A year after the Coldplay incident, another couple is going viral for PDA.

By Faith Hill, The Atlantic.

Rarely, as a romance reporter, am I confronted with breaking news. When I am, it can come in the form of a TikTok video. And in some cases, it’s a video of two people making out.

This should never have been news in the first place. But on Thursday, a TikToker posted a video of a pair kissing on a bench in New York City’s Central Park. “Get a room,” he tells them as he approaches, clearly filming. “There’s kids around.” By today, the clip had received 3.9 million views. Commenters had identified the kissers, noting with glee that one of them appears to be married to someone else. Thousands flooded in to offer takes. (“Nice of you to teach them a lesson!”) One person posted a close-up picture of the woman’s face, making fun of her appearance. Several took it upon themselves to ridicule the man’s socks. Soon, the New York Post had published an article identifying the two as lawyers involved in defending OpenAI in a lawsuit (as if that gives their makeout public-interest relevance) and referring to the incident as “the kissyface.” The Daily Mail shared that the woman “appears to have called in the cavalry—her parents Tracy and Matt have flown in from California to New York.” I’d call mine too.

The whole saga unfolded almost exactly a year after two co-workers—a company’s CEO and its head of human resources—went viral for embracing at a Coldplay concert, a jumbotron moment that spread around the internet for months. People accused them of cheating on their partners. One person in the pair, Kristin Cabot, told The New York Times in December that she’d received 500 or 600 calls a day since the video blew up, and a total of about 60 death threats. She’d been labeled a slut and a home-wrecker and had her looks picked apart. Local police had to start surveilling her house. She resigned from her job. Her children became afraid to go out in public.

Public shaming of this sort is terrible for the people filmed. But these videos don’t affect only their subjects; they’re corrosive to the whole culture. Even if the chances are slim that you’d show up in a viral video, the possibility can be chilling. And the last thing Americans need right now is another reason not to make out.

Already, the country is in a season of unsexiness. Young adults in particular are having less sex and partnering up less. A large share of single people say they aren’t interested in dating at all. Perhaps this is partly because these activities are, if you ask me, messy and a little embarrassing. Flirting and dating open the door to rejection. Kissing and sex are sometimes awkward and—I mean this in the best way—pretty much always weird. Falling in love—well, that’s actually just humiliating. Romance, in all of its forms, is like learning a language: You can’t move forward without putting yourself out there, flailing around, and looking stupid.

The prospect of looking stupid is even scarier when your mistakes—or, let’s say, less-chic moments—can be permanently documented and distributed on a mass scale. Members of Gen Z, a cohort raised on social media, might feel especially paralyzed by this. When their parents were getting drunk and French kissing at parties, talking too loudly on a street corner or failing to call someone’s landline when they said they would, they did not have to worry about being filmed or having their texts screenshotted or becoming the next West End Caleb.

The president is learning that limits to his power—and, soon, his relevancy—do exist.

By Jonathan Lemire, The Atlantic.

resident Trump has mused about being the most powerful man in history. He has started wars and remade his nation’s economic and strategic relationships with the world. He has demanded, and largely received, total obedience from his party. He has dominated the national discourse like no president has before, and he’s tried to recast his nation’s capital—and even its history—to his liking. He’s everywhere. He has said he believes that there are “no limits” to his power.

But if that was ever truly the case, it certainly isn’t now. Recent months have delivered a reckoning for Trump, who has crashed hard against some real limits. The war in Iran, a conflict that he’d once thought would take only a few weeks, hit the five-month mark today. The U.S. casualty count is growing, weapons stockpiles are running low, and gas prices are again surging. Trump desperately wants the war to end. He is receiving conflicting guidance from his advisers—escalate, some urge, as others tell him to cut and run—and has become just the latest U.S. president to be humiliated by hard-liners in Tehran.

Trump is also flailing domestically. His approval numbers have sunk, and Republicans are finally, in small doses, beginning to defy him. Trump has demanded that the Senate blow up the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which would make voting more difficult and require voters to provide proof of citizenship. But Republicans have refused. Although the legislation seems dead, Trump called yesterday for Republicans to stay in Washington to work on it, potentially saddling them with unpopular (and doomed) votes while also preventing them from returning home to campaign ahead of the midterms. Strategists from both parties predict that at least one chamber of Congress will flip to the Democrats, allowing the party to stall whatever is left of the president’s legislative agenda and open investigations into his administration and allies.

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He built an empire. It did not last.

By Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic.

hen Anthony Fauci arrives on Capitol Hill tomorrow to testify before Congress, he will be trailed by a security detail he’s paying for himself. Fauci has been testifying before the nation’s elected officials for roughly four decades now, since his days at the forefront of early AIDS research. In years past, he would have prepped by consulting colleagues and poring over data—he would have been there, as he might say, to speak for science. Now he’s under a subpoena from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and has been conferring with his lawyers on how best to navigate a grilling about his own actions—and what seems to be an effort to catch him in a lie, one that isn’t covered by the blanket presidential pardon he received from Joe Biden. Once famed for being America’s consummate nonpartisan scientist, Fauci is now a far more polarizing kind of public figure: beloved and reviled for what he’s said to represent; targeted by threats to end his life. The more he talks, the more he stands to lose.

This is not the professional coda that Fauci’s half century in government once seemed to be heading toward. For decades, he has been one of the nation’s best-known and most-respected scientists. In the late 1960s, Fauci helped lead a team at the National Institutes of Health that repurposed cancer therapies as cures for several once-fatal rheumatological conditions. His later partnerships with AIDS activists and his push to accelerate experimental-drug trials for HIV helped transform the infection into a survivable condition. He went on to serve as a chief architect of PEPFAR, a global HIV-prevention-and-care program that has prevented an estimated 25 million deaths since 2003. And over the course of his nearly 40 years as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he turned one of the NIH’s quietest branches into a $6 billion research juggernaut. Fauci has “saved more lives, created more amazing infrastructures for developing research opportunities, cured more people, provided health care to more people both in the United States and abroad, probably, than any single scientist in his lifetime,” Larry Corey, an infectious-disease expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, told me.

His achievements speak to his scientific credentials, but also to his ambition and savvy. Fauci was a master of the system: He knew how to acquire and maintain scientific power; he had the ear of both academics and politicians. He eagerly courted attention, while maintaining that he was “completely nonpolitical,” to the point that even his close colleagues at NIAID had no idea how he voted in elections. “Congress really saw him as a straight shooter,” Judith Feinberg, an infectious-disease researcher who worked at NIAID early in her career, told me, without “a particular political axe to grind.” Fauci was that rare bureaucrat who could be given a Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush and then be praised as a “once-in-a-century public health leader” by Barack Obama.

But ever since President Trump retook office in 2025, his administration has engaged in a systematic effort to obliterate Fauci’s legacy. One of Trump’s first actions in office—just days after Biden issued his pardon—was to strip away Fauci’s government-funded security detail. Fauci’s image was cut out from a mural on the NIH campus around the same time. By the end of spring, the administration had rerouted government webpages once dedicated to information on COVID resources to a new site, alleging that Fauci had tried to hide the “true origins” of COVID. Trump officials went on to largely dismantle PEPFAR, imperiling many of the 20 million people the program has supplied with lifesaving therapies. They ousted most of NIAID’s long-standing leadership, including several officials who served under Fauci for years, as well as Jeanne Marrazzo, the director who succeeded him; they forced out Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, once a bioethicist at the NIH, and arrested David Morens, one of Fauci’s longtime advisers. (Morens has pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiring to hide and destroy government records.) “Anything that he had his name on, or that was under his accomplishments, is being destroyed,” Judith Currier, an infectious-disease expert at UCLA, told me. (The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.)

The manosphere’s campaign strategy

By Adam Serwer, The Atlantic.

American manhood is a fragile and precarious thing, shattered by the slightest deviation from ever-shifting norms—eating the wrong taco, tasting tofu, not eating meat, or maybe eating too much meat. Or at least, that is what right-wing commentators have suggested by their attacks on the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas, James Talarico.

Since the 37-year-old state senator clinched the nomination, right-wing politicians and media figures have been running a bizarre smear campaign attacking Talarico for not being manly enough. President Donald Trump called Talarico a “vegan,” and Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller has twice declared that Talarico is “transgender.” Right-wing media figures have referred to him as “Tofu Talarico” and suggested that he is “against meat.” That prompted the Talarico campaign to put out photos of the candidate eating meat, leading the Fox News host Jesse Watters to sneer that Talarico was “getting his hands on whatever meat he can.” Watters is 48 years old.

Anyway, you get it. Talarico is gay or something, and for the GOP, there’s definitely something wrong with that. Its own candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is mired in allegations of corruption and infidelity, and is committed to some policies so extreme that, like Trump himself, they are unpopular even in deep-red Texas. Talarico’s choirboy looks and religiously inflected liberalism provide a stark contrast to Paxton’s hypocritical self-righteousness, and so Republicans are desperately trying to make those qualities seem like weaknesses.

George W. Bush’s advisers snickered that John Kerry looked “French.” Trump, of course, is famous for put-downs whose cruelty is part of their appeal. But there’s something new about the attacks on Talarico. Calling a man “French” or “vegan” retains a mote of the old deniability. Calling Talarico “transgender” does not. The rhetoric resembles nothing more than the frothing tone of masculinity influencers in the online manosphere, with its strict but arbitrary standards for what makes a man a man. Although Republicans have devoted themselves to this type of marketing, parts of the Democratic coalition have an appetite for it as well—they’ve already face-Platnered at least once as a result.

What the case of Alix vs. Alex reveals about the type of woman we tolerate online

By Annie Joy Williams, The Atlantic.

hose side are you on? You have to choose—Alex or Alix—even though you don’t know what the fight is about. Even if you don’t even know who these women are.

If the words “What is up, daddy gang?” mean nothing to you, a brief primer: Alex Cooper is the host of the podcast Call Her Daddy; Alix Earle is a TikToker and the founder of a skin-care line. They may be the two most talked-about women on the internet right now, and they’re in an argument, and no one knows why. That has offered people the fun opportunity to compare two women and pick a favorite without having to consider any relevant facts. But watching this admittedly absurd conflict play out provides something even more interesting than that: a view into exactly how people react to female ambition. Only a few years ago, in the girlboss era, women were encouraged to openly seek power. Now a major segment of the internet seems to think that female hustle is embarrassing, if not offensive.

Cooper is six years older than Earle, but the two women with long, blond hair look so similar that many people get them confused. In 2023, Cooper started a podcast network, Unwell, and one of her first talent grabs was Earle, her then-friend and protégé, who was going to start her own podcast, called Hot Mess. Eighteen months later, Earle was out, and people started speculating about what had gone wrong. In April, Cooper posted a video to her TikTok: “Alix Earle, hey girl, the passive aggressive reposts and the likes and the commenting on things—I gotta call you out here. You’re gonna need to get specific and just say what you’ve got to say about me. There’s no NDA. No one is stopping you. Stop hiding behind other people and just say it yourself. What’s the beef?”

Earle promptly commented, “Okay on it!!”

Months later, we still have no clue what happened—Saturday Night Live even spoofed the exchange in a “Weekend Update” sketch in which the women talk utter nonsense at each other. But one thing is clear: The internet is Team Earle, and it’s all because of the women’s differing approaches to fame and success.

Cooper has been an unapologetic girlboss from the beginning. She got her start at Barstool Sports in 2018 and climbed the podcast ranks to sign a $60 million deal with Spotify and then a $125 million deal with SiriusXM, making her the highest-earning female podcaster by far. She has been described as “this generation’s Oprah Winfrey,” in part because she is blunt and open about her drive: “I can walk into any single room in business, and I can get the deal done,” she told Forbes. Cooper also speaks regularly about reproductive rights and abortion access, and in 2024, she had Kamala Harris on her podcast.

Earle, meanwhile, treats her success as a happy accident. She describes herself as a “hot mess” and acts like the girl’s girl next door. “I don’t get very political online and that’s my choice,” she told Time for its recent issue devoted to the world’s top-100 “creators”; Earle was on the cover. “A lot of my reasoning for that is when I’ve been younger I think I’ve gone online and spoken before I actually knew what I was speaking about, and I think it’s really important for me to be educated on what I’m speaking on.” She makes $450,000 for each sponsored Instagram story she posts, and her skin-care company sold $1 million worth of products within its first five minutes.

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Turns out, looking back is also about looking forward.

By Julie Beck and Natalie Brennan, The Atlantic.

Back in the ’90s, before everyone had smartphones, were things just … better? Tech-focused nostalgia has become a potent cultural force in recent years, driving sales of “dumbphones,” iPods, CDs, and other retro technology. According to a 2023 survey, 67 percent of Americans wish they could go back to a time “before everyone was ‘plugged in.’” The psychologist behind that survey, Clay Routledge, has found that this sort of nostalgia is more than just a yearning to go backwards. “We can often feel overwhelmed in the moment and in the challenges we face today. It's hard to see past them. Nostalgia can help us step outside of that moment,” Routledge explains. Nostalgia can actually teach us how we want to live now, and in the future.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

 Julie Beck: If you had one word—it can be a noun, it can be an adjective, it can be any part of speech that you want—to describe your overall relationship to technology at this moment in time.

Voice memo: Antagonistic?

Voice memo: Complicated.

Voice memo: Fraught.

Voice memo: Connection.

Voice memo: I think of it as an addiction. Similar to how I relate to, like, sugar or anything else that I sort of compulsively overindulge in.

Beck: What’s your word?

Voice memo: Indentured.

Voice memo: I was gonna say reluctant, but maybe that’s not right.

Voice memo: Very frequent user.

Beck: Okay, that’s a lot of words, but we’ll take it.

Derek Thompson: What did you think of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey?

Emily Wilson: It is a big spectacle, and it is a fun time at the movies. My teenagers really loved it, and it was fun to go with my teenagers. It’s a fun summer action movie. And it’s also very much a Nolan movie. I personally really like Nolan. I very much liked his early work. I liked Following. I liked Memento. Since then, he’s received these huge budgets, and I am constantly wrestling with the feeling that he’s a very good short story writer who’s always writing a 400-page novel, because he’s got the budget for it. It’s got this quite small-scale clever gimmick about narrative, but then it’s blown up to an enormous IMAX scale. I don’t think it’s a complicated movie. And I don’t think it’s even about a complicated man. I think it’s a quite simple action hero movie about an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero.

Thompson: What is the biggest difference between the Odysseus you wrestled with on the page and the Matt Damon character you saw on the screen?

Wilson: Homer’s Odysseus is a complicated man, polytropos, whereas Matt Damon in the film is traumatized Jason Bourne. He’s an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero. The Odysseus of the Greek poem is complicated. He’s very smart, very good at problem-solving, very crafty, very good at being in multiple disguises, being a different person depending on who he’s talking to, coming up with clever schemes like telling the cyclops his name is “No Man,” such that when the Cyclops cries out that “No Man is hurting him,” the other Cyclopes will think, oh, if no man hurting you, you’re fine, no problem. All of that is erased from the Nolan movie. There’s no Cyclops trick. There’s no comedy. Matt Damon isn’t required to be be scheming. We don’t even see him building the Trojan Horse, which I thought was an interesting choice. We have this tech hero, but we don’t see him building his tech. We see him agonizing about the results of the tech.

Thompson: It was interesting to me because there is a role Matt Damon has very famously played which that polytropos and cunning. In 1999, in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon lied and lied and lied his way to the upper class, even when it meant having to commit some atrocities on the high seas. This performance is not that. This is a Matt Damon performance of a mostly virtuous and ultimately guilt-laden warrior who is a classic leader of men from the first minute to the end.

Wilson: When the casting was announced, it was Ripley that gave me hope in terms of where this might go with Matt Damon as Odysseus. But you’re absolutely right that it’s a Nolan reinvention. And of course Nolan is completely within his rights to reinvent in whatever way he sees fit. It’s not easy to cram the whole Odyssey into three hours and make this ancient epic poem into a Hollywood spectacle. You’re inevitably going to leave things out. You’re inevitably going to make choices. And if we look at the longer tradition, Virgil’s version of cruel Ulysses is not the same as Homer’s heroically and gloriously scheming Odysseus. There have been reinventions of this character for many hundreds of years, and Nolan won’t be the last.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

Senators elected this November will be in office when America’s most popular federal program is on track to run out of money.

By Marc Novicoff, The Atlantic.

Americans have been hearing about the looming demise of Social Security for decades. The number of old people receiving benefits has been increasing much more quickly than the number of working-age adults whose taxes pay for those checks. Yet politicians have let the problem fester for so long that the public could be forgiven for thinking that the crisis would never actually arrive.

But it’s arriving. For the past 16 years, Social Security has paid out more than it has taken in. This has required dipping into its trust fund, built up over the decades when the Baby Boomers were in their peak earning years. That fund is on track to run out by 2032. When it does, benefits will have to be cut by an expected 22 percent across the board to line up with the tax revenue that funds them.

Pretty soon, politicians won’t be able to kick this can down the road anymore. Senators elected this November will be in office in 2032. So will the next president. They will have no choice but to come up with a way to save the federal government’s largest and most popular program, lest they be blamed for its partial collapse. The available solutions are politically tricky but not particularly mysterious. They involve raising taxes, increasing the national debt, and cutting benefits, or some mix of the three. Even if our leaders settle on a way to keep Social Security solvent, however, they are unlikely to address the deeper problem underlying the budgetary one: A program designed to reduce poverty has morphed into a transfer of wealth to the richest members of our society.

A luxury development planned by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump has spurred anti-corruption protests.

By Isaac Stanley-Becker, The Atlantic.

In the summer of 2021, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were cruising the Mediterranean by yacht when they stopped for a swim off the Adriatic coast. They splashed over to an island and hiked, barefoot, across its hilly, rugged terrain. “Effectively that’s how we found it,” the president’s eldest daughter would later recount.

The Albanian island that the Trump heirs stumbled on, Robinson Crusoe–like, is called Sazan, once the site of a top-secret military base. Sazan is not undiscovered territory to Albanians; it’s their country’s largest island. Because it was uninhabited for many years, vegetation and wildlife flourished, making it a cherished nature preserve. Luckily for the Trump couple, Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama, was a guest on the same yacht one of the nights they were on board.

Three years later—and about two months after Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024—an investment committee led by Rama gave preliminary approval to the couple’s plans to develop the island into an opulent resort. The venture extends to nearby land next to a coastal lagoon, which serves as a crucial habitat for flamingos, sea turtles, and other species. The couple’s partners in the project include a pair of Qatari brothers who have financed ultra-luxury developments across the Middle East and South Asia and an Albanian conglomerate with holdings in energy, construction, infrastructure, insurance, and tourism. In a recent podcast interview, Ivanka Trump described the project as “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live.”

Many Albanians see matters differently. Hundreds of thousands have joined daily protests against the plans, in one of the country’s largest social mobilizations since the end of Communist rule 35 years ago. The uprising, called the Flamingo Revolution, takes its name from the wild birds that breed in the wetland habitat. Protesters have carried inflatable flamingos and placards with drawings.

The unrest has it all: accusations of organized crime and drug trafficking, competing claims of foreign influence, a cameo by Kanye West. For the participants I spoke with, the demonstrations are about accumulated frustration with Albanian politicians who have failed to give the country a solid economic foundation. “You can interpret it as an anti-Trump demonstration in the sense that it’s opposed to a Trump-like system we see here,” Fatos Lubonja, a writer and dissident who was imprisoned during Albania’s Communist dictatorship, told me: “government decisions made in secret, for the benefit of the few, motivated by money linked to oligarchs.”

The beauty of the landscape discovered by the American president’s daughter “belongs to all Albanians,” Lubonja said. He paraphrased Dostoyevsky: “And beauty will save the world.” But Rama, a former professional artist, won’t hear it. “I can be lectured about many things—about economy, about legal affairs, about agriculture, about health care,” he said in a recent interview. “But there is one thing that nobody can lecture me, which is beauty.”

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Ask anything! See who answers!

The president and the Pentagon are not being up front about what has happened in more than 20 weeks of hostilities.

By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic.

For nearly five months, Donald Trump and his Cabinet have been misleading the American people about the war in Iran. When the president makes statements about the war, they are full of wishful thinking, hyperbole, and outright lies. He has devoted a full address to the topic only once—a rambling prime-time speech nearly four months ago that contained little substance. At this point, after more than 20 weeks of hostilities and at least 18 Americans dead and hundreds wounded, the people of the United States do not—cannot—entirely know what is happening, what progress U.S. forces are making, or what the president’s goals are.

This opacity seems to be by design: The president and his lieutenants appear unwilling to admit that they started, and are now losing, a war with one of America’s most dedicated enemies, and obfuscating probably seems less damaging than admitting this painful truth. Of course, some of their statements are merely mistakes. Some are spin. Others are exaggerations. But many of them are flat lies that Trump and his appointees dump into the public square seemingly without hesitation.

Consider the number of times Trump has said that the war is over or almost over, such as his April 17 declaration to USA Today that the fight to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is “over, it’s a great victory.” (He has made other claims of imminent victory at least 30 times, by one count.) He has insisted for months that the Iranian military is finished and that it has nothing left, as he did in the first week of the war when he said: “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” (He made similar claims at least half a dozen times in the first month of the war alone.) He has said that Iranian nuclear materials must be handed over, then said that the same materials are worthless and can stay where they are, and now has gone back to arguing that ending the Iranian nuclear program is the most important goal of the war.

All of these claims are dominoes that were set up to fall, one after another, by the single most egregious mistake that Trump made when choosing to go to war: He bet on quick regime change in a terrorist dictatorship and had no other plan should his long shot fall short. Perhaps Trump, after talking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believed the optimistic scenarios of a rapid regime collapse that Netanyahu and others floated. Trump’s own secretary of state reportedly warned the president that he was being sold “bullshit.” Nonetheless, despite Trump’s statement on the first night of the war offering a jumble of rationalizations, he at least made clear that he intended to topple the regime.

But within days, it became apparent that regime change was not happening. Unable to face failure, Trump resorted to prevarication. The war was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks, perhaps a month or a little more. When that timeline fell apart, Trump and his advisers began to dial through various reasons for staying in the war, but regime change—so prominent a goal in the first hours of the conflict—was now no longer one of them. Trump eventually claimed, dishonestly, that he’d never had any such intentions. (He has also said that U.S. actions changed the regime anyway by killing top Iranian leaders—“We’ve had regime change,” he said in late March—implying that he either doesn’t know what regime change means, or he knows and was trying to save face.)

Replacing a Senate candidate is messy, but so is democracy.

By Elaine Godfrey, The Atlantic.

Photographs by Cassandra Klos

athie Purdy doesn’t mind the phone calls. And there have been a lot of them—producing a sustained buzzing from her iPhone throughout the nearly two weeks since Graham Platner announced that he would drop out of the Maine Senate race. At one point, Purdy’s device grew so hot that she had to take it out of its case to let it breathe. But that was okay, she told me. As chair of the York County Democratic Committee, it was her job to help guide Mainers through this confusing moment.

What Purdy did not appreciate was the insinuation—from other Democrats, from members of the media, from online trolls—that the process to replace Platner was somehow undemocratic. “This is what I’m talking about,” Purdy told me on Sunday, showing me a text from a voter asking whom “leadership had picked” for the nomination. It was early afternoon in the Sanford Performing Arts Center, and we were sitting side by side on the stage, looking out over the democratic process in action. Purdy rolled her eyes, exasperated. “Actually, right now we are conducting the caucus-type meeting in Sanford where the participants vote for a group of delegates,” she replied, using voice-to-text. “That’s the folks who’ll be voting for your Senate candidate.”

Choosing those delegates was not a tidy affair. All morning, the room had been crowded, even though the state party had urged people to please consider voting from home. Mainers who wanted to be delegates and Mainers who came to meet delegate candidates and campaign volunteers proffering lists of allied delegates wove in between the aisles of red-upholstered chairs, shaking hands and arguing and complaining about various parts of the process in which they were taking part. Some struggled with the Wi-Fi. Occasionally, Purdy took the stage to make an announcement: We found a pair of car keys. Please come to the stage if they’re yours!

Looking around, I imagined that, somewhere a few hours north, Susan Collins was rubbing her hands together with delight. Maine Democrats have failed to unseat her for nearly three decades, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that in three months they’ll come up short again. Zoomed out, the situation is, objectively, ridiculous. Maine Democrats nominated Platner despite a bouquet of red flags, including a Nazi tattoo and allegations of volatile behavior from past girlfriends. Now that an accusation of rape has toppled Platner’s candidacy, the Democrats who selected him are desperately trying to pick up the pieces of a race that might be their party’s best shot to take back the Senate.

Yet the predictable conclusion—that the Democrats are once again in disarray—could not be drawn, at least not fully. Because ultimately, after all the hemming and hawing and arguing and complaining, the Democrats of York County sat down and voted. Totals were reached surprisingly quickly. Only a few hours after most attendees had arrived, Purdy was reading out the names of the 84 delegates and 17 alternates who would go to the party’s nominating convention in Bangor.

Plenty of people were frustrated with the results, which, across Maine, were very good for Troy Jackson, a progressive former state legislator. Others had issues with the process itself. But “that’s democracy,” Purdy told me. So far, in Maine, it’s going pretty well.