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Cancel Earthworms

The “crazy worms” remaking forests aren’t your friendly neighborhood
garden worms. Then again, those aren’t so great either.
An illustration of a mass of worms beneath a forest.

Myriam Wares

* Story by [45]Julia Rosen
*
* January 23, 2020
[46]Science

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On a sweltering July day, I follow Annise Dobson down an overgrown path
into the heart of Seton Falls Park. It’s a splotch of unruly forest,
surrounded by the clamoring streets and cramped rowhouses of the Bronx.
Broken glass, food wrappers, and condoms litter the ground. But Dobson,
bounding ahead in khaki hiking pants with her blond ponytail swinging,
appears unfazed. As I quickly learn, neither trash nor oppressive
humidity nor ecological catastrophe can dampen her ample enthusiasm.

At the bottom of the hill, Dobson veers off the trail and stops in a
shady clearing. This seems like a promising spot. She kicks away the
dead oak leaves and tosses a square frame made of PVC pipe onto the
damp earth. Then she unscrews a milk jug. It holds a pale yellow slurry
of mustard powder and water that’s completely benign—unless you’re a
worm.

Seconds after Dobson empties the contents inside the frame, the soil
wriggles to life.

“Holy smokes!” she says, as a dozen worms come squirming out of the
soil—their brown, wet skin burning with irritation. “Disgusting.” I
have to agree. There is something unnerving about their slithering,
serpentine style; instead of inching along like garden worms, they snap
their bodies like angry rattlesnakes. But the problem with these worms
isn’t their mode of locomotion. It’s the fact that they’re here at all.

Until about 10,000 years ago, a vast ice sheet covered the northern
third of the North American continent. Its belly rose over what is now
Hudson Bay, and its toes dangled down into Iowa and Ohio. Scientists
think it killed off the earthworms that may have inhabited the area
before the last glaciation. And worms—with their limited powers of
dispersal—weren’t able to recolonize on their own.

For someone like me, who grew up in the Midwest seeing earthworms
stranded on the sidewalk after every rain, this was a shocking
revelation. With the exception of a few native species that live in
rotting logs and around wetlands, there are not supposed to be any
earthworms east of the Great Plains and north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

But there are, thanks to humans. We’ve been moving worms for centuries,
in dirt used for ship ballast, in horticultural plants, in mulch. Worms
from South America now tunnel through the global tropics. And European
earthworms live on every continent except Antarctica. Dobson, a forest
ecologist at Yale University, calls it “global worming.”

But of all the earthworms people have shuttled around the world, the
ones Dobson shows me at Seton Falls have scientists most concerned.
Originally from Korea and Japan, they are known as jumping worms, snake
worms, or crazy worms. And they have the potential to remake the once
wormless forests of North America.

The perils of an earthworm invasion are hard to grasp if you’ve been
raised to believe that earthworms are good. “They seem so symbolic of a
healthy ecosystem,” Dobson says. For their stellar reputation, they can
thank none other than Charles Darwin. In addition to developing the
theory of evolution, Darwin studied earthworms for 40 years at his home
in England.

With characteristic curiosity and rigor, the naturalist conducted all
manner of earthworm experiments: He observed their reaction to the
sound of the bassoon (none) and to the vibrations of a C note played on
the piano (panic). He watched how they pulled leaves into their
burrows, and tested their problem-solving skills by offering them small
triangles of paper instead (most figured out how to drag them by a
corner). Darwin also measured how quickly worms covered up a large
paving stone in his garden with their castings. He estimated that they
could move at least 10 tons of soil per acre per year.

[47]Read: [48]A creationist sues the Grand Canyon for religious
discrimination

Dirty, slimy earthworms weren’t especially popular in Victorian
England. But in 1881, shortly before his death, Darwin compiled his
worm studies into a book called The Formation of Vegetable Mould
through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits, in which
he praised the humble critters. “It may be doubted whether there are
many other animals which have played so important a part in the history
of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures,” he rhapsodized.
The book became a best seller, giving worms’ dingy public image a
makeover in the process.

[49]Life Up Close

Traveling the world to see microbes, plants, and animals in oceans,
grasslands, forests, deserts, the icy poles—and wherever else they may be.
[50]Read more

Gardeners now rejoice to find earthworms in their soil, and you can
purchase a 1,000-pack of “Nature’s Wonder Workers” on Amazon for $45.
There’s even an entire canon of worm-centric children’s literature,
including Wiggling Worms at Work and Richard Scarry’s Best Lowly Worm
Book Ever! But Peter Groffman, a soil ecologist at the City University
of New York, says that while worms may do some good in your compost
bin, they don’t deserve all the credit for your bumper crops and lush
ornamentals. “The earthworms are in the soil because the soil is
healthy,” he says. “They are not necessarily doing anything for it.”

And though they can be helpful for breaking up compacted soils and
breaking down organic matter, worms can also cause trouble in
agricultural fields. Their burrows create channels that allow nutrients
and pesticides to leak from fields into nearby waterways, and carbon
dioxide and nitrous oxide to escape into the atmosphere. In fact, a
2013 review of recent research found that worms likely increase
greenhouse-gas emissions.

But Darwin wasn’t thinking about these things—and he certainly wasn’t
thinking about the consequences of introducing worms into ecosystems
that had evolved without them.

The mustard pour, which Dobson had done partly for my benefit and
partly just to check in on the worm population, is over a few minutes
after it begins. The worms—bothered but otherwise unscathed—have
disappeared back into the forest floor. So Dobson and I head back to
where we left her assistant, Mark, toiling among a jungle of knee-high
poison ivy and Johnny jumpseed.

He’s searching for the pink flags that Dobson left here last year to
mark a few dozen specimens of native plants. Her goal is to track them
as they grow and reproduce to see if they show any potential of
adapting to jumping worms. Mark, an undergraduate at the University of
Connecticut, is doing his best. But it’s his first day on the job, and
also, someone has deposited a filthy, yellowing mattress over much of
Dobson’s research plot.

“That’s the beauty of working in urban systems,” Dobson jokes.

By now, it’s after 11 a.m. and the heat has grown unbearable, so Dobson
suggests we decamp to a nearby McDonald’s. We pile into her silver
Subaru Impreza, where the dashboard thermometer reads 38 degrees
Celsius—100 degrees Fahrenheit. (Dobson and her car are both Canadian.)
There is no gauge for the humidity, but it’s stifling.
__________________________________________________________________

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__________________________________________________________________

Inside the restaurant, air conditioning and cold beverages revive our
spirits. We settle into a booth, and I ask Dobson about North America’s
first wave of earthworm invaders. Common species like Lumbricus
terrestris, better known as the night crawler, arrived hundreds of
years ago with European settlers, and have long been welcomed in
gardens and farmland. In the 1980s, however, researchers began to find
European worms in the forests of Minnesota and other northern states.
One hypothesis is that people spread them when they throw away extra
fishing bait next to lakes and streams.

The discovery alarmed scientists. In the absence of worms, North
American hardwood forests develop a thick blanket of duff—a
mille-feuille of slowly decomposing leaves deposited over the course of
years, if not decades. That layer creates a home for insects,
amphibians, birds, and native flowers. But when worms show up, they
devour the litter within the space of a few years. All the nutrients
that have been stored up over time are released in one giant burst, too
quickly for most plants to capture. And without cover, the invertebrate
population in the soil collapses.

Where millipedes and mites once proliferated, now there are only worms.
“If you were to think about the soil food web as the African savanna,
it’s like taking out all the animals and just putting in elephants—a
ton of elephants,” Dobson says.

With their food and shelter gone, salamanders suffer and nesting birds
find themselves dangerously exposed. Plants like trillium, lady’s
slipper, and Canada mayflower vanish, too. This may be because the
worms disrupt the networks of symbiotic fungus that many native plants
depend on, or because worms directly consume the plants’ seeds. Or that
native species, accustomed to spongy duff, are ill-prepared to root
into the hard soil left behind when the worms have finished eating. It
could be all of the above.

Perhaps most worryingly, early studies suggest that worms can sometimes
halt the regeneration of trees. Josef Görres, a soil scientist at the
University of Vermont, says he often struggles to find a single
seedling in invaded portions of New England’s famous maple forests. His
theory is that the worms take out all the understory plants, leaving
nothing for deer to chew on but the young trees. And that could spell
trouble for the region’s prized maple syrup industry. “In 100 years’
time, maybe it’s going to be Aunt Jemima,” he says. “That’s a real bad
horror story for people in Vermont.”

[55]Read: How to make a half-gallon of maple syrup in 20 easy steps

These sweeping powers are why earthworms are often called ecosystem
engineers. And Dobson and her colleagues fear that jumping worms pose
an even greater threat than their European predecessors. Jumping worms
appear to have many of the same effects, except that they grow larger
and exist in dense colonies, sometimes numbering more than a hundred
individuals per square meter of ground. And while European worms range
throughout the upper four to six feet of soil, jumping worms stick to
the top six inches or so, churning it relentlessly into a loose
sediment that Dobson likens to ground beef. (Others I talked to
compared it to coffee grounds.)

The disturbed soil erodes easily, dries out quickly, and generally
makes poor habitat for many plants. At McDonald’s, Mark pipes up to say
that he noticed patches of it during his basic training at Fort Knox
last year. While there, he cursed the lack of understory in which to
take cover during tactical exercises.

Dobson explains that the worms act like a funnel, winnowing away the
diversity of the forest. First, they take out the most sensitive native
plants, leaving only hardy species like poison ivy and Virginia
creeper. Then they prime the ground for invasives. Even more than their
European relatives, jumping worms seem to reshape the forest from the
ground up.

“Every single thing that they do is transformative,” Dobson says.

Until it moves, a jumping worm looks a lot like any other earthworm:
long and thin, with rosy brown skin divided into bellows-like segments.
Experts will tell you to look at the clitellum—the band that holds the
reproductive organs of worms, which are hermaphrodites. In European
worms, the smooth, pink clitellum is found closer to the middle of the
body. On jumping worms, it’s milky white and sits near the head.

There are many species of jumping worms. The first arrived in the
United States in California in the 1860s. Others have been in the
Southeast for more than a century—long enough to earn colloquial names
like the Alabama Jumper. (You can buy these online, too, but worm
experts advise against spreading them.)

The three species that Dobson and others worry most about are newer
arrivals, and likely hitchhiked on imported plants, where they caught
the attention of groundskeepers. “The gardeners were out there saying,
‘I know these are earthworms; they are supposed to be good. But I
swear, they are killing my plants,’” Dobson says.

An oft-repeated anecdote holds that jumping worms first appeared in
Washington, D.C., among the cherry trees in 1912. By the 1940s, they
were spotted at the Bronx Zoo, where one species was later raised to
feed the resident platypuses. They have been in a few other New York
parks for more than 50 years, which is why Dobson chose these forests
to study their long-term ecological effects. For some reason, however,
jumping worm populations have exploded in the last decade or so. And
the worms are spreading even faster than Dobson imagined—including
within city limits.

While in New York, I meet with Clara Pregitzer, a forester at the
nonprofit Natural Areas Conservancy, who takes me on a tour of Forest
Park in Queens. When I find her next to the statue of a somber soldier
at the Richmond Hill War Memorial, she’s wearing tortoiseshell glasses,
a loose white blouse, and dirty jeans cuffed above leather boots. We
stroll up the tree-lined avenue, then turn off onto a shady path. “This
is one of my favorite parks for showing off high-quality forest,”
Pregitzer says.

Indeed, it’s a beautiful spot. Hundred-year-old oaks stretch their
boughs across the wide trails and the understory is neither bare nor
overgrown. (Pregitzer says the park has good “sight lines.”) The gently
undulating landscape is a textbook example of the “knob and kettle”
terrain left behind by retreating glaciers.

Earlier, over email, Pregitzer had warned that we might not find any
jumping worms here. In 2013 and 2014, she led a survey of New York’s
green spaces, tallying up the trees and understory plants and noting
the distribution of jumping worms. She found heavy infestations in 12
percent of the plots she studied, though they may have been present in
close to a third. Less than 5 percent of the plots at Forest Park
showed signs of jumping worm activity.

But within ten minutes of walking, I spot the coffee-ground soil on the
edge of the trail. Pregitzer decides to do her own version of the
mustard pour: a dilute solution of dish soap. Within a few minutes, a
parade of jumping worms emerges from the ground.“Oh, nasty,” says
Pregitzer, scrunching up her nose.

We follow the worm soil away from the trail, 10 feet, 15 feet, 50 feet,
into a shallow depression. There, we don’t need the dish soap. Brushing
away the leaf litter reveals a dozen worms in an area the size of a
dinner plate. Pregitzer picks up a six-inch-long monster with a stick.
“Nasty,” she says again.

She is visibly unsettled by the discovery. “This is one of the best
parks, and now that we are digging in a little bit and really looking
for them, they’re everywhere,” she says, gazing around. “There have got
to be, like, millions.” We keep walking for another hour or so, and,
much to her dismay, find only one worm-free site—on a steep hill where
the topsoil has washed away.

That’s a big change from a few years ago, and when I report the news to
Annise Dobson, who is using Pregitzer’s survey data in her own work,
she immediately decides to revisit the original study sites. A week
after I get home, Dobson emails me to say that she’s finding worms
everywhere. “I'm floored and honestly reeling from the extent of it,”
she says. They are now in 64 percent of the plots across the city.
A footprint with worms in it Myriam Wares

It’s not entirely clear how the jumping worms have spread. Conventional
knowledge holds that they can’t cover much ground on their own—perhaps
30-odd feet in a year, although one researcher I talk to swears he’s
seen a single worm move that far in an afternoon. Their cocoons, which
are about the size of peppercorns, can be carried much farther in
water, and scientists have noticed that invasions often march down
hillsides and along waterways.

But experts suspect that the blame lies primarily with humans. It’s all
too easy to unwittingly transport worms and cocoons in plants, mulch,
and soil, in the treads of shoes and tires, or caked onto landscaping
equipment.

[56]Read: Is the insect apocalypse really upon us?

Perhaps we’ve been moving more earth in recent years, and carrying
worms with it. A few major nurseries could be spreading them by
accident. Or the worms may be benefiting from favorable conditions or
some clever adaptation to their new environment. Whatever the reason,
jumping worms have fanned out across the northern United States over
the past few decades and continue to expand their territory. They were
first identified in Rhode Island in 2015 and in Oregon in 2016, though
they may have arrived earlier in both places.

As of late 2017, there had only been one sighting of jumping worms in
Canada, but the country’s vast tracts of carbon-rich, worm-free boreal
forest are already under siege by their European cousins. And
scientists there know it’s only a matter of time before the jumping
worms follow.

Bernie Williams remembers when she discovered jumping worms in
Wisconsin. October 3, 2013, was “the day that ruined many of our
lives,” says Williams, a worm expert at the state Department of Natural
Resources.

She was leading a group of researchers and managers on a tour of the
University of Wisconsin arboretum. Scientists already knew European
worms had taken up residence there, and Williams led the visitors to a
heavily invaded spot. But as soon as she saw the soil, she knew
something was wrong. “These worms were everywhere,” she says.

Over the next three years, the jumping worms stormed across 25 acres of
forest in the arboretum, effectively eradicating their European rivals.
They have now been reported in 52 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, Williams
tells me, disproving predictions that the harsh winters would keep them
at bay.

Many Madison residents know and loathe the worms, which can decimate
flowers and vegetables. At a community garden near campus, I meet a man
sifting compost through a screen as a precaution. “That usually catches
’em,” he says.

Sometimes, under the right conditions, the worms can reach
“infestation” levels, and come pouring out of a house’s foundations
“like Medusa’s head,” Williams says. “If you like invertebrates, you
squeal with delight.” Homeowners, however, tend to be less thrilled,
and in bad years, Williams spends her days fielding calls from
disgruntled residents.

Dobson hears similar frustrations in heavily impacted parts of the East
Coast. People are seeing changes in their gardens, in their local
woods, even on their kids’ soccer fields (the worms can damage the
roots of turf grasses). She’s watched people break down in tears and
pick fights with their neighbors over who’s to blame for introducing
the worms. “A lot of my time is taken up trying to comfort very upset
people,” Dobson says.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much anyone can do once invasive earthworms
get established. This becomes clear one day as I watch Brad Herrick and
Marie Johnston crawl around for hours in Wisconsin’s mosquito-infested
woods, plucking jumping worms from inside a series of two-foot-wide
metal enclosures. Herrick and Johnston, both researchers at the UW
arboretum, want to test one of the few promising weapons against
jumping worms: a low-nitrogen fertilizer called Early Bird, commonly
used on golf courses. To assess its effectiveness, they’ve been
manually removing all the worms from each of 24 high-walled rings
before adding back a known number of victims. (When I ask Herrick what
they do with the evicted worms, he says, “We gently chuck them.”)

The problem is that the cocoons act like a seed bank. Mature worms lay
them in the fall before they die, and the cocoons hatch throughout the
spring and summer, providing a seemingly endless source of young worms.
“It’s like a two-headed monster,” Herrick says.

Herrick and Johnston each claim an enclosure and start sweeping through
the leaf litter. In his first, Herrick finds 37 jumping worms; Johnston
counts 52 in hers. Then they move on to the next. This is their sixth
removal attempt, and Herrick is baffled by the high number of holdouts.
“Maybe they are climbing in,” Johnston muses, only to look over and see
a worm crawling up the outside of a nearby enclosure. “Crap!”

Even if Early Bird is effective, Herrick says, it will only be useful
for small infestations in gardens or urban landscapes. Scientists are
wary of applying it to forests. Prescribed burning shows some promise,
but everyone agrees that by far the best solution to the worm problem
is to stop spreading them in the first place.

Johnston and Herrick recently published a study showing that heating
compost and soil to 104 degrees Fahrenheit effectively kills both worms
and cocoons. That’s something that mulch and compost companies could
do. The bigger challenge is educating the public, which Herrick has
made a personal mission.

The day I visit, he and Johnston give a talk to a few dozen teachers
who are visiting the arboretum for a training workshop. That same
night, he drives three hours across the Illinois border to speak with a
group of master gardeners. He tells them to buy only mulch and compost
that have been treated to kill stowaways, and to avoid city compost
made of leaves collected from sites all over town. He urges them to
inspect potted plants for jumping worms and to buy bare-root varieties
whenever possible. Some scientists go even further, advising local
garden clubs not to hold plant swaps at all.

[57]Read: When conservationists kill lots (and lots) of animals

Under its invasive-species rules, Wisconsin has officially banned the
transportation and sale of jumping worms, as has New York. But Williams
says the state focuses more on helping limit worm movement than on
punishing people who spread them, since it’s usually unintentional.

The day after our meeting, she heads up north to talk to a group of
loggers about the risks of invasive worms and what they can do to stop
them. She recommends using a broom to knock soil off trucks and tires.
She’s under no illusion that this will solve the problem, but “you’ll
slow them down,” she says.

In general, it’s hard to change people’s opinions about earthworms. “We
have this Eurocentric mind-set that whatever is good in Europe has got
to be good here,” Dobson says. “People don’t take it really seriously
unless they’re actually seeing the impacts on the ground.”

In a perverse way, the jumping worm has been something of a blessing:
Unlike European worms, they elicit an intense feeling of repulsion in
most people. “They only get more gross over time,” Dobson says.

“They are the stuff of nightmares,” says Justin Richardson, a soil
biogeochemist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who
studies heavy-metal accumulation in worms. Remembering his first
encounter with them, he says, “It was like Night of the Living Dead.”

Bernie Williams is the only person I talk to who has anything nice to
say about jumping worms. “They’re much faster. They’re aerodynamic,
almost. They’re smooth. They’re handsome,” she says. “I really think
they are an amazing animal.”

Williams’s enthusiasm for worms knows few bounds. She tells me that the
annelid phylum, to which earthworms belong, has been around for at
least 500 million years. It contains more than 7,000 species of worms,
which come in all different shapes and sizes, including one native to
eastern Washington State that reportedly grows up to three feet long.
And, as if that weren’t enough, earthworms have five hearts—or the worm
equivalent. (However, it’s a myth that cutting a worm in half makes
two; it usually just makes one dead worm.)

Williams understands the concerns about invasive worms’ effects on
forests, and she spends a lot of her time teaching people how to
prevent their spread. But she also takes a more pragmatic view. “We are
going to have to live with them,” she says.

It’s a sad truth about most biological invasions. If humans catch the
problem early on, or if the intruders are confined to an island, we can
sometimes eradicate an unwanted visitor. But more often than not, the
offending organism infiltrates the landscape long before we fully grasp
the threat. Think of chestnut blight, which toppled 4 billion trees in
the early 20th century, or the Burmese python, now a top predator in
Florida’s Everglades.

Given that earthworms won’t likely fell giant trees or swallow your
cat, I wonder if they will fit into the category of lesser-known
offenders, like house sparrows and starlings. Both were introduced in
the late 1800s from Europe to New York. The sparrow was brought over
for pest control and old-world nostalgia, the starling by a group of
Shakespeare enthusiasts intent on importing every species mentioned in
his writings.

The birds outcompete native songbirds for nest sites and hurt
agricultural yields by eating seeds, pooping on grains stored in silos,
and transmitting diseases. By one estimate, starlings cause $800
million in damage every year. But the birds have not set off alarms in
most ordinary citizens. They are just part of American life.

[58]Read: Eat an invasive species for dinner

Will worms be the same? There is no question that forests are changing
in fundamental ways as a result of the invasion. “Do they store less
carbon? Probably. Are they more susceptible to drought? Probably,”
Peter Groffman says. “Are they supporting a different suite of
biodiversity? Yeah, they are.” But the impacts are invisible to most of
us, and represent metamorphosis as much as destruction.

Perhaps it’s not a matter of whether worms are good or bad. Maybe such
projections of human values—from the Victorians to Darwin to today—are
what got us into this mess in the first place, Dobson says. “What I’ve
come to realize is that that’s not the right way to think about
anything in an ecosystem.”

On my last day in New York, Dobson picks me up and we battle our way
along the Gowanus Expressway toward Staten Island and more city parks.
With brick warehouses and shiny skyscrapers rising around us like
mutant trees, it’s tempting to dismiss New York’s parks as urban
anomalies with little bearing on the fate of the rest of the
continent’s forests. But Dobson pushes back against that idea.

For one thing, she says, the ecosystems aren’t that different; native
hardwoods dominate the overstories of both, and the understories of New
York’s parks often hold surprising troves of rare plants like true
Solomon’s seal. More importantly, the stresses urban forests
experience—including biological invasions, pollution, and human
disturbance—presage those that other North American forests will
encounter in the future. “What happens here is going to predict
potentially what happens beyond,” Dobson says.

Eventually, the traffic thins and we cross the Verrazzano-Narrows
Bridge, passing from a world of glass and concrete into one overrun by
lush vegetation. We head south and soon arrive at a quiet sweep of
forest called Wolfe’s Pond.

Dobson parks on an empty street and we take a few minutes to ready
ourselves. I follow her lead, tucking my pants into my socks to protect
against ticks, as she prepares three jugs of mustard slurry. Then we
set off into the woods, using the GPS on her phone to locate one of
Pregitzer’s plots.

We find the site next to a muddy wash, surrounded by dented beer cans
and faded plastic debris. The ground is solid poison ivy and Virginia
creeper, both mowed down to ankle height by deer. The soil looks like
the dregs in a French press. “Wow, this is so wormy,” Dobson says. She
throws down the PVC frame and pours out half of the mustard mixture.
Then she sets a 10-minute timer and starts counting. Within five
minutes, she’s at 24. She dumps out the rest of the bottle, and another
wave appears. “Oh, there’s 30,” she says. “31.”

Dobson suspects that this is a relatively new invasion, like the one I
saw at Forest Park. Worm infestations tend to peak and then decline.
Their numbers climb quickly when resources are abundant. Then, after
the worms eat themselves out of house and home, the population density
drops. “This is the top of the parabola,” Dobson guesses.

Next, we head to another plot, across the road. Upon setting foot in
the woods, we can tell it’s different. We retreat to the sidewalk and
clean the treads of our shoes with sticks to avoid transporting cocoons
into what appears to be a worm-free forest.

Dobson points out dainty Canada mayflower growing along the trail. She
pulls out a handful of duff and lights up when she sees the thin white
tendrils of hyphae—symbiotic fungi—weaving through the humus. “There
are so many beautiful things here!” she says.

We continue a few hundred yards up the trail to another of Pregitzer’s
plots. Dobson lays down the frame, carefully fitting it over a few
fragile plants. Then she pours. We hold our breath, waiting to see if
anything moves. After a minute, a jumping worm emerges, then another.
She counts four in all. For the first time, Dobson appears crestfallen.
This forest seems so healthy. She looks over her shoulder, back toward
the worm-infested spot across the road.

“This might very well look like that in a few years,” she says. While
it may not be good or bad, it will certainly be different.

[59]Julia Rosen is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon.
Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, High Country News,
National Geographic, Hakai and elsewhere.
Connect[60] Twitter

This article is part of our Life Up Close project, which is supported
by the HHMI Department of Science Education.

[61]

Life Up Close

Traveling the world to see microbes, plants, and animals in oceans,
grasslands, forests, deserts, the icy poles—and wherever else they may
be.
* [62]Start Here
* [63]Table of Contents

Life Up Close is a project of The Atlantic, supported by the HHMI
Department of Science Education.
Most Popular on The Atlantic
* Photo illustration: Weronika Gęsicka; Alamy
The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
David Brooks
The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the
past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to
figure out better ways to live together.
The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history:
Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday
around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins,
aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old
family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place
you’ve ever seen in your life,” says one, remembering his first day
in America. “There were lights everywhere … It was a celebration of
light! I thought they were for me.”
To hear more feature stories, [64]get the Audm iPhone app.
The oldsters start squabbling about whose memory is better. “It was
cold that day,” one says about some faraway memory. “What are you
talking about? It was May, late May,” says another. The young
children sit wide-eyed, absorbing family lore and trying to piece
together the plotline of the generations.
[65]Continue Reading
* Illustration: Mishko; Hanna Alandi / Getty
The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
McKay Coppins
How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will
shape the 2020 election
Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020.
One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I
picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face
obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump
and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to
follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with
names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my
cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of
private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an
application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.
To hear more feature stories, [66]get the Audm iPhone app.
The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a
multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’
understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings.
Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet,
portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign
corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore
little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread.
Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed
with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was
taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I
wanted to see it from the inside.
[67]Continue Reading
* Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan Ed Reinke / AP
This Is How Reaganism and Thatcherism End
Anne Applebaum
In a hotel ballroom in Rome, leaders of the nationalist right took
a grim view of Western liberal democracy—which Cold War
conservatives deeply believed in.
In an Italian hotel ballroom of spectacular opulence—on red velvet
chairs, beneath glittering crystal chandeliers and a stained-glass
ceiling—the conservative movement that once inspired people across
Europe, built bridges across the Iron Curtain and helped to win the
Cold War came, finally, to an end.
[68]Continue Reading
* An illustration of a spiking chart with people. Arsh Raziuddin /
The Atlantic
The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America
Annie Lowrey
In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded,
families were bled dry.
In the 2010s, the national unemployment rate dropped from a high of
[69]9.9 percent to its current rate of just 3.5 percent. The
economy expanded each and every year. Wages picked up for
high-income workers as soon as the Great Recession [70]ended, and
picked up for lower-income workers in the [71]second half of the
decade. Americans’ confidence in [72]the economy hit its highest
point since 2000, right before the dot-com bubble burst. The
headline economic numbers looked good, if not great.
But beyond the headline economic numbers, a multifarious and
strangely invisible economic crisis metastasized: Let’s call it the
Great Affordability Crisis. This crisis involved not just what
families earned but the other half of the ledger, too—how they
spent their earnings. In one of the best decades the American
economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords,
hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care
centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or
downright terrible.
[73]Continue Reading
* Mitt Romney Jacquelyn Martin / AP
In the Long Run, Romney Wins
Eliot A. Cohen
The Utah senator’s speech was the stuff of American myth.
It is a useful exercise to think about our current moment not from
where we are, or even where we will be in five years, but where we
will be in 50. Viewed from that perspective, the most important
thing about the impeachment of Donald Trump will probably be Mitt
Romney’s speech explaining his vote to convict the president of
abuse of power.
In the near term, that speech will do neither Romney nor his cause
any good. The armies of trolls and sneering louts will come after
him, their jeers all the louder because they emanate from a
terrified emptiness within. Shambling, tongueless, and invertebrate
politicians who deep down know better will resent Romney for having
the courage to say what they believed, but dared not utter.
[74]Continue Reading
* The Nuclear Family Wasn’t Built to Last
Vishakha Darbha
Catherine Spangler
David Brooks breaks down the enduring myth of the virtuous
all-American family.
[75]Watch Video

[76]More Popular Stories

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