have ordered their meal, “because then they order from a position of maximum hungriness,” he says. Plus, the delay builds anticipation: “Will there be bread? I see other people with bread. We haven’t got bread yet.” And then, once the bread is bestowed: “Oh! There is bread! What a fun surprise.”

Horner’s demonic calculation for how many slices or rolls each table’s basket should contain is [Number of diners] + 1. Unevenly divisible bread creates “a tension that I really enjoy.”

But Horner describes himself as “anti–free bread”—a common position among restaurant professionals. A premature breadbasket can gut the total bill. Also, the bread intended to placate customers can just as often be something else for them to complain about. “They get really, really particular about this thing you’re giving them for free,” Horner says. “ ‘This isn’t hot’ or ‘Bring me more stuff ’; ‘I need more bread’; ‘I need more oil and vinegar for some reason’; or ‘This butter is wrong.’ ” He sees the decline of free bread as a consequence of restaurants being stretched so thin during the pandemic. They just got fed up: “You know what? You don’t get bread anymore! ”

Several chefs, including the author Alison Roman, make the case that customers, by demanding bread that is free, deprive themselves of bread that is worth eating. “It’s either good and you pay,” Roman tells me, “or it’s free and bad. Bread costs money to make. It takes skilled labor, and it shouldn’t be free.”

Horner echoes her point. When free bread is “an afterthought”—provided only because free bread is expected—“I would rather just not have it on the table,” he says. If you’re going to give customers bread, “it should be as good as the rest of your food. And if that’s the case, you should charge for it.”

(No one outside the food industry ever tells me they’d prefer paying for excellent bread to receiving mediocre bread for free. Most people just want to be given bread they have not paid for. That bread being good constitutes a rare and wonderful possibility—certainly not an expectation. Nothing tastes as good as free costs.)

My primary means of determining the best free restaurant bread in America is to demand answers from people—my father and friends, yes, but also anyone else I can think of. Strangers encountered on errands. Everyone who sends me an email during the month of October. “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” I amass several hundred answers.

In harvesting this knowledge, I am exposed to countless novel methods through which humans might delight, disappoint, irritate, and surprise one another. Some people invent their own question on the spot and answer that instead: Asked to identify the best free restaurant bread in America, they tell of a great bakery where bread can be purchased for money, or the worst free restaurant bread in America. Others imagine that the question contains some hidden constraint, which they undertake to expose—“It can’t be a chain restaurant,” they declare, or “It has to be a chain restaurant.” The fixins’-dazzled deliver monologues about butter and olive oil, forgetting that bread exists. One smug stranger in a hot tub tells me that she cannot answer, because she makes her own bread. (Does she bring it to restaurants?) A number decline to consider the question, because they no longer eat gluten. (I don’t require anyone to eat the bread they mention.) (Unrelated warning—not a threat: Gluten-free bread is unable to transubstantiate into the body of Christ, according to Catholic law.) Some folks itch to argue with me about what I mean by bread, daring me to reject their votes for pitas, sopaipillas, corn tortilla chips, or hush puppies. They are disgruntled to learn that I let each person define bread as he or she wishes, desiring only that it incorporate a non-raw staple starch.

[From the March 1989 issue: Corby Kummer on the ideal panettone]

I am astonished that only a minority of people can summon an answer quickly. My mental filing cabinet devoted to cataloging free restaurant breads is one of the largest and most scrupulously maintained in my neocortex; I’ve discarded the contents of other filing cabinets (“Visuospatial Reasoning,” “First Aid”) to make room for it. What occupies the free-bread space in others’ minds? Americans of the second type—those who don’t have an immediate answer to the best-free-bread question—are certainly not charmed by being asked. They seem to resent being pulled out of the swift current of their life and forced to ponder restaurant bread for a few seconds. But aggression is not limited to such people. A man from Boston overhears me asking another stranger the question in an elevator, and cuts in: “Any restaurant you walk in, in the North End, is the best bread.” I ask him to name one. “Any of them,” he says. “Pick one,” I encourage. The man grows furious: “Any of them!”

My father’s answer surprises me. When I was growing up, he, my mother, and I were all serious eaters (not in the sense of being discerning, but of deriving satisfaction from doggedly plowing through any volume of food) with a special penchant for free items. At 81, he tells me, he possesses a single vivid memory of free restaurant bread: He ate it on one of the handful of days in his life that he saw his father. “He would show up occasionally and try to act like the big dad,” my father recalls, bringing Christmas presents to his wife and sons in South Philly. Once, in 1962, my grandfather bought his sons—one in the Air Force, the other (my father) a teenage gang member—lunch at the Four Seasons in Manhattan.

I am stunned to learn that my father—an indefatigable storyteller who I thought had long since frog-marched me through everything that had ever happened to him—once went to a restaurant as nice as the Four Seasons. I’d thought he might say the biscuits at Red Lobster, a restaurant that was the setting for so many jubilant meals with my parents, grandparents, and cousins that I struggle to recall a distinct memory from it; every meal blurs together in a montage of steaming biscuits and laughing faces, not unlike a commercial for Red Lobster. I ask my dad if he has any happy memories of his father. “None that I can think of,” he says. But he remembers that the bread was warm.

What Celebrities Don’t Want You to Know

Hear me when I say this: Irrespective of the vibrant plausibility of your parasocial fantasies, America’s celebrities are not your friends. There is only one good celebrity in this world: the author Stephen King. According to Mr. King, the best free bread in America is “crusty and warm” and served at Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse in Sarasota, Florida. Given the fact that no other star, out of the scores I contact via their representatives, successfully manages to answer this question, I can conclude only that America’s celebrities consider it their unholy mission to ensure that her masses—their fans—die ignorant of the identity of her best free restaurant bread.

Publicists demand to know which other celebrities are telling me their favorite free restaurant bread before they will even consider passing along this question. LeBron James cannot devote one minute to contemplating the best free restaurant bread in America, a representative confides in October, because the totality of his “focus” is “on preparing for the upcoming season”—a frightening and lonely thought. (A few weeks later, James will shatter the tempered-glass backboard of his concentration at 6:32 a.m. Los Angeles time, confessing on social media: “I love watching YouTube golf ⛳ videos!! Random I know. lol. SO COOL!” I email his rep a plea to slip the question to James while a YouTube golf video is loading. Do not hear back.) Ben Affleck cannot answer due to being “in the midst of a project”—aren’t we all? Jennifer Lopez is likewise “filming a movie right now” and therefore totally unreachable by terrestrial communication.

Do you want to know how abjectly I debase myself, attempting to divine this forbidden knowledge from the impenetrable minds of celebrities? I contact Chris Pratt’s publicist to seek Pratt’s answer, even though—since we’re all being so honest—I don’t especially care to know it. (I am merely asking to be polite.) “We need to politely hold off as there isn’t interest,” comes the reply. Excuse me! That is actually not polite! I don’t need to know that Chris Pratt isn’t interested; and also, how can he not be interested in such an interesting topic? And also, I am the one who is not interested! But this is not even my lowest moment. That nadir is struck when I am forced to reach out to my nemesis: a celebrity publicist I have previously sworn never to speak to again, because several years ago she lied to me—did not refuse to comment; flat-out lied—when I asked her a direct question. Typing my query about the best free restaurant bread in America to this individual feels like dragging my raw, bleeding fingertips across a gravestone that has been scorched by lightning. And would you believe that not only does this publicist fail to provide an answer to my fun and fascinating question; she does not even acknowledge receipt of my email or my follow-up email ? And so now I am forced to put into writing my new vow, a vow I will keep, even if it one day destroys my life, even if it kills me: Ashley, the next time you and I cross paths, it will be in hell.

(“What a nice article this will be to read,” Oprah Winfrey’s ultra-classy publicist writes, while unequivocally declining her client’s participation.)

On a handful of occasions, my interactions with public-relations professionals are at least moderately helpful. When pressed, Buzz Aldrin’s and Tyler Perry’s publicists reveal what they (these men’s publicists) consider to be the best free restaurant bread in America, though they will not ask their principals; I duly log their data.

More often, the exchanges are vexing. The senior director of media relations for the country’s largest food-service lobbying group, the National Restaurant Association—the other NRA—tells me that no one from the group will be able to speak with me about free restaurant bread in any capacity, because it “isn’t a trend that we track.” I ask if someone might be able to chat with me about free restaurant bread anecdotally. “It’s not even something we could talk about anecdotally,” she responds. I ask if she will tell me what, in her personal opinion, is the best free restaurant bread in America. She never replies to me again. (Neither here nor there, but in 2023, an investigation by The New York Times revealed that this NRA used the $15 fee that restaurant workers pay to attend its mandatory food-safety course to fund a nationwide lobbying campaign against minimum-wage increases.)

Almost but Not Actually the Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America are words that, in deference to the integrity of this investigation, I am unable to print immediately followed by the cymbal-washed, experimental-jazz phrase Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits. But such an announcement would be very nearly true. Raw poll numbers situate Red Lobster’s signature bread offering—knobbly, crimpled clods, butter-radiant and freckled with parsley—comfortably in second place. I have personally enjoyed these rolls (introduced in 1992 under the straightforward name Hot Cheese Garlic Bread) so many times that I worry I will struggle to evaluate the biscuits impartially, the same way a friend’s beauty seems to increase over time as your love for her deepens. And so I beg my friend Alice, an Englishwoman for whom Cheddar Bay is mare incognitum, to let me watch her sample her first at our local Red Lobster in Santa Fe.

Red Lobster’s butter-radiant Cheddar Bay Biscuit. (The culinary historian William Rubel denies the possibility that any chain restaurant might have the “best” bread.) (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

Our Ultimate Feast is not without some painful moments, such as when, one second before tasting the milky-slurry piña-colada dipping sauce for our Parrot Isle Coconut Shrimp, Alice asks, “What is this?” and then, at the exact same moment I gaily sing, “You’re gonna like it!,” gasps, “Oh my God—that is disgusting.” But her verdict on the Cheddar Bay Biscuits is effusive: “Americans have got a lot of things right regarding the texture of foodstuffs,” she says. “Outstanding.”

The problem is that I want to examine the nubiform texture of these foodstuffs at Red Lobster’s culinary-development center, in Orlando.

My email inquiry is answered by a representative from the PR firm that fields press requests for Red Lobster. I express my desire to visit the offices of the company that purchases a quarter of the lobster and crab caught on boats in North America; she tells me she will “check in with the brand to see what is possible.” What is not possible, I am informed a few days later, is setting foot anywhere inside the corporate lobster den, let alone its gleaming test kitchen. I can enjoy no audience with Damola Adamolekun—who at 35 became the youngest Red Lobster CEO in company history and has spent recent months in a media blitz, promoting the brand’s determination to claw its way back into the hearts of young Black Americans as part of a post-bankruptcy revitalization strategy. Instead, I am invited to submit some questions via email or Zoom to ancillary executives.

By coincidence, in the midst of these faltering negotiations, I meet someone who previously worked with Adamolekun. She says he’s “really cool,” “actually quite lovely”; I should just email him directly, rather than becoming ensnared in PR red tape, like the hundreds of thousands of dolphins, whales, seals, etc. that perish in the Earth’s oceans each year, tangled in trash and fishing gear; here is his email address. I send Adamolekun a short email, in which I attempt to make it clear that I am likewise really cool and actually quite lovely. “I’d like to figure out a fun way to feature Red Lobster in the story,” I say. “I have a couple ideas that would involve you directly.” (Ideas like: eat the biscuits with him, and many other ideas that will hopefully occur to me if he writes back.)

And that is how I learn that Damola Adamolekun is a snitch.

The next day, I receive an email from the same PR rep. “The brand and I connected following your email to Damola,” she writes. “To keep things streamlined and to spare Damola’s inbox, feel free to continue corresponding through me. 😊”

This PR representative is made of steel. Googling her name unearths a YouTube assignment recorded for a college public-relations class a few years ago. In it she coolly addresses the camera while expressing regret for a factory collapse in which, “so far, 1,100 people have lost their lives.” (The crisis-video exercise was apparently inspired by the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, in which 1,134 people were killed while working in a building where clothing was manufactured for retailers including the Children’s Place and Benetton. “I cannot express how sorry I am that this had to happen,” she tells the camera calmly.) I give up trying to penetrate the Red Lobster carapace.

What Is the “Best”?

Let us acknowledge that the “best” bread is influenced by current fashions. Soft white bread was, for much of human history, a yearned-for extravagance. Today, Americans generally regard it as the nastiest, lowest form of bread and stock it in their cheapest grocery stores. Tastes change.

The late 19th century in New York City—soot-blackened, ammoniac with horse urine—spawned a frenzy for breads baked in sanitary conditions. Under the headline “Bread and Filth Cooked Together,” an 1894 exposé by The New York Press devoted several lurid paragraphs to the cockroach kingdoms of cellar kitchens, where, according to state inspectors, vermin “abounded, and as chance willed became part of the salable products.” One baker recounted how an employer had forced him to mix worm-infested, “green and rotten” old pumpernickel into new dough to add volume. The English language “is not sturdy enough,” the article insisted, to convey “the animate and inanimate horrors” that its reporters had uncovered. (“Unclean Men Mix the Dough and Sleep in the Same Rooms”!) Within eight months, public outcry fast-tracked a law implementing minimum hygiene standards, including housing toilets in rooms separate from the ones where dough was kneaded.

By the early 1900s, basement bakeries were being replaced by aboveground factories. The new operations began packaging bread in waxed paper as a visual marker of sanitation. The paraffin-coated paper, moreover, helped bread go stale more slowly by delaying moisture evaporation; new additives incorporated directly into the dough delayed staleness further. Soft white bread that stayed fresh for days, once a product of wild fantasy, became commonplace.

[From the November 1935 issue: Ready-sliced bread]

The rolls served at Texas Roadhouse (third place in the best-free-restaurant-bread contest by raw votes) are indisputably soft and white, roundly square, and immaculate enough to have possibly made themselves with no outside aid. Seven hundred years ago, a king might have eaten such satin-smooth bread on Easter; the Roadhouse gives it out for free, in portions that are infinite. (The first basket accompanies you to your table, like a fellow guest.) The menu items my husband and I order during our visit are remarkable in their own way—no rabbits stealing the last of the November lettuces by moonlight ever chewed a colder salad than our Caesar—but without question, the free rolls, accompanied by honey-cinnamon butter, are the only items really worth paying for (besides the lovely, big Diet Cokes).

If the paschal king were served the bread now in vogue in the United States, he would be apoplectic. People might die. Our most au courant breads would be, to him, peasant fodder—dun-colored, chewy, whole-grain bricks or, even more inexcusable, loaves rendered intentionally sour.

That the “best” bread is prescribed by trend is demonstrated by no bread better than sourdough. Before the 20th century, William Rubel points out, it was considered unwise to eat bread that tasted acidic, biting, or in some way off: “Eating sour foods was credited with the reason that your family had diarrhea.” But, he says, in the 21st century, “the high-end culinary elite in this country is very aggressively against any bread that’s not sourdough.”

After an explosion of interest in the United States during the first spring of COVID, the obsession has continued to flourish, borne, Rubel says, on a memory mirage. In contrast with, say, grits (a dish that has, more or less, been eaten continuously in North America for more than a thousand years), there is, he insists, “no sourdough tradition in the United States.”

In this country, sourdough gained widespread usage in the days of the Gold Rush—as a term to refer not to bread but to people. According to legend, fortune hunters in the western hinterlands, far from a steady supply of baker’s yeast, kept their starters (a bit of fermented dough that could be added to the next day’s mix) warm by sleeping with them, which caused the miners to reek of sour dough.

As a term referring to a type of bread, rather than a type of person, sourdough did not take off before the 1960s, when it was presented as a kitschy, tough-to-chew wilderness food. Alice Waters—the farm-to-table divinity whose altar is every traffic-thronged urban farmers’ market—brought a craving for French-style sourdough back to California after she had it in Paris, where levain has a much longer history. Americans have now “fetishized the sourdough,” Rubel says, so much so that, in their pursuit of tradition, they have bolted out beyond it, into an ahistoric gastronomic delusion: American sourdough, Rubel says, is uniquely astringent. “In France, they don’t want it to taste sour.”

Rubel also tells me that the whole premise of my article is flawed. “I think you need to think about favorite versus best,” he says. He objects to the fact that I am using the terms, essentially, interchangeably: “Obviously, those can be really different.”

Rubel’s pronouncement severs the tether that has been weakly holding me to reality as I attempt to determine the best free restaurant bread in America. I spend an afternoon losing and evading my own mind across a kaleidoscopic astral plane of axiological and epistemological contemplation. What if the true criteria for what makes one bread the best are unknown, not just to me, but to everyone on Earth? What are the chances that my 555 poll takers represent, exclusively, morons and deviants, whose tastes in no way reflect those of normal people? Wouldn’t many people citing the same thing as their favorite necessarily make it, at least in some way, the best?

The Bread That Flies Through the Air

While I attempt to ask as many different sorts of people “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” as possible, my sample—though it encompasses respondents of diverse ages, races, incomes, political persuasions, formal-education levels, points of geographic origin, etc.—is inevitably limited.

Lambert’s Cafe is a remarkable contender for several reasons. Although it has only three locations, in Missouri and Alabama, its bread is among the 10 most-named by respondents: four strangers from the internet, two members of my husband’s family, a museum curator my friend knows, and the chef of another restaurant I visited on my quest. But the most noteworthy thing about Lambert’s Cafe is that it distributes its free bread to diners by lobbing it at them from across the room, forcing them to catch it in their bare hands. It is, as its shockingly robust gift shop makes clear 20 million times over, the “Home of Throwed Rolls.”

I make my pilgrimage to Lambert’s a few days after last Christmas; in Foley, Alabama, families are milling around outside at night in T-shirts and shorts. The restaurant sprawls like a commercial ag shed. Its furnishings are psychotropic, but devoid of the gentle embrace of tranquilizers. Above my booth hang several wooden birdhouses and one birdcage (all vacant), an Alabama license plate, a lithograph of a magician, signs advertising gasoline and Coca-Cola, an illustration of mules in a river, a T-shirt for a wheelchair basketball team framed behind cracked glass, and a metal pictogram that appears to warn of ducks.

Not since stoop-shouldered Irish monks illuminated miracles on vellum in aureate arsenic have more densely inscribed materials than the Lambert’s Cafe menu been produced in the Western Hemisphere. Each page bears more rules and explanations than I have ever seen on a menu or legal document—all the more impressive because each page also contains more pictures. There are portraits of Lambert forebears; cartoons of farm animals making dry allusion to the fact that they are subject to slaughter for their protein; a Zodiac Killer cipher key, elucidating the 12 abbreviations for common allergens that speckle the menu; edicts governing plate sharing and doggie bags; an exhortation to visit the gift shop; a list of salads, all of which contain meat; the yowl “SLICE O’HOG From the left side and cut fresh every day!”; and many other elements, besides.

The one that soothes me so totally that it sends all the adrenaline molecules in my body drifting away on a blood lazy river is a red-text promise: “ALL YOU CAN DRINK” soft drinks. My Diet Coke is served in the restaurant’s signature mug, which, I learn later, while typing these very words, holds 64 ounces of liquid, and which, I also learn—upon Googling 64 oz x 2 to gallons—means I drank an entire gallon of Diet Coke in one sitting? No???

Lambert’s Cafe ovens turn out an average of 520 dozen rolls a day, for a total of more than 2 million five-inch rolls a year. On the night of my visit, the roll warden—the hlāfweard—is a young man in heatproof gloves with the salient biceps and keen sight of a baseball player. Patrons signal that they would like a roll to be hurled at them by raising a hand in the air. The accuracy of the bread thrower’s aim is spectacular, especially considering that his mental calculations must incorporate a flash assessment of each customer’s degree of hand-eye coordination. In the nearly two hours I spend in the restaurant, I see only one roll miss its mark, obviously due to catcher error.

These rolls are, I discover when one collides with my chest cavity, as hot as meteorites slamming into the Earth. They are, by far, the hottest part of my meal, which includes numerous cooked items. The rolls—big and bulbous, with a dense and super-soft interior; faintly sweet and just east of gummy; the tranquil hue of hot-dog buns—are fine but not great. I would absolutely go back. Terrific big sodas!

The Bread of the Appalachian Dancing Bear

Do you know what I love most about my spreadsheet containing 555 replies to the question “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” (Apart from the fact that it has revealed to me, and soon to you, the hitherto hidden knowledge of what is quite possibly—and in fact I really do believe—the best free restaurant bread in America.)

I love seeing what 555 people said. I love the American optimism, which even more American confidence transforms into certainty, that every respondent is, or at least could be, possessed of the knowledge of the best free restaurant bread in America. I love the fact that no matter where you travel within the 50 states and Washington, D.C., you are never far from what at least one person considers the best free restaurant bread in America.

I love the town names—Big Indian, New York (named for a Munsee Lenape man, allegedly more than 7 feet tall, who lived there); Bee Cave, Texas (named for the honeybees—Mexican honeybees, allegedly—who lived there). I love the chance that the best free restaurant bread in America is to be found on an island off the coast of South Carolina with a population of 130. I love contemplating the food court inside the Pentagon—site of a Lebanese Taverna, whose warm pita is nominated as the best free restaurant bread in America by a man eating at Netflix Bites, and by the chef José Andrés. I love the outrageous-but-not-impossible prospect that the best free restaurant bread in America might be handed out by an oyster bar in Omaha, which is almost as far from an oyster bed as it is physically possible to be in America.

Cafe Capriccio. Sanitary Fish Market and Restaurant. Silver Saddle. Spindleshanks. Because I lack the budget and employer patience to journey to each of the 226 restaurants that received only a single vote, I determine, instead, to visit just one. This will serve as a spot check, to assess the quality of random strangers’ nominations. Having no better means of selecting the spot, I pick the one that has the most charming name. This is how I end up driving into the woods—fully into the woods—of Townsend, Tennessee, to dine at Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro.

Dancing Bear’s entrance is an illusion of carved pine and glass. On approach, its doors appear to depict the arches and stained-glass windows of a Gothic cathedral; close up, the woodwork resolves into the sloping tree branches of a humble forest scene. The dining room, on a cold winter night, is a cozy hall abundant with wood, lit and warmed by an immense stacked-stone fireplace.

The free bread arrives on a slate slab: two wedges of corn bread drizzled with sorghum syrup, next to a ruffled dollop of whisper-light butter. The bad news: Corn bread is just not my favorite. Therefore, I do not believe Dancing Bear’s corn bread is the best free restaurant bread in America. The good news: If you love corn bread, this might well be the best free restaurant bread in America, to your misguided taste. It is fathoms above other corn breads. It does not crumble into infinite particles when I bite it. The wedges leave wet sorghum smacks on the slate. In fact, I am dribbling sorghum all over the table. What decadent madness, to entrust every diner with such a sticky substance. I request more bread and, using my trowel-shaped knife, coat it in butter as thickly as a mason mortaring a chimney. I eat a knifeful of the salty butter alone because I am a wild animal. The bread is so good, it makes me giddy. Is corn bread my favorite?

The corn bread from Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro, in Townsend, Tennessee, might be the best free restaurant bread in America, but only if corn bread is your favorite. (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

(Eventually, I learn that I just happened to be there on a corn-bread evening. The restaurant also serves two varieties of focaccia.)

The rest of my meal—roasted-garlic-and-herb-crusted beef-tenderloin tips with local mushrooms, apple-cider gelée, Granny Smith apples, and pickled cranberries; steamed Moosabec mussels—is so delicious as to border on the hallucinatory. The room thrums with conviviality, pierced, now and then, by shrieks of intoxicated laughter. I cannot shake the thought that, when people imagine a perfect little restaurant, this dining room is what they are searching for. When, as I mull dessert options, my waiter tells me that I may also just help myself to free s’mores outside, I wonder how this reasonably priced restaurant (my meal, with dessert—and free s’mores—comes to just over $60 before tip) can possibly make money.

Datassential, an analytics company that monitors the food-and-beverage industry, uses a representative sample of 4,800 establishments to keep tabs on restaurant-menu trends across the United States. In 2012, when the company began tracking the practice of charging for bread, 6 percent of restaurants did it. Last year, 36 percent of restaurant menus in the sample offered some form of bread as an appetizer, and 41 percent of menus listed it as a side. Seemingly every newspaper or magazine story about the increasing popularity of “bread courses” features at least one chef, owner, or manager explaining that a restaurant can no longer afford to give bread away. I want to know how Dancing Bear pulls it off.

The restaurant’s bread cost per table is “really not that much,” says Dancing Bear’s executive chef, Jeff Carter—about 40 cents, he estimates. The vice president of operations, Houston Oldham, tells me that has “very little effect on our bottom line.”

“If somebody’s telling you that they are scared of having bread on their menu because it costs too much,” Oldham says, “there is a cost of pain for your guests too: a cost of a bad experience when you don’t have a way to fill the gaps between courses.”

And, Carter says, the bread enhances the festive atmosphere. “We kind of consider this our gift to the guest.”

The other thing that Dancing Bear gets just right: nice big Diet Cokes in stout glass jars. And they keep them coming.

The Restaurant in America That I Hate, That I Will Never Go Back to, That Has Made of Me an Enemy for Life Due to Its Psychotic Soda Policy

A confession: Throughout this investigation, I nurture an unscientific—though, I am fairly certain, forgivable because ultimately correct—bias. Although it receives just one vote (mine), I remain confident that the bread that inspired this quest truly is the best free restaurant bread in America. A week after my trip to the earthly paradise known as Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro, I fly to Atlanta—to the steak house Bones—to eat it.

Here is what the restaurant does beautifully on my visit: the bread. It is a boule cut into four wedges. Every possible shade of golden retriever, from pale cream to the deepest cognac orange, is represented by some centimeter of this rotund loaf; its floured bottom is the dark brown of all of their paw pads. Its crust is a texture known to old-fashioned Yankees as cat ice—the brittle sheet, so thin that a cat’s paw could shatter it, of an iced-over puddle. On very close inspection, the irregular latticework of air pockets inside the chewy crumb resembles a network of semi-translucent cobwebs. It has no dominant taste other than the flavor of the verriest bread—simple, warm, perfect bread—which it possesses in extraordinary quantity.

Here is what the restaurant does poorly: serves Diet Cokes in glasses that are, I’m going to say, no bigger than a thimble inside a sewing kit inside a dollhouse and, I am astounded and appalled to discover upon receiving my bill, charges you $4 for each and every single one you drink. (Having previously dined here only as my husband’s brilliant and visually stunning dream date, I had apparently never looked at a bill at this restaurant.) Over the course of one evening, I spend a total of $16 on Diet Cokes. Worth every penny, of course—1,600 of them—but I’ll never go back.

I award this restaurant negative 10 million stars.

The boule from the steak house Bones, in Atlanta, is simple and perfect—
unlike the restaurant’s contemptible Diet Coke–pricing strategy. (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

The Chain-Restaurant Popularity Paradox

Can the best free restaurant bread in America come from a chain restaurant? According to raw poll votes, the answer is yes. Chain restaurants claim nearly every spot in the top 10 of my poll. On the one hand, this is to be expected; people are more likely to have been exposed to the bread at a restaurant with 940 locations than at a restaurant with just one. On the other hand, although chains are named most often in the responses, the number of a restaurant’s locations do not predict its overall popularity; Olive Garden, with the most locations, receives the fifth-most votes.

I email Sir David Spiegelhalter, a professor emeritus of statistics at the University of Cambridge and a former president of the Royal Statistical Society, to see if he might suggest a math equation to derive meaning from my helter-skelter data. “If a restaurant had 10 customers, and 8 thought it had the best bread, this would seem more impressive than if another restaurant had 100 customers, and 10 thought it had the best bread,” he writes back. I concur with my associate. The problem: To weigh the number of votes a restaurant received against the number of that restaurant’s customers, I would need to find reliable estimates of each restaurant’s customers per year. “But I don’t know where you get the footfall data from!” replies Sir David, now as hopelessly lost as I.

I decide to calculate the rate of bestness by analyzing the two variables I know for certain: the number of each bread slinger’s locations and the number of nominations it received.

Dividing votes (40) by location (215) gives the Cheesecake Factory—the restaurant that received the most total votes—a bestness rate of 0.19, or the equivalent of 19 votes per 100 restaurants. Lambert’s Cafe earns a bestness rate of 2.66—the equivalent of 266 votes per 100 restaurants. While imperfect, this method at least does not penalize restaurants for failing to be national chains—though, for the purposes of the poll, I accept all nominations at face value. If a person tells me they believe the best free restaurant bread in America can be had at Olive Garden, I believe them. I am open to the possibility.

William Rubel is not open to the possibility. When I mention that table bread, these days, is most reliably found at restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory and Texas Roadhouse, he is staggered that I’m even considering them as possible purveyors of the best free restaurant bread in America. “It never occurred to me that that’s what you’d be referring to,” he says.

“There is no best bread, in an elite cultural sense, at these places you’ve mentioned—which are places that people like me have never been.” He “cannot imagine why I would ever walk through the door” of such a place. He would “never go to” them “under any circumstances.”

I imagine a circumstance: What if a Red Lobster is all that’s around?

“I don’t eat at chain restaurants,” he says. “I eat at artisan restaurants.”

What if he were driving, I insist, and there were no other options. Would he starve?

“That’s why I don’t travel the United States,” he says.

Red Lobster, Rubel explains, is “what I would read as sort of down-market. I’m sorry—you go there.” (Only when it’s open!) “But it’s not going to Chez Panisse.” The amount of money possessed by the average Red Lobster patron is likely less than the average diner at a restaurant evaluated by the James Beard Foundation, he observes. Therefore, he points out—not unreasonably—their concepts of “value” may differ.

It will be impossible, Rubel thinks, for me to identify the best free restaurant bread in America if I’m willing to entertain nominations for chain restaurants. “Because, I’m sorry, those factories are not producing anything that would be called ‘best’ by any objective standard—probably,” he says.

However, “brown bread” from the Cheesecake Factory is not only the most popular answer in the poll; it also tends to come to people quickly. Helen Rosner, a food correspondent for The New Yorker, sums up the tastes of the nation even without being privy to the polling data. “Obviously the Cheesecake Factory’s brown bread is the gold standard of free restaurant bread,” she writes to me in an email—and, in the same heartbeat, presents a bang-on psychological profile of the country’s citizens. “It’s distinct,” she writes. “Dark brown bread shows up pretty rarely in most people’s daily lives, so it both feels special, and has the competitive advantage of not being subconsciously compared to near-infinite other breads of similar complexion.”

One January afternoon, I travel to the smallest Cheesecake Factory in America—the flagship location, in Beverly Hills—to break brown bread with Jay Hinson, the company’s senior vice president of restaurant-kitchen operations. The average Cheesecake Factory location serves about 7,500 “brown breads”—they are “whole-wheat baguettes,” technically, drearily—a week, plus 6,800 of the less-remarked-upon sourdough baguettes that accompany them in the same basket. All of the bread is baked off-site—the sourdough at facilities in New Jersey and Los Angeles, the brown bread in Chicago—frozen, and shipped to the restaurants, where it is rebaked to order. The Cheesecake Factory declined to share any details about the amount of money it spends creating thousands of breads for hundreds of restaurants every week, but at one point in our conversation, Hinson observes, “It is very expensive to have a bread program that is free.” At another, he tosses out a hypothetical scenario in which a restaurant company might spend “$10 million” on bread, which seems like an absurd number to chance upon as a totally random example; make of that what you will.

The miniature whole-wheat baguette from the Cheesecake Factory is firm, marginally sweet, speckled with oats for texture, and memorably brown. (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

Hinson, an amiable man with six daughters, began working at the Cheesecake Factory as a line cook in Westbury, New York, 28 years ago, and now flies to Chile to meet salmon vendors, and Turkey to meet branzino vendors, and Sweden to watch German-made ovens churn out pasta and steak simultaneously, with an eye ever fixed on the horizon of potential Cheesecake Factory refinements. He is loquacious only about the science of cooking, but also possessed of a striking corporate verbal tic, in which he substitutes the word opportunities for problems : “If your equipment, after five years, has opportunities, you have to place service calls.” “We’ll meet with my team and discuss any opportunities that happened the week prior. Did we solve them all?” Many customers “had some opportunities with” a previous sourdough iteration that was unacceptably crusty.

The miniature whole-wheat baguette placed on our table is the rich brown of life-giving Diet Coke. It is warm, of course; soft, but with a firm crust; covered in a dense constellation of oats, for “a little bit of texture,” Hinson says. It is sweet in the way that adults like things to be—marginally—and mellowed further with the addition of salted Grassland butter. I sample it as I sample everything: like a black hole. I consume two baskets of baguettes solo; Hinson seldom eats free restaurant bread. I would like it to be sweeter, or saltier, or both. But it feels virtuous to be eating something at least moderately healthy, and so blatantly brown.

Except, Rubel informs me (of course), brown bread is not especially healthy. “It’s not?” I ask. “In real life?” Rubel replies. “No.”

I think of Rubel, and his self-sentenced ignorance of the delights of Red Lobster, a few weeks later, when I visit my father. Measured by the amount of joy it is capable of producing, I’d told Rubel, “a Cheddar Bay Biscuit at Red Lobster is pretty good.”

We moved my father cross-country to his apartment in Santa Fe a few years ago, after my mother died unexpectedly. I can tell before I’ve set one foot inside his door that the man has treated himself to a Red Lobster Ultimate Feast. “Ohhh, it smells like lobster in here!” I exclaim; he has been feeling poorly, and I have taken, recently, to entering his apartment with the verve of a cartoon character. My father is in his recliner, the Ultimate Feast sprawled out before him: A snow crab’s severed Jurassic limbs jut over the edge of his wooden tray alongside a half-eaten Cheddar Bay Biscuit.

I am happy to see that he’s summoned an Ultimate Feast for himself, because a couple of weeks earlier, he told me that food doesn’t “taste like food” to him lately. But I realize that he hasn’t made his characteristic dent in the spread.

“What does it taste like?” I ask.

“It kind of tastes like sawdust,” Dad says. “Even the biscuits didn’t taste good, and I love their biscuits.” He is so darkly fascinated by this—Cheddar Bay Biscuits’ novel flavorlessness—that he repeats the observation a minute later. “It’s amazing,” he says, “because I usually love their biscuits.” He encourages me to take the extra biscuit home, which of course I do.

My dad will die a few days later, while I am working on this story. This conversation about Cheddar Bay Biscuits will turn out to be one of our last.

The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

Based on survey responses, Americans seem capable of genuinely convincing themselves that they have just eaten the best free restaurant bread in America anytime they are given gratis bread that is warm or hot. This is not just psychology, Kantha Shelke, a food scientist, tells me; “it’s actually thermodynamics.” Because aroma is “80 percent of the flavor,” Shelke explains, and warm bread releases volatile aroma compounds into the air, “the warm bread literally tastes better to us.” (She also tells me that, short of seizing a Cheesecake Factory and transforming it into your private residence, you will never, ever be able to re-create the exact taste of its brown bread at home. Commercial enterprises have access to oxidizing agents, dough-conditioning enzymes, and surfactants that “simply are not available to home bakers.”)

Apart from temperature, pillowy, soft, and sweet are the most common adjectives applied to favorite breads in people’s responses, followed by crispy and crusty. Small efforts to enhance presentation, plus novel shapes and flavors⁠—bread served on a black linen napkin, for example, or apple fritters—seem to pay off big in terms of memorability. There are some quirky regional trends: Many Californians are able to name the exact local bakery from which their favorite restaurant bread is sourced. Millennials from Massachusetts are inordinately likely to at least mention a pizza chain called Bertucci’s that, I am informed over and over again, gives young diners raw dough to play with at the table. Immediate family members frequently identify the same bread as their favorite, as if this has been determined by group vote. Many people can only recall breads eaten as children.

Two restaurants are named often enough in the poll to reach the top 10 without being chains: Parc, in Philadelphia, and Le Diplomate, in Washington, D.C. These restaurants, both operated by the Philadelphia restaurateur Stephen Starr, turn out to serve the exact same bread. If, for the purposes of calculation, we consider them a single restaurant with two outposts, they receive the equivalent of 1,150 votes per 100 restaurants. There are other, no doubt smarter ways to manipulate the data. And, of course, there remains the possibility that the poll has demonstrated only the peculiar tastes of morons and deviants—with the exception of the gracious Stephen King. But you can’t keep fiddling with the numbers of your bread poll forever. At a certain point, you have to rejoin the world.

The wicker baskets at Parc, a French bistro on Rittenhouse Square, contain three varieties of bread tucked into wax paper—but the only one people talk about is the cranberry-walnut loaf. It is fitting that the best free restaurant bread in America should contain cranberries; they are indigenous to North America. If you were going to design a restaurant bread specifically intended to appeal to 21st-century Americans, you might well create this exact foodstuff: It is a very chewy sourdough, with a thick, crispy crust that is chocolate brown in color—practically the same hue as the Cheesecake Factory bread. The dried cranberries add so much sweetness that some people mistake them for cherries, but oats and nuts check the suavity before it runs amok. In fact, the bread has an Everlasting Gobstopper–ish ability to harmoniously convey the sensation of eating an entire meal, with dessert, in every bite. It is assembled from familiar ingredients, but unusual enough to be memorable. The terrazzo arrangement of nut and berry is beautiful by candlelight; the crumb appears studded with gems.

Slices of the cranberry-walnut bread served at Parc, in Philadelphia, and Le Diplomate, in Washington, D.C. Each bite delivers the sensation of eating an entire meal. (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

Starr estimates that, at a cost of about 60 cents a basket, with 10,000 customers a week, Parc gives away slightly less than half a million dollars in free bread every year—a figure that does not include butter. The kitchen turns out about 1,500 loaves a day, of which 200 are the cranberry-walnut. The brief that Starr gave his chef and baker when the restaurant opened was: “Just come up with the greatest breadbasket ever.” The goal, he tells me, was to create a breadbasket so satisfying that “you didn’t have to spend any money. You could just come in here, order the breadbasket, a glass of wine, and you’re good for the next five, six hours. We just wanted it to be joyful.”

“From a financial standpoint, it was the dumbest move we ever made,” he says. “It costs so much and people eat so much of it.” He’s come close to charging for it, he says. But “the moment I think I’m going to do it, I go, ‘I can’t do it.’ ”

My visit to Parc, a few weeks after my father’s death, is the first time I go to Philly, his hometown, without his knowledge. I am seated near a family: a mother, father, and college-age daughter. I can hardly look at them, even as I can’t keep my eyes off them. Veiled by Parc’s low lighting, I allow myself to sink into a luxuriant, tear-flooded sadness. My parents will never again shout to be heard in a winter-crowded restaurant, or identify the cheapest (Mom) or most expensive (Dad) entrée. They will never again call, into a McDonald’s drive-through speaker, the beverage-order coda that I have never heard anyone outside my immediate family utter: “And a cup of free water.” Before my check arrives, I request a to-go box of just cranberry-walnut bread, and am floored by the quantity of pieces I receive in a swish brown bag. I wish I could tell my parents about it. Just knowing it was possible to receive so much bread for free would have delighted them.

William Rubel’s profoundest anxiety about my article, I learn, is that I will inadvertently denigrate another culture’s bread—by suggesting that a yeasted roll is inherently superior to, say, chapati. He fears this more than the possibility that I might assert in print that Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits taste better than the bread served at Chez Panisse. (“I guess I need to eat it,” he says, catching himself declaring, with no firsthand knowledge, that the table bread at Red Lobster could not possibly be superior. I will extend this same grace to the bread at Chez Panisse.) “You’ll need to find some way to clarify that you aren’t saying these are the best breads in the world,” he tells me. “These are what people you talked to in America at this time considered the best.”

“There’s no recipe for the best bread,” Rubel says. “The best bread is written in each person’s heart.”

I disagree. The best bread—at least the best free restaurant bread in America—is the aforementioned cranberry-walnut loaf.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Hegseth’s Unholy War

2026-04-14T06:00:00-04:00

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“The devil,” William Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, “can cite Scripture for his purpose.” As we’ve seen in recent weeks, so can Pete Hegseth.

Late last month, during the first Christian worship service at the Pentagon since the Iran war began, the secretary of defense cast the conflict as essentially religious and spiritual in nature. The focus of his remarks was less the righteousness of our side of the war than the necessity of mercilessly inflicting vengeance and pain on the other.

Hegseth invoked Psalm 18, in which King David says he did not turn back until his enemies were “consumed.” His enemies “cried for help, but there was none to save them.” Hegseth read passages in which David exults that he “beat them fine as dust before the wind” and “cast them out like the mire of the streets.”

Hegseth also read a prayer composed by a chaplain—relying on imprecatory psalms, including 35, 58, and 144—requesting God’s “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Hegseth prayed that “every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness.” He requested that God “break the teeth of the ungodly.” By “the blast of your anger,” he said, God would “let the evil perish.” The Almighty should “pour out your wrath against those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind.” Hegseth beseeched God to act so “evil may be driven back and wicked souls be delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.”

The man who refers to himself as the secretary of war concluded his prayer with “we ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, king over all kings, and amen. Amen.”

To be clear, then: Secretary of Defense Hegseth is praying for “overwhelming violence” and “no mercy” in the “powerful name of Jesus Christ,” the Prince of Peace.

As Ronit Stahl, a historian of the military chaplaincy, told Greg Sargent of The New Republic, “It’s highly unusual for high-ranking officers or civilian military leaders to relish killing and violence in God’s name as a religious duty.”

But Hegseth is different. Last month, Hegseth said that the United States would give “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” which would constitute a war crime under both international law and U.S. military codes. Pentagon offices designed to prevent civilian harm during combat operations are being dismantled. And in Donald Trump’s first term, Hegseth lobbied the president for pardons for three members of the military who were facing charges related to, or had been convicted of, war crimes. He defended Blackwater contractors convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians. He appears to relish the ability to inflict destruction and death.

Trump, for his part, has threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants, desalination stations, oil wells, roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. Last week, he threatened to send the Iranians “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” On Easter weekend, he wrote that unless the Iranians open the Strait of Hormuz, “all Hell will reign down on them. All glory to God.” And in the most crazed statement of his crazed presidency, Trump wrote on Easter morning, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.”

[Missy Ryan: Pete Hegseth delights in violence]

The day after Easter, Trump intensified his threats to devastate Iranian bridges and power plants if Iran’s leaders didn’t agree to a cease-fire. “Every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again,” the president warned. He dismissed any concerns that such actions might constitute war crimes. “Not at all,” Trump said. The following day, the president of the United States wrote on social media, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

In the end, Trump pulled back; a whole civilization did not die on Tuesday night. But no one can doubt Trump’s genuine indifference to the norms and laws of armed conflict that, however imperfectly, aim to restrain the worst abuses. When asked earlier this year if there are any limits on his global powers, he answered, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Hegseth has given us a lot to untangle theologically. Take his use of imprecatory psalms, which call on God to rain down calamity and destruction upon his enemies. Imprecatory psalms are emotional laments, in the voice of the desperate and the powerless—and they sound very different when recited by those in charge of the most awesome military force in history. In imprecatory psalms, it is God, not humans, being asked to execute judgment. These psalms generally express a deep yearning for justice, with vengeance placed in the hands of the Lord, freeing us of the consuming need to seek revenge ourselves.

Psalm 18 is not an imprecatory psalm. In it, David narrates his own story, telling of the destruction of his enemies and crediting God for making it possible. Hegseth’s invocation of Psalm 18 sends the message that military action is an expression of divine will, and that the attack on Iran constitutes a holy war.

The Trump administration’s invocation of scripture and allusions to the total annihilation of the enemy add yet another layer. Hegseth and Trump and their supporters, particularly the fundamentalist and evangelical Christians among them, want theological cover for targeting Iran’s power supply, which might result in mass civilian death. Hospital equipment would stop working, water purification would cease, sewage systems and food refrigeration would fail. The food supply chain would be disrupted. Urban areas might become unlivable, forcing millions to flee.

Trump hasn’t yet done those things, and perhaps he never will. But the president and his secretary of defense are already justifying such acts, just in case they decide to go down this path. They want to signal to the world, and perhaps reassure themselves, that God is on their side. That killing civilians is not just acceptable but an act of righteous obedience.

Some bells can’t be unrung.

Tucked away in this debate is a complicated interpretive dispute. Some adherents of the Christian faith believe, as many of the early church fathers did, that biblical accounts of divine violence—especially accounts of God commanding the Israelites to kill entire populations—are not literal but allegorical, representing the soul’s battle against sin. Figures like Origen argued that embracing a literal understanding of texts such as 1 Samuel 15:3, in which God commands that his people utterly destroy “man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” would attribute monstrous qualities to God, a moral impossibility. A good rule of thumb, they would say, is that if you find yourself ascribing to God actions that are repellant and horrifying when done by humans, something is amiss.

[Peter Wehner: Pete Hegseth’s moral unseriousness]

Others, like Paul Copan, the author of Is God a Moral Monster?, believe that the language of herem—a Hebrew term for a ban, in this case meaning total destruction, or wholesale slaughter—was typical of the hyperbole found in the ancient Near East. What’s being described is a military conflict, he would say, but one sanctioned by God. The specific words in the Bible, however, reflect the military bravado employed by writers of the Hebrew scriptures. They are not to be taken literally.

The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff offers a contemporary example that helps illustrate this point: If a high-school-basketball player says that his team “slaughtered” its opponents, he doesn’t literally mean what he says, and he doesn’t assume that anyone would take him to be literal. He’s simply saying that his team dominated the game. Advocates of this interpretive approach point out that in the Book of Joshua, peoples who were said to have been “utterly destroyed” reappear. So, they argue, the language was either intentionally hyperbolic or the accounts false.

A third group of scholars that includes Peter Enns, a professor of biblical studies at Eastern University, believes that the portrayal of God as an advocate for total annihilation is what you’d expect from a tribal people describing God in their tribal ways. As Enns has written, “God never told the Israelites to kill the Canaanites. The Israelites believed that God told them to kill the Canaanites."

In a blog post published last year, Enns makes what he considers to be the more important point: “The word of God as a two-edged sword is supposed to be turned inward, piercing us, not everyone around us.” He adds, “The Bible is not a weapon, a sword to be wielded against modern-day Canaanites or Babylonians. It is a book where we meet God. It brings hope, encouragement, knowledge, and deep truth for those willing to risk, and to ‘die’ to themselves, as Jesus puts it, to accept the challenge of scripture, knowing they will be undone in the process.”

Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, says that the Bible is “the accumulation of what you might call the interaction of God with a succession of human societies.” The biblical scholar John Barton refers to the Bible as a “dialogue among authors.” The authors say different things at different times, including about God. The Bible is a book—a library of books, really—that contains, and is meant to contain, different and at times competing theologies. The Bible preserves disagreements, and it’s no less sacred for doing so. (Among the competing accounts of this subject within scripture are 2 Kings and Hosea, which present contrasting perspectives on Jehu’s massacre of the House of Ahab, and the differences in attitude toward the Ninevites in Jonah, where we see expansive mercy, and Nahum, where we see wrath.)

Still others, like Tremper Longman III, a scholar of the Jewish Bible, accept the full historicity and divine authorization of the herem commands. Longman believes that God ordered the wholesale slaughter not just of opposing armies but of entire populations, including women, children, and infants. But, he argues, the circumstances were unique, the product of a particular historical moment, and not to be replicated. To do so would be to undo the work of Jesus.

Longman relies on what he calls “spiritual continuity.” What he means by that is “the war against the Canaanites was simply an earlier phase of the battle that comes to its climax on the cross and its completion at the final judgment. The object of warfare moves from the Canaanites, who are the object of God’s wrath for their sin, to the spiritual powers and principalities, and then finally to the utter destruction of all evil, human and spiritual.”

None of these scholars, despite their other disagreements, sees holy war as normative. That should be especially obvious to those who claim to follow Jesus, who told them to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” The Sermon on the Mount is a repudiation of the conquest ethic.

When Peter drew his sword at the Garden of Gethsemane, during the night of Jesus’s arrest, Jesus told him, “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” Jesus affirmed a shocking thing: The kingdom he was inaugurating is not advanced by the sword. Yet Hegseth prayed that “every round would find its mark.”

Virtually all of the individuals within the various interpretive camps in Christianity I’ve discussed above would contend that it is a serious misreading of scripture to argue that imprecatory psalms and conquest accounts in books like Deuteronomy, Joshua, and 1 Samuel are endorsements of the wholesale slaughter of innocents today.

And that’s not all. Almost all rabbinical scholars—whether they affirm the historicity of the conquest accounts or not—emphatically agree that the rules of the warfare the scripture describes no longer apply. Among other things, Jewish scholars point out, the specific peoples against whom herem was commanded no longer exist as identifiable groups. That door has been bolted shut. “There is a category of milchemet mitzvah, which is a commanded war of self-defense,” Michael Holzman, the rabbi of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, told me. “But wars of annihilation no longer exist.”

Serious and thoughtful people have argued over these issues, which have bedeviled Christians and Jews for millennia. But Hegseth, Trump, and many of their fundamentalist and evangelical followers seem less interested in textual interpretation than in seeking scriptural validation for their bloodlust. They seem determined to find texts within the Bible to justify their dark passions, their emotional and psychological predilections. They believe what they believe quite apart from the Bible; its utility is to affirm what they already intend to do. Hegseth and his merry band of holy warriors aren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent that God is on their side.

This is a constant temptation, and giving in to it almost always ends badly.

On an individual level, there’s something quite sad about people whose lives are fueled by hate and vengeance, who seem perennially unsettled, and for whom inner peace and calm contentment seem always out of reach. They are at war with the world and at war with themselves.

When these individuals assume positions of power, however—when they are able to inflict suffering on others, particularly on a mass scale; when their pathologies become society-wide and find a haven within the highest reaches of government—sympathy should give way not just to concern but to outrage.

One thing I’ve come to see, more clearly than I once did, is that understanding sacred texts does not depend solely on knowledge of the text. At least as important, and perhaps a good deal more important, are the sensibilities and temperament—the wisdom—that readers bring to the text.

In fundamentalist and evangelical circles in particular, enormous emphasis is put on reading scripture and memorizing Bible verses. That can be a blessing, of course. Christians and Jews believe that the books comprising their canon are holy. They bear witness to God—the Word behind the words—and reveal what it means to live rightly before God. In times of trial and grief, the words of the Bible can be healing. They can provide hope and grace in the journey.

But it’s also true that in the wrong hands, Bible verses can become decontextualized, or be used to sanctify preexisting biases. Scripture has on far too many occasions been used to deny scientific truths (evolution and the age of the Earth) and to advance immoral ends (slavery, segregation). People frequently use the Bible to wound others under the guise of speaking “truth in love.” Many of the greatest crimes in Christian history were committed by people who knew their Bible exceedingly well.

The Bible said it, I believe it, and that settles it is an approach to hermeneutics that can lead people astray. It rests on two mistaken presumptions: that the Bible is easy to interpret, and that our own interpretations of the Bible are inerrant. Neither is true.

[Missy Ryan: Holy warrior]

The latest debate about holy war is a reminder that moral dispositions and discernment are among the most important interpretive tools Christians have. The apostle Paul seemed to hint at this when he said, in 1 Corinthians 13, that you can have all knowledge, you can fathom all mysteries, you can have faith that moves mountains, but without love, you are nothing.

Those who relish mercilessness and see themselves as agents of God’s wrath are nothing.

Trump Pivots to ‘Least Bad Option’ On Iran

2026-04-13T18:14:31-04:00

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President Trump may have reached the limits of what he can achieve by bombing targets in Iran—now he’s trying to use economic pressure to bring Tehran back to the negotiating table. After a six-week pummeling by U.S. and Israeli forces failed to force Iran to capitulate, and a marathon weekend negotiating session ended without a deal, the United States announced that it would be imposing a naval blockade on Iran. The latest strategy illustrates just how far the war has shifted from Trump’s original—albeit confusing—objectives. The principal American interest today is to walk into the next round of talks with a clear advantage, by making Iran’s economic life as difficult as possible.

That is, to reach a peace deal during the already declared cease-fire, the U.S. believes that it needs to wage a new kind of war, this time by targeting Iran’s economy—which depends heavily on energy exports through the Strait of Hormuz.

The blockade is “the least bad option” after the collapse of the talks in Islamabad last weekend, one former military official told us. Trump has repeatedly claimed victory in the war, but the regime remains in charge in Tehran and has used its control of the strait to impose steep economic costs on the world. Imposing a blockade will also draw the U.S. military deeper into the conflict, potentially putting Navy ships face-to-face with Iranian forces or proxies.

The war’s outcome may now be decided by whether the U.S. or Iran blinks first from the economic pain and returns to the negotiating table with concessions. U.S. intelligence suggests that Iran may be more economically fragile than it is letting on, and that the loss of oil revenue from the blockade might force its hand, U.S. officials told us. But regardless of who wins, there are already a couple of clear losers. One is the rest of the world, which will suffer prolonged economic pain while Washington and Tehran engage and stare each other down at sea. The second is Trump’s own reputation as a leader who has spent years calling the geopolitical shots by making maximalist threats.

Trump has had little luck in recent weeks turning his headline-grabbing rhetoric into substantive victories on the world stage. Trump and J. D. Vance made extensive and highly visible efforts to prod the Hungarian electorate into backing another term for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, but couldn’t prevent the resounding defeat of Trump’s ally at the polls yesterday. European allies, in the face of Trump’s hectoring, have declined to enter the war in Iran. And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far not stopped his country’s war with Lebanon, a key Iranian demand, though he agreed to Trump’s request to rein in assaults and engage in direct talks with Lebanon this week in Washington, D.C.

[Read: There’s a message for MAGA in Viktor Orbán’s defeat ]

Even Trump’s recent trolling of Pope Leo XIV—which included posting a depiction of a Christlike Trump and an accusation that the head of the Roman Catholic Church was “WEAK on Crime”—was met with a papal riposte that encapsulates how more and more global leaders appear to be feeling: “I have no fear of the Trump administration.”

The blockade took effect today, but neither the White House nor the Pentagon provided much detail on how it will work. America’s allies and even officials within the military were scrambling to understand the scope of Trump’s order and how it would affect shipping through the strait and, by extension, the global economy.

The U.S. carried out what it called a naval “quarantine” against Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis. And the Trump administration conducted a limited blockade of Venezuela, targeting oil tankers, in the weeks leading up to the January capture of President Nicolás Maduro. But Washington rarely employs the tactic, because it is considered an act of war under international law; it’s complex to implement, demanding troops and materiel; and it’s inherently risky, current and former military officials told us. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive operations details, they described for us what would be involved.

[Read: Venezuela seems to be going … well?]

A formal blockade of the Strait of Hormuz that prevents Iranian ships and any other nations’ ships leaving Iranian ports from transiting to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea would begin with air power, the officials told us. At least two aircraft-carrier groups or land-based air forces would be tasked with providing cover for seaborne forces monitoring the waterway. P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft would watch the water and attack targets at sea. E-2 Hawkeye radar planes would fly above the fleet to detect threats and other aircraft. The U.S. would also swarm the strait with drones.

Controlling access points would take roughly a dozen destroyers and littoral combat ships. These ships, along with autonomous systems that don’t require human navigation, could also be used to conduct de-mining operations. Regional partners, including the United Arab Emirates, might also contribute to the effort.

Once a suspected Iranian ship attempted to break the blockade, Marines or Navy SEALs would need to board the ship, arriving by helicopter or on small boats. One Marine Expeditionary Unit, which could provide three boarding parties at any given time, is already nearby. But after U.S. troops seize an Iranian vessel, where would it go and who would guard it? This scenario assumes that those aboard such a ship would peacefully comply with U.S. orders. What if Iran put armed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps members on its ships who resist the American operation? For riskier boarding operations, the military typically employs highly skilled Special Operations forces, but even then things can go awry. In 2024, two SEALs died during one such mission off Somalia.

How else might Iran respond to the blockade? The regime, as it did during the 39-day U.S.-led campaign, could hit back with asymmetrical tactics—laying mines or launching drones and missiles. Those attacks might target both U.S. naval forces and Persian Gulf partners, on land and at sea. A single mine would not destroy a tanker but could sink a U.S. destroyer. The Iranians could also ask the Houthis in Yemen to harass commercial-shipping vessels in the Red Sea, which the group has done before, choking off an alternate route.

In theory, the blockade will prevent Iran from exporting additional oil from its ports—a sharp reversal from the Trump administration’s effort earlier in the war to lower the global price of oil by easing restrictions on the Iranian supply already at sea. Trump’s social-media post announcing the blockade indicates that the United States would interdict any vessel in international waters that had paid Iran to transit the strait. “No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas,” he said on Truth Social. In the Venezuela blockade, the U.S. Navy pursued ships as far as the Indian Ocean. But Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, has suggested that it is pursuing a more narrow mission focused on blockading Iranian ports. The U.S. military is also beginning a mission to clear the area of Iranian mines—but how many are hiding in the strait remains unknown, making the endeavor all the more perilous.

A blockade offers the U.S. a flexible, coercive means of imposing economic damage while minimizing direct civilian casualties. Air strikes on a bridge or a power plant, unlike a blockade, create damage that is not easily reversed. Retired Vice Admiral Kevin Donegan, who commanded U.S. naval forces in the Middle East from 2015 to 2017, said that the Navy has long interdicted vessels suspected of carrying drugs or other illicit cargo from Iran, including weapons bound for allies in Yemen. U.S. sailors, he said, can manage the risk associated with unwilling crews and with anti-ship fire from shore. “If your idea is to keep up the pressure on Iran during negotiations, a blockade does that without having to resort to restarting air strikes,” he told us.

But even if the blockade is successful, a return to normalcy for shipping traffic and prewar energy prices remains a long way off. Trump, in an interview yesterday with the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, said the price of oil might come down by November’s midterm elections—or “it could be, or the same or maybe a little bit higher, but it should be around the same.”

[Read: Iran out-trolled the troller in chief ]

Since the beginning of the conflict, commerce has slowed to a trickle in the strait, through which one-fifth of the world’s traded oil normally transits. Trump’s cease-fire nearly a week ago raised hopes that trade would soon resume. Now “that optimism has evaporated,” Chris Newton, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, told us. “If you take what Iran and the United States have said publicly, what you have is a double blockade, and no one wants to sail through that.”

The U.S. and Iran may yet return to their negotiations before the cease-fire expires next week. The 21 hours of meetings in Islamabad didn’t yield a breakthrough, but officials tell us that they did create some momentum. U.S. officials described the second stretch—nearly 10 hours—as the point when the friction between the two sides abated and they began to listen to each other. The result was a framework that would allow for future talks, though one official acknowledged that the cease-fire could still end with either a deal or a resumption of conflict.

The talks produced progress on the U.S. demand that Tehran abandon its nuclear-weapons ambitions, the official told us without providing specifics. But friction over the strait persists. After all of the ordnance that the U.S. and Israel have dropped in their effort to bring Iran to heel, the verdict of global markets might ultimately prove dispositive.

In the meantime, despite Trump’s threats and bluster, the U.S. may have to rely on other nations to find peace. Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey continue to try to get the talks back on track. The foreign minister of China, a major importer of Iranian oil, today urged other nations to “unequivocally oppose any actions that undermine the cease-fire or escalate the confrontation.” (Trump is scheduled to travel to Beijing next month for high-level talks, which have already been postponed once because of the war.) And the United Kingdom and France this week will host talks that are intended to form a peaceful multinational mission to restore freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.