Latest from The Atlantic
Atlantic
7 hours ago
- Health
- Atlantic
‘I'm Not Quite Sure How to Respond to This Presentation'
The past three weeks have been auspicious for the anti-vaxxers. On June 9, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. purged the nation's most important panel of vaccine experts: All 17 voting members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which sets recommendations for the use of vaccines and determines which ones must be covered through insurance and provided free of charge to children on Medicaid, were abruptly fired. The small, ragtag crew of replacements that Kennedy appointed two days later met this week for the first time, amid lots of empty chairs in a conference room in Atlanta. They had come to talk about the safety of vaccines: to raise concerns about the data, to float hypotheses of harm, to issue findings. The resulting spectacle was set against a backdrop of accelerating action from the secretary. On Wednesday, Kennedy terminated more than $1 billion in U.S. funding for Gavi, a global-health initiative that supports the vaccination of more than 65 million children every year. Lyn Redwood, a nurse practitioner and the former president of Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization that Kennedy used to chair, was just hired as a special government employee. (She presented at the ACIP meeting yesterday.) A recently posted scientific document on the ACIP website that underscored the safety of thimerosal, an ingredient in a small proportion of the nation's flu vaccines, had been taken down, a committee member said, because the document 'was not authorized by the office of the secretary.' (A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told me in an email that this document was provided to the ACIP members in their meeting briefing packets.) What's clear enough is that, 61 years after ACIP's founding, America's vaccination policy is about to be recooked. Now we've had a glimpse inside the kitchen. The meeting started with complaints. 'Some media outlets have been very harsh on the new members of this committee,' said Martin Kulldorff, a rangy Swedish biostatistician and noted COVID contrarian who is now ACIP's chair. (Kuldorff was one of the lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial proposal from the fall of 2020 to isolate seniors and other vulnerable people while reopening the rest of society.) In suggesting that he and Kennedy's other appointees are opposed to vaccination, Kulldorff said, journalists were misleading the public, weakening trust in public health, and fanning 'the flames of vaccine hesitancy.' This was, in fact, the most pugnacious comment of the two-day meeting, which otherwise unfolded in a tone of fearmongering gentility. Robert Malone, a doctor and an infectious-diseases researcher who has embraced the 'anti-vaccine' label and published a conspiracy-theory-laden book that details government psyops against the American people, was unfailingly polite in his frequent intimations about the safety of vaccines, often thanking CDC staff for their hard work and lucid presentations. With his thick white beard, calm affect, and soldierly diction—Malone ended many of his comments by saying, 'Over' into the microphone—he presented less as a firebrand than as, say, the commanding officer of a submarine. When Malone alluded to the worry, for example, that spike proteins from the mRNA-based COVID vaccines linger in the body following injection, he did so in respectful, even deferential, language, suggesting that the public would benefit from greater study of possible 'delayed effects' of immune-system activation. The CDC's traditional approach—its 'world-leading, rigorous' one, he clarified—might be improved by examining this question. A subject-matter expert responded that the CDC has been keeping tabs on real-world safety data on those vaccines for nearly five years, and has not detected any signs of long-term harm. Later, Malone implied that COVID or its treatments might have, through some unspecified, bank-shot mechanism, left the U.S. population more susceptible to other illnesses. There was a 'paradoxical, sudden decrease' in flu cases in 2020 and 2021, he noted, followed by a trend of worsening harm. A CDC staffer pointed out that the decrease in flu during those years was not, in fact, a paradox; well-documented shifts in people's health behavior had temporarily reduced the load of many respiratory illnesses during that same period. But Malone pressed on: 'Some members of the scientific community have concern that they're coming out of the COVID pandemic—exposure to the virus, exposure to various countermeasures—there may be a pattern of broad-based, uh, energy,' he said, his eyes darting up for a moment as he said the word, 'that might contribute to increased severity of influenza disease.' He encouraged the agency to 'be sensitive to that hypothesis.' Throughout these and other questions from the committee members, the CDC's subject-matter experts did their best to explain their work and respond to scattershot technical and conceptual concerns. 'The CDC staff is still attempting to operate as an evidence-based organization,' Laura Morris, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, who has attended dozens of ACIP meetings in the past and attended this one as a nonvoting liaison to the committee from the American Academy of Family Physicians, told me. 'There was some tension in terms of the capacity of the committee to ask and understand the appropriate methodological questions. The CDC was trying to hold it down.' That task became more difficult as the meeting progressed. 'The new ACIP is an independent body composed of experienced medical and public health experts who evaluate evidence, ask hard questions, and make decisions based on scientific integrity,' the HHS spokesperson told me. 'Bottom line: this process reflects open scientific inquiry and robust debate, not a pre-scripted narrative.' The most vocal questioner among the new recruits—and the one who seemed least beholden to a script—was the MIT business-school professor Retsef Levi, a lesser-known committee appointee who sat across the table from Malone. A scruffy former Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer with a ponytail that reached halfway down his back, Levi's academic background is in data modeling, risk management, and organizational logistics. He approached the proceedings with a swaggering incredulity, challenging the staffers' efforts and pointing out the risks of systematic errors in their thinking. (In a pinned post on his X profile, Levi writes that 'the evidence is mounting and indisputable that mRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death'—a position entirely at odds with copious data presented at the meeting.) Shortly before the committee's vote to recommend a new, FDA-approved monoclonal antibody for preventing RSV in infants, Levi noted that he'd spent some time reviewing the relevant clinical-trial data for the drug and another like it, and found some worrying patterns in the statistics surrounding infant deaths. 'Should we not be concerned that maybe there are some potential safety signals?' he asked. But these very data had already been reviewed, at great length, in multiple settings: by the FDA, in the course of drug approval, and by the dozens of members of ACIP's relevant work group for RSV, which had, per the committee's standard practice, conducted its own staged analysis of the new treatment before the meeting and reached consensus that its benefits outweighed its risks. Levi was uncowed by any reference to this prior work. 'I'm a scientist, but I'm also a father of six kids,' he told the group; speaking as a father, he said, he personally would be concerned about the risk of harm from this new antibody for RSV. In the end, Levi voted against recommending the antibody, as did Vicky Pebsworth, who is on the board of an anti-vaccine organization and holds a Ph.D. in public health and nursing. The five other members voted yes. That 5–2 vote aside, the most contentious issue on the meeting's schedule concerned the flu shots in America that contain thimerosal, which has been an obsession of the anti-vaccine movement for the past few decades. Despite extensive study, vaccines with thimerosal have not been found to be associated with any known harm in human patients, yet an unspecified vote regarding their use was slipped into the meeting's agenda in the absence of any work-group study or presentation from the CDC's staff scientists. What facts there were came almost exclusively from Redwood, the nurse who used to run Kennedy's anti-vaccine organization. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that at least one citation from her posted slides had been invented. That reference was removed before she spoke yesterday. (HHS did not address a request for comment on this issue in its response to me.) The only one of Kennedy's appointees who had ever previously served on the committee—the pediatrician Cody Meissner—seemed perplexed, even pained, by the proceedings. 'I'm not quite sure how to respond to this presentation,' he said when Redwood finished. He went on to sum up his concerns: 'ACIP makes recommendations based on scientific evidence as much as possible. And there is no scientific evidence that thimerosal has caused a problem.' Alas, Meissner's warnings were for nought. Throughout the meeting, he came off as the committee's last remaining, classic 'expert'—a vaccine scientist clinging to ACIP's old ways—but his frequent protestations were often bulldozed over or ignored. In the end, his was the only vote against the resolutions on thimerosal. Throughout the two-day meeting, Kuldorff kept returning to a favorite phrase: evidence-based medicine. 'Secretary Kennedy has given this committee a clear mandate to use evidence-based medicine,' he said on Wednesday morning; 'The purpose of this committee is to follow evidence-based medicine,' he said on Wednesday afternoon; 'What is important is using evidence-based medicine,' he said again when the meeting reached its end. All told, I heard him say evidence-based at least 10 times during the meeting. (To be fair, critics of Kuldorff and his colleagues also love this phrase.) But the committee was erratic in its posture toward the evidence from the very start; it cast doubt on CDC analyses and substituted lay advice and intuition for ACIP's normal methods of assessing and producing expert consensus. 'Decisons were made based on feelings and preferences rather than evidence,' Morris told me after the meeting. 'That's a dangerous way to make public-health policy.'
Atlantic
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Tea Party Is Back (Maybe)
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. Signs were all around, but the clinching evidence that the Tea Party is back came this week in New Hampshire, where the Republican Scott Brown announced that he'd be running for U.S. Senate. Fifteen years ago, in January 2010, Brown, a state senator in Massachusetts, defeated the Democrat Martha Coakley in a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by the late liberal icon Ted Kennedy. Brown's victory was a landmark for conservative opposition to Barack Obama's administration, and in particular to his attempt to overhaul health insurance. Protests in the streets and angry crowds at legislators' town-hall meetings had given a taste of the brewing voter anger, but Democratic leaders dismissed demonstrators as rabble-rousers or astroturfers. Brown's victory in deep-blue Massachusetts proved that the Tea Party was a real force in politics. Brown turned out to be somewhat moderate—he was, after all, representing the Bay State—and his time in the Senate was short because Elizabeth Warren defeated him in 2012. But in the midterm elections months after his win, a big group of fiscally conservative politicians were elected to Congress as anti-establishment critics of the go-along-to-get-along GOP, which they felt wasn't doing enough to stand up to Obama. Led by Tea Party activists and elected officials, Republicans managed to narrow but not stop the Affordable Care Act, which Obama signed in March 2010; they briefly but only fleetingly reduced federal spending and budget deficits. By 2016, the Tea Party was a spent force. Its anti-establishment energy became the basis for Donald Trump's political movement, with which it shared a strong element of racial backlash. Trump provided the pugilistic approach that many Republican voters had demanded, but without any of the commitment to fiscal discipline: He pledged to protect Medicare and Social Security, and in his first term hugely expanded the deficit. But now there's a revival of Tea Party ideas in Washington, driven by some of the same elected officials. Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act follows the long-running Republican principle of reducing taxes, especially on the wealthy, but it doesn't even pretend to cut spending commensurate with the reductions in revenue those tax cuts would produce. This is standard for Republican presidents: Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Trump all ran for office railing against deficits, and then increased them while in office. They were eager to lower taxes, but not to make the politically unpopular choices necessary to actually reduce federal spending. In theory, at least, the Tea Party represented a more purist approach that insisted on cutting budgets, even if that meant taking on politically dangerous tasks such as slashing entitlements. (Republicans could also produce a more balanced budget by increasing revenue through taxes, but they refuse to seriously consider that.) Some of the Tea Party OGs are striking the same tones today. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, elected in the 2010 wave, has emerged as the foremost Republican critic of the GOP bill. 'The math doesn't really add up,' he said on Face the Nation earlier this month. Trump called Paul's ideas 'crazy' and, according to Paul, briefly uninvited him from an annual congressional picnic at the White House. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, another member of the class of 2010, has also demanded more spending cuts and described the bill's approach as ' completely unsustainable.' 'I'm saying things that people know need to be said,' he told The Wall Street Journal. 'The kid who just exposed that the king is butt-naked may not be real popular, because he kind of made everybody else look like fools, but they all recognize he was right.' (The White House has lately been working to court Johnson.) Standing alongside these senators are representatives such as Andy Harris of Maryland, who was elected in 2010; Paul's fellow Kentuckian (and fellow Trump target) Thomas Massie, who arrived in the House in 2012; and Chip Roy, a Texan who first came to Washington in 2013 as chief of staff for Tea Party–aligned Senator Ted Cruz. Staring them down is Speaker Mike Johnson. Like Paul Ryan, who was a role model for many Tea Partiers but clashed with the hard right once he became speaker of the House, Johnson has frustrated former comrades by backing off his former fiscal conservatism in the name of passing legislation. As my colleague Jonathan Chait has written, this has led Johnson and his allies to brazenly lie about what the bill would do. The neo–Tea Partiers are not the only challenge for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. More mainstream and moderate GOP members are skittish about a bill that is deeply unpopular and will cut services that their constituents favor or depend on. Nor is fiscal conservatism the only revival of Tea Party rhetoric. Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary has elicited a new burst of bigotry, sometimes from the same exact people. Meanwhile, Democrats are experiencing their own echoes of 2010, as voters demand more from elected officials, and anti-establishment candidates such as Mamdani win. The 2025 Tea Party wave faces difficulties the first wave didn't. Rather than being able to organize Republicans against a Democratic president, Paul, Johnson, and company are opposing a Republican president who is deeply popular with members of Congress and primary voters. Roy threatened to vote against the bill in the House but then backed down. Now he says he might vote against the Senate bill when the two are reconciled. 'Chip Roy says he means it this time,' snickered Politico this week, noting that he and his allies have 'drawn and re-drawn their fiscal red lines several times over now.' Then again, how better to honor their predecessors than to back down from a demand for real fiscal discipline? President Donald Trump said that he had cut off trade negotiations with Canada because of Canada's tax on tech companies that would also affect those based in America. The Supreme Court limited federal courts' ability to implement nationwide injunctions in a decision that left unclear the fate of Trump's executive order restricting birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled that parents can withdraw their children from public-school classes on days that storybooks with LGBTQ themes are discussed if they have religious objections. Dispatches Atlantic Intelligence: Damon Beres interviews Rose Horowitch about her latest story on why the computer-science bubble is bursting. The Books Briefing: As a writer and an editor, Toni Morrison put humanity plainly on the page, where it would outlast her and her critics alike, Boris Kachka writes. Evening Read The Three Marine Brothers Who Feel 'Betrayed' by America By Xochitl Gonzalez The four men in jeans and tactical vests labeled Police: U.S. Border Patrol had Narciso Barranco surrounded. Their masks and hats concealed their faces, so that only their eyes were visible. When they'd approached him, he was doing landscape work outside of an IHOP in Santa Ana, California. Frightened, Barranco attempted to run away. By the time a bystander started filming, the agents had caught him and pinned him, face down, on the road. One crouches and begins to pummel him, repeatedly, in the head. You can hear Barranco moaning in pain. Eventually, the masked men drag him to his feet and try to shove him into an SUV. When Barranco resists, one agent takes a rod and wedges it under his neck, attempting to steer him into the vehicle as if prodding livestock. Barranco is the father of three sons, all of them United States Marines. The eldest brother is a veteran, and the younger men are on active duty. At any moment, the same president who sent an emboldened ICE after their father could also command them into battle. More From The Atlantic Culture Break Coming soon. A new season of the Autocracy in America podcast, hosted by Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion and democracy activist. Watch (or skip). Squid Game 's final season (out now on Netflix) is a reminder of what the show did so well, in the wrong ways, Shirley Li writes. Play our daily crossword. P.S. Tuesday was a red-letter day for blue language in the Gray Lady. The New York Times is famously shy about four-letter words; the journalist Blake Eskin noted in 2022 that the paper had published three separate articles about the satirical children's book Go the Fuck to Sleep, all without ever printing the actual name of the book. An article about Emil Bove III, which I wrote about yesterday, was tricky for the Times: The notable thing about the story was the language allegedly used. In its second paragraph, the Times used one of its standard circumlocutions: 'In Mr. Reuveni's telling, Mr. Bove discussed disregarding court orders, adding an expletive for emphasis.' It printed the word itself in the 16th paragraph, perhaps because any children reading would have gotten bored and moved on by then. The same day, the Times reported, unexpurgated, on Trump's anger at Iran and Israel: 'We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing,' the president told reporters. I was curious about the discussions behind these choices. In a suitably Times -y email, the newspaper spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told me: 'Editors decided it was newsworthy that the president of the United States used a curse word to make a point on one of the biggest issues of the day, and did so in openly showing frustration with an ally as well as an adversary.' It's another Trumpian innovation: expanding the definition of news fit to print.
Atlantic
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump's Running Tab in the Abrego Garcia Case
The Trump administration's long, belabored campaign to prove that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a gang leader, a terrorist, and an all-around bad guy—not a wrongfully deported Maryland man—has produced some extraordinary legal maneuvers. The administration fought Abrego Garcia's return from El Salvador all the way to the Supreme Court, lost, and eventually brought him back to the United States to slap him with criminal charges it had started investigating after it had already sent him to a foreign prison. But with that criminal case off to a shaky start, the administration is threatening to deport Abrego Garcia again—this time to a country other than his native El Salvador—because the judge has ordered his release while the trial is pending. Having spent months trying to gather evidence against Abrego Garcia, the administration is suggesting it may walk away from it all by sending him to Mexico, Guatemala, or another nation willing to take him. The threat of Abrego Garcia's imminent re-deportation prompted his attorneys to take the extraordinary step today of asking a district court to delay their client's release and keep him locked up for several more weeks to protect him from ICE. 'The irony of this request is not lost on anyone,' his attorneys told the court. 'In a just world, he would not seek to prolong his detention further.' The lawyers accused the government of pretending to want Abrego Garcia to face 'American justice,' while really only wanting to 'convict him in the court of public opinion.' The head-spinning developments of the past several days add to the administration's running tab in a case that has challenged its determination to admit no wrongdoing. The case has produced nearly 57,000 pages of documents; ended the Department of Justice careers of one, perhaps two prosecutors; and prompted the Trump administration to cut deals with convicted felons that protect them from deportation in exchange for testimony. Some of the most remarkable accommodations appear in the transcript of a June 13 pretrial hearing for Abrego Garcia in Tennessee, where the government is trying to convict him of human smuggling. Under cross-examination by defense attorneys, the government's lead investigator, the Department of Homeland Security agent Peter Joseph, told the court that his primary cooperating witness—the source of the most damning testimony—is a twice-convicted felon who had been previously deported five times. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes, who was presiding over the hearing, did a double take. 'Sorry. Deported how many times?' she asked. Joseph, who confirmed the total, said the cooperator has been moved out of prison to a halfway house and is now awaiting a U.S. work permit. He told the court that a second cooperating witness is seeking similar inducements from the government. Trump and his top officials have said for months that their mass-deportation campaign would prioritize the swift removal of criminals from the United States. But in its effort to punish Abrego Garcia—who does not have a criminal record—the administration is protecting convicted felons from deportation. Other costs include ending the 15-year career of a Department of Justice attorney, Erez Reuveni, who filed a whistleblower claim with Congress this week alleging that he was fired for refusing to go along with unsubstantiated claims, pushed by the White House, that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang leader and a terrorist. When Reuveni's superiors told him to sign a legal brief making those claims, he refused, saying he 'didn't sign up to lie' when he became a federal prosecutor. He was suspended seven hours later and fired on April 11. Reuveni's career may not be the only DOJ casualty. Another federal prosecutor, Ben Schrader, the head of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney's office in Nashville, submitted his resignation last month when the government brought Abrego Garcia there to face charges. Schrader, who declined to comment and has not discussed his departure publicly, wrote in a LinkedIn post that 'the only job description I've ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.' As Reuveni and others have pointed out, ICE officials initially recognized that Abrego Garcia had been deported on March 15 due to an ' administrative error.' His removal from the country was in violation of a 2019 order protecting him from being sent to El Salvador, which he fled at age 16, after a U.S. immigration judge found that he was likely to be attacked by gangs. At that point, the Trump administration could have brought Abrego Garcia back and deported him to another country, or reopened his case to try to strip him of his protected status. But Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the White House aide Stephen Miller, and other administration officials dug in and insisted there was no error. They declared that Abrego Garcia would never come back and never go free in the United States. They launched an all-of-government campaign to make the case about his character, not his due-process rights. How the Trump administration flipped on Kilmar Abrego Garcia Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement that Abrego Garcia 'is a terrorist illegal alien gang member.' Those who defend him 'should take a good look in the mirror and ask themselves if they really want to side with this heinous illegal criminal,' she said, 'simply because they dislike President Trump.' 'If the answer is yes, they need to seek help,' Jackson added. 'The American people elected President Trump to hold criminals like Abrego Garcia accountable.' But as attorneys for the Justice Department put it in a court filing Wednesday: 'This is no typical case.' Not one, but two, overlapping cases will determine Abrego Garcia's fate. The first is the civil lawsuit that Abrego Garcia's wife, a U.S. citizen, filed in district court in Maryland in March, which seeks his release. The Trump administration opened a second case when it brought Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador earlier this month to face criminal charges in Tennessee. The charges stem from a 2022 highway stop in which Abrego Garcia was pulled over in a Chevrolet Suburban by officers who said he'd been driving 70 miles per hour in a 65-miles-per-hour zone. Police said there were nine passengers in the vehicle and no luggage, raising suspicions of smuggling. Abrego Garcia told officers he was driving construction workers from St. Louis to Maryland on behalf of his boss. The highway-patrol officers reported the incident to federal authorities, but Abrego Garcia was not charged and allowed to continue the journey. Police-bodycam footage of the stop was obtained and released by the Trump administration as it called him a 'human trafficker' and later alleged, citing unnamed cooperating witnesses, that Abrego Garcia transported thousands of migrants during smuggling trips across the United States as part of a conspiracy dating back to 2016 that earned him roughly $100,000 a year. Joseph, the Homeland Security investigator, said cooperating witnesses told him more: that Abrego Garcia transported guns and narcotics, that he sexually abused younger female passengers in his care, and that he routinely endangered underage minors, including his own children, whom he left sitting without seat belts on the floor of the vehicle during lengthy trips from Texas to Maryland. The government made its claims to convince Judge Holmes that Abrego Garcia should remain in federal custody while awaiting his criminal trial. Holmes was not swayed. The defense attorneys representing Abrego Garcia pointed out that the government was relying on stories transmitted through multiple levels of hearsay—claims made outside court, not under oath—by cooperating witnesses seeking some benefit from the government. 'You've got agents going to jails and prisons around the United States right now trying to talk to people who you think might know something about Mr. Abrego?' the federal public defender Dumaka Shabazz asked Joseph, the investigator. 'They have done it through the course of the investigation, yes, sir,' Joseph answered. Shabazz told the court that the first cooperator, 'despite all of his deportations, his criminal history, being the criminal mastermind behind a transport business,' was 'chilling at the halfway house.' 'He's not in jail. He's not getting deported. He's living his life right here in the United States of America. But he sounds like the exact type of person that this government should be wanting to deport.' Holmes largely agreed, issuing a decision Sunday denying the government's attempt to keep Abrego Garica locked up. Her decision did not seem to bode well for the evidence and testimony the government is preparing against Abrego Garcia. Holmes said she gave 'little weight to this hearsay testimony' of the top cooperating witness, whom she called 'a two-time, previously-deported felon, and acknowledged ringleader of a human smuggling operation.' Holmes wrote that she considered the hearsay statements of the second cooperator no more reliable. Furthermore, she said the testimony and statements 'defy common sense,' because she did not believe the claims that Abrego Garcia drove thousands of miles every week with his children—two of whom have autism—sitting on the floor. Another federal judge in Tennessee decided on Wednesday that Abrego Garcia should not remain in criminal custody. District Court Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw, who is overseeing the criminal case, said the government had largely failed to prove he was a flight risk or a threat to the community. The Trump administration made clear that as soon as Abrego Garcia was released, ICE could immediately take him back into custody. Then it played a new card, warning that ICE could try to deport Abrego Garcia before the criminal case goes to trial. By threatening to deport Abrego Garcia again, the government was pressuring his legal team and the judge to agree to his continued detention. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was never coming back. Then he did. Crenshaw tried to shift responsibility from his courtroom back to the administration, saying the Justice Department needed to convey its deportation concerns to DHS, which oversees ICE, not him. 'If the Government finds this case to be as high priority as it argues here, it is incumbent upon it to ensure that Abrego is held accountable for the charges in the Indictment,' Crenshaw wrote. 'If the Department of Justice and DHS cannot do so, that speaks for itself.' egotiations over where Abrego Garcia should go next ping-ponged through the courts yesterday, as his lawyers reacted to the administration saying one thing in court and other things publicly. At first, Abrego Garcia's attorneys in Maryland asked the district court to have him transferred there while he awaits the Tennessee criminal trial. 'Absent order from this Court, the Government will likely shuttle Abrego Garcia elsewhere,' they wrote. The attorneys said the government's public statements 'leave little doubt about its plan: remove Abrego Garcia to El Salvador once more.' The last time the government detained Abrego Garcia for deportation, they noted, it sent him to detention facilities in Louisiana and Texas, a move they said was part of a 'pattern' in which the administration sends detainees to those states in anticipation that the more conservative federal courts in that circuit are likelier to side with the government. The administration's position became even more muddled after a Justice Department attorney told the court in Maryland that the administration was indeed planning to deport Abrego Garcia if he's released from custody but would send him to a country other than El Salvador. Abrego Garcia's 2019 protections—the ones the Trump administration violated—prevent his deportation only to El Salvador. The Trump administration has secured agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and other countries around the region to take back deportees from other nations. The rushed, blundering effort to send deportees to third countries Jackson, the White House spokesperson, said on social media last night that the Department of Justice threat to deport Abrego Garcia was 'fake news' and that the criminal case in Tennessee would go forward. 'He will face the full force of the American justice system - including serving time in American prison for the crimes he's committed,' Jackson wrote. In response to the mixed messages and distrust of the government's intentions, Abrego Garcia's lawyers wrote today that they would rather keep him in jail than trust the administration not to deport him. 'When Mr. Abrego revealed the weaknesses in that case—securing the pretrial release to which he is entitled—the government threatened to remove him to a third country,' they wrote. Government attorneys said they intend to 'see this case to resolution,' a message echoed by White House officials. But if Abrego Garcia were poised to walk out of detention and reunite with his family as news cameras rolled, those involved know the administration could be tempted to do something drastic, even if it meant ditching their own case. 'Anything is possible,' an attorney who is tracking the case but did not want to be named told me. 'It seems clear they are committed to not allowing him to be at liberty during the case.'
Atlantic
12 hours ago
- Business
- Atlantic
The College-Major Gamble
This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here. When I was in college, the Great Recession was unfolding, and it seemed like I had made a big mistake. With the economy crumbling and job prospects going with it, I had selected as my majors … journalism and sociology. Even the professors joked about our inevitable unemployment. Meanwhile, a close friend had switched majors and started to take computer-science classes—there would obviously be opportunities there. But that conventional wisdom is starting to change. As my colleague Rose Horowitch writes in an article for The Atlantic, entry-level tech jobs are beginning to fade away, in part because of new technology itself: AI is able to do many tasks that previously required a person. 'Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words,' Rose writes. 'This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it. A recent Pew study found that Americans think software engineers will be most affected by generative AI. Many young people aren't waiting to find out whether that's true.' I spoke with Rose about how AI is affecting college students and the job market—and what the future may hold. This interview has been edited and condensed. Rose Horowitch: There are a lot of tech executives coming out and saying that AI is replacing some of their coders, and that they just don't need as many entry-level employees. I spoke with an economics professor at Harvard, David Deming, who said that may be a convenient talking point—nobody wants to say We didn't hit our sales targets, so we have to lay people off. What we can guess is that the technology is actually making senior engineers more productive; therefore they need fewer entry-level employees. It's also one more piece of uncertainty that these tech companies are dealing with—in addition to tariffs and high interest rates—that may lead them to put off hiring. Damon: Tech companies do have a vested interest in promoting AI as such a powerful tool that it could do the work of a person, or multiple people. Microsoft recently laid thousands of people off, as you write in your article, and the company also said that AI writes or helps write 25 percent of their code—that's a helpful narrative for Microsoft, because Microsoft sells AI tools. At the same time, it does feel pretty clear to me that many different industries are dealing with the same issues. I've spoken about generative AI replacing entry-level work with prominent lawyers, journalists, people who work in tech—the worry feels real to me. Rose: I spoke with Molly Kinder, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies how AI affects the economy, and she said that she's worried that the bottom rung of the career ladder across industries is breaking apart. If you're writing a book, you may not need to hire a research assistant if you can use AI. It's obviously not going to be perfectly accurate, and it couldn't write the book for you, but it could make you more productive. Her concern, which I share, is that you still need people to get trained and then ascend at a company. The unemployment rate for young college graduates is already unusually high, and this may lead to more problems down the line that we can't even foresee. These early jobs are like apprenticeships: You're learning skills that you don't get in school. If you skip that, it's cheaper for the company in the short term, but what happens to white-collar work down the line? Damon: How are the schools themselves thinking about this reality—that they have students in their senior year facing a completely different prospect for their future than when they entered school four years ago? Rose: They're responding by figuring out how to produce graduates that are prepared to use AI tools in their work and be competitive applicants. The challenge is that the technology is changing so quickly—you need to teach students about what's relevant professionally while also teaching the fundamental skills, so that they're not just reliant on the machines. Damon: Your article makes this point that students should be focused less on learning a particular skill and more on studying something that's durable for the long term. Do you think students really will shift what they're studying? Will the purpose of higher education itself change somehow? Rose: It's likely that we'll see a decline in students studying computer science, and then, at some point, there will be too few job candidates, salaries will be pushed up, and more students will go in. But the most important thing that students can do—and it's so counterintuitive—is to study things that will give you human skills and soft skills that will help you endure in any industry. Even without AI, jobs are going to change. The challenge is that, in times of crisis, people tend to choose something preprofessional, because it feels safer. That cognitive bias can be unhelpful. Damon: You cover higher education in general. You're probably best known for the story you did about how elite college students can't read books anymore, which feels related to this discussion for obvious reasons. I'm curious to know more about why you were interested in exploring this particular topic. Rose: Higher ed, more than at any time in recent memory, is facing the question of what it is for. People are questioning the value of it much more than they did 10, 20 years ago. And so, these articles all fit into that theme: What is the value of higher ed, of getting an advanced degree? The article about computer-science majors shows that this thing that everyone thought is a sure bet doesn't seem to be. That reinforces why higher education needs to make the case for its value —how it teaches people to be more human, or what it's like to live a productive life in a society. Damon: There are so many crisis points in American higher education right now. AI is one of them. Your article about reading suggested a problem that may have emerged from other digital technologies. Obviously there have been issues stemming from the Trump administration. There was the Claudine Gay scandal. This is all in the past year or two. How do you sum it all up? Rose: Most people are starting to realize that the status quo is not going to work. There's declining trust in education, particularly from Republicans. A substantial portion of the country doesn't think higher ed serves the nation. The fact is that at many universities, academic standards have declined so much. Rigor has declined. Things cannot go on as they once did. What comes next, and who's going to chart that course? The higher-education leaders I speak with, at least, are trying to answer that question themselves so that it doesn't get defined by external forces like the Trump administration.
Atlantic
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Lorde Is Looking in the Mirror. Again.
Has the internet sucked all the fun out of the physical world, or has it merely concentrated it in Washington Square Park? New York University's de facto campus green has long served as an open-air salon for bohemians and drug dealers, but since the coronavirus pandemic, it's buzzed with new energy—the energy of content creation. TikTokers patrol the park's paths, ambushing passersby to ask for interviews. Video-game streamers lead fans around ' like a Pied Piper.' Timothée Chalamet went there to check out his own look-alike competition. The veil between the online and offline realms feels thin as Zoomers socialize in their Zoomer way: playful, anarchic, yet always aware of the camera. Lorde is there too. The 28-year-old pop eccentric claims to have been hanging out in Washington Square Park 'every day' of late. In April, she caused a commotion there by blasting her new single to a crowd of fans while filming a guerrilla-style music video. Her propulsive fourth album, Virgin, is set amid the heat-radiating pavement of the park and its downtown-Manhattan surroundings. The exemplary voice for a generation beset by digitally induced isolation, Lorde is making a bold effort to celebrate the visceral by singing of flesh, spit, sweat, blood, and cigarette smoke. But the rush she wants to deliver is diluted by another modern problem: self-consciousness verging on self-obsession. Lorde changed the world when she was just a 16-year-old New Zealander uploading music to SoundCloud. Her 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, used hissed confessions, minimalistic beats, and a writerly sense of narrative to refute its era's abundance of body-over-brain EDM and hip-hop. Many of her listeners were kids in the very same situation that Lorde sang about: stuck in a bedroom in their anonymous town, alienated from the high life advertised on their screens. The influence of that album—and its smoldering 2017 follow-up, Melodrama —still shapes the work of Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and even Taylor Swift. The point of post-Lorde pop isn't to get faceless crowds grooving mindlessly. It's to make each individual fan feel like their life is a movie. Lorde then disoriented her audience with 2021's Solar Power, a warm sigh of an album from a star enjoying some well-deserved relaxation. Its strummy songs about fleeing Hollywood to get high on a New Zealand beach contained some of the most beautiful craftsmanship of her career. But fans who'd always related to her started to feel left out of the story she was telling: Lorde was slowing down and leaning out at a time of life, her early 20s, when people tend to speed up and lean in. For many listeners, traits that had been essential to her art all along—overwroughtness, sentimentality, affectation—stopped seeming so cute. Virgin is, as its name suggests, a purposeful regression, a return to youthful possibility. The sound is electronic and rhythmically driven; the singing trembles with desire and confusion. But Virgin also reflects where Lorde finds herself in her late 20s, and where pop finds itself in the mid-2020s. Following the example of Charli XCX's Brat and its avant-garde influences, the producer Jim-E Stack has fashioned fun beats out of distorted noise. Lorde sings about a transitional period of womanhood marked by pregnancy tests, gender-identity explorations, body-image issues, crises of confidence, and a shattering breakup with her partner of seven years. The action is as spiritual as it is physical: 'I might have been born again,' she sings on the opener. The ensuing songs are laden with so many religious references that one wonders if she's joined an unconventional church in which singing about kinky sex and party drugs is a sacrament. More likely, Lorde is just trying to lend enchantment to her 21st-century yuppie routine. The titanium water bottle she carries around is, she's said in interviews, a ' talisman.' Her smartphone is, per one lyric, 'liquid crystal.' As she pumps iron and meditates on heartbreak, she seems to imagine her younger self looking down like an 'angel.' She confesses to having treated her ex like God—but now, it's clear, Lorde's lord is Lorde. The album's best moments transmit the magic she's singing about. The bleary garage beat of 'Shapeshifter' creates a sense of twilight intrigue building to dawn-breaking revelation. On 'If She Could See Me Now,' rigid-feeling verses melt satisfyingly into swaying choruses. When Lorde's voice merges with waves of reverb on the gut-punch closer, 'David,' you might check to see if the music is coming from outside, not inside, your headphones. Throughout, she uses conversational cadences to steer through hairpin emotional turns without making anyone dizzy. Too often, though, Virgin 's thrill is muddled or muted. In part, blame Stack's production: The trappings of sonic radicalism and aggression—industrial guitars that hum like broken TVs, percussion that pounds from all directions—belie what's essentially smooth, streamable fare. Now-tired 2010 fads that Lorde pioneered, including bittersweet tropical-pop textures and moaning vocal snippets, are everywhere. Moments of genuine surprise and extremity are rare. An album that presents itself as stark and liberated feels too much like a product of creative compromise. Against this backdrop, Lorde's insularity starts to wear on the listener. This album about exciting city life is really about Lorde finding herself wherever she goes—in the aura reader on Canal Street, in the shirt her hookup is wearing, in the endorphin epiphany she has at the gym. She sings of ego death and punching mirrors, but only as part of a process of ever-more-granular inward inspection that's intense but ultimately circular. Whatever's happening in the broader world is written off as 'painted faces' babbling about 'current affairs.' As the album cover indicates, Virgin is an X-ray that highlights what's not there. So much of recent pop music is like this—hyperspecifically self-involved—precisely because of Lorde's influence. But Virgin suggests this once-exciting approach is starting to become redundant and rote, reflecting a culture in which introspection has supplanted any sense of common purpose, and no one can tell the difference between living life and performing it. In Lorde's early days, she sang a lot about 'we,' a generational cohort beating back alienation together. Virgin is all 'I'—but a breakthrough awaits when she or one of her talented contemporaries turns their lens outward.
