2026-02-20 10:32:00
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has faced intense scrutiny from Republicans and calls for her firing from Democrats since the January 24 shooting of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis. Now Noem’s tenuous standing with the Trump White House is creating concern in her home state of South Dakota that she might leave the Cabinet to challenge Senator Mike Rounds in the state’s June Republican primary.
Political allies of Rounds have begun preparing for this scenario, even though they remain skeptical that Noem will actually make the move, three people familiar with the discussions told me. To get into the race, Noem would have to register for the primary and collect the 2,171 supportive signatures statewide by the end of next month. A Noem adviser told me today that she has no plans to leave. But Noem could have an incentive to seek elective office if Democrats remain on track to win back control of the House and launch investigations into her tenure at the Department of Homeland Security. A Senate seat would give her both a professional staff and a fundraising platform to help defend herself.
“It’s something people are talking about across the state,” one Republican involved in South Dakota’s politics told me; this person, like others I spoke with, requested anonymity to discuss the rumors. “And based on everything I’ve been hearing, Mike Rounds would handily win that race.”
In recent weeks, Noem has ceded some of her public-leadership role overseeing immigration-enforcement operations, and President Trump has relied more on the White House “border czar” Tom Homan to lead those efforts. White House officials have grown frustrated with her performance as Republican midterm strategists raise alarms about the political damage her deportation strategy is doing to the party’s chances. One person familiar with the discussions told me that Noem’s position in the Cabinet is no longer secure, even though the president has not yet moved against her and has repeatedly praised her in public comments.
[Read: Battles are raging inside the Department of Homeland Security]
The situation has been complicated by the refusal of congressional Democrats to vote for a new budget for Noem’s department, which has caused a partial government shutdown that is expected to last at least into next week. Republicans say that Democratic calls for Noem’s removal make Trump pushing her out in the immediate future less likely. In his second term, Trump has been deeply reluctant to allow political pressure to force him into firing Cabinet members.
Several weeks ago, before the Pretti shooting, Republicans in South Dakota learned that pollsters were asking voters whom they would prefer in a matchup between Rounds and Noem, two people familiar with the calls told me, adding that they don’t know who is paying for the polling and have not seen the results.
The possibility of Noem running against Rounds has also prompted discussion among advisers to the president about possibly waiting to make a change to DHS leadership until after next month’s filing deadline, according to one person familiar with the discussions. Others have been supportive of a move. “Mike Rounds is so unpopular amongst Republican primary voters, he’d lose to a dead dog,” a national Republican strategist told me. The senator’s allies pushed back against that characterization. Rounds, 71, has successfully run statewide as a Republican four times since 2014, serving two terms as governor before being elected twice to the Senate.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told me in a text message that it would not be appropriate for a government spokesperson to comment on a story about Noem’s political future. Another adviser to Noem told me that her team had not polled the race.
Rounds’s Senate office did not respond to a request for comment. The White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told me in a statement, “President Trump has assembled the most talented and America First cabinet and staff in history,” before listing off some of the administration’s accomplishments.
Rounds and Noem, both former governors of South Dakota, have never been particularly close and have occasionally clashed in public. After Noem published a book that describes her decision to kill her family dog after she determined that it was dangerous and untrainable, Rounds was notably outspoken in his criticism. “I don’t see how it helps,” he said of her description of the incident. “These dogs become a member of a family, you know. People identify with that.”
[Read: Kristi Noem’s audience of one]
Trump and Rounds have also clashed, particularly over Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, which Rounds described as “fair”; Trump incorrectly maintains that he won the election. But Trump endorsed Rounds over the summer—“HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!” the president posted on social media. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the senior senator from South Dakota, is a close ally of Rounds and would likely back him over Noem.
Another possible route for Noem is to run again for the U.S. House seat that she held from 2011 to 2019. That seat will be vacated next year by Representative Dusty Johnson, who has announced that he is running for governor. Noem has also expressed interest in the past about being selected as a running mate on a Republican ticket or mounting her own presidential campaign.
2026-02-20 08:19:00
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For several hours last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi sat before the House Judiciary Committee with one apparent mission: Don’t back down.
The oversight hearing focused on the recent actions of the Justice Department, which has been consumed with the release of the Epstein files, as well as ongoing investigations into the fatal shootings of two American citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis. At some points, the back-and-forth between Bondi and Congress devolved into a screaming match. Faced with questions about her department’s haphazard redaction of the files, she often went on the attack, calling Representative Jamie Raskin a “loser lawyer” and asking Representative Jerry Nadler whether he’d “apologized to President Trump” for participating in his impeachment hearings.
Bondi seemed more passionate about these deflections than she did about defending the department’s work, which has been hampered in recent months by understaffing and low morale. DOJ reportedly lost nearly 10,000 employees from November 2024 to November 2025. U.S. Attorney’s Offices (which are part of the department) shed 14 percent of their workforce, a one-year reduction that officials say is unlike anything they’ve seen in years. Some were fired, some took a buyout package, and others simply walked away. Last month, Bondi suggested in court filings that the department was struggling to keep up with its workload, having released only a fraction of the millions of Jeffrey Epstein–related files under review. Some attorneys were reportedly spending all or most of their days on the files. (Bondi said on Saturday that “all” of the files have been released, as mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but lawmakers have criticized the files’ heavy redactions.)
Add to that a backlog of federal immigration cases and the ongoing legal fallout from the administration’s mass-deportation push, and the result is an organization that is thoroughly overwhelmed. The U.S. attorney for Minnesota, who has been responsible for defending recent federal immigration-enforcement efforts, described the new influx of casework as an “enormous burden.” One ICE attorney who volunteered to work on Minnesota’s backlog was reportedly removed from her DOJ post after telling a judge that her job “sucks” because of the increased caseload and the administration’s failure to comply with immigration court orders. “I wish you would just hold me in contempt, your honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep. I work days and night,” she said.
Nationally, DOJ is making some progress—the Executive Office for Immigration Review announced in September that it had whittled its pending-case backlog down from more than 4.18 million to under 3.75 million—but the lack of staffing will only make it harder to tackle the remaining caseload. (A DOJ spokesperson told me in a statement that “after four years of bureaucratic weaponization under the Biden Administration, President Trump and Attorney General Bondi have created the most efficient Department of Justice in American history.”)
The mission and purpose of the department has also been overhauled—many of its core functions have been politicized since Trump’s return to office. The president has directed the department to pursue his personal enemies and has replaced career DOJ employees with inexperienced MAGA loyalists, sometimes to the detriment of his own agenda. Take the recent prosecution of two longtime Trump rivals, New York State Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. In September, after an acting U.S. attorney reportedly decided that the case against Comey was too weak to pursue, the president pressured him to resign and replaced him with one of his former lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, who had never prosecuted a case before. Halligan appeared to make several fundamental errors in presenting Comey’s case, and her cases against James and Comey have since been thrown out. She resigned in January, a few months after a judge ruled that she had been illegally appointed.
The New York Times reported that Bondi’s former chief of staff put out an open call on social media for lawyers who “support President Trump and anti-crime agenda” to privately message him about jobs within the department. These were, until recently, some of the most prestigious positions in the American legal system—the “crème de la crème,” my colleague Quinta Jurecic, who covers politics and law, told me. Now the halls are empty enough that a department affiliate is seeking out applicants online.
At least the remaining employees know who’s in charge. This afternoon, a banner was hung on the DOJ building’s facade—on it, right above the slogan “Make America Safe Again,” was a picture of the president.
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Evening Read
The Longevity Scam
By Jordan D. Metzl
The quest to live forever has fascinated humans for millennia. The Epic of Gilgamesh, composed about 4,000 years ago, follows a king who searches the world for a plant that can restore youth, only to lose the plant to a thieving snake. The (likely apocryphal) story of Juan Ponce de León, who is said to have embarked on a search for the Fountain of Youth in the early 16th century, refuses to die—unlike its protagonist, who was killed along his journey.
Today’s longevity-medicine movement is driven by the same aggressive desire for eternal youth as the mythic stories of old. But whereas in earlier times ideas about wellness could travel only as fast as the people who held them, today just about anyone with an internet connection can use social media and AI-generated graphics to sell medical advice in seconds. Despite a decided shortage of placebo-controlled trials in humans to support that advice, the business of longevity is booming, thanks in large part to sleek direct-to-consumer marketing delivered by health influencers with far more confidence than evidence. By 2030, $8 trillion might be spent annually on longevity-related products.
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Read. A new book buries the Obama-era idea that small shifts in personal behavior can greatly improve the world, Rob Wolfe writes.
Watch. A breakthrough film is rarely nominated only for its screenplay. In 2022, David Sims picked some of the best films from previous years that were underappreciated by the Academy in this way.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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2026-02-20 08:06:25
A post on X claimed to be a simple message from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Stay active; eat well. But the 90-second video it shared, called “Secretary Kennedy and Kid Rock’s Rock Out Work Out,” seems designed to be bewildering. Here was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eating steak and doing preacher curls in his belted blue jeans and a pair of hiking shoes; and here he was again, stripping off his T-shirt to ride an exercise bike inside a sauna; and here he was a little later, strutting over to a cold-plunge tub (still in his blue jeans but with the belt removed); and here he went into the tub, sliding underwater in his dungarees.
Why was the HHS secretary bathing in a pair of pants? The video never provides an answer for this question, even as Kennedy plays pickleball, then mugs for the camera, then soaks in a Jacuzzi with a glass of milk, all while still in jeans. It’s just bizarre—a PSA that presumably has been dialed in by his staff to maximize its WTF effect. (The video has been viewed more than 13 million times and produced some 11,000 replies; HHS did not respond to a request for comment about the video or the jeans.) However his peculiar gymwear habit started, its present state is very clear: The secretary’s jeans are self-aware.
Kennedy’s proclivity for working out in belted denim long predates the knowing wink with which it’s now displayed. Take the summer’s “DOD-HHS Fitness Challenge,” for which Kennedy donned his favorite workout gear and did a bunch of pull-ups with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Or the viral clip of him from 2023, wearing jeans and boots and nothing else, squeezing out a final set on Venice Beach. I don’t believe that these show a man who lifts in jeans to maximize his clicks. I believe that they show instead a man who fits a waning archetype in fitness culture, a species that has for decades been endemic to the gym: Kennedy is a jeans guy.
I’ve worked out, off and on, for more than 30 years—and for all of that time, the jeans guys have remained a steady presence on the rubber floors. They are sometimes taciturn, sometimes chatty. They often pair their jeans with boots, as Kennedy will do, and with a T-shirt or a tank top or a hoodie. But lest you think he simply has no truck with any gym-specific gear, the jeans guy is sometimes spotted wearing padded lifting gloves, or a leather lifting belt across his Levi’s. At times, his social role will overlap with that of other weight-room regulars, not least of which is the gym grandpa, who hangs around and shoots the breeze and doles out tips on how to lift. However he appears, and however much he gabs, the jeans guy’s social status is the same: He’s an outsider. Rarely does one find a jeans guy paired up with a workout partner. “It’s usually like, ‘The jeans guy rides alone,’” Tolga Ozyurtcu, a historian of physical culture at the University of Texas at Austin, told me when I called him up to talk about this phenomenon.
Not everyone enjoys the company of the jeans guy. Some see him as a threat. Planet Fitness once made a point of banning denim in the gym, along with grunting, dropping dumbbells, and judging others. (Those who broke these rules could be punished with a “lunk alarm” and summarily kicked out.) But this discrimination feels as ill-considered as it is unfair: In my experience, jeans guys are harmless at the very worst, and at best, they add some needed color to a dreary landscape. In this way, the jeans guys are akin to other gentle curiosities, such as the shorts guys who alight on college campuses in wintertime, and the black chipmunks that scamper by from time to time in city parks.
What motivates the jeans guy? No one knows. He is, if nothing else, as inscrutable as a four-leaf clover. Ask him why he isn’t wearing shorts, and he will likely tell you that he chooses denim for efficiency. When Fox News’s Jesse Watters asked Kennedy in August to explain his favored workout gear, all Watters got was this: “Well, I just started doing that a long time ago because I would go hiking in the morning and then I’d go straight to the gym, and I found it was convenient, and now I’m used to it.” In the hope of getting more, I reached out to Ryan Calder, the fitness coach who spotted Kennedy on the incline bench in that viral video from 2023. Did Calder—who at the time was dressed, quite reasonably, in shorts—happen to ask Kennedy about his denim pants and boots? He did. “I asked him right then, you know, like, ‘So, you’re banging it out in jeans?,’” he told me. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, man, this is my efficient way. I only have 30 minutes. I don’t spend time changing clothes.”
A jeans guy’s self-report must be taken with a grain of salt—maybe even he cannot really fathom why he lives the way he does. Kennedy’s is no exception to this rule. In public appearances, he is almost always in a suit and skinny tie, so adding a daily interlude in workout denim would hardly seem to be a way of saving time. His habit may be instead a product of the workout culture he imbibed during his youth. “The jeans guy, it’s a thing. It’s a very definitive thing,” Conor Heffernan, a fitness historian at Ulster University, told me. “It’s a trope we’ve had since the ’80s.” The power lifters of the time, some of whom were connected to the biker subculture, adopted a “rugged, spit-and-sawdust aesthetic” in the gym, he said. This included denim. During the same period, glitzy photoshoots for bodybuilders also featured jeans, to match the styles of the time. Heffernan brought up a famous photo of Lee Haney, the eight-time Mr. Olympia, flexing shirtless in a pair of jeans above a steamy manhole cover in New York City. Perhaps the older jeans guys of today—Kennedy himself is 72—are nothing less than living fossils.
Their aesthetic may have faded out, but a younger set of jeans guys—ironic jeans guys—has since emerged in the fitness culture. Take the influencer-marathoner Truett Hanes: His brand is built on running very fast and very far … in jeans. He claims that this started as a goof, but it has turned into a business. He now represents a denim company, as well as a chafing cream. The idea of working out in jeans, partly silly and partly serious, is everywhere once you start to look for it. One gymwear brand, Raskol, launched a line of lifter jeggings in 2023 in shades such as “blue steele” and “pale thunder,” with a tongue-in-cheek campaign that had bodybuilders boasting of their pride at using PEDs—that is, “performance-enhancing denims.”
This self-mocking move may be just the prelude to a fuller jeans-guy renaissance, Heffernan suggested. After all, Raskol’s jeggings did sell out, he said. And this wouldn’t be the first time that a traditional signifier of masculinity crept back into mainstream culture by way of performative half jokes. The fashion for bushy beards, and beards’ association with authentic manliness, has followed this same trajectory from irony to earnestness during its various resurgences since the early 19th century. Now the same could be happening to denim workout pants: Today’s goof evolves into tomorrow’s masculine ideal. “I think irony moves into fashion very quickly in fitness,” Heffernan said.
For Kennedy, this process may appear to be going in reverse: His latest workout video shows that he’s in on the joke, that in 2026 he’s capable of pumping irony as well as iron, and that he can engage in what Heffernan described as “a very deliberate deployment of jeans.” But it also shows that there is a recipe, if not a cultural machinery, for rehabilitating out-of-date ideas. Not all of Kennedy’s eccentricities are as quaint as how he dresses in the gym, and there are many ways of going backwards in pursuit of health while pretending that you’ve found a way into the future. MAHA is nostalgia, sometimes with a smirk. The jeans guy dunks himself in water. The jeans guy is reborn.
2026-02-20 05:33:00
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
ChatGPT and food-delivery droids came to my campus at roughly the same time, in the 2022–23 academic year. My response—cranky, tweedy—was hopelessly on brand for a history professor. The chatbot and the droid appeared to be in league, robotic species on the vanguard of civilizational collapse. Both were premised on the idea of frictionless ease, liberating their users from outmoded toils. Because you couldn’t kick the chatbot, I had to resist the urge to kick the droids. I felt new and sudden sympathy with those English weavers who tried to smash the machines.
I’d like to think that my grievance was rooted in something beyond my own impending irrelevance. The product of too many years of humanities education, I wanted to defend the foundational exercise of writing. Going back to the late 19th century, writing instruction in the humanities has been premised on the idea of writing as both a craft and an art: a practical skill that could be taught and refined, and a creative practice through which sustained effort yielded insight. The formula went something like this: We read things, we had conversations about them to unravel their many levels, then we went and wrote. In that final part of the cycle—the writing part—were torments, perhaps even tortures, but good things happened. We became thinking people, mingling with complex ideas and perhaps coming up with some of our own. The advent of the chatbot raised an unsettling question: What if writing didn’t have to be hard? What if that noble ordeal was no more necessary than going to a well to fetch your water when you could just turn on a tap?
Combing through the archives of The Atlantic, one might reasonably conclude that both writing instruction and civilization have been in peril since roughly 1890. In 1893, James Jay Greenough argued that young minds had become impoverished by too many slang words to form anything but “narrow” ideas. By November of 1959, when the magazine had a special section on “The Teaching of Reading and Writing,” excessive emphasis on standardized testing had pushed writing instruction to the side—just at the moment when young people’s minds were becoming addled by modern media and the popularity of “illiterate expressions.”
Easy as it is to mock the melodrama of such pronouncements, I can understand them. Underlying the different diagnoses and prescriptions is the basic idea that animated my own efforts as a professor: that learning to write was vital to the formation of a mind. As Henry Chauncey put it in the magazine in 1959, the “art of written communication” was “clear thinking clearly expressed.” Something essential was happening in the hard work of trying to make your thoughts comprehensible to another human being (even if that human being was just your teacher). The sparks thrown off in the process could become the energy for better thoughts—for more complex and perhaps even original ideas.
The trouble was that thinking the thoughts, finding the words, and getting them down on the page could involve considerable discomfort. Writing in the magazine in 1912, soon after graduating from college, Randolph Bourne described the “hopeless labor of writing.” “One must struggle constantly,” Bourne lamented, “to warm again the thoughts that are cold or have been utterly consumed.”
Students didn’t turn to chatbots to warm their cold and consumed thoughts all at once, but the advent of AI tools sparked a disorienting reckoning for those of us reading their papers. At first, some of the work coming in was just a little weird. Certain papers appeared as Frankenstein monsters of machine-made and human text, some of it eloquent yet empty, some of it strained and meandering in familiar ways.
But in the years to come, with updated models and the fuller integration of AI into people’s lives, I noticed a general smoothing out of student writing. The hard edges and rough parts were getting sanded down, and the arguments and ideas were more uniform. It was less common to see the kinds of errors I’d hoped to preempt on the guide to writing and history I gave the students. They didn’t refer to works of historical scholarship as “novels” much anymore, but they also didn’t find their way into some beautiful, odd idea in a convoluted sentence buried in the second paragraph on page 4.
By the end of last year, I had dusted off blue books for the first time in years and had the students sit for an in-class essay. Reading their tortured handwriting was a small price to pay to see their thoughts anew—messy, but alive.
2026-02-20 03:50:00
Updated with new questions at 2:50 p.m. ET on February 19, 2026.
If you put any stock in the ability of IQ tests to assess intelligence, we humans have spent the past century steadily getting smarter. (And if you don’t put any stock in them, well, we humans have steadily gotten better at IQ tests.)
Because IQ is a standardized measure, humankind’s average score still sits at 100—but this isn’t your granddaddy’s 100. IQ tests are regularly recalibrated, and over the past many decades, when new subjects have taken an old test, they have almost always outscored their predecessors’ average; Grandpa’s generation might have hovered around 100, but the kids are scoring 115 … which then becomes the new 100.
This phenomenon is called the Flynn effect, and researchers still aren’t sure what causes it. Perhaps it’s due to more efficient education or better nutrition. The reason could be that modern environments contain more interesting stimuli or that modern gasoline no longer contains lead.
I haven’t seen anyone propose that trivia is to thank, but the growing popularity of quizzing tracks with the IQ trend line pretty well too. I think I speak for all of science when I say we shouldn’t rule it out quite yet.
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And by the way, did you know that barcode scanning was initially greeted with a huge backlash? The first item ever scanned by barcode was a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in June 1974, but by the end of the ’70s, only about 1 percent of stores had adopted barcodes.
Consumers were worried that the tech would be used to rip them off. Advocacy groups mounted campaigns against the barcode, and protesters even picketed stores that used scanners. Others swore that the barcode was the biblical “mark of the beast.”
Obviously, it eventually caught on, and people got over their fears—though if you ever get rung up at $6.66, maybe offer to round to the next dollar, just in case.
See you tomorrow!
Answers:
How did you do? Come back tomorrow for more questions, and if you think up a great question after reading an Atlantic story—or simply want to share a fact—send it my way at [email protected].
And by the way, did you know that the University of Bologna is nearly a millennium old? It’s the world’s oldest university that was founded as such (at least one older university started as a madrasa), and its alumni include Copernicus, Dante, and more than one pope.
Imagine trying to write a halfway-decent poem for an assignment, and your classmate turns in the Divine Comedy. Then again, at least you’d have had a leg up on Copernicus, who probably got marked off plenty for insisting that the Earth actually orbits the sun.
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2026-02-20 03:42:24
Rebecca Blackwell / AP
From left: Poland’s Iwona Januszyk, China’s Cidan Yuzhen, and Spain’s Maria Costa Díez race up steps during a ski-mountaineering women’s-sprint heat in Bormio, Italy, on February 19, 2026. The sport of ski mountaineering makes its official Olympic debut at this year’s Winter Games, featuring both men’s and women’s sprints and a mixed-relay event.
Previously:
February 18: A Golden Smile
February 17: In Pursuit
February 16: Snow Jump
February 15: On Target
February 14: A Victory Leap
