2025-08-23 07:27:00
FBI directors don’t customarily announce raids in progress. But early this morning, Kash Patel celebrated the search of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s home as agents were rolling into his suburban-Maryland driveway: “NO ONE is above the law … @FBI agents on mission,” Patel wrote on X. Agents also executed a search warrant at Bolton’s office in Washington, D.C. President Donald Trump later told reporters that he had learned about the raid on one of his most voluble critics from TV news, but he took the opportunity to call Bolton a “lowlife” and “not a smart guy.” Then he added: “Could be a very unpatriotic guy. We’re going to find out.”
The FBI’s actions were hard not to read as payback for Bolton’s years of criticism of the president, even as the facts that persuaded a judge to approve a search warrant remain unknown. That’s the problem with a politicized legal system—even if an investigation is legitimate, it’s easy to assume that its motives are corrupt. Trump has spent years vowing retribution against Bolton, particularly after Bolton published a 2020 memoir that portrayed the president as incompetent and out of his depth on foreign policy.
If this was revenge, it wasn’t an isolated act. As agents were still packing up boxes of Bolton’s effects, The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had pushed out yet another senior military officer, firing Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In June, its analysts delivered a preliminary assessment that U.S. bombers had caused relatively limited damage to Iranian nuclear facilities, undercutting Trump’s pronouncements that the sites were “obliterated.” And just three days ago, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revoked the security clearances of more than three dozen current and former national-security officials. Several played key roles in efforts to counter or expose Russia’s 2016 election interference, what Trump calls the “Russia Hoax” and Gabbard has described as part of a “years-long coup” against the president.
[Read: The ‘Russia Hoax,’ Revisited]
Put it all together, and this may be remembered as the week Trump’s campaign against the “deep state” kicked into high gear. To some intelligence professionals I spoke with, it felt as though something fundamental had shifted in their historically apolitical line of work.
“Given the dystopian nature of it all—clearance revocations of former officials who did no wrong, forced retirements of long-standing intelligence officials, reductions in force that include junior officers who were just hired, and a wildly politicized leadership in the intelligence community—I no longer recommend young Americans to pursue careers in intelligence,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a veteran CIA officer who had his own security clearance yanked earlier this year, told me.
Purge doesn’t adequately capture what national-security experts see happening here. Chilling effect is too mild, though revoking the security clearances of two senior intelligence officers, as Gabbard did, effectively ending their government careers, will indeed send a message. Terrorizing the workforce is a phrase I heard a lot this week. And that may indeed be the point.
“Instead of being honest about what we think, now people will just keep their mouths shut or tell Trump what he wants to hear,” said one former official, who would only speak anonymously. The administration publicly identified this person as part of the “Russia Hoax,” and they’ve hired personal security for outside their home, fearing that Trump’s most fevered supporters might pay a visit.
Forget about calling out misbehavior or wrongdoing by administration officials, the person added: “Where would we go to file a grievance, or to report misconduct? Who’s going to do that?”
Gabbard’s office did not respond to my request for comment.
[Read: Tulsi Gabbard Chooses Loyalty to Trump]
One current official described the mood among career intelligence officers as “panicked.” In this person’s agency, three senior officials were abruptly placed on administrative leave this week. One of them has been involved in efforts to counter foreign threats against U.S. elections, which the administration has scaled back.
Gabbard’s actions have also raised concerns about separation of powers. She revoked the clearances of at least two congressional staffers. It will be difficult for them to perform their oversight of the executive branch without access to classified information.
Bolton was in his Washington office as the FBI conducted its search, according to a person close to him. He did not respond to a request for comment. Bolton was investigated during the first Trump administration and during the Biden administration over his book, The Room Where It Happened. He had submitted the manuscript for a prepublication review in early 2020, and after a lengthy back-and-forth with government officials, he made changes to address concerns about the possible disclosure of classified information. That effectively made it suitable for publication, according to a detailed statement from the official who led the review.
But in a highly unusual maneuver, the Trump White House ordered a second review by an administration official, who concluded that the manuscript was full of classified information. (That official, Michael Ellis, is now deputy director of the CIA.) The official in charge of the earlier review disagreed and concluded that the administration was trying to silence a political critic and was trampling his First Amendment rights.
Bolton published the book anyway. Federal investigators looked into whether he had illegally disclosed classified information. But Bolton was never charged. It’s possible some new evidence of a potential crime has emerged, leading to today’s FBI raid. But the administration’s hostility toward Bolton is well known, and Trump has made no secret of the fact that, seeing himself as the victim of political prosecutions during the Biden years, he is eager to turn the tables on perceived enemies. A senior U.S. official told the New York Post that the Biden administration had shut down the probe into Bolton “for political reasons.”
“That’s nonsense,” a former senior Justice Department official told me. “No decision in any case was ever made for political reasons. These accusations are obviously made in bad faith, and honestly, that’s what happens when you have people making decisions with basically no experience with complex national- security investigations. They have no clue what they’re talking about.”
There are still officials working in the government who took part in the 2016 efforts to counter Russia. Has the White House overlooked them? Are they next on the list to be purged? Everyone is left to wonder. But no one thinks that the president’s retribution campaign is anywhere near its end.
Vivian Salama and Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed reporting.
2025-08-23 04:58:00
This morning, Donald Trump claimed he knew nothing about the raid on the Maryland home of his former National Security Adviser John Bolton. “I’m not a fan of John Bolton,” Trump said, calling him a “lowlife.” In that respect he agrees with many Democrats: After Trump fired Bolton, in 2019, Representative Adam Schiff of California (now a senator) said that one “should question John Bolton’s patriotism,” and Representative Nancy Pelosi called him a “disgrace.” In January, Trump pulled Bolton’s security detail, which had been in place due to credible threats by the Iranian government, which is also not a fan of John Bolton. Bolton’s neighbor Gerald Rogell told The New York Times that Bolton was “unfriendly.” He added, dryly and a little gratuitously, “John Bolton is not our favorite person.” If a terrible accident befalls Bolton, one should not rule out a Murder on the Orient Express scenario. Who did it? Maybe everyone.
Reports say the government is searching Bolton’s home and office to determine whether he mishandled or shared classified material. (The New York Times says the raid followed “intelligence collected overseas” by the CIA.) The investigation is therefore unlikely to be related to Bolton’s long-standing dispute with Trump over Bolton’s memoir, which he published in 2020 without waiting for government clearance. (Bolton alleged that Trump’s administration slow-rolled the review to block criticism of the president.) Bolton has, ironically enough, been a longtime pooh-pooher of accusations that the federal government classifies way too much material, and that that secrecy-bloat impedes transparency.
[David A. Graham: John Bolton plumbs the depth of Trump’s depravity]
Bolton applies a lawyerly, punctilious zeal not only to his work but to many other aspects of his existence. Such people are not great at block parties. When you drop by to borrow sugar, they draft contracts with ruinous penalties and arbitration in the jurisdiction of Guantánamo Bay to ensure the return of their measuring cup. In my 2019 profile of Bolton, I recounted his argument across the deli counter at a Safeway, over whether he was owed a refund for a turkey he had not yet consumed. Although these born sticklers may not be great neighbors, they tend to be scrupulous about personal liability, especially when they know—as Bolton must—that the president is gunning for them.
FBI agents were seen entering Bolton’s home with cardboard boxes. I wonder what they walked out with. Bolton is not the type to stumble into a situation that he cannot litigate his way out of. That said, he is cocky, and his memory is brimming with so many secrets that even a cautious person could spill one in an unguarded moment.
FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted, in apparent reference to the raid, that “NO ONE is above the law.” Patel has also recently pledged to “de-weaponize the FBI,” in particular by purging it and its partner agencies of those who have claimed that Trump has colluded with Russia. Bolton, in this regard, should be safe. He has used Trump’s own language in describing the Robert Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt,” and he has consistently denigrated Trump since 2020, not for treason but for ignorance, sloth, and foreign-policy blunders. After last week’s Ukraine summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bolton accused Trump of one of the worst sins one can commit in Trump land: being low-energy. He told CNN that Trump “looked very tired up there,” and said one should “reflect on what that means.”
[Graeme Wood: John Bolton knows what he’s doing]
Reflection is certainly in order, on the topic of what it means that Patel is investigating a former Trump official just as that defector is getting more mordant in his criticisms of his former boss. The pledge to “de-weaponize” the FBI would be more credible from a less vindictive administration, and one that had not spent its opening months purging apolitical staff. Until more information comes out about the warrant and the intelligence behind it, no one can say definitively whether today’s raid is due to Bolton’s status as critic, Bolton’s bad judgment or malfeasance, or nothing at all. All remain possible. A truly depoliticized Justice Department and intelligence community—less politicized than Trump’s, and also less politicized than recent Democrats’—would leave less doubt about the relative likelihood of each. But that is not the Justice Department currently in place.
2025-08-23 04:11:00
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Long flights can be tedious, but they also present a chance to watch movies both new and familiar. So we asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors: What is the perfect film to watch on a plane?
Crazy Rich Asians (available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV+)
Sleep was elusive on my recent 15-hour flight. Never before had an airplane-movie formula been more important. First, the obvious: I look for anything that is mindlessly fun or otherwise engrossing enough to help me forget that I am hurtling through the air in a bus with wings. I probably will not watch anything worthy of the Criterion Collection. Provided that I am entertained, the movie’s length is no issue. And it doesn’t hurt if there are scenes involving airports or travel, to help me romanticize the experience of crying children and cramped seats.
These are among the many boxes that Crazy Rich Asians ticks. I’ve spaced out my rewatches of this movie enough that it still feels fresh and captivating every time. Michelle Yeoh’s performance as an icy, formidable matriarch is hard to look away from. The lavish scenery and shots of Singapore’s night-market food strengthen my travel urge. Plus, those sweet airplane scenes (no spoilers!). The only downside is that it makes me wish I no longer had to travel in economy.
— Stephanie Bai, associate editor
***
The Dark Knight Rises (streaming on HBO Max)
Moviegoing in an airplane may not elicit the same cinematic thrill as sitting in an IMAX theater, but it can bring a different emotional vulnerability. Perhaps you’ve just said goodbye to a lover you will never see again, or you’re flying home to fix a fraught situation with your parents. Feelings, too, can be heightened at cruising altitude.
I’ll just come out and say it: I’ve teared up more than once over the Atlantic Ocean while watching Bruce Wayne go to war with his inner demons in The Dark Knight Rises. The finale of Christopher Nolan’s morally serious and visually exquisite treatment of the Batman story culminates in Wayne’s showdown with a hulking Bane—ruthless and funnily accented, drunk off his own self-righteousness. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice to say, the moment when Alfred glances up from his caffè lungo in Florence is when I lose it.
— Thomas Chatterton Williams, staff writer
***
In Her Shoes (available to rent on Prime Video)
In Her Shoes, the 2005 dramedy, is white noise. No, pink noise—heartfelt but easy. Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz play feuding sisters. Shirley MacLaine is their long-lost grandmother. The movie has cute dogs and witty seniors. It’s an in-flight tonic that beats even benzos and cabernet.
For years, two colleagues and I would refer to In Her Shoes as a sacred text of procrastination; it was always playing on cable at just the right time. I asked them to endorse my nomination of the film.
“There are no banger lines you have to hear, no intricate plot points you have to absorb,” Monica told me. “It’s a low-altitude film to be enjoyed at high altitude.”
“It’s the best movie for just getting through something you don’t want to be doing,” Hank said. “Writing the rest of Chapter 7,” for example. Or: Sitting in seat 24C to LAX.
The film’s 20th anniversary is in early October. So, consider this blurb a commemoration. Cheers.
— Dan Zak, senior editor
***
The Fifth Element (available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV+)
On a plane, I prefer to watch a movie that I already know well, and enjoy rewatching. Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element has always been a guilty pleasure, something I’ve seen so many times that I can fill in any dialogue, sound design, or music that might be missed because of noisy passengers or bad headphones.
The movie is unabashedly fun, and Bruce Willis has never been more charming than he is as a taxi driver tasked with saving the world from an evil sentient fireball. It’s easy to watch as an engaged viewer or as a distracted traveler, and the PG-13 rating makes it okay for public viewing. Sure, there is some silly dialogue (such as the phrase “slightly greasy solar atoms”) and subpar acting, but somehow that just adds to the appeal.
— Alan Taylor, senior photo editor
***
The movie the person near you is watching (playing on their screen)
The perfect airplane movie is the movie playing on one of your fellow passengers’ screens, which you watch through a crack between the seats or by glancing across the aisle. There’s an invigorating element of randomness (since you have no control over their selection), and also a pleasing surreptitious feeling about the whole experience, as if you’re getting away with something. Given that you won’t have any sound, subtitles are helpful, but sometimes it’s just as fun without them—consumed this way, even the most clichéd romantic comedy gains a certain art-house surrealism. Some things I have recently watched this way include Pulp Fiction, Dune: Part Two, multiple action films starring former professional wrestlers, and several episodes of the Batman miniseries The Penguin (out of order).
Later, on a different trip, I plugged in my headphones and watched Dune: Part Two with sound and dialogue on my very own screen. I have to say that it didn’t make much more sense.
— Quinta Jurecic, staff writer
***
Augmented-reality glasses (available to buy online)
Let’s be honest: The best airplane film is whatever film you personally want to watch. That’s probably going to be different for you than it is for me. But though I can’t tell you which movie to watch in midair, I can tell you how to watch the exact movie you want, regardless of what’s available on the seatback screen in front of you. All you need is a pair of augmented-reality glasses.
As somebody who travels a lot for work, I have perfected the art of bringing my own movie theater with me. Unlike their more famous and expensive VR headset counterparts, these types of glasses are lightweight and won’t leave you exhausted from wearing them or looking like an alien to passersby. Most important, the glasses can connect to your smartphone, laptop, or video-game device, meaning that if you can stream it or download it, you can project it onto your own giant, private silver screen. Companies such as Xreal, Viture, and Rokid offer a range of models, features, and prices. Some even allow you to adjust the display for your prescription. Find the right one for you—you can typically get the same functionality for less money if you buy an old model—and you’ll never fly the same way again.
— Yair Rosenberg, staff writer
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
Dispatches
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Evening Read
Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad
By Clint Smith
In what looks to be an intensifying quest to reshape American history and scholarship according to his own preferences, President Donald Trump this week targeted the Smithsonian Institution, the national repository of American history and memory. Trump seemed outraged, in particular, by the Smithsonian’s portrayal of the Black experience in America. He took to Truth Social to complain that the country’s museums “are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian,” he wrote, “is OUT OF CONTROL.” Then Trump wrote something astonishing, even for him. He asserted that the narrative presented by the Smithsonian is overly focused on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”
Before continuing, it is important to pause a moment and state this directly: Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, believes that the Smithsonian is failing to do its job, because it spends too much time portraying slavery as “bad.”
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Watch. The sensitive tween of the animated show King of the Hill is now an adult—with extremely Millennial anxieties, Jeremy Gordon writes.
Take a look. These photos of the week show a sail-in parade in Amsterdam, harness racing in Germany, an independence celebration in Indonesia, and more.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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2025-08-23 02:37:36
Something strange has been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks. After being uploaded, some videos have been subtly augmented, their appearance changing without their creators doing anything. Viewers have noticed “extra punchy shadows,” “weirdly sharp edges,” and a smoothed-out look to footage that makes it look “like plastic.” Many people have come to the same conclusion: YouTube is using AI to tweak videos on its platform, without creators’ knowledge.
A multimedia artist going by the name Mr. Bravo, whose YouTube videos feature “an authentic 80s aesthetic” achieved by running his videos through a VCR, wrote on Reddit that his videos look “completely different to what was originally uploaded.” “A big part of the videos charm is the VHS look and the grainy, washed out video quality,” he wrote. YouTube’s filter obscured this labor-intensive quality: “It is ridiculous that YouTube can add features like this that completely change the content,” he wrote. Another YouTuber, Rhett Shull, posted a video last week about what was happening to his video shorts, and those of his friend Rick Beato. Both run wildly popular music channels, with more than 700,000 and 5 million subscribers, respectively. In his video, Shull says he believes that “AI upscaling” is being used—a process that increases an image’s resolution and detail—and is concerned about what it could signal to his audience. “I think it’s gonna lead people to think that I am using AI to create my videos. Or that it’s been deepfaked. Or that I’m cutting corners somehow,” he said. “It will inevitably erode viewers’ trust in my content.”
Fakery is a widespread concern in the AI era, when media can be generated, enhanced, or modified with little effort. The same pixel-filled rectangle could contain the work of someone who spent time and energy and had the courage to perform publicly, or of someone who sits in bed typing prompts and splicing clips in order to make a few bucks. Viewers who don’t want to be fooled by the latter must now be alert to the subtlest signs of AI modification. For creators who want to differentiate themselves from the new synthetic content, YouTube seems interested in making the job harder.
[Read: ChatGPT turned into a Studio Ghibli machine. How is that legal?]
When I asked Google, YouTube’s parent company, about what’s happening to these videos, the spokesperson Allison Toh wrote, “We’re running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses image enhancement technology to sharpen content. These enhancements are not done with generative AI.” But this is a tricky statement: “Generative AI” has no strict technical definition, and “image enhancement technology” could be anything. I asked for more detail about which technologies are being employed, and to what end. Toh said YouTube is “using traditional machine learning to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos,” she told me. (It’s unknown whether the modified videos are being shown to all users or just some; tech companies will sometimes run limited tests of new features.)
Toh’s description sounds remarkably similar to the process undertaken when generative-AI programs create entirely new videos. These programs typically use a diffusion model: a machine-learning program that is trained to refine an extremely noisy image into one that’s clear, with sharp edges and smooth textures. An AI upscaler can use the same diffusion process to “improve” an existing image, rather than to create a new one. The similarity of the underlying process might explain why the visual signature of diffusion-based AI is recognizable in these YouTubers’ videos.
While running this experiment, YouTube has also been encouraging people to create and post AI-generated short videos using a recently launched suite of tools that allow users to animate still photos and add effects “like swimming underwater, twinning with a lookalike sibling, and more.” YouTube didn’t tell me what motivated its experiment, but some people suspect that it has to do with creating a more uniform aesthetic across the platform. As one YouTube commenter wrote: “They’re training us, the audience, to get used to the AI look and eventually view it as normal.”
Google isn’t the only company rushing to mix AI-generated content into its platforms. Meta encourages users to create and publish their own AI chatbots on Facebook and Instagram using the company’s “AI Studio” tool. Last December, Meta’s vice president of product for generative AI told the Financial Times that “we expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that [human] accounts do.”
[Read: What we discovered on “deep YouTube”]
In a slightly less creepy vein, Snapchat provides tools for users “to generate novel images” of themselves based on selfies they’ve taken. And last year, TikTok introduced Symphony Creative Studio, which generates videos and includes a “Your Daily Video Generations” feature that suggests new videos automatically each day.
This is an odd turn for “social” media to take. Platforms that are supposedly based on the idea of connecting people with one another, or at least sharing experiences and performances—YouTube’s slogan until 2013 was “Broadcast Yourself”—now seem focused on getting us to consume impersonal, algorithmic gruel. Shull said that the modification of his videos erodes his trust in YouTube, and how could it not? The platform’s priorities have clearly shifted away from creators such as Shull, whose combined work is a major reason YouTube has become the juggernaut it is today.
2025-08-23 01:05:00
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
One of the more common clichés of modern travel is calling any trip—even a subway ride to an Instagram-famous coffee shop—a pilgrimage. The word originally applied to journeys made to holy places by people so devout that they were willing to endanger their lives to get there. Today, both the risks and rewards of travel tend to be lower, but the activity retains its spiritual character for some, including the novelist Lauren Groff. For the latest installment of The Atlantic’s series “The Writer’s Way,” she traveled to Kyoto in search of the mysterious author of The Tale of Genji, frequently credited as the world’s first novel. She made her way through the crowds swarming Japan’s former imperial capital to find out more about that writer, known to us as Lady Murasaki. But Groff also came across the kinds of spiritual experiences that fire up much of her own fiction.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:
Groff was in Kyoto in April; the journalist Reeves Wiedeman was there around the same time. In a feature published in June in New York magazine, Wiedeman wrote that the city has become the epicenter of the “age of overtourism”: a once-tranquil historical landmark blighted by travelers racing to take selfies at a handful of clogged sites. Reading it, I wondered how Groff’s essay could wrest meaning from this location—what weaving among the frequent-flying box-checkers could reveal about the Heian era of Japan, a time and place that Groff says is “thrillingly distant to my imagination.”
In Kyoto, Groff did what many tourists do: She made a list and checked off destinations—temples, palaces, and museums associated with Murasaki’s life and work. Yet her most meaningful encounters had as much to do with sensation as place. She describes a feeling of “living outside time” while eating a 7-Eleven egg sandwich and sitting on a clean-swept sidewalk curb; she has an epiphany not while beholding a 10th-century relic but while taking a hot bath downstairs from her hotel room. Her deepest connections to medieval Japan are experiential, rather than physical or intellectual. “I had an inkling that, though my love of Lady Murasaki could be explained only through beautiful abstraction—by meeting her mind in her work,” Groff writes, “I might begin to understand something tangible about her through the wordless animal body.”
This kind of sensory awareness can be found in Groff’s fiction. Her most explicitly religious novel, Matrix, published in 2021, imagined the 12th-century mystic Marie de France as a towering figure who made a British abbey into a power center for medieval women. A heterodox interpretation of Christianity infuses much of her work, as Judith Shulevitz noted in a recent Atlantic essay about her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds. Shulevitz considered the journey in the book, a young woman’s flight from Jamestown in the 17th century, to be a spiritual one—an update, in fact, of The Pilgrim’s Progress—in which communion with nature is achieved through perilous struggle. She called the book “Christian allegory in a post-Christian spirit.” Groff’s recent novels, as my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote in a profile when Matrix was released, sprang from “the idea that so much of our present suffering comes from a misreading of Genesis. God instructed man to have dominion over Earth and its creatures, and yet dominion, Groff thinks, has been interpreted as domination instead of care: ‘the right to kill, the right to take, and not the right to nurture.’”
I don’t think it’s a stretch to connect this dichotomy—dominion versus care—with the approach Groff takes in Kyoto, diverging from the flocking tourists that Wiedeman depicts. Groff, a fan (as Shulevitz notes) of the animist-leaning Quaker John Bartram, observes the nature-worship of Japan’s Shinto traditions. She closes her essay with a tea-and-meditation ceremony at the Shunkō-in Temple, a place with no ostensible connection to Murasaki, and yet she gleans something valuable about the often-puzzling structure of The Tale of Genji. She learns from one of the temple’s Buddhist reverends that “the self is a shifting, inconstant phenomenon”; he advises her to “embrace” ambiguity, which is “part of nature.” This instruction helps Groff understand the orderly disorder of Murasaki’s writing; it also teaches her about herself. Perhaps this is—or should be—the goal of every pilgrimage.
A Tale of Sex and Intrigue in Imperial Kyoto
By Lauren Groff
A thousand years ago, Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel. Who was she?
The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, by John McPhee
Pilots get most of the public credit for a flight’s successes—but they couldn’t go anywhere without the behind-the-scenes heroes: engineers. McPhee has a rare gift for stepping into the astonishing obsessions of seemingly ordinary working people; here, he uses it to immerse the reader in a decades-long quest to build an entirely new type of aircraft. That potential vehicle, shaped like the titular pumpkin seed, was imagined as a combination of dirigible and airplane. Its siren call, as McPhee shows, was sometimes all-consuming, even life-destroying. In a saga that reaches from the Civil War to the 1970s, one acolyte after another grew convinced that he (this affliction appears to target men exclusively) would be the one who conquered the engineering challenge that had theretofore led only to ruin. Did anyone finally succeed? The fact that you aren’t reading these words in the passenger compartment of a dirigible-airplane hybrid gives you a clue, but McPhee’s storytelling makes readers hope that the mission will somehow pan out. — Jeff Wise
From our list: Six books to read before you get to the airport
📚 A New New Me, by Helen Oyeyemi
📚 The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, by Howard W. French
📚 Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan Wang
Why Is Everything Spicy Now?
By Ellen Cushing
To put it generally and reductively, American food has not always been known for embracing spice. But now a large and apparently growing number of people in this country are willingly chomping down on fruits that have been expressly cultivated to bind to their body’s pain receptors and unleash fury with every bite. “It’s one of the great puzzles of culinary history,” Paul Rozin, a retired psychologist who spent much of his career studying spice, told me. “It is remarkable that something that tastes so bad is so popular.”
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2025-08-23 00:17:00
In its original televised run, from 1997 to 2009, the animated show King of the Hill aired 259 good-to-great episodes about the Hills, a folksy and well-intentioned family living in small-town Texas. That’s a lot of TV, and those looking for a representative moment—one that summarizes the entire show, more or less—might pick an exchange from the third-season episode “Three Coaches and a Bobby,” in which the stodgy patriarch, Hank, attempts to explain to his son, Bobby, why soccer is a stupid sport. Hank is a Dallas Cowboys diehard; the idea of Bobby getting into the Premier League sends him into full-body shivers. But rather than take offense or rise to his father’s provocation, Bobby fixes his old man with a placid look and asks: “Why do you have to hate what you don’t understand?”
During those initial seasons, King of the Hill drew much of its humor from how Hank’s values clashed with modern society—for example, his inability to understand why anyone would enjoy, as he put it, a sport “invented by European ladies to keep them busy while their husbands did the cooking.” But the living personification of the changing times was Bobby. The younger Hill was a sensitive and proudly chubby tween boy—not good at fighting or football, but handy with a sewing machine and a master of prop comedy. Hank, who was born in the 1950s or ’60s—cartooons tend to be vague with ages—grew up in an era with a very fixed view of how men should think and behave. To paraphrase Tony Soprano, he was the Gary Cooper type, strong and silent. Bobby, whose age hovered between 11 and 13, was by contrast a Millennial—part of a generation that had more freedom to do things differently, and that would come to be consistently misunderstood by its elders.
[Read: The strength of the ‘soft daddy’]
The new season continues probing that tension between father and son—not by picking up where the original show left off, but by vaulting forward into the future (a rarity for animated programs, whose characters often remain fixed in time). Hank and his wife, Peggy, are now retired in present-day Texas; Bobby is 21 years old and living on his own. Although this age technically categorizes him as a Zoomer—the show has been off the air for 16 years, but it has chosen to age its characters less than a decade—Bobby still behaves like a Millennial. At one point, he describes himself as “hashtag thick,” slang ripped right out of an old BuzzFeed post. And his anxieties seem propelled by a fear of winnowing potential, the feeling that he might be left behind. Watching him, I was struck by how aptly he channeled the unease of a generation reaching middle age while still lacking many traditional signposts of adult life. Yet he’s also inimitably Bobby—sweet, congenial, a little goofy—which makes his trajectory in these episodes all the more endearing, because it’s rooted in believable growth.
In earlier seasons, Bobby was sometimes the centerpiece of a plot, but he was just as often relegated to delivering a well-timed quip in service of another character’s storyline. Now he’s become a co-headliner, appearing substantively in each episode of the new season. The shift may partly be logistical: Luanne, Hank’s angelic and naive niece who filled out the Hill family, was voiced by Brittany Murphy, who died in 2009, and her role was not recast out of respect. But the refocus on Bobby allows the show to use father and son as foils for each other. Just as Hank remains confused by the things he doesn’t understand—such as the expected courtesy of rating your ride-share driver five stars, when he’s really done more of a four-star job—so is Bobby lightly out of step with his own peers, forcing a similar confrontation with his own principles.
Right away, we get a sense of how his experience differs from others in his age cohort. Whereas many of them are off at college, Bobby is instead the executive chef and a co-owner of Robata Chane, a Japanese-German restaurant; he works long hours for not much money. In the first episode, a flirtatious customer invites Bobby to a frat party, and they end up going home together. The next morning, when he tries to set up a future date, she makes it clear that their hookup was a onetime, rhythm-of-the-night type of thing. Here was a moment that could indicate how the show meant to portray Bobby: If he should project hurt, perhaps the show would tilt toward a judgmental “kids these days” perspective on evolving sexual mores. Instead, pleasant surprise dawns on Bobby’s face—this is not such a bad outcome, even if he might have liked a second date. He is still the boy who is open to new experiences, not someone who has been hardened by adulthood.
[King of the Hill now looks like a fantasy]
Yet he is not unconditionally tolerant; like his father, he draws some lines in the sand. Early on in the season, he reconnects with Connie, a middle-school sweetheart who is now going out with Chane, his business partner. At one point, he obtains evidence that Chane may be cheating on Connie—which, he then learns, is a moot discovery, because the two of them are practicing ethical nonmonogamy. Connie explains how it works, in a dutiful and credulous way, and to Bobby it sounds like nonsense. Because he cares for her, he can’t help but express his distaste for the arrangement, edging uncomfortably close to slut-shaming—“the worst thing” a person can do, Connie tells him, aghast at his response even as it seems to leave her less assured about her own behavior.
This is subtle character work that, as described on the page, might seem hectoring or prescriptive. But King of the Hill has always been more of a good hang, rooted in the organic interplay of recognizable personalities, than a laugh factory. Back in the day, its sister shows on Fox were The Simpsons and Family Guy, two punch-line-heavy shows with lots of cutaway gags and surreal touches. Both of those shows starred young boys, Bart Simpson and Chris Griffin, who never got older, and whose immaturity was a pointed feature; you could, and can, count on them to behave and react the way they usually do. Watching Bobby mature into a young adult—as many viewers have since the show first premiered—is a different experience, and perhaps the best reason to tap in.
These scenes aren’t funny, per se. What is funny—has always been funny, will always be funny—is the texture of Bobby’s voice. None of this would land without the heroic voice acting of Pamela Adlon, who subtly dials up his boyish vocal fry into the rasp of a grown man. Bobby sounds like a born sweetheart, someone whose heart is pure and whose frailties are relatable—not a smart aleck or a dullard or an agent of chaos. Another plot point this season concerns Hank’s teenage half brother, Good Hank (it’s a long story), who gets swept up in the manosphere. Bobby would never, I thought while watching this subplot play out. He’s too old-fashioned to completely get with the times, and too attuned to his own sense of right and wrong to give into peer pressure. In this, like countless sons before him, he walks the path toward becoming a fresh iteration of his father, bringing the show full circle.
The new season knowingly acknowledges that it is asking viewers to sit with the years that have passed for the Hills. Television revivals are always good for a healthy whiff of nostalgia, but the routine may quickly become tired. In the season’s finale, Bobby wonders if Connie might “only like the 12-year-old husky version of me,” rather than the man he’s become. Connie, thankfully, brushes off this fear—Bobby is the bravest person she knows, she says, because he’s doing exactly what he wants. He still has plenty of road to burn: Financial stability would help, as would the time to do his laundry. (He still drops off his dirty clothes at his mom’s.) But this self-awareness is meaningful, as it was for his younger self. You believe that he’ll keep growing, and that he’ll weather whatever storms may come, because he understands who he is.
