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Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyA top adult film star alleges she was forced to participate in an onscreen orgy against her will and then became the victim of a vicious smear campaign after a fellow performer overdosed on prescription drugs and nearly died while on set.Now, Melissa Hutchison, who is known to her fans as Phoenix Marie, claims to be out multiple millions and a deal with the Fleshlight brand of sex toys, according to a $30 million federal lawsuit obtained by The Daily Beast.The situation has led to “anxiety, panic attacks, sleepless nights, and sexual dysfunction,” Hutchison maintains.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Tucker Carlson speaks in Florida on April 2, 2024. | Ivan Apfel/Getty Images Carlson mainstreamed antisemitism for a long time, and conservatives seemed not to care. Then he set his sights on Israel. The New York Times once described Tucker Carlson’s Fox News hour as “the most racist show in the history of cable news.” In the past week, allegations of bigotry involving his new show on X have come from a rather different corner: his fellow conservatives. The fight started April 9, when Carlson published a friendly interview with Palestinian pastor Munther Isaac. The pastor — who has reportedly praised the “strength” of the October 7 attackers — argued that Israel is no friend to Christians: It bombs them in Gaza, represses them in the West Bank, and restricts their ability to proselytize inside Israel proper. The interview went viral, receiving over 30,000 reposts so far. Erick Erickson, a prominent radio host and former Carlson ally, spoke for many on the right when he labeled Tucker a “pro-Hamas” ally of “the antisemites on college campuses, and the terrorist-supporting progressives of the American left.” Carlson has, according to Erickson, become “willing to use his platform and formerly earned trust and reputation to persuade the easily manipulated to believe the lies he used to rail against.” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) wrote a blistering post on X that attempted to banish Carlson from the conservative movement entirely. “Tucker’s MO is simple: defend America’s enemies and attack America’s allies. There isn’t an objective bone left in that washed up news host’s body,” Crenshaw wrote. “Tucker will eventually fade into nothingness, because his veneer of faux intellectualism is quickly falling apart and revealing who he truly is: a cowardly, know-nothing elitist who is full of shit.” While Erickson and Crenshaw are seen as more establishment-friendly voices nowadays, the outrage at Carlson was shared even by some in the right’s Trumpier corners: Even the sorts of people who oppose Ukraine aid laid into the former Fox host after the Isaac interview. Only an openly antisemitic fringe of the conservative movement — the so-called Groypers — seem to be gleeful, believing that pitting Israel against Christians can bring old-school European Jew hatred to contemporary America. “It’s waking people up. It’s making people aware of the fundamentals — which is first and foremost that Jews are not Christians,” said Nick Fuentes, the leading voice of the Groypers. “Once you get into those basics, you can start to build upon that and get to where we are.” So is what Carlson suggests about Israel and Christians accurate? And what does the right-wing backlash against him say about the state of the conservative movement today? Broadly, I think there are basically three key answers to these questions: It’s true that Palestinian Christians are suffering, though it’s largely because they are Palestinians rather than because they are Christians. Carlson’s message, however, does less to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians than to pit Jews against Christians. In trying to excommunicate Carlson, conservatives are pretending that he’s changed — but he’s really the same guy he always has been. The antisemitic and otherwise bigoted things he said on Fox were far worse than anything in the Isaac interview and received only a fraction of the internal right-wing condemnation. Carlson is exploiting legitimate criticism of Israel to fan the flames of Christian antisemitism, which has become a growing problem on the right even as much public attention recently has focused on the left wing. Let’s discuss each of these points in turn. Israel doesn’t persecute Christians, but it does oppress Palestinians Christians are a small minority inside Israel — about 2 percent of the total population. But this mostly Arab group’s numbers are growing, and they tend to do better than their Muslim peers in socioeconomic terms. A 2021 report from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics found that Israeli Christians were more likely to get a college degree and less likely to be on welfare attainment than Muslims and even Jews. Israeli law guarantees formal freedom of religion, and there are no legal restrictions on Christian worship. There is some restriction on missionary activity, but that typically only affects travel visas for foreigners rather than Christians living in Israel. No one in the country has been prosecuted for missionary activity. That’s not to say Israeli Christians have no problems. Jewish extremists occasionally harass Christians in Jerusalem, and there are tensions surrounding the city’s holy sites. Danny Seidemann, a leading expert on Jerusalem, has warned that settler plans for the city threaten the historic Christian presence there. But this, per Seidemann, is less a reflection of hostility toward Christians per se than it is a reflection of the generalized settler goal to control all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Pierbattista Pizzaballa blesses Christian worshipers at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Easter Sunday 2024. But while the Israeli state does not officially discriminate against Israeli Christians, it does oppress Palestinians — and Palestinian Christians suffer along with their Muslim brethren. From churches bombed in Gaza to Israel’s “security barrier” cutting right through Bethlehem, Palestinian Christians experience Israeli occupation the same way that other Palestinians do: as violence and unfreedom. “The major threat to Christian communities and institutions is dismissiveness. They’re not seen,” Seidemann writes. “What’s seen are Palestinians and Arabs who are always suspected terrorists.” Most of Isaac’s comments in the Carlson interview were focused on explaining how the general cruelty of the occupation hurts Palestinian Christians. But Carlson’s additions — such as saying Israel is “blowing up churches and killing Christians” — go a bit further. He suggests that Israel is targeting Christians as a class, and that the Jewish state is fundamentally hostile to Christianity. In doing so, he is playing with antisemitic fire: invoking the longstanding canard that Jews are a danger to the Christian West. “Palestinian Christians, like all Palestinians, suffer under occupation,” writes Matt Duss, a leading Christian expert on the Israel-Palestine conflict. But “Tucker Carlson is absolutely not an ally in the struggle for safety and equality. Be clear: he seeks division here, not solidarity.” The right’s turn on Tucker is hypocritical — at best The conservative movement is highly factional, riven by deep disagreements over all sorts of major issues. But with the exception of the openly antisemitic fringe — which we’ll talk about in a second — most of them have expressed anger at Carlson’s interview. But what’s striking in this discourse is a pervasive sentiment that Carlson’s current output is radically at odds with his work for Fox. Jenna Ellis, former Trump 2020 election attorney and convicted felon, said on her Salem News Channel show that Tucker’s worldview is “very, very different than who he presented himself as on Fox News.” Her guest, Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, who is Jewish, agreed. “I genuinely enjoyed watching Tucker on Fox. But it turns out Tucker needed Fox more than Fox needed Tucker, because he needed those guardrails. He needed his staffers [and] research assistants,” Hammer said. The specifics of Hammer’s claim are pretty funny, as Carlson’s staff at Fox included notorious extremists. In 2020, head writer Blake Neff resigned after his history of racist posts in anonymous forums came to light. More generally, the Fox show was typically far worse than anything in the Isaac interview. From openly espousing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory to suggesting that immigrants to the United States are dirty and diseased to peddling the same sort of antisemitic lies that motivated the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting, Carlson consistently worked to make some of the most dangerous fringe ideas in American politics palatable to mainstream Republicans. This flirtation with antisemitism isn’t a break from Carlson’s longstanding persona but an extension of it. Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images Tucker Carlson in 2018, while he was still hosting on Fox. The internal conservative discourse on Carlson is thus both substantively and psychologically revealing. Substantively, it shows that the right is willing to forgive or downplay antisemitism unless it’s somehow linked to criticism of Israel — in which case there’s a zero-tolerance policy. Psychologically, it shows there is a powerful need to reconcile conservatives’ previous love of Carlson with the reality of who he is, requiring implausible contortions about his changing radically after leaving Fox. “Tucker Carlson is the same person he was for his last few years at Fox. You may have pretended not to see it because it would have been personally inconvenient, but there were a select few of us on the Right who stated the uncomfortable truth out loud and were scorned for it,” Mediaite’s Isaac Schorr writes. The reticence among conservatives to acknowledge that Schorr was right all along points to something bigger: that the issue of right-wing antisemitism is much more serious than mainstream conservatives want to admit. The right’s growing antisemitism problem In the past few years, the Groypers have looked more influential than many on the more mainstream right seem to appreciate. In 2022, Nick Fuentes finagled an invite to Mar-a-Lago and had dinner with Donald Trump. More recently, popular podcaster Candace Owens has outed herself as a Groyper-adjacent antisemite. While this turn led to her departure from the right-wing Daily Wire, it also showed how much the movement has made inroads on the broader right. During the Owens saga, Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing sat down for a conversation with Fuentes that was streamed on X. Speaking to a man he had once called “a wicked little s**t with evil ideas,″ Boreing praised Fuentes as a “most talented” and “very funny” broadcaster — and invited him to be a guest on a Daily Wire show. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images Woven Stars of David at the Tree of Life Synagogue on the 1st Anniversary of the shooting on October 27, 2019. There’s a lot of evidence that right-wing antisemitism is rising. While much attention has been paid (rightly) to left-wing antisemitism after October 7, academic research suggests that antisemitic attitudes are disproportionately concentrated among right-wing young adults. Right-wing extremists are responsible for nearly all of the deadly attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in recent years. Trump’s own rhetoric has long been rife with antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories. The simple fact is that the worldview of the antisemitic right has clear resonance with the Trumpified Republican party. Their influence is primarily felt online today, but what happens online doesn’t always stay there. There’s enough evidence of this bleeding out into the real world — all-too-often literally — that it’s worth being alarmed about it. The reaction to Carlson’s interview raises a question about whether conservatives can see this. Are they merely angry that Tucker’s longtime antisemitism turned into anti-Israel sentiment? Or are they capable of the broader self-reflection and self-policing necessary to fix the movement’s deeper problem with Jews?

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Christ The Good Shepherd Church/AAP via ReutersA knife attack on a bishop and others at a church in Sydney on Monday was a religiously-motivated terrorist act, according to police in Australia. A 16-year-old boy was restrained and arrested after he allegedly stabbed Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and others at the Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd Church in the suburb of Wakeley. Footage of the alleged attack, in which at least four people sustained non-life-threatening injuries, captured by a church livestream spread rapidly online, sparking outrage and prompting an angry mob to descend on the place of worship.The suspect was held inside the church for his own safety as hundreds of worshippers assembled outside demanding vengeance. The crowd violently clashed with police, throwing bricks and bottles at officers trying to maintain order. Two officers were hurt—including one who suffered a broken jaw—and 10 police cars were destroyed in the hourslong riot, according to the BBC. Read more at The Daily Beast.

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James MacDonald/Bloomberg Creative via Getty Images How industrial meat and dairy trap us in an infectious disease cycle. H5N1, or bird flu, has hit dairy farms — but the dairy industry doesn’t want us saying so. The current, highly virulent strain of avian flu had already been ripping through chicken and turkey farms over the past two years. Since it jumped to US dairy cows for the first time last month, it’s infected more than 20 dairy herds across eight states, raising alarms among public health authorities about possible spread to humans and potential impacts on the food supply. One Texas dairy worker contracted a mild case of bird flu from one of the impacted farms — the second such case ever recorded in the US (though one of hundreds worldwide over the past two decades, most of them fatal). Whatever fear-mongering you may have seen on social media, we are not on the cusp of a human bird flu pandemic; the chances of further human spread currently remain low. But that could change. As the virus jumps among new mammal species like cows, the risk that it’ll evolve to be able to spread between humans does increase. But the American Association of Bovine Practitioners (AABP), an organization of beef and dairy veterinarians, declared in a statement (condemned by public health experts) last week that it doesn’t believe bird flu in cows should be considered bird flu at all. “The AABP will call this disease Bovine Influenza A Virus (BIAV),” the association’s executive director K. Fred Gingrich II and president Michael Capel said in a statement, encouraging federal and state regulators to do the same. “It is important for the public to understand the difference to maintain confidence in the safety and accessibility of beef and dairy products for consumers.” In other words, industry vets are trying to rebrand bird flu so that we keep calm and keep buying cheeseburgers. “They’re worried about selling products,” bovine veterinarian James Reynolds, a professor at Western University’s vet school, told me, calling the group’s statement “disease-washing.” Covering bird flu over the last two years, I’ve seen a lot of wild stuff, but this may be one of the weirdest. And it’s more than just a terminological or political spat: It reflects an inescapable paradox about how we produce food. The meat industry’s infectious disease trap Naming infectious diseases is always political. In this case, the cattle industry appears desperate to distance itself from the bird flu news cycle and avoid the perception that it’s contributing to human disease risk. But animal agriculture is one of the top drivers of zoonotic diseases — and growing global demand for meat, dairy, and eggs may be putting us at ever-greater risk of new outbreaks. To understand why, one of the most elegant models I’ve found is the “infectious disease trap,” a concept coined in a 2022 paper by New York University environmental scientist Matthew Hayek. Farming animals for food requires lots of land — much more land than it would take to grow an equivalent amount of plant-based foods. More than a third of the planet’s habitable land is devoted to animal agriculture alone, making it the world’s leading cause of deforestation as forests are cleared for farms. That in turn leads to more human and farm animal encounters with wild animals, a major source of new zoonotic diseases. Animal agriculture’s land use can be shrunk through intensification — densely packing animals into factory farms — which limits deforestation and helps reduce meat’s climate footprint. But such operations are terrible for animal welfare, and they exacerbate zoonotic disease risk in other ways, allowing viruses to rapidly tear through factory farms filled with thousands of stressed, genetically identical animals. That’s exactly what’s been happening at chicken and turkey farms across the US over the last two years — and to prevent further spread, farmers have killed more than 85 million poultry birds on farms hit with bird flu since 2022, often using a grisly method that kills them via heatstroke. Our current food system is a recipe for brewing more virulent disease strains and, many experts fear, it’s a ticking time bomb for the next pandemic. As long as global meat production expands, Hayek’s model explains, both low-density and factory farm-style animal agriculture trap us with rising disease risk. What does this mean for the future of bird flu in cows? A lot remains unknown about how bird flu has spread so rapidly among cows on dairy farms as far apart as Michigan and New Mexico. One plausible theory is that the disease is moving with cows being trucked across the country, just as a human disease might move with people. In recent years, as the dairy industry has increasingly consolidated into large factory farms, long-distance transportation of cows has become very common, Reynolds explained. Young female calves are often trucked from northern states to warmer climates in the south, then shipped back north when they’re old enough to become pregnant and produce milk. “There’s kind of a constant movement that really didn’t exist much 20 years ago,” Reynolds said. Long-distance shipment can inflict extreme suffering on farmed animals, who are treated more like cargo than sentient beings. It’s also a hallmark of intensive animal agriculture systems described in the infectious disease trap model, allowing diseases to jump to new regions. At least 18 states have restricted cow imports from states where dairy cows have tested positive for bird flu. The dairy industry recognizes the risks, Reynolds said, and is making efforts to improve biosecurity on these cross-country journeys. Meanwhile, regulators are scrambling to track the disease and stem its spread — but experts have argued those efforts don’t go nearly far enough, failing to require widespread testing. And whatever steps are being taken now to stop the spread, the infectious disease trap model shows us that if we’re chasing zoonotic diseases after they’ve infected farm animals, we’re already behind. Escaping that trap requires a much broader societal rethinking of our factory farm system. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Salman Rushdie tells us that he wrote Knife, his account of his near-murder at the hands of a 24-year-old Shia Muslim man from New Jersey, for two reasons: because he had to deal with “the elephant-in-the-room” before he could return to writing about anything else, and to understand what the attack was about. The first reason suggests something admirable, even remarkable, in Rushdie’s character, a determination to persist as a novelist and a man in the face of terror. After The Satanic Verses brought down a death sentence from Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, which sent Rushdie into hiding, he kept writing novels and refused to be defined by the fatwa. When, decades later, on August 12, 2022, the sentence was nearly executed on a stage at the Chautauqua Institution, in upstate New York, where Rushdie was about to engage in a discussion of artistic freedom, he had to will himself through an agonizing recovery—pain, depression, disfigurement, physical and mental therapy, the awful recognition that the fatwa was not behind him after all. Then, to write this book, he had to stare hard, with one eye now gone, at the crime—even, in the end, to revisit the scene—because it stood in the way of the fiction writer’s tools, memory, and imagination.“Something immense and non-fictional had happened to me,” Rushdie writes. Telling that story “would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art.” The most powerful manifestation of this art in Knife is Rushdie’s description—precise and without self-pity—of the price he pays for his words. The knife blows to his face, neck, chest, abdomen, and limbs are savage and very nearly kill him. He loses the sight in his right eye, which has to be sewn shut, and most of the use of his left hand. He is beset with nightmares and periods of profound gloom. The resilience he musters—aided by the love of his wife and family—is vulnerable, ornery, witty, self-centered, and heroic. It has made him a scarred symbol of free expression—or, as he acidly puts it, “a sort of virtuous liberty-loving Barbie doll.” He would rather be famous for his books, but he accepts his fate.The other reason for writing Knife—to understand why he came within millimeters of losing his life—is more elusive. The “suspect,” Hadi Matar, committed the crime before about 1,000 witnesses and subsequently confessed in a jailhouse interview to the New York Post; still, he has pleaded not guilty. The trial hasn’t happened yet, and in fact has been postponed by this book’s publication—Matar’s attorney argued that Rushdie’s written account constitutes evidence that his client should be able to see. Matar’s story seems to be the all-too-familiar one of a thwarted loner on a glorious mission. He travels from New Jersey to Lebanon to see his estranged father and returns changed—withdrawn and angry at his mother for not raising him as a strict Muslim. He tries learning to box and watches videos in his mother’s basement, including a few of Rushdie’s lectures. He reads a couple of pages of The Satanic Verses and decides that the author is evil. He hears that Rushdie will be speaking at Chautauqua and stalks him there. Matar is a Lee Harvey Oswald for the age of religious terrorism and YouTube.Rushdie isn’t much interested in him. He won’t name Matar, calling him only “the A.,” for assailant, ass, and a few other A words. Throughout the book, Rushdie expresses scorn for or indifference toward his attacker, calling him “simply irrelevant to me.” Still, he makes one sustained attempt to understand Matar: “I am obliged to consider the cast of mind of the man who was willing to murder me.” A journalist might have gone about the task by interviewing people who knew Matar and trying to reconstruct his life. Oddly, Rushdie doesn’t mention the names—perhaps because he never learned them—of the audience members who rushed the stage and stopped the attack, and he gives doctors in the trauma center impersonal titles such as “Dr. Staples” and “Dr. Eye.” Given that he dedicated the book to “the men and women who saved my life,” these omissions are striking and suggest a limit to Rushdie’s willingness to explore the trauma. After all, he’s a novelist, and his way of understanding is through imagination. He conjures a series of dialogues between himself and his attacker, but Rushdie’s questions—Socratic attempts to lead Matar to think more deeply about his hateful beliefs—elicit brief retorts, lengthier insults, or silence. Perhaps there really isn’t very much to say, and the conversation is inconclusive. It lasts as long as it does only because the man being questioned is trapped inside Rushdie’s mind.The novelist might have gained more insight by imagining Matar as a character in a story, seeing the event from the attacker’s point of view, the way Don DeLillo writes of the Kennedy assassination from Oswald’s in Libra. But that would have given Matar far too much presence in Rushdie’s mind. His ability to survive as a writer and a human being depends on not forever being a man who was knifed, as he had earlier insisted on not being just a novelist under a death sentence. If Rushdie’s reasons for telling this story are to move on and to understand, this first reason is more important to him than the second and, in a way, precludes it.[Read: All because Salman Rushdie wrote a book]Back in 1989, the fatwa hardly turned Rushdie into a hero. Plenty of Western politicians and writers, along with millions of Muslims around the world, put the blame on him for insensitivity if not apostasy. The knife attack was different—it drew nearly universal outrage and sympathy. Perhaps the horror of an attempted murder overcame any squeamishness about offending religious feelings. Perhaps the statute of limitations on blasphemy had run out, the fatwa too long ago to count. Perhaps there’s been too much violence since then in the name of a vengeful God and other ideologies. “This is bigger than just me,” Rushdie tells his wife in the trauma ward. “It’s about a larger subject.” The subject—the idea for which Rushdie nearly died—is the freedom to say what he wants. It’s under as much pressure today as ever—from fanatics of every type, governments, corporations, the right, the left, and the indifferent. Rushdie survived, but he has too many scars to be certain that the idea will. This book is his way of fighting back: “Language was my knife.”

When I brought my new dog, a 4-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Grace, home for the holidays last year, I was nervous. I didn’t know how she’d react to the unfamiliar environment, so I kept scanning the floor for items she might swallow. She wasn’t perfectly house-trained yet, so I was constantly watching to see if she started to walk in circles—a sign that she has to go to the bathroom.After a week with no trouble, my mom gently called me out. “You’re being a helicopter parent,” she said. “Grace might do better if you stopped hovering over her.” The comment jarred me. I’d always assumed that I’d be a good nurturer, but now that I was actually responsible for another creature, it seemed like I might not have the touch. I started to worry about what this meant not only for Grace but also for my future kids. Was I doomed to hover over them one day as well? Or, if I learned to let go a bit with Grace, could I carry those lessons forward when I had my own child?The idea of a dog as a “starter kid” is a cliché at this point—but there’s a bit of truth to it. Millennials have delayed having children, adopted dogs in droves, and frequently consider those pets to be as much a part of the family as any human, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu recently reported. Many are raising a dog before they have a baby. In fact, in a 2021 survey commissioned by a pet-food brand, four in 10 dog and cat parents said that they got their pet to test whether they were ready for a kid. Of course, raising animals is in many ways not at all comparable to raising children, and no one who doesn’t actually want a dog should get one as a practice baby. That said, pet parenting does have things to teach future parents of humans. Some connections, such as “potty” training, are obvious. But on a broader level, getting a pet requires taking responsibility for another living thing’s well-being. The experience can offer insight into your tendencies as a caregiver—and, with the right amount of self-awareness, a chance to grow.Parenting preparation is a spectrum. Reading advice books is on one end of it: You might pick up a few tips, but the learning is just theoretical. Caring for human children, perhaps by babysitting, gets you closer to the actual experience. Experts told me that it’s close to the best practice you can have, though the average person’s opportunities to do it are dwindling as teen babysitters grow rarer and families tend to be smaller, giving kids fewer opportunities to watch younger siblings and cousins. Responsibly raising pets (especially those that require more attention, such as cats and dogs) is somewhere in between; dogs are probably the most relevant, given how much work training one takes. Crucially, caring for a pet lets you learn by doing, which Susan Walker, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota who specialized in parenting education, told me is more effective than reading generic advice.[Read: Why don’t we teach people how to parent?]Both dogs and kids need help learning how to behave—though with dogs it’s of course more a matter of simple dos and don’ts than the morality of right and wrong we try to instill in children. But some of the principles of good dog training do translate to teaching young kids. Experts generally agree that for both groups, positive reinforcement should guide discipline. Whether the problem is a toddler coloring on the wall or a puppy chewing on your shoes, the parenting coach Elisabeth Stitt recommends responding with a quick correction followed by a warm distraction. You might say no and then give the dog a toy bone and the child a coloring book. Perhaps most important is to keep these expectations consistent and to repeat lessons over and over. “Parents will say to me, ‘I’ve told my kids a million times,’” Stitt told me. “Good. That’s what you need to do.” Grace still pulls on her leash at least once a day when I walk her—and each time I have to stop, wait for her to come back, and then give her a treat when we start back up again.What’s more, both dogs and infants have no choice but to communicate without words. Learning to read a dog’s cues can help strengthen the skill of “perspective taking,” or the ability to see the world through another’s point of view, Gail Melson, a professor emeritus at Purdue University studying families and animals, told me. Developing that muscle might make it easier to later interpret a child’s early attempts at self-expression. Having firsthand knowledge that what seems like misconduct could actually be a signal of fear, boredom, or frustration is helpful for developing the patience required for parenting. Rather than reacting with anger, perhaps you’ll know to think, “What’s the motivation behind that behavior, and how can we meet whatever those needs are?” Shelly Volsche, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls studying human-animal interaction, explained to me.And if you get a dog with a partner, you’ll be doing all of this learning alongside them. Think of it as a rehearsal for some of the logistics of co-parenting. “A lot of times, couples get blindsided because they don’t necessarily have a plan for who’s going to feed the baby or who’s going to diaper the baby, who’s going to get up at night,” Darby Saxbe, a University of Southern California professor studying the transition to parenthood, told me. Dogs aren’t nearly as much work, but you still have to divvy up who walks and feeds them. Doing that fairly “might set a healthy precedent” for splitting child-care duties, Saxbe said. When you do eventually have a kid, perhaps you’ll already have a framework for discussing a shared approach.[Read: Pets really can be like human family]But more than chore charts and discipline, raising a pet—and, to a far greater extent, raising a child—demands making sacrifices. No matter how tired you are in the morning, you have to get out of bed to soothe a crying baby or to take a dog out to pee, Saxbe explained. Workdays will get interrupted if your kid or pet gets sick. And you never get a break, unless you secure a sitter—but even in those cases, you’ll still want to be reachable in emergencies. “That is a really dramatic shift, I think, for people that have never had a baby or a pet,” Saxbe told me.Adjusting your schedule to the rhythms of life with a dog might help make space for an eventual baby too. Perhaps you’ll have redone your budget to afford vet bills—a decision some of Laurent-Simpson’s research subjects have made. Maybe you’ll be used to staying out late less frequently to get home for your dog. You may have lined up friends who could watch a pet or a baby in a pinch; as experts told me, building community is vital for any type of caregiving.On a deeper level, caring for a pet can spur personal reflection. You may get a window into “Who am I as a nurturer?” Volsche explained. Are you too much of a pushover? Do you dole out discipline too harshly? “The parenting styles are very similar, independent of whether we’re talking about dogs or whether we’re talking about human children, because we’re focused on the human caregiver’s behavior,” Monique Udell, a professor at Oregon State University studying human-animal interactions, told me. And, as Udell’s research has shown, the ideal parenting style—authoritative parenting—is the same for dogs and kids. Authoritative parents have high expectations—for a dog’s training or a kid’s schoolwork, say—but are caring and responsive to their dependent’s needs. Though the needs may be very different, caretakers of both pets and humans should strive for a balance of warmth and structure, Udell said.[Read: Dogs need understanding, not dominance]Of course, there’s no guarantee that people with pets will take advantage of the opportunity to start mastering that balance. Unfortunately, no one I spoke with knew of any research on the transition from pet parent to human parent. Sometimes people learn through a process of “generalization,” Melson explained, and apply what they pick up in one realm to another. But at other times, learning tends more toward “compartmentalization.” And we just don’t know whether pet parents are generalizing these lessons or compartmentalizing them. That said, nearly everyone I spoke with agreed that people could learn some parenting skills from having pets—especially if they approached the process with intention.So I’ve been trying to do that with Grace, and as I’ve grown more confident, so has she. When I first got her, she was scared of almost everything: cars, going on walks, the vacuum cleaner. My lap was her safety blanket, and I was eager to soothe her. But, with practice, I’ve gotten better at tolerating my discomfort with her discomfort. Rather than preemptively comforting her when we go somewhere new, I’ve learned to practice patience, give lots of positive reinforcement (read: treats), and gently encourage her to explore; the world really has so many things to sniff. She still recoils when motorcycles pass, but at other times, she’ll chase the leaves that drift by and pounce on pine cones. I’m there if she needs reassurance, but I’m finding that she’s turning to me, trembling, less and less.

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Jennifer Pan at the time of her 2010 arrest. | Courtesy Ontario Police Jennifer Pan allegedly hired hitmen to kill her parents in 2010. But the case is in limbo. The end of Netflix’s new true crime documentary What Jennifer Did reveals a bombshell detail: After we’ve learned of the alleged culprits and the alleged motive for the horrific 2010 murder of Toronto mom Bich Pan and the attempted murder of her husband, Huei Hann Pan, we learn that the perpetrators have all had their convictions overturned. They are currently awaiting retrials. The documentary chronicles the unraveling secrets of the Pans’ daughter, Jennifer, in the aftermath of a shocking home invasion and shooting that left Bich dead and her husband blind in one eye. Over the course of the film, audiences unfamiliar with this infamous crime learn of the elaborate, enormous web of lies that Jennifer Pan wove for her parents for years — lies that began in high school and included everything from doctoring report cards to faking her high school graduation and subsequent college attendance to nonexistent internships and lies about her relationship status — all to keep up the facade of a golden child. Through taped interrogation interviews with Jennifer and more recent interviews with authorities who worked the case, we come to understand that the more her parents saw through Jennifer’s deceit and tried to rein in her behavior, the more pressure she felt to break free of their control. At age 24, while living at home under a set of strict rules as a result of all her lies, Jennifer Pan tried repeatedly to hire someone to kill her father. On November 8, 2010, she allegedly succeeded, leaving the door unlocked for three assailants, friends of her ex-boyfriend Daniel Wong, to enter the house and attack her parents. During the investigation, Jennifer’s lies rapidly collapsed, and she was convicted at trial of first-degree murder and attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison alongside three of her co-conspirators. A fourth pleaded guilty to conspiracy and received an 18-year sentence, but died in prison in 2018. These convictions, the documentary informs us, have all since been tossed out — and the film ends without explaining why or elaborating on the status of the case, beyond noting that retrials are planned. So what happened, and what’s next? Improper jury instructions led to new trials for Jennifer and her co-conspirators The overturned convictions come as a result of appeals filed by Jennifer Pan and her three remaining co-conspirators: her ex Daniel Wong and his friends Lenford Crawford and David Mylvaganam, who were both involved in the home invasion and shooting. The appeals had seven points of argument, including the argument that in the original 2014 trial, the presiding judge Justice R. Cary Boswell improperly instructed the jury. This tactic can be a strong form of appeal for defense attorneys because how a judge instructs a jury can influence how they view evidence and testimony and lead them to disregard certain verdicts. Attorneys for the Pan defendants argued that, in this case, both things happened: that Justice Boswell influenced the jury to consider only two “paths to liability” for the accused. This doesn’t mean he instructed them to consider only two verdicts, but rather that when he was advising them how to think about the facts of the case, he suggested they consider either one of two possible scenarios for how the home invasion and murder occurred: that the assailants planned to murder both of Jennifer’s parents, or that they planned to “commit a home invasion/robbery” and the murders occurred in the process. The appeal argued that these instructions significantly limited the conclusions the jurors could have drawn from the evidence presented at trial. For instance, Jennifer herself had argued as part of her defense that she had tried to hire the hitmen to kill her, not her parents — a third scenario Justice Boswell did not mention. In May 2023, a Canadian appellate panel agreed with the defense. “In my view, this is the most difficult and most consequential error that is put forward,” Justice Ian Nordheimer wrote in the panel’s decision. “If it succeeds, it requires a new trial for all the appellants on the murder charge. I have concluded that it does.” The court rejected the defendants’ appeals for their convictions for the attempted murder of Hann Pan, so they have remained in jail, still serving that sentence, while awaiting their retrials. This is, however, complicated in the Canadian court system; unlike the US, in Canada, prosecutors also have the right of appeal at this stage, so in August 2023, prosecutors for the Pan case filed their own appeal against the appellate ruling with the Canadian Supreme Court. That means we’ve entered a double limbo: We’re waiting on the Supreme Court of Canada to decide whether to hear arguments on the appeal. If they don’t, or if they do but ultimately side with the defense, then the retrial order remains, which means that then we’ll be waiting on the lower courts to decide whether to bring the case to a retrial. In the latter event, a retrial seems very likely, given what a high-profile case this is — a 2015 story by reporter Karen Ho about the case went massively viral and brought the Pan case to broader attention, after which came reporter Jeremy Grimaldi’s 2016 book on the case, which formed the basis of the documentary. There’s also still plenty of evidence against the perpetrators, in the form of texts, phone records, and their various testimonies against each other. These all add up to, well, What Jennifer Did — and what Jennifer did is already the stuff of true crime legend, whether the courts ultimately rule in her favor or not.