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So you’ve found research fraud. Now what?

2 h

vox.com

Carolyn Fong/The Washington Post via Getty Images Harvard dishonesty researcher Francesca Gino faked her research. But she still has a lot to teach us. When it is alleged that a scientist has manipulated data behind their published papers, there’s an important but miserable project ahead: looking through the rest of their published work to see if any of that is fabricated as well. After dishonesty researcher Francesca Gino was placed on leave at Harvard Business School last fall following allegations that four of her papers contained manipulated data, the people who’d co-authored other papers with her scrambled to start double-checking their published works. Gino was a prolific researcher, and with 138 papers now called into question and more than 143 people who had co-authored with her, it proved a challenge to find who handled what data — so six co-authors began to work through each paper to systematically make public how the data was collected and who had custody of it. Their work was organized as the Many Co-Authors Project. The group was undeterred by Gino suing all of her accusers last summer, as well as by her condemnation of the project as unfair (“it inadvertently creates an opportunity for others to pin their own flawed studies or data anomalies on me,” she wrote). But their work provides a window into what kinds of manipulations and errors might make it past peer review until they come under heightened scrutiny — and raises in its own way a broader problem with our current research system. Based on the group’s work, it looks plausible that the data manipulation for which Gino is under fire is not contained to the four papers that have already been retracted. For example, in this 2019 paper, many participants were disqualified for not paying attention to the instructions — but the participants who were disqualified were overwhelmingly ones whose results were contrary to the hypothesis. (Likely because of the litigation surrounding the charges against Gino, the authors are careful not to say outright that what they’ve seen is a surefire sign of fraud.) But papers like the 2019 one — where the data is available — are the exception, not the rule. For most of the papers, no one has access to the data, which leaves no way to determine whether manipulation occurred. In some cases, co-authors are wary of participating in the effort to find other sketchy studies, worried that their name will be tarnished by association if they find a fraudulent paper. With systematic fraud, transparency is the only way through. Without a serious reckoning, the discovery of data manipulation doesn’t undo the harm it caused to our understanding of the world. Even after a paper is retracted, it doesn’t mean that other research that relied on those findings becomes amended. Instead, new studies are built atop flawed research. That’s a problem for scientific inquiry. We need to do something more systematic about fraud There’s something simultaneously heartwarming and exasperating about stories of researchers across the globe coming together to check whether their published research was actually faked. Why is basic information such as “which co-author collected the data?” and “who has access to the raw data?” not included as part of the process of publishing papers? Why is the data itself not available by default, which allows for finding mistakes as well as fraud? And after many researchers have been accused of systematic fraud, why is there still no process for systematically looking for problems in research? This is one of Gino’s complaints about the Many Co-Authors Project. “Like all scholars, I am interested in the truth. But auditing only my papers actively ignores a deeper reflection for the field,” she wrote. “Why is it that the focus of these efforts is solely on me?” The focus is on her for a good reason, but I do think that the Many Co-Authors Project is a symptom of a broken system. Even once a researcher is suspected of fraud, no institution is responsible for reviewing the work they’ve published and how it might affect the literature. Richard Van Noorden reported in Nature last year about what happens when a researcher is well-known to have fabricated data: “A more recent example is that of Yoshihiro Sato, a Japanese bone-health researcher. Sato, who died in 2016, fabricated data in dozens of trials of drugs or supplements that might prevent bone fracture. He has 113 retracted papers, according to a list compiled by the website Retraction Watch.” So what happened to other work that relied on Sato’s? For the most part, the retractions haven’t propagated; work that relied on Sato’s is still up: “His work has had a wide impact: researchers found that 27 of Sato’s retracted RCTs had been cited by 88 systematic reviews and clinical guidelines, some of which had informed Japan’s recommended treatments for osteoporosis. Some of the findings in about half of these reviews would have changed had Sato’s trials been excluded.” Journals do not consider themselves responsible for following up when they retract papers to see if other papers that cite those papers should be affected, or to check if other papers published by the same author have similar problems. Harvard doesn’t consider itself to have this responsibility. Co-authors may or may not consider themselves to have this responsibility. It’s as if we treat every case of fraud in isolation, instead of acknowledging that science builds on other science and that fraud rots those foundations. Some easy principles for reform I’ve written before that we should do a lot more about scientific fraud in general. But it seems like a particularly low bar to say that we should do more to, when a person is demonstrated to have manipulated data, check the rest of their work and get it retracted if needed. Even this low bar, though, is only being met due to the unpaid and unrewarded work of people who happened to notice the problem — and some of them have been sued for it. Here’s what could happen instead: Data about which co-author conducted the research and who has access to the raw data should be included as a matter of course as part of the paper submission process. This information is crucial to evaluating any problems with a paper, and it would be easy for journals to simply ask for it for every paper. Then you wouldn’t need a project like the Many Co-Authors Project — the data they’re attempting to collect would be available to everyone. Nonprofits, the government, or concerned citizens could fund an institution that followed up on evidence of data manipulation to make sure that manipulated results no longer poison the literature they’re a part of, especially in cases like medical research where peoples’ lives are at stake. And the law could protect people who do this essential research by making it faster to dismiss lawsuits over legitimate scientific criticism. Ginosued her critics, which is likely contributing to the slowness of reevaluations of her other work. But she was only able to do that because she lived in Massachusetts — in some states, so-called anti-SLAPP provisions help get quick dismissal of a lawsuit that suppresses protected speech. Part of the saga of Francesca Gino is that Massachusetts has a very weak anti-SLAPP law, and so all of the work to correct the scientific record takes place under the looming threat of such a lawsuit. In a state with better anti-SLAPP protections, she’d have to make the case for her research to her colleagues instead of silencing her critics. It is very much possible to do better when it comes to scientific fraud. The irony is that Gino’s research and the controversy surrounding it may well still end up having a long-lasting legacy in teaching us about dishonesty and how to combat it. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

How JoJo Siwa’s “rebrand” got so messy

3 h

vox.com

JoJo Siwa performs at Miami Beach Pride Festival on April 14, 2024. | Sean Drakes/Getty Images Is the massive backlash against the former child star justified? It’s a Hollywood cliche, but unfortunately true, that talented children rarely have it easy transitioning their careers into adulthood, much less transitioning to adulthood themselves. The recent string of controversies around Dance Moms-kid-turned-pop-star JoJo Siwa, however, reminds us that rebranding from a child star to a mature one isn’t easy — especially if your “brand” was perhaps never fully understood to begin with. Since Siwa started promoting her new single “Karma” over a month ago, the backlash from fans and haters alike has been virtually nonstop. Audiences have trashed her for everything from allegedly “stealing” the song itself (she didn’t) to getting too sexual in the music video, which went viral in part due to the outrage over a scene in which she dry-humps another woman. (She did warn us it wouldn’t be kid-friendly.) All of this outrage is simultaneously more and less complicated than it looks on the surface. On the one hand, Siwa is yet another young star who’s had trouble putting an end to the aura of their childhood cuteness, and who’s being perceived as “trying too hard to shock us” with a rebrand many seem to view as crass and over-sexualized. On the other hand, the controversy seems to suggest that there’s a limit to what kind of public queerness we’re comfortable with — especially regarding queer women. On top of all this, there’s an arguably separate conversation about the actually offensive things Siwa has allegedly done and said — a series of missteps, bad business decisions, and profound failures to read the proverbial room that can’t be ignored. Siwa’s promotion of “Karma” has already dealt her plenty of backlash JoJo Siwa has long been a fixture of competitive reality TV thanks to her striking personality, nimble dancing, and perhaps most famously, her collection of big bright hair bows, made by her mom. Siwa joined the Dance Moms universe in 2013, when Dance Moms instructor Abby Lee Miller, who ran the show’s focal dance studio, highlighted her as a guest dancer on the spinoff series Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition. She joined the main show in its fourth season the following year, then rode the reality dance show wave through the rest of her adolescence and early adulthood. Siwa grew her fanbase through YouTube via her XOMG POP! channel. Her hit 2016 single “Boomerang,” released when Siwa was almost 13, currently sits just shy of 1 billion views. The video sees her sporting her trademark bows and fully embracing her ice-cream-colored teen girl bubble-pop era. On the strength of its success, Siwa signed a lucrative deal with Nickelodeon in 2017 to do similar work aimed at Nickelodeon’s target audience of preteens — leading Siwa to helm an “empire” of children’s programming that netted her an estimated $20 million over the years. In 2020, Time named Siwa, at 17, one of its 100 most influential people. Siwa’s Nickelodeon era plays like an extended Hannah Montana remix of fully kid-themed, ditzy pop. Simultaneously, however, and a little incongruously, she continued her dance show career, using it to help her transition toward more adult mediums: She featured as a singing, dancing T-Rex on the third season of The Masked Singer in 2020. After casually coming out in a tweet in 2021, she competed on Dancing With the Stars in its 30th season, dancing to upbeat queer anthems like “Born This Way” as part of a historic same-sex dance team. The last two seasons of So You Think You Can Dance have seen Siwa joining the show as a somewhat controversial judge. You might expect that with that much influence and popularity and the ability to leverage her dancing skills into an ongoing career, Siwa would have relatively little problem transitioning out of her Nickelodeon phase. But therein lies the problem: The image she’s trying out now is, depending on who you talk to, either a step too far removed from that earlier spunky kid for many fans to take, or not far enough — just “Disney with cuss words,” as one X user put it. “Child stars and celebrities embody not only our culture’s ideals of childhood, but also demonstrate how contradictory those ideals actually are,” Djoymi Baker, who researches child stars as a media and cinema studies lecturer for RMIT University in Melbourne, told Vox in an email. “Child celebrities are expected to act as if they are not getting older, and maintain a child-like innocence or face public outrage.” With “Karma,” the outrage at Siwa seemed to peak. Siwa’s “Karma” music video released on April 5, yet due to the incendiary previews of a fully sexualized Siwa, it was drawing backlash well before its release. The general consensus was that Siwa was trying too hard to perform a hyper-sexualized, raunchy caricature of her own queerness — and the actual video only seemed to confirm that view. Highlights include Siwa’s much-mocked choreography and a sequence in which Siwa makes out with a series of different women, set to lyrics about infidelity and reaping what you sow. The public’s general distaste for Siwa’s “Karma” persona involved debates about authenticity and whether her style is really “her” — a conversation that soon extended to controversy over the song itself and whether it’s also really “hers.” Things kicked off when Siwa claimed to invent a subgenre of music that already existed. “I want to start a new genre of music,” she told Billboard on April 5, “called ‘gay pop.’” She then went on to list example songs like Lady Gaga’s “Applause” and her own version of “Karma,” prompting many people to respond by noting both the long history of queer pop artists and the long existence of the music she claimed to want to “start.” She quickly corrected the statement, telling TMZ less than a week later that she “definitely [was] not the inventor” of the style, but rather wanted to “be a piece in making it bigger than it already is.” By the time Siwa walked back that unfortunate statement, however, the hostility toward her had already calcified. On April 12, artist Lil Tay slammed Siwa on Twitter, noting that she “didn’t buy the song [her 2023 single “SUCKER 4 GREEN”] or hire a ghostwriter,” implying that Siwa had. It’s true that Siwa didn’t write “Karma,” but rather picked up a new production of an old track. According to Siwa, she was pitched an old song that had been recorded by previous artists, including Miley Cyrus, who never released it. Although it’s a completely pedestrian thing for artists to release previously unreleased or little-known tracks, most of those artists hadn’t recently claimed to be inventing something new, and the backlash that settled on Siwa was ferocious. As part of the virality of the outrage, fans discovered singer Brit Smith’s 2012 version of “Karma” and boosted its sales, pushing the artist to a surprise No. 1 spot on Billboard’s electronic digital chart, all while Siwa’s version failed to even reach the Hot 100. Lil Tay’s “SUCKER” also got a boost, passing a milestone of 5 million Spotify streams amid all the noise over Siwa. That doesn’t mean the reception to “Karma” has been fully negative, however: Siwa’s version did open across multiple ranking charts, and she played to a crowd of over 50,000 at the Miami Beach Pride Festival on April 14, performing “Karma” for enthusiastic fans and reportedly breaking audience records. Still, the sheer level of the public’s anger toward Siwa suggests that something deeper is happening. It might stem from the career growing pains of a young adult making young adult mistakes, but part of it seems to boil down to a fundamental misunderstanding of Siwa herself. Siwa’s “rebrand” arguably isn’t that much different from her original brand During her time on Dance Moms, Siwa was portrayed as colorful, loud, opinionated, “obnoxious, [and] sometimes rude.” Siwa channeled that energy into her performances, which usually reflected an edgy personality and powerful, athletic dancing. The bows she always wore, followed by her Nickelodeon era, may have given audiences the false impression of Siwa as forever innocent, stuck in arrested development as a preteen. Writing for Vogue in 2021, Emma Specter argued Siwa had “built a brand off of the kind of glittery, bow-festooned femininity that is typically reserved for straight women” — a brand that her coming-out, especially at the young age of just 17, worked to subvert. But in fact, there’s really not much difference between one of Siwa’s early dance routines and her current much-touted “rebrand.” It’s not a stretch, for example, to see the girl who performed a tongue-wagging “Electricity” trotting out a KISS homage for an awards show. Abby Lee Miller herself recognized Siwa’s underlying consistency when she reacted to “Karma” on TikTok. “Everyone’s making such a big deal about the rebrand,” she noted. “I think it’s JoJo with paint on her face and a fabulous costume. It’s always been JoJo.” On the other hand, the backlash to this aesthetic has resurfaced some not-so-good things Siwa has actually done. Though Siwa is only 20, the list of her controversies and allegedly offensive behavior would be notable for a star at any age — everything from marketing a makeup line that was recalled for containing asbestos, to allegedly helping create an abusive work environment for members of her failed pop group XOMG POP!, to defending and continuing to be friends with disgraced YouTuber Colleen Ballinger after Ballinger allegedly engaged her underaged fans in inappropriate sexual exchanges. Though some of these claims and allegations aren’t necessarily Siwa’s fault, many seem completely avoidable — like the time a white child dancer was asked to don brown monkey makeup for her 2020 music video “Nonstop.” Responding to backlash over the alleged blackface, Siwa doubled down rather than apologizing. That’s more or less her MO for these situations — forging ahead rather than wasting time asking for forgiveness. And while there’s a huge difference between an adult putting a kid in blackface and a 17-year-old Siwa doing it, she’s old enough to know better, and this sort of behavior has caused Siwa’s notoriety to surpass her fame. Still, none of these controversies were what caused such deep public outrage in the days since “Karma” was released, and it’s hard not to think that this negative response ultimately boils down to a mismatch of expectations between Siwa’s extended public audience and the core queer audience to whom she’s performing. It’s hard not to compare Siwa’s fairly tame performance of queer sexuality in “Karma” to Lil Nas X’s wildly successful “Montero” music video. Both were the entries of established pop stars into a queer space, claiming their recently announced sexualities through raunchy, glittery, erotic performances. “Montero” saw Lil Nas X riding a stripper pole and giving the literal devil a lap dance before crowning himself the king of hell. By comparison, “Karma” is milder and murkier: Siwa uses the muddled metaphor of a sea monster emerging from the ocean to illustrate the anxieties of a girl who can’t choose between any of the beautiful women in her orbit. Admittedly, “Montero” is a lot more fun, full of far more creative and inventive artistry; yet it’s hard not to wonder if the vast difference between the public’s glee and delight in “Montero” and its disdain and derision for Siwa’s “Karma” is ultimately about a misogynistic refusal to let female pop stars grow up — at least without forcing them into rigid parameters of what that adulthood looks like. “The child star brand of innocence has historically been quite specific,” Baker said. “It is predominantly white, able-bodied, cis-gendered, and ostensibly asexual, with an expectation that growing up will be both heteronormative and yet as non-sexual as possible, particularly for women. This pattern has been seen again and again, with female child stars such as Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.” Baker pointed out that the Siwa backlash closely mirrors the backlash her teen pop predecessor Miley Cyrus received a decade ago, at the same age of 20, after twerking with Robin Thicke in 2013 — a move for which Cyrus recently confessed she “carried some guilt and shame.” “I was creating attention for myself because I was dividing myself from a character I had played,” Cyrus told British Vogue last year. “Anyone, when you’re 20 or 21, you have more to prove. ‘I’m not my parents.’ ‘I am who I am.’” Baker noted that Siwa has called Cyrus her “number one idol” for making the transition to an adult brand. A good deal of the criticism Cyrus faced in 2013 focused on the racially insensitive cultural appropriation of her twerking. Yet Baker also observed that both women’s queerness, and their performance of that queerness against their earlier sanitized child-star images, may have amplified the backlash they received. “That Cyrus is pansexual and Siwa is lesbian means they do not fit into the restrictive ideals of childhood, the child star, or growing up that still dominate,” she said. After all, apart from Siwa claiming her sexuality, just about everything else about her aesthetic is the same — she’s still colorful, opinionated, and backed by innumerable sparkly outfits. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that “Karma” has provoked such conversations about authenticity. Love her or hate her, the JoJo we have now was arguably the JoJo we had all along.

Student protests are testing US colleges’ commitment to free speech

3 h

vox.com

Columbia University students participate in an ongoing pro-Palestinian encampment on their campus following last week’s arrest of more than 100 protesters, on April 25, 2024 in New York City. | Stephanie Keith/Getty Images The crackdown on protesters at Columbia and elsewhere lays bare the challenge of balancing academic freedom with student safety. Student protests are heating up around the country, just as the school year is winding down. At Columbia University in New York, a deadline is nearing for the administration to clear the student encampment off the campus lawn. The NYPD chief of patrol defended his department’s actions earlier this week in arresting over 100 student protesters on campus, writing “Columbia decided to hold its students accountable to the laws of the school. They are seeing the consequences of their actions. Something these kids were most likely never taught,” in a post on X. But the root of all the arrests and protests at Columbia is, arguably, free speech. In testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in Washington, DC, last week, Columbia President Minouche Shafik struggled to walk a line between ensuring student safety and protecting academic freedom. “We believe that Columbia’s role is not to shield individuals from positions that they find unwelcome,” she said, “but instead to create an environment where different viewpoints can be tested and challenged.” In light of the fierce debate over campus speech and student safety, Today, Explained reached out to the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Irene Mulvey to get her view on the state of free speech on college campuses. AAUP is a nonprofit organization comprising faculty and other professionals in academia whose stated mission is to protect academic freedom and support higher education as a public good. Mulvey shared her insights into whether Columbia and other institutions where crackdowns of protests are happening are living up to those ideals. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. —Miranda Kennedy Sean Rameswaram Has protecting academic freedom and supporting higher education become more difficult since October 7? Irene Mulvey Yes, it has become more difficult since October 7. Although I would say our job of protecting academic freedom and protecting higher education from outside interference has always been difficult. There’s always been political interference into higher education, and that’s why we were founded. In the past, the interference into higher education has been targeting individual professors, you know, a wealthy donor doesn’t like somebody’s research and they want to get them fired. Or somebody speaks up at a faculty meeting, criticizing the administration and the administration doesn’t want them to get tenure. What we’re seeing now is an escalation in that the entire enterprise of higher education as a public good in a democracy is being attacked. We’re seeing attacks at the state level with legislation that will censor content — we call these educational gag orders, where there’s legislation that says what can be taught in a college classroom. That’s just outright censorship and the kind of thing you see in an authoritarian society, not a democracy. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has dragged these presidents in front of the committee for a performative witch hunt of a hearing. And that is an escalation because those are private institutions. So it’s a remarkable escalation for the federal government to be intruding into what’s happening at private colleges. To think about how professors are feeling about these protests, we need to think about how professors feel about higher education. And what professors are thinking [is] that in higher education, we should have a robust exchange of ideas in which no idea is withheld from scrutiny or debate. Our students have very strong feelings about what’s happening in the Middle East. They are attempting to have that robust exchange of ideas about what’s happening. And I think as faculty members, we support that. Students on a campus, the students are learning from professors. They’re learning how to conduct research on their own. They’re learning how to analyze arguments. They’re learning how to think critically about complex matters. And they have thoughts about what’s happening in the world [and] on their campuses, with regard to what their campuses are doing to support what’s happening in the Middle East. Faculty members are supportive of this. This is what academic freedom means. Sean Rameswaram So it sounds like you don’t support the president of Columbia University calling in the NYPD to make arrests at a peaceful protest. Irene Mulvey That’s an understatement. I think what the Columbia president did was the most disproportionate reaction that I’ve ever seen. My understanding is these were peaceful protesters on an outdoor lawn on a campus where they pay a lot of money to attend, and she had them deemed as trespassers and invoked a statute where she has to argue that they are a clear and present danger to the functioning of the institution in order to allow the NYPD on campus. The most important thing is her response is doing the opposite of what’s supposed to happen on a campus. Her response silenced the voices of the students. Her response suppressed the speech and suppressed the debate. It’s the absolute opposite of what should happen on a college campus, and it was extremely disappointing. Sean Rameswaram If you had been in her position as the president of Columbia, and you were dealing with these protests and people [are] saying they feel unsafe, that there’s antisemitic slogans, that there was a protest outside where a Jewish student was told to go back to Poland, how would you have navigated these competing forces? Irene Mulvey Yeah, well, it’s not easy. Let’s be clear, there’s no easy answer to what’s going on here. But the principle behind anyone’s response should be education, should be speech, should be debate, should be ideas being put up for justification. And, you know, there could be some kind of forum for the students. Of course, they have to protect the safety of all students. But if the way you’re choosing to keep students safe is by suppressing somebody else’s speech, that’s a false choice. You don’t have to suppress speech to keep students safe. I agree that these are difficult situations. And I know all of these campuses where these things are happening — Columbia, NYU, Yale — these campuses and these presidents will espouse academic freedom and free speech at the drop of a hat. But if you’re not standing up for those principles at times like these, then those words are completely meaningless. Sean Rameswaram It’s interesting because I think what we’re seeing here is the clearest evidence that we haven’t quite figured out where the line is on protecting students versus free speech versus the open discussion of ideas. I think the president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, made that point in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, that universities haven’t figured this out. The Supreme Court hasn’t figured this out, and it shouldn’t be on universities to figure this out. Do you have some idea of where the line is between the open academic discussion of ideas and something that could be dangerous for students and thus not permitted? Irene Mulvey The way to think about it is in situations like this where there are polarized views, there are really strong feelings for very good reasons. Not all the speech is going to make you comfortable. Academic freedom and free speech can be messy. And so I think you have to err on the side of allowing the speech and allowing the debate and allowing the discussion. When it veers into something that doesn’t feel good, then someone should speak up and say that. But silencing voices because you don’t like what they’re saying is a very dangerous, slippery slope that we do not want to get onto. Sean Rameswaram One thing I’ve found heartening following these protests on college campuses for six months is that they’ve mostly been peaceful. Now, that being said, if I’m a Jewish student walking across campus and someone says, “Go back to Poland!” I might start to feel unsafe. If I’m a Muslim student and someone’s doxxing me because of my attending a protest, I might start to feel unsafe. How do college administrators navigate safety, which feels sort of amorphous sometimes, in a free-speech environment? Irene Mulvey Administrations — universities — have an obligation to address issues of harassment and hate speech through their policies that have been in place for decades. Because hate speech didn’t just arrive on campus since October 7. We’ve had to address issues like this for decades. So campuses have policies to address issues like that, and their obligation is to keep the campus safe. For the most part, I feel the protests that I’ve seen have been peaceful. But again, it’s a messy situation. The important way to handle it is to stand back on principles of academic freedom, free speech, and keeping the campus safe, and addressing issues of hate speech through policies that are developed with the faculty. Sean Rameswaram You were a professor of mathematics for 40 years — for four decades. I imagine before that, maybe you were a student at a college protest, trying to voice your opinion and embracing free speech. Do you think with all the perspective that you have that this is just a rough patch that we get over and we’re stronger because of it? Or do you think we’re really going to get bogged down here? Irene Mulvey Oh, that’s a good question. I did participate in protests as a student during the Vietnam War. I was in high school. But this is definitely a rough patch. And where we come out on the end of it is an open question. I think what’s happening is part of an agenda to control what happens on campus, not just about the history and policies of Israel. What’s happening now is part of a larger movement, the anti-DEI movement, the anti-CRT movement, which is intended to censor or control what can be learned in a college classroom and what can be taught on campus. I think that’s the real danger, that broader movement, which I think would really damage higher education and the role it’s supposed to play in a democracy — to be a check and balance on politics. Be sure to followToday, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The end of coral reefs as we know them

3 h

vox.com

Paige Vickers/Vox Years ago, scientists made a devastating prediction about the ocean. Now it’s unfolding. More than five years ago, the world’s top climate scientists made a frightening prediction: If the planet warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius, relative to preindustrial times, 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs globally would die off. At 2°C, that number jumps to more than 99 percent. These researchers were essentially describing the global collapse of an entire ecosystem driven by climate change. Warm ocean water causes corals — large colonies of tiny animals — to “bleach,” meaning they lose a kind of beneficial algae that lives within their bodies. That algae gives coral its color and much of its food, so bleached corals are white and starving. Starved coral is more likely to die. In not so great news, the planet is now approaching that 1.5°C mark. In 2023, the hottest year ever measured, the average global temperature was 1.52°C above the preindustrial average, as my colleague Umair Irfan reported. That doesn’t mean Earth has officially blown past this important threshold — typically, scientists measure these sorts of averages over decades, not years — but it’s a sign that we’re getting close. David Gray/AFP via Getty Images Marine biologist Anne Hoggett swims above bleached and dead coral on the Great Barrier Reef in April 2024. David Gray/AFP via Getty Images Tourists snorkel above a section of the Great Barrier Reef full of bleached and dead coral on April 5, 2024. So, it’s no surprise that coral reefs are, indeed, collapsing. Earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that the planet is experiencing its fourth global “bleaching” event on record. Since early 2023, an enormous amount of coral in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans has turned ghostly white, including in places like the Great Barrier Reef and the Florida Keys. In some regions, a lot of the coral has already died. “What we are seeing now is essentially what scientists have been predicting was going to happen for more than 25 years,” Derek Manzello, a marine scientist at NOAA who leads the agency’s coral bleaching project, told Vox. The recent extreme ocean warming can’t solely be attributed to climate change, Manzello added; El Niño and even a volcanic eruption have supercharged temperatures. But coral reefs were collapsing well before the current bleaching crisis. A study published in 2021 estimated that coral “has declined by half” since the mid-20th century. In some places, like the Florida Keys, nearly 90 percent of the live corals have been lost. Past bleaching events are one source of destruction, as are other threats linked to climate change, including ocean acidification. The past and current state of corals raises an important but challenging question: If the planet continues to warm, is there a future for these iconic ecosystems? What’s become increasingly clear is that climate change doesn’t just deal a temporary blow to these animals — it will bring about the end of reefs as we know them. Will there be coral reefs 100 years from now? In the next few decades, a lot of coral will die — that’s pretty much a given. And to be clear, this reality is absolutely devastating. Regardless of whether snorkeling is your thing, reefs are essential to human well-being: Coral reefs dampen waves that hit the shore, support commercial fisheries, and drive coastal tourism around the world. They’re also home to an incredible diversity of life that inspires wonder. “I’m pretty sure that we will not see the large surface area of current reefs surviving into the future,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, who was involved in the landmark 2018 report, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that predicted the downfall of tropical reefs at 1.5°C warming. “Every year is going to be worse.” NOAA A map of coral bleaching “alerts,” which indicate where the ocean is unusually warm and bleaching is likely to occur. Red areas have a risk of reef-wide bleaching; magenta and purple regions are at risk of coral death. But even as many corals die, reefs won’t exactly disappear. The 3D formation of a typical reef is made of hard corals that produce a skeleton-like structure. When the polyps die, they leave their skeletons behind. Animals that eat live coral, such as butterfly fish and certain marine snails, will likely vanish; plenty of other fish and crabs will stick around because they can hide among those skeletons. Algae will dominate on ailing reefs, as will “weedy” kinds of coral, like sea fans, that don’t typically build the reef’s structure. Simply put, dead reefs aren’t so much lifeless as they are home to a new community of less sensitive (and often more common) species. “Reefs in the future will look very different,” said Jean-Pierre Gattuso, a leading marine scientist who’s also involved with the IPCC. “Restoring coral reefs to what they were prior to mass bleaching events is impossible. That is a fact.” On the timescale of decades, even much of the reef rubble will fade away, as there will be no (or few) live corals to build new skeletons and plenty of forces to erode the ones that remain. Remarkably, about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide that we pump into the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans. When all that CO2 reacts with water, it makes the ocean more acidic, hastening the erosion of coral skeletons and other biological structures made of calcium carbonate. Jennifer Adler for Vox Bleached staghorn coral in a nursery run by the Coral Restoration Foundation off the coast of the Florida Keys in September 2023. Buying time For decades now, hard-working and passionate scientists have been trying to reverse this downward trend — in large part, by “planting” pieces of coral on damaged reefs. This practice is similar to planting saplings in a logged forest. In reef restoration, many scientists and environmental advocates see hope and a future for coral reefs. But these efforts come with one major limitation: If the oceans continue to grow hotter, many of those planted corals will die too. Last fall, I dived a handful of reefs in the Florida Keys where thousands of pieces of elkhorn and staghorn — iconic, reef-building corals — had been planted. Nearly all of them were bleached, dead, or dying. “When are [we] going to stop pretending that coral reefs can be restored when sea temperatures continue to rise and spike at lethal levels?” Terry Hughes, one of the world’s leading coral reef ecologists, wrote on X. Ultimately, the only real solution is reducing carbon emissions. Period. Pretty much every marine scientist I’ve talked to agrees. “Without international cooperation to break our dependence on fossil fuels, coral bleaching events are only going to continue to increase in severity and frequency,” Manzello said. Echoing his concern, Pörtner said: “We really have no choice but to stop climate change.” Jennifer Adler for Vox A collection of bleached “planted” staghorn coral on a reef in Florida in September 2023. But in the meantime, other stuff can help. Planting pieces of coral can work if those corals are more tolerant to threats like extreme heat or disease. To that end, researchers are trying to breed more heat-resistant individuals or identify those that are naturally more tolerant to stress — not only heat, but disease. Even after extreme bleaching events, many corals survive, according to Jason Spadaro, a restoration expert at Florida’s Mote Marine Laboratory. (“Massive” corals, which look a bit like boulders, had high rates of survival following recent bleaching in Florida, Spadaro said.) Scientists also see an urgent need to curb other, non-climate related threats, like water pollution and intensive fishing. “To give corals the best possible chance, we need to reduce every other stressor impacting reefs that we can control,” Manzello told Vox. These efforts alone will not save reefs, but they’ll buy time, experts say, helping corals hold on until emissions fall. If those interventions work — and if countries step up their climate commitments — future generations will still get to experience at least some version of these majestic, life-sustaining ecosystems. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Is Fallout a warning for our future? A global catastrophe risk expert weighs in.

4 h

vox.com

Ella Purnell as Lucy in Fallout. | JoJo Whilden/Prime Video What a post-nuclear aftermath could really look like. Between the crumbling of trust in our institutions and escalating global conflict, dystopia feels deeply familiar in today’s world. Though there are people and organizations who are working to keep the globe and our humanity intact, it’s normal for us to think of the worst-case scenarios. Fallout, a recently released show on Amazon Prime based on the popular video game franchise, is the latest exploration of one of these scenarios: survival after nuclear war. Fallout takes place in two different periods in the Los Angeles area: the moments before nuclear bombs are dropped across the US, and 200 years later. Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), the show’s protagonist, is a “vault-dweller” — the term for people who live underground in sealed bunkers created by a company called Vault-Tec. Despite their world’s dark past, Lucy and the community of Vault 33 remain optimistic that one day — when the radioactive levels are low enough on the surface — civilization can restart with their help. But when her father, the leader of their vault, gets kidnapped by people from the surface, Lucy leaves her bunker to bring him back. As she embarks on her quest to find her dad, Lucy finds that the surface is a hostile place. There’s little to no food or clean water, danger exists around every corner in the form of bandits and mutants, and the lone survivors are cynical and distrustful — especially toward Lucy, whose bunkered life seems easy by comparison. As one disgruntled shopkeeper tells Lucy, “The vaults were nothing more than a hole in the ground for rich folks to hide in while the rest of the world burned.” Indeed, in our real world, there are wealthy people investing in bunkers in case shit hits the fan, including some big names like Mark Zuckerberg. But what about everyone else? That’s a key message in Fallout: Survival isn’t equitable. And while Fallout is a fictional depiction of nuclear war that’s heavy on the sci-fi, nuclear warfare itself is not off the table in reality. There are also plenty of other existential risks that can shape how we live, like future pandemics, a changing climate causing extreme weather and disasters, and harmful artificial intelligence. What makes nuclear war particularly terrifying is the devastation it can cause in just seconds — the horrifying damage and loss of life from the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly 80 years ago underscore why we should prevent this from ever happening again. Yet, nine countries are still armed with nuclear weapons, with the US and Russia possessing thousands of nuclear warheads. So I reached out to Seth Baum, the executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a think tank that analyzes the greatest threats to civilization and develops strategies to reduce these risks. We talked about what the aftermath of a nuclear war could look like in our real world — and also what we should focus on now to prevent this scenario from happening, as well as how we could prepare for it if it does. “We do actually need to take this seriously, as dark and unpleasant as it is,” Baum said. “It is a very worthwhile thing to be doing because we could really need it. It could be the difference between life and death for a massive number of people.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity. After watching Fallout for myself, it feels like an ominous warning. But, of course, it’s also describing an alternate history, and there’s a lot of science fiction in the story. What could an actual post-nuclear world look like for us? [It] probably would not involve mutants and monsters. Nuclear radiation can cause some mutations, but it probably wouldn’t actually happen like that. But that’s okay, it’s a video game and a TV show, it’s supposed to be entertaining — that’s fine. The most important thing we can do is to not have a nuclear war in the first place. And that should always be the first option to address the risk of nuclear war. In the event of an actual nuclear war, for people who are in the immediate vicinity of the explosion, there’s not much that can be done. The force of a nuclear explosion is too much. Buildings will be destroyed, people will be killed, that’s just how it’s going to be. Then for the rest of the world, this is where things get interesting. The plausible nuclear war scenarios would not have nuclear explosions across the whole world. First of all, we just don’t have that many nuclear weapons, which is a good thing. Second of all, much of the world is just not a likely target in any actual nuclear war scenario. You know, I live in New York City, it’s a good chance I would die, right? We are a likely target of nuclear explosions. But across much of the world, across Latin America, across Africa, large portions of Asia — these are countries that are not involved in any significant disputes with the nuclear-armed countries. There’s only a few nuclear-armed countries, and we tend to have our nuclear weapons pointed at each other and at our close allies, maybe. So unless you happen to live near [a nuclear missile silo], you’re probably not going to get hit, you’re probably going to survive the immediate attack. Then there are a few things that you’re going to want to look at. The two big global effects are one, nuclear winter, and two, damage to the global economy. If you start removing hubs from the economy, that’s going to have an effect on the rest of the economy. What would that effect be? Well, nobody really knows, we’ve never tried it before. That’s something that every country would have to deal with. At a minimum, there’s going to be some sort of supply chain shocks. Also, nobody’s really studied this in much detail — we could at least try studying it a little bit. There has been more research on nuclear winter — I’m using the term nuclear winter broadly to refer to all of the global, environmental effects of nuclear war that come from basically the ashes of burning cities and burning other places going up into the stratosphere, which is the second level of the atmosphere, and it stays up there for months, or even years. That can have a variety of effects. One of the biggest being plants don’t grow as much, because it’s colder, it’s darker, there may be less precipitation. So there are some projections and very severe agricultural shortfalls. It could take a lot of effort just to survive, even for countries that had nothing to do with a conflict that caused the war. How is the US prepared to preserve the lives of its civilians in the event of a nuclear war or other catastrophic events with similar impacts, if at all? My understanding from this is that we’re just not really prepared to handle this type of situation, that we have some emergency management capabilities, but we push past the reasonable limits of those capabilities pretty quickly in these very extreme scenarios. So would we be able to do some things to help out? Yeah, sure. Would we be able to keep society intact? Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it. This is really just something that we are not currently set up to do. Frankly, this would be a good thing to invest more in for the United States government and other governments, to invest more in the capabilities of more successfully surviving these extreme catastrophe scenarios. Nuclear war is one of them, it’s not the only one. This is something that we could and, I think, should do better at. In the show, a select few of the population get to live safely in bunkers underground — those who have access to power and money, generally. In real life even, there’s a community of wealthy people who have invested in bunkers in case of emergencies. How do we ensure shelter and refuge for as many people as possible in these kinds of situations? Yes, there are wealthy people who are making these preparations. There are also the survivalists, the preppers, who are doing similar sorts of things, often with a much deeper commitment to actually surviving. Having a bunker in New Zealand doesn’t do you very much good if you’re in the United States during the time of the war. So for people living out in more strategic locations on a permanent basis, those people may be a lot more likely to survive something like a nuclear war, which targets the big cities in ways that it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you can’t survive the nuclear explosion. It just doesn’t work that way. What does bring benefits is having the resources in place to deal with the aftermath, which for nuclear war could include a combination of food stockpiles, and preparations to continue making food through any agricultural shortfalls with nuclear winter, could include the public health capabilities to manage the effects. If we see significant supply chain shocks, and just general disruption of how a civilization functions, that can create major public health challenges even away from where the attacks occurred. And also, the social and psychological and institutional preparedness. This is a really big challenge — getting people to wrap their minds around and make actual serious plans with institutional weight behind them, to be prepared to deal with this sort of thing. It’s not easy. This is not something that we like to think about, like to work on, this is not happy stuff, right? It’s tough because most of the time, you don’t need it. In fact, hopefully you never need it. And yet, if something like this happens, and it could happen, then this could be the difference between life and death for a large number of people. Why is there this ever-present fascination with stocking up on supplies? Whether it’s bunkers or emergency kits, it feels like people can buy their way to safety — I’m curious what you think is the underlying dynamic here? Well, first of all, it’s just interesting. I’m fascinated by it, even if I myself am a real failure of a prepper. Despite my line of work, I’m actually not personally very good at this, plus I live in Manhattan — my default expectation is that I would just die. I don’t know my way around this stuff. But some people do, and you know, more credit to them for taking on that sort of responsibility. And a lot of this is things that any of us would be well-served by doing even for a much more basic set of catastrophes. I remember, a few years ago, I went to a meeting of the New York City preppers group. And I was a little disappointed. I was kind of hoping to meet some really crazy, eccentric people. And it just wasn’t. The group was led by a police officer who was just doing this in his spare time, this little public service, and the people there were normal and they were just trying to learn some basics of what to do. And it turned out some of the basic preparations, it’s a lot of the stuff that FEMA recommends people do for basic disaster preparedness. Now, is that gonna be enough for a nuclear war? Maybe not. For that, you might need something more serious, and some people are trying to do that sort of serious thing. In the event of a nuclear war, that might be the difference between them surviving and then them not surviving. It’s entirely reasonable that there’s some people out there doing it. For the rest of us, we should, I think, broadly be supportive of this. I wouldn’t look at those people as eccentric crazies — I would look at them as people who are taking the responsibility of ensuring their own survival and their family’s survival across a wide range of scenarios. That’s commendable, and I wish that there was more of a public or communal attitude toward: Can we help all of us to do more along these lines? Because we could end up really needing it. While the US hasn’t faced any events as deeply catastrophic for our survival as nuclear warfare would be, are there past crises that we can look to and learn from in an effort to prepare for the worst in the future? This is a major challenge in the study of global catastrophic risk. We don’t really have a lot of data points. I mean, modern global civilization has never been destroyed before, which is a good thing. That’s, of course, a good thing. But for research purposes, it means a lack of data. What we have to do is make use of what information we do have. And events like the Covid-19 pandemic are one really important source of information. Another we can try to learn from [is] major catastrophes that have occurred across human history. Then also for the local scale disasters that occur on a relatively frequent basis: natural disasters, violent conflicts, and so on. All of this does provide some insight into how human societies respond to these sorts of situations. The best we can do is take what we do have experience with, what we do have data on, and extrapolate that as well as we can to these other scenarios that have never happened before, and use that as the basis for using our best judgment about how we can survive and cope with it. And along the way, we can perhaps use that as that much more motivation to prevent these scenarios from happening in the first place, which, again, is always the best option. Ideally, the world never finds itself in a situation as devastating to human life as global nuclear war would be. How do we reduce that risk as best as possible? There are a lot of small-picture things that can be done, and then there is that one big-picture thing that, in my opinion, is not getting the attention that it deserves. The small picture things — and in my experience, this is the primary focus of work on nuclear war risk reduction — are just the day-to-day management of nuclear weapons systems and relations between the countries that have them. This was all especially pronounced recently during the most tense moments of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and is probably still a day-to-day concern for the people who manage the nuclear weapons systems in Russia, in the United States, and France and the UK. There’s a lot to be done there to prevent things from escalating, and this is important work. In my opinion, none of this solves the underlying issue: which is that there are these countries that have nuclear weapons, some of them in rather large numbers. And so those nuclear weapons are pointed at each other and may at some point get used. My view is that the only real solution to this is to improve the relations between these countries, enough that they don’t feel that they need the nuclear weapons anymore. Now, that process can include attention to how terrible the aftermath of nuclear war would be that makes countries that much more eager to get rid of these terrible weapons. But I have a hard time seeing any significant nuclear disarmament without significant improvements in the relations between the countries that have them, the most important of which is Russia. This is not a quick-fix solution. This is something that, if it’s going to happen, it would probably happen over the decades.

Canada’s polite Trumpism

5 h

vox.com

Pierre Poilievre speaks at a protest against a Federal Carbon Tax increase on March 27, 2024. | Artur Widak/NurPhoto/Getty Images The rise of an unusually tame right-wing populist reveals how Canadian democracy stays strong — and why the world should take notes from Ottawa. “Are we a country that looks out for each other ... or do you go down a path of amplifying anger, division and fear?” That’s how Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described the stakes in his country’s upcoming election in an interview with Vox’s Today, Explained this week — outlining the 2025 contest as no ordinary election but a referendum on the very soul of Canada. This existential framing is an unsubtle shot at Trudeau’s rival, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, a populist firebrand who is currently outpolling the prime minister by a wide margin. Poilievre rose to party leadership as a champion of the extremist trucker convoy that occupied Ottawa in January 2022, and since then has regularly pandered to far-right voters. He has proposed defunding the CBC (Canada’s widely respected public broadcaster) and repeatedly promoted a conspiracy theory in which Trudeau is in league with the World Economic Forum. There’s a reason that Trudeau and many others have directly linked Poilievre to Trump: His political style practically invites it. But how accurate is the comparison? Is Canada really poised to be the next Western country to fall to the far-right populist global wave? The answer, as best as I can tell, is mixed. It’s true that, by Canadian standards, Poilievre is an especially hard-nosed figure, one far more willing to use extreme rhetoric and attack political opponents in harsh terms. But on policy substance, he’s actually considerably more moderate than Trump or European radicals. Mostly eschewing the demagogic focus on culture and immigration that defines the new global far right, Poilievre is primarily concerned with classic conservative themes of limited government. His biggest campaign promises at present aren’t slashing immigration rates or cracking down on crime, but building more housing and repealing Canada’s carbon tax. Poilievre is basically just a conventional Canadian conservative who wraps up his elite-friendly agenda in anti-elite language aimed at working-class voters. He’s the kind of politician that some Republicans wish Donald Trump was: a tame populist. Understanding Poilievre isn’t just of interest to Canadians. There are reasons that his brand of populism is less virulent than what’s cropped up in many other Atlantic democracies — ones that hold important lessons for safeguarding democracy around the world. Why Pierre Poilievre doesn’t fit the far-right script The University of Georgia’s Cas Mudde, one of the leading scholars of the European right, has developed what is (to my mind) the most useful definition of radical right politics today. In his account, this party family — factions like Hungary’s Fidesz, France’s National Rally, and the US GOP — share three essential qualities. First, they are nativist; they strongly oppose immigration and multiculturalism. Second, they are willing to use aggressive, even authoritarian measures to deal with social disorder like undocumented migration and crime. Finally, they are populist, meaning that they define politics as a struggle between a virtuous people and a corrupt elite. Poilievre is certainly a populist. A right-wing operative and politician since he was a teenager, he rocketed to the top of the Conservative Party hierarchy after emerging as the most vocal champion of the 2022 Ottawa occupation. The uprising, which began against pandemic restrictions but swiftly became a broader far-right movement, was quite unpopular nationally. But inside the Conservative Party, there was enough support for its “pro-freedom” message that Poilievre rode his pro-convoy stance to victory in the party’s subsequent leadership election. Steve Russell/Toronto Star/Getty Images A protester makes his stand as police remove the “Freedom Convoy” from Ottawa on February 18, 2022. Since then, his populism has focused relentlessly on attacking the media, “globalists,” and (above all) Trudeau. Casting the fight between his Conservatives and Trudeau’s Liberals as the “have-nots” versus the “have-yachts,” he has argued that the prime minister embodies a debased Ottawa establishment out of touch with the needs and values of ordinary Canadians. In a recent speech, Poilievre cast Trudeau as an “elitist” leader gunning for Canada’s freedoms. “If he had read Nineteen Eighty-Four, he would have thought it was an instruction manual,” Poilievre argued. Somewhat ironically, Poilievre also believes Canada’s criminal justice system should be harsher. Blaming Trudeau for a recent rise in car thefts, Poilievre has argued for a reimposition of mandatory minimum sentences and other tough-on-crime policies. This means there’s at least a case that he also fits the second prong of Mudde’s definition of radical right politics. But on the first prong, nativism, Poilievre clearly diverges from Trump and the European far right. He has publicly insisted that “the Conservative party is pro-immigration,” and he has made appealing directly to immigrants a central part of his campaign strategy. “It doesn’t matter if your name is Poilievre or Patel, Martin or Mohamed,” he said at a Diwali event in October 2022. “If you’re prepared to work hard, contribute, follow the rules, raise your family, you can achieve your dreams in this country.” While he has called for a decrease in current levels of immigration, he has refused to specify a target for said cuts. His most recent position is that immigration levels should be linked to housing supply — the more houses and apartments built, the more immigrants should be let in. And since he is solidly pro-construction, that doesn’t necessarily imply that immigration needs to be cut radically. This a far cry from Trump’s claim that Mexico is sending rapists and drug dealers, or Dutch radical Geert Wilders’ (recently withdrawn) proposal to ban mosques in the Netherlands. Poilievre may assail the media and champion right-wing hooliganism on the streets of Ottawa, but he’s unwilling to attack immigrants and ethnic minorities in the way that others in the global far right do. Rather, Poilievre’s politics seem more shaped by Canada’s longstanding populist tradition than anything new or global. Arising primarily in Western provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Poilievre’s native Alberta), Canadian “prairie populism” historically draws strength from the notion that the federal government cares more about the population centers in Quebec and Ontario than the rest of the country. Prairie populism, which comes in left- and right-wing varieties, focuses far more on regional and economic issues than the cultural obsessions of the modern far right. “We have had a long history of populism — particularly in the prairie provinces, the Western provinces — going back to the 1920s and 30s,” says Keith Banting, a professor at Queen’s University in Ontario. “Populism draws less extensively on anti-immigrant sentiment in Canada than it does almost anywhere else.” Indeed, Poilievre’s biggest focus is cost-of-living issues — blaming ordinary people’s economic pain on high taxes and big government. His signature proposals are repealing Trudeau’s carbon tax, cutting spending to fight inflation, and removing restrictions on housing construction. You can think whatever you want about the merits of these various views (personally, I’m against the first two and for the third), but they’re basically what you would expect from any Conservative Party leader in his position: the historic party of Canada’s wealthy calling for lowering taxes and shrinking government. While the global far right is unbendingly hostile to immigration and flexible on size-of-government questions, Poilievre is essentially the reverse. Poilievre’s “plutocratic populism” While Poilievre is a very Canadian figure, fitting solidly into the right-wing prairie populist tradition, his politics also have a lot in common with a concept developed for the United States: political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s “plutocratic populism.” In their book Let Them Eat Tweets, Hacker and Pierson argue that the Republican Party uses culture war as a vehicle to attract popular support for a party that primarily caters to the interests of the rich. This strategy of “exploiting white identity to defend wealth inequality” allowed Trump’s GOP to attract downscale, non-college-educated voters without abandoning its core commitment to tax cuts and deregulation. But in the United States, the populists ate the plutocrats. Trump’s anti-democratic instability and economic heterodoxy on issues like trade led some GOP billionaires, like the Koch family, to try and unseat him in the 2024 primary. They failed miserably and now are slinking back. In the Republican Party, MAGA is calling the shots. Poilievre, by contrast, keeps his populism within plutocrat-acceptable bounds. His rhetorical gestures toward the working class are paired with solidly pro-rich policy views and a distinct absence of attacks on the democratic system itself. In 2013, he claimed to be “the first federal politician to make a dedicated push” toward imposing US-style right-to-work laws in Canada. He has endorsed tax cuts for the rich and cuts to social spending. His trade policy is far more free-market than Trump’s. There are no signs that he would challenge the legitimacy of Canadian elections, let alone stage a January 6-style insurrection. None of this should be surprising. Poilievre is a longtime creature of the Conservative Party, a cabinet minister in former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government. He is not an anti-establishment figure like Trump but rather a member of the establishment. There’s no reason to believe his leadership would seriously diverge from the Conservative Party’s historic policy priorities to any major degree. He is the kind of “populist” that people like the Kochs wish Trump was. What the world can learn from Canada’s tame populism All that being said, Poilievre’s populist positioning is not harmless. There are genuine costs to villainizing your political rivals, mainstreaming conspiracy theories, and corroding public trust in the media. In the long run, this rhetoric can corrode the bonds of citizenship and raise polarization to dangerous levels. His proposal to defund the CBC’s English-language broadcasts is concerning; if implemented, it would be quite damaging to Canada’s civic health. Perhaps for this reason, many members of his own party oppose the idea. Yet in comparison to places with significant far-right problems —like the United States or even Germany — Canada’s democracy is still in relatively safe waters. Poilievre’s aggressive rhetoric is worrying, but it’s hardly a system-threatening danger akin to Trump’s election denialism. This speaks, more than anything else, to the durability of what’s been termed “Canadian exceptionalism:” an unusual level of resistance to far-right populism when compared to its peers in the Atlantic world. Generally speaking, Canadian exceptionalism seems to stem from the country’s historically high levels of public support for immigration and multiculturalism. Unerringly, right-wing extremist parties around the world draw the core of their strength from majority-group voters concerned about ethnic and religious minorities. While such people certainly exist in Canada, they are a smaller percentage of the overall population than in peer democracies and, accordingly, less politically influential. This exceptionalism is rooted in Canada’s distinct national identity as one that elevates the ideas of tolerance and diversity into defining and distinctive national values. In fact, Canadians who express higher levels of patriotism tend to be more supportive of immigration (in the United States, the relationship unsurprisingly goes the other way). Steve Russell/Toronto Star/Getty Images Canadians Maryam and Nore Kasmeih wait for Syrian refugees at the airport on December 10, 2015. Between Poilievre’s rise to power and a recent poll showing concern about immigration driving up housing costs, some have worried that this may be ending. But a closer look suggests that these are actually testaments to the enduring power of Canadian exceptionalism. The Canadian Conservative Party has remained in bounds on issues of immigration and identity because going harder would be politically counterproductive (as the public disapproval of the trucker protest showed). Even amid the current concern about rising home prices, a majority of Canadians believe that immigration levels should be kept the same or increased. If Poilievre is a tame populist, the people responsible for taming him were not the Canadian rich but rather the Canadian majority. His populism is primarily rhetorical — rather than system-threatening — because the Canadian system for limiting extremism is still basically intact. The lesson for the rest of the world is that Canada is onto something. Several decades of official multiculturalism have helped it build up antibodies to the infection eating away at democracies as different as the United States, Hungary, India, and Israel. Liberals and democrats everywhere should be trying to think about how to build their own variants of this ideology at home. Realistically, this is a long-term project. Canada’s multiculturalism project began under Trudeau’s father, Pierre, in 1971. It took decades for it to build on itself and become an authentic part of Canadian identity, one strong enough to create barriers to far-right politics. This isn’t something that can be adopted overnight in response to an extremist challenge; in fact, the very existence of that challenge creates a significant barrier to moving in Canada’s direction. But at the same time, the crisis of global democracy may be the time to get started. Canada’s multiculturalism policy was in large part a response to internal conflict and crisis: violent Quebecois separatism rooted in French-Canadian desire for cultural autonomy. Perhaps the current crisis in global democracies will create a similar incentive to start thinking about long-term policy ambitions in their own countries. At the very least, the rise of Poilievre should not be seen as a failure of the Canadian model. If anything, his relatively neutered populism should be seen as a testament to its strength

Mass graves at two hospitals are the latest horrors from Gaza

15 h

vox.com

Gazan teams, civil defense, crime scene investigation, and forensics continue to carry out investigation at the scene after Israeli siege and attacks that destroyed Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza, on April 17, 2024. | Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images What we know — and what we don’t — about the mass graves at Gaza hospitals. A mass grave with 324 bodies was uncovered at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, members of Gaza Civil Defense said over the weekend. The discovery follows reports of similar mass graves at the al-Shifa Hospital complex, where some 381 bodies have been exhumed since Israeli troops withdrew from the facility at the beginning of April. As part of its ongoing war in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the Israeli military conducted extensive raids at both hospitals earlier this year. There’s a lot that’s unknown about the victims, including their causes of death. Some bodies had been buried at and around the hospital grounds because they could not safely be interred at cemeteries. But the sharp increases in the number of dead raise concerns that both hospitals could be the sites of serious crimes, including possibly extrajudicial killings, that require an independent investigation, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. That’s why the discovery of hundreds of bodies in the grave sites is so alarming. There are allegations that IDF soldiers moved bodies that were temporarily buried at the hospital, which could lead to families losing track of remains, among other issues. Hospitals are supposed to be protected spaces under international humanitarian law, with an exceptionally high legal bar for carrying out military operations there. And if people were killed during those raids, authorities must be able to determine who they were and how they died, as the intentional killing of civilians is a war crime. In the near term, the ongoing conflict will make it difficult to determine exactly what happened, hindering accountability efforts if wrongdoing occurred. Some of the victims “were allegedly older people, women and wounded, while others were found tied with their hands ... tied and stripped of their clothes,” Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Tuesday in a press release. (The UN has not said if it has independently verified these reports but has said they have “renewed concerns about possible war crimes amid ongoing Israeli airstrikes.”) The Israeli military has rejected the idea that its soldiers buried the bodies, calling such accusations ”baseless and unfounded.” The IDF told CNN that it had examined some bodies in their search for the remains of Israeli hostages, but returned the remains “to their place.” Here’s what we know about the graves Starting last fall, Israeli forces targeted Gaza’s hospitals with bombing campaigns and with weeks-long raids at Nasser and al-Shifa, on the premise that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure like hospitals to plan and conduct operations. After a siege on al-Shifa Hospital and a later raid, as well as one on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, medical officers suggested many had died. It is not clear how many people were killed in each hospital, how they died, or who they were. Here’s what we do know about what happened at each hospital. Al-Shifa Hospital At al-Shifa Hospital, the IDF says that it killed 200 “terrorists” hiding at the facility and has for months alleged that the hospital was a base of Hamas operations. Hamas media officials say that 400 people were killed during the raid, including at least 20 patients who died from lack of access to medical care, according to the WHO. Hospital staff have denied that Hamas fighters were at the hospital, according to Reuters. Al-Shifa was destroyed, rendered essentially inoperable during the raid. Nasser Hospital According to the IDF, its February attack on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis was an operation to recover the remains of Israeli hostages thought to be at the facility. At the time, the IDF told Vox, without providing any evidence to support this assertion, that “Hamas terrorists are likely hiding behind injured civilians inside Nasser Hospital right now and appear to have used the hospital to hide our hostages there too.” The IDF later claimed to have detained 200 “terrorists and suspects in terrorist activities,” but when contacted this week, the IDF did not provide information about what happened to those detained. Some bodies had been buried at a temporary site at Nasser Hospital during the Israeli siege and raid in February, according to Gaza Civil Defense. But the number of bodies discovered after the raids surpasses the number previously thought to be buried at either site, and it’s not clear where the new bodies came from. Furthermore, Col. Yamen Abu Suleiman, head of Gaza Civil Defense in Khan Younis, said some of the bodies at the mass grave at Nasser Hospital show signs of summary execution, and some bodies had their hands and feet bound. “We do not know if they were buried alive or executed,” he told CNN. “Most of the bodies are decomposed.” (CNN and other media organizations have not been able to independently verify these allegations.) The group is also searching for the bodies of about 400 people missing since Israeli forces left Nasser Hospital. The broader picture Those allegations — and the uncertainty around where the unexpected bodies came from — prompted UN human rights commissioner Volker Türk’s call for “a clear, transparent and credible investigation” into how the people buried at the sites died. “What appears to have happened, or what is alleged to have happened, is that the IDF dug up many of those bodies, removed identifying information, and then put the bodies back in the grave,” Adil Haque, an international humanitarian law professor at Rutgers University, told Vox. “So now people can’t identify their loved ones without great difficulty.” There are provisions in international law regarding the dignity of the dead; people should, whenever possible, be buried in marked graves, and their families and loved ones should be able to engage in mourning practices. The presence of mass graves can indicate improper burials, though that is not always the case. Very little is known about the mass graves so far, especially what happened to the new people buried within them — and that is what’s alarming. “The question is, what happened during the IDF takeover of the hospital that explains why there’s so many more bodies in the grave than were originally there?” Haque said. And it’s not clear that the justification for the raids on the hospitals was legal under international humanitarian law, given that medical facilities and personnel receive special protection. “You cannot attack a hospital, medical services, medical units; medical personnel and medical institutions must be protected,” Anjli Parrin, director of the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, told Vox. “That you’re seeing large numbers of deceased individuals at a hospital is very troubling. There’s a question not just of the bodies but why did you attack these places? Who were the civilians harmed? Was it really the only option? Was it under the legal standard of hostile acts harmful to the enemy?” Mass graves show a real need for an independent investigation What happened to the people in the mass graves and why they are there is difficult to understand in part because of the lack of independent information coming out of Gaza. No outside reporters have been allowed in, almost a hundred Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, aid groups struggle to operate, and independent investigative bodies have not been able to access the territory. “That we don’t know is not good enough,” Parrin said. “The discovery of these mass graves suggests that there’s a really urgent need to carry out investigations, one, but even before you get to that point, to preserve evidence, which the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to do” following the court’s January ruling that Israel was not doing enough to prevent genocide in Gaza. If the IDF indeed willfully killed civilians or even militants hors de combat — meaning they’re not on the battlefield due to injury, for example — at the hospitals, that would be a crime. All of the parties to combat are obligated to make sure that evidence is preserved for later investigations and prosecution per IHL. But getting that investigation into motion will be difficult; for one, it’s not clear who would carry it out, though Haque suggested that the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, or the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights would be the appropriate bodies. And there would need to be a ceasefire, or at the very least guarantees that the investigators could carry out their work safely. But there is still the question of why Israel has raided so many hospitals in Gaza, which, as Parrin said, is highly unusual in conflict. “There’s a risk [that] this kind of conduct becomes normalized,” she said. “It would be very worrying for other conflicts. It shouldn’t be the situation that attacks on a hospital are somehow justified.”

The wild past 24 hours of Trump legal news, explained

16 h

vox.com

Former US President Donald Trump exits his criminal trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments at Manhattan Criminal Court on April 25, 2024, in New York City. | Jeenah Moon/Getty Images Trump allies newly indicted in Arizona, testimony continuing in New York, and the Supreme Court hearing arguments in DC. The Arizona attorney general’s office unsealed a new case indicting several top Trump allies, including Rudy Giuliani, for trying to steal the 2020 election. The former publisher of the National Enquirer spilled new details about Trump in testimony during the former president’s first criminal trial in New York. But the Supreme Court gave Trump new reason to hope his second criminal trial, in DC, will be delayed until after the election. All that happened this week in an unusually tumultuous 24 hours for the Trump legal saga, which continues to dominate the 2024 campaign. The most important development was probably that Supreme Court argument. There, Trump’s lawyers were arguing that his federal indictment for trying to steal the 2020 election should be thrown out because it involved “official acts” he took as president. Several conservative justices displayed striking sympathy for Trump’s argument, though it’s unclear how the Court will rule on the merits. Still, a divided Court likely means the ruling will be complex or slow in coming down — and either scenario could well delay the biggest, most important Trump trial until after November. Yet Trump could still end up a felon before then, due to the hush money trial happening in New York. There, David Pecker, the prosecution’s first witness, testified about Trump’s knowledge about hush money payments that he had helped arrange. Meanwhile, in Arizona, Trump himself was not indicted, but the charges against major Trumpworld figures like Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows effectively send a message that those who collaborate in his schemes may well face legal consequences. The odds rose that Trump’s most consequential trial won’t happen this year The federal case against Trump for trying to steal the 2020 election was viewed by many observers as the most consequential of his four prosecutions. It combined a substantively important underlying issue — the health of US democracy — with a tight, clean case that could go to trial and end in a verdict before the 2024 election. Initially, it was scheduled to take place this March. But pretrial preparations have been paused since December so higher courts can deal with a Trump appeal, in which he argued that he should be immune from prosecution for “official acts” he took as president. That appeal went before the Supreme Court for arguments on Thursday, and observers like my colleague Ian Millhiser thought the arguments went quite well for Trump. There were really two things at stake in the arguments Thursday: whether Trump’s trial can go forward at all, and how quickly it can go forward. Overall, the argument was much less about the specifics of the Trump prosecution and much more about the broader question of prosecuting a former president for his conduct while he was in office. Four conservative justices voiced deep misgivings about that idea, while the three liberals were fine with it. The Court’s swing votes — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett — were less clear. But experts came away from the arguments believing it was unlikely that they’d give a simple green light to the prosecution. Instead, the Court seemed likely to issue a ruling setting out new standards for what counts as a presidential “official act” and what doesn’t. That may not sound so bad in theory, but in practice, the likely impact would be to delay the trial. The window for the trial to happen before November 2024 was already narrow. Judge Tanya Chutkan has pledged to allow nearly three months more prep time if she does get permission to proceed. Even a late June Supreme Court ruling could in theory let the trial kick off in September. But if the Court issues a new ruling with novel legal standards, implementing that at the trial court level would require new briefings and arguments, which take more time. Arizona sent a message that would-be election stealers will be held accountable Even though Trump got good news in his main election-stealing case, several of his allies in that plot got some very bad news in Arizona. On Wednesday night, prosecutors in the office of Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) unsealed charges centered on the “fake electors” plot as it unfolded there. To recap the fake electors plot: Biden won Arizona and other key swing states, and therefore his team’s chosen slate became the official electors, casting these states’ electoral votes for Biden. But Trump’s team organized their own elector slates, declaring them to be the true legitimate electors. These fake electors then submitted their own “electoral votes” to Congress in the hope that Vice President Mike Pence would choose to count them and flip the election to Trump. Several prosecutors have argued the fake electors scheme was illegal, violating conspiracy, fraud, or even forgery laws. It was part of the big federal case against Trump, as well as the Georgia case against Trump, in which several fake electors in that state were also charged. Michigan’s fake electors were indicted in that state, though Trump was not. Trump wasn’t charged in Arizona either — though several of his top allies in the election-stealing plot were. Those indicted were: Eleven Arizona fake electors: The most prominent name in the bunch is Kelli Ward, the former chair of the Arizona Republican Party, who has long been associated with the state’s far right. Seven Trump lawyers and aides who organized the fake elector plan: Their names are redacted in the official indictment, but per reports, details offered make clear they are Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Christina Bobb, Boris Epshteyn, and Mike Roman. It’s not clear why Trump wasn’t charged, but he is referred to as “Unindicted co-conspirator 1” in the indictment. Effectively, though, the Arizona indictment serves as another warning for those who might be tempted to try and mess with democracy by stealing an election: Don’t do it, or you could be charged criminally. One of the most effective constraints on Trump’s authoritarian ambitions in his first term was the repeated tendency of his key aides to refuse to carry out his orders. Some may have done so because they thought he was acting unethically, but others may have had the more self-interested motive of fearing legal exposure. The Arizona charges, like the Georgia and Michigan ones, make it clear that fear is well-founded. David Pecker testified about what Trump knew on hush money payments Finally, Trump’s criminal trial in New York — for falsifying business records related to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels — is still in its early stages, but the first witness to take the stand gave some helpful testimony for the prosecution. Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified at length about his relationship with Trump and about the Enquirer’s involvement in keeping damaging stories about Trump from coming out during the campaign. One of those payments was made to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who alleged an affair with Trump. The Enquirer bought MacDougal’s “life rights” so she wouldn’t publish the story elsewhere. Pecker testified that, during the transition period after Trump won, the president-elect summoned him to a Trump Tower meeting, asked how “our girl” was doing, and thanked him for his help with her — demonstrating Trump’s personal knowledge of the McDougal payment. Pecker also repeatedly testified that he believed Trump wanted these hush money payments made to help with his campaign — not to prevent personal embarrassment or his family members finding out, as his defense team has alluded. But this testimony matters because, to make the felony charges against Trump stick, prosecutors have to prove that he falsified business records to cover up a crime. That crime, they’ve argued, could be violating campaign finance law. They want to prove that hushing up Daniels was an effort to influence the election. And Pecker’s testimony helps them do that.

Donald Trump had a fantastic day in the Supreme Court today

20 h

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Then-President Donald Trump shakes hands with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who Trump placed on the Supreme Court. | Getty Images It’s unclear if the Court will explicitly hold that Trump could commit crimes with impunity, or if they’ll just delay his trial so long that it doesn’t matter. Thursday’s argument in Trump v. United States was a disaster for Special Counsel Jack Smith, and for anyone who believes that the president of the United States should be subject to prosecution if they commit a crime. At least five of the Court’s Republicans seemed eager to, at the very least, permit Trump to delay his federal criminal trial for attempting to steal the 2020 election until after this November’s election. And the one GOP appointee who seemed to hedge the most, Chief Justice John Roberts, also seemed to think that Trump enjoys at least some immunity from criminal prosecution. Much of the Court’s Republican majority, moreover, seemed eager not simply to delay Trump’s trial until after the election, but to give him extraordinarily broad immunity from criminal prosecution should he be elected once again. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example, argued that when a president exercises his official powers, he cannot be charged under any federal criminal statute at all, unless that statute contains explicit language saying that it applies to the president. As Michael Dreeben, the lawyer arguing on behalf of Smith’s prosecution team, told the Court, only two federal laws meet this standard. So Kavanaugh’s rule would amount to near complete immunity for anything a president did while exercising their executive authority. Justice Samuel Alito, meanwhile, played his traditional role as the Court’s most dyspeptic advocate for whatever position the Republican Party prefers. At one point, Alito even argued that permitting Trump to be prosecuted for attempting to overthrow the 2020 presidential election would “lead us into a cycle that destabilizes ... our democracy,” because future presidents who lose elections would mimic Trump’s criminal behavior in order to remain in office and avoid being prosecuted by their successor. In fairness, not all of the justices, or even all of the Republican justices, engaged in such dizzying feats of reverse logic. Roberts did express some concern that Trump lawyer John Sauer’s arguments could prevent the president from being prosecuted if he took a bribe. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, meanwhile, pointed to the fact that Sauer drew a distinction between prosecuting a president for “official” behavior (which Sauer said is not allowed), and prosecuting a president for his “personal” conduct (which Sauer conceded is permitted). Barrett also argued that many of the charges against Trump, such as his work with private lawyers and political consultants to overthrow the 2020 election, qualify as personal conduct and thus could still be prosecuted. Still, many of the Republican justices, including Barrett, indicated that the case would have to be returned to the trial court to determine which of the allegations against Trump qualify as “official,” and which qualify as “personal.” Barrett also indicated that Trump could then appeal the trial court’s ruling, meaning that his actual criminal trial would be delayed for many more months as that issue makes its way through the appeals courts. In that world, the likelihood that Trump will be tried, and a verdict reached, before the November election is approximately zero percent. The Court’s decision in the Trump case, in other words, is likely to raise the stakes of this already impossibly high-stakes election considerably. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned, the risk inherent in giving presidents immunity from the criminal law is that someone like Trump “would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon.” It’s unclear if the Court is going to go so far as to definitively rule that the president of the United States is allowed to do crimes. But they appear likely to make it impossible for the criminal justice system to actually do anything about Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election — at least before Trump could be elected president again. Even if Trump technically “loses” this case, he’s still won Under current law, all government officials enjoy some immunity from civil lawsuits. The president, meanwhile, is on a short list of government officials, alongside judges and prosecutors, who enjoy particularly robust immunity from such suits. But the law has never been understood to immunize any government official from criminal prosecution. Moreover, while no president has been prosecuted prior to Trump, judges and prosecutors (who enjoy the same level of immunity from civil suits as the president) are routinely prosecuted for taking bribes or for otherwise violating the criminal law during their official conduct in office. For this reason, I’ve argued that his immunity case was primarily about delaying Trump’s trial until after the election. The arguments for presidential immunity from the criminal law are so weak and their implications are so shocking — Trump’s lawyer told a lower court that, unless Trump had first been successfully impeached, he could not be prosecuted even if he ordered the military to assassinate one of his political rivals — that it seemed unimaginable that even this Supreme Court would buy Trump’s immunity arguments. After Thursday morning, however, a decision that merely delays Trump’s criminal trial until after the election is probably the best possible outcome Smith could hope for. There appears to be a very real chance that five justices will rule that the president of the United States may use his official powers in order to commit very serious crimes. Even the best case scenario for Smith, moreover, is still an enormous victory for Donald Trump. If Trump prevails in the 2024 election, he can order the Justice Department to drop the charges against him or even potentially pardon himself. And, regardless of what happens in November, the American people will go to the polls without the clarity of a criminal trial which determines whether or not Trump is guilty of attempting to drive a knife into US democracy. The case is likely to turn on the difference between “official” and “personal” behavior Trump’s core argument is that the president is immune from prosecution for “official acts” taken while he was in office. All six of the Court’s Republicans showed at least some sympathy for this argument, though some displayed more sympathy than others. It appears likely that at least four justices — Justices Clarence Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch — will give Trump the immunity he seeks (or apply a rule like Kavanaugh’s requirement that criminal statutes don’t apply to the president unless they explicitly say so, which would have virtually the same effect). At one point, Thomas even suggested that the Justice Department’s decision to appoint Smith to investigate Trump was unconstitutional. Roberts and Barrett, meanwhile, were a little more enigmatic. But both, at the very least, floated sending this case back down to the lower court for more delay. Chief Justice Roberts, for what it’s worth, did express some concern that the line between an “official” action and a “personal” one is difficult to draw. Early in the oral argument, he asked Sauer about a president who appoints someone as an ambassador because that appointee gave the president a bribe. While making the appointment is an official act, taking a bribe is not. Roberts worried that prosecutors would be unable to secure a bribery conviction if they were forbidden from telling the jury about the official act taken by the president in order to secure that bribe. Barrett, meanwhile, spent a considerable amount of time walking Sauer through the actual allegations in the indictment against Trump. And she even got him to admit that some of the charges, such as consulting with private lawyers and a private political consultant on how to certify fake electors, amount to private conduct that could be prosecuted. Later in the argument, however, Barrett seemed to lay out how the process of determining which parts of the indictment can survive should play out. Under her suggested framework, the trial court would have to go through the indictment and sort the “official” from the “personal.” The trial would then be put on hold while Trump appeals whatever the trial court says to higher courts — in a process that is likely to take months or even longer to sort out. By the time that was all done, the November election would be long past, and Trump could very well be back in office — and emboldened to commit more crimes in the very way that Justice Jackson warned about. Indeed, the striking thing about Thursday’s argument is that most of the Republican justices appeared so overwhelmed by concern that a future president might be hampered by fears of being prosecuted once they leave office, that they completely ignored the risk that an un-prosecutable president might behave like a tyrant. Gorsuch even warned that presidents might “try to pardon themselves” on the way out the door to avoid such prosecutions. Under the legal rule that Gorsuch and many of his colleagues are considering, however, such a pardon would be unnecessary because the president would be almost entirely above the law — including, potentially, a president like Trump who has already shown his eagerness to destroy constitutional governance for his own personal gain.

Bird flu in milk is alarming — but not for the reason you think

24 h

vox.com

Dairy cows at an operation in Lodi, California, in 2020. | Jessica Christian/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images The US Department of Agriculture’s failed response to bird flu in cows, explained. Bird flu has had a busy couple of years. Since 2022, it’s ravaged the US poultry industry, as more than 90 million farmed birds — mostly egg-laying hens and turkeys — have either died from the virus or have been brutally killed in an attempt to stop the spread. Last month, confirmation that the virus — a strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza known as H5N1 — had infected US dairy cows alarmed infectious disease experts, who worry that transmission to cows will allow the virus more opportunities to evolve. One dairy worker fell ill, increasing concerns about human risk levels. Now it’s in the milk supply. On Tuesday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) confirmed that genetic evidence of the virus had been found in commercially purchased milk. However, it’s unclear whether the milk contains live virus or mere fragments of the virus that were killed by pasteurization, a process that destroys harmful bacteria, but remain detectable. The FDA said it’ll soon release a nationwide survey of tested milk and that for now, the commercial milk supply remains safe, a claim that numerous independent experts have confirmed. The news that the bird flu has been found in the US milk supply may raise alarm among some consumers, and the FDA has been criticized for prematurely assuring the safety of milk without hard data. But the real problem, which has received little attention, is the tepid and opaque response from the federal agency tasked with stopping the on-farm spread of the disease: the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). What we know — and what we don’t — depends on the USDA Ever since the virus was detected on a Texas dairy farm in late March, infectious disease experts around the world have roundly criticized the USDA on multiple fronts. It took nearly a month for the agency to upload data containing genetic sequences of the virus, which scientists use to better understand its threat level. And once the sequence was uploaded, it was incomplete, lacking specifics that researchers say they needed to properly study the data. “It’s as if the USDA is intentionally trying to hide data from the world,” Rick Bright, a former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority at the US Department of Health and Human Services, told STAT. A Dutch virologist told STAT it should’ve taken the USDA days, not weeks, to share data and updates. Beyond the data obfuscation, there’s insufficient monitoring. The virus may have started circulating on US dairy farms months before it was detected, according to Michael Worobey, a biology professor at the University of Arizona. That suggests the need for better and more proactive pathogen monitoring on the part of the USDA. And once H5N1 was confirmed in dairy cows, the USDA didn’t require dairy farms to conduct routine testing nor report positive H5N1 tests. The USDA has even tolerated uncooperative farmers, despite the high stakes of the disease spread. “There has been a little bit of reluctance for some of the producers to allow us to gather information from their farms,” said Michael Watson, administrator of USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, in a press conference on Wednesday. But, he added, “that has been improving.” This voluntary approach is a recurring theme in USDA policy; there’s even uncertainty as to whether the agency is enforcing orders for farmersto toss milk from infected cows to ensure it doesn’t wind up in the food supply, which could explain how traces of it were found in store-bought milk. Last week, the New York Times reported that North Carolina officials confirmed there were asymptomatic cows in the state, which could also explain why the virus was detected in the commercial milk supply. It also suggests more herds may be infected than previously thought. On Wednesday, a month after the first confirmation, the USDA finally issued a federal order requiring that laboratories and state veterinarians report farms with positive H5N1 tests and that lactating dairy cows must test negative for bird flu before crossing state lines (and cooperate with investigators).At a Wednesday press conference, the agency didn’t specify how the order will be enforced. Why regulation and response go hand-in-hand The USDA’s sluggish response to a rapidly moving virus may leave some foreign observers scratching their heads. But much of it can be explained by an irresolvable conflict baked into its mission. The agency, according to food industry scholars Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz, has “the oxymoronic double mandate of both promoting and regulating all of American agriculture—two disparate tasks that, when combined, effectively put the fox in charge of the henhouse.” More often than not, it’s heavy on the promotion and light on the regulation. The paradox has been at the center of its response to the bird flu’s decimation of the US poultry industry in recent years. While the USDA is developing several bird flu vaccines, it’s long been stubbornly opposed to a broad vaccination campaign due to industry fears that it’ll disrupt trade, a major source of revenue for US poultry companies, despite pleas from experts to give birds a bird flu shot. USDA has also been deferential to industry on matters of pollution, labor, political corruption, false advertising, and animal cruelty across numerous sectors. And it’s not the only agency that too often takes a hands-off approach to problems stemming from food production. The FDA has failed to stringently regulate antibiotics used in animal farming, a pressing public health threat that, in recent years, some European regulators have addressed in earnest. Agriculture is a top source of US water and air pollution, due in large part to congressional loopholes and weak enforcement on the part of the US Environmental Protection Agency. It all adds up to what food industry experts call “agricultural exceptionalism,” in which the food industry operates under a different set of regulations than the rest of the economy. The justification of such exceptionalism is that it’s necessary, given the importance of an abundant food supply. But that’s all the more reason not to give farmers and ranchers carte blanche to let disease circulate on American farms unchecked.

Lawmakers are overreacting to crime

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Members of the US Army National Guard patrolling Penn Station in New York City. | Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images Crime rates are falling. Why are lawmakers passing tough-on-crime bills? When it comes to public safety, lawmakers have two primary jobs: enacting policies that curb crime and making their constituents feel safe. It might seem like those two things go hand-in-hand; after all, if lawmakers successfully reduce crime rates, then people have less to worry about. But as has been especially evident recently, there can be a big disconnect between actual crime trends and how people feel about them. According to a Gallup poll, for example, the share of Americans who believe that crime is an “extremely” or “very serious” problem afflicting the country recently hit an all-time high — 63 percent in 2023, up from 48 percent just five years earlier. But the crime data paints a very different picture: According to the FBI, after an uptick in crime in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, crime rates have actually been falling across the country, with murders declining by 13 percent between 2022 and 2023. In New York City, one of the cities Republicans often point to as a supposed example of lawlessness, shootings are down 25 percent, and homicides are down 11 percent. “We keep getting a lot of really great information suggesting that violent crime is declining — in some cases extremely sharply,” said Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. “At the same time, there’s a real lag between what the data show and how people perceive the data.” That gap between reality and public perception is proving to have serious consequences. “Elected officials don’t govern based on necessarily what the data say,” Grawert said. “They govern on what the data say and how the public perceives it.” So as long as people continue to feel that crime is a problem — a reality prompted by an early pandemic crime spike and subsequently fueled by media reports that often overstated the rise in crime — lawmakers feel pressured to respond to a problem that, by and large, appears to be subsiding. That’s why a slew of cities and states have started adopting laws that hark back to the tough-on-crime approach of the 1980s and ’90s, a trend that has crossed party lines. Some jurisdictions, for example, have dramatically increased police presence, cracked down on homeless encampments, and imposed harsher penalties for petty crimes. These policies, in both Republican and Democratic jurisdictions, threaten the meaningful progress that criminal justice reform advocates achieved in the past decade, including a reduction in the prison population. This kind of legislation is both shortsighted and irresponsible: Many of these bills are getting enacted after crime began falling, which not only means they’re likely unnecessary, but they could also potentially pave the way for a reinvigorated era of mass incarceration. New crime bills are not responding to actual crime trends Louisiana was once known as the prison capital of the world, with more prisoners per capita than any other US state, or country for that matter. In 2012, according to the Times-Picayune, one in 86 adults in the state was serving time in prison, which at the time was almost twice the national average. The racial disparities were staggering, too: In New Orleans, one in seven Black men was either in prison, on parole, or on probation. But following a wave of criminal justice reforms across the country, some of which had bipartisan support, Louisiana lawmakers sought to change the state’s reputation. They succeeded, overhauling crime laws and ultimately reducing the prison population. The number of people held in prison for nonviolent offenses, for example, declined by 50 percent between 2016 and 2023. Legislators in the state recently passed changes to its criminal justice system that will likely reverse that pattern. The new laws will impose harsher penalties and longer sentences for a range of offenses, including carjackings and drug dealing, make it significantly harder to qualify for parole or overturn a wrongful conviction, and treat 17-year-olds who are charged with a crime as adults. But deep-red Louisiana isn’t the only place this sort of change of heart is happening. In San Francisco, voters approved ballot measures in March that would expand police surveillance and impose drug tests on welfare recipients — showing a public appetite, even among liberal voters, to do away with a more forgiving law enforcement approach. And in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, recently deployed hundreds of National Guard troops to patrol the city subway system, despite the fact that crime on the subway was relatively rare and already on the decline. One area getting a lot of lawmakers’ attention is drug enforcement, especially against the backdrop of rising overdose deaths across the country. Oregon’s Democratic governor, for example, recently signed a bill that recriminalized possession of drugs in the state, reversing a decriminalization ballot measure that voters passed in 2020. But criminalization of drugs in particular is an easy way for lawmakers to say they’re responding to a problem without actually committing the necessary resources to address it, like making treatment centers more accessible. “The laws that are being proposed to counteract this by punishing people are not being proposed with public safety in mind,” Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative, told me. If they were, she said, they would be accompanied by an expansion of programs, including treatment centers and safe injection sites. Part of the tough-on-crime trend can be explained by the fact that an election is coming up, and politicians are concerned that the public’s sentiment about crime might sway voters. Fear-mongering about crime — and law-and-order campaigns in particular — is especially popular among Republicans every election cycle. This time around, Democrats seem to be responding not by pointing to declining crime trends, but by trying to appear even tougher on crime than their Republican counterparts. Given people’s attitudes toward crime — and the wrong public perception that crime is on the rise — Democrats might be justifiably worried about appearing out of touch if they deny their constituents’ distorted reality. But that just leads to bad policymaking as a result. “It’s a punitive turn in American policymaking that reflects a political establishment that doesn’t have any good ideas,” Bertram said. “Republicans love to make penalties harsher and sentences longer. To see Democrats bandwagoning on it is sinister and new and reflects a fear that they don’t have enough in their platform.” A renewed era of mass incarceration After the number of prisoners in the United States peaked at around 2.3 million people in 2008, a range of criminal justice reform bills succeeded in bringing that number down by reducing sentences, decriminalizing drugs, and by prosecutors being more selective about which laws to enforce and against whom. And in 2020, after the Covid pandemic prompted lawmakers to release low-risk prisoners, the prison population dipped to around 1.7 million. In recent years, the number of people in prison has been starting to creep back up, increasing by 2 percent nationally between 2021 and 2022. In some states, the rise has been much more pronounced, like in Mississippi, where the prison population grew by 14.3 percent in the same period. That’s in part because crime did indeed rise during the pandemic, but it’s also likely the result of a stricter law enforcement approach to low-level crimes. The overblown shoplifting panic, for example, prompted many states and local prosecutors to impose harsher penalties on offenders, despite the fact that shoplifting, like other crimes, was trending downward. It’s too early to know just how much the new tough-on-crime laws will affect the overall prison population, but they could potentially erase years of progress and further entrench America’s era of mass incarceration as a permanent reality. It’s easy for lawmakers to forget that when the public seems desperately afraid of a crime wave that seems to no longer exist. “There’s a sort of sense of ‘We have to do something, this is something, let’s do it,’ rather than a sober-minded, careful response to the data and the history, and what we know works and what doesn’t,” Grawert said. Indeed, it’s important for lawmakers to take a long-term approach to crime instead of trying to find a quick fix to a short-term problem. One way lawmakers can remind themselves of that is this tidbit in public polling: The same poll that showed that 63 percent of Americans think crime is a very serious problem nationally also showed that only 17 percent believed crime was an extremely or very serious problem in the area they lived in. That could be because while they might read about a supposed crime wave across the country, they’re not actually seeing any evidence of it in their own neighborhoods. Even if new tough-on-crime laws are intended to assuage the public’s fears about crime, they’re seemingly unnecessary and end up hurting everyone in the long term. After all, policy responses like New York sending the National Guard to the subway, which only visibly reinforce the idea that there’s an active threat, won’t only make people feel less safe; they’ll likely lead to more arrests for low-level offenses, too. Lawmakers should ask themselves: What would that actually achieve?

How the Supreme Court weaponizes its own calendar

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Former President Donald Trump greets his own appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, ahead of the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 04, 2020. | Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images The justices already effectively gave Trump what he wants in his Supreme Court immunity case. Today, the Supreme Court will hear what might be one of its least consequential arguments in modern history. I’m referring, of course, to Trump v. United States, the case asking whether former President Donald Trump is immune from a federal criminal prosecution arising out of his failed attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. This is one of the most widely followed cases the Supreme Court has heard in recent memory. For the first time in American history, a former president faces criminal charges. And these charges are a doozy, alleging that Trump targeted our democracy itself. So why is this argument so inconsequential? The answer is that Trump has already won everything he could reasonably expect to win from the Supreme Court, and then some. Even this Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican-appointed supermajority, is unlikely to buy Trump’s argument that former presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution. Trump’s lawyers have not even attempted to hide the implications of this argument. When the case was heard by a lower federal court, a judge asked Trump’s lawyer if the former president was immune from prosecution even if he’d ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.” Trump’s lawyer responded that Trump was immune, unless he were first impeached and convicted by the Senate. If you’re curious about the legal arguments in this case, I dove into them here. But again, they are a sideshow. Trump’s goal is to delay his trial for as long as possible — ideally, from his perspective, until after this November’s election. And in this respect, the Supreme Court has already given him what he wants. So long as this case is sitting before the justices, that trial cannot happen. And the justices have repeatedly refused special prosecutor Jack Smith’s requests to decide this immunity question on an expedited schedule that would ensure that Trump’s criminal trial can still happen before November. This decision to put Trump’s appeal on the slow track is part of a much larger pattern in this Supreme Court: The justices do not always need to rule in favor of a conservative party on the merits in order to achieve a conservative result. They can do so simply by manipulating their own calendar. How the Court games its calendar to benefit litigants on the right By handling requests from Republican litigants with alacrity, while dragging their feet when a Democrat (or someone prosecuting a Republican) seeks Supreme Court review, the justices can and have handed big victories to right-wing causes while simultaneously sabotaging liberals. Before the Trump case reached the Supreme Court, this penchant for manipulative scheduling was most apparent in immigration cases. During the Trump administration, lower courts often handed down decisions blocking the former president’s immigration policies, and the Court (often over the dissent of several justices appointed by Democrats) moved quite swiftly to put Trump’s policies back in place. In Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary(2019), for example, after a lower court blocked a Trump administration policy locking many migrants out of the asylum process, the Court reinstated this policy about two weeks after the administration asked it to do so. Similarly, in Wolf v. Cook County(2020), the Court reinstated a Trump administration policy targeting low-income immigrants just eight days after Trump’s lawyers sought relief from the justices. Once Biden came into office, however, the Court hit the brakes. In August 2021, for example, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — a Trump appointee who is known for handing down poorly reasoned decisions implementing right-wing policy preferences — ordered the federal government to reinstate a Trump-era immigration policy known as “Remain in Mexico.” Though the Supreme Court eventually reversed Kacsmaryk’s decision, it sat on the case for more than 10 months, effectively letting Kacsmaryk dictate the nation’s border policy for that whole time. Similarly, after another Trump-appointed judge struck down a Biden administration memo laying out enforcement priorities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Court waited about 11 months before finally intervening and restoring the administration’s longstanding power to set priorities for law enforcement agencies. The point is that, even in cases where the justices ultimately conclude that a conservative litigant should not prevail, they frequently hand that litigant a significant victory by sitting on the case and allowing a Republican policy to remain in effect for sometimes more than a year.(Given the slow pace of most litigation, this might not be particularly remarkable — except for the stark difference in how the Court has treated suits against Trump and Biden’s policies.) The Court’s ability to set its own calendar allows it to manipulate US policy without actually endorsing lower court decisions that cannot be defended on the merits. The Court’s behavior in the Trump immunity case is a close cousin to this tactic. Again, it is difficult to imagine even this Supreme Court ruling that presidents may commit crimes with impunity. But the Court does not need to explicitly declare that Trump is above the law to place him above the law. All it has to do is string out his immunity claim for as long as possible. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Imagining an internet without TikTok

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Photo illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images The potential TikTok ban is now law. What happens next? The bill to require TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a nationwide ban made it to President Joe Biden’s desk on Wednesday as part of a huge foreign aid package that passed through Congress this week. And Biden, as he previously promised, signed the bill into law. ByteDance now has nine months to sell TikTok, a deadline that Biden can opt to extend once by 90 days. And while TikTok could avoid a ban with a successful sale or court challenge, the new law means Americans might want to start imagining an online world without TikTok. The push to either ban TikTok or excise the platform from its owner has been around for years. For instance, then-President Trump announced plans to ban the app in the summer of 2020, although Trump now says he thinks banning TikTok is a bad idea and that people should be mad at Biden about it. The threat of a TikTok ban has always been a little weird and complicated, drawing from a mixture of valid concerns and questionable moral panics about the ills of social media. As I’ve written previously, TikTok’s moderation failures and data privacy concerns are hardly unique, even as some lawmakers seem to persist in holding TikTok uniquely responsible for perpetuating them. With that in mind, let’s break down the implications of this new law, why it’s happening, and what the internet would look like if TikTok disappeared. What you need to know about the ban Now that Biden has signed the bill into law, ByteDance has at least nine months — and possibly one year — to sell TikTok. It’s not clear, though, whether the law will survive a court challenge, which TikTok has already vowed to do. The government is likely prepared for this, as the new law was the result of years of planning by lawmakers, triggering waves of opposition from TikTok executives and the app’s huge user base, which includes 170 million Americans, according to TikTok. Congress made one earlier attempt to pass such a ban in March. That bill, which passed the House but didn’t make it through the Senate, gave ByteDance just six months to sell TikTok. The new version’s extended deadline may have helped sway some people in the Senate to vote for the bill. It certainly didn’t hurt that the TikTok ban was attached to a $95 billion aid deal that would provide support to Ukraine and Israel. TikTok CEO Shou Chew said Wednesday that the app wasn’t “going anywhere” and that the company believes the courts will ultimately find the ban unconstitutional, violating the First Amendment. The US government would need to meet a high standard to prove that a ban is necessary to protect the nation’s security and privacy in order to prevail. Montana’s statewide ban of TikTok was blocked by a federal judge late last year as a likely violation of the First Amendment. The state is appealing that decision. ByteDance could also, you know, sell. However, the Chinese government has previously said that it would oppose a forced sale of TikTok. Why is this happening? Great question! The lawmakers leading the charge on this ban have cited national security concerns stemming from the app’s Chinese ownership. Specifically, they’ve mentioned the possibility of the Chinese government accessing the data of American users and using the app to spread propaganda or influence foreign elections. Members of Congress have referred to information they learned in security briefings about the potential for TikTok to harm American interests, but the contents of those briefings are not public. Arguments in favor of banning TikTok note that the app’s Chinese ownership puts user data at risk of access by an unfriendly foreign government; critics note that the Chinese government could access a lot of the same data by simply buying it from a data broker. There’s another driving force here, though. As we’ve previously noted, the current push for a ban in Congress gained a lot of attention after a viral but unfounded accusation spread that TikTok was brainwashing the youth of America with anti-Israel content in the first days of the Israel-Hamas war. That narrative seemed to rekindle a lot of fears about the power of TikTok to become a propaganda tool. What changes if TikTok goes away in the US? This isn’t the first time a major force in internet culture has faced extinction (RIP Vine). In fact, this churn is increasingly part of being online now. But TikTok, arguably, is the most influential online platform in the US, and it won’t be easily replaced. If TikTok goes away, other platforms will try to jump into the void it will leave. As the Washington Post’s Will Oremus wrote, a TikTok ban would provide an open space for Meta and Google to move in. Meta has already adapted a lot of TikTok’s features via Reels, and Google’s YouTube has its Shorts video format, but neither quite has the cultural force behind them that TikTok has right now. A lot of bigger creators — those with resources, managers, and huge followings — will be able to switch to another platform, if they haven’t already. Everyone else might see things shift more dramatically. Earlier this year, Zari A. Taylor, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies media and culture, explained to me that the biggest loss to online culture if TikTok goes away will be in the uniqueness of how the platform promotes videos into user feeds. TikTok is good at recommending videos by accounts with small followings, whose makers are often not professional content creators. These creators “don’t have the audience that could help them evolve into other areas of the entertainment industry,” she said, and will likely lose their audience should the ban stand. In some ways, the constant threat of a ban has already taken a toll on TikTok’s appeal for creators. After the first wave of TikTok ban threats back in 2020, I spoke with Ryan Beard, a creator who at the time had nearly 2 million TikTok followers. The threat of a ban from President Trump sent his livelihood into a spiral, and he accelerated his efforts to get views and followers on other apps. These days, he’s all but stopped posting on TikTok and has instead become a commentary YouTuber. When TikTok rose in influence, it was better than any other app at showing users what they wanted to see, for better or for worse. Short, vertical-format videos might be available on any old platform these days, but the format doesn’t replicate what keeps people scrolling. Some, like Beard, will turn their modest TikTok success into views on another platform. For many others, even the threat of the ban is a harsh reminder of the realities of making content on the internet: Your livelihood is tied to the success and attention of platforms you don’t control. A version of this story was published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

We might be closer to changing course on climate change than we realized

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The world might soon see a sustained decline in greenhouse gas emissions. | Eric Yang/Getty Images Greenhouse gas emissions might have already peaked. Now they need to fall — fast. Earth is coming out of the hottest year on record, amplifying the destruction from hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, and drought. The oceans remain alarmingly warm, triggering the fourth global coral bleaching event in history. Concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere have reached levels not seen on this planet for millions of years, while humanity’s demand for the fossil fuels that produce this pollution is the highest it has ever been. Yet at the same time, the world may be closer than ever to turning a corner in the effort to corral climate change. Last year, more solar panels were installed in China — the world’s largest carbon emitter — than the US has installed in its entire history. More electric vehicles were sold worldwide than ever. Energy efficiency is improving. Dozens of countries are widening the gap between their economic growth and their greenhouse gas emissions. And governments stepped up their ambitions to curb their impact on the climate, particularly when it comes to potent greenhouse gases like methane. If these trends continue, global emissions may actually start to decline. Climate Analytics, a think tank, published a report last November that raised the intriguing possibility that the worst of our impact on the climate might be behind us. “We find there is a 70% chance that emissions start falling in 2024 if current clean technology growth trends continue and some progress is made to cut non-CO2 emissions,” authors wrote. “This would make 2023 the year of peak emissions.” “It was actually a result that surprised us as well,” said Neil Grant, a climate and energy analyst at Climate Analytics and a co-author of the report. “It’s rare in the climate space that you get good news like this.” The inertia behind this trend toward lower emissions is so immense that even politics can only slow it down, not stop it. Many of the worst-case climate scenarios imagined in past decades are now much less likely. The United States, the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter, has already climbed down from its peak in 2005 and is descending further. In March, Carbon Brief conducted an analysis of how US greenhouse gas emissions would fare under a second Trump or a second Biden administration. They found that Trump’s stated goals of boosting fossil fuel development and scrapping climate policies would increase US emissions by 4 billion metric tons by 2030. But even under Trump, US emissions are likely to slide downward. This is a clear sign that efforts to limit climate change are having a durable impact. Carbon Brief US emissions are on track to decline regardless of who wins the White House in November, but current policies are not yet in line with US climate goals. However, four months into 2024, it seems unlikely that the world has reached the top of the mountain just yet. Fossil fuel demand is still poised to rise further in part because of more economic growth in developing countries. Technologies like artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies are raising overall energy demand as well. Still, that it’s possible at all to conceive of bending the curve in the near term after more than a century of relentless growth shows that there’s a radical change underway in the relationship between energy, prosperity, and pollution — that standards of living can go up even as emissions from coal, oil, and gas go down. Greenhouse gases are not a runaway rocket, but a massive, slow-turning cargo ship. It took decades of technology development, years of global bickering, and billions of dollars to wrench its rudder in the right direction, and it’s unlikely to change course fast enough to meet the most ambitious climate change targets. But once underway, it will be hard to stop. We might be close to an inflection point on greenhouse gas emissions Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, greenhouse gas emissions have risen in tandem with wealth and an expanding population. Since the 1990s and the 2000s, that direct link has been separated in at least 30 countries, including the US, Singapore, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Their economies have grown while their impact on the climate has shrunk per person. In the past decade, the rate of global carbon dioxide pollution has held fairly level or risen slowly even as the global economy and population has grown by wider margins. Worldwide per capita emissions have also held steady over the past decade. “We can be fairly confident that we’ve flattened the curve,” said Michael Lazarus, a senior scientist at SEI US, an environmental think tank, who was not involved in the Climate Analytics study. Still, this means that humanity is adding to the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and doing so at close to its fastest pace ever. It’s good that this pace is at least not accelerating, but the plateau implies a world that will continue to get warmer. To halt rising temperatures, humans will have to stop emitting greenhouse gases, zeroing their net output, and even start withdrawing the carbon previously emitted. The world thus needs another drastic downward turn in its emissions trajectory to limit climate change. “I wouldn’t get out any balloons or fireworks over flattening emissions,” Lazarus said. Then there’s the clock. In order to meet the Paris climate agreement target of limiting warming this century to less than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) on average above pre-industrial temperatures, the world must slash carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. That means power generators, trucks, aircraft, farms, construction sites, home appliances, and manufacturing plants all over the world will have to rapidly clean up. The current round of international climate commitments puts the planet on track to warm by 5.4°F (3°C) by the end of the century. That’s a world in which the likelihood of a major heat wave in a given year would more than double compared to 2.7°F of warming, where extreme rainfall events would almost double, and more than one in 10 people would face threats from sea level rise. “That puts us in this race between the really limited time left to bend the emissions curve and start that project towards zero, but we are also seeing this sort of huge growth, an acceleration in clean technology deployment,” Grant said. “And so we wanted to see which of these factors is winning the race at the moment and where we are at.” Grant and his team mapped out three scenarios. The first is a baseline based on forecasts from the International Energy Agency on how current climate policies and commitments would play out. It shows that fossil fuel-related carbon dioxide emissions would reach a peak this year, but emissions of other heat-trapping gases like methane and hydrofluorocarbons would keep rising, so overall greenhouse gas emissions would level off. The second scenario, dubbed “low effort,” builds on the first, but also assumes that countries will begin to fulfill their promises under agreements like the Global Methane Pledge to cut methane pollution 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030 and the Kigali Amendment to phase out HFCs. Under this pathway, total global emissions reach their apex in 2025. The third scenario imagines a world where clean technology — renewable energy, electric vehicles, energy efficiency — continues gaining ground at current rates, outstripping energy demand growth and displacing coal, oil, and natural gas. That would mean greenhouse gases would have already peaked in 2023 and are now on a long, sustained decline. Climate Analytics Global greenhouse gas emissions are likely to fall in the coming years, but the rate of decline depends on policies and technology development. The stories look different when you zoom in to individual countries, however. While overall emissions are poised to decline, some developing countries will continue to see their output grow while wealthier countries make bigger cuts. As noted, the US has already climbed down from its peak. China expects to see its emissions curve change directions by 2025. India, the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter, may see its emissions grow until 2045. All three of these pathways anticipate some sort of peak in global emissions before the end of the decade, illustrating that the world has many of the tools it needs to address climate change and that a lot of work in deploying clean energy and cleaning up the biggest polluters is already in progress. There will still be year-to-year variations from phenomena like El Niño that can raise electricity demand during heat waves or shocks like pandemics that reduce travel or conflicts that force countries to change their energy priorities. But according to the report, the overall trend over decades is still downward. To be clear, the Carbon Analytics study is one of the more optimistic projections out there, but it’s not that far off from what other groups have found. In its own analysis, the International Energy Agency reports that global carbon dioxide emissions “are set to peak this decade.” The consulting firm McKinsey anticipates that greenhouse gases will begin to decline before 2030, also finding that 2023 may have been the apogee. Global emissions could just as easily shoot back up if governments and companies give up on their goals Within the energy sector, Ember, a think tank, found that emissions might have peaked in 2022. Research firm Rystad Energy expects that fossil fuel emissions will reach their pinnacle in 2025. Bending the curve still requires even more deliberate, thoughtful efforts to address climate change — policies to limit emissions, deploying clean energy, doing more with less, and innovation. Conversely, global emissions could just as easily shoot back up if governments and companies give up on their goals. “Peaking is absolutely not a guarantee,” Grant said. And if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, even at a slower rate, Earth will continue heating up. It means more polar ice will melt, lifting sea levels along every ocean, increasing storm surges and floods during cyclones. It means more dangerous heat waves. It means more parts of the world will be unlivable. We’re close to bending the curve — but that doesn’t mean the rest will be easy There are some other caveats to consider. One is that it’s tricky to simply get a full tally of humanity’s total impact on the climate. Scientists can measure carbon dioxide concentrations in the sky, but it’s tougher to trace where those molecules came from. Burning fossil fuels is the dominant way humans add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Since they’re closely tracked commercial commodities, there are robust estimates for their contributions to climate change and how they change over time. But humans are also degrading natural carbon-absorbing ecosystems like mangrove forests. Losing carbon sinks increases the net amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Altering how we use land, like clearing forests for farms, also shifts the balance of carbon. These changes can have further knock-on effects for the environment, and ecosystems like tropical rainforests could reach tipping points where they undergo irreversible, self-propagating shifts that limit how much carbon they can absorb. All this makes it hard to nail down a specific time frame for when emissions will peak and what the consequences will be. There’s also the thorny business of figuring out who is accountable for which emissions. Fossil fuels are traded across borders, and it’s not always clear whose ledger high-polluting sectors like international aviation and shipping should fall on. Depending on the methodology, these gray areas can lead to double-counting or under-counting. “It’s very difficult to get a complete picture, and even if we get the little bits and pieces, there’s a lot of uncertainty,” said Luca Lo Re, climate and energy analyst at the IEA. Even with these uncertainties, it’s clear that the scale of the course correction needed to meet climate goals is immense. According to the Climate Analytics report, to meet the 2030 targets for cutting emissions, the world will need to stop deforestation, stop any new fossil fuel development, double energy efficiency, and triple renewable energy. Another way to illustrate the enormity of this task is the Covid-19 pandemic. The world experienced a sudden drop in global emissions as travel shut down, businesses closed, people stayed home, and economies shrank. Carbon dioxide output has now rebounded to an even higher level. Reducing emissions on an even larger scale without increasing suffering — in fact, improving welfare for more people — will require not just clean technology but careful policy. Seeing emissions level off or decline in many parts of the world as economies have grown in recent decades outside of the pandemic is an important validation that the efforts to limit climate change are having their intended effect. “Emissions need to decrease for the right reasons,” Lo Re said. “It is reasonable to believe our efforts are working.” The mounting challenge is that energy demand is poised to grow. Even though many countries have decoupled their emissions from their GDPs, those emissions are still growing. Many governments are also contending with higher interest rates, making it harder to finance new clean energy development just as the world needs a massive buildout of solar panels, wind turbines, and transmission lines. And peaking emissions isn’t enough: They have to fall. Fast. The longer it takes to reach the apex, the steeper the drop-off needed on the other side in order to meet climate goals. Right now, the world is poised to walk down a gentle sloping hill of greenhouse gas emissions instead of the plummeting roller coaster required to limit warming this century to less than 2.7°F/1.5°C. It’s increasingly unlikely that this goal is achievable. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change To meet global climate targets, greenhouse gas emissions need to fall precipitously. Finally, the ultimate validation of peak greenhouse emissions and a sustained decline can only be determined with hindsight. “We can’t know if we peaked in 2023 until we get to 2030,” said Lazarus. The world may be closer than ever to bending the curve on greenhouse gas emissions downward, but those final few degrees of inflection may be the hardest. The next few years will shape the warming trajectory for much of the rest of the century, but obstacles ranging from political turmoil to international conflict to higher interest rates could slow progress against climate change just as decarbonization needs to accelerate. “We should be humble,” Grant said. “The future is yet unwritten and is in our hands.”

The breathtaking lifesaving impact of vaccines, in one chart

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Photo credit should read Umer Qadir/ Eyepix Group/Future Publishing via Getty Images It is almost hard to believe just how effective vaccines are at saving infants’ lives. The world has become a much safer place to be a young child in the last 50 years. Since 1974, infant mortality worldwide has plummeted. That year, one in 10 newborns died before reaching their first birthday. By 2021, that rate had fallen by over two-thirds. A lot of factors drove this change: lower poverty and better nutrition, cleaner air and water, and readily available antibiotics and other treatments. But one of the biggest contributors, a new study from the World Health Organization (WHO) concludes, was vaccines. Vaccines alone, the researchers find, accounted for 40 percent of the decline in infant mortality. The paper — authored by a team of researchers led by WHO epidemiologist and vaccine expert Naor Bar-Zeev — estimates that in the 50 years since 1974, vaccines prevented 154 million deaths. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}});window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded',function(){var i=document.createElement("iframe");var e=document.getElementById("datawrapper-c6v50");var t=e.dataset.iframeTitle||'Interactive graphic';i.setAttribute("src",e.dataset.iframe);i.setAttribute("title",t);i.setAttribute("frameborder","0");i.setAttribute("scrolling","no");i.setAttribute("aria-label",e.dataset.iframeFallbackAlt||t);i.setAttribute("title",t);i.setAttribute("height","400");i.setAttribute("id","datawrapper-chart-c6v50");i.style.minWidth="100%";i.style.border="none";e.appendChild(i)})}() Of that 154 million, 146 million lives saved were among children under 5, including 101 million infants. Because the averted deaths were so concentrated among young people, who on average would go on to live for 66 years, vaccines gave their beneficiaries an astounding 9 billion additional years of life. The paper was commissioned on the 50th anniversary of the WHO’s Expanded Programme on Immunization, which launched in 1974 to build on the success of the agency’s work eradicating smallpox. It covers a critical period of time. The previous decades had seen a spree of important, newly developed vaccines: a joint diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccine in 1948, a polio vaccine in 1955, a measles vaccine in 1963. While rolled out quickly in wealthy countries, these immunizations were, as of 1974, not broadly available in the Global South, even as the diseases they prevented wreaked massive damage. Over the ensuing half-century, through vaccination campaigns led by the WHO and later Gavi (a multilateral group formerly called the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), that changed radically. In sub-Saharan Africa in 2021, 68 percent of 1-year-olds received a first dose of the measles vaccine, 78 percent received the tuberculosis vaccine, and 70–71 percent received the vaccines against hepatitis B, polio, and diphtheria/tetanus/pertussis. This progress yielded massive gains. The measles vaccine, in particular, deserves pride of place in this story. The researchers conclude that it averted 93.7 million deaths from 1974 onward, accounting for the most deaths averted by vaccines in general. In terms of lives saved, the runners-up — tetanus (28 million saved), pertussis (13.2 million), and tuberculosis (10.9 million) — pale in comparison. Stamping out measles through vaccination enabled it to go from an omnipresent, fast-spreading lethal threat to a relic of the past — though anti-vaccine activists threaten to undo some of that progress. The data is a reminder that vaccines have historically been one of our best tools for saving lives and that redoubling efforts to discover and distribute new ones for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis could have a similarly transformative effect. How the researchers tracked the benefit of vaccines Studying the effect of vaccines across all continents, and across a 50-year time frame, is a daunting project. It’s not for nothing that this paper has 21 authors. (And let’s give them the credit they’re due. They are: Andrew Shattock, Helen Johnson, So Yoon Sim, Austin Carter, Philipp Lambach, Raymond Hutubessy, Kimberly Thompson, Kamran Badizadegan, Brian Lambert, Matthew Ferrari, Mark Jit, Han Fu, Sheetal Silal, Rachel Hounsell, Richard White, Jonathan Mosser, Katy Gaythorpe, Caroline Trotter, Ann Lindstrand, Katherine O’Brien, and Naor Bar-Zeev.) The paper is essentially combining three separate kinds of data and research results: Actual infant, child, and overall mortality across countries from 1974 to 2024, based on the UN World Population Projections dataset through 2021 as well as its projections for mortality in 2022–2024. Vaccine coverage by country and year, using both WHO databases and those from the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium. Empirically verified models of how measles, polio, hepatitis B, and several other diseases spread in the absence of vaccines, as well as estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study of the effect of vaccination on diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and tuberculosis. Put simply: They used what we know about how many people got vaccinated in the last five decades and how well vaccines work to construct a version of history where all that vaccination didn’t occur, and adjusted actual death rates and health statistics accordingly. This necessarily involves filling in some gaps in the data. They note that in many countries, our data on vaccine coverage starts in 1980, not 1974; in these places, they argue that vaccine coverage was so meager that assuming no coverage in 1974 and a steady increase thereafter is appropriate. They also conduct sensitivity analyses showing that other ways of handling this problem produce similar headline results. The years of health life data allows another vantage point on gains from vaccination. Some diseases, like polio, are less lethal than the likes of measles but can cause lifelong negative health impacts, up to and including muscle paralysis. (For instance, while many doctors no longer think Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s paralysis was due to polio, it easily could have been.) Any way you slice the data, vaccines saved a ton of lives and prevented a ton of suffering. The past few years have been wonderful for vaccination, mostly due to the tremendously positive impact of the rapidly developed Covid-19 vaccines, but also somewhat perilous. In the US, the share of adults saying all children should be vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella has fallen, specifically among Republicans, a likely aftershock of how polarized the Covid vaccine issue has gotten. In that context, it’s important to remember just how much immunization has given us. In a half-century, it’s given people 9 billion additional years to live their lives. That’s nothing short of miraculous.

4 tips for dealing with a ferocious allergy season

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Getty Images Seasonal allergies making you miserable? Here’s what you need to know. It’s a sneezy, snotty, itchy-eyed time for many Americans — perhaps more so than ever before. Seasonal allergies are the effects of the immune system’s overreaction to pollen spewed into the air by trees, grasses, and ragweed, most commonly in the spring (although really, year-round). Climate change is making allergy season worse: As warm seasons get warmer and last longer, more plants release more pollen for longer periods. Although the risk of developing allergies is hereditary, experts suspect higher pollen levels are tipping more genetically prone adults into developing seasonal allergies for the first time. If your airways are among the afflicted, you know that finding relief can be a challenge. There’s lots of advice and an overwhelming array of products out there, and it’s sometimes hard to know what’s true and where to begin. Here are a few tips for thinking through what’s causing your symptoms and what to do to stop the streams of liquid constantly coming out of your head. Not everything that makes your nose run is allergies Lots of things make people sneezy and snotty — who cares what the reason is? Well, you should. One of the biggest mistakes people make in the course of seeking relief from allergy symptoms is thinking they have an allergy when they don’t, says Jonathan Bernstein, a Cincinnati allergist and lead author on a recently published review article on allergic nasal symptoms. “So first and foremost, are they diagnosed properly?” When an allergic response is responsible for nasal symptoms, what’s happening in the background is an invisible biochemical cascade involving lots of moving parts, many of which are the targets of allergy medications. It’s a very different process from what happens when airways are just irritated (for example, by dust, smoke, or perfume), infected (as with a cold or another infection), or reacting to changes in temperature or pressure. Therefore, treating a non-allergic cause with an allergy medicine won’t work and can lead to unnecessary side effects, expense, and frustration. Allergic reactions to pollen don’t usually happen the first time you’re exposed to it. The first time your immune system meets those tiny particles, it merely determines that particular type of pollen is an outsider it doesn’t like. Your immune system might react a little bit in the moment, perhaps with a little sneezing and a mild runny nose. The most consequential work it’s doing at this stage is teaching the rest of your immune system to overreact next time the invader shows up and storing the memory of that invader in memory cells. This part of the allergic response is called sensitization. The next time your immune system meets that pollen, it’s primed — and it reacts fast, unleashing hellfire on the invader within 30 to 60 minutes. Some of the key players in this quick response are mast cells, which release histamine. This chemical dilates the nasal blood vessels, causing inflammation; gooses the sensory nerves in the face, causing sneezing and nasal itching; and stimulates mucus-producing glands in the nose, leading to water, water everywhere. One way to tell your symptoms aren’t allergic is by taking note of what they include: If a fever accompanies irritated airways, it’s more likely you have an infection (likely a viral cold) than allergies. Also, if your symptoms don’t respond well to allergy medications, that’s a good clue you might not be dealing with an allergy, says David Shulan, a retired allergist who used to practice in Albany, New York. When medications seem variably effective — or if they’re effective but you can’t figure out what you’re allergic to or your symptoms are severe — he says a helpful next step might be allergy testing. Severe symptoms are subjective, says Pedro Lamothe, a pulmonologist who treats and researches allergic asthma and lung disease at Emory University in Atlanta. “If the symptoms are resistant to treatment [or] are impacting your daily life because you can’t be going outside, because you can’t do your job,” he says, “that’s the definition of severe symptoms.” If you do get allergy testing, it’s best to get it done by a physician who’s an allergy specialist. “You have to correlate it with the individual’s history and their exposure,” Bernstein says. Letting allergy symptoms run their course won’t “build immunity” to the allergen. It just makes it worse next time. It’s not uncommon for people with seasonal allergy symptoms to just ride them out. The reasons for this vary, but sometimes, people power through because they believe doing so will make future allergic reactions land softer. That’s the opposite of the truth, says Lamothe. More allergic reactions just means more sensitization — that is, more opportunities for your immune system to learn how to overreact to a stimulus and to store that information so it can react even more ferociously next time. Letting allergic reactions run their course won’t make you stronger, he says, “You’re going to make your allergic responses stronger.” Another consequence of waiting to treat an allergic reaction: You’ll ultimately need much more medication to subdue your symptoms in their later stages than if you’d treated the response in its earlier stages. “These medications are much more effective at preventing the symptoms that are getting rid of them once they’ve already started,” says Lamothe. It’s best to stop the allergic reaction before the cascade gets into motion and before the immune system gets too smart for your own good — and it’s ideal to prevent the reaction altogether, says Lamothe. He recommends people with persistent seasonal symptoms actually start taking their medications before allergy season starts. In the relatively temperate climes of Georgia, that might mean starting the medications in February. Taking a proactive approach is particularly important for people with seasonal allergy-related asthma, which can be life-threatening. Asthma is effectively an allergic reaction localized to the lungs; in allergy-related asthma, the allergic reaction starts with the upper airways — the nose, mouth, and throat — and extends to the lungs, leading to wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath. If you have seasonal allergies that lead to breathing problems, take note of how often you use your asthma medications, says Cherie Zachary, an allergist who practices in Minneapolis. If you’re using a rescue medication (like an albuterol inhaler) more than three times a week or you’ve needed to take an oral steroid like prednisone more than once in the past year, get additional help controlling both your asthma and your allergies, she says. People with allergy-induced asthma sometimes get so used to breathing poorly during certain seasons — or even year-round — that they forget it’s not normal to feel breathless at baseline. That may be especially true when many others around them also aren’t breathing well. Older patients may also have had bad experiences with ineffective treatments or with the medical system that administers them, leading them to put off getting care even when they’re feeling really ill. That should no longer be a deterrent. “We have good treatments now for allergies and asthma, which we certainly didn’t have 35 years ago,” says Zachary. The higher your risk of allergy-related asthma, the lower your threshold should be to seek care if you’re having uncontrolled symptoms during allergy season, she says. “Especially for the asthma patients, don’t ignore your symptoms.” Certain risk groups are more likely to have life-threatening outcomes from pollen exposure and should have a lower threshold for getting treatment Seasonal allergies play out differently in different racial and ethnic groups in the US. White adults are more likely to be diagnosed with seasonal allergies than are others, but in one study, Black people were twice as likely as white people to end up in an emergency room with pollen-related asthma exacerbations. More broadly, Black and Puerto Rican Americans are more likely than others to have asthma of any type, including severe and life-threatening flares. The reasons for these disparities are complicated, but are in part related to how well people’s allergies are controlled on a day-to-day basis — which is itself related to issues of insurance coverage and health care access and trust. Environmental factors may also be at play: Exposure to industrial toxins and air pollution is thought to increase people’s risk of developing allergies and asthma, including the kinds related to pollen. Higher concentrations of these pollutants in neighborhoods and workplaces where people of color live could in part explain the higher prevalence of seasonal allergies — and their most severe consequences — in these groups. “When you look at the risk factors and you look at redlining, they really do correlate,” says Zachary. Your first-line allergy medication might not be one you take by mouth The best treatment for allergies is prevention, and experts have lots of strategies for reducing your face time with whichever allergen is your particular nemesis. Shulan suggests minimizing your time outdoors during peak pollen time, which is typically around midday; there’s usually less pollen in the air before dawn, after sunset, and during or immediately after rain. You can also try wearing a face mask outdoors if the air temperature doesn’t make it intolerable, says Lamothe. As best you can, avoid tracking pollen into your home: Wipe down your face (including eyebrows and any facial hair), change your clothes and remove your shoes when coming home (and keep them outside the bedroom), and consider removing makeup, which pollen loves to stick to. Keeping bedroom windows closed and running an air conditioner with or without a separate air filtration unit can also help minimize nighttime symptoms. If you typically hang your clothes outside to dry, avoid doing so during allergy season. Cleaning the surfaces of your upper airways with saline nasal spray or nasal irrigation (like with a Neti pot) can also be helpful. While some people advocate eating local honey to reduce allergy symptoms, several experts told me there isn’t great data to support this practice, but “the placebo effect is remarkably powerful,” said Shulan. Even with these preventive measures, many people need pharmaceutical help to manage their symptoms, and the array of over-the-counter allergy medicines to choose from is literally dizzying. For many people with moderate to severe seasonal allergies, a nasal spray containing a corticosteroid is a good place to start, says Lamothe. These include fluticasone (Flonase), triamcinolone (Nasacort) mometasone (Nasonex), and budesonide (Benacort). Unlike steroids taken by mouth, these act only on the interior surfaces of the nostril and upper airways where they land, so they’re relatively low-risk. Still, aim the nozzle outward when you spray to avoid drenching the nasal septum, which can lead to nosebleeds. It might take a few days to feel relief from these medications, so don’t expect immediate results. Antihistamines are faster-acting and are available as nasal sprays, eye drops, and oral medications. Again, the formulations you don’t take by mouth are less likely to have systemic effects. Modern, second-generation oral antihistamines — which include cetirizine (Zyrtec), fexofenadine (Allegra), and loratadine (Claritin) — are much less likely to cause sleepiness than diphenhydramine (Benadryl), the most common of their first-generation counterparts. Some people find cetirizine somewhat sedating; levocetirizine dihydrochloride (Xyzal), a variant of the drug, avoids this effect. Although some people appreciate the sedating effects of Benadryl, experts advise against taking it on a regular basis due to emerging data about its associations with dementia. They also recommend caution with decongestants: Occasional doses of pseudoephedrine are safe for many adults, but they can raise blood pressure and heart rate and are not safe for children. Antihistamine nasal sprays like oxymetazoline (Afrin) are dependency-forming and should not be used for more than a few days running. If allergy meds aren’t controlling your symptoms or you need more medication than you want to take to control your symptoms, immunotherapy might be an option for you, says Shulan. Most people know this treatment as allergy shots, which involve getting progressively higher amounts of the protein you’re allergic to injected under your skin until your immune system stops overreacting to it, usually for around three to five years. More recent oral formulations mean this treatment can be administered without needles for certain allergies. To date, the Food and Drug Administration has approved oral immunotherapy to treat people allergic to ragweed, grasses, and dust mites. Oral allergy drops are also on the retail market, often marketed as a “natural” solution to allergies. However, these often-pricey products are not FDA-approved and the evidence to show they make things better and not worse just isn’t there, says Zachary. “Natural is not always neutral,” she says.

A new Supreme Court case seeks to make it much easier for criminals to buy guns

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Confiscated guns on display at Attorney General Letitia James’s announcement that the Attorney General’s Office, Drug Enforcement Administration, New York Police Department, and State Police took down ghost guns and narcotics trafficking ring in New York. | Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images The fight over “ghost guns” is back before the justices. The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear Garland v. VanDerStok, a case that could open up a massive loophole in US gun laws, effectively neutralizing federal laws requiring gun buyers to submit to a background check, and also requiring guns to have a serial number that law enforcement can use to track them. That outcome, however, is fairly unlikely. The Court has already heard this case twice on its “shadow docket” — a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the Court typically handles on an expedited basis. And the Court has twice ruled against gun manufacturers seeking to weaken federal law, albeit on a temporary basis both times. So the Court’s decision in VanDerStok is likely to make permanent what the Supreme Court already said in these two temporary decisions. Nevertheless, the stakes in this case are high and the outcome is not entirely certain. The first time this case arrived at the Court, the justices split 5-4 on whether to drastically weaken US gun laws, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett crossing over to vote with the Court’s three Democratic appointees. The case involves “ghost guns,” weapons that are sold dismantled and in ready-to-assemble kits. A decision by three Trump appointees on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit would exempt these ghost guns from the laws requiring background checks and serial numbers. The decision of these three Trump judges is now before the Supreme Court. The laws mandating background checks and serial numbers apply to “any weapon ... which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.” It also applies to “the frame or receiver of any such weapon,” the skeletal part of a firearm that houses other components, such as the barrel or trigger mechanism. Thus, even if someone purchases a series of firearm parts to assemble a gun at home, they will still face a background check when they purchase the gun’s frame or receiver. According to the Justice Department, it is often trivially easy to convert a ghost gun kit’s incomplete frame into a fully operational one. For example, some kits allow a ghost gun buyer to build a working firearm after drilling a single hole in the kit’s frame. Others merely require the user to sand off a small plastic rail. So ghost guns are a fairly obvious effort to evade federal gun regulations by selling weapons that are about 99 percent complete, and then claiming that they do not meet the federal definition of a firearm subject to certain laws. The Fifth Circuit bought this argument, claiming that a frame that is missing a single hole, or a receiver that needs to be sanded down a little are “not yet frames or receivers.” The three Trump judges also claimed that ghost guns do not count as a weapon that “may readily be converted” into a working gun because this phrase “cannot be read to include any objects that could, if manufacture is completed, become functional at some ill-defined point in the future” — even if only a trivial amount of work would be necessary to make the gun function. It is likely that a majority of the justices will again vote that ghost guns must be subject to the laws governing background checks and serial numbers. But, given how close the Court’s first vote in this case was, there is at least some risk that a justice could flip their vote and allow ghost guns to proliferate.

The Supreme Court’s likely to make it more dangerous to be pregnant in a red state

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An activist with the Center for Popular Democracy Action holds a large photo of US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s head as the group blocks an intersection during a demonstration in front of the US Supreme Court on December 1, 2021, in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images But it’s not yet clear they’ve settled on a rationale for doing so. A federal law requires most US hospitals to provide an abortion to patients experiencing a medical emergency if an abortion is the proper medical treatment for that emergency. This law is unambiguous, and it applies even in red states with strict abortion bans that prohibit the procedure even when necessary to save a patient’s life or protect their health. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court spent Wednesday morning discussing whether to write a new exception into this federal law, which would permit states to ban abortions even when a patient will die if they do not receive one. Broadly speaking, the Court seemed to divide into three camps during Wednesday’s argument in Moyle v. United States. The Court’s three Democrats, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all argued — quite forcefully at times — that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) means what it says and thus nearly all hospitals must provide emergency abortions. Meanwhile, the Court’s right flank — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — left no doubt that they will do whatever it takes to permit states to ban medically necessary abortions. That left three of the Court’s Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, in the middle. Kavanaugh and Barrett both asked questions that very much suggest they want states to be able to ban medically necessary abortions. But they also appeared to recognize, at times, that the arguments supporting such an outcome are far from airtight. Realistically, it is highly unlikely that EMTALA will survive the Court’s Moyle decision intact. The Court already voted last January to temporarily allow the state of Idaho to enforce its strict abortion ban, despite EMTALA, while this case was pending before the justices. And Kavanaugh and Barrett have both taken extraordinary liberties with the law in the past when necessary to achieve an anti-abortion outcome. Still, federal law is crystal clear that states cannot outright ban medically necessary abortions. So there is a chance that two of the Court’s Republicans will reluctantly conclude that they are bound by the law’s clear text. Moyle should be an exceptionally easy case EMTALA requires hospital emergency rooms that accept Medicare funding to provide “such treatment as may be required to stabilize the medical condition” of “any individual” who arrives at the hospital’s ER with an “emergency medical condition.” Though the law does not specifically mention abortion, it is written in capacious terms. So, if a patient has an “emergency medical condition” and the proper treatment to stabilize that condition is an abortion, the hospital must provide an abortion. Though the law only applies to Medicare-funded hospitals, that’s nearly all hospitals because Medicare provides health coverage to Americans over the age of 65. EMTALA conflicts with an Idaho law that bans abortions in nearly all circumstances. While Idaho permits an abortion when “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman,” it does not permit such an abortion if the patient faces a catastrophic health consequence other than death, such as the loss of her uterus. EMTALA requires emergency rooms to stabilize any patient who is at risk of “serious impairment to bodily functions,” “serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part,” or other nonfatal consequences that are defined as medical emergencies by EMTALA. So the federal law applies in many cases where the patient is not at risk of death. Additionally, EMTALA includes a provision saying that state and local laws must give way to the federal requirement to stabilize patients “to the extent that the [state law] directly conflicts with a requirement of this section.” So, if the Supreme Court were concerned solely with the text of EMTALA, they would hand down a unanimous decision holding that Idaho’s law is preempted by EMTALA, at least to the extent that Idaho prohibits medically necessary abortions. EMTALA does not purport to override most restrictions on abortion, but its explicit text requires hospitals to perform an abortion when necessary to stabilize a patient’s emergency medical condition. So how did the Republican justices propose getting around EMTALA’s clear text? Members of the Court’s Republican majority proposed three possible ways they could try to justify a decision permitting Idaho to ban many medically necessary abortions. The weakest of these three arguments was proposed by Justice Samuel Alito, author of the Court’s 2022 decision eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion. Alito pointed to a provision of EMTALA that requires hospitals to also offer stabilizing care to a pregnant patient’s “unborn child” if a medical emergency threatens the fetus’s life, though Alito did not really make a legal argument. He just expressed indignation at the very idea that a statute that uses the words “unborn child” could possibly require abortions in any circumstances. “Isn’t that an odd phrase to put in a statute that imposes a mandate to perform abortions?” Alito asked US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. As Prelogar told Alito, EMTALA reconciles the dual obligations it imposes on hospitals to treat both a pregnant patient and the patient’s fetus by only requiring the hospital to “offer” stabilizing care for both patients — so, in the tragic case where only the mother or the fetus could be saved, the hospital must offer both treatments and honor the mother’s choice. A second argument for limiting EMTALA, which was at times floated by Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett, is that reading the statute according to its actual text would raise a constitutional problem. EMTALA imposes an obligation on hospitals that accept Medicare funds, and the Supreme Court has long held that Congress may impose requirements on parties that voluntarily accept federal funding. The constitutional argument is that Congress could not use federal funding provided to a private hospital to neutralize a state ban on abortion because the state of Idaho must also consent to having its law altered in this way. There is some case law that provides theoretical support for this argument, but the bulk of the Court’s case law already establishes that a federal grant program that provides money to private parties may displace state law. Thus, for example, in Coventry Health Care v. Nevils (2017), the Court held that the federal government’s decision to offer its own employees health plans that violate Missouri law preempts that state law. And in Bennett v. Arkansas (1988), the Court held that federal Social Security law overrides an Arkansas law that allowed the state to seize an incarcerated person’s Social Security benefits. The Court could conceivably repudiate precedents like Coventry and Bennett, but that would have unpredictable consequences for all sorts of federal programs. Federal spending programs like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid are riddled with provisions that might conflict with one state law or another. And if the Supreme Court declares that these state law provisions overcome federal Medicare, Social Security, or Medicaid law, that is likely to disrupt those and other programs in erratic ways. That leaves one other way to achieve an anti-abortion outcome in the Moyle case, whose biggest proponent was Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh noted that Idaho has weakened its abortion ban since this litigation began and that it’s done so in ways that theoretically make it easier for doctors to claim that they needed to perform an abortion to protect a patient’s life. In light of these changes, he suggested that maybe “there shouldn’t be an injunction” against Idaho because it’s not clear that the state’s law still conflicts with EMTALA. But this argument is hard to square with the facts on the ground in Idaho. As Justice Kagan pointed out close to the end of the argument, hospitals in Idaho are still so uncertain when they can perform an abortion that many of them are flying patients to other states. She noted that just one Idaho hospital had to do so six times so that those patients could receive an emergency abortion in a location where everyone could be sure it was legal. Idaho’s lawyer, moreover, struggled so hard to explain when Idaho’s law permits a doctor to perform a medically necessary abortion that Barrett accused him of “hedging.” Kavanaugh’s argument, in other words, would require the justices to ignore what’s happening in Idaho and to pretend that Idaho is somehow complying with EMTALA, despite the fact that Idaho’s own lawyer could not explain how its abortion ban works. So the ultimate question looming over the Moyle case is whether two of the Court’s Republican appointees will be so troubled by the weakness of the anti-abortion arguments in this case, and so embarrassed by the fact that there’s really only one plausible way to read EMTALA, that they will begrudgingly apply the law as written. That’s not the most likely outcome in this case. But, at the very least, the Court’s Republican majority does not appear to have settled on a way to explain a decision creating an abortion exception to the EMTALA statute.

What the backlash to student protests over Gaza is really about

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Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images The Columbia protests and the debate over pro-Palestinian college students, explained. Protests over the war in Gaza erupted on Columbia University’s campus last week and have sparked demonstrations at other universities across the country. The demonstrations have resulted in some intense crackdowns and political scrutiny, all coming in the wake of recent congressional hearings on antisemitism on campus and amid an uptick in both antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment in the US. Protests have emerged across the country, including at Yale University, New York University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Miami University in Ohio, and Temple University in Philadelphia, among other campuses. Once again, top universities have become the locus around which America litigates questions about the US’s support of Israel amid its deadly war in Gaza, free speech, antisemitism, and anti-Muslim discrimination — and a convenient target for political elites looking to make a point. For example: Lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson today, are visiting Columbia’s campus. The protests are calling on universities to divest from firms that they contend profit from Israel’s war and occupation in Palestine, more than six months after the start of the war and as the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 34,000. Some groups at universities that conduct military research, like New York University, are also requesting their schools end work contributing to weapons development as well. At Columbia, Yale, and New York University, students have faced mass arrests as administrators seek to quell the unrest. Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests have become a prominent feature on college campuses since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. They reached a fever pitch in December when the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania gave controversial testimony before Congress about campus antisemitism, both real and hypothetical. Tensions reignited last week after Columbia president Nemat Shafik gave congressional testimony that, per the Associated Press, focused on “fighting antisemitism rather than protecting free speech.” Students erected tents on Columbia’s main lawn to show solidarity with Gaza. Then Shafik took the controversial step of calling in the police to arrest those involved. That contentious decision wasn’t just jarring to Columbia students particularly because of the university’s history, but also sparked outrage among onlookers both at the site and on social media. The controversy at Columbia and other campuses has illustrated how universities have struggled to uphold their dual commitments to free speech and protecting their students during a fraught political moment when more young people sympathize with the Palestinian cause than with the Israeli government. Concerns about antisemitism at the protests (often attributed to students, but largely perpetrated by outsiders according to anecdotal reporting) also piqued national attention; amid this all, Columbia University switched to remote learning on Monday, April 22 — which also happened to be the first day of the Jewish holiday of Passover. “Calling the police on campus is such a breach of the culture of a college or university,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is representing arrested Columbia students, told Vox. “To do so in response to nonviolent student protest is beyond the pale, and it really undermines the standing of the university in the eyes of a broad swath of the population as a place of free, open, and robust dialogue and debate.” What’s actually happening on college campuses Last Wednesday, students pitched more than 50 tents on the Columbia lawn in what they called a “Liberated Zone.” But the tents stayed up only about a day and a half before Shafik intervened. “The current encampment violates all of the new policies, severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students,” she wrote in a letter to the Columbia community on Thursday. The police arrived shortly thereafter to arrest students for trespassing and removed more than 100 protesters, tying their hands with zip ties. Some have also been suspended and removed from student housing. In the days since, pro-Palestinian student groups on other university campuses have staged similar protests in solidarity with their counterparts at Columbia. Students have also erected encampments at Yale, the University of Michigan, New York University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. A total of 47 students were arrested at Yale on Monday, and more than 150 were arrested at New York University overnight Tuesday. On Monday, a group of Columbia professors staged a walkout to support the student protests. A lot of the national attention has focused less on the protesters’ demands or the US-Israeli relationship — and the destruction of Gaza — and more on allegations that the protests are inherently antisemitic for criticizing Israel, or that specific antisemitic incidents have occurred. Shafik announced that all Columbia classes would be virtual on Monday (and now hybrid through the end of the academic year) to provide a “reset” on the conversation and in light of students’ safety concerns — Rabbi Elie Buechler, a rabbi associated with Columbia University’s Orthodox Union Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus, had urged hundreds of Orthodox Jewish students to go home and urged them to stay there for their safety. “I cannot but agree that this is motivated by trying to pacify congressional members who are trying to interfere in the running of this university and, at this point, all universities,” Marianne Hirsch, professor emerita of English and comparative literature and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University, said at a press conference in front of Shafik’s house Tuesday. Student protests on Columbia’s campus have been nonviolent so far. Representatives from the New York Police Department said during a press conference Monday that there had been some incidents in which Israeli flags were snatched from students and unspecified hateful things said. But they said that there have not been any reports of Columbia students being physically harmed or any credible threats made against individuals or groups associated with the university community ahead of the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover. The police only enter Columbia’s campus when asked, given that it is a private university. They have established off-campus “safe corridors” where officers are stationed and will intervene in incidents involving harassment, threats, or menacing behavior — which does not constitute protected speech under the First Amendment. However, a video surfaced over the weekend of what appeared to be masked pro-Palestinian protesters outside of Columbia’s gates shouting, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” at Jewish students. It’s not clear whether those shouting were affiliated with the university. Just after the video was circulated, President Joe Biden issued a statement: “This blatant Antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous — and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country.” That statement served as a “blanket condemnation of the Columbia protests,” said Matt Berkman, an assistant professor of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. It failed to distinguish those featured in the video who may not have been affiliated with the university from the vast majority of student protesters, who based on many different accounts, have been peaceful. “Pro-Israel activists are clearly invested in painting everyone at Columbia, whether inside or outside the gates, with the same broad brush,” Berkman added. On Tuesday, a student draped in an Israeli flag spoke to reporters from within the fenced-in area of the encampment. Jewish students who have been suspended from Columbia and Barnard stated that they had celebrated a Passover Seder within the encampment at a press conference. There are antisemitic incidents in the United States, which represent real danger to Jewish communities and individuals — and they have increased since the Hamas attacks on October 7. In December, the Anti-Defamation League reported that antisemitic incidents had increased by nearly 340 percent since then. Complicating its data, however, is the fact that the ADL does not always differentiate between violent antisemitic incidents like assault and anti-Zionist protests and calls in support of BDS. Removing all Israel-related incidents from their count, America has a smaller but still big problem: Non-Israel-related antisemitic incidents still rose by 65 percent compared to 2022, per their data. Columbia students aren’t alone in facing broad accusations of antisemitism. Students at Yale, the Ohio State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others have all been called out by the ADL for engaging in Palestine solidarity protests as well as for specific incidents of antisemitism. Nor are they alone in facing arrest; NYU students and faculty and students at Yale have also been arrested. Police involvement in the protests — particularly on New York City campuses — has been met with backlash, particularly from university faculty and activists. Veronica Salama, who as a staff attorney at NYCLU is part of the team defending these students, told Vox that Shafik called the police as part of her emergency powers — but in doing so violated university policy. Vox has reached out to Columbia for comment and will update with its response. According to an email obtained by Vox, university administration set a deadline of midnight Tuesday night to reach an agreement to dismantle the encampment; if none is reached, the email says, the administration “will have to consider alternative options for clearing the West Lawn and restoring calm to campus.” Negotiations about removing the encampment, however, continued into Wednesday. What’s behind the protests? In many ways, the demands of the protesters have been overshadowed by the controversy. At Columbia, the protesters belong to a coalition, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which formed in 2016 to demand Columbia and Barnard College disclose investments in and divest — or remove from its investment portfolio— from Israeli and American companies and institutions that support Israel, citing its wars in Gaza and oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. The coalition’s demands are of a piece with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement started by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. BDS cites as its inspiration the anti-apartheid activists of the 1980s who targeted South Africa’s apartheid government with boycotts. While that movement wasn’t decisive in bringing down that government, it was successful in alienating the apartheid government from major global players like Barclays bank, the Olympics, and the International Cricket Conference, forcing countries and international institutions to confront their complicity in South Africa’s racist policies. In addition to divestment from “companies profiting from Israeli apartheid,” CUAD has a list of five other demands, including a call for an immediate ceasefire from government officials including President Joe Biden, and, importantly, an end to the dual degree program that Columbia has with Tel Aviv University. These demands echo those of student groups at other colleges and universities. NYU student activists are also demanding the university shut down its Tel Aviv campus and “divest from all corporations aiding in the genocide,” including weapons companies, and ban weapons tech research that benefits Israel. Critics allege that BDS and anti-Zionism are at their core antisemitic, arguing that BDS delegitimizes Israel and “effectively reject[s] or ignore[s] the Jewish people’s right of self-determination, or that, if implemented, would result in the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state, are antisemitic,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. The nature and tenor of the campus anti-war protests has been at the forefront of both media coverage and congressional hearings on antisemitism and campus free speech. But administrative response to them — particularly calling the police and issuing suspensions — has added a new dimension to the debate. It’s all part of a broader fight over free speech and antisemitism on college campuses Universities have struggled to balance their goals of protecting free speech and combatting antisemitism since the outbreak of war in Gaza, which has proved a political minefield. In December, a trio of university presidents who testified before Congress were accused (if not fairly) of being too permissive of free speech in the face of antisemitism or being too legalistic in their explanations of their situation. Now, some universities seem to be changing their tack. Shafik called in the police on protesters despite Columbia’s longstanding reputation as a bastion of free speech. The University of Southern California recently canceled the commencement speech of its pro-Palestinian valedictorian over campus safety concerns. And now NYU has also instituted a police crackdown on protesters. Private universities, like many of those experiencing protests today, have long maintained policies that protect free speech similarly to the First Amendment: permitting anything up to genuine threats of violence and threatening behavior that would warrant punishment or even referrals to the criminal system. But the last six months have seemingly made many of them question not just when and where a threat begins, but also maybe even those commitments to students’ free speech more broadly. And complicating this all is a years-long history of pro-Palestinian activists saying they face targeted harassment. Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that if Columbia wants to remain committed to free speech, it has an obligation to apply its speech policies in an equitable manner that is unbiased against any particular viewpoint and to ensure that students currently facing disciplinary action are offered due process. “Columbia providing due process, while fairly and consistently applying its viewpoint-neutral speech policies, will be absolutely mandatory here if Columbia wants to start back on the right path,” Morey said. Prohibiting students from camping out or blocking entrances or exits is “all above board” if applied uniformly, Morey added. But schools should see calling the police to enforce any such policies as a last resort, said Frederick Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis University and a lecturer at Georgetown Law. “I understand the very strong desire to protect the safety of all the students involved,” he said. “At the end of the day, the presumption should be in favor of free speech and free expression, and there are exceptions to that, but [starting] with that presumption often brings a lot of clarity to these vital decisions.”