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Kamala Harris and Oprah humanized the consequences of state abortion bans

vox.com

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris attended a town hall style forum hosted by Oprah Winfrey in Michigan Thursday night. Harris received questions on most of the 2024 campaign cycle’s top issues, including guns and immigration — but a segment on abortion proved to be an emotional centerpiece that has continued to generate conversation. That moment largely focused on a 28-year-old Black woman from Georgia named Amber Thurman, featured in a recent ProPublica report. Thurman died in August 2022 after doctors hesitated to treat her following a complication from a medication abortion. After that year’s Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the right to an abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, Georgia implemented a strict abortion law that severely limited the abortion-related care available to anyone more than six weeks pregnant. Thurman was at least nine weeks pregnant; state law allows Georgia doctors to perform the procedure she required — a dilation and curettage, or D&C — only when the mother’s life is in danger. Doing so before then could result in a doctor going to prison for up to 10 years. At the time, the hospital reportedly had no guidance or policy in place about how to navigate the law and ascertain whether a pregnant person’s life was in danger. However, the ProPublica report suggests Thurman’s doctors waited too long — 20 hours after she went to her local hospital — before beginning to operate on her. A state review found Thurman’s death was “preventable,” and that’s a theme her family stressed as they spoke with Harris and Winfrey. “They just let her die because of some stupid abortion ban,” Thurman’s older sister said. “They treated her like she was just another number.” Harris offered her condolences to Thurman’s family, and used the moment to argue that Thurman’s story underscores the need for a change for greater abortion rights — as well as the sort of abortion policy Democrats are running on. Democrats are running on expanding abortion rights In the wake of Dobbs, more than a dozen states have passed strict abortion bans; nearly a dozen others, including Georgia, have laws that severely limit who is able to access an abortion. Georgia’s law, the LIFE Act, was initially passed in 2019 and upheld last year. It outlaws abortion once embryonic cardiac activity is detectable, something that usually occurs around five or six weeks of gestation. It does allow abortions past that point for “medical emergencies,” but is vague about when doctors should declare an emergency, other than defining them as a “condition in which an abortion is necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.” In many states, there have been efforts to overturn abortion laws — or keep them from being instituted. In Michigan, where the town hall was held, voters enshrined the right to abortion into the state’s constitution in 2023. In the wake of Dobbs, ballot initiatives to protect abortion access in Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Vermont, Montana, and California all passed. And this year, a new slate of states will decide whether to protect access. “There are 10 states with ballot initiatives for this November,” said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University who focuses on gender and abortion access. “Five of those states would change the current law in that state … going from [ending] a complete abortion ban [in] South Dakota and Missouri, to alleviating a six-week ban in Florida, a 15-week ban in Arizona, and a 12-week ban in Nebraska.” Democrats have tied themselves to these initiatives, hoping that they boost turnout. The party successfully campaigned on abortion in the 2022 midterms, and made abortion a factor in several special elections that were Democratic wins. They hope to make the issue a central part of this year’s election too. According to the Pew Research Center, abortion is a top five issue for Democratic voters, and a top 10 issue for voters overall. Harris has repeatedly attacked former President Donald Trump as being responsible for the end of Roe, arguing as she did Thursday, “The former president chose three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would overturn the protections of Roe v. Wade — and they did as he intended.” Harris, meanwhile, has said that, as president, she would approve federal legislation protecting the right to abortion. The current model for that legislation is the 2023 Women’s Health Protection Act, which would prevent state governments from imposing restrictions on abortion rights pre-viability. (Of course, Harris would probably need a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate — which currently seems unlikely — for federal abortion protections to pass.) For his part, Trump has bragged about being the president who overturned Roe, and has argued that abortion policy should be left to the states. He has said he would not approve a federal abortion ban if given another term. He has also sought to distance himself from Project 2025, the conservative vision for the US that includes draconian restrictions on women’s health care, rights, and freedom. But that’s not to say that a second Trump term couldn’t make even abortion more difficult to access, including through the method he used the first time around: court appointments.

Shohei Ohtani just did something no pro baseball player has ever done

7 h

vox.com

Shohei Ohtani #17 of the Los Angeles Dodgers looks on after hitting a two-run home run against the Miami Marlins during the third inning at loanDepot park on September 17, 2024, in Miami, Florida. | Sam Navarro/Getty Images During a Thursday Los Angeles Dodgers game versus the Miami Marlins, baseball phenom Shohei Ohtani hit a record that no other player has reached. In that game, Ohtani became the first baseball player to reach the elusive “50/50” milestone, which translates to hitting 50 home runs and stealing 50 bases in one season. This new stat surpasses records set by then-Seattle Mariner Alex Rodriguez in 1998, when he achieved a “42/42,” and Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr., who hit 41 home runs and stole 73 bases in 2023. It’s particularly impressive because most players are either muscular power hitters or speedy base stealers, not both. HISTORY!SHOHEI OHTANI IS THE ONLY MEMBER OF THE 50/50 CLUB. pic.twitter.com/F1T5D4n6QD— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) September 19, 2024 This latest record also only adds to Ohtani’s dominance in Major League Baseball. First signed to the Los Angeles Angels in 2017, Ohtani has long been considered uniquely talented because of how good he is at both hitting and pitching, a rare combination. Given his strengths as a “two-way player” – of a caliber not seen since the likes of Babe Ruth – he secured one of the most lucrative contracts in the sport when the Dodgers offered him a 10-year $700 million deal in 2023. Since joining the MLB, Ohtani has become the first player in recent memory to be in the top 15 for both home runs scored and strikeouts pitched in a single season. In addition to being the only member of the 50/50 club, Ohtani turned in a historically strong game on Thursday. In six at-bats, Ohtani hit three home runs, two doubles, and a single, scoring every time. His hits also led to 10 runs batted in (RBIs), setting a new Dodgers record. And on top of that, he stole two bases. (That means he didn’t just hit the 50/50 mark, he actually now has a record 51 home runs and stolen bases.) Notably, Ohtani is also still recovering from an elbow surgery that’s left him unable to pitch this season. All that has made Thursday’s game a neat encapsulation of what has made Ohtani a star. He’s demonstrated uncommon versatility in the game as a commanding pitcher and hitter, and now a record-breaking base-stealer, too. Players recovering from surgery often have slow seasons, but that just has not been the case for Ohtani. And as the Washington Post notes, it can take other players several games to do what Ohtani did Thursday in one. That Ohtani was able to achieve so much in Thursday’s game speaks to why he’s one of the most-hyped athletes in Major League Baseball, and already considered by many fans to be one of the greatest players of all time. What the record means The record is a testament to Ohtani’s unique power as a hitter, as well as his speed. Ohtani had one of his strongest offensive games of the season on Thursday, ultimately helping the Dodgers land a spot in this year’s playoffs with the runs he scored. He’s also refined his ability to steal bases, improving his “running mechanics” and broader offensive techniques, according to the Wall Street Journal. As ESPN notes, players in Ohtani’s current position — designated hitter, an athlete who stands in to bat for the pitcher — tend to be slow. Before this year, Ohtani hadn’t stolen more than 26 bases in a single season. Following an injury in 2023, Ohtani was forced to take a break from pitching and instead used that time and energy to improve his base stealing. His latest success also comes after a dramatic sports gambling scandal earlier this year involving his former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, who allegedly stole money from Ohtani to cover debts and pleaded guilty to bank fraud. After an investigation by the League, Ohtani was ultimately exonerated of wrongdoing. Ohtani’s record-shattering game this week firmly established his ascendancy in the sport and was broadly cheered by other baseball greats including the Oakland Athletics’ Jose Canseco, who in 1988 was the first player to hit “40/40,” and fellow players like Tampa Bay Rays’ Taylor Walls, who said that his team was watching Ohtani’s game while playing its own. “This guy is unreal,” basketball legend Lebron James posted on X. Ohtani’s colleague on the Dodgers, second baseman Gavin Lux, best summed up Thursday’s game and Ohtani’s style of play. “That has to be the greatest baseball game of all time. It has to be,” Lux said after the game. “There’s no way. It’s ridiculous. I’ve never seen anybody do that even in Little League, so it’s crazy that he’s doing that at the highest level.”

How Kodak invented the “snapshot”

In 1888, Eastman Kodak patented roll film and released the Kodak No. 1 box camera. The company’s business model — selling film, then processing and printing the photos taken on that film for their consumers — made photography available to the masses for the first time. Before then, photography was a complicated process requiring knowledge of chemi

9 h

vox.com

Will the Mark Robinson revelations tank Republicans in a key battleground state?

11 h

vox.com

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson delivers remarks prior to Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaking at a campaign event at Harrah’s Cherokee Center on August 14, 2024, in Asheville, North Carolina. | Grant Baldwin/Getty Images Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina endorsed by former President Donald Trump, was already known to be an extreme right-wing candidate who appeared to be alienating voters in a key battleground state. New revelations about his inflammatory comments on a porn site and his sexual exploits have now shaken even some of his Republican colleagues. CNN reported on Thursday that Robinson regularly posted on a porn website’s message board between 2008 and 2012. In those posts, he identified himself as a “black NAZI!”, supported a revival of slavery, described himself as a “perv” for enjoying transgender porn, and admitted to “peeping” on women in public showers as a teenager. The posts were found on the site “Nude Africa.” Despite now supporting legislation that would ban abortion at around six weeks of pregnancy, he also said on the forum that he would not care if a celebrity had an abortion, though he would “wanna see the sex tape!” And though he would become North Carolina’s first Black governor if elected, he referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as a “commie bastard.” Robinson’s email has also been connected to an account on Ashley Madison, an online dating website for people seeking to have an affair. Robinson, North Carolina’s current lieutenant governor, denied writing the posts, and his campaign said he has not made an Ashley Madison account. Nevertheless, several North Carolina Republicans, including some running in competitive races this fall, subsequently pressured him to drop out of the contest to succeed incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who is term-limited. He has opted to stay in the race, in which he is running behind his Democratic rival, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, by between 5 and 14 percentage points in polls conducted over the last month. In doing so, Robinson might drag down not just down-ballot Republicans in a closely divided purple state, but also potentially Trump. “We have few examples of reverse coattails where a down-ballot candidate hurts the top of the ticket,” Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster, told Vox. “But if anyone could do it, it’s this character.” Robinson is extreme even for MAGA The current scandals don’t mark the first time Robinson has been mired in controversy. He has hurled hateful remarks at everyone from Michelle Obama to the survivors of the Parkland school shooting. He’s called the LGBTQ community “filth.” He threatened to use his AR-15 against the government if it “gets too big for its britches,” and he wants to outlaw all abortions as well as return to a time when women couldn’t vote. He’s also ridiculed the Me Too movement, women generally, and climate change. It seems Robinson is willing to entertain all manner of conspiracy theories, too. He’s a Holocaust denier and has a history of antisemitic remarks. He’s suggested that the 1969 moon landing might have been fake, that 9/11 was an “inside job,” that the music industry is run by Satan, and that billionaire Democratic donor George Soros orchestrated the Boko Haram kidnappings of school girls in 2014. In spite of all of this, Robinson was not only able to win his party’s nomination for the state’s most powerful position, but he did so by a margin of more than 45 percent over his rivals. The other Republican candidates, trial lawyer Bill Graham and state treasurer Dale Folwell, raised concerns about Robinson’s electability, but ultimately neither could compete with his name recognition nor his MAGA bona fides in a state that twice voted for Trump. Will Robinson hurt the GOP’s chances this fall in North Carolina? Robinson might function as an ideal foil for Democrats — not just in the governor’s race, but also in the presidential and down-ballot races. Robinson might struggle to capture the more than 35 percent of GOP voters who opposed him in a contentious primary. Republican leaders certainly seem concerned. “We knew that [he was extreme], but I still think the revelations over the last 24 hours are stunning,” former Rep. David Price (D-NC) told Vox. “I believe the Republican leaders know that as well. A corner has been turned in terms of Robinson being able to count on even the most faithful Republican supporters.” Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) told the Hill that the reports about Robinson are “not good.” And Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said they were “very concerning.” “My hope is that [the] lieutenant governor can reassure the people of North Carolina that the allegations aren’t true,” he said. “He said they’re not true. I think he needs to have the opportunity to explain to the people in North Carolina exactly how these allegations aren’t true.” The fact that even Republicans are distancing themselves from Robinson suggests that the tide may turn further in Democrats’ favor in North Carolina. That doesn’t mean, however, that Robinson will deliver Democrats a major victory. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are practically tied in the state, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. And Republican candidates have won three presidential elections in North Carolina since Barack Obama surprisingly took the state in 2008 — including Trump twice. The state has stayed on the red side of purple, though it does have a tradition of split-ticket voting. That helped power Cooper’s two election wins and has added to the belief that the state may be in reach for Democrats. “I don’t think celebration is called for because so much more is at stake than just the governor’s race,” Price said. “We know how tight this is.”

What it means that new AIs can “reason”

16 h

vox.com

In this photo illustration, the sign of OpenAl o1, the first in a planned series of “reasoning” models that have been trained to answer more complex questions, is displayed on a smartphone screen on September 13, 2024, in Suqian, Jiangsu Province of China. An underappreciated fact about large language models (LLMs) is that they produce “live” answers to prompts. You prompt them and they start talking in response, and they talk until they’re done. The result is like asking a person a question and getting a monologue back in which they improv their answer sentence by sentence. This explains several of the ways in which large language models can be so frustrating. The model will sometimes contradict itself even within a paragraph, saying something and then immediately following up with the exact opposite because it’s just “reasoning aloud” and sometimes adjusts its impression on the fly. As a result, AIs need a lot of hand-holding to do any complex reasoning. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. One well-known way to solve this is called chain-of-thought prompting, where you ask the large language model to effectively “show its work” by “‘thinking” out loud about the problem and giving an answer only after it has laid out all of its reasoning, step by step. Chain-of-thought prompting makes language models behave much more intelligently, which isn’t surprising. Compare how you’d answer a question if someone shoves a microphone in your face and demands that you answer immediately to how you’d answer if you had time to compose a draft, review it, and then hit “publish.” The power of think, then answer OpenAI’s latest model, o1 (nicknamed Strawberry), is the first major LLM release with this “think, then answer” approach built in. Unsurprisingly, the company reports that the method makes the model a lot smarter. In a blog post, OpenAI said o1 “performs similarly to PhD students on challenging benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry, and biology. We also found that it excels in math and coding. In a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO), GPT-4o correctly solved only 13 percent of problems, while the reasoning model scored 83 percent.” This major improvement in the model’s ability to think also intensifies some of the dangerous capabilities that leading AI researchers have long been on the lookout for. Before release, OpenAI tests its models for their capabilities with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons, the abilities that would be most sought-after by terrorist groups that don’t have the expertise to build them with current technology. As my colleague Sigal Samuel wrote recently, OpenAI o1 is the first model to score “medium” risk in this category. That means that while it’s not capable enough to walk, say, a complete beginner through developing a deadly pathogen, the evaluators found that it “can help experts with the operational planning of reproducing a known biological threat.” These capabilities are one of the most clear-cut examples of AI as a dual-use technology: a more intelligent model becomes more capable in a wide array of uses, both benign and malign.If future AI does get good enough to tutor any college biology major through steps involved in recreating, say, smallpox in the lab, this would potentially have catastrophic casualties. At the same time, AIs that can tutor people through complex biology projects will do an enormous amount of good by accelerating lifesaving research. It is intelligence itself, artificial or otherwise, that is the double-edged sword. The point of doing AI safety work to evaluate these risks is to figure out how to mitigate them with policy so we can get the good without the bad. How to (and how not to) evaluate an AI Every time OpenAI or one of its competitors (Meta, Google, Anthropic) releases a new model, we retread the same conversations. Some people find a question on which the AI performs very impressively, and awed screenshots circulate. Others find a question on which the AI bombs — say, “how many ‘r’s are there in ‘strawberry’” or “how do you cross a river with a goat” — and share those as proof that AI is still more hype than product. Part of this pattern is driven by the lack of good scientific measures of how capable an AI system is. We used to have benchmarks that were meant to describe AI language and reasoning capabilities, but the rapid pace of AI improvement has gotten ahead of them, with benchmarks often “saturated.” This means AI performs as well as a human on these benchmark tests, and as a result they’re no longer useful for measuring further improvements in skill. I strongly recommend trying AIs out yourself to get a feel for how well they work. (OpenAI o1 is only available to paid subscribers for now, and even then is very rate-limited, but there are new top model releases all the time.) It’s still too easy to fall into the trap of trying to prove a new release “impressive” or “unimpressive” by selectively mining for tasks where they excel or where they embarrass themselves, instead of looking at the big picture. The big picture is that, across nearly all tasks we’ve invented for them, AI systems are continuing to improve rapidly, but the incredible performance on almost every test we can devise hasn’t yet translated into many economic applications. Companies are still struggling to identify how to make money off LLMs. A big obstacle is the inherent unreliability of the models, and in principle an approach like OpenAI o1’s — in which the model gets more of a chance to think before it answers — might be a way to drastically improve reliability without the expense of training a much bigger model. Sometimes, big things can come from small improvements In all likelihood, there isn’t going to be a silver bullet that suddenly fixes the longstanding limitations of large language models. Instead, I suspect they’ll be gradually eroded over a series of releases, with the unthinkable becoming achievable and then mundane over the course of a few years — which is precisely how AI has proceeded so far. But as ChatGPT — which itself was only a moderate improvement over OpenAI’s previous chatbots but which reached hundreds of millions of people overnight — demonstrates, technical progress being incremental doesn’t mean societal impact is incremental. Sometimes the grind of improvements to various parts of how an LLM operates — or improvements to its UI so that more people will try it, like the chatbot itself — push us across the threshold from “party trick” to “essential tool.” And while OpenAI has come under fire recently for ignoring the safety implications of their work and silencing whistleblowers, its o1 release seems to take the policy implications seriously, including collaborating with external organizations to check what their model can do. I’m grateful that they’re making that work possible, and I have a feeling that as models keep improving, we will need such conscientious work more than ever. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. 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The extremely messy, profoundly confusing fight over who should profit from animal DNA

17 h

vox.com

Marine animals known as sea squirts, shown here, produce defense compounds that can damage cancer cells. Scientists have used them to produce anticancer drugs. | Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images Stuck to rocks, shells, and piers in oceans around the world is a strange little creature called a sea squirt. It resembles a squishy potato and has two valves poking out, which it uses to suck in and expel seawater. Sea squirts are special for a few reasons. They tend to shoot water out of their valves when you squeeze them. And like oysters and clams, they filter ocean water, helping keep it clean. They also produce chemical compounds to defend themselves that are known to damage cancer cells. Scientists have used those compounds to develop drugs for patients with certain kinds of cancer. Sea squirts are among an endless list of animals, plants, and microbes that stand to improve human lives. Researchers estimate that an astonishing 70 percent of antibiotics and cancer treatments in use today are rooted in natural organisms, from plants to snakes to sea sponges. The first medication to treat HIV came from a Caribbean sea sponge. The cosmetic drug Botox is derived from a bacterium. The enzyme used to stonewash jeans was originally derived from wild microbes in salt lakes in Kenya. Collectively, these natural derivatives — and the profits they generate — are considered the benefits of a planet with healthy biodiversity. And maintaining these benefits is a key justification for protecting nature: It can literally save our lives. But a key question that has long been a source of division among global conservation leaders is who, exactly, should reap those biodiversity benefits. There’s a long history of what some advocates and researchers call biopiracy. It typically refers to when companies take organisms from poor nations and Indigenous communities, such as medicinal plants, and use them to develop commercial products, failing to share the benefits back with them. Those benefits include things like money but also access to those products and research results. Until recently, the solution to exploitative innovation was, at least in theory, relatively straightforward. Under a United Nations treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), countries can require that foreign researchers sign benefit-sharing agreements before granting them permission to retrieve wild organisms. Essentially, under those agreements, you can’t walk out of a country with medicinal plants without first agreeing on how you’ll compensate that country and its people. But there’s an enormous loophole to this approach that keeps getting bigger. Major advances in biotechnologies have made it easier to sequence and analyze DNA. Now, researchers and companies no longer rely only on physical samples to make stuff derived from biodiversity. They increasingly make products — drugs, vaccines, better crops, and so on — using DNA and RNA sequences, or other genetic data. This digital biodiversity data, referred to by the arcane term digital sequence information, or DSI, is found abundantly in scientific databases that are free for anyone to use. And it’s not regulated by the CBD treaty. That means industries can create vaccines and other commercial products using DSI without sharing the benefits from those products — the benefits of biodiversity — with whatever country or local community the sequence information originates from. It’s kind of like what platforms like Napster did to the music industry: Instead of having to buy CDs from stores and funneling money to musicians, once music was digitized, you could eventually stream unlimited music online for free. If you find DSI confusing, that’s because it is. Experts who have been debating for years about how to regulate DSI don’t even agree on how to define the term. Does it cover just DNA and RNA sequences? Would it also include 3D images of proteins and epigenetic data (i.e., changes to how genes are expressed)? They also don’t agree on how benefit sharing should work. Some countries, especially those with smaller economies, want genetic information tracked from its place of origin all the way to the final products. Others say that’s essentially impossible. This debate will come to a head this October in the Colombian city of Cali. Countries that are party to CBD — which notably does not include the US, in part because conservative lawmakers tend to dislike global treaties — will convene for their biannual meeting to discuss global conservation issues. One of their main goals this year, at what will be known as COP16 — but not that COP — is to hammer out a plan to bring more accountability to the use of DSI around the world. On one hand, such a plan seems impossible to put in place. Companies hold a tremendous amount of power and typically want fewer regulations, not more. But it could also be a massive opportunity. If developed nations and industries shared some of the money and knowledge that is derived from digital biodiversity data, it could be used to conserve nature in the places where it is most vital — and most at risk. Who benefits from nature? The debate and tensions around DSI are rooted in inequality. Put simply, rich nations have loads of scientific resources, whereas many poorer nations have loads of less-explored biodiversity. And up until now, the relationship between the two groups has been lopsided. Decades ago, a US pharmaceutical company developed anticancer drugs with the help of a plant from Madagascar called the rosy periwinkle; the company didn’t share its profits with the people of Madagascar. You can find similar stories with the antifungal spray Neemax, derived from a tree in India, and muscle relaxants made with compounds from curare, a group of poisonous plants from the Amazon. “Scientists from the global north have frequently extracted data and samples from the Global South without the permission of the people there, without collaborating meaningfully — if at all — with local scientists, and without providing any benefit to the countries where they conduct their work,” a team of researchers wrote earlier this year. Global environmental leaders recognized this problem decades ago. When they established the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, still the world’s most important biodiversity agreement, they made benefit-sharing one of three main goals of the treaty, along with conserving biodiversity and using it sustainably. Under the agreement, benefits derived from plants and animals should, at a minimum, be shared with the countries and local communities where that biodiversity is found — and especially with the groups who have safeguarded it, such as Indigenous communities. Nearly two decades later, CBD made the requirements around benefit-sharing more concrete and enforceable through an agreement called the Nagoya Protocol, named after the Japanese city where it was adopted. The agreement essentially affirms that countries have the legal right to regulate access to physical plants, animals, and other elements of biodiversity within their borders. All countries are also supposed to make sure that any bits of biodiversity they — or their companies — use that come from other nations are collected with the consent of that country. Share your feedback Do you have feedback on this story or tips for the author? Reach out to Vox reporter Benji Jones at benji.jones@vox.com. The Protocol has, at best, a mixed record. Middle-income nations, like Brazil, or those with a lot of donor support, have established systems that work. In many poorer nations, however, access is still poorly regulated or unregulated. In general, very little money has flowed into countries via the Nagoya Protocol, said Marcel Jaspars, a professor at the University of Aberdeen and a leading expert on DSI in the Global North. DSI only adds to these benefit-sharing woes. When environmental leaders crafted the CBD and the Nagoya Protocol, digital biodiversity data wasn’t as easily accessible or as useful as it is today; these agreements don’t even mention DSI. It’s widely understood that CBD and the Protocol only pertain to physical materials — microbes, plants, compounds from a sea squirt — not genetic sequences. That leaves the use of DSI, now a massive source of scientific innovation, largely unregulated. What DSI is and how it works DSI is one of the most confusing concepts in the environmental world, which is already racked with confusing terminology and technical jargon. Here’s the gist: After researchers collect plants, animals, and other organisms, they commonly sequence their DNA, or part of it, and upload that information to a database. The largest global collection of DNA and RNA sequences — which is the subject of much of these discussions — is (take a breath) the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration. It houses billions of genetic sequences and is free for anyone to use. Downloading the data and using it to develop commercial products does not trigger the legal obligations under CBD that harnessing a biological sample would. You’re basically harvesting information from a computer instead of from the environment. Scientists use DSI for a mind-bending array of projects. Consider the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. The company used nearly 300 genetic sequences, according to the patent, many of which were drawn from open-access databases, to produce the shot (which the company was able to design in just two days). Researchers also use DSI to figure out how unique a particular genetic sequence might be, or what it might do — as in, what physical trait it might be linked to. This is incredibly valuable for the biotech and agriculture industries. A seed company, for example, might have a crop that appears more drought tolerant in their private collection. They can sequence the plant’s DNA and cross-reference its genetic information with online databases. Those databases often list information about the role of different sequences. Ultimately, this can help the company identify which particular sections of the plant genome might be associated with an ability to survive droughts, a valuable trait. Artificial intelligence, including projects like Google’s AlphaFold, makes these sorts of predictions even easier. Conservation scientists also benefit from DSI in a big way. They increasingly rely on an approach called environmental DNA (eDNA) to catalog what species live in a particular area, such as a stream or the forest floor. Researchers will gather samples of water or soil and filter out bits of DNA that were shed by animals or microbes into the environment. Then they’ll look for a direct match with those sequences in open-access databases, revealing what those animals are. If the species are rare or otherwise considered important, this information could, say, help justify protecting habitat. This is to say: DSI is useful! There’s a good reason it’s open to everyone. It both enables and speeds up research, some of which is literally life-saving. At the same time, it maintains inequities and furthers exploitation when the people who prosper from it are largely in wealthy economies (a problem that’s especially pronounced and worrying when it comes to developing vaccines.) “DSI makes it possible to get all kinds of commercial advantages,” said Michael Halewood, an expert in genetic resource policy at CGIAR, a global agriculture organization. “That creates a big gap that needs to be closed. We all agree on the inequities of the situation. What’s a sensible way to close that gap without undermining science?” What a plan to regulate DSI might look like Even as COP16 looms, the debate around DSI is still a mess. There’s a lack of trust between country negotiators, leading to an enormous amount of uncertainty about how this digital data might be regulated on a global scale. Consensus has, however, grown around the idea that companies, entire sections of the economy, or perhaps even consumers should pay into a fund that supports conservation and development, especially in the Global South. From there, two big questions rise to the top: Who, exactly, pays to use DSI, and who ultimately receives those payments? A handful of low- and middle-income countries want what negotiators refer to as a “track and trace” system. That would entail tracing genetic sequences, i.e., DSI, from open-access databases to specific products, such as medicines or drought-tolerant crops, that generate value. So if a company in Europe makes a drug using DNA from a sea squirt found in, say, Panama, it would have to share benefits from that drug — money and also access to the drug itself, perhaps — back with the Panamanian people. Many academic researchers and developed countries call this a nonstarter. The chain of development for drugs and other products is long and tangled and relies on hundreds if not thousands of individual sequences. Even if it’s clear that an end product is based on a specific bit of genetic code, the research process to find that sequence — which could involve scientists across dozens of institutions, all using their own bits of DNA — relies on sifting through unimaginable amounts of genetic material. That makes it hard to determine who, exactly, should receive the benefits. Plus, many of the sequences in global databases don’t come with location information; geotagging wasn’t required until somewhat recently. That makes it even harder to direct benefits to a specific country. Scientists also fear that a complex tracking system would slow the pace of innovation, and be incredibly expensive to operate. “By making track and trace a necessity, the system will cost more than it generates, almost certainly,” Jaspars said. Many of the groups who oppose a track and trace approach, including many developed economies and academic scientists, prefer what they describe as a “sector” approach. This would require companies in sectors of the economy that are highly dependent on DSI — such as agriculture and pharmaceuticals — to put a small percentage of their profits or sales (or other measure of value) into a DSI fund. That money would likely be dished out to countries or specific projects for the benefit of conservation and human development. Proponents of this approach argue that it would allow money from DSI to flow quickly; it wouldn’t be contingent on companies profiting from specific DSI-based products. It’s also simpler because it doesn’t involve tracking sequences. While this sector approach has a lot of support from scientists and rich countries, it’s still not clear how to determine which industry sectors, or parts of sectors, would need to pay up. The corporate world, meanwhile, has serious concerns about requiring payments from broad sectors of the economy, according to Daphne Yong-D’Hervé, who leads global policy at the International Chamber of Commerce. Different companies use vastly different quantities of DSI, she said. And generally speaking, trying to regulate DSI as separate from physical materials is problematic, Yong-D’Hervé said. Organisms and their genetic sequences are often used collectively during R&D. Ultimately, she said, what corporations want is a simple, unified system to use DSI and physical materials that gives them a license to operate worldwide. Without paying too much, of course. “Businesses support the principle of benefit sharing, but this has to be implemented in a way which is aligned with scientific and business realities, is simple, and does not discourage investments in research and innovation,” Yong-D’Hervé told Vox. Then there are some wealthy countries, such as Japan and Switzerland, that seem to be in favor of the status quo. They prefer a deal that encourages companies that actively use digital biodiversity data to contribute to a DSI fund, but without the legal obligation to do so. But advocates for lower-income countries say this, too, would be a nonstarter — a continuation of exploitation. “We are asking for accountability,” said Nithin Ramakrishnan, a senior researcher at Third World Network (TWN), a group that advocates for human rights and benefit sharing. To TWN, Ramakrishnan says, the priority is getting an agreement that makes sharing benefits from DSI mandatory. Will this ultimately help biodiversity? None of these proposals are perfect, and they represent only a handful of the issues pertaining to DSI that countries disagree on. There are questions about sharing benefits other than money and access to drugs, such as lab equipment. Some researchers and advocates are also concerned about who will manage the DSI fund and about the databases that store genetic data. The big databases are largely hosted by organizations in developed nations, so poorer countries have little control over how they operate, Ramakrishnan said. Making everything more complicated is the reality that there are other international treaties — including those pertaining to crops and the high seas — that are also trying to figure out how to manage access to DSI. Regulating genetic data on a global scale will likely only work if all of these treaties are aligned and define DSI in the same way. And even if countries come to an agreement, it’s not clear they’ll be able to enforce it at the national level. (This is a problem for other international agreements. The 2015 Paris Accord, for example, lacks teeth because it doesn’t have a strong enforcement mechanism). Can environmental officials get entire corporate sectors to pay up? In some countries, these payments might also require governmental approval. Also not helping: The US, the world’s premier scientific power, is not a party to CBD, so it wouldn’t be bound by any framework that officials finalize in Cali. (However, some of the big US pharmaceutical companies have told Jaspars they are “open to sharing benefits.”) So yes, crafting an effective plan will not be easy. Then again, the payoff of such a system could be huge — it could be lifesaving. Researchers estimate that the gap in funding for biodiversity conservation globally is somewhere around $700 billion a year; that’s a key reason why biodiversity is in peril. And critically, any payments for using DSI could help close that gap, especially if they’re generated from entire sectors. Far more support is needed for things like restoring coral reefs, managing parks, and preventing wildfires, much of which Indigenous groups and local communities have already been doing. These efforts help ensure that biodiversity, and all the secrets it still holds, is left intact. “There’s a whole incredible world still to discover,” said Sarah Laird, co-director of People and Plants International, a nonprofit environmental organization. “We know a lot, but there are things we can’t even imagine out there. There are amazing opportunities.”

America’s looming election crisis, explained in 3 charts

18 h

vox.com

A Trump supporter holds a “stop the steal” sign while gathering on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol to protest the election on January 6, 2021, in Denver, Colorado. | Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images Are we barreling toward a legitimacy crisis in this election? The polls show a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, suggesting that the 2024 election, like the 2020 one, may be decided by narrow margins in a few battleground states. And like last time, polls suggest a sizable proportion of Republican voters seem poised to reject the results if Trump comes up short. If Trump loses, about a quarter of Republicans said they think he should do whatever it takes to ensure he becomes president anyway, according to a September PRRI poll. That may include resorting to violence: Among Republicans who don’t believe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate, almost one-third said in an August poll by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University that they expected “a lot” or “a great deal” of political violence after the November election. That doesn’t mean that violence is inevitable — but after the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection, the possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand. These beliefs may stem from the fact that, among Republicans, Trump proved by far the most trusted source of information about election results, well above local and national news outlets. In an Associated Press/NORC/USAFacts poll from earlier this month, more than 60 percent of Republicans said they believe Trump himself is the best place to get the facts about results. The problem with all this, of course, is that the former president has been very consistent in falsely claiming that he won the 2020 election, and in casting doubt on the legitimacy of US elections ahead of the 2024 contest. During his first debate against Harris, Trump again refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, walking back his comments in a podcast interview earlier this month in which he said he “lost by a whisker.” And despite facing criminal charges for pressuring election officials to overturn the results in 2020, Trump has not indicated that he will accept the results in November. “We have to have good elections. Our elections are bad,” he said during the debate. Trump has also threatened to prosecute “those people that CHEATED” in the 2024 election and subject them to long-term prison sentences if he wins. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), also said in a podcast appearance this month that he wouldn’t have certified the results of the 2020 election if he had been in Congress at the time. “I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and ask the country to have a debate,” he said. Trump’s long-running insistence that he won in 2020 appears to be having an effect over time, with several surveys measuring greater buy-in of his lies about the election from voters today than in the past. A December Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that 36 percent of US adults did not believe Biden was legitimately elected, compared to 29 percent two years prior. And in a Pew Research poll conducted earlier this month, 27 percent of US adults said that Trump did nothing wrong in trying to overturn the election results, up from 23 percent in April. The pervasiveness of Trump’s lies about the election seems to have also contributed to Republican fears about the future of democracy, which polling suggests are more acute than among Democrats. Republicans were much more likely to say American democracy isn’t working and that it would end in their lifetimes than Democrats in a March Quinnipiac poll. Overall, surveys suggest that many Americans believe there’s a real possibility that Trump won’t accept the election results. An August ABC/Ipsos poll found that only 29 percent said they believed Trump was prepared to accept the results regardless of the outcome. Add it all up and the picture is troubling: If the election is close — and all indications are that it will be — we seem to be set up for a genuine legitimacy crisis if Trump were to lose. It’s yet another indication of US democracy’s perilous state and how Trump has bent American politics to his will. Can the center hold? Trump’s words and actions — and his followers’ beliefs — stand in contrast to Harris’s and her supporters. In her Democratic National Convention speech last month, Harris committed to a peaceful transfer of power. Democrats show the same commitment: The August ABC/Ipsos poll found that 92 percent were prepared to accept the results, regardless of the outcome, in contrast to 76 percent of Trump supporters. That said, recent reports about Trump allies laying the groundwork to undermine the election results in some key states could certainly end up raising questions for some Democratic voters about the legitimacy of the results if he wins. In Georgia, for instance, members of the state elections board associated with the Trump-aligned “stop the steal” campaign have signed off on new rules that allow local elections officials to make “reasonable inquiry” into election irregularities — without defining what might constitute a “reasonable” inquiry. That could potentially lead to frivolous challenges that could complicate the certification of what is expected to be a close election in Georgia. Moreover, the polarized state of the country means a Trump victory, especially a narrow one, would likely prompt the kind of massive peaceful protests the country saw in the wake of the 2016 election (though, of course, accepting the results and peacefully protesting them is entirely different from storming the Capitol and attempting to stop the peaceful transfer of power). As we near Election Day, it’s well worth taking a step back and assessing the state of American democracy in 2024. One of the two major party candidates refuses to accept his defeat four years ago and shows every sign of doing the same thing again this year if he loses. His supporters are right there with him. That the election remains close raises the risk of a true crisis but is also a reminder of how, because of Trump, what was once unthinkable is now reality.

How Minion Jesus died — and then rose — on TikTok

18 h

vox.com

Traci Coston, a serious young Christian TikToker, stares directly at the camera. “One day, an animator was messing around, and he created this picture of a little minion.” Coston points up to an image of a sausage-bodied minion hanging limply from a wooden cross. Easily among the most recognizable anti-heroes in film history, minions are the stars of a $5 billion animated movie franchise. The enduring success of the franchise can be attributed, at least in part, to their extremely online fans, who have been feverishly producing minions memes since the release of the first movie, Despicable Me, in 2010. “Listen to this,” she continues, “a minion didn’t die for you, but somebody actually did. Jesus actually died for you.” Coston had sacrificed the Minion Jesus for my attention, and the crucified minion had done its job. I had not scrolled away. His death was the key that unlocked the door to my carefully curated TikTok algorithm, and Coston had walked right through. The 40-second video was as sacrilegious as it was sincere. It was deeply funny and deadly serious. I typed “Minion Jesus” into the search bar and dove headlong into the wild world of high-kitsch TikTok evangelism. What I learned was that Coston isn’t a lone wolf. A dozen other TikTokers had recently posted Minion Jesus videos, all repeating the same near-verbatim message in front of the exact same minion torture scene. The scriptedness of the videos was unusual. On TikTok, sounds and trends go viral, and participation in memes tends to be iterative and improvisational. In the comment sections of these scripted Minion Jesus videos, hundreds of TikTokers gathered to discuss the mystery. Who wrote this script? Do these people know each other? Are they AI deep-fakes? Are they joking? For the Today, Explained podcast, I decided to get to the bottom of it. The road to Minion Jesus is long and rambling. It takes us from a tiny town in Louisiana all the way to the steps of White House. But our tale begins in the halls of Facultad de Artes Plásticas, a small art school in Arteaga, Mexico. The Minion Jesus origin story In 2021, a young graphic design student named Americo Cruz sketched out a Minion Jesus on paper, opened up his 3D modeling software, and got to work. Two days later, he posted it to his personal Facebook page. Cruz told Vox he took inspiration from a 2015 meme: a photograph of a stuffed toy minion engulfed in flames and fastened to a cross. “The truth is that it’s just a parody — a simple joke,” he said. “At the end of the day, it is just the absurd humor that we have in Gen Z.” Cruz hadn’t seen the TikTok videos until I reached out to him for this story. How they’d gotten hold of Cruz’s image, though, seemed relatively straightforward. Minion Jesus went moderately viral in 2021, and it has since been shared thousands of times on Facebook, X, Reddit, and Instagram — all platforms where images are easy to access and download. In all likelihood, someone had stumbled across the image online, downloaded it, and penned the script. Less clear was who, and whether the subsequent videos were a part of some sort of coordinated campaign. The Minion Jesus TikTokers post similarly structured content every day, most of it concerned with convincing the viewer to convert to Christianity. Several also make conservative political content. They don’t all follow one another on their various social media platforms, but I soon realized they all have one connection in common: a blond, brawny evangelist named Taylan Michael Seaman. The makings of a Christian content farm Seaman is the 26-year-old self-proclaimed millionaire behind a coaching program called Kingdom University. From a small town in central Louisiana, he offers online courses to any would-be social media evangelist willing to “invest” thousands of dollars into his ministry. In exchange, he teaches them his “Viral Video Framework,” a basic digital content marketing strategy couched in the language of proselytism. The program offers its students a bold guarantee: “at least 100,000 new followers in 90 days.” As you may have guessed by now, the Minion Jesus video is a Kingdom University product. @vox If you scroll away from this video then you’ll miss our producer explaining “Minion Jesus.” #minions #minionjesus #christianity #religion ♬ original sound – Vox – Vox According to several enrollees who spoke to Vox under the condition of anonymity, the coaches alert their students when a particular piece of content — like Minion Jesus — is doing well. They are then encouraged to follow suit, which is the reason the videos are often so eerily similar. Seaman’s personal content skews a bit more pessimistic. His videos are often concerned with demonic possession, and they tend to be more overtly political and caught up with conspiracy theories than the content created by his students. His message is also often about money. This is no coincidence. An explicit focus on wealth-building is integral to his ministry, and his videos contain clear nods to a midcentury offshoot of Pentecostalism commonly known as the Word of Faith Movement. How Word of Faith became an evangelical powerhouse In the 1960s, itinerant evangelist Kenneth Hagin rose to fame by performing (and possibly inventing) the miracle of Holy Laughter in churches around the United States. At the wave of his hand, congregants would fall to the floor shrieking and convulsing in rapturous hysterics. This kind of ecstatic religious expression is a defining feature of the Pentecostal tradition, which originated in the early 20th century. At the height of Jim Crow, Pentecostalism emerged in California as a multiracial, working-class movement. The services were frenzied experiences, and congregants often jumped out of their seats during services, dancing in the aisles and crying out in what a 1906 Los Angeles Times story referred to as a “weird babel of tongues.” Half a century later, Kenneth Hagin’s Word of Faith movement capitalized on that fervor. The laughing evangelist told his followers that poverty was “the penalty for breaking God’s law,” and true faith was the key to wealth. As he traveled the country spreading his Holy Laughter, Hagin asked for large donations from congregants and promised them miraculous returns on investment. Fifty years before TikTok appeared in the app store, Hagin began broadcasting his sermons over the radio and selling reel-to-reel tapes to anyone willing to pay for them. In 1974, Hagin founded Rhema Bible Training College, an unaccredited bible school in Oklahoma. Today, there are Rhema training centers in 14 countries, and course listings include classes on “how to apply proven techniques in the areas of multimedia, web and management to grow your congregation” and “the importance of the corporate governing documents, IRS and state legal requirements, liability issues, setting of compensation and benefits packages.” In 2002, two Rhema graduates founded Faith Church Ruston, a nondenominational church in Ruston, Louisiana. Their son-in-law and protégée is the godfather of the Minion Jesus TikTok, Taylan Michael Seaman. The movement turned toward Christian nationalism “It’s the blood, the blood, the blood — the word, the name, the blood — the word, the name, the blood,” shouted Kenneth Copeland, an 84-year-old prophet with an estimated net worth of $300 million. One year into the Covid-19 pandemic, he was receiving a vision from God on a megachurch stage. For a brief moment, the prophet saw heaven, crying out: “There is Brother Hagin! There is Brother Hagin!” By 2021, Word of Faith founder Kenneth Hagin had been dead for 18 years. In his absence, this new Kenneth had risen up: Kenneth Copeland is now the figurehead of the Word of Faith movement, a millionaire prophet with pinprick pupils and visions of blood. In the 1960s, a young penniless Copeland attended one of Hagin’s seminars and allegedly offered to trade his car for a collection of Hagins tapes. He managed to walk away with a few without giving up his vehicle and promptly memorized them. Within a few years, Hagin was acting as the young man’s mentor. Under the guidance of this new “spiritual father,” Copeland took the Word of Faith movement to new heights. He founded a Christian broadcast network, built a multimillion-dollar empire, and now claims that his flagship show reaches 885 million viewers a day. In the decades after Hagin’s death, Copeland’s theology and conservative politics began to meld. The Word of Faith movement in its current form has dovetailed neatly with another quasi-Pentecostal movement called the New Apostolic Reformation — a fusion of prosperity gospel theology and Christian Nationalist politics. Where the Word of Faith movement leveraged the faithful to amass wealth, the New Apostolic Reformation is leveraging that wealth to build political power. Andy Kroll, who covers fringe religious movements in America for ProPublica, told Vox that where right-wing Christian political movements in decades past have encouraged Christians to effect change from within the political system, the New Apostolic Reformation’s vision for America is more ambitious and less democratic. New Apostolic Reformation’s most prominent figure is Lance Wallnau, a regular guest on Kenneth Copeland’s television network, the movement’s loudest megaphone. For the last two decades, Wallnau has been scribbling out a vision he calls “The Seven Mountains Mandate” on dry-erase boards across the country. He argues that conservative Christians should “take dominion” over American life by assuming positions of power in seven key spheres of influence: arts and media, business, church, education, family, government, and science and technology. “This segment of Christianity is not the largest by number, but it’s the fastest-growing,” says Kroll. Across the country, pastors are using Wallnau’s language to communicate a new kind of Christian Nationalism to their congregations. You cannot, of course, spell “dominion” without the word “minion.” “How To Have DOMINION!!” In July, the man behind the Minion Crucifixion TikToks livestreamed a sermon to his YouTube followers. For an hour and a half, Taylan Michael Seaman paced back and forth across Faith Church Ruston’s stage, microphone in hand, and delivered a sermon he titled “How To Have DOMINION!!” Once fringe, this vision for America has found a champion in former president Donald Trump. Wallnau was one of the first Christian leaders to endorse Trump, and Trump has spent the past eight years borrowing liberally from Wallnau’s language and theology to appeal to his base. Hours after Donald Trump survived the July 13 assassination attempt, Wallnau made a special appearance on Flashpoint, a Christian political show on Kenneth Copeland’s broadcast network. “There are some attacks, when they happen, God intervenes and he moves in a miraculous way,” said Wallnau, pointer finger raised, “and I pray for a miraculous intervention of God now on President Trump.” The next day, Trump logged into his Truth Social account and typed, “Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening. We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.” Who could have more influence than … minions? In the tradition of Hagin, Copeland, and Wallnau, Seaman has come to recognize that he is only as powerful as his flock is large. His YouTube audience? 3 million. “When I go online and I look up Minion Jesus, and when I read about Taylan, I see an archetype,” said Kroll. “Someone who is common throughout this Wild West of Christianity. Someone who’s really thinking about how to break through on whatever the latest communication platform is.” At this point in his career, Seaman is nowhere near as influential or wealthy as the trailblazers that came before him. There is also a chance his subscriber count has been inflated by purchased followers. This is a common practice, and the fact that Taylan’s Kingdom University guarantees enrollees 100,000 followers in a matter of months does raise red flags. Regardless, he is effectively exploiting a loophole that his predecessors could only have dreamed of. Put simply, I didn’t go searching for Minion Jesus. Minion Jesus came looking for me. Hagin, Copeland, and Wallnau have demonstrated that there are myriad ways to become a millionaire Christian influencer. Perhaps the simplest one to date is Seaman’s. Game the system. Crucify a minion. Let the algorithm do the rest.

Even solar energy’s biggest fans are underestimating it

19 h

vox.com

Solar power deployment is exceeding even the most optimistic forecasts. Every day, the sun’s rays send 173,000 terawatts of energy to Earth, 10,000 times the amount used by all of humanity. Which is to say, the potential for solar energy is immense, and we’re nowhere near the limit. That’s why solar energy is such an appealing prospect, particularly as an alternative to the fossil fuels that cause climate change. And over the past decade, solar energy technology has vastly improved in performance and plummeted in cost. As a result, photovoltaic panels have cropped up like dandelions across fields and rooftops at a stunning pace. Yet even the people most plugged-in to the energy industry and most optimistic about solar power continue to underestimate it. In fact, it’s a long-running joke among energy nerds that forecasters keep predicting solar will level off as it continues to rocket up to the sun. “Solar does continue to surprise us,” said Gregory Nemet, who wrote How Solar Energy Became Cheap, in an email. “It seems like it shouldn’t at this point. It’s been roughly 30 percent growth each year for 30 years. And costs continue to fall so new users — and new uses — continue to emerge.” In the past year, solar power has experienced Brobdingnagian growth, even by solar standards. According to a new report from Ember, an energy think tank, the world is on track to install 29 percent more solar energy capacity this year — a total of 593 gigawatts — compared to last year, which was already a record year. This is more than one-quarter of the electricity produced by every operating coal plant in the world combined. In 2020, the whole world had installed just 760 GW of solar in total. Yes, this deserves all the italics I’m using. That solar power installations are going up as the technology improves and prices come down isn’t too surprising, but the sustained surge is still stunning. “When you look at the absolute numbers that we’re on track for this year and that we installed last year, it is completely sort of mind-blowing,” said Euan Graham, lead author of the report and an electricity data analyst at Ember. Several factors have aligned to push solar power installations so high in recent years, like better hardware, economies of scale, and new, ripe, energy-hungry markets. Right now, solar still just provides around 5.5 percent of the world’s electricity, so there’s enormous room to expand. But solar energy still poses some technical challenges to the power grid, and the world’s ravenous appetite for electrons means that countries are looking for energy wherever they can get it. So if you’re concerned about climate change, it’s not enough that solar wins; greenhouse gasses must lose. Why’s everything so sunny for solar? Solar energy has a lot going for it, particularly photovoltaic panels. They’re modular and they scale up and down easily — there isn’t much difference between a panel that’s one of a dozen on a suburban rooftop and a panel that’s one of thousands in a megawatt-scale power plant spanning acres. They’re mass-produced in factories using well-established processes, namely semiconductor fabrication. That means tiny improvements in cost and performance in individual panels add up to massive advantages in aggregate. And for solar, gains have been anything but tiny: Solar electricity prices have dropped 89 percent since 2010 while silicon solar panels have surged in efficiency from 15 percent to more than 26 percent over the last 40 years. Solar’s scalability means that curious developers can try it out with less upfront investment before ramping up. Most solar installations use off-the-shelf components, so when a homeowner or a utility does decide to step into the sunlight, they can start making power quickly. “That development time is absolutely minimal compared to something like building a nuclear power station, but also even just a wind farm, which can take five to seven years or so from the initial permitting to first power coming out,” Graham said. Even if you don’t care about climate change, solar energy has become one of the cheapest, fastest ways to sate your appetite for electrons. Texas, the biggest oil and gas producer in the country, is also the national leader in adding solar power to its grid, surpassing California. But what happens when the sun sets? Solar does have some drawbacks. The sun does sink below the horizon every day, and solar energy’s output varies with weather and the seasons — dipping when it’s cloudy and when the days get shorter. Banking electricity when it’s abundant to use when it’s scarce would resolve this problem, and, well, there’s good news on that front too. Energy storage technologies like batteries are also getting way better and cheaper. The price of batteries has tanked 97 percent since 1991. Because of better technology, falling costs, and more markets for saving power, the US is on track to double its grid energy storage capacity compared to last year. More than 10 gigawatts of solar and storage came online in 2023 across the country and that’s likely to double this year. “Energy storage is at an earlier stage [than solar] but we are likely to see rapid expansion in that segment, especially in regions where solar and wind penetration are high already such as California and Texas,” said Steve Piper, director of energy research at S&P Global Commodity Insights, in an email. Combined solar-plus-storage energy projects are already cheaper than new fossil fuel power plants in many parts of the world, and costs are poised to fall further. Good morning with good news: Solar plus storage or wind plus storage are NOW much cheaper than coal or gas generated electricity in most of the world.By 2027, clean solar or wind PLUS STORAGE are cheaper than dirty fossil fuels in the entire world!https://t.co/ZtyhVOZNFV pic.twitter.com/l9pz28hYhs— John Raymond Hanger  (@johnrhanger) September 15, 2024 Even knowing all this, energy experts keep underestimating the potential of solar. “Forecasters recognize that with regard to solar PV we are in a phase of rapid expansion and adoption,” Piper said. “In a period like this, being off about the rate of expansion by even a little bit will still result in a large forecast error.” The details of solar energy’s expansion are even more surprising Not every country is riding the solar power rocket to the sun just yet. Individual countries have seen peaks and dips in solar installations based on how well their economies are doing and how strong their policy incentives are, like feed-in tariffs, net metering, and tax credits. In the past couple of years, the global story has really been about China. Add up every solar panel installed in the US in history and you get how much China installed last year alone, almost 60 percent of all new solar installed in the world. The sheer scale of this deployment broke a lot of forecasters’ models. “No research shop necessarily predicted the pace at which China was going to grow their solar capacity over the last year or so,” said Michelle Davis, head of global solar at Wood Mackenzie, an energy market analysis firm. “Everyone’s been revising them upward in order to correct for the data that’s been coming out of China.” Photovoltaics are also a key part of China’s export strategy, and last year, China cut wholesale panel prices in half. That in turn has led to a huge surge in exports and knock-on solar power booms in other countries. Pakistan, the fifth-most populous country in the world, imported 13 gigawatts of Chinese solar modules in the first half of this year alone. That’s almost one-third of Pakistan’s total installed electricity to date. Davis cautioned that imports of solar panels don’t necessarily mean they’ll all be installed, but it’s definitely a sign that solar is growing and its impact may be greater there than in larger or wealthier countries. While the solar energy additions in developing countries may be smaller in absolute numbers, they’re proportionately a larger share of the grid. “Those developing parts of the world are growing at a more rapid rate on a smaller base,” Davis said. “The big Kahunas in the solar world are China, Europe, and the United States. Those markets are maturing, though, and they’re not growing as fast.” There are some clouds in the sky This can’t keep going on forever, right? Well, again, solar is still in the single digits in the global electricity supply, and it’s often the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to generate power. That momentum isn’t going to dissipate anytime soon. In the US, the Federal Reserve’s recent interest rate cut means it will likely be even cheaper to get a loan to finance solar power, giving it another boost. Some challenges have also emerged. If you want to add more solar to the US power grid right now, you need to take a number and get in line. There are hardware limits to how much intermittent power you can add to the aging electricity network, and making the necessary upgrades to accommodate it costs money and takes time. Delays are getting longer: In 2015, a typical energy project waited about three years in an interconnection queue. In 2023, that wait time was almost five years. Getting the permits to build more large-scale solar is also a tedious process. Many countries are facing similar hurdles. In addition, the US is bolstering its domestic clean energy sector with trade barriers, including tariffs on Chinese solar panels. That may give an advantage to US producers but it raises overall costs and imposes supply chain constraints. The US is also investing $40 million to bring more of the solar energy supply chain within its borders. And solar power didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree; it exists in the context of a global economy that’s still 80 percent powered by coal, oil, and natural gas. Overall global energy consumption is growing, and not everyone is discerning about where they get their heat and electricity. As a result, fossil fuel demand is also rising, though it may peak before the end of the decade. To meet international climate change targets of limiting warming to less than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit this century, greenhouse gas emissions have to fall at a much faster clip and effectively zero out by 2050. Analysts are anticipating that solar energy will help bend that curve. According to Wood Mackenzie, total global solar capacity is going to almost quadruple in the next decade. It’s not certain whether the world will reach its climate goals, but solar will continue to spread as sure as the sun will rise.

The real impact of the Teamsters’ non-endorsement

1 d

vox.com

Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien speaks during a rally with workers and union members as part of an “Amazon Teamsters Day of Solidarity” in support of the unionization and collective bargaining of Amazon delivery drivers at the Teamsters Local 848 on August 29, 2024, in Long Beach, California. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the US’s largest and best-known labor unions, has declined to endorse a candidate for president, citing major political divides among its membership, as well as dissatisfaction with each major candidate’s stances on key union priorities. In a tight presidential race where the vast majority of labor unions have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, the Teamsters’ decision not to do so could be seen as a high-profile rebuke, especially since Harris is part of a Democratic administration that has, for the most part, been highly supportive of labor union rights. Whether the decision actively hurts her, however, remains to be seen. The Teamsters represent more than a million workers from many industries, including UPS drivers and workers in construction, healthcare, and sanitation. Their members are located throughout the United States. But Teamsters have a particularly strong base in the Midwest and in swing states that could be decisive in November. Ahead of the decision, the Teamsters polled members on their presidential preferences. In a September telephone poll, 58 percent of Teamsters members supported Republican candidate Donald Trump, and 31 percent said they’d like the union to endorse Harris. In straw polls conducted at town halls prior to President Joe Biden’s decision to exit the race in July, 44 percent of members supported Biden, versus 36 percent for Trump. While the poll results suggest a general preference for Trump, a number of Teamsters local unions and subgroups have vocally come out in support for Harris. The Teamsters National Black Caucus endorsed Harris in August, not waiting for the national organization’s decision. In the wake of Wednesday’s announcement, local unions in battlegrounds like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — among others — also endorsed Harris. Now both camps are claiming to have the Teamsters behind them, Trump because of the poll results, and Harris because of the local endorsements. Will the Teamsters’ political decision carry weight in November? The lack of endorsement may not ultimately matter much when it comes to how Teamsters will vote. The polls and local endorsements so far have made it clear that most Teamsters have a set preference this election cycle, and it’s not clear that an endorsement from the national union would have done much to change that. Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri, told Vox that where union endorsement really matters is on the ground, campaigning. “Union endorsements are valuable because they usually come with access to resources, particularly volunteers to knock on doors and work phone banks,” Squire said. “Leadership may be able to persuade some members to vote the way they would like, but the real value is in campaign assistance.” Besides the setback of having fewer volunteers, there’s also some possibility that the non-endorsement could sway non-union voters sympathetic to labor issues. “There’s the broad symbolism” of the lack of endorsement, Vanderbilt University professor of sociology and political economy Larry Isaac told Vox. Teamsters national president Sean O’Brien said, “We sought commitments from both Trump and Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries — and to honor our members’ right to strike — but were unable to secure those pledges.” That statement, along with the larger choice not to issue an endorsement, makes an explicit argument that neither candidate would look out for organized labor. Prior to Wednesday’s announcement, there were indications that the union might not endorse at all, in a break with other major unions — which wasn’t a total shock given that the Teamsters have often been out of step politically with the rest of the US labor union movement, Isaac said. The United Auto Workers, the American Federation of Teachers, the AFL-CIO, and many smaller unions across industries and across the country have endorsed Harris. Still, the Teamsters’ announcement may be enough to influence some voters. Americans support unions at higher levels than they have in decades — and some data suggests voters were more likely to support candidates they perceived as being pro-union in the 2022 elections. Through her connection to Biden, Harris does have a good record on labor; Biden stood at the picket line with UAW workers when they were striking last summer, and has generally supported the right to strike and sought to undermine corporate power. But the administration also forced Teamsters members back to work under what union leadership said was a less-than-ideal contract ahead of a railroad strike in 2022. But Harris’s own policies and values distinct from Biden’s aren’t all that well known, though she has supported the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would strengthen protections around workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively. But Teamsters leadership was reportedly unimpressed with what they heard during a meeting with Harris earlier this week. Trump, on the other hand, appointed labor antagonists to the National Labor Review Board and approved legislation that restricted workers’ right to organize and strengthened workplaces’ ability to break up a union during his presidency. Rather than focusing on pro-labor policy, Trump has spent the 2024 campaign courting the working class with his populist message. Still, Trump too, apparently did not impress Teamsters in his roundtable meeting with members.

The scary truth about how far behind American kids have fallen

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Students are welcomed back on the first day of class at Roosevelt Elementary School in Anaheim, California, in 2023. | Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images Sometimes, panics are overblown. Sometimes, older generations are just freaking out about the youngs, as they have since time immemorial. That’s not the case, unfortunately, with kids’ learning right now, more than four years after the pandemic shuttered classrooms and disrupted the lives of millions of children. The effects were seen almost immediately, as students’ performance in reading and math began to dip far below pre-pandemic norms, worrying educators and families around the country. Even now, according to a new report released this week by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a research group at Arizona State University that has studied the impact of Covid on education since 2020, the average American student is “less than halfway to a full academic recovery” from the effects of the pandemic. The report — the group’s third annual analysis of the “state of the American student” — combines test scores and academic research with parent interviews to paint a picture of the challenges facing public schools and the families they serve. That picture is sobering: In spring 2023, just 56 percent of American fourth-graders were performing on grade level in math, down from 69 percent in 2019, according to just one example of test score data cited in the report. Declines in reading were less stark but still concerning, and concentrated in earlier grades, with 65 percent of third-graders performing on grade level, compared with 72 percent in 2019. Recovery in reading has also been slower, with some researchers finding essentially no rebound since students returned to the classroom. The report mirrors what many teachers say they are seeing in their classrooms, as some sound the alarm publicly about kids who they say can’t write a sentence or pay attention to a three-minute video. “Focus and endurance for any sort of task, especially reading, has been really hard for a lot of teenagers” since coming back from pandemic closures, Sarah Mulhern Gross, who teaches honors English at High Technology High School in Lincroft, New Jersey, told Vox. Meanwhile, even the youngest children, who were not yet in school when lockdowns began, are showing troubling signs of academic and behavioral delays. “We are talking 4- and 5-year-olds who are throwing chairs, biting, hitting,” Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association, told the New York Times earlier this year. If schools and districts can’t reverse these trends, Covid could leave “an indelible mark” on a generation of kids, CRPE director Robin Lake said this week. The effects are greatest for low-income students, students with disabilities, and children learning English as a second language, who faced educational inequities prior to the pandemic that have only worsened today. Covid “shined a light on the resource inequities and opportunity gaps that existed in this country, and then it exacerbated them,” said Allison Socol, vice president for P-12 policy, research, and practice at EdTrust, a nonprofit devoted to educational equity. The report is the latest effort to catalog what many educators, parents, and kids see as the deep scars — academic, but also social and emotional — left behind by the pandemic. Earlier this year, the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a nationwide testing company, reported that rather than making up ground since the pandemic, students were falling further behind. In 2023-24, the gap between pre- and post-Covid test score averages widened by an average of 36 percent in reading and 18 percent in math, according to the NWEA report. When it comes to education, the effect of the pandemic “is not over,” Lake said. “It’s not a thing of the past.” Kids are behind in reading and math, and they’re not catching up Nearly all public schools in America closed by the end of March 2020, and while some reopened that fall, others did not fully resume in-person learning until fall 2021. The switch to remote school, along with the trauma and upheaval of living through a global health emergency in which more than a million Americans died, dealt a major blow to students’ learning. Scores on one set of national tests, released in September 2022, dropped to historic lows, reversing two decades of progress in reading and math, the New York Times reported. Still, experts were optimistic that students could make up the ground they’d lost. NWEA’s MAP tests, which measure academic growth, showed a strong rebound in the 2021-22 school year, said Karyn Lewis, director of the Center for School and Student Progress at NWEA. But growth slowed the following year, and now lags behind pre-pandemic trends. Kids “are learning throughout the year, but they are doing so at a slightly sluggish pace,” Lewis said — not enough to make up for their Covid-era losses. A team of researchers using separate data from state tests appeared to find more hopeful results earlier this year, documenting significant recovery in both reading and math between 2022 and 2023. But after reanalyzing their data, they found that the improvements in reading were probably produced by changes in state tests, not actual improvements in student achievement, said Thomas Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard and one of the leaders of the research team. In fact, though students did gain some ground in math, they showed little recovery in reading between 2022 and 2023. More recent data does not paint a rosier picture. About half of states have released test results for the 2023-24 school year, and “I don’t see a lot of states with substantial increases” in scores, Kane said. Many factors probably contribute to students’ slow recovery, experts say. Some may have missed “foundational pieces” of reading and math in 2020 and 2021, Lewis said. Learning loss can be like a “compounding debt,” she explained, with skills missed in early grades causing bigger and bigger problems as kids get older. Chronic absenteeism also remains a big obstacle to learning. Twenty-six percent of students were considered chronically absent in 2022-23, up from 13 percent in 2019-2020. Children who are in kindergarten and first grade today were too young to experience the shift to remote learning in 2020 and 2021. But they were more likely to be isolated from other children and adults, Lake said. And like their older counterparts, many also experienced the trauma of deaths in the family, poverty, and parents out of work, all of which could have affected their social and emotional development. Some have argued that pandemic learning loss shouldn’t be a concern because all students were affected — maybe, the argument goes, learning is just different now. But that’s not the case, experts say. Students from wealthier school districts are already well on their way to recovery, while students in lower-income areas continue to struggle. “Not everybody is in the same boat,” Kane said. It’s not too late to help kids recover Despite the dismal numbers, some teachers are seeing successes. When they came back to the classroom after the pandemic closure, Kareem Neal’s students at Maryvale High School in Phoenix, Arizona, were falling asleep in class, having trouble focusing, and struggling to put away their laptops when asked, Neal, who teaches special education science and social studies, told me. But starting last school year, “a lot of the behavioral challenges dissipated,” he said. “I remember telling so many people, ‘Whoa, the kids are so well-behaved.’” Gross, the New Jersey English teacher, said she has seen improvement since her students were required to leave their cell phones at her desk during class. “For the first time in years, I’m seeing them talk to each other,” she said. Some schools have had success reducing chronic absenteeism, including a middle school in Salem, Massachusetts, that aimed to make education more fun by introducing more field trips and hands-on learning, according to the CRPE report. “It’s just like a happier version of school,” said one student cited in the report. There’s still time to help kids who are struggling, experts say. Most of the strategies proven to work are simple and low-tech, like tutoring and summer school, according to the CRPE report. Staffing shortages and the sheer logistical difficulty of setting up large-scale tutoring programs, however, have made even these solutions a challenge for districts, Lewis said. The expiration of pandemic-era federal funding later this month will only make matters worse. “A system that actually needs more is about to have less,” EdTrust’s Socol said. And districts have to actually make recovery programs accessible to all, and convince families to participate. In Louisiana, for example, just 1 percent of students eligible for a post-pandemic literacy tutoring program actually participated, according to the report, and districts often struggle to get students to enroll in summer school. But if schools don’t act, kids could face deficits in basic skills that could haunt them into adulthood, leading to difficulty attaining higher levels of education, finishing college, and lost earnings in their working lives. Because of grade inflation, many parents are also unaware that their children are behind academically. “One of the most powerful things would be if teachers told parents when their child was below grade level,” Kane said. In practice, that often doesn’t happen. But more than that, schools need to rebuild the relationships among students, teachers, and families that frayed during the pandemic, experts and educators say. “People want to feel like a part of a bigger community again,” Neal said. “We need to figure out ways to make that happen so that students are not feeling left out.”

You got into college. How will you pay for it?

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It’s a common worst-case scenario for many students aspiring to college: you’ve worked diligently throughout high school to earn top grades and aced your standardized tests. All your studying and those extracurricular activities are finally paying off — you’ve been accepted to your dream school. The problem is, says John Tillman, president of the financial aid planning firm Ecliptic Financial Advisors, there’s no way your family can afford it. It’s a situation that can cause anguish for everyone involved. “As a parent,” he says, “you’re in a situation where now you have to have a discussion about a budget when the student has already gotten excited about being accepted.” Vox’s guide to college application season This is what admissions officers really want to read in college essays Applying to college? Seven current students on how to stand out and stay sane It’s no secret the cost of a college education has ballooned. In the United States, one year of tuition and fees at an in-state public college ran students an average of $10,662 during the 2023-24 academic year (that total ratchets up to $23,630 for out-of-state students); private schools cost $42,162 per year on average. Over half of graduates from public and private four-year institutions walked away with debt in 2022. On average, students with a bachelor’s degree graduated with $29,400 in debt. Stress due to high student loan payments can have negative impacts on young adults’ mental and physical health. Paying back loans can hamper you as you try to jumpstart a career and may take precedence over saving for retirement, too. Even if you or your parents have little to contribute, getting a college degree is possible without taking out massive loans. In order to side-step future financial stress, students and their families should take a clear-eyed, pragmatic approach to paying for college that starts well before acceptance letters hit the mail, experts say. Determine a budget as soon as possible Ideally, parents will have begun saving for their child’s college education from the moment they’re born, Tillman says. Three-quarters of college families relied on money from parents to cover the cost of college, according to a recent Sallie Mae and Ipsos study, followed by scholarships and grants. But saving for a child’s education may be unrealistic for some families. Depending on your circumstances, parents — or the student themselves — may want to start setting money aside for college by the student’s freshman year of high school, Tillman says. Whether parents have been saving for years or not at all, they should have a conversation with their child before the end of their junior year of high school about how much money they can contribute, says Brendan Williams, vice president of knowledge at uAspire, a nonprofit that helps students from underrepresented backgrounds access financial aid and navigate higher education. Parents and their children should be on the same page about how much money each party has available to pay for college, how long the student anticipates they’ll be in school (will they complete a four-year degree or go on to get advanced degrees?), and if they will get a job while in school. That way, the student has an idea of what schools they can realistically afford — and they won’t waste time applying to those they can’t. Parents and their children should be on the same page about how much money each party has available to pay for college For example, private schools are typically more expensive than public universities. The student might also consider attending a community college first and then transferring to a state university to save money. “You’re saving 35 to 40 percent off the full cost of the four years of school,” Tillman says. “So it’s a very effective way to reduce the overall cost of college.” If the student wants a certain college experience — dorm life, dining halls, and a sprawling campus with fancy facilities — they’ll have to weigh whether these features are worth the possible debt. Williams suggests researching schools’ financial aid programs before applying. Each school has a net price calculator on their website (the US Department of Education also maintains its own database where you can search schools’ net price) where prospective students can enter information about their family’s finances to find out what students from similar backgrounds paid per year, including financial aid and grants. Be strategic when applying for aid Students also should apply for schools where they have a strong chance at receiving merit-based financial aid, Tillman says. Scores of schools offer at least some merit-based aid — that is, scholarships awarded based on your grades, leadership ability, or sports and artistic talents. For instance, over half of students at the University of Denver receive non-need based aid during the 2022-23 academic year. Some schools consider every student who applies for merit scholarships, but others may have separate applications. Schools also usually list the GPA, SAT, and ACT scores of the middle 50 percent of students admitted to the university. For example, the middle 50 percent SAT range for accepted students at Towson University in Maryland is 1100–1300. If your scores are above these ranges, you’re more likely to receive merit-based aid, Tillman says. Aside from merit-based aid, many students will qualify for need-based financial aid, which is based on your family’s financial situation. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, is how students apply for federal, state, and college financial aid. Fill it out as soon as you can after the form opens for the next academic year. Aid is offered in the form of grants, scholarships, loans, and work study. On average, students received $8,890 in 2022 in federal grants. Usually, the FAFSA is available on October 1, but the form for the 2025-26 school year will be available on December 1. Some aid is awarded on a first-come, first-served basis, so the earlier you apply, the better. There are also scholarships offered by private organizations that students can apply for beyond the FAFSA. Many students wait until they receive acceptances and financial aid packages to start applying, Williams says. However, there are more opportunities available at the start of the academic year than at the end, he says. Students should begin applying for scholarships as early as possible in their senior year of high school — and continue in the months following. Don’t discount scholarships from local organizations, like your school district or banks. You may have a higher chance of earning one because fewer students apply, Williams says. There are also more scholarship opportunities for incoming freshmen, he says, so don’t wait until your sophomore year to try landing scholarships. Make a plan by listing all the scholarships you hope to apply for, when applications open, and the submission deadline, Williams says. Consider your return on investment Thomas Caleel, the founder and chair of Global Education Opportunities and the former director of MBA admissions and financial aid for the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, always tells students to think about the return on investment for a degree at a particular school. “If I’m putting my money into this education,” he says, “what am I getting out of it?” “I personally don’t think you should go into this just thinking, ‘I’ll borrow whatever I need to borrow, I’ll figure it out.’ That’s a terrible thing to do.” Students should think about what they hope to pursue after college and if a specific school can best support those goals, whether through a professional network, a unique program or other surprising benefit that will help you get ahead. For example, a California-based student who plans to go into real estate in their home state would get a higher return on investment at an in-state college versus an East Coast university. “It’s going to be much harder for you to leverage that network into a focus on real estate development in the Los Angeles County area,” Caleel says. If you know you want to go to medical school or will pursue an advanced degree, you might have a higher return on investment by starting your education at a community college and transferring to an in-state school for your undergraduate degree, knowing how long you anticipate being in school, Caleel says. Look at the big-picture cost Once students have gotten their acceptances and financial aid award offers — a document that shows how much financial aid, including federal grants, scholarships, and loans the college is offering — they can start comparing the yearly cost of each school. First, look at the details of your aid package. Anything marked as a grant, you do not have to pay back. Federal Pell Grants from the US government are awarded based on the information you included on your FAFSA — the maximum award is $7,395 for the 2024–25 year. Loans are funds that must be repaid and accrue interest. Work study allows you to get an on-campus job to earn money throughout the year. The school will apply your grant and loans toward your tuition, fees, and room and board, while any extra money is paid to you directly. While the net cost for each school you were accepted to may be similar, make sure to compare how much money in loans you would need to repay after graduation. Try to avoid taking out private loans — money lent by banks and credit lenders and not included on your financial aid award offer — which tend to have higher interest rates. “I personally don’t think you should go into this just thinking, ‘I’ll borrow whatever I need to borrow, I’ll figure it out,‘” Tillman says. “That’s a terrible thing to do, and it puts students in a very bad situation down the road.” @scholarshipjunkie How to Read your College Financial Aid Award. Know what you are getting yourself into so you can evaluate different college award better! #financialaid #financialaidadvice #fafsatips #fafsagivememoremoney #collegeadvice #classof2024 #instagram ♬ original sound – Sade, Scholarship Strategist? There are other associated costs not included in the price of tuition and housing students should be aware of. Factor in how much you’ll need to spend on books, transportation to and from campus, and social expenses, like club memberships and off-campus meals, William says. There are also other incidentals: you might need to buy an air conditioner if you’re going to school somewhere much warmer than where you grew up or a winter jacket for somewhere colder. If the cost of tuition for your dream school is just out of budget, you can try negotiating with the university, Caleel says. Collect documentation of financial aid offers from other schools, any changes in financial circumstances, like a parent’s loss of a job or medical expenses, and parent tax returns. The student should then email the financial aid office explaining how you’d like to negotiate tuition. “It’s best to get as many offers as you can and then go and say — and be honest here — ‘You are our top choice. But to go there, we need to pay $25,000 a year that we just don’t have, and our second choice is $5,000 a year. Can we meet somewhere in the middle?’” Caleel says. Sometimes schools will have extra funds for additional aid, but it’s hardly a given. Although college is a considerable expense, it doesn’t need to be an onerous burden. Students and their families need to be realistic about the costs and shouldn’t discount lesser-known institutions. “Parents want to be able to say, ‘My child is going to [the] big, shiny university,’” Caleel says, “when the smarter financial decision is for a child to go to a really, really good community college, to a really, really good state college, and save a ton of money.”

This is what admissions officers really want to read in college essays

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One of the most memorable essays college admissions counselor Alexis White worked on with a student wasn’t about a harrowing personal challenge or a rewarding volunteering experience. “It started with the sentence ‘My hair arrives in a room before I do,’” says White, the founder and director of the consultancy firm Alexis College Expert. “It just was the best. And everybody who reads it loves it.” College application essays have an infamous reputation for being one of the most difficult aspects of the application process. But it remains a crucial way to share details about your life and interests — a way to distinguish yourself beyond your grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities, even in the era of ChatGPT (more on that later). Vox’s guide to college application season You got into college. How will you pay for it? Applying to college? Seven current students on how to stand out and stay sane. Admissions officers are looking to be entertained when reading application essays, White says. Of course, students should use their essay to showcase their curiosities, character, and point of view, but contrary to popular belief, these personal statements don’t need to recount devastating moments of painful growth. “You can be fun,” White says. “You don’t have to have trauma.” There are a number of essays students will need to write as a part of their college application. Over seven million students apply to college through the Common App, a streamlined platform that allows students to apply to multiple schools at once. There, students write a personal statement, usually between 500 and 650 words, centered on a student’s identity, beliefs, accomplishments, and interests, and can choose from among seven prompts for the 2024–25 application season. One prompt even allows the applicant to write about a topic of their choice. “Write the essay that your heart wants to write,” says college essay coach Cassandra Hsiao. Individual colleges also ask for additional shorter pieces (around 250 words), also known as supplemental essays, which may ask applicants to explain why they’re applying to this specific school, and about their academic interests and extracurricular activities. With so much to write, students need to dedicate serious time and effort — White suggests at least eight weeks — into crafting compelling and effective essays. Here’s what college essay pros want applicants to know. Make sure your essays are unique to you Students often put pressure on themselves to have a one-of-a-kind essay topic, White says. There are very few unique concepts, she continues, but what will set you apart is your way into the essay. Start strong with an attention-grabbing first sentence, experts say, that immediately hooks the reader. Can’t decide what to write? Try these exercises. Look around your house or room and pick 10 items that spark a memory — like a soccer trophy or a painting you made — and write them down. Or recount a typical day in your life in detail, from the music you listen to in the shower to the snack you grab before bed. The point, Brooks says, is to hone in on things that you may think of as humdrum, but that you can use to tell a story about yourself. Don’t discount minor details when thinking about extracurriculars and accomplishments. “When my kids are stuck, it’s a lot of chatting about things that they think don’t matter and then we typically come to something really great,” says Tyler. Another tactic is picking five adjectives would you use to describe yourself, suggests White. Expand on each with an experience or memory. Focus on developing a unique lens through which to see an event in your life, with an original point of view. These can be small moments, says Stacey Brook, the founder and chief adviser at College Essay Advisors. For example, one student she worked with wrote an essay about bonding with her mother during drives to gymnastics practice. After the student got her license and no longer had these moments with her mother, she wrote, she felt a sense of loss. “She was reflecting on what those drives meant to her and what it means to grow up and to gain things and lose them at the same time,” Brook says. “That’s the tiniest moment, the smallest slice of life out of which you can make an incredible essay.” Even if you’re writing about a common topic, like school sports or lessons learned from an adult in your life, one way to differentiate your essay is to add dialogue, Hsiao says. “It’s in the specificity that only you can write because you went through that,” she says. Avoid regurgitating your resume, Hsaio continues. Instead, lead the reader through a narrative arc showing your growth. You don’t need to explicitly state what you learned from the experience. Instead, use descriptive, scene-setting language — about how tense you were during that big game or your excitement when you stepped onto the stage — that shows how you’re different on the other side. Again, you don’t need to share the worst thing that’s ever happened to you — or try to dramatize your life to make it seem more challenging than it is — but help the reader understand the effort you put in to get a new club off the ground, for example. “What you went through objectively might be really small on a global scale,” Hsiao says, “but because it felt big to you and I care about you as the writer, it will feel big to me.” Don’t even think about copying from ChatGPT (or other generative AI) While Brook understands the appeal of ChatGPT, experts say don’t use it to write your essay. College application reviewers will be able to tell. The purpose of these pieces is to display your personality and writing ability and bots will never produce a unique, personalized essay. These chatbots use a style and tone that is immediately identifiable to readers, one that is rife with cliches and an awkward cadence, experts say. Appropriate uses of generative AI include spell and grammar check or as a thesaurus. “Once you start pulling full paragraphs, you’re cheating,” White says. “It’s not your work.” Tailor supplemental essays to each school Depending on the school, you may be asked to write one or two shorter supplemental essays. These prompts may have similar themes, about your academic interests or how you relate to the people around you. For these essays, experts say you can reuse answers for multiple schools — but make sure you revise your answers to be specific to each school. To ensure you’re tackling supplemental essays efficiently, Brook says to collect all of the prompts for the schools you’re applying to and see where they overlap. Hsiao suggests brainstorming three or four activities, obsessions or aspects of your life you know you want to showcase and try to match these topics to essay prompts. This can be anything from an extracurricular to your favorite TV show. “We are prioritizing what is important in our lives and then showcasing that by mixing and matching per school for the supplemental essay questions,” she says. For example, if you plan on writing about your future major for one college, adapt that essay to each school. However, make sure you’re researching each university and adding details about their specific program to your piece, Brook says. For essays asking why you want to attend that specific college, ensure your answers are unmistakably catered to that school. “‘I love Delaware because I can’t wait to go to football games and pledge a sorority, and I’m excited about the business school.’ That is not going [cut it] because you could say that about Rutgers,” says Kyra Tyler, a senior director and college admissions consultant at Bright Horizons College Coach. Instead, pepper your answer with details about school traditions, an honors program you hope to join, interesting research opportunities or what you observed when you went on a tour (whether in person or virtual), Tyler says. Tell a vivid story — and showcase your writing ability Not only do your essays need to be of substance, but they should showcase style, too. Tyler suggests students avoid metaphor: Don’t talk about caring for your younger sibling in the context of a Bluey episode — be straightforward. (“Kids can’t get away from [metaphors],” Tyler says, “and what happens is they get stuck under them, and they can’t write.”) You’ll want to write vividly using concrete examples instead of plainly spelling everything out, White says. For instance, if you were a camp counselor who helped a nervous child come out of their shell, write a scene showing the camper interacting with other kids rather than simply saying the camper was less reserved. Write as if you were talking to your best friend, Tyler says. Avoid slang terms, but let your personality come through your writing. Try reading your essay aloud to see if it sounds like you. Don’t forget about the basics, like good grammar, proper spelling, and word choice (make sure you’re not repeating similar words and phrases). You don’t need to focus on the five-paragraph structure, Hsiao says. Just make sure you’re telling a compelling story. Have a trusted adult, like a teacher or parent, read your essay to help point out style and structural issues you may have missed. After you’ve completed a draft, set it aside for a few days, come back to it with fresh eyes for revisions, Tyler says. College application essays are your chance to share who you were, who you are, and how this university will shape who you hope to be, Hsaio says. Focus on topics you want admissions officers to know and let your voice and passion carry the essay.

Applying to college? Seven current students on how to stand out and stay sane.

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It’s that time of year again: Summer is over, class is in session, and high school seniors are filled with dread. Yes, it’s college application season. The formula required to get into many colleges these days involves striking a delicate balance between highlighting personal and academic accomplishments, outlining future interests and aspirations, and painting a picture of who you are versus who you want to be. The prospect of documenting an entire high school career while also selling your personality can be daunting. It’s normal for aspiring undergrads — and their parents — to feel overwhelmed. But you can manage it, whether you’re applying to five schools or 15. Vox’s guide to college application season This is what admissions officers really want to read in college essays You got into college. How will you pay for it? I talked to the people who are most familiar with how high-stakes it can all feel: seven current college students who successfully navigated the process for themselves. Here, they offer their best advice on staying organized, quelling anxiety, and the mistakes they wish they’d avoided. Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket “At first, I only applied to one school, and then got wait-listed. I ended up applying to more after that. I wasn’t really thinking about college as much as I should have, and I was dead set on this one school. I just assumed the application process and acceptance was going to be a lot easier than it was. I put all my eggs in one basket. I was so overwhelmed and I wanted to get the application out of the way. I wish I would have applied to more schools from the start. I wish I would have relied more on support and help from other people, like my school counselors and friends who had already applied to colleges and got accepted.” —Alani Sage, 19. Applied to five schools, accepted to four, wait-listed at one. Now attends the University of Alabama. Trust that you can turn heartbreak around “I was one of those students who didn’t get accepted into a dream school, and you feel like it’s the end of the world, like you have no other hope. But now that I look back, I honestly think every single thing that happens, it’s for a reason. If you adapt and accept things head-on, you’ll thank yourself. I’m really happy now. I think that this experience was better for me, better for becoming more mature, more independent.” —Amna Ahmed, 19. Applied to 22 schools, accepted to 10, wait-listed at six. Now attends Wake Forest University. Use social media (but don’t let it discourage you) “Reddit is a great resource. Subreddits r/CollegeResults and r/ChanceMe are great resources because people post their admitted profiles and you can see what their extracurriculars were and you know what they did to get into X school. r/ChanceMe, you post your own application and people say if they think you’re going to get in or not. “Create a story for yourself that is so authentic and unique to you that anyone that reads it would be like, ‘That is so you.’” Take what people say about your application with a grain of salt, because at the end of the day, they’re not the admissions officer. It’s okay to compare yourself and your application to other people, but it’s not the be-all, end-all. Use it as inspiration but don’t think, ‘This person’s just better than me. I’m never going to have a chance.’” —Dylan Ott, 18. Applied to 15 schools, accepted via early decision to the University of Pennsylvania. Focus on authenticity “College apps are very tricky if you haven’t previously heard advice or if you don’t have other family members that have gone through them. I struggled a lot, because my family is from India, and they weren’t accustomed to the American college admission process. For example, a lot of my peers could afford college counselors when my family didn’t even know what those were. I struggled with selling myself and knowing how to tell my story in a way that was unique to me, because from a very young age, I felt pressure trying to be more like people around me. Whenever I was writing my essays, I would try to frame myself as someone that had this background that my peers did, even though I didn’t. Create a story for yourself that is so authentic and unique to you that anyone that reads it would be like, ‘That is so you.’ Pick one angle about yourself to go with. For me, I talked about my self-growth and development, from being pretty shy to being super confident, starting a TikTok, and being in debate.” —Tanu Tripathi, 20. Applied to 11 schools, accepted to six. Now attends the University of Texas. Just keep writing “I spent a lot of time finding my story and writing down my life, asking my parents about things through my childhood that I couldn’t remember that I could draw connections to right now. It was me dumping much of my life onto the page, and then rewriting it and rewriting it and rewriting it again for a long time. Those 250-word blurb answers were the hardest for me. I wrote about all my interests first and then saw what would match the essay questions for each school. Then you can edit them and change it to match, so you’re not really writing as many essays as you need to. In all, for every single school, there were over 50 essays. But I didn’t write 50 essays. A lot of these are reused, and a lot of them were also 150-word ones. For those questions, I always tried to answer them very creatively and in a way that most people wouldn’t just to show another side of myself.” —Jeremy Hsiao, 21. Applied to 11 schools, accepted to six, wait-listed at two. Now attends Stanford University. Stay organized and have an emotional outlet “I figured out a system of organization that worked for me. Making a drive on Google was huge. I called it ‘college.’ Within that drive I had different folders for scholarships, supplemental essays, and then my Common App. Once you have those folders, make a huge spreadsheet for all the colleges you’re going to apply to. Divide out your spreadsheet into three different sections: early action, a November 30 or December 1 deadline, and then your regular decision colleges. Having it all in one place helped a lot. Everyone’s going through this at the same time, and it’s really important to talk to your friends and family throughout the whole process for your mental health. Make sure you’re not keeping all the stress and all the overwhelming feelings inside of you. Make sure you’re ranting to your friends, ranting to your mom. Getting it all out is generally going to help you so much more in the long run.” —Chahat Kapoor, 20. Applied to 15 schools, accepted to nine, wait-listed at two. Now attends University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Highlight the commonality in all your activities “I talked to a lot of my admission officers and interviewers after I got into these schools and they told me what stood out about my profile was it was so clear what type of student I was going to be. All my activities, my awards, my essays, even my extracurriculars, touched on my leadership and value of community service, specifically in the health field. My junior year of high school when I started thinking about college, I sat down and I wrote out all my extracurriculars and all my awards, and I saw that so many things I did were involved in the health field, and I also had a lot of leadership positions, so that naturally became what I would present in my profile.” —Olivia Zhang, 19. Applied to 26 schools, accepted to 20, wait-listed at two. Now attends Harvard University.

I asked Bill Gates why there are still so many hungry children

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vox.com

Bill Gates says there have not been enough new donor countries to keep making progress in global health and child hunger campaigns. | Hollie Adams/Bloomberg via Getty Images Bill Gates helped launch a global health revolution at the turn of the 21st century, one in which multilateral humanitarian efforts arrested the AIDS crisis in Africa and began to make strides against longtime killers like tuberculosis and malaria. People in the Global South were living longer. A more equitable future appeared within our grasp. But that progress has since stalled. Between 2000 and 2020, the worldwide child mortality rate fell by 50 percent, but it has remained stagnant over the past four years. Global development funding to support health efforts grew by 6.6 percent a year on average from 2000 to 2020, increasing less than $15 billion annually to about $50 billion. But that growth has slowed with the pandemic, falling to just 2.3 percent. Now, a new report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation projects global health investments could actually decline over the rest of the decade. The stinginess comes at a particularly bad time. We are in a critical fundraising cycle for the major global health organizations. Gavi, the vaccine alliance that provides immunizations to people in low-income countries, is currently seeking $9 billion to replenish its funds for the next five years. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, which supports prevention and treatment for those diseases in developing countries and was seeded with a donation from the Gates Foundation, will begin its replenishment drive next year. But there are real and growing concerns that these groups may fail to reach their fundraising targets. As a result, the world could lose ground against infectious diseases and especially child malnutrition, and those challenges are only set to grow in the future. Climate change threatens humanity’s food supply and thus its ability to feed itself. Without intervention, the number of children in the world who experienced stunting is expected to grow by 40 million by 2050 and the number who experience wasting will increase by 50 million. How can the world get back on track? Gates, as the chair and chief funder of a foundation that has delivered nearly $78 billion in grants chiefly for global health programs since 2000, is one of the most influential people trying to figure that out. In a recent interview with Vox, Gates conceded the challenges facing global health advocates, offered his own explanations for why investments have fallen off, and previewed the developments in the field he thinks hold the most promise for regaining the momentum of the early 21st century. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Dylan Scott You framed the report around the stalled investment in global health that coincided with the pandemic. There seems to be a real realignment within the public and among policymakers in the US and in other countries, the countries that have driven a lot of global health investment. So what is your theory of why that is? How do you change people’s minds back if their views are starting to shift on this issue? Bill Gates The world committed itself to keep making progress in reducing childhood death through the UN sustainable development goals that were set in 2015. We were spoiled during that period, between 2000 and 2015, because helping Africa, cutting the childhood death rate, it really had a lot of attention. There was some low-hanging fruit in that vaccines were being given in rich countries that we were able to reduce the cost of dramatically and we got Gavi to finance and get them distributed out to a very high percentage of all the world’s children. That’s why we got the childhood mortality cut by a factor of two, from 10 million kids a year dying to under 5 million. If it was just the pandemic, then getting back on track actually wouldn’t be that hard because the pandemic’s over. The things that are happening alongside that are, first of all, that the African countries got cleared of their debts around the turn of the century. And that was a super-worthy cause that predates the foundation. Over these years, though, they’ve built up debts. Now, as macroeconomic conditions have changed, the interest rates on those debts have gone up a lot, particularly for them because they’re risky borrowers. So African countries are now spending more on interest payments than on health and education combined. That’s a pretty dramatic thing. Then the aid levels coming out of the rich countries have actually gone down. That’s a surprise. Rich country budgets are squeezed by wanting to raise defense spending, wanting to help Ukraine, having aging populations with higher health costs, and not wanting to raise taxes. So there’s a squeeze in the rich countries’ budgets, even though aid is well under 1 percent of the US government budget. We’ve seen cuts in the UK, in Germany, in France, and the European Union. That is really tragic because the assumption was that as these Asian countries — Vietnam, Indonesia, India — graduated from being aid-eligible because of their economic growth, we’d have more money per person to put into the low-income countries that remain, which are mostly in Africa. But that has not turned out to be the case. When somebody says to me the old arguments don’t work, I’m like, “Wow, we don’t care about children dying anymore?” I mean, it seems like, “Oh my God, what the hell?”BILL GATES I want to help get those aid budgets up so we can provide the debt relief, so we can fund Gavi. Even Gavi is going to have a tough time raising as much money as it did five years ago. The Global Fund raises every three years, so next year, they’ll be going around. And I don’t know if they’ll be able to raise as much. That’s despite the fact that whether you see it through the moral lens or the climate adaptation lens or stopping pandemics before they get to rich countries or global stability — whatever it is, these are the best investments possible. Dylan Scott Does the global health movement need to find a new argument, as we expect these new countries to make more investments? Bill Gates Lots of countries have transitioned from low-income to middle-income: Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia, India, Vietnam. Very few countries have transitioned from middle-income to high-income. South Korea is this famous example. Depending on where you set the threshold, you could say Chile or Poland are examples. But there’s not that many. As you move from low-income to middle-, you are self-sufficient, so you’re not drawing on whatever the aid budget is. As you move from middle- to high-, which China’s right on the threshold of, then hopefully you become a donor in some way. But we haven’t gotten too many new donors. We’re still extremely reliant on five countries: Japan, Germany, France, the UK, the US. That’s like 70 percent of the aid right there, even though you have a few like Sweden and Norway who by the percentage of their economy are the most generous at about 1 percent each. But the big money is in the Big Five. But the cuts there are so gigantic, we won’t make up for them with new donors. When somebody says to me the old arguments don’t work, I’m like, “Wow, we don’t care about children dying anymore?” I mean, it seems like, “Oh my God, what the hell?” I admit that the way that we get to people, including the younger generation, is changing. I think we have to renew our energy and how we connect on this. There’s no substitute for getting people to go see this and come back and bear witness to it. But we are challenged and we admit our message isn’t landing, so we’ve got work to do. Dylan Scott Your report outlines some solutions. You’ve got new technology to increase dairy productivity. You’ve got financing through the Child Nutrition Fund. You’re focusing on making sure food is actually nutrient-rich. You’ve got prenatal vitamins. If I were to force you to pick the first action item, keeping in mind this idea that we just don’t have as many resources as we’re used to to accomplish these things, what would you pick? Bill Gates I would say that large-scale food fortification — where you get people to stick vitamin A or folic acid into foods — the cost of that is super, super low. We have a team that’s expert in that, working with the food makers and really measuring what the vitamin deficits are. That’s a best buy. The idea of these chickens that lay a lot of eggs or cows that make a lot of milk, the beauty of that is once you improve the genetics of the African cows, that’s a gift that keeps on giving. That’s a teaching a man to fish type thing where, as we mix the super productivity of Western dairy cows together with the heat and disease tolerance that African cows have, you can get something that’s 75 percent as productive as a [dairy cow], which is four times the milk productivity of the cows that are in Africa today. It’ll take five years before, say, half the cows in Africa get that, but that’s a gigantic thing because that’s income for women, that’s milk for the kids where malnutrition, vitamin deficiency, and protein deficiency are gigantic. Cheap eggs, cheap chickens, and cheap milk are a big part of this. We’ve already cut the cost of eggs in Ethiopia in half. We see the poorest households actually using twice as many eggs as they used before because they’ve become a lot more affordable. Those egg factories and milk factories, getting those into Africa in the hands of the smallholder farmers, that’s pretty powerful. Once you improve the genetics of the African cows, that’s a gift that keeps on giving. That’s a teaching a man to fish type thing.BILL GATES Dylan Scott We are learning more all the time about our gut bacteria and how that influences our digestion and physical health. What potential interventions are in the works to improve the microbiomes of children in the Global South? Bill Gates The probiotic stuff, that’s at an earlier stage. We have to prove out the impact, and we have to get the cost of that down a lot. It’s in our R&D work. If it works as well as we think, if we reduce the cost as much as we think, then we might even want to grow the size of the Child Nutrition Fund [a UNICEF-led program on child hunger] and add that as an intervention. We’ve been the biggest funder of research in [microbiomes], including the original study where we took Malawi twins. We saw that one of them would be on the growth path, one would be off, and then we would look at stool samples or have them swallow capsules and figure out, “Okay, what is the makeup of a healthy microbiome?” The kid whose growth was faltering, what we saw was their microbiome was very different [from their twin] and very inflammatory. Their ability to absorb nutrition was limited, and then you get on a negative path because as you get weaker, you can’t get out of that condition. One way to intervene is to put the good bacteria in and have them outcompete the bad bacteria, but we don’t know how much we’ll be able to reduce the costs of that. The ideal thing would be to come up with a food-based intervention that’s cheap. We have a trial going on studying choline, a nutrient that the good microbacteria thrive on and that the bad microbacteria don’t. It’d be a lot cheaper and more scalable if it turns out that choline, which we can make super cheap and add to vitamin supplements, pushes you toward this noninflammatory set of microbiota species. We know that protein pushes you in the right direction, but just saying, “Hey, every kid in the world should have lots of milk and eggs,” that’s way too expensive. We know we can make probiotics way cheaper than that. Dylan Scott I’ve been hearing that the global health field itself is changing, emphasizing systems more and specific diseases or conditions less. We used to focus on one problem at a time: PEPFAR being focused on AIDS is maybe the best example of that. People thought, “We’re going to try to address this disease,” or, “We’re going to try to address this particular problem.” But I’ve sensed that there’s been a shift toward supporting systems and supporting institutions. Investing in health system infrastructure, for example, instead of starting a campaign focused on a specific disease. I’m curious if your own thinking about not only how to deliver aid most effectively, but also what type of aid is most likely to lead to a lasting impact, has shifted. Bill Gates There’s no doubt that the long-run solution is economic development. Economic growth that allows the government to collect more taxes and therefore fund more health, more education, more infrastructure, that’s the magic thing that India, Vietnam, Indonesia have shown is the way to get to self-sufficiency. They’ve reduced their malnutrition a lot. How do we help Africa get on an economic growth path? We need healthier children so that they can go to school and can be productive. BILL GATES But you have to say, “Okay, what enables economic growth? Why is Africa in a poverty trap?” We know that parents choose to have enough children to have a 90 percent chance of having at least two survive to adulthood. As you reduce childhood death rates, fertility rates go down almost in lockstep. There’s this weird paradox that if children survive, population growth goes down, which is the opposite of the commonsense view. So how do we help Africa get on an economic growth path? We need healthier children so that they can go to school and can be productive. We need to reduce population growth, and reducing the death rate is your biggest lever to do that. And as you educate girls, that becomes another factor in driving that fertility rate down, as is making a contraception widely available. So these are all areas that the foundation works in. We want to enable economic growth. If you want to reduce children’s deaths, it’s not about some big health system; don’t think hospitals. Africans do not need doctors. They are born, they live, they die, and the majority never meet a doctor, or what the US would call a doctor. You have to look at: What’s killing these kids? What’s causing them to be malnourished? Four things get you 85 percent of those deaths: malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, and then a bunch of things that can kill you in your first 30 days. Those are the categories. We’ve made huge progress on malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia. We haven’t made as much on those first 30 days, and there’s still a lot more to do on that. No one disagrees that economic development is the end goal. But these very basic health things, that’s how for just $10 per citizen per year, you get yourself to a position where the kids are doing well at school. You’re moving off of the farms into services and manufacturing, and you will no longer be dependent on aid. My basic theory has been refined in terms of, “Okay, why did this work so well in Asia and what’s missing in Africa?” But the overall idea of “help them help themselves” is still pretty much the same.