Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors fights for a rebound during the game between the Raptors and the Oklahoma City Thunder in Toronto, Canada, March 22, 2024. | Zou Zheng/Xinhua/Getty Images It’s a case that underscores how betting could continue to threaten the game. The NBA has banned Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter for life after an internal investigation found that he placed bets on basketball and gave information to a bettor to improve their odds. The Porter fracas is the latest involving athletes and sports betting as the gambling industry has exploded in recent years and as such transactions have become increasingly accessible. It also follows a recent scandal centered on baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, who has been charged with taking $16 million from the athlete to cover gambling debts. Porter’s gambling practices — including a willingness to change his gameplay to assist with certain bets — ultimately spotlight the ethical quandaries that sports betting poses for athletes and leagues as it becomes more popular. The betting industry has grown significantly since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a policy barring many states from allowing commercial sports betting. In the years since, the majority of states have legalized both in-person and online sports betting, making the practice available to far more people. In 2023, sports betting raked in a record $10.92 billion in revenue, bringing in roughly 45 percent more as an industry than the year before. As Porter’s case illustrates, a central question raised by the prevalence of sports betting is how sports leagues and athletes can maintain the integrity of their games as betting becomes more common and lucrative. “The recent case of the NBA’s Jontay Porter is, I am afraid, just the tip of the iceberg,” Sean McKeever, a Davidson College professor who teaches a course on sports and philosophy, told Vox. “The corrupting forces are powerful ones. ... And bettors stand to make significant sums if they can extract valuable information and behavior from players and those around them.” The Porter scandal and its mechanics, explained Porter, a 24-year-old now-former power forward for the Raptors, had been playing in the NBA for four seasons. His penalty for gambling was announced by the league earlier this week and has been viewed by sports observers as a warning shot to other players who might be tempted to try similar practices. “There is nothing more important than protecting the integrity of NBA competition for our fans, our teams and everyone associated with our sport, which is why Jontay Porter’s blatant violations of our gaming rules are being met with the most severe punishment,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement. Porter wound up getting caught after a bet that was placed on his performance got flagged as suspicious by licensed sports betting operators and an organization that monitors gambling markets, the NBA says. The NBA found Porter did three things wrong. Firstly, Porter bet on NBA games himself, which is strictly banned for players in the league. The NBA found that he had used someone else’s online betting account to place 13 bets that amounted to $54,094 total on multiple games. These bets did not include games that Porter played in, though they did include bets on Raptors games that he did not play in. Secondly, Porter gave a sports bettor information about his health status ahead of a March 20 game, inside information that could have helped that bettor place wagers and potentially make money. And thirdly, Porter altered his own actions in a game in order to help fulfill a wager that a bettor had made. In sports betting, people can bet on everything from who will score the most points to whether a player commits a foul. These are known as proposition bets, or prop bets, which focus more on developments in a game than just the outcome of a game. In Porter’s case, a bettor had placed a prop bet for $80,000 on the fact that he would underperform in a March 20 game. The payout for that bet would have been $1.1 million. In that game, Porter stopped playing after just three minutes, claiming that he felt sick. This bet, however, was flagged by betting operators and frozen. Following its investigation, the NBA has concluded that Porter claimed illness so that this wager would be successful. Porter’s actions highlight longstanding fears about how athletes could not only affect game outcomes for their own benefit but also take smaller actions to help bettors. The most aggressive version of such behavior would be to throw a game completely, but there is a range of other factors to manipulate, too, since bets can be placed on who scores the first basket, for example, or who has the most rebounds. The league’s penalty for Porter is the harshest that’s available, and it marks the first time the NBA has banned a player for gambling-related offenses since 1954. It is intended to indicate both its lack of tolerance for such activities and suggest that there are safeguards in place to catch this behavior while the league continues to collaborate with sports betting businesses. Sports leagues — including the NBA, NFL, and NHL — actively work with licensed betting platforms to promote sports betting in exchange for a significant cut of the revenue. The NBA, for example, works with FanDuel and DraftKings as its sports betting partners and has integrated live betting during games into its app. The NFL, similarly, has formal sports betting partnerships; the Washington Commanders even host a sports betting hub in their stadium. “It is everywhere around us in any sports programming we watch,” says Villanova University sports law professor Andrew Brandt. Porter’s case allows the NBA to argue that it can catch bad actors, despite being an active participant in boosting this industry itself. “The Jontay Porter bets were flagged by one of the ‘integrity’ companies used by these leagues to note irregular betting,” Brandt told Vox. “Now Porter is banished, and the NBA can claim integrity and simply remove a rogue player that transgressed.” This is a growing problem that isn’t going away The sports betting market is only expected to get bigger in the coming years, with Goldman Sachs predicting that it will eventually go from a $10 billion industry to a $45 billion one. For now, 38 states and DC have legalized the practice, with more likely to do so given the hefty tax revenues that come along with it. The prevalence and accessibility of sports betting are likely to expose more people — including athletes — to it, increasing the potential likelihood of addiction, exploitation, and situations like Porter’s. “As the proportion of the population who gambles grows, so will the proportion of athletes who gamble and who develop problems,” says Lia Nower, the head of the gambling studies center at Rutgers University. Nower notes that athletes in particular are more susceptible to developing problem gambling habits because they have a higher likelihood of betting on sports, which is a type of gambling more tied to problem gambling. Additionally, she says athletes as a group are more open to risk-taking and competitiveness, and they might believe they’re better at making wagers because of their background. Such concerns underscore the awkward line sports leagues have tried to tread as they seek to make money from sports betting while also attempting to ensure that their players don’t get caught up in it.

Asna Tabassum, a graduating senior at the University of Southern California majoring in biomedical engineering, is at the center of the latest firestorm on college campuses after the university named her valedictorian, then barred her from speaking at graduation. | Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images As the school year winds down, colleges are still grappling with student speech. Campus tensions over Israel’s war on Gaza have flared up again, this time at the University of Southern California, which this week barred its valedictorian from speaking at next month’s commencement ceremony. The school cited potential campus safety risks if Asna Tabassum delivered a speech. Provost Andrew T. Guzman said in an email to students and staff on Monday that public discussion had “taken on an alarming tenor” after the school announced its choice for valedictorian. “The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement,” he wrote. Tabassum, a South Asian American biomedical engineering major who is Muslim and wears a hijab, says that she, along with other critics of the decision, believes the school canceled her speech because of her public support for the human rights of Palestinians. Pro-Israel USC student groups, including Trojans for Israel and the Chabad Jewish Student Center, had complained online about Tabassum’s views, calling them antisemitic. The Provost explained in the email that the decision “has nothing to do with freedom of speech” and made no mention of Tabassum’s political views. The Provost’s email did not state whether USC had already received specific threats of violence or disruption. Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, campuses have been embroiled in controversy as student protests test the boundaries of freedom of expression. Many college and university leaders have struggled to make satisfactory public statements about the conflict and balance safety with speech protections. In the attack, Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage. Since then, Israel has killed 33,899 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Though schools have vowed to keep their students safe, some have reported facing violence and harassment. After failing to adequately condemn antisemitism in congressional testimony late last year, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard resigned. A congressional hearing on Wednesday also brought Columbia University’s president before lawmakers to answer questions about the school’s response to antisemitism, showing that the quandary is far from over. The USC Provost referenced the broader turmoil on US campuses in his email: “We cannot ignore the fact that similar risks have led to harassment and even violence at other campuses.” Pro-Israel groups are celebrating USC’s decision, claiming that Tabassum’s speech, which she said she had not yet written, could have made Jewish students feel uncomfortable. Tabassum told Inside Edition that she hoped to share a message of hope in her speech. Meanwhile, critics say that it undermines free speech and is a signal that universities are caving to pro-Israel pressures. “USC cannot hide its cowardly decision behind a disingenuous concern for ‘security,” said Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Los Angeles. “The university can, should and must ensure a safe environment for graduation rather than taking the unprecedented step of canceling a valedictorian’s speech.” Student groups and outlets including the LA Times and the Guardian have defended Tabassum and condemned USC. As the academic year comes to a close, the country is watching how similar situations might unfold on other campuses. It’s customary for students to make political statements during commencement speeches, but this year’s campus controversies could lead schools to keep buckling under pressure, raising concerns about students’ freedom of expression in the process. USC chose its valedictorian — then silenced her USC announced that Tabassum would be the university’s valedictorian on April 2, based on her grade point average, which topped 3.98, contributions to the campus community, essay submission, and performance in interviews. Tabassum, who also minors in resistance to genocide — studies about conflicts including the war in Ukraine, genocide in Darfur, and the Holocaust — was selected from more than 200 students who qualified for the award, and was slated to deliver the customary valedictory speech at the May 10 commencement. Then, Tabassum was notified that she wouldn’t deliver the address at commencement after all because of safety concerns. Critics began to speculate that USC was kowtowing to pro-Israel groups and people who complained about Tabassum being selected as valedictorian. The right-wing pro-Israel organization organization End Jew Hatred welcomed USC’s decision stating, “Ms. Tabassum’s speech as valedictorian was anticipated to be harmful to Jewish students and even potentially agitate anti-Jewish activists.” The USC campus group the Trojans for Israel wrote that Tabassum “openly traffics in antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric.” Tabassum told CNN that she received “hate and vitriol” for including a link to the website “Free-Palestine.Carrd.Co” on her Instagram profile. The homepage of the website contains the image of a woman holding up a Palestinian flag and a peace sign rising above flames and smoke, and links to help visitors “learn about what’s happening in Palestine.” USC’s Chabad argued that the linked website called for the “abolishment of the state of Israel” and called the words on the website, which Tabassum did not create, “antisemitic and hate speech.” Tabassum said in a statement that she believes there was a “campaign” of “racist hatred” on the part of “anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian voices” to prevent her from addressing her peers at commencement due to her “uncompromising belief in human rights for all.” “I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred. I am surprised that my own university—my home for four years—has abandoned me,” Tabassum said, adding that the school denied her request for more information about their threat assessment. Pro-Palestinian students and groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace have faced discipline, sanctions, and campus suspensions and bans over protest activity since October 7 — part of a long history silencing student activism for Palestine. Meanwhile, students advocating for Palestine have been labeled antisemitic for chanting phrases such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “globalize the intifada.” Student protesters say the phrases don’t advocate for harm to Israelis, while critics say the phrases are threatening and call for violence. School leadership has often said the groups were reprimanded for violating school policies amid a rise in antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment on campus. On Thursday, police in riot gear arrested more than 100 pro-Palestinian Columbia students at President Minouche Shafik’s direction, while administrators suspended three Barnard students, including, Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D), for setting up “unauthorized” protest encampments on campus. USC has not responded to requests for further information about any specific threats to Tabassum or anyone else in the USC community. USC has not yet responded to Vox’s request for comment. “If anti-Palestinian groups are threatening violence, then USC needs to say what they’ve threatened and why it is so dangerous that it has led to such a drastic action, instead of disingenuously claiming that it isn’t engaging in censorship,” said Radhika Sainath, an attorney at Palestine Legal, an organization that defends people who speak out in support of Palestine. “The fact that Palestinians and their allies are being punished and canceled in this way — while Israel is committing an ongoing genocide in Gaza — speaks to the McCarthyite moment we’re in.” USC’s decision raises questions about free speech on campus USC is a private school that makes First Amendment-like free speech promises, Alex Morey, an attorney at Foundation Individual Right and Expression, an organization that advocates for free speech, told Vox. The school is also required to provide students First Amendment rights in certain situations under California’s Leonard Law, a 1992 statute that extended free speech protections to students at private colleges and universities in the state. The school’s decision to cancel Tabassum's speech, Morey said, “does implicate campus expression in an important way.” “For those of us watching the campus speech space on the regular, canceling controversial speeches or events due to vague, unspecified ‘safety concerns’ is one of the oldest tricks in the book,” Morey said. “USC appears to have made a calculated move that this was the way to avoid the most criticism. Yanking the student’s valedictorian status or canceling the speech for viewpoint-based reasons, would have pleased the students’ critics but angered her supporters. By citing ‘safety’ however, USC’s doing their best to look like the good guy and suggest this isn’t about viewpoint at all.” Morey told Vox the school should have done everything in its power to ensure that the event would go on, and that if threats remained, it should have been transparent about what those threats are. If USC did in fact cancel the speech due to pressure from pro-Israel critics, now they know “that with the right amount of pressure, they can silence certain views at USC,” Morey said. The USC decision has also introduced bigger questions about whether students who have publicly expressed any views on Palestine or Israel will be passed over for honors in the future. These decisions might lead students to self-censor. “If USC will only honor students with certain views, are they really living up to their lofty free expression promises?” Morey said. Ironically, Morey pointed out, Tabassum minored in “resistance to genocide” and is effectively getting dinged for saying “precisely the kind of things you’d imagine one would hear in Resistance to Genocide 101 at a school like USC.”

Dev Patel as Kid in his directorial debut Monkey Man. | Universal Pictures Dev Patel’s action-packed directorial debut also takes aim at contemporary Indian politics. Monkey Man, a gripping, blood-soaked action film from first-time director Dev Patel, has garnered acclaim for its fight scenes — including, famously, when the main character cuts a man’s throat open by holding the knife in his mouth. Undergirding all this action, however, is also an attempt at commentary about growing authoritarianism in India, and how political leaders leverage both religion and police to maintain their power. “Having spent most of my career traveling in and out of India shooting films, it is hard to ignore some of the stories that fill the columns of the newspapers there,” Patel said in a BBC interview. “I wanted to touch on some of that and maybe reach an audience that would never normally access such topics.” Monkey Man’s debut comes as India navigates its 2024 elections, which the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a chief proponent of Hindu nationalism, hopes to use to maintain its political dominance nationally. Since he came to power in 2014, Modi has acted to suppress political opposition, to undermine the free press, and to discriminate against Muslim people, all efforts that mark what experts describe as a backsliding of the country’s secular democracy. Monkey Man stops short of critiquing the BJP’s policies explicitly — and in fact reportedly underwent minor changes to avoid doing so. But key plot points levy clear broadsides against India’s current political leaders, Hindu nationalism, and corruption in law enforcement. Centered on a protagonist known as “Kid” (Patel) seeking vengeance for his mother’s murder at the hands of a brutal police chief (Sikandar Kher), Monkey Man is largely a breakneck action film jam-packed with stunts, gore, and creative uses of fireworks.That Patel was willing to use this forum to make a political statement, however, is significant as the Indian government has cracked down on journalists, freedom of expression, and cinema. Notably, too, Monkey Man goes further than many mainstream Bollywood films, which are unlikely to have such pointed politics — and which at times have even boosted Modi. Monkey Man’s villains are analogues for contemporary politics In his efforts to avenge his mother (Adithi Kalkunte), Kid’s chief targets are Rana Singh, the police chief of a fictional city clearly meant to be a stand-in for Mumbai, as well as Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), the religious leader Singh works for. Shakti (whose name translates to “power” in Hindi) is depicted as a guru who capitalizes on religious fervor to justify crimes like the land dispossession of minority groups.While not a political leader himself, Shakti is portrayed as the puppetmaster behind a political leader’s operation. Singh, meanwhile, is shown using violence and authority to hurt those with less power and to implement Shakti’s plans. Given the framing of these characters, Shakti has been perceived by many viewers and critics as an analogue for Modi and key members of the BJP, like Yogi Adityanath, a far-right populist spiritual leader and politician who built his following in part through a fiery, reactionary interpretation of Hinduism. Like Modi, Adityanath has been accused of using his political power to harm minority communities. Monkey Man takes direct aim at both Shakti and Singh’s characters, with a particularly devastating scene featuring the police destroying Kid and his mother’s village, as the officers seek to clear the land for development under Shakti’s orders. That destruction is followed by Singh’s attempted sexual assault and then violent murder of Kid’s mother, a harrowing attack that fuels the protagonist’s lifelong pursuit of revenge. While Kid grew up listening to stories about Hindu gods and isn’t Muslim, these developments echo real-life land dispossession that has specifically targeted Muslims in India and been overseen by the state and by police. “Thousands of Muslim families have been forcibly evicted [in the Indian state of Assam] since 2021 from land they had been residing on for decades,” Nazimuddin Siddique writes for Al Jazeera. “Since 2016, police have shot at and killed protesters in at least two instances.” Modi has also been repeatedly scrutinized for his role in anti-Muslim riots in 2002, which police and government officials did little to stop and which killed 1,200 people in the state of Gujarat. As chief minister of the state at the time, Modi has been accused not only of condoning but inciting this violence. He has been cleared of wrongdoing by Indian courts, but questions about his involvement remain, and were most recently surfaced by a 2023 BBC documentary about the massacre that was censored by the Indian government. In 2005, the State Department barred Modi from a US visit due to concerns about his involvement. Shakti’s power only grows after the destruction of Kid’s village, and as Monkey Man documents the success of the political party he supports in the film, it also intersperses clips from actual news reports on protests against the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in India. Shakti at one point also utilizes the Hindi phrase “Bharat Mata ki jai,” which translates to “Long live Mother India,” and is often employed by BJP leaders, including Modi. For all its efforts to broach this subject, the film’s critiques could be even sharper. When it comes to its depiction of Shakti, the film doesn’t offer many specifics about his ideology, beyond that he abuses the support he receives. And much of the attention in the movie is dedicated to the individual animus Kid has toward Singh, the police officer, rather than the system that he’s a part of. Some film critics, including Siddhant Adlakha, who wrote a piece for Time, andPrabhjot Bains, who authored a review for But Why Tho, also took issue with how the film employed certain Hindu references. For Bains, the use of the phrase, “Jai Bajrang Bali,” which praises Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god behind the film’s namesake, contained uncomfortable echoes of how Hindu nationalists have utilized it. This phrase is used by a viewer at a boxing match to support Patel’s character, who is dressed like a monkey. That same phrase, however, has also been used as a slogan by Hindu nationalists while committing harm against Muslims, Bains writes. For Adlakha, efforts to recast Hindu imagery were also complicated by how they were used to endorse violence. “The reclamation of such images appears to be Patel’s goal — one he shares with numerous Hindu leaders who have continued to battle Hindu nationalism,” Adlakha adds. “But the use of Hindu imagery as a call to violence, reminiscent of the Hindutva project, is central to Kid’s mission, resulting in narrative dissonance.” It’s worth noting that the film’s inclusion and celebration of trans people in India, some of whom are part of a community known as hijra, is also significant, directly pushing back on how they have been marginalized by media and in society. In Monkey Man, a group of hijra offer Kid sanctuary, train him in a martial arts montage, and rescue him during an especially pivotal fight scene. Monkey Man’s depictions of the sexual assault and harassment of women also nod at enduring violence that women have experienced in India, drawing more awareness to this ongoing problem. you don’t understand. the people in this gif are hijras/transfemme/3rd gender people & they’re about to kick ass. MONKEY MAN is an incredible action film featuring INDIAN TRANS PEOPLE as a major part of the plot! I can’t stop screaming it from the rooftops! Dev Patel ilysm ️‍⚧️ pic.twitter.com/WX4fQE2Omo— Jeremy Allen Black ✊ (they/them) (@LKirwanAshman) April 7, 2024 Despite its shortcomings, it’s nonetheless notable that Patel made political criticism of Indian leaders such a pivotal aspect of the film, especially given the current climate and how heavily studios count on the Indian market. According to Irfan Nooruddin, a professor of Indian politics at Georgetown University, it’s “virtually unheard of” for mainstream films to make such a direct critique of Modi and the BJP. That’s because film censorship in India has gotten worse in recent years as the BJP has increased scrutiny of art and expression that’s critical of the government. Ahead of April’s election, for instance, Bollywood has released a slew of films that amplify Modi’s agenda. Besides the BBC documentary, other projects — including a film adaptation of Maximum City, a book that nods at Muslim oppression in India, and Gormint, a political satire — have also been tabled by Netflix and Amazon due to what The Washington Post describes as “self-censorship.” Concerns about this were even clear in Monkey Man itself, which was bought then dropped by Netflix, with some reports suggesting that may have been due to worries about its political content. Even after it was rescued by Universal, there appear to have been changes: In one example, an early trailer showed the banners for the political party in the film as saffron — the color of the BJP. In the final film, some of these banners have been changed to red. And presently, it’s still uncertain if Monkey Man will screen in India at all. the new trailer shows that they've changed the colors of the evil political party from saffron (hindu nationalist BJP) to red (communist party) https://t.co/HYFrhNqcV8 pic.twitter.com/te2NKTYy2p— atulya (@computer_atulya) March 23, 2024 “I don’t see it coming out in India, but if it does it’s not going to come out in one piece,” Adlakha tells Vox, citing likely censorship of violence, sexuality, and politics in the film. “It’s going to be a heavily compromised version.” There are major threats to India’s democracy Monkey Man is premiering during a period when experts are worried about the state of India’s democracy and the potential for more erosion. In a federal election set to begin on April 19, the BJP is expected to maintain its majority in Parliament, wins that could further cement the anti-Muslim positions it employs and its efforts to subvert major institutions like the press and the judiciary. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has written, the BJP rose to power while pursuing “policies undermining Muslim rights and inflaming Hindu anxieties about their Muslim neighbors.” A key law that has raised concern is the Citizenship Amendment Act, which excludes Muslims from neighboring countries from obtaining a fast track to Indian citizenship. That same law allows members of other religious groups including Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians to expedite their attempts at naturalization. Both Modi’s and the party’s rhetoric have sought to exploit existing divides between Hindu and Muslim people, including questioning the right of certain Muslims to be in India and alleging that they’re seeking to overtake the Hindu majority by growing their population. One example of this has been fears that the BJP have stoked about the concept of “love jihad,” which alleges that Muslim men are interested in marrying Hindu women in order to establish a larger presence in India. There’s “a growing sense of fear that a continued run of the BJP is going to bring more laws that are going to really put Muslims in second-class citizenship status,” says Nooruddin. During Modi’s tenure, there have also been a number of anti-democratic developments, including the increased jailing of opposition, attacks on journalists, media censorship, and the weakening of the judiciary. In recent weeks, the chief minister of Delhi, a major opposition leader, was jailed shortly before the election on corruption charges he claims are politically motivated. Assaults on the press have also become more common, with police raiding the homes of reporters at a left-leaning publication in 2023, and some mainstream outlets now dubbed “lapdog media” by prominent journalists who call them that for their willingness to dilute critiques on the government. Top political leaders have also tried to diminish the role of the judiciary and to exert greater influence in the selection of judges. Monkey Man, though imperfect, dares to allude to some of these concerns in a time when even doing that is a risky move.

Ludo Studio Did you see a parent crying today? The brilliant kids’ TV show Blueyis why. If you happen not to have children or have been living under a rock, let me introduce you to someone. Her name is Bluey. She’s a 7-year-old who lives with her younger sister Bingo and her dad Bandit and mom Chili in the bucolic Australian city of Brisbane. Also, she’s a dog — a blue heeler, to be precise. And a cartoon. And she’s really, really big. The brainchild of Australian animator Joe Brumm, the kid’s cartoon Bluey premiered in its home country in 2018 before taking the rest of the world by storm. In 2023, Bluey was the second-most popular streaming show in the US, where it was watched for 731 million hours. But a better measurement of Bluey’s power is in the mindspace of its tens of millions of young fans and the wallets of their parents, who bought enough books, dolls, albums, juices, cookies, and even theater tickets to make the Bluey brand worth an estimated $2 billion. (As Bluey herself might say, that’s a lot of dollarbucks.) Which is why the most recent episode of Bluey, which hints at a possible ending for the show, was so shocking — not just to her multitudes of adoring kid fans and their parents, but to the major media companies like Disney that are banking on a never-ending supply of content like Bluey. But like childhood itself — for both children and the parents who watch them grow — nothing as perfectly beautiful as Bluey is meant to last forever, unchanged. Which may be the lesson the show was trying to tell us all this time. Bluey, explained You have to watch Bluey — and you absolutely should — to really understand what makes it so superior to the vast, often-polluted river that is children’s TV content. It’s funny in a way that 5-year-olds and 45-year-olds can appreciate. But what pushes Bluey into the realm of the masterpiece is Brumm and his colleagues’ ability to thread real-life themes into their richly realized childhood world. Aging parents, infertility, parental fighting, sibling rivalry: Each of these complicated subjects gets its moment in between the games of keepy-uppy. And not in a didactic, Afterschool Special sort of way. The lessons Bluey has for children and parents alike aren’t told; they’re lived. You can see that for yourself in the most recent episode, which dropped globally on April 14, a 28-minute special titled “The Sign.” Bandit has gotten a new job, one that Chili tells the kids “can give them a better life” — but it requires selling their beloved home in Brisbane and moving across the country. A sudden, major move is about as traumatic as it gets for kids — and that’s precisely how Bluey responds. She becomes fixated on the “For Sale” sign outside her house, reasoning with perfect kid logic that if the sign is removed, the house can’t be sold. But life doesn’t stop because of one kid’s crisis, whether in Bluey or in the real world. While Bluey struggles with the sign, her beloved babysitter tries to decide whether to go through with a wedding, while her mother Chili comes to grips with her own doubts about the move. Spoiler alert for all our 6-year-old Today, Explained readers: The family does not, in the end, go through with the move. It was an unusual decision for a show that generally hasn’t shied away from the challenges of reality. At our house, at least, the ending was received by a great flow of what my son and my wife called “happy tears.” But much of the angst that has greeted “The Sign” has less to do with the episode itself than the very real chance it could represent, if not a full-stop ending to Bluey, at the very least a significant change. If its current incarnation does end, there would be a flood of “sad tears.” But it would also underscore why Bluey is so great — and so unusual for kids’ programming. The longest shortest time Bluey is the closest thing a multibillion-dollar media property can be to a truly artisan production. It has remained defiantly Australian, down to the accents and the lingo. Brumm writes or co-writes all the episodes. He’s kept production at his studio in Brisbane, rather than subcontracting it out to cheaper countries. All that makes for greatness — and burnout, something that critics have noticed sneaking into Brumm’s characterization of his stand-in Bandit. He told Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this month about his worries that he would repeat himself, that the quality couldn’t possibly keep climbing. The slowness to announce what would be a fourth season, combined with the soft finale feeling of “The Sign,” has fans panicking. As you can imagine, studios like Disney and the BBC that have a huge financial stake in the continued production of Bluey have no desire to see it end. The streaming ecosystem needs a constant supply of new content to keep subscribers hooked and bring on new ones (which is one reason why they’re so excited about the dystopian possibility of AI-generated content). If the quality suffers, that’s a small price to pay to keep the IP flowing. It’s not clear what will happen with Bluey next, though producers involved in the show have promised fans it will be returning in some form. But Brumm has spoken about his reluctance to replace the actors who voice Bluey and Bingo as they age out of the roles and the fact that, as his own daughters get older, he can’t draw from their experiences as he once did. I can relate. My own son, the one who cried the “happy tears,” is turning 7 soon, aging out of the Bluey zone. This is one of the fundamental facts of the longest shortest time that is parenting. On top of the sleepless nights, the endless hours to fill, and, yes, all that joy, raising a kid is one long experience of loss. We lose the 1-year-old with his arms outstretched to be picked up, the 4-year-old bravely marching to his first day of preschool, the 6-year-old who just wants to snuggle on the couch and watch Bluey. They’re replaced by new people we can’t wait to meet, but the ones they were, the ones we knew and loved, they’re gone forever. Maybe that’s why I love Bluey so much — so much I almost hope it ends now, at its zenith. Watching it is a time capsule for a moment I would hold onto with all my strength, even as I know I can’t. I suspect Brumm knows that too. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Paige Vickers/Vox; Jorm Sangsorn/Getty Images From kava to “sleepy girl mocktails,” can anything ever take the place of booze? The first time I did shrooms and actually felt something was probably my last time doing shrooms at all. The moment it hit I was in the middle of a round of Mario Kart and abruptly handed the controller to someone else and went downstairs, as far as possible from the screen that had suddenly become terrifying to me. A familiar panic was rising in my chest, and my solution was the only thing that I knew was foolproof: wine, two glasses of it, in rapid succession. After a few minutes, my anxiety tempered as I spent the next several deeply unpleasant hours waiting for the psilocybin to leave my body. The shrooms, a drug I have never been particularly interested in, were a result of several factors: One, everyone does shrooms now. You can buy shroom chocolate at the bodega. (This is not entirely legal.) Two, this particular group of friends is without the kind of major obligations (i.e. kids) that would preclude other people from wasting an afternoon sitting around doing drugs. Third, and probably most significantly, it is 2024, we are in our early 30s, and we are part of the demographic of people interested in ways to have fun and hang out together without resorting to the default method. That default method is alcohol, a drug I have always been very interested in. It is also poison. Alcohol overuse causes 178,000 deaths in the US every year, and one in 12 Americans suffers from alcohol use disorder. Despite what the sponsored ads in your chumbox might say (“Great news: red wine is GOOD for you!”), even light drinking is associated with certain types of cancer and cardiovascular disease. Drinking causes hangovers, poor sleep, embarrassing texts, unexplainable bruises, and a nagging sense that you’ve done something you regret, even if you can’t quite remember it. Hence the widespread interest in replacing alcohol with ... something else. “People are much more literate about what is good for us,” says Ruby Warrington, the author of 2018’s Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol. “It starts to shine a light on how incompatible alcohol use is with our other health goals.” When Warrington first started exploring sobriety in 2011, the only options available to nondrinkers were sugary mocktails, the classic soda water and lime, and maybe a watery nonalcoholic beer. By the late 2010s, after she’d begun hosting dry events around New York City, there was more to choose from: Athletic Brewing, the nonalcoholic craft brewery that’s become the leader in the fastest-growing segment of the beer market, debuted in 2017; the canned water brand Liquid Death followed in 2017 with its ironic heavy-metal branding. Zero-proof spirit companies and alcohol-free bars skyrocketed in the same time period, providing an option for nondrinkers to order that don’t feel out of place in boozy social settings. The rise in “sober curiosity” is directly correlated to an interest in wellness, an industry that exploded in the early 2010s at the same time smartphones and social media became a part of everyday life. Perhaps people were searching for ways to really feel the experience of being in one’s body when everything else felt increasingly abstract; perhaps we simply wanted to look hotter for Instagram. But by 2019, the buzziest trend in alcohol was drinking less of it or none at all: low-cal, low-ABV (alcohol by volume) hard seltzers were all the rage, beer began to look and taste more like juice, and alcohol brands were marketing their products as keto- or paleo-friendly, or something to crack while kayaking or after the end of a long hike. Alcohol, it seemed, was trying to shed its image of indulgence and hedonism in an era that was increasingly judgmental of vice in general. The wellness industry cycled through an endless carousel of products meant to cure the most prevalent ailments of the modern age, from fatigue to anxiety to obesity to wrinkles. Alcohol can exacerbate all of these things at the same time that it offers an escape from thinking about any of them. But in this explosion of snake oil, perhaps there was something that could offer all of the benefits of alcohol — the ritual of drinking a glass of wine while cooking, the extravagance of a fancy cocktail, the communal feeling of a pint at your local pub — with none of the downsides. The first and most obvious choice was weed. The 2010s was the decade pot truly went mainstream, beginning in 2012 with Colorado and Washington’s cannabis legalization. By 2021, nearly half the country was living in states where marijuana was legal. Now, in 2024, pot is illegal in only four states, and the CDC estimated that about 18 percent of Americans used it in 2019. For some, weed offers a relaxed high with significantly fewer adverse health effects than alcohol, unless you are like me and it makes you really weird and panicky. Enter: the totally legal, handy gateway drug version — CBD, which was inserted into everything from hand cream to dog treats through the course of the 2010s — and which may not have done anything at all. Kava, the bitter, muddy-tasting psychoactive South Pacific plant also popped up in specialized bars in urban enclaves around the country over the course of the last decade. In 2012, there were about 30 kava bars in the US; that number has since risen to 400. Mitra 9, a canned kava drink that calls itself the Budweiser of the industry, launched in late 2021, and co-founder Dallas Vasquez describes the sensation to me as a social lubricant: “You’re socially more outgoing, and it’s just kind of a relief. And the best thing about it is you’re not intoxicated — it’s not going to limit your functionality.” Liz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images Patrons at a kava bar in San Bruno, California, in 2017. Mitra 9 also makes a version with kratom, another plant native to Southeast Asia that acts as more of a stimulant and is sometimes used as an opioid substitute. One 2019 study estimated that 0.7 percent of Americans have consumed kratom in the past year, with people who’ve been addicted to opioids being more likely to have done so. “We do really well in the soccer mom world,” Vasquez explains. “We’re not trying to win the morning — coffee wins by a long shot — but the afternoon and the nighttime is where we want to compete. If you need more energy, you can crack a kratom; if it’s at night and you’re trying to wind down, you can crack a kava.” “Can people stop trying to convince me that as a society we’re getting over drinking?” Then there are shrooms. In the year after the pandemic began, mushrooms were suddenly everywhere, as alternatives for coffee and meat, in interior design, in cutesy internet aesthetics, and, of course, as drugs. Studies have shown the potential benefits of shrooms as not only consciousness-altering psychedelics but as therapeutic tools, and over the past decade or so, it’s become common for people — even ones with powerful jobs! — to be relatively open about microdosing shrooms or other psychedelics like LSD; they say it makes them more focused, more creative, and more present. At raves and nightclubs, young people are increasingly switching from alcohol, cocaine, and ecstasy to hallucinogens like ketamine, 2C-B, and DMT due to their association of being “more healing than they are harmful.” Meanwhile on TikTok, each week brings a new way to supposedly decrease anxiety and increase sleep quality. Earlier this year, women concocted “sleepy girl mocktails” made of tart cherry juice, magnesium, and soda water; another iteration of the “sleepy girl mocktail” combined cough syrup, Jolly Ranchers, and Sprite, to make what one person on Twitter called “gentrified lean.” Supplements like ashwagandha, Vitamin D, and magnesium have all gone viral as young people search for solutions to sleep woes and stress, while also allowing for a guilt-free novelty and a way to ritualize certain moments in the day. Even if, as one doctor said, the “sleepy girl mocktail” would likely cause little more than a placebo effect, it’s part of “little treat culture,” or the idea that life should be full of small indulgences like fancy lattes and Target runs, with the twist being that the treat is actually good for you. The exploding sector of nonalcoholic beverages that sort of look and feel like alcohol has grown apace, from chic apéritifs like Ghia or the St. Agrestis Phony Negroni; cheeky canned mocktails like Psychedelic Water, which contains kava root; and Kin Euphorics, a “functional beverage” brand co-founded by supermodel Bella Hadid. The “functional” element comes from the addition of adaptogens, or plants meant to decrease stress; nootropics, which claim to boost brainpower despite minimal evidence; and caffeine. Unlike some other alcohol alternatives, Kin promises to actually do something beyond acting as a stand-in for an Aperol spritz. Similarly, a UK startup called GABA Labs launched a synthetic alcohol called Sentia, designed to mimic the effects of alcohol without the hangovers or health problems. Jerritt Clark/Getty Images for Tao Group Hospitality Bella Hadid holding a can of Kin Euphorics. “I’m a huge fan of all of these products,” says Warrington. “It lowers the barrier to entry for people who are sober curious or who are questioning their drinking.” She points out that, historically, alcohol recovery communities have warned against consuming these sorts of replacement products over the worry that they might hit too close to home or trigger a relapse, but these attitudes are changing along with attitudes about whether sobriety is truly one-size-fits-all. Rax King, a writer who’s currently working on a memoir about her “poorly executed sobriety,” says that while she mostly sticks to Shirley Temples at bars, she still smokes weed and drinks kratom. “It’s evolving this idea of what sobriety can be, and I think these extensive mocktail menus and kava bars really speak to people’s desire to have something to do that isn’t just sitting on a barstool getting drunk. And I appreciate that very much, it makes sobriety a little easier,” she says. At the same time, King is wary of any supposed miracle cure for drinking that promises all of the fun with none of the downsides. “I’m an addict myself, and I can pretty much make any intoxicant into an addiction if I put my mind to it.” Kratom, for instance, can be addictive, and on sober forums, folks have discussed the harmful addictive qualities of a kratom tonic that’s popular on social media and that left them with terrible withdrawals. It also recently went viral when TikToker Emmy Hartman realized she’d been drinking a kratom drink that made her feel euphoric and productive but later found that some refer to it as “gas station crack.” @emmwee ♬ original sound - EMMY Robert Evans, the author of A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization, has used kratom since he was a teenager, usually as a coffee substitute on sluggish afternoons. “I like getting high on it, but it is an addictive drug and is one that has some health consequences,” he says. “A lot of the deaths that have occurred have been people getting stuff that is not pure kratom, and I would like to see a situation where the FDA takes a protective role without restricting people’s access.” From 2021 to 2023, a Tampa Bay Times investigation found that there were more than 2,000 fatal kratom overdoses in the US. Though there are currently zero federal regulations around kava or kratom (some states do have them, and six states outright ban kratom), in 2016 The Verge obtained via FOIA request knowledge of 25 cases from 2004 to 2015 in which people who had consumed kava developed liver problems, severe skin rashes, and for one woman, a fatal case of hepatitis. This is dwarfed by the number of people who get sick or die from alcohol-related causes every year, but it’s clear that more research is needed to understand what effects these products have on the body. In a Time story on Sentia, Anna Lembke, the medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford, said, “There’s always the promise of some new molecule that’s going to do exactly what the old molecule did but not have the harmful effects. Every single time, that has not panned out.” The writer points to heroin, which was invented as a safer form of morphine, and e-cigarettes, both of which can be harmful and addictive. Still, the alcohol-alternative beverage market is expected to be worth more than $29 billion by 2026, according to the WSJ. There has been a simmering, if not formally organized contingent of people online who point to all this stuff — $15 adaptogenic mocktails or the idea that everything we consume must be good for us — and find it sort of obnoxious. “Can people stop trying to convince me that as a society we’re getting over drinking?” said the TikToker Madi Hart in a recent video. “You’re not going to be able to convince me that I don’t like alcohol. Sorry trendy people, sorry people who are like, ‘drinking is out, weed is in, microdosing shrooms is in.’ You’re not gonna convince me with your mocktail recipe or whatever.” One particularly miserable-sounding tech industry event in San Francisco organized by the bizarre immortality crusader Bryan Johnson went viral for touting ice baths, a pushup contest, and a “supplements buffet” instead of a bar. The quote-tweets were full of people lamenting how out of touch and robotic its attendees seemed and how the fixation on self-improvement has had a sterilizing effect on culture. Much like anti-aging skin care products for tweens, craving-stopping drugs like Ozempic for already thin celebrities, or creepily hygienic millennial-gray homes, there’s a sense that humanity is being erased in favor of optimization and efficiency, that fear and risk-aversion, even the sensible kind, has lost us something greater. happiness will not be found in "sleep scores" or "supplement buffets." it will not be found in optimization. https://t.co/UemeDM3AWr— Magdalene J. Taylor (@magdajtaylor) March 10, 2024 The reason people drink is mostly uninteresting and extremely transparent. Alcohol is fun. It makes life and weddings and awkward work happy hours more bearable. As Evans explains, “There are no health benefits to alcohol, but there are societal benefits to alcohol, and one of those is that it changes how you think and how you operate. There are experiences you can have when you’re engaging in alcohol that are profoundly beneficial.” Much like LSD or psilocybin or anything else that alters your state of being, the harm of alcohol comes from the fact that it, well, works. “It’s the same reason that variety among human beings is positive: Different people have different points of view and experiences, and substances can change [those things.],” he says. And yet acting unlike oneself is risky in an era of near-constant social surveillance. “Drunk doesn’t look good on social media,” says Warrington. On TikTok, young people have expressed nostalgia for an era of club culture they imagine existed before smartphones, one where everyone danced wildly to songs about “getting crunk” rather than the current state of some lounges: people standing around filming each other. It’s reminiscent of one of Sex and the City’s most iconic scenes, where Kristen Johnston as party girl Lexi Featherston shouts about how “No one’s fun anymore! Whatever happened to fun?!” She was referring to the fact that she wasn’t allowed to smoke inside, but it’s easy to imagine her giving the same diatribe in 2024 about the decrease in socially acceptable drunkenness. (Presciently, she then falls out the window to her death.) “I suspect if you were to go into the far future to the last human beings, you will see them drinking in groups” But unlike smoking inside, it’s almost unimaginable to think of alcohol someday being fully replaced, and stories about Gen Z ushering in an era of prudish teetotalism are usually overblown or misunderstood. “If you go back to the furthest periods of time in which human beings have organized in any meaningful capacity, you find them drinking in groups. And I suspect that if you were to go forward into the far future to whatever the last human beings are that live in organized societies, you will see them drinking in groups from time to time,” says Evans. What could change, however, is how often we drink to excess. Evans points out that it is only because of industrialization and mass production that we even have the option to do so: When liquor became widely available, we immediately saw the rise of the temperance movement. A hundred years later, we’re still dealing with the aftermath of the widespread availability of alcohol in the form of death, addiction, and disease. It’s no wonder people are reconsidering their relationship to it in a time when its harms have never been easier to prove. A major aspect of alcohol that people probably want to replace is the ritual of it, perhaps even more so than the psychoactive effects. Older civilizations throughout history have tended not to police vice and excess, as we do now, but isolate them with special occasions. “People had reliably defined periods of time in which everyone they knew would engage in excessive behavior in a ritualized fashion, and I think that was healthier than sort of leaving it up purely to when people can afford to get blasted,” he says. In our individualized culture, the closest approximations — e.g. New Year’s Eve or St. Patrick’s Day — are heavily commercialized and far from comparable to the festivals and feast days of the pre-industrialized era. When unlimited alcohol is readily available to anyone who can afford it, societies find other ways of regulating the thing we all know is terrible for us: sometimes with widespread movements to ban it entirely, sometimes with chicly packaged zero-proof cocktails. “The world is really tough,” says Warrington. “The world has only gotten more anxiety-inducing and more challenging over the past decade or so. People are looking to numb out, they want to medicate their anxiety.” There’s a dream that basically everyone in the world shares. It’s the dream of an alcohol that isn’t quite alcohol but almost is — a substance that will make you feel free and happy and sexy and chatty but also won’t get you addicted, won’t shave years off your life, won’t make you groggy and achy and anxious the next day. It’s the dream of a substance from which taking an entire month off as part of an annual challenge would be laughably absurd because why would anyone ever need a break from it? But such a substance could never be more than fantasy because of course human beings would find a way to render it destructive. So we try our luck with the options that we do have and weigh our odds, whether it’s with weed or shrooms or kava or cherry juice before bed, knowing that the condition of choosing when to indulge in something we know is bad for us will continue to be a part of life. We know that alcohol only makes these problems worse, yet two-thirds of Americans choose to drink anyway. Luckily, for those looking to do less of it, there’s now a lot more than seltzer on the menu.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testifies before the House Homeland Security Committee about the fiscal year 2025 budget on April 16, 2024. | Allison Bailey/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images Senate Democrats put a quick end to Republicans’ political stunt. Republicans’ political impeachment stunt against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas came to a head this week in the Senate, with lawmakers in the upper chamber voting to dismiss the charges. On Tuesday, House Republicans sent two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas to the upper chamber, and on Wednesday, senators were sworn in as jurors for a trial. The articles accuse Mayorkas of failing to enforce immigration laws, making false statements to Congress, and obstructing oversight into DHS policies, all charges he denies. On Wednesday, the Senate rejected both articles, voting 51-48 along party lines to deem the first “unconstitutional” and 51-49 to dismiss the second article and adjourn the trial before it even really began. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted present on the first article. This is the first impeachment trial of a Cabinet secretary in more than a century. It’s likely to be remembered not as a historic moment of political accountability but as a marker of how polarized Congress has become over the last decade. The swift conclusion of the proceedings marks a win for Democrats and the Biden administration, who denounced the impeachment effort as a sham and a waste of resources. Democrats have long said that the behavior Mayorkas is accused of does not qualify as “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which is the legal threshold for impeachment. Republicans, meanwhile, wanted to drag the process out in order to draw more attention to the issue of immigration, and to use the proceedings as a platform to criticize the Biden administration’s immigration policies. Mayorkas oversees border security and asylum as DHS secretary, so going after him created an opportunity to focus on these subjects and to make election-year promises to voters that the GOP will fix issues at the border if it come back into power. These efforts come as immigration has become a more potent campaign flash point this year because of the surge in migration the US has experienced. The “trial” showdown, briefly explained In February, the House voted to impeach Mayorkas after almost a year of hearings and investigations. Republicans argued that he did not properly enforce immigration laws, citing, in one case, the decision to release migrants after they arrived at the southern border. In fact, that’s an established practice followed by multiple administrations, in part because the US does not have sufficient space to detain people as they await immigration hearings. Republicans also said that Mayorkas had made false statements to Congress because he testified that the border was “secure,” and that he blocked oversight by failing to respond to subpoenas and offer sufficient access to his office. Mayorkas has pushed back against the charges, noting that his approach may differ from that of Republicans, but he’s been committed to immigration enforcement and has worked to comply with Congress’s oversight of the agency by providing testimony and documents. Many Constitutional law experts also said Republicans had not shown that the charges reached a legal bar for impeachment, and that they instead seemed to be founded on policy disagreements. “If allegations like this were sufficient to justify impeachment, the separation of powers would be permanently destabilized,” wrote top scholars, including Harvard’s Laurence Tribe and Berkeley’s Erwin Chemerinsky, in a January letter. The first phase of the Senate trial on Wednesday took place because the upper chamber needed to fulfill its constitutional duty. Following a House impeachment, the Senate’s job is to hear the charges and determine whether the person should be convicted. If an official is convicted — which requires a two-third majority vote — they would then be removed from their position. The Senate also has the option to dismiss, or table, the impeachment articles if a simple majority votes to do so. Ultimately, that’s what happened on both articles against Mayorkas, though it wasn’t without some drama. During the process, Republicans were able to force additional votes on “points of order,” or procedural motions regarding how the impeachment should move forward. They used this platform to slam Democrats repeatedly for not holding a full trial like those seen during the impeachment proceedings of former Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton and to try to delay the trial to a later date. The GOP points of order all largely failed on party lines. The impeachment is political messaging in a campaign year The impeachment itself is part of a broader GOP strategy to keep the focus on immigration as Republicans campaign on border security ahead of this year’s presidential election. It’s a strategy that’s worked for them before, including in 2016, when Trump made building a wall at the southern border a central promise of his campaign. The general public has also historically viewed Republicans as more trustworthy on border security than Democrats. A September 2023 NBC News poll found that 50 percent of voters trust Republicans on this issue, compared to 20 percent who trust Democrats. Immigration has been especially resonant this year because there’s been a high number of unauthorized crossings at the southern border as global displacement has increased and as instability in some South American countries has forced people to flee. State Republican leaders, including Govs. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, have drawn attention to this development by busing and flying migrants to Democrat-led cities such as New York City and Chicago. Democratic leaders, including New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, have kept the focus on the influx of migrants as they’ve sought help from the federal government and imposed harsh eviction policies. In response to the Mayorkas impeachment, Democratic lawmakers have called Republicans’ focus on the issue disingenuous, as GOP leaders, including Trump, have opposed efforts to pass bipartisan immigration reforms that could help address some of these challenges. As a result of the attention it’s received in recent months, immigration has become a top issue in key swing states that Republicans hope to flip in order to win back the presidency and retake certain Senate seats. A March 2024 Wall Street Journal poll found that immigration was one of voters’ top two issues in seven key swing states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada. According to research from political scientists Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler, approaches like this have successfully dented presidents’ approval ratings in the past. The researchers found, for example, that if lawmakers spent 20 days per month on investigative hearings, the president’s approval rating could see a commensurate decline of 2.5 percent in that time. But while the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas was designed to cast negative attention on the Biden administration as Trump navigates countless legal scandals of his own, Senate Democrats’ quick dismissal has dulled much of its impact.

The senate hearings come months after a door plug in a Boeing 737-9 MAX plane blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight on January 5. | Getty Images Experts and whistleblowers testified before Congress today. The upshot? “It was all about money.” Boeing went under the magnifying glass at not one, but two senate hearings today examining allegations of deep-seated safety issues plaguing the once-revered plane manufacturer. Witnesses, including two whistleblowers, painted a disturbing picture of a company that cut corners, ignored problems, and threatened employees who spoke up. These hearings have convened just four months after a door plug blew out of a Boeing-made Alaska Airlines plane mid-flight in January, sparking further concerns about a precipitous downslide in Boeing’s reputation for safety and quality in recent years. The first hearing, held by the Senate Commerce Committee, questioned aviation experts who put together an FAA report published in February. It concluded that the company had not made enough strides in improving its safety culture since the deadly 2018 and 2019 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people. “There exists a disconnect, for lack of a better word, between the words that are being said by Boeing management, and what is being seen and experienced by employees across the company,” said witness Javier de Luis, an aerospace engineer and lecturer at MIT. The FAA report conducted hundreds of interviews with Boeing employees across the country, and the authors found staff often didn’t know how to report concerns or who to report them to. “In one of the surveys that we saw, 95 percent of the people who responded to the survey did not know who the chief of safety was,” said Tracy Dillinger, manager for safety culture and human factors at NASA. The second hearing put the spotlight on two whistleblowers — Boeing quality engineer Sam Salehpour and former Boeing engineer Ed Pierson — alongside aviation safety advocate and former FAA engineer Joe Jacobsen and Ohio State University aviation professor Shawn Pruchnicki. The whistleblowers slammed Boeing for allegedly knowing about defective parts and other serious assembly problems, and choosing to ignore or even conceal them. Such problems could slow down production and be expensive to fix — and internal and external critics say that Boeing’s priority was maximizing its profits. Salehpour said he had gone up high in the chain of command at Boeing to alert them of his concerns, having written “many memos, time after time.” Yet he says his warnings went unheeded — and that he was punished for bringing them up. “I was sidelined. I was told to shut up. I received physical threats,” he said. “My boss said, ‘I would have killed someone who said what you said in the meeting.’” Boeing’s many whistleblowers During Wednesday’s hearings, witnesses reiterated that Boeing management had been overly focused on ramping up production while also cutting costs. Salehpour, who has worked at Boeing since 2007, came forward in early April warning that more than 1,000 Boeing planes in the skies were in danger of structural failure due to premature fatigue. In the 787 line, tiny gaps between plane parts hadn’t been properly filled, he said. “I found gaps exceeding the specification that were not properly addressed 98.7 percent of the time,” Salehpour testified during the hearing today. He said that debris ended up in these unfilled gaps “80 percent of the time.” Such debris could, in some cases, result in a fire. On the 777s, he found “severe misalignment” of airplane parts. “I literally saw people jumping on the pieces of the airplane to get them to align,” he said. Salehpour urged Boeing to ground all 787 Dreamliner planes ahead of his testimony. Boeing, for its part, has denied Salehpour’s assertions, saying that “claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate” and noting further that it had tested the 787 line many more times than the jet would actually take off or land in its lifespan, and had found no evidence of fatigue. But Salehpour pointed out today that the above-and-beyond stress testing referred to older 787 planes, in which excessive force wasn’t used during assembly. Talking about the faulty software system that contributed to the deadly 737 MAX crashes, Pruchnicki, the OSU professor, accused Boeing of sneaking the system through the certification process. “It was all about money,” he said. “That’s why those people died.” There were plenty of fingers pointed at the FAA for failing to oversee Boeing with a tighter rein. When Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked if hiring more FAA inspectors would help, Jacobsen, the former FAA engineer, answered that it would — but that the attitude needed to change. “The attitude right now is Boeing dictates to the FAA.” Boeing has said it’s cooperating fully with investigators, but at another Senate hearing in March, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board testified that, two months after the Alaska Airlines incident, Boeing still had not provided several records related to door plug failure. Boeing says it can’t find them. Pierson, the ex-Boeing whistleblower, testified today that this couldn’t be true. “I’m not going to sugarcoat this: This is a criminal cover-up,” he said. “Records do in fact exist. I know this because I’ve personally passed them to the FBI.” Kent Nishimura/Getty Images Sam Salehpour, a Boeing quality engineer and whistleblower, testified before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on April 17. A steady crop of whistleblowers have come forward over the decades flagging issues with Boeing’s planes, particularly after the MAX crashes. Boeing’s safety concern tip portal also saw a 500 percent increase in reports after the Alaska Airlines accident. A previous whistleblower from Boeing’s South Carolina plant, former Boeing quality manager John Barnett, claimed there were numerous quality issues with Boeing’s manufacturing process, including dangerous debris that hadn’t been removed from its jets and issues with its emergency oxygen system. He was recently found dead of an apparent suicide right before his third day of deposition testimony in his whistleblower lawsuit; Barnett, like others, said that he had faced retaliation from the company. Some of Barnett’s former coworkers don’t believe he died by suicide, according to reporting from the American Prospect. We don’t know yet what the results of the ongoing regulatory and criminal investigations into these recent safety scares will be, or the consequences for Boeing. CEO Dave Calhoun recently announced he would be stepping down from the position at the end of this year. Boeing already underwent a fraud investigation for the earlier 737 MAX crashes — it agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle the case, avoiding a criminal conviction. What does this mean for airline passengers? Boeing’s safety issues are especially unsettling because there isn’t a quick fix to untangling them. It’s been more than five years since the deadly 737 MAX disasters, and according to aviation experts and current and former employees, the company hasn’t managed to right the ship. That critics have accused Boeing of pushing for higher profits at the expense of safety is an alarm bell for anyone who ever plans to take a commercial flight again. There are just two passenger jet makers that dominate the market: Boeing and Airbus. “You’ve got a management team that doesn’t seem terribly concerned with their core business in building aircraft,” Richard Aboulafia, managing director of the consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory, told Vox in January. Commercial aviation is remarkably safe, but that near-pristine safety record was hard-earned. It’s understandably shocking that one of the world’s only commercial jet manufacturers appears to have let its once-high standards slacken, if the allegations of Boeing whistleblowers are true. It’s also prudent to expect the highest rigor possible for aviation safety — good enough isn’t good enough. Boeing has consistently downplayed structural problems with its planes and denied that it puts profits over quality. But the number of whistleblowers and experts saying otherwise is reaching a deafening pitch. “It really scares me, believe me,” Salehpour said of being a whistleblower and facing retaliation. “But I am at peace. If something happens to me, I am at peace, because I feel like, coming forward, I will be saving a lot of lives.”

At a protest in Rome in October 2023 calling for a ceasefire and aid into Gaza, a protester holds a sign calling for an end to “colonialism and displacement” in Palestine. | Simona Granati/Corbis via Getty Images The historical discussion at the heart of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Is Israel a “settler colonial” state? That charge has been the subject of fierce debate in recent months amid the continuing Israeli assault on Gaza after the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Colonialism is a system in which one people dominates another and uses the subjugated group’s resources for its own benefit (the British Raj in India is a classic example). Colonial projects take many forms, but Israel is accused of being the result of a specific variety: settler colonialism. According to the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, settler colonialism has “an additional criterion that is the complete destruction and replacement of indigenous people and their cultures by the settler’s own in order to establish themselves as the rightful inhabitants.” Settler colonialism does not have a definition under international humanitarian law (unlike many other terms used during this latest war), although Article 49 of the Geneva Convention prohibits certain actions often associated with that term; it is instead a concept that historians use to describe the system of replacing an existing population with a new one through land theft and exploitation, which is enabled by occupation, apartheid, forced assimilation, or genocide. Historians often apply the termto the projects that founded the United States, Canada, South Africa, and others. Within that cohort, there are scholars who apply the term to Israel’s founding, too. The argument begins with the 30-year period during which the British Empire controlled historic Palestine and facilitated the mass migration of Jews, particularly those persecuted in Europe before the Holocaust and in the wake of it. That migration, they argue, displaced the existing Arab population and launched a conflict that continues to this day. But critics of the argument view accusing Israel of settler colonialism as a distortion of the term, in large part because of Judaism’s deep historical ties to present-day Israel. Many Jewish people who migrated from around the world and became citizens of Israel use the word “return” to describe making their home there. The debate has echoed from college campuses to the halls of Congress. In the United States, “colonialism” is, at times, viewed as a popular buzzword used to vilify the Jewish state and a means of casting Jewish refugees as agents of empire. Among pro-Palestinian activists and in many formerly colonized communities, the term is a historical prism linking much of the Global South and through which the Palestinian struggle can be understood. The argument might seem academic. But it is important for understanding pro-Palestinian groups’ grievances with the international community — for failing to prevent Israel from engaging in what they view as an established settler colonial pattern of eliminating a native population through expulsion and genocide to annex Palestinian land. Palestine’s short but critical history as a British colony, briefly explained Both the United States and Canada, widely viewed by historians as states founded as settler colonial projects, relied heavily on British patronage. Israel’s foundations are similar, some scholars argue. In 1917, the British colonial period, or British Mandate, began in historic Palestine. Zionism, the ideology that Jews are both a religious group and nation whose spiritual homeland is Israel, was extant for decades before then, driven in large part by violent antisemitism in Europe. Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images British Mandate forces in Jerusalem in October 1937. But that year, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote what he considered a declaration of sympathy with the aspirations of Zionism. “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” he wrote in what came to be known as the Balfour Declaration. The declaration also stated, “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” — though, as my colleague Nicole Narea wrote, there was no specification of what those protections would be or who they would apply to. The letter was a powerful endorsement of the establishment of a Jewish home where the biblical kingdoms of David and Solomon once were. Priya Satia, a historian of the British Empire and professor at Stanford University, said it also marked another British foray into colonial enterprise. “You’ve got to remember, this is against the backdrop of ongoing British settler movement into Rhodesia, into Kenya, into South Africa,” she said. “That is what the architects thought they were doing when they started this process.” Historians argue that the British Empire backed the Zionist movement for myriad reasons, including anxieties about Jewish migration to Britain, the search for new allies in World War I, and to maintain control of the nearby Suez Canal. “The British, before they decided to take Zionism under their wing with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, for more than a decade had decided for strategic reasons that they must control Palestine,” Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, told Vox. “They needed it to defend the eastern frontiers of Egypt. They needed it because it constituted the Mediterranean terminus of the shortest land route between the Mediterranean and the Gulf.” After the Balfour Declaration, the British facilitated the mass immigration of European Jews to historic Palestine. Per a League of Nations mandate, the British would maintain economic, political, and administrative authority of the region until a Jewish “national home” was established. Were Zionism and the founding of Israel inherently colonial projects? The debate, explained. That long, tangled history planted the seeds for today’s strife — and the debate over what to call the Israeli project. “Zionism, of course, has a national aspect, but as early Zionists all understood and accepted and were not ashamed of, it was a colonial project,” Khalidi said. “It was a settler-colonial movement to bring persecuted Jews from Europe to Palestine, where they would establish a Jewish majority state.” But others dispute that view. That includes scholars like Benny Morris, a member of the Israeli New Historian movement that challenges official Israeli history, who argues that Zionism is rooted in the aspirations and ideals of a persecuted group, instead of the interests of a mother country. “Colonialism is commonly defined as the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country, settling it with its sons, and exploiting it economically,” Morris writes. “By any objective standard, Zionism fails to fit this definition.” Derek Penslar, a history professor at Harvard University, writes in his book Zionism: An Emotional State about the various taxonomies of Zionism and that some of its early visionaries were critical of political Zionism’s aims. “The most famous Zionist intellectual of the early 20th century, Asher Ginsberg, who went under the pen name of Ahad Ha-am, was against the establishment of a Jewish state,” Penslar told Vox. “He was very well aware of the Arab population of Palestine, and he said, ‘look, you know, we basically can’t get these people against us. We can’t anger them, we have to live with these people.’ And so he advocated forming much smaller communities that would not antagonize the Arab populations.” The man who came to be known as the ideological father of Israel, however, was the political Zionist Theodor Herzl. A journalist from Vienna in the late 1800s, he witnessed the rise of populist, antisemitic politicians in his city and remarked on the pervasiveness of antisemitism in Europe in a play and later his pamphlet, The Jewish State. Imagno/Getty Images Theodor Herzl in Palestine in November 1898. Credited for galvanizing an international movement for Jewish statehood in Palestine, Herzl sought a more dignified existence for European Jews like himself and espoused a vision of the Jewish state that included universal suffrage and equal rights for the Arab population. But in private, he wrote of Arab expropriation, and in public, he placed Zionists like himself within the colonial order of the time. “We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism,” he wrote. “We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.” While under British control, Palestine saw violent clashes between Zionists and Arabs, and its demography changed rapidly, with the Jewish population increasing from 6 percent to 33 percent. In the eyes of Arab nationalists, the argument was a simple one: A foreign power took control of Arab land and promised it to another foreign group. “For the Zionists and for Israel, it’s a lot more complicated,” said Penslar, whose work links post-colonial studies with the history of Zionism. “They wanted to be free, they wanted self-determination, and they wanted the kinds of things that colonized people in the world wanted. And the consensus was that they would realize their freedom in the Jews’ historic, biblical, and spiritual homeland in the land of Israel, which is the same thing as historic Palestine.” (In a sign of how contentious the discussion over Zionism and antisemitism is, as part of a broader criticism of Harvard’s handling of antisemitism on campus, critics also protested Penslar’s heading of a university task force to combat antisemitism, pointing to his criticism of Israel as disqualifying — this despite Penslar’s own critiques of Harvard’s handling of antisemitism and his distinguished academic reputation.) Judaism’s ties to the Middle East, mentioned in both the Bible and the Quran, the Hebrew language’s origins in ancient Palestine, and the Jewish ties to the region as a motherland motivate arguments that Jews are a native group in present-day Israel. It’s why groups supportive of Israel argue that it does not fit into the settler colonialism framework. Universal Images Group via Getty Jewish refugees aboard a ship. “Jews, like Palestinians, are native and indigenous to the land,” writes the Anti-Defamation League, a mainstream Jewish pro-Israel group and also one of the US’s leading anti-extremism organizations. “The Land of Israel is integral to the Jewish religion and culture, the connection between Jews and the land is a constant in the Bible, and is embedded throughout Jewish rituals and texts. The Europeans who settled in colonies in the Middle East and North Africa were not indigenous or native to the land in any way.” To scholars like Khalidi, who comes from a family of Palestinian civil servants dating back to the 17th century, the connection doesn’t justify the creation of a majority Jewish state under international law. “Does that mean that the people who arrive from Eastern Europe are indigenous to the land? No, they’re not indigenous. Their religion comes from there. Maybe or maybe not their ancestors came from there,” said Khalidi. “That doesn’t give you a 20th-century right — that’s a biblical land deed that nobody believes except people who are religious. And in modern international law, that just doesn’t hold.” By the mid-20th century, the British, recovering from World War II and facing anti-colonial agitation from Zionists and Arabs in Palestine — not to mention from other corners of their empire — handed control of Palestine to the United Nations. In 1947, the General Assembly passed Resolution 181 to partition Palestine. “Even though Arabs constituted a two-thirds majority of the country, more than 56 percent of it was to be given to the Jewish state and the rest was to be given to an Arab state,” said Khalidi. For Israel, the birth of a Jewish state was a triumphant defiance of odds in the face of the Holocaust, and victory against military units from Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt who were defeated the following year. It also occasioned the expulsion or voluntary exodus of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries. Israel soon established a Law of Return that would grant any Jew from any country the right to move to Israel and gain citizenship. In Palestinian memory, the establishment of Israel entailed an ethnic cleansing campaign known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic. Fearing violence by Zionist forces or actively expelled by them, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in present-day Israel. According to a 1948 Israeli Defense Forces intelligence report, “without a doubt, hostilities were the main factor in the population movement.” No Law of Return exists for Palestinians who were displaced by the Nakba. History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Palestinians driven from their homes and fleeing via the sea at Acre by Israeli forces, 1948. The Nakba took place as independence movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean gained traction. To scholars like Satia, who studies the empire that once colonized a quarter of the world, Palestine became a global touchpoint in an era of decolonization. “All these other places do eventually get some kind of decolonization process. And in Palestine, there isn’t one,” she said. “It becomes the last bastion along with South Africa.” The present-day charges of settler colonialism and demands to decolonize Settler colonialism is hardly a thing of the past nor is it an exclusively Western enterprise. China is arguably practicing it by incentivizing Han Chinese migration to Xinjiang and Tibet. India’s revocation of Kashmir’s autonomous status is criticized as a Hindu nationalist effort to transform the demographics of its only majority Muslim state. And Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories motivates charges of present-day colonialism. This includes continued settlement construction in the West Bank and control of the ingress and egress of people and goods (most notably humanitarian aid) into the Gaza Strip. In the West Bank, almost 700,000 Israelis are living in settlements scattered throughout the territory, which are protected by the Israeli military and often subsidized by the government. “It’s pretty fair to say that the Palestinians are an occupied people. And there’s no question that the settlements that Israel has set up in the West Bank since 1967 are a kind of colonialism,” said Penslar. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained, “Most international lawyers (including one asked by Israel to review them in 1967) believe settlements violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of population into occupied territories.” Israel’s government disputes that its settlements violate any international law. The settlements obstruct the contiguity of Palestinian land and movement. Palestinians are barred from certain Israeli-only roads and forced to navigate a network of checkpoints, which invokes comparisons to apartheid South Africa. “The contiguity of the territory of the West Bank has been completely broken up,” said Satia. “You can use analogies like ‘Bantustans,’ which comes from the South African context.” Menahem Khana/AFP via Getty Images Palestinian laborers work at a construction site in the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, in the occupied West Bank, on February 29, 2024. South African politicians, including its first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, argued that Palestinians were engaged in a parallel struggle. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent siege of Gaza, South Africa is accusing Israel of committing genocide in the International Court of Justice. Israel vehemently denies the charge, calling it “blood libel,” and says it has a duty to protect its citizens from Hamas. As the world watches the deadliest war in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict unfold on their screens, activists and academics rely on the term “settler colonialism” to explain a decades-long cycle of violence that has killed over 30,000 Palestinians and over 1,400 Israelis in the last six months. To Penslar, who lived in Israel through two intifadas, today’s cycle of violence won’t change by identifying Israel as a settler-colonial state. “Even if we do go through all of this and decide Israel is a settler-colonial state, it doesn’t really mean very much, because at the end of the day we have to come up with a solution which involves either Israeli Jews dominating Arabs, or Arabs dominating Jews, or the two people sharing the land or two states,” he said. “And whether you call Israel a settler-colonial state or not, it doesn’t really help us a whole lot.” The call for decolonization is criticized by some for lacking achievable goals and denounced by others as a euphemism for expelling or killing Israelis in the name of anti-colonial resistance. Immediately after the October 7 attacks, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said, “the enemy has had a political, military, intelligence, security and moral defeat inflicted upon it, and we shall crown it, with the grace of God, with a crushing defeat that will expel it from our lands.” But academic proponents of the settler-colonial thesis say that expulsion is not a natural consequence of accepting that settler colonialism is foundational to a country. “You can have that conversation and acknowledge that historical reality without implying that everyone needs to leave,” said Satia, citing Australia, New Zealand, and Canada — countries that have formally apologized to their indigenous peoples for colonial atrocities and pledged reparations to certain groups. If the First Aliyah, or migration of the Jewish diaspora to historic Palestine, began in the late 19th century, then the descendants of those people living in Israel today are tied to the land not only because of Judaism’s history but also because of several generations living there in recent memory. “Those are people who now have not just a presence but certain rights,” said Khalidi, adding that Israel fits into a pattern seen in other settler-colonial enterprises. “You look at South Africa, or you look at Ireland, or you look at Kenya, or you look at what is now Zimbabwe — a very large proportion of the populations that were settled there by colonial powers … are now part of those populations. They have rights there. They should live there,” he said. “Now, how the relationship between them is to be worked out. That’s a question that’s not going to be easy to solve.”

A kidney transplant team in Nice, France. | BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Giving a kidney saves a life. Paying donors could fix the shortage. What if I told you there was a way that the US could prevent 60,000 deaths, save American taxpayers $25 billion, and pay a deserving group of people $50,000 each? Would you be interested? Would you wonder why I’m pitching this to you like I’m the host of a late-night basic cable infomercial? I am not a spokesman. I am simply a fan and supporter of the End Kidney Deaths Act, a bill put together by a group of kidney policy experts and living donors that would represent the single biggest step forward for US policy on kidneys since … well, ever. The plan is simple: Every nondirected donor (that is, any kidney donor who gives to a stranger rather than a family member) would be eligible under the law for a tax credit of $10,000 per year for the first five years after they donate. That $50,000 in total benefits is fully refundable, meaning even people who don’t owe taxes get the full benefit. Elaine Perlman, a kidney donor who leads the Coalition to Modify NOTA, which is advocating for the act, based the plan on a 2019 paper that estimated the current disincentives to giving a kidney (from travel expenses to lost income while recovering from surgery to pain and discomfort) amounted to about $38,000. That’s almost $50,000 in current dollars, after the past few years’ inflation. The paper also found that removing disincentives by paying this amount to donors would increase the number of living donors by 11,500 a year. Because the law would presumably take a while to encourage more donations, Perlman downgrades that to about 60,000 over the first 10 years, with more donations toward the end as people become aware of the new incentives. But 60,000 is still nothing to sneeze at. Due to a law signed by Richard Nixon, the US has single-payer health care for only one condition: kidney failure. Medicare picks up the bill for most patients with kidney failure, including for the main treatment of dialysis, in which an external machine replicates the functions of a kidney. Dialysis is not only worse for patients than a transplant, for reasons we’ll get into in a moment; it’s more expensive too. In 2021, Medicare spent $33.4 billion, or almost 7 percent of its overall budget, on patients with kidney failure, much of it on dialysis treatment. Getting people transplants saves both lives and money: At about $416,000 in estimated savings each, those 60,000 transplants made possible by donor incentives over the first 10 years would save taxpayers about $25 billion. I write about a lot of government programs, and usually there’s a tradeoff: You can do more good, but you’re going to have to spend a lot more money. Win-win scenarios where the government saves money while saving lives are virtually unheard of. We’d be foolish not to leap at this one. The kidney problem, explained The End Kidney Deaths Act is trying to solve a fundamental problem: Not nearly enough people are donating their kidneys. In 2021, some 135,972 Americans were diagnosed with end-stage renal disease, meaning they would need either dialysis or a transplant to survive. That year saw only 25,549 transplants. The remaining 110,000 people needed to rely on dialysis. Dialysis is a miraculous technology, but compared to transplants, it’s awful. Over 60 percent of patients who started traditional dialysis in 2017 were dead within five years. Of patients diagnosed with kidney failure in 2017 who subsequently got a transplant from a living donor, only 13 percent were dead five years later. Life on dialysis is also dreadful to experience. It usually requires thrice-weekly four-hour sessions sitting by a machine, having your blood processed. You can’t travel for any real length of time, since you have to be close to the machine. More critically, even part-time work is difficult because dialysis is physically extremely draining. Most people who do get kidney transplants get them from deceased donors. There’s more we can do to promote that: One study found that about 28,000 organs annually, including about 17,000 kidneys, could be recovered from deceased donors but are not, largely because organ procurement groups and surgeons have strong incentives to reject less-than-perfect organs. People are working hard on fixing that problem, but they’d be the first to tell you we need more living donors too. The gap between kidneys needed and kidneys available is about 10 times larger than that 17,000-a-year figure. Kidneys from living donors also last longer than those from deceased donors, and the vast majority of those who die (96.7 percent by one study’s estimate) are not even eligible to donate their organs, usually because the prospective donor is too sick or too old. So we should be recovering the organs that are eligible. But it won’t get us all the way. We need living donors too. But we don’t have enough — particularly enough nondirected donors. These are donors giving to a stranger, and thus donors whose kidneys can be directed to the person with the most need. While I and others have done our best to evangelize for nondirected donation, our ranks are pretty thin. In 2023, only 407 people donated a kidney to a stranger. The End Kidney Deaths Act would aim to increase that number nearly thirtyfold. Perlman told me the Coalition to Modify NOTA is open to supporting donors who give to family or friends as well, or even providing benefits to families of deceased donors. But in part because nondirected donations are so rare, starting out by just subsidizing them saves money upfront. The act is meant as a first step toward a system of more broadly compensating donors; if it proves this approach can work, we can always expand eligibility. The moral case for compensating kidney donors The most common objection to compensating kidney donors is that it amounts to letting people “sell” their kidneys, a phrasing that even some proponents of compensation adopt. For opponents, this feels dystopian and disturbing, violating their sense that the human body is sacred and should not be sold for parts. But “selling kidneys” in this case is just a metaphor, and a bad one at that. The End Kidney Deaths Act would not in any sense legalize the selling of organs. Rich people would not be able to outbid poor people to get organs first. There would be no kidney marketplace or kidney auctions of any kind. What the proposal would do is pay kidney donors for their labor. It’s a payment for a service — that of donation — not a purchase of an asset. It’s a service that puts some strain on our bodies, but that’s hardly unusual. We pay a premium to people in jobs like logging and roofing precisely because they risk bodily harm; this is no different. When you think of donor compensation as payment for work done, the injustice of the current system gets a lot clearer. When I donated my kidney, many dozens of people got paid. My transplant surgeon got paid; my recipient’s surgeon got paid. My anesthesiologist got paid; his anesthesiologist got paid. My nephrologist and nurses and support staff all got paid; so did his. My recipient didn’t get paid, but hey — he got a kidney. The only person who was expected to perform their labor with no reward or compensation whatsoever was me, the donor. This would outrage me less if the system weren’t also leading to tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily every year. But a system that refuses to pay people for their work, and in the process leads to needless mass death, is truly indefensible. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Menstruation has been understudied for decades. Scientists are trying to change that. | the_burtons via Getty Images Menstruation affects the body and mind in countless ways. A new study is just the beginning. PMS, food cravings, “period flu,”: Anybody who menstruates knows from experience that the monthly cycle can have a profound impact on the body and mind. But researchers are still only beginning to explore exactly how menstruation can affect health — and, in some people, worsen symptoms of illness. In one recent study, psychologist Jaclyn Ross and a team at the University of Illinois Chicago asked 119 female patients who had experienced suicidal thoughts in the past to track their feelings over the course of a menstrual cycle. They found that for many patients, suicidal thoughts tended to get worse in the days right before and during menstruation. On those days, patients were more likely to progress from thinking about suicide to actually making plans to end their own lives. These results might seem sadly unsurprising to people living with depression, who have been telling their therapists — and talking among themselves — for years about how their periods affect their symptoms. But thanks to misogyny in science and medicine, these effects haven’t been studied in a systematic way until recently, frequently leaving patients on their own to navigate fluctuations in mood that doctors may not know how to diagnose or treat. In fact, menstruation has been understudied for decades, creating a knowledge vacuum in which patients with pain or heavy bleeding wait years for a diagnosis. In recent years, however, more scientists have begun to study the process and menstrual fluid — research that could uncover crucial information about human health that’s been unjustly ignored. Menstruation can affect mental health symptoms Ross’s colleague, psychologist Tory Eisenlohr-Moul, had the idea for the research after one of her therapy patients mentioned worsening symptoms around her period, she told the Chicago Tribune. “I thought if we had some evidence that this was common then maybe we could do something about it,” she said. The connections between periods and mental health have started to get more attention in the last decade. Clinicians have long known that a small percentage of the population experiences a condition called premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), characterized by severe feelings of anxiety, depression, or irritability in the days leading up to menstruation. PMDD was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 2013, and experts believe 3 to 8 percent of menstruating people have the condition. But Ross and her team wanted to study whether menstrual cycles affected more people’s mental health, too. So the patients in their study were not diagnosed with PMDD, and instead were chosen because they reported suicidal thinking in the past month. The researchers asked participants to record symptoms like depression, anxiety, and hopelessness every day of their cycle. They also asked about suicidal ideation and suicidal planning. Ideation tended to be more intense, and planning was more likely, on the days around menstruation, Ross told the Tribune. “What’s fascinating is that even though we did not recruit for PMDD, we see that a majority of participants reporting recent suicidal ideation tend to experience worsening symptoms around the days before and during menses onset,” she told Vox in an email. Most people don’t experience major psychiatric symptoms in response to hormonal changes, Ross said. However, research has found that people with underlying mental illness — including 60 percent of women with depressive disorders — often do feel worse around their periods. Ross’s study, published in December in the American Journal of Psychiatry, suggests that therapists, psychiatrists, and OB-GYNs should be giving patients information about how menstruation can affect emotional symptoms, especially suicidality. Patients might also benefit from charting their own symptoms for a few months to see whether a cyclical pattern emerges. The lab where Ross works, led by Eisenlohr-Moul, is also studying behavioral and pharmaceutical treatments that could help people whose symptoms are tied to their menstrual cycles, from dialectical behavioral therapy to hormone-blocking drugs. Researchers are fighting the stigma around periods The findings add to an area of study that’s still battling silence and stigma. People with PMDD still struggle to get a diagnosis; in a 2022 survey, around 40 percent of PMDD patients said their mental health care providers had no knowledge of the condition. The impact of menstruation on other mental health conditions, like depression, is even more poorly understood. However, a growing body of research and reporting is shedding light on how menstruation works and the many profound ways that our menstrual cycles can affect us, mentally and physically. Researchers are also exploring whether menstrual fluid could be used in early detection of conditions like uterine fibroids, cancer, and endometriosis. Studying menstruation, in which the uterus sheds and regrows its own lining, could provide insight into wound healing, midwife and author Leah Hazard told Vox’s Byrd Pinkerton. In the last two years, researchers have also confirmed what many patients reported anecdotally: that Covid-19 vaccines have small but measurable effects on menstrual cycles. The findings could push vaccine manufacturers to test their products’ effects on menstruation so that patients won’t be caught off guard. (The menstrual effects of the Covid vaccine are temporary and do not impact fertility, experts say.) Many of the connections between menstruation and other aspects of physical and mental health went undiscussed for years, at least in public, because scientists and doctors simply weren’t studying them. When it comes to understanding menstrual health, “we’re very, very behind,” Alice Lu-Culligan, a pediatrics resident at Boston Children’s Hospital who has studied menstruation, previously told Vox. In 2023 — yes, last year — researchers finally conducted one of the first studies to test the capacity of menstrual products using real blood. Studies like Ross’s, however, show that clinical research is starting to catch up with what many people who menstruate already know: that the process is an inextricable part of human functioning that has a lot to teach us, if we care to listen. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Unhoused people photographed in San Francisco in February of 2024. | Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images Grants Pass v. Johnson could make the entire criminal justice system far crueler. It also tests the limits of judicial power. The Supreme Court will hear a case later this month that could make life drastically worse for homeless Americans. It also challenges one of the most foundational principles of American criminal law — the rule that someone may not be charged with a crime simply because of who they are. Six years ago, a federal appeals court held that the Constitution “bars a city from prosecuting people criminally for sleeping outside on public property when those people have no home or other shelter to go to.” Under the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Martin v. Boise, people without permanent shelter could no longer be arrested simply because they are homeless, at least in the nine western states presided over by the Ninth Circuit. As my colleague Rachel Cohen wrote about a year ago, “much of the fight about how to addresshomelessness today is, at this point, a fight about Martin.”Dozens of court cases have cited this decision, including federal courts in Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Florida, Texas, and New York — none of which are in the Ninth Circuit. Some of the decisions applying Martin have led very prominent Democrats, and institutions led by Democrats, to call upon the Supreme Court to intervene. Both the city of San Francisco and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, filed briefs in that Court complaining about a fairly recent decision that, the city’s brief claims, prevents it from clearing out encampments that “present often-intractable health, safety, and welfare challenges for both the City and the public at large.” On April 22, the justices will hear oral arguments in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, one of the many decisions applying Martin — and, at least according to many of its critics, expanding that decision. Martin arose out of the Supreme Court’s decision in Robinson v. California (1962), which struck down a California law making it a crime to “be addicted to the use of narcotics.” Likening this law to one making “it a criminal offense for a person to be mentally ill, or a leper, or to be afflicted with a venereal disease,” the Court held that the law may not criminalize someone’s “status” as a person with addiction and must instead target some kind of criminal “act.” Thus, a state may punish “a person for the use of narcotics, for their purchase, sale or possession, or for antisocial or disorderly behavior resulting from their administration.” But, absent any evidence that a suspect actually used illegal drugs within the state of California, the state could not punish someone simply for existing while addicted to a drug. The Grants Pass case does not involve an explicit ban on existing while homeless, but the Ninth Circuit determined that the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, imposed such tight restrictions on anyone attempting to sleep outdoors that it amounted to an effective ban on being homeless within city limits. There are very strong arguments that the Ninth Circuit’s Grants Pass decision went too far. As the Biden administration says in its brief to the justices, the Ninth Circuit’s opinion did not adequately distinguish between people facing “involuntary” homelessness and individuals who may have viable housing options. This error likely violates a federal civil procedure rule, which governs when multiple parties with similar legal claims can join together in the same lawsuit. But the city, somewhat bizarrely, does not raise this error with the Supreme Court. Instead, the city spends the bulk of its brief challenging one of Robinson’s fundamental assumptions: that the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” limits the government’s ability to “determine what conduct should be a crime.” So the Supreme Court could use this case as a vehicle to overrule Robinson. That outcome is unlikely, but it would be catastrophic for civil liberties. If the law can criminalize status, rather than only acts, that would mean someone could be arrested for having a disease. A rich community might ban people who do not have a high enough income or net worth from entering it. A state could prohibit anyone with a felony conviction from entering its borders, even if that individual has already served their sentence. It could even potentially target thought crimes. Imagine, for example, that an individual is suspected of being sexually attracted to children but has never acted on such urges. A state could potentially subject this individual to an intrusive police investigation of their own thoughts, based on the mere suspicion that they are a pedophile. A more likely outcome, however, is that the Court will drastically roll back Martin or even repudiate it altogether. The Court has long warned that the judiciary is ill suited to solve many problems arising out of poverty. And the current slate of justices is more conservative than any Court since the 1930s. Grants Pass’s litigation strategy is bizarre One reason why this already difficult case is being needlessly complicated is that Grants Pass made some odd strategic decisions when it brought this case to the Supreme Court. While the city’s primary argument seems to attack one of the fundamental principles of American criminal law, there is probably much less to this argument than an initial read of their brief would suggest. Robinson was an Eighth Amendment decision. It held that this amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” does not permit the government to punish mere “status.” Instead, as mentioned, criminal laws must target some “act” committed by a defendant. The city’s primary argument is that Robinson erred in this decision. The Eighth Amendment, it claims, “focuses not on the nature of a criminal offense, but the sentence imposed for it.” So, under this approach, California did not violate the Eighth Amendment in 1962 when it made merely existing while experiencing addiction a crime, so long as it was not imposing an excessive sentence on that addiction. Similarly, the amendment would forbid Grants Pass from imposing the death penalty on homeless people — because such a harsh punishment would be excessive — but it wouldn’t forbid a city from making existing while homeless a crime. On the surface, this is an extremely consequential argument. If the Supreme Court should agree that mere status can be criminalized, that would open the door to thought crimes and allow states and localities to effectively banish entire classes of people they deem undesirable. But there is probably less to this argument than it initially seems. As the city notes in its brief, some scholars argue that even if being arrested for a status crime does not violate the Eighth Amendment, it does violate two other provisions of the Constitution, which forbid the government from denying “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” So even if a majority of the current justices agreed that Robinson misread the Eighth Amendment, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the government can criminalize status. Moreover, the idea that government may only punish voluntary actions, and not status, is hardly some newfangled idea invented by liberal justices in the 1960s. It has deep roots in the common law, the body of judge-made law that developed in English courts over many hundreds of years and that still shapes much of US law. In their brief, the unhoused plaintiffs quote a 1754 lecture by an English legal scholar who said that “no action can be criminal, if it is not possible for a man to do otherwise. An unavoidable crime is a contradiction.” There’s even a Latin term, “actus reus,” that refers to the criminal act that someone typically must commit before they are charged with a crime. This is one of the most basic concepts in American criminal law. Virtually any law student who has completed the first week of their introductory course in criminal law will be familiar with this term. So, while it is theoretically possible that the current Supreme Court could eliminate the requirement that someone commit an actus reus before they can be criminally punished, that seems unlikely. This is such a foundational principle in US criminal law that even this Court is unlikely to disturb it. The line between “status” and “action” is often blurry Yet while the Court is unlikely to say that people can be declared criminals simply because of who they are, the line between what constitutes a law criminalizing “status” and a law criminalizing action can be quite blurry at the margins. Consider Powell v. Texas (1968), which asked whether an alcoholic who claimed to have an irresistible urge to drink could be charged with a crime for being drunk in public. Leroy Powell, the defendant in this case, claimed that arresting him for being drunk was no different than arresting someone addicted to drugs simply for being addicted, because his drunkenness was an unavoidable consequence of his status as someone with alcoholism. The Court, however, rejected this argument — albeit in a close 5–4 decision. Writing for himself and only three other justices, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote the Court’s lead opinion in Powell. That opinion leaned heavily into Marshall’s doubts that Powell’s alcoholism was a truly an “irresistible compulsion to drink and to get drunk in public” that was so strong he was “utterly unable to control” his drinking. Justice Byron White, meanwhile, cast the fifth vote against Powell but did not join Marshall’s opinion. Citing Robinson, White argued that “if it cannot be a crime to have an irresistible compulsion to use narcotics,” then “I do not see how it can constitutionally be a crime to yield to such a compulsion.” He also wrote that “the chronic alcoholic with an irresistible urge to consume alcohol should not be punishable for drinking or for being drunk.” Ultimately, White voted against Powell because Powell was convicted of publicdrunkenness — the justice reasoned that, even if Powell could not avoid drinking, he could have remained at home. But White’s approach has fairly obvious implications for the Grants Pass case. That case involves a web of local ordinances that, the Ninth Circuit determined, punish homelessness in much the same way that a ban on drinking punishes an alcoholic who genuinely is incapable of not drinking. Among other things, these ordinances include strict limits on where people can sleep and prohibit anyone from using “material used for bedding purposes” on public property — a provision that, the city claims, permits it to cite anyone who so much as wraps themselves in a blanket while sitting on a park bench. Violators face a fine of at least $180, an enormous amount for someone who cannot afford housing, and the penalties escalate quite quickly for repeat offenders. Because everyone has to sleep eventually, and because Grants Pass is too cold in the winter for anyone to sleep outside without a blanket or similar protection, the Ninth Circuit reasoned that Grants Pass’s web of ordinances effectively makes it impossible to live while homeless in Grants Pass — thus criminalizing the status of being homeless. One way that the Supreme Court could resolve this case is to reject White’s conclusion in Powell that there is no difference between a law that criminalizes status directly and one that does so indirectly by criminalizing an involuntary act that arises out of their status. That would be a huge blow to unhoused people, as it would fundamentally undermine the Martin decision. Even under White’s framework, moreover, Robinson only protects individuals who have an “irresistible compulsion” to drink alcohol. It follows that Robinson should only protect people who cannot voluntarily sleep anywhere except for places where Grants Pass’s ordinances effectively forbid them from sleeping. And this distinction between voluntary and involuntary action presents the biggest problem for the unhoused plaintiffs in Grants Pass. The biggest problem with the Ninth Circuit’s decision, briefly explained The Ninth Circuit determined that people are protected by Robinson only if they are “involuntarily homeless,” a term it defined to describe people who “do not ‘have access to adequate temporary shelter, whether because they have the means to pay for it or because it is realistically available to them for free.’” But, how, exactly, are Grants Pass police supposed to determine whether an individual they find wrapping themselves in a blanket on a park bench is “involuntarily homeless”? For that matter, what exactly does the word “involuntarily” mean in this context? If a gay teenager runs away from home because his conservative religious parents abuse him and force him to attend conversion therapy sessions, is this teenager’s homelessness voluntary or involuntary? What about a woman who flees her violent husband? Or a person who is unable to keep a job after they become addicted to opioids that were originally prescribed to treat their medical condition? Suppose that a homeless person could stay at a nearby shelter, but they refuse because another shelter resident violently assaulted them when they stayed there in the past? Or because a laptop that they need to find and keep work was stolen there? What if a mother is allowed to stay at a nearby shelter, but she must abandon her children to do so? What if she must abandon a beloved pet? The point is that there is no clear line between voluntary and involuntary actions, and each of these questions would have to be litigated to determine whether Robinson applied to an individual’s very specific case. But that’s not what the Ninth Circuit did. Instead, it ruled that Grants Pass cannot enforce its ordinances against “involuntarily homeless” people as a class without doing the difficult work of determining who belongs to this class. That’s not allowed. While the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure sometimes allow a court to provide relief to a class of individuals, courts may only do so when “there are questions of law or fact common to the class,” and when resolving the claims of a few members of the class would also resolve the entire group’s claims. But that’s not true in Grants Pass. A case involving a queer teen who fled his parents’ home is materially distinct from a case involving a woman who sleeps outside because she cannot find a shelter that will allow her to bring her dog. That does not mean that both of these individuals should not prevail in court. But the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require them to bring separate legal proceedings that can address the unique facts of their unique cases. The courts probably aren’t going to provide much help to homeless people in the long run Grants Pass is hardly the first time the courts have been asked to intervene in a complicated question of anti-poverty policy. The best-known example is probably San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), which challenged a public school funding scheme in Texas that tended to provide much more money to wealthy school districts than to poorer ones. The Court turned away this suit in a 5–4 decision. In the decades after Rodriguez, however, many state supreme courts broke with their federal counterparts and ordered their states to spend more on education, to provide more resources to poor districts, or to otherwise implement a more equitable finance system. As of 2019, plaintiffs bringing Rodriguez-like suits in state courts had prevailed in 23 states. But these cases are difficult to litigate and often require multiple trips to the state supreme court over the course of many years. Frequently, after a state supreme court issues a decision calling for some change in the state’s funding scheme, the legislature makes some small changes and then drops the issue until a court orders them to act again. In Arkansas, for example, school finance reformers won a state supreme court victory in 1983 declaring that the state’s school finance system bore “no rational relationship to the educational needs of the individual districts” and then had to return to court nearly two decades later. Seventeen years after its initial decision, the Arkansas Supreme Court found that the wealthiest school districts were still spending nearly twice as much per pupil as the poorest districts. Even if Martin survives contact with the Supreme Court, anti-poverty advocates are likely to face even more difficulties trying to wield it to mitigate the problem of homelessness than those same advocates have faced in school finance cases. Because the law restricts when courts can provide class-wide relief to anyone experiencing homelessness (or even to “involuntarily homeless” people), enforcing Martin is likely to become a long, slow slog of individual cases attempting to rescue individual criminal defendants from an individual arrest for sleeping outside. Of course, the courts could relax the rules governing when judges can provide class-wide relief. But such a relaxation would have implications far beyond homelessness policy and would likely do far more to empower the judiciary’s far right than it would to help anti-poverty advocates. Imagine, for example, what Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Trump-appointed judge who tried to ban the abortion drug mifepristone and who routinely hands down court orders implementing right-wing policy preferences, would do if he were handed a new power to issue class-wide relief to any group of people he wants to help out. So, with so many ways that Grants Pass could end very badly for homeless people — and for criminal defendants generally — the case is unlikely to end well for them.

Rapper Drake at “Lil Baby & Friends Birthday Celebration Concert” at State Farm Arena on December 9, 2022, in Atlanta. | Prince Williams/WireImage Everyone involved in Drake’s latest — and biggest — feud. To borrow a phrase from our foremost cultural observer, Azealia Banks, the boys are fighting. Since the explosive drop of producer Metro Boomin and rapper Future’s first joint album, We Don’t Trust You, on March 22, a cold war has broken out involving the duo and the rest of hip-hop’s top-tier (male) millennial roster: Drake, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, and A$AP Rocky. It’s been a strange few weeks, with shots being thrown in an extremely public and increasingly amusing way. In an utterly baffling move, Cole made a public apology for his own diss track, bowing out of the beef early. Meanwhile, like any argument you might see among a group of rich women on Bravo, Drake is being put on blast for his rumored plastic surgery. (Thank you, Megan Thee Stallion.) This isn’t the first time this particular group of A-listers — all of whom dominated the mainstream rap charts of the 2010s — have exchanged lyrical blows. In particular, Drake and Lamar have sneak-dissed each other for a while now. However, to the average music listener, all these men have a more well-known history of collaboration, including features, a joint album, and tour stops. Lamar’s fiery verse, however, on the We Don’t Trust You track “Like That,” has shattered any remaining semblance of camaraderie. In the weeks since, Future and Metro have released yet another rage-fueled album, hilariously titled We Still Don’t Trust You. And Drake finally — if not clunkily — released his own sprawling diss over the weekend, name-dropping everyone from SZA to Maroon 5 to Swifties. Did I mention Uma Thurman is also involved? After nearly 15 tumultuous years in the game, it’s no surprise that Drake has once again found himself on the receiving end of some hate. Still, this latest beef could be exactly what rap’s sensitive king needs in a rather uninspired era in his career, defined by a rather dull musical output and gross jabs at women. Who’s beefing with who? Johnny Nunez/Getty Images for The Recording Academy Kendrick Lamar wins Best Rap Album award for “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers” during the 65th Grammy Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 5, 2023, in Los Angeles, California. A few weeks ago, Future and Metro essentially released a breakup album from their frequent collaborator and former comrade, Drake. (Drake and Future have nearly 30 collaborations combined, and Metro executive-produced their 2015 mixtape What A Time to Be Alive.) We Don’t Trust You is packed with subliminal messages seemingly directed at Drake, regarding his shady maneuvers. However, it was Kendrick’s relatively gentle prodding on the track “Like That” that was ultimately the most incendiary. On the track — which has sat at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in a row now — he raps “Motherfuck the big three, it’s just big me,” renouncing his informal association with rap peers Drake and Cole. On the recent Drake song “First Person Shooter,” off his latest album For All the Dogs, Coleclaimed on his guest verse that he, Drake, and Lamar are the “Big 3” of the current era of hip-hop. Nevertheless, Lamar’s ire on “Like That” is mostly pointed at his noted frenemy Drake, brushing off his purportedly unstoppable commercial success. “Your best work is a light pack,” he asserts. “N—, Prince outlived Mike Jack.” Cole responded first on April 5 with the track “7-Minute Drill,” featured on his aptly titled mixtape Might Delete Later. Cole throws shots at Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning discography, calling his latest album Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers “tragic” and claiming his Grammy-winning sophomore album Good Kid, Maad City “put [listeners] to sleep.” He also promises to “humble” Lamar if “push comes to shove.” However, by April 10, Cole had rescinded his warning shot, including removing “7-Minute Drill” from streaming platforms. At his annual Dreamville Festival, he issued a heavily mocked quasi-apology to Lamar. “I tried to jab [Lamar] back, and I try to keep it friendly,” he told the crowd in North Carolina. “But at the end of the day when I listen to it, and when it comes out and I see the talk, that don’t sit right with my spirit.” Before Drake could unleash his own diss, Future and Metro released the follow-up, We Still Don’t Trust You, on April 12. This time, A$AP Rocky got some punches in. On the song “Show of Hands,” he rapped “N—-s in they feelings over women. What, you hurt or something? I smash before you birthed, son. Flacko hit it first, son.” This is presumably a response to Drake apparently dissing A$AP and his partner Rihanna, whom Drake previously dated, on his song “Fear of Heights.” (Fans have also speculated that A$AP means he previously slept with the mother of Drake’s son.) Another one of Drake’s most famous industry mates, The Weeknd, appears on both Future and Metro albums. However, on We Still Don’t Trust You’s eighth track, “All to Myself,” he sings, “I thank God that I never signed my life away.” Fans interpreted that as a jab about Drake’s label OVO Sound, which, despite his heavy association with the label, The Weeknd ultimately never signed to. Who is Drake dissing on “Push Ups”? On Saturday, April 13, Drake’s long-awaited response titled “Push Ups (Drop & Give Me Fifty)” mysteriously made its way to the internet. The seemingly unmixed demo made many social media users speculate whether the song was AI-generated before noted hip-hop commentator DJ Akademiks eventually played it — noticeably with some tweaks, like the omission of a line about P. Diddy and a different beat — on his livestream. Hip-hop radio station Power 105 also streamed a high-quality version of the song. Given Drake’s comments on Instagram over the weekend, including a photo of Uma Thurman single-handedly taking on a group of fighters in the 2003 film Kill Bill, all signs point to the track being legitimate. That said, “Push Ups” is a hefty (and expectedly humorous) diss record, taking aim at Drake’s aforementioned opps while pulling some other parties into the crossfire. One of them is the Weeknd’s manager, CashXO, who he accuses of “blowing Abel’s bread trickin.” He also takes shots at Memphis Grizzlies player Ja Morant, who fans are speculating he was previously in a love triangle with. In probably the silliest development of this multi-pronged feud, he throws some digs at rapper Rick Ross, another frequent collaborator of his. “This n— turning 50,” Drake raps. “Every song that made it on the chart he got it from Drizzy.” Ross swiftly followed up with his own diss called “Champagne Moments,” which quickly went viral. Among other insults and accusations, he calls Drake, who’s mixed, “white boy” and claims he got a nose job. Johnny Nunez/WireImage Drake and Rick Ross at P. Diddy’s Ciroc The New Years Eve Party at his home on December 31, 2013, in Miami Beach, Florida. As for Lamar, Drake offers a pretty comprehensive rebuttal, poking fun at Lamar for apparently wearing a “size 7 shoe” and his collaborations with pop acts like Maroon 5 and Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” (Lest we forget, Drake has also linked up with Swift for a check.) He also names some artists who he feels have surpassed Lamar’s stardom, including SZA, who’s signed to Lamar’s own Top Dawg Entertainment label. (She apparently doesn’t want to be involved.) There’s also a bar that many listeners, including DJ Akademiks, interpreted as an audacious mention of Lamar’s fianceé, Whitney Alford (“I be with some bodyguards like Whitney”). However, this could also be a misreading of a more obvious reference to the Whitney Houston film, The Bodyguard. The industry may be against him, but Drake has always thrived in a beef “Push Ups” aside, Drake has handled his public gang-up with an expected sense of humor and irreverence. In addition to an exchange with Uma Thurman, he shared a perplexed text message from his mother, Sandi Graham, inquiring about his alleged cosmetic surgeries on his Instagram Stories. He’s also used the platform to further troll Metro, who he told to “shut up and make some drums” on “Push Ups,” in the following days. As anyone who’s even slightly followed rap over the past decade and a half can attest, this isn’t Drake’s first time engaging in warfare with his peers. Most famously, his career has seen headline-generating battles with Meek Mill, Pusha T, Joe Budden, and Kanye West. Arguably, his most infamous tiff was the culmination of a long-brewing beef with Pusha T in 2018, where the Virginia rapper exposed Drake’s formerly hidden son Adonis to the world. Despite the brief moment of humiliation, Drake ultimately emerged the victor — that is, if you’re using chart numbers and general popularity as a determining metric. After his moderately received victory lap of an album, Views, he was given a more gripping narrative to fuel his blockbuster 2018 album Scorpion. At the same time, he was once again proving his mass appeal outside of the rap audiences with party bangers like “God’s Plan,” “Nice For What,” and “In My Feelings,” all of which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. More recently, however, Drake has been involved in several seemingly one-sided beefs with famous women. On his 2023 song with 21 Savage, “Circo Loco,” he threw out a not-so-subtle diss at rapper Megan Thee Stallion (“This bitch lie ’bout getting shots but she still a stallion”), joining a chorus of famous men disputing her now-proven claims that singer Tory Lanez shot her in the foot in 2020. During the rollout of For All the Dogs, he vexed actress Halle Berry, who claimed he used a photo of her for the artwork for his single “Slime You Out” without her permission. Additionally, he’s attempted to reignite drama with his former fling Rihanna. Aside from his digs on “Fear of Heights,” he played their collaboration “Work” at one of his concerts just to claim that he “doesn’t sing [the] song anymore.” Drake’s songwriting is often propelled by a sweeping sense of grievance and an obsession with the past and his haters (he’s not that different from Taylor Swift after all!). However, his constant feelings of victimhood within his relationships with women — and the subsequent, more blatant misogyny that’s grown out of that — has begun to wear on critics and parts of his female fanbase. That said, his appropriately savage (yet funny) handling of his latest attack feels reminiscent of a more palatable, forgone iteration of Drake. Watching him navigate the constant betrayals and routine pitfalls that come with fame has been the basis for his more compelling work, like his breakthrough 2015 mixtape If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, his 2017 mixtape More Life, and the more melancholic parts of Scorpion. It’s unclear who, if anyone, will respond to “Push Ups” next. The track mostly aimed at Lamar, who has been quiet so far. Right now, Drake may be outnumbered, but as he often does, he’s still finding a way to take the W.