The network evening news is in flux: Why an American TV institution is under pressure
For broadcast networks, the evening news broadcast is a cherished part of their legacies — having brought the likes of Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings into living rooms over the decades.
But with pressures mounting on the traditional TV business, the American institution is in a period of flux.
The traditional TV audience is a slow melting glacier, with network evening newscasts down nearly 1 million viewers in the 2024-25 season compared to the previous year, according to Nielsen. As a result, network news executives will be on edge this year, with two of the three broadcasts undergoing major overhauls.
Next month, NBC will replace longtime 'Nightly News' anchor Lester Holt with Tom Llamas, 45, who helms the streaming NBC News Now program 'Top Story.' It will mark only the fourth change in the 'Nightly' role since 1983.
This comes after 'CBS Evening News' in January replaced Norah O'Donnell with a duo of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois. Conceived by outgoing '60 Minutes' executive producer Bill Owens, the new 'CBS Evening News' has aimed to do longer segments instead of the headline-driven style the broadcasts are known for.
Although broadcast networks have largely ceded scripted TV shows to streaming, they are still protective of the news programs. Both NBC and CBS are trying to improve their competitive position against 'ABC World News With David Muir,' which has its largest lead over the second-place peacock network in 30 years.
Like other TV newscasts, evening programs are in a battle to maintain relevance amid competition from not only cable and streaming but also YouTube, which attracts older audiences as well as younger, digital-savvy viewers.
'No one wants a tombstone that reads 'Here lies the guy who killed the evening news,'' said Jonathan Wald, a veteran producer who worked with Brokaw on 'NBC Nightly News.'
Evening newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC — all of which launched in the late 1940s — are among the few shows that still drive appointment viewing.
They've held up better than most TV network genres. Nielsen data show the programs are watched by an average of 18 million viewers a night and reach 71 million each month despite competition from 24-hour cable news and a barrage of platforms available digitally.
There are many weeks throughout the year when Muir's broadcast is the most watched program in all of TV, often averaging 8 million viewers.
So far, the audience isn't buying the changes on 'CBS Evening News.' The program has dropped below 4 million viewers in some weeks since its launch and occasionally gets topped by 'Special Report With Bret Baier' on Fox News.
NBC News executives believe Llamas can provide a fresh spark for 'Nightly News.' They're encouraged that he led in the 25-to-54 age group on recent nights when he filled in for Holt.
'We think he's exactly the right guy at this moment,' said Janelle Rodriguez, executive vice president of programming for NBC News. 'He is someone who has worked at this literally since he was a kid.'
But there is always risk involved when an anchor change occurs — programs typically see a shift of 500,000 viewers in the aftermath. A single audience share point decline in the Nielsen ratings can mean about $10 million less in ad revenue.
Evening news broadcasts are still profitable businesses and have benefited from increased advertiser demand for audiences watching live TV. In 2024, ad spending on the three network evening newscasts, including the weekend editions, hit $669 million, according to measurement firm iSpot.tv, an increase of 12% over the previous year.
The programs also still provide an identity for ABC, CBS and NBC. A recent study by research firm Magid found that 50% of consumers cite news as their top reason for watching a network TV affiliate.
Most of the people tuning in at 6:30 p.m. to watch are older viewers who likely grew up with the habit, as evidenced by the commercial breaks. The data from iSpot show around 46% of the ad dollars spent on the programs are for pharmaceutical products.
Competitors have long taken shots at 'World News,' calling it a shallow broadcast that delivers a lot of of stories without much detail. ABC News executives counter that Muir has traveled around the world to do lengthier reports that are expanded into documentaries for Hulu.
'We spend a lot of time making sure the show is informative visually and reflects a modern, elegant broadcast,' said Chris Dinan, Muir's executive producer. 'David knows television. He's a student of it.'
Viewers, who like Muir and the visual sizzle of 'World News,' have made it No. 1 for nine consecutive years.
'You can't listen to the chattering classes,' said Wald. 'The show is watchable and consistent. You know what you're going to get.'
Muir's success has been rewarded. After sharing special coverage anchor duties with George Stephanopoulos, he is now the dominant face of ABC News. Muir's former longtime executive producer, Almin Karamehmedovic, became president of the division last year.
For most of his tenure, Muir has maintained a neutral image that protected him from right-wing claims of bias made against many mainstream journalists.
That changed last fall as Muir and colleague Linsey Davis became targets after they vigorously fact-checked President Trump at the second presidential debate in September. 'I'm not fans of those guys anymore,' Trump said during a Fox News appearance. 'And his hair was better five years ago.'
Trump's anger at Muir has had no impact on the ratings for 'World News,' which have remained steady. Nielsen data show the program's audience is down only 1% in the 2024-25 TV season compared to a year ago, while 'NBC Nightly News' is off 6% and 'CBS Evening News' is down 8%.
While Holt's departure from 'Nightly News' was presented as his decision, NBC News is historically unsentimental when it comes to making talent transitions, always looking for the next generation.
Llamas, 45, has spent three years at the helm of 'Top Story' on NBC News Now, the network's 24-hour streaming news service that draws a younger audience than the broadcast network.
Like Muir, Llamas has been immersed in TV news since he was a teenager.
Muir worked in a local Syracuse TV newsroom where staffers tracked his growth spurt with pencil marks on a wall. A 15-year-old Llamas landed an internship at a Miami TV station with the help of Jorge Ramos, the longtime Univision anchor. (Ramos' children were patients of Llamas' father, who has a dental practice in Miami.)
Llamas interned at 'NBC Nightly News' and went on to jobs at MSNBC and as a local anchor at NBC's Miami and New York stations. He moved to ABC News in 2014, where he was anchor of the weekend newscast and often filled in for Muir. He returned to NBC in 2021, leading to immediate speculation that he was being developed as Holt's heir apparent.
'He'll be a great steward for what 'Nightly' is now and maybe even extend its lifespan by injecting some youth,' said Wald.
The question at CBS News — which has been distracted by a lawsuit filed by Trump against '60 Minutes' and the pending sale of parent company Paramount Global to Skydance Media — is whether it will make tweaks to its evening news format before viewers start sampling again after Holt departs.
CBS News declined to provide an executive to speak on the record about the newscast. But two people close to the show said management continues to support the alternative approach to the broadcast and there are no imminent changes.
People who work on 'CBS Evening News' but were not authorized to comment publicly said the program has already moved to shorter pieces. The producers are also expected to get some notes from Tom Cibrowski, the new CBS News president who comes from ABC News, where there is an emphasis on being viewer-friendly.
But the challenges faced by CBS demonstrate how hard it is to make changes to evening news when continuity and familiarity matter to the audience.
Muir was a longtime weekend anchor and then primary substitute for Diane Sawyer during her five-year run on 'World News.' Holt was a fill-in for Brian Williams before his abrupt departure in 2015.
CBS has likely been hurt by changing evening news anchors six times since Dan Rather ended his 20-year run at the desk in 2005. The program has long suffered from a weak audience lead-in from its local stations, a problem that goes back to the mid-1990s, when a number of its affiliates switched to Fox after CBS lost its NFL package.
But broadcast networks are aware that the downward trend in appointment viewing on traditional TV is never going to reverse. It's why the networks have expanded their evening news programs online.
Llamas will continue to do 'Top Story' on NBC News Now after he takes over for Holt in June. Dickerson has done an additional half-hour, which includes a longer newsmaker interview and a brief commentary at the end, on 'CBS Evening News Plus,' which is shown on CBS News Streaming after the network broadcast.
All of the evening newscasts stream full episodes on YouTube, each attracting several hundred thousand viewers a night, as well as getting repeat airings on the 24-hour streaming news channels. 'NBC Nightly News' clips reached 43 million on TikTok in the first quarter of 2025.
'As people move across different distribution points, we need to be ready for them,' Rodriguez said.
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Atlantic
3 hours ago
- Atlantic
How I Accidentally Inspired a Major Chinese Motion Picture
In December, a friend sent me the trailer for a new Chinese movie called Clash. It's a sports comedy about a ragtag group of Chinese men who start an American-football team in the southwestern city of Chongqing. With the help of a foreign coach, the Chongqing Dockers learn to block and tackle, build camaraderie, and face off in the league championship against the evil Shanghai team. Funny, I thought. In 2014, I wrote an article for The New Republic about a ragtag group of Chinese men who'd started an American football team in the southwestern city of Chongqing. With the help of a foreign coach, the Chongqing Dockers learned to block and tackle, built camaraderie, and—yes—faced off in the league championship against the evil Shanghai team. The Chinese studio behind Clash, iQIYI, is not the first to take an interest in the Dockers' story. 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At the very least, one of us had to see the movie. Fortunately, it was premiering in February at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. I booked a flight to the Netherlands. The movie I saw, which came out in Chinese theaters last month, did not alleviate my concerns. But the film, along with the conversations I had with its producer and director, provided a glimpse into the cultural and political forces that led to Clash 's creation. Indeed, the trajectory of the IP itself—from the original article to the Hollywood screenplays to the final Chinese production—says a lot about how the relationship between the United States and China has evolved, or devolved, over the past decade. What began as a story about transcending cultural boundaries through sports has turned into a symbol of just how little China and the U.S. understand each other—and how little interest they have in trying. I went to China in 2011 because I had a vague sense that something important was happening there. I moved to Beijing, with funding from a Luce scholarship, and started looking for stories. They weren't hard to find. The years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics turned out to be a remarkable era of relative openness. Many international observers saw Xi Jinping's rise in 2012 as the beginning of a period of liberalization, the inevitable political outcome of the country's growing prosperity. For journalists, China was a playground and a gold mine at once. We could travel (mostly) freely and talk to (almost) anyone. Along with the wealth of narrative material came a sense of purpose: We felt as though we were writing the story of the New China—a country opening up to the rest of the world, trying on identities, experimenting with new ways of thinking and living. The story that captivated me most was that of the Chongqing Dockers. It was one of those article ideas that miraculously fall in your lap, and in retrospect feel like fate. I'd heard that McLaurin, another Luce Scholar, had started coaching a football team in Chongqing, so I flew down to visit him. The first practice I attended was barely controlled chaos: The team didn't have proper equipment, no one wanted to hit one another, and they kept taking cigarette breaks. 'It was like 'Little Giants,' except with adult Chinese men,' I wrote to my editor at The New Republic. He green-lighted the story, and I spent the next year following the team, as well as McLaurin's efforts to create a nationwide league. The movie analogy was fortuitous. Just before the article was published, Sony bought the IP rights, as well as the rights to McLaurin's life story. The project would be developed by Escape Artists, the production company co-founded by Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants. Maybe the NFL, struggling to break into the Chinese market, would even get involved. The deal changed McLaurin's life. Sony flew him and his mom out to Los Angeles, where a limo picked them up at the airport. He met with Tisch and the other producers. They floated Chris Pratt for the role of the coach. One executive asked McLaurin if he'd considered acting. McLaurin also met with high-level executives at the NFL interested in helping establish American football in China. He'd been planning to apply to law school, but now he decided to stay in Chongqing and keep developing the league. In retrospect, the China-Hollywood love affair was at that point in its wildest throes. As the reporter Erich Schwartzel recounts in his 2022 book, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, China spent the late 2000s and 2010s learning the craft of blockbusting by partnering with Hollywood filmmakers and executives. Hollywood studios, meanwhile, got access to the growing market of Chinese moviegoers. (In 2012, then–Vice President Joe Biden negotiated an agreement to raise the quota of U.S. films allowed to screen in China.) It was, in effect, a classic technology transfer, much like General Motors setting up factories in China in exchange for teaching Chinese workers how to build cars. Erich Schwartzel: How China captured Hollywood With a potential audience of 1.4 billion, every U.S. studio was trying to make movies that would appeal to the Chinese market. This led to some ham-fisted creative choices. The filmmakers behind Iron Man 3 added a scene in which a Chinese doctor saves Tony Stark's life, though it wasn't included in the U.S. cut. The Chinese release of Rian Johnson's time-travel thriller, Looper, contained a gratuitous sequence in which Bruce Willis and Xu Qing gallivant around Shanghai. In the same film, Jeff Daniels's character tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt's, 'I'm from the future—you should go to China.' The threat of being denied a Chinese release also resulted in countless acts of self-censorship by Hollywood studios. Sony changed the villains of its Red Dawn remake from Chinese to North Korean in postproduction, and removed a scene showing the destruction of the Great Wall of China from the Adam Sandler film Pixels. In this environment, Hollywood put a premium on stories that could appeal equally to American and Chinese audiences. That usually meant going as broad as possible and leaning away from cultural specifics, as in the Transformers and Marvel movies. But in theory, another, more difficult path existed, the Hollywood equivalent of the Northwest Passage: a movie that incorporated Chinese and American cultures equally. This could be a breakthrough not only in the box office but also in storytelling. It could even map a future for the two countries, offering proof that we have more in common than we might think. The producers at Sony apparently hoped that a 'Year of the Pigskin' adaptation could pull off that trick. 'The movie we want to develop is JERRY MAGUIRE meets THE BAD NEWS BEARS set in China,' Tisch wrote in an email to Sony's then-chairman and CEO, Michael Lynton. 'This is the perfect movie to film in China.' But there was a puzzle built into the project. 'The struggle for me was trying to figure out who the movie was for,' Ian Helfer, who was hired to write the screenplay, told me recently. His task was to create a comedy that would be a vehicle for a big American star while appealing to Chinese audiences. But nobody in Hollywood really knew what Chinese audiences wanted, aside from tentpole action movies. They seemed happy to watch Tom Cruise save the world, but would they pay to see Chris Pratt teach them how to play an obscure foreign sport? Helfer's vision mostly tracked the original article: An American former college-football star goes to China and teaches the locals to play football. Everyone learns some important lessons about teamwork, brotherhood, and cultural differences along the way. He turned in a draft and hoped for the best. Most Hollywood projects die in development, and the autopsy is rarely conclusive. Exactly why the Sony project fizzled is not clear. Helfer said he'd heard that Sony's China office had objected to the project because it didn't feature a Chinese protagonist. Whatever the reason, when the 'Pigskin' option came up for renewal in 2017, Sony passed. By then, the China-Hollywood wave was cresting. The Zhang Yimou–directed co-production The Great Wall, released in 2017 and starring Matt Damon, flopped in the United States. That same year, the agreement that had raised the quota of U.S. films in China expired. Xi Jinping, who was turning out not to be the liberal reformer many Westerners had hoped for, railed against foreign cultural influence and encouraged homegrown art. His plan worked: Although China had depended on the U.S. for both entertainment and training earlier in the decade, it was now producing its own big-budget triumphs. In 2017, the jingoistic action flick Wolf Warrior 2 broke Chinese box-office records and ushered in a new era of nationalist blockbusters. At the same time, however, U.S. box-office revenues had plateaued, making the Chinese market even more important for Hollywood profits. After Sony declined to renew, Paramount optioned the rights to 'Year of the Pigskin,' and the development gears ground back into motion. This time, there was apparent interest from John Cena, who was in the midst of a full-on pivot to China, which included studying Mandarin. (He hadn't yet torpedoed his career there by referring to Taiwan as a 'country' in an interview, after which he apologized profusely in a much-mocked video.) The Paramount version of 'Pigskin' died when the studio discovered belatedly that football wasn't big in China, according to Toby Jaffe, the producer who'd arranged the deal. 'They realized that it wasn't well-suited for the Chinese market,' he told me recently. 'So the reason they bought it for maybe wasn't the most logical analysis.' The option expired once again in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic snuffed out whatever flame still burned in the China-Hollywood romance. McLaurin's China dreams were fading too. His hopes for a broad expansion of American football in China—he had started working for the NFL in Shanghai—seemed out of reach. He left China and went to law school. I figured we'd never hear about a 'Pigskin' adaptation again. When I met the Clash producer and screenwriter Wu Tao outside a hotel in Rotterdam in February, he greeted me with a hug. He told me he couldn't believe we were finally meeting after all these years, given how our lives were both intertwined with the Dockers. 'It's fate,' he said. Wu has spiky hair, a goatee, and an energy that belies his 51 years. He was wearing a bright-green sweater covered with black hearts with the words THANKYOUIDON'TCARE spelled backwards. We sat down at a coffee table in the hotel lobby alongside the director of Clash, Jiang Jiachen. Jiang was wearing computer-teacher glasses and a ribbed gray sweater. Wu, who'd produced and written the script for Clash, right away called out the elephant in the room with a joke. He had stolen one line from my article, he said with a chuckle—a character saying, 'Welcome to Chongqing'—but hadn't paid me for the IP. (This line does not actually appear in the article.) 'Next time,' I said. Wu said he'd been working as a producer at the Chinese media giant Wanda in Beijing when, in 2018, he came across an old article in the Chinese magazine Sanlian Lifeweek about the Dockers. He'd already produced a couple of modest hits, including the superhero satire Jian Bing Man, but he wanted to write his own feature. He was immediately taken with the Dockers' story, and a few days later, he flew to Chongqing to meet the players. They mentioned that Paramount was already working on a movie about the team, but Wu told them that an American filmmaker wouldn't do their story justice. 'In the end, Hollywood cares about the Chinese market,' Wu told me. 'They don't understand China's culture and its people.' He paid a handful of the players about $2,750 each for their life rights, and bought the rights to the team's name for about $16,500. Wu also met up with McLaurin in Shanghai, but they didn't ultimately sign an agreement. 'I understood that, in his head, this was his movie,' Wu said. But Wu had his own vision. Shirley Li: How Hollywood sold out to China Wu got to work writing a script. By 2022, he'd persuaded iQIYI to make the movie and gotten his script past the government censorship bureau with minimal changes. In summer 2023, they began shooting in Chongqing. Wu told me that he'd set out to tell the Dockers' story from a Chinese perspective. 'It's easy to imagine the Hollywood version, like Lawrence of Arabia,' he said. 'A white Westerner saves a group of uncivilized Chinese people.' Even if he'd wanted to tell that kind of story, Wu knew it wouldn't fly in the domestic market. 'We're not even talking about politics; that's just reality,' Wu said. Jiang added, 'It's a postcolonial context.' This argument made sense to me in theory, but I was curious to see what it meant in practice. That evening, I sat in a packed theater and took in the film. Clash opens with a flashback of Yonggan, the hero, running away from a bully as a kid—behavior that gets him mocked as a coward. (His name translates to 'brave.') It then cuts to adult Yonggan, who works as a deliveryman for his family's tofu shop, sprinting and careening his scooter through Chongqing's windy roads, bridges, and back alleys. When Yonggan gets an urgent delivery order from an athletic field where a football team happens to be practicing, the team captain watches in awe as Yonggan sprints down the sideline, takeout bag in hand, faster than the football players. He gets recruited on the spot. Although Clash has the same basic framing as the American film treatments—an underdog team struggling against the odds—the details are original, and telling. Instead of focusing on the coach, the story centers on Yonggan and his teammates, each of whom is dealing with his own middle-class problems: Yonggan's father wants him to give up his football dreams and work at the tofu shop; the war veteran Rock struggles to connect with his daughter; the model office-worker Wang Peixun can't satisfy his wife. The coach, meanwhile, is not an American former college-football star, but rather a Mexican former water boy named Sanchez. He wanted to play in the NFL, he tells the players, but in the U.S., they let Mexicans have only subordinate jobs. The sole American character is, naturally, the captain of the evil Shanghai team. Notably, there's no mention of 'American football' at all; they simply call the sport 'football,' which in Mandarin is the same as the word for 'rugby.' As for the tone, it's hyperlocal in a way that feels authentic to the material. Characters trade quips in rat-a-tat Chongqing dialect. Jokes and references are not overexplained. The film has a catchy hip-hop soundtrack featuring local artists. It also embraces tropes of Chinese comedy that might feel cringey to American audiences: abrupt tonal shifts, fourth-wall breaks, and flashes of the surreal, including an impromptu musical number and a surprisingly moving moment of fantasy at the end. (There are also the predictable gay-panic jokes.) I had been dreading a lazy rip-off, but this felt like its own thing. To my surprise, the audience—which was primarily European, not Chinese—loved it. At both screenings I attended, it got big cheers. When festival attendees voted on their favorite films, Clash ranked 37th out of 188 titles. (The Brutalist came in 50th.) After watching the film, my griping about the IP rights felt petty. Sure, Wu had blatantly lifted the premise of my article. (I looked up the Chinese article that Wu claimed first inspired him and saw that it explicitly mentioned my New Republic article, and the Sony movie deal, in the first paragraph.) But he'd done something original with it. It occurred to me that even if Wu had taken the story and reframed it to please a domestic audience, I was arguably guilty of the same crime. Just like Wu, I had been writing for a market, namely the American magazine reader of 2014. American narratives about China tend to be simplistic and self-serving. During the Cold War, China was foreign and scary. In the 1980s, as it began to reform its economy, American reporters focused on the green shoots of capitalism and the budding pro-democracy movement. In the post-Olympics glow of the 2010s, American readers were interested in stories about how the Chinese aren't all that different from us: See, they play football too! Or go on cruises, or follow motivational speakers, or do stand-up comedy. I was writing at a cultural and political moment when American audiences—and I myself—felt a self-satisfied comfort in the idea that China might follow in our footsteps. What Hollywood didn't realize is that Chinese viewers weren't interested in that kind of story—not then, and certainly not now. Part of me still wishes that a filmmaker had managed to tell the Dockers story in a way that emphasized international cooperation, especially now that our countries feel further apart than ever. But the liberal-fantasy version was probably never going to work. I'm glad someone made a version that does.
Atlantic
3 hours ago
- Atlantic
Paris Can Be Intimidating—But It Has Great Butter
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain's account of his international adventures, made him famous—and cemented the stereotype of the Ugly American. One hundred and fifty-eight years later, Caity Weaver followed him to Paris. Caity and I chatted about her hilarious recounting of her trip in The Atlantic, why Paris can feel so intimidating, and the only food she ate there that she actually liked. Isabel Fattal: If you could go back in time and travel to Paris with Mark Twain, would you? Caity Weaver: Could I be assured of a safe return? Isabel: Yes, for imagination's sake. Caity: Absolutely. I would go anywhere with him. One of the things I was struck by when I reread this book before my trip was how unbelievably funny it is. Of course I knew that Mark Twain was 'a humorist,' but there were sections where I was laughing out loud. I think a lot of times when people think of old books, they get an idea in their head of a book that's really stuffy or boring. But this was cracklingly interesting. As a reader, it's rewarding to come across prose like that. As a writer, it's extremely irritating and intimidating. This man was funnier than I'll ever be, and he did it in 1869. Isabel: Do you have a favorite line or passage from the book? Caity: There was a section where he wrote about what he calls 'the Old Travelers'—well-traveled know-it-alls you sometimes encounter abroad: 'They will not let you know anything. They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest absurdities.' Isabel: If you could ask Twain one question about his trip, what would it be? Caity: I would say: 'Sam, Mr. Clemens, did you go to the Louvre? Did you set foot inside the Louvre, really?' I can't prove that he didn't, but I strongly suspect that he didn't. And I feel like he would tell me. Can't kid a kidder. Isabel: You write in your story about the possibility that Twain was ashamed about not understanding the art at the Louvre. Does visiting Paris make a person feel like they need to have a certain level of cultural knowledge? Did you feel intimidated at any point? Caity: I feel like a completely idiotic, disorganized, disheveled crumb bum anywhere, but especially in Paris. It's like walking into a very fancy hotel lobby. Some people are going to be really comfortable there, and some people are going to think, Am I gonna be arrested for walking into this hotel lobby? Paris is so just-so. I find it to be an intimidating place. The combination of not really speaking the language and the city being so beautiful … I felt a little bit on edge there. Isabel: I have one bone to pick with you. I think you were eating wrong in Paris. You didn't eat anything yummy! Caity: I sure didn't. (Well, I had great ramen.) Isabel: What went wrong? Caity: I didn't eat anything I absolutely loved except the butter. I had a crêpe suzette—delicious, and thrilling to have a small fire caused in a restaurant at your behest. I had some croissants. I really was hoping to be able to write, 'Oh my God, I found the best croissant in the world,' and I just don't think I did. But the butter: unbelievably good. I took so many notes for myself trying to describe the color and the taste of the butter. [ Reads through her notes.] I suppose I am an Ugly American, because this is my description of butter: 'creamy; has a scent; smells almost like movie theater butter.' The color was such a rich, deep yellow, almost like how an egg yolk can sometimes tip over into orange. My notes say, 'So fatty and rich.' Next bullet point: 'like if the whole room were made out of pillows.' And then: 'Yes, I realize I am describing a padded cell.' But it was an ultimate richness, softness, like, Just let me roll around in a padded cell. That was how I felt eating this butter. I took dozens of photos in my hotel room trying to capture its exact hue, and failed to. I encountered another group of Americans in my hotel lobby who were trying to figure out a way to transport butter home in their luggage. I involved myself in their conversation, as Americans do: What if the hotel was willing to store it in a freezer, in an insulated lunch bag? We devoted quite a bit of time to solving this problem. Caity: Oh, no, I think they're probably enjoying that butter right now. I wanted to bring a bunch of dried sausage back to the U.S. And then, after I purchased it, I realized that I could get in trouble for flying with it. I ate so much saucisson in my hotel room so fast. I worried such a dense concentration of salt might cause my heart to shut down. I Googled something like: How much dried sausage too much. Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The Week Ahead Essay A High IQ Makes You an Outsider, Not a Genius By Helen Lewis Who has the highest IQ in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever. Her name, appropriately enough, was Marilyn vos Savant. And she was, by the most common yardstick, a genius. I've been thinking about which people attract the genius label for the past few years, because it's so clearly a political judgment. You can tell what a culture values by who it labels a genius—and also what it is prepared to tolerate. The Renaissance had its great artists. The Romantics lionized androgynous, tubercular poets. Today we are in thrall to tech innovators and brilliant jerks in Silicon Valley. Vos Savant hasn't made any scientific breakthroughs or created a masterpiece. She graduated 178th in her high-school class of 613, according to a 1989 profile in New York magazine. She married at 16, had two children by 19, became a stay-at-home mother, and was divorced in her 20s. She tried to study philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, but did not graduate. More in Culture Catch Up on The Atlantic When Pete Hegseth's Pentagon tenure started going sideways The travel ban shows that Americans have grown numb. The Trump administration is spending $2 million to figure out whether DEI causes plane crashes. Photo Album Spend time with our photos of the week, which include images of monsoon flooding in India, Dragon Boat Festival races in China, a huge tomato fight in Colombia, and more.
