The AtlanticModify

2026-06-30 03:04:00

The Kennedy Center was ready for a night of comedy yesterday. But before guests even reached the red carpet, the building presented a setup of its own. A large tarp was still hanging across the building’s facade, blocking any view of the spot where Donald Trump’s name had been added and then taken away following a court order. Inside, the punch lines practically wrote themselves.

Officially, comedians had gathered there to pay tribute to this year’s recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the talk-show host Bill Maher. Onstage, comic after comic—including Jay Leno, Louis C.K., and Whitney Cummings—took potshots at the president while celebrating Maher’s contrarian posture and decades-long joy at sparing neither the left nor the right. “Finally, an award for my dear friend, ironically at the Trump Kennedy Center,” the actor Woody Harrelson told the audience. “No, oh right—we fixed that.”

Cummings imagined a Kennedy Center transformed by Trump, joking that under his influence, the Washington arts complex’s fall lineup would include a “three-month run of white Hamilton.” Another joke—that Trump missed the ceremony because he was caught in “sex traffic”—drew a mix of laughter and groans before Cummings revealed she had been instructed not to use it. “The thing about comedy is that we aren’t scared,” she said. “We try not to be scared of the people that bully. It’s something I love so much about Bill Maher: He bullies the bullies.”

As Maher took the stage to accept his prize at the end of the night, he was “interrupted” by the popular Trump impersonator and comedian Matt Friend, who emerged from the crowd to gripe about Maher. “Why are we giving this low-ratings, lightweight jerk the Mark Twain Award?” Friend said, repeating insults the president had used against Maher in a Truth Social post earlier this year.

The bit between the two comedians emphasized Maher’s feud with Trump, whose administration in March denied reporting in The Atlantic that Maher would receive the Twain Prize, only for the Kennedy Center to announce the next week that Maher was indeed the choice. For years, Maher lampooned the president on his HBO talk show, Real Time With Bill Maher, before the two met last spring in a highly publicized dinner at the White House (along with some famous Trump supporters), drawing backlash against Maher from figures including Larry David.

[Read: The Bill Maher effect]

“We all know that Bill got some heat for having dinner with President Trump, but everyone missed that he went there to prove a point that he’s been trying to prove for years,” Cummings said during last night’s ceremony. “Seeing Donald Trump, Dana White, and Kid Rock together in the White House once and for all proves there really is no God.” (Maher is an outspoken atheist and a critic of organized religion.)

In his acceptance speech last night, Maher delivered a broad defense of comedy’s role in challenging power—and of his frequent refusals over the years to soften his views in the face of criticism.

He praised Mark Twain’s maxim that “if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything,” arguing that comedians have an obligation to follow that principle even when doing so invites blowback. “If you ask me what I’m proudest of in my whole life,” he said, “it’s simply staying on—staying on the air for 33 years without ever pulling a punch.” And he cast laughter as a kind of public verdict. “Laughter is involuntary,” Maher said. “It’s people’s inescapable truth detector, whether they want to believe it or not.”

Yesterday’s ceremony echoed the dynamic of last year’s Twain event honoring Conan O’Brien, when performers also used the stage to tweak Trump after his February 2025 takeover of the center. Since then, Trump has replaced much of its leadership and board, redirected its programming, and sought to remake one of the nation’s premier cultural institutions. The changes prompted artist cancellations, revenue declines, and staff departures before a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s effort to close the Kennedy Center as well as the board’s renaming of the complex.

The tarp outside the ceremony served as a reminder that the fight over the institution is far from over. Yet for a few hours last night, an older Kennedy Center prevailed.

The atmosphere in the audience was a notable contrast to recent Kennedy Center spectacles, including First Lady Melania Trump’s documentary premiere, where much of the Trump administration’s leadership walked the red carpet. Instead, at the Twain Prize, a packed Concert Hall recaptured some of the bipartisan flavor that used to characterize the center’s marquee events. Democratic lawmakers such as Senator John Fetterman and Representative Ro Khanna (who have both been guests on Maher’s shows) appeared alongside the Trump health official Mehmet Oz and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Lutnick, whose wife is a trustee, told me he has been “helping out” with Kennedy Center board proceedings during its legal fights.

July could bring another volatile chapter. According to a June 19 court filing, Kennedy Center trustees will weigh three options next month: a complete closure of the building with no programming; a partial closure with limited programming in areas unaffected by the renovation; or a series of phased closures to address the structure’s serious needs but leaving programming intact.

Last week, two employees at the center told me they are eager for their own clarity—not only about the future of the institution, but their role within it. The center’s multiple lawsuits, sweeping layoffs, union disputes, and strained operations have left the staff in limbo. A crisis facing the Kennedy Center’s only remaining flagship tenant, the National Symphony Orchestra, seems likely to deepen.

Yesterday, at least, cultural observers were offered another reminder that there are limits to how much any president can redirect American culture, let alone a single arts center. Though Trump has often succeeded in making institutions and even events about himself—such as his stint hosting the Kennedy Center Honors last year—last night it had an unintended consequence. By making himself the central figure in the Kennedy Center’s story, he also made himself the night’s easiest target.

2026-06-30 00:49:19

2026-06-29 23:39:10

As billions of people can attest, giving birth is hard for humans. Our infants have an exceptionally large head for their body size and yet have to squeeze through a very narrow pelvis. Appendages can get stuck; bones can fracture. At worst, the consequences can be lethal for mothers or babies. Until recently, many researchers believed that our species weathered that particular hardship alone: Other primates, they supposed, didn’t need to strike the same compromise between super-brains and walking upright, and so could birth babies with relative ease. But new evidence has started to challenge the notion that human childbirth is uniquely dangerous.

A new paper published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution offers one of the most compelling cases to date against that assumption—showing that other primates, too, must push their babies through some seriously restricted spaces, contributing to infant-death rates that can exceed 34 percent. Humans have long put ourselves on an evolutionary pedestal—“We always think we are special,” Nicole Webb, an evolutionary biologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, in Germany, who wasn’t involved in the new research, told me. But the more scientists have looked across the animal kingdom, the more the biological realities of other animals have upended this narrative.

The assumption that people have it especially rough during childbirth can largely be traced back to a scientist named Adolph Schultz. Schultz’s research was revolutionary: Nearly a century ago, he was the first to gather evidence on the pelvic proportions of several primate species as a proxy for how easily their babies would fit. But his approach also had serious flaws, Nicole Torres-Tamayo, an anthropologist at the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology, in Spain, and one of the new study’s authors, told me. Schultz was wrong about the orientation in which the fetal head of different primates moved through the birth canal. He also incorrectly assumed that the measurements that scientists had taken of the human birth canal would be the most relevant ones to take for other species.

Generally, the most limited section of the human birth canal is the section between the upper part of the sacrum and the front of the pelvis. But in other primates, the birth canal narrows farther down than that. Those errors led Schultz to overestimate just how much room other primates had to shepherd their babies through the birth canal.

So a few years ago, Torres-Tamayo and her colleagues decided to take a new set of measurements with a more open-minded approach. After surveying more than two dozen primate species, they found that humans were far from alone in having to squish babies through an unaccommodating pelvis. According to their research, we’re not even the most disadvantaged among primates. Human babies have heads almost exactly as big as the mother’s pelvis—a squeeze by any standard and a tighter fit than other great apes. But some other primates, including tamarins and bush babies, must birth infants whose head is almost twice as large as what their mom’s pelvis seems to accommodate.

Squirrel monkeys—a petite, chirruping, tree-climbing species whose dark muzzle gives the impression of permanent 5 o’clock shadow—have to deal with that proportional dilemma, too. Although they’re one of the smallest primates around, they can give birth to babies that, overall, weigh as much as 15 percent of what the mother does. (For a 150-pound human, that’d be the equivalent of vaginally delivering a 22.5-pound infant—a feat that, historically, does not end well.) Some data suggest that, at least in captivity, more than a third of squirrel-monkey babies may die, Lia Betti, an anthropologist at University College London and one of the study’s authors, told me. In one study from the 1990s, a researcher observing seven squirrel-monkey births watched two of the babies get stuck; neither survived.

And yet humans, squirrel monkeys, and all other still-living primates have somehow made it work, in large part by evolving anatomical work-arounds. Many primates, for instance, emerge from the birth canal not with the crown of the baby’s head popping out first, as humans do, but face-first—a position that seems to put the head in the least obtrusive position as it transits through the pelvis. Squirrel monkeys are also able to successfully birth babies by completely dislocating their pelvis during delivery—and their infants have been documented pulling themselves out of the birth canal once their shoulders are in the clear.

These particular options aren’t available to humans, though. Our erect posture and the position of the spine makes it very risky—and uncomfortable—to deliver babies face-first. For us, a baby who is delivered head down and is facing the mother’s spine, with their chin tucked toward their chest, has the easiest path out. And for us, a strong, solid pelvis is thought to be key to supporting our weight as we walk upright, nixing the option of keeping those bones loose and fully dislocatable, Betti told me.  

Making these kinds of comparisons, though, can tell researchers only so much. Each species has such a unique anatomy, physiology, and evolutionary history that no single metric or measurement can fully capture the complexity of birth. Anna Warrener, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado at Denver who wasn’t involved in the new paper, also pointed out that most serious human-birth complications actually don’t involve babies getting stuck: They instead get dangerous when a mother starts to bleed uncontrollably, or suffers complications from an infection. Birth is probably treacherous for many, many animals in ways that humans don’t yet appreciate.

Ultimately, what sets humans apart the most may be our ability to cope with birth in creative ways. Humans monitor pregnancies closely and attend one another’s births; we can intervene to minimize bleeding and infection, and extract babies surgically. Many experts have cautioned against the dangers of over-intervening during delivery; at the same time, the availability of clinical care, when properly deployed, has clearly saved countless lives. And even outside of that clinical assistance, “from a grand evolutionary perspective, our species has done a pretty good job,” Warrener said. Difficult births aren’t necessarily unsuccessful ones—and certainly, she added, “there wouldn’t be 8 billion of us if we hadn’t cracked the code.”

2026-06-29 22:15:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

President Trump wanted to paint the Reflecting Pool that sits between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial a deep shade of blue; he wanted it to be resplendent for the nation’s big anniversary. The pool itself is a sight to behold. “Two thousand five hundred feet, the length of the tallest Building in the World,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in late April. The new paint job was supposed to be finished in a week at a fraction of the cost that had been expected, he boasted. It was a part of his broader effort to leave his mark on the nation’s capital—including the ballroom at the White House where the East Wing once stood and his proposed archway on the Virginia side of the Potomac River.

As my colleague Michael Scherer recently wrote, Trump is “proud” of how he’s changed D.C.—often at the expense of national-park projects elsewhere across the country. But as April turned to May and May to June—and the pool turned from that deep, reflective blue to a gelatinous, algal green—it became an example of how the president’s tendency to move fast at the expense of procedure (and, at times, legality) can create new problems.

What can Trump’s effort to make the bottom of a seven-and-a-half-acre pool the same blue that the 50 stars of the American flag rest upon tell us about how he has tried to refashion the nation’s capital? On Radio Atlantic, my colleague David Graham joins me to discuss.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Graham: I’ve often treated that as a kind of skeleton key to understanding Trump’s approach to things. He sees the splashy announcement as what matters. So, it’s a splashy announcement to say you’re gonna fix the Reflecting Pool, and you’re gonna have it looking great by the Fourth of July for the 250th celebration. It’s great to say you’re gonna go into Iran, you’re gonna, you know, topple the regime and bring democracy. Those announcements are easy and fun, and they tend to have a political payoff. But the political payoff decays over time.

[Music]

Adam Harris: The Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., holds a special place in American history. It’s a symbol of national pride. It was built a century ago to connect the National Mall—the space between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. It was dedicated in 1922.

It was where the crowds gathered as Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

Martin Luther King Jr.: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream.

Harris: And it’s been in iconic films: It’s where Forrest Gump, wearing his dress uniform, reconnects with Jenny, depicting the day in October of 1967 when thousands of Vietnam War protesters gathered for the March on the Pentagon.

Tom Hanks (from Forrest Gump): Jenny!

Harris: But when the pool recently turned green as a result of algae blooms, and its just-finished paint job began to peel away, the Reflecting Pool became a symbol of something else.

I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic. This week, we need to think about the president’s mission to leave his mark on the nation’s capital.

Now, the Reflecting Pool is just one of several projects President Trump has launched since returning to office. Some have been to beautify the city in the lead-up to the nation’s 250th anniversary. But others—including tearing down the East Wing to build a ballroom, or his plan to construct an arch at the city’s limits—are an attempt to cement his legacy long after his term in office is over.

What does the president gain by trying to remake Washington? And what, if anything, do we as Americans stand to gain, or to lose?

Joining me to discuss all of this is my colleague, Atlantic staff writer David Graham. Let’s get to questions.

So David, why are people so glued to this Reflecting Pool drama?

David Graham: I mean, there’s a lot of factors, but I think there’s a couple, maybe three. One is a little bit like the East Wing demolition. It’s a really physical demonstration of something. So you can talk about corruption, you can talk about power grabs, you can talk about all these things and they’re kind of abstract, but the Reflecting Pool is there. Or conversely, the East Wing is not there anymore.

The second thing is that he just made this a story on his own. You know, this was not—no one was talking about the Reflecting Pool before he started making a big deal about it a few weeks ago.

And then the third thing: The Reflecting Pool really was green, although it seems like it may now be turning back blue, and experts are warning that it could vary some over time here.

Harris: At its root, though, the Reflecting Pool, the demolition of the East Wing to try to build a ballroom, all of these things are—if you allow Trump to tell it—attempts to beautify the city of D.C. But when you look at the polls, it shows that few Americans are supporting the changes that he’s making here. What is it about the specific changes? If the attempt is to beautify the city, what is it about the specific changes that people don’t seem to like?

Graham: You know, I want to believe that a lot of it is about process, and that’s hard to believe, because usually I don’t feel like Americans care a lot about process. Like, political reporters do, but it’s, you know, it’s sort of irrelevant. But I think the way that he does these things without permission, without seeking funding, and of course that’s true elsewhere—see the Iran war, for example—I think does grate on people. But the other problem is he does it poorly.

Like, if Trump were doing these things and it was working really well, I think maybe it would be a different story. But if you say you’re going to fix the Reflecting Pool and you spend $16 million on it and it immediately falls apart, that’s gonna blow back on you. If you say you’re gonna erect a giant arch, and it looks really bad, people are going to see it looks really bad. Whereas if you build something beautiful without asking permission, I think people are likely to be more forgiving.

Harris: Yeah, that’s fair. And, you know, you think about construction projects, they often fail, right? Or they’re gonna need repairs over time. It’s not that this is something where—thinking about it in the context of, like, your house. Somebody comes to repair your sump pump and two weeks later, your sump pump breaks. I’m not speaking from personal experience here, I promise.

Graham: (Laughs.)

Harris: But these construction projects—they are more than a dozen at this point—they’re gonna cost at least a billion dollars, according to a New York Times analysis that recently came out. And that’s like only accounting for the projections that we can track. What purpose does remaking D.C. serve for the president?

Graham: You know, he has such a self-image as a builder and a self-created image as a builder. And I think he wants to, you know, he wants to show that. He wants to be the builder that he claimed to be in real estate. I do buy into the idea that he’s more obsessed with legacy than he was in his first term. There’s all these things that are meant to be sort of big swings and are meant to leave—have a lasting legacy. But the problem is you have to do things well. And that has always been a challenge for Trump.

He has never lacked for ideas throughout his career in business, but he has not always followed through very effectively. And I think that’s part of the problem here. And, you know, he rages against process and he rages against procedures, but some of those things—and look, government has a lot of red tape; no one would disagree with that. But sometimes that red tape has a purpose and it is to make sure that you have the best contractor doing it and not some rando who might have donated to your campaign. And you have the right process and you’ve thought through it.

If you look at the Kennedy Center, it’s clear they just didn’t think about what they were doing. They wanted to take over the Kennedy Center. They didn’t like the way it was going, but they didn’t really think about, Okay, what’s the next step after we seize control? And so I think that causes problems too, just sort of the lack of planning. And, you know, that’s very much the case with the Reflecting Pool. You can say the Reflecting Pool was full of algae and could have looked better. Fair enough. But like, do you actually have a plan to fix that or you just have a plan to say you’re going to fix it?

Harris: Yeah. The idea that that planning—I’ve been thinking about that a lot as well too. If you think about the fact that it’s summer, when algae blooms start up. One of our colleagues talked to ecologists who were like, Well, if you have a dark background to a pool (this is a darker color, shade of blue), and you do it in the spring (you should be doing it in the fall or winter), you’re going to get these algae blooms; this is something you could have foreseen. I also think of that in the context of war-gaming Iran. Saying that, Well, they have the opportunity to close the Strait of Hormuz, and now that is a permanent option that’s on the table for Iran.

So, I guess, what does this say about the president’s MO? His way of doing things?

Graham: I go back a lot to the first impeachment, in the first term. Trump was withholding money from Ukraine that Congress had appropriated, and that was the basis for the impeachment. But what he wanted from Ukraine was that they would announce an investigation into Hunter Biden. And, crucially, it was not—it became very clear in the impeachment hearings and the hearings in Congress and in testimony that Trump didn’t actually care about how the investigation was executed; he wanted an announcement, because he saw that as the politically useful thing.

And that, to me—I’ve often treated that as a kind of skeleton key to understanding Trump’s approach to things. He sees the splashy announcement as what matters. So it’s a splashy announcement to say you’re gonna fix the Reflecting Pool and you’re gonna have it looking great by the Fourth of July for the 250th celebration. It’s great to say you’re gonna go into Iran, you’re gonna, you know, topple the regime and bring democracy. Those announcements are easy and fun, and they tend to have a political payoff. But the political payoff decays over time.

And in the case of the Reflecting Pool, or Iran, I think the decay has been faster than Trump is prepared for or expects or sort of has a plan to deal with.

Harris: I’m thinking about the construction projects and I’m also thinking about the things that aren’t as physical in D.C., right? You talked about his legacy, trying to quite literally cement his legacy, build an arch and things of the sort. But how should we be thinking about the ways that he has also changed our political institutions in ways that may be intractable at this point.

Graham: Yeah, I mean, when you talk about his MO, and we’re talking about it with these physical things, it’s not like the MO is significantly different in other places. And so when you see Trump, for example, sidelining Congress, taking control of the independent regulatory agencies—so the sort of alphabet soup, FEC, FCC, NLRB kind of stuff—I think it’s working in much the same way. It’s just not as visible.

But Trump has upended 90 years of precedent about these independent agencies. Maybe people will like the way that they’re operating in the new system, but I don’t think so. And I would look at the FCC as an example, where you have Ted Cruz being one of the most prominent critics of the way Brendan Carr, Trump’s handpicked FCC chairman, is running things. If you don’t like Brendan Carr and his approach, you’re not gonna like the way that looks when the president controls all of those agencies, which is what seems likely.

But putting them back is gonna be really hard to do. And there’s not a lot of thought about how to do that, and I think the repair is going to take a long time. I don’t know how long it will take to fix the Reflecting Pool. It sounds like, from contractors, we’re talking about, you know, well past July 4.

I don’t know how long it will take to fix the Kennedy Center, which is a sort of less-mechanical fix, but it’s kind—they’ve taken it over; they’ve broken it; now the audiences have been driven away; the artists have been driven away. A judge says they have to remain open, but it’s not clear what they’ll actually do if they remain open, like what the shows are going to be. And so I think there’s a lot of these issues that—a lot of this MO creates issues that are deeper, harder to see, and harder and longer to fix than, you know, an eyesore on the Mall.

Harris: So every administration spins things, but this administration seems to try to spend things that we can see are untrue with our own eyes. Things from winning the war with Iran—“winning” the war with Iran—to the green water in the Reflecting Pool. So are Americans, Republicans in particular, and congressional Republicans if I’m being really specific, turning a corner and starting to call Trump on these instances?

Graham: First I’d say your point about spin is interesting. I think that’s useful and it made me think, like, one of the differences with other administrations—every administration spins, but Trump seems to treat it as the spin is the endpoint rather than a way to sell something. There often isn’t anything under it. It’s all on the surface.

Is Congress turning a corner? It’s so hard to know. It kind of goes in fits and starts. It does seem like having somebody like Bill Cassidy, who got into a shouting match with Trump behind closed doors on Wednesday, apparently; or Tom Tillis, who is spitting great quote left and right to reporters on the Hill; or even John Cornyn, nobody’s idea of a rogue actor. You see people pushing back on these things. I want to see how far that goes.

Trump is making another push for the SAVE America Act. It doesn’t seem like that’s going to work.

Harris: Can you actually just remind people what the SAVE America Act is?

Graham: Yeah. This is the big bill that Trump and a few Republican allies have been pushing. And it would do a bunch of things to change election administration. But the biggest and most famous one is it would require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.

But what we’ve seen in the past is that when Trump tries enough times, eventually the Senate gives in. It would be remarkable for senators this time to hold the line. And it seems possible, but I wouldn’t rely on it given the history.

Harris: Yeah, actually can you talk a little bit about that history of, like, places where Republicans have pushed back and then it’s sustaining that pushback, sustaining that diligence that sort of decides whether or not the president is able to do the things that he would like to do.

Graham: Yeah, I mean you can go back to the primary in 2016 where nobody in the party wanted Trump to be the nominee, and then they acquiesced, and then they seemed like they were gonna push him out after the Access Hollywood tape, and then they came back. And that pattern has just gone back and forth. I mean, you see it to some extent on the Epstein files, where a couple of Republicans broke ranks, but not many. You see it on some of these votes on the Iran war. There’s just a, you know—I think what happens is these members of Congress see something happen and they realize that it is bad. They are personally offended by it or they personally think it’s bad. But then, over time, Trump is able to kind of marshal his media machine and his megaphone, and they get a little bit nervous and they back off.

There are signs that that is splintering. When you see somebody like Tucker Carlson breaking with the president so fiercely, and I don’t think Carson deserves any credit, but I think it’s notable to see that. Maybe Trump has a little bit less power. And also maybe with the midterms coming, Republicans are thinking, Well, I don’t want the president yelling at me. But on the other hand, I’ve already gotten through my primary, and what I really don’t want to do is lose my seat. This guy’s unpopular, doing unpopular things. Maybe this is the time to break from him, at least for a little bit.

Harris: So we’re coming up on the 250th anniversary; we’re coming up on July fFourth. What are you going to be watching for as we move through this week of 250 celebrations, events, leading up to the Fourth of July?

Graham: It feels like—to choose a kind of World Cup metaphor—Trump is in a real own-goal space right now. There’s a housing bill that Republicans think will be useful for Republicans in the midterms. He announces he’s not going to sign it. He tries to jawbone them again on the SAVE America Act.

And I think some of this is: He’s really angry that they voted on the Iran war to limit his powers. I think some of this is: Trump realizes that Congress is very unpopular and he’s sort of trying to push back against them as a way of bolstering his own popularity.

But I think a lot of it is just, he’s kind of—he’s in a mood. And he keeps doing things that seem to me to be self-defeating. And so I want to see where that goes, whether he continues that or if they’re kind of compartmentalized.

In his rally on Wednesday night, he didn’t really talk about those things. That’s maybe unusual message-discipline from him, but I wouldn’t say that there’s a plan, because there’s often not a plan, but I’m curious to see how he kind of gets out of this.

Harris: Yeah. You know, it’s actually interesting too that it’s—as we’re moving towards this national anniversary, we’re thinking so much about this one man, right? As opposed to the ideals that are underpinning it, which seems to also be a sort of feature of the Trump era.

Graham: Yeah, he loves that. He must be very pleased about that. (Laughs.)

Harris: David, thank you so much for joining me.

Graham: My pleasure.

Harris: That’s all for today’s episode. If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday.

You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts.

And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

2026-06-29 19:31:00

More than a decade ago, the economist Erik Brynjolfsson made a prediction: AI would change everything.

Humans began using tools millions of years ago. They cultivated grain and domesticated animals, and then developed written languages, iron tools, the printing press, gunpowder. Progress was slow and local until the mid-1700s, when modern society roared into being alongside machines and engines. Invention built on invention. Then, in recent decades, the pace of human progress slowed again. Productivity growth, the academic measure of how much better people are getting at generating outputs from inputs, collapsed.

“We are at a technological plateau,” in the midst of a “great stagnation,” the public intellectual Tyler Cowen argued in 2010. “Apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953.” Shortly after, the economist Robert Gordon of Northwestern University released a best seller arguing that our era of unprecedented growth and life-changing innovation had come to an end.

Cowen and Gordon had the numbers on their side, but Brynjolfsson thought they were wrong. Along with the economist Andrew McAfee, he published two books arguing that the digital revolution was just getting started. AI was already besting human beings at cognitive tasks. Soon, it would make self-driving cars and hyper-smart computers look like nothing more than “warm-up acts,” the pair wrote in The Second Machine Age. Productivity growth would pick up, Brynjolfsson believed. Living standards would improve. Another new society would roar into being.

Last month, I visited Brynjolfsson at Stanford, where he teaches, with a few questions in mind: How had he known what AI would be capable of years before the release of ChatGPT and Claude Code? And what did he think it would do now? Would society trend toward debilitating mass unemployment or the joyful end of work?

I was not the only person seeking answers from the seer. Brynjolfsson is teaching overflow classes about AI and technological progress, as well as running a humming lab tracking AI’s effect on workers, firms, and human welfare. Academics are relying on his data. Silicon Valley luminaries such as Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind are eating at his table. Senators and governors are calling him up.

Brynjolfsson—who is towering and gregarious, what I imagine the Brawny-paper-towel guy would be like if he’d become an academic rather than a lumberjack—is gratified that the rest of the world is finally “seeing what I was seeing,” he told me. AI is spurring advances in medicine, science, media, transportation, and energy. In time, it will do to white-collar work what machines did to blue-collar work: make people more productive, and push millions of them into new roles. He doubts that humans will fail to find new things to do. Yet he worries that algorithms could further cleave the 0.001 percent from everyone else, and that those elites could consolidate political and social power, along with precious capital. He added—joking, I pray—that a powerful AI could “do whatever it wanted, I mean, including get rid of us all.”

Could, he emphasized, not would. “We’re going to be scrambling with chaos, and I don’t know how we will handle it,” Brynjolfsson said, before tossing on a leather jacket and loping off to give his students a pop quiz.

Brynjolfsson has always been optimistic about technological change. His father was a sheepherder on Iceland’s northern coast who moved to Denmark, studied with Niels Bohr, immigrated to the United States, and worked on the Apollo missions. “It is a pretty amazing life to go from no electricity to putting people on the moon,” Brynjolffson said. He became obsessed with AI when he was a kid reading Isaac Asimov instead of going to sleep, thinking, “This is going to be big.”

As an academic, he came to understand why. Technological advances are different from those in many other industries. They are combinatorial, digital, and exponential. An improvement in machine learning boosts the effects of an improvement in chip speeds. (Thus, it is combinatorial.) An improvement in machine learning spreads quickly at low or even zero cost. (Because it is digital.) An improvement in machine learning sets up additional improvements in machine learning, instead of making marginal improvements harder to eke out. (In other words, it is exponential.)

Human beings began making thinking machines in the 1950s. Progress continued, if slowly and imperceptibly, from that point forward. Brynjolfsson was never sure when progress would become fast and perceptible, he told me in his Stanford office, which is dominated by a humanoid robot, now defunct. But he was “pretty confident” that it would. With exponential advances, “barely anything changes, and then at some point the function crosses this point of salience. Technically, the percentage growth rate is the same the entire time. But it’s off a small base, then once the base is big enough … ”

Brynjolfsson got his Ph.D. at MIT and spent 30 years at the institution, studying how humans put the technologies they invent to use and the effects on output, employment, and efficiency. The process is often messy and slow, he found. Just out of graduate school, he coined the term productivity paradox to describe why the IT revolution took decades to show up in national statistics. (Computers raised productivity in the 1990s, a big blip on a middling trend.) A 50-pound desktop arrived in Dave from accounting’s cubicle in 1982. Dave stopped doing calculations by hand and quit hunt-and-peck typing in 1987. He helped implement a digital ordering system in 1989. His firm’s profitability started to pick up only in 1994.

Sometimes, life-changing technological advances do not affect marquee economic statistics at all. Smartphones, social networks, GPS, tap to pay, ride-sharing apps and gig-work platforms, costless global videoconferencing—they have yet to charge American productivity or boost GDP growth. They likely never will, Brynjolfsson thinks. Digital services tend to be low-cost or zero-cost. Payroll reports and GDP data never capture these services’ true value or give a sense of how much they have changed modern life.

Brynjolfsson has kept track of AI throughout his career. The first course he ever taught, at Harvard’s Extension School in 1985, was about “expert systems”—hand-coded, if-then decision-making proto-AIs. He watched as algorithms revolutionized search, as self-driving cars took the wheel, as software became capable of image recognition. In 2012, he decided to “evangelize” his belief that technology had hit an inflection point, in response to Cowen and Gordon and many other big-name academics.

He and McAfee wrote Race Against the Machine, arguing that the digital revolution was accelerating and that technological unemployment could soon afflict white-collar, middle-skill workers. In 2014, they beefed up the argument in The Second Machine Age. Thinking machines would generate enormous bounty, they argued. Human minds would have to ensure that that bounty got distributed in socially beneficial ways.

When Brynjolfsson arrived at Stanford, in 2020, his ideas still seemed outlandish. Productivity remained close to scratch. The start-up economy was in a recession. Meta, Google, and Apple hadn’t put out an exciting new innovation in eons. Their core products were enshittifying, when they weren’t destroying attention spans and crushing democracy. “Everybody was talking about going to Austin or Miami,” Brynjolfsson said. “I said: Guys, be honest with me. Did I miss it?”

Yet that same year, Brynjolfsson got access to GPT-3, a progenitor of ChatGPT. He fed it one of his papers, asked it for comments, and was “blown away” by the response. He prompted the chatbot to do it again, but this time channeling Taylor Swift. “What you gonna do when the knowledge factory has no floor?” it wrote. “How you gonna run when the knowledge factory is in the cloud?” He “thankfully” did not try to sing the lyrics, but he kept staring at them, thinking, “Holy shit.” Soon after, OpenAI and Anthropic released products to businesses and consumers. Financiers started to push hundreds of billions of dollars into algorithms and data centers.

When I asked Brynjolfsson’s colleagues and collaborators to describe his strengths, I expected them to talk about his skill at coding or data collection. Instead, they invariably brought up his people skills. A former student marveled that they had “never—literally never—seen Erik be mean to anyone.” Daniel Rock of the University of Pennsylvania remembered watching him bound past a bunch of eminences at a conference to beeline to a table of students talking about AI. “Erik is exceptionally warm,” Nela Richardson, the chief economist at ADP, the payroll processor, told me—unprompted, as soon as we started a call. She described meeting “an economist who gives you eye contact” as a “special” thing.

His conviviality powers his work. At Stanford, he set up his lab in the computer-science building instead of the economics building, making him a bridge between the number crunchers arguing that AI was a “fad” and the code writers arguing that “the world was going to end,” Houda Nait El Barj, a former student who now works at OpenAI, told me. He hosts and convenes, avidly and constantly—billionaires, Nobel laureates, garage-dwelling start-up types, obscure researchers, students too young to rent a car. And he runs his classes like business-school classes, with industry figures giving frequent lectures. “Although some academic economists are a bit snooty about it, it’s a real strength,” the economist Diane Coyle of the University of Cambridge told me; it gives him and his students insight into what AI can actually do, how businesses are actually using it, and how it is changing the tasks that workers perform.

His lab is dedicated to studying those changes analytically: figuring out how quickly firms are adopting AI, and whether the technology is acting as a complement to human workers (making them better at their jobs, boosting productivity) or as a substitute for them (rendering them obsolete, suppressing employment) or all of the above, as seems to be the case right now. A recent paper Brynjolfsson co-authored with Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond found that generative AI is boosting customer-service workers’ output by as much as 30 percent. Another study found it is increasing the employment of some workers and decreasing the employment of others.

Measuring the impact of technological change is always “very difficult,” Bharat Chandar, one of the researchers in Brynjolfsson’s lab, told me. “We don’t have an experiment where we can compare one world versus the other.” That leaves academics to pore over surveys that are too slow and too broad to be useful, or to devise new ones. In 2021, Brynjolfsson and a few other academics collaborated with the Census Bureau to collect data from thousands of industrial firms. AI had experienced a productivity paradox, they found, but that paradox had resolved at warp speed. Firms using AI robots were less efficient and profitable at first, and more efficient and profitable soon after. Stanford also teamed up with ADP to produce measures of how AI is affecting employment, wages, hiring, and occupational tasks. The resulting “canaries dashboard” indicates that workers in their early 20s are, indeed, canaries in the coal mine. AI has put them into a hiring recession.

To many AI executives, and to many ordinary people, Brynjolfsson’s predictions seem modest. More than half of adults are worried that AI will put someone in their household out of work. While in the Bay Area, I heard smart people argue that productivity growth would quintuple to 10 percent; we would descend into neo-feudalism; we would cure cancer; we would become even more ensorcelled by our smartphones and even less happy; the GDP report would become meaningless. The forecast I found most moving, a tentative one, came from a Stanford undergraduate. They worried that knowledge jobs might not be available when they graduate. I wanted to give them a bear hug.

But plenty of academics believe that Brynjolfsson is still overestimating AI’s impact. As his own work shows, people take time to learn how to use new tools. Companies take time to rejigger their workflows and update their systems. Right now, firms are finding that AI “really speeds up or increases” the output of some workers, Coyle, of Cambridge, said—“but that doesn’t translate to organizational gains. It may be that one department is way ahead, but if the other departments are not catching up, the whole process won’t improve.”

Other people emphasize the rules and regulations slowing down diffusion and stymieing change. The FDA has to approve each iteration of the AI software used to analyze medical images, for instance. Radiologists still have to read each scan and collaborate with their colleagues to diagnose and treat patients. Plus, AI isn’t cheap; companies have to spend millions to get benefits, diverting capital from other resources.    

Gordon, of Northwestern, is among the most prominent economists arguing that AI won’t improve the underlying economy much at all, whatever his longtime buddy at Stanford says. In 2020, the two made a friendly public bet. If the annual labor-productivity rate in the coming decade averaged out to less than 1.8 percent, Gordon would win. If it came in higher, Brynjolfsson would. (The wager is worth $400, and the loser will give the money to charity.)

So far, Brynjolfsson is winning by a few tenths of a percentage point. But he’s not really winning, Gordon told me, because AI isn’t really boosting productivity. To explain why, he divided American workers into three groups: industrial workers (stevedores, roofers); people who can work from home, whether they do or not (accountants, writers); and people who have to go to work in person (baristas, nurses). “By far, the biggest adoption of AI has been in the working-from-home category,” he said, yet all of the “productivity improvement in the last eight years is outside that category.” Baristas and roofers have gotten more efficient, and accountants have gotten less efficient—thanks a lot, ChatGPT.  

If AI does make white-collar workers more efficient, the country’s productivity rate will still not go up, he said. A Google engineer produces something like $215 of labor value an hour, a waiter something like $27 an hour. If high-productivity firms shed workers and low-productivity firms gain them, he said, it would “completely offset the benefit.” The United States is also facing gale-force productivity headwinds, such as the aging of the population and the relentlessly rising cost of health care, education, and housing. What’s AI going to do about that?

Gordon is impressed by ChatGPT, which he uses to look up information about the Great Famine and the panzer and the like. (It’s not going to tell him anything about economics.) Still, he fears AI’s potential to undercut wages, increase unemployment, and immiserate young people, particularly the ones who pay a fortune for a useless college degree. And he delights, at least a little, in the tech optimists learning how unpopular their optimism is.

When we spoke earlier this month, college students were booing commencement speakers who talked up AI. His “beloved colleague”—Joel Mokyr, who just won a Nobel Prize for his work on “sustained growth through technological progress”—was due to give a convocation address at Northwestern soon after. Gordon wasn’t invited to the address, he said, but he had commissioned a research assistant to text him and let him know if Mokyr got heckled. In turn, he would let me know, he said, beaming as if he had won the lottery and not some piddling $400 bet.

Mokyr groaned when I called him to ask about the speech, mock annoyed at his colleague’s caper and unfazed by the prospect of being booed. Asked for his thoughts on our AI future, he cited the Talmud: “Ever since our Second Temple was destroyed, the art of prophecy was given to the fools.”

At the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, the productivity of human workers took perhaps a millennium to double. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, it took a decade. As of five years ago, it would have taken a century. If Brynjolfsson is right about AI, it might take only a generation.

He believes in AI because he trusts in history (it would be “weird” if this kind of technology didn’t lead to exponential growth) and because he is witnessing the revolution himself. “A lot of economists look at data sets and numbers and try to figure out what’s going on,” he said. Too few visit companies, talk with managers, and speak with actual human beings.

He gets why students are booing commencement speakers. (Mokyr did not end up being one of them, by the way. He delivered a podium-pounding pro-immigration stem-winder and got a standing ovation.) He sympathizes with people who feel like they’re on a digital roller coaster and can’t get off. Not long ago, a student came to his office hours. She was graduating. She didn’t have a job lined up. Nor did many of her friends. “She was worried that her generation was doomed,” Brynjolfsson told me. “That’s heavy.” Yet human beings find it easier to worry about what may be lost than to imagine what could be created, he said. We don’t want AI to do everything humans can do. We want AI to change what humans can do. Beyond the corpus of current human achievement, he said, exists “this much bigger space, bigger than you know, as big as you can imagine, of things that have never been done before.”

Brynjolfsson wants people to see that, while also understanding the social risks AI poses. Right now, “human skills are inherently decentralized,” he said. “No matter how smart Bill Gates is, he can’t make all the decisions in Microsoft.” But if AI is performing thinking tasks and executing on them, this limitation disappears. AI could create significant unemployment if humans do not adapt fast enough; it could create malign new forms of inequality too. Society needs to act now, or “a lot of people could be made worse off.”

The politics that can help get us there are beyond his remit, he said; policy isn’t his area of expertise. So he is doing what he always does. He is building the body of human knowledge. And he is acting as a social network. He is convening. He is talking. He is getting people together to figure it out.

2026-06-29 19:00:00

Something about art disgusted Marcel Duchamp. Expression, taste, aesthetic intention—anything that gave off a whiff of the precious, he recoiled from. He was modern. He relished the impersonal operations of chance. He loved jokes and sex and the movements of modern machinery. “Painting is finished,” he said to the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși at an air show in Paris in 1912, when he was 25. “Who will do any better than that propeller?”

The next year, Duchamp mounted a bicycle wheel onto an upside-down fork fixed to a wooden stool. He enjoyed the way the spokes rotated around a central axis, like a propeller, and how they reflected shimmering light, like a fireplace. He wouldn’t come up with the term until two years later, but Duchamp had created the first “readymade.” The mischievous, machine-obsessed, maddeningly inconsistent Frenchman was on his way to having an impact on modern creativity comparable to that of Richard Wagner or Charles Baudelaire on an earlier generation of modernists.

Duchamp left behind a legacy that people either love or loathe. He is known as the father of conceptual art, but his so-called ideas were mostly idle notions, provocations, speculations. Opinion divides on whether he snuffed out or emancipated art. But fret as we might about the fate of art after Duchamp, this strange, original man—so nonchalant! so fanatical!—was engaged in something more private, urgent, and amorous (more on that later) than merely “making art.”

A visit to the massive Duchamp exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art—his first North American retrospective in more than 50 years—can feel less like taking in a traditional exhibition than like wandering through an archive. (It was organized by MoMA’s curators Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo, and Matthew Affron of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) The items on display, many of them replicas sanctioned by the artist, have none of the aloof self-sufficiency, the “aura,” we expect from great art. Each object is instead more like a footnote or an index entry for something that once existed, was once thought, once got a laugh. The farther you advance, the more the show starts to feel forensic, like a crime scene. Near the end, your suspicions are confirmed: On display is a poster that Duchamp designed for his first-ever retrospective, at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963. It features a mock WANTED notice offering a $2,000 reward. The mug shots are of himself.

If you dislike contemporary art, all of the things you hate about it can be traced back to Duchamp. Art that requires no skill or that was made, conversely, with great skill by people other than the “artist” claiming credit for it. Art that is all backstory, that leans so heavily on verbal explanations that it would collapse in a heap without them. Art tailored to generate pretentious academic dissertations. Art as cult fodder, marginalia, obscurantism—Duchamp inaugurated all of this.

Yet his work has a lively, quicksilver quality that continues to feel generative. You can sense his wicked intelligence flickering behind some of the most rebellious, winningly unselfserious impulses in contemporary art. He’s so funny. Call me puerile, but I still laugh at his reproduction of the Mona Lisa, on which he drew a mustache and goatee in pencil. He called the piece L.H.O.O.Q.; the letters, spoken individually in French, sound like Elle a chaud au cul (“She has a hot ass”).

He denied being an influence on anyone, but in truth his artistic progenies are everywhere. Artists who use readymades aren’t the only ones borrowing from Duchamp. Also in his debt are artists who incorporate chance; make assemblages and installations; play with alter egos and cross-dressing; present their own lives as works of art; embrace copies, replicas, factory-style production; mock the art market by presenting as “art” things that are clearly absurd or worthless (Yves Klein selling empty space, Piero Manzoni selling cans of his own excrement, Maurizio Cattelan selling a banana taped to a wall); make work involving machines, eroticism, molds of body parts, archives, graffiti, optical illusions, puns. The list of those who haven’t been influenced by Duchamp would likely be shorter.

Duchamp himself, one of seven children, grew up in an affluent household just outside Rouen, where “so much artistry” ran in his family, he later said, that it was like being immersed in an “aesthetic bath.” Though his father was a notary, his grandfather had been a successful artist. His mother, too, was an amateur artist in her youth, and his older brothers, Gaston and Raymond, gave up law and medicine, respectively, and became artists in Paris. Suzanne, one of his younger sisters, also became an artist.

From the beginning, Duchamp’s sense of his calling seemed to have had more to do with familial love than any kind of inner aesthetic conviction. “When I was 16, I thought for about six months that I’d like to be a notary like my father,” he later explained, “but that was just because I loved my father. I adored my brothers.” In 1904, he moved to Paris to join them.

The opening galleries at MoMA lead us briskly from the artist’s early satirical cartoons—their sly captions anticipating his later, punning titles—through a smattering of richly colored Cézanne- and Matisse-influenced paintings to his semi-abstract, Cubist works, all in shades of brown. Duchamp played chess starting in childhood. In the 1910s, he began to funnel a growing interest in systems of logic and machines (starting with coffee mills and chocolate grinders) into, strangely enough, a lifelong preoccupation with eroticism.

I think of Duchamp’s oeuvre, touched by the same World War I nihilism that produced Dada, as an attempt to generate inventive energy from the trauma of total war, exile, and modern conformity. But no one who delves into Duchamp can shake the feeling that erotic fixations and frustrated romantic love are at the core of his imaginative universe. How else to explain his focus on masturbation? He used his own semen in at least one artwork, used chocolate grinders as a metaphor for masturbation (“The bachelor grinds his chocolate himself”), and explained his enduring obsession with circles and rotation as “a kind of onanism.”

Duchamp’s life was marked by two serious cases of unrequited love. The object of the first was Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, whom Duchamp met when he was about 24. She promptly introduced him to her husband, Francis Picabia, a playboy and a pioneer of abstract art. Buffet-Picabia had studied avant-garde music in Paris and Berlin, and she now pushed Picabia and Duchamp into new approaches to visual art. Recognizing Duchamp’s paradoxical nature, she saw an anxious perfectionist, “possessed by a need for absolute logic,” and yet also a rebel who embraced randomness. The trio enjoyed in-jokes, road trips in fast cars (Picabia was obsessed with automobiles), and artistic experiments. In Gabriële, a biographical novel about Buffet-Picabia, their great-grandmother, Ann and Claire Berest describe Picabia and Duchamp as sharing “the same taste for shattered icons, for the art of irony and the irony of art, for jokes no matter the circumstance, and the idea that God is dead.”

Duchamp was taken aback when his painting of a nude woman descending a staircase, her movements captured in the manner of a superimposed sequence of stop-motion photographs, was presented at the 1913 Armory Show in New York and made him notorious. Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) was lampooned in the press (an “explosion in a shingle mill” was how one critic described it). But audiences had seen nothing like it, and, in a culture trying to make sense of onrushing modernity, it quickly became the most famous painting in America. Its reception encouraged Duchamp to travel to the United States in the summer of 1915. War was raging in Europe, and he stayed for three years. A woman friend said he was “lionized by tout New York and courted by most of the female population.”

Many experts, though, believe he was allegorizing his unfulfilled longing for his best friend’s wife in the masterpiece he embarked on during those years, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, which he continued to labor over for eight more and left poignantly unfinished. The Large Glass, as it’s more commonly called, consists of two glass panels set vertically in a metal frame. The glass is inscribed—in lead wire, lead foil, oil, varnish, and dust—with diagrammatic imagery evoking machinery. The machines represent a bride (above) and nine bachelors (below). When the glass cracked during transportation, Duchamp put the pieces back together, relishing the random-looking lines of breakage (it is now permanently on display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art). He planned to have the work accompanied by a book-length guide to the abstruse and self-involved thinking that went into it, but ended up settling for an unbound pile of notes called The Green Box.

While he worked on The Large Glass, he produced a series of readymades with witty titles. The most famous appeared in 1917, when Duchamp turned a porcelain urinal on its back and signed it “R. Mutt.” Fountain, as he called the piece, is a provocation, a prank. But it’s also an homage to the wonders of modern plumbing. Two years earlier, three such urinals had been displayed at the Newark Museum, whose founding director, John Cotton Dana, pronounced that “the genius and skill which have gone into the adornment and perfecting of familiar household objects should receive the same recognition as do now the genius and skill of painting in oils.”

Amused by this way of thinking, Duchamp began to ridicule those who kept at painting, rebuking them for being obsessed with the smell of paint and deriding their efforts as “retinal art” (art that engages only the eye). He wanted to bring art back to what it had been during the Renaissance, when Leonardo da Vinci understood it as a cosa mentale—an intellectual matter. But Duchamp’s idea of “intellectual” was always gravitating toward the erotic: “I want to grasp things with the mind,” he said, “the way the penis is grasped by the vagina.”

In 1920, Duchamp decided to create a female alter ego, Rose Sélavy. Being “a lone individual with a masculine name,” he explained 40 years later, didn’t suffice, and he wanted “to make another personality from myself.” He changed the spelling to Rrose Sélavy, to make it sound more like Eros, c’est la vie. “Rose” specialized in facetious entrepreneurial gambits (supported by wealthy patrons, Duchamp enjoyed mocking the profit motive), optical illusions, and sexual innuendo.

And then, three years later, having successfully overturned everyone’s idea of what art might be (a snow shovel! an ampoule of air! a portrait of the artist in drag!), Duchamp returned to Paris and, for more than a decade, dedicated himself to chess. He played in high-level tournaments, represented France at four Chess Olympiads, and even co-wrote a book on chess theory. But he continued to dabble in graphic design and tended to his legacy by creating elaborate portable boxes with mirrors and secret compartments, all filled with fastidiously executed small-scale reproductions of his bizarre but brilliant work. He settled in Manhattan during World War II but died in France in 1968.

A year later, the world learned that Duchamp had worked in secret for more than 20 years on a diorama-like work called Étant donnés (which will be on view when the show travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it resides). It consists of an old wooden door at the end of a corridor, with two peepholes, through which the viewer spies a brick wall with a large opening. Beyond this can be seen the cropped torso, along with an arm and legs, of a naked woman splayed corpse-like on branches and leaves, her shaved genitalia exposed, her left arm holding up a shining gas lamp.

For the woman’s body, Duchamp assembled casts of the limbs of his second wife, “Teeny” Sattler—whom he married in 1954 after she left her art-dealer husband, Pierre Matisse (son of Henri)—as well as of two of his lovers: Mary Reynolds, an avant-garde bookbinder, with whom he carried on an affair starting in the 1920s, and the surrealist sculptor Maria Martins, the second great thwarted love of Duchamp’s life, after Buffet-Picabia. They had an intense affair in New York in the ’40s and early ’50s, and Duchamp was devastated when her husband, a Brazilian diplomat, was transferred to Paris and Martins chose to go with him. Étant donnés, which Jasper Johns called “the strangest work of art in any museum,” is a transgressive, deeply disturbing piece that continues to flummox its would-be interpreters. If it functions as a romantic tribute, and perhaps an art-historical one (it most obviously calls to mind Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World ), it’s also a creepy, confusing, isolating experience that turns every viewer into a morbid voyeur of a bewildering sex crime.

“Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things,” Robert Browning wrote in his dramatic monologue “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” “The honest thief, the tender murderer, / the superstitious atheist.” Had Browning encountered Duchamp, he might have added, “The shy attention-seeker, the nonchalant fanatic, the heartsick Casanova.”

Duchamp was interested in the dangerous edge of art—that zone of uncertainty where the fiction of the “aesthetic” drops away and the purpose of art grows blurry. In “The Creative Act,” a brief speech he delivered in Houston in 1957, he said that “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone” but also by the spectator, whose interpretations bring the work to life. By dissolving the barrier between art and life and emphasizing the role of the viewer, Duchamp unraveled art’s claim to special status. Suddenly, anything could be art and anyone could make it. Indeed, you were making it just by looking at it.

Stripping away the aura of preciousness around art proved enormously liberating. But it also set up a quandary: If art is undifferentiated from life—if it is an arbitrary designation—why even maintain it as a separate category? If a bicycle wheel or a snow shovel can be art, what is the point of exhibiting these objects in galleries? Why not contemplate them (if that’s what you wish to do) in the bicycle-repair shop or the basement? Why have “art” at all?

Duchamp’s habitual skepticism had the salutary effect of returning us to first principles. For him, part of being modern—living in the aftermath of Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, and the trenches of World War I—meant dispensing with inherited illusions. “All this twaddle, existence of God, atheism, determinism, free will, societies, death, etc. are the pieces of a game of chess called language,” he once wrote in a letter. “Art,” by his reckoning, was merely another word, a piece in the game.

Busy scorching communal “fictions,” Duchamp became ever more absorbed by private concerns that could often be impenetrable. If he was forever puzzling over what art is and isn’t, he was also endlessly puzzling over the relationship between sex and love. Averse to sentimentality, he didn’t really believe in romantic love. But being intellectually skeptical of something is not the same as banishing it from one’s existence. If Duchamp remained, in spite of everything, an artist, he also remained a man prone to falling in love. “Contradiction,” he quipped near the end of his life, “is the whole point.”

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The Mischievous, Maddening Marcel Duchamp.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.