One of the weapons used in the deadly abduction of four Americans in the Mexican border city of Matamoros earlier this month was purchased in the United States and provided to a Mexican cartel, according to a federal court document.

My mom has been warning me that I’m going to ruin my feet for almost as long as I’ve been able to walk. She has her reasons: I spent much of my childhood refusing to wear shoes more substantial than soccer slides. In high school, she wouldn’t buy me high heels, so I got an after-school job and bought them myself. During college, I added slipperlike ballet flats and Ugg boots to my repertoire. When I was 25, a physical therapist who was treating my ankle, destroyed years prior during rec-league soccer, told me that he’d never before had a client with a leg injury show up in flip-flops.

Now I am 37, and if you already have been 37, you probably know where this is going. I’ve cleaned up my worst shoe habits, but a moderate concession to podiatric health wasn’t enough to save me. Recently, I developed plantar fasciitis, a common, nagging injury to a band of connective tissue in the foot that most acutely afflicts people who spend a lot of time on their feet—nurses, bartenders, distance runners, seemingly everyone in the NBA. It is also possible to acquire plantar fasciitis by being a dumbass who loves traipsing around in terrible shoes, which was my method.

When I called my mom a few weeks ago to admit that I’d ordered some orthopedic house slippers, she started laughing before I’d even finished my sentence. I couldn’t begrudge her the amusement; she also deals with plantar fasciitis, and I’ve been teasing her about her own selection of medically sound footwear for years, setting up the kind of long-game I told you so that I imagine is one of the most satisfying parts of having children. Unlike my mom, however, I bumbled my way into a very opportune moment to be a dumbass. The kinds of shoes that could help fix my feet—cushioned, stabilized, and with plenty of support—used to be the province of suburban dads, sensible aunts, and grandparents. But over the past decade, ultra-comfy sneakers, cushy clogs, sandals with arch support, and all manner of quasi-orthopedic footwear haven’t just become more abundant than ever; they’ve also become cool. Like, for young people.

In fact, that might be underselling it. Orthopedically healthy shoe styles have had an unusually broad and enduring appeal across geography, age, and a host of other demographic markers. At brands better known for hyper-technical, slightly dorky, or even outright ugly designs—New Balance, Hoka, Birkenstock, Teva, and Merrell, among others—sales are up. Ugly-cool shoes made it; they’re the rare lasting change in how millions of people dress. And everyone’s feet might be better off for a long time because of it.

For a fashion trend to work at any scale, it has to be compelling to look at. You can’t get very far in convincing people to wear something if it isn’t aesthetically pleasing or interesting in some way. But aesthetics themselves aren’t enough to make a trend durable. Instead, they’re the spark that gets a fire going; the size of the eventual blaze depends largely on the environment in which it burns, and what kinds of needs and desires are available to fuel it.

In the case of ugly-cool shoes, the aesthetic spark came in the mid-2010s, as the trend cycle that had dominated mainstream dress norms for the preceding decade—skinny jeans, high heels, tight tailoring, and minimalist sneakers such as Adidas’s Stan Smiths—was on its last legs among the kind of young, creative people who push dress norms forward. That cycle had been itself a rejection of the baggy jeans, oversize flannels, and lug soles of the 1990s. Such is how the pendulum of aesthetic culture swings: People get sick of looking at clothing shapes that are bulky or bulbous. Something tight and spare might feel risky or foreign, and then maybe thrillingly so, and then it is the accepted norm. Then, once 10 or so years have elapsed, people are bored of looking at nothing, and they want to look at something again. Even if it feels a little ugly. Maybe because it feels a little ugly.

And so, bulky and bulbous are back. In 2014, New York magazine introduced the public to a new word to describe this nascent aesthetic phenomenon: normcore. You’ve likely noticed sometime in the past decade that it is cool for young, hot people to dress vaguely like Seinfeld characters—mom jeans, dad hats, crew-neck sweatshirts, ’90s florals, and bulky sneakers from brands such as New Balance and Reebok. Among those elements of normcore, chunky shoes really, really broke out. People are generally more willing to take risks with their accessories than with their clothes, and especially for men, shoes are a common place to try out something new.

Shifting tides within the sneaker market itself helped. As mainstream interest in limited-edition shoes from major brands such as Nike and Adidas surged, thanks to the expansive cultural influence of hip-hop combined with America’s embrace of athleisure, scores of resellers with bot armies drove up prices for new shoes to several times more than retail on StockX and other broker websites, pushing out regular buyers. This made purposefully uncool, widely available sneakers, as well as other inexpensive shoes like Crocs and Tevas, newly enticing to the nation’s sneakerheads. “I think it really excited a certain type of guy who was just sick and tired of, like, begging for the opportunity to purchase sneakers,” Lawrence Schlossman, a co-host of the men’s-fashion podcast Throwing Fits, told me.

[Read: Shoppers are stuck in a dupe loop]

The fashion industry didn’t take long to alchemize these chunky, foot-friendly shoes into its own expensive, limited-release products. Schlossman described ugly-cool shoes’ trajectory in the late 2010s as a “trickle-up effect” during which high-end brands such as Balenciaga, Off-White, and Dior took the chunky look of ’90s sneakers and dorky sport sandals to their logical extremes. The look gained favor among influential celebrities and rappers—Rihanna, Yung Thug, and Bella Hadid were among its acolytes—and then trickled back down to regular teenagers, who aped the look with more basic and affordable ’90s-style sneakers from Fila, Nike, and Adidas. By 2020, thick-foam soles abounded. Bulky, low-top white Air Force 1s were so in-demand that Nike couldn’t keep them in stock. Crocs became a high-school wardrobe staple.

The trend could have easily cooled off here, having burned through much of the under-40 buying public over the course of more than half a decade. But in the tale of the ugly-cool orthopedic shoes, this is where the coronavirus pandemic comes in. (The pandemic always comes in these days.) Over the past few years, “health and wellness was one of the greatest industries to be in,” Colin Ingram, the vice president of global product at the running-shoe brand Hoka One One, which is known for its thick, curvy, and sometimes bulbous foam soles, told me. People who felt cooped up at home or who missed their usual gym routines looked for new outdoor outlets, and a lot of them took up running or hiking, which have relatively low barriers for entry and require little equipment beyond, of course, shoes. In its 2020 fiscal year, Hoka brought in revenue of $353 million. Three-quarters of the way into the brand’s current fiscal year, revenue has already topped $1 billion.

Whether you took up any new sports or not, pandemic-era habit changes might have done a number on your feet. Priya Parthasarathy, a Washington, D.C.–area podiatrist and a spokesperson for the American Podiatric Medical Association, told me that once people were comfortable returning to their usual medical visits, podiatrists saw a sustained uptick in patients with plantar fasciitis or Achilles tendonitis, which can be caused by sudden changes in activity levels or too much time spent barefoot or in unsupportive shoes on hard floors. All at once, millions of Americans had started moving, stopped moving, or begun spending a lot of time at home, padding around their hardwood floors all day. Some proportion of them hurt themselves in the process. If they wanted their feet to get better, they, like me, would soon discover that they had a wide variety of sensible shoes to choose from.

Most fashion trends don’t last a decade. By all indications, ugly-cool orthopedic shoes will clear that mark easily. The New Balance 990, which Schlossman told me was the first normcore sneaker to really ignite, was just the subject of a lengthy feature in GQ, and the brand is in the midst of a series of fashion-world collaborations with buzzy designers including Salehe Bembury and Aimé Leon Dore’s Teddy Santis. If anything, the trend is simply settling in: As Schlossman pointed out, America’s pants are starting to go broadly the way of normcore, with fewer super-skinny cuts and more straight or wide legs. Those styles look better and more proportional with a bigger, bulkier shoe.

[Read: Fashion has abandoned human taste]

The ugly-cool shoe trend has pulled back a bit from the extremes—you can now get some of the wildest designer versions at a significant markdown—but general-release versions of old dad-shoe favorites still sell briskly, and related phenomena such as gorpcore, which repurposes outdoorsy designs and tech fabrics into fashion, are thriving. Meanwhile, the high-end fashion industry in general has started to turn some of its footwear energy away from sneakers, according to Schlossman, instead moving much of it toward shoes that look like those made by Clarks and Birkenstock, as well as classic loafers, all of which still have plenty of dad-shoe appeal (and room for arch support).

At least for the next few years, comfort looks less like a style that will pass than a foundation on which new shoe trends will be created. Once you know what it feels like to wear a good shoe, it can be very difficult to go back to wearing bad ones full time. That, Hoka’s Ingram told me, has been the brand’s greatest advantage in winning over the people who prefer the sleek look: Just put well-cushioned, highly stable alternatives on their feet. This certainly seems to have worked for the once-broke creatives who made normcore pop a decade ago. Now in their 30s and early 40s, they’re considering the prospects of actual middle age instead of just mining the closets of their elders for cheeky references, and many of them have more money to spend on things they enjoy wearing. Like me, many also spent their pre-normcore lives running around in a previous era’s terrible shoes, too young and immortal to think about things like the connective tissue within our feet. Even if they didn’t, maybe they’re just now learning the hard way that you’re not supposed to walk around barefoot at home. (May I suggest you look into recovery sandals and compression socks, both of which have become somewhat trendy in their own right?)

Parthasarathy, the podiatrist, told me that in her experience, it’s not a foregone conclusion that people entering middle age will make a natural transition to healthier, more supportive footwear. In the past, she’s found that conversation difficult to have with some of her patients, many of whom don’t want to give up the shoes that landed them in her office in the first place. Getting dressed, after all, is a way that we construct an understanding of ourselves, and what we wear is a language we use to communicate with everyone who sees us. Losing the stilettos or wing tips because we’ve gotten older and our bodies have narrowed our choices for us can feel intolerable in a way that isn’t about the shoes, not really.

Lately, Parthasarathy said, those conversations with her patients have tended to be easier. People who might have been holdouts a few years ago are more receptive. Indeed, those of us in our 30s and 40s might have accidentally given ourselves a tremendous gift: The coolest among us spent the past decade making orthopedic shoes the height of fashion, and we even persuaded people much younger than us to get onboard—right in time to provide our older selves with a little bit of plausible deniability. We’re not wearing these New Balances just because our knees hurt. We swear.

“You’re just getting older, and you want to look cool, but you also have a body that is absolutely failing you because you’re aging, and that’s just how it works,” Schlossman said. “Time stops for no man, and it stops for no sneakerhead.”

Imagine that someone—perhaps a man from Florida, or maybe even a governor of Florida—criticized American support for Ukraine. Imagine that this person dismissed the war between Russia and Ukraine as a purely local matter, of no broader significance. Imagine that this person even told a far-right television personality that “while the U.S. has many vital national interests ... becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.” How would a Ukrainian respond? More to the point, how would the leader of Ukraine respond?

As it happens, an opportunity to ask that hypothetical question recently availed itself. The chair of the board of directors of The Atlantic, Laurene Powell Jobs; The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg; and I interviewed President Volodymyr Zelensky several days ago in the presidential palace in Kyiv. In the course of an hour-long conversation, Goldberg asked Zelensky what he would say to someone, perhaps a governor of Florida, who wonders why Americans should help Ukraine.

Zelensky, answering in English, told us that he would respond pragmatically. He didn’t want to appeal to the hearts of Americans, in other words, but to their heads. Were Americans to cut off Ukraine from ammunition and weapons, after all, there would be clear consequences in the real world, first for Ukraine’s neighbors but then for others:   

If we will not have enough weapons, that means we will be weak. If we will be weak, they will occupy us. If they occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova and they will occupy Moldova. When they have occupied Moldova, they will [travel through] Belarus and they will occupy Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. That’s three Baltic countries which are members of NATO. They will occupy them. Of course [the Balts] are brave people, and they will fight. But they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapons. So they will be attacked by Russians because that is the policy of Russia, to take back all the countries which have been previously part of the Soviet Union.

And after that, if there were still no further response? Then, he explained, the struggle would continue:

When they will occupy NATO countries, and also be on the borders of Poland and maybe fight with Poland, the question is: Will you send all your soldiers with weapons, all your pilots, all your ships? Will you send tanks and armored vehicles with your young people? Will you do it? Because if you will not do it, you will have no NATO.

At that point, he said, Americans will face a different choice: not politicians deciding whether “to give weapons or not to give weapons” to Ukrainians, but instead, “fathers and mothers” deciding whether to send their children to fight to keep a large part of the planet, filled with America’s allies and most important trading partners, from Russian occupation.

But there would be other consequences too. One of the most horrifying weapons that Russia has used against Ukraine is the Iranian-manufactured Shahed drone, which has no purpose other than to kill civilians. After these drones are used to subdue Ukraine, Zelensky asked, how long would it be before they are used against Israel? If Russia can attack a smaller neighbor with impunity, regimes such as Iran’s are sure to take note. So then the question arises again: “When they will try to occupy Israel, will the United States help Israel? That is the question. Very pragmatic.”

Finally, Zelensky posed a third question. During the war, Ukraine has been attacked by rockets, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles—“not hundreds, but thousands”:

So what will you do when Russia will use rockets to attack your allies, to [attack] civilian people? And what will you do when Russia, after that, if they do not see [opposition] from big countries like the United States? What will you do if they will use rockets on your territory?

And this was his answer: Help us fight them here, help us defeat them here, and you won’t have to fight them anywhere else. Help us preserve some kind of open, normal society, using our soldiers and not your soldiers. That will help you preserve your open, normal society, and that of others too. Help Ukraine fight Russia now so that no one else has to fight Russia later, and so that harder and more painful choices don’t have to be made down the line.

“It’s about nature. It’s about life,” he said. “That’s it.”

Our full report from Ukraine will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Atlantic.

What with everything going on in the world, stewing over an obscure, century-old maritime law might seem odd. But the Jones Act really does warrant such consternation. It’s not just a terrible law that hurts you, me, and everyone we know—especially if they live in Puerto Rico or drive to work on the East Coast. It’s also a cautionary tale against government industrial policies, which can have unintended consequences far beyond higher prices or budget overrun.

The Jones Act, formally known as Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, was ostensibly intended to ensure adequate domestic shipbuilding capacity and a ready supply of merchant mariners and ships in times of war or other national emergencies. Today, it requires that any domestic waterborne shipping of goods be conducted on vessels that are built, owned, flagged, and crewed by Americans. As a result, the U.S. has one of the most (if not the most) restrictive shipping systems in the world.

By effectively barring foreign competitors from transporting goods between U.S. ports, the Jones Act has predictably inflated the cost of shipping and shipbuilding in the United States. That’s the law’s seen cost, which many of its supporters acknowledge but claim is necessary for ensuring a thriving industrial base and sufficient supply of ships and mariners. But the unseen costs do the most notable damage and thus swamp any alleged benefits.

[From the April 2023 issue: The age of American naval dominance is over]

First, let me put the direct costs in perspective: We’re not just talking about a few extra bucks here and there. Building a container ship in the United States costs up to five times as much as it does abroad, and transporting crude oil on a Jones Act tanker can cost three times as much—an ever-expanding price differential driven by decades of insulation from foreign competition.

Because ships and shipping are so expensive, few companies use this method outside routes that offer no other alternatives, such as between the continental United States and Puerto Rico or Hawaii. Instead, they use land-based transport—mainly trucks and trains—to deliver goods that could have traveled by sea between the approximately 360 U.S. ports to service the 130 million people that live near our 95,000-plus miles of coasts. (Many other countries do this kind of “short-sea shipping.”)  

In fact, the Congressional Research Service reports that only about 2 percent of all U.S. freight is carried by ships, and that—despite the massive growth in coastal U.S. cities since the 1960s—coastwise shipping tonnage has actually declined by roughly 44 percent over the same period. All other modes of freight transport, including international shipping, have either increased or remained steady.

“Ship American” might sound nice in theory. This is what it looks like in practice: not shipping much of anything in America at all.

Heightened use of trucks and freight trains means more wear on aging U.S. infrastructure and more traffic, especially on roads running parallel to U.S. sea lanes. It means a higher risk of accidents involving dangerous materials in or around urban centers, such as the recent propane-car derailment near Sarasota, Florida. And it means increased environmental harms, because surface transportation emits more carbon and uses more energy than ocean ships and barges. The law thus forces unwitting northeasterners to be stuck on I-95 surrounded by smog-producing 18-wheelers hauling trailers that could have been traveling between the Ports of New York and Boston on compact, low-emission ships that the Jones Act has made cost-prohibitive.

The expense of U.S. shipping and shipbuilding thus forces us to waste finite resources—work or leisure time, tax dollars, environmental efforts—that could be better used elsewhere.

It also denies us many other types of ships. For example, the U.S. has a grand total of zero Jones Act–compliant liquefied natural gas tankers, because producing these massive, complex vessels here would be so expensive as to defy any economic sense. Consequently, transporting LNG in bulk to New England and Puerto Rico is impossible, and these U.S. regions suffer from diminished energy security. Last fall, several New England governors, alarmed by Ukraine-related depletion of local energy inventories, begged the Biden administration for a winter-long Jones Act waiver, and local utilities warned that an unseasonably cold winter could produce rolling blackouts across the region. (The waiver was never issued.) A lack of LNG, propane, and oil tankers also forces these areas to import energy from Nigeria, Oman, Spain, (pre-sanctions) Russia, and other faraway places, even as U.S. energy is exported from Texas to China and dozens of other countries. Not only is that economically nonsensical, but it also means higher shipping emissions.

The environmental damage doesn’t stop there. The United States lacks specialized wind-turbine-installation vessels, used to build offshore wind projects, that meet Jones Act requirements. This means higher project and taxpayer costs, slower wind-energy deployment, and diminished progress on climate change. (The first Jones Act–compliant wind-turbine-installation vessel is supposed to be delivered in the fourth quarter of 2023 at a substantial cost, but we’ll still need four or five more to meet U.S. offshore wind goals. No other such vessels are in the pipeline.)

Thanks to the Jones Act and another antiquated law (the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906), the U.S. fleet also suffers from a dearth of top-notch dredging vessels, which excavate seabed material for port expansions and other projects. (In fact, the largest hopper dredge in the United States wouldn’t crack Europe’s top 30.) Dredging U.S. ports and waterways is therefore costly and slow, imperiling much-needed projects that would boost supply-chain efficiency, job numbers, and economic growth.

The general lack of Jones Act vessels also inhibits emergency-response efforts for Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, and other U.S. regions without easy land-based access. When Hurricanes Maria and Fiona devastated Puerto Rico in 2017 and 2022, respectively, more than 99 percent of the world’s cargo ships couldn’t immediately participate in the relief efforts, because they didn’t comply with the Jones Act’s restrictions. At one point last year, a tanker moving diesel from Texas to Europe rerouted to Puerto Rico to boost the island’s depleted fuel supply, but the Jones Act blocked it from offloading this much-needed cargo. The ship finally docked days later, but only after massive public outcry prodded the Biden administration to issue a legally dubious Jones Act waiver.  

Bureaucratic delays and bottlenecks are costly annoyances in normal times, but they become life-threatening problems following a natural disaster, when every second counts.

High costs mean not only fewer ships but also older ones, because they’re so expensive to replace. The average age of a Jones Act ship in 2019 was 20 years—more than seven years older than ships that don’t meet the law’s requirements. And the previous 15 Jones Act ships that were scrapped had an average age of 43. Having decrepit rust buckets cruising right off U.S. coasts raises more safety and environmental concerns.

The Jones Act’s unintended harms even extend to the U.S. shippers and shipbuilders it’s supposed to protect. The law encourages American shipyards to turn away from the competitive international market and toward a captive, but much smaller, domestic one. Their reduced output (averaging just three oceangoing ships a year), in turn, means that high fixed costs are spread across fewer vessels, and that economies of scale, volume discounts from suppliers, and specialization are extremely limited. The result is a vicious cycle where prices go up and the quantity demanded goes down, placing further upward pressure on prices. Rinse and repeat until you have the zombie industry we see today.

The Philly Shipyard offers a troubling example of this cost death spiral. In 2013, the shipping company Matson ordered two container ships from the shipyard for $209 million each; last year, Matson ordered three of the same ships from the same company for roughly $333 million each. Even accounting for inflation and some technological upgrades, this deterioration in competitiveness was so notable that it prompted a Danish maritime magazine to wonder whether the ships were going to be built with gold plates.

[Derek Thompson: Don’t ‘buy American’]

Supporters claim that reforming or repealing the Jones Act would destroy the domestic industry and imperil national security, but these doomsday scenarios are far-fetched. For starters, government orders account for almost all U.S. shipbuilding output and revenue, and repealing the law wouldn’t touch these transactions. The availability of cheaper and better vessels, moreover, would boost domestic demand for coastwise shipping, improving the industry’s financial prospects. A recent OECD study estimates, in fact, that nixing the Jones Act would increase domestic shipbuilding output and final value ​added by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

And it’s not like current law is doing a bang-up job protecting the industry. The Jones Act fleet has dropped from around 250 ships in the 1980s to just 91 today. No use protecting something that’s already dead.

Industrial policy is once again hot in the United States. Federal subsidies and trade restrictions—fueled by pandemic- and China-related security risks and intended to boost strategic commercial industries such as semiconductors and batteries—have proliferated dramatically since 2020. Collectively, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act will funnel hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to favored companies in the United States, marking one of the biggest U.S. industrial-policy pushes since the ’80s.

The ribbon-cutting ceremonies and golden shovels that will accompany commercial projects supported by these laws will make for great photo ops and generate lots of political excitement. But the cameras won’t catch the invisible knock-on effects and unintended harms. And if the Jones Act is any guide—which, really, it should be—they’re going to be worth stewing over.