A small Kurdish boy is sitting on the ground in a damp Polish forest, a few miles from the eastern border with Belarus. The air is heavy with cold and fog. The boy is crying.

Around the boy, sitting in a circle, are his parents, uncles, and cousins, all from the same village near Dohuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan. There are 16 of them, among them seven children, including a four-month-old infant and an elderly woman who can scarcely walk. They don’t speak Polish, or English. One of the boy’s relatives, a man named Anwar, speaks Arabic. Through a translator, Anwar says that the family has been in this forest, moving back and forth between Poland and Belarus, for two weeks. They have eaten nothing for the previous two days.

Surrounding the boy and his family is another circle, this one containing people with cameras. The people holding the cameras are Polish, Swedish, Slovene, German, Japanese, American. I am one of them. We were all given this precise location on Tuesday by Grupa Granica, a Polish volunteer organization created in the past couple of months to help migrants; its name simply means “Border Group.” The group’s spokesperson sent out text messages with the GPS coordinates of this family because they wanted as many journalists as possible to record the moment when Anwar asks the Polish border guards for asylum. He will hold up a sign, in English. The translator, Jakub Sypiański, also a member of Grupa Granica, will translate his request into Polish as well. Sypiański explains that if media are present, it will be more difficult for Polish border guards to ignore the request and to force Anwar, the boy, and the rest of the family back into the forest, back toward the border, as they have forced other, similar families back toward the border over the past several weeks. Sypiański tells me later that he has personally seen families ask for asylum, only to be taken back to the border immediately afterward.

The scene has a false kind of familiarity because we in the West have all seen this combination of players—migrants, journalists, humanitarian volunteers—in photographs or on television before. But the sequence of events that brought this particular small boy to this particular forest is very strange, when you think about it. So many tragedies were required to create the conditions for it, including wars in Iraq and Syria, the rise of Islamic extremism, and the failure of democracy in Belarus. Stranger still is that fact that this boy’s fate has been determined, and will go on being determined, by the political calculations of two people whom he will never meet, and whose names he surely does not know. One of them is Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus. The other is Jarosław Kaczyński, the chairman of the Polish ruling party, the country’s de facto leader, the man who tells the Polish president and prime minister what to do.

Lukashenko’s brutality is far greater. Belarus’s dictator remains in power in his country only thanks to the violence he has used to suppress the large, sophisticated, and articulate democratic opposition. More than 800 political prisoners now sit in his jails. Many have been beaten or tortured. Thousands have moved abroad. The European Union and the United States have sanctioned him for these crimes, and now he is seeking revenge, not just against particular democracies but against democratic values more broadly, the values that he wants to defeat at home as well as abroad: respect for human rights, the rule of law, impartial justice.

Lukashenko seeks not only to show his contempt for these things but to destroy the international institutions that maintain them. Last May, he used his country’s air-traffic controllers to hijack an Irish commercial airplane and force it to land, in order to arrest a dissident onboard. And last summer, he launched a program of state-sponsored human trafficking designed not only to deceive people in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere about the ease with which they can get into the European Union via his capital, Minsk, but also to take their money along the way.

[Graeme Wood: The Ryanair hijacking pierced the delusion of flight]

To get to the Polish border, for example, Anwar said that his family traveled by bus from Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, to Istanbul in Turkey. There they would have purchased visas for Belarus and airline tickets to Minsk. Though Anwar did not say what he paid, others have been charged fees that represent, in that region, a small fortune. A recent documentary short, Visa to Nowhere,  put together by Outriders, a Polish journalists’ collective, contains an interview with a Syrian who was living in a refugee camp in Lebanon but planning to travel to Europe via Belarus. He had paid $6,000—money collected from his extended family in Lebanon and Europe—for the travel package, and he was convinced it was worth it. He had been messaging people who had made the trip on Facebook, and they made it sound easy: “They suffered for some days, then they made it through Poland.” That seemed a small price to pay for what he wanted: “a dignified life.” Outriders also taped a travel agent in Beirut, who told them that a visa alone would cost $1,300—money that, presumably, goes to the Belarusian government.

Once they arrive in Minsk, the migrants stay in hotels, which they also pay for, though sometimes they sleep at the airport. Videos posted on social media have shown them clustered in large groups in central Minsk, and there are stories of them buying up rubber boots and winter clothes. What happens next is murky. Some pay to be taken to the border—Anwar said the cost was $300 for each car full of people—but others report having been escorted by uniformed men, probably border guards. When they arrive at the border fence, they are told to cross it—illegally. Trucks transport them along the border, and the Belarusian border guards help them to find deserted areas where crossing is easy. Anwar said that border guards used wire cutters to cut the border fence and allow his family to pass through. Others have been given wire cutters and told to do it themselves.

At that point, they have no other choice. They are not allowed to go to the formal border checkpoints to ask for asylum, though some ask to do so. They are not allowed to return to Minsk, even if they beg to be allowed to return home. The Belarusian border guards point guns in their faces, beat them and tell them they have no option. And so they start walking westward.

This human-trafficking project began last summer, initially on Belarus’s border with Lithuania, which, like Poland, is a member of the EU. The number of migrants at first was small. But as it grew, the Belarusian border guards began driving people to the Latvian border, and to the Polish border too. Now, with thousands of people arriving in Minsk from the Middle East each week, the situation is changing again. On Monday, the Belarusian border guards gathered hundreds of migrants together and orchestrated a mass assault on the border near the Polish town of Kuźnica. Last night, Belarusian border guards gave the migrants cans of tear gas to use against Polish border guards; they also turned on strobes and lasers so that the Poles couldn’t see what was happening. So far, the Polish police and soldiers who are now massed along the border have held the line. But hundreds of people remain camped along the border, waiting for—something.

Lukashenko’s tactics are diabolically cynical: weaponize human desperation, lure people into making a risky and dangerous journey, take their money, force them to break the law. On the Polish side, Kaczyński’s tactics are cynical too, but differently so. Like Lukashenko, the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party also wants to remain in power. But because his country is still, for the moment, a democracy, he needs popular support. (Here I should state for the record that I am married to an opposition politician in Poland.)

One of the ways Kaczyński has built popular support in the past is through the use of fearful, anxious, and xenophobic rhetoric. At the time of the previous European migrant crisis in 2015, Kaczyński warned that refugees from Syria were carrying “parasites and protozoa”; he said they would use churches as “toilets.” This time around, the Polish interior minister and the Polish defense minister actually appeared together on the main evening news, on the taxpayer-funded state television channel, and solemnly played a clip from a film showing a man having sex with a horse. This, viewers were told, was a video found on a telephone in the forest, and it showed one of the migrants camped on the border. In reality, the clip came from a piece of bestiality pornography made in the 1970s and widely available on the internet. But the message was clear: These people are animals.

In this very narrow sense, the migration crisis is useful to Kaczyński. COVID-19 rates are rising again, inflation is very high, corruption is rampant, but now he can change the subject: Poland has been invaded by sick, diseased Muslims, and only I can fix it. In August, the government announced a policy of “pushback”: Anyone found illegally in Poland would be sent back to the border. In early September, the Polish government declared a state of emergency in the border areas, set up checkpoints, and prohibited journalists and humanitarian organizations from entering the locked-down area. In October, Kaczyński called for a “radical strengthening of the army” too.

Anne Applebaum: The disturbing new hybrid of democracy and autocracy

At the same time, Kaczyński has refused, on principle, to accept any help from the European Union, presumably because that would rob him of the only-I-can-fix-it narrative. But the EU has learned a lot since 2015. The EU’s border service, Frontex, is actually headquartered in Warsaw, and could offer assistance to Polish border guards. A spokesperson for the EU home-affairs commissioner told me that the resources of the European Asylum Support Office and other sources of emergency funding could be made available to the Polish government too. Lithuania and Latvia have taken advantage of these offers, but the Polish government wanted none of them. Nor has Polish diplomacy made any effort to galvanize a unified, international response: sanctions against Lukashenko, for example, or an EU-sponsored mass-information campaign across the Middle East. Instead, Polish party leaders carry on a petty war of words with the EU and barely speak to the Biden administration at all.

In domestic political terms, this might prove a success: The militarized rhetoric of war, invasion, and struggle, now used constantly on state television, seems to be helping to shore up the ruling party’s slipping poll numbers. But on the ground, this policy has created moral, humanitarian, and legal chaos. In reality, migrants who are “pushed back” to the Belarus border do not cross it, return to Minsk, and fly home. They can’t. Instead, they try repeatedly—eight, 10, 20 times—to cross the border. The Polish border guards periodically announce how many people they have stopped but really, these are the same people getting caught over and over again. Some run out of food: People from the Middle East are hardly in a position to live off the land in a Central European forest by hunting wild boar. Grupa Granica has collected reports of at least 13 deaths. On the Belarusian side there could be many more.

But the incompetence is just as bad as the chaos. Even on its own terms, “pushback” has failed disastrously. Lukashenko has not been deterred. On the contrary, Poland’s hybrid-war rhetoric seems to have encouraged him to find new ways to troll Polish border guards and pile in more Belarusian troops, as if this really were a war and they really were needed. Besides, Poland has a long border with Belarus, the resources of the Polish army and police are finite, and the migrants have a huge incentive to find a way into the EU: They are afraid they might die otherwise. A Warsaw taxi driver told me that he had already been asked if he wanted to get into the lucrative business of ferrying people across Poland, from the Belarusian border to the German border. He told me that he said no, but others have clearly made a different decision. Police in Germany report that more than 9,000 people have now entered that country after traveling from Poland via Belarus, almost all in the past two months. Some of those who do get through boast of their luck on social media, which encourages more to come.

A different kind of chaos has descended on the people who live in the border areas, both inside the strefa—the locked-down zone, which extends a couple of miles inside the country from its frontier with Belarus—and along its edges. This is a famously quiet, famously beautiful part of Poland. Białowieża, a national park along the border, contains the last remaining primeval forest in Europe, as well as the largest remaining herd of European bison. The region normally attracts bird-watchers, photographers, and artists, which is part of what makes the situation so jarring. Katarzyna Wappa, who lives in the famously charming town of Hajnówka, just outside Białowieża, now has to cross checkpoints and show ID in order to visit her grandmother. “Białowieża has more soldiers than inhabitants,” she told me. “All of the Białowieża hotels are full of soldiers, the stadium is now a tent city housing soldiers.”

But the armored cars rumbling past wooden houses offer nothing to local residents, nothing to help them cope with the surreal situation they find themselves in. The Polish government’s official policy is that no one gets through, so nothing has to be done. In fact, almost everyone in the area has encountered starving, disoriented people from all kinds of places—Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon—struggling across their fields and gardens, hiding behind trees. Sometimes they have become too weak to walk, or are too frightened to ask for help. How are they supposed to react? Wappa told me that she simply finds it impossible to do nothing: “If I know that someone is dying outside my fence, outside my garden, my town … I have no option. I can’t allow someone to die of hunger, thirst, or cold right next to me.” Besides, she said, “it’s not normal that saving someone’s life might be a crime.”

She is one of many local people who have organized makeshift warehouses, stockpiling food, water bottles, winter clothes, and cellphone batteries in spare rooms and garages. They have also improvised, together with Grupa Granica and volunteers from the rest of Poland, a miraculously efficient patrol system. Their phone numbers circulate on Arabic social media; groups of migrants pass them back and forth. When people become desperate, they call. Volunteers respond by carrying blankets, shoes, and thermoses filled with soup into the forest.

Some more experienced organizations, including the Polish Red Cross and a popular national charity, the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (known by the Polish acronym WOŚP), have created more formal systems to collect donations from around the country. The WOŚP warehouse that I visited was indeed filled with foil blankets, water bottles, and other supplies. This weekend a larger, more experienced medical-emergency NGO has announced that it will come to the border and help too. Still, the state is absent, international organizations are absent, and until now it’s mostly been amateurs trekking into the forests to help, mostly amateurs who are facing impossible medical, moral, and legal choices. Do they call for an ambulance when someone who is clearly ill begs them not to, because they fear being captured by the border guards? Do they bring food and water to a family of migrants camped in the forest—and then just go home and leave them there?

[Anne Applebaum: The French intellectual who refuses to look away]

Polish government policy has also created an information vacuum that volunteers have also been forced to fill. Grupa Granica now organizes press conferences and keeps in touch with dozens of international journalists. Yet it too is staffed by people who have never done anything like this before. Iwo Łoś, the organization’s press spokesperson, is a doctoral candidate in sociology who has postponed everything, including the submission of his thesis, to do what has suddenly become a full-time job. Sypiański, the translator, is also close to getting his doctorate in medieval history—he is an expert on relations between the Arab world and Byzantium—but has spent the past month at the border instead. Theoretically the border guards also have a spokesperson. But after our encounter with the Kurds in the forest, my Polish colleague texted her to ask what had happened to the family. We never received a response.

None of which is to say that this crisis has some easy, obvious alternative solution, because it does not. Neither Poland nor the rest of the EU can open its borders to the millions of people who would like to go there. Neither Warsaw nor Brussels should give in to blackmail from Minsk. The Polish government has every right to defend its borders, especially since the status of the people who have managed to cross them is murky. They have indeed broken the law and destroyed the fence. Although some would have a genuine case, many do not qualify for political asylum. They want to go to Germany because they have family there, because they think they can get jobs there, because the prospect of another decade in a refugee camp in Lebanon or Turkey is so grim. In any case, asylum is something you are meant to request when you reach the first country where you are safe. Some say they should have asked in Minsk, though that’s difficult to do when you are immediately bused to the border. Americans will recognize all of these dilemmas from their own border with Mexico.

But it is precisely because Lukashenko is a cynical autocrat who is using human beings as weapons, and precisely because his scheme is designed to undermine democratic values, that the Polish government’s response has been so disastrous. The democratic world can and should come up with a response to this kind of provocation based on respect for the rule of law, transparency, and human decency. To send people back, repeatedly, into a dangerous situation, knowing they might die, is immoral, in addition to being a violation of international law. To pretend that this is only a hybrid war, and not simultaneously a humanitarian crisis, is to misunderstand profoundly what is happening on the ground.

[Read: The West is failing Belarus]

Part of the answer, as I’ve said, could lie in a consolidated international response of a kind that the Poles should have called for months ago. Already, pressure from the EU seems to have persuaded Iraqi Airways to stop flights from Baghdad to Minsk, and Turkish Airlines says it won’t sell any more one-way tickets from the Middle East to Minsk either. But the strange fact that the Polish border remained for so long open to trade with Belarus also requires some examination. Why aren’t sanctions higher, stiffer, faster? Why has it taken the EU so long to impose more of them?

An even more important part of the answer might lie in speeding up and expanding the legal processing of migrants. In fact, many of the people who make it to Germany will have their cases examined, will be found not to merit asylum, and will then be sent back. This procedure will take a couple of months, which sounds like a lot unless you remember that similar procedures on the U.S.-Mexico border can take several years. What if an emergency system were created to make that process happen even faster? Those people who genuinely qualify for refugee status or deserve some kind of special consideration can then stay, while the rest would be sent home. The sight of large airplanes carrying people back to Erbil from Warsaw might finally persuadepersuade others not to come. David Miliband, the CEO of the International Rescue Committee, an organization that provides long-term aid to refugees around the world, told me that “the speed of processing is vital, so that those with the appropriate claims are quickly accepted, but those who do not qualify are just as quickly sent back.” In the meantime, no one would die in the forest.

There isn’t much time. If the situation does not change quickly, we may soon witness tragedy on a much broader scale. Video clips circulating online already seem to show Belarusian soldiers shooting in the air near the border. What if they start shooting straight across it? Russian troops appear to be exercising alongside Belarusian troops near the Lithuanian border. What if they swoop down to Krynki or Białowieża to defend their Belarusian allies? Even if a direct confrontation is avoided, a sharp change in the weather could create a different kind of crisis. Snow can fall in Poland in late November and December. Last year it did. If that happens, hundreds and possibly thousands of people are going to freeze to death.

But I began with a single Kurdish boy for a reason, so let me end with him too. For the truth is that that almost everyone with an interest in perpetuating this crisis, or in taking advantage of this crisis, or in profiting politically from this crisis doesn’t want you to see him. They want you to see masses, migrants,, or Muslims robbed of humanity and lacking faces and names. They want you to see “waves” of people, “hordes” of people, anonymous migrants who have allowed themselves to become bullets in a hybrid war. But a mass tragedy is really just a set of individual tragedies. Remember that when you see one starting to unfold.  

Does anyone still remember the Chicago Seven?

They were a disparate group of radicals—some who knew each other, some who didn’t—who went to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 to spark trouble. Trouble did indeed erupt, although maybe not the exact trouble they had wanted. They were indicted and prosecuted. And then things went terribly wrong for the government.

The prosecution thought it was running a trial, a legal proceeding governed by rules. The defendants decided that they would instead mount a new kind of media spectacle intended to show total contempt for the rules, and to propagandize the viewing public into sharing their contempt. The prosecution was doing law; the defense countered with politics.

The indictment of Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress is the opening bell of a similar kind of fight over law, justice, and authority. The attack of January 6, 2021, to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power struck nearer the heart of American democracy than the disorder in the streets of Chicago had. In 1968, the worst of the violence was mostly initiated by police; in 2021, it was initiated by the pro–Donald Trump mob forcing a police officer to shoot to defend the officeholders it was his duty to protect. But though the details of the riots were different, there is a striking parallel between the gleeful contempt for legal authority of the far-left defendants of long ago and the pro-Trump authoritarian nationalists of today. Congress wants to hear from pro-Trump partisans about their advance knowledge, if any, of the January 6 attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election. At former President Trump’s direction, those partisans have adopted a no-cooperation strategy, pleading that the defeated ex-president should permanently enjoy the legal privileges of his former office.

That’s not a very smart legal strategy. But it’s not meant as a legal strategy. It’s a political strategy, intended, like the Chicago Seven’s strategy in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom all those years ago, to discredit a legal and constitutional system that the pro-Trump partisans despise.

The Trump partisans start with huge advantages that the Chicago Seven lacked: They have a large and growing segment of the voting public in their corner, and they are backed by this country’s most powerful media institutions, including the para-media of Facebook and other social platforms.

Thanks to that advantage, the Trump partisans don’t need to convince much of anybody of much of anything. It won’t bother the Trump partisans that their excuses are a mess of contradictions. They say that nothing happened, and that it was totally justified; that Trump did nothing, and that Trump was totally entitled to do it. Their argument doesn’t have to make sense, because their constituency doesn’t care about it making sense. Their constituency cares about being given permission to disregard and despise the legal rules that once bound U.S. society. That’s the game, and that’s how Bannon & Co. will play the game.

[David Frum: The real lesson of my debate with Steve Bannon]

Permission seeking and permission granting were exactly how January 6 happened in the first place. Trump supporters were gradually radicalized through a series of escalating claims:

Trump didn’t really lose.

The majority in a state legislature has the right to reverse that state’s election results if it does not agree with them.

The vice president can initiate that reversal process if he wants to.

If the vice president balks, kidnapping him and putting a gun to his head until he changes his mind is legitimate.

If the plot fails, any attempt to hold the would-be kidnappers to account is unjust political persecution.

Now, in 2021–22, the project is to repeat that kind of kaleidoscope shift of denial and justification. Like the Chicago Seven, Bannon understands the political power of ridicule and contempt. He’s not coming to trial to play by somebody else’s rules. If he does eventually testify about the events of January 6, he won’t play by the rules then, either.

Bannon and Trump’s strategy of distraction and denial won’t necessarily succeed. Most people recognize reality. But to prevent the strategy from working, it’s important to anticipate it and be ready for it.

The most important basis of national self-defense is to always keep in mind the limits of criminal prosecution to deal with political wrongdoing. Many things are wrong without being illegal—and certainly without being provably criminal. The criminal law rightly demands overwhelming evidence. Convicting people unable to recognize they were doing wrong can be very difficult.

The Robert Mueller investigation into Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election should’ve made particularly clear the inadequacy of the criminal process in a political context. The country needed to know from Mueller whether Donald Trump—as a businessman, candidate for office, and president—had improper connections to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Mueller instead went looking for proof of a criminal conspiracy within the technical legal definition. But a businessman hoping for a giant payday from shady characters around a foreign dictator is not a prosecutable crime. A businessman lying on camera about his dealings with the shady characters around a foreign dictator is not a prosecutable crime. Being tipped off that the foreign dictator has potentially damaging information about a political opponent is not a prosecutable crime. Appealing on television to that dictator to hurry up and release that information is not a prosecutable crime. Once the statute of limitations has lapsed, even money laundering ceases to be a prosecutable crime.

Through all the long months of the Mueller investigation, people who followed the Trump-Russia story were led to hope that the thing would end with Trump doing a perp walk. Excited anti-Trump media sometimes inflated Americans’ expectations about what federal prosecutors could or would do. They sometimes overhyped rumors into reports. In doing so, they redirected attention from the need for coalition-building and vote-winning to a messianic hope: “Mueller is coming.” Only Mueller was not coming, because Mueller and the Trump Department of Justice had defined his job in a way that forbade him from looking at the stuff that mattered most: intelligence risks rather than criminal charges, and the financial transactions that cast light on the story, even if they did not break the law.

[Read: When the MAGA bubble burst]

Here we are again. Trump’s consigliere Michael Cohen testified a long time ago that Trump does not leave a paper trail. He does not speak direct orders. He signals what he wants, and then leaves it to his underlings to figure out for themselves how to please him. Trump likely followed those lifetime habits in the weeks leading to January 6.

The struggle between supporters of constitutionality and legality, on the one side, and Trump and his faction, on the other, is always an asymmetrical fight, as it was between the law and the Chicago Seven in 1968. Those trying to protect Trump from accountability for January 6 know what they are trying to accomplish, and have built a large constituency in the country that supports them. The fight to uphold law cannot be won by law itself, because the value of law in the face of violence is the very thing that’s being contested. The fight ahead is an inescapably political fight, to be won by whichever side can assemble the larger and more mobilized coalition. The Trump side is very clear-eyed about that truth. The defenders of U.S. legality and democracy against Trump need to be equally aware.

When I first suspected that I was losing my hair, I felt like maybe I was also losing my grip on reality. This was the summer of 2020, and although the previous three months had been difficult for virtually everyone, I had managed to escape relatively unscathed. I hadn’t gotten sick in New York City’s terrifying first wave of the pandemic. My loved ones were safe. I still had a job. I wasn’t okay, necessarily, but I was fine. Now my hair was falling out for no appreciable reason. Or at least I thought it was—how much hair in the shower drain is enough to be sure that you’re not imagining things?

The second time it happened, a little more than a year later, I was sure—not because of what was in the shower drain, but because of what was obviously no longer on my head. One day, after washing and drying my hair, I looked at my hairline in the mirror and it was thin enough that I could make out the curvature of my scalp beneath it. I still had enough hair, but notably less than I’d had before the pandemic. Feeling a sense of dull panic at the no-longer-refutable idea that something might be wrong, I tipped my head forward to take a picture of my scalp with my phone’s front-facing camera. When I looked at it, the panic became sharp.

I did what everyone does: I Googled my symptoms. At the very top of the search results, a colorful carousel of vitamins, serums, shampoos, and direct-to-consumer prescription services appeared; a so-small-you-could-miss-it disclosure in one corner signaled that these products weren’t real search results, but advertising. Well below them, the real results weren’t much better—WebMD, a bundle of Reddit threads, medical journals whose articles would cost me $50 a pop, factually thin blog posts, natural-health grifters touting hair-growth secrets that doctors didn’t want me to know, product reviews that weren’t labeled as ads but for which someone had almost certainly been paid. I pressed on to gather whatever reliable-looking information I could find, itself full of terms I didn’t fully understand—effluvium, minoxidil, androgenic.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I had just started a quest for answers that many, many others had also undertaken in the previous year. Only a few months into the pandemic, around the same time when I first thought I might be losing either my hair or my mind, people whose hair was indeed falling out by the handful started to come forward. They showed up in Facebook groups about hair loss, in subreddits dedicated to regrowth, and in the waiting rooms of dermatologists and hair-restoration clinics. First there were a few, but then there were thousands. Some of them had had COVID-19, but others, like me, had not.

At first, the fire hose of products I’d been sprayed with felt like a very American type of reassurance—not only was my problem apparently common, but it was also widespread enough to be profitable, and therefore maybe it had a solution. In hindsight, the products feel more like a warning.

This story isn’t about a medical mystery. The pandemic was a near-perfect mass hair-loss event, and anyone with the most basic understanding of why people lose their hair could have spotted it from a mile away. The actual mystery, instead, is why almost no one has that understanding in the first place.

Hair loss, I eventually learned from my diligent Googling, can be temporary or permanent, and it has many causes—heredity, chronic illness, nutritional deficiency, daily too-tight ponytails. But one type of loss is responsible for the pandemic hair-loss spike: telogen effluvium. TE, as it’s often called, is sudden and can be dramatic. It’s caused by the ordinary traumas of human existence in all of their hideous variety. Any kind of intense physical or emotional stress can push as much as 70 percent of your hair into the “telogen” phase of its growth cycle, which halts those strands’ growth and disconnects them from their blood supply in order to conserve resources for more essential bodily processes. That, in time, knocks them straight off your head.

The pandemic has manufactured trauma at an astonishing clip. Many cases of TE have been caused by COVID-19 infection itself, according to Esther Freeman, a dermatologist and an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and the principal investigator for the COVID-19 Dermatology Registry, which collects reports of COVID-19’s effects on skin, nails, and hair. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with something unique about the disease, she told me—any illness that comes with a high fever can cause a round of TE, including common illnesses such as the flu. Among the millions of Americans who have been infected by the coronavirus, hair loss has been a common consequence, she said, both for patients whose symptoms resolve in a couple of weeks and for those who develop long COVID. Researchers do not yet know exactly how prevalent hair loss is among COVID-19 patients, but one study found that among those hospitalized, 22 percent were still dealing with hair loss months later.

[Read: Yes, the pandemic is ruining your body]

COVID-19 infections are only part of the picture. Throughout the pandemic, millions more Americans have suffered devastating emotional stress even if they’ve never gotten sick: watching a loved one die, losing a job, going to work in life-threatening conditions, bearing the brunt of violent political unrest. Feelings can have concrete, involuntary physical manifestations, and these traumas are exactly the kinds that leave people staring in horror at the handfuls of hair they gather while lathering up in the shower.

All of these factors have led to what Jeff Donovan, a hair-loss dermatologist in Whistler, British Columbia, described to me as a “mountain” of new hair-loss patients since the pandemic began. What exacerbates the difficulty of dealing with hair loss for many patients, he and the other doctors I spoke with told me, is just how little good, if any, information on the condition the people coming into their offices are able to assemble, even if they broached the issue with other kinds of doctors in the past. “They don’t know what’s going on, they don’t know why they’ve spent so much money, and they’re just so confused," Maryanne Makredes Senna, a co-director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s hair-loss clinic, told me. “It’s like, ‘I don’t know what to believe, and I went to this doctor and they made me feel like I was crazy.’” The doctors I spoke with said that their patients typically come to them after having seen at least a handful of other practitioners, and sometimes as many as 15.

This level of confusion—including my own—is, frankly, infuriating. Eighty percent of men and about half of women experience some form of hair loss in the course of their life. TE was first described in the 1960s, and it has long been a predictable side effect of surgery, changing medications, crash dieting, childbirth, bankruptcy, and breakups. The way TE resolves for almost everyone who doesn’t already have chronic hair-loss issues is that the hair eventually grows back—plain and simple. You would think, at some point, that someone would tell you not to panic if you lose some hair after something intense happens—that even if you shed for months, it will grow back eventually, and there’s no need to do anything but wait.

For several reasons, many people don’t get much straightforward information on any type of hair loss, TE and beyond. For one, hair loss doesn’t really lend itself to the format of the modern American doctor appointment. Finding the right diagnosis can be a detailed, time-intensive process. “You cannot do everything for a hair-loss patient in a 15-minute visit,” Senna said, and that’s all the time many doctors get to have with their patients. Seeing a dermatologist who specializes in hair loss, she said, is more likely to get patients a visit of at least 30 to 45 minutes and a more detailed, empathetic evaluation—if a patient can figure out to go to such a dermatologist in the first place.

Moreover, hair loss typically isn’t a particularly urgent problem for practitioners who may have many other types of health concerns coming into their office. Most hair loss that isn’t triggered by some kind of trauma is caused by androgenic alopecia, or AGA, often known as male or female pattern hair loss. It’s passed on genetically and has no cure, although some safe treatments are widely available. Doctors busy with other things may shrug their shoulders at patients who have incurable conditions that aren’t physically dangerous or painful. And for panicking patients who hear “Wait it out” or “Buy some Rogaine,” that recommendation may feel dismissive or inadequate, even if it is correct.

Some causes of hair loss vary along ethnic lines, so getting answers can be even harder for certain patients. Susan Taylor, a dermatologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder of the Skin of Color Society, told me that Black patients usually land in her office with more advanced hair loss than their non-Black counterparts, which can make treatment less effective. Black patients are more likely to have a type of hair loss called central centrifugal cicatricial alopecia, or CCCA. According to Taylor, many practitioners know little about CCCA, and their advice to patients suffering from it can be especially dismissive. “For Black women in particular, they’re told, ‘Stop your relaxers; don’t straighten your hair,’” Taylor said. “And then they say to me, ‘But Dr. Taylor, I always wear my hair natural. I don’t relax my hair.’”

[Read: When ‘good hair’ hurts]

What makes all of this harder is that hair loss—TE in particular—is a long game played on a wonky, counterintuitive timeline. It’s a nightmare for people trying to distinguish correlation and causation on their own. TE is temporary for almost everyone, but because of the vagaries of hair’s growth cycle, the shedding generally doesn’t start until two to four months after the stressor that triggered it occurred. By then, people are no longer thinking about the flu they had months ago—a new shampoo or medication might get the blame instead. And many people who experience TE have no idea whether their hair will ever come back; the shedding can go on for months before slowing down, and regrowth can take several more months to become visible to the naked eye. By the time people notice their hair growing back, a year may have passed since the process was set into motion. Once it starts, the only effective treatment is patience.

If you’ve never gone from normal hair to bald spots in a matter of weeks, you might be tempted to dismiss this as vanity. But people value their hair because the society they live in tells them it’s important. Women in particular have been told for centuries that their hair is their glory, which paraphrases a biblical edict about long hair as a demonstration of righteousness before God. A full head of hair, Donovan, the Whistler dermatologist, pointed out, is still a crude, unscientific shorthand for youth, for healthy living, for vitality. Losing it can send people into a profound depression, or make them ashamed to leave the house.

So people do what I did. They turn to the internet. Waiting for them is a booming market for nonmedical health products, ranging from the dubiously effective to the obviously scammy. Never does a new product look more promising than when you’re trying to solve a problem you don’t understand. In America, where competent medical care can be hard to access even for simple problems, hair loss—extremely common, highly emotional, absolutely confounding—is a case study in how much money there is to be made in this mixture of desperation and hope.

When I first began my own search for answers, the avalanche of hair-loss products under which Google immediately buried me was disorienting and overwhelming. It wasn’t just the beautiful, full-color photos of luxuriously packaged pills and oils that Google threw at me up front, but how the internet kept the score, using the admission that I was losing my hair to stalk me across time and platforms in a way seemingly designed to wear down my defenses. For months on end, those products and many more followed me around the internet, interrupting my friends’ Instagram stories of their latest cooking projects and slipping between my extended family’s Facebook posts about their kids’ first day of school.

At first glance, many of these products seem promising. Vegamour, a start-up that describes its shampoos and scalp serums as a “holistic approach to hair wellness,” can become practically inescapable if you use the internet to look at mainstream fashion and beauty products. It has a website and social-media presence befitting any luxury cosmetic, complete with videos of models tossing around their impossibly thick hair and promises of clinical proof that its products will grow yours. This clinical proof is not included on the site for scrutiny. (A spokesperson for Vegamour did not respond to questions about its products and website.)

Similarly omnipresent are brands of slickly packaged hair-growth supplements, such as SugarBearHair, whose Tiffany-blue gummy-bear vitamins can be found between the lips of celebrities such as the Kardashian-Jenner sisters in sponsored Instagram posts. Social-media influencers are common in this game. Wellness products are a marketing sweet spot for a class of celebrities who are supposed to be more relatable than traditional stars, because they seem to offer a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to be beautiful, but without really revealing anything at all. They are a simple way to assure an audience that you got hot through clean living, good nutrition, and a little self-care—that your entire deal isn’t one big, carefully stage-directed feminine farce. The catch, of course, is that the professionally beautiful absolutely do not rely on these types of products to ensure that their hair looks thick and luxurious. Celebrities, as Senna told me, generally don’t have incredible hair. Instead, they have incredibly expensive hair extensions and lace-front wigs. (SugarBearHair did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

In the United States, cosmetics and dietary supplements occupy a separate legal category from drugs. Their efficacy claims are far less regulated, which allows the manufacturers of nonmedical hair-growth products to make enticingly vague promises that would be more heavily scrutinized and caveated when made by a pharmaceutical company. Paradoxically, this freedom from regulatory surveillance can lead potential customers to assume that these products must be superior overall. The difference can seem implicit in the distinction from pharmaceuticals—if this class of products weren’t safer, more natural, and just as effective, wouldn’t the same level of governmental caution be applied to them? Can’t we infer something from its absence?

These assumptions and their attendant fears are explicitly encouraged by many supplement and cosmetic companies as a way to more effectively market their own products. Vegamour’s website, for example, includes a list of medical-grade ingredients that its products do not include, alongside context-free lists of the most unpleasant side effects that have ever been attributed to those ingredients, even if those side effects are quite rare. The site does not mention any potential side effects of its own products. Drug manufacturers are legally required to track and disclose side effects, but cosmetic companies are not.

You can see the effect anywhere that health problems are being discussed online, especially in spaces dedicated to regrowing hair. In one Facebook group with nearly 30,000 members, the same discussion plays out again and again: A new member asks for help, alongside photos of her thinning hair. Well-meaning people post links to buy the vitamins or essential oils that they’re currently using. They suggest a megadose of biotin, which has never been linked to hair growth in those without a biotin deficiency. They recommend an iron-supplementation protocol with its own Facebook group, even though taking iron supplements can be dangerous if you’re not deficient. Suggesting minoxidil can be controversial, even though it’s one of the only effective treatments for hereditary hair loss, has been studied for decades, and is widely available over the counter in cheap generics. People express a fear of side effects without getting more specific about what scares them. The most common side effect of minoxidil is scalp irritation.

When wading through the sludge of the internet’s hair-loss advice, if you’re lucky, you come across someone like Tala, whose last name I’m not using in order to protect her privacy. She’s a 39-year-old moderator of the Reddit forum r/FemaleHairLoss, which has grown from about 3,000 subscribers to more than 14,000 during the pandemic. The subreddit is a relative rarity on the internet: a place to crowdsource information about a tricky health problem where discussions tend to stay based in reality. People post lots of pictures of their head, either to ask whether it looks like they’re losing more hair than they should be or to show before-and-after photos of treatment plans that really work. They talk about minoxidil and finasteride. They trade hair-war stories about scalp injections and laser helmets, and tell newbies how to find a specialist who can actually help them.

Tala has AGA, the hereditary kind of hair loss, and has been losing hair since she was 30, but she considers herself lucky—she lives in an area with lots of good doctors and she can afford to see them, which means she has access to quality information. Passing on as much of it as possible feels important to her and the subreddit’s other moderators because of how vulnerable many of the group’s new members are. “I can’t tell you how many suicidal people come to this group,” Tala told me. “To know that somebody is suffering that much because they lost their hair, it breaks my heart.”

Maintaining a safe, truthful environment is an uphill battle. “To keep this group running and to keep it free from shills and people who are trying to take advantage of it and spammers, it’s a lot of work,” Tala said. She and the other mods walk a difficult line: For the group to be helpful to as many people as possible, it has to feel welcoming and nonjudgmental, and it has to be free of people who might be trying to sell something. For the group to actually help, the moderators and regular commenters have to find ways to tell people who have spent so much money on “natural” cures that they maybe have been duped, without making them feel stupid or defensive. They teach people the basics of hair’s growth cycle, what to look out for when evaluating a scientific study, and which treatments are known to be effective for the type of hair loss they suspect they have.

Several of the doctors I spoke with think that communities like r/FemaleHairLoss, which encourage rigor and evidence-based treatment options, provide a useful port in the storm of internet health marketing and misinformation. Nonmedical products, the doctors said, are basically all useless for expediting the growth of existing hair—which is not possible in already healthy individuals—or reviving dormant follicles. Dietary supplements themselves can be useful, Senna said, but only for patients whose hair loss is caused by a nutritional deficiency, which is rarely the case for people eating a standard American diet. If you’re not medically deficient, more isn’t better—and it can certainly be worse. Senna mentioned biotin, large doses of which are extremely common in hair-growth supplements. Too much biotin can lead to an incorrect thyroid-disease diagnosis, she said. Thyroid disease can also cause hair loss, so the misdiagnosis can send doctors on a wild-goose chase. The whole problem becomes bigger than if you never took the supplements in the first place.

The myths commonly passed on as facts in some online hair-loss groups are a constant impediment to getting patients on treatment regimens that actually have some chance of helping their hair. “It can be very, very challenging to convince the patient that the diagnosis that she came up with from the internet is not the correct one,” Taylor, the University of Pennsylvania dermatologist, told me. With some types of chronic hair loss, the time that people spend trying things that don’t work is precious—the longer someone goes without effective treatment, the less effective they can expect that treatment to ultimately be.

In the case of TE, hair loss’s timeline is on the side of the wellness industry. Think about how all of this feels to the average person, who has no idea what’s happening to them or why, and who may not even realize that dermatologists treat hair loss—I didn’t. After a couple of months of shedding, they may get worried enough to start looking for remedies as their scalp becomes more visible. They pick up a bottle of hair vitamins and a vial of scalp oil, with the understanding that results will take a few months to see. Down the line, when they spot short little hairs filling back in around their hairline, they’ll attribute that regrowth to the things they bought, not their natural hair-growth cycle. Suddenly, they’re evangelists for their vitamins and oils, which seem like a miracle cure but did nothing at all.

The pandemic likely put this process into motion thousands—if not millions—of times. It’s a challenge that the supplement and cosmetic industries were well positioned to meet; beauty supplements and topical cosmetics are now often sold alongside each other, not just in luxury department stores and beauty emporiums such as Sephora and Ulta, but at Target or via Amazon’s recommendation algorithm. That these products don’t work matters very little to their profitability. In that way, this is a story that predates the pandemic by at least a century. When real, reliable information is hard to come by—in this case, when it is cut off from the general public by the structural limitations of the American health-care system—there will always be a market for new products with hollow promises.

The 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the third meeting of the parties under the Paris Agreement, is not going to save the world.

You would not know it from the headlines. The rhetoric of climate journalism can sometimes swell with catastrophic overtones, but accounts of COP26, which will come to a close today in Glasgow, Scotland, have reached a new level of engorgement. “Can the Glasgow climate change summit save the world?” asked The Hill. “The fate of the planet will be negotiated in Glasgow, Scotland,” Vox declared. The BBC called Glasgow “the last best hope to fight climate change.”

It isn’t—or, at least, it isn’t in the way that such coverage suggests. In the next day or so, countries will likely agree to a “Glasgow deal,” but it will not resolve the core challenges of climate change, nor will it launch a new era in international climate diplomacy, nor will it outshine the 2015 Paris Agreement. The most important advances to come out of Glasgow probably won’t appear in the deal at all, and we may not know what they are for another decade.

Despite all this, what’s happening in Glasgow now—a relatively arcane contract negotiation surrounded by a very large trade show—is crucial. Its outcome will shape the future path of global warming. It just doesn’t matter for many of the reasons that mainstream news coverage discusses. It matters because the world is deciding what it means to live under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Officially, Glasgow is important for two reasons. First, under the Paris Agreement, countries must submit a new carbon-reduction pledge to the UN every five years. The first round of those pledges was due at Glasgow in 2020, but with the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN pushed the conference back a year, and most countries missed the end-of-year deadline for new pledges.

That first round of pledges is now public, and they show that countries are more ambitious about tackling climate change now than they were in 2015. Under the initial Paris pledges, the world was projected to warm 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100; the current Glasgow pledges for 2030 would get the world to 2.4 degrees Celsius, according to the Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific analysis group.

[Read: We’re heading straight for a demi-Armageddon]

But there’s a wrinkle here: The policies that countries actually have in place are not as strong as what they have pledged. Under the national policies in place today, the world is still due to warm 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100. One of the surprises of the Paris process is that countries have made international climate promises that they have not yet enshrined into law. In the United States, for example, the Biden administration has promised to halve emissions by 2030, but Congress has yet to pass the legislation that would accomplish that.

The second reason that Glasgow officially matters is because negotiators are still hashing out the terms of the toughest section of the Paris Agreement. Many of these questions are about finance—who pays for preparing for and mitigating climate change in poor countries?—and a section of the Paris rules called Article 6, which governs how to count carbon reductions that have been traded in international carbon markets. These are important disputes with long-term ramifications for whether countries can avoid cutting carbon at home by buying emissions offsets from poorer countries, a loophole that would hamper the Paris Agreement’s ability to reduce emissions.

But America’s diplomatic announcements in Glasgow have very little to do with these substantive issues. Instead, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more than 100 other countries formally adopted a pledge to cut nearly a third of their annual emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas more than 20 times as powerful as carbon dioxide, by 2030. The U.S. is one of 130 countries pledging to end deforestation by 2030. It organized a “First Movers Coalition” of major companies that committed to buy zero-carbon steel and concrete, which will help create demand for the climate-friendly products. Perhaps the country’s biggest domestic accomplishment was a joint statement with China, which was newsworthy not because it said anything new, but because transpacific ties are so frayed right now that any joint diplomatic action suggests progress is possible.

[Read: Steel is back]

These sorts of results are typical of COP: lots of committing, not a lot of co-doing. All this pledging is worthwhile, of course. Methane is such a potent greenhouse gas that the pledge, if carried out, will shave 0.2 degrees Celsius off the world’s temperature in the middle of the century. And the deforestation initiative, if successful, would represent a species-level achievement in conservation and planetary stewardship for humanity, which has been clear-cutting forests since at least 4000 B.C.

But the overall effect of the achievements more closely resembles tapas than T-bone steak (or Tofurky), and you would not be wrong to leave the meal unsated. The most important way to stop climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels for energy, which produces carbon pollution. Yet COP26’s major accomplishments have done everything but touch this issue. Where are the emissions cuts? Dozens of countries around the world pledged to phase out coal, a move that the Biden White House has suggested that it supports but did not join, because it cannot afford to alienate Senator Joe Manchin, from the coal-loving state of West Virginia, before he votes for the Build Back Better Act. America’s domestic politics, in other words, prevent it from acting too aggressively on the international stage. This might dismay climate advocates. But it also shows that the Paris Agreement is working as intended.

There are two ways to understand the world’s path to decarbonization. The traditional view stresses that climate change is a global-commons problem. Decarbonization, in this view, is an inconvenient but worthwhile endeavor, in which everyone is responsible for cleaning up after themselves, somewhat like picking up your own litter in a nice park. Nobody should litter, and picking up your food scraps is the right thing to do. But if some picnickers—or countries—stop doing it, then others may conclude that it’s not worth the hassle.

The second view reframes climate change as a distributive conflict. In every country, some set of companies, coalitions, unions, and residents want to adopt climate-friendly policy, motivated either by earnest environmental concern or material interest (see: EV makers). At the same time, other companies, coalitions, unions, and so on want to retain the fossil-fuel-dependent economic system that already exists.

There is some truth to the first account—especially in a pre-2015 world of expensive clean energy. But the second account describes the real process of change, the push and pull to pass ambitious policies despite serious opposition. It describes the decisive opposition (and misinformation campaign) run by oil companies, manufacturers, railroad companies, and industrial unions that stymied the U.S. in passing climate policy during the 1990s. And it captures the coalitional politics that have actually resulted in climate-policy victories, such as the solar and wind tax credits, or the Biden administration’s recent trade arrangement over clean steel.

Whichever hypothesis you accept will shape how you understand the Paris Agreement. If you believe that countries would happily decarbonize if only they had the proper incentives, then the Paris Agreement seems inadequate, if not negligent. The agreement’s main mechanisms—ratcheting up carbon-reduction commitments over time, “naming and shaming” countries that fail to do so—doesn’t fix the global-commons problem.

If you accept that the world is locked in a complicated conflict of redistribution over climate change, and that decarbonizing does not necessarily entail sacrifice, then the Paris Agreement will … also seem inadequate, probably. But its structure will make more sense. The annual meetings under the auspices of Paris allow for climate-concerned actors in each country to come together and make their plans. It allows the U.S. to push large American companies toward decarbonization and find international markets for U.S. clean-energy start-ups. That, in turn, should change the domestic politics of climate change over time, making it cheaper and easier to pass aggressive climate policy at home and champion it abroad. The Paris Agreement, and the Glasgow conference, allow what I have called the “green vortex”—the feedback loop of cheaper technology, business investment, and favorable politics that drives decarbonization—to spin faster and faster.

[Read: How the U.S. made progress on climate change without ever passing a bill]

This is the irony of COP26—and, perhaps, every COP for the foreseeable future. On the one hand, COPs abound in hype, in theatrics, in self-imposed deadlines and weighty declarations. It is fitting that Leonardo DiCaprio goes to them. On the other hand, the point of COP, under the Paris program, is to push global climate action forward through hype, theatrics, made-up deadlines, and weighty declarations, and by being the kind of thing that Leonardo DiCaprio would show up to. The “name and shame” mechanism at the heart of Paris requires the world to talk about climate change, and nothing gets the world talking like having a big multi-week event aimed at getting the world talking.

In that sense, reaching a deal at Glasgow is tremendously important, because what really matters is the sheer fact that a deal has happened at all. If the delegates can agree to something, it shows that momentum is continuing, that the world still wants to decarbonize, that the Paris Agreement is barreling forward as it was before. And it shows that the world is still paying attention to those—whether they be skeptical lawmakers in Washington or covetous technocrats in Beijing—who aim to stop the forward moment and immiserate the world.

Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.

In 2020, public-health experts’ message to Americans was simple: Cancel Thanksgiving. This year, COVID vaccines afford us more options for a safe Turkey Day.

But not all celebrants come to the table equally at risk; kids 5 to 11, for example, won’t be able to reach full vaccination in time because their shots just got authorized, and younger children are still waiting. And in many areas of the country, at-home coronavirus tests remain scarce and pricey.

I talked with my colleague Katherine J. Wu about how to think about risk ahead of the holiday.

The conversation that follows has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Let’s start with the basics. Is it safe to gather for Thanksgiving dinner this year?

The better way to think about it is to ask, What is the safest way to gather for Thanksgiving this year? At this point in the pandemic, we have a whole list of behaviors and tools that we can use to lower our risk. Nothing will ever get us to zero risk if we are gathering. But a combination of all those things can help get us pretty close.

We are in such a better position to celebrate Thanksgiving this year compared with last year. We have a huge—not enough, but a huge—percentage of the population vaccinated now, so that means it is totally possible to have a Thanksgiving where everyone there is fully vaccinated. And that feels reasonably safe to me. [But you have to consider:] Who is most at risk? How can we best accommodate them?

Should I take a test beforehand?

It is probably a good idea. But tests are powerful tools with limitations, just like everything else. If you test positive, that can stop you from going to a dinner infected. If you test negative, that probably increases the likelihood that you’re not going to pose a threat to other people. But tests can’t predict the future. It's possible that the virus could still be inside you, but not at the detectable level yet.

If you’ve been traveling or going to work and not masking in the office, you can probably assume that you might have had a recent exposure, even if it wasn’t a really serious one. There’s maybe good reason to test yourself and your family a couple times the week of Thanksgiving, especially if you’re about to go to a gathering where there might be unvaccinated people or vaccinated people who remain at high risk—like if they’re older or immunocompromised—or if the gathering is going to be totally indoors and maskless, and there’s going to be a lot of people. Things like that can all factor into the test decision-making process.

What if tests aren’t available in my area? Are there other measures I can take to be safe?

Testing is still not as available as it really should be at this point. I don’t think lacking access to a test has to be a complete deal breaker. This again goes back to the layered approach: If you don’t have tests, do you think you can build a safe enough Thanksgiving with vaccines, masks, distancing, or outdoor dining? Is everyone vaccinated?

Should case numbers or hospitalization rates play a role?

If you are going to be holding a Thanksgiving gathering in a very high transmission region where the hospitals are slammed and people are still getting very sick—not just infected, but very sick—consider what position that puts you in. If someone, God forbid, were to get really sick in your group, would the local health system have the capacity to take care of them?

Also, if there’s a ton of transmission in your region, what does that mean for the riskiness of the activities you’re engaging in in the days leading up to it?

What about quarantining?

Quarantines are really tough for a lot of people to manage. If people are going to work, it means they have to stay home from work. If you're traveling, you can't then lock yourself in a room for two weeks. Thanksgiving will be over by that point.

Have other questions in advance of the holiday that you’d like Katie to answer? Send them in.

The news in three sentences:

(1) Kyle Rittenhouse took the stand to testify in his own defense today during his homicide trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (2) The Bureau of Labor Statistics released another not-so-good inflation report. (3) The United States and China announced a surprise climate pact.

Today’s Atlantic-approved activity:

Take a photo trip to the ​​Faroe Islands with this captivating gallery.

A break from the news:

The singularity is here.

Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.

As the days become shorter and the nights grow colder, I wanted to take one last look at the colorful beauty of this autumn, seen in cities and countryside vistas across the Northern Hemisphere. For even more autumnal goodness, check out “Fall Is in the Air: Images of the Season” from earlier this year.

For the past several months, Little Amal, an 11-foot-tall puppet depicting a Syrian refugee girl, has been on a 5,000-mile trek across Europe, bringing attention to the plight of millions of refugees and displaced children around the world. The Handspring Puppet Company and Good Chance Theater worked together to build the character and embark on the months-long project titled “The Walk,” beginning on the Syrian border with Turkey, passing through dozens of cities and towns in Europe and ending in the United Kingdom. Amir Nizar Zuabi, the project’s Artistic Director, says “The purpose of The Walk is to highlight the potential of the refugee, not just their dire circumstances. Little Amal is 3.5 meters tall because we want the world to grow big enough to greet her.”

American exceptionalism can sometimes be quite bleak: The United States is the only wealthy country in the world without a national program for paid parental leave.

The U.S.’s best chance yet of giving up this dismal distinction might be slipping away. The $1.8 trillion domestic-policy bill that’s making its way through Congress initially was going to include funding for 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, which would cover a share of people’s wages as they take time off work to care for their loved ones (newborns included) or themselves.

But because of hesitations on the part of moderate Democrats (and total resistance on the part of Republicans), the proposed leave went from 12 weeks to four weeks to zero weeks, when the provision briefly dropped out of negotiations entirely. Last week, Democrats in the House reinstated four weeks of leave, but whether that will make it into the final version of the bill that the Senate votes on is unclear.

The bill does include other policies that would be a huge help to time- and cash-strapped families, including funding for universal pre-K and an extension of the expanded child tax credit. But losing family and medical leave would be dispiriting for many Americans who need it, especially after the coronavirus pandemic has underlined the strain that the lack of such a policy puts people under, particularly parents and working women. “At a time when recognition of the need for paid leave is higher than it’s ever been, for it to be seen as not essential or too expensive just seems crazy,” Richard Petts, a sociologist at Ball State University who studies parental leave, told me. Watching the political process play out, he said, “I just want to bash my head against the wall.”

[Read: The conservative argument over paid family leave]

The prospect of missing out on parental leave is particularly exasperating to experts like Petts given that researchers have been documenting its benefits for decades. “This is not new information, by any means,” Petts said of the policy’s positive effects.

Paid leave is also not nearly as controversial around the globe as it is in the United States—186 other countries, for instance, provide some amount of paid maternity leave. “If Brazil can do this with its GDP, please explain to me why the United States can’t do this, with its GDP,” Jennifer Glass, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “Sad” and “depressing” were two words she used to describe what it has felt like, as an expert on work-family policies, to watch the U.S. go on and on without a national leave program.

To a large extent, the benefits of parental leave are self-evident. Healing from giving birth usually takes at least six weeks, and “returning to full-time work when the newborn and primary caregivers are still adjusting to one another, and a birth mother has not yet recovered physically from childbirth, is a terrible idea,” Glass said. But that’s what many mothers and most fathers do anyway, because they can’t afford not to. (Per government data, only 23 percent of American workers have access to paid family leave through their employer.)

Over the past several decades, research has established further benefits that fall under several, often overlapping, categories. First, leave is good for families’ physical and mental health. Babies whose parents take leave are more likely to get their vaccinations on time, more likely to be breastfed, and less likely to go to the hospital with an infectious disease. And on top of giving birth mothers time to physically heal, taking leave is linked to better mental health for mothers, both when they take it and when fathers do.

Leave is also beneficial for family relationships: Dads who take leave tend to go on to be more involved in their kids’ lives, and their partnerships tend to be more stable. “This sets up a developmental trajectory for both parents and children,” Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at NYU, told me. Fathers “develop stronger, longer-term ties to their children, and parents see parenting as a more collaborative and shared endeavor.”

[Read: End the plague of secret parenting]

Third, parental leave helps families financially. Currently, many new mothers who take time off lose or leave their job, and the employers they turn to afterward may pay them less or view their new child-care obligations as a liability. Meanwhile, Glass said, “paid parental leave keeps parents employed during that crucial transition to parenthood,” preventing a steep drop in pay and a period of employment instability. That continuity—both in employment and in income—can make a difference in children’s lives, particularly those with parents in low-paying lines of work. (Kids benefit from parental leave, but they also benefit from family and medical leave in a broader sense, because many people who need to take time off work to care for loved ones or themselves are supporting children as well.)

Clearly, implementing a policy that captures some of these benefits is possible, even for countries with far less wealth than the United States has. When I asked several experts what they thought was behind America’s unique lack of paid leave, some brought up the country’s low rates of union membership and general deference to employers’ desires. But the most common theory was that a program that, however briefly, pays people to not do their jobs seems to violate the (sometimes pernicious) American virtues of self-sufficiency and hard work. This logic, though, can be self-defeating, in the sense that paid leave can help mothers stay in the workforce, and its lack can push them out of it. (This faulty rationale also ignores the very real work of parenting and other caregiving.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the four weeks of leave currently under consideration is, by global standards, paltry. In an interview, Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank New America, called it “a very American period of time”: Four weeks is less time than it typically takes to recover from birth, and is far less than the worldwide averages, which are about seven months of paid leave for mothers and four months for fathers in the countries that provide it.

Despite America’s historically underwhelming family policies, some of the experts I spoke with looked back on the past few decades with some optimism. Shabo said that when she started focusing on these issues in 2010, only two states had paid-leave programs. Now nine states and the District of Columbia do, and she expects that even if family leave is cut from the congressional bill, more states will put their own policies in place.

Gerson, the NYU sociologist, has been researching families and work since she was a grad student in the 1970s. “One major shift that we now take for granted is that we are no longer arguing about whether or not mothers should work—that was the dominant debate in the late 20th century,” she said. Now the debate is over how to support working families. “I find that very heartening,” Gerson told me. “I’m optimistic about the long run, and that helps me deal with the short-run setbacks.”

The fear of breakthrough COVID-19 infections spoiled the summer. In the early days of vaccine bliss, many Americans had thought that the shots were a ticket to normalcy—and at least for a while, that’s precisely what public-health experts were telling us: Sure, it was still possible for vaccinated people to get COVID-19, but you wouldn’t have to worry much about spreading it to anyone else. Interim guidance shared by the CDC in March stated that these cases “likely pose little risk of transmission,” and a few weeks later, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus.”

And then came Delta. The hyper-contagious variant sent cases skyrocketing and led ICUs to yet again fill up with COVID patients. And it also spurred a full-on freak-out that our understanding of who could spread the virus was all wrong. In early August, the CDC published its findings on a huge cluster of COVID cases in Provincetown, Massachusetts, concluding that 74 percent of cases had occurred in vaccinated people. The supposed implication of that finding was even more ominous: Vaccinated people were just as likely to spread the virus as the unvaccinated. The CDC quickly went back to recommending that vaccinated people wear masks indoors while news outlets ran headlines such as “Vaccinated People With Breakthrough Infections Can Spread the Delta Variant, CDC Says.” The worst-case scenario—that vaccinated people might be going about their lives only to be seeding tons of new coronavirus cases—all of a sudden seemed possible.

Three months later, we have fortunately not seen this doomsday scenario come to pass—the fears raised by the Provincetown report were largely overblown. But that doesn’t mean that the vaccinated are in the clear, either. Breakthrough infections are still happening, and they can lead to transmission. But we still don’t know just how widely that spread actually happens.

[Read: No, vaccinated people are not ‘just as likely’ to spread the coronavirus as unvaccinated people]

Vaccinated people spread the virus less overall because they are significantly less likely to get infected in the first place. In early September, the CDC found that six unvaccinated people were testing COVID-positive for every one vaccinated person. But there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic beyond that. Some recent research shows that even once they’ve been infected, the vaccinated are less likely to spread the coronavirus than the unvaccinated. “We’re back in this category of, Yeah, it can happen, but it seems to be a very rare event,” Ross Kedl, an immunology professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me.

He pointed me to two studies, neither of which has been peer-reviewed, to make his point. One shows that although transmission did occur among the vaccinated in Provincetown, those cases represent what Kedl calls a “very limited” proportion out of the total number of infections that occurred as part of that outbreak. In the other study, researchers in the U.K. found that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines consistently reduced transmission downstream of breakthrough cases. Much of the original Delta concern was based on something called “viral load”—the amount of virus a person carries while infected. But the researchers concluded that viral load is just one of many factors correlated to transmission reduction. In other words, even if vaccinated and unvaccinated people have the same viral load, it may not necessarily mean they are just as likely to spread the virus.

One reason for this may be that vaccinated people carry less infectious virus particles, as (not yet peer-reviewed) research from the Netherlands has recently illustrated. Although it’s widely assumed that virus particles carried by the vaccinated and unvaccinated are the same, basic principles of immunology actually predict otherwise, Kedl told me. Virus particles expelled by a vaccinated person are thought to be coated in antibodies—some of which are produced in the nose and mouth and are considered part of “mucosal” immunity—so “we can expect less of a downstream transmission,” he said.

Other researchers have come to similar conclusions. “The data are very clear that vaccinated individuals are less likely to spread the virus to others than unvaccinated individuals,” Christopher Byron Brooke, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me in an email. A recent paper Brooke co-wrote showed that vaccinated people shed less virus, stop shedding virus sooner than the unvaccinated, and shed particles that are less infectious—supporting the notion that they’re less likely to transmit disease. One study from the Netherlands found a 63 percent reduction in household transmission among the vaccinated. That’s a testament to our vaccines: Homes are a “setting where the deck is heavily stacked towards transmission since members of a household are in extremely close contact for long stretches of time,” Brooke said. (However, another recent study didn’t find a statistically significant difference in household transmission between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.) Ultimately, Brooke said, you can certainly say the transmission risk for vaccinated people is lower, “but I don’t really know how you define ‘low.’”

[Read: Post-vaccination infections come in 2 different colors]

The new research so far hasn’t swayed the CDC, which remains cautious. A spokesperson for the agency told me in an email that the data that have come out since the Provincetown study makes it clear that fully vaccinated people with a breakthrough infection can spread the virus to other people, including the vaccinated. Although the science is still emerging, the spokesperson said that “it seems that at least early after infection, fully vaccinated people with breakthrough infection can be equally as infectious and more likely somewhat less infectious to others than unvaccinated people who are infected.”

Other public-health experts are wary too. “I think that the jury is still out about the extent to which vaccination might reduce the risk of transmission, but we do know that transmission does occur,” Lisa Maragakis, the senior director of infection prevention at the Johns Hopkins Health System, told me. “I wouldn’t say it’s low [risk].” She alluded to data showing similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

All the researchers I spoke with agreed on one thing: Vaccination is still the best way to protect against infection and transmission. The vaccines may not be perfect, but they are by far the best tool we have in the fight against COVID-19—both for protecting yourself and others. Moreover, vaccinated people can tamp down on spreading the virus by steering clear of situations in which that’s more likely to happen. When it comes to breakthrough infections, “one thing that’s not discussed enough is behavior,” said Syra Madad, an epidemiologist at New York City Health and Hospitals. The Provincetown event—which included tightly packed indoor parties during the rise of Delta—wasn’t exactly conducive to preventing breakthroughs. Precautions such as masking and ventilation are still important. For those reasons, Maragakis will be “watching the data in a concerned way” as the holidays approach: If people begin to gather indoors more, that might lead to more breakthrough infections—and more spread.

Another wild card is how long we’ve gone since getting our vaccine. As the U.K. paper showed, protection against transmission started to wane after about three months, though most data indicate that overall protection is still quite strong. For people under 60, a breakthrough infection might entail feeling miserable for a week, but it does not often result in a hospitalization. This age group is not as likely to spread the virus—especially not to other vaccinated people—by virtue of their stronger immunity, Kedl told me. But the same can’t be said for vaccinated people 65 and older, who have weaker immune systems that make them more vulnerable to serious illness and transmission—hence, the need for booster shots. The “million-dollar question” now, Maragakis said, is how often we’ll need boosters in the months and years ahead.

[Read: Should you mix and match your booster shot?]

We might not reach a consensus on just how contagious breakthrough infections are, and that’s okay. Uncertainty is part of living with the coronavirus, even some 20 months into the pandemic. As long as we’re unsure, erring on the side of caution is the best way to keep the people around you safe. That means that “anybody who has an infection needs to isolate,” Maragakis said. “I would be very hesitant to tell them that they’re not at risk of giving it to others.” Unfortunately, although getting the vaccine does let you safely do lots of activities, it does not give you carte blanche to act as if it’s 2019.

In the best-case scenario, getting a breakthrough infection will someday be akin to catching the flu. “At the end of the day, everyone will get infected with this virus at some point, regardless of vaccination status, as the virus goes endemic,” Brooke said. If enough people get the shot—and if immunity continues to stick around—eventually the consequences of vaccinated people potentially spreading the virus will be nothing to panic about.

Passing looks like a daydream. Set in Manhattan at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the film is shot in sumptuous black-and-white. The soft focus of the lens distorts the frame’s edges. Hazy imagery—a fluttering curtain here, sunlight peeking through tree branches there—often fills the screen. And the story at the center appears mellow: Two women, Irene (played by Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), rekindle their friendship after years apart. Once playmates as children, they evolve as adults into each other’s confidants.

The relationship’s ease, though, is illusory. Irene and Clare are light-skinned Black women who can pass for white, but while the former rarely strays past the color line, the latter has crossed it entirely. Clare has dyed her hair a shimmery blond and shed her origins, to the point where even her husband, John (Alexander Skarsgård), believes her to be white. Her secret transforms the women’s friendship into something stranger: a genuine but risky intimacy, built on their shared knowledge of Clare’s true identity.

Based on the 1929 book by Nella Larsen, Passing, which starts streaming Wednesday on Netflix, is the rare film about race that treats the turbulence of its subject matter with a delicate touch. As much as the story may be about the effects of living in a racist society, not once does the movie depict physical violence by white characters. Instead, it draws tension from the psychological torment of two people who have taken entirely different approaches to their identity, each repressing elements of herself to survive. The film is told not through extravagant set pieces or scenes of emotional catharsis, but through meaningful looks and longing glances between the leads. Though tears are shed and tea sets get shattered, the real force of Passing comes from the anguish that Irene and Clare feel but can’t reveal.

[Read: Who wants to watch Black pain?]

Much of the credit goes to the first-time filmmaker Rebecca Hall, who’s best known for her work as an actor in thrillers such as The Prestige and The Town. Passing is a deeply personal project for her; in interviews, she’s explained that she began adapting Larsen’s novel after learning that her own Black grandfather had passed as a white man. But although Hall has said that writing the script helped her process her family’s history, the finished product doesn’t feel like the work of a debut director intimidated by a weighty premise. Instead, Hall seems to have grasped the story as a performer would, prioritizing the potency of the characters’ interior lives over the plot. And perhaps given her acting background, she draws from Thompson and Negga a pair of finely tuned and exquisite performances. In every scene they share, they radiate a tender but perilous chemistry.

The two women are seduced and repelled by how the other lives. They’re curious about and enthralled by—perhaps even attracted to—each other, but they’re also ashamed by their envy for what the other has. Irene believes that she’s taken the moral path, having married a Black doctor and settled in Harlem, yet she’s also drawn to Clare’s audacity and welcomes her old friend when she shows up at her doorstep. Meanwhile, Clare considers rewriting her history to be worth the cost of living a dishonest life; John is wealthy and respected, and she can go anywhere she likes as his wife. But her vivacity elides a desperation to immerse herself in the culture she abandoned. Each woman believes the other to have a kind of freedom and safety she cannot obtain.

Hall examines Irene’s and Clare’s duality with meticulous care and obvious compassion. She shoots the women using a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, making the frequent close-ups of their faces look even closer. Often the two are shown in the same frame or through mirrors, as if they could overtake each other or switch places at any moment. And Devonté Hynes’s twinkly piano score underlines the delicate nature of their intertwined lives. The film, through these graceful flourishes, suggests that the societal lines Irene and Clare believe are being blurred only sharpen as a result of their efforts. After all, race isn’t the only constraint that exists; there are also expectations for mothers, for wives, for women’s sexuality. Slowly, Passing reveals how Irene pushes the limits of her identity to bolster her social status: She snipes at her darker-skinned housemaid and gossips about Clare with a white writer who attends the Negro Welfare League parties she helps organize. Who’s the one betraying her identity more? Who actually leads the more dangerous life?

The tragedy of Irene and Clare rests not in the question of whether the act of passing is morally defensible but in the fact that neither can fully provide an answer. In 1920s America, a repressive world of social norms and niceties, they don’t have the words to express exactly what they feel. But Passing, in Hall and her cast’s deft handling of a relationship that’s equal parts relief and resentment, tells their story in the fragile silences they share.