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The Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham has been thinking and writing about Memphis’s policing crisis for several months now. This past weekend, he went back to survey the aftermath of released video footage of Tyre Nichols’s fatal beating by police officers. David is at work on a story about where police reform goes from here, and I called him today to talk a bit about what he saw and heard over the weekend, and how Memphis’s policing strategy led to tragedy.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The myth propelling America’s violent police culture The internet loves an extremophile. J. Kenji López-Alt thinks you’ll be fine with an induction stove.

Not Enough

Isabel Fattal: You were in Memphis over the weekend. What did you hear from residents of the city?

David A. Graham: The sense I got from people in Memphis is that they are glad the city moved so quickly to fire these officers, and they’re glad the district attorney moved so quickly to prosecute. But it’s not enough. They want to know more about the incident. It’s unclear why Tyre Nichols was pulled over. They want to see action against the other officer who tased Tyre Nichols and who has been relieved from duty but has not been fired. They want to know who else was involved. We’ve seen the SCORPION [Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods] unit that these officers were members of disbanded, but they want to see the broader organized-crime unit in the department disbanded. And they want this to not happen again. The city is saying the right things, but the trick is avoiding it in the future.

Isabel: You wrote last Friday that “one of the more remarkable things about the video is that it exists.” To what extent is police activity surveilled in Memphis?

David: Often, when we learn about these incidents, it’s because of bystander video. But in this case, as far as we know, no bystanders were involved. People didn’t come out of the houses around there. I went to the scene on Saturday, and it’s a quiet suburban street. But there is something called SkyCop, which is this surveillance system all over Memphis. It’s really eerie: There are these twinkling blue lights 15 or so feet off the ground, and there are surveillance cameras, which I think are hard to miss, whether you’re a civilian or a police officer. And these officers were wearing body cams.

We’ve seen cases where officers have tried to manipulate body cams. But there’s no effort to hide this. In the video, there’s nothing that suggests they thought they made a mistake, either morally or as a matter of police work.

Isabel: During your past reporting in Memphis, you heard from residents in places with high crime that the city is simultaneously under-policed and over-policed. Can you talk a bit about that?

David: When you’ve got a spike in violent crime—as you did in Memphis, and in a lot of other American cities in 2020—one of the solutions that a lot of departments turn to is hot-spot policing, where you put a lot of officers in an area where there’s crime. We know from experience in a lot of cities that hot-spot policing can drive down crime, but the question is how it does that.

One way you can do it is by sweeping a lot of people up—just arresting a lot of people, stopping people on pretext, and seeing what you can get them on. That may stop crime, but it also creates animosity between residents and the police department. It seeks out people for things that have nothing to do with public safety, and because of where a lot of this hot-spot policing is done, it leads to a lot of Black men being arrested.

So in Memphis, this SCORPION unit was created in 2021 to deal with violent crime and the sorts of public-safety issues that residents are complaining about. And what you see them doing instead, in this case, is terrorizing and killing a citizen who at the worst was driving unsafely, from what we know. So I think it’s a clear example of under-policing and over-policing. They’re not doing anything to stop violent crime, but they are abusing citizens.

Isabel: You wrote last week, “The problem with a troubled department like Memphis’s adopting a tool like hot-spot policing is that culture tends to triumph over tactics.” Why was hot-spot policing a mistake for Memphis?

David: If you have a police department that has a history of excessive force, like Memphis’s does, and you institute a new tactic like hot-spot policing but you don’t do anything to change the underlying culture of the department, then you’re going to get abuses in hot-spot policing.

In the aftermath of Nichols’s death, the mayor of Memphis said that an outside review will help determine whether this is a matter of training or a matter of culture. You can’t watch a video like that and think, Well, if only they had been trained better. No police officer is trained to savagely beat someone like that. It’s not that they needed to be told that. It’s that there’s a problem with the culture.

Isabel: How do you think Nichols’s death might affect the national conversation about police reform?

David: Each of these situations does have its own unique factors and local context. But the national horror that we have seen reflects not only just how visceral this video is but also the fact that we are familiar with this.

It’s always hard for me to know when one of these stories will become a national story. I think this one did partly because the video is so visceral, but also because people are primed for this. They’ve seen so many of these cases. And I think every time we have one of them, it’s a reminder that there was a moment after George Floyd’s death when people were unified on this and there were some changes, but there’s still a lot of work to do to make sure that people are experiencing just policing around the country.

Related:

Memphis’s policing strategy was bound to result in tragedy. Inhumanity in Memphis

Today’s News

The seven states that comprise the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin failed to reach an agreement on water-conservation plans for the second time in six months. Representative George Santos of New York told House Republicans that he will temporarily step down from his congressional-committee positions amid ongoing scrutiny of his campaign finances and biographical fabrications. President Joe Biden announced his plan to end COVID-19 national-emergency and public-health-emergency declarations on May 11.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: For the first time in half a century, the rich are buying more free time, Derek Thompson writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Daniele Castellano

The Existential Wonder of Space

By Marina Koren

Of all the moons in the solar system, Saturn’s largest satellite might be the most extraordinary. Titan is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere, and liquid methane rains gently from its sky, tugged downward by a fraction of the gravity we feel on Earth. The methane forms rivers, lakes, and small seas on Titan’s surface. Beneath the frigid ground, composed of ice as hard as rock, is even more liquid, a whole ocean of plain old H2O.

The wildest part about Titan—the best part, perhaps—is that something could be living there. NASA is currently working on a mission, called Dragonfly, that would travel to the faraway moon and search for potential signs of alien life, past and present. A helicopter will fly around and study the local chemistry, checking whether conditions may be right for microbes to arise. Hypothetical Titanian life-forms could resemble the earthly varieties we’re familiar with or be something else entirely, feeding on methane compounds the way we rely on oxygen.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Angry football fans keep punching their TVs. Airplane toilets could catch the next COVID variant. Never underestimate Jennifer Coolidge.

Culture Break

Salman Rushdie, April 2021 (Benedict Evans / August)

Read. Victory City, the latest novel from Salman Rushdie—and “a triumph,” according to the writer Judith Shulevitz.

Listen. Gloria, the radically inoffensive new album by the pop singer Sam Smith.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

For a more detailed analysis of the Memphis Police Department’s troubled history, David recommends this recent New York Times opinion essay by the Memphis-based journalist Emily Yellin. “One reason I wanted to focus on Memphis when I started writing about it was that it’s really similar to a lot of cities but also has its own distinctive characteristics,” David told me. Yellin’s article helps situate this recent tragedy within the city’s particular history.

— Isabel

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

These days, strolling through downtown New York City, where I live, is like picking your way through the aftermath of a party. In many ways, it is exactly that: The limp string lights, trash-strewn puddles, and splintering plywood are all relics of the raucous celebration known as outdoor dining.

These wooden “streeteries” and the makeshift tables lining sidewalks first popped up during the depths of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when restaurants needed to get diners back in their seats. It was novel, creative, spontaneous—and fun during a time when there wasn’t much fun to be had. For a while, outdoor dining really seemed as though it could outlast the pandemic. Just last October, New York Magazine wrote that it would stick around, “probably permanently.”

But now someone has switched on the lights and cut the music. Across the country, something about outdoor dining has changed in recent months. With fears about COVID subsiding, people are losing their appetite for eating among the elements. This winter, many streeteries are empty, save for the few COVID-cautious holdouts willing to put up with the cold. Hannah Cutting-Jones, the director of food studies at the University of Oregon, told me that, in Eugene, where she lives, outdoor dining is “absolutely not happening” right now. In recent weeks, cities such as New York and Philadelphia have started tearing down unused streeteries. Outdoor dining’s sheen of novelty has faded; what once evoked the grands boulevards of Paris has turned out to be a janky table next to a parked car. Even a pandemic, it turns out, couldn’t overcome the reasons Americans never liked eating outdoors in the first place.

For a while, the allure of outdoor dining was clear. COVID safety aside, it kept struggling restaurants afloat, boosted some low-income communities, and cultivated joie de vivre in bleak times. At one point, more than 12,700 New York restaurants had taken to the streets, and the city—along with others, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia—proposed making dining sheds permanent. But so far, few cities have actually adopted any official rules. At this point, whether they ever will is unclear. Without official sanctions, mounting pressure from outdoor-dining opponents will likely lead to the destruction of existing sheds; already, people keep tweeting disapproving photos at sanitation departments. Part of the issue is that as most Americans’ COVID concerns retreat, the potential downsides have gotten harder to overlook: less parking, more trash, tacky aesthetics, and, oh God, the rats. Many top New York restaurants have voluntarily gotten rid of their sheds this winter.

The economics of outdoor dining may no longer make sense for restaurants, either. Although it was lauded as a boon to struggling restaurants during the height of the pandemic, the practice may make less sense now that indoor dining is back. For one thing, dining sheds tend to take up parking spaces needed to attract customers, Cutting-Jones said. The fact that most restaurants are chains doesn’t help: “If whatever conglomerate owns Longhorn Steakhouse doesn’t want to invest in outdoor dining, it will not become the norm,” Rebecca Spang, a food historian at Indiana University Bloomington, told me. Besides, she added, many restaurants are already short-staffed, even without the extra seats.

In a sense, outdoor dining was doomed to fail. It always ran counter to the physical makeup of most of the country, as anyone who ate outside during the pandemic inevitably noticed. The most obvious constraint is the weather, which is sometimes pleasant but is more often not. “Who wants to eat on the sidewalk in Phoenix in July?” Spang said.

The other is the uncomfortable proximity to vehicles. Dining sheds spilled into the streets like patrons after too many drinks. The problem was that U.S. roads were built for cars, not people. This tends not to be true in places renowned for outdoor dining, such as Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, which urbanized before cars, Megan Elias, a historian and the director of the gastronomy program at Boston University, told me. At best, this means that outdoor meals in America are typically enjoyed with a side of traffic. At worst, they end in dangerous collisions.

Cars and bad weather were easier to put up with when eating indoors seemed like a more serious health hazard than breathing in fumes and trembling with cold. It had a certain romance—camaraderie born of discomfort. You have to admit, there was a time when cozying up under a heat lamp with a hot drink was downright charming. But now outdoor dining has gone back to what it always was: something that most Americans would like to avoid in all but the most ideal of conditions. This sort of relapse could lead to fewer opportunities to eat outdoors even when the weather does cooperate.

But outdoor dining is also affected by more existential issues that have surmounted nearly three years of COVID life. Eating at restaurants is expensive, and Americans like to get their money’s worth. When safety isn’t a concern, shelling out for a streetside meal may simply not seem worthwhile for most diners. “There’s got to be a point to being outdoors, either because the climate is so beautiful or there’s a view,” Paul Freedman, a Yale history professor specializing in cuisine, told me. For some diners, outdoor seating may feel too casual: Historically, Americans associated eating at restaurants with special occasions, like celebrating a milestone at Delmonico’s, the legendary fine-dining establishment that opened in the 1800s, Cutting-Jones said.

Eating outdoors, in contrast, was linked to more casual experiences, like having a hot dog at Coney Island. “We have high expectations for what dining out should be like,” she said, noting that American diners are especially fussy about comfort. Even the most opulent COVID cabin may be unable to override these associations. “If the restaurant is going to be fancy and charge $200 a person,” said Freedman, most people can’t escape the feeling of having spent that much for “a picnic on the street.”

Outdoor dining isn’t disappearing entirely. In the coming years there’s a good chance that more Americans will have the opportunity to eat outside in the nicer months than they did before the pandemic—even if it’s not the widespread practice many anticipated earlier in the pandemic. Where it continues, it will almost certainly be different: more buttoned-up, less lawless—probably less exciting. Santa Barbara, for example, made dining sheds permanent last year but specified that they must be painted an approved “iron color.” It may also be less popular among restaurant owners: If outdoor-dining regulations are too far-reaching or costly, cautioned Hayrettin Günç, an architect with Global Designing Cities Initiative, that will “create barriers for businesses.”

For now, outdoor dining is yet another COVID-related convention that hasn’t quite stuck—like avoiding handshakes and universal remote work. As the pandemic subsides, the tendency is to default to the ways things used to be. Doing so is easier, certainly, than coming up with policies to accommodate new habits. In the case of outdoor dining, it’s most comfortable, too. If this continues to be the case, then outdoor dining in the U.S. may return to what it was before the pandemic: dining “al fresco” along the streetlamp-lined terraces of the Venetian Las Vegas, and beneath the verdant canopy of the Rainforest Cafe.

Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, purports to be the summary of a long-lost, 24,000-verse epic poem from 14th-century India. The hero and author of the poem is Pampa Kampana, who as a girl becomes the conduit for a goddess, channeling her oracular pronouncements and wielding her magical powers. She later causes a city to rise overnight from enchanted seeds, presides as its queen, and lives to the age of 247. The city she founds becomes a utopia—a feminist one, I’m tempted to say, because in its heyday women are equal to men. But really, when women flourish, everyone flourishes: male and female, native and foreigner, Muslim and Buddhist and Jain, gay and straight and bisexual. This liberal Xanadu goes on to become a great kingdom and turns distinctly illiberal. Pampa is forced to flee and hide.

The novel is titled Victory City not so much because that’s the city’s name—though briefly called that (Vijayanagar), it was soon rechristened Bisnaga—or because Pampa emerges victorious. She does not. The title comes from the last passage of her poem, written at the end of her centuries-long life. Casting her mind back over the rise and fall of her empire, she asks how its kings and queens will be remembered. Only through words, she answers—her words:

While they lived, they were victors, or vanquished, or both.
Now they are neither.
Words are the only victors.

Just by dint of ending up in our hands, Victory City vindicates Pampa’s bittersweet faith in literature. In a sense, that’s true of everything Rushdie has published since 1989, when he went into hiding after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa, a religious ruling, in this case condemning Rushdie to death. His books could so easily not have been written. But Victory City is especially precious. For one thing, it comes out a mere six months after a self-avowed admirer of Khomeini finally got to Rushdie, assaulting him on a stage and stabbing him repeatedly in the neck and torso. Rushdie lost the use of an eye and a hand. He may have still been working on this novel; he may have finished it already. Readers will easily spot general parallels between our hero and her creator—both are prolific world-builders; both must elude political assassination—but a few of them seem to reproduce with eerie specificity the events of the summer. We don’t know whether he added those afterward or life imitated fiction, as it sometimes does. It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that Victory City is a triumph—not because it exists, but because it is utterly enchanting. Words are the only victors.

[From the September 1981 issue: “The Prophet’s Hair,” a short story by Salman Rushdie]

If this somber backstory makes you think that the novel is a slog, I’ve misled you. Victory City is a cheerful little vessel, despite its ultimate destination. Its myths of origin are recounted with glee. The day Bisnaga is created, its newly minted inhabitants are found asleep in the street, or wandering like sleepwalkers, or rolling on the ground in a state of confusion, beshitting themselves. Pampa whispers words that reach their ears and fill their minds with fictional ancestors, made-up memories, and notions of how to behave. By the following day, the adults are acting like adults and the children are running around as children should. Out of chaos has come something very like a nation: “It was as if everyone had lived here for years,” Rushdie writes, and had “formed a long-established community, a city of love and death, tears and laughter, loyalty and betrayal, and everything else that human nature contains.”

Rushdie plays adroitly with the metafictional and political implications of “real” people and a “real” polity being created out of imaginary backstories. (The image brings to mind a line from Benedict Anderson’s great treatise on nationalism, Imagined Communities : “It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.”) But not to worry. These big ideas bob along on the novel’s buoyant tone. That is set by two former cowherds, Hukka and Bukka, who hail from a town named Gooty. Fresh from a stint of inept soldiering and inspired by word of Pampa’s great beauty, they show up at her door bearing a bag of seeds, among other gifts. She casts a spell on the seeds and sends the young men out to sow them. Stunned to see the city materialize, Hukka and Bukka decide that one of them should be its king and the other the king in waiting. That they’re the right men for the jobs is not immediately evident.

“We must become gods now,” Hukka says. “There, you see,” he says, pointing. “There is our father, the Moon.” Oh, cut it out, Bukka says. “We’ll never get away with that.” A little later, it’s Bukka’s turn to essay great thoughts. “What is a human being?” he ventures. Did we start out as seeds? Or vegetables? Or “cows who lost our udders and two of our legs”? Frankly, he says, “I’m finding the vegetable possibility the most upsetting. I don’t want to discover that my great-grandfather was a brinjal, or a pea.”

Soon enough, they’ve moved on to the topic of who will be king first.

“Well,” Bukka said, hopefully, “I’m the smartest.”

“That’s debatable,” Hukka said. “However, I’m the oldest.”

“And I’m the most likable.”

“Again, debatable. But I repeat: I’m the oldest.”

“Yes, you’re old. But I’m the most dynamic.”

“Dynamic isn’t the same thing as regal,” Hukka said. “And I’m still the oldest.”

If their shtick sounds familiar, that’s because Hukka and Bukka descend from a noble line of squabbling clowns. They’re the heirs of the Marx Brothers bumbling around Freedonia; Abbott and Costello debating who’s on first; The Lion King’s Timon and Pumbaa arguing over which bugs taste best. You can’t read this novel without having classic movies on the brain. Film references are everywhere. Hukka insults his and Bukka’s no-good, thieving brothers, Pukka, Chukka, and Dev, who have come to mooch off their siblings, in phrases that echo the curses a French soldier hurls at King Arthur and his knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Empty-headed animal-food trough water! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!”). The nefarious brothers are “dark princes, shadow lords, phantoms of the blood,” Hukka says while the trio stands in front of him and Bukka. “They are stale bread. They are rotting fruit. They are moons in eclipse.”

Hukka and Bukka’s buffoonery helps turn Victory City into one of the most charming of Rushdie’s wonder tales, his excursions into Arabian Nights–style fantasia, a category that includes such novels as Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008). Victory City takes on the issues the novelist has addressed throughout his career: the truthfulness of fiction and the scourges of religious orthodoxy and sanctimony, as well as colonialism, capitalism, fanaticism, and all other isms that in Rushdie’s view are antithetical to the joyous multifariousness he treasures. To this rogues’ gallery, Victory City adds patriarchy—and handles it, too, with a light touch.

Rushdie’s comedies aren’t always this effervescent. Some of them—I count The Satanic Verses among them—have felt strained and overstuffed. They’re zany, which is not the same as funny. Clause is heaped upon clause in 10-car pileups of verbosity. The satire gets lost in the jumble. Victory City, however, sticks to the folk spirit of fairy tale. That is not to say the prose is simple. Rushdie’s narration is always polyphonic, but here the hubbub is muted. You have to listen for the shifts in register. The narrator seems to slip into different personas, each with its own vocabulary and speech patterns: a pontificating elder, say, followed by a sarcastic wit.

Rushdie’s protagonists also have a hard time staying in character. They try valiantly to stick to the orotund locution of myth and legend but keep lapsing into the vernacular, as if the heroic mode irritated their skin and had to be shrugged off. When Hukka proposes to Pampa, she replies, as though from on high, “There are things that must be done that are important for the general good … I will accept your hand to establish the bloodline of the empire.” Hukka, hurt, starts to berate her, and his face erupts in spots. She bursts out laughing: “Suppurating zits, good gracious.” It’s very prepubescent of me, but one of my favorite lines turns on nothing more than the incongruous use of bad language. A man pauses before an enchanted forest, afraid that its presiding goddess will kill him if he ventures in. Finally, he makes a decision: “Okay … Fuck it. I’ll stay.”

The playful language, though, doesn’t obscure the seriousness of the politics. This is a novel about backlash—the kind now cresting in America and abroad, and the kind found throughout history whenever despots feel threatened by the flowering of liberty. Here are some of the freedoms and pleasures opposed by the often cadaverous malefactors of the novel: worshipping the wrong god, women enjoying the same rights as men, sexual diversity, the mixing of faiths and cultures, dissent, poetry, art. “The thugs of the discarded power structure didn’t give up easily,” the narrator observes at one point.

[Graeme Wood: Salman Rushdie and the cult of offense]

Victory City begins with a damning picture of the life—and death—of women under the old power structure. Pampa’s mother drops her child’s hand to walk into a funeral pyre, joining a mass suicide of women, mostly wives whose husbands were recently slaughtered in a senseless battle. Pampa’s mother, widowed years earlier, falls prey to the collective frenzy of female self-immolation. The abandoned child swears she will “turn her face toward life” and carry on until she is “impossibly, defiantly old.” This is the moment when the thundering voice of the goddess issues from her mouth. “You will fight to make sure that no more women are ever burned in this fashion, and that men start considering women in new ways,” the goddess decrees. “And you will live just long enough to witness both your success and your failure.”

Pampa’s life is definitely long enough to see both the realization of her and the goddess’s ambitions and all that follows. When she whispered Bisnaga into being, she gave the women professional identities they couldn’t dream of having anywhere else, certainly in the 14th century. They are lawyers, police officers, scribes, dentists, and soldiers. They guard the palace wearing golden breastplates; when they play drums in the square, men dance to them. While egalitarianism reigns, the city thrives; its coffers are said to be overflowing.

If I were into numerology, I’d attribute significance to the fact that if you subtract Pampa’s life span (247 years) from the present year, 2023, you get 1776, which suggests another nation conceived in liberty. America’s lapses do seem to be on Rushdie’s mind. Much later, after Bisnaga has come under corrupt, theocratic rule, the narrator observes that its people have “little regard for yesterdays.” They live wholly in the present. “This made Bisnaga a dynamic place, capable of immense forward-looking energy, but also a place that suffered from the problem of all amnesiacs,” Rushdie writes, “which was that to turn away from history was to make possible a cyclical repetition of its crimes.” This could describe any number of evolving countries, of course, but echoes a familiar critique of the United States.

Pampa, meanwhile, is a woman of the future who does not forget the past. She is thrillingly brazen, not just by the standards of her day but also by ours. Her audacity amounts to an authorial nudge, bidding us to remember that we, too, can be prudish. Pampa agrees to marry Hukka only on the condition that she be allowed to keep her lover, a Portuguese horse trader whose eyes are “the green of the grass at dawn” and whose hair is “the red of the sun as it set.” Hukka agrees to this unconventional arrangement because her power and beauty drive him mad with lust: “You are so unbelievably dangerous,” he says feverishly. Pampa should have realized that this love language of Hukka’s was also a warning.

Salman Rushdie is often called a magical realist. I think a better term is fabulist, in the literal sense of the word. His novels are fables, stories featuring magical humans and other creatures who teach little, and big, lessons. There are two ways to write didactic fiction: with a straight face or playing it for laughs. Rushdie has always gone for the laughs, embellishing his morality plays with vaudevillian flourishes. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which he wrote for his son, the villains wear long black cloaks and carry hidden daggers. It’s a cloak-and-dagger joke, of course, but its adult audience may have read into it something else as well. Haroun came out in 1990, the year after the fatwa was issued. The black-robed Khomeini claimed that Rushdie’s brashly profane Satanic Verses was an insult to “the sacred beliefs of Muslims” (Rushdie’s theory is that the imam wanted to rally his followers after the ruinous Iran‑Iraq War). Screaming mobs had demanded that the book be banned. In Haroun, the bad guys have outlawed speech itself; the head bad guy is “the Arch-Enemy of all Stories,” “the Prince of Silence,” and “the Foe of Speech.”

One of the lesser vicissitudes of becoming world-famous as the object of an international murder plot rather than as a novelist is that your work will always be read as an allegory of your life. I don’t think I’m overindulging in this biographical fallacy, though, if I say that Rushdie’s frothy comedies are also very dark. Even the happy ending of a children’s book like Haroun feels Brechtian. Sudden rescues after an implausible series of events underscore the blunt truth that good isn’t guaranteed to triumph. On the contrary: The odds are usually against it.

[Randy Boyagoda: To support Salman Rushdie, just read him]

Bisnaga founders because Pampa’s personal liberties engender a political crisis. Her marriage to Hukka is unhappy. Her daughters have reddish hair and green eyes, and Hukka grows sulky. In his gloom, he comes under the sway of a particularly unpleasant priest, Vidyasagar, the leader of a puritanical “New Religion,” who aims to correct what he considers Bisnaga’s moral laxity. Vidyasagar and Pampa have history, too: When she was a child, he took her in, only to sexually abuse her for years. Now Vidyasagar becomes Hukka’s chief adviser, but luckily, Hukka dies before the two of them can outlaw everything with life in it. Bukka ascends to the throne. He’s open-minded and jolly. Pampa’s horse-trader paramour has died, and she marries Bukka for love; he’s happy to let Pampa put up erotic friezes all over the city. Theirs is the first golden age of Bisnaga.

But golden ages don’t last, and as everyone knows, utopias and magic kingdoms rarely survive generational transitions of power. The dour ascetic gains an ever larger following. The queen refuses to compromise her principles. Pampa demands that her daughters, who have grown up to be gracious and wise, claim the right of succession to the throne, rather than the younger, brutish sons she had with Bukka. He complies and banishes them, reluctantly. Riots break out in the city, which is growing more intolerant. Pampa tries to whisper the people back to reason, but they’re less inclined to listen than they used to be. “It may just be,” Rushdie has Bukka observe, in a wink to the reader, “that your ideas are too progressive for the fourteenth century.” The gears of the city’s and Pampa’s downfall creak into motion.

Rushdie knows a lot—too much—about backlashes and their horrors. It would be easy to read the antics of his post-fatwa novels as pure defiance: If he stops playing the jester, the terrorists win. There’s some truth to that, and in the face of a deadly threat that curtailed his freedom of movement for more than three decades, his staunch drollery has been remarkable. But he was a clown from the beginning. His verbal excess, his vamping, his characters’ exaggerated traits—his general shenanigans—are parts of a whole, a commedia dell’arte performance drawing on his personal suffering, yes, but also on the great dramas of our time, in which he played a role only because he was forced to. Chief among these dramas, for Rushdie, are the struggle between authoritarianism and noisy, messy democracy, and the efforts of the humorless and hierarchical to quash irreverence and equality. No matter what else is happening, in the theater of this author’s mind, the masks go on and are taken off. He stands in the wings, ready with the next one. He mugs for the audience. Points are made, but lightly, lightly. When you think about it, Rushdie’s novels are a miracle. May the goddess grant him strength to write another one.

This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “The Miraculous Salman Rushdie.”

On YouTube, a British influencer named Tom Torero was once the master of “daygame”—a form of pick-up artistry in which men approach women on the street. “You’ll need to desensitise yourself to randomly chatting up hot girls sober during the day,” Torero wrote in his 2018 pamphlet, Beginner’s Guide to Daygame. “This takes a few months of going out 3-5 times a week and talking to 10 girls during each session.”

Torero promised that his London Daygame Model—its five stages were open, stack, vibe, invest, and close—could turn any nervous man into a prolific seducer. This made him a hero to thousands of young men, some of whom I interviewed when making my recent BBC podcast series, The New Gurus. One fan described him to me as  “a free spirit who tried to help people,” and “a shy, anxious guy who reinvented himself as an adventurer.” To outsiders, though, daygame can seem unpleasantly clinical, with its references to “high-value girls,” and even coercive: It includes strategies for overcoming “LMR,” which stands for “last-minute resistance.” In November 2021, Newsweek revealed that Torero was secretly recording his dates—including the sex—and sharing the audio with paying subscribers to his website. Torero took down his YouTube channel, although he had already stopped posting regularly.

[Read: To learn about the far right, start with the ‘manosphere]’

This was the narrative I had expected to unravel—how a quiet, nerdy schoolteacher from Wales had built a devoted following rooted in the backlash to feminism. Instead, I found a more surprising story: Tom Torero was what I’ve taken to calling an “extremophile,” after the organisms that carve out an ecological niche in deserts, deep-ocean trenches, or highly acidic lakes. He was attracted to extremes. Even while working in an elementary school, he was doing bungee jumps in Switzerland.

As churchgoing declines in the United States and Britain, people are turning instead to internet gurus, and some personality types are particularly suited to thriving in this attention economy. Look at the online preachers of seduction, productivity, wellness, cryptocurrency, and the rest, and you will find extremophiles everywhere, filling online spaces with a cacophony of certainty. Added to this, the algorithms governing social media reward strong views, provocative claims, and divisive rhetoric. The internet is built to enable extremophiles.

In his daygame videos and self-published books, Tom recounted a familiar manosphere backstory of being bullied by his male peers and friend-zoned by girls. But that wasn’t the whole picture. While doing my research, I received a message from Tom’s ex-wife. (In the podcast, we called her Elizabeth, a pseudonym, because she feared reprisals from his fans.) Elizabeth said she had been at university with Tom Ralis—his birth name—at the turn of the century. They’d met in the choir. He was “quite tall, and quite gawky … he had a kind of lopsided grin and he was sort of cheery and chirpy and wanted to make people laugh,” she told me. Elizabeth was a music student, and she was—unusual for Britain—a follower of the Greek Orthodox faith. How funny, Tom had said. He was interested in that religion too. But he didn’t expect to become her boyfriend. He was happy just to be friends.

[Read: To learn about the far right, start with the ‘manosphere’]

When Elizabeth’s father had a car accident, though, Tom started love bombing her. He turned up at her room in college with tea bags and biscuits, and told her that he did in fact want to date her. This proposal came with an implicit threat: “If I wouldn’t be with him, he would disappear,” she told me. “And the way that he talked about it … there was a kind of threat of suicide, that he would kill himself if I wouldn’t be with him.”

Confused, worried, and under pressure, Elizabeth said she “let him take over.” She began to date Tom, and they got married while still at university. Then, she recounted, they moved to a Greek island, where Elizabeth taught English, and Tom, who had started dressing all in black, went on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos—an Orthodox monastery that bans women and even female animals to maintain its purity. When he returned, Elizabeth said, Tom announced that he wanted to become a monk.

I was surprised by this revelation: The man who became famous for teaching seduction had considered a vow of celibacy? But to Elizabeth, the announcement made perfect sense. When she first met Tom, he was a biology student who “hero-worshipped” the geneticist and atheist Richard Dawkins, she said, before he became “disillusioned with science and rationalism.” The common thread between all of these different Toms—Ralis and Torero; ardent atheist, wannabe monk, and YouTube pick-up artist—was a psychological need, a desire to be respected, to be listened to, to be a preacher. It was the role he wanted. The subject matter that he preached about came second.

[Read: Am I being love bombed? Are you?]

Not every internet guru follows this pattern. Some influencers have developed a genuine interest in a single topic and decided to make it into a career. But many other corners of the internet are full of serial enthusiasts who have pinballed from one ideology to another, believing in each one deeply as they go. These flexible evangelists are perfectly suited to becoming online gurus. They believe, and they need to preach—and because of the lack of gatekeeping on social media, the most talented talkers can easily find an audience online.

Andrew Tate is another extremophile. The misogynist influencer, a former kickboxer and reality-show contestant, used to describe himself as an atheist, but he announced last year that he had converted to Islam because—as one interviewer, the British rapper Zuby, summarized Tate’s view—“Christianity is kinda cucked.” Once Tate decided that God exists—which he had deduced because evil exists, and therefore so must its opposite—it was important to him to find the religion he deemed the most hard-core. (After all, a man who keeps swords in his house could not have become a mild-mannered Episcopalian.) On the other side of the gender divide, Mikhaila Peterson, a second-generation influencer who became known for advocating a “lion diet” as a cure for immune conditions, revealed in 2021 that she had found God through taking psychedelics. She now talks about religion healing her soul with the same intensity that she speaks about her all-meat diet healing her body.

Shortly after Tom Ralis returned from Mount Athos, Elizabeth escaped the Greek island, and their marriage. When they divorced in 2006, YouTube was in its infancy. Throughout the 2010s, she would search for him online occasionally, and she watched him develop his daygame model. It was like the love-bombing technique he had used on her but condensed from several months into a single date. In December 2021, she discovered from a text message sent by a mutual friend that Tom had taken his own life. He had often spoken of his experience with depression, but his death still shocked her. In April last year, several of his online friends organized a tribute in London, and talked about Torero’s effect on their life. He had successfully become the secular online version of a preacher—a YouTube guru.

Tom Torero wanted to be an authority figure, and he found the cultural script that best fulfilled his needs. On my journey through the gurusphere, I encountered many stories like his. Take Maajid Nawaz, whom The New York Times anointed a member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” in 2018. Before becoming famous as a heterodox public intellectual, Nawaz had been jailed in Egypt for four years in the early 2000s for being a member of the Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. After renouncing that ideology, he became an antiextremism adviser to then-Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, and at the same time stood as a candidate for Britain’s centrist party, the Liberal Democrats. Having failed to succeed in politics, Nawaz became a talk-radio host and became radicalized again, this time into COVID denialism. He left the broadcaster LBC in January 2022 after claiming that mandatory vaccination was “a global palace coup” by “fascists who seek the New World Order.”

[Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Extremism has spread into the mainstream]

Nawaz is, I would argue, another extremophile. This 2015 description of him by The Guardian could just as easily apply to Tom Torero: “Nawaz’s powers of verbal persuasion are something even his detractors concede. There’s a strong line to take in every answer. But equally, there’s very little sense of being open to persuasion himself.” Unlike most of us, with our needling doubts and fumbling hesitation, extremophiles are fervent in whatever their current belief is. And they want to tell other people about it.

For this reason, extremophiles have always made particularly good op-ed columnists—and now podcasters and YouTubers. The Hitchens brothers are a traditional example: Christopher was a Trotskyist as a young man, yet he became a supporter of the ultimate establishment project, the Iraq War. Peter moved from socialism to social conservatism, and has used his Mail on Sunday column to oppose strict COVID policies. Their analogue in the social-media age is James Lindsay. He believes that America is under threat from a Marxist-pedophile alliance, and he frequently collaborates with the Christian Nationalist Michael O’Fallon. But Lindsay first entered public life in the 2010s, writing books in support of New Atheism. At that time, he saw himself on the left. Although his middle name is Stephen, he told me that he wrote his atheist books as “James A. Lindsay” to deflect any backlash from the conservative community where he lived. As far as he is concerned, he has always been a rebel against the prevailing political climate.

Not everyone with an internet following is an extremophile. Someone like Russell Brand, a left-wing British comedian and actor now dabbling in anti-vax rhetoric and conspiracy theories about shadowy elites “concretizing global power,” strikes me as having a different psychological makeup. He is merely a heat-seeking missile for attention. His mirror image on the right is Dave Rubin, a gay man who has built a fan base among social conservatives opposed to homosexuality, as well as a Trumpist who—sensing the wind changing—recently boasted about attending the inauguration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Extremophiles are more like the sociologist Eric Hoffer’s “true believers,” the people who fuel mass movements. “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not,” Hoffer wrote in 1951. Hoffer’s formulation reminded me of a friend telling me about a mutual acquaintance who had been in two cults. I felt like Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell: To be in one cult may be regarded as a misfortune; to join two looks like carelessness. Or think about the Mitford sisters, the quintessential English aristocrats of the early 20th century. As children, Unity was a fascist, and Decca was a communist. Their childhood sitting room was divided down the middle; one side had copies of Der Stürmer and Mein Kampf; the other had hammers and sickles. The only point of political agreement between the two girls was that the mere conservatives and liberals who visited the house were boring.

My journey reporting on the gurusphere has led me to confront my own extremophile tendencies. After being raised Catholic, I became interested in New Atheism in the 2000s, because it was a countercultural phenomenon. Like pretty much everyone else, I would argue that my political beliefs are all carefully derived from first principles. But the ones that I choose to write about publicly are clearly influenced by my own self-image as an outsider and a contrarian. Being self-aware about that helps me remember that my fear of normiedom has to be kept in check, because the conventional wisdom is often right.

Researchers of extremism are now studying its psychological causes as keenly as they are its political ones. “Psychological distress—defined as a sense of meaninglessness that stems from anxious uncertainty—stimulates adherence to extreme ideologies,” wrote the authors of a 2019 paper on the topic. Many people become radicalized through “a quest for significance—the need to feel important and respected by supporting a meaningful cause.” The COVID pandemic was so radicalizing because one single highly conspicuous issue presented itself at exactly the same time that many people were bored, lonely, and anxious. Cults usually try to isolate their followers from their social-support networks; during the pandemic, people did that all by themselves.

The extremophile model helps us make sense of political journeys that are otherwise baffling to us, like the monastery-to-pick-up-artist pipeline. We might be tempted to ask: Who was the real Tom Torero—atheist bro, aspirant monk, or master seducer? The answer is: all of them. He was a true believer, just not a monogamous one.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

One of the weirdest economic stories of the past half century is what happened to rich Americans—and especially rich American men—at work.

In general, poor people work more than wealthy people. This story is consistent across countries (for example, people in Cambodia work much more than people in Switzerland) and across time (for example, Germans in the 1950s worked almost twice as much as they do today).

But starting in the 1980s in the United States, this saga reversed itself. The highest-earning Americans worked longer and longer hours, in defiance of expectations or common sense. The members of this group, who could have bought anything they wanted with their wealth, bought more work. Specifically, from 1980 to 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men increased their work hours by more than any other group of married men: about five hours a week, or 250 hours a year.

In 2019, I called this phenomenon “workism.” In a time of declining religiosity, rich Americans seemed to turn to their career to fill the spiritual vacuum at the center of their life. For better or (very often) for worse, their desk had become their altar.

Since then, the concept of workism has been attached to a range of cultural and political phenomena, including declining fertility trends in the West. I’ve blamed workism for U.S. policies that resist national parental and sick leave because of an elite preference for maximizing the public’s attachment to the labor force.

Then the pandemic happened. I didn’t know how the forcible end of white-collar commutes and the demise of the default office would change affluent American attitudes. I assumed that remote work would make certain aspects of workism even more insidious. Researchers at Microsoft found that the boomlet in online meetings was pushing work into odd hours of the week, leading to more “just finishing up on email!” late nights, and Saturday mornings that felt like mini-Mondays. Working on our computer was always a “leaky” affair; with working from home and COVID, I feared the leak would become a flood.

But I was wrong. This year, Washington University researchers concluded that, since 2019, rich Americans have worked less. And less, and less. In a full reversal of the past 50 years, the highest-educated, highest-earning, and longest-working men reduced their working hours the most during the pandemic. According to the paper, the highest-earning 10 percent of men worked 77 fewer hours in 2022 than that top decile did in 2019—or 1.5 hours less each week. The top-earning women cut back by 29 hours. Notably, despite this reduction, rich people still work longer hours overall.

This analysis may have been thrown off by untrustworthy survey responses received during the chaos of the pandemic. But according to The Wall Street Journal, separate data from the Census Bureau back up that conclusion. From 2019 to 2021, married men reduced their workweek by a little more than an hour. Unmarried men had no similar decline.

So why are rich married men suddenly—and finally—reducing their working hours, by an unusual degree? Yongseok Shin, an economist at Washington University and a co-author of the paper, told me that he had “no doubt that this was a voluntary choice.” When I asked him if perhaps rich married men had worked less in dual-earner households to help with kids during the early pandemic period, he told me that their working hours continued falling in 2022, “long after the worst periods of school closures and issues with child-care centers.”

The title of the new paper is a bit misleading: “Where Are the Workers? From Great Resignation to Quiet Quitting.” The authors make frequent references to quiet quitting, the notion that workers in 2022 suddenly decided to reduce their collective ambition and effort. But their analysis doesn’t actually find anything like that. In the past three years, the median worker hardly reduced his or her hours. All of the decline in hours worked happened among the highest-earning Americans, with the longest workweeks. Is that an outbreak of quiet quitting? I’d say no. It’s more like the fever of workism is finally breaking among the most workaholic Americans.

“I think the pandemic has clearly reduced workaholism,” Shin told me. “And by the way, I think that’s a very positive thing for this country.”

I’m inclined to agree. In the years since I wrote the workism essay, I’ve toggled between two forms of writer’s guilt. Some days, I worry that I went too hard on people who are devoted to their job. If people can find solace and structure and a sense of control in their labor, who am I to tell them that they are suffering from an invisible misery by worshipping a false and marketized god?

But on other days, I think I wasn’t hard enough on workism, given how deeply it has insinuated itself into American values. The New York Times and Atlantic writer David Brooks has distinguished between what he calls “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” Résumé virtues are what people bring to the marketplace: Are they clever, devoted, and ambitious employees? Eulogy virtues are what they bring to relationships not governed by the market: Are they kind, honest, and faithful partners and friends?

Americans should prioritize eulogy virtues. But by our own testimony, we strongly prefer résumé virtues for ourselves and especially for our children. This year, Pew Research Center asked American parents: What accomplishments or values are most important for your children as they become adults? Nearly nine in 10 parents named financial security or “jobs or careers [our children] enjoy” as their top value. That was four times more than the share of parents who said it was important for their children to get married or have children; it was even significantly higher than the percentage of parents who said it’s extremely important for their kids to be “honest,” “ethical,” “ambitious,” or “accepting of people who are different.” Despite large differences among ethnicities in some categories, the primacy of career success was one virtue that cut across all groups.

I can’t read those survey results without thinking about the fact that teenage anxiety has been steadily rising for the past decade. Commentators sometimes blame a technological cocktail of smartphone use and social media for the psychological anguish of American youth. But perhaps a latent variable is the reverberation of workism in the next generation. These surveys suggest that everything society ought to consider bigger than work—family, faith, love, relationships, ethics, kindness—turns out to be secondary.

The message from American parents, in a century of economic instability, seems to be Your career is up here, and everything else is down there. Is there any scenario in which this is good for us? People can control their character in a way that they can’t control their lifetime earnings. In the ocean of the labor market, we’re all minnows, often powerless to shape our own destiny. It can’t be healthy for a society to convince its young people that professional success, the outcome of a faceless market, matters more to life than values such as human decency, which require only our own adherence.

I don’t know what will happen to workism in the next decade, but if rich American men are beginning to ease up on the idea that careerism is the tentpole of identity, the benefits could be immense—for their generation and the ones to come.

Office hours are back! Join Derek Thompson and special guests for conversations about the future of work, technology, and culture. The next session will be February 6. Register here and watch a recording anytime on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel.

Some 25 years ago, I remember sitting on the Shooting Review Board for the King County Sheriff’s Office, a large metropolitan police department serving the Seattle region. I recall listening to an investigator explain the chain of events that had led to the fatal shooting of a man fleeing the scene of an armed robbery. My memory is that the man had a long criminal record and had just committed another felony. Not a sympathetic figure to me or the public, but still a human being.

The presentation we heard contained evidence that the responding officers’ tactics had created the conditions that made the shooting necessary, to ensure their own safety. (The term of art is “officer-created jeopardy.”) But the review process had been negotiated with the police union and by design had remained out of the public’s view and tightly focused on the moment the officers had fired their weapons.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: The authoritarian instincts of police unions]

I had misgivings, but ultimately, I voted with the rest of the board to find the shooting justified. As their precinct commander, I knew that the officers involved were good people, and I didn’t have the heart or courage to call out their bad tactics. I just let it go. I knew nothing about the person they’d killed—except that he had a criminal record and had just committed a felony. That was enough for me to rationalize my vote, and thus dodge the risk of being seen as a traitor to my tribe. Over my 33 years with the sheriff’s office, I participated in more than a dozen such review boards, and every time, I voted in defense of the officers’ actions.

I ignored how the board’s validation of bad tactics perpetuated future bad practices. Or how it mirrored the cultural tolerance for rough and aggressive tactics in high-crime neighborhoods. The board’s approach reinforced the myth about how policing should be done in those neighborhoods—with those kinds of people. It was considered the cost of doing business.

My acceptance of this culture began to shift when I ran for sheriff in 2004 and had to listen to people outside of my cop cave during my campaign. I spent a lot of time in neighborhoods that weren’t used to positive, personal attention from police leaders. When people working for my campaign suggested that I avoid reaching out to residents in such neighborhoods because they don’t turn out to vote or donate much to campaign funds, it shocked and angered me so much that I did the opposite and focused even more time with them. I’m glad I did. The trust and relationships I built in conversations with people who didn’t love the police gave me insight into the damage done by police indifference to the humanity of people they hurt.

Then, Washington State legislation enacted in 2019 mandating more transparent and comprehensive investigations of deadly force required me, as the director of the Criminal Justice Training Commission, to seek community input on police training and investigative practices. This resulted in me spending many, many hours face-to-face with families of people killed by police. There were so many mothers with sons the same age as my sons. I couldn’t turn away. My heart hurt for them, and all the rationalizations I had employed over the years felt as hollow as they now sounded. I was forced to confront the deep chasm between police culture and the lived experience of communities who feel occupied rather than served by police.

We, America’s law-enforcement leaders, have to change. I understand the motivation of police leaders who believe they are protecting the “good” men and women who join this profession with honorable intentions. I was one of them. But ignorance and good intentions don’t justify or eliminate the actual harm caused by misguided actions. I cringe when police leaders describe officers like Derek Chauvin as “bad apples” or “rogue cops,” as if their behavior is a surprise. How can anyone be surprised? And nothing would have changed without the public exposure of the video showing George Floyd’s death. This is what happens in a culture that accepts, rationalizes, and makes excuses for indefensible behavior and prioritizes group loyalty over speaking out.

[Seth W. Stoughton, Jeffrey J. Noble, and Geoffrey P. Alpert: How to actually fix America’s police]

My generation of police was socialized in the comforting myth of police as heroes, engaged in a righteous battle. We didn’t learn the history of how police have been used to maintain order for those in power, such as on slave patrols or through enforcing Jim Crow laws, busting unions, or waging the War on Drugs. The insular culture of policing protects the flattering myth of heroes and keeps the ugly original mission hidden. The image of the noble hero, holding the line between good and evil, forms the very foundation of police group identity, intensifying the “us versus them” mentality and feeding on the profound human need to belong to a group.

When I worked the street, the fear of being ostracized was stronger than the fear of getting shot. One incident stands out: I joined a team of undercover narcotics detectives on a poorly conceived and nearly catastrophic drug bust. The tactical plan made no sense and seemed reckless to me. But I was the new kid on the team and kept my mouth shut. My partner nearly got his head blown off. It was one of those “but for the grace of God” moments. I still shudder when I think about how I would have faced his wife if she had become a widow and his kids had lost their father.

Though the vest, the gun, the training, and the equipment all lessen the physical danger of the job, nothing assuages the fear of rejection from one’s group.

I progressed through the ranks and eventually became responsible for an entire police tribe. The fear of rejection never subsided. But building those relationships with people hurt by bad policing gave me strength to keep challenging the status quo. I began to see myself as part of a larger tribe—one that includes the community. This shift in mentality, in seeing the broader community as something police are a part of, not something they are set against, is what needs to happen across policing.

This past weekend, as I watched the videos of Tyre Nichols being beaten to death, I asked myself, Why does this keep happening? But I know the answer: It’s police culture—rooted in a tribal mentality, built on a false myth of a war between good and evil, fed by political indifference to the real drivers of violence in our communities. We continue to use police to maintain order as a substitute for equality and adequate social services. It will take a generation of courageous leaders to change this culture, to reject this myth, and to truly promote a mission of service—a mission that won’t drive officers to lose their humanity.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked, “​​What is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve policing and the criminal-justice system?”

James contends that shootings by police mostly aren’t the products of “bad apple” cops:

Like a plane crash or a nuclear-plant mishap, they are the emergent result of training, hiring, dispatch, supervision, and more, all of which can be improved. An “event review,” not a “performance review” of the cop who pulls the trigger, allows for resident participation and expert input. This is not a substitute for discipline and punishment of violators. It assumes that the discipline of a lone violator is a bad place to stop if prevention is the goal.

Maryanne describes what made her late brother a good cop:

My brother Paul, a police officer for 37 years, died this past Thanksgiving Day. At Paul’s wake, the constant stream of fellow officers and staff demonstrated he was loved by all, but those to whom he was the field-training officer spoke about him in a tone of reverence. Many of your readers will suggest taking a hard look at how officers are trained. I would urge a hard look at who they are trained by. Can they demonstrate not just what to do but also how to be? Here is a story shared on Paul’s memorial website by one of his trainees:

“Paulie taught me the value of words over force. There is one particular incident I’ll never forget involving … a mentally unstable young man … who had real fighting skills. The guy kept repeating he would count to three and ‘kill all of us.’ He would get to two several times, which caused Kline and I to prepare for battle. Paulie, with his hands in his pockets and his calming demeanor, would say just what the kid needed to hear to interrupt his violent thoughts and reset. Eventually, the kid succumbed to Paul’s verbal judo and no force was required to bring the incident to a close. I’ll never forget that, or Paul, for all the other good he did. As a trainer years later, I always remembered that and tried to pass it along thanks to him. RIP Paulie. You touched many lives!”

My eulogy for Paul provided some additional context for how a beloved police field-training officer came to be the person he was and why that served his trainees and the community:

“The quality I’ve heard over and over again about Paul was that he was ‘nice,’ which is not the typical description of a cop; usually you hear good cop or bad cop, and nice cop may seem out of the norm. Often I suspected I was latching onto the word nice because he was my brother and of course I was biased. Yesterday at the wake, my biases were confirmed and I kept hearing story after story of what nice meant to his fellow officers and staff, that what most defined Paul were not the occasional events that resulted in his commendations or awards but instead his ‘thousand small acts of kindness.’”

Between the time Paul was married to his former wife and when he met and married Wei, the true love of his life, he found a very good counselor. Paul was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. As with many recurring adulthood patterns, the counselor saw there were roots in childhood, but a lot of it was fuzzy, and so they encouraged Paul to “go talk to your sister.” During that time we spent hours upon hours piecing together our childhood. Like many families, ours was touched by a depressed and alcoholic parent. The normal ebb and flow went between apparent calm and total chaos that kept us always on guard, not knowing which it would be at any given moment.

Bit by bit, we pieced together all the fractured moments to re-create many of the events we weren’t allowed to talk about and often told to ignore as if they hadn’t happened at all. At certain points, true to Paul’s nature, as all the memories of craziness and chaos began to emerge, he would just get me laughing and laughing, often by inserting the phrase “How in the world did we ever grow up to be fairly normal functioning adults?” The evidence and statistics were clearly not in our favor, and things easily could have gone in another direction.

But we had figured out how to cope. Paul’s role in our family was the “disrupter,” so any of you who marveled at Paul’s particularly skillful and effective methods for diffusing “domestic” calls who think he learned this at the police academy would be only partially correct. The truth is Paul started honing those skills from the time he was about 6. He transformed the coping and challenges of a child into kindness and helpfulness as an adult.

A few of you who had Paul as your field-training officer shared stories of Paul’s ability to use “Words, not force” in his work, and I will be forever proud that “Words, not force” is what you most wanted to share about what you learned from him. But now I’d like to share my favorite story that Paul shared with me … Of course it takes place in the police station.

Near the end of his career, after Paul had transferred from the street to the desk, one day a woman walked in … Paul sensed the signs of an alcoholic and he was sure this would have no small part in why the woman was there. The woman said that her teenage daughter hadn’t come home the prior night and she wanted to report her as a runaway. Paul took all the information and tried to reassure the woman that he thought her daughter was probably okay and just decided to stay over at a friend’s house. All the while, he was thinking to himself that he understood exactly why the daughter didn’t want to be at home.  

I can’t recall what the girl’s name was, but she needs a name for this story, so I’ll call her Amy. A while later, a teenage girl came into the station, walked up to Paul at the desk and just said “I need some help.” I suspect she was a little taken aback when Paul said “I bet you are Amy. Your mother has already been here, but you’ve come to the right place, and you’ve come to just the right person.” He took Amy to the back of the station and just sat and listened to her. It was no surprise to Paul that his assumptions were correct: This was a teenager struggling with a parent who was struggling with addiction.

He assured her there were safe places to share her story and get the support she needed. So they went over to the computer, where Paul helped her look up group meetings in the area. With a list in hand, Amy made a promise that she would go to the meetings, and also that she would go home. I think about Amy a lot and hope that she found the support she needed and grew up to be a “fairly normal functioning adult.” I can’t know any of that for sure, but I do know in my heart that when she left the police station that day, she felt a little more empowered and a lot less alone because she met Paul.

Scott is a criminal-defense attorney and longtime critic of flaws in policing and prosecuting:

For those of us who have spent decades trying to figure out and then implement reform, the past few years have been brutal. There was a rare window of opportunity for change, when the public wasn’t screaming for ever more laws, ever harsher punishments, and fewer alternatives to the historical (and failed) belief that we could punish our way out of violence, drugs, and crime. Instead, the activists took the field, indulging their fantasy ideological solutions that would neither work nor be accepted by the majority of Americans as viable solutions requiring trade-offs everyone could live with.

Simplistic solutions such as “defund,” based on ideologically bound understandings of the problem, never stood a chance. As soon as the next “wave” hit, as it surely would, the pendulum would swing and we would be back to the tried-and-failed more crimes, less due process, and harsher punishments. And here we are. We squandered a once-in-a-generation (or more) opportunity for serious reform where all stakeholders reached consensus and the best, if imperfect, fixes were accepted by a majority of Americans and to everyone’s benefit. Instead, we’re back where we started and no one was saved.

Robert urges an emphasis on accountability:

Eliminate qualified immunity, which renders all but the most egregious, outrageous conduct unaccountable. It is a long slog to change attitudes, but by making punishment more likely, we can change behavior. In an ideal world, we would also be able to foster a police culture where misbehavior is seen as an unacceptable stain on police as a whole and something that every effort is made to eliminate. Culture change is difficult to impossible to impose from outside, but it can occur.

I am a retired physician, and I remember the ’70s and early ’80s when physicians circled the wagons to defend malpracticing docs but gradually began to realize that malpractice hurt people and made everyone else look bad. The profession ceased to tolerate physician misbehavior. I can’t say how to make that happen in the police, but it’s where they need to go.

MC recommends more sunlight:

This issue is not about the failure of police departments but of the weak policing of them. I don't think policing can be improved much except by forced transparency and external enforcement of humane standards. Officers have to be more afraid of the consequences of brutality. Mandate body cameras that can't be disabled, monitored by an external office that doesn’t normally work with police officers. Footage becomes publicly available, with identities suppressed.

We’re horrified at police brutality whenever another video shows it. There’s nothing more horrifying than how obvious it is that this behavior is normal for the ones inflicting the violence. We must bring the eyes of the public into all the dark places where that treatment was learned and practiced.  

Jay wants police to be more active:

Improved policing begins with actually enforcing the law as written. We’ve deemed law enforcement of smaller crimes such as shoplifting, graffiti, and small theft “optional,” then wondered why larger crimes continue to soar. There’s little justice for criminals nor for victims in a system in which policing is optional, understaffed or harassed and harried into inertia.

C. is a white cop who is married to a Black police dispatcher on a college campus:

This question haunts me because of my job, because of my wife's job, and because any children we may have will have to interact with American police as mixed-race individuals.

One morning, we had a dining-hall employee pull into our department’s parking lot. She had been on her way to work on campus when her ex began following her in his car. She stopped at our department to scare him off, and to make us aware that he might show up at the dining hall to further harass her. We got information on the ex and found out that he had a warrant for misdemeanor assault (on the employee). The employee went on her way to work, and we followed to hang out in the area and keep an eye out.

The ex didn’t wait long, and parked right near the employee before she had even gotten out of her car. My shift partner found him first, and when I got on scene, the ex was outside his vehicle shouting toward the employee in her car. She was having a full-blown panic attack, breathing and crying so loud I could hear her through the closed car windows. And the ex had their child in the car. Couldn’t have been more than 2, and he wasn’t in a proper car seat; he was standing on the backseat looking out the window.

The ex was focused on the employee, ignoring my shift partner, and started freaking out at how much she was freaking out. I was likewise concerned about her, so I went ahead and radioed for medics to be dispatched. I could tell my shift partner was trying to get in a position to handcuff the ex, but he kept sidestepping, trying to keep an eye on the employee and still shouting toward her.

I knew if we went hands-on as the situation stood, it was going to be ugly (the guy was tall, like 6 foot 2, while my shift partner was a paltry 5 foot 5 and I’m an average 5 foot 10). So I got his attention and told him, “Look, I have medics on the way to check on her, but we can only do one thing at a time, and we have information that you have a warrant out. We’re still waiting for confirmation that the warrant is current and valid, but that’s what we know right now. If you would have a seat in our cruiser while we wait for that info, we can have medics check her out.”

The guy just stopped. Then he said, “Yeah, I’m not gonna lie. I got a warrant.’ He turned around and put his hands behind his back. My partner cuffed him and got him in a cruiser. I went to check on the employee, while our sergeant, who arrived during all this, retrieved the child and brought him to his mother. Medics showed up a bit later, and made sure the employee was okay.

Now, standard operating procedure when arresting someone with a warrant for a violent offense is to get them in a position where you can cuff them up real quick before they even know what’s happening, and then explain the situation. It’s supposed to prevent the individual from even trying to fight the arrest. In this situation, though, the guy was already amped way up; we had a woman that legitimately might need medical attention and a 2-year-old toddling around the back seat of a car. If we'd gone hands-on with no explanation, he would have struggled, and we would have had to fight to get him under control while his ex hyperventilated herself into passing out and his son watched from the car. It was going to be a bad day all around. So instead, I treated the guy with respect and explained the situation point-blank. And he let us arrest him.

My shift partner, later, told me he didn’t really like the way I’d handled it, and that we should’ve cuffed him before we told him about the warrant. I got a guy that brought his 2-year-old son with him to harass the mother of said son to let us arrest him for assault of that same mother. And my partner didn’t like the way I’d handled it. If that isn’t an indictment of police standard operating procedures and culture, then I don’t know what is.

Taylor argues that the best way forward is a relentless focus on creating and scaling up alternatives to police:

We should be thinking about crisis-response teams (Denver's STAR program relies on social workers to respond to calls), getting police out of traffic enforcement, and civilian systems for “welfare checks” (that often compose up to 70 percent of a jurisdiction’s 911 dispatches).

These programs take armed police out of the equation, in circumstances that most often escalate into police harassment, intimidation, abuse, and murder. They reduce harm, without any need for police-culture change, effective retraining, or functional internal accountability mechanisms.

But rebalancing public-safety budgets to rely far less on policing has not advanced, in part, because people with legitimate concerns about their safety cannot envision the world where police are not the first responders. "What happens when I call 911 if it’s not the police responding?” Before we will have the political space we need to then limit police to a narrower role, we need to build up these alternatives in a visible way and show they are effective, giving time for them to become a routine part of a multipronged public-safety structure.

Jaleelah urges a more active citizenry:

Monitor the police in your community. Go to city-council meetings and town halls. If police unions are blocking formal oversight, monitor them on the ground. If you see an officer yelling at a civilian, stop and record. If you see a barista threatening to call the police to remove a homeless person sleeping on a bench, try to mediate the disagreement.

Police officers may oppose civilian interference in their work. If that is the case, they should lobby their unions to make policy changes that will engender confidence in their intentions and capabilities. Until that happens, ordinary Americans’ on-the-ground surveillance is the only thing that can keep cops accountable.

D. H. argues that a lack of public understanding of what police work entails is an impediment to better policing:

The George Floyd situation was as close to indisputably wrong as any police-caused deaths in the past decade or so, and captured on videotape. It was clearly outrageous to keep him face down, handcuffed behind his back, and to continue to kneel on his neck while he was experiencing difficulty breathing.  

Other situations are not so clearly wrong, thus there is less outrage. Trying to shoehorn every deadly encounter with police into the same category as the George Floyd situation has probably hurt the cause rather than helped it, because people get outrage fatigue. We live in a violent society beset by an upsurge in violent crimes (at least in the Portland area). At this juncture, defunding the police feels more like giving free rein to criminals to prey on society, and encouraging vigilantes and militia to take policing into their own hands. “Defund the police” was one of the worst liberal rallying cries ever. The gun scourge in this country makes it feel very unsafe for officers and the public alike.

With the constant barrage of vitriol expressed toward the police, who would want to become a police officer? Who at retirement age would want to remain on the force? If they do not feel supported by the public, some may not feel highly motivated to protect and serve. How many quiet-quitting police officers are out there, and can you really blame them?  

We cannot work up sufficient outrage to take meaningful steps to prevent mass shootings, so why would anyone think a society numb to school and church shootings might remain outraged enough to effect meaningful change to the police organizations that must respond to those?  

I can understand how the fear of corrupt and/or brutal police could cause a rational person to resist arrest, as could impaired judgment from mental illness or intoxication.  However, if one chooses to resist arrest, that choice will be met by force (police violence) aimed to quickly overcome that resistance and gain control of the situation. Once force is employed, situations become much more volatile and outcomes worse. But, if police do not use force, then noncompliance will be encouraged. Getting the level of force right is more difficult in real time in the field than it may look after the fact.

I am not a police officer, but before retiring, I frequently represented them in civil-rights actions seeking money damages in federal court, and have a pretty good grasp on their perspective. They do have a strong sense that the public does not understand what they are called upon to do, and how they are trained to do it, and why they are trained that way (answer: survival). The way forward is thorny. The public needs to know what is and is not lawful police conduct. There is a lot of misinformation in the press, and the public deserves accurate information about persons armed and authorized to use force against them.  

Police should not police themselves; indeed, no group should police itself.  Recruiting diverse panels of retired judges, public defenders, prosecutors, academics, and others knowledgeable about the law and police procedures to take testimony, gather evidence about serious police conduct complaints, and issue public reports of their findings might be a start. It could help the poor and ignorant obtain representation in meritorious cases, publicly identify transgressing offices, and discourage frivolous lawsuits where the facts show the conduct was justified. Of course, that would cost money, and panels of experts can be wrong, biased, or even corrupted.  

Timothy believes that guns are a big part of the problem:

Improving policing is a tough problem as long as America remains a highly weaponed society. The police can’t respond to a traffic situation, a domestic situation, or even a missing-child situation without fearing for their lives. Hence, they react as if any situation is or will become violent. With the proliferation of drugs, their fears are increased. There are many situations where certain drugs increase a person’s sense of violence while deadening their awareness to pain or injury. That makes it really tough on the police.  

Jon concurs, and wants police officers to advocate for more gun control:

An acute manifestation of America’s gun insanity is that police departments, chiefs, sheriffs, and unions are not the most vocal supporters of gun-safety measures and laws to get guns off the streets. Where everyone (including, apparently, 6-year-olds) can possess a deadly weapon, police are not irrational to bring a sense of caution, or worse, fear, to almost every interaction, heightening tensions and leading to faster and deadlier escalations. This has contributed to more militant, violent, confrontational policing.

JD worries about the mental health of police officers:

I believe that the majority of those who undertake careers in law enforcement are motivated by a desire to make a positive difference. Over time, however, the soul-killing impact of repetitively dealing with humanity in its worst moments erodes empathy and altruism and generates resentment, hostility, fear, and an overarching effort to exert control.  

While our culture has made great strides in acknowledging the impact of PTSD on our veterans and others who experience trauma, only rarely does such understanding extend to law enforcement. As a former medical educator in a family-practice residency program, I recall the utility of Balint training in assisting medical-school graduates to maintain empathy and professionalism in the context of medical practices requiring them to encounter 15-20 persons a day, each seeking the best of medical care. Balint training created a context where peers could share the best and worst of their days in a judgment-free setting and, in the best of outcomes, permit them to renew their commitment.

Thanks to everyone who sent responses, whether or not I had space to print them––as ever, lots of great ones went unpublished. See you later this week.

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.

Elections have consequences. Florida’s governor has decided to root out wrong-think at one of Florida’s public colleges, and his harebrained meddling will likely harm the school, but he has every right to do it.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Republicans’ 2024 magical thinking March 2023 cover story: We’ve lost the plot. Montana’s Black mayor

Florida’s Soviet Commissars

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.

Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”

As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.

Rufo is part of a new generation of young right-wing activists who have managed to turn trolling into a career. Good for him, I guess, but these self-imagined champions of a new freedom are every bit as dogmatic as the supposed leftist authoritarians they think they’re opposing. Their demands for ideological purity are part of an ongoing hustle meant to convince ordinary Americans that the many institutions of the United States, from the FBI in Washington down to a college in Sarasota, are somehow all scheming against them.

But Rufo is absolutely right about one thing: If Ron DeSantis wants to put him in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.

Elections have consequences. If the people of Florida, through their electoral choices, want to wreck one of their own colleges, it is within the state’s legitimate power to do so. In fact, Florida could decide tomorrow to amend its own constitution and abolish state universities entirely. There’s no national right to a college education, and if Florida wants to unleash a battalion of Guy Montags on its own state colleges and their libraries—well, that’s up to the voters.

But something more important is going on here. At this point in any discussion of college education, we are all supposed to acknowledge that colleges have, in fact, become ridiculously liberal. There’s some truth to that charge; I included some stories of campus boobery when I wrote about the role of colleges in America some years back. And only a few weeks ago, I joined the many people blasting Hamline University for going off the rails and violating basic principles of academic freedom while infantilizing and overprotecting students.

Fine, so stipulated: Many colleges do silly things and have silly professors saying silly things.

But the Sovietization of the New College isn’t about any of that. Something has changed on the American right, which is now seized with a hostility toward higher education that is driven by cultural resentment, and not by “critical race theory” or any of the other terms that most Americans don’t even understand. College among conservatives has become a kind of shorthand for identifying with all kinds of populist grievances, a ploy used even by Republicans with Ivy League educations as a means of cozying up to its non-college-educated and resentful base.

GOP attitudes about education have changed fast. As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.

It doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing to realize that those four years tracked with the rise of Donald Trump and a movement whose populist catechism includes seething anger at “the elites,” a class that no longer means “people with money and power”—after all, Republicans have gobs of both—but rather “those bookish snobs who look down on our True Real-American Values.” The Republican message, aided by the usual hypocrites in the right-wing entertainment ecosystem (such as Tucker Carlson, a prep-school product who told kids to drop out of college but asked Hunter Biden for help getting his own son into Georgetown), is that colleges are grabbing red-blooded American kids and replacing them with Woke Communist Pod People.

This is a completely bizarre line of attack: It posits that a graduate student making a pittance grading exams is more “elite” than a rich restaurant owner. But it works like a charm, in part because how Americans measure their success (and their relative status) has shifted from the simple metric of wealth to less tangible characteristics about education and lifestyle. Our national culture, for both better and worse, has arguably become more of a monoculture, even in rural areas. And many Americans, now living in a hyperconnected world, are more aware of cultural differences and the criticism of others. Those self-defined “real Americans” partake in that same overall national culture, of course, but they nonetheless engage in harsh judgment of their fellow citizens that is at least as venomous as what they imagine is being directed by “the elites” back at them.

Which brings us back to DeSantis—a graduate, he would apparently like you to forget, of Harvard and Yale. DeSantis is now a “populist,” much like Trump (Penn), Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard), Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale), and Elise Stefanik (Harvard and the Ferengi  Diplomatic Academy). He has tasked Rufo (Georgetown and Harvard) to “remake” a school meant for the sons and daughters of Florida’s taxpayers not so that he can offer more opportunity to the people of his state, but so that he can run for president as just one of the regular folks whom reporters flock to interview in diners across the mountains and plains of a great nation.

Look, I live in New England surrounded by excellent public and private institutions, and I candidly admit that I couldn’t care less what kind of damage Florida does to its own schools. If Florida parents really don’t want Ron DeSantis appointing ideological commissars to annoy deans and department chairs, then they should head to the ballot box and fix it. But in the meantime, faux populists, the opportunists and hucksters who infest the modern GOP, are going to undermine education for the people who need it the most: the youngsters who rely on public education. And that’s a tragedy that will extend far beyond whatever becomes of the careers of Ron DeSantis or Christopher Rufo.

Related:

How Ivy League elites turned against democracy The professors silenced by Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation

Today’s News

A sixth Memphis police officer has been suspended from the force during the investigation of Tyre Nichols’s death. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is starting to present evidence to a grand jury in its criminal investigation into Donald Trump. The evidence focuses on Trump’s role in paying hush money to an adult-film star during his 2016 campaign. The Ukrainian air force warned that it would not be able to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles, should Russia obtain them.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf collects reader perspectives on how to improve policing. Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn attend a party with a very specific heart- and belly-warming theme. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how coffee became capitalism’s favorite drug.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman during HBO Films Pre Golden Globes Party Inside Coverage at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California (Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic / Getty)

The Luxury Dilemma

By Xochitl Gonzalez

Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.

As a born-and-raised New Yorker without a driver’s license, I found the hotel the perfect place to park myself for a day of meetings in the era before Ubers and WeWorks and Soho Houses. I used to go there in the 2000s, back when I was a wedding planner. It was like a celebrity safari; stars would walk by, within arm’s reach. You could “do Los Angeles” without ever needing to move. I never could have afforded a room there, but I knew by reputation that at night it offered entertainment of a different sort: luxury and licentiousness and debauchery, unbounded by any rules.

In more recent years, I’ve returned to Los Angeles in a different career—as a screenwriter traveling on someone else’s dime. Naturally, I didn’t want to just take meetings at the Chateau; I wanted to stay there, to be a fly on the wall where the wild things were. Only I couldn’t.

I was told, in early 2021, that the hotel was not taking any new bookings.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård sit together in "Infinity Pool" (Neon Films)

Read. “Poem Beginning With a Sentence From My Last Will & Testament,” by Donald Platt.

“Lucy, when I die, / I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes / of Virginia Beach.”

Watch. Infinity Pool, in theaters, is a gory, existential horror film with a premise deliciously nasty enough to keep you invested—even if it can’t quite keep up with its initial hook.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I usually take this final word in the Daily to direct you toward something fun or interesting, often derived from my admittedly oddball taste in pop culture. Today, I’m going to ask for your indulgence as I offer you something that I wrote yesterday in our Ideas section.

Some years ago, I wrote about the young losers and misfits among us who suddenly explode and commit mass murder. Even before the recent shootings in California (which actually are outliers in the general pattern of attacks by younger men), I’d decided to revisit this question. I wanted to think more about why America—and, yes, other nations as well—has produced so many lost young men who turn to performative and spectacular acts of murder or terrorism. I think the growth of narcissism is one of the answers, but I discuss it all at more length in this article, which I cannot say is pleasant reading but, I hope, offers a path toward more productive discussions about how to prevent such tragedies.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.