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Dear James,
For all intents and purposes, at age 47, I’m in the best shape of my life. In June 2022, I entered into a wonderful relationship with my current partner. We’re happy. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about death.
Some context: Before this, I was in a sad, somewhat unhealthy 20-year marriage; my wife had an affair, and I finally decided to leave after several years of sleepless, panicked nights spent wondering why my partner would betray me. I’ve suffered other losses: As the child of a single mother, I was home alone a lot when I was very young. My biological father and my stepfather (who helped raise me) are gone (drugs and alcoholism). My grandfather, an aunt, and two cousins have died. After years of therapy, it’s become clear to me that these losses, coupled with my sad marriage, may have robbed me of the pleasure of some of my formative years—and that all of this is at the center of my fear of leaving this Earth prematurely.
But living in fear of dying is mentally exhausting. Is it normal for someone my age to think daily about their imminent death? Is this what they call an existential or midlife crisis?
Dear Reader,
How to overcome the fear of death: If I could give you an answer to that one, I wouldn’t be typing this column right now. I’d be in my compound, with my cult. I’d be leading 400 of my most dazed and grateful followers into our brand-new Orgy Dome, designed by Rem Koolhaas.
Nevertheless, let me attempt to respond to your question. Or at least to tell you what (sort of) worked for me.
Let’s begin with this: It is absolutely normal for a 47-year-old man to be thinking constantly about dying. It’s not fun, but it is normal. Middle age is when you lie in bed listening to what Martin Amis called “the information”: creaky joints, distress in the bowel, heart jitters, libidinal crisis, all the nasty little indexes of mortality. Your body begins to mutter at you. So yes, death is on your mind.
Also: You’re having a nice time with your partner. You are not used to having a nice time. Some part of you, perhaps, wonders if you deserve to have a nice time. Which makes you think: Surely this cannot last. Surely malignant Fate will strike me down.
At some point it will, of course. No getting around it. As my first therapist used to say, his ginger eyebrows flying, after I’d been speculating on this or that scenario for my own imminent carrying-off: “Well, there is a reality to that.”
Here’s what helped. First, I began to treat my fear of death as a symptom, rather than as a dilemma to be resolved. I treated it as a kind of rash on my psyche. “My fear of death is acting up again!” “My fear of death is killing me today.” This, after a while, allowed me a degree of detachment from the fear-of-death feelings. Some wiggle room—only about half an inch, but that’s all you need.
Second, I eventually and almost accidentally—via thinking, panicking, and running around like an idiot—roughed out an emergency philosophy for myself. I think that, in the end, everyone has to do this on their own. Mine is nothing very coherent or profound; perhaps I can better describe it as a ramshackle neurological resilience. At any rate, it seems to meet the moment or at least get me to the next moment. Some books that were helpful: Barry Miles’s biography of Allen Ginsberg, the Gospel of Mark, and At the Existentialist Café, by Sarah Bakewell.
In the short term, I recommend reattaching yourself to your body—that same grumbling, bits-falling-off, what’s-happening-to-me body that we discussed earlier. Put some stress on it! Run up a hill; take a cold shower; hit the town; eat a doughnut. Don’t worry too much about the pleasures you may have missed in your life. Take your pleasures now. Enjoy your partner. Enjoy yourself. Enjoy being alive.
Courage!
James
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This article contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of The White Lotus.
The guests at White Lotus resorts arrive and leave by boat, a fact I’ve come to believe has some kind of mythological significance. These guests are never simply going on vacation. Rather, they’re entering some kind of magical-realist hinterland where they’re tormented by different iterations of fate, pride, vanity, and greed, a ritualistic evisceration accompanied by pool drinks and a spectacular breakfast buffet. The high Greekness of it all is offset by absurd humor. Is Tim really going to murder his entire family with piña coladas? I wondered, watching the Season 3 finale. Is this Duke University–loving, pill-popping, intrusive-thoughts-plagued man really capable of familicide?
Kind of! I’ve been hung up on Jason Isaacs’s Timothy Ratliff for several weeks now because his particular storyline is the darkest the HBO show has ever explored, wallowing in the suicidal fantasies of a man on the brink of ruin week after week after week. The day Tim got to the White Lotus Thailand, he learned that his relationship with a business associate accused of financial crimes was being investigated by journalists; by the third episode, the FBI was raiding his office, panicked employees were lighting up his phone, and the prospect of being outed to his family as a failure led Tim to confiscate everyone’s devices while dipping into his wife’s lorazepam stash. Since then, he’s been a haunted wretch of a character: stoned, sullen, stuck with recurring visions of shooting his wife and himself.
The White Lotus is a satire; two of my colleagues, defending the finale on Slack, pointed out that Tim’s final speech to his family before giving them cocktails spiked with the toxic seeds of the pong-pong tree (thank you to Pam, a bizarrely forthcoming hotel employee, for the detailed lowdown on how best to do it) could have been ripped right out of Arrested Development. But I didn’t find the scene funny, and I’m still not convinced it was intended to be. For three seasons now, the show has parsed the varying flaws and faces of poisoned masculinity. In Hawaii, back in Season 1, Jake Lacy’s Shane exercised calamitous levels of entitlement while Steve Zahn’s Mark fretted over his diminished status within his marriage and the health of his testicles. In Season 2, Albie (Adam DiMarco) reproached his father and grandfather for their old-school sexism while Cameron (Theo James) boorishly cheated on his wife and stiffed sex workers at the Sicilian hotel. But none of these storylines was as high-stakes or as bleak as Tim’s disintegration, through which the show examined all the ways in which a seemingly upstanding family man with no known history of violence might come to murder his wife and children.
Familicide, or family annihilation, the terms used to describe the act of murdering one’s children (and, often, one’s partner or ex-partner) is disturbingly common in the U.S., occurring roughly every five days. A 2013 study divided people who commit familicide into four different groups: anomic, disappointed, self-righteous, and paranoid. Tim fits cleanly into the anomic group, people who see their family as an extension of their success and status and are unable to imagine them continuing to exist after something has taken that status away. People who kill their family are overwhelmingly men, and most fail to fit any preexisting criminal profile. “Family annihilators were overwhelmingly not known to criminal justice or mental health services,” the criminologist David Wilson told Wired in 2013. “For all intents and purposes these were loving husbands and good fathers, often holding down high profile jobs and seen publicly as being very, very successful. They were simply not on the radar.” In many cases, the precipitating circumstance is some kind of financial disgrace. The impulse to murder one’s family, Wilson has also argued, is tied to “masculinity in crisis,” whereby patriarchs feel unmanned by their failures and can’t fathom their wife and children functioning without them.
Tim—sinking into drug abuse and narcissistic despair, as mournful as a donkey in a spa robe—has hovered over The White Lotus like a heavy black cloud. Isaacs is a terrific actor, but I haven’t been able to figure out how we’re supposed to read Tim’s looming defeatism. When Tim watches his wife hug his daughter in the finale, the former hugely relieved that the latter is too spoiled to commit to a Buddhism retreat, are his slight eyebrow raise and confused expression, seemingly an acknowledgment that now he might have to murder them both, supposed to be comedic? When, ashen and lifeless, he tells his youngest son, “It’s your last day. Don’t just sit in here,” is Isaacs delivering a wry wink? Tim’s speech to his family over poisoned drinks is stupidly simple: “I couldn’t ask for a more perfect family. We’ve had a perfect life, haven’t we? No privations, no suffering, no trauma. And my job is to keep all that from you. To keep you safe. I love you. I love you so much.” But it also reads as the thesis statement of someone who apparently would rather see his family dead than have their high opinions of him diminished.
This is, it has to be emphasized, very dark material for mainstream television. For the majority of the season, Mike White, the show’s creator, has teased Tim’s impulse to commit appalling acts, rendering his fantasies in bloody, realistic fashion. The character has sought out multiple ways to commit murder-suicide, first stealing a gun that he hides in a hotel room, and then asking Pam how best to avail oneself of something locals call “the suicide tree.” He goes so far as to harvest the poisonous seeds, grind them up in a blender, and mix cocktails for his wife and two of his children to drink, before changing his mind and dashing the drink out of his eldest son’s hand. When his youngest son, who collapses after making himself a protein smoothie using the still-toxic blender, opens his eyes in his father’s arms, is the moment supposed to be redemptive for Tim? Is he changed enough to be honest with his family about what he almost did to them? The show never lets us see.
The final scenes of Season 3, which duck away from the Ratliffs before they find out that their money is gone and their father is likely going to prison, left me feeling almost more unsettled than Tim’s violent reveries. For weeks, The White Lotus played with a truly macabre storyline like a cat with a ball of string, pulling it out, chasing it around, knotting it up. If Tim had actually killed one of his loved ones, whether intentionally or by accident, it would have signaled something new about the show: a willingness to take its pessimism about human nature and karmic balance to a grim and brutal extreme. Maybe an HBO executive intervened. Maybe family annihilation is too bleak for a satirical comedy after all. But there’s something abject about taking up such a fraught subject, wringing every ounce of suspense and dramatic potential out of it, and then backing away as though Tim’s arc is just another story of sad enlightenment.
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Chaos is terrifying, which is perhaps why traders were so relieved this morning when Walter Bloomberg tweeted “HASSETT: TRUMP IS CONSIDERING A 90-DAY PAUSE IN TARIFFS FOR ALL COUNTRIES EXCEPT CHINA.” Who exactly Walter Bloomberg is has never been clear, but his feed of financial-news headlines has a large following, and stock indices shot up briefly upon this morsel of hope.
And then—cold, hard reality. Bloomberg’s tweet referred to a Fox News interview with Kevin Hassett, the director of Donald Trump’s National Economic Council, who’d been asked about a pause and replied, “I think the president is going to decide what the president is going to decide.” (Trump never rules out anything, of course.) The White House quickly labeled the report “fake news,” and the markets returned to their previously scheduled slide.
Over the past couple of weeks, the administration has shown again and again that it truly has no idea what it’s doing. The Trump administration has been accidentally texting war plans to my boss, Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg; deporting a person it admits it had no legal reason to deport; and firing people it quickly realizes it needs back. If the start of Trump’s second presidency showed an unfamiliar ability to impose its will, the recent stretch has served as a reminder that Trump is Trump, his administration is not run by polished professionals, he hasn’t learned much since his first term, and there’s no master plan that’s going to save the country.
One of the recurring ideas of the first Trump administration was that he was finally becoming “presidential.” Just like Marx said, this arrived first as tragedy—people really believed it—and then as farce, most prominently in an absurdist X thread by the comedian Megan Amram. By the end of 2020, pretty much no one appeared to buy into the notion.
Then it somehow made a comeback. Observers convinced themselves that they saw a more disciplined Trump—or at least a more disciplined Trump campaign. (My colleague Tim Alberta’s contemporaneous reporting showed the weaknesses of this belief.) They grew frustrated with former President Joe Biden’s age, or his economic policies, or his messaging, and they convinced themselves that Trump couldn’t be that bad. Because hey, chaos is terrifying, and it’s more reassuring to assume some secret plan exists that’s more clever than what meets the eye.
Unfortunately, the only secret plans appear to be the ones that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent to Goldberg. Last week, my colleague Nick Miroff reported that the government had mistakenly arrested Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man with protected legal status, and flew him to El Salvador, where he is imprisoned. This is nefarious, but it’s not part of some nefarious scheme; they just messed up. A Justice Department lawyer who admitted as much in court last week has been placed on leave as punishment. The lawyer, Erez Reuveni, is a career Justice Department lawyer, but he’s no liberal plant: He was promoted into his current role by Trump officials just two weeks ago. (The Supreme Court today agreed to an administration request to pause an order requiring it to bring Abrego Garcia home. The Justice Department acknowledged “an administrative error” but insisted that Abrego Garcia is now in Salvadoran custody and beyond U.S. reach—a logic that might be funny if it weren’t so treacherous.)
Nor does the White House have a master plan for the tariffs. Officials were working right up until the last minute to prepare a plan for Trump’s supposed Liberation Day on April 2. Perhaps they should have kept working. The final result includes embarrassing errors like tariffs on uninhabited islands, or an archipelago that houses only U.S. and British military personnel, but it has more fundamental flaws. As Kevin Corinth and Stan Veuger of the conservative American Enterprise Institute explain, the formula the administration used includes a very basic error: confusing retail and import prices. The result is two variables that cancel each other out.
Yet the idea that the president would willingly drive the country toward a likely recession is hard to believe. No wonder that some Very Serious People in finance spent the days leading up to April 2 seriously considering something referred to as the “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” which sought to make sense of Trump’s actions but which my colleague Rogé Karma aptly labeled “QAnon for tariffs.”
Now the tariffs are here, and trillions in market value is gone. Trump’s major response to jitters today was to threaten even higher tariffs on China—showing that he is making it up as he goes and isn’t deterred by the prospect of inflicting more chaos. As long as you don’t look at your own portfolio, you might get some schadenfreude from the X posts of Bill Ackman. The veteran activist investor became a mainstream figure, and a “main character,” in late 2023. Although he was a longtime Democrat, Ackman became furious at campus protests against the Israeli government, and at woke culture more broadly, and embraced Trump. Now Ackman is apoplectic about tariffs, warning of “a self-induced, economic nuclear winter.”
Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do. Ackman apparently didn’t believe it. When you’ve become a billionaire, it’s easy to be optimistic: Things have worked out well for you so far! It’s also easy to assume that Trump’s punishment will never come for you. This is the mortar of the Trump coalition: a desire for Trump to take on your adversaries, and a conviction that you’ll never be the one facing his wrath.
Some Trump supporters have already been forced to recognize that they’re vulnerable. The realization has been slower for others, such as the very wealthy. They can overlook incidents like Abrego Garcia’s deportation, although as I have written, they should not: Once the executive branch finds a way to ignore the law for one person, it can ignore the law for any person. Trump’s malice has now visited upon the lawyers whom the rich employ, and now his incompetence is coming for their portfolios. They can’t say they had no warnings.
The Supreme Court temporarily paused a court order to bring back a Salvadoran man from Maryland whom the Trump administration mistakenly deported to El Salvador’s prison.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump in Washington, D.C., where they discussed the hostage situation in Gaza and tariffs.
America is not just suffering from a wealth gap; America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a “comfort class.” These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own. And their disconnect from the lives of the majority has expanded to such a chasm that their perspective—and authority—may no longer be relevant.
I’m excited to be back in the saddle after a few days of vacation, which were reinvigorating despite the premature Final Four demise of my beloved Duke Blue Devils. I spent the last weekend of March at Big Ears, a festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. My colleague Annie Lowrey, a repeat attendee, likes to say it’s the music festival that the NPR station in Parks & Rec would put on. Six years of attendance have convinced me that Knoxville is among America’s most underrated cities. And if you need something soothing in this chaotic moment, let me endorse ganavya, who gave one of my favorite shows of the festival and whose album Daughter of a Templeis musical balm.
— David
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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This article was updated on April 7, 2025, at 8:40 pm.
The Supreme Court is about to decide whether the Trump administration can exile Americans to a gulag overseas and then leave them there.
The Trump administration wants everyone to believe that the case challenging its deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, is about the government’s right to deport undocumented immigrants, or gang members, or terrorists. But it’s actually about whether the United States government can kidnap someone off the street and then maroon them, incommunicado, in a prison abroad with little hope of release. Human-rights groups have said that they have yet to find anyone freed from CECOT, and the Salvadoran government has previously said anyone imprisoned there will “never leave.”
Today, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to lift a federal-court order telling the administration to retrieve Abrego Garcia. This afternoon, Chief Justice John Roberts blocked the order temporarily. A short time later, the majorityissued a per curiam decision in a separate case, allowing deportations under the Alien Enemies Act to continue, albeit under judicial supervision.
As my colleague Nick Miroff reported, the Trump administration acknowledged in court that Abrego Garcia was deported because of an “administrative error.” Abrego Garcia has been in the U.S. since he was 16, having fled El Salvador and come to the U.S. illegally after gangs threatened his family. He is married to an American citizen, and has a 5-year-old child. In 2019, a judge gave him a protected status known as “withdrawal of removal,” ordering the government not to send him back to El Salvador. The Trump administration has alleged that Abrego Garcia is a member of the gang MS-13, based on the word of a single anonymous informant six years ago, and the fact that Abrego Garcia was wearing Chicago Bulls attire.
In its majority opinion rejecting the government’s argument, though, judges from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the record “shows that Abrego Garcia has no criminal history, in this country or anywhere else, and that Abrego Garcia is a gainfully employed family man who lives a law abiding and productive life,” and that “if the Government wanted to prove to the district court that Abrego Garcia was a ‘prominent’ member of MS-13, it has had ample opportunity to do so but has not—nor has it even bothered to try.” Abrego Garcia is not an exception—an analysis by CBS News found that three-quarters of the more than 200 men deported to El Salvador lacked criminal records.
Even though the Trump administration conceded that Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake, it is insisting that federal courts cannot order his return. “A judicial order that forces the Executive to engage with a foreign power in a certain way, let alone compel a certain action by a foreign sovereign, is constitutionally intolerable,” it said in a court filing. The implications of this argument may not be immediately obvious, but if federal courts cannot order the return of someone exiled to a foreign gulag by mistake, then the administration is free to exile citizens and then claim they did so in error, while leaving them to rot.
As the legal scholar Steve Vladeck wrote, “A world in which federal courts lacked the power to order the government to take every possible step to bring back to the United States individuals like Abrego Garcia is a world in which the government could send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process, claim that the misstep was a result of ‘administrative error,’ and thereby wash its hands of any responsibility for what happens next.” If the Trump administration prevails here, it could disappear anyone, even an American citizen. Several have already been swept up and detained in recent ICE raids. Whether you can imagine yourself in Abrego Garcia’s position or not, all of our fates are ultimately tied to his.
Deporting people without due process is what’s actually “constitutionally intolerable,” given that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee due process of law. Disappearing people off the street and exiling them is “constitutionally intolerable” for the same reasons. Sending people who have never been convicted of any crime to CECOT, a prison where advocates allege that inmates are routinely abused, may also be “constitutionally intolerable,” given the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. But whatever their constitutional status, all of these things should be morally intolerable to any decent human being.
This should be one of those cases in which the justices are unanimous. If the Constitution’s commitments to due process mean anything, they should mean that the government cannot send people to be imprisoned by a foreign nation without a shred of evidence that they’ve committed any crime. American “history and tradition” produced a system designed to reject arbitrary powers such as these, with the conscious fear that “parchment barriers” would provide little protection against an “overbearing majority” willing to violate rights. Nevertheless, I have little doubt that someone will try to argue that the Framers who wrote two due-process clauses into the Constitution actually loved disappearing people to foreign prisons.
“The facts of this case thus present the potential for a disturbing loophole: namely that the government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, wrote in his concurrence. “It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.”
This is eloquent and correct, but this lawlessness is happening precisely because the nation’s highest court condoned it in advance. The right-wing justices on the Roberts Court have repeatedly rewritten the Constitution to Donald Trump’s benefit, first by nullifying the anti-insurrection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, and then by inventing an imperial presidential immunity that is nowhere in the text of the document. It is no surprise that Trump is now acting as though he is above the law. After all, the Roberts Court all but granted him permission.
In the ruling in the Alien Enemies Act case, although the Court unanimously decided that the detainees are entitled to judicial review, its decision states those deported have to challenge their detentions in the jurisdiction where they are held. The risk, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissent, is that “individuals who are unable to secure counsel, or who cannot timely appeal an adverse judgment … face the prospect of removal directly into the perilous conditions of El Salvador’s CECOT, where detainees suffer egregious human rights abuses.”
“The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal,” Sotomayor wrote. “History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.”
The Roberts Court should not congratulate itself over this ruling. America remains on the path to “perfect lawlessness” Wilkinson described, largely thanks to the justices.
In response to the President’s decision to drive the economy into a wall by levying extreme tariffs on essentially the rest of the world, the most common response from Trump apologists is that this is necessary for the benefit of American “workers.” I wanted to take moment to examine this argument.
Let’s start by addressing an important question: who are we talking about when we talk about “workers.” My guess is that we’re not talking about everyone who works. For example, in the last few days the person who has been pushing this argument was, a little over two months ago, celebrating the mass lay-off of Federal Workers. Further, they argued for the necessity of those lay-offs based on their own proclaimed experience of turning around “failing” businesses by… laying off workers.
I realize this feels like narrow casting, but it’s necessary in this case to unpack the shaky ground this argument is being made on. Clearly “workers” doesn’t mean everyone who works. Or even everyone who works more entry-level or lower-paid, frontline positions, which many of those government jobs were. Nor, I suspect, are they thinking about the tariffs’ impact on current service-based workers. In fact, while not all service jobs are retail, retail work remains the largest employment sector in the country today, and these tariffs will hit that sector HARD (and most likely lead to a workforce contraction) . So clearly these folks are not thinking about “retail workers.”
I guess that they are mainly thinking about manufacturing jobs. That focus on manufacturing workers as the primary workers we should be thinking of seems supported by a x/eet from another Pro-Trump account:
I don’t care if the price of your Nintendo Switch 2 goes up $20. I voted to reverse this: pic.twitter.com/niwObtjLUu
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson used this as a jumping-off point for a series of X/eets that pointed out the problem with this thinking. For ease of reading, I’ll quote them instead of directly embedding the long X/eets:
This seems to be a photo of an abandoned plant owned by Packard Auto, a failed 20th c car maker that over-expanded in the 1940s and got out-competed by the Big Three. Guy who voted in 2024 to go back in time and fix the business decisions of an also-ran mid-century auto maker
It’s a little mean to narrowly claim that the tariffs are designed to travel back in time and change the business decisions of 1940s Packard Auto execs. But I think it’s useful to be clear about what exactly these tariffs are supposed to do, and where they’re supposed to do it.
If folks are mad about de-industrialization, we need a bigger framework to consider why, for example, even countries like Germany that ran trade surpluses also saw declining manufacturing share of the labor force. If folks are mad about photos of abandoned plants, it worthwhile to ask why THAT PLANT was abandoned.
Using de-industialization porn from the 1950s to run Econ policy in the 2020s is … I’m sorry to say, more than mildly insane. [source]
It is without a doubt a fact that we have seen a fall-off in manufacturing via off-shoring and for other global trade reasons. That has devastated communities. I don’t question that as all. And as someone who has organized workers in the recent past, I care about what happens to American workers in all sorts of roles. I also care what happens to them while they are out of work (which is another reason why I am so concerned for the immediate future, given the Trump administration’s attack on our social safety net from all sides).
At the same time, the idea that these tariffs are a strategy to help “American workers” moving forward is simply not based on any grounded facts. First, if it were, the President’s supporters could actually present coherent arguments about how the tariffs will help (or even what the tariffs are supposed to do). Are they to solve our debt? Or bring manufacturing back home? Or get better trade agreements? No one can tell.
Let’s assume that they are to bring manufacturing back home. First, there is the question of whether or not that is even possible. Again, I’ll turn to a X/eet from Spencer Hakimian, Founder of Tolou Capital Management.
Hey Cult Boys, I got another complicated math question for you.
Please see if you can help me figure it out. I just can’t seem to.
It costs $2 to make a t shirt in Vietnam. It costs $20 to make that same t shirt in West Virginia. After you tariff Walmart 50%, and make that t shirt cost $3 in Vietnam.
Does Walmart: A) Continue using the Vietnamese factory B) Switch to West Virginia’s factory
Please help.
I would welcome any Trump apologist with business experience to make the argument for “B”–especially if said WV factory doesn’t already exist. It would be great for them include why companies would make that type of capital investment given the deeply unstable policy landscape we are currently facing.
Here’s the thing, I’d also love for them to explain how option “B” creates manufacturing jobs at scale. Even the President’s own Secretary of Commerce has highlighted the flaw with that:
Watters: What kind of manufacturing are you talking about returning here?
Lutnick: What’s going to happen is robotics are going to replace the cheap labor… pic.twitter.com/k9UPNhuvU1
Robotics and other forms of manufacturing automation are going to replace much of the hand-labor that was the hallmark of mid-century manufacturing. Manufacturing could return to the US, even at scale, but that doesn’t mean that the same scale of manufacturing jobs will.
For a truly fascinating deep dive into this I recommend this X/itter thread on “Lights-out factories”–manufacturing facilities with so few people, they keep the lights off–by journalist Charles Fishman. Not only do lights-out factories exist within the US, they are increasingly being built around the world–including in Vietnam and other places to make those $3 t-shirts. I suspect that even the president’s apologists will be forced to admit that the future of American manufacturing is a move towards lights-out facilities–especially for lower-cost consumer goods.
Nowhere in Trump’s plan or his apologists’ hot takes has this question about where manufacturing jobs at scale will come from been addressed. Yes, they tell us to “think about the workers,” but that’s an emotional appeal to the past, versus a fact-based argument or strategy for the future.
One final note on this: the “what about the workers” emotional appeal is being used to attack people they see as their political enemies. Even worse, those political enemies make the apologists uncomfortable by pointing out facts they can’t address on substance.
So, I’m going to pile one last uncomfortable fact on that heap: most of those apologists were for off-shoring and so-called efficiency-based layoffs before they were against them.
I grew up in a household in the eighties and early nineties where conservative talk radio was always on. So I remember what folks like Rush Limbaugh and Bob Grant were saying about American manufacturing then. The main thrust was “nobody was buying American because other countries made better products–especially cars–better, faster, and cheaper.” And whose fault was that? American workers… the same workers we’re supposed to care about now. Tell me if this type of tough-love thinking sounds familiar:
“We talk about the value of hard work, but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance.”
However, now positions have shifted, and people who have laid off workers in the past in the name of turning around failing businesses, suddenly believe that manufacture can come back home and we should suddenly care about “the workers” (though given those same people’s focus on cutting debt while preserving tax cuts that are good for them are fine with regressive taxes on American Workers via tariffs and cutting the social safety net for the former workers who currently can’t find the jobs that the apologist remind us don’t exist).
One more note on Conservative Media–which I know many of Trump’s fiecest apologists marinate in–during the 80’s and 90’s at the very least, one of the most consistent mantras of Limbaugh and others were that “We have the ‘facts’ and Democrats/Libs have the “feels.” The utterly factless and feel-based defenses to the tariffs (especially from people who claim to understand business and manufacturing) is a prime example of how either things have flipped or perhaps this was a fig-leaf from the start to protect against cognitive dissonance.
The U.S. economic outlook is bleak—but just how bad is it going to get? In the three trading days since President Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariff regime, the S&P 500 fell 11 percent and J.P. Morgan put the odds of a U.S. and global recession at 60 percent, while Goldman Sachs raised its odds to 45 percent this week. (The only reason the numbers aren’t higher is these banks aren’t sure whether to believe Trump—if he really follows through on his 185-front trade war, they argue, the chance of a recession will become significantly higher.)
What can Americans do now if a recession is truly around the corner? Build up a buffer.
Of course, the best advice is personal. How to prepare for a recession depends on how well you were doing before Liberation Day. If you’re on the younger side and doing all right financially, avert your eyes and try not to freak out. Your 401(k)? “Don’t even look,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. “If you’re able to save, save.” Recessions come with a higher chance of losing your job or getting your pay or hours cut.
“Cut back spending as much as you can, cut back on luxuries, and try and see out the craziness,” the economist David Blanchflower told me. If you have low savings, such that you couldn’t “deal with a $1,000 exigency,” Blanchflower added, you might want to “put off necessities.” This might include home or car maintenance, or a nonurgent dentist appointment.
The older you are, and the more likely you are to get laid off, the more important it is to have liquid savings. (Of course, people don’t always see job loss coming, even in economically uncertain times.) “Having access to that cash—to that capital—can be really, really helpful,” Cory Stahle, an economist at the job-posting site Indeed, told me. Savings you can actually use, he explained, are better in tough times.
And for retirees on the eve of a potential recession, Zandi cautioned, it may be a good time to double-check that you’re not taking on too much risk. “Think about your broader savings and make sure that it’s consistent with your goals and your risk tolerance, and if you’re fortunate enough to have an investment manager, it’s probably a good time to check in with them,” Zandi told me.
If you really do have the money to spare—meaning, you have more than just rainy-day savings—consider buying assets. Trump could still change his mind and avoid the worst outcomes, and nobody knows exactly where the bottom of this stock market lies. “If you’re very wealthy, if you’re in the top 20 percent of the distribution,” Zandi explained, “you can be thinking more opportunistically about investing.”
Yet if everybody but the affluent puts off their purchases, cuts back on luxuries, and saves as much as possible, a recession will be guaranteed. That’s not unlikely—people act with their own best interests in mind, not with the expectation that they can save the macroeconomy. “There’s a paradox,” Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at the Economic Innovation Group, told me. “If everyone tries to save at the same time, that’s obviously one of the ways that a recession can happen,” he explained. “A recession can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Eventually, enough people hunkering down sends a signal that gets picked up, if not by politicians, then at least by central bankers at the Federal Reserve and its equivalents around the world, who will cut interest rates to spur businesses and consumers to spend once again. This is when the stock market and the economy tend to turn around, Blanchflower told me, but government spending is usually part of the equation too. On that front, “nobody should have any faith,” he said.
Should tariffs rise to the degree that Trump promised, many Americans will find themselves saving as well as deferring their purchases. When the economy contracts as a result, all we can hope for is that government leaders have a desire to intervene to improve conditions. If not, a huge number of Americans will indeed find that a kind of liberation awaits them: unemployment.
Thisarticle contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of The White Lotus.
On The White Lotus, misdirection abounds. Each installment of the writer-director Mike White’s acerbic satire opens with a guest at the titular hotel chain stumbling upon a dead body, before rewinding a week to introduce a motley crew of patrons and staff who might each end up being the deceased. As these characters and their complicated relationships come into view, the question of the corpse’s identity recedes into the background; the fatal arc rarely plays out as anticipated, and is not always relevant to each character’s story.
The White Lotus, which began as a COVID-era limited series filmed in Hawaii, has always been a closely observed study of wealth and its excesses, whether carnal or material. This season, filmed mostly on the Thai island of Ko Samui, used the new setting to nudge its characters toward pursuits beyond the flesh. Guests got a crash course in Buddhist principles, a reflection of White’s own interest in the religion and its philosophies. The pacing was slower, and the tone less raucous, than in seasons past, as characters served up meditations on life, death, and the things we do to survive in between. But last night’s Season 3 finale proved that the show isn’t above an obvious, anticlimactic ending—and hasn’t quite transcended its original formula.
Perhaps more than any other TV show airing now, The White Lotus has inspired fans to share their theories about the symbolism, pop-culture allusions, and real-world inspiration on view—and how that all might manifest in the finale’s on-screen deaths. In seven preceding episodes, Season 3 zoomed in on the insecurities, selfishness, and devious choices of a wide-ranging ensemble cast. Each narrative thread seemed to tease a potentially explosive ending, and the White Lotus team promised a shocking finale. The steady stream of online chatter helped propel this season to some of the show’s highest-ever ratings, but it also inadvertently revealed the trouble with this season’s writing. Instead of deepening the psychological and interpersonal inquiries of its character studies, The White Lotus simply bombarded viewers with more—more characters, more accents, more episodes, more dead bodies, more Easter eggs to scrutinize—only to end up with a predictable outcome.
The show has always been more invested in skewering its living hotel patrons than obsessing over the specifics of any one character’s demise. But the finale undermined—and wholly ignored—some of the season’s more interesting ideas. One of the season’s main stories has focused on Rick (played by Walton Goggins), a morose middle-aged man vacationing with his earnest, wide-eyed girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). Rick spent most of the season chasing Jim (Scott Glenn), the man he believed to be his father’s killer, before confronting him in the penultimate episode. Rick managed to walk away from the encounter without harming Jim, and the resulting calm he felt afterward marked a notable shift for a man whose entire understanding of himself was shaped by the death of his father. It also represented a heartening development in his relationship with Chelsea, who had constantly begged Rick not to choose violence.
Near the end of the finale, all of that progress was erased. A new encounter with Jim triggers Rick’s rage, leading to a wild shoot-out across the hotel grounds. And right after Rick does shoot Jim, he learns that Jim was actually his father—with no setup or follow-through. Just moments before, Chelsea had pleaded with Rick to “stop worrying about the love you didn’t get” and “think about the love you have.” Of course, Rick doesn’t, and his refusal leads to their deaths, too. The shootings played out in rapid succession, filling the final 20 minutes of the episode with a barrage of gunplay that felt like the rushed conclusion to an action film. Where the Season 2 finale imbued its important action scenes with a modicum of whimsy, last night’s episode presented little by way of humor, stylistic finesse, or emotional release. By the time Rick tells a dying Chelsea that they’ll be together forever, just like she’d said throughout the season, the words ring hollow.
Other plotlines stacked up the possibility of immense tragedy, only to pull back at the last minute. Earlier in the season, embattled father Tim Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) had become desperately suicidal after learning he was under investigation for financial crimes. Convinced that his family would not survive the loss of their wealth, he seemed prepared to poison not only himself but also his wife and two of his children. For a short stretch in the last episode, it seemed like his younger son, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), would inadvertently die instead. But after accidentally drinking a poisoned milkshake, Lochlan was … fine, and his family soon boarded a boat departing the island (with no acknowledgment of the shoot-out that had just killed multiple people). For a moment, Tim seems ready to tell his wife and children what will happen when they get back to the United States—but then the scene ends. After eight episodes of the show hinting at a possible murder-suicide, the finale sends them off with nothing worse than a stomachache.
Another scene struck a very different note, in a marked contrast to the plot-heavy proceedings. Throughout the season, a trio of childhood friends—Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Kate (Leslie Bibb), and Laurie (Carrie Coon)—had navigated their middle-age ennui by gossiping about one another. Then, in a lovely monologue, Laurie admitted that their bond was one of the most important things in her life. “I don’t need religion or God to give my life meaning, because time gives it meaning,” she says tearfully. “We started this life together. I mean, we’re going through it apart, but we’re still together.” It’s a beautiful sentiment, bringing some welcome closure to a true-to-life dynamic. But sandwiched in between so much plot, the scene’s gravity was undercut. If the finale had stopped trying to do so much, perhaps it could have actually given us some emotional satisfaction.
Meet your next word-game obsession: Bracket City. Today we’re announcing that this fast-growing word puzzle––created earlier this year by an independent game designer––has a new home at The Atlantic.
In Bracket City, players solve nested layers of clues to uncover a fact about the given day in history. Each solved bracket reveals a part of the next, creating a chain reaction that eventually resolves the whole puzzle into a single sentence. Players earn city-themed ranks for success, such as “Commuter,” “Mayor,” or the coveted “Kingmaker” for a perfect puzzle.
Bracket City was created by Ben Gross and has rapidly amassed an audience of loyal players. Ben will continue to create daily puzzles with Caleb Madison, the director of games at The Atlantic.
[Work performed in a theater] [not later] at The Atlantic.
On the first episode of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney, Netflix’s new talk show, the comedian gathered a panel of 11 actors who have played Willy Loman, the tragic protagonist of the classic play Death of a Salesman. He lobbed queries at the group, which included recognizable stars (among them Christopher Lloyd) and fresh-faced students, asking them to answer in character—but not about their performances or the play itself. Instead, the host asked such questions as “How much screen time should an adolescent get?” and “Are movies too violent?”
This meeting of the Willy Lomans was a strange, charming, and original bit, the kind of thing that seemed like it could only have sprung from Mulaney’s mind; he’s long delighted in giving old-school American entertainment a modern tweak. It was a fantastically irrelevant piece of comedy that also let the comedian react to contemporary issues in his own specific manner: by gleefully summoning avatars of the broken American working man and using them to expose the ridiculous way we live now. This type of self-assured humor is core to Mulaney’s comedic sensibility—and a large part of what’s made his late-night experiment so fascinating.
Mulaney may very well roll his eyes at that analysis, and he’d probably be right to do so. The bulk of Everybody’s Live is clearly designed for the comedian’s amusement. The hour-long program, which airs Wednesdays and is Netflix’s first foray into weekly live programming, builds upon the six-episode series he did for the streamer in 2024, called Everybody’s in L.A. The ornery character actor Richard Kind is his announcer, barking non sequiturs from behind a podium. Each episode has a conversation topic with no particular connection to the week at hand, like lending people money or funeral planning; each one is just a subject of interest to Mulaney. His guests are a mix of celebrities and experts, yet the celebs make no effort to plug whatever current projects they may have. And Mulaney takes calls from viewers live on air, though if the person on the other end of the line rambles for too long, he will bark at them to hurry up.
In constructing this loopy hangout session, Mulaney is taking the standard talk-show format and languidly injecting it with some disorder. The audience never knows what might happen, but there’s also little chance of something truly maniacal going on. Mostly, the host is happy to chitchat, with pals and strangers alike. He has shown that he is as much an acolyte of the storied genre as he is an eager dismantler of it: When he emerged as one of the leading stand-up comedians of his generation, Mulaney already had more than a little Johnny Carson to him. Like the late talk-show veteran, he’s a reedy-voiced midwesterner with a face every mother could love. Mulaney’s schtick, however, carries a salty edge. It wasn’t too hard, while watching him perform onstage, to imagine the comedian ending up somewhere like The Tonight Show, delivering zingers from behind a desk.
But late night has become a rapidly decaying format, as broadcast television—where it primarily lives—slouches toward extinction. CBS just canceled After Midnight, the variety program hosted by the stand-up comic Taylor Tomlinson, which airs after Stephen Colbert’s Late Show; the network has no plans to replace the series or fill its time slot. When Conan O’Brien retired from hosting Conan on TBS, the cable channel began airing sitcom reruns in its stead. The Tonight Show, hosted by Jimmy Fallon,is still a TV institution; meanwhile, its excellent sister show Late Night With Seth Meyers,has been shedding budget, losing the house band last year. ABC will seemingly retain Jimmy Kimmel as long as he wants to keep doing Jimmy Kimmel Live—it’s currently in its 23rd season—yet his deal expires this year, and he’s yet to sign a new one. Shows from other, newer entrants in the late-night field, like the comedy duo Desus and Mero and the Daily Show fixture Samantha Bee, also ended prematurely.
Mulaney has many advantages at Netflix that his conventional-television peers don’t, however. He doesn’t have to worry as much about ratings; he does only one show a week, with just 12 episodes currently planned, and there’s more room to break from the status quo on a streaming service that has sought to upset traditional media’s apple carts. At the same time, Everybody’s Live harkens back to a chattier, looser era—like The Merv Griffin Show, where interviews could run half an hour or longer, or Tom Snyder’s The Tomorrow Show, a newsier hour of talk that aired after Carson’s The Tonight Show for eight years. Focusing the conversation on a particular subject reminds me of Bill Maher’s shows Politically Incorrect and Real Time, though Maher tackles more topical material; taking live calls reminds me of the stand-up comic Chris Gethard’s truly riotous The Chris Gethard Show, which is still maybe the most electrifying attempt to remake the late-night genre of the past decade.
The resulting balance of serious and silly is perfectly amusing for a Mulaney fan like myself. Others might find the pithy gags a touch indulgent: Mulaney spends time fumbling around with a delivery robot and tossing beverages to his befuddled guests. The variety of pretaped sketches, including the Willy Lomans bit, may also fit into this category. But the pointlessness, as O’Brien emphasized in his conversation with Mulaney on his podcast last week, is part of the point. Rather than adopt the typical structure of a late-night show—celebrities telling cheeky, canned stories boiled down to 10 minutes or less—the host embraces weird, sometimes confusing antics.
O’Brien, one of Mulaney’s most apparent influences, articulated the appeal of this approach in their conversation: “We live in this era where I think people got intoxicated at some point with comedy having a point, and comedy meaning something, and comedy driving the conversation,” O’Brien said, referring to Mulaney’s absurdist spin on Death of a Salesman. “I think I just love when there’s a really funny idea that’s very creative.” An idiosyncratic sketch like that one, he added, “has a power that’s hard to understand, but it’s there.”
The “funny first” sensibility motivated O’Brien during his many years as a late-night television host. To him, Mulaney, and their ilk, it’s much more important for comedy to be purely, anarchically funny, rather than speaking directly to “the moment.” O’Brien was also being a little coy: His own material can still speak to current events, even if he never trolls for “clapter,” a term Meyers coined to describe the reaction of an audience demonstrating its approval instead of laughing spontaneously. O’Brien still has fun with societal foibles, just in a less direct fashion than some of his contemporaries. Mulaney’s approach to social commentary on his show is even more subtle; sometimes, concentrating a sketch on a character like Willy Loman is enough.
Mulaney’s comedic priorities have thus far kept Everybody’s Live focused—or as focused as such a program can be. Take a recent episode about cruises, which featured Ben Stiller, Quinta Brunson, and Mulaney’s frequent comedy partner Nick Kroll, along with a befuddled industry expert named Anne Kalosh. Kalosh sat chuckling as other panelists confessed they’d never been on a cruise and had no real interest in them, while Mulaney rolled with that irony chipperly. And when one caller’s story about life on a boat went on too long, Mulaney hung up on him. “It’s become a yarn, and we don’t have time for yarn,” he explained to his guests. “It’s a little rude, but also, it’s rude to waste the whole globe’s time.” He might be here to hang out, yet he’s still putting on a show.
