The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is proposing a ban on non-compete agreements that prevent workers from moving to another company or starting a business in the same field, a decision that could affect roughly 30 million Americans. FTC chair Lina Khan argued that non-compete restrictions drive down wages and…

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When President Joe Biden visited Kentucky yesterday to tout a new bridge project, most media attention focused on his embrace of bipartisanship. And indeed Biden, against the backdrop of the GOP chaos in the House of Representatives, signaled how aggressively he would claim that reach-across-the-aisle mantle. He appeared onstage with not only Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, but also GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, a perennial bête noire for Democrats.

But Biden also touched on another theme that will likely become an even more central component of his economic and political strategy over the next two years: He repeatedly noted how many of the jobs created by his economic agenda are not expected to require a four-year college degree.

Throughout his presidency, with little media attention, Biden has consistently stressed this point. When he appeared in September at the groundbreaking for a sprawling Intel semiconductor plant near Columbus, Ohio, he declared, “What you’ll see in this field of dreams” is “Ph.D. engineers and scientists alongside community-college graduates … people of all ages, races, backgrounds with advanced degrees or no degrees, working side by side.” At a Baltimore event in November touting the infrastructure bill, he said, “The vast majority of these jobs … that we’re going to create don’t require a college degree.” Appearing in Arizona in December, he bragged that a plant producing batteries for electric vehicles would “create thousands of good manufacturing jobs, 90 percent of which won’t require a college degree, and yet you get a good wage.”

[Peter A. Shulman: What infrastructure really means]

Economically, this message separates Biden from the past two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Both of those men, as I’ve written, centered their economic agendas on training more Americans for higher-paying jobs in advanced industries (and opening markets for those industries through free-trade agreements), largely because they believed that automation and global economic competition would doom many jobs considered “low skill.”

Although Biden also supports an ambitious assortment of initiatives to expand access to higher education, he has placed relatively more emphasis than his predecessors did on improving conditions for workers in jobs that don’t require advanced credentials. That approach is rooted in his belief that the economy can’t function without much work traditionally deemed low-skill, such as home health care and meat-packing, a conviction underscored by the coronavirus pandemic. “One of the things that has really become apparent to all of us is how important to our nation’s economic resiliency many of these jobs are that don’t require college degrees,” Heather Boushey, a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me this week.

Politically, improving economic conditions for workers without advanced degrees is the centerpiece of Biden’s plan to reverse the generation-long Democratic erosion among white voters who don’t hold a college degree—and the party’s more recent slippage among non-college-educated voters of color, particularly Latino men. Biden and his aides are betting that they can reel back in some of the non-college-educated voters drawn to Republican cultural and racial messages if they can improve their material circumstances with the huge public and private investments already flowing from the key economic bills passed during his first two years.

Biden’s hopes of boosting the prospects of workers without college degrees, who make up about two-thirds of the total workforce, rest on a three-legged legislative stool. One bill, passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $75 billion in direct federal aid and tax credits to revive domestic production of semiconductors. An infrastructure bill, also passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $850 billion in new spending over 10 years for the kind of projects Biden celebrated yesterday—roads, bridges, airports, water systems—as well as a national network of charging stations for electric vehicles and expanded access to high-speed internet. The third component, passed on a party-line vote as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, provides nearly $370 billion in federal support to promote renewable electricity production, accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, and retrofit homes and businesses to improve energy conservation.

All of these measures are projected to trigger huge flows of private-sector investment. The Semiconductor Industry Association reports that since the legislation promoting the industry was first introduced, in 2020, companies have already announced $200 billion in investments across 40 projects in 16 states. The investment bank Credit Suisse projects that the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy provisions could ultimately spur $1.7 trillion in total investment (in part because it believes that the legislation’s open-ended provisions will produce something closer to $800 billion in federal spending). And economists have long demonstrated that each public dollar spent on infrastructure spurs additional private investment, which could swell the total economic impact of the new package to $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, the administration estimates.

Taken together, the three bills constitute a level of federal investment in targeted economic sectors probably unprecedented in recent U.S. history. “The kind of money we are going to see going into these sectors is just unheard-of,” Janelle Jones, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor under Biden, told me. Though rarely framed as such, these three bills—reinforced by other Biden policies, such as his sweeping “buy American” procurement requirements—amount to an aggressive form of industrial policy meant to bolster the nation’s capacity to build more things at home, including bridges and roads, semiconductors, and batteries for electric vehicles. “This is a president that is taking seriously the need for a modern American industrial strategy,” Boushey said.

[Read: What Joe Biden has (and hasn’t) accomplished]

These measures are likely to open significant opportunities for workers without a college degree. Some analysts have projected that the infrastructure bill alone could generate as many as 800,000 jobs annually. Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, estimated that about four-fifths of the jobs created under an earlier version of the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the House would not require a college degree, and he told me he believes the distribution is roughly the same in the final package. A Georgetown University institute projected an even higher percentage for the infrastructure bill. More of the jobs associated with semiconductor manufacturing require advanced education, but even that bill may generate a significant number of blue-collar opportunities in the construction phase of the many new plants opening across the country. (The industry is also pursuing partnerships with community colleges to provide workers who don’t have a four-year degree with the technical training to handle more work in the heavily automated facilities.)

Yet even if these programs fulfill those projections, it remains unclear whether they will reach the scale to improve the uncertain economic trajectory for the broad mass of workers without advanced education. These three bills mostly promote employment in manufacturing and construction, and together those industries account for only about one-eighth of the workforce (roughly 21 million workers in all), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total construction employment peaked in 2006, manufacturing in 1979. Far more workers, including those without degrees, are now employed in service industries not as directly affected by these bills.

What’s more, both of those occupations remain dominated by men. And largely because of resistance from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Congress didn’t pass Biden’s companion proposals to bolster wages and working conditions for the preponderantly non-college-educated, nonwhite, female employees in the low-paid “care” industries such as home health care and child care. “We can’t [ignore] these millions and millions of care workers, particularly Black and brown women,” said Jones, now the chief economist and policy director for the Service Employees International Union.

Another complication for Biden is that his plans are colliding with the Federal Reserve Board’s drive to tame inflation. Spending on his big three bills is ramping up in 2023, which could increase the demand for—and bargaining power of—workers without college degrees. But the Fed’s push to slow the economy may neutralize that effect by increasing unemployment. “They are undercutting the job creation that we are supposed to be incentivizing,” Hersh said.

The list of further projects tied to these three bills is almost endless. The White House calculates that firms have announced some $290 billion in manufacturing investments since Biden took office; the Congressional Budget Office projects that spending from the infrastructure bill could be more than twice as high in 2023 as last year and then increase again by half in 2024.

That pipeline means Biden could be cutting ribbons every week through the 2024 presidential campaign—which would probably be fine with him. Biden rarely seems happier than when he’s around freshly poured concrete, especially if he’s on a podium with local business and labor leaders and elected officials from both parties, all of whom he introduces as enthusiastically (and elaborately) as if he’s toasting the new couple at a wedding. At his core, he remains something like a pre-1970s Democrat, who is most comfortable with a party focused less on cultural crusades than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to people who work with their hands. In his instincts and priorities, Biden is closer to Hubert Humphrey or Henry Jackson than to George McGovern or Obama.

Less clear is whether that throwback approach—the formula that defined the Democratic Party during Biden’s youth—still works politically. Over the course of Biden’s career, the parties have experienced what I’ve called a “class inversion”: Democrats have performed better among college-educated voters while Republicans have grown dominant among white voters without a college degree and more recently have established a beachhead among nonwhite, non-college-educated workers. For most of these voters, the evidence suggests that cultural attitudes have exerted more influence on their political allegiance than their economic circumstance has.

[Ruy Teixeira: Democrats’ long goodbye to the working class]

Biden, with his “Scranton Joe” persona, held out great hopes in the 2020 campaign of reversing that decline with working-class white voters, but he improved only slightly above Hillary Clinton’s historically weak 2016 showing, attracting about one-third of their votes. In 2022, exit polls showed that Democrats remained stuck at that meager level in the national vote for the House of Representatives. In such key swing states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, winning Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates ran slightly better than that, as Biden did while carrying those states in 2020. But, again like Biden then, the exit polls found that none of them won much more than two-fifths of non-college-educated white voters, even against candidates as extreme as Doug Mastriano or Kari Lake, the GOP governor nominees in Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively.

The Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me she’s relatively optimistic that Biden’s focus on creating more opportunity for workers without a college degree can bolster the party’s position with them. She said the key is not only improving living standards, but “validating that this is real work … not the consolation prize to a job that a college degree gets you.” No matter how many jobs Biden’s initiatives create, she said, “if you are treating them as lesser jobs, we are still going to have our problems from the cultural side of things.” Biden has certainly heard (or intuited) such advice. In his speeches, he commonly declares that an apprenticeship as an electrician or pipe fitter is as demanding as a college degree.

Yet Murphy’s expectations remain limited. “Just based on the negative arc of the last several cycles,” she said, merely maintaining the party’s current modest level of support with working-class white voters and avoiding further losses would be “a win.” Matt Morrison, the executive director of Working America, an AFL-CIO-affiliated group that focuses on political outreach to nonunion working-class families, holds similarly restrained views, though he told me that economic gains could help the party more with nonwhite blue-collar voters, who are generally less invested in Republican cultural and racial appeals. No matter how strong the job market, Murphy added, Democrats are unlikely to improve much with non-college-educated workers unless inflation recedes by 2024.

What’s already clear now is how much Biden has bet, both economically and politically, on bolstering the economic circumstances of workers without advanced education by investing literally trillions of federal dollars in forging an economy that again builds more things in America. “I don’t know whether the angry white people in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are less angry if we get them 120,000 more manufacturing jobs,” a senior White House official told me, speaking anonymously in order to be candid. “But we are going to run that experiment.”

The defeat of Kevin McCarthy in his bid for the speakership of the House would be good for Congress. The defeat of Kevin McCarthy would be good for the United States. It might even be good for his own Republican Party.

Because the people attempting to inflict that defeat upon McCarthy include some of the most nihilistic and destructive characters in U.S. politics, McCarthy is collecting misplaced sympathy from people who want a more responsible Congress. But the House will function better under another speaker than it would under McCarthy—even if that other speaker is much more of an ideological extremist than McCarthy himself.

McCarthy is not in political trouble for the reasons he deserves to be in political trouble. Justice is seldom served so exactly. But he does deserve to be in trouble, so justice must be satisfied with the trouble that he’s in.

[David A. Graham: Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning]

McCarthy deserves to be in trouble because he refused to protect the institution he now seeks to lead. After the January 6, 2021, insurrection, he told fellow Republicans that he would urge President Donald Trump to resign immediately. When that vow became public, McCarthy denied he had ever made it, until a contemporaneous audio recording exposed his lie.

“I’ve had it with this guy,” McCarthy said after the January 6 attack—then voted in the impeachment proceedings to protect this guy. Eight days after Trump left office, McCarthy flew to Florida for a photo opportunity with the ex-president who had sent a mob to rampage through the Capitol and harm, abduct, or do worse to McCarthy’s own colleagues. Trump then released a statement boasting that he and McCarthy would be working closely together into the future, a statement McCarthy never contradicted.

McCarthy then enabled and supported a purge of every House Republican who had acted with the integrity that he himself had failed to muster. He endorsed the primary opponent to Liz Cheney. He stripped committee assignments from Republicans who served on the committee to investigate the Capitol riot he had once condemned and now condoned.

For weeks after January 6, McCarthy denied that he’d telephoned Trump that day to blame him for the attack. When then–Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler exposed his denials as false, McCarthy brutally rebuked her.

“You should have come to me! Why did you go to the press? This is no way to thank me!”

“What did you want me to do? Lie?”

Well, yes, obviously. That’s what McCarthy did.

Herrera Beutler then lost the nomination in a primary battle against one of the most reactionary Republicans of the 2022-midterms slate—who then proceeded to lose a seat in rural Washington State to a Democratic newcomer.

[Tom Nichols: The GOP-speaker-vote burlesque]

Sadly, the 20 or so Republicans voting against McCarthy are not exacting retribution for his cravenness toward Trump. It’s not easy to discern what exactly they are exacting retribution for. They do not seem to have noteworthy policy disagreements with McCarthy. Their rebellions seem aimed instead at enhancing their own power within the caucus. They are hostage-takers whose chief demand is to keep holding their hostage forever.

Distaste for the anti-McCarthy faction, however, should not mislead anyone into supporting McCarthy. Very specifically, distaste for the anti-McCarthy faction should not mislead House Democrats into rescuing McCarthy. McCarthy has been frantically signaling for Democratic rescue. Speakers are elected by a majority of the representatives. If enough Democrats were to absent themselves, McCarthy could be elected speaker by the roughly 200 Republicans who do back him. But what’s the affirmative case for such rescue?

If McCarthy becomes speaker now, he will be a weak and precarious one—constantly at the mercy over the next two years of those 20-odd fringe Republicans voting against him this week. McCarthy will appease and accommodate them. When John Boehner was speaker, he dealt with the irreconcilable fringe by building majorities across the aisle. The 2015 budget deal that ended that year’s debt-ceiling crisis passed the House with only 174 Republican votes, augmented by 95 Democratic votes to reach the necessary 218 majority. But if McCarthy survives his present leadership test, he’ll do so only by committing never to repeat Boehner’s example. That commitment will have teeth, too, because McCarthy has reportedly agreed to allow any single disaffected Republican to call for a vote of confidence in his speakership if he displeases them. He has proposed to escape his immediate hostage crisis by handing himself over as a hostage forever.

That’s the beginning of the reason it would be better if he failed to win the speakership. If McCarthy somehow ekes out a win, he will be broken from the beginning—an officeholder who holds only the office, not the power of the office.

A speaker of the House who does not speak for a majority of the House is a waste of time and space. He speaks for nobody, he acts for nobody, and there’s no point in negotiating with him. Seeking a decision from him will be like seeking a decision from the president of Lebanon, when everybody knows that it’s actually Hezbollah who controls the guns and money, and is the power in the land. To have to deal directly with Hezbollah is unlovely, but more practical and probably safer, with less room for misunderstanding along the way.

[David A. Graham: Kevin McCarthy’s loyalty to Trump got him nothing]

It would be better to have a speaker who can deliver than one who cannot, even if that speaker is more ideological than McCarthy. An ideologue can say “Yes” and have it mean something; a speaker who does not command a majority cannot.

A McCarthy speakership is a formula for parliamentary paralysis, for rule by a minority faction within the majority caucus, for crisis after crisis after crisis. Rejection of McCarthy by an agitated minority may paradoxically make it easier for the rest of the system to function with the post-McCarthy Republican majority.

By electing a more ideological speaker, Republicans may inadvertently shape a less ideological House majority. Imagine what this House will look like after a McCarthy defeat. Twenty Republican House members will have exposed 200 colleagues to national ridicule for reasons that even those 20 insurgents cannot coherently explain. Are the 200 now likely to follow the 20 into a fight to default on the U.S. debt? To slash American aid to Ukraine and hand the advantage to Russian President Vladimir Putin? To try to impeach President Joe Biden over some QAnon fantasy? To devote the next Congress to waging war on the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies? Or will they more likely say, “That’s enough from you—you have embarrassed us one time too many”?

The coverage of this speaker election has tended to present the spectacle as a failure and a hazard. But maybe what we’re seeing is a system working for the better. An unworthy man could be about to lose a job he lacks the talent and character to do. The radical crew who aimed to exclude the unworthy man imagine that they will be empowered by their rebellion. Instead, their destructive action will only have discredited them with their peers.

New House Republican leadership must be found. Although that leadership may be more ideologically extreme than McCarthy, it may also learn from this week’s debacle to be more careful about launching crazy adventures—and thus be more able to negotiate and deliver deals.

Ditch McCarthy. He won’t be missed.

After months and months of SARS-CoV-2 subvariant soup, one ingredient has emerged in the United States with a flavor pungent enough to overwhelm the rest: XBB.1.5, an Omicron offshoot that now accounts for an estimated 75 percent of cases in the Northeast. A crafty dodger of antibodies that is able to grip extra tightly onto the surface of our cells, XBB.1.5 is now officially the country’s fastest-spreading coronavirus subvariant. In the last week of December alone, it zoomed from 20 percent of estimated infections nationwide to 40 percent; soon, it’s expected to be all that’s left, or at least very close. “That’s the big thing everybody looks for—how quickly it takes over from existing variants,” says Shaun Truelove, an infectious-disease modeler at Johns Hopkins University. “And that’s a really quick rise.”

All of this raises familiar worries: more illness, more long COVID, more hospitalizations, more health-care system strain. With holiday cheer and chilly temperatures crowding people indoors, and the uptake of bivalent vaccines at an abysmal low, a winter wave was already brewing in the U.S. The impending dominance of an especially speedy, immune-evasive variant, Truelove told me, could ratchet up that swell.

But the American public has heard that warning many, many, many times before—and by and large, the situation has not changed. The world has come a long way since early 2020, when it lacked vaccines and drugs to combat the coronavirus; now, with immunity from shots and past infections slathered across the planet—porous and uneven though that layer may be—the population is no longer nearly so vulnerable to COVID’s worst effects. Nor is XBB.1.5 a doomsday-caliber threat. So far, no evidence suggests that the subvariant is inherently more severe than its predecessors. When its close sibling, XBB, swamped Singapore a few months ago, pushing case counts up, hospitalizations didn’t undergo a disproportionately massive spike (though XBB.1.5 is more transmissible, and the U.S. is less well vaccinated). Compared with the original Omicron surge that pummeled the nation this time last year, “I think there’s less to be worried about,” especially for people who are up to date on their vaccines, says Mehul Suthar, a viral immunologist at Emory University who’s been studying how the immune system reacts to new variants. “My previous exposures are probably going to help against any XBB infection I have.”

SARS-CoV-2’s evolution is still worth tracking closely through genomic surveillance—which is only getting harder as testing efforts continue to be pared back. But “variants mean something a little different now for most of the world than they did earlier in the pandemic,” says Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, who’s been tracking the proportions of SARS-Cov-2 variants around the world. Versions of the virus that can elude a subset of our immune defenses are, after all, going to keep on coming, for as long as SARS-CoV-2 is with us—likely forever, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written. It’s the classic host-pathogen arms race: Viruses infect us; our bodies, hoping to avoid a similarly severe reinfection, build up defenses, goading the invader into modifying its features so it can infiltrate us anew.

[Read: How long can the coronavirus keep infecting us?]

But the virus is not evolving toward the point where it’s unstoppable; it’s only switching up its fencing stance to sidestep our latest parries as we do the same for it. A version of the virus that succeeds in one place may flop in another, depending on the context: local vaccination and infection histories, for instance, or how many elderly and immunocompromised individuals are around, and the degree to which everyone avoids trading public air. With the world’s immune landscape now so uneven, “it’s getting harder for the virus to do that synchronized wave that Omicron did this time last year,” says Verity Hill, an evolutionary virologist at Yale. It will keep trying to creep around our defenses, says Pavitra Roychoudhury, who’s monitoring SARS-CoV-2 variants at the University of Washington, but “I don’t think we need to have alarm-bell emojis for every variant that comes out.”

[Read: The coronavirus’s next move]

Some particularly worrying variants and subvariants will continue to arise, with telltale signs, Roychoudhury told me: a steep rise in wastewater surveillance, followed by a catastrophic climb in hospitalizations; a superfast takeover that kicks other coronavirus strains off the stage in a matter of days or weeks. Omens such as these hint at a variant that’s probably so good at circumventing existing immune defenses that it will easily sicken just about everyone again—and cause enough illness overall that a large number of cases turn severe. Also possible is a future variant that is inherently more virulent, adding risk to every new case. In extreme versions of these scenarios, tests, treatments, and masks might need to come back into mass use; researchers may need to concoct a new vaccine recipe  at an accelerated pace. But that’s a threshold that most variations of SARS-CoV-2 will not clear—including, it seems so far, XBB.1.5. Right now, Hodcroft told me, “it’s hard to imagine that anything we’ve been seeing in the last few months would really cause a rush to do a vaccine update,” or anything else similarly extreme. “We don’t make a new flu vaccine every time we see a new variant, and we see those all through the year.” Our current crop of BA.5-focused shots is not a great match for XBB.1.5, as Suthar and his colleagues have found, at least on the antibody front. But antibodies aren't the only defenses at play—and Suthar told me it’s still far better to have the new vaccine than not.

In the U.S., wastewater counts and hospitalizations are ticking upward, and XBB.1.5 is quickly elbowing out its peers. But the estimated infection rise doesn’t seem nearly as steep as the ascension of the original Omicron variant, BA.1 (though our tracking is now poorer). XBB.1.5 also isn’t dominating equally in different parts of the country—and Truelove points out that it doesn’t yet seem tightly linked to hospitalizations in the places where it’s gained traction so far. As tempting as it may be to blame any rise in cases and hospitalizations on the latest subvariant, our own behaviors are at least as important. Drop-offs in vaccine uptake or big jumps in mitigation-free mingling can drive spikes in illness on their own. “We were expecting a wave already, this time of year,” Hill told me. Travel is up, masking is down. And just 15 percent of Americans over the age of 5 have received a bivalent shot.

The pace at which new SARS-CoV-2 variants and subvariants take over could eventually slow, but the experts I spoke with weren’t sure this would happen. Immunity across the globe remains patchy; only a subset of countries have access to updated bivalent vaccines, while some countries are still struggling to get first doses into millions of arms. And with nearly all COVID-dampening mitigations “pretty much gone” on a global scale, Hodcroft told me, it’s gotten awfully easy for the coronavirus to keep experimenting with new ways to stump our immune defenses. XBB.1.5 is both the product and the catalyst of unfettered spread—and should that continue, the virus will take advantage again.

American skiing star Mikaela Shiffrin is one win away from equaling Lindsey Vonn's record of 82 World Cup wins after taking victory in the slalom competition in Zagreb, Croatia, on Wednesday.

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

Communities can be amazingly resilient after traumas. Londoners banded together during the German Blitz bombings of World War II, and rebuilt the city afterward. When I visited the Thai island of Phuket six months after the 2004 tsunami killed thousands in the region and displaced even more, I found a miraculous recovery in progress, and in many places, little remaining evidence of the tragedy. It was inspirational.

Going from surviving to thriving is crucial for healing and growth after a disaster, and scholars have shown that it can be a common experience. Often, the worst conditions bring out the best in people as they work together for their own recovery and that of their neighbors.

COVID-19 appears to be resistant to this phenomenon, unfortunately. The most salient social feature of the pandemic was how it forced people into isolation; for those fortunate enough not to lose a loved one, the major trauma it created was loneliness. Instead of coming together, emerging evidence suggests that we are in the midst of a long-term crisis of habitual loneliness, in which relationships were severed and never reestablished. Many people—perhaps including you—are still wandering alone, without the company of friends and loved ones to help rebuild their life.

If your life has not yet gone back to its 2019-era “normal,” you are not alone. In a poll conducted in March 2022 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 59 percent of respondents said they had not fully returned to their pre-pandemic activities.

One of the routines that remains disrupted is work, which for millions of Americans went from a social experience to one of isolation: sitting behind a computer screen, miles away from others. And it probably won’t return to “normal,” especially for office jobs. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of people working from home more than tripled from 2019 to 2021. Universal remote work is no longer necessary from a public-health standpoint, yet in 2022, 59 percent of those who say their jobs can mainly be done from home are still working at home all or most of the time. Most are doing this by choice, despite the fact that 60 percent say they feel less connected to their co-workers than they had before the pandemic.

[Read: The hidden toll of remote work]

More serious for happiness is that many people now prioritize socializing for fun less than they used to in the “before times.” Friends whom I’ve recently seen for the first time since 2020 tell me they still almost never go to parties or to others’ homes, even though they used to go out frequently before the pandemic. In a poll that the Pew Research Center conducted in May 2022, 21 percent of respondents said that socializing had become more important to them since the coronavirus outbreak, but 35 percent said it had become less important.

Some people are probably seeing their loved ones less because of continued fear of disease. But when I’ve pressed friends for an explanation, the typical response has been, “I just got out of the habit.” This anecdotal evidence is backed up by data: Most respondents in a spring 2022 survey of American adults said they found it harder to form relationships now, and a quarter felt anxious about socializing. Only 9 percent were worried about being physically near others; the biggest source of anxiety (shared by 29 percent) was “not knowing what to say or how to interact.” Many of us have simply forgotten how to be friends.

This growing habitual loneliness is a public-health crisis. Research has consistently shown that isolation is linked to depression and anxiety. It has also been shown to lead to premature mortality, worsen cardiovascular health, increase inflammation, and disrupt hormones and sleep.

[Listen: How to know you’re lonely]

This harm is not equally distributed. Researchers at the Institute for Family Studies have found that in America, rates of unhappiness rose from before the pandemic (2012–18) to after the worst phase (2021). However, of those studied, two groups saw their rate of unhappiness rise more significantly than the others: single people and those who did not regularly attend a religious service. People in these groups likely have less automatically programmed social interaction than others.

Children, too, may be especially vulnerable. Kids born during the pandemic missed a crucial window of socialization, and a study of babies in Dublin published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood found that they are, on average, exhibiting deficits in communication. Compared with those born from 2008 to 2011, they are less likely to say one definite or meaningful word, to point, or to wave bye-bye by 12 months of age. Most of these babies enjoyed less interaction with a variety of people than they would have in the absence of a pandemic. We have no idea what the long-term implications will be.

If habitual loneliness is causing so much misery, why aren’t the habitually lonely taking greater steps to fight it? Why aren’t they insisting on working in person and reconnecting with friends? One possible answer is that, as research has shown, loneliness likely inhibits our executive function, which we need in order to deal with our distress appropriately. Think of a time when you felt very lonely, and instead of doing what you really needed to do—call people, get outside, and be social—you cocooned on the sofa by yourself.

Loneliness, like homelessness or poverty, tends to be self-perpetuating: Much as it is harder to get on your feet once you no longer have a place to sleep and shower, an address, or a phone, social isolation leads to behavior that leads to even more isolation. If you’ve been seeking remote work instead of in-person work for convenience, choosing solitary activities over group ones because of awkwardness, or electing not to reestablish old friendships because of sheer torpor, you may be stuck in a pattern of learned loneliness.

To break out of the cycle, you might need to try an “opposite signal” strategy. Your inertia probably tells you that getting dressed and going to work will be a hassle, and that inviting someone over for dinner will be uncomfortable. You should do these things anyway. Think of it like starting a workout routine after a long sedentary period (another common COVID problem). At first, your system complains bitterly, but if you push through the complaints, you soon find that you can exercise (or socialize) easily, because it has become routine and because you can feel how it improves your life.

[Read: Sedentary pandemic life is bad for our happiness]

There is no law of nature saying that if you wait long enough, you will be happy again. You must proactively manage your own environment. Insist on working in person with others; become a hub for physical gatherings of friends. If your circumstances make COVID a continuing threat—say, if you are immunocompromised—taking the initiative in forming plans that fit your needs is particularly important. I have friends who are very social in their home, for example, but who test all their guests because of their particular health status. In doing so, they are accepting what is really just a minor inconvenience in order to maintain their “friendship chops.”

COVID-19 may well have cut a groove of loneliness into your life. Going with what is easy and convenient in work and friendship cuts that groove deeper, making your isolation harder to escape. But if you can remember the warmth and happiness of your old social self and make a few changes, 2023 can be a year of renewal.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

If you think the crisis of American democracy is over, the circus in the House should remind you that a significant portion of the Republican Party has no interest in governing, policy, or democracy itself. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The economy is improving in three major ways. Electric vehicles are bringing out the worst in us. The dark pageant of the NFL A Fatuous Rebellion

Watching the messy filleting of Representative Kevin McCarthy’s career (and ego) over the past 24 hours has been undeniably entertaining, not least because the representative from California deserves it. McCarthy, a dull creature of the Beltway, tried to pander his way to power. Much like his lieutenant, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, he sold his soul to Donald Trump’s movement and expected loyalty in return. (Trump endorsed him for the job, but for a moment seemed to have second thoughts about backing a loser.) Ambition and opportunism are common among politicians, but McCarthy took it to new levels. He even sorted Trump’s favorite Starburst candies so that the “Toddler in Chief” could avoid the icky yellows and oranges. (I am not making this up.)

Maybe Stefanik and other grovelers deserve such a comeuppance even more, but McCarthy has built up a serious karmic debt. He once preened as one of the self-appointed GOP “Young Guns,” the trio of conservative up-and-comers who were going to lead a practical and policy-oriented Republican Party to a governing majority. Reality quickly intervened: Cantor was turfed in a 2014 primary by a Tea Party flash in the pan named Dave Brat, who was defeated in 2018 by an actual centrist Democrat, Abigail Spanberger. Ryan suffered through two terms as speaker before boarding the John Boehner Emergency-Exit Pod and bailing out of politics. McCarthy stayed and made the compromises he thought he had to make, which is how he ended up sorting candy with his staff.

As I said to my friend Charlie Sykes yesterday, if there is such a thing as Narcan for schadenfreude, I’ll need to keep it handy if McCarthy is actually defeated once and for all in his quest for the House’s top job. But McCarthy’s misery is secondary to the real story behind the hijinks of the Republican defectors tormenting their own leader. McCarthy and others have asked what the rebels want—but they do not understand that the rebels have no tangible goals. A significant part of the Republican Party, and especially its base, now lives in a post-policy world. Governing is nothing. The show is everything.

As I was writing this, Representative Chip Roy of Texas proved that the play’s the thing by nominating Byron Donalds for the speakership. Who? Donalds is a 44-year-old Republican first elected to the House in 2020. I’m guessing Roy nominated him simply to counter the nomination of Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democratic caucus, with that of another Black legislator. Roy even made a cringe-inducing speech, complete with a Martin Luther King Jr. quote, about the wondrousness of two young Black men vying for the speakership. It’s great television, right?

Unfortunately for McCarthy, it’s also great television to see the GOP leader lose his fourth vote for speaker, which he did in short order, with the same 20 votes for Jordan moving over to Donalds. The fifth and sixth defeats followed in quick succession.

The inane Kabuki taking place around McCarthy’s job isn’t really about debt ceilings or abortion or Ukraine—or anything else. If you think Lauren Boebert or Matt Gaetz or Andy Biggs are possessed of deep thoughts about any of these issues, you have already made the same mistake that brought McCarthy to this impasse. Gaetz’s big idea in politics is that—according to a Trump aide’s testimony to the House Select Committee on January 6—he should be given a blanket pardon for things he swears he didn’t do. (Gaetz has denied asking for the pardon.) Biggs is the high-minded Cincinnatus who suggested that the January 6 riots could be blamed on the FBI; Boebert ran a gun-themed restaurant back in Colorado and often says things that lead to debates not over policy, but over whether she is the most ignorant person currently sitting in Congress.

What all of these GOP members do seem to have in common is a shared belief that they should be in Congress in order to make other people miserable. Usually, those “other people” are Democrats and various people on the generic right-wing enemies list, but lately, the targets include the few remaining Republicans who think their job in Washington is to legislate and pass bills and other boring twaddle that has nothing to do with keeping the hometown folks in a lather, getting on television, and getting reelected.

Note, by the way, that the conspiracy-minded Marjorie Taylor Greene—herself a perennial nominee for, shall we say, the least intellectually incisive member of Congress—is backing McCarthy. Indeed, Greene and Boebert are now in a political slap fight with each other. Both women are playing to the same base, but Boebert’s district is far less safe than Greene’s, and so, as Ed Kilgore wrote recently, “it makes sense for her to pick a fight with Greene, or with one of Greene’s famously batshit bits of commentary.” Greene, meanwhile, can aim for more power by backing McCarthy. This would also explain McCarthy’s support from Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who slyly went to the floor to argue for electing McCarthy and then watched as McCarthy failed yet again because 19 votes were cast for—wait for it—Jim Jordan.

This is the best of all worlds for someone like Jordan, one of the most irresponsible members of Congress, who thinks his job as a legislator is to show up at hearings and Gish gallop the proceedings into chaos. He gets to support McCarthy and look like a team player, and then, no matter what happens, get the job he wants: chair of the House Judiciary Committee, where he likely intends to investigate Hunter Biden and impeach the president.

The Republican rebellion is rooted in a giant inferiority complex: We know we’re not popular, we know a lot of people think we’re jerks, but we’ll show everyone that we can paralyze this country and its institutions using the machinery of government. Democracy, process, lawmaking, and governing? All of that is for saps; doing it is how you end up becoming Eric Cantor or Paul Ryan. The GOP rebels have every intention of staying in Washington and staying in power—even if “power” amounts to little more than sitting in the wreckage of the Capitol and keeping warm by burning the furniture. Win or lose, McCarthy never had a chance at being a true master of the House.

Related:

The humiliation of Kevin McCarthy What if the House can’t elect a new speaker? Today’s News A “bomb cyclone” storm system is hitting California; flooding, mudslides, and damaging winds are forecasted for the state’s northern and central regions. The Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin remains in critical condition after experiencing cardiac arrest during a Monday-night football game. Rick Singer, the man behind the 2019 “Varsity Blues” college-admissions bribery scandal, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks whether sports are worth the physical risks.

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Evening Read (Getty)

How Children Conjure a Snow Day

By Kate Cray

Snow days felt magical when I was a child—and not just because of the wonder of waking up to a world transformed or the gift of a day without school. They felt magical because I believed that I had helped to conjure them.

As soon as the forecast hinted at snow, my brothers and I would get to work. First came the ice cubes, upended from their trays and flushed down the toilet, one for each inch of snow. Then our pajamas, put on early (for good measure) and inside out (no matter how itchy the seams). Finally, three spoons, selected with care, stowed under each of our pillows. We knew our classmates had also followed these steps, because we’d all game-planned together at recess the day before. And, chances were, so had other students in schools across the district—maybe even the state, depending on the reach of the storm. We were joining an army of children who for generations, armed with nothing but household supplies, have believed they could change the weather.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

We have long been living in an age of remarkable choices in television. Although it’s customary to follow that observation by name-checking the classics—The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and The Wire, among others—let me draw your attention to the strange gem that is Slow Horses, now streaming on Apple TV+. Based on the novels by Mick Herron, Slow Horses follows the adventures of a group of people in British intelligence who are most decidedly not James Bond. They’re losers, including the boss, a chain-smoking, slovenly drunk played with such shabby authenticity by Gary Oldman that you can almost smell him through the screen. They all work at Slough House, a kind of purgatory for MI5 agents who have somehow screwed up. (Bond worked for the more glamorous MI6, which is like the CIA; MI5 is domestic intelligence, something like the American FBI.)

What I like best about Slow Horses is that it portrays intelligence work far more realistically than a show like the much-beloved The Americans, which was, I admit, fun, but mostly silly. The intelligence business, as people who have done it can tell you, is a grind, involving, as someone once said of police work, hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Think of the difference between The Americans and Slow Horses as something like the difference between The Godfather and Goodfellas. The former makes you want to be a gangster; the latter reminds you that in reality, life in the mob is misery. Slow Horses is a challenging show with intricate plots, and be warned: It cuts no slack for Americans who might have trouble with mumbly British accents or espionage slang. (Helpful hint: A “Joe” is an agent, not someone named Joe.)

— Tom

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Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.