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“A new ‘Game of Thrones’ series!” you might be thinking. “Time to unroll my map of Westeros.” Well, unroll away—but “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” despite its name, won’t require a refresher on the distance from Sunspear to Dragonstone. The six-episode series, which débuted this month on HBO, has a small-scale focus, and its first season takes place on a small bit of map. Unlike “Game of Thrones” and its prequel “House of the Dragon,” it doesn’t aim for epic. Based on George R. R. Martin’s series of novellas “Tales of Dunk and Egg,” and a welcome return to character development, “Knight” centers on the adventures of Dunk (Peter Claffey), a strapping naïf otherwise known as Ser Duncan the Tall, and his spectacularly bald boy squire, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell). Each wants to prove himself, and for that to happen Dunk must triumph in a jousting tournament. That’s pretty much the plot.

Where “Thrones” was a soaring fantasia of ice, fire, dragons, and direwolves, and “House of the Dragon” was a saga spanning decades, “Knight” is a gentle buddy dramedy. It wants to give us a frisson of the old “Thrones” feeling but also wants to subvert it. The series signals this early in the first episode, when we watch our aspiring knight contemplate his future and get a good idea. Inspiration strikes, strains of the “Thrones” theme music begin to swell—Oh, boy!—and then abruptly stop; the scene shifts to Dunk crouching beside a tree, naked rump majestically spraying shit. “[Wet splatting], [relieving sighs],” the subtitles explain. Moments such as these help indicate whether the show is going to be your bag.

“Knight,” created by Ira Parker with George R. R. Martin, is set a century before the events of “Thrones.” As the series opens, Dunk, a squire, stands on a desolate one-tree hillside, lowering the body of his mentor, the late Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb), into a grave. “I don’t know the right words,” Dunk says. “You were a true knight. You never beat me when I didn’t deserve it.” (Well, except that one time.) Later, lying under a sunny sky, he brainstorms aloud, talking to his three horses. Should he go to King’s Landing? Lannisport? Join the City Watch? He imagines this, brandishing Ser Arlan’s longsword: “Stop raping, ser!” Hmm, the sword fits his grip. And hmm!—the good idea cometh. “There is a tourney at Ashford Meadow . . .” he says, thoughts visibly moving across his face and firming into resolve.

So the journey begins. The first episode is largely Eggless, but he makes a memorable impression. Approaching a tavern with his horses, Dunk, in a grubby cloak and a rope belt, encounters a tiny bald kid, assumes he’s the stable boy, and tries out his new knight persona, demanding oats and a palfrey rubdown. He doesn’t wonder why this well-spoken, curious child resists confirming that he’s the stable boy. (Egg has some secrets.) “You’ll get a copper if you do well, and a clout in the ear if not,” Dunk says, a threat we can’t imagine him carrying out. The mysterious Egg scoffs at Dunk’s rope belt but offers to be his squire. Dunk declines; soon enough, Egg has found him again.

Dunk is a bit of a lunk. He hits his head on a doorframe, twice; in the second episode, he observes, during a moment of philosophizing, that people have always said he was stupid. (“And?” Egg asks, expecting a pep talk. But that’s the whole anecdote.) Still, Dunk believes in himself, like any good hero, and people are drawn to his guilelessness. He’s also an outsider. Ser Arlan had been a hedge knight—a freelancer of sorts, who roamed the realm doing chivalric things and making his home where he found it. In flashbacks and outdoor domestic scenes, Dunk seems at home and at peace in nature, outside of society. But like most of us, he must make his living within it. In Ashford, where a camp has been set up for the tournament, he tells the registrar of his desire to enter and joust; Ser Arlan knighted him before he died, and he wants to serve the realm and protect the weak. But is he really a knight? the registrar wonders. Busting Dunk’s chops while hocking into a tankard, the registrar says that if he’s somehow revealed not to be a real knight they’ll administer “the Ashford chair”: lower him naked onto a sharpened point and fuck him dry, har har! But seriously, he needs a real knight to vouch for him. Dunk looks befuddled, but then another idea occurs—Ser Manfred Dondarrion of Dorne will surely remember me, from when Ser Arlan knighted for his father!—and he sets off to find him. We might not share his confidence.

Outside a tent, Dunk is told, by two of the show’s jaded yet cheerful prostitutes, that Ser Manfred is busy napping. They also chuckle at Dunk for being a hedge knight. “Like a knight, but sadder,” one says. (“We’re not sad,” Dunk mutters to his horse. “Certainly not rising-to-the-level-of-a-comment sad.”) He meets a pair of cousins who are fighting in the dirt, then decides to “seek quieter accommodations,” and goes off to make a home in the hedges. In the wilderness, to a strummy, whistling score, Dunk bathes in a stream and beats his clothes against a rock. Some of “Knight” ’s most enjoyable scenes are these peaceful idylls, when Dunk is off on his own or with a companion; they offer insight about the difference between solitude and loneliness.

In the first episode and the second, Dunk continues to strike out with gouty, dissolute Ser Manfred, as well as with other high-born men of distinction who might vouch for him. A montage of tender and funny flashbacks opens the second episode, with a voice-over of Dunk making appeals about Ser Arlan to men of House Florent, House Hayford, and House Tyrell, putting a generous spin on the old man’s distinctions. “He said it was you, m’lord, who told him that a hedge knight was the bridge between lords and the smallfolk,” Dunk concludes to Lord Tyrell. Tyrell spits, unmoved. “I know him not, man,” he says. After all this, Egg asks the obvious: “Was he a shit knight?”

There’s something universal in this early quest of Dunk’s, the recalibrating that comes with beginning to make your own way in the world, the continual realization that the world of your youth was smaller than it had seemed. But through Dunk’s own distinctions—his earnestness, his will, his towering, if ungainly, form—he makes some progress, too. A comely puppeteer (Tanzyn Crawford) helps him repaint Ser Arlan’s shield; the nicer of those cousins fighting in the dirt (Shaun Thomas) brings him to a rollicking feast hosted by Ser Lyonel (the Laughing Storm) Baratheon (Daniel Ings), an antler-crown-wearing raconteur with a Dinklageian lust for life. By the party’s end, Dunk and the Laughing Storm are having a heart-to-heart booze-and-chat, and the antlers are on Dunk’s head. These budding friendships, his yin-yang mentorship of Egg, and a connection with Prince Baelor Targaryen (Bertie Carvel), a kindhearted noble who actually does remember Ser Arlan, will shape his fate as the series unfolds, in chivalric challenges on and off the tiltyard.

“Knight” ’s episodes are shorter and fewer than “Game of Thrones” episodes, and its scope, which allows for reasonable pacing, succeeds in all ways but one: the show, which was created and written largely by men, can feel like it. The first season, adapted by Parker from Martin’s 1998 book, has signposts of an earlier era—women are an afterthought, “Ashford chair” jokes are all in good fun—and its obvious joy in things like loogie-hawking, bowel-emptying, and an old man’s comically huge dick isn’t shared by viewers like me. “Game of Thrones” made an effort in this regard, including, among its thrills and horrors, details and characters to entertain almost anyone. With the notable exception of its two sensitively evoked leads, “Knight” doesn’t. In later episodes, grime and grunting and fighting abound, reminding me of “Thrones” battle boredom and the White Walker army. (During one such longueur, I had a bumper-sticker idea: “I’d rather be watching ‘Heated Rivalry.’ ”) But if you love and miss this seven-kingdomed world, Dunk and Egg make excellent companions for the return. ♦

Last week, I asked if modern political movements, especially on the left, could survive without the church. Social media serves as an outrage machine that can fuel big street demonstrations, but, without any real-world infrastructure, it cannot sustain the momentum needed to make actual social change. Can religious leaders help rectify this? Or does the decades-long decline of religious attendance mean that the church can no longer provide either a shared vision of how to treat people or the actual people to show up at a protest?

Two years ago, I wrote about Wayne Hsiung, the founder of the animal-liberation group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE. Hsiung is among the most interesting activists I’ve encountered, in part because he faces a nearly impossible task: the public does not like animal-rights activists, and, even if people don’t want beagles to be tortured in testing facilities, it’s relatively easy for them to turn a blind eye to such things. That challenge of advancing a cause that not many people will get behind forced Hsiung and DxE to come up with increasingly novel ways to further their aims. Most famously, they engaged in so-called open rescues, breaking into breeding facilities and factory farms, basically kidnapping distressed animals, and then giving them new homes. Hsiung’s mission, outside of saving animals, was to get arrested and charged with various felonies so that he could then represent himself in court and argue that helping an animal in distress is legally justified.

But, last year, Hsiung made a surprising announcement: he was enrolling in a seminary. In a blog post about the decision, he wrote, “I have spent most of the last 20 years of my life understanding the power of disruption. But one cannot disrupt, effectively or sustainably, when one stands alone. The next chapter of my life will be exploring how to create the scaffolding that helps people stand as a community. And for that purpose, you may see me soon in a surprising place. My journey is taking me across the country into the ministry.” He began studying at Union Theological Seminary, in New York, that August.

It struck me at the time that Hsiung had only arrived at the church after exhausting nearly every other option for pursuing social change, including running for mayor of Berkeley. But, in our many talks across the years, I have always found him to be a deeply serious and intelligent man, and I wanted to know more about why he ultimately decided upon the church. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you grow up going to church?

When I was born, in central Indiana, there were barely any Chinese people. There wasn’t a Buddhist temple within a hundred miles. The only place Chinese people could gather was at a Chinese church in my neighborhood. I don’t think I even coded it as a church, to be honest. I thought it was the place where I could talk to people in Chinese and have Chinese food and have friends. One of the biggest draws was the Chinese school—my mom was the founder and principal.

I can’t say my affiliation with Christianity was very strong, but I did develop a positive association with the idea of moral community—the idea that we could get together, support each other, and try to do something good for one another and for the world. That seemed like an important thing for us to be doing.

When did you start thinking about the role of religion in your animal-rights activism? I ask because the organization you started, Direct Action Everywhere, feels explicitly secular.

I remember having a conversation around 2015 with Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford who studies political movements. For the most part, he thought that DxE was a fascinating demonstration of grassroots mobilization and community-building. But he said one thing that really hit me hard, and made me think we might be on the wrong path: “You’re not really harnessing any particular identity. And movements that don’t have identities behind them just don’t succeed, because they can’t sustain themselves over the long term.”

Fundamentally, what moves people is when they believe they’re fighting for something that’s part of them. If it’s purely about ideology, not about identity, it’s just not going to create sustained mobilization. The example he gave me was the Black church. He told me to read “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” by Aldon Morris.

I already knew a lot about Martin Luther King, Jr., and how the movement collapsed in the late sixties partly because of the loss of faith. There wasn’t the same sense of community and commitment. Doug shared this acronym with me, WUNC, coined by the sociologist Charles Tilly. It stands for “worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.” When you have those four attributes, you have a successful movement.

I realized there wasn’t a sense of worthiness in our movement, partly because there wasn’t a commitment to some greater moral purpose. In the late stage of the civil-rights movement, it became nihilistic—the Weather Underground, the Vietnam War tearing at the fabric of people’s commitment to nation, to community, to church. Our movement just never had that deep sense of moral purpose that made people feel like, O.K., these people are praiseworthy people.

You don’t think “Don’t kill animals” is a worthy cause?

I think it’s a worthy cause. I don’t think people see us as worthy people. There’s a big difference. It’s not enough to have a good cause. You have to have people believe you’re good people. If anything, it’s almost the opposite—even though people think we’re a good cause, they find us annoying and pedantic.

I remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates went on Ezra Klein’s show after he read “Why We’re Polarized.” He called it a “cold, atheist book.” I think, even when animal rights is at our best, people see us as a cold, hard-atheist movement. There’s sentimentality and emotion about suffering in animal-confinement facilities, but there isn’t this sense that we’re a morally meaningful, upstanding contingent of the broader human community.

I agree that the public thinks you guys are freaks or agents provocateurs trying to advance a marginal cause. How does affiliation with the church change that?

I think it’s a complete antidote to that “freak” allegation. It’s hard to say whether this is a cultural artifact of the past ten thousand years or whether there’s something inherent in humanity—the desire for divine purpose. But, regardless of whether it’s socialization or something inherent, most humans on Earth see the divine as the most morally praiseworthy thing in our communities. This is even true of the cold, hard atheists—the effective altruists. They don’t call the divine God. Their divinity is some form of very strict utilitarianism.

A shared narrative has to involve a story that doesn’t just matter to me. We all have stories about ourselves that are funny or interesting or inspiring, but a lot of times they only matter to us. And there are some stories that affect all of us—the nation-state, universities, sports teams.

The other thing that’s important is a sense of power beyond our comprehension and control. I think that might be inherent to human beings—there’s something about that we almost want to worship.

In the early stages of your movement, how did you think about your identity as a moral, political movement?

We tried to create an identity, and instead everyone just saw us as a cult. That identity was basically veganism.

Looking back at the last fifteen years of organizing, a lot of what we were doing was independently creating practices you see in religion. The blog post I wrote that resonated more than any other was called “The Roadmap to Animal Liberation.” I envisioned a world where authorities and ordinary citizens—everyone who saw an animal suffering—just intervened to help.

It sounds, at the start, like a typical open-rescue scenario: we’re being sneaky; we break into a factory farm; we see these distressed animals; we get them out. But the catalyst for the narrative shift is when we see some farm employees and, instead of us running away—which is what typically happens when we’re caught—they run away, because they realize we’ve caught them. We call 911, the hospitals come, and we start taking all the sick animals out one by one with the entire community supporting us.

So we had this almost utopian vision of the way the world could be. In Christianity, it’s the Second Coming of Christ. In Buddhism, it’s some sort of karmic liberation, Nirvana.

We also had practices that you could describe as rituals. We asked our volunteers to go through nonviolence training, and one of the rituals was practicing getting harassed and responding positively. They’re standing there getting shoved, having people screaming right in their face—basically spitting in their face—saying, “Get the fuck out of here.” And everyone’s all in, committed to nonviolence, and they feel so proud afterward.

We independently came to a lot of the things that religious institutions already do in terms of ritual and vision. But I think the great mistake was, I just don’t think you can actually create identities like animal rights out of thin air. At most, you can remix ones that already exist and are powerful.

Why couldn’t veganism work as an identity? There’s a lot of famous vegans.

Veganism means too many things to too many people. Some people are health nuts. Some are doing it for environmental reasons. Some for ethical reasons. And even the ethical people have differing perspectives—hard-core utilitarians focus on suffering—and then there are people like me who have more ambitious visions. I would like to see a world where every animal has legal rights, where they’re seen as persons and included in our democracy.

But the other thing is, even if we have the same shared commitment, I don’t think you can build a moral community and a moral identity for the future unless you have a shared past as well.

When J. D. Vance said why he chose Catholicism, people mocked him. But I actually thought it was pretty wise. He said, “I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old.” It goes back two thousand years. It’s the original church.

If you have a group of buddies from some basketball group, there’s something about the people you have shared stories with for twenty years that’s stronger than the people who’ve only been around a year. The O.G. crew really matters.

Veganism doesn’t even have stories. We have Peter Singer and Donald Watson, but they’re terrible stories. Peter Singer sitting in a cafeteria in Oxford getting into a philosophical argument about utilitarianism—that’s just not a very good story.

In the past, you’ve been quite critical about how progressive activism functions today, especially the ways in which it can be self-defeating and constricting. How did those concerns inform your decision to go to seminary?

In our corner of animal rights, we saw massive growth from 2012 all the way through 2018. The number of people coming both to protests and to community events was basically increasing by a hundred per cent every year. By 2018, we had about five hundred highly committed, highly engaged people every month. And then you hit a certain size, and it all starts falling apart because there’s no scaffolding to hold it all together.

You see it get torn apart by infighting. Some people will blame excessive wokeness, but the critiques of wokeness are missing the point—wokeness was not inherent to the problem. The problem was there were no mechanisms for addressing wokeness within the left. We lacked a political immune system to handle disagreements, to elicit truthful opinions from people. A lot of people nodded and went along with even the craziest aspects because there was no mechanism to get feedback from our own people. Everyone just nodded along in fear, thinking, I don’t want to get cancelled.

There are all sorts of threats that can cause communities to fall apart. Having a shared vision inspires everyone to focus on that vision, but it also encourages people to set aside their differences and work things out because they see there’s a bigger purpose. We just never had that sort of shared vision that a religion has—notwithstanding the people who accused us of being a cult.

What is the scaffolding that the church provides?

Some of it is kind of silly, logistical, practical things that are actually quite important. One is just literal scaffolding—a literal building. Physical spaces where people gather are much more important than is commonly understood in movements. Everyone thinks it’s just Twitter and online mobilization, but one of the things that made us powerful when we were most powerful is that people were gathering in person a lot.

Another is institutional scaffolding. Basic things like, Do we have a conflict-resolution process? Do we have a membership process? What are the decisions about how the e-mail list is used? There are all these institutional insights and social technologies that religion has invented over the past ten thousand years that we can just use off the shelf. We don’t have to reinvent everything—like, How do we handle sexual harassment? Not that the church has handled sexual misconduct particularly well, but still.

There are also subtle institutional things that good moral communities do. People have always sought community for romantic relationships—they want to find people who are a good match, who are going to be good people. There’s no place to find that anymore. It used to be through the church. There are subtle ways people can identify good matches through the institutional scaffolding, such as choir and Sunday school. You find mutual inspiration through your love of song or teaching. Hinge and Tinder aren’t doing it.

Two other things in scaffolding are important. One is narrative—some sort of shared narrative, especially older narratives. Old stories are important. And the last one is ritual. The scholar Joseph Henrich, who I’m kind of obsessed with right now, has this paper about the importance of credibility-enhancing displays. One of the ways communities develop group cohesion is by asking all participants to engage in some sort of costly public display. There are terrible examples—fraternities with hazing—but also good ones. Effective altruism has one I think is good: give ten per cent of your income and do it publicly. There are critiques of E.A. that I’m sympathetic to, but that’s a good practice. It demonstrates something about someone when they put their money where their mouth is.

Is this a genuine embrace of the church, or is this a clever activist trying out different theories to get to the same end? I ask because I first heard of you when you ran for mayor of Berkeley, and I can’t help but wonder if you’re just a smart and curious guy who is trying every avenue for his cause.

I don’t think I would have done this if it was just an activist ploy. Even ten years ago, when we started doing direct action and rescuing animals out of factory farms, I said, “The only thing better than being a lawyer doing direct action would be to be a minister.”

But honestly there’s another experience that was quite powerful. I’ve been in and out of jail for our open-rescue campaign—not super long stays, but I’ve been in a lot of different jails all over the country now, and I’ve met a lot of people, and I’ve seen a lot of people in crisis.

It’s really hard to be in jail if you’re an empathetic person, because there’s so much suffering. I’m healthy of body, healthy of mind. I’ve got people writing me letters. Books are being sent to me while I’m in jail. And then you get your Vietnamese cellmate who has no teeth, barely speaks the language, can’t find a Vietnamese book, and no one even knows he’s there. His public defender doesn’t return his calls. He sits there staring at the walls, getting angrier every day, suffering more and more to the point that you can almost see the psychosis developing.

The one thing I saw consistently across many different jails that helped people was faith. People would get together and have a prayer circle, and they’re allowed to hold hands. Men in jail don’t hold hands, but when you’re having a prayer you’re allowed to. That matters to people—the idea that there’s a man in the world who doesn’t hate you so much that he isn’t willing to take your hand and show you some love.

Faith was a route for them to get there. No matter what racial differences, political differences, no matter what macho attitude you have about strength and power and domination, if there’s a supreme being out there—or something akin to a supreme being, maybe a supreme philosophy, maybe a supreme social commitment we’ve made to each other—that allows you to break bread with people you otherwise wouldn’t . . . that’s an amazing fucking thing.

I remember this guy—upper-middle-class dude in Sonoma County, insurance salesman. Meth just ruined his life. He got addicted, ended up in drug dens, started stealing, got sent to jail, got sent back for breaking probation. Everyone in his life had abandoned him. Everything was fucked. But he was a happy person because he found God. He was a leader in the jail, trying to get other inmates to come to prayer, because he realized, This thing I found is so special. It protects me from all the insanity of the world.

That was the first time someone prayed for me. I have a pretty regular prayer practice now, even though I don’t even believe in God, per se, but I pray for people anyway. It was partly because of that experience. I realized how powerful it is to pray for someone, and for someone to know you’re praying for them.

You don’t believe in God? That seems odd for somebody in seminary.

I don’t believe in God in the traditional Christian sense, or the traditional Buddhist or Hindu sense. I think the universe can be explained by the physical laws of science, probably. Science has a better claim to truth than any other paradigm we’ve discovered.

But what Einstein said about God is probably roughly what I believe: there’s great mystery in the universe and great marvel, especially around sentient beings, that might as well be God.

So what’s the vision you have for all this? You’re a well-known activist in seminary and you’re interested in religion for both personal and political reasons. What does all this eventually look like?

To reverse the decline in religious participation in the United States and throughout the developed world through some form of more modern moral community. We desperately need this. It’s funny—we all understand why our kids need this. We just don’t understand it about ourselves.

I see the attempt to merge movements with the church as existential—not just for social movements but for churches, too. Churches have fallen apart largely because they don’t adapt quickly enough. There are beautiful stories and traditions they have to offer, but if they hold on to everything they’ll lose everything, because everyone’s going to run away.

The idea of a muscular form of compassion has been lost since the civil-rights movement. Gandhi and King both said that nonviolence is not for the weak; it’s for the brave. But the left became afraid of strength. Because being strong in your compassion means actually having a position on something, and that’s terrifying if you’re trying to please everybody.

O.K., but how does animal rights, in particular, fit into the vision of the resurgent moral community?

The most powerful part of every religious tradition I’ve studied is its defense of the vulnerable. That’s why people become committed to religious communities—they understand that when they are vulnerable they will be protected, and when they are strong they will protect the vulnerable. That’s the trade.

I’ve made a bet with my life and my resources, and in some cases a bit of my freedom, that one of the most powerful iterations of that core human narrative is our treatment of animals.

When so much of what’s wrong in the world is the narrowing and shrinking of our moral circles, a movement that effectively challenges that has to do the opposite. It can’t just say, “Let’s not throw immigrants out of the country.” We have to have an affirmative vision: “We love immigrants. Immigrants are amazing because we’re all human beings, and God commanded us to love even the Samaritans, to see the beauty even in the Canaanites and the tax collectors and the lepers.”

I think the most powerful and most obvious next iteration for this expansion of our moral boundaries is other sentient beings. We’ve seen rights gradually expand for all different classes of humans throughout the past two hundred years, since the Enlightenment, and animals are, as Martha Nussbaum has written, the next frontier.

There’s also something unique about our interactions with animals. It has to do with more than ten thousand years of domestication. For most people, the only creature who will truly unconditionally love you is your dog. I’ve seen dogs who are horribly abused who are still desperate for the love of their guardians. It’s horrible how attached they are to the person who’s hurting them. But it happens all the time—it’s because we’ve raised them for thousands of years and selected them for that attribute. But it’s created this intensely vulnerable and loving being that can teach us something about the nature of compassion and love, if we’re able to embrace that lesson.

I think animal rights has something to offer the world.

So there are two parts here. Religion can provide the stories you need for animal rights, but animal rights—this form of compassion at its most pure—can also be used by the church to reverse its decline. But the church is so diminished—it seems like you’re buying into a distressed asset. Can it actually be the vanguard of a movement again?

You call it a distressed asset. I see that as an asset that has opportunities. You’re buying low.

If the church were flourishing, it would be unlikely to be open to change. But, when I walk into churches and I’m the youngest person by decades, everyone wants to talk to me. It’s like a sci-fi movie where all the young have died and someone is born and everyone freaks out.

That presents opportunities. But it’s not just strategic or tactical—it’s theological. Part of the reason the church has declined is that it hasn’t theologically evolved. If there’s a genuine, committed, energetic movement to evolve these theologies, there are huge opportunities.

I’ll ask you plain what I’m trying to figure out myself: Can progressive movements survive without some new grounding in religion?

No. I think left civilization, not just left movements, will die unless there is some form of moral community to organize it all. ♦

Last November, I felt totally underwater with grading and parent-teacher conferences. So I arranged all my students’ papers in a stack and jotted down some bullet points for the P.T.C.s. Then I drew a pentagram on the floor.

A crack of thunder, a flash of light, and a sulfurous mist flooded my apartment. Marax, President of Hell, stood before me. Marax entered my summoning circle, eyes burning with unholy fire, and I gave him the stack of homework to flip through while I brushed my teeth. Marax marked up the papers and fleshed out my bullet points into thoughtful feedback before I even got to my molars. Then—three hours of my life, saved!—I banished him back to Hell before my strength gave out.

I am not ashamed to say that I use demons for work. I use a demon to make the assignment, another demon to grade the assignment, and a third demon to write constructive comments. At the end of the day, I use a demon to look in my fridge and tell me what to cook for dinner (tonight: rigatoni with charred entrails).

Using a demon is not cheating. Cheating is pawning off somebody else’s work as your own. A demon is not “somebody.” A demon is a being of pure malice. If I catch a student copying another student’s work, that’s a zero. If I catch a student’s demon filling out their test for them, that’s being prepared for the future—A+.

Every paradigm-shifting invention is met with a hysterical reaction. What if, when the calculator was invented, we had acted as if it was going to eat our children’s faces and wear their faces out to dinner and then eat us, too, before dragging our souls down to Hell for an eternity of torture? We would never have made it to the moon.

I, of course, have gotten an earful from the usual Luddites in the teachers’ lounge. Mr. Reed—who doesn’t even own a laptop—is flunking anyone whose work stinks of sulfur and has singed claw marks on it. Well, while he is busy teaching cursive penmanship and struggling to get home in his busted car (he is poor), my students and their demons will be lapping him. Sorry, but it’s just a fact—demons flat-out get the job done.

It would be irresponsible not to teach students how to use demons. Jobs in the twenty-thirties will be totally different, and we need to prepare the employees of the future. They need to be ready to summon demons properly. If they can’t draw a tight summoning circle, they’ll never find work in the demon economy. We have called demons in, and they are not going anywhere. Not unless they are fleeing an even fouler, more powerful demon.

Sure, demons make mistakes. My demons have gobbled up my neighbor’s dog, burned down the assembly hall, and fabricated countless sources. But it’s all worth it for the moment when a student says, “I finally get trigonometry,” or, “My demon is my best friend, and has taught me that man is by nature fallen. There is no ‘good,’ only sin, might, and fire.”

So, open your door, open your windows. Remove that crucifix from your wall. And rejoice—there is work to be done, and the demons are hungry.

—Valefar VI, Duke of Hell, writing on behalf of Charlie ♦

This past week, after the semi-famous Brooklyn Beckham confirmed, via Instagram, a long-simmering rift with his very famous parents, people urgently wanted to know: What happened at his wedding? The intrigue stemmed from Brooklyn’s contention that his parents, David and Victoria Beckham, the English former football star and Spice Girl, had tried to ruin his relationship with his wife, Nicola Peltz, before their marriage, in 2022. In his post, Brooklyn accused his parents of pressuring him to sign away the rights to his family name in the weeks leading up to the wedding. He claimed that they referred to Peltz as “not blood” and “not family,” that they disrespected her, and that Victoria, who runs her own fashion label, had cancelled making Peltz’s dress “at the eleventh hour.” (Peltz wore Valentino haute couture instead.)

Most gripping, for those following along online—in the U.K., that was pretty much everyone—he described how his mother “hijacked” the couple’s first dance. “In front of our 500 wedding guests, Marc Anthony called me to the stage, where in the schedule was planned to be my romantic dance with my wife but instead my mum was waiting to dance instead,” Brooklyn wrote. “She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.” He went on to say that the experience was so distressing that he and Peltz recently renewed their vows, “so we could create new memories of our wedding day that bring us joy and happiness, not anxiety and embarrassment.”

Weddings have a way of bringing out the worst in families—whose special day is it, really?—and the Beckhams are no exception. The event seems to have been a catalyst for Brooklyn. “I have been silent for years and made every effort to keep these matters private,” he wrote in his Instagram post. “Unfortunately my parents and their team have continued to go to the press, leaving me with no choice but to speak for myself and tell the truth about only some of the lies that have been printed.” Brooklyn’s anger is on full display. He writes like a man backed into a corner. “I do not want to reconcile with my family. I’m not being controlled, I’m standing up for myself for the first time in my life,” he went on. “For my entire life, my parents have controlled narratives in the press about our family. The performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships have been a fixture of the life I was born into.”

The post, far from defusing the situation, has ignited a frenzy. On TikTok, actors pretending to be Brooklyn and Victoria danced inappropriately to songs including “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls. (“So tell me what you want, what you really, really want”) The wedding took place at the Peltz family home, in Palm Beach, Florida, and cost an estimated three million dollars. (Peltz comes from her own formidable family. Her father, Nelson Peltz, is an American billionaire and Republican donor. She is one of eight siblings.) Wedding guests were reportedly required to lock away their phones on arrival. British Vogue, reporting on the nuptials at the time, named the song “Only Fools Rush In” by the South African artist Lloyiso, as the newlyweds’ first-dance tune. On Friday, however, the couple’s wedding d.j., Tony Marnach, who goes by the name DJ Fat Tony, told a British network that after Marc Anthony called Brooklyn and his mother onstage for a dance, Peltz ran from the room in tears. “The whole situation was really awkward for everyone in the room,” he said. Yikes!

Still other unsavory details have emerged. Brooklyn, who now lives with Peltz in Los Angeles, claimed that Victoria called him “evil” for not seating her and David at his wedding table. (He says they prioritized the grandmothers instead.) He called out his brothers for attacking him on social media, his father for refusing to see Peltz around his birthday, and his mother for orchestrating meetings with “women from my past” intended to make him and Peltz uncomfortable. Most perplexingly—and here we are really getting into the weeds—he has said that Victoria refused to help Peltz “save displaced dogs during the LA wildfires.” “Brand Beckham comes first,” Brooklyn wrote. “Family ‘love’ is decided by how much you post on social media or how quickly you drop everything to show up and pose for a family photo op even if it’s at the expense of our professional obligations.”

What are we to make of this very public family meltdown? If it is true that Brooklyn has benefitted from the immense privilege of his family name, it is also true that, as he suggests, he comes from a family that prizes publicity over privacy. In the past three years, two slick, multi-part Netflix documentaries have been released covering each half of the Beckham power couple. (David’s production company helped create both docuseries.) David and Victoria are early pioneers in the modern practice of overexposing one’s offspring. They purchased the trademark for the names of their four children, and have sold photos from family moments to tabloids for decades. (Brooklyn first appeared in OK! magazine shortly after his birth, and again a few months later, at his parents’ wedding.) There’s a telling moment in Victoria’s documentary in which she recalls a brief period when she was out of the spotlight. The Spice Girls had disbanded, and she had recently given birth to Brooklyn. “I had this amazing relationship, this amazing little baby,” she says. “But it felt quite slow. It felt really lonely. And I remember thinking, ‘God, is anybody going to want to put me on a plane and do a photo shoot again?’ ”

Like many parents of children who have chosen to go “no contact,” however, David and Victoria may not have seen Brooklyn’s announcement coming. Perhaps Victoria, out there on the dance floor, was simply grooving to Marc Anthony, unaware that the moment would become an inflection point in her fraught relationship with her eldest son. The fervor surrounding the Beckham feud—at one point it was the most-viewed story on the Guardian’s U.K. site—is a testament both to the Beckhams’ fame and to public anxiety around adult children cutting ties with their parents, a phenomenon some experts believe is growing. (A survey conducted by the family sociologist Karl Pillemer in 2019 suggested that twenty-seven per cent of Americans were currently estranged from a relative.) The same panic ensued when Prince Harry defected to Montecito with Meghan Markle. If it can happen to the Beckhams, or the Windsors, who have been able to give their children every material advantage, who can’t it happen to?

But I don’t think that thinking is quite right. We are not all the Beckhams. We are not all hounded, or aspiring to be hounded, by the tabloids. Most of us do not have a “family brand” to navigate beyond Trader Joe’s or Target. When Brooklyn made his Instagram statement distancing himself from his parents—no doubt advised by a public-relations team—he was only following family protocol, participating in a long tradition of sharing intimate moments with millions of strangers. If your family’s births and weddings are public, why wouldn’t your estrangement be as well? What’s more on-brand for the Beckhams than that?

What seems clear is that celebrity family estrangement, in the vein of Prince Harry, and now Brooklyn Beckham, has become an exercise in “controlling the narrative.” It is not enough to simply absent oneself from one’s family by, say, moving to L.A. and making beautiful tablescapes. (Perhaps the sunshine and optimism of California—so different from London—is attractive to fleeing Brits.) You must also share your reasoning with your followers or, ideally, with Oprah, as Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex did, in 2021. So far, in the Beckham family saga, David and Victoria have yet to respond publicly to their son’s announcement. When they do, you can bet we’ll hear all about it. ♦

On Saturday, agents with U.S. Border Patrol killed a man named Alex Jeffrey Pretti, the second person who has been shot dead by federal personnel in Minneapolis since President Donald Trump launched an immigration-enforcement operation in the city earlier this month. After the first killing, of a woman named Renee Good, who was shot behind the wheel of her car by an ICE agent, federal officials made clear that they had little interest in conducting an impartial investigation into the circumstances of her death. During a press conference, Vice-President J. D. Vance said that federal officials have “absolute immunity” in performing their duties. In the aftermath of Pretti’s death, which has prompted even some Republican officeholders to call for an investigation, state officials have accused the federal government of blocking access to the scene of the shooting. Multiple members of the Trump Administration have called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and falsely described what occurred when he was gunned down, which was captured on video. On Saturday night, a federal judge ordered the government not to destroy or alter evidence after a lawsuit was filed by Minnesota authorities.

To talk about what state officials can and cannot do to investigate and prosecute crimes allegedly committed by federal officials, I spoke by phone with Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown who writes a newsletter on legal issues called “One First.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the law on these questions is so unsettled, how the Trump Administration could try to sabotage potential state actions, and how the Supreme Court might view future cases that feature a clash between executive power and states’ rights.

Tell me if this is helpful—there are two different ways it can be difficult for states to investigate or prosecute federal officials. One of them has to do with the law itself as defined by the courts, and the second has to do with the Trump Administration trying to throw up every roadblock it can. Those seem like different things.

I think that’s very helpful. There’s both the question of whether the law would allow a prosecution and whether as a matter of pure logistics, the prosecution is viable. We haven’t usually had to worry about the second one, but we certainly have to worry about it right now.

So then let’s start with the first one, which relates to why it could be complicated for state officials to charge federal officers with crimes in a state such as Minnesota. What is the primary legal roadblock?

The primary legal roadblock is the doctrine that’s become known as supremacy-clause immunity. This is a not-very-well-developed idea dating back to an 1890 Supreme Court decision, which basically says that federal officers are immune from the consequences of state law for actions they’re performing in the legitimate exercise of their federal duties. And the idea, which I think is actually relatively uncontroversial, is that federal officers who are lawfully acting within their federal duties are necessarily acting in a way that has to override contrary state laws. It’s analogous in that respect to the doctrine that’s generally known as preëmption—that valid federal laws will always displace valid state laws.

So the idea here, in the best case, is that if federal officials are trying to enforce desegregation at a school in the South in the nineteen-fifties, for instance, then state and local officials cannot mess with them?

That’s exactly right. You can’t prosecute federal officers for trespassing, for example, for enforcing a court order on a public school in the civil-rights era.

Was the thinking behind the decision so high-minded, though, back in 1890?

Actually, it was. So, the 1890 decision is this remarkably colorful case about the attempted assassination of Justice Stephen Field, and the question was whether his bodyguard, who was a deputy U.S. marshal, could be prosecuted by California for the murder of the Justice’s would-be assassin. And that was a context where I don’t think it’s especially surprising that the Supreme Court was of the view that the federal officer was immune from prosecution under state law for protecting one of their colleagues.

What other decisions have come up about these questions since 1890?

The biggest problem is that there really haven’t been that many cases, and virtually none that have gone back to the Supreme Court. Most of the development of the doctrine has actually been in lower courts. And one of the things I think is unhelpful is that, even when lower courts held in at least some of these cases that prosecutions could go forward, they were often dropped by the prosecutors before they produced a verdict. So we actually have a very, very tiny number of examples of successful state prosecutions of federal officers in American history. Of course, one might also say we don’t have that many examples in American history of what’s been happening in Minneapolis over the past three weeks.

Has the Supreme Court ruled that Congress needs to provide authorization for states to go after federal officials? Am I understanding that correctly?

The Supreme Court has never said that. There are other contexts in which the Supreme Court has said that Congress needs to specifically authorize, for example, [civil] damages suits before federal officers can be sued for violating the Constitution. But we’ve never quite had that ruling in the context of criminal prosecutions. And that’s because these cases have been so few and far between.

The real development in case law has been trying to figure out exactly where the line is between the officer who was immunized because he was acting in good faith and the officer who went too far and should have known that he was going too far. There is a 2006 ruling in the federal appeals court in Denver, which was written by Michael McConnell, a very highly regarded and pretty right-of-center federal appeals judge. And McConnell says you can prosecute federal officers if it wasn’t necessary and reasonable for the officer, in the carrying out of their federal duties, to do what they did.

And that ruling has held?

I think the best that can be said is it’s the law of the Tenth Circuit right now. Minnesota is in the Eighth Circuit. So we’re in a place where there’s no obvious binding authority on this issue for state or local prosecutors.

But let’s say that state or local prosecutors in Minnesota decide that that’s a good standard that you laid out from McConnell. Could you potentially have a situation where the question of whether what the federal officials were doing was “necessary and reasonable” would go to court?

I think the way it would have to happen—and who knows if this is how it actually will happen—is that you would have prosecutors in Minnesota bringing an indictment against one or however many officers they believe they can charge. Those officers would then remove the case to federal court under what’s known as the Federal Officer Removal statute, but it would still be a state prosecution. And then I think the next step would be that the officer or officers would move to dismiss on the grounds that they have this immunity. That’s the moment, before this case could really ever get off the ground, that you’d have to have, almost certainly, a federal judge deciding the immunity question, which as you say is a question of both what the standard is and whether the standard is satisfied here.

If we can set aside the specifics of what we have been witnessing the past few weeks in Minneapolis, what do you think the Constitution says on this matter? And what do you think is a proper way for judges to figure this question out?

The missing piece from any effort to tie this conversation to current events is the role that federal-state coöperation has played historically in mooting this question. No history of the United States would tell a story in which the federal government and the states have always got along. But the blue-sky ideal here is that you don’t need these state-level cases—that when it is a close enough call, when a federal officer has acted in a way that raises that many concerns, then the officer would face consequences under federal law first. And so I guess from a structural constitutional-law perspective, what I worry about is how much those federal consequences have disappeared. It is so hard today to use federal law to hold federal officers accountable for violating our constitutional rights. Criminal prosecutions require a President and a Department of Justice willing to prosecute their own officers. And civil liability has been all but foreclosed by the Supreme Court in a series of cases over the past twenty-five years. All that has put pressure on states, whether state prosecutors or state courts through civil suits, to try to find their own ways of filling the gap.

My own preference, and I think the better reading of the Constitution, is that we’re better off with a uniform system of federal remedies, but if the choice is state remedies or nothing, then I think it’s just as clear that the answer should be at least in some cases, state remedies, or else the Constitution can’t be enforced at all.

You recently wrote, “A world in which the Constitution is only enforceable against the federal government prospectively is a world in which the federal government and its officers can do whatever it wants to the people. . . . This is why, for instance, it has proven so much easier to enforce the Second Amendment (where government restrictions are creating forward-looking consequences) than the Fourth (where the violation is usually a one-off).” Can you talk a little bit about the distinction you’re drawing there between the Second and Fourth Amendments?

Yeah, so the law has this long-standing distinction between what the lawyers would call prospective relief and retrospective relief. With prospective relief, the classic example is an injunction where we are trying to stop the defendant, whether it’s the government or a private party, from continuing to do something that’s wrongful. Retrospective relief is when the wrongful act has already ended, and all we’re trying to do is get the defendant to make the plaintiff whole. And for better or for worse the Supreme Court, with some help from Congress, has got us to a place where it is almost impossible to get retrospective relief against the federal government and especially against federal officers, but actually pretty easy to get prospective relief, often in the form of an injunction, such as someone challenging President Trump’s birthright-citizenship executive order to prevent it from being enforced. But when the harm has ended, whether it’s the use of excessive force by a law-enforcement officer or an assault or an unlawful search, those remedies usually are only retrospective, and that’s where it’s become so difficult.

I don’t want to sound naïve and pretend that this Supreme Court or any Supreme Court is just going to call balls and strikes, to quote Chief Justice John Roberts. What are the possible ideological ways that conservative and liberal Justices might approach the question of federal immunity?

It is interesting. There is a bit of an ideological bent to the debate over whether, for example, federal courts can provide remedies for unconstitutional actions by federal officers without an express act of Congress. I actually argued one of the more recent cases, which was decided in 2020, and it split the Court right down ideological lines. I lost five to four. This was the Hernandez case, which is about whether a Border Patrol agent could be held liable for the allegedly unprovoked cross-border shooting of a fifteen-year-old Mexican national. And on the Court there has been, for better or for worse, a deeply ideological split about whether federal courts can provide their own remedies for damages in cases like that.

But the criminal-prosecution question is a little different because it really is two different doctrines running headlong into each other. One of them is executive power, where this Court has obviously been as sympathetic to broad readings of Article II as any of its predecessors. The other is states’ rights, and the conventional principles of federalism under which states are allowed to have their own accountability regimes.

So you have two ostensibly conservative principles running into each other.

One hundred per cent. And that’s why, by the way, I think it is interesting that the most recent leading case on this very topic in the courts of appeal was written by Michael McConnell, because he’s exactly the kind of judge for whom that intersection would pose some interesting quandaries.

I was struck that a federal judge has just ordered the federal government to refrain from “destroying or altering” evidence in the Pretti shooting. Is that normal?

Nothing about this is normal. It is unusual to ask a federal judge to tell the federal government to not do something it already is not allowed to do. The difference is that getting a federal judge to do it brings with it the contempt power. Obtaining an injunction—or, I think it’s a temporary restraining order, for now, in this case—is basically just a way of giving that legal prohibition teeth.

What can the federal government do, though, if it wants to throw a wrench into this? Are there specific things that you’d be worried about?

I’m worried already about, for example, just how thoroughly the federal government ran forensics on the scene of Saturday’s shooting. Just how carefully they documented the witnesses. Did they run, for example, forensics to figure out which guns fired shots? Did they do gunshot residue tests on each of the officers who were present, in terms of their hands and clothing? One of the problems here is this ship may have already sailed, but there’s also the concern that many of the witnesses to whatever happened on Saturday were apparently brought down to the federal building. The concern is the spectre of intimidation—and whether these individuals were told that they could leave at any time and/or consult an attorney. And so I think the concern is that, if the federal government didn’t do everything by the book, that could make it harder in any future prosecution, frankly, by anybody, whether it’s the states, whether it’s this Administration, or a future Administration.

I suppose if you wanted to be really cynical, there’s a way in which intentionally doing things not by the book could screw up any prosecution.

Right. And I think that’s why you saw the state and local authorities run to federal court on Saturday night. We should all hope that it wasn’t necessary.

We don’t need to be naïve about this. There’s no chance that the federal government will prosecute these people.

No, no, no. There’s no chance.

I would also imagine that a reason any case needs to be done in state court as opposed to federal is that the President cannot pardon people in a state prosecution, right?

It’s sadly accurate. And even though a state prosecution of a federal officer would almost certainly end up in federal court, it is still a state prosecution, and so it would still be exempt from the President’s pardoning power. It shouldn’t be the case that we’re worried about reflexive pardons from the President, but that’s yet another reason why a state criminal prosecution might seem attractive to so many people at this particular moment.

While we continue not being naïve, am I correct in thinking that there would be a relatively easy legislative fix for some of these questions? I realize the odds of that happening in the next year are also close to zero.

So, if our goal is to insure that there’s some measure of accountability when federal officers violate our rights, then, yes, Congress could fix that in a one-sentence statute. Congress could create a robust damages remedy for federal officers who violate the Constitution. Congress could have it be either the officers or the federal government who’s liable. Congress could legislate what defenses the officers would and would not be allowed to have in those cases. The politics of that are unfortunately messy, but the law is not.

The criminal prosecution piece is harder. I think it would be very hard for this Congress, at least while we have this Supreme Court, to find ways of making it easier for the federal government to prosecute its own officers in cases where the President doesn’t want to. This is part of why I’ve spent really so much of my career pushing for a more robust damages framework. Damages aren’t perfect in these cases, but a broadly available, meaningful damages remedy would not just be a way of making the victims whole when their constitutional rights are violated—it would also hopefully deter federal officers from engaging in at least some of the conduct that we’ve been seeing over the last year. ♦