Kaid Benfield

French President Emmanuel Macron has to be wondering why former President Donald Trump retained, of all things, information about him. I certainly am; aren’t you? According to an inventory of what the FBI took from Mar-a-Lago during last week’s search and recovery of materials from Trump’s home, the French dossier, so to speak, stood out. Why Macron? Lest we forget, France is a friend and partner to the U.S., most notably in the unified response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

For now, we’re stuck with a maddening uncertainty about the true stakes of the matter: If Trump was holding on to personal information—perhaps mere tittle-tattle—about the leader of an allied nation, as well, reportedly, as top-secret intelligence about nuclear capabilities, then why? We swing between gossip and fear, the scurrilous and the deadly serious, The Real Housewives and The Walking Dead. We parse the judicial warrant, including an Espionage Act charge, for clues. The temptation to indulge in overheated speculation, particularly for some of Trump’s more partisan critics, is irresistible—but irresponsible, as The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols has warned.

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.

By this point, the pandemic saga has introduced us to a cast of recurring characters. Among them are the Chill Friend, who is totally over COVID precautions at this point, and the Unlucky Acquaintance, who has had COVID three times and brings it up whenever someone else falls sick. And then there is the Person Whose Roommate Has COVID. You know the type: They’ll describe, in the hushed tones usually reserved for tragic gossip, how and when their live-in friend, partner, child, or whoever came down with the virus—before interjecting, “But I feel fine! … For now.” Nervous laughter ensues. Whether their house is dealing with a blazing-fever situation or a mild-cough one, Person Whose Roommate Has COVID always has the same underlying worry: Am I next?

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I’ve been thinking about the threats against law enforcement and Trump’s barely veiled warning to Attorney General Merrick Garland about a “country on fire.” We should no longer wonder if we can avert a new era of political violence in the United States. It’s already here.

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

• Why Trump’s safe was not safe
• The country that suffers whenever Russia schemes
• The odds of getting COVID from your housemate are “about a coin flip.”

A Deepening Void

Civil war is among the many terms we now use too easily. The American Civil War was a bloodbath driven by the inevitable confrontation between the Union and the organized forces of sedition and slavery. But at least the Civil War, as I said Friday on Morning Joe during a panel on political violence in America, was about something. Compared with the bizarre ideas and half-baked wackiness that now infest American political life, the arguments between the North and the South look like a deep treatise on government.

It’s suddenly become acceptable to say that COVID is—or will soon be—like the flu. Such analogies have long been the preserve of pandemic minimizers, but lately they’ve been creeping into more enlightened circles. Last month the dean of a medical school wrote an open letter to his students suggesting that for a vaccinated person, the risk of death from COVID-19 is “in the same realm, or even lower, as the average American’s risk from flu.” A few days later, David Leonhardt said as much to his millions of readers in the The New York Times’ morning newsletter. And three prominent public-health experts have called for the government to recognize a “new normal” in which the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus “is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses that include influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more.”

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.

Deep in the loamy soil of forests around the world, there exists a fungus called the honey mushroom that makes its living on death. A parasite that preys on weak trees, it sucks its victims dry of nutrients, then feasts on their postmortem flesh. Orchards and vineyards have fallen to it; gardeners, farmers, and foresters spend their days fruitlessly fighting the pesticide-resistant scourge. Although the bulk of the fungus’s mass is underground, its devastation is visible to anyone who’s flown over the gray, balding patches of woodland where the pathogen has felled its hosts.

The honey mushroom is also an exemplar of the extreme forms that life can take. Thousands of years ago, one honey-fungus species, Armillaria ostoyae (also known as Armillaria solidipes), birthed a spore that settled in what we now think of as Oregon, started to spread, and never stopped. “It was just extremely, extremely successful at growing,” says Adriana Romero Olivares, a mycologist at New Mexico State University. “And so it got extremely, extremely large.” Today, that individual fungus inhabits roughly 2,400 acres of earth. Nicknamed Humongous Fungus, it is one of the planet’s largest known organisms, and the biggest ever recorded by area on land.

In the three decades since Moldova gained its independence, Russia has spent billions, perhaps trillions, of rubles to subvert this tiny country sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine. At different times, using different tactics, Russian security services have helped create and nurture pro-Russia political parties, pro-Russia media, and pro-Russia social-media campaigns in Moldova. Russian “entrepreneurs” created a web of corruption in Moldova, too, culminating in the spectacular scheme known as the Moldovan Laundromat. In that venture, a group of Moldovan banks, with the support of several senior Moldovan politicians, among others, helped launder more than $20 billion of illicit Russian money from 2010 to 2014.

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I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. My wife can’t drive my car, which limits our transit options. And when I’m at the wheel, I can’t hold a cold, delicious slushie in one hand, at least not safely. But despite the inconvenience, I love a manual transmission. I love the feeling that I am operating my car, not just driving it. That’s why I’ve driven stick shifts for the past 20 years.

That streak may soon be over. When it comes time to replace my current car, I probably won’t be able to get another like it. In 2000, more than 15 percent of new and used cars sold by the auto retailer CarMax came with stick shifts; by 2020, that figure had dropped to 2.4 percent. Among the hundreds of new car models for sale in the United States this year, only about 30 can be purchased with a manual transmission. Electric cars, which now account for more than 5 percent of car sales, don’t even have gearboxes. There are rumors that Mercedes-Benz plans to retire manuals entirely by the end of next year, all around the world, in a decision driven partly by electrification; Volkswagen is said to be dropping its own by 2030, and other brands are sure to follow. Stick shifts have long been a niche market in the U.S. Soon they’ll be extinct.

When the activist and writer Ellen Willis published “Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution” in 1982, the preposition in her title underscored an uncomfortable truth: The sexual revolution had come and (mostly) gone and left women largely unsatisfied. On the one hand, the ’60s and ’70s had ushered in real, tangible gains. Contraception and abortion had been legalized; the stigmas surrounding casual and extramarital sex had lessened. For women, there weren’t as many punishments for daring to have sex as there had been before. Still, the rewards hadn’t entirely materialized, either. Willis is chiefly remembered today for defining the concept of pro-sex feminism, refusing to condemn pornography—as many feminists did—and espousing the radical idea that “sexual love in its most passionate sense is as basic to happiness as food is to life.” But the new “liberated” sexuality, Willis noted in the early ’80s, was “often depressingly shallow, exploitative, and joyless.” True sexual liberation, she argued, would involve “not only the abolition of restrictions, but the positive presence of social and psychological conditions that foster satisfying sexual relations. And from that standpoint, this culture is still deeply repressive.”