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Older parents are constantly telling those in the early days to cherish it: It goes by in a flash. But that can be very hard advice to follow when you’re in the thick of it, as Stephanie H. Murray wrote in 2022. Ultimately, all a parent can do is “keep an eye out for the precious moments amid the tumult and chaos,” one mother Murray spoke with told her. “Do what you can to imprint them in your memory—write them down, or share them with friends. Collect them like gems, so that when your arms are finally free and your eyes are a little clearer, you can turn them over in your hand.” Today’s reading list explores both the gems and the challenges of parenting.
On Parenthood
Why We Long for the Most Difficult Days of Parenthood
By Stephanie H. Murray
Older parents are always telling parents of young children to cherish every second; it will be gone in a flash. But it’s very difficult advice to follow in the thick of it.
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President Donald Trump is about to begin the first major foreign trip of his second term, traveling next week to Saudi Arabia, while also making stops in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, nations that play a key role in mediating conflicts in the region. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss.
Trump’s Middle East visit comes at a crucial time, as America’s role and influence in the world under his leadership are being tested by the escalating conflict between India and Pakistan, the Israeli government’s controversial moves in Gaza, and the war in Ukraine.
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, are Susan Glasser, a staff writer atThe New Yorker; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR and a political contributor for ABC News; David Sanger, the White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times; and Nancy Youssef, a national-security correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.
Early Monday morning, the leader of the free world had a message to convey. Not about the economic turmoil from tariffs, any one of the skirmishes playing out abroad, or a surprise shake-up in his White House staff. Instead, President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to post about something called the “$TRUMP GALA DINNER,” with a link to gettrumpmemes.com.
A visit to the website paints a slightly fuller picture: Buy as many tokens as you can of Trump’s personal cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, and you could be invited to a private event later this month at the Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C. There, you will get the unique opportunity to meet with the president and “learn about the future of Crypto.” The gala looks very much like a thinly veiled gambit to pump up the price of $TRUMP, a so-called memecoin that is mostly owned by Trump-backed entities. Funnel the greatest amount of money to the president of the United States, and you could win some face time with the big man himself.
In 2021, Trump called bitcoin a “scam.” Now he seems to understand exactly what crypto can do for him personally: namely, make Trump and his family very, very rich. The $TRUMP gala is one part of a constellation of Trump-affiliated crypto efforts that includes Trump Digital Trading Card NFTs, a crypto company called World Liberty Financial, and a bitcoin-mining firm. According to an analysis by Bloomberg, the Trump family has already banked nearly $1 billion from these projects. Long before he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower a decade ago, Trump’s public image was rooted in his business prowess. But compared with his real-estate projects or The Apprentice, crypto is already turning into his most successful venture yet.
Trump perhaps wouldn’t be president at all if it wasn’t for crypto. During the 2024 campaign, the industry was among his campaign’s biggest donors. That money flowed in from both crypto corporations and individual donors, such as the bitcoin billionaires Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (The identical twins gave $1 million each in bitcoin to the Trump campaign, but had to be refunded because they exceededthe legal donation limit.) In exchange, Trump promised the imperiled industry a fresh start after four years of a Biden-sanctioned crypto crackdown. Last summer, as the keynote speaker at the annual bitcoin conference, Trump promised that if elected, he would make America the “crypto capital of the planet.” The crypto industry is now getting its money’s worth. Consider the crypto firm Ripple, which spent four years squaring off against Biden’s regulators in federal courtrooms and donated $4.9 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Yesterday, the new administration dropped the government’s case, as the White House has effectively stopped enforcing crypto rules.
Trump is still tapping crypto magnates for money. On Monday, he attended a super PAC’s “Crypto & AI Innovators” fundraiser, for which donors shelled out $1.5 million to get in the door. But for Trump, crypto has quickly become about more than soliciting campaign donations and rewarding supporters. In September, Trump announced the launch of World Liberty Financial, a decentralized-finance company to be managed by his sons Eric and Don Jr. and a couple of young entrepreneurs. (One previously ran a company called Date Hotter Girls, while the other is the son of Steve Witkoff, a longtime Trump ally serving as special envoy to the Middle East.) Then, in January, just before Inauguration Day, he launched $TRUMP. Like all memecoins, it has no underlying business fundamentals or links to real-world assets—the point is to just quickly capitalize on a viral trend, conjuring value out of practically nothing. This proved extremely lucrative almost immediately: $TRUMP initially spiked in value before crashing back down, at one point accounting for almost 90 percent of the president’s net worth. (There’s also an official $MELANIA coin, if that’s more your thing.)
With crypto, Trump has found an unnervingly effective way to transmute the clout and power of the nation’s highest office into cold, hard cash. Last week, World Liberty Financial announced that its cryptocurrency, USD1, would facilitate an Abu Dhabi investment firm’s $2 billion stake in the crypto exchange Binance. Eric and Don Jr. are also on the crypto press circuit, with plans to speak at the 2025 bitcoin conference later this month. Some of Trump’s decisions as president, such as creating a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” may also function to inflate his crypto riches, in the sense that a rising tide lifts all boats; promoting crypto as part of the national interest can only support the idea that these coins are worth buying into.
Crypto is a conduit for the self-interest that has defined Trump’s entire political career—an M.O. that has consistently blurred the boundary between public and private, country and party. For the most part, Trump has been especially good to those who line his pockets, rewarding them with all kinds of preferential treatment.
During his first term, Trump enriched himself the old-fashioned way—by way of merchandising deals and real-estate investments across the globe. But with crypto, all of that has ratcheted up in Trump’s second term. In crypto, money is fast, loose, and digitally native—properties that have made his personal dealings in the industry even more galling, and potentially more vulnerable to outside sway. Someone looking to gain access to Trump might have once had to pay thousands of dollars a night for a room at Mar-a-Lago for a chance encounter with the president on the golf course. Now the door is open for influence from almost anyone in the world with an internet connection.
The White House insists that there is nothing to see here. “His assets are in a trust managed by his children, and there are no conflicts of interest,” Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in an emailed statement. Keeping that wealth in a trust may do very little to sever the connection between Trump and his riches, though, depending on the exact conditions of the arrangement. Even when Eric and Don Jr. serve as a buffer, the money stays in the family.
Crypto’s anonymous nature poses unique challenges in understanding exactly what is happening—transactions on a blockchain are typically posted using long strings of numbers known as addresses, rather than verified by legal name. By all accounts, to interact with $TRUMP is to funnel money directly into the president’s pockets, but the campaign-finance laws that caused the Winklevosses’ exorbitant donations to be refunded don’t apply here. Nothing is stopping, say, agents of foreign powers, or tech billionaires looking for favorable tariff treatment, from using $TRUMP to gain access to the highest echelons of government. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are starting to get it: Yesterday, three GOP senators joined Democrats to block a major crypto bill that would serve to benefit World Liberty Financial.
Ironically, Trump’s embrace of crypto is pumping money into the industry while simultaneously damaging it. Since the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried in 2022, the image of crypto as a haven for scams and hackers has loomed large. At a moment when the crypto industry is trying to claw its way back to respectability and legitimization, Trump has taken every opportunity to cement it in the minds of the Americans as nothing more than a vehicle for channeling money directly to him. In crypto, “there are many people who have ethics, and have been working for years to build the system because they believe what they are doing is in the public interest,” Angela Walch, a crypto expert and former law professor, told me. “And what this does is it makes all the messaging that has come from extreme crypto critics about, ‘It’s only a tool for grift,’ and makes it look like that.”
By hitching their wagon to Trump, the industry’s leaders have unleashed a force they can’t control. The moment the president cashed in on crypto, the calculus shifted. Like the hot dogs at Costco, “being the president” is the loss leader; crypto pays the bills.
Several years ago, to research the novel I was writing, I spent six months working in the warehouse of a big-box store. As a supporter of the Fight for $15, I expected my co-workers to be frustrated that starting pay at the store was just $12.25 an hour. In fact, I found them to be less concerned about the wage than about the irregular hours. The store, like much of the American retail sector, used just-in-time scheduling to track customer flow on an hourly basis and anticipate staffing needs at any given moment. My co-workers and I had no way to know how many hours of work we’d get—and thus how much money we’d earn—from week to week. We’d be scheduled for four hours one week and 30 the next.
For my co-workers, these fluctuating paychecks made it nearly impossible to get an auto loan or to be approved for a lease on an apartment, let alone to save money. Many didn’t have cars. They walked to work—in the middle of the night (our shift started at 4 a.m.), in the snow, in the rain. Even more maddening, in many states, social-safety-net programs such as Medicaid and food stamps require beneficiaries to document their work hours, meaning that if workers are, through no fault of their own, scheduled for too few hours in a given period, they could lose the very benefits that their lack of hours makes them need even more. Human-resources departments usually tell workers that the way to get more hours is to increase their availability—that is, if you want more hours at one job, you’re advised to promise to be available whenever you may be wanted. This makes it very hard to hold down a second job.
One of the great achievements of 20th-century American labor law was to set limits on how many hours of work an employer could demand from its employees. In recent years, however, working-class Americans have become susceptible to a different sort of exploitation. Instead of assigning employees too many hours, large corporations routinely give them too few, hiring multiple part-time staff in place of one full-time worker. These precarious, contingent workers aren’t entitled to benefits and are subject to inconsistent schedules in which the number of hours they work fluctuates dramatically from week to week. The result is an inversion of the situation that reformers confronted a century ago. For millions of American low-wage workers today, the problem is not overwork—it’s underwork.
Work as Americans understand it began in 1940, with a piece of New Deal legislation. Before then, Americans commonly worked 60 or 80 hours a week for little more than subsistence-level pay. Even the much-mythologized jobs in industry and manufacturing—the “good jobs” that Americans regret losing to globalization—consisted of dangerous, poverty-level work.
Then came the Fair Labor Standards Act. The FLSA established the federal minimum wage and limited child labor. And it stipulated that employers pay most nonmanagerial workers overtime, or time and a half, for all hours worked beyond 40 in a week. Combined with the rise of unionization, the FLSA changed work in fundamental ways. Americans began to believe something novel in human history: that if a person was willing to work, he or she should be able to make a decent living—maybe not a lavish one, but more than the kind of bare subsistence that had always been the lot of most human beings. When popular songs and movies use “9 to 5” as a shorthand for work, they are referring not to some natural phenomenon but to a way of life formalized by the FLSA.
Over the past 20 years, however, employers have figured out a clever way to circumvent the FLSA, taking advantage of the fact that the law sets a ceiling on work, but not a floor.
In 2005, The New York Times obtained a revealing memo written by a senior Walmart human-resources executive. The memo, drafted with advice from McKinsey consultants, recommended various ways of cutting costs. One of those suggestions would become particularly consequential: hiring more part-time workers. A year later, the Times revealed that Walmart planned to double the percentage of its workers who were part-time, from 20 percent of its workforce to 40 percent. Walmart is hardly unique in that regard. At Target, for example, where pay starts at $15 an hour, the median employee makes not $31,200, the annualized full-time equivalent, but $27,090, meaning that at least half of its employees are part-time. Kohl’s and TJX (the owner of such stores as T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods) also rely on predominantly part-time workforces.
The most obvious reason employers favor part-time labor is to avoid paying benefits. Starbucks, for example, talks up its generous benefits. But the median Starbucks worker made just $14,674 last year. For baristas, who earn a $15 minimum wage, this amounts to about 19 hours a week, just shy of the 20 hours a week that the company requires to be eligible for those benefits.
But an even bigger and less well-understood driver of the shift to part-time work is the rise of just-in-time scheduling. With a part-time workforce, made up of workers not guaranteed a set number of hours, employers can schedule the bare-minimum number of worker hours they expect to need on a given day. If business turns out to be brisker than expected, as it often does, they have a reserve of part-time workers to call on at the last minute.
The ability to schedule low and add more worker hours as needed saves employers money by freeing them from the necessity of offering, and paying for, 40 hours of work (or whatever number of hours it defines as full-time), week in and week out, even when business is slow. For the system to operate effectively, workers must be not merely part-time but also underscheduled—so desperate for more hours that they will reliably come in at the last minute.
Employers, and many economists, argue that this approach is efficient because it allows businesses to use only the number of worker hours they actually need. That is true, in the same sense that child labor and 80-hour workweeks were efficient during the original Gilded Age. The fact that what is most efficient for an employer might prevent workers from living stable, prosperous, healthy lives is why labor laws exist.
Employers and industry lobbyists also claim that they are merely responding to employee preference. The National Retail Federation, the country’s largest retail trade organization, argues that “flexibility and part-time options are essential” for many employees, such as “students pursuing a degree, working parents and teenagers.”
In fact, the available evidence suggests that most part-time workers would prefer to have stable full-time work. A survey of more than 6,000 Walmart employees conducted by the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive advocacy group, found that 69 percent of part-time workers would like to be full-time. If Walmart wished to contest this claim, it could conduct its own survey. But the nation’s largest employers have not only chosen not to disclose precisely what percentage of their workforces are part-time; they also haven’t released any data to support their claim that many workers prefer these sorts of schedules.
Meanwhile, issues concerning hours are often among the first demands made by employees who form unions today. The platform of Target Workers Unite, for example, lists as its first demand not increased hourly pay or better benefits, but “more hours.” The second demand is “stable schedules.” The platform goes on to say, “Target workers can’t live decent lives when we have no fixed schedules or no guaranteed hours while we are encouraged to have open availability and be on call for any open last-minute shifts.”
The FLSA worked as well as it did because it dealt with the two components of income—wages and hours—whereas efforts to raise the minimum wage alone, however well-intended, deal with only half of the equation. But for all of its virtues, the FLSA never contemplated the problem of underwork.
Congress has the power to correct that oversight. It could require large employers to set schedules in advance, as some municipalities have done in recent years. It could remove some of the incentives for employing people part-time by either rewarding businesses for hiring full-time workers or penalizing them—such as by charging them the equivalent of benefits—for hiring part-time workers.
Another modification of the law would be to let hourly workers at big firms choose whether they want to work part- or full-time, the same way they choose to sign up for health insurance or change insurers during an annual window. The advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t involve the federal government putting its finger on the scale in favor of a particular type of employment. Instead, it allows employees to determine what type of schedule works best for them—something that should appeal to employers, who have spent years insisting that they’ve moved to part-time schedules because that’s what their employees want.
But none of these or any other reform ideas will gain any traction unless the issue of part-time work becomes a political issue, much as the minimum wage has. So far, the dismantling of “9 to 5”—of the kind of steady, predictable work it assumed—has gone largely unnoticed, except among low-wage workers themselves, who unfortunately tend to lack access to the levers of power.
One reason for this is the very success of the FLSA. It so effectively instilled the 40-hour workweek as the norm that even many economists habitually assume that workers choose whether they work full-time or part-time. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates annual earnings in various sectors by multiplying the average reported hourly wage by 2,080, the number of hours you’d work if you worked 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. As a result, many earning statistics that are widely relied on for policy prescriptions have become more aspirational than reality-based.
A second reason is that professional-class workers tend to imagine part-time work as a mutually beneficial arrangement agreed on by employee and employer—say, for a mother who’d like to spend more time at home with her young children. For professional workers, this is what part-time work generally has been.
But the appeal of just-in-time scheduling for employers is not inherently limited to low-wage professions. Even those of us who don’t work in a retail or food-service environment could find that our jobs nevertheless can be made more “flexible”—organized around projects or workload rather than customer flow. This has happened already to some white-collar jobs. Consider higher education, where well-paid, full-time positions for professors have been replaced with tenuous, part-time adjunct gigs. Without a concerted policy response, more industries could be affected. You might think your boss needs you for 40 hours every week of the year. But are you sure?
A person who has severe silicosis has to fight for every breath. A short walk that should take just 20 minutes can take an hour. Climbing stairs, carrying groceries, and normal recreational activities are distant memories.
Silicosis is typically caused by years of breathing in silica dust at work, and can worsen even after work exposures stop. In recent years, after decades of inaction, the federal government finally took several important steps to reduce the incidence of this ancient and debilitating disease. Under the Trump administration, all that progress is going away, in but one example of the widespread destruction now taking place across the federal government.
Silicosis first caught the attention of the federal government in the early 1930s, when hundreds of workers hired by the chemical company Union Carbide and its subsidiary to drill a tunnel through a mountain of almost pure silica died of silicosis. Most of the workers were Black, and many were buried in unmarked graves. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, issued a report on the widespread problem across factories and mines, informing businesses that control measures, “if conscientiously adopted and applied,” could prevent silicosis.
Perkins’s report went mostly unheeded. For all of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century, the government’s silica-control standards failed to adequately protect workers and prevent workplace disease. Hundreds of workers employed in mines, foundries, and at construction sites developed silicosis, and some died from it. Many others died from lung cancer, also caused by silica exposure.
The 1970 law that established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) also launched a scientific-research agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), whose job included providing OSHA with recommendations for health standards. In 1974, NIOSH provided OSHA with strong evidence that its silica-exposure standard needed to be more stringent—that too many workers were being exposed to too much silica, and suffering greatly as a result. (One of us, David, ran OSHA for more than seven years during the Obama administration. The other, Gregory, led the NIOSH Division of Respiratory Disease Studies for 15 years and served as deputy assistant secretary of labor in the Mine Safety and Health Administration [MSHA] for three years.)
OSHA’s process for setting this sort of health standard is not known for its speed. OSHA started working on a strengthened silica standard in 1997 and finally issued new rules for general industry and construction 19 years later (while David was running the agency)—but, significantly, the agency didn’t include mines and quarries, which are under the authority of MSHA, in the Department of Labor. Ever since, when workers face high levels of airborne silica, employers have been required to use engineering controls to reduce exposure; if airborne silica levels are still too high, employers must also provide workers with NIOSH-certified face masks such as N95s.
For many years, lung-disease experts employed in the congressionally mandated NIOSH Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program (CWHSP) provided medical testing and counseling to miners in an effort to identify workers who were showing early signs of lung disease, including silicosis. Under the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act, miners with a dust disease such as silicosis have the legal right to transfer to jobs with less dust exposure, and to have their exposure going forward monitored frequently. The chest X-ray readings of NIOSH’s trained and certified experts help sick miners move to safer work areas, which may improve their prognosis.
Despite OSHA’s new silica standard, MSHA’s standard remained outdated, and more miners were getting sick, particularly younger miners. Risk has been driven up by changes in mining practices, such as longer hours, the mining of seams that have less coal and more silica, and the use of new mining equipment that generates more dust. MSHA started working on a new silica standard during the Obama administration, but that work was halted when the first Trump administration came into power in 2017. The agency restarted work when Joe Biden took office and last year finally issued a strengthened silica standard.
In the few months since the second Trump administration began, the federal government’s efforts to control silicosis have been destroyed. Elon Musk’s DOGE fired the entire CWHSP team and most of the NIOSH engineers, staff, and other scientists who are doing research to make mining less dangerous. The White House made clear that virtually all of NIOSH’s functions are being permanently scrapped.
Additionally, in early April, the president signed four executive orders to promote the mining and use of coal. Then, days before MSHA’s rule could go into effect, the new leadership at the Department of Labor “paused” enforcement, claiming that employers would have difficulty complying because NIOSH no longer has staff to certify the respirators and measurement devices necessary for implementing the policy.
Although the Trump administration has not announced major personnel cuts to OSHA yet, the agency’s ability to prevent silicosis is under threat as well. DOGE has announced that 11 OSHA offices, along with 34 MSHA offices, will be closed, which will lead to fewer inspections, undoubtedly followed by more injuries and illnesses.
Even without these cuts, silicosis was already making a comeback, this time in a different industry: the fabrication and installation of artificial-stone kitchen countertops. In the Los Angeles area, more than 200 workers, almost all Latino immigrants, have developed silicosis; several have needed lung transplants. There are likely to be thousands more affected workers throughout the country, but the true number is unknown. Most of the workers in this industry are employed in small fabrication shops, and OSHA is so under-resourced and underpowered that it has had difficulty merely finding the shops where the work is being done.
Preventing silicosis is exactly the sort of essential public-health work that government employees perform with little or no recognition. When these policies work, lives are saved—invisibly, as no one can ever know who didn’t get silicosis because of good regulation and enforcement. But soon enough, if the Trump administration’s devastation of NIOSH, MSHA, and OSHA goes uncorrected, workers will certainly be getting silicosis because of inadequate public-health protections—and those losses will be quite visible, if not to the Trump administration then certainly to the people unfortunate enough to get sick.
This article originally misstated the meaning of the N95 abbreviation.
In the span of his infant papacy, Robert Prevost hasn’t had time to make many decisions besides what to say from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, what to wear when he said it, and what name to take as pope. This last choice is the most instructive. As the novelist Laurence Sterne once wrote,names exert “a strange kind of magick bias” on their subjects. This is especially true for popes, ever since Jesus told a Jewish fisherman named Simon that he would be called Peter, the rock on which Christ built his Church. Many observers try to discern the politics of a new pope through his chosen name, searching the past for Christians who shared it. They may be disappointed to find that the name Leo resists easy ideological categorization. As read through both Church and world history, the name suggests something much different from mere progressivism or conservatism.
In the run-up to the conclave, most observers saw Leo as aligned with Pope Francis’s legacy. Like his immediate predecessor, Leo prioritized concerns for the poor and marginalized, particularly those in the global South, and Francis had recently tapped him for major roles in Rome. But unlike Francis—who idiosyncratically selected a papal name that had never been used—Leo went back in time, by more than 100 years, and also by more than 1,000. His choice by no means signals a rejection of Francis; in fact, it seems to affirm their connection. But it also suggests that the new pope is more invested in pursuing continuity within the deep tradition of the Church.
After Leo finished his opening remarks at St. Peter’s Basilica, a Vatican spokesperson explained that his name was meant to invoke two predecessors: the last Leo and the first. When viewing the papacies of Leo XIII and Leo I together, three themes emerge: a pronounced concern for the poor and oppressed, a renewal of the global life of the Church through unity and tradition, and a holy challenge to secular power.
Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 to 1903, is best remembered for his encyclical Rerum Novarum or On Capital and Labor, which begins by describing the contemporary world as one in which “a small number of very rich men have been able to lay up on the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke which is very little better than slavery itself.” Against this reality, Leo XIII affirmed the rights of workers to receive a living wage, form unions, and strike. This may seem self-evident and even paternalistic now, but in the late 19th century, it wasn’t. Rerum Novarum was a major statement of papal support for the weak against the powerful, in a world not unlike ours: marked by growing inequality, limited worker rights, and harsh working conditions. The encyclical also inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching, and several later popesanchored their teaching on human dignity in Leo XIII’s work.
But Leo XIII was much more than a reformer. Through another encyclical, Aeterni Patris, he helped revive traditional Scholastic philosophy, elevating the teaching of the medieval theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas to singular preeminence in the Church. Leo XIII also cut against his reputation among some as a progressive when he sided with conservative U.S. prelates against lay Catholics who were trying to establish greater interreligious dialogue in America.
The new Leo—the Church’s first American pope—will likely take a different view of American Catholicism’s role in public life. In February, an account on X that appeared to belong to Prevost shared an article pushing back on Catholic Vice President J. D. Vance, who had recently invoked the theological concept of ordo amoris as a justification for prioritizing the concerns of one’s fellow countrymen over others. In response, the profile bearing Prevost’s name posted the headline of the essay: “JD Vance is wrong; Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
That statement is in keeping with the teaching of the Augustinians, a centuries-old religious order that the new Leo led. The order follows the monastic rule set forth by the fourth-century theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo, which prescribes a communal life of prayer and works focused on the needs of others, with no distinctions made according to national identity.
Likewise, the first Pope Leo sought to resolve global discord. During his reign from 440 to 461, various breakaway movements were dividing the Church, as were debates about Mary and her motherhood of Christ. Leo I was so successful in bridging the Church’s several divides across Europe and Africa that he became popularly known to Catholics as Leo the Great. Like his ancient predecessor, Leo XIV also faces a geopolitically divided Church, largely split between the West and the global South. A new set of questions cleaves Catholics today, particularly those related to the role of women in the Church as well as the Church’s ongoing efforts to engage LGBTQ Catholics.
But that would be true of any pope in 2025, choosing any name. Perhaps the most provocative connection between Leo I and the new pope goes well beyond immediate Catholic concerns. In 452, Leo I risked his life by traveling hundreds of miles from Rome to meet Attila the Hun, who was in the midst of a murderous campaign across continental Europe. Leo is said to have dressed in papal finery and flattered Attila by praising his military successes. But he also directly challenged Attila. According to ancient testimony, Leo concluded the meeting with a religious plea that was just as much a blunt challenge: “Now we pray that thou, who hast conquered others, shouldst conquer thyself.” Popular legend has it that Attila decided against attacking Rome after he met with Leo, sparing countless lives.
The new pope will face no such threat, of course, but he takes office at a time when expansionist strongmen are ascendant around the world. Whether—or perhaps, how—he follows the legacy of his namesake in this area, among many others, will help shape the future of both the Church and the world.
Some people spend a lifetime trying to unravel their relationship with their mother. That bond, after all, is fundamentally asymmetrical: Moms can watch their children become who they are, but children will never see their parents’ formative years firsthand. Who was she before I came into the picture? many of us wonder. What makes her tick?
These questions are hard enough to answer when mother and child are close and mutually fond; for those pairs with complicated histories, explanations can feel even more elusive. The results of every maternal audit will differ, because moms are people, and people are distinct. Still, many of us can’t help but try, over years or decades, to understand the women who ushered us into the world.
The seven books below are about different kinds of parents, fictional and real; many, but not all, are told through the points of view of their children. These stories offer a starting point—and perhaps some insights—for those seeking perspective on their mothers. Reading them might spark contemplation about the choices our forebears have made, the losses they’ve endured, or the people they were before, and after, we showed up.
When the unnamed narrator of Lobato’s semi-autobiographical debut leaves her home in Brazil to attend a liberal-arts college in Vermont, Skype becomes a lifeline for her and the lonely mother she left behind. On their near-daily video calls, the protagonist obliges her mom’s eager requests for “the news,” even while insisting “there isn’t much to tell.” “Soothe this old heart,” her mother says, a demand as much as a supplication. Mothers are frequently our first and best listeners—but they also have their own needs and longings, this novel shows. Though the book’s first section unfurls from the daughter’s perspective, the second focuses on the mother: her worries for her child, her declining health, and her struggle to define herself outside of the role of caregiver. Over the course of the novel, their relationship—now mediated by screens—shifts, as each woman takes turns mothering the other through their shared senses of sadness and isolation. Blue Light Hours concludes with the two women’s bittersweet reunion after five years apart. The separation has inevitably changed them—yet with it comes the possibility of discovering each other anew.
Coming across an old picture of your mom—seeing her in her youth, maybe the age you are now, perhaps even bearing some resemblance to you—can provoke strange, striking feelings. A few years ago, Lepucki tried to get to the bottom of that sensation. She invited her female followers on social media to send her photos of their mothers before they became moms and cataloged the submissions on the Instagram account @mothersbefore, which now hosts hundreds of pictures of young women across many years and continents, along with wistful captions from their daughters paying tribute to the people they became. The account later spawned this book, which features more than 60 photos and essays from contributors such as Brit Bennett, Jennifer Egan, and Jia Tolentino. For these daughters—and, inevitably, for their readers—the images call to mind the forces that constrained their mothers’ lives, the sacrifices made on their children’s behalf, and time’s swift, inexorable passage. But the pictures also honor the individual personalities often obscured by the maternal role. Becoming a mom can cleave a life into before and after; Lepucki finds that “looking closely at an old photo of your own mother and asking yourself who she was then, and who she is now, asks you to blur that line a little.”
The seventh and final installment of Angelou’s series of autobiographies, which began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969, commemorates her relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter, who abandoned Angelou and her older brother as young children and reentered their lives a decade later. (Neither of her parents, Angelou writes coolly at the start of the book, “wanted the responsibility of taking care of two toddlers.”) When they reunite, Baxter attempts to compensate for her absence with displays of loyalty: “If you need me, I will come,” she tells her daughter at one point. She fights for Angelou, but she is also an erratic and intensely independent person who doesn’t care to be pigeonholed as a parent; she throws herself into many jobs (shipfitter, nurse, real-estate broker, barber) and many lovers. Writing with the hindsight of decades, Angelou is more generous to Baxter than she was in her more youthful treatments, including Caged Bird. Here, she tries to accept her mother for who she was, acknowledging her shortcomings while feeling gratitude for the admirable qualities she instilled. “You were a terrible mother of small children,” Angelou concedes, “but there has never been anyone greater than you as a mother of a young adult.”
In Patchett’s novel, set in the spring of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic sends 57-year-old Lara Nelson and her husband, Joe’s, three 20-something daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell, back to the Michigan cherry farm they call home. There, the family hunkers down, their days occupied with the grueling task of picking cherries in the absence of their usual workers. To pass the time, Lara—who long ago abandoned her acting career—regales her daughters with the story of her 1980s romance with a now-famous film star. Her recollections teach the girls about a version of their mother they hardly knew existed: a 24-year-old thespian—about the age they are now—whose life was all art and pleasure; a woman who was single-minded about her craft, while squeezing in time between summer-stock-theater rehearsals for trysts and dips in a nearby lake. Her daughters, seeing new dimensions in Lara, initially can’t understand why she left acting behind to settle down with a farmer. But Lara has no regrets, and assures them that she is exactly where she wants to be. Although the glow of that summer has faded, she finds in the sum of all her choices a deeper, more durable joy.
Among the bustling cast of characters in Evaristo’s kaleidoscopic novel about the lives of a large group of Black British women are several indelible mother-daughter pairs who try—and often fail—to make sense of one another across generational, ideological, and economic divides. The sprawling Girl, Woman, Other plays out across decades, dropping readers into the worlds of women on both sides of the parental equation. Among them are Amma, the lesbian playwright whose fiery, combative daughter, Yazz, is “the miracle she never thought she wanted”; Bummi, a Nigerian immigrant whose daughter, Carole, becomes illegible to her when she goes off to a “famous university for rich people”; and Winsome, who came from Barbados to ensure a better life for her now well-off daughter, Shirley, who in turn is “never satisfied with what she has.” Even when these children and parents wound one another, Evaristo takes no sides, instead extending empathy and offering insights into what compels their sometimes maddening, sometimes relatable decisions.
McCracken once promised never to make her deeply private mother, Natalie, a character in one of her books—especially not in a memoir, a genre the elder McCracken despised. But when Natalie died, in 2018, the writer reconsidered that vow. The Hero of This Book, a novel that playfully skirts the boundary between fact and fiction, sees the bereaved McCracken wrestling with the ethics of writing about the ones she loves. In the process, she tries to parse Natalie’s many contradictions. McCracken, or her avatar, spends the novel wandering around London, a favorite city of Natalie’s, shortly after her death, recalling as much as she can about her: her small stature and larger-than-life personality, her bookish brilliance and financial incompetence, her stubbornness and self-mythologizing. (Natalie claimed to have invented both the mojito and children’s Tylenol.) From this swirl of memories emerges a moving portrait of an imperfect person who, McCracken writes, “loved being alive and in the world.” Her vivid rendering proves to be not a betrayal but the ultimate tribute.
Boyt’s novel is one of the sharpest, most poignant portraits of motherhood in recent memory. Loved and Missed is narrated by Ruth, a middle-aged schoolteacher in London who is estranged from her drug-addicted daughter, Eleanor. When Eleanor gives birth to a baby named Lily and—in Ruth’s eyes—proves unfit to care for her, Ruth decides to raise the girl alone. It’s a second shot at parenting for the new grandmother, who blames herself for Eleanor’s addiction. Over some 15 years, Ruth and Lily form an intimate, unshakable bond, anchored by their domestic routines and mutual affection. “I breathed my love onto Lily,” Ruth says. “What we felt for each other had a lot of heat and urgency.” Boyt elides the quotidian miseries of child-rearing, instead extolling its quiet, tactile pleasures. At the same time, the novel acknowledges that to become a mother is to take a profound risk, and offers an unvarnished look into Ruth’s mind—her regrets, desires, and fierce love—as she decides to leap one more time.
Out of nowhere, for reasons mainly unknown (or unexplained), President Donald Trump has spent the early days of his second term insulting Canada and threatening its sovereignty, repeatedly suggesting that Canada should, and would, become an American state. He has stoked an on-again, off-again trade war, risking $900 billion in trade between the two countries. Canada is not blameless in the relationship; it spends paltry sums on its own defense, traditionally preferring to have the U.S. taxpayer absorb that burden. At a recent Atlantic event, I spoke with the Canadian ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, about Trump’s aggressively anti-Canadian posture, and about her country’s defense spending and trade policies.
Jeffrey Goldberg: My colleague Anne Applebaum recently said something that struck me: Donald Trump has achieved the impossible. He’s made Canadians angry. Are you angry at the way Canada is discussed by President Trump?
Kirsten Hillman: Well, first, thank you for having me, in my polite Canadian manner.
I think Canadians have gone through a range of emotions: surprise, disbelief, confusion, sadness. But we, I think, are angry and frustrated. Angry sometimes because we are unsettled by a behavior, in particular with respect to the tariffs, that is having serious and immediate impacts on our well-being, economically. It’s having big impacts here as well, but it’s having impacts on our well-being, and Canadians are like, “Well, can we just talk about this? Because we don’t think this makes sense for you, for us. This isn’t how good friends work together. Let’s get down and talk about it.” And we will. But I think, yes, Canadians have become very seized of this issue, very seized indeed.
Goldberg: How do you explain Trump to your colleagues in Ottawa? Do you tell them, “Oh, he means it. He literally wants to make Canada a state”? Do you take him seriously but not literally?
Hillman: One: I think that it’s clear that the president of the United States and his administration are seeking to transform, in particular, their economic relationship with the world and, therefore, very much with us. We have the single biggest trading relationship with you, of any country in the world; we’re your biggest customer. We buy more from you than China, Japan, the U.K., and France combined. It’s a huge relationship, in all ways, not just economic. And the president and his administration are seeking to change that in ways that I think are quite consequential. And that is what it is. It will change, and therefore we will change, and therefore we will move into something different than we have been in for a few generations.
In terms of taking the president seriously, Donald Trump is the president of the United States—of course we take him seriously. He’s a man with enormous influence and power over this country and the world. And so yes, we take it seriously.
Goldberg: Among the things Donald Trump told The Atlantic in a recent interview is that the U.S. is “subsidizing” Canada “to the tune of $200 billion a year.” True or untrue?
Hillman: Untrue.
Canada and the U.S. have the biggest bilateral trading relationship in the world. We sell, back and forth, in goods and services, $2.5 billion a day. In that relationship, for those who are looking at this through the perspective of balanced trade, which the president most certainly does, Canada has a trade deficit—in other words, we buy more than we sell—of manufactured goods, of electronics, certainly of services, stuff that Americans make and manufacture, the things that the president is very deeply concerned about. We buy more of that from you than you buy from us. And we are about one-tenth your size, just to put that in perspective. Another thing to put in perspective is, in manufactured products for the United States, more than half of what you manufacture in the United States, you export. So, selling your manufactured products to other countries is very important for the jobs that the president wants to create. And I think 77 percent of your economy runs on services. Again, we are a huge consumer of American services.
But a third of what we sell you is energy, and a lot of that is oil, and the Canadian oil that we sell is transported down to the Gulf Coast, where it’s refined. It is, frankly, according to many Canadian experts, sold at a discount. That product is then refined and resold at three times the price into the United States, to third-country markets, keeping your manufacturing costs down, right? So yes, we sell you more energy than you sell us—that is absolutely true. And because a third of what we sell to you is energy, overall, we have a trade deficit, but it’s about $60 billion, not 200. But if the United States wants to balance trade with Canada, the only way to really do that—we can’t buy that much more from you; we are 41 million people; there’s only so much we can buy. We will have to sell you less energy. And I don’t actually think that’s what the administration wants.
Goldberg: So, when he says we don’t need anything that you make, that is untrue?
Hillman: I believe that the U.S. benefits from the Canadian-energy relationship, from our manufacturing relationship. We sell you critical minerals. We sell you uranium. We sell you all sorts of products that, if you weren’t buying them from us, and if you don’t have them in the ground, if you don’t actually have them, then you’re going to buy them from someone else. And is it going to be Belarus or Venezuela? Why wouldn’t you buy it from us? An ally, a steadfast ally and friend and an ideologically aligned country that wants democracy and rule of law.
So what does need mean? Does it mean the United States could survive without affordable Canadian energy? Probably. Does it mean that the price of all sorts of things would go up for Americans? Yes, it does. Does it mean you might buy it from Venezuela? Probably. Is that the objective? I don’t think so.
Goldberg: Does the president understand economics?
Hillman: I think the president has a very specific vision of what he’s trying to do in America. I think there are a lot of people that don’t feel that the means by which he is seeking to do that make sense or are traditional. But he’s undaunted.
Goldberg: Can you explain the Canadian position on these tariffs?
Hillman: Tariffs are a tax on anything that’s imported into the country. And they serve a variety of purposes. They raise revenue. They disincentivize imports—they make imports more expensive—and by disincentivizing imports, they can potentially, I suppose, incentivize domestic production. All of that works in the abstract and sometimes in the concrete. But again, coming back to Canada-U.S., we are deeply integrated over generations to be as efficient and competitive as possible as neighbors and partners by using the comparative advantages of each country. So, we are a commodity country. I mean, we do lots of great stuff other than commodities, but in our relationship with the United States, largely what we do—70 percent of what we sell to you—are inputs that you put into products that you manufacture in the United States, and often sell back to us.
Goldberg: What does an angry Canadian look like?
Hillman: Well, did you watch that last hockey game?
Goldberg: What does an angry Canadian look like off the ice? We could make jokes about stereotypes, but at a certain point, you are discovering a national pride that has not been right up there on the surface, the way it is with some other countries, including the United States. Your conservative candidate lost because he was seen as too close to MAGA ideology. Would you really reorganize your economy to pull away from the United States, at a certain point? I mean, if you can’t get what you consider to be a good deal, what does the future look like?
Hillman: I think that it’s a question of mitigation. We will seek to strengthen our own economy, and we’re doing that already. We will seek to reinforce relationships that we have all over the world. We have a trade agreement with Europe. We have a trade agreement in Asia. Canadian businesses are already giving me anecdotes about selling their product into those markets.
Goldberg: You’re a two-ocean country, just like we are.
Hillman: Right. So the products that are not as competitive down here because of the tariffs, they’re going to go to these other countries. The U.S. buyers aren’t happy, but the Canadian sellers are doing what they have to do for business. But of course, we want to get to a place of sort of stability and predictability with the United States.
Goldberg: But what if you can’t?
Hillman: You know what? I think we can. This administration has changed the paradigm about the role that it wants to play and how it proceeds in trade and economic discussions or relationships. There’s no question about that. And we have to adapt. But the American people, the businesses here in America, consumers here in America, are better off with a more stable relationship with your biggest customer.
Goldberg: Has Canada made any mistakes along the way in managing its relationship with the United States?
Hillman: That’s a good question. I mean, we all make mistakes, don’t we? I’m not sure I would characterize it as a mistake. I think that what Canada and probably all of America’s allies around the world have to continually make sure we fully understand is that the U.S. is seeking to play a different kind of role, to do things differently. We have to actually act in a way that fully recognizes that, and relate to this administration from where they are, right? They want to transform the way the U.S. relates to the world. They will do that, and we will therefore have to do the same.
Goldberg: Let me ask one specific question on the subject of noneconomic relationships. Your military is very small. You have, I think, 68,000 active-duty soldiers, airmen—
Hillman: 70,000.
Goldberg: You don’t spend even 2 percent of GDP on defense, although you’re trying to move it slowly. Isn’t there a legitimate reason for Americans to say, “Canada, like many European countries, just hasn’t pulled its NATO weight.” I mean, I’m wondering if that’s something that stimulates some American resentment of Canada.
Hillman: I think that there’s no question that not just the U.S., but all of our NATO allies are eager to see Canada spend more and faster. We have tripled our spending in the last 10 years or so, but yes, we can do more and we will do more. We just had an election yesterday. I anticipate that that will be something that our new prime minister will speak to soon. So yeah, I think that that’s a fair point. But I guess the other thing that I would say—so, absolutely a fair point—where we are trying to really orient ourselves in our defense priorities, is toward things that we can do that are specific to Canada.
Goldberg: Under pressure, Canadian patriotism is becoming a thing. Do you feel differently now as a Canadian than you did six months ago?
Hillman: Not me. I represent Canada in a foreign land. And I am every single day reminded of my Canadian-ness. It’s a big part of my job to understand that and to express who we are as a nation to you here in the United States. We’re a deeply patriotic country with a strong sense of our values, who we are, and our hopes and dreams. But more to your beginning point, we’re a quieter bunch about it. We are not born of revolution. We are born of negotiation. We are born of a much more gentle birth, if you will, than the one you encountered. And I think that—
Goldberg: You were kind of ambivalent about King George III. We get it. [Laughing.] “There are good people on both sides.”
Hillman: Our founding nations are France, the U.K., but of course, our First Nations, our Native people, were there, who remain a huge part of our cultural reality and important to our cultural identity. So we’re just a different country, but we’re the less rowdy cousin at the Thanksgiving table.
Goldberg: Right.
Hillman: But not today. Not today.
Goldberg: Not today?
Hillman: Getting rowdier.
Goldberg: And my final question: When you met Donald Trump five years ago, when you first came to Washington to do this job, did you think that he was anti-Canadian? Did anything suggest that, oh, there’s trouble afoot here?
Hillman: No, in fact, I met President Trump during the NAFTA renegotiation a few times and then over the course of the COVID crisis, when we had to slow down the border. And on the contrary, I think he is very supportive of Canada-U.S., very supportive of us. I don’t think that President Trump is anti-Canada, just to be clear. I don’t think President Trump is anti-Canada at all. And Canada’s not anti–United States. We love you guys. You’re our neighbors and our friends. I mean, you were talking about the military: We fought and died together in all the wars—First World War, Second World War, Korea, Afghanistan, all over the world. So there is no greater partnership. We have almost half a million people go between our two countries every day. Not, maybe, lately. But truly, we have an enormous amount of interconnection. If you ask me why I’m confident that we will figure this out, it’s because of that. It’s because of the half a million people almost every day; it’s because of all of this. We have to—those of us who represent our people—our job is to figure it out, and we will. And I’m convinced that the president will be happy to do so, or will certainly do so.
It’s been nearly a decade, but the image from Riyadh still prompts fascination, mystery, and a general feeling of Just what was that anyway? The glowing orb radiated from the center of a darkened room lined with computer screens. A trio of world leaders—President Donald Trump, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt—silently and slowly approached. All three then placed their hands on the bright white sphere and held them there for nearly two minutes. Their faces were illuminated from below, as if they were standing above the world’s most expensive campfire. No one said a word.
The first lady, Melania Trump, also momentarily touched the orb, which, upon closer inspection, was actually a globe. Photos and videos of the scene immediately went viral and, depending on your political viewpoint, evoked either the bridge of a sleek Star Trek spaceship or a summit of James Bond supervillains. None of the leaders seemed to know quite what to do. At one point, Trump sort of smirked. I was standing about four feet away from the odd assemblage. And it wasn’t even the strangest thing I saw that day.
The first foreign trip of Trump’s second term, scheduled for next week, will come almost eight years to the day after the first international trip of his previous term, and it will begin in the same place—the Saudi Arabian capital. Many of the same themes that defined the president’s 2017 visit remain pertinent now: Trump’s support for Israel, his fondness for authoritarians, his push to contain Iran, and his prioritization of deals over humanitarian concerns. Now, as then, European allies are watching nervously.
For all the spectacle of that first trip, its true revelation was Trump’s refusal to say the things that American presidents normally say. He made no attempt to publicly promote democracy and human rights in Saudi Arabia. In Israel and the West Bank, he pointedly declined to affirm America’s long-standing support for a two-state solution. And on the last leg of the trip, in Europe, Trump would not explicitly endorse the mutual-defense doctrine that has been the cornerstone of transatlantic security for decades. But what was shocking then is expected now. In many ways, Trump on that trip first suggested the role he intended to play as a global figure that has now been fully realized in his second term in office.
In 2017, world leaders were still adjusting to the new American president, knowing they needed to flatter him but deeply uncertain about what he truly believed and how he would wield his power on the international stage. Now there are fewer mysteries with Trump, who, since his return to power, has shown no hesitation in straining alliances, igniting a global trade war, and favoring autocratic regimes over democracies. But he is heading back to the Middle East at a fraught moment, amid a humanitarian crisis and renewed conflict in Gaza, as well as precarious talks over Iran’s nuclear future. His transactional view of foreign policy has only hardened, and it will be on full display as he returns to the region.
As soon as Air Force One touched down in Riyadh’s triple-digit heat in May 2017, it was clear that the Saudis had figured out how to get in Trump’s good graces. When Trump stepped onto foreign soil for the first time as president, he did so onto a literal red carpet and was greeted by the king—an honor not given to his predecessor, Barack Obama. Cannons boomed, and Saudi military jets roared overhead. I was in the press pool—the rotating group of journalists that travels with the president—and as our motorcade raced through the city’s emptied streets, we saw giant images of Trump and King Salman hanging on nearly every highway overpass and many buildings. A lavish cardamon-coffee ceremony and medal presentation at the Royal Court followed, honors usually bestowed only on royalty. Trump’s image was also projected onto the side of the Ritz-Carlton resort where he stayed, towering over the sprawling desert metropolis. (That same hotel would later be used as a luxurious detention center, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the king’s son and heir apparent, imprisoned his political foes.)
The strange orb was part of a hastily built anti-extremist center. And yet it was somehow topped on the surrealness scale by a traditional sword dance that followed a few hours later at the nation’s official cultural center, which included Steve Bannon, noted isolationist, cutting a few moves alongside saber-toting Saudi royals. (After publication, Bannon told me he wasn’t dancing that night.) Everything about the Saudi stop was larger than life, meant to impress and woo the president, and Trump seemed flattered by the overtures. The template established by those days in Riyadh was emulated in some fashion in the months ahead in global capitals as disparate as London and Beijing.
“One thing that has remained constant is his seeming kindred affection for strong leaders,” Mark Hannah, the head of the Institute for Global Affairs, a foreign-policy think tank, told me. Hannah added that Trump’s choice not to lecture about American values on the world stage might now put him in a better position to broker deals. “He’s shrewd about the value of geopolitical neutrality,” Hannah said, “and creates a sense to others that they can do business with him.”
Next week’s trip will be more modest in scope than the 2017 tour, with just three Gulf-state stops—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—over a few days. A major focus for Trump will be business, including investments in technology, as well as weapons sales and joint AI projects. A Saudi-U.S. investment forum will take place during Trump’s visit. Similar efforts are being planned for the UAE. A diplomat who works for one of the nations Trump will visit, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss upcoming negotiations, told me that the trip is expected to focus more on concrete financial achievements than on achieving diplomatic breakthroughs. “We’re no longer in ‘solving the world’s problems’ mode,” this person said.
“A secure and stable Middle East means greater prosperity for our partner nations and the United States,” a White House spokesperson told me.
But the world’s problems will be impossible to avoid. Israel has announced that it plans a military assault and full-on occupation of Gaza unless Hamas agrees to concessions, including releasing the remaining hostages it is holding; the deadline the Israelis gave the terrorist group falls the day after Trump’s visit to the region concludes. Israeli officials had hoped that Trump would include a stop in their country. But two administration officials told me that Trump did not want to visit unless he had secured a Gaza cease-fire that he could tout. At the same time, Trump has given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wide leeway to run his war in Gaza, and proposed that all 2 million Palestinian residents be removed so the Gaza Strip could be turned into a resort. Gulf-state leaders, mindful of the sympathy their people have for the Palestinians, are expected to lobby Trump to rein in Israel.
“When President Trump came into office, there was real positive movement in Gaza. There was a cease-fire in place. There were dozens of hostages released, and there was robust humanitarian aid getting in to address the suffering of Gazans. That’s changed,” Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, told me. “Trump has an enormous opening here, an opportunity to show real leadership on the world stage by pressing Netanyahu to abandon the idea of occupying Gaza fully, to abandon the idea of displacing Palestinians, and to restart humanitarian aid into Gaza.”
Negotiations between the United States and Iran about its nuclear future will also be a central agenda item for the trip. Tehran is close to developing a nuclear weapon, which Israel and other Middle Eastern neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, strongly oppose. There has been internal debate within the Trump administration as to what path Tehran should be permitted to take; the Iran hawks support Netanyahu’s view that the nuclear program should be completely destroyed, while others, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have voiced support for allowing Iran to maintain a nuclear-energy program. Trump has argued against using military force and recently said on Meet the Press that he wants “total dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program, something Tehran has previously refused. Still, some in the administration believe that a deal could be possible before long, according to the two U.S. officials.
“We have to remember what led to the Iran negotiations to begin with: The administration’s motivation to pursue talks is rooted in an assessment that Iran could be close to having a nuclear weapon,” Hagar Chemali, a former Treasury Department official under President George W. Bush and National Security Council adviser under Obama, told me. “That would fundamentally change things across the Middle East.”
Trump has established close ties with the Saudi crown prince, known as MBS, whom he defended after the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in 2018, allegedly at Riyadh’s order. And the president’s fondness for Saudi Arabia has further isolated its rival Iran. Aides told me that one goal for his second term is to secure an extension of the Abraham Accords, the deal his first administration brokered to normalize relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and others. Now the administration wants to do the same for Israel and Saudi Arabia. A deal between those two countries was gathering momentum in the Biden administration before Hamas’s attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. Most observers believe that a breakthrough in Gaza is needed before much additional progress can be made.
Trump earlier this year teased one other blockbuster possibility for his time in Saudi Arabia: a surprise meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an effort to end the war in Ukraine. But Trump has since downplayed those chances, and both the White House and the Kremlin have said no summit is scheduled.
As for the orb? The anti-extremist center in Riyadh is still open, but the orb is no longer there, according to a book by the New York Times reporter Ben Hubbard. When workers at the center noticed that many American visitors took photos with it, the Saudi government gave the sphere to the U.S. embassy as a gift. It has since been placed in storage.
Professional baseball has a pitching crisis, as its starters throw harder and faster—and get injured more often. In search of what’s gone wrong with a pillar of this beautiful game, I drove along Lake Hartwell, in South Carolina, and pulled into a dirt driveway, where a baseball wizard by the name of Leo Mazzone greeted me. From 1990 to 2005, he oversaw the Atlanta Braves’ pitching staff, one of the greatest in history. He’s long been dismayed by Major League Baseball’s relentless focus on analytics and what it has done to pitchers, and I figured I would give him a chance to say I told you so.
I asked Mazzone: What happened?
“All anyone in the majors watches now is how damn fast a guy can throw,” he told me, rocking on his heels. “Grunt and heave, grunt and heave. It’s not pitching; it’s asinine.”
He chuckled.
“You see guys with these crazy-violent deliveries, spinning out on the mounds. Would I trust these guys in a game? Sheeit.”
Mazzone, 76, lives in a retirement exile, ignored by the Ivy League quants who now dominate teams’ front offices. In December, though, Major League Baseball released a report that implicitly acknowledged the core truths of Mazzone’s critique. The emphasis on throwing as hard as possible on every pitch is likely ruinous for a pitcher’s ligaments, the report found, and has led to a sharp increase in elbow surgeries. A pitcher’s craft is reduced to optimizing his “stuff”—arcane computer-driven metrics such as spin rates, horizontal and vertical breaks, and radar-gun-certified speed.
Beyond putting pitcher health at risk, this insistence results in boring, plain-ugly baseball. Pitcher workdays come with strict limitations. Two decades ago, after injury rates began to climb, teams imposed a limit of 100 pitches a game, and that somewhat arbitrary threshold yielded to limits of 90, 80, and even 70 pitches—meaning that most starters leave the pitching mound after five innings, before being replaced by largely anonymous relievers who are also throwing as hard as they can.
“The focus on velocity, ‘stuff,’ and max-effort pitching—have caused a noticeable and detrimental impact on the quality of the game on the field,” the report observed. “Such trends are inherently counter to contact-oriented approaches that create more balls in play and result in the type of on-field action that fans want to see.”
So far, though, the report hasn’t changed anything, perhaps because the fixation on pitch velocity and spin rates has become entrenched throughout the sport, from youth travel baseball to college to the majors. Electronically clocking a prospect’s fastball, and analyzing the arm and wrist torque that causes a ball to spin, is easier than forecasting whether he has the mental discipline and control needed to thrive for years in the majors. Front offices may calculate that burning through little-known relievers is cheaper and easier than finding and nurturing future stars.
More than two decades into the sabermetrics era, baseball evinces what is obvious in many fields: Fixating on statistics changes everything, and not always for the better. Pitching is not math; it’s an art.
Mazzone still advises college coaches and speaks at youth baseball conventions. He shudders when he sees young pitchers lift barbells and hurl weighted baseballs at walls. “The game now is all about speed,” he said, “and it’s all bullshit.”
Mazzone grew up in the rural sawmill town of Luke, Maryland, and labored for 10 years as an itinerant Minor League pitcher, including a stint in Mexico with the Guaymas Oystercatchers. As a Minor League coach for the Braves, he found a mentor in Johnny Sain, a perpetual rebel and pitching savant. Sain had tutored baseball’s best pitchers and insisted that they concentrate less on brute strength than on varying speeds and the location where the ball crossed home plate. “Every night he took me to his RV and fired up his grill, and we’d have a sip or two and just talk pitching,” Mazzone recalled. “I wondered about all the dumbasses who would not listen to this man.”
From Sain, Mazzone learned the elements of his pitching gospel. “All of our efforts were put on movement, change of speeds, location. Velocity was No. 4 on that list,” he said. Mazzone settled on simple rules: A good pitcher should throw at 85 percent of his full effort and learn to save his best for late in the game.
Mazzone was elevated to Braves pitching coach. His three best starters, Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, and Tom Glavine, won a total of six Cy Young awards as the best pitcher in the National League during Mazzone’s tenure in Atlanta and strolled into the Hall of Fame. He worked his magic on many other starting pitchers, whose careers were revived with the Braves. Some baseball writers and historians argue that Mazzone, for his wisdom and innovation, belongs in the Hall too.
Mazzone left the Braves in 2005 and served as pitching coach for the Baltimore Orioles, grooming some fine starting pitchers. After the Orioles fired him in 2007, Mazzone was prematurely retired, his strong opinions and barbed wit doing him no favors with front offices.
For more than a century, the starting pitcher was a favored prince. Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, Justin Verlander, Steve Carlton, Pedro Martinez, Jim Palmer, Randy Johnson: To rattle off these names is to conjure up that lovely baseball pleasure, the solitary duel between a great pitcher and a great hitter.
I recall as a kid watching on a black-and-white television the 1973 World Series between my beloved New York Mets and the Oakland A’s. There was Seaver, with that relentless drop-and-drive delivery of his, facing off against Reggie Jackson, the swashbuckling Oakland slugger—darting fastballs and curves matched against a magnificent swing.
Batting styles have also changed since then, with much emphasis put on hitting with power, preferably home runs. Strikeouts have spiked sharply, and batting averages have plunged.
Mazzone does not care for that: more dullness. He’s not opposed to computer analysis as a tool in a coach’s arsenal. But his pitching credo had little to do with 100-miles-an-hour fastballs and the obsessive monitoring of pitch counts and spin rates. Mazzone has no patience for the conventional wisdom that pitchers tire and struggle on the third time through an opposing lineup, in the sixth or seventh inning.
Mazzone told me that his most reliable pitchers played well late in games. “The key was controlling the amount of effort,” he said.
In 1987, the Braves traded a fine but aging starting pitcher, Doyle Alexander, for John Smoltz, who came from the Detroit Tigers’ Minor League system. People chattered that the Braves had been fleeced. Take the kid out back to a pitching mound, then–General Manager Bobby Cox told Mazzone, and tell me what we’ve got. Scouting reports suggested that the 20-year-old Smoltz had a lively but erratic fastball.
Mazzone and the kid walked to a back lot in the Braves training complex. “I told Smoltzy to just throw natural,” Mazzone recalled. On the fourth or fifth pitch, Smoltz shook his head and muttered,: “This ain’t right.”
“What ain’t right?” Mazzone asked.
“Well, my left leg has to go here, and my right leg has to go there,” Smoltz said. “When I was in Detroit—”
Mazzone cut him off. “You’re not in fucking Detroit. Throw natural.”
Smoltz—who has recalled their conversation similarly—calmed down and tossed one fastball after another across the plate, beautiful as could be. From there, Mazzone worked on developing Smoltz’s off-speed pitches.
A year later, Smoltz reached the majors at age 21. A year after that, he pitched more than 200 Major League innings. “I said to myself, Damn, this was too easy,” Mazzone recalled.
Although Mazzone kept a clicker in his pocket to count pitches, he is no fan of that stat. From Seaver to Nolan Ryan to Ferguson Jenkins, many great pitchers threw more than 270 innings in multiple seasons—which meant they tossed well in excess of 100 pitches a game. Yet the record shows that most of them, particularly at their career peak, were harder to hit in later innings than earlier in the game. Mazzone’s top Braves pitchers averaged 200 to 250 innings a year and rarely missed games because of injuries. “My greatest satisfaction was the health of my staff,” he said. “We gave them a chance to earn their money.”
John Smoltz of the Atlanta Braves, circa 1988. (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Owen C. Shaw / Getty)
Even when Mazzone counted pitches, he was purposely erratic about the count, he gleefully admits. He wanted to teach his pitchers to work through fatigue without resorting to trying to muscle pitches by a batter. Far better to rely on good form and guile. “Hell, I used to cheat,” he said, cackling. “Smoltzy would come off the mound and say, ‘I’m a little tired’ and I’d say, ‘Geez, that’s strange—you’ve only got 60-something pitches.’”
Cox caught on: “Bobby Cox would ask me, ‘Is that the real pitch count or is that fucking yours?!’” Cox, who had the fourth-highest win total in history as a manager, was not much more enamored of data. Because of him, Mazzone said, the Braves stadium was the last in the majors to install a digital screen showing the count and speed of pitches.
Quants would counter that trying to return to Mazzone’s era would be folly. Hitters have more sophisticated workout regimens, and the emphasis on swinging up on the ball to hit home runs has changed the game. To ask a pitcher to throw at less than maximum effort is to risk getting clobbered.
But many successful pitchers have eschewed that ethos. In 2016, I watched Bartolo Colon pitch for the Mets at age 43, well past the point when most pitchers have retired. A portly fellow, he threw a fastball that was notably slow and more often traveled in the mid-80s. Yet he artfully varied speeds and hit his spots, and pitched nearly 200 innings and finished 15–8.
Compared with today, pitchers were at a far greater disadvantage in the ’90s and 2000s—baseball’s Frankenstein Era, when steroids were rampant among power hitters and home-run totals soared. Yet in 2000, the relatively diminutive Pedro Martinez (5 foot 11 and 170 pounds; known for his exquisite control) pitched 217 innings for the Red Sox, struck out 284 men, and posted a record of 18–6 with a microscopic 1.74 earned-run average. In the National League that same year, Maddux, then 34 and past his prime, pitched 249 innings and finished 19–9—even though, Mazzone recalls, his fastball rarely edged past 90 miles an hour.
If, in that most hostile era, the best pitchers could control the strike, today’s pitchers have nothing to fear. “Hitters are bigger and stronger, but they make less contact than ever,” Mazzone said. “That’s good for pitchers!
Mazzone’s motor never stops. When he was with the Braves, he rocked back and forth on the bench. The more intense the game, the faster he rocked. As we sat in his study—lined with uniforms, signed baseball photos, championship rings, and bats and balls—and talked about recent pitching foolishness, his voice rose, and he rocked in his chair. He dismissed any suggestion that he was stuck in the past. He endorsed recent reforms intended to liven up the game that has slowed down dramatically in the sabermetrics era.
He likes the pitch clock, which gives pitchers no more than 15 to 18 seconds between throws. Starters, he said, should adhere to a brisk pace. And he has made peace with the decision to start extra innings by placing a man on second base. “It adds strategy,” he said.
But he’s no optimist about the future of his beloved starting pitchers. From the majors to youth Pony League, a mania for speed predominates, as if everyone has purchased stock in radar-gun makers. “I talk to youth leagues and warn them: Never talk about velocity to your kids,” he said. “Then I take questions, and it’s all about speed.”
When I interviewed Mazzone several years ago, he recounted how Maddux had once tried to explain to young Braves pitchers during spring training how old-fashioned craft could lead to fantastical riches. “You know why I am a millionaire? Because I can put my fastball wherever I want to,” Maddux had said. “Do you know why I own beachfront property in L.A.? Because I can change speeds. Okay, questions?”
I asked Mazzone: What would happen if Maddux gave that speech today? Mazzone scoffed. “They’d nod,” he said, “and go back to throwing weighted baseballs at walls and trying to throw 100 miles per hour.”
