Remember when streaming was supposed to let us watch whatever we want, whenever we want, for a sliver of the cost of cable? Well, so much for that. In recent years, streaming has gotten confusing and expensive as more services than ever are vying for eyeballs. It has done the impossible: made people miss the good old-fashioned cable bundle.
Now the bundles are back. Last week, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced that, starting this summer, they will offer a streaming bundle of Disney+, Hulu, and Max. Then, on Tuesday, Comcast said that next month it will introduce a streaming bundle of its own, packaging Peacock, Apple TV+, and Netflix. This bundle, called StreamSaver, will be available only to Comcast’s broadband, mobile, and TV customers. Some smaller mini-bundles already exist, but for the most part, the streaming wars had become a battle royale—no alliances, everyone for themselves. Now the combatants have aligned in two blocs, sort of like the Avengers versus the Justice League—except that, confusingly, Marvel movies (Disney) and DC movies (Max) are now part of the same bloc.
It’s not cable, but it’s not not cable either. Streaming hasn’t quite come full circle, but it’s three-quarters of the way around. These bundles are ending an entire era of streaming, with its unsatisfying free-for-all of services. This new era may well be better than the one before it. But the dream of streaming as a cheaper, better version of cable is dead.
For a while, it did actually exist. When Netflix launched its streaming service back in 2007, the company pretty much dominated the market without much serious competition. You could watch basically everything with no ads, and for less than $10 a month. Then, beginning at the tail end of the 2010s, all of the big legacy entertainment companies tried to get in on the action. “For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars,” the media-industry analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November. The current streaming landscape, despite offering unprecedented abundance, is a nightmare to navigate. To watch entertainment now requires wading through a frustrating array of streaming services: Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu, yes, but also Peacock, Paramount+, AMC+, and others.
But this hasn’t brought in the types of profits that companies hoped for. Last year, Disney, Comcast, and Paramount collectively lost several billion dollars on streaming. Making and licensing shows and movies, it turns out, is not cheap. And people are willing to pay for only so many streaming subscriptions. Even when the new services managed to attract subscribers, they weren’t able to hold on to them; in industry parlance, churn was too high. Streaming services have tried to recoup their losses by raising prices, creating ad tiers, and cracking down on password sharing.
Going it alone hasn’t worked, so now they’re teaming up. Neither mega-bundle has announced details about costs, but Comcast’s StreamSaver will be sold “at a vastly reduced price” relative to individually subscribing to all three services, the company’s CEO, Brian Roberts, said during the announcement this week. Packaged together and sold at a discount, each streaming service will make less per subscription, but perhaps collectively they will be more competitive and hold on to more of their subscribers. That’s the idea, anyway.
For consumers, these bundles are probably a good thing. There’s a reason so many people rejoiced at the prospect of cutting the cord—but cable was simple. With streaming, keeping track of all your accounts and all your passwords and where to watch whatever you want to watch—that is not simple. And then, just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, one of the services you subscribe to informs you that you’ll have to shell out for the premium tier if you want to watch a certain show or movie. If you can convert three separate subscriptions into a single cheaper one, as the new deals will seemingly allow some people to do, that’s a win.
The new bundles don’t exactly restore order and sanity. The array of overlapping options is itself confusing. In addition to the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle, there is also a Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle, which does not include Max. But if you really want to watch sports, you’ll presumably go for the ESPN/Fox/Warner Bros. Discovery bundle, named Venu Sports. And if you’re a Verizon myPlan customer, you can subscribe to a Netflix/Max bundle—even though those two services are part of opposing three-service bundles, as announced over the past two weeks. Making matters even more complicated, some of the bundlers are already themselves bundles. Disney owns Hulu and ESPN. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN and Max. Bundles are bundling with bundles.
Even more bundles are likely in the works, and they may save people some money. But they will not resolve the fundamental tension in what people want out of cable, or streaming, or whatever it is that serves them up stuff to watch. On the one hand, we like having everything in one place. On the other, we don’t like paying a lot of money for things we don’t use. Cable satisfied the former desire but not the latter. Streaming, after the fleeting honeymoon period when you could find almost anything on Netflix, satisfied the latter but not the former. With the new bundles, the streamers are trying to strike a balance between the total consolidation of cable and the total chaos of streaming. That new balance may well be superior to the status quo, but the trade-off between having things in one place and paying for things you don’t need will remain. As long as it does, we’ll never feel totally satisfied.
No pope has ever set foot in China, but 10 years ago, Francis came the closest. On a flight to South Korea in August 2014, he became the first Vicar of Christ to enter Chinese airspace. Apparently that wasn’t enough. “Do I want to go to China?” Francis mused a few days later to those of us journalists accompanying him on his flight back to Rome. “Of course: Tomorrow!”
Francis has been more conciliatory to the People’s Republic than any of his predecessors. His approach has brought some stability to the Church in China, but it has also meant accepting restrictions on the religious freedom of Chinese Catholics and undermining the Vatican’s credibility as a champion of the oppressed. Francis sees himself as holding the Chinese Church together; he might be helping to stifle it in the process.
That trade-off becomes apparent when comparing the two major groups that make up China’s estimated 10 million Catholics. One is the state-controlled Church, overseen by the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which has a long history of appointing bishops without the Vatican’s approval—a nightmare for popes because it presents the danger of a schism. In 2018, Francis mitigated that threat by negotiating an agreement in which the Chinese government and the Vatican cooperate on the appointment of bishops. The details of the pact, which is up for renewal in the fall, remain secret, but the pope has said it gives him final say. In return, the Vatican promised not to authorize any bishop that Beijing doesn’t support.
The agreement came at the expense of China’s second group of Catholics: the so-called underground Church, which previously ordained its own bishops with Rome’s approval and is now in effect being told by the Vatican to join the state-controlled Church. The underground community rejects President Xi Jinping’s campaign of “Sinicization,” a program that seeks to reinforce Chinese national identity, in part by demanding that all religious teaching and practice accord with the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Occasionally that means prohibiting religious worship entirely: Shortly before the Vatican and Beijing signed the deal, new legislation went into effect that led to stricter enforcement of such rules as a ban on minors attending Mass. And sometimes Sinicization means muddling Catholic doctrine with CCP dogma. As one priest in the official Church claimed in 2019, “The Ten Commandments and the core socialist values are the same.”
Whether the Chinese Church can remain authentically Catholic in the face of Sinicization is an open question. That Francis came to terms with the government just as the program intensified felt to some underground Catholics like a betrayal, a sign that he might tolerate the continued compromising of their faith. He accommodates Beijing in order to stabilize the Church in China, but Chinese authorities aren’t interested in the faith that Francis professes. They’ve made clear that they want a Church that submits to the state; such a Church might be stable, but would it be Catholic?
Safeguarding orthodox Catholicism in China depends on whether Francis and his successors can strike the right balance between cooperation and confrontation. The Vatican must cultivate greater influence in Beijing while also defending the faith—a daunting challenge for even the canniest diplomat.
The past six years make clear that the agreement on bishops has largely been a disappointment. Even some in the Vatican concede that it hasn’t lived up to expectations. “We would have liked to see more results,” Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s equivalent of a foreign minister, told America magazine in 2022. (The Vatican declined to comment for this article.) Only nine bishops have been consecrated under the agreement, and some 40 dioceses still have no leader. In the meantime, Beijing is happy to leave those dioceses under the administration of mere priests, Father Gianni Criveller, the editorial director of the Catholic publication AsiaNews, told me. Because bishops possess greater authority, they are harder for the government to control.
The agreement has yielded three new bishops in the past six months—the first new ones since 2021—but little else suggests much improvement in the relationship between the Vatican and China. Formal diplomatic relations remain a distant prospect, and China has rebuffed the Vatican’s proposal for a permanent representative office in Beijing, according to a Vatican official with knowledge of the talks, who described them on the condition of anonymity. The latest “Five-Year Plan for the Sinicization of Catholicism in China,” adopted by the government-controlled Church in December, makes no reference to the Vatican or the pope.
Still, the Vatican achieved its primary goal of reducing the risk of schism. “The aim is the unity of the Church,” said Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, defending the agreement in 2020. “All the bishops in China are in communion with the pope. There are no more illegitimate bishops.” Unity, in this case, means integrating China’s underground clergy into Beijing’s state-recognized hierarchy. In other words, Chinese Catholicism will be more and more controlled by the government, an undesirable outcome for Francis but one that he’s apparently willing to bear.
Some see that calculation as prudent. Francesco Sisci, a Sinologist and an expert on Vatican-China relations, told me that if the Vatican continued cooperating with the underground Church and holding the CCP at a distance, “you have to wait for the current power to fall, and who knows if the new power will be better than the old? In my opinion, the choice to go underground is much riskier.” As Richard Madsen, a professor emeritus of sociology at UC San Diego, put it to me, the agreement on bishops “gives a certain stability to the Church … so that in the long run it can develop and flourish.”
But Catholicism in China certainly doesn’t seem to be flourishing now. As Fenggang Yang, a sociology professor at Purdue University, told me, the Vatican’s conciliatory approach has demoralized Chinese Catholics. The agreement has put greater pressure on the underground churches to join the official Church, he noted, reducing their freedom to evangelize. The Vatican knew this was coming. In 2023, Archbishop Gallagher said that the deal “was always going to be used by the Chinese party to bring greater pressure on the Catholic community, particularly on the so-called underground Church.” Still, he defended the agreement, calling it “what was possible at the time.” Not all Chinese Christians are having such difficulty; Yang said that the decentralized evangelical Protestant “house churches” have continued to grow despite repression.
History suggests that resistance rather than compromise makes for a vital Church. During the Cold War, the Vatican pursued a policy of accommodation with Communist states in the Soviet bloc, negotiating over the appointment of bishops. But it was in Poland—where the Catholic hierarchy was least cooperative with the authorities, and where an underground Church was strongest—that Catholicism remained most vibrant.
Unlike Poland, China has only a small Catholic minority. But even there, the more uncompromising and persecuted portion of the faithful—the underground Church—has the higher morale, Criveller told me. “Those in the official Church are theoretically freer because they do not have to worship in secret, but in fact all their initiatives must be approved and agreed on with the officials in charge of religious affairs,” he said. “They are more easily discouraged.” Criveller noted that many Catholics in the state-controlled Church lose respect for bishops and clergy who are seen as “too aligned with government policy.” Ceding ground to Beijing might limit oppression, but it can weaken the authority of the Church.
The pope’s willingness to negotiate the 2018 agreement reflects two central features of his pontificate: his multipolar view of the world and his preference for dialogue over confrontation. Francis often flouts the geopolitical consensus of the West, questioning its authority and sympathizing with its adversaries—suggesting, for example, that NATO may have provoked the war in Ukraine by “barking at Russia’s gate.” China’s increasing power, which has so alarmed the West, is for Francis all the more reason to engage the country. While calling for the religious freedom of Christians in China and elsewhere, he also seeks closer ties with the governments that persecute them.
These tendencies have become more pronounced since the deal. The Vatican has grown both more conciliatory toward the state-controlled Church and less supportive of the underground Church. In 2019, the Vatican publicly encouraged underground clergy to comply with the CCP’s demand to register with civil authorities, even though they would be required to sign a statement endorsing the “independence, autonomy and self-administration” of the Church in China.At least 10 underground bishops have refused, according to the Vatican official; one was arrested earlier this year.
In another sign of acquiescence, Rome begrudgingly accepted the decision by Chinese authorities to transfer a bishop to its Shanghai diocese last year without consulting the pope. The bishop, Joseph Shen Bin, is the head of the Chinese bishops’ conference, which the Vatican doesn’t recognize, and an avid proponent of Sinicization. As he recently told an interviewer, “We must adhere to patriotism and love for the Church, uphold the principle of independence and self-management of the Church … and persist in the direction of Sinicization of Catholicism in China. This is the bottom line, no one can violate it, and it is also a high-voltage line, no one should touch it.”
Vatican officials have suggested that Sinicization is akin to the Catholic Church’s long-standing practice of inculturation—that is, presenting the Church’s teachings and practices in the terms of different cultures. But Yang, the Purdue professor, makes a crucial distinction: The goal of Sinicization, he argued in Christianity Today, “is not cultural assimilation but political domestication—to ensure submission to the Chinese Communist party-state.”
Shen Bin is forthright about this. In another recent interview, he stressed that Sinicization means not only adapting liturgy and sacred art to traditional Chinese culture, but also interpreting Catholic teaching in accordance with Communist doctrine. Sinicization, he said, “should use the core socialist values as guidance to provide a creative interpretation of theological classics and religious doctrines that aligns with the requirements of contemporary China’s development and progress, as well as with China’s splendid traditional culture.” Shen Bin is scheduled to speak next week at an academic conference at the Vatican, alongside the Vatican secretary of state. By accepting the dominance of the official Church, whose bishops Shen Bin leads, Rome is in practice accepting the supremacy of politics over religion.
Another cost of Francis’s overtures has come in the form of his silence about China’s human-rights violations. In July 2020, amid China’s crackdown on prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong, Francis decided not to deliver prepared remarks calling for “nonviolence, and respect for the dignity and rights of all” in the city, and voicing hope that “social life, and especially religious life, may be expressed in full and true freedom.” Vatican diplomats privately expressed puzzlement at the pope’s decision.
Francis has drawn particular criticism for his failure to denounce China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority, whom Beijing has forced into reeducation camps to eradicate their religion and culture—a striking omission given the pope’s emphasis on promoting dialogue with Islam. The most he’s said on the matter came in a book published in 2020, in which he made a brief reference to “the poor Uighurs,” including them in a list of “persecuted peoples.”
The Vatican’s reluctance to denounce China has also caused tension in its dealings with the United States. In September 2020, then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seemed to criticize Pope Francis’s relative silence while speaking to an audience in Rome that included the Vatican’s foreign minister. After noting the Vatican’s unique ability to help protect religious freedom in China, he admonished: “Earthly considerations shouldn’t discourage principled stances based on eternal truths.” Sisci, the Sinologist, told me that Pompeo’s comments only helped Francis in his dealing with the Chinese authorities, reassuring them that the pope was not “an instrument of U.S. policy.”
For now, the agreement on bishops is temporary, requiring renewal every two years. This raises the question of what Francis’s successor might do. The next pope likely won’t have his hands tied; he will be free to join the West in taking a more confrontational—or, as Pompeo would have it, principled—tack with China.
Alternatively, he can wait and see if Francis’s approach bears fruit. There’s an old saying that applies to the Church and China in equal measure: They think in centuries. The wait could be a while.
American Bloods—what a title! Hammering out agreement on the meaning of American is hard enough, but factor in blood—our precious bodily fluid, susceptible to poisoning in the fevered fascist imagination—and a brawl might just be brewing. If you’ve figured out that Blood is a surname, the subtitle of John Kaag’s new book (The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation) could possibly defuse the situation, but it too is provocative: If the Blood dynasty shaped the nation, why have we never heard of it?
Kaag, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, lives in a house on the banks of the Concord River that was built in 1745 by a colonial named Josiah Blood. A decade later, in that same house, Thaddeus Blood was born. He was at the scene with a musket on April 19, 1775, when the “shot heard round the world” was fired; as an old man, he was interviewed about the experience by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Kaag saw that the Blood clan would offer him a chance to explore big ideas in relation to individual lives, to start close to home and expand outward, weaving together personalities, cultural history, and philosophy in an attempt to ask not just where we came from but where we’re going.
Kaag sets out to trace the nation’s growth (and “excruciating growing pains”) as refracted through “one of America’s first and most expansive pioneer families,” whose lineage happens to run straight through his family home. Listed in the index of a privately published genealogy he finds in his house are thousands of Bloods, from Aaron to Zebulon. In addition to Josiah and Thaddeus, Kaag plucks out a handful of others, curious characters born between 1618 and 1838, who found themselves in the thick of roiling history or crossed paths with famous American thinkers.
Kaag makes the case that, “unlike many other more visible or iconic American dynasties” (he mentions the Cabots, Lowells, Astors, Roosevelts), the Bloods
consistently, and with remarkable regularity, reveal a particular frontier ethos: their genealogy tracks what Henry David Thoreau called “wildness,” an original untamed spirit that would recede in the making of America but never be extinguished entirely. The United States may have been founded on “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but it was always shot through with something unbalanced, heedless, undomesticated, fearful.
The making of America meant pushing back the frontier, establishing civilization where before, as the Puritan William Bradford testified, there had been “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men.” Kaag asserts that New England colonials drew a clear, unwavering line between the civilized and the wild, but he believes that the Blood dynasty shared a more complicated ethos: Its members “continually explored life and its extremes,” absorbing the lesson that “human existence was not cleanly demarcated but unshakably wild.”
Hardly alone in wanting, just now, to weigh the risk of mayhem in America, he asks, “What untamed stories lie beneath the skin of our more or less well-functioning society? How persistent is the wildness that once defined our country?” The answers, he warns, won’t be tidy, though he can’t resist assigning conveniently emblematic roles to his small sample of Zelig-like Bloods.
Naked opportunism guided the first figure in Kaag’s book: Thomas Blood, who was not American but is the most notorious individual to bear the name. In 1671, he tried to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. A rogue as well as a thief, Thomas sets the tone for the American branch of the family, which was started by his nephews, who were among the early New England settlers, arriving sometime in the 1630s. By mid-century, Robert Blood had established a farm on a 3,000-acre tract just north of Concord, then very much the frayed edge of civilization. A “troublesome” man, Robert was a good citizen when it suited him and a renegade when taxes fell due. He nonetheless understood that the best defense against external threats was neighborly cooperation. The wary dance he did with local authority, in Kaag’s telling, “presages in miniature the political dynamics” as the colonies began to rebel against the British Crown.
The old favorites Emerson and Thoreau, Transcendentalists who championed American cultural independence and the primacy of the individual soul, take the stage as Kaag fast-forwards roughly a century to focus on Bloods intersecting with homegrown ferment. Robert’s great-great-grandson Thaddeus made an enduring impression on Emerson, who admired the rare courage that the veteran of the skirmish at the Old North Bridge had displayed as a young minuteman. Kaag suggests (though certainly doesn’t prove) that Emerson’s conversation with Thaddeus in 1835 was the catalyst for what he calls Emerson’s own “acts of insurrection”: two speeches delivered in the next several years, “The American Scholar” and the bombshell “Divinity School Address,” in which he renounced all organized religion (and in particular what he elsewhere derided as “corpse-cold Unitarianism”).
“The American Scholar” called for a new type of educated American, an active, engaged intellectual boldly embracing the rough-and-tumble of a new nation—what a pleasure to see the 34-year-old Emerson roll up his sleeves and resolve to “run eagerly into this resounding tumult,” to take his place “in the ring to suffer and to work”! And yet Kaag’s next Blood, Perez, son of Thaddeus, shrank from the tumult. A recluse and an amateur astronomer, Perez spent his time in his woodshed, seated on a swivel chair, peering at the heavens through a telescope. Undeterred, Kaag finds a way to fit him into his exploration of wildness by claiming that Perez had a “lasting and profound” friendship with Thoreau and helped him “define his conception of human freedom.” In the first sentence of “Walking” (an essay published in this magazine, posthumously, in 1862), Thoreau associates wildness with “absolute freedom”—as distinct from “a freedom and culture merely civil.” According to Kaag, both Perez and Thoreau freed themselves from “the tawdry distractions of modern life,” and the eccentric old stargazer inspired Thoreau “to see the inner, noble form of a seemingly common man.”
The resounding tumult returns with James Clinton Blood, a co-founder and the first mayor of Lawrence, Kansas, and a passing acquaintance of John Brown, whose gory attacks on militant pro-slavery settlers helped give “Bloody Kansas” its name. James had gone west as part of an abolitionist scheme to keep the territory from becoming a slave state, and acted as an agent and a scout, buying up land from Native tribes. He survived the Lawrence Massacre of 1863 (when Confederate guerrillas killed some 150 unarmed men and boys), and in the postwar decades “happily watched the frontier town civilize itself.”
James is meant to be representative of the many Bloods who participated in the settlement of the American West and who “came to understand the border as a paradoxical space, where the most vicious of beings could also be the most vulnerable.” I don’t know whom Kaag is referring to in that last clause or what he means. He’s keenly aware that we can’t contemplate “the bleeding of Kansas” unless we reckon with the calamitous war fought over the moral abomination of slavery and also the genocidal persecution of the Native population. In earlier chapters, he mentions a few of the enslaved people bought and sold by various 18th-century Bloods, and here he describes the dismal fate of the Plains tribes who were cheated out of their land or driven off or simply exterminated. We never learn, though, whether James’s land deals were made in good faith or how other untamed Bloods fared on the new frontier. This seems the wrong moment to fudge: The stories we tell about how, exactly, the Wild West civilized itself color our ideas about who we are as a nation.
American Bloodsis not a panoramic intellectual history or even a conjoined narrative. Nor does Kaag substantiate the claim that the Bloods “circulated through each era, an animating force of American history, just below the surface.” Don’t let the fancy blood metaphor distract you: Heredity cannot plausibly account for the persistence of an ideology or a spirit over a span of centuries. Instead of telling an unbroken story, Kaag has assembled a series of portraits, some more engaging than others, the degree of interest determined by which great men are adjacent to the male Blood in question. At one point, he alludes to what he calls “a largely forgotten counternarrative: the Blood women.” But his only substantive contribution to that counternarrative is to present us with the charismatic women’s-rights advocate Victoria Woodhull, who married Colonel James Harvey Blood, a veteran of the Union Army and a committed spiritualist. Kaag calls Woodhull “arguably the most famous and scandalous of the American Bloods,” and it’s perfectly obvious why he would want to adopt her: Extreme and mercurial, she’s an ideal embodiment of many divergent, unconventional responses to the trauma of the Civil War.
Victoria met James in St. Louis in the mid-1860s. Twenty-six years old and strikingly beautiful, she was working as a medium and a “spiritual physician” when James consulted her, seeking treatment for wounds suffered in battle. She fell into a trance and announced that their destinies were linked. James liked the idea: Obeying the spirits, they left St. Louis and their spouses behind. The new marriage lasted barely a decade—but it was some decade.
In New York, the soothsaying of this Blood-by-marriage morphed into investment advice (lapped up by an aged Cornelius Vanderbilt), and Victoria made “an utter fortune from her wildness,” as Kaag puts it. She founded a brokerage house and a crusading weekly newspaper, and waged energetic campaigns for free love and equal rights. Kaag concedes that Victoria’s “methods” as a healer and fortune teller “were fraudulent—which is to say too wild for belief.” He doesn’t try to make sense of her dishonesty, or condemn the blatant hypocrisy of her final incarnation: Having ditched James, she married a rich English banker, renouncing radicalism to secure for herself “the standing and success that women of previous generations could not have envisioned.” Kaag leaves it to the reader to connect her successive self-reinventions with the larger Blood narrative.
Having toured this gallery of “untamed beasts” exhibiting so many different shades of American wildness, we might ask what wild means to Kaag himself. I’m not sure. But it’s clear that one important step in his quest to make space for the “contradictions and tensions and paradoxes” of daily life has been coming to terms with Benjamin Blood, a promiscuously talented poet-philosopher. Benjamin’s rhapsodic mysticism, eccentricity, and primal vigor were particularly appealing to William James. This Blood taught Kaag’s hero that “the secret of Being,” in James’s words, “is not the dark immensity beyond knowledge, but at home, this side, beneath the feet, and overlooked by knowledge.”
A practical idealist, high-minded yet of the people (he’s been called “a mystic of the commonplace”), Benjamin was born in 1832 in upstate New York. Over the course of his 86 years, he was an inventor, a gambler, a gymnast, and a boxer, as well as a poet, metaphysician, and compulsive writer of letters to the editor—in short, the antithesis of a library-bound thinker. Dissatisfied with philosophizing, he told James that he “felt compelled to go into more active life,” to work 10 hours a day in a local mill. “I have worn out many styles,” he boasted, “and am cosmopolitan, liberal to others, and contented with myself.” His intellectual pursuits, Kaag writes, should be regarded “as an afterthought to action, the trace of a life lived as fully as possible.”
Deeply impressed by a self-published pamphlet, The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy (1874), James struck up a correspondence with the author and eventually volunteered to try to make him famous. He kept his word: The last essay he ever wrote, “A Pluralistic Mystic” (1910), is a hymn to Benjamin’s uncommon merit.
James directs our attention to a remarkable passage in which Benjamin explains that “the universe is wild—game flavored as a hawk’s wing.” Celebrating the contingent and the unfinished, Benjamin declares that “nature is miracle all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different.” We can never fully grasp reality; our understanding, in Benjamin’s words, is “ever not quite.” Or as James himself insisted, uneasy about what seemed an oppressively bureaucratic and professionalized 20th century, “There is no complete generalization, no total point of view.”
Kaag warmly welcomes the idea of the incomplete, of a cobbled-together and eternally unfinished worldview; he finds it frustrating but also encouraging. At the same time, he can’t resist imposing an overarching unity. Eager to wrap things up neatly, he claims that Benjamin Blood’s philosophy of open-ended, open-hearted pluralism—and of active engagement in the wider world—somehow “silently guided the Blood family from its very inception.” And yet the thought of the whole crew, from Thomas to Perez to Victoria, all wedded to a single ethos hardly sits well with Benjamin’s belief that “the genius of being is whimsical rather than consistent.”
What does this have to do with America? Kaag is telling us that wildness is with us always, yesterday and today, even the dangerous, corrupt, fraudulent varieties, but that beneficent wildness makes room for exploration, new ideas, new ways of being. A more perfect union is always possible—though ever not quite.
This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Wild Blood Dynasty.”
Shortly before I started college, I finally wised up to the fact that fluency in my parents’ native language of Mandarin Chinese might be an asset. But after nearly two decades of revolting against my parents’ desperate attempts to keep me in Chinese school, I figured I was toast. Surely, by then, my brain and vocal tract had aged out of the window in which they could easily learn to discern and produce tones. And whatever new vocabulary I tried to pick up would, I figured, be forever tainted with my American accent.
Turns out I was only partly right. We acquire speech most readily in early childhood, when the brain is almost infinitely malleable. And the older we get, the tougher it is to pick up new languages and dialects—to rewire our brain circuitry and to move our mouth and tongue and vocal cords in new ways. But even when you’re an adult, “the way you pronounce sounds can and does change,” Andrew Cheng, a linguist at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told me. Just how much will depend on factors such as age, geography, exposure, and natural talent. To a large degree, how we speak also reflects what we feel—especially, it seems, when it comes to regional accents.
Second-language acquisition offers some of the clearest examples of how difficult adjusting to a new way of speaking can be. Take, for instance, the struggle of adult English speakers—like me—to properly deploy the multitude of tones that inflect Mandarin, as my mother will exasperatedly attest. But even within a language, certain ingrained patterns can be difficult to modify. People struggle to unmerge sounds they’ve gotten used to treating as the same, Margaret Renwick, a linguist at the University of Georgia, told me. For instance, Californians, who tend to pronounce Mary, merry, and marry identically, may have a tough time sounding local in parts of upstate New York, where the pronunciations of those three words all diverge. A similar pattern arises among Spanish speakers who emigrate from, say, Mexico to certain parts of Spain, where the s in words such as casa (house) is pronounced as a th.
Many of those constraints can be overcome with enough time or incentive—and the motivation to sound a certain way can be huge. Everyone has an accent, and each one is a beacon to the rest of the world, prompting all sorts of assumptions about the speaker’s age, geographic origins, race, socioeconomic status, even their education and intellect. The associations between voice and identity are so strong that, around the world, cultures have ordered regional accents into a hierarchy of prestige. Researchers such as Alarna Samarasinghe, a linguist at the University of Bristol, in England, have found that people in the U.K. tend to hold people with a southeastern English accent (also called received pronunciation) in higher regard than those who sound like they come from rural parts of the country. In the U.S., accents from the South are commonly described as “nicer” but less brainy. These sorts of biases can affect a speaker’s personal or professionalsuccess. For instance, John Baugh, a linguist at Washington University in St. Louis, has found that voices that sound African American or Mexican American—even when they’re not attached to faces—tend to be denied more job and housing opportunities than those perceived as white.
So it’s no shock that people often try to alter their accents, especially as they move between geographies or social contexts. Ignacio Moreno-Torres, a linguist at the University of Málaga, in Spain, recalls rapidly discarding his Málaga accent when he moved to Madrid for college, where his peers immediately ribbed him for his odd speech. Many speakers of African American Vernacular English are all too familiar with the exhausting process of toggling between different ways of speaking in different social contexts, Sonja Lanehart, a linguist at the University of Arizona, told me. Renwick, of the University of Georgia, thinks prestige concerns may be speeding up the disappearance of southern accents in cities such as Atlanta and Raleigh. Many southern cities have seen a big influx of people from other parts of the country over recent decades. If southern accents were better regarded, at least some of those newcomers “might be motivated to sound more southern,” Renwick said, but instead, they’re retaining their old way of speech. Now “the South, on the whole, sounds less southern than it did a half century ago.”
Accents, of course, don’t always bend to expectation or hierarchy. English that’s strongly Indian-accented can, for some people, be more challenging to understand, Okim Kang, a linguist at Northern Arizona University, told me. But she once interviewed a lawyer who was dead set on maintaining that accent because it helped her connect with her clients, who spoke in a similar way. Another person she worked with lost her high-status British accent within months of starting to date an American. One study found that people learning Welsh exaggerated their Welsh accent in response to an interviewer (using received pronunciation) challenging the utility of them learning Welsh at all. “If I want to be socially closer to you, then I’m more likely to imitate what you’re doing,” Cynthia Clopper, a linguist at Ohio State University, told me. “But I can also move further away.”
Our voices, after all, have a powerful influence over the people who interact with us. Researchers have found that little kids generally prefer to hang out with children who look like them—until they’re offered the chance to befriend someone who sounds like them, regardless of appearance. And we’re aware of these tendencies, at least subconsciously. Speakers of all ages naturally take on the mannerisms and vocal patterns of the people they’re interacting with, sometimes within the span of a single conversation, Morgan Sonderegger, a linguist at McGill University, in Canada, told me. It’s easy to poke fun at celebrities, such as Lindsay Lohan, who return from an extended European sojourn with a mysterious new accent—or your own college friends, freshly home from a semester abroad with suspiciously Italian-sounding vowels—but they might not actually be “putting it on” as much as people think.
Even the fabled criticalperiod of language learning in early childhood might be at least partly a product of subjective emotions. Young brains are certainly more adept at hearing and incorporating new sounds. But kids are also less set in their identity than adults are—and, as they immerse themselves in the varied accents of peers they’re eager to fit in with, may feel less allegiance to their “first” way of speech than adults who have had decades to decide who they want to be, Jennifer Nycz, a linguist at Georgetown University, told me.
That flexibility doesn’t have to end with childhood. After about a decade of speaking English with a U.S. accent—acquired in part by binge-watching reruns of Friends and The Big Bang Theory—Yiran Guo, who grew up in Nanjing, China, was proud that her pronunciation was noticeably more American than her friends’ and family’s. Guo’s accent was hard-earned, and she clung to it when she moved to Australia in her late teens to study linguistics at the University of Melbourne. “I actually didn’t like the Aussie accent when I came here,” she told me. “I just didn’t find it appealing.”
But as Guo’s dislike for Australian pronunciation ebbed, so too did the Americanness of her speech. Within a couple of years, most of her vowels had changed to match what she heard from her surroundings—her American “no,” for instance, rounding and rolling into something more like noerh. After seven years of Aussie life, Guo told me, her accent still feels like it’s deepening by the month. But already, she can pass as a local—even to her own adviser, who studies the sounds of speech for a living.
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It’s common, in criminal court, for a defendant’s friends and family to join them in the courtroom as a show of love and support. That’s not exactly what’s happening in Manhattan this week. More, after these three stories from The Atlantic:
Donald Trump’s hush-money trial was already strange enough. A former president and a porn star walk into a Manhattan courtroom. But an additional cast of characters have recently inserted themselves into the drama. During this week’s testimony from Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, Republican politicians of many different ranks donned their courtroom best and headed downtown to put on a show for the boss. Although these particular charges could be the weakest of the many indictments Trump faces, one got the sense that none of his party allies was there to discuss the finer points of the law.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who quite famously opposes pornography on religious grounds, nevertheless accompanied the man accused of cheating on his wife with a porn star to his trial yesterday. Outside the building, Johnson told reporters that the case is a “sham” and a “ridiculous prosecution.”At Monday’s session, Senators Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and J. D. Vance of Ohio apparently adopted the roles of Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot for the event, each offering running commentary on the “dingy” courtroom, with its “depressing” vibes; the disturbing number of mask-wearing attendees; and the “psychological torture” being inflicted on Trump (who, as a reminder, has been charged with 34 felonies in this case alone).
The former presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum took turns bemoaning the state of the justice system. Even a few bit players wanted in on the action, including pro-Trump Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, who flew all the way from Des Moines to stand before the news cameras and remind viewers that “politics has no place in a criminal prosecution.”
You might be wondering: Don’t these people have anything better to do? The answer is that, in today’s Republican Party, prostration before Trump is as much part of the job as anything else.
All of this showboating has been happening for several reasons. “At its most tangible level, what we’re seeing is a work-around to the gag order,” Sarah Isgur, a former senior spokesperson for the Trump-era Justice Department, told me. The ex-president was warned by the presiding judge, Juan Merchan, that if he talks or posts any more about the jury or the judge’s family, he could face jail time. So, just as in a political campaign, Trump’s surrogates are stepping up to stump for him.
Legally, Trump can’t ask these politicians to violate the order on his behalf. But why would he have to ask when they know exactly what he wants from them? “The playbook that Trump expects party members in good standing to follow is in public,” Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP staffer and now an editor at Protect Democracy, told me. Trump’s given these acolytes their cues with his posts on Truth Social, and they’re dutifully following them.
Lower Manhattan has, over the past week, become a pilgrimage site for those vying to be in Trump’s inner circle, with a court appearance carrying the promise of a holy anointing. You could also think about this courtside display as another audition in the early veepstakes. For Ramaswamy, Burgum, and Vance, in particular, this moment is a chance to demonstrate their abiding loyalty to Trump in the hopes of being selected as his running mate. Others may have reasoned that a little time in front of the cameras yelling “Sham trial!” will go a long way toward snagging a plum Cabinet position in a second Trump administration. (A virtual unknown such as Bird, of course, probably doesn’t expect to get either of these things. But, as every climber knows, one must never miss an opportunity to ingratiate oneself with the boss.)
Which brings us to one final observation. “There’s a larger, more philosophical reason they’re all there,” Isgur said. “That’s what the Republican Party stands for now.” There is no real platform, no consistent set of principles. There is only Trump, and degrees of loyalty to him. These courtroom groupies are simply responding to the obvious incentives—“If you didn’t know that the Republican Party is now focused on Trump,” Isgur said, “I’ve got an oceanfront property to sell you in Arizona.”
That’s their deal, but what about the boss’s? Trump no longer appears concerned only with shielding himself from political accountability. Now that he has almost clinched the nomination, he’s using the party to shield himself from criminal accountability, too. This has given the GOP a new rallying cry. “The Big Lie in 2020 was that the election was stolen,” Carpenter said. “The Big Lie 2.0 is that justice has been weaponized against him to deprive him of the presidency.”
Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, was shot several times in an assassination attempt. He has been hospitalized and is undergoing surgery.
President Joe Biden and Donald Trump agreed to two presidential debates. The first one will be hosted by CNN on June 27, and the second will take place on September 10, broadcast by ABC.
A barge slammed into the Pelican Island Causeway in Galveston, Texas, causing a partial collapse and spilling oil in the bay below.
Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Alamy.
The New Workplace Power Symbols
By Michael Waters
If you walked into an office building during the second half of the 20th century, you could probably figure out who had power with a single glance: Just look for the person in the corner office. The corner offices of yore were big, with large windows offering city views and constant streams of light, plus unbeatable levels of privacy. Everyone wanted them, but only those at the top got them. Land in one, and you’d know you’d made it.
Fast-forward to today, and that emblem of corporate success is dying off. The number of private offices along the side of a building, a category that includes those in the corner, has shrunk by about half since 2021, according to the real-estate company CBRE. But today’s workplace transformation goes beyond the corner.
For the past few months, it wasn’t exactly clear whether President Biden and Trump would meet on the debate stage before November. (Some, including The Atlantic’s David Frum, argued that they shouldn’t.) Well, folks, it looks like they’re doing it. The two presidential contenders agreed today to participate in two debates. The agreed-upon rules stipulate that neither event will have a studio audience—a welcome development for viewers who would rather watch a political debate than an episode of Jerry Springer.
— Elaine
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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