A French couple cry foul after receiving only €150 for a mask that later fetched €4.2m at auction.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is our Science editor Sarah Laskow. Sarah recently investigated whether salsa is gazpacho—and whether gazpacho is salsa. She’s also explored how America’s lost crops rewrite the history of farming.

Sarah is enjoying the sincerity in The Golden Bachelor, despite its cringiest moments; regretting her Shins phase as a New Jersey teen; and thinking about the incredible quantity of oranges consumed in a wonderful children’s book.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Books that changed how our writers and editors think Why America doesn’t build Are pet cloners happy with their choice?

The Culture Survey: Sarah Laskow

The entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: Killers of the Flower Moon. I think if you say the words “Martin Scorsese is adapting a David Grann book,” a certain sphere of people will accept point-blank that they have to experience that.

The best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: On the plane to a friend’s wedding in Greece, I decided that as a mom leaving her kids behind to spend time in Athens, I might as well reread Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which begins on a plane with a mom leaving her kids behind to spend time in Athens. I’m not divorced and did not meet a Greek shipping heir on the plane, but I did end up later having drinks with someone who told a story about their complicated relationship with a Greek shipping heir, which I swear Cusk could have written. I wondered if that was why I loved this book even more than the first time I read it. But really I was just so swept away by the way the book works: The narrator is constantly listening to other people tell her stories about their lives, sometimes invited, sometimes less so, which means the novel is both a collection of vignettes with many narrators and a portrait of the narrator, who’s defined as much by what she doesn’t say as by what she does. It’s truly incredible that Cusk wrote this book in three weeks (although three weeks without children does sound like a luxury of time).

On that same trip, I also read Rick Steves’s Pocket Athens, and specifically the chapter that guides you through the National Archaeological Museum. It is a peerless work of a very specific genre of nonfiction. It does exactly the job it needs to, illuminating the story of Greek sculpture for the casual tourist who has no background in the subject. (A friend recommended the guide-museum combo, which made me wonder the same thing about Rick Steves that I wonder about bird-watching: Is it getting more popular, or am I just getting old?) The highlight of the museum, for me, was the Mask of Agamemnon—I’ve seen so many images of it over the course of my life, but the real thing was so shiny and beautifully made; seeing it among the other burial objects with which it was discovered made me imagine the excitement of an archaeological dig where piece after piece of gold emerged from the ground after being buried for thousands of years. [Related: Rachel Cusk won’t stay still.]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: On the theme of ancient treasures, I’m obsessed with The Golden Bachelor. I haven’t been a particular fan of the series—in fact, I identify with the subset of semi-clueless contestants on this season who need to be reminded what the roses and date cards mean. The show can’t quite escape itself: It’s still about a group of extremely groomed women fighting over a man. But I find this particular iteration compelling as a portrait of Boomers and how they imagine the later stages of life. The bachelor in question, Gerry, comes across as both disarmingly genuine and gratingly of his time. I cringed when he ordered food without really stopping to ask what his date might want. That old-fashioned tinge, though, is part of why I’m watching. Like the best reality TV, the show has just enough sincerity to make me root for at least some of these very cheesy people.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: Whitney Houston’s Whitney has always been one of the best albums to listen to, and belt along to, even if, like me, you are a terrible singer. On the other end of the spectrum is the Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow, which just had its 20th anniversary—and which I listened to on repeat at one point in my life. Something about the band’s wordy music spoke to my suburban–New Jersey teenage dissatisfactions, although I always felt a little betrayed that the Shins’ fame was so closely tied to Garden State, a bad film. (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is a much more true portrait of Jersey vibes.) But now I mostly find these songs whiny and can’t stand to listen to any for more than 20 seconds.

Something I recently revisited: My brother-in-law and nephew recently started reading My Father’s Dragon; my 3-year-old isn’t so interested yet, but when I reread the first few chapters—in which Elmer, the young protagonist, meets a cat, learns about a captive dragon, packs his bag with two dozen pink lollipops, and stows away on a ship—I remembered why I had loved it as a kid. One detail I had forgotten is just how many tangerines Elmer consumes after landing on the island of Tangerina. At one point he puts 31 in his bag, then later eats eight in one go and then three more a few hours after. I can eat a lot of small citrus fruits, but that’s a lot of tangerines.

The Week Ahead

The Gilded Age, a period drama set in New York City during the economic change of the 1880s, comes out with its second season (premieres on HBO today). In The Reformatory, a novel by Tananarive Due, a boy who is sent to a segregated reform school in Jim Crow Florida sees ghosts—and the truth (on sale Tuesday). Priscilla tells the story of the teenage girl whom Elvis Presley fell in love with, and the life they built together (in theaters Friday).

Essay

TCD / Prod.DB / Alamy

The Hero Gen Z Needs

By Elise Hanuum

Snoopy was everywhere when I was growing up, in the early 2000s. On TV, the cartoon beagle appeared as a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and starred in the holiday specials my family watched; in real life, his statues were all over Saint Paul, Minnesota, a hometown I share with the Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. After I left for college, Snoopy largely disappeared from my life. But recently, I’ve started encountering him all over again, on social media.

The TikTok account @snooopyiscool, also known as Snoopy Sister, went viral earlier this year and has more than half a million followers. Other Snoopy videos on the app regularly rack up thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of views. This online resurgence, primarily among young people, has mostly been fueled by short, shareable Peanuts clips set to surprisingly apt contemporary music. In them, Charlie Brown’s intrepid pet beagle tags along on the kids’ adventures—they often face some sort of problem but aren’t always left with an easy solution … It seems that a new generation is finally seeing Snoopy for who he really is.

Read the full article.

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Britney finally tells her story. It’s dark. Sadness and triumph at a Massachusetts boarding school Pain Hustlers is a goofy celebration of greed. “The whole country has PTSD.” A movie about the perils of being a control freak Is a coincidental similarity enough for real intimacy? When America helped assassinate an African leader SNL didn’t need subtitles. Poem: The mowing that woke my daughter

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Photo Album

Lucerne Bell of Team USA competes in the women’s 400-meter individual medley swimming event at the Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile. (Francois-Xavier Marit / AFP / Getty)

Shrimp fishing on a Belgian beach, the WNBA-championship victory parade in Las Vegas, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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World Rugby says there is insufficient evidence that Mbonambi racially abused England's Tom Curry in the semifinal.

At every party, no matter the occasion, my drink of choice is soda water with lime. I have never, not once, been drunk—or even finished a full serving of alcohol. The single time I came close to doing so (thanks to half a serving of mulled wine), my heart rate soared, the room spun, and my face turned stop-sign red … all before I collapsed in front of a college professor at an academic event.

The blame for my alcohol aversion falls fully on my genetics: Like an estimated 500 million other people, most of them of East Asian descent, I carry a genetic mutation called ALDH2*2 that causes me to produce broken versions of an enzyme called aldehyde dehydrogenase 2, preventing my body from properly breaking down the toxic components of alcohol. And so, whenever I drink, all sorts of poisons known as aldehydes build up in my body—a predicament that my face announces to everyone around me.  

By one line of evolutionary logic, I and the other sufferers of so-called alcohol flush (also known as Asian glow) shouldn’t exist. Alcohol isn’t the only source of aldehydes in the body. Our own cells also naturally produce the compounds, and they can wreak all sorts of havoc on our DNA and proteins if they aren’t promptly cleared. So even at baseline, flushers are toting around extra toxins, leaving them at higher risk for a host of health issues, including esophageal cancer and heart disease. And yet, somehow, our cohort of people, with its intense genetic baggage, has grown to half a billion people in potentially as little as 2,000 years.

The reason might hew to a different line of evolutionary logic—one driven not by the dangers of aldehydes to us but by the dangers of aldehydes to some of our smallest enemies, according to Heran Darwin, a microbiologist at New York University. As Darwin and her colleagues reported at a conference last week, people with the ALDH2*2 mutation might be especially good at fighting off certain pathogens—among them the bug that causes tuberculosis, or TB, one of the greatest infectious killers in recent history.

The research, currently under review for publication at the journal Science, hasn’t yet been fully vetted by other scientists. And truly nailing TB, or any other pathogen, as the evolutionary catalyst for the rise of ALDH2*2 will likely be tough. But if infectious disease can even partly explain the staggering size of the flushing cohort—as several experts told me is likely the case—the mystery of one of the most common mutations in the human population will be one step closer to being solved.

[Read: Tuberculosis got to South America through … seals?]

Scientists have long been aware of aldehydes’ nasty effects on DNA and proteins; the compounds are carcinogens that literally “damage the fabric of life,” says Ketan J. Patel, a molecular biologist at the University of Oxford who studies the ALDH2*2 mutation and is reviewing the new research for publication in Science. For years, though, many researchers dismissed the chemicals as the annoying refuse of the body’s daily chores. Our bodies produce them as part of run-of-the-mill metabolism; the compounds also build up during infection or inflammation, as byproducts of some of the noxious chemicals we churn out. But then aldehydes are generally swept away by our molecular cleanup systems like so much microscopic trash.

Darwin and her colleagues are now convinced that the chemicals deserve more credit. Dosed into laboratory cultures, aldehydes can kill TB within days. In previous research, Darwin’s team also found that aldehydes—including ones produced by the bacteria themselves—can make TB ultra sensitive to nitric oxide, a defensive compound that humans produce during infections, as well as copper, a metal that destroys many microbes on contact. (For what it’s worth, the aldehydes found in our bodies after we consume alcohol don’t seem to much bother TB, Darwin told me. Drinking has actually been linked to worse outcomes with the disease.)

The team is still tabulating the many ways in which aldehydes are exerting their antimicrobial effects. But Darwin suspects that the bugs that are vulnerable to the chemicals are dying “a death by a thousand cuts,” she told me at the conference. Which makes aldehydes more than worthless waste. Maybe our ancestors’ bodies wised up to the molecules’ universally destructive powers—and began to purposefully deploy them in their defensive arsenal. “It’s the immune system capitalizing on the toxicity,” says Joshua Woodward, a microbiologist at the University of Washington who has been studying the antibacterial effects of aldehydes.

Specific cells show hints that they’ve caught on to aldehydes’ potency. Sarah Stanley, a microbiologist and an immunologist at UC Berkeley, who has been co-leading the research with Darwin, has found that when immune cells receive certain chemical signals signifying infection, they’ll ramp up some of the metabolic pathways that produce aldehydes. Those same signals, the researchers recently found, can also prompt immune cells to tamp down their levels of aldehyde dehydrogenase 2—the very aldehyde-detoxifying enzyme that the mutant gene in people like me fails to make.

If holstering that enzyme is a way for cells to up their supply of toxins and brace for inevitable attack, that could be good news for ALDH2*2 carriers, who already struggle to make enough of it. When, in an extreme imitation of human flushers, the researchers purged the ALDH2 gene from a strain of mice, then infected them with TB, they found that the rodents accumulated fewer bacteria in their lungs.

The buildup of aldehydes in the mutant mice wasn’t enough to, say, render them totally immune to TB. But even a small defensive bump can make for a massive advantage when combating such a deadly disease, Russell Vance, an immunologist at UC Berkeley who’s been collaborating with Darwin and Stanley on the project, told me. Darwin is now curious as to whether TB’s distaste for aldehyde could be leveraged during infections, she told me—by, for instance, supplementing antibiotic regimens with a side of Antabuse, a medication that blocks aldehyde dehydrogenase, mimicking the effects of ALDH2*2.

Tying those results to the existence of ALDH2*2 in half a billion people is a larger leap, several experts told me. There are clues of a relationship: Darwin and Stanley’s team found, for instance, that in a cohort from Vietnam and Singapore, people carrying the mutation were less likely to have active cases of TB—echoing patterns documented by at least one other study from Korea. But Daniela Brites, an evolutionary geneticist at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, told me that the connection still feels a little shaky. Other studies that have searched for genetic predispositions to TB, or resistance to it, she pointed out, haven’t hit on ALDH2*2—a sign that any link might be weak.

The team’s general idea could still pan out. “They are definitely on the right track,” Patel told me. Throughout most of human history, infectious diseases have been among the most dramatic influences over who lives and who dies—a pressure so immense that it’s left obvious scars on the human genome. A mutation that can cause sickle cell anemia has become very common in parts of the African continent because it helps guard people against malaria.

[Read: A history of humanity in which humans are secondary]

The story with ALDH2*2 is probably similar, Patel said. He’s confident that some infectious agent—perhaps several of them—has played a major role in keeping the mutation around. TB, with its devastating track record, could be among the candidates, but it wouldn’t have to be. A few years ago, work from Woodward’s lab showed that aldehydes can also do a number on the bacterial pathogens Staphylococcus aureus and Francisella novicida. (Darwin and Stanley’s team have now shown that mice lacking ALDH2 also fare better against the closely related Francisella tularensis.) Che-Hong Chen, a geneticist at Stanford who’s been studying ALDH2*2 for years, suspects that the culprit might not be a bacterium at all. He favors the idea that it’s, once again, malaria, acting on a different part of our genome, in a different region of the world.

Other tiny perks of ALDH2*2 may have helped the mutation proliferate. As Chen points out, it’s a pretty big disincentive to drink—and people who abstain (which, of course, isn’t all of us) do spare themselves a lot of potential liver problems. Which is another way in which the consequences of my genetic anomaly might not be so bad, even if at first flush it seems more trouble than it’s worth.

Rival unions claim the miners were either held hostage or protesting.

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The MAGA movement has been infused with violence and threats of violence for years. Those threats—now aimed at Republican lawmakers—are the new normal in the GOP.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The hard truth about immigration A record of pure, predatory sadism Too many people own dogs. How the media got the hospital explosion wrong

Sleeping With a Gun by the Bed

The trash fire that is the Republican competition to elect the speaker of the House is entering a new phase now that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio is out of the running. Nine men have put themselves forward; Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota is the apparent favorite, at least for now. Of the nine, seven voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (Emmer and Representative Austin Scott of Georgia voted to certify the results.)

Before this contest moves into horse-race handicapping, we should revisit the astonishing stories from over the weekend about the threats made against Republican legislators during Jordan’s brief candidacy. CNN’s Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, and Aaron Blake at The Washington Post, among others, reported on these threats, but many Americans seem unable to muster more than a shrug and a kind of resigned acceptance that this is just how some Republicans are now. The only people who seem angry about this are the Republican lawmakers who, along with their families, received these threats.

Although Jordan repudiated these tactics, some of his colleagues blame him anyway, and Americans are now, as Blake wrote last week, in a “long-overdue” conversation about the role of threats in public life, one that “should include a recognition that these threats and intimidation can work, and probably have.”

That “conversation,” unfortunately, is unlikely to continue. Republicans have long feared their own voters, and have for years whispered about it among themselves. Now that Jordan has been defeated, they will likely go back to pretending that such threats are isolated incidents. But the threats during Jordan’s candidacy should confirm that Trump’s MAGA loyalists, firmly nested in the GOP, constitute a violent movement that refuses to lose any democratic contest—even to other members of its own party.

Some of these threats can be dismissed as the result of technology: The frictional costs of threatening people are basically nonexistent. Angry cranks once needed time and materials (envelopes and stamps, or at least a call to an information line) to say awful things. Today, people are surfing the internet with a smartphone—their personal secretary and valet—right by their side, so the interval between having a repulsive thought and expressing it to a target is now functionally zero.

But email and the internet, and political violence in the United States, have been around for a while. Only in the age of Trump have threats become a common part of daily American partisan politics. Almost anyone who is even remotely a public figure now gets them over almost anything, and Trump and his movement have gone quite far in killing any sense of shame for saying terrible things to other people or their families over political differences.

Not only does Trump expressly model this kind of behavior; he and his media enablers provide rationalizations for such threats. Ironically, many of these excuses were once associated with the violent far left a half-century ago: The system is rigged; democracy is a mug’s game; anyone who disagrees with you is an enemy; those in power will never give it up without being subjected to violence and intimidation. But much of it is also out of the far-right, fascist playbook: The elites are plotting against you; anyone who disagrees with you is obviously in on the plot; the only salvation is if We the People engage in violence ordained by God himself.

We’ve seen these illiberal, populist attitudes and beliefs before. What we have not seen in America until now is the capture of a major political party by this kind of paranoia and violence.

The threats around Jordan’s attempt to gain the gavel are also different because the people making them are reaching down into granular, inside-baseball GOP politics. In recent years, some MAGA adherents have made threats against their partisan opponents in order to defend Trump’s honor, or because they were convinced that the 2020 election was stolen. Now, however, the movement is turning on its own. Some people follow internal House conferences as if they are members of the caucus, and treat the election of a speaker—which is important, to be sure—as an existential battle.

Amazingly, these people made threats in support of … Jim Jordan. They are actually menacing other human beings over the ambitions of a loudmouthed, ineffectual member of Congress.

After threats over the speakership, what’s next? Death threats over who becomes deputy whip? Put the honorable Mr. Bloggs on the Rules Committee, or I’ll hurt your family? As the writer Eric Hoffer so presciently noted more than 70 years ago, decadence and boredom can be among the most useful raw materials for the construction of an authoritarian movement, and clearly, American society has plenty of both.

Many Republican legislators are scared, and they should be. Only 25 members of the House GOP conference voted against Jordan on the floor during the last round of voting. Many more opposed making him speaker; in a secret ballot, 112 of Jordan’s colleagues voted against him—which suggests that more than 80 of them feared doing so in public.

It’s not uncommon for members of Congress to vote one way among themselves and then cast a different vote on the floor, especially if the issue is one where the national party is at odds with the voters in a member’s district. Such political calculations, though sometimes distasteful, are common. But democracy cannot function if legislators feel that their lives—and those of their families—are in danger from their fellow citizens. No matter what happens with Trump and the MAGA cult, the Republican Party cannot go on this way, and some of the legislators who spoke up about threats during Jordan’s attempt to become speaker seem to know it.

What they are willing to do about it is less clear. But I wonder if the arrests and convictions for the January 6 insurrection are having their effect: One caller to a representative, after a string of f-bombs and barely veiled threats, made an effort to stipulate that he was speaking only of nonviolent harassment. Perhaps holding such people legally accountable for their actions—whether they intended violence or were just trying to throw a scare into others—might begin to reverse this trend.

Republican elected officials didn’t seem to care very much about such rhetoric when it was aimed at their opponents, and they were only briefly shaken on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob made clear that there was plenty of room reserved on the gibbet for Mike Pence and other Republican leaders. Perhaps they’ll take such threats more seriously now that their internal squabbles could lead to their wives having to sleep with a gun by the bed, but I suspect that the hyper-partisanship and stunning cowardice that brought the GOP to this moment will, as ever, win the day.

Related:

The new anarchy Only the GOP celebrates political violence.

Today’s News

Two more hostages were released by Hamas. The International Committee of the Red Cross said that it facilitated their release. The Philippines accused the Chinese coast guard of “intentionally” hitting its boats in a disputed area of the South China Sea. María Corina Machado won the Venezuelan opposition’s first presidential primary in more than a decade. If allowed to run, she will challenge President Nicolás Maduro in what he has promised will be an internationally monitored election next year.

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie Plaugic and Kaitlyn Tiffany try to find ghosts in Manhattan, but all they see is Anderson Cooper’s apartment.

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Culture Break

Read. In Lee Friedlander’s new retrospective, Real Estate, the great American documentary photographer treats American cityscapes as focal points.

Watch. With Bad Bunny as the host, the weekend’s Saturday Night Live (streaming on Peacock) was defiantly bilingual—and all the better for it.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

A while back, I said that I would occasionally use this space to revisit some 1980s musical oddities. This week, I want to remind you how very political music videos could be in the Decade of Excess. You’ve probably seen the video for the 1986 Genesis hit “Land of Confusion,” which used Britain’s Spitting Image puppets to portray world leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to trippy effect. Reagan made a lot of appearances in words and images in those days, including in Sting’s “Russians,” Men at Work’s “It’s a Mistake,” and others.

But for my money, the best video with a Reagan reference was made by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Better known for its huge dance hit “Relax,” in 1984, the band recorded “Two Tribes,” a song about nuclear war. (I wrote about MTV’s nuclear genre here.) The video features two actors, one obviously Reagan, and the other—and this is the cool trivia part—meant to be the Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The two of them beat each other up until the world explodes. The end.

But wait—who? Exactly. Chernenko was leader of the U.S.S.R. for all of 13 months, mostly as a seat warmer in ill health. History has forgotten him, but thanks to a video filmed at the right moment in time, he will live on, forever headbutting Reagan and biting the American president’s ear in an eternal arena match.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Living in Kinshasa in the mid-1990s, I often drove past a futuristic tower looking out over the slow-moving, hyacinth-spotted river separating what was then Zaire from its neighbor, Congo-Brazzaville. The tower was a medley of gleaming metal tubes and concrete pillars, and its raison d’être was a bit of a mystery: It wasn’t particularly beautiful, had been left unfinished for decades, and couldn’t be visited.

That ambiguity was fitting. The Limete Tower, as it was called, was an exercise in presidential hypocrisy, and a half-hearted one at that. Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s long-ruling dictator, had commissioned it to commemorate his former boss and onetime friend Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Congo. Lumumba was assassinated in January 1961 with the collusion of Western powers worried about his suspected Communist sympathies and determined to keep him from power. In theory, the monument was meant to glorify a national hero, a martyr to imperialism. But the gesture’s sincerity was open to question, because Mobutu himself helped ensure Lumumba’s death, ordering him to be flown handcuffed to a secessionist province where he was shot by firing squad, his body then dismembered and dissolved in acid.

Returning to Kinshasa this summer after a 20-year absence, I found a capital bursting with energy. The population has quadrupled; main avenues are regularly jammed with traffic. The city, interestingly, is now spattered with commemorative public art, including an impressionistic portrait of Mobutu, a.k.a. “the Leopard,” in the lobby of a famous hotel, and a portly statue and a mausoleum dedicated to Laurent Kabila, the rebel leader who toppled Mobutu in 1997. Most significant, a proper statue to Lumumba now stands, one arm raised, beneath the Limete Tower, and his only surviving body part—a gold-crowned tooth pried from his mouth by a Belgian colonial officer—is preserved in a coffin stowed below.

The statue is not a good likeness, as Stuart A. Reid, the author of the new book The Lumumba Plot, acknowledges. But crucially, after a surreal ceremony attended by African presidents and a few Lumumba impersonators, it is there. Like a patient with PTSD, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as it is now known, is slowly coming to terms with its history, a tumble of events so violent and shocking that many Congolese emerged convinced of their utter powerlessness in the face of cynical Western manipulation.

Reid’s book will contribute helpfully to that process. Although the broad outlines of Lumumba’s story are widely known, many of the published accounts about his rise and fall have long been out of print. Two important books—the CIA agent Larry Devlin’s memoir, Chief of Station, Congo, and the scholar Ludo De Witte’s investigation, The Assassination of Lumumba, a book whose revelations were so sensational they prompted a Belgian parliamentary inquiry—are more than 15 and 20 years old, respectively.

A new work pulling together the material was overdue. Having trawled through United States and United Nations archives; accessed declassified memos and cables, private letters, and unpublished documents; and interviewed Lumumba’s surviving family members, Reid has brought welcome narrative coherence to a globe-spanning, multilayered story. He manages a difficult balancing act, serving up the detail that will satisfy experts while providing the dramatic tension and character analysis craved by the general reader. Despite the story’s complexity, one’s attention never wanders.

But then, when it comes to drama, Reid had quality ingredients to work with: a botched independence swiftly followed by army mutinies and attempted secession by two renegade provinces, egged on by Belgium, the colonial power unwilling to let go; a charismatic Black leader who comes to a terrible end, aged just 35; a first-of-its-kind UN military operation to keep a fragmenting African state in one piece, climaxing in a mysterious plane crash and the death of the UN secretary-general; Cold War skullduggery of the most nefarious kind, including a poison vial stowed in a safe; not one but two coup d’états. The “Congo crisis,” as it was called at the time, kept the world on the edge of its seat. It would be difficult to make such material boring.

According to Reid’s account, Lumumba fell victim to an accident of birth. He was a member of the Batetela, a small ethnic community in Congo’s southern Kasai province, and that meant he could not count on the automatic support of any sizable ethnic constituency once he moved to the capital and launched his political career. If proud national unity became his rallying cry, it was also a position he was obliged to embrace in order to claim the top job as Congo prepared to break away from Belgium, its colonial master, in June 1960.

Yet uniting a territory that had been defined entirely by King Leopold II’s greed was always going to be a massive challenge. Routinely described as “the size of Western Europe,” the DRC is famously home to about 250 different ethnic groups and some 700 dialects and languages. Lumumba won the admiration of his Congolese subjects for defying Belgium’s colonial powers, and was then doomed to attempt the impossible: keep an unfeasibly large, haphazardly delineated nation together.

In retrospect, his fiery insistence on rushing independence through in four months, rather than the multiple years Brussels envisaged, was one of his worst mistakes. Congo did not have a political class or civil service with any experience in policy making or administration, and moving so quickly gave the country no time to develop them. Mutinies by soldiers furious at racial discrimination in the ranks were swiftly followed by the attempted secession—supported by Belgium—of Katanga and South Kasai, two mineral-rich provinces whose leaders believed they would do better on their own. These multi-pronged problems called for governing expertise that simply wasn’t there.

[Read: The coup in Niger is about power. Russia will exploit it.]

Lumumba was a populist leader, and forward planning was not his strength. Reading Reid’s biography with today’s eyes, one constantly catches glimpses of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orbán, and Silvio Berlusconi—figures who also rose to power based on their ability to read a crowd, not develop policies and see them through. Like many a modern-day demagogue, Lumumba’s curriculum vitae was a florid, chaotic affair, littered with malpractice and fiddled accounts (he did prison time for fraud committed while working at the post office), neglected spouses, and embittered friends (one of them, fatefully, his former private secretary Joseph Mobutu). As a politician he made grandiose promises he never intended to keep, proved incapable of delegating, and was allergic to compromise.

Yet put him on a podium, thrust a microphone before him, and a magical transformation took place. “Cerebral yet passionate, he interspersed chapter-and-verse legal arguments with raw emotion,” Reid writes. He would have the audience—whether ordinary workers or restive soldiers—eating out of his hand, swept away by his charisma and oratory. And, what’s more, he could work this miracle in three local languages, as well as French.

Several men compete with Lumumba for attention in these pages. One is Mobutu, who removed Lumumba from the political scene by ordering him and two colleagues aboard a flight to Katanga, where he knew the secessionist leader Moise Tshombe, who loathed Lumumba, would do the necessary. Mobutu, who would go on to run Zaire for 32 long years, his leopard-skin toque virtually synonymous with the country, comes across as a far more hesitant, tortured, and haunted individual than he is usually thought to have been. At the height of  the “Congo crisis,” the State Department feared that the future president, threatening to resign and downing tranquilizers, might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The other key player is, of course, one of the most famous station chiefs in CIA history: Larry Devlin, posted in Leopoldville, as Kinshasa was known, during those years. When I was researching my 2000 book on Mobutu, Devlin was one of my first interviewees, and years later, I would occasionally pick up the phone and hear his instantly recognizable, wheezing voice on the other end. Once a heavy smoker, he eventually died of emphysema.

Devlin did not believe that Lumumba himself was a Communist—“He was just a poor jerk who thought, I can use these people,” he told me—but was convinced that his readiness to flirt with the Soviet Union placed Congo in acute danger of falling into Moscow’s control. And if Congo went Communist, its nine neighboring countries might well do the same—or so the argument went.

That scenario was used to justify an extraordinarily energetic campaign of political subversion and manipulation, in which Devlin handed out one bribe after another. During those years, barely a cabinet decision was reached, an election held, or a “spontaneous” demonstration staged in Congo that didn’t bear his fingerprints. And if he decided against slipping the poison he’d been given by the CIA’s master chemist, a man known simply as “Sid from Paris,” into Lumumba’s food, Devlin was nonetheless instrumental in ensuring that the former prime minister got on the fateful flight.

We can all think of several other occasions in which well-informed and supremely capable Western officials somehow managed to convince themselves that a country of only tangential relevance threatened their own society’s very existence, justifying muscular intervention. If Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with its never-found “weapons of mass destruction,” was the most recent example of hyperventilating wishful thinking, the Vietnam War represented another case of disastrous groupthink. Devlin, tellingly, also played a part in that quagmire.

Reid rejects the entire Cold War premise. The beleaguered Lumumba certainly turned to Russia for military help, but the eventual opening of Soviet archives revealed that Moscow was never as interested in Congo as Washington assumed. “I think we overrated the Soviet danger, let’s say, in the Congo,” he quotes Allen Dulles, the former CIA chief and Cold Warrior, later admitting.

That miscalculation, Reid argues, was based on a misunderstanding of Lumumba: “The idea that he would simply ditch his ardent anticolonialism and let his country fall under Soviet dominion struck him as preposterous, and so it should have struck everyone else.”

Knee-jerk racism certainly played a role in the West’s tendency to dismiss Congo’s various players as clueless pawns in a superpower chess game. What is striking about reading the cables written by U.S. and UN officials is not just how profoundly many of them disliked Lumumba but the crudeness with which they expressed their hostility.

The U.S. ambassador to Congo joked about Lumumba’s supposed cannibalism, while the UN’s man in the Congo, Ralph Bunche, likened him to Hitler. “It would be unkind to the animal kingdom to describe him as having the morals and conduct of an ape,” Bunche wrote to his wife. American and UN cable traffic was peppered with paternalistic references to “the children” running Congo and “little boy” Lumumba. Another Congolese politician was dismissed as “an illiterate moron.”

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The consequences of those lazy assessments changed central Africa forever. “By discarding Lumumba and embracing Mobutu, the United States tilted the Congo off its political axis, creating an artificial gap between what the country’s politics should have been and what they actually were,” Reid writes. If Reid is clear that the DRC was “never destined to become a Jeffersonian democracy,” he nevertheless thinks that without American meddling, “it could well have followed the trajectory of many postcolonial states in the region: poor and politically chaotic, but at least functional and free of mass violence.”

A counterfactual is hard to prove, of course, and I’m not sure I agree with Reid. But Lumumba’s ghost has certainly haunted the DRC, and Africa, ever since. Had he been allowed to govern, his impulsiveness and gift for making political enemies might well have gradually lost him the support of an adoring Congolese public. As with Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara—in some ways Lumumba’s West African counterpart—dying young turned him into an icon of What Might Have Been, and an abiding reproach to Western powers. Lumumba himself seems to have had some inkling of that symbolic, sacrificial destiny. “If I die, too bad,” he told a colleague a few months before he was shot. “The Congo needs martyrs.”

The legacy is romantic, but it comes at a profound psychological price. I am occasionally asked to debate contemporary African events on Congolese television and radio channels, and each time, I’m struck by the extent to which my fellow panelists are convinced, whether discussing a military coup in Niger or civil war in Sudan, that they can discern the Machiavellian hand of U.S., French, or British intelligence once again at work. That’s a counterintuitive assumption, given what seems to me, instead, to be a pattern of creeping indifference toward the continent in many formerly engaged Western states. Instead of relationships with the U.S. and former European colonial masters, African countries are now making deals with China, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

You cannot blame the Congolese for their suspicion—after all, the CIA really did help plot their first prime minister’s assassination; Belgium really did try and divide the country—but it risks stripping citizens of one of Africa’s largest nations of agency, encouraging them to see themselves as eternal, hapless victims of some great power play. And that’s not helpful to anyone.

Many are viewing this inaugural iteration with interest – for its impact on the African game, and beyond.

In 1925, a new, highly desirable trait was invented. Press reports hailed a new Hollywood star: Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten, an Austrian noble and tennis champion, who was rumored to be appearing in a film from the megaproducer Samuel Goldwyn. What made the 39-year-old Hollywood material? “He is photogenic,” Goldwyn told a reporter. Newspapers quickly credited the producer with coining a new word.

As it turned out, von Salm-Hoogstraeten’s acting career did not take off, but Goldwyn’s turn of phrase sure did. Now, nearly a century later, photogenicity is essential to the vocabulary of the selfie era. A photogenic person, common thinking goes, looks effortlessly good in a photograph. On social media, photogenicity has become a kind of currency: the intangible “it” factor that can lead to a high follower count. As a result, articles now promise to unspool the secrets of photogenicity; people on TikTok have been taking random stills from their videos to apparently determine whether they’re photogenic. For the rest of us, the concept might serve to justify an aversion to selfies (we’re not unattractive; we’re just not photogenic).

Yet delve into the research, and there’s little direct evidence for the idea that some people are naturally better looking on camera. Perhaps, instead, when someone gets called “photogenic,” what people are really referring to is a practiced sense of ease in front of the camera—and the ability of a photographer and photographic technology to capture it. Photogenicity, in this sense, is more nurture than nature. It is probably less of a measure of how attractive one looks than of how well someone has reconciled themselves to the particularities and limits of modern technology.

To understand this, let’s break down some pervasive assumptions underlying photogenicity. First: There is little universal understanding of who has it and who doesn’t. “To a surprisingly large extent, we disagree on who we individually think of as attractive” in photographs, Clare Sutherland, a psychology lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, told me. Psychological studies, including Sutherland’s own, have demonstrated that a person who is rated as very attractive in one photo might be considered much less attractive in another. “There’s going to be a lot of individual variation in how we make this judgment about whether or not someone looks photogenic,” Sutherland said.

That extends to ourselves too. In a 2017 study, Sutherland and a group of researchers found that, given a set of 12 photos of their own face, participants generally preferred very different photos of themselves to the ones their peers did. The same disjuncture in how we perceive our photographed face was also the subject of a 2014 study in Japan. In it, researchers took photos of each participant, then lightly modified them, increasing or decreasing the size of eyes and mouths. Participants were then given four photos of the same person’s face and asked to pick which one had not been modified. In the end, people were worse at identifying their real face than their peers’. We are, in other words, terrible judges of what we look like to other people. Thus, when we insist that we are not photogenic, we probably don’t know what we are talking about.

The study in Japan suggested that perhaps a person’s professed lack of photogenicity stems from their unfamiliarity with how they look on camera. The theory is intriguing—but it doesn’t account for the possibility that photogenicity might really be a kind of on-camera savvy. Photogenic people might have mastered their relationship with image-capturing devices. Models swear by the importance of angles, and there is some truth to the idea that how we orient our face in photos informs the final product. For example, photos taken from above tend to make people look trimmer, whereas photos taken head-on might emphasize the broadness and power of our body.

Sometimes this plays out involuntarily: Numerous studies since the 1970s have found that we tend to pose with the left side of our face, a phenomenon that Alessandro Soranzo, a psychology researcher at the U.K.’s Sheffield Hallam University, speculates might have something to do with brain chemistry. “Our right hemisphere of the brain is the one that is more involved in emotions,” Soranzo told me. And because the right hemisphere governs the left side of the face, “our left side is more expressive emotionally,” he said. Whether that actually translates into our left looking better remains a matter of debate, according to Soranzo.

Another factor that complicates photogenicity is the historical bias built into photographic technology. In the 20th century, Kodak calibrated the light and coloration of its photos according to a photograph of a white woman named Shirley. Black and brown people subsequently found that their skin did not show up accurately. While researching early references to photogenicity in newspaper archives, I encountered numerous articles that acknowledged this bias quite explicitly, including one in the Illustrated Daily News in 1934 proclaiming the camera to be “kindest to blondes” because of “their ‘photogenic’ coloring.”

When you understand the history of the concept, “you can see just how fluid and unstable the very idea of photogenicity is,” says Sarah Lewis, a professor of African American studies at Harvard and the founder of the Vision & Justice initiative, an organization that publishes research on visual culture. Photography is still not a level playing field, and, as Lewis has written, anti-Black bias lingers in many digital photos today. For example, cameras that add artificial light or optimize exposure tend to distort the skin color of Black people in particular. Using different kinds of lighting according to one’s skin tone, then, is key to creating the appearance of photogenicity.

That brings us to the last component of photogenicity—the person taking the photo. I was struck by a comment by Naima Green, an artist and a commercial photographer who often works with nonprofessional models. She told me that she encounters many subjects who tense up in front of the lens. “They’re so hyperaware of the camera that they want to make sure they’re doing everything right for me,” she said. “And when you are just more in the moment, I think that really changes what happens in the picture.” Instead of contorting people into rigid poses, Green prioritizes making people feel comfortable on set with her. The trick is in finding sitting or standing positions where their body can relax. It is a small tweak, but a telling one. We can all do this for ourselves, too, even when posing for a selfie.

[Read: How to have a realistic conversation about beauty with your kids]

The reality is that the people most often considered photogenic are probably also the ones who have repeated exposure to photos of themselves—say, models or actors. Sure, they may be considered conventionally beautiful, and they may be good performers who know how to work with a camera. But perhaps their greatest asset is simply how many reps they’ve put in. As a result, they are attuned to the camera’s tendencies, and they are relaxed in front of it.

Maybe those of us who are not professional posers just have to remember that photogenicity may be a skill you can work to improve, like any other. If we choose to, perhaps we can take so many photos of ourselves that we know our visage from every angle. We can learn the lighting that matches our complexion. We can master the poses that make us feel most like ourselves. At some point, we might cease to be surprised by the image looking back at us.

Of all the high-flying tourism ventures spawned by space-obsessed billionaires, Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, offers perhaps the most unconventional approach. It doesn’t use big rockets or gumdrop-shaped capsules. Instead, an airplane takes off with a spacecraft strapped to its wing. The spacecraft, shaped like a plane itself, holds the paying customers and more pilots. When the airplane reaches a certain altitude, it releases the spacecraft. The spacecraft’s pilots then ignite its engine, and the vehicle soars straight up, to the fuzzy boundary that separates us from the rest of the universe, before gliding back down and landing on a runway.

The spaceplane experience is a stark contrast to Blue Origin’s suborbital jaunts and SpaceX’s orbital missions, but Virgin Galactic’s passengers still have a few surreal minutes of weightlessness, and they get to see the planet gleaming against the darkness of space. Those passengers have included the first former Olympian to reach space, as well as the first mother-daughter duo, and, most recently, the first Pakistani.

In the midst of all that, Virgin Galactic clocked a first that raised some eyebrows: The company withheld the passenger list from the public before a takeoff last month, divulging the travelers’ names only after they had landed. The company never publicly explained its preflight secrecy. (Virgin Galactic did not respond to a request for comment.) Yesterday, Virgin Galactic announced its next flight, scheduled for November; the company kept one of the three listed passengers anonymous, saying only that the person is “of Franco-Italian nationality."

Virgin is of course within its rights to withhold passenger names before takeoff. After all, airlines and railroads keep private the names of their customers. But Virgin Galactic’s choice to do so marks a subtle shift—the latest in U.S. spaceflight’s arc from a publicly funded national mission to private tourism. NASA, as a taxpayer-funded organization, has always had to provide the public with launch lists and livestreams. But the age of space tourism raises a host of questions: How much openness do space-tourism companies owe the public? How much privacy do they owe their customers? Before the Virgin flight returned home last month, it operated almost like a privately chartered plane, its movements known to relevant aviation agencies but its passengers’ names undisclosed to the public. Commercial spaceflight and air travel are still far from alike, but in this particular aspect, the space-tourism industry may be drifting toward its private-jet era.

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In practice, the space-tourism industry is barely more than two years old, and it’s “still finding its norms,” says Carissa Christensen, a space consultant and the CEO of BryceTech, an analytics and engineering firm. The first passenger rosters were marquee news in 2021, when Branson and Jeff Bezos were racing to be the first to ride their own spacecraft, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX was working to send a quartet of private astronauts with zero spaceflight experience into orbit.

All three of their companies publicized, and even hyped, the passenger lists, in some cases months in advance. Wally Funk, an octogenarian aviator who had outperformed male candidates in astronaut tests during the 1960s but was kept out of the astronaut corps because she was a woman, flew alongside Bezos. Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman, paid for three other people to fly into orbit with him on SpaceX; all of them gave countless interviews before launch. And who can forget the hype ahead of William Shatner’s flight, and the Star Trek star’s unfiltered, emotional remarks after landing?

The rosters became less noteworthy as time went on: The customers were no longer memorable guests who got free rides, but simply very wealthy people who could afford the trips on their own. Last month’s temporarily secret Virgin Galactic fliers included a real-estate investor from Las Vegas, a South African entrepreneur, and a British engineer who founded a company that builds race cars. Michelle Hanlon, a space lawyer and the executive director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for Air and Space Law, told me that she was mildly surprised by Virgin Galactic’s decision to withhold the passengers’ identities before takeoff, but that the decision did not strike her as inappropriate.

“From a paparazzi standpoint, if it’s Ashton Kutcher, the world’s gonna care a little bit more than if it’s Michelle Hanlon,” Hanlon said. (Kutcher did, in fact, purchase a Virgin Galactic ticket in 2012, but he later sold it back to the company after his wife and fellow actor, Mila Kunis, talked him out of going.) And from a legal standpoint, nothing inappropriate occurred, Hanlon said; there are no existing requirements for a private company to disclose passenger names. Space travelers must sign waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration outlining the risks associated with the activity, she said, but the companies they’re flying with are not required to provide the agency with a passenger list.

[Read: Jeff Bezos knows who paid for him to go to space]

Passenger names aren’t the only details of commercial spaceflight that are becoming more opaque. When SpaceX launched its first set of private astronauts, the company shared significantly less live footage of their experience in orbit than they did when NASA astronauts test-drove the capsule a year earlier. During its last two flights, Virgin Galactic decided not to provide a livestream, giving updates on social media instead.

Because there are no regulations, it’s difficult to say when the companies’ right to privacy becomes a concerning level of secrecy. NASA overshares when it comes to its astronauts and their mission, because the public—which funds the agency—expects it. Americans might also expect a good look at SpaceX customers who visit the International Space Station, which relies on billions of dollars of taxpayer money, and where private visitors share meals with government astronauts. But what about other kinds of SpaceX missions, which go into orbit without disembarking at any government-owned facility? The company developed its crewed launch services with significant investment from NASA, so virtually every SpaceX trip indirectly involves government money. That doesn’t necessarily mean SpaceX is obligated to share as the space agency does, even if people on the ground feel that it should.

Another major difference between NASA missions and private ones, of course, is that astronauts are at work, whereas many space tourists are presumably just having fun. Caryn Schenewerk, a consultant who specializes in commercial spaceflight at her firm CS Consulting, told me that she thinks commercial spaceflight will adopt the practices of other forms of adventure tourism. Take skydiving, for example: Schenewerk said that she has signed paperwork granting the skydiving company permission to use footage of her experience for its own purposes. “There’s some expectation of privacy on the individual’s behalf that then has to be actively waived for the company’s benefit,” she said.

The once-anonymous Virgin Galactic passengers on the September flight have since publicly shared their stories, basking in the awe of their experience. Christensen told me that most future tourists will likely do the same. “A big part of the fun is other people knowing that you’ve done it,” she said. Flying to space isn’t exactly something to be modest about: Fewer than 700 people have done it since human beings first achieved the feat, in the early 1960s, and we know all of their names. If Virgin’s new mystery passenger doesn’t reveal their name, they really will make history.

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Many spacefarers—the Soviet cosmonauts who inhabited the first space station, the American astronauts who shuttled their way into orbit, the Chinese astronauts living in space right now, all of the people who have flown commercial—have spoken about the transformational wonder of seeing Earth from space, a phenomenon known as the overview effect. They reported that they better understood the reality of our beautiful, fragile planet, and that they felt a duty to share their impressions with people on the ground. Gene Cernan, one of the dozen men who walked on the lunar surface, once said, “If only everyone could relate to the beauty and the purposefulness of it … It wouldn’t bring a utopia to this planet for people to understand it all, but it might make a difference.” In this sense, for a space traveler to remain unknown forever would be a sort of anti–overview effect: Just as they may have the right to request some privacy, they have no obligation to bring the transcendent power of their journey back to Earth.

Three years ago, two NASA astronauts made a historic flight on a new SpaceX astronaut capsule. Ahead of the mission, I asked NASA what Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken were going to have for breakfast on the morning of the launch. It was a question with a long tradition in spacefaring history: During the Apollo days, the public was privy to the final Earth-bound meals of history-making astronauts. NASA officials balked, saying they couldn’t divulge that information for privacy reasons. But on the day of the launch, Hurley, as if to sate the space press corps, posted a picture of his steak and eggs on Twitter (as it was still known then).

Hurley and Behnken’s preflight hours seemed like fair game; after all, these men were government employees, doing their job on their assigned mission. But future passengers may decide that we have no business knowing their breakfast order—or even their name.