The Atlantic Daily: What Comes After Cancellation

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What happens after someone is canceled?

Cancel culture is a murky term. As my colleague Anne Applebaum argues, the mob justice it can sometimes refer to is real, but the phrase is too broad and has been unhelpfully politicized.

“Dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways,” Anne explains in a recent story.

Canceled or not, some people have lost jobs over failing to comply with social norms. What happens next? Some recent reporting offers insight.

• It gets quiet. “The phone stops ringing,” writes Anne, who spoke with more than a dozen people who were involved in recent scuffles. “People stop talking to you. You become toxic.”

• One woman formed a support group. Counterweight, its founder told our staff writer Olga Khazan, “offers moral support and help with ‘strategic negotiation’ with employers,” sometimes writing letters on workers’ behalf.

• Hear from the fired directly. For her new interview series, our reporter Emma Green spoke with people who had lost their job amid controversy, such as the evangelical insider who vouched for COVID-19 vaccines and the teacher who was let go after assigning the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The news in three sentences:

(1) Olaf Scholz, a progressive who ran a model campaign, led his party to victory in the German federal election. (2) The FBI reported a record year-over-year jump in homicides in 2020—and we don’t know why. (3) A jury found R. Kelly guilty of racketeering and sex-trafficking charges.

What else is happening this week:

Top U.S. military leaders are scheduled to testify before the Senate on the Afghanistan withdrawal (Tuesday); a court considers whether to remove Britney Spears’s father from her conservatorship (Wednesday); and Congress faces a budget-negotiation deadline to avoid a government shutdown (Thursday).

Today’s Atlantic-approved activity:

The new film The Eyes of Tammy Faye argues that the much-ridiculed ’70s televangelist was actually ahead of her time.

A break from the news:

Even Taco Bell is a tech company now.

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