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The critics and the gamers have written much about The Last of Us, the video game that became a majestic HBO series. The main story is about love and family, but there’s a dark and nagging question in the scenario: If the world had no more rules, what kind of person would you be?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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Who Are You?

This story contains spoilers for the entire first season of The Last of Us.

Did you read that disclaimer? No, I mean it—I am going to spoil everything in the first season. You’ve been warned.

In interviews, the writers of The Last of Us have said that they intended the series to be about love. And they have indeed created a gorgeous—and disturbing—tale of how we find and cherish family. But I want to raise another question that lurks in the adventures of Joel and Ellie, a dark rumble of a thought that most of us would rather not confront: If the world ended, and all of the rules of society vanished, what kind of person would you be?

This question, I think, resonates more with us today than it did during the Cold War. Back then, and particularly in the 1970s and ’80s, postapocalyptic fiction included an entire pulpy genre that the scholar Paul Brians called “Radioactive Rambos,” in which men—almost always men, with a few notable exceptions—would wander the wasteland, killing mutants and stray Communists. (They also had a lot of sex.) Sometimes, these heroes were part of paramilitary groups, but most typically, they were the classic lone wolf: super-skilled death machines whose goal was to get from Point A to Point B while shooting everything in between and saving a girl, or a town, or even the world.

But we live in more ambiguous times. We’re not fighting the Soviet Union. We don’t trust institutions, or one another, as much as we did 40 or 50 years ago. Perhaps we don’t even trust ourselves. We live in a time when lawlessness, whether in the streets or the White House, seems mostly to go unpunished. For decades, we have retreated from our fellow citizens and our social organizations into our own homes, and since COVID began, we’ve learned to virtualize our lives, holding meetings on glowing screens and having our food and other goods dropped at our doors by people we never have to meet.

We also face any number of demagogues who seem almost eager for our institutions to fail so that they can repopulate them in their own image and likeness.

Living in a world of trees and water and buildings and cars, we can posture all day long about how we would take our personal virtues with us through the gates of Armageddon. But considering that we can barely muster enough civic energy to get off our duffs and go vote every few years, how certain are we about our own bravery and rectitude?

Although Joel and Ellie are rendered with wonderful complexity by the show’s writers and by the actors Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, some of the greatest moments in The Last of Us are with people the protagonists encounter during their travels: Bill, the survivalist (played by Nick Offerman in what should be a slam-dunk Emmy nomination); Kathleen, the militia leader (Melanie Lynskey); and David, the religious preacher and secret cannibal, played with terrifying subtlety by Scott Shepherd. (I warned you there were spoilers.)

Each of these characters is a challenge, and a reproof, to any of us who think we’d be swell folks, and maybe even heroes, after the collapse of civilization.

Bill is a paranoid survivalist who falls in love with a wanderer named Frank. They live together for years and choose suicide when Frank becomes mortally ill. It’s a marvelous and heartbreaking story, but Bill admits in his suicide note that he always hated humanity and was initially glad to see everyone die. He no longer feels that way, he says, implying that Frank’s love saved him, but right to the end, he remains hostile to almost everyone else in the world—just as he was before Outbreak Day.

Kathleen leads a rebellion in Kansas City against FEDRA, the repressive military government that takes over America after the pandemic. Her “resistance,” however, is a brutal, ragtag militia, and Kathleen is a vicious dictator who is no better (and perhaps worse) than the regime she helped overthrow. She promises clemency to a group of FEDRA collaborators, for example, and then orders them all to be shot anyway. “When you’re done, burn the bodies,” she says casually. “It’s faster.” She even imprisons her own doctor, who pleads with her, “Kathleen, I delivered you.” She executes him herself.

What’s important about Kathleen, however, is that she later admits that she really hasn’t changed. Her brother was the original head of the resistance: kind, forgiving, a true leader. She admits that she never had that kind of goodness in her, not even as a child—which raises the troubling thought that we all live near a Kathleen who is tenuously bound only by the restrictions of law and custom.

And then there’s David.

History is replete with times when desperate human beings have resorted to cannibalism, and although we recoil in disgust, we know it can happen. David hates what he felt he had to do, and he admits his shame. But it turns out that what makes David evil is not that he eats people but that he’s a fraud: He cares nothing about religion; he cares about being in charge, and he admits that he has struggled all his life with violent impulses. He is another character whom the apocalypse reveals more than it changes. When he gleefully tries to rape Ellie, she kills the former math teacher in self-defense.

Again, this raises the creepy question of how many Davids walk among us, smiling and toting algebra books, restrained from their hellish impulses only by the daily balm of street lights and neighbors and manicured lawns. We should be grateful for every day that we don’t have to know the answer.

Related:

The Last of Us makes the apocalypse feel new again. How The Last of Us cherishes a bygone world

Today’s News

Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan endorsed Finland’s NATO bid; he has not yet approved Sweden’s. The Justice Department is reportedly investigating the surveillance of Americans by the Chinese company that owns TikTok. President Joe Biden urged Congress to expand the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s authority to impose more stringent penalties on senior executives who mismanage lending banks.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Nicole Acheampong writes about the gift of rereading. Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on the freedom and frustration of cars.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

GPT-4 Has the Memory of a Goldfish

By this point, the many defects of AI-based language models have been analyzed to death—their incorrigible dishonesty, their capacity for bias and bigotry, their lack of common sense. GPT-4, the newest and most advanced such model yet, is already being subjected to the same scrutiny, and it still seems to misfire in pretty much all the ways earlier models did. But large language models have another shortcoming that has so far gotten relatively little attention: their shoddy recall. These multibillion-dollar programs, which require several city blocks’ worth of energy to run, may now be able to code websites, plan vacations, and draft company-wide emails in the style of William Faulkner. But they have the memory of a goldfish.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Today, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and one other Russian official for their possible involvement in the kidnapping of what could be thousands of Ukrainian children. The ICC was created in 1998 by the Rome Statute, an international treaty, and began holding its first sessions in 2003, but it doesn’t have a lot of power: Russia, China, and the United States are not parties to the statute, and neither is Ukraine (which has nonetheless granted the ICC jurisdiction over its territory). A Kremlin spokesperson, of course, immediately waved away the warrant as irrelevant.

Things could get interesting, I suppose, if Putin ever travels to a nation that is part of the ICC, which is almost every other country in the world. Would another state decide to enforce the ICC warrant and arrest a foreign leader? That’s pretty unlikely, but it’s something Putin would at least have to think about if he ever decides to venture too far away from his Kremlin bunker. In the meantime, unfortunately, he and his commanders will continue their crimes in Ukraine, but the ICC warrant is at least a welcome symbolic statement.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The court alleged that Moscow's forcible deportation of Ukrainian children is a war crime, as the Kremlin reacted with outrage.

The Chinese leader will make a three-day trip next week from Monday to Wednesday, the Kremlin and Beijing announced.

The visit comes as China offers to broker peace in Ukraine, an effort that has been met with scepticism in the West.

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.

Both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have signaled their willingness to sell out Ukraine to the Kremlin, and the Russians have gleefully taken notice. How could this be happening in the party of Ronald Reagan?

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Taking the Bait

State governors are not usually experts on foreign policy, but those who intend to run for president are advised to at least brush up on the subject. Alas, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did not get that memo. Last week, DeSantis declared Russia’s massive invasion—the largest operation in Europe since the defeat of the Nazis—to be a mere “territorial dispute,” and said that the war is thus not “a vital American national strategic interest.” This was too much for many elected Republicans and even for the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, who described the comments as “Ron DeSantis’s First Big Mistake.”

This shining opportunity to stumble came courtesy of the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who a few weeks ago sent out questionnaires about Ukraine policy to a group of possible GOP presidential candidates. Carlson’s questions presented Republican contenders with a dilemma. On the one hand, many faithful MAGA voters, who make up the core of the GOP base, are regular viewers of Carlson’s show, and his questionnaire was a kind of early beauty pageant, an opportunity for Republican candidates to take a quick walk down the runway in front of MAGA World. On the other hand, Carlson is an irresponsible demagogue who has been exposed in the Dominion-lawsuit filings as a relentless opportunist who will bamboozle his own audience for ratings.

Since the war in Ukraine began more than a year ago, Carlson has gone on numerous unhinged rants against “the D.C. war machine,” meaning anyone who supports aiding Kyiv. (He even went off the deep end about me a few weeks ago.) Carlson claims to just be asking questions, but on Ukraine, as on many other issues, he is located right in the heart of the fever swamps.

In addition to his own bizarre perorations, Carlson also occasionally relies on input from his guest Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel who for a hot second was an adviser to Trump’s last (acting) defense secretary, Christopher Miller, and whose nomination to be an ambassador foundered in part because of a history of weird and offensive statements. To give you some idea of the minefield awaiting GOP candidates, Macgregor went on last night about how the Ukrainians are getting “crushed,” and how the left has weakened the U.S. military to the point where it is almost useless. (The Pentagon’s assessment is a bit less gloomy, to say the least.) Carlson responded by asking, “[If America] became embroiled in a hot war with Russia, how long before you are arrested would it be, do you think, for saying what you just did?”

Even Macgregor didn’t bother answering that one, but it shows why, for the credible would-be candidates filling out Carlson’s questionnaire, there is no real advantage in saying anything of substance. And so, most of them didn’t, offering unexceptional responses composed mostly of political dryer lint: Kristi Noem blamed Joe Biden for being too weak to deter the Russians. Mike Pence said that regime change in Russia was up to the Russian people. Vivek Ramaswamy was more than happy to provide more detailed answers, but that is a luxury one can take while on the path to becoming a kind of GOP Andrew Yang. And Nikki Haley, in a classic cautious Nikki Haley move, waited until Carlson’s deadline for response had passed and the show on the subject had aired before answering the questions.

DeSantis, however, bit down on this giant hunk of bait, and his answers were displayed on Carlson’s show like a prize marlin.

Of course, this may have been DeSantis’s intent. He may well be trying to sound like an ill-informed isolationist, because he is trying to capture the MAGA voters who now support Trump. The former president is the undisputed world heavyweight champion of ignorant views, and if you’re going to take him on, you’d better have some stunningly ignorant views of your own to bring to the table. That’s what the Republican base wants.

DeSantis seems to know this all too well, which is likely why he’s been shoveling so much red meat out the front door of the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee to the MAGA cultural warriors. While covering his Trump-exposed flank on foreign policy, however, DeSantis has accidentally illustrated the problem of running for office in what used to be the party of Reagan: If you want to win the primary voters, you’ve got to reject everything you once believed.

Indeed, back in 2017, DeSantis the congressman—but not yet the candidate—wanted to be Reagan. When he opposed Barack Obama’s efforts to initiate a “reset” with Russia, he noted that Democrats “viewed guys like me who are more of the Reagan school that’s tough on Russia as kind of throwbacks to the Cold War.” And two years earlier, DeSantis was all about teaching the Russians a lesson for seizing Ukraine. He excoriated then-President Obama for being weak-kneed:

We in the Congress have been urging the president … to provide arms to Ukraine. They want to fight their good fight. They’re not asking us to fight it for them. And the president has steadfastly refused. And I think that that’s a mistake.

Well said, congressman. Perhaps you might have a talk with the current governor of Florida.

This pandering to the MAGA base is going to get worse, because Trump continues to dominate the GOP primary field. In some areas, this featherweight posturing will be repairable: Down the road, no one is likely to be fighting over whether first graders should be assigned college texts on “critical race theory.” In other cases, such as the destruction of Florida’s public universities, the damage will be more long-lasting.

But in foreign policy, amateurish pandering to Tucker Carlson’s audience is dangerous. The Russian media are already crowing that the next American president will throw Ukraine to the wolves, a belief that could lead the Kremlin to take even greater risks than bumping into drones. Many elected Republicans and GOP presidential contenders—despite their constant fear of offending Trump—seem to recognize this, to their credit. If only Ron DeSantis were one of them.

Related:

Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already? The war in Ukraine is the end of a world.

Today’s News

Polish President Andrzej Duda pledged to give Ukraine about 12 MiG-29 fighter jets, making Poland the first NATO member nation to follow through on Kyiv’s requests for warplanes. Eleven major U.S. banks said they would deposit $30 billion into First Republic Bank amid a crisis of confidence from the bank’s customers and investors. The U.S. military released video of what it says is the collision between a Russian fighter jet and an American surveillance drone over the Black Sea.

Dispatches

I Have Notes: Nicole Chung reflects on the responsibilities of writing about the dead.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

Climate Activists Are Turning Their Attention to Hollywood

By Katharine Gammon

On a warm, windy fall night in Los Angeles, I stood in a conference room at the Warner Bros. Discovery television-production offices, straightened my spine, and stared down my showrunner, preparing to defend my idea for a minor character in our near-future science-fiction series.

“This character needs a backstory, and switching jobs because she wants to work in renewable energy and not for an oil company fits perfectly,” I told the unsmiling head honcho.

His face twisted, as if his assistant had delivered the wrong lunch. “Too complicated. That just feels like a lot of information to cram into a backstory. What if her story is that she wants this job because it’s near where her brother was killed in a terrorist attack? We’d just need to invent a terrorist attack.”

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Speaking of Ukraine, as we noted above in Today’s News, America’s NATO ally Poland has announced its decision to send MiG-29 jets to Ukraine. This is important for several reasons—not least of which is that Poland has gotten out in front of the rest of NATO on the issue. I thought I would take a moment here, however, to explain what a MiG-29 is for those of you who do not keep up on vintage Soviet military hardware.

The MiG-29 was designed in the 1970s and entered service in the ’80s. Russian fighters are designated by the bureau that designed them: “MiG” is the “Mikoyan and Gurevich” design bureau, named for its founding engineers, and “Su” or “Tu” in front of a jet’s name are the Sukhoi and Tupolev bureaus, respectively. (The NATO code names for all Soviet-era fighters begin with F, and this one is the “Fulcrum.”) It was meant to be roughly equivalent to an American F-16 or F-15. Although not as good as its American counterparts, it is a solid fighter and capable of taking on multiple roles, especially “air superiority,” which means what it sounds like: controlling the airspace and dominating it (as opposed to, say, bombing targets or flying missions close to the ground to support troops in battle). It’s a fine jet—at least when flown by competent pilots—and more to the point, it’s one that Ukrainian pilots will already know how to fly, because it was part of the Soviet and post-Soviet inventory for so long.

— Tom

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.