As a being whose body contains billions of billions of atoms, I am subject to certain rules. To walk through my front door, I first have to open it. If I throw my jacket onto a chair, it will move in the direction and at the speed with which I tossed it, and stay on the chair until I pick it up again. I can’t affect the movement of a tennis ball in China by bouncing one in New York.
In the quantum world, where physicists study the behaviors of individual atoms and their even smaller parts, these laws do not apply. Particles of matter sometimes act like waves, or move through solid objects. The qualities of one atom can be linked to another’s, even if the two are a great distance apart.
Starting around the turn of the 20th century, physicists began to understand that the behaviors of the tiniest bits of our world couldn’t be explained by the laws of classical physics—the type that governs macroscopic solids, gases, liquids, and the forces that act on them. But as the field has developed, it has taken on another surprising role: as a touchstone in alternative health and wellness spaces, used to justify manifestation, energy healing, and other fringe claims and products. The phenomenon is called “quantum woo,” “quantum mysticism,” or “quantum flapdoodle.” It’s both an incorrect appropriation of scientific ideas and a strangely elegant way to explain the psychological forces that push people toward alternative medicine. Many wellness trends reflect a desire for another, contrarian account of the inner workings of the human body and mind—just what quantum mechanics provides for the inner workings of the physical world. Alongside a pervasive interest in alternative-medicine practices and New Age beliefs, more people could be in danger of getting pulled into the flapdoodle.
The physicist Matthew R. Francis once wrote that “possibly no subject in science has inspired more nonsense than quantum mechanics.” In some cases, quantum terminology is arbitrarily added to health practices to legitimize them, or to indicate that they are mysterious and powerful, says Christopher Ferrie, a physicist at the University of Technology Sydney and the author of Quantum Bullsh*t: How to Ruin Your Life With Advice From Quantum Physics. “Like calling your dishwasher detergent Quantum, it just makes it sound cooler,” Ferrie told me. It’s easy to find a “quantum healer” practicing within a couple of miles of my home. YouTube and Instagram accounts offer advice on learning to quantum leap; you can read books about falling in quantum love. You can even buy a $99 quantum water bottle “charged” with special healing frequencies or a quantum crystal kit that will help you “clear any negative vibrations you have picked up.”
In a 2020 episode of the Netflix show The Goop LabWith Gwyneth Paltrow, an energy practitioner named John Amaral told Paltrow that a pillar of quantum mechanics, the double-slit experiment, shows that “consciousness actually shifts or alters, in some way, shape, or form, physical reality.” What the experiment actually demonstrates is that when photons are shot through two open slits, they can act either as waves or as particles, depending on whether they’re measured. The finding is perplexing—how can matter behave as a wave, and why would recording photons change their behavior? Physicists are still actively working on how and if quantum behaviors might seep into the larger world, but they agree that the human body is a solid thing, and that people don’t act as photons do.
Amaral’s comments are typical of quantum woo in that they apply the uncertain state of subatomic particles to people, and expect humans to act as photons do. “By influencing the frequency of energy in and around your body, you can change your physical reality,” Amaral said on Goop Lab. In The Secret, the best-selling manifesto of manifestation, Rhonda Byrne referenced quantum physics to claim that thoughts and emotions are entangled with outcomes in the exterior world. There are parallels in her description to the quantum theory of entanglement—the idea that pairs of particles can have correlated behaviors even at a distance. In physics, energies and frequencies refer to measurable properties of subatomic particles and waves. In New Age or wellness vernacular, these terms are squishier, usually alluding to ambiguous thought patterns, life forces, or chakras—so immeasurable as to be incontrovertible.
Quantum physics’ close relationship with mystical ideas has on occasion pushed the science forward. In 1975, two students affiliated with the theoretical-physics division of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory formed the “Fundamental Fysiks Group,” which frequently connected quantum mechanics to Eastern mysticism, psychedelic-drug experiences, and telepathy. Their explorations into parapsychology, including getting CIA funding to test “remote viewing”—basically whether one person could receive telepathic messages from another—were a bust. But David Kaiser, a quantum physicist at MIT and the author of How the Hippies Saved Physics, told me that the group’s radical questions about the quantum world and its limits “helped nudge the broader community, which then began to take some of these questions more seriously than they had been taken before.” For example, the group’s thought experiment on entanglement led to the “no-cloning theorem,” which states that certain quantum states cannot be copied. This is now important for, among other things, quantum cryptography, which takes advantage of the fact that encrypted messages cannot be copied without also being corrupted.
Crucially, the Fundamental Fysiks Group put its notions to the scientific test, combining Eastern religious or parapsychic ideas with real physics know-how. The quantum wellness and health industry, by contrast, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what quantum physics is all about. “Quantum mechanics does have many strange and counterintuitive features,” Kaiser said. But quantum states are very delicate, and much different from the ones humans live in. To perform quantum experiments, physicists typically have to put atoms in vacuums or subject them to temperatures near absolute zero. “By the time you get to something that’s a few thousand atoms big, you’re losing the pure quantum essence,” Philip Moriarty, a physicist at the University of Nottingham, in England, told me. “When you get to something as big as a human, there’s no quantum essence left.”
Quantum mechanics arose because classical physics failed to completely describe the microscopic universe around us—because scientists had uncovered experimental situations that defied the physics they knew. It suggested that, underneath the world of cause, effect, and consistency, a secret alternative playbook was hiding in plain sight. Applying that hint of fantasy to the world at human scale has proved too tempting for the wellness marketplace—and many consumers—to resist. Deepak Chopra, a popular alternative-medicine figure and the author of Quantum Healing, declares on his website, “You are a mystery that needs quantum answers.” Many people’s emotions and bodies really do feel like puzzles that we haven’t been given all the pieces to solve, so it’s appealing to think that the missing bits exist somewhere in the quantum realm.
The wellness industry often reflects larger anxieties around health, food, and environmental safety, Adam Aronovich, a medical anthropologist at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Spain, told me. It also has a history of using scientific-sounding—but scientifically inscrutable—language to lend itself a patina of legitimacy. Quantum wellness is no exception. Quantum water filters, for example, are enticing “not only because of the quantum mysticism behind it, but because people have real anxieties about microplastics,” Aronovich said. “You don’t have to worry about microplastics in your water if you have enough money to buy this quantum filter that has the approval stamp of Deepak Chopra. It is going to filter away all the bad things in a mystical, magical, unknowable way.”
The quantum world may be all around us, but humans—and our anxieties—inhabit a classical world. Most people are concerned primarily with how to keep our bodies healthy and tend to our emotional states amid social and environmental conditions that make doing so difficult. These problems operate on the macro scale. We can’t rely on single atoms to solve them for us.
At this late stage in Bob Woodward’s career, it would be possible to publish an entertaining anthology of the negative reviews of his books. Although there’s an ongoing debate about the journalistic merits of Woodward’s reportorial mode, he has no doubt succeeded in bringing out the vitriolic best from the likes of Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens, and Jack Shafer.
A few years back, I wrote to Woodward, hoping to get his help with an article I was reporting. I decided to solicit him with a thick layer of flattery, in what I believed to be the spirit of Bob Woodward. To my embarrassment, he replied that he struggled to reconcile my fawning missive with the negative review of his book State of Denial that I had published in The New York Times in 2006, “which strongly concludes the opposite.” His response suggests that he might be the ideal editor of the anthology.
Over the years, my critique of Woodward has softened considerably. It’s not that the complaints about his works aren’t fair: He does recite his sources’ version of events with excessive deference; he trumpets every nugget of reporting, no matter how trivial; he narrates scenes without pausing to situate them in context. But when he’s in his most earnest mode—and War, his new book about President Joe Biden’s navigation of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, might be the most earnest of his career—he exudes an almost atavistic obsession with the gritty details of foreign policy. Woodward is the most gifted sensationalist of his generation, but it’s his abiding desire to be known as a serious person that yields his most meaningful reporting.
War gets to that fruitful place, but it begins in unpromising fashion. In the prologue, Woodward remembers that Carl Bernstein ran into Donald Trump at a New York dinner party, back in 1989. Trump exclaimed, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if Woodward & Bernstein interviewed Donald Trump?” The journalistic duo that helped bring down Richard Nixon agreed to see him the next day.
Last year, Woodward went to a storage facility and began rummaging through his files in search of the lost interview. In a box filled with old newspaper clippings, he found a battered envelope containing the transcript. That’s the most interesting part of the story, alas. Woodward subjects his reader to pages of Trump’s banal musings: “I’m a great loyalist. I believe in loyalty to people.” Because Woodward and Bernstein were the ones asking the questions, the conversation is apparently worthy of history. This is a goofy, tangential start to a book devoted to the foreign policy of the Biden presidency.
The cover, which features a row of faces of global leaders, places Kamala Harris’s visage in the center. It’s another piece of misdirection, because the vice president is a bit player in the story. That said, Harris comes off well in her cameos. She asks diligent questions in the Situation Room. In phone calls with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she plays the heavy, asking him about civilian casualties in Gaza. There are no instances, however, of her disagreeing substantively with Biden.
The most revealing Harris moment comes toward the end of the book. One of Biden’s friends asks her, “Could you please talk to the president more than you talk to him? Your president really loves you.” Her boss’s biggest disappointment was that she didn’t write, she didn’t call. In response to the friend’s plea, Harris joked about her strongest bond with the president: “He knows that I’m the only person around who knows how to properly pronounce the word motherfucker.” It’s a genuinely funny exchange, and telling in its way.
But these are just MacGuffins: sops to the Beltway superfans. At its core, Woodward’s book is about diplomacy. Just past the sundry tidbits about Trump—most horrifying, the former president’s ongoing chumminess with Vladimir Putin, a charge that Trump’s campaign denies—there lies a serious history of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. I have reported on these stories myself, and I can’t say that I found any faults in his account. If anything, I’m unashamedly jealous of how he managed to get a few big stories that eluded me. One of the most stunning sections of the book captures Putin mulling the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine—and all the quiet diplomacy that pushed him back from the brink. Newspapers hinted at this threat at the time, but Woodward reveals the backstory in robust and chilling detail. (Jon Finer, the deputy head of the National Security Council, says that Putin’s decision on whether to deploy the nuke seemed like a “coin flip.”) When Biden frets about the possibilities of nuclear escalation, he’s not just recalling his youth in the earliest days of the Cold War. He’s confronting a very real risk in the present.
Unlike his predecessors, Biden was distrustful of Woodward. Old enough to remember how one his books helped to derail Bill Clinton’s first term, Biden appears to have chosen not to participate in either this history or Woodward’s previous book, Peril. Having withheld access, the president comes across as lifeless. It’s not that he’s out to lunch—he is in command of his faculties, according to Woodward’s reporting. There are just no real insights into his psychology. His decision to withdraw from the 2024 race came too close to the book’s publication date for Woodward to report on the process that led the president to back away. He has very little to say about the most fascinating decision in recent political history.
But in some sense, Biden and Woodward were made for each other. These two octogenarians are both avatars of a bygone era in Washington, when foreign policy was the shared obsession of the establishment. Even if Woodward doesn’t find Biden personally interesting, he pores over the president’s conversations with Netanyahu and Putin with genuine fascination. These aren’t the scraps of reporting that move copies, but they are clearly what he treasures. In his epilogue, he hints at how much he enjoyed covering “genuine good faith efforts by the president and his core national security team to wield the levers of executive power responsibly and in the national interest.”
Despite his fixation on substance, Woodward fails to answer—or even ask—some of the bigger questions about Biden’s foreign policy: Could he have done more to bolster Ukraine? Could he have pushed Israel to accept a cease-fire? But Woodward does arrive at a judgment of the presidency that strikes me as measured and fair: “Based on the evidence available now, I believe President Biden and this team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.” Despite the many mistakes of this administration, I’m guessing that Woodward’s verdict will pass the test of time, and that none of the reviews of War is destined for the anthology.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Hurricane Milton’s wind and rain lashed Florida overnight—flooding streets, spawning tornadoes, and sending sheets of a fiberglass stadium roof billowing like tissue paper. As they did just weeks before, people in the Southeast have cycled through another round of evacuations, storm surges, and waking up to survey the damage. In the wake of Hurricane Helene, houses that were once up the street are now downriver, and entire communities have been “wiped off the map.” One survivor told CNN that “the smell of decay, and the smell of loss of life … will probably stick with me the rest of my life.” Many are living in a world not so much upside down as erased.
Less than a century ago, New England was in a similar position. As in North Carolina before Helene, rainstorms saturated the Northeast’s soil and overwhelmed its rivers. Then, a Category 3 hurricane traced a fishhook path across the Atlantic and slammed the New England coastline on September 21, 1938. Later nicknamed the “Long Island Express” and the “Yankee Clipper,” after the areas it damaged the most, the storm took almost everybody by surprise; no one had expected it to travel that far north—meteorologists included. According to Atlantic writer Frances Woodward’s report, a gust of wind had toppled a crate of tomatoes in front of a New England grocery store early that day. An onlooker speculated a hurricane might be brewing. Another scoffed: “Whad’ye think this is, Palm Beach?”
When the storm hit, people were caught “alone and unprepared,” according to the editors’ note on Woodward’s story. Residents watched as the physical world gave way around them: Streets were engulfed by “the sea itself,” inundated with a “bulk of green water which was not a wave, was nothing there was a name for,” Woodward observed. Long Island Railroad tracks were damaged, Montauk temporarily became an island, and more than 600 people died. “Curious to see the houses you knew so well, the roofs under which you had lived, tilt, and curtsy gravely—hesitate, and bow—and cease to exist,” Woodward wrote.
After the flooding receded, people gathered to assess the damage. Their towns didn’t feel like home anymore, Woodward recalled: “It was just some place out of a cold-sweated dream … the sour smell on the air. And the alien face of the harbors, blue and placid, with shore lines no one could recognize.” As the sun set, fires burned along the waterfront. “It was a sort of nightmare background to the wet and the cold and the feeling of being still as confused as you had been in the wind.”
The year 1938 had already been a difficult one. The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Edward A. Weeks, could have been describing 2024 when he wrote in the aftermath of the New England hurricane: “We have all had too much worry, too much recession, too much politics, too much hurricane, too much fear of war.” Survivors asked then, as they are now, How do you begin again?
I’d hoped there might be an answer in The Atlantic’s archives. But what I found instead was a story that repeats itself after every natural disaster: People sift through the rubble, searching for missing loved ones. They take stock of what they have left, and figure out a way to rebuild. “You got used to it, in a way, if you kept going,” Woodward wrote.
Maybe there’s a comfort in knowing that our predecessors weren’t sure how to handle this moment either. One of the earliest mentions of a hurricane in The Atlantic comes from a poem by Celia Thaxter, published in April 1868. After a hurricane causes a shipwreck, a lighthouse keeper laments how unfair it is that the ocean can still look beautiful, when so many sailors have died in it. He asks God how He could have allowed so much suffering; in response, a voice tells him to “take / Life’s rapture and life’s ill, / And wait. At last all shall be clear.”
Sighing, the man climbs the lighthouse steps.
And while the day died, sweet and fair,
I lit the lamps again.
Lore Segal, who died on Monday, spent the last four months of her life looking out the window. Her world had been shrinking for some time, as a hip replacement, a pacemaker, deteriorating vision, and other encroachments of old age had made it difficult to leave her New York City apartment, even with the aid of the walker she referred to as “my chariot.” But now, after a minor heart attack in June, she was confined to a hospital bed at home. There, she could study the rooftops and antique water tanks of the Upper West Side—a parochial vision for some, but not for the Viennese-born Segal, who once described herself as “naturalized not in North America so much as in Manhattan.”
Of course, she was an old hand at seeing the universe in a nutshell. It was one of her great virtues as both a writer and a person, and her affinity for tiny, telling details had drawn me to her work long before I became her friend. I also loved her freshness of perception. In Segal’s 1985 novel, Her First American, Ilka Weissnix, newly arrived in this country, disembarks from a train in small-town Nevada and has what must be one of the very few epiphanies ever prompted by a glue factory. “The low building was made of a rosy, luminescent brick,” Segal writes, “and quivered in the blue haze of the oncoming night—it levitated. The classic windows and square white letters, saying AMERICAN GLUE INC., moved Ilka with a sense of beauty so out of proportion to the object, Ilka recognized euphoria.”
To some extent, this euphoria must have stemmed from Segal’s own history as an immigrant. She left Vienna on the Kindertransport in 1938, then lived in Britain and Santo Domingo before making landfall in the United States in 1951. Her books are full of people who have been dislodged from one place and set down in another. The challenges of such displacement are obvious. But it can be a gift for a writer, dropped into a glittering environment whose every detail is, to use Segal’s favorite word, interesting.
She also possessed extraordinary empathy. Segal was quite specific about what this meant, and resisted the idea of being seen as a victim, even when it came to her narrow escape from the Third Reich’s killing machine. “Sympathy pities another person’s experience,” she once wrote, “whereas empathy experiences that experience.” It was getting inside other people that counted, even if our grasp of another human soul was always partial.
Her empathetic impulse accounted for a hilarious comment she once made to me about her television-watching habits: “I don’t like to watch shows where people feel awkward.” Because this is the modus operandi of almost every post-Seinfeld TV show, it must have really cut down Segal’s viewing options. I think what bothered her were scenarios specifically engineered to bring out our helplessness in social or existential situations. She found it hard to hate other people and couldn’t even bring herself to dislike the water bug that lived in her kitchen.
I’m not suggesting that Segal was some sort of Pollyanna. She was well aware of our capacity for cruelty and destruction—it had, after all, been shoved in her face when she was very young. But her fascination with human behavior on the individual level seemed to insulate her from received thinking on almost any topic. “Contradiction was her instinct, her autobiography, her politics,” Segal wrote of her doppelgänger, Ilka, who reappeared in Shakespeare’s Kitchen more than 20 years after the publication of Her First American. “Mention a fact and Ilka’s mind kicked into action to round up the facts that disproved it. Express an opinion and Ilka’s blood was up to voice an opposite idea.” Everything had to be freshly examined; everything had to pass the litmus test that is constantly being staged in a writer’s brain.
Segal also brought this approach to ideological truths, few of which made the grade. It’s fascinating to me that a writer so allergic to ideology managed to produce one of the great Holocaust narratives and one of the great American novels about race—projects that might now be hobbled by questions of authenticity and appropriation. For Segal, the glut of information, and the ethical exhaustion that resulted, turned contemporary existence into a minefield, and politics was no way out. Decency was, but that took enormous work and concentration.
“To be good, sane, happy is simple only if you subscribe to the Eden theory of original goodness, original sanity, and original happiness, which humankind subverted into a fascinating rottenness,” she wrote in an essay. “Observation would suggest that we come by our rottenness aboriginally and that rightness, like any other accomplishment, is something achieved.” In all of her books, in every word she wrote, Segal struggled for that very rightness. I would say she achieved it too, with amazing frequency.
I cannot think about Lore Segal’s work without thinking about my friendship with her. For years and years, I read her books and admired her from a distance. It was only in 2009 that I finally met Lore, as I will now call her. Her publisher was reissuing Lucinella, a madcap 1976 novella that somehow mingles the literary life with Greek mythology: Zeus turns up at Yaddo, the prestigious artists’ colony, in a notably priapic mood. I was asked to interview her at a bookshop, and we hit it off at once.
This small, witty, white-haired person, whose voice still bore the inflection of her Viennese childhood, was a joy to be around. She laughed a lot, and made you laugh. Her marvelous capacity to pay attention made you feel larger-hearted and a little more intelligent—it was as if you were borrowing those qualities from her. In her apartment, with its grand piano and Maurice Sendak drawings and carefully arranged collections of nutcrackers and fin de siècle scissors, we spent many hours visiting, talking, joking, complaining. We bemoaned the slowness and blindness and intransigence of editors (even during the years when I was an editor). We drank the dry white wine I’d buy at the liquor store three blocks away, and Lore always pronounced the same verdict after her first sip: “This is good.”
In time, she began sending me early drafts of the stories that would eventually make up most of her 2023 collection, Ladies’ Lunch. As her vision worsened, the fonts grew larger—by the end, I would be reading something in 48-point Calibri, with just a few words on each page. I was flattered, of course, to function as a first reader for one of my idols. I was touched as well to discover that she was still beset with doubts about her work. “Wouldn’t you think that age might confer the certainty that one knows what one is doing?” she lamented in an email a couple of years ago. “It does not. It deprives.”
We saw each other, too, at meetings of our book group, which Lore had invited me to join in 2010. In more recent years, we always met at Lore’s, because it had become harder and harder for her to bundle herself and her walker into a taxi. Only a few weeks before she died, the group met one last time, at her insistence. She had chosen a beloved favorite, Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and was not going to be cheated out of the conversation.
We sat around her hospital bed, with her oxygen machine giving off its periodic sighs in the background. Lore, peering once more into the microcosm of James’s novel and finding the whole world within it, asked the kind of questions she always asked.
“Are the characters in this novel exceptional people?” she wanted to know.
“Of course not,” replied another member of the group. “They’re absolutely typical people of the period, well-heeled Americans without an original thought in their heads.”
This did not satisfy Lore. She felt that Lambert Strether, sent off to the fleshpots of Paris to retrieve his fiancée’s errant son, had been loaned some of James’s wisdom and perceptive powers (exactly as I always thought I was borrowing Lore’s). “Live all you can,” Strether advises, with very un-Jamesian bluntness. And here was Lore, living all she could, sometimes resting her head on the pillow between one pithy observation and the next. It was the capacity to feel, she argued, that had been awakened in the novel’s protagonist. Empathy, rather than analysis, was Lore’s true currency to the very end.
I visited her just a few more times. She was fading; the multicolored array of pills and eye drops on the table grew bigger and more forbidding; the oxygen machine seemed louder with just the two of us in the room.
“I hope I’ll see you again,” I said, the last time I left. These are the sort of words usually uttered at the beginning of a friendship, not at the conclusion. “But whatever happens, I’ll be thinking of you.”
Out the door I went, and boarded the elevator, in whose creaking interior I shed a few tears, and as I strolled up one of those Upper West Side streets mounded with the trash bags that Lore had so eloquently described (“the bloated, green, giant vinyl bags with their unexplained bellies and elbows”), I found myself asking: Why do we cry? How do we cope with loss? What, precisely, is sadness? These were the questions that Lore would ask—the questions she had been asking her entire career. Her books constitute a kind of answer, at least a provisional one. I will be reading them for the rest of my life and, exactly as I promised Lore on my way out the door, thinking of her.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 4852.5291ʹS 12323.5116ʹW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.
They had been sailing a 60-foot foiling boat, the Mālama, in the Ocean Race, a round-the-world yachting competition, and had passed near that very spot, halfway between New Zealand and South America. Now, two months later, they had paused briefly in Newport, Rhode Island, before tackling the final stretch across the Atlantic. (And the Mālama would win the race.) I spoke with some members of the five-person crew before going out with them for a sail on Narragansett Bay. When I asked about their experience at the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, they all brought up the weather.
With a test pilot’s understatement, the crew described the conditions as “significant” or “strong” or “noteworthy” (or, once, “incredibly noteworthy”). The Southern Ocean, which girds the planet in the latitudes above Antarctica and below the other continents, has the worst weather in the world because its waters circulate without any landmass to slow them down. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the most powerful on Earth, a conveyor belt that never stops and that in recent years has been moving faster. These are the waters that tossed Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton. The winds are cold and brutal. Waves reach 60 or 70 feet. In a second, a racing boat’s speed can drop from 30 knots to five, then jump back to 30. You may have to ride out these conditions, slammed and jammed, for five days, 10 days, trimming sails from inside a tiny sealed cockpit, unable to stand up fully all that time. To sleep, you strap yourself into a harness. You may wake up bruised.
This is not a forgiving environment for a sailboat. But it’s a natural habitat for the albatross you find yourself watching through a foggy pane as it floats on air blowing across the water’s surface—gliding tightly down one enormous wave and then tightly up the next. The bird has a 10-foot wingspan, but the wings do not pump; locked and motionless, they achieve aerodynamic perfection. The albatross gives no thought to the longest swim. It may not have touched land in years.
The oceanic pole of inaccessibility goes by a more colloquial name: Point Nemo. The reference is not to the Disney fish, but to the captain in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In Latin, nemo means “no one,” which is appropriate because there is nothing and no one here. Point Nemo lies beyond any national jurisdiction. According to Flightradar24, a tracking site, the occasional commercial flight from Sydney or Auckland to Santiago flies overhead, when the wind is right. But no shipping lanes pass through Point Nemo. No country maintains a naval presence. Owing to eccentricities of the South Pacific Gyre, the sea here lacks nutrients to sustain much in the way of life—it is a marine desert. Because biological activity is minimal, the water is the clearest of any ocean.
What you do find in the broad swath of ocean around Point Nemo—at the bottom of the sea, two and a half miles below the surface—are the remains of spacecraft. They were brought down deliberately by means of a controlled deorbit, the idea being that the oceanic point of inaccessibility makes a better landing zone than someone’s rooftop in Florida or North Carolina. Parts of the old Soviet Mir space station are here somewhere, as are bits and pieces of more than 250 other spacecraft and their payloads. They had been sent beyond the planet’s atmosphere by half a dozen space agencies and a few private companies, and then their lives came to an end. There is a symmetry in the outer-space connection: If you are on a boat at Point Nemo, the closest human beings will likely be the astronauts aboard the International Space Station; it periodically passes directly above, at an altitude of about 250 miles. When their paths crossed at Point Nemo, the ISS astronauts and the sailors aboard the Mālama exchanged messages.
Illustration by Anuj Shrestha
The Mālama’s crew spoke with me about the experience of remoteness. At Point Nemo, they noted, there is no place to escape to. If a mast breaks, the closest help, by ship, from Chile or New Zealand, could be a week or two away. You need to be able to fix anything—sails, engines, electronics, the hull itself. The crew described sensations of rare clarity and acuity brought on by the sheer scale of risk. The austral environment adds a stark visual dimension. At this far-southern latitude, the interplay of light and cloud can be intense: the darks so very dark, the brights so very bright.
Simon Fisher, the Mālama’s navigator, described feeling like a trespasser as the boat approached Point Nemo—intruding where human beings do not belong. Crew members also described feelings of privilege and power. “There’s something very special,” Fisher said, “about knowing you’re someplace where everybody else isn’t.”
We all know the feeling. Rain-swept moors, trackless deserts, unpeopled islands. For me, such places are hard to resist. Metaphorically, of course, remoteness can be found anywhere—cities, books, relationships. But physical remoteness is a category of its own. It is an enhancer: It can make the glorious better and the terrible worse. The oceanic pole of inaccessibility distills physical remoteness on our planet into a pure and absolute form. There are continental poles of inaccessibility too—the place on each landmass that is farthest from the sea. But these locations are not always so remote. You can drive to some of them. People may live nearby. (The North American pole of inaccessibility is on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota.) But Point Nemo is nearly impossible to get to and offers nothing when you arrive, not even a place to stand. It is the anti-Everest: It beckons because nothing is there.
I first heard the name Point Nemo in 1997, when hydrophones on the floor of the South Pacific, thousands of miles apart, picked up the loudest underwater sound ever recorded. This got headlines, and the sound was quickly named the “Bloop.” What could be its source? Some speculated about an undiscovered form of marine life lurking in the abyssal depths. There was dark talk about Russian or American military activity. Readers of H. P. Lovecraft remembered that his undersea zombie city of R’lyeh was supposedly not far away. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration eventually concluded that the sound had come from the fracturing or calving of ice in Antarctica. In this instance, freakish conditions had directed the sound of an Antarctic event northward, toward a lonely expanse of ocean. Faraway hydrophones then picked up the sound and mistook its place of origin. News reports noted the proximity to Point Nemo.
You might have thought that a planetary feature as singular as the oceanic pole of inaccessibility would be as familiar as the North Pole or the equator. In a sci-fi story, this spot in the South Pacific might be a portal to some other dimension—or possibly the nexus of the universe, as the intersection of First and First in Manhattan was once said to be. Yet at the time of the Bloop, the location of the oceanic pole of inaccessibility had been known and named for only five years.
I have not been to Point Nemo, though it has maintained a curious hold on me for decades. Not long ago, I set out to find the handful of people on Earth who have some sort of personal connection to the place. I started with the man who put it on the map.
Hrvoje Lukatela, a Croatian-born engineer, left his homeland in the 1970s as political and intellectual life there became turbulent. At the University of Zagreb, he had studied geodesy—the science of measuring Earth’s physical properties, such as its shape and its orientation in space. Degree in hand, he eventually found his way to Calgary, Alberta, where he still lives and where I spent a few days with him last fall. At 81, he is no longer the avid mountaineer he once was, but he remains fit and bluff and gregarious. A trim gray beard and unkempt hair add a slight Ewok cast to his features.
After arriving in Canada, Lukatela was employed as a survey engineer. For several years, he worked on the Alaska Highway natural-gas pipeline. For another company, he determined the qibla—the precise alignment toward the Kaaba, in Mecca—for a new university and its mosque in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In time, he created a software company whose product he named after the Greek astronomer Hipparchus. This was in the 1980s, when digital cartography was advancing rapidly and civilian GPS systems were on the horizon. The Hipparchus software library—“a family of algorithms that dealt with differential geometry on the surface of an ellipsoid,” as he described it, intending to be helpful—made it easier to bridge, mathematically, three-dimensional and two-dimensional geographical measurements. Lukatela can go on at length about the capabilities of Hipparchus, which he eventually sold to Microsoft, but two of the most significant were its power and its accuracy.
By his own admission, Lukatela is the kind of man who will not ask for directions. But he has a taste for geographical puzzles. He heard about the longest-swim problem from a friend at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and was immediately engaged. You could twirl a classroom globe and guess, correctly, that the oceanic pole of inaccessibility must lie in the South Pacific, probably concealed by the rectangle where most publishers of maps and globes put their logo. But no one had tried to establish the exact location. As Lukatela saw it, the logic of the search process was simple. It takes three points to define a circle. Lukatela needed to find the largest oceanic circle that met two criteria: The circumference had to be defined by three points of dry land. And inside the circle there could be no land at all. The oceanic point of inaccessibility would be the center of that circle.
I’ll leave the computational churning aside, except to say that Hipparchus was made for a problem like this. Drawing on a digitized cartographic database, it could generate millions of random locations in the ocean and calculate the distance from each on a spherical surface to the nearest point of land. Lukatela eventually found the three “proximity vertices” he needed. One of them is Ducie Island, a tiny atoll notable for a shark-infested lagoon. It is part of the Pitcairn Islands, a British overseas territory, where in 1790 the Bounty mutineers made their unhappy home. A second vertex is the even tinier Motu Nui, a Chilean possession, whose crags rise to the west of Easter Island. The character Moana, in the animated movie, comes from there. The third vertex is desolate Maher Island, off the coast of Antarctica. It is a breeding ground for Adélie penguins. The three islands define a circle of ocean larger than the old Soviet Union. Point Nemo, at the center, lies 1,670.4 miles from each vertex. For perspective, that is roughly the distance from Manhattan to Santa Fe.
Lukatela completed his calculations in 1992, and quietly shared the results with his friend at Woods Hole and a few other colleagues. As the young internet gained users, word about Point Nemo spread among a small subculture of geodesists, techies, and the simply curious. In time, new cartographic databases became available, moving the triangulation points slightly. Lukatela tried out two of the databases, each recalibration giving Point Nemo itself a nudge, but not by much.
Lukatela had named the oceanic pole of inaccessibility after the mysterious captain in the Jules Verne novel he had loved as a boy. Submerged in his steampunk submarine, Captain Nemo sought to keep his distance from terrestrial woes: “Here alone do I find independence! Here I recognize no superiors! Here I’m free!”
But Captain Nemo couldn’t entirely stay aloof from the rest of the planet, and neither can Point Nemo. Many of the boats in the Ocean Race carry a “science package”— equipment for collecting weather data and water samples from regions of the sea that are otherwise nearly impossible to monitor. Data collected by their instruments, later given to labs, reveal the presence of microplastics: Even at the oceanic point of inaccessibility, you are not beyond the reach of humanity.
An article this past spring in the journal Nature reported the results of a scientific expedition that bored deep into the sediment of the ocean floor near Point Nemo. The focus was on the fluctuating character, over millions of years, of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, whose existence became possible after tectonic forces separated Australia and South America from Antarctica. The current helps regulate temperatures worldwide and keep Antarctica cold. But, as the Nature article explained, its character is changing.
I spent several hours recently with one of the article’s authors, Gisela Winckler, at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, high on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson River. Winckler is a physicist and an oceanographer, and her interest in oceans and paleoclimate goes back to her graduate-school days at Heidelberg University, in Germany. She confessed that she’d first learned about Point Nemo not from a scientific paper but from the 2010 album Plastic Beach, by Damon Albarn’s project Gorillaz. Winckler is intrepid; early in her career, a quarter century ago, she descended to the Pacific floor in the submersible Alvin, looking for gas hydrates and methane seeps. Yellow foul-weather gear hangs behind her office door. On a table sits a drill bit used for collecting sediment samples. Water from Point Nemo is preserved in a vial.
Illustration by Anuj Shrestha
Winckler’s two-month expedition aboard the drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution, in 2019, was arduous. Scientists and crew members set out from Punta Arenas, Chile, near the start of the dark austral winter; they would not encounter another ship. The seas turned angry as soon as the Resolution left the Strait of Magellan, and stayed that way. The shipboard doctor got to know everyone. Winckler shrugged at the memory. That’s the Southern Ocean for you. The drill sites had been chosen because the South Pacific is understudied and because the area around Point Nemo had sediment of the right character: so thick and dense with datable microfossils that you can go back a million years and sometimes be able to tell what was happening century by century. The team went back further in time than that. The drills punched through the Pleistocene and into the Pliocene, collecting core samples down to a depth corresponding to 5 million years ago and beyond.
The work was frequently interrupted by WOW alerts—the acronym stands for “waiting on weather”—when the heave of the ship made drilling too dangerous. Five weeks into the expedition, a violent weather system the size of Australia came roaring from the west. The alert status hit the highest level—RAW, for “run away from weather”—and the Resolution ran.
But the team had collected enough. It would spend the next five years comparing sediment data with what is known or surmised about global temperatures through the ages. A 5-million-year pattern began to emerge. As Winckler explained, “During colder times, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current itself becomes cooler and slows down, shifting a little bit northward, toward the equator. But during warmer times, it warms and speeds up, shifting its latitude a little bit southward, toward the pole.” The current is warming now and therefore speeding up, and its course is more southerly—all of which erodes the Antarctic ice sheet. Warm water does more damage to ice than warm air can do.
Before I left the Palisades, Winckler walked me over to the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository, a sediment library where more than 20,000 tubes from decades of expeditions are stacked on floor-to-ceiling racks. The library was very cold—it’s kept at 2 degrees centigrade, the temperature of the sea bottom—and very humid. Open a tube, and the sediment may still be moist. I wondered idly if in her Point Nemo investigations Winckler had ever run into a bit of space junk. She laughed. No, the expedition hadn’t deployed underwater video, and the chances would have been infinitesimal anyway. Then again, she said, you never know. Some 30 years ago, during an expedition in the North Atlantic, she had seen a bottle of Beck’s beer from an array of cameras being towed a mile or two below the surface. In 2022, in the South Pacific, the headlights of a submersible at the bottom of the Mariana Trench—about seven miles down, the deepest spot in any ocean—picked up the glassy green of another beer bottle resting in the sediment.
Jonathan McDowell hasnever been to the ocean floor, but he does have a rough idea where the world’s oceanic space junk can be found. McDowell is an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also part of the team that manages science operations for the Chandra deep-space X-ray telescope. At more or less monthly intervals, he publishes a newsletter, Jonathan’s Space Report, notable for its wide-ranging expertise and quirky humor. He has written about Point Nemo and its environs, and in an annual report, he provides long lists, in teletype font, with the coordinates of known debris splashdowns.
British by parentage and upbringing, McDowell looks ready to step into the role of Doctor Who: rumpled dark suit, colorful T-shirt, hair like a yogi’s. He is 64, which he mentioned was 34 if you count in Martian years. I met him at his lair, in a gritty district near Cambridge—some 1,900 square feet of loft space crammed with books and computers, maps and globes. One shelf displays a plush-toy Tribble from a famous Star Trek episode. A small container on another shelf holds a washer from the camera of a U.S. spy satellite launched into orbit in 1962.
McDowell has been preoccupied by spaceflight all his life. His father was a physicist who taught at Royal Holloway, University of London. As a teenager, he began keeping track of rocket launches. In maturity, McDowell has realized a grander ambition: documenting the history of every object that has left the planet for outer space. Nothing is beneath his notice. He has studied orbiting bins of garbage discarded decades ago by Russia’s Salyut space stations. If a Beck’s bottle were circling the planet, he’d probably know. McDowell estimates that the thousands of files in binder boxes on his shelves hold physical records of 99 percent of all the objects that have made it into orbit. For what it covers, no database in the world matches the one in McDowell’s loft.
Unless something is in very high orbit, what goes up eventually comes down, by means of a controlled or uncontrolled deorbit. The pieces of rockets and satellites and space stations large enough to survive atmospheric reentry have to hit the planet’s surface somewhere. McDowell pulled several pages from a printer—colored maps with tiny dots showing places around the world where space debris has fallen. The maps reveal a cluster of dots spanning the South Pacific, like a mirror held up to the Milky Way.
Guiding objects carefully back to Earth became a priority after 1979, when the reentry of the American space station Skylab went awry and large chunks of debris rained down on southern Australia. No one was hurt, McDowell said, but NASA became an object of ridicule. The coastal town of Esperance made international news when it tried to fine the space agency for littering. From the 1990s on, more and more satellites were launched into orbit; the rockets that put them there were designed to fall back to Earth. The empty ocean around Point Nemo became a primary target zone: a “spacecraft cemetery,” as it’s sometimes called. That’s where Mir came down, in 2001. It’s where most of the spacecraft that supply the International Space Station come down. There are other cemeteries in other oceans, but the South Pacific is Forest Lawn. The reentry process is not an exact science, so the potential paths, while narrow, may be 1,000 miles long. When reentry is imminent, warnings go out to keep ships away.
Illustration by Anuj Shrestha
When I mentioned the conversation between the Mālama crew and its nearest neighbors, the space-station astronauts, McDowell pointed me toward a bank of flatscreens. He called up a three-dimensional image of Earth and then showed me the orbital path of the ISS over the previous 24 hours. Relative to the universe, he explained, the plane of the ISS orbit never changes—the station goes round and round, 16 times a day, five miles a second. But because the globe is spinning underneath, each orbit covers a different slice of the world—now China, now India, now Arabia. McDowell retrieved a moment from the day before. The red line of the orbit unspooled from between Antarctica and New Zealand and traced a path northeast across the Pacific. He pointed to the time stamp and the location. At least once a day, he said, the space station will be above Point Nemo.
McDowell is drawn to the idea of remoteness, which maybe shouldn’t be surprising: To an astrophysicist, remoteness is never far away. But, he said, “there are layers and layers when it comes to how you think about it.” In 2019, a space probe relayed pictures of a 22-mile-long rock known as Arrokoth, the most distant object in our solar system ever to be visited by a spacecraft. That’s one kind of remote. More recently, the James Webb Space Telescope has found galaxies more distant from our own than any known before. That’s another kind. McDowell brought the subject almost back to Earth. On our planet, he said, Point Nemo is definitely remote—as remote as you can get. “But I’m always moved by the thought of Mike Collins, who was the first person to be completely isolated from the rest of humanity when his two friends were on the moon and he was orbiting the far side, and he had the moon between him and every other human being who has ever lived.”
Collins himself wrote of that moment: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.”
I joined Hrvoje Lukatela and his wife, Dunja, for dinner one evening at their home near the University of Calgary. Hrvoje and Dunja had met at university as young mountaineers—outdoors clubs offered a form of insulation from the Communist regime. They emigrated together soon after their marriage. In the basement office of their home, he still keeps his boyhood copy (in Croatian) of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Lukatela spread maps and computer printouts on the table as we ate.
Lukatela might wish to be remembered for the Hipparchus software library, but he accepts that the first line of his obituary will probably be about Point Nemo. He is proud of his discovery, and like a man with a hammer, he has a tendency to see everything as a nail. He and Dunja spend part of the year in Croatia, and in an email this past spring, he sent me some new calculations that solve the longest-swim problem for the Adriatic Sea (“with millimetric numerical precision”). Set him down alongside Loch Ness or the Central Park Reservoir, and I can guess what he’d be thinking.
Lukatela has a dream for Point Nemo, though probably not one that he can pursue alone. His hope is that someone, someday, will venture into the South Pacific and leave GPS receivers on Ducie Island, Motu Nui Island, and Maher Island, establishing the location of the triangulation points more accurately than ever before. While they’re at it, they might also drive brass geodetic markers into the rock. Ducie and Motu Nui would be relatively easy to get to—“I could do it on my own,” he ventured. (Dunja, listening, did not seem overly concerned.) Access to Maher Island, Lukatela went on, with its inhospitable location and brutal weather, might require some sort of government expedition.
What government would that even be? Lukatela indicated Maher Island on a map. Officially, it is part of Marie Byrd Land, one of the planet’s few remaining tracts of terra nullius—land claimed by no one. But Lukatela recalled hearing that Maher Island had recently come under the jurisdiction of one of those start-up micronations that people invent to advance some cause.
He was right. Maher is one of five Antarctic islands claimed by the Grand Duchy of Flandrensis, a Belgium-based micronation devoted to raising ecological awareness. At international conferences, the grand duke, Nicholas de Mersch d’Oyenberghe, wears military dress blues with handsome decorations and a yellow sash. But he answers his own email. Asked about Lukatela’s ambition, he explained that his country is the only one in the world that seeks to bar all human beings from its territory; the thousand or so people who have registered as citizens are all nonresidents. “No humans, only nature!” is the Grand Duchy’s motto. However, he went on, a mission to install a GPS receiver and a geodetic-survey marker would be deemed scientific, and welcomed. The Grand Duchy would be happy to provide a flag.
The astronaut Steve Bowen has orbited above Maher Island and Point Nemo many times. Before being selected by NASA, Bowen was a submariner; he knows a lot about life in a sealed container far from anywhere. He was one of the crew members aboard the International Space Station who spoke with the Ocean Race sailors as their trajectories crossed at Point Nemo. When I caught up with him this past summer, he compared his circumstances and theirs. The astronauts sleep a lot better, he said—in microgravity, you don’t wake up bruised. But the environment never changes. There is no fresh air, no wind, no rain. Bowen remembered the exhilaration whenever his submarine surfaced in open sea and he would emerge topside into the briny spray, tethered to the boat, taking in a view of nothing but water in every direction.
In the space station, Bowen would often float his way to the seven-window cupola—the observation module—and gaze at the planet below. From that altitude, you have a sight line extending 1,000 miles in every direction, an area about the size of Brazil. In a swath of the planet that big, Bowen said, you can almost always find a reference point—an island, a peninsula, something. The one exception: when the orbit takes you above Point Nemo. For a while, the view through the windows is all ocean.
That same expanse of ocean will one day receive the International Space Station. When it is decommissioned, in 2031, the parts that don’t burn up in the atmosphere will descend toward the South Pacific and its spacecraft cemetery.
Last March, aboarda chartered ship called the Hanse Explorer, a Yorkshire businessman named Chris Brown, 62, exchanged messages with Lukatela to make sure that he had the coordinates he needed—the original computation and the later variations. Brown values precision. As he explained when I reached him at his home in Harrogate after his return from the South Pacific, he and his son Mika had been determined to reach Point Nemo, and even have a swim, and he wanted to be certain he was in the right neighborhood.
This wasn’t just a lark. Brown has been attempting to visit all eight of the planet’s poles of inaccessibility, and he had already knocked off most of the continental ones. Point Nemo, the oceanic pole, was by far the most difficult. Brown is an adventurer, but he is also pragmatic. He once made arrangements to descend to the Titanic aboard the Titan submersible but withdrew in short order because of safety concerns—well founded, as it turned out, given the Titan’s tragic implosion in 2023. The ship he was chartering now could stay at sea for 40 days and was built for ice. Autumn had just begun in the Southern Hemisphere when the Browns left Puerto Montt, Chile, and the weather turned unfriendly at once. “Nausea was never far away,” he recalled.
But approaching Point Nemo, eight days later, the Hanse Explorer found a brief window of calm. Steering a Zodiac inflatable boat and guided by a GPS device, Brown made his way to 4852.5291ʹS 12323.5116ʹW. He and Mika slipped overboard in their wetsuits, becoming the first human beings to enter the ocean here. A video of the event includes photos of the men being ferociously attacked by an albatross. While treading water, they managed to display the maritime flags for the letters N, E, M, and O. Then, mindful of Lukatela’s further calculations, they headed for two other spots, a few miles distant—just to be safe. Admiral Robert Peary’s claim to have been the first person to reach the North Pole, in 1909, has long been disputed; his math was almost certainly off. Brown did not want to become the Peary of Point Nemo.
He isn’t, of course. I think of him, rather, as Point Nemo’s Leif Erikson, the man credited with the first New World toe-touch by a European. I think of Hrvoje Lukatela as some combination of Juan de la Cosa and Martin Waldseemüller, the cartographers who first mapped and named the Western Hemisphere. Jonathan McDowell is perhaps Point Nemo’s Alexander von Humboldt, Gisela Winckler its Charles Lyell and Gertrude Bell. Steve Bowen and the Ocean Race crew, circumnavigating the globe in their different ways, have a wide choice of forebears. The grand duke of Flandrensis may not be Metternich, but he introduces a hint of geopolitics.
Unpopulated and in the middle of nowhere, Point Nemo is starting to have a history.
This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Most Remote Place in the World.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The aftermath of Hurricane Milton in Florida, a beachside air show in California, restoration efforts in the Vatican, a historical autumn fair in England, a dog-grooming class in Brazil, cranberry harvesting in Massachusetts, and much more
To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.
Donald Trump’s affection for oppressive and bloodthirsty dictators is by now so familiar that it might go unremarked, and yet also so bizarre that it goes unappreciated or even disbelieved.
Sometimes, though, a vivid reminder surfaces. That was the case this week, when stories from Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, War,became public. In the book, the legendary reporter writes that in 2020, in the depths of the pandemic, Trump prioritized the health of Vladimir Putin over that of Americans, sending the Russian president Abbott COVID-testing machines for his personal use, at a time when the machines were hard to come by and desperately needed. (The Kremlin confirmed the story; Trump’s campaign vaguely denied it.) Meanwhile, Trump told people in the United States they should just test less. So much for “America First.”
“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin told Trump, according to Woodward.
“I don’t care,” Trump said. “Fine.”
“No, no,” Putin said. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”
U.S. relations with Russia have deteriorated since Trump left office, especially since Russia launched a brutal, grinding invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But the former president has stayed in touch with Putin, according to Woodward, who says an aide told him that “there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021.”
Trump’s public line on the war in Ukraine is that Putin never would have invaded on his watch, because of his strength. Yet evidence keeps piling up that Trump is weak to any Putin overture—that Putin can get Trump to do what he wants, and has done so again and again. It happened when Trump sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies at the horrifying Helsinki summit in 2018, it happened when he declined to bring up election interference during a phone call in 2019, and it happened when Putin got Trump to hush up the transfer of the testing equipment. If Trump is so effective at pressuring Putin, and he remains in touch with him to this day, why isn’t he exerting that influence to pressure Russia to withdraw and end the war?
Putin is hardly alone. Trump’s record shows a consistent pattern of affection for dictators, with them doing little or nothing for America’s benefit in return. Russia’s apparent moves to interfere in the 2016 election by hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee and leaking them—right after Trump made a public appeal for just that—is a rare example of reciprocity, though not to the benefit of the nation. Trump was drawn to the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, even though Erdoğan blithely defied Trump’s requests to stop an invasion of Syria and purchased Russian weapons over U.S. objections. Trump also can’t say enough good things about North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (when he’s not confusing his country with Iran), but failed to achieve nuclear disarmament despite a splashy summit with Kim.
Some people still seem unwilling to believe that Trump admires these dictators, even though he keeps telling us just that. During his first term, his advisers tried to conceal this affection, warning him in writing before a call to Putin after a corrupt election, “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” (He did, of course.) When Putin warned Trump not to disclose the sharing of COVID tests, he showed a more acute grasp of domestic political dynamics than the American president. Yet Trump keeps blurting out his love for authoritarians, including one very strange moment during last month’s presidential debate. Kamala Harris charged that “world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.”
“Let me just tell you about world leaders,” he replied. “Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men—they call him a strongman. He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime minister of Hungary. They said, Why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago, it wasn’t. Why is it blowing up? He said, Because you need Trump back as president.”
Orbán is not widely respected—he’s a pariah or at least an annoyance in most of the world. (Lest there be any doubt that Trump understands who Orbán is, he helpfully noted the Hungarian’s reputation as a strongman.) Orbán’s endorsement is not reassuring—my colleague Franklin Foer in 2019 chronicled some of his damage to Hungary—and the moment suggests how easily Trump can be manipulated by flattery.
Many people also persist in believing that stories about Trump’s collusion with and ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign were a hoax. This seems to be an unfortunate by-product of Special Counsel Robert Mueller not establishing any criminal conspiracy. Yet the evidence of improper relationships with Russia was out in the open long before Mueller completed his report. Not only was it not a hoax then, but Woodward’s reporting shows that Trump’s secretive dealings with the Kremlin continue to this day.
At one time, commentators seemed perplexed and puzzled by Trump’s love of dictators, because it ran so counter to typical American notions about rule of law and reverence for the Constitution and the country’s Founders, to say nothing of the country’s interests.
But no reason remains for feeling confused. Trump attempted to overturn an election he lost; he denies that he lost—though he conclusively did—and he was comfortable with violence being committed in an effort to keep him in power. He has no remorse for this assault on American democracy. He has said he wants to be a dictator on day one of his second term, and though he claims it’s a joke, he’s also raised the idea of suspending the Constitution. If he returns to office, his legal team has persuaded the Supreme Court to grant him immunity for anything that can be plausibly construed as official conduct. Trump is drawn to dictators—he admires their power, their inability to ever lose—and he wants to be one.
These days, you can easily find vapes in flavors that include “Lush Ice,” “Blueberry Banana,” “Mango Lychee,” “Hot Fudge,” and “Fcuking Fab” (whatever that is). No matter which one you choose, it’s almost certainly illegal. The tiny battery-powered devices that produce a mist of nicotine when you inhale, first popularized by Juul, are not outright banned—at least not for adults—but only a few flavored vapes have gotten the FDA authorization required before they hit the market. That hasn’t stopped hundreds of shadowy companies, many based abroad, from effectively hawking contraband. Vapes are sold to Americans online for as little as $5, and are well-stocked in convenience stores, smoke shops, and even vending machines.
With such little oversight, it’s no wonder that about 1.6 million American kids are regularly vaping, leading to panic that they are getting duped into a lifetime of nicotine addiction. The FDA has levied fines, filed lawsuits, and even seized products to keep vapes off of shelves, and the agency has pledged a major escalation in its efforts. Politicians across the political spectrum, including Senators Mitt Romney and Chuck Schumer, have advocated for a vaping crackdown. But not Donald Trump.
In 2020, Trump abruptly abandoned a plan to ban flavored vapes, much to the chagrin of public-health officials. Late last month, Trump posted on Truth Social that, if elected, he would “save Vaping again!” The former president may be a deeply flawed messenger, and the vaping industry hardly deserves any sympathy. Many of these companies flagrantly violate the law and overtly market to kids. Even so, Trump has a point. Vapes—as a replacement for cigarettes, anyway—are actually worth saving.
Trump said in that Truth Social post that vapes have “greatly helped people get off smoking.” It’s easy to dismiss that as spin. After all, he had received a personal visit from the head of the vaping industry’s lobbying group that same day. However, vapes are indeed a revelation for the 28 million adults in the United States who smoke cigarettes. They work as well, or even better, than all of the conventional products designed to help wean people off of cigarettes.
Gum, lozenges, and patches simply deliver nicotine, the addictive chemical that keeps smokers smoking, in a safer way. These so-called nicotine-replacement therapies don’t contain any of the harmful ingredients in tobacco products such as cigarettes. Whenever you might feel an itch to smoke, you can instead use one of these replacements to satiate your craving.
But nicotine-replacement therapies don’t work well. Less than 20 percent of people who try to quit smoking using these therapies in clinical trials are actually successful; one study found they aren’t any better than attempting to quit cold turkey. That’s because, for smokers, nicotine gums and lozenges never deliver anything close to the euphoric feelings of puffing on a cigarette. Your average cigarette is just tobacco leaves wrapped in paper with a filter on the end, but it is exquisitely efficient at delivering nicotine to the body. When burned, tobacco creates nicotine particles that hit receptors in the brain within 10 to 20 seconds. Nicotine-replacement therapies deliver nicotine much more slowly—from minutes to several hours—because the drug is absorbed by the mouth or through the skin.
But you know what can get close to the experience of smoking? Vapes. They generate an aerosol that can reach deep into the lungs, allowing nicotine to hit the bloodstream at a speed that is “almost identical” to cigarettes, Maciej Goniewicz, an expert on nicotine pharmacology at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, told me. Part of what makes vapes so effective is that they look and work like cigarettes. “People who are addicted to smoking are not just physiologically addicted to the nicotine; they’re also behaviorally addicted to the process of smoking,” Ken Warner, an emeritus professor of public health at the University of Michigan, told me.
Vapes even hold their own against the one conventional treatment that’s more effective than the traditional gums and patches: a prescription drug called Chantix. Instead of replacing the nicotine in cigarettes, it blocks the pleasurable effects of nicotine on the brain. According to a recent clinical trial, roughly 40 percent of some 400 people given a vape or Chantix successfully quit smoking after six months. Vaping may be an easier transition for smokers: Chantix isn’t widely used, in large part because of its side effects, which include nausea and vivid dreams. It certainly doesn’t hurt that huffing on a “Fcuking Fab”–flavored gadget can also just be fun. That vapes come in so many flavors is often the reason people start vaping in the first place. It’s not that different from alcohol: Many drinkers would prefer a vodka cranberry over a shot of Tito’s.
Just like how it’s not just heavy drinkers who enjoy a vodka cranberry, the same is true of flavored vapes. The attractiveness of flavors is also why kids gravitate toward them, as do adults who have never smoked. Because kids overwhelmingly use flavors, banning them seems like an easy way to reduce vape use. But if public health is about managing trade-offs, the benefits of vapes seem to outweigh the negatives. Although no kids should be vaping, abusing these products is not deadly like cigarettes are. Amid rising public awareness about the dangers of youth vaping, even FDA’s top tobacco official has acknowledged publicly that youth vaping is no longer the epidemic it was a few years ago.
But there are other caveats to consider when it comes to the anti-smoking potential of vapes. They are regulated as consumer products and not medicines, so they have not gone through the same rigorous approval process that every other anti-smoking drug has gone through. We still don’t know a lot about how effective vapes might be to help people quit smoking, or how often smokers need to use them to successfully quit. Because vapes are still relatively new, no one can say definitively that they do not carry some long-term risks we do not know yet. The current Wild West of vapes also adds to the potential pitfalls. Vapes also contain known carcinogens, likely because of the chemicals in e-liquids being heated to high temperatures. Some likely carry higher risks than others because of how little standardization there is in the chemicals used.
All of these risks have made public-health groups understandably reluctant to embrace their use. The FDA acknowledges that vapes are safer than cigarettes, though they do not endorse them as an anti-smoking treatment. Should the agency get its way, the majority of flavored vapes will eventually be off of store shelves. The head of the FDA’s tobacco center has said that “nothing is off the table.”
No matter who wins in November, some of the FDA’s decisions are likely out of the next president’s control: The agency’s decisions on which vapes to green-light doesn’t rest with the commander in chief or the FDA commissioner; rather, they are governed by FDA scientists who are following a legal standard. Still, having a president who embraces vaping could go a long way. Surveys show that a sizable proportion of smokers mistakenly think vapes are more dangerous than cigarettes. That likely keeps many smokers from trying them.
Kamala Harris has not weighed in on vaping since becoming the Democratic nominee. (Her campaign declined to comment on her position. And any single-issue vaping voters out there might do well to reconsider their priorities before voting for Trump.) His stance isn’t exactly academically rigorous, nor is it adequately nuanced. But if Trump acknowledges the benefits of vaping while also condemning the lawlessness of much of the current vaping industry, he could help legitimize a product that has been shunned by most of the medical establishment. For now, few reputable companies are willing to invest in making their own vapes, and few doctors are going to recommend them to patients.
This all might sound like public-health sacrilege. But given that the overwhelming majority of smokers who try to quit each year fail, “anything that we can add to the tool kit as a way that could help people transition away from smoking is something that is worth exploring,” Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has studied anti-smoking drugs, told me. You might cringe at the thought of anyone putting something called “Fcuking Fab” into their lungs, but consider that cigarettes still kill nearly 500,000 Americans each year. Vapes are deeply flawed. Unfortunately, so are the alternatives.
As the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, veers into open xenophobia, Vice President Kamala Harris faces a crucial decision about how to respond when she appears today on Univision, the giant Spanish-language television network. Trump’s attacks on immigrants in the past few weeks have grown both sweeping and vitriolic: He is blaming migrants for a lengthening list of problems, even as he describes them in more dehumanizing and openly racist language. As he amplifies these attacks, Trump has also explicitly embraced the kind of eugenicist arguments that were used to justify huge cuts in immigration after World War I, such as his claim this week that Democrats are allowing in undocumented immigrants whose “bad genes” incline them toward murder.
“Certainly, in my lifetime nobody as prominent as Trump has been this intentional, this racist, so consistently—and this all-inclusive in terms of scapegoating,” Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, told me. “We have certainly seen flare-ups in the past, with governors in different states—and even with Trump, of course, in his first term. But this is on another level. And it begs the question of what comes next.”
Harris so far has responded to this Trump onslaught cautiously, and in a tone more of sorrow than of anger. She has often labeled Trump as divisive in general terms. But when talking about immigration, she has focused mostly on presenting herself as tough on border security. She has almost entirely avoided any direct discussion of Trump’s most militant immigration ideas—particularly his proposal to carry out the mass deportation of millions of undocumented migrants.
But Harris will very likely face pressure to offer a more frontal response to Trump’s mass-deportation plan in a town hall she’s holding with Univision in Nevada. With most polls still showing Trump making gains among Latinos since 2020, many Democratic activists and interest groups focused on that community believe that a more forceful rejoinder from Harris to Trump’s intensification of his anti-immigrant rhetoric can’t come too soon.
“We are in the last four weeks of the election, and she needs to be really clear about showing the contrast,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration-advocacy group, told me. “It is a missed opportunity for [Democrats] not to lean more into the consequences of this mass-deportation slogan.”
Leon Neal / Getty
Some immigrant-rights activists and Democratic strategists believe that Harris is so focused on proving her strength on the border that she has become reluctant to criticize almost any element of Trump’s immigration agenda, out of concern that doing so would support his jackhammer portrayal of her as soft on the issue. This debate among Democrats about Harris’s approach to immigration is part of a larger internal conversation that is quietly gathering momentum. Some senior party operatives are privately expressing concern that Harris is spending too much time trying to reassure voters about her own credentials, and not enough making a pointed case against a possible second Trump term. This pattern was starkly apparent in her series of friendly media interviews this week. “Bring a bazooka to a gunfight, please, not a BB gun,” one worried Democratic pollster told me yesterday. Today’s Univision town hall will provide another revealing measure of whether Harris is advancing her case forcefully enough in the campaign’s final stages.
Hostility to immigrants and immigration has been integral to Trump’s political brand from the outset. Yet, even by his standards, the volume and venom of Trump’s attacks on immigrants have amped up sharply during this campaign.
In recent weeks, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, have insisted that migrants are: stealing jobs from native-born Americans, spurring a national crime wave, driving up housing costs, spreading disease, committing voter fraud, and consuming so many Federal Emergency Management Agency resources that the government doesn’t have enough money to help hurricane victims in North Carolina and Florida. Despite protestations from local officials that the story is a fabrication, Trump and Vance have also insisted that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating residents’ pets.
The other claims have also been debunked. FEMA’s big reserves for responding to natural disasters are held in a congressionally appropriated account that is separate from the funds the agency has for resettling migrants. Violent crime, which rose immediately after the onset of the pandemic, has been declining, and some research suggests that undocumented migrants commit offenses at lower rates than native-born Americans. Despite Vance’s additional claim that Springfield, Ohio, has seen a “massive rise” in communicable disease, local records show that the county-wide rates of such diseases have declined over the past year.
Equally specious is the GOP candidates’ claim that all of the nation’s job growth is accruing to foreign-born workers. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provided by the White House show that nearly 4.5 million more native-born Americans in their prime working years (defined as ages 25 to 54) are employed today than when Trump left office. Contrary to the Trump-Vance claim, this demographic group has added more jobs during President Joe Biden’s term than foreign-born workers have; the share of native-born workers ages 25 to 54 participating in the labor force is higher now than at any point in Trump’s presidency. The latest unemployment rate for native-born Americans in these prime working years is lower than for comparable foreign-born workers.
More ominous even than the multiplying allegations against migrants may be the language Trump is using to describe them. He has said that they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing a formulation used by Adolf Hitler. In Ohio, he said of undocumented migrants, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” Later in the same speech, he called them “animals.” In Wisconsin last month, he said of undocumented immigrants, “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” Removing some of the undocumented migrants, Trump mused last month, during another Wisconsin visit, “will be a bloody story.”
Earlier this week, Trump resorted to unvarnished eugenics, twisting federal statistics to argue that the Biden administration has let into the country thousands of murderers. “You know now, a murderer—I believe this—it’s in their genes,” Trump told the conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. “And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Hewitt chose not to challenge this toxic assertion.
Witnessing this cascade of allegations from Trump and Vance, Erika Lee, a Harvard history professor and the author of America for Americans, told me that she feels a weary sense of “déjà vu” about their anti-immigrant theme—“as if they have dusted off the well-worn playbook that generations of xenophobes have used before.”Nearly every major argument Trump is making, she says, has been made before by nativist campaigners during periods of anti-immigrant backlash.
In 1917, for instance, a Missouri journalist named James Murphy Ward wrote that the great wave of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century was taking jobs from Americans and threatening the nation’s religious traditions. Calling it a “foreign invasion,” he saw their importation as a Catholic plot to undermine the political influence of white American Protestants—this was the Great Replacement theory of his age. The title of Ward’s book would not seem out of place in a political debate today: The Immigration Problem; or, America First. And the most damning example of the immigrant menace that Ward claimed to find has an even more resonant contemporary echo.
“The Chinese laborers who have come to this country, we have been told, are not at all averse to a diet of rats,” Ward wrote, while “the writer himself has heard at least one of these aliens speak of little ‘pups’ as making ‘a fine soup.’”
Harris’s response to Trump’s harsh turn on immigration has been constrained by the Biden administration’s difficulties with the issue. After Congress refused to consider Biden’s legislative proposal to combine tighter border security with a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s population of about 11 million undocumented immigrants, the administration struggled to respond to an unprecedented surge of migrants seeking asylum at the southern border.
The political pressure on Biden ratcheted up last year after Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, started transporting tens of thousands of migrants to northern cities, straining local resources and prompting loud complaints from some Democratic mayors and governors. Finally, in January, Biden endorsed a bipartisan Senate plan led by the conservative James Lankford of Oklahoma that proposed to severely restrict opportunities to seek asylum.
When Lankford’s Republican colleagues abandoned the plan after Trump denounced it, Biden moved in June to use executive action to implement some of its key provisions that narrow opportunities for asylum. The new rules have reduced the number of migrants seeking asylum by as much as three-fourths since late last year, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. But the political damage was done. Polls consistently showed that Americans: disapproved of Biden’s performance on the border in larger numbers than on any other issue except inflation; by a big margin, trusted Trump more than Biden to handle the problem; and were growing more open to Trump’s hard-line solutions, including building a border wall and carrying out a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants already in the country. In July, Gallup found that the share of Americans who wanted to reduce immigration had reached 55 percent, the highest level since soon after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Republican groups, sensing a Democratic vulnerability, have spent heavily on ads portraying Harris—whom Biden early on appointed to deal with the root causes of migration—as weak on the border.
These headwinds have encouraged Harris to center her immigration messaging on convincing the public that she would be tough enough to secure the border. She has emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and as California’s attorney general pursuing “transnational gangs,” as well as promising to tighten Biden’s limits on asylum even more. She has also hugged the bipartisan Senate compromise that Trump derailed—similarly to the old political analysts’ joke about Rudolph Giuliani and the 9/11 terror attacks, a typical sentence on immigration for Harris is Noun, verb, Lankford.
Harris has coupled these promises of tougher enforcement with the traditional Democratic promise to “create, at long last, a pathway to citizenship for hardworking immigrants who have been here for years,” as she put it in Arizona last month during a set-piece speech on immigration. Yet she has almost completely avoided discussing Trump’s mass-deportation plan.
Implicitly, Harris’s agenda rejects any such scheme, because the longtime residents for whom she would provide a path to legalization are among those Trump would deport. Apart from a passing reference in a speech last month to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, however, she has not explicitly criticized the Trump plan; nor has Harris discussed at any length how the proposal would disrupt immigrant communities and harm the economy. When her running mate, Tim Walz, was asked directly about Trump’s deportation agenda during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month, he responded by talking almost entirely about the Lankford bill himself. Walz has called the language from Trump and Vance about immigrants “dehumanizing,” but Harris has tended to wrap Trump’s attacks on immigrants into a more generalized lament about his divisiveness.
Amid the campaign sparring on immigration, Trump has seemed to be enjoying a double dividend: He has energized his core support of culturally conservative whites with vehement anti-immigrant language and has gained ground, according to most polls, with Latino voters, even as Latino communities would be the principal targets of his deportation plans. Although polls show Harris recovering much of the ground Biden had lost among Latinos, she is still lagging the level of support he had in 2020, particularly among Latino men.
Supporters at a rally for Donald Trump in the Bronx earlier this year.
Polls of the Latino community have consistently found that, like other voters, they are more concerned about the economy than immigration. Surveys also show a slice of Latino voters who, departing from the view among advocacy groups, feel that recent asylum seekers are, in effect, jumping the line—and this has moved them toward Trump’s hard-line approach.
But Carlos Odio, a Democratic pollster who focuses on Latino voters, says surveys show that support for mass deportation plummets among not only Latinos but also other voters when “people learn that Trump’s plans are to deport [undocumented] people who have been living and working here for decades.” So Trump is holding his elevated Latino support despite that opposition to mass deportation, Odio told me, in large part because most Latinos “don’t actually believe any of this stuff is going to happen”; they expect that the courts, Congress, or business groups would prevent him from pursuing widespread removals.
Odio, the senior vice president for research at the polling firm Equis, believes that Harris has run an effective campaign to regain much of Biden’s lost ground among Latino voters, but he thinks she could benefit from more forcefully targeting Trump’s enforcement agenda, including mass deportationand his refusal to rule out again separating migrant children from their parents at the border. (Given that nearly 4 million U.S.-citizen children have at least one undocumented parent, Trump’s deportation agenda could be said to amount to a mass family-separation policy as well.) “There has been such a desire to tamp down the border debate [that] there’s been less of an ability to pivot to other parts of the immigration debate that could be helpful,” Odio told me. Even conservative Latinos who moved toward Trump, he notes, overwhelmingly opposed his family-separation policies in an Equis post-2020 election survey.
Castro likewise thinks Harris’s overall approach to Latino voters has been sophisticated, but he worries that the reluctance that she, along with almost all other prominent Democrats, shows to challenging the mass-deportation proposal is “moving the Overton window” and normalizing the plan. “There’s not enough pushback on it,” Castro told me. “The consequence of not pushing back is that more people believe that something like mass deportation is a reasonable, moral policy choice, which is completely wrong.”
The history of immigration politics is that it tends to be what political scientists call a “thermostatic” issue, meaning that public opinion moves left when a president moves right (as happened under Trump) and right when a president moves left (as happened for most of Biden’s presidency). That pattern underscores the likelihood that enforcement of a Trump mass-deportation program—complete with TV images of mothers and children herded onto buses, even detained behind the barbed-wire fences of internment camps—would face much more public resistance in practice than polls suggest today.
Yet Lee, the Harvard historian, says that the previous eruptions of anti-immigrant agitation show how great a challenge the more explicit xenophobia that Trump has catalyzed could present in the years ahead. Although many scholars believe that xenophobia flourishes primarily during periods of economic distress, Lee says that a more common factor in the past “has been the effectiveness of the messenger and the medium.” For instance, she told me, the first great wave of 19th-century anti-Catholic agitation “spread through newspapers and newly available cheap novels”; then the anti-Chinese propaganda a few decades later “spread through even more newspapers and illustrated magazines.”
Those distribution systems for anti-immigrant ideas pale next to what we’re seeing today, Lee believes. “Now we have a 24/7 news cycle, organized networks pushing content, plus social-media platforms that broadcast xenophobia around the world as it happens,” she told me. “As a result, xenophobia today feels both frighteningly familiar and devastatingly more widespread and violent than other periods in history.”
Harris and other Democrats have tactical incentives to avoid a full-on confrontation with those sentiments in the final weeks before next month’s election. But the history of America’s experience with xenophobia indicates that Trump’s lurid attacks will only find a larger audience unless Harris, and others who believe in a more inclusive society, challenge them more directly than they have so far.
The Wegmans in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard is—sorry to be dramatic—paradise on Earth: 74,000 square feet of high ceilings and long aisles, stocked with nearly everything a person could conceivably want to eat or drink. It has tamarind and rambutan and malanga; pink pineapples and purplish, fresh-packed venison; a special cheese that is softly dusted with dried flowers and herbs collected in the German Alps. The milk options alone include beverages made from soy, almonds, oats, cashews, flaxseeds, bananas, pistachios, and hazelnuts, in addition, of course, to the lactational secretions of the American cow, all displayed prominently in well-stocked, brightly lit display cases.
One of the world’s most consumed, most convenient, and least wasteful types of dairy, in contrast, occupies a space about the size of a beach cooler, on the bottom shelf in an unglamorous and highly missable corner of aisle six. It’s shelf-stable milk, a miracle of food science—and a product that Americans just can’t learn to love.
Shelf-stable milk is, as you might imagine, milk that does not need refrigeration and can thus be stocked on shelves. It gets this way by being blasted to 280–302 degrees Fahrenheit for one to five seconds in a process that is hotter and faster—and much more effective at killing bacteria—than other types of pasteurization. It’s then poured into special packaging that is sterile and airtight, where it can last for months on end.
Shelf-stable milk (also known as ultrahigh-temperature, or UHT, milk) does not take up space in the refrigerator before it needs to; it does not need to be packed on ice when thrown into a picnic basket or a lunchbox; it does not begin, like a car, to lose value as soon as you drive it off the lot. Andrew Novaković, a professor emeritus of agricultural economics at Cornell, told me that it is “almost immortal.” It is safe, convenient, practical, and particularly useful in the many urban parts of this country where refrigerator space is at a premium, as well as in the many rural areas where grocery stores are spread out. More meaningfully, it doesn’t require participation in the resource-intensive, greenhouse-gas-spewing system of refrigeration that the industry calls the “cold chain.”
For all of these reasons, shelf-stable milk is wildly popular in many parts of the world. Hilton Deeth, a professor emeritus in the School of Agriculture and Sustainability at the University of Queensland, in Australia, told me that in some European countries, a good 90 percent of the commercial milk supply is UHT. In France, to be more precise, 19 out of every 20 liters of milk sold is UHT; in Spain, it’s 48 out of 50. The Chinese market is growing quickly, Deeth told me, as is the Central American one. In dairy sections around the globe, the default is rectangular, unrefrigerated, plastic-coated cartons of milk that lasts for months.
But in the United States—a market that is, at least theoretically, addicted to convenience, no stranger to processed foods, and more and more attuned to climate change—shelf-stable milk is unpopular. This is not for lack of trying: In the 1990s, Parmalat, the company that popularized UHT milk in Europe, attempted to introduce its product to the U.S. via a splashy marketing push that involved blanketing the airwaves in 30-second spots and throwing a free Pavarotti concert in Central Park. By 1995, after all that effort, shelf-stable milk still accounted for less than 1 percent of the U.S. milk market. As of 2020, it made for 3 percent, according to the analysis firm Verified Market Research.
To understand why, you have to understand just how weird, comparatively speaking, Americans are about milk. U.S. adults drink more milk than their counterparts in Europe, experts told me, and are much finickier about temperature. “We’re just trained to enjoy super-cold things,” Amy Bentley, a food-studies professor at NYU, told me. “Milk fits into that.” But Americans are also particularly enthralled by some enduring myths about milk. Here, milk is supposed to be fresh and natural. And for that reason, it also needs to be refrigerated—because it is so fresh that, like beef ribs or chicken cutlets or other animal products, it was recently a little bit alive.
The earliest American advertisements for milk, from the 1840s, emphasized its bucolic origins and uncontaminated contents, using imagery of rolling hills and words such as wholesome, fresh, and unadulterated. These ads, directed at city dwellers, sold milk as a small escape from urban life, which was chaotic, crowded, and artificial. Milk became one of America’s favorite beverages, and more than a century later, modern milk advertising still features rolling hills and words such as fresh. Even though our milk is now highly likely to come from gigantic, thousand-acre farms in the Southwest, where land is cheap, advertising still sells us on small, family-run dairies. The last time I bought conventionally pasteurized milk, the back of the plastic jug described its contents as “all-natural.”
E. Melanie DuPuis, a professor of environmental studies and science at Pace University, wrote a book about this; its title, taken from an early milk advertisement, is Nature’s Perfect Food. She calls the mythmaking around dairy “the imaginary of milk.” “The imaginary of milk is that it’s coming from the countryside,” she told me. It’s from a happy cow, and it’s bottled quickly, with minimal intervention. It’s old-fashioned Americana incarnate. It is, as Bentley put it, “the epitome of wealth and health and freshness”—or, as the ads put it, “pure.”
UHT milk, with its initialized name and aseptic packaging, evokes something else. Its imaginary, DuPuis said, is that it is “a manufactured product that’s coming from far away.” When Deeth tells people about the work he does researching shelf-stable milk, he finds that many are completely misinformed about what it is. Based on the name and the packaging, they believe it to be full of preservatives, instead of just processed in a slightly more extreme way than the milk they drink all the time. “I think people are suspicious,” he said. (He and others have also noted a slightly “burnt” or “caramelized” taste to UHT milk, though obviously it’s not enough to turn off consumers all over the world.) Shelf-stable milk is an affront to the stories that Americans have been told by the dairy industry and pop culture about what milk should be.
Those stories are so powerful that Americans refrigerate all kinds of milk-adjacent products unnecessarily. Soy and nut milks are just shelf-stable ingredients blended into water, and as such do not require refrigeration before opening. But they are typically sold in the refrigerated section, often at a cost to manufacturers, who pay extra for the shelf space. To them, the symbolism associated with refrigeration is worth it. When Steve Demos launched the soy milk Silk, in the late 1970s, he paid supermarkets more to display it in the refrigerator, a canny marketing decision that some experts credit for the eventual widespread adoption of alternative milks.
“Milk in a bag, milk in [an aseptic container], just doesn’t feel right,” Bentley told me of American attitudes toward shelf-stable milk. It “feels substandard, subpar.” And in a rich country with relatively large refrigerators, she pointed out, people can afford to avoid it: “Because the U.S. is so wealthy and can devote the resources to a cold chain, we do.”
We do so at no small cost to the environment. As the writer Nicola Twilley outlines in Frostbite, her recent history of refrigeration, mechanical cooling requires tremendous amounts of power for warehouses—refrigeration accounts for about 8 percent of global electricity usage—as well as diesel for trucks. It also requires chemical refrigerants, small amounts of which leak into the air as part of the process; many of these refrigerants are “thousands of times more warming” than carbon dioxide, Twilley writes. Environmental scientists call them super-greenhouse gases.
That Americans do this in the service of natural is bizarre, because natural is a bizarre word to use for the process by which a substance meant for baby cows leaves their mothers’ bodies at 101.5 degrees and ends up hundreds or thousands of miles away, refrigerated in plastic, to be consumed at 40 degrees by a different species. Natural is an inappropriate descriptor for a drink that requires days in the massive vasculature of manufactured chill, which ships cold air around a warm country 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The milk in your refrigerator is a small monument to industrial machinery, the result of centuries of human intervention. There’s basically nothing natural about it.
A strange paradox of American culture is that people want to understand food—but only to a point. We want to reap the spoils of a massively industrialized food system, but we do not want our food to feel industrial. Shelf-stable milk is a reminder of all that’s artificial about what we eat. It’s not a reminder that most Americans want.
The milk I bought at Wegmans cost $3.49 and was made by Parmalat, which is still holding on to its tiny U.S. market share. It sat in my pantry for a week or so—even after all this, I just couldn’t bring myself to peel back its silvery seal and take a big swig. But then life’s great motivator—desperation—intervened: I ran out of cold milk and forgot to buy more. So we opened the Parmalat. The primary milk-drinker in my household, who is 1 year old, declared it yummy. I let it sit for another day or two in the fridge before finally trying it myself. I really don’t know what I was expecting, but it tasted like milk: creamy, slightly sweet, as natural as anything else.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
