2025-10-09 06:20:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Days after deploying National Guard troops to Chicago against the wishes of local leaders, President Donald Trump is calling for the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to be jailed.
What happened? In a Truth Social post Wednesday, Trump wrote, “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!”
What’s the context? Trump has deployed around 500 National Guard troops — 200 from Texas and 300 more from Illinois — to the greater Chicago area, despite opposition from leaders in the city and state. Both Johnson and Pritzker have vocally condemned the move, which Pritzker described as an “invasion.”
Why does this matter? The Logoff generally steers away from covering Trump pronouncements until they translate into real-world impacts, because they often amount to false alarms. Trump is easily suggestible, so he’ll express openness to ideas put to him as questions, and he’s more likely to say something than he is to follow through with it. But it’s worth underscoring both the absurdity and the seriousness of Trump’s post.
First, it’s not immediately obvious what federal immigration agents — who have aggressively deployed militarized force in Chicago, including Black Hawk helicopters and tear gas — need protection from.
And second, while threats of jail aren’t anything new for Trump — in 2016, he made calls to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, a major feature of his rallies — the context is significantly different now.
Trump successfully engineered the indictment of former FBI director James Comey last month, and Rep. LaMonica McIver is currently facing farcical felony charges for “impeding” law enforcement earlier this year. Top Trump advisers like Stephen Miller have attacked judges and elected officials standing in the way of immigration operations in increasingly extreme terms. Trump’s comments on Wednesday may just be the latest example of that extremism — but they shouldn’t go unnoticed.
Don’t miss my colleague Constance Grady’s recent examination of one of Jane Austen’s less-known and less-loved works, Mansfield Park. The piece is a fascinating deep dive into what we know about Austen’s thoughts on slavery, which rarely appeared in her writing, and what — if anything — we can learn from how the topic does show up in Mansfield Park. Have a great evening!
2025-10-08 22:55:13
If your feed isn’t already filled with AI-generated video slop, it’s only a matter of time.
Meta and OpenAI will make sure of it. Meta recently announced its endless slop-feed Vibes, made up entirely of AI-generated content: cats, dogs, and blobs. And that’s just in Mark Zuckerberg’s initial video post about it.
OpenAI’s new Sora app offers a different flavor of slop. Like TikTok, Sora has a For You page for vertically scrolling through content. But the scariest part of Sora is how real it looks. One feature, called Cameo, lets users make videos of themselves, their friends, and any public-facing profile that grants access. This means videos of Sam Altman hanging out with Charizard or grilling up Pikachu are making the rounds on social media. And, of course, Jake Paul videos are also starting to circulate.
It’s just the beginning, and the technology is only getting better. To help navigate it, we spoke with Hayden Field, senior AI reporter at The Verge. Field and Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram discuss why these tech giants are doubling down on AI video, what to do with it, and we even get fooled by one.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What is Mark Zuckerberg trying to do with Vibes?
That is the million-dollar question. These companies, especially Meta right now, really want to keep us consuming AI-generated content and they really want to keep us on the platform.
I think it’s really just about Zuckerberg trying to make AI a bigger piece of the everyday person’s life and routine, getting people more used to it and also putting a signpost in the ground saying, “Hey, look, this is where the technology is at right now. It’s a lot better than it was when we saw Will Smith eating spaghetti.”
How did it get so much better so fast? Because yes, this is not Will Smith eating spaghetti.
AI now trains itself a lot of the time. It can get better and train itself at getting better. One of the big things standing in their way is really just compute. And all these companies are building data centers, making new deals every day. They’re really working on getting more compute, so that they can push the tech even more.
Let’s talk about what OpenAI is doing. They just released something called Sora 2. What is Sora?
Sora is their new app and it’s basically an endless scroll AI-generated video social media app. So you can think of it as an AI-generated TikTok in a way. But the craziest part, honestly, is that you can make videos of yourself and your friends too, if they give you permission. It’s called a Cameo and you record your own face moving side to side. You record your voice speaking a sequence of numbers and then the technology can parody you doing any number of things that you want.
So that’s kind of why it’s so different than Meta’s Vibes and why it feels different when you’re scrolling through it. You’re seeing videos of real people and they look real. I was scrolling through and seeing Sam Altman drinking a giant juice box or any number of other things. It looks like it’s really Sam Altman or it looks like it’s really Jake Paul.
How does one know whether what they’re seeing is real or not in this era where it’s getting harder to discern?
These tips I’m about to give you aren’t foolproof, but they will help a bit. If you watch something long enough, you’ll probably find one of the telltale signs that something’s AI-generated.
“Taylor Swift, actually — some of her promo for her new album apparently had a Ferris wheel in the background and the spokes kind of blurred as it moved.”
One of them is inconsistent lighting. It’s hard sometimes for AI to get the vibes of a place right. If there’s a bunch of lamps — maybe it’s really dark in one corner, maybe it doesn’t have the realistic quality of sunlight — that could be something you could pick up on. Another thing is unnatural facial expressions that just don’t seem quite right. Maybe someone’s smiling too big or they’re crying with their eyes too open. Another one is airbrushed skin, skin that looks too perfect. And then finally, background details that might disappear or morph as the video goes on. This is a big one.
Taylor Swift, actually — some of her promo for her new album apparently had a Ferris wheel in the background and the spokes kind of blurred as it moved.
Anything else out there that we should be looking for?
I just wish we had more rules about this stuff and how it could be disclosed. For example, OpenAI does have a safeguard: Every video that you download from Sora has a watermark or at least most videos. Some pro users can download one without a watermark.
Oh, cool, so if you pay them money, you could lose the watermark. Very nice.
But the other thing is I’ve seen a bunch of YouTube tutorials saying, “Here’s how to remove the Sora watermark.”
Do companies like OpenAI or Meta care if we can tell if this is real or not? Or is that exactly what they want?
They say they care. So I guess that’s all we can say right now. But it’s hard because by the very nature of technology like this, it’s going to be misused. So you just have to see if you can stem that misuse as much as possible, which is what they’re trying to do. But we’re going to have to wait and see how successful they are at that. And right now, if history is any guide, I’m a little concerned.
2025-10-08 20:30:00
If someone illegally double parks in a one-way street and a cop walks by, the expectation is that they’d get fined. Similarly, you’d think that if a company that uses animals is caught mistreating them, they too would face some sort of legal repercussion. But for many businesses in the US, that’s not what’s happening.
This summer, an inspector with the US Department of Agriculture visited a dog breeder in Ohio where they found one of his dogs — a 4 1/2-year-old female Maltipoo — to be in bad shape. Several of her teeth were missing, she had gum recession, and when the inspector lightly pressed on some of the teeth she still did have, they moved. The breeder was issued a warning, which has no real consequences.
That was also the case when, three years prior, a USDA inspector who visited Alpha Genesis — a company that breeds and experiments on primates — learned that two of the company’s animals died after some of their digits (fingers and toes) became entrapped in a structure inside their cage. Another primate died after being placed in the wrong cage and attacked by another animal.
These incidents represent severe animal neglect and mismanagement — and alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act. According to a new, exclusive analysis by the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), they’re part of a larger trend over the last five years of the USDA increasingly issuing warnings over actual enforcement actions, like fines.
“USDA is continuously looking for opportunities to improve regulatory compliance and believes that regulatory correspondence, such as an Official Warning, can be a useful tool to encourage compliance and deter future noncompliance,” a USDA spokesperson wrote in an email to Vox.
Passed in 1966, the Animal Welfare Act sets minimum standards, such as food, water, housing, and veterinary care for over a million animals used by around 17,500 businesses, which are subject to annual USDA inspections to ensure compliance with the law.
The problem is that the act is rife with loopholes. It excludes the animals abused in the greatest numbers: those farmed for meat, milk, and eggs, who now number over 10 billion each year. The legislation does cover animals used in laboratory experiments, but excludes mice, rats, fish, and birds — the species who make up the vast majority of animals used in research.
Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.
In other words, the bill covers less than 0.01 percent of animals exploited by US businesses.
The animals who are covered can be, and often are, still treated terribly, like in puppy mills, where dogs are treated more like breeding machines than man’s best friend; in zoos, where the mental well-being of many wild animals is severely damaged by captivity; and in research laboratories, where animals are subjected to painful experiments.
It stands to reason that if a business is found in violation — especially repeatedly — it would receive a hefty fine or worse, like a license suspension, animal confiscation, or criminal charge. But as AWI’s new analysis has revealed, the USDA’s enforcement has only gotten weaker in recent years.
What gives?
Part of the problem is that the USDA is severely understaffed; over the last few years, the agency has lost one-third of its inspectors while the number of businesses it needs to inspect has doubled.
But the root of the problem is that it often lets violators off easy: The department has long been criticized by both animal advocates and the US Office of Inspector General (OIG) — a government oversight agency — for terribly weak enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act.
Stretching back to the early 1990s, the OIG has documented the USDA consistently failing to hold repeat violators accountable, along with significantly reducing fines (in the early 2000s, fines were reduced by an average of 86 percent). The resultant fines are so small — thousands of dollars instead of tens of thousands; or tens of thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of thousands — that many violators see them “as a normal cost of business, rather than a deterrent for violating the law,” according to an OIG report.
But according to AWI’s analysis, the Supreme Court and the Trump administration bear some of the blame for enforcement getting worse in recent years.
In June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy that the SEC violated the Seventh Amendment — the right to a jury trial — when an SEC judge fined a hedge fund manager for allegedly defrauding investors. The decision essentially stripped the agency of its power to impose certain fines.
It also seems to have had a chilling effect on other agencies, including the USDA.
In the 14 months after the Jarkesy decision, the USDA issued just five fines compared to 63 fines in the 14 months before it. And of these five, only one was issued during President Donald Trump’s second term, suggesting the new administration is going easier on businesses that allegedly violate the Animal Welfare Act, a problem also observed in Trump’s first term.
“Jarkesy has hamstrung us the most,” an anonymous USDA manager told Science magazine in August. “We have an inability to do anything, even when we see bad stuff.”
“The decision in Jarkesy v. SEC impacts all agencies that seek civil penalties before administrative law judges (ALJs),” a USDA spokesperson wrote. “USDA continues to assess its authorities in light of the decision.”
Mary Hollingsworth, director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic and a former Justice Department trial attorney, told me what’s most needed to deter violations is stronger fines. For that to happen, the Animal Welfare Act needs to be amended to allow the Justice Department to take violators to federal court, where judges are “much more likely to impose a reasonable fine” than USDA judges, Hollingsworth said.
In the last Congress, a bill to do just that — among other Animal Welfare Act reforms — garnered 220 cosponsors, but didn’t get put up for a vote. The current Congress is weighing a reintroduced version of the bill. Stronger fines are especially critical for holding research facilities accountable, since it’s generally the only enforcement action the USDA can bring against them.
On the bright side, however, the Trump administration is at least — even if for the wrong reasons — trying to hack away at the core issue: reducing the number of animals used in experiments and moving toward non-animal methods.
2025-10-08 19:30:00
TikTokers love a challenge, especially if it involves some sort of self-imposed hibernation period that will transform their lives and pay off in physical or financial success.
Currently, my feed is full of young people participating in “The Great Lock-In,” a three-month challenge that began in September and lasts through the end of the year. The goal is that participants enter January having already completed a set of goals and established certain habits, a jumpstart on “New Year, New Me.”
“Locking in” has become its own aesthetic. Videos under the #thegreatlockin and #lockingin hashtags feature Zoomers in sterile apartments wearing neutral workout clothes. They’re usually fixing healthy meals, walking on treadmills, and making lists in journals, complete with timestamps for each activity. There are inspirational slideshows set to rap songs. Others feature soundbites from iconic NBA players, like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan.
“It’s all about programming your mind to go hard for a sprint of time,” says influencer Tatiana Forbes in a TikTok video. “It’s meant to be this time where you put forth immense effort in some area of your life.”
It’s curious that locking in is a formal challenge. With origins in football and video-game culture, the term itself describes a period of hyperfocus in order to get stuff done. Online, locking in has become the ultimate Gen Z mantra. People post about locking in at the gym, locking in at work, locking in to finish books, locking in to stay hydrated, and locking in to simply get through the day.
Of course, this collective desire for productivity and personal growth isn’t a new phenomenon. If Gen Z seems obsessed with assigning themselves a list of goals every few months, it’s probably because they witnessed or at least felt the residual effects of millennial hustle culture. Whereas millennials were reacting to their own generation’s misfortune — namely, the Great Recession — Zoomers are trying to shake off the brain rot of digital living in the pandemic and navigate the economic uncertainty brought on by artificial intelligence and the second Trump administration.
So what exactly is Gen Z locking in for, and how does the mantra manifest in their lives beyond TikTok? Is locking in an act of resistance, a coping mechanism, or just a performance? The answer is a bit of everything.
There are some obvious reasons why young people are craving focus. As much as locking in is about completing tasks, for some, it also means eliminating distractions. Tips for locking in on social media consistently include limiting screen time before bed. Some guidance is more extreme, encouraging users to “lock in and disappear” from social media with the expectation that they’ll eventually return as their improved self.
Even if the time away from their phones is temporary, many young people are aspiring to digital minimalism, a term popularized by Georgetown University professor and author Cal Newport. There’s now a popular subreddit devoted to promoting digital minimalism as a lifestyle, a way to recharge and live more intentionally.
Locking in isn’t that different from another concept coined by Newport: deep work. And it’s seemingly just the Gen Z version of a millennial-era idea. This, according to Newport, refers to “the act of focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.” Newport says that, according to young people he’s talked to, locking in is “specifically a reaction to smartphones” and feeling like they’re “under the spell of digital attention purveyors.”
“It would be impossible for them to avoid noticing the degree to which these devices are taking them away from essentially every meaningful activity and manipulating their psychology,” Newport told me.
Recent studies reveal as much. Some 83 percent of Gen Z respondents said they have an unhealthy relationship with their phone, compared to 74 percent for other generations, according to the 2024 BePresent Digital Wellness Report. Similarly, 72 percent of Gen Z members surveyed in a 2025 study by Harmony Healthcare IT said that their mental health would improve if apps were “less addictive.” This year’s Pinterest Summer Trend Report found that the searches on the platform for “digital detox vision board” were trending up by 273 percent.
Still, the act of being active, for many, necessitates posting on TikTok or Instagram, which you might say is antithetical to the whole distraction-free concept of locking in. The locked-in lifestyle falls into a broader category of popular aspirational content online that, following the Covid-19 pandemic, revolves mainly around wellness and fitness. There’s social-media capital in looking like someone who is locked in.
So what is locking in actually inspiring young people to do with their lives? You’d think the point of getting off your phone would be to engage in human connection. But Gen Z has built a reputation for being the loneliest generation, with higher isolation rates than millennials and Gen X-ers, due in part to pandemic lockdowns and heavier reliance on social media. An uncertain economy is also keeping Gen Z stuck in a permanent cocoon.
Locking in defies previous stereotypes we’ve held about Gen Z and its relationship to work. Gen Z is far from lazy — rather, studies have found that Gen Z has a different perspective on their professional lives than what grind culture taught millennials. Zoomers are more focused on creating work–life balance than climbing the corporate ladder, with only 6 percent saying that attaining a leadership position is a primary career goal, according to a 2025 Deloitte survey. A LinkedIn study also found that Gen Z was the most likely generation to reject jobs that don’t offer flexible work policies. But just because Gen Z isn’t as eager to devote themselves to a company doesn’t mean they aren’t busy.
“Gen Z isn’t more obsessed with productivity, but rather, obsessed with productivity in a different context,” says Kate Lindsay, co-founder of the newsletter Embedded and co-host of the podcast ICYMI. “Anecdotally, millennials enjoy being productive in relation to their career, whereas Gen Z is more focused on productivity as self-improvement — ‘locking in,’ ‘glowing up,’ etc.”
Lindsay sees locking in as a response to our resting state becoming “very passive.” “We’re scrolling, we’re binging, we’re bed-rotting,” she said. “Locking in is a way of kick-starting ourselves out of that and into a state that’s more active.”
This focus on self-improvement can be explained by a labor market that has become highly competitive for young people following the Covid-19 pandemic, including a declining number of entry-level jobs due to AI. A Bank of America Institute report found that over 13 percent of unemployed Americans this past July were “new entrants” or those without prior work experience, a group that “skews toward Gen Z.”
While “locking in” can appear like a shallow venture to some, it allows people to “feel in control of their lives in an economy that seemingly offers little security,” according to freelance writer and editor Chiara Wilkinson, who covered “The Great Lock In” in British Vogue.
“Many of the promises we were sold in the traditional narrative of growing up now seem out of reach for the vast majority of the population,” Wilkinson told me. “Factors like crippling student debt, rising house prices, inflation, and bleak graduate prospects — especially as AI threatens entry-level jobs — have left many Gen Z-ers unsatisfied with the current state of play.”
In its most radical interpretation, locking in seems like a way to fight back against tech companies that have shortened our attention spans and degraded our social lives. However, in its most common use, the locking-in trend shows Gen Z pursuing an endless cycle of self-improvement that doesn’t offer a fix to any of their generation’s problems.
You have to wonder: With all these rule-based attempts to improve their lives, is Gen Z factoring in fun?
“So much of Gen Z’s worldview is shaped by economic anxiety, and many can feel uneasy when they’re not being productive,” Wilkinson says. “The current economic structures might make ‘having fun’ difficult. Even ‘free’ fun, like going for a walk, or hanging at a mate’s house, comes with a degree of trade-off.”
For now, it seems like “locking in” is simply a way to get by, not necessarily a way to get better. We’ll know that life for Gen Z has finally improved when they don’t have to try as hard.
2025-10-08 18:00:00
There’s a bizarrely opaque, oddly modern question hovering over the legacy of Jane Austen. And despite centuries of debate, scholars still haven’t been able to figure out how to answer it.
Jane Austen lived under the rule of a slave-trading empire. What did she think about that? And if we could figure out what someone so smart and morally conscious thought about life in a colonizing power, what would that tell us about how ordinary people make their peace with living with an atrocity?
One scene in particular is key to this debate. It comes in Austen’s third published novel, 1814’s Mansfield Park. Today, Mansfield Park is one of Austen’s least-loved books. Nonetheless, it is her only book to feature characters discussing slavery without using it as a metaphor for something else — and, upon a close reading, the whole book is riddled with references to the slave trade and the slave economy.
The scene in question features the novel’s heroine, poor and downtrodden Fanny Price, talking with her cousin and love interest Edmund Bertram about his father, stern Sir Thomas Bertram.
Fanny is a little afraid of Sir Thomas, who took her into his lavish country home when she was 10 years old as an act of charity. Fanny is now in her late teens, and both Sir Thomas and Edmund know her to be the most upright and moral member of their household — but Sir Thomas is so forbidding, and Fanny so convinced of her social inferiority to her wealthy relations, that she rarely speaks to him of her own volition.
The scene begins with Edmund telling Fanny she should talk to Sir Thomas more. Then Fanny, out of apparently nowhere, starts talking about slavery: “[…]Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?”
“I did — and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.”
“And I longed to do it — but there was such a dead silence! And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like — I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.”
What, literary critics have demanded, is that scene doing in Mansfield Park? Does it have anything to do with why Mansfield Park is such a strange, sad, moralizing novel? What do we make of that “dead silence” that answered Fanny’s question? Is this how normal people talked about slavery at the time? Is it how Austen talked about slavery? What did she think of it? What did other people think of it? Most urgently of all: What horrible things are we treating as polite dinner table conversation without realizing it?
I’ve been thinking a lot about Jane Austen and Mansfield Park over the last few weeks, as President Donald Trump announced his intention to excise from the Smithsonian museums all references to slavery that he finds objectionable, and as conservatives promote educational materials that minimize the effects of slavery on America’s history.
Some scholars argue that Mansfield Park is Austen’s apologia for slavery. The first time I came across that reading, in college, I was depressed by it, in the same way that I was depressed when I learned about the Founding Fathers being slave owners.
Austen has such a clear, precise moral vision: You can hear it ticking through her fiction like clockwork. How awful, I thought, if someone who thought so carefully about what was ethical and what was pleasurable was able to talk herself into internalizing the logic of empire to the point that it warped the very machinery of her novels. What a disappointment. I had the instinct to try to forget Mansfield Park even existed, to bury it away, like the Trump administration demanding the Smithsonian stop talking about slavery so much. It had never been my favorite of Austen’s books, anyway.
But literary scholars aren’t looking for references to slavery in Mansfield Park to try to prove that it is a sinful book that must be forgotten. They are looking for those references to try to figure out how the citizens of the British Empire thought about the terrible acts that were committed in their name, the acts that brought them so much wealth and power. Looking at those thought processes with clear eyes helps us understand how the human mind is capable of deceiving itself — and what we might be deceiving ourselves about too, here at the other end of history.
To modern readers, Mansfield Park is a strange book in Austen’s beloved oeuvre. Among its more fashionable sisters — sparkling Pride and Prejudice, melancholy Persuasion, clever Emma, bitchy Northanger Abbey, and sweet Sense and Sensibility — Mansfield Park is the Mary Bennet of the crowd. It reads as lugubrious, scolding, and far too moralistic to be any fun.
While Mansfield Park has gone through periods of approbation — the Austen scholar Devoney Looser notes that by the 1830s, male readers were particularly fond of it — it seems to have puzzled its first audience, too. The rest of Austen’s six novels were all covered by contemporary literary periodicals as soon as they were published, but Mansfield Park went six years without a single review. Austen’s records showed she asked her family what they thought of it, and her mother said that Fanny was “insipid.”
In 1954, the literary critic Lionel Trilling spoke for many when he described Mansfield Park as the only novel of Austen’s “in which the characteristic irony” could not be found. “Perhaps no other work of genius has ever spoken, or seemed to speak, so insistently for cautiousness and constraint, even for dullness,” he went on, adding, “Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park.”
Fanny Price is indeed a tough pill to swallow. While Austen’s other heroes are spirited, funny, and attractively willing to break with convention when it suits them, Cinderella-like Fanny Price is anxious, solemn, and aligns herself with conventional morality. Her moral goodness is, indeed, her only real strength. Physically she is so frail that she is overcome by gathering a basketful of roses, and emotionally she is so unwilling to stand up for herself that she spends her rare free time in a room kept frigidly cold, because she cannot bear to ask for a fire to be lit for her.
But Fanny, alone of all her wise and wealthy relations, is able to hold onto her moral courage even when it is inconvenient and unpleasant to do so. Her cousins are all seduced by the rich and charismatic Henry Crawford. So is the reader, who can recognize a bad boy ready to be redeemed by the love of a good woman as soon as he strides onto the page, quoting Shakespeare and talking about how he thinks he might be ready to give up his wickedness. Only Fanny looks at Henry, so anguished and so witty, and sees a cad.
In the end, Fanny is proven right to refuse Henry. He runs away with her married cousin, Maria. Fanny, in turn, marries the upright Edmund, the only Bertram who was ever kind to her, and ultimately lives out the rest of her life as an honored figure on the grounds of Mansfield Park. We may find it hard to love Fanny, but Austen directs us to notice that she is, in the end, correct, and rewarded for her correctness, too. Even if Edmund is much less charming and way more priggish than Henry.
Throughout the novel, the wealth of Mansfield Park stands as the redemptive factor that will save Fanny Price: luxurious, beautiful wealth, which takes her out of the wretched squalor of her parents’ house and into the withholding ease of the estate. And where does this wealth come from? It comes from Sir Thomas Bertram’s holdings in Antigua — which is to say, it comes from a sugar plantation worked by enslaved people.
The first critic to truly grapple with the problem of Sir Thomas’s slave holdings was the great postcolonialist critic Edward Said, in his classic 1994 essay “Jane Austen and Empire.” Said argued that because Austen lived in a slave-holding colonizing state, the ideology of empire inflected her worldview and fiction in ways that felt so natural as to slide under not only her notice but the notice of her readers.
In Mansfield Park, the Bertrams bring their niece Fanny to live with them partially out of a genuine desire to help the impoverished relative, and partially out of convenience. A girl like Fanny, they feel, could be a help around the house. In 1994, Said argued that the worldview that would import a poor relation into a person’s country estate is the same worldview that could lead a nation to export their agricultural work to a colony worked by enslaved people.
“I think Austen sees what Fanny does as a domestic or small-scale movement in space that corresponds to the larger, more openly colonial movements of Sir Thomas, her mentor, the man whose estate she inherits,” Said wrote. “The two movements depend on each other.”
This was one of the essays in which Said essentially invented postcolonialist literary criticism, or the idea of reading literature with a focus on the effects of colonialism. It was hugely influential and is still taught in colleges. A central part of his argument was that slavery formed a sort of lacuna in Austen’s tale, a pointedly ignored hole that spoke to a shameful guilt.
“All the evidence says that even the most routine aspects of holding slaves on a West Indian sugar plantation were cruel stuff. And everything we know about Austen and her values is at odds with the cruelty of slavery,” Said wrote. He thought the key to understanding how Austen made her peace with the contradiction lay in that famous scene where Fanny asks about the slave trade, and is met with “such a dead silence” — as though, Said wrote, “one world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both.”
For Said, reading Mansfield Park while paying special attention to the source of Sir Thomas’s wealth was a radical attack of redirecting one’s attention, of refusing to cover up an inconvenient truth, just as Fanny does when she refuses Henry Crawford.
In the time since Said’s essay, however, scholars have begun to make the case that Austen wasn’t being quite so silent on the problem of slavery as she appears to contemporary readers.
When Austen published Mansfield Park in 1814, slavery was central to the British economy. It was a politically charged topic, and the newly enshrined aristocrat who owes their fortune to the slave trade was a known type. As ever is the case with new money, established gentry tended to sneer at them as coarse, unrefined, and — in this case, truthfully — inextricably intertwined with a moral atrocity.
Some scholars read the Bertram family as Austen parodying this prominent new type. Lady Bertram’s indolent carelessness, the relaxed morals of her daughters, their casual dependence on the imported labor of their ill-treated cousin: All this is a send-up of the slave-owning aristocratic class. Toward the end of the book, we even learn that the adulterous Maria Bertram has taken over a house previously owned by the Lascelleses, a prominent family of slave plantation owners of the same type Austen may have been parodying with the Bertrams.
The reference becomes more pointed with the repeated invocation of names associated with the slave trade and with abolition. Mansfield Park itself shares a name with William Murray, first earl of Mansfield, an aristocratic judge with a mixed-race adopted daughter. Lord Mansfield famously ruled in 1772 that it was illegal to transport a slave out of England and Wales against his or her will, a landmark decision that paved the way for the abolition of the slave trade.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Norris, Fanny’s most miserly and wicked aunt, shares a name with the infamous slave trader Robert Norris, a man whose venal sadism made him the villain in a book of history Austen said in her letters she read and admired.
Throughout the novel, Sir Thomas journeys back and forth between Mansfield Park and his holdings in Antigua, where he must set right some never-specified trouble that apparently involves his slaves.
In her recent book Wild for Austen, Looser sums up the debate: “To some readers, the fact that Sir Thomas isn’t explicitly damned for that quest, by any character or the narrator, suggests Austen must be pro-slavery. Others conclude the opposite: that the sordid, selfish doings of powerful white people at Mansfield Park…are meant to make readers connect these characters’ deep flaws to their ill-begotten colonial wealth. As is characteristic of her fiction, Austen raises these difficult moral and political questions, then doesn’t tell her readers what to do or think. It’s bewildering by design.”
Austen left behind no clear account of her feelings about slavery in her surviving papers. But Austen was a very moral writer, and even Said thought that it was unlikely that she was in favor of slavery.
In Wild for Austen, Looser provides a fair amount of historical context that suggests Austen was probably in favor of abolition of the slave trade. Austen wrote in a letter that she had just finished a book by an abolitionist historian and found herself “in love” with the author. Three of her brothers were active abolitionist activists after her death, implying the Austens had a family history of anti-slavery thought. Further, as Fuller points out, women of Austen’s education and social class at the time were overwhelmingly likely to be abolitionists, in the same way that highly educated young women today are overwhelmingly likely to be liberal.
But if Austen was against slavery, why is it so hard to tell that from Mansfield Park?
One prominent theory, recently espoused by the author Lauren Groff in the New York Times, is that Austen wrote Mansfield Park with encoded anti-slavery messages, the better to foil censorious readers. Groff quotes the literary critic Helena Kelly, author of the 2017 book Jane Austen the Secret Radical, who argues that in the early 19th century, Austen was writing under what we should understand today as a totalitarian state.
To that end, Kelly approaches Austen’s novels with the spirit of an amateur detective with a decoder ring. She makes much of the appearance of an apricot tree of the Moor Park variety (“Is it just coincidence that it’s the same word Shakespeare uses to describe the ethnicity of black Africans and that ‘Moor Park’ echoes ‘Mansfield Park’?”), and she argues that when Fanny Price hangs a cross pendant on a gold chain gifted to her by the clergyman Edmund, Austen has provided us with a symbol that is “clear as daylight.” The chain, Kelly writes, represents slavery. The cross represents the Church of England.
“It’s the Church of England that is tainted; the Church that taints,” she writes. The Church of England, like other wealthy institutions of the day, was heavily invested in slave plantations. As such, Kelly theorizes that Austen wrote Mansfield Park with the aim of castigating the Church for its hypocrisy.
Other scholars, meanwhile, note that Austen’s contemporary peers wrote plenty of non-coded books that deal explicitly with slavery, and they don’t appear to have been arrested or tortured by the government for their daring.
“Discussion of the West Indies and slavery was a cornerstone of even educational fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,” the scholar George E. Boulukos wrote in 2006. “Far from avoiding these issues so prominent in political and journalistic discourse, fiction considered them educational, topical, and even fashionable subjects.”
Another theory — and I must confess I find this one most convincing — is that Austen wrote from a perspective in favor of abolishing the slave trade, but for keeping slavery itself. This position was a surprisingly ubiquitous “moderate” stance in her era, a kind of attempt at finding reasonable common ground.
The idea was that while it was surely immoral to kidnap free-born people away from their homes and treat them as chattel, slavery itself was too entrenched in Britain’s economy to be reasonably outlawed. In that case, as long as a slave owner was merciful and humane to the enslaved people he owned, and he wasn’t enslaving anyone who wasn’t born into the system, then he was fulfilling his moral duty.
This theory helps make sense of why, in that dinner scene, Fanny and Edmund both think the slave-owning Sir Thomas was happy to hear Fanny ask questions about the slave trade: They could probably all agree that the trade of free-born people was wrong. “We are left with the sense that Fanny sees Sir Thomas’s trip to Antigua as fulfilling his moral obligation to ensure the humane treatment of his slaves,” Boulukos wrote.
In this reading, Austen is neither a shamefully repressed apolitical slave apologist, as Said argued, nor a secret abolitionist radical, as Kelly suggested. Instead, she’s a hypocritical centrist of a type who was all too common in her moment.
Ultimately, though, all this is theorizing. We don’t really know either way. We probably never will.
It really is so tempting to simply reject Mansfield Park. I never particularly liked the novel, and I never liked prim, preaching Fanny Price either. If I could simply discard her as a symbol of empire, and Mansfield Park as a novel irrevocably damaged by its moment, I could have the rest of Austen and her undeniable genius to myself.
Annoyingly, that’s the very trap that Mansfield Park warns us clearly against, in a way you don’t need a PhD in 19th-century abolitionist discourse to parse.
Every single character in that book except for Fanny is willing to embrace charming Henry Crawford and his sister, witty Mary, despite all the red flags suggesting that they aren’t overly bothered about other people’s pain. It’s almost as impossible to read Mansfield Park and not like the Crawfords, all their faults be damned, as Lionel Trilling said it was to read Mansfield Park and like dour, insipid Fanny.
Yet the second Fanny turns down Henry Crawford, the energy around her in the text seems to crackle. For the first time, there is something compelling about her, something that draws us in. When she tells Sir Thomas, through tears, that she would not be refusing Henry “if it were possible for me to do otherwise…but I am so perfectly convinced that I could never make him happy, and that I should be miserable myself,” there seems to be an electric strength of character about her that no one else in this novel has, not even the Crawfords.
Part of the project of postcolonial literary criticism is to use old literature to understand how people who lived within morally depraved institutions thought about those institutions for themselves. Whatever Mansfield Park has to say about slavery, it answers that question very clearly. The awful message of Mansfield Park is that we mistake charm and intelligence for true moral fiber at our peril, and that people who are good when it is convenient for them to be so may not continue to do what is right when it interferes with their pleasure.
Supporting something awful when it is fully integrated into the economic and political system in which you live is very convenient. Choosing to work against it requires real strength of character. Plenty of charming, likable people throughout history have done that math and come out on the side of keeping dead silent about an atrocity.
So we don’t know for sure, in the end, what Jane Austen really thought about slavery and empire. She chose her words too carefully for us to be able to tell. What we can see very clearly, nonetheless, is what she thought about doing something that you know to be wrong, because it’s too difficult or inconvenient to do otherwise.
Correction, October 8, 5 pm ET: A previous version of this story misstated the ownership of Mansfield Park at the end of the novel.
2025-10-08 06:00:00
Tariffs. United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. National Guard deployments. The Epstein Files. Strikes on Iran. Gaza and Ukraine. Sticky inflation. The first year of President Donald Trump’s second time in office has been a firehose of unpopular policies, confrontational tactics, and frequent clashes with his perceived enemies.
Each of these developments has tended to trigger the same question: Will any of this matter to the voters who made up his winning coalition in 2024? Will he bleed support, fracture his coalition, and doom future Republicans? Or was 2024 a more durable realignment in American politics?
The answer isn’t as clear-cut as headlines often make it out to be. There has been some slippage in support among Trump’s 2024 voting coalition, but it’s not the GOP doomsday scenario some headlines have tended to make it out to be (for example, saying that the coalition has “fallen apart”).
Similar cases were made after Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs, after American strikes on Iran, after the Epstein Files took over headlines, and as Trump began to enforce his immigration policies and carry out deportations. Yet, through it all, this summer and entering fall, his popularity and approval ratings have remained steady — negative, historically low, but still not a complete collapse.
So, what can we tell about the state of Trump’s 2024 coalition? At least three things:
It’s important to be clear about what we mean when we talk about Trump’s coalition. It includes the loyal MAGA base: primarily white, rural, and non-college educated. And it includes a broad swath of new voters that gave him the margins to narrowly win the popular vote and battleground states: young and nonwhite voters, specifically young men, and former Democrats who were disgruntled with the establishment and status quo. These newer Trump voters weren’t hardcore conservatives or loyal Republicans, but they were disengaged, dissatisfied, and desired change.
Almost a year later, the majority of this coalition still stands by Trump. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll, one of the most useful tools we have available, finds little change in how people feel about the president today when compared to four months ago. From April to September, Trump’s share of support has held steady at about 42 to 43 percent.
In other words, some 40 percent of the country approves of Trump’s presidency through every controversy and pronouncement, while a slight majority continuously disapproves. That approving minority includes more than nine in 10 Republicans, a little under a third of Hispanic voters, and about half of voters over the age of 45.
Still, the data we have available shows that not all is well. By looking at both presidential approval ratings, generic congressional ballot polling, and economic sentiment, a clear picture emerges of dropping support among young people and Latino voters because of sour economic vibes.
“He has lost more ground among the people he gained the most ground with last year — young people and Hispanics,” Elliott Morris, a data journalist who runs the publication Strength in Numbers, told me. By Morris’s estimates, there’s been about a 30 percentage point swing in approval among these voters away from Trump when compared to his margins of victory — meaning something is shifting among this segment of the electorate.
The NYT/Siena poll captures some of this, too. Trump’s youth support is shockingly low. Only 30 percent approve of him, compared to the 66 percent who disapprove. His Latino support is similar: Only 26 percent approve, and 69 percent disapprove. Those numbers stand in stark contrast to Trump’s 2024 performance, when he nearly won young and Latino voters outright last year.
Comparing generic congressional ballot polling also shows a shift of these voters away from Republicans toward Democrats, Lakshya Jain, the head of political data at The Argument, told me. “Where are Democrats gaining the most with voters right now compared to where they stood in 2024? The thing you’re consistently seeing is [gains] with young voters [and] Hispanics,” Jain said.
Morris estimates this generic ballot shift among both groups at about 10 points away from Republicans — not as dramatic as the approval figures, but still significant.
And the reasons for this drop-off, Morris and Jain both tell me, are primarily economic and incumbent-related. These voters who swung to Trump in 2024 were most sensitive to economic conditions — to inflation, to price hikes, to affordability — and continue to feel negatively about the economy today.
“It’s the economy. Perceptions are negative, people are unhappy, and people think Trump is not focusing the most on the economy,” Jain said.
In 2024, Trump benefited from being on the outside; disgruntled voters had the option of rejecting the status quo by voting for him. This year, Morris told me, they don’t have that option. Their frustration is manifesting as disapproval of Trump.
“A lot of these voters didn’t vote for Donald Trump because he was Donald Trump, but because of the economy,” Morris said. “This apparent shifting of these groups away from Trump is less of a political statement about Trump and more of a reaction to underlying economic conditions. In other words, they are not really pro-Trump or anti-Trump — they are anti-status quo.”
This is the longer-term danger for the GOP. Many voters in the Trump coalition were upset enough to vote against the Democratic incumbents of 2024 — but if they remain dissatisfied, Republicans might not be able to count on them come 2026.
Correction, October 7, 5:45 pm ET: This story originally misstated the most recent youth approval rate for President Donald Trump; it was at 30 percent in a September NYT/Siena poll.