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Boardroom sentiment has soured in an economy already grappling with the world’s highest unemployment rate, collapsing municipal services, and intensifying political agitation.

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.A 52-year-old man named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot dead by an ICE officer this week. ICE claimed it was in self-defense, but this account deserves serious skepticism. And indeed, this story has now gotten even darker. A representative for the victim’s family now says the three other men in the van with Araujo are not just in detention, they’re also under pressure to self-deport.All this comes as even some MAGA judges are starting to reject Trump’s deportation policies in surprising numbers. So it’s time to take stock. Trump and Stephen Miller are escalating deportations in a big way, but trying to do so very quietly. We’re at a real crossroads moment here that will determine how far they can get with their lawless ethnic cleansing campaign. We’re talking about all this with New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant, who has a great piece laying out why people need to care a lot about this shooting. Melissa, good to have you on.Melissa Gira Grant: Hey, thank you, Greg. Yeah, the piece is called “ICE Is Hoping You Won’t Notice the Man Agents Killed in Texas.” Sargent: And ICE really is hoping that. Let’s start with this shooting. It was around six in the morning. Lorenzo was driving to a construction job with three other guys. He stopped as part of a targeted operation. ICE now claims that he attempted to evade arrest, refused to follow verbal commands, and then weaponized his vehicle against an officer, who then fired in self-defense. It hit Araujo in the stomach, and he died at the hospital. Melissa, can you explain why this account is worthy of skepticism?Grant: So we’ve been hearing a lot from ICE and from DHS that people are using their cars as deadly weapons, or to potentially injure an officer. And that was certainly the case they made, for example, with Renée Good. They lied and said she was driving into them. We know that’s not the case. So at the time, Araujo, his brother, and two other men—the three of them were part of a construction crew. You know, Araujo has been working in construction for like 35 years in Houston and then the suburbs around there. He was on the way to work.When ICE approached him, as I understand it, they were in their vehicle. And we know from other ICE stops in other cities, they tend to drive vehicles that are unmarked. They tend to use their car to box someone in. And at times they approach people very threateningly without clearly identifying themselves as law enforcement. And I think we have every reason to believe that that is part of what happened in this case. It would be their pattern. If they didn’t do that, it would be a break with their pattern.Sargent: Let’s talk about who Araujo is. He’s 52 years old. He’s been in this country for 35 years. He started his own business. He put several children through college. They’re all now grown up. And Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, says that the family had actually been preparing for the possibility that he might be picked up. And they had a whole plan in place where he would just cooperate, and then the family would try to get him freed. So it’s a little hard to see this guy as someone who would try to commit vehicular manslaughter against law enforcement, isn’t it?Grant: Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense that he would do anything to endanger himself when he had family support in a plan that ran counter to that. It is very clear from listening to the press conferences and reading some of what his son Ronaldo has posted on social media that this is somebody who had a lot of support and I don’t think would make a rash decision in the moment.Sargent: It really doesn’t seem like it. Now let’s talk about these three other guys who are in the van. As you mentioned, one was Araujo’s brother. The other two were workers at Araujo’s business. As we reported at NewRepublic.com on Thursday, a representative for all these families, Juan Proaño, who’s the CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, now says those three guys are in detention, and that they’re under pressure to sign self-deportation orders. As Proaño says, these could be the only witnesses that could contest the government’s account of the shooting.There doesn’t appear to be any video of the shooting itself. There’s been video of the aftermath, but not the shooting itself. And yet these guys who saw this happen—presumably, we don’t know that they did, but it seems highly plausible that they might have—they might be removed from the country. Melissa, what do you make of that?Grant: It is possible that they are the only witnesses, and it’s possible that that is factoring into how DHS is looking at this. And again, you said we don’t know what they witnessed, but I have to believe that they have more context, and that context is probably not favorable to the ICE and DHS story.Sargent: Absolutely. It does seem like that. By the way, I want to quickly note that in response to my questions about this, ICE put out a statement that entirely dodged the matter. It was just boilerplate repeating what it had said before, and then adding that this is a developing situation. They won’t say any more. They just referred all further questions to the FBI. So as of this recording, ICE is not denying that they are pressuring several witnesses to this thing that just happened to self-deport, remove themselves from the country.And by the way, one other thing—we should note that Juan Proaño, who represents the families, did say on a conference call today that he does think the three men are illegal. So they may actually be deported, or at least subject to deportation. And it’s possible ICE is trying to deport them to prevent them from sharing their account of what happened, which is just amazing.Grant: It’s something that stuck out as I was working on the background to ICE killings for my story. That, you know, we have 16 examples in the second Trump administration of the administration’s story coming to the conclusion that the shooting was justified before an investigation had even concluded. And so that’s the context in which I understand the statement that ICE made in response to your reporting. They’re going to allude to there being an investigation.The other thing about any kind of investigation—local law enforcement, including the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, they have tried to join the investigation, offer assistance. They have been denied that. And that includes being denied access to key pieces of evidence. So we’re being asked to, again, very similarly with Renée Good and Alex Pretti, we’re being asked to fall for what I don’t think you could ever call an independent investigation at this point, and they’re rejecting any outside law enforcement participation. I would not be surprised if the White House comes out and just says this is justified, moving on, and tries to let that be the end of the story. And as I understand it, this community will not let that be the end of the story.Sargent: Well, it sure looks like there’s a major groundswell for Araujo right now. You had this very good piece about this shooting as well. I want to highlight one thing you wrote—how the government’s cavalier response to this killing really shows that Trump and Stephen Miller and MAGA just don’t regard people like Araujo as fundamentally human: You wrote, “[For them] the lives of people who aren’t worthy of citizenship have no value.”And they really tried to create a second-class caste out of undocumented immigrants by pushing the end to birthright citizenship. They failed there, but they are going to do everything they possibly can to try and treat undocumented immigrants—and plenty of legal immigrants as well—as an inferior caste. That’s what’s happening now. Melissa, can you expand on that?Grant: Sure. That comment, I was trying to capture the Trump administration’s ethos. That is certainly not my belief, that the lives of people who aren’t worthy of citizenship have no value. That is what this administration’s been telling us, I mean, since 2015, right? Since Trump came down the escalator. This is where they’ve started. And, this idea of dehumanizing any immigrant in the course of this campaign—I feel like they’ve shown us multiple ways that they’re doing that, whether that’s in the legal arena, whether that is the news that they make, whether that is the panic that they’ve been kicking up over this. They’re fighting this in multiple arenas.And there are two representatives from Congress who’ve also called for a full investigation. There may be others by now, but as of now, one of them is Christian Menefee, who I think has just very recently come to Congress—I think he only showed up in February. And he said something just completely perfect, honestly, at a press conference the family held earlier this week. He said, “What other profession has the power to take somebody’s life in the … street? And meanwhile, our administration is in court fighting to make sure people like Ronaldo and Lorenzo Jr.”—which is another one of his sons—“can’t be citizens in this country.” Right? Like, Ronaldo, Lorenzo Jr., and the third—they are here because their father came here and they were born here.Sargent: There’s a big tool that the administration has been using to try to maximize the deportations and maximize the ethnic cleansing. ICE is trying to detain people without bond—even if they’ve been in the country for many years, when they’d ordinarily be afforded bond. Politico’s Kyle Cheney, who’s done great reporting on this, has just done a big count. He put out a piece saying that this has now been rejected by judges 15,000 times. Melissa, can you walk us through what this thing is about, what this policy is about, what they’re trying to do, and why it’s not working?Grant: Sure. So, we’ve had decades of immigration laws that were and weren’t enforced in various ways. Like, I think that’s a good place to start. Every administration kind of comes in and is like, what are going to be our priorities? And even though this law has been sitting on the books for 30 years, it has never been used in this way.The law that the Trump administration is weaponizing here concerns when someone can be detained, and for how long they can be detained, when they’ve come into the country. And standard practice had been, for decades in this country, even before this law, that people weren’t detained for crossing the border. That is a very insignificant crime. There’s a whole process for that person to get status in the country. It is optional for the government to detain someone for crossing the border. That is on them.And now we’ve swung all the way to actually every single person—and actually not every single person who crosses the border, but every single person who doesn’t have legal status, or people who we have profiled as not having legal status, is fair game to be detained. And an even older legal principle, of habeas corpus—literally “show us the body,” produce the body—using this tool, attorneys and families have been able to get people who are now being swept up by the thousands into immigration detention. I mean, we’re detaining more people in immigration detention than we ever have. I think it was 63,000 was the most recent number that I saw. That might already be out of date.It’s really fascinating. It’s a kind of super simple, super basic principle that, like, you can’t actually just hold somebody for as long as you want without giving them due process. And immigration court is not the same thing as our criminal or civil courts—it’s its own process. People don’t have the same rights to counsel, for example. So what we have seen is this upswell of lawyers and community organizations using the habeas process to get people out, and seeing that in numbers that we’ve never seen before.So the fact that, you know, more than 15,000 times judges have rejected this mass detention policy—the flip side of that is that that is 15,000 habeas petitions that succeeded. That’s 15,000 people, potentially, who were released. And so it’s this cat and mouse of, like, the more people you detain, the more habeas petitions we’re going to throw at you, and the busier the courts are going to get, and the more incentivized judges are going to be to let people go. They can’t simply keep up with these numbers. And that’s the story I see behind that number too.Sargent: There’s one other nugget of reporting from Kyle Cheney that I want to highlight here. He did this big count, and he found that even a majority of Trump-appointed judges who have considered this detention policy have ultimately rejected it. That seems to me to be pretty remarkable. We’re talking about MAGA judges, judges who were picked by Donald Trump, who agree with more liberal judges that this major tool that they’re using—again, this is absolutely central to their entire mass deportation campaign—this major tool that they’re using is too much for a majority of Trump-appointed judges who have considered it.Grant: This novel legal argument, this real stretch of a legal argument that has not been made before—I mean, it could just be like a true small-c conservatism on the part of these judges, is like, no, you can’t do this. You can’t just make up a new interpretation. This is too far. I do suspect, though, that part of it is the sheer number of cases. None of these judges have been called upon to deal with this kind of volume, this many habeas cases, this many immigrants who have been detained.Like, in a way, Trump and Stephen Miller, who I’m assuming is a significant architect of this policy interpretation—they have created the situation for their own failure. It just simply cannot circulate this many people through the system. And when you increase the number of people who are being harmed by this, there’s more people who are going to fight. And then there’s other people—attorneys are looking at the success that attorneys are having in other circuits, and they’re going for it. It’s sort of a snowball effect at this point. And it only stops if they actually stop detaining people.Sargent: So that brings me to the concluding question here. We’re sort of in this split-screen moment. On one screen, Trump and Stephen Miller have amassed really tremendous power to carry out this ethnic cleansing. They’ve gotten billions and billions, tens of billions of dollars, that’s basically not subject to any serious oversight, which they’re using to build massive detention centers and hire God knows how many ICE agents. They’ve got this real army at this point, which is armed with paramilitary weaponry in a very serious way. So they’ve got that, they’ve got all this power.Yet on the other flip side of this whole thing, we’re seeing tremendous resistance to what Trump and Stephen Miller are wanting to do. You saw this backlash in Minneapolis. Public polls have shown that solid majorities are rejecting this. They reject the mass deportations as a policy, not just the tactics that we’re seeing in the streets. You’ve got the courts really drawing a very hard line in many cases against this. There’s serious institutional resistance. You had the Supreme Court—not by enough, but still, the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship. And you have Trump-appointed judges in enormous numbers saying, no, you can’t do this. So where are we? How far are they going to get? I tend to think that they’re not actually going to get that far towards what they want. What’s your reading of it?Grant: I mean, there’s optics, and then there’s what’s happening in the courts, and then there’s what’s actually happening in people’s neighborhoods. So one of the things I found pulling my piece together—there was that big moment after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti of an alleged drawdown in Minneapolis. There were some personnel changes—Gregory Bovino, the guy in the greatcoat with the kind of Nazi-appealing haircut—he’s out, we’re bringing in Tom Homan. He’s an old hand. He looks more legitimate, even though arguably he’s in the same exact lane ideologically as the rest of them. A few months later, we get rid of Kristi Noem, we bring in Markwayne Mullin. I think there’s something going on where they at least want to change the optics. They at least want to make it look like grown-ups are in charge. And that to me says, like, what was sort of building up to Minneapolis—they took that very seriously. They don’t want to be in that position again.However, we are seeing this huge increase in arrests and detentions. You know, we have double the amount of detentions daily happening in some cases. There were five days in June this year where 10,000 people were arrested by immigration agents. That’s double what would be the normal rate even under this administration. So it’s important right now for people to maintain their focus, maintain the work that they’ve been doing to challenge these policies, and press for more. This is, I think, exactly what the administration would like—is for us to turn away and believe that things have changed. And they certainly have not.Sargent: A hundred percent. Couldn’t have said it better. I really agree with that. I really hope people take that to heart. Folks, you saw what happened in Texas. That’s a very good sign that Melissa’s really onto something here. So stay in this, people. Please stay on top of it. Melissa Gira Grant, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for all this.Grant: So good to talk with you. Thanks.Sargent: Folks, a quick announcement. The Daily Blast is taking a short break to recharge. The pod will return in a week, early in the morning on Monday, July 20. See you all then.

Ben Soodavar, King’s College London The Conversation (The Conversation) – Less than a month after a ceasefire was signed between the US and Iran, conflict has returned to the Middle East. The peace agreement Donald Trump signed at the palace of Versailles in France on June 18 – which he hailed as Iran’s “unconditional surrender” – is now, […]

Many commentators, myself included, perceived a different headline to the Supreme Court’s rejection in Trump v. Barbara of Trump’s executive order in the birthright citizenship case. The real gobsmacking detail was not the court’s holding, which was broadly signaled in oral arguments, but the fact that four justices—Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh—were prepared to uphold a radically counter-textual reading of the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment to exclude from citizenship children born here to parents who were in the country illegally or only temporarily.In fact, the dissenting opinions, in particular those of Thomas (joined by Gorsuch) and Kavanaugh, are far loonier and more unorthodox than just their offensive bottom line. The dissenters didn’t simply reach a result aligned with the administration’s wishes; they got there by abandoning the method of interpreting the Constitution that mainstream judges and scholars, conservative and liberal alike, have firmly adopted.The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment prescribes a clean two-part test: Anyone (1) “born … in the United States” and (2) “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a citizen. Period, full stop.It’s not difficult to apply the first part: Trump’s flights of fancy aside, it’s clear what it means to be born here. So any play in the joints has to be in the interpretation of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”The five-person majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts applied the conventional and commonsensical meaning of that phrase. The opinion holds that the clause “uses jurisdiction in its ordinary sense—referring to the power of the United States to govern those within its territory.” You are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States if you are bound by the web of obligations and privileges that apply to us all. That’s the same way the court’s 1898 opinion in Wong Kim Ark, which figured heavily in the oral argument and the opinion in Barbara, construed the phrase.The dissenters’ principal theme is that the “subject to the jurisdiction” clause incorporates, for elaborate historical reasons, a notion of domicile: that the child’s parents were not merely in the country but had set down roots and developed a sense of loyalty to the nation.The obvious challenge, which I think they don’t come close to surmounting, is how to wrest that reading from the simple words of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.Thomas, in the principal dissent joined by Gorsuch, begins not with the words of the text but with a history of Dred Scott, Frederick Douglass, and John Bingham, the Ohio Republican congressman who was the principal drafter of the Fourteenth Amendment. He builds methodically toward the claim that the amendment was, in his words, “designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks.” This theme continues throughout the 90-some pages of the dissenting opinion, which argues that the amendment’s Framers had a narrow purpose in mind: undo the Dred Scott abomination and secure citizenship for the children of the freed slaves.Interpreting constitutional text based on the intent of the drafters, what was subjectively in their heads, has a name: intent originalism. It also has a provenance: It was once a mainstream method of constitutional interpretation, but it has since been firmly rejected, especially by conservatives. No less an avatar of conservative thought than Justice Antonin Scalia disavowed it, insisting that the inquiry was never the search for “the intent of the Framers” but for the original meaning of the text. He put it bluntly: “It is the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver.”The classic demonstration of why original-intent originalism collapses is the canonical case of Brown v. Board of Education. The plaintiffs in Brown built their argument around the notion that racial segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states simply that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Yet, the Reconstruction Congress plainly didn’t intend the Fourteenth Amendment to outlaw segregated schools: After all, many of its own drafters ran segregated schools in Washington, D.C. Therefore, if the Framers’ intent governs, and not the words they inscribed into law, Brown looks to have been wrongly decided.In fairness, that consensus may have been overstated. Judge Michael McConnell and others have shown the Framers’ views on school segregation weren’t as monolithic as assumed. But that revision only reinforces the deeper point: Relying on what was privately in legislators’ minds, rather than the words they put to paper and voted to approve, is an unstable method that can flip an outcome depending on which stray comment you excavate. That’s why original-intent originalism is not merely flawed but effectively moribund; it barely appears anymore in serious Supreme Court jurisprudence.The reading of the Barbara majority of the “subject to the jurisdiction” language was no different from how the court’s 1898 opinion in Wong Kim Ark read the phrase: An alien present in the country, Justice Horace Gray wrote, “is completely subject to the political jurisdiction of the country in which he resides”—owing obedience to its laws and answerable to them, just as a native-born citizen would be. The court identified a narrow set of exceptions described above in which persons born here, the children of foreign diplomats, would not be subject to our laws in the normal sense.Domicile appears in the 1898 opinion only as a description of the parties actually before the court; nowhere does Gray treat it as a legal requirement of jurisdiction itself.There’s much more detail to Thomas’s argument, but it’s in service of the same private-meaning project, notwithstanding his own claim, at one point, that he’s simply applying original meaning. He spends many pages arguing that “subject to the jurisdiction” secretly encoded the nineteenth-century legal concept of domicile—a person’s fixed, permanent home—and that domicile implied something more freighted: exclusive, undivided allegiance to the United States.That’s shaky on its own terms; domicile has never required renouncing competing loyalties, only living somewhere with intent to stay. But the bigger problem is simpler, and insuperable: The Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t say “domicile.” It says “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”; and, as the majority holds, those words refer, in 1868 or 1898 or 2026, to the “power of the United States to govern those within its territory.”Whatever you think of the result the dissenters wanted, they didn’t reach it through any interpretive method that survives contact with the last 40 years of debate about how to read the Constitution. They got there by asking what the Framers intended to accomplish, instead of the meaning of what they actually wrote. That’s a method nearly every serious originalist, including the conservative justices who built modern originalism, has definitively rejected.Finally, a quick word on Justice Kavanaugh’s separate opinion, which in a way is even worse. Kavanaugh concluded that a 1940s statute repeating the Fourteenth Amendment’s exact words already forbids Trump’s order. He then gratuitously went on to say that Wong Kim Ark was wrong to treat its exceptions as a closed, exclusive list, and that Congress could just add a new one for children of unlawful or temporary immigrants. But he never explains—and it’s hard to see how he could—why those children would actually fall outside U.S. jurisdiction.Kavanaugh’s concurrence permitted Trump to seize a partial victory from what would and should have been a decisive loss. Trump immediately seized on Kavanaugh’s suggestion, insisting Congress could still legislate his own, xenophobic definition of citizenship, notwithstanding that it plainly would contradict the holding in Barbara. Explaining Kavanaugh’s odd separate opinion may call for a discipline other than law.

The Atlantic is a magazine about the imminent loss of all that we hold dear. That’s a business model likely pitched to older readers, whose keener understanding of their own mortality can sometimes make them project it onto the world around them. The median age of an Atlantic reader, according to an August 2025 Pew survey, is 51, or eight years more than The New York Times, seven years more than The Washington Post, and four years more than The Wall Street Journal. The only print publication in Pew’s survey with an older median reader was Newsweek (57). The median age of readers of The New Republic, which was not included in Pew’s survey, is somewhere between 45 and 54, according to a sampling of roughly one-fifth of the total audience.I don’t dispute that some things in life end, or that the United States right now has a very serious governance problem, or that the humanities are going through a pretty gruesome patch. Many aspects of life that I cherish are under siege. Independent coffee shops are disappearing, newsstands are repurposed to sell candy and snacks, and movie theaters are shuttering. On the other hand, an Oxford mathematician named Andrew Wiles finally cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem; deaths from heart disease are down 66 percent since 1970; the Democrats will likely win back the House in November; and Ann Patchett’s latest bestselling novel is a delight. I mention this last because the latest Atlantic cover story announces “The Age of Reading Is Over,” and the story itself is headlined “The End of Reading Is Here.” Everything is always ending in The Atlantic. Did you know, for instance, that “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending”? Neither did I. An otherwise strong March 2024 piece by Franklin Foer, about the troubling recent rise in antisemitism, went haywire in its final paragraph.“The forces arrayed against Jews, on the right and the left, are far more powerful than they were 50 years ago,” Foer wrote. OK, but that’s an unexceptional observation because antisemitism was negligible in 1974. The better point of comparison would be 70 years ago, which was right around the time my Jewish father spent a whole interview with a Madison Avenue personnel chief dodging the question, “What kind of a name is ‘Noah’?” Or maybe even 60 years ago, when it was still common to change your surname to sound less Jewish. Antisemitism is on the rise, and that’s worrying. But it’s nowhere near the level that pervaded the U.S. as late as 1964.Foer went on to argue that antisemitic societies “are prone to decline” in other ways. “England entered a long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290.” But excepting an epidemic of bubonic plague that crashed ashore 58 years later, I can’t fathom what Foer’s talking about. “Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s.” That’s more plausible, because many of the revolutionaries were Jewish, including Leon Trotsky. “If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.” Yes, it would be bad for the Jews. But we’re only 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, and America, sad to say, prospered through a much more fierce surge of antisemitism stretching from the Gilded Age through the roaring twenties. Can’t a recent increase in antisemitism be evaluated as its own specific problem?Other things that The Atlantic has declared to be ending: “The End of Men” (July/August 2010), “The End of Diplomacy” (February 2026), The End of High-School English” (December 2022), “The End of Minimalism” (July/August 2020), “The End of Trust” (November 2021), “The End of Human Rights” (March 2026), “The End of Democracy Has Already Begun” (September 2024), “This is the Way a World Order Ends” (April 2025), “The End of Rule of Law in America” (May 2025), “How America Ends” (December 2019), “The End of the West” (November 2002), and, most hyperbolically of all, Francis Fukuyama flagging “More Proof That This Is Really the End of History” (October 2022). Only very occasionally does the thing that’s ending merit a “good riddance,” but in September 2025 The Atlantic did post a Hanna Rosin podcast under the heading, “Is This the End of Kids on Social Media?” Alas, it wasn’t, except on Facebook.Sexual activity declines as people age (including, presumably, Atlantic readers), so it shouldn’t surprise us that The Atlantic repeatedly announces the end of sexual congress. “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” was a reasonable question to ask in December 2018, as the word incel was starting to acquire currency. But did we also need “The Bored Sex” (i.e., women, sexually) in February 2019 and “The Death of the Sex Scene” in February 2023 and “The Slow, Quiet Demise of American Romance” in December 2024 and “Sex Without Women” (about hetero male preference for porn) in March 2025? After all, Atlantic readers had already been fed “Dear Therapist: My Husband Doesn’t Want to Have Sex Anymore” in 2018 and “The Real Problem With Hookup Culture: Bad Sex” in 2013. What’s it going to take to get a little fucking going in The Atlantic?I asked Google AI: “How often has The Atlantic announced the end of something?” The bot turned out to be even more fed up than I am:The Atlantic has proclaimed “the end of” various cultural, political, and societal concepts hundreds of times over its long history. It is one of the magazine’s most famous and frequently deployed headline tropes, framing everything from macro-political shifts to tiny cultural trends as a grand finale. The publication has a well-documented fondness for “apocalypse stories,” routinely declaring that an era, a habit, or an institution has officially reached its expiration date.In fairness, neither of the sources Google AI cited supported this interpretation, and the one used to undergird the claim that The Atlantic fancies “apocalypse stories” was neither an apocalypse story nor an assertion that The Atlantic runs a lot of them. Rather, it was a characteristically excellent analytical essay by Adam Kirsch about the appeal of apocalypse stories, under a headline (“Apocalypse, Constantly”) that would serve just as well for the piece you’re reading now. So Google AI’s assessment framed the guilty. On the other hand, Google AI had no trouble finding “end of” Atlantic stories. It furnished many of the examples I’ve cited already. (For the record, in anticipation of glass-house accusations, I acknowledge that The New Republic also has used “The End of ...” in a handful of headlines over the years, but nowhere near as frequently as The Atlantic.)I then asked Google AI: “Has The Atlantic ever announced the beginning of anything?” Yes, it replied. But then I looked at its examples. The first was “The Beginning of a New DOJ” from last October, about the wrecking ball the Trump administration is taking to rule of law at the Justice Department, so really that was about the end of responsible prosecutions. Strike one. The second was “The Beginning of the End of NATO” from last September. Strike two. The third was “Caitlin Clark Is Just the Beginning.” That was a genuine “beginning of” piece about the (hopeful) future for female college athletics. But Google AI had to admit that beginnings in The Atlantic tend to be endings in disguise:The publication frequently uses the beginning-of-a-new-era narrative to document profound changes in society. For instance, their writers have pondered whether we are witnessing the beginning of a postliterate or post-reading age, or the beginning of entirely new, reality-altering conspiracy networks.In other words, The Atlantic published pieces about the end of reading and the end of accurate perception of reality. Please don’t mistake my criticism for an argument on behalf of chirpy good-news stories. Rather, it’s an argument against doom porn (for which I’ve criticized The Atlantic before) and overgeneralization. Part of the difficulty is that The Atlantic cut back on-scene reporting decades ago, I presume to save money, though money doesn’t appear to be in short supply lately. It’s harder to issue grand pronunciamenti, either optimistic or pessimistic, after you’ve interviewed a lot of people face to face. Even if you don’t circle the globe, though—I certainly don’t—you can report and write about bad stuff in a spirit not of defeat but defiance. While I was reporting early last year a comprehensive guide to resisting President Donald Trump, I felt in a near panic that some other news organization—maybe even The Atlantic—would scoop me. I needn’t have worried. Neither did The New Republic have to fret about being scooped by The Atlantic (or many others) when it initiated a series of short profiles about people who were resisting Trump in promising ways.This is not a piece about The Atlantic’s new “End of Reading” piece. I haven’t read it, and for all I know it’s superb. Certainly it’s a legitimate social problem that high school and even college teachers struggle to get young people to read books (especially those published before 1900). The protagonist of Patchett’s novel Whistler is a middle-aged woman named Daphne Fuller who teaches English at an exclusive all-girls private school in New York modeled on Spence or Chapin. Her students, Fuller tells her stepfather, who’s a longtime editor at Random House, still read books. “When they read David Copperfield,” she says, “they read the whole thing. They read The Return of the Native. The AP girls read Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick last semester. Moby-Dick!” This is the only part of Patchett’s narrative that required, from me, a willing suspension of disbelief.I’ve valued some of The Atlantic’s End-ist pieces in the past (Foer’s antisemitism piece minus its End-ism; Hanna Rosin’s “End of Men” piece, which was really about economic displacement; Kate Julian’s Young-People Sex piece, which persuasively identified the problem as a “sex recession”; recessions don’t last forever). But The Atlantic is addicted to framing these and other stories as the End of Something. You’d think that a magazine that’s been around for 169 years would possess a better sense of life’s continuities. What I’d like to see end is “end of” pieces in The Atlantic as it sails into its next 169 years.

Over the last two days, the United States has struck nearly 200 sites in Iran and killed 14 people, according to Iranian state authorities. Iran, meanwhile, is back to lobbing missiles at military sites in Jordan, Qatar, and Kuwait. The Strait of Hormuz is all but closed. The Israeli military is “ready and on alert for a resumption of fighting,” said Defense Minister Israel Katz. “The attacks were four to five times more extensive than other strikes launched since the agreement to end the war was signed last month,” a senior Trump official told The Wall Street Journal. That official also told the Journal that “the U.S. still considers the ceasefire in effect.” Another official was much blunter to Axios’s Barak Ravid, saying, “We’re going to slap them a bit so they understand we’re not fucking around.” It’s been roughly a month since the U.S. and Iran reached a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the war, and three months since the two sides first agreed to a ceasefire. And this is hardly the first flare-up in hostilities over that time. So what do you call a ceasefire that is punctured by expansive, destructive strikes every few weeks, if not days? Is it still a ceasefire? Is the goal still to reach a deal to end the war? Or are we entering a new phase, in which both sides insist they are working to reach a permanent solution while maintaining the tit-for-tat status quo for ... how long, exactly? Every day, this conflict looks more and more like Trump’s forever war. It may not ever involve boots on the ground or “regime change” on par with Iraq or Afghanistan. But it shows every sign of persisting as those wars did—and every sign of being left for his successors to truly resolve. The ceasefire is still in effect even as the U.S. fires missiles into five Iranian provinces and Iran fires back at U.S. military bases across the Persian Gulf. A legal agreement, it can withstand—as several have, most recently in Gaza—widespread violence without being formally “broken.” But how different is the current situation from the one that preceded last month’s agreement? Even if both parties cling to the “ceasefire,” it’s hard to argue that there has been much improvement since April, when negotiations to end the Iran war began in earnest. It is, I suppose, good news in and of itself that both sides agree the ceasefire is still in effect, even amid periodic bombing; it suggests that neither intends to fully resume hostilities. But the larger picture is bleak: a war that continues indefinitely, via extensive strikes that occur for a few days at a time, when it suits the regional interests of the Iranian regime or the economic ones of the U.S. It’s clear that the Trump administration is frightened that a long-lasting closure of the Strait of Hormuz would cripple the global economy and trigger a recession in the U.S. But it also seems clear that periodic closures of the strait do not worry it. Iran, meanwhile, has proven able to withstand the U.S. strikes, though is careful not to retaliate in a way that would trigger a more devastating (and potentially nuclear) reaction from Trump. So it flexes its muscle largely by showing it’s capable of controlling the strait enough to deter commercial maritime traffic. Thus, the current quagmire. The biggest problem with the Trump administration’s handling of the Iran war has always been its lack of clear objectives at the beginning. It was clear that the president, misled by key advisers, began the conflict under the mistaken belief that it would end so quickly that Iran wouldn’t even have the time or capability to close the Strait of Hormuz. Iran proved otherwise, of course, and ever since it has had the upper hand. The U.S. now has few ways to end the war without granting clear concessions to a regime it had set out to topple in late February. Regime change, at least, now seems off the table. But the U.S. also seems intent on “slapping” around the Iranians whenever it feels like it—even though it’s still not clear what the administration hopes to get out of a longer and more robust peace agreement than the ceasefire deal that was reached last month, beyond, perhaps, an end to nuclear enrichment similar to the one included in the Obama administration’s “Iran Deal” that Trump canceled. At least, it’s not clear what they want from Iran in order to permanently end the war. What they do seem content with is a new kind of forever war, one that muddles on endlessly until, like Iraq and Afghanistan, it becomes someone else’s problem.

In 2012, as a 33-year-old staff writer at The American Prospect in D.C., I had the opportunity to travel around the country, looking for stories that would show how real people were connected to the decisions made by politicians inside the Beltway. On a trip to Colorado, while interviewing voters in a suburban swing district just west of Denver, I met a young couple staying in a homeless shelter who mentioned that they had previously stayed at a slightly rundown hotel, paying weekly rent, until they could no longer afford it. I had been looking for a chance to write a long narrative feature on the rise of suburban poverty during the Great Recession, and when I checked out the hotel, I found many other families living in it and in other hotels nearby. Back in D.C., I pitched my editor and later returned to the Denver area to live in the hotel for about five weeks. I got to know the people living there—how they lost their home and what life living in a hotel was like. My article, “The Weeklies,” ran in March 2013. I remain incredibly proud of it, because it highlighted the struggle ordinary Americans were facing as the economy slowly recovered from the housing crash. I thought of all of this recently when I came across a link to a website called In the Weights. Designed to look like a 1980s computer game, it’s a database where you can “find out whether you live on” in large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, and assigns a score based on your prominence. That’s how In the Weights frames it, anyway—a naked appeal to vanity. In reality, the site shows you how much of your work has been used to train AI chatbots. I found that a lot of mine was: I was given a “strength” score of 735, which put me in the top 5 percent.So I turned to the chatbots themselves for details. Some would not divulge which works of mine were used in their training, but Gemini cited my work at The American Prospect and TNR: Your Reporting on Class and Poverty: I have access to the core concepts and reporting from your career, such as your pieces for The American Prospect covering the shredded social safety net, food insecurity among military families, and health disparities, as well as your recent coverage of working-class politics and economic anxiety for The New Republic. There have been more than a few times lately when I wanted to throw my laptop across the room, drop everything, and go live in the woods. This was one of them. “The Weeklies” wasn’t just a 7,000-word article; it was months of work. In fact, you could say I’d begun work on it even before I’d formed the idea. I had spent most of my twenties in low-paid, low-level journalism jobs, building up the reporting and writing expertise to even contemplate tackling such a story. Journalism jobs famously do not pay well: Into my mid-thirties, by the time I was writing long narratives, my salary remained $50,000. I struggled to pay rent in D.C. while also repaying my student loans from journalism graduate school. (I am still making $611.31 monthly payments and likely will continue to do so until I retire.)I don’t want to throw too much of a pity party, but as someone who went to college thanks to financial aid and then borrowed to go to graduate school because I didn’t know how else to move into my desired career, I never had family money or connections to rely on. During these years, I struggled to keep up with my bills and to stay one step ahead of the layoffs devastating the entire industry. At various times, I put my student loans in forbearance, had a Honda Civic repossessed, and defaulted on credit cards. It took me years to dig out of that financial hole.These are fairly common ups and downs for someone who grows up working-class in the U.S. These are also the kinds of trade-offs many people make early in their careers, as they hope to cash in on the experience later. Working hard at a low-paying job is supposed to allow you to step up a ladder to a more stable career. At least, that’s what we’re promised when we borrow money to get an education and then live on ramen, with multiple roommates, as we embark on a career.AI is not the first technology to upend that promise, but it is the latest—and the one that has touched me most personally. It makes sense that I would be In the Weights. I wrote a lot of words during the early years of internet publishing, creating a body of work that is easy to find and offers free material for the LLMs to suck into their gaping maw. But it is a mistake to think of everything I published under my name as just internet writing. Each word came from years and years of labor.A number of organizations are trying to tackle how AI is used in the workplace, and how workers might have say in its use and be protected from job loss. The AFL-CIO, in a platform released after its national convention last month, demanded that “working people have a say in how and whether AI and other advanced technologies are developed and deployed.” Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is working with states, policymakers, industries, and Big Tech to design policy, training, and payment programs that help transition workers who may be displaced by AI. New America released a report late last month about “centering workers in the AI economy,” using lessons learned from major labor disruptions of the past. Even the pope has weighed in.We definitely need to talk about where we’re headed, but what about where we’ve been? Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is the rare voice on Capitol Hill to acknowledge that AI “is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and the creative work of tens of millions of people.” Last month, he introduced a bill that would levy a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI firms to create a $7 trillion sovereign wealth fund, which every year would pay out more than $1,000 to everyone in the U.S. It would also give the federal government voting shares and positions on company boards to allow the public to have a say in its future use.This legislation recognizes the real problem. I lived paycheck-to-paycheck to create the work that helps fuel LLMs today, yet I get zero compensation for it while global investment in AI is in the billions and it’s making Silicon Valley even richer. Elon Musk’s SpaceX absorbed his AI model, Grok, to increase the aerospace company’s value ahead of an IPO that briefly made Musk the world’s first trillionaire. AI may be a bubble, and I agree with the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci that AI can’t possibly steal all of our jobs, but it will make many people extremely rich no matter what. And they will have gotten rich because AI relied on the labor of working people without paying a cent for it.Of course, this is part of a broader trend in which executives and investors mint millions while workers get an increasingly thin sliver of the pie. If you want one chart to explain why people are mad about the economy right now, look at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s chart showing how labor’s share of gross domestic product has declined since the 1950s. These trends are global, but in the U.S. the divide is more extreme than in other countries. Our productivity keeps going up, but the gains are rewarding capital and pumping up CEO salaries. If the past is any guide, the people who will be the most hurt by AI disruptions are the workers who are later on in their careers who have built up a specific expertise and don’t easily transition into new jobs at the same salary as their previous jobs—and this chart shows that these are the workers who’ve been underpaid this whole time.While anger at Big Tech is growing, I don’t know if people are angry enough, and I wonder if that’s partly because a lot of the work that has fueled social media platforms and now AI is in creative fields like art and writing, which are misunderstood or esoteric to many Americans. The writing that many people do in their own working lives might be annoying paperwork, like a self-evaluation, or a cover letter in a job application—typing, basically. But writing, whether a quick take on the day’s news or months of reporting, is really the product of months or even years of labor. Writing also demands thinking, which is work in itself. Generative AI can write, albeit very poorly, but it can’t really think—not as humans do. The best it can do is scan all of its inputs—the result of human beings’ thoughts—in order to approximate the output a human would provide.Big Tech wants us to believe they’re concerned about the effects their models might have on real people, like creating mass unemployment. Anthropic positions itself as an ethical AI company, and its CEO, Dario Amodei, has aligned with the Vatican on its concerns about the human costs of AI. Other tech CEOs make noises about policies like guaranteed income that would allow people to earn salaries even without jobs. But that kind of generosity is at odds with the way they built their models in the first place—by stealing others’ intellectual property.Only politics can address the problems with AI, but for the past 50 years our leaders in Washington have largely abandoned labor in favor of companies’ capital growth. Wages, taxes, and regulations have undervalued the work and safety of real people, driving the K-shaped economic growth we see now. Political and economic systems won’t change course unless we force them to. To use an example from the past, the Luddite rebellion was not a wholesale rejection of modern advances. The Luddites were textile workers angry about how mechanization was being used to exploit working people, and they protested by destroying automated power looms. My desire to smash my laptop comes from an old tradition.