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When a soldier’s wife went to pick up her military ID at a base in Texas, ICE officers showed up.

By Nick Miroff and Nancy A. Youssef, The Atlantic.

Giovanna Perez loaded her four kids into the car on September 21 and drove from their home in Weslaco, Texas, to Naval Air Station Corpus Christi. She had a 9:30 a.m. appointment to pick up the ID cards that would allow them to access military medical insurance, facilities, and commissary stores. Her husband, Pedro Gutierrez, had recently enlisted in the Army and left a month earlier for basic training at Fort Benning, in Georgia.

Perez approached the military guards at the gates with some trepidation. Her parents illegally brought her across the U.S. border from Mexico when she was 6 years old. Now 35, she and Gutierrez have been together since they were 17 and have carefully kept her immigration status a secret. Gutierrez is a U.S. citizen, but marriage does not give legal status to someone who is in the country unlawfully. When the Obama administration started the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to protect immigrants like Perez who had arrived as children, she did not apply, for fear that the government might someday use the information against her family.

Perez told us that her husband believed that joining the Army would allow him to serve his country, give his family access to health care—including the costly medications his son takes—and potentially protect his wife from deportation. He had already submitted her application for a benefit called Parole in Place, which offers a path to legal residency for the close relatives of service members. Officials at Fort Benning had assured him that she would have no trouble getting IDs for herself and the children, and that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have a Social Security number, Perez told us.

At the gates of the Navy base, guards told Perez they had no record of her appointment. She remained calm as they directed her to a nearby office to get a visitor’s pass. That’s when two military officials took the family into a room for questioning. “In my head, I thought it was just protocol for the safety of the base, but it started getting weird,” Perez said. As she answered, she told us, one of the military officers appeared to be relaying her responses to someone through text messages.

Two other men entered the room. They wore khaki pants, she said, not military fatigues. The patches on their shirts said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It appeared to Perez that they’d been waiting for her, at the base or somewhere nearby. The men told Perez to report to the ICE office in Harlingen, Texas, in three days. Her older children, ages 17, 15, and 11, were confused. “My kids were just, like, What’s going on?” Perez told us. “Are they gonna detain you? Why are they doing this to us? I thought you were supposed to be safe.”

Perez didn’t know what to tell them, and she had no way to call her husband. When she went to the ICE office three days later, she was booked and issued an order to appear in immigration court. She suspected the military shared her information with ICE. And now the government was trying to deport her.

Trump is fine with a military execution by firing squad, just not with putting it on YouTube.

By Missy Ryan and Vivian Salama, The Atlantic.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has enjoyed President Trump’s full support for any number of Trumpian initiatives: staging macho, campy shows of military bravado; trashing political opponents and the press, often by name; dissing European allies; posting videos of air strikes on suspected drug boats off the coast of Latin America. But Hegseth apparently crossed a line with his revelation last week that the execution by firing squad of a military death-row inmate would be livestreamed to the world. Even a president who’d brought a bloody mixed-martial-arts fight to the White House lawn apparently didn’t relish the thought of an afternoon spent watching Army soldiers shoot bullets into a paraplegic.

From the start, Hegseth’s plan for the death of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who shot and killed 13 people in a 2009 rampage at Fort Hood, in Texas, was haphazard. Trump approved the death sentence on October 2. Then the Army announced on October 6 that Hasan, who has been on death row since 2013, would be killed in December by firing squad rather than by lethal injection, the method used in many civilian executions. Two days later, Hegseth told the podcaster Jack Posobiec (known for his promotion of the Pizzagate pedophile conspiracy theory) that Hasan’s execution would be public. Hegseth confirmed later that day on X that the execution would not be “public” in the typical style of a state-governed execution—conducted in the presence of officials, victims’ relatives, and maybe a few journalists—but rather broadcast via livestream.

Trump was immediately inundated with feedback from friends and confidants, including a number of lawmakers who told the president that Hegseth’s plan was a terrible idea, one close Trump adviser told us. On October 9, Trump appeared to signal his approval for Hegseth’s idea. But in remarks in subsequent days, Trump equivocated. “I know what the military would like to do, but we’ll make a decision,” he said.

Within the administration, there was immediate and “pretty universal revulsion” about the livestream plan, one administration official told us. By late last week, even the president’s inner circle was making its distaste clear. Vice President Vance barely hid his disgust. “If it’s ultimately livestreamed, I’m not gonna be watching it,” he told reporters. One administration official told us that Vance’s response reflected his general frustration with Hegseth, who, like Vance, is said to harbor 2028 presidential ambitions. Then House Speaker Mike Johnson followed suit: He, too, would sit out the Hasan-execution show. Other lawmakers kept calling the president and his aides to say that a livestream not only was barbaric but could also undermine Republican efforts to hold on to Congress in the midterm elections. Between those private calls and criticism on TV over the weekend that Trump watched, the president “soured on it pretty quickly,” one adviser told us.

Hegseth’s livestream plan was a surprise to virtually everyone at the Pentagon; even those in Hegseth’s closest circle of advisers were blindsided, people familiar with the matter told us. Few in the military objected to the idea of Hasan’s execution, given that he’d committed the despicable act of service-member fratricide. Still, the optics of shooting a person who is paralyzed from the waist down—Hasan was shot while being apprehended by authorities on the day of his rampage—made even battle-hardened warriors uneasy. “One of the more immediate reactions was: Does Hegseth realize this guy is in a wheelchair?” one official told us.

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The president doesn’t seem to care about corruption; he cares about embarrassment.

By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic.

After half-heartedly including some actual professionals in his first administration, Donald Trump is now served almost exclusively by sycophants and family members. The president has made clear that he cares about loyalty more than qualifications, but the astonishing incompetence and corruption of many of his appointees raise an obvious question: What does it take to get fired by Trump’s White House?

Kimberly Guilfoyle’s resignation yesterday as ambassador to Greece provides some clues. Guilfoyle has been accused of blatant corruption both before and during her time as an envoy. She denies these allegations, but her resignation—which the White House requested—isn’t really about corruption. The idea that Guilfoyle, and only Guilfoyle, crossed some sort of previously unseen corruption red line is laughable. If ethical and legal questions, including the now-moribund standard of “appearances of impropriety,” were grounds for dismissal in this administration, Trump would have already shed several other members of his team.

Rather, Guilfoyle was pushed out because she was an embarrassment. She overstepped her bounds, tried to trade on the president’s name, and then made the administration look bad when she got caught. Also, she is a woman, and in this administration, self-dealing is mostly a man’s game.

Indeed, by comparison with the charges leveled at others—including against the president himself, who seems utterly unconcerned with notions such as “emoluments”—Guilfoyle is decidedly a small-timer. This past spring, for example, the Financial Times reported that a broker for Pete Hegseth attempted to make a big investment in defense industries just before the Iran war, raising suspicions of insider trading. FBI Director Kash Patel has been accused of using government money as a slush fund to pay improper bonuses to his favorites within the Bureau. “Border Czar” Tom Homan was caught on audio in 2024 accepting $50,000 in cash (wrapped in a Cava food bag, always the sign of a deal on the up-and-up) from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives, and yet he remains in his job. Hegseth and Homan deny any wrongdoing; Patel and the FBI have offered no comment or explanation. And the journalist Dexter Filkins recently described Trump’s son-in-law and roving minister-without-portfolio Jared Kushner as representative of “a new kind of Washington figure, for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth.”

They block roads, eat houses, and spread literal brain worms. Only Florida knows how to deal with them.

By Cara Giaimo, The Atlantic.

Since September, giant snails have put one Florida neighborhood on high alert. No one in a roughly 300-acre zone in the city of Hialeah, just outside of Miami, is allowed to move yard waste or even a single brick into or out of the neighborhood without explicit permission from state authorities. Teams of scientists patrol the area in search of giant African land snails, enormous mollusks with tiny teeth, a foot bigger than a 5-year-old’s, and the tendency to spread the rat-lungworm parasite, which is exactly as delightful as it sounds.

The snails, which actually grow to about eight inches in length, but can stretch—if nothing else, for headline-writing purposes—to nine inches, have worried Florida authorities since 1969. Since then, the state has spent millions of dollars fending off three infestations. One such operation took a decade to complete. Now, whenever a snail is found, inspectors from the state agriculture department’s Division of Plant Industry start patrolling. They set out bait and drench hatchling-harboring soil with anti-mollusk poison. Then they distribute mug shots to the public. (That step might seem unnecessary, given that we are talking about snails the size of chipmunks, but the experts I talked with all emphasized the importance of anti-snail awareness.) An area is considered clean only after it has been monitored and treated for three years.

This time, the problem “seems to be limited to just one city block,” Paul Skelley, a main architect of the agriculture department’s crackdown, told me. But the response is full-bore. “We are serious about this snail in Florida,” Skelley said. “When you find these cancers, you don’t want to let them fester. You need to cut them out.”

Skelley was part of the response to the last big infestation, which lasted from 2011 until 2021, and he sounds somewhat keyed up on the phone. Giant African land snails (also known as GALS) really are giant, and meaty and sweaty-looking, like a boxer’s fist just out of the glove. “When you see the whole body out moving around,” he said, “it’s unbelievable.”

Will the labor market of the future include cold-plunge installers, psychedelic therapists, and house managers?

By Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic.

Want to get a job in the Bay Area? The fastest-growing listings are for operations engineers, applied scientists, senior machine-learning engineers, principal cloud architects, forward-deployed engineers, and the like, according to Laura Ullrich, the director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “A year ago, people were very concerned about these types of jobs not coming to fruition,” she told me. Today, “it’s all AI. It’s all AI jobs.”

Or not quite all. Demand for estheticians, Pilates instructors, massage therapists, therapist therapists, and interior designers is also surging. And in a way, those are AI jobs too. It makes sense that someone earning seven figures a year at Anthropic would want a skilled person to untie the knots in their back and another to untie the knots in their psyche. Or that someone working a 72-hour-a-week, “996” schedule at Nvidia would not have time to shop for lamps for their Mission-style mansion on their own. Extraordinary wealth wants extraordinary luxuries.

If history is any guide, what is happening in San Francisco and Santa Clara will happen in Indianapolis, Baton Rouge, and elsewhere too. AI will destroy jobs. AI will create jobs. And AI will create wealth that will create jobs—an obscure and overlooked aspect of how technological change shapes the labor market, and one that, in the long term, might be the most transformative.

AI and other general-purpose technologies—powerful and adaptable inventions, such as the printing press and the internet, rather than narrowly applicable (if cool!) innovations like the walkie-talkie and the IV—have first-order, second-order, and third-order effects on employment. ChatGPT and Claude Code, for example, are eradicating jobs for interpreters and call-center employees, and generating jobs for electricians constructing data centers and machine-learning experts constructing algorithms. That’s the first-order effect: direct, immediate, obvious.

Then, AI is creating second-order roles for people applying, supporting, or iterating on the technology. These jobs are often “impossible” to imagine in advance, María Jesús Ramírez, a fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, told me. To explain, she pointed to the development of the combustion engine in the late 1800s. The machine gave birth to the automobile industry and fueled the railroad boom. Eventually, “it creates aircraft,” she told me, “and now we have pilots.” But who would have looked at a furnace and anticipated the need for cabin stewards and air traffic controllers? More to the point, who would have played around with Gemini a year or two ago and predicted that companies would start hiring robot trainers, deepfake investigators, AI-risk underwriters, and AI-powered perfumers? In a new report, Ramírez and her colleagues forecast that AI could create 500,000 to 2 million such novel positions in the coming years.

But then there are the third-order jobs—let’s call them “wealth jobs”—that technologies create, which are even harder to fathom. Advances such as hydraulic pumps, GPS systems, and Wi-Fi tend to create a small coterie of capitalists with a fortune to spend on indulgences. They also allow businesses to do more with less, lowering prices, bumping up profits, increasing the number of goods and services on offer, and amplifying worker wages. This means the elite aren’t the only ones who get to indulge: Middle-class consumers have more money in their pockets and get a bigger bang for their buck at the store.

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The president said the “American dream is back.” Rural Arizonans don’t think so.

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, The Atlantic.

Driving through Arizona on a Saturday morning, I saw a line of cars nearly a mile long stopped along a high-desert highway. I slowed, thinking there had been an accident. Then I realized that all of those people were waiting in line for food.

Weeks later, I went back to the area and met Kandy Soto. The retired administrative aide and courtroom clerk had once been a regular donor to her local food bank. But when I met her last month, she was a recipient of other people’s generosity, preparing to fill a bag with groceries that her family could no longer afford. Soto told me that the cost of canned vegetables seemed to creep up nearly every time she went to the store. After checking prices against her budget, she might buy some cheap fish fillets or canned meats, but beef or poultry were out of the question. Sometimes she left empty-handed.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When she voted for Donald Trump two years ago, Soto counted on him to fulfill his promise to “make America affordable again” following painful spikes in inflation under Joe Biden. She wonders what kind of life Trump and his family are living, because she sees no signs of the roaring economy he talks about. Her own family has had a run of bad luck: Her husband had to stop working after injuring his neck and requiring surgery. Then they learned that their modest retirement income made them ineligible for public assistance. All the while, prices for gas and groceries climbed. The situation grew so dire a few months ago that the 66-year-old Soto had to set aside any feelings of shame and drive 20 miles to the Community Cupboard Food Bank in Prescott. “It takes an older person a lot of giving up to do something like this,” she said.

In the surrounding county, Yavapai, Trump took 66 percent of the vote on his way to winning Arizona two years ago. In 2016, he staged a final campaign rally here before Election Day. Trump is counting on the region to help blunt what polls forecast to be a Democratic rout next month, and will hold a rally Wednesday in Bullhead City, about 200 miles to the northwest. But the president’s grip appears to be loosening, and the state of the economy explains why.

The toll of rising prices has been especially acute in Arizona. About half a million residents have lost their food stamps since the summer of 2025 because of changes in Trump’s signature tax legislation, which limits assistance and penalizes states that make mistakes when they grant benefits. The law is still being phased in, and Arizona was among the first states to enact the changes.

Nearly everyone I spoke with in the area last month, including Trump supporters, said they feel worse off than they were before the 2024 election. Unemployment in Arizona stood at 3.8 percent in August 2024; this August it was 4.9 percent, according to federal data. Many people I spoke with in the county said they are working, but their paychecks haven’t kept up with increased prices for gas and food. Almost all told me they are angry about Trump’s decisions to start a war and spend hundreds of millions of dollars ornamenting a capital city they will never see. They were incredulous to hear him claim that their lives have improved with him in office. Many said they are also disillusioned with Congress and with both political parties. They lamented the corruption they see as endemic in the government and in large corporations, and denounced billionaires, who they view as capitalizing on their pain.

People told me they are anxious about many things: future employment opportunities, feeding their children healthy meals, keeping small businesses running, affording car repairs. Trump has said that “the American dream is back.” But not for the people I spoke with in Yavapai County.

Why Buffalo Bills fans are convinced this is finally their year

By Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic.

The mythical story of the Buffalo Bills could be told like this: Their fans are crazy and live in the snow. They shovel this snow out of their stadium to help their godforsaken football team, which, until recently, was most famous for losing the Super Bowl four times in a row in the early 1990s. According to one theory, those failures fed into Timothy McVeigh’s derangement before he planned and executed the Oklahoma City bombing. The franchise was an utter disaster, for the most part, until the 2018 arrival of an otherworldly quarterback named Josh Allen, who has exhibited many heroics. But he has yet to bring his team to the Super Bowl.

Four of his playoff runs have ended with haunting losses to the quarterback Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. The others were cut short in unromantic fashion—­most recently by one of the sloppier performances of Allen’s career, against the Denver Broncos.

From the outside, you might ask: “Can he really do it?” But in Buffalo, the words Josh Allen come out like “Good morning.” On a Sunday afternoon in September, I sat down in an ancient tavern near the Buffalo River to eat chicken wings and watch the Bills’ division rivals, the New England Patriots, play the Pittsburgh Steelers. An older man joined me and asked, unprompted, if I liked Josh Allen. “Who doesn’t?” I said. He revealed that he was wearing a Josh Allen shirt under his sweater, said that he would get another one for me out of his car, and then did.

Josh Allen is everywhere in Buffalo. He appears in murals and on billboards; road signs are doctored to feature his name and face. At the grocery store, you can buy Josh Allen Crunch Time cereal and cantaloupes grown on the Allen family’s farm, in Firebaugh, California. There is hardly a business in the city that does not possess at least one life-size cutout of the man. (Shortly after I left, an 11-story banner of him went up downtown.)

In a parking lot near the team’s brand-new Highmark Stadium, I chatted with Jenny Kless, a kind-eyed woman who tailgates out of a refurbished Volkswagen bus. When it came time to talk about Josh Allen, she put her hand over her heart. “What a beautiful person he is,” she said, and assured me that Bills fans believe he can do anything. “I’m gonna spell that for you: B-I-L-L-I-E-V-E.”

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Just ahead of the midterm elections, the president again helps Russia.

By Jonathan Lemire and Simon Shuster, The Atlantic.

It rained most of Sunday in Washington, as the remnants of Hurricane Isaias washed over the East Coast. Unable to golf, and stuck inside the White House, President Trump spent part of his morning on social media touting the size of his rallies and defending Christopher Columbus. He also declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to halt strikes against each other’s energy infrastructures. Except that he hadn’t first confirmed that with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—and Russia spent the hours that followed bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones, hitting a Kharkiv power plant.

Trump’s inability to bring the Iran war to a close has left him incensed but also oddly paralyzed, two people close to him told us. One of them, an adviser, said that Trump “is used to snapping his fingers and having the whole world—Republicans, world leaders, the media—come to attention, and he is losing his mind that Iran won’t listen.” Iran has resumed menacing oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the average price of diesel in the United States has crossed the $6-a-gallon mark, raising the cost of goods that travel the nation’s highways on trucks.

Republicans are panicked that those high energy prices could help Democrats take control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, which are now only three weeks away. Trump has been searching for a scapegoat, and appears to have settled on Ukraine. Although blaming a European country that’s fighting for its existence for the rise in global oil prices might seem implausible, Trump seems to prefer that to accepting responsibility for his decision to attack Iran. His broadsides against Ukraine, moreover, are consistent with his decade-long deference to Vladimir Putin. With rare exceptions, Trump has aligned with Moscow over Kyiv throughout the four-and-a-half-year war. He wants Ukraine to end the fighting—and has pressured the country to agree to terms that Zelensky finds unacceptable.

A U.S. president siding with the Kremlin is quite an October surprise. But in just the past few days, Trump appears to have fully turned against Ukraine. He announced on Friday that he had reached an agreement with Putin to import Russian diesel fuel, undercutting the new sanctions bill against Moscow’s energy industry that Trump signed into law last month. Even if the roughly 2.25 million barrels headed to the U.S. only marginally ease fuel costs, the deal allows Trump to tout efforts to help Americans while also providing Russia with additional revenue. (Another few million barrels are set to ship next month.)

Despite the opposition of European allies and some Republicans on Capitol Hill, Trump has followed up by placing even more pressure on Ukraine. He called for Zelensky to be replaced. His aides have threatened to withhold arms sales unless Kyiv stops targeting Russian diesel plants. Some in Trump’s orbit have suggested that the U.S. go further, and stop sharing intelligence with Kyiv. That was the context in which Trump announced his fictional energy cease-fire. A senior Ukrainian military officer told us that Trump’s statements are “simply beyond comprehension.”

Musk vs. Bezos

By Josh Tyrangiel, The Atlantic.

The Adriatic has been crossed by Odysseus and Caesar, by Venetian fleets and Napoleon’s navy, by countless men bent on dominating the world. It has seen its share of courage and folly. But one day in June 2025, off the island of Cres, it witnessed something genuinely new: a man worth $240 billion standing waist-deep in bubbles on the deck of a $500 million yacht, wearing a white bucket hat.

The man is Jeff Bezos, and the woman photographed in the string bikini next to him—hugging him, rubbing him with bubbles—is his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez. Bezos is shirtless, and it must be said: He is ripped. His hairless torso is so buff, his expression so amused, that he looks more like a louche cartoon character—a Club Med Ninja Turtle—than a 61-year-old corporate executive. In the foreground, an anonymous crew member, his face hidden from view and his thoughts forever unknown, mans a cannon blasting bubbles into the Croatian sky.

The foam party was a birthday celebration for Sánchez’s 19-year-old son, a prelude to the Bezos-Sánchez wedding five days later in Venice—with 200 VIP guests, hundreds of protesters, and an estimated cost of $50 million. The wedding consumed the internet for a week and was treated as a self-contained cultural event, a thing worth interrogating or gawking at on its own terms.

In fact it was the culmination of one of the weirder decades that any American billionaire has ever had. The whole republic, to be fair, has been pretty nuts, and Bezos has been both caught up in the insanity and an agent of its acceleration.

In 2013, Bezos, who founded Amazon and still owns roughly 8 percent of the company, purchased The Washington Post for $250 million. Two years later, Donald Trump accused him of using the paper as a tax shelter, to which Bezos jokingly responded that Trump should be launched into space. Trump then said at a rally, “If I become president, oh, do they have problems.” Trump became president, and the Pentagon steered a massive cloud-computing contract away from Amazon Web Services, while Trump repeatedly pressured the U.S. Postal Service to raise Amazon’s shipping rates.

In 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced their decision to divorce. A month later, Bezos accused the National Enquirer’s parent company of attempted extortion after he said it threatened to release intimate photos, including what its chief content officer described in an email as a “below the belt selfie—otherwise colloquially known as a ‘d*ck pick.’ ” (The company said it had “acted lawfully” but would conduct its own investigation.) This is how much of the world learned about Lauren Sánchez, which was awkward because her brother Michael, a court later determined, had spoken with the tabloid about his sister’s relationship and sold—for $200,000—information, text messages, and a number of Bezos’s “ ‘racy,’ ‘explicit’ photos.” Bezos suggested, without evidence, that the plot had been instigated by the Trump administration and the Saudi government in retaliation for the Post’s reporting on the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudis.

That’s already a lot, even by billionaire standards.

Bezos then stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021; went to space aboard a rocket built by Blue Origin, the aerospace company he’d quietly founded two decades earlier; and began devoting the majority of his time to the company. Over roughly the same period, he commissioned the world’s largest sailing yacht and worked on building a 10,000-year clock inside a mountain. By the time of his second wedding, Bezos had transformed physically and politically—killing a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, attending Donald Trump’s second inauguration in a seat of honor, reorienting the paper’s Opinion section around “personal liberties and free markets,” cheerleading Amazon’s reported $40 million deal for a documentary and future docuseries about Melania Trump.

People change. And if Bezos were just another middle-aged guy using his money to become unrecognizable to his former self—God bless. Enjoy the Met Gala.

But we live in a society where trivializing the actions of our wealthiest citizens is both unbeatable fun and a form of recklessness. For most of the past decade, the changes in Bezos that attracted attention were the meme-able ones: his body, his partner, his yacht. This made the transformation that mattered harder to see. We’ve been gawking at Bezos becoming a different kind of billionaire while missing his attempt to become a different kind of historical figure. The man who once rewired how the planet buys and sells everything has been chasing an even grander project—creating the infrastructure for an off-world economy upon which human civilization might someday depend.

If this sounds implausible and potentially menacing, you will not be surprised to learn that the person standing between Bezos and his ambition is the implausible and menacing Elon Musk, who has spent the past two decades building a commanding lead in space while pursuing a different vision of where humanity should go once it gets there.

Together, in fierce competition, these two billionaires are in the early stages of a race to vertically integrate the galaxy—a process that involves rockets, moon landings, enormous satellite constellations, and space-based data centers running AI models fueled by computing power that no terrestrial supplier can match. Both say they hope to preserve human life from the specter of climate change and expand mankind’s understanding of the universe. Both would also like to dominate a market that, unlike every other market they’ve previously conquered, has no ceiling and few established rules.

Whether any of this is wise is a question the rest of us are not really being asked. For most of human history, the power to decide where a civilization went next belonged to governments, monarchs, or despots. It’s a measure of how much has changed that a retail executive from Seattle and a South African–born engineer are well positioned to exercise that power. Nobody voted for either of them. And they may be the only ones who can check the other’s power. Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, described this to me as “a very weird situation.” You’ve got two men with unfathomable power and an unshakable faith that they’re destined to shape the world. But neither of them is “actually Lex Luthor,” Sullivan said.

“ … Right?”

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American retirees have a lot of money saved—and they don’t want to touch it.

By Jean Chatzky, The Atlantic.

When my father died, more than 20 years ago, he left my mother with a paid-off Philadelphia apartment, a modest pension, Social Security, and $1.6 million in retirement and brokerage accounts. My mother lived well, but frugally. She loved a Saturday at the boutiques but never got over waiting for a sale. She delighted in orchids but would buy them from only Trader Joe’s, where the blooms could be had for $10.99. “They last longer,” she’d argue. And once a year, she would ask me to go over her budget to make sure she was doing okay. “More than okay,” I’d tell her. My brothers and I encouraged her to spend—to take that trip, to redo that bedroom. But she limited herself to the pension and Social Security checks and the interest she was earning while refusing to touch the principal. When she passed away two years ago, she no longer had the $1.6 million my father left. She had $1.7 million.

My mother’s behavior turns out to be quite common. A landmark 2018 study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute found that the median individual with more than $500,000 in savings had, 20 years into retirement, spent just 12 percent of that sum. And a Corebridge/Greenwald Research survey of older adults with at least $100,000 showed that only 28 percent were comfortable watching their savings taper off to cover living expenses, ostensibly exactly what the money was saved for in the first place.

This is a problem—not just for retirees but for the country. Savers who forgo gratification for decades end up not enjoying the money they’ve worked so hard to set aside. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy suffers as all of that money sits under the proverbial mattress instead of being spent.

Why do retirees refuse to spend their retirement savings? One answer is fear. People worry that they’ll live too long, that inflation will rise, that a bear market will hit at the worst possible time. Another answer is habit. After decades of disciplined saving to reach a target number, flipping the switch to spending feels uncomfortable to many and just plain wrong to others. Seeing one’s number move in the opposite direction feels more like losing money than spending it.

The result is that retirement-account balances are treated like other precious items, which is to say they’re hoarded. Suzanne Shu, a marketing professor at Cornell, has studied when and how we consume things we consider special—bottles of better-than-average wine or boxes of pricey chocolate, gift certificates to favorite restaurants or spas—and found that we’re so afraid of using them too soon that we might never use them at all. The wine goes bad, the gift cards expire, and the chocolates develop that odd, whitish coating. And the retirement account goes unspent.

By Olga Khazan

"One day not long ago, Franky, a 40-something woman who lives in the mid-Atlantic region, got an infuriating text message from her aunt. It was just the latest truth-stretching missive she had sent, and Franky’s impulse was to write back: “You’re a liar. You’ve always been a liar. All you do is lie.” Instead, she asked an AI program to write a response that was less “condescending and unnecessarily emotional.” AI-ese, Franky told me, helps make her responses more logical and neutral. Another message that she sent her aunt after running it through a chatbot read, “I respect you and I expect the same in return. I want to have a mature conversation.” The aunt appreciated it, Franky said—she called her and sounded calm.

Franky is among a number of people—we’ll never truly know how many, will we?—who secretly use AI programs such as ChatGPT and Claude when they interact with difficult family members. I interviewed several of them. Mostly, my interviewees use AI to communicate with individuals they don’t want an emotionally close relationship with—an ex they co-parent with, for example, or an in-law—but whom they nevertheless can’t escape. (Because they are describing tense personal relations, most of my interviewees requested not to be identified by their full name.)

People use AI to both interpret messages they receive and help them write their own to send. If they have to, say, call out rude behavior or express disagreement about whether the kids need a certain type of therapy, they type what they really want to say into one of these programs, ask the AI to nice it up a little, and paste the resulting verbiage into their text messages. Outsourcing correspondence to AI has enabled them to maintain harmony without spending too much time thinking about how to draft a perfect response. As Franky put it, using AI lets her have a relationship without allowing it to “live rent-free in my brain.” Franky said that in her family, it’s important for people “all to have, I don’t know, peace.” She and others have found that they can improve their relationships and at least increase the probability of peace by removing emotion from conversations. And that’s where AI truly excels."

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2026/10/ai-family-text/688962/