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

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

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

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

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

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

Rihanna at the 2015 Met Gala. | J. Countess/FilmMagic Turns out the first Monday in May is the perfect venue for celebrity image-making. On Monday night, some of the biggest celebrities in the country, dressed in their finest and most outrageous couture, assembled at the steps of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the biggest red carpet event of the year. They entered the museum for a high-profile celebration of fashion — sponsored by TikTok this year — that remained entirely out of sight of the public’s gaze, so that all we saw was the arrival of the beautiful and wealthy. This is the Met Gala, and for an event that is theoretically just for fashion nerds and doesn’t even get televised inside, it has a remarkable cultural cachet. The Gala, which falls on the first Monday of May, purportedly celebrates the Anna Wintour Costume Center’s keystone exhibit every year. It’s overseen by the Center’s eponymous queen: Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. This year, the exhibit is called “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” and features some of the museum’s oldest and most fragile garments. Guests have accordingly been asked to follow the dress code “Garden of Time,” after a 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard, with moody florals, clock motifs, and even outstanding archival pieces all expected to fit the theme. Stars like Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, Kim Kardashian, and Cardi B were all in attendance — even as exploding protests over the war in Gaza and a just-averted strike by Condé Nast workers threatened to cast a shadow on the rarefied gathering. When the Met Gala was first instituted in 1948, it would not have boasted such an A-list roster of guests, nor such a trendy corporate sponsor (albeit one currently in crisis). The Gala has always been glamorous, but it used to be a local event, primarily a showcase for the society ladies of the Upper East Side. It took decades of careful strategizing and alliance-building with Hollywood to make the Met Gala the pop cultural phenomenon it is today. Now, the Met Gala shines because it is an unparalleled occasion for celebrity image-building. It is a showcase for both the illusion of accessibility and unreachable glamour at the heart of modern celebrity. Here’s how it got there. How the Met Gala went from midnight supper to opium-scented art show to celebrity showcase Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images Diana Vreeland with Ralph Lauren at the 1984 Met Gala. The Met’s Costume Institute was born out of the Museum of Costume Art, a library devoted to the art of theatrical costumes. In 1946, Lord & Taylor president Dorothy Shaver decided to bring the collection to the Met. Fashion, she felt, needed the cultural power that comes from allying with a major museum. It needed its history preserved and its present recognized to be respected as a major and vital art form. The Met agreed to take the collection — with the caveat that the American fashion industry would be responsible for raising the funds for the Costume Institute’s entire annual operating budget. The Met Gala was conceived out of this grim necessity. At the time, the party was planned by publicist Eleanor Lambert, and it didn’t even take place at the Met. It was a midnight breakfast hosted at Manhattan institutions like the Waldorf Astoria, Central Park, and the Rainbow Room. It was a glamorous affair, but it was for local society and fashion insiders only. In 1974, Diana Vreeland arrived at the Met as special consultant for the Costume Institute from Vogue. There, she had been editor-in-chief and was fired, according to rumor, for refusing to mind her budget. Rumor also had it that New York society royalty Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Babe Paley campaigned for her to take the new post. Vreeland brought with her a new edge. She introduced the concept of linking the gala to an Institute exhibit via a theme, the first one being “The World of Balenciaga.” Her parties were lavish and romantic. “There was evocative music and sometimes even fragrance was pumped into the air,” so that “regardless of the fashions being presented, it always felt like a delicious opium den,” recalled designer Steven Stolman in Town and Country in 2018. The opium was sometimes close to literal. New York magazine reported in 2005 that Vreeland liked to use a signature perfume in the galleries for each party, and for a 1980 exhibit on China, Vreeland scented the air with the YSL eau de toilette Opium. When guests complained, she explained that the fragrance was needed to create the appropriate air of “languor.” Along with instituting the iconic theme, Vreeland first brought celebrities to the Met Gala. Under her watch, major popular artists including Andy Warhol, Diana Ross, and Cher rubbed shoulders alongside politicians like Henry Kissinger. After Vreeland’s death in 1989, the fate of the Gala was up in the air. Wintour was brought in to host for the first time in 1995, shortly after her arrival as Vogue’s editor-in-chief. The next year, however, the honors went to Wintour’s rival Elizabeth Tilberis, fellow British expat and editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. It was Tilberis, in many ways, who created the first modern Gala. Tilberis’s Met Gala was sponsored by Dior, which had just named a newly ascendant John Galliano artistic director. Diana, Princess of Wales, attended that year, fresh off her divorce from now-King Charles, appearing in a Galliano-designed blue satin slip gown. The look caused a sensation. Richard Corkery/NY Daily News via Getty Images Princess Diana in her iconic Met Gala look in 1996. The dress, tame by the standards of today, represented Diana freeing herself from the strictures of royal life with a slinky, negligée-inspired look that surely would have been frowned upon by Queen Elizabeth. For Diana, the gown was a piece of image-making that allowed her to make a statement without having to say a word. For Galliano and Dior, it proved their cultural relevancy and their ability to make clothes that spoke for the wearer. For the Met Gala itself, the moment was a breakthrough. It showed how important the Met could be when it came to both fashion and celebrity: a place where two symbiotic institutions could meet and be celebrated in the best possible light. The Met Gala is highly public and highly exclusive. That’s a potent combination. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Anna Wintour on the Met steps, for the 2023 Met Gala in New York City. After Tilberis died of cancer in 1999, Anna Wintour took over the Met Gala on a permanent basis. And Anna Wintour understands the value of star power. Wintour has always had a canny sense of how closely fashion and celebrity are intertwined, and how much each depends upon the other. Under her reign, the cover stars of Vogue went from models to actresses. The Met Gala has followed suit. It’s become a coveted celebrity ticket — not least because going to the Met Gala and, ideally, serving as a co-host gives you a better shot of landing that Vogue cover. Wintour also makes sure that she and the Gala retain control over just how all those celebrities make their fashion statements. Frequently, she’s the one who matches celebrities with designers. You can track the slow evolution of the Met Gala brand under Wintour’s watch. In 2005, a mere six years into the Wintour era and less than a decade after Diana’s newsmaking moment, New York magazine allowed that Wintour’s camp “like[d] to think of the Costume Institute Ball, held this year on May 2, as a sort of Oscars for the East Coast.” By 2019, 20 years into Wintour’s reign, that nascent ambition was now conventional wisdom. The Sydney Morning Herald declared the Met “the fashion Oscars” without irony. Wintour was helped along in her quest for relevance by the advent of streaming video and social media, both of which helped reinvigorate red carpet coverage. It was common now for pop culture die-hards to follow along on the internet with celebrity arrivals at major award shows and events, and to share their opinions of the fashion on Twitter and Instagram. Celebrities add to the intimacy of the affair by letting viewers into their prep process in streams and Instagram stories. If modern technology is central to the Gala’s relevance, it also provides a venue for Wintour to show off the Gala as a financial powerhouse. Every year the Gala has a new heavyweight corporate sponsor, frequently from the tech sphere. (This year’s is TikTok; in the past they’ve included Instagram, Apple, and Amazon.) It still makes enough money to provide the Costume Center’s entire annual operating budget. Last year, the gala brought in almost $22 million, with tickets selling for $75,000 each and tables for brands to buy starting at $350,000. Karwai Tang/Getty Images Mike Coppola/Getty Images NDZ/Star Max/GC Images Kim Kardashian in Marilyn Monroe’s gown at the 2022 Met Gala. The Met Gala is now the event where celebrities come to reveal a new image or refine an old one, and where the public follows along on the internet with bated breath. Zendaya announced her transition from Disney star to adult actress by acting out a Cinderella transformation on the Met steps in 2019. Rihanna proved she had the fashion cred to read a theme with nuance and the charisma necessary to pull off a dramatic look when she showed up to the 2015 Met Gala, themed to the influence of Chinese fashion on the West, in an enormous imperial yellow fur cape from Chinese couturier Guo Pei. Kim Kardashian built parallels between herself and Marilyn Monroe when she arrived at the 2022 Gala in Marilyn’s iconic “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress. The Met Gala continues to fascinate in part because of the alchemy Wintour has created: an assemblage of dozens of celebrities at the height of their fame, taking full advantage of fashion as an art form for image-making. Yet at the same time, the Gala remains a highly alluring mystery. Only Vogue is allowed to take photos inside the party, with the occasional highly curated exception (many attendees have made a tradition of bathroom selfies, where we see a Mad Libs-y melange of A-listers that only add to the party’s mystique). The event itself is not televised. It is not livestreamed. It is not accessible to anyone who is not explicitly invited, which includes most of us. The Gala is thus both highly visible and still a black box — no small feat in an age of overexposure. It allows celebrities to speak to their public without words and then vanish off again into the night, unknowable and unreachable, the way almost nothing else in the social media era does. Sometimes, though, the heady, decadent fantasy of the Met Gala can become a liability. This year, the Condé Nast union, locked in a bitter contract dispute with company management, threatened one of Condé’s most lavish showcases with the possibility of a strike on the day of the Gala. Since Condé Nast includes Vogue, the potential for disarray at the Gala itself was high — high enough that the union explicitly credited their just-announced win to their willingness to do “whatever it takes” on the first Monday in May. Meanwhile, protests over the war in Gaza are raging across the city as the museum prepares for the Gala, with police arresting dozens of student activists on college campuses. It remains to be seen whether the public can remain enamored with celebrity opulence when real-world concerns are just outside, waiting to crash the party. Update, May 7, 10:12 am: This story, originally published on May 6, has been updated multiple times, most recently to include several celebrities who attended the 2024 Met Gala.

AI-powered apps may be able to use your data (including selfies) to predict your current mental state. | Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images Emerging apps use AI to guess when you’ll be sad. Can they also help you feel better? If you have a sore throat, you can get tested for a host of things — Covid, RSV, strep, the flu — and receive a pretty accurate diagnosis (and maybe even treatment). Even when you’re not sick, vital signs like heart rate and blood pressure give doctors a decent sense of your physical health. But there’s no agreed-upon vital sign for mental health. There may be occasional mental health screenings at the doctor’s office, or notes left behind after a visit with a therapist. Unfortunately, people lie to their therapists all the time (one study estimated that over 90 percent of us have lied to a therapist at least once), leaving holes in their already limited mental health records. And that’s assuming someone can connect with a therapist — roughly 122 million Americans live in areas without enough mental health professionals to go around. But the vast majority of people in the US do have access to a cellphone. Over the last several years, academic researchers and startups have built AI-powered apps that use phones, smart watches, and social media to spot warning signs of depression. By collecting massive amounts of information, AI models can learn to spot subtle changes in a person’s body and behavior that may indicate mental health problems. Many digital mental health apps only exist in the research world (for now), but some are available to download — and other forms of passive data collection are already being deployed by social media platforms and health care providers to flag potential crises (it’s probably somewhere in the terms of service you didn’t read). The hope is for these platforms to help people affordably access mental health care when they need it most, and intervene quickly in times of crisis. Michael Aratow — co-founder and chief medical officer of Ellipsis Health, a company that uses AI to predict mental health from human voice samples — argues that the need for digital mental health solutions is so great, it can no longer be addressed by the health care system alone. “There’s no way that we’re going to deal with our mental health issues without technology,” he said. And those issues are significant: Rates of mental illness have skyrocketed over the past several years. Roughly 29 percent of US adults have been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lives, and the National Institute of Mental Health estimates that nearly a third of US adults will experience an anxiety disorder at some point. While phones are often framed as a cause of mental health problems, they can also be part of the solution — but only if we create tech that works reliably and mitigates the risk of unintended harm. Tech companies can misuse highly sensitive data gathered from people at their most vulnerable moments — with little regulation to stop them. Digital mental health app developers still have a lot of work to do to earn the trust of their users, but the stakes around the US mental health crisis are high enough that we shouldn’t automatically dismiss AI-powered solutions out of fear. How does AI detect depression? To be formally diagnosed with depression, someone needs to express at least five symptoms (like feeling sad, losing interest in things, or being unusually exhausted) for at least two consecutive weeks. But Nicholas Jacobson, an assistant professor in biomedical data science and psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, believes “the way that we think about depression is wrong, as a field.” By only looking for stably presenting symptoms, doctors can miss the daily ebbs and flows that people with depression experience. “These depression symptoms change really fast,” Jacobson said, “and our traditional treatments are usually very, very slow.” Even the most devoted therapy-goers typically see a therapist about once a week (and with sessions starting around $100, often not covered by insurance, once a week is already cost-prohibitive for many people). One 2022 study found that only 18.5 percent of psychiatrists sampled were accepting new patients, leading to average wait times of over two months for in-person appointments. But your smartphone (or your fitness tracker) can log your steps, heart rate, sleep patterns, and even your social media use, painting a far more comprehensive picture of your mental health than conversations with a therapist can alone. One potential mental health solution: Collect data from your smartphone and wearables as you go about your day, and use that data to train AI models to predict when your mood is about to dip. In a study co-authored by Jacobson this February, researchers built a depression detection app called MoodCapture, which harnesses a user’s front-facing camera to automatically snap selfies while they answer questions about their mood, with participants pinged to complete the survey three times a day. An AI model correlated their responses — rating in-the-moment feelings like sadness and hopelessness — with these pictures, using their facial features and other context clues like lighting and background objects to predict early signs of depression. (One example: a participant who looks as if they’re in bed almost every time they complete the survey is more likely to be depressed.) The model doesn’t try to flag certain facial features as depressive. Rather, the model looks for subtle changes within each user, like their facial expressions, or how they tend to hold their phone. MoodCapture accurately identified depression symptoms with about 75 percent accuracy (in other words, if 100 out of a million people have depression, the model should be able to identify 75 out of the 100) — the first time such candid images have been used to detect mental illness in this way. In this study, the researchers only recruited participants who were already diagnosed with depression, and each photo was tagged with the participant’s own rating of their depression symptoms. Eventually, the app aims to use photos captured when users unlock their phones using face recognition, adding up to hundreds of images per day. This data, combined with other passively gathered phone data like sleep hours, text messages, and social media posts, could evaluate the user’s unfiltered, unguarded feelings. You can tell your therapist whatever you want, but enough data could reveal the truth. The app is still far from perfect. MoodCapture was more accurate at predicting depression in white people because most study participants were white women — generally, AI models are only as good as the training data they’re provided. Research apps like MoodCapture are required to get informed consent from all of their participants, and university studies are overseen by the campus’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) But if sensitive data is collected without a user’s consent, the constant monitoring can feel creepy or violating. Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota, says that with informed consent, tools like this can be “really good because they notice things that you may not notice yourself.” What technology is already out there, and what’s on the way? Of the roughly 10,000 (and counting) digital mental health apps recognized by the mHealth Index & Navigation Database (MIND), 18 of them passively collect user data. Unlike the research app MoodCapture, none use auto-captured selfies (or any type of data, for that matter) to predict whether the user is depressed. A handful of popular, highly rated apps like Bearable — made by and for people with chronic health conditions, from bipolar disorder to fibromyalgia — track customized collections of symptoms over time, in part by passively collecting data from wearables. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Aratow said. These tracker apps are more like journals than predictors, though — they don’t do anything with the information they collect, other than show it to the user to give them a better sense of how lifestyle factors (like what they eat, or how much they sleep) affect their symptoms. Some patients take screenshots of their app data to show their doctors so they can provide more informed advice. Other tools, like the Ellipsis Health voice sensor, aren’t downloadable apps at all. Rather, they operate behind the scenes as “clinical decision support tools,” designed to predict someone’s depression and anxiety levels from the sound of their voice during, say, a routine call with their health care provider. And massive tech companies like Meta use AI to flag, and sometimes delete, posts about self-harm and suicide. Some researchers want to take passive data collection to more radical lengths. Georgios Christopoulos, a cognitive neuroscientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-led a 2021 study that predicted depression risk from Fitbit data. In a press release, he expressed his vision for more ubiquitous data collection, where “such signals could be integrated with Smart Buildings or even Smart Cities initiatives: Imagine a hospital or a military unit that could use these signals to identify people at risk.” This raises an obvious question: In this imagined future world, what happens if the all-seeing algorithm deems you sad? AI has improved so much in the last five years alone that it’s not a stretch to say that, in the next decade, mood-predicting apps will exist — and if preliminary tests continue to look promising, they might even work. Whether that comes as a relief or fills you with dread, as mood-predicting digital health tools begin to move out of academic research settings and into the app stores, developers and regulators need to seriously consider what they’ll do with the information they gather. So, your phone thinks you’re depressed — now what? It depends, said Chancellor. Interventions need to strike a careful balance: keeping the user safe, without “completely wiping out important parts of their life.” Banning someone from Instagram for posting about self-harm, for instance, could cut someone off from valuable support networks, causing more harm than good. The best way for an app to provide support that a user actually wants, Chancellor said, is to ask them. Munmun De Choudhury, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, believes that any digital mental health platform can be ethical, “to the extent that people have an ability to consent to its use.” She emphasized, “If there is no consent from the person, it doesn’t matter what the intervention is — it’s probably going to be inappropriate.” Academic researchers like Jacobson and Chancellor have to jump through a lot of regulatory hoops to test their digital mental health tools. But when it comes to tech companies, those barriers don’t really exist. Laws like the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) don’t clearly cover nonclinical data that can be used to infer something about someone’s health — like social media posts, patterns of phone usage, or selfies. Even when a company says that they treat user data as protected health information (PHI), it’s not protected by federal law — data only qualifies as PHI if it comes from a “healthcare service event,” like medical records or a hospital bill. Text conversations via platforms like Woebot and BetterHelp may feel confidential, but crucial caveats about data privacy (while companies can opt into HIPAA compliance, user data isn’t legally classified as protected health information) often wind up where users are least likely to see them — like in lengthy terms of service agreements that practically no one reads. Woebot, for example, has a particularly reader-friendly terms of service, but at a whopping 5,625 words, it’s still far more than most people are willing to engage with. “There’s not a whole lot of regulation that would prevent folks from essentially embedding all of this within the terms of service agreement,” said Jacobson. De Choudhury laughed about it. “Honestly,” she told me, “I’ve studied these platforms for almost two decades now. I still don’t understand what those terms of service are saying.” “We need to make sure that the terms of service, where we all click ‘I agree’, is actually in a form that a lay individual can understand,” De Choudhury said. Last month, Sachin Pendse, a graduate student in De Choudhury’s research group, co-authored guidance on how developers can create “consent-forward” apps that proactively earn the trust of their users. The idea is borrowed from the “Yes means yes” model for affirmative sexual consent, because FRIES applies here, too: a user’s consent to data usage should always be freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific. But when algorithms (like humans) inevitably make mistakes, even the most consent-forward app could do something a user doesn’t want. The stakes can be high. In 2018, for example, a Meta algorithm used text data from Messenger and WhatsApp to detect messages expressing suicidal intent, triggering over a thousand “wellness checks,” or nonconsensual active rescues. Few specific details about how their algorithm works are publicly available. Meta clarifies that they use pattern-recognition techniques based on lots of training examples, rather than simply flagging words relating to death or sadness — but not much else. These interventions often involve police officers (who carry weapons and don’t always receive crisis intervention training) and can make things worse for someone already in crisis (especially if they thought they were just chatting with a trusted friend, not a suicide hotline). “We will never be able to guarantee that things are always safe, but at minimum, we need to do the converse: make sure that they are not unsafe,” De Choudhury said. Some large digital mental health groups have faced lawsuits over their irresponsible handling of user data. In 2022, Crisis Text Line, one of the biggest mental health support lines (and often provided as a resource in articles like this one), got caught using data from people’s online text conversations to train customer service chatbots for their for-profit spinoff, Loris. And last year, the Federal Trade Commission ordered BetterHelp to pay a $7.8 million fine after being accused of sharing people’s personal health data with Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Criteo, an advertising company. Chancellor said that while companies like BetterHelp may not be operating in bad faith — the medical system is slow, understaffed, and expensive, and in many ways, they’re trying to help people get past these barriers — they need to more clearly communicate their data privacy policies with customers. While startups can choose to sell people’s personal information to third parties, Chancellor said, “no therapist is ever going to put your data out there for advertisers.” Someday, Chancellor hopes that mental health care will be structured more like cancer care is today, where people receive support from a team of specialists (not all doctors), including friends and family. She sees tech platforms as “an additional layer” of care — and at least for now, one of the only forms of care available to people in underserved communities. Even if all the ethical and technical kinks get ironed out, and digital health platforms work exactly as intended, they’re still powered by machines. “Human connection will remain incredibly valuable and central to helping people overcome mental health struggles,” De Choudhury told me. “I don’t think it can ever be replaced.” And when asked what the perfect mental health app would look like, she simply said, “I hope it doesn’t pretend to be a human.”

Guidance counselor Jacquelyn Indrisano embraces ninth grader Arianna Troville, 16, outside her office at East Boston High School. | Craig F. Walker/Boston Globe via Getty Images A new book on youth suicide clusters offers perspective on prevention. Between 2000 and 2015 in an affluent, predominately white community in the US, 19 young people died by suicide through what’s known as suicide clusters. These clusters refer to an unusually high rate of suicide for a community over a short period of time, often at least two deaths and one suicide attempt, or three deaths. Suicide clusters are an extreme example of youth mental health struggles — an issue that’s been getting more attention since the pandemic and one that’s at the center of an increasingly charged national conversation around social media and phones. Anna Mueller, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington, and Seth Abrutyn, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia, recently published Life Under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them, which explores why these clusters happened and how to prevent more. The researchers embedded themselves within the community (which goes by the pseudonym Poplar Grove) to understand the social conditions that preceded and followed the teenagers’ deaths. Senior policy reporter Rachel Cohen spoke with Mueller and Abrutyn about the youth mental health crisis, the crucial role and responsibility of adults, and how kids take behavioral cues from those around them. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. Rachel Cohen There’s been a lot of confusing and often conflicting reports about youth suicide trends, especially since the pandemic. Can you outline for readers what we know? Anna Mueller Since 2007, rates of youth suicide in the United States have been increasing pretty significantly and substantially. Not all countries around the world are experiencing this, though some others are. With the pandemic, I feel like I have to plead the fifth since the suicide data is still sort of inconclusive. For some kids, the pandemic was really hard in terms of mental health. For others, it actually took some pressures away. Rachel Cohen Do we know why youth suicide in the US started going up in 2007? What are the best theories? Seth Abrutyn It’s a complicated question. As you’re probably aware, there’s been some recent very public academics like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge who have been studying the relationship between social media and mental health, especially among adolescent girls. So there’s some argument that that’s part of it. Of course, that wouldn’t explain why it started in 2007, when social media and smartphones were not really ubiquitous in the way they are now, but it probably plays a role in accelerating or amplifying some of the underlying things that were happening prior. Another part of the explanation might be that efforts to destigmatize mental health have given people greater license to talk about their mental health. So things that may have been hiding are now out there more, though that doesn’t necessarily explain why suicide rates have gone up, but it may help understand the context. Kids today are growing up in an extremely destabilized environment, and the economy is extremely precarious. Add that to the fact that since 2007, LGBTQ kids have been able to be more freely out, which also then causes more attention to them and invites more backlash. Anna Mueller Everybody asks us that, and I’ll be honest with you, it’s my least favorite question because we just don’t have great data to assess any of these theories. A lot of this really just remains speculation. Social media is something important to consider, but I take a little bit of an issue with the theory that it’s what we should solely be focused on. It’s sort of an excuse to ignore other social problems, like the fact that over that same period, rates of school shootings have increased substantially, and now make things like lockdown drills a normal part of our children’s lives. There’s also been increasing awareness that climate change is a fundamental threat to everyone’s ability to survive and that the cost of college has wildly increased. So we have a lot of pretty challenging things going on. Rachel Cohen I was going to ask you about phones — since as you note there’s a ton of debate right now about their role contributing to worsening mental health, but they didn’t really come up in your book. What role did you see phones play in your research on teen suicide? Anna Mueller Phones facilitated kids talking privately and in spaces that adults couldn’t access. And they meant kids had access to information that their parents weren’t aware they received, like kids would often find out a friend had died by suicide by text. I think that’s something adults need to be really aware of — it means the burden is on us to have meaningful conversations with kids about mental health, suicide, and how to get help because we may not be aware when our kid gets hit with some information that’s going to be relevant. Rachel Cohen But did it seem like the smartphones were causing the mental health problems? Seth Abrutyn Social media didn’t even really come up in the book. When we were in the field [back in 2013–2016], Instagram was out, but it was really more a photographic, artistic thing. Instagram wasn’t about influencers, and Facebook, Vine, and Snapchat were around but kids didn’t all have smartphones yet. Flip phones were still quite available. I think in our original fieldwork, a lot of the young adults were far more impacted by the internet, like they sat at home on a laptop or something like that. In our new fieldwork, what we see are kids who carry the internet on their phones wherever they go. Quickly we’ve habituated to the ubiquity of smartphones and social media. Rachel Cohen In your research, some of the teenagers who died by suicide had loving parents, friends, romantic partners. They didn’t necessarily have mental illness. Can you talk about what you learned with respect to risk factors and protective factors? Anna Mueller In the community where we were working, it was a lot of popular kids who had seemingly perfect lives who were dying by suicide. Some of them probably did have undiagnosed mental illnesses, you know, there was some evidence that they were struggling with things like deep depression or eating disorders or other things. But it was never visible. And so what the community saw was this perfect kid just gone for no reason. It is tough, because on the one hand, what we learned was that this community had really intense expectations for what a good kid and a good family and a good life looked like. And so for kids who didn’t have a lot of life experience to know that there are a lot of options out there for how else to be in this world — they really struggled. Things that helped were having family or other adult mentors who could put things in perspective. Rachel Cohen Life Under Pressure is about youth suicide clusters, and I wanted to ask if you could talk more about this idea of “social contagion,” which comes up several times in your book. It seems community leaders were really nervous about saying or doing the wrong thing in the wake of a youth suicide for fear of contributing to another teenager deciding to take their own life. What does the research on social contagion in this context look like? Anna Mueller Exposure to suicide, either the attempt or death of somebody that a kid cares about — whether they admire them, identify with them, or really love them — can be a pretty painful experience. Suicide is often about escaping pain, and so seeing people role model suicide can increase that vulnerability for kids. Our work suggests that it’s not just pre-existing risk factors, there’s something uniquely painful about exposure to suicide that can introduce suicide as a new way to cope. Seth Abrutyn If we take a step back, suicide is just like almost anything else. Smoking cigarettes, watching television, all the things that we end up doing and liking — a lot of it we’re learning from the people around us. And people are exceptionally vulnerable to influential others. That could be someone that’s very high status that we look up to like a popular kid in school, or it could just be a really close friend that we trust a lot. In the community, where there are these high-status popular kids dying by suicide, if the messaging is not done correctly by adults, if we don’t have adults who can actually help talk through what’s going on and help kids grieve appropriately, the story can easily become, well, for kids who are under pressure and feel distressed, suicide is an option. Rachel Cohen The idea of social contagion has been coming up a lot in debates around youth gender transition too. Some adults say kids are being unduly influenced by their friends and social media regarding things like taking puberty blockers or pursuing gender-affirming surgeries. Other research contests the idea that social contagion is a factor, and some advocates say even the suggestion that gender identity may be susceptible to peer influence is offensive. Does your research in this area offer us any insights here, any more nuanced ways to think about this? Anna Mueller I’m not answering this. We can’t answer this. Sorry. We have ongoing work, and we can’t go there. And I don’t know the literature and we can’t go there. Rachel Cohen Okay, so you don’t think it’s applicable — the social contagion research you’ve studied in the youth suicide context — to other contexts? Seth Abrutyn The only thing I would say is I think the word “contagion” is the word that’s problematic. We’ve tried to actually change that in our own research, and there’s pushback because it’s relatively accepted. It has a sort of folk meaning that everybody can kind of grasp on. The problem is it sounds like how people get the flu in a dormitory, right? But just because everyone shares a heating system and air conditioning system doesn’t mean it will spread like wildfire. Sociologists don’t think of it that way. When behaviors and beliefs spread, it’s usually because people talk about them with each other, or watch people do something and then talk about it. And then they can text that to their friends and talk about it with each other, and in that sense it is contagious, if you want to call it that. I would call it more like diffusion. Rachel Cohen Part of your book is about the need to talk more openly about mental health issues. There’s been this public conversation recently about whether there’s been inadvertent consequences in the push to destigmatize mental illness, with one being that young people may now have become so familiar with the language and frameworks of psychiatric illness that youth can get locked into seeing themselves as unwell. Oxford professor Lucy Foulkes coined the term prevalence inflation to describe the way that some people consume so much information about anxiety disorders that they begin to interpret normal problems of life as signs of decline in mental health, and she warned of self-fulfilling spirals. Psychology professor Darby Saxbe also noted that teenagers, who are still developing their identities, may be particularly susceptible to taking psychological labels to heart. I wanted to invite you to weigh in on these questions and debate. Anna Mueller I’m not sure that I find that idea to be really useful. One of the problems with adults right now is that we’re not listening to the pain that kids are experiencing, or taking it seriously. If I were to advocate for something, I would advocate for seriously listening to kids about their struggles and sources of pain, and working to build a world where kids feel like they matter. Obviously, helping kids build resiliency is incredibly important. We can do a better job at helping our kids navigate challenges, and I’m an advocate of letting kids fail, the road shouldn’t just be perfectly smooth. But I’m pretty fundamentally uncomfortable with not listening to kids’ voices. Rachel Cohen I don’t think anyone’s saying don’t listen to kids, but they’re saying that if you encourage kids to think of themselves as anxious, and if you give kids those certain frameworks to diagnose or understand their problems, and as you noted earlier a lot of this information is coming from social media — Anna Mueller We think of frames as ways for kids to express themselves. As adults, it’s our job to dig deeper into how they’re framing their lives. Can suicide be an idiom of distress? Yes. Research has shown that some kids use the language of suicide as a way to express themselves to the adults in their lives. Similar things with anxiety, but then our job is to unpack that and discover what does that mean. Seth Abrutyn I think what Anna is trying to say, and what our book is trying to say, is that adults are really responsible for the worlds these youth inhabit. And these anxiety frames maybe are something that spreads around on TikTok, but it’s also something that’s being generated by adults, and it’s actually something being generated from real things in their lives, like school shootings. The way that we talk about them, and the way that we don’t listen to them, is maybe not helpful to kids. As a sociologist, we’re sitting there thinking how do we make schools better places? Well, what are adults doing? How are we making schools safer spaces so that this anxiety frame is not something kids are talking about? Rachel Cohen What are the big questions researchers are still grappling with when it comes to youth suicide? Anna Mueller I know one thing that emerged for me and Seth after our book is how can we look at how suicide prevention is enacted in the school building, so that we’re catching kids before they get to that? Since we did the fieldwork for Life Under Pressure, our research has involved working collaboratively with schools to strengthen kids’ ability to get meaningful care. We have begun to see some differences in how schools approach suicide prevention that are actually really salient to whether the school experiences an enduring suicide problem or recurring suicide clusters. Seth Abrutyn Most schools know that trusted adults are a really important part of the school building. And so thinking about how do we get teachers to do little things, like one school building made sure every teacher between classes was outside of their room for five minutes, just standing in the hallway, just saying hi, smiling, and pointing out that you were there. We often think those things don’t make a big impact, but it does. If a kid is not having a good day, maybe they’re not the most popular kid, but if they see that someone remembers them, someone knows them, it makes a real difference.

Franco Zacha for Vox Your neighborhood watering hole is more important than you think. Meng Liu spent years ping-ponging around the world looking for community. It was her dream to live in New York City, but after she found it difficult to make friends, Liu moved to Los Angeles, where she faced similar social roadblocks. Loneliness followed her across the globe to Shanghai, where she again chased a sense of belonging that never came. Thinking back on a comment a friend had made years ago, Liu had an epiphany. “Belonging isn’t some magical place that you can find in your next destination,” she recalled the friend saying. “It is where you feel most connected with the people around you, and that you have people who love you and that you love.” So Liu decided to give New York a second chance. She moved back in 2019 and made a commitment to fostering relationships. Inspired by her own difficulty making friends and the country’s epidemic of loneliness, in 2022 she founded a social club, Wowza Hangout, that brings people together around shared interests and activities. Wowza Hangout has hosted gatherings where people ranging in age from early 20s to late 50s play games, watch movies, sing karaoke, and picnic. All events are free, though Wowza Hangout is experimenting with a subscription model ($14.99 a month for unlimited hangouts, as opposed to monthly organized get-togethers). A crucial component of these hangouts are their settings: board game cafés, bars, museums, parks. They’re venues that populate a vibrant city like New York, but where attendees might feel awkward approaching someone they don’t know. Wowza Hangout not only provides the location but gives people permission to transform each of these physical spaces into a hub for connection — in other words, a third place. First defined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, third places are settings a person frequents beyond their home (the first place) and work (the second place). Third places can include more traditional settings like places of worship, community and recreation centers, parks, and social clubs, but also encompass bars, gyms, malls, makeshift clubhouses in neighborhoods, and even virtual settings like Nextdoor. As Oldenburg described them, third places are great equalizers, spots where regulars of different backgrounds and perspectives can mingle in a location that is comfortable, unpretentious, and low-cost. Even prior to the pandemic, these institutions were shuttering, according to research. As Americans spend more time alone and practice individualized forms of leisure, like marathoning television series on streaming services and passively scrolling on social platforms, they aren’t gathering communally as often as they were in decades past — a shift the political scientist Robert Putnam observed a quarter century ago in his formative book Bowling Alone. You don’t need to take on the herculean task of making new friends to be less lonely. You may just need a third place. High rent and disinvestment in low-income neighborhoods could be drivers in the closure of third place businesses, according to Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor in the Institute of Behavioral Science and the department of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. (Finlay doesn’t yet have data to support this hypothesis, but this summer she hopes to study exactly where third places are closing and how the trends differ by neighborhood.) On a planning level, zoning laws preventing commercial spaces like bars and cafés from building in residential areas further drive the wedge between families and communities. This isn’t to say Americans don’t value third places. “I think that people both wish they had more of them,” says Katherine Giuffre, a professor emerita of sociology at Colorado College, “and at the same time, overlook them or take them for granted.” With some intentionality, experts believe we can recommit to — and reimagine — third places. They may look exactly as we’ve always experienced them. They may not be physical spaces at all. The benefits of third places If one of the many crises that befall our society is loneliness, third places offer a solution. These environments are where the community gathers, where you can be either actively engaged in conversation or passively taking in the bustle around you. At their very best, third places allow people of differing backgrounds to cross paths — to develop what are known as bridging ties. As opposed to our closest connections, bridging social networks encompass people who have varying identities, social and economic resources, and knowledge. “Studies have shown that just having a diversity of folks in your life … more informal and infrequent and unplanned, can be really protective for health and well-being,” Finlay says. “Classically, third places were sites where you could build up these bridging ties.” As a result, third places are trust and relationship builders: You encounter a person frequently enough that you naturally graduate from a polite smile to small talk to perhaps deeper conversation. “You start to get the feeling that maybe I can trust that person if they say hello to me,” Giuffre says. “It’s not the beginning of some scam.” According to a 2007 study, even employees in these places, like bartenders and hairdressers, can provide emotional support to patrons looking for a sympathetic ear. You don’t need to take on the herculean task of making new friends to be less lonely. You may just need a third place. Simply developing acquaintance-like relationships is enough to foster feelings of belonging, studies show. Without third places, “Americans may be losing access to key services, goods, and amenities, in addition to community sites that help buffer against loneliness, stress, and alienation,” Finlay wrote in her 2019 paper detailing the loss of third places. Why we aren’t getting the most out of third places While teaching a master’s level course about building community at Viterbo University, ethics professor Richard Kyte observed students’ piqued interest when discussing third places. Even if they hadn’t heard the term before, Kyte says, they could easily identify these communal relationship breeding grounds. “It would be the kind of place they used to visit, or a place they remembered from their childhood,” says Kyte, the author of Finding Your Third Place: Building Happier Communities (and Making Great Friends Along the Way). “Or a place that they see other people frequenting, and they wish they had in their lives. But not that many people who say, ‘I have a third place and I go to it on a regular basis.’” Aside from the obvious — the pandemic — there are a multitude of reasons why third places aren’t being frequented, supported, or funded. In her study of third place closures, Finlay and colleagues found that between 2008 and 2015, stores selling sporting goods, hobby items, musical instruments, and books decreased by 27 percent, while barbershops, beauty salons, and laundromats dropped by nearly 23 percent. Declining church membership suggests organized religion is no longer the community builder it once was. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, over half of Americans say they would rather live in a larger house where schools, stores, and restaurants are miles away. Despite the fact that most of the country lives near a bar, movie theater, restaurant, or park, the Survey Center on American Life found that 56 percent of Americans in 2021 said they had a third place they frequent, down from 67 percent in 2019. According to Kyte, the separation of residential and commercial real estate means people must rely on cars to access bars and fitness studios. Food- and beverage-focused locations also encourage patrons to purchase their items and leave to make room for the next customer. If you do hope to stay, expect to keep spending. The low-cost luxuriating necessary for healthy third places isn’t considered profitable. Restaurants aren’t the only environments becoming untenable for lingering. Parks with hostile architecture and a lack of bathrooms and water fountains send the signal that they are spaces just for passing through. “They’re meant to be hostile to people who are without homes,” Giuffre says. “But it ends up being hostile to the whole community.” And some third places are increasingly difficult to access at all for certain populations. With fewer hangout options for teens (what spots do exist might require them to be chaperoned), they lack time for unstructured socializing. Older and immunocompromised people are vulnerable to illnesses like Covid-19, flu, and RSV circulating in indoor environments that are not well ventilated. Community- and health-focused efforts implemented during the height of the pandemic, like streeteries, expanded patio areas, and pedestrian-only street closures, have been pared back or abandoned, denying many an opportunity to safely engage with their cities and towns. (On the contrary, some cities, like Los Angeles, have made outdoor dining measures permanent.) When people don’t feel safe in specific contexts, they won’t engage with them. Recently, third places have become a monolith of experience, Finlay says. People are self-segregating based on specific interests, hobbies, or ideologies that tend to skew toward a particular demographic. Interacting with people who look and see the world similarly may deepen our existing connections but don’t facilitate bridging social networks. “We need to facilitate more of these bridging ties and bridging encounters,” Finlay says, “so that we’re not just spending time in an echo chamber, whether it’s online or in person, of people who already think the same way that we do.” However, opting to spend time with people who share similar experiences and backgrounds can be a matter of safety. If you suspect other patrons in a community book club will judge you — or worse, harass you — based on your views or how you present yourself, you’ll avoid those spaces. In her research looking at young people with histories of housing instability and homelessness, Danielle Littman found that this population doesn’t always feel welcomed in modern third places. People who don’t appear as if they “belong” might face questions like “Why is this person here?” or “Are they supposed to be here right now?” says Littman, an assistant professor in the College of Social Work at the University of Utah. The person might be asked to leave. “Even worse,” she says, is “criminalization of just existing in a space. I see some of those practices and policies as inequitable enforcement of third places.” By nature, third places should be diverse, Giuffre says. Everyone has a responsibility to act inclusively so the space is safe and welcome to all. “That can be a lot easier said than done,” she says. “Because the teenagers are loud and the old people don’t want to hear them. But we have to open ourselves up to embracing difference.” How to reimagine third places Experts agree communities are in a collective state of rethinking third places. But how might those places look? In response to the housing affordability crisis, people are moving into smaller homes they can afford, says Jorge González-Hermoso, a research associate at the Urban Institute. In these smaller homes, people might lack leisure amenities, like a backyard or space for a home gym, pushing them into third spaces to seek those services elsewhere. In order to signal that these places are lively and in demand, González-Hermoso says, there must be some form of engagement and activation, whether through exercise classes in a park or kids’ skate nights at a roller rink. This public commitment often comes naturally when the community’s needs are taken into consideration. When the nonprofit Better Block plans public space transformations in cities and towns worldwide, its team first solicits the community’s feedback, says the organization’s executive director, Krista Nightengale. “Valuing the community’s input and not only listening, but watching what they do and how they respond to a space,” she says, “is a huge thing.” In the parking lot outside of Better Block’s offices, for instance, four parking spaces were transformed into a small basketball court where students from a nearby school now organically gather. “Our parking lot has now become a third place for many of those students,” Nightengale says, “where they’ll bring their basketballs, they’ll play after school, or they’ll just simply sit in the patio furniture that we’ve put out there and hang out.” In her research, Littman says people are looking for third places to meet basic needs — amenities like a safe place to nap or free snacks — especially if they are not getting those needs met at home or work or school. To make third places as inclusive as possible, Better Block ensures park signs reflect the diverse languages spoken by members in the community or use images like emojis to convey messages, Nightengale says. The organization also aims to make the spaces ADA accessible. Comfortable seating and shade are also integral to making a space comfortable for all. Despite fears that the furniture may be stolen or vandalized, those incidents almost never transpire, Nightengale says. “When you show a space is loved and taken care of, people tend to treat it the same way.” Perhaps the most accessible third place of all isn’t necessarily a physical one. Online platforms can offer people in rural communities, people with limited mobility, and people with marginalized identities safe and affirming ways to connect. While many potential benefits of online third places haven’t been studied, Finlay has spoken with study participants who say online concerts, for instance, have allowed them to enjoy an event they wouldn’t have experienced otherwise. She has also heard from people who use Nextdoor because, despite it being online, they can still interact with locals. Younger generations may prefer apps like Pokémon Go, she says, another platform that filters reality through the screen — and gets people outside. Chat rooms and social media sites centered around specific interests and hobbies are also popular online third places, Finlay says. However, these online forums come with their own complications, including harassment from other, sometimes anonymous, users and less welcoming attitudes toward people with differing perspectives. When it comes to established environments that serve the needs of as many people as possible, experts agree that public parks are the closest we have to an ideal third place. Parks are preferably welcoming to all members of the community for a variety of activities; they ideally have bathrooms, water fountains, and cooling tree cover; they’re free and open daily. It might be easier for parents of children playing to chat with one another than for a picnicker to approach a jogger, but events — like concerts, art installations, and farmers markets — can help bring more people together, Giuffre says. But funding and support for parks isn’t always a given. “It’s a policy decision to say we’re going to have money put into these public spaces from our tax dollars so that everyone can participate,” Giuffre says. How to find your own third place To get the most out of third places, you’ve got to find one you enjoy frequenting. Mine your interests, Littman says, to discover a location that fulfills your needs. For instance, if you love books but don’t necessarily want to discuss them with others, find a bar or café that offers silent reading nights for people who want to read communally. See what public and commercial spaces are in your community: Do any of them offer classes you’d want to take? Are they spots you’d want to hang out and become a regular? Invite a friend, coworker, or family member to check it out with you. Immersing yourself in the culture of the space requires intentionality, consciously caring for your, and your community’s, social health. This might require some actionable changes, like dedicating time each week to spend an hour or so in a neighborhood hangout, going into a restaurant or coffee shop instead of picking up, leaving your phone in your pocket while waiting in line, engaging with people in small but meaningful ways. Don’t become discouraged if an interaction isn’t as successful as you hoped, says Liu, the founder of meetup group Wowza Hangout. To be a part of something, you must consistently show up. Soon enough you’ll naturally braid into the fabric of the third place; you’ll become a familiar face, a driver of conversation, a person to say hello to. In an age of loneliness, that might be one of the most powerful tools of all.

Signs hang at George Washington University’s Gaza solidarity encampment, created by students in conjunction with other DC-area universities, in Washington, DC on April 25, 2024. | Allison Bailey/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images And is it feasible? Plus three other questions about the student protesters’ demands. A core demand at the heart of the protests over the war in Gaza currently roiling college campuses across the US and around the world: that universities divest from Israel. That means withdrawing funds their endowments have invested in companies that are linked to Israel. Their demands have revived a long-running debate about whether universities should even consider ethics in their investment decisions and whether there is an ethical approach to divestment from Israel, or if these institutions should simply maximize returns. There is also a question of whether these divestment demands, which have been criticized by some pundits as overly broad, are feasible to meet or will even be effective. Their demands come as the Palestinian death toll (now over 34,000 people) only keeps rising and as full-blown famine breaks out in northern Gaza, with the rest of the territory remaining at risk. The US Student Movement for Palestinian Liberation released a statement April 21 indicative of what the protests are broadly calling for; it asked universities to “completely divest our tuition dollars from — and to cut all institutional ties to — the zionist entity as well as all companies complicit in the colonization of Palestine.” But students on some campuses have articulated more specific demands, seeking to focus their efforts on divesting from major weapons manufacturers that universities have invested in, ensuring that their universities no longer accept research funding from the Israeli military, or ending academic partnerships with Israeli institutions. Some universities, including Columbia University, have already rejected those calls and have swiftly called the police on protesters, prompting further escalation. Others — including Brown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota — have agreed to consider them. On Thursday, Evergreen State College became one of the first to approve an effort to divest. Divestment has been a tactic embraced by protesters in previous student movements opposing the South African apartheid regime and fossil fuel companies contributing to climate change. Those calls for divestment have had varying degrees of success — to what degree depends on how you define that success in terms of their financial or political impact. The movement to divest from Israel borrows from the traditions of those historical movements. But will it work the same way? What is divestment? Divestment is, essentially, reversing an investment. And the goal of divestment movements generally is “generating social and political pressure on the companies that are targets of divestment — stigmatizing behavior,” said Cutler Cleveland, a Boston University sustainability professor who was involved in the decade-long fossil fuel divestment campaign there. Current calls for divestment from Israel are an outgrowth of the broader Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which originated in 2005 among Palestinian civil society groups after several failures in the two-state peace process and was inspired by the movement to divest from South African apartheid. The BDS movement’s website argues that, since Israel’s founding in 1948 when it forced 700,000 Palestinians to flee their homes, the country has “denied Palestinians their fundamental rights and has refused to comply with international law” while maintaining a “regime of settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation over the Palestinian people.” The BDS movement has therefore called on banks, local councils, churches, pension funds, and universities to “withdraw investments from the State of Israel and all Israeli and international companies that sustain Israeli apartheid.” However, critics of BDS say that it is inherently antisemitic in that it “effectively reject[s] or ignore[s] the Jewish people’s right of self-determination” and that if implemented, it “would result in the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. Student groups behind the recent protests on college campuses have denounced antisemitism, which they do not equate with opposing Israel. But there have been incidents of antisemitism, and some Jewish students say they feel unsafe on their own campuses as the target of threatening behavior and rhetoric. The BDS movement has recently notched new wins: Evergreen State College’s announcement last week, and one from Ireland’s sovereign investment fund in April stating that it will divest from six Israeli companies, including some of its biggest banks, based on their operations in the Palestinian territories. How endowments work Understanding whether it’s feasible for universities to divest from Israel requires understanding how their endowments work. Endowments are basically large rainy day investment funds whose returns far outpace growth from new donations, allowing universities to supplement tuition dollars and fees in supporting their daily operations. Harvard University has the largest endowment, at $49.5 billion in fiscal year 2023 — bigger than the GDP of more than 120 countries — but US university endowments average about $1.6 billion. Most universities are “very wary or averse to using the endowment as a political tool,” said Georges Dyer, executive director of the Intentional Endowments Network. That’s because university endowments have both a financial interest in maximizing returns — and a legal duty to serve the financial health of their institutions. Today, the vast majority of universities manage their endowments through external investment management companies, Dyer said. They might invest in private equity funds, hedge funds, or public companies, usually via index funds where they are one of many investors putting their money into a pool that is invested in a portfolio of stocks and bonds designed to track a certain financial market index such as the S&P 500. The portfolios of these funds are not tailored to the preferences of a particular university, which may make it difficult to divest from particular causes. These funds also present challenges in terms of transparency. The companies included in index funds are publicly reported. But hedge funds or private equity funds may not even disclose to their own clients where their investments lie, which is part of their competitive advantage. Universities with larger endowments tend to allocate more of their investments to these private investments, Dyer said. And that can make divestment difficult. What we can learn from past divestment movements Two major divestment movements have laid the groundwork for the current protests. In the 1980s, student activists pushed their universities to divest from firms that supported or profited from South African apartheid. Politically, they were effective: 155 universities ultimately divested. And in 1986, the US government also bowed to pressure from protesters and enacted a divestment policy. Along with increasing protests within South Africa led by organizations including the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, and trade unions, that kind of international pressure helped force the white South African government to begin negotiations that ultimately ended apartheid, at least officially. A few things helped make this movement successful. For one, protesters faced little pushback at the time given that much of the political establishment was embarrassed by the US’s ties to apartheid. Investments in commingled funds that are now favored by universities were not as widely used back then. And the interconnected, global economy as we know it today had not yet taken shape, making it practicable to isolate companies based in South Africa or with major South African interests. Currently, there is an ongoing movement to push universities to divest from fossil fuels, popularized by climate activist and Middlebury professor Bill McKibben. About 250 universities have at least committed to do so after years of campus activism, though this has overall had a negligible impact on the finances of fossil fuel companies (with the exception of coal companies), suggesting that it may not have yet had the impact hoped. Cleveland said that part of what helped persuade his university to divest in 2021 is the undeniable fact that fossil fuel companies have driven the climate crisis, which provided “a basis to argue that the university has a responsibility to align its investment decisions with its educational research.” Practically, fossil fuel divestment was also feasible. Though there are some quibbles about what constitutes a fossil fuel company — for example, do power plants that use fossil fuels count? — it’s a generally easy-to-define group. It’s also become easier to disentangle fossil fuel investments from an endowment’s portfolio because fund managers have started to offer purportedly fossil fuel-free funds, seemingly in response to external pressure. And finally, there’s a financial argument for divestment from fossil fuels: “If and when society moves toward a low-carbon economy, those investments in the fossil fuel companies will become worth less because much of their value is based on the fossil fuel reserves that won’t be used,” Dyer said. Can divestment work in the context of Israel? Universities divesting broadly from Israeli companies or companies that do business in Israel might not have much of a financial impact. “The data suggests that, economically, anything short of official sanctions by important economic partners such as the United States or European Union would be unlikely to produce anything near the kind of economic pressure BDS supporters envision,” researchers at the Brookings Institution concluded. Broad divestment from Israel would also be practically very difficult. Israel has many research and development partnerships with US entities, and is also a major player in industries such as computer technology, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. Many major multinational companies do business in Israel or with Israel, such as Google and Cisco. To exclude them entirely would require withdrawing from many kinds of commingled investment funds. It might be more practicable for protesters to target a specific list of companies, as students at Brown University are doing. They are seeking divestment from 11 companies that Brown directly invests in, accounting for less the 10 percent of its endowment: AB Volvo, Airbus, Boeing, DXC, General Dynamics, General Electric, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Oaktree Capital, Raytheon, and United Technologies. The question, however, is where universities would draw the line. “There’s the very subjective nature of the assessment of the war in Gaza that I think puts you in a very different terrain than the fossil fuel divestment debate,” Cleveland said. “It will just be so arbitrary about who you’re going to include and not include.” And even with more piecemeal efforts to divest, universities and students would need to weigh any financial hit to the endowment that would hurt the university community and its mission. “Students need to be confronted with moral questions, such as whether Columbia being associated with defense contractors is worth the tuition discount,” Oliver Hart, an economics professor at Harvard, and Luigi Zingales, a professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, write in Compact. It’s hard to know exactly what the costs of divestment to universities might be in the context of Israel. Chris Marsicano, an assistant professor of education studies at Davidson College, told PBS that research including his own has shown that divestment in the fossil fuel context had “at worst, a negligible effect for institutions like Stanford and Dayton and Syracuse and, in many cases, may have had a positive effect.” What would make divestment successful? Calls for divestment at universities have always been a means to a greater end, whether it be bringing down an apartheid regime or reversing climate change. In the current context, what student protesters really want is an end to the fighting in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, and the end of what they see as the injustices Israel, as the biggest cumulative beneficiary of US foreign aid, has exacted on Palestinians for decades. Whether universities ultimately divest and whether that has any material financial impact on Israel might be less important to the protesters than whether their calls for divestment alone can make the status quo politically untenable. The question is whether the political impact of the protests is lining up with that goal. Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have already latched on to the protests as an example of America’s need for their brand of “law and order.” “The movements themselves become a potent symbol for the other side,” said Matthew Nisbet, a professor of communication, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern University. Both US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have publicly addressed the protests on US college campuses, suggesting that they are feeling at least some pressure to react — but are not bowing to it yet. Biden said Thursday that the protests had not caused him to reconsider his strategy in the Middle East, and his aides remain confident that the protests will not overshadow his case for reelection in 2024. But young people leading the protests represent an important constituency for Biden. “Demanding financial disclosure and asking US universities to break their financial ties has proven to be very powerful and threatening,” said Jennie Stephens, a professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern University who has written a forthcoming book about climate justice on campus. How powerful and threatening, however, remains to be seen. A version of the story appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Palestinians in eastern Rafah migrate to Khan Yunis after the Israeli army’s announcement on May 6, 2024. | Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images The Israel-Hamas war went from a potential short-term ceasefire to strikes on Rafah on Monday. Israel’s long-threatened invasion of Rafah looks like it could be imminent. Israel conducted airstrikes Monday on the southern Palestinian city, currently home to about 1.4 million people who have been displaced throughout Israel’s war on Gaza. It did so one day after ordering at least 100,000 Palestinians to evacuate from the eastern part of the city, prompting scenes of families fleeing north to areas heavily damaged by nearly eight months of fighting. The combination of the two events — plus a vote from Israel’s war Cabinet on Monday to move forward with the operation — indicates a larger operation could be on the way. Israel maintains that four Hamas battalions are operating from the southern city. Rafah is also one of the only places in Gaza that Israeli forces have not destroyed and is the site of two border crossings — critical routes for the humanitarian aid people in Gaza so desperately need. This all came as representatives from Hamas, Israel, Egypt, Qatar, and the US gathered in Cairo to discuss the terms of a potential ceasefire. Hamas reportedly agreed to a proposal by Qatari and Egyptian officials on Monday. Israel has rejected that plan, saying that the agreement is not aligned with the proposal drafted by Israeli and US negotiators. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly warned that Israel will attack Rafah, despite US admonitions not to do so without a clear and credible plan for protecting civilians — which State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the US had not yet seen during a press briefing Monday. Given the destruction of Gaza and the staggering number of deaths — at least 34,500, some 14,000 of whom were children — aid groups and international organizations like the UN are warning that an invasion could be catastrophic due to the immense crowding there and could cut off critical aid routes. However, as of Monday evening, Netanyahu’s government appears committed to its maximalist military objective of destroying Hamas. Israel has consolidated operational control of wide swaths of Gaza, including operations that razed and captured major cities like Khan Younis and Gaza City. In recent months, Rafah has become the focus of the war. Given Israel’s belief that it houses many of Hamas’s remaining fighters, the country’s right wing has been clamoring for an invasion there as the necessary step toward “total victory” and Netanyahu has framed it as an existential battle. But considering Israel’s moves to entrench its control of the north for months or years to come, the possibility of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seizing Rafah raises dire questions about the future of Gaza after the war. And as the concentration of the vast majority of Gaza’s population is there (and the fact that the city serves as the territory’s main aid hub), in the short term, a full-scale operation spells a humanitarian disaster. What’s happening in Rafah? On Monday, the prime minister’s office posted on X, “The War Cabinet unanimously decided that Israel continues the operation in Rafah to exert military pressure on Hamas in order to promote the release of our hostages and the other goals of the war” while continuing to negotiate a potential ceasefire. That announcement was followed by IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari posting on X, “IDF forces are now attacking and operating against the targets of the terrorist organization Hamas in a targeted manner” in eastern Rafah Monday night local time. According to the Jerusalem Post, Hagari said an aerial operation started Monday in preparation for a ground offensive. Israeli forces air-dropped leaflets to people in east Rafah Sunday night warning them to go to a safe zone; however, the operation in east Rafah began just hours later, according to Hagari. The tactics echo ones used in the beginning of the war, when the military urged people to leave northern Gaza, giving them 24 hours to leave the area before a proposed operation (Israel ultimately delayed the strike). As of now, there are few details about what exactly that operation entails — and how many of the 100,000 people urged to evacuate the area made it out to areas near Khan Younis, a city roughly 5 miles north of Rafah, before the operation began. Rafah was supposed to be a safe zone for the roughly 1.7 million people now sheltering there. Israeli operations in northern and central Gaza leveled about 70 percent of the housing in the region, as Abdallah al-Dardari, director of the regional bureau for Arab states at the UN Development Program, said in a press briefing last week. Israel has repeatedly engaged in strikes against Rafah, despite the risk to civilians due to population density, including one on Sunday in retaliation for a Hamas rocket attack on the Kerem Shalom border crossing, which killed four Israeli soldiers and reportedly may have helped accelerate Israel’s timeline for the Rafah operation by stoking fears of Hamas’s capabilities. The Israeli strikes killed at least 19 people, according to Palestinian health officials. The most immediate concern of any operation is humanitarian; military engagement poses a great risk to the people in Rafah, and the UN warned Friday that hundreds of thousands of people would be “at imminent risk of death” should an invasion go forward. Humanitarian supplies including food, fuel, clean water, and medical aid are already in short supply, and some medical aid groups, like MedGlobal, have opted to suspend their operations in light of the operation. “There is nowhere safe to go: for over six months, Israel has routinely killed civilians and aid workers, including in clearly marked ‘safe zones’ and ‘evacuation routes,’” Abby Maxman, the president and CEO of OxFam America, said in a statement Monday. “The notion that the 100,000 civilians being evacuated by Israel will be safe and protected is simply not credible.” It’s also unclear how safe the evacuation zones are. For example, Israel targeted al-Mawasi, a supposed humanitarian zone, in February when an IDF tank fired on a house there, killing the wife and daughter-in-law of a worker with the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders (MSF). “Six other people were injured, five of whom were women or children,” according to a news release from the group. “Bullets were also fired at the clearly marked MSF building, hitting the front gate, the building’s exterior, and the interior of the ground floor.” (The Israeli army told France 24 it had “fired at a building … where terror activity is occurring.”) What are Israel’s goals in Rafah? The ostensible goal of the operation is to go after four Hamas battalions that the government says are based in Rafah. Israel has made various claims about the number of militants the armed forces have killed during the war on Gaza, suggesting numbers as high as 12,000. Hamas does not disclose the number of its fighters killed. Though Israel claims there are six Hamas battalions left — the four in Rafah and two in central Gaza — it’s difficult to assess whether that’s true. “You’ve got the official government line saying that this is the last bastion of Hamas — whatever remains of their battalions,” Tahani Mustafa, senior Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Vox. “But then you’ve got military leaks that are coming out, with some members of the Israeli military saying, ‘Actually, Israel has been completely unsuccessful in destroying a single battalion,’ and Hamas’s 24, 25 battalions, they assume they are still very much intact.” “There’s a consensus that Hamas still has at least half of its fighters in the field,” Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox. Israel has said that its goal is the destruction of Hamas, politically and militarily. Because of that, even in the event of a ceasefire and an agreement releasing the hostages Hamas still holds from its October 7 raid, Israel would not have met its goals, perhaps leaving the door open for further actions in Rafah, and Gaza more broadly. Even a more limited incursion into Rafah — if that is even possible — creates some political risks, including the potential for Egypt to reverse a decades-long peace deal with Israel, as it threatened to do in February should Israel invade the city. France has also warned against an invasion; the foreign ministry said that forcibly displacing people from Rafah would constitute a war crime. The US has also warned Israel against launching any invasion without a plan for civilian protection, but there has been no forceful condemnation from the Biden administration, nor any threat to US military aid to Israel so far. What about the ceasefire process? Israel and Hamas have not agreed to a ceasefire since November, when a week-long pause in hostilities saw the return of some 105 hostages and 240 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. The latest round of peace talks have stalled over the past two months because the bargaining positions are fundamentally at odds. “Unfortunately, we’re in a situation where both sides — their demands are mutually exclusive,” Mustafa said. “You’ve got Hamas that’s insisting on a complete and total cessation of hostilities, a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, that is about one-fifth of its size pre-October 7. It’s demanding the return of people from the south back to the north.” According to Reuters, Hamas negotiators agreed to a three-phase plan consisting of two six-week ceasefire phases during which Hamas would release Israeli hostages in return for a phased military retreat and the release of Palestinian prisoners. The third phase would include implementing a reconstruction plan in Gaza and ending the years-long blockade on the territory. Now, Israeli leadership has said that it is using the Rafah offensive as a pressure tactic — a phased operation to pressure Hamas into accepting its demands for a ceasefire. Each side has blamed the other for the failure to reach an agreement, but fundamentally, as Mustafa said, the positions of the two sides boil down to: stop the war, and continue fighting, which cannot coexist. Netanyahu and the Israeli public see this as a multi-year war, Alterman said. “They don’t want this to end anytime soon, because they want the possibility of October 7 ever happening again to be eliminated,” he said. “Now, whether there’s a military way to get there or not, is a separate question.”

Inspectors and police are seen raiding the Al Jazeera offices in Jerusalem, Israel, on May 5, 2024, and confiscating its equipment. | Saeed Qaq/NurPhoto via Getty Images Press freedom is in a state of emergency in Israel and Gaza. Israel’s decision to shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in the country signaled an escalation in an already hostile environment for journalists covering the war in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has previously called Al Jazeera a “mouthpiece for Hamas,” accused the Qatar-based news network of threatening Israel’s national security and used powers granted under an emergency law to shutter the outlet. He has not identified what specifically about Al Jazeera’s coverage the government believed crossed that line. “The government headed by me unanimously decided: the incitement channel Al Jazeera will be closed in Israel,” Netanyahu wrote Sunday on X in Hebrew. For years, many experts in Israeli politics have been warning about the country’s gradual embrace of far-right undemocratic principles. Now, as Israel prepares for an imminent invasion of Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, the Netanyahu government is impinging on freedom of the press in a way that may limit oversight and should put the world’s liberal democracies on guard. “This move sets an extremely alarming precedent for restricting international media outlets working in Israel,” Carlos Martinez de la Serna, program director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement. “The Israeli cabinet must allow Al-Jazeera and all international media outlets to operate freely in Israel, especially during wartime.” What we know Months ago, the Israeli government adopted an emergency law to censor foreign journalists deemed threats to national security while the war in Gaza proceeds. Pro-Iranian channel Al Mayadeen was previously censored under the law, with Netanyahu’s security cabinet citing its “wartime efforts to harm [Israel’s] security interests and to serve the enemy’s goals” following the October 7 attack by Hamas, which receives funding from Iran. Two of the network’s journalists were subsequently killed in an Israeli bombing in southern Lebanon. The government has been talking about invoking the law against Al Jazeera since at least early November, when communications minister Shlomo Karhi claimed the network had “photographed and published” the positioning of IDF forces, “broadcast military announcements by Hamas,” and “distorted facts in a way which incited masses of people to riot.” On Sunday, the government finally brought down the ax, restricting the network’s ability to broadcast from Israel and to be viewed by Israelis, as well as seizing broadcast equipment. The block is in place for 45 days, with the option of a 45-day extension. In a statement, Al Jazeera called the decision a “criminal act that violates human rights and the basic right to access of information.” It’s not clear how the decision will impact the network’s ability to cover the war from Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Why does it matter? The decision to shut down Al Jazeera is the latest escalation against journalists trying to cover the war both in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories. Throughout the war, Israel has said that it cannot guarantee journalists’ safety in Gaza and has denied foreign journalists access to the region. As of May 3, at least 97 journalists and media workers have been killed over the course of the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. By some counts, that’s more than were killed during the entire two-decade Vietnam War. Journalists covering the war have also faced assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship, as well as contended with communications blackouts in Gaza. There are also multiple reports of killings of reporters’ family members in Palestine. Under international law, journalists don’t constitute a separate, protected class from civilians overall. However, because it is illegal to intentionally target civilians or launch an attack that does not distinguish between military targets and civilians, it is also illegal to intentionally target journalists. Media cannot be considered military targets even when they are being employed for propaganda purposes unless they make an “effective contribution to military action” or they “incite war crimes, genocide or acts of violence,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Nevertheless, independent investigations from Reporters Without Borders have alleged that Israel has intentionally targeted journalists on multiple occasions. For Israel, which is increasingly losing the international war of public opinion, all of this is a means of undermining independent reporting that could further damage its image abroad. It could also obscure the reality on the ground. The war has made independent reporting difficult, with dozens of outlets’ offices destroyed, in addition to journalists being killed. In that vacuum, Hamas and Israel frequently offer dueling narratives that are often impossible to verify.

It’s only the beginning of the cicada eruption. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images Trillions of these noisy insects are set to take to the skies in the first double brood event in 221 years. For the first time in 221 years, this spring will seebillions, if not trillions, of cicadas take to the skies in a rare synchronized event that will transform our ecosystems for years to come. In forests across the United States, two groups, or “broods,” of these noisy insects will crawl out from their underground dwellings to sprout wings, mate, lay eggs, and eventually die. In the Midwest, there’s Brood XIX, which pops up every 13 years, and Brood XIII, which emerges every 17 years and is concentrated in the Southeast. The mass eruption, scientists believe, is strategic, but many mysteries about cicadas remain: Why do their alarm clocks use prime numbers? For that matter, how do they keep time? We’ll explain everything we know about this spectacular double brood event here. Follow along.

Rapper Drake at “Lil Baby & Friends Birthday Celebration Concert” at State Farm Arena on December 9, 2022, in Atlanta. | Prince Williams/WireImage Everyone was fighting with everyone — until Kendrick Lamar proved to be the ultimate challenger. To borrow a phrase from our foremost cultural observer, Azealia Banks, the boys are fighting. Since the explosive drop of producer Metro Boomin and rapper Future’s first joint album, We Don’t Trust You, on March 22, a cold war has broken out involving the duo and the rest of hip-hop’s top-tier (male) millennial roster: Drake, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, and A$AP Rocky. It’s been a strange few weeks, with shots being thrown in an extremely public and increasingly amusing way. In an utterly baffling move, Cole made a public apology for his own diss track, bowing out of the beef early. Meanwhile, like any argument you might see among a group of rich women on Bravo, Drake is being put on blast for his rumored plastic surgery. (Thank you, Megan Thee Stallion.) This isn’t the first time this particular group of A-listers — all of whom dominated the mainstream rap charts of the 2010s — have exchanged lyrical blows. In particular, Drake and Lamar have sneak-dissed each other for a while now. However, to the average music listener, all these men have a more well-known history of collaboration, including features, a joint album, and tour stops. Lamar’s fiery verse, however, on the We Don’t Trust You track “Like That,” has shattered any remaining semblance of camaraderie. In the weeks since, Future and Metro have released yet another rage-fueled album, hilariously titled We Still Don’t Trust You. Drake clunkily released his own sprawling diss, “Push Ups,” name-dropping everyone from SZA to Maroon 5 to Swifties. (Did I mention Uma Thurman is also involved?) Lamar responded with two back-to-back disses: first, the scathing track “euphoria,” and, later, “6:16 in LA,” which had a surprising producer credit from Taylor Swift’s righthand man, Jack Antonoff. Over the weekend, though, tensions between Lamar and Drake reached a fever pitch. The rappers exchanged several explosive diss tracks with some pretty dark, criminal allegations. It was Kendrick who ultimately seemed more prepared. After nearly 15 tumultuous years in the game, it’s no surprise that Drake has once again found himself on the receiving end of some hate. At first, it seemed like this latest feud was exactly what rap’s sensitive king needed in a rather uninspired era in his career, defined by a rather dull musical output and gross jabs at women. However, following Lamar’s verbal lashings, a PR cleanup may be needed. Who’s beefing with who? Johnny Nunez/Getty Images for the Recording Academy Kendrick Lamar wins the Best Rap Album award for Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers during the 65th Grammy Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 5, 2023, in Los Angeles, California. A few weeks ago, Future and Metro essentially released a breakup album from their frequent collaborator and former comrade, Drake. (Drake and Future have nearly 30 collaborations combined, and Metro executive-produced their 2015 mixtape What A Time to Be Alive.) We Don’t Trust You is packed with subliminal messages seemingly directed at Drake, regarding his shady maneuvers. However, it was Kendrick’s relatively gentle prodding on the track “Like That” that was ultimately the most incendiary. On the track — which has sat at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in a row now — he raps “Motherfuck the big three, it’s just big me,” renouncing his informal association with rap peers Drake and Cole. On the recent Drake song “First Person Shooter,” off his latest album For All the Dogs, Cole claimed on his guest verse that he, Drake, and Lamar are the “Big 3” of the current era of hip-hop. Nevertheless, Lamar’s ire on “Like That” is mostly pointed at his noted frenemy Drake, brushing off his purportedly unstoppable commercial success. “Your best work is a light pack,” he asserts. “N—, Prince outlived Mike Jack.” Cole responded first on April 5 with the track “7-Minute Drill,” featured on his aptly titled mixtape Might Delete Later. Cole throws shots at Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning discography, calling his latest album Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers “tragic” and claiming his Grammy-winning sophomore album Good Kid, Maad City “put [listeners] to sleep.” He also promises to “humble” Lamar if “push comes to shove.” However, by April 10, Cole had rescinded his warning shot, including removing “7-Minute Drill” from streaming platforms. At his annual Dreamville Festival, he issued a heavily mocked quasi-apology to Lamar. “I tried to jab [Lamar] back, and I try to keep it friendly,” he told the crowd in North Carolina. “But at the end of the day when I listen to it, and when it comes out and I see the talk, that don’t sit right with my spirit.” Before Drake could unleash his own diss, Future and Metro released the follow-up, We Still Don’t Trust You, on April 12. This time, A$AP Rocky got some punches in. On the song “Show of Hands,” he rapped “N—s in they feelings over women. What, you hurt or something? I smash before you birthed, son. Flacko hit it first, son.” This is presumably a response to Drake apparently dissing A$AP and his partner Rihanna, whom Drake previously dated, on his song “Fear of Heights.” (Fans have also speculated that A$AP means he previously slept with the mother of Drake’s son.) Another one of Drake’s most famous industry mates, The Weeknd, appears on both Future and Metro albums. However, on We Still Don’t Trust You’s eighth track, “All to Myself,” he sings, “I thank God that I never signed my life away.” Fans interpreted that as a jab about Drake’s label OVO Sound, which, despite his heavy association with the label, The Weeknd ultimately never signed to. Who is Drake dissing on “Push Ups”? On Saturday, April 13, Drake’s long-awaited response titled “Push Ups (Drop & Give Me Fifty)” mysteriously made its way to the internet. The seemingly unmixed demo made many social media users speculate whether the song was AI-generated before noted hip-hop commentator DJ Akademiks eventually played it — noticeably with some tweaks, like the omission of a line about P. Diddy and a different beat — on his livestream. Hip-hop radio station Power 105 also streamed a high-quality version of the song. Given Drake’s comments on Instagram over the weekend, including a photo of Uma Thurman single-handedly taking on a group of fighters in the 2003 film Kill Bill, all signs point to the track being legitimate. That said, “Push Ups” is a hefty (and expectedly humorous) diss record, taking aim at Drake’s aforementioned opps while pulling some other parties into the crossfire. One of them is the Weeknd’s manager, CashXO, who he accuses of “blowing Abel’s bread trickin.” He also takes shots at Memphis Grizzlies player Ja Morant, who fans are speculating he was previously in a love triangle with. In probably the silliest development of this multi-pronged feud, he throws some digs at rapper Rick Ross, another frequent collaborator of his. “This n— turning 50,” Drake raps. “Every song that made it on the chart he got it from Drizzy.” Ross swiftly followed up with his own diss called “Champagne Moments,” which quickly went viral. Among other insults and accusations, he calls Drake, who’s mixed, “white boy” and claims he got a nose job. Johnny Nunez/WireImage Drake and Rick Ross at P. Diddy’s Ciroc The New Years Eve Party at his home on December 31, 2013, in Miami Beach, Florida. As for Lamar, Drake offers a pretty comprehensive rebuttal, poking fun at Lamar for apparently wearing a “size 7 shoe” and his collaborations with pop acts like Maroon 5 and Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” (Lest we forget, Drake has also linked up with Swift for a check.) He also names some artists who he feels have surpassed Lamar’s stardom, including SZA, who’s signed to Lamar’s own Top Dawg Entertainment label. (She apparently doesn’t want to be involved.) There’s also a bar that many listeners, including DJ Akademiks, interpreted as an audacious mention of Lamar’s fiancé, Whitney Alford (“I be with some bodyguards like Whitney”). However, this could also be a misreading of a more obvious reference to the Whitney Houston film, The Bodyguard. Drake’s latest round with Kendrick took a particularly dark turn Ahead of Lamar dropping his response, “euphoria,” Drake released another diss track for Lamar on April 19 called “Taylor Made Freestyle” using AI-generated vocals from 2Pac and Snoop Dogg to “spit” on his behalf. Drake’s weaponization of artificial intelligence, specifically regarding the deceased Tupac Shakur, generated mixed responses online. Some fans were amused by his “innovation,” while others, including Snoop, seemed downright confused. However, after his and Lamar’s most recent round of disses, these criticisms would be the least of his concerns. On April 30, Lamar finally dropped his rebuttal titled “euphoria” on streaming platforms. He spends most of the 6-minute track poking holes in Drake’s public persona. Among other digs, he questions the Canadian rapper’s proximity to Black American culture and his relationships with women. A few days later, Lamar followed up with “6:16 in LA,” claiming that Drake has a “leak” in his camp. Presumably, Drake wanted to get ahead of any dirt Lamar could possibly expose by dropping the track “Family Matters” this past Friday, along with a music video. In addition to Lamar, Drake has some more words for Ross, The Weeknd, and even Pharrell Williams. However, it’s Lamar’s fiancée, Whitney Alford, who’s the primary target of Drake’s claims. First, he suggests that one of Lamar’s children is actually fathered by his general manager, Dave Free, who’s also the former president of Lamar’s former label, Top Dawg Entertainment. Then he makes the more troubling allegation that Lamar “puts his hands on” Alford. “They hired a crisis management team to clean up the fact that you beat on your queen,” he says at the end of the track. Seemingly tipped off by a mole, Lamar followed up just a few minutes later with “meet the grahams,” with cover art featuring a box of the weight-loss drug Ozempic supposedly prescribed to Drake. In that song, Lamar addresses his verses to Drake’s son, Adonis, and Drake’s parents. “Dear Adonis, I’m sorry that man is your father,” he bluntly opens the track. He also dedicated a verse to Drake’s alleged 11-year-old daughter, who would be the second child the rapper has kept hidden from the public. Drake, however, was quick to jump on Instagram and shut down the claim that he had a secret daughter. More strikingly, though, Lamar refers to Drake as a “predator” and even likens him to Harvey Weinstein. Later that evening, Lamar dropped yet another track — this time, produced by DJ Mustard, who seemingly also has beef with Drake — “Not Like Us,” where he outright calls Drake a “pedophile.” In particular, social media lost it over the triple entendre, “tryna strike a chord, and it’s probably A-minor.” On May 5, it seemed like Drake was ready to bow out after releasing the track “The Heart Part 6.” In addition to the curious claim that he purposely planted false information for Lamar to use, he spends most of the song denying that he sleeps with underage girls. He even addresses a controversial incident from 2018, when Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown, who was then 14 years old, stated in an interview that she texted the rapper about boys. In a haphazard move, Drake attempts to connect these claims to Lamar’s own trauma, referencing the “one record where [Lamar] said [he] got molested” titled “Mother I Sober” — only Lamar doesn’t state that he was sexually abused on the song. In rapping about his cousin who was accused of sexual assault, he claims twice on the track that his cousin didn’t touch him, despite his family not believing him. Drake ends the song with a rambling spoken outro, similar to Nicki Minaj’s Megan Thee Stallion diss “Big Foot” earlier this year. “I’m not going to lie,” he says. “This shit was some good exercise.” In a noticeably exhausted tone, he says “it is what it is,” seemingly waving a white flag. Drake has previously thrived in beefs — but can he win when the whole industry is against him? For the most part, Drake has handled his public gang-up with an expected sense of humor and irreverence. However, with the latest releases, he seems to be fighting a battle he can’t win, using wishy-washy bars to attempt to toss off some serious allegations. It’s worth noting that Drake’s domestic-abuse claims against Lamar are just as serious. Nevertheless, rap fans on social media seem more invested in the seedy gossip that’s surrounded Drake’s mostly private romantic life, including these unsettling accusations about underage girls. Plus, after years of dominating the rap scene and making enemies out of several rappers, it seems social media users are ready to see the rapper taken down a few pegs. @xeviuniverse Everyone has their own reasons to dislike him but are aware of everyone elses reasons, makes him unlikable#greenscreen ♬ original sound - Xevi As anyone who’s even slightly followed rap over the past decade and a half can attest, this isn’t Drake’s first time engaging in warfare with his peers. Most famously, his career has seen headline-generating battles with Meek Mill, Pusha T, Joe Budden, and Kanye West. Arguably, his most infamous tiff was the culmination of a long-brewing beef with Pusha T in 2018, where the Virginia rapper exposed Drake’s formerly hidden son, Adonis, to the world. Despite the brief moment of humiliation, Drake ultimately emerged the victor — that is, if you’re using chart numbers and general popularity as a determining metric. After his moderately received victory lap of an album, Views, he was given a more gripping narrative to fuel his blockbuster 2018 album Scorpion. At the same time, he was once again proving his mass appeal outside of the rap audiences with party bangers like “God’s Plan,” “Nice For What,” and “In My Feelings,” all of which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. More recently, however, Drake has been involved in several seemingly one-sided beefs with famous women. On his 2023 song with 21 Savage, “Circo Loco,” he threw out a not-so-subtle diss at rapper Megan Thee Stallion (“This bitch lie ’bout getting shots but she still a stallion”), joining a chorus of famous men disputing her now-proven claims that singer Tory Lanez shot her in the foot in 2020. During the rollout of For All the Dogs, he vexed actor Halle Berry, who claimed he used a photo of her for the artwork for his single “Slime You Out” without her permission. Additionally, he’s attempted to reignite drama with his former fling Rihanna. Aside from his digs on “Fear of Heights,” he played their collaboration “Work” at one of his concerts just to claim that he “doesn’t sing [the] song anymore.” Drake’s songwriting is often propelled by a sweeping sense of grievance and an obsession with the past and his haters (he’s not that different from Taylor Swift after all!). However, his constant feelings of victimhood within his relationships with women — and the subsequent, more blatant misogyny that’s grown out of that — has begun to wear on critics and parts of his female fanbase. It’s an observation that Lamar has sharply utilized in his diss tracks over the weekend. While this latest beef originally seemed like an ultimately invigorating experience for Drake in a snoozy part of his career, Lamar’s accusations of pedophilia and other predatory behavior will presumably leave a strong stench on Drake’s public image. It’ll be fascinating to see whether the seemingly invincible rapper can maintain fans’ respect after such dark claims. However, history has proven that male rappers can still thrive despite the most sordid allegations. Update, May 6, 2 pm: This story was originally published on April 17 and has been updated multiple times, most recently to include Kendrick Lamar’s new diss tracks, “meet the grahams” and “Not Like Us,” as well as Drake’s rejoinder, “The Heart Part 6.”

A Brood X cicada molts in Washington, DC. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images How to summon a cicada. In the coming weeks, billions of periodical cicadas will rise up from the ground across the midwestern and southeastern United States. As they do, they’ll sprout wings, mate, and die within a few weeks. If you live in an area where Brood XIII and Brood XIX cicadas are expected, you will not mistake their arrival. In addition to littering the ground with exoskeletons, in their frenzied quest for mates, cicadas make a ton of noise. That loud buzzing sound is produced by a chorus of males, who sing together from the trees to attract females. Interested females respond with a quick flip of their wings, which produces more subtle clicking sounds. The males will then change their tunes and try to home in on the clicking females in order to mate. It turns out that humans can summon — and dare I say, seduce — a male cicada by imitating those female cicada clicks. Why might you want to do this? Perhaps it could be helpful in collecting cicadas for a protein-packed meal. Up to you! Esteemed nature documentarian and activist Sir David Attenborough demonstrates how to summon one. “I can imitate the female’s wing flip with a snap of my fingers,” Attenborough says in his unmistakably husky voice in this clip from a 2005 BBC program below. By snapping his fingers, Attenborough draws the cicada toward him, closer and closer. And then the cicada jumps toward Attenborough, to continue the courtship in a more intimate matter. “The noise is awful,” Attenborough says as the cicada hums sweet nothings into his ear. Update, May 6, 12 pm ET: This piece, originally published in 2016, has been updated for 2024 with details about Brood XIII and XIX.