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Dozens of used electric-vehicle batteries were stacked like cordwood on pallets in a warehouse-style building about 30 miles east of Reno, Nevada, when I visited the site last week.The batteries were bound for an assembly line that would begin the chemical process of recycling up to 95 percent of the lithium, cobalt, and nickel they contain. Eventually, after treatment in two more buildings on the site, the metals will become a high-value, fine black powder called cathode active material that is shipped in vacuum-sealed containers to Toyota and Panasonic for the manufacture of new EV batteries.This cutting-edge recycling process has been developed by a company named Redwood Materials. Founded by J. B. Straubel, a former chief technology officer at Tesla, Redwood has invested about $2 billion in this 300-acre facility located in an industrial park in rural Storey County, not far from where Tesla has built a massive “Gigafactory” manufacturing complex.With about 900 employees now on-site, and a workforce of 1,500 expected when the plant is operating at capacity, Redwood’s Nevada facility embodies the economic opportunities spinning off from the environmental imperative to reduce carbon emissions and combat the risk of global climate change.[Read: Biden’s blue-collar bet]The facility is also a testament to the incongruous political dynamics forming around the emerging electric-vehicle industry and the broader transition toward a clean-energy economy.Electric vehicles are being adopted at the fastest rate inside blue-leaning major metropolitan areas. In polls, self-identified Democrats now express much more openness to purchasing an EV than Republicans.Yet counties that Donald Trump won in 2020, such as Nevada’s tiny Storey County, are receiving the most private investment, and the jobs associated with it, in new EV-production facilities, according to a Brookings Metro analysis provided exclusively to The Atlantic.The paradox is that even as those red-leaning places are receiving the greatest direct economic benefits from the EV transition, they have mostly elected Republican House members who voted last year to repeal the new federal tax incentives that have encouraged these investments. These places are also likely to provide most of their votes this fall to Trump, who has pledged to repeal “on day one” all of President Joe Biden’s efforts to accelerate the EV transition.All of this raises doubts about whether it’s sustainable for the emerging EV industry to rely preponderantly on Democratic-leaning places for both its sales and political backing, while providing the greatest economic lift to Republican-leaning places electing political figures hostile to government support for the industry. Put another way: Is red makers for blue takers a viable model for the green economy?“Every industrial order requires policy support, and so you can certainly imagine all sorts of problems if you have a complete disconnect of the production side from the consumption side,” Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, told me.The risk of losing federal support has come as the electric-vehicle industry faces a noticeable slowdown in its previously rapid sales growth. That means the industry could experience even greater disruption if Trump wins and succeeds in repealing the incentives for EV adoption that Biden signed into the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill.If the incentives are rescinded, U.S. companies across the emerging EV industry will find it much more difficult to survive the rising competitive challenge from China, Albert Gore III, the executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me.“The role of public policy in achieving the objective of eventually out-competing China in manufacturing batteries, battery components, and EVs themselves is really significant,” said Gore, the son of the former vice president and environmental advocate Al Gore. “Those two bills have taken existing momentum [in the industry] and accelerated it and magnified it.”At this early stage in the industry’s development, the mismatch between the geography of EV production and consumption—between the makers and takers—could hardly be greater.In its tabulation, Brookings Metro identifies more than $123 billion in U.S. investments in EV plants since Biden took office. Almost exactly 70 percent of that spending has flowed into counties Trump won in 2020, Brookings found.The environmental group Climate Power tracks all private-sector investment in clean energy, including facilities that manufacture components for generating solar and wind electric power, and plants that provide semiconductors for clean-energy products and improvements to the electric grid. In its latest report, the group found that since passage of the IRA, Republican-held House districts had received three-fourths of the total $352 billion in clean-energy investment under that broader definition; the GOP districts had also received 53 percent of all the jobs associated with those investments.In contrast, the places where EVs comprise the largest share of new vehicle registrations are entirely large blue-leaning metropolitan areas, according to a recent New York Times analysis using data from S&P Global Mobility. All six of the metro areas where EVs exceed 20 percent of new registrations are on the West Coast, including five in California and Seattle; other places where EVs have made the most inroads, the Times found, include Portland, Oregon; Denver; Las Vegas; Phoenix; and Washington, D.C. Deep-blue California alone accounts for more than one-third of all U.S. EV registrations.Polling shows that uncertainty about EV costs, reliability, and charging infrastructure is evident among a broad range of Americans. But the partisan gap over EVs remains striking.In Gallup polling this spring, about one-fourth of Democrats said they either own or are seriously considering purchasing an EV; nearly another half of Democrats said they were somewhat open to buying one. But Republican voters have become deeply resistant to EVs; in both the 2023 and 2024 Gallup surveys, about seven in 10 say they would never buy one. Other polling this year has found that while Democrats, by a ratio of about 10 to one, believe that EVs are better for the environment and more energy efficient than gas-powered cars, a plurality of Republicans say that traditional internal-combustion-engine vehicles are better on both counts. Republicans are also far more likely than Democrats to say that gas-powered cars are safer, more reliable, and more affordable to operate. And of course, many more Republicans than Democrats to begin with reject the scientific consensus that carbon emissions are dangerously transforming the environment.Brian Deese, who helped devise Biden’s clean-energy strategy as his first director of the National Economic Council, told me that economics, not politics, explained the geography of EV production. In choosing where to locate their plants, Deese said, companies are not focusing on a community’s political inclinations but rather are looking for places with lots of space, as well as nearby manufacturing and construction capacity. All of those factors, he notes, tend to be most available in communities outside major metro areas that are now preponderantly represented by Republicans. Labor officials would add one other factor: In many cases, companies are locating their new EV facilities in Republican-leaning states with right-to-work laws that impede union organizing.Deese also thinks it’s too soon to assume that Democratic voters will remain the prime market for EVs. Although polls today show such political polarization around EVs, “it’s pretty hard to think of a technology where there was a cheaper, better technology to solve a consumer need and consumers prioritized a cultural or political patina over lower costs and higher quality,” said Deese, who is now a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.The challenge for the EV industry is that the current mismatch between its makers and takers could doom the public policies promoting its growth before it can prove its value to consumers across the political spectrum.The industry’s key firms, as Gore told me, began investing in EV facilities long before Biden signed the IRA and infrastructure bills, or finalized the Environmental Protection Agency regulations requiring auto manufacturers to sell a growing number of zero-emission vehicles over the next decade. But companies, he added, are undoubtedly counting on both those carrots and sticks when calculating how much consumer demand will grow to support the EV-production facilities they are building.Redwood itself typifies that dynamic. Alexis Georgeson, Redwood’s vice president of government relations and communications, pointed out that the company was formed in 2017, while Trump was president; even then, she told me, Straubel recognized that as the number of EVs on the road increased, recycling their batteries could provide an economic opportunity while also reducing U.S. reliance on foreign sources of lithium and other critical minerals the batteries require. “Our mission, our business proposition, has not changed as a result of what we have seen happening with this administration,” Georgeson said.But Georgeson is quick to add that the policies approved under Biden have “been tremendously helpful to us.” Redwood has been approved for a $2 billion federal loan to fund further expansion of its Nevada site (although it has not received any of the money yet). It also will benefit from the IRA provisions that provide tax credits for producers and consumers in order to encourage domestic manufacture of EV batteries. Within a few years, Redwood expects to be producing enough of the recycled minerals, as well as superthin foil from recycled copper, to manufacture at least 1 million EV batteries a year.Devon Reese, a Reno city-council member, told me that the EV industry’s rapid expansion in the area has come with “growing pains” mostly relating to ensuring reliable transportation to the isolated Storey County. But overall, he said, there’s no question that the industry’s growth “absolutely has been a net positive” for the community. There are “probably nearly 11,000 jobs that have been created in this region by the energy projects,” Reese told me. “That represents a lot of families, and homes that are owned, and apartments that are rented, and stores that are shopped in.”Despite this enormous flow of investment into the Reno region from Redwood and Tesla’s “Gigafactory,” Mark Amodei, the area’s Republican U.S. representative, joined every other House Republican last year in voting to repeal all of the IRA’s incentives for EV production and clean energy. Every House and Senate Republican also voted against the initial passage of the IRA in 2022.After his repeal vote, Amodei told me he questioned how many of the construction and production jobs would really go to Nevada residents. “The benefits I don’t think outweighed the negative stuff in terms of debt, inflation, and—oh, by the way—how much really came to Nevada,” Amodei said. He also said that the pace at which Biden is seeking to encourage a transition away from internal-combustion engines toward EVs “borders on suicidal” and “just makes no sense unless it’s all about a political agenda and not much about solving problems” (Amodei’s office did not respond to a question about whether his views have changed since then).Environmentalists had hoped that the spread of clean-energy investments into Republican-held seats would politically safeguard the IRA the same way the diffusion of military projects across virtually every state and district ensures broad bipartisan congressional support for defense-spending bills. Groups, including Climate Power, are running ads in swing states this year touting the new jobs that EV manufacturers are creating, for instance in building fully electric school buses. “This is really about jobs in the United States,” Alex Glass, Climate Power’s managing director of communications, told me. “What Donald Trump has been saying is he would rather have these jobs—the jobs of the future—happen in China.”But the willingness of all House Republicans to vote to repeal Biden’s EV incentives, even while their districts are receiving most of the investment flowing from them, challenged the traditional assumption that politicians fear voting against policies that are providing direct economic benefits to their voters.[Read: Biden’s ‘big build’]Now the hope among clean-energy advocates is that some Republicans whose districts are benefiting from these incentives voted to rescind them last year only because they knew that repeal could never become law with a Democratic Senate and president. If Trump wins, and Republicans seize unified control of Congress next year, a vote to repeal the IRA incentives would transform from a symbolic gesture into an actual threat to jobs in these districts. Even under a scenario of unified Republican control in Washington next year, “our perspective is that it would be quite challenging” for the GOP to assemble enough votes for repeal, Georgeson said.As evidence, she pointed to the disconnect between Republican opposition to the IRA in Washington and the cooperation the company has received from GOP governors and other state officials in Nevada and South Carolina, where it is beginning work on an even larger recycling plant that will involve $3.5 billion in investment. “Both states have been incredibly supportive of us,” she told me, providing assistance not only in infrastructure but in forging partnerships with local colleges to train workers for the new jobs.Gore told me that the electric-vehicle industry will mobilize to defend the federal tax and spending programs promoting its growth if Republicans try again to repeal them next year. The industry, he said, must do a better job of demonstrating how it is benefiting the Republican-leaning communities where it is primarily investing. But, he added, it can now marshal powerful evidence for that case in the form of new manufacturing plants and jobs. “No politician sees a vote against a popular growing factory in his or her district as a winning issue,” Gore told me.As Trump and congressional Republicans escalate their threats against Biden’s environmental agenda, the best defense for the emerging clean-energy industry may be the growing number of red communities benefiting from the green of new paychecks.

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Stormy Daniels leaves Manhattan Criminal Court on May 9, 2024, in New York City. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images What we learned from Daniels’s testimony. A New York case against former President Donald Trump, once considered the least important of the four criminal suits he faces, could now be the only one to have a direct impact ahead of the election. This case, which centers on whether Trump falsified business records in order to hide hush money payments to adult actress Stormy Daniels, is currently on trial. (Two cases involving Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, as well as a third involving his mishandling of classified documents, are stalled and may not be heard in court until after November.) And boy what a trial it is — cutting memes, potential betrayals, and more. Despite the significance of the New York trial, it hasn’t necessarily broken through to most US voters: As of late April, just 45 percent of people have been following its developments, according to a PBS/NPR/Marist poll. Because Trump has faced so many legal cases, including another civil suit related to business fraud, many people have grappled with fatigue as these cases have blurred together. Enter: Daniels’s testimony this week. Given her prominent platform, the ongoing interest in her relationship with Trump, and her willingness to speak out about the intimidation she’s faced in the past, Daniels’s appearance seemed to raise the case’s profile. It’s not likely, however, that it will shift much of Trump’s core support just yet. What Daniels said Daniels’s testimony, which spanned multiple days this week, featured intimate details about her 2006 encounter with Trump and marked the first time the two had come face to face in years. By divulging this information, Daniels helped prosecutors establish that she and Trump had had a sexual relationship, something he has denied. Providing evidence of that relationship enables prosecutors to make the case that he had reason to pay money to cover it up. The defense team, meanwhile, sought to undermine Daniels’s credibility by asking about her animus toward Trump and her financial incentives for coming forward about the relationship with him. While Daniels’s testimony may not be as key as that of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer who allegedly helped facilitate the hush money payments and who is expected to take the stand to testify against him, it does provide “the critical motive for Trump to be frantic about her revelations weeks before the election and try to buy her silence,” Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman told Vox. Below are some excerpts of what Daniels said on the witness stand. She described in detail her sexual encounter with Trump. Daniels recounted the 2006 relationship, noting that her “own insecurities, in that moment, kept [her] from saying no,” and that she felt there was a “power imbalance.” She also included specifics, stating that Trump was initially wearing silk or satin pajamas, that he did not wear a condom, and that he asked about her career. After the encounter, she says he told her, “Let’s get together again, honey bunch.” Following this testimony on Tuesday, the defense called for a mistrial, arguing that Daniels’s statements would prejudice the jury against Trump. The judge denied this request. She denied that her decision to speak out about Trump was motivated by money. Daniels was questioned multiple times by the defense about whether she was motivated to come forward because of financial gain. Daniels said that she had profited from the story but emphasized that she was looking for accountability. “I have been making money by telling my story,” she said, while also adding, “It has also cost me a lot of money.” Daniels also said that it had been a net “negative” for her life to come forward about the encounter. She pushed back on claims that she fabricated her story. Daniels repeatedly rebutted assertions from the defense suggesting that she had made up the encounter. “If that story was untrue,” she said, “I would’ve written it to be a lot better.” She made clear she dislikes Trump. The defense pressed Daniels on her stance toward the former President in an attempt to undermine her reliability. “Am I correct that you hate President Trump?” defense attorney Susan Necheles asked. “Yes,” Daniels responded. She confirmed she received the hush money payment but did not confirm Trump’s involvement. Daniels testified that she received $130,000 in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement. She also stated that her attorney had negotiated the payment with Cohen and that she did not have knowledge of Trump’s involvement with it. Will it break through? Notably, there’s been less enthusiasm about this election so far relative to past ones. In April, an NBC News poll found that the proportion of voters who have high interest in the presidential contest has hit a 20-year low. As one Democrat put it in a New York Times story about the general burnout members of the “resistance” have experienced this year, “It’s crisis fatigue, for sure.” Daniels’s testimony has certainly generated more attention this week, though experts note that it alone might not be enough to hurt Trump’s base. “​​Stormy Daniels has always been clickbait. Thus, more people are likely to tune in to hear about her testimony than the testimony of the Trump Org’s controller,” said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University. This is also one of the cases against Trump that’s on shakier legal ground, some experts say, and Trump’s core backers in particular already view this trial as a political attack. That’s unlikely to change, says Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “If I were designing a legal case that would be easy for Republicans to dismiss as a partisan witch hunt, I would design exactly the case that’s being brought in New York,” Ayres told Vox. Ultimately, it could well come down to a conviction to determine whether there’s an impact on the 2024 election at all. An April AP poll found that 47 percent of independents, some of whom could be swing voters, would not consider Trump to be fit to be president if he is convicted. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. 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Australia is a country of abundant sunshine, but the skin of most Australians is better adapted to gloomy England than the beaches of Brisbane. The country’s predominantly white population has by far the world’s highest rate of skin cancer, and for years the public-health establishment has warned residents about the dangers of ultraviolet light. A 1980s ad campaign advised Australians to “Slip, Slop, Slap”—if you had to go out in the sun, slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, and slap on a hat. The only safe amount of sun was none at all.Then, in 2023, a consortium of Australian public-health groups did something surprising: It issued new advice that takes careful account, for the first time, of the sun’s positive contributions. The advice itself may not seem revolutionary—experts now say that people at the lowest risk of skin cancer should spend ample time outdoors—but the idea at its core marked a radical departure from decades of public-health messaging. “Completely avoiding sun exposure is not optimal for health,” read the groups’ position statement, which extensively cites a growing body of research. Yes, UV rays cause skin cancer, but for some, too much shade can be just as harmful as too much sun.It’s long been known that sun exposure triggers vitamin D production in the skin, and that low levels of vitamin D are associated with increased rates of stroke, heart attack, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, depression, osteoporosis, and many other diseases. It was natural to assume that vitamin D was responsible for these outcomes. “Imagine a treatment that could build bones, strengthen the immune system and lower the risks of illnesses like diabetes, heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure and cancer,” The New York Times wrote in 2010. “Some research suggests that such a wonder treatment already exists. It’s vitamin D.” By 2020, more than one in six adults were on that wonder treatment in the form of daily supplements, which promise to deliver the sun’s benefits without its dangers.But sunlight in a pill has turned out to be a spectacular failure. In a large clinical trial that began in 2011, some 26,000 older adults were randomly assigned to receive either daily vitamin D pills or placebos, and were then followed for an average of five years. The study’s results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine two years ago. An accompanying editorial, with the headline “A Decisive Verdict on Vitamin D Supplementation,” noted that no benefits whatsoever had been found for any of the health conditions that the study tracked. “Vitamin D supplementation did not prevent cancer or cardiovascular disease, prevent falls, improve cognitive function, reduce atrial fibrillation, change body composition, reduce migraine frequency, improve stroke outcomes, decrease age-related macular degeneration, or reduce knee pain,” the journal said. “People should stop taking vitamin D supplements to prevent major diseases or extend life.”[Read: You’re not allowed to have the best sunscreens in the world]Australia’s new guidance is in part a recognition of this reality. It’s also the result of our improved understanding of the disparate mechanisms through which sunlight affects health. Some of them are intuitive: Bright morning light, filtered through the eyes, helps regulate our circadian rhythms, improving energy, mood, and sleep. But the systemic effects of UV light operate through entirely different pathways that have been less well understood by the public, and even many health professionals. In recent years, that science has received more attention, strengthening conviction in sunlight’s possibly irreplaceable benefits. In 2019, an international collection of researchers issued a call to arms with the headline “Insufficient Sun Exposure Has Become a Real Public Health Problem.”Health authorities in some countries have begun to follow Australia’s lead, or at least to explore doing so. In the United Kingdom, for example, the National Health Service is reviewing the evidence on sun exposure, with a report due this summer. Dermatology conferences in Europe have begun to schedule sessions on the benefits of sun exposure after not engaging with the topic for years.In the United States, however, there is no sign of any such reconsideration. Both the CDC and the American Academy of Dermatology still counsel strict avoidance, recommending that everyone but infants wear sunscreen every day, regardless of the weather. When I asked the AAD about Australia’s new guidelines, a spokesperson offered only that, “because ultraviolet rays from the sun can cause skin cancer, the Academy does not recommend getting vitamin D from sun exposure.”Such a stance surely reflects understandable concerns about mixed messaging. But it also seems more and more outdated, and suggests a broader problem within American public-health institutions.More than a century ago, scientists began to notice a mysterious pattern across the globe, which they came to call the “latitude effect.” Once you adjust for confounding variables—such as income, exercise, and smoking rates—people living at high latitudes suffer from higher rates of many diseases than people living at low or middle latitudes. The pattern plays out in many conditions, but it’s most pronounced in autoimmune disorders, especially multiple sclerosis. Throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S., populations at higher latitudes are much more likely to develop MS than those closer to the equator. Over the years, scientists have offered many theories to explain this phenomenon: differences in diet, something in the water. But MS research pointed to a perhaps more obvious answer: sunlight. The higher the latitude, the lower the angle of the sun and the more its rays are filtered by the atmosphere. A number of studies have found links between sun exposure and the disease. Kids who spend less than 30 minutes a day outside on weekends and holidays are much more likely to develop MS than kids who are outside for more than one hour on these same days. Relapse rates for the disease are higher in early spring, after months of sun scarcity. People who were born in the spring (whose mothers received little sun exposure during their third trimester of pregnancy) are more likely to develop MS than people born in the fall.Here, too, scientists first assumed that vitamin D was the key. But vitamin D supplementation proved useless for MS. Could something else about sun exposure protect against the condition?A hint came from another disease, psoriasis, a disorder in which the immune system mistakes the patient’s own skin cells for pathogens and attacks them, producing inflammation and red, scaly skin. Since ancient times, it had been observed that sunlight seems to alleviate the condition, and doctors have long recommended “phototherapy” as a treatment. But only in the late 20th century, with the recognition that psoriasis was an autoimmune disease, did they start to understand why it worked.It turns out that UV light essentially induces the immune system to stop attacking the skin, reducing inflammation. This is unfortunate when it comes to skin cancer—UV rays not only damage DNA, spurring the formation of cancerous cells; they also retard the immune system’s attack on those cells. But in the case of psoriasis, the tamping-down of a hyperactive response is exactly what’s needed. Moreover, to the initial surprise of researchers, this effect isn’t limited to the site of exposure. From the skin, the immune system’s regulatory cells migrate throughout the body, soothing inflammation elsewhere as well.[Read: AI-driven dermatology could leave dark-skinned patients behind]This effect is now believed to be the reason sun exposure helps prevent or ameliorate many autoimmune diseases, including MS, type 1 diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. It also explains why other conditions that involve a hyperinflammatory response, such as asthma and allergies, seem to be alleviated by sun exposure. It may even explain why some other diseases now believed to be connected to chronic inflammation, including cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s, are often less prevalent in regions with more sun exposure.The consortium of Australian public-health groups had those potential benefits in mind when it drafted its new guidelines. “There’s no doubt at all that UV hitting the skin has immune effects,” Rachel Neale, a cancer researcher and the lead author of the guidelines, told me. “There’s absolutely no doubt.” But as to what to do with that knowledge, Neale isn’t certain. “This is likely to be both harmful and beneficial. We need to know more about that balance.”What does one do with that uncertainty? The original “Slip, Slop, Slap” campaign was easy to implement because of its simplicity: Stay out of the sun; that’s all you need to know. It was, in a sense, the equivalent of the “Just Say No” campaign against drugs, launched in the U.S. around the same time. But the simplicity also sometimes runs afoul of common sense. Dermatologists who tell their patients to wear sunscreen even indoors on cloudy winter days seem out of touch.Australia’s new advice is, by comparison, more scientific, yet also more complicated. It divides its recommendations into three groups, according to people’s skin color and susceptibility to skin cancer. Those with pale skin, or olive skin plus other risk factors, are advised to practice extreme caution: Keep slip-slop-slapping. Those with “olive or pale-brown skin” can take a balanced approach to sun exposure, using sunscreen whenever the UV index is at least a 3 (which is most days of the year in Australia). Those with dark skin need sunscreen only for extended outings in the bright sun.[Read: The problem sunscreen poses for dark skin]In designing the new guidelines, Neale and her colleagues tried to be faithful to the science while also realizing that whatever line is set on sun exposure, many people will cross it, intentionally or not. Even though skin cancer is rarely fatal when promptly diagnosed, it weighs heavily on the nation’s health-care system and on people’s well-being. “We spend $2 billion a year treating skin cancer in Australia,” Neale said. “It’s bonkers how much we spend, apart from the fact that people end up with bits of themselves chopped out. So at a whole-population level, the messaging will continue to be very much about sun protection.”That said, we now know that many individuals at low risk of skin cancer could benefit from more sun exposure—and that doctors are not yet prepared to prescribe it. A survey Neale conducted in 2020 showed that the majority of patients in Australia with vitamin D deficiencies were prescribed supplements by their doctors, despite the lack of efficacy, while only a minority were prescribed sun exposure. “We definitely need to be doing some education for doctors,” she told me. In support of the new position statement, Neale’s team has been working on a website where doctors can enter information about their patients’ location, skin color, and risk factors and receive a document with targeted advice. In most cases, people can meet their needs with just a few minutes of exposure a day.That sort of customized approach is sorely needed in the United States, Adewole Adamson, a dermatologist who directs the Melanoma and Pigmented Lesion Clinic at the University of Texas, told me. “A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t productive when it comes to sun-exposure recommendations,” he said. “It can cause harm to some populations.” For years, Adamson has called for more rational guidelines for people of color, who have the lowest risk of skin cancer and also higher rates of many of the diseases that sunlight seems to ameliorate. Adamson finds it disheartening that mostly white Australia now has “a better official position” than organizations in the U.S., “where nonwhite Americans will outnumber white Americans in the next 20 years.”To some degree, one can sympathize with the desire to keep things simple. People have limited bandwidth, and some may misunderstand or tune out overly complicated health messages. Others will inevitably turn a little information into a dangerous thing. A fringe segment of the alt-health crowd is already suggesting that skin-cancer dangers have been exaggerated as a way to get us all to buy more sunblock. But knowing that some people will draw strange conclusions from the facts is not a good-enough reason to withhold those facts, as we saw during the pandemic, when experts looking to provide simple guidance sometimes implied that the science was more settled than it was. This is not the 1950s. When public authorities spin or simplify science in an attempt to elicit a desired behavior, they are going to get called on it. Conspiracy-minded conclusions, among other bad ones, are likely to gain more credence, not less. And the public is going to have less faith in national institutions and the positions they espouse the next time.Besides, in this case, the news being withheld is incredibly good. It’s not every day that science discovers a free and readily accessible intervention that might improve the health of so many people. That’s the real story here, and it’s most compelling when conveyed honestly: Science feels its way forward, one hesitant step at a time, and backtracks almost as often. Eventually, that awkward but beautiful two-step leads us to better ground.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “Against Sunscreen Absolutism.”

Justin Verlander, who saw the Mets’ disappointment firsthand last season, said he doesn’t expect the struggling Astros to suffer the same fate.