The athlete’s physique is both a marvel and a weapon. Witness Killian Maddox, a bodybuilder whose formidable muscles gleam under golden light. He is a violent man—some might even say “disturbed”—whose chosen profession leads him to use performance-enhancing drugs that further amplify his aggression. Maddox does not make vague threats toward people who run afoul of him. Instead, he specifically tells them that he will split their skull apart and drink their brains like soup—a promise he makes twice over the run of Magazine Dreams, a new movie by the writer-director Elijah Bynum.
For much of the film, Maddox, who is played by Jonathan Majors, does not seem capable of acknowledging his capacity for violence. This dismissive attitude would be unnerving in any dramatic character study, but unlike earlier cult classics about angry men in search of belonging, Magazine Dreams comes with a different context. The movie has been mired in controversy since shortly after it first debuted to a standing ovation and positive reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023, when Majors was a rapidly rising star. Two months later, he was arrested and charged with assault and harassment following a dispute with his then-girlfriend, the actor Grace Jabbari. Majors denied the allegations, but Magazine Dreams was dropped by its original distributor amid the fallout. And within the year, a jury had found him guilty on two of four charges—one harassment violation and one misdemeanor assault charge. The Magazine Dreams release seemed uncertain until last October, when it was acquired by Briarcliff Entertainment, the distributor behind the Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice.
Ahead of the movie’s delayed release, Majors has attempted to re-ingratiate himself with Hollywood decision makers and the viewing public, dominating the Magazine Dreams press run with interviews that emphasize his personal growth. The PR blitz draws attention to an uncanny parallel with his character. Magazine Dreams is a film about a man who constantly puts himself on display for others to judge: All Maddox wants is to be the best bodybuilder alive. But sheer athleticism won’t turn him into a celebrity, and his demeanor doesn’t endear him to people—Majors plays Maddox as a sullen and tightly wound outcast whose environment shapes his isolation. The athlete is not just socially inept; in several scenes, he either deliberately misleads or aggresses people who do attempt to engage him.
Whereas the character fails to earn the admiration of those around him, the embattled actor is trying to prove that he can do it successfully in real life. The Magazine Dreams press run has seen Majors portraying himself as a flawed but fundamentally good man who can transcend his past misbehavior. Several high-profile celebrities have come forward to say that they have faith in him as an actor and a man; in interviews, Majors has spoken about leaning on religion, and he sports a new tattoo that reads rebirth. And a week before the film’s theatrical release, The Hollywood Reporter published a cover story in which Majors was asked what he would say to entertainment-industry figures now, as he looks to rebuild a once-promising career. “I would tell them I’m still learning,” the actor said, “and I would thank them for participating in my growth.”
Although some of these features do quote dissenting voices, the stories have largely positioned Majors as a fallen man who just might deserve to reclaim his mantle—someone who, perhaps, has suffered enough already. If this redemptive rhetoric feels familiar, it’s because several other men have tried to stage industry comebacks using similar language. “They’re using all the hot-button words,” one crisis-communications consultant said of Majors’s team in an interview with New York magazine. A supporting cast of women has also helped burnish Majors’s image, in part by reinforcing the actor’s view of himself as an important pillar of the Black community—the kind of charismatic male leader we all need. Majors has repeatedly denied any allegations of violence against women, but last month, Rolling Stone reported on an audio recording in which Majors appears to admit to strangling Jabbari. When asked by Complex how he felt about the audio emerging so close to the film’s release, Majors defaulted to platitudes: “There were vibrations, reverberations, same as everything before,” he said. “But I was happy I’d done my work. I was happy I’d done my work.”
The spectacle of Majors’s redemption tour has certainly overshadowed the work of the Magazine Dreams creative team and crew, as well as that of the rest of the cast. Ironically, the film is at its most compelling when it explores the deadly implications of male entitlement. The question that hangs over the screenplay is not if Maddox’s desolation will metastasize into violence, but when. Maddox struggles to connect with nearly everyone around him, especially women: When other characters ask him about himself, he either becomes tongue-tied, deflects the questions, or responds with an overwhelming barrage of information.
A date with his grocery-store co-worker, a cheerful young white woman who seems genuinely interested in him, ends on a sour note after he scares her off with an eerily matter-of-fact description of his parents’ deaths. (Maddox’s father killed his mother, and then himself.) Two uneasy sexual encounters leave him even more adrift: In one of them, a Black sex worker chastises Maddox for kissing her; the woman’s contempt, coupled with his own steroid-induced erectile dysfunction, induces palpable shame. Before the scene abruptly ends, it feels fraught with the clichéd possibility of Maddox unleashing his rage on the woman. As the story progresses, we watch as rejection or perceived disrespect plunges Maddox further into a spiral that seems destined to end with bloodshed, whether realized or simply threatened. Magazine Dreams is not always deft or subtle in its approach, but it does attempt to seriously dig into weighty, complicated material.
And yet, Majors’s press run suggests a distance between the actor and some of the film’s core elements—a blind spot that distracts from the work itself. In an interview with Variety, Majors responded to a comment about Maddox’s crushing solitude and the on-screen violence by asking where the reporter sees violence in the film. (There are several such scenes in Magazine Dreams, and some involve Majors’s face and body being covered with blood; after the journalist cited some, Majors clarified that he believes audiences have the right to perceive art as they see fit.) As Magazine Dreams progresses, Maddox descends further into his antisocial tendencies and grows more destructive. Majors has argued that this kind of behavior stems primarily from loneliness: In the Variety interview, he said that society uses “positive-sounding attributes” such as “lone wolf” and “Alpha male” to describe toxic masculinity, making it difficult for men—once they are on their own—to “get back without help.”
But Magazine Dreams doesn’t revolve around a character who’s simply been abandoned by nearly everyone. The film depicts a man whose ego isolates him and prevents him from forging genuine bonds—who pushes people away with his obfuscation, lies, and single-minded pursuit of fame through physical strength. Even before he commits any violence, Maddox conveys an inability to see himself as more than his body, or to accept any response from the outside world but praise. In that sense, the question of separating Majors, or his conviction, from the movie he headlines feels like a moot one. For some viewers with knowledge of his off-screen reputation, watching Majors radiate quiet hostility in Magazine Dreams may already make the all-consuming performance difficult to evaluate in a vacuum. And even for those who might be able to separate art from artist, the actor’s seeming lack of introspection about how violence is threaded through his film is an artistic failing. No training regimen can compensate for that.
Less than a month before his assassination in 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed his last bill: one aimed at reforming America’s mental-health system. The year prior, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had brought attention to the crude treatments in mental institutions, and like the novel’s protagonist, the president’s sister Rosemary had received a lobotomy that left her profoundly disabled. Kennedy sought to end the “reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation,” he said in a statement to Congress.
Dedication to improving the country’s approach to mental health became a family project. In 1962, Eunice Kennedy Shriver started a sports camp for people with intellectual disabilities, which became the Special Olympics. In the 1970s, Senator Edward Kennedy tried to fix living conditions in mental institutions; in the ’90s, he helped establish the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Recently, his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current secretary of Health and Human Services, subsumed that agency into a new one: the Administration for a Healthy America, which includes mental health as one of its focuses.
RFK Jr.’s policy plans have not yet taken form. So far, he has overseen deep cuts to HHS and begun reorganizing the agency internally. He has met once, reportedly, in private with the Make America Healthy Again Commission, created by the president to address chronic health issues; one of its stated goals is to assess the threat of prescription psychiatric drugs. (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.) When speaking publicly, Kennedy has repeatedly returned to the idea that American doctors overprescribe such drugs.
Kennedy is skilled at picking up on frustrations in the zeitgeist. The sentiment that doctors over-rely on psychiatric drugs, while neglecting side effects or difficulty tapering doses, has been receiving more public attention. Consistent and affordable access to therapists, or to economic and housing support, is hard to come by. Yet to the extent that RFK Jr. has revealed his own thinking on how to address those complaints, his suggestions remain isolated from robust debates about mental-health treatment. His clearest proposal, still, is his campaign promise to create wellness farms where Americans would reconnect with the soil and “learn the discipline of hard work.” That idea is little more than a retreat to well-trodden calls to address mental distress through seemingly natural means, and shows scant interest in the nuances of debate around psychiatric medication, or the ways in which separating people from society for such cures has failed.
Kennedy first brought up wellness farms during his presidential run, and when he painted a picture of pastoral meccas for treating addiction, he joined a tradition that dates back more than 200 years. Take the Retreat, founded in England at the end of the 18th century by a Quaker, William Tuke, who along with the French doctor Phillipe Pinel is considered a father of “moral treatment,” an effort to create humane hospitals. Instead of shackles and corporal punishment, the Retreat provided a stately country home, with acres of land to tend cows and grow food. The doctor Benjamin Rush—who signed the Declaration of Independence—was inspired by moral treatment, and wrote in 1812 that men who “assist in cutting wood, making fires, and digging in a garden, and the females who are employed in washing, ironing, and scrubbing floors, often recover,” whereas those who don’t do any manual labor do not.
Tuke and Pinel believed that farming was especially helpful, and many early asylums in the United States employed a “work as therapy” component, says Neil Gong, a sociologist at UC San Diego. At the time, these institutions were cutting-edge, and those running them believed that the “insane” didn’t have to be locked up in chains to improve. “Mental hospitals started out in the 19th century with very utopian expectations around them and their ability to cure,” says Andrew Scull, a sociologist and the author of Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness. By the end of the 19th century, every state had at least one government-funded institution.
But when moral treatment was generalized to larger populations, it fell apart. (The Retreat was designed to take on only 30 patients.) Over time, government-run asylums became overwhelmed with cases, and rampant with abuse. At scale, institutions “rapidly declined into warehouses where lots of unpleasant things happen to the patients, and where patients tended to get lost,” Scull told me.
Including farming didn’t protect against such issues, either. The Fort Worth Narcotic Farm, a federally funded project opened in 1938, promised to blend honest farmwork with recovery from drug addiction. Only 25 percent of patients, one study estimates, stuck to their treatment plan, and most people treated at federal narcotic farms, according to a 1957 study, used drugs after they left. The U.S. Narcotics Farm, which opened in 1935, was the temporary home of many famous jazz musicians, including Chet Baker. But once people left the farm, the majority—nearly 90 percent—relapsed. It closed in 1976 after a congressional inquiry led by Senator Ted Kennedy found that doctors were testing experimental drugs on the people living there, and sometimes giving patients drugs such as heroin and cocaine as a reward.
The idea of farm-based detox is appealing enough that today, plenty of private rehabilitation centers incorporate nature and farming; pastoral work as mental-health treatment has become a luxury good, Gong told me, but is often combined with a suite of other services, including psychiatric support. Still, there isn’t an overwhelming body of evidence that care farms have ever been effective at improving outcomes. One review from 2019 found no proof that “care farms improved people’s quality of life” and limited evidence for improved depression and anxiety. “To champion the wellness farm seems out of left field when other models like permanent supportive housing or supportive employment have a huge evidentiary base, including cost-effectiveness,” Ryan K. McBain, a health economist at the RAND Corporation, told me. If Kennedy wanted to, he might tap the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, which evaluates new programs, to assess how effective a state-run wellness farm could be. This month, however, the CMMI announced that it is cutting funding for several of its programs.
The most revealing aspect of Kennedy’s plan isn’t what people would do on these farms, but what they wouldn’t—take any sort of psychiatric drugs. In describing the farms, Kennedy painted a picture of them as detox centers where people would also taper off medications for depression and ADHD. In the moral-treatment times, drugs such as antidepressants and Ritalin didn’t exist; moral treatment was, nevertheless, seen as alternatives to barbaric interventions such as bloodletting and restraint. For Kennedy, the wellness farm is the same: a substitute for, not a complement to, other treatments.
The role that psychiatric drugs play in Americans’ mental-health treatment is a real and active debate. For many people, psychiatric medications can be a crucial part of their recovery. Yet contemporary psychiatrists have plenty of complaints about insurance companies that reimburse more for medication than for other treatments and a pharmaceutical industry riddled with conflicts of interest. In 2025, people working in this field recognize that the ways in which drugs have claimed to treat mental illness have oversimplified or overemphasized biology. Deliberations on the origin of and rightful reaction to mental distress are core to psychiatry: Michel Foucault thought that psychiatry could be a pernicious force to control society; the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz thought that mental illness was a myth altogether.
However, Kennedy hasn’t engaged with any of these topics substantially. Instead, he has muddied the water with false claims, including that antidepressants are associated with school shootings and are more addictive than heroin. In a podcast last year, he said that wellness farms free of psychiatric drugs would be especially helpful for Black children: “Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, on SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented.”
In this way, Kennedy’s wellness-farms proposal shows how his thinking about public health is defined almost entirely by his naturalness bias—that “natural” treatments are always better, and that manual labor and fresh air, or simply the right diet, could resolve complex and widespread health problems. (“They’re going to grow their own food, organic food, high-quality food, because a lot of the behavioral issues are food-related,” Kennedy said about the farms.) This is consistent with his ideas about vaccination—that natural exposure to disease might be desirable, and that dealing with diseases such as measles with diet and sanitation, as the country did in the first half of the 20th century, is preferable.
But we’ve learned plenty in the past 50, if not 200, years. Facilities that take people out of their community have limited capacity, on their own, to be an effective public-health measure. A more radical idea than wellness farms would be treating people in their community, with a mixture of care options that they can choose from. That idea is also closer to what John F. Kennedy had in mind when he signed the Community Mental Health Act in 1963. He didn’t simply want to close government-run mental centers; he aimed to create 1,500 community mental-health centers. This goal went unrealized. Community mental-health care gives a person access to an interdisciplinary case-management team of social workers, nurses, doctors, and psychologists, and to social services such as housing and employment support. Creating that at scale presents a more obvious and necessary challenge than sending people away to a farm to breathe fresh air and till the land.
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“We’re going to start being smart, and we’re going to start being very wealthy again,” President Donald Trump announced today as he laid out a plan that risks derailing America’s economy. At his “Liberation Day” event, he unveiled a 10 percent–minimum tariff on all imports, with no change for Canada and Mexico but significantly higher rates for other countries, such as China and India, that far exceeded what many economists had expected.
With today’s announcement, Trump is tariffing essentially all foreign goods. The administration says that the levies will bring in some $6 trillion, which would amount to the biggest tax hike in U.S. history. Some of the most perplexing updates are in countries where the United States has existing free-trade agreements, such as South Korea, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economic policy, told me. The Trump administration claims that South Korea has a 50 percent tariff on the U.S., but it is basing its tariff estimations in part on currency manipulation and trade barriers. It hasn’t yet provided evidence confirming that such factors, insofar as they exist, are equivalent to a 50 percent tariff.
Such all-encompassing tariffs will cost each American family thousands of dollars, economists predict. Americans will likely feel the effects of this while standing in a grocery-store aisle, purchasing auto insurance, or undertaking home renovations. These levies have the potential to increase inflation and slow down the economy in the longer term, and the uncertainty of what happens next will also contribute to the confidence of shoppers and businesses. “The way that Trump does tariffs is he often makes these really big announcements and then rolls them back,” perpetually modifying the rules, as in a game of Calvinball, Annie explained. “That’s really hard if you’re a business. Should we wait this out? Are they actually going to do it?”
Given the sweeping nature of the new tariffs, Trump may have just essentially encouraged other countries to consider banding together to impose further tit-for-tat levies on the United States. The best-case scenario, Annie told me, is that after some countries threaten reciprocal tariffs, a negotiation is reached that allows Trump to feel like he has won but also “gives some certainty” to businesses and people; shoppers absorb high costs at first, but then the uncertainty declines. If Republicans realize after this whole ordeal that this level of chaos could affect their chances at reelection and opt for fewer surprises going forward, the economy could bounce back, she argued.
America’s economy is full of mixed signals right now—or at least it was, before Trump’s announcement. “If you knew nothing about it and you came in and looked at the main figures, you would say this is not an economy in a recession or anything close to it,” Annie said. The unemployment rate is fairly low, at 4.1 percent; GDP numbers are strong. But things start looking worrisome when you consider that consumer confidence is the lowest it’s been since early 2021, and that Trump’s new tariff plan won’t quell those fears. The solution for the kind of post-tariff downturn the economy might face is simple: Remove the tariffs. But the Trump administration is not likely to let them go easily, Annie noted: “We could be getting ourselves into a bad situation where we’ve taken options for improving the situation off the table.”
Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: alfalfa126 / Getty; MirageC / Getty.
The New Singlehood Stigma
By Faith Hill
Just to be clear: Today is, in many ways, the best time in American history to be single.
In the 18th century, bachelors paid higher taxes and faced harsher punishments for crimes than their betrothed counterparts. (“A Man without a Wife,” Benjamin Franklin said, “is but half a Man.”) Single women—more likely, naturally, to be seduced by the devil—were disproportionately executed for witchcraft …
Forgive me, then, if I sound ungrateful when I say this: Americans are still extremely weird about single people. But now the problem isn’t just that singlehood is disparaged; sometimes, it’s that singlehood is celebrated. Relentlessly, annoyingly celebrated.
Eid al-Fitr prayers in Indonesia and Senegal, a new volcanic eruption in southwestern Iceland, the Ogoh-ogoh festival in Indonesia, the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in Myanmar, unrest at a town hall in Indiana, snowboard cross in Switzerland, and much more.
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Last week, at an event in West Virginia, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fat-shamed the state’s governor, Patrick Morrisey. “The first time I saw him, I said you look like you ate Governor Morrisey,” Kennedy told a laughing crowd. Morrisey has apparently invited Kennedy to be his personal trainer. The health secretary plans to put Morrisey on a “really rigorous regimen” involving monthly public weigh-ins and the all-meat “carnivore diet.” Once Morrisey loses 30 pounds, Kennedy will return to West Virginia for a celebration and final weigh-in.
According to Kennedy, not so long ago, obesity was virtually unheard of. “When my uncle was president, 3 percent of Americans were obese, and today, 74 percent of Americans are obese or overweight,” Kennedy said during his confirmation hearing. This is wrong: In the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy was president, an estimated 45 percent of Americans were overweight, including 13 percent of whom had obesity. (Such classifications are determined based on body mass index, a flawed but sometimes useful metric). Although RFK Jr. is correct in suggesting that rates of obesity have surged in recent decades, his nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. In fact, RFK Jr. might be surprised to learn that his own uncle once waged a campaign against what he perceived as America’s deteriorating physical fitness.
Anxiety over American obesity dates back to at least the mid-20th century. In 1948—six years before RFK Jr. was born—the founder of Harvard’s nutrition department wrote an essay in The Atlantic warning that obesity was a risk factor for several health conditions including diabetes and high blood pressure. Seven years later—when RFK Jr. was an infant—the renowned nutritionist Jean Mayer declared obesity “a national obsession.” Mayer was particularly frustrated by the barrage of “mercenary lures” that filled the media, advertising ineffective and sometimes harmful “‘health foods’ or ‘thinning foods.’” (RFK Jr.’s endorsement of the carnivore diet and uncorroborated claim that seed oils are “one of the driving causes” of the obesity epidemic come to mind.) Instead, Mayer wrote in The Atlantic, exercise was key to weight loss. We now know that although exercise is crucial for good health, it’s not a silver bullet for treating obesity.
RFK Jr. often refers to his childhood as a sort of golden age for American health. “When I was a kid,” RFK Jr. said at the West Virginia event, “we were the healthiest, most robust people in the world.” But by the time he was of school age, his uncle was leading a national fitness campaign. President Kennedy feared, in particular, that American youth lagged “far behind Europeans in physical fitness.” As evidence, he pointed to a series of strength tests given to children in America, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria: More than one-third of American kids failed at least one test, compared with only 1 percent of European children.
More generally, JFK was worried that an “increasingly large number of young Americans” were “neglecting their bodies” and “getting soft.” In 1961, JFK’s warnings about America’s poor physical well-being led to an Atlantic essay titled “We May Be Sitting Ourselves to Death,” in which a spokesperson for the American Dairy Association fretted over the health of men who spent their days withering away at desk jobs instead of hiking “the dusty trail to bring home the buffalo meat.” (The writer was less concerned about women, who he suggested got plenty of exercise from washing clothes, cooking meals, and picking up after their messy family.) At the time, JFK presented America’s deteriorating health as a matter of Cold War–era national-security concern. As one Atlantic writer explained, “The basic impetus behind this Spartan movement seems to be the fear that the Russians (a vast race of tawny, muscle-bound gymnasts) will someday descend upon our shores and thrash each of us flabby capitalists individually.” America’s growing “softness,” JFK suggested, threatened to “strip and destroy the vitality” of the nation.
Much like the “Make America healthy again” campaign, the JFK-era movement looked nostalgically upon a rustic, heartier past. But even earlier, during the buffalo-hunting 19th century, Americans were anxious about the nation’s declining health. Only four months after this magazine’s first issue, in 1857, one writer complained that the ancient Greek tradition of fitness “seems to us Americans as mythical.” He insisted that a 30-mile walk, five-mile run, or one-mile swim would cost most Americans “a fit of illness, and many their lives.” Even an hour in the gym, the writer worried, would leave any man’s “enfeebled muscular apparatus” groaning “with rheumatism for a week.” One year later, a surgeon argued that busy schedules and “sedentary life” were to blame for the “limited muscular development” of “professional” men. “We live so fast that we have no time to live,” he wrote.
Obesity rates remained relatively stable for 20 years after JFK’s 1960 campaign, before doubling from 1980 to 2000 to what the U.S. surgeon general in 2001 called “epidemic” proportions. Today, 40 percent of U.S. adults meet the clinical definition for obesity. The precise reason for this surge remains unclear, although changing diets and decreased activity levels are thought to play a role. In this particular regard, RFK Jr. is right about America’s declining health. But many other American health outcomes have improved over the decades. Around the time RFK Jr. was born, cardiovascular disease killed Americans at roughly double the rate it does today. Cancer deaths, too, have fallen significantly, thanks to breakthroughs in cancer treatment and a decline in smoking. And that’s not to say anything of the progress made fighting infectious disease earlier in the 20th century.
Yet RFK Jr.’s romanticization of the past has led him to develop an anachronistic approach to health care. He is skeptical of the many advances—GLP-1s, vaccination, milk pasteurization—that have helped improve America’s health over the years. If his intention is to wind back the clock on the American public-health apparatus, he’s off to a strong start. Just this week, he led sweeping cuts across federal health agencies, eliminating thousands of jobs, including the nation’s top tobacco regulator, prominent scientists, and even staffers who focus specifically on chronic-disease prevention. The Department of Health and Human Services was established less than a year before RFK Jr. was born; now he is inviting its destruction. But his efforts to turn back time are foolish. If the golden age of American health exists, it’s in the future, not the past.
The idea of politics as a sport is a familiar analogy. For a little more than 25 hours from Monday to Tuesday evening, politics left behind the metaphor and became a grueling, perhaps even dangerous, ultramarathon. Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking speech—an “oratorical marathon” and a “feat of political endurance,” according to reporters—was nearly an hour longer than Strom Thurmond’s 1957 attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act. The impact of Booker’s effort remains to be seen, but to judge it through a strictly political lens is to miss a grittier athletic drama—and overlook how sports science might help a future senator extend “filibusterthon” endurance even further.
Before he took to the lectern, clad in a dark suit and black sneakers, Booker announced his intention of pushing the limits of his 56-year-old body. “I’m going to go for as long as I’m physically able to go,” he said.
This is precisely the kind of challenge that animates amateur endurance athletes like me, as well as the professionals I write about as a journalist who specializes in the science of endurance. The open-ended nature of such boundary-pushing is particularly alluring. The current world record for “backyard ultras,” which involve running about four miles every hour until everyone else gives up, is 110 laps—that’s 458 miles over four and a half days. Research on these competitors has found that the physical demands of such a prolonged effort pale in comparison to the psychological toll.
Still, Booker’s speech presented some unique physiological challenges—most notably that he couldn’t yield the floor to go to the bathroom. That’s no trivial feat: In 2007, a woman died shortly after participating in an on-air “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest held by a radio station. Her problem was drinking too much. To forestall the call of nature, Booker stopped eating on Friday, and refrained from drinking on Sunday evening, a full 24 hours before he started speaking.
Scientists assess that, on average, humans can survive without water for about three days. Long before that, your kidneys will be stressed, your cognitive function will be impaired, and you may develop a headache as your brain—which is mostly water—shrinks. Just as well that Booker didn’t have to debate anyone.
Then there’s the effect on your muscles. “I’m a former athlete, so I know when you get dehydrated you get a lot cramps,” Booker, who played football for Stanford in the early 1990s, told reporters after his speech. “That was the biggest thing I was fighting, is that different muscles were really starting to cramp up, and every once in a while I’d have a spasm.” As a matter of scientific fact, the link between dehydration and muscle cramps is no longer as widely accepted as it was when Booker was in college. Instead of sipping water occasionally during his speech, he might have had better luck warding off cramps with pickle juice, which is thought to reset the nervous-system reflexes that go haywire when you cramp.
Fasting for more than four days also made Booker’s task considerably harder. Among Tour de France cyclists and other endurance athletes, the trend is to scarf down astonishingly large quantities of carbohydrates, as much as 120 grams—the equivalent of three plates of pasta—every hour while competing. Booker’s jaw muscles clearly didn’t need that much fuel, but letting blood-sugar levels drop is associated with mental fog, lightheadedness, and the risk of fainting. Strangely enough, you can counteract some of these symptoms simply by swishing sports drink in your mouth and then spitting the drink out. Just a whiff of glucose will trigger calorie sensors in your brain and make you feel better. It’s the perfect solution for future filibusterers, because it won’t make you need to pee.
Missing a night’s sleep is one element of Booker’s feat that most of us have replicated at some point in our life. That’s nothing compared with what those backyard-ultra competitors endure, but it has an effect: Researchers have famously found that staying awake for 24 hours makes you a worse driver than drinking alcohol to the legal limit. The standard advice among ultrarunners, backed by scientific findings, is that getting extra sleep in the week prior to your ordeal can help buffer some of the effects of sleep deprivation.
Even if the distance Booker covered during his event was zero miles, he still faced the considerable physical challenge of standing for more than 24 hours. Just a few hours into his speech, he had a Senate page remove his chair—to eliminate the temptation to sit down.
Although the evils of sitting all day are well known, standing all day is no picnic either. Research has found that people whose jobs require standing all day are twice as likely to develop heart disease as those who sit, and are vulnerable to a host of other ills, ranging from varicose veins to “spontaneous abortions.” And yes, muscle cramps: the most likely culprit for Booker’s spasms was muscle fatigue rather than dehydration. There’s no easy fix, but marching in place might help engage different muscles to spread the strain, along with a pair of highly cushioned supershoes.
The shoes of Senator Cory Booker, photographed while he spoke to reporters on Tuesday after surpassing the record for the longest Senate speech (Eric Lee / The New York Times / Redux)
Even if another senator optimized all of these details, could they break Booker’s new record? For an answer on that, I am persuaded by the great Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi. “Mind is everything: muscles—pieces of rubber,” he said. “All that I am, I am because of my mind.”
When he emerged from the Senate Chamber after his oratorical marathon, Booker pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. It was a passage from the Book of Isaiah: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Anyone who wants to beat Booker will need to draw from a similar wellspring of belief and commitment. But they should probably also bring some pickle juice.
The United States is in the midst of an energy revolution. Under the Biden administration, the country shoveled unprecedented sums of federal dollars into clean-energy projects—battery factories, solar farms, nuclear plants—while also producing and exporting record volumes of oil and gas. President Donald Trump has vowed to ramp up energy production further, but takes a skeptical view of solar and wind power. But Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” mantra extends beyond fossil fuels. His administration is embracing geothermal energy, which is primed for a very American boom.
In the United States, geothermal energy, which uses the Earth’s heat to create electricity, supplies less than half of 1 percent of the country’s electricity, but few other clean-energy sources offer as much promise right now. Many climate activists support geothermal energy as a renewable power source that generates zero-carbon electricity. A recent report from the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm, projected that geothermal could meet as much as 64 percent of new electricity demand from data centers by the early 2030s. America is far behind rivals such as China and Russia in manufacturing solar panels or building nuclear plants. But geothermal makes use of an area of the U.S. industrial base that has grown in recent years—oil and gas production.
Cindy Taff, whose company, Sage Geosystems, is anticipating geothermal’s potential growth, told me about a recent drive she took through southern Texas that illustrated that overlap. “The same drilling rig that drilled our well in September was on a lease right off the highway drilling an oil-and-gas well,” she said, laughing. “It’s just the same.”
Taff came from the oil industry: She was once a vice president at Royal Dutch Shell who commanded a team of 350 employees using hydraulic fracturing (better known as fracking) to drill their way through five countries’ bedrock. Fracking had driven an oil-and-gas boom starting in the mid-2000s, and her team had looked at using the same technique to tap the Earth’s underground heat. At Shell, “we never actually drilled wells” to try it on geothermal energy, she told me. “It was frustrating.” The opportunity looked big enough to her that she started Sage.
Much like oil and gas, geothermal energy, which harnesses the planet’s molten core to make steam, had long been confined to the places where access came easy—the American West, where Yellowstone’s famous geysers hint at the heat below, or volcanic Iceland. In those places—generally volcanic hot spots where magma flows at shallow depths in the Earth’s crust and underground water reservoirs—geothermal energy can be a substantial source of power. Currently, it provides roughly 10 percent of Nevada’s electricity generation and as much as 5 percent of the power California produces; Iceland generates 30 percent of its electricity, and Kenya nearly half, from geothermal. Traditional coal or nuclear plants generate heat to turn water into steam, which spins turbines to make electricity. Geothermal power stations do the same using hot water from underground reservoirs.
Sage uses fracking technology to crack open hot rocks even deeper underground, enabling access to heat in more locations. The company’s drillers then inject water into the well, prying open the stone fissures and creating an artificial reservoir. When Sage releases that water, the pressure from underground shoots it upward, and the heat creates vapors that spin turbines and crank out electricity. This system can also serve as storage for weather-dependent wind and solar: Extra electricity from turbines and panels can pump water into Sage’s wells that can be released later to produce electricity.
Sage expects to have its first energy-storage facility up and running in Texas in the coming weeks, but already has a deal to sell power to Meta’s data centers. And a similar start-up, Fervo Energy, demonstrated that it could use fracking technology to successfully produce 24/7 carbon-free energy back in 2023, at a pilot project in Nevada.
Geothermal does have certain advantages compared with other sources of renewable energy. Solar and wind need large areas of land, huge volumes of minerals, and a massive new network of transmission lines. (Plus, China dominates those industries’ supply chains.) Hydroelectric dams are less dependable in a world where water is growing scarcer and precipitation harder to forecast. Nuclear reactors cost billions of dollars and take years to build; the U.S. depends heavily on counties such as Canada, Kazakhstan, and Russia for uranium fuel, and has yet to establish the infrastructure to either permanently store or recycle nuclear waste.
For now, most of the efforts to debut next-generation geothermal technology are still in the American West, where drilling is relatively cheap and easy because the rocks they’re targeting are closer to the surface. But if the industry can prove to investors that its power plants work as described—which experts expect to happen by the end of the decade—geothermal could expand quickly, just like oil-and-gas fracking did.
That the “enhanced” geothermal industry piggybacks on technology from the fossil-fuel industry also puts it in a position to grow. “In the U.S., our manufacturing base is falling apart. But we have a ridiculously good industrial base in oil and gas,” Charles Gertler, who until recently worked at the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office and co-authored a report outlining a pathway for the industry’s growth, told me. “The fact that you can just rely on many of the same tools and people and technologies and supply chains is the reason a lot of folks are so excited.” Investors have been cool on the industry since a handful of conventional geothermal projects went under two decades ago. But Gertler estimated that, if five to 10 new geothermal projects prove successful, banks will open their wallets again.
Unlike other renewable-energy sources, the emerging geothermal sector has received little direct support from the federal government. By the time Fervo had demonstrated it could frack for geothermal energy, the Biden administration had already passed two monumental climate-spending laws, which directed billions of dollars toward technologies such as solar, wind, and nuclear power, but just $84 million for early-stage geothermal. Companies such Fervo and Sage could still benefit, though, from tax credits for producing zero-carbon electricity, if Republicans in Congress don’t repeal key parts of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
“I don’t know where that’s going,” Representative Celeste Maloy, the Utah Republican in whose district Fervo is building its first large-scale plant, told me. But she said slashing the requirements for obtaining federal permits—which her party is eager to do—could give the industry enough of a boost that “it almost doesn’t matter what happens to the IRA incentives.” (No company has made that case to her, she allowed.)
Like any energy industry, geothermal has external costs that could become bigger issues as it grows. In 2017, an early experiment in enhanced geothermal energy in South Korea triggered a serious earthquake. (Earthquakes doubled in Texas in 2021 thanks to oil and gas companies injecting sludgy wastewater into underground wells.) Locations with particularly good hot-rock resources could end up overlapping with threatened species, just as one of the nation’s biggest lithium projects ran up against an endangered wildflower or one of California’s largest solar farms put tortoises at risk. Environmentalists primed to see anything with Big Oil’s fingerprints on it as suspicious will find plenty of connections between this industry and fossil-fuel companies. And, as the industry scales up, it will use larger volumes of water.
Fervo, for one, has been pushing to use water too brackish for agricultural or municipal purposes, Tim Latimer, Fervo’s chief executive, told me: “So we’re not really fighting with people over water even though we’re in the western desert.” Other companies, such as XGS Energy, are boring more conventional wells and keeping water contained in closed-loop pipes, eliminating the risk of losing any water at all in the process.
Electricity has to come from somewhere, though, and as demand surges, the Trump administration is winning over support even from some Democrats to keep coal plants open longer. Meanwhile, gas power plants are expanding. To keep the lights on—while keeping utility bills and global temperatures down as much as possible—the country will need to employ all available resources of clean power, and perhaps especially those the current administration is willing to support.
Over the past decade or so, an influential set of female novelists has been circling a shared question: Given how often women are forced to understand themselves as fundamentally in relation to others (most commonly a child and/or a partner, but also parents, extended family, friends), is it possible for a woman to have an authentic, independent self? If a female narrator is extracted from her core relational ties, what kind of consciousness is left?
I am thinking here of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, whose narrator, divorced and currently apart from her children, travels and observes the world with a sense of self so hollowed out as to render her more a conduit for the musings of her interlocutors than a full-fledged character. I also have in mind Jenny Offill’s alienated wife in Dept. of Speculation, as well as Ottessa Moshfegh’s parodically disaffected protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Katie Kitamura’s last two novels, A Separationand Intimacies, are exemplars of this form. Her female protagonists lack the normal trappings of selfhood: They have no names, ages, or detailed backgrounds. They are loners, dispassionate and disassociated, floating through foreign places in dreamlike Woolfian internal monologue. They recall Emerson’s turn of phrase “I become a transparent eyeball.” Who are they? They’re rarely sure.
“I don’t really know what ‘authentic’ means,” Kitamura said in a recent interview about her new novel, Audition. “When you take away all of the role-playing, all of the performance, what is left? I don’t know if that’s your authentic self, or if it’s a profoundly raw, destabilized, possibly non-functioning self.” Audition, which Kitamura describes as the final entry in a loose trilogy, lingers over this curiosity about the instability of the “self,” and her bafflement at how authenticity could have anything to do with something so clearly assembled and performed.
The narrators of A Separation and Intimacies are translators, one who specializes in contemporary fiction and the other who works as a simultaneous interpreter. Her latest is yet another woman whose job is to become a vessel for other people’s words: She is a stage actor. This is a kind of stakes-raising for Kitamura. Translators are intended to be, at least in theory, impersonal transmitters of language, but an actor is someone for whom the performance of emotional authenticity is paramount, someone who is supposed to make the words convincingly their own. The actor’s career is itself a string of alter-selves.
Kitamura’s narrator is again nameless, and we learn almost nothing of her childhood, family of origin, or race, though we’re given clues that she is not white and that she is middle-aged. Her vocation requires the skill of transformation and self-abnegation, as well as a receptiveness to language and emotion not her own. Accordingly, she feels attuned to the ways in which selfhood can be permeable and subject to manipulation by persuasive narrative. The actor finds that an all-consuming story is a thrill, but “also a danger for a person of my disposition, for whom the managing of these borders was not always easy.”
This instability is a signature of Kitamura’s women. They tend to be encased in rigid professional or class structures that they observe and enter through language—a medium that Kitamura portrays as forceful but morally ambiguous. The narrator of Intimacies, who serves as an interpreter in trials of war crimes—her job, she reflects, is “to repeat the unspeakable”—comes to think that she’s neutralizing the crimes, or causing them “to recede further and further into some state of unreality.”
Audition’s plot revolves around a rupture in the border between reality and unreality for the narrator: A young man, Xavier, shows up when she’s rehearsing a new play, introduces himself, and confesses that he’s been looking for her. An article he’d read about her described her “giving up a child” many years ago, and he thinks he was that child. The actor stares at him. “He was evidently in the grip of some serious delusion,” she thinks, “or else he was a grifter of some kind, it was one or the other.”
As he talks, she acknowledges to herself that his story, if misguided, is also “a little bit comprehensible.” Back when she was single, she’d had an abortion, which had been obfuscated in the article. And she’d had another brush with maternity: Much later, after marrying her husband, Tomas, she became pregnant again. Tomas had grown emotionally attached to their future as parents and was quietly devastated when she miscarried. She was comparatively cool about the end of the pregnancy, a difference in responses that silently drove a wedge between them.
The encounter with Xavier highlights these facts of her life—she never gave birth, never became a mother—while also stirring a sense of doubt. She had noticed the way that Xavier sits back in his chair and gives a little sigh. “I realized with a growing sense of horror that I myself had made that exact gesture, had utilized it, to be more precise, many times in my work.” It is the kind of twinning of small gestures that occurs between parents and children, those epigenetic tics that subconsciously signal that two people are family. Not that she has concrete reason to question her own life history, but the assuredness with which she has just declared Xavier to be delusional or manipulative begins to waver.
This tiny reflex draws attention to how little we know of this actor’s body (except that it has seemingly never carried a child to term)—a distancing of corporeal experience shared across the recent fictional array of silvery, cerebral female consciousnesses. Writing in The Atlantic about Cusk’s 2024 novel, Parade, the critic Nicholas Dames described this variety of fiction as a slow process of almost ascetic, transcendent self-erasure: “No more identities, no more social roles, even no more imperatives of the body—a clearing of the ground that has, as Cusk insists, particular urgency for writing by women, who have always had to confront the limits to their autonomy in their quests to think and create.” Kitamura’s actor has been constrained by both her gender and her race. As a woman of color, she has been forced repeatedly to play “only parts that were commensurate with erasure,” characters who “were quite literally silent, a moving image, and nothing else.”
The trend of alienated and disembodied female narrators can be read as a collective rejection of the social “imperatives” of the body, allowing, as the novelist Heidi Julavits suggested in her review of Cusk’s Outline, “a more complex portrait of a person—a self instead of a set of gender stereotypes.” This is a Pyrrhic victory, one that seems to preclude the possibility that a woman could create and think in concert with her body.
What’s more, these narrators commonly achieve their spectral detachment only in the ambivalent or ruinous aftermath of procreation. Offill’s narrator in Dept. of Speculation decided in her youth to skip marriage and motherhood in favor of being “an art monster,” and the novel tracks her struggle, after reversing her earlier decision, to reconcile herself to the life of a mother-wife-writer. In Outline, the narrator reveals that she has recently moved from the countryside to London, bidding farewell to “our family home,” after having “stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.” Kitamura’s actor, too, has achieved a kind of creative and professional zenith only after renouncing the prospect of such a home, and Xavier’s claim suddenly confronts her with the alternative reality of being a very different kind of character: a mother.
His declaration/question is destabilizing precisely because it is in some way seductive. Kitamura has talked about her abiding interest in the “psychological and ethical repercussions of allowing yourself to be a vessel for language,” and one can detect in her work a broader query: What are the repercussions of allowing yourself to be a vessel at all—whether for language, for art, for a child, for a beloved’s needs and desires?
This becomes the through line of Audition, which plays again and again with the idea that the shared reality of intimate relationships is merely the result of the performances that unfold between people and the flawed interpretations they invite. For the actor, what transpires is not an escape from the motherhood plot, but a vertiginous, possibly delusional slide into it. Unsure of who she and Xavier are to each other, she also begins to lose her grip on what Tomas actually knows and feels about her, and she about him.
As the novel progresses, this sense of unreality sharpens. On arriving at her apartment,
I felt as if I were entering a space long uninhabited, for a brief moment it was as if I had come into an apartment that looked exactly like my home in every last particular, down to the vase on the table in the hall and the coats hanging from the rack, and yet was not my home at all.
When she later runs into Xavier on her way to rehearsal, he seems to have completely forgotten about his claim on her and behaves warmly but professionally, explaining that the play’s director has taken him on as an assistant. “I found myself wondering if I had misunderstood or misinterpreted or even misremembered the entire unlikely thing,” she confesses. A pattern emerges: She is sure of her interactions, and sure of herself, until she is not.
Audition is broken into two parts. At the end of the first, the actor and Tomas are approaching a moment of confrontation. Part two opens with a feeling of déjà vu: The actor and Xavier are sitting across from each other in a restaurant, as they were earlier in the book. Months have passed, rehearsals are over, and the show has become a smash hit. Now Tomas is at the table and Xavier is her son—is their son. He’s asking to come live at home with her and Tomas. Tomas is making a toast. “As he lifted his glass I gazed at Tomas and then at Xavier, their faces soft and smiling in the light, united in the same expression, each an echo of the other.” When she hugs Xavier later, she remembers “what it was like to embrace him as a child, the animal scent of the skin at his neck.”
This disjuncture—a total reassembly of the terms of the story—goes unremarked upon and unexplained. The actor carries on in the same stream-of-consciousness style as before, acknowledging no memory of the terms of part one. Are we in a parallel universe? Are we in the same universe, and the narrator has somehow become psychologically destabilized? Is this a game?
As interactions among the actor, Tomas, and Xavier spiral into an ever more baroque and unsettling drama, another option suggests itself: Perhaps the three of them have embarked upon a shared performance, constructing a family where there was none, and doing it so faithfully that they never, not even in their own thoughts, break character. In a moment of strain, the actor realizes that all along, they
had been playing parts, and for a period—for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another person—the mechanism had held.
But the glamour between the actor and Xavier has dissipated, “as if it had suddenly occurred to both of us that his lines were insufficient, my characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible.”
This is the revelatory moment that these novels of female alienation inevitably confront: the dissolving of any illusion that intimacy is possible, the failure of the narratives that unify a family, the crumbling of the relational identities (mother, wife) that have pinned her in place. Instead of floating uneasily through the world of the book, the narrator rises skyward, like a balloon, totally untethered.
The formal moves by which Kitamura delivers the actor to this place are unusual and interesting, yet the trajectory toward giddy estrangement is familiar—such a staple of all these plots that it arguably now defines a subgenre of the contemporary literary novel. Why has this become a “type” of fiction, and this narrator a kind of woman with whom the literary world is preoccupied?
The untethered narrator enacts, to a degree, a welcome fantasy: that the alienation generated inside long marriages and complex parent-child relationships—or intrinsic to living in a fraying social and political world—can both provide inspiration for profound art and also be left behind entirely. In the same way, this arc imagines that the body’s burdens, demands, and constraints can be readily abandoned for an escape into pure consciousness. “I wondered also if that wasn’t the point of a performance,” the actor reflects:
that it preserved our innocence, that it allowed us to live with the hypocrisies of our desire … We don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.
But one can’t—women especially can’t—elude embodiment and entanglement in the end. Not in this country, not anywhere—not even in novels, however attenuated their characters become. We are ensnared in the real, as much as we might wish it were otherwise. The book’s end finds the actor reassembling her marriage, hoping to make peace with Xavier, and attempting to create art from inside the confusing mess of a self that she could not escape. No matter how lost in her mind or subsumed in a fiction she becomes, she must return, over and over, to her own life, home, and marriage. The tethers don’t actually vanish simply because she feels untethered.
She is once again up on a stage, speaking into a theater’s waiting dark, following “a chain of words, sturdy as a cable, a voice that has been given to me.” She is playing a character patterned after her, “a woman who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real.” But this space of performance—of generating something and someone new out of the material of herself—is where she feels the most real: “Here, it is possible to be two things at once,” she recognizes. “Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind.” I won’t give away who has written the monologue. And Kitamura pulls back, too, declining to forecast a next chapter of the actor’s marriage or what new creation she might forge with her layered selves. But the question that could carry us beyond this spate of novels about the untethered woman beckons: What will this woman make once she’s back in her body and back on the ground?
This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “Who Needs Intimacy?”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is finally getting his wish of sucker-punching the federal health agencies. This week, Kennedy began the process of firing some 10,000 employees working under the Health and Human Services umbrella. Even before he took office, Kennedy warned health officials that they should pack their bags, and on Tuesday, he defended the cuts: “What we’ve been doing isn’t working,” Kennedy posted on X. He is focused on “realigning HHS with its core mission: to stop the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.” But instead of improving how the federal health bureaucracy works, RFK Jr. is throwing his agencies into chaos.
The Trump administration hasn’t released details about which offices specifically were targeted, but the cuts seem to be so deep and indiscriminate that they are going to hamstring Kennedy’s own stated priorities. Kennedy has made clear that he’s singularly focused on reducing rates of chronic disease in America, but the health secretary has reportedly laid off officials in the CDC’s office tasked with that same goal. While cigarette smoking remains a leading cause of chronic disease, the top FDA official in charge of regulating tobacco is now on administrative leave, and everyone working for the CDC office that monitors tobacco use has been fired, according to the former CDC director Tom Frieden. Despite Kennedy’s promises to establish a culture of “radical transparency” at the federal agencies, he also appears to have fired the employees whom journalists and the greater public rely on to provide essential updates about the government’s actions. (In a statement, a spokesperson for HHS said that the personnel cuts were focused on “redundant or unnecessary administrative positions.”)
No plan—not his MAHA agenda, not efficiency, nothing—can realistically explain cuts like these. Instead, the mass firings don’t seem to be a means to an end on the way to overhauling American health. They are an end in themselves.
It’ll take months, if not years, to fully appreciate the effect that the cuts will have on America’s scientific enterprise. The decimation at the FDA is particularly galling. Several of the agency’s top leaders charged with reviewing and approving innovative new treatments have been ushered to the exit. This is likely to lead to slower development of advancements in biomedical science; although the FDA doesn’t fund biomedical research, its leaders play a crucial role in advising pharmaceutical companies on how to conduct research and ultimately get their breakthroughs approved. America was just beginning to reap the benefits of these efforts. There are now gene therapies that can treat genetic blindness. Young children who previously would have been condemned to certain death at the hands of a rare disease, such as severe spinal muscular atrophy, now have a chance at life. The government invested in mRNA technology for decades before it was leveraged to create vaccines that saved us from a once-in-century pandemic.
One particularly dispiriting departure is that of Peter Marks, the longtime leader of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. I’d guess that, unlike me, you didn’t spend the early pandemic binge-watching scientific meetings where vaccine policy was debated. Marks was impossible to miss—a bespectacled man speaking from a bunkerlike basement, a painting of a polar bear serving tea behind him. He gets a hefty portion of credit for Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, the effort to turbocharge the development of COVID vaccines, and he came up with the moniker. His center also regulates gene therapies, stem cells, and the U.S. blood supply.
Marks reportedly resigned under pressure from Kennedy on Friday, just before mass firings hit the FDA. The two men—one, America’s top vaccine regulator and the other, its top vaccine conspiracy theorist—have a long history. In 2021, when Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization formerly chaired by Kennedy, petitioned the FDA to revoke authorization for COVID shots, Marks is the one who signed the letter denying the request. It’s reasonable to assume that Kennedy and Marks were never going to see eye to eye on vaccines. But Marks publicly insisted that he wanted to stay in his role, and that he was willing to work with Kennedy. In a resignation letter, Marks wrote that Kennedy demanded nothing short of “subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” (Marks declined to comment for this story.)
Of course, not all 10,000 people who were fired had this type of history with their new boss. But the cuts, in many ways, appear to be rooted in a similar antagonism. In his welcome address to HHS staff in February, Kennedy offered reassurance that he was not coming in with biases, and said that people should give him a chance. “Let’s start a relationship by letting go of any preconceptions that you may have about me, and let’s start from square one,” Kennedy told the crowd. “Let’s establish a mutual intention to work toward what we all care about, the health of the American people.” In firing a huge swath of his staff, Kennedy has made clear what he believes: Anyone with an HHS badge is complicit in the current system, whether or not they have anything to do with the country’s health problems. As Calley Means, a top adviser to Kennedy, said during a Politico health-care summit earlier today, the scientists who were laid off “have overseen, just demonstrably, a record of utter failure.”
Kennedy can argue all he wants that the focus of federal health agencies needs to shift more toward chronic disease. Means and other MAHA acolytes are right that, in some ways, America has gotten less healthy and federal bureaucrats haven’t done enough to solve the problem. But decimating the entire health bureaucracy in this country is not proving his point. Kennedy doesn’t look like he is setting the agencies on a productive new course. He looks like he’s just out for revenge.
Last night, X’s “For You” algorithm offered me up what felt like a dispatch from an alternate universe. It was a post from Elon Musk, originally published hours earlier. “This is the first time humans have been in orbit around the poles of the Earth!” he wrote. Underneath his post was a video shared by SpaceX—footage of craggy ice caps, taken by the company’s Dragon spacecraft during a private mission. Taken on its own, the video is genuinely captivating. Coming from Musk at that moment, it was also somewhat depressing.
X fed me that video just moments after it became clear that Susan Crawford, the Democratic judge Musk spent $25 million campaigning against, would handily win election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Given Musk’s heavy involvement—the centibillionaire not only campaigned in the state but also brazenly attempted to buy the election by offering to pay voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges”—the election was billed as a referendum of sorts on Musk’s own popularity. In that sense, it was a resounding defeat. Musk, normally a frenetic poster, had very little to say about politics last night, pecking out just a handful of terse messages to his 218.5 million followers. “The long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary,” he posted at 1:23 a.m. eastern time.
In the light of defeat, the SpaceX post feels like a glimpse into what could have been for Musk—a timeline where the world’s richest man wasn’t algorithmically radicalized by his own social-media platform. It’s possible that Musk’s temperament and personal politics would have always led him down this path. But it’s also easy to imagine a version where he mostly stayed out of politics, instead leaning into his companies and continuing to bolster his carefully cultivated brand of Elon Musk, King of Nerd Geniuses.
Unfortunately, he surrendered fully to grievance politics. Like so many other prolific posters, he became the person his most vocal followers wanted him to be and, in the process, appears to have committed reputational suicide. Since joining President Donald Trump’s administration as DOGE’s figurehead—presiding over the quasi-legal gutting of the federal government—Musk has become not just polarizing but also genuinely unpopular in America. Now his political influence is waning, Tesla is the object of mass protest, and sales of his vehicles are cratering. This morning, only hours after his candidate lost, Trump reportedly told his inner circle and Cabinet members that Musk will be “stepping back” from his perch in the administration for a more “supporting role.” In Trumpworld, nothing’s over until it’s over, but Elon Musk seems to have overstayed his welcome. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the White House referred me to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s post calling the report that Musk is stepping back “garbage”; Musk posted on X that the reporting is “fake news.”)
Musk’s appeal to Trump has always been about two things: money and optics. As the richest man in the world, Musk is both a cash cow and a kind of enforcer: His checkbook and closeness to Trump remind Republicans in Congress that they can and will be primaried if they break from the administration. But Musk’s reputation is just as important to Trump, who respects great wealth and clearly enjoys being shadowed and adored by a man of Musk’s perceived stature and technological acumen (although Trump is easily impressed—take, for example, “Everything’s Computer!”) Musk’s image in Silicon Valley was useful to the Trump campaign, bringing in new fanboy voters and sending a message that the administration would transform the government and run it like a lean start-up.
But although his money is still good, the Wisconsin election suggests that Musk himself is an electoral liability. A poll released today, conducted in Wisconsin by Marquette University Law School, showed that 60 percent of respondents view Musk unfavorably, and a recent Harvard/Harris poll shows that his national favorability dropped 10 points from February to March. (He now has a net favorability rating of –10 percent.) An aggregation of national polls shows that the approval rating of his DOGE efforts has also dipped dramatically: Just 39 percent of Americans approve of his work, nearly 10 points lower than in mid-February.
To many observers, it seemed inevitable from the outset that, over time, Musk would clash with, and alienate himself from, Trump, a man who does not like to share the spotlight. But behind Musk’s low favorability rating is a simple notion: Americans (including Trump supporters) are uncomfortable and resentful of an unelected mega-billionaire rooting through the government, dismantling programs and blithely musing about cutting benefit programs such as Social Security. Musk has long behaved in business as though laws and regulations don’t apply to him—a tactic that seems to backfire more easily when applied to politics. His posts, which use captions such as “Easy money in Wisconsin” to offer thinly veiled bribes to state residents for posing outside polling locations, aren’t just questionably legal; they’re blatant reminders that the world’s richest man was attempting to purchase an election.
There is also, perhaps, a creeping sensation that Musk’s efficiency hunt into the government has not yielded the examples of corruption that Trump supporters crave. During a Q&A at Musk’s rally in Wisconsin on Sunday, one attendee asked if DOGE had found any evidence that “radical left” Democrats have received money from USAID, and if so, whether Musk planned to share the evidence. Musk stammered, explaining only that USAID’s money flowed circuitously and that it was suspicious that members of Congress were so wealthy. Throughout the rally, Musk seemed more interested in role-playing as a politician, delivering “extended monologues about immigration policy, alleged fraud in the Social Security system and the future of artificial intelligence,” as TheNew York Times reported.
Trump may be realizing that though tech products and services may be quite popular, their creators are often less appealing. (Two-thirds of Americans have an unfavorable view of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, even as billions of people around the world use his platforms.) To those outside of the techno-optimist bubble, plenty of the obsessions of the tech elite (artificial general intelligence, cryptocurrency) can come off as weird or inscrutable. “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” Musk posted on X in the wee hours today, as if to prove the point.
Musk seems, at least outwardly, unable to reckon with his current position. Just days after framing this race as a hinge point for “the entire destiny of humanity,” Musk said on X that “I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for positional gain.” From the outside, though, it’s difficult to see what he’s gained. Last week, protesters demonstrated outside hundreds of Tesla locations; Musk has long been erratic, but his dalliance with DOGE has alienated environmentally conscious liberals, a major demographic for electric vehicles. And by seeming so focused on DOGE, he’s frustrated investors who worry that Tesla is losing its first-mover advantage in the United States. Foreign rivals, such as China’s BYD, are quickly gaining steam. Tesla’s stock price instantly rose 15 points on the reports that Musk would soon leave the administration.
There is a case to be made that Musk’s cozying up to Trump will ultimately benefit Musk’s empire—avoiding regulations that may help with Tesla’s self-driving plans or SpaceX and Starlink contracts, for example. But so many of the signs point to a less desirable outcome. Musk’s outsize support of Trump was always a political risk, but his decision to come aboard the administration and, at one time, position himself as a kind of shadow president is arguably the biggest bet of his career. In the short term, it does not appear to be paying off.
Musk woke up this morning less popular than he’s been in recent memory. He’s alienated himself from an American public that used to widely revere him, and his political capital seems to be fading rapidly. The only question now is whether, after getting a taste of the political spotlight, he’ll be able to give it up without a fight.
