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  • Inside the Growing Scientist Migration to Europe

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    It all started promisingly enough. French biologist Gabriela Lobinska had enjoyed her Ph.D. training, researching how organisms change over time. Arriving at Harvard Medical School in September 2024, she hoped for more of the same. She planned to look at how, over the course of a lifetime, healthy cells change into diseased ones.

    Donald Trump won the presidential election shortly after her arrival, and before long, things went downhill. In the spring, the grant paying her salary—along with thousands of others—was cut. In April, the White House proposed cutting by 40% the budget of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the country. Then the government withdrew Harvard’s ability to provide visas for international researchers like Lobinska. While a court allowed Harvard to sponsor visas for the time being, Lobinska was questioning why she was in the U.S. “There are places where I could go to do science,” she recalls thinking, “without all this.”

    Soon she had a job offer from AITHYRA, a new institute for biomedicine and AI in Vienna. And when she heard of a new Austrian fellowship called APART-USA—specifically for people leaving American institutions, with a generous four years of research funding—she applied, and got it.

    Now, she lives in the city where, before Vienna’s scientific community was devastated by World Wars I and II, blood types were discovered, cosmic rays were first identified, and psychoanalysis was born. All around her are architectural remnants of those heady days, like the 1910 Art Nouveau observatory on the edge of the Danube Canal—reminders that a place’s status as a scientific powerhouse is only as secure as the geopolitics that surrounds it.

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    Lobinska is just the kind of scientist that Heinz Fassmann, president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, hoped to lure to Austria with the APART-USA fellowship. He saw the instability in the U.S., while regrettable for science, as an opportunity for Austria to reclaim some of this scientific glory. If the U.S. keeps cutting budgets, he says, we will keep scooping up the good people. By September 2025, 25 candidates had been accepted, including Lobinska. 

    The APART-USA fellows weren’t the only ones looking beyond U.S. borders. Nature, a leading science journal, reported in April 2025 that through the job board it maintains, “U.S. scientists submitted 32% more applications for jobs abroad between January and March 2025 than during the same period in 2024.” U.S. page views of job postings abroad also spiked: “In March alone, as the administration intensified its cuts to science, views rose by 68% compared with the same month last year,” Nature wrote.

    It goes on. In May 2025, the E.U. granted 500 million euros in funding for the “Choose Europe” initiative, intended to help draw international researchers. In April, the president of Germany’s Max Planck Society announced the Max Planck Transatlantic Program, stating it will include roles for researchers who are looking to leave the U.S. The French government also revealed 100 million euros in funding to attract international scientists.

    “The United States profited from the migration flow of highly qualified persons, decades after the Second World War,” Fassmann says. “And now, it’s maybe the first time that we can move around this migration direction—that Europe can profit from the talents that are educated in the United States.”

    The U.S. wasn’t always a magnet for scientists. “Hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America in 1840. In the late 19th century, Germany was the global leader in scientific research. It would be quite some time before the image of Americans as unimaginative backwoodsmen began to shift, and in the early 20th century, apart from agricultural research, American science was often supported by philanthropy and individual states, rather than by the federal government.

    Heinz Faßmann, President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, spearheaded in
    2025 the fellowship program, APART-USA, to attract top researchers from the U.S. to Austria.     Koekkoek for TIME

    After the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, however, European researchers—including Albert Einstein, most famously—headed in greater numbers to the U.S. In 1939, just before war was declared, Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning that Germany had the brain-power and resources to create atomic weapons. FDR responded with the Manhattan Project, which employed many fleeing physicists and eventually developed the atomic bomb. Congress had new respect for the possibilities of research after that, and the flow of scientists into the U.S. accelerated.

    By the mid-20th century, the U.S. had turned into a haven for international talent. Before the war, American science had been notably less hierarchical than in many European institutions. Instead of having to spend years as an assistant to a senior professor, as in Germany, a young professor in America was largely a free agent, explains Daniel Kevles, a retired science historian at Yale University: “There was a great deal of freedom to do what you wanted.” And after the war, European science lay in shambles; there was no comparison between what awaited European scientists in the U.S. and what they could do at home.

    The U.S. also had an unusually large system of nationally funded labs, notable for their dedication to basic research. The peculiar openness of American society—scientists could bring their families and become citizens—added to the appeal, says Catherine Westfall, a science historian now retired from Michigan State University.

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    This was part of a particular mindset in the government, explains sociologist of science Olof Hallonsten of Sweden’s Lund University. “You maintain a big brain trust in the universities, in these big research centers, and you let people do more or less what they want,” he says, “because when the time comes that this whole brain trust needs to be mobilized…we can then pool all these resources into specific problem solving.”

    To be sure, American science has had its ups and downs. Senator Joseph McCarthy targeted scientists in his 1950s red-baiting campaign, including prominent figures like physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The center of gravity for nuclear physics moved back to Europe after American funding for a new collider collapsed in 1993. And it has never been unusual for researchers trained in the U.S.—American or otherwise—to move abroad, taking a job wherever their particular flavor of science is in demand. But in recent years, U.S. public and private sources were the largest funders of all research and development on the planet, and the country was a net importer of scientists. For many scientists, the U.S. had become a hub, where many were educated and hoped to stay.

    Now, that status may be shifting. Italian physicist Andrea Urru moved to the U.S. in 2023 to work on magnetism at Rutgers University. He was considering the possibility of securing a faculty position in the U.S., at the same time that he looked at jobs closer to home. “Developing an academic career in this country would be absolutely great,” he says. However, after the National Science Foundation, a major funder of basic science, came under threat from government cuts last year, that option “became even fainter, and I decided to direct my efforts towards getting funds in Europe.” Urru will soon move to the University of Cagliari in Sardinia.

    American geneticist Audrey Lin studies evolution using ancient DNA, with a particular focus on how dogs were domesticated. In the spring of 2025, when she was applying, “the job situation in the U.S. was very unstable, with a lot of faculty job searches being canceled or postponed,” she says. But “science doesn’t stop. I’ve spent almost a decade of my life training and working on my research, and this is what I’ve chosen to dedicate my life to. And I have to go where I can do this.” She too is now an APART-USA fellow, and arrived in Austria in February.

    Europe likely can’t compete with what the U.S. traditionally spends on science. As a whole, the continent funds about 20% of the world’s research and development, compared with the U.S.’s roughly 29%, according to numbers compiled by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. What’s more, large investments in basic science are usually the purview of a rapidly growing economy, Hallonsten says, which Europe’s is not. “The reason that China has been investing so much in science and technology in the past 20 to 30 years, of course, is that they have the money. They need to invest in something,” he says. “The same thing was true for the United States after World War II.” China now funds around 28% of the world’s R&D, but Hallonsten and other experts aren’t convinced the country will build a similar research environment to that of the U.S. Many researchers moving to China from abroad these days are U.S.-educated Chinese scientists, says Deborah Seligsohn, a professor of political science at Villanova University—people returning home, rather than immigrants.

    But Europe can try to provide some of what has historically been appealing about American science. At the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, in the Vienna Woods, new buildings have been springing up like mushrooms of steel and glass, labs where that culture of freedom is being carefully cultivated.

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    Italian biologist Elia Mascolo, who uses information theory to study how genes work, was attracted by the cluster of researchers already at ISTA. Working with specific people was also why he had spent four years in the U.S., and why he might have stayed longer if the right job had come along. But when the APART-USA fellowship was announced, he signed on. “It’s so niche, my research,” he says, sitting in a glass-walled pavilion on the campus, which is studded with quirky public art and bridges between buildings. It’s a common refrain among scientists: they have to go where the funding and support for their specific work is. 

    What does the U.S. stand to lose, if it is no longer a hub for science? “I think what we’re going to see now is a dispersal of scientific talent, and I think that’s costly, not just to the United States, but to the world,” says Seligsohn. “If you think about a long-term history of global development, there’s usually been a scientific hub when there are a lot of advances, whether that hub was Paris or Berlin or the United States.” As well, work from economists who study technological innovation has found that it increasingly depends on basic science. Since 1975, the percentage of new U.S. patents drawing on federally funded science has roughly tripled, to nearly a third of all patents filed.

    What the U.S. gives up, others stand to take. Fassmann says that Austria is not rescuing these scientists—it’s making a calculated attempt to redirect the flow of scientific migration.

    Since Trump took office in January 2025, nearly 8,000 research grants have been canceled or frozen, and around 25,000 federal scientists and employees of research agencies have lost their jobs, Nature has reported. The effects are still rippling through American institutions, and the long-term consequences of this upheaval remain to be seen.

    However unstable the landscape is for scientists in the U.S., there’s no guarantee of solid ground abroad, either. The world is a tumultuous place. Westfall, the American science historian, attended a recent physics meeting at CERN, one of the world’s largest institutions for scientific research. She sensed that European scientists also did not feel particularly at ease. “Everybody is feeling the insecurity about Russia and Ukraine,” she says, and there are fears that government spending in Europe might increasingly turn toward defense at the expense of funding for science.

    The picture in the U.S. continues to be uncertain and hard to read. There have been some changes since Lobinska’s stressful spring: Harvard enrolled a record number of international students in 2025, and Congress has pushed back against the budget proposed by the Administration, refusing many funding cuts to science. In the meantime, scientists continue to have to decide where they are going to take their work, each one making the call on where they think they’ll best be able to thrive.

    For chemist Yasin El Abiead, an APART-USA fellow, leaving the U.S. led to a homecoming. He grew up not far from Vienna and was educated there; he spent several years in the U.S. mainly because he, like Mascolo, wanted to work with a particular researcher. “[The U.S.] is where the money is, and that’s what brings more people there,” he says on a cold morning in January in his new lab. “That’s how it rolls. And if that ever turns around…I don’t know.” He sighs.

    Finally he puts words to what’s on his mind. “All the greatest researchers used to be in Germany,” he says, and in other parts of Europe. “You can still see many of these old buildings in Vienna…Austria was huge in science.” At the University of Vienna, in the chemistry department, there still stands a lecture hall that looks just as it did when Einstein was photographed attending a lecture there, not all that long before Nazis took over the country.

    The U.S. is where people go to do science, for the moment. “But things change,” El Abiead says. “Let’s see what happens.”

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    Veronique Greenwood

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  • March 2026 U.S. Credits

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    Vanity Fair’s March 2026 issue

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  • The Migrants in the Ancient Forest

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    In August, 2021, thirty-two Afghans who had fled their country just before the Taliban took over arrived at the border, hoping to claim asylum. Poland refused to process them. So the Afghans, stranded, sat in a muddy no man’s land, flanked by armed border guards on both sides. Technically, they were already in Poland, in a tiny village called Usnarz Górny. There was no fence there, so locals and journalists could interact with the refugees. Images of an Afghan woman camped out with a gray cat went viral. The European Court of Human Rights soon ordered Poland to give the migrants assistance and temporary shelter.

    Within weeks, Poland announced a state of emergency and closed areas near the border to medics, humanitarian workers, and reporters, among others. The Polish journalist Aga Suszko, who helped with the reporting for this piece, recalled, “I’m in a democratic country, covering something happening before my eyes that’s very significant, and suddenly: ‘You cannot see it, so you cannot report on it, because you cannot see it.’ ”

    Illustration by Anuj Shrestha

    The weather in the forest cooled, and rain set in. The Afghans were sleeping on the ground. That September, Poland’s interior minister held a press conference, aired on national TV, in which he displayed a photo, purportedly of a man having sex with a cow, and claimed that it had been discovered on a device confiscated from a migrant.

    In October, migrants attempted more than ten thousand crossings (the Polish border guard counts crossings, not people), and Poland passed a law effectively legalizing “pushbacks.” In a pushback, authorities force migrants back across the border immediately after they arrive, often violently, without considering asylum claims or other needs. (The guards often send them through access gates.) The law appeared to violate E.U. and international law’s principle of non-refoulement, which forbids returning people to places where they face threats to their life or freedom. The Afghans would clearly be in danger if sent home. Even if they were returned only to Belarus, they would be at risk: border guards there regularly beat migrants who failed to complete the journey to Poland. Yet Poland pushed back the thirty-two Afghans, including a fifteen-year-old girl, arguing that they had remained outside Polish jurisdiction the whole time, so non-refoulement didn’t apply.

    The next month, hundreds of desperate and marooned migrants, freezing in makeshift encampments on the Belarusian side of the border, tried to break through the barbed-wire fence to Poland. Polish border guards responded with tear gas and water cannons. “I had my life before 2021 and my life after,” Suszko, the journalist, told me. She’d grown up hearing the story of how, in the nineteen-eighties, the Solidarity movement had heroically overthrown the oppressive Communist regime, transforming the country into a democracy that generally respected human rights and the rule of law. “It was the death of Poland as I knew it,” she said.

    Since 2021, Poland has built the permanent border wall that Ahmed crossed; razor-wire fences stand on both sides of it. Thousands of security officers are now stationed there, along with cameras, thermal and motion sensors, night-vision devices, and other surveillance tools.

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    Elizabeth Flock

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  • Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s Life in Pictures

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    Andrew has always maintained that he has no memory of ever meeting Giuffre, and that he committed no wrongdoing in any of his relations with Epstein, who died in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center in 2019, while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Nonetheless, in 2011, Andrew stepped down from his decade-long role as a U.K. international-trade envoy. In 2019, after a disastrous television interview in which he admitted that he had “let the side down” by his association with Epstein, Andrew stepped back from royal duties.

    Just over two years later, Andrew was stripped of his royal patronages and military roles; soon afterward, he reached a reportedly multimillion-dollar settlement with Giuffre in a civil sexual-abuse suit, in which he admitted no liability. Last October, with the posthumous publication of Giuffre’s memoir, in which she alleged that she had had sex with Andrew on three occasions, he surrendered the use of his title Duke of York. Then—in what would once have seemed an impossible demotion—he was effectively stripped of his royal status altogether, and reborn as Mr. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. For a man whose identity was constituted around a sense of social superiority—according to Lownie’s book, if Andrew was met with insufficient deference upon entering a room he would loudly announce, “Let’s try that again,” before exiting and reëntering to hastily performed bows and curtsies—the reduction in status was surely a profound humiliation. Even Charles I, who was executed for treason in 1649, went to the scaffold as King.

    Last week, Andrew spent his first birthday as a commoner in circumstances as degraded as earlier celebrations had been grand. At around eight in the morning, he was arrested at a farmhouse on the King’s Sandringham estate—not in relation to any sexual offenses but on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The arrest apparently resulted from documents recently disclosed by the United States Department of Justice suggesting that as trade envoy he had shared privileged information with Epstein. (Mountbatten-Windsor has, as of this writing, not been charged with any crime.) Identified by the police as “a man in his sixties from Norfolk,” Andrew, who is the first senior member of the Royal Family to be arrested since Charles I, spent about eleven hours in custody before being released under investigation. As the car carrying him departed the police station, a photographer captured another indelible image, of the former Prince slumped in the back seat, wide-eyed and slack-jawed—the boy for whom the chimes once pealed looking very much like a man for whom the bell now tolls.

    Andrew is not the only highly placed member of the British establishment whose reputation, at the very least, has been destroyed by an association with Epstein. Peter Mandelson, the former Ambassador to the U.S., is under investigation for passing privileged information along to the financier. (Mandelson has not been arrested or charged, and a report by the BBC noted its understanding that “his position is that he has not acted in any way criminally.”) That scandal has shaken an already unsteady Prime Minister Keir Starmer, despite Starmer’s having never so much as encountered Epstein himself. “Nobody is above the law,” the Prime Minister said during a television interview, broadcast last week just as Andrew was being arrested.

    In Britain, on the current evidence, that appears to be true: investigators have been promised the “wholehearted support” of the King, who issued a statement while his brother was still in custody that “the law must take its course.” It is striking that, by contrast, no authorities in the U.S. seem willing or able to seek comparable accountability from the powerful men who entered Epstein’s orbit. President Trump, when asked whether more former Epstein associates might face arrest, replied, “Well, you know, I’m the expert in a way, because I’ve been totally exonerated,” deflecting the question while allowing that events were “very, very sad” for the Royal Family, as if this were a parochial affair among posh Brits, free from implications for an American élite. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s legal fate is still unfolding, but whatever the future holds, the party is over for him. When will it be over for the rest of them? ♦

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    Rebecca Mead

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  • The Trial of Gisèle Pelicot’s Rapists United France and Fractured Her Family

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    “Yes, that’s me, it’s my bedroom,” she said. “I never sleep like that.” She was struck by how floppy her cheek was. She told Perret, “I don’t know where I am anymore.”

    He showed her another photo, of a man in her bedroom with graying hair and a tattoo. “Do you recognize this location?” he asked.

    “Who is this guy?” she said. “I never wanted to have sex with him.”

    When he mentioned a Skype username that her husband had used to communicate with her rapists, she said, “You’re speaking Chinese to me.”

    Perret asked if she wanted to press charges. Her husband, he explained, had kept a list of more than fifty people in the past decade who’d raped her while she was unconscious. The thought of pressing charges hadn’t occurred to Gisèle, but she said yes.

    An officer drove Gisèle home while Dominique stayed at the police station. “I got caught up in a vicious cycle,” he confessed. “I realized that, with sleeping pills, it was very easy to get what I wanted, which I couldn’t get otherwise, which was normal, because it wasn’t her way of life.” He said that he had ruined his family. He was disgusted with himself. “I had fantasies that gradually came true, and I wanted to take them further,” he said.

    When Gisèle got home, she put a load of laundry into the washing machine. Then she asked her closest friend in Mazan to come over. As she waited, she hung Dominique’s boxers and pajamas on a clothesline in her garden. It was good that the sun was out, she thought—his clothes would dry quickly. She did some ironing and vacuumed the bedrooms.

    The next morning, her three children—David, Caroline, and Florian—came from Paris to the police station to meet with Perret, who filled them in on his investigation. As Gisèle drove with them back to Mazan, she felt relieved that there was leftover pumpkin soup in the refrigerator that she could serve for dinner. But her children were not interested in sitting down for a meal. Caroline, who was forty-one and a communications manager, said that the house suddenly looked uglier and older, and she no longer liked the smell. She and her brothers started going through her father’s drawers, where they discovered unpaid bills. A few hours later, Perret called Caroline and asked her to return to the station. He realized that he’d recognized her face. At the station, an officer showed her two photographs of her asleep in bed. In both pictures, she was lying on her side, her underwear exposed. “It should be noted that Mme. Caroline Pelicot is shaking and informs us that she feels very ill,” the officer wrote. “Let us suspend the meeting.”

    When Caroline returned to the house, she later wrote, her mother looked up at her “casually, as if I’d just come back from a pleasant walk.” David, the oldest child, who works in marketing, had always credited his father with giving him “a good education, values, a backbone.” He told me, “I decided very quickly to erase this man from my memory.” He and Florian put Dominique’s belongings in trash bags, and drove to the dump. They made ten trips. Caroline destroyed framed photographs and art on the walls, as well as a trunk of family photo albums. “I think my mother resented me for that—for being in that kind of frenzy,” Caroline said later. Gisèle remembers telling Caroline, “Don’t break everything, please. There are things I’d like to keep.” Of all her children, Caroline was the one that Gisèle struggled with the most. “She’s one of those highly strung people who love and lose their temper in the same breath,” Gisèle writes in her new memoir, “A Hymn to Life.” “She seems to have been filled since childhood with a feeling of insecurity that I have never really understood or been able to soothe.”

    As a child, Caroline considered her father “more motherly than my mother,” she said. She described him as a “dad who listened, who came to see me in my room, who sat on the edge of my bed and said, ‘But, Caroline, you can’t say that—you can’t behave like that.’ ” He helped all three of his children with their homework, played soccer with them, and cooked for the family. After Caroline had her own child, she and her husband, Pierre, spent a few weeks every summer with her parents. In the evenings, they drank cocktails and played Trivial Pursuit and sometimes stayed up until 1 A.M. talking. “I adored this man,” Pierre said later. Florian’s wife, Aurore, was similarly struck by the family’s rapport. “I remember telling my husband that they were U.F.O.s,” she said. “I, who came from a complicated family with taboos, arrived in a loving, demonstrative family. For me, it was a bit like the ideal family.”

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    Rachel Aviv

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  • Is There a Remedy for Presidential Profiteering?

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    In May, between the two payments, Trump, overruling objections from his national-security advisers about Emirati ties to China, approved a huge sale of cutting-edge A.I. computer chips to the U.A.E. (A spokesman for World Liberty said that the President and Steve Witkoff had not had “any involvement whatsoever” since the election and that the Emirati deal had nothing to do with Trump’s decision about the chips. Trump told reporters that he does not know about the investment and that his sons “are handling that.”)

    It is well documented that Trump and his immediate family have exploited the Presidency for personal profit on an unprecedented scale. Last summer, The New Yorker calculated that over the past decade those profits came to $3.4 billion. Six months later, at the end of his first year back in office, that tally had climbed to more than four billion. But the Emirati payment raises novel questions, beginning with the Constitution’s prohibition against officeholders accepting any “present” or “emolument” from a foreign state without congressional consent. In Trump’s first term, his lawyers contended that renting hotel rooms at Trump properties to foreign states was not the kind of “emolument” that the Founders had in mind. They argued that this was a “fair value” exchange and that, in any case, Trump donated the profits to the U.S. Treasury.

    Trump did abstain from new business deals outside the U.S. in his first term. In his second, he has abandoned such scruples. Yet the Trump Organization maintains that it still avoids deals with foreign governments—a claim the Emirati payment appears to vitiate. Will Trump say that it, too, was a “fair value” exchange and donate the profits?

    Then, there’s the secrecy. The sheer brazenness of the Trump family’s operations has been in some ways Trump’s strongest defense against charges of corruption. Because Presidents cannot be expected to jettison all their financial ties, government ethics rules rely mainly on public disclosure to allow voters, and their elected representatives, to judge whether a President puts personal interests ahead of the public’s. And, until now, Trump always seemed unembarrassed to crow about his side hustles. But, if the Emirati payment was kept secret, what else might be? Both World Liberty and Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars from unnamed investors over the past year. Neither the companies nor the President has disclosed the sources of that money.

    In the run-up to the 2020 election, Bob Bauer, who was a lawyer in the Obama White House, and Jack Goldsmith, an Assistant Attorney General under President George W. Bush, published a book, “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.” In it, they offered reforms to curtail the opportunities for the abuse of executive power that Trump’s first term had exposed—opportunities that his second term has taken to extremes. To address potential financial conflicts of interest, one proposal would require Presidents to certify that they have fully removed themselves from any role in any private businesses in which they own stakes, with no access to information about them that is not also available to the public. A second would force any such business to disclose its assets, liabilities, and other stakeholders (precluding a secret investment by a foreign government). A third would give teeth to the emoluments clause: any business connected to a President would be required to publicly report any expected payment or benefit from an arm of a foreign state. If Congress did not consent to it within sixty days, a President would be forced to sell off that interest.

    Such measures are, of course, out of the question as long as Trump has a veto. But most of our current government ethics rules date back to a bipartisan backlash after the Watergate scandal. It is hardly impossible that Trump’s self-enrichment, at four billion dollars and counting, might yet trigger a similar wave. ♦

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    David D. Kirkpatrick

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  • Living in Tracy Chapman’s House

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    It wasn’t exactly a house or, I guess, it was less than a house. Specifically, it was half of a house, three stories, divided top to bottom, clapboarded, on a corner lot in Somerville. There was a house on the left, where whoever lived there fought all the time—you could hear them through the wall, horsehair plaster and lath—and then there was the house on the right, where we, the loopy semi-vegetarians, lived in, I admit it, squalor, two thousand square feet of it, much of the time smelling of sex, salty and oil-and-vinegary. One night, everyone stood together in the second-floor hallway, listening to the shrieking on the other side of the wall—louder and wilder than the noises you hear at night in the woods, fox and vixen, courting, mating—trying to decide whether to call the cops. Tracy Chapman, who’d huddled in the hallway that night, wrote “Behind the Wall”: Last night I heard the screaming. I didn’t live there then, but later I heard that screaming, too.

    I think Tracy found the house her junior year at Tufts. I was a year behind her. Don’t get your hopes up. We never met. I can’t tell you anything about Tracy Chapman, because I don’t know anything about Tracy Chapman, and probably, if I knew anything, I wouldn’t tell you. I moved in only after she’d moved out, but people would still call on the phone, asking for her. Fans, reporters, fans. Did we know where she was? Did we know how to reach her? Could we get a message to her? No. Wasn’t she amazing, the best thing ever in the whole wide, wonderful, cocked-up world? Yes.

    This isn’t a story about Tracy Chapman. It’s a story about the house. There were six bedrooms, but sometimes there were eight or nine or ten or even a dozen people living there, because it was cheaper if you shared and the place was such a mess—what was one more sweaty body compared with two more hands to do chores and another person to split the rent? There was also a dog named Takisha and a cat named Buddha and another cat named Misha that S., who became a soil scientist, had inherited from his grandmother, who’d named him after Mikhail Baryshnikov, because of how high the cat could leap. When S. moved out—I think he went to Japan?—he gave Misha to a very nice old lady named Donna, who lived in a vinyl-sided yellow house next door. That cat strode down the street like a lion, king of the pride. Once, he won a battle with a pit bull. Man, that cat could fight.

    None of the rest of us had anything like Misha’s self-possession, or not when I lived there. No one was who they meant to be, not yet, anyway. We were embryos, stem cells, brain stems of our future selves, wet behind the ears, wet all over. We lived in muddled, uncertain, thrilling, and dizzying chaos, slamming doors, crying into pillows, pondering the possibilities of turnips and menstrual cups and macrobiotics and Audre Lorde. One chapter of our lives had ended, but the next chapter hadn’t begun, and none of us were sure what we wanted, only that we wanted it, longed for it, were desperate for it. I’ve been told that it’s the work of young adulthood to learn that you are in charge of your own life. Easier said than done, but for sure wackier and more fun in a house with a bunch of other misfits, especially if at least one person knows how to make a decent frittata, though it can be a little tricky figuring out how to take charge of your life if you’re trying to do it in the shadow of Tracy Chapman.

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    Jill Lepore

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  • Deepfaking Orson Welles’s Mangled Masterpiece

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    On set, a young director named Victor Velle was rehearsing the train-station scene with the actors playing George and Uncle Jack. Velle, who wore a neck brace (Fourth of July diving accident), was joined by Katya Alexander, who had worked at the Sphere before Saatchi hired her as Fable’s head of production. They would shoot the actors talking face to face, to create emotional depth, but then separate them for the A.I. work, which for some shots required the use of a motion-controlled robotic camera.

    “It’s not just putting together this puzzle,” Velle said. “It’s re-creating the pieces so that the puzzle fits together.” Tiny dramaturgical details had been lost to time. In the train station, Uncle Jack holds an umbrella while accepting cash from George. “Is it going to be weird for him to fumble with an umbrella as he puts the money in his pocket?” Alexander asked. “How does he pick up the suitcase? We don’t have a shot of him picking it up.”

    Velle added that Welles’s actors often handled props in an “aesthetically pleasing” way: “Orson is the king of cool, so how to do it with his flavor?”

    They had put out a call for actors in Backstage, seeking not exact look-alikes but people with what Velle described as a “regal nineteen-forties vibe.” He said, “In that period, a lot of people would act as if they had tons of Botox—their foreheads don’t move.” The three actors they hired worked with a coach, Kimberly Donovan, to study their 1942 counterparts. “You’re reverse engineering someone else’s performance,” Donovan told me. Holt, for example, “attacks every word,” whereas Moorehead’s delivery can be “soft and kitten-like.”

    Cody Pressley, an actor with a sonorous Wellesian voice, was playing both George and Eugene in separate scenes. Pressley said that he often gets cast in period pieces. (Previous roles include Gerald Ford’s photographer in “The First Lady” and a drunk teen in “Stranger Things.”) He’d been camping in Colorado when he got the call from Fable and rushed back to L.A. “It’s so very technical,” he told me. “You have to match the cadence of an actor from the forties. You have to match the words verbatim. And you basically have to keep your head still.”

    They started shooting the scene. John Fantasia, who was playing Uncle Jack, stumbled over a wordy bit of dialogue. “Cut!” Velle yelled. He gave Pressley a note: “George’s voice is a tiny bit higher pitch than what you did.” They rolled again, as the robotic camera whirred. Later, Fantasia told me that he had limited knowledge of A.I. “As an actor, I thought, I don’t think I’ll ever want to do this, because it’s contributing to the downfall,” he said. “But then I thought, It’s already seeped into the Hollywood subculture.” Plus, he added, “it’s a paying gig.”

    In the afternoon, Saatchi and Rose took me to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Margaret Herrick Library. The two made an odd couple. Saatchi was in minimalist black-and-white, in the style of a Silicon Valley guru. Rose, who had flown in from Missouri, wore a tucked-in plaid shirt with a tie and had a Nikon camera hanging from his shoulder, like a tourist at Niagara Falls. We sat in a reading room and opened a folder of weathered correspondence. First came a letter dated August 18, 1941, in which the R.K.O. employee Reginald Armour gushed to Welles, “If the picture turns out to be as good as the script, you already have another smash hit on your hands.”

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    Michael Schulman

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  • Gavin Newsom Is Playing the Long Game

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    Next, he brought out a stack of canary-yellow index cards, thick as a sandwich. It was covered in his scrawl. From the lined pages, he distills the material and copies things a second time onto the cards. “And, from here, it goes in right in there,” he said, gesturing to his head.

    This process of underlining, copying, and recopying is the backbone of Newsom’s working life. He spends his ninety-minute commute—between Kentfield, in Marin, where he lives with his wife, the documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and their four children, and Sacramento, where he usually overnights once or twice a week—making notations in the back seat of the gubernatorial S.U.V. Between meetings and after dinner, the pads and cards come out. What he described as the resulting “hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands” of pieces of paper lived for a while as ballast in the trunk of his car. Today, they occupy an unofficial archive off the Governor’s office, with a filing system of his own conception. If an adviser tells Newsom something that strikes him as odd, he has been known to vanish into his archive, emerge with a folder (“There are, like, tabs and things,” Jason Elliott told me with horror), and extract a note proving that, months ago, the same adviser told him something else.

    Because of his reading struggles, Newsom rarely gives long written speeches; instead, he memorizes. (He sees the lines of text on a teleprompter screen as a single image, like a Chinese character, which he uses to recall the next line.) Lindsey Cobia told me, “A four-hour podcast where he gets asked about everything from U.F.O.s to his policy on assisted suicide is actually a more comfortable space for him, because of his dyslexia, than reading a ten-minute speech.” Lateefah Simon, a Bay Area congresswoman, who shared consultants with Newsom during the 2020 Democratic National Convention, recalled that they left to help him with speech prep—normally a half-hour task. “ I didn’t see them for, like, three hours,” she said. “He wanted to do it over and over.”

    Simon met Newsom twenty-five years ago, when she was the director of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, an organization representing girls in the juvenile-justice system. She was chanting with a bullhorn outside his office in protest of his approach to welfare. “The electeds never come out to see you,” she said. But Newsom did, and he listened to the protesters’ grievances for an hour. “At the end, he said, ‘My office is always open to all of you.’ ” Simon began watching his press conferences. “I would tell my members, ‘Write his stats down, and let’s check them—because he has no notes!’ ” Newsom’s stats checked out; he can “drill down,” as he put it, on almost any subject at the slightest invitation. He sometimes gives the impression of a man with more stamina for talking than people have for listening.

    On the campaign trail, Newsom has a mental stack of cue cards that he riffs on the way a jazz pianist might improvise from a chord chart. His movements through the language can be weird. (“The rule of law, not the rule of Don, and I hope it’s dawning on people” is a construction that he has found fit to repeat on air.)

    “Prove to me you can be nice to people.”

    Cartoon by Frank Cotham

    Hilary, who is now the co-president of PlumpJack, sees his displays of esoteric knowledge as compensatory. In the family, she was thought to take after their brilliant, charismatic father. “My mom was incredibly shy, and always told everyone that Gavin was just like her—but she was super critical of herself,” she said. “I think there was this quiet rebellion in him that wanted to say, I’m not like that.” In high school, he began slicking his hair, wearing suits, and carrying a briefcase, inspired by the TV show “Remington Steele.” He was trying to channel the era’s buffed iconography of masculine power, but came off like Alex P. Keaton. “I remember paying him five dollars to go to the Levi’s store in San Rafael with me and get a pair of Shrink-to-Fit jeans, because I’m, like, ‘You’re bad for my luck in high school,’ ” Hilary said. In light of his trajectory from problem child to aloof entrepreneur, Newsom, who is said to be planning a run for higher office, has an opportunity to become America’s first Gen X President.

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    Nathan Heller

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  • Did a Celebrated Researcher Obscure a Baby’s Poisoning?

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    After a newborn died of opioid poisoning, a new branch of pediatrics came into being. But the evidence doesn’t add up.

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    Ben Taub

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  • Tucker Carlson’s Nationalist Crusade

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    Neff agreed with other AutoAdmit commenters who argued that Michael Brown deserved to be killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, complaining that “the violent criminals are even MORE heroic to Black people.” He claimed that the four liberal congresswomen known as the Squad—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib—want to “MAKE YOUR COUNTRY A DUMPING GROUND FOR PEOPLE FROM THIRD WORLD SHITHOLES.” In another post, Neff warned that “once Democrats have the majorities to go full F**K WHITEY, things are going to get really wacky really quickly” and lamented that “there’s a suicidal impulse to Western peoples that honestly feels almost biological in origin.”

    In July, 2020, after a CNN reporter discovered Neff’s AutoAdmit posts, Neff resigned from Fox News. (Years later, Neff, who went on to work as a producer on Charlie Kirk’s podcast, would maintain that he was “the least racist person on AutoAdmit,” noting that, unlike many of the site’s users, “I never posted the N-word.”) Carlson, for his part, said that he was unaware of the posts. “We don’t endorse those words,” he said. “They have no connection to this show.” But Neff’s AutoAdmit habit was not a secret to some people he worked with. At the Daily Caller, Neff bragged about his posts to at least one colleague. “He was really proud of his AutoAdmit persona,” a former Caller staffer remembered. And Neff’s connection to Carlson was not a secret on AutoAdmit, either. In 2017, when Scott Greer, who had been a colleague of Carlson’s and Neff’s at the Daily Caller, appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to promote his book “No Campus for White Men,” Neff dropped a favorite AutoAdmit catchphrase—“the sweet treats of scholarship”—into Carlson’s script introducing Greer. Neff’s fellow AutoAdmit members didn’t miss the Easter egg. “We maed [sic] it,” one wrote.

    An analysis of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer found that, between November, 2016, and November, 2018, Carlson was mentioned in two hundred and sixty-five of its articles, most of them featuring clips of his show, with titles like “Tucker FILLS Liberal Kike with LEAD for Demanding Gun Control” and “Tucker Carlson FORCES Fat Beaner Whore to CHOKE to DEATH on GREASY TACOS.” (Hannity, by comparison, was the subject of twenty-seven Daily Stormer articles during that period; Laura Ingraham, another of the network’s prime-time hosts, was the subject of four.) As one blog post on the site celebrated, “Tucker Carlson is basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’ Other than the language used, he is covering all our talking points.”

    On a Monday morning in April, 2023, Carlson was at his winter home in Florida, having just sent his producers the first draft of his monologue for that evening’s show—a lengthy attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom Carlson liked to refer to as Sandy Cortez, invoking her high-school nickname—when he got a call from Fox News’ chief executive, Suzanne Scott. “We’re taking you off the air,” Scott told him. He was being fired. Scott offered him the opportunity to include his own statement in a press release that Fox would send out in fifteen minutes announcing his departure, a face-saving gesture that would make it seem like the decision was a mutual parting of ways. Carlson refused. If Fox was firing him, he wanted the world to know. When the phone call was over, he sent an e-mail to his staff—known inside Fox as the Tuckertroop—telling them the news.

    In the days after Carlson’s firing, there was much speculation, both inside and outside of Fox, about the reasons behind it. Six days earlier, the network had settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, which alleged that Fox News hosts, including Carlson, had knowingly aired false accusations that the company’s voting machines were used to change vote totals in the 2020 Presidential election. Some thought that Carlson’s dismissal had to do with offensive comments that were revealed during discovery, including a text message in which Carlson reportedly called Irena Briganti, the head of Fox News’ media-relations department, a “cunt.” Others wondered whether it could have been because of another lawsuit, brought by Abby Grossberg, a former head of booking on Carlson’s show, who accused him and the network of creating a hostile work environment. (Fox settled the suit for twelve million dollars.) Still others speculated that it had something to do with a potential lawsuit from Ray Epps, a January 6th protester from Arizona who was at the center of a conspiracy theory—amplified by Carlson—that Epps was a government provocateur placed in the crowd to spur an insurrection. In fact, a sympathetic profile of Epps had appeared on “60 Minutes” the night before Carlson’s firing. Perhaps Murdoch, who, at ninety-two, fit squarely in the CBS show’s viewer demographic, had seen it and got spooked. (Epps’s suit was eventually dismissed.)

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    Jason Zengerle

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  • Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News

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    Trump, for his part, was effusive in his praise of Weiss. “I think you have a great new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise,” he said during his sit-down with O’Donnell. “I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person.” After the recording concluded, Weiss stepped forward to introduce herself to the President. It was the first time that she’d met the man whose presence now loomed over her installation at the network. They greeted each other warmly, exchanging a kiss on the cheek.

    Weiss grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, “raised in what can be accurately described as an urban shtetl,” she wrote in her 2019 book, “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” Her great-grandfather Philip (Chappy) Goldstein was a successful flyweight boxer who sometimes sported a Star of David on his boxing silks. Her parents worked in the family’s furniture store, where Weiss’s father, Lou, had a flair for marketing, doling out a line of candies called Weiss Krispie Treats to customers. Weiss attended a Jewish day school—which one of her three sisters now heads—and the family spent a couple of summers in Jerusalem, where her parents learned Hebrew. “I grew up in a family where we belonged to three synagogues,” Weiss told an interviewer in 2019. “It was not unusual for me to read Torah at shul and then go, say, to a Chabad family for lunch before heading to basketball practice.”

    The Weisses’ Shabbat dinners featured a rotating cast of guests and were often contentious. “I remember vividly, like, constant debate,” Weiss’s sister Casey told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last year. “Sometimes it got really heated.” Lou, who grew up in a “McGovern liberal” household, had become a conservative at Kenyon College. He kept copies of Commentary magazine and the Financial Times around the house, and frequently contributed op-eds to local Pittsburgh papers. His politics were centered around free markets and support for Israel. “They hate gays, and they subject women to horrible second-class treatment—not every single person, but as a group,” he told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle in 2017, for an article about Syrian refugees. “If you bring them here, ultimately, they will vote. If you think they’ll vote to support Israeli interests, you’re sadly mistaken.” Weiss’s mother, Amy, has described herself as a “very moderate liberal Democrat”; she threatened a Lysistrata-esque sex strike in 2016 if Lou voted for Trump. (He ended up writing in Amy’s name.)

    Weiss’s bat-mitzvah ceremony was held at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, which, in 2018, became the site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, a mass shooting that left eleven congregants dead. Weiss covered the massacre for the Times, writing a moving report about the aftermath. “When an anti-Semitic murderer mows down Jews in the synagogue where you became a bat mitzvah, you might find yourself in the sanctuary again,” she wrote. “But instead of family and friends, the sanctuary is host to a crew of volunteers—the chevra kadisha—who will spend the week cleaning up every drop of blood because, according to Jewish tradition, each part of the body must be sanctified in death and so buried.”

    One of Weiss’s elementary-school teachers told the Post-Gazette that Weiss was “a power to reckon with, even in second grade.” At Shady Side Academy, a secular private high school, Weiss led pro-Israel events and organized student groups for interdenominational understanding. Students followed a dress code, inspiring a lifelong practice. “If you’re really getting down to work and you’re Bari Weiss,” her youngest sister, Suzy, told me, “you’re putting on a collared shirt.”

    “Mr. Karamazov is my father’s name. You can call me Dmitri, Mitka, Mitya, Dima, Mityok, D-Man, D. Doggy-Dogg . . .”

    Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers

    After graduation, in 2002, Weiss worked on a kibbutz near the Gaza border and studied at a yeshiva in Jerusalem before entering Columbia the following fall. During her sophomore year, she took an introductory course with Joseph Massad, an assistant professor in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department. Massad, a Jordan-born Palestinian academic, had recently become the subject of student accusations that the department’s faculty trafficked in antisemitism. In 2004, the Boston-based advocacy group the David Project helped produce a short film, “Columbia Unbecoming,” which featured interviews with Jewish students accusing certain professors of harassing them because of their support for Israel. A student who had served in the Israeli Army said that, during a public lecture, Massad asked him, “How many Palestinians have you killed?”

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    Clare Malone

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  • Vinson Cunningham on Barry Blitt’s Obama “Fist Bump” Cover

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    I was in a yellow cab in high summer when I saw it. Twenty-three at the time, I sometimes skimmed articles about politics on my clunky BlackBerry while cruising through Central Park to my first real job, fund-raising for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign. Usually, the ride was placid. This time, I opened a link to an article in Politico (still an upstart outlet at the time) about a quickly growing controversy. Apparently, the latest cover of The New Yorker was a doozy.

    Barry Blitt’s already infamous illustration, which graced the July 21st issue, shows Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. The rug in the room, flat and ornate as a coin, looks proper to its setting. So does an insouciantly drawn old chair. But look at the Obamas! Instead of their customary J. Crew-ish Presidential attire—thin lapels, a sleeveless dress—the charismatic couple are outfitted in clothes that look like the loose parts of one big racist joke. The presumptive Democratic nominee wears a white thawb and sandals, and the future First Lady appears in the clichéd garb of an outdated Black radical: black shirt, camo pants, a rifle slung across her back. He wears a turban shaped like the Guggenheim; she’s got a scribbled-in Afro. Her face looks cruelly joyful while his is impossible to read. In the fireplace, an American flag is being eaten by flames. Osama bin Laden’s face sneers from a portrait on the wall. The couple bump their knuckles together, a reference to a recent bout of hysteria over an identical real-life gesture, sparked by a Fox News host who referred to it as a “terrorist fist jab.” It’s an image tightly packed with complex meanings, to say the least.

    Nearly two decades later, it can be hard to remember just how flagrantly racist the rhetoric against the Obamas often was. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton’s aide Mark Penn spent a whole TV interview testing how many times he could smoosh the words “cocaine” and “Obama” together. Right-wingers insisted not only that Obama had been born outside the United States but that he’d been educated at a Muslim “madrassa.” Michelle Obama’s throwaway comment about not having felt fully “proud” of her country until recently was pilloried as if she had cried, “Kill Whitey!” Speaking of “Whitey,” someone started a spurious rumor that she’d been recorded using the word.

    Blitt’s cover was, at heart, a work of media criticism, aimed at this latticework of horseshit. Here’s one big risk a public satirist of racism takes: by displaying a panoply of tropes and crude imagery, he reveals just how well he knows and can deploy them himself. It’s a generous act: assuring the rest of us—just as fixated on and poisoned by this stuff, whether we acknowledge it or not—that someone else is weighed down by this, too.

    Once I got to the office, I found out a lot of people were furious. Or at least they acted that way. One strain of the uproar had a touch of blithe condescension: there were people out there who wouldn’t get the joke, and who would take the cover as a straightforward assertion by The New Yorker—of all the joints in the world—regarding the attitudes and ideologies of the Obamas. Another strain, somewhat more reasonable, still rang of a prudish fear of images to which I have never been able to relate: to reproduce this imagery, for any reason at all, some said, was to add to its total volume and, over time, to augment its dark power.

    I’ll admit, I laughed in the cab. I still do when I see the cover now. I regard it as important evidence of the darker edges of a promising moment, a portrait of a nation that too often sees cartoons when confronted with flesh and blood. ♦

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    Vinson Cunningham

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  • Why Trump Supports Protesters in Tehran but Not in Minneapolis

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    On January 8th, the twelfth day of mass protests in Iran, which began when shopkeepers, responding to runaway inflation, closed Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, the Iranian government shut down public access to the internet, further shrouding an already largely closed society. Nevertheless, isolated images and details have been smuggled out, giving a hint of how brutal and monumental these events are.

    Video clips have circulated of people outside a morgue, unzipping body bags as they search for their loved ones. In the western city of Ilam, near the Iraqi border, security officials stormed a hospital to try to seize wounded protesters, while medical staff resisted. An ophthalmologist at a hospital in Tehran reported that it has been overwhelmed by casualties, including many people who were shot in the eye. In the conservative city of Mashhad, a journalist said that the streets were “full of blood.” The Iranian government has acknowledged the deaths of two thousand people, though international observers fear that the total may be much higher. The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, insisted on Tuesday that the regime was in “its last days or weeks.” If he proves to be correct, it will be because of hundreds of thousands of brave acts by Iranian citizens—acts of discontent but also of idealism.

    The portfolio of this crisis landed across classified Washington, on the desks both of career staff in the intelligence and diplomatic services and of Donald Trump’s recent appointees, among whom idealism is an increasingly shunned philosophy. The norm in American foreign policy has been that all interventions, including blatantly self-serving ones, are pitched in elevated humanitarian terms. During Trump’s second Administration, universal principles such as self-determination and due process are wielded only opportunistically. In Venezuela, Trump followed his ouster of Nicolás Maduro not by supporting the democratic opposition but by sanctioning the ascent of the dictator’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodríguez, seemingly in exchange for oil revenues. (The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, could only offer her Nobel Peace Prize medal.) Just after the New Year, in a conversation that also touched on annexing Greenland, against the will of its people, the White House adviser Stephen Miller gave CNN’s Jake Tapper the emerging party line: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

    This is an encompassing vision, one that is now playing out in the ICE campaign in Minnesota against undocumented migrants and, more and more, against protesters and ordinary citizens. It also makes plain the hypocrisy in Trump’s embrace of the Iranian opposition. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s government has denounced the protesters it has killed, calling them terrorists; the Trump Administration has said that Renee Good, the woman shot dead by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, was engaging in an act of “domestic terrorism.” If the scenes in the Twin Cities look like those from an overseas occupation, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh suggested in the magazine Equator this week, that is because, under this Administration, the foreign and the domestic realms have bled together, as Trump threatens war-time powers “to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants—and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.” The Administration is asserting, too, an almost colonial kind of impunity: last week, Vice-President J. D. Vance baldly asserted that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” from local prosecution for their activities in Minnesota.

    Even so, although the President’s intrinsic sympathies are with strongmen—Putin, Orbán, Kim—his strategic interests in Iran are with the protesters. (As it happens, the Administration’s old allies in Israel and its newer ones in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states all want the Iranian theocrats gone.) On social media, the President made some gestures of solidarity. “keep protesting,” he urged. “help is on the way.”

    Exactly what kind of help remains unclear. Trump’s adviser Steve Witkoff met with Reza Pahlavi, once the crown prince of Iran, but the White House found the deposed royal unconvincing. “He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump told reporters. In posts and appearances, the President returned to more familiar themes: he mused about possible military strikes on strategic sites in Iran, threatened tariffs against countries that trade with it, and announced a little bit of progress—the Iranian government had apparently reversed a plan to execute Erfan Soltani, a twenty-six-year-old shop owner who was arrested in connection with the protests. “We’ve been told the killing is stopping,” Trump said on Wednesday afternoon, and then, somewhat tellingly, struggled with his verb tenses. “It has stopped. It is stopping.”

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    Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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  • The Lights Are Still On in Venezuela

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    We spent Christmas Eve driving around Caracas, revisiting familiar places, such as San Agustín del Norte, the neighborhood where my grandfather grew up, and Bellas Artes, the picturesque museum district. My grandfather, despite nearing his centenary year, insisted on driving—his way of retaining a sense of control among the local and geopolitical chaos. During the crisis years, in the second half of the twenty-tens, when poverty, violent crime, and civil unrest reached a fever pitch, my grandparents had purchased an armored Toyota Camry, the only bulletproof vehicle they could afford. But the car—small, low to the ground, and exceedingly heavy, owing to the ballistic steel and glass—is not suited to a city like Caracas, which is rife with steep inclines and deep potholes, and is best travelled in a four-by-four. The car was surely designed for a foreign diplomat to drive down one straight road between an embassy and a hotel; instead, it suffers greatly at the twists and turns of this city, and at the hands of my grandfather, who drives boldly.

    When my grandparents felt that Caracas was at its most dangerous, around 2019, they rarely left their neighborhood at all. In recent years, as violent crime has declined, they’ve become more willing to venture out, eager to reconnect with a place that, for years, they felt they could not explore. On Christmas Eve, we looked through the car windows with awe at a city that my grandparents had almost forgotten, and that I had never got to know in the first place—a mosaic of colorfully painted houses and narrow favela streets, loud with the sound of motorbikes and music, interspersed with walkways wrapped in Christmas lights.

    There was something slightly comical about the aesthetics of Christmas, shaped as they are by the colder global North, being superimposed on this tropical landscape. But the humor quickly turns dark when you cross the Río Guaire into San Agustín del Sur, the hillside favela near my grandfather’s old quarter, and arrive at a pyramidal building called El Helicoide. A wildly ambitious brutalist project, the structure was intended as a luxury shopping mall, complete with a four-kilometre ramp that loops around it, allowing vehicles to drive right in and park inside. It is now one of the most notorious political prisons in South America. For the past three months, it has also been a Christmas tree. An L.E.D. star sits atop the pyramid, and strands of colorful lights encircle the structure, like tinsel.

    Inmates have reported cruel and inhumane treatment: electrocution, beatings, and simulated executions, among other horrors. Many were arrested for protesting Maduro’s regime, after he stole the Presidential election, in 2024. Some were detained for simply sending texts questioning the government’s legitimacy—messages that were uncovered during the phone searches that have become a routine part of law enforcement in Caracas.

    Trump’s aggressive actions toward Venezuela only worsened the Maduro regime’s paranoia, and, in turn, its authoritarian grip on power. A common slogan, written on the armored personnel carriers that could be seen coming and going from El Helicoide at all hours of the day, translates to the declaration “To Doubt Is Treason.” The city’s most ubiquitous image, painted all over Caracas by government-commissioned muralists, is of the eyes of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, watching us.

    In September, after the Trump Administration had begun striking boats off the coast of Venezuela, I was out photographing the local flora, a few streets down from where my grandparents and I live. After taking a picture of an unusually overgrown kapok tree—which, my neighbors later told me, was near a property owned by a high-ranking government official’s daughter—plainclothes officers approached me. They asked fairly banal questions about my employment and my reasons for taking photographs, and they looked through my phone, where they discovered that I had some text messages in English, further arousing their suspicion.

    After roughly half an hour of sitting with the officers in the shadow of the kapok, being interrogated about my thoughts on the government, a four-by-four pulled up. Officers from SEBIN, the country’s intelligence service, dressed in black balaclavas and combat gear, with semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, emerged from the vehicle and said that they were going to take me somewhere for questioning. They explained that, for my own safety, they were going to have to restrain me, and, in a gesture painfully symptomatic of the fact that I have spent far too much of my life in England, I made sure to shake the officers’ hands before they zip-tied my wrists.

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    Armando Ledezma

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  • Denmark Is Sick of Being Bullied by Trump

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    When the King visited Greenland in April—looking jaunty and at ease while cruising on a fjord with the Prime Minister, and taking a coffee-and-cake break with locals at a cultural center in Nuuk—the contrast with Vance’s gloomy trip couldn’t have been starker. Shortly before the royal visit, the King had issued an updated coat of arms for the Kingdom of Denmark in which the symbols for Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the other Danish territory, take up more space. In the new flag, it’s easier to see that Greenland’s polar bear is roaring.

    Denmark recently pledged to give Greenlanders an additional quarter of a billion dollars in health-care and infrastructure investments. Trump’s nakedly imperialistic rhetoric has also prompted Danish leaders to look more honestly at their own role as a colonial power. In August, for example, Frederiksen issued an official apology for a program, started in the nineteen-sixties and continued for decades, in which Danish doctors fitted thousands of Indigenous Greenlandic women and girls with intrauterine birth-control devices, often without their consent or full knowledge.

    Such reckonings are overdue. In 2021, Anne Kirstine Hermann, a Danish journalist, published a pioneering book, “Children of the Empire,” in which she chronicled how little say Greenlanders had in Denmark’s decision to incorporate the former colony into its kingdom, rather than granting it independence. Hermann told me, “Danes aren’t used to being the villain—we’re do-gooders. But Greenland has a whole different experience.”

    Pernille Benjaminsen, a human-rights lawyer in Nuuk, said that Danes have always compared themselves, favorably, “to what happened in North America—putting Indigenous people in reservations, killing them.” But, she noted, “a lot of bad things also happened in Greenland—we had segregation between white Danish and Greenlandic people, we had eras when we were asked to leave stores when Danish people wanted to enter.” She added, “We need to kill the narrative that there can be a ‘good’ colonizer.”

    Benjaminsen credited Prime Minister Frederiksen for being more forthright about the colonial past. Around the time that Trump returned to office, Frederiksen posted online that Danes and Greenlanders “have some dark chapters in our history together, which we, from the Danish side, must confront.”

    Some people in Copenhagen told me that, for younger Danes, the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. had spurred soul-searching about their own country’s racism toward Inuit Greenlanders. But Denmark’s sudden attentiveness to Greenland was also an inadvertent gift from Trump. Hørlyck, the photographer, told me, “He has activated Danish people’s connection to Greenland.” Danes of his generation were asking themselves, in a way they hadn’t before, “What do I really know about Greenland? Have I really talked to Greenlanders?” He went on, “It’s quite funny that the strategy over there from Trump opens up something positive here.”

    Trump’s antagonism toward Greenland has also changed Danish views about European unity. In the past, Danes had been soft Euroskeptics. They joined the E.U. in the nineteen-seventies, but they kept their own currency, the krone, and in 1992 they voted against the Maastricht Treaty, which tightened European conformity regarding security, citizenship, and other matters. When Frederiksen recently called for more defense spending, she acknowledged, “European coöperation has never really been a favorite of many Danes.” They’d grumbled, she said, about everything from “crooked cucumbers and banning plastic straws” to open immigration policies, which Frederiksen’s government had rejected.

    Ole Wæver, a professor of international relations at the University of Copenhagen, told me that Danes have long had a “kind of anti-E.U. sentiment, with a lot of the same arguments that you saw in Brexit—‘Oh, it’s big bureaucracy,’ ‘Brussels is far away,’ ‘It’s taking away our democracy.’ ” Such attitudes, Wæver said, had helped to make Denmark “go overboard” in its allegiance to America. Elisabet Svane, a columnist for Politiken, told me, “Our Prime Minister used to say, ‘You cannot put a piece of paper between me and the U.S., I’m so transatlantic.’ She’s still transatlantic, but I think you can put a little book in between now.”

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    Margaret Talbot

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  • Donald Trump Was Never an Isolationist

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    There aren’t many moments in Donald Trump’s political career that could be called highlights. But one occurred during the 2016 Republican primary debate in South Carolina, when Trump addressed the prickly issue of the Iraq War. It had been a “big, fat mistake,” he charged. And the politicians who started it? “They lied.”

    The audience hated this. Trump’s fellow-debaters Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio argued that George W. Bush—Jeb’s brother—had kept the country safe. Trump plowed on loudly through the booing. It was as if an “angry Code Pink-style protester” had crashed the Republican debate, the journalist Michael Grunwald wrote.

    Trump hadn’t stood against the Iraq War from the start, as he has frequently claimed. (When asked, in the run-up to the invasion, whether he supported it, he replied, “Yeah, I guess so.”) But by 2004 he truly was opposed. He scoffed at the notion that the war would achieve anything. What was the point of “people coming back with no arms and legs” and “all those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces?” he asked. “All of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong.”

    Skepticism came easily to Trump, who had long been hostile to mainstream foreign policy. He made his political début, in 1987, by taking out full-page ads in several papers to complain of Washington’s “monumental spending” on defense for allies like Japan and Saudi Arabia. The foundations of U.S. supremacy since 1945—the aid packages, alliances, trade pacts, and basing arrangements that make up what the former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calls the “symphony of power”—have all seemed to Trump like a colossal waste.

    Critics have called Trump an isolationist. Given the unconcealed delight he takes in dropping bombs on foreign lands (seven countries in 2025 alone), that can’t be right. A better diagnosis is that Trump doesn’t think the United States should seek to superintend global affairs, to take responsibility for the operation of the system. “American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country,” his recently released National Security Strategy explains. “Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”

    At times, Trump has veered oddly close to the left, which has opposed trade deals (“neoliberalism”), military interventions (“warmongering”), the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus (“the Blob”), and the U.S. policing of the planet (“empire”). In his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton, he scored points by spotlighting her support of the Iraq War. “In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” he said last year, “and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

    What distinguishes Trump from the left, of course, are his narrow nationalism and his love of raw force. “I’m the most militaristic person there is,” he has boasted. He relabelled the Department of Defense the Department of War, and appointed a Secretary, Pete Hegseth, who has promised to give “America’s warriors” the freedom to “kill people and break things.” Forget the symphony of power; Trump just wants to crash the cymbals.

    Trump’s second term has been cacophonous with threats—to acquire Greenland, ethnically cleanse Gaza, make a state of Canada, throw the world economy into convulsions. This is a self-conscious flight from principles toward what he calls the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”

    Hence this past weekend’s assault on Venezuela, in which U.S. forces launched air strikes on Caracas and nabbed the head of state, President Nicolás Maduro. (At least a hundred people were killed, local authorities say.) Trump claims that his goal is to punish Maduro for heading a “vast criminal network” that has brought “colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States.” But this is hard to swallow. The drug that is killing people, fentanyl, is almost entirely produced in Mexico, and the drug Venezuela does play a (minor) part in transporting, cocaine, goes mainly from there to Europe. Also, didn’t Trump just pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran President, who had been sentenced to forty-five years in federal prison for conspiring to import four hundred tons of cocaine into the United States?

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    Daniel Immerwahr

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  • Winter 2026 U.S. Credits

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    Vanity Fair’s Winter 2026 issue, featuring Teyana Taylor

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  • The Making of the First American Pope

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    In Peru every August, throngs of Catholics set out on foot from the remote northern town of Motupe, bound for a cliffside chapel that houses the Cross of Chalpon. The cross, made of guayacán wood and ringed with precious metals, stands about eight feet tall and is believed to have been discovered, as if by a miracle, in a nearby cave in 1868. The ascent takes about an hour, and venders along the way sell religious images and replicas of the cross, as well as roasted corn and Inca Kola. A highlight of the pilgrimage comes when a procession bears the cross downhill, to the church of San Julián, in Motupe’s main plaza. The next day, the Bishop of Chiclayo, the regional capital, leads a Mass for a congregation that fills the square. A brass band plays and helicopters scatter rose petals over the faithful. For decades, the presiding bishop was a member of Opus Dei, a traditionalist movement, founded in Spain in 1928, that has thrived in Latin America. In 2014, however, Pope Francis appointed Robert Prevost, an Augustinian priest from Chicago who had spent a dozen years as a missionary in Peru, to the post.

    Prevost himself, of course, is now the Pope; he was elected on May 8th and took the name Leo XIV. Made famous overnight, he stuck to a Midwestern matter-of-factness: he addressed the cardinals who’d elected him in flat-vowelled English, phoned his family daily, kept up his morning habit of doing the Times’ Wordle puzzle, and sent e-mails and texts from his personal accounts. His election was striking but not altogether surprising: he was on many Vatican watchers’ lists and, since the Second Vatican Council, in the early nineteen-sixties, it has been the pattern that a dynamic, pathbreaking Pope is succeeded by a more sober, deliberate ally. Leo—who in recent years worked closely with Pope Francis as the Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, a powerful Vatican office—seems likely to carry forward his predecessor’s emphasis on the poor and those on the margins of society with a steadiness that will complement the Argentinean prelate’s improvisatory style.

    The public was instantly captivated by Prevost’s background. He was called “the first American Pope,” “the pan-American Pope” (as a bishop, he was required to take Peruvian citizenship), and “the three-world Pope” (to account for his time in Rome). Following accounts that his mother’s family was from New Orleans and his maternal grandfather, born in Haiti, was listed as Black in the 1900 census, he was hailed as “the Black Pope”—until reports of his Sicilian, French, Québécois, Spanish, Cuban, and Creole ancestry brought him the tag “the immigrant Pope.”

    “You can settle your check whenever you’re ready to understand my need to turn this table over at least three times tonight in order to make any sort of living.”

    Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen

    The press descended on his childhood home, a modest brick bungalow in Dolton, Illinois, just south of Chicago, and on his boyhood church there, St. Mary of the Assumption, which was shuttered in 2011, its rose window cracked and weeds sprouting near its cornerstone. His elder brother John, a retired Catholic-school principal, confirmed that Leo was a White Sox fan and liked the thin-crust pizza at Aurelio’s; Sox fans started showing up at home games dressed in papal garb, and Aurelio’s introduced a pie called the Poperoni. His eldest brother, Louis, Jr., a retired Navy man, described himself as a “MAGA type” and “Rob” as “much more liberal,” but suggested that he would lead the Papacy “down the middle.”

    The summer had the feel of a soft opening to Leo’s pontificate, in part because many papal events had been arranged before he was elected. In Rome, he arrived by helicopter at the Jubilee of Youth, which drew about a million young Catholics to a park south of the city, and he presided over the canonization of the “first millennial saint,” Carlo Acutis, an Italian teen-ager known as “God’s influencer,” who, before his death, from leukemia, used digital media to promote Catholic values. Leo took part in a Vatican conference on the climate emergency, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, a guest speaker, called him an “action hero” because, as soon as he became Pope, he “ordered the Vatican to put solar panels on the buildings.” He met with people who had a wide range of viewpoints, including Ben Shapiro, the conservative podcaster; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the host of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” who presented him with the Prevost family tree; Father James Martin, a Jesuit who advocates “building bridges” with L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics; and Cardinal Raymond Burke, a “rad-trad” advocate for the restoration of the Latin Mass.

    Then, on September 30th, a news correspondent for EWTN, a Catholic broadcaster, asked Leo about a controversy in Chicago: the archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich, planned to give an award to Senator Dick Durbin for his long support of migrants’ rights. Traditionalists pointed out that Durbin, a Democrat, has also long supported abortion rights. The Pope replied, “Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life. Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion,’ but ‘I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States’—I don’t know if that’s pro-life. So they are very complex issues. I don’t know if anyone has all the truth on them, but I would ask first and foremost that there’d be greater respect for one another.”

    Some saw those remarks as a rebuke of the White House (“Holy Smackdown,” the Daily Beast announced, “Pope Leo Trashes Trump’s Signature Policy”), others as Leo giving cover to Cardinal Cupich. (Because of the controversy, Durbin decided not to accept the award.) The website Where Peter Is, which focusses on the Papacy, saw it as a sign of “Leo’s unifying, de-escalation-oriented priorities.” It was, in other words, an instance of Leo going about the Papacy the way his brother said he would—playing it down the middle.

    Man on deserted island waves goodbye to someone who just got airrescued from a neighboring island.

    “I’m so happy for you.”

    Cartoon by Jon Adams

    “I’m just a month and a half into this new mission,” Leo told a friend in an e-mail in July. A man who a decade ago was presiding over pilgrimages in a remote Peruvian town is now leading a global religion with more than a billion followers, and will have to contend with rising authoritarianism and Christian nationalism, a Church divided between progressives and conservatives, clashes over immigration, grinding wars, and a climate crisis rapidly growing more intense. The Pope’s life, since he entered a seminary high school in 1969, as he turned fourteen, has been a series of assignments, each with clear objectives. The question now is: What is the papal mission, as he sees it?

    In 1955, when Richard J. Daley, who went to Mass every morning, became the mayor of Chicago, there were 1.7 million Catholics among the city’s population of some four million people. Irish, Italian, German, and Polish communities each worshipped—in Latin—at their own churches, often within blocks of one another. Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, the archdiocese, led by Cardinal George Mundelein, had been allied with the Democratic Party and labor unions, and had promoted social activism through groups such as Young Christian Workers and the Catholic Interracial Council. During the postwar years, though, tens of thousands of white parishioners chose to move to new enclaves in the city and the suburbs as, owing to the Great Migration, the Black population, long sequestered on the South Side, grew and expanded into other neighborhoods.

    Robert Prevost’s parents—Louis Prevost, from the South Side, and Mildred Martinez, from the North Side—met while pursuing graduate degrees in education at DePaul, a Catholic university in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. After marrying, they moved to Dolton, a mostly white suburb that was thriving along with the nearby steel mills and refineries. He worked as a school principal and superintendent; she was a librarian at Mendel Catholic, a high school run by the Augustinian order, a community founded in 1244 and named for St. Augustine, a fourth-century Bishop of Hippo and the author of “Confessions.”

    The Prevosts raised their three sons in Dolton; Rob was born there in 1955. The boys rode bikes and played baseball with the kids on the block, John told reporters. They knew that their mother’s father had been born in Haiti, he said, but “we never really talked about it.” They were altar boys at St. Mary of the Assumption, often serving at six-thirty Mass before school, a diligence that the priests rewarded by taking them to Sox games. A Spanish Augustinian named Fidel Rodriguez, whom their father had met through a local charity effort involving migrant workers, sometimes came to supper, dressed in the black habit worn by members of the order. “He had quite an impact on me,” Robert Prevost said, years later. “I never forgot it, in terms of his sense of humor, his generosity, his willingness to serve these people who were, if you will, kind of down and out, and just the way he reached out to them.” Rob practiced celebrating the Mass by draping a sheet over an ironing board in the basement and consecrating Necco wafers. “He was going to be a priest,” John said. “Period. End of discussion.”

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    Paul Elie

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  • What Will New York’s New Map Show Us?

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    On the new map, you can readily see where each train stops, but with less of a sense of where you are on the grid. Central Park, for instance, has been reduced to a small, deformed square. This change is not as helpful to tourists as it is meant to be, but, then, locals secretly think that, if you don’t know where the B train runs, you shouldn’t be on it. (Anyway, locals and tourists alike, seeking some new destination, will ultimately turn to their phones, on which the cooing G.P.S. lady will tell them how to get there.)

    Maps become less perfect, even as they attempt to become more perfect. In Lewis Carroll’s “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded,” we learn of a map, described by an ambitious philosopher, that increases in scale bit by bit until it’s the same size as the terrain it represents. Unable to roll the map out, its creators cheerfully realize that the country itself can serve as its own map. Perhaps the most beloved map in recent decades was Saul Steinberg’s view of New York, initially a cover for this magazine. In the guise of a map, it captured a mentality: New Yorkers see anything beyond Eleventh Avenue as blank, uncharted wilderness. Steinberg’s point was not that his fellow New Yorkers were provincial but that all maps record a state of mind. (Indeed, on the Steinbergian map of today’s New York state of mind, many Brooklyn neighborhoods would loom as large as his West Side avenues did.)

    Even the current redistricting battle reveals the constant paradox: we draw firm lines around a fluctuating reality. The intention in Texas, recently green-lighted by the Supreme Court, was to redraw the congressional map to make it easier for Republicans to win more districts, however absurd the boundaries. But the shifting allegiances of the people within those boundaries may thwart the designers’ aim. The Latinos grouped together who were expected to vote Republican may, after the mass mobilization of ICE and the implementation of other anti-immigrant policies, no longer do so. The map itself can’t capture the changing views of the people who populate it.

    “The map is not the territory” is by now a truism, but the more important truth is that the territory is inarticulate without a map to know it by. Maps are the ideal metaphor for our models of what the world might be. A new political map of New York City awaits us—“slight left turn ahead,” as the G.P.S. lady would say, unless she pauses and issues an unsettling “recalculating” alert.

    And so for the map of the country. We live in a time when the chart of the nation, its recognizable edges and worn paths, has been largely erased and replaced with one that calls to mind medieval maps, with misshapen horizons, weirdly distorted territories, and dragons lurking beyond the borders. The primary feeling that many of us currently experience is not merely distress but profound disorientation. We not only don’t like where we are; we don’t know where we are. Once reliable routes to reality have been cut off.

    It helps to know where we’re going before we get there. If there is a consoling reflection in this season, it is that all good maps, like the digitized city map, turn out to be shared work, made by many hands over a long period of time. Drawing a plan of our plans is the necessary task of the approaching year, as an act of collective imagination and common hope. ♦

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    Adam Gopnik

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