We set out to solve why a forest in the middle of Uruguay looked like that — and wound up discovering something much bigger. Deep in the geographic center of Uruguay, there’s a peculiar group of trees just a few kilometers down the road from the small town of San Gregorio de Polanco. From the ground, it looks like any other forest, with tall trees reaching deep as far as the eyes can see. But from above, the view is mind-boggling: Hundreds of trees are arranged in perfect concentric arcs, all spiraling toward the center. Together, they look remarkably like a human fingerprint. When we first saw this forest, thanks to a Reddit post, we were fascinated. Why had they been arranged in this shape? Who planted them there? And why — when you zoom out on satellite view — was the entire country of Uruguay covered in similar-looking forests? To answer that question, we went straight to the source: interviewing locals, experts, and people whose lives have been shaped by a transformed landscape and economy.

Photo Illustration by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Was this book the reason TikTok is getting banned in the US? No, but ads saying so sold a lot of copies. If you’ve spent enough time scrolling through TikTok, you might have seen a video from an account like @tybuggyreviews, a handle with half a million followers that exclusively posts videos selling products through the TikTok Shop. The creator, whose verified Instagram account identifies him as Tarik Garrett, used the @tybuggyreviews account to pitch viewers on supplements, water flossers, earbuds, workout machines, bible study guides, probiotics for women to help “that smell down there,” watch bands, inspirational hoodies, inspirational T-shirts, face massagers, foot massagers, rhinestone necklaces, oil pulling kits, and colon cleanses. In the TikTok Shop, creators earn a commission for each sale linked to their account. Garrett’s product videos got tens of thousands of views. A few even topped a million views. But nothing from his account took off quite like his sales pitch for an obscure 2019 publication called The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies. “Now I see why they’re trying to remove TikTok. This book right here? This book of herbal remedies? They do not want us to see this book,” Garrett said at the beginning of one Shop video, referring to a new US law that requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company to either sell the app or face a ban. TikTok is challenging the law in court, arguing that lawmakers citing national security concerns as a reason to pass the bill did not adequately argue why those concerns should supersede the First Amendment. The law, to be clear, does not cite the Lost Book of Herbal Remedies’s availability on the TikTok Shop as a reason for banning the platform. Garrett posted his pitch for the book on April 15. As of May 7, the video had more than 16 million views. Garrett opened the book and showed pages of its recommendations, urging users to take screenshots (and purchase a copy of their own) before it’s too late. The camera lingered on a list of plants that, the book claimed, were treatments for cancer, drug addiction, heart attacks, and herpes. As of Wednesday, the listing for The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies that Garrett linked to has more than 60,000 sales on the TikTok Shop. To put that number in perspective, appearing on a bestseller list generally requires 5,000–10,000 sales in a week. And that interest isn’t staying exclusively on TikTok. Google search interest in the book’s title spiked on the same day Garrett posted his video. The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies was, as of Wednesday, May 8, ranked 10 on Amazon’s bestseller list for books, and has appeared toward the top of Amazon’s bestseller rankings for the past three weeks. I sent a handful of Garrett’s videos advertising the book, along with about a half dozen additional widely viewed videos from other creators promoting The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies, to TikTok for comment. A spokesperson for TikTok said that videos linking to Shop products must abide by both the community guidelines, which ban medical misinformation, and Shop policies, which do not allow misleading content. If a video violates only the Shop policies, they said, they’ll simply remove the link to the Shop but keep the content up. If it violates community guidelines, the video comes down. The violations were enough for TikTok to remove his product review account. Garrett did not respond to a series of emailed questions. How e-commerce took over TikTok TikTok has long been good at guessing what its users might want to see, but less good at monetizing that trick. When the platform launched its Shop feature in the United States last fall, the For You page shifted, pushing video after video like those made by @tybuggyreviews in the hope that its users will start buying the products that go viral on TikTok directly from their store. The result became a For You page with constant interruptions from random product pitches. Right now, for instance, my For You page shows me a bunch of creators dancing to a German song about rhubarb, a bunch of pet birds behaving poorly, chaotic nonbinary people, and lots of ads from alternative wellness creators trying to sell me oils, mushrooms, and books. The Shop ads I see, like much of the content pushed to me on TikTok, are personalized, though my TikTok Shop recommendations are heavily influenced by my reporting on stories like this one. Your results may differ. And yet, it is clear that TikTok has catapulted the Remedies book into relevance beyond a niche audience. The company earns money off of the explosion of sales on the shop, some of which come from creators who are explicitly promoting unproven cancer “cures” and conspiracy theories about the platform. Like the Shadow Work Journal, a workbook that went super viral on TikTok Shop several months ago as a mental health tool — despite its dubious effectiveness — The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies is part of a swell of wellness creators, brands, and products that have found success reaching new audiences on TikTok Shop. Shop videos have become a sort of “loophole” for health misinformation on TikTok, said Evan Thornburg, a bioethicist who posts on TikTok as @gaygtownbae and studies mis/disinformation and public health. Creators, and those with something to sell, know that Shop videos will get privileged on For You pages. Some creators may use those videos to promote dangerous health claims. In other cases, Thornburg noted, “the creator promoting the material isn’t necessarily spouting off disinformation, but the material that they’re convincing people to purchase is.” A recipe for misinformation The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies appears to be a case of both: The book contains misleading information, and creators are circulating misleading health claims in order to sell books. A video with nearly 1 million views promoting the book’s TikTok Shop listing is basically a series of ominous, AI-generated images with an AI voiceover. The video claims that the book contains secrets previously locked away in an ancient book located in the “Vatican library,” and that The Lost Book of Herbal Medicine was previously only available on the “dark web” before surfacing on TikTok. (Not true: The book is for sale on Amazon, the author’s website, and appears to be available through some academic and public library systems.) Another Shop video with more than 1 million views is captioned, “Cure for over 550 diseases, even cancer.” I scanned through a copy of The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies this week. The 300-page book contains a disclaimer noting that it’s intended to “provide information about natural medicine, cures, and remedies that people have used in the past,” that it is not medical advice, and that some of the “remedies and cures found within do not comply with FDA guidelines.” It’s split into two parts: an alphabetical listing of ailments and conditions alongside the plants that the authors believe can cure or treat them, and an alphabetical list of plants, sorted by region, with instructions on how to prepare them. The list of ailments the book includes proposed treatments for cancer, several STDs, mental health disorders, and digestive issues, among many other things. A few stand out: The book lists cures for smallpox, strep, and staph infections. There’s an emergency medicine section that includes plant remedies for serious medical conditions like internal bleeding and poisoning. Flip to the entries for the plants and you’ll find lists of claims referring to research that is not cited. An entry promoting Ashwagandha’s “anti tumor effects” and ability to “kill ... cancerous cells” refers to “research,” but does not note that, while there is some indication that Ashwagandha can slow the growth of cancer cells, these studies were conducted on rodents and have yet to be replicated on humans. Nicole Apelian, one of the book’s authors, did not reply to an emailed request for comment. While active on TikTok, it’s not her main social media presence. Her TikTok bio encourages her 17,000 followers there to check her out on Instagram, where she has 100,000 followers. Apelain also runs Nicole’s Apothecary, an herbal shop mentioned in the book that sells some of the tinctures she recommends, sells memberships to an online “Academy” for fans of her book, and advertises her paid appearances and workshops. The endless whack-a-mole As a journalist, there’s a pattern that becomes evident when writing about health misinformation on social media: something gets views, you assess the real or potential harm and try to understand its context, you contact the company to ask about the harmful thing. Maybe the video or post or group is taken down, maybe it’s not. The company gives you a statement, refers you to their policies on misinformation, and then you publish the article. This happens over and over and over and over because writing about misleading health information is a game of whack-a-mole that feels harder and harder to win. Thornburg, the bioethicist, noted a couple reasons why I can’t climb out of this purgatory. First, meaningful moderation of a platform like TikTok is somewhat implausible. Social media companies are “never going to prioritize the amount of labor that would need to consistently be put into misinformation management,” they said. Most sites rely on a combination of human moderators and AI, and it’s difficult to create automated moderation tools that don’t also censor allowed content. For example: health misinformation targeting minority communities often taps into legitimate distrust of medical professionals and institutions that have roots in recent history. An AI tool designed to moderate keywords associated with this sort of targeted misinformation might also sweep up criticism of health care systems in general. And second, the creators who profit off health misinformation are really good at figuring out what they can say where, and what Thornburg calls “life boating” their audiences from one platform to another as needed. “You will have people who will drive interest in something through TikTok because the virality and the algorithm are aggressive,” Thornburg said. Then, their profile will link out to their Instagram or Linktree or YouTube channel. Health misinformation on social media is a million cross-pollinating moving targets. TikTok Shop is a hot spot right now. Later, it might be something else on another platform. Chasing this content from platform to platform, harm to harm, viral video to viral video, is exhausting. I am exhausted. At the end of our interview, Thornburg shared the question that drives a lot of their work in this space, “Who do we consider accountable for these things that are harmful and regulate them or hold them to certain standards?” Often, it’s not really the person behind the individual piece of content driving the incentives for making it. As a result of my reporting, Garrett’s account was taken down, along with a few other popular videos advertising a book that has already sold tens of thousands of copies. As long as the incentives remain, it won’t be long until the next product promising a miracle starts polluting my For You page.

Franco Zacha for Vox Because of one law, the internet has no legal duty of care when it comes to hate speech. Just take a look at what happened in Myanmar. Just after the clock struck midnight, a man entered a nightclub in Istanbul, where hundreds of revelers welcomed the first day of 2017. He then swiftly shot and killed 39 people and injured 69 others — all on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Among those killed was Jordanian citizen Nawras Alassaf. In response, his family filed a civil suit later that year against Facebook, Twitter, and Google, which owns YouTube. They believed that these tech companies knowingly allowed ISIS and its supporters to use each platform’s “recommendation” algorithms for recruiting, fundraising, and spreading propaganda, normalizing radicalization and attacks like the one that took their son’s life. Their case, Twitter v. Taamneh, argued that tech companies profit from algorithms that selectively surface content based on each user’s personal data. While these algorithms neatly package recommendations in newsfeeds and promoted posts, continuously serving hyper-specific entertainment for many, the family’s lawyers argued that bad-faith actors have gamed these systems to further extremist campaigns. Noting Twitter’s demonstrated history of online radicalization, the suit anchored on this question: If social media platforms are being used to promote terrorist content, does their failure to intervene constitute aiding and abetting? The answer, decided unanimously by the Supreme Court last year, was no. The Court insisted that without ample evidence that these tech companies offered explicit special treatment to the terrorist organization, failure to remove harmful content could not constitute “substantial assistance.” A similar case in the same Supreme Court term, Gonzalez v. Google, detailing a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris, shared the same decision as Twitter v. Taamneh. Both decisions hinged on 26 words, stemming from a nearly three-decades-old law: “[N]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” ​​Known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law fundamentally encoded the regulation — or lack of it — of speech on the internet. According to the logic of Section 230, which dates back to 1996, the internet is supposed to act something like a bookstore. A bookstore owner isn’t responsible for the content of the books they sell. The authors are. It means that while online platforms are free to moderate content as they see fit — just as a bookstore owner can choose whether or not to sell certain books — they are not legally responsible for what users post. Such legal theory made sense back in 1996, when fewer than 10 million Americans were regularly using the internet and online speech had very little reach, be it a forum post or a direct message on AOL. That’s simply not the case today, when more than 5 billion people are online globally and anything on the internet can be surfaced to people who weren’t the intended audience, warped, and presented without context. Targeted advertisements dominate most feeds, “For you” pages tailor content, and a handful of platforms control the competition. Naturally, silos and echo chambers emerged. But when a thirst for personalization exacerbates existing social tensions, it can amplify potential harm. It’s no surprise that the US, where social media platforms have intensified partisan animosity, has experienced one of the largest rising political polarization levels in a developed democracy over the past four decades. And given how most platforms are based in the US and prioritize English speakers, moderation for other languages tends to be neglected, especially in smaller markets, which can make the situation even worse outside the US. Investments follow competition. Without it, ignorance and negligence find space to thrive. Such myopic perspectives end up leaving hate speech and disinformation undetected in most parts of the world. When translation algorithms fail, explicitly hateful speech slips through the cracks, not to mention more indirect and context-dependent forms of inciting content. Recommendation algorithms then surface such content to users with the highest likelihood of engagement, ultimately fueling further polarization of existing tensions. Speech is not the crux of the issue; where and how it appears is. A post may not directly call for the death of minorities, but its appearance in online groups sharing similar sentiments might insinuate that, if not help identify people who might be interested in enacting such violence. Insular social media communities have played a sizable role in targeted attacks, civil unrest, and ethnic cleansing over the past decade, from the deadly riots that erupted from anti-Muslim online content in Sri Lanka to the targeted killings publicized online in Ethiopia’s Tigray War. Of course, the US Supreme Court doesn’t have jurisdiction over what a person in another country posts. But what it has effectively accomplished through Section 230 is a precedent of global immunity for social media companies that, unlike the Court, do act globally. Platforms can’t be held responsible for human rights abuses, even if their algorithms seem to play a role in such atrocities. One notable instance would be Meta’s alleged role in the 2017 Rohingya genocide, when Facebook’s recommendation algorithms and targeted advertising amplified hateful narratives in Myanmar, playing what the UN later described as a “determining role” in fueling ethnic strife that instigated mass violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. While the company has since taken steps to improve the enforcement of its community standards, it continues to escape liability for such disasters under Section 230 protection. One thing is clear: To see regulation only as an issue of speech or content moderation would mean disregarding any and all technological developments of the past two decades. Considering the past and ongoing social media-fueled atrocities, it is reasonable to assume that companies know their practices are harmful. The question initially posed by Twitter v. Taamneh then becomes a two-parter: If companies are aware of how their platforms cause harm, where should we draw the line on immunity? Myanmar’s walled garden and the many lives of online speech The rapid adoption of Facebook when it entered Myanmar in the 2010s offers a poignant example of the pitfalls of unbridled connectivity. Until fairly recently, Myanmar was one of the least digitally connected states on the planet. Its telecommunications market was largely state-owned, where government censorship and propaganda were prevalent. But in 2011, the deregulation of telecommunications made phones and internet access much more accessible, and Facebook found instant popularity. “People were using Facebook because it was well-suited to their needs,” anthropologist Matt Schissler said. By 2013, Facebook was Myanmar’s de facto internet, Schissler added. In 2016, the Free Basics program, an app that provided “free” internet access via a Facebook-centric version of the internet, was launched. Myanmar is a military-ruled, Buddhist-majority state with a demonstrated history of human rights abuses — and in particular, a record of discrimination against Muslim populations since at least 1948, when Myanmar, then called Burma, gained independence. As a result, the Rohingya — the largest Muslim population in the country — have long been a target of persecution by the Myanmar government. In the process of connecting millions of people in just a few years, anthropologists and human rights experts say Facebook inadvertently helped exacerbate growing tensions against the Rohingya. It took very little time for hateful posts — often featuring explicit death threats — to proliferate. Then came the Rohingya genocide that began in 2017 — an ongoing series of military-sanctioned persecutions against the Rohingya that have resulted in over 25,000 deaths and an exodus of over 700,000 refugees. Anti-Rohingya posts on Facebook were gaining traction, and at the same time, reports from the Rohingyas of rape, killings, and arson by security forces grew. Myanmar’s military and Buddhist extremist groups like the MaBaTha were among the many anti-Muslim groups posting false rape accusations and calling the Rohingya minority “dogs,” among other dehumanizing messages. In a 2022 report, Amnesty International accused Facebook’s newsfeed ranking algorithms of acting to significantly amplify hateful narratives, actively surfacing “some of the most egregious posts advocating violence, discrimination, and genocide against the Rohingya.” The Amnesty International report heavily referenced findings from the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, outlining how Facebook’s features, along with the company’s excessive data-mining practices, not only enabled bad-faith actors to target select groups but also created financial incentives for anti-Rohingya clickbait. “Facebook’s signature features played a central role in the creation of an environment of violence,” said Pat de Brún, the report’s author and the head of big tech accountability and deputy director at Amnesty International. “From the Facebook Files leaked by Frances Haugen, we found that Facebook played a far more active and substantial role in facilitating and contributing to the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya.” Facebook, hosting nearly 15 million active users in Myanmar at the time, also operated with a malfunctioning translation algorithm and only four Burmese-speaking content moderators — a disastrous combination. Drowning in the sheer quantity of posts, moderators more often than not failed to detect or remove the majority of the explicitly anti-Rohingya disinformation and hate speech on its platform. In one case, a post in Burmese that read: “Kill all the kalars that you see in Myanmar; none of them should be left alive,” was translated to “I shouldn’t have a rainbow in Myanmar,” by Facebook’s English translation algorithm. (“Kalar’’ is a commonly used slur in Myanmar for people with darker skin, including Muslims like the Rohingya.) If a moderator who encountered such a post wasn’t one of the company’s four Burmese speakers, a post that’s equally if not more inflammatory would go undetected, freely circulating. Facebook’s reported failure to detect hate speech was only one small part of the platform’s role in the Rohingya genocide, according to the report. Facebook’s recommendation algorithms acted to ensure that whatever slipped through the cracks in moderation found an audience. According to Amnesty International’s investigation, Facebook reportedly surfaced hateful content to insulated online communities seeking affirmations for their hateful positions — all in the service of engagement. Between Facebook’s market entry and the mass atrocities of 2017, the UN’s investigation found that some of the most followed users on the platform in Myanmar were military generals posting anti-Rohingya content. Hate speech was not the only type of speech that engagement-optimizing algorithms amplified. “There’s hate speech, but there’s also fear speech,” said David Simon, director of the genocide studies program at Yale University. Forcing formerly neutral actors to take sides is a common tactic in genocidal campaigns, Simon said. Core to the Burmese military’s information operations was “targeting non-Rohingya Burmese who had relationships with Rohingya people,” Simon said. In doing so, militant groups framed violence against the Rohingya as acts of nationalism — and, consequently, inaction as treason. Reuters’ 2018 investigation reported that individuals who resisted campaigns of hate were threatened and publicly targeted as traitors. By forcing affiliations, the Burmese military was able to normalize violence against the Rohingya. “It’s not a matter of making everyone a perpetrator,” Simon told Vox. “It’s making sure bystanders stay bystanders.” The context-dependent nature of fear speech manifested most notably in private channels, including direct texting and Facebook Messenger groups. In an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, six Myanmar civil society organizations reported a series of chain messages on Facebook’s messaging platform that were sent to falsely warn Buddhist communities of “jihad” attacks, while simultaneously notifying Muslim groups about anti-Muslim protests. While hate speech, considered in isolation, explicitly violates Facebook’s community guidelines, fear speech, taken out of context, often does not. “Fear speech would not get picked up by automatic detection systems,” Simon said. Nor can Meta claim it had no advance notice of what might unfold in Myanmar. Prior to the 2017 military-sanctioned attacks in northern Rakhine state, Meta reportedly received multiple direct warnings from activists and experts flagging ongoing campaigns of hate and cautioning of an emergent mass atrocity in Myanmar. These warnings were made as early as 2012 and persisted until 2017, taking shape in meetings with Meta representatives and conferences with activists and academics at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has published several reports in the years since about current policies and updates in Myanmar, including that it significantly increased investments there to help with moderation, in addition to banning the military (Tatmadaw) and other military-controlled entities from Facebook and Instagram. The internet is nothing like a bookstore The Rohingya are not recognized as an official ethnic group and have been denied citizenship since 1982. A majority of stateless Rohingya refugees (98 percent) live in Bangladesh and Malaysia. Being a population with little to no legal protection, the Rohingya have very few pathways for reparations under Myanmar law. On the international stage, issues of jurisdiction have also complicated Meta’s liability. Not only is Myanmar not a signatory of the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) to address acts of genocide, among other war crimes and crimes against humanity, the ICC is not designed to try corporations. Ultimately, the closest anyone can get to corporate accountability is in the US, where most of these platforms are based but are effectively protected under Section 230. Section 230 was written for an internet that did not have recommendation algorithms or targeting capabilities, and yet, many platform regulation cases today cite Section 230 as their primary defense. The bill grounds itself in the analogy of a bookkeeper and a bookstore, which is now a far cry from the current state of our internet. In the landmark First Amendment case Smith v. California, which involved a man convicted of violating a Los Angeles ordinance against possessing obscene books at a bookstore, the Supreme Court ruled in 1959 that expecting a bookstore owner to be thoroughly knowledgeable about all the contents of their inventory would be unreasonable. The court also ruled that making bookstore owners liable for the material they sell would drive precautionary censorship that ultimately limits the public’s access to books. The internet in 1996, much like a bookstore, had a diverse abundance of content, and then-Reps. Chris Cox and Ron Wyden, of California and Oregon respectively, saw a meaningful parallel. They decided to take the Court’s bookstore analogy one step further when they framed Section 230: Not only should online platforms have free rein to moderate, but pitting websites with better, “safer” curations against each other would also create monetary incentives for moderation. Today, the concentration of users on a handful of social media platforms shows that real competition is long gone. Social media companies, without such competition, lose incentive to maintain safe environments for site visitors. Instead, they’re motivated to monetize attention and keep users on the platform for as long as possible, whether via invasive ad targeting or personalizing recommended information. These developments have complicated the original analogy. If entering a platform like Facebook were akin to entering a bookstore, that bookstore would only have a personalized display shelf available, stocked with selections based on personal reading histories. Today, the bounds of Section 230 are painfully clear, yet that law still effectively bars activist groups, victims, and even countries from trying to hold Meta accountable for its role in various human rights abuses. Section 230 has prevented the landscape of platform regulation from expanding beyond a neverending debate on free speech. It continues to treat social media companies as neutral distributors of information, failing to account for the multifaceted threats of data-driven targeted advertising, engagement-based newsfeed rankings, and other threatening emergent features. Although platforms do voluntarily enforce independently authored community guidelines, legally speaking, there is little to no theory of harm for social media platforms and thus no duty of care framework. In the same way landlords are responsible for providing lead-free water for their tenants, social media platforms should have the legal duty to protect their users from the weaponization of their platforms, alongside disinformation and harmful content — or in the case of Myanmar, military-driven information operations and amplified narratives of hate. Social media companies should be legally obligated to conduct due diligence and institute safeguards — beyond effective content moderation algorithms — before operating anywhere, akin to car manufacturers installing and testing road safety features before putting a car on the market. “It’s not that companies like Facebook intentionally want to cause harm,” Schissler said. “It’s just that they’re negligent.” The way forward What needs to change is both our awareness of how social media companies work and the law’s understanding of how platforms cause harm. “Human rights due diligence as it is currently practiced focuses narrowly on discrete harms,” said André Dao, a postdoctoral research fellow studying global corporations and international law at Melbourne Law School. He said internationally recognized frameworks designed to prevent and remedy human rights abuses committed in business operations only address direct harms and overlook indirect but equally dire threats. In a Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) report that Meta commissioned in 2018 about its operations in Myanmar, BSR — a corporate consultancy — narrowly attributed human rights abuses to Meta’s limited control over bad actors and Myanmar’s allegedly low rate of digital literacy. The report recommended better content moderation systems, neglecting a core catalyst of the genocide: Facebook’s recommendation algorithms. Giving users more agency, as Brún notes in the Amnesty report, is also critical in minimizing the effects of personalized echo chambers. He advocates for more stringent data privacy practices, proposing a model where users can choose whether to let companies collect their data and whether the collected data is fed into a recommendation algorithm that curates their newsfeeds. To Brún, the bottom line is effective government regulation: “We cannot leave companies to their own devices. There needs to be oversight on how these platforms work.” Between fueling Russia’s propaganda campaigns and amplifying extremist narratives in the Israel-Hamas war, the current lack of social media regulation rewards harmful and exploitative business practices. It leaves victims no clear paths for accountability or remediation. Since the Rohingya genocide began in 2017, much of the internet has changed: Hyperrealistic deepfakes proliferate, and the internet has started sharing much of its real estate with content generated by artificial intelligence. Technology is developing in ways that make verifying information more difficult, even as social media companies are doubling down on the same engagement-maximizing algorithms and targeting mechanisms that played a role in the genocide in Myanmar. Then, of course, there’s the concern about censorship. As Vox has previously reported in the past, changes to Section 230 might engender an overcorrection: the censorship of millions of social media users who aren’t engaging in hate speech. “The likelihood that nine lawyers in black robes, none of whom have any particular expertise on tech policy, will find the solution to this vexing problem in vague statutes that were not written with the modern-day internet in mind is small, to say the least,” wrote Vox’s Ian Millhiser. But to an optimistic few, programmable solutions that address the pitfalls of recommendation algorithms can make up for the shortfalls of legal solutions. “If social media companies can design technology to detect copyright infringement, they can invest in content moderation,” said Simon, referencing his research for Yale’s program on mass atrocities in the digital era. He said these new technologies shouldn’t be limited to removing hate speech, but should also be used in detecting potentially harmful social trends and narratives. ExTrac, an intelligence organization using AI to detect and map emerging risks online, and Jigsaw, a Google incubator specialized in countering online violent extremism, are among the many initiatives exploring programmable solutions to limit algorithmic polarization. “Tech isn’t our savior, law isn’t our savior, we’re probably not our own saviors either,” Simon said. “But some combination of all three is required to inch toward a healthier and safer internet.”

Mexico City is being threatened by a water crisis after the main reservoirs remain under 40 percent of their full capacity due to low rainfall, geography, and lack of infrastructure. | Hector Vivas/Getty Images Mexico City is staring down a water crisis. It won’t be the last city to do so. Mexico City is parched. After abysmally low amounts of rainfall over the last few years, the reservoirs of the Cutzamala water system that supplies over 20 percent of the Mexican capital’s 22 million residents’ usable water are running out. “If it doesn’t start raining soon, as it is supposed to, these [reservoirs] will run out of water by the end of June,” Oscar Ocampo, a public policy researcher on the environment, water, and energy, told my colleagues over on the Today, Explained podcast. Already, some households receive unusably contaminated water; at times, others receive none at all. It’s stoking tensions over obvious inequities: Who gets water and who doesn’t? The crisis is also leading Mexico City to siphon more from the underground aquifers on which the city sits, a decision that’s not just unsustainable without replenishment but also causes the ground to sink — at a rate of almost five inches each year, Ocampo said. While many factors that led to this moment might be specific to Mexico City, or CDMX (including the Spanish colonists’ decision hundreds of years ago to drain the lake on which the city originally sat), or this moment in time (see: El Niño exacerbating droughts), the bigger issue is not. Bogotá, Colombia, is rationing water amid a drought that has pushed reservoirs to “historically low” levels. And you might remember Cape Town staring down its own Day Zero crisis in 2018. A few years earlier, Sao Paulo, Brazil confronted a similar situation. This all raises big questions. Is this the fault of climate change? Rapid or unsustainable development? Other human errors? Try all of the above. “There is an element of climate change that’s contributing to these conditions that we find ourselves in, but there’s also a very strong human-built environment element — a governance element, a politics element, and a mismanagement element of both the natural and the human environment,” Victoria Beard, an expert in international development planning and urbanization at Cornell University, told me. So … what do we do? Solutions, near term The most obvious: Use less water. “Typical US cities — without a lot of lawns — it’s about 100 gallons per day of water use,” Howard Neukrug, who directs UPenn’s Water Center, told me. “In the best cities in the world, they are down to about 25 gallons of water use per capita per day. It’s a pretty big difference.” And in “Day Zero” situations, that can make a difference. During Cape Town’s crisis, “they had a lot of consumer awareness ... ‘Day Zero’ itself is a campaign to draw attention to this issue so that people can understand what’s happening,” Samantha Kuzma at the World Resources Institute told my podcast colleagues. “People were changing the way they were using water, they were conserving it more. And that did help create a longer runway until Day Zero — but ultimately it is the rain that helped alleviate that crisis.” What needs to happen is conservation — or, really, resource management — at a much more systemic level. One of the most important steps, experts said, is better wastewater recycling — making it more of a “circular economy,” Neukrug said. “In the past, the water was really cheap,” he told me. So industries would “just use it once through and then put it out to the sewer.” “But now they not only have to pay for their water, they have to pay for their stormwater runoff and pay for the wastewater. [They’re] figuring out how to continuously loop this water.” Another clearly actionable idea: Fix leaky pipes. “A lot of our water is lost along the way with leaky systems, like leaky pipes that’s lost between when it leaves the treatment plant and when it arrives in your faucet,” Beard said. In Mexico City, Ocampo said some 40 percent of water is lost. But it’s a problem all around the world, including the US. And then there’s the need to rethink our relationship with not just the water system itself, but urban planning more broadly. We need to “do a better job of protecting natural environments that allow our aquifers and our groundwater to recharge,” Beard said, and within our cities, a better job building them “out of materials that allow our groundwater to recharge. We don’t have to smother every inch of our city with these impervious surfaces.” There are places that do all this well: Singapore, for example, relies on Malaysia to import most of its fresh water, has developed phenomenal wastewater recycling systems, embraces its wetlands, and fights to not lose water at any step. Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto via Getty Images When water is cut off or intermittent, it can become contaminated. Residents of the Benito Juarez district in Mexico City, seen here on April 9, 2024, were protesting a gasoline-like smell in the water in their homes. This isn’t going away In a study of 15 cities in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, Beard and a colleague found that in 12 of them, households were connected to city water infrastructure, but it didn’t work 24/7. “One thing that people don’t realize, for many, many urban people around the world, Day Zero is every day,” she said. We’re not going to become less urban. And climate change is going to keep exacerbating this. Higher temperatures drive higher water use — and not always in the ways we think. The agricultural industry uses the vast majority of the world’s water, and when temperatures skyrocket, it requires more. In cities, Neukrug pointed out, the “biggest users of water is electricity generation — and the biggest user of electricity [in turn] is water systems and the pumps ... and when it’s drying hot, you’ve got bigger energy demands” and water demands, feeding an escalating cycle. These concerns are most pressing in developing countries without the infrastructure or the sunny-but-water-strapped locales people can’t seem to stop moving to (looking at you, recent Arizona transplants). But it isn’t something anyone can fully ignore: Even the famously rainy Pacific Northwest faced hydropower challenges last year amid a drought. In short: We need to stop taking water for granted and manage it better. There are debates about how to best do so — do you treat water like a commodity and bring in the private sector, do you treat it like a public good and re-municipalize the service from top to bottom — but all of them require political will and money. “When I started working on development issues in urban areas, we didn’t have universal access to primary education,” Beard said. “But no country in the Global South now would say, ‘Oh, that’s too expensive. We can’t do it.’ They just did it.” “And I think that we need to think about water and sanitation in this way,” she added. “It is a public health, a human right, and an equity issue. And there needs to be that political will.” This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Experts say AI automation likely won’t mean human jobs are replaced altogether — instead, humans will work alongside new tech, potentially for less pay and in worse working conditions. | Getty Images/iStockphoto Is a new age of digital offshoring coming? Questions of how a new technology will change the way we work have only become more pressing since OpenAI’s Chat-GPT burst onto the scene in late 2022. Since then, we’ve seen frenzied predictions of how AI will upend American jobs — perhaps even doing away with the need to work altogether. Some wonder if their careers will even exist in a few years. Chances are, they will, but the tasks they do might be different. How exactly that will happen can feel obscure, but it’s been happening in much the same way for decades if not centuries. To put a human face on the way technology changes jobs, visit a fried chicken spot called Sansan Chicken in New York City’s East Village. There, the cashier takes your order over Zoom, from over 8,000 miles away in the Philippines. Another worker in the kitchen slides your order through a small window when it’s ready. These workers are employed by a company called Happy Cashier, which contracts them out to a handful of NYC-based restaurants. The big draw of Happy Cashier is that it saves the restaurants money, as the average hourly wage of a cashier in the Philippines is about $1, based on Indeed’s data. Happy Cashier’s “virtual assistants” make $3 per hour, according to the New York Times. While video calling isn’t bleeding-edge tech, the Zoom cashier captures what often happens when an industry integrates new tech into its business model: Jobs don’t really disappear, they just shrink, along with their paycheck, and this degradation is presented as the natural outcome of automation and technological progress. Modern tech has allowed more industries to chop up jobs into smaller parts and to send many of those parts to underpaid workers overseas. The offshoring of American jobs is most immediately associated with the exodus of manufacturing work that kicked into high gear in the 1980s, but a great deal of foreign outsourcing has occurred in the digital age: think social media content moderation, customer support, and even virtual personal assistants. Silicon Valley can still be summed up by the famous labeling found on Apple products: designed in California, assembled in China. (Or, these days, the Philippines.) Now, with AI poised to automate new industries, instead of commanding a salary of $50,000 per year for taking charge of a whole range of tasks from start to finish, you might eke out a fraction of that for doing just a part of the work, the rest of the tasks fulfilled by an AI function. It might mean that, with the aid of AI, your boss now expects you to produce twice as much in the same amount of time. It might mean that some or even most of your job is done by a poorly paid worker outside of the US. If it sounds too far-fetched and pessimistic, the unfortunate reality is that the use of tech to degrade work that humans do is not novel — it’s been happening for hundreds of years. A brief history of paying people less Fears about what automation could do to human work date back centuries. In the 19th century, the Luddites were textile workers who smashed machines in protest of their employers using machines to replace them or reduce their pay. Introducing machines to boost productivity and reduce labor costs was a fairly novel idea — to workers of that day, it looked like employers were “quite literally stealing work, and therefore money and bread, as they put it, from the mouths of working people,” says Brian Merchant, journalist and author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Merchant explains that since then we’ve had 200 years of ideology saying that technology equals progress, a prevailing outlook that stifles any Luddite impulses. Tech itself, not corporate executives, was the inevitable force replacing jobs, or devaluing them According to labor historian Jason Resnikoff, “automation” was a term coined by a Ford executive in 1946. In the New Deal era, employers faced a problem. In a political climate where unions were powerful and popular, companies couldn’t just attack them outright. At the same time, there was an “almost universal technological enthusiasm” in this era, Resnikoff tells Vox, when we believed people would soon drive flying cars, go to the moon, and have a lot more leisure time. Corporations argued that their R&D labs were where technological innovation was born. It had its own momentum, as if multiplying in a Petri dish — tech itself, not corporate executives, was the inevitable force replacing jobs, or devaluing them. “What’s wild is everyone agrees to that, including the unions,” says Resnikoff. Unions of this era didn’t reject “automating” machines because standing against technology would brand you a backward-thinking opponent of progress. Unions had also traded control of how they worked, including production speed and what machines they would use, in exchange for benefits like health care, unemployment insurance, and pensions. Far from ending work, or even reducing it, workers in a multitude of sectors — automobiles, railroads, coal mines — quickly found that they were laboring even harder. “It has just put more of the work on me, and they fired or laid off my colleagues,” explains Resnikoff, speaking for the workers. Until the 1960s, in the industries that “automated” quickest, the number of workers actually grew, he reports in his book, Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work. Often, what was one job before would get split up into several parts, and the new work would become more repetitive, more boring, more like part of an assembly line. It was around this same time that offshoring, or sending jobs overseas, started to come into fashion. The humans behind the robots Now, in 2024, as employers scramble to adopt AI technologies, we stand at the edge of what might be another wave of atomizing jobs and shipping them to nations with cheaper labor. A 2022 report from the policy think tank RAND Corporation predicted that with remote work becoming ubiquitous alongside the explosion in AI enthusiasm, “the greater a sector’s exposure to AI, the more likely it is to offshore jobs to lower-income countries.” What we call “automation” has long meant humans toiling alongside machines, rather than machines replacing humans entirely. A lot of supposedly automated tech, including AI, is actually assisted by a mass of human laborers — often in Asia, Africa, and South America. Amazon recently discontinued its Just Walk Out service in its grocery stores, which let customers leave without checking out their items because the store’s sensors automatically detect what they had picked up in store. News of the wind-down went viral when people learned that this technology had needed human workers in India to double-check that it was tallying checkout items correctly. There was also some surprise when Presto Automation, an AI drive-thru technology used by fast food chains like Carl’s Jr. and Hardees, revealed that it used human workers overseas to fulfill, review, or correct the vast majority of orders. The robotaxi company Cruise, which suspended its operations after one of its cars ran over a woman last fall, has said that its driverless cars received remote human assistance about every four to five miles. Automated tech is trained (and continuously improved) with the blood, sweat, and tears of human workers What’s more, automated tech is trained (and continuously improved) with the blood, sweat, and tears of human workers — like the annotators who label and sort data that ChatGPT learns from. On digital “crowdwork” platforms, such as Upwork, workers complete small online tasks, like identifying objects in images, that computers have trouble doing — and are paid pennies for each tiny job. One 2021 paper estimated that there were 14 million workers registered on such crowdwork platforms who had completed at least one task. Amazon nodded to the all-too-common illusion of intelligent, autonomous machines in naming its crowdwork platform Mechanical Turk, which was a fake chess-playing automaton in the 18th century that in fact housed a human chess master. Launched in 2005, it became one of the biggest crowdwork sites around the world. Remotasks, a newer crowdwork platform owned by the AI data provider Scale AI, boasts that over 240,000 “entrepreneurial taskers” work for them currently — many in the Philippines, under conditions that one AI ethicist described as “digital sweatshops.” These taskers often complain that their payment is delayed, and that’s not to mention that the pay is low to begin with, at times not meeting minimum wage in the Philippines — currently about $10.67 per day in the Manila metropolitan area. The truth behind AI and automated tech plays out like the end of a Scooby Doo episode. Surprise! Behind the spooky ghost is a real, solid human being. As the filmmaker and writer Astra Taylor put it, it’s “fauxtomation.” Tobias Sytsma, an economist at RAND and the author of the report, explains that automation might hit new kinds of jobs — not so much in manufacturing jobs this time, but jobs in sectors that produce intangible goods, affecting who we often call “knowledge” workers. One potential target is software development, says Sytsma. Large language models like ChatGPT have been trained on a lot of code, and “we’ve seen companies use offshore developers in the past,” he tells Vox. He notes health care may also see a lot of AI adoption. Instead of thinking of how to design a piece of code, a software developer might now merely review the AI’s output and fix any errors. Instead of translating a book from start to finish, the human translator makes smaller tweaks for style. For each piece of work, the rate of pay shrinks. “You talk to illustrators, you talk to writers, you talk to copywriters — and freelancers especially — and you hear that they have already lost large percentages of their work that they would have been getting this time last year,” says Merchant. Some workers in creative fields have already embraced using generative AI as part of their workflow, allowing them to set lower prices while also producing at a quicker pace. This sort of hybrid model is actually ideal for most employers, says Resnikoff. “The machine cheapens the labor, and then the labor allows you to not have to invest too much in fixed capital, which are the machines.” The future of automation is still unwritten Techno-optimists often make sweeping statements about the radical changes new technologies will bring — like declaring that we’re in an “AI revolution” that will redistribute social and financial power. People are led to believe that this mysterious, awe-inspiring tech will itself be a transformative agent. We can gird ourselves, but the transformation is coming whether we want it or not. The Zoom cashier shows how tech is usually deployed by companies in the same mundane (if discomfiting) ways as before: to save money, skimp on labor costs, and even skirt labor law, as in the case of countless gig platform companies that continue to classify their workers as independent contractors. The workers don’t have much say in how the tech impacts them. “We have this very non-democratic mode of technological development that has more or less been in place for 200 years,” says Merchant. As Resnikoff points out, if people want to change that, the first step is recognizing that automation isn’t inevitable — and certainly not in the way employers would like to implement it. Workers most keenly feeling the threat of employer-imposed automation have been organizing and putting up a fight, whether it’s gig workers trying to form unions and improve their working conditions or Hollywood screenwriters with the Writers Guild of America last year winning some provisions around AI, including that AI-generated writing can’t be used as a source material that a human writer might later spruce up. (Disclosure: Vox’s editorial staff is unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East.) In the post-war period, when people believed that tech would end work altogether, the suggestion that machines should not be brought into the workplace might not have been taken seriously. But amid the labor momentum galvanizing American workers right now, there seems to be more awareness that new tech like AI isn’t a force of nature they must accept. “A worker today can say, ‘you’re bringing this machine, but you’re just making me compete with some poorly paid Filipino worker who deserves better him or herself,’” Resnikoff says. When I visit Sansan Chicken on a Wednesday afternoon, the Zoom cashier is at first the only visible employee in sight, a floating head amid a greenscreen background. I ask her what she recommends — well, what’s most popular on the menu, anyway — and based on her response I order the karaage fried chicken. She notes that if I get the combo it comes with fries and a drink. After I pay, on a second screen next to the Zoom call, a standard tip screen pops up. The touch screen, however, is unresponsive. An in-store employee notices and tries to help, but to no avail. Another employee in the kitchen calls my order once it’s ready, sliding the tray out a narrow window. The Zoom cashier greets every customer who comes through the door, but most don’t respond. A few feet from her, there’s a digital kiosk that several customers opt to use instead.

Palestinians walk around the rubble of buildings destroyed after an Israeli attack on the As Salam neighborhood in Rafah, Gaza, on May 6, 2024. | Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images The US has offered unconditional military aid to Israel throughout the war in Gaza. Israel’s operation in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza that houses more than a million displaced Palestinians, may have finally forced the Biden administration to do something it has been hesitant to do: pause a weapons shipment to Israel. The administration has been reluctant to restrict military aid to Israel in any way despite federal law requiring that it do so when members of a foreign military to which the US is providing aid commit gross human rights violations — something international organizations and individual nations have accused Israel of. But this week, US officials announced that they paused a shipment of thousands of bombs to Israel — the first known instance of the US withholding military aid since the start of the war. “We’re going to continue to do what’s necessary to ensure that Israel has the means to defend itself, but that said, we are currently reviewing some near-term security assistance shipments in the context of unfolding events in Rafah,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. The decision comes as the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 34,000 and full-fledged famine has broken out in the north, with the rest of Gaza at famine risk in the coming months. A ceasefire agreement appeared within reach this week when Hamas announced that it had accepted a draft proposal negotiated by Egyptian and Qatari mediators that involved a release of all Israeli hostages taken during Hamas’s October 7 raid on Israel. Israel, however, refused that deal, saying the gaps in the negotiations remain wide. The Biden administration’s decision to pause the bomb shipment is a big step. “This action is welcome,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT), who has advocated against sending weapons to Israel for anything but defensive purposes, told Vox. “That sends a message I hope the Netanyahu government hears loud and clear.” At the same time, the decision to pause a weapons shipment is so far only a one-time occurrence. However, if the US were to continue to withhold weapons from Israel, that could signal an actual shift in the US policy of offering unconditional support to Israel. Some foreign affairs experts say existing US laws meant to safeguard human rights, including what is known as the “Leahy law” and the Foreign Assistance Act, should have long ago restricted the flow of military assistance to Israel, even predating the war in Gaza. With Israel in mind, President Joe Biden also signed a new memorandum in February that requires countries receiving US security assistance to provide “credible and reliable written assurances” that they will use American military assistance in accordance with international law. Under that memorandum, the US government is expected to issue a formal decision as soon as this week as to whether Israel has committed human rights abuses through its airstrikes on Gaza and by curbing the delivery of humanitarian aid. Reports have varied on what that decision may be. Depending on the outcome, that could lead to further restrictions on US military aid to Israel. “Our weapons cannot be used in ways that violate international law or where the government is interfering with the ability of the US to provide humanitarian aid,” Welch said. “So if there’s a finding that there’s a violation, I would argue that means we’ve got to stop delivering those weapons.” But despite a longstanding record of human rights abuses, Israel remains the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid, and Biden has been clear in his intent to maintain the US’s “special relationship” with Israel that goes back decades. What we know about the bomb shipment The shipment reportedly included 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs. The administration is also reportedly considering halting an upcoming shipment of 6,500 munitions that convert unguided bombs (“dumb bombs”) into precision-guided bombs. The held shipment could still be released, depending on what Israel does next. US officials have expressed particular concern about how the 2,000-pound bombs could be used to inflict mass destruction in a dense urban area such as Rafah, as they already have in other parts of Gaza. Biden had personally urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to undertake the operation in Rafah because of its vast refugee population, and because the city provides the only route for getting humanitarian aid into Gaza. Netanyahu appears to be proceeding anyway, further straining the two men’s already icy relationship. Overall, Biden has rarely directly criticized Israel, with his expression of outrage following the killings of humanitarian workers for World Central Kitchen being one of the few occasions on which he has done so publicly. (Biden has reportedly had some strong criticisms of Netanyahu in private.) Israel has seized the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, meaning that the Israeli military now controls the flow of humanitarian aid at a time when hospitals in southern Gaza are days away from running out of fuel. About 50,000 Palestinians have evacuated from Rafah ahead of Israel’s operation there, but many more remain and there is no plan to ensure their safety. Why withholding weapons from Israel matters The decision to pause a weapons shipment is only a temporary administrative decision that isn’t tied to any law. But it is an indication that the US is attempting to exert its leverage over Israel — and perhaps enforce its laws protecting human rights — in a way it has not before. The US was already providing Israel with $4 billion annually through 2028 before Congress approved another $14.1 billion in supplemental aid last month. Seven months into the war in Gaza, Israel is increasingly reliant on that aid, having run down its own munitions stores already. Foreign military transfers like those sent to Israel go through numerous reviews and approval processes, involving the State Department, Pentagon, and Congress. They are also governed by a set of laws, including the Leahy law. First approved by Congress in 1997, that law’s purpose is to prevent the US from being implicated in serious crimes committed by foreign security forces that it supports, by cutting off aid to a specific unit if the US has credible information that the unit committed a gross violation of human rights. Such violations generally include torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, or rape, but can also be interpreted more broadly. No security forces, not even American ones, are entirely immune to committing such violations. Aid can be later reinstated if the State Department determines that the country is taking effective steps to bring responsible units to justice. Some former administration officials and congressional staff previously told Vox that the law has never had teeth against Israel, despite what human rights experts, both in and outside of the US government, have identified as substantive evidence that Israel has committed human rights violations both before and during the current war in Gaza. In one 2022 case, for example, a UN investigation found that Israeli forces killed Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera, while she was covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank and was wearing a blue vest that read “Press.” Immediately following her killing, Israeli officials argued that she had been “filming and working for a media outlet amidst armed Palestinians” and may have been killed by stray Palestinian fire, something that those on the scene rebutted. Israel later admitted that she was likely killed by Israeli fire, but ruled her death accidental and never charged the soldiers involved. Some Senate Democrats, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), have recently asked the Department of Defense to address concerns that the Leahy law is not being consistently applied to Israel. “Not a single incident resulted in the denial of assistance to any unit of the IDF,” the senators wrote in a letter. “In order for the United States to protect our own national security interests and maintain credibility as a global leader of human rights, we must apply the law equally.” The weapons shipment pause could be a first step in ensuring that Leahy is equitably applied.

Beef cattle stand in a barn at a feedlot in Illinois, on April 5, 2011. | Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images Tyson Foods and the federal government refuse to show their math for a new sustainability label. One species accounts for around 10 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions: the cow. Every few months, like clockwork, environmental scientists publish a new report on how we can’t limit planetary warming if people in rich countries don’t eat fewer cows and other animals. But meat giant Tyson Foods, in conjunction with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), has a different solution: “climate-friendly” beef. Tyson claims that its “Climate-Smart Beef” program, launched last year and supported with taxpayer dollars, has managed to cut 10 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from a tiny fraction of its cattle herd. Those cattle are then slaughtered and sold under the company’s Brazen Beef brand with a USDA-approved “climate-friendly” label, which is now for sale in limited quantities but could soon land in your local supermarket’s meat aisle. It sounds nice — Americans could continue to eat nearly 60 pounds of beef annually while the world burns. But it’s just the latest salvo in the meat industry’s escalating war against climate science, and its campaign to greenwash its way out of the fight for a livable planet. Show me the math Tyson’s climate-friendly beef website is full of earnest marketing phrases like this one: “If we’re showing up for the climate, then we’ve got to show our work.” Yet that “work” is nowhere to be found. Despite requests for transparency from scientists and dogged journalists, Tyson and the USDA haven’t opened up their emissions ledgers, so the program remains a black box. Tyson and consulting firm Deloitte, which worked on Tyson’s program, both declined interview requests for this story. Where Food Comes From, a private company that audits food labels for animal welfare, safety, and sustainability claims — including Tyson’s “climate-friendly” label — did not respond to an interview request. Last year, when I asked to see Tyson’s environmental accounting model, the USDA said I’d need to submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The nonprofit organization Environmental Working Group did that — but all 106 pages of the documents it received were heavily redacted to, as the USDA put it, protect “trade secrets.” Tyson’s sole known supplier for Brazen Beef, Adams Land & Cattle Co., is a sprawling cattle feedlot operation in Nebraska. Google Maps/Environmental Working Group An aerial shot of Nebraska-based Adams Land & Cattle Co., Tyson’s sole supplier of its Brazen Beef line. “I’m not surprised, but I’m concerned,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group. “Where’s the evidence? Where are the receipts?” “If [Tyson’s] Brazen Beef could carry this claim,” Faber added, then “what’s to stop other companies from making similar claims based on science and other data that’s simply unavailable to all of us?” The USDA didn’t respond to a request for comment about the FOIA documents. Tyson also worked with environmental nonprofit juggernauts The Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense Fund to develop its Climate-Smart Beef program, which the company touts on its website and in advertisements. Environmental Defense Fund said in an email that it integrated its nitrogen emissions model into Tyson’s environmental accounting, while The Nature Conservancy noted that it reviewed and provided recommendations on data used in Tyson’s model but wasn’t otherwise involved in its Climate-Smart Beef program. Both organizations declined an interview request for this story when it was first published last year. Earlier this year, during interviews for a related story, both groups said companies need to be transparent about their climate goals but stood by their collaboration with Tyson Foods. What makes beef climate-friendly, according to Tyson Foods So what exactly does Tyson say its ranchers and farmers are doing to achieve a 10 percent emissions reduction? We can look to their website to get a vague sense, but it helps to first understand how cattle pollute the planet. The 1.5 billion cows farmed worldwide for cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes each year accelerate climate change in three main ways: they eat grass and/or grain, like corn and soy, causing them to burp out the highly potent greenhouse gas methane; they poop a lot, which releases the even more potent nitrous oxide, as does the synthetic fertilizer used to grow the grain they’re fed; and they take up a lot of land — a quarter of the planet is occupied by grazing livestock, some of which could be used to absorb carbon from the atmosphere if it weren’t deforested for meat production. Raphael Alves/Washington Post via Getty Images Cattle are seen along deforested land on highway BR-319, in the rural city of Humaita in Brazil. Cattle ranching is the leading cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. To achieve a 10 percent emissions reduction, Tyson’s website mentions that grain farmers who supply feed to its cows employ practices like planting cover crops and reduced tillage, which are good for soil health but haven’t been proven to cut emissions. There’s also mention of “nutrient management,” which usually means reducing fertilizer over-application, but no details on emissions savings are provided. Among other practices, Tyson also lists “pasture rotation,” which entails moving cattle around more frequently with the goal of allowing grass to regrow, which can provide a number of environmental benefits, but many climate scientists are skeptical it can meaningfully reduce emissions. Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University who’s written about Tyson’s climate-friendly beef label, told me the methods Tyson is talking about are admirable, but that doesn’t mean the 10 percent reduction claim is justified. Some practices may be good for land stewardship but don’t reduce emissions. For those that can reduce emissions, savings will be marginal. “These are razor-thin distinctions in a country that already produces meat incredibly efficiently, and our tools are not cut out [to measure] these thin margins,” Hayek said. “You can’t call that [climate-friendly], in any good conscience.” And because emissions from US cattle operations vary widely, “There’s simply no reliable way to estimate a change in greenhouse gas emissions as small as 10 percent on any one farm — let alone a complex network of them,” Hayek and political economist Jan Dutkiewicz wrote in the New Republic last September. Tyson’s claims are brazen but unsurprising given how the USDA collaborates with industry. When it comes to animal welfare claims on meat packages, for example, the USDA more or less allows meat producers to operate on an honor system. Just as important as showing its math is knowing where the starting line for emissions reduction begins. Tyson says it has reduced the carbon footprint of some of its beef by 10 percent, but 10 percent relative to what? What’s the benchmark? Nobody knows. A 2019 study by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association found that the average American steer emits 21.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per kilogram of carcass weight. But in 2021, the USDA approved a low-carbon beef program (unrelated to Tyson) that uses a benchmark nearly 25 percent higher than the 2019 study, as noted by Wired last year. In September, when asked what benchmark the USDA uses to approve a 10 percent emissions reduction claim, the agency again said I would need to file a FOIA request. In the document it sent to Environmental Working Group, the portion on benchmarks was redacted. But even if we give Tyson and the USDA the benefit of the doubt, there’s a stubborn truth about beef: It’s so high in emissions that it can never really be “climate-friendly.” Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images Beef cattle at the Texana Feeders feedlot in Floresville, Texas. To be sure, the US beef industry has reduced its emissions over the years, and it’s much lower than most countries. But relative to every other food product, beef remains the coal of the food sector. “Beef is always going to be and always will be the worst [food] choice for the climate,” said Faber of Environmental Working Group, which has also petitioned the USDA to prohibit “climate-friendly” claims on beef products altogether. “And no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that.” What Tyson’s done here is equivalent to making a Hummer 10 percent more fuel-efficient and calling it climate-friendly — it’s greenwashing, and surveys show that most consumers know far too little about food and climate change to navigate this brave new world of so-called “climate-friendly” meat. Consumers will be deceived by “climate-friendly” meat claims Meat and dairy production account for 15 to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and leading environmental scientists say we must drastically reduce livestock emissions and eat more plant-based meals. That message, however, hasn’t broken through to the general public, nor to policymakers. In an online survey conducted last year in partnership with market research consultancy firm Humantel, Vox polled consumers about which parts of the food sector they think contribute most to climate change. Meat and dairy production came in dead last, even though it’s the top contributor in the list. In another question, “what we eat” was (incorrectly) ranked as a smaller contributor to extreme weather than refrigerant chemicals, single-use plastics, and air travel. Most respondents did rank plant-based meat alternatives as more climate-friendly than beef by a decent margin. However, plant-based meat and grass-fed beef were almost tied, even though plant-based meat has a drastically smaller carbon footprint (and grass-fed beef is generally worse for the climate than conventional beef). Other surveys have found similar results, demonstrating Americans’ limited understanding of emissions from the food system. Throw “climate-friendly” beef into the mix and consumers are sure to be misled and possibly persuaded that beef can indeed be good for the climate. However, meat companies could face legal consequences over misleading environmental claims. Earlier this year, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS, the world’s largest meat company, over its claim that it will achieve net zero emissions by 2040. James argued that such a goal was unsubstantiated and unachievable. Cashing in on consumers’ desire to shop more sustainably — and their misunderstanding of what actually makes food sustainable — could lead to more of what Tyson wants: increased beef consumption after decades of decline and stagnation. That would be a disaster for the climate at a time when the window to act is closing. The USDA and government agencies around the world know what must be done to slash food emissions. Now they just need to follow the science, resist industry greenwashing, and cut back on the burgers. Update, May 8, 2024, 2:40 pm: This story, originally published September 8, 2023, has been updated to include documents obtained by Environmental Working Group through a Freedom of Information Act request. A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!

Drake and Kendrick Lamar performing onstage. | Prince Williams/Wireimage, C Flanigan/Getty Images The rappers accused one another of abusing women, but weaponizing Me Too isn’t the same as standing up for women. The first weekend of May was the ultimate gift to rap fans. After more than a month of subliminal barbs and third-party interference, Drake and Kendrick Lamar went back-to-back with heavyweight diss tracks. Over the course of 72 hours, they created an amount of mayhem that hasn’t been seen in hip-hop since Drake was last accused of hiding a child. (There’s allegedly another one, per Lamar on “Meet The Grahams.”) As of May 8, it seems like the bulk of this rap war has already been fought. On May 4, Lamar delivered what seemed like a knockout blow with the catchy, DJ Mustard-produced diss track “Not Like Us.” Since then, videos of the song being enjoyed by club-goers — while Drake’s music has been booed — have gone viral. By the time Drake released “The Heart Part 6” on Sunday, a notably limp voice note of a track brushing off Lamar’s diss, the world had already chosen a victor. This weeks-long debacle has many layers, but Drake and Lamar’s choice of ammunition is arguably the most striking part. On his three-act diss “Family Matters,” Drake made bombshell claims that Lamar is a domestic abuser. Meanwhile, Lamar uses the years-long rumors surrounding Drake’s alleged relationships with underage girls as a cudgel on “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us.” The rappers each accused the other of misogyny, attempting to weaponize a post-Me Too culture against one another. As is the out-of-pocket nature of rap beef, both callouts were shocking. Still, it’s hard to completely revel in this moment with such serious claims floating around. In both cases, we’re looking at weighty allegations, and dropping them in a diss track seemed clunky and insensitive. Is this truly an exciting moment in hip-hop when it comes at the expense of women? Or are fans just enabling a disturbing status quo within the genre? Drake and Lamar calling out each other’s misogyny isn’t noble. It’s hypocritical. Kevin Winter/Getty Images Drake at the premiere of HBO’s Euphoria at the Cinerama Dome on June 4, 2019, in Los Angeles, California. While social media users are mostly enjoying the drama playing out between Drake and Lamar, others have pointed out the glaring hypocrisy in hearing two men — both of whom have demonstrated sexist attitudes in their music and supported abusers in the industry — attempt to expose each other’s mistreatment of women. Knowing that this is all an effort to win the internet’s favor makes these claims feel even more shallow. On his first diss track, “Euphoria,” Lamar comes out swinging by questioning Drake’s combative relationships with women, flat-out stating that he “doesn’t believe [he] likes” them. It’s hard to disagree with the general sentiment that Drake might be a misogynist, as it’s become harder to dispute — or more accurately, ignore — in recent years. In addition to his unprompted jabs at Rihanna and Megan Thee Stallion, his raps have gradually become the stuff of incel subreddits. His once-endearing loverboy persona has regressed to that of a petulant, scorned teenager. But listening more closely, the delivery of Kendrick’s accusation is ... well, a little misogynist itself. There’s a tinge of homophobia to this bar, including saying Drake can “pop ass” with women and sees them as competition, explicitly comparing him to glasses-wearing rapper Sexxy Redd. That said, this characterization of Drake as an “Instagram baddie” who’s gotten plastic surgery — Lamar even references those BBL rumors, at one point — has become its own meme in recent years. From the mouth of an ardently Christian straight guy in the middle of a vicious feud, it doesn’t have the same light-heartedness. It has certainly benefited Lamar that Drake’s transgressions against women have generated more public backlash and is fresher in listeners’ minds. That’s maybe why fans generally seem less curious about the domestic abuse claims Drake makes on “Family Matters” against Lamar. To be fair, Drake goes about dropping these accusations in a frivolous way, which undermines any supposed concern on his end. In one line, he couples this allegation with a joke about Lamar’s short height. He uses the song to tout a rumor that Lamar’s fianceé Whitney Alford birthed a child outside of their relationship, suggesting these claims have equal weight. On Lamar’s back-to-back responses, “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us,” he unleashes the darker intel he teases about Drake in his earlier diss tracks, mainly the accusation that Drake sleeps with underage girls. On “Meet the Grahams,” he calls Drake a “sick man,” suggesting that “him and Weinstein should get fucked up in cell for the rest of their lives.” On “Not Like Us,” he’s a bit more direct, calling Drake a “certified pedophile.” There’s also the triple entendre, “tryna strike a chord, and it’s A-minor,” that’s become a standout bar from this feud. Nevertheless, it’s an uncomfortable subject matter to hear over an up-tempo, West Coast rap beat. Drake, in his last rejoinder “The Heart Part 6,” weakly defends himself against these deadly serious accusations, but none of it feels deeply considered. He hits back against sexual assault claims by saying he “would’ve been arrested” if they were true. (Out of every 1,000 reported rapes, only 50 will lead to an arrest or conviction, according to the National Organization for Women NYC.) He also adds that he is “way too famous for the shit [Lamar] suggested,” as though the Me Too movement wasn’t devoted to exposing famous, powerful men for such offenses. He also goes out of his way to deny years-old rumors of an inappropriate relationship between him and Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown when she was a teenager. Despite Lamar not even mentioning her, he forced her name into part of a public, complicated tiff. Christopher Polk/Billboard via Getty Images Kendrick Lamar at Life Is Beautiful 2023 on September 23, 2023, in Las Vegas, Nevada. On Lamar’s tracks, he does a better job of at least articulating the severity of misogyny and the systematic ways abusers are protected by powerful men in the industry. Undermining these sentiments, however, is his failure to explore such matters in his previous music, where he frequently addresses social inequality from the limited perspective of straight, cis Black men. There were also some controversial moments on his most recent album, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers. The track “Silent Hill” features rapper Kodak Black, who took a plea deal in 2021 for an alleged sexual assault case and pleaded guilty to a lesser battery charge. Lamar was also accused of transmisogyny by some members of the LGBTQ+ community for the song “Auntie Diaries,” where he misgenders his uncle while grappling with his uncle’s trans identity. These diss tracks don’t display a concern about misogyny, but they acknowledge a cultural shift By all evidence, it seems like Drake and Lamar were relying on the power of what problematic men would inadequately label “cancel culture” to handle their issues with each other. Nor does it feel like Lamar’s main gripe with Drake is whatever seedy behavior he’s allegedly partaking in behind the scenes. Lamar overall just seems irritated by who Drake is, seeing him as a fraud — a biracial, Canadian child actor with no street cred who’s unjustly become the face of modern hip-hop while cosplaying different parts of Black American culture. Lamar’s mention of Harvey Weinstein on “Meet the Grahams” was a timely reminder that the Me Too movement never really took hold in the hip-hop and R&B world the way it did (however momentarily) in Hollywood. While R. Kelly became the poster boy for abusive behavior, rappers such as Kodak Black, Lil Uzi Vert, and XXXTenacion, as well as R&B stars like Trey Songz and Chris Brown, continued to rack up allegations of gendered violence while scoring No. 1 hits and maintaining support from their colleagues. Following a series of lawsuits against Diddy— and now a federal investigation of sex-trafficking claims — however, the rap world has become starkly aware of the ways these behaviors can catch up to even the most powerful human beings. While a legal outcome has yet to be determined, the idea that Diddy, who has charmed his way out of decades of unsavory rumors while building a billion-dollar empire, would ever be confronted with consequences seemed unlikely. But his reckoning, along with Tory Lanez’s conviction in 2022, has signaled the beginning of some sort of sea change — or at least disrupted the notion that men get away with everything, even if they get away with most things. Drake’s and Lamar’s claims of misogyny feel entirely born out of convenience, with seemingly no regard for the women they’ve pulled into the crossfire. It wouldn’t be the first time women have become casualties of rappers’ feuding, but it should be the last.

Jessica Gow/TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images Politics on Eurovision isn’t new. It’s been part of it almost from the start. The annual Eurovision Song Contest kicked off yesterday and is bracing for protests and audience disruptions over Israel’s inclusion in the event as its war in Gaza in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack rages on. The song contest will be thousands of miles away — in Malmo, Sweden — but fury over the war is expected to be palpable in the small Scandinavian city, whose population will swell with both Eurovision fans and protesters. Over 1,000 artists in the host country signed a letter calling for Israel’s disqualification for its “brutal warfare in Gaza,” according to the Guardian, and pro-Palestinian groups are lobbying state broadcasters not to air the event and calling on artists to refuse to participate. Already, Swedish pop star Eric Saade appeared wearing a keffiyeh — a traditional scarf that has come to symbolize resistance to Israel’s incursion into Gaza — around his wrist during a performance on Tuesday night. A spokesperson for European Broadcasting Union (EBU) — which organizes the event — issued their “regrets” over the decision, according to the BBC. Saade has appeared as a Eurovision competitor before but was a guest performer last night. Politics intruding on Eurovision isn’t new, despite its stated desire to stay above the fray. In 2022, the contest disqualified Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. Nonetheless, the EBU has rejected demands from pro-Palestinian activists, maintaining that it is a music event that keeps political messages away from the stage. Sweden will bring additional police from Denmark and Norway to Malmo, and the Eurovision Song Contest is expected to continue with the usual participants, including Israel, which has won Eurovision four times since joining the contest in 1973. The EBU did require Israel to revise its entry this year, though, which was a song initially called “October Rain,” featuring the lyrics “those that write history, stand with me.” The song appeared to be a reference to Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that killed more than 1,100 people and led to the kidnapping of some 240, dozens of whom are still held hostage. The reference to the attack was deemed too political by the EBU, and thus ineligible for the competition. Israel initially refused to sanitize its entry, even threatening to pull out of the competition, but revised it after involvement from President Isaac Herzog. The new song, which will be performed by Eden Golan, is now a romantic ballad entitled “Hurricane,” and the opening line was changed to “writer of my symphony, play with me.” The controversy over Israel’s song and the protests looming over this year’s event underscore how much politics encroaches on an event that seeks to promote a utopian vision of global comity. But as Tess Megginson, a PhD candidate studying European history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, argues, the song contest, founded during the Cold War with seven European countries and initially excluding the Soviet Union, has always been a space for political performance. In an interview with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram, she explained that while some of today’s controversy is unique, the contest had some of its most contentious political moments after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to a longer version of Megginson’s interview and highlights from Eurovision on Today, Explained. —Haleema Shah, producer Sean Rameswaram You wrote in the Washington Post that politics at Eurovision is nothing new, using the ’90s as an example. Tess Megginson I would argue the 1990s are actually some of the most political years of the contest, and this actually isn’t always a bad thing. As soon as you have the Eastern European countries start joining, hosts are talking about welcome to the rest of Europe, and now we’re finally unified. And you have all these songs about peace and unity and breaking down walls. Some of these do quite well in the contest, some of them don’t. In 1990, the first competition held in Eastern Europe, in Zagreb, the winning entry was Italy with “Insieme: 1992.” The hook in the chorus is “unite, unite Europe,” and it got a very good reception and won the competition. It is a really beautiful time in the contest, but also in the ’90s you have the Yugoslav wars. And this is the first time that we actually see a country banned from the competition. Yugoslavia was banned from the contest shortly after the 1992 competition because of the siege of Sarajevo. UN sanctions are imposed against Yugoslavia, and Bosnia is able to participate in the competition, but Yugoslavia cannot. Even though Bosnia is not participating with a song entry, they’re still able to vote in the contest [and] call into the contest while under siege. Sean Rameswaram Wow. Tess Megginson The phone line initially disconnects and it goes dead. And there’s just this silence that falls over the audience. Soon they’re able to reconnect, and there’s a loud applause and cheering from the audience as they’re able to give their points for the contest. It’s a really beautiful moment of solidarity for people who were at war and under occupation. And it’s something that, even though it’s a very political moment, it’s quite a beautiful moment in the contest’s history. Sean Rameswaram These political moments we’re talking about — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of communism, the genocide in Bosnia — they all happened on the continent of Europe. But here, now, in 2024, we’ve got this controversy and calls for a boycott that relate to something happening in the Middle East. Is there a precedent for that at Eurovision? Tess Megginson Yeah. Boycotts in Eurovision are almost as old as the contest itself, starting in the 1970s. In 1975, Turkey invaded Cyprus, and Greece boycotted the contest. The following year, Greece submits a song that is a very anti-war song and clearly referencing Turkey’s presence in Cyprus, and Turkey boycotts the contest. So that’s kind of the first example we see of these big boycotts. More recently [there have] been calls to boycott Azerbaijan because of their treatment of their viewers who vote for Armenia. They’ve threatened to block the Armenian broadcast before. And of course, when they hosted the contest in 2012, there was a big outcry because they displaced a lot of people living in a community in Baku because they were building a stadium just to host the Eurovision Song Contest. Sean Rameswaram Wow. Tess Megginson And then of course, Russia’s the big one that you see a lot in the conversation because of its invasion of Ukraine, finally banned from the competition in 2022. Sean Rameswaram It sounds like it’s par for the course to have this level of controversy and calls for boycotts and tensions between nations at Eurovision. Does that make this current controversy less exceptional? Tess Megginson Not necessarily. I think there’s also been a long and unique history with Israel’s participation in the contest. As the first non-European country to participate, it’s also had relative success since it joined. It’s won the contest four times and hosted it three times. All the way back in 1978, we started seeing these controversies arise with Israel’s participation. In 1978, they actually won the competition, but in Jordan, which was a member of the EBU, although not participating in the contest, they didn’t air the Israel entry. And when it became clear that Israel was going to win the contest, they cut the broadcast short and announced Belgium as the winner in Jordan. Sean Rameswaram What? They just lied?! Tess Megginson Yep, they lied to people in Jordan and said Belgium had won the contest. I don’t know when they found out that wasn’t true. Sean Rameswaram When they got Wikipedia. Tess Megginson Yeah. Pre-Internet, it was a lot easier to get away with that sort of thing. Sean Rameswaram How does Eurovision typically handle the boycotts and the tensions between these nations? Tess Megginson Not very well. They officially market themselves as an apolitical contest. So when politics enter the contest, they are not happy about it. One kind of fun example is in 2015, they introduced what they called “anti-booing technology.” You couldn’t hear the crowd booing the Russian entry during the contest. I don’t think it’s been used since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they use a similar thing this year. And another thing is fines — they do really like to fine their members. In 2019, when Israel hosted the contest, there were calls to boycott and move the contest out of Israel. Icelandic performers held up Palestinian flags and the Icelandic broadcaster ended up getting a huge fine from the EBU for doing that. Sean Rameswaram Do you think Eurovision this year will end up transcending our current geopolitical situation? Tess Megginson There are a couple signs we can look for to see how Europeans are reacting to Israel’s participation. The first is going to be the live audience reaction. This is going to be more difficult for us to see as viewers; we’re probably going to have to rely on things like social media and journalists on the ground to hear how the audience is reacting to Israel participating. But we’re also going to see this maybe with the other performers, if they, say, wave Palestinian flags like we saw in 2019. Also, when the votes are given out at the end of the competition, are people going to boo countries that give Israel top votes? We’ll have to see. A second thing, of course, is the popular vote. Will people vote for Israel or will this be a protest vote against them? If there’s a big difference between the jury vote for Israel and the popular vote, that’s probably a sign that people are not voting for Israel because they don’t agree with what they’re doing in Gaza. The third thing to see is viewership. If the boycott is effective, there’ll probably be a stark decline in viewership in certain countries. Obviously, there are other factors at play here. So if a country, a participant, doesn’t make the finals, there could be a decline in viewership because of that, but if we see a significant decline, I would probably argue that it’s the boycott. Be sure to follow Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

During a demonstration against the Israeli government, protesters hold flags and signs calling for a hostages deal with Hamas on May 4, 2024, in Tel Aviv, Israel. | Amir Levy/Getty Images A deal will still be tough. The war in Gaza hangs in the balance this week as Israel ramps up for what many predict could be the bloodiest battle of the war, while at the same time, a ceasefire deal to end the fighting — at least temporarily — looks more possible than it has in months. On Monday, the political dynamics of the conflict shifted dramatically when Hamas announced it had accepted a draft proposal for a ceasefire and hostage release deal that had been negotiated in Cairo with Egyptian and Qatari mediators. The announcement was greeted with celebrations in the streets of Rafah and demonstrations across Israel calling on the government to take the deal and secure the release of the hostages. But the excitement was short-lived, as Israeli officials quickly said the deal was significantly different from an earlier draft they had found acceptable, and that it had been “softened” during the negotiating process in Hamas’s favor. Even as the negotiations continued, the Israeli Defense Forces pressed on with its Rafah operations, launching a volley of strikes at the city and seizing control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. The actions were what many fear is the opening stage of a long-anticipated offensive into the densely packed city, the last section of the enclave outside the IDF’s direct control. But in a sign that diplomacy has not been abandoned entirely, Israel’s war cabinet also dispatched a delegation of mediators to Cairo “to exhaust the possibility of reaching an agreement under conditions acceptable to Israel.” (Israeli negotiators had not been present when the latest proposal was drafted.) It has also reportedly agreed to keep its operations in Rafah limited to taking control of the area’s border crossing, rather than launching an all-out ground assault — at least for the time being. On Tuesday, US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby struck an optimistic note on a call with reporters, saying that a “close assessment of the two sides’ positions suggests that they should be able to close the remaining gaps.” That assessment is not shared by the Israelis, who say the gaps between the two sides are still wide. As of now, there are more questions than answers about what may be the last chance for the foreseeable future to stop a war in Gaza that has killed more than 30,000 people. How did this happen? Just three days ago, the ceasefire talks appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Israel did not even send a delegation to the talks over the weekend, which, in addition to Hamas, included the Egyptians, Qataris, and a US delegation led by CIA director William Burns. (The US does not negotiate directly with Hamas, which it considers a terrorist organization, but communicates its positions and proposals to the group through the intermediaries.) When the latest round of talks began over the weekend, Hamas had not yet issued a response to the latest ceasefire proposal, which had been pushed aggressively by the US and had been agreed to by Israel, according to media reports. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had vowed to move ahead with plans for a ground incursion into Rafah, which Israel describes as Hamas’s last holdout, but where around 1.5 million Palestinians displaced from the fighting have taken refuge. All indications were that the two sides were not actually interested in a ceasefire. On Sunday, Hamas launched a rocket and mortar attack on a border crossing between Gaza and Israel. On Monday, Israel ordered a partial evacuation of about 110,000 people as its warplanes struck targets around Rafah. So it came as something of a bolt out of the blue on Monday when Hamas agreed to a ceasefire proposal, even if it wasn’t the same one the Israelis had agreed to. “Hamas’ acceptance of a deal that Israel says was not on the table certainly seems to have taken Israel by surprise, and also seems to have successfully forced Netanyahu’s hand by getting him to send a negotiating team to Cairo, which he had been refusing to do previously.” Michael Koplow, an expert on Israeli politics and chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum, told Vox. What’s on the table? The previous and only ceasefire of this war, in November 2023, lasted for a week and saw the release of 105 Israeli hostages and 240 Palestinian prisoners. The main division now between the two sides — and one that may be irreconcilable — is that Hamas is seeking a permanent end to the fighting and the withdrawal of Israeli troops, while Israel wants only another temporary ceasefire in exchange for the return of hostages, and remains committed to continuing its military operation until Hamas is wiped out. The Egyptian-Qatari proposal attempts to fudge this divide by separating the ceasefire into three phases. In the first phase, which would last for six weeks, fighting would be suspended, the IDF would withdraw from parts of Gaza, and a prisoner exchange process would begin. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages, three at a time — starting with women, young people, older people, and ill hostages. In return for each hostage, Israel would release a certain number of Palestinian prisoners depending on various criteria. (For instance, according to one reported draft, Israel would release 40 Palestinian women prisoners for every female IDF soldier released.) Israel had previously insisted on 40 hostages being released in the initial phase, but it’s not clear if enough of the 128 remaining hostages who meet the criteria for transfer are actually still alive. In the text of the Hamas-agreed draft, published by Al Jazeera on Monday, this hostage-release scheme is pretty similar to what Israel reportedly agreed to in April, with a few differences. (For instance, in the April draft, three hostages would be released every three days. In the new draft, three would be released every seven days, and then the remainder would be released at the end of the six weeks.) The much tougher bit comes in phase two. Here, hostage releases would continue — eventually to include male civilians and soldiers — and the two sides would take steps toward “restoring a sustainable calm,” wording which was reportedly crafted by the US to allow the Israelis to avoid committing upfront to a permanent ceasefire. The hope from the White House is that a cessation in fighting during phase one will allow space for negotiations on a longer peace. “It has been the stated aim of the United States to ensure that an initial six-week ceasefire would be built into something more enduring,” a senior US administration official told Vox. “The agreement lays out three phases for this purpose and it would be our aim to see all three phases completed with all the hostages returned to their families.” As for Hamas, a deputy to the group’s leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar said on Monday that Egypt would be the guarantor of the deal and would somehow assure that the war did not resume. Hamas said they had also received promises that President Biden was committed to implementing the deal. What about the Israelis? “There seems to be a way out of this, which is for both sides to agree to punt permanent ceasefire negotiations to a second phase,” said Koplow. “But that can only happen if Netanyahu is willing to embrace some strategic ambiguity rather than insisting at every turn that there will be no permanent ceasefire.” It’s unclear exactly how phase two differs between the two drafts, though the Al Jazeera report suggests that under phase two in the Hamas-agreed version, “Israeli forces shall withdraw completely from the Gaza Strip.” Agreeing to that upfront is almost certainly a nonstarter for Israel. In the third phase, the two sides would exchange remains of the dead and begin a process of reconstruction for Gaza. According to media reports about the earlier draft, the third phase also included language committing Hamas to not rebuilding its military arsenal or infrastructure. This pledge is not in the text published by Al Jazeera. Israel might insist on it. Where is the US? Israeli officials have suggested that the Hamas offer is a ploy to make it appear as if Israel was rejecting a deal. They have also expressed frustration with the Biden administration, suggesting that the Americans knew about the proposal ahead of time and didn’t warn the Israelis. The White House has denied keeping the Israelis in the dark, but has also been somewhat coy about whether Burns had any hand in crafting the proposal, with Kirby saying on Monday that it is “safe to conclude that that response came as a result or at the end of these continued discussions that Director Burns was part of.” The Biden administration has publicly and repeatedly opposed a major ground operation in Rafah, saying it has not seen what it considers an adequate plan from Israel to protect civilians. The president has personally warned Netanyahu that an assault on Rafah would cross a “red line.” Perhaps with those objections in mind, the IDF has described its operations this week as a “precise counterterrorism operation,” which is more or less what the US was urging Israel to do. Kirby also said on Tuesday that the White House had been assured by the Israelis that this was “an operation of limited scope, scale and duration.” Whether it will stay that way remains to be seen. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told a group of Israeli soldiers on Tuesday that unless Hamas agreed to return the hostages, “we will go on and deepen the operation.” (Limited or not, the escalating airstrikes have already forced roughly 50,000 people to flee Rafah.) The US hasn’t made clear exactly what would happen if Israel crosses the “red line,” but it is currently holding up several shipments of weapons to Israel, in what officials tell Politico is an attempt to send Israel a political message. Is there a way out? Aaron David Miller, a veteran Mideast peace negotiator for several US administrations now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox that while “constructive ambiguity” has often been useful in Israeli-Palestinian talks in the past, what’s taking place now “is a very strange negotiation.” That’s because, he said, the two sides have defined the stakes as “existential.” While Hamas has taken significant casualties in this war, it has not been wiped out, as Israel vowed to do after October 7, and a ceasefire now would mean it would remain a significant political presence in Gaza. It’s far from clear that Israel is willing to live with that. Another reason for skepticism, he says, is that both Netanyahu and Hamas’s Sinwar “are thinking first and foremost, not about how to relieve the suffering of the Gazan people or relieve suffering of these early hostages or their families. They’re thinking long-term about how to survive this.” A recent poll found that 62 percent of Israelis think a hostage deal should take precedence over a Rafah operation, a majority that made itself very visible on Monday’s demonstrations. But that’s not the view of Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who described the Hamas offer as a “manipulative trap” and urged his government to “press harder and harder on … Hamas’s throats until they are destroyed, to speak only with fire.” If his allies bolt from his fragile coalition, Netanyahu could be out of a job, which — given his unrelated legal troubles — could mean he is back in court or behind bars. “[Netanyahu] is unwilling to risk [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir and Smotrich bolting from his coalition, and I haven’t seen anything indicating that he is going to reverse course on that anytime soon,” said Israel Policy Forum’s Koplow. The stakes are even higher for Sinwar, who has to worry about his own survival in a very literal sense. Miller said this should cause us to take commitments made by Hamas’s political leadership outside of Gaza with a grain of salt: “These negotiations are indirect. The key Palestinian decision-maker is 20 or 30 meters underground somewhere surrounded by hostages.” Ultimately, the differences in wording between the various drafts of the ceasefire may matter less than whether the two sides actually want the deal. That’s far from clear.

Longevity research may not let us live forever — but it could still make our lives better in smaller ways. Jonathan An tries to ignore the hype about new life-extension treatments, but it’s caught up to him anyway. He has heard the gospel of the longevity influencers, including that one multimillionaire who has been on a media campaign for months claiming that the 111 pills he takes each day will help him live forever. An, an assistant professor of oral sciences at the University of Washington, doesn’t buy it. But he recently found himself inadvertently ensnared by the fervor around anti-aging — thanks to his mice. An has studied mice suffering from periodontal disease, a bacterial-induced inflammatory infection of the gums that can lead to tooth loss. Mice (and more than 60 percent of human adults over 65) have to deal with this uncomfortable oral illness — and they don’t have much choice but to cope. When people’s teeth fall out, dentists like An replace them. But he would rather not have to remove so many. While studying for his doctorate in dentistry at the University of Washington, An pursued a joint PhD to research preventive dental measures. He experimented with giving mice chow infused with the drug rapamycin each day to see if it would improve their oral health. It worked. Mice treated for eight weeks with the drug — traditionally used to help prevent organ-transplant rejection — not only experienced delayed symptoms of periodontal disease, but saw regrowth of their tooth-supporting jaw bones. This year, An is planning to test rapamycin in humans. If it has the same effect in adults as it did in mice, people might eventually be able to pick up a drug at the pharmacy that helps them avoid unwanted trips to the dentist’s office. Better dental health would be a pleasant effect, but that’s not why An’s research drew an unusual amount of attention. Because the drug An chose to test was rapamycin, the longevity field took notice. In separate lab experiments over the past decade, rapamycin has been found to extend the lifespan of yeast, nematodes, fruit flies, and mice. It has helped mice delay or reverse immunity decline, muscle decline, cognitive decline, and cancer growth. This string of successes for rapamycin, which belongs to a class of drugs that stifle one biological pathway for cell growth, has caught the eyes of renowned longevity researchers. It’s also attracted the attention of wealthy lifehackers and the clinics, supplement companies, and biotech investors who — out of true belief, opportunism, or a combination — stand to make money from people seeking an elixir for longer life. Since An’s study was published in 2020, longevity clinics from across the country have asked him how they can incorporate rapamycin into their practices. Some scientists consider rapamycin a strong candidate for life-extension purposes both because it has helped lab species live longer and because it has already been approved as an immunosuppressant in humans. Today, doctors can and do prescribe rapamycin for off-label use — including for longevity. An wants to believe that these clinics — part of a fledgling longevity industry that includes between 50 and 800 providers across the US, according to the Wall Street Journal — are genuinely trying to improve their clients’ health. But he suspects that may not always be the case. He tells the longevity crowd what he does know, which is less exciting than they might hope. When it comes to human health, “I don’t know what rapamycin does,” he said. “But I always tell them to make sure to have a dentist on hand because some of the side effects are oral-related.” Other companies want him to help with their own studies, the results of which they plan to keep private. An says no. “I’m a dentist,” An said. “Not a salesperson.” A longer, healthier life is one of the easiest products in the world to sell. According to a Deloitte report, the 50 biggest longevity companies raised more than $1 billion in venture capital funding as of 2020 — a number that the company said would rise “due to the growing conviction that the longevity market could outstrip the existing health care market.” Altos Labs, a “rejuvenation” biotech whose investors include Jeff Bezos, announced in 2022 that it had raised $3 billion in funding. An astronomer’s discovery of a neutron star has much less commercial potential and therefore generates much less interest than a researcher’s discovery that the micronutrient resveratrol helps yeast live longer — even if it’s likely that neither ultimately affects human lifespan. The attention paid to billionaire-funded research risks obscuring whether the longevity field is genuinely on the verge of a breakthrough or whether a clinic is just saying that to promote their experimental blood transfusion. In reality, longevity research is advancing — but slowly. Clinical trials are moving forward on select uses for longevity drugs, younger researchers are taking the field more seriously, and private organizations are pledging significant support to research: The Saudi-based Hevolution Foundation has promised up to $1 billion in funding annually for biotech startups and academic researchers. But while there likely remain many promising treatment candidates that have yet to be identified, they would take decades to reach clinical trials. Even academics who are bullish on the promise of longevity research fear that, for all the fanfare, the field has become too fixated on a few drugs and lifestyle adjustments that have been under investigation for years, while neglecting the basic research that could reveal novel pathways to slow down human aging. For now, the three best ways to extend your life remain boring: eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, and sleeping well. We aren’t going to add decades to human life any time soon; living to 150 or 200 remains in the realm of science fiction. But in decades to come, advancements in the science of aging may still lead to therapeutic breakthroughs that lengthen human healthspan — the period of life spent in good health. Perhaps a few more people will become centenarians, but the real success would be having more years when you can live well. How longevity went mainstream in academia Matt Kaeberlein, a longevity researcher at the University of Washington, remembers a time when few in academia took the study of aging — much less the idea of longevity — seriously. “When I came into the field as a graduate student in 1998, there was nobody who went to graduate school to study aging,” he said. “The perception among the broader scientific community was that it was mostly snake oil and crap. There’s still a lot of snake oil and crap, but it is more accepted now than it used to be.” The field began gaining wider recognition in 1993 when Cynthia Kenyon, a pioneer in aging research who now works at the Alphabet-owned life sciences company Calico Labs, discovered that mutating a single gene of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans doubled its lifespan. Other scientists soon figured out why. Gary Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues found that the altered gene regulated an insulin-signaling pathway similar to one in humans that might play a role in slowing cell growth and metabolism. Researchers like Andrzej Bartke found similar mechanisms in mice, which have been the subject of much of the relevant research so far. “One of the key things that’s happened is that the evidence that you can actually slow down and interfere with the aging process in mammals … has become so overwhelming that only the willfully blind can ignore it,” Richard A. Miller, who leads the University of Michigan’s Paul Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, told me. In the last two decades, scientists have performed hundreds of lab experiments — mostly on animals — on drugs like rapamycin, canagliflozin, acarbose, empagliflozin, metformin, and on interventions like calorie restriction in diets and removal of nondividing senescent cells. Instead of testing the effects of these treatments on specific illnesses, many of these studies test whether certain interventions slow down animals’ aging processes and help them live longer. The expansion of longevity research has unearthed some potentially useful information about which biological mechanisms control aging and how to alter them. In mice and other species, changing a single pathway has the power to extend life by significant margins, raising hopes that if humans respond similarly, certain drugs could extend human lives by years. “We just have a better understanding of what those pathways are,” said Tom Rando, director of the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center, “even if we don’t have a complete understanding of why they work and why they extend lifespan.” Though most experiments with potential longevity drugs and other interventions like blood transfusions are still being tested on lab animals, two dozen candidate drugs have moved to clinical trials with human patients. Daniel Promislow, a University of Washington professor of medicine and pathology, told me that when he got into the field three decades ago, researchers talked hopefully about early developments someday making it to the lab. “Fast forward 25, 30 years, and many of these lab-based discoveries are now at the heart of a large number of clinical trials,” he said. The clinical trials could allow researchers to produce evidence for interventions — besides diet, exercise, and sleep — that might help people live longer. Coleen T. Murphy, professor of molecular biology at Princeton, wrote in her 2023 book How We Age that, “What drugs can I take to live longer?” is becoming an increasingly tangible goal. “A few years ago I might have chuckled at the naivety of this question,” she wrote, “but now it’s not so crazy to think that we will be able to take some sort of medicine to extend our healthy lifespans in the foreseeable future.” The horizon for this future is still far off. Most researchers I spoke to didn’t believe that humans were going to experience a rapid increase in life expectancy any time soon — or maybe ever. They believed progress would instead be made in healthspan, helping people stay healthier for longer and avoiding long periods of physical and cognitive decline as they get older. Such results probably won’t lead to someone living an extra decade. But they could make old age less burdensome. That would matter enormously for individuals, who could enjoy more years in good health, and society, by potentially reducing the high costs of late-in-life medical care. “I can’t fathom saying, ‘Yeah, we’re going to try to extend someone’s lifespan by nine years,’” An told me. “There’s really no way to do that.” Behind the hype, longevity research is moving — but slowly In a way, some of the biggest improvements to human lifespans have already been made. Initiatives in public health — water sanitation, vaccination campaigns, sewage systems — have added decades to the average person’s life over the past few centuries. Since 1900, the average lifespan of a newborn has more than doubled worldwide — from 32 years old to 71 years old. But the very fact that humans already live far longer than a lab animal is part of the reason that longevity research is so slow and difficult. For experimental purposes, laboratory mice live less than three years. Researchers have tested rapamycin in both young and old mice at a range of doses and then waited for them to die. Doing the same in humans would be far more expensive and take much longer. It’s also not strictly legal. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t classify aging as a disease, which means that clinical trials can’t set out solely to test how much longer an intervention keeps someone alive. Instead, researchers must study age-related indicators like cardiovascular function and cognitive impairment instead of “aging” itself. To compensate, longevity researchers are looking for other ways to measure aging that don’t require a patient’s death. They have identified several biomarkers that could serve as surrogate endpoints, but none have reached a scientific consensus. These include “aging clocks,” predictive models that purport to measure biological age or the age of specific biological organs; Bryan Johnson, the multimillionaire tech founder who calls himself a “professional rejuvenation athlete,” touts such data as proof that he has reversed his aging. These tests are ostensibly based on the research of Steve Horvath, a former professor at UCLA who now works at Altos Labs. He has used age-related DNA methylation to determine biological age. Though most researchers I spoke to expressed cautious optimism about the potential of Horvath’s findings, they were skeptical of the extant consumer tests. “We’re not really sure if the age we tell you is accurate and if it’s going to be the same tomorrow and whether it has any value,” said Tony Wyss-Coray, a Stanford professor of neurology who has found that elderly mice given the blood of younger mice see improvements in brain function. “And of course, no company wants to tell you that, but that’s just a fact.” Most longevity researchers think about their research environment the same way: The flashiest stories are usually pretty removed from the actual state of the field. A drug that just helped mice live 50 percent longer is unlikely to do exactly the same for humans, no matter what a press release implies. Human bodies are much better at repairing their DNA than mice are, which makes them less susceptible to diseases like cancer. Plus, studies that would definitively prove a certain intervention would aid human life would take decades, and experts believe they could struggle to demonstrate their effectiveness to the FDA. “You’ll rarely find a scientist funded by the [National Institutes of Health] who’s doing work in the biology of aging who would claim that their research could or will allow people to live to 140,” Rando told me. “It’s really coalesced around the idea that our main successes will be in reducing the burden of disease.” It reflects a realism among the real experts. In longevity, there is not going to be a moment when a chrysalis bursts and a butterfly flies out, Miller said, a sudden leap forward in people’s life expectancy. “It’s more like the evolution of land plants. Gradually, they creep up over the beach, and then onto the meadow and then into the meadows. This is sort of creeping through the scientific community — too slowly.” According to many researchers, part of the reason for the relatively slow progress in longevity treatments is lack of funding in the field. For all the flashy announcements about companies like Calico and Altos Labs, academic researchers struggle to find financial support. The National Institute on Aging, the NIH division that funds research on the aging process, projects that it will spend about 9 percent of its budget on the biology of aging in 2024 and just under 60 percent on neuroscience-specific research. (The NIA’s total projected budget in 2024 is about $4.4 billion of the NIH’s $47.1 billion.) Promislow and Kaeberlein, who co-run a long-term study on biological and environmental factors that could contribute to aging in dogs, are currently fighting to keep their project alive with their NIH funding expected to end in June. “I think there’s an assumption by a lot of people that there’s a ton of money in aging research,” Murphy told me. “If you’re an academic trying to get funding from the NIH, it’s actually not true.” The lack of funding also draws university researchers out of their scholarly institutions and to companies like Calico and Altos Labs. “The idea of working with very smart people with lots of resources, all that’s really attractive,” Miller told me. But that drift to the private sector could actually slow down aging research, already a sluggish endeavor, even more in the long run. The field is trending toward investor-driven research, while the basic research studies necessary for the next generation of possible interventions languish because they depend on public or philanthropic funding. Drugs like rapamycin have already taken decades to enter clinical trials, but it’s possible that none of the current leading longevity candidates work. Researchers don’t even agree on which of the current drugs and interventions is the most promising: Miller, for example, told me he thinks that rapamycin is “the wrong drug” and that more funding should go to canagliflozin, which has increased median survival age in male mice by 14 percent and for which human side effects are better known due to its use in treating type 2 diabetes since 2013. Still, he doesn’t think it’s easy, “from our limited amount of knowledge, to be confident as to whether rapamycin, or canagliflozin, or any other promising drug would produce major benefits in people with acceptably low side effects.” Most aging-related biotechnology companies use investor money to test aging interventions already proven in mice. Few are conducting the basic research to find new possible pathways for future therapies. The more aging-related pathways scientists can find, the more possible targets for longevity drugs they would have. Each discovery opens the possibility for new interventions. Kaeberlein said that though the field has expanded in terms of the number of studies on certain drugs and mechanistic pathways, it’s also become in a sense more narrow. “We think, ‘This is how the system works. So we’re going to test these parts of the model,’ instead of the more exploratory science that was being done when I was a graduate student, which was, ‘We have no frickin’ clue how the system works. Let’s go do some unbiased screens to figure out what’s happening here,’” he said. Longevity researchers may be playing in a tiny corner of the sandbox, investigating just a few pathways while ignoring other possibilities. Scientists blame such myopia for the long gap between breakthroughs. The most consistently effective intervention for extending animal lifespan has been known for decades: restricting the number of calories they eat. “I think that shift in mentality has led to more incremental results and fewer big, exciting, new discoveries,” said Kaeberlein, “and I think, personally, that’s why nobody has done better than rapamycin in 15 years and no one has done better than caloric restriction in 50 years.” There’s also the possibility that drugs that have worked consistently across different species will work for some humans but not others. “The vast majority of studies in our field are done in one genetically identical strain of mouse,” Rando said. “It’s sort of like running a clinical trial in humans and only using identical twins. … Even if something could work, it’s likely to work in a subset of the population and not in everybody.” Oddly, even the most brazen of the (non-expert) anti-aging boosters have uninspiring perceptions of the current state of longevity research. I was surprised when Bryan Johnson explained to me that, despite having a team of doctors who track the age of his organs and feed him a daily canister of pills, his choices weren’t really made based on today’s advancements in health and wellness. He instead puts his faith in the continued evolution of artificial intelligence capabilities, which has advanced greatly over the past few years. He sees AI continuing to develop at an exponential rate — and longevity research eventually progressing at a more rapid speed than human researchers could hope to replicate. “It’s an observation that we are baby steps away from super intelligence,” Johnson told me, “and it’s improving at a speed that we can’t imagine.” It’s that, he hopes, that will bring about eternal life. The mice studies are less relevant. A more realistic future for the longevity field Immortality is enticing, but it’s not coming anytime soon. Neither is living to 150. Some people — hopefully more than now — will live to 100, but they will still be the exception. The way longevity research might push the field forward could look very similar to the treatments we already have. For people with a high risk of cardiovascular disease, statins are a sort of longevity drug. For those dealing with certain cancers, chemotherapy can be considered a longevity treatment. The future of longevity likely looks more like the world where we discover that rapamycin — a drug that can extend the lives of mice and help humans accept a new organ — can also treat elderly patients for periodontal disease. It could mean that people take a blood sugar-regulating drug like canagliflozin and suffer from fewer heart attacks and cancers. “I don’t really care about life extension because there’s no way to measure it,” An said. “It’s really about your health.” Even in slow motion, the field keeps advancing. Murphy told me she was excited to see trial results from the longevity company Unity Biotechnology back in 2020. The drug UBX0101, which interacts with a tumor-suppressing pathway, cleared a phase 1 clinical trial. When it moved to phase 2, though, it failed to achieve its aim of helping patients with osteoarthritis of the knee. A success could have been a promising sign for treatments to get rid of non-dividing senescent cells. But even a failure was valuable. It might not have been the result that anyone wanted, but it was a result, and it was public. “That’s progress for our field,” she told me. “This is moving forward.”

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) walking the halls of Congress. | Nathan Howard/Getty Images Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis banned cell-cultivated or “lab-grown” meat. Why did Democratic Senator John Fetterman lend his support? Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law to ban cell-cultivated or “lab-grown” meat from the Sunshine State. “Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere,” DeSantis said. “We’re not doing that in the state of Florida.” Cell-cultivated meat is made by feeding animal cells a mix of nutrients to produce real meat without slaughtering an animal. It’s an emerging technology — billed as a solution to factory farming’s enormous carbon footprint and horrific animal treatment — and was approved last June by the US Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture as safe to eat and legal to sell. But it remains far from commercial viability and is not available for sale anywhere in the US. DeSantis banned the technology to protect Florida’s farmers and ranchers from future competition. But it was also a culture war win for the governor, as meat has become a hot topic in the right wing’s conspiracy-laden politics. The day DeSantis signed the bill, he posted a bizarre image on X accusing the World Economic Forum of an authoritarian plot to force people to eat cell-cultivated meat. The ban, unsurprisingly, earned DeSantis praise from fellow Republicans. But in a rare moment of political unity, a Democratic member of Congress supported the ban, too: Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. “Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron, but I co-sign this,” Fetterman posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, last week about the Florida ban. “As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.” Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron, but I co-sign this. As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers. pic.twitter.com/zZLYf8t5lI— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) May 2, 2024 (I’ve tried cell-cultivated chicken and it tastes like, well, chicken — not slop.) This isn’t the first time Fetterman has spoken out against various forms of alternative meat. He’s also co-sponsored a slate of bills supported by factory farm trade groups. Those include bills to ban plant-based egg and dairy companies from using words like “egg” and “dairy,” and to set restrictions on what plant-based meat companies can write on their labels. Fetterman’s office declined an on-the-record interview request for this story and didn’t respond to detailed questions. “The Senator has heard from constituents on this issue, and that’s what informs his views…All of this comes down to consumer choice and transparency,” a spokesperson said in an email, adding that Fetterman has introduced legislation to increase access to soy milk in school cafeterias. The soy milk legislation is important, especially since so many kids can’t digest lactose. But supporting a ban on cell-cultivated meat reduces rather than expands consumer choice. DeSantis’s ban goes against the Republican party’s free market platitudes, though it fits neatly into his culture war agenda. But it may seem odd that Fetterman lent his support. While the Democratic party doesn’t have much to say about meat alternatives, the nascent sector aligns with many of the party’s stated values and goals. Plant- and cell-based meat startups offer an alternative to the factory farm system, which produces virtually all of America’s meat, dairy, and eggs, and is a leading contributor to climate change, air and water pollution, pandemic risk, labor abuse, and animal torture. So why is Fetterman so opposed to slaughter-free meat? If you don’t like cell-cultivated meat factories, you really won’t like factory farms Allying with factory farming business interests will help Fetterman appear more moderate in the swing state of Pennsylvania — the state ranks high in dairy and egg production, and farm-state politicians tend to side with agribusiness. And it’s a move that’s relatively safe for a Democrat to take. Despite the widespread damage that factory farming inflicts on society, Americans of both parties eat lots of meat and dairy. Farmers and ranchers hold a mythic status in American culture, and questioning their practices or calling for even modest regulation is politically dangerous, even for Democrats. Fetterman’s opposition may also be explained by the “naturalistic fallacy”: the notion that anything “natural” — real animals slaughtered for food — is good, while anything new and “artificial,” like cell-cultivated meat, is bad. That was evident in a follow-up to his post in support of DeSantis’s ban, where he shared a picture of a bioreactor used to make cell-cultivated meat with a caption that read “btw, this is the thing that makes lab meat.” btw, this is the thing that makes lab meat pic.twitter.com/4GZIt4SnNN— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) May 3, 2024 Users on X mocked the post, with many sharing photos of similar stainless steel machines used to make all manner of agricultural products, like milk, cheese, beer, and coffee. Some also replied with pictures of factory farms and slaughterhouses — images far more disturbing than a cell-cultivated meat factory. I assume ordinary sausages are made in a manner all would enjoy seeing. https://t.co/Vl2cxp2qkZ— Sridhar Ramesh (@RadishHarmers) May 3, 2024 Any critique of novel food technology must also include an honest reckoning with what it seeks to replace: in this case, conventional meat production, a highly industrialized system that depends on a slew of horrific practices, including: Feeding cattle chicken feces Feeding pigs feces from other pigs Forcibly impregnating animals (this is technically bestiality but most states have exempted it for agricultural purposes) Ripping out female shrimps’ eyes so they lay more eggs Force-feeding ducks Grinding up male chicks alive because they can’t lay eggs This list just skims the surface. Factory farming also commits widespread environmental pollution and subjects its workers to dangerous conditions on the farm and in slaughterhouses, where people lose fingers and limbs and some reportedly wear diapers because bathroom breaks are so limited. Many Democrats side with the factory farming industry. It won’t age well. I’d venture to guess that Fetterman’s membership of the US Senate Agriculture committee should give him a clear picture of what meat, dairy, and egg production entails, so his behavior can likely be chalked up to cold political calculation. Will it work? It’s hard to know what exactly consumers think about cell-cultivated meat, because poll methodology has varied widely, and it’s a hard issue to poll on — most people don’t know what it is and it’s not available for purchase. But we do know that most Americans are uncomfortable with factory farms, and when they have an opportunity at the ballot box to stop its cruelest practices, like locking pigs and egg-laying hens in tiny cages, they tend to take it, whether it’s in a red, purple, or blue state. Animal agriculture accounts for 15 to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and is under increasing pressure to shrink its environmental footprint. It’s poised to be one of the next fronts in the fight against climate change, and alternative meat technologies could help achieve significant emissions reductions the same way electric vehicles and heat pumps can get us off fossil fuels. While we’ve come to expect Republicans to stand in the way of technological solutions to clean up the environment, Fetterman’s opposition to alternative meat and dairy — and that of others in his party — suggests we may need to brace ourselves for some Democrats to join them. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Despite increasing H5N1 flu concerns, self-interest appears to be trumping the common good as the world negotiates a pandemic treaty. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images A post-Covid pandemic treaty was supposed to be a breakthrough. Instead, it looks like a disappointment. The simmering fears over bird flu should leave no doubt: The health of humans and our fellow animals is inextricably linked. Covid-19 was likely transmitted from animals to humans, and millions died as a result. The world is now anxiously watching for any sign that H5N1, i.e., the bird flu, could cause another pandemic so soon after the last one. For years, public health experts have preached the importance of a One Health philosophy: treating the health of the environment, animals, and human beings as a single issue that requires a comprehensive approach because the health of one affects the others. On the ground, however, it remains a work in progress; the slow implementation of livestock surveillance for bird flu is only the latest example of that struggle. The world’s nations are currently negotiating a pandemic treaty that was supposed to prevent humanity from repeating the mistakes of Covid-19. In particular, the agreement was seen as an opportunity to put those One Health principles into practice. But we might miss our chance. As the pandemic fades into memory, self-interest appears to be winning out over global cooperation. What the world could do — and what it seems like it’ll do instead In December 2021, the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the World Health Organization, announced that it would “draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument … to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.” The goal was to create a binding international agreement that would compel countries around the world to take steps to prevent future pandemics and, should those efforts fail, to ensure smoother coordination in any future public health emergency. Negotiators are supposed to largely wrap up their work by Friday, May 10. Representatives from the world’s governments will convene in Geneva on May 27 for the World Health Assembly. The plan is for the pandemic accord to be ratified before the assembly adjourns. Even with the threat of H5N1 looming, however, it has become clear the world is downsizing its ambitions for the treaty. In place of firm commitments are vague aspirations. On two important sections — the One Health measures and the establishment of a system to share pathogens between countries — the latest draft text would defer momentous operational decisions until at least 2026. One Health has been one of the major points of contention: Rich countries want it because it would lead to a significant investment in disease surveillance in poorer countries, where it is easier for threatening pathogens to lurk unnoticed. But poorer countries dislike it for the same reason, arguing it amounts to a massive unfunded mandate placed on them. “It’s a vital step to reduce future pandemic risks. But achieving this demands substantial and costly changes,” Suerie Moon, co-director of the Global Health Centre (GHC) at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, told Geneva Solutions. “It requires changing how we raise livestock and animals.” Comparing the text of an October 2023 draft of the treaty and the most recent draft reveals the dwindling ambition. In the earlier version, there were specific commitments that called for stronger animal surveillance, more research and more education for health workers and communities, and a “whole of government” and “whole of society” approach. In the latest draft, much of that language has been removed. Governments are given more leeway to “promote” and “engage” One Health principles as they see fit. The problem is — again — money. No one wants another pandemic. But no one wants to pay up to prevent one. Poor countries already spend significantly less money on health care than wealthy nations. Historically, long-term economic growth has been the way to increase health expenditures. If developed nations want developing ones to make new investments now, the middle and low-income countries argue that the rich countries should be willing to help pay for it. But at the same time they are demanding One Health investments, those rich nations are balking at a proposal that would help the world identify and fight potentially dangerous pathogens. I wrote about this issue in late February. It’s called pathogen access and benefit sharing (PABS). The idea is that rich countries or the pharma manufacturers should pay for access to pathogens of concern that are identified in developing countries and commit to sharing the benefits derived from that access — i.e., diagnostics and vaccines that are ultimately produced — with those poorer countries. That provision has been a priority for the developing world after the pandemic, when Covid-19 vaccines were slow to reach low-income nations in Africa and the rest of the world. But the rich countries don’t like it. They, along with the pharmaceutical companies they represent, argue such a system would be too bureaucratic and risk slowing down innovation in a future public health emergency. Some experts have noted the irony of the US and Europe insisting on unfettered access to pathogens from low-income countries at the same time the US government is facing criticism for being slow to share data about H5N1. “The situation with avian influenza across the United States exemplifies the inherent hypocrisy and vested economic interests around Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response,” Dr. Christian Walzer, executive director of health at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in a statement. “While the Global North is demanding transparent and rapid access to pathogen data from the Global South … it seems unwilling to share such information with the world.” The two issues have become entwined in last-minute horse-trading. Based on the latest reporting, developed countries are trying to force a compromise by dangling PABS in exchange for the One Health provisions. But as of now, the most likely outcome appears to be, at best, a symbolic commitment to One Health principles and a directive to reach an agreement on more specific provisions in the next two years. Such a disappointing resolution, even as concerns about bird flu grow, is symptomatic of the world’s struggles to apply the lessons of Covid-19. As the urgency with which the negotiations began continues to fade, self-interest and geopolitical rivalries are standing in the way of making the world safer from pandemics. Let’s hope we don’t pay the price for that shortsightedness. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

A December 2023 photo shows a Palestinian girl injured as a result of the Israeli bombing on Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. | Saher Alghorra/Middle East images/AFP via Getty Images AI nudges us to prioritize speed and scale. In Gaza, it’s turbocharging mass bombing. Israel has reportedly been using AI to guide its war in Gaza — and treating its decisions almost as gospel. In fact, one of the AI systems being used is literally called “The Gospel.” According to a major investigation published last month by the Israeli outlet +972 Magazine, Israel has been relying on AI to decide whom to target for killing, with humans playing an alarmingly small role in the decision-making, especially in the early stages of the war. The investigation, which builds on a previous exposé by the same outlet, describes three AI systems working in concert. “Gospel” marks buildings that it says Hamas militants are using. “Lavender,” which is trained on data about known militants, then trawls through surveillance data about almost everyone in Gaza — from photos to phone contacts — to rate each person’s likelihood of being a militant. It puts those who get a higher rating on a kill list. And “Where’s Daddy?” tracks these targets and tells the army when they’re in their family homes, an Israeli intelligence officer told +972, because it’s easier to bomb them there than in a protected military building. The result? According to the Israeli intelligence officers interviewed by +972, some 37,000 Palestinians were marked for assassination, and thousands of women and children have been killed as collateral damage because of AI-generated decisions. As +972 wrote, “Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians,” which began soon after Hamas’s deadly attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7. The use of AI could partly explain the high death toll in the war — at least 34,735 killed to date — which has sparked international criticism of Israel and even charges of genocide before the International Court of Justice. Although there is still a “human in the loop” — tech-speak for a person who affirms or contradicts the AI’s recommendation — Israeli soldiers told +972 that they essentially treated the AI’s output “as if it were a human decision,” sometimes only devoting “20 seconds” to looking over a target before bombing, and that the army leadership encouraged them to automatically approve Lavender’s kill lists a couple weeks into the war. This was “despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as ‘errors’ in approximately 10 percent of cases,” according to +972. The Israeli army denied that it uses AI to select human targets, saying instead that it has a “database whose purpose is to cross-reference intelligence sources.” But UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply troubled” by the reporting, and White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said the US was looking into it. How should the rest of us think about AI’s role in Gaza? While AI proponents often say that technology is neutral (“it’s just a tool”) or even argue that AI will make warfare more humane (“it’ll help us be more precise”), Israel’s reported use of military AI arguably shows just the opposite. “Very often these weapons are not used in such a precise manner,” Elke Schwarz, a political theorist at Queen Mary University of London who studies the ethics of military AI, told me. “The incentives are to use the systems at large scale and in ways that expand violence rather than contract it.” Schwarz argues that our technology actually shapes the way we think and what we come to value. We think we’re running our tech, but to some degree, it’s running us. Last week, I spoke to her about how military AI systems can lead to moral complacency, prompt users toward action over non-action, and nudge people to prioritize speed over deliberative ethical reasoning. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows. Sigal Samuel Were you surprised to learn that Israel has reportedly been using AI systems to help direct its war in Gaza? Elke Schwarz No, not at all. There have been reports for years saying that it’s very likely that Israel has AI-enabled weapons of various kinds. And they’ve made it quite clear that they’re developing these capabilities and considering themselves as one of the most advanced digital military forces globally, so there’s no secret around this pursuit. Systems like Lavender or even Gospel are not surprising because if you just look at the US’s Project Maven [the Defense Department’s flagship AI project], that started off as a video analysis algorithm and now it’s become a target recommendation system. So, we’ve always thought it was going to go in that direction and indeed it did. Sigal Samuel One thing that struck me was just how uninvolved the human decision-makers seem to be. An Israeli military source said he would devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing. Did that surprise you? Elke Schwarz No, that didn’t either. Because the conversation in militaries over the last five years was that the idea is to accelerate the “kill chain” — to use AI to increase the fatality. The phrase that’s always used is “to shorten the sensor-to-shooter timeline,” which basically means to make it really fast from the input to when some weapon gets fired. The allure and the attraction of these AI systems is that they operate so fast, and at such vast scales, suggesting many, many targets within a short period of time. So that the human just kind of becomes an automaton that presses the button and is like, “Okay, I guess that looks right.” Defense publications have always said Project Convergence, another US [military] program, is really designed to shorten that sensor-to-shooter timeline from minutes to seconds. So having 20 seconds fits quite clearly into what has been reported for years. Sigal Samuel For me, this brings up questions about technological determinism, the idea that our technology determines how we think and what we value. As the military scholar Christopher Coker once said, “We must choose our tools carefully, not because they are inhumane (all weapons are) but because the more we come to rely on them, the more they shape our view of the world.” You wrote something reminiscent of that in a 2021 paper: “When AI and human reasoning form an ecosystem, the possibility for human control is limited.” What did you mean by that? How does AI curtail human agency or reshape us as moral agents? Elke Schwarz In a number of ways. One is about the cognitive load. With all the data that is being processed, you kind of have to place your trust in the machine’s decision. First, because we don’t know what data is gathered and exactly how it then applies to the model. But also, there’s a cognitive disparity between the way the human brain processes things and the way an AI system makes a calculation. This leads to what we call “automation bias,” which is basically that as humans we tend to defer to the machines’ authority, because we assume that they’re better, faster, and cognitively more powerful than us. Another thing is situational awareness. What is the data that is incoming? What is the algorithm? Is there a bias in it? These are all questions that an operator or any human in the loop should have knowledge about but mostly don’t have knowledge about, which then limits their own situational awareness about the context over which they should have oversight. If everything you know is presented to you on a screen of data and points and graphics, then you take that for granted, but your own sense of what the situation is on the battlefield becomes very limited. And then there’s the element of speed. AI systems are simply so fast that we don’t have enough [mental] resources to not take what they’re suggesting as a call to action. We don’t have the wherewithal to intervene on the grounds of human reasoning. It’s like how your phone is designed in a way that makes you feel like you need to react — like, when a red dot pops up in your email, your first instinct is to click on it, not to not click on it! So there’s a tendency to prompt users toward action over non-action. And the fact is that if a binary choice is presented, kill or not kill, and you’re in a situation of urgency, you’re probably more likely to act and release the weapon. Sigal Samuel How does this relate to what the philosopher Shannon Vallor calls “moral de-skilling” — her term for when technology negatively affects our moral cultivation? Elke Schwarz There’s an inherent tension between moral deliberation, or thinking about the consequences of our actions, and the mandate of speed and scale. Ethics is about deliberation, about taking the time to say, “Are these really the parameters we want, or is what we’re doing just going to lead to more civilian casualties?” If you’re not given the space or the time to exercise these moral ideas that every military should have and does normally have, then you’re becoming an automaton. You’re basically saying, “I’m part of the machine. Moral calculations happen somewhere prior by some other people, but it’s no longer my responsibility.” Sigal Samuel This ties into another thing I’ve been wondering about, which is the question of intent. In international law contexts like the genocide trial against Israel, showing intent among human decision-makers is key. But how should we think about intent when decisions are outsourced to AI? If tech reshapes our cognition, does it become harder to say who is morally responsible for a wrongful act in war that was recommended by an AI system? Elke Schwarz There’s one objection that says, well, humans are always somewhere in the loop, because they’re at least making the decision to use these AI systems. But that’s not the be-all, end-all of moral responsibility. In something as morally weighty as warfare, there are multiple nodes of responsibility — there are lots of morally problematic points in the decision-making. And when you have a system that distributes the intent, then with any subsystem, you have plausible deniability. You can say, well, our intent was this, then the AI system does that, and the outcome is what you see. So it’s hard to attribute intent and that makes it very, very challenging. The machine doesn’t give interviews. Sigal Samuel Since AI is a general-purpose technology that can be used for a multitude of purposes, some beneficial and some harmful, how can we try to foretell where AI is going to do more harm than good and try to prevent those uses? Elke Schwarz Every tool can be refashioned to become a weapon. If you’re vicious enough, even a pillow can be a weapon. You can kill somebody with a pillow. We’re not going to prohibit all pillows. But if the trajectory in society is such that it seems there’s a tendency to use pillows for nefarious purposes, and access to pillows is really easy, and in fact some people are designing pillows that are made for smothering people, then yes, you should ask some questions! That requires paying attention to society, its trends and its tendencies. You can’t bury your head in the sand. And at this point, there are enough reports out there about the ways in which AI is used for problematic purposes. People say all the time that AI will make warfare more ethical. It was the claim with drones, too — that we have surveillance, so we can be a lot more precise, and we don’t have to throw cluster bombs or have a large air campaign. And of course there’s something to that. But very often these weapons are not used in such a precise manner. Making the application of violence a lot easier actually lowers the threshold to the use of violence. The incentives are to use the systems at large scale and in ways that expand violence rather than contract it. Sigal Samuel That was what I found most striking about the +972 investigations — that instead of contracting violence, Israel’s alleged AI systems expanded it. The Lavender system marked 37,000 Palestinians as targets for assassination. Once the army has the technological capacity to do that, the soldiers come under pressure to keep up with it. One senior source told +972: “We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us. We finished [killing] our targets very quickly.” Elke Schwarz It’s kind of a capitalist logic, isn’t it? It’s the logic of the conveyor belt. It says we need more — more data, more action. And if that is related to killing, it’s really problematic.

AI is supposed to help militaries make precise strikes. Is that the case in Gaza? Israel’s war with Hamas, in response to the attacks of October 7, 2023, has led to more fatalities than in any previous Israeli war, with at least 34,000 Palestinians killed as of May 7, 2024. In Israel’s 2014 war in Gaza, just over 1,400 were killed. One factor in that difference is the use of artificial intelligence. Israel’s incorporation of AI in warfare has been public for years through both defensive and offensive weapons. But in this war, AI is being deployed differently: It’s generating bombing targets. The promise of AI in a military context is to enhance strike precision and accuracy, but over the past few months Israeli outlets +972 magazine and Local Call have revealed that the multiple AI systems that help the IDF select targets in Gaza have contributed to the highest number of Palestinian civilian deaths and injuries ever. In our video, we interview multiple experts to understand how two specific systems, Gospel and Lavender, operate, and we explore the broader implications of current and future AI use in warfare.

Bambie Thug, Ireland’s entry to Eurovision this year, calls herself a “ouija popstar” and a witch. | Jens Büttner/Picture Alliance via Getty Images Eurovision doesn’t want to be about Israel-Palestine, but amid protests and boycotts, it might not have a choice. For taxonomic purposes, Eurovision is an international song contest. Technically, the European Broadcast Union (EBU) created the event in 1956 to foster post-WWII European unity, but has largely expanded beyond that function and Europe itself, with countries like Australia and Israel participating. The closest reference point for people in the US is American Idol, the extremely popular reality television singing contest that once crowned national treasure Kelly Clarkson. Think: polarizing and sometimes very disparate musical acts from each represented country, a public vote, and a night of live performances, but with the added elements like spooky Austrian comedy and whispers of devious Swedish sabotage. Is there any better way to symbolically present peace than getting in costume and singing a silly pop song in a lighthearted musical competition? What if I told you that there is no prize money for the winning country’s band — only bragging rights, a trophy, and national hosting duties for the next Eurovision? There is absolutely nothing like Eurovision. With nothing and seemingly everything on the line, Eurovision has become an international spectacle, perhaps the international spectacle aside from the Olympics. It’s a fantasy that both undergirds and undermines everything you think you know about Europe and pop music. But as we gear up for another chapter of ostentatious music acts sing-fighting for zero money, the biggest story heading into this week’s (May 7 to May 11) contest in Malmo, Sweden, threatens that escapist reputation. Protests over Israel’s participation have punctuated the lead-up to the event, with activists asserting that Israel should be barred, given its military assault in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands. It’s far from the first time that politics and war have made their mark on the proceedings, but now Eurovision faces a huge question over its existence, its history, and who is and isn’t allowed to take part in a competition that’s supposed to really be about European novelty. Eurovision can’t be replicated Eurovision usually bends toward more conventional, meaningful winners like last year’s Loreen (who has won twice), 2016’s Jamala, and 2021’s Måneskin. ABBA and Celine Dion have also won the competition, and are its most famous alums. This year the UK’s Olly Alexander, from the successful pop band Years & Years, seems like a ringer. But the winners only tell part of Eurovision’s story. Eurovision can feel vaguely psychedelic, which is what makes it a joy to behold. And the contest is at its best when it leans into unmitigated absurdity and the unexpected. Take, for example, Austria’s 2023 entry: “Who the Hell is Edgar?” by Teya & Salena. The female duo met on Starmania, a talent show in their native country, and wrote “Who The Hell is Edgar?” to address “an industry that all too often doesn’t give women enough credit for their hard work and expertise,” according to the official Eurovision website. So how did Teya and Salena use their talents to discuss an industry that overlooks the female experience? “Who the Hell is Edgar?” is about Teya and Salena being possessed by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, that Edgar Allan Poe. Instead of writing another short story like “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Raven,” Poe has commandeered their bodies to write a fantastic pop song that they believe will make them rich and famous. At one point in the tune, a spooky pop polka, the two wish that they could wrangle Shakespeare and get him to ghostwrite an even bigger hit. But alas, because it’s so hard to make money in the music business — they sing that they can only make “$0.003” per listen — not even these famous ghosts could make the women stars. Pop music today doesn’t usually make room for the kind of camp storytelling that characterizes “Who the hell is Edgar?” but it works in Eurovision. There, weirdness and cheekiness is celebrated. This is, after all, a competition that has had entries like DJ BoBo’s “Vampires Are Alive” (Switzerland) and Verka Serduchka’s “Dancing Lasha Tumbai” (Ukraine), a techno-inflected pop-folk number where the performers looked like someone zapped The Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man with a Liberace laser beam: How Eurovision winners are crowned As my colleague Zack Beauchamp has previously detailed, voting is split between a popular call-in vote from the public and a jury that consists of music industry professionals from each participating country. Thirty-seven participants will compete in semifinal rounds — beginning on May 7 — in hopes of qualifying for one of the 26 total spots in the grand final on May 11. Jury voting is like Olympic judging, with each country giving out a maximum of 12 points (and all the way down to one) to the twelve best of the night in the grand finale. Sometimes, the jury vote — the vote from music professionals — doesn’t exactly coincide with the televote. Last year, the judges picked Loreen from Sweden’s “Tattoo”, while the public selected Käärijä from Finland’s “Cha Cha Cha” as the best of the night. The jury placed Finland fourth, which spawned a conspiracy theory about rigging Sweden’s win so the country could host in 2024, the 50th anniversary of when ABBA won. The low-ish stakes make for a fun bit of drama, but the disconnect between the jury and the popular vote has led to questions about why the jury votes have as much sway as the millions of calls coming through. Perhaps they shouldn’t; the winner would likely be a little more out of the box if the more conventional jury votes didn’t carry equal weight. Sweden’s alleged rigging is also not unlike some previous bits of Eurovision history, like the time Switzerland picked noted Canadian Celine Dion to represent the famously neutral country in 1988. Rules at the time did not specify that a singer had to be born in the country they represented, and Dion was a burgeoning star internationally. Dion, of course, won the whole thing. That said, while Eurovision is a “competition” and a winner is crowned, megastars like ABBA and Dion are exceptional exceptions of Eurovision victors. Eurovision winners don’t usually become worldwide superstars. The list of winners — 1982’s Nicole? 2002’s Marie N? 2006’s Lordi — are probably blue Wikipedia links for normies. That should underscore the idea that Eurovision is really about the entertainment of the night, the stunts, the scintillating swing for the fences, rather than the actual score. Can Eurovision still be fun this year if the biggest story about Eurovision is Israel-Palestine? Ahead of the competition in Malmo, the lead-up to Eurovision this year has been a series of protests and proposed boycotts against Israel’s participation in this year’s competition. The gist: Israel should not be allowed to participate in Eurovision because of its continued attacks in Gaza. A country at war shouldn’t perform at an event about unity and peace. The opposition to Israel’s inclusion — Israel has participated in Eurovision since 1973 — isn’t without precedent. Critics of Israel’s participation point out that just two years ago, Eurovision disallowed Russia in a similar situation. Olafur Steinar Rye Gestsson/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images Ahead of Eurovision, protesters have called on the event to ban Israel’s participation and viewers to boycott the event entirely. On February 25, 2022, Eurovision banned Russia a day after its invasion of Ukraine. At the time state broadcasters from participating countries like Iceland, Finland, Norway, and The Netherlands called for Russia’s ban, which the EBU ultimately granted, citing Eurovision’s mission to protect “the values of a cultural competition which promotes international exchange and understanding” and saying that the event “unites Europe on one stage.” Speaking on the ban, Eurovision’s executive supervisor Martin Österdahl said that Russia’s exclusion was a decision about upholding the core values of democracy and human rights core to the event’s spirit. “When we say we are not political, what we always should stand up for are the basic and ultimate values of democracy. Everyone is right to be who they are,” he said in December 2022. Since then, Russia has suspended its EBU membership and has not returned to the competition. Earlier this year, more than 1,000 Swedish artists called for Israel’s ban. Similarly, Finnish and Icelandic musicians have also called on Eurovision to block Israel’s entry, stating that by allowing their participation “a country that commits war crimes and continues a military occupation is given a public stage to polish its image in the name of music.” Fans are also making pleas to Eurovision participants not to compete this year because of Israel’s participation, and Sweden has ramped up security in anticipation of protests. Yet, the ongoing protests and calls for action haven’t convinced the EBU or Eurovision organizers. A young singer named Eden Golan will represent Israel and sing “Hurricane.” The song’s original rejected title was “October Rain,” a not-so-veiled reference to the October 7 Hamas attacks. EBU officials rejected the title and asked Israel to alter the song before re-entry. “I think it’s important for Israel to appear in Eurovision, and this is also a statement because there are haters who try to drive us off every stage,” Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said in February. Before altering its lyrics, Israel had threatened to withdraw from the competition. According to EBU Director General Noel Curran, Eurovision is a competition between international broadcasters and not the countries themselves. “It is not a contest between governments,” he said, adding that though the EBU and Eurovision made a decision on Russia, it was not going to do so for Israel. “Comparisons between wars and conflicts are complex and difficult and, as a non-political media organization, not ours to make,” he said. While Curran insists that the contest will be apolitical, its actions might not be interpreted as such. Palestinian flags will not be allowed at the competition nor will any pro-Palestinian symbols or signs referring to Israel and Hamas’s war. The Israeli flag will be allowed because it’s a member state and only participants’ flags are permitted, with the exception being rainbow and LGBTQ flags. The rules of what’s allowed to be shown and who’s allowed to support whom make for a jumbled message. Obviously no one expected Eurovision to solve the crisis in the Middle East. But in an attempt to appear apolitical and actively not reference the bloodshed, Eurovision organizers have made their decisions difficult to ignore and this event even harder to enjoy.