Deseret Magazine January 2026

THE AFTERMATH GOV. SPENCER COX AND THE CHARLIE KIRK KILLING

WHY CONGRESS IS FAILING

GOODBYE TO SUNDANCE

STUCK IN LIMBO

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CONTENTS

38 THE BROKEN BRANCH HOW CONGRESS BECAME THE MOST DYSFUNCTIONAL ARM OF GOVERNMENT.

BY JAY COST

“Time after time, Congress has allowed the president to walk all over it.”

58 THE CRUCIBLE OF SPENCER COX A GOVERNOR’S PURSUIT OF UNITY AFTER THE CHARLIE KIRK KILLING.

BY JESSE HYDE

THE AFTERMATH GOV. SPENCER COX AND THE CHARLIE KIRK KILLING

WHY CONGRESS IS FAILING

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O N THE COVER P HOTO G R A P HY BY M AR K OWE N S

WHAT WILL BE LOST WHEN THE FILM FESTIVAL LEAVES UTAH?

BY NATALIA GALICZA

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026

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From the rise of the nones to shifting beliefs and practices, it’s the clearest view yet of the role of religion in our country.

See what’s changing at pewresearch.org/rls

CONTENTS

“The American dream is the opportunity to have, by your effort, what you couldn’t have in your country.”

LETTERS FROM THE FIELD

32 AMERICAN LIMBO Cubans stuck in Mexico City confront the new realities of immigration.

BY ETHAN BAUER

IDEAS

THE NEW LUDDITES 70 Meet the Americans ditching their smartphones.

BY ZACHARY DAVIS

COMMENTARY

FROM FEAR TO FREEDOM

POINT/COUNTERPOINT

13

Hope as a lifeline and force for good.

JUDGE NOT?

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

16

OUT OF REFILLS Why pharmacies are disappearing in rural America.

Mandatory minimums on trial.

BY ETHAN BAUER

BY NUBIA PEÑA

BY VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY

BREAKDOWN

THE WEST

ACCESS AND ALLIES

24

BANK SHOT

14

The modern geopolitics of the Arctic.

A Black-owned bank comes to an unlikely place.

BY NATALIA GALICZA

BY ETHAN BAUER

28

INTERVIEW

BACK FROM THE BRINK

76

Sen. Mark Kelly and the plague of political violence.

MODERN FAMILY

FORGIVING MY HELICOPTER PARENTS

18

ODE

AGAINST THE GRAIN

How trauma impacts parenting.

An ode to a wooden pew.

BY VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY

BY ETHAN BAUER

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026

80

5

CONTRIBUTORS

NUBIA PEÑA

JAY COST

HELENA PALLARÉS

Peña is director of strategic partnerships and external engagement for Gilead Sciences, a global biopharmaceutical company. She is a past director of the Utah Division of Multicultural Affairs and a senior adviser to Gov. Spencer Cox. A former law enforcement victim advocate, Peña’s commentary on hope as a bridge from fear to freedom is on page 13.

Cost is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. A contributing editor at the Washington Examiner and the author of several books on American political history, his latest book, “Democracy or Republic: The People and the Constitution,” is due for release this year.

Cost’s feature story on restoring Congress’ role in governing is on page 38.

Pallarés is a Paris-based illustrator and designer, whose work has been exhibited in London, Paris, Shanghai, Istanbul, Évora, Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao. Her many clients include The Washington Post, Madame Figaro, Glamour, Harvard and Stanford universities and the Berklee College of Music. Pallarés’ illustration can be seen on page 16.

JESSE HYDE

MIRIAM MARTINCIC

ZACHARY DAVIS

Hyde is editor of Deseret Magazine. He has reported from Haiti, Russia, Guatemala, Ethiopia, China and the Philippines for the Deseret News. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Hyde’s feature on Utah Gov. Spencer Cox navigating today’s hyperpartisan politics is on page 58.

A teacher of illustration and design at Iowa State University. Martincic’s work has appeared in Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Harper’s and been recognized by the Society of Illustrators in New York and Los Angeles, American Illustration and World Illustration Awards, and other groups. Martincic’s illustration is on page 19.

Davis is executive director of Faith Matters and editor of Wayfare Magazine. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School and Brigham Young University, he is also host of the podcasts “Article 13,” “Writ Large,” and “Ministry of Ideas.” His essay on the modern-day resistance against technology is on page 70.

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THE VIEW FROM HERE

AFTER THE SHOCK

S

ometimes a single moment can change your world. That happened for many of our readers on September 10, 2025, when conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was fatally shot at Utah Valley University. Among them was the embattled governor of our small red state, who found himself fielding media requests from the Moab Times and The New York Times, from cable networks and foreign outlets he’d never heard of. Suddenly, Spencer Cox was in the middle of the biggest news story in the world.

The assassination of one of America’s most vocal political figures was, of course, more than a headline. It was a tragedy, the senseless killing of a husband and father. And it was one more indicator, perhaps the most troubling yet, of a country deeply divided.

Reactions to Kirk’s murder in my own social circle revealed hints of that divide. Some friends had never heard of Kirk. They were rarely online, or they lean left. Some were shocked or angry or nearly bowled over with grief. My wife’s boss couldn’t stop crying.

Others were somewhere in between — bewildered by the intense response in some corners, aghast at those few who celebrated his death, or offended when they came across certain incendiary things Kirk had said over the years.

What I felt, besides shock and sadness, was a more primal emotion: fear. I was afraid of what this could unleash. I worried that this act of political violence, born of our divisions, could send the country somewhere darker and even more dangerous, into a cycle of violence and reprisal, the kind most of us have only read about.

At first, it felt like I was right to be afraid — like we were hurtling in that direction. Unhinged conspiracy theories germinated and bloomed on social media, and seemed to gain force with each passing hour. The dialogue was tribal. It was us versus them.

There were calls for retribution. And no one in national leadership seemed to be calming things down.

And then Spencer Cox stepped into that void.

In this month’s cover story, “The Crucible of Spencer Cox” (page 58), I try to capture what happened next and how Cox met the

moment, emerging as the unlikely voice urging our nation to find our better angels. He asked the country to remember that political disagreement isn’t supposed to curdle into hatred, that we don’t have to see our rivals as enemies, that violence over ideas cannot be the cost of living in a democracy.

When I met Cox in his office, roughly two months after Kirk’s assassination, he seemed a little weary — but also, to my surprise, optimistic. The calls for retribution had, like most things on social media, surfaced loudly and then fizzled out. There had been no rioting, no reprisals. And the way the country, and even the world, had responded to his message offered a glimmer of hope in an era that has, at times, felt pretty dismal.

Maybe this moment is different, Cox told me. Maybe Kirk’s assassination will be more than part of a black chapter in our nation’s history. Maybe it will be a turning point. Maybe it will help us to see what our divisions have cost us.

Other stories in this issue serve as a nice complement to our cover story but circle similar themes and tension points. McKay Coppins talks to Sen. Mark Kelly about the roots of political violence (page 76). Staff writer Ethan Bauer travels to Mexico City to speak with Cuban refugees stuck in Mexico but dreaming of America’s unique promises of safety, prosperity and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in our Bill of Rights (page 32). And Zachary Davis introduces us to a group of people who have ditched their smartphones altogether (page 70) — which made me think of Spencer Cox, and his diagnosis that so much of what ails us happens on social media.

Taken together, I hope these stories can remind us of something we can be too quick to forget: that our neighbors, or that one cousin or nephew who really likes to argue, or even people who hold values that are directly in opposition to the beliefs we hold most dear, are also citizens of this great republic and deserve a little patience and grace. At least the same measure we expect them to give. And perhaps, if we keep this in mind, we can all find those better angels.

—JESSE HYDE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026

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Our NOVEMBER cover story examined the current state and future of the Democratic Party (“Democrats in the Wilderness”). Contributing writer Eric Schulzke reported on the party being adrift and out of touch one year after losing the White House and control of the U.S. Senate. Since the story was published, New Yorkers elected as mayor Zohran Mamdani, who represents a more radical left wing of the party that some consultants Schulzke interviewed believe should be the new path forward, while others told him a more moderate message would appeal to a broader swath of voters. Our readers had their views, as well, on what the party leaders can do to regain lost ground in upcoming elections. “If Dems are planning to use Mamdani as a template, they will continue to lose elections,” wrote Dan Kelson. “One of the Dems’ greatest strategic flaws is thinking that carrying major urban centers is enough to win elections. In a center-right country like the U.S., it’s not.” Kim Juretich also saw Democrats taking a hard turn left as a recipe for alienating more voters. “Whomever is supposedly leading this political party ought to more carefully script the next platform to speak to a greater population of U.S. voters.” Staff writer Natalia Galicza showed readers what it’s like to live in America’s most polluted city — Bakersfield, California (“Still Breathing”). She traveled to the city in California’s Central Valley and spoke with residents who endure what the American Lung Association has ranked as the worst year-round particle pollution in the nation six years running. Many readers debated over the cause of the pollution and what role government plays in cleaning up the air and regulating industry in areas like Bakersfield. A reader who identified online as Justinstiches described how he still suffers from asthma developed growing up in the polluted air of California’s Imperial Valley, just S T I L L B r e at h i n g over the border from Mexicali, which imposed no pollution controls on industry. “The battle between control and free rein has been going on for nearly 100 years in California,” he wrote. “It hasn’t been just Trump. He’s just the latest.”

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“One of the Dems’ greatest strategic flaws is thinking that carrying major urban centers is enough to win elections.”

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COMMENTARY

FROM FEAR TO FREEDOM HOPE AS A FORCE FOR GOOD

BY N UBI A P EÑ A

O

ver the course of my career, I served as a victim advocate, juvenile defense attorney and policy adviser, working alongside underresourced communities facing complex trauma and uncertainty. During those years, one truth has been affirmed time and again: In the face of adversity, hope is more than a fleeting feeling. It is not a simple wish — it is a force that heals. Hope moves the soul forward, step by step, through the darkest valleys.

And each of us has the capacity to inspire it in others.

One unforgettable exchange reminded me of this truth.

At the conclusion of a commencement ceremony where I served as keynote speaker, a woman approached me with tears in her eyes.

“Do you remember me?” she asked softly. I admitted I did not, and she gently reminded me: “You were my advocate.” Turning, she pointed to a graduate in regalia — her youngest child — and said, “You held my hand for hours, prayed for me, and told me it would be OK. You were right.” She shared the CliffsNotes of her life, confirming that the belief that she could offer her children a different future gave her the courage to persist.

In that instant, time rewound.

Fifteen years earlier, I had walked into a hospital room at 2 a.m. after receiving a dispatch as the advocate on call. Escorted by a nurse, I found a woman with visible injuries, holding three small children in pajamas, barefoot and frightened, their night disrupted by violence. Unsurprisingly, they were scared and unwilling to engage. It took time before we could talk about what happened, ask what she needed and begin to plan for what would follow.

ILLU STR ATION BY KY LE H I LTO N

It was in times like these that 19th-century Baptist minister and author Charles Spurgeon’s words came alive for me: “Hope is like a star — not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity, and only to be discovered in the night of adversity.” After years of working in hospital rooms, homeless shelters, detention centers and courtrooms, where fear was real and choices felt impossible, I learned that it is both a responsibility and a privilege to hold hope when others cannot. To cultivate it when it is absent, and to lend it when others feel lost. I adopted a mantra I would share — for myself as much as for my clients: “I know today is hard, but I believe that with time, it can be better.” I understood that the only gift I could offer during those moments was not a solution but hope itself.

Science affirms what experience taught me. Chan Hellman, executive director of the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma, teaches that hope is not passive optimism; it is an active process involving goals, pathways and agency. Hope is the ability to see possibilities and believe in one’s capacity to pursue them.

Simply put, he defines it as “the belief that the future will be better and that you have the power to make it so.” Hellman’s research demonstrates that hope predicts well-being, resilience and recovery, especially for those who have endured trauma. Neuroscience confirms this truth: hope activates the brain’s prefrontal cortex, reduces stress hormones, and increases dopamine, fueling motivation and problem-solving.

In other words, hope is both a science and a lifeline — a bridge between fear and freedom.

That night, holding the hand of my client, I offered hope. Fifteen years later, holding her hands once again, I saw its harvest. A mother who believed her tomorrow could be better for her daughters, now standing free, bold and triumphant.

Imagine the ripple effect if each of us chose to be a hope bearer: someone who not only believes in a better future but actively helps others see it and pursue it.

Instilling hope begins with small acts: listening deeply, nurturing empathy, speaking words of possibility, and reminding others of their strength and worth. Hellman’s work further teaches us that while individual hope is powerful, collective hope is transformative, and more importantly, it is contagious. It grows into a movement when we care for those in need and join people in their challenging moments, choosing to offer hope in the form of kindness, resources and connection.

So I invite each of us to adopt hope as a shared responsibility, a science-backed force for good and a necessary strategy that offers light to pierce the darkest nights. Together, we can create a world where hope is not rare but radiant and abundant — where each of us become a bright star encouraging one another toward a better tomorrow.

N UB I A P E Ñ A I S D I R E C TO R O F S T R AT E GI C PART N E R S H I P S AN D EXT ER N AL EN G AG EMEN T AT GI L E AD S C I E N C E S AN D A F O R M E R S E N I O R ADV I S E R TO U TAH G OV. SP EN CER COX.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026

13

THE BREAKDOWN

ACCESS AND ALLIES MODERN GEOPOLITICS NORTH OF THE 66TH PARALLEL

ONCE A FROZEN and impassable wilderness, the warming Arctic has become the setting for a new “Great Game.” Like the imperial powers that engaged in that fabled (and largely ill-fated) 19th-century colonial venture, five Arctic nations are jockeying to control the increasingly strategic polar region and its wealth of untapped resources.

Rising temperatures and receding ice have made Arctic waters and the land around and beneath them accessible to shipping, fishing, scientific research and mineral extraction. With vast stores of critical resources at stake, this race will shape the global future. Here’s the Breakdown. — N ATA LI A G A LI C Z A

509 YEARS LATER …

John Cabot sailed from England in 1497 seeking a “Northwest Passage” to Asia via the Arctic. He failed. More died trying, including a combined crew of 129 from two British ships that set sail in 1845. Norway’s Roald Amundsen finally completed the voyage in 1906 with six crewmembers on a 70-foot sloop. Since 2007, each summer the ice temporarily recedes enough to open the route. In 2024, 1,781 ships entered the Arctic — primarily fishing vessels and cargo ships — up 40 percent in a decade.

THE LAST POLAR TREK

In 2014, 46 years after a Minnesota insurance salesman led the first expedition to indisputably reach the North Pole over the ice, two Coloradobased explorers completed what is likely the last such trek on foot. One-fifth of the polar ice cap has disappeared since 1979. Arctic temperatures are rising at nearly four times the planetary rate.

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1,669 TRILLION CUBIC FEET

That’s the estimate of natural gas in the Arctic, more than all of Russia: about 30 percent of undiscovered global reserves along with 13 percent of undiscovered oil. Last year, the U.S. started offering oil and gas leases on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s 1.56 million-acre coastal plain, where up to 12.8 billion barrels of oil deposits await. Oil drilling in the adjacent Chukchi Sea entails a 75-percent risk of a major spill, per the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

7

MILITARIES ARE ACTIVE IN THE ARCTIC

920 POUNDS

That’s the weight of rare earth elements built into each F-35 fighter jet. Fifteen of the 60 minerals deemed “critical” to U.S. economic or national security are rare earth elements. More than 70 percent of rare earth minerals are mined in China; 90 percent are processed there. Demand is expected to almost triple by 2030. Greenland alone has 1.5 million tons of rare-earth deposits like neodymium and dysprosium, critical to smartphones, hybrid cars, wind turbines and Tesla’s new humanoid robots.

1/5

OF THE POLAR ICE CAP HAS DISAPPEARED SINCE 1979.

30%

OF UNDISCOVERED NATURAL GAS RESERVES ARE IN THE REGION

ILLU STR ATION BY JA M E S G U LLI V E R H A N CO C K

69 MILITARY BASES

That’s the best estimate of staffed facilities in the Arctic between Russia (32), Norway (15), Canada (eight), Denmark/ Greenland (three), Iceland (one) and the U.S. (10, but just one inside the Arctic Circle). Russia has reportedly reopened 13 Soviet-era airfields among 50 refurbished installations in the region since 2007. Arctic defense is seen as one reason Canada bought 88 American F-35 fighter jets. Russia just added a combat ship to its fleet of more than 40 icebreakers, eight of them nuclear-powered.

The U.S. has three, plus 17 in the works. China has four.

“ I F WA S H I N G TO N D O E S N OT R E S O LV E T H E DEFICIENCIES AND CO N T R A D I C T I O N S OF ITS ARCTIC S T R AT E GY S O O N , I T M AY F I N D T H AT I T H A S A L R E A DY LO S T T H E N E W G R E AT G A M E .”

H E AT H E R A . C O N L E Y, NONRESIDENT SENIOR F E L LOW AT T H E A M E R I C A N ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE, F O R F O R E I G N A F FA I R S

‘NEAR-ARCTIC STATE’

China joined the fray in 2018, claiming this title through a State Council white paper on Arctic policy. By 2024, the Chinese and Russian militaries were flexing in the region with joint coast guard patrols and naval exercises. U.S. and Canadian jets intercepted a Sino-Russian bomber patrol near Alaska. Russian and Chinese warships both patrol near the Aleutian Islands.

-1,200 METERS

The Arctic Ocean is shallow compared to the mean depths of its counterparts, like the Atlantic (-3,646 meters) and Pacific (-4,080 meters).

Nearly a third of its floor is continental shelf. The Eurasian Shelf is 930 miles wide, largest in the world. Russia holds 53 percent of Arctic coastline with 14,999 miles. There are 36,563 islands in Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, inhabited since 2500 B.C.E. Less than 40 percent of Alaska’s seabed has been mapped; the NOAA plans to finish mapping the Arctic coastal zone by 2030.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026

15

POINT / COUNTERPOINT

JUDGE NOT? MANDATORY MINIMUMS ON TRIAL

MANDATORY MINIMUM SENTENCES require judges to impose fixed prison terms for certain

crimes regardless of circumstances. They emerged in the 1980s along with the war on drugs, “tough on crime” politics and concerns about sentencing inconsistencies, dramatically curtailing the discretion of state and federal judges in relevant cases. From the beginning, these sentencing strictures have raised questions about the nature of justice and the quality of mercy. The opposing arguments reflect competing visions of fairness: equal treatment through standardization versus the wisdom of judges weighing each case in context. Which should our legal system prioritize? — ET HA N B AUER

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JUSTICE IS SERVED MANDATORY MINIMUMS DEFINE the stakes of com-

mitting certain crimes, then punish accordingly, leaving no room for sentimentality or bias.

They embody fairness as our legal system defines it: equal justice under the law, for everyone, regardless of race or class, gender or immigration status. By establishing a floor for punishment, mandatory minimums standardize what could otherwise be head-spinning variance from one jurisdiction to another. They ensure that certain crimes will be punished according to the will of the people, rather than the personal whims of different judges.

Mandatory minimums also help to deter would-be criminals. Research shows that certainty of punishment is more important to deterrence than severity, although the latter can also help by extending the time in confinement where it is impossible for inmates to reoffend. No wonder the proliferation of mandatory minimums has coincided with plummeting crime nationwide. “As determinate sentencing and existing mandatory minimums have taken hold over the last generation,” says Georgetown Law adjunct professor Bill Otis, “crime is down by 50 percent. Not only is the system of determinate sentencing not broken, it is very likely the most successful domestic initiative of the last half-century.”

By primarily targeting serious criminals and repeat offenders — the federal system exempts certain low-level defendants — mandatory minimums give prosecutors the leverage they need to achieve justice quickly and consistently by negotiating plea bargains from a position of strength. Avoiding expensive trials keeps costs down. That same leverage can be used to persuade defendants to disclose information that can be used to dismantle criminal organizations, especially useful in drug cases. They are a valuable tool in our shared pursuit of public safety.

Less frequently discussed, mandatory minimums are also more democratic. They’re determined by legislators, who are directly elected to embody the will of the people.

Meanwhile, reforms that would eliminate these standards threaten to reverse downturns in violent crime. “It will give more power to ideologically driven judges for whom no criminal is without an excuse,” adds Otis, “and it will pave the way for the creeping return of irrational disparity in sentencing.”

ILLU STR ATION BY H E LE N A PA LLA R É S

ONE SIZE FAILS ALL human judgment and replace it with flat, bureaucratic rules.

Judges exist to judge, and their sentencing decisions, which come after guilt has been determined by jury or a change of plea, have perhaps the most gravity. Informed by the available facts, victim-impact statements and mitigating factors, they’re uniquely positioned to weigh the circumstances of each defendant. Mandatory minimums strip away this great power and responsibility, replacing it with something less than just.

It may seem counterintuitive, but mandatory minimums disproportionately impact minority populations. Researchers at the University of Michigan have shown that prosecutors are more likely to bring charges that carry mandatory minimums against Black offenders. Another study found that prosecutors were more likely to charge Black and Latino defendants with such crimes, more so in states that separately rated higher in metrics of racism and discrimination. “African Americans are 13 percent of the nation’s population but 37 percent of the prison population, and 1 in 3 African American men spends time incarcerated,” writes conservative Washington Post columnist George Will. “All this takes a staggering toll on shattered families and disordered neighborhoods.”

In practice, mandatory minimums have upset the constitutional balance. At least one federal judge has compared them to a “sledgehammer” that prosecutors can use to pressure defendants into waiving their constitutional right to a trial by jury. “Mandatory minimum sentencing laws can expose defendants to draconian prison terms if convicted at trial,” Mike Fox wrote for the libertarian Cato Institute earlier this year. “This stark disparity, known as the ‘trial penalty,’ creates a coercive environment in which even those who insist on their innocence may feel compelled to plead guilty.” Further, when less cases go to trial, that removes a check that once encouraged governmental restraint.

Finally, mandatory minimums sow distrust in the courts.

Many judges who are required to impose mandatory minimum sentences don’t agree with them — and say so. If the judge sees an outcome as unfair, why should anyone else trust the system? No wonder one 2024 poll shows that 70 percent of American voters now favor the elimination of mandatory minimums — including 60 percent of Republicans.

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FORGIVING MY HELICOPTER PARENTS MY PARENTS SAW A WORLD FULL OF THREATS. ONLY LATER DID I UNDERSTAND

BY VA L E R I E B R AY LOVS K I Y

T

hrough the grainy haze of old home videos, I see my younger self.

In one clip, I toddle down the sidewalk outside our townhouse in a Bay Area suburb, my mom hovering over me, ready to catch every wobble. In another — dressed head to toe in pink with rounder cheeks — I’m celebrating my third birthday, devouring an ice cream bar while my dad warns me not to take such big bites. Fast-forward six years and I’m nine, bundled in two jackets, knee pads and a helmet on a weekend bike ride. We take a break and I’m feeding my toddler sister Cheerios on a park bench as Dad reminds me to hold her tight.

In every frame, I’m entering a new stage of life with my parents close beside me — protective, attentive, always a little anxious. Watching those videos now, living alone in Utah after leaving California for the first time, hit me harder than I expected.

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There’s something surreal about seeing your younger self grow up on tape — and realizing your parents were just people, too.

I CAN TRACE SO MUCH OF WHO I AM BACK TO MY FAMILY’S HISTORY — FOR BETTER OR WORSE — AND SOME OF THAT INHERITANCE MAY HAVE BEGUN LONG BEFORE I WAS BORN.

Being first-generation American — the daughter of Jewish refugees from Belarus and Ukraine — shaped much of my childhood. My early years were filled with my

grandmother’s beet soup and potato pancakes, mornings at a Russian-speaking preschool in my great-uncle’s house, folk dance lessons in bright sarafan dresses, and dreaded weekend math classes run by strict teachers who fit every Russian stereotype.

As a kid, I never thought much about my parents’ overprotectiveness. I figured all parents worried, especially immigrant ones from the former Soviet Union who wore puffer jackets in 60-degree weather and saw superstitions everywhere, from whistling indoors to celebrating birthdays early.

But by adolescence, I was embarrassed that my upbringing differed from that of my more “American friends,” whose parents seemed far more relaxed than mine.

There were endless rules in my house — no going outside with wet hair, no joining Girl Scouts, always keeping my phone’s ringer on, visiting the doctor for every

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cold, no mall trips without an adult. Yet within my parents’ circle of Soviet émigrés, such vigilance was normal, rooted in an unspoken belief that safety could vanish at any moment.

I couldn’t wait for college and adulthood, expecting independence to bring freedom. Instead, time and distance brought something else — a newfound empathy for my parents. What I once dismissed as “helicopter parenting,” a 1990s buzzword for overinvolved parents, I now understand differently. My parents’ overprotectiveness wasn’t random — it was an inherited response to their past, a passing down of the survival instincts that once kept them safe.

That inheritance isn’t just anecdotal.

Research shows that trauma and other environmental exposures can reverberate across generations — shaping family dynamics, learned behavior and even influencing how genes function outside the DNA sequence. My parents’ past shaped how they saw the world and how they raised me. Once I understood that, I began to see my childhood through a clearer lens; even the home videos seemed a little less grainy.

I NEVER FULLY grasped my family’s history

growing up. My parents loved to tell stories of starting over in America and falling in love, glossing over the hardships that came before. To them — and many immigrants of their generation — things hadn’t been that bad. They had food, shelter and schooling, even if it meant standing in

ST I L LS F R O M THE AU T HO R ’ S FA MILY HO M E VIDE OS.

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ration lines or watching cartoons on a single state-controlled TV channel.

But the reality was more complicated.

They came of age amid political upheaval, censorship and widespread antisemitism.

After the Holocaust, under Soviet rule, synagogues were mostly closed or repurposed, passports listed Jews as a separate “nationality,” and access to universities and jobs was restricted. Jews were more vulnerable

“IN THE HOLOCAUST, YOU COULDN’T SAY GOODBYE. WHEN YOU DID, MOST LIKELY IT WAS THE LAST TIME YOU’D EVER SEE THE PERSON.”

to arrest for alleged anti-Soviet activities and couldn’t freely emigrate until the late 1980s.

Antisemitism in the region was nothing new — pogroms had swept through Eastern Europe since the 19th century and continued, in different forms, through the Holocaust.

Each generation of my family had known this struggle intimately.

As the saying goes, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.

Trauma research has built on that idea, expanding beyond isolated events — violence, life-threatening injuries — to include cultural, historical and collective experiences. A 2016 literature review in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, analyzing 20 studies on intergenerational trauma in refugee families, found that experiences such as political persecution, displacement and starvation can leave lasting psychological effects — often manifesting as anxiety and depression in both parents and children.

Psychologist Yael Danieli has spent her career studying this phenomenon. As a Ph.D. student in New York City in the 1960s, she began interviewing Holocaust survivors for her dissertation. That work led her to found the Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and their Children in 1975, one of the first postwar counseling programs of its kind. In 1998, she edited the International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, expanding the field’s scope to include other genocides and war crimes worldwide.

“As a psychohistorian, I always look to what history we are living,” Danieli says.

“I’m addicted to it because I believe if we don’t know it, we don’t understand who we are.”

As a curious kid, I often pried into my parents’ pasts, piecing together fragments from half-told stories. My dad grew up in Kharkiv — Ukraine’s second-largest city — where Jews made up around 5 percent of the population in 1970 and were singled

out at school, with teachers reading students’ “nationalities” aloud during roll call.

He often came home with split knuckles after fighting classmates who taunted him with slurs.

In Minsk, Belarus, my mom’s family attended secret gatherings at Yama — “the hole,” a memorial built on the site of a mass grave for 5,000 Jews from the nearby Minsk Ghetto who were killed there on March 2, 1942 — where informal speeches stood in for prayers. My mom grew up in far poorer conditions than my dad, spending hours in ration lines for bread and milk and wearing the same patched coat winter after winter.

Fruit was so rare that when bananas appeared once every few years at a state-run summer camp, she hid the leftover peels under her bed in the musky dorm she shared with 20 girls.

By the early 1990s, as the USSR collapsed, my parents — then young adults — faced limited futures. Within a year of each other, both families began the long process of applying for refugee status in Moscow. For my grandparents, leaving meant abandoning their language, home and everything familiar. But staying felt like a dead end, for their children and whatever future they hoped to build.

Before speaking with Danieli, I decided to take part in one of her most influential contributions to the field — the Danieli Inventory. Developed in 2015 after decades of interviewing Holocaust survivors and their children, the three-part behavioral questionnaire measures how survivors’ coping mechanisms — what Danieli calls “adaptational styles” — shape their children.

Though my parents were born decades after the Holocaust, many of the statements resonated, and I found myself scoring them high. My parents wanted to know where I was at all times. I was taught to mistrust authority. I find it difficult to say goodbye. I feel responsible for my parents’ happiness.

“Survival means adapting to the conditions that allowed you to survive,” Danieli says. “Those adaptational styles become

lifestyles. They become who you are, how you live with other people, how you view the world, how you think about politics, how you think about the weather.”

During our conversation, Danieli often turned the focus back to me, like any seasoned psychologist. Talking to her felt less like an interview and more like confiding in an older relative who instinctively understood my family.

“A lot of people call all of this love,” she told me. “What you call overprotection — in a lot of cultures, that’s what love is.”

No one showed love more fiercely than my grandparents, who helped raise me

POLITICAL PERSECUTION, DISPLACEMENT AND STARVATION CAN LEAVE LASTING PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS — OFTEN MANIFESTING AS ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION IN BOTH PARENTS AND CHILDREN.

while my parents worked. Their vigilance made my parents’ overprotectiveness seem mild. My paternal grandmother, a petite woman with a pixie cut, cooked enough food each week to feed an army. My grandfather arrived early for school pickup every day, refusing to wait in line. My mom’s parents were masters of frugality — my grandfather compared prices at every produce store before buying fruit, and they took multiple buses from San Francisco just to visit me each week.

Both sides of my family carried the aftershocks of World War II and the Holocaust, especially my maternal grandparents, who survived it firsthand. In 1941, they

evacuated Belarus by train — my grandma to Kazakhstan, my grandfather to the Ural Mountains. That first winter, his younger brother starved to death in a dugout shelter.

When he returned home after the war with his mom and older brother, their house had burned down, his father had died in combat and most of his relatives were gone. He lived in poverty for years afterward, only speaking about it when my mother recorded his biography, shortly before his death in 2018.

“It’s quite possible that your parents themselves inherited (overprotectiveness) from their own parents,” Danieli told me.

“In the Holocaust, you couldn’t say goodbye. When you did, most likely it was the last time you’d ever see the person.”

In many post-Soviet families, closeness — sometimes to the point of suffocation — is the norm. Grandparents help raise grandchildren, adult children rarely move far. Even as a kid, I sensed my parents’ fear of distance and felt responsible for easing it. Part of me still feels guilty for leaving California, even though I talk to my mom at least three times a day. Danieli calls behaviors like this a “reparative adaptational impact,” a child’s instinct to protect their parents and undo the harm of the past.

“I believe that every child wants to heal their parents and themselves,” she says.

“For children of survivors of trauma, there is no stronger mission in life.” parents’ overprotectiveness was their way of showing love was one thing; accepting how deeply it shaped me was another. I recognize it in my empathy and attentiveness, but also in my need to prepare for everything and overthink what I can’t control. I’ve become a “mama bear” to my teenage sister, an overprepared traveler with every possible snack on a family trip, the self-appointed doctor diagnosing my parents when they’re sick. As an adult, I can trace so much of who I am back to my family’s history — for better or worse — and I know some of that inheritance may have begun long before I was born.

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“A LOT OF PEOPLE CALL ALL OF THIS LOVE. WHAT YOU CALL OVERPROTECTION — IN A LOT OF CULTURES, THAT’S WHAT LOVE IS.”

Transgenerational epigenetics, a field that gained recognition only in recent decades, challenges the idea that DNA alone determines who we become. In the early 2000s, biologist Michael Skinner at Washington State University discovered that environmental exposures could influence not just one generation of animals but several. Rats exposed to agricultural chemicals produced descendants three and four generations later with the same health defects — a discovery showing that heredity can be shaped not by changes to DNA itself, but by chemical tags that regulate how genes turn on and off.

“Stress and trauma are just as active as environmental toxins in terms of reprogramming the epigenome,” Skinner says.

“The earlier in development you are, the more sensitive you are to change.”

In early embryonic development, a mother’s environment — her stress levels, diet or exposure to toxins — can most strongly influence her fetus’ epigenetic programming. These changes can persist into adolescence and later, and Skinner’s research in animal models suggests they can be transmitted through the germline to future generations.

In 2015, psychiatrist Rachel Yehuda, 22

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director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at Mount Sinai hospital, found early evidence of this in humans. Her study, though limited in size, showed that 32 Holocaust survivors and their children shared epigenetic changes in a gene that helps regulate cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone.

“The fact we got a hint was big news,” Yehuda told BBC in 2019. “Now the question is, how do you put meat on the bones? How do you really understand the mechanism of what is happening?”

Science can’t yet predict exactly how trauma and stress — what Skinner calls “inducers” — are passed down through generations. Rather than dwell on inevitability, Skinner hopes his research will pave the way for using epigenetic analysis to better trace family histories, assess disease risk and raise awareness. That same awareness is what I’m working toward, too.

There’s one video I return to often, whenever I miss my parents or after an argument. My dad’s voice fills the living room, narrating in Russian: “Today’s the sixth of December, about 10 minutes to 4. In an hour, we’re preparing to go to the hospital, to meet our Valerie. Here’s Mama.”

He pans to my mom, resting a book over her belly, wearing striped track pants and a vintage Betty Boop shirt. She begins reading Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, Baby, The Places You’ll Go!” in broken English — the same book she read to me throughout her pregnancy. Near the end, her voice wavers.

She wipes her eyes, then laughs and tells my dad to turn off the camera before she starts crying.

Every time I watch it, I tear up, too. My mom wasn’t much older than I am now, just hours away from the unknown. Anyone would have been terrified, even without what she’d already lived through. Yet in that moment, her eyes are glazed with unmistakable joy.

There’s something cathartic about reliving my childhood on tape, and something even more special about witnessing my parents in the moments just before they became parents.

Each time I turn back the clock through a home video, I’m filled with more empathy.

My parents, and theirs before them, did the best they could with what they had and the histories they carried. Now, I get to decide what to carry forward — and what to let go of.

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

OUT OF REFILLS PHARMACIES ARE DISAPPEARING IN RURAL AMERICA

BY VA L E R I E B R AY LOVS K I Y

I

n Heber-Overgaard, Arizona, everyone knows everyone. Tucked in the state’s White Mountains, the town has no stoplights or big-box stores — just open sky, wandering elk herds and a diner serving homemade strawberry shortcake for a few dollars. Its roughly 3,000 residents come from two unincorporated communities: Heber, settled by Latter-day Saints, and Overgaard, a former lumber hub. After merging in 1990, the twin towns became known simply as Heber-Overgaard.

Like many rural places, the town relies on a handful of businesses for daily needs. So, when its only pharmacy closed in 2013, residents suddenly faced an hour’s drive along winding forest roads (which can be dangerous in the winter) to fill prescriptions in Show Low, nearly 40 miles away.

In 2017, pharmacist Nick Bryce opened White Mountain Pharmacy, part of the Good Neighbor Pharmacy Network, in a Show Low strip mall. That’s when he realized patients were making the hourlong drive from Heber-Overgaard.

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Seeing the demand, Bryce expanded in 2019, reopening Heber-Overgaard’s long-vacant pharmacy as a telepharmacy — legal in 28 states — which allows prescriptions to be filled under remote supervision.

Today, White Mountain Pharmacy cares for about 8,000 patients between its Show Low and Heber-Overgaard locations.

“ALL WE WANT TO DO IS HELP OUR PATIENTS, BUT WE DO NEED TO STAY ABOVE WATER.”

It’s a precarious time for pharmacies nationwide. Both chains and independently owned stores are closing at record rates.

Nearly 30 percent of U.S. pharmacies shut down between 2010 and 2021, and

from 2018 through 2021, closures have outpaced new openings. Walgreens announced plans to close 500 locations in 2025 and plans to shutter another 700 over the next two years. Rite Aid, after a second bankruptcy filing in as many years, has ceased operations entirely. Today, 48.4 million people, or 1 in 7 Americans, live in a pharmacy desert, defined as an area more than 10 miles from the nearest pharmacy. Rural regions like Navajo County — home to Heber-Overgaard and the nation’s largest Native American reservation — are among the hardest hit, with more than 108,000 residents traveling nearly two hours round trip to refill a prescription.

Without reliable transportation, many risk losing access to care entirely. A 2023 Health Affairs Scholar study found that in nearly 14 percent of U.S. counties, at least half the population depends solely on independent pharmacies — residents more likely to be elderly, low-income and rural.

The crisis traces back to decades of consolidation, rising drug costs, shrinking margins and the growing power of

PHARMACI ST NI CK BRYCE RE OP E NE D T H E WH IT E MOU NTAIN P H ARMACY IN H E B E R- OV E RGAARD, ARI ZONA, TO ELI MI NATE THE H OU RLONG COMMU T E F OR C U STOME RS TO F IL L T H E IR P RE S C RIP T IONS .

pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. Once simple payment processors in the 1960s, PBMs now control much of the drug pipeline — negotiating prices, managing formularies and setting reimbursement rates.

The “big three” — Caremark (CVS Health), Express Scripts (Cigna) and Optum Rx (UnitedHealth Group) — control about 80 percent of the market, up from less than half in 2012.

In late 2024, Congress came close to passing bipartisan reforms targeting PBMs, but House Republicans stripped the measures — along with several others — from an end-of-year spending bill at the last minute, reportedly following pushback from President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk. A recent Health Affairs Scholar analysis by Geoffrey Joyce, chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical and Health Economics at USC’s School of Pharmacy, PHOTOGR AP H Y BY JAS O N KOST E R

found that delinking middlemen compensation from drug list prices could have cut annual drug spending by more than $95 billion — without hurting manufacturers — if only that provision had passed. Within 10 weeks, another 326 pharmacies had closed — 237 of them independent — an average of roughly four closures per day.

“Sometimes I worry that I’m not even going to be able to get payroll,” Bryce says. “A pharmacy’s owner has to make a decision.

Do they keep going into debt, do they just try to keep the lights on or do they close up shop and say uncle?”

WHEN WHITE MOUNTAIN Pharmacy opens at

9 a.m., there’s rarely a quiet hour. Monday mornings in October are especially busy when Bryce runs flu shot clinics. Retirees and vacationers escaping the desert heat — “Arizona snowbirds” — keep the small

outpost busier than the Show Low location.

The high desert town sits along the Mogollon Rim at about 7,000 feet, surrounded by dense pine forest. Its main street runs less than six miles, lined with a few diners, a dollar store, a hardware shop and a single pharmacy — a low, green-roofed building across from the firehouse. Inside, wooden beams draped with autumn garlands frame aisles stocked with everyday medicines.

Behind the counter, shelves of bagged prescriptions line the wall and bins of pill bottles cover every inch of counter space.

Outside Bryce’s office-turned-vaccineroom, a bulletin board overflows with Christmas and thank-you cards. Beside it, a whiteboard lists the pharmacy’s three employees: Tori Neisius, Cassie Watson and Cassie’s daughter, Josie, a clerk training to become a technician. In the corner, the “quote of the week” reads: “Shoot for JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026

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the moon. If you miss, you just have to blame Tori.”

Tori, 36, and Cassie, 45, call each other sisters. “We’re one big happy family,” Tori says with a laugh. They process about 200 prescriptions daily. Under Arizona’s telepharmacy laws, technicians can’t give medical advice directly, so patients consult pharmacists through an in-store tablet.

To work at a remote dispensing site, including telepharmacies, technicians must complete a state-approved training program, pass a board exam and log 1,000 supervised hours — no college degree required. Many imagine pharmacy staff in white coats with years of medical training, but in towns like Heber-Overgaard, those behind the counter are often locals who learned on the job.

After leaving high school early, 22-year-old Josie is earning her GED while running the counter — the busiest post in the store where the stream of customers and refill requests rarely lets up.

Just over half the states that permit telepharmacy regulate staffing ratios, typically limiting one pharmacist to three to six technicians. When former technician Paige left for health reasons this summer, the team grew even thinner — though Bryce plans to bring on a third technician soon.

Across the country, pharmacies are struggling to keep staff and hire new ones.

A 2022 National Community Pharmacists Association survey found more than three-quarters of community pharmacists experienced staff shortages, and nearly 90 percent struggled to fill open technician

W H I TE MO UN TA IN P HARMACY I N OVERGAARD S E RVE S A B O UT 4,0 0 0 PATI ENTS, I NCLUDI NG T HOSE F R O M N E A R BY TOWNS.

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positions. Among 20,000 technicians surveyed that same year by the Pharmacy Technician Certification Board, 75 percent cited lack of pay — a median annual salary of $43,460 in 2024, compared with $137,480 for pharmacists — as a significant reason for leaving the profession.

For Bryce, payroll is his biggest expense after drug costs. “By the time (manufacturers) make (the drug) and it comes here, it’s passed through at least four or five different hands. In my mind, that’s why medication is so expensive.”

Today’s pharmaceutical system runs on vertical integration, with a handful of corporations owning nearly every link in the supply chain — manufacturers, insurers, PBMs, distributors and retail chains. “Vertical integration, in and of itself, is not a bad thing,” says Joey Mattingly, a pharmacotherapy professor at the University of Utah.

“But you have to weigh the pros and cons of a company getting really big or so powerful that it doesn’t have to compete.”

In this system, size determines leverage.

Larger chains like Walgreens and CVS use their purchasing volume to negotiate better contracts with PBMs and secure higher reimbursement rates. Independents, with less bargaining power, receive less for dispensing the same prescriptions or are excluded from “preferred” insurance networks altogether. A 2022 Drug Channels analysis found that all four major Medicare Part D plans rarely included independents in their coverage.

Bryce buys his inventory through Cencora (formerly AmerisourceBergen), one of three wholesalers that dominate U.S. drug distribution. To qualify for rebates, independent pharmacies must meet a supplier’s Generic Compliance Ratio, typically requiring them to buy about 90 percent of their generic drugs from a single wholesaler — cornering them into higher prices they can’t escape by working with the buying groups that are affiliated with the same distributors.

Filling prescriptions has also become a losing game. For example, one pharmacy

T H E IMAGE OF A P H ARMAC I ST I N A W H I TE LA B COAT WIT H Y E ARS OF T R A I N I N G I S O U T DAT E D. IN S MAL L TOWNS T H OS E B E H I N D T H E COU NT E R OF T E N L E ARN O N T H E J O B .

owner shared on LinkedIn that a one-month supply of the brand-name blood thinner Eliquis cost his independent pharmacy about $582, but PBMs reimburse only $536.20 — including the patient copay — a $45 loss per prescription. Multiply that across hundreds of prescriptions each month, and independents are seeing their profits go down the drain.

“If you got the same dollar amount that a Walgreens got, you’re probably already hurting,” Mattingly says.

After facing those losses firsthand, Teresa Dickinson — owner of Melrose Pharmacy in Phoenix and co-founder of the Arizona Independent Pharmacy Coalition — became a founding member of Pharmacists United for Truth and Transparency, a watchdog group, in 2007. “That was back at a time where nobody would talk about PBMs at all,” Dickinson says. “We were so secretive with our emails. We were actually kind of afraid for our lives about exposing the problem.”

Dickinson calls her pharmacy’s 20-year survival “short of a miracle,” currently helping save another local store on the brink of closure. “All we want to do is help our patients, but we do need to stay above water.”

Pharmacy’s Show Low location, technician Jordan McCarthy spends most days compounding custom prescriptions — bioidentical hormones, AT W H I T E M O U N TA I N

shingles creams, nerve pain gels. After leaving a chain pharmacy, she joined Bryce’s team. “Everybody at this pharmacy in Overgaard cares about the patients,” she says.

“In a lot of the bigger pharmacies, I’ve noticed that they just don’t care.”

Unofficially, she’s the in-house chemist doctors call when wholesalers can’t supply what patients need, which she does by compounding, preparing medications based on specialized formulas for individual prescriptions. Compounding is one of the few ways independent pharmacies survive outside the PBM system, since patients usually pay out-of-pocket rather than through insurance. Others, like Bryce, depend on telepharmacy, clinical services such as immunizations or the federal 340B Drug Pricing Program. The long-contested program requires drug manufacturers to sell medications at discounted prices to eligible hospitals and clinics — primarily those serving low-income or Medicaid patients — which then contract with pharmacies to dispense them. To stay afloat, many independent pharmacies use the margin between discounted purchase prices and insurer reimbursements to cover expenses like payroll and operating costs.

Meanwhile, mail-order giants and direct-to-consumer models — such as Eli Lilly and Amazon Pharmacy — promise patients lower prices but often at the expense of local pharmacies. Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, launched in 2022, offers a different approach — still bypassing PBMs to provide transparent pricing while supporting local pharmacies. In 2023, the company created its Affiliate Pharmacy Network, partnering with nearly 7,000 independent and grocery chain pharmacies that receive a flat $12 dispensing fee per fill. The goal was to align reimbursement with actual drug costs, challenging a system that often drives pharmacies into the red.

“It’s a simple problem with a horrible ending,” Cuban said over email. “While employers and the state complain about rising costs, they are signing contracts with the very insurance carriers and PBMs that are

increasing their health care costs. … Quite a bit of regulatory work needs to be done before the market can be efficient.”

In 2025, more than 40 states introduced measures to protect local pharmacies. At the federal level, two new bills — one sponsored by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and another by Republican Rep. Adrian Smith — seek to prohibit PBMs from owning pharmacies and to allow pharmacists to evaluate and diagnose patients for certain common illnesses that currently are only handled by doctors. President Trump’s new direct-to-consumer website, TrumpRx, promises “most-favored nation” pricing and a partnership with Pfizer to boost do-

“IT’S A SIMPLE PROBLEM WITH A HORRIBLE ENDING. WHILE EMPLOYERS AND THE STATE COMPLAIN ABOUT RISING COSTS, THEY ARE SIGNING CONTRACTS WITH THE VERY INSURANCE CARRIERS INCREASING THEIR HEALTH CARE COSTS.”

mestic drug production, though its impact is still unclear.

For now, rural pharmacists keep going however they can, sustained by community and purpose. A recent JAMA Health Forum study led by Mattingly found that independent pharmacies had a higher annual turnover rate than chains between 2010 and 2023.

This turnover rate has an outsized impact in rural areas, where many towns only have one pharmacy, if they have one at all.

In response, Washington State University pharmacotherapy professor Dr. Megan Undeberg launched the Rural Health Curriculum in 2022, backed by a $2.2 million anonymous donation. The program places

at least six new pharmacists each year in rural communities and is part of a network of 20 universities training graduates for small-town health care.

“Throughout the nation, there’s pockets of rural (communities) and we’re all finally coming together,” Undeberg says. “We realized we can’t do it alone.”

In her home state, that vision is already taking shape. After receiving multiple ownership offers last year, 25-year-old Florida graduate Josuah Tilus bought Chinook Pharmacy in rural Washington with support from National Community Pharmacists Association board member and past president Jeff Harrell, who helped with the down payment and retains part ownership in the store. Tilus ultimately chose Chinook for the backing and resources available through Harrell’s Cascadia Pharmacy Group, a new coalition of more than 40 independent pharmacies across the Pacific West that negotiates drug prices, manages contracting and helps members grow revenue through expanded services. Within a year, Tilus added curbside pickup and delivery services, allowing him to hire four more employees.

“It really is a calling when you’re a rural pharmacist because you are a person of that community,” Undeberg says. “You know your people, and that’s the beauty of it.”

Back in Heber-Overgaard, the morning rush never slows. “Stay out of trouble, mister!” Cassie calls out to a customer on his way out. Her brothers once served in the fire department with him, and her sister used to cut his wife’s hair. “We have some that are our favorites,” she says. “They give us a hard time, we give them a hard time.”

Tomorrow isn’t promised for White Mountain Pharmacy, or for any pharmacy these days. With Bryce on the other end of the line, and Tori, Cassie and Josie behind the counter, there’s little time to think about margins or red tape when an entire town depends on you. In the end, that’s what keeps them — and every rural pharmacy — going.

“We’re not just here to do our job,” Tori says. “We’re here to be part of the community. It’s more than just a paycheck.”

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THE WEST

BANK SHOT THE FIRST BLACK-OWNED BANK IN THE WEST HAS COME TO AN UNLIKELY PLACE

BY E TH A N B AU E R

I

nside the wood-paneled lobby of what used to be Holladay Bank and Trust stands an enormous mural. Stretching the length of the teller stations, it visually narrates the bank’s history using dozens of faces. Some are men in suits. Others ride in cars or play in the snow. Many more float along as heads alone, pressed onto circular, yellow backgrounds like saints in Byzantine art. The mural is colorful and intricate; you could spend hours exploring its layers, putting the story together. But whether you look deeply or barely skim the surface, the faces make one fact unmistakably clear: This bank was founded by white people.

It also almost exclusively served white people. It wasn’t that way out of malice, but circumstance: The people who lived in Holladay, a suburb of Salt Lake City, back then were almost exclusively white, and the bank existed to serve the local population. Those 28

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demographics haven’t changed much. The most recent census data shows Holladay remains 86 percent white — and just 1 percent Black. Yet in June of last year, a group of Black entrepreneurs acquired Holladay

“THE IMPACT ON THE COMMUNITY WOULD BE MUCH BIGGER THAN THE FINANCIAL RETURNS.”

Bank and Trust. It was a purchase made possible not by shifting demographics but by new circumstances.

The group of entrepreneurs is led by Ashley Bell, who served in multiple White House roles during Donald Trump’s first

term, and Bernice King, the youngest child of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Their decision to purchase a bank in Utah last summer generated national headlines for the simple fact that it’s so surprising: A Black-owned bank in one of the country’s whitest states? Publications from The Wall Street Journal to Ebony magazine found that newsworthy. But, like looking at the mural and finding new storylines beneath the veneer, there’s more going on here than novelty alone.

The newly branded Redemption Bank offers a nexus for two contentious national issues: race and wealth. Just over five years ago, George Floyd’s murder unleashed a racial reckoning across the nation. Its momentum has slowed, but its aftershock remains in institutions like this one, which was founded explicitly to correct economic injustice. The bank’s founders believe capitalism is the key to that goal, because it

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LAURA SEITZ

A MURAL I NSI DE REDEMPTI ON BANK TELLS THE STORY OF I TS PREDECESSOR’S LOCAL HI STORY. I TS FUTURE, HOWEVER, WI LL BE DI STI NGUI SHED

BY REDEMPTI ON’S FOCUS ON CLI ENTS WHO’VE LONG BEEN OVERLOOKED.

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LAURA SEITZ

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THE WEST

gives everyone a chance at lasting success.

But inequality is rising. Pew reports that in 1971, 61 percent of Americans lived in middle-class homes. By 2021, that had dropped to 50 percent, while the wealthy and lower-income groups both grew. The Congressional Budget Office similarly details how between 1989 and 2022, Americans in the top 10 percent of income distribution expanded their control of the nation’s wealth from 56 to 60 percent, while the bottom 50 percent’s share didn’t change at all. And inequality is particularly stark among racial groups; per the Federal Reserve, the “racial wealth gap” between median Black and white households in 2022 was more than $220,000.

Such inequities are longstanding and have discouraged efforts toward change.

But Brandon Comer, a founding investor in the Utah venture, believes in capitalism’s potential to be a force for good, including for racial progress. And Utah has become the ideal laboratory to test his hypothesis. The nearest Black-owned banks are in Houston to the east and Los Angeles to the west, making what was once called Holladay Bank and Trust the only such institution in the entire Mountain West. It may seem a strange choice on the surface, but Utah’s unusual circumstances regarding race, business and their collective impact could be poised to deliver something revolutionary.

The founders call their project Redemption Bank, and in Holladay, new signs dress the space around the mural. For Bell, the name — like the institution itself — reflects the founders’ values. “If this opportunity is to be realized; if we are going to be able to do something that’s never been done before in our country,” he says, they needed a name that would be an anchor. A constant reminder of why they believe in the project’s potential. “And it’s for those people who need a second chance,” Bell adds.

“For the communities that have been overlooked. For the marginalized. For the least, the last and the left-behind, to give them an opportunity to chase their dreams.”

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REDEMPTION BANK CHOSE Utah foremost

for practical reasons. Going back to its earliest days, “Utah was founded as this new state by this new people, with a bank structure that was very different than what everyone else was doing,” says Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor of law at University of California, Irvine, and a leading expert in the history of Black banks. “It really was a very egalitarian, community-based bank.”

Today, that legacy shows up in an unusual regulatory environment that’s streamlined and bank-friendly, encouraging innovation in frontier spaces like cryptocurrency and financial technology. Utah encourages banks, in other words, to get creative and think big, which in the past has attracted branches of Goldman Sachs, American Express, PayPal, Ally Bank and others.

“I DON’T THINK WHAT REDEMPTION IS DOING IS RADICAL, BUT IT IS FIGHTING AGAINST SOME PRETTY BIG HEADWINDS, AND SO IN THAT WAY, IT’S PRETTY BRAVE.”

Redemption’s founders also liked the idea of bringing a Black bank to a Black banking desert. And there happened to be a well-run community bank for sale. “I was aware of perceptions about the place,” Comer says.

“But despite what things may have been or looked like, I think this was a great opportunity, and it shows that Utah is a welcoming place.” Indeed, Utah’s unique heritage has made a tremendous impact not only on the state’s business-friendly culture, but also on its civic conscience.

Under the late President Russell M. Nelson, who died in September, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints took significant steps to work with Black leaders nationwide during a time of a national

awakening about the lingering effects of systemic racism. It formally partnered with the NAACP, offered financial support for Black scholarships and, during the faith’s worldwide general conference in October 2020, President Nelson bluntly condemned racism from the pulpit. He directly called on members to “lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice.” He pleaded with them to “promote respect for all of God’s children.” Bell met with President Nelson in April 2023.

“That’s when I knew,” he said, “that something was different. That this opportunity was being received very differently.”

The meeting wasn’t long, but Bell says he’ll remember it forever. President Nelson was spry for a man of 98, with incredible memory and unusual warmth. They discussed President Nelson’s recent acceptance of the inaugural Gandhi-King-Mandela Peace Prize from Morehouse College, a historically Black institution in Georgia.

Bell asked him to pray for his venture’s success. President Nelson was supportive.

“After that, there was a different confidence level from our team,” Bell says, “as far as, ‘This could be something extraordinary.’”

Given its unusual history, Utah tends to take issues of culture and diversity more seriously than other red states. “I know Utah to be a place that has a lot of people who are very interested in helping the underprivileged,” Baradaran says. “It’s sort of baked into the religious structure. It’s baked into how Utah sees itself, its history of being outsiders, of being discriminated against.”

So when Redemption Bank set up shop, the state’s business infrastructure was eager to get involved. The Garffs, the Millers, the Huntsmans, the Eccles family and the Sorensens — major players in Utah’s business and philanthropic scene — invested in the project. “And guess what? They’re all white.

They’re all Utahns,” says Byron Russell, a Black Utahn and Redemption Bank board member. “And that tells you that there is something very special about Utah. That it is unique in so many ways.”

Dinesh Patel, another local investor, saw

it as a good opportunity. In his experience, Utah needs more community banking to finance small businesses and entrepreneurs within the state’s minority populations and beyond. He also believes in Redemption Bank’s potential to grow. But “am I investing in this to make 10 times my money?

No,” he says. “I’m trying to help the community, and I’m hoping to get a good return. … The impact on the community is what would be much bigger than the financial returns.” Clint Stone, chief investment officer of the Miller Family Foundation, seconds Patel’s thinking. “Returns for us in this investment are secondary,” he says.

“The primary motivation was seeing this opportunity that aligned with one of the missions of (our) foundation: economic empowerment. ... We felt like this was just right in the fairway of that.”

Returns for Redemption’s founders, however, are not secondary. They are very clear about the fact that they aren’t looking for charity. They want to grow and turn a profit for their backers.

WHEN ASKED WHAT he hoped Redemption

Bank could accomplish in the days ahead, Bell said, “We hope that in five years, this bank will be publicly traded. We want to build a bank that is publicly traded, no different than Zions Bank, that gives us an opportunity for our investors to reap the benefit of a lot of hard work.” In other words, he hopes the bank will enrich its shareholders. That doesn’t sound new or revolutionary. Is the mission just a façade of racially conscious branding?

Absolutely not, argues Bell. Alongside Bernice King in Detroit, he said so in August. This is about profit, yes — but it’s also about values. “The movement for us is to give you an alternative to banking with a place that may not be aligned with your values,” he explained. “You don’t need to bank with us — but you need to bank somewhere that’s creating the world you want to see.”

Too much of the corporate world today is purely selfish. “Greed has become an overarching factor that’s modified the system,”

Comer says, “and a bit of a lack of empathy as well.” Rebelling against that paradigm, however, doesn’t require abandoning capitalism. “Economic justice just means that capitalism remains pure,” Bell says, “in the sense that everybody should have an opportunity” to succeed.

The bank’s investors can profit — but the people whose payments make that profit possible can also use the bank’s access to capital to enrich their own lives. To help them grow a business, buy homes, build wealth. Especially minority communities.

“It’s really not about DEI. It’s about understanding the value of people … and wanting the best,” Bernice King said. “And when

“IT’S FOR THOSE PEOPLE WHO NEED A SECOND CHANCE, FOR THE COMMUNITIES THAT HAVE BEEN OVERLOOKED. FOR THE MARGINALIZED. FOR THE LEAST, THE LAST AND THE LEFT-BEHIND, TO GIVE THEM AN OPPORTUNITY TO CHASE THEIR DREAMS.”

you’re honest about the disparities that exist in this world … we’ve got a lot of work to do to overcome the gaps.”

As he helps prepare Utah’s celebrations for the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary, Russell has been thinking a lot about how capitalism is a uniquely potent tool in that quest to overcome. “Financial independence is the best tool for racial equity,” he says. Throughout the nation’s history, our most powerful institutions have excluded Black Americans from much of their bounty; from the founding promises of equality

and the pursuit of happiness. But progress to enable voting and ensure civil rights can be tenuous. “As you might read, those are being dissolved. They’re being erased. They’re being reversed,” Russell says. “But you can’t reverse a person’s financial independence, and you can’t reverse what you own. That’s what capitalism is supposed to be.”

In that sense, what Redemption is doing isn’t all that different. “There’s nothing that they’re doing that is trying to change the system,” Baradaran says. And that can be a problem, in her view, because stronger stuff is actually needed to fix certain systemic inadequacies. However, she likens Redemption to a “David and Goliath” type of story, with the bank swimming against the tide of not only structural racism, but threats to small businesses everywhere. If it succeeds, that alone could send a powerful message.

“To redeem faith in capitalism, you’d want to see small, nimble banks being able to compete with the large, heavy, institutional ones,” she says. “I don’t think what Redemption is doing is radical, but it is fighting against some pretty big headwinds, and so in that way, it’s pretty brave. And, I guess, radical in that way.”

Back in Holladay, little has changed. New signage aside, the bank’s pre-acquisition staff remains, alongside the aging decor and, of course, the mural. Redemption’s leaders don’t plan to alter the mural anytime soon, but it’s sure to look different in the future. Not literally, perhaps, but the context, the circumstances that surround it, will change. They already have.

“I’m excited for what the mural of Holladay Bank and Trust, now Redemption, looks like 20, 25 years from now,” Comer says. “Because it’s on that foundation that whatever we do going forward sits.” Some things, in other words, must remain the same. They cannot alter history. But even if the mural’s many faces don’t change, the faces looking up at it will. And, if Redemption’s mission succeeds, the promise and opportunity it renders in striking intricacy and detail could look entirely new.

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LETTERS FROM THE FIELD

AMERICAN LIMBO STUCK IN MEXICO CITY, AN ENCLAVE OF CUBAN MIGRANTS CONFRONTS THE NEW REALITIES OF IMMIGRATION

BY E TH A N B AU E R

T

he place called Peñón de los Baños was once an island. In the heyday of the Aztec empire, it rose from Lake Texcoco and was famed for mineral hot springs that flowed from its base. People would visit to bathe and to heal. To find refuge. Then the conquistador Hernán Cortés came and took it — along with the rest of what had come before. Over the next three centuries, his successors drained Lake Texcoco until Peñón de los Baños was no longer an island, but a hill, until it became one neighborhood in a metropolis of 22 million, abutting the northwestern edge of Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport. Many today cannot even say why it’s called Peñón de los Baños — “rock of the baths.” Certainly, Alfredo cannot.

He knows the name only from seeing it on smartphone maps. He knows little else about the place, save for which carnicería 32

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sells the cheapest meat, and which abarrotes stocks the cheapest milk. Despite coming from Cuba and speaking fluent Spanish, he’d never heard that word, abarrotes, until he came here. He learned it was

ALFREDO SEEMS TO BE ANSWERING THE CALL OF RONALD REAGAN, WHO POSITIONED THE UNITED STATES AS A PLACE “OPEN TO ANYONE WITH THE WILL AND THE HEART TO GET HERE.”

Mexican shorthand for the kinds of shops people in the U.S. might call convenience stores. Mini-marts. Bodegas. He’d prefer to use those terms. The American terms.

What he would give — what he has already given — to live with them as vernacular.

When he returns home from work or from errands, limping slightly on his bad leg, he shuffles past a clothesline that, on most days, flaps with life. It hoists laundry for seven people across three households, from a two-year-old’s socks to a 47-year-old’s T-shirts. They wash the garments collectively, first in buckets. They wring them and rinse them and wring them again before pinning them on the shared clothesline.

Then the residents of the courtyard lot behind Chimalhuacán 32 go inside and wait.

In the bathroom, a seatless toilet wobbles and the showerhead hangs on a hook, awaiting its next dip into a bucket for bathtime. There is no kitchen, so Alfredo’s wife Mari’s garbanzos hiss in a slow cooker on a portable gas stove, brought to life with the flick of a cigarette lighter. And

ILLU STR ATION BY J O R G E G O N ZÁ LE Z

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there is but one bed, where the couple’s son, Alfredito, sleeps between his mom and dad at night.

The family shares the setup with Alfredo’s half-brother and his half-brother’s girlfriend, and with two other women, a pair of sisters they’d never met before happenstance brought them together here, occupying the same thin clothesline, running through the same courtyard, in the same forgotten piece of Mexico City, where they all dream of places other than this one.

(They requested that Deseret Magazine use only their first names to avoid jeopardizing their potential immigration status.)

Not long ago, those dreams looked like some version of the American dream. That’s the shared vision that brought them here, and the one Alfredo still clings to. “I will be in The Land of the Free,” he likes to say, as a sort of mantra, as if responding directly to

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Ronald Reagan. The 40th president, in his 1989 farewell address, positioned the United States as a place “open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Donald Trump, meanwhile, has long made curbing immigration a cornerstone of his politics, and particularly since returning to office last year. He’s signed multiple executive orders since then aimed at enhancing border enforcement, facilitating deportations and virtually halting all refugee resettlement.

He’s also helped secure a funding windfall for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose budget has increased by 400 percent, while revoking temporary protected status for migrants from certain countries, including Cuba, who did come legally and effectively ending the asylum process at the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s all had a significant impact on migrants already en route to the United States.

It’s especially visible in Mexico City. “It wasn’t common to see people in the streets from Venezuela, from Haiti, from Cuba, from Afghanistan,” says Isabel Gil Everaert, an associate professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Now there’s people from many nationalities who are in Mexico City streets much more than ever before.” Some of them, she suspects, will end up going back home. Others will stay in Mexico, or perhaps in some third country, like Costa Rica or Panama, “which is a different flow,” she says, “that’s starting to happen.”

I’ve known Alfredo since 2022, when I visited Cuba and hired him as my fixer. We’d stayed in touch since, and I knew he’d left the island in a quest to reach the U.S. He’d sent a few pictures along the way, crossing rickety bridges in the Guatemalan jungle. I didn’t hear from him for a long time after

that. Several months later, fearing the worst, I learned he’d reached Mexico City.

In this corner of Peñón de los Baños, where centuries ago the Aztecs sought refuge and eventually found something very different, Alfredo and his fellow migrants are stuck in a way they never imagined possible. Now, together, the members of this enclave must figure out what comes next.

ALFREDO MEETS ME at the Mexico City air-

port in March 2025 and guides me a single block to his housing complex. Behind a metal gate, we follow a colorful path of chipped tile that wraps around the property’s main home and opens into a courtyard. His house, home to a group of Venezuelans before him, is in the back on the far left, up against the fence, square and yellow and standing beside a hose and a cinder block sink. A second unit above Alfredo’s home is a bit more subtle. It’s accessible only by ladder.

Alfredo, 35 at the time, introduces me to the man who lives inside it: his half-brother, Ernesto. Tall and slim and shirtless, Ernesto looks older than his 25 years, with a toned stomach and an arch at the bottom of his front teeth. He arrived here more recently than Alfredo, even though he left Cuba a month earlier.

He’d fled to Nicaragua, alongside his 22-year-old girlfriend, Fátima, prodded by the same abject poverty, desperation and Communist Party meddling that have made Cubans flee for decades. The Nicaraguan government has allowed Cubans to enter visa-free since 2021, knowing that many of them use this privilege as a “land bridge” en route to the United States. That’s what Alfredo did. But his brother planned to stay. “The point,” Ernesto said then, “is that Nicaragua is better than Cuba.” But life there was not what they expected, and after a few months, they hired a smuggler recommended by Alfredo to reach Mexico City. They were out of money in Tapachula, a border city in Mexico’s far south, and were stuck there for six months. In January, they heard on TikTok about a migrant caravan that would be departing that same night

from a local park. They packed two bags and headed over.

This caravan was almost certainly the same one Reuters covered on January 22, 2025, which had departed, trailed by police and an ambulance, just hours before Trump took office for a second time. It was a hard thing to see, Ernesto remembers: children and pregnant women making that long, grueling walk. All searching and desperate. After a few days, his and Fátima’s legs had turned swollen and red. She could no longer keep up with the pack. They’d walked nearly 200 miles by then, but without proper paperwork, they were returned to Tapachula.

They called in some favors and cobbled together enough cash to pay for bus fare.

They arrived in Mexico City on February 12. Alfredo welcomed them with the room

“THE AMERICAN DREAM IS THE OPPORTUNITY TO HAVE, BY YOUR EFFORT, WHAT YOU COULDN’T HAVE IN YOUR COUNTRY.”

above his apartment — a room with no bathroom and no way to get up and down aside from that ladder. Ernesto found work mopping floors. Then in a poultry factory, with shifts beginning at 4 a.m., six days a week at minimum. Fátima started folding clothes at a laundromat. They hadn’t considered going back to Cuba until the door to the American dream was slammed shut.

Now, they have no interest in going to the U.S. illegally, nor do they want to stay in Mexico. “It is better here,” Fátima admits.

“But it’s also not what we expected.”

Fátima misses her grandmother. Ernesto misses his mom, and his everyday existence on his family’s farm. “It’s just a different vibe,” he says. “Here, it’s just work, then home. Home, then work. Work,

then home.” They’ve decided that in a few months, after saving some cash, they’ll go back to Cuba. “I’m against that,” his brother says. The goal should not be a better life just anywhere, Alfredo insists. “The goal is the American dream.”

But Ernesto and Fátima will not wait here for a future they may never see. They will not sacrifice their youth to an ideal. Ernesto will go back to the family farm, and Fátima will open a nail salon. And hopefully the situation in Cuba improves — but in their eyes, it’s already no worse than their Mexican purgatory.

AC R OSS T H E CO U R T YA R D, another Cuban

migrant lives in a dwelling similar in size to Alfredo’s. Inside, the perforated drywall lets in streaks of daylight. Above the front door, a gap invites in any and all critters.

The floor is cracked. The roof leaks. And someone — long ago, by the faded look of it — has painted on the far wall a mural of the cartoon characters Rick and Morty, running away from some unseen danger — arms flailing, mouths hanging open. The migrant’s name is Mima. Her sister, Yeli, lives above her in a space accessible via a twisting, rusted staircase. Like Alfredo, Ernesto and the millions of other Cubans who’ve fled the island over the decades, they’ve ended up here because of a belief in something better.

Since Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, not a decade has passed without mass exodus. In the beginning, Cuban refugees fled the Communist, authoritarian government. The U.S. passed the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966, which essentially allowed them to migrate to the United States worry-free. During the Cold War, the optics were fantastic: refugees of Communist horrors, risking it all for American freedom. Of course we’d welcome them. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Cubans started coming on makeshift rafts to escape economic calamity more than political ideology, the American “wet foot, dry foot” policy allowed them to stay if they could just make it here.

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That policy ended in the final days of the Obama administration, and in the early days of Trump’s first term, the new president made it clear that special treatment for Cubans was, indeed, over.

Poverty on the island, meanwhile, reached a level unseen in Cuba’s tumultuous post-Revolutionary history. Combined with the Covid-19 pandemic, the summer of 2021 produced the country’s most significant anti-government protests since 1994.

With its agricultural base long abandoned and its main economic driver, tourism, nonexistent starting in 2020, food shortages were constant. Medicine was inaccessible. Thousands took to the streets. The government responded, as it always has, with repression. Hundreds were arrested.

Many were told to leave. Many did — especially young, educated professionals, who saw no future for themselves in Cuba. “We oldies are the only ones who are left,” one Cuban woman told The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson, whose September 2025 dispatch reported theft, assault and scamming on the rise across Havana. “What we have been enduring for some time now isn’t life; with these horrendous heat waves, without electricity most of the time, one cannot be sure of having enough to eat nor sufficient sleep,” a Cuban reporter, writing for a Communist paper, said in July 2025, “and what is needed is not more explanations but concrete solutions.”

So far, nothing has materialized. And the exodus unleashed after 2021 has continued, becoming something historic. As many as two million people are estimated to have left Cuba this decade. That’s close to 20 percent of the island’s population — and 16 times more than those who fled during the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Many have gone to Nicaragua, given its lax entry laws. And from there, given the United States’ historic welcoming of Cubans, many have headed north, toward the border, in search of freedom from tyranny, socioeconomic mobility or some combination thereof. Under the current White House, they’ve found an unexpected reception.

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That’s how Mima and Yeli ended up here, and it’s unclear how many more like them — from Cuba, Afghanistan or elsewhere — are waiting in Mexico City and across Mexico. No one officially keeps track. The answer is, however, likely more than ever before. The Spanish newspaper El País reported in August that at least 5,000 were living in shelters around Mexico City but cautioned that the numbers are always in flux. “Nothing about what has happened to us is easy,” Yeli tells me, placing a moka pot on the apartment’s camping stove. “And now we’re here, hopeless.”

Mexico itself has seen a radical uptick in asylum-seekers, and not just because of Trump. Gil Everaert, the researcher, says Mexico saw about 750 asylum requests as recently as 2011. By 2017, the number had

THE FACT THAT THE UNITED STATES WILL NOT WELCOME ALFREDO IS NO DETERRENT. HE BELIEVES HE WILL PROVE HIMSELF WORTHY.

risen to over 14,000. By 2023, 140,000. For those hoping to continue toward the United States, the Biden administration built out the CBP One app — originally launched in the final days of the Trump administration to facilitate commerce — to also facilitate coveted interviews at American ports of entry. In the early days, the app only worked in the capital and farther north. Combined with the city’s job and housing opportunities, that suddenly made Mexico City a desirable waystation. Eventually, access to CBP One expanded to all of Mexico until the Trump administration remade it to facilitate “voluntary deportations.” Without the CBP One app, some have indeed started migrating south. Others will surely turn to smugglers. And many, including Mima and Yeli, will wait, unsure of what they should do.

Near the boiling moka pot, Alfredo’s wife brushes a coat of white paste into Yeli’s hair.

They stew over how many “bad people” got through to the U.S., back when it was easier to get through, before the policies that have trapped them here. “Then again, look at how many people they’re deporting now,” Yeli says. “Who can say why God allows these things to happen?” Alfredo says little, despite having plenty to say.

ALFREDITO, WHO IS two, goes to bed every

night between his mother and his father in a single bed. Sometimes Alfredo looks at his boy, then closes his eyes and tries to doze.

Sometimes that works. But other times, the memories of what he did to get here keep him awake. Like when he floated from Guatemala into Mexico on a raft made of innertubes and two-by-fours, at 2 o’clock in the morning, in the pouring rain, with his wife and his child, piloted by a swift current and a smuggler with a very long stick. Or the three houses they’ve lived in over eight months since, each one cheaper and smaller than the one before. Or the five jobs he’s had, from truck driver to car washer to English teacher, none paying more than any other.

Sometimes — though rarely, because Alfredo is a forward-looking man — he also recalls what he left behind in Cuba. Life there was never perfect, but by Cuban standards, he made an excellent living as manager of a private tourism company’s fishing operation on the Bay of Pigs. He had a two-bedroom house, a car and a salary that allowed him to save $14,500. He remembers that now as the happiest time of his life. Every day, he gets further away from it — but no matter. When he dwells too long, he need only glance at Alfredito again.

Alfredito would never forgive him, he believes, if he hadn’t made this trip. If he hadn’t taken this risk. Alfredo never would have forgiven himself, either. It was always a leap of faith — one whose verdict is still undetermined. But he had to do it. “When you have nothing,” he says, “you have nothing to lose.” And, in his mind, everything to gain.

his calculus. He has to be getting closer.

Has to be.

The cruel irony is that Mexico City sits 600 miles from the nearest border crossing, while Havana is just 90 miles away by sea.

Yes, Alfredo knows all about the American dream, or so he thinks. He speaks of it with zeal. He’ll die, if he must, in its pursuit. “The American dream is the opportunity to have, by your effort, what you couldn’t have in your country,” he told me.

“The American dream is the possibility given in the States to be a free man. To be a worker. To be respected. That’s the American dream. The rest is on your shoulders.”

The very forces conspiring to keep him out, he believes, are what make this dream great to begin with. The United States is great, in his view, precisely because of its willingness to doggedly enforce border security. In fact, he’s a Donald Trump fan.

He believes Americans were correct to vote him into office, even though it torpedoed his own pursuits.

On those nights when he drifts toward despair, thinking about where the journey has led him so far, he thinks instead about the opportunity before him. The fact that the United States will not welcome him is no deterrent. He will prove himself worthy.

“I will be in the Land of the Free,” he says.

The Land of the Free, meanwhile, continues to conspire against him, and Alfredo knows it. But there is no going back to some wistful before. The new political paradigms guarding the border don’t change

The lack of change lately, he assures himself, is just an illusion.

Just like it was for the Venezuelan migrants who lived in Alfredo’s home before him. And the indigenous Mexicans before them. And on and on and on, down T H E N E X T DAY, Ernesto secures a job at through the conquistadors and the Aztecs the poultry plant for Alfredo, too. I watch and whatever group occupied this place Alfredo do the math on his phone: If he some 12,000 years ago, when one of the works 13 of every 14 days, he’ll bring home oldest people ever discovered in the Amerabout 10,400 Mexican pesos per month. icas died near the springs. The place re“With that,” he tells me, “I’ll be able to pay mains through it all, but the context does for the rent and the food.” He jumps at it not. What was once an island spa can despite the 4 a.m., 11-hour shifts. The day become an apartment complex. No place before he begins, I invite him, Mari and Al- stays the same forever.

Nor does any group of people. fredito to have tacos across the street from Mima’s laundromat, in the heart of Peñón In September 2025, Alfredo texted me de los Baños. On our way, we walk right saying he’d moved to Monterrey, about past the mineral hot springs that gave this 150 miles from the nearest border crossplace its name. ing. He planned to move again soon, Alfredito doesn’t know many words, but he added, to Piedras Negras — a border he recognizes Mima’s laundromat, and he’s town across the Rio Grande from Eagle eager to say hi. It amazes Alfredo that his Pass, Texas. “You know,” he told me, “that son knows this place by sight. Mima smiles I have to see my little boy grow up and when she sees Alfredito in the window, but vote in America.” Texas, meanwhile, has she can’t come out. She just waves, then reinforced Eagle Pass with stacked shipgoes back to ironing shirts. The toddler, ping containers and many miles of barbed pleased enough, leads wire. Vice President JD us back home.

Vance visited in March, around the time I visitHe’s getting quicker, Alfredo tells me. And ed Alfredo in Mexico, to THEY WILL REACH he loves stairs, taking tout the Trump adminTHE AMERICAN every opportunity to istration’s commitment DREAM. ALFREDO run up and down as we to border security. This, TELLS HIMSELF SO MONTH AFTER pass them. That’s tough Vance said, was just the MONTH, DAY for Alfredo, who has a beginning. “Rome,” he AFTER DAY. grapefruit-sized lump added, “wasn’t built in between his left knee a day.” and ankle, the afterWhen I asked Alfredo math of a motorcycle about the others, he told accident. It’s getting harder to keep up. By me Ernesto and Fátima were still planning the time we reach their street, having tra- to return to Cuba but hadn’t yet. And Yeli versed the nearby Parque del Niño Quema- and Mima were still stuck in the same place do — “Burned Boy Park” — the toddler’s as before. Some things had changed since way out in front.

March. But his resolve, faced with barbed Alfredo doesn’t seem to mind. That’s wire and detention centers and mass dewhat this is all about: his son. That’s why portations, remained intact almost a year they’re here. They will reach the American later. “Same old story, my friend,” he wrote, dream. Alfredo tells himself so month af- “working and hoping to get some day to the ter month, day after day, hour after hour. Land of the Free.”

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by Jay Cost

illustration by

Nash Weerasekera

For more than a century, public demands for responsive government have weakened Congress and strengthened the presidency.

Has that bargain backfired?

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T H E U. S . C A PI TO L B U I LD I N G I S T H E FO C A L PO I N T O F WAS H I N GTO N , D.C . , I N TE N D E D TO S I G N A L THE DOMINANT R O LE O F CO N G R E SS I N FE D E R A L G OV E R N M E N T.

EVEN MONTHS AFTER President Donald

Trump launched his “Liberation Day” campaign of global economic protectionism, the government’s Solicitor General John Sauer stood before the U.S. Supreme Court to argue that Congress gave his boss the authority to impose sweeping tariffs.

“There’s enormous deference to the president in both political branches” and “inherent authority” to manage foreign affairs. “And pile on top of that there’s a broad delegation of the duty,” Sauer continued before Justice Neil Gorsuch cut him off and asked: “You’re saying there’s inherent authority in foreign affairs, all foreign affairs … commerce, duties and tariffs and war. It’s inherent authority all the way down, you say. Fine. (What if ) Congress decides tomorrow, well, we’re tired of this legislating business. We’re just going to hand it all off to the president. What would stop Congress from doing that?”

Reporters seized on the November 2025 exchange as evidence that Trump’s foreign-policy ambitions were likely to be checked. Yet the dynamic Gorsuch described — Congress ceding broad authority to the president — has long been the norm.

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Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama rewrote the nation’s immigration laws by executive fiat. President George W. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless surveillance, circumventing rules established by Congress under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. President Bill Clinton engaged in a nearly 80-day military campaign in Kosovo without receiving congressional approval under the War Powers Resolution.

Such has been the story of executivelegislative relations for generations, be it Republicans or Democrats occupying the White House or controlling Congress.

The House and Senate write vague laws that presidents interpret with maximum latitude, and Congress responds to presidential overreach by doing nothing. The president becomes more powerful while Congress becomes weaker. Even if the Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s tariffs, the fact remains that it is the court — not Congress — that is responding to executive overreach. Time after time, Congress has allowed the president to walk all over it.

Congressional diminishment has become so entrenched in our thinking that

HALB ERGM AN

even members of Congress erroneously think of their institution as co-equal to the executive branch. Years ago, I took a group of high schoolers to visit the Capitol. Before the tour began, we were shown an introductory video that proclaimed Congress “co-equal” to the other branches. I could not believe it. The framers of the Constitution would have been appalled. Congress was not “co-equal” in their thinking. It was intended as the first branch of government, constituting the assembled representatives of the people to write laws on the country’s behalf, which the courts and the president are required to follow.

There is, no doubt, a lure to executive power. The president can get things done quickly and efficiently, while Congress often gets mired in gridlock. However, this shift in constitutional authority has had bad consequences for how the United States is governed. The only institution that can possibly reflect the values and interests of 330 million people is Congress. With it increasingly distancing itself from the traditional role as lawmaker, public policy is not going to reflect the entirety of public opinion. Instead, policy increasingly depends on the views of

just one person — the president. No wonder our country has become more divided — as power moves from the legislative to the executive, the opportunity for debate, discussion and compromise has diminished.

Fixing Congress should be a national priority, but it will not be easy. There is no simplistic account for the collapse of Congress. It was a complicated process that took over a century. But if we hope to restore the federal legislature to its constitutional place, we have to understand the story of its fall.

IF YOU HAVE ever been to Washington,

D.C., it is easy to appreciate just how much the city’s designers wanted you to notice Congress. The gridlines of the city, which dissect it into four quadrants, converge at Capitol Hill. That elevated perch overlooking the sprawl of monuments and executive offices is named after the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the most important place in the celebrated Roman Republic. The White House is a rather traditional and somewhat plain looking estate from the 18th century, while

The fact remains that it is the court — not Congress — that is responding to executive overreach.

Time after time, Congress has allowed the president to walk all over it.

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Congressional diminishment has become so entrenched in our thinking that even members of Congress wrongly think of their institution as co-equal to the executive branch.

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Congress is a grand and ornate building.

Built in the neoclassical style, it draws heavily on Roman influences, again intended to convey the founders’ admiration of one of the world’s first republics.

Washington’s design was meant to reinforce our constitutional structure. Under the Constitution, Congress has vast and sweeping powers — and not just to write the law. The executive departments and the lower courts are creations of Congress, which can direct how they operate.

Congress also funds both branches. The Senate’s power to advise and consent on judicial and executive appointments gives it the ability to micromanage personnel decisions in both branches.

Moreover, Congress can impeach and remove any official in the executive or judicial branches, but the president and the courts cannot remove members of Congress. If you can fire me, but I cannot fire you, are the two of us “co-equal”? Hardly.

I’d say you were my boss, which is exactly what the framers had in mind. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”

The constitutional powers of Congress reflect the republican character of our nation.

Abraham Lincoln declared at Gettysburg that our government is “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The only branch that actually represents the people is Congress, and the framers debated internally for months at the Constitutional Convention over how that should look — finally agreeing that the House should reflect the people as citizens of the country, and the Senate should reflect the people as part of states.

While the president is also elected, he is only one person, and cannot possibly reflect all the varieties of values, preferences and experiences in American life. But Congress can.

Even the name itself tells us what the framers had in mind. “Congress” derives from a Latin word, meaning “come together”: The people, through their representatives, gather to resolve the disputes, find consensus and enact laws for the public good.

For much of our early history, Congress functioned as the framers intended. National debates over slavery, westward expansion and economic development were centered in Congress. Leaders like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster would give long, majestic speeches in the Senate that were published in newspapers across the country. The president, while important, usually was left following the legislators’ lead.

There were exceptions. George Washington was of such astonishing national stature that the government often followed his direction. Andrew Jackson likewise could dictate terms to Congress. But for the most part, the job of the president was to enforce the laws of Congress while recommending policy changes that were, ultimately, up to the legislature.

How did that change? In a word, corruption. As the 19th century wore on, Congress turned away from the people’s business and toward the demands of special interests. Coincidentally, a major force behind congressional dysfunction was the very issue driving Trump’s economic agenda — the tariff. After the War of 1812, the United States adopted industrial “protection,” placing high tariffs on imported goods to protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competition.

The original intent was for national security. Policymakers realized that the country needed domestic industries to supply its wartime needs. Great Britain was the United States’ top trading partner, and the war had deprived the young nation of essential goods like clothing and farm equipment.

Tariffs were meant to prevent that from happening again. The high tariff was a boon to the nation’s manufacturing sector, which by the 1820s had begun organizing itself into a political lobby to raise rates even further, regardless of national security. Congress eventually acceded, and the tariff schedule became a complicated tangle of various rates, drawbacks and exemptions, whose purpose was not to advance a national agenda but reward local constituencies.

While the problem of corruption started with tariffs, it was hardly confined to it.

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BET TMA N A RC HIV E VIA G E TTY IM AGE S

E XPA N D E D P OW E R O F T H E E X E C UTIVE B R A N C H B E GA N IN T HE 20 TH C E N TURY U ND E R P R E SID E N T T HE ODO R E R O OSE VE LT A N D ACC E LE R ATE D I N T H E 1 2-Y E A R A D M I N ISTR ATIO N O F H IS CO USIN , P R E S I DE N T F R A N K LIN D. R O OSE VE LT.

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Members of Congress began demanding that the president distribute federal jobs, contracts and licenses as political rewards.

Imagine the person delivering your mail was chosen because he was a second cousin of a senator — that’s how life was in the 1800s. As the decades passed, the scale of patronage grew. By the 1870s, the Ulysses S. Grant administration had given the Republican Party of New York control over the jobs at the Port of New York, where millions of dollars flowed annually through tariffs, import penalties and bribes. The New York Republicans ran the port similar to how the mafia used to run Las Vegas — skimming off the top from collections to enrich itself and build an unstoppable statewide machine.

As the industrial economy developed, big businesses bought plenty of friends in Congress to keep regulations to a minimum.

By the end of the 1800s, the Senate did not so much represent their states but rather the “trusts,” the massive combinations of businesses that controlled all manner of economic life, from oil to sugar to beef. The bargain was simple, if diabolical: Senators would make sure that business interests

were defended in Congress, and in return, businesses would give senators cash to build political machines. None of this was subtle. Representatives of the trusts would often hand senators bags of cash. And senators in turn would literally buy votes — giving cash gifts to voters to make sure they stayed in office.

BY THE END of the century, the country

had had enough. Muckraking journalists exposed the extreme graft and corruption in the public councils, federal and local — with works like “The Treason of the Senate” by David Graham Phillips and “The Shame of the Cities” by Lincoln Steffens.

And the cries for reform became undeniable. The widespread public outrage gave rise to a progressive movement that dominated politics from 1901 until 1920. One priority for the progressives who ran for public office was congressional reform.

They enacted the 16th Amendment to allow the income tax, intended to be a more equitable way to raise revenue than the tariff. The 17th Amendment required the direct election of senators, to cut down on the power of party bosses. The progressives also instituted the first party primaries to transfer power from party bosses to average American voters, although it would be decades before they were adopted nationwide.

Progressive leaders in government also sought to limit congressional malfeasance by transferring power to the president.

He was, after all, the only official in government chosen by the whole country. He could claim to reflect the national interest and perhaps could force Congress to behave itself. Teddy Roosevelt was the first embodiment of this idea. He involved himself in all manner of affairs that previous presidents had avoided. For instance, he intervened in the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 when the shutdown in coal production threatened to cut off home heat for the winter. After an unsuccessful effort to mediate the dispute,

he threatened to send in the military and have the government mine the coal.

Voters were thrilled to have a president who could get things done. But presidential action came at a cost — for the office has no real, constitutional authority to do what Roosevelt had threatened. Nevertheless, his intervention in the coal strike set the tone for politics in the 20th century: expanding the powers of the president to handle problems that Congress could not or would not solve. As he wrote in his autobiography, “My belief was that it was not only (the president’s) right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the Nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws.”

If Teddy Roosevelt was a model for presidential action, Woodrow Wilson provided a theory. Wilson, an academic who served as president from 1913 until 1921, was a conscientious advocate of presidential power. He thought the framers had erred in placing too much authority in Congress, and that the president could correct this problem. In his 1908 book “Constitutional Government in the United States,” Wilson asserted the president’s position “is the vital place of action in the system, whether he accept it as such or not, and the office is the measure of the man, — of his wisdom as well as of his force.” The former New Jersey governor and president of Princeton University thus injected himself into all sorts of congressional activity. He started the tradition of a State of the Union address — all presidents since Thomas Jefferson had submitted theirs in writing — to lobby Congress directly. As Congress was debating tariff reform in 1913, Wilson took an office in the Capitol to jawbone members on the Hill. When senators balked at the Treaty of Versailles to end World War I, he embarked on a nationwide speaking tour to move public opinion.

Wilson also pushed for redesigning government so public policy was settled in the executive branch. The Federal Trade Commission was a Wilsonian innovation that gave the executive branch the authority to

decide which businesses were too big for the country’s good. The War Industries Board sought to manage the wartime economy through negotiations between the president and big business, among other responsibilities. Congress still wrote the underlying legislation, but there was an undeniable shift in decision-making power, from the legislature to the executive.

Ultimately, the public rejected Wilsonian governance, overwhelmingly choosing conservative Republican Warren G. Harding in 1920. But one person who remained impressed was Franklin Roosevelt, who had served as Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy and ran as the vice presidential nominee in 1920. When he was elected president in 1932, he sought to continue Wilson’s project of expanding presidential power against an acrimonious and corrupt Congress.

FDR had widespread support for what he called the New Deal, for Congress had beclowned itself during the early years of the Great Depression. As the economy cratered in 1930, congressional Republicans returned to their tried-and-true formula, a protective tariff. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff was intended to stabilize domestic industry in the face of global economic collapse.

But in practice it became a mad scramble for plunder, as every House member and senator looked to hike rates to protect industries in their districts. The tariff ultimately raised rates to levels not seen in 100 years, prompting an international trade war as foreign countries responded with tariffs against the United States. The global assault on international trade slowed the economy and worsened the Depression.

When Roosevelt took the oath of office in 1933, the country was eager to put him — and him alone — in charge.

The New Deal Congress of 1933–34, stocked full of Roosevelt Democrats, was happy to oblige. On issue after issue, the legislature did not so much reform public policy but empower the Roosevelt administration to reform it as the president saw fit. The Agricultural Adjustment Act gave the executive power to set farm prices. The

The job of the president was to enforce the laws of Congress while recommending policy changes that were, ultimately, up to the legislature.

How did that change? In a word, corruption.

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TODAY, MANY ANALYSTS bemoan the rise

of what’s been called an “Imperial Presidency,” a chief executive who wields power akin to the Roman Emperor Augustus, without regard to the concerns of the people’s representatives in Congress. This happened 46

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over decades of a Congress failing to address public problems, and the people — in frustration — turning to leaders like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, whose expansive views of executive power may not have been consistent with the framers’ vision of the Constitution. But when the economy is crashing or the nation is at war, debating constitutional niceties seems absurd.

And so it goes with Trump and his tariffs.

His “Liberation Day” shocked many people, but nobody should have been surprised.

Since 1934, Congress has empowered the president to set tariff rates. There are all manner of laws and precedents that Trump can cite for his actions, and even if the Supreme Court strikes down this round of tariffs, there are statutes empowering him to likely restore many of the duties by altering their legal justifications ever so slightly. After almost 100 years of historical precedent, in which Congress has handed authority of foreign trade to the president, Trump has manifold options.

The problem with this bargain is that the people may have gained executive efficiency, but we have lost the republican character of our constitutional system. Yes, the president can act decisively and quickly, for he is only one person. But, because he is only one person, there is no way he can account for the variety of views and interests in the nation. Inevitably, a large group of Americans are going to be alienated by presidential action. And that is exactly what has happened for decades. Republicans under Obama and Biden felt the sting of the imperial presidency on their unilateral changes to securing the southern border or providing legal sanction to certain classes of immigrants living in the country illegally, just as Democrats feel right now under Trump.

If decisions are made by one person who is nominated by one party and elected by half the country, then the other party — constituting the other half of the country — is going to feel left out.

On the other hand, if Congress were restored to its place of power, there is a greater chance that policy would better reflect

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National Industrial Recovery Act gave a similar authority over wages and prices in the industrial sector. Banking and monetary policy were handed off to executive discretion. So was trade policy. The country’s 100-yearlong experiment with protectionism came to an end under FDR with passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, which began the process of unwinding protective tariffs and creating the conditions for free trade. Importantly, decisions were left to the president on when and how tariffs would be lowered.

In some cases, the Supreme Court struck down Roosevelt’s initiatives. But the public stood fast behind Roosevelt, who won four consecutive elections. During his tenure, he filled eight of the nine seats on the Supreme Court, which in due course bent to his will. FDR’s revolution in executive power — begun with Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson — became the established way of governance in Washington, D.C. When Republicans finally came back to power in 1953 under Dwight Eisenhower, they had made peace with the New Deal. A decade later, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society once more expanded the power of government, specifically through the executive branch, as a whole host of new federal agencies were empowered to regulate American life. The underlying laws that empowered these agencies were notoriously vague on specifics. Congress was content to allow the president and his appointees to figure out how to promote goals like clean air, racial equality and truth in advertising. And once again, Republicans accepted most of it. Far from unwinding the Great Society, Richard Nixon expanded it with the Environmental Protection Agency.

ANOT H E R E X PANS ION OF E X E C U T IV E P OWE R TOOK P L AC E U NDE R P RE S IDE NT LY NDON JOH NS ON, WH OS E GRE AT S OC IE T Y B E GAN AN E RA OF INC RE AS E D GOV E RNME NT RE GU L AT ION.

the diversity of views in this country. For the most part, Congress can only function through compromise, meaning everybody has to give a little to get a little. That makes policymaking slower — as deals take a while to develop — but it means the final result is more in keeping with the interests of the broader country, rather than just the faction that the current president happens to align with.

Ultimately, we must be mindful of all of history’s lessons. Congress in the 19th century really was corrupt and parochial. Reformers had good reason for moving power to the executive branch. But there was an overcorrection in the 20th century — the president acquired too much power. We are not so much a republic anymore as we are an elective monarchy. We need to find some middle ground between these extremes through a Congress where debates are held, disputes are resolved, and public policy is enshrined into law. But we also must remember that the president can serve as a good check on congressional incompetence, especially during economic crises.

THE PLACE TO start is in reforming Con-

gress itself. Happy to pass the buck to the president for a century, the legislature has allowed itself to fall into extreme disrepair.

Nowadays, it would be foolish to demand Congress reclaim powers from the executive — for it lacks the ability to wield them responsibly. We must first make Congress a respectable partner in governance, rather than the national embarrassment it has become.

Consider, for instance, the periodic government shutdowns. These are, in part, a consequence of partisan bickering, but they also reflect the fact that the way Congress writes its annual budget is hopelessly outdated. The rules are still set by the Congressional Budget Act, written over 50 years ago, establishing a process that simply does not work anymore. Congress is chronically late in finalizing its spending plans, and the minority party (Democratic or Republican)

often tries to slow it down further for political gain. It should be revised so that Congress can plan the next year's spending in a timely fashion.

Likewise, the Senate filibuster should be reformed. The filibuster — which allows the minority to delay action indefinitely — was originally intended to allow unfettered debate among senators. It developed into a way to make sure that minority views are included in public policy, which is a good thing in a country as closely divided as the United States. But since the 1970s, it has become a way to gum up the works of the Senate, preventing even the most simple

The purpose of Congress is not to “fight!” as so many candidates promise to do. It is to “walk together” — find common ground, build consensus and compromise.

or essential measures from being enacted. In the 96th Congress (1979–80), the majority tried to end 21 filibusters. In the 118th Congress (2023–24), that number skyrocketed to 241 filibusters. Reforms of the filibuster — limiting its scope to certain bills or mandating that minorities actually hold the floor and talk if they want to delay — could retain the virtue of minority input while making Congress work better.

As President Joe Biden said in 2021, the filibuster has “been abused from the time it came into being,” but “in an extreme way in the last 20 years. Let’s eliminate the abuse first.”

As for the House of Representatives, it should become more representative. The current number of representatives — capped at 435 members — is not in the Constitution but set by statute nearly 100 years ago, when the country was roughly a third of its current population. A member of Congress now represents on average a district of more than 750,000 people. It is impossible for one person to reflect the views and interests of so many people. The British House of Commons has 650 seats and the German Bundestag has 630. Surely, the U.S. House can be expanded.

Above all, people must remember that — for better and for worse — change begins at the voting booth. If Congress is full of grandstanders who would rather scream at each other on cable news and social media rather than legislate solutions, voters can remove them from office. The progressive movement of the early 20th century provides an example — when the public demanded reform loudly and consistently enough, politicians listened. Today, we all need to remember that the purpose of Congress is not to “fight!” as so many candidates promise to do. It is to “come together” — find common ground, build consensus and compromise. That does not require sacrificing core values but acknowledging that other people have different values, and that the best way forward is discovering policies that work for more than just half-plus-one of the country.

Ultimately, we need to realize that our current problems have been brewing for a long time. Liberals bemoaning Trump as a king, like conservatives who despised Obama and Biden’s executive overreach, should recognize that their grandiose ideas of executive power have deep roots in our body politic.

If we want to end the imperial presidency, we must appreciate that history, so we can reform the Congress and restore the constitutional balance within our government.

JAY C O S T I S T H E G E R A L D R . F O R D N O N R E S I D E N T S E N I O R F E L L OW AT T H E A M E R I C A N E N T E R P R I S E I N S T I T U T E , W H E R E H E F O C U S E S O N P O L I T I C A L T H E O RY, CONGRESS AND ELECTIONS.

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Sundance Rise, P HOTO COLL AG E BY D ESER ET N EWS STA F F / P H OTOS BY S P E N S E R H E A P S A N D BY U S P E C I AL CO LLECT I O NS

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by Natalia Galicza

The independent film festival that Robert Redford built changed the industry and its host state. What does it mean now that it’s gone?

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Robert Redford made a wrong turn.

SOMEWHERE ALONG HIS thousand-plus mile

commute from his college town of Boulder to his family home in Los Angeles, the interstate became a quiet two-lane road.

He was 18 or 19 years old then, flunking out of the University of Colorado in the mid-1950s, adrift. He weaved his motorcycle up a narrow canyon lined with aspen and pine trees, in pursuit of a better view of the mountain he saw towering overhead. The path twisted and tightened. His breathing deepened. Then, he arrived at a clearing.

The landscape opened up to reveal Mount Timpanogos in all its splendor.

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In spite of how he’d gotten there — entirely by mistake — Redford felt like he’d arrived somewhere promising. Sunlight glittered off the permanent snowfield on the mountain’s north slope, ice crystals winking like coins. The area surrounding one of the tallest peaks in Utah was undeveloped at that point, apart from a locally owned ski resort by the name of Timp Haven. It had humble amenities: a homemade rope tow, a single chairlift and a T-bar.

Rather than leave it up to fate to decide how long it would take for encroaching development to spoil that sight, Redford

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vowed to put a stake in the ground and return to Utah. A few years later, in 1961, he bought two acres of ski area land off a sheepherder for $500.

Over the years, Redford morphed from an unserious college dropout to a celebrated actor, breaking through with a Broadway production of “Barefoot in the Park” in 1963 before becoming one of Hollywood’s most beloved heartthrobs in 1969 with a lead role in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” He’d winter with his Provo-born wife at their retreat in Provo Canyon when he needed respite from the grind of the

crisis for both the festival and the state that had built it.

The 2026 Sundance Film Festival will mark Park City’s final year as the world’s premiere destination for independent filmmakers. The Sundance Institute — which hosts the year-round labs, workshops and learning opportunities that Redford was especially proud of — will remain in Utah for the foreseeable future. Yet the loss of the state’s marquee annual event will prove impossible for locals to ignore in the years to come. Not even a month after the institute announced it would relocate the festival to Boulder, a Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll found that 56 percent of state residents felt disappointed by the news. So was Gov. Spencer Cox. “Ultimately, this decision is theirs to make,” he said in a statement, “but I believe it’s a mistake and that, one day, they’ll realize they left behind not just a place, but their heritage.”

By the time the institute arrived at its conclusion, Redford was 88 years old.

He gave the decision his blessing. Then he died six months later in his home at Sundance Mountain Resort where he’d arrived by chance all those years ago, barely an adult, yet fated to transform a state and an industry. Now Utah is left to brace for a future without the festival, while the festival looks toward one without its original home or its founder.

Movies that had not shown in the artsiest cultural hubs of the United States had come to Utah. It demonstrated that diversity of thought, lived experiences and expression can resonate with audiences in “flyover country.”

T H E STAT E ’ S R E L AT I O N S H I P with film be-

gan way back, before Redford and before Sundance, with “The Covered Wagon,” a 1923 silent film Western shot across Utah’s Antelope Island and Beaver County. The director, James Cruze from Ogden, was tasked with creating a film that promoted Americanism to help reset Hollywood’s then-scandalous reputation. He opened the film with a title card that read: “The blood of America is the blood of pioneers — the blood of lion-hearted men and women who carved a splendid civilization out of an uncharted wilderness.” Then-President Warren G. Harding was such a fan of the film, he invited members of the Supreme

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industry. Then his small hideout, and his vision for it, expanded. In 1969, Redford’s two acres grew to include a mountain resort and wilderness preserve spanning 5,000 acres in the Wasatch Range. He named it Sundance, after his titular role. And in 1981, at the base of the same snowy mountain that had lured him off course as a teen, he founded the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing independent film.

More than four decades later, the institute hosts labs and workshops for aspiring screenwriters and directors, dishes out upward of $3 million in grants and matches more than 1,000 new filmmakers with seasoned mentors every year. It also hosts the Sundance Film Festival, which has brought Hollywood hopefuls, coastal elites, industry outcasts, A-list celebrities, film nerds and the cinema-curious from around the world to Park City each January. “It helped put Utah on a map in a way we hadn’t been before,” says Gary Herbert, who served as a Republican governor from 2009 to 2021 and proclaimed November 9, 2013, “Robert Redford Day” in Utah to honor the actor’s impact on the state. “People wanted to come and enjoy the same culture, the same beauty that Redford had fallen in love with years ago.”

Last year alone, the event generated an economic boost of more than $196 million, brought in nearly 30,000 visitors from out of state and created about 3,000 jobs. Beyond the finances, the festival proved that creativity and art can thrive in so-called “flyover country” — that a landlocked state in the Intermountain West that’s been solidly Republican for more than half a century can double as a hub of independent film.

“People do sell Utah short if they don’t know it,” says Virginia Pearce, director of the Utah Film Commission. “Redford staking a claim in Utah gave all of the filmmakers here a belief that Utah truly was a place where creative ideas belong.” So when the institute announced in March that the festival would leave its home for Boulder, Colorado, in 2027, it presented an identity

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Court, military and Congress to view it at a special White House screening. Another silent film, 1924’s “The Deadwood Coach,” highlighted the dramatic scenery of Kanab and the wide open spaces that made the town a choice location for Westerns of the era, drawing in the genre’s biggest stars like John Wayne. By 1949, it had become the most popular filming location outside of California and earned the nickname “Little Hollywood.”

Even after Westerns fell out of mainstream favor in the 1970s, Utah made a concerted effort to continue attracting filmmakers. Gov. Calvin Rampton, a Democrat who served from 1965 to 1977, established the Utah Film Commission near the end of his tenure. The state agency opened in 1974 and became one of the first state-level film commissions in the country, with a mission of advertising Utah as a filming location.

And advertise, it did.

The Utah/U.S. Film Festival launched in September 1978 and featured screenings in Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square, alongside panel discussions and local competitions that highlighted voices in independent cinema. That initial slate of showings included the Southern Gothic “A Streetcar Named Desire” and neo-noir crime drama “Mean Streets.” After the industry rejected the Hays Code in 1968 — which had imposed strict guidelines barring profanity, violence and even interracial relationships on screen — studios adopted a rating system that allowed filmmakers more creative freedom. This period of experimentation and boom in independent film became known as the New Hollywood era, and the Sundance Film Festival was the first event of its kind to respond to that cultural reset on a national stage.

Redford was drawn to the festival for that same reason. Though he wasn’t a founding member, he’d gotten involved early on and served as the first board chairman.

After he attended the festival in 1979, he later told Architectural Digest, he understood “that experiments were going on — in provincial garages — and not getting 52

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seen.” Yet however noble of a pursuit Redford found the festival to be, it had accrued mounds of debt. He took a central role in saving it. The festival was rebranded as the U.S. Film and Video Festival in 1981 and relocated to Park City in January at the suggestion of revered film director Sydney Pollack. The hope was that by becoming the world’s only film festival to take place in a ski town during the winter, it would generate enough novelty and interest to boost ticket sales. That idea, coupled with the exposure and resources available after Redford’s Sundance Institute assumed control of the festival in 1985, worked as planned. It expanded to a 10-day event in 1985 and adopted its final name in 1991: the Sundance Film Festival.

By then, the festival had already earned the attention of industry giants and had enough status and acclaim to push the boundaries by premiering Norman René’s “Longtime Companion,” one of the first films to put a human face on the AIDS crisis. “Over the years, you would have angsty films, difficult films. They were never afraid of telling difficult stories,” says Randy Barton, manager of the Egyptian Theatre in Park City, which has helped host the festival throughout its four decades in town. “It was a place where stories were told, where people’s passions became real.”

People like Steven Soderbergh, whose Sundance debut went on to receive the highest honor at the Cannes Film Festival.

Or Quentin Tarantino, who premiered his first film, “Reservoir Dogs,” at the 1992 festival. The following year, master of twee, Wes Anderson, got his start at Sundance before going on to make such groundbreaking films as “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Since 1991, 20 documentary films supported by the institute have gone on to win Oscars, as well as at least 30 more Oscar-winning feature and short films. As early as 1996, the festival was known not just as the most famous festival for independent film, but the “preeminent American film festival, period,” according to then-Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan. This evolution

“We have a long history in film. We are a film-loving state. It’s not as if we just woke up one day a few years ago and decided to get into the film industry.”

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brought independent or “indie” films — often low budget, quirky or unusual — from niche to one of the most lauded approaches to filmmaking.

Movies that had not shown in the artsiest cultural hubs of the United States had come to Utah. It demonstrated that diversity of thought, lived experiences and expression resonate with audiences in the interior West. Perhaps even more so than in places where that kind of exchange is widely accessible and taken for granted.

It’s that paradox that makes Sundance’s origin story uniquely Utahn. “The reasons (Redford) fell in love with Utah were not just the beautiful landscapes, but a community that embraced creativity and the wild spaces that encouraged connection to nature and gave you space as an artist to create and be thoughtful,” Pearce says. “Independent filmmaking, creative thought, didn’t begin with Sundance (Film Festival). It certainly won’t end with it.” But it might change.

JARED HESS THOUGHT he was going to be

sick. He could feel the anxiety bubble up in his stomach, to the point where he was dry-heaving in anticipation of the movie about to begin. The 24-year-old was two years out of film school at Brigham Young University when he arrived at the Park City Library on January 17, 2004. He’d attended Sundance each year he was in college as an audience member and aspiring filmmaker.

That Saturday night, he attended for the first time as a featured director.

As the house lights dimmed, Hess caught his breath. The audience hushed.

The screen went black. Then, a lanky teenage boy with aviator eyeglasses and a permed mop of ginger hair appeared. He was waiting outside his home for the school bus, and when it arrived, he trudged to the last seat and sat down with a huff.

“What are you going to do today, Napoleon?” the student next to him asked.

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office sales. It was set and filmed in Preston, Idaho, a farming town of fewer than 5,000 at the time and where Hess himself grew up as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a self-identified nerd and a fellow awkward teenager. “‘Napoleon Dynamite’ works because of the people who made that movie,” says Brian Price, a lecturer in film studies at Yale University who taught screenwriting at UCLA for 15 years.

“The reason why it has the cult status that it has is that it’s about misfits and that it appeals to misfits.”

The festival had inspired Hess to believe that stories about people from overlooked backgrounds can resonate with national audiences. “There was a special dynamic that happened between art and culture,” he says. “Utah has its own very unique culture. Bringing something here, a festival that sometimes is at odds with that general culture, is an amazing thing. It creates conversation, and it exposes a culture to art and stories that they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

That includes films from rural pockets of the Intermountain West and middle America ignored by the coasts, as well as those made by or featuring people of diverse racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds sometimes overlooked by mainstream media. The 2025 Hollywood Diversity Report

by UCLA found that 80 percent of directors and co-directors are white, along with more than 90 percent of writers of Hollywood’s top films. Sundance has invested in grants and outreach efforts for artists who are Muslim, disabled, Native American, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander — perspectives that are sorely lacking in the industry at large. An event in the state that prioritized those principles on such a globally visible scale gave Utah a reputation of being multidimensional despite the state’s

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tied to a string, and tossed it out of the bus window. It bobbed behind the vehicle along a dirt road, surrounded by sunbleached mountains and crop fields.

Everything — from the outdated ’80s garb, to the characteristically defiant teenage attitude and deadpan delivery — instantly appealed to the audience. Within the first two minutes of the premiere, laughter echoed around the auditorium. When the screening of “Napoleon Dynamite” ended, the film received a standing ovation and set a bidding war in motion, ultimately going to production company Fox Searchlight for $4.75 million. “I can’t overstate the impact that it had on my life,” Hess says. “If you’ve played at Sundance and had a film that’s unique, you come away with the confidence of trying to stay true to yourself and your own voice and make things that are original. The world’s a better place with a multitude of voices like that.”

Despite a slim $400,000 budget, the film went on to become a cult classic, grossing more than $46 million in worldwide box

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conservative political leanings. It didn’t just bring the world to Utah, it brought Utah to the rest of the world.

ON A SATURDAY night in April 1976, a group

and our community started to view Sundance not as a cultural nonprofit event, but as a cash cow.”

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of more than 500 Kanab locals gathered around a flame. Tensions had bubbled unusually high in the small town of some 2,000 people. Just two days before, on April 15, the Southern California Edison Company and San Diego Gas and Electric Company had withdrawn support for the impending $3.5 billion Kaiparowits coal-fired power plant.

It would’ve been the largest power plant on Earth, capable of burning 30,000 tons of coal each day. It would’ve brought southern Utah stable jobs — if not for Redford and a band of environmentalists that had advocated against it and successfully thwarted the project. So the mob of 500 lamented its loss by burning the actor in effigy, complete with a blond wig.

Throughout his time in Utah, Redford never shied away from advocacy.

He was a prominent activist who pushed for the creation of the Grand StaircaseEscalante National Monument, as well as against a six-lane highway. “There was this belief that Redford was an extreme environmentalist, therefore his politics didn’t fit in with Utah’s general attitude towards conservative thought and policy,” former Gov. Herbert, who considered Redford a friend, told me. “He was much more multifaceted and had a broader view than other people gave him credit for.”

Other qualms dealt with finances and local values. The Utah-based Sutherland Institute raised an issue in 2013 when the state invested $300,000 to advertise Utah tourism through Sundance branded merchandise. Sutherland argued the state shouldn’t fund the festival with public money when it doesn’t represent the mores of all residents. “Some of the films they did were a little R-plus rated, and folks didn’t like that. That was a pushback,” said Herbert. Though the festival and its founder have generally been supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, considering the event’s economic impact. At least right up until the end of the festival’s time in Utah.

Within the last few years, several laws have been passed that have come at odds with the anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-discriminatory vision set forth by the film festival. Among them are a law that bans the display of pride flags on government property, an anti-DEI law, and restrictions on bathrooms and college campus housing for transgender people. The Sundance Institute has stated that politics did not play a major role in the decision to move to Colorado. But lawmakers and locals can’t help but suggest a connection, especially since the institute listed “ethos and equity values” as one of the criteria for selecting its new home. Deadline reported in March that a “Sundance insider” called the flurry of legislation “a terrible look for the state.”

Erin Mendenhall, Salt Lake City’s mayor, spoke publicly about her concern that the pride flag ban would harm the state’s bid to keep the festival. Meanwhile, Republican state Sen. Daniel McCay celebrated the festival’s timely departure by posting on X in March that “Sundance does not fit in Utah anymore.”

To some extent, that may be true. If not for political and cultural reasons, then at least in terms of size. When Sundance officials looked to new locations to host its future festivals, they — including Redford — suggested the event needed room to grow. The three top contenders fell to Ohio, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026

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What attracted Redford to Utah and what guided his plans for Sundance are factors totally devoid of

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finances.

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Colorado and Utah, which offered $3.5 million in funding to keep it. Colorado, though, offered $34 million in tax incentives over a decade. Boulder is also roughly 10 times bigger than Park City, with the infrastructure to support the massive influx of people who arrive each year for the festival. When Jared Hess premiered “Napoleon Dynamite” in 2004, for example, fewer than 37,000 people attended the festival. In 2025, more than 85,000 people attended.

“The culture that it brought to the state, I think there was a level of appreciation for it among the local community that was just off the charts,” Hess says. “Everyone’s going to feel its loss once it’s gone.”

The idea to leave Park City had been simmering for some time. The town is home to only about 8,300 full-time residents, yet attracts 600,000 tourists every year. Most of those visitors arrive in the winter to ski or snowboard at the Park City Mountain Resort, the largest skiing area in the country, and compete with Sundance attendees for services. Even outside high season, Park City is the most expensive locale in Utah with a cost of living more than 30 percent above the national average. “Park City and our community started to view Sundance not as a cultural nonprofit event, but as a cash cow,” Barton, Egyptian Theatre manager, says. “The room rates skyrocketed, restaurants raised prices and it’s tough to get around.”

Redford himself hinted at the possibility of relocating the festival in a 2016 interview with The Associated Press. “As it grew, so did the crowds, so did the development in Park City,” he said then. “Well, at some point, if both those things continue to grow, they’re going to begin to choke each other.” He didn’t have all the answers at that point. But he did have questions.

Should the festival risk changing its home base, the forces that shaped it in the first place, the community that brought it such resounding success? Would that move be rejecting the roots the founder deemed the festival’s “heart and soul”? What would that mean moving forward?

EUGENE HERNANDEZ SAT beside his win-

dow at the Sundance Mountain Resort in late October 2025. He gazed out at the same mountain range that captivated Redford decades before and reflected on his own first trip to Utah in 1993 — which was also the first time he set foot on a plane, the first time he saw snow. He was a student at UCLA then, curating the student-run film program, and he had no clear vision of who exactly he wanted to be. Hernandez fell so in love with the festival on that trip, he has attended it nearly every year since. Now, more than 30 years later, he oversees it as the festival director and head of public programming for the Sundance Institute.

In his third year in the role, Hernandez is navigating the biggest change the festival has made in its more than 40 years, while mourning the loss of the person who made it possible. He scanned the pines just beyond his window pane. “This is the place, literally,” he said, “that Mr. Redford and others founded the Sundance Institute at a similar moment to that we’re in now, of artists looking for ways to make and tell stories.”

While the festival is permanently relocating to Colorado, the Sundance Institute will remain in Utah. About a third of the 165 people employed through the institute live in the state. And Hernandez’s hope is that the directors lab, the screenwriters lab and the programs that bring aspiring artists to the mountain resort will continue as is.

“The region around Salt Lake City and Park City are so essential to the history and the formation of this organization, its ethos, what it stands for, and what it supports.”

Gov. Cox has pitched the idea of creating a new festival with the $3.5 million the state had set aside to keep the festival.

The likelihood that a few million dollars in funding alone can create a festival to rival the world’s premiere independent film festival that took decades to build is slim. Within the last 10 years alone, the film commission brought the state 36,000 production jobs and more than $736 million in total economic impact. Incentive

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programs offer filmmakers who choose to shoot in Utah a refundable tax credit of up to 25 percent of what they spent in-state on production costs. Other programs like the Rural Utah Film Incentive Program offer filmmakers funding if they produce at least 75 percent of a project in a rural county, which equalizes economic impact across the state. “We have a long history in film. We are a film-loving state. It’s not as if we just woke up one day a few years ago and decided to get into the film industry,” Pearce says. “This has been a part of our DNA from the beginning.”

Part of what attracted Redford to Utah and what guided his plans for Sundance are factors totally devoid of finances. The fact that individuals with different values, backgrounds and politics could come together and celebrate great filmmaking — independent from the industry, from preconceived notions — is what made the festival successful. It’s possible that a sense of unity and discovery won’t come as easily in a city or state where a majority of residents are

already aligned ideologically. It’s possible it can’t be replicated anywhere anymore, that it didn’t just outgrow Utah but outgrew a world where that kind of exchange felt within reach.

In his final statement about the festival’s relocation, Redford reinforced that lofty goal. “I founded the Sundance Institute with a commitment to discovering and developing independent artists, with the Sundance Film Festival serving as the platform for stories to help expand audiences and broaden the landscape,” he said. “That mission remains even more critical today and will continue to be our core principle.”

Everyone has a story, as Redford often said.

They just need to be sought out and shared to make a difference. The belief that this can be achieved is what will bring audiences to Park City one final time in 2026, along with all the Utahns about to bid the festival farewell. Because when the movies end and the crowds leave, it will be up to the locals who stay behind to determine what story starts next.

D ESERET NEWS ARCHIVE

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Mark Owens

Utah’s governor had made improving civil disagreement a cornerstone of his administration.

Then came the killing of Charlie Kirk

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The schedule for Governor Spencer Cox did not seem particularly demanding on the morning of September 10.

He had an event with some telecom execs in Mona, a small town of mostly pasture and lavender fields down in Utah County, and then a quarterly birthday lunch back at the Capitol with his staff of about 20. He had no public events for the rest of the day.

He’d just returned from Mona and sat down in a conference room for lunch when his assistant came in and rushed to his side. “We need you and your chief of staff right now,” she whispered. The governor couldn’t recall her ever speaking to him with such urgency.

Cox shut the door behind him and stepped into his formal office — a high-ceiling chamber of marble and oak decorated with rodeo belt buckles and cowboy boots — to find a captain of the Utah Highway Patrol standing stiffly in his dress uniform: 60

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chocolate-brown shirt pressed to a crease, matching tan trousers, polished boots.

“Charlie Kirk has been shot,” he told the governor.

Cox’s mind spun, trying to make sense of what he had just heard. Charlie Kirk, he thought to himself. Charlie Kirk?

Then he remembered. Charlie Kirk was down at Utah Valley University in Orem.

His staff had briefed him on the event days earlier. Kirk, head of Turning Point USA, was instrumental in mobilizing young voter turnout in the 2024 election for Donald Trump. He was famous for showing up at college campuses to argue with liberal students, which Cox admired, even though Kirk had once called for Cox to be expelled from the Republican Party.

As chairman of the National Governors

Association, Cox had introduced an initiative called “Disagree Better” the year before. Cox didn’t agree with everything Kirk said, and, like much of Utah’s MAGA base, Kirk was no fan of the governor, but that was OK. That was the whole point of “Disagree Better.”

Kirk had picked Utah Valley as the first stop for “The American Comeback Tour,” a nationwide road trip across America’s college campuses. Cox knew there might be protests, but if there were, they would be small; Utah County was one of the reddest counties in America.

“They’ve taken him to the hospital,” the UHP captain said. “That’s all we know.”

“How do you know?” Cox said, his brain struggling to keep up. “What do you know?”

An assistant emerged from Cox’s

working office and handed him a phone. A video played, posted to X. Charlie Kirk was seated under a white pavilion tent in front of a massive crowd on Utah Valley’s grassy quad. Cox had been there a million times. It was the largest of Utah’s public universities, with a student body of nearly 47,000. Kirk was wearing a white T-shirt with the word FREEDOM emblazoned across the front in black block lettering. Two security guards with earpieces stood a few feet away from him, one on each side, looking out at the crowd. Two others stood behind him, monitoring the perimeter. The crowd was full of college students wearing red Make America Great Again hats, or white ones with the number 47 on the side in gold lettering, a nod to Trump.

A student was at the mic asking Kirk something about transgender shooters.

Kirk started to answer and suddenly there was a crack and then a gush of blood.

Cox felt a wave of nausea and a sickening pit in his stomach, heavy as lead. His mind flashed back to a video he’d recently seen of Kirk with his daughter running toward him.

Cox said a silent prayer. “Please, God,” he pleaded. “Please keep him alive. That’s all.

We just have to keep him alive.”

Thirty seconds later, Cox’s cellphone rang. It was the White House. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was in the Situation Room and had just heard about the shooting. The president wanted an update.

He told Rubio what he knew. Cox had the Utah Commissioner of Public Safety on the other line, who was getting briefed from a Highway Patrol officer at Timpanogos, the hospital Kirk had been rushed to after the shooting. “It’s not great,” Cox told Rubio.

Fifteen minutes later, Cox called Rubio back. “I’m so sorry,” he told the secretary of state. “We just got condition fatal.”

Rubio let out a deep sigh. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll tell the president.”

When the president called an hour or so later, Cox updated him on what they knew. Surveillance video from campus police had picked up footage of a suspect in black on the roof of a building near the

quad running east. The shot had come from that area, Cox reported.

Later, when Trump would speak about the killing, his words would be laced with anger, but on the phone with Cox there was no anger, just shock, and a deep sadness.

Kirk had been a close personal friend, the president said. He’d helped him get elected.

“You know who loved Charlie?” the president asked. “The young people. The young people really loved Charlie.”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. President,” Cox said.

His mind immediately started to spin forward, to what this meant for Utah, but more than that, what it meant for the nation. Cox had been warning for some time that America’s growing polarization was becoming deeply dangerous, but it didn’t seem anyone was listening. Then the president had nearly been assassinated. Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home had been firebombed. Two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses had been shot — one of the couples died in the attack — in their own homes. And now this.

The moment he feared had arrived.

The Utah Governor’s Mansion is about five

blocks east of the Lion House, the official residence of the first territorial governor, Brigham Young. A soaring French-style chateau of granite and limestone, it was built by a 20th century Park City mining magnate, who insisted on Italian and African marble for the floors. The mansion has been renovated several times, most recently in 2021 for security upgrades, and anyone

who visits today must be buzzed in and escorted through several security checkpoints.

It was near midnight on September 10, roughly 11 hours after the shooting, when the governor finally arrived home. The public rooms on the main floor, with their hand-carved woodwork and formal parlors, were dark by then, and the house was quiet and still; the staff of the first lady, Abby Cox, had gone home for the day. She was upstairs in the private residence, already in bed.

They had both been “sober” from cable news for about 12 years, Cox liked to joke, and Abby had deleted all her social media accounts from her phone during her husband’s first gubernatorial run, about five years before, meaning neither followed the news at home. As much as possible, whatever hours they had together were a sanctuary from the outside world.

At least two nights a week, sometimes three, there were dinners and events and formal parties to attend around town, and sometimes downstairs. On the rare nights that they had to themselves, they watched sports. Cox had been a fanatic of the Utah Jazz since he was a kid, but he loved watching college football too — the Utes and the Cougars and the Aggies — and he was trying to watch as many games as he could of Utah’s newest franchise, the Mammoth of the NHL. Anyone who knew the governor and the first lady noticed they were unusually close.

“More so than any other couple I’ve ever seen, they are a package deal,” one of their

Kirk had once called for Cox to be expelled from the Republican Party.

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Cox didn’t see Trump as his enemy, but he had concluded that being seen as his enemy had not accomplished anything.

her sometime after midnight. But it fell apart quickly, and they were back to square one. How on earth had the shooter got away in such a public place, packed with people, she wondered.

As she drifted off to sleep, her husband was still on the phone.

When she woke up the next morning, he was already gone.

During Cox’s time as lieutenant governor,

friends, Spencer Hall, told me. It’s hard to see “where one ends and the other starts.”

They had both grown up near Fairview, a town of 1,300 about an hour and a half south of Salt Lake City, and when Cox was asked to become lieutenant governor, in 2013, he did so on the condition he could stay there, meaning he commuted back and forth to the state Capitol twice a day, 100 miles each way. He and Abby wanted their four children to have the same upbringing they had, getting up at 5 a.m. to move irrigation pipe, learning how to drive tractors at age 10, and how to mark the seasons by the sweet smell of cut hay.

After law school in Virginia, they had returned to Fairview, where Cox served on the city council, and then, like his father, became the mayor. He was just 33. He was also the bishop of the Fairview Latter-day Saint congregation, which meant sometimes he’d order the power turned off for an unpaid bill as mayor and then show up as bishop to help turn it back on.

To see pictures of Cox from that era is to see a man infused with hope and idealism.

His hair formed a bushy halo around his balding head. He wore baggy, out-of-style jeans with dress shoes, and played in a Killers cover band.

When he ran for governor in 2019, few thought he could beat Jon Huntsman Jr., the former two-term governor, presidential candidate, and scion of one of the state’s most prominent and wealthy families. But Cox ran a relentlessly cheery 62

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campaign — presenting himself as somewhere in the middle between Huntsman’s watered-down conservatism and the hard edge of the far-right candidate. He painted an RV green and yellow, in the gradient colors of the Jazz uniform, and visited 248 cities in the state. He presented himself as a unifier — someone who could hold court with the tech bros in Utah County as well as the farmers and ranchers from places like Fairview. He dressed the part too, usually in the plain, slightly rumpled uniform of a man more accustomed to county-fair stages than “Meet the Press.”

Here was a local boy who had gone on a Latter-day Saint mission to Mexico, got a 4.0 GPA at Utah State, and then turned down Harvard Law for Washington and Lee, a school known for polishing the Southern patrician elite into statesmen attorneys who modeled civility. He didn’t say “Disagree Better” just yet, but it was on his mind. “We’re better when we work together,” he said, in what amounted to a campaign slogan.

Now lying in bed, Abby watched her husband pace across the creaky floors of the century-old mansion. She couldn’t tell exactly what he was saying, but she caught snatches of his phone conversations with the FBI director, the Utah Department of Public Safety and police officers down in Utah County, maybe the White House.

She could tell he was trying to protect her, careful with what he chose to share. “I think we have a really good lead,” he told

a small, tight-knit friend group had coalesced around him. Some, like Jon Cox, a distant relative, had once had informal roles in his administration (they jokingly referred to themselves as a “kitchen” cabinet). By 2023, when Cox was running for reelection, none were political advisers anymore — they were just close friends with a group text thread they were all on every day.

“It runs the gamut,” a friend from the group named Ryan Beck told me.

The group had become something of a sounding board and safe place for Cox, and each year, they camped together, a guys-only outing somewhere in Utah’s remote wilderness. (Beck told me Cox was always the first up to start the fire.)

The day after Charlie Kirk’s killing, Cox slipped out of his office to meet the group for a quick lunch. He told them he only had an hour, but he was still processing the magnitude of the killing and what it would mean for Utah, and the nation. He was humming with adrenaline and said he hadn’t slept, something that had become common since taking office.

The manhunt for the killer was his main focus, and most of his energy was taken up by coordinating the work of Utah’s Department of Public Safety with local police agencies and the FBI. “He was just starting to appreciate just how global this moment was,” Beck told me. “He recognized that this could be a massive accelerant to the forces in America he’d spent his career trying to marginalize.”

The calls for retribution had already begun. “The Left is the party of murder,” Elon Musk wrote on X.

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her career studying how countries slide from ordinary partisanship into what she called “pernicious polarization,” which can upend democracies if left unchecked.

When citizens began to justify intimidation, threats and the dehumanization of rivals; when parties adopted a win-at-all-costs mentality; when leaders decided that fear was more useful than persuasion — political violence followed. In Kleinfeld’s telling, America was not immune. It was already further down the path than most people wanted to admit.

Cox had seen the warning signs firsthand. His lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, had received so many death threats over false allegations of election fraud she now rethought trips to the grocery store alone. At least two people were in prison for credible death threats to Cox’s predecessor,

MICH AE L CIAGLO/G E TTY IM AGE S

A F T E R C HA R LIE K IR K ’ S A L L E GE D K ILLE R WAS A R R E STE D, COX SP O K E L I V E TO A N ATIO N A L AU D I E N C E , B E SE E C HING A M ER IC A N S TO SE TTLE T HE I R D IF F E R E N C E S P E AC E F ULLY. L E A DE R S F R O M A LL OVE R THE CO U NTRY THA N K E D HIM F O R H IS WO R DS.

“Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war,” Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump adviser, said.

Unless someone could turn the temperature down, Cox worried this sort of rhetoric could escalate. The irony is that Kirk had never called for violence, and instead had modeled a form of civil dialogue. “Charlie, at his best, wanted what Spencer wanted,” Beck said.

During his first term, Cox had concluded that political polarization had become one of America’s biggest problems, that if we couldn’t get past that, we could never get to the very unglamorous work of governing.

He had begun studying the years leading up to the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and became particularly intrigued by the work of Rachel Kleinfeld, a political scientist at the Carnegie Endowment, who had spent

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former Gov. Gary Herbert. One of Cox’s longtime aides, Mike Mower, had served in every governor’s administration since 2005. He pointed out that when he started, there wasn’t a fence around the Governor’s Mansion. Then they built a 3-foot fence, Mower told me. “Now it’s 6 feet tall.”

In 2023, Cox was elected chair of the National Governors Association. Each governor picks an initiative for the year, and Cox considered pressing issues that affected both his state and the broader nation, like the rising cost of health care, or the need for additional energy and minerals for the coming AI boom. As pressing as those issues were, he concluded nothing had become a bigger problem in American politics than polarization. He decided his focus for the year would be “Disagree Better,” an idea he had gotten from Arthur Brooks, the Harvard professor and New York Times bestselling author.

For his first gubernatorial election bid, in 2020, Cox approached his Democratic opponent, Chris Peterson, and asked him if he wanted to make a campaign ad together. Peterson was shocked, but agreed to the ad, which featured Cox in a red tie and Peterson in a blue one saying that while they disagreed with each other on almost every issue, they could still be friends. The ad was surprisingly effective: Researchers at Stanford found that viewers came away noticeably less hostile toward the other side. Cox took the idea national, persuading pairs of politicians from both parties to film their own versions.

While the idea gained traction nationally, it was not well received in Cox’s own state, especially among his own party. At the GOP convention in April 2024, he was lustily booed, and one of his opponents — a cowboy-hat-wearing sheep farmer and former state party chair — had dedicated his entire stump speech to the idea of not disagreeing better.

“Don’t vote for me if you want to disagree better,” he said. “Vote for me if you know we better disagree.”

His leading primary opponent, Phil

Lyman, called “Disagree Better” a “leftist, Marxist tactic to get people to drop their opinions.” Cox pushed back that this wasn’t the idea at all. You could have your opinions; you should have your opinions and stand up for them. You just didn’t have to hate those you disagreed with.

As Cox toured the state during the primary, he was dismayed by how much things had changed in Utah in just four years.

Where his first campaign had been joyous and energizing, a confirmation of all the things he loved about Utah, he was now met with looks of skepticism and distrust.

Lyman was using X to spread disinformation — that the Chinese government was funding the Cox campaign, that the governor was interfering with the Wi-Fi to censor the news and bussing in immigrants in the country illegally from Colorado to vote for him. “People we know and love were literally believing the stuff being said,” Abby told me. He could defend his record as conservative, but this didn’t seem to matter. He had declined to vote for Trump in 2016, and again in 2020. He had turned his back on the party, and so they would turn their backs on him.

Cox won the primary, but the distortions from Lyman and his allies had an effect. Lyman mounted a write-in campaign that had the feral energy of an insurrection (handwritten signs on street corners, banners

taped to highway overpasses) and had carried 8 percent of the vote. (I texted Lyman requesting an interview for this story for weeks until he stopped responding to my texts or calls.)

The experience had left Cox bruised. He had long liked walking through cemeteries in quiet moments, and on Sundays, he often found himself with Abby at the Salt Lake City cemetery, among the tall granite headstones and monuments to Utah pioneers. It gave him perspective on the long arc of history. This moment felt fraught and unprecedented, but Americans had been through worse. One day, he would be forgotten, his body long since decomposed beneath a chunk of rock. The principles he stood for, though? They would endure, for better or worse.

He had come to see “Disagree Better” as more than a political slogan. Among his texting friend group, they turned often to a sermon the Rev. King had delivered in 1957 in Montgomery, Alabama. It centered on the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, and the command to love your enemies.

Love implied a long-term relationship, the Rev. King pointed out. It implied commitment. And only in love could you persuade.

Only love had the power to transform.

In July of that year, Trump had survived an assassination attempt by mere inches in Butler, Pennsylvania. The next day, Cox was

His staff told him the same thing his friends had told him: Someone needed to turn the temperature down, and they worried that if Cox didn’t do it, nobody would.

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sitting in church with his family, when the thought came to him that he should write Trump a letter.

Cox had intended the letter to be private, but it leaked, and when he had been asked about it at a press conference, he said he planned to vote for Trump. Some of his closest friends were aghast and asked for private audiences to plead with him to change his mind. (One told me that when Cox defended the decision by saying it had come after prayer, the friend shot back: “Well, maybe you should pray again.”)

Cox tried to explain his decision in pragmatic terms, but the reality is, he couldn’t quite explain why he had written the letter, or why he had decided to vote for the president. He had felt that there would come a time when he needed to have influence within the party, and upon the president himself. And now, that moment had arrived.

After lunch on September 11, Cox returned to his office at the Capitol, where he met with his staff. By that point, two suspects had been detained and released.

Investigators, both in Utah and at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, were reviewing surveillance footage of a suspect in a stairwell on the Utah Valley campus.

Cox knew it was a matter of time before they caught Kirk’s killer. What worried him was what might happen until then, or in the aftermath, depending on the suspect’s motives. Already conspiracy

theories were blossoming online, about antifa, or that the shooter was motivated by “transgender ideology.” It was the exact sort of scenario Cox had been studying for the past two years in trying to understand what led to the assassinations of the Rev. King and RFK. It was the sort of tinderbox Kleinfeld had warned against.

His staff told him the same thing his friends at lunch had told him. Someone needed to turn the temperature down, and they worried that if he didn’t do it, nobody would.

At a little after 8 a.m. on September 12,

roughly 44 hours since the shooting, Cox stood before the press. Rumors had been circulating since early that morning that a suspect was in custody. In the 12 years Cox had been part of the governor’s office, he’d never seen so many news cameras in one place.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “We got him.”

He went on to explain the events that led up to the capture of their suspect, a 22-year-old from a small town in southern Utah named Tyler Robinson. The tip had come from a retired police detective who knew the Robinson family. Robinson’s father had turned him in.

He briefly reviewed the evidence Robinson allegedly left behind, and clues that may have suggested his motives, including a bolt-action rifle wrapped in a towel and transcriptions on bullet casings.

How had we gotten to the point where our entire character was defined by who we vote for?

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He described the killing as a “political assassination” and warned that the country was at a moment of serious fracture. As he had been doing for some time, he called out the role of social media in escalating division, even feeding off it.

He turned his attention to the rising generation. “You are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage. It feels like rage is the only option.” But that wasn’t true, he insisted. “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.”

We could return violence with violence, he said, or we could find a better way.

Throughout the day, Cox’s phone lit up with calls and text messages, thanking him for his words. They came from friends in Fairview, from former Latter-day Saint mission companions, from the governors of Hawaii and Wyoming, from Jeb Bush and Asa Hutchinson.

And then they started coming in from numbers Cox didn’t recognize. He wouldn’t tell me who they came from exactly, but he did say they were heads of state. That night, Cox spent eight hours responding to emails and text messages.

“A lot of blame and finger-pointing had been happening at that point,” Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson told me. “The governor recognized that he had an opportunity to do things differently and to give a message that wasn’t being given at that time and one that was desperately needed.”

Hundreds of media requests came in, but Cox didn’t want to do any more media, especially national media. He was tired of being used as a prop that played foil to Trump. He had slept for maybe 90 minutes over the past two days, and wanted to spend time with his family, especially his children, who were getting death threats.

But he did do media. He went on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast, he went on “60 Minutes,” and he did all the Sunday shows, from “Meet the Press” on NBC to “This Week” on ABC to “Face the Nation” on CBS. He did so partly because he believed

KEVIN CART ER/GET T Y IM AGES

S OME ME DIA H AV E C AST GOV. COX AND P RE S IDE N T T RU MP AS F OE S , A C H ARAC T E RIZ AT ION COX RE JE C TS . “E V E RY B ODY WANTS TO P IT ME AGA I N ST T H E P RE S IDE NT,” COX SA I D.

in his message of unity, of the principles behind “Disagree Better,” and that the nation needed it. And he did so because the president had asked him if he would.

In November, roughly two months after

Charlie Kirk’s death, I met Cox at his office in the Capitol.

Friends told me the year prior to Kirk’s killing had been perhaps the most difficult in Cox’s time in public service, which has spanned two decades, even though he is only 50. The eager affability and earnestness that had long defined him now has a slightly guarded edge. His strong jawline seems more pronounced, and his eyes carry a certain wariness.

He had always thought of himself as someone who could bridge differences, and Utah as relatively immune from the darker currents running through national politics. Prior to becoming governor, he had seen the state reach compromises on immigration and LGBTQ rights that were

unusual for a red state, but when he had tried to do something similar on trans kids playing high school sports in 2022, it had blown up in his face. Tucker Carlson had dedicated an entire segment to him, calling Cox “creepy” and woke, and wondering how a “low IQ weekend MSNBC anchor” had become governor of a red state.

Ironically, it was over this same issue that Kirk had said Cox should be expelled from the GOP. At a campaign event in 2024 for Trent Staggs, a pro-Trump candidate running for Mitt Romney’s open U.S. Senate seat, Kirk asked the audience, “Can you believe your governor? What is wrong with this guy?”

When he decided to vote for Trump later that summer, many of his friends to the left of him were just as vicious. Stuart Reid, a Never Trump Republican and former state senator, excoriated him in an open letter published in The Salt Lake Tribune: “You have lost your credibility and relinquished your honor.” Democratic allies

and moderates in Utah he had considered friends turned on him.

This baffled Cox. How had we gotten to the point where our entire character was defined by who we vote for? How had we gotten to the point where we stop talking to family and friends if they don’t share our politics?

Cox had previously explained his decision to vote for Trump in somewhat tortured political terms, but I wondered if there was something deeper, something beyond political calculation. I wondered if the decision had been informed in part by his study of the sermons of the Rev. King and the biblical idea of forgiving our enemies.

When I asked his wife Abby about this, she stressed that while her husband had never seen Trump as his enemy, he had concluded that being seen as his enemy had not accomplished anything. In fact, it had perhaps been counterproductive in getting elements of his own party on board with his message.

Cox pointed out that in his own state, and maybe around the nation, he’d made more inroads with Democrats with the “Disagree Better” idea than within his own party.

“I haven’t been great at that,” he admitted. “In the past, I’ve alienated some people within my own party who didn’t deserve to be alienated, lumping people together in ways that weren’t helpful.”

He was referring to the previous spring, when he had been loudly booed at the state GOP convention. He had responded by pointing out that his record was unassailably conservative: the largest tax-cut in Utah history, a transgender bathroom bill, the shuttering of abortion clinics, making it legal to carry a gun without a permit.

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“I think the vast majority of the people of the United States are hungry for some moral clarity.”

So why did they hate him? It didn’t make any sense. “Maybe you just hate that I don’t hate enough,” he said.

Cox’s friends told me they loved the line.

Finally, after years of taking it on the chin from the likes of Tucker Carlson, he was firing back. But he told me he immediately regretted it. Republican committees from around the state, including Iron, Davis and Salt Lake counties, all condemned the speech and demanded Cox apologize.

“If I could go back and do that differently, I would,” he said. “It’s taken me a long time to heal, to mend some of those relationships. And some of them, I may never be able to mend.”

Since the shooting, much had been made of a call President Trump had with Cox after the press conference announcing Robinson’s arrest. “You know, the person who shot Charlie would have loved to shoot (us),” Cox says the president told him.

National media had cast the call as a warning, but Cox said that wasn’t how he saw it. He told me he and the president spoke for an hour, on everything from why the National Guard was in Chicago to how he’d reduced the flow of immigrants entering the country illegally across the southern border. Toward the end of the call, the president thanked Cox for his message and said he had agreed with it. He would later ask through his staff for Cox to do the Sunday shows.

“Everybody wants to pit me against the president,” Cox said, “but to have him tell me twice on that phone call that he 68

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appreciated what I said, like that means something. And I don’t get that opportunity if he and I are just fighting.”

“I’m not trying to pick fights,” he went on.

“I’m trying to win converts. And that’s a very different philosophy, and a very different conversation and a very different calculation.”

Trump hadn’t exactly been pushing “Disagree Better” since Kirk’s murder. Instead, he had called for “beating the hell” out of “radical left lunatics,” and promised investigations into “leftist” organizations he said contributed to political violence.

Famously, when Kirk’s widow Erika said she forgave her husband’s killer during a memorial service, Trump spoke next and jokingly said he didn’t forgive or forget.

If Cox had voted for the president to have more influence within the party, and upon the president himself, I asked him if he thought it was working.

“I mean, I guess as a neutral observer people would say, probably not,” Cox said with a laugh. “I don’t know that he’s changed, but it allows me to have those conversations, to have some influence.”

Prior to Kirk’s killing, Cox had begun to wonder if America could pull itself back from an era riven by discord. But the way the country responded after Kirk’s assassination had given him a glimmer of hope. In Utah, there had been no riots. In fact, there hadn’t been rioting anywhere. And while there had been some calls for reprisal on the right, none had materialized.

Much of the national media had credited Cox for this, pointing out that it was him,

and not the president, who had met the moment with a message that turned down the temperature.

“In any other state, local politicians might have either become targets for President Donald Trump or leapt to inflame the situation,” David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic. “But the Beehive State’s governor is perhaps the most consistent voice of calm and conciliation in the GOP.” Predictably, in the wake of Kirk’s killing, there have been questions about Cox’s future. He ends his second term as governor as Trump ends his second term as president, in 2028. Perhaps the mood of the country will have shifted by then, and the sort of quiet, dignified leadership Cox has long tried to model will make him a viable presidential candidate.

Cox’s friends have encouraged him to at least think about it.

“I think the vast majority of the people of the United States are hungry for some moral clarity,” Lt. Gov. Henderson told me.

“They’re hungry for leadership. They’re hungry for an example of doing things differently and rising above the rancor.”

Cox said he feels energized that his message of “Disagree Better” is finally seeming to resonate, but that he has no interest in higher office. Things may change, but for now, he says that when he finishes his term, he will be done with politics.

Friends say he might go back to Fairview, if they’ll have him. And if not Fairview, somewhere else quiet, away from all the noise.

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IDEAS

THE NEW LUDDITES MEET THE AMERICANS DITCHING THEIR SMARTPHONES

I BY ZACHARY DAVIS

ILLU STR ATION BY E R I C N YQ U I ST

N 2015, August Lamm dropped out of Wes-

leyan University and moved to Berlin to learn how to draw and give her dream of being a freelance artist a serious go. She’d never been to art school, had no gallery connections, but she had two secret weapons: 1) verve and 2) complete digital fluency.

Since she unwrapped her first iPhone on Christmas Day five years earlier, Lamm, then a sensitive, artsy 14-year-old, had lived her life fully immersed in the endlessly enticing glow of the phone. A loner in school, she found connection as she swiped, tapped and clicked her way through every fascinating corner of the internet.

Now in a foreign country and 19 years

old, she instinctively turned to her phone for company and began posting her daily sketches on Instagram — pine cones, coffee cups, fire hydrants. Initially, likes were few and far between, but after aggressively posting fawning praise on hundreds of other artists’ accounts, her following began to steadily grow. After a year, she had 10,000 followers and started making money selling custom artworks and prints directly to her audience.

But keeping up with the comments and customer service turned into a full-time job as anything less than “high engagement” resulted in lost sales and followers.

Moreover, the trends on the platform were constantly changing, requiring Lamm to adapt her personality and posts to whatever hashtag was taking off that week. The algorithmic beast was ravenous, and it demanded constant feeding.

She noticed the one consistent path to clicks was emotional vulnerability. In 2018, she shared a small drawing of a shark with the caption “Crying nonstop & blowing my nose on my shirt. Thank you all for being my internet family, I truly need that in my life.” Sales spiked after posting pity-traps like these, and naturally, Lamm kept tapping the lucrative content mine of personal pain. By 2020, Lamm had 170,000 Instagram followers and was making a modest but sustainable income selling art, enough to consider herself a “professional” artist.

Though, she considered herself an art influencer. She secured paid partnerships with art supply companies for sponsored content. She spent hours carefully creating, captioning and promoting her posts.

But all of that time was time spent alone and lacked any inherent pleasure. She was popular online and completely isolated in real life. “I could appreciate reality only as JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026

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a source of content — a pleasing image, a compelling story — to share with others,” Lamm wrote, recounting her experience in The Free Press. She had to be online all day to make a living, and her work, life and social media had become so entangled that separating them became unthinkable.

In the summer of 2022, Lamm was getting ready to publish her first book (a how-to guide for crosshatch drawing) and suddenly found herself inexplicably locked out of her Instagram account. Customer service was unable to resolve the issue, and promoting the book and selling art the only way she knew how became impossible. It was months before Lamm regained access.

But the abrupt halt to her illusion of connection forced Lamm to face the depth of her dependency, misery and isolation, and the fact that she was compulsively addicted to her phone. She suffered from anorexia and her health was deteriorating. In her crisis, she turned to her phone one last time to post a YouTube video of her speaking into the camera for half an hour, describing how social media had destroyed her life.

That same day, she deactivated her Instagram account.

But disconnecting was easier said than done. Even without an Instagram logo to tap, she still couldn’t stop herself from constant phone usage. She tried other techniques to loosen the hold her device had on her — turning the screen to grayscale, deleting the most addicting apps and installing screen time limits. But the itch remained. She’d be on a date or at a yoga class and she’d find herself pining for the glow of her screen. And she always found ways around her self-imposed limits.

Eventually, she realized there was only one lasting solution: ditch the smartphone and get a dumb phone. In her case, a used Nokia flip phone — a device that could do little more than call or text. Which was exactly the point.

LAMM ISN’T ALONE in her experience. Most

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is unhealthy. Americans spend an average of about five hours a day on their phones, with Gen Z rates even higher. Yet few people are prepared to follow Lamm’s example of abandoning their devices cold turkey. That’s why several companies have come up with middle-ground solutions: devices like the Light Phone, a minimalist alternative built for calls and texts but stripped of social media, email and other attention traps.

And the demand for phones like these is part of a broader recognition of the harms of our screen-mediated culture. Social

LUDDITES WERE NOT OPPOSED TO ALL NEW TECHNOLOGY, JUST THOSE THEY BELIEVED PRODUCED FAULTY OR INFERIOR GOODS.

psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s crusade to remove phones from schools is spreading. Currently, 36 states and Washington, D.C., have policies aimed to reduce cellphone use at school. Online, the subreddit r/digitalminimalism is hugely popular, with more than 119,000 weekly visitors.

And young people are in many ways leading the effort to take back control from the screens. Last year, Harvard graduate students launched the delightfully named “Appstinence” movement to persuade Gen Z to ditch their phones and “restore the fiber of the human experience.” A youth-led group

called #HalfTheStory runs Social Media U, a program that teaches teens “emotional resilience, algorithmic awareness, and healthy digital habit development.” More mischievously, several months ago, an anti-tech rally took place at New York City’s High Line park, where protesters dressed like gnomes smashed iPads. Efforts like these appear to be working. The Financial Times reported that worldwide, social media use peaked in 2022 and is in decline.

Other movements with an environmental bent are taking root. Eco-villages like Earthaven near Asheville, North Carolina, are an increasingly popular option for people looking to live with greater intentionality with the Earth and their neighbors. There are even new educational institutions, such as the Strother School of Radical Attention, that aim to build a “movement to push back against the fracking of human attention by coercive digital technologies.” My personal favorite example of technology resistance is the anti-automation protesters Safe Street Rebel in San Francisco who placed orange traffic cones on Waymo driverless cars to immobilize them.

None of this should be surprising. Humans have always pushed back against what they see as the overreach of technology.

I’ve noticed that when someone wants to sound sensible while expressing even a mild critique of some technology, their remark is almost always prefaced by “Now, I’m no Luddite, but …” Given how frequently they are disavowed, I assumed Luddites were idiotic anti-progress fanatics. But it turns out the actual Luddites were not unthinking technophobes but well-organized guerilla activists who keenly understood the threat mechanization posed to the meaning of their lives and the quality of their craft.

The Luddite movement began in England during the Napoleonic Wars, which had caused economic stress and widespread unemployment. Food was scarce and expensive. On March 11, 1811, in the textile manufacturing center of Nottingham, a crowd of textile artisans gathered to

protest the rise of cheap factory-produced goods that threatened their source of income and their dignity. British troops were deployed to violently disperse the crowd.

That night, these angry workers smashed textile machinery in a nearby village. Attacks on machinery spread to more cities, and these vigilantes began claiming that their leader was “General” Ned Ludd, an apocryphal textile apprentice who smashed a stocking frame with a hammer after criticism from a superior. But contrary to popular perception, Luddites were not opposed to all new technology, just those they believed produced faulty or inferior goods.

The British government did not appreciate the subtlety of this distinction. Fearing a mass uprising and further economic disruption, thousands of troops were dispatched to defend vulnerable factories.

In 1812, Parliament passed a law making machine-breaking punishable by death.

The following year, dozens of men were executed and scores more sentenced to prison in Australia. Over time, the term “Luddite” became a rhetorical weapon to dismiss any and all critiques of technological power as irrational windmill-tilting.

Today, some — including Lamm — are reclaiming the name and legacy of the Luddites. In 2022, a group of teenagers in New York City made national news when they decided to put away their phones and just live. They met each week at a park, screen-free. “Some drew in sketchbooks.

Others painted with a watercolor kit,” The New York Times reported. “One of them closed their eyes to listen to the wind.”

Calling themselves The Luddite Club, they have since started a snail-mail newsletter, been the subject of a documentary and formed a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with chapters in more than 25 cities worldwide from London to Santa Barbara, California. Their motto: “Unplug.”

F O R N E A R LY 1 0 years, Lamm’s entire life

had centered on an object that was now locked in a drawer and out of sight. “I felt

purposeless, adrift, with nothing to reach for in moments of boredom or distress except my own thoughts, which were dull and shapeless from neglect,” she wrote.

The money from print sales and commissions dried up. She returned to the U.S. to live with her mom in Connecticut. What did she do? “I started to learn piano. I went on long walks around the suburbs. I bought a film camera and took photos of the snow.

I was not happy — in fact, I was isolated and lost — but I was present,” she wrote.

“There was now no alternative to reality, no escape hatch to flip open in moments of boredom. I had to accept things as they were, and things weren’t great.”

But things got better. She became more comfortable being alone with her thoughts. She stopped feeling a constant need for stimulation and found that she could wander, investigate weird natural phenomena, or just sit there — but a sitting that felt like living. As she described on the “Wisdom of Crowds” podcast, “Every day I am like, ‘Is this day gonna keep going?’ Like, it’s nonstop because the hours never slip by.”

Last year, Lamm published “You Don’t Need a Smartphone,” a how-to pamphlet for those seeking a serious digital detox.

Chapters range from the philosophical (“The Moderation Lie,” or “What Will You Do with Your Time”) to the minutely practical (“Dual Factor Authentication”).

Lamm says navigation, photos and music are the primary concerns with downgrading for most people. Many jobs also require the security and productivity functions of smartphones. But a bigger problem is that there are an increasing number of important public functions that require a smartphone, such as travel documentation and banking. And many events distribute tickets with special smartphone barcode technology to prevent fraud.

Lamm says the inconveniences of unplugging don’t bother her. “But I do think that it is distancing me from society, even from my friends, in a way that’s not sustainable, especially as this tech increases in

“YOU HAVE TO GET RID OF (YOUR PHONE) COMPLETELY. YOU HAVE TO STOP USING IT AND JUST SWITCH TO A DUMB PHONE.”

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its power and scope,” she says. “So I think the hardest thing for me now is feeling this looming deadline. I don’t know what it’ll look like. I just imagine in the next five years … society will degrade to the point that I can no longer function in it as someone who doesn’t use this technology.”

A mistake Lamm often sees is people trying to gradually reduce their smartphone usage through willpower alone. A common technique is to keep the phone in a drawer when you leave the house. Ultimately, Lamm believes, these half-measures can’t address the real problem. “Long term, there isn’t really a moderate solution that’s going to give you that real sense of integration into reality, because when you have it in your back pocket, literally or figuratively, you’re going to be thinking in a way that is dependent on this technology instead of using your own mental resources, which have really atrophied over time for all of us,” she told WNYC radio host Brian Leher.

If you want your mind back, “you have to get rid of (your phone) completely. You have to stop using it and just switch to a dumb phone.”

Lamm wants people to explore a fundamental question about their technology use: Why do they want these technologies to begin with? “The answer is usually to do things more quickly, more efficiently, with less effort. But why? I mean that seriously. Why do we need to do things more quickly? Was it not fast enough before?” she said on the “Wisdom of Crowds” podcast, rhetorically setting up a dire critique.

“Because what happens with speed is that when one thing speeds up, the other thing needs to speed up. The competitor needs to speed up. All the people need to speed up. Every activity needs to speed up. And then we just are in this world where everything’s moving a lot more quickly and it doesn’t feel good.”

She warned that compulsive social media use has become so universal that it can lead to a pathological addiction. “I saw it in myself that when I was out with people, I could be having the time of my life and I’d 74

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still be thinking, ‘I cannot wait to go to the bathroom and check my phone.’ That was always the priority for me.”

THE PROBLEM IS too big to solve by leaving

it to individual choice. But the more people who reject smartphones, the easier it becomes for others. As Jonathan Haidt recommends in his book “The Anxious Generation”: “No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14). … Let kids

“I THINK ATTENTION IS PRAYER AND WHAT YOU SPEND YOUR TIME ON EARTH DOING SHOULD BENEFIT CREATION AND SHOULD HAVE AN AIM AND AN INTENTION.”

get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers.”

For Lamm, her quest to back away from her phone has taken on a religious dimension, where she equates our relationship to our phones to idol worship. “I think attention is prayer and what you spend your time on Earth doing should benefit creation and should have an aim and an intention,” she tells me. “And to spend your time aimlessly and unthinkingly and to be harming

yourself and harming the world through your time and attention is a sin.

“I can’t tell you the amount of pain that has been caused by me even the last 24 hours by spending time with friends and having them look at their phone while I’m talking to them and telling them an important story to me,” she laments. “I just saw a friend and he looked at his phone, looked at messages while I was telling him about something that was really important to me. And that hurts. That’s like a stab into your soul.”

But Lamm expressed on the “Wisdom of Crowds” podcast that change is possible, if we could decide on that change together. “If everybody logged off of Instagram tomorrow, Instagram wouldn’t be a problem. We have more power than we realize.”

What both old and new Luddites resisted is not so much technology itself, but the myths we tend to believe about technology.

Some of these myths that they seek to counter are that social media is about connection.

That information can replace wisdom. But the biggest myth of all is that more technology always equals more progress.

The truth is that technology always introduces tradeoffs. Inventing writing allowed us to create much better records and invent literary forms like the novel, but it also meant the loss of oral storytelling skills and culture. The introduction of cars allowed for powerful new personal modes of travel, but it also has caused very real losses in environmental damage and urban vibrancy.

We might very well accept these tradeoffs, but we need to be aware of them because sometimes the tradeoffs aren’t worth it.

And when it comes to our societywide phone addiction, what the neo-Luddites urge us to do is face the hard truth that what we’ve lost in our capacities for attention, presence and cognition are not worth the gains. So log off, unplug, downgrade, and if you’re really feeling rebellious, smash the machines!

Z A C H A RY D AV I S I S E X E C U T I V E D I R E C T O R O F FA I T H M AT T E R S A N D E D I T O R O F WAY FA R E M A G A Z I N E .

INTERVIEW

AND REW HARNIK/GET T Y IM AGE S

ARIZONA S EN . M A R K K E LLY SAYS T H E T RU MP A D M I N I STR AT I O N ’ S DE P LOY ME NT O F A R M Y A N D NAT IONAL GUA R D TR O O PS TO U.S . C IT IE S S E N DS T H E W R O N G ME SSAGE AB O U T TH E PU R POS E OF T H E MIL ITA RY.

BACK FROM THE BRINK SEN. MARK KELLY AND MCKAY COPPINS ON ENDING THE PLAGUE OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

P

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OLITICAL VIOLENCE IS no longer an abstraction in American life, as detailed in this month’s profile of Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk. As the article reports, a growing number of lawmakers — across parties — say they worry about their own safety in ways they never imagined a decade ago.

Few people have observed this shift as closely, or as personally, as Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona. His wife, former U.S. House Rep. Gabby Giffords, survived an assassination attempt in 2011.

In this conversation with McKay Coppins, Kelly reflects on what he sees driving the current climate: economic

anxiety, social fragmentation, the distortions of social media and a political ecosystem that increasingly rewards outrage.

He describes how members of Congress talk about safety behind closed doors, what rising threats mean for democratic accessibility and why small changes in tone from national leaders can reverberate far beyond Washington.

The discussion, which has been edited for clarity and length, ranges widely — from the effects of National Guard deployments in major cities, to the politics of immigration enforcement, to the uneasy balance between de-escalation and blunt criticism of presidential power. That sort of criticism has caught the ire of the president. In November, a week after this conversation, Kelly was one of six Democratic lawmakers who had served in the military or the intelligence community who participated in a video reminding service members that they could refuse illegal orders. In response, the president said Kelly and the others in the video should be arrested and tried for “seditious behavior,” which he said

was “punishable by death.” As of press time, the Pentagon was investigating Kelly and the other lawmakers who appeared in the video.

Kelly’s perspective on this moment is part diagnosis and part warning, grounded in the day-to-day realities of governing at a time when the prospect of violence shadows public life.

MCKAY COPPINS: As someone

who has been covering politics for a long time, the increase of political violence seems like a blinking red warning light for the health of our democracy.

I’m curious what you think is driving it.

MARK KELLY: Well, people are feeling desperate in a lot of different ways. It might be social change. It might be economic inequality. The wealthier folks in our country just keep getting richer. And then overlaid on top of that is social media and the ability to put a message out into the world in a rather anonymous way, where you can say things to a large, very large, group of people that you would never say to them publicly, like if you were standing in front of them. And it just further takes us down a road where we become more divided. And I think people think this is them against us. And we’re somehow marching towards some kind of civil war. I don’t believe that. I think we’ve got to figure out ways to turn down the temperature here.

It’s up to us, people like myself and others, in leadership

positions to help the country move forward. I think it’s also fair to say that we have a president who looks for every opportunity to divide us. He’s got the exact opposite instinct of every other president we’ve had in my lifetime. And I think it’s probably fair to say every other president this country has ever had. I mean, can anybody think of one time that when something major has happened in our country that Donald Trump became the unifier? I can’t.

And the death threats to members of Congress are up dramatically from what I’ve learned, being the spouse of Gabby. And after she was shot, just from my discussions with the Secret Service and the FBI, you learn that there’s not a lot you can do, and it’s usually not the person that makes a threat. We always focus on these people who make the threat. You know, Charlie

COPPINS: I’ve seen a pretty

dramatic shift in our political culture, and I think a lot of people have gotten used to it, and stopped realizing how different things are now than they were not that long ago.

KELLY: I think saying dramatic

shift is an understatement.

Think about this for a second.

At a memorial service for Charlie Kirk, Erika Kirk says she forgives the shooter. And Donald Trump follows that up with saying he hates his political enemies.

“WE’VE GOT TO FIGURE OUT WAYS TO TURN DOWN THE TEMPERATURE. IT’S UP TO PEOPLE IN LEADERSHIP POSITIONS TO HELP THE COUNTRY MOVE FORWARD.”

COPPINS: I have spoken

to people who are in high elected office who acknowledge privately or anonymously that they are thinking about their personal safety and the safety of their families more than ever; that somebody could try to kill them at any given moment, which I think was not the case 20, 30 years ago. But I’m curious if you are seeing that same thing.

KELLY: We talk about it.

Kirk’s shooter didn’t threaten him. My wife, Gabby’s shooter, never threatened her. So folks are really, really concerned about it. We’re trying to do some things to make us a little bit safer.

into the office buildings, but then you can just walk right up to an office. And I actually think that’s a beautiful thing about American democracy. We don’t want to forfeit that because we can’t figure out how to keep people who want to harm elected officials away from them, right?

KELLY: We don’t need to live

in that kind of world, and we don’t want to discourage people from serving in elected office because they’re afraid of being harmed. That’s not a good environment. In my view, the No. 1 thing that could happen right now to reduce the amount and the threat of political violence would be for the president to say, “Hey, we’re all Americans. We are all in this together. We’ve got differences of opinion. But Democrats are not my enemy, and the Republicans are not the enemy of the Democrats.”

That is definitely true here on Capitol Hill, where I’ve got great relationships with my Republican colleagues. We don’t agree on everything. And we often have to verbally fight it out on the floor over policy.

But to have somebody who is leading this country focus on bringing us together and unite us and talk about values and what has created this great cohesive country, that would be huge. Now, I don’t hold my breath, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

COPPINS: A lot of people who

come to Washington for the first time are actually surprised by how accessible their congressmen and senators are. You can go through a metal detector to get

COPPINS: It does seem like most

elected officials in both parties really do want to figure out how to solve this problem for the sake of the country and, if nothing JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026

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INTERVIEW

else, for their own personal safety.

You’ve become friends with Sen. John Curtis of Utah. You disagree. You belong to different parties. But you work together.

KELLY: I’m a Democrat. He’s

a Republican, and we have differences of opinion. And sometimes, you know, those differences could be pretty significant on policy. But we’re friends and I enjoy serving with him. The relationships between senators are not what people think they are. Let me give you an example. I was recently talking to a pretty sophisticated person, who is very engaged politically, who asked me if I ever see (Texas Republican Sen.) Ted Cruz.

And I said, “Yeah, I see him basically every week.” And then she said, “Do you ever talk to Ted Cruz? You don’t talk to him, do you?” And I said, “Yeah, I talk to him, maybe not every day, but every week. I’m friends with Ted Cruz.” And they found this almost unbelievable. That a Democrat in the United States Senate could be friendly with a Republican colleague. And I’ve told Ted Cruz this story.

And I’m like, “Ted, we got to figure out a way to show that we work together.” We can disagree, but we do get along and we have respectful relationships. I mean, across the board. I’m talking about all 100 of us. Now, you might have specific people you’re not like besties with, right? But we have strong relationships.

And if the American people saw that a little bit more and understood that, 78

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I think that would also have a positive effect.

COPPINS: That conversation

you just described is emblematic of why the political incentives flow the other way. There are not many incentives for senators to show their constituents, especially the constituents in their base, that they are friendly with “the enemy.” Some people would be offended by it.

number of times with my Republican colleagues. We try to say nice things about them and we try to be respectful.

And you can disagree. We’re going to win some political fights and we’re going to lose some, but you don’t have to go after people’s character and you don’t have to refer to them as enemies and call them awful names. Because people see that and they model that behavior.

COPPINS: The thing that always

“I THINK IT’S ALSO FAIR TO SAY THAT WE HAVE A PRESIDENT WHO LOOKS FOR EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO DIVIDE US. HE’S GOT THE EXACT OPPOSITE INSTINCT OF EVERY OTHER PRESIDENT WE’VE HAD IN MY LIFETIME.”

KELLY: Well, because people

view them as the enemy, but I don’t.

COPPINS: And this is what has

to change. How do you fix this?

KELLY: We do events together,

where we show people we’re friendly, and we go on TV together. I’ve done that a

frightens me about political violence, aside from the obvious, is that everyone who studies this issue will tell you that political violence begets more political violence. We are in a moment where the imagery of violence, the threat of violence, looms in our politics. And just one example is President Trump earlier this year began deploying troops to American cities to impose public order, to crack down on crime. What do you make of this moment?

KELLY: Well, I’d say it’s not

helpful. I get it, I’m the son of two cops. We want safe communities. We want safe streets. But to use the United States Army and the National Guard in this role just sends the wrong message about the purpose of the military. In Donald Trump’s first term, he asked if the National Guard could shoot people that were protesting. “Can we just shoot them in the legs?” People remember that. And now they see these troops deployed in their communities, whether it’s here in Washington or

Chicago or Los Angeles. And they are wondering, what’s next? I always question, what’s his motivation? I mean, is it really about crime in safer communities? Or is he trying to send a message that he has this political tool that he is willing to use against the American people?

COPPINS: There’s been a lot

made of this idea that there has been less activism, fewer protests, fewer demonstrations in the street in Trump’s second term compared to his first term. Are you saying that you think that the presence of the National Guard and the kind of imagery that’s been invoked is part of the reason there haven’t been as many antiTrump demonstrations in the second term?

KELLY: Well, I haven’t seen that

statistic. So I’ll take your word for it that that is accurate. Yeah, I think it could be. Or maybe folks are just exhausted and are starting to check out. And that’s probably the worst thing that could happen. People checking out politically and say, “Hey, I’m just tired of all this.” And my worry is they check out and then maybe they don’t vote, they don’t get involved. They’re afraid to go to a peaceful protest because they’re afraid it’s going to turn into something else. I am concerned about the chilling effect that these deployments will have on the American people.

COPPINS: There are some who

believe Democrats allowed for too much public disorder and

crime to spread, and as a result, a political space was created for Trump to come in and be the strongman. What do you think of that line of criticism?

KELLY: I think that’s fair. I

mean, people don’t like crime.

My wife was the subject of a horrendous crime, and they shouldn’t have to tolerate it.

And I can tell you, it’s not helping law enforcement to have the president instructing masked ICE agents, who are also law enforcement, to chase people down because of the color of their skin. What are folks in the community supposed to do when a guy with no identification and a mask comes to chase them down? I mean, what would anybody do? That’s not giving the American people tremendous confidence in police in general.

COPPINS: I have a colleague

at The Atlantic who recently wrote about this question of ICE agents wearing masks. And his reporting suggested that they know it’s a bad look. They know that it reduces public trust, and they’re continuing to wear it for a variety of reasons. But one of them is if an interaction that looks bad goes viral, that they could receive their own death threats. What do you say to ICE agents who say, “Look, I have to worry about my own safety as I’m carrying out the orders that I’ve been given”?

KELLY: Don’t have bad

interactions with people. Do the job in a respectful way and follow the law. By the way, you

don’t have to follow unlawful orders. That’s true for the military. I think it’s true for federal law enforcement, too.

Nobody can tell you to break the law. You can’t be told to violate people’s constitutional rights. People have to stand up and say, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

COPPINS: Would you like to see

more of that among ICE agents?

KELLY: Of course. I’d like to

see them wearing an ID, not wearing masks and telling Stephen Miller, or Kristi Noem, “We will follow the law and there are limits to what we will do. And we’re not violating people’s constitutional rights.”

I mean, there’s evidence that there were deported American citizens, and they’re breaking up communities. It benefits our country in no way — tearing communities apart, taking parents away from their children. I visited two folks in an ICE facility. One of them, her name’s Kelly Yu, came to the United States from China 20 years ago. Today, her mother’s a U.S. citizen.

Her daughter’s a U.S. citizen.

Her sister’s a U.S. citizen.

Her husband’s a U.S. citizen.

She’s the only one who is not.

She’s been here 20 years. She has two or three businesses.

She has 70 employees. She has added to our economy, added to that community in such a positive way. She’s not only putting food on her family’s table. She’s putting food on other people’s tables.

She’s no threat to society at all.

She’s been sitting in a jail in

Florence, Arizona, for months.

Now she has a deportation order. They’re going to kick her out of the country and send her back to China. For what? Doesn’t make us a better country. And here’s the sad thing about this. I’ve got Republican colleagues that feel mostly the same as I do about this issue. Many of them don’t think we should be deporting 10 or 20 million people. They know that that does not benefit us as a nation. Sure, we need strong border security.

We should be kicking out criminals and gang members and drug dealers. But didn’t Donald Trump run on that?

I guess it’s fair to say he also said the mass deportation thing. I don’t think anybody believed him.

COPPINS: I’m going to press

you on this a little bit. One could argue that Democratic policy failures opened the door to the mass deportations and the ICE raids, because the southern border, by most objective measurements, got fairly out of control.

KELLY: You don’t have to push

me on this. I agree with you.

And Joe Biden’s policy at the border was not working. It was a crisis. I said that from the first time I got elected and worked really hard with this and pushed back against the administration and the White House multiple times.

We have got to do more. We need more Border Patrol agents. By the way, we need to close some of these gaps in the border wall. I mean, I’m probably the only Democrat that was able to get the White House to build some more border wall.

COPPINS: I want to bring this

conversation back to where we started. You talked about the need for us to turn down the temperature as a country. But at the same time, you’re not pulling your punches, right? When you talk about President Trump, you’re very critical of his policies.

You’re very critical of him. How do you reconcile the desire to de-escalate the tension in our political culture with what you seem to believe is a need to also be very clear-eyed and direct about the points of disagreement?

KELLY: Well, here’s the thing,

you probably noticed that I never called the president a name, right? I never said he was my enemy. I want to work with the president on anything that helps this country. We are so fortunate to live in the greatest country that this planet has ever seen. We’re generous. We’re innovative.

We’re welcoming. We don’t always get it right. And I think this president largely gets most of it wrong. Not everything, but a lot of it. But I don’t consider him my enemy at all.

A DA P T E D F RO M T H E “ D E S E R E T VO I C E S ” P O D C A S T, W H I C H I S R E L E A S E D O N T H U R S DAY S O N S P O T I F Y, A P P L E P O D C A S T S , T H E D E S E R E T N E W S YO U T U B E C H A N N E L A N D AT D E S E R E T. C O M/ P O D C A S T S . V I D E O C L I P S O F I N T E RV I E W S A R E P O S T E D O N T H E D E S E R E T N E W S S O C I A L M E D I A C H A N N E L S I N C L U D I N G YO U T U B E , I N S TA G R A M , FA C E B O O K A N D X .

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ODE

AGAINST THE GRAIN AN ODE TO A WOODEN PEW

BY E TH A N B AU E R

A

pew can be a hard, unforgiving thing. I’ve been sitting here for a good hour and its wooden rigidity is taking a toll on my aching back. I rock side to side, angling to find some kind of cushion within my body, but the bench seems to resist my efforts. The service has ended, the candles are doused, and the priests walk past me toward the exit as a pipe organ plays Beethoven’s festive “Ode to Joy.” I know that standing up will bring me sweet relief, but I’m not quite ready for that. Instead, I lean harder into the polished oak.

I haven’t been to Mass in years, not with any frequency, though it was a common practice at the Catholic schools I attended as a boy.

I’m here now at the Cathedral of St. Jude the Apostle in St. Petersburg, Florida, to remedy that, for the benefit of my young family but also for myself. We live near the striking Spanish-style building, with beige brick and red tile roofing. The space inside feels familiar, yet also evokes a distant time. Sunlight filters through stained glass in an arching rotunda, falling across a large crucifix set above a rather plain white altar. I’m sitting on the far left, within the array of semicircular pews that wrap around a raised dais built out of black stone.

The pews are shared. A middle-aged woman I’ve never met sits at the other end of my bench, too far for us to talk without shouting but close enough that we exchange waves following the Lord’s Prayer. She’s still here now, holding a hymnal and singing along with the organ. Looking around, I see dozens more like us, and it 80

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strikes me that we’re sharing not just benches but an experience.

I dig a green hymnal from the wooden pocket on the pew in front of me and follow along on the page.

Pews come in different shapes and sizes, of course. Some are straight and long enough to hold three full-sized families without a break. Some are too small to share with a stranger. I’ve seen grids of padded benches that must feel like heaven by comparison. This pew is like none of those. I run my chewed-up fingernails across the surface and they crackle against the grain, the oak stained and finished to a glossy yellow. Pews haven’t changed much since they were first introduced in the 14th century, but that’s not because they’re so comfy. A pew doesn’t give so much as it asks something of you.

Before pews, people used to stand at church, or sit on stone slabs with no back support. Maybe that’s why a pew still seems designed to require a certain effort, which helps you to sit up straight and pay attention. It keeps you in the moment, in touch with your thoughts and feelings. This one reminds me of where I am and why I’m here — unlike my couch, where I can lose myself for hours without thinking much at all. Yes, the firm surface is mashing my poor coddled tailbone, born in this padded age, intolerant of even mild irritations. But I also find comfort in a seat that lifts me up without letting me sink into it.

With that realization, I stand up, stretch out my fatigue and return to a softer world.

PHOTOGR AP H Y BY J. M I C H A E L T U C K E R

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026

81

PARTING SHOT

BADLANDS NEAR HANKSVILLE, UTAH. | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN HAYMORE

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