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Since the U.S. and Iran agreed to a temporary ceasefire, on Tuesday night, Israel has continued pummelling Lebanon with air strikes, killing more than three hundred people on Wednesday and wounding over a thousand more. After the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, in February, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia paramilitary group in Lebanon, fired missiles at Israel; this was followed by a heavy Israeli response across the country, and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Israel has forced out over a million people from their homes, and killed more than a thousand, in a country of some five million, vowing to hold many of these areas as buffer zones. (The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, has compared the strategy to the one his country used in Gaza.) And the New York Times reported that Israel has recently made allowances for religious groups other than Shia Muslims to remain in the “evacuation zone.” Meanwhile, Israel and Lebanon are set to hold talks next week, but Iran and the United States have not yet reached an agreement on whether the ceasefire covers Israeli operations in Lebanon.

I recently spoke by phone with Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Center, who lives in Lebanon and was in Beirut when we talked. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Israel is really trying to accomplish in Lebanon, the changing political fortunes of Hezbollah, and how Lebanese civilians are dealing with the war.

It seems that Israel has attacked areas across Lebanon, including Beirut, with huge civilian populations. Can you talk about what the past few days have been like?

Devastating. It’s not just about the bombs dropping around us but, also, about the anxiety, the frantic calling of friends and family to make sure they’re fine. The areas that were hit were considered relatively safe, to the extent that you can be safe in a war, but they were considered relatively safe. There’s no predominant military presence in these areas.

By military presence, you mean Hezbollah presence?

Hezbollah, yes. And I’m not describing the lack of a military presence to justify that this means it’s O.K. to hit certain areas, but not these areas. But, still, there is no predominant military presence of Hezbollah or any other political/military/non-state actor in these areas. So it was quite a shock to have entire residential buildings flattened in the space of minutes, a hundred air strikes or so in the space of ten minutes across Lebanon. It was really shocking. And then came the air strike at 7:00 P.M., in Beirut, which was the final air strike they did in the evening on Wednesday that also brought down an entire residential building. They’re still looking for survivors now. So I feel like I’m still shell-shocked, frankly.

I appreciate you telling people that. I’ll turn to some broader questions now. We talked several weeks ago about Israel and Lebanon, but can you tell people what has changed, and what Israel has done in this war so far in southern Lebanon?

They’re now occupying significant chunks of the south of Lebanon. They’ve ordered the mass evacuation of almost fifteen per cent of Lebanese territory. More than a million people have been displaced, and counting. Many of those will not be able to return. In a short time, half a million of those people were told to leave. So there’s that aspect of it. But there’s a sense that there is a deliberate ethnic cleansing of the Shia populations in the south. And I use this term very carefully, but that’s the impression that we all have, given the nature of the evacuation orders and the demographic nature of the towns and villages that are being evacuated.

What is it specifically that makes you use that term?

In the south, most villages are predominantly Shias. You also have villages that are mixed, and several that are predominantly Christian and Sunni too. Lebanon is a diverse country. I often talk about Lebanon as a regional public good. Frankly, it’s the one country in the region that, for all its ills, is a place where you have intersectarian relationships. People are forced to deal with each other, whether they want to or not. It’s a plural society. Israel’s evacuation orders have hit most of the south. They’ve asked all the villages south of the Litani River to leave, but now also the villages south of the Zahrani River, too. The predominant population there is also Shia. Plus, they’re dynamiting many of these villages. Last week, they dynamited a village that’s been around since the Roman era.

So the possibility of going back home to tend to your land, to live, is just not there anymore. On top of that, there is a clear attempt, and this was clear from last year, from the 2024 conflict, to depopulate the south. When you uproot more than sixty thousand olive trees, when you drop white phosphorus on agricultural land, rendering it unusable, which means that even people who are allowed to go back cannot go back, then people don’t have the economic livelihood that they had before. Most of these people are in agriculture. They’re farmers. So all of this adds up to literally depopulating areas in the south and kicking some of the Shias out.

There have been reports in the media that some other ethnic sects in southern Lebanon have been allowed to stay despite evacuation orders. Is that something you’ve heard as well?

We know that is true. It is mostly the predominantly Christian areas or Christian villages that have been allowed to stay. And they wanted to stay, and said so loud and clear: We’re not leaving because we’re terrified we may not be able to come back. The I.D.F. later said, “Well, if you don’t have Hezbollah fighters, fine. We’ll allow you to stay.”

What is happening today in the south is triggering a lot of anxiety for southerners because they saw what happened in Gaza. People’s homes are completely destroyed. People in Gaza were not allowed to go home. The memory of the Palestinian Nakba is also there. People left thinking they’d go back to their homes, but were never allowed to go back. We still have Palestinian refugees in Lebanon from that period. So, for the Lebanese, they’re terrified that once they leave, they may not be allowed to go back.

Is the stated Israeli reason for this that Shia communities in southern Lebanon are actually housing Hezbollah fighters and weapons, or is the idea that the Shia community more broadly gives political support to Hezbollah and therefore is a threat?

I think it’s a mix of both. There is a sense of collective punishment. You have two political parties that predominantly represent the Shia community, Amal Movement and Hezbollah. Not all the Shiites in Lebanon are supporters of Hezbollah. So there is a sense of collective punishment when you’re kicking a religious sect and saying, “No, you’ve probably supported Hezbollah, therefore you’re not allowed to come back. You’re guilty by default somehow.” As to the idea that many of these villages harbor Hezbollah, many of the Hezbollah fighters come from these villages. And, for them, they’re defending their land. They’re there to defend their land. I’m talking about the ones who are fighting now.

But this does not in any shape or form justify Hezbollah dragging Lebanon into this conflict, which was a conflict that everyone here was desperate to stay out of. That decision was made by Tehran in an attempt to turn Lebanon into another battlefront.

How much resistance is Hezbollah putting up on the ground? And, secondly, it seemed like the central government, before the war, had finally gotten more serious about disarming Hezbollah than it ever had before, but how has that gone in the last month or so? Is there an effort by the Lebanese state to disarm Hezbollah? As you say, a lot of Lebanese people are upset that they were dragged into this war.

Hezbollah has put up a lot of resistance fighting on the ground. It’s not about the rockets. It’s the actual resistance on the ground. This is their terrain. These are their homes. They know these areas very intimately. So they have put up resistance, and we see it. And they’re doing this while much of the setup they had in place prior to 2024, a lot of the military infrastructure, was destroyed by the Lebanese Armed Forces. Much of this, south of the Litani, had been cleared out.

But in terms of disarming Hezbollah more now, you cannot disarm them in the middle of a war. There were more than a hundred strikes in the space of ten minutes on Wednesday. So it’s very difficult to say you are going to be disarming this group in the midst of a conflict. But what the government has done is declare Beirut a city free of arms. This effectively means going into areas, setting up checkpoints, and making sure that there are no armed non-state actors in administrative Beirut. I think it’s an important move in a very big way. We have to wait and see how they’re going to implement this because it may put the Army at odds with local populations. Tensions are already very high. People are very polarized, and the I.D.F. just issued a new evacuation order, and not only for the suburbs. They’ve really expanded the area to the Palestinian camps and elsewhere.

I don’t know where these people are going to go. We don’t have enough shelters. This is a country that has no air defenses, it has no sirens, and it has no bomb shelters.

But the Lebanese President reached out again and said they need to be negotiating directly with the Israelis. So Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that he’s authorized direct negotiations with Lebanon. Meanwhile, there’s no ceasefire. Frankly, I’m not holding my breath over these negotiations, but at least it opens a window, a diplomatic window to spare Lebanon more destruction.

Lebanon is a country that has had to deal with many refugees, including Palestinian refugees and Syrian refugees, at different times. You said that over a million people in the south had to leave their homes. Where are they going and what sort of strain might that put on the rest of Lebanon, in addition to the obvious horror for the people who have to leave?

The government has, I think, done a really good job in its very rapid response. This is the most responsive government we’ve seen to crises. They have established shelters in public schools and used the sports stadium in Beirut. Still, while some people displaced by the war are staying with their families, some are staying with friends, and some are renting places and staying there, it has created a lot of tension on the ground for a number of reasons. I think, as time passes and resources dwindle, it’s going to be a race to the bottom. Two, there is the sense that the targeting we saw by Israel has placed a bull’s-eye on the displaced. Nobody wants to have a displaced person in their vicinity because everyone’s worried that they might be targeted by Israel. And it’s created a lot of tensions on the ground, a lot of accusations. We’ve seen some neighborhoods that have absolutely refused to even open the public schools for refugees.

In addition to being concerned about targeting, is there a sense from other people in the country that some Shias had brought this on themselves by supporting Hezbollah, and that Hezbollah dragged this country into the war?

It is an issue, but it’s a minority issue. Like all countries, you have different perspectives and points of view. So it is an issue, but I really would say it’s a minority issue. People are trying to help in any way they can. Even those who don’t want to host are trying to help in other ways, but there’s also a lot of anger. There’s a lot of anger at Hezbollah for having dragged Lebanon into this, and an understanding that the displaced are the ones, frankly, who are paying the price for Hezbollah’s military adventurism. So, yes, there are people who think that way.

Israel is talking about creating what they call a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, which, according to them, would make it harder for Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israel. Do you have a sense of what a buffer zone would look like?

This is not a buffer zone. This is occupied Lebanese territory, period. In 2024, they dynamited around towns and villages near the border with Israel. Now they’re dynamiting additional villages, and making it impossible for people to go back home. They’ve also blown up all the bridges crossing the Litani River. It’s a river, so it varies with the geography, but it’s about thirty kilometres from the Israeli border. All the bridge crossings have been blown up. So that part of Lebanon is now completely isolated from the rest of Lebanon. Now, whether they decide to maintain a military presence in these areas, how extensive that military presence will be, I’m not sure. But what I would say is that so long as there is one Israeli soldier on Lebanese land, this is going to reinforce and give credence to Hezbollah’s narrative that only military resistance is viable. They will say it’s the only way to liberate land. This has been their narrative for a long time. This continues to be the narrative today, and the occupation of any part of Lebanon is going to reinforce that in a very big way. I’m already seeing the shift. Even among, I would say, members of the Shia community who have been increasingly critical of what Hezbollah has done, now everyone is closing ranks and not just within the community, but I would say even among many Lebanese.

So you’re saying, despite the anger at Hezbollah for dragging Lebanon into the war, that any medium- or long-term occupation of Lebanese territory may in fact have the reverse effect, politically, of making people think that at least Hezbollah is talking about reclaiming land, when nobody else is?

Yes, absolutely. There’s a lot of anger at what Israel is doing. What they are doing just does not make sense beyond absolutely terrorizing an already terrified population. The anger and the shock at what happened yesterday will turn the tide; it is already turning the tide. Anger was growing against Israeli actions in Lebanon. The feeling is that they’re not just going after Hezbollah; they’re going after Lebanon.

How has the government responded?

There’s sufficient evidence of war crimes being committed in Lebanon, and they can lodge complaints, make a case in international courts, despite the fact that we’re seeing the undermining of multilateral institutions, like the U.N., globally, but, still, I think we need to have an insistence on these. They’re beginning to do that. But, at the same time, yes, there is an offer to negotiate with Israel. These direct talks would be breaking a massive taboo for the country. It’s not something that was acceptable at all, even six months ago, let alone a year ago.

And if there’s a longer occupation, I assume it will get harder.

I think it'll become impossible to negotiate. Look, all conflicts, at the end of the day, have to end with a political settlement somewhere along the line. A military offensive is not going to resolve the issues between Lebanon and Israel. It certainly will not get rid of Hezbollah. This is an organization that was born out of the rubble of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and which caused the deaths of twenty thousand people.

And these are Lebanese. This is not 1982, when Arafat was forced to leave Lebanon on a boat and went to Tunis. These are Lebanese. They’re not going to go anywhere. So we’re going to end up at the negotiating table sooner or later. And I think, if we don’t, we’re going to see many, many more Hezbollahs emerging. ♦

American hubris dies hard. Listening to the hyperventilations of Pete Hegseth on Wednesday morning, as he enthused about a tenuous ceasefire with Iran that may or may not mark the end of what President Donald Trump has called his “little excursion” in the Middle East, one might have been forgiven for thinking that America, aided by the hand of the Almighty himself and the “courage and resolve” of its Commander-in-Chief, had just pulled off one of the greatest wins in the long history of armed combat. Trump’s self-styled Secretary of War revelled in what he called “a capital-V military victory” against a “humiliated and demoralized” Iranian regime, cataloguing a six-week campaign of destruction that had “eliminated” the country’s senior leadership, sunk its Navy to “the bottom of the sea,” “wiped out” its Air Force, and “functionally destroyed” its missile program. Operation Epic Fury, he exulted, “achieved every single objective, on plan, on schedule, exactly as laid out from Day One.”

The President himself has been similarly effusive about his own great success since announcing a two-week cessation of hostilities with Iran at 6:32 P.M. on Tuesday, approximately an hour and a half before his self-imposed deadline for the Iranian government to agree to a deal or face civilizational erasure. The war, Trump told one of many journalists to whom he has granted quickie phone interviews this week, was nothing less than a “total and complete victory. One hundred per cent. No doubt about it.”

If this was victory, I’d hate to see what failure looks like. Perhaps the most immediate problem with the ceasefire—which was, according to Trump, supposed to be conditioned on the “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz”—is that it has not actually resulted in the complete, immediate, and safe opening of the Strait of Hormuz, according to those who have been monitoring it. On Wednesday, just four ships, none of them oil tankers, passed through the strait, fewer than on the day before the ceasefire. By Thursday, traffic continued to be at a virtual standstill, with just seven ships transiting the strait, about ninety per cent less than normal. “Let’s be clear,” Sultan al-Jaber, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, said. “The Strait of Hormuz is not open.”

Iran has not only retained control over the strait through which one-fifth of the world’s oil-and-gas supply flows; it now asserts the right to charge millions of dollars in tolls to ships that wish to pass—a new status quo sanctioned by Trump that will enrich and entrench the theocratic government he started out the war wanting to topple. As long as this continues, oil prices will remain high and the world economy will pay the price for America’s costly war.

Instead of regime change, Trump has succeeded merely in swapping one Supreme Leader named Khamenei—the aging ayatollah whose killing Trump celebrated on the first day of the war—for another Supreme Leader named Khamenei, the ayatollah’s son, who appears to be even more of a hard-liner than his father was. As for the many, many other goals for the conflict that Trump had offered at various points, suffice it to say that he failed to achieve anything like the obliteration of Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic-missile arsenal, or proxy network of terrorist allies that might have constituted a positive outcome. (The reason, no doubt, that Israel kept firing away at Hezbollah in Lebanon even after the ceasefire was announced.) “Unconditional surrender” this was not.

The costs of Trump’s folly include far more than the thousands of deaths and tens of billions of dollars the Pentagon has spent on the war—from billions of dollars in damage to U.S. military installations, oil-and-gas production facilities, and civilian infrastructure in Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, to the disruption of global supply chains and air-traffic routes, to the depletion of hard-to-replace air-defense and munitions stockpiles. The longer-term and less tangible costs may be even higher, as measured in the strained alliances in Asia and Europe with allies who refused to join Trump’s war and the erosion of the very idea of America as a global leader

No wonder, then, that where the Trumpists see victory, the rest of the world does not. A sampling of headlines from the past few days: “Donald Trump is the war’s biggest loser” (The Economist); “ ‘There are no winners’: US and Iran enter into a fragile truce” (Financial Times); “Trump’s Iran War Leaves the US Looking Weakened to Adversaries” (Bloomberg); “Why the US-Iran ceasefire is seen as a failure for Donald Trump” (South China Morning Post). Even Trump-friendly Fox News displayed a huge graphic that listed the President’s various unmet goals in the war, as a host announced, “the President’s demands—we have not reached any of those objectives.” Superpowers rarely inflict such swift and straightforwardly embarrassing injury to themselves. The Vietnam War lasted nearly two decades. The war in Iraq unfolded over nearly nine years. This act of self-harm took just thirty-eight days.

That Trump’s experiment in military adventurism would end so badly was not much of a surprise. For years, experts have gamed out exactly such a war with the Islamic Republic of Iran, with predictable consequences just like those that awaited Trump. This is why his predecessors Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden didn’t try it—it wasn’t because, as Trump suggested the other night, they were all cowards and losers.

The shocker here was more that Trump—he of the “no new wars” campaign pledge—chose to go for it. This was no doubt because he was operating under his own version of the autocrat’s delusion: that he would achieve fast and nearly cost-free victory over a weakened enemy. As the Times reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman revealed this week in their in-the-Situation Room account of how Trump decided to start the war, no one in his Cabinet of courtiers had the guts to challenge his mistaken assumptions. Reading it, I could not help but think of Vladimir Putin back in 2022, ordering his generals to invade Ukraine with their dress uniforms packed and ready for the victory parade in Kyiv that would surely soon follow. Sycophants make terrible war planners. Is it Hegseth’s fault, or Trump’s, that all that divine intervention and all those thirteen thousand strikes that our leaders have bragged about did not enable them to defeat Iran?

Much of what made the outcome of the war so embarrassing was Trump’s conduct during it—not only the constant lies and dissimulations about why he had launched the conflict and what he hoped to achieve from it but, even more, the spectacle he presented of unhinged, unaccountable American power. For weeks, culminating in his threat, on Tuesday morning, to wipe out the ancient civilization of Persia, the President crudely celebrated death and destruction, made light of the suffering he had unleashed, and encouraged America’s powerful military to engage in war crimes against a civilian population in whose name he had launched the war in the first place. All over the world, people wondered how this could possibly be: Had the most powerful man on the planet suddenly gone mad?

How awful, then, to have to admit what we Americans have seen for a decade now—this is not a new Trump but a very old one. Defeat will not temper his mania. There is no strategic setback so big as to embarrass him. Unchastened by failure, Trump, on Thursday morning, was shit-posting on social media about his plans for the U.S. military’s “next Conquest.”

To Trump, the inability to achieve the goals he himself articulated in a war of his choosing against Iran is just one more screwup. He has, after all, made a lifetime of catastrophic mistakes and still ended up as President—twice. He’ll handle this like all the rest by moving on and getting over it even before the cleanup crews have finished in Tel Aviv and Tehran. ♦

At the start of the new comedic thriller “Big Mistakes,” the lives of Nicky Dardano (Dan Levy), a quasi-closeted pastor, and his sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega), an elementary-school teacher, are far from ideal. That’s before Morgan steals a necklace from a chintzy gift shop run by a Turkish gangster named Yusuf, who proceeds to kidnap the pair, intimidate them at gunpoint, and threaten their family, forcing them to perform an array of odd jobs to make up for the petty theft. But even under these conditions, Yusuf, who runs errands for other low-ranking thugs, senses that his new subordinates have something he doesn’t. “You two are like pieces of white bread,” he sneers. “You can get away with anything in this country.”

In fact, Nicky and Morgan’s middle-class respectability conceals an overwhelming existential paralysis. Both siblings seem to feel locked into tracks they hadn’t intended to stay on for long. Nicky leads a congregation that accepts queerness among its clergy only if they are “nonpracticing,” obliging him to keep his boyfriend (Jacob Gutierrez) a secret from his family and his church. Morgan has returned to their home town in suburban New Jersey after a failed stint as an actress in New York and fallen back into a relationship with her high-school boyfriend (Jack Innanen), a petulant bum who proposes by flinging a ring box at her as he drops her off at work. At first, Yusuf and his Russian associates keep the Dardanos (and the viewer) in the dark about what sorts of malfeasance they’re accessories to, mining the disconnect for comedy. (A typically vague instruction: “Just give him the cash and do the deal.”) With such limited tutelage, they don’t exactly become criminal masterminds—but after a while they begin to wonder what a bit of transgression could yield for them, too.

“Big Mistakes,” now streaming on Netflix, was co-created by Levy and Rachel Sennott, and it has the manic, overheated energy that’s become the actress’s signature. The New Jersey ennui and the organized-crime story lines also evoke “The Sopranos,” or a funhouse version of it with a woman and a gay man at the helm. Much of the new show’s unpredictable humor stems from this switch in perspective. When a job takes Nicky and Morgan to a near-empty strip club, it’s hard not to recall Tony’s many meetings at the Bada Bing; Nicky, for his part, takes a seat by the stage only to stare at his phone, unmoved by the half-naked dancer inches away. Yusuf’s threats—to, say, flay Nicky and burn him with acid if he doesn’t comply—tend to yield more exasperation than fear from the pastor, who tells him, “You’re being very dramatic.” It’s a small but notable subversion: in this musky, hypermasculine world (where no one is particularly bothered by Nicky’s sexuality), the straight guys are the histrionic ones. There’s more than a hint of are-men-O.K. bafflement when Morgan tries to guess what sorts of misdeeds the Russians might be up to, wondering aloud, “Why is it only ever men that get involved in this shit?”

“Big Mistakes” is Levy’s first scripted series since “Schitt’s Creek,” the gentle Canadian sitcom about a riches-to-rags family forced to downsize. Both shows feature fish-out-of-water scenarios and Levy as a tetchy gay man with a difficult sister—though Nicky has two of those, not just one. But “Big Mistakes” is a harder-edged project, closer in spirit (and volume) to “The Bear.” (The housewife-breaks-bad dramedy “Weeds” is another clear influence, as evidenced by the casting of one of that show’s leads, Elizabeth Perkins, in a small but pivotal role.) The loopy theatricality of Catherine O’Hara’s Moira, the matriarch of “Schitt’s Creek,” is replaced by the abrasive self-pity of Nicky and Morgan’s narcissistic mom, Linda (a wonderfully typecast Laurie Metcalf). The series’ opening scene plops audiences in the middle of the Dardanos’ dysfunction, as Linda, presiding over her own mother’s hospital room, screeches that her children should bear witness to their terminally ill nonna’s final days—even to her urinary incontinence. Linda rattles off all that’s on her plate, then turns to Nicky and Morgan and asks, “Could the two of you for once set your differences aside and make my mother’s death easy on me?”

Throughout her career, Metcalf has elevated such caustic obliviousness to a minor art form. It’s always a pleasure to be exhausted by her characters, but “Big Mistakes” also deploys the quality to a different end: Linda, we learn, defends her kids as ferociously as she attacks them. Such strong characterizations and go-for-broke performances, especially among the women, make up for some decidedly contrived plotting. The relatively unknown Ortega emerges as the show’s secret weapon, conjuring a breezy chemistry with her co-stars even as her chaos-prone character needlessly complicates all her relationships. For Morgan, crime provides an escape hatch from a day-to-day she doesn’t want, as well as an outlet for the improv skills that she presumably developed as an actress. It’s not long before the Russians notice that she’s a valuable asset, while her brother is not. (She doesn’t disagree, scoffing at Nicky, “You would not last one day on ‘Survivor.’ ”) Leading a double life is less a burden than a test of one’s mettle.

As the season progresses, though, these two worlds become more difficult to reconcile. (It’s tough to get invested in a subplot about Linda’s mayoral ambitions while her kids are caught up in a “Sicario”-style firefight.) The gangland drama is deeper and darker than the domestic one, strengthened by the unexpected portrayal of the Russian toughs as bumbling in their own way; as they discover, you can only scare the bejeezus out of people so many times before desensitization kicks in. Yusuf and his pals are as stymied as the siblings themselves, and just as preoccupied by their status within a larger universe. “Big Mistakes” comes close to making a point about all these hierarchies—but the show, like its characters, has a policy of shooting first, asking questions later. ♦

The first generation of parents to have resorted, at least occasionally, to mollifying their children by putting digital screens in their hands has now seen those kids grow up. The parents themselves are increasingly reliant on products powered by algorithms, and teen-agers have become around-the-clock users of social-media apps. Concurrently, mental-health crises among teens have become legion. Do tech companies bear any of the blame? Last month, a California jury concluded that, in the case of a woman known as Kaley, they do, finding Meta and Google liable for her addiction to Instagram and YouTube, which they respectively own, and awarding her six million dollars in damages. Serving as a signal of a taste in the courts and among the public to have tech companies bear some of the costs of harm that they have allegedly caused, the verdict represents the opening legal salvo in a fight against one of the central anxieties of our time.

For decades, the understanding was that social-media companies were essentially immune from any such legal liability. Congress said, sweepingly, in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, that an online platform was not to be treated as a “publisher or speaker” and so could not be held responsible for potentially harmful content posted on it by third parties. But, in 2023, Kaley, who was then seventeen years old, filed suit in California, claiming that she had become addicted to social media as a child, which had caused anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia. Many other lawsuits alleged similar harm, including one claiming that TikTok and Snapchat had contributed to the suicides of three children. Since plaintiffs were foreclosed, by Section 230, from arguing that social-media companies are liable for publishing harmful content, lawyers came up with a claim that attempted to sidestep it.

The claim was that tech companies had designed social-media apps to “maximize user engagement” with features such as infinite scroll, beauty filters, autoplay, push notifications, and tailor-made algorithms, and that, in so doing, the companies had been negligent. That is, they had failed to exercise reasonable care with respect to the dangers of social-media addiction, a condition that has been recognized by the American Psychological Association and the Surgeon General. Reasonable care, according to the lawyers’ claim, might have entailed, say, companies easing up on the user-engagement features; perhaps they could also have instituted meaningful age-verification or parental-notification measures, or limits on how often and for how long and at what times of day a child could use these apps.

Similar design claims were made against Big Tobacco, beginning in the nineteen-nineties. Those claims alleged that companies had engineered products to be more addictive; for example, by adding chemicals to speed and intensify nicotine delivery to the brain and to ease inhalation, so that smokers would become unable to quit. The claims met with some limited success in a few states, and in 2006 a federal court ordered tobacco companies to publicly state that they intentionally designed cigarettes to induce and maintain addiction.

Kaley’s case was selected as a “bellwether”—a test case to go to trial first and show how a jury would react to the claims—from more than a thousand lawsuits filed against social-media companies by individuals and school districts in California, which were consolidated into a single proceeding before a California judge, Carolyn B. Kuhl. She allowed the design claim to go to trial, meaning that the jury would decide, based on the evidence, whether the design features were addictive, whether the companies were negligent in designing them, and whether that addiction had caused harm to Kaley. As Kuhl explained it, “the allegedly addictive features of defendants’ platforms (such as endless scroll) cannot be analogized to how a publisher chooses to make a compilation of information, but rather are based on harm allegedly caused by design features that affect how plaintiffs interact with the platforms regardless of the nature of the third-party content viewed.” Thousands of similar federal lawsuits were also consolidated into a proceeding in a district court in California, and the first federal bellwether trial is scheduled for June. Separately, a coalition of dozens of states sued Meta on similar claims, and a trial in federal court, also in California, can be expected in the next year.

Kaley testified that she had been on YouTube since the age of six, had posted more than two hundred videos by age ten, and had created nine additional social-media accounts for the purpose of liking and commenting on her own content: “I spent all my time on it. I would sneak it. I would watch it in class. Every time I set limits for myself, it didn’t work. I just couldn’t get off,” she said. Social media “made” her give up hobbies and prevented her from making friends. She added that it still consumes her as a twenty-year-old woman: “I just can’t be without it.” When Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Meta, testified at the trial, Kaley’s lawyer showed the jury a collage of hundreds of selfies that Kaley had posted to Instagram, which she said she had used since she was eleven.

Meta suggested that Kaley’s mental-health struggles were attributable not to social-media addiction but, rather, to her mother’s emotional and physical abuse and neglect, and that Kaley’s social-media use was not the source of her troubles but a way to cope with them. Kaley denied being abused or neglected, though Meta’s attorneys did show some Instagram posts about her mother screaming at her. But the strategy of attempting to pin the blame elsewhere was stymied, because California has a highly lenient standard in cases alleging that a defendant caused injury to a plaintiff: defendants can be liable if their negligence was a “substantial factor” in causing the harm—not necessarily the only cause or even the primary one. So the jury could have decided in Kaley’s favor even if it believed that the platforms’ negligent designs merely contributed to the many possible causes of her injury, such as, perhaps, school pressures, economic pressures, the political landscape, climate change—or bad parenting.

The contest over causation goes to parents’ simultaneous senses of responsibility and helplessness about their children’s fates. If parents have in the past felt they were competing with bad influences on children—questionable friends, shady neighbors, or profanity-laced music among them—the core anxiety in this era is that algorithms have made it so that there is no competition at all, undermining parents’ opportunity to steer their children right. (The day before the verdict in Kaley’s case, a New Mexico jury imposed a civil penalty on Meta of three hundred and seventy-five million dollars, under state consumer-protection laws, for misleading users about platform safety and enabling child sexual exploitation.) This generation of parents was also warned by those opposed to helicopter or tiger parenting not to monitor kids like hawks, and even to try some “free-range” parenting to let them explore and make mistakes. Meanwhile, engineers in Silicon Valley were allegedly designing ingenious ways to make explorations of digital rabbit holes irresistible. In millions of American homes, while parents were making dinner or paying bills, their kids were in another room scrolling social media and talking to chatbots.

In response to the verdict, a Meta spokesperson said that “teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.” Google said in a statement that the case “misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.” (Both companies said that they would appeal.) In the end, though, what made the verdict remarkable was the relative ordinariness of Kaley’s story. Her testimony about her habits, her behavior, and her anxieties was relatable to many people. The jury award was a spur to understand a life recognizably shaped by social-media algorithms, in ways that were perhaps near-impossible to resist, as a serious injury to an entire generation.

But there is a more general dread about human vulnerability to technology—a growing existential fear that people are losing the authorship and agency of their own lives to, particularly, artificial intelligence—that will be reflected in an avalanche of related negligent-design legal claims. A dozen California lawsuits against OpenAI alleging injury from negligent design of A.I. chatbots have been consolidated into a proceeding that is now in its early stages. The suits include a case brought by parents alleging that ChatGPT encouraged their son to die by suicide, offered to write his suicide note, and helped him make the noose with which he hanged himself. Another suit claims that an adult man’s relationship with ChatGPT persuaded him to believe not only that the A.I. was sentient but that his “mathematical theories combined with his past traumas had somehow caused it to become sentient and that, with enough fundraising and resources, he could save the world from destruction.” The theory of the complaints is that it was reasonably foreseeable that vulnerable people would develop psychological dependencies on A.I., and that companies did not exercise reasonable care in prioritizing user engagement over user safety in designing the A.I. OpenAI has responded by asserting, among other things, that the injuries were caused by the “misuse, unauthorized use, unintended use, unforeseeable use, and/or improper use of ChatGPT.”

Blaming the conduct of companies may provide some comfort by asserting that the harm is caused by the acts of human beings to wrong other human beings. But the lawsuits underscore the larger-scale loss that we fear is already inevitable. The pursuit of court decisions finding that the design of algorithms made a person unable to stop using them, or that the design of a large language model took away an individual’s reasoned decision-making power is a meagre resistance to the general anxiety. Whether or not cases survive appeals or change the incentives and behavior of tech companies, they stand as recognition of the fear that what makes us most human is not the capacity to reason and make choices but rather the vulnerability to giving that up. ♦

Hi, Shirley. Could you check and see if Dr. Solomon can move my dental cleaning to next week? I came across two baby squirrels as I was walking to my car—the early-morning sunlight hitting my face—that must have fallen out of a tree during yesterday’s windstorm. One seems O.K. The other is quite listless, and I think it’s best that I stay here cradling them both against my chest. That’s pretty much all I’m capable of doing right now, in this moment of soft connectivity to a fragile world. I can say with assurance that I don’t have the emotional resilience to have my gums poked at, so, if you could reschedule the appointment, that’d be great.

Jorge, I’m going to stop you right there. I think you’re really nice—you’re quick to smile, and it seems like Ally got this match right. But, when I was in the rest room, I realized that I’m exactly the same age my dad was when he died, and it’s not that I’m not proud of all I’ve done—I am!—it’s just that life is so fleeting, and any of us could be gone in a moment, especially if we smoke, and eat too much mayonnaise, so I’m going to have to take a walk along the river and stare at the horizon. But, call me later, I’d love to do this again! I’ll leave a twenty for my crème brûlée. You can take what’s left home.

Excuse me, excuse me, sorry, sorry, sorry—I just have to squeeze past you. I figured out where this movie was going five minutes ago and there are a hundred and six minutes left (I looked it up) so I’m gonna leave. Maybe I’ll sit on a bench at the bus station and watch the human tapestry unfurl itself. I’m sorry that I stepped on your souvenir popcorn bucket—take mine.

Please, you go ahead. I can’t decide between an Americano or an espresso—I think it’s because, several hours ago, I missed a step on the stairs when I heard my train coming, and I caught myself on the bannister, but the frantic rush of anxiety and loss of control is still coursing through my veins, since, as a robust person who derives much of my pleasure in life from moving freely, the vision of breaking my bones really made me think about what would happen if my simplest joys were suddenly ripped away. Also, when I grabbed the handrail, I touched someone’s gum, so, you know what? I deserve a treat. I’ll have a chai latte.

It’s your seat, ma’am! Take the seat, please—your bags look heavy and I’m still thinking about another baby squirrel I found, this time dead, on the sidewalk this morning and the arrogance of believing that we have control over our destinies or the machinations of a hard, unfeeling world. Actually, I am gonna sit, thank you. I’ve had a day—Oops, never mind, that guy took it.

Hey, pals, we’re all getting a little heated in this political discussion. So let me ask: Have you ever picked up a tomato and held it in your hand for six minutes and thought about its origins—from seed, to soil, to a farmer’s calloused hands, to a truck, to a store, to a shopping bag, and then a car and restaurant, to this exquisite gazpacho, all within just a short period of time? Pretty wild. If you don’t like tomatoes, try it with cheese.

I’m sorry, guys. I’ve gotta cancel on our plans tonight. You can give my ticket to someone who didn’t make eye contact with a pigeon and feel super judged for the decadent, indoor-human life I lead. ♦