2026-03-31 06:27:37
Thore Graepel may have been the first human to be vanquished by a superintelligence. In 2015, on his first day as a researcher at Google DeepMind, he was challenged to play against the earliest iteration of AlphaGo—a computer program developed by DeepMind that would prove so effective at the ancient-Chinese game of weiqi (or Go, as it is commonly known in the West) that it changed how humans play it, and then upended the field of AI itself.
When Graepel faced it, AlphaGo was just a “baby” project, as he put it to me, and he was an accomplished amateur player. But it still took him down. Then, the following year, AlphaGo—now fully developed—plowed through a number of human champions, ultimately crushing Lee Sedol, widely considered the best player in the world, with a match score of 4–1. This month marked the tenth anniversary of that victory.
For decades, developing a program that plays Go at an elite level was an infamous problem in computer science. Many considered it unsolvable—far harder than developing a similar program for chess, in which the supercomputer DeepBlue beat the world champion in 1997. In Go, two players take turns positioning stones on a 19-by-19 grid, and their movements are relatively unrestricted. In chess, which has a far smaller grid, a rook can move only horizontally and a bishop only diagonally, but Go pieces can be placed on any open space. The number of possible Go positions is so high that it cannot be easily expressed in words; it is higher than the number of atoms in the observable universe, and orders of magnitude higher than the number of possible chess games. Today, the technical frameworks and approaches that allowed an algorithm to excel at this board game have translated fairly directly into bots that can write advanced code, help tackle open problems in mathematics, and replicate scientific discoveries from scratch.
Generative AI is living in AlphaGo’s shadow. Beyond the actual models, “conceptual things emerged from the whole AlphaGo experience which essentially entered the AI vocabulary,” Pushmeet Kohli, the vice president of science and strategic initiatives at Google DeepMind, told me. In many ways, Go and chess provide ideal templates for understanding how the AI boom has unfolded—and a guide for what it may yet wreak.
DeepMind’s innovation was to essentially pair two algorithms: one AI model to propose moves and a second model to judge whether a move is good or not, allowing the system to devote computational resources to planning sequences of moves most likely to result in victory. AlphaGo then played itself thousands of times, improving from every mistake through a training process known as reinforcement learning. Today’s frontier AI labs face an analogous problem: Large language models such as ChatGPT could spit out lucid sentences and paragraphs, but when they faced challenging tasks in computer science, physics, and other areas that would require a human to really think, chatbots had been stuck stumbling in the dark. That began to change in late 2024 with the advent of so-called reasoning models, an approach that now underlies all of the top bots from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. And the idea behind these reasoning models “is surprisingly similar to AlphaGo,” as Noam Brown, a researcher at OpenAI, recently put it.
[Read: A machine crushed us at Pokémon]
The intuition behind chatbot reasoning is to have AI models work out a solution step-by-step, using a scratch pad of sorts, and then evaluate steps along the way to change course or start over as needed—very much like the two-step approach used by AlphaGo. The training method for these reasoning chatbots is the same as well: reinforcement learning. An algorithm can play lots of games of Go or attempt to solve lots of difficult math problems, then learn from its mistakes when it loses or errs. Today’s best AI models “can be traced back to some degree to the AlphaGo work,” Graepel said.
Perhaps the most crucial insight shared between AlphaGo and the chatbot-reasoning breakthrough is a twist on the AI industry’s central dogma, the “scaling laws.” Traditionally, AI companies improved their large language models by training them on more data and with more computing power. In the case of AlphaGo and reasoning models, researchers realized that they could scale another dimension: having the program devote more time and computing power to a task, akin to how harder problems typically take humans more time to solve. For bots, this meant planning more and longer sequences of moves or using more words to “reason” through a tough coding task. That wasn’t guaranteed. “It could happen that you give them more time and they spend more time just getting confused,” Kohli said.
After the success of AlphaGo, DeepMind made a successor program called AlphaZero. Whereas AlphaGo was initially shown a number of human Go matches as a baseline, AlphaZero became dominant at a number of games—Go, chess, and so on—purely by playing itself, with zero prior knowledge, and learning from each game. That an AI model essentially taught itself, very rapidly, to surpass the abilities of any human ever at multiple games might suggest that very rapid advances for today’s chatbots are on the horizon. By this logic, models could essentially figure out ways to improve themselves. But the success of AlphaGo and AlphaZero more likely signals obstacles ahead. The most important ingredient in AlphaGo was the simplicity with which one could measure success—win or lose—and thus give the machine feedback to improve.
[Read: The human skill that eludes AI]
With board games, “we were always operating in a specific environment where the rules of the game were known,” Kohli said. “The systems of today are expected to operate in a much more general environment.” Reasoning models have found success mostly in areas that still have a relatively clear rubric for evaluation: whether an AI-written program works as intended, for instance, or whether an AI-written proof holds up. Instilling any notion of a more general intelligence in a machine will be a far more challenging problem than conquering even Go.
DeepMind has been able to design evaluations for more abstract ideas, for instance by orchestrating several AI agents to act as a team of virtual “scientists” that will rank hypotheses about problems in biology. But even that system operates within a relatively constrained domain of biological reasoning and literature. It’s unlikely that any lab will come up with a single way to evaluate “general intelligence” that can be used to train a bot AlphaGo style, let alone one as straightforward as winning or losing a board game.
[Read: AI executives promise cancer cures. Here’s the reality.]
Still, the progress the AlphaGo approach has yielded for AI models in a number of scientific domains is impressive—so much so that, a decade after AI conquered humanity’s hardest board game, the nation is now in a frenzy over whether AI is about to first overhaul the economy and then unsettle the purpose of being human at all.
Once again, chess and Go might offer guides. As a result of improving via self-play, AlphaGo and AlphaZero developed not only superhuman ability but also inhuman style, using tactics and strategies no human had previously considered. These AI strategies did not destroy the human pursuits of chess and Go; they reignited new waves of human creativity and strategy. The most optimistic analogy for today’s more broadly useful AI systems would be that they also, rather than providing a wholesale replacement for humans, will function as a sort of complementary intelligence. Biologists, mathematicians, and computer scientists are already finding ways in which today’s AI models are not simply speeding up their work but qualitatively changing the kinds of questions humans can ask and the discoveries we can make.
Of course, the business proposition of generative AI is quite the opposite: that products such as ChatGPT and Claude Code can automate huge swaths of white-collar work, help students cheat their way through school, and allow humans to live mostly without thinking. Perhaps C-suite executives, like AI researchers, can learn a lesson from Go and chess. Like any sport, chess and Go are worthwhile because of human struggles and storylines, champions made and toppled, the very fact that people are doomed to be imperfect but always striving to become just a bit better. And rather than automating human chess masters or destroying the sport and pastime, chess-playing AI models have helped the business of chess to boom.
Likewise, employees, managers, students, professors—really all of us—are always learning and learning by failing, or at least we should be. That is useful and worth preserving in plain economic terms. Nobody becomes world-class at anything without at some point being rather terrible at it, and allowing novices who might be less capable than a bot to build up skills is the only way you get experts with human judgment and abilities that surpass any AI. But more important than that economic rationale is an existential one: To grow or help another do so is a beautiful thing. Some might call it being human.
2026-03-31 06:07:13
The Trump administration has made a habit of pressing criminal charges against Americans observing and protesting harsh immigration-enforcement tactics, using the power of the executive branch to intimidate and punish those who visibly dissent from the president’s political agenda. In many ways, the prosecution of LaMonica McIver is in line with this general approach. Last May, she was charged with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officials after ICE agents tangled with her outside a Newark, New Jersey, immigration detention center, at one point violently pushing her. But an important factor makes McIver’s case unique: She is a member of Congress.
McIver’s case reflects both President Trump’s aggressive tactics on immigration and the broader dynamics between Trump and Congress: a vindictive executive and a struggling legislative branch yet to find its footing in a legal system tilted in favor of presidential power. Trump has ignored congressional budgetary outlays, attempted to shut entire congressionally mandated agencies, and treated House and Senate hearings with contempt. But the McIver case represents his most sustained attack on an individual lawmaker. Earlier today, McIver filed her first brief before an appeals court, asking the judges to throw out her prosecution as an illegal infringement on the protections afforded to Congress under the speech-or-debate clause of the Constitution.
McIver has rejected the prosecution as “dangerous, baseless, and designed to stop me from doing my job.” She has every reason to understand the charges as an effort to scare Congress out of conducting oversight. But that may not be enough to protect her.
[Quinta Jurecic: The Trump administration’s favorite tool for criminalizing dissent]
The case against McIver turns on a scuffle that took place in the parking lot of Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in McIver’s congressional district. On May 9, 2025, she and two other Democratic representatives from New Jersey, Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez, came to tour the facility. While the three lawmakers were waiting outside the building, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka arrived, and a scrum developed when ICE agents attempted to arrest Baraka for trespassing. Security and body-camera footage from that day shows McIver and the other representatives gathering around Baraka to shield him from the ICE agents. As the agents pull Baraka inside the gate of Delaney Hall, one agent shoves McIver, who then tries to keep moving forward.
Trump’s power over the Justice Department shadowed the incident from the beginning. Body-camera footage shows an ICE agent announcing the plan to arrest the mayor “per the deputy attorney general of the United States,” an unusual and disturbing level of direct involvement for a high-level official. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, under the leadership of Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba, filed charges against Baraka for stepping onto land owned by a private prison—only to dismiss them shortly afterward. Habba then unveiled a new case against McIver under a criminal statute that forbids “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officers. McIver had “slammed her forearm into” and used “her forearms to forcibly strike” ICE agents, the indictment alleged. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump described her as “out of control” and declared, “The days of woke are over.”
McIver promised to fight the charges. “At the end of the day, this is all about political intimidation,” she told a crowd of supporters outside the courthouse after entering a plea of not guilty.
Other members of Congress targeted for prosecution by the Trump administration have managed to get their cases thrown out early on, thanks to irregularities or incompetence on the Justice Department’s part. One investigation, of Senator Adam Schiff, reportedly petered out after prosecutors could not find any evidence of the supposed mortgage fraud that Trump allies had alleged. Another—focused on six lawmakers who released a video encouraging members of the armed services to disobey illegal orders—failed when a grand jury unanimously rejected DOJ’s effort to bring charges. McIver has had less success. District Judge Jamel K. Semper, a Biden appointee, rejected her arguments both that the Trump administration had unfairly targeted her in what is known as a “vindictive or selective” prosecution, and that constitutional protections for lawmakers shield her from the charges. McIver’s brief filed today is her first crack at convincing the appeals court, which will likely hold oral arguments on her case this summer.
The appeals court will probably be most interested in McIver’s reasoning concerning the speech-or-debate clause, which creates a level of legislative immunity to shield members of Congress from legal consequences for their work as lawmakers. In McIver’s argument, because she arrived at Delaney Hall to conduct oversight of ICE, this immunity should extend to her interactions with the agents in the parking-lot scuffle.
The ideal of speech-or-debate immunity derives from high-minded concerns by the Founders over the separation of powers. The “fundamental purpose” of the speech-or-debate clause, the Supreme Court wrote in 1972, is “freeing the legislator from executive and judicial oversight that realistically threatens to control his conduct as a legislator.”
Framed this way, McIver’s case seems like a near-perfect example of what legislative immunity is meant to defend against: political pressure by an executive seeking to dissuade members of Congress from carrying out oversight that the administration dislikes. Stan Brand, who served as general counsel to the House of Representatives from 1976 to 1983, described the litigation to me as part of an American “heritage” of a sort, a continuation of a long-running “battle between an overreaching executive and Congress.” Along these lines, McIver’s lawyers have emphasized that her presence at Delaney Hall was in service of her responsibilities as a member of Congress. The facility is in her district; she sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, which is tasked with oversight of ICE; and the three lawmakers were armed with a statutory provision, passed in 2020, that requires DHS to allow members of Congress access to ICE facilities for inspection. Her tangle with ICE, in this view, was in response to the agents’ obstruction of her protected legislative work.
But this argument is not as firmly grounded in the law as McIver and her allies might hope. In declining to dismiss McIver’s case, Judge Semper ruled that McIver’s conduct should be understood more granularly. From this standpoint, her legislative aims in inspecting Delaney Hall are unrelated to her intervention in Baraka’s arrest. Some of this disagreement derives from different interpretations of the chaotic body-camera footage from May 9: After the ICE agent standing at the gate pushed McIver, did she move back toward the gate in an effort to get onto the facility’s grounds (as McIver argues), or to obstruct the agent from reaching Baraka (as the government argues)?
Beyond the frame-by-frame analysis is a broader issue. McIver’s case is unusual, without much precedent to guide it. The speech-or-debate clause “is kind of obscure,” Brand told me. “It’s not in the forefront the way a lot of constitutional issues are”—in part because the Justice Department has typically held back from prosecuting members of Congress in anything but the most serious and well-substantiated cases.
Brand seemed optimistic about McIver’s chances of succeeding on appeal, and suggested that her legal team could even take the case to the Supreme Court if the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rules against her. But other congressional experts I spoke with were more cautious. Courts have generally read legislative immunity rather narrowly, constraining its scope to the core of the legislative process. “I tend to doubt” that the speech-or-debate clause will protect McIver, Michael Stern, who formerly served as senior counsel to the House, told me.
That said, McIver’s appeal presents risks for the executive branch too. I spoke with John Keller, who resigned last year from his role as the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which historically had to sign off on any DOJ investigation into a member of Congress. But the Justice Department scrapped that consultation requirement only a week before McIver was charged; according to Reuters, DOJ did not bother to seek approval from the Public Integrity Section in McIver’s case. Because there is so little jurisprudence on the speech-or-debate clause, Keller said, this is “a sensitive area where single cases could have outsized impact in terms of precedent.” He noted that an appellate ruling siding with McIver might “dramatically expand” the scope of legislative immunity in a way that could limit DOJ’s ability to prosecute serious corruption cases in the future. For that reason, Keller told me, the Public Integrity Section would, in the past, have wanted to closely scrutinize the facts and circumstances of a case like McIver’s before signing off on whether to prosecute.
Yet the Trump administration has shown itself to be uninterested in thinking that far ahead. The concern is not for the long-term interests of the executive branch, but for whatever instant gratification might be secured by harassing the president’s enemies. That spite and shortsightedness unbalances the constitutional dynamics between the president and Congress. And the speech-or-debate clause, as shaped by courts inclined to grant the benefit of the doubt to the executive, may—ironically, given the clause’s origins—be poorly suited to these extremes.
[David A. Graham: Trump’s newest crackdown on dissent]
This captures a paradox many Democratic members of Congress surely know all too well: Squaring off against a vindictive president, lawmakers are uniquely empowered and protected, but at the same time—because of their prominence—uniquely vulnerable. Congressional ethics restrictions prohibit McIver from accepting pro bono legal help and place limits on her ability to fundraise for her own defense. A recent profile in The New Yorker reported that, as of December, her legal expenses had risen to close to $1 million—money that will have to come out of her reelection campaign. Other Democratic members of Congress, spooked by McIver’s prosecution, have taken out liability insurance.
A loss on the speech-or-debate question would not be the end of McIver’s case. The charges against her are feeble, and a jury in blue New Jersey might be disinclined to convict. Still, even if she is acquitted, the Trump administration has gotten its message across—not through the consequences of a guilty verdict, but by the infliction of pain along the way.
2026-03-31 02:57:02
“I chose and my world was shaken, so what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not.”
— Stephen Sondheim in a lyric presumably inspired by playing trivia
And by the way, did you know that Sondheim wrote exclusively with Blackwing 602 pencils, the flat-tailed, lightweight instrument also favored by John Steinbeck? They were discontinued while Sondheim was still writing, but he had purchased boxes and boxes of them just in case.
Sondheim disliked the way the erasers dried out, but he loved the softness of the lead: “You can spend a lot of time re-sharpening them, which is a lot easier and more fun than writing.” You and me both, Steve.
See you tomorrow!
Find previous questions here, and to get Atlantic Trivia in your inbox every day, sign up for The Atlantic Daily. If you think up a question yourself, send it my way via [email protected].
2026-03-31 02:34:04
The Atlantic is announcing the hires of four new staff writers: Kelsey Ables, Janay Kingsberry, Will Oremus, and Matt Viser. All are joining from The Washington Post.
Kelsey and Janay will both focus on the major cultural institutions facing pressure from the Trump administration. Will has produced authoritative work about technology and the fracturing of reality, and will continue this line of coverage. Matt has covered the White House and national politics since 2018 and most recently served as the Post’s White House bureau chief.
Below are the announcements about our new staff:
Kelsey Ables has recently been focused on the various pressures facing major cultural institutions in the Trump era—but she has a wide variety of interests, including visual art, architecture, and design. She has been a nimble and erudite reporter on a challenging beat, covering the convulsions at the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution. She has also written smartly and entertainingly on any number of other subjects, including D.C.’s “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” and the unsettling ubiquity of Kusama pumpkins. Kelsey got her start covering museums and architecture at the Post, and served in the newspaper’s Seoul hub for a stint, writing overnight on a wide array of newsy subjects, including U.S. politics and the papal conclave.
Janay Kingsberry has dominated the culture beat nationally for the Post. She has been ambitious and smart on the rolling Kennedy Center crisis, as well as the planned changes to Washington’s monumental landscape. And she scooped that the Smithsonian had removed mention of President Trump from an impeachment exhibit. Before taking on the arts beat, she was a sharp and versatile reporter for the Post’s Style section, where she wrote memorably about Jennifer Hudson’s “spirit tunnels,” grief, social media, and much more. She previously worked at Politico and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Will Oremus also comes to us from The Washington Post, where he has produced authoritative work about technology and the fracturing of reality. He has broken news about the AI industry’s quest to scan millions of the world’s books, profiled a policeman who spent a month in jail for posting a Charlie Kirk meme, and written about the proliferation of conspiracy theories after a devastating hurricane in North Carolina. Before joining the Post, Will worked at OneZero and Slate.
Matt Viser is also joining us from The Washington Post, where he’s spent nearly eight years producing distinctive and authoritative coverage of national politics, most recently as the paper’s White House bureau chief. Matt is a highly accomplished chronicler of the presidency, with the prizes to prove it: He’s won both the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Award for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage. During the Biden and Trump administrations, Matt has delved into the family dynamics and personal proclivities that shape history-making decisions. When not covering the biggest stories of our time, Matt delights in finding odd and quirky tales—the museum in rural Kansas that’s dedicated to the losers of each presidential election, for instance, and Michael Dukakis’s completely normal Thanksgiving habit of collecting old turkey bones from his neighbors. Matt previously spent 16 years at The Boston Globe, where his reporting on city and state governments often took him past The Atlantic’s historic home, the Old Corner Bookstore.
Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | [email protected]
2026-03-31 02:03:25
Through gestures big and small, Bruce Friedrich conforms to the archetype of a lifelong anti-meat crusader. He bikes almost everywhere. He was once arrested for streaking in front of Buckingham Palace with the web address goveg.com painted across his body. He runs a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, the Good Food Institute, that champions alternative proteins and doles out grants to accelerate their development. And he is a dutiful vegan whom I have witnessed scraping the cheese from the patty of an Impossible Whopper.
Yet he is also a savvy observer of popular trends, as you can tell from the opening pages of his new book, Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food—And Our Future. From the start, Friedrich recognizes that the human diet is stubbornly carnivorous, perhaps even trending in what he considers to be the wrong direction. But he has traded in provocation for the soft sell. “I’m not here to tell anyone what to eat,” he writes. “This book isn’t about policing your plate.”
Friedrich’s thesis appears in a chapter titled “Humanity’s Favorite Food”: To address society’s “insatiable craving for animal meat,” we merely have to produce it differently. This includes plant-based options such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods as well as the cultivated cuisine being generated by companies such as Upside Foods—meat grown from animal cells in bioreactors resembling the fermentation tanks at your local craft brewery. (Recall Winston Churchill’s wish that humans would “escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”)
Friedrich is a rationalist to the core. Meat “is absolutely not a diet change book,” he told me over email, “and to the degree it has a stance on meat, that’s pro-meat. It just suggests a shift in how meat is produced.” Friedrich meticulously marshals figures in his book to explain the predicament: Animal agriculture is the chief driver of methane and nitrous-oxide emissions, yet the world is on pace to produce more than 370 million metric tons of meat a year. Given the current trajectory, we’ll require another 3.3 billion hectares of land over the next several decades to house all livestock, a scenario that imperils the planet’s remaining forests. Producing and promoting meat alternatives is, in his framing, an easy choice.
If only we lived in a moment when measured arguments led to lasting, technocratic solutions. The ascendant mindset isn’t exactly moving Friedrich’s way. Under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again movement, raw milk is trendy and slaughterhouse meat now sits at the top of the food pyramid. The data on the popularity of meat substitutes aren’t especially forgiving, either. Sales of plant-based meat fell by 12 percent in 2023 (a trend that continues)—and this was before MAHA came to the fore. As for lab-grown meat, the Good Food Institute’s own recent survey showed that it appeals to just 21 percent of Americans.
[Read: America is done pretending about meat]
Can a supply-side leap in production fix this? Consider the comparison with a larger industry that has similar goals: alternative energy. Electric vehicles began growing in popularity a few years ago thanks to sustained investment and policies that begot social and cultural buy-in. (These policies were dialed back, however, under the Trump administration, and sales of new EVs began falling again.) Yet cultivated meat, still a relatively fringe innovation, isn’t available to the everyday consumer. And plant-based meat, which you can find in grocery stores, isn’t exactly flying off shelves.
Friedrich explains this trend with characteristically cheery forthrightness in his book: “The products are not good enough, and all of them cost too much.” A gentle proselytizer, he has a habit of amiably conceding the shortcomings of meat substitutes before gathering himself back up to explain just how and why they will shortly be overcome. Fifteen years ago, no plant-based-meat products even came close to the real thing; now we have fast-food burgers with imitation patties. Cultivated meat was once a scientific novelty; by 2023, you could order cultivated chicken at China Chilcano, the José Andrés–owned restaurant in D.C.
At times, Meat reads like any other book encouraging readers to eschew animal protein out of concern for the climate. Environmentalists and animal-rights advocates have been trying for the better part of 50 years to persuade people unlike Friedrich to eat less of the stuff—or none at all. But Friedrich isn’t trying to outdo Michael Pollan or Jonathan Safran Foer in rhetorical force or depth of research.
Instead, what he sets out to accomplish—what feels new about Meat—is to convince readers of a generational opportunity to replace like with like: plant-based and cultivated meat that matches, in price and taste, the stuff under cellophane in supermarkets today. If these products can really catch on, a sustainable path may be well in sight. Replacing 50 percent of meat consumption with alternatives—a goal that feels aspirational, for now—would free up 650 million hectares of land, Friedrich writes. In conjunction with regenerative-farming methods and carbon sequestration, that could be enough to move meat-related pollution far down the list of climate threats.
We certainly have the means, thanks in part to Friedrich. In the decade since he founded the Good Food Institute, the alternative-protein sector has grown into a business with billions of dollars in research funding, products that are approved for sale in the United States, and financial investment from Cargill and Tyson Foods, two of America’s three largest meat companies. This amounts to lasting progress.
And yet, for there to be a way, there must be a will. The average American consumes more than 200 pounds of meat annually, and that amount is growing. Last year, in this publication, Yasmin Tayag reported that America was experiencing a “meat renaissance,” adding, “It’s not just MAGA bros and MAHA moms who resist plant-based eating. A wide swath of the U.S. seems to be sending a clear message: Nobody should feel bad about eating meat.”
[Read: RFK Jr. is taking an axe to America’s dietary guidelines]
Cultural trends shift, of course, but what seems to stubbornly persist is an intrinsic discomfort with food that feels somehow inauthentic, and therefore viscerally wrong. “Maybe they can solve all this eventually and create products people will want to eat,” Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at NYU, told me of Friedrich and his compatriots. “But in general, as far as I can tell, people want to eat real food.”
Friedrich tries to parry this point head-on. He believes there’s still a lot of work to be done in educating consumers on the fact that cultivated meat is real meat, just grown from the muscle and fat taken from a grazing cow or a strutting chicken. He also addresses concerns that plant-based meat is “ultra-processed,” noting that it still contains less saturated fat and fewer calories than the real thing.
Most effectively, he pulls analogies from the history of scientific innovation, including his favorite example, the automobile. In the early 20th century, more than 500 car companies went bust. Cars were hard to start. Cars broke down easily. Cars were expensive. They were even panned in 1906 by Woodrow Wilson, when he was the president of Princeton University, as “a picture of the arrogance of wealth.” Just seven years later, following the release of Ford’s Model T, more than 1 million cars were on New York City’s streets.
“Nothing is going to be successful until it meets consumer needs,” Friedrich told me, touching on the real problem. The gulf between consumers and meat alternatives (including lab-grown meat) lies in their taste, price, and inconvenience. Until those metrics align with what we already get from animal meat, alternatives won’t become mainstream. While acknowledging this, Friedrich highlights the ongoing research that’s pushing alt-protein closer and closer to what we’ve come to expect. Will the meat we eat, so often intertwined with culture and politics, be changed only through persuasion on the basis of “ethics, health, or novelty,” as Friedrich writes? That’s easy, to him: The answer is no. “We still have a long way to go, but the path forward is a lot more clear,” he said. We’ll need to produce new versions of humanity’s favorite food that taste like humanity’s favorite food, in a way that doesn’t asset-strip the planet in service of the dinner plate. Perhaps that feels like a tall order, but stranger things have happened.
2026-03-30 20:00:00
Early in One Battle After Another, the director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning tale of insurgency in slow decline, Pat Calhoun, a guerrilla explosives expert played by Leonardo DiCaprio, makes a choice that sets the course of both his life and the movie: He picks parenthood over radicalism. As Pat drives into the night with his infant daughter snuggled in a laundry basket, viewers understand that he has forsaken one set of ideals—and battles—for another.
A very similar decision animates Bsrat Mezghebe’s debut novel, I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For. Its protagonist, Elsa Haddish, is a former Eritrean People’s Liberation Front guerrilla now living with her daughter, Lydia, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Lydia’s father died in the war, and Elsa is the only former fighter in the D.C. area’s large Eritrean diaspora. Her community admires her militant past, but she considers herself a failure. When the novel starts, in 1991, Eritrea’s 30-year war to free itself from Ethiopian rule is ongoing, and Elsa’s inner life is ruled by guilt at having emigrated to raise Lydia in safety while her “comrades weren’t leaving the war unless their mission was achieved or they died trying.”
I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For is written lightly—clunky title aside, it’s a novel you can tear through—and it draws on several tropes that habitual readers of 21st-century literary novels will recognize immediately: It’s an intergenerational immigrant story and a bildungsroman, with elements of what the critic Parul Seghal has called the trauma plot. But at its core, and at its most intriguing, Mezghebe’s novel, like One Battle After Another, represents a storyline that may not seem relatable, but holds a powerful appeal for contemporary audiences. I call it “what happened to the radicals.”
A what-happened-to-the-radicals story has one constant: It tracks guerrillas, rebels, or militants over enough time that their convictions either harden into dogma or, as happens to Pat and Elsa, get worn to shreds. Although some of these stories are warm toward their radical protagonists, they tend not to glorify them. Rather, they explore the moral challenges that intense ideological commitments—and the violence that often results—can create.
This is the case in Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction book Say Nothing, which begins with the Irish Republican Army’s kidnapping of a Protestant mother in Belfast and follows several of the militants who were involved through decades of the Troubles. But Keefe’s book also examines the corrosive silences that can endure long after militancy has been left behind—he shows former IRA leaders wrestling with disillusionment, isolation, and a growing sense that their illicit activities belong in the historical record. Dana Spiotta’s novel Eat the Document imagines a quieter version of this struggle. Its main characters, a radical couple who go into hiding separately after a bombing they planned went wrong, suffer as much from secrecy as from remorse.
In Mezghebe’s novel, Elsa is ashamed not of what she did in the war, but of having left it. These emotions render her unable to discuss her past with—or impart her political values to—her daughter. As a result, these values are not what propels their story forward; the novel becomes a tale of individual entrapment, not societal liberation. One Battle After Another, though more optimistic, renders the aftereffects of Pat’s radicalism very similarly to Elsa’s depressive self-regard, though Pat smokes a lot more pot.
These sorts of narratives explore how much sacrifice, and what kind of sacrifice, is enough to satisfy a true believer, and how long and fully a person can live according to their ideals. In doing so, these stories also challenge readers and viewers; even if they enjoy the vicarious thrill of radicalism, they may also discover a strange pleasure in watching revolutionary characters’ convictions wither away.
It’s no surprise that many what-happened-to-the-radicals stories hinge on parenthood. Few human experiences are stronger or more intuitive ideological tests. In non-guerrilla life, this can mean deciding what sort of school your children will attend or whether you, as a parent, will engage in civil disobedience.
Stories about radicalism and its decline contain extreme versions of these choices. Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s novel Retrospective fictionalizes the life of the Colombian director Sergio Cabrera, whose hard-line Communist parents left Cabrera and his sister alone in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution to be trained in Maoist thought, then brought them home to become guerrilla soldiers. The siblings survived, though barely; neither remained a militant in adulthood.
[Read: How conflicts end—and who can end them]
Reading Retrospective may bring a dual sense of recognition and relief: Most anyone deeply involved in a young person’s life can connect to the question of how best to educate children, and regardless of your views on raising young revolutionaries, Cabrera’s training plainly did not justify the hardship he had to endure. Indeed, Vásquez depicts it as a parental failure—one that a parent of any political persuasion might read about and think, At least I’d never do that.
Even more dramatic instances of this effect appear throughout the playwright Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s forthcoming memoir, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, which chronicles his childhood as the son of the Weather Underground leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Dohrn evidently admires his parents’ values, but not their violence—or the intensity of their beliefs, which was stronger than any desire to give him and his brother a safe, stable childhood.
Still, he makes clear that he had it better than his adoptive brother Chesa Boudin, the son of the Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin. When Chesa was a toddler, Gilbert and Boudin went to prison after aiding a robbery that went wrong, and Dohrn and Ayers took him in. In Dohrn’s eyes, it was unforgivable for Chesa’s parents to run such a risk together; he writes that “their ideological commitment had outstripped their judgement, their reason, and even their morality.”
Dohrn isn’t otherwise this condemnatory. In fact, the more notable emotion in his memoir is ambivalence. His complicated feelings highlight the draw of stories in which revolutionaries suffer from their convictions or slide into ordinariness: They affirm the choices of readers, even sympathetic ones, who have never lived on the political edge.
I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For does this, too, though the means are quite different. Mezghebe never glamorizes Elsa. Instead, she depicts her as an unhappy victim of her own beliefs. Although Elsa never considered remaining in rebel-controlled Eritrean territory with little Lydia, she also does not see raising a child as morally equal to war. Her grief and guilt about her decision harden into a shell of silence.
For Elsa, this is extremely painful; for 13-year-old Lydia, it’s even worse. She worries that her mother doesn’t love her or doesn’t want to communicate with her, and she yearns for stories of her father. Lydia feels adrift in a world where “everyone called her parents heroes,” because she “couldn’t imagine her mother as one.” Still, she tries to unearth Elsa’s history, which leads mostly to anger that her “mother could just open her mouth and start talking,” but won’t. (Willa, Pat’s daughter in One Battle After Another, might well feel the same way.) If Elsa did talk, Mezghebe suggests, it would bring Lydia closer not only to her mother, but also to the identity and values that Elsa has clung to in isolation.
[Read: The misunderstanding of Perfidia]
Seen together, these tales of radical and ex-radical parenthood suggest that there’s a clear ethical choice when these commitments clash, but also that the radicals can’t win. I suspect that this is the message audiences want. Although the secondhand excitement of rebel life might be enjoyable—most of the examples I’ve mentioned take on the texture of thrillers at times—many people would seemingly prefer if it came with the reassurance that choosing extremity, even if the cause is as righteous as Elsa’s, is compromising to the soul.
In these stories, radicalism that doesn’t lead to a violent death diffuses instead into smaller tragedies. That may be comforting to read or watch, but it also indicates a gap in our culture. I haven’t encountered many tales of sustainable, long-term idealism like that of civil servants who devote whole careers to quietly ensuring vital services or lifelong activists able to respond to changing times. Such stories may be less dramatic than those of rebels whose convictions flame out or trap them in time, but that doesn’t make them less fascinating—and in a moment of scarce optimism, they might be even more satisfying to read.
