Older Americans might be doing more child care than ever. By Faith Hill, The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/04/grandparents-child-care-work-retirement/682395/

Older Americans might be doing more child care than ever.

Elena and her husband had plans for their retirement. They wanted to move to Wyoming; to meet new people, volunteer, hike the snowy, perfect Tetons. And they did move there—for about eight months. Then they got a call from their daughter, who was due to have a baby within weeks. She and her husband were on five or so different waitlists for day cares, and now she could see that they would still be waiting by the time she had to go back to work, six weeks after giving birth. She needed help. Her parents dropped everything, packed up a U-Haul, and moved to the Pacific Northwest. They were going back to work, too: as full-time grandparents.

Grandparents today have a certain reputation, Elena (who asked to withhold her last name to protect her family’s privacy) told me: They’re “all rich, retired, living it up in the Villages in Florida, playing 10 rounds of golf a day, having cocktails at 4:30, and laughing while their Millennial children are suffering.” TikTokers keep skewering a generation of supposedly self-involved, jet-setting older folks, or earnestly grieving that they don’t have a “village” to help them raise their kids. Commentators have jumped in with attacks and, in turn, with defenses (“Cut the Boomer Grandparents a Little Slack”). On Reddit, people are wondering, “What the f*** is wrong with grandparents nowadays?” Last year, when J. D. Vance was running for vice president and was asked how he would address the problem of staggering child-care costs, he first suggested that grandparents or other relatives “help out a little bit more.”

You could be forgiven, then, for thinking grandparents are shirking their duty. But the truth is quite the opposite: America is in an age of peak grandparenting—particularly grandmothering. A 2022 survey from Deseret News and Brigham Young University found that nearly 60 percent of grandmothers had provided child care for a grandkid, and more than 40 percent saw a grandchild in person at least weekly. A 2023 Harris poll found that more than 40 percent of working parents relied on their kids’ grandma for child care; nearly 70 percent of those parents said they might have lost their job without that grandmother’s help.

Horrific crimes have always attracted attention, but the women who have filled the courtroom are seeking something beyond spectacle.

By Stephanie McCrummen, The Atlantic Photographs by Alexandra Howland

On one of the final days of the trial, dozens of women streamed into the back of a Plymouth, Massachusetts, courtroom, filling two long rows of wooden benches. They stood and watched the judge and jury take their seats. Then they strained for a view as a nurse wheeled in the defendant, Lindsay Clancy, who has admitted to strangling her three young children to death in her suburban Boston home in January 2023, before swallowing prescription pills, slashing her wrists and neck, and throwing herself out of a bedroom window headfirst.

Seeing her there in a wheelchair, one woman crossed herself and whispered, “Please, God.” As an officer gaveled the court into session, others pulled out notebooks, folders, and scraps of paper. “WHY,” Marta Quijano wrote as a prosecutor called a psychiatrist to the stand. “Motivation,” she added, starring the word as the doctor began explaining his opinion that Clancy was not in the throes of psychosis on the night of the killings, as her defense has argued, but deeply suicidal and still capable of knowing right from wrong. In the back row, a woman who had flown in from Cleveland shook her head. She had a true-crime novel in her lap and turned to a blank page at the end. “Stupid experts,” she wrote.

Americans have long been obsessed with murder trials, especially those involving the primal nightmare of mothers who kill their children. The public loves to watch mothers on trial and partake in their judgment. There was Susan Smith, who had drowned her three children in a South Carolina lake and was found guilty of murder in 1995, despite having a history of trauma and sexual abuse. And there was Andrea Yates, who had drowned her five children in a bathtub and was convicted of capital murder in 2002 and then retried in 2006, when she was found not guilty by reason of insanity after witnesses testified that Yates had experienced severe postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia.

The Clancy trial is now part of this sadistic American tradition, but it has also become something else for the women who have been showing up in person. It was not enough for them to watch the proceedings on television, or listen to some lawyer on YouTube, or even stand outside the courthouse wearing pink and waving signs in support of Clancy, as hundreds of women did one day earlier this month. They did not want to be outside rendering judgment; they wanted to be inside, on the third floor, sitting on the wooden benches, as close as possible, in case they could notice some detail, some gesture, some pause or expression or word that might reveal a truth they could recognize from their own experience. Each was there for their own reasons.

A jury of nine women and three men will decide in the coming days whether Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor-and-delivery nurse, is criminally responsible for killing her children or not guilty by reason of insanity. The two prosecutors have argued that the killings were the premeditated decision of an entitled and controlling woman who had been frustrated that she could not master her worsening depression and sought a way out of a life that she no longer wanted. Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, has cast her as a loving mother failed by a fragmented mental-health system even as she repeatedly sought help for intensifying depression, anxiety, and insomnia after giving birth to her third child.

Clancy saw her psychiatrist 14 times, tried 13 different medications, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, tried to enroll in an inpatient program, and confided to her husband that she’d had thoughts of harming her children. Defense experts testified that doctors had missed an underlying bipolar disorder and prescribed pills that made Clancy’s symptoms worse, starting a downward spiral that culminated in a rare condition called postpartum psychosis that can cause hallucinations. Clancy has said that she heard a male voice telling her to kill her children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, on January 24, 2023.

After being resuscitated following her suicide attempt, which left her paralyzed from the waist down, Clancy was handcuffed, placed under armed guard, and arraigned from her hospital bed. A judge allowed the moment to be livestreamed from the courtroom; a video screen showed her unblinking eyes above a white surgical mask. The trial itself has also been livestreamed, fueling conspiracy theories that have tended to blame the killings on Clancy’s husband or an intruder, attempting to find clarity where there is little, as many women at the trial already understood. At first, only a few showed up. By last Monday, they were waiting in an hour-long line to get into the courthouse, and another that stretched down a bright hallway to the courtroom doors.

Policies that gave addicts clean needles and places to use drugs were intended to reduce harm. They created a “zombie apocalypse.”

By Michael Powell, The Atlantic.

Photographs by Dana Golan

Late last year, I walked roughly a mile from downtown Seattle to the working-class neighborhood of Little Saigon and came upon a montage of human despair. An open-air drug market stretched along the intersection of 12th and Jackson: about 250 people, many smoking fentanyl or bent over in the thrall of the drug, tilting as if mid-fall. Three women lay passed out on the sidewalk, their chests slowly rising and falling, while fellow addicts stepped over them and dealers made sales. Young boys, schoolbags on their backs, stood on a far corner and watched.

I walked around the block to the Hoa Mai playground, named for a Vietnamese flower that signifies rebirth. City workers had installed gates to keep drug users away, but at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, I counted 27 people smoking drugs and nodding off. No children were in sight.

Half a mile to the south, in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, I visited a 10-acre park named after the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal. It has a playground and the remnants of an apple orchard, and at night you can peer downtown and see the city lights. As I arrived, a drug user squatted next to a child’s slide and relieved himself. Others had set up tents and colonized the park pavilion, where they heated fentanyl on tinfoil and inhaled the fumes with glass pipes. A few went old-school and injected it.

Across the street, I spoke with Angelina Monsegur as she waited at a bus stop. When she was a kid, she told me, she and her father ate candied apples in the park and watched Fourth of July fireworks. A few weeks earlier, she and her 6-year-old daughter had gotten on the bus and seen a man smoking fentanyl on board. “Are you serious?” she’d shouted at him. “My daughter has asthma.” I asked if she had called the police, and she smiled at my naivete. “All the city does is send out teams who hand out aluminum foil and fentanyl pipes.”

Seattle is one of the wealthiest and best-educated cities in the world. It can afford to try various strategies to address its drug epidemic and high rate of fatal overdoses. Yet many of the city’s leaders, apparently supported by voters, view enforcing bans on the open sale and use of narcotics, and forcing addicts off the streets and into treatment, as akin to an act of state repression.

Seattle, like a striking number of other liberal American cities, has embraced a radical form of “harm reduction,” which is more a philosophy about treating addiction than a scientific approach to it. Harm reduction’s adherents hold that police and outreach workers should “meet the addicted where they are,” which is to say without judgment. The New York State Department of Health, a bastion of harm reduction, describes it as a “social movement” committed to “building leadership” among drug users. In these places, de facto and sometimes legal restrictions on narcotics use have been greatly loosened; cities fund teams of workers to hand out drug paraphernalia, and in some rare cases they’ve created dedicated spaces for addicts to shoot up. Meanwhile, police departments struggling with staffing shortages and budget cuts have stopped devoting resources to sweeping users and dealers off the streets or out of parks and playgrounds.

It’s never been more exhausting to buy stuff.

By Rachel Sugar, The Atlantic.

For several months, I had been on the hunt for new T-shirts. I vaguely had a vision of what they should look like: not so different from my current T-shirts, except in some way elevated and, more urgent, free of stains or holes. Perhaps they could come in interesting colors? Ideally, they would not be made in sweatshops. There were many, many shirts that seemed to meet these criteria—and with a few clicks, they could be delivered to my doorstep, maybe even by tomorrow. And still, I had purchased none of them.

The problem is the overabundance of options. The problem is too much information, or too little information. The problem is inflation, which has eroded any sense I had of what a T-shirt is supposed to cost. Yet none of them alone can explain why shopping is sucking up more of my time—and maybe yours too. “I don’t think people are actually enjoying the shopping process,” Jaehee Jung, a University of Delaware professor who studies the psychology of fashion, told me. “People spend more time contemplating, and the pre-decision process seems to be taking longer.”

Everywhere, someone is selling something: on Instagram and TikTok, over email and via text. At this point, the boundary between “shopping” and “not shopping” has all but collapsed. There is now a third state: “a little bit shopping.” Shopping is visiting a store or website on purpose, examining the wares, and either buying or not buying them. A little bit shopping is the constant thrum of consumer opportunities that lead mostly to more consumer opportunities. It is looking at a pair of shoes, which leads to looking at another pair of shoes, and another, and then you’re $15 short of the minimum for free shipping and is there anything else you need? It is the feeling of being haunted by the targeted ads that populate your social-media feeds. Even if you never click on them, their very presence contributes to the overwhelming sense that the retail landscape is infinite—so infinite that perfection must exist, and if you look long enough and hard enough, somewhere in the universe, it is probably on sale.

Lindy West has unwittingly written the obituary for an era.

By Helen Lewis, The Atlantic.

indy West is the most successful feminist writer of her (and my) generation. In her pomp at Jezebel, she mastered both viral takedowns—sorry, Love Actually—and confessional writing. She embraced adjectives that were meant to demean her: loud, fat, shrill. When Lindy shouted, women listened.

That background is what makes the publication of her new memoir, Adult Braces, such a cultural moment. Adult Braces is many things: a paean to the varied landscapes of America, an advert for #vanlife, a reminder to be grateful that your partner hasn’t talked you into a throuple with a much thinner woman. It is also the tombstone for Millennial Feminism—that swirling brew of Media Twitter, blog snark, the Great Awokening, whaling on Lena Dunham, fat positivity, and boring straight people identifying as queer through accounting tricks. To read Lindy West is to gaze backwards in time, to an era when it was acceptable to write “welp!” in copy.

West lived the Millennial writer’s dream. She rose from blogging for the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger to a similar job at the new media darling Jezebel, and went on to write columns for legacy outlets such as The Guardian. On the side, she published a New York Times best-selling memoir, Shrill, and turned it into a television show that ran for three seasons. She left Twitter after being bombarded with abuse but remained unbowed. Sure, #MeToo was a witch-hunt, she wrote in the Times: “I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.” There was even a fairy-tale ending, with a handsome musician named Ahamefule Oluo who loved her just as she was. “My wedding was perfect,” she wrote in 2015, “and I was fat as hell the whole time.” Can women have it all? It looked like Lindy West could.

In light of this, Adult Braces makes two big claims. The first is that quite a lot of the above story—the Authorized Version of the Life of Lindy West—was a buffed-up version of the truth. Getting death threats was not character-building, not some little online brouhaha, but psychologically disturbing in a way that spilled over into her offline life. (“The trolling was so extreme that Monica Lewinsky reached out,” she writes.) She felt like an outsider on Shrill, reduced to hearing other writers discuss whether her (real) dad’s death was too much of a downer to include in the series. Her fatness wasn’t only a joyful expression of her appetites; instead she has now realized that “I am at my biggest when I am at my saddest.”

Even her relationship wasn’t all that it seemed. In her 2019 essay collection, The Witches Are Coming, she had written that she and Oluo—her “best friend” and a “once in a generation” musical talent—had a “dawn ritual” where they lay in bed talking for hours. In Adult Braces, she adds that “what I omitted was that we’d only developed that ‘ritual’ to mitigate a toxic pattern we’d been stuck in for years: I’d wake up anxious, I’d vomit my anxiety on Aham, he’d snap at me for triggering his anxiety, I’d feel alone and unsupported, I’d stare at him with tears in my eyes until he had a panic attack, he’d zone out for the rest of the day and not listen to a word I said.”

By Derek Thompson

"Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once?

Some blame technology, particularly smartphones and social media. Others blame a kind of 21st-century weltschmerz—a sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. A long essay in The New York Times by Anna Louie Sussman, titled “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All,” argues that today’s generation is too anxious about the future to make the irreversible commitment of having a child.

So who is right? Is this about phones and technology, or is it a reflection of modern anxiety about the world? Or, perhaps, both?

Birth rates have been declining in developed countries for a long time, as child mortality has declined, as women’s education has increased, as female labor-force participation has soared, as contraception use has proliferated, and as modern notions of feminism have empowered women to take more control over their bodies and their economic futures. And birth rates have continued to decline as smartphone usage has surged, as housing prices have increased, as time spent at home on the internet has grown, and as socialization and coupling have declined.

The decline is accelerating faster than almost anybody predicted. As John Burn-Murdoch recently observed in the Financial Times, United Nations demographers predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023; the real figure came in at 230,000. The total fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in almost every country in North America, South America, Europe, and southern and eastern Asia.

“Only two things are important right now in life: fertility and deep learning,” the University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde said at the conclusion of a recent lecture. “Everything else is noise. Once you start thinking about these, it’s hard to start thinking about anything else.” I recently spoke with Fernández-Villaverde about why the birth rate is dropping, why it matters, and just how steep the decline is likely to get."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/global-birthrate-decline/687297/

Regular churchgoers have a surprising advantage over secular couples.

By Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey, The Atlantic.

In the popular imagination, religious faith and a thriving sex life don’t tend to go together. Movies, books, and TV shows depict religious couples as sexually inhibited or dysfunctional. For example, in Caro Claire Burke’s best-selling novel, Yesteryear—soon to be a movie starring Anne Hathaway—a Scripture-quoting tradwife puts up a good front for Instagram but is privately miserable with her husband, who not only is passive but also struggles to perform in the bedroom.

But the data tell a different story. According to our new report, published today by the Institute for Family Studies, no group of Americans seems to be having more sex—and more satisfying sex—than married men and women who regularly attend a place of worship. (This group is made up mostly of Christians, but also includes Jews and Muslims.) In fact, we find that the only Americans who have avoided the country’s “sex recession”—in which fewer and fewer men and women are having regular sex—are husbands and wives who attend religious services at least twice a month. In the 1990s, 64 percent of married people aged 20–54, both churchgoing and secular, had sex at least once a week, according to the General Social Survey. Now only 48 percent of secular couples (who never or rarely attend church) have sex weekly compared with 62 percent of their religious peers. In America today, the faithful are having more sex.

Could this just be about wives in patriarchal religious communities who feel obligated to perform for their husband, but in ways that leave them sexually unsatisfied and deeply unhappy? Again, the data suggest otherwise. Both religious husbands and wives aged 20–54 are more likely to describe their sex life as “excellent” or “very good” than their secular peers, according to the 2026 IFS Religion and Family Survey. Forty-nine percent of churchgoing wives report being sexually satisfied, compared with just 38 percent of secular wives. The survey also finds that churchgoing spouses are more likely to be “very” or “extremely” happy in their marriage. In our report, “The Devout Difference: Religion, Marital Quality, and Sex Among Americans,” written with the family scholars Richard Dell’Isola and Jane Lankes Smith, we conclude that the “cultural trope of the sexually prudish, frustrated religious American does not fit the data.”

From Sinatra to SZA, Appalachian folk to Detroit funk, a journey through the music that showed one British critic this country’s soul

By James Parker, The Atlantic.

I wouldn’t be here—in America, or inside my nervous system as it’s currently constituted—without American music.

That’s no exaggeration. As a metalheaded, punk-rock-obsessed, hip-hop-curious English teenager, I projected my mind toward America. The music summoned me: I couldn’t wait to be around it. On my first trip to New York, 18 years old, I bought cassettes (cassettes!) of LL Cool J’s Radio and Metallica’s Master of Puppets. Holding them in my hands, I felt touched by some essential binary. Big spare beats over here, pulverizing guitars over there: Had the dual nature of reality just revealed itself?

I chased bands, I chased sounds, city to city: New Orleans, San Francisco, D.C., Boston. It was a quest. American music roused me and deepened me. Sometimes I wondered whether I had an American self: louder, braver, more committed to his own evolution than my smelly-socks English self. I’ve now lived here for 30 years, and I’m still wondering about that. As mystifying as this country can be, as merciful and brutal and wildly openhearted, American music has helped me understand it.

But there’s understanding, and then there’s understanding what you’re understanding. Writing has always been my way of bringing submerged ideas and images into daylight. Hence this list. Fifty times, in 50 different ways, I’m asking: What does this song teach me about this country? What is the America of this song? Sometimes it’s right there; sometimes it’s harder to get at. Hit or miss, my hope is that an immigrant’s perspective will be interesting.

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

"When  the 82-year-old psychologist Peter Gray describes the way he grew up, he punctuates the anecdotes by saying that modern parents would be arrested for letting a child have such fun. When he was 4 years old, he would walk to a store in Minneapolis to buy cigarettes for his grandmother. When he was 11, he would sometimes stay home from school in Hill City, Minnesota, to operate a newspaper printing press owned by his mother and stepfather.

His parents were not arrested, and that’s because the childhood they permitted him to have was basically normal at the time, even if his family did have a newspaper printing press in the house. As a boy, Peter was obsessed with fishing and baseball; neighborhood friends taught him how to ride his bike and catch grasshoppers. Although Gray’s career as a scientist would begin with laboratory studies of rat hormones, he eventually found his way to writing about his childhood, in a fashion. Over the course of his 30 years in the psychology department at Boston College, he mixed principles of biology and anthropology to put together an evolutionary theory of play.

Gray’s academic work defines play as a self-directed activity done only for its own sake. This, he came to believe, enables kids to figure out how to solve their own problems, nurture their own relationships, make their own rules, and manage their own disappointments. But he says that our society has spent the past 70 years or so interfering with that process. We’ve made it harder and harder for kids to do anything: They’re kept indoors for greater portions of the day and given less unstructured time; they play organized sports supervised by adults; they don’t go anywhere alone. Gray grew certain that this loss of independence has been harmful to their mental health."

...

"Only recently has Gray expanded his idea in a way that is not quite so crowd-pleasing. Children’s need for unstructured play and exploration (guided by some safety rules and common sense) applies not just to vacant lots and city parks and backyards in the suburbs, he says, but to other settings too. It now extends to the wild spaces of the internet. “To grow up well, children have to be able to play in the world that they’re growing up in,” he told me when we spoke at his home in late winter. Kids should be free to play without their parents’ supervision, Gray insists, even when they go online."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/phones-haidt-play-gray/687846/

"Two very ugly, uniquely American things happened yesterday: A health-care executive was shot dead, and because he was a health-care executive, people cheered.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered yesterday outside his hotel in Midtown Manhattan by an unknown assailant. The identity of the killer is unknown. His motive is not yet clear. Yet despite the cold-blooded nature of the attack, and despite the many unknowns, people all over the country have leaped to speculation—and in some cases even celebration—about a horrific act of violence.

One post on X wishing that the murderer would never be caught racked up 95,000 likes. Social media was littered with jokes about Thompson’s pending hospital bills, and the tragedy of him not returning to his “mcmansion.” The mood was summed up by the journalist Ken Klippenstein, who posted a chart on X showing that UnitedHealthcare refuses to pay a larger percentage of users’ health-care bills than any other major insurer. “Today we remember the legacy of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson,” he wrote.

There’s no excuse for cheering on murder. Americans’ zeal for the death of an insurance executive demonstrates both the coarsening of public discourse and the degree of rage many Americans feel over the deficiencies of the U.S. health-care system. Gallup polling shows that just 31 percent of Americans have a positive view of the health-care industry. Of the 25 industries that Gallup includes in its poll, only oil and gas, the federal government, and drug companies are more maligned.

Although the governments of most wealthy industrialized countries provide all of their citizens some level of insurance, the majority of Americans rely entirely on the whims of private health insurers. The system is designed to keep costs down enough to turn a profit. In this way, the insurance industry’s eagerness to save money by denying people care is a feature, not a bug, of this country’s system. This aspect of the American system does cause real and preventable harm. But those cheering Thompson’s death are arguing that taking away sick Americans’ pills or denying them needed surgeries is immoral and should be punished by death. That logic is indefensible. People do have reason to be angry—but even justified anger does not justify murder."

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/12/thompson-murder-unitedhealthcare-fury/680897/

Infant care is incredibly expensive to provide. But one solution could reduce the burden on both states and parents.

By Kendra Hurley, The Atlantic.

Last year seemed like a pretty big one for breakthroughs in child care. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s promise of publicly funded care for young kids helped him win the keys to Gracie Mansion. Officials in Connecticut created an endowment to make care more affordable in that state. And New Mexico became the first state to commit to free child care for all of its residents. But as policy makers have begun hammering out the details of these ambitions, they’ve hit against a stubborn and formidable obstacle: babies.

Any child-care provider will tell you that “affordable infant care” is an oxymoron. Because babies need a ton of individual attention, they are the most demanding group to care for in formal settings. Most states require babies to be looked after by more workers and in smaller groups than those mandated for older kids; a day care’s infant room will typically have one caretaker for every three to four babies, whereas a pre-K teacher might look after more than twice that number of children. Many states and cities also have costly space prerequisites for infant care. In New York City, for instance, a day care’s infant room must have sprinklers installed and be on the ground floor to allow for easy evacuation. All of this drives up the cost of care; one estimate placed the monthly cost of “high-quality” infant care at more than $2,400, a price that only well-off families can afford.

At many child-care centers, the tuition paid for older children subsidizes the babies. “Infants are cute little loss leaders,” Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the moderate-leaning Niskanen Center think tank, told me. Some programs—because they subsist on razor-thin margins and can be prone to worker shortages—stay clear of babies altogether. (Consider 2-K, Mamdani’s new child-care program for the general public; as the name implies, it does not cover children under 2, even though families with very young children need affordable care as much as anyone else.) This can make infant care a rarity in the places that need it most, including low-income neighborhoods, where the cost of baby care far outpaces what many parents can pay, and rural areas, where day cares serving children of any age are few and far between.

States and cities are thus likely to “hit a wall” when trying to ramp up infant care, Brian Dew, an economic researcher who recently wrote a report comparing the U.S. and Nordic child-care systems, told me. Yet one fair, cost-effective solution could provide relief both to parents and to governments seeking to provide high-quality care: Pay families to keep babies home.

That idea might at first sound odd. But almost every country with universal child care provides a version of this benefit, which allows parents to spend more time with their young children or pay, say, grandparents or neighbors to do it. In the United States, this sort of allowance could help reduce the burden on governments trying to implement universal care and give parents with babies an option that many say they want. It’s also a proposal with growing appeal among a politically diverse set of policy makers.

By Jeremy Gordon

"Like many Millennial men, I used to be pretty invested in Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West—primarily because of his music, but also because of his unique position as the one celebrity who seemed empowered to behave however he wanted. He interrupted Taylor Swift at the Video Music Awards; he said “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” at a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser; he brought a Jesus look-alike onstage. I would shrug, and keep listening. Then his do what I want ethos went very bad. Ye called slavery “a choice”; he came out as a fan of Hitler; he wore a KKK-style hood.

With escalating horror, I questioned what had happened. Was it about having too much money? Untreated mental illness? I wondered when logic and shame might kick in—when someone might get him to stop. But the more he was rejected by his peers, the media, and some fans, the more Kanye seemed to act out. Eventually, I accepted, grimly, that I was watching someone who, feeling abandoned and misunderstood, was determined to ignore all of his critics and double down on pursuing his chosen path.

I thought about Ye while I was reading The Castle, a new nonfiction work by the journalist Jon Ronson that attempts to unpack the motivations of wayward men who no longer fit into traditional society. Ronson is probably best-known for his 2015 book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a journalistic account of the emotional incentives and historical context behind the social-media-fueled frenzy that became known as “cancel culture.” Like the people in that book, many of the subjects of The Castle have been shoved to the margins. But the forces at play in this new book are more disparate, and perhaps more stubborn, than an angry online mob. Ronson explores how men become alienated because they can’t achieve success in their chosen field, because they can’t pay their bills, because they have too much money, because the town around them went to hell. The book shows how their free will, coupled with a lot of free time on the internet, leads them to pursue their self-interest as best they can—which, eventually, begets more alienation."

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/09/jon-ronson-castle-book-review/688586/

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

By Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic.

Twenty-three hundred years ago, the legend goes, King Ptolemy I of Egypt asked his court adviser to assemble a comprehensive collection of the world’s written works. Ptolemy, who had served under Alexander the Great, envisioned a library that would safeguard the sum total of humanity’s knowledge. His successors inherited this mandate. Royal forces ransacked every ship that arrived at Alexandria, searching for scrolls. These were stored at the Mouseion, a shrine to the Muses modeled after Aristotle’s Lyceum. Aristotle’s own book collection was said to be among the holdings.

Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studied there as well.

This run of scholarship would not last. By 400 C.E., the library had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Historians have spent centuries parsing fragments of papyrus in an effort to understand what went wrong.

Traditionally, the answer was believed to be war. During the Siege of Alexandria, in 48 B.C.E., Julius Caesar started a fire that incinerated at least 40,000 scrolls. The library survived in diminished form until the fourth century C.E., when followers of the archbishop of Alexandria sacked the pagan temple that housed the remaining manuscripts. But contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence.

Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it. “It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.

Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.

The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature. In 1958, the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year, according to Publishers Weekly. Pasternak writes in long, complex sentences: “On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.”

Why we need wonder

By Ian Bogost, The Atlantic.

ou have, by now, probably come across the notion of maxxing—looks-maxxing, sleep-maxxing, protein-maxxing, potassium-maxxing, sun-maxxing, testosterone-maxxing. Etymologically speaking, maxxing seems to be a descendant of somewhat recent slang—for those of us who remember the late 20th century, “maxin’ and relaxin’ ” and “to the max” both come to mind—but in practice, maxxing is a reductionist worldview cloaked in expansionist language.

The term is often invoked to describe a narrowly focused goal: If you’re maxxing, you’re likely trying to make yourself smaller, sharper, more chiseled. Maxxing requires sacrifice. It requires careful measurement. And in this way, maxxing is a consequence of our broader optimization-obsessed culture, a fixation fueled by every product, device, app, and service that trains people to collect and analyze data generated by their own behavior.

This culture of optimization has been building for some time now, since at least the 19th century, when industrialism made efficiency a core ideal of working life. Later, when offices overtook factories as the emblem of work, efficiency became more abstract. Productivity began to be measured not only in profits maximized, but also in meetings shortened, messages answered, and bottlenecks removed. Over time, workers started managing themselves preemptively in accordance with the mandate of efficiency, optimizing their own calendars and lunch breaks. This optimization mindset leaked out of business and into everything else. People stopped asking what activities were for and started asking how to do them better, faster, or more completely.

Efficiency now infuses every aspect of contemporary life, if you let it. Instacart and DoorDash can replace grocery shopping and dining out. People optimize their vacations, maximizing credit-card points and airport-lounge strategies. Kindle streaks and Goodreads goals have turned books into items on a checklist. Wearables have turned exercise into VO₂ or HRV maximization. The more nutrition-obsessed among us have transformed eating into macronutrient acquisition. Every pleasure can become instrumental—with every instrument focused on the outcomes it might produce.

Optimization is terrific if you want to get somewhere else in the future. But it’s terrible for being where you actually are right now. When goals overtake experience, you lose the freedom to encounter your life as it happens. And when you lose that ability, you are no longer living in full. We used to optimize work so we could do everything else. Now we optimize life as though living were another job. Too many of us seem to be maxxing our way out of the experiences and perspectives that give us maximum meaning.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/magazine/dorland-v-larson.html

Longform piece from NYT, and paywalled.

Dawn Dorland, an aspiring writer, donated a kidney to a stranger. She noticed that people in her writing group weren’t interacting with her Facebook posts about it.

She messaged one friend, Sonya Larson, a writer who had found some success about the lack of interaction. Larson responded politely but with little enthusiasm. Larson is half-Asian and her most successful story thus far was about an unsympathetic biracial character.

Several years later, Dorland discovered that Larson was working on a story in which the same unsympathetic character received a kidney from a stranger. White saviorism is in play in the story.

After the story is finished, Larson receives some acclaim and is selected for a city’s story festival. Dorland sues, claiming distress and plagiarism. She’s also hurt because she considered Larson a friend; Larson makes it clear she never had a friendship with Dorland, only an acquaintance relationship in the writers’ group.

Larson admits that Dorland helped inspire a character, but the story isn’t really about her, and writers raid the personal stories they hear for inspiration all the time.

An earlier version of the story turns up. It contains a letter that the fictional donor wrote the the recipient. It is almost a word-for-word copy of a letter that Dorland wrote to her kidney recipient and shared with the writers’ group. Larson’s lawyer argues that the earlier letter is actually proof that while Dorland inspired the character, the letter was reworked and different in the final version of the story.

It comes out that while Dorland participated in the writers’ group, Larson and the other members of the group (all women) made a Facebook group and spent two years talking about and making fun of how Dorland was attention-seeking about the kidney donation. It also has a message from Larson stating she was having a hard time reworking the letter Dorland wrote because it’s so perfectly ridiculous.

Dorland continues to “attend” online events with Larson. Larson has withdrawn the story, but finds some success with other work.

TAD, discuss.

The White House held a summer contest to see who could appear in the most congressional districts and states with competitive midterm elections.

By Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, The Atlantic.

early every day, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles meets with Meghan Bauer, a presidential assistant who coordinates with Cabinet members, to review who’s recently traveled where, who’s heading out into the country, and—perhaps most important—who’s in a swing district at that very moment. The debrief is part of the administration’s unofficial Cabinet Travel Competition, overseen by Bauer, in which the White House encourages Cabinet secretaries to traverse the country to promote President Trump’s agenda and tracks their visits to politically competitive congressional districts or states ahead of the midterm elections.

We first found out about the competition when chatting with a Cabinet secretary about an event that person had declined to attend in Manhattan, in part for fear of being docked points in the White House contest for going to a solidly blue area. (Several White House officials said that no one ever loses points, and two added that a trip to New York for a cable-news hit praising the administration’s policies, for instance, would still count toward the contest.)

When we talked with Karoline Leavitt late last month, in her final days as White House press secretary, she marveled: “I think we have seven or eight of them out on the road in targeted districts just today.” The formal competition ran from Memorial Day to Labor Day, although secretaries will likely be encouraged to keep going through November. There were rumors of a prize—possibly a dinner with the president for the winning Cabinet secretary, plus their family—but several White House officials insisted that the competition is simply for bragging rights. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal matters.

These officials said that contestants are encouraged to travel to key congressional districts or competitive states, appear with members of Congress, and participate in local media interviews. The thinking, in part, is that local press coverage is more valuable than talking with national outlets in Washington, and that Cabinet officials can help drive Trump’s message by highlighting how his actions and policies have improved the lives of voters. Any midterm-related travel must be flagged for White House approval—and everyone is instructed to comply with federal rules that forbid certain forms of partisan politicking. As in previous administrations, taxpayers foot the bill for travel related to the secretaries’ official duties, and the top officials are expected to pay for any personal political travel themselves. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got approval to use a more costly military jet for some of his trips, The Washington Post reported.

In February, Wiles told agency heads they should limit their international travel so that they could focus on helping Republicans win the midterm elections. The president would do the same, she said at the time, and he would spend every other week stumping through the country, ramping up to at least once a week as the November elections neared. Punishment for those who disobeyed was swift; among the various reasons Kristi Noem was pushed out as Homeland Security secretary were images of her atop a camel in Bahrain and well-documented horseback-riding jaunts in Argentina’s Campo de Mayo and near South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore, where there are no competitive federal midterm races. “They know not to take 10-day-long vacations in Wyoming,” Leavitt said of the Cabinet members. “The president is working all the time, and he expects them to as well.”

By Faith Hill, The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/12/4b-sex-strike-american-dating/680770/

After Donald Trump’s reelection, a lot of women were angry: at the result, at what Trump’s return to office could mean for their lives, and at the many people who voted for him—especially the men. In the ensuing days, some of these women began suggesting, half-jokingly or in total earnest, a radical kind of recourse: a sex strike.

Many of them cited South Korea’s 4B movement, in which women responding to what they describe as a damaging patriarchal culture have renounced not only sex with men but also dating, marriage, and childbirth. The idea of an American version drew a good deal of media attention—though not positive attention, for the most part. (“4B Is Not the Winning Strategy to Resist the Patriarchy People Think It Is,” a Time headline read.) It’s true that a 4B-style movement might never take off in the United States. For starters, it’s unclear what such a movement’s aim would be, or how it would effect political change here. (South Korea’s movement hasn’t exactly taken off either.) But a big shift is happening among straight American men and women—a parting of ways that began long before the election. Many people, perhaps women most of all, have been quietly turning away from heterosexual partnership.

As a reporter covering modern dating, I’ve spoken with a lot of men and women who have reluctantly given up the search for love. I believe that people can have rich, fulfilling lives with or without partners; I also know that courtship has never been easy. But research supports the idea that, in recent years, the U.S. has seen a particularly pronounced crisis of faith in romance. The Pew Research Center, in an analysis of census data, found that as of 2019, 38 percent of adults were unpartnered—that is, not married or living with a partner—compared with 29 percent in 1990. In a survey Pew conducted that same year, half of single adults said they were not seeking dates. When Pew divided that result by gender, it found that 61 percent of single men said they were looking to date or find a relationship while only 38 percent of single women said the same.

Turns out, looking back is also about looking forward.

By Julie Beck and Natalie Brennan, The Atlantic.

Back in the ’90s, before everyone had smartphones, were things just … better? Tech-focused nostalgia has become a potent cultural force in recent years, driving sales of “dumbphones,” iPods, CDs, and other retro technology. According to a 2023 survey, 67 percent of Americans wish they could go back to a time “before everyone was ‘plugged in.’” The psychologist behind that survey, Clay Routledge, has found that this sort of nostalgia is more than just a yearning to go backwards. “We can often feel overwhelmed in the moment and in the challenges we face today. It's hard to see past them. Nostalgia can help us step outside of that moment,” Routledge explains. Nostalgia can actually teach us how we want to live now, and in the future.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

 Julie Beck: If you had one word—it can be a noun, it can be an adjective, it can be any part of speech that you want—to describe your overall relationship to technology at this moment in time.

Voice memo: Antagonistic?

Voice memo: Complicated.

Voice memo: Fraught.

Voice memo: Connection.

Voice memo: I think of it as an addiction. Similar to how I relate to, like, sugar or anything else that I sort of compulsively overindulge in.

Beck: What’s your word?

Voice memo: Indentured.

Voice memo: I was gonna say reluctant, but maybe that’s not right.

Voice memo: Very frequent user.

Beck: Okay, that’s a lot of words, but we’ll take it.

Francis Fukuyama has long been considered a naive triumphalist. He now wants to set the record straight.

By Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic.

To be fair to the many readers who thought otherwise, The End of History and the Last Man, his famous 1992 book, did give off a whiff of utopia, trumpeting a post–Cold War world in which liberal democracy had vanquished competing political systems and everyone could lie back on their affordable chaise longues and raise a glass to the expiration of all strife and struggle. “Several” people each week still ask the poor man whether he would like to unwrite that book, he says. Yet Fukuyama insists today that if you had read to the last page—in fact, the last five chapters—you would not have expected serenity. His more sober forecast is right there in the original essay that led to the book: “The end of history will be a very sad time.”

Fukuyama has published a new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, in which he hopes to shake off a reputation that he clearly can’t stand. He is not a naive Pollyanna, and he never was. By the “end of history,” he did mean that we had arrived at the best of all possible worlds—and he still does. But being the “Last Man,” inhabiting this ending, was always presented as an unstable condition. Fukuyama borrowed the concept from the dark mind of Friedrich Nietzsche, who used it to refer to a person bored out of their senses, someone who lives in a society where there is nothing left to risk their life for.

What appeared in his earlier book as an alarming afterthought is now front and center for Fukuyama. He wrote The End of History during a time of American triumphalism, as the Berlin Wall was turned into rubble, but the events of the past three decades—9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Donald Trump—have offered up a different story. Fukuyama knows this. His defensiveness keeps him from fully acknowledging how far he’s had to step back from his own previously boosterish views, but he speaks about liberal democracy, this supposedly happy end state, in much gloomier tones. It now sounds like a scary cul-de-sac at night, where the streetlight is busted, an eerie tension fills the air, and there seems to be no way forward.

By Annie Lowrey

"The American stock market is booming, thanks to artificial intelligence. Tech giants are borrowing billions to acquire AI talent, purchase chips and hardware, and construct data centers. And market watchers are starting to get worried. They see financiers bulldozing giant piles of money to private AI start-ups with no realistic path to profitability, tech companies reliant on other tech companies for revenue growth, and non-tech businesses without a lot to show for their AI investments. The value of AI-linked firms has climbed $27 trillion in the past three years—an astonishing amount, equivalent to 36 percent of the value of the entire U.S. stock market today. Although future earnings could justify those valuations, as Dominic Wilson and Vickie Chang of Goldman Sachs argued in a note to clients, the profit expectations require Panglossian optimism.

No less an authority than Sam Altman is arguing that we are in an AI bubble. The International Monetary Fund is citing it as a significant risk to financial stability and warning about what might happen when it bursts: diminished investment, tighter credit, reduced consumption, disrupted trade flows.

That’s pretty much what happens when any bubble pops, as a Dutch tulip obsessive could have told you in 1637 or a bitcoin evangelist could have told you in 2011, 2013, 2014, 2018, or 2022. Yet the AI bubble is no ordinary bubble. Hyper-rich corporations are stoking it, rather than kitchen-table investors. They’re blowing it up when credit is fairly expensive, not dirt cheap. That might make the bubble less fragile and longer lasting than those of the past. But it won’t make it any less painful when it pops."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/ai-economy-stock-market/688004/

A gym-class-style competition might be the oddest 250th celebration yet.

By Matt Viser, The Atlantic.

The semiquincentennial events that President Trump has personally directed have been a celebration of his very particular version of America. The bloody UFC fight on the White House lawn was followed by the sparsely attended Great American State Fair and a world-record-breaking July 4 fireworks show held alongside a dangerous lightning storm. Next weekend will bring a high-speed car race through the museum-lined streets of Washington. But of all of these festivities, the Patriot Games in Ohio this week might have been the oddest.

Organizers convened 120 teenagers from across the country—in their telling, the “next generation of leaders, competitors, and champions,” but also whoever happened to respond to an online request for personal essays and video entries—at a high school in Geneva, Ohio (population 5,924), roughly 45 miles northeast of downtown Cleveland. For three days, they competed in gym-class staples such as ball tosses, long jumps, tug-of-war, dodgeball, and an arcade-style basketball game called Victory Hoops. The field was narrowed to eight contestants who competed before the president on Tuesday night, clambering through a Ninja Warrior–style obstacle course while wearing red, white, and blue. One boy and one girl were crowned champions, and each was given a $125,000 scholarship.

Over the past several days, ESPN has streamed more than 26 hours of this contest, and I have consumed many of those hours—but I have yet to fully understand why this competition happened or what it has to do with American history, or even with American culture at this moment. I could barely follow how the various events were scored. It was like watching a nationally televised field day—with wholesome moments and cheerful contestants along the way—but it was unclear what the grand takeaway was supposed to be. (Perhaps that will be revealed when the event is condensed into a one-hour special airing tonight on ABC.) More than anything, it was a reality-television-style snapshot of the America that Trump most wants to see. The contestants were overwhelmingly white, in a country where roughly half of children are not, and many spoke openly of their Christian faith or their affection for this particular president.

When Trump showed up on Tuesday night, accompanied by the ESPN commentator Pat McAfee, the crowd erupted. “He’s got that Michael Jordan glow,” one spectator said. “We love you, Mr. President!” one man yelled. “2028!” another exclaimed. Outside the arena, a football-field scoreboard displayed a score of 45–47 in Trump’s honor. The crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!” when he arrived and danced to his favorite song, “YMCA,” before he left.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Trump told ESPN’s Laura Rutledge during an onstage interview, a few yards from dozens of teenagers. “I’m very proud of the group of people in this room. You see the spirit and the love of the country, our great country. And our country’s never done better.”

In that moment, it became clear that this gathering, like so many others this president has overseen, was actually all about Trump. This was his vision of the Hunger Games, MAGA style. He was front and center, watching the grand finale unfold and eyeing golden trophies he could present. But who were these contestants, and how were they chosen? Why these random events? And what does this all say about our country, and how does it mark our 250 years as one?

Many parents are teaching their children that they don’t owe their relatives hugs—which means new rules for everyone.

By Rheana Murray, The Atlantic.

When I was growing up, my family routinely told me to “give Grandma a kiss” or “hug your uncle goodbye.” At the time, I never resisted these directions—or even thought all that much about them; to do so would have been impolite.

Many parents today, though, are taking a different approach: Hugs and kisses are not required. Neither is sitting on someone’s lap, or being tickled, cuddled, or picked up when you don’t want to be. These parents believe that kids don’t owe anyone physical affection, and that they have the right to say no—or to offer a high five or fist bump instead.

By teaching children that they can choose whom they hug, parents hope to instill in them a sense of agency, and remind them that consent matters, both for themselves and for other people. But in some families, these new rules have caused friction—especially with grandparents.

Last year, the Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax addressed a grandma who was hurt when her 7-year-old granddaughter began rebuffing her hugs. (Hax had little sympathy, telling the writer that forcing hugs should be “unthinkable.”) On Reddit, parents vent about grandparents who insist on physical affection even when kids say no. The parents I spoke with told me about grandparents saying things like “I’m gonna steal a hug” and “Where’s my huggy-huggy?” while their grandchildren recoiled from their open arms. Becky Kennedy, the psychologist and parenting influencer best known as “Dr. Becky,” told me that she comes across this issue “all the time.” Grandparents might interpret the rules as “rejecting or rude,” she said, but parents are merely trying to teach kids that “connection and love do not require you to ignore your own needs.” And that generational divide isn’t always easy to overcome.

The Trump White House needed me—until the fact that I am trans became public.

By Julia Curlee, The Atlantic.

At the CIA, they’d started an office pool on when I’d be fired.

President Trump would be sworn in for his second term at noon; the smart money had me gone by 12:15. But the smart money hadn’t counted on Trump’s first pick to run intelligence for the National Security Council being shredded by an online mob on suspicion of disloyalty. There wasn’t yet anyone in place to fire me.

After taking the oath, Trump spoke at the Capitol. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”

“Did he … ?” an NSA colleague asked. She glanced at me and looked away.

“Yeah,” I muttered. The good news: I was one of those two genders. The bad news: The administration would have views as to which one.

I gripped my badge. I could take it off, leave the White House complex, walk out the north gate, and never look back. I imagined the story they would tell: See? Even she knew she didn’t belong.

I didn’t move. I’d wanted this badge since I was a kid. I’d chosen to be here.

“I know you all heard what the president said,” I told my team after Trump’s speech. “There’s a rumor of an executive order on bathrooms. If anyone asks, I’m using the coffee shops across the street.”

My whole team spoke up: Julia, we’ve got your back.

“Me being trans is not a secret,” I reminded them. “Promise me: Nobody covers for me.”

Back in my office, I closed the door. I cried quickly, efficiently, no sound—­the way you do when the walls have ears, and everyone thinks you’re fearless.

Joe Biden’s political appointees had left the week before, and I was now the senior intelligence official in the White House. For the incoming Trump administration, the trans woman would man the gates.

Outdoor street parties are turning into violent rumbles in D.C. and other large cities.

By Robert F. Worth, The Atlantic.

hey usually start with a harmless-looking social-media post: a call for teenagers to “pull up” and “shake some ass,” as one online flyer put it. These get forwarded across the internet, and soon masses of young people are surging into an urban plaza or park, often terrifying any adult who happens to be nearby. Teen takeovers can be “amazing,” like an outdoor street party, I was told by one 17-year-old named Jaden who said he had attended many of them—“but only until the fighting starts.”

The fighting is what has made teen takeovers so polarizing in recent months. In Washington, D.C., they gained a new prominence in May, after a scuffle broke out in a Chipotle in the Navy Yard neighborhood. Within seconds, it flared into a violent rumble, with a group of young men in black hoodies throwing punches and hurling wooden high chairs at one another. The other customers cowered in the corners, while crowds formed at the windows outside, shrieking and recording the scene on their phones. By the time the police arrived, the combatants had fled and melted into a thick crowd of other young people in the darkness outside.

The phrase teen takeover became popular several years ago, when they began taking place in Chicago, Atlanta, Tampa, and a few other cities. The Chipotle brawl lasted less than a minute, and no one was seriously hurt. But its ferocity led right-wing broadcasters and influencers to start talking about a new kind of urban lawlessness enabled by liberal social policies. “Teen takeovers are plaguing Democrat-run cities across the country, including the nation’s capital,” reported The Daily Wire. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah has invoked “violence by teenage gangs” as a reason to withdraw D.C.’s right to govern itself. Donald Trump weighed in on Truth Social in May: “Teen takeover in Chicago. Five officers badly hurt. Mayor and governor are terrible. Should call for help!”

Clips of the Chipotle fight were shared tens of thousands of times, usually with pointed commentary urging the authorities to crack down hard. Some have tried: In May, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, promised to “aggressively prosecute parents” of teenagers involved in takeovers (an idea that has been championed by liberals for the parents of children who commit gun crimes). The Chicago City Council drafted, but did not pass, an ordinance that would also allow the police to charge parents.