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.

The Army secretary told Trump about problems in the Army and his friction with Hegseth, then resigned.

By Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer, The Atlantic.

During a White House meeting last week, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll brought his concerns about the future of the Army under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly to President Trump—a sign of how far tensions between the two Pentagon leaders had escalated, and of the dysfunction inside the building, four people familiar with the conversation told us.

Trump was surprised when Driscoll told him how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth, one of the people said. Driscoll argued that the Army could not transform itself the way it needs to, because of the departure of so many leaders, this person said, adding that Trump expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership. Driscoll informed the president of his intention to resign—and by today, Driscoll was on his way out.

Hegseth’s purge of the military has been so dramatic that with Driscoll gone, the military’s largest service is left without a top civilian leader, a Senate-confirmed top general, a confirmed Army general in charge of operations, or a confirmed commander of Army troops in Europe. Because of all the firings across the service over the past year, the Army, with more than 450,000 active-duty soldiers positioned across the globe, has fewer generals than at any point in recent history. Driscoll’s personal appeal to Trump just days before his exit was the most direct articulation of high-level concerns among Pentagon leaders about the strains facing the force—including Hegseth’s intervention in Army personnel decisions and the mounting demands of the Iran war.

The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said that Driscoll had been “highly effective” in improving soldier readiness and advancing other administration priorities. “The United States Army is more powerful than ever thanks to his work alongside the Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of War,” Kelly wrote in a statement, using the administration’s preferred term for the Department of Defense.

Driscoll’s spokesperson declined to comment, and Driscoll did not respond to a call seeking comment. But a person familiar with his resignation told us that Driscoll had “brought up concerns with the administration surrounding Army transformation and readiness and Hegseth’s blocking those efforts specifically by firing the Generals who were responsible.” Hegseth did not have an immediate response to Driscoll’s departure.

New York City’s pied-à-terre tax is a reasonable policy.

By Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic.

If you were trying to identify the spiciest policy affecting the fewest Americans, you’d struggle to do better than New York City’s pied-à-terre tax.

This spring, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul agreed on a plan to target extremely valuable homes. As of this fiscal year, homeowners will have to pay up to 6.5 percent tax on condos and co-ops assessed at more than $1 million; and up to 1.3 percent on multifamily houses assessed at more than $5 million. The out-of-town owners of a $10 million single-family home would pay $80,000 a year, on top of standard property taxes, for instance. Although the new fee is expected to hit only about 11,000 of the city’s 3.7 million housing units, it has dominated nightly newscasts and fronted tabloids (PIED-A-TERROR, HOLD IT RIGHT TERRE!) for weeks. A city-council hearing on the policy stretched for hours, with resident after resident complaining that it was confusing, unfair, invasive, confiscatory.

New Yorkers have every right to criticize the rollout, which left a lot to be desired. Still, this controversy is a tempest in a walk-in closet. The pied-à-terre tax is a sound progressive option for a city with an excruciating housing shortage and obscene wealth inequality. More than that, it is a policy meant to make the city a city—populated by, enjoyed by, and built for people.

Right now New York does not always feel that way. The brutal cost of housing has strained or wholly priced out many artists and care workers, retirees and young parents, blue-collar types and entrepreneurs.

When wealthy families actually live in the units they own, they invest in the city in many ways. They pay income taxes. They buy bacon-egg-and-cheeses at the deli down the block. They volunteer at nonprofits. They eat at restaurants. They put their kids in school. If they don’t live in their units, they pay property taxes without making extensive use of city services. Still, they contribute to rising housing prices without paying income taxes, spending at local businesses, or filling classrooms with children. They turn homes into safety-deposit boxes, “zombifying” their neighborhoods. No vacancies, no residents—it’s not a great scenario for a city as wonderful and in demand as New York.

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Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction.

By Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic.

After reading Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I’d set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or ’80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I’d confiscate all of their science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein—all of it.

As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get—maybe couldn’t get—was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away. These boys just thought the killer robots sounded cool. They grew up to become ruthless entrepreneurs, but their surface enchantment stayed with them. It helped shape their desires. In 2009, Thiel, by then a man in early middle age, directed his venture-capital fund to focus on “science-fiction-type investing. So it’s basically: space, robots, AI.” The world we now live in was made from this misreading. We are all trapped under the covers with those 13-year-old boys.

“In Silicon Valley, science fiction is neither a slight nor an incidental entertainment,” Lepore writes. “Nor is it read as a literary text or a set of cautionary tales; instead it’s taken as a form of technical writing, a set of assembly instructions.”

Lepore, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in History for another book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, exercises two different modes in this one; both of them make use of her extraordinary erudition and her ability to shoot off a barrage of facts at the pace of an automatic weapon. The first half is a history of how we got to what she calls an “artificial state,” a moment when humanness, and Earth itself, is regarded as a burden to be sloughed off. In the second half she switches from historian to cultural critic to get inside the minds of the men who have happily created this state (and seek to profit from it).

Lepore wants to understand some strange turns in our world, such as our embrace of a technology that might just lead to our elimination, and the blitheness with which powerful entrepreneurs like Altman imagine much of our planet’s surface covered in data centers. In seeking the source of all these dark fantasies, she reveals something else: the power and stubborn persistence of the adolescent mind.

It used to be the peak symbol of wellness. Now many studios can barely stay open.

By Rheana Murray, The Atlantic.

At a recent Pilates class, where I pumped and pulsed under infrared heat panels until my fingertips were sweating, I ran into a former yoga teacher of mine, our mats inches apart in the neon-lit room. Afterward, I said hi and told her that I hadn’t seen a yoga class that packed in a while. She shrugged. “Yoga,” she told me, “is dead.”

She was being hyperbolic, of course—yoga is still plenty popular. In some ways, it’s more mainstream than ever. People practice it in airports, offices, prisons, schools. But her words illuminated something I’ve noticed: Yoga, it seems, is no longer the defining symbol of holistic health in America that it used to be.

The decline has been building for a while. Yoga studios, which have long been plagued by razor-thin profit margins, took a hit during the pandemic. Independent studios closed; YogaWorks, a California-based chain, filed for bankruptcy. In September 2020, The New York Times asked, “Is This the End of the New York Yoga Studio?” Even after the fitness industry rebounded and people returned to in-person workouts, many yoga studios continued to struggle for all sorts of reasons—rising costs, increased competition from other workout styles, the decision by some students to stick with at-home practices established during the pandemic. On Reddit, teachers commiserated about low class attendance. In May, a beloved studio near my home in the Hudson Valley emailed a desperate plea for students to return, calling its current business “unsustainable.”

Plenty of studios are doing just fine: Representatives from apps that track fitness attendance, such as ClassPass and Walla, told me that yoga remains one of the top choices at boutique fitness studios. But the data reveal something else, too. Many yoga studios are succeeding by offering less yoga. Walla’s “veteran” yoga studios, defined as those opened for more than three years, have cut yoga class supply by 25 percent this year. ClassPass said that in April, more than 40 percent of its yoga studios also had reservations for Pilates classes. Mindbody, another booking platform, said that the number of its yoga studios offering Pilates grew more than 20 percent from 2023 to 2025. On the yoga Subreddit, people frequently gripe about Pilates and sculpt classes bumping yoga from the schedule.

Fitness trends come and go. But the workouts people choose also reflect the contemporary understanding of what it means to be well. For years, that meant yoga and its promise of stress reduction and mindfulness. In today’s world of fitness-maxxing and social-media-driven obsession over image, though, the cultural ideal seems to have shifted from inner peace to outward perfection.

Lessons from fallen autocrats

By David Frum, The Atlantic.

Americans are not accustomed to learning lessons about democracy from Nigeria, Peru, or the Philippines. That disregard may soon change. Those countries offer examples of what it looks like to reclaim stolen or swindled wealth from fallen authoritarian rulers. Done right, this work can deliver justice and strengthen democratic institutions for the long run. But cleaning up after a corrupt regime also comes with serious challenges and hazards.

The Trump presidency has often looked more like a post-Soviet or postcolonial regime than like a first-world democracy. The Trump post-presidency may look the same. Trump has abused his office to enrich himself and his family in ways that are completely unprecedented—not only in the United States but also in the history of almost any peer democracy. Only Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s notoriously lawless former prime minister, was in any way comparable, and Berlusconi was sentenced to prison.

Trump faces little danger of prison. The U.S. Supreme Court has bestowed substantial criminal impunity on him, even assuming that he leaves office in 2029 as required by the Constitution. But an ex-president remains subject to civil liability, and the proceeds of bribery, extortion, insider trading, and market manipulation may be exposed to civil penalties. Other countries have shown the way.

Alberto Fujimori, who was elected president of Peru in 1990, entered office at a time of extreme national crisis. The murderous Shining Path insurgency controlled much of Peru’s hinterland and terrorized the capital, Lima. Inflation ran at nearly 8,000 percent. Food and electricity were in constant shortage. Fujimori stopped the inflation and crushed the insurgency, but his harsh and sometimes criminal methods included warrantless detentions and extrajudicial killings. Fujimori dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and rewrote Peru’s constitution to allow his own reelection in 1995. He won roughly two-thirds of the vote in a free, more or less, election.

But as Fujimori was doing things Peruvians wanted done, he was also presiding over a secret scheme of self-enrichment. His intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, operated a system of embezzlement and kickbacks that amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts. When this deception came to light, just after Fujimori’s 2000 reelection to a third term, he fled the country and resigned from office.

To claw back these funds, Peru created a special prosecutor’s office and worked closely with the countries that hosted these contested assets. Peru has since recovered about $200 million of misappropriated wealth from accounts in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, the United States, and Luxembourg, according to the database of the World Bank’s Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative. Peru’s economy also grew strongly after Fujimori’s fall from power. Foreign investment returned when the country renewed the rule of law. But then, in the 2010s, world demand slowed for Peru’s mineral exports, ensuring that Peru’s economy slowed too. Political instability returned.

The conservative legal movement doesn’t consider the Supreme Court’s recent ruling to be the final word on the Fourteenth Amendment. And it already has a playbook for overturning it.

By Quinta Jurecic, The Atlantic.

Early last year, a woman named Liza and her husband were busy preparing for the birth of their child. On top of the normal stresses of pregnancy, they faced another, less typical concern: that their baby would be stateless. The couple had left Russia for the United States. Liza is legally in the U.S. on a temporary status, and her husband is seeking asylum. They could in theory have applied for Russian citizenship for the baby at the consulate, though Liza told me that would have been risky, in light of her husband’s asylum application.

Before January 20, 2025, this would not have been a concern: Although Liza and her husband are Russian citizens, their baby, born on American soil, would have automatically received U.S. citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. But an executive order signed by Donald Trump on the day of his second inauguration had called that guarantee into question. After February 19, according to the order, only children with at least one biological parent who was either a U.S. citizen or a green-card holder could be legally considered American. That would have left Liza’s baby without U.S. citizenship—or citizenship anywhere at all. Liza, who asked that I withhold her last name out of concern for her family’s safety, worried that her child would be entirely without legal protection if she and her husband were deported.

“I was really, really anxious,” she said. “I was even blaming myself, like, Why didn’t I have the baby sooner? ” On January 21, Liza and four other expectant mothers joined a lawsuit against the order—one of several challenges to Trump’s decree. (The plaintiffs sued using pseudonyms or only their first names, to protect their identities.) Within days, federal courts blocked the policy from going into effect.

At the end of June, a year and a half after Trump issued the order, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Barbara that the policy violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Civil-liberties groups and immigration advocates cheered the ruling. Headlines declared it a major loss for Trump. Anna O. Law, a political scientist who studies constitutional law and immigration at CUNY, told me she had been scheduled to join two news broadcasts to discuss the ruling. Once the Court decided against Trump, both canceled because, as one put it, “the danger has passed.”

But the Court made its decision by a far tighter margin than most observers had anticipated: Only five of the nine justices took the view that Trump’s executive order was constitutionally prohibited. Four justices, all conservatives, would have allowed at least some restrictions on birthright citizenship. “Trump v. Barbara was not a win; it was a reprieve,” Law said.

Administration officials were hardly coy about their plans. “We have to keep fighting,” Vice President Vance told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, “because we actually have an opportunity to reverse this decision.” A month later, the White House announced a second, narrower executive order purporting to restrict certain limited categories of people from birthright citizenship, such as children born to members of legally designated foreign terrorist groups.

The new order also appears largely unconstitutional, and is more a howl of frustration than a serious effort to pare back the Supreme Court’s ruling in Barbara. But it signals that MAGA’s assault on the Fourteenth Amendment is far from over. And the right already has a proven model for how to overturn a Supreme Court ruling, one more careful and systematic than a single executive order: the campaign against Roe v. Wade. The conservative movement never regarded Roe as the final word on abortion. The MAGA movement does not regard Trump v. Barbara as the final word on birthright citizenship.

The country’s “stability” hides a host of problems.

By Michael Schuman, The Atlantic.

Compared with Donald Trump’s chaotic, divided, and violent America, China is a bastion of steady progress and serene order. This, at least, is the story that Beijing’s propagandists have been eager to spread. The Global Times, a Communist Party–run news outlet, proclaimed earlier this year that “the world’s peace and development increasingly rely on China’s stability.” The state news agency Xinhua chimed in that “in today’s uncertain world, China’s stability and predictability provide a rare and valuable anchor, which is set to benefit other countries.”

This message appears to be resonating around the world. A Pew Research Center survey of three dozen countries recently found that China is now seen more positively than the United States. Respondents expressed more confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping to “do the right thing” in world affairs than Trump.

China’s stability may appear desirable to a world in turmoil. But inside China, this “stability” looks a lot like policy paralysis, economic stagnation, and intensified political repression. What all the handwringing over China’s growing influence and surging exports fails to recognize is that the country is flatlining politically and economically. The evidence is in plain sight.

Policy makers around the world are understandably fixating on China’s abundant and cheap electric cars and competitive AI models, which present a serious threat to national industries. But these advances are one small part of a broader economy with pernicious and deep-rooted problems. The country’s property-market downturn, triggered by the 2021 meltdown of the real-estate developer Evergrande, has not hit bottom. Home prices continue to fall, eating away at the wealth of many middle-class households.

Trump’s war with Iran has pushed up oil prices, raising the cost of production for Chinese companies and ending three years of deflation. But the underlying problems of oversupply and weak demand remain entrenched. Youth unemployment, which emerged as a major social issue in 2023, has become chronic. The jobless rate among workers aged 16 to 24 stood at 18 percent last month.

These pressures have left Chinese consumers reluctant to spend. Retail sales grew a paltry 0.6 percent in July. Domestic sales of EVs have been falling. China’s economic problems have become so dire that some economists suspect that the official government statistics are overstating the country’s true performance. Although China’s economy has been growing a respectable 5 percent annually for the past three years, the research firm Rhodium Group estimates that China’s actual growth rate was probably near 2 percent in 2023 and closer to 3 percent over the past two years.

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A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A new group is targeting tech companies and the government with the climate movement’s playbook.

By Matteo Wong, The Atlantic.

f there’s one thing America seems to agree on, it’s AI. Some three-quarters of Americans oppose a data center being built in their area, three-quarters of Americans think AI will hurt their job security, nearly 70 percent think the technology is advancing too quickly—the polls go on. Progressive and Republican candidates alike are bashing the tech industry to win primary elections. States and cities are halting plans for data-center development.

Yet in cloistered San Francisco, where I live, staffers at OpenAI and Anthropic are developing this same feared technology at light speed and pulling down compensation packages that stretch to considerably more than $1 million. Silicon Valley’s growth is largely unencumbered by regulation, and President Trump’s administration has if anything used its authority to speed the AI industry along. The divide between these camps—the majority of people in this country who simply have to deal with the technology as it’s rolled out, and the much smaller population of people with direct influence over it—is a defining feature of this era. And so I noticed when a small group, with ties to both the Bay Area and Washington, started making noise, insisting that the AI race slow down and the technology be overseen not by executives and engineers, but by the broadest population possible.

The group—which formally launched today and calls itself Irreplaceable, as in people are irreplaceable by machines—has an audacious and perhaps naive vision. It is essentially a protest against capitalism as it is practiced in America today, focused on resisting first and developing a coherent plan for the future later. I have seen exactly how bulletproof the AI companies are—pilfering seemingly infinite volumes of media to train their models, building unpermitted power plants for their data centers, and unleashing autonomous agents capable of massive security breaches, almost entirely without consequence. I wanted to meet with Irreplaceable’s founders to ask: How do they possibly expect to pull this off?

The organization is staffed with people who made a name for themselves in the climate movement, and they are hoping to avoid past mistakes by focusing on the emotional reaction Americans are having to AI, rather than anchoring their work in white papers and policy recommendations. “People get it,” Jeremy Ornstein—a campaign strategist for Irreplaceable and former organizer with the Sunrise Movement—told me. “People have the intuition that if we create machines more powerful than people, that could go dangerously and terribly wrong.”

The North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper is getting a lot of national attention, but the lessons of his campaign may not be transferable.

By David A. Graham, The Atlantic.

Last summer, North Carolina’s race for U.S. Senate was expected to be among the most exciting in the 2026 cycle. Thom Tillis, a Republican, had opted not to run for reelection. Donald Trump had recruited Michael Whatley, the former head of the Republican National Committee, to stand in his place. Roy Cooper, a former two-term governor, seemed like Democrats’ best and only hope to make the race competitive in a state Trump had won three times—and where no Democrat has won a Senate race since 2008.

Today, other contests are attracting more attention, and North Carolina has been a bit of a snooze. It hasn’t yet been the billion-dollar election some observers predicted. Whatley, a first-time candidate, has struggled to gain traction, and Cooper has gone from last hope to strong favorite. Cooper’s team isn’t declaring victory yet. “This is going to be a two-to-three-point race at the end of the day,” his longtime strategist, Morgan Jackson, told me. “We know that it’s a 50–50 state and you win or lose on the margins.” But most forecasters rate the race as leaning toward a Cooper win.

As the Democratic Party struggles to define its identity in the Trump era, Cooper’s purple-state success has drawn lots of attention. National press coverage has hailed Cooper’s campaign as “boring” (complimentary) and “normal.” That lack of intrigue comes as a relief to a party dealing with drama and outrage in many other races. Cooper hasn’t taken controversial political stands like Michigan’s Abdul el-Sayed has, and he doesn’t have the personal scandals of the erstwhile Maine candidate Graham Platner. Republican voters also haven’t found ways to call him weird like they have Texas’s James Talarico.

It’s natural for Democrats to want to emulate Cooper’s success, but I’m skeptical that he offers any simple, transportable lessons. That isn’t to say that descriptions such as boring and normal are wrong. When I asked Jackson point-blank whether Cooper was boring, he didn’t exactly dispute the notion. “He’s a workhorse; he’s not a show horse,” he said. “He’s a steady hand. So voters don’t see him out there as a lightning rod.”

Cooper’s first big asset is that he has a long relationship with North Carolina voters. He entered statewide elected office in the waning days of the Bill Clinton presidency, a stretch that ended only in January 2025, after two terms as governor. This means that any Republican candidate will struggle to define Cooper in their own terms.

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His magic lay in his ability to be outrageous without being self-conscious.

By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic.

It’s a brisk night in downtown Boston in the early 1980s, and I’m out with a group that includes a very nice, very pretty young woman from my college whom I hope to get to know better. After dinner, one of the guys has an idea: a movie! Better yet, a midnight movie, after which, of course, we’d have to be gallant and walk the girls home. Ambling down Newbury Street to the Exeter Street Theater (now long gone), I spot an unexpected and sartorially strange crowd lined up around the corner. I am dressed like a basic preppy-wannabe: jeans, loafers, a button-down shirt. But the people lined up to get into this movie include men in heavy makeup and—wait, can this be?—garter belts. What the hell am I doing here?

The movie, of course, was the 1975 flop turned cult hit The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and audiences came dressed as their favorite character. Those tarted-up men were paying tribute to Tim Curry’s bizarrely glorious Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who belts out a song about being a “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania.” I may have been a youthful Republican, but I knew that I was watching something—and someone—amazing. I saw the movie many more times, and although I wasn’t going in drag (if you know Rocky Horror, I was more the Brad Majors type), Curry’s pure, perverse joy on-screen was always a welcome escape.

The English actor died today at 80. In a perfect tribute, Curry’s many fans are happily debating his greatest performances, which is remarkable given that he wasn’t in that many films and was rarely the lead. Yet his charisma ensured a loyal following for generations.

Spencer Cox’s very hopeful, very quixotic crusade

By McKay Coppins, The Atlantic.

n August 9, 2023, Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, found himself sitting across from Joe Biden in an armored presidential limousine as it idled in downtown Salt Lake City. Working up the nerve to pitch a far-fetched idea, he cleared his throat.

“Mr. President, I know this might sound crazy,” Cox said, “but I think you should pardon Donald Trump.”

Trump was, at the time, facing criminal charges in multiple jurisdictions. He was also the Republican frontrunner for president—a man who had promised to drive “Sleepy Joe” (a.k.a. “Enemy of the State,” a.k.a. “Most Corrupt President We’ve Ever Had,” a.k.a. “Worst President in the History of Our Country”) from the White House and imprison members of the “Biden crime family.”

Cox had no loyalty to Trump; though a Republican, Cox had never voted for him and was hoping that his party would nominate someone else in 2024. But he believed that prosecuting a former president would deepen the country’s political crisis. A pardon by Biden, he argued, could deescalate tensions and interrupt the cycle of partisan retribution.

To Cox’s surprise, Biden perked up at the suggestion. “You know, I’ve actually considered this for a while,” Biden said. “In fact, just this week as we were lying in bed, Jill and I had a long conversation about it.” Biden said that although people were “demanding justice” for Trump, he would seriously consider a pardon.

Cox left the limousine convinced it was a real possibility. Of course, it never happened.

A year later, after a gunman nearly killed Trump at a rally, Cox tried again from the other direction. In a letter to Trump, he wrote, “You have the opportunity to do something that no other person on earth can do right now: unify and save our country.” He offered his support for Trump’s candidacy, and encouraged him to respond to the moment with restraint and magnanimity.

Trump happily accepted the endorsement, which Cox made public at a press conference several days later—but Trump the Great Unifier never materialized. Within days, he was back to railing against “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and riffing on illegal immigrants from insane asylums.

Cox describes his experiences with the two presidents in his new book, Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt, which will be released next month. In the book, these episodes are framed as worthwhile—if ultimately unsuccessful—attempts at depolarization. “When I spoke with President Biden, I hoped he would choose mercy over escalation,” he writes. “When I wrote to President Trump, I hoped he would choose unity over retaliation. In both cases, things didn’t turn out quite the way I’d hoped.”

“It would be fair to suggest I failed,” Cox ventures. Indeed it would. But he prefers not to think of it that way.

Off Ramp is many things—a useful compendium of research on polarization and political violence, a candid memoir of Cox’s uneven attempts at peacemaking, a practical handbook for Americans who want to rediscover how to live with one another. But perhaps more than anything, it is an exercise in an almost-militant optimism that, to skeptics, might border on naivete.

Cox told me that the book had been gestating for more than a decade. He spent years poring over political-science literature and testing his ideas in speeches and interviews; he even launched a project with the National Governors Association: “Disagree Better,” built around the book’s central arguments. But the book acquired a new urgency last year, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah and Cox was thrust into the international spotlight, where he called on Americans to step back from the brink.

“At some point we have to find an off-ramp,” he said then, “or it’s going to get much, much worse.” When Kirk was murdered, Cox writes, “all of my research became painfully pertinent.”

Throughout the book, and in a series of conversations I’ve had with him recently, Cox seems eager to dispel any notion that he has written another anodyne collection of bromides about bipartisanship and civility. The very word civility—with its connotation of, as he puts it, “a milquetoast politeness that would make Ned Flanders seem aggressive”—makes him cringe. What plagues America right now, in Cox’s telling, is not bad manners, or even political division, but contempt—the conviction that those who don’t share our opinions or values are beneath us and unworthy of good-faith engagement. “Healthy conflict is not a toxic symptom of democracy,” he writes. “It is foundational to it.”

The proposition at the heart of Off Ramp is that political combat can be drained of contempt. As a civic aspiration, it’s hard to argue with. But at this moment? With these leaders? In a system that so strongly rewards reciprocal hatred? Cox knows as well as anyone how difficult it now is to practice the politics he’s preaching.

For Carlos Alemán, the pinnacle of the dozen years since he became a U.S. citizen was the night in 2020 when he was elected to serve on the city council of Homewood, Alabama. One of the lowest moments came earlier this year, when he learned that some of the most powerful people in his state are attempting to ban immigrants like him from pursuing higher office.

“It seems to be part of a project to reject anyone who’s not born in this country as not worthy or deserving of the full rights of citizenship,” Alemán, who was born in Nicaragua, told me.

For most of American history, becoming a citizen has meant acquiring the right to participate in virtually all aspects of civic life, including voting, serving on juries, and mounting a campaign for any political office other than the presidency. But in Alabama and other states across the country, Republican lawmakers are now pushing to make an important distinction: Naturalized citizens, they argue, should not have the same right to serve in public office as someone born in the United States.

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