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The legal website Just Security maintains a “litigation tracker,” chronicling all the lawsuits filed against the second Trump Administration. On Wednesday morning, that tally stood at a hefty seven hundred and thirty-four, with cases ranging from the President’s immigration policies to his dismantling of disfavored agencies to his effort to punish law firms to his ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports. Each of these is important in its own way, but none more so than the challenge taken up on Wednesday by the Supreme Court, to the legality of Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Issued in the first hours of his first day back in office, the order is Donald Trump’s bid to abolish the long-standing rule that, with narrow exceptions, citizenship attaches automatically to those born on U.S. soil. By executive fiat, Trump would eliminate the guarantee of birthright citizenship for children whose parents are in the country without legal authorization or on a temporary basis—a position once considered so fringe that he shied away from it during his first term. His edict contravenes the language of the Constitution, the high court’s own rulings, legislation passed by Congress, and the consistent practice of previous Presidents. As Trump himself seems to recognize, it is difficult to imagine that the Supreme Court—even this Supreme Court, with its conservative super-majority—will let this order stand, and the tenor of the two-hour-plus oral argument seemed to bear that out. If the questions from the conservative Justices offer a reliable guide to their thinking, the mystery is not so much whether Trump will lose but how resoundingly.

In a physical embodiment of the constitutional clash, Trump attended the birthright-citizenship arguments in person, the first President in history to do so. That made for riveting inter-branch theatre, especially since Trump, infuriated by the Court’s rejection of his emergency tariffs in February, has denounced the Court as “STUPID” and “disloyal to the Constitution.” Two of the Justices he appointed, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, defied him in the tariffs case; he called them “fools” and an “embarrassment to their families.” This is, perhaps, not the best way to make friends and influence Justices. But Trump’s presence—he left shortly after Solicitor General D. John Sauer finished presenting the government’s case—is best understood as posturing for the base.

With the birthright case, Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court faces the most important test of this dangerous Administration. Will a supposedly originalist Court ignore the meaning of the constitutional text? Will a supposedly conservative Court allow a President to trample on the separation of powers, ignoring precedent and upstaging Congress? Equally important, will it preside over a revolutionary change in the national character, one that would be as impossible to administer as it would be unwise to implement? As Cecillia Wang, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and herself a beneficiary of birthright citizenship, told the Justices, “Ask any American what our citizenship rule is and they’ll tell you everyone born here is a citizen alike. That rule was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to put it out of the reach of any government official to destroy.” Demographers predict that eliminating birthright citizenship would affect two and a half million children in the course of a decade, creating a permanent underclass exposed to deportation and with curtailed access to education, jobs, and benefits.

For the Trump Administration, this is less a bug than a feature: Sauer argued, in his opening statement, that birthright citizenship “demeans the priceless and profound gift of American citizenship,” “operates as a powerful pull factor for illegal immigration,” and “has spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism, as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States.” Chief Justice John Roberts, returning to the last point, asked Sauer a seemingly friendly question about how significant a problem that was. Sauer eagerly seized the moment to cite estimates that 1.5 million babies have been born to “birth tourists” from China alone. Then the Chief Justice zoomed in on his fundamental point: “Having said all that, you do agree that that has no impact on the legal analysis before us.” Sauer responded, “We’re in a new world now . . . where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.” To which the Chief Justice retorted, “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment of that Constitution adopted following the Civil War, in 1868, forms the centerpiece of the case: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The Amendment was designed to write the concept of birthright citizenship into law, and to undo the damage inflicted by the Supreme Court’s ruling eleven years earlier in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which denied citizenship to anyone of African descent. The immediate question before the Court is what exceptions were meant by the clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The answer, at least for most mainstream scholars, is clear: the intended carve-outs, based on English common law, involved children born to foreign diplomats or occupying armies; in the United States, the sovereign status of Indian tribes meant Native American children were excluded as well. (Congress explicitly granted citizenship to Native Americans in 1924.) The Trump Administration contends that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” covers a far broader category: anyone not authorized to remain in the country permanently. This contention met with considerable resistance among the Justices. “I’m not sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples,” Roberts told Sauer.

Roberts’s point is well taken, and the debates surrounding the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment do not support the Administration’s expansive interpretation. For example, during the debate over the amendment, Senator Edgar Cowan, of Pennsylvania, asked, “[I]s it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race? Are they to be immigrated out of house and home by Chinese? I should think not.” Senator John Conness, of California, said that Cowan’s interpretation was correct: “The children of all parentage whatever, born in California, should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States.” In the arguments on Wednesday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked, “What do we do with those debates and the fact that the proponents of both acts”—the Fourteenth Amendment and a predecessor statute, the Civil Rights Act of 1866—“said everyone who’s born in the U.S. will be citizens?”

The central precedent interpreting the Citizenship Clause is the 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, involving a man born in California to Chinese parents who were not citizens—they could not be, under the terms of the Chinese Exclusion Act. After Wong visited China, he was denied reëntry to the United States on the ground that he was not a citizen. The Justices disagreed. “The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes that children born within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States,” the Court said. “Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States.” The Trump Administration seizes on the decision’s references to domicile, arguing that, except for those with green cards, foreigners with authorization to live in the U.S. cannot be “domiciled” in the United States because they expect to be here only temporarily; meanwhile, in the Administration’s telling, those here without any authorization “lack the legal capacity to establish domicile here.” This has things more than a little backward—as Justice Elena Kagan noted that undocumented migrants frequently intend to remain for as long as possible. This focus on domicile omits the fact that the question never came up in the debates over the Fourteenth Amendment; it also ignores subsequent Supreme Court rulings in which the Court reaffirmed that children of those here illegally were nonetheless citizens. In one 1957 case, the Court said that a U.S.-born child of parents who overstayed their permitted time in the country was “of course, an American citizen by birth.” In a 1985 case involving a Mexican couple smuggled into the country illegally, the Court described their two “citizen children” without any indication that status was open to debate.

But some conservative Justices—and, notably, Kagan—acknowledged that the Wong Kim Ark decision did use the term “domicile” repeatedly. “It appears in the opinion twenty different times, and including in the question presented and in the actual legal holding,” Roberts told Wang, the legal director. “Isn’t it at least something to be concerned about?” Kagan asked, “What are those twenty domicile words doing there?” Still, the Justices wrestled with Sauer’s interpretation of the case. “I’m not sure how much you want to rely on Wong Kim Ark,” Justice Neil Gorsuch told him.

Of all the Justices, Samuel Alito seemed most inclined in the Administration’s direction. “What we’re dealing with here is something that was basically unknown at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, which is illegal immigration,” Alito observed. But others of the Court’s conservatives expressed reservations. Justice Amy Coney Barrett continually questioned how “domicile” would be determined, if that is, in fact, the test of birthright citizenship. How, she asked, would authorities evaluate the citizenship of “foundlings,” whose parentage is unknown, or deal with children born in the United States to victims of sex trafficking? “If they were going to invent an entirely new kind of citizenship, like an American brand, why wouldn’t we have seen more discussion of that in the debates?” she asked Sauer. Gorsuch made similar points about the difficulty of determining domicile as a test of citizenship: “I mean, would we use contemporary sources on what qualifies as domicile in a state, or do we look in 1868, and do we have to do this for every single person?”

Gorsuch noted that one of the dissenters in Wong Kim Ark, Justice John Marshall Harlan, had given a lecture after the ruling in which he posed the example of English parents who travel to Hot Springs to treat their gout and have a child while there. “Is that child a citizen of the United States, born to the jurisdiction thereof, by the mere accident of his birth?” Harlan asked. He said he believed that was not correct “but I was one of the minority, and of course I was wrong.” “What do you do with that?” Gorsuch asked Sauer. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who spoke relatively little, asked about immigration laws, enacted in 1940 and 1952, that accepted the common understanding that Wong Kim Ark had established birthright citizenship for the children of migrants, regardless of domicile. “One might have expected Congress to use a different phrase if it wanted to try to disagree with Wong Kim Ark,” Kavanaugh said. “Yet Congress repeats that same language knowing what the interpretation had been, so how are we to think about that?”

Making predictions on the basis of oral argument is always a risky endeavor. This is an undoubtedly conservative Supreme Court, one that is inclined in the direction of Presidential power—see the Presidential-immunity case—but also willing to draw lines about its reach, as the tariff case demonstrated. When it comes to certain contested issues, such as the right to abortion, the conservative majority will overrule decisions and upend the constitutional status quo. But this has not been a court itching to revisit settled understandings and entrenched precedents outside those hot-button matters; curbing illegal immigration is a passion project of the MAGA base, not of the originalist Court. The three remaining liberal Justices need only two conservatives to join their side in order to foil the Administration’s plan. They may well have a Justice or more to spare. ♦

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s latest book, “Lake Effect,” begins in 1977, and follows the story of a woman who finds her staid domestic life style disrupted by her era’s shifting mores. “I spent a lot of time thinking about what it was like to be a woman who probably married in the nineteen-fifties, and then, all of a sudden, the world changed dramatically,” Sweeney said recently. “The choice for this character—which was the choice I saw many of my parents’ friends have to make—is, Do I stay in this small life that I chose as a very young person to keep my family intact, or do I choose happiness at the risk of upending family stability?” Not long ago, she joined us to discuss some of the books from that era that she revisited while crafting her novel, which speak to the changing moral codes of the time in which it unfolds. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

The Joy of Sex

by Alex Comfort

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I was born in 1960, so I grew up in the seventies. My parents were avid readers, and we had a very bookish house. They had a bookshelf in their bedroom, where I would go find things to read—and which is where I came across their copy of “The Joy of Sex.” I was probably twelve or thirteen, and I remember being horrified because this was my parents’ book, but also enthralled. As a really bookish kid, I remember thinking, I don’t need this now, but I’m going to need this one day, and I’m glad I know where to find it.

This book is completely bonkers. Ariel Levy actually wrote a great article about Comfort, who was a British doctor. In the version of the book that I have, Comfort claims that he came across the source material of the book in the course of his research as a biologist. But, in reality, he wrote it, drawing a lot from a longtime affair that he was having with his wife’s best friend—they even took Polaroids of themselves that served as the models for the extremely insane drawings that appear in the book.

It’s a flawed document in many ways—it’s fat-phobic, it’s homophobic, there’s definitely some casual racism in there. But there’s also something earnest in it, in a very seventies way. It trumpets joy as the primary driver of an intimate relationship, and that was really new.

Forever . . .

by Judy Blume

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I was probably sixteen when I read this. It’s a novel about a character named Katherine, who is a senior in high school. Katherine meets and quickly falls in love with a boy, Michael, who really wants to “do it” with her. The story is about how she goes about engaging in an intimate relationship with him. Katherine is very thoughtful about it—she knows when she’s not ready, and, when she is, she really sets the pace for the course of their relationship.

This book is fifty years old, and so there are definitely some things about it that don’t hold up to contemporary scrutiny. Blume has talked about seeing it as an artifact of a certain time and demographic—that is, a middle-class family on the East Coast. But I reread it recently and remembered how profound an impact it had on me at the time. One thing is that none of the central characters in the book—not Katherine, not anyone else—treat sex between two seventeen-year-olds with shame or disdain or distaste or discouragement. Her grandmother, for example, sends her a bunch of pamphlets on S.T.D.s and birth control! The adults’ attitude is really just, Well, of course this is going to happen—just be smart about your decision-making and make sure this is what you want to do, and stay safe. At one point, Katherine’s mother says something to her that I think is so profound. She says, I know you love Michael, and I know you want to be close with him in that way, but, once you do that, you can’t go back to just holding hands. To me, it’s a beautiful way to say, You’re young and you’re in love—enjoy all the little stages of it, and maybe linger in that easier place before you go to the harder place.

But I think what I really took with me from the book, through college and beyond—and what I think Blume has given to millions of young people—was a belief in my own desires and my own wants, and the conviction not to privilege another person’s desires over mine. “Forever . . .” really taught me how to trust myself and know what I wanted, to be the person I wanted to be, not the person someone else wanted me to be.

All the President’s Men

by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

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This was a defining book of my teen-age years. My parents were very political, very liberal. The summer I was twelve and going on thirteen, I watched the Watergate hearings every day. I would call my best friend Linda every morning because Art Buchwald’s column was syndicated in our local Gannett paper, and we would both read it and recite our favorite lines making fun of Richard Nixon.

For those who don’t know it, this book is a record of two reporters’ investigation—carried out with the support of the paper they worked for, the Washington Post—into a break-in at the Watergate building, in D.C., which ended up leading to the discovery of some of the worst Presidential misbehavior up to that point, and to Nixon’s subsequent resignation.

I loved this book when it came out, but what’s so remarkable to me rereading it today is that it really is incredibly written. Even though it’s full of the banality of bureaucracy, it’s also an incredible political thriller. It’s a difficult read right now, because it’s a snapshot of a time when people in this country weren’t afraid to challenge authority—when truth was sacred, when the government was willing to investigate itself, when breaking the law and acting in self-interest had consequences, and when Americans believed institutions were salvageable. It’s also a powerful ode to the necessity of a free and independent press to provide a check and balance to those in power. I was one of thousands of kids who went off to college to become a journalism major because I wanted to be an investigative reporter like Woodward and Bernstein. I quickly realized I was spectacularly unsuited to that job, but I never lost my appreciation for investigative journalism and the print press. To me, “All the President’s Men” is not just a great encapsulation of the seventies, and the loss of trust in institutions and government that followed the Vietnam War; it’s also about a nation’s effort to rebuild some degree of that trust.

From an excruciating story comes this even more impossible detail: the home from which Nancy Guthrie mysteriously vanished, as was reported on February 1st, was the very same place where she raised her three children, Annie, Camron, and, fatefully, Savannah, the “Today”-show anchor of long tenure, whose fame has made Nancy’s kidnapping an international event. The Guthries settled north of Tucson, Arizona, when Savannah was two years old. Over a decade later, Charles, Nancy’s husband and Savannah’s father, died of a heart attack. Nancy was steadfast after the tragedy, modelling the sacrificial aspects of the Christian faith that she’d diligently passed along to her kids, showing them that life could continue—and, indeed, with all its tenacious necessities, had to continue, there was no other option—in the aftermath of a tragedy.

She conveyed this education in her house, and she held on to the house even after her daughter became wealthy enough, presumably, to move her anywhere in the world. She must have loved the place in a protective, stubborn way. It had held some hurt and some joy, had sheltered lives in their flowering, fragile years. In the fullness of time, Nancy had a Nest camera installed—one of those all-seeing eyes meant to guard the property and calm anxious nerves and provide real safety from intrusion. Perhaps one, or all, of her kids, fretting over their independent-minded mother, had advised her to get it. On the last night that anybody else reportedly saw Nancy, that camera caught a glimpse of a person clad in dark clothes, wearing gloves and a black balaclava, unidentifiable, standing at the threshold. Then Nancy was gone. Her home had been a house of mourning, a symbol of resilience, a family cornerstone, and now—bright shock—the empty scene of an unseen crime.

“It’s the house where all of our memories are, good and bad,” Savannah Guthrie said, her eyes sparkling with barely dammed tears, during a conversation in late March with her friend and former co-worker Hoda Kotb. Guthrie had returned to the “Today” show after nearly two months away, for an interview that would be broadcast across two mornings. She’d been in Arizona, enduring an ordeal the likes of which most of us can contemplate only as part of the plot of an egregiously dramatic movie or television show. Eighty-four-year-old Nancy vanished, a flood of variously credible ransom demands were levied, then . . . nothing. No more credible messages, no triumphant return, no body. Guthrie and her siblings recorded videos, pleading for news, for help, for a merciful change of heart from whoever had absconded with their mom. But still nothing.

Guthrie had agreed to do the interview as a desperate final appeal. Someone, she kept saying to Kotb—someone must know something. She’s right. You can’t just make a person disappear. Another camera, an eye tuned to the subtle strangeness of an otherwise ordinary day—someone or something, somewhere, must have caught a glimmer of the truth. Among the public facets of Nancy’s disappearance is a frank, resentful, widespread incredulity at the failure of the technological apparatus that surrounds us so ungraciously, whether we like it or not. Many of us assume that we are, at this late date in the history of the world, almost totally surveilled. Our bodies pass from one camera’s jurisdiction to another, turning the city street or suburban road into a constant cinema of overlapping angles. What’s all this footage for, if not a scenario like this one? How can an elderly woman just be gone?

That question, no less baffling today than it was back in February, haunted Savannah Guthrie’s interview. She spoke in her usual strong, musical way, but there was also something mystified and hesitant in her tone. She relayed the story of her family’s tragedy almost tentatively, as if testing her own perceptions against the recollection of the audience at home. Was this really happening at all?

The surrealism of the interview—and of the circumstance that was its context—was heightened by the fact that both Guthrie and Kotb are exemplary exponents, even under so much pressure, of the “Today” show’s ethos and sensibility. Both women occasionally smiled through their tears, telegraphing poise and control more than an overflowing inner joy. As Kotb asked questions about Nancy, whom she sometimes affectionately called Guthrie’s “mommy” or “mama,” she seemed to brace herself, and Guthrie, too, for the inevitably devastating answer. They were narrating an awful and unresolved series of events, but also still doing the “Today” show—reassuring the audience by way of their softly displayed, endlessly professional command over the medium of television.

In the interview, describing the early moments of her mother’s absence, Guthrie explained the array of terrifying thoughts that occurred to her and to her siblings. Her brother, a retired fighter pilot, “saw very clearly, right away, what this was.” A kidnapping, he said, for ransom. “He knew.” Guthrie’s instant instinct was self-blame.

“It sounds so—like, how dumb could I be? But I didn’t want to believe. . . . I just said, ‘Do you think . . . because of me?’ ” Here, something cracked in Guthrie’s held-together performance. “ ‘Yeah, maybe,’ ” her brother responded. Guthrie gasped quickly for breath as she recounted the conversation. The warm studio lights and blurred background and pinkish couch now played in haunting counterpoint to the spectacle of a daughter relaying—and still pondering—the arrival of the darkest fear: having somehow, possibly, caused harm to her mother. Of course, this was deeply unfair. The blame, almost certainly, at least partially, belongs to the unconscionable entity caught on camera, gussied up like an ICE agent or a soldier on loan from a private military contractor. But simply naming the great fear and sharing it with the millions of watchers in living rooms and hotels and airport lobbies was a trial almost too painful to contemplate.

How did she feel watching the person on the Nest camera? “It’s just totally terrifying. And I can’t imagine that that is who she saw standing over her bed.”

Whenever the interview cut back to the “Today”-show set, members of the program’s cast—Craig Melvin, Carson Daly, Al Roker—emitted an audible groan of terror and sorrow for their friend. They, too, were participating in a professional exercise, however unprecedented. But, unlike Kotb and Guthrie, out there alone on the tightrope between total journalistic disclosure and the sensitivities of morning TV, they couldn’t really keep it together. Melvin—always the empath—looked ready to head home and cry. Daly, the former teen-pop monarch of “Total Request Live,” seemed to age decades before the camera’s eye.

It all seemed, uncomfortably, like a crowd had gathered to watch Guthrie walk through the stations of some unfathomable cross. The timing of the interview—just a few days before Holy Week, when Christians like Nancy and Savannah Guthrie, year after year, stage a harrowing reënactment of an unjust, torturous death—wasn’t lost on anyone. On Friday, when the final segment of the interview aired, Guthrie spoke in boldly religious terms. She’d prayed and prayed at the beginning of her family’s Passion, and at one point, she said, she actually heard the voice of God, speaking to her. She knew where her mother was, the voice said: “With me.” Whether in this world or whisked away from it, there Nancy was, close to the divine presence.

Hearing Guthrie speak of God in this direct, personal, utterly assured way may have alerted some listeners to the fact that although “Today” has no official religion, its aesthetics—vibrant colors, kind words, total decent positivity—match that of an American public Christianity whose moral and imaginative hold lately keeps attenuating, until, suddenly, in the right, blameless hands, it seems briefly to brighten again.

Kotb announced afterward that Guthrie would return to “Today” on Monday, April 6th, the day after Easter. “My joy will be my protest,” Guthrie said. ♦

The best science fiction shows us new ways to see our lives and our times by showing us how both might be otherwise. Characters who seem like us seek out alien worlds whose systems clash, or rhyme, with those we recognize. Characters who seem very unlike us—A.I.-infused cyborgs, plant people who photosynthesize, or humans from made-up societies—act on their feelings, and contemplate moral decisions, and we ask how their stories might inform our own. Critics call these effects cognitive estrangement: the term, coined by the scholar Darko Suvin in the nineteen-seventies, describes how science fiction’s worlds seem strange, yet also make sense, according to knowable rules in a fictional universe, and according to readers in our own.

Great science-fiction writers, almost by definition, are masters of cognitive estrangement. Some of those writers enjoy long, successful careers. Others quit, or disappear—or suddenly, after decades of silence, show up again. That’s what has happened, this year, with the novelist Cameron Reed. Her first novel, “The Fortunate Fall” (1996), a queer cyberpunk tale reminiscent of Dostoyevsky, became a kind of underground classic, more often praised than found. The book portrays an authoritarian near-future Russia where most entertainment and all news comes through Cameras, people wired to transmit their experiences directly from their brains to the internet. Such people rely on Screeners, who make sure Cameras don’t overload or share censored information. Our tragic hero, a Camera named Maya, uncovers the real history of her nation, and of her A.I.-dominated world, along with previously unknown parts of her own biography. The plot attends both to twentieth-century horrors, such as Ukraine’s Holodomor, and to what Reed saw coming, in social media’s incessant threat to our inner life. What if we could replace our lived experience—our self-image, our values, our sexuality—with immersive videos, delivered fresh every day? What would we lose, and would we want it back?

After “The Fortunate Fall,” Reed published a short story that won the Tiptree Award (now called the Otherwise Award), for the year’s best science fiction about gender. Then nothing, for twenty-seven years. Critics’ and fans’ attempts (including my own) to contact the author failed: nobody seemed to know if she was even alive. Then she reëmerged, posting on Bluesky and Mastodon as @LateOnsetGirl. In 2024, her work’s lasting impact led Tor Books to reissue “The Fortunate Fall” in a series of modern sci-fi and fantasy classics. And now Tor is set to release a new novel from Reed, “What We Are Seeking,” that’s longer, more joyful, more ambitious, and at least as devoted to cognitive estrangement, making new worlds whose structures and societies let us see ours with fresh eyes.

“The Fortunate Fall,” by some measures, represented one of the last major entries in cyberpunk, that line of gritty, wired-up near-futures. “What We Are Seeking” (the title comes from Edna St. Vincent Millay) occupies another corner of science fiction. It’s partly space opera—far future, with starships and aliens—and mostly set on a colonized planet: the kind of premise made popular by “Star Trek.” It’s a cracking, fast-moving adventure story, with a wilderness-survival plot, love stories, coming-out stories, and a whodunnit. It’s about desert botany and zoology, and reproductive freedom, and new tech, and religious faith. And it asks us to sleuth out—in its world, and our own—connections among all those things.

The book’s point-of-view character, John Maraintha, has embarked on a starship from his native Essius, a planet without monogamy, or indeed marriage. Essian sex is called “visiting”: most people do it, with whatever genders they prefer. Essian kids grow up in extended matrilineal families, with no husbands or wives. John’s home planet thus has a reputation, elsewhere, as a place of sexual license: “he was entirely defined to these people by visiting.”

Near the start of the novel, John gets unfairly expelled from the starship. He and a friend, Sudharma, end up in a settlement on the planet Scythia, which has recently been colonized by two societies with contrasting mores. The Ischnurans have what we might consider a standard American attitude toward sex and dating, but they also recognize a third gender, the jesses, who vow to wear long braids and practice celibacy. The other society, the Zandaheans, live like conservative Catholics: two genders, nuclear families, no divorce, priestly authority, and would-be trad wives. Neither of these models seems ideal for the small new town. “At first we were all working in our specialties,” Laura, a friendly—and discontented—Zandahean mother, tells John. “But then we started having children, and surprise surprise, it turned out that the burden of providing” for children fell to women. The whole settlement will collapse if townspeople can’t get along. Or if the birth rates drop too low. Or if crops fail, or the local fauna attack.

John dreads learning to live among “marrying people,” who ought to know that “monogamy was unnatural.” He becomes close to Iren, the colony’s only jess, who explains their decision to take the braid after a childhood “longing for a body and a way of being I had never had.” Sudharma’s adherence to the Jain religion—he performs a daily ritual of repentance, avoids garlic—and Iren’s devotion to the sacred jess braid contrast with the Zandahean Church, a faith that tells all people what they should do; Iren and Sudharma apply their rules only to themselves. John also becomes close to Laura, her husband, Piro, and their teen-age child Tali, who wants to become a jess herself.

Thus far, the book is a human-centered frontier narrative, with an assist from Ursula K. Le Guin’s once crucial, now dated, “The Left Hand of Darkness.” The novel’s efforts at cognitive estrangement begin with home and family life. When John asks Iren why jesses wear women’s clothing, Iren says, “Me, wear women’s clothes? What an idea. This is a jess’s dress, young man—the proof of which is, that I am a jess, and I am wearing it.” Then the action moves into the wilderness. Scythia’s plants are its animals, and vice versa, blooming and breeding in alternate generations. (Reed’s planet shares its name with the legendary Scythian lamb, a plant that grew sheep as its fruit.) When John and Sudharma explore the desert beyond the town, they get trapped in a canyon, where John has to fight a carnivorous “snake-tree” while wounded, with only his wits and a knife.

If the novel concerned only these elements—the clash of cultures in a small town, the thrill of the landscape beyond it—readers would still turn the last page with a fruitful, even nourishing, sense of disorientation. But Reed wrote a more ambitious novel than that. It turns out that the Scythian colonists sent for Sudharma, specifically, because he knows how to engage, and translate for, aliens. Besides carnivorous snake-trees, majestic candlehawks, and various glittering quasi-insects, the Scythian biome includes a species called the basket-men, who look like a cross between great apes and praying mantises. Their name comes from the baskets they weave, which let them carry food. Are they a threat to the colony? Possible allies? Do they have language? It’s Sudharma’s job to find out. Humans on Scythia risk extinction if they get the answer wrong, since the basket-men could team up with killer plants to wreck all their buildings and farms.

More perilous still, Earth is watching. Back home, humans have bonded with aiyi, a species of near-omnipotent artificial intelligence that operates according to its own moral code. The aiyi have sent an emissary to Scythia, who will determine whether the colonists deserve to survive. As the novel advances, we learn what the basket-men want, and how to consider minds so unlike our own. We watch Sudharma acquire the Scythian language, whose semantics recall those of Australian Aboriginals. And we discover how Scythia’s basket-men—who appear to lack anything like writing—store information in biochemical form.

In other words, Reed hasn’t just written a novel about social change and family life, queerness and faith. She’s embedded those ideas into a larger arc about settler-colonial systems, about the centuries that gave us Hernán Cortés, Bartolomé de las Casas, the American Revolution, Andrew Jackson, the Atlantic slave trade, and the Treaty of Waitangi. She’s writing about Hawaii and Fiji and Nunavut—and about New England, where I live.

How to estrange—to imagine differently—our presence in such places? As in “The Fortunate Fall,” Reed is thinking about cosmic justice, which does not exist, and about small-scale interpersonal justice, which can exist, and about the idea of original sin. From one point of view, the original sin of modernity, and of Scythia, is simply colonization: the impulse to find a supposedly new world and then “spread anywhere we want.” We—Westerners, humans, Ischnurans, and so on—shouldn’t be here. But now we are. Given the errors made by our civilization’s founders, how should we choose to live? It’s the same question—“reason is also choice”—that John Milton wrestled with in “Paradise Lost,” an epic that, like Reed, he wrote “after long choosing and beginning late.” “Paradise Lost,” too, describes life in a new land, whose humans (Adam and Eve) learn how to care for their biome, how to have sex, and whom to trust, before fighting a snake in a tree.

Milton supported the right to divorce, but also supported monogamy: he hoped we would reason our way to his own moral code, and to the worship of his one God. “What We Are Seeking” offers other answers. From Reed’s perspective, the original sin of modern society consists not just in colonialism (which we cannot fully undo) but in attempts to control who gets to love and reproduce, and how John, for example, eventually gains access to aiyi technology: Should he, Iren, and others use it to make their bodies feel different, and whole? All the humans in Scythia—once they learn to understand the basket-men—have to talk about the futures they want, for themselves and for their children, and about what to do when they must live as people on Earth once lived (a bit like Adam and Eve leaving Eden). Parents, the novel says, do not own their kids: no more than any one God owns us, and no more than Scythians own the snake-trees.

That proposition might seem obvious to some of us, but it’s a far cry from settled law and practice. Seeking good models, or crying out in distress, we might want to read about utopias or dystopias. But we can probably learn more—we might even find more hope—on worlds such as Reed’s Scythia, where thoughtful, flawed characters make choices with limited options. Each figure on Scythia has to consider how strange he or she or they look, how alien their mentality seems, to others. We might see our own lives, our own choices, in none of them, or in them all. ♦

Since France abolished capital punishment, in 1981, it has been nearly impossible to see a guillotine. In Paris, the Museum of the Prefecture of Police possesses just a guillotine blade, while the closest thing on view at the Carnavalet Museum is a two-foot-tall model guillotine and a pair of dangly brass guillotine earrings. In the Eleventh Arrondissement, where the Rue de la Roquette meets the Rue de la Croix Faubin, you can just make out five rectangular indentations in the pavement—flagstones that supported a guillotine that stood outside the Roquette prison during the second half of the nineteenth century. (It was used to execute dozens of people, including the anarchist Auguste Vaillant, who lobbed a bomb onto the parliament floor, and Émile Henry, who blew up a café to avenge Vaillant’s execution.) The apparatus is a phantom now, but it was once a concrete, almost corporeal presence, known familiarly as the Widow, the National Razor, the Cigar Cutter, or, simply, the Machine.

Originally, the guillotine was called the louisette, after its inventor, the surgeon Antoine Louis. He conceived of the device in the late seventeen-eighties, likely drawing inspiration from the English gibbet, the Scottish maiden, and the Italian mannaia, and had it built by a harpsichord manufacturer named Tobias Schmidt. Louis and Schmidt were acting on the advice of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a physician who firmly opposed the death penalty but, as long as it was in effect, wanted to render it more humane and efficient.

Before the Revolution, methods of capital punishment varied according to class: nobles were beheaded by a brisk swing of the sword, while other criminals faced an array of punishments, from hanging to drowning, depending on the offense. Guillotin urged the Assemblée Nationale to democratize its approach, so that “offenses of the same kind will be punished by the same kind of penalty, regardless of the rank and status of the guilty.” To that end, he proposed the creation of a new apparatus. “The knife falls, the head is severed in the blink of an eye, the man is no more,” he famously explained. “He barely feels a quick breath of fresh air on the back of his neck.”

The first public execution by guillotine took place in 1792. Despite Guillotin’s ideals, executions were messy and sometimes shambolic affairs, swarmed by bloodthirsty crowds and heckling tricoteuses. One such affair claimed an extra life when the executioner’s son ascended the scaffold to brandish a head, lost his footing, and fell to his death. The machine came with its own macabre accessories: a splatter shield and a wicker basket, placed at the foot of the platform to catch the rolling head.

Executioning was a hereditary métier, monopolized in Paris by the Sanson clan for nearly two centuries. In 1847, Henri-Clément Sanson, who preferred gambling to guillotining, pawned off the family apparatus. The Deibler family eventually took over, launching a new trend: waggish criminals started tattooing the words “ma tête à Deibler” (“my head for Deibler”) on the backs of their necks. The guillotine was conspicuous, until it wasn’t. In 1939, hundreds of people mobbed the Place Louis Barthou to witness the execution of the serial killer Eugen Weidmann. Someone had stashed a film camera in an apartment high above the plaza, capturing a scene of rowdy onlookers feasting on sausage sandwiches and uncorking bottles of wine as—after a series of delays—the blade dropped on Weidmann’s nape. The spectacle was sufficiently embarrassing that the Prime Minister decreed within a week that executions would theretofore be hidden behind prison doors. Yet gruesome traces of the practice endure: Anatole Deibler chronicled his work in a series of gray linen notebooks, excerpts from which were published in 2000 as a book called “Guillotinés.” Readers will encounter mugshots of the condemned, Deibler’s hand-drawn notations (a red cross with a black circle represented a completed execution), and, without warning, a series of photographs of severed heads.

In the four and a half decades since France abolished the death penalty, the guillotine itself has rarely been seen. It was last used in Marseille, in 1977, to execute Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian man convicted of murder. Robert Badinter, the Minister of Justice who led the campaign against capital punishment, recognized that the device—killer not only of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Danton, and Robespierre but also of hundreds of Algerian revolutionaries and of Marie-Louise Giraud, who was executed in 1943 for having provided twenty-seven abortions near Cherbourg—was too important a part of French history to be destroyed. At his urging, “so that the public, too, could confront this machine of death,” two guillotines entered the national collection of popular artifacts, insuring their preservation. However, Badinter insisted on a stipulation: owing to their intensely sensitive nature, they were not to be displayed for twenty years.

In 2010, one of the two guillotines went on display at the Musée d’Orsay as part of an exhibition dedicated to crime and punishment—but organizers considered the sight so potentially upsetting that they decided to obscure the machine with a black veil. Similar measures were deployed at viewings in 2013 and 2019. This fall, President Emmanuel Macron inducted Badinter, who died in 2024, into the Panthéon, France’s national mausoleum of heroes. The panthéonisation took place at a fractious political moment, three days after the resignation of Sébastien Lecornu, France’s fourth Prime Minister in thirteen months. Yet the homage to Badinter proved strikingly uncontroversial, with politicians from opposite ends of the political spectrum striving to claim him as one of their own. Newsstands stocked special issues dedicated to him, and the mint rolled out a commemorative coin. And, to honor the occasion, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem), in Marseille, decided to display a guillotine in full view.

Badinter’s campaign against capital punishment had its origins in his own brutal family history. Born in Paris in 1928, he was the son of Simon Badinter and Charlotte Rosenberg, both Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia. His parents prospered, opening a fur shop called Paris-New York and moving to the tony Sixteenth Arrondissement. By the time he was eleven, Robert knew how to attach a collar to a coat of astrakhan or skunk. When the now notorious exhibition “The Jew and France” opened at the Palais Berlitz, in 1941, Robert and his brother went to see it, laughing defiantly at plaster casts of hooked noses intended to help the public “recognize Jews.” The next year, their uncle was arrested in the Vel d’Hiv roundup, and months later French police took their ailing paternal grandmother, Sheindléa Badinter. She died in a cattle car on her way to Auschwitz. By February, 1943, the Badinters were living quietly in Lyon. One day, Simon left the apartment and was arrested in a raid organized by the Nazi officer Klaus Barbie—the Butcher of Lyon. When Simon failed to come home, Robert went looking for him and came within a hair’s breadth of being caught himself.

A historian later wrote that Simon, who died in Sobibor, “bequeathed to his son a crazy love for the Republic, daughter of the Revolution, which had given Jews equal rights.” Robert became a corporate lawyer, marrying the philosopher and Publicis advertising heiress Élisabeth Bleustein-Blanchet, but later shifted his focus to criminal defense. One of his law partners later speculated that, in agreeing to represent the condemned, he was seeking to make “ ‘moral compensation’ for the major financial cases that so enriched the firm.” Badinter’s wife put it more bluntly: “He remained all his life that young man—permit me the expression—cut in half, torn apart” between the horrors he had survived and a desire to make the most of his life. A formative case came in 1972, when Badinter failed to save the life of a man he was representing who had been sentenced to death. He and a fellow-inmate planned to escape prison, and the other inmate killed a nurse and a guard during the attempt. As the man’s lawyer, Badinter witnessed his execution. On the train the next morning, he decided to dedicate his life to abolishing the death penalty: “From then on, I was an intransigent adversary of capital punishment. I had gone from intellectual conviction to militant passion.”

In 1976, Badinter joined the defense team of Patrick Henry, a sales representative who abducted a seven-year-old boy from school and smothered him to death. Henry had led the victim’s parents and the public on for weeks, demanding a million francs in ransom when the child was already dead. It looked as though the United States, where the Supreme Court had for several years maintained an effective moratorium on executions, might soon do away with capital punishment. But the French nation was up in arms—“France is afraid,” a television news presenter famously intoned, as, within twenty-four hours, three ministers called for Henry to be executed.

Badinter knew that debate-club arguments about deterrence and human-rights law and the possibility of judicial error would be ineffective. Nor would it suffice to try to evoke empathy for the defendant. He decided that his only chance was to impress upon the judges their direct, personal responsibility for the taking of a life by, as he called it, the “bloody lottery” of capital punishment. He later wrote, “It was about leading them, with all possible intensity, in front of the guillotine, showing them this young man in front of them and telling them: it’s up to you, now, to decide whether he should be cut in two in the courtyard of a prison.” His closing argument presented abolition as a fait accompli:

Time will pass. . . . The death penalty will be abolished, and you will remain alone with your verdict, forever. And your children will know that you once condemned a young man to death. And you will see the way they look at you!

Against all expectations, the judges spared Henry, and Badinter’s arguments gained traction with the French public. Still, in 1981, when François Mitterrand appointed him Minister of Justice, sixty-three per cent of the French public approved of capital punishment. Badinter forged on, delivering a now famous speech exhorting the members of the Assemblée to prevent “furtive executions at dawn, under the black canopy.” The measure passed, 363–117, killing the death penalty in France. (Badinter also played an instrumental role in decriminalizing homosexuality.) Two years later, Klaus Barbie was arrested in Bolivia and extradited to France to stand trial for his wartime crimes. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, avoiding the guillotine owing to the efforts of the son of a man he’d helped annihilate. Badinter considered Barbie’s fate “a true victory of civilization.”

Only fifteen of the world’s nearly two hundred countries carried out executions in 2024—the lowest number ever recorded. The United States, it requires no reminding, is one of them, joining China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq on a rogue’s list of nations that persist in maintaining what Amnesty International has characterized as “the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.”

In MAGA circles, support for capital punishment is trending, alongside looksmaxxing and ice baths. In at least seven death-penalty states—Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas—lawmakers have introduced legislation that would allow women who choose abortion to be tried for homicide. “The only way to address that on this side of heaven is that you forfeit your right to live,” the pastor Jeff Durbin declared at a Turning Point USA event. Elon Musk recently opined that “Murderers, where there is unequivocal evidence of guilt, should be hanged, as has been the case throughout history.” (He was piggybacking on a post lauding executions as a way to “weed out” criminal genes.) Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir, the software company that made nearly two billion dollars last year enabling the federal government to perform tasks such as surveilling immigrants, followed suit, arguing that offenders should be hanged “quickly” after three violent crimes, and that it was “time to bring back masculine leadership.” Ma tête à la manosphere.

Tech thugs’ burgeoning mania for capital punishment owes much, of course, to Donald Trump. The President has delectated in the idea since at least 1989, when he paid a reported eighty-five thousand dollars to take out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the return of the death penalty, two weeks after the attack that would be pinned on the Central Park Five. (“Muggers and murders,” he wrote, “should be forced to suffer.”) The fact that the Central Park Five were, in fact, innocent has done little to temper Trump’s lust for the chamber and the chair. As central punisher-in-chief, he has stayed the executions of more turkeys than humans, granted clemency to money launderers and insurrectionists but spared not a single person on death row. One of his first acts upon entering his second term was to issue an executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety.” (The Robespierrean echoes were probably not intentional.) In November, when Democratic lawmakers urged members of the military not to follow illegal orders, Trump responded with capital letters and capital threat: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” This week in Israel, meanwhile, lawmakers—some wearing lapel pins in the shape of a noose—passed a measure that would make hanging the default punishment for Palestinians convicted of deadly militant acts; experts say that it would likely spare Jewish Israelis convicted of similar offenses.

American public support for the death penalty is at fifty-two per cent, the lowest it has been in nearly sixty years, yet executions soared in 2025, nearly doubling from twenty-five to forty-seven. Quizzed by Gallup in 2014 on what execution method they considered to be the most humane, respondents chose lethal injection (sixty-five per cent), firing squad (nine per cent), hanging (five per cent), electric chair (four per cent), and gas chamber (four per cent). In 2022, the state of Arizona gave Frank Atwood the option to be executed using Zyklon B, the hydrogen-cyanide gas that the Nazis used to murder more than a million people during the Holocaust. A Jewish group sued to stop the plan, so Arizona resorted to a lethal injection. Prison employees had enough trouble inserting an I.V. in Atwood’s vein that he ended up offering advice to his executioners: “Could you try the hand?” Amid evidence of torturous administration methods, racial bias, and wrongful convictions—more than two hundred death-row inmates have been exonerated since 1973—twenty-one states have implemented so-called secrecy laws or other provisions reducing transparency around executions.

One argument for displaying the guillotine publicly is that it will help French people remember the horrors of capital punishment. Victor Hugo, a committed abolitionist, wrote that “One can remain somewhat indifferent to the death penalty, not take a position, say yes or no, until one has seen a guillotine with one’s own eyes.” Badinter himself was awed by the machine, observing that, “with its two tall, thin arms raised high, it so perfectly expressed death that it seemed to be death itself.”

Not long ago, I took a train to Marseille to see the guillotine at Mucem. The museum’s director, Pierre-Olivier Costa, met me in the entry hall and led me through the galleries housing Mucem’s permanent exhibition of items from its collection of folk arts and popular traditions. We passed by circus posters, weathervanes, and ex-votos before entering the space where more than a hundred thousand museumgoers would eventually encounter the machine. The one on display, he explained, had been used from 1872 to 1977. Costa explained that the archives hadn’t yielded much information about its victims, other than to suggest that it had been “much used during the Second World War, notably to kill resistants.” Museum workers had assembled it from forty pieces with no instruction manual. As Costa put it, the museum wanted to show the machine “lightly bound, like a monster that has been tied up and can no longer reach its objective.” Still, he added, several visitors had already become faint just looking at it.

The machine stood in its own room, looking stark and alone. It was shockingly tall—fifteen feet of wood and steel, hulking over our heads. It had been mounted on a small platform, which bore a little icon of a pair of feet inside a backslash circle, as though stepping into a guillotine were every museumgoer’s wish. Costa’s characterization of the device as a monster befitted its physical dominance, but I felt a chill from a different source of recognition: the guillotine, so colossally impassive, so indifferent to the range of passions that humans project upon it, was a technology, not a beast. I might have been looking at a drone or a driverless car. As the lawyer and author Constance Debré notes in “Protocoles,” her recent book on the American death penalty, the first electric chair was developed in Thomas Edison’s workshop. Debré writes, “Finding the best manner of killing is a quest.”

Inspecting the guillotine more closely, I noticed that Costa and his colleagues had nixed the wicker basket that caught heads, not wanting to enter “dans le gore.” Costa stepped back and beheld the guillotine. He homed in on the heavy, glinting blade. “Were we right to show it? It’s so incredibly violent,” he said, then added, “But it’s important to show that the battle is over and has been won.” This is true, at least, in more than eighty-five countries around the world. But in the United States the spectacle has yet to decisively sicken its proponents, and the “bloody lottery” carries on. ♦