This unnamed publisher may have been a patsy and a discredit to literary freedom, but at least he knew how to read at an eighth-grade level. Sadly, this is more than can be said for the makers of a new version of Animal Farm, directed by Andy Serkis, the actor and motion capture specialist famous for playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes franchise.

The new film, voiced by a cast of A-list actors including Glenn Close, Seth Rogen, Steve Buscemi, and Woody Harrelson, earned bad press when its trailer was released late last year, but the reality is somehow even worse than it seemed back then. The film feels, to put it plainly, like a bad joke about Orwell that a right-wing X account would dream up to get mad at. Hey guys, what if those crazy, woke socialists in Hollyweird actually went back and rewrote “Animal Farm” to be about the exact opposite of what the author intended? In the film, the message is no longer about how the revolutionary dreams of doing away with capitalist hierarchy are inevitably dashed by the avaricious realities of human nature. The problem, as portrayed by Serkis, is instead corporate greed under capitalism.

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Fast-forward to a year after our respective births, however, and a discrepancy emerged: I was a 1-year-old baby, but Thriller was a global phenomenon, and its creator both more famous and more ubiquitous than any cultural figure before or since. This was Michael Jackson: the smallest cast member of the Jackson 5ive cartoon series that ran on Saturday mornings. The boyfriend-turned-zombie dancer in a spooky music video that was always popping up around Halloween time. The guy who convinced my entire third-grade class, circa 1989, that grabbing your crotch while letting out a high-pitched squeal was the only way to dance. He was an icon, a superstar, the King of Pop who brought crowds to their feet and women to their knees.

But there was also another Michael Jackson—one often featured on the tabloid covers at the supermarket checkout, alongside stories of alien autopsies, Bigfoot sightings, and the ongoing travails of a creature with pointed ears and luminous eyes known as Bat Boy. And this Michael Jackson was not a gifted pop artist, but a reclusive oddball who slept in a glorified test tube, looked like a ghoul, and once dangled his infant son off a balcony—which, depending upon whom you believed, was one of the less sordid things he ever did to a child. The year I was 12, Jackson settled out of court with the family of Jordan Chandler, a 13-year-old who had accused the musician of sexual abuse. A decade later, Jackson was accused again—and this time officially charged, with multiple counts of child molestation, as well as conspiracy to commit child abduction and extortion.

Jackson was acquitted of every charge at trial, but public opinion was not on his side. Polling at the time revealed that a majority of Americans held unfavorable views of the pop star—although opinions differed drastically depending on whether the respondent was black or white. In the former category, nearly two out of three people believed Jackson was innocent; white people, in the same proportion, believed he was guilty.

The child star, the pop icon, the tabloid freak, the accused sex criminal: How you remember Jackson will depend largely on which of these narratives about his life happened to coincide with your cultural awakening. I was intrigued to learn that my 73-year-old mother remembers Jackson almost exclusively as a preadolescent phenom, but she knows almost nothing about the salacious gossip that dogged him later in life—even though, back in 1993, she would have been standing right there next to me at the supermarket checkout where the tabloids lived. My 30-year-old editor, on the other hand, grew up in a world where it was simply assumed that Jackson was a pedophile; she had no idea that he’d even stood trial, let alone been cleared of wrongdoing.

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Earlier this year, in an essay for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel that we knew we had to reprint as soon as we read it, Freya wrote about what she aims to do as a writer:

“I want to say things that bother people and move people and confuse people; I want to start sentences that can’t be auto-completed because even I don’t know where they’re going. I want to learn and offend and regret and grow. I want to be interesting, irritating, irreplaceable. . . . I want to try and be seen trying, to be a person you can’t perfectly map out and make sense of. What good am I otherwise? What am I otherwise?”

In her first essay for us as a contributing writer, Freya writes about the reception to her debut book, GIRLS^®, which dives deep into the misery of Gen Z women, exploring how they’ve been commodified by Instagram, corrupted by pornography, destabilized by the decline of religion, and isolated by the internet.

The book is out next week in the U.S.—and we highly recommend you preorder it!—but it came out a couple months ago in the UK, and Freya was struck all over again by how her work is interpreted by a corner of the media that insists there’s only one explanation for women’s misery, and it’s this: Dudes suck.

Read on to find out what Freya makes of this, and please join us in welcoming her on board. —The Editors

Why are young women so unhappy? Rates of anxiety disorders, depression, and self-harm are soaring; in the U.S., almost one in three teenage girls seriously considered suicide in 2021. Read the mainstream press and you will overwhelmingly find the same answer: teenage boys, misogyny, masculinity, Andrew Tate. For years, blaming men has been the accepted explanation for our misery.

Into this climate landed a viral cover story from the flagship magazine of the British left, The New Statesman, headlined “Meet the Angry Young Women.” Gen Z women in Britain, they found, feel unhappy, hopeless about the future, and hostile toward men. According to new polling, around 72 percent of young men say they have a positive view of women; only half of young women say the same about men. And while just 7 percent of young men have a negative view of women, 21 percent of young women have a negative view of men.

The piece itself was balanced, finally acknowledging that the “femosphere”—left-wing female influencers—also “reinforces this hostility toward men.” But plenty of commentators still read the report as yet more evidence that men are the problem; even an op-ed offering an economic explanation for the angriness of women couldn’t help but conclude: “a woman can choose to subjugate herself to a man, or to the man.”

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Here’s a brief synopsis: Bathed in ethereal California light, Pratt, 42, stands outside the mansions of incumbent LA mayor Karen Bass and city councilmember (and mayoral candidate) Nithya Raman. They, he tells viewers, do not have to deal with the consequences of their bad policies. Cue the consequences, flashing across the screen: homeless encampments, buildings on fire, a masked man holding a flare in front of a graffitied wall.

“This is where I live,” Pratt says, as the ad cuts to an Airstream trailer on the scorched lot where his Pacific Palisades property used to be. He’s been living there for most of the time since his house burned down in the 2025 LA wildfires. The response to the fires by Bass’s administration has been widely maligned.

“They let my home burn down,” Pratt says in the ad. “I know what the consequences of failed leadership are. That’s why I’m running for mayor.” The camera pans back to reveal his empty lot surrounded by some trees, the sun in the sky, and the campaign’s slogan: “A New Golden Age for Los Angeles.”

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Gallaudet is a man with serious credentials. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, he is the former head of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, has worked on anti-submarine warfare, ran the Naval Observatory, and eventually became the acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He’s also one of the most outspoken proponents of the idea that not only are UFOs real, but the government is hiding the truth about them. “We’re being visited by some kind of higher-order intelligence that we don’t understand,” Gallaudet told me. “And it’s happening often, frequently, in our airspace and in our water and in space.”

Gallaudet recalls participating in a naval exercise off the East Coast in 2015 and finding that pilots flying off the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier, were not only seeing UFOs but getting so close that officers like him became worried about a midair collision. These sightings produced the famous GoFast video of a UFO, which the Pentagon later said was an object that appeared out of the ordinary due to an effect called motion parallax.

Gallaudet, who says his correspondence about the object was mysteriously wiped from his computer, is far from convinced by that explanation. And he’s particularly curious as to why so many UFOs appear to be flying over water and in some videos, appear to be disappearing beneath the waves. “If they want to remain unseen,” he told me, “that’s the place they would be.”

As you’ll see, Gallaudet is sincere in his beliefs. He’s testified before Congress about what he’s seen. He and his wife, a fellow oceanographer, are still on the lookout for more proof that UFOs are real. They are true believers, and Gallaudet is not at all shy about expressing his convictions. He says what the government has disclosed so far is “a fraction of the tip of the iceberg of what we’re really seeing day to day.”

In this episode, we also talk about former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who told Congress he regularly encountered UFOs while flying his F-18 fighter jet, as well as the accounts of other military whistleblowers like former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, former Army Colonel Karl Nell, and former Department of Defense officials Christopher Mellon and Luis Elizondo.

Now, this episode does get a bit freaky. We do discuss, for example, the possibility that Atlantis is not just real but findable. If you want to hear from someone who is a good deal more incredulous about this phenomenon than Admiral Gallaudet, be sure to check out my interview last week with professional skeptic Michael Shermer. You can also watch my interviews with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

But, again, Gallaudet is a serious man and a former flag officer in the U.S. Navy. And he’s coming out with a new memoir about his experiences, Holding Fast in Heavy Seas: Leadership for Turbulent Times. He is worth listening to as we try to get to the bottom of all this ahead of President Donald Trump’s promised disclosure of UFO documents. Watch the video above, or check out a condensed and edited partial transcript of the interview below.

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A sub–two-hour marathon has long been the Holy Grail of long distance running, and it got us wondering how Sawe pulled it off—and whether we can expect this to become the new normal among marathoners.

For answers, we turned to Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and the author of The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports. Nick, an extraordinary long-distance runner himself, recently set a U.S. record for running 31 miles among men over 50, with a time of 3:10. Our interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Hiding behind a building at the back of my school, I would light a cigarette while ducking from teachers. Later, I would walk through my front door covered in cheap perfume, trying to mask that familiar smell from my mother. I confessed this to her a few years ago. Her reaction: “Do you think I’m an idiot?” It was the sort of teenage caper that I now look back on fondly.

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There were hospital bed selfies, aesthetic photos of pills scattered like candy, and lots and lots of hashtags: #invisibleillness, #healingjourney, #disabledandproud. The women called themselves spoonies, after a famous metaphor offered by the blogger Christine Miserandino in 2003, when she used a handful of spoons to illustrate how even small and ordinary activities, like washing her hair, required spending down her limited supply of energy. They were tragic figures but also savvy marketers; as The Free Press’s Suzy Weiss wrote, their world was “an illness kingdom filled with micro-celebrities offering discounts on supplements and tinctures; podcasts on dating as a spoonie; spoonie clubs on college campuses; a weekly magazine; and online stores with spoonie merch.”

But among these micro-celebrities, there was one woman who was the real thing: Lena Dunham, the patron saint of the extremely online millennial. Posting from her hospital bed after she was rushed to the emergency room from the Met Gala; sharing her journey through surgeries, struggle, and addiction; spinning stories about her health journey the same way she once captured the millennial zeitgeist as the creator and star of HBO’s Emmy-winning drama Girls.

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I thought back to this bit of family lore this morning, when I watched New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino and the socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker debate the merits of microlooting, a made-up word that just means committing theft but feeling good about it. The conversation was hosted by The New York Times Opinion section, and took place in a tastefully decorated whitewashed loft.

Piker is a proud champagne socialist; he sported designer sunglasses on a propaganda trip to Cuba, an island he says has been “asphyxiated” by the U.S., while Tolentino is the cultural critic for the internet age: photogenic and constantly virtue signaling. She, of The New Yorker and a New York Times bestseller, is from the old media world—while Piker is the king of the internet stream, appealing to disaffected young men. But they’re both getting at the same thing.

The headline of the interview, interestingly, is: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” The subhead: “Why petty theft might be the new political protest.” It is worth watching the whole thing for a glimpse into how the very online left—for which Piker and Tolentino are avatars—is responding to the much-discussed death of woke. Answer: a litigation of the Ten Commandments, one by one. According to the very polished, perfectly comfortable class avengers: Murder is up for debate. So is stealing, provided that it’s not from a Zohran Mamdani–sponsored grocery store.

The host, Nadja Spiegelman, began the conversation by establishing her guest’s theft threshold: “Would you share your Netflix password?” “Would you steal from the Louvre?” “Would you steal from Whole Foods?”

Apparently a lot of people steal regularly from Whole Foods. Just a few small things, here and there. They’re even getting thrown in the store’s mini-jail for it. It’s a trend, I think, for two reasons. One is that Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, who is the third richest man in the world, and whose name has become a synonym for rapacious capitalism. The second is that Whole Foods sells upscale organic groceries and supplements for people who want to boost their collagen.

Meaning, those microlooting Whole Foods are probably not destitute mothers stealing formula for their babies. They are more likely graphic designers stealing probiotics. People who studied “studies” at Seven Sisters colleges. They are disenchanted magazine writers and casting directors who use their parents’ HBO log-ins. In other words, they are downwardly mobile brats who can afford it. And they are telling themselves that by taking without paying—a behavior known to the rest of us as stealing—they are, in fact, engaging in a quiet political protest.

When asked if she’d ever done this, Tolentino said “yes,” and “on several occasions.” But don’t worry, it was for an elderly neighbor called “Miss Nancy,” who she shops for as part of her neighborhood mutual aid group, which Tolentino has been in since 2021, thank you very much. She said she stole four lemons for Miss Nancy, though we’re never told if anyone checked with Miss Nancy over whether she was cool to receive boosted goods. Piker dutifully reported that he is “pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.”

And, in general, Piker continued: “We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in.”

Rock on, brother—anyway your burger’s up!

Perched atop deep, white armchairs in business casual, the three nodded knowingly to each other as they found even deeper agreement in the fact that “the valence of property is on the table as something to be toyed with, in terms of direct action.” In other words: It’s good, actually, that more people are becoming thieves. “Everyone, try it. See what happens,” Tolentino trilled. “Yeah, chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go,” Piker added, when presented with the idea that if everyone were to steal from Whole Foods, the prices would go up.

At the very least, Piker is clear about what he’s going for: He wants the government to run all the grocery stores, and he thinks that sowing chaos is the surest path there. And by that logic, if stealing leads to nationalized grocery stores, then murder might just lead to universal healthcare! Piker doesn’t endorse the killing of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, but he points out that Thompson was engaged in “a tremendous amount of social murder” through “the systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty.” Here’s when I would normally change train cars. Of the people who have to deal with Byzantine insurance companies, and with medical debt he said, “For them, that is murder; for them, that is torture.”

In Piker’s morally inverted world, the assassin putting a bullet in someone’s back is a hero, and the guy getting killed is the real murderer. In Tolentino’s world, which is the same one, blowing up a pipeline “should be okay” but getting iced coffee in a plastic cup is “profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action.” (Yes, she says this.)

And what about the man who burned down the Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Canada to protest low wages? “Do I think that some sort of fire could hypothetically be framed within a collective action that is tactically useful?” Tolentino rhetorically asked herself. “Yes.”

What is the threshold for some sort of fire, and how can we make sure it doesn’t get mixed up with the bad, hot destructive kind? Which store sells the hypothetical frames?

Stealing from Whole Foods doesn’t actually have to do with billionaires, or how much they pay in taxes. The logic that says slipping a magazine or a chocolate bar into your tote might equal one less orchid at the Bezos wedding is ridiculous. Stealing has to do with you, and whether you are a good or bad person, and your community, and whether you want to live in one where all the shampoos at the CVS are kept in tiny jails.

The Times conversation ended with the same line of questioning it began with from Spiegelman. “Steal from Whole Foods?” Both Tolentino and Piker responded with my grandfather’s least favorite word: “Sure.” He despised sure. He thought it made the speaker seem like they can’t be bothered to give you a straight answer. Like they’re doing you a favor. That deep down, they don’t actually care at all.

Agree with him or not, Shermer is a thoughtful and often friendly critic of UFO enthusiasts. He’s even part of the Galileo Project, which is Harvard professor Avi Loeb’s effort to find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. He’s also out with a new book, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It & Why It Still Matters, in which he ably explains or debunks beliefs and theories he finds unconvincing. Whether you’re a believer or not, the book is well worth your time.

In this interview, which has been edited and condensed, we talk about the possibility of space aliens visiting Earth, why he’s so unconvinced by the UFO evidence we currently have, and why he expects the coming disclosure won’t reveal much of anything. We also discuss the case of the 11 missing scientists that the FBI is investigating, the existence of God and the role of religion in society, and even his own ghost story.

Will Rahn: Let’s get the first question out of the way, the one I’m asking everyone: What should smart people think about UFOs?

Michael Shermer: I start by distinguishing between two different questions. Are they out there somewhere? And have they come here? Almost everybody confuses these two.

When I say I have my doubts that they’ve actually come here to Earth, people tell me, “Oh, this vast universe of trillions of stars and planets, you’re saying we’re alone?”

No, that’s not what I’m saying. They’re probably out there somewhere. But the distances are literally astronomically vast, and the chances of them finding us at the right time and place—it’s just very, very, very unlikely. And the evidence that they’ve already come here is just not very good.

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The loss of a job, a bad breakup, a nervous collapse: Where do these fall on the spectrum? Is there any way of knowing? Does it all depend on where they lead; on what comes next?

So goes my thought process as I make the routine mistake of googling my beloved New York Metropolitans. Record: seven wins, 16 losses, the worst in the National League. Last 10 games: zero wins, 10 losses. Payroll: $370 million, the second-highest in baseball.

My favorite player, Pete Alonso? He’s slugging for the Baltimore Orioles now. Big Pete, bullied as a child, a great beauty at the plate, had spent his entire career in the Mets organization and last year set the team’s all-time record for most home runs. He was a hero to the fans. But the Mets are the Mets, so they just let him go in free agency without a fight.

Brandon Nimmo, my second-favorite player? The good news is that he’s the best hitter on the team. The bad news is the team is the Texas Rangers. The Mets traded him away for Marcus Semien, who is barely hitting at all.

This brings me to the real question: Why am I doing this to myself?

Maybe it’s because baseball breaks my heart in a way I can handle.

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Or, as Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber puts it in her new book, they have turned us into Screen People. It’s not just that we spend our lives looking at screens, she writes, in an excerpt adapted from the book; it’s that we’ve begun to behave as though we’re constantly being watched through them. We’ve self-isolated, retreating from any real-world interactions that can’t be edited or rehearsed to perfection.

In this environment, Garber asks, has “feeling seen” transformed from a blessing into a curse? And why, in an era with more options to connect to each other than ever before, are we increasingly, irrevocably, choosing to be alone? —The Editors

February 26, 2015, was an exceptional day on the internet. That afternoon, BuzzFeed writer Cates Holderness republished a picture she had come across on Tumblr: a dress, horizontally striped and topped with a matching bolero, hanging against a window. The post had a simple headline—“What Colors Are This Dress?”—and a brief explanation: “There’s a lot of debate about the color of the dress.” It concluded with a poll inviting readers to weigh in. Was the garment in question black and blue. . . or white and gold?

The dress quickly acquired the name recognition typically reserved for megastars: It became, simply, The Dress. Some saw one set of colors. Some saw another. There was no nuance to be found. Teams formed and clashed, each side absolutely sure that it saw the dress as it really was, and baffled by the other side’s delusion. Celebrities weighed in. So did politicians. So did God (or, at any rate, the widely followed Twitter account @TheTweetOfGod): “The color of a dress? Really? That’s what you’re asking Me?” it thundered.

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As a longtime denizen of bookstores in Western countries, I knew that almost any shop would carry a few titles about the evils of Zionism and Israel, a venerable genre on the Marxist left. But this time I saw a change: The Gaza war had inspired a proliferation of these titles so intense that they now filled much of a shelf. I noticed the same phenomenon in other bookstores in other cities, where there were suddenly more “Gaza” and “Palestine” books, it seemed, than books about the rest of the entire Arab world combined. Humanity now inhabited a new age, according to one title, The World After Gaza. According to another, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. There was Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, and Palestine and Feminist Liberation, and many more examples in the same vein, with more soon to be published. A new literary genre had been born.

The Gaza war has been fought a two-hour drive from my Jerusalem home by people I know, and has claimed the lives of several of them. For me, reading the back covers of these books left the impression of a genre related to the actual territory of Gaza as the Dune novels are related to the actual NASA space program. At the same time, it wasn’t fringe work. Among the practitioners were authors who have recently won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and additional accolades.

After reading more in subsequent months, I came to think of the genre as “Gazology.” By this term I don’t mean the study of the real territory of Gaza, or of the terrible human tragedy caused by the Hamas offensive of October 7 and by the Israeli response in the war that followed—vast tracts of Gaza destroyed, tens of thousands of civilians killed along with tens of thousands of combatants, and aftershocks across the Middle East. Gazology is not reportage, and most of its practitioners are not in or even near Gaza or Israel. This is a Western literary genre with its own rules, tropes, and goals.

It’s likely that much Western culture, journalism, and politics in the coming years will be downstream of these books and the ideology behind them. Students in disciplines from anthropology to medicine will be assigned these works and invited to see the world’s problems through the lens of “Gaza.” For this reason, the genre is important. What follows is a survey of five representative samples of the volumes in question, in an attempt to sketch the contours of this expanding body of writing and to understand what it is trying to say.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

The memorable cover of the genre’s most popular title, and the first one I read, shows a stylized girl with a bomb about to drop on her head. The author, Omar El Akkad, was born in Egypt and immigrated to Canada, where he reported for The Globe and Mail before moving to the United States. He’s now an American citizen living in Oregon.

In the pages of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad watches the war in Gaza unfold in portrayals on television and online, describing it as an era-defining evil that people will eventually claim to have opposed, like the crimes of the Nazis or the conquistadors. The war resonates for him as someone living with the displacement of his own migration from the Islamic world as a teen, with a heightened sensitivity to racism, and with the abiding discomfort of a Muslim man living in North America.

The book’s title, particularly the word this, led me to expect an account of the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, or the war itself, but the strangest aspect of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is the author’s slim interest in any of those topics. We follow his travels in Oregon, and in Montreal. He listens to Nirvana. His backyard deck collapses in a way that feels emotionally significant, an episode that gets more space in the book than the entire ideology of Hamas—including the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews in pursuit of the supremacy of Islam—which is never mentioned at all. He writes sentences like “We are all governed by chance. We are all subjects of distance,” and “Fear obscures the necessity of its causing.” His daughter, we learn, “turns seven soon, a hundred in dragon years. She is made of dreaming.” The book won last year’s National Book Award for nonfiction.

El Akkad complains about racism from officials on the U.S.-Canada border, about the hardships of the writer’s life, and about the immoral Israeli investments of people who once gave him a Canadian book prize worth $100,000, which he doesn’t mention giving back. “I’ve sat through a wildly uncomfortable book tour interview once after I joked that I write all my novels in Arabic and then run them through Google Translate, and the interviewer believed me,” he tells us. We’re meant to sneer at this prejudice and sympathize with its victim, but why wouldn’t the interviewer believe him? And why does an author claiming to have discovered the age’s defining evil seem to be concerned primarily with himself? This was confusing at first, but as I read Gazology more deeply, I realized this approach is a characteristic of the genre: In these books, Gaza is not a subject but a stage.

The author gives no indication of ever having set foot in Gaza or in Israel, and when he talks about witnessing events, the recurring phrase is “I watch footage.” Some events are “witnessed” in this fashion—that is, via images that are subject to Hamas censorship and intimidation in Gaza, often curated by Western activists practicing journalism as agitprop, and then supercharged by the various Qatari, Chinese, and Russian information campaigns bending our online algorithms. Other events are not witnessed but ignored to the extent possible, most notably the October 7 massacre that began the war. In what turns out to be another feature of the genre, El Akkad sidesteps the butchery of that day by homing in on one false story promulgated after the attack about Israeli babies who were beheaded or put in an oven. That didn’t happen. But a reader doesn’t learn what did happen: namely, a premeditated mass murder committed by teams of terrorists going house to house through Israeli communities, burning families in their bedrooms, kidnapping toddlers and grandparents, and gunning down more than 350 young people at a music festival. To a reader of this book the motivation behind the attack remains mysterious. Though it was carried out by the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by the Arabic acronym Hamas, the words Islam or Islamic appear in the entire book a total of four times. The word genocide, on the other hand, appears more than 40 times.

This word is key to this book and to the entire Gazology genre: Genocide is the equivalent of water in Dune, the substance that moves the storyline along. If the Jews have committed genocide, everyone else can finally stop thinking about the genocide committed against them, can turn without guilt against the state that allowed Jews to protect themselves for the first time, and can sink with relief back into pre-Holocaust thought patterns—because by committing the ultimate evil, the Jews have finally proved that those thought patterns were correct. The accusation serves to justify violence against Israelis, including, retroactively, the violence of October 7, thus making them responsible for a war launched by Palestinians. The “Gaza genocide” may be an obvious falsehood, but it’s an irresistible story.

After two-and-a-half years of a brutal war fought by Israel against an enemy that makes itself indistinguishable from civilians by design, the population of Gaza is alive. Hamas’s own statistics put military and civilian fatalities—a distinction the group doesn’t make—at just over 3 percent of the prewar population, and the people of Gaza are largely displaced and suffering but have increased in number since the beginning of the war. The genocide charge is not an analysis of Israeli operations but a tool designed to shift attention away from the people who started the war and built the twisted battlefield on which it would be fought, and to mass-produce a verbal weapon that can be used to anathematize opponents and obscure their concerns. Using the term is a way not to think, for example, about the real options available to an Israeli officer approaching a Gaza town containing 15 miles of Hamas tunnels, 1,000 jihadists dressed like civilians, and several dozen Israeli hostages alive or dead in unknown locations.

El Akkad, watching on the internet from Oregon, is convinced that he’s seeing “the wholesale murder of a people” and “one of the largest killing sprees of Muslims in recent history.” The practice of inversion, I found, is a habit of the writers in this field, which explains the following sentence: “Of all the aftereffects of the War on Terror years, the most frequently underestimated is the heightened derangement of language for the purpose of sanitizing violence.”

Gaza Faces History

Enzo Traverso, an Italian historian on staff at Cornell, opens his own contribution to the genre, Gaza Faces History, with an admission: He is “not a specialist on the Middle East, nor on the Arab-Israeli conflict, nor on Palestine.”

Nevertheless he would like to share his thoughts. “We are not dealing with two armies, given the disparity between the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and Hamas, but with executioners and victims, an army and a civilian population—precisely the conditions associated with genocide,” Traverso writes. He does admit “a gap” between what we would usually call a genocide and the events in Gaza—the gap presumably being that the victims in this case aren’t dead. But genocides, he assures us, “differ in scale and may be committed using a variety of means.” The professor then proceeds to his real topic, which isn’t Gaza but Jews.

The Jews, we are to understand, have used the Holocaust to justify their own crimes, culminating—with a kind of literary inexorability—in their transformation into Nazis. The word jihad, which is Hamas’s word for its own ideology and actions, doesn’t appear in Gaza Faces History, but the Warsaw Ghetto appears four times. When the word tunnels makes its single appearance, this is the context: “[T]he destruction of Gaza by the IDF recalls the razing of the Warsaw ghetto by General [Jurgen] Stroop in 1943, and the combatants leaping out of tunnels to strike at an occupying army that sees them as ‘animals’ inevitably suggests the Jewish fighters in the ghetto.”

He goes on to discuss Al Jolson and minstrel shows, and includes a tangent about a scholar who once wrote that the medieval blood libel against Jews was actually true. It’s hard to understand what he means by this, but it’s clear that in the mind of this European scholar, “Gaza” exists not in the Islamic world but in the mental plumbing of Christian Europe, his home court. When he does turn his attention to the place mentioned in the book’s title, he begins to trip over his own ideas. “Nothing can justify” the actions of Hamas on October 7, he writes, and then justifies them repeatedly: Gaza was an “open-air prison,” so massacring Jews at a rave in southern Israel is not, he assures the reader, like massacring French concertgoers in Paris. “All that Hamas can do, not being a state, is to take hostages and launch rockets. Hamas’s terrorism is just the dialectic twin of Israeli state terrorism. Terrorism is never pretty, but the terrorism of the oppressed is generated by that of their oppressor.” And we must understand why so many people rejoiced on October 7, an event which, like El Akkad, he avoids describing in detail: “[S]chadenfreude is a human emotion, like the wan smile on the faces of Auschwitz inmates when they heard the news of the bombing of German cities.”

By now Traverso has forgotten that he is “not a specialist,” and also that Hamas’s atrocities can’t be justified, and continues with decreasing coherence. Israel “has every right to exist,” he writes, and continues, in the same sentence, “but the future of this nation is threatened by the political entity governing and representing it today.” There seems to be no editor on hand to intervene. “Faith,” the historian declares, passing judgment on poor souls who don’t share his clarity, “often calls for a denial of reality.”

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth

Andreas Malm, a Marxist academic from Sweden, would like to widen the lens: Israelis are responsible for the destruction of Palestinians, to be sure, but that’s not all. They’re also complicit in the destruction of the entire planet. In The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth—part of a new Gazology series from Verso Books, whose website boasts a commitment to “radical publishing”—we learn that Zionism and fossil fuels are not merely the dual evils facing the world but conjoined twins.

The author quotes Theodor Herzl: “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct,” which Malm explains is a reference to “the construction of racial colonies.” In fact, this line from The Jewish State refers to writing, and specifically to Herzl’s method for building an argument on the page. Malm clearly hasn’t read the text. In his defense, the author apologizes for his busy schedule: “Work on other projects has prevented me from giving more than a rough (and lightly referenced) account,” he writes in his introduction.

In his real life, the author seems to be an employee of the Swedish welfare state as an associate professor in the Department of Human Geography at Lund University. His fantasy life is quite different: “If I lived in Gaza, I would, I imagine, be a long-standing member of the PFLP,” he writes, referring to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. If he were a woman, “I would have joined the women’s brigades of the DFLP,” that being the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. (Both are leftist factions famous from the days of Palestinian airline terrorism and eclipsed since the 1980s by jihadists.) He believes that the Gaza war is not just a genocide, but possibly worse than past genocides because it’s supported by countries in the West: “I must confess to some naivety here: I had not expected quite this voracious an appetite for Palestinian blood.” He’s not thrilled by every aspect of October 7, but admits with refreshing honesty that he did greet the massacres with “cries of jubilation.”

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth argues for a special link between Israel and global environmental degradation. The author’s thesis revolves around the year 1840, when the British Empire first used armed steamboats in the Levant, demonstrating the supremacy of coal and also sparking the early glimmers of Christian Zionism among British aristocrats. “Here is the first moment of articulation: the moment that ignited the globalization of steam, through its deployment in war, was also the moment that conceived the Zionist project.” Steam can obviously be linked to nearly every historical development on Earth since its invention, and the unique connection to Zionism remains elusive to a reader despite the author’s passion, which is expressed in sentences like: “However mighty they may be, the fossil fuel and Zionist lobbies are epiphenomenal excrescences from deep structures that have operated over a very longue durée.”

The central irony of Malm’s thesis is that until a few years ago Israel had no fossil fuels to speak of, unlike its traditional enemies, who include the world’s greatest oil producers. Replying to a colleague who seems to have politely pointed this out, the author concedes that the issue is less fossil fuels than who’s using them. When the Soviet Union used oil revenue to defeat fascism or to fund his own heroes from the PFLP, that was good. Oil is also good when the Islamic petro-dictatorship Qatar uses the proceeds to fund its propaganda channel Al Jazeera, which the author describes as the “single source of sustained sanity in the global media landscape.”

From his command post in the faculty lounge at Lund, the author calls for bloodshed. “Limiting, stopping, reversing the destruction of Palestine and the planet therefore require, as a logically unassailable condition, the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure and racial colonies,” he writes; however, “not necessarily their physical destruction; but necessarily their decommissioning and repurposing, in the cases where that is possible, and where not, on the path to their abolition, yes, their physical destruction.”

The World After Gaza

A reader of Gazology discovers not only that Jews are committing a great sin, which they are trying to hide, but that these actions exist at the heart of the age. Once again, it turns out, some “physical destruction” may be necessary to save the world from them. As the Irish novelist Sally Rooney recently told an audience, echoing the title of Malm’s book, “By standing in solidarity with Palestine, we are learning how to fight for life on Earth.” Or in the words of another English-language novelist, the American writer Susan Abulhawa, referring to the “vile colony” of Israel: “The only way humanity has a fighting chance at a moral future is if this cancer is excised from our political, moral, and social reality.” This belief is held by figures as seemingly divergent as Candace Owens, the popular American podcaster, who told her followers this month that “There will never be peace in the world while Israel exists,” and the defense minister of Pakistan, who posted on X that “Israel is evil and a curse for humanity.”

The World After Gaza is the contribution from Pankaj Mishra, a writer who was born in India and lives in Britain. In keeping with the genre, the book’s subject is not Gaza. It’s about literature, and specifically Jewish literature, and more specifically Jewish literature related to the Holocaust. The words Holocaust or Shoah appear more than 250 times in The World After Gaza, four times as often as the word Gaza.

The book begins with a blizzard of quotes from Jewish writers like Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud before proceeding to Isaac Babel and, eventually, to five whole pages about a novel by Saul Bellow. A reader gets the impression that Jewish writers are being stacked here like sandbags against the suspicion that the author may be engaged in something other than honest analysis when he describes the Israeli war in Gaza as “an act of political evil,” a “livestreamed mass-murder spree,” and a genocide to rival the Holocaust. There are other tragedies on Earth, to be sure: “Yet no disaster compares to Gaza—nothing has left us with such an intolerable weight of grief, perplexity, and bad conscience.”

Once a Gazology reader realizes that the goal is not an analysis of an actual war in Gaza, the search begins for the real use to which “Gaza” is being put. Mishra’s project, as far as I can tell, is to replace the genocide of Jews in the Western mind with a genocide by Jews, and then to replace the Jewish writers whom the author admires with—well, with himself. He returns repeatedly to the celebrated Italian novelist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who is mentioned dozens of times in a book that has “Gaza” in the title, in which the name Yahya Sinwar is not mentioned once. Mishra seems to want to be Primo Levi, and even if we understand this is impossible—because Levi is gifted and Mishra is not, because Levi is a witness and Mishra is a voyeur, because Levi’s Holocaust was real and Mishra’s is an ideological fantasy—one still finds something authentic and plaintive in this longing.

The slipperiness of Mishra’s book made me miss the Swede who identifies as a PFLP commando, and who at least says what he means. Mishra regrets that the Palestinians have been outmaneuvered by “internationally connected and resourceful Zionists.” He sees “the insidious racism that had helped prioritize the interests of the West’s chosen nation in the Middle East while demeaning Palestinian suffering in Western eyes.” Getting insidious racism and chosen nation in one sentence is, a reader senses, what he considers daring. He quotes Roald Dahl: “Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion.” Mishra calls Dahl an “antisemite,” and seems to agree with him.

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

Any worldview that places Jewish malfeasance at its center will draw Jewish adherents who see the advantage of being at the center of something, and on the Gazology shelf we find a sad little volume by Peter Beinart, an American journalist. This one begins, as usual, not with Gaza but with the author, in America: He’s in college, or at a conference in Colorado, holding forth on the Bible and on an alphabet soup of American Jewish organizations he doesn’t like.

Unlike the other books, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning takes the trouble to describe and humanize some of the Jewish victims of October 7. But the author thinks Hamas gunmen are akin to anticolonialist rebels in Haiti or the Mau Mau of Kenya—that is, that their actions are an effect, not a cause, and that their grievance is justified. Hatred of Jews who live outside Israel is bigotry and a feature of the political right, Beinart explains. Hatred of Jews in Israel is rational.

The project of this particular “Gaza” book is to find a place for Jews in a Western left increasingly gripped by anti-Zionist conspiracies, while simultaneously offering other leftists a Jewish reassurance that their current preoccupation with Jews is unrelated to the historically recurring preoccupation with the same group of people. The chant “from the river to the sea,” which is a call to replace the single Jewish state with a Muslim-majority state, expresses a “democratic vision,” he writes, so there’s nothing to worry about unless you oppose democracy. He endorses the idea that the Jewish side of the recent war must be at the center of the world’s understanding of injustice: “In its unchecked cruelty and unbearable pain, the destruction of Gaza is a symbol of our age.”

Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide

The last category on the Gaza shelf is different from the others. It consists of testimony from people actually in Gaza, rather than of the thoughts of foreigners energized by this tragedy. Displaced in Gaza, for example, introduces 27 Palestinian civilians rendered homeless in the devastation of the war. A woman named Aisha Osama Abu Ajwa gives a harrowing account of being on the move under fire with six children, living in shelters: “We just want the war to stop and to return to our lives before the war.” Another account is from Fidaa Fathi Abu Yousef, a mother of four: “I feared for my children due to intense bombardment. Occupation forces bombed several houses adjacent to us, and dozens of our friends, neighbors, and loved ones were martyred.” Her son Odai is killed.

The correct response to these suffering people is compassion. No one would want to be in their place. An observer can only point out what isn’t in any of the testimonies: Hamas, the group that has ruled Gaza for two decades, which started the war, prolonged it for two-and-a-half years, and fought it from inside and under the houses of the people in the book. Whether because of coercion or ideological sympathy, these Gazans do not admit to seeing any of the group’s tens of thousands of armed fighters, or any of the thousands of tunnel entrances across Gaza. They didn’t see the Israeli hostages and corpses paraded through their streets on October 7, and weren’t in any of the cheering crowds.

I don’t mean that the presence of Hamas is played down in Displaced in Gaza but that the word Hamas doesn’t appear even once. The same is true of a recent New York Times essay written by Ghada Abdulfattah in the same vein, “Gaza’s Rubble Is the Grave of Our Future,” and it’s true of most first-person accounts from Gaza aimed at Western audiences. In Hamas messaging for Middle Eastern audiences, by contrast, like speeches from the group’s leaders and viral videos with red triangles marking Israeli targets, the brave fighters of the Islamic Resistance are said to be striking the Zionist enemy with the support of a population committed to victory and martyrdom.

In the work of Mosab Abu Toha, for example, a writer whose vivid essays in The New Yorker made him perhaps the most prominent Gazan voice on this war, Hamas does appear by name, but as a distant actor in the background of a catastrophe engineered by Israel. It would be interesting to read what Abu Toha, who fled Gaza and now lives in the U.S., actually knows about Hamas; he likely has acquaintances or relatives in the organization, as do most people in the Hamas-controlled territory. But this knowledge is out of bounds. When a library he founded was destroyed early in the fighting, he blamed “Israel’s genocidal campaign to erase Gaza and everything that breathes of life and love,” and in February, Abu Toha could be found on X accusing Israel of trafficking in the skin of dead Palestinians. Early last year, around the same time a book of his poetry was published by Knopf, Abu Toha decried the fact that the Israeli hostage Emily Damari, who was shot and seized from her home near the Gaza border on October 7, was considered a hostage even though she was a police officer; the poet’s post ended with the phrase, “Fuck your language.” Last spring he won the Pulitzer Prize in commentary.

The disappearance of Hamas is the key tactic in making Israel seem irrational or malign. It’s like describing the American war in the Pacific without mentioning Japan, or describing all Japanese on every Pacific island as civilians. If you understand there’s a Hamas commander in a given house, for example, it’s possible to perceive the reasoning behind the air strike that destroys the house, even if you think the civilian casualties are tragic or immoral and feel sympathy for mothers like Aisha Osama Abu Ajwa. If there is no Hamas, the strike is just a massacre.

The genre I’ve called Gazology makes three central claims. Firstly, that the war in Gaza is not a response to the attack of October 7, which was either unimportant or justified, and was in any case unrelated to the faith and ideology of the attackers or of the hundreds of millions who support them across the Islamic world. Secondly, that no firsthand experience, language skills, military knowledge, or even proximity are required for an author working in the genre, because all relevant facts are incontrovertible and available online. And lastly, and most importantly, Gazology rests on the idea that the Gaza war is not just Israel’s fault, a bad decision, or even a crime, but the doorway to the dark workings of the world.

It’s in the last point that a reader glimpses the battery powering the genre. Gazology is a literature of Jewish evil. Its origins lie not in journalism or academic inquiry but in the pseudosciences that have sprung up over the centuries to explain the problems of humanity with stories about the malevolence of this group of people.

When I began working as a correspondent for the international press in Israel 20 years ago, I was surprised to find myself participating in coverage guided less by curiosity than by activist ideas that were then taking hold in the Western left. One of these ideas, common in Soviet propaganda and in Marxist circles since the 1970s, portrayed the Jewish state as the prime embodiment of the ills of the West—particularly imperialism, racism, and militarism, if not apartheid and genocide. A similar process of ideological capture was playing out in those years across much of the storytelling apparatus of the West—the academy, human-rights groups, the United Nations, publishing—merging to create an information bubble that was inflaming public opinion while making the real world harder and harder to understand.

I had a sense of what one result would be. In 2014, after leaving my job as a correspondent for the Associated Press, I wrote two essays describing what I’d seen and warning that the kind of journalism now being produced “laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews.” Just over a decade later, the Gazology shelf shows that the migration is complete. These alarming ideas are now accepted by many as so self-evident that they no longer require defense.

It’s tempting to mock these writers as the grandchildren of phrenologists. It would be honest to point out how shoddy the inquiry, how poor the writing, how evident the pathologies at work. But dismissing them would be a mistake. This is an old poison, and a strong one. It shows every sign of working.

This was a few months into my first pregnancy, and suddenly horror stories about breastfeeding were everywhere. Friends told me about weeping as they pumped, glaring at their snoring husbands, white-knuckling their way through mastitis to squeeze out every last drop. Around 70.3 percent of mothers report breastfeeding difficulties—cracked nipples, fatigue, low supply. About 10 percent of American women who are nursing get mastitis, a painful inflammation of the breast tissue. And then there’s dysphoric milk ejection reflex—a particularly bleak condition that causes some women to experience rage, anxiety, and dread while lactating. All in all, 60 percent of women stop breastfeeding sooner than they had planned to. Sure, I had a couple friends who took to it straightaway. There are women who find it easy and convenient, even joyful. Lucky them! And I heard from women who chose to push through the difficulty because it feels worth it.

But I decided that breastfeeding simply was not going to be my thing. After a Las Vegas honeymoon at 25 followed by a botched attempt at natural family planning, I wanted to control the few things I could.

And so I was initiated into one of the most toxic debates in the momosphere: breast milk versus formula.

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And perhaps relatability was the aim of The Miniature Wife, a new series that landed on Peacock last week. The show stars Elizabeth Banks as Lindy Littlejohn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who gets accidentally miniaturized by her scientist husband, Les. The problem, which is standard-issue in stories like these, is that the technology only functions properly in one direction—which is to say, every time Les tries to restore a miniaturized object to its original size, it explodes.

Lindy’s accident (although, as Les admits later, it was more like accidentally-on-purpose) comes at a symbolically laden moment. Although Lindy’s first novel became a bestseller, she wrote it 20 years ago—and ever since, she has been, well, shrinking. Away from the spotlight, away from her work, into the small and wholly unappreciated role of Midwesterner, mother, and supportive spouse to a husband who wants (and, after the way he supported her, arguably deserves) his turn to shine. When she screams, “Make me big again,” it can be understood as both a literal request as well as a professional, even existential, cri de coeur.

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My first true political conviction was that they were real, they were here, and the government was covering it up. It was sci-fi, I confess, that did it. I obsessively watched The X-Files as a kid, and I became convinced that it was basically a documentary. Over time, of course, I steadily grew more skeptical, but as a teenager, I talked to a close family friend—a distinguished medical doctor—who believed in aliens. He claimed to have had patients who worked in the government and had told him about these beings. He said that they weren’t extraterrestrial, but inter-dimensional. They could defy our physics. They could even walk through walls.

Now I’m an adult, with a child and a house, which is full of books by the great authors on the subject of aliens: the French computer scientist Jacques Vallée, the journalist Leslie Kean, and the religion professor Diana Pasulka, just to name a few. My wife and I have even visited the sites of supposed abductions and UFO crashes. I’ve mostly treated alien visitations as a distinctly American kind of folklore. But there might be a lot more to it than that.

Look, I know you sound like something of a nutcase when you talk about this stuff. This has long been treated as a topic for cranks, paranoiacs, and dimwits—the sort of people unable to distinguish the difference between sci-fi and actual science. But in the last decade, that has slowly started to change.

In 2017, The New York Times unveiled footage recorded in 2004 of some kind of oblong-shaped orb flying near a U.S. Navy exercise off the coast of San Diego. There’s no easy way to dismiss that 2004 footage, which is now popularly known as the “Tic Tac” incident. Since then, we’ve also had whistleblower after whistleblower show up before Congress with wild stories about American UFO retrieval programs and efforts to reverse-engineer crashed spacecraft. In 2023, retired Air Force officer David Grusch, a decorated Afghan war vet who also served in the intelligence community, testified to Congress of his knowledge of a supposed crash retrieval program. He even told reporters that Benito Mussolini’s Italy recovered a crashed UFO in the 1930s, which was then handed over to U.S. forces at the end of World War II via the Vatican.

More recently, there’s been another story flying around all this. As The Wall Street Journal reported last year, the government might not have been suppressing our knowledge of UFOs. In fact, it might have been behind it. Perhaps UFOs, as we know them, were an invention to hide what the U.S. military was actually up to at places like Area 51, where bizarre-looking spy planes and stealth jets were tested.

And yet, and yet, when President Barack Obama was asked about aliens on a podcast earlier this year, he said: “They’re real.” He then clarified that statement, saying he was only speculating due to the high odds they exist, but President Donald Trump was quick to accuse him of releasing confidential information. Trump then said he was ordering the release of government files on the phenomenon. (He did not say when this release would occur.) The fact that current and retired presidents have been talking about this at all is a huge shift from where we were at the start of this century.

What do they know that we don’t? Why do clean-cut senators like South Dakota’s Mike Rounds seem so convinced that the government isn’t telling Congress the truth about this phenomenon? Why are bureaucrats with security clearances testifying under oath that the government has UFOs?

I want some answers. So I’ve interviewed a handful of experts, and for the next month, we’ll be publishing an interview a week. I’m not here to convince you of anything. This is not one of those History channel shows that runs with the most wild hypothesis. I’m here, as they say, just asking questions. I’ll probably get some stuff wrong. When I make mistakes, I want you to correct me. This is an important subject. And I want us to go on a journey of discovery together.

But enough of what I have to say. I want to introduce you to our guests. In this four-part series, we’re going to speak to journalist Michael Shellenberger, physicist Avi Loeb, oceanographer and retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, and University of North Carolina Wilmington professor Diana Pasulka.

And today, to begin our quest, we have Michael Shellenberger—who has studied this phenomenon for years. He has even testified to Congress about what he’s uncovered. Watch the whole video to see what he has to say.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

Crowds lined the beaches of California. Children on the East Coast stayed up late to watch the broadcast. Millions around the globe anticipated the safe return of four human beings—three Americans and one Canadian—who had ventured farther into space than anyone before them.

It felt magical. It felt like a miracle.

But it was neither.

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At the time, Jackson was in precarious financial shape. Nine years earlier, he had been accused of sexually abusing 13-year-old Jordan Chandler and paid a rumored $20 million settlement. Shortly thereafter, Jackson proposed to Lisa Marie Presley. They quickly married and divorced. Michael maintained a wildly expensive and reclusive lifestyle he could not afford. He had not toured for three years, and his biggest asset, ATV Music publishing, was heavily leveraged.

The allegations of child sexual abuse were well known, but so was the withdrawal of the complaint and a richly funded public relations onslaught that framed the incident as a shakedown. The issue of whether Michael was a predator had been jumbled, and I didn’t pause to carefully consider the authenticity of the allegations. In short, I didn’t know back then what has now become so clearly, damningly, obvious.

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These cheap, pocket-size books measure roughly 7 by 4¼ inches and are printed on thin wood-pulp paper, glued rather than sewn. The lineage of the mass-market paperback runs back to 1939, when Robert de Graff’s Pocket Books began selling 25-cent books that could fit in the American commuter’s pocket. Soon, they found their natural home on the spinner racks of supermarkets, drugstores, and airport newsstands. At their peak in the 1990s, Americans were buying them in the hundreds of millions annually.

In its glory days, it was the most widely sold physical book format in the country: the book of beach bags and coat pockets. Now, thanks to a supply-chain decision, it will soon disappear. Sic transit gloria mundi.

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One day in January, earlier this year, Campbell noticed something strange: There were songs popping up on her Spotify profile that she knew nothing about, although they did include snippets she’d posted on YouTube. Right away, she had a theory: Someone had likely fed those snippets into AI, asked it to generate a whole song, then uploaded it under her name. She contacted Spotify, and they helped her remove these songs.

But this past weekend, things escalated.

Campbell discovered that, first of all, AI-generated covers of her work had been uploaded to YouTube by someone—or something—using a distribution company called Vydia. Then—and here’s where things get very strange—Vydia appears to have successfully made multiple copyright claims on YouTube, effectively fooling the platform into thinking the AI-generated version of Campbell’s music was the original. The singer got a notification: “You are now sharing revenues with the copyright owners of the music detected in your video.” In other words, she was ceding the profits of her own work to the bots that copied it. (A spokesperson for Vydia told The Verge that the person who had uploaded the fake videos of Campbell’s songs has been banned from their platform, and that the company had given up all of its copyright claims to her work. He added that Vydia was receiving “literal death threats.”)

“I was under the impression that we had a little bit more checks in place before someone could just do that,” she said in a video posted on Instagram that promptly went viral. She also warned that her story might not be as unusual as it sounds. “It’s the Wild West,” she said, “and it could happen to anyone.”

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