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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants us to return to the golden age of air travel, when nobody got into a punching match for reclining a seat into someone else’s lap. He says this golden age starts with us, and he has a whole campaign prepared! I assume it will involve more humane accommodations for travelers—or less harrowing working conditions for the flight attendants charged with both crowd control and safety. Or modernizing air-traffic control to make it safer and more efficient.

Now to lower my tray table, take a sip from my tiny plastic cup dangerously overfilled with cranberry juice, and see what he has recommended. There’s a video with footage of air travel seemingly from the 1960s? He is in a suit? And he wants us to dress “with respect,” and “go back to an era when we didn’t wear pajamas to the airport”?

Sometimes I wish I did not know the difference between correlation and causation. I think I would be happier. I would certainly have a lot more suggestions for solving problems. And I could tell people, with a straight face, to wear suits to the airport to usher back in a golden age.

If somebody forced me to identify the problem with air travel today (this happened to lots of comics in the 1980s!), the dress code would be the last thing I would suggest. To recover the conviviality of a time when you had enough elbow room to eat a meal on board the plane, you need the elbow room. You do not need the elbow pads.

Simply putting on the garments of an era when sardines did not walk around the plane and mock your travel conditions (“Look at that loser!” “Packed like that and not even in a tasty, aromatic oil!”) is not enough. If anything, you will be more enraged than before because you are in a suit and you don’t understand what the change of outfit is supposed to accomplish, like my baby whenever I try to put him in a festive hat.

Even if you believe that clothes inspire civility, that is true only up to a point. Look at the 1950s, when everyone was in a suit. Was it really better? One etiquette guide for travelers from the 1950s and 1960s also warned against taking off your shoes, drinking, flirting with the flight attendants, and getting mad about delays. So maybe there wasn’t even a golden age of civility then! The only thing that was different was that you were wearing a suit while you harassed the flight attendant. And perhaps William Shatner was there to see a gremlin on the wing.

No, the age of suits was not the golden age of air civility! To find it, we must go back earlier still! Then you will see a trend: men in top hats, women in hoop skirts, and absolutely no fighting on airplanes at all. Indeed, the earlier you go, the fewer aviation-related incidents there are. And this was surely because of the quality of the attire available! The more old-fashioned the outfit, the less fighting on airplanes.

The absolutely best thing to wear to the airport is a toga. They are comfortable, and if you look at the annals of ancient Rome, you will notice zero airport fight-incidents. Julius Caesar did get stabbed by a bunch of senators once, but that was unrelated to air travel.

Alternatively, we could view this from a more practical angle. You know what kind of clothes will guarantee civility? A full suit of armor. Good luck to anyone who tries to recline onto that! Now all you need to do is get it through security.

Related: • The golden age of flying wasn’t all that golden. • Fear of flying is different now.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: • Welcome to the slopverse. • Trump’s war on military justice • The fear taking hold among Indiana Republicans

Today’s News • The White House is defending U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff after a leaked transcript revealed he advised a senior Kremlin aide on how Russian President Vladimir Putin could appeal to President Donald Trump while discussing a possible peace proposal for Russia and Ukraine. • A Georgia special prosecutor announced that he is dropping all criminal charges against Trump and his co-defendants in the 2020 election-interference case. • A Brazilian woman with family ties to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was arrested by ICE near Boston this month for overstaying a visa. Her attorney said that she is being detained in a Louisiana ICE facility. She has not been able to speak with her 11-year-old son, Leavitt’s nephew.

Evening Read

A War on Facts About Thanksgiving Dinner

By Daniel Engber

There’s a fairy tale about Thanksgiving that gets refuted every fall. Does eating turkey really make you fall asleep? When science writers check in with the experts, they always get the same response: No, no, no, and no. Also no and no.

These holiday debunkers tell you what the science says: Turkey meat is not a sedative. They tell you what the studies show: Drumsticks don’t produce fatigue. And then they take another step, however ill-advised: They lay out different reasons Thanksgiving dinner might be sleep inducing. Even as these stories bust the turkey-coma myth, they end up replacing it with other fables.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic • The family hug standoff • The DOJ’s cartels memo is legal quicksand. • The Court has an easy answer on the Fed. • The David Frum Show: My friend, Bill Buckley • People are underestimating America’s Groyper problem.

Culture Break

Read. A new history of rock makes the case for the long-overlooked drummer—and the great mystery of their instrument, James Parker writes.

Watch. Perfidia is the character who gives One Battle After Another (available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV) its urgency, Anna Holmes writes.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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