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Trump’s Latest Vaccine Order Is Making Things More Confusing

<div>Americans have been stuck in a state of vaccine whiplash.<br><figure><img src="https://imgproxy.citrusreader.com/38vPksOMzR5j9W_s0yxINFWXYKpOTNew00q_tCqmSto/raw:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9jZG4udGhlYXRsYW50aWMuY29tL3RodW1ib3IvOU5EZ1hndUUwNEhxZEpIQXFLWXNhUFBueXVjPS8weDA6Mjg4MHgxNjIwLzk2MHg1NDAvbWVkaWEvbmV3c2xldHRlcnMvMjAyNi8wOC8yMDI2XzA4XzEzX1RoZV9EYWlseV9WYWNjaW5lX0d1aWRhbmNlX2lzX2FfTWVzc18yMjM5ODcwNTM5L29yaWdpbmFsLmpwZw" alt="Doctor Nola Jean Ernest talks with Shaquanta Alfrod as she holds her son Yuri, 1, at the doctor's office in Enterprise, Alabama, on September 12, 2025." referrerpolicy="no-referrer"><figcaption>Dan Anderson / The Washington Post / Getty</figcaption></figure><small><i>This is an edition of The</i> Atlantic<i> Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. </i><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/atlantic-daily/"><i>Sign up for it here.</i></a></small><br><br>In January, the Trump administration attempted to fundamentally change the way the United States handles childhood immunizations. Following a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC updated its vaccine schedule to recommend that some shots no longer be given to all children. A federal court undid the effort in March. In an <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/05/realigning-united-states-core-childhood-vaccine-recommendations-with-best-practices-from-peer-developed-countries/">executive order</a> in May, Donald Trump called on states to adopt the narrower schedule anyway. On Monday, Trump issued a new <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/delivering-gold-standard-childhood-vaccine-recommendations-for-americans/">executive order</a> on the same subject, focused on lowering the number of vaccines that the government recommends for all children. As I wrote earlier this week, this White House has a habit of <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/08/trump-doubles-down-old-conflicts/688255/">doubling down</a> when it doesn’t get its way. But only states have the power to put these proposals into practice—and many state policy makers, concerned that the White House is contradicting existing research, aren’t keen to follow its guidance.<br><br>According to the new executive order, preventive shots for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, dengue, and other diseases should be recommended for “high-risk” groups only. The order also calls to split up vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella—the two-dose MMR shot that has been a standard recommendation for U.S. children for decades—into three separate stages, and directs the attorney general to pursue legal action against states that don’t respect “parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law.” (The order says it will align U.S. policy with the best practices of other countries, such as Denmark, but the experts I spoke with highlighted that what works in one country <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/07/hhs-vaccine-policy-europe-denmark/683640/">won’t necessarily work in another</a>.)<br><br>The mandate may not have any legal authority to compel states to change their guidelines in the near term, although the invocation of the attorney general suggests that litigation may be on the horizon. And the single-disease vaccines that the executive order encourages aren’t yet available in the U.S. But this week’s order risks creating even more uncertainty about vaccines than already exists. “If you set out to write a policy that confuses people, it would look a lot like this one,” Jake Scott, an infectious-disease specialist at Stanford, told me.<br><br>Between the policy priorities of the Trump administration and the guidance of public-health experts, Americans have been stuck in a state of vaccine whiplash. When the American Academy of Pediatrics <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/pediatricians-cdc-children-vaccine-guidance-rfk-jr-rcna255939">broke</a> with the government earlier this year over its proposed vaccine schedule, the chair of the organization’s committee on infectious diseases told reporters that the recommendations are a “strong departure from the medical evidence and no longer offer the optimal way to prevent illness in children.” Some state lawmakers have been fighting over how best to adapt to the CDC’s changing guidelines; Kansas’s GOP-dominated legislature tried to bring the state’s vaccine rules into alignment with the CDC’s, only for its Democratic governor to <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article315395954.html">veto the effort</a> in April. And many other states have <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.kff.org/state-health-policy-data/state-recommendations-for-routine-childhood-vaccines-increasing-departure-from-federal-guidelines/">publicly said</a> that they will reject the guidelines.<br><br>Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has questioned vaccines’ safety in the past, has been driving the discussions of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, as my colleagues Tom Bartlett and Katherine J. Wu <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/09/acip-hep-b/684266/">reported</a>. And although the secretary has <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/health/kennedy-vaccine-safety.html">moved away</a> from explicit anti-vax rhetoric in recent months (following a <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-04-09/rfk-jr-has-stopped-talking-about-vaccines-a-memo-shows-why">reported</a> White House push for health officials to stick to messages with broad public support), vaccine skepticism clearly lingers within the administration. During the press conference for Monday’s executive order, Trump suggested that the MMR vaccine could be “quite lethal.” There is no evidence for this. Measles, though, can kill: Last year, the U.S. saw its <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/texas-measles-outbreak-death-family/681985/">first deaths</a> from measles in a decade.<br><br>Rethinking MMR at this moment poses extreme logistical challenges. Even if pharmaceutical companies opted to invest the time and money to introduce these shots to the American market, splitting up the doses would create new problems for caregivers. “We are essentially tripling the operational labor required of the parent or guardian (who must now schedule three separate appointments for their child),” Maimuna Majumder, a Harvard epidemiologist, told me in an email, which is “all but guaranteed to result in missed vaccines.”<br><br>In the meantime, the executive order risks misinforming Americans who are already unsure of how they feel about vaccination. The Kaiser Family Foundation released a <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.kff.org/public-opinion/kff-tracking-poll-on-health-information-and-trust-update-on-common-vaccine-myths/">study</a> in June suggesting that about a third of American adults fall into a “mixed middle group” of vaccine skepticism—they believe some myths and reject others. My colleague Nick Florko, who covers public health, told me that these are the people most likely to be swayed by the administration’s latest push: “Those are the folks that might see this and think, <i>Okay, maybe my belief that I want to delay this vaccine is well founded because the federal guidance now says that we should do that</i>.” Under the White House’s rubric, the Americans who most need clear guidance are those who stand to lose.<br><br><b>Related</b>:<br><br><li><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/09/acip-hep-b/684266/">Kennedy’s handpicked vaccine committee is a mess. (<i>From 2025</i>)</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/05/us-global-vaccination/687247/">The U.S.’s most concerning anti-vaccine policy</a></li><strong>Here are three new stories from <i>The Atlantic</i>:</strong><br><br><li><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/patriot-games-trump-freedom-250/688273/">Hunger Games, MAGA style</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/08/kennedy-center-trump-board/688276/">Trump’s new plan to get his name back on the Kennedy Center</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/08/airplane-wifi-travel/688260/">Our last Wi-Fi-less refuge is gone.</a></li><strong>Today’s News</strong><br><br><li>The Kennedy Center’s board <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/arts/design/kennedy-center-closure-board-vote-trump.html">voted to put President Trump’s name back on the building</a>, months after a federal judge ordered it removed. The board also approved closing the main building for a $250 million renovation, aiming to reopen it in 2028.</li> <li>A federal judge <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/08/13/us/trump-news#harvard-antisemitism-case-dismissed">dismissed the Trump administration’s anti-Semitism lawsuit against Harvard</a>, finding that the incidents cited by the government were “too isolated and episodic” to show that the university was violating federal civil-rights law. The administration had accused Harvard of failing to address anti-Semitism on campus and sought the ability to deny the university federal grants.</li> <li>Flock Safety, which operates a nationwide network of license-plate-reading cameras used by police to track vehicles, announced <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/13/flock-unveils-changes-after-post-report-police-misuse-its-network/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">new safeguards after reports that officers misused the system to surveil people</a>. The company said it will cut its default data-storage period from 30 days to seven and add stronger oversight of police searches.</li><strong>Dispatches</strong><br><br><li><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/time-travel-thursdays/"><b>Time-Travel Thursdays</b></a><b>:</b> In 1973, an <i>Atlantic</i> writer predicted that Richard Nixon’s downfall would restrain presidents for generations. Instead, Watergate <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/08/watergate-schlesinger-nixon-presidential-scandals/688282/">helped write the script for the scandals that followed</a>, Jake Lundberg argues.</li><em><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://link.theatlantic.com/click/29767897.0/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cudGhlYXRsYW50aWMuY29tL25ld3NsZXR0ZXJzLz91dG1fc291cmNlPW5ld3NsZXR0ZXImdXRtX21lZGl1bT1lbWFpbCZ1dG1fY2FtcGFpZ249YXRsYW50aWMtZGFpbHktbmV3c2xldHRlciZ1dG1fY29udGVudD0yMDIyMTEyMQ/61813432e16c7128e42f4628B52865c35">Explore all of our newsletters here.</a></em><br><br><strong>Evening Read</strong><br><br>What I Saw In Sinaloa<br><br><i>By Kevin Sieff</i><br><br><p>Last Tuesday night, I was eating sushi with a Mexican police chief in downtown Culiacán, a city that had momentarily flickered back to life amid a bloody cartel turf war. At the table next to us was a birthday party. The police chief ordered a salmon roll. Through the window, I could see groups of families and friends walking on the sidewalk, past car dealerships and strip malls, after months of self-imposed lockdown.</p> <p>Among them were three influencers who pulled up to a KFC down the street. They were dressed as food-delivery workers, carrying insulated bags on their backs, joking with one another and livestreaming everything with their phones. César Gastélum, the group’s front man, had become famous for such innocuous pranks. Even as thousands were murdered by the cartels, Gastélum, a stocky, bearded 24-year-old, posted videos of himself dancing in pajamas, dressing as a priest, sipping iced coffee. He had more than 700,000 followers on TikTok.</p><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/08/cartels-mexico-sinaloa-influencers-cesar-gastelum/688253/">Read the full article.</a><br><br><b>More From <em>The Atlantic</em></b><br><br><li><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/08/iran-muslim-countries-defense-pact/688265/">Arash Azizi: Tehran has to make a choice.</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/08/mark-zuckerberg-ai-manifesto/688269/">Mark Zuckerberg’s convenient truth</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/jonestown-cult-radical-politics/688257/">James Kirchick on the fatal combination of ideology and charisma</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/08/smartphones-technology-nostalgia-how-to-touch-grass/688169/"><i>Radio Atlantic</i>: Longing for a time before smartphones</a></li><b>Culture Break</b><br><br><b>Listen. </b>Phoebe Bridgers’s new record is a <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/08/phoebe-bridgers-lost-weekend-review/688268/">perfect album for a frustrating decade</a>, Spencer Kornhaber argues.<br><br><b>Explore.</b> Hollywood <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/08/youtube-reddit-hollywood-movies-backrooms-obsession/688258/">sees Reddit and YouTube as gold mines</a>, Shirley Li writes. But turning a viral video into the next big movie isn’t so easy.<br><br><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/">Play our daily crossword.</a><br><br><small><i>Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.</i></small><br><br><small><em>When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting </em>The Atlantic<em>.</em></small><br><br></div>

2026/8/13
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The Lesson Watergate Was Supposed to Teach

<div>Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. thought Nixon’s downfall would restrain presidents for generations. Instead, Watergate helped write the script for the scandals that followed.<br><figure><img src="https://imgproxy.citrusreader.com/74prpfVEEgqGzjN9veSLQ0sBgRLXfb7GykC5qyUFORI/raw:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9jZG4udGhlYXRsYW50aWMuY29tL3RodW1ib3IvajJXaWdHNGtySkx6dzM2ZUJZSFY2X0N3bllnPS8weDA6MjAwMHgxMTI1Lzk2MHg1NDAvbWVkaWEvbmV3c2xldHRlcnMvMjAyNi8wOC8yMDI2XzA4XzEyX1RpbWVfVHJhdmVsX21wZy9vcmlnaW5hbC5qcGc" alt="Nixon announces his resignation on national television, following the Watergate scandal." referrerpolicy="no-referrer"><figcaption>Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Pierre Manevy / Express / Getty.</figcaption></figure><p data-flatplan-paragraph="true"><small><em>This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through </em>The Atlantic<em>’s archives to contextualize the present. <a data-event-element="inline link" data-gtm-vis-first-on-screen31117857_899="596" data-gtm-vis-has-fired31117857_899="1" data-gtm-vis-total-visible-time31117857_899="100" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://link.theatlantic.com/click/33390566.0/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cudGhlYXRsYW50aWMuY29tL25ld3NsZXR0ZXJzL3NpZ24tdXAvdGltZS10cmF2ZWwtdGh1cnNkYXlzLz91dG1fY2FtcGFpZ249dGltZS10cmF2ZWwtdGh1cnNkYXlzJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9bmV3c2xldHRlciZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV9jb250ZW50PTIwMjMxMTE2JmxjdGc9NjA1MGUyYjIxZmMxNmQxMzdmODNjMDM4/6050e2b21fc16d137f83c038B739d3752&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1700537312616000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1Wnu2HF_pgwDs1mmU_1D82" href="https://link.theatlantic.com/click/33390566.0/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cudGhlYXRsYW50aWMuY29tL25ld3NsZXR0ZXJzL3NpZ24tdXAvdGltZS10cmF2ZWwtdGh1cnNkYXlzLz91dG1fY2FtcGFpZ249dGltZS10cmF2ZWwtdGh1cnNkYXlzJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9bmV3c2xldHRlciZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV9jb250ZW50PTIwMjMxMTE2JmxjdGc9NjA1MGUyYjIxZmMxNmQxMzdmODNjMDM4/6050e2b21fc16d137f83c038B739d3752" target="_blank">Sign up here.</a></em></small></p>Historians are generally better off interpreting the past than predicting the future. By training, we’re meant to read sources, not tea leaves. In the fall of 1973, during the middle acts of Watergate’s Shakespearean drama, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. tried to do a little bit of both. In the cover story of <i>The Atlantic</i>’s November issue that year, “<a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/11/the-runaway-presidency/306211/">The Runaway Presidency</a>,” Schlesinger cast President Richard Nixon’s abuses as the result of long-standing historical trends that had empowered the chief executive, and in the process offered a hopeful prognosis for what was to come. “Watergate,” Schlesinger wrote, “is potentially the best thing to have happened to the presidency in a long time. If the trails are followed to their end, many, many years will pass before another White House staff dares take the liberties with the Constitution and the laws the Nixon White House has taken.”<br><br>Nixon resigned 52 years ago this month, marking an end to the scandal, but bringing no such catharsis to our national life and no stop to the runaway presidency. Underscoring just how poorly Schlesinger’s optimism aged, J. D. Vance <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://apnews.com/article/vance-nixon-watergate-9a82141f1b4f5b2c973a4bdb107812d9">mused in June</a> that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” As my colleague David A. Graham <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/vance-watergate-news-cycle-comments/687742/">noted</a> at the time, the remark was a startling admission from a member of an administration that has taken liberties with the Constitution and the laws. It’s also entirely plausible: Scandals that would have previously brought the nation to a standstill barely register for more than a few days, in part because there are simply <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-ethics-corruption-crypto-watchdogs/688187/">so many of them</a> under Donald Trump. To understand how Schlesinger got it so wrong, first you have to understand what he got right.<br><br>In 1973, Schlesinger published a brick of a book titled <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780618420018"><i>The Imperial Presidency</i></a>. He’d begun writing it as a pamphlet that March, but the project quickly swelled to 200,000 words as the spectacle of Watergate unfolded. The book tracked the aggregation of executive power from the founding onward, which accelerated during World War II and the Cold War. By the early ’70s, the office had grown so far beyond its constitutional bounds, Schlesinger wrote, that it posed “a revolutionary challenge to the separation of powers itself.”<br><br>Schlesinger’s <i>Atlantic</i> essay was preaching from his own text. In that account, Nixon’s abuses were symptoms that made visible a larger sickness. The expansion of the presidency, especially in the realm of war and foreign policy, was clear enough, but Nixon showed the dangers and “intoxications” that came with such power at home. Previous presidents may have possessed such authority but, Schlesinger argued, they had the character and restraint not to use it. Nixon was a different kind of case, demonstrating what would happen when a person “not open and modest,” but “from the start ambitious of power and contemptuous of law,” reached the nation’s highest office.<br><br>The president’s place at the center of the American political story exacerbated the problem. Congress should restrain the executive to reassert its place in the constitutional order, Schlesinger argued (he had advocated for Nixon’s impeachment as a starting point), but the American people also had a role to play: They must form “a new attitude” toward their presidents, becoming more skeptical and less reverent toward the office. Doing so would administer fewer “intoxications” to its occupant, Schlesinger wrote. But his prescriptions struck his critics <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/12/13/no-thank-you-mr-president/">as rich, to say the least</a>. As he admitted in <i>The Imperial Presidency</i>, “historians and political scientists, this writer among them, contributed to the rise of the presidential mystique.” Contributed, indeed. Over the course of his career, Schlesinger had endowed Democratic presidents with just the stature he now feared. In 1965, he’d memorialized John F. Kennedy (to whom he served as special assistant) in a <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Thousand_Days.html?id=uFhNxX5lrNEC">book</a> so reverential that the writer Christopher Hitchens later called it “the founding breviary of the cult of JFK.”<br><br>Schlesinger may have only got religion because of the sins of the Republican Nixon administration, but he wasn’t exactly wrong. Many others in the moment hoped that Nixon’s transgressions would spark something of a democratic revival to check the dangerous tendencies that had made Watergate possible. And reforms did come: A slew of legislation from 1973 to 1978 attempted to address abuses exposed by Watergate and restrain presidential power on war, impoundment, elections, secrecy, and surveillance.<br><br>What Schlesinger failed to see was that although the dramas of Watergate may have pierced the mystique of the presidency, they also heightened the American fascination with it. Many people did lose their reverence for the office, but they didn’t turn their attention away. Perversely, it seemed that the spectacle of the presidency was enhanced rather than diminished by its subsequent scandals. Watergate supplied more than the inevitable suffix for all presidential crises to come—it also established the script. The crime and the cover-up; the drip of revelations; the question of what the president knew, and when he knew it; the obscure Washington characters thrust into the spotlight; the marathon hearings; the stern reports on the nightly news.<br><br>But presidential scandals, which once dominated the media cycle for weeks and months, now come and go at the speed of an attention economy that demands constant novelty. Meanwhile, the institutions that might have checked presidential power now enable it. Congress’s inaction and the Supreme Court’s expansive doctrine of executive authority have brought us closer to Nixon’s later assertion that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Watergate would be a 12-hour news story today, as Vance suggests, because there’s nothing to stop a new one from happening tomorrow. In an era of revelation without reckoning, we’re more transfixed than ever by the imperial presidency, whether we like it or not.<br><br>At the end of his 1973 <i>Atlantic</i> essay, Schlesinger suggested that corruption came to the White House in 50-year cycles, like monstrous cicadas. There is perhaps something to the idea. Start from the abuses of Nixon, in the early ’70s, and go back half a century to the abuses of Warren Harding, in the early 1920s. Do that again, and you would arrive at the scandals that plagued Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, in the 1870s. Keep rewinding another 50 years—ignore John Quincy Adams’s reputation for probity and rectitude—and you’d land on the “Corrupt Bargain” that gave Adams the presidency in the election of 1824.<br><br>The cycle could be projected forward, too: Schlesinger closed with one more prediction, this one more right than wrong. “Around the year 2023,” he wrote, “the American people will be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.” We can’t say we weren’t warned.<br><br></div>

2026/8/13
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Trump’s New Plan to Get His Name Back on the Kennedy Center

<div>The center’s board voted—again—to shut down for a renovation. It threw in a design tweak.<br><figure><img src="https://imgproxy.citrusreader.com/o14xMRPCn5rfPDddIne8CSPr1Yy0mm7y0UpoPv0f0Q0/raw:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9jZG4udGhlYXRsYW50aWMuY29tL3RodW1ib3IvYkxJQ3otVHB0c3R1eS1pWXNNUm5MTGRCWV84PS8weDA6Mjg4MHgxNjIwLzk2MHg1NDAvbWVkaWEvaW1nL210LzIwMjYvMDgvMjAyNl8wOF8xM19Eb25hbGRfVHJ1bXBfQ2Fubm90X0xldF90aGVfS2VubmVkeV9DZW50ZXJfR29fMjI4MDcyMDY0NC9vcmlnaW5hbC5qcGc" alt="A person is silhouetted in front of a building under construction" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"><figcaption>Alex Wroblewski / AFP / Getty</figcaption></figure>Donald Trump just won’t let go of his plans for the Kennedy Center.<br><br>Less than three months after a federal judge ordered the president’s name stripped from the national arts center, Trump’s handpicked trustees have found a new way to try to put him back on the building. During a board meeting today, they voted in favor of a resolution that would return the president’s name to the building’s facade. It would read:<br><br><p align="center"><span class="smallcaps">The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts<br> Restored and Renovated by President Donald Trump </span></p>I obtained a copy of the resolution, which contains one more edit to the Kennedy Center’s marble edifice. Once an <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/the-trump-kennedy-center-foundation-is-the-arts-complexs-latest-mystery/687752/">obscure</a> endowment known as the Trump Kennedy Center Fund reaches $100 million in donations, the resolution would expand the proposed signage’s language to include a third line: <span class="smallcaps">Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund</span>. The vote, which was not included on the agenda distributed before the meeting, will likely drag out a legal fight over Trump’s transformation of the center and deepen an institutional crisis that has repelled audiences, artists, and donors since his takeover. Participants voted 20–3 to adopt the resolution, one person familiar with today’s proceedings told me on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter. The three “no” votes were from ex officio members of the board, who are not appointed by Trump but serve by dint of their federal office. Most members of the board are general trustees appointed by Trump. (The board elected Trump chair in February 2025.)<br><br>There is also still the matter of the center’s renovation plans. A main item of the meeting was to resolve a problem that has dogged Trump’s plans for the Kennedy Center for months: how to make a convincing case that the center needs to close. A federal judge had previously ruled that the board had failed to sufficiently examine the consequences of a full shutdown when it signed off in March on Trump’s surprise plan to close down the center for two years for a glow-up. Critics, including some ex officio trustees, accuse Trump of using the renovation as a cover for the center’s operational failings under his leadership. This time, board members reviewed a new trove of materials before—once again—voting for a full closure.<br><br>I obtained the report, assembled by a consulting firm and a construction-management firm, which presented two scenarios. The two-year-closure plan favored by Trump, which would displace ensembles such as the National Symphony Orchestra until the center reopened, would be covered largely by the $257 million appropriation from Congress that Trump asked for last year. A $560 million plan would extend the renovation to four years but allow programming to continue inside the center. Arts administrators generally try to avoid full shutdowns of major arts venues for fear of breaking audiences’ attendance habits. The uncertainty has deepened a crisis faced by the orchestra, which has been unable to announce its next season.<br><br>Paolo Zampolli, a general trustee who also serves as the Trump administration’s special envoy for global partnerships, says he strongly supports the plans to close. “It doesn’t make sense to keep it open,” he told me in a phone call after the meeting. “It’s going to take the double of time and cost the double of money.”<br><br>At one point, Trump joined the meeting virtually, delivering a tirade of “epic proportions” about the center’s disarray, the person familiar with the proceedings told me. Kennedy Center leaders under Trump have long claimed that the building is falling apart and that the president helped turn around the institution. Today’s naming resolution honored his “existential and unprecedented contributions” to the center.<br><br>“It’s very normal that when people do good things, there’s going to be some kind of recognition,” Zampolli told me, adding that he would support Trump’s name being included “everywhere that it could be possible” at the center. Zampolli, a longtime friend of Trump’s, also said he planned to use his own international business relationships to solicit donations for the institution. “That’s why we’re there,” he said of the general trustees. “That’s why the president chooses us and has confidence in us.”<br><br>In a statement, one of the ex officio trustees, Representative Rick Larsen of Washington State, criticized the name resolution. “The courts have already determined that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is the memorial to the late President and that the current president’s name cannot be used in the public spaces of the memorial,” he said. “If and when the renovations are done, let’s talk about an appropriate recognition. Until then, let’s get the necessary renovation work done.”<br><br>The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to my requests for comment, and it has yet to communicate with staff about its renewed plan to close the building, according to two staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. One of them said employees had suspected leadership would try to proceed with a shutdown, but news of the name resolution was not expected. “The inscription on the wall is them testing the limits,” the person said. The proposal, as well as the renovation plan, could face pushback from the federal judge assigned to the lawsuit over the center’s future, which was filed earlier this year by Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, one of the ex officio trustees.<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/the-trump-kennedy-center-foundation-is-the-arts-complexs-latest-mystery/687752/">Read: The Kennedy Center’s latest defense raises a new mystery</a><br><br>The name resolution will likely renew speculation about why a tarp is still draping the Kennedy Center’s facade. The covering, fastened tightly to a towering system of scaffolding, has obscured John F. Kennedy’s name since June, when leaders say they complied with U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper’s order to remove Trump’s name from the building. So far, they have not provided a compelling reason for why the tarp is still up.<br><br>A spokesperson previously told me that it would remain up “as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels.” But the center will have to elaborate on that reasoning in its filing next week, if the tarp is still up.<br><br>When Trump took over the Kennedy Center, he promised to make it “hot” again, accusing the former leadership of allowing the building to crumble and the finances to wither. But if his tenure was meant to prove the thesis that he could make the Kennedy Center great again, the evidence is lacking. For many patrons and artists, the center has simply become too politicized to go anywhere near. The latest design tweak almost certainly won’t change that.<br><br></div>

2026/8/13
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Hunger Games, MAGA Style

<div>A gym-class-style competition might be the oddest 250th celebration yet.<br><figure><img src="https://imgproxy.citrusreader.com/O75aFEnCQnDvTAHYOd4XRfXbOJfawHOxiLTBqK2VC58/raw:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9jZG4udGhlYXRsYW50aWMuY29tL3RodW1ib3Ivd1ZUWGpQVTNzRmF5YVFlUjhiVzRPUk9RbzRvPS8weDA6NDAwMHgyMjUwLzk2MHg1NDAvbWVkaWEvaW1nL210LzIwMjYvMDgvMjAyNl8wOF8xM19UaGVfRnJlZWRvbTI1MF9QYXRyaW90X0dhbWVzX01pY2hhZWxfU2NoZXJlcl9NYXR0X1Zpc2VyL29yaWdpbmFsLmpwZw" alt="Contestants in the Patriot Games parade in an arena, carrying flags from various states." referrerpolicy="no-referrer"><figcaption>Mark Schiefelbein / AP</figcaption></figure>T<span class="smallcaps">he semiquincentennial events</span> that President Trump has personally directed have been a celebration of his very particular version of America. The bloody <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/06/trump-ufc-250-and-barthes-spectacle-excess/687549/">UFC fight</a> on the White House lawn was followed by the sparsely attended <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/great-state-fair-trump/687719/">Great American State Fair</a> and a world-record-breaking July 4 fireworks show held alongside a dangerous lightning storm. Next weekend will bring a high-speed car race through the museum-lined streets of Washington. But of all of these festivities, the Patriot Games in Ohio this week might have been the oddest.<br><br>Organizers convened 120 teenagers from across the country—in their telling, the “next generation of leaders, competitors, and champions,” but also whoever happened to respond to an online request for personal essays and video entries—at a high school in Geneva, Ohio (population 5,924), roughly 45 miles northeast of downtown Cleveland. For three days, they competed in gym-class staples such as ball tosses, long jumps, tug-of-war, dodgeball, and an arcade-style basketball game called Victory Hoops. The field was narrowed to eight contestants who competed before the president on Tuesday night, clambering through a <i>Ninja Warrior</i>–style obstacle course while wearing red, white, and blue. One boy and one girl were crowned champions, and each was given a $125,000 scholarship.<br><br>Over the past several days, ESPN has streamed more than 26 hours of this contest, and I have consumed many of those hours—but I have yet to fully understand why this competition happened or what it has to do with American history, or even with American culture at this moment. I could barely follow how the various events were scored. It was like watching a nationally televised field day—with wholesome moments and cheerful contestants along the way—but it was unclear what the grand takeaway was supposed to be. (Perhaps that will be revealed when the event is condensed into a one-hour special airing tonight on ABC.) More than anything, it was a reality-television-style snapshot of the America that Trump most wants to see. The contestants were overwhelmingly white, in a country where roughly half of children are not, and many spoke openly of their Christian faith or their affection for this particular president.<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/donald-trump-legacy-history/686817/">Read: The YOLO presidency</a><br><br>When Trump showed up on Tuesday night, accompanied by the ESPN commentator <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/pat-mcafee-threat-sports-journalism/678480/">Pat McAfee</a>, the crowd erupted. “He’s got that Michael Jordan glow,” one spectator said. “We love you, Mr. President!” one man yelled. “2028!” another exclaimed. Outside the arena, a football-field scoreboard displayed a score of 45–47 in Trump’s honor. The crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!” when he arrived and danced to his favorite song, “<a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/05/donald-trump-gay-icon/687332/">YMCA</a>,” before he left.<br><br>“I didn’t know what to expect,” Trump told ESPN’s Laura Rutledge during an onstage interview, a few yards from dozens of teenagers. “I’m very proud of the group of people in this room. You see the spirit and the love of the country, our great country. And our country’s never done better.”<br><br>In that moment, it became clear that this gathering, like <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/06/trump-250-great-american-state-fair/687456/">so many others</a> this president has overseen, was actually all about Trump. This was his vision of the Hunger Games, MAGA style. He was front and center, watching the grand finale unfold and eyeing <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-gold-statues/688142/">golden trophies</a> he could present. But who were these contestants, and how were they chosen? Why these random events? And what does this all say about our country, and how does it mark our 250 years as one?<br><br>T<span class="smallcaps">he Patriot Games</span>, it must be said, seldom made for great television. I watched kids’ arms quiver as they tried to keep their chin up and over a bar—at least one lasted scarcely a second. Some struggled to cross the monkey bars in an obstacle course. Others tripped over the hurdles on the track, knocking over almost every one. (“A natural hurdler? Not really,” the announcer remarked.)<br><br>In one contest, the teenagers were asked to navigate an obstacle course of sorts: bear-crawl under a net, high-step through tires, weave between slalom poles, climb up and down a cargo net, walk across a beam, flip a tire (once for girls; twice for boys), traverse the monkey bars, carry two jerricans, leap onto hanging panels, and push a red button. In another contest, they went through a circuit of various sports. They attempted to kick a soccer ball into a bull’s-eye, catch three tennis balls, run through a maze of tackling dummies, throw a football into a target, serve a volleyball three times, hit a T-ball, and, finally, run around a few bases. In between challenges, some kids offered brief, out-of-breath analysis. “I did a lot better than I thought I would on the monkey bars,” concluded Gabriel Hayes, who was representing the Shawnee Tribe. “I just got kinda tired, to be honest,” said Remy Taylor, from Delaware.<br><br>The announcers revealed the kinds of small biographical details familiar to anyone who has watched the Olympics, attempting to humanize the athletes by highlighting their love of macaroni and cheese, Greek mythology, or Legos. Some were members of JROTC or the Future Farmers of America. Many came from military families, and aspired to carry on that tradition. There were at least three sets of siblings. Multiple boys wore a cross necklace, and several of the girls had a cross painted on their body. “I just want to say, it’s the glory for God. Thank you, Lord, for this opportunity,” said Max Biondolillo of Florida, after finishing the obstacle course. “Thank you, Jesus. That’s all I can say. Thank you, Jesus,” Seylah Brown, representing North Carolina, said after completing the circuit of sports.<br><br>The biographies suggested that the organizers might have struggled with recruitment in some deep-blue jurisdictions. The boy representing Puerto Rico has a southern accent and resides in Texas. Elsie Bruckart was the contestant for Vermont, but her hometown was listed as Bellbrook, Ohio. Her cousin Rebekah Roberts competed for Maine, but her hometown was Cornish, New Hampshire. Bobbi Vickers was representing Massachusetts, but she is from California. “I get a bunch of questions, like <i>Why are you representing Massachusetts and not your home state?</i>” <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/09/politics/patriot-games-trump-partisan-patriotic-branding">Vickers told CNN</a>. “But I think it’s really cool, because a lot of my family is from there and my favorite basketball team is actually the Boston Celtics.”<br><br>People familiar with the process told me that the athletes were selected through applications that required submissions of performance data and athletic statistics, along with a personal-essay and video submission. Freedom 250 did not respond to questions about why certain states were represented by competitors living in other states, or why there was such a lack of diversity among the contestants.<br><br>Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for Freedom 250, the Trump-aligned group that organized the games, said in a statement that the Patriot Games were one of the “unforgettable signature events” meant to “celebrate our country and inspire the next generation.” Organizers told me that they’d sought to create a range of challenges, aiming to show that the winner has mastered many different skills.<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/06/trump-250-great-american-state-fair/687456/">Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle</a><br><br>Often, during the events, the producers displayed the scores for only the top-10 contestants, shielding from embarrassment those who struggled. The announcers remarked several times that just because a contestant hadn’t performed well in one discipline didn’t mean they wouldn’t do better in another. Coaches shouted encouragement from the sidelines like summer-camp counselors: <i>Give it your all! Finish the race! Be proud of the process!</i> Some contestants had said beforehand that they had little clue before they arrived in Ohio what events would be included. “I’ve never really played soccer before,” said the girl representing Michigan. “I don’t know how to throw a football,” said the girl representing the Virgin Islands.<br><br>“It was hard. It was challenging. I mean, I’ve never played any of these sports. Like, I’m a cheerleader,” Laynie Arrowood, the 16-year-old representing the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, told the sideline reporter good-naturedly. “I’m not good at throwing football—obviously not good at soccer! But it’s okay. I tried my best.” Most of the contestants did seem to be enjoying themselves, and several said they’d made close friendships over the days they’d spent together. Some said they understood how Trump’s involvement had politicized the competition but were baffled as to why they had come under scrutiny. “We can’t vote,” Jonah Beauregard, a 17-year-old from Massachusetts, <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/13/nation/trump-patriot-games-athlete-backlash/">told <i>The Boston Globe</i></a>. “We can’t do anything in our power to do anything to help it.”<br><br>T<span class="smallcaps">rump announced in May 2023</span> that, if elected to a second term, he wanted to host “major sporting contests for high-school athletes” as part of the country’s 250th celebrations. “These Patriot Games will allow young Americans from every state to show off the best of American skills, sportsmanship, and competitive spirit,” he said in a campaign video.<br><br>America has a rich athletic history, and the youth-sports industry in this country generates an estimated $40 billion in annual revenue. But to find a precedent for these games, you’d have to go further afield. The Roman emperor Nero, in 59 C.E., began hosting the <i>Ludi Juvenales</i>, a series of youth games in a festival to mark the transition from boyhood to manhood. In ancient Greece, athletic competitions began when boys turned 12. And the International Olympic Committee stages a Youth Olympic Games every four years for those ages 15 to 17.<br><br>Andy Hall, an ESPN communications director, told me that Freedom 250 approached the network last year about televising the event. He said that the network is not paying for the rights to carry it, but he would not say whether it was being paid and declined to provide any viewership data on how many people were streaming the content. (The link was buried inside the ESPN app and took me some time to find.) He said that the network had no role in organizing or planning the games, and that it was televising it as it would a game organized by other entities. The content will all be repackaged into an hour-long ESPN special that will air tonight on ABC. Representatives for ABC did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Hall declined to further comment. The Federal Communications Commission ordered a review earlier this year of the network’s licenses. Airing the president’s competition on its national platform may buy the network some goodwill.<br><br>On Tuesday night, Trump sat as the finalists worked through a course that involved swinging from ropes, carrying two kettlebells, and climbing up a wall. Kennadi Fuhrman, a soccer player from Kansas, won the girls’ competition, crediting “God, all the way.” Rockwell Myers, a tennis player and ballroom dancer from Utah, won the boys’. “It’s been amazing, and it’s taught me so much,” he said. “It really, really puts an emphasis on how important it is to put God first in your life and make him your No. 1 priority.”<br><br>Trump came onstage and helped present the trophies and oversize checks. “Incredible people. I like the audience also, I have to tell you. But what a great bunch of young athletes,” he said. Confetti went off, falling onto the contestants. One blue piece stuck in the president’s hair.<br><br><i>Michael Scherer contributed to this report.</i><br><br></div>

2026/8/13
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Influencers Are the Sinaloa Cartel’s Newest Targets

<div>The U.S. is trying to destroy Mexican cartels. But so far, a turf war has only deepened.<br><figure><img src="https://imgproxy.citrusreader.com/Gs1L98vzy-3CLYrAes5P8mc-SkBYBPrR_pZ-K26-5wY/raw:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9jZG4udGhlYXRsYW50aWMuY29tL3RodW1ib3IvZmZiRnAyYzIxc1k4TWUxaFJwUGhUN2hPQUR3PS8weDA6NDAwMHgyMjUwLzk2MHg1NDAvbWVkaWEvaW1nL210LzIwMjYvMDgvMjAyNl8wN18xMl9UaGVfTmV3X0NhcnRlbF9XYXJfS2V2aW5fU2llZmYvb3JpZ2luYWwuanBn" alt="Three black and white images showing a soldier in a military vehicle, a crime scene, and César Gastélum." referrerpolicy="no-referrer"><figcaption>Illustration by Anna Ruch / The Atlantic. Sources: Ivan Medina / AFP / Getty; Kevin Sieff; YouTube / César Gastélum.</figcaption></figure><em><small>Sign up for our&nbsp;</small></em><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/national-security/?utm_source=feed" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><em><small>newsletter about national security</small></em></a><small>&nbsp;</small><em><small>here</small></em><small>.</small><br><br>L<span class="smallcaps">ast Tuesday night,</span> I was eating sushi with a Mexican police chief in downtown Culiacán, a city that had momentarily flickered back to life amid a bloody cartel turf war. At the table next to us was a birthday party. The police chief ordered a salmon roll. Through the window, I could see groups of families and friends walking on the sidewalk, past car dealerships and strip malls, after months of self-imposed lockdown.<br><br>Among them were three influencers who pulled up to a KFC down the street. They were dressed as food-delivery workers, carrying insulated bags on their backs, joking with one another and livestreaming everything with their phones. César Gastélum, the group’s front man, had become famous for such innocuous pranks. Even as thousands were murdered by the cartels, Gastélum, a stocky, bearded 24-year-old, posted videos of himself dancing in pajamas, dressing as a priest, sipping iced coffee. He had more than 700,000 followers on TikTok.<br><br>It was this kind of incongruity that had drawn me to Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa. The city is the center of the fiercest and most consequential battle between armed groups in Mexico, and I wanted to untangle what was behind the surge of violence. From afar, it was difficult to tell whether someone like Gastélum was proof that the mundane and the horrific could coexist here, as they have for decades across Mexico, or whether he was a symbol of something else—the way drug cartels had quietly co-opted even the city’s least likely protagonists.<br><br>At about 8 o’clock, Gastélum and his friends were recording themselves waiting for their fried-chicken orders when two men on a motorcycle drove past. “Those guys scare me,” Gastélum said. He then seemed to regain his calm, joking about his skinny jeans in front of the camera when the motorcycle returned. It stopped momentarily in front of the three young men. The driver, wearing a black helmet with a face shield, raised a gun about two feet from Gastélum’s head and fired. The livestream captured the moment of the bullet’s impact and then went dark.<br><br>Someone on the city’s ambulance team texted me when the 911 call came in, and I ran across the street to the KFC. I got to the scene as police were arriving. Gastélum’s body lay at the drive-through’s exit, a ribbon of blood streaming toward the sidewalk. A cluster of soldiers gathered nearby, some of them scrolling through Gastélum’s TikTok feed. A small group of crime photographers were taking photos and uploading videos.<br><br>“As you can see, they have killed another influencer here in Culiacán,” José Ángel Beltrán of <em>Luz Noticias</em> said, narrating on Facebook Live.<br><br>Culiacán, for years the axis of Mexico’s drug wars, is now the focus of a U.S. effort to demolish drug cartels—something President Trump has said he’s willing to use military force to achieve. It is in many ways an understandable target: The Sinaloa cartel, which has administered the state for decades, is responsible for trafficking millions of kilos of fentanyl, meth, and cocaine into the United States. The Justice Department has indicted both the Sinaloa governor and the Culiacán mayor for cooperating with the cartel. Several of its leaders are serving life sentences in the U.S., and others have been targeted by Mexican security forces using intelligence from the United States.<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/archive/2025/09/fentanyl-trump-venezuela-caribbean-boats/684373/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Read: Fentanyl doesn’t come through the Caribbean</a><br><br>And yet, so far, these actions have only deepened the civil war between two Sinaloa-cartel factions, one run by the children and supporters of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán (the Chapitos), and the other run by allies of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García (the Mayos). In 2022, there were 476 homicides in Sinaloa. In 2025, it had 1,657. Government action against organized-crime groups in Mexico has almost always had such an effect—increasing violence without significantly altering the flow of drugs into the United States. But the current Sinaloa turf war—<em>la narcopandemia</em>, locals call it—has created new categories of victims, far from the foot soldiers and hit men targeted in previous spasms of violence. Now influencers and content creators are recruited by cartels to distribute their messages online. And university and vocational students have been kidnapped, presumably because their skills are needed by criminal groups. Each time a young person here is killed or vanishes, there are immediate questions about whom he or she might have been working for. When drug traffickers allegedly subsidize TikTok dances, a victim’s innocence can be almost impossible to discern.<br><br>As forensic police arrived at the KFC, Beltrán told me that another TikToker had been killed a few blocks away months earlier. A fitness influencer, El Tata, was murdered while leaving a shopping center. The body of a YouTuber, El Pinky, was found showing signs that he had been gagged and bound. About a dozen other influencers in Sinaloa have been killed, kidnapped, or attacked. Each time, the Mexican government investigated whether the influencers had somehow been linked to one group and targeted by the other. Last year, an unidentified plane dropped thousands of flyers over Culiacán that accused a number of influencers and musicians of having ties to the Chapitos (Gastélum was not on the list).<br><br>Standing in front of the crime scene as the forensic police hovered around Gastélum’s body with flashlights, I asked Beltrán why he thought a goofy livestreamer would be a target in a cartel turf war.<br><br>“Did you see that he was wearing a cowboy hat?” Beltrán asked me.<br><br>Cowboy hats have become a symbol of the Mayos faction of the cartel. The implication was that Gastélum, while performing juvenile pranks, had been making a subtle nod to one group’s power. Online commenters rushed to make the same point.<br><br>Beltrán filmed one last video of Gastélum’s body as it was taken away, and then he tapped me on the shoulder. Another victim had been found half a mile away: a man shot in the city’s botanical garden after a screening of a Lady Gaga documentary. I went with him to cover it. When we got there, it was dark, and the body was lit by a streetlight. Beltrán took his phone out again and started streaming.<br><br>“Hello again, everyone,” he said. “It’s another rough night in Culiacán.”<br><br>T<span class="smallcaps">he next day, </span>I drove 30 minutes from downtown Culiacán to a neighborhood called Costa Rica, on the outskirts of the city. I passed several motorcyclists who had their face covered by a ski mask. These <em>punteros</em>, as they’re called, have for years worked as low-level informants for the cartel. Even before the fracture of Sinaloa, the cartel was famous for its capacity to monitor every inch of Culiacán. In addition to deploying the <em>punteros</em>, it placed hundreds of cameras across the city and set up surveillance teams in residential neighborhoods.<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/mexico-informants-fbi-attack-sheinbaum/688019/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Read: A planeload of informants</a><br><br>The Mexican government has surged hundreds of soldiers and national guardsmen across the city, ostensibly to disrupt the criminal groups who have terrorized it. But the military presence is overwhelmingly performative. On the road to Costa Rica, I watched as <em>punteros</em> and soldiers nonchalantly drove past one another.<br><br>I pulled up to the squat house of Marta Pérez Guzman, whose son, David Antonio Ruelas Pérez, had been kidnapped by armed men along with his classmate José Isaías Ibarra Duarte. There were 2,154 disappearances in Sinaloa last year, but the kidnapping of Ruelas, 22, and Ibarra, 23, had received more attention than most. The men were students at an aviation school in Culiacán, and many here suspected that they had been abducted to work on cartel aircraft. There was another notable fact: Ibarra is a U.S. citizen, born in Los Angeles.<br><br>His mother, Graciela Duarte Valdez, had wondered whether that would be enough to nudge the U.S. government to act. After all, Trump had articulated in Truth Social posts and Fox News interviews his desire to intervene in Mexico. She had traveled to the closest U.S. consulate, in the neighboring state of Sonora, and made her case. Not only was her son still missing, but the Mexican attorney general’s office had obtained surveillance footage of the kidnapping and showed it to her. Through tears, Duarte described seeing footage of four men who wore ski masks and carried rifles getting out of a minivan and forcing her son and Ruelas into a second car. It all took only a few seconds.<br><br>She felt abandoned by the Mexican government’s investigators, who asked questions suggesting that the boys had been working for a cartel faction before the kidnapping. When she went to the U.S. consulate, officials took notes and thanked her for coming (when I asked the State Department about the case, a spokesperson told me in a statement that it was “aware of reports of the kidnapping of a U.S. citizen in Mexico” but did not elaborate). Duarte was despairing; she knew that just a small fraction of disappeared people were later found alive in Sinaloa. One day last year, she heard that Governor Rubén Rocha Moya was visiting her neighborhood. She ran to meet him.<br><br>“Please help,” she told the governor, as she held a missing-person poster with her son’s photo and name on it. Rocha told her he would try.<br><br>A few months later, Duarte was skimming her Facebook feed for information about missing people and recovered bodies when she saw a news story that said Rocha had been indicted by the United States for colluding with the cartel. The U.S. government had acted, but she could not bring herself to see the move as productive or helpful. Rocha temporarily resigned and fled Culiacán. The Mexican government announced that it would support him until the U.S. showed more evidence of his collusion.<br><br>“All I could think was that I had begged that man for help,” Duarte said. “But of course, he did nothing. He had been working for the cartel the whole time.”<br><br>A<span class="smallcaps">bout a third of Mexico</span> is controlled by organized criminal groups, according to a U.S.-government analysis. Culiacán—even during its most peaceful stretches—has been a prime example. The cartel presence here has never been subtle. One man in his early 20s told me that his childhood friends had been recruited to work in fentanyl labs and would return smelling like chemicals for weeks. The children of cartel kingpins enrolled in the city’s top prep schools. In one cemetery, families of deceased cartel operatives erected graves the size of suburban homes. Each time the cartel’s fractures sent the city into spirals of violence—in 2010 and 2017—they ended the same way: not with the disintegration of organized crime but with one faction emerging as the victor.<br><br>The Trump administration believes that it can avoid repeating this pattern, partially by going after Mexican politicians who support the cartel—“all the government officials that are part of the ‘Culiacán clan,’” Sara Carter, the director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, told a journalist earlier this year. The U.S. has also continued its decades-long strategy of targeting top cartel operatives, largely by funneling intelligence to elite Mexican-military units who have conducted a number of successful operations. That partnership is deeper than it has been in years. But I didn’t meet anyone in Culiacán who believes that the strategy will reduce violence here. So far, it hasn’t reduced drug flows, either. Even officials in the Mexican government who are in favor of attacking criminal groups privately dismiss the Trump administration’s absolutist goal of eliminating cartels, given the enormous demand for drugs in the United States.<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2025/12/mexico-claudia-sheinbaum-trump/685397/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Read: Claudia Sheinbaum’s impossible dilemma</a><br><br>“On Day one, President Trump designated major cartels—including Sinaloa—as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, unlocking powerful sanctions, asset seizures, and enhanced prosecutorial tools to crush their operations. We will not allow cartels to profit off of poisoning our children and grandchildren,” Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement.<br><br>As César Gastélum’s body was buried last week, some of the city’s influencers posted tributes to him, as if describing a fallen comrade. “We need to take care of ourselves,” one wrote to his 2.3 million followers. Even Mexico’s president weighed in, promising to find the assailants. Duarte had followed the news. Gastélum was just a year older than her son.<br><br>But she was following another story more closely. The government had detained a dozen young alleged cartel operatives in a rural area outside Culiacán. It published photos of the boys and men, their faces blurred. Many of their T-shirts were off, revealing skinny frames. Duarte zoomed in on one of them. It was hard to tell, but he looked at least a little bit like her son.<br><br></div>

2026/8/13
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Our Last Wi-Fi-Less Refuge Is Gone

<div>Subpar connectivity on airplanes was a gift, in a way.<br><figure><img src="https://imgproxy.citrusreader.com/1dg5GN-zxwVLa1FEeg8xbVLpUnwjZAGzgyOq5kjZ3cA/raw:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9jZG4udGhlYXRsYW50aWMuY29tL3RodW1ib3IvQkZnNjB6eWZTOFdPdm5iaWNmbHVtWW1nT20wPS8weDA6MjAwMHgxMTI1Lzk2MHg1NDAvbWVkaWEvaW1nL210LzIwMjYvMDgvMjAyNl8wOF8wN19wbGFuZV9tcGdfMS9vcmlnaW5hbC5qcGc" alt="A crossed-out wireless symbol floats in a background of clouds." referrerpolicy="no-referrer"><figcaption>Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic</figcaption></figure><small><i>This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. </i><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/one-story-to-read-today/"><i>Sign up for it here.</i></a></small><br><br>Until very recently, airplanes were one of the last places where you couldn’t count on having good Wi-Fi. Even the Amazon’s most remote villages have high-speed internet, but for years, the typical in-flight connectivity experience could have been best summed up by the aviation Reddit thread titled “WiFi horrible?”<br><br>Now major airlines have started rolling out Wi-Fi that is both free and usable. In June, United announced that by the end of this year, nearly 1,000 of its planes would be getting high-speed Wi-Fi via Starlink, the network of low-Earth-orbit satellites owned by SpaceX. Other major airlines, including Delta, JetBlue, and Alaska, are partnering with either Starlink or its closest competitor, Amazon Leo, to offer better Wi-Fi in the next year or two. This new technology provides almost the same internet experience you’d get on the ground, Seth Miller, an airline-industry analyst, told me. This is not Wi-Fi that’s “good for an airplane.” It’s just … good.<br><br>As technology conquers this final Wi-Fi frontier, air travel will never be the same. The fickleness that made in-flight Wi-Fi infuriating was also its own kind of luxury: Planes were a bastion of unreachability. And once that luxury is gone, we may miss it.<br><br>Delivering the internet to a metal tube traveling at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the Earth, is so difficult because the tube is both far from internet sources and constantly moving. In the early days of plane Wi-Fi, aircraft had what were essentially giant mobile hot spots attached to their bellies, which would connect to cell towers on the ground. (This was Gogo’s in-flight Wi-Fi which, let’s be honest, never really Gogo’d.) For the past decade or so, major airlines have connected instead to satellites about 22,000 miles above the Earth, which provided Wi-Fi good enough to send an email (sometimes) but too slow for Instagram. The satellites that Starlink and Amazon Leo use travel much closer to the Earth and the plane, so they’re about 10 times less laggy, Miller said. With these connections, people can use social media, play online poker, and—in theory—Zoom, though many airlines still forbid or discourage video calls.<br><br>This level of connectivity might sound like a win: Airplane travel is a cramped, chaotic experience; the least you might ask is for the ability to scroll through TikTok when the limited catalog of in-flight movies gets stale. The pitch, as Grant Milstead, the vice president of digital technology at United Airlines, told me, is that with faster, free Wi-Fi, the plane can become a “living room in the sky”—where, just like in a living room on the ground, people can have the TV on for entertainment, their laptop out for productivity, and their phones nearby for messages and social media. Some people are clearly embracing that reality: On a recent 10-hour flight, the guy next to me prepped a slide deck, listened to Spotify, and flirted over DM with someone I sincerely hoped was his girlfriend.<br><br>But this level of connectivity also means that, on a plane, you can no longer be blissfully unaware of what’s happening back on the ground. Before Starlink, someone on a business trip might still decide to expense suboptimal Wi-Fi to keep up the pretense of working. But for the rest of us, “Sorry, I was on a plane” was one of the last socially acceptable reasons a person could be unreachable while doing nothing except eating Biscoff cookies. A plane ride meant hours set aside to watch movies, read, or doodle, free of guilt and earthbound demands. Instead of responding to a message from your mother-in-law, you could look out the window and see rivers transformed into green ribbons. While my seatmate worked on his slide deck, all I did was watch <em>Top Gun</em> and <em>Top Gun: Maverick</em> and slam Bloody Mary mix. It was glorious.<br><br>The level of disconnection on a plane might have once been an inconvenience, but now people pay good money for enforced breaks from their phone. Sixteen years ago, when Starbucks started offering free Wi-Fi, this magazine declared, “It’s about time!” These days, many cafés withhold Wi-Fi and ban laptops as a selling point. At least 10 million people use the Opal app, whose premium tier costs $100 annually, to lock themselves out of distracting apps, while others pay $59 for the Brick to do the same. Subpar airplane Wi-Fi included this kind of detox with the price of your ticket.<br><br>No one will argue that breathing stale air in a seat that offers 30 inches of leg room counts as a wellness retreat, and the research on how much dedicated tech detoxes actually improve well-being is mixed. Still, a disconnected plane ride “might create an opportunity to temporarily remove some of the demands that normally compete for our attention—email, work messages, social media, news, and notifications,” Lisa Walsh, a psychology professor who researches happiness at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told me. Flying was a rare, bounded period of time untethered from the world below. Whether or not someone might benefit from that time depends on how they spend it, Kostadin Kushlev, a psychology professor at Georgetown who studies technology and well-being, told me. A nice use of a plane ride might include actually talking to the strangers next to you (an act tied to well-being, he said), letting your mind wander (also linked to well-being), or even just really focusing on <em>Top Gun</em> (research has yet to link Tom Cruise to well-being, but you never know). Kushlev told me about how, during grad school, he once set aside a flight to journal about what he wanted from his life and future. “It really kind of changed my trajectory,” he said. Now, with enough to keep him busy on the plane, he said, “I don’t bother.”<br><br>Of course, passengers don’t have to log into the Wi-Fi. But as fast connections become ubiquitous on planes, expectations may begin to shift. We already spend just about every moment of our life near our phones—at work, at the grocery store, at parties, at concerts, in bed, and, for the 75 percent of Americans who’ve copped to this, in the bathroom—where anyone can message us. Now people could easily expect a response while we’re hurtling through the lower stratosphere, too. (And if you don’t reply, people will know it’s because you wanted to eat Biscoff cookies and ignore them.) Connectivity also means the plane becomes just another place to be productive. Milstead, the United executive, told me that one of the company’s customers vibe-coded a website for his new business from the air. Meanwhile, people have already started complaining online about fellow passengers taking Zoom calls and Microsoft Teams meetings onboard. When your seatmate is leading a Q1 strategy session, staring out the window and daydreaming—one of the most distinct opportunities of flying—may seem like time wasted.<br><br>If 30,000 feet is yet another place where Zoom meetings are unavoidable, it’s hard not to see a future in which we are nostalgic for the recent past when the Wi-Fi was bad. The early aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh once wrote that flying is “a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes—purposes of speed, accessibility, and convenience.” Instead, a plane ride was an opportunity to watch the familiar world grow strange. Most people who fly no longer treat the experience like a miracle, but now we barely need to notice we are up in the air. It’s just another place to check Instagram.<br><br></div>

2026/8/13
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A Perfect Album for a Frustrating Decade

<div>Phoebe Bridgers’s new record is heavy with post-pandemic disappointment.<br><figure><img src="https://imgproxy.citrusreader.com/ifc5sMfwNFymIv64fHehI5ZWK5WUPRsZiYj1kAD7tDM/raw:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9jZG4udGhlYXRsYW50aWMuY29tL3RodW1ib3IvU3V6SEZSQ0hjd21UMXFwdmMxVmZvNFpKWmVJPS8weDA6MjAwMHgxMTI1Lzk2MHg1NDAvbWVkaWEvaW1nL210LzIwMjYvMDgvMjAyNl84XzEyX1Bob2ViZV9CcmlkZ2Vycy9vcmlnaW5hbC5wbmc" alt="The singer Phoebe Bridgers" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"><figcaption>Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: mikroman6 / Getty; Todd Owyoung / NBC / Getty.</figcaption></figure>One of the coronavirus pandemic’s many terrible legacies is the slow smothering of ambition in popular culture. In the depths of the crisis, media—music, movies, and all the rest—were widely hailed as a “balm” for anxieties and a “lifeline” to the shared society we could look forward to someday returning to. Yet at the same time, that pre-pandemic sense of cohesion was being destabilized. Entertainers emerged from lockdown to find their fans wild-eyed with obsession and everyone else utterly unreachable. The ensuing years in the arts have felt <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/american-pop-culture-decline/682578/">strange and stilted</a>—defined by stalled dreams, a shattered common stage, and a nervous relationship between artists and audiences.<br><br>The Southern California folk singer Phoebe Bridgers is one artist who experienced the unique intensity of a pandemic breakthrough. In June of 2020, her hushed and biting second album, <em>Punisher</em>, was received with the sort of acclaim suggesting the arrival of the next great American songwriter. She was funny and thoughtful on social media, and fans came to regard her with all the intimacy of a best friend—despite her requests for them to step back and <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-03-31/phoebe-bridgers-bullies-airport-bo-burnham">respect boundaries</a>. Now, after more than half a decade, she’s released her third full-length album, <em>Lost Weekend</em>—a beautiful but frustrating document of post-pandemic disappointment.<br><br><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://youtu.be/4KXnboPN1p4?si=g-wcR3jI7E_9Xa-N"><figure class="c-embedded-video"><div class="embed-wrapper" style="display: block; position:relative; width:100%; height:0; overflow:hidden; padding-bottom:75.00%;"><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; encrypted-media; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="true" class="embedly-embed lazyload" data-src="//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2F4KXnboPN1p4%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;display_name=YouTube&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D4KXnboPN1p4&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F4KXnboPN1p4%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute; width:100%; height:100%; top:0; left:0; border:0;" title="YouTube embed" width="640" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"></iframe></div></figure></div>From her early days drawing buzz as a teenage disciple of pillow-voiced balladeers such as John Lennon and Elliott Smith, Bridgers’s appeal has lain in her ambivalence. She is an adventurer with a reclusive streak; she wants to see the world outside of her phone and then get back to bed. Many of her songs play like travelogues through a corrupted civilization—its skies littered with chemtrails and satellites, its bars patrolled by users and abusers. Her sighing style of singing and the downward lilt of her melodies suggest that the world’s fallen nature simply tires her out. “There’s no place like my room,” she sings on <em>Punisher</em>’s closing track, “I Know the End.”<br><br>In the years after that album, Bridgers didn’t actually disappear. She collaborated with the likes of Paul McCartney, SZA, and Taylor Swift, who <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/aug/08/phoebe-bridgers-songwriter-taylor-swift">proclaimed “she <em>is</em> the reference now”</a> for modern songwriters. She released a splashy album with the supergroup <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2023/03/boygenius-interview-the-record-album-phoebe-bridgers/673551/">boygenius</a>. But none of this work had the sheer density of insight—the line-after-line sense of surprise—that has defined Bridgers’s solo music. (Her 2017 single <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sfYpolGCu8">“Motion Sickness”</a> begins “I hate you for what you did / And I miss you like a little kid / I faked it every time, but that’s alright.”) Earlier this year, she embarked on a tour at which audience members were banned from using their phones—a sign that she was coming back to her main project on her own, self-protective terms.<br><br>On paper, <em>Lost Weekend</em> is everything that the follow-up to a breakthrough should be: epic-scale, richly orchestrated, musically evolutionary. A glittering cast of collaborators includes the hitmaking producer Jack Antonoff, the Pulitzer-winning composer Caroline Shaw, the indie multi-instrumentalist Alex G, the mandolin-wielding MacArthur fellow Chris Thile, and—<a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/phoebe-bridgers-cameron-winter-lost-weekend-1235600345/">suspectedly</a>, under a pseudonym—the It Boy vocalist of 2020s rock, <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/09/geese-getting-killed-album-review/684380/">Geese’s Cameron Winter</a>. They’ve created a moody, varied soundscape featuring drum machines, hard guitars, and oases of country plucking.<br><br>The first three songs are stunning. “The Outside” opens with Bridgers alternating between Laurie Anderson–style vocoder confessions and swirling piano paired with clean vocals. As she moves from the inorganic to the organic and back again, she also slips between tempos for an effect as mesmerizing as a shadow flickering in a stream. Then comes “Lost Boys,” a should-be smash single in which layers of chiming instruments coalesce into one swinging, shaggy mass. On “Kill Me,” rustling guitars convey cold unease until the chorus offers a hint of warmth. “This is gonna kill me,” sings Bridgers. Then she pauses to add, offbeat, “wait.”<br><br>These early tracks portray Bridgers at the height of her success—crowd-surfing at concerts and surrounded by friends—yet feeling alienated. “I pretended it was make believe,” goes a great line from “Lost Boys,” capturing the psychological trickery that results from disassociating from one’s own life. When “Kill Me” crescendos in gang-sung cries of “Let’s go missing,” it’s an exciting cliff-hanger: Bridgers sounds poised to take the listener down a rabbit hole to somewhere fantastical and fresh.<br><br>Instead, reality persists, murky and enervating. “The Governor’s Waltz” finds her at a famous music festival, feeling—yet again—disconnected and on edge. Fingerpicked guitars and toybox melodies are creepy yet obvious, like a Tim Burton movie. The lyrics bait gossip blogs by seeming to refer to an ex and the girl he replaced her with. These blind items <em>should</em> be interesting: Bridgers once knew how to make inside jokes land for everyone. But many of her descriptions, across the album, are naggingly opaque or inert. “You had a nosebleed, you were in my way / And you didn’t remind me of anything,” she sings, a line that’s intriguing only because it hints at her own creative blockage.<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/12/max-martin-musical/672313/">Read: Decoding the most important songwriter of our time</a><br><br>For much of the rest of the album, she seems to want to let her musicians do the talking. A number of songs are structurally fragmentary, featuring sudden cuts into silence or lengthy digressions into “folktronica” (a term for banjos-and-beats music of the sort that was last trendy in the 2000s). These seemingly avant-garde touches unfortunately scan more like boho-café fare. In May, Bridgers was seen wearing a T-shirt for <em>Kid A</em>—the numbed-out, synth-driven curveball that Radiohead released in 2000 after achieving alternative-rock dominance. But Bridgers isn’t leading a cutting-edge band that’s built up internal chemistry over years for unpredictable results. She’s enlisted a prestigious mishmash of stars to whip up variations on two moods: looming dread and wistful uplift.<br><br>The story she’s telling should have been strong enough to land without so much filigree. On “Still Standing,” she seems to refer to abuse of her mother by her father, who died in late 2022. Rather than just condemning him, Bridgers spends part of the album examining the traits he passed on to her, for good and ill. At the same time, she’s wrestling with a fatalistic view of fame. “Surviving my gift until I get shot,” she sings on the title track—a chilling line on an album with a <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.biography.com/musicians/john-lennon-lost-weekend">Lennon-inspired name</a>. Her personal demons and public pressures really do sound suffocating. Can she possibly escape them?<br><br>The twist of <em>Lost Weekend </em>is that it suggests a happy answer to that question. On the roaring and catchy “Bobby,” she sings about a blissful home life with a lover, who also shows up as a savior figure in other songs. Their meet-cute seems to be described in the first line: “I saw you slow dancing alone in your room.” Bobby is almost certainly her real boyfriend, the comedian Bo Burnham, and she’s implying that she fell for him while watching his acclaimed 2021 Netflix special, <em>Bo Burnham: Inside</em>, a document of stir-crazed social isolation.<br><br>It’s quite the revelation: Back in the pandemic, Bridgers was in the exact same position as her audience—stuck at home and having her life changed by something on a screen. Burnham, himself an object of overwhelming public fascination, has mostly stayed out of the spotlight since <em>Inside</em>, though he has seven writing credits on this album<em>. </em>Virtual desire becoming real, isolation giving way to communion, a life built outside the digital panopticon—these are powerful themes for the 2020s. But too often, the album meets its moment in a sad way: with strained, distant songwriting that suggests its creator’s hesitation about reconnecting with the crowd.<br><br></div>

2026/8/13
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Atlantic Trivia: Our Greatest Debate

<div>Test your knowledge—and read our stories for a little extra help.<br>Two days left of <em>Atlantic </em>Trivia, but Rabbithole has just begun! You can learn more about the new trivia game—and play it—<a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/games/rabbithole/archive/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><u>here</u></a>.<br><br>And by the way, did you know that in 1924, the Supreme Court ruled that vinegar made from dried apples cannot be called apple-cider vinegar? That designation requires vinegar to be made using fresh apples.<br><br>Now, what’s really great here is the case name. Because the government was technically challenging the product and not the producer—and also because the government apparently did not feel like counting—the case was called <em>United States v. Ninety-Five Barrels (More or Less) Apple Cider Vinegar</em>.<br><br>Doesn’t sound like much of a fair fight to me. Indeed, the government won.<br><br>Until tomorrow!<br><br><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/games/trivia/archive/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Find previous questions here</em></a><em>, and to get trivia in your inbox every day, </em><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/atlantic-daily/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><em>sign up for The Atlantic Daily</em></a><em>. If you think up a question yourself, send it my way via </em><a data-event-element="inline link" href="mailto:trivia@theatlantic.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">trivia@theatlantic.com</a><em>.</em><br><br></div>

2026/8/13
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Tehran Has to Make a Choice

<div>A new regional pact highlights Iran’s isolation.<br><figure><img src="https://imgproxy.citrusreader.com/Pij5pU8oM53I_glbcSB6DT0UZpsGGz6JpOJvLI-HbMM/raw:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9jZG4udGhlYXRsYW50aWMuY29tL3RodW1ib3IvZ0E1NnhXSjhyUVJEUDg2TFJIQ0poRWRzTW9VPS8weDA6NTY1MngzMTc5Lzk2MHg1NDAvbWVkaWEvaW1nL210LzIwMjYvMDgvMjAyNl8wOF8xMV9NZWNjYV9QYWN0LTEvb3JpZ2luYWwuanBn" alt="The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey got together last week to forge a new defense agreement" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"><figcaption>Turkish Presidency / Murat Cetinmuhurdar / Anadolu / Getty</figcaption></figure><small><i>Sign up for our </i><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/national-security/?utm_source=feed"><i>newsletter about national security</i></a> <i>here</i>.</small><br><br>When the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey got together last week to forge a new defense agreement, they emphasized that their pact wasn’t aimed at any particular country. But one country was surely<i> </i>on everybody’s mind: the Islamic Republic of Iran.<br><br>Iran has positioned itself as the most overtly anti-Western state in the region, and the coming together of three prominent Muslim-majority countries aligned with the West, two of which have land borders with Iran, signals its isolation. Iran has endured months of war with Israel and the United States without losing, but it has done so in part by repeatedly attacking neighboring countries that house U.S. military bases. Now these countries are among those closing ranks against Iran in an agreement signed in and named for Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.<br><br>The symbolism can’t be lost on Tehran. The parties to the Mecca pact include some of the world’s most powerful Muslim-majority countries: the two with the biggest economies in the region (Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which also spend the most on their militaries), and the Muslim world’s sole nuclear power (Pakistan).<br><br>Iran has traditionally maintained good relations with Turkey and Pakistan; its cultural bonds with these two countries are strong and go back centuries. More recently, the Islamic Republic has worked to improve its relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly since reestablishing diplomatic ties with Riyadh in 2023.<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/08/iran-appeals-jordan-alliance/688205/">Read: Iran goes looking for love in Jordan</a><br><br>Even so, Iran’s regional policies have put the country at odds with these and other neighbors. Tehran gave its full support to the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, which rebels who were backed by Ankara and Riyadh overthrew in 2024. The Iranian military exchanged strikes with Pakistan in 2024 and attacked Saudi Arabia in recent weeks. Iranian missiles were intercepted over Turkish airspace earlier this year. Tehran-backed militias in Yemen and <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/middleeast/saudi-houthi-iran-iraq-attack-latam-intl">Iraq</a> have attacked Saudi interests. More broadly, Iran’s anti-American stance clashes with the official orientations of all three signatories of the Mecca agreement.<br><br>Skeptics will point out that the new defense pact might not mean much in practice. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a similar deal last year but did not invoke it when Saudi Arabia came under attack during the current conflict. But the language of the Mecca accord is <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://x.com/brett_mcgurk/status/2085695781764292681?s=20">stark</a>: “Any armed attack against any of the three States shall be regarded as an attack against them all.” The arrangement includes a new organization, to be overseen by a secretariat in Saudi Arabia, and regular meetings among the foreign and defense ministers of the three countries, along with their military chiefs. Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, has <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/turkey-pakistan-saudi-arabia-defence-pact-technically-same-natos-article-5-2026-08-08/">compared</a> the new organization to NATO and suggested that Egypt, the most populous Arab state, is likely to join. Altogether, the pact suggests a significant improvement in relations between Turkey and the Arab states—a development that could help stabilize the entire region.<br><br>Iranian officialdom has mostly greeted the news of the Mecca pact with studied nonchalance. A spokesperson claimed to welcome the arrangement as evidence that the member countries would no longer rely on the United States. A reformist civil-society activist suggested to me that the Mecca agreement could be “an opportunity, not a threat,” insinuating that Iran could one day join it. But some hard-line politicians are less sanguine. Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Parliament’s foreign-policy committee, <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://x.com/Ebrahimazizi33/status/2086133202389749950?s=20">posted</a> on Saturday that the Mecca three “haven’t found the right path yet. We warn them about miscalculations. No mistake will go unanswered.”<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/trump-iran-economic-pressure/688250/">Read: Trump’s new strategy of nothing</a><br><br>Washington has long encouraged its allies in the Middle East to work together. Throughout much of the Cold War, regional alliances held off both Soviet communism and Arab radicalism, which meant that the United States felt the need to intervene only rarely and briefly. Iran was a crucial part of this architecture—intervening, together with Saudi Arabia, in civil wars in Oman and Yemen to help defeat Communist-backed rebels, and helping to found the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 1969. President Richard Nixon so relied on Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to help keep the U.S. out of Middle Eastern affairs that in 1972 he told Pahlavi, “Protect me.” Then came the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and with it, a new era of chaos and discord.<br><br>Iran is not the only Middle Eastern country excluded from the emerging security arrangement that Mecca portends. Israel, too, is absent. The 2020 Abraham Accords normalized Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, but the big prize was always Saudi Arabia, which has conditioned recognition of Israel on progress toward the formation of a Palestinian state. Israel is currently moving away from this prospect rather than toward it. Pakistan doesn’t recognize Israel either. Turkey has diplomatic and military relations with Israel, but the two countries have drifted apart in recent years.<br><br>If Israel still wants to work toward regional recognition, it may find that its best course is to patch things up with Turkey and try to meet the Saudis halfway. At least these two countries don’t share the depth of Iran’s animus against Israel.<br><br>Iran, too, will be faced with a choice. It can go on supporting militias and destabilizing the region, which will further isolate it. Or it can embrace the regional consensus on economic development, diplomatic reconciliation, and a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Islamic Republic can either militate against Mecca, in other words, or give up its revolutionary ambitions at last.<br><br></div>

2026/8/13
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The Trouble With Trying to Turn Viral Videos Into Blockbusters

<div>The film industry is starting to see Reddit and YouTube as gold mines, but those platforms won’t save Hollywood on their own.<br>Almost 14 years ago, the producer Scott Glassgold stumbled on a <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://vimeo.com/53532069">short film on Vimeo</a> about a woman who believes she’s encountered an alien. The project, by a pair of filmmakers named Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell, was “a wonderful, lo-fi science-fiction story” that conveyed a distinct storytelling voice, Glassgold told me. He immediately set out to work with them, hoping to introduce the pair to Hollywood as fresh directing talent. “That was an early moment for me on the internet,” he explained. “I just saw it as an incredibly viable path to meeting artists, finding ideas, frankly, in a place where, at the time, really no one else was looking.”<br><br>He learned from that period, however, that Hollywood wasn’t universally enthusiastic about turning such material into feature-length movies—at least, not with unknown, internet-bred creators involved. Even though Earl and Caldwell’s work attracted potential studio buyers, Glassgold sought independent financing to help the pair avoid what’s known in the industry as development hell. “The first call I would get from a studio head would be like, <i>We’re so excited. When can we fire the director?</i>” Glassgold recalled. “I would just put my hands on my face, because it was entirely antithetical to what we were trying to achieve.”<br><br>That was, as Glassgold put it, “the 1.0” of Hollywood’s dalliance with the internet—a far cry from the industry’s upgraded view of digital-native talent these days. Works by filmmakers who first found success online consistently scored at the box office this spring: <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/05/backrooms-movie-interview-director-kane-parsons/687013/"><i>Backrooms</i></a>, directed by Kane Parsons, who went viral as a teenager with a web series set in the same world of <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/11/liminal-space-internet-aesthetic/671945/">liminal spaces</a>, is now the studio A24’s highest-grossing movie ever. <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/obsession-movie-gen-z-anxiety/687459/"><i>Obsession</i></a>, a horror-comedy made by Curry Barker, who first built an audience on YouTube through sketch-comedy videos, became a word-of-mouth hit. And <i>Iron Lung</i>, a video-game adaptation self-financed, directed, and released by the gaming YouTuber known as Markiplier, grossed at least 10 times its budget worldwide with the help of his nearly 40 million subscribers.<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/02/iron-lung-markiplier-youtuber-movie-review/686020/">Read: A no-name director to everyone but his 38 million fans</a><br><br>Hollywood, inspired by these triumphs, is doing what it does best: working overtime to capture the same magic again. Several projects with online roots have recently entered into development to become feature-length films, including <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/siren-head-horror-zach-cregger-brian-duffield-1236634292/"><i>Siren Head</i></a> and <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://deadline.com/2026/07/tristar-pictures-trevor-henderson-cartoon-cat-1236981042/"><i>Cartoon Cat</i></a>, each inspired by the disturbing viral imagery of the artist Trevor Henderson; <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://deadline.com/2026/06/lily-james-to-star-seasons-drew-hancock-amazon-mgm-1236964258/"><i>Seasons</i></a>, an adaptation of a short story first published on the Subreddit r/nosleep, a forum for grassroots horror writing, about a couple whose dream ranch turns out to be haunted; and <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://deadline.com/2026/07/youtube-mandela-catalog-steven-spielberg-scott-stuber-1236973259/"><i>The Mandela Catalogue</i></a>, a script based, much like <i>Backrooms</i>, on a popular horror series on YouTube.<br><br><i>Mandela</i>, set in a fictional county in Wisconsin that’s invaded by shape-shifting creatures,<i> </i>led to an 11-studio bidding war, with Steven Spielberg signing on as a producer along the way. Aaron B. Koontz, an indie filmmaker and a producer for <i>Mandela</i>, told me that Hollywood’s new fascination with digital creators has been vindicating—and overwhelming. “It’s the opposite of what I’m used to in my entire career,” he said, adding that after <i>Backrooms</i>’ release, he was on the phone every day for three weeks with executives interested in picking up <i>Mandela</i>. “People in Hollywood that never took my call,” he said, “are now calling <i>me</i>.”<br><br>To the filmmaker Shawn Levy, whose production company 21 Laps worked on <i>Backrooms </i>and <i>Seasons</i>, these green-lighted projects merely underline “a predictable sort of frenzy” based on the latest Hollywood success story; they’re not a sure sign that the industry is shifting significantly. “Even though right now there’s a mad gold rush of assistants being tasked with scouring the internet for the next Kane Parsons or the next Curry,” he told me, “most long-shot bets don’t pan out.” Hollywood has clearly grasped that the next auteurs and franchises can be found on the web. “Nothing teaches Hollywood a faster lesson than a hit,” Levy said. But whether Hollywood’s intensive focus on all things internet leads to anything resembling this year’s box-office successes will depend on the industry seeing the internet as more than just a place from which to mine ideas.<br><br>Hollywood once seemed baffled by the internet. Throughout the 2010s, almost every time the industry attempted to translate trendy web culture into conventional entertainment, the results were largely forgettable: The Grumpy Cat meme inexplicably starred in <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2013/05/grumpy-cat-movie/314772/">a Lifetime holiday movie</a>, a thread about one writer’s father’s curmudgeonly sayings became <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/jul/03/shit-my-dad-says">a quickly canceled sitcom</a>, and a major studio’s adaptation of <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/how-slender-man-lost-audiences-years-before-it-opened-1134089/"><i>Slender Man</i></a>, a character that originated on an internet forum, bombed with critics.<br><br>Yet over the years, the language of digital natives began to influence popular culture anyway as the internet became intertwined with daily life. Consider the growing slate of satires about influencers, the numerous coming-of-age films that <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/07/eighth-grade-is-a-mesmerizing-heartfelt-portrait-of-teenhood/565013/">have</a> <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/08/didi-movie-review/679456/">tapped</a> into teenage angst amid the rise of social media, and the fact that entire movies have been made that take place exclusively on <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/searching-is-a-fiendishly-clever-online-thriller/568450/">computer screens</a>. TikTok users embraced <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2023/01/skinamarink-horror-movie-shudder-review/672718/"><i>Skinamarink</i></a>, an experimental horror flick made for 15,000 Canadian dollars, by posting story breakdowns and their terrified live reactions.<b> </b>The director <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/05/i-saw-the-tv-glow-jane-schoenbrun-interview/678273/">Jane Schoenbrun</a>’s films—including their latest, <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/08/teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma-movie-review/688227/"><i>Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma</i></a>—could be considered an offshoot of internet culture, trafficking as they do in esoteric online-fandom sensibilities. Their movies, packed with surreal imagery and dream-logic-driven plots, conjure the sensation of getting lost down an internet rabbit hole.<br><br>The road to building such an oeuvre, however, required “lying,” Schoenbrun told me with a laugh. When they were pitching their projects to traditional studio brass, many of the executives they met didn’t understand the stories at first glance, even though they sought voices like Schoenbrun’s. “It’s like,” the director explained, “trying to say something in a way that will be understood and digestible.”<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/08/influencer-culture-social-media-satire-not-okay-movie/671052/">Read: The horrors of being extremely online</a><br><br>That kind of code-switching can create tension, according to Lucas Ford, a producer I spoke with. He would know: As an assistant at 21 Laps in early 2022, Ford brought Parsons’s YouTube channel to the attention of Levy and his fellow executive Dan Cohen. Today, Ford runs his own production company, translating ideas from all kinds of visual artists and writers into potential films. He told me that when pitching to studios, he tries to go beyond highlighting shallow metrics—viewer counts, subscriber numbers—and instead articulate why he’s personally drawn to the material.<br><br>Any internet creator who has built an online following has a relationship with their audience that Hollywood should cultivate rather than erase, Ford noted; if a movie adapting an online work has forced its digital-native storyteller’s vision to fit conventional molds, viewers familiar with the original material “can sniff that out immediately.” Schoenbrun told me something similar, observing that <i>Backrooms</i> and <i>Obsession </i>had brought young people to theaters by appealing to their concerns about, say, the flagging economy and dating habits. “This was youth culture speaking to itself,” they said of those films.<br><br>By offering more internet talent a chance to bring their visions to big-screen life, Hollywood seems eager to further invoke today’s youth culture. But deepening that relationship, Levy said, will require precise care. He told me that he’d initially had “healthy skepticism” about <i>Backrooms</i>’ ability to become a feature-length film: “Certainly, question marks abounded,” he explained, including “the fact that it was a teenager who was being given the keys to the car.” In the end, he pushed the movie forward; he trusted his team’s assessment of both the concept and, after meeting him, Parsons’s capacity to turn an aesthetic into a fleshed-out story deserving of a theatrical release.<br><br>Adapting this kind of material can require different approaches. Koontz, the <i>Mandela Catalogue </i>producer, told me that he’d advocated for its creator, Alex Kister, to direct and co-write the film adaptation because a large part of the project’s appeal came from Kister’s creative flourishes: He uses alternating points of view, plenty of biblical allusions, even footage from a children’s cartoon. For <i>Siren Head</i>, though, Glassgold explained that the material warranted bringing experienced filmmakers on board. Henderson’s artwork, as striking as it is, isn’t enough of a foundation for a movie, so the film is moving forward with two Hollywood-horror veterans overseeing its creation: the screenwriter Brian Duffield and the <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2025/08/weapons-movie-2025-review-ending/683886/"><i>Weapons</i></a><i> </i>director Zach Cregger, who are collaborating on the script.<br><br>The internet has never been predictable: <i>Backrooms</i>’, <i>Obsession</i>’s, and <i>Iron Lung</i>’s collective overperformance at the box office argues against the kind of gold-rush thinking that is driving Hollywood to seek out digital storytellers. Even for the filmmakers who achieved liftoff from their online beginnings, the web can be an unreliable foundation on which to build. Kyle Edward Ball, the director of <i>Skinamarink</i>, told me that he began uploading videos on YouTube in the 2010s in part because he believed that going viral would help launch his career. He instead found the platform more useful as a training ground, honing his voice one video at a time. (Ball noticed at the time that amassing views certainly led some creators to Hollywood success, but many of the results seemed to involve “bedazzling the wheel instead of reinventing it,” he said.)<br><br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/12/internet-information-trends-virality-tracking/676888/">Read: Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore</a><br><br>Schoenbrun, for their part, pointed out that the flurry of headlines about digital-native talent impressing Hollywood has tended to flatten anything that began on the internet into one genre, despite the fact that, creatively, <i>Backrooms </i>isn’t <i>Obsession</i>, just as <i>Siren Head </i>won’t resemble <i>The Mandela Catalogue</i>. The artists behind these works also approach the internet differently; Parsons riffed on an aesthetic born on internet forums, for instance, while Barker treated online behavior as his subject matter. (His first feature film, <i>Milk &amp; Serial</i>, is about YouTube pranksters.) Hollywood’s latest fixation could be just a brief, reductive detour away from tentpole franchises or superhero films and into horror movies (one of the most reliable genres for producing mainstream hits) that take nontraditional paths to being made. “I’m not like, <i>Wow, this is the French New Wave for YouTube</i>, you know?” Schoenbrun said.<br><br>Maybe not, yet the film industry does seem to have hit the jackpot—these few times, at least—in a realm that has long appeared to confound it. Either way, Ball told me, it’s a thrilling moment for artists bred online to experiment without worrying about fitting any filmmaking molds. “Don’t chase Hollywood,” he said. “Have Hollywood chase you.”<br><br></div>

2026/8/13
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