Some people ignored Hurricane Milton’s evacuation orders and, because the way the world works, their videos have gotten hugely popular on TikTok. | via TikTok On the afternoon of October 10, author and influencer Caroline Calloway texted me “I lived bitch.” She posted a screenshot of the same proof-of-life selfie and message on her Instagram story that morning after Hurricane Milton made landfall.  We’d spoken one day earlier about Calloway’s decision not to evacuate for the monster of a storm, as well as to post about that choice on social media, and at one point I asked if she thought she was going to die.  “Someday,” she told me, “We all are.” Yes, she was aware of the massive storm surges Milton would bring in its wake that would likely wash away parts of the state. She knew it would inflict a wretched amount of emotional and monetary damage. For now, we don’t know Milton’s total devastation, but as it stands at least 14 people are dead and 3 million people are without power. Milton also spawned “dozens” of tornadoes across the state, according to the Associated Press. “It was a really hard choice to stay or to go. And I didn’t make it lightly,” she told me, “But you know, if I can be of service in terms of entertainment on the internet? So be it.”  Calloway isn’t the only Floridian evacuation refuser who’s posting through it. On TikTok in particular, there are plenty. There’s the woman who told her followers that she was instructed to have enough food and water for three days and has decided that she will have “some kind of barbecue” (she posted that she was safe on Thursday evening). There’s a Floridian celebrity who goes by the name “Lt. Dan” who safely rode out the storm on his boat. And then there’s the woman who did not want to leave her gigantic concrete house because she wanted to “save” it and partly because her staying would, in her words, “piss” liberals off. (Her account now shows up as “banned” on TikTok.)   People defying evacuation orders isn’t a new phenomenon. But getting millions of views on TikTok for doing so is. So why are these people staying? And why are they posting?  The psychology behind staying and posting through a hurricane One of the most important things to know about StormTok is that having the ability to leave and deciding to stay behind is a choice that most people who do not evacuate don’t have. “The real story is that most people who don’t evacuate can’t evacuate. Evacuation is expensive,” Dave Call, a meteorologist and storm chaser based at Ball State University, tells me. Call explains scenarios in which people can’t take off from work, can’t afford hotels, don’t have reliable transportation, and can’t afford meals. Factors like not being able to speak English and being an undocumented immigrant also affect those contingency plans. Evacuation isn’t a feasible option for these people, and we rarely see their stories, Call stresses.  Being able to stay and share what’s happening is essentially a luxury.  Call chases tornadoes, and he explains that there’s a slight difference between what storm chasers do and what these hurricane posters are getting at, even if they’re both technically documenting storms.  “These people are different from tornado chasers because they aren’t driven by a desire to see exciting weather, but by other factors,” Call says. “They may not comprehend the scale of a hurricane. Some have put their lives into their home and feel that it is safe enough. There’s also overlap between these folks and those who drive through flood waters, refuse to shelter in storms, drive recklessly, etc.” What Call is getting at is that there is a multitude of factors that goes into the psychological decision of staying in place and sticking out a hurricane like Milton. Barbara Millet, an assistant professor at the University of Miami, echoes that sentiment. Part of Millet’s research has focused on disaster communication and how the public understands the dangers and risk of hurricanes.  “Evacuation decisions are complex. They’re multifaceted and they’re personal. There’s no single reason, but rather a combination of factors that really influence individuals and families,” Millet tells Vox.  She explains that these factors range from money to past experiences with hurricane evacuations to uncertainty about the forecast, to the perception that being at home might be safer. Disaster fatigue, the exhaustive process of rebuilding, the lack of trust in lawmakers and officials, and everything in between can affect someone’s decision not to obey evacuation protocols.  “Maybe all these reasons don’t apply to any one given person, but there’s certainly a combination of them that influence people’s decisions to — or not to — evacuate,” Millet adds.  If there’s a reassuring aspect to these extremely viral videos of people hunkering down and ignoring evac orders, it’s that the reasons and motivations they’re citing line up with research. Scientists know that factors like expenses and lack of trust in officials are why people don’t evacuate and have been figuring out better ways to address those concerns.  “The reasons that they were giving are the same reasons that turn up in most of our surveys. None of the stated reasons were a surprise in those videos,” says Cara Cuite, an associate professor at Rutgers University who studies risk and emergency communication. What caught Cuite and her colleagues by surprise was how popular the videos became. They wondered if that engagement could be another driving force in people’s decision-making. “Seeing these videos raises the question of whether there is a counterproductive incentive to stay and not evacuate in the form of driving engagement to people’s accounts,” Cuite adds. “We don’t know if that’s happening, but it certainly raises that question.”  In that same vein, what worries Millet and Call is that people posting their refusals to evacuate and garnering millions and millions of views in the process could be one of those factors that may sway someone else’s decision from evacuating to staying put.  “Social media provides official information to be communicated to a larger group of people, but it also allows for unofficial information and misinformation to be communicated, and that’s what worries me most,” Millet tells me. “Misinformation and how that impacts people’s ability to take decisions, actions that they need to take.”  Why people are turning the hurricane into content  Calloway’s decision to stay wasn’t prompted by a lack of information. She explained that she had been following Milton and all the news surrounding the storm but that mitigating factors like her inability to drive and her desire to care for older neighbors kept her staying put. She also details that her experience evacuating in 2022 for Ian also shaped her decision.  “I decided the right thing for me and my immediate community was to stay,” Calloway told me. “They’re my first priority.”  She explains that she had previously honored evacuation protocols for Hurricane Ian in 2022, fleeing to her mother’s house inland in Northport, Florida, and ended up needing a military rescue anyway. She added that she’s on the third floor of her concrete condo and that she has hurricane-proof windows. She does admit that with all these posts, she is hoping to promote her latest project (“I’m going to be trapped inside for two days anyway — let’s sell some books. That’s sort of my attitude.”) which happens to be a book about survival. Judging by the many posts about whether or not Calloway would survive the hurricane, ironic admiration for Calloway’s insistence on promoting her new book, and the attention her posts from Milton’s eye have garnered, she successfully provided the internet with some form of entertainment. She’s also no stranger to the dangers of misinformation, including rumors of her living on the ground floor of her condo, which she says were made up by a “fucking idiot who’s blind.” It’s not lost on Calloway that there’s a certain schadenfreude or a grim morbidity from people online watching her post, that much of this attention was glibly predicated on her possible demise.  @angeyb__ We was instructed to have enough food an water for up to 3days #hurricanemilton #tampa #florida #viralvideo ♬ original sound – ANGEYB__ The way the stubborn stayers on social media are consumed and recirculated speaks to both society’s rubber-necking and many viewers’ judgments about the posters’ reality. That these Floridians had the money and resources to leave and chose to stay rubs people the wrong way, but it also gets them very invested.  We can’t help but be curious about the implied before-and-after picture of it all. Some want to see if the lady’s concrete house gets wrecked or the woman having a barbecue in the wake of a storm surge realizes amid standing water that burgers and dogs are the last thing on her mind.  There’s also the fact that, as Call, the meteorologist and storm chaser, points out, it’s simply hard to comprehend living in the destructive aftermath of a hurricane. Parts of Florida are still soaked from Helene, and it’s unclear how many days or even weeks Milton will leave the swaths of the state without electricity. Milton is going to strain Florida in ways that TikTok can’t capture.  “Rebuilding from a hurricane is measured in years,” Call says.  That’s the part we don’t see and that won’t get millions and millions of views. 

AI companies are on a mission to radically change our world. They’re working on building machines that could outstrip human intelligence and unleash a dramatic economic transformation on us all.  Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has basically told us he’s trying to build a god — or “magic intelligence in the sky,” as he puts it. OpenAI’s official term for this is artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Altman says that AGI will not only “break capitalism” but also that it’s “probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”  There’s a very natural question here: Did anyone actually ask for this kind of AI? By what right do a few powerful tech CEOs get to decide that our whole world should be turned upside down?  As I’ve written before, it’s clearly undemocratic that private companies are building tech that aims to totally change the world without seeking buy-in from the public. In fact, even leaders at the major companies are expressing unease about how undemocratic it is. Jack Clark, the co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, told Vox last year that it’s “a real weird thing that this is not a government project.” He also wrote that there are several key things he’s “confused and uneasy” about, including, “How much permission do AI developers need to get from society before irrevocably changing society?” Clark continued: Technologists have always had something of a libertarian streak, and this is perhaps best epitomized by the ‘social media’ and Uber et al era of the 2010s — vast, society-altering systems ranging from social networks to rideshare systems were deployed into the world and aggressively scaled with little regard to the societies they were influencing. This form of permissionless invention is basically the implicitly preferred form of development as epitomized by Silicon Valley and the general ‘move fast and break things’ philosophy of tech. Should the same be true of AI? I’ve noticed that when anyone questions that norm of “permissionless invention,” a lot of tech enthusiasts push back. Their objections always seem to fall into one of three categories. Because this is such a perennial and important debate, it’s worth tackling each of them in turn — and why I think they’re wrong.  Objection 1: “Our use is our consent”   ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer application in history: It had 100 million active users just two months after it launched. There’s no disputing that lots of people genuinely found it really cool. And it spurred the release of other chatbots, like Claude, which all sorts of people are getting use out of — from journalists to coders to busy parents who want someone (or something) else to make the goddamn grocery list. Some claim that this simple fact — we’re using the AI! — proves that people consent to what the major companies are doing.  This is a common claim, but I think it’s very misleading. Our use of an AI system is not tantamount to consent. By “consent” we typically mean informed consent, not consent born of ignorance or coercion.  Much of the public is not informed about the true costs and benefits of these systems. How many people are aware, for instance, that generative AI sucks up so much energy that companies like Google and Microsoft are reneging on their climate pledges as a result? Plus, we all live in choice environments that coerce us into using technologies we’d rather avoid. Sometimes we “consent” to tech because we fear we’ll be at a professional disadvantage if we don’t use it. Think about social media. I would personally not be on X (formerly known as Twitter) if not for the fact that it’s seen as important for my job as a journalist. In a recent survey, many young people said they wish social media platforms were never invented, but given that these platforms do exist, they feel pressure to be on them. Even if you think someone’s use of a particular AI system does constitute consent, that doesn’t mean they consent to the bigger project of building AGI.  This brings us to an important distinction: There’s narrow AI — a system that’s purpose-built for a specific task (say, language translation) — and then there’s AGI. Narrow AI can be fantastic! It’s helpful that AI systems can perform a crude copy edit of your work for free or let you write computer code using just plain English. It’s awesome that AI is helping scientists better understand disease. And it’s extremely awesome that AI cracked the protein-folding problem — the challenge of predicting which 3D shape a protein will fold into — a puzzle that stumped biologists for 50 years. The Nobel Committee for Chemistry clearly agrees: It just gave a Nobel prize to AI pioneers for enabling this breakthrough, which will help with drug discovery. But that is different from the attempt to build a general-purpose reasoning machine that outstrips humans, a “magic intelligence in the sky.” While plenty of people do want narrow AI, polling shows that most Americans do not want AGI. Which brings us to … Objection 2: “The public is too ignorant to tell innovators how to innovate”  Here’s a quote commonly (though dubiously) attributed to car-maker Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The claim here is that there’s a good reason why genius inventors don’t ask for the public’s buy-in before releasing a new invention: Society is too ignorant or unimaginative to know what good innovation looks like. From the printing press and the telegraph to electricity and the internet, many of the great technological innovations in history happened because a few individuals decided on them by fiat. But that doesn’t mean deciding by fiat is always appropriate. The fact that society has often let inventors do that may be partly because of technological solutionism, partly because of a belief in the “great man” view of history, and partly because, well, it would have been pretty hard to consult broad swaths of society in an era before mass communications — before things like a printing press or a telegraph!  And while those inventions did come with perceived risks and real harms, they didn’t pose the threat of wiping out humanity altogether or making us subservient to a different species. For the few technologies we’ve invented so far that meet that bar, seeking democratic input and establishing mechanisms for global oversight have been attempted, and rightly so. It’s the reason we have a Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and a Biological Weapons Convention — treaties that, though it’s a struggle to implement them effectively, matter a lot for keeping our world safe. It’s true, of course, that most people don’t understand the nitty-gritty of AI. So, the argument here is not that the public should be dictating the minutiae of AI policy. It’s that it’s wrong to ignore the public’s general wishes when it comes to questions like “Should the government enforce safety standards before a catastrophe occurs or only punish companies after the fact?” and “Are there certain kinds of AI that shouldn’t exist at all?”.  As Daniel Colson, the executive director of the nonprofit AI Policy Institute, told me last year, “Policymakers shouldn’t take the specifics of how to solve these problems from voters or the contents of polls. The place where I think voters are the right people to ask, though, is: What do you want out of policy? And what direction do you want society to go in?” Objection 3: “It’s impossible to curtail innovation anyway”  Finally, there’s the technological inevitability argument, which says that you can’t halt the march of technological progress — it’s unstoppable! This is a myth. In fact, there are lots of technologies that we’ve decided not to build, or that we’ve built but placed very tight restrictions on. Just think of human cloning or human germline modification. The recombinant DNA researchers behind the Asilomar Conference of 1975 famously organized a moratorium on certain experiments. We are, notably, still not cloning humans.   Or think of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Adopted by the United Nations against the backdrop of the Cold War, it barred nations from doing certain things in space — like storing their nuclear weapons there. Nowadays, the treaty comes up in debates about whether we should send messages into space with the hope of reaching extraterrestrials. Some argue that’s dangerous because an alien species, once aware of us, might conquer and oppress us. Others argue it’ll be great — maybe the aliens will gift us their knowledge in the form of an Encyclopedia Galactica! Either way, it’s clear that the stakes are incredibly high and all of human civilization would be affected, prompting some to make the case for democratic deliberation before intentional transmissions are sent into space. As the old Roman proverb goes: What touches all should be decided by all. That is as true of superintelligent AI as it is of nukes, chemical weapons, or interstellar broadcasts. 

There’s an old saying that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s intended as a dig at music criticism, but beneath that, there’s a deeper truth: Music is intangible, subjective; it’s universal yet still deeply personal. And while science and math are involved in its creation, there is something undeniably mystical about it.  Laraaji is a 80-year-old pioneer of so-called New Age music and someone who’s been sitting on the fringes of the music world for decades — though, last year, he joined Andre 3000 onstage in Brooklyn.  When he was young, Laraaji experimented with acting, including a role in the landmark experimental film Putney Swope, and spent time in the 1960s standup comedy scene. After that, he became interested in spiritual communities, discovered the autoharp, and devoted his life to making music. He’s been a truly prolific artist ever since.I recently invited Laraaji on The Gray Area to talk about music, meditation, spirituality, and the therapeutic power of laughter. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing I’m so intrigued by all the artistic interests you’ve had in your life. You’ve done standup comedy. You’ve done acting. Obviously, in the end, you gave yourself over to music. Did the experience of acting and doing comedy make you a better musician? Or is it just creatively a totally different thing?  Laraaji  It’s the same thing, Sean. It’s wherever I choose to open and give expression to. I’m practicing the art of surrendering and spontaneity.  Sean Illing I think that’s why I’m a lousy musician. I’m too in my own damn head.  Laraaji  I say observe your body language when you have your next orgasm.  Sean Illing  I don’t think anybody — including myself — wants to see that! Laraaji  Seriously, look at your breath. Look at your body language. Look how focused you are into surrendering to this energetic expression. And I see some of that expression carried over into the way people sing pop music, rock music. They get into the more orgasmic, passionate level of release.  Sean Illing Do you think of yourself as primarily an improvisational musician for those reasons?  Laraaji I depend more on improvisation than I do on set scores. I find that improvisation is aligned with what I call my spiritual belief that every moment is new. And to trust that what I need in this moment is here.  Sean Illing  Musicians always talk about that, feeling more like a conduit than an author. Is that what it’s like for you on stage?  Laraaji  Yes, and it’s magical and mystical and a transportive place because you’re somehow beyond linear time flow. You’re in the midst of local time, but you’re also witnessing an unbroken, constant present time. It’s speaking through me and it’s speaking as me. I’m sound, I’m space, I’m timelessness. This is like music I can dream up. Part of my art is knowing when to get out of the way, how to set up a musical flow or a musical event, and then to step to the side of it and let it speak through.   Sean Illing  You also sing but it feels like part of the music, like there’s little distinction between the instruments you’re playing and what’s coming from your voice. Do you think of your voice as another instrument and not something separate? Laraaji  Yes, I do like doing everything at the same time. Spontaneous, unified flow.  Create a flow with several instruments at the same time, using the voice without calling the mental process into linear thinking. And using a voice as an emotional expressional instrument. That’s what I’ve been exploring, especially with meditation or deep contemplation of contacting altered planes of conscious present time. And so to talk about it is to take the mind out of it.  Then there’s sounds of passion, passionate immersion. The voice can be used to express witnessing inside of an awe-inspiring perception. So the whole body becomes the voice and the breath and the movement and become a conduit.  Invented or improvisational language can be the evidence of a person or practitioner in total immersion, total submission, getting involved with a total perception that’s beyond linear description. So the brain is given a vacation, and in that vacation or place, it might be freed up to have an alternative space-time experience. And that might be the message the artist wants to convey, that there is an alternative way of being conscious here and now.  Sean Illing  I have heard you talk about music as a tool for total presence. Why do you think music has that kind of effect on us?  Laraaji  Music generated or channeled by the right musician or artist? The artist is in a state of contemplation or meditation or a suspended time awareness. And in the languaging that occurs with their instrument, their interaction with their instrument and with their voice can convey this repurposing of the human instrument, repurposing it from a conveyor of local human-based emotion to a conduit of exalted emotion, direct perception inside this timeless present moment.  It’s always available. Certain sounds. Drones can do that. Music that’s very spontaneous, that can pull the mind out of linear thought, could allow the perceiver, the listener, to suddenly directly notice the reality of eternal time and the infinite space.  Sound can point to the invisible and sound can suggest the flowing of energy, the flowing of blood, the flowing of breath. It can suggest the integration of seemingly separate and discordant. In the case of a harp, all 36 strings are vibrating at the same time and producing this synergetic tonal event. So, as you say, that sound can throw a suggestion. It can point to the invisible, it can point to the transcendent. It can direct the emotional body out of heaviness so that a lightness, a more ethereal resonance can be directly witnessed.  Sean Illing  Once we start talking and using words, we’re already in the world of ideas and abstractions. But music is more primary than that, right? It touches something in us that existed before we invented words.   Laraaji  Yes. Music might be able to say more than what speech can say. My general mode of operation is to prepare before a performance or recording through just dropping into a refined sense of the meditative field. Do some yoga postures, some breathing exercises, some positive affirmations, and then sculpt this field or point to this transcendental field and let it transmit itself into a sound repetition through me. When this happens, I tend to call it a sound bath. A celestial sound bath. It’s an immersion experience. And once again, here we’re away from the words and we’re into the pure impacting force of sound.  Sean Illing  Do you actually find a meaningful distinction between music and meditation, or is it all just different manifestations of the same practice?  Laraaji  My ultimate answer is that they’re one and the same, meaning that in the moment of deepest meditation, I consider meditation to be the highest romance and that romance is the highest meditation. This meditation is simultaneous with music. It couldn’t be separated.  Sean Illing  When did laughter become such an important thing for you?  Laraaji  It shifted the energies of the bullies in my neighborhood when I was young to use humor. I wouldn’t be so afraid of their presence when I could use humor. And in church, we use humor because it could get so boring. And because I was in the right place to use it, we’d use it to get other peers to laugh in the middle of a serious sermon. But I notice the power of laughter to alter, to break the sense of rigidity and separation. I began writing scripts in high school and doing situation comedies for talent shows because I enjoyed seeing people lose it to laughter. The family I grew up in, the uncles, aunts, the cousins all were laughter friendly, so laughter was always on the menu. I can’t remember even a funeral where laughter was outlawed.  Sean Illing  You really do see it as a transformative force?  Laraaji  Well, after doing standup comedy I decided to let standup comedy go for a while and just focus on music. It was a book by Rajneesh, Osho Rajneesh, that helped me to realize that I could access the laughter experience without doing comedy, and that I could guide other people into the laughter zone and enjoy the deliciousness of laughter without using humor and at the sacrifice of something.  And now, through laughter — play shops, I call them — we use laughter to get people into the play zone and to get them into contact with their inner child and to get them into deep relaxation. Yeah. And I really enjoy laughter now because it can come up out of people without it having to be nervous. Yeah, the entire body can get involved. The entire breath can be open, and it’s getting sweeter and more delicious every time I do one of these.  Sean Illing  So laughter is another way to transcend the thinking mind?  Laraaji  Yes. Rajneesh pointed out that when you’re laughing, really involved with laughter, that you or us or whoever is laughing is not thinking, they’re not involved in the thought process of linear thought. That may be so if you’re into pure, open laughter. If it’s a nervous laughter where you’re mindful of a threatening situation, that would be a different situation. But real, full body, cathartic laughter, you’re releasing faster than you can think. So there’s no thought process processing what it is that’s being released. It’s just a yummy, open, nurturing release.  Sean Illing  You’ve been a professional musician for decades, performing all over the world. You’re entangled with the business and the commercial side of music. I guess I just wonder how you navigate that element, of being a professional musician and being a spiritual person at the same time?   Laraaji  Well, I did many years ago get that unless I integrate my spiritual nature, I would never be totally happy, content, or experience resolution because I can’t get it from the physical world. I’m not hating the physical world, but things in the physical world are temporary and constantly we’re reminded that things come, they stay, and then they leave. And some things are just too beautiful for us to accept that they’re ever going to leave.  And I grew to understand that behind the world that is changing, there is this spiritual field that if I learn how to embrace it constantly, even while I’m embracing my outer wealth, that when the outer wealth shifts, I’m not bent out of shape because I’m still connected to this inner spiritual platform that doesn’t get bent out of shape when the outer world shifts. So for me, staying constant and staying with my spiritual practice allows me to be more playful and less fearful of the physical world, and less fearful of change and less fearful of losing. And so I find that the spiritual side helps me to be more present, more experimental, and more risk-taking with my musical expression.  Sean Illing  I’ve also heard you say that you think our core spiritual problem is our misidentification with our bodies. What does that mean?  Laraaji  I’m not going to do this. I wouldn’t think of doing this to you, Sean.  Sean Illing  Wait, what are you going to do to me?!  Laraaji  I would amputate your leg. Your feet. You’re still there. Your torso. You’re still there. Your arms, your elbows. You’re still there. That’s just a head. And you’re still there. Your ears and nose goes. You’re still there. Your lips and tongue. God is still there. Suddenly your head disappears. But you’re still there. And you’re saying to yourself, wait a minute. I thought I was that body. Look. I’m timeless. I’m invisible. I’m wingless. What do I do with this?  And I believe that identification with the physical body, which is birth, that lives and dies, and we get attached to it, and we get sentimental with it. And we try to enjoy its five senses, and we forget, or we don’t access the joy that we can have, the more expansive joy we can have through the infinite self that is always here.  Perhaps your buddies have had an epiphany through the use of certain ceremonies. Where you’re suddenly in another sense of present time and space, a different sense of expansiveness, a different sense of how time is unfolding, slower or not at all. And to have this experience is to be taking advantage of a different form of body. The deepest sense of happiness and joy I feel comes from having an intimate, communing experience with my eternal present time-self. The spiritual presence which is always here, always everywhere. It just needs to be totally present, to dig it in, to catch it and to wear it and to behold it.  Sean Illing  You’re 80 years old. You’ve been making music for over 40 years. You’ve lived such an interesting life as an artist and a contemplative. As you sit here now, today, what is your spiritual mission? What gets you out of bed every day?  Laraaji  I’ll go through what I have to do the moment I get out of bed. Usually what gets me up is a sense of a daily agenda, which is different every day. Something that I’m going to do that day that I’m going to really enjoy, whether it’s music, performance, or designing, new tuning or getting to know a new piece of equipment, or sitting for an extra period of time in meditation, either in lotus position in my house or going for a walk in Central Park or Riverside Park and sitting on a bench in the sun, getting into meditation.  What keeps me enthusiastically involved in life and passionately involved with life is the sensation of an eternal non-human intelligence that’s generating this thing called creation and is allowing me to participate in it and to co-witness and to co-collaborate with it. And then in the midst of this, it is remaining invisible and remaining infinite. And I’m feeling it through my connection with it. And so it’s not so much what I’m getting out of bed for, but as I’m getting out of bed there’s this sense of conscious improvisational collaboration within the divine alternating intelligence. But when I’m doing tours and I’m put in a nice, beautiful hotel, I’ll happily get out of bed for the breakfast.  Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Members of the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force search a flood-damaged area along the Swannanoa River in Asheville, North Carolina, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on October 4, 2024. | Mario Tama/Getty Images Hurricanes Milton and Helene have absolutely devastated large swaths of the United States. But residents who are cleaning out waterlogged homes and businesses have another challenge to their recovery, one that hasn’t let up — viral disinformation.  There’s the rumor that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is limiting payouts to disaster survivors to $750. False, according to a fact-checking page the agency has set up.  What about the one that says FEMA is blocking private planes from landing in affected areas to deliver supplies? Also false.  These rumors have turned political, with some Republican politicians, including former President Donald Trump, repeating them to large audiences. As FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said recently, the swirl of misinformation is “absolutely the worst that I have ever seen.”  “Misinformation is not uncommon in disasters. They come on fast. People see things that don’t end up being true,” Juliette Kayyem, a crisis management expert at Harvard who served as the assistant secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, told Today, Explained’s Sean Rameswaram. “I think in many ways what we’re experiencing now is purposeful lying.” Kayyem is also the author of the book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Sean Rameswaram For people who may have missed this disaster of facts, can you just tell them what’s going on?  Juliette Kayyem If you look on social media, at the atmosphere of response, there’s a lot of false facts about how the Biden administration is responding, about basic disaster response capabilities and rules. They are then amplified by, in particular, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and create their own reality that then has to be shot down by already-overburdened first responders, emergency managers, and FEMA, which has put up a rumor page on their website just to combat this crap.  One example is Donald Trump consistently saying that the money that should go to Americans who are impacted by the disaster was all used for housing illegal immigrants. Not true. There was a separate line item to support migrants and sheltering that Congress passed. That money was sent to FEMA to administer, but it wasn’t replacing disaster management funds. It didn’t even overlap. It’s just the same entity distributing these funds. This creates a false division between the immigrants, who are not getting this money, and Americans, who might be mad that the money that they want for disaster relief is not available. They demoralize emergency managers and volunteers. They put them at risk. I have talked to people at FEMA about what’s happening on the ground. They are deploying people in larger numbers because they’re worried about what the reaction will be. Most importantly, it’s confusing victims about what they should do, what they have access to, and what’s available to them.  Sean Rameswaram You’re saying that Donald Trump is perpetrating some of this misinformation. Where is he doing it?  Juliette Kayyem At his rallies; on social media. Recently at a rally, he suggested that resources weren’t going to red states, that more Republicans were dying. There’s just no factual basis for it.  What’s interesting is you’re seeing Republican governors push back on that narrative, saying that they are getting the resources they want. They know that they have to work with the federal government to protect their citizens and begin these recoveries.  One of the most obnoxious, disgusting rumors being amplified out in the communications space involves whether FEMA would take your home. FEMA has a process where they can buy your home. It’s a very small program. It’s if you, the homeowner, and FEMA agree on a fair market value and you don’t want to live there anymore because it’s been flooded four years in a row, and this is a rational transactional decision.  This narrative that they’re going to take your home — what does that do? Well, it makes people very nervous about leaving their home. And so you hear people now saying, “I’m not going to leave, because if I leave my home, the government’s going to take it.” Those are the real-world impacts of all of these lies.  Sean Rameswaram And you’re saying this is being amplified not only by other Republican politicians, but by the owner of Twitter?  Juliette Kayyem Yes. He is probably the biggest amplifier of disinformation, retweeting things that are clearly false.  What they’re trying to do is create divisions in communities in two ways. One is the divide between the citizen and government, which has always been a tactic by that wing of MAGA-ism. Then also [there’s the divide] between citizens and their neighbors. That creates chaos, confusion, and divisions.  I think why you’re seeing such a concerted pushback by GOP governors, but also by FEMA and others who are calling this out, is because they know it can harm their response capabilities. I should say this is being done at a time when we’re seeing our very communication networks under stress. Communications are down. It’s hard to communicate with people. And so they have that vacuum being filled by this noxiousness of which has life-and-death consequences.  Sean Rameswaram Back during Hurricane Sandy, I distinctly remember social media being useful for people. It was useful for people going through Sandy, it was useful for government agencies to get out information. Is that era of social media being a helpful tool in a disaster over?  Juliette Kayyem It’s over. Elon Musk broke “Disaster Twitter.”  Twitter’s moment of birth, the moment that its founder realized its benefit, was during a minor earthquake in San Francisco. It had been just one of those other social media platforms. But it was that real-time, authenticated information that was flowing in people’s feeds that the leadership at Twitter began to take its responsibility in a disaster very seriously.  You had an entire system, including the government relying on Twitter to amplify good information, and that whole system is down. This is the first domestic disaster where that is entirely clear, that Twitter is broken across the board for disaster management. Sean Rameswaram Is the mis- and disinformation around Milton as bad as that we saw after Helene? Juliette Kayyem You saw it more online than, say, from political leadership.  You saw much more aggressive government [and] FEMA pushback on that. They were sort of ready now. Helene was — I think they were sort of caught [by surprise]. So you saw just a lot of outreach, a lot of push back on the misinformation and even from [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis, who pushed back on some of that. Sean Rameswaram Do you think this makes an agency like FEMA more prepared for the next hurricane and for the next storm, if you will, of misinformation? Juliette Kayyem Yeah, I think it will, on the misinformation and the lies front. I think it’s just going to be part of your emergency management plan. You’re going to push back on the rumors in a very formal way. It used to be done, but it was very piecemeal. I saw language coming out of FEMA spokespeople, which I’d never seen before, essentially just calling out the lies, in particular on social media. So they’re using the language, the sort of freewheeling language, of social media, which I think is important, rather than the sort of more formal language of government.  Sean Rameswaram I think from the hype around Milton, there was this sense that, like, it could destroy Tampa. And it’s early yet, but I don’t think that happened. Do you think that sort of confirms and fuels this misinformation engine after an event like this? Juliette Kayyem Yeah, it will be viewed as overreach, as “the government’s incompetent, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.” I think the next evacuation will be harder if you don’t see the kind of damage and the kind of death that everyone was worried about. This is something that’s common, it has a name: the preparedness paradox. If you are ready, you get houses ready, you get communities ready, you get them to evacuate, and the thing comes through and the damage is less than you were worried about — that’s why you wanted the evacuation. That’s why you wanted the houses to be ready.  People will say, “What were you so worried about in the first place?“ In other words, the government’s reaction, which may have minimized harm and damage and death, may very well, paradoxically, be viewed as the government’s original assessment was wrong.  Sean Rameswaram Could FEMA be doing a better job during Helene and now Milton?  Juliette Kayyem It’s hard for me to know right now. In some ways, FEMA’s biggest challenge is going to be recovery. How quickly can they deploy resources?  In Helene, the biggest lesson learned is how we communicate risk to Americans who may not view themselves at risk. Looking back, the only warnings that were given were a flood warning given to communities where there could be a flood. That is likely because people remember the soil was very saturated from rains in the days before. And I wonder if, in hindsight, flood warning — does it get people to move? Maybe we should think about how we communicate risk, especially because we’re getting these events that don’t really have historical precedent.

On early Thursday, Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida as a Category 3 storm. | Getty Images/Joe Raedle Even when a life-threatening hurricane is headed your way, there are many reasons why you might stay put. You might have dependent family members who can’t leave due to disabilities or other health-related reasons; you might not have reliable transportation to get to a safer area, and what’s more, no gas to get there. Sometimes, you simply refuse to leave your home and everything you own behind. There’s also the reality of just not being able to afford it.  In a 2021 University of South Florida survey, over half of the state’s residents said that finances would impact whether they evacuated from a hurricane or not, with almost 43 percent saying they had under $1,000 for emergencies. People escaping both Hurricane Milton and Helene — a Category 4 hurricane that heavily impacted the Southeastern US in late September — report spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars to get to safety.  Connie Vickers, 63, typically resides about an hour outside of Asheville, North Carolina. It cost her about $5,000 to book the first available Airbnb she could find to evacuate from Hurricane Helene. She considers herself fortunate — she could pay that out of pocket, with the hope that her insurance would cover some or all of the cost. “I’ve been thinking about the socioeconomic differences,” she tells Vox. “Some people literally have nothing.” Terrifyingly, anecdotes of people seeing outrageous flight, hotel, and rental car prices have spread like wildfire on social media in the lead-up to Hurricane Milton’s landfall as a Category 3 storm.  On TikTok, one woman in Southwest Florida has been explaining why it’s so difficult to leave home with six children and four dogs. Many shelters don’t accept pets. “I would have to book an Airbnb or something,” she says in one video. “I can’t afford to do that.” Flights, hotels, or gas can be pricey — if they’re even available The longer someone waits to evacuate, the costlier evacuation is likely to be. One 2011 study estimated that evacuation costs for a Category 3 hurricane could increase from $454 about 3 days before expected landfall to $526 mere hours before landfall, which is about $632 to $732 in today’s dollars. While the cheapest one-way flight from Tampa to Atlanta in mid-November can be had for just $39, according to Google Flights, on October 8, the cheapest the search engine showed was $321. The cheapest one-way ticket from Tampa to NYC, usually available for $45 to $90, was $458. Plane tickets are priced dynamically, typically shooting up during busy travel periods and when you’re booking last minute. A United spokesperson told Vox that the airline had implemented fare caps this past Sunday. “Since then, the average price for a one way, economy class ticket to our hubs from affected Florida markets was below $500,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. They also noted that the viral screenshots of $1,000-plus fares from Tampa to St. Louis included two stops. By early Tuesday, though, it was hard to find any nonstop flights from Tampa. Delta and American Airlines have also capped fares. Whether these tickets actually existed is also a different matter — going directly to airline websites often showed that there were actually no available flights, since airports were closed and many flights had been canceled. By Tuesday, when many evacuation orders were just going into effect, options were increasingly limited — and costly — for Floridians in the path of Milton. Many airports were closing down. As of Wednesday, FlightAware data showed that 90 percent of flights out of Tampa International Airport were canceled.  Rental car locations were either running out of cars or shutting down for safety as of Tuesday, and according to GasBuddy, a site that helps people track prices and availability at nearby gas stations, fuel was scarce. Finding a place to stay is an uphill climb, too. At time of writing, many hotels in Northwest Florida had filled up. While there are free shelters available across Florida counties where evacuation orders have been issued, as well as free shuttle services or other free transportations options, not everyone may be in an area where they can access them. There are also several reasons why people choose not to go to a shelter: They may not be sure exactly where it’s located, whether it’s full, or may not be able to bring their pets.  Being poor and having few job protections makes it harder to escape a storm People with the least money are also often least likely to be able to escape a natural disaster. They are less able to leave work in advance to beat traffic or book lodgings and flights before they’re all sold out, and in the long-term, less able to permanently move to an area at lower risk of hurricanes — yet another example of how it can be more expensive to be poor. The Gulf Coast faces some of the highest poverty rates in the US, and the combination of extreme poverty and higher rates of poor health (often due to racial inequality and environmental factors) leaves residents in this region especially vulnerable during disasters. Carson MacPherson-Krutsky, a research associate at the Natural Hazards Center at University of Colorado Boulder, is currently studying the factors that motivate people to evacuate and shelter — or not — for hurricanes and tornadoes. “A huge one is resource constraints,” she tells Vox. “You have to have lodging wherever you’re going. You may need to have social support, potentially, if you want to stay with family and friends who are outside of the area. You have to have the ability to leave your job.” Even in ordinary times, hotel and flight prices can be tough to stomach. Average hotel prices in the US have risen this year; across the country, it has become increasingly common to pay upwards of $200 per night for a room. The cost of buying a car, maintaining it, and having insurance for it has also gone up precipitously in the past few years. Then there are the higher food prices to consider. If you’ve evacuated to temporary lodgings and don’t have a stove, eating out can quickly become costly.  Over a quarter of Americans had less than $500 in their checking account last year, according to a CNBC Select survey, and over half of Americans have less than $1,000 saved for emergencies. A Fox Business report from 2017 estimated that hurricane preparation and evacuation could cost an average family as much as $5,000; a New York Times report from 2018, when Hurricane Florence ravaged North Carolina, cites one family having to cough up over $2,000 to evacuate. It can be prohibitively expensive to survive a storm. For some, the risk of lost wages or other consequences of missing work may have influenced their decision to stay put. During Hurricane Helene, a factory called Impact Plastics in Erwin, Tennessee, allegedly told employees to continue working despite flood warnings in the area. The company denies that it discouraged employees from leaving, saying in a video statement last week that they had been told to leave “at least 45 minutes before the gigantic force of the flood hit the industrial park.” It’s currently being investigated after 11 workers went missing, at least five of whom have since been found dead. How the government — and some companies — are trying to help To ease some of the costs of evacuation, the state of Florida has suspended road tolls and has encouraged hotels to waive pet fees. Uber, which famously came under fire for surge pricing in New York during Hurricane Sandy, is giving people fleeing Milton free rides to shelters. Major US airlines, including United, American, and Delta are waiving some fees if you need to rebook a flight. A few hotels have also been offering “distress rates” for evacuees, with one Myrtle Beach resort charging as little as $39 per night before taxes, and rooms at an Orlando area hotel chain starting at $69 before taxes. The supply-and-demand explanation for why things like flights and hotels can cost more during emergencies is that a lot of people are trying to snap them up at the last minute. That doesn’t mean it’s in a company’s best interest to hike prices, especially when people have been airing their sticker shock online. In some cases, it could even be illegal price gouging. “Price gouging is different than a normal market increasing prices,” says Teresa Murray, director of the Consumer Watchdog office at the Public Interest Research Groups. It usually needs to occur during some kind of emergency, and only applies to essential goods. One clear example of price gouging, according to Murray, happened during the baby formula shortage in 2022. Right now, 37 states have some sort of anti-price gouging law in the books. Florida’s anti-price gouging law doesn’t kick in unless an official state of emergency has been declared, which Gov. Ron DeSantis did this past weekend. If the price of food, water, or gas, for example, “grossly exceeds” the average prices seen in the 30 days before the state of emergency, that’s illegal — but it’s not clear what “grossly exceeds” exactly means. Some states set a price increase threshold, such as anything more than 10 percent above normal prices. The Florida attorney general’s office has urged residents to report any price gouging they see; it was already investigating potential price gouging after receiving hundreds of complaints during Hurricane Helene. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said on X that the Department of Transportation is “keeping a close eye on flights in and out of areas affected by Hurricane Milton” to ensure there’s no price gouging, and the department is now in touch with airlines about the issue.  Typically, Murray adds, we see a lot of price gouging — whether it’s water, food, or supplies needed for clean up and repair, like chainsaws — happening in the aftermath of a disaster. With Milton, too, we might see more of it occurring as recovery efforts begin. “It’s just unconscionable that some companies might be taking advantage of this crisis by jacking up their prices,” Murray says. “We’re talking about people’s lives here.”

A car is seen parked as it rains heavily in Fort Myers, Florida, on October 9, 2024, as Hurricane Milton approaches. | Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images Ahead of Hurricane Milton’s destructive landfall on Wednesday evening, millions of residents chose to leave. For roughly 1,200 inmates in the Manatee County Jail, which is located in a major evacuation zone near Sarasota, Florida, that wasn’t an option. Local authorities decided not to evacuate the prisoners so they rode out the storm — which brought widespread flooding, property damage, and fierce winds to the area — in the jail.  They weren’t alone. The Manatee County Jail is one of many that chose not to evacuate, according to the New York Times. Pinellas County and Lee County, two others on the Gulf Coast that were in the storm’s direct trajectory, also did not evacuate their jails, per a Pinellas County news conference and a spokesperson for Lee County Sheriff’s Office. (Manatee County and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)  The plight of Florida’s inmates is just the latest example to highlight how vulnerable incarcerated people are during natural disasters, when they have no control over their mobility or their exposure to hazardous situations. As the Appeal and the Fort Myers News-Press reported, Manatee, Pinellas, and Lee County officials argued that they could move inmates to higher floors in case of flooding and storm surge. Manatee County officials also described the jail as “hurricane-rated,” while Pinellas County officials cited the logistical challenge of moving 3,100 inmates from the facility during the storm as justification for their decision.  The Lee County jail was fully staffed and had water tanks on standby, according to the spokesperson, who noted that all the inmates were safe as of Thursday afternoon. The main facility lost power during the storm, the spokesperson added, but there were no other “notable incidents.”  The Manatee Sheriff’s Office also told the Appeal that the inmates were “storm safe” as of Thursday and that the power was going in and out, but that they did not lose running water. The Pinellas Sheriff’s Office told the publication that it had power and no running water issues. The Florida Department of Corrections (DOC), which oversees state prisons, meanwhile, says that “all staff and inmates in the path of Hurricane Milton have been accounted for,” in an update that it posted on Thursday morning. Per the DOC, it had evacuated 5,950 inmates from 37 facilities across the state as of that time.  The DOC has also said that its public list of evacuated facilities has a lag and may be incomplete since it only updates 24 hours after the inmates have already been transported. It told Vox that it weighs multiple risk factors when considering evacuations, including “the path of the storm … timing, traffic disruption, the risks of evacuating inmates, and the conditions of facilities being evacuated.” In total, more than 28,000 people are incarcerated in facilities in counties that had either full or partial evacuation orders, and many were not evacuated, the Appeal reported. Really important rundown of how Florida prisons and jails are responding to evacuation orders by @elizabethweill and @EthanSCorey. Several facilities in places with mandatory evacuation orders told The Appeal they will not evacuate. Interactive map here: https://t.co/EbC5XXv4YV https://t.co/Wl8aOOpQu4 pic.twitter.com/AEPjebzmX4— Meg O'Connor (@megoconnor13) October 9, 2024 Decisions not to evacuate certain facilities stood in stark contrast to dire warnings from regional leaders about the need to leave areas in the storm’s path and the “life or death” risks people faced if they failed to do so. Manatee County Jail, for example, is located in Evacuation Zone A, an area that faced high flooding risk.  “We do not issue evacuation orders lightly,” Manatee County Public Safety Director Jodie Fiske previously said in a news release. “Milton is anticipated to cause more storm surge than Helene. So, if you stayed during Helene and got lucky, I would not press my luck with this particular system.” Incarcerated people have few protections Florida’s inmates are not the first forced to shelter in place during a severe hurricane. When Hurricane Helene hit last month, 550 men in North Carolina were left in flooded cells at the Mountain View Correctional Institution without lights or running water for five days, the Intercept reports. Previously, hundreds of prisoners were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina without food or water after staff at the Orleans Parish Prison fled.  Incarcerated people are often neglected when it comes to ensuring their safety during natural disasters, but they’re frequently exploited for labor in the aftermath of those same situations. In Louisiana, incarcerated people performed clean-up and recovery efforts after Hurricane Francine in September and, in California, they’ve been key to fighting wildfires for years. While some of these tasks offer an alternative path to rehabilitation or allow inmates to refine new skills, none come with the same labor protections around safety or wages that other workers generally receive.  “The incarcerated population, they’re doubly vulnerable,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told Vox. “First, they’re often overlooked or deliberately just ignored … when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess in the wake of the disaster.” Federally, there are no requirements for guaranteeing the safety of incarcerated people during natural disasters, Kendrick told Vox. And while policies vary by state, a 2022 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that just six states mentioned safety protocols for incarcerated people in public plans detailing their emergency responses, while 24 mentioned the use of their labor for disaster mitigation.  “That patchwork becomes even more patchy when you go to the local level of jails because there’s significant local control over how jails operate,” Mike Wessler, communications director for the Prison Policy Initiative, told Vox.  And although there’s a Supreme Court decision that establishes a safety standard for inmates, experts note that court cases about mistreatment face an uphill battle following the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act in the 1990s, which made it much harder for prisoners to file civil suits. Prisons and jails also have limited oversight at either the federal or state levels, so they often operate with little regard to accountability.  As a result, incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to neglect and other abuses, in general and during natural disasters specifically, which can endanger their health and their lives. During past disasters in Florida, like 2022’s Hurricane Ian, inmates described a dearth of running water, including a lack of drinkable water as well as non-flushing toilets.  Kendrick and Wessler noted that jails and prisons suffer from a failure to prepare for these increasingly common natural disasters as well as a broader lack of concern for inmates’ well-being. To pursue an evacuation, these facilities would need agreements with other facilities where they can transport inmates, transportation for large groups, fuel, and other resources — proposals they need to put in place prior to the emergency itself.  As a baseline, states and counties should have policies that apply mandatory evacuation orders to inmates, the same way that they do to other non-incarcerated people, Kendrick said. (Although the government doesn’t force people to leave, it’s technically illegal to stay in a mandatory evacuation zone during a storm.) The federal government could also condition disaster aid to states based on their evacuation policies, in an attempt to guarantee that inmates are protected, attorney Maya Habash explained in the University of Maryland Law Journal. Federal laws like the Stafford Act and the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which require that the government provide resources to protect vulnerable populations, could also be amended to include references to prisoners to make clear that they should be recipients of funding as well. And the federal government could establish clear mandates that outline how prisons and jails need to treat inmates during natural disasters.  “I think the federal government should set national standards for prisons and jails and emergency responses, and those should be the floor, not the ceiling, for what places have to do,” Wessler told Vox.

Dairy calves housed in hutches at a Sonoma County farm. | Courtesy of Coalition to End Factory Farming Most people know Sonoma County, the Northern California region sometimes called America’s Provence, for its lush vineyards, Mediterranean-style villas, and farm-to-table restaurants. But when I traveled to wine country last year, it was to observe a side of Sonoma that few outsiders know about: a dead-of-night animal rights protest at an industrial chicken slaughterhouse, located within a stone’s throw of a gastropub, an organic bakery, and a major vegan cheesemaker.  This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter Sign up here for Future Perfect’s biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more. Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com! Run by a subsidiary of the poultry giant Perdue, which raises hundreds of thousands of chickens on factory farms across Sonoma, the slaughter plant typifies the unusual politics of agriculture in this part of the country, where a cultivated image of gentle, humane farming sometimes sits uneasily alongside an increasingly consolidated agriculture sector. The county has also seen a recent influx of new residents fleeing rising housing prices in San Francisco, a longtime center of animal rights activism and utopian thought. The region’s rural heritage and progressive politics will collide next month when Sonoma County residents vote on a first-of-its-kind ballot measure that could banish Perdue’s chicken facilities, along with all other large factory farms. The proposed law — which would cap the size of animal agriculture facilities and phase out all large factory farms in the county within three years — faces long odds. If successful, it could reshape the face of farming in the county and set a precedent that has terrified agricultural interests in California and across the country.  Known as Measure J, the proposal has produced fierce debate in the county over the environmental, public health, and animal welfare impacts of modern animal agriculture. It’s poised to generate the highest campaign spending of any ballot measure in Sonoma County history, with about $2 million in contributions made for and against — the vast majority of which has been spent by industry in opposition.  Measure J is one of a pair of local ballot initiatives this fall seeking to abolish industrial animal agriculture. In Denver, a historic center for the Western livestock trade and still an important hub for the US sheep industry, voters will decide next month whether to ban slaughterhouses in the city. The measure’s passage would shut down a lamb slaughter plant that butchers up to 500,000 lambs per year, accounting for between 15 and 20 percent of all US lamb meat.  Both measures face opposition from their respective political elites, including the local Democratic Parties in Denver and Sonoma and the entire Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. While some prior farm animal welfare ballot measures — like California’s historic 2018 animal welfare law, Proposition 12 — have been more limited in scope, aiming to incrementally improve horrific factory farm conditions, the Sonoma County and Denver measures are more clearly perceived as bans.  The measures are easily perceived as negative, as snatching things away from people — and they put proponents in the awkward position of trying to persuade voters to effectively abolish an industry, at least locally, on which they depend for abundant cheap meat. It’s already famously expensive to live in California in part because it’s difficult to build housing, and some Sonoma residents may roll their eyes at Measure J as yet another bid to make it prohibitively expensive to do business in the Golden State. But industrial animal agriculture — a sector that exacts immense costs on the public in the form of greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, strain on local resources, disease risk, and animal suffering — makes a more worthy target for a ban. In principle, there’s a lot of sense in capping the size of factory farms. Measure J’s proponents are betting that progressive Sonoma County, better known for its tasting rooms than its slaughterhouses, can push California — and the nation — in that direction. Animal cruelty in a farming paradise Measure J, advanced by a coalition of animal rights, environmental, and public health groups known as the Coalition to End Factory Farming, would require farms classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as large “concentrated animal feeding operations” (known as CAFOs) to either downsize or shut down within three years. The proposal is similar to a farm reform bill introduced by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) that would phase out large CAFOs by 2040. Sonoma doesn’t have the mega factory farms found in the Midwest or South, or elsewhere in California, that pack together millions of chickens or several thousand cows in one place. But it does have big industrial farms that employ standard factory farm methods.  Weber Family Farms, one of the county’s top egg producers, was hit last year with a bird flu infection and killed its flock using “ventilation shutdown plus” — a highly controversial, painful method being used on many large farms to mass cull poultry birds by sealing up sheds and pumping in extreme heat, killing them via heatstroke.  The Yes on J campaign has compiled a list of 21 farms in Sonoma County that they believe meet the large CAFO threshold, including several egg farms and chicken meat farms, six dairies, and one duck farm. Dairy operations of 700 or more mature dairy cows are classified as large CAFOs, while chicken farms can house up to 125,000 birds before being considered large CAFOs.  “The trend is toward mergers and toward ever-increasing sizes in animal agriculture,” Woody Hastings, a Sonoma County resident who works in climate policy and supports Measure J, told me. Hastings has worked with environmental justice organizations in California’s Central Valley, a far more CAFO-dense, ultra-productive agricultural region where residents are afflicted by air and water pollution and terrible odors. “What I learned in my work in the Central Valley is seeing how bad things can get if there is no cap on the size,” he said.  Animal farming industries have mobilized an all-out war against Measure J, pushing social media campaigns, TV ads, and a direct mail blitz, at times making exaggerated claims about the measure’s potential to wipe out all animal agriculture in the county or cause a dramatic spike in food prices.  One direct mailer sponsored by Western United Dairies (WUD), a dairy trade group, claimed the measure would shut down “more than 60 organic dairy farms” — but there are only 50 dairy farms of all categories in the county, according to the most recent USDA data, and most of them don’t meet the threshold to be affected by Measure J. “We do not differentiate between any dairy farming operations,” WUD told me in a statement, adding that they were concerned that Measure J would affect all dairy farms.  There’s been confusion in the county about the scope of the measure, with some arguing that it could be construed to include farms that are smaller than large CAFOs; my reading of Measure J is that it would only impact Sonoma County’s large CAFOs.   Much of the opposition to Measure J has centered on Sonoma County’s dairy industry, which has been declining in recent decades and has almost entirely converted to organic, pasture-based operations because they command higher retail prices, according to Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. Although the measure wouldn’t affect consumer prices much because grocery stores would simply stock more milk from elsewhere in the region, Sumner said, it is likely to reduce significantly how much milk is produced in Sonoma.  That’s left some Sonoma voters asking: Why punish dairies that are doing things better than the vast majority of the US dairy industry? Measure J “threatens what is probably one of the best progressive dairy environments, certainly in California, probably in the country,” Roy Smith, a small farmer in Sonoma County, told me. “Yes, there are compromises that are made, but if we wanted to improve the well-being [of animals], I would suggest that more dairies reopen here, and close the ones that are low-welfare in Wisconsin.”  No dairy farm in Sonoma is as big as America’s biggest mega-dairies, and it’s undoubtedly true that cows with access to a pasture have it better than those raised on conventional factory farms. But organic dairies can still qualify as CAFOs. Most of Sonoma’s milk cows are still concentrated on farms that are very large, and large-scale dairy production of any kind is hard to justify on environmental and animal welfare grounds.  Whether they’re raised organic or conventional, ruminant grazing requires a lot of land and water — the latter increasingly scarce in the parched American West — and produces significant greenhouse gas emissions. Organic dairy CAFOs, including some in Sonoma, share some of the characteristics of conventional ones, like the use of manure lagoons — giant pools of animal waste that pollute air and water and can harm human health. And, organic or not, the dairy business model depends on repeatedly impregnating dairy cows and taking away their newborns (highly social animals that are then generally forced to live alone in small hutches) to extract the cows’ milk, keeping them alive just as long as they remain productive. A recent Atlantic investigation into one of the nation’s most celebrated organic dairies, a few counties north of Sonoma, found pervasive animal cruelty, including some techniques that were unique to the organic model. (Because milk from cows that have ever received antibiotics can’t be marketed as organic, cows can be denied them even when they really need them for a painful disease or injury.)  In my experience writing about the livestock industry, it’s often the worst factory farms that set the bar for how we talk about animal agriculture, allowing other producers — including organic facilities — to appear idyllic by comparison. We rarely frame the conversation around what animals truly deserve: Does it really make sense to mass produce another mammal for its milk, separating mothers from babies, all for a product that isn’t nutritionally necessary and that climate scientists say is so high in emissions that we have to scale it down?  Measure J, a blunt instrument for shrinking a bloated industry, offers one possible answer: We have to make less of it.  Slaughterhouse zero In Denver, meanwhile, the proposed slaughterhouse ban, led by the advocacy group Pro-Animal Future, looms like a “black cloud” over the US sheep industry, as one sheep feedlot employee put it.  Over the last 50 years, American lamb farming has declined precipitously; the Denver slaughterhouse that would be shut down by the ballot measure, run by top lamb producer Superior Farms, is one of relatively few important facilities remaining.  If the measure passes, it’s possible that some producers will be able to send their animals to be slaughtered elsewhere or that a new slaughterhouse will open outside Denver limits. Or, Sumner told me, the measure could hasten the death of the lamb industry altogether. Not many investors are saying, “Gee, I think I’ll go into the lamb slaughtering business,” he said. “Mostly they look for something that’s growing, and nobody thinks the lamb business is growing.”  Pro-Animal Future, much like the coalition campaigning for Measure J in Sonoma County, sees the ballot initiative as a means to start civic conversations about building a more humane, planet-friendly food system, without making people feel like the only option available to them for making change is to go vegan.  The lamb industry, particularly an industrial slaughterhouse, is a reasonable target for such a reckoning: Most people rarely eat lamb — making them perhaps more sympathetic to them as animals — while slaughterhouses are, pretty much invariably, sites of terrible violence. The per-serving climate impact of sheep’s meat is also significant, second only to beef. The Superior slaughterhouse, under the name Mountain Meadows, was also recently fined by the EPA for Clean Air Act violations, and has been fined multiple times for labor violations. This week, the Intercept published findings from a recent undercover investigation into conditions at the Superior slaughterhouse, including gruesome footage of partially eviscerated, thrashing lambs hanging upside down on the slaughter line, with one lamb appearing to lift its head and open its mouth, and injured lambs who are unable to walk being thrown, dragged, and kicked toward slaughter. It also documented what appears to be the use of “Judas sheep”: sheep who live at the slaughterhouse and have been trained to greet incoming truckloads of lambs and lead them to slaughter. Superior Farms spokesperson Bob Mariano told me in a statement that “nothing included in the footage we have seen is evidence of extreme violence, animal cruelty, or halal violations [the slaughterhouse is halal-certified]. This is yet another example of proponents of the slaughterhouse ban misunderstanding or misrepresenting standard, legally compliant parts of the slaughter process in an attempt to shock voters and influence an election. This is not the first time our workers have been attacked by activist groups falsely claiming that illegally obtained footage shows things that it simply does not.”  The investigation’s findings echoed a recent Denver Post op-ed by Denver resident Jose Huizar, who worked at the slaughterhouse decades ago: “Someone has to wield that knife — over and over,” he wrote. “Spending your day slitting throats, stepping in guts, ripping the skin from the spasming bodies of animals who were alive moments ago — it’s hard to go home to your family after that.”  The slaughterhouse, located in Denver’s low-income, majority nonwhite neighborhood of Globeville, employs about 160 people — people who don’t want to lose their jobs. Like Measure J, the Denver ballot initiative directs local government to prioritize people whose jobs are eliminated as a result of the measure in workforce training programs.  “Our hope is not just to stick it to this one slaughterhouse, but to draw a connection to the fact that this is how the industry is run generally,” Olivia Hammond, an organizer for Pro-Animal Future, told me.  Woody Hastings, the Sonoma resident, compared the fight against factory farming to oil and gas phase-outs: Just as we need to transition away from fossil fuels, we know we need to scale down industrial animal agriculture. We also know there will be economic impacts to such change that ought to be distributed fairly, and workers who lose their jobs ought to be treated with dignity.  The anti-factory farming movement has a long way to go in convincing the people of Sonoma County and Denver to see industrial animal agriculture the way they do fossil fuels. And without meaningful change in either the underlying demand for meat and dairy, or in nationwide regulation of CAFOs, isolated local initiatives are, for now, likely to only shift production elsewhere.  But should even one of the ballot measures succeed next month, political leaders might be persuaded that their constituents care enough about farm animal issues to create momentum for further reform. Win or lose, though, animal advocates will still face the wearying task of trying to bridge the public’s cognitive dissonance about where our meat comes from and channel it productively into politics.  This story was featured in the Processing Meat newsletter. Sign up here.

Flood waters from Hurricane Milton inundate Punta Gorda, Florida, on October 10. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images After churning across the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico earlier this week, Milton made landfall near Sarasota, Florida, around 8:30 pm Wednesday as a powerful Category 3 hurricane with up to 120 mile-per-hour winds. The storm — and the many tornadoes it spawned — tore the roofs off of homes and a major baseball stadium and left more than 3 million people without power across the peninsula. Several fatalities have been reported so far.  Sarasota is slightly south of Tampa, which was spared from the eye of the hurricane and extreme storm surge. Remarkably, winds from Milton actually caused a so-called reverse storm surge in Tampa Bay, which is when seawater recedes. But Tampa, the region’s largest city, still saw severe flooding: Milton dumped an astonishing 17 inches of rain in the region on Wednesday, causing what some have described as a 1,000-year flooding event.  Sarasota, meanwhile, recorded at least 10 feet of storm surge, which sent seawater rushing into the city. Surge is typically the deadliest part of a hurricane. It floods neighborhoods and can collapse homes and drown people. Prior to landfall, Milton also spawned an outbreak of tornadoes, prompting the National Weather Service to issue more than a hundred tornado warnings. As of Thursday morning, Milton was still a Category 1 storm just off the east coast of Florida, though it’s expected to weaken later today as it moves farther offshore.  What’s especially gutting is that Milton — the ninth Atlantic hurricane during what government officials predicted would be an especially active season — struck parts of Florida that are still reeling from the impact of Hurricane Helene. Helene made landfall just two weeks ago, killing more than 200 people across the South and Appalachia and a dozen people in the Tampa Bay area. Milton prompted a historic evacuation of western Florida.  On one hand, Hurricane Milton is highly unusual. As I wrote earlier this week, the hurricane intensified incredibly quickly, transforming from a tropical storm to a Category 5 in roughly 24 hours. With wind speeds pushing 180 miles per hour earlier in the week and very low pressure, it’s one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic.  Then again, extreme storms like Milton are exactly what the world’s leading climate scientists have been predicting now for years. Burning fossil fuels is not just warming the air but also the ocean, and hot water is the key ingredient for super-powerful hurricanes. The threat becomes even greater when you consider that more and more people are moving to coastal Florida.    The toll of Hurricane Milton will become clearer in the days ahead, and we’ll be here to keep you in the loop. In the meantime, here are a handful of stories that really helped me understand the threat posed by superstorms and how we can be better prepared for them. As Milton descends, Florida prepares for uncharted territory The back-to-back phenomena of Hurricanes Helene and Milton spell disaster for communities in Florida that just barely started to rebuild and recover from Helene’s damage. A climatologist for the Florida Climate Center explains this uniquely destructive moment, and why we ought to find some reassurance as emergency responses and preparations get better and more efficient.  Just how doomed is home insurance? Insured losses from natural disasters around the world in the first half of the year have already topped $60 billion, 54 percent higher than the 10-year average — and that’s before the estimated tens of billions of dollars in claims from Hurricanes Helene and Milton are added to the tally. Now, as the weather gets warmer and storms worsen, insurers are raising rates to eye-popping figures or refusing to insure some homeowners altogether.  Is FEMA messing up? Milton arrives as communities continue to recover from Hurricane Helene, which caused flooding, days-long power outages, and fatalities across six states, including Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida. In Helene’s wake, a litany of questions has arisen over the role of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in getting essential help to survivors. So, what does a good government response to horrific natural disasters look like in a time of escalating dangers driven by climate change?  Donald Trump’s many, many lies about Hurricane Helene, debunked Since Hurricane Helene inundated parts of western North Carolina late last month, former President Donald Trump has seized on the tragedy to perpetuate lies about the federal response, sowing chaos and confusion as he repeatedly and falsely suggests that the federal government is purposely neglecting areas with Republican voters, that it is funneling emergency aid to migrants instead of disaster response, and that it’s giving hurricane victims just $750 in support. Experts say the disinformation could harm relief efforts and deter survivors from seeking assistance. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

At first, I thought I was allergic to my shampoo. I’d switched to a new brand recently, and while my hair looked amazing, I’d developed an itchy ring around the perimeter of my skull, like someone had put a poison crown on me. When the itch became so distracting I couldn’t work, I reluctantly switched back to my old, frizz-promoting hair care regimen.  Then my older kid started scratching. It turned out that about half his class had head lice. At our house, closer inspection revealed scuttling insects on both our scalps. We began an odyssey of combing and shampooing that lasted weeks, caused at least one meltdown per person, and left our bathroom full of sinister metal nit combs and half-empty bottles of goo.  Our experience is a rite of passage for young children and their families. In addition to being disturbing on a psychological level (I, for one, do not like the phrase “blood meal”), lice can cause intense itching; Logan, 5, another recent sufferer, described his recent case to me as “super, amazing, big, wild itchy.” Lice are often a source of shame and anxiety for families. The insects have “been historically associated with things like poor personal hygiene or houselessness or a certain socioeconomic status,” said Dawn Nolt, a pediatric infectious disease doctor and the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’s 2022 recommendations on lice.  In fact, however, there’s some evidence that they prefer clean hair, Kate King, a school nurse in Ohio and the president of the National Association of School Nurses (NASN), told me. And the insects infest people of all walks of life, all around the world, though kids and caregivers are the most susceptible. Lice are an annoyance, not a danger, Nolt said — they do not spread disease. But some school districts, including New York City, where I live, bar kids from the classroom if they’re found to have lice. For my kid, that meant a day spent getting combed in front of the TV, instead of attending kindergarten. Experts say no-lice policies — and in-school lice checks in which a nurse or other adult combs an entire class for bugs — don’t actually stop the spread of lice, and are especially problematic as school districts battle chronic absenteeism in the wake of Covid-19. “Since the pandemic, we really appreciate the benefits of in-person schooling,” Nolt told me. “Head lice is not a reason for a child to miss school.” The CDC has actually recommended against sending kids home for lice for more than 10 years. But a website redesign led to a resurgence of interest in the policy at the beginning of the 2024–25 school year, alongside what some say is an uptick in lice cases after a pandemic lull.  Instead of panicking, experts say, families and schools alike should approach lice as what they are: annoying bugs that want to eat us, but that can be defeated with the right tools, and the right attitude.  As Logan told me, “Don’t give up.” The truth about head lice Head lice are about the size of a sesame seed and can live on a person’s head for about a month, feeding on blood. During that time, they lay eggs called nits, which they stick to the hair shaft very close to the scalp with an adhesive material. Those eggs incubate for about 10 days, Nolt said, before hatching and maturing into new lice. The itching that is the hallmark of a lice infestation is actually caused by the insect’s saliva, which can cause a mild allergic reaction in humans. This reaction takes four to six weeks to develop, Nolt said, so once you start scratching, you’ve already had lice for a while.  Lice don’t have wings, and they can’t jump, but they spread by crawling from one person’s head to another, usually through head-to-head contact (something that happens a lot among little kids, who like to hug and roughhouse and generally get up in one another’s faces). They can spread through shared hats or clothing, but that’s much less common, Nolt said, because lice simply can’t survive for very long away from their source of warmth and food. For some kids, the worst part of having lice is getting rid of them. Typically, an adult washes a child’s hair, then uses a special lice comb (included with many over-the-counter lice shampoos) to find all the nits and remove them. Depending on the length of a kid’s hair, the process can take hours. “The combing really hurt,” Thomas, 7, told me. His parents let him play video games as a distraction, but “it still really hurt,” he said.  Some kids don’t mind the combing — Byron, Logan’s 2-and-a-half-year-old brother, called it “tingly.” Adding some mythos may help: Logan and Byron informed me that their family had used “nit destroyer warrior” combs “made by lasers.” (A fact-check reveals that some nit combs are purportedly made using “laser technology.”) Complicating matters further is the fact that lice appear to have evolved some resistance to pyrethrin and permethrin, the active ingredients in many over-the-counter lice shampoos. Some research shows that dimethicone, a gooey polymer that basically suffocates lice, remains effective. This is what finally worked in my house, after several rounds of permethrin-based products failed. It is also extremely oily and takes forever to wash out. All of this is stressful enough without adding school disruption to the mix. Once children have symptoms, they’ve usually already had lice for weeks, Nolt said. Sending them home for a day or two does little to limit spread, but deprives the child of key learning time. Along with the CDC, the NASN and the American Academy of Pediatrics also recommend against sending kids home for lice. In-school lice checks — a mainstay of my millennial childhood that’s still a reality in New York and elsewhere — are also ineffective, experts say. “It doesn’t produce any real results,” said King, the NASN president. “It’s also very demeaning and shaming for students.” When a child has lice at her school, King contacts the family with information about treatment, and provides free lice shampoo upon request. “Our main focus is to be a helper, not a punisher.” Ultimately, experts say schools and families should think of lice not as something shameful or frightening, but as a part of childhood — annoying, sure, but normal and not always avoidable. “Head lice are like the common cold,” said King. “Sometimes, it just happens.” What I’m reading Nearsightedness is on the rise among kids around the world, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, possibly as a result of the rise in “near work,” such as reading and writing (the effect of smartphones and other screens is still unclear). The report’s authors recommend two hours of outdoor time per day to counteract the trend, at least one of which should take place during school. Students with disabilities lack access to college readiness programs, another report finds, even though they’re entitled to such support under federal law.  In the wake of Hurricane Helene, tens of thousands of kids are home from school, with no idea when they can return to the classroom. Even remote learning isn’t possible in some areas of North Carolina because of disruptions to internet and electric service. “This isn’t Covid remote learning. This is nothing,” a professor who has studied the impact of Hurricane Katrina told the New York Times. At my house, we are reading Bill Bryson’s A Really Short History of Nearly Everything. Warning: This has required me to spend a lot of time trying to explain the Big Bang and the shape of the universe, topics that are pretty cognitively taxing at bedtime. Get in touch For Halloween, I’m hoping to write about scary stories. As a fan of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Goosebumps, I’m curious what kids are reading (or watching) to freak themselves out nowadays. For adults, I also want to hear about your favorite scary tales from childhood — or the ones that gave you nightmares for weeks. If you have observations about spooky kid content past or present, let me know at anna.north@vox.com. Your eerie recommendations (or warnings) could make it into a newsletter soon!

What is the relationship between creativity and intelligence?  That’s a fundamental, perhaps unanswerable, question. Is it also an obsolete one? The question today seems to be: What is the relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence? We tend to think of artistic creativity as a uniquely human endeavor, but what if it can be much more? Philosophers, artists, and scientists are already debating whether the art and writing generated by Midjourney and ChatGPT are evidence of machines being creative. But should the focus be on the output — the art that’s generated? Or the input — the inspiration? And what about the other, smaller ways in which we use our creativity, like through a prank on a friend or in a note to a loved one? Does the value of those communications change if AI creates them?   Meghan O’Gieblyn is an essayist and the author of God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. She’s been thinking about our relationship with technology for a long time. Her book, originally published in 2022, made a convincing case that we’re going to have to reimagine what it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence. I invited O’Gieblyn on The Gray Area to explore how AI might force us to also reconsider the meaning — and importance — of creativity. As always, you can hear the full conversation on The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing How did you start studying and writing and thinking about the relationship between humans and computers? Meghan O’Gieblyn I came to my interest in technology in a very idiosyncratic way. I grew up in a very religious family. There was a lot of fear about technology when I was growing up during the Y2K crisis, for example, and just all of this focus on the end times prophecies, which were often filtered through the lens of emerging technologies and fears about emerging technologies. I studied theology for two years at Moody Bible Institute, a very conservative, old Christian institution in Chicago, and ended up having a faith crisis while I was there. I left that belief system behind and just happened to read Ray Kurzweil and some other transhumanists in the years after that deconversion experience. I became kind of obsessed with the relationship between spiritual traditions and the larger philosophy of human nature that I had grown up with, this idea that humans are made in the image of God, that we’ve been given these divine capacities for reason and creativity.  Sean Illing Since you brought it up, I should ask for a thumbnail definition of transhumanism. Meghan O’Gieblyn Transhumanism is a movement that emerged primarily in Silicon Valley in the ’80s and ’90s. Followers believed that humans could use technology to evolve into a higher form of intelligence. At the time, the conversations about those possibilities were very speculative. But I think the things that were being discussed at that time are very much being implemented now into technologies that we’re using every day. Sean Illing You once asked a computer scientist what he thought creativity meant and he told you, “Well that’s easy, it’s just randomness.” What do you make of that view of creativity?  Meghan O’Gieblyn It’s no coincidence that a computer scientist came up with this definition. If you’re thinking about creativity, or what we call creativity, in large language models (LLMs), you can play around with the temperature gauges. You can basically turn up the temperature and turn up the amount of randomness in the output that you get. So if you ask ChatGPT to give you a list of animals at a low temperature, it’ll say something very basic like a dog, a cat, a horse. And if you turn up the temperature, it’ll give you more unusual responses, more statistically unlikely responses like an ant eater. Or if you turn it way up, it’ll make up an animal like a whistledy-woo or some Seussian creature that doesn’t exist. So there is some element of randomness. I’m inclined to think that creativity is not just randomness because we also appreciate order and meaning.  The things that I appreciate in art have a lot to do with vision, with point of view, with the sense that you’re seeing something that’s been filtered through an autobiography, through a life story. And I think it’s really difficult to talk about how that’s happening in AI models.  Sean Illing We have these large language models, things like ChatGPT and Midjourney, and they produce language, but they do it without anything that I’d call consciousness. Consciousness is something that’s notoriously hard to define, but let’s just call it the sensation of being an agent in the world. LLMs don’t have that, but is there any way you could call what they’re doing creative? Meghan O’Gieblyn The difficult thing is that creativity is a concept that is, like all human concepts, intrinsically anthropocentric. We created the term “creativity” to describe what we do as humans. We have this bad habit of changing the definition of words to suit our opinion of ourselves, especially when machines turn out to be able to do tasks that we previously thought were limited to us. Inspiration has this almost metaphysical or divine undertone to it. And now that we see a lot of that work done by automated processes, it becomes more difficult to say what creativity really is. I think there’s already an effort, and I sense it myself too, to cordon off this more special island of human exceptionalism and say, “No, what I’m doing is actually different.” Sean Illing Do you think a machine or an AI could ever really communicate in any meaningful way? Meghan O’Gieblyn There’s things that you can say in an essay or a book that you can’t say just in normal social conversations, just because of the form. I love seeing the way that other people see the world. When people ask, “Do you think an AI could create the next best American novel, the great American novel?” We’re talking a lot in those hypotheticals about technical skill. And to me, I think even if it was — on the sentence level or even on the level of concepts and ideas — something that we would consider, virtuoso, just the fact that it came from a machine changes the way that we experience it. When I’m reading something online and I start to suspect that it was generated by AI, it changes the way I’m reading. I think that there’s always that larger context of how we experience things, and intent and consciousness is a big part of it. Sean Illing There’s something about the intentionality behind artistic creations that really matters to us. It’s not like when I consume a piece of art, I’m asking myself, how long did it take to make this? But I know subconsciously there was a lot of thought and energy put into it, that there was a creator with experiences and feelings that I can relate to who’s communicating something in a way they couldn’t if they weren’t a fellow human being. That matters, right? Meghan O’Gieblyn I think that the effort that we have to put into making things is part of what gives it meaning, both for the audience and the person who’s producing it. The actual sacrifices and the difficulty of making something is what makes it feel really satisfying when you finally get it right. And it’s also true for the person experiencing it.  I think about this a lot even with things that we might not consider works of genius. Everyday people have always been creative — like my grandfather, who would occasionally write poetry or make up funny poems for different occasions. He didn’t have a college education, but he was creative and the poems were personalized for the person or for the occasion. And that’s precisely the kind of thing that an LLM couldn’t do very well, right? It could write a simple poem and you could prompt it to do that. But what would that mean to us if it was just produced by a prompt? I think that really does change how you experience something like that. Sean Illing Do you remember that controversy over the Google Gemini commercial? It’s Google’s competitor with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The commercial has a young girl who wants to write a fan letter to her hero, who’s an Olympic gold medalist or something like that. Her dad says something like “I’m okay with words, but this letter has to be perfect.” And so he’s just going to let the AI write it for them.   It is horrifying to me because it shows that AI isn’t just coming for our art and entertainment, it’s not just going to be writing sitcoms or doing podcasts, it’s going to supplant sincere authentic human-to-human communication. It’s going to automate our emotional lives. And I don’t know what to call that potential world other than a machine world populated by machine-like people and maybe eventually just machine people. And that’s a world I desperately, desperately want to avoid. Meghan O’Gieblyn For a long time I wrote an advice column for Wired magazine where people could write in with questions about technology in their everyday life. And one of the questions I got very shortly after ChatGPT was released was from somebody who is going to be the best man in their friend’s wedding. And he said, “Can I use ChatGPT, ethically, to do a best man’s speech for me?” There’s cases of people doing this. People use it to write their wedding vows. And my first instinct was like, well, you’re robbing yourself of the ability to actually try to put into words what you are feeling for your friend and what that relationship means to you. And it’s not as though those feelings just exist in you already.  I think anyone who’s written something very personal like this realizes that you actually start to feel the emotions as you’re putting it into language and trying to articulate it. I think about the same thing with this hypothetical fan letter that the girl is writing in the commercial, right? It’s like you’re stealing from your child the opportunity to actually try to access her emotions through language. Sean Illing Do you think that AI will make radically new kinds of art possible? Meghan O’Gieblyn Any of us who are daring to speak about this topic right now really are putting ourselves out there and risking looking stupid in two years or five years down the road. But it is true that AI is often called an alien form of intelligence and the fact is that it reasons very differently than we do. It doesn’t intuitively understand what’s relevant in a dataset the way that we do because we’ve evolved together to value the same things as humans. Sean Illing This is a big question, but I’m comfortable asking you because of your theological background. Do you think we have any real sense of the spiritual impact of AI? Meghan O’Gieblyn It’s a paradox in some way, right? Technologies are very anti-spiritual in the sense that they usually represent a very reductive and materialist understanding of human nature. But with every new technological development, there’s also been this tendency to spiritualize it or think of it in superstitious ways.  I think about the emergence of photography during the Civil War and how people believed that you could see dead people in the background. Or the idea that radio could transmit voices from the spiritual world. It’s not as though technology is going to rob us of a spiritual life. I think that technological progress competes with the type of transcendence that spiritual and religious traditions talk about, in the sense that it is a way to push beyond our current existence and get in touch with something that’s bigger than the human. I think a very deep human instinct is to try to get in touch with something that’s bigger than us. And I think that there’s a trace of that in the effort to build AGI. This idea that we’re going to create something that is going to be able to see the world from a higher perspective, right? And that’s going to be able to give our lives meaning in a new way.  If you look at most spiritual traditions and wisdom literature from around the world, it usually involves this paradox where if you want to transcend yourself, you also have to acknowledge your limitations. You have to acknowledge that the ego is an illusion, you have to admit that you’re a sinner, you have to humble yourself in order to access that higher reality. And I think technology is a sort of transcendence without the work and the suffering that that entails for us in a more spiritual sense. Sean Illing What I’m always thinking about in these sorts of conversations is this long-term question of what we are as human beings, what we’re doing to ourselves, and what we’re evolving into. Nietzsche loved this distinction between being versus becoming. Humanity is not some fixed thing. We’re not a static being. Like everything in nature, we’re in this process of becoming. So what are we becoming?  Meghan O’Gieblyn At some point, I think, a threshold is crossed, right? Where is that? If we’re becoming something, we’ve already been becoming something different with the technologies that we’re using right now. And is there some hard line where we’ll become post-human or another species? I don’t know. My instinct is to think that there’s going to be more pushback against that future as we approach it than it might seem right now in the abstract. I think that it’s difficult to articulate exactly what we value about the human experience until we are confronted with technologies that are threatening it in some way.  Some of the really great writing and the conversations that are happening right now are about trying to actually put into words what we value about being human. And I think these technologies might actually help clarify that conversation in a way that we haven’t been forced to articulate it before. They can help us think about what our values are and how can we create technology that is actually going to serve those values, as opposed to making us the subjects of what these machines happen to be good at doing. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk speaks during a Turning Point PAC town hall in Phoenix, Arizona, on June 6, 2024. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images It seems as though the country has been engaged in one long screaming match since 2016. Go on YouTube or scroll through X and that feeling gets a face. Videos claiming that someone “silenced” or “destroyed” another party in a discussion about politics abound on social media. There are now nearly unavoidable clips of conservative personalities like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro arguing with college students at liberal universities or leftist commentators on their social platforms. Meanwhile, videos of random folks with polar-opposite political views sitting in a dark room arguing over hot-button issues — and often saying wildly offensive or misinformed things — are on the rise.  She fought a good fight, but lost I fear . pic.twitter.com/k7U3lOrvkl— Stace (@StaceDiva) September 21, 2024 At the end of September, a YouTube video titled, “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 25 Trump Supporters” went viral, drawing attention for its absurd, Battle Royale-like premise. In two weeks, it had accumulated 9.6 million views. The video sees 19-year-old liberal TikTok pundit Dean Withers (a.k.a. the “woke teen”) thrown into a lion’s den of young, zealous Trumpers eager to prove him wrong. One by one, he argues with his opponents across a table about reproductive rights and Kamala Harris’s bona fides. One clip where he appears to stump a woman during a discussion about abortion and IUDs garnered millions of views on X.  This is just one of the contentious and extremely clicky scenarios explored by the media company Jubilee in its popular YouTube series “Surrounded.” The series’ setup looks like a satire of what debate has become in the age of Trump: extremely competitive, theatrical, and unbalanced (literally and emotionally) to boot. What should theoretically be an exchange of facts and logic has become the ultimate bloodsport for a certain type of “thought leader” often happy to traffic in opinions and distorted truths. These oral pugilists are more interested in some online-only version of “winning” than having meaningful discourse.  Across the political spectrum, there has proven to be an appetite for watching people shout at each other. These on-air clashes have been the bread and butter of cable news networks like CNN and Fox News. Still, these filmed debates mostly promote the pessimistic notion that the US is too polarized to be saved. They’re frequently a front-row seat to all the misinformation, conspiracy theories, and regressive attitudes polluting the political landscape and affecting people’s daily lives. So why can’t we stop watching them?   In the Trump era, liberal vs. conservative face-offs are everywhere  While this critique has certainly been amplified in the Trump era, the observation that public debate has become a circus is not exactly new. You can go back decades; in the 2000s, Jon Stewart (fairly) disparaged Crossfire; in the ’90s, Saturday Night Live parodied the unproductive and shouty nature of political panel show The McLaughlin Group and, later, The View. However, in the digital age, this kind of content has been mass-produced and even more degraded. You no longer have to watch CNN or programs like Real Time With Bill Maher to see opposing parties talk over each other and manipulate facts. Instead, you can go to the New York Post’s website to watch two random people shout about the legitimacy of the Black Lives Matter movement in a series called “Face Your Hater” or watch a group of strangers argue about traditional and modern masculinity on Vice’s YouTube channel.  Ryan Broderick, a freelance journalist who writes the newsletter Garbage Day, began noticing these viral confrontations ramping up after the Obama era, a period that saw a growing cultural backlash to progressive policies and rhetoric (i.e. the Tea Party movement) and eventually culminated in Trump’s election. This was a time when liberals and moderates were encouraging each other to “reach across the aisle” and talk about politics with their Trump-supporting relatives during holidays. He describes these filmed social experiments as an “impulse from extremely naive digital media companies.”  “That whole style of content got really popular because there was this impulse coming out of the Obama years that we could bypass all the unpleasantness of the last 10 years if we could just talk to each other,” said Broderick.  Some of these videos are at least designed as slightly more benevolent attempts to see if two supposedly opposing identities can find common ground or at least engage in a civil conversation. The YouTube channel Only Human has a series called “Eating With the Enemy” where two people from different backgrounds — like a drag queen and a Catholic priest, for example — share a meal while discussing political issues, like gay marriage.  Others, like Vice’s popular “Debate” series on YouTube, can get a little more dramatic and heated, like watching a daytime panel show or a scene from Real Housewives. Even with a moderator guiding the discussion, they aren’t exactly designed with the goal of finding middle ground or even having one side convince the other of their argument. Rather, they feel like useless surveys meant to convey our country’s deeply divided climate. For instance, one debate between a group of “anti and pro feminists” arguing over a slew of women’s and trans issues ends with some of the participants talking to the camera about their experiences. Ultimately, they leave more affirmed in their established beliefs than moved by other arguments.  Jubilee’s “Surrounded” series feels more like a MrBeast-inspired game show in its pure stuntiness. Even the way the channel highlights the number of people debating against one another resembles his excessive model. The prompts displayed in the top corner of the videos — like “trans women are women” or “Kamala Harris is a DEI candidate”— aren’t rigorous or challenging. They feel primed to become “rage bait” clips meant to get viewers excited or angry, to the tune of millions of clicks.  Still, this content is sort of genius in the way it attracts and satisfies a range of audiences because there’s typically someone you can agree with and believe made the better argument. For instance, someone can watch Jubilee’s video of Charlie Kirk being schooled by college students with more educated arguments and still, if they’re a fan of his, believe he won the debate. Broderick says that Jubilee, despite the pugnacious nature of their videos, inadvertently creates this sort of “feel-good centrist” content designed for everyone.  “I can’t fathom watching this and thinking that Charlie Kirk looks good,” says Broderick. “But from what I’ve seen of right-wingers watching this stuff, they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, he’s the one that’s making sense.’” Online debates have become a successful way to self-brand   Conservative pundits, in particular, have taken online debate culture to competitive and self-serving extremes. The phrase “debate me, bro” has become  largely associated with the very online and combative community of right-wing commentators, like Dinesh D’Souza and Steven Crowder — a.k.a. the guy in the “change my mind” meme — who are constantly challenging liberal politicians, women, or practically anyone who disagrees with them on the internet to verbally spar.  For personalities like Kirk, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson, these videos have become a promotional tool to prove their authority in the marketplace — or, more precisely, battlefield — of ideas. Given that many of them host debates or upload in-person confrontations on their media platforms, they’re able to edit or advertise themselves as outsmarting their opponents. For instance, the YouTube channel for Turning Point USA features videos of Kirk supposedly “destroying” “arrogant” and “naive” students on liberal college campuses on his speaking tours. These videos are not actually about producing an interesting dialogue but rather humiliating their opponents and highlighting their supposed stupidity.  @itsdeaann Full Rally Video Tmr, Friday the 28th at 10am PST! On YT: ParkerGetAJob @Parker ♬ 哔 短消音 – Official Sound Studio Leftists, like YouTuber Destiny and livestreamer Hasan Piker, have also gained visibility and clicks via their eagerness to argue with conservatives. Journalist Max Read, who writes the newsletter Read Max, says that, when it comes to these chronic debaters, the line between “self-promotion and movement-building” can be very thin. “I can understand the idea that you’re not just boosting your own profile; you’re boosting the profile of your politics and trying to bring more people into it,” says Read. “However, I’m inclined to be more generous to YouTubers who make explanatory response videos than join debates.”  Dean Withers, who’s participated in several Jubilee videos, hosts livestreams on TikTok where he debates with users about political subjects. He also posts solo responses to right-wing talking points. He says he understands people’s criticism around his debate content as clicky and unproductive. However, he says he uses these exchanges as opportunities to educate his audience.  “The main prerogative of my platform is to inform the people watching the debates that I have on what the issues are, why they matter, and why you should agree with me,” he says. “I know that getting my opponent to agree with me is more than likely to never occur.”  For someone, like Withers — who was in middle school when Trump was elected and whose political consciousness was developed in the social-media age — debating with strangers online may just seem like an obvious approach to activism. Research has found, though, that this phenomenon may create a more toxic picture of how humans engage in political discourse.  Political boxing matches might be entertaining, but they don’t reflect how we communicate in reality A March study found that political debates on social media often give the impression of a climate that’s more combative and divided than it actually is. Specifically, research found that Americans are more likely to argue over political topics with people they know and trust, like family and friends, than strangers on the internet, and often leave these interactions with positive feelings. University of California Berkeley professor Erica Bailey, who co-authored the study, says these intense, Jubilee-like debates “almost never happen in real life.”  “While these debates can seem ubiquitous because we’re constantly being fed them through our screens, my research has found that the typical American debates hot-button issues infrequently,” she says. “Of the most common topics, like vaccines, reproductive rights, and policing, only about half of Americans have debated these topics in the last year.”  On the rare occasion that you may be forced to defend a political stance, it can still be a pretty daunting task and cause feelings of anxiety. This seems to be one of the reasons we can’t stop watching these videos. On the whole, these exchanges seem generally unpleasant, but it can provide a sense of relief to watch an expert — or someone who claims to be an expert — confidently expressing their opinions.  “When you engage in debate, you often find out all the ways in which your knowledge and understanding is incomplete,” says Bailey. “Watching debate videos is cathartic because we get to cosplay as an excellent debater who can articulate our position with ease. It also helps that these clips are certainly edited to show us the most persuasive moment of the exchange.”  Humans also just tend to engage more with content that elicits a strong emotional response. It’s one of the reasons even the most obvious “rage bait” is hard to avoid on social media, whether you’re the type of person who would ordinarily click on it or not. This behavior, plus algorithms that boost this sort of controversial content, has created a cycle of doom content we can’t escape.  While content like Jubilee’s abounds, the staginess and over-produced structure of these videos underlie a comforting truth: This level of antagonism surrounding political discourse may be clicky but it is thankfully not natural.   “It might be surprising given the state of polarization,” says Bailey. “But humans are typically wired toward social cohesion. In the end, we really don’t want to fight; we want to belong. ” 

Around 15 years ago, a new campaign took off across the young social media ecosystem.  People with learning disabilities and intellectual disorders were asking everyone else to stop using the r-word to describe them or even to make jokes. No more, “Bro, that movie’s so dumb, it’s [r-word],” no more, “Don’t be stupid, why are you acting like such a [r-word]?”  Across the internet, commentators had their doubts that the movement would succeed, or even that it was worthwhile. Surely, detractors argued, we had seen this dance before, with words like “idiot” and “moron” and “stupid.” All of them were originally developed as clinical terms for people with intellectual disorders, and they all eventually became insults as the wider public picked up on them, in a process variously called the euphemism cycle or the euphemism treadmill. “Idiot” and its ilk emerged in an era that lacked our current moment’s sensitivity over slurs, so they hadn’t experienced the same boycott campaign that the r-word was facing.  Even if the r-word was banished, wouldn’t new pejoratives simply replace it? “If interest groups want to pour resources into cleaning up unintentional insults, more power to them,” allowed a Washington Post column in 2010. “But we must not let ‘retard’ go without a requiem. If the goal is to protect intellectually disabled individuals from put-downs and prejudice, it won’t succeed. New words of insult will replace old ones.”  All of them were originally developed as clinical terms for people with intellectual disorders, and they all eventually became insults Yet apparently against the odds, the campaign worked. Over the past decade, bit by bit, the r-word more or less vanished. (To a certain extent, though, the expected also occurred, as other euphemisms did in fact emerge. Donald Trump has lately taken to contending, just on the edge of a slur, that he thinks Kamala Harris might be “mentally disabled.”)  Until the past year or so, that is, when the r-word appeared to be trending back up.  Posts using the word have racked up tens of thousands of likes, bookmarks, and reposts on X in the last year. Edgelord comedians have started to use the word in their sets. “I know I said ‘retarded’ there a couple times. My bad on that,” said comic Shane Gillis in a recent set as he introduced a joke about his uncle’s Down Syndrome. On FX’s new sitcom The English Teacher, teachers muse about how “the kids are not into being woke” anymore and “they’re saying the r-word again.” It’s become a bipartisan slur, available to anyone on the right or the left or in between who wants to show off their iconoclasm.   “This summer I started hearing it right after the Democratic convention,” says Katy Neas, CEO at The Arc, a disability rights advocacy group. “Governor Walz’s son [who has neurodivergence] appeared, and I saw people being comfortable in using it on social media.” Andrea Cahn, vice president at Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools who helped lead the 2009 campaign against the r-word, says she’s seen steadily increasing attention to the old parts of the Special Olympics website that used to promote their anti r-word campaigns. “Last year, people started asking for it because they were saying that they needed to reconnect with that messaging,” says Cahn. “So we promoted those pages, and traffic to the website went up by 200 or 300 percent or something like that.” It’s hard to say for sure that usage of the r-word is increasing. The use of swear words across time is notoriously hard to track. But it does at the very least look as though for some demographics, the r-word has become trendy in a way that it wasn’t a few short years ago.  Here’s how the r-word fell out of usage and why it seems to be coming back now. Running on the euphemism treadmill One of the ways you can tell when a group is particularly marginalized is that the words we use to describe them come to seem humiliating and dehumanizing, even when they’re not intended to be. We can track this process very neatly when it comes to people with intellectual disabilities by observing the name changes of a group now known as the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD).  When the AAIDD was founded in 1876, its name was the Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Persons. In 1910, it became the American Association for the Study of the Feebleminded. By 1933, it was the American Association on Mental Deficiency. In 1957, the American Association on Mental Retardation. Finally, in 2007, it became the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.  “Idiot” and “feeble-minded” were legitimate medical diagnoses in their day. So, too, was “mentally retarded.” Over time, though, they all became words that laypeople were happy to throw around as insults, which in turn meant that as medical terminology, they came to feel humiliating to the people they were supposed to help. In order to do their work, the words had to shift.  This kind of shifting of meaning was called the euphemism cycle by linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor in 1974, and later renamed the euphemism treadmill by psycholinguist Stephen Pinker in 1994. “Euphemisms denoting low intelligence seem particularly susceptible to the sort of pejoration that the word ‘retarded’ is undergoing,” observed Taylor in her paper “Terms for Low Intelligence.”  The r-word started to fall out of official usage in the last decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st. In 2010, Barack Obama signed into effect Rosa’s Law, which removed the words “mental retardation” from federal law and replaced them with the words “intellectual disability” or “intellectual disabilities.” Multiple states followed suit. By 2018, so many students had signed a pledge not to use the r-word as part of “Spread the Word” that the campaign was basically over As the r-word faded out of official language, activists began to turn their attention to more casual use. Cahn says the 2007 film Tropic Thunder, which prominently features a joke about actors “going full retard,” was a major impetus for Special Olympics to launch their “Spread the Word to End the Word” campaign to eradicate the r-word once and for all.  “We had some youth advocates that were really vocal about the harm and the insult that it was — people with intellectual disabilities, athletes of Special Olympics, and a lot of our young people that were involved in Unified Sports in schools,” says Cahn. “We had a fairly concerted campaign around Tropic Thunder, and that really galvanized our population.”  By 2018, so many students had signed a pledge not to use the r-word as part of “Spread the Word” that the campaign was basically over. “Our school participants were asking, ‘What’s next?’” says Cahn. The Special Olympics team decided to expand to “focus on a larger, broader inclusion message” focused less on teaching kids about the r-word specifically. After all, they already knew. Or, at least, they used to.  How the r-word came back It’s hard to say why the r-word is suddenly so much more visible now than it was a few years ago. One reason might be that influencers have far more reach now, and they experience less incentive to avoid insulting parts of their audience than traditional celebrities.   “Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the more traditional celebrity is more aware of the feedback or more concerned about a feedback loop that could happen,” Cahn says. “Whereas, for the more individual influencer, they have less at stake when being outrageous.” Indeed, for some online personalities, being outrageous is the whole point. Linguist Caitlin Green points out that the r-word has become a convenient marker of edgy identity among conservatives online.  “What you’re doing when you use a slur is you’re telling the people in your audience, ‘This is the kind of person I am, and this is the kind of attitude I have toward the normies that don’t use that word,’” says Green. “You get the right-wingers using it because they’re anti-woke and not using the slur is local, right?”  Linguist Christopher Hom notes that the heroes of the online right are those with the loudest voices when it comes to mocking those with disabilities, if not outright using the r-word. Trump infamously mocked journalists with disabilities twice in 2015 during his successful campaign for the presidency. “That really sends a signal about what’s acceptable and about how our social norms can change,” says Hom.  Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who has publicly used the r-word to taunt his critics online, has chosen to remove the old Twitter safeguards against hate speech since he purchased the site in 2022. Under Musk’s reign, the r-word has been free to spread and flourish on what is now known as X.  “It creates this cycle where you see that the word is allowed, so then others feel like they can use it,” says Hom. The r-word seems to be particularly appealing for Musk and others in the Silicon Valley right who are preoccupied with racist pseudoscience around whether some races have higher IQs than others.  “That ideology is pretty closely connected with the tendency to go for a mental disability over another kind of slur,” says Green. If a central part of your worldview is the reprehensible idea that some races are physically and mentally superior, ableism becomes especially important: You prove that one race is better than another by making the claim that it’s less likely to experience disabilities and that people who experience disabilities are less than human.  “It creates this cycle where you see that the word is allowed, so then others feel like they can use it” The r-word can also be attractive to people who identify as leftists and want to make a point that they’re cooler than mainstream liberals. “A lot of them are trying to claim this position that’s actually kind of a balancing act to maintain,” says Green, “which is ‘Yes, I’m on the left, but I’m not one of those crazy, screechy lefty people. I’m cool. I’m willing to use slurs.’” The resurgence of the r-word could also be seen as a sign that mainstream culture has gotten less censorious in the post-pandemic 2020s than it was during the more progressive 2010s. “People are just being less sensitive,” said one poster on Reddit during a conversation earlier this year about why the r-word has returned. “For most of the 2010’s the attitude was not offending anybody and walking on eggshells. Now it seems to be shifting to ‘Just don’t be an asshole and if you are here’s the hardline’ and the word ‘Retard’ isn’t on that line.” Why people think ableism is just not that bad  Ableism is frequently the prejudice that doesn’t quite make it to the hardline. “Ableism is an easy one to ridicule as a concept,” says Green. “We have these discourses that come up every once in a while on social media, where someone will be like, ‘Telling me not to use DoorDash is ableist,’ or like, ‘Telling me I have to smile when I’m at my customer service job is ableist.’ And then everybody piles on them, and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, these online woke people, they’re out of control.’”  “Ableism is the vector” that leads to stern think pieces about how wokeness has gone too far, Green adds. People may overlook the discrimination disabled people face if they compare it to other prejudices that run rampant in the US. Hom cites the FBI’s hate crime report, which shows 28 incidents of violence against those with mental disabilities over the past year, as opposed to over 1,000 incidents against Black people and Jewish people combined. But violent crime against people with disabilities is still disproportionately high, and in 2021, the Department of Justice reported that it was rising. “But if you look at the other factors,” Hom continues, “the kind of boring factors that are really significant about quality of life, the ability to have a dignified life, to be able to have self-determination, it’s really bad actually. The numbers are quite shocking.” People with intellectual disabilities live 12 years less than other adults on average. For those with Down Syndrome, it’s 18 years less, and for those with cerebral palsy, it’s 23 years less. People with intellectual disabilities are more likely to develop chronic health conditions and to die of Covid-19. During the height of the pandemic, some states adopted the policy that ventilators should be preferentially saved for those without disabilities.  To state plainly a thing most people sort of already know: Our society is not set up well for people with disabilities. It is very difficult and very expensive to live a good life as a disabled person in the US. Despite those facts, it seems to be very easy for many people to think of ableism as the kind of prejudice that doesn’t really count and the r-word as not a real slur.  Jason Rogers, 32, has been involved in Special Olympics for years. As a teenager, he competed in swimming, which he says is his all-time favorite sport, and also practiced track and field.  It seems to be very easy to think of ableism as the kind of prejudice that doesn’t really count and the r-word as not a real slur Today, Rogers is the coordinator of workplace readiness and inclusion on the leadership and organizational development team at Special Olympics International. He’s also community liaison for the Down Syndrome Community of Greater Chattanooga. Last summer, a stranger called him the r-word at a memorial service for a recently deceased family member. “Think before you say something,” says Rogers. “Don’t say something you regret. We take the r-word very seriously in the Down community.” Despite this seriousness, the r-word’s defenders protest that replacing it will be useless and that a new slur is certain to come along before too long. It’s a popular position to take. It’s popular even though the reason we keep having to replace medical terminology for people with intellectual disabilities is because we transfigure those words into a deeply humiliating insult, and we do that because our society is designed to treat people with disabilities with contempt. “Ableism is what is fueling the euphemistic treadmill,” says Hom. “I take this as evidence that ableism really is pretty significant in our culture.”

Tomorrow is World Mental Health Day, and in many ways, it seems like the world has made great strides in mental health care. In 2023 alone, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) poured $1.25 billion into research studying how mental illness manifests in the brain. People are prescribed more psychiatric drugs now than ever, while talking openly about depression, anxiety, and ADHD isn’t just becoming less stigmatized — online at least, it’s almost cool. Despite having more access to medication in the US than ever, over 50,000 Americans died by suicide last year — the highest number ever recorded. The US Surgeon General describes mental health as “the defining public health crisis of our time,” but we’re barely any closer to understanding the neuroscience of mental health than we were 50 years ago. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Despite the popular framing of mental illnesses as being fundamentally caused by electrochemical imbalances in the brain, a pile of evidence decades in the making suggests the truth is much more complicated. It’s the biggest open secret in neuroscience — psychiatric medications often don’t work. If drugs that alter chemical signaling in the brain are capable of silencing auditory hallucinations and suicidal thoughts, then brain chemistry must somehow explain mental illness, at least in part. But while medications like antidepressants and antipsychotics make many people feel a lot better, they make just as many — or more — feel the same or even worse. (Prescribing the right meds for the right condition is mostly a guess, and the wrong match can accidentally shoot someone into a manic episode, for example.)  The brain is one of the most complex machines in the universe, made up of 86 billion cells connected by 100 trillion synapses. To give you a sense of just how complicated that is, it took over four years for neuroscientists to build a map of a single fruit fly’s brain, which only contains about 0.00003% of the neurons in a human brain — and as much of a scientific achievement as that was, it doesn’t even come close to fully explaining a fly’s behavior. Try scaling that project up by several orders of magnitude, and the prospect of fully understanding human brain chemistry looks downright impossible.  It could be that neuroscience simply hasn’t had enough time to develop truly effective mental health therapies for most conditions. It’s a relatively young field, and scientists have only been able to get a good look at living brain activity for a few decades. The breakthrough psychiatry needs could be right around the corner. But it’s also possible that some of the best mental health care lies outside Western psychiatry altogether. Maybe two things can be true at once. Psychiatrists no longer think chemical imbalances cause mental illness. Why do we?   For thousands of years, mental illness could only be explained by supernatural forces or moral deviance. In Enlightenment-era Europe and its colonized territories, people with psychiatric disorders were largely confined to asylums — later rebranded as “psychiatric hospitals” — up until the 1950s. In the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud and his peers popularized psychotherapy, which helped (and continues to help) people navigate disorders like depression and anxiety. But physicians at asylums were initially hesitant to adopt it, preferring a “somatic” approach to mental health care that involved stimulating the body and the nervous system to alter the mind.  Leading doctors once believed that disorders like schizophrenia were caused by an underactive “vegetative” nervous system, an old term for the parts of the brain that control basic life-sustaining functions like digestion and breathing. Early psychiatric treatments were designed to send a big enough shock to the brain — whether with electricity, an intentional malaria infection, or coma-inducing drugs — to kickstart these supposedly underactive processes. Psychiatrists who invented malaria treatment — using the malaria virus to induce a high fever, hopefully killing neurosyphilis-causing bacteria — and the prefrontal lobotomy both won the Nobel Prize in Medicine while asylums were still the norm in Europe.  Over time, however, physicians began to acknowledge that their somatic treatments weren’t working very well. That, combined with the observation that mentally ill brains didn’t seem to have anything visibly wrong with them when autopsied, began to drive physical treatments out of fashion.  Everything changed in 1952, when Parisian surgeon Henri Laborit accidentally discovered that chlorpromazine, an antihistamine he used to make anesthesia less dangerous for his patients, was also a powerful antipsychotic. When chlorpromazine entered the market in 1954, it changed psychiatry like the discovery of insulin changed diabetes. Suddenly, people who had been chronically restrained in mental hospitals could have calm conversations with their psychiatrists. Within a year, public psychiatric hospitals in the US began closing as policymakers hoped that new drugs would render institutionalization obsolete.  For years, no one knew how drugs like chlorpromazine worked, only that they did, albeit with unpleasant side effects like drowsiness, weight gain, and uncontrollable muscle spasms. Neuroscientists later figured out that antipsychotics like chlorpromazine bind to a certain type of dopamine receptor in the brain, flagging the neurochemical dopamine — specifically, having too much of it — as the biological root of schizophrenia. The idea that a chemical imbalance could change someone’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors quickly spread throughout psychiatry. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac, widely used antidepressants introduced in the 1980s, block neurons from reabsorbing leftover serotonin after a chemical signal is sent. Theoretically, if a lack of serotonin contributes to depression, keeping more serotonin molecules available should make people happier. About half of people who take SSRIs feel better after a couple of months. However, antidepressant researcher Alan Frazer told NPR, “I don’t think there’s any convincing body of data that anybody has ever found that depression is associated to a significant extent with a loss of serotonin.” Pinning schizophrenia simply on dopamine is similarly oversimplified and old-fashioned. Today, researchers believe that many neurotransmitters — on top of other genetic, social, and environmental factors — affect the likelihood that someone experiences mental illness. Even though dopamine- and serotonin-related self-help videos keep making the rounds on TikTok, neuroscientists and psychiatrists have been vocally skeptical of the “chemical imbalance” trope for decades. Electrochemical interactions, to the extent that scientists are capable of understanding them, can’t fully explain — or more importantly, treat — mental illness.  The future of mental health doesn’t belong only to neuroscience Thinking of mental illness as something that medication can solve provides people “a way to establish their suffering as both tangible and unfeigned, and it offers a simple account and positive prognosis for their struggles,” sociology professor Joseph Davis wrote for Psyche. If a person claims their mental illness as a disease beyond their control, like cancer, then others may be more likely to view them as humans worthy of respect and opportunities.  Two weeks ago, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a new antipsychotic drug that doesn’t target dopamine receptors — the first since chlorpromazine was first introduced. The new medicine, called Cobenfy, targets acetylcholine instead, a neurotransmitter that notably isn’t dopamine, but can affects dopamine levels indirectly.  The fact that Cobenfy is the first new option presented in 70 years was enough to make headlines. But whether it actually works better than existing options remains to be seen: None of the drug’s three clinical trials ran long enough to tell whether Cobenfy will cause the same long-term side effects — dramatic weight gain, repetitive body movements — as its predecessors.  The introduction of Cobenfy captures a lot of what’s troubling — and what’s hopeful — about the role of neuroscience in treating mental illness. Sure, a new pharmaceutical treatment may relieve the worst symptoms of schizophrenia with fewer side effects than before. But introducing a new drug can’t eliminate the condition altogether or fundamentally shift how people navigate psychosis.  The latter strategy — radically reconsidering how communities care for people with even the most severe mental illnesses — is recommended by the World Health Organization. In many cultures, mental health problems are not considered biomedical problems, so people generally don’t seek things like medication. Community-based mental health care, where lightly-trained laypeople facilitate therapy sessions in their own neighborhoods, can work as well as formal psychiatric care in many settings, with or without medication.  While community-based models are often discussed in the context of non-psychotic mental illnesses like depression, options beyond psychiatry can help people experiencing more severe psychosis, too. Anti-carceral care strategist and crisis responder Stefanie Kaufman-Mthimkhulu believes that whether the root cause of psychosis is ultimately ancestral spirits, childhood trauma, post-viral inflammation, or a delicate shift in neurochemistry, “it is critical to offer people multiple ways to define and make sense of our experiences.”  Neuroscience can only take us so far. At some point, our willingness to find value in mental states beyond our own has to take over.