Edward Tenner

The defiant speech from Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming after her defeat in yesterday’s Republican primary could be reduced to a single message: This is round one.

Cheney didn’t specify how, or where, she intends to continue her struggle against former President Donald Trump, after Harriet Hageman, the candidate Trump endorsed, routed her by more than two to one in the primary for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat.

But Cheney dropped a big hint when she noted that the GOP’s Founding Father, Abraham Lincoln, lost elections for the House and Senate “before he won the most important election of all” by capturing the presidency. This morning, she went a step further, telling the Today show that she was “thinking about” joining the 2024 Republican presidential race.

A quick skim of the CDC’s latest COVID guidelines might give the impression that this fall could feel a lot like the ones we had in the Before Times. Millions of Americans will be working in person at offices, and schools and universities will be back in full swing. There will be few or no masking, testing, or vaccination mandates in place. Sniffles or viral exposures won’t be reason enough to keep employees or students at home. And requirements for “six feet” will be mostly relegated to the Tinder profiles of those seeking trysts with the tall.

Americans have been given the all clear to dispense with most of the pandemic-centric behaviors that have defined the past two-plus years—part and parcel of the narrative the Biden administration is building around the “triumphant return to normalcy,” says Joshua Salomon, a health-policy researcher at Stanford. Where mitigation measures once moved in near lockstep with case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths, they’re now on separate tracks; the focus with COVID is, more explicitly than ever before, on avoiding only severe illness and death. The country seems close to declaring the national public-health emergency done—and short of that proclamation, officials are already “effectively acting as though it’s over,” says Lakshmi Ganapathi, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital. If there’s such a thing as a “soft closing” of the COVID crisis, this latest juncture might be it.

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It’s rare to see a politician speak hard truths to surly—and even dangerous—fellow citizens, but that’s exactly what Liz Cheney did in her concession speech last night.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

• Paul Manafort is back.
• Monkeypox doesn’t need to be renamed.
• The Court’s liberals still have power.

‘I Love My Country More.’

Representative Liz Cheney was blown out in her reelection bid last night. She lost the Wyoming Republican primary to Harriet Hageman, which in their deep-red state is tantamount to losing the general election. Hageman was once a Cheney ally and a critic of Donald Trump, but she is now a Trump booster and an election denier. Like so many Republicans, Hageman has decided that the humiliation of bending the knee to Trump is a price worth paying in order to live in Washington, D.C.

The title of Paul Manafort’s memoir, Political Prisoner, is ridiculous, but at least he’s writing what he knows. For much of his professional life, Manafort served as a lobbyist and an image consultant for the world’s most prolific torturers. One of his clients, the Angolan revolutionary Jonas Savimbi, led an army that incinerated its enemies alive. Another of his clients, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, dumped hundreds of mutilated corpses in the streets to show the price of opposing him.

After spending 23 months in prison on charges of bank fraud, witness tampering, conspiracy, and tax evasion—the longest stretch in a low-security facility in Pennsylvania—Manafort now places himself in the same category as the victims of rape and beatings whose suffering he was once handsomely paid to minimize. This grotesque conflation feels like the fitting capstone to his career.

Last spring, my boyfriend sublet a spare room in his apartment to an aspiring model. The roommate was young and made us feel old, but he was always game for a bottle of wine in the living room, and he seemed to like us, even though he sometimes suggested that we were boring or not that hot.

One night, he and my boyfriend started bickering about which Lorde album is better, the first one or the second one. This kind of argument can be entertaining if the participants are making funny or interesting points, but they weren’t, and they wouldn’t drop it. The roommate was getting louder and louder; my boyfriend was repeating himself. It was Friday; I was tired. I snapped and said, loudly, “This conversation is dumb, and I don’t want to keep having it.” I knew it was rude, but I thought it was expedient, eldest-sibling rude. So I was sort of shocked when the roommate got up without a word, went into his room, slammed the door, and never spoke to me again.

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants. Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled SANCTUM ROSARIUM alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.

Today I have for you a collection of photos of structures around the world that were built high atop mountains, cliffs, and stone pillars. These remote buildings range in age from palace complexes thousands of years old to tourist destinations built mere decades ago. These observatories, monasteries, castles, towers, forts, and palaces were all built for different reasons—as defensive measures, or to make the most of a grand view, or maybe just to take advantage of a remote location’s tranquil setting.

To tell the story of how a purported cow tooth dug up in the Caribbean might corroborate the mythical origin of wild horses off the coast of Maryland and Virginia, let us begin, naturally, with a children’s book, Misty of Chincoteague.

If you know, you know—horse girls, I’m looking at you. For everyone else: This beloved 1947 children’s novel tells the story of Misty the pony, born on the beaches of an uninhabited barrier island. The story is fictional, but the setting is real. A band of wild horses still roams that island today, eating seagrass and largely ignoring tourists who come for selfies with a real-life version of Misty.

No one knows how the horses first arrived there, but Misty of Chincoteague retells a dramatic bit of local lore. It opens with literal Sturm und Drang. A Spanish galleon carrying Moorish ponies to the gold mines of Peru shipwrecks off the coast of what will later become Maryland and Virginia. The crew perishes, but the ponies swim to a nearby island and survive. “The seasons came and went,” the book goes, “and the ponies adopted the New World as their own.” In their newfound freedom, they became wild—or technically, feral, domesticated but untamed. Today, the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company, which manages the southern half of this horse population for historical reasons, promulgates the shipwreck origin story of the island ponies. The National Park Service, which manages the northern half, tells a decidedly less romantic tale: 17th-century settlers probably brought these horses with them.

To become law, a Supreme Court opinion needs the backing of five justices. That reality has forced progressive justices for almost 50 years to compromise with center-right justices, resulting in legal doctrine rife with contradictions and loopholes, which conservatives have ruthlessly exploited to pare back the rights of women, racial minorities, and the gay community. Progressive justices had to make these bargains in order to get the five votes needed to be in the majority. That’s how things work.

But now that the progressive bench has been whittled down to three, these justices’ job has changed. Now they will be writing dissents, and in a dissent, there is nothing to lose. The Court’s three liberal justices—Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—should take advantage of this new freedom and leave behind their old role as salvagers of compromise and embrace their new one as prophets of doctrinal revolution.

Joseph Osmundson, a microbiologist at NYU, was walking home recently in New York City when a stranger abruptly shouted “Monkeypox!” at him. He wasn’t infected with the virus, which has been spreading largely through intimate contact between men, nor did he have the characteristic skin lesions. So he must have been targeted for this catcall, he told me, on account of his being “visibly gay.” From his perspective, the name of the disease has made a painful outbreak worse. “Not only is this virus horrible, and people are suffering,” he said, “but it’s also fucking called monkeypox. Are you kidding?”

Since the global crisis started in the spring, efforts to contain the spread of monkeypox have developed in parallel with efforts to change its formal identity. In June, more than two dozen virologists and public-health experts put out a call for a “neutral, non-discriminatory and non-stigmitizing” nomenclature for the virus and its subtypes; World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus responded by announcing a formal process to create one. A month later, with monkeypox still mired in linguistic purgatory, the health commissioner of New York City issued an open letter to Ghebreyesus warning that a “public health failure of words with potentially catastrophic consequences” was imminent. “Words can save lives or put them at further risk,” the letter said. “The WHO must act in this moment before it is too late.”