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

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

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

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

Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O’Connor in Challengers. | Challengers/Amazon MGM Studios An investigation into a sport of short shorts and thrown rackets. In addition to solidifying Zendaya as a movie star, the new Luca Guadagnino film Challengers presents a couple of ideas about the seemingly polite and preppy game of tennis: One, it’s a sport that belongs on the silver screen as regularly as football, baseball, or boxing. Two, it’s quite possibly the most erotic activity outside of sex. Early on in Challengers, tennis prodigy Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) explains to her fellow players and future romantic conquests, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), that “tennis is a relationship.” As the film goes on, the sport becomes a vehicle for psychosexual warfare. The movie time-jumps across a tense love triangle between the three athletes, who take diverging career paths but remain trapped in a perpetual three-way match throughout their adulthood. While there’s no actual intercourse, there are lots of passionate make-outs, male nudity, and simmering glances. Most of the film’s sexual tension is released on the court, where Art and Patrick meet a decade-plus later to have a climactic showdown at the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) Challenger Tour, the second tier of professional male tournaments. There’s much more than just ranking points at stake. Arnold Jerocki/Getty Images for Warner Bros Pictures Zendaya and her Challengers co-stars attend the Monte Carlo Masters tennis tournament. It’s safe to say that the gameplay in Challengers is mostly sexy because of Guadagnino’s directorial sensibilities, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsing score. The Italian filmmaker is known for sensually (and queerly) capturing the beauty and horror of the human body, to the point where they sometimes overlap. However, there’s an argument that the formalities, aesthetics, and personalities of professional tennis make it an innately hot sport designed for hot people. In an interview with Variety, Challengers’ screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes argued that tennis is naturally an “erotic sport.” He compares the game — which has origins in Victorian-era Britain — to a “Victorian romance,” adding that there’s a “deep intimacy and a lot of repression.” Culture writer Kyndall Cunningham and senior culture correspondent Alex Abads-Santos, former players and fans of the sport, unpack what makes tennis so right (and occasionally wrong) for such a naughty film, ranking these qualities from least to most sexy. The lingo Stroke. Balls. Depth. Grip. Grunt. Love. These are all tennis terms and, depending on your maturity level (or lack thereof), they could easily be manipulated into a double entendre. The men’s professional tour has actually done this! Famously, in 2001, the organization was promoting the next generation of exciting new players, which included future GOAT Roger Federer and grand slam winners like Marat Safin. To drum up excitement at the time, the ATP tour released a campaign with the tagline “New balls please.” The line is a reference to an actual part of a tennis match; two new cans of balls are opened after the first seven games because of wear and tear. But the slogan also functions as a smirky way of signaling a changing of the guard in the men’s game because of the testicle innuendo. New balls good, old balls bad. But see how unsexy that is right there? Not just because of that uncouth combination of words and scientific terminology of body parts, but it’s all just a bit too obvious. When it comes to self-evident jokes, though, much has already been made of tennis’s grunting. From parody to gossip, the observation that tennis playing can sound like sex is, at this point, bordering on banal. It might even raise questions about what kind of sex one is having if their sex sounds like some modern tennis players. Tennis innuendo is just too obvious to be thrilling or even naughty. Maybe tennis doesn’t need words to be sexy! —AAS The tantrums It’s not a surprise that Guadagnino makes a meal out of the traditionally frowned-upon racket smash in Challengers. In addition to yelling at the umpire, this is perhaps the most classic act of bad sportsmanship practiced at some time or another by most pros, including more disciplined players like Rafael Nadal and the notably ill-mannered John McEnroe. This code violation can come with a big fine. Plus, there isn’t a more obvious way to let your opponent know you’re losing confidence. Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images Andy Murray is very fed up in this moment, and quite possible sexy? Yet, there’s something admittedly hot about this sort of emotional expulsion; a casual display of superhero strength and feeling exposed in such a formal environment. For whatever reason, it feels less obnoxious when women partake in this tradition, like when Belarusian player Aryna Sabalenka lost to Coco Gauff at last year’s US Open final and was recorded in the facility locker room slamming her racket against the floor. (She did the same on the court during last month’s Miami Open after she lost to Ukrainian player Anhelina Kalinina.) The US Open moment went viral and drew some criticism. I’d argue this primal display of fury only made her a more alluring and terrifying player. —KC The kits Tennis is a sport of tiny outfits that, for most of the season, is played outside and under ample amounts of sunshine. We have sweaty, sunned athletes in shorts and skirts, and the juxtaposition between effort and semi-formal style is inherently alluring (as long as you don’t think about the absolutely shocking sock tans some players possess). Tennis also allows for a lot of personal style. Aside from Wimbledon’s all-white rule, there’s some wiggle room in the uniform (unless you’re Serena Williams). S&G/PA Images via Getty Images Bjorn Borg is a style icon! Over the years, more fashionable players like Roger Federer, Serena and her sister Venus, Rafael Nadal, and Maria Sharapova have stepped onto the court with custom fits, like Serena’s diamond sneakers at her final US Open or Federer’s man-in-black ensemble. Bjorn Borg, a tennis player in the 1970s and early ’80s, gets referenced as a fashion icon again and again. While this kind of self-expression can be thrilling, most players get generic tennis outfits from brands like Nike and Adidas, sometimes in cuts and colors that aren’t flattering or pleasing. Even some of the aforementioned stars have had some flops. —AAS The rules Tennis is a sport built on confusing rules. Even the scoring seems impenetrable. A tennis match is when two players face off against each other, and a match consists of points, games, and ultimately sets. Each game is a sequence of at least four points with a margin of two. That game gets players on the scoreboard (e.g. 1-0). The first player to six games with at least a margin of two (e.g. 6-4) wins the set, and the first person to win two out of three sets (6-4, 6-4) or three out of five sets wins the match. If both players get to six games apiece, then a tiebreak may go into effect — players race to seven points and have to win by at least two. Tennis is all about the margin of two because it signifies a player both winning points on their serve and winning points when their opponent serves. There are all kinds of circumstantial hijinks too! Whew! And all that is just scoring and not even taking into account how every point is a matter of where a ball lands and that a millimeter can be the difference between winning and losing. The sport isn’t exactly easy to follow. All these little tidbits can sometimes raise more questions than answers, but they do one thing very well: maximize drama — and drama is sexy. The scoring structure creates high-pressure situations and taxing mind games. Will the server take a little off a serve to get it in? Will the returner gamble? Will the entire momentum of the match flip? In a competitive match, so many of these questions go into every point and each swing at the ball. While this kind of pressure might not feel great for the players, especially those on the losing end, these morsels of tension and excitement are a treat for the audience. —AAS The incredibly crushable players In her book Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon, author Elizabeth Wilson suggests that the “intense” and “intimate” way matches are filmed “places the tennis player alongside the film star as an icon of glamour and beauty.” It’s true that the way matches are shot — particularly with the modern use of close-ups and slow-motion replays — places you right on the court, allowing you to nearly feel what the players are feeling and clearly read their facial expressions, just like a big screen idol. In the cases of players like Shakira video vixen Rafael Nadal, fashion and beauty icon Serena Williams, or Italian heartthrob Matteo Berrenetti, I have to agree. Plenty of spectators have appreciated the beauty of tennis stars as well. During her peak in the late ’90s and early aughts, Russian player and model Anna Kournikova was placed on many “sexiest female athlete” lists and in men’s magazines before joining a famously hot power couple with her husband, singer Enrique Iglesias. In a rare public display of thirst, Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour declared herself a “groupie” for Swiss superstar player Roger Federer. However, it’s more than just physical appearance. There are also personalities, sportsmanship, and politics to consider. That said, someone like No. 1 male player in the world and widely renowned villain Novak Djokovic, who opposed Covid-19 vaccination mandates in 2020, works against this argument. There’s also Nick Kyrigios, whose overly try-hard bad-boy schtick and domestic abuse allegations undermine his otherwise attractive looks. —KC The dominance of female players The basketball world is currently seeing how much more exciting their sport is when they acknowledge the contributions of female players. But when it comes to tennis, women have long garnered as much — if not more — attention than their male counterparts, from gender-equality activists like Billie Jean King in the ’70s to ’80s icons such as Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova. Since the mid-’90s, this has been particularly true of Black women. Grand Slam champions like Serena and Venus Williams, Naomi Osaka, Sloane Stephens, and Coco Gauff have become renowned celebrities and multihyphenates, as well as notable entry points for generations of fans who may not have otherwise tuned into the sport. Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images Serena Williams is the most dominant female tennis player in a sport where women dominate attention and excitement. This level of visibility didn’t happen overnight and is arguably still in progress. This year only marks the 17th season that the Women’s Tennis Association has offered women the same cash prize for all four Grand Slam tournaments as the men’s ATP. (In regular-season events, like the Italian Open, women are still starkly underpaid.) —KC The rivalries Every sport has rivalries: Magic and Bird, the Red Sox and the Yankees, Duke and Carolina, Frazier and Ali, Harding and Kerrigan, and the list goes on and on. But there’s nothing like a singles tennis rivalry. In team sports like basketball, you could have a matchup between superstars that never have to guard each other (e.g. Lebron James and Steph Curry), and in individual Olympic sports like figure skating or gymnastics, a star athlete — e.g. gymnast Simone Biles, skater Nathan Chen, or swimmer Michael Phelps — has to beat a certain time or score, which puts destiny into their own hands. Tennis is set up in a way that one player has to outright beat another player to advance. There are no ties, no judges scores, no timed laps or splits, and no other teammates in singles tennis. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do when the human on the other side of the net is playing amazingly well, and vice versa. That winner-take-all element is what made every match between Federer and Nadal, Serena and Venus, Navratilova and Evert, McEnroe and Borg, and other famed tennis rivalries so compelling. Simon Bruty/Anychance/Getty Images Roger Federer vs. Rafael Nadal is one of tennis’s most storied rivalries. The player-versus-player dynamic also becomes very personal. Rivals become intimately familiar with each other’s games. They know their weaknesses, strengths, and tendencies. Every tournament, every match, every point, and every stroke becomes a chapter in a saga between two people. Like any pair of humans who have a long history with each other, tennis rivalries can symbolize and encapsulate anything from revenge to respect to animosity to friendship in a way that other sporting rivalries just can’t. —AAS

Pro-Palestine student demonstrators march from the University of Colorado campus in Boulder to show solidarity and to protest the sale of US jets to Israel in this October 1973 photo. | Denver Post via Getty Images And for decades, schools have tried to crack down on their activism. Last week, the country watched one of the biggest escalations in campus unrest this year unfold, when dozens of New York City police officers clad in riot gear entered the grounds of Columbia University and, on the orders of university president Minouche Shafik, arrested more than 108 student protesters who had built a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on campus. The students are calling for the school to divest from companies and organizations with ties to Israel amid the ongoing war in Gaza. Though Shafik said at a congressional hearing she had taken the steps to make all students feel safe amid a reported rise in antisemitic rhetoric on campus, students said the administration put them in danger by authorizing a “notoriously violent” police unit to forcibly remove them, and NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell later described the arrested students as “peaceful.” At schools across the country, including the University of North Carolina, Ohio State University, University of Michigan, Boston University, and University of California Berkeley, students and faculty have launched marches, walkouts, and other demonstrations in solidarity with students at Columbia and to bring attention to the 34,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks in the months since Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage on October 7. New Haven police arrested nearly 50 people on Yale University’s campus early Monday on the third day of an encampment demonstration, while Columbia announced that classes would be held virtually as a campus “reset” and be hybrid for the remainder of the semester. Monday night, police arrested students on New York University’s campus, where about 400 people protested, after administrators called their demonstration “disorderly, disruptive and antagonizing.” Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg via Getty Images Pro-Palestinian demonstrators’ encampment at Columbia University on April 22, 2024, as the campus continued to reel after arrests of more than 100 protesters. These campus crackdowns have gone hand in hand with a long history of US student activism for Palestine that began even before Israel’s founding in 1948. Pro-Israel groups and students have doxxed and surveilled student activists, the media has sometimes mischaracterized their demonstrations, and administrators and law enforcement have punished the students with probations and suspensions or long legal fights and threats of jail time. “In the current moment, we’re seeing an exacerbation of a longstanding strategy of suppression of pro-Palestine organizations on college campuses,” said Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, the organization defending pro-Palestinian students in court, last fall, as tensions on campuses were rising. “Instead of allowing debate to take place on campuses — and allowing student organizations to highlight what’s happening to Palestinians — school leaders have taken the approach of trying to squash out the organizing and expression altogether,” he said. Students’ pro-Palestine protest — and its suppression — has long been a locus of debate over the bounds of criticism of Israel and Zionism on campuses, the definition of antisemitism, and who is and isn’t allowed to fully exercise freedom of expression and assembly. Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg via Getty Images Demonstrators at Columbia University in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York, April 22, 2024. Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg via Getty Images Faculty protest at Columbia University on April 22, 2024. The early roots of US student activism for Palestine US student activism for Palestine predates the Nakba — the 1940s expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians and the destruction of villages by Zionist militias amid a war to establish the state of Israel — by decades. Arab medical students and doctors in the US formed the Palestine Anti-Zionism Society (later known as the Palestine National League and then the Arab National League) as early as 1917 to protest the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s statement that called for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people’’ in Palestine. The group published 1921’s “The Case Against Zionism” text and testified before Congress against the establishment of a Zionist state. The students also battled the negative depictions of Arabs that were spreading across the country alongside the Zionist movement. More than 100 years ago, two members of the group told Congress what pro-Palestinian students across America are saying today: “Palestinians are not as backward as the Zionists portray them. They are entitled to a chance to build their own homeland…” Larger-scale collective action increased as more Palestinians immigrated to the United States through the 1930s and ’40s “as the combination of colonial British rule and Zionist immigration made their lives unbearable,” San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi wrote in “Activism and Exile: Palestinianness and the Politics of Solidarity.” Student activism for Palestine grew with the student movement against the Vietnam War, among other struggles. Images of last week’s arrests at Columbia have even been juxtaposed with those from 1968, when about 1,000 police officers, some on horseback and carrying nightsticks, stormed the Columbia campus to arrest students protesting the war and US foreign policy. “Palestine liberation organizing was very much a part of the anti-establishment, antiwar counterculture of the 1960s,” author and journalist Nora Barrows-Friedman wrote in the 2014 book In Our Power: U.S. Students Organize for Justice in Palestine. The 1967 war between Israel and its neighbors brought a new wave of uprooted Palestinians who couldn’t return home, students who were “politically conscious” and wanted to maintain their Palestinian identity, according to Abdulhadi. The next few decades saw the formation of different pro-Palestinian groups, including the Organization of Arab Students, the Association of Arab American University Graduates (created by the late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said), and the General Union of Palestinian Students. Many of the organizations faded after the Oslo Accords, the American-led effort to broker peace between Israel and Palestine, in the early 1990s. The modern face of pro-Palestinian student activism Students for Justice in Palestine is one of the key groups currently leading protests for Palestine across US campuses. The group organized some of the encampments that have sprouted up at campuses in the last week. Since October 7, some campus SJP chapters have been banned or suspended by administrators who say their demonstrations, slogans, and protest chants violated school policies. For example, George Washington University’s president suspended the school’s SJP chapter after students projected slogans including “Divestment from Zionist genocide now,” “Glory to our martyrs,” and “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” on the side of the library. The president called some of the phrases antisemitic, though students and activists say the slogans call for Palestinian liberation. SJP reignited activism for Palestine when it was launched at the University of California Berkeley in the early 1990s, as talks to dismantle the racialized apartheid regime in South Africa were underway and students drew parallels to Palestine. But it was the group’s actions amid the Second Palestinian Intifada — the uprising that began in 2000 in which Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel resisted the Israeli occupation — that have come to define the organization today. At UC Berkeley, aside from organizing teach-ins and showing films to educate fellow students about Palestine, SJP members reenacted Israeli checkpoints across campus, temporarily blocking students at various campus gates. They built mock refugee camps on campus, occupied administrative buildings, disrupted classes, and chained themselves to the main administrative building. Initially, the group “prioritized the spectacle with the aim of radicalizing our audiences and thrusting them into mobilization. The purpose was to avoid inertia,” wrote former UC Berkeley SJP member and Rutgers professor Noura Erakat in the forward to In Our Power. But SJP found stronger direction in its divestment and “right of return” campaigns. When a vast coalition of pro-Palestine groups announced an official movement in 2005 to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, or BDS, the group at Berkeley focused on pushing for the right of Palestinian refugees to return home and the need for Israel to comply with international law. The new platform allowed the Berkeley chapter to find broader solidarity with Palestinian organizers across the country as those groups embraced BDS. SJP grew between 2003 and 2008 as students formed new SJP chapters, expanding to the East Coast, while activity ebbed and flowed based on conditions in the West Bank and Gaza. Houston Chronicle via Getty Images Palestinian student demonstrators gathered outside of the Israeli consulate in Houston, Texas, on July 21, 1981. “Media accounts, political analysts, and most observers noted the nascent movement with interest but dismissed it as idealistic and naïve,” wrote Erakat. Members, founders, and alumni told Vox that SJP’s staying power has come from its ability to draw in students of all backgrounds, including Jewish students. “Historically, SJP was very dynamic because of its diversity. It wasn’t a Palestinian student organization or an Arab or Muslim one,” said William Youmans, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University who helped resuscitate UC Berkeley’s SJP chapter in 2000 and started Law Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley’s law school. Youmans spoke with Vox last fall as protests erupted on campuses. As SJP chapters formed, members developed new protest strategies and signature events, some of which continue today. Students at the University of Toronto, for example, launched Israel Apartheid Week to bring attention to the BDS movement, among other issues. Students told Barrows-Friedman that the week was formed to show that Israel’s occupation was not an “intractable conflict” or “of equal burden held by both Israel and the Palestinians” but an “unequal situation in which a US-supported government with an occupying military force rules over the displaced, confined, excluded, and occupied.” When intensified violence broke out between Israel and Hamas in 2012, SJP members at UC Riverside constructed large coffins to conduct mock funerals. Around the same time, members at San Diego State University, University of New Mexico, and University of Arizona created 10-foot-tall “apartheid walls” to draw attention to the restrictions Palestinians face. Students boycotted products with connections to Israel, like the SJP members at DePaul University who organized a movement to boycott Sabra, the hummus company. When campuses invited Israeli soldiers to deliver speeches, SJP students protested and walked out at schools including the University of Kentucky, Rutgers University, George Mason, and San Diego State University. In violation of speech and conduct regulations, some students disrupted speakers mid-speech. Pro-Palestinian student activists have faced pushback and consequences As students organized, they faced counterprotests from pro-Israel student groups, backlash and shifting rules from university administrators, and have been subjected to death threats, legal fights, and surveillance, doxxing and targeting by pro-Israel organizations. The crackdown on student organizing after 2000 coincided with the George W. Bush administration’s “war on terror” following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which included the passage of the Patriot Act that made it easier for the government to carry out domestic surveillance that often targeted Muslim communities. When SJP members at Boston University planned the school’s first Israeli Apartheid Week, BU Students for Israel formed “Israel Peace Week” and scheduled it for the week before. When students planned a Right of Return Conference there in 2013, a student reported that the conference “received a lot of pushback from Zionists who called the administration in an effort to stop the conference from happening.” After students at Florida Atlantic University spoke out and walked out of a speech given by an Israeli soldier in 2013, they were put on administrative probation barring them from holding campus leadership positions, and forced to attend an anti-bias training created by the Anti-Defamation League, the pro-Israel organization that tracks hate crimes. In a rare criminal prosecution, 10 students who heckled then-Israeli ambassador Michael Oren during a talk he gave in 2010 at the University of California Irvine were found guilty of misdemeanors for “disrupting a public meeting,” and were sentenced to three years of probation, 56 community service hours, and fines. Northeastern University suspended its SJP chapter in 2014 and threatened students with expulsion after they handed out mock eviction notices during the group’s Israel Apartheid Week. That same year, university administrators at Barnard quietly removed an SJP banner with the words “Stand for Justice, Stand for Palestine” with no explanation. When SJP passed resolutions through student governments to have their institutions stop investing in companies that support Israel, universities condemned the votes. SJP activists have reported being contacted, interviewed, or followed by the FBI over their organizing. Individual students have also worked with pro-Israel groups on a few occasions to file claims under Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, alleging that SJP activism at UC’s Irvine, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz campuses created a “hostile environment,” with “harassment, intimidation, and discrimination” for Jewish students and amounted to antisemitism. The most popular of these lawsuits, 2011’s Felber v. Regents of the University of California, was dismissed that same year after a judge determined that the university was working to foster dialogue and ensure safety between opposing groups. Since October 7, pro-Palestinian students have struggled to strike the appropriate tone, critics said. The national SJP, which is not affiliated with any campus chapters, released a five-page instructional toolkit that called for chapters across the country to “resist” as part of Hamas’s attack, which was described as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” The document, condemned as antisemitic, featured paraglider imagery in its graphics, reminiscent of the Hamas militants who descended on Israel during the attack. The state university system of Florida swiftly deactivated its SJP chapters after the toolkit’s release, arguing that the students were providing material support for a terrorist organization. “October 7 was a unique moment because the scale of Hamas’ attack is unprecedented in Palestinian history. The scale of the atrocity, the spectacle of violence against civilians — it was a horrific attack,” said Youmans. “That put a lot of student organizers in this complicated position. On the one hand, the US media was focusing on the horror of it and a lot of Palestinian solidarity activists were saying that it was the natural outcome of constant bombardment of Palestine by Israel every two to three years for a decade and a half. There was this violence and traumatization that was happening for years. “But instead of explaining that, a lot of SJP chapters used slogans or others had a celebratory tone. It was so out of touch with the larger mood in the country.” Student organizers who spoke to Vox said that they denounce antisemitism and take time to welcome their Jewish peers at protests. At the Columbia encampment last week, students held Shabbat and sang prayers, and for the first night of Passover on Monday, students held a seder at the tents. But other Jewish students have reported feeling unsafe. Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images Students at New York University continue their demonstration on campus in solidarity with the students at Columbia University and to oppose Israel’s attacks on Gaza, on April 22, 2024. The focus on their protest strategies, their mistakes, and the discipline they’re facing, student organizers told Vox, only detract from the reality that Israel has killed 34,000 Palestinians and has destroyed nearly 70 percent of homes in Gaza. “There’s a respectability politics that we are forced to constantly hold ourselves to, not just as an organization, but also as students who are Arab American, or Muslim, or Palestinian on campus,” said a George Washington student who spoke to Vox last fall on the condition of anonymity because they fear for their safety, including fears that their personal information could be posted online without their permission. “We have to play into this idea of a respectful Arab who uses demure language and [act] like liberation is not at the forefront of our demands. It’s just a way to suppress the movement. The conflation with antisemitism is aggressive.” As students approach finals season, with commencement ceremonies on the horizon, many across the country, supported by some faculty members and alumni, say they won’t stop protesting until their demands are met. “Cracking down on student protesters has only made us louder,” Columbia SJP wrote in an Instagram story. “We will not be silence[d] until Columbia divests from genocide & palestine is free.”

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

A coyote in the El Capitan meadow area at sunrise in Yosemite National Park. | Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Your taxes fundan obscure government program that kills millions of wild animals to benefit Big Ag. A red fox killed with a cyanide bomb. A gray wolf gunned down from an airplane. A jackrabbit caught in a neck snare. These are just a few of the 1.45 million animals poisoned, shot, and trapped last year by the euphemistically named Wildlife Services, a little-known but particularly brutal program of the US Department of Agriculture. The program kills wildlife for many reasons, including poisoning birds to prevent them from striking airplanes and destroying beavers that sneak onto golf courses. But one of the primary purposes of the mostly taxpayer-funded $286 million program is to serve as the meat and dairy industries’ on-call pest control service. “We were the hired gun of the livestock industry,” said Carter Niemeyer, who worked in Wildlife Services and related programs from 1975 to 2006. Niemeyer specialized in killing and trapping predators like coyotes and wolves that were suspected of killing farmed cattle and sheep. Wildlife Services has also killed hundreds of endangered gray wolves, threatened grizzly bears, and highly endangered Mexican gray wolves, often at the behest of the livestock industry and enabled by exemptions from the Endangered Species Act. The top three species Wildlife Services killed in 2023 were European starlings, feral pigs, and coyotes, according to data released last month. How these animals were targeted — from shooting coyotes to poisoning birds — has prompted Congress to fund nonlethal initiatives within the program and conservation groups to call for sweeping changes to how Wildlife Services operates. The USDA didn’t respond to several questions sent via email. “God was our only witness out there,” Niemeyer said about agents killing animals in the field. “You just hope that everybody makes [choices] morally and ethically acceptable and as humane as possible.” To Wildlife Services’ credit, the vast majority of its work entails nonlethally scaring animals off. Controversy, though, has dogged the program for decades, as critics like Niemeyer and other former employees say much of its predator killing is unnecessary, imprecise, and inhumane. Conservation groups say it’s ecologically destructive, as such predators are crucial to ecosystem health and biodiversity. Predator hysteria, explained Adrian Treves, an environmental science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the origins of today’s rampant predator killing can be found in America’s early European settlers, who brought with them the mentality that wolves were “superpredators,” posing a dangerous threat to humans. “We’ve been fed this story that the eradication of wolves was necessary for livestock production,” he said. Today, Wildlife Services’ most controversial work is its killings of coyotes and other predators for the supposed threat they pose to American ranchers and the food supply. But according to a USDA estimate, predation accounted for just 4.7 percent of cattle mortality in 2015. Conservation groups say that figure is exaggerated because it’s based on self-reported data from ranchers and shoddy methodology. According to an analysis of USDA data by the Humane Society of the United States, predation accounts for only 0.3 percent of cattle mortality. (Disclosure: I worked at the Humane Society of the United States from 2012 to 2017 on unrelated agricultural issues.) The Humane Society points to several flaws in the USDA data, including the fact that ranchers reported livestock predation from grizzly bears in six states that don’t have any grizzly bears. In the Northern Rocky Mountains region, the rate of livestock predation reported by ranchers was 27 times higher than data provided by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which had actually confirmed livestock deaths by predators. “When I first went to work, there was just sort of this acceptance that if a rancher called and he said he had a coyote problem, we assumed that [he] had a coyote problem,” Niemeyer said. “We didn’t question it. I didn’t see a lot of meticulous necropsy work done” to investigate the cause of death. The numbers reported to the USDA by ranchers, he now believes, are “exaggerated and embellished.” USDA-APHIS A coyote caught in a foothold trap. The USDA financially compensates ranchers for livestock killed by wolves and some other species, which can create an incentive to attribute farm animal deaths to predators. Robert Gosnell, a former director of New Mexico’s USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service who administered the state’s Wildlife Services program, told the Intercept in 2022 that the agency’s field inspectors had been ordered to report livestock deaths as “wolf kills” for ranchers. “My guys in the field were going and rubber-stamping anything those people asked them to,” Gosnell said. Niemeyer is not opposed to killing individual coyotes or wolves suspected of killing a particular cow or sheep. But much of Wildlife Services’ predator control, he said (and another former employee has alleged), is done preventively in an attempt to reduce coyote populations. “Every coyote is suspected of potentially being a killer,” Niemeyer said, which he characterizes as coyote or wolf “hysteria.” Last year, 68,000 coyotes were taken down by a variety of means, including ingestion of Compound 1080, a poison that causes acute pain in the form of heart blockage, respiratory failure, hallucinations, and convulsions. Thousands more animals are killed as collateral damage. Last year, over 2,000 were killed unintentionally, a consequence of setting out untold numbers of traps and baited cyanide bombs. These devices have also injured a small number of humans and, between 2000 and 2012, killed more than 1,100 dogs. Some employees have died on the job, and there have even been allegations of orders within the agency to cover up unintentional kills of pets and a federally protected golden eagle. USDA-APHIS A hawk caught in a trap. An irrational bias against predators has made it hard for Americans, and its regulators, to recognize predators’ many ecological and social benefits. One study in Wisconsin, for example, found that wild wolf populations keep deer away from roadways, which in turn reduces costly, and sometimes deadly, car crashes. And killing predators may, counterintuitively, lead to more livestock deaths, Treves said. Some predator species that experience mass killing events may compensate by having more babies at younger ages. That could partly explain why, when wolf killings increased in some Western states, livestock predation went up, too. And when you wipe out some animals, others may fill the void. Coyotes significantly expanded their range in the 1900s after America’s centuries-long wolf extermination campaign. Finally, Treves said, killing suspected predators from one ranch may simply drive the remaining population into neighboring ranches. One study he co-authored on wolf kills in Michigan found “a three times elevation of risk to livestock on neighboring properties after a farm received lethal control of wolves from Wildlife Services.” Agricultural sprawl and the war on “invasive” species Wildlife Services represents yet another example of the USDA’s seeming indifference to animal welfare, but it also highlights a little-known fact of human-wildlife conflict: Most of it stems from agriculture. Almost half of the contiguous United States is now used for meat, dairy, and egg production — most of it cattle-grazing — which has crowded out wildlife and reduced biodiversity. And whenever wild animals end up on farmland that was once their habitat, they run the risk of being poisoned, shot, or trapped by Wildlife Services. That’s true for animals that find their way onto fruit, vegetable, and nut orchards for a snack, too. But Wildlife Services’ primary goal is to protect the interests of livestock producers, USDA public affairs specialist Tanya Espinosa told me in an email — yet another subsidy for an already highly subsidized industry. While much of the criticism lobbed at Wildlife Services pertains to its treatment of charismatic megafauna like coyotes, bears, and wolves, little attention is paid to the European starling, Wildlife Services’ most targeted species. Starlings accounted for a little over half of all animals killed by Wildlife Services, at 814,310 birds. Starlings, which are targeted because they like to feast on grain at dairy farms and cattle feedlots, are mostly mass-poisoned with DRC-1339, also known as Starlicide, which destroys their heart and kidney function, slowly and excruciatingly killing them over the course of three to 80 hours. It’s not uncommon for towns across the US to suddenly find thousands of starlings dropping dead out of trees or raining from the sky. Despite these deaths, starlings receive little sympathy — even from bird enthusiasts — given its status as an “invasive” species, a term often invoked to justify excluding a species from moral consideration, according to Australian ecologist Arian Wallach. Here too, as with predators, we may be in need of a reframe, or at least a broadening of our often one-track conversation about nonnative species like feral pigs and starlings. “In no way does the starling imagine itself as an invasive species — that is a human construction,” said Natalie Hofmeister, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of Michigan and author of the forthcoming book Citizen Starling. Rethinking mass killing Despite Wildlife Services’ high kill counts, it has expanded its use of nonlethal methods in recent years, including guard dogs, electric fencing, audio/visual deterrents, bird repellent research, and fladry — tying flags along fences, which can scare off some predator species. “The last three years have shown a little bit of a turning of the tide for Wildlife Services,” said Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director of the advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s been more focus on preventing conflicts versus the Band-Aid of killing animals.” Matt Moyer/Getty Images A range rider in Montana hangs fladry — long red flags attached to fencing — to scare away livestock predators. Treves agrees, but is skeptical there will be meaningful change. Most importantly, he wants to see Wildlife Services experimentally test its lethal methods to see if they actually prevent livestock predation. “I am cynical,” he said. “I am frustrated that this is 20 years of arguing with this agency that’s entrenched, stubborn, and will not listen to the people who disagree with them.” There are no easy answers here. While much of Wildlife Services’ work is ecologically ruinous and unjustifiably cruel, wild animals do inflict real damage on our food supply. Better management on the part of farmers and ranchers and further USDA investment into nonlethal methods could help. Even better would be to rethink the USDA’s — and the meat industry’s — license to wage war on wildlife. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

On April 18, the United Auto Workers won the union vote at a Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. | Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images The UAW is unlocking worker power in the South. An expert explains why it matters. The Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, has about 5,500 employees. On April 19, almost three-quarters of them voted to join the United Auto Workers. It’s the latest victory for one of the country’s largest labor unions, coming on the heels of a major contract win last fall with the “Big Three” American carmakers: GM, Ford, and Stellantis (which merged with Chrysler), whose workers make up about 150,000 of the UAW’s 400,000-plus membership. A union vote at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga assembly plant is big news for many reasons. For one, the US was the last country where Volkswagen workers didn’t have some form of representation. But perhaps more importantly, it’s failed twice before, once in 2014 and again in 2019; Volkswagen Chattanooga will be the first non-Big Three auto plant in the South to become unionized. The UAW has no intention of slowing down now. Union president Shawn Fain told the Guardian that the Volkswagen plant was “the first domino to fall” in a strategy targeting mainly foreign automakers in the South: In May, there’s a UAW vote at a Mercedes plant in Alabama, and organizing efforts are also beginning at BMW, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, and Nissan plants, among others, across several Southern states. (The union has also set its sights on Tesla facilities in Texas, Nevada, and California.) The UAW has eyes on the South because it stands to gain huge ground there. In the last few decades, a slew of auto plants have popped up in the region, a trend that’s only accelerating as more car companies invest in making EVs and announce new manufacturing facilities in the US. States often offer tempting subsidies to attract automakers to set up shop within their borders, but companies have an extra incentive to head South: it has some of the lowest unionization rates in the nation. In South Carolina, just 2.3 percent of workers belong to a union, compared to 24.1 percent in Hawaii and 20.6 percent in New York. This stark regional difference is tied to a history of racist anti-labor laws, an outgrowth of Jim Crow laws that segregated Black and white Americans in the South until they were overturned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Vox spoke to Andrew Wolf, a professor of global labor and work at Cornell University, on how unionizing the South could not only raise wages for all auto workers, but also tear down some of the racial disparities workers of color experience in the economy. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Why was the union vote at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant such a big deal? This was a big deal for many reasons. There has not been an organizing victory of this size in the South in decades. It’s a place where the union had lost previously. It just has really big ramifications for the future of organized labor, and the future of the economy in the South. This is the first Volkswagen union in the US, but Volkswagen already has unionized workers in other countries. Did that make organizing easier or harder here? The existence of unions and the really strong labor laws that exist in Germany generally certainly helped. It helped compel the company to be far more neutral and less aggressive in opposing the union than, for example, what’s happening right now at Mercedes in Alabama. Yes, workers at the Alabama plant are claiming Mercedes is retaliating against their union efforts. As you noted, the Chattanooga vote is a huge deal because it’s in the South. I think I know the answer to this, but — are there many unionized auto plants in the South? No. These companies opened in the South to avoid unions, especially with the rise of neoliberalism after the general financial crisis in the 1970s. It’s a within-country version of outsourcing. More and more companies move to the South to avoid unions, to take advantage of the lower wages that are the historical legacy of Jim Crow. You see it explicitly in the comments of the governors — you had the governors of all of these states talking about how this unionization would undermine the culture and values of the South. That’s very coded language for, “We don’t let workers get representation or fair pay in the South, because it’s better for business.” In the past few years we’ve seen some high-profilewins for American unions, but the reality is that union membership rates in the US are pretty low. In the 1950s, about a third of workers were in a union. What happened in those intervening years? Many things happened — globalization, neoliberalism, change in laws. The biggest thing was just that there were declines in the industries where unions were strongest, and a lack of union organizing in the industries that were fast-growing. So that combined with increased employer hostility, increased political hostility, and weakening of labor and employment laws, drove down the rate of unionization in this country. In the South, specifically, what were the policies that led to such low unionization? As with everything in America, the answer to the question is race. Avoiding unions was part of the Jim Crow apparatus. Unions are particularly threatening to orders like Jim Crow, because they bring workers across races together in common cause. So unionization was a real threat to the economic order of the South and that has had lasting impact, with wages being significantly lower in the South, unionization rates lower in the South, and poverty rates being higher. The National Labor Relations Act passed in the ’30s, and then after World War II, Congress passes the Taft-Hartley Act, which undermined the NLRA. But specifically, [Taft-Hartley] empowers states to undermine [the NLRA]. All the Southern states passed these right-to-work laws while the more heavily unionized states in the North and Midwest didn’t institute right-to-work. Essentially, it’s a strategy that makes it both harder to organize and keep the unions funded if you do organize. And what are right-to-work laws? Right-to-work laws are laws that allow workers in unionized workplaces to refuse to pay fair-share fees. Where unions exist, workers can either become a member, in which case they pay dues, or if they don’t want to become a member they have to pay their fair-share fees, which covers the cost of the union representing them. This makes it much harder for unions to fund themselves. Then there’s other little things that exist in right-to-work laws in different states, such as requiring the union to get everyone to re-sign up for the union every single year in order to pay dues. Do workers who aren’t members of a union still benefit from them? [Yes.] For example, if you’re a worker in a shop that’s unionized in a right-to-work state, and you decide you don’t want to pay dues, but then you get fired and you want to challenge that termination — the union is still legally required to represent you, even though you have not paid for that representation. How does low unionization tie into the high rates of poverty we see in the South today? There’s two mechanisms. There’s a significant and persistent union premium, with unionized workers making more money. Additionally, there’s the spillover effects of this. If you have a high unionization rate in your locality, the other employers pay better as well, to remain competitive — a kind of “rising tides lifts all boats” situation. Without unionization, in the South, it depresses wages across the board, and then in turn it depresses wages across the country because there’s always this threat that auto companies could leave Detroit and go south. Also, many Southern states haven’t set their own minimum wage separate from the federal minimum [which is still $7.25 per hour]. Yes, exactly. And right now there’s this huge push across the South to roll back the few labor rights they do have — most prominently, removing all these child labor laws. They just rolled back health and safety laws, including heat laws in Florida for agricultural workers. To get back to Volkswagen in Chattanooga — the union vote passed with 73 percent saying yes. Is that high? Just okay? I was shocked. I mean, it’s a completely overwhelming victory, especially when you consider that the union had lost here in the past. It just really shows you how powerful this moment is right now, and how much workers are buying the message that the current UAW is selling. The Chattanooga facility voted no to unionization twice before. What do you think was different this time? Everything’s different. The biggest difference was this massive contract victory that UAW had at the Big Three last fall. When workers see unions win, it increases interest in the unions — so it had a real galvanizing effect. There was so much publicity on it, talking about these big wage increases. I think these workers down in the South were looking at their paychecks and comparing, right, and realizing the raw deal they have. Additionally, you had the experience of the pandemic, where all these workers were told they were essential, but then they weren’t compensated as if they were essential. It’s just spurred this massive upsurge in labor organizing since the pandemic. What did you think when you heard that the UAW was going to try to unionize the South? It just struck me as really smart, to leverage this big contract victory to go out and try to improve conditions more generally in the industry. Because, as I said, a rising tide lifts all boats, but also, the sinking tides in the South can diminish the wages for unionized workers in the North. I think [UAW organizers] also realize there’s this imperative, that you can’t let this big disparity in auto wages exist between the North and South and continue to win these meaningful contracts. What does this portend for the upcoming Mercedes UAW vote? It’s a different state, a different company. Are there different headwinds? It will be more challenging there, because the company is being far more aggressively anti-union. We talked about how the relationship with the VW union in Germany helped in this situation. But, at the same time, I think there are reasons to be hopeful that the UAW might succeed given what we’ve seen elsewhere. I feel much better about it considering that the Chattanooga vote was 73 percent than if it had been, say, 51 percent. Right now, many foreign carmakers are trying to establish a bigger presence here as the US transitions to electric vehicles. Does that make it more pivotal that the UAW expansion happen right now? Yeah, and you saw this reflected in the contract the UAW secured with the Big Three as well. The move to electric vehicles is going to really change the auto industry — it’s probably going to result in less putting-the-car-together jobs, so to speak, but probably more parts jobs. So the UAW contracts last fall secured the right to organize some of these battery factories. It’s absolutely coming at the right time, because it’s a moment [that] would have only further undermined the UAW foothold in the industry. Do you see this as potentially inspiring for other companies and industries in the South? For sure. I would imagine that is what we would see. It’s hard, though — I don’t know if interest in movements for it will necessarily result in victory. But I think you’ll see much more labor action in the South and elsewhere across the country.

Ukrainian soldiers fire artillery near Siversk, in Donetsk, Ukraine, on April 1, 2024. | Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu via Getty Images New American weapons will buy Ukraine’s defenders some valuable time. Ukrainian forces are having their best week in months, and it’s coming not on the muddy battlefields of the Donbas, but across the Atlantic. On Saturday, after months of delay, the US House of Representatives approved $61 billion in new funding for Ukraine, alongside aid packages for Israel and for US allies in the Pacific; last night, the Senate approved the package and sent it on to President Joe Biden. He said he’ll sign it today. The new weapons can’t come soon enough. During recent months, the tide has turned decisively against the Ukrainians on the battlefield as they have been forced to conserve artillery and air defense ammunition. Russia’s military has been firing as much as five times as many artillery shells as the Ukrainians, and one US commander recently warned that the advantage could soon be as high as 10-1. Farther from the front lines, Ukraine’s much-vaunted air defense systems —which once shot down around 90 percent of Russian missiles and drones — have become dramatically less effective, with disastrous consequences for Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure. Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told Vox that Ukraine has lost an estimated 583 square kilometers (225 square miles) of territory since last October, when the US began reducing the size of its aid packages. This is not a huge amount of territory within Europe’s second-largest country, but more important than the actual ground covered was that the Russian advances forced the Ukrainians to “waste their precious resources on repelling Russian attacks rather than taking the initiative,” Stepanenko said. “The delay in providing assistance to Ukraine cost us dearly,” Yehor Cherniev, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and deputy chair of its defense committee, told Vox. “Due to a lack of ammunition, we lost [the city of] Avdiivka and a number of small settlements, and also suffered significant human losses … All this could have been avoided if help had been provided on time.” Now that help has been provided — can it stanch the bleeding? Turning the tide, or buying time? The Pentagon, which has certainly had ample time to prepare, reportedly has an initial weapons package ready for approval and deployment as soon as the funding comes through. While the administration has not yet announced what specific weapons will be sent, Reuters reports that the initial tranche may be worth as much as $1 billion and include vehicles, artillery ammunition, and air defense ammunition. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) has also suggested it could include long-range ATACMS missiles, a capability Ukraine has been asking for since the early days of the war but which the White House has been reluctant to approve due to concerns they could be used to strike targets inside Russia. But more than two years into the war, will this aid really make a difference? “Yes, this is enough to stabilize the front lines,” said Mark Cancian, a retired US Marine colonel and expert on defense logistics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “You’ll see almost an immediate battlefield impact.” That’s no small thing considering the concerns expressed recently by observers in Ukraine that the country’s defenses could collapse entirely. Franz-Stefan Gady, an analyst with the Center for a New American Security who recently returned from a study trip to the front lines in Ukraine, said the new aid package was likely to “restore a situation more akin to November 2023, when the Ukrainians didn’t have to make as many trade-offs” about which sections of the front line and targets in the rear they were able to defend. The aid also comes in the nick of time, as Russia has been stepping up its strikes along the front line, likely ahead of new attempts to seize territory in the spring, when drier conditions will make it easier to maneuver military vehicles. However, Gady cautions, “the package doesn’t address the most critical issue, which is manpower.” Ukraine’s front-line units have an acute shortage of infantry soldiers and the government has been reluctant to expand the use of conscription to refill their ranks. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did sign a law earlier this month lowering the minimum conscription age from 27 to 25 (the average age of Ukrainian soldiers is over 40) but Russia, with its higher population and much higher tolerance for large numbers of casualties, is still likely to have the manpower advantage. The optimistic view of the conflict for Ukraine is that new assistance will buy it much-needed time. It can hold the line this year and replenish units that were badly damaged in last year’s disappointing counteroffensive, hopefully putting it in a better position to push back Russia’s gains in 2025. By that time, Ukraine will have access to some new capabilities, such as F-16 fighter jets, and more importantly, the US and Europe will have ramped up their production of artillery ammunition, hopefully allowing the Ukrainians to narrow the Russians’ ammo advantage. But there’s a difference between avoiding losing the war and actually winning it. No one expects this new aid alone to accomplish the latter. “Okay, you’ve stabilized the front. Now what?” said Cancian. “The Ukrainians have to answer that question. What is their theory of victory?” The Washington front No one should expect a Russian collapse overnight. Even the most optimistic scenarios for Ukraine envision a long and costly war of attrition. Unfortunately, the lengthy and agonizingly difficult process of passing this aid bill suggests Washington may not be so patient. If the new aid allows Ukraine merely to preserve a new stalemate on the battlefield rather than make significant gains, international pressure on Kyiv to negotiate with Moscow may grow more prominent. Ukrainian leaders will counter that they have no reason to trust that Russia will honor such a settlement. As for Russia’s own calculations, the passage of the aid bill was an important signal to President Vladimir Putin that there’s still strong political support for Ukraine in the United States, even if it’s not quite as robust as it was two years ago. Of course, that could all change next year if former President Donald Trump, who would likely pressure Ukraine to give up territory to end the war, returns to the White House. Ukraine and its allies have been reaching out to Trump and his allies in hopes of hedging their bets, and in a slightly positive sign for Kyiv, Trump ended up backing the new aid package after it was structured as a loan rather than a grant, an idea he had floated earlier. But it’s safe to say that leaders in both Kyiv and Moscow will have to continue keeping one eye on America’s political climate even as they plot their next moves on the battlefield. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Finnish activist Aiski Ryökäs at a My Voice, My Choice press conference. | Varja Jovanovič A massive effort to expand access throughout Europe launches today. An unprecedented effort to expand abortion rights throughout Europe launches today, led by groups that were already fighting for reproductive freedom at the national level in their eight home countries. The My Voice, My Choice campaign aims to collect 1 million signatures in the next few months to pressure leaders of the European Union to commit to helping anyone who is not easily able to end an unwanted pregnancy where they live. While legal abortion is supported throughout Europe andis broadly more accessible and affordable in the EUcompared to the United States, there are some exceptions.Poland and Malta have near-total abortion bans, Austria and Germany generallydo not provide free abortion care through national health insurance, and in countries such as Croatia and Italy, many doctors refuse to provide the procedure. Activists say their effort could help shore up access for nearly 20 million women. Their campaign for a European Citizens’ Initiative would help address those gaps by providing financial support for people to get care internationally if needed. Activists are presenting their initiative as voluntary — member states can choose to opt in. Those states that do participate “in the spirit of solidarity” could then receive financial support from the EU to terminate pregnancies for those who lack access to safe and legal abortion where they live. The proposed EU mechanism would cover the cost of the procedure but not travel costs. “What’s really special is it’s basically being built as the largest feminist movement in Europe, which is crazy and super tiring sometimes, and also really, really beautiful,” said Nika Kovač, a Slovenian activist leading the campaign. Varja Jovanovič Nika Kovač. Kovač told Vox she decided to mobilize on the European-wide level after seeing the Supreme Court overturn legal abortion in the United States. “The whole idea for this campaign came from the despair in the US,” she said. Kovač and her colleagues at the 8th of March Institute, a Slovenian human rights group named for International Women’s Day, planned this citizens’ initiative idea in secret for about 18 months, and then started recruiting international partners in late 2023. The core coalition now includes activists from Poland, Ireland, Spain, France, Austria, Croatia, and Finland. They aim to collect 1 million signatures in advance of the European parliamentary elections in June, which occur only once every five years. Collecting so many signatures in such a short time will be difficult, and if they’re successful, it would be the fastest signature collection for a European Citizen Initiative in history. Still, success is not inconceivable given that the effort is being led by organizers with years of mobilization experience in their home countries. Signature collection can be done both in-person and online, and activists are looking to organize at big upcoming events like May Day protests. “One thing I can rely on is the stubbornness of these women,” Kovač said. “In Europe we are so often caught up in our own national context, and this is the first time I feel like we’re slowly coming out of it.” How the proposed European abortion rights measure would work The European Union, which is comprised of 27 member states, has authority to govern via international treaties, primarily in realms such as monetary policy, trade policy, environmental policy, and consumer protection. Any powers — officially known as competences — not covered by these treaties remain exclusive to the member states, and for years activists were told that reproductive rights were simply beyond the scope of what the EU could legislate on, meaning that abortion had to be left to each sovereign country. “So many European politicians and bureaucrats say nothing can be done in the context of abortion on the European level because it’s not directly one of the competencies of the European Commission,” Kovač explained. “So we had to do a lot of thinking and researching.” They convened a group of international lawyers who helped develop a novel legal strategy, positioning their citizens’ measure as one within the “supporting competence” of the EU, an established official authority that allows the European Commission to support member states for a variety of purposes, including the protection and improvement of human health. Even with broader grounds for legal exceptions in European countries with earlier gestational age limits, first-trimester bans in Europe still force thousands of pregnant people to travel internationally every year to end their unwanted pregnancies. One study published in 2023 looked at pregnant people who traveled from countries like Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, and Italy to the Netherlands or England for later abortion care. Over half of the pregnant people surveyed hadn’t learned they were even pregnant until they were at least 14 weeks along, when they had already surpassed the limits in their home countries. If activists succeed in collecting enough signatures, then members of the European Commission would need to decide if they would support the citizens’ initiative. Activists aim to press all candidates running for European Parliament in June to clarify their stance on the proposal so voters have that information when they go to the polls. “It really will depend on what the next European Commission looks like, but the important thing for us is that this will go to them and they will need to speak to it and then do something,” Kovač said. “It’s really the first concrete solution for the people in Europe.”

Rep. Summer Lee, a progressive and member of the Squad, is running for reelection in Pennsylvania. | Nate Smallwood/Bloomberg via Getty Images Lee is the first Squad member to face a 2024 primary challenge. It could send a strong message about progressive power. Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) is the first member of the progressive group of House Democrats known as the Squad to be up for a 2024 primary challenge, a contest expected to be a preview of how Democratic divides over Israel could play out this year. Lee, one of the earliest lawmakers to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and to condemn Israel’s airstrikes, has fielded critiques from some Jewish leaders and members of her constituency for taking these positions. Her moderate challenger, Edgewood City Council member Bhavini Patel, has been vocal about her support for Israel and has focused her attacks on Lee on the Israel-Hamas conflict, as have outside groups. Their race reflects the intense focus there’s been on the conflict in the wake of Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack and Israel’s devastating bombings of Gaza. Democrats have been divided in their stance on the ongoing war, with many progressives on the Hill calling for a ceasefire and more moderate lawmakers arguing for military aid to Israel. As congressional primary season unfolds, many anti-war progressives — particularly those in the Squad, including Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) — are facing primaries against challengers supported by pro-Israel groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Though Lee’s race isn’t a perfect analog for those of her Squad colleagues, it will send an early signal about just how serious a threat the primaries pose to those progressives facing challengers. “What it can tell you if someone wins with [Lee’s] position is that it may not be a vulnerability,” says Berwood Yost, the head of the Franklin and Marshall College poll in Pennsylvania. “But of course, it will depend on the candidates who are running and what they’re emphasizing.” Summer Lee’s primary, briefly explained Lee, a former community organizer and state representative, is a first-term lawmaker who represents Pennsylvania’s 12th district. The district — which is in the western part of the state and includes Pittsburgh — is solidly Democratic, but more moderate than some of the other districts that progressives hold around the country, and Lee has said that she strives to “be a representative” for everyone in her district. Lee has long backed progressive policies like Medicare-for-all and a Green New Deal. During the race, she has emphasized how much federal funding has flowed to her district during her term, including $1.2 billion dedicated to everything from replacing lead water pipes and building out passenger rail in the region. (Much of this funding is tied to the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which passed before Lee took office, but she could have still had a role in its distribution.) When it comes to Israel-related policy, she has condemned Hamas, called for a ceasefire, voted against a resolution establishing that Congress stands with Israel, and voted against sending a recent aid package to Israel. These positions build on past statements Lee has made in support of Palestinian rights and calling for the conditioning of US aid based on humanitarian requirements. Lee’s position on Israel’s war in Gaza has been scrutinized and, at times, criticized by some of her constituency, which includes a large Jewish American population. Squirrel Hill, a neighborhood in Pittsburgh and part of Lee’s district, was the site of a devastating antisemitic mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. “We call on Rep. Lee to exercise better leadership and join her colleagues in upholding the moral obligation for Israel to protect its citizens against Hamas,” a group of Jewish leaders in the region wrote in a letter last November. Some Jewish constituents who’ve expressed concerns about Israel’s attacks on Gaza have, however, supported Lee’s stances. Patel, meanwhile, is an entrepreneur and city council member. Some of her key policy positions include backing labor unions, supporting policing, and lowering prescription drug costs. Across a broad array of issues, including criminal justice reform, health care, and environmental policy, her stances are to Lee’s right. Patel has also taken a more moderate position on Israel’s offensive and has expressed support for the country. She’s claimed, too, that Lee’s position is not a reflection of where her constituents stand and condemned Lee’s backing of voters who choose “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary instead of supporting President Joe Biden. “She’s clearly picked a side in this situation and completely disregards her entire district,” Patel told the Washington Post. “I think it’s important that any call for a cease-fire should acknowledge that hostages are still being held.” As Post noted, however, Lee’s support for a ceasefire in Gaza reflects where many Democrats stand on this issue as well. A February 2024 Data for Progress poll found that 63 percent of Democrats support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. “There has been increasing criticism of this war, even among those who were horrified by the October 7 attacks and believe Israel has the right to defend itself,” says Dan Mallinson, a political scientist at Penn State University. “If this was January, or maybe November of last year, she may be in a slightly different position politically than she is now.” Lee has also built up an impressive arsenal of fundraising and endorsements that far outpace Patel, including backing from Pennsylvania Sens. Bob Casey and John Fetterman — an indication of the strength of her candidacy. Such support signals that she’s in a solid position going into this race, despite the disagreement some constituents have expressed about her stances. This strength may be a reason why AIPAC, a pro-Israel group that’s vowed to send $100 million to unseat progressive candidates, did not invest in this particular primary. Other outside groups — including the Moderate PAC, which draws much of its funding from a pro-Israel Republican donor — are backing Patel. Due to fundraising gains, incumbency, endorsements, and the state of public opinion, Lee is widely expected to come out victorious against her moderate challenger. Her success would send a positive signal to her fellow progressives who are also under threat of primary challenges, including some that could be heavily supported by pro-Israel groups like AIPAC. Democratic divides are set to play a role in the election Lee’s race is far from the only one in which lawmakers’ stances on Israel are expected to be a flash point. AIPAC has already said it intends to spend its sizable war chest — as much as $100 million — on taking out certain progressive members, though that spending has yet to manifest, and groups including the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC (DMFI) have said the same. In 2022, AIPAC saw successes in six of eight Democratic primary races that it invested in, including Rep. Haley Stevens’s win over Rep. Andy Levin in Michigan. Some of the members that AIPAC and DMFI intend to target include other members of the Squad like Reps. Jamaal Bowman (NY), Cori Bush (MO), Ilhan Omar (MN), and Rashida Tlaib (MI), all of whom will be up for primaries later this year. “We’re not interested in defeating people who are pro-Palestinian, we’re interested in defeating people who are anti-Israel and I think it’s fair to say that Bowman, Bush, and some of these other members are decidedly anti-Israel,” Mark Mellman, the head of the DMFI, told the Hill. Experts note that AIPAC and DMFI may have passed on investing in Lee’s race in favor of putting their dollars in primaries in which lawmakers are perceived to be more vulnerable. Bowman and Bush are two of the lawmakers who could well see more difficult races because they’re navigating other issues that could affect their candidacies, including Bowman’s past blog posts regarding September 11 conspiracy theories and a DOJ investigation of Bush’s use of campaign security funds. “I think with Bowman and Bush, in particular, they both have controversies surrounding them that have nothing to do with the Israel issue that have made them uniquely vulnerable,” Erin Conley, a House analyst for Cook Political Report, tells Vox. Beyond Democratic primaries, there’s also an open question on the impact that intraparty fissures on Israel will have on support for Biden in November. Already, a fraction of Democratic voters have expressed their opposition to his willingness to continue backing the country’s military as more than 30,000 Gazans have been killed. In Michigan, for example, more than 100,000 people cast their vote for “uncommitted” in order to register their opposition to Biden. “We’re anticipating [the presidential race] to be close again. So anything that’s going to depress your turnout or people not being excited about you is potentially problematic,” says Mallinson.