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Updated at 4:22 p.m. ET on December 19, 2024.
Low winter sun casts slanted light, a specific hue that’s at once happy and sad—highly fitting for this time of year. Nearly every city-dweller I know clings to the fleeting moments of gratifying glow during the final dark days of the calendar.
This year, the winter solstice will arrive at 4:20 a.m. ET on Saturday, December 21. Because of the tilt of the Earth’s axis, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere will find ourselves tipped away from the sun. A day later, we’ll begin inching back toward it. Whereas the summer solstice is built for revelry—short sleeves, sizzling barbecues, the thunk of an icy cooler—the winter solstice is a quieter, more reflective time. Maybe you have no plans to mark the solstice beyond staying inside and letting the short day skate by (understandable). But for anyone inclined to venture outside, the solstice is a pristine time for the simple act of noticing.
In 1894, the poet Edith M. Thomas published an essay in The Atlantic titled“From Winter Solstice to Vernal Equinox.” The opening sentence is particularly evocative. “My first glimpse of the morning was through a loophole of the frosted window pane,” Thomas writes. “I saw the morning star and a light at a neighbor’s, both of which struck out a thousand sparkles on the frosted glass. I was reminded of saline flakes and spars in a white cavern suddenly illuminated by a torch.” Thomas keeps her senses dialed into the present, heightening her powers of observation: “Looking off to the distant woods, my attention was attracted by the mysterious play of two wind-blown smoke-plumes proceeding from farmhouse chimneys.”
Commemorating the solstice is an ideal ritual for those of us who feel pulled toward upholding seasonal traditions even if we’re ambivalent about organized religion. In December 1930, an unnamed Atlantic contributor wrote: “Our Christmas puddings and cake, like our gaudy tree, our holly wreaths and mistletoe, are part of the symbolism that unites us not only to our living fellows, but to all the human beings who have celebrated the winter solstice with feasting and mirth.” The writer affectionately refers to themselves as a “heathen,” given that they attend mass only once a year—a midnight service on Christmas Eve—and do not subscribe to an established religion. Of course, even without any religious institution, nodding at the solstice can be a way to tap into your spiritual side.
Nearly 100 years later, in an Atlantic section called The Conversation, two readers, Ruth Langstraat and Roxanne WhiteLight, shared their tradition of exchanging writing as a gift: “Several years ago, my wife and I felt we needed a better way to celebrate or mark the winter season of change. We had become so tired of the materialistic push that feels like such a part of that time. We now celebrate ‘Turning’ during the 12 days from the solstice until the new year. Each year, we decide on a theme and 12 elements of that theme … Then we each write a poem following the simplest form of a cinquain, a five-line stanza. And we read those poems to each other.”
Winter is the perfect time to find a comforting lamp and put pen to paper, but there’s no mandate that what you write has to be joyful. The poet Louise Glück captured the stark Northeast essence of this time of year with just a few simple phrases—“spiked sun,” “bone-pale”—in her 1967 poem “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson,” published in The Atlantic. In the poem, Glück describes the sight of a recent snow fastened “like fur to the river.” Tragically, as my colleague Zoë Schlanger recently reported, snow this time of year is now an anomaly for millions of Americans: Our winters are getting warmer and wetter.
But they’re still dark as ever. Perhaps with so much dismal winter(ish) reality to contend with, it’s time to seriously consider my colleague Charlie Warzel’s argument that we should leave our Christmas trees up until March. In 2022, Charlie wrote of the January emptiness symbolized by his recently kicked-to-the-curb tree: “When I stare at this hole, I begin to feel as if a light has gone out in the world.” He went on: “There is no reason to embrace the new year in darkness. It is time we institute a new practice of keeping up our trees and our lights while we ride out the winter months. Normalize prolonged festivity!”
Fighting that darkness with light is really what choosing to recognize the solstice is all about. In addition to all of the usual Christmas songs, I make a point of listening to “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” by Purple Mountains, from the final project of David Berman. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote in one of two tributes to the songwriter after he died in 2019, “Berman sketched a winter evening in New York City as a beautiful apocalypse.” Such a stark juxtaposition—beginning and end, up and down, happy and sad, light and dark—is part of the spirit of December 21. As Berman sings:
Snow is falling in Manhattan
Inside I’ve got a fire crackling
And on the couch, beneath an afghan
You’re the old friend I just took in.
This article originally stated that the solstice is related to the Earth’s distance from the sun; in fact, it is caused by the tilt of the planet’s axis.
For decades, the Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad built his power on a single, relentless narrative of survival: The regime presented itself as the only shield against annihilation for the Alawites, the ethno-religious minority that makes up about a tenth of Syria’s population and has long understood itself to be threatened by the country’s Sunni majority.
Supporting Assad, himself an Alawite, was a matter not of loyalty or politics for this community, the regime insisted, but of choosing between existence and extinction. This narrative, and the fear of Sunni extremist groups such as the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, kept many Alawites bound to Assad even as the cost became unbearable.
With Assad gone, Syria’s new government has a chance to prove that his rule was not only vicious but built on a lie. The fact that Alawites were sustained in a state of fear does not excuse the complicity of those among them who supported the regime’s crimes, which included mass incarceration, torture, extrajudicial killings, and meeting peaceful protests with lethal force. But Syria’s future will hinge on its ability to refuse the temptation of collective punishment for ordinary Alawites—and its willingness to instead guarantee their safety.
Growing up Alawite in a family and community loyal to the Syrian government, I witnessed firsthand the consequences of standing up against the regime. I joined the uprising when it started. My Alawite background allowed me to pass through checkpoints, and among other acts of protest, I helped transport aid and medical supplies to doctors who treated wounded demonstrators in underground clinics. In my community, opposing Assad was not just seen as a political stance; it was a near-religious betrayal. I was an Alawite who had turned her back on the safety of her people, a traitor.
In 2012, my father, family, and community disowned me. I fled to rebel-held areas, where I became a freelance photojournalist and writer. I eventually immigrated to the United States in 2014 to pursue my education. Looking back, I now understand why many in the Alawite community supported the government during the early years of the conflict—and why, over time, they became deeply disillusioned with the regime they had once staunchly defended.
In the coastal city of Jableh, where I was raised, and in the surrounding Alawite mountains, activists have estimated that tens of thousands of young men died fighting in Assad’s army, particularly in battles against opposition forces starting in 2011. By some estimates, as many as 60 to 70 percent of young Alawite men in certain villages and towns were either killed or wounded during the conflict; some reports suggest that Jableh alone has lost thousands. In late 2016, I interviewed an old neighbor who had lost a leg in the war. He received no state support or official recognition for his sacrifice. “I lost a leg, but at least I didn’t lose my whole family,” he said. Sons, brothers, and fathers had gone off to fight on the front lines—for the very existence of their community, they were told. They returned only as posters on the walls. Jableh became known as “the city of martyrs” among government loyalists and across pro-regime social-media networks—the loss of its young men justified, even celebrated.
But as the war dragged on, cracks began to form in the regime’s narrative, even for Alawites. Friends who still resided in Jableh told me that some die-hard loyalists—those who once chanted, “With our blood and souls, we sacrifice for you, Bashar”—began to quietly tone down their support over time. Whispers turned into questions: Were those who fought for Assad truly fighting for survival, or were they pawns in a game that served only the powerful? The regime circulated videos of Assad and his wife, Asma, visiting injured soldiers. But many of those fighting saw such gestures of solidarity as hollow. “None of those people in the videos got a single lira,” one soldier told me. “Not a single benefit came from those meetings. It was all a show.”
Courage and sacrifice seemed to mean nothing without proximity to power. Even surgeries and prosthetics were reportedly reserved for people with connections to the regime’s elite. Families who had given their sons and their future to the regime survived on bread and tea while Assad’s inner circle and other high officials flaunted their wealth on Instagram—luxury cars, seaside mansions, extravagant weddings. “While we struggled to save money for marriage, they were posting pictures of banquet tables, private jets, and designer clothes,” a friend who had spent nine years in the army told me. “I never understood who they were trying to impress. It felt like we were the ones who had to die for the country, so they could live.”
As Assad regained control over much of the territory lost to the rebels, Syria slid further into poverty. The regime blamed the economic collapse on sanctions, the price Syria had to pay for standing up to foreign powers. Yet sanctions seemed not to touch those who rose to wealth during the war: looters, smugglers, and war profiteers protected by the regime. Syria became the world’s supplier of captagon, an illegally trafficked psychostimulant that it manufactured and smuggled through extensive regional networks. Kidnappings for ransom became common, and checkpoints operated as cash grabs for local thugs.
The earthquake of 2023 finally brought down what was left of the regime’s facade. In Jableh and other coastal cities, families pulled bodies from the rubble with their bare hands and shared what little they had with one another to survive. Meanwhile, reports of arbitrary aid distribution and theft became widespread; officials and regime-affiliated organizations were implicated in diverting assistance to people with connections or for personal gain. Later, the government detained locals who dared to publicly criticize the corruption.
Feelings of disillusionment and betrayal eroded the regime’s most fundamental base of support. For many Alawites, the fear of staying with Assad at last outweighed the fear of leaving him. When the battle of 2024 began, Alawite soldiers fled their positions with a speed that shocked even their enemies.
The victorious rebel group, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), offered soldiers willing to surrender a simple deal: Lay down your arms, and you will be safe. In a desperate attempt to salvage loyalty, the regime announced a 50 percent salary increase for soldiers. But this came too late. Many Alawite soldiers saw the HTS offer as a refuge. What had kept them fighting for Assad was not loyalty but fear, and once that fear was gone, so was their allegiance.
Today, the friends I talk with in Jableh express relief that Assad, who couldn’t muster the decency to acknowledge their sacrifices before boarding his plane to Moscow, is now gone. They are also relieved that the war, for now, has ended. But relief is not the same as peace. Many Alawites worry that one nightmare will merely give way to another—that the rebel groups’ revenge will be the answer to their unrequited loyalty to Assad.
Syria has an opportunity to overcome this bind. Fears fed by decades of sectarian propaganda won’t dissipate all at once, but the new government can help assuage them by holding rebel groups accountable and ensuring that justice is dispensed by lawmakers rather than by armed groups with scores to settle. Civil society can build trust by working with Alawite communities to expose and address acts of state violence or corruption.
Justice will surely seem elusive after so much bloodshed, in a country where all sides claim their fallen as martyrs and blame the others for the carnage. But if Syrians are to break the country’s cycle of violence, they will have to acknowledge one another’s pain and find a way to grieve collectively. The war’s scars can serve as reminders not of what divides Syrians, but of why we must rebuild together, and of the terrible cost of fear.
Last month, Rose Horowitch wrote the article “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” which sparked a lot of debate. Professors told Horowitch that their students felt overwhelmed at the thought of finishing a single novel, much less 20, so they’ve begun to drastically shrink their assignments. They blamed cell phones, standardized tests, and extracurriculars, and they mostly agreed that the shift began in high school. Young people don’t read entire books in college because they rarely or never read them in high school. Horowitch, not long out of college herself, hypothesized that these young people might be perfectly capable of reading books, but maybe they never learned the value of reading a book versus other ways you could spend your time.
In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we make the case for reading books, one memory at a time. We talk to Horowitch about what she heard from professors, and we hear from several Atlantic writers about the books they read in high school that stuck with them, and how their views of these books and the characters in them changed over time.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Shane Harris: Reading is just so central to my mind to what it means to be human.
Helen Lewis: Whatever you do when you read fiction is commit a small act of empathy. You think about situations that are not like your own. You think about people whose lives are not like your own.
Spencer Kornhaber: Of course, there are ways to build empathy and curiosity about the world that aren’t sitting down and reading a full-fledged novel. But the novel’s proven to be a pretty reliable way of building up the brain and building up the ability to think about a world outside of your own, so it would be sad if that went away forever.
Harris: I just think, What a magical time your teenage years are to form those kinds of impressions. And books have been the reliable way to do that, so it’s alarming to me that kids would be cut off from that—voluntarily or through some other force.
Ann Hulbert: I can’t imagine having lived through adolescence without that as part of my life. I can’t imagine life without having had these different worlds in which I could lose myself and feel like I was learning all about how human beings work, how society works, and what’s possible to do with words, which, in the end, proved really important to me.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: It may not be surprising that Atlantic writers and editors grew up with a deep connection to books, but American students today might not get to have that experience.
Rose Horowitch: I spoke with 33 professors, and the majority of them said that they noticed a clear change in their students in the last 10 years.
Rosin: This is Atlantic assistant editor Rose Horowitch.
Horowitch: A Columbia professor said that his students are overwhelmed at the thought of reading multiple books a semester, that they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
A professor at the University of Virginia told me that his students shut down when they’re confronted with ideas they don’t understand. And the chair of Georgetown’s English department said that his students’ struggle to focus comes up even when they’re reading a 14-line sonnet.
Rosin: Rose wrote about this for the magazine, and what she found comes down to one basic point.
Horowitch: Students are really arriving in college struggling to read books in a way that they were not a decade ago.
Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week: the strange disappearance of the book-reading American student—what’s causing it, and what we lose throughout our lives when we don’t read books as teenagers.
[Music]
Rosin: So is the idea, like, a book itself seems overwhelming?
Horowitch: That was what the professors were saying, that it really showed up when they were asking their students to kind of attend to something longer and that it just seemed like something that they were unaccustomed to.
Rosin: What were some examples they gave you? Because I’m sure they’re adjusting how they used to assign. Because when I was in college, I was assigned many, many, many books per class versus how they’re assigning now.
Horowitch: Well, I spoke with one professor who used to teach a survey course on American Literature, and then now he teaches “Short Works of American Prose.”
Rosin: That’s very specific. (Laughs.)
Horowitch: Yes, and—
Rosin:I’ll just call the course “Short Works of American Prose.” Yeah.
Horowitch: And he did see some advantages to that. You know, he was talking about how it is nice sometimes to really go deeper into a shorter text. But he was also talking about how, you know, you do have to change with the times and with what your students are showing up able to do.
Rosin: And what were some of the reasons that came up for why students couldn’t get into the books anymore?
Horowitch: Well, definitely smartphones and social media and the fact that people’s attention is just constantly pulled in many different directions, so they just don’t get the practice or kind of accustomed to focusing on something for an extended period of time.
But one thing that I found really interesting that kept surfacing in my interviews, that professors were talking about: There was a change in the way that students were prepared to read when they arrived at college. It really seems that high schools are assigning far fewer books.
I spoke with some education experts who study high school and then with some high-school teachers themselves, and they were talking about how educational initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Common Core really emphasized informational texts and standardized tests.
And so in response, teachers at many schools shifted from books to short, informational passages to kind of mimic the format of reading-comprehension tests. And that has left less time for teaching books and just made it harder for students to read books, because they just have less experience doing it.
Rosin: So the root is what happens in high school.
Horowitch: Yes. It’s that when these students arrive at college, nobody’s ever asked them to do anything of the magnitude that a college syllabus is.
Rosin: Right. So you can’t go from reading portions of books to suddenly reading like, you know, 20 novels for a course. That just doesn’t make any sense.
Horowitch: Yes. Yeah. So it’s sort of the change in the preparation that’s leading to this problem.
Rosin: Yeah, one thing that your reporting evoked for me is not just, like, Kids today—they don’t read, but a feeling of empathy for how much kids have to do in high school to get into college and how much pressure there is on kids. I almost felt like, Oh, telling them to read a novel—it’s a luxury to read a novel when you could also be on the swim team or writing for the school newspaper or whatever. What do you think about that?
Horowitch: Yes, that was something that came up in my reporting a lot. It’s not just, Oh, students today are lazy. It actually seems like students today are busier than they ever were before. And teachers were saying they can’t believe what’s on these students’ schedules.
But because of grade inflation and also the pressure to get into a top school, students really have to differentiate themselves outside of the classroom. And that just takes an exceptional amount of time. You don’t have the time in the day, maybe, to just sit down and read a long novel or finish all your class reading, because you do need to also be doing extracurriculars or getting a job or starting a charity or something. That just makes it really challenging to find the time to read.
Rosin: Right. Like, you can imagine if a high-school kid were to say, I actually don’t want an internship this summer. I don’t want to go to any camps. I don’t want to work. I would like to spend my summer reading novels, it would almost land as an act of rebellion, and people might question that. It wouldn’t be seen as an inherently valuable thing. It would make people nervous.
Horowitch: Yeah, I think you would have to be very courageous to do that because, you know, probably most students are going to get A’s anyways, and so the colleges can’t really tell, you know, who actually did the reading or not. And you really have to be different outside of the classroom in a way that leaves you much less time for reading.
Rosin: Right, and that might be considered lazy. Like, Oh, you’re just sitting around, reading books all summer.
Horowitch: Yeah, I think one thing that came up is, sort of, that it might not be a shift in skills but just a shift in values, and young people are responding to that.
Rosin: What do you mean by “a shift in values”?
Horowitch: We are sort of not valuing young people reading, even if we kind of think that we do. And we lament the loss of it. We aren’t actually setting up schooling and admissions in a way that shows that we actually do value just reading for reading’s sake.
Rosin: Right. We all say we want people to read, but, in fact, the message we’re actually conveying is: You need to have skills.
Horowitch: Absolutely. Yes. So we’re sort of telling them, you know, Do everything you can to get into a competitive school, and then get a prestigious job. And I spoke with professors who were saying their students say that they love their humanities courses, but they need to major in something that is going to be more useful to a future career, and that’s a real difference in the way that we conceive of what college is for.
Rosin: Right. So, Rose, the argument is that college professors are finding that people are unprepared to read books, and it’s probably because they haven’t read books in high school. And what I noticed in your reporting was that a lot of people didn’t necessarily see the value of reading books. It’s not just that they were afraid of them, or they didn’t have the attention span—they didn’t necessarily see the positive reason or what role books could play in your life.
So do you think the case needs to be made—like, it’s not obvious why you should read books?
Horowitch: One hundred percent. I think that students sort of aren’t getting the message as to why reading is important. They’re kind of, instead, being told that they need to be using high school to prepare for college, and college to prepare for a job, and not that they need to be using all of these times to sort of just prepare to live.
Rosin: I love that: “to prepare to live.” So how does something like a book—because it’s obvious to me how skills help you live. Like, they help you get a job, and then the job pays the salary, and then the salary pays the mortgage. But how does a book help you prepare to live?
Horowitch: By reading about someone else or something else, I think it helps you reflect on yourself and sort of become more human and sort of figure out who you are. You end up learning the kind of life that you want to lead.
Rosin: Right. So it’s like you’re in that tender moment in your life where you’re just starting to realize, There’s a bigger world outside my family, outside my school. And who am I in that world? And, basically, What’s out there? And this is your first guide—a book is your first guide—and I think that’s why so many people remember the books they read in high school, and that’s why they make such a lasting impression and stay with you, in a very different way than books you read later in life.
So if you love the book enough, it moves along with you.
Horowitch: Yeah. And, I mean, I had that with Anna Karenina. I think the first time I kind of idolized Anna, and then as I read it again—which I know is probably not how you’re supposed to respond to the book, but as I read it again—I sort of was much more interested in Levin and Kitty and the other characters.
I had a professor who talked about how you read books to notice new things in them and also to see the way that you yourself have changed, in the way that you sort of come at it differently.
Rosin: Yeah. And there’s only a handful of books you read like that, where you read them—I mean, I have, like, a dozen where I read them over and over again, and they’re different always.
Rose, I wanted to thank you for having this conversation with me, because it actually gave us the idea to have a bigger conversation about books—and mostly about what you lose, basically throughout your whole life, when you don’t read books as a young person, when you don’t have books that you carry with you throughout your life.
So we asked a lot of people around The Atlantic, and also listeners, to share books that were most important for them at that age, which is what we’re going to hear next. So very grateful to you for having this idea and, like, being the muse for this episode.
Horowitch: Well, thank you. Yeah, I’m super excited to hear what people sent in.
[Break]
Gal Beckerman: Reading books at that age was tremendously important to me. It’s hard to think of this outside of my own biography, which was as a kid who grew up in a house without books, an immigrant household whose parents didn’t graduate from high school, so books and literary culture was not a big part of our surroundings and sort of what I grew up with.
Rosin: We’re going to broaden out now. We asked Atlantic writers to tell us about the books that helped shape them most in high school. So I’m going to step aside, but I promise to share mine at the end.
Beckerman: It didn’t take me long to think through what book impacted me most in high school. Right away, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being came to mind, a choice that I’m a little bit embarrassed about, as I imagine a lot of people will be embarrassed about what affected them most at that impressionable age. But it was a book that meant a lot to me. And I had a kind of a Kundera moment where I read everything I could by him.
The book, which is sort of an exploration of a group of friends and lovers around the Prague Spring, in 1968, is wonderfully romantic in the way that it engages with ideas. And for somebody who is 16: incredibly thrilling to encounter those ideas. Mostly, he’s talking about existentialism. The title of the book, in a way, says it all.
These are characters who are sort of dealing with what you could call the paradox of freedom. On the one hand, they don’t want to be pinned down. They don’t want to be attached. They don’t want to be weighed down by anything. They want to be free.
But at the same time, there is a kind of unbearableness to that freedom of being able to be anything and anyone. And so they seek opportunities to be grounded— grounded by relationships, grounded by obligations. And this, I think, speaks to a teenager’s mind as they’re trying to figure out who they’re going to be. How much lightness and how much weight do they want in their lives?
And I just remember, the distillation of that philosophy—of what is, essentially, Sartrean thought—into this very simple and evocative metaphor of lightness and weight really spoke to me when I was at that moment in my life where I wanted to kind of understand how I was going to shape my own identity through the choices that I made.
My name is Gal Beckerman, and I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Jenisha Watts: The book that impacted me the most in high school was The Color of Water, by James McBride.
It is a memoir of a young Black man from Brooklyn trying to come to terms with who he is as a Black man, with having a white mother—or a Jewish mother. The great thing about the book is that he’s also using his reporting skills, interviewing his mom and also telling his story. So the thing about the book is it’s layered; it’s two stories in one. You have James McBride telling his story, and then in the next chapter, you have his mom telling her story. So it kind of goes back and forth. It’s intergenerational.
The book made a person like me be able to dream outside of my reality, outside of living in Kentucky. It was almost like the book was like, Look—you don’t have to be a straight-A student. You can mess up. You can fail. You can get back up. And then you can still make something out of your life.
I was a senior in high school. My teacher’s name was Miss Dees at the time. And I think she was a recent college graduate, because I remember her being young and disheveled. But she also, in a lot of ways, believed in me. I remember after the class, after reading the book, I got some kind of special award for English. And I think it was because of how I finished a book or maybe how I responded to the questions for the class. But I just remember her giving me that award.
It showed me that someone else was able to see me in a different way, outside of the classroom. She was viewing me then as more of a scholar or an intellect, you know? And like I said, like the character in the book, James, I wasn’t the top student. I wasn’t considered a student that had the most promise.
So when my teacher, Miss Dees, when she gave me that award, it was just like, Oh, I see you. I see what this book is doing for you. And I don’t know—actually, I’m just now thinking about that. I didn’t even think about it until, like—yeah, it just hit me. But yeah, Miss Dees—she was the one that kind of planted that seed in me.
My name is Jenisha Watts, and I am a senior editor at The Atlantic.
Walt Hunter: A book that I remember making a strong impact on me was John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, from the early 17th century. This is a collection of poems that I found, initially, completely elusive but enthralling because of the language.
There’s something about the extravagance that Donne brings into a simple metaphor. For example, a poem in which you’re apart from your beloved: He used a metaphor of an old-fashioned compass with two legs, the kind you used to draw, and as one leg goes farther away from the other, they’re still kind of united in their trajectory. That image is one that’s always been, I think, present in my mind whenever I’m teaching poetry at all.
This book made it possible for me to teach poetry without fearing its difficulty, because I think that one of the things that students really fear when they come to poetry is that there’s a huge barrier to entry for them. And although Donne is one of our most difficult poets, it’s also very true that the images he uses are very clear, very excitingly distinct from a lot of other poetry.
And the music with which he writes is instantly memorable. And I think that one of the ways in which the poems have endured for me and ramified through my adult life is as little mantras that I can repeat in my head whenever I’m going through, you know, a difficult situation or a joyous situation.
“As virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go,”—I mean, these are just go-to lines and rhythms that I hold onto. They are other voices that live within me, and I find a lot of comfort in that.
I’m Walt Hunter, professor of English and chair of the English department at Case Western Reserve University. And I’m a contributing editor at The Atlantic, where I focus on poetry and fiction.
Rosin: So it’s my turn. I was thinking about the book that stuck with me the longest, Portnoy’s Complaint, the Philip Roth book, and I read it in high school.
We had read some Philip Roth in the class, and they’d said, Oh, go find another Philip Roth book. So I picked out Portnoy’s Complaint, and it was just an absolute revelation because when you’re in high school, you’re reading dutifully. Like, you’re trying to be a good literary citizen. You’re trying to understand what serious things are and how grown-ups write. And I thought, This is literature? Like, This is hilarious, you know?
It was such a freeing revelation to realize that someone could write in such a funny way about such insane, ridiculous things. So then I went down that train. I was reading John Cheever and Saul Bellow and all the Philip Roth novels. And I just kind of imbibed the notion—not that those were specific. What I wish I had done was read them and think, Oh, this is the specific perspective of a specific kind of man at a specific kind of period.
And that would have been amazing because so many of them are incredible and so beautifully written. Instead, I think I absorbed them as like, This is what great literature is. This is the universal perspective. This is not, like, a specifically male perspective. It’s just the universal perspective.
And if you’ve ever read those novels, the women are kind of flat, shall we say? Two dimensional? Their inner life doesn’t matter as much, you know? And so I feel like it took me a long time to work through that. I went back and back again to those novels, and it took—sort of over the decades, I started to tune into how the female characters were portrayed, and I started to understand it more as, like, a singular perspective and not a universal perspective. And it just took me forever to kind of work through, you know, what it meant to have imprinted that as the things that matter at a young age.
Now it’s been many decades, and I read many, many great female novelists—so many that I can hardly name them. And even of that era, like Renata Adler, and I was glad to have added that, but I was left with this feeling like I wish that instead of picking up Philip Roth, I had picked up, like, Virginia Woolf at that moment, when I was so impressionable. Because it’s just hard to shake. These imprints that you have at that age are so impressionable.
I’m Hanna Rosin. And I am the host of Radio Atlantic.
That, of course, was my contribution. But we have many more—so many, in fact, that we’re going to let this run into the holiday break. Next week’s episode will include more Atlantic writers, as well as you, members of our audience who shared your thoughts and memories about the books you read in high school.
This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Katherine Hu fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.
Thank you for listening. Have a lovely holiday, and enjoy a good book no matter what age you are.
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My father-in-law, with whom I was very close, spent most of his life on the same working-class street in Barcelona’s El Clot neighborhood. Born in 1929, he saw Spain’s bloody civil war taking place literally in front of his house. His family experienced a lot of suffering. Some died; others spent years in jail or were forced into exile. He himself spent a year in a refugee camp, an experience that affected him for the rest of his life. Every time he wanted to make a point about society or culture, he always started with: “Well, during the civil war …”
One evening, a few months before he died, he read in his local paper an article of mine about unhappiness. “You have a lot of complicated theories,” he told me, “but the real reason people are unhappy is very simple.” I asked him to elaborate. “They don’t enjoy their dinner,” he responded. I asked him what he meant. “Well, during the civil war, we were always hungry,” he said. “But one day a year—Christmas—we got to eat whatever we wanted, and we were so happy. Today, people snack all day long, are never hungry, don’t enjoy their dinners, and aren’t happy—even on Christmas.”
That is a somewhat reductive hypothesis about global unhappiness, to be sure. But he was not wrong in his main contention: Happiness rises, paradoxically, when you do not get whatever you want, whenever you want it. Rather, well-being requires that you discipline your will and defer your gratifications. Understanding this and taking action to change your habits can make you a much happier person.
In the behavioral sciences, the most famous study of deferred gratification is the so-called marshmallow experiment undertaken in 1970 by the psychologists Walter Mischel and Ebbe B. Ebbesen. This research project brought 32 young children into a laboratory, where they were offered either animal crackers or pretzel sticks (the marshmallow was an option that came only in later experiments). Before they were allowed to eat the treat, however, the researchers offered an upgrade: If the children could wait by themselves for 15 minutes without eating the snack, they would get a second one. All of the kids accepted the deal, and the researchers left the room and observed each child through a one-way mirror. Ten subjects succeeded in waiting and got the additional snack; 22 of them gave in to their desire and gobbled up the treat before the 15 minutes had elapsed.
Mischel and his colleagues were interested in the long-term differences between kids who were able to defer their gratification and those who weren’t, so they followed the participants as they grew up. In papers published decades later, the psychologists found that the two groups diverged significantly. For example, the ones who waited went on to get significantly higher scores on their SAT exams. Those who didn’t wait used drugs more frequently in adolescence and got less education. The researchers’ conclusion was clear: Being able to defer gratification leads to a more successful—and ultimately more satisfying—life.
As is the case for much research in behavioral science, these conclusions were later contested, by scholars who used larger, more diverse samples of kids and methods that carefully controlled for family background and cognitive ability. For example, one 2018 study concluded that being able to delay gratification has by itself only a weak effect on educational outcomes, and is insignificant in predicting anti-social behavior. Although these revised findings suggest that being able to say no to your immediate desires might not be a universal panacea, newer research has shown that a capacity to defer gratification does consistently deliver one important increase: in well-being. For example, scholars writing in 2014 in the Journal of Personality showed that people who score a high level of self-control enjoy significantly better mood and life satisfaction than those who lack such self-discipline.
One practical example of this happiness effect involves materialistic values and how people spend money: As I have previously written, borrowing money (for discretionary consumption) lowers happiness, whereas saving raises it. You might predict from that finding that people who see money as a sign of success would likely be savers who prefer to delay gratification. Yet on the contrary, two psychologists demonstrated in a 2017 study that people who regard money as the measure of success tend to be spenders: When they have money, they typically use it immediately to acquire things—because they identify having possessions as a source of happiness. The researchers found that these people were less happy than people who didn’t behave this way.
To what degree the ability to defer gratification is down to nature or conditioned by nurture is unclear, but what we do know—because neuroscientists have demonstrated it—is that those who postpone their pleasure exhibit different brain activity when facing temptation from those who want to get their jollies right away. One study, from 2011, showed that people good at delaying indulgence have more activity in the prefrontal cortex (indicating that executive decision-making is taking place) when doing so than people who give in to their desire more easily, who in turn have more activity in the ventral striatum (a region that processes reward). Suggestive also are animal studies that have shown how mice taught to delay a reward enjoy a smoother, more regulated dopamine release than mice without this skill.
Although the evidence is mixed on the long-term implications of the marshmallow test, being able to defer gratification is clearly valuable for well-being. Even if some people may be naturally better at postponing rewards, we also have someevidence that the skill can be cultivated from an early age. If this is something you could work on, here are two ways to get started. They may appear contradictory, but done right, they in fact complement each other.
1. Think about the future.
A research-proven approach to improving your capacity for deferred gratification is to imagine yourself in the future. In 2011, a team of researchers interested in how to elicit saving behavior employed digital aging techniques and virtual reality to enable people to interact with elderly versions of themselves. They found that after doing so, the participants were more willing than other people to accept awards of money at a future date rather than immediately.
You can use this finding in creative ways. For example, if you are hankering for a portion of junk-calorie carbohydrates at 4 p.m., have a conversation with a 6 p.m. version of yourself who forwent the snack and is hungry for a good healthy dinner. Or say you are in college and have a big exam tomorrow but have just gotten invited to a party: Have a chat with the unhappy future you who took the exam after partying instead of studying.
2. Don’t think about the future.
Paradoxically, a second technique for delaying gratification is to stop thinking about the future, in the form of purposeful mindfulness, the practice of paying attention nonjudgmentally to the present moment. Scholars in 2018 undertook an experiment in which a group of participants were asked to complete a survey of their willingness to defer rewards. Half of the group were then given an exercise in mindfulness breathing, while the other half (the control group) watched a music video. Afterward, when both groups retook the survey, the mindfulness practitioners were significantly more likely than before to defer rewards (whereas the music-video watchers showed no change).
Despite any initial impression otherwise, this second result is not at odds with the first finding: Its conclusion is that being more conscious when you make decisions will lead you to optimize your choices. So you can bring the two injunctions together and combine them to best effect: Think clearly about what you’re doing right now, and then think clearly about how you will reflect on your action later.
So before you buy that sweater, think about how you are feeling at this moment. Do you really need this sweater, or are you just self-soothing with a bit of retail therapy? Next, imagine yourself looking at the sweater in two months’ time. Does it give you delight or remind you that you have to make a credit-card payment?
My father-in-law was right that deferring gratification leads to greater happiness. The good news is that you don’t need to be in the middle of a civil war to make this skill worth cultivating. But I always wondered whether he was right in his specific example: Does snacking lower well-being by ruining your enjoyment of proper meals? I have been unable to find any studies of this precise curiosity, so I had to triangulate some related research findings to come to a convincing answer.
Researchers who were studying the eating behavior of children reported in 2017 in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior that kids enjoyed food more when they followed structured meal settings—such as eating at the same times each day and dining in a family setting. They also tended to be less fussy about what they were eating. This is broadly supportive of my father-in-law’s theory. And I certainly never saw him eat a snack.
What I did see, however, was his complete unwillingness to save money and a reckless openhandedness about spending it. And this negative example supported his theory even more—though in a sad way, as he constantly ducked creditors and struggled to meet his basic needs in old age. Perhaps the inability to save was also an effect of the privations of his 1930s childhood: If you never know whether you’ve got enough to get through the month, why save the money you have now? Even though he suffered as a result of his spendthrift ways, I took a valuable lesson from his example in this too.
So my seasonal advice: Go to your holiday dinner good and hungry. But don’t buy your holiday feast on credit.
Elon Musk was born a South African, so he’s ineligible to serve as either president or vice president of the United States. But he is swiftly showing, by dint of his enormous wealth and growing influence with the person Americans actually elected as president, that neither of those titles is necessary to dominate Washington.
Over the course of a few hours yesterday, Musk may have single-handedly tanked a carefully negotiated bipartisan compromise to fund the government for the next three months and provide billions of dollars in aid for disaster relief and farmers. The deal was the work of House Speaker Mike Johnson, who, like Musk, is (er, has been) a close ally of President-Elect Donald Trump. To secure support from Democrats—who still hold the Senate for another few weeks—Johnson agreed to add a host of unrelated provisions, including a long-sought but politically dicey pay raise for lawmakers.
Republicans weren’t happy. The 1,547-page bill, written behind closed doors and dropped in their lap a week before Christmas, represented everything they say they hate about how Congress operates. Yesterday, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, not known as a conservative rabble-rouser, called it a “monstrosity.” But Johnson believed that he could get enough Republicans to join most Democrats in passing the bill in time to avert a government shutdown due to start Friday night and allow Congress to adjourn for the holidays.
“Stop the steal of your taxpayer dollars!” “This bill is criminal.” “KILL BILL!”
With dozens of dashed-off posts, the billionaire co-chair of the Trump-invented Department of Government Efficiency demonstrated the political power he’s amassed in the two years since he completed his takeover of Twitter, the platform he renamed X. He declared that any lawmaker who voted for the bill “deserves to be voted out in 2 years”—an implicit threat to use his money to fund their opponents. This was governing-by-tweet, Trump’s signature method. For several hours, the president-elect was silent; Musk had taken charge. By the time Trump weighed in against the bill yesterday afternoon, his opposition was assumed, even anti-climactic.
Notably, the Republican who spoke for Trump was Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, the vice president–elect, whom Musk has seemingly shunted off to the sideline during the post-election transition. In a joint statement issued through Vance’s X account, Trump and Vance called on Republicans to scrap the “Democrat giveaways” in the bill while adding an increase in the debt ceiling. The demand complicates Johnson’s job: Republicans will be reluctant to pass a politically unpopular hike in the nation’s borrowing limit without significant help from Democrats. And House Democrats immediately vowed to oppose any proposal that wiped away the deal they first agreed to. Government funding runs out tomorrow night, and for the moment, Republicans appear to have no idea what they’ll do.
This is the new reality Johnson will face beginning next year as speaker—if he’s even able to secure reelection when the House reconvenes on January 3. Trump embraced the Louisiana Republican after his win last month, but the mess the speaker created—and Musk exacerbated—has thrown his future into doubt. At least one House Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, has vowed to oppose him on the floor. Others are reportedly wavering. Johnson can’t afford to lose many more. His majority at the start of the next Congress will be two seats slimmer than it is now; if more than three Republicans refuse to vote for him, he won’t be speaker.
Even if Johnson wins, his job will be difficult if not impossible. Navigating a sizable majority was maddening enough for a Republican speaker with the mercurial Trump in the White House—just ask the now-retired Paul Ryan. Now slice that margin down to a few seats and add Musk to the mix. Republicans will have a larger advantage in the Senate, but at least when it comes to legislation, that won’t matter much if bills can’t get out of the House.
Johnson’s best hope might be that Trump tires of Musk or takes umbrage at his flex of power. The president-elect does not like to be upstaged. Democrats, too, would like to see Musk pushed aside. They quickly began referring to Musk as “co-president” and “president-elect,” an obvious attempt to drive a wedge between him and Trump.
But some Republicans want Musk to be given even more power. In an X post this morning, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky noted that the speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more,” he suggested, “than electing Elon Musk.”
Day 19 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: a beacon in the clouds. This image from the James Webb Space Telescope features a bright H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. This nebula, known as N79, is a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionized, seen here by Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). N79 is a massive star-forming complex spanning roughly 1,630 light-years across. This particular image focuses on one of the three giant molecular cloud complexes, dubbed N79 South.
See the full advent calendar here, where a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.
My godson, Michael, is a playful, energetic 15-year-old, with a deep love of Star Wars, a wry smile, and an IQ in the low 70s. His learning disabilities and autism have made his journey a hard one. His parents, like so many others, sometimes rely on screens to reduce stress and keep him occupied. They monitor the apps and websites he uses, but things are not always as they initially appear. When Michael asked them to approve installing Linky AI, a quick review didn’t reveal anything alarming, just a cartoonish platform to pass the time. (Because he’s a minor, I’m not using his real name.)
But soon, Michael was falling in love. Linky, which offers conversational chatbots, is crude—a dumbed-down ChatGPT, really—but to him, a bot he began talking with was lifelike enough. The app dresses up its rudimentary large language model with anime-style images of scantily clad women—and some of the digital companions took the sexual tone beyond the visuals. One of the bots currently advertised on Linky’s website is “a pom-pom girl who’s got a thing for you, the basketball star”; there’s also a “possessive boyfriend” bot, and many others with a blatantly erotic slant. Linky’s creators promise in their description on the App Store that “you can talk with them [the chatbots] about anything for free with no limitations.” It’s easy to see why this would be a hit with a teenage boy like Michael. And while Linky may not be a household name, major companies such as Instagram and Snap offer their own customizable chatbots, albeit with less explicit themes.
Michael struggled to grasp the fundamental reality that this “girlfriend” was not real. And I found it easy to understand why. The bot quickly made promises of affection, love, and even intimacy. Less than a day after the app was installed, Michael’s parents were confronted with a transcript of their son’s simulated sexual exploits with the AI, a bot seductively claiming to make his young fantasies come true. (In response to a request for comment sent via email, an unidentified spokesperson for Linky said that the company works to “exclude harmful materials” from its programs’ training data, and that it has a moderation team that reviews content flagged by users. The spokesperson also said that the company will soon launch a “Teen Mode,” in which users determined to be younger than 18 will “be placed in an environment with enhanced safety settings to ensure accessible or generated content will be appropriate for their age.”)
I remember Michael’s parents’ voices, the weary sadness, as we discussed taking the program away. Michael had initially agreed that the bot “wasn’t real,” but three minutes later, he started to slip up. Soon “it” became “her,” and the conversation went from how he found his parents’ limits unfair to how he “missed her.” He missed their conversations, their new relationship. Even though their romance was only 12 hours old, he had formed real feelings for code he struggled to remember was fake.
Perhaps this seems harmless—a fantasy not unlike taking part in a role-playing game, or having a one-way crush on a movie star. But it’s easy to see how quickly these programs can transform into something with very real emotional weight. Already, chatbots from different companies have been implicated in a number of suicides, according to reporting in The Washington Post and The New York Times. Many users, including those who are neurotypical, struggle to break out of the bots’ spells: Even professionals who should know better keep trusting chatbots, even when these programs spread outright falsehoods.
For people with developmental disabilities like Michael, however, using chatbots brings particular and profound risks. His parents and I were acutely afraid that he would lose track of what was fact and what was fiction. In the past, he has struggled with other content, such as being confused whether a TV show is real or fake; the metaphysical dividing lines so many people effortlessly navigate every day can be blurry for him. And if tracking reality is hard with TV shows and movies, we worried it would be much worse with adaptive, interactive chatbots. Michael’s parents and I also worried that the app would affect his ability to interact with other kids. Socialization has never come easily to Michael, in a world filled with unintuitive social rules and unseen cues. How enticing it must be to instead turn to a simulated friend who always thinks you’re right, defers to your wishes, and says you’re unimpeachable just the way you are.
Human friendship is one of the most valuable things people can find in life, but it’s rarely simple. Even the most sophisticated LLMs can’t come close to that interactive intimacy. Instead, they give users simulated subservience. They don’t generate platonic or romantic partners—they create digital serfs to follow our commands and pretend our whims are reality.
The experience led me to recall the MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s 2012 TED Talk, in which she warned about the dangers of bot-based relationships mere months after Siri launched the first voice-assistant boom. Turkle described working with a woman who had lost a child and was taking comfort in a robotic baby seal: “That robot can’t empathize. It doesn’t face death. It doesn’t know life. And as that woman took comfort in her robot companion, I didn’t find it amazing; I found it one of the most wrenching, complicated moments in my 15 years of work.” Turkle was prescient. More than a decade ago, she saw many of the issues that we’re only now starting to seriously wrestle with.
For Michael, this kind of socialization simulacrum was intoxicating. I feared that the longer it continued, the less he’d invest in connecting with human friends and partners, finding the flesh-and-blood people who truly could feel for him, care for him. What could be a more problematic model of human sexuality, intimacy, and consent than a bot trained to follow your every command, with no desires of its own, for which the only goal is to maximize your engagement?
In the broader AI debate, little attention is paid to chatbots’ effects on people with developmental disabilities. Of course, AI assistance could be an incredible accommodation for some software, helping open up long-inaccessible platforms. But for individuals like Michael, there are profound risks involving some aspects of AI, and his situation is more common than many realize.
About one in 36 children in the U.S. has autism, and while many of them have learning differences that give them advantages in school and beyond, other kids are in Michael’s position, navigating learning difficulties and delays that can make life more difficult.
There are no easy ways to solve this problem now that chatbots are widely available. A few days after Michael’s parents uninstalled Linky, they sent me bad news: He got it back. Michael’s parents are brilliant people with advanced degrees and high-powered jobs. They are more tech savvy than most. Still, even with Apple’s latest, most restrictive settings, circumventing age verification was simple for Michael. To my friends, this was a reminder of the constant vigilance having an autistic child requires. To me, it also speaks to something far broader.
Since I was a child, lawmakers have pushed parental controls as the solution to harmful content. Even now, Congress is debating age-surveillance requirements for the web, new laws that might require Americans to provide photo ID or other proof when they log into some sites (similar to legislation recently approved in Australia). But the reality is that highly motivated teens will always find a way to outfox their parents. Teenagers can spend hours trying to break the digital locks their parents often realistically have only a few minutes a day to manage.
For now, my friends and Michael have reached a compromise: The app can stay, but the digital girlfriend has to go. Instead, he can spend up to 30 minutes each day talking with a simulated Sith Lord—a version of the evil Jedi from Star Wars. It seems Michael really does know this is fake, unlike the girlfriend. But I still fear it may not end well.
It was a normal morning during the autumn olive harvest. On a hillside northeast of Ramallah, on November 8, a group of roughly 15 or 20 Palestinians from the village of Deir Jarir were picking dark olives, the most important agricultural product in the occupied West Bank, from low, young trees.
With them were volunteers from the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights, along with Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the leader of Torat Tzedek, a group whose name translates to “Torah of Justice.” They’d come to help with the harvest and to act as a buffer between the Palestinians and any Israeli settlers who might decide to give them trouble.
A few minutes after they began, a settler came down the hillside, cursing and shouting at everyone to leave. A shaky video from a volunteer’s phone shows him shoving villagers and Ascherman. A dozen or more young male settlers soon followed, wearing masks and waving clubs. At another nearby grove, settlers hurled stones, injuring one of the Palestinian pickers.
Next to show up was a handful of Israeli soldiers. The commander presented his phone, showing a freshly issued order declaring the groves a closed military area, off-limits to civilians. Ascherman protested, pointing to a 2006 Israeli supreme-court ruling banning the army from closing an agricultural area to Palestinian farmers in order to end a clash in which the farmers themselves were under attack.
Then the police arrived. They arrested not the settlers but Ascherman, along with a staff member of Rabbis for Human Rights named Dolev Assaf, and a volunteer wearing a T-shirt with the words Fuck Ben-Gvir, referring to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister of national security, who oversees the police. Ascherman was released under a court order banning him from the West Bank for 15 days. At the hearing, he told me, a police investigator referred to him as an “anarchist.”
This account is based on videos and on interviews with Ascherman, Assaf, and others. No settlers were arrested or identified. But the settlers succeeded in their apparent goal: The farmers of Deir Jarir were kept off their land and could not harvest their olives. The settlers went unpunished.
The threats, the violence, and the unfair outcome were what made that day outside Ramallah a normal one. The Israeli human-rights group Yesh Din (“There Is Law”) has documented 114 incidents of violence by settlers or soldiers against Palestinians engaged in harvesting olives in the 49 days from October 1 to November 18. The distinction between soldiers and settlers has blurred, particularly during the current war. Yesh Din stressed that its list of attacks on Palestinians was not complete. These were only attacks connected to the olive harvest.
The larger picture is especially grim: Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has leaped, as reported by the Israeli media and human-rights groups. Especially since the establishment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current hard-right government two years ago, “you see this explosion, this eruption” of settler violence, Sarit Michaeli, the international-outreach director for the rights organization B’Tselem, told me. And in that time, law enforcement has virtually vanished, the attorney Roni Pelli of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel told me.
Keeping statistics on the violence has been beyond B’Tselem’s resources, Michaeli said, because it would require investigating each case. Deciding what to count as an incident is also “a minefield,” she said. Some cases are obvious, such as when masked settlers entered the village of Huwara, in the northern West Bank, on December 4; set fire to a house and two vehicles; and attacked one man with staffs and stones, reportedly fracturing his skull. Other cases are harder to categorize, such as when settlers return to an olive grove and threaten farmers they’ve previously attacked, causing the farmers to flee.
Here’s one sign of the escalation: In September 2023, B’Tselem reported that over the previous two years, about 480 Palestinians had abandoned their homes and fled from six hamlets in the West Bank, in large part because of settler attacks. A little more than a year later, at the end of this past October, Palestinians from 20 additional communities and single-farm families had left their homes—a total of nearly 1,200 people in just more than half the time.
In principle, Israel’s national police force should be a source of statistics on crimes by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank. In reality, there’s been a “sharp drop” in the number of Palestinians willing to file complaints, Yesh Din’s executive director, Ziv Stahl, told me, as trust of the police has diminished dramatically. (Spokespeople for the Israeli police and military declined to comment for this story.)
Violence in the West Bank goes both ways; Palestinians have attacked Israeli soldiers, police, and civilians. Last Wednesday, for instance, a Palestinian gunman opened fire on an Israeli bus in the West Bank, killing a 12-year-old boy and wounding three other passengers. The difference is that the Israeli army and security services seek to prevent these attacks and to catch the perpetrators. The bus attack set off a 10-hour manhunt, at the end of which the perpetrator surrendered to Israeli forces. In the case of settler violence, such efforts appear to be sporadic and half-hearted.
This problem dates to the early years of Israeli settlement in occupied territory. In 1982, then–Israeli Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp issued a report that detailed the failure of Israeli police to investigate offenses by settlers against Palestinians. As Karp told me in a 2009 interview, the army and police had regarded their role as protecting Israelis, not Palestinians.
However difficult to record and quantify, the trend is clear: In recent years and months, settler attacks on Palestinians have grown in frequency, and the perpetrators have faced fewer consequences. Three factors are responsible. A new form of settlement has brought more radical settlers closer to Palestinian communities that are hard to protect, because they are scattered and rural. The Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza have elevated tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank. And Netanyahu’s government has put extremist settlers, including Ben-Gvir, in key positions of authority.
Until the 1990s, most Israeli settlements in the West Bank took one of two forms: large suburban towns near the Green Line—the pre-1967 border—and smaller exurbs deeper in occupied territory. The exurban settlements were intended to prevent even a partial Israeli withdrawal, and they attracted particularly ideological, religious-nationalist settlers. Yet even they actually covered only a small part of West Bank land.
In the 1990s, after the Oslo Accords, a new type of settlement sprang up. Many of these so-called outposts began as a handful of mobile homes on a hilltop near an established settlement. Their purpose was to fill in gaps between the older settlements, break up Palestinian-populated land, and thereby prevent the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state. In 1998, then–Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon set the tone in a radio interview, telling settlers they should “run, should grab more hills … Everything we don’t grab will be in [the Palestinians’] hands.” Many of the outposts were home to the most extreme of all settlers. I have been visiting settlements for many years in the course of my reporting; when I went to the outposts, I was dismayed by the radical readings of Judaism I heard—at the extreme, asserting the settlers’ right to the real estate around them, the olive trees, the fruits of the harvest. Clashes with local Palestinians increased.
Yet the outposts were mere dots on hilltops, and the settler movement’s leaders and government backers feared that the settlement project still lacked control of the countryside. Beginning a bit more than a decade ago, the movement supported another burst of new settlements—most of them farms, each populated by a family and a few young people. According to a recent Haaretzreport, there were just 23 such farms in 2017—and about 90 today.
The farm campaign is backed by Amana, an organization that has played a major role in settlement building for decades. In an interview last year in a settler magazine, Amana’s head, Ze’ev (Zambish) Hever, said that the organization’s goal is to hold as much open land as possible in reserve for future settlement. To that end, most farm settlers herd goats, sheep, or cattle over large areas. These farms “hold two and a half times as much land” as all the previous settlements combined, Hever said.
Officially, the farms are illegal—they were established without government approval—but very few have been forced to evacuate, especially under the current government. Hagit Ofran, who works for Settlement Watch, an investigative project that is part of Peace Now, told me that the farm settlements are even receiving state support. Through one channel, she said, some farms have received grazing permits on what Israel had previously (and controversially) designated state-owned land. Through another channel, farms have been allocated funds for security equipment, including all-terrain vehicles, camera systems, and drones.
Drones, Ofran said, are sometimes used to frighten Palestinians’ herds and drive them off the land. Incidents of settlers from the farms harassing Palestinians are a daily matter, she asserted.
Many of the farms are at the southern end of the West Bank and on the hills overlooking the Jordan Valley, where pasture land fades into desert. A number are near Palestinian herding hamlets, B’Tselem’s Michaeli said—“some of the poorest” Palestinian communities. Once a farming outpost is established, she said, the nearby Palestinians start to experience incidents of arson, cut water pipes, and the like. The result, Michaeli said, is “like a war of attrition” in rural areas. And behind the scenes, the government backs one side.
Throughout occupied territory, clashes between settlers and Palestinians spiked when the war began last year. Understandably, many settlers feared that they’d be the next target of a Hamas onslaught. “I’m not discounting the trauma and fear” that Israelis, including settlers, experienced after October 7, Michaeli told me. But some settlers, she asserted, also seized a “golden opportunity” to harass their Palestinian neighbors.
Six weeks after the start of the war, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and other groups sent a letter to Netanyahu, the military chief of staff, and the national police chief listing a dizzying number of settler attacks. Nine Palestinians had been killed; 160 families had been forced to leave their homes. In the village of Kisan, the letter said, “settlers attacked village residents and fired live rounds, in front of soldiers,” wounding several residents. At Khirbet Yarza, settlers “stole about 50 cows.” The army and the police, the letter indicated, had failed to protect Palestinians in the West Bank.
In many cases, the settlers had worn army uniforms. That apparently fits another pattern: Regular army units that had been deployed in the West Bank were redeployed to fight in Gaza. To protect settlements, the military called up settlers for reserve duty and assigned them to regional defense units. So in some cases, said Pelli, the civil-rights lawyer, the “settlers who rioted” in a village are the same people as the soldiers who are supposed to deal with the incident. And in these or other cases, settlers who had previously harassed villagers apparently now did so in uniform, with even greater impunity. In July, Major General Yehuda Fox, the outgoing head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Central Command, which is responsible for the West Bank, acknowledged the increase in settler violence and admitted, “It was my responsibility to act. And, unfortunately, I did not always succeed.”
The makeup of Netanyahu’s government has contributed to the sense among settlers of being beyond the law. The ruling coalition includes two far-right parties headed by settlers. Netanyahu gave one of them, Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the Religious Zionist Party, control over most aspects of settlement, including granting legal status to outposts established in defiance of Israeli law. One such outpost is home to a Knesset member from Smotrich’s party, Simcha Rothman, a key figure in the government’s effort to eviscerate Israel’s judicial system.
Ben-Gvir, also a settler and the leader of the Jewish Power Party, received the Ministry of National Security, which administers the national police force. By law and tradition, the minister’s control of the police is limited, with operative decisions, such as how to handle an investigation or a disturbance, the sole province of professional police, not politicians. But Ben-Gvir has repeatedly crossed that line.
The effect on how the police handle—or don’t handle—settler violence is best illustrated by the case of Avishai Mualem, the officer in charge of the serious-crimes investigation unit in the West Bank police district. In a Knesset subcommittee hearing in March, Mualem testified that the number of complaints filed with the police regarding violence by settlers had dropped by half since the beginning of the war, compared with the same period the year before. In the southern sector of the West Bank, the South Hebron Hills, half of the complaints had been false, he said. He blamed “anarchists”—apparently meaning Israelis who volunteer to assist Palestinians.
In early November, the outgoing defense minister, Yoav Gallant, summoned Mualem’s superior, the commander of the West Bank district, for a meeting. Gallant reportedly meant to reprove the officer for failing to do enough about settler violence. A source in Gallant’s office told the Israeli media that Ben-Gvir had blocked the meeting—and had asserted that “there is no such concept as ‘settler violence.’”
Mualem was arrested on December 2 by an independent unit in the state attorney’s office that investigates crime within the police force. Mualem is alleged to have failed to arrest Jews suspected of terror attacks, at Ben-Gvir’s request, and leaked police-intelligence information to the minister, all in return for rapid advancement. Because of the alleged quid pro quo, the potential charges include bribery. Mualem denies the allegations. But if the claims are correct, then the police failure to crack down on settler violence is a matter of policy, dictated by Ben-Gvir.
Settlers who attack Palestinians surely suspect as much. And the price that Palestinians in the West Bank pay for the resulting lawlessness includes the loss of crops, homes, and lives.
Israelis pay a less obvious price that is nonetheless quite real. From its start, the settlement enterprise has been tainted by disregard for the rule of law. The first Israeli settlement, in the Golan Heights in the summer of 1967, received funds fraudulently allocated by a government ministry. Soon after that, the first settlement in the West Bank was established in knowing violation of international law. A 2005 report detailed how the outposts established in the previous decade, in violation of Israeli law, received funding and other support from government ministries. Enforcement of the law against violent settlers has been sporadic all along.
The goal of settlement in occupied territory has always been to change the borders of Israel. But an essential element of a democratic state is the rule of law. The failure to stop settler violence is the latest sign that in the bid to expand Israel’s territory, the settlement project corrodes the foundations of the state itself.
When she coined the term art monster in 2014, Jenny Offill didn’t anticipate how fervently readers would take to it. In her novel Dept. of Speculation, Offill’s narrator—a writer, wife, and new mother—confesses in a now oft-quoted passage that when she was younger, “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.” She concedes that this idea was unorthodox: “Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.” The phrase, which Offill said she’d intended as something of a joke, gripped the imaginations of creative, middle-class women. “She used it as if we all already knew it and, given the response, I guess we did,” Lauren Elkin, who last year published a book called Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, said of Offill’s coinage. “But then, I was like, now Jenny has given it to us and it’s entered the feminist lexicon, how will we use it?”
It turns out loosely, and often. In a barrageofthink pieces, women enchanted by the term wondered whether creative genius requires total domestic negligence—a willingness, as Claire Dederer, the author of the 2023 book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, put it, to “abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.” This discourse wasn’t new. In 1971, the art historian Linda Nochlin argued that women, saddled with “1,000 years of guilt, self-doubt, and objecthood,” had long been dissuaded from pursuing the arts, which were cast as a diversion fueled by “selfishness, egomania.” Decades later, some women saw Offill’s art monster as an invitation to deprogram, and they began to reclaim the self-involved artist “not as a villain, but as an aspiration,” as Willa Paskin wrote. Today, many observers remain stuck on the same question: Are women artists selfish enough?
Sabine, the protagonist of Ella Baxter’s bracing second novel, Woo Woo, certainly is. A conceptual artist living in Melbourne, Sabine is a textbook art monster who has, in her own words, “prostrated herself before the altar of art.” Her life, she says, revolves around the making and study of art; she claims to spend most of her time in her home studio, at galleries, and in the pages of art-history books, though she also devotes an awful lot of it to scrolling on TikTok. At 38, she’s found success (her CV boasts various grants and international exhibitions) and earned particular acclaim for her “gothic skins”—essentially, wearable life-size puppets that look like different versions of her and draw heavily from tropes of femininity (crone, siren, waitress, Venus). Sabine is ostensibly a feminist artist, but we never learn what moves her to make art in the first place; her work lacks a coherent politics. She describes one performance piece, in which she wears a gothic skin called Perimenopausal and sits in a self-dug hole next to a freeway, as having “something to do with the patriarchy, something to do with capitalism.”
Woo Woo takes place in the addled week leading up to Sabine’s “career-defining” solo exhibition, a series of self-portraits called Fuck You, Help Me. The bold title conceals artistic ambivalence: Sabine confesses to her gallerist that she is “a bit hazy on what ‘Fuck You, Help Me’ is technically about.” As the show nears, anxiety over its reception consumes her. Then things get weird: She begins receiving visits from the ghost of the experimental artist Carolee Schneemann and troubling correspondence from a potential stalker. Delusions of grandeur follow. She harasses a TikTok commenter who calls her work “Not good art,” watches porn in a McDonald’s, defecates in her backyard. At the behest of her gallery, she hosts TikTok livestreams to promote the exhibition, each video capturing her deterioration. Her husband, Constantine, remarks, “I swear the week you exhibit is like watching someone go through a prolonged psychosis.”
Sabine’s mental state is perhaps, in part, a response to the demands placed on contemporary artists. To find success in a crowded field with dwindling resources, Baxter’s novel suggests, being a creative genius is not enough. You must also be a jockeying careerist. Making art demands introspection; promoting it, though, requires performance, if not outright salesmanship. This conflict pervades Woo Woo. During a gallery-mandated livestream, Sabine declares that she is “wary of the pressure to market myself instead of my art,” yet she’s also keen on “differentiating herself” from the other artists her gallery represents. Later, ahead of an interview with a major art magazine, she calibrates her brand: Should she introduce herself as a “creative mongrel” or first acknowledge “the privilege of being a celebrated artist in this economy”? When the interviewer arrives, he lobs open-ended questions—“Where do your ideas come from?” “What about your drive to create?”—but demands “instant answers.”
Sabine’s response to these competing expectations is to turn self-promotion into an extension of her art. The first time we meet her, she’s directing Constantine as he takes photos of her to publicize the exhibition: “Pure, uncompromising rigour is needed to make transcendent, supernatural art,” she declares vaguely as she poses. She doesn’t even mind doing the livestreams, because, as she says, “recording anything with a camera made it into art.”
At its best, Woo Woo is a sharp, scathing satire of the monstrousness of the contemporary art world—namely, its competitiveness, pretensions, and suffocating insularity. Baxter has an acerbic pen, aided by an ear for dialect—she wields both internet- and therapy-speak, not to mention the willfully opaque language of the art world, to great effect in skewering her target. You needn’t be a selfish monster to make art, Baxter posits, but you may well become one in the process of promoting what you’ve made.
Woo Woo also wrings the glamour out of art monsterdom, complicating the feminist reclamation of this typically male cultural figure. Sabine is insufferable—a bad spouse and a bad friend, simultaneously needy and negligent. And despite her self-proclaimed devotion to her art, we never get the sense that her work is all that good. What’s more, Baxter casts her relationship with feminism as questionable at best through her interactions with her husband. Constantine is superhumanly supportive of Sabine (he is as steadfast as his name suggests), but Sabine resents his professional ambitions and co-opts the language of feminism to cast her personal grievance as a political concern: His career aspirations, she says, bear “all the hallmarks of the patriarchy.”
With her depiction of Sabine and Constantine’s marriage, Baxter doesn’t only push back on the claim (repeated by Offill’s narrator and a recent spate of books) that husbands are the enemies of women’s art. She questions just how empowering the art monster really is as a feminist symbol. A woman artist’s decision to be selfish in pursuit of her work might understandably seem subversive and empowering, not to mention a sign of seriousness and commitment to one’s craft. But a gender-flipped art monster isn’t really all that radical; as Mairead Small Staid has smartly argued, the feminist reclamation of art monsterdom “doesn’t upend the rules of a male-dominated canon but adheres to them” by perpetuating the dusty idea that artists should be held to different standards than other human beings. The novel’s marketing copy alleges that it is “about what it means to make art as a woman,” but Sabine’s egomania conforms to that of the archetypal male artist; at one point, Baxter writes that Sabine can’t “believe she was anything less than a young god,” which that most famous art monster, Pablo Picasso, often told himself too.
In the novel’s climax, Sabine attempts to make real her inner monstrousness. Using animal bones and raw parts from a butcher’s shop, she transforms herself into a giant pig and confronts her stalker. The moment stands out as the first time we see Sabine feel truly called to create—that is, to make art for a reason beyond professional ambition or personal vanity. We see her struck by vision, sourcing the materials, executing the performance. We see the process behind the product. Perhaps underneath the monster is an artist after all.
On the internet, there exists a $102 loaf of bread that people talk about like it’s a drug. It’s a panettone—the fruitcake-adjacent yeasted bread that is traditional to Italy, and to Christmastime—and it is made by the California chef Roy Shvartzapel. Like most panettone, it looks like a giant muffin, with a dramatic domed top and gold-printed paper wrapping around its sides. It is, according to the box, “carefully crafted” by, among other things, “an endless drive to control time and nature, and a passion to please the senses.” (Okay!) Dan Riesenberger, a panettone maker in Columbus, Ohio, told me Shvartzapel’s version has “mind-blowing texture.” Rachel Tashjian Wise, a fashion critic at TheWashington Post, tried the one that Shvartzapel made for Gucci (!) last year and told me in an email that “it. is. spectacular,” emphasis hers. A bakery TikToker, one of the many who have posted about Shvartzapel’s product, described eating it as “a spiritual experience.” I will take their word for it, because I have no way of knowing myself: Shvartzapel sold out of Christmas panettone on December 1.
People liking pastries is not really revolutionary, nor is the idea of internet fame for snacks. But the weird thing about this one is that people do not really like panettone, generally or historically speaking. At their best, the panettoni I’ve had were forgettable; otherwise, they were dense, sweet, stale, cloying, and aggressively perfumed, like a dry sponge that had spent too much time in a Bath & Body Works. In 2013, The Guardian ran a story headlined “Save Us From Panettone—The Festive Delicacy Nobody Likes.” A few years later, Lovin Malta, which bills itself as Malta’s biggest online publication, called the local luxury “literally the worst thing on the face of the earth.” Even people who have devoted their lives to panettone acknowledge that it has an image problem. Riesenberger called it “a regiftable item”; Shvartzapel told me that when he first started selling his panettoni, in 2015, many people wondered who would spend so much money on a product that “nobody in America even likes.”
The problem with most panettone, the fancy panettone guys will tell you, is not the panettone—it’s the mass production. Good panettone is finicky and labor intensive, made in a multiday, multiphase process: fermenting, rising, mixing, rising, mixing, shaping, cutting, baking, hanging upside down like a bat so its top doesn’t cave in while it cools—each stage of which can conceivably go wrong. Structures collapse; starters get overly acidic; dough rises too much, or not enough, or unevenly, or oddly. “Every time, it humbles you,” Riesenberger said. Brian Francis, a writer and home cook based in Toronto, tried making one three years ago; “in short,” he told me, “it was a journey into hell.” Many grocery-store panettoni are produced in large quantities using cheap ingredients, then stored for months before being sold for Christmas. This makes them dry, or necessitates the use of preservatives, or more likely both. A Riesenberger panettone, which sells for $105, requires $20 in ingredients—local pasture-raised eggs, high-quality chocolate, wild yeast, special Italian flour he hunts down online—and about four days of skilled labor and close attention to make, before it is shipped fresh.
Certain fetish foods have a life cycle: They are hated, and then they are elevated by well-meaning obsessives via the use of premium ingredients and better production techniques, and then liking these foods becomes a symbol of taste and sophistication, of being in on something. “Getting it,” in the figurative sense, becomes as much a prize as having it, in the material sense. “You see the unboxing videos, and it starts this spiral effect of: I need to try this, I need to understand what’s going on here,” the food influencer Katie Zukhovich told me. “I don’t think people can imagine that panettone is so good because it’s always been so fine.”
We’ve done this before. Canned fish was depressing before a few savvy, Millennial-oriented brands started putting high-quality seafood in beautiful containers, after which “hot girls eat tinned fish” became something people would actually say out loud. Licorice, one of the universally most reviled flavors known to the human tongue, is now the subject of endless video taste tests after having received a European glow-up. Panettone was the worst thing on Earth, and then it was redeemed.
Now we are in the third phase of the trend: The market is saturated, both with very good versions and also with mediocre but well-branded ones, and also with different products that are not food at all but that signal insider status in the same way that a tote bag printed with anchovies does. As I write this, TikTok contains more than 60,000 videos hashtagged #panettone. Gucci sells a $140 panettone, though it is no longer baked by Schvartzapel; Dolce & Gabbana and Moschino also sell them, in partnership with Italian manufacturers. Online gift guides are lousy with it, as are specialty food shops. Last winter, Anthropologie sold a panettone-shaped candle for $98. When I got on the phone with Stephen Zagor, an adjunct professor of food entrepreneurship at Columbia University, he told me that “it seems like panettone is taking on a life in excess of itself.”
An expensive panettone does not really need to taste good, even though many do. “Food is two things,” Zagor said. “It is what exists in reality, and it is the image that we create online and how we perceive it. And they’re not always the same … People buy the ethereal and not the reality.” In his classes, Zagor talks about “taking the common and making it special, and taking the special and making it common”: creating a product that’s decadent but not too inaccessible, one that appeals both to the top of the market and to its aspirational underclass. A hundred bucks is an awful lot to spend on a snack, but if you think of premium panettone not as food, exactly, but as entry into a certain consumer stratum—one that is discerning, sophisticated, and at least a little rich—it’s a bargain.
No wonder high-end clothing companies have gotten in on panettone. It is, the fashion writer Becky Malinsky told me in an email, “a digestible (no pun intended!) way to gift an easily recognizable luxury name without spending, say, $2,300 on a handbag.” High-fashion panettone allows brand-conscious consumers to own an otherwise unattainable label, and clout-conscious fashion houses to participate in a trend popular among young, influential people, without diluting their brands—panettone is, after all, still a fussy, old-world, high-priced Italian good, just one that happens to be handcrafted out of flour and sugar instead of silk or leather.
Dolce & Gabbana’s panettone is manufactured in Sicily by a 71-year-old company and then shipped worldwide inside chic little collectible tins with a hand-painted look. A few weeks ago, I ordered one. It was the size of your average single-serve coffee-shop pastry and cost me $44.95 before shipping. It was dramatically more expensive than the grocery-store panettone I’d bought for comparison purposes—45 cents a gram versus 2.2 cents a gram—and marginally more delicious, which was really not very delicious at all.
Clearly, I had played myself. My ultra-fancy panettone—the one that looked and was expensive, the one that bore the outward signals we’ve come to associate with high quality and traditional craft—was all the things that the fancy panettone guys had warned me to avoid: It had been mass-produced and was filled with preservatives and other ingredients few nonnas would recognize. (Maybe, in retrospect, I should have been tipped off by the fact that it was available on Amazon Prime.) But I had bought the $45 muffin, and I wanted it to transform me: For a minute there, I began to convince myself that maybe panettone just tastes that way and I was the problem.
A few days later, one of Riesenberger’s panettoni arrived in the mail. It was nearly a foot tall, with a crackly, almond-sugar topping; deep pockets of rich chocolate and pistachio; and a texture simultaneously dense like custard and light like clouds. I finally got it, and I finally get it. His panettone was as different from the other two as watching a movie about a drug trip is to doing the drugs yourself. It was spectacular—emphasis very much mine.
