Mass shootings didn’t start at Columbine High, but the mass-shooter era did. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s audacious plan and misread motives multiplied the stakes and inspired wave after wave of emulation. How could we know we were witnessing an origin story?
The legend of Columbine is fiction. There are two versions of the attack: what actually happened on April 20, 1999, and the story we all accepted back then. The mythical version explained it all so cleanly. A pair of outcast loners dubbed the “Trench Coat Mafia” targeted the jocks to avenge years of bullying. Dwayne Fuselier, the supervisory special agent who led the FBI’s Columbine investigation, is fond of quoting H. L. Mencken in response to the mythmaking: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
The legend hinges on bullying, but the killers never mentioned it in the huge trove of journals, online posts, and videos they left to explain themselves. The myth was so insidious because it cast the ruthless killers as heroes of misfits everywhere. Fuselier warned how appealing that myth would sound to anyone who felt ostracized. Within a few years, the fledgling fandom would find one another on social media, where they have operated ever since.
Around the world, Eric and Dylan are idolized as champions of “the nobodies.” Eric hated the nobodies. He mocked them mercilessly on his website and in his journal. He wasn’t a loner or an outcast, and neither was Dylan. Eric and Dylan made clear in their writings that they were planning the attack for their own selfish motives—certainly not to help the kids they ridiculed at the bottom of the social food chain.
They were not in the Trench Coat Mafia. They were not Nazis or white supremacists, and they did not plan the attack for Hitler’s birthday. They did not target jocks, Christians, or Black people. They targeted no one specifically. They shot randomly and designed their bombs to kill indiscriminately. That’s where “they” ends: Their polar-opposite personalities drove opposite motives. Psychopaths are devoid of empathy; Eric was a sadistic psychopath who killed for his own aggrandizement and enjoyment. Dylan was suicidally depressed and self-loathing. Eric lured him into punishing the world for the pain it inflicted on him, instead of punishing himself. Columbine was a suicide plan, but on “Judgment Day,” as they called it, Dylan would show the world the “somebody” we’d never seen.
The Columbine killers have fans. Eric and Dylan’s adoring online following spreads across nearly every continent, and it’s growing across multiple platforms. In Russia, the government, which has been plagued by an explosion of both Columbine fandom and mass shootings, estimates that more than 70,000 members exist. They call themselves the TCC, for “True Crime Community,” and I’ve spent much of the past 15 years inside their online world. My book Columbine made me enemy No. 1 for portraying Eric and Dylan as ruthless murderers.
In 2016, a young fan tweeted: “hey @DaveCullen block me or else i shoot my school.” She’d been ranting for hours, posting pictures of school shooters, and tweets such as: “It’s also something a lot of people need, To die….I wish i was dead…I LIKE VIOLENCE…I want to be killed in front of an audience. … I think someone failed to abort me (:”
These teens are ensnared in an American tragedy that just keeps growing worse.
I’ve tried to leave this story so many times, but this diagram haunts me, ruthlessly expanding like an unstoppable spider web, devouring all the lives and futures in its path. It demands that we address the cause—25 years too late. That web is made up of 54 mass shootings that have killed nearly 300 people and wounded more than 500. And every gunman left evidence that they were inspired or influenced by the murderers at Columbine. The Columbine effect.
Eric and Dylan’s bombs failed. Yet the legend made them heroic to their progeny and gave birth to their fandom. By the tenth anniversary, a small band of “Columbiners” had formed online. They gravitated to the TCC, to Ted Bundy, to the younger Tsarnaev brother, to Dylann Roof, and to others—but Eric and Dylan are the megastars. The groupies multiply, as fresh crops of teens join their ranks each season.
Most gunmen die in the act, so the 54 attacks itemized in the diagram are just the ones that we know of, and that were carried out. A 2015 Mother Jones investigation of Columbine copycats found more than two thwarted attacks for each one that succeeded. It identified 14 plotters targeting Columbine’s anniversary and 13 striving to top its body count. Surviving mass shooters have admitted that they were competing with one another.
All roads lead back to Columbine. The Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, wrote in a school assignment that he wanted to “repeat Columbine” and that he idolized its “martyrs.” The Northern Illinois University killer marked a third generation, explicitly inspired by both Virginia Tech and Columbine. Sandy Hook was the fourth generation; Adam Lanza had studied all three. Six more school shooters later referenced Sandy Hook and Columbine. Five generations of fallout, all reenacting the original legend.
Most early Columbiners were just curious teenagers interested in the criminal mind or in analyzing Columbine. Many still are, and their analyses are often useful. Many are angry about being tarred with the group’s reputation, but they have been outnumbered by new arrivals unabashedly calling themselves fans. Many use the killers’ faces as avatars, extoll their virtues, and compose love poems, fan fiction, and gory memes about them. Sue Klebold said she was shocked by the volume of letters she received calling Dylan “heroic” and by the number of girls saying, “I wish I could have his baby.”
How little these groupies know about the murderers they obsess over is ironic. They keep repeating the misreporting that was debunked decades ago, convinced it’s true because it has metastasized into TCC dogma. The TCC twists the story to recast the murderers as victims; and the dead, wounded, and traumatized as villains. The groupies didn’t start these myths; we in the media bear that shame. But the groupies are now the carriers, spreading the legend of Dylan and Eric to remote reaches of the globe.
Seventy thousand is a tiny fraction of the adolescent population, but a magnet for a dangerous cohort of marginalized, disaffected, and hopeless teens—a major pool of aspiring shooters. Most TCC members outright say that they condone the Columbine murders, often in their profiles. They have turned Eric and Dylan into folk heroes, and they celebrate them as avenging angels. Adam Lanza obsessed over the Columbine killers and spent years immersed in these groups online. Then he murdered 20 little kids and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Here’s the twist: Most of the TCC members I’ve engaged with describe themselves as awkward outcasts desperate to fit in. The TCC embraces them. The TCC feels cool—Eric and Dylan are super cool—and so they finally feel cool. I find it heartbreaking to hear them describe the pain they endure at school and the affinity they feel for “Dylan” and “Eric,” the fictional characters they’ve constructed. These kids are shocked when I tell them that other members of the TCC have told me the same—that they are putting on the same show, sure that all the others really mean it. Did Adam Lanza believe the posers? We’ll never know, but we can be certain that as you read this, a distraught, lonely kid somewhere is contemplating an attack—and the one community they trust is screaming, Do it!
Lots of kids fantasize about killing. Two days after Columbine, Salon ran “Misfits Who Don’t Kill,” in which three people came clean about their youthful fantasies of enacting mass murder. The phenomenon was widely reported that week. But none of those people did anything, because they knew how horribly wrong acting out the fantasy would be. Inside the TCC bubble, the constant message is that if your classmates are tormenting you, killing them is not just moral —it’s heroic and noble.
The TCC has a tell: Actual shootings unnerve them. Their posts grow quiet, respectful, and even mournful after some troubled young person heeds their call. I can gauge the change instantly, because the incessant harassment I get from them stops cold—for a week or two. Parkland was different: Six months went by before the taunts began trickling back in, and I haven’t gotten a death threat in the six years since. Why? I have no way to be certain about this, but my educated guess is that David Hogg, X González, and the rest of the March for Our Lives kids were suddenly cooler than the young shooters. And so much more powerful.
Eric and Dylan weren’t powerful—their plan failed. They’d planned Columbine as a bombing, the primary terrorist tactic. They thought they were launching a three-act drama: The cafeteria bombs would kill nearly 600 people instantly; what they called the “fun” part would be shooting up hundreds of survivors; and the massive car bombs set in the parking lot outside were to be the coup de grâce. Those timers were set to explode 45 minutes after the initial blast, wiping out countless more survivors and first responders, live on national TV. The Columbine killers’ performance was staged as the most apocalyptic made-for-TV horror film in American history. Eric complained in his journal that his “audience” would fail to understand. He got that right. He got everything else wrong.
Every element fizzled. All of the big bombs failed. Eric and Dylan went down to the cafeteria in a last desperate move to ignite the bombs with gunfire and a Molotov cocktail. Failed. Experts on psychopaths say they get bored after their initial kills, and Eric had likely lost interest. His gun’s recoil had broken his nose, so he spent that time in acute pain. The cops refused to kill them in the blaze of glory that they’d described as their final curtain. The smell of all the blood and already decomposing bodies was overpowering. Out of options, each shot himself in the head.
A more obscene and pathetic way to die is hard to imagine. Yet their fans have never confronted that ugly reality, because the opposite story took hold, making Eric and Dylan masterminds of the “worst school shooting in American history.”
The Columbine effect has gone global. It has inspired mass shootings in Finland, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Russia—as well as knife and axe attacks in places as remote as Siberia. In 2022, Russia designated the online “Columbine movement” a terrorist group. To comply with the ruling, my publisher required me to disavow the group in the Russian translation of Columbine. Mass murder inspired by those inept perpetrators is America’s most revolting cultural export.
I know when the TCC colonizes a new region, because I start getting a barrage of taunts in a different language. It’s a social contagion. Researchers have described school shootings as the American equivalent of suicide bombings—an ideology joined with a tactic. The phenomenon is escalating and self-perpetuating.
The Columbine groupies have no idea that they’re exporting a fraud. The media set this whole thing in motion 25 years ago. To untell a legend is a formidable task. It will be possible only when the media finally begin to convey how pathetic and gruesome the killers’ final moments were. The fans need to hear the ugly truth. Eric and Dylan viciously murdered innocent kids for their own selfish and petty agendas, and they died miserable failures.
This essay is adapted by the author from the new preface to a 25th-anniversary edition of Columbine.
In 2006, Oprah Winfrey couldn’t stop talking about The Secret. She devoted multiple episodes of her talk show to the franchise, which started as a kind of DVD seminar and later became a best-selling book. Its author, Rhonda Byrne, claimed to have stumbled upon an ancient principle, one that can teach anyone to manifest anything they want: money, health, better relationships. Winfrey retroactively credited its core philosophy for bringing her success, and her endorsement helped bring the book international fame: It has now sold more than 35 million copies. But in the era of endless scrolling, an author doesn’t necessarily need Winfrey’s stamp of approval. They just need TikTok.
Keila Shaheen figured this out last year, when her self-published book The Shadow Work Journal began to dominate the app’s feeds. A slim volume, the book purports to help people unpack their “shadow” self—the repressed unconscious—through various activities. In video after video, TikTok users show themselves filling out its exercises and talk about the journal as if it has magical powers. They learn about Carl Jung’s model of the psyche. They circle terms related to their trauma. They heal their inner child! If you use a new coupon on TikTok Shop, the app’s new built-in store, you too can heal, for just a couple of bucks! they say. (Many of those posting earn a commission from each sale, but pay that no mind.)
The journal has sold more than 600,000 copies on TikTok alone, and more than 1 million copies in total, a feat usually accomplished by the Prince Harrys and Colleen Hoovers of the world. Shaheen, a 25-year-old writer with a marketing background, is the new breakout star of the self-help genre. She even outsold Winfrey’s latest book.
Her story began in an untraditional way: Here is a young author, plucked from obscurity by a powerful app’s algorithm during a conveniently timed e-commerce push and turned into a best-selling phenom. Yet her next chapter is following an expected arc. She has signed a multi-book deal with Simon & Schuster to bring an updated version of TheShadow Work Journal to new audiences. Specifically, she is working with the brand-new imprint Primero Sueño Press, which will launch her book as its “flagship,” Shaheen told me, in addition to releasing a new Spanish translation later this year. The self-help queen of TikTok is officially going mainstream.
Shaheen’s popularity makes a lot of sense. We live in the age of therapy-speak; talking about one’s mental health isn’t as stigmatized as it once was. And yet a lot of people are still struggling. Teenagers—many of whom say they use the app “almost constantly”—are experiencing hopelessness and sadness at record highs. TikTok is known for authenticity, at least when compared with the picture-perfect posts on Instagram—it is supposed to be messier, more real. The kind of place where you’d talk about your struggles while in your sweatpants.
The Shadow Work Journal isn’t the only such success on the platform. One of Shaheen’s other books, The Lucky Girl Journal—which teaches readers how to manifest their own good fortune, rather than leaving things up to chance—has sold more than 25,000 copies on the app’s store. Don’t Believe Everything You Think, a self-published volume by Joseph Nguyen, a mental-health content creator with little notoriety outside social media, has sold about 60,000 copies on TikTok, and is currently in the top 10 most sold books on Amazon.
It’s boom times for self-help on social media. Kathleen Schmidt, who helped publicize The Secret and now runs a public-relations company (and writes the Substack newsletter Publishing Confidential), first heard about Nguyen’s book when her 16-year-old daughter asked for a copy. “I can see why it has caught on,” she told me. “It’s very simplistic, and it gives you big promises, like You’ll stop suffering,you’ll understand how to let go of anxiety, and all that.” A lot of self-help books, she explained, are too complicated or ask the reader to do too much; the more successful books tend to be accessible. If The Secret were published today, she argued, “it probably would have gone viral on TikTok and would have had somewhat of the same effect—but without Oprah.”
With all of this in mind, I asked Shaheen why she’d made the decision to go a more traditional route. It was over Zoom, during a meet and greet set up by her publisher (and attended, as far as I could tell, by just me, one other writer, and some folks from her team). “I think I was just at a time and place where I couldn’t control what was going on,” she said, of all the attention last year, “and it was very overwhelming for me.” She realized that if she “wanted to continue helping people and grow the impact of this journal,” then she “would need help from a traditional publishing company.” She said she’d entertained offers from various publishers before settling on Primero Sueño Press, which will take over the production of her books. And anyway, her books will still be available for purchase on TikTok Shop.
One publishing house she hadn’t heard from is 8th Note Press—which is owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. It appears to have acquired three titles so far, and published its first book last month; a representative for TikTok told me that it has seen significant growth on TikTok Shop and success for a variety of books and book sellers, but did not comment on Shaheen’s decision to sign with a traditional publisher.
Perhaps ByteDance has a little too much on its plate to prioritize courting authors. TikTok still faces the threat of a national ban in the United States. When defending itself in ads or before Congress, the app likes to tout how many small-business owners it supports—people like Shaheen. For some businesses, that’s definitely true. But with all the uncertainty about the platform’s future, a big, traditional publishing house can offer two things that never feel especially present on social media: stability and security. After all, Simon & Schuster has a pretty good track record. It publishes a little book called The Secret.
After a decade working as an obstetrician-gynecologist, Marci Bowers thought she understood menopause. Whenever she saw a patient in her 40s or 50s, she knew to ask about things such as hot flashes, vaginal dryness, mood swings, and memory problems. And no matter what a patient’s concern was, Bowers almost always ended up prescribing the same thing. “Our answer was always estrogen,” she told me.
Then, in the mid-2000s, Bowers took over a gender-affirmation surgical practice in Colorado. In her new role, she began consultations by asking each patient what they wanted from their body—a question she’d never been trained to ask menopausal women. Over time, she grew comfortable bringing up tricky topics such as pleasure, desire, and sexuality, and prescribing testosterone as well as estrogen. That’s when she realized: Women in menopause were getting short shrift.
Menopause is a body-wide hormonal transition that affects virtually every organ, from skin to bones to brain. The same can be said of gender transition, which, like menopause, is often referred to by doctors and transgender patients as “a second puberty”: a roller coaster of physical and emotional changes, incited by a dramatic shift in hormones. But medicine has only recently begun connecting the dots. In the past few years, some doctors who typically treat transgender patients—urologists, gender-affirmation surgeons, sexual-medicine specialists—have begun moving into menopause care and bringing with them a new set of tools.
“In many ways, trans care is light years ahead of women’s care,” Kelly Casperson, a urologist and certified menopause provider in Washington State, told me. Providers who do both are well versed in the effects of hormones, attuned to concerns about sexual function, and empathetic toward people who have had their symptoms dismissed by providers. If the goal of menopause care isn’t just to help women survive but also to allow them to live their fullest life, providers would do well to borrow some insights from a field that has been doing just that for decades.
American women’s relationship with estrogen has been a rocky one. In the 1960s, books such as Feminine Forever, written by the gynecologist Robert A. Wilson, framed estrogen as a magical substance that could make women once again attractive and sexually available, rendering the menopausal “much more pleasant to live with.” (The New York Times later reported that Wilson was paid by the manufacturer of Premarin, the most popular estrogen treatment at the time.) Later, the pitch switched to lifelong health. By 1992, Premarin was the most prescribed drug in the United States. By the end of the decade, 15 million women were on estrogen therapy, with or without progesterone, to treat their menopause symptoms.
Then, in 2002, a large clinical trial concluded that oral estrogen plus progesterone treatment was linked to an increased risk of stroke, heart disease, and breast cancer. The study was an imperfect measure of safety—it focused on older women rather than on the newly menopausal, and it tested only one type of estrogen—but oral-estrogen prescriptions still plummeted, from nearly a quarter of women over 40 to roughly 5 percent. Despite this blow to the hormone’s reputation, evidence has continued to pile up confirming that oral estrogen can help prevent bone loss and treat hot flashes and night sweats, though it can increase the risk of strokes for women over 60. Topical estrogen helps address genital symptoms, including vaginal dryness, irritation, and thinning of the tissues, as well as urinary issues such as chronic UTIs and incontinence.
But estrogen alone can’t address every menopause symptom, in part because estrogen is not the only hormone that’s in short supply during menopause; testosterone is too. Although researchers lack high-quality research on the role of testosterone in women over age 65, they know that in premenopausal women, it plays a role in bone density, heart health, metabolism, cognition, and the function of the ovaries and bladder. A 2022 review concluded, “Testosterone is a vital hormone in women in maintaining sexual health and function” after menopause.
Yet for decades, standard menopause care mostly ignored testosterone. Part of the reason is regulatory: Although estrogen has enjoyed FDA approval for menopausal symptoms since 1941, the agency has never green-lit a testosterone treatment for women, largely because of scant research. That means doctors have to be familiar enough with the hormone to prescribe it off-label. And unlike estrogen, testosterone is a Schedule III controlled substance, which means more red tape. Some of Casperson’s female patients have had their testosterone prescription withheld by pharmacists; one was asked if she was undergoing gender transition.
The other hurdle is cultural. These days, providers such as Casperson, as well as menopause-trained gynecologists, might prescribe testosterone to menopausal women experiencing difficulty with libido, arousal, and orgasm. Many women see improvements in these areas after a few months. But first, they have to get used to the idea of taking a hormone they’ve been told all their lives is for men, at just the time when their femininity can feel most tenuous (see: Feminine Forever). Here, too, experience in trans care can help: Casperson has talked many transmasculine patients through similar hesitations about using genital estrogen cream to balance out the side effects of their high testosterone doses. Taking estrogen, she tells those patients, “doesn’t mean you’re not who you want to be,” just as taking testosterone wouldn’t change a menopause patient’s gender identity.
Many trans-health providers have also honed their skills in speaking frankly about sexuality. That’s especially true for those who do surgeries that will affect a patient’s future sex life, Blair Peters, a plastic surgeon at Oregon Health & Science University who performs phalloplasties and vaginoplasties, told me. Experts I spoke with, including urologists and gynecologists with training in sexual health, said that gynecologists can often fall short in this regard. Despite treating vaginas for a living, they can often be uncomfortable bringing up sexual concerns with patients or inexperienced at treating issues beyond vaginal dryness. They can also assume, inaccurately, that concerns about vaginal discomfort always center on penetrative sex with a male partner, Tania Glyde, an LGBTQ+ therapist in London and the founder of the website Queer Menopause, told me. A 2022 survey of OB-GYN residency programs found that less than a third had a dedicated menopause curriculum.
Bowers, who is herself transgender, told me she got comfortable talking about sexuality in a clinical setting only after moving into trans care. If she were to return to gynecology today, she said, she would add some frank questions to her conversations with midlife patients who share that they’re having sexual issues: “Tell me about your sexuality. Tell me, are you happy with that? How long does it take you to orgasm? Do you masturbate? What do you use?”
Menopause care has already benefited from decades of effort by queer people, who have pushed doctors to pay more attention to a diversity of experiences. Research dating as far back as the 2000s that included lesbians going through menopause helped show that common menopause stereotypes, such as anxiety over remaining attractive to men and disconnect between members of a couple, were far from universal. Trans people, too, have benefited from advances in menopause care. Because both gender transition and menopause involve a sharp drop in estrogen, many transmasculine men who take testosterone also lose their period, and experience a similar (though more extreme) version of the genital dryness and irritation. That means they can benefit from treatments developed for menopausal women, as Tate Smith, a 25-year-old trans activist in the U.K., realized when he experienced genital pain and spotting after starting testosterone at 20. After he found relief with topical estrogen cream, he made an Instagram post coining the term trans male menopause to make sure more trans men were aware of the connection.
The more menopause and gender care are considered together in medical settings, the better the outcomes will be for everyone involved. Yet menopause studies rarely consider trans men and nonbinary people, along with younger women and girls who experience menopause due to cancer treatment, surgery, or health conditions that affect ovarian function. Although these patient populations represent a small proportion of the patients going through menopause, their experiences can help researchers understand the effects of low estrogen across a range of bodies. Siloing off menopause from other relevant fields of medicine means menopausal women and trans people alike can miss out on knowledge and treatments that already exist.
Unlike gender transition, menopause is generally not chosen. But it too can be an opportunity for a person to make choices about what they want out of their changing body. Not all women in menopause are worried about their libido or interested in taking testosterone. Like trans patients, they deserve providers who listen to what they care about and then offer them a full range of options, not just a limited selection based on outdated notions of what menopause is supposed to be.
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American society has a confused, contradictory relationship with animals. Many dog owners have no compunction about eating feedlot-raised pigs, animals whose intelligence, sociality, and sentience compare favorably with their shih tzus and beagles. Some cat lovers let their outdoor felines contribute to mass bird murder. A pescatarian might claim that a cod is less capable of suffering than a chicken. Why do some species reside comfortably within our circles of concern, while others squat shivering beyond the firelight, waiting for us to welcome them in?
In Our Kindred Creatures, their meticulously researched history of the dawn of the animal-rights movement, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy argue that America’s animal attitudes were largely shaped over a period spanning the mid-1860s to the mid-1890s. It was during those decades, Wasik and Murphy write, that many Americans came to realize that animals weren’t mere “objects” but “creatures whose joys and sufferings had to be taken into consideration.”
This moral awakening, described by one contemporaneous journalist as a “new type of goodness,” still influences Americans’ love of certain animals today, and our indifference toward many others. These disparate feelings, Wasik and Murphy suggest, are an inheritance from that late-1800s era. They are also influenced by spatial and psychic proximity: Most people are more likely to care about the well-being of a pet with whom they cohabit than a pig that resides in a slaughterhouse. The future of animal welfare in the United States may depend on whether Americans can expand their concern beyond the boundaries drawn by 19th-century reformers—whether, as Wasik and Murphy put it, we can apply our “reservoirs of pet love” to other, more distant creatures.
Wasik and Murphy’s book often makes for disturbing reading, so unflinchingly does it document humankind’s capacity for cruelty. In the 19th century, horses, ubiquitous beasts of burden in the pre-automotive age, were whipped mercilessly and forced to haul impossibly heavy loads. Medical-school instructors vivisected rabbits in anatomy lessons. High-society women sported fanciful hats adorned with the plumes of egrets, terns, and other birds “slaughtered wholesale for the cause of fashion”; offshore bobbed ships full of live sea turtles flipped on their shell, slowly dying as they waited to become soup. Every day in New York City, stray dogs were rounded up and “killed by drowning in a giant metal box … used to dispatch some sixty to eighty dogs at a time.”
Although Wasik and Murphy make the case that women eventually became central to the animal-rights movement, their account focuses principally on two men who were among its most forceful leaders. One is Henry Bergh, the dyspeptic heir to a shipbuilding fortune who embraced animal welfare after watching a bullfighting exhibition in Spain. Bergh’s approach was a punitive one: Beginning in the 1860s, he cajoled New York’s legislators into passing welfare laws, then, under the auspices of a new organization called the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, delegated agents to enforce those laws in cooperation with local police. His counterpart was George Angell, the president of the Massachusetts SPCA and the son of a Baptist preacher, who founded a newsletter called Our Dumb Animals and packed its pages with treacly poetry and stories written from the perspective of horses. Angell was a skilled rhetorician and salesman: When a compassionate “autobiography of a horse” called Black Beauty was published in the United Kingdom, Angell reprinted it in the U.S. (ignoring its original publisher’s copyright) and marketed it so ardently that one reporter speculated it would outsell the Bible.
Through legal and moral suasion, Bergh, Angell, and their conspirators made rapid progress. They passed laws preventing horse abuse, broke up dog-fighting rings, and nudged the meat industry to adopt less crowded train cars for cattle. In Philadelphia, a reformer named Caroline White opened a humane dog shelter at which strays were “fed a healthy diet of horsemeat, cornmeal, and crisped pork skin.” Those who weren’t adopted were euthanized in a carbon-dioxide chamber, which was thought to be less painful than drowning. Some species, then as now, were easier to promote than others: Bergh’s prosecution of a ship captain for mistreating sea turtles failed when a judge absurdly ruled that turtles were fish, and thus not subject to new welfare laws. Such setbacks notwithstanding, near the end of the 19th century, 39 of the country’s 44 states had adopted laws proscribing animal cruelty.
Although Wasik and Murphy share their subjects’ sympathies, they are admirably clear-eyed about their deficiencies, including some lamentable anti-science sentiments. Wasik and Murphy’s previous book, Rabid, tackled the history of rabies, and Our Kindred Creatures, too, spends time on that dread disease. Rabies, a common and deadly scourge in the 19th century, posed a contradiction to animal advocates. On the one hand, the development of a human rabies vaccine in 1885 was good for dogs: Once pooches were no longer terrifying disease vectors, people could welcome them into their home without reservation. On the other hand, the vaccine’s creation entailed copious animal experimentation, including “cerebral inoculation,” whereby researchers drilled holes in anesthetized animals’ skulls to infect them. Bergh and his allies deemed the rabies vaccine a “hideous monstrosity” and campaigned against its “evils,” seeming to recognize only the cruelties associated with the vaccine, and not its ultimate benefits.
Early welfarists had another blind spot: agriculture. Although Bergh and his allies occasionally waded into livestock advocacy, they railed primarily against abuses they could see: the horse whipped by his rider, the dog kicked by her owner. To Bergh’s mind, such public displays inculcated a culture of cruelism—the notion, as Wasik and Murphy put it, that witnessing meanness had a “coarsening influence on human minds … priming them for further acceptance of cruelty against man and beast alike.”
But a worldview focused on the prevention of visible cruelty proved a poor match for the meat industry. The slaughterhouses and packing plants that sprang up in Chicago in the late 1800s, for instance, concealed the brutality of their slaying methods—cows battered in the head, the occasional still-living pig dunked in boiling water—behind closed factory doors. Humane groups mostly ignored meatpacking’s horrors. The Illinois Humane Society even appointed the meat magnate Philip Armour to its board of directors and wrote him a praiseful obituary that, as Wasik and Murphy write, washed “away the blood of the countless millions of animals so cruelly disassembled in his slaughter factories.”
That cognitive dissonance—“the selective care for certain species and not others”—still afflicts American society. In their afterword, Wasik and Murphy argue that modern Americans, like their 19th-century forebears, need to adopt their own new “goodness,” one that emphasizes a “systems-driven moral thinking.” The misery of sows held captive in feedlots, or the suffering of wild creatures evicted by habitat loss, must become as real and urgent as the pain of chained dogs and starved cats. Meat-loving Americans would do well, Wasik and Murphy write, to reconsider the “patterns of consumption” that have led to the confinement of about 99 million cows and 74 million pigs. They might use their concern for pets as “well-springs from which to love, and to aid, all those distant, unseen animals we know only as abstractions.”
It’s a welcome proposal. Aside from that brief afterword, though, Wasik and Murphy’s book is almost entirely a study of the past. Our Kindred Creatures would have benefited from a more thorough examination of how early animal-welfare campaigns still reverberate—or don’t—today. Does P. T. Barnum’s deplorable treatment of captive beluga whales in the 19th century inform the campaign to free orcas and other cetaceans housed in modern aquariums? How have Indigenous-led efforts to restore bison to North America’s prairies managed to grow from the poisoned soil of 19th-century buffalo massacres? Lingering in the present would have made for a different—and longer—book, but also, perhaps, a more resonant one.
Our Kindred Creatures also could have spent more time on the evolution of wildlife conservation. At the animal-welfare movement’s outset, some of the same people and groups who inveighed against horse beatings and dog drownings also fought the annihilation of bison and birds. But those causes soon diverged, as scientists and upper-crust sportsmen came to dominate conservation and largely squeezed out the lay crusaders who had launched welfarism. Today, many animal-welfare groups focus on pets and livestock, while organizations such as the National Wildlife Federation and the World Wildlife Fund advocate for their free-roaming brethren. Some scientists seek to reunify conservation and animal rights via the wild-animal-welfare movement, which works to both protect creatures and make their daily lives more pleasant—for example, by studying the effects of light pollution on owls, and by sponsoring research that provides birth control to overpopulated and starving pigeons in urban areas. After more than a century of divergence, animal welfarism and conservation may once more align, potentially to the benefit of the wild creatures whose lives have been immiserated by human activity.
Ultimately, in spite of its accomplishments, the crusade launched by Bergh, Angell, and their peers remains unfinished. As Wasik and Murphy point out, early welfarists were fond of analogies as a rhetorical tool. Some activists even extended the logic of animal rights to protect children from domestic abuse; in one instance the authors write about, Bergh dispatched ASPCA agents to rescue a mistreated child and prosecuted one of the first child-welfare cases on her behalf. If the modern animal-rights movement is to continue racking up victories, more Americans should perhaps think in analogy. If dogs and cats deserve good lives, why not cows, pigs, and chickens? If elephants, tigers, and other large, charismatic mammals are worthy of protection, why not bats, reptiles, insects, and other smaller, less endearing critters? Animals have long been beset by not only human cruelty but also human hypocrisy. What they need now, perhaps, is moral consistency.
Over the course of World War II, countless challenges made basic transportation difficult, costly, and dangerous. The need for fast, efficient, and quiet ways of moving people from A to B—despite fuel shortages, damaged roads, and ongoing battles—led many soldiers and civilians to take advantage of bicycles as transport. Troops in some areas became more nimble, refugees used bikes to carry their family and belongings to safety, air-raid wardens could cover more ground on two wheels, and many civilians had no other options available. Gathered below are a handful of images of some of the many ways people put bicycles to use during the Second World War.
In the criminal case now unfolding in a Manhattan courtroom, Donald Trump is accused of having a sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, finding a way to pay her to keep quiet about it, and then disguising those payments as a business expense. The facts are all very tabloid-y. They also took place before the 2016 election, long before January 6 or the “Stop the Steal” movement, or any of the more serious threats to democracy we associate with Trump.
But the Stormy Daniels case has distinct and simple advantages: In the other, more sprawling cases that deal directly with election interference, Trump’s lawyers have been remarkably successful at piling on delay tactics and are unlikely to go to court any time soon. But in the Stormy Daniels trial, the defendant has been summoned, the jury is being selected, witnesses have been called. And the D.A., Alvin Bragg, has honed his argument that the hush-money payments were in fact an attempt to interfere with the election.
In his indictment, Bragg lays out a detailed case for why the former president, in hiding the payments, intended to violate both state and federal election laws. It’s a comparatively indirect case that he has no guarantee of winning. It will not bring legal resolution to the central question of whether Trump interfered in the 2020 election. But it makes the trial much harder to dismiss as just an old grudge about an affair.
In this episode of Radio Atlantic, staff writer David Graham tests the importance of the Stormy Daniels case with the Al Capone model: Can you most effectively address the most serious question of our political moment with the arguably least serious case? And he explains how, whatever the outcome, Trump might benefit from, and even enjoy, this new form of courtroom campaigning.
Newscaster 1: Donald Trump is facing more legal trouble.
Newscaster 2: He’s now facing four different felony trials as he runs for president.
Newscaster 3: Donald Trump is facing 37 criminal counts over retaining national-defense information.
[Overlapping news audio]
David Graham: It’s been overwhelming covering these cases. At the beginning, it was very exciting and sort of surreal, and then as they piled up, it became really hard to keep track of all of them.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: This is David Graham, the Atlantic staff writer who’s following all of Trump’s legal entanglements.
You may remember the civil trials Trump faced in Manhattan. Now on appeal, they total over half a billion dollars in judgments.
But Trump also faces criminal charges in four separate cases: one in Florida about classified documents, one in D.C. about attempting to subvert the 2020 election, another about election subversion (that one is in Georgia), and, lastly, the one we are talking about today.
It involves hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. And the main and very important distinction between this case and all the others? Trump’s lawyers have failed to bog it down with infinite delays. It’s actually underway, right now—the first criminal trial of a former president.
I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week, why this one matters.
[Music]
Rosin: So this week is the first time a former president has faced a criminal trial. What’s happening, and how big of a deal is it?
Graham: You know, it’s funny. What’s happening now is just jury selection. So we say the trial has started, but in a lot of ways, the main event is still to come. And this is kind of the dry, boring stuff—but dry, boring stuff that matters so much down the line. But here we are, you know, in this case about Trump paying hush money and whether he covered that up and whether it was an attempt to interfere with the election, as prosecutors say.
Is it a big deal? I mean, it is. It’s so weird. In the Trump era, I feel like, we’re like, Is it a big deal for the former president to be on trial for this particular charge? Which is both a valid question and also kind of a bonkers one. Of course it’s a big deal, but also not as much of a big deal as some of the other things. So I have a hard time calibrating it myself.
Rosin: Well, we can even start more elemental. Is it a big deal that a former president is sitting in the defendant’s chair at a criminal trial? Like, is that alone a big deal? Never mind the substance of the trial, which we will get to.
Graham: I think that is a big deal. And I think it’s a big deal that has been a little—we’ve been already acclimated a little bit to that by him sitting in the defendant’s chair for so many civil trials, and it’s possible to maybe even overlook what a big deal it is just for him to be there.
Rosin: Although the penalty in a civil trial is money. The penalty in a criminal trial is a conviction, like an actual criminal conviction. So even on those grounds alone, this seems unprecedented.
Graham: Oh, absolutely. In those cases, what he stood to lose was money. And in this case, he stands to lose potentially his freedom and certainly his clean criminal record, and I think that’s pretty different.
Rosin: Can you give me a brief explanation of the case? What is this case about?
Graham: It is a little bit arcane. Let me see if I can sum it up without missing anything, but also not getting bogged down.
Rosin: And also tabloidy. It’s simultaneously arcane, tabloidy, and important.
Graham: Well, it’s literally tabloidy too. I mean, this involves tabloids. You know, people may remember the case: So, Trump had these sexual liaisons with Stormy Daniels and other women, allegedly. He denies them. But the basic allegation is that Trump paid to keep their stories quiet. This is a complicated maneuver involving these “catch-and-kill” deals, where the National Enquirer would pay for the rights to the story with the express purpose of not running it.
And then money. Trump would also pay them—the money would come from Trump via Michael Cohen, who was then his fixer. And these things were recorded as business expenses. And what the prosecution alleges is that, in fact, this was political: The whole goal here was to keep the public from knowing about these allegations of sexual relationships, and that was an attempt to interfere with the election.
Rosin: So, essentially, it’s two steps. The first step—the first allegation—is business fraud. Like, you’re paying money and covering it up. It’s like an accounting scheme.
Graham: Right.
Rosin: So that in and of itself is a crime, but in the scheme of things not a deeply serious crime. Maybe the reason this takes on a different level of importance is because the prosecutor, the D.A. Alvin Bragg, is trying to link that to a form of election interference.
Graham: Right. And so there have been all these complaints: Well, you know, this case isn’t all that serious. It’s often compared to the classified-documents case in federal court in Florida or the election-subversion case in federal court in Washington, D.C., in an unflattering way. And what Alvin Bragg has tried to say is, No, guys. This is also an election-interference case. Trump was trying to keep the public from learning this information, which would interfere with voters. And so this is just as serious as these other cases. This too is election interference.
And I think that’s maybe more of a moral point than it is about the actual substance of the law. But when we’re thinking about how serious this is, I think a question that people have to think about is, you know, what are the stakes in this case? And that’s the prosecution’s argument.
Rosin: Right. We do have all these complicated cases, like the one in Georgia about election interference. But people see the one in New York as less serious because if he’s convicted there, it would be for bookkeeping and for under half a million dollars.
Graham: Yeah, this is what I call the Al Capone objection. You know, they got Al Capone for tax fraud, not for being a notorious mobster. I don’t know what to say to that, because I think it is true and also not true. Like, you know, let’s be serious. This is not as serious as the election subversion we saw in 2020. But also, you know, if they’re able to prove that he broke the law, then he broke the law.
Rosin: So, can we stick with the Al Capone example for a minute? Because I think it’s, actually, a pretty important way to think about this. I’m not calling our former president a mobster, so just leave that aside for now. It’s just a useful legal metaphor. In cases involving RICO statutes and extremely complicated crimes, like the election-interference cases—they’re unbelievably complicated and, in fact, the president’s legal team has managed to bog them down for months and months and, in some cases, years.
Graham: Right.
Rosin: It seems like, just like Al Capone and tax evasion, here you have a case that, even though less on paper is at stake, it’s straightforward and achievable.
Graham: I think that’s exactly right.
Rosin: And so you do end up getting Al Capone on tax evasion for a reason, because that’s a gettable offense.
Graham: Right.
Rosin: And none of these other cases are likely to move along before the election, right?
Graham: That seems right. You know, we just don’t know. I think the wild card there is what happens in the election-subversion case. The Supreme Court is going to hear that next week. We’ll see how fast they rule. It’s possible that we could see that case moving before the election. But you know, unless they move really fast, I think it’s easy to imagine not.
Rosin: Right. I think the last thing I want to say about this Al Capone metaphor is: So is the idea that if there is cause to hold Trump accountable for not playing by the rules, for any kind of attempt to interfere in democratic elections, this case is the last chance to do it? The only chance to do it?
Graham: It seems that way.
Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So is that a reason why this case is important? Maybe.
Graham: Yes.
Rosin: Okay. So who’s convinced who now, at the end of this?
Graham: I don’t know. I think over time, I have become more convinced of this case being serious. And part of that is, you know, we heard these challenges early on to the statute of limitations and the application of the law, and there’s still places where Bragg’s team could lose this, but he’s cleared some of those bars, including, notably, the statute of limitations. So I think he’s quietly proven that this case is a little stronger than some of its critics said at the outset, and that has helped to convince me.
Rosin: Let’s get into the implications for the election. What does this mean for his campaign? What does it change for him having to sit in that defendant’s chair for the next few weeks?
Graham: You know, we’ve heard of a whistle-stop campaign or a front-porch campaign, and now he’s running a courtroom campaign.
Rosin: Did you make that up, or does everyone say that?
Graham: I don’t know if someone else has made it up, but I did just come up with it on the spot as far as I know.
Rosin: That’s good. Courtroom campaignTM.
Graham: He can’t be out holding rallies. He can’t be out doing events. He can’t be out glad-handing. And, you know, this looks like an impediment to him. It may actually be something he likes. He has been holding not that many rallies so far this season. They’re expensive. I think they’re a hassle. He drones on. They’re not necessarily always that successful.
And, you know, he can go to this trial, where there are gonna be dozens and dozens of cameras on the courtroom and on the courthouse when he’s coming in and out. And he’s using that to try to get attention. So he has to run in a different way, but maybe this is actually to his advantage and allows him to sort of create the kind of media spectacle that he loves.
Rosin: Interesting. So it’s to his advantage because, one, it’s a free media spectacle. Like, we’re talking about this. There’s probably hundreds of reporters in New York. He is going to get a lot of coverage. Are there ways that he’s leaning into it, making that part of his message?
Graham: Oh, totally. He is just loving playing the victim. You get this in his fundraising emails. He’s always been sort of a high-volume spammer on emails. But the kinds of emails we’ve seen the last couple months, I think, are a different thing. He talks about miscarriage of justice, and They’re persecuting me, and They’re coming for me because I’m between you and them. And there’s just tons of this stuff. And so there’s both that stuff, and then I think you see him trying to draw the court system into battles that he thinks will benefit him politically.
Rosin: What do you mean?
Graham: Oh, anytime he picks a fight with a judge. So in this case, he’s been going after Juan Merchan, you know, saying his daughter’s a Democratic operative, saying that he can’t be impartial, blah blah blah.
Rosin: So [he’s] trying to portray the justice system—I don’t know if it’s part of the deep state—but as a kind of political cabal organized against him.
Graham: Right. Well, I guess it works in a bunch of ways. Like, one, he’s saying that Alvin Bragg is George Soros’s favorite prosecutor. So he’s saying this is biased, and he’s saying that, you know, this is a Biden prosecution. There’s no evidence that Joe Biden is directing this. In fact, Joe Biden is trying to stay as quiet as possible about this. But that’s what he does.
Then he wants to draw the judge into things. And I think that works in two ways: One, he can argue that the proceeding is totally, you know—it’s a kangaroo court, and they’re out to get him. And then, if he can draw the judge into engaging, maybe he can make that point even more salient.
And so that’s what we saw, I think, in the civil case with Justice Arthur Engoron. He, you know, wanted Engoron, it seemed like, to fine him, to gag him, to say critical things about him. Because then he can say: Look. See, I told you. I told you they were out to get me, and the way he’s behaving proves that they’re out to get me.
Rosin: Yeah. I mean, do you have a sense, or has it been reliably polled, how this plays outside with his audience? Because, for example, the mugshot. Like, he’s gotten so much mileage from that mugshot. It’s on a lot of T-shirts.
Graham: I think this works like a lot of Trump rhetoric going back to the 2016 campaign, where it really revs up his base. And you see in the polling, they think he’s being persecuted. They think the justice system is biased. They think that these judges are tools of the Democratic deep state, or whatever.
And on the other hand, it doesn’t do that well with other voters. It’s not winning over many independents. It’s turning some of them off. So, you know, he’s really good at turning up the temperature for the base but often at the expense, potentially, of turning off other people. And I think that’s going to be the case here, too.
Rosin: Interesting. And do we have any idea, in greater detail, how that could play out?
Graham: You know, it seems to be the case that a high-turnout election probably helps Trump. And there’s a lot of people who support Trump but are infrequent voters. And so he really does need to get those people fired up. But, you know, there’s a risk to it on the other side.
Rosin: Right. I see. One other thing I’ve noticed in keeping with this theme, as I’ve seen him on the campaign trail and in rallies the last couple months, is how much he closely identifies all of a sudden with the January 6—as he calls them, “the hostages”—talking about all of them as a group being unfairly persecuted. I feel like that’s coming up more and more in his speeches.
Graham: That’s exactly right. And he’s done that a little bit for a while, but it is becoming, really, a central part of his rallies. He’ll play these recordings of the January 6 choir. He talks about this hostage or sort of martyr attitude, and it’s become the centerpiece of a lot of these rallies.
Rosin: Yeah, and when I’ve seen him do it, I have to say, it feels less, who can know—I’m talking about intent here—less strategic than it is deeply felt and furious. It doesn’t feel like a ploy. It feels angry.
Graham: I think that’s right. I mean, it’s been interesting with a lot of Trump things that started out seeming like shtick and have started to feel like he really believes them, insofar as he believes anything. You know, I think about this with the way he talked about the media. Like, he blasted the media in 2016, and it was nonsense.
He loves the media, and he can’t resist calling reporters. But, over time, I think it curdled into a pretty serious enmity. And I think that’s true of the kind of deep-state rhetoric, and I think it’s true now about the court system. You know, after January 6, there was a certain amount of opportunistic talking about these people.
Rosin: Theatrics.
Graham: Yeah. I mean, and he waffled. He was like, On the one hand, I told them to go home. I called for a peaceful rally. But also, Why are they going after them? And also, Antifa revved this up. And you could see him sort of grasping for what the right messaging was. And as the court system has zeroed in on him, you see him coming around to that sort of hostage rhetoric.
[Music]
Rosin: Alright, well, depending on how long jury selection takes, this trial could be a matter of weeks. It could even stretch to a couple of months. After the break, David and I get into the meat of the trial.
[Music]
Rosin: So let’s get into it. How has Trump behaved in the run up to this trial?
Graham: He’s mostly been focused, as far as I can tell, on impugning the prosecutor and impugning the judge. So rather than going after the specifics of the evidence, he’s saying this is a political prosecution, this judge is biased.
And then, of course, [he’s] going after Michael Cohen, who we expect to be the star witness, who was his fixer, who was involved in these payments, lied about the payments to Congress, and was convicted of perjury for that and now has turned against Trump. And he’s saying, This guy can’t be trusted. He’s a convicted perjurer. Which has the benefit of being true.
We don’t see him so much going after the evidence. And part of that, I think, is a question of whether Bragg has evidence up his sleeve that we don’t yet know about. And so that’s one of the things I’m most interested to see: Does he bring something new to bear on this, or is it kind of a rehash of already public information?
Rosin: Right. Now, looking at the case, there are two parts of it, as we talked about. One is proving that the hush-money payments happened, that there was this complicated scheme involving the executives at National Enquirer to kind of shift money around—and Michael Cohen to shift money around, pay Stormy Daniels, and sort of hide that money and make it look like a legitimate payment. There’s so much public-record evidence that that occurred. Right?
Graham: Yeah. Like, the outline, you know—we’re gonna get details, but the outlines of that have been clear since fall 2016, when The Wall Street Journal first reported it.
Rosin: So is the difficult part of the case the second part of the case?
Graham: Yes. It’s tying this to politics and showing these weren’t a business expense, because it’s not against the law to pay someone hush money. It might be unsavory, but it’s not criminal. The question is whether there’s a falsification of business records and if the purpose was for political gain.
Rosin: So what’s in the public record is the existence of hush money. What remains to be proven is falsification of records and tying that falsification of records to election interference.
Graham: Right. And some of that falsification—you know, we have some of that. When Cohen appeared before Congress and perjured himself, some of that information came out. We saw some things that hint at what the case might look like. There have been, I don’t even want to say, like, intimations, but there’s speculation that Bragg has more evidence along those lines to prove that, you know, there was chicanery inside the business and this was a concerted effort. And that is something that we just, you know, we don’t know yet, and I think that will be really interesting to see.
Rosin: For you and others who are watching this case, what counts as a smoking gun? Like, what would be an incredible piece of evidence that the prosecutor could pull out?
Graham: You know, the gold standard would be a recording.
Rosin: And a recording saying what?
Graham: A recording of Trump saying, you know: Hey, Michael. Make sure we pay off Stormy Daniels. And then we’re going to put it in the books this way, so make sure that we do it that way so that nobody knows it’s to keep it out of the election.
Rosin: Right, right. All the way to the word “election.” That’s like the real smoking gun.
Graham: Yeah. You know, failing that, I think they’re going to have to rely a little bit more on witnesses like Cohen to say, This was the purpose, and potentially other executives inside the Trump organization or inside National Enquirer or—you know, or possibly Daniels. I don’t know.
Rosin: So this is a hard case to prove, both elements of it.
Graham: It’s a complicated case. I don’t know how hard it is, but it’s definitely complicated. This is, I think, where the Al Capone metaphor breaks down a little bit because if you’re evading taxes, you’re evading taxes. And it’s a little bit easier to pay that, but this is a multistep process.
And it’s a little bit more complicated. So yeah, it’s elaborate.
Rosin: Mm-hmm. Okay. How does this fit, then, into the broader constellation of other Trump cases? Can we do just a very brief rundown of the cases so we know where to place this one and how to think of them all together?
Graham: I mostly tend to think of them in terms of gravity.
Rosin: Okay, so let’s do them in terms of gravity.
Graham: Okay, so I think this is good. I think this is, although for all the reasons we’ve said, totally a relevant case and one that’s important, also the least grave.
Next up, I would say, is the classified-documents case. People became aware of this in August 2022, when the FBI went to Mar-a-Lago to collect these documents. But, as we now know, it was the culmination of a long process where the National Archives recognized they were missing things—like a letter from Kim Jong Un to Trump—and asked Trump to return them. And Trump, allegedly, over a period of months, refused and tried to hide them, claimed he didn’t have them, wouldn’t cooperate with a subpoena to return them.
And that’s, in fact, what he’s charged with here: not so much absconding with these documents but trying to hide from the government that he had them and trying to obstruct them, including documents that were, apparently, really sensitive national-security documents dealing with things like nuclear defense and foreign militaries and who knows what else.
Rosin: So that’s serious for a different reason, not for the reason of election interference.
Graham: Correct.
Rosin: Right. Okay. Next one.
Graham: So we have these two cases that both deal, in one way or another, with Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election: the federal case on election interference and the Fulton County election-interference case, in Georgia.
Rosin: And is there another one? Have we covered them? That’s it.
Graham: That is all, for now. (Laughs.)
Rosin: I guess the one thing that allows this one to rise in importance, even if the facts being discussed aren’t as important, is that it’s happening before November. Like, that fact alone makes it important.
Graham: Yeah, exactly. I mean, people have a right to know if the person they’re considering voting for president committed a felony or, for that matter, a serious misdemeanor before they go to the voting booth, if it’s going to happen soon after. And this might be the only chance for them to get that.
Rosin: Right. Although, David, do you think, maybe, we’re putting too much on this case? I feel like we’re maybe overlaying everything we know about January 6 and the 2020 election onto this criminal trial, which is actually about 2016.
Graham: I think that’s exactly right. Because the other cases seem bogged down and because we have seen Trump’s behavior and we saw January 6 and we saw what came before January 6, it’s impossible not to kind of see it in that light. And I think Trump is involved, kind of on the flip side of that, in the same way, because he is making all of these cases to be part of the same supposed conspiracy against him—you know, They’re all out to get him, and each of these is a tendril of that.
And also his argument that he can’t be held legally accountable—in all of these cases, he’s arguing that he shouldn’t be held legally accountable for one reason or another. And so, insofar as he is making it a question about rule of law, I think it’s hard not to also think about it as a sort of basic rule-of-law question from the other side.
Rosin: Yeah, I guess what’s hanging out there—both in the way that he’s delayed these cases and conducted himself in other ways—is: Is he above the law? So that’s the cultural question being tested. It’s not exactly the question that’s being asked by the prosecutor.
Graham: Yeah.
Rosin: Is it a weird, rare advantage that he’s running for president? Because he can just delay cases until he’s in office. I mean, that’s another incredibly unusual thing that we haven’t talked about.
Graham: Yes. So he can delay all of these cases, and then it plays in different ways if he gets reelected. If he gets reelected, he can, basically, instruct the Justice Department to end the two federal cases against him, and that would be that. And, you know, it’s not quite as simple as he picks up a phone, but it’s pretty close to that.
And you hear people threatening, Oh, it would be the Saturday Night Massacre. You would have all these people resigning. And I think what we’ve seen of the Trump team is they would say, And? So what?
It’s a little bit murkier in this case and in the Fulton County case. But you can totally be sure that if he wins, he will then say, I can’t be sitting in court. I can’t be defending these cases. I am the president of the United States, and I am busy doing this, and it’s improper to interfere with this. You’ve got to let me free on these things too, or you have to wait ’til after I’m president, or you name it.
Rosin: Right. So that would be yet another way in which things that were unimaginable X years ago were now perfectly routine.
Graham: Right. I mean, could you imagine, also, if Trump is president but has to be going to a Fulton County courthouse three or four days a week to sit in his trial while also trying to administer the country? I mean, I just can’t imagine how it would work.
Rosin: Yeah. I can’t, but I also couldn’t have imagined that somebody would be conducting a presidential campaign from the defendant’s chair in a courtroom. So lots of things we couldn’t previously imagine.
Well, David, thank you so much for walking us through this trial.
Graham: Oh, my pleasure.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend, edited by Claudine Ebeid, engineered by Rob Smierciak, and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
On a July weekend in Tijuana, in 1924, Caesar Cardini was in trouble. Prohibition was driving celebrities, rich people, and alcoholics across the border from San Diego, and Cardini’s highly popular Italian restaurant was swamped. Low on ingredients, or so the legend goes, he tossed together what he had on hand: romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese, and croutons, dressed in a slurry of egg, oil, garlic, salt, Worcestershire sauce, and citrus juice. It was a perfect food.
On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food.
We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi-dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce. In October, the food magazine Delicious posted a list of “Caesar” recipes that included variations with bacon, maple syrup, and celery; asparagus, fava beans, smoked trout, and dill; and tandoori prawns, prosciutto, kale chips, and mung-bean sprouts. The so-called Caesar at Kitchen Mouse Cafe, in Los Angeles, includes “pickled carrot, radish & coriander seeds, garlicky croutons, crispy oyster mushrooms, lemon dressing.” Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with cae on one tongue and sal on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”
It’s all a little peculiar, at least in the sense that words are supposed to mean something. Imagine ordering a “hamburger” that contained a bun and some lettuce, with chicken, marinara sauce, and basil Mad-Libbed between. Or cacio e pepe with, say, carrots and Christmas ham. To be clear, modifying the Caesar isn’t fundamentally a bad thing, as long as the flavors resemble those of the original. Baz likes her Caesar with anchovies (traditional! controversial! correct!) but said she’s happy to swap in fish sauce, capers, or “other salty, briny things.” Jacob Sessoms, a restaurant chef in Asheville, North Carolina, told me he doesn’t mind an alternative green but draws the line at, say, pomegranate seeds. Jason Kaplan, the CEO of a restaurant-consulting firm in New York, doesn’t mind a miso Caesar. “Because of the saltiness and the complexity, because it’s a fermented soybean paste, you know?” he told me. “That doesn’t piss me off as much as somebody saying that ‘this is a Caesar salad,’ when clearly there’s nothing to say it’s even closely related.”
The Caesar’s mission creep toward absurdity began long before the tequila and the fava beans. In fact, it has been going on for decades—first slowly, then quickly, swept along by and reflective of many of the biggest shifts in American dining. Michael Whiteman is a consultant whose firm helped open restaurants such as Windows on the World and the Rainbow Room, in New York. He remembers first seeing the Caesar start to meaningfully change about 40 years ago, when “hot things on cold things” became trendy among innovative California restaurants, and his friend James Beard returned from a trip out West raving about a Caesar topped with fried chicken livers. This was also, notably, the era of the power lunch, when restaurant chefs needed dishes that were hearty but still lunchtime-light, and quick to prepare. The chicken Caesar started appearing on menus, Whiteman told me, followed by the steak Caesar, and “it went downhill from there.”
In the 1980s and ’90s, as advances in agriculture, shipping, and food culture increased Americans’ access to a variety of produce, chefs started swapping out the traditional romaine for whatever the leafy green of the moment was: little gem, arugula, frisée. At that point, the Caesar was still found mostly in Italian American and New American restaurants. But as “fusion” took hold and culinary nationalism abated, the Caesar became a staple of Mexican American and Asian American chain restaurants, zhuzhed up with tortilla strips or wontons for a mainstream dining public who wanted something different yet familiar.
More recently, stunt food has come for the Caesar. “We’re living in a period of extreme eating, meaning extreme in terms of outlandish,” Whiteman told me, in which “innovation for its own sake” seems to be motivating chefs and restaurants up and down the price spectrum. Whiteman calls the resulting dishes “mutants.”
To some degree, the reason for all of this experimentation is obvious: Caesar salads—even bastardized ones—rock, and people want to buy them. “Isn’t it perhaps kind of the case that the Caesar salad might be close to the perfect dish?” Sessoms said. “It hits all of your dopamine receptors that are palate related, with umami, fat, and tons of salt.”
The Caesar is a crowd-pleaser salad, a name-brand salad, a safe-bet salad. It’s also a format that allows for a sort of low-stakes novelty. That helps explain the rise of the fake Caesar too. Though demand for restaurants has generally bounced back since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, labor and ingredient costs are much higher than they were four years ago. Just like Caesar Cardini before them, chefs are looking for relatively cheap, relatively fast dishes, and creative ones are looking for classics they can riff on without alienating customers. “Would untrained American eaters be more likely to order a Caesar salad than any other salad? Yes,” Sessoms said. Sometimes, when he’s trying to find a use for specialty greens—celtuce, radicchio—he’ll douse them in Caesar dressing to get diners to order them.
At the same time, Kaplan told me, it’s hard to overestimate how important the widespread adoption of the online menu has been over the past decade or so. Recognizable favorites sell. When diners can see what’s available before they make a reservation or leave the house, the menu is as much an advertisement as a utilitarian document. Appending the name “Caesar” to a salad is a shortcut to broad appeal.
Last week, I called up Stewart Gary, the culinary director of Nitehawk Cinema, the Brooklyn dine-in movie theater where I ordered that almond-and-pickled-onion salad. He told me essentially the same thing: In his line of work, people have limited time with the menu, and Caesar is a useful signifier. “Look,” he said. “If we called it a kale salad with anchovy dressing, no one would order it.”
Ancient philosophers were bedeviled by the question of whether the ship of Theseus retained its fundamental essence after each of its component parts was replaced one by one over the course of centuries. I’ve been thinking about salads for a few weeks now and feel pretty sure that a true Caesar requires, at minimum, garlic, acid, umami, cold leaves, hard cheese, and a crunchy, croutonlike product. Beyond that, you can get away with one or maybe two wacky additions before you start straining the limits of credibility. It’s about principle, not pedantry.
Besides, the more you learn about Caesar salads, the more you come to realize that pedantry is useless. The original Caesar was reportedly made with lime juice instead of lemon. It was prepared tableside and intended to be eaten by hand, like a piece of toast, “arranged on each plate so that you could pick up a leaf by its short end and chew it down bit by bit, then pick up another,” as Julia Child and Jacques Pépin explained in their version of the recipe. It was meant to be dressed in stages, first with oil, then with acid, then with a coddled egg (to coat the lettuce leaves, so the cheese would stick to them), not with the emulsified, mayonnaise-adjacent dressing common today. Crucially, it didn’t have whole anchovies.
As soon as the recipe began showing up in cookbooks, in the early 1940s, it started changing: Some recipes called for rubbing the bowl with garlic, or adding blue cheese or pear vinegar or mustard. In her headnotes for one of the earliest printed versions of the Caesar recipe, published in West Coast Cook Book, in 1952, Helen Evans Brown described the Caesar as “the most talked-of salad of a decade, perhaps of the century.” She then went on to note that “the salad is at its best when kept simple, but as it is invariably made at table, and sometimes by show-offs, it occasionally contains far too many ingredients.” The Caesar is forever, which means it’s forever being manipulated. For better and for worse.
In the fall of 2021, Gabriel Arias felt like his body was “rotting from the inside.” He was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a form of blood cancer so aggressive that doctors had him hospitalized the day of his biopsy. In cases like his, the ideal treatment is a transplant. Arias’s cancer-prone blood cells needed to be destroyed and replaced with healthy ones taken from the bone marrow or blood of a donor who matched him biologically. Fortunately, doctors found him a match in the volunteer-donor registries—a man in Poland. Unfortunately, Arias’s single match in the entire world was no longer available to donate.
In the past, the road to transplant might have ended here, but a medical advance had dramatically expanded the pool of donors for patients such as Arias. With the right drug, Arias could now get a transplant from his brother, a partial match, or, as he ultimately chose, he could join a clinical trial in which his donor would be a stranger who shared just eight of 10 markers used in bone-marrow transplants. Under this looser standard, Arias’s registry matches multiplied from one to more than 200. “It really is a game changer,” says Steve Devine, the chief medical officer of the nonprofit NMDP, which runs the U.S. donor registry and has led research into the use of mismatched donors. Today, agonizing searches for a matched donor are largely a thing of the past.
The drug powering this breakthrough is actually very old. Cyclophosphamide was first developed in the 1950s for chemotherapy. Fifty years later, researchers at Johns Hopkins began studying whether it could be repurposed to prevent a common and sometimes deadly complication of bone-marrow transplants called graft-versus-host disease, where the donor’s white blood cells—which form the recipient’s new immune system—attack the rest of the body as foreign. The bigger the mismatch between donor and recipient, the more likely this was to happen. Cyclophosphamide worked stunningly well against graft-versus-host disease: The drug cut rates of acute and severe complications by upwards of 80 percent.
Cyclophosphamide has now enabled more patients than ever to get bone-marrow transplants —more than 7,000 last year, according to NMDP. (Bone-marrow transplant is still used as an umbrella term, though many of these procedures now use cells collected from the blood rather than bone marrow, which can be done without surgery. Both versions are also known, more accurately, as hematopoietic or blood stem-cell transplants.) The field has essentially surmounted the problem of matching donors, a major barrier to transplants, Ephraim Fuchs, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Fuchs couldn’t remember the last time a patient failed to get a blood stem-cell transplant because they couldn’t find a donor.
It wasn’t obvious that cyclophosphamide would work so well. “I’m just going to come clean,” Devine told me. “Back in 2003 and 2005, I thought it was crazy.” Derived from a relative of mustard gas, the drug is known to be highly toxic to a variety of blood cells; in fact, doctors had long used it to kill the diseased bone marrow in patients before transplant. Why would you want to give such a drug after transplant, when the new donor cells are still precious and few? It defied a certain logic.
But as far back as the 1960s, researchers also noticed that high doses of post-transplant cyclophosphamide could prevent graft-versus-host disease in mice, even if they did not know why. Over the next few decades, scientists working away in labs learned that cyclophosphamide isn’t quite carpet-bombing the blood. It actually spares the stem cells most important to successful transplant. (Blood stem cells differentiate into all the types of red and white blood cells that a patient will need.) Why cyclophosphamide works so well against graft-versus-host disease is still unclear, but the drug also seems to selectively kill white blood cells active in the disease while sparing those that quell the immune system.
By the late ’90s, doctors saw a clear need to expand the search for donors. Bone-marrow transplants are most successful when donor and recipient share the same markers, known as HLA, which are protein tags our cells use to distinguish self from nonself. We inherit HLA markers from our parents, so siblings have about a one-in-four chance of being perfectly matched. As families got smaller in the 20th century, though, the likelihood of a sibling match fell. Donor registries such as NMDP were created to fill the gap, however imperfectly.
Doctors soon began coalescing around the idea of using family members who were only haploidentical, or half matched, meaning they shared at least five out of 10 HLA markers. Every child is a half match to their parents, and every parent to their child; siblings also have a 50 percent chance of being half matches. But when doctors first tried these transplants, the “outcomes were horrible,” Leo Luznik, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. Patients had frighteningly high rates of graft-versus-host disease, and more than half died within three years.
Based on the lab findings, Luznik, Fuchs, and other colleagues at Johns Hopkins wondered if post-transplant cyclophosphamide could help. The pharmaceutical companies that made it were uninterested in funding any research, Luznik said, because “it was an old, very cheap drug.” With government grants, however, the team was able to prove that cyclophosphamide got the rate of graft-versus-disease as low as in matched sibling transplants. By the late 2000s, transplants with half-matched family members were becoming routine.
Still, not every patient will have a sibling or parent or child who can donate. Doctors began wondering if cyclophosphamide could work for unrelated donors too. If only eight of the 10 markers have to be matched, then almost everyone would find a donor, even multiple donors. This was especially important for patients of mixed or non-European ancestry, who have a harder time finding unrelated donors, because people of those backgrounds make up a smaller proportion of registry donors and because they can carry a more diverse set of HLA markers. Two-thirds of white people can find a fully matched registry donor, but that number drops to 23 percent for Black Americans and 41 percent for Asians or Pacific Islanders.
Amelia Johnson, who is half Indian and half Black, was one of the first children to get a transplant from a mismatched unrelated donor in a clinical trial in 2022. Her mom, Salome Sookdieopersad, remembers being told, “You guys need to start recruiting bone-marrow donors to help increase your chances.” When that still didn’t turn up an ideal match, Sookdieopersad prepared to donate to her daughter as a half match. But then Amelia was offered a spot in the clinical trial, and they decided to take it. Transplants with mismatched unrelated donors had already been tried in adults—that was Arias’s trial—and they offered other potential benefits. A younger donor, for example, has younger cells, which fare noticeably better than older ones. Amelia did end up with a bout of graft-versus-host disease; cyclophosphamide lowers the risk but not to zero. Still, the transplant was necessary to save her life, and her mom pointed out that some risk was unavoidable, no matter the type of donor: A friend of Amelia’s got graft-versus-host even with a perfectly matched one. Doctors were able to treat Amelia’s complications, and she returned to school last August. The pediatric trial she was part of is ongoing.
In adults, where more data are available, doctors are already moving ahead with mismatched, unrelated donors. Between this and half-matched family members, patients who once might have had zero donors are now finding themselves with multiple possibilities. Doctors can be choosier too: They can select the youngest donor, for example, or match on characteristics such as blood type. The larger pool of donors also prevents situations like Arias’s, in which a single matched donor who signed up years ago is no longer available, which happens with some regularity. Cyclophosphamide is now routinely used in matched transplants too, because it lowers the risk of graft-versus-host disease even further.
Arias’s mismatched unrelated donor in the trial was an anonymous 22-year-old man who lives somewhere in the United States. When Arias and I spoke last month, it had been almost exactly two years since his transplant. He’s cancer free. He and his wife just welcomed a baby girl. None of this would have likely been possible without the transplant, without the donor, without a 70-year-old drug that had been smartly repurposed.
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Updated at 6:17 p.m. ET on April 16, 2024
Donald Trump is among the most famous and most polarizing people alive. The task of selecting 12 impartial jurors who can render a fair verdict in the criminal trial of a former president is a first for America’s court system.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Yesterday, jury selection began in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, and today, seven jurors were selected. The New York trial, centered on accusations that Trump falsified business records to conceal a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels, may be the only of Trump’s various legal cases to wrap up before the November election. Many Americans are set on their hopes for the trial’s outcome before it begins, which makes finding impartial jurors a real challenge. Ninety-six potential jurors were called into the courtroom yesterday—an unusually large number—and more than half of them quickly raised their hand to say they couldn’t be impartial and thus needed to be dismissed. Some prospective jurors who had indicated yesterday that they could be impartial changed their mind today.
The task of the judge is not necessarily to select people who have no feelings about Trump—that’s near-impossible. Rather, the point is to select people who can be impartial (about both Trump and other potential witnesses), listen to evidence, and follow the law and the rules given by the court, Sharon Fairley, a professor from practice at the University of Chicago Law School, told me. The jurors selected so far, whose names haven’t been released, reportedly include a young corporate lawyer, a man originally from Ireland who works in sales, and a young Black woman who said that some of her friends have strong opinions about the former president but that she is not a political person.
Criminal convictions, Fairley reminded me, require a unanimous decision from the jury. So Trump’s lawyers are likely hoping for even a single holdout—a person who is independent in their thinking and perhaps not a stickler for following rules. The government’s lawyers, for their part, are likely looking for people who are intelligent and discerning, who believe in the rule of law, and who are able to see through the “smoke and mirrors” that the Trump defense may introduce to the courtroom, Fairley said. Lawyers from either side can dismiss 10 potential jurors for any reason (so far, both Trump’s lawyers and the prosecution have done this with six potential jurors). Beyond that, Fairley explained, the judge has discretion in selecting people who he feels could credibly set aside personal feelings to render a fair judgment.
Trump has held tight to his narrative that this trial is a politically motivated “witch hunt,” a tactic that will only add to the court’s unique challenges here. Usually, the prosecution is more likely to generate publicity about criminal trials than the defense, Valerie Hans, a law professor at Cornell University, told me in an email—most defendants do not “have the public microphone of Donald Trump.” Already, Hans noted, one prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, has been trying to draw a distinction for prospective jurors between what they have seen about the trial in the news and the actual evidence that they will go on to see.
Part of the court’s challenge is weeding out people who are actually able to be impartial versus those who say they are because they want to get on the jury for their own reasons, James J. Sample, a law professor at Hofstra University, told me in an email. Ideological jurors could come from either side, Sample noted: “Yes, Manhattan is mostly blue. But might there be one true believer who wants to cement themselves as a MAGA hero? Absolutely.”
How each prospective juror voted will be of interest to lawyers on either side, but it likely won’t be the deciding factor in who gets placed on the jury—and lawyers aren’t allowed to ask that question directly. Justice Juan M. Merchan’s 42 questions for would-be jurors, including ones about whether they are part of advocacy groups or have attended campaign events for Trump (or anti-Trump groups), “suggest an attempt to find a reasonable middle ground here—not ruling out anyone who has some views on Trump or disqualifying them based on their vote in 2020 or 2016, but also making sure they’re not rah-rah activists either for or against,” my colleague David Graham told me.
There’s also a simple irony at the core of this whole process: The type of person best suited to be a thoughtful and credible juror in this case will almost by definition know something about Donald Trump. “A hypothetical juror who had never heard of Mr. Trump at all,” Sample acknowledged, “would be such an uninformed citizen as to be of suspect legitimacy from the jump.”
The trial is expected to last about six weeks (though it could take longer). After the rest of the jury is chosen, the trial proceedings will kick off in earnest, with former Trump-world figures including Michael Cohen and possibly even Stormy Daniels herself expected to testify. But in the meantime, the public and the defendant (who seemed to nod off on the first day) will need to sit through more of the same. As David told me, “Monday’s start to the trial was both huge in historic terms and mostly very boring in substance.”
The U.S. Supreme Court justices considered whether the Justice Department can charge January 6 defendants with violating an obstruction statute—a decision that could affect the election-interference case against Donald Trump.
Israel’s military chief said yesterday that Iran’s recent strike “will be met with a response” but did not specify a timeline or the scale of a retaliatory attack.
A federal appeals court ruled that a West Virginia law, which bans transgender girls and women from playing on certain sports teams, violates the Title IX rights of a teen athlete.
Evening Read
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
What Happens When You’ve Been on Ozempic for 20 Years?
By Gary Taubes
Of all the wonder drugs in the history of medicine, insulin may be the closest parallel, in both function and purpose, to this century’s miracle of a metabolic drug: the GLP-1 agonist. Sold under now-familiar brand names including Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro, these new medications for diabetes and obesity have been hailed as a generational breakthrough that may one day stand with insulin therapy among “the greatest advances in the annals of chronic disease,” as The New Yorker put it in December.
But if that analogy is apt—and the correspondences are many—then a more complicated legacy for GLP-1 drugs could be in the works. Insulin, for its part, may have changed the world of medicine, but it also brought along a raft of profound, unintended consequences …
With the sudden rise of GLP-1 drugs in this decade, I worry that a similar set of transformations could occur.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Courtesy of the author; FPG / Getty; Tom Kelley / Getty.
Care for a loved one. With the right amount of self-awareness, you can learn parenting lessons from raising a dog, Kate Cray writes.
Watch.Recent prestige TV shows have featured difficult men: heroes who are resolutely alienated, driven to acts of violence they don’t want to inflict and can’t enjoy, Sophie Gilbert writes.
