Men will do a lot to avoid going to therapy, including crawling through rivers and digging their own graves. These are just a few activities available from a growing industry of alpha-male camps. Charles Bethea reports from the inside. Plus:

• Susan B. Glasser on Trump’s empty prime-time war address
• The team using Legos to promote the Iranian regime
• Broadway’s “Dog Day Afternoon” is dumbed down and frantic

Charles Bethea A staff writer based in Atlanta

One of Donald Trump’s “favorite authors” is a bearded Australian expat named Nick Adams. Trump recently selected him to be a “Special Presidential Envoy for American Tourism, Exceptionalism, and Values.” The two have some history: the President is credited with writing the foreword to Adams’s 2024 manual of sorts, “Alpha Kings,” in which he praises Adams for “fighting for the qualities that make alpha males so special.”

Adams’s book positions itself, however absurdly, as a primer on the topic of being an alpha, a concept that, propelled by Trump and the manosphere, has had something of a resurgence. According to Adams, being an alpha male means, among other things, marrying a woman who is both “hot” and “low maintenance,” and never apologizing. If you’re too much of a beta, and need more than an instruction manual, don’t worry: you can now attend a boot camp geared toward fixing your masculinity. For a piece in this week’s issue, I travelled to Virginia and California to see two man camps in action.

With names like Warrior Week, the Men of War Crucible, and Activate Your Alpha, these programs are often multiday events, frequently in wilderness settings, where men are subjected to gratuitous physical punishment (simulated drowning, gravedigging, hiking while blindfolded) and, in some cases, a bit of bro-coded therapy. The proceedings are sometimes troubling. At a program called Squire, which targets teen-agers, I watched a former marine warn the boys not to be “fruitcakes,” as he pushed them through a rusty-nail-covered obstacle course and into an ice bath. “That’s how you get the money, get the girl, get the fucking mansion and the car,” he exclaimed, after the boys had finished schlepping sledgehammers and kettlebells around a dirt patch with their dads. Adams, who did not answer my e-mails—an alpha move, no doubt—would probably have been proud.

Many of the adult men whom I met at a program called RISE (it stands for Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution), meanwhile, were lonely, anxious, depressed, and looking to, as one put it to me, “shed my skin.” I saw them collapse in tears, and heard them cuss and threaten to fight. I witnessed a few startling revelations, too—one involving erectile dysfunction—amid all the hardcore hose-spraying, mud-crawling, and rucksacking. As Richard Reeves and other scholars of modern masculinity have made clear, men are not doing well. The programs I visited underscored this fact. The solutions are complicated, but I left these man camps feeling certain about one thing: you’ve got to learn how to connect, console, and, yes, apologize.

The President fired Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, earlier today. She lasted less than fourteen months on the job, despite her fierce loyalty to Trump and her commitment to his broad agenda of political retribution. Bondi, however, had drawn the ire of many high-profile members of the MAGA movement.

When did things start to go wrong for Bondi?

“For years, much of the movement has been obsessed with the government’s investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier, child sex offender, and onetime friend of Trump’s. Once Trump returned to power, these followers were convinced, his Justice Department would reveal the truth of various conspiracy theories involving Epstein: among them that his death while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges was not suicide, and that he maintained a ‘client list’ of celebrities and politicians. But Bondi botched the matter from the start, a misstep that threatened to turn the President’s base against him.”

—Ruth Marcus, in her definitive profile of the former Attorney General

Last night, Trump delivered a prime-time address to the nation on the war in Iran that offered little news about a conflict that now seems likely to continue for at least the next few weeks. But, Susan B. Glasser writes, the President’s speech raised an existential question: Can everything be going according to plan if there is no plan? Read or listen to the story »

• Tascha Van Auken helped to oversee the operation of Zohran Mamdani’s election campaign. Now, as the commissioner of the Mayor’s new Office of Mass Engagement, what will she do inside City Hall?
• A.I.-generated propaganda against the war in Iran, done in the style of the Lego movies, is going viral online. Kyle Chayka tracked down the team making the videos.
• The new star-studded Broadway production of “Dog Day Afternoon,” Emily Nussbaum writes, “feels dumbed down and frantic, full of violent slapstick and musty sex jokes.”

The hosts of Critics at Large discuss the new HBO miniseries “DTF St. Louis,” a whodunnit set against the backdrop of suburban America. Depictions of the suburbs have long been a mirror for the nation’s discontents. What do they reveal today? Listen and follow »

• A show: Rachel Syme has a suggestion for how to fill the nineties New York nostalgia hole that “Love Story” has left behind.
• A book: The classic Watergate narrative “All the President’s Men,” by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, is full of the banality of bureaucracy, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney writes, but “it’s also an incredible political thriller.”
• A movie: Seeing the crocuses poke through is putting us in mind of Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” and scenes of lavender flowers and butterflies.