The Atlantic

After 42 years of academic life, "I am hanging it up," Eliot A. Cohen writes. "I leave elite academe with doubts and foreboding that I would not have anticipated when I completed my formal education in 1982."

What would happen if Donald Trump actually ran a competent campaign? The co-architects of his 2024 bid believe he could remake the electoral map, Tim Alberta reports. https://lnkd.in/errjMPQz “The consensus of the political class post-2020 held that Trump’s base was maxed out,” Alberta writes. Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign chiefs, and James Blair, his political director, disagree. During the elections she ran in Florida, Wiles says she discovered about a million Trump supporters who had no history of engagement with the state party apparatus—but who, when contacted, sometimes became Trump’s most willing volunteers. In Iowa, where Trump was outspent heavily in the primary by Ron DeSantis, she believes these low-propensity voters carried Trump to victory. But Trump was always heavily favored to win Iowa, and skeptics argue that his indictment powered his margins. Scaling this strategy to a national level in a few months may not be possible. The Trump campaign plans to focus on four battleground states that it sees as crucial to the presidential election—potentially at the cost of downballot races. “Republican officials in key states have complained for months about Trump’s practically nonexistent presence on the ground,” Alberta writes. One Trump aide “predicted that Wiles, LaCivita, and Blair will either look like geniuses who revolutionized Republican politics—or the biggest morons ever put in charge of a presidential campaign.” Another major factor: Trump has surmounted his disdain for mail-in voting, which the campaign believes it can use to attract a slice of the electorate the GOP has spent two decades ignoring: low-propensity left-leaning voters, especially young men of color. If Trump can siphon off any significant chunk of those voters, Alberta writes, “the math for the Democrats isn’t going to work.” And if Trump can do so while maintaining a sizable portion of suburban white women, the election could be a blowout. “Wiles and LaCivita wouldn’t simply be credited with electing a president,” Alberta continues. “They would be remembered for running a campaign that altered the nation’s political DNA.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the businesswoman Arianna Huffington recently announced a new company called Thrive AI Health, which they believe could help revolutionize healthcare using generative AI. Charlie Warzel has his doubts—so he asked them about it.

Taylor Swift "has offered millions of teenagers—and their parents—the purest freedom of all, the freedom to be an absolute dork," Helen Lewis writes:

After a 12-year legal struggle, New York City’s Elizabeth Street Garden—a serene public park in Lower Manhattan—will be evicted this fall, and the lot will be sold to developers. But as cities and neighborhoods grow denser and more developed, green spaces are becoming more necessary, Naomi Huffman writes. https://lnkd.in/ePtesQwr In her new book, “The Garden Against Time,” Olivia Laing argues that people’s lives are enriched by having access to free green space. But, Huffman writes, Laing neglects to offer specific ideas about how investing in gardens might lead to a more equitable future. For Laing, the importance of accessible green spaces became clear when she moved to the English countryside. There, Laing took to writing about her work transforming an overgrown, long-neglected garden. “I had hoped Laing might explain how the work she performed in her garden—slow, often frustrating, inglorious—offers a rich metaphor for activism,” Huffman writes. “Instead, she mostly focuses on how her garden offers her space for meditation, isolation, and respite from the calamitous news cycle.” “Laing does not meaningfully acknowledge the paradox of relishing her private garden while insisting that we would all benefit from more public access to more land,” Huffman writes. And though “The Garden Against Time” identifies many of the social and political forces that have long permitted the wealthiest to dictate who has had access to green space over time, little attention is given to the privatization of land today. The destruction of the Elizabeth Street Garden “will be an extraordinary loss,” Huffman writes. “Those of us lucky enough to have experienced it might … imagine a future in which gardens are not concealed behind high walls or stifled by corporate greed, but flourish freely, for all.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/ePtesQwr 📸: Amr Alfiky / The New York Times / Redux

Donald Trump used to talk about taking on corporate power. Now he’s openly pandering to plutocrats—and polling more strongly than ever, Rogé Karma writes.

"Vice President Kamala Harris seemed to have one goal at a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, yesterday," John Hendrickson writes: "Prove she’s ready to square up to Donald Trump."

“If you’re an excitable type (like me), plan a way to get a few hours, or even a few meaningful minutes, of solitude when you need to calm down,” advises Arthur C. Brooks: https://lnkd.in/ebCNG-qi

“Longlegs” is “The Silence of the Lambs” meets “Hereditary,” writes David Sims—and, yes, it really is that scary:

Only about four percent of people in the U.S. avoid eating meat. But for such a rare—and fundamentally personal—lifestyle choice, vegetarians are still a stigmatized group that attracts a lot of negative views, Ellen Cushing writes in Time-Travel Thursdays: