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One afternoon at the start of April, I am on my way home from an errand when my legs seize up; they are suddenly so stiff that walking feels impossible. Standing on the sidewalk, I call my husband. Luckily, he is working at home and comes to get me. Hanging on to him, I am able to shuffle the last two blocks.

In the E.R. at NewYork-Presbyterian, a couple of hours later, while I wait to be seen by the neurologist on call, I watch a middle-aged mother fussing over her twentysomething daughter, who seems to be suffering from a similar affliction. The mother is clearly a person of means, and she badgers the nursing staff about when her daughter’s private room will be ready. Her sense of entitlement is irksome; nevertheless, I’m impressed by her devotion to her daughter.

Her overbearing presence takes me back almost twenty-eight years, to a week I spent at this very hospital being treated for multiple sclerosis. My mother came to see me once. She announced that my father had parked illegally, so they couldn’t stay long. Like the mother in the E.R., she was devoted, but she never could deal with illness or adversity. I am glad, this time, to have my youngest daughter, who is seventeen and fiercely competent, with me.

“It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backward,” Kierkegaard sagely wrote in his journal, in 1843. “But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forward.”

Since my mobility became impaired in April, however, it has sometimes felt as if I were living backward, too—perhaps because learning to walk is regarded as one of the most significant developmental milestones in the life of an infant. At the same time, my health crisis has seemed entirely of the moment, at least the political one. Just as a plurality of American voters in 2024 knowingly elected an Administration that is intent on crippling everything that has made the U.S. the envy of other nations, my immune system, in the throes of M.S., has directed B and T cells to attack the myelin sheath that insulates the nerve fibers of my central nervous system, impeding my functionality and triggering weakness and pain.

I am still trying to make sense of it all.

The last time my legs gave out on me, I was a month shy of my twenty-eighth birthday. Back then, system failure occurred in the space of twenty-four hours. On waking one morning, I found that a swarm of pins and needles had seemingly replaced a limb that had been sturdy the day before. When I tried to put weight on my left leg, it felt as if there was nothing to hold me up. Soon, the sensation of numbness spread up the entire left side of my body.

An MRI detected a small lesion on my brain stem. After a spinal tap confirmed my neurologist’s suspicions, I was provisionally diagnosed with a clinically isolated episode, which is often the first presentation of M.S.

Two months later, my paralysis lifted as mysteriously as it had appeared. Follow-up MRIs during the next several years showed no new lesions on my brain or my spine. At some point, my neurologist sent me out of his office and into the world with the dictum “Go enjoy your life.” (Since disease-modifying treatments have emerged and neurologists have come to understand that clinically isolated episodes are nearly always indicative of M.S., this advice is no longer given.)

I did my best. And, eventually, so many symptom-free years had gone by that my diagnosis began to seem like just one more zany tale from my careening twenties.

M.S. had so thoroughly vanished from my mind as a concern—or, really, I had so successfully buried the memory of it—that late last winter, when I began to feel a sharp pain running up the back of my left leg as I lay in bed, my first instinct was to book an appointment with a sports-medicine doctor.

When that doctor’s MRI of my lumbar spine showed little of clinical interest, however—and then my leg began to weaken—it all felt strangely inevitable. Like Freud’s return of the repressed. Or maybe Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Past.

By the time I found myself stranded on a Brooklyn street, it seemed as if the ghost had reappeared to point out not my miserliness but my foolishness for ever having believed that I was O.K.

For decades, I.V. steroid infusions have been the standard treatment for M.S. relapses. These are supposed to speed up one’s recovery from symptoms.

While I am on the receiving end of the first of three infusions, the woman in the chair to my left orders (and receives and consumes) three bags of food from Grubhub. The woman to my right, who uses a wheelchair, has fallen asleep and is snoring. Keen to separate myself from the suffering and abjection around me, as if I were merely an interloper and not an active participant, I put in my earbuds and cue up the new album by Lucy Dacus.

A few nights earlier, I had limped through Radio City Music Hall with my daughter, to see Dacus perform. We’d purchased tickets months ahead of time, and I didn’t want to disappoint her. But dread had become a constant companion whenever I embarked on an outing that wasn’t close to home. Like a swimmer who has ventured out too far, I feared that I wouldn’t have the strength to return to shore and would panic. Above all, I feared panic itself, to the extent that it became hard to differentiate between central-nervous-system dysfunction and cortisol response. (As it happened, I made it through the concert without issue, but, hemmed in by hundreds of concertgoers on a subway platform afterward, I didn’t think I would survive the trip home.)

When I complete the infusion, a heroically effervescent nurse warns me with a laugh that I may be buzzing around my house at 4 a.m., frantically cleaning out my closet. On the way home, I type “intravenous steroid side effects” into Google—and learn that the list includes headache, dizziness, changes in personality, bulging eyes, and “inappropriate happiness.” I find myself wondering if it’s ever inappropriate to be happy. Shouldn’t all opportunities for such be embraced, especially at a time like this?

Conversely, I ask myself if it is appropriate for me to be unhappy. Do I even have that right? After all, I made it more than twenty-seven years without any flareups. From a certain angle, I am one of the lucky ones.

And, yet, in recent months, I have felt terribly unlucky. Why me? I keep thinking.

On the one hand, I am aware of having purposefully carved out a life that allows me to spend most of my waking hours at home, with my laptop and books. On the other hand, even before the onset of symptoms earlier this year, I had been feeling ashamed of how small and—in both economic and literary terms—unproductive my life had become. My sudden disablement feels like a manifestation of my old fear that, while others forge ahead with their travels and triumphs, I am, per usual, Going Nowhere.

In my mid-twenties, I had a boyfriend who used to order for me in restaurants. “She’ll have the roast chicken,” he’d tell the waiter. I recognized that this was problematic. But, somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to protest. Back then, the whole business of adult life seemed beyond my skill set.

Another part of me believed that I was too busy writing important works of literature to concern myself with the mundane details of daily life, like what to eat for dinner.

Although I’ve become far more self-sufficient in the decades since, my husband still accuses me of “learned helplessness.” He isn’t entirely wrong. I haven’t yet figured out how to use our smart TV. Although I maintain an up-to-date New York State license, I never drive. The mere sight of IKEA instruction manuals causes my eyes to glaze over, to say nothing of home COVID tests.

Since becoming involuntarily reliant on others during this relapse, however, I’ve found that dependency has lost its allure.

A few days after my first steroid infusion, I find that I can lift my left leg off the ground again. But, after that, progress appears to stall, then reverse itself. In mid-May, I can hardly make it to the end of my block.

Around the same time, I receive a pinging alert from my iPhone, warning me that my daily step count has dropped precipitously. On several days in the past few weeks, the recorded count was actually zero. I have never received a message from my fitness app before, and it leaves me startled and defensive. As if my sudden turn to sedentariness were the result of indolence, not infirmity. “It’s not my fault!” I want to protest, but I would only be replying to tracking software.

Disablement is just one item on the M.S. menu of misery. I have also been suffering from other common symptoms, including tingling, numbness, and spasticity. It is difficult to describe the latter sensation, but to attempt to walk in the throes of spasticity is to feel as if bags of topsoil had been strapped to the back of your knees. Chronic neuropathic pain, however, is the most unwelcome of all the interlopers. Sometimes, it descends on the area above my left ankle. Minutes later, like a fly that evades swatting, it will crop back up on the outside of my thigh—or switch sides and attack my right toes or knee.

In search of relief, I book an appointment with an acupuncturist.

With off-putting brusqueness, the acupuncturist sticks needles into my head and left leg, leaves the room—and appears to forget all about me. After forty-five minutes, despite the piped-in lute music, I become suddenly anxious. “Hello?” I call out. And then, “Hello?!”

No one answers. I try again, louder this time, and with panic building.

Finally, the acupuncturist returns to the room and apologizes. “I should have gotten to you first. I lost track of time.”

To be fair, she isn’t the only one. Lately, I seem to have lost track of everything—sometimes even what day of the week it is. My cycling and ever-changing symptoms keep directing my attention back to my body, making it difficult to concentrate on anything else.

Or, at least, anything except the latest horrific headline.

In between bouts of doomscrolling, I have been asking ChatGPT questions about my condition, then feeling vaguely queasy about having done so. I fear the practice fuels obsessional thinking on my part. It also feels akin to cheating. After all, members of the medical community spend years accumulating expertise. They examine us in person. Their conclusions are likely to be far more reliable than A.I.’s “educated” guesses.

But doctors are busy people, especially those who work at research hospitals and rely on insurance payments. And, especially in unclear cases like mine, A.I. tantalizes with both its endless availability and the promise, however illusory, of uncovering the hidden causes and mechanisms that mere mortals might have missed.

It goes even beyond that. To be human is to be needy, and to seek affirmation and solace. Between medical appointments, it can seem as if the chatbot, which is programmed to preface its conclusions with expressions of empathy and concern, is the only one that cares. “That is a very difficult and frustrating situation, and you’re asking a completely valid question. Here’s a breakdown,” it replies to one of my queries.

I also suspect that I am asking “Dr. Chat,” as my friend E. calls it, to play the same role that, in my twentieth-century childhood, Ouija boards and Magic 8 Balls did—that is, to predict the future. Really, all my questions are variations on the same question: Am I going to get better?

Of course, no one can predict the future, not even A.I. But some part of me wishes that the bot would skip the faux humanity and the bullet points, and—like the analog, mid-century Magic 8 Ball—simply reply with a blue-lettered, triangle-framed “OUTLOOK GOOD.”

Here is something else that makes us human: vanity.

In truth, I used to be quite vain about my legs. (Once, my long legs seemed like compensation for my flat chest.) I was especially pleased with them during my first years in New York City. Having read Jean Stein’s oral history of the Warhol Factory starlet Edie Sedgwick, “Edie: American Girl,” I became captivated by her glittering, if tragic, life—and, in homage, began pairing vintage A-line minidresses with black tights.

These days, I’d rather admire the faces and forms of my daughters than contemplate my own increasingly etiolated reflection in the mirror. But vanity hasn’t completely abandoned me. I haven’t stopped fretting over my perceived visual flaws, and every so often I am disappointed to find anew that strangers no longer look at me twice.

At the same time, invisibility has come as a relief, insofar as my vanity always kept company with self-consciousness and self-flagellation.

Nevertheless, when a new neurologist describes my brain as “beautiful” while examining my MRI images, I admit to feeling pathetically flattered. She seems especially impressed with a series of squiggly, inchworm-like lines, which, I am told, represent my blood vessels.

At my age, one takes compliments where one finds them.

But, even if my brain is still beautiful, I can’t help thinking that it, like my legs, has betrayed me. More generally, I have never been so aware of the inadequacy of the crooked straitjackets in which we remain imprisoned for life. Why didn’t evolution produce a more dependable version of the human body, less prone to malfunction and decay? I wonder.

It is a head trip to think that this very sentence you are reading, and maybe even my willingness to share personal medical details, may, in some minor way, be informed by demyelination in my frontal lobe, an area believed to affect planning, decision-making, and memory. (Recent MRIs of my brain illuminated two “inactive” lesions in my frontal periventricular white matter, confirming my M.S. diagnosis.)

At one medical appointment, a doctor asks if I have been experiencing any cognitive issues. I try to recall if I have, and cannot come up with any instances. But what if my memory itself is compromised? I later worry.

Still, there have been upsides to the resurgence of my disease: I currently possess a foolproof excuse not to show up at anyone’s readings, screenings, concerts, parties, picnics, benefits, and religious ceremonies, should I not feel like attending. The same goes for answering anyone’s e-mails or texts in a timely fashion. For the moment at least, no one can accuse me of being self-absorbed and neglectful, either. (For most of my life, I have lived in fear of people being angry at me.)

What’s more, I have nearly conquered my claustrophobia. Or, at least, the version that, twenty-seven years ago, rendered me unable to get into an MRI scanner tube without an intravenous tranquillizer. I have my routine down these days: five milligrams of diazepam thirty minutes prior; eye mask thirty seconds before (no peeking allowed).

During the myriad MRIs that I have had this year—the last one went on for a delirium-inducing hour and forty-five minutes—I have squeezed the panic button only once. Suddenly overheated, I became aware of the cage over my face. Thankfully, the technician responded quickly, sliding me out of the crypt, removing my blanket, and reassuring me that I was “doing great,” before sliding me back in.

As if lying there playing dead while gradient coils conjure an otherworldly racket that best mimics a mashup of jackhammers and Philip Glass were an admirable skill. (Maybe it is?)

Another positive to my malaise: I have been touched and amazed to discover all over again what wonderful friends and family I have. They are constantly writing to see how I’m doing, coming over to visit, bearing food and drink, picking me up in their cars, and taking me for drives.

In honor of my semi-invalid status, I have also cracked open the first volume of Lydia Davis’s translation of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” So far, I admit to wishing that our frail young hero would buck up a little. But I am only fifty pages in.

Finally, the return of M.S. has offered a welcome reprieve from the pressure to achieve—pressure that has dogged me since I was a child and which is inevitably accompanied by a sense of failure at not having achieved more.

At least for now, my main goal is simply to get better.

Though, as my friend A. recently pointed out, I now have an opportunity to write the world’s first work of autoimmune autofiction. Or should it just be called autoimmunefiction? She even has a title in mind for me: “Life Lesions.”

It feels so good to laugh. . .

Even so, my mood craters at least once per day.

One evening, I ask E. if she thinks my life is over. “Absolutely not,” she replies. I can still read, write, and host dinner parties. Also, I have a supportive husband. “Lots of men would leave,” she adds.

“Really?” I say, somehow shocked by the assertion.

“There are so many assholes out there,” E. insists. “But he wants to take care of you.”

Later, I repeat the “assholes” line to my husband, and we laugh about that, too.

But I can’t stop thinking that some part of him must actually want to leave me. For several days, I keep expressing this idea out loud, until he finally gets pissed and tells me never to say it again.

As I ponder my life, it seems somehow accidental that I ended up married to such a good and loyal person; he does not even order for me in restaurants.

Moreover, when one is unwell, it becomes even more apparent that what matters most is love, and the rest is largely noise.

Insofar as no “active” lesions were found on any of my MRIs, my neurologist now thinks that I might have suffered not a classic M.S. relapse but a reactivation (or “recrudescence”) of quarter-century-old scar tissue in my brain stem, possibly set off by an infection, even though the original lesion is now too small to show up on standard imaging. She sees no evidence of progressive disease, and continues to predict further improvement.

Another neurologist, whom I consulted for a second opinion, thinks, however, that I am in the initial stage of secondary progressive M.S., in which new lesions are not always a feature.

Half a year later, I have seen big improvements in my walking. At the beginning of summer, for the first time in months, my daily step count surpassed a mile. More recently, I clocked a three-mile day. “I can tell you’re feeling better, because you’ve started complaining about me again,” my husband says. Some days, I feel nearly like my old self; others, less so. The pain, tingling, and spasticity have also eased, though they continue to come and go according to an inexplicable schedule of their own making.

In M.S. more generally, the question marks are legion. Not only are relapses unpredictable but scientists have yet to explain the slow and insidious degeneration that often occurs even without new lesions. Given the disease’s wide range of trajectories and manifestations—from mild and manageable to severely disabling—some now regard it as a group of diseases, rather than a single one. With M.S., the only certainty is uncertainty.

Maybe that’s what makes my diagnosis so psychologically challenging. It is difficult to mourn when one can’t even be sure what one has lost.

Despite everything that has happened, I try to remain hopeful—even when I feel hopeless and, like Proust’s narrator, wish to climb back under the covers and never get up again.

An electromyography test I underwent in May—imagine being zapped in the legs by an electrified fence for thirty straight minutes—confirmed that I don’t have A.L.S. At low moments, I remind myself of this fact.

And, in June, I began a newish disease-modifying treatment that uses monoclonal antibodies to deplete troublesome B cells in my body. Ideally, this will prevent new inflammation, and—with apologies to my insurer—it only costs nine grand per month. Clearly flagging me as a potential cash cow, representatives from the pharmaceutical company that manufactures the drug have been e-mailing, texting, calling (“Hey there! It’s Karen from Kesimpta . . .”), and sending me brochures and accessories: a “wellness notebook” featuring decorative stickers, an “on-the-go cooler” in which to store my injections. “YOU GOT THIS!” reads the flap of one envelope.

I feel like writing back, “I REALLY DON’T!”

But, thanks to all the rain last spring, the hydrangeas in my garden went mad over the summer. (Really, who in our current dystopia hasn’t done so?) And the blossoms were not just magnificent but a reminder of the possibility of renewal. To that effect, I have been working with a physical therapist to rebuild my strength and stamina. Swimming helps, too, I’ve found—especially in the sea, where my limbs feel as blissfully weightless as the silvery little fish darting around me.

For me, as for the country, deep in its own autoimmune-like illness, it seems, the best antidote to being laid low is to rise up. I can’t wait until I am well enough to march in the streets again. That, too, keeps me going. ♦

Toward the end of the 1954 film “On the Waterfront,” Marlon Brando’s character, Terry, makes one of the most famous speeches in the history of movies. The most often quoted line is “I could have been a contender,” but the full emotional impact of what he has to say hits just before it. Terry refuses to accept his older brother Charlie’s attempt to blame someone else for Terry’s failed boxing career. “It wasn’t him, Charlie. It was you,” Terry says. He recounts how, early on, Charlie told him to throw a critical match because the “smart money” (i.e., their mobster-like boss) had placed a bet on the other fighter. “You was my brother, Charlie,” Terry tells him. “You should’ve looked out for me a little bit. You should’ve taken care of me just a little bit, so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money.”

That expression of the corrosive damage done by the failure to protect people to whom we owe a duty has new resonance lately. In just the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has successfully pressured the Department of Justice to bring baseless criminal charges against the former F.B.I. director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom he perceives to be his political enemies, and he has threatened to arrest both the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois. Trump has ordered the National Guard into blue cities in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. His close adviser Stephen Miller has said that judges, prosecutors, and lawyers are protecting a movement of “leftwing terrorism,” and that “state power” should be used to dismantle “terror networks,” with the clear implication that those judges, prosecutors, and lawyers who oppose the Administration are part of those networks and should be punished accordingly. Then there are Trump’s long-term efforts to shred the Constitution, such as his executive order purporting to eliminate birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. Bedrock legal principles of prosecutorial independence, separation of powers, and rule of law have been shattered, and it’s not clear when, or even if, they can be restored.

A central goal of the first nine months of Trump’s second Administration has been to establish an unbridled and unopposed “unitary executive”—a fever dream of the far right which holds that the President has absolute authority over the entire executive branch, and that any independence of agencies or departments of the federal government is impermissible. It is obvious now, if it was only hypothetical in the early days of the second term, that achieving that goal requires making the Justice Department merely a tool of his political aims and forcing lawyers and judges to go along with his demands, or else.

It is worth considering how we got here, and whether we could have done anything to slow this downward spiral. Counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but it doesn’t require a giant speculative leap to conclude that, had major U.S. law firms not so quickly surrendered to Trump, this spring, he would have been denied early momentum for his lawlessness. Perhaps a united opposition might have even provided the opposite momentum, toward a defense of the rule of law.

The story of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison L.L.P., one of the leading law firms in the world, stands out. It employs twelve hundred and fifty lawyers in offices around the globe, and pulls in annual revenues of $2.63 billion, resulting in yearly profits of more than $7.5 million per partner. The firm boasts some of the most accomplished lawyers in the U.S., and has a widely feared litigation practice. It also has a venerable tradition of civil-rights work, including assisting Thurgood Marshall on desegregation cases, in the nineteen-fifties, and representing the plaintiff Edith Windsor in the landmark 2013 Supreme Court case, United States v. Windsor, which struck down as unconstitutional a federal statute defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman.

Trump had it in for Paul, Weiss for several reasons. Jeannie Rhee, who was then a partner at the firm, had worked for Robert Mueller, the former special counsel who investigated possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, and, after the events of January 6th, she took on a pro-bono case against some of the rioters; Mark Pomerantz, a former partner, had helped prosecute Trump in New York courts for falsifying business records; and Trump was angered by the firm’s D.E.I. employment practices. On March 14th, he issued an executive order that cited these alleged sins and directed federal agencies to review any security clearances previously granted to Paul, Weiss attorneys, to restrict their access to federal buildings, and to potentially terminate government contracts with the firm. Around the same time, Trump issued executive orders against a variety of other firms because he disliked lawyers who worked for them or clients they represented, or both. The executive order against the law firm Perkins Coie L.L.P., for example, cited its representation of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

The consequences of these orders could be devastating to a firm like Paul, Weiss. If its lawyers were unable to enter federal buildings or courthouses, representation of clients before federal courts and agencies would become impossible. The firm’s work with multinational corporations seeking licenses and permits before government agencies (such as energy companies requesting development permits or investment companies negotiating with the Securities and Exchange Commission), or even litigating in federal court, could evaporate.

But efforts by the government to punish speakers and speech that it disfavors are blatantly unconstitutional. Any attempt to stop private lawyers from representing the clients they choose is an assault on those lawyers’ basic right to practice law, and a clear infringement of their and their firms’ First Amendment rights. And going after firms because the Administration has a grudge against a specific lawyer who works there is unprecedented, and represents a crude weaponization of executive power. This is not a close constitutional call.

The chair of Paul, Weiss is Brad Karp, who assumed the role at the comparatively young age of forty-eight. He has been described as one of the best litigators in the country, representing some of the largest financial companies in the world in billion-dollar lawsuits. And Karp is not ignorant of the risks posed by threats to the rule of law: he served on the board of trustees of the World Law Foundation, a non-for-profit organization of more than eight thousand U.S. and international lawyers dedicated to “promoting the Rule of Law as a guarantor of freedom and peace, and strengthening democracy and its institutions throughout the world.” The foundation hosts biannual congresses, with panels devoted to discussing recent threats to the rule of law, and awarding honors to lawyers who defend it. Past honorees have included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Andrew Young, and Nelson Mandela. (I spoke on panels at the congresses in 2023 and 2025, on issues related to press freedoms.)

But, instead of standing up for the rule of law and suing the Administration for its unlawful executive order, Karp and Paul, Weiss settled a mere six days after Trump issued it. That settlement obligated the firm to provide forty million dollars in pro-bono services to “support the Administration’s initiatives,” and to “not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies.” Eight other global law firms quickly followed suit, reaching settlements totalling a reported nearly billion dollars in pro-bono services for causes championed by the Administration. And, although all the firms claimed to have retained control over what specific pro-bono work they will do, Trump clearly doesn’t see it that way, suggesting during one Cabinet meeting that he could use the legal work as sort of a personal piggy bank of services even after he leaves office, saying, of the accumulated total, “Hopefully I won’t need that,” he said, “after it ends—after, after we leave. Maybe I’ll need it.”

Some of the firms that were targeted, including Perkins Coie L.L.P., sued the Administration and won orders blocking the specific restrictions on them. And many lawyers resigned in protest from the firms that settled. (After Paul, Weiss capitulated, Jeannie Rhee left to start a new firm with a group of former partners, including Karen Dunn, who had reportedly urged people within the firm to approve the settlement.) But Paul, Weiss’ decision to fold was shocking at the time, and was taken as a signal within the profession of where the “smart money” was betting.

It would be unfair to say that everything that has happened to debase the legal system since Paul, Weiss reached its settlement is the firm’s fault. There have been many shameful moments along the way, as when Emil Bove III, who at the time was a senior Justice Department official, allegedly told department lawyers that they should say “fuck you” to courts trying to stop the Trump Administration from deporting detainees without any due process. (Bove denied telling lawyers to defy court orders during his successful confirmation hearing to become a federal judge.)

The Administration has also been extremely canny in going after institutions rather than individuals. It has figured out that large institutions, rather than being protected by their size and their wealth, are in many instances actually more vulnerable, because they have more pain points—federal grants, licenses, merger approvals—that the Administration can use to exert leverage. Individuals, conversely, are more able to at least attempt a legal fight on principle, especially when they can line up pro-bono or crowdfunded representation. (Now that Trump has also scored victories against universities and media companies, we will likely see him turn his attention more fully to individuals. Indeed, last week, the Times reported that he has urged the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. to go after other perceived enemies, including former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and the special counsel Jack Smith.) And Karp has insisted that the risk to the firm from the E.O. was existential: even in that first week, clients were leaving or threatening to leave, and rival firms were attempting to poach its lawyers.

But law firms are in a special position. They don’t just use the legal system; they play a critical role in creating and upholding it. Even more than other private actors, such as universities and media companies, law firms and lawyers have an established duty to uphold the integrity of the system they work in, not only for their own benefit but for the benefit of society. As the inscription on the New York State Supreme Courthouse in lower Manhattan says, “The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government.”

Indeed, mastery of the legal rules, procedures, and principles is how lawyers distinguish themselves. If the rules don’t matter anymore, then lawyers are glorified fixers, who lobby politicos for favors. And, usually, those favors are bestowed in exchange for something—a sixteen-million-dollar donation to a Presidential library, perhaps, or shares in a cryptocurrency scheme. We are currently witnessing a Precambrian-like explosion of corruption, enabled by the lack of any independent prosecutors and enforceable rules.

The law firms must have understood this. Collective action by firms—leadership by the individuals who run each of them—would have been one solution. There were reportedly some early attempts at forming a coalition among targeted law firms, but those that settled apparently could not see beyond their own interest of attempting to put the immediate threat behind them. It may sound naïve to think that intensely competitive law firms should have been able to work together, but firms frequently collaborate when they have clients on the same side of some legal dispute, either by drafting amicus briefs or entering into joint-defense agreements. And now, with the independence of the legal profession at risk, firms must advocate not just for their own clients, or for their short-term business survival, but for the profession itself.

A firm of the size and power of Paul, Weiss should have looked out for the system a little bit. Karp, his partners, and their peers at the other firms that settled should have taken care of the system just a little bit. Instead, they took a dive for the short-end money. ♦

Earlier this month, Israel and Hamas announced a ceasefire to the two-year war in Gaza. The agreement was brokered in part by the United States, but American officials are concerned, according to the New York Times, that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may be trying to end it. And indeed, since the ceasefire began, nearly a hundred Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers have been killed. (Per the first stage of the deal, Israel remains in control of approximately fifty-three per cent of Gaza.)

I recently spoke by phone with Michael Milshtein, the head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University. Milshtein served as senior adviser to the commander of COGAT, which supervises civilian policy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and as the head of the Department for Palestinian Affairs in the I.D.F.’s military-intelligence wing. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Netanyahu wants for Gaza, Hamas’s strategic aim to take over the Palestinian national movement, and why a lasting ceasefire in Gaza will be so difficult.

If this ceasefire is going to work, what would it look like over the next few months? What is the best-case scenario?

Most or maybe all of the scenarios are going to be bad, so we’re not speaking about the best case, but the least worst case. And that would be the beginning of a new regime, the establishment of a new Palestinian regime in Gaza, which does not include Hamas. There would be a symbolic deployment of international forces, and a kind of coördination system between Israel, the United States, and other international forces about any violations of the ceasefire. And then Israel would be able to act immediately against any challenge or threat that is being developed in Gaza, and get warnings about a plan to launch rockets or to smuggle weapons or things like that. That would be the best case.

At the same time, I must say in a very frank manner, this best case would also mean that Israel would not control most of the territory in Gaza, with the exception maybe of several areas near the border. This is the only part that would be kept by Israel. And, in this scenario, Hamas would commit to hold only defensive weapons, such as rifles and grenades and pistols. They would not be able to have offensive weapons, mainly rockets.

So there would be some sort of disarmament of Hamas, and Israel wouldn’t launch strikes, and an international force would help secure Gaza, which is what the ceasefire agreement lays out. I assume that when you said that you wanted to be “very frank” you meant that a solution like this could also prevent Israeli expansionist fantasies in Gaza, correct?

Yes. There are still many people here in Israel who say that our goal is not only to defeat Hamas but actually to make Palestinians vanish from Gaza or maybe even to deport them. And this fantasy will not happen. And, more than that, I assess that Hamas cannot be convinced to give up its weapons totally. But I think that if Hamas does not have the same power that it had two years ago, and it will not be able to commit once again October 7th, and it will be limited always by Israel and by the international forces, I think that this is not a bad situation for Israel.

You’re saying that there’s no great solution here, but you’ve laid out what you think might be the best one or the least bad one.

That’s right.

But does either side want that? How do you understand at this point what both Hamas and the Netanyahu government want? Let’s start with Netanyahu.

I think that he doesn’t want the current ceasefire. He was forced to accept it, because it was imposed on him. And, of course, there is a very broad gap between his demands for a ceasefire and what actually happened. For example, he demanded that there would be a very clear commitment by Hamas for full disarmament. And, of course, we do not see that right now. I’m quite sure that Netanyahu’s government will not be glad with the scenario that I described above. I think that maybe another government in Israel, when there are elections, will be more satisfied with such a scenario. And I think that other players, such as Turkey and Qatar, will be very satisfied with such a scenario, because they will be able to preserve Hamas as a player in Gaza. But, at the same time, they can say that there is a kind of a change, even if it’s a cosmetic change.

And, regarding the United States, I’m quite sure that there will not be any way to implement all the goals they have laid out, for example, to get the total disarmament of Hamas or to convince Hamas to accept all the international forces that Vice-President J. D. Vance spoke about on his recent trip to Israel. He spoke about forces from Indonesia and the Gulf that could deploy in Gaza. But a large international force is something that I think Hamas does have some reservations about.

Netanyahu resisted a ceasefire for a long time. You said the ceasefire was forced on him. But what does he want? When we talked several months ago, you thought that Netanyahu was flirting with the expansionist views about resettling Gaza expressed by his right-wing ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. What do you think that he actually wants now?

What he really wants is to be able to announce that Hamas was defeated, even if it means to occupy most or maybe all of Gaza, and even to stay there. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are eager to occupy Gaza, of course, and even to encourage the Palestinians to emigrate from Gaza. Regarding Netanyahu, I think he understands that he cannot really convince a lot of people in Israel today that he defeated Hamas. And I think he’s very embarrassed of the fact that Hamas still exists, that Hamas is still the dominant player in Gaza. If he could choose, he would prefer to continue the war. It seems that President Trump was the one who decided to end the war.

What I find so strange about it from Netanyahu’s perspective is the following: you’re saying that he doesn’t want Hamas to remain in charge of Gaza.

That’s right.

But my understanding is that he also doesn’t want the Palestinian Authority [P.A.] coming into Gaza, and he certainly doesn’t want conditions in Gaza making it so a Palestinian state is more likely.

That’s right.

And a Palestinian state is usually seen as more likely under the Palestinian Authority or with some sort of international force present. So it seems like a bit of a Catch-22 for him.

Yeah, sure. And, Isaac, a lot of people have been speaking about Israel becoming an American protectorate.

A client state. [During his trip to Israel, Vice-President Vance said, “We don’t want a vassal state, and that’s not what Israel is. We don’t want a client state, and that’s not what Israel is. We want a partnership.”]

Exactly. Many people feel that Israel has lost its dominance and its impact in Gaza. And this is a result of the fact that the government insisted for the past two years on only focussing on the military impact of what it was doing, and not to speak about the day after, or to be focussed on the diplomatic and the political aspects of a future plan for Gaza. Israel didn’t have any realistic, detailed strategy about Gaza except promoting more and more and more military power and operations. This actually led us to the current situation, and it means that Israel is not the one who decides about the end of the war now. Israel is not the one who can decide whether to renew the war. And it seems that Israel has a very limited say about the future regime or the future political situation in Gaza. So I totally agree with you: Netanyahu said so many times and in so many cases no, no, and no, and was very stubborn, so much so that we find ourselves with limited relevance for the day after in Gaza.

You mean that Israel pissed off so many people, including the Americans, that eventually a solution, or at least a short-term one, was forced upon them?

Yeah. In terms of all the current effort toward establishing a future Palestinian regime and speaking about the international forces in Gaza, there are many politicians here in Israel who are trying to announce or demonstrate that, of course, this is exactly what we meant, and this is the full implementation of our demands. But, let’s face it, there is a gap. There is a huge gap between what Israel wanted a month ago or announced that it wanted a month ago, and what is happening right now. And it seems that, for example, Qatar and Turkey—they’re prominent players in Gaza, and they’re promoting a lot of moves. And, of course, the Americans are the real sponsor of most of the moves in Gaza. Israel has quite limited space to maneuver. Israel cannot decide, for example, whether to renew the war. It’s Donald Trump who decides.

I hear what you are saying, but my guess would be that if Israel decides to renew the war, Trump may be irritated and he may yell at Netanyahu on a phone call. But, fundamentally, if Netanyahu wants to do that, he can do that, and he’ll get away with it. I don’t see the Americans cutting off military aid.

Well, it is not clear. I’m not totally sure about my argument. But last week there was a clash that took place in Rafah, where Hamas killed two soldiers. And the interpretation by Trump was, O.K., maybe the people who committed this attack were not exactly Hamas members. [Hamas said that it was “unaware of any events or clashes” in the area.] In response, Israel announced that it would prevent any humanitarian aid convoys from entering Gaza, and then, after talks between Washington and Jerusalem, Israel had to announce that it would reopen the border crossings. So I really recognize a gap between the two sides, which actually is much broader than it was a month ago.

Yes, maybe Israel’s room to maneuver has shrunk in some ways, but that still seems very far from an international solution being forced upon them in Gaza, where foreign troops help pave the way for a Palestinian state or something. So it seems like Netanyahu can prevent the scenarios he truly doesn’t want.

Did you hear about the Civil-Military Coordination Center? It’s the command that will be responsible for coördinating all the military and civilian moves in Gaza going forward. [U.S. Central Command opened the C.M.C.C. in coördination with the Israelis to oversee the details of the ceasefire.] The two prominent militaries over there are the Israelis and the Americans. But there are military forces from other states—from the U.K., from Denmark. Maybe, in the future, there will be representatives from the United Arab Emirates and other states. It seems that this will be a kind of headquarters that will be responsible for every move during the second phase of the ceasefire. The Americans are monitoring every military operation of the I.D.F. As I understand it, there are already hundreds of people in this center. It is based in the south of Israel not far away from Gaza. And Israel has a role, but in my assessment it is quite limited compared to the role of the Americans. [After we spoke, the Times reported that the American military is flying drones over Gaza to monitor the ceasefire.]

In the first eight months of Trump’s second term, Israel ended an earlier ceasefire, in March, and Trump supported them. There was a complete cutoff of aid to Gaza for more than two months—Trump supported it. Trump talked about emptying Gaza of Palestinians. And then it seemed like after the Israeli strike on Qatar, when Israel attempted to kill Hamas negotiators, and Netanyahu, at Trump’s request, apologized to Qatar’s Prime Minister, things changed. I’m trying not to be too glib here, but it’s a little hard to believe that Trump would care about Qatar being struck unless you have a perhaps cynical view of how Trump’s business deals affect his political decision-making. I’m curious how people in Israel process this change, even if it is temporary.

I’m quite sure that this Qatar strike was the shift regarding the American policy toward Israel and Netanyahu. Here in Israel, many people were impressed by the interview that took place this week on the program “60 Minutes.” The Trump negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner described what happened during the attack in Doha. They said that, first of all, it surprised the American Administration and that it even made them believe that Israel was damaging to its own interests.

That’s so sweet of Witkoff and Kushner to be looking out for Israel’s interests.

Yeah, I’m trying not to be too naïve, but I do think that this attack in Qatar mattered. It caused Israel damage—to its image and to its status in the eyes of the American Administration. There was pressure from Qatar, too, which used all its soft power, in terms of its diplomacy and, of course, finance and media to push Israel to end the war after the strike. And Trump also personally expressed much more willingness to put an end to the war after this.

It’s quite amazing because in the meeting between Netanyahu and Trump in Washington in late September, it seems that they both agreed to very strict demands of Hamas. And then three or four days later, Hamas announced its response. They said, Yeah, sure, we say yes to the plan. But they didn’t agree to give up their weapons. So it seems that the Americans are ready to accept many violations or many gaps or many problems which appear in the behavior of Hamas.

At this point, what does Hamas want? What is its aim?

Hamas survived. So they already implemented goal No. 1, to survive and remain the dominant player in Gaza. Now they want to eradicate from the map all the challengers that developed in Gaza—all the gangs and the militias and clans, many of whom were supported by Israel. They have already started executing them. They are also trying to promote civil reconstruction of Gaza, and to nominate new commanders, and therefore have internal reconstruction.

Maybe it’ll take time, maybe months, even years. They speak about the long run. In the political arena, one goal is to increase their impact in the West Bank. In Gaza, I believe that they will try to accept any kind of cosmetic cover, and even P.A. involvement, because they’re not afraid of that. But they will, I think, plan to increase their impact in the West Bank, and maybe implement reconciliation with the P.A. They want to be part of the political structure of the West Bank. This was their plan twenty years ago, too.

So you’re saying Hamas is fine with the P.A. coming in as some sort of fig leaf in Gaza as long as they keep fundamental control, and that the broader goal is to kind of take over Palestinian politics?

Yeah. From their point of view, there will be a local council that will get a lot of money from international donors, but, behind the scenes, Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, will be able to continue to preserve its military and political and civil power. They want to adopt the Hezbollah model. They’re not going to turn themselves into a political party and say, O.K., there will be no more military activities, only political or civil ones. It won’t happen. They’re trying to build a kind of convenient and cosmetic cover that will enable them to exist and to maintain their status and power in the Palestinian arena.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Jared Kushner is interested in a plan that would more formally split Gaza in two, and allow reconstruction only in the Israeli-controlled part until Hamas disarms. This would supposedly show Palestinians that there was a better answer than Hamas. What did you make of this idea?

Regarding this idea of a Singaporean Gaza and a Somali Gaza, it’s not a new idea. In the first stages of the war, there were ideas like this to make Palestinians jealous and to make them believe that this was a positive example for them, and make them protest against Hamas. But we are talking about a very small territory. Are you going to create a border, like between North Korea and South Korea, inside Gaza? It’s hard for me to believe that you can implement this.

There are too many fantasies. There was Trump’s vision about evacuating Gaza and creating this Mediterranean Riviera. If this idea ends the way Trump’s plan did, there won’t be much damage. But if there are concrete steps to implement it, I am concerned. It will end like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, where hundreds of Palestinians were killed near their sites, or the way it ended for these clans and gangs that Israel armed to oppose Hamas, who are now being executed. So I am concerned someone will try to turn this into reality. If I recognized any kind of Palestinian ambition or Palestinian efforts to support this idea, maybe I would be more optimistic. But I don’t, and I don’t see this from the Arab world either. We are talking about an attempt to engineer minds and lives and reality, so it will probably end in a very sad, and I hope not tragic, manner. ♦

The surprise and shock that so many people have registered at the photographs of Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House—soon to be replaced by his own ostentatious and overscaled ballroom—is itself, in a way, surprising and shocking. On the long list of Trumpian depredations, the rushed demolition might seem a relatively minor offense. After months marked by corruption, violence, and the open perversion of law, to gasp in outrage at the loss of a few tons of masonry and mortar might seem oddly misjudged.

And yet it isn’t. We are creatures of symbols, and our architecture tells us who we are. John Ruskin, the greatest of architectural critics, observed that a nation writes its history in many books, but that the book of its buildings is the most enduring. The faith in order and proportion embodied in the Alhambra, the romance of modernity caught in the Eiffel Tower’s lattice of iron—these are not ideas imposed on buildings but ideals that the buildings themselves express, more lastingly than words can. Among them, not least, is the modest, egoless ideal of democratic tradition captured so perfectly in such American monuments as the Lincoln Memorial, which shows not a hero but a man, seated, in grave contemplation.

The same restrained values of democracy have always marked the White House—a stately house, but not an imperial one. It is “the people’s house,” but it has also, historically, been a family house, with family quarters and a family scale. It’s a little place, by the standards of monarchy, and blessedly so: fitting for a democracy in which even the biggest boss is there for a brief time, and at the people’s pleasure. As Ronald Reagan said, after a victory more decisive than Trump could ever dream of, the President is merely a temporary resident, holding the keys for a fixed term. That was the beauty of it.

The East Wing has never been a place of grandeur. The structure as we knew it was built in the anxious years of the Second World War. It was Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to regularize a jumble of service spaces and, not incidentally, to carve out a secure refuge beneath them. But it quickly became a center of quiet power. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted women journalists there. Two decades later, Jacqueline Kennedy presided over a different kind of transformation from the same offices, founding the White House Historical Association. The wing’s very plainness came to symbolize the functional modesty of democratic government: a space for staff, not spectacle; for the sustaining rituals of civic life, not the exhibition of personal glory.

All of that is now gone. The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat. He asks permission of no one, destroys what he wants, when he wants. As many have noted, one of Trump’s earliest public acts, having promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art the beautiful limestone reliefs from the façade of the old Bonwit Teller building, was to jackhammer them to dust in a fit of impatience.

Trump apologists say that earlier Presidents altered the White House, too. Didn’t Jimmy Carter install solar panels? Didn’t George H. W. Bush build a horseshoe pit? Didn’t Barack Obama put in a basketball court? What’s the fuss? And, anyway, who but élitists would object to a big ballroom that looks like the banquet hall of a third-rate casino? Who decides what’s decorous and what’s vulgar? Even the White House Historical Association, with a caution that has become typical of this dark time, confines itself to stating that it has been allowed to make a digital record of what’s being destroyed—as though that were a defense, rather than an epitaph.

This, of course, is the standard line of Trump apologetics: some obvious outrage is identified, and defenders immediately scour history for an earlier, vaguely similar act by a President who actually respected the Constitution. It’s a form of mismatched matching. If Trump blows up boats with unknown men aboard—well, didn’t Obama use drones against alleged terrorists? (Yes, but within a process designed, however imperfectly, to preserve a chain of command and a vestige of due process.) If Trump posts a video featuring himself as the combat pilot he never was, dropping excrement on peaceful protesters—well, didn’t Lyndon Johnson swear at his aides from his seat on the john? What’s the fuss? The jabs and insults of earlier Presidents, though, however rough, stayed within the bounds of democratic discourse, the basic rule being that the other side also gets to make its case. Even Richard Nixon sought out student protesters one early morning—at the Lincoln Memorial—and tried to understand what drove them.

So it was with the White House. Earlier alterations were made incrementally, and only after much deliberation. When Harry Truman added a not very grand balcony to the Executive Residence, the move was controversial, but the construction was overseen by a bipartisan commission. By contrast, the new project—bankrolled by Big Tech firms and crypto moguls—is one of excess and self-advertisement. The difference between the Truman balcony and the Trump ballroom is all the difference in the world. It is a difference of process and procedure—two words so essential to the rule of law and equality, yet doomed always to seem feeble beside the orgiastic showcase of power.

That is the rhetorical fragility of liberal democracy: its reliance on rules rather than on rage. If the White House must be remade, let there be a plan; let it be debated; let the financing be transparent and free of kickbacks and corruption. It isn’t complicated, and it’s the very principle at the heart of the American Revolution: following rules is not weakness. It is the breaking of them that is the indulgence of insecure tyrants, who feel most alive in acts of real and symbolic violence.

Architecture embodies values; it is not merely a receptacle of them. Simple proportions and human-scale spaces don’t just suggest the spirit of a democratic nation. They are that spirit in three dimensions, with doors and windows. Reverence for the past, and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known, is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life. To conserve, after all, is the essence of conservatism. The shock that images of the destruction provoke—the grief so many have felt—is not an overreaction to the loss of a beloved building. It is a recognition of something deeper: the central values of democracy being demolished before our eyes. Now we do not only sense it. We see it. ♦

Until recently, the most reliable source of clever thought experiments about ascendant technologies on television was the Netflix series “Black Mirror.” The anthology drama débuted in 2011, and its creator, Charlie Brooker, quickly established his interest in the promise and perils of artificial intelligence. The 2023 episode “Joan Is Awful”—which posits a nightly, A.I.-generated series that mines a normal woman’s experiences and then villainizes her for viewers’ enjoyment, with a simulation of the actress Salma Hayek in the starring role—became a talking point during the Hollywood strikes as a worst-case scenario of studio indifference to ethics and quality. One union member called it a “documentary of the future”: the kind of project a deep-pocketed streamer like Netflix might aim for if it were unfettered from all obligations to workers, subjects, and audiences. A.I. was a sticking point in both the W.G.A. and SAG-AFTRA negotiations—but it is already supplanting the labor of animators, costume designers, and special-effects artists. A decade prior, a “Black Mirror” episode called “Be Right Back” followed a widow who becomes consumed by her interactions with an automaton programmed with the memories of her dead husband. I thought of the episode this summer, while reading a news story about the mother of a Parkland shooting victim who uses A.I. to have her murdered son’s voice say the words “I love you, Mommy.”

It’s unfortunate that, just as A.I. has truly permeated American life—and begun to be responsible for individual tragedies of the type “Black Mirror” once excelled at depicting—the series has fallen into creative bankruptcy. The A.I.-centric episodes that premièred this year are not timely provocations but fantastical larks, wholly divorced from today’s debates about how or whether it should be deployed. One such case is “Hotel Reverie,” which sees a modern-day actress named Brandy Friday (Issa Rae) inserting herself in a gender-swapped and race-bent remake of a black-and-white nineteen-forties romance in which her character has an extramarital affair with an unhappy heiress (Emma Corrin). Historically, “Black Mirror” ’s power has come from its believability, but nothing about this particular chapter is persuasive: the tech is nonsensical—Brandy’s consciousness is uploaded into an experimental device that somehow allows the heiress to access the memories of the actress who plays her—and the burgeoning relationship between the two women is devoid of sparks. Suddenly, the rise of A.I. is less an existential threat than a pretext for a bland romance.

“The Morning Show,” with its fixation on the recent past—the #MeToo movement, the pandemic, the insurrection—instead of the not-too-distant future, is in some respects “Black Mirror” ’s inverse. Given this ripped-from-the-headlines tendency, it was perhaps inevitable that A.I. would eventually appear. In the new season, it’s treated as a recurring, shapeshifting threat. The Apple TV drama, which began as a workplace soap about an A.M. news program, has gradually broadened its scope to encompass the fictional network’s fight for relevance in an overcrowded media ecosystem. Executives’ initial efforts aren’t promising. As the 2024 Olympics approach, the broadcaster develops buggy, A.I.-powered real-time translations of its stars’ commentary on the Games in a variety of languages. The feature proves so unreliable that it’s shelved—though not before one of the anchors gets a lesson on the danger of deepfakes. Later, a network chief makes the mistake of using the company’s in-house chatbot as a sort of therapist. Her secrets are then divulged in a sequence that’s peak “Morning Show”: extravagant, unrealistic, and unapologetically camp.

In 2025, A.I. seems to pop up on TV nearly as often as it does in real life. On the hospital-mockumentary sitcom “St. Denis Medical,” a curmudgeonly physician resents the unerring faith that a patient has in his A.I. diagnostic tool. In the high-school-set comedy “English Teacher,” an idealistic educator campaigns for “smart” trash cans, only to discover that the new camera-equipped bins are part of an elaborate data-harvesting scheme. And in the Hollywood satire “The Studio,” a production company’s revelation that one of its projects will rely on A.I. animation causes major backlash.

Some shows have taken a more sympathetic approach. The Apple TV dramedy “Murderbot,” based on Martha Wells’s book series, tries to see things from the point of view of its titular hero. The story takes place on a far-off planet, where the self-named Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) is tasked with insuring the safety of a group of scientists studying unpredictable local fauna. While the researchers bicker with one another about how much dignity to accord the android—is he a machine or a slave?—Murderbot obeys their directives with the sullenness of a put-upon teen-ager and snarks to himself about their tiresome “exchanges of words and fluids.” (He’s not wrong about their tediousness, but he’s just as dull as the objects of his mockery.) The twist is that Murderbot isn’t particularly concerned with helping or destroying the people around him; he’d simply prefer to fritter away his off-duty hours bingeing cheesy space operas. It is his Bartleby-esque recalcitrance, in fact, that makes him feel most human.

Unexpectedly, the 2025 series that channels contemporary A.I. anxieties most effectively is a sci-fi drama set in the twenty-second century, in a universe where artificially intelligent flunkeys have already become obsolete. The “Alien” film franchise has long been noted for its populist, cyberpunk-esque perspective; in the original movie, the primary characters are interstellar merchant mariners deemed expendable by their employer. The new FX prequel series “Alien: Earth” renders the evils of corporate exploitation yet more explicit: its chief antagonist, a haughty man-child who calls himself Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), is a trillionaire with no compunctions about deceiving the vulnerable or endangering the planet to advance his own agenda.

The world of “Alien: Earth” has no practical government; after the collapse of democracy, five megacorporations took over. Technological marvels do little to ameliorate the hardscrabble existence of most workers; sixty-five-year labor contracts are the norm. Extraterrestrials aside, the show’s portrayal of internecine battles between callous, self-involved plutocrats at the expense of pretty much everyone else doesn’t feel too far removed from our own situation. In May, the C.E.O. of a prominent real-life A.I. firm predicted the elimination of half of all entry-level white-collar jobs by 2030—even as talent wars within the field enabled top researchers to command nine-figure pay packages. The contrast has prompted doomer jokes about an impending “permanent underclass.” Meanwhile, various large language models have absorbed vast swaths of data, sometimes through illegal means, and A.I.-generated images and videos have ushered in a terrifying new era in which people have less control than ever over their likenesses and those of their loved ones. This month, the release of the text-to-video app Sora 2 forced the daughters of Robin Williams and Martin Luther King, Jr., to plead with the public to stop sending them deepfakes of their fathers.

The way A.I. is rupturing relationships, institutions, and truth itself has given our current moment the air of science fiction: every day brings new reports of chatbots becoming objects of romantic obsession, pushing users toward psychotic breaks, or encouraging teen-agers to kill themselves. As commentators on both sides of the A.I. divide frequently note, either as a promise or a threat, this is the worst the technology will ever be. Hollywood will have to confront—and compete with—that reality if it’s to help make sense of what’s to come. ♦

For his third monograph, “The Children’s Melody,” the photographer Eli Durst returned to his elementary school in Austin, Texas. The New Deal-era building appeared remarkably unchanged, except for all the laptops. The cafeteria smelled the same. One of his former teachers was still there, coaxing students to line up neatly. “I felt like I was eight years old again,” Durst told me.

Durst likes to take pictures of activities—the shared, structured experiences that are neither work nor purely play. His first book, “The Community,” began as a project exploring church basements and then expanded to include other multipurpose spaces that served as the setting for Bible-study groups but also for Boy Scout meetings, team-building exercises, and community-theatre rehearsals. These everyday American rituals, as seen by Durst’s curious, patient eye, seem mysterious, unexpectedly loaded with significance. A dozen arms stretch toward a loaf of bread; a woman, seen from behind, clasps hands with two mannequins. The images emphasize the surreality and occasional absurdity latent in the things we do to make sense of ourselves and one another.

“The Children’s Melody” has a narrower aperture, focussing on young people—roughly of elementary-school age to college—participating in a variety of collective endeavors: R.O.T.C., cotillion, school plays, cheer practice, Irish dance. “I’ve always been drawn to photographing group activities where there’s a rehearsal and a performance. Where there’s sort of a becoming, a practicing and internalizing, and then a performing outward,” Durst told me. He’s interested in “how we learn behaviors, learn gender roles or ideas about value—how they become a part of us and how we then perform them outwardly for other people.” The photographs in “The Children’s Melody” were nearly all shot in Texas, a place that, despite its purported celebration of individual freedoms, is hellbent on shaping its youth. The state accounts for more than a quarter of recorded book bans in the country; many university systems restrict discussions of transgender and nonbinary identities; and a new state law mandates the display of the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom. Durst is interested in institutions that attempt to instruct and influence children, but these are not images of conformity; in “The Children’s Melody,” indoctrination is always ambivalent and incomplete.

Durst’s second book, “The Four Pillars,” was made largely during the COVID pandemic. Its ambiguously staged scenes, many involving a New Age self-help group that Durst had been following since the church-basement days, leaned into the strained artificiality of the period. Taking the pictures in “The Children’s Melody” felt like “a return to the world,” in all its baffling complexity, Durst told me. The project crystallized after Durst took a picture of a boisterous group of second graders singing. The resulting image depicts a loose choreography—several children hold their ringed arms in front of them, fingertips touching—but the over-all impression is one of gleeful, expressive chaos. Children look to the left, to the right; they sing with their eyes closed; they stare fixedly at one another; they are quite obviously daydreaming. It’s an image about the attempt to corral individuals into a collective, the task given to our teachers and coaches and troop leaders. In Durst’s work, it’s always only partly successful. As the book progresses, some of the children in the photographs are older and more in control of their outward expression, but scraps of strangeness or incongruity always peek through.

The young people in Durst’s images try on guitars, tiaras, military uniforms, graduation gowns, and child-size bow ties, which they inhabit with varying degrees of confidence. Some seem to feel at home in their costumes of adulthood. A girl in lipstick and a blond ringlet wig steps forward, face beatific and chest puffed, as if into an imaginary spotlight. At other times, an outfit seems to amplify vulnerability: An R.O.T.C. cadet in a camouflage getup looks nervously past the edge of the frame at a threat that the viewer can’t see. Durst’s images capture the uncanny temporal quality of children’s faces, how they can sometimes look both much older and much younger than they actually are.

One of the book’s most striking images is also the simplest. Four children in semi-formal wear line up against a wall. They are roughly the same age—maybe twelve—but vastly different heights. The second tallest, a boy, looks at the camera with the steady gaze of a future class president. The tallest, a girl in a ruffled skirt, is warier. Their personalities are present but not yet solidified; the adults they could become flicker in and out of focus. This picture is one of a few taken at cotillion, a largely Southern tradition of etiquette classes and formal dance instruction for middle schoolers. In its staginess and structure, it makes for a classic Durst subject matter. Although there’s plenty about cotillion that’s retrograde (who, exactly, needs to learn the cha-cha these days?), Durst’s photographs are free of cynicism. Cotillion is fundamentally about children interacting with one another face to face. (My own memories of cotillion all center on seventh-grade psychodramas; I have forgotten all of the dance steps.) The children aren’t sure yet what this will mean to them, and Durst inhabits that uncertainty alongside them.

Durst shoots digitally, using multiple off-camera flashes that he deploys to subtly strange effect. The monochrome images are sometimes backlit, sometimes illuminated by directional light coming from unexpected angles. In one image, a flash appears in a mirror as a strange orb, reminding the viewer of the photographer’s presence. The rooms are clean but timeworn; in their shabby surfaces you can see the accumulation of years, the thousands of children who have sat in these chairs, performed these routines, followed these dance steps. One of the book’s first images shows an empty school auditorium. A riser spans the stage, flanked on one side by the Texan and American flags and, on the other, by a fake tree in a large pot. The curtain parts slightly, hinting at a backstage that we can’t quite glimpse. There are stage lights, a microphone, an amp. Nothing in the scene is surreal, and yet the photograph has a dreamlike charge to it, a kind of archetypal intensity that made me think of how many of my anxiety dreams return me to places just like this.

The epigraph of “The Children’s Melody” is a brief, didactic poem about children’s activities, written in the sixteenth century by Henry VIII. The monarch praises the “feats of arms” and other “good disports” that are “pleasant to God and man,” a virtuous busyness that keeps at bay the threat of “vice.” Fretting about how young people spend their hours is a perennial adult pastime, one that long predates Minecraft. Hardly any digital technology is present in Durst’s images. Instead, children perform and compete and regard one another. They inhabit a world of brick walls, folding chairs, drop ceilings, exposed ductwork, and chipped laminate at the base of a cracked-open door. A projector sits on a scuffed desk, propped up on a stack of Bibles. A wooden gymnasium floor is so shiny you can almost hear the sneakers squeak. There’s a timelessness to these spaces, but the feelings the images evoke are more nuanced and uneasy than straightforward nostalgia. “I remember being extremely anxious as a young person, extremely nervous about, you know, Who am I, what’s my job going to be, am I a good person?” Durst told me. That sense of anxiety is present throughout the book, most vividly in a wide shot of a group of cheerleaders rehearsing in a gym. Five clusters of uniformed girls press together, arms uplifted, each holding up another girl who balances on one leg. Cheerleading is often portrayed as a performance of effortless perfection and symmetry. Here, the effort is foregrounded. This is a picture of strong thighs and strain, one that makes evident all the work that goes into a human construction that might collapse at any moment.

The photographs in the book were taken over the past five years, a period that coincides with Durst’s wife’s pregnancy and their son’s early years. When we spoke on the phone, he was in the final days of parental leave from his teaching job at the University of Texas at Austin, after the birth of his daughter a few weeks earlier. He told me that he hadn’t initially thought of this project as being related to his new parenthood, although looking back now, the connection seems obvious. The family—an ambivalent institution bar none—shapes us, and yet our individuality resists that shaping. We both are and aren’t what our parents, teachers, coaches, and leaders try to make us. That wrestling with what can and cannot be controlled is the work of raising children, and also the work of his photography. “That’s the paradox,” Durst said. “And that’s what makes the pictures interesting to me.”