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The history of Arizona’s Civil War-era abortion ban

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A protester holds a sign reading “My body my choice” at a Women’s March rally where Arizona Secretary of State and then-Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs spoke outside the State Capitol on October 8, 2022, in Phoenix, Arizona. | Mario Tama/Getty Images How conspiring doctors, questionable tonics, and twisted patriotism led to the 1864 Arizona abortion ban that has finally been repealed. Arizona lawmakers voted Wednesday to repeal a Civil War-era state law that amounts to a near-total ban on abortion following an Arizona Supreme Court ruling last month that the law could be enforced. Democrats in the chamber — as well as both former President Donald Trump and Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, in an election-year shift toward a more moderate stance on abortion — had pushed the Arizona legislature to overturn the law. If it had gone into effect, it would have threatened access to reproductive care for about 1.6 million people of reproductive age. It’s one of several abortion laws enacted before the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that had been revived since the justices overturned Roe in 2022. Resuscitating these laws has created legal headaches, in part because they were written in a very different time for reasons that have little in common with the concerns of anti-abortion advocates today. Arizona’s ban, first passed in 1864 and codified again in 1901 and 1913, says anyone who “provides, supplies or administers” an abortion or abortion drugs will face a state prison sentence of two to five years unless the abortion is necessary to save the life of the person who is pregnant. Taken out of the 19th-century context in which it was passed, that language would seem to amount to a near-total ban on abortion. But that’s not how the law was originally enforced. Few people were prosecuted under the Arizona law or similar ones in other states. At the time, first-trimester abortions were widespread and widely accepted in the public conscience. Abortion laws of the mid-1800s were the product of discussions among lawyers and doctors and were designed to professionalize abortion services and medicine writ large — a seemingly noble cause, but also one driven by physicians’ self-interests and the desire to both boost (white) women’s birth rates and weaken a nascent feminist movement. There was no national abortion debate to speak of. Religion wasn’t yet a major factor in Americans’ views on abortion in the way it is today, and scientists had not yet developed methods to detect pregnancy during the first months of gestation. All of that meant abortion was a common, if not always safe, part of American life, despite what the old laws might suggest. “I think people imagine nobody did it because it was illegal. But we know that’s not true,” said Lauren MacIvor Thompson, a history professor at Kennesaw State University focusing on women’s rights and public health. Abortion was common and widely accepted in the 19th century For much of the first half of the 19th century, there were few laws in the US that were specifically concerned with abortion. Rather, abortion was understood in the tradition of British common law: It was only a crime after “quickening,” when a fetus’s movement could be detected — around four or five months of gestation. Before quickening, people could be ignorant (or have plausible deniability) about being pregnant. Generally, the American public at this time had few moral qualms about abortion before quickening. In particular, it was a service that many believed should be offered to unmarried women, who risked reputational ruin if they proceeded with the pregnancy and often came from poor backgrounds, as historian James Mohr writes in his 1978 book, Abortion in America. But around the mid-1800s, things started to shift. More people appeared to be seeking abortions, not just those who were unmarried. One estimate by physicians at the time that Mohr cites suggests that as many as one in five pregnancies ended in abortion. Partially because of this, birth rates fell dramatically: from 7.04 children per woman in 1800 to 3.56 by 1900, according to Mohr. Starting around the 1830s, abortion became a lucrative industry. It was still mostly unregulated but perceived as largely safe, especially when weighed against the risks of pregnancy. There is little available data on maternal mortality rates in the US at the time, but even by 1915, after the development of antisepsis, it was about 600 in every 100,000 births — higher than in some European countries at the time. In 2021, the US maternal mortality rate was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births. As Mohr writes, home medical manuals and midwifery texts advised readers on abortifacient substances (such as black hellebore) and practices that could bring about an abortion (such as bloodletting and “raising great weights”). Abortifacient tonics of varying effectiveness were prolifically advertised. Physicians, midwives, and even untrained practitioners offered procedures to clear “obstructed menses.” One abortion provider to the elites, known as “Madame Restell,” amassed a fortune estimated at up to $1 million. Increased access to abortion seen throughout the 19th century led to increased scrutiny, however, and that led to many of the laws and attitudes still with us today. The beginnings of the anti-abortion movement The anti-abortion movement began to take off in the 1850s for a few reasons. For one, anti-abortionists resented the fact that wealthy, white Protestant women were starting to drive demand for abortions, usually to limit their family size or delay having their first child. These women were seen as shirking their duties to “republican motherhood” — a concept that involved raising the next generation of productive citizens instilled with the values espoused by the young American republic and that excluded nonwhite women. They were maligned for indulging priorities outside of the home at a time when the women’s suffrage movement was taking shape. Some men were seen as complicit in this phenomenon, urging their wives to get abortions and paying for them. Anti-abortionists argued that laws specifically restricting abortion were necessary because otherwise, “nice white ladies who don’t want to be pregnant just won’t fulfill their obligation,” as MacIvor Thompson put it. Around this time, there were also a few highly publicized trials involving botched abortions, typically cases where the pregnant person died. This raised the profile of abortion as a safety issue for legislators. A broader movement to professionalize the American medical system also contributed to the first laws restricting abortion in the US. The Civil War laid bare the need for more competent medical professionals, and credentialed physicians known as “regulars” lobbied for laws on abortion for the stated reason of protecting people from quacks. But they also had selfish motivations to essentially establish a monopoly over the market for abortions and sideline their competition. Physicians — who, at that point, were nearly all white and male — had lost income and stature as a result of this competition with other medical practitioners, and performing abortions was a way to attract loyal long-term patients, Mohr writes. “What they’re trying to do is consolidate their professional dominance because they don’t want to be competing with midwives or competing with what they call ‘the irregulars,’” MacIvor Thompson said. This was despite the fact, she added, that the “outcomes that doctors got in terms of treating patients were really not that much better than people who didn’t have medical training.” Arizona’s abortion ban came amid a wave of early anti-abortion legislation The first standalone law to specifically prohibit abortion in the US was passed in Massachusetts in 1845. It made performing an abortion a misdemeanor for which an offender could serve five to seven years in jail and face up to a $2,000 fine — about $74,000 in 2024 dollars — or a felony in cases where the person having the procedure died. But as would be the case with others that came after it, the law was rarely enforced: No one was convicted under it between 1849 and 1857, according to Mohr. Generally, such early abortion laws mostly did not create penalties for the pregnant person who sought an abortion but only for those who performed them — and messed up. “Historians have argued that a lot of these initial laws were meant to protect women. They’re either next to poisoning laws, or they’re framed in a way where it’s like, this is to protect women from quacks,” said Shannon Withycombe, a history professor at the University of New Mexico who studies early abortion laws. Few religious leaders wanted to get involved in abortion politics. Some Catholic bishops espoused the position, as the church does now, that abortion is wrong because life begins at conception. But at the time, Catholicism was associated with European immigrants who weren’t “welcomed into white middle-class American society,” MacIvor Thompson said. However, Horatio Storer, a Harvard physician who converted to Catholicism in his 40s, set out to consolidate support for anti-abortion laws in the 1850s. He ultimately led the charge to criminalize those who sought abortions and to make the punishment more severe if the person was married. He even pushed physicians and legislators to abandon the earlier understanding of abortion as acceptable before quickening and to suppress it at any stage of pregnancy. Storer’s writings came to inform anti-abortion legislation across the country, though the physician lobby didn’t agree with everything he wrote. Many believed he had gone too far in framing abortion as a religious and moral issue, insisting that it was really a medical issue, Withycombe said. But physicians latched on to one particular point Storer made in his 1860 book On Criminal Abortion in America: that “doctors need to be able to practice abortion because there are lots of reasons why an abortion is important for the health and life of a woman,” Withycombe said. This supported physicians as the definitive source of medical expertise about when and how an abortion should be safely administered over other abortion practitioners. And Withycombe notes that in her readings of medical articles and obstetrical teaching texts of the time, she has found a broad array of circumstances in which physicians believed it was their medical duty to perform an abortion — including circumstances in which failing to do so wouldn’t necessarily result in a pregnant person’s death, such as “pernicious anemia,” “obstinate vomiting,” and “advancing jaundice.” Withycombe said the 1864 Arizona law was part of a wave of legislation, all with similar provisions informed by Storer’s writings, that swept the West in the 1860s while the Civil War was raging. Colorado passed a ban in 1861, Nevada in 1861, Idaho in 1864, and Montana in 1864. At the time, these states were trying to prove that they were part of modern America, emulating medical licensing laws and protections that had already been enacted in more cosmopolitan parts of the country. In that sense, the passage of these laws was more about professionalizing medicine than the moralistic arguments that later motivated the 1873 Comstock Act, a federal anti-obscenity law that also prohibited the mailing of “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” However, Storer’s moral philosophy on abortion did eventually gain traction, and it influenced the next wave of anti-abortion lawmaking in the decades thereafter. About 40 states banned abortion by 1880. Where the battle over the Arizona ban stands now Arizona isn’t alone in dealing with a pre-Roe anti-abortion law. Oklahoma is currently enforcing a 1910 abortion ban. Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general has asked the state Supreme Court to strike down that state’s 1849 ban. Delaware, New Mexico, and Michigan have repealed their pre-Roe bans only in the last few years. West Virginia’s 19th-century ban was blocked in court in 2022, but the state legislature moved quickly to codify a new abortion ban that allows few exceptions. As part of the Arizona Supreme Court ruling, the state was supposed to ensure the 19th-century law was “harmonized” with a ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy passed in March 2022. It’s not clear what that meant in practice. But now that the Arizona legislature has repealed the law, it’s a moot issue. If lawmakers had not intervened, though, its enforcement would have looked very different from the way the law was interpreted in the years immediately after its passage. As mentioned, enforcement was spotty in the 19th century, and unlike now, abortion providers continued to operate despite facing potential legal repercussions. Producers of abortifacients often circumvented bans by using euphemistic language to describe their products. Early abortion laws, including the Arizona ban, also empowered physicians to make decisions about abortion. “A lot of these laws were at least supported if not written by physicians,” Withycombe said. “Physicians agreed that they have complete discretion over whether an abortion is medically necessary.” However, doctors have often been sidelined in the enforcement of abortion bans post-Roe, with many choosing to leave states with restrictive laws because they feel they cannot perform lifesaving care. The medical and popular understanding of pregnancy and abortion has also evolved since 1864. We can now detect pregnancy much earlier than “quickening” using urine and blood tests. In the 1860s, early abortions were generally seen as morally equivalent to contraception, Mohr writes — a concept that the American right largely rejects today. “These laws are being upheld as proof that everyone was completely against abortion in all cases, from the moment of conception,” Withycombe said. “Given the understanding of human development at the time, that is not true in the 1860s.” Update, May 1, 5:15 pm ET: This story was originally published on April 14 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with news that the Arizona legislature has repealed the 1864 ban.

Marijuana could be classified as a lower-risk drug. Here’s what that means.

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Federal law requires all research in federally funded laboratories to use only marijuana from a single facility located in Oxford, Mississippi. | Brad Horrigan/Hartford Courant/Tribune News Service/Getty Images A potential policy change could have big benefits for marijuana businesses. The United States Department of Drug Enforcement and Administration (DEA) reportedly now plans to reclassify marijuana as a lower-risk drug, a change that could further destigmatize the substance’s use and have a major impact on how the cannabis industry operates. In the US, marijuana is currently classified as a Schedule I drug, in the same category as heroin, and treated as more dangerous than fentanyl and cocaine. Schedule I drugs are described by DEA as drugs with “no accepted medical use and and a high potential for abuse.” After a request from the Biden administration for the relevant agencies to review its status, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) suggested the DEA — which is in charge of scheduling drugs — alter its classification to Schedule III, a category that includes anabolic steroids and ketamine. This week, the DEA moved forward with that plan, which now awaits approval from the Office of Management and Budget. Once it receives that sign-off, the agency will field public comments about its decision to reschedule the drug before officially implementing this update. Practically, a move to reschedule marijuana could be a major boon to weed businesses, allowing them to access tax breaks that they currently aren’t able to use. Rescheduling marijuana does not legalize it federally, however. And while individuals could see reduced federal penalties for weed possession, having marijuana could still be criminalized at the federal level, meaning drug charges would remain a risk. Many criminal justice reform advocates and lawmakers have called for weed to be descheduled — much like alcohol — which would mean that it can be regulated, but that states would have more leeway for reforms. Rescheduling falls short of this, though it could still meaningfully dilute some of the stigma around the medical and recreational use of the drug, and may pave the way for other policy changes. Drug scheduling, briefly explained There are five categories that a drug can be “scheduled” as under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), with each demarcating its medical uses and potential for abuse. Schedule I is the harshest classification that’s available, while Schedule V is the least, signaling that a drug is less likely to be abused. Weed could be moved to Schedule III. Schedule III drugs are described by the DEA as drugs with “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence,” and believed to have some medical applications. Some drugs, like nicotine and alcohol, are descheduled, which means there’s limited federal oversight and that they’re not regulated as part of the CSA at all. Instead, descheduled drugs are subject to public health laws and state-level regulations. Many activists and advocates, as well as a group of Senate Democrats, have argued that cannabis should be descheduled rather than rescheduled in order to truly decriminalize it and remove harmful legal penalties altogether. “The case for removing marijuana from Schedule I is overwhelming. The DEA should do so by removing cannabis from the CSA altogether, rather than simply placing it in a lower schedule,” a dozen senators including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) previously wrote in a letter to the agency. [Related: The federal drug scheduling system, explained] What a change to weed’s federal classification could mean The changing of weed’s classification could portend key changes for weed businesses and for drug researchers. Because weed is currently a Schedule I drug, businesses that sell it are subject to a high tax rate and limited deductions, something that marijuana businesses often claim make for difficult margins. One marijuana CEO told Politico access to federal financial business incentives would create a “healthier cannabis industry.” A reclassification could also open up possibilities for scientific research on the medical benefits of weed and other questions, since Schedule III drugs aren’t subject to as onerous of an approval process for such studies. A rescheduling of marijuana could also mean that more medicinal products that contain it could be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. And that could lead to a more regulated medical marijuana industry for those who use the drug to treat conditions like Parkinson’s disease or lupus. Other Schedule III drugs like ketamine, for example, can be obtained via a prescription. For individuals, access to recreational marijuana could still vary depending on their specific state’s laws, as could access to medicinal marijuana, depending on if the FDA chooses to approve more specific treatments. Recreational use at the federal level would also still be illegal. Legislation to legalize marijuana federally has had some bipartisan support in Congress from the likes of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH), but it still hasn’t picked up sufficient backing to pass both chambers. That’s despite a majority of Americans supporting marijuana legalization and growing momentum to pass such laws at the state level: 23 states have legalized the use of recreational marijuana and 38 states have approved access to medical marijuana. All that means, however, that there could still be risk of arrest and federal charges for marijuana. There is a chance that rescheduling could “reduce or potentially eliminate criminal penalties for possession,” according to the Associated Press. Activists, however, warn that it’s not yet clear just how much such penalties would change. “Rescheduling cannabis from 1 to 3 does not end criminalization, it just rebrands it. People will still be subject to criminal penalties for mere possession, regardless of their legal status in a state-level medical program,” cannabis advocate Justin Strekal told Politico. One thing rescheduling would have is significant symbolic heft. It would alter the way that weed is formally being treated at the federal level, and would do more to normalize its use. Theoretically, that could act as an early step to more transformative federal policy that could one day legalize marijuana more broadly and provide more consistent regulations on the subject. Update, May 1, 5:10 pm ET: This piece was originally published on August 31, 2023, and has been updated with the DEA’s recent decision.

Take a mental break with the newest Vox crossword

New Vox Crossword puzzles come out Monday through Saturday | Amanda Northrop For the curious in all of us. Can you solve it? Welcome to the Vox crossword. Puzzles come out Monday through Saturday. Make sure to bookmark this page (or add to your phone’s home screen) to find new ones each day. You can also get a weekly email reminder by signing up f

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Vox Welcomes Naureen Khan as Senior Editor, Culture and Features

Courtesy of Naureen Khan Khan joins from Cosmopolitan, will shape and edit culture features Today, Vox announced that Naureen Khan has joined the team as senior editor for culture and features. In addition to shaping the outlet’s culture coverage, Khan will lead its service journalism-focused vertical, Even Better, which is focused on helping peop

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Philosophers are studying Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?”

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If the Ancient Greek philosophers had had access to the internet, perhaps they would have created something like Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” | Getty Images In which philosophy tries to understand how normal people think about morality. Philosophers, bless them, are trying to understand how normal people think about morality. Normal people, as you may have heard, hang out on the internet. And what is the internet’s biggest trove of everyday moral dilemmas? Why, it’s Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” forum! So, why not comb through millions of comments there to find out how people make moral decisions? This might sound like a joke, but it’s actually been the past four years of Daniel Yudkin’s life. As he was doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, Yudkin thought about how moral psychology and moral philosophy — his fields of research — mostly focus on hypothetical, contextless scenarios involving strangers. For example, the famous “trolley problem” asks if you should actively choose to divert a runaway trolley so that it kills one person if, by doing so, you can save five people along a different track from getting killed. That’s a pretty weird way to study moral decision-making. In real life, the trade-offs we face often involve people we actually know, but the trolley problem imagines a world where you have no special relationship to anybody. It doesn’t ask whether you should make a different decision if one of the people tied to the tracks is, say, your mother. Yudkin, now a visiting scholar at Penn, hypothesized that this style of investigating morality overlooks an important aspect of real life: the relational context. And Yudkin worried about that omission. Philosophy doesn’t only matter for the ivory tower — it can shape how we set up our societies. “If we’re living in a society that omits the importance of relational obligations,” he told me, “there’s a risk that we see ourselves as atomic individuals and we aren’t focused enough on what we owe each other.” So, together with a group of co-authors on a recent preprint paper, he set about studying the popular subreddit where people describe how they acted in a moral conflict — whether with a spouse, a roommate, a boss, or someone else — and then ask that all-important question: Am I the asshole? What studying morality on Reddit reveals Yudkin and his co-authors scraped roughly 369,000 posts and 11 million comments written between 2018 and 2021 on “Am I the Asshole?” (AITA for short). Then they used AI to sort the dilemmas into several categories. Those include procedural fairness (like “AITA for skipping the line?”), honesty ( “AITA for saying I don’t speak English in awkward situations?”), and relational obligations ( “AITA for expecting my girlfriend to lint roll my jacket?”). The researchers found that the most common dilemmas had to do with relational obligations: dilemmas about what we owe to others. Courtesy of Daniel Yudkin With the help of AI, Yudkin and his co-authors categorized posts on Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” according to their moral themes. Next, they wanted to find out whether certain types of dilemmas were more likely to pop up in certain types of relationships. Will some dilemmas arise more often with your sister, say, than with your manager? So the researchers examined how often each dilemma popped up in 38 different relationships. Surprise, surprise: The likelihood of encountering different dilemmas, they found, does depend on whom you’re dealing with. If you’re hanging out with your sister, you’re more likely to be worrying about relational obligations, while interactions with your manager are more likely to get you thinking about procedural fairness. The truth is, you don’t need a fancy study to tell you this.If you’ve ever had a sister or a manager — or if you’ve ever had the experience of being, you know, a human — you probably already know this in your bones. It’s probably obvious to most of us that relational context is super important when it comes to judging the morality of actions. It’s common to think we have different moral obligations to different categories of people — to your sister versus to your manager versus to a total stranger. So what does it say about modern philosophy that it’s largely ignored relational context? Uncovering philosophy’s blind spots Let’s get a bit more precise: It’s not as though allof philosophy has ignored relational context. But one branch — utilitarianism — is strongly inclined in this direction. Utilitarians believe we should seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people — and we have to consider everybody’s happiness equally. So we’re not supposed to be partial to our own friends or family members. This ethical approach took off in the 18th century. Today, it’s extremely influential in Western philosophy — and not just in the halls of academia. Famous philosophers like Peter Singer have popularized it in the public sphere, too. Increasingly, though, some are challenging it. “Moral philosophy has for so long been about trying to identify universal moral principles that apply to all people regardless of their identity,” Yudkin told me. “And it’s because of this effort that moral philosophers have really moved away from the relational perspective. But the more that I think about the data, the more clear to me it is that you’re losing something essential from the moral equation when you abstract away from relationships.” Moral psychologists like Princeton’s Molly Crockett and Yale’s Margaret Clark have likewise been investigating the idea that moral obligations are relationship-specific. “Here’s a classic example,” Crockett told me a few years ago. “Consider a woman, Wendy, who could easily provide a meal to a young child but fails to do so. Has Wendy done anything wrong? It depends on who the child is. If she’s failing to provide a meal to her own child, then absolutely she’s done something wrong! But if Wendy is a restaurant owner and the child is not otherwise starving, then they don’t have a relationship that creates special obligations prompting her to feed the child.” According to Crockett, being a moral agent has become trickier for us with the rise of globalization, which forces us to think about how our actions might affect people we’re never going to meet.“Being a good global citizen now butts up against our very powerful psychological tendencies to prioritize our families and friends,” Crockett told me. Utilitarians would say that we should overcome those powerful psychological tendencies, but many others would beg to differ. Philosopher Patricia Churchland once told me that utilitarianism is unrealistic because “there’s no special consideration for your own children, family, friends. Biologically, that’s just ridiculous. People can’t live that way.” But just because our brains may incline us to care for some more than others doesn’t necessarily mean we ought to bow to that, does it? “No, it doesn’t,” Churchland said, “but you would have a hard time arguing for the morality of abandoning your own two children in order to save 20 orphans. Even [Immanuel] Kant thought that ‘ought’ implies ‘can,’ and I can’t abandon my children for the sake of orphans on the other side of the planet whom I don’t know, just because there’s 20 of them and only two of mine. It’s not psychologically feasible.” If you ask me, that’s fair enough. While I’d respect the decision of those who choose to save the 20 orphans, I certainly wouldn’t fault someone for acting in line with an impulse that is hardwired into them. So ... am I the asshole?

High interest rates probably aren’t going away anytime soon

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Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, on April 16, 2024. | Samuel Corum/Bloomberg via Getty Images The Federal Reserve will give an announcement on interest rates during its May meeting Wednesday. Even borrowing money is more expensive these days — and the Federal Reserve might decide to keep it that way for a while. All eyes are on the Fed’s May meeting today, where Fed chair Jerome Powell will make an announcement about interest rates. Though analysts do not expect the Fed to cut rates just yet, some had projected a cut might be coming soon. That now appears increasingly unlikely. Instead, his remarks are expected to shed light on how much longer the US economy will have to endure high interest rates, which are squeezing everyone from prospective home buyers to people who have racked up credit card debt. High interest rates have helped cool a too-hot economy, significantly bringing down inflation to 3.5 percent from its 9.1 percent peak in June 2022. But it’s still well above the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent, and inflation has increased slightly in the last few months, which means we might not see a rate cut anytime soon. “The ‘last mile’ ... to the Fed’s target range was expected to be more difficult than what came before it,” said Matt Colyar, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Even with that expectation, however, inflation data in the first three months of 2024 has been surprisingly high.” Why inflation has remained high A few factors are driving stubborn inflation. Housing costs have been the biggest contributor by far. Inflation in rent and homeowners’ cost of living in their own homes has moderated somewhat but by less than expected, Colyar said. Auto insurance and repair costs have also risen sharply even though car prices have fallen. And health care costs have also picked up. Nicole Narea/Vox But this isn’t necessarily a “strong indication that inflation will remain similarly high for the rest of 2024,” Preston Caldwell, chief US economist at Morningstar, said in a note to investors Friday. The US economy has so far staved off a recession, growing at a slower but still solid pace in the first quarter of 2024 in part because Americans are continuing to spend a lot. The job market also remains strong, with the US blowing past projections to add 303,000 jobs in March. That hasn’t given the Fed much urgency to cut rates anytime soon. “It’s not an economy in obvious need of the pick-me-up that a rate cut would deliver,” Colyar said. Strong consumer spending, though, isn’t expected to last as Americans deplete any savings they accrued in the pandemic and rack up more household debt. That will likely cause US economic growth to slow in the coming year, which “should be sufficient to cool off remaining excess inflation,” Caldwell told Vox. When will the Fed cut interest rates? After the Fed’s December meeting, financial analysts were expecting six interest rate cuts in 2024, beginning in June. But given that inflation has remained high and the economy is still going strong, that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon. Caldwell said he’s now expecting three cuts this year starting in September. Other top economists at UBS, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America have also pushed back their projections for a rate cut. For example, Bank of America is projecting only a single rate cut in December. Some Fed officials also have not ruled out the possibility of another rate hike, which would be the first since last July. Fed Governor Michelle Bowman recently said she would support a rate hike “should progress on inflation stall or even reverse.” But Caldwell said that still seems a far-off possibility. “The mere fact that they’re delaying rate cuts already has a contractionary effect on the economy,” he said. Colyar said he will be watching Powell’s remarks to discern “how spooked they have been by the hotter-than-expected inflation data in the first quarter” and to what extent he attributes the stickiness of inflation to a few industries, rather than an indication of current overall cost pressures. What continued higher interest rates might mean for the economy Recent economic data has already dampened earlier enthusiasm in the stock market about an imminent interest rate cut. Powell’s remarks might have a similar depressive effect, depending on how pessimistic he is about the Fed winning its battle against inflation in the near term. “The first effect is psychological,” Colyar said. “Persistently high borrowing costs are painful and will eventually break something.” It’s already slowing down the real estate market significantly. Mortgage rates have surpassed 7 percent, and that’s keeping prospective home buyers and sellers on the bench. People who secured lower interest rates just a few years ago don’t want to sell and would have to secure a higher-rate mortgage for their new lodging, so there are fewer homes on the market, keeping prices higher than many buyers can afford. Americans’ total credit card debt also hit a record $1.13 trillion earlier this year, and repaying that in a high interest rate environment is bound to hurt their wallets. At the same time, the US economy has proved resilient even in a high interest rate environment. The Fed doesn’t need to step in just yet given steady job growth and economic growth, as well as strong consumer spending. “However, I would argue that the time to start loosening policy is before things are flashing red,” Colyar said. “Waiting too long because shelter prices are slow in moderating I think is an unnecessary risk.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Want to know how to reduce gun crime? Look at Detroit.

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People walk through downtown Detroit, Michigan, on April 3, 2024. The city has experienced a historic turnaround on crime that is both part of a national trend and the result of a transformation in the city’s policing. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images Last year, Detroit saw its fewest homicides since 1966. Here’s how it did it — and how other cities can do the same. In 2021, Detroit was in trouble. The city, which already had one of the highest murder rates in the country, was experiencing a surge in gun violence coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic. In the first five months of the year, homicides were up 27 percent, and nonfatal shootings were up 44 percent. James White, who was Detroit’s assistant police chief from 2012 to 2020, had only been retired from the department for a year when he got the call to return, this time as chief of police, in June 2021. When he came back, he said, “policing had completely changed.” “It was on the heels of the George Floyd murder, it was the pandemic — all those things kind of intersected,” White told Vox. It wasn’t just Detroit: Homicide spiked 30 percent across the US in 2020, the largest single-year increase since the FBI began tracking it. “We found ourselves [facing] a really big question, and rightly so, about the validity of policing and the model of policing that was happening around the country.” Three years into his time as chief, White and others in the community have much to celebrate. At the end of 2023, the city reported the fewest homicides since 1966, a decline of 18 percent over the previous year. Nonfatal shootings fell nearly 16 percent, and carjackings dropped by a third. By the end of 2023, the city’s homicide rate had returned to pre-pandemic levels. Detroit is on the leading edge of a national trend. Across US cities last year, homicides fell more than 12 percent, the largest single-year decline in violent crime since the FBI began keeping track. In Buffalo, they fell 46 percent from a year earlier — the fewest homicides since 2011. In Philadelphia, they dropped 21 percent. New York and Los Angeles also saw double-digit declines, according to preliminary data. What explains the precipitous rise — and sharp fall — in violent crime? Experts caution that several complex, intersecting factors drive crime trends, and no single explanation can easily answer the question. The best working theory is that multiple overlapping social crises — including pandemic-related disruptions that kept more people stuck at home and out of work, and the unrest across major cities after the murder of George Floyd — contributed to a breakdown of trust between the public and police, and created conditions ripe for violence in a country awash in too many guns. The decrease, meanwhile, may have much to do with society reopening and stabilizing, but it also probably has something to do with changes to the way some police, prosecutors, and civic leaders — in Detroit and elsewhere — have been operating after the major challenges of 2020. For Detroit, what worked was a coordinated effort across multiple agencies and community organizations that was targeted at reducing and preventing gun crime and mobilizing the judicial system after a pandemic-era shutdown seriously hampered the courts. That’s not to say Detroit, like other cities in the US, doesn’t face severe challenges when it comes to reducing violent crime. Though the city saw the fewest killings since 1966, it also had a much larger population back then, meaning 2023’s per capita homicide rate of around 41 people per 100,000 is much higher than the 1966 homicide rate of 15 people per 100,000. Still, White says, elected officials and community leaders in Detroit are encouraged by the fact that homicide fell back to the pre-pandemic baselines. “We’re not satisfied,” White says, but there’s satisfaction in “knowing our plans are working.” Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images US President Joe Biden shakes hands with Detroit Police Chief James White in February in Washington. Biden met with White to tout Detroit’s efforts to reduce crime, including using federal funds to transform policing and community interventions. It’s not just the chief of police saying that, either. “I think our people are hardwired to be skeptical of any news that comes from top to bottom, like, is this a political ploy? Is it real?” says Alia Harvey-Quinn, the founder of FORCE Detroit, a community violence intervention program that is active in northwest Detroit and is part of the effort to reduce gun violence. “We’re hearing people actually feel safer as of late, and that’s exciting.” Violent crime is continuing to fall across the US this year, but it’s still a major voter concern, driving politicians to pass laws aimed at reducing it further. Here’s how Detroit is reducing crime, and what other cities can learn from their success. Detroit changed the way police respond to some calls In 2020, in response to the murder of George Floyd, the city came up with plans for a Crisis Intervention Team, a partnership between mental and behavioral health specialists and police. The Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network (DWIHN) staffs 911 call centers with mental health professionals and offers week-long training programs for police officers to learn about trauma-informed policing. The network also partners with police on a centralized mental health unit co-response team, where officers are paired with behavioral health specialists who can respond to people experiencing mental health crises. DWIHN’s Andrea Smith, who has answered 911 calls and worked with the crisis response team on in-person calls, says the goal is always “to bring a situation down instead of contributing to an escalation of the crisis,” and to help officers find other ways of responding to certain calls. The approach, modeled on methods first implemented by a team in Memphis, Tennessee, “contributes to a lower number of incidents of use of force,” says Smith. “It’s allowed us to have more of a focus on, ‘OK, this person might not have a behavior problem. It might be a behavioral health problem.’ … When you have the community that knows that the police are looking at alternatives to just pulling out their gun, that enhances or improves the relationship between the police and citizens.” For White, who in addition to being police chief is also a licensed mental health counselor, paying attention to the mental health needs of community members makes sense, but it was far from the only strategy. The city also unveiled a 12-point “summer surge” plan that increased police presence, curfew enforcement, and strategic traffic restrictions to secure downtown Detroit following the murder of a security guard last year. Police also cracked down on drag racing and stepped up their presence at community events where they had reason to believe there might be a risk of gun violence. The city council also approved a contract that gave officers a roughly $10,000 raise at the end of 2022 to help offset the recruiting problem other police departments are also facing across the country. White was careful to point out, though, that the work is far from over: “The challenge is to continue to drive down violent crime while providing policing excellence to our community and treating everyone fairly,” he says. Prosecutors made community outreach a key priority Courts across the country shut down because of Covid-19, delaying trials and preventing felony charges from moving through the adjudication process. To get the system moving again and to reduce the backlog of felony gun cases, district and circuit courts moved to get more hearings on the calendar. The US attorney for Eastern Michigan, Dawn Ison, also partnered with federal agencies to prosecute gun crimes and take illegal weapons off the street. Ison also led violence prevention and reentry efforts for formerly incarcerated people. “The studies show enforcement alone has never been effective at moving the needle to reduce violent crime. We have to be transparent and bring legitimacy. We can’t do this work without the community,” Ison says. When developing One Detroit, her office’s program to reduce violence in the two city precincts with the highest rates of gun crime, Ison drew upon several evidence-based strategies outlined in the bookBleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence—and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets by Thomas Abt, founding director of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland. This included reaching out last summer to 200 individuals who, based on their previous interaction with the state’s legal system, were believed to be at highest risk of becoming a victim of, or perpetrating, gun violence. They were invited to a roundtable to hear from people who’d been incarcerated in an effort to deter them from violence. Ison’s office also focused on engagement with the city’s residents. In the summer, she goes into the precincts with high rates of gun crime and hands out fliers letting the public know that her office is looking to prosecute the small number of people driving most of the gun violence in the city. The office also puts on what they call “peacenics,” or summer block parties with DJs, bounce castles, and vendors from the city and local government who help people with basic services, like getting a driver’s license or having their record expunged for low-level offenses. “My vision is for it to be our non-enforcement engagement with the community,” Ison says. “We have to be talking to them, and not only there when we’re kicking in their doors or arresting somebody.” By the end of 2023, the city reported that homicides were down 17 percent in the precincts targeted by One Detroit, and carjackings were down 63 percent. Kirby Lee/Getty Images The Detroit skyline. Ison isn’t the only prosecutor focusing on violent crime reduction. At the direction of the Office of the Attorney General, each US attorney was asked to come up with their own district-specific violence reduction plan in response to the pandemic-related spike. But Thomas Abt says that the energy Ison brings to the effort is unusual. “The US attorney and Chief White are demonstrating an exciting new form of collaborative leadership,” Abt says. “They’re people who can celebrate the successes of others. I think that’s really positive and constructive.” Detroit invested in community violence interruption Detroit received $826 million through the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021, and in 2023, the city allocated a small slice of the money to a handful of community-based programs working to reduce gun violence in the neighborhoods that suffered from it the most. One of those programs is FORCE Detroit, which works on the west side of Detroit in a neighborhood that saw a significant reduction in gun violence last year. “Our goal is to create peace, so we’re dealing with people on multiple sides of conflict,” says Harvey-Quinn, the group’s founder. “They understand that our space is a neutral zone.” Since FORCE has begun its work, she says, the group has had at least 87 instances of intervention or deescalation. Those incidents range from getting someone to take down a threat made on social media before it escalates into violence to convening rival gang members and saying, “Let’s sit everyone down, and as long as people don’t want to go to prison, or die, there has to be a solution.” Mostly, it’s about connecting young people with credible messengers who have served time and lost friends to gun violence and are now trained by her organization in deescalation and crisis mitigation strategies. FORCE Detroit was touted by city leaders when the neighborhood they serve saw no homicides between November 2023 and January 2024. “We’re working with the people who shoot guns, and we’re encouraging them not to,” Harvey-Quinn says. “Statistically, less than 2 percent of our community is ever going to shoot a gun.” By designing programs focused on meeting that 2 percent in their own neighborhoods, she says, “you have a real opportunity to deeply impact them. It really matters whether or not they get the good, wraparound services. It really matters that they have mentors that care.” With polls showing that voters think of crime as a major concern this election year, political leaders are looking to show that they’re serious about reducing it. If they’re interested in what reduces crime, they should look at what worked in Detroit. It wasn’t the “tough on crime” approach that so many leaders are now pursuing as a too-late reaction to the crime surge of 2020 and 2021. Detroit succeeded by thinking creatively, working cooperatively, and asking the city’s residents to partner with them in the effort. City leaders demonstrated that they were willing to offer resources to help, even as they acknowledge there’s so much more work to be done. It’s a strategy designed for long-term improvement, not election-year grandstanding.

How La Niña will shape heat and hurricanes this year

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vox.com

Heat waves have begun to take hold in Asia as El Nino begins to wane. | Kazi Salahuddin Razu/NurPhoto via Getty Images Climate change and the outgoing El Niño will likely ignite more weather extremes. The Pacific Ocean — Earth’s largest body of water — is an engine for weather around the planet, and it’s about to shift gears this year. The warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, known as El Niño, is now winding down and is poised to move into its counterphase, La Niña. During an El Niño year, warm water starts to spread eastward across the surface of the equatorial Pacific. That warm water evaporates readily, adding moisture to the atmosphere and triggering a cascade that alters rainfall, heat waves, and drought patterns across the world. The current El Niño is among the strongest humans have ever experienced. It fueled wildfires, droughts, and floods in South America. It bent the jet stream, trapping heat over the southern United States last summer, and ended the year with the warmest winter on record for much of the country. It fueled both heavy rain and extreme dry conditions in southern Africa, killing crops and putting millions at risk of hunger. It heated the world’s oceans to the highest levels ever measured. It raised global temperatures to their tallest peaks scientists have ever recorded. “The last year has been an amazing year in terms of records set around the world for extreme heat,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The periodic swings between El Niño and La Niña, collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), is a natural phenomenon cycling every three to seven years. Over the past year, the El Niño also synced with other natural patterns like the warm phase of the Atlantic Ocean’s temperature cycle, driving thermometers up further. But humanity’s relentless injection of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere is pushing these changes to greater extremes. Forecasters now expect that warm water across the Pacific to begin retreating westward, heralding a shift to La Niña. McPhaden said one of the most common definitions of La Niña is when surface water temperatures over a large area of the Pacific drop by at least 0.5 degrees Celsius below the historical average for three months or more. El Niño is typically defined when the same region is a half-degree Celsius hotter. NOAA projects an 85 percent chance that the ENSO cycle will shift to its neutral phase between April and June 2024, and then a 60 percent chance a La Niña will develop between June and August 2024. Historically, strong El Niños are followed by short neutral phases, about three to five months, before switching to La Niña. “The handwriting is on the wall with regard to this La Niña,” McPhaden said. “The question is exactly when will it come and how strong will it be?” It also takes several months between when ENSO changes and when it starts to influence weather. So the warming impact of the outgoing El Niño is likely to persist and could raise global temperatures this year even higher than they were last year if the rising La Niña is weak or moderate. Heat waves are currently baking Southeast Asia, triggering school closures and health warnings. When La Niña does set in, it will slow and reverse some of the intense weather patterns the world experienced over the past year. But it will also set the stage for more hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. To make this all even more complicated, this is all occurring in a world that’s warmed to the highest levels humans have ever experienced, so it’s not clear yet how far some of these extremes will go. How La Niña will likely play out in different parts of the world Though they are on opposite sides of a cycle, the effects of El Niño and La Niña are not quite mirror images of each other. “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” said Pamela Knox, an agricultural climatologist at the University of Georgia Extension. The specific types of weather impacts also vary by region, but looming shifts in the cycle can help forecasters calculate what kinds of heat, rain, and drought conditions are in store in the coming months. For instance, ENSO makes it easier to predict climate variability in the southeastern US, particularly in cooler months. “We have a pretty strong signal here compared to the central plains,” Knox said. During a La Niña, the cooler waters in the equatorial Pacific soak up heat energy from the atmosphere while air currents deflect the jet stream — a narrow, high-altitude band of fast-moving air — pushing it northward. NOAA La Niña tends to push the jet stream northward, leading to cooler weather to its north and drier conditions to the south. That air current then tends to box in cold weather to its north in places like Canada and Alaska while trapping moisture in regions like the Pacific Northwest. States like Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina tend to be warmer and drier during La Niña winters, while the Midwest tends to be cloudier, cooler, and wetter. (NOAA has published maps of the globe showing how these patterns typically play out around the world). Mickey Glantz, director of the Consortium for Capacity Building at the University of Colorado Boulder, who studies the impacts of ENSO, noted that La Niña doesn’t just shift weather — it can also intensify existing rain and heat patterns in some regions. “La Niña, to me, is ‘extreme normal,’” Glantz said. “You have a wet season, it’s going to be really wet. If you have a dry season, the probability is it’s going to be really dry.” La Niña may bring about a more severe hurricane season One of the biggest consequences of a shift to La Niña is the higher likelihood of major hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricanes are built from several ingredients, but two parameters are especially important when it comes to ENSO: water temperature and air stability. The ocean needs to be around 80 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter to form a hurricane, and the air above it needs to hold steady. El Niño years tend to heat up the Atlantic Ocean, but they also induce wind shear, where air rapidly changes speed and direction in the atmosphere, disrupting tropical storms before they can form. Still, the Atlantic was so abnormally hot last year that it fueled an above-average hurricane season. The Atlantic Ocean is still startlingly hot, but now the looming La Niña is likely to stabilize the air above the sea — creating a foundation for more hurricanes. The Weather Company and Atmospheric G2 projected that the 2024 hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30, would see 24 named storms compared to an average of 14. They projected six hurricanes will reach above Category 3 strength, compared to just three in a typical year. Researchers at Colorado State University expect 23 named storms. University of Pennsylvania scientists anticipate 33 named storms in the Atlantic this year, the highest count ever projected. Why ENSO cycles are becoming harder to predict The added difficulty in predicting how La Niña will play out is that people have heated up the planet. A “cool” La Niña year is now hotter than an El Niño year from 20 years ago. “It’s not the same climate regime that we forecasted the earlier [ENSO cycles] so it’s getting a bit harder to forecast,” Glantz said. How will future climate change in turn affect ENSO? NOAA illustrated the answer with a helpful albeit highly technical schematic (bear with me): Anna Eshelman/NOAA Climate change is likely to amplify the swings in the ENSO cycle. The swings between the cool and warm phases of the ENSO are likely to get stronger if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current pace. So many of the most densely populated parts of the world, like the Andean region in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, are going to experience a more aggressive whiplash between wet and dry years, between calm and stormy summers, and between warmer and cooler winters. For scientists, the rest of 2024 is going to be an important case study in the impacts of climate change and natural variability, sorting out where they diverge, where they intersect, and where they lead to more disasters. The world will be a real-world laboratory, showcasing severe weather that could become more typical as average temperatures continue to rise. “It’s going to be a very interesting year,” McPhaden said. “We’ll have to wait and see and be ready for more extremes.”

The Kristi Noem puppy-killing scandal, explained

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vox.com

Gov. Kristi Noem recently wrote about killing a puppy. It’s not going over well. | Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images Noem wanted to look decisive. That’s not what happened. In the past, politicians have bragged about raising puppies as a way to seem more approachable. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, meanwhile, recently wrote about killing one. Noem, one of the top contenders to be former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, recalled the shooting in a new book, No Going Back. In it, she says she killed Cricket, her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, because the dog had behavioral issues and wasn’t taking to the training provided. The anecdote is included as an attempt at touting Noem’s decision-making skills, and to highlight how the governor can make “difficult, messy and ugly” choices when needed. Instead of conveying that idea, however, Noem’s revelation has prompted a wave of backlash, angering animal rights experts and pretty much anyone who likes dogs — which is a lot of the US voting public. More than 60 million US households have at least one dog, according to the American Veterinary Medicine Association, and a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center found that 97 percent of pet owners see their companions as part of the family. Americans’ affinity for pets — and attachment to dogs, especially — helps explain the visceral reaction Noem has faced over the news. The seriousness with which Americans approach canine welfare has helped and hurt politicians in the past. The uproar over Noem’s decision has political insiders suggesting that it could be enough to sink her chances for VP and that it will harm her political image overall. “Trump isn’t a dog person necessarily, but I think he understands that you can’t choose a puppy killer as your pick, for blatantly obvious reasons,” an unnamed Trump ally told the New York Post. The puppy-killing incident, explained Noem is a second-term governor of South Dakota who is known for her embrace of gun rights, for keeping the state open during the Covid-19 pandemic, and for adhering to broadly MAGA policy positions. In No Going Back, which is set to hit shelves in May, Noem describes Cricket as extremely energetic and not receptive to any training she was using to help Cricket become a pheasant hunting dog. Beyond that, Noem says she was concerned Cricket was potentially dangerous and that she had an “aggressive personality.” Noem cites an incident when Cricket jumped from her truck and attacked a neighbor’s chickens, killing several, as a breaking point. During that incident, Cricket also attempted to bite her, according to Noem. Following that attack, Noem argues that she had to make the difficult choice, and ultimately led Cricket to a gravel pit and put the dog down. “It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done,” Noem writes. Additionally, she also mentions killing a goat that was causing trouble and harassing her children. Noem’s recounting of the incident has been met with severe backlash, with some wirehaired pointer experts arguing that Noem should have invested in more training rather than killing the dog. They noted, too, that the breed is inherently high-energy and that Cricket was likely too young to serve effectively as a hunting dog. PETA, the animal rights group, similarly lambasted Noem’s choices and said she should have either trained the dog further or rehomed Cricket rather than shooting her. Broadly, dog lovers have expressed their horror at Noem’s decisions, with the incident also prompting a wave of reactions from Democrats and some Republicans. “Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz wrote on X. “She can’t be VP now,” right-wing commentator Laura Loomer wrote in a post. “You can’t shoot your dog and then be VP.” Noem has stood by her decision. “As I explained in the book, it wasn’t easy. But often the easy way isn’t the right way,” she wrote in a statement on X. I can understand why some people are upset about a 20 year old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book — No Going Back. The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons…— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) April 28, 2024 Amid the blowback to Noem’s admission, MSNBC Morning Joe hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough theorized Noem’s attempt to focus on the puppy killing was a bid to look strong and try to win support from the GOP’s hard-line conservative base. Meanwhile, South Dakota Senate Democratic Majority Leader Reynold Nesiba speculated that she was trying to spin a negative story into a positive one. According to Nesiba, there have long been rumors that Noem killed this dog in a “fit of anger,” and this anecdote was a chance to frame these actions in a more positive light. “She knew that this was a political vulnerability, and she needed to put it out there, before it came up in some other venue,” he told the Associated Press. “Why else would she write about it? Pets have long played a role in politics The Noem fracas is only the most recent to showcase how pets and the treatment of them have political heft. Sen. Mitt Romney, for instance, got significant flack for forcing a dog to ride in a carrier on top of his car during a 12-hour family road trip in the 1980s. As part of his presidential run in 2012, critics frequently cited that incident to attack Romney’s character and judgment over alleged neglect of the dog and a lack of humane treatment of his family pet. President Joe Biden has also made headlines for challenges his German Shepherd, Commander, has faced when it came to biting Secret Service and the eventual removal of the dog from the White House. His critics were quick to suggest the incidents were evidence of Biden’s lack of administrative skill. On Fox News’ The Five, for instance, host Greg Gutfeld asked viewers, “If a president can’t control his dogs that attack brave Americans, how can he govern a country that’s being invaded on both borders?” For decades, pets have played a role in politicians’ attempts to soften their images and seem more accessible. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was known for bringing her golden retriever, Bailey, to campaign events for her presidential run, while Sen. Raphael Warnock was often accompanied by a beagle named Alvin (who was not actually his dog), when he was vying for the Georgia Senate seat. The Clintons had Socks the cat and Buddy the Labrador, the Obamas had Bo and Sunny the Portuguese water dogs, and the Bushes had Barney and Miss Beazley the Scottish terriers. Overall, people’s ownership of pets and their treatment of them are often seen as a stand-in for character, telling voters how they would behave in leadership roles. “How we treat animals is a direct reflection of our character, both as individuals and a nation,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) previously said in a statement about animal cruelty legislation. Noem’s new image problem, ultimately, stems from what her actions appear to say about her.

Could bird flu cause a human pandemic?

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vox.com

A dairy farm worker prepares cows for milking in Ontario, Canada, in July 2022. | Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Here’s what’s worrying experts right now about H5N1’s spread among dairy cows — and what isn’t. Last year, when an H5N1 avian flu virus — commonly known as bird flu — was spilling over from bird populations into a variety of wild mammals, Seema Lakdawala, a virologist and influenza A transmission specialist at Emory University, was “not overly concerned” about human risk. We don’t have “much of an interface with seals or with foxes, for that matter, or polar bears,” she says. But when it comes to cows, that interface is vast. People on dairy farms regularly interact with cows and their milk; when the animals and their milk are infected with a virus that can cause disease in humans, and that mutates constantly, each of those interactions functions as an opportunity for the virus to workshop its adaptability. Now, says Lakdawala, “I am more concerned than I have been, and it’s not for the general public — it is for dairy workers.” The H5N1 outbreak among cows on 34 dairy farms in nine states has so far led to only one very mild human infection. However, the virus was likely spreading among cows for months before it was detected. Lakdawala’s greatest concern is that this highly changeable virus has now arrived at an important point of human-animal convergence, and that we are not prepared. For a virus to cause a human pandemic, it has to have three important characteristics, say flu experts. It has to cause human disease; it has to be something our immune systems haven’t encountered before; and it must spread easily among humans, especially through the air. The latest events do not yet demonstrate that H5N1 has new capacities in any of these categories. However, they hint that the virus has the machinery to evolve those capacities — and that it could do so before we know it. In dairy cows, H5N1 has found an excellent laboratory for evolving traits dangerous to humans Although Lakdawala was concerned when mink, seals, and other mammals were infected with H5N1 last year and the year before, cows are different. An outbreak among “mammals with a large interface with humans” is a red flag to her. It’s a numbers game. Although all viruses mutate routinely, flu viruses are particularly good at shapeshifting and can even swap entire chunks of genetic material with other flu viruses if an animal is co-infected with more than one of them. These mutations happen randomly, and most don’t make the viruses more dangerous to humans — but it’s entirely realistic to imagine that some occasionally do. If that occasionally human-threatening mutation happens to a flu virus that has infected, say, a wild fox, it doesn’t pose a particularly high risk of causing a pandemic among humans. After all, few wild foxes have contact with humans. If it happens in a cow, however, there are far more opportunities for the virus to effectively workshop its new features. People who work on dairy farms are constantly interacting with cows and their milk — they check udders, hook and unhook milking machines, and perform other tasks to care for the animals. That puts them in lots of contact with any virus infecting the cows. If the virus were one that didn’t infect and kill people or that doesn’t mutate and adapt as easily as the flu does, perhaps it wouldn’t be as concerning — but H5N1 does infect people at close proximity to animals, and at least half of the more than 900 people who’ve been infected with the virus since it came on the scene in 1996 have died. “There is a high viral load in milk of these infected cows, and so it is a concern to me in terms of spillover [from] cows into workers,” says Lakdawala. “And the more often the virus has an attempt to spill over, the more likely it is to adapt.” We already know the virus is adapting in mammals, she says. “The more spillover events, the more attempts that the virus has to find a successful variant that can take off or infect the human — and then one infected individual, three infected individuals, go home” to their families, where they could potentially spread the virus further. It’s not a pandemic right now, she says, but now is the time to act to reduce the opportunities for spillover events. For the first time, we have proof of H5N1 spreading among a mammalian species When a virus leaps from one species into another, that’s not usually enough to cause a large outbreak. You could look at H5N1’s history: Although the virus has leapt from animals into people hundreds of times, it has very rarely spread among people. When infections effectively stop spreading once they cross species lines, the non-transmitting species is called a “dead-end host.” Birds readily transmit H5N1 to other birds, but until recently, scientists have thought mammals getting infected with H5N1 were dead-end hosts. In the past couple of years, they’ve had some sneaking suspicion that minks and other mammals getting infected with the virus were spreading it among themselves — but they never had definitive proof. That is, they couldn’t rule out the possibility that all the animals had gotten infected by eating bits of the same sick bird, or through another so-called “common source” exposure. It’s much harder to contain a pathogen’s spread within a species if members of that species can transmit it to each other. What the dairy cow outbreak shows for the first time is that mammals can indeed now infect each other with H5N1 — and can do it efficiently. “Genetic data and epidemiologic data are all quite strongly suggesting that these viruses are getting transmitted in some way between these cows,” says Louise Moncla, a veterinary pathobiologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine whose team has analyzed genetic data from infected cows that the US government recently made available. This virus’s mode of transmission isn’t apparent yet — and it matters It’s not yet clear how the virus is being spread through and between dairy cow herds. High viral loads in cows’ udders and in their unpasteurized milk make it possible that contact with contaminated milking machines is doing most of the transmission. However, it’s also possible the virus is spreading through the fecal-oral route or through contaminated air; the latter would be particularly concerning because it’s so much harder to prevent. (Moncla notes that while the classic genetic fingerprint for a bird flu’s ability to spread through air between mammals is absent from this strain of H5N1, that doesn’t mean we’ve ruled out respiratory spread.) Regardless of exactly how H5N1 is spreading among cows, the significance that they’re transmitting the virus to each other is clear to flu experts: If the virus has adapted to spread among one mammalian species, it raises the specter that it can also adapt to spread among humans. There is a precedent for flu viruses to spread from livestock to humans, leading to a pandemic: The H1N1 flu outbreak began when a flu virus spread from pigs to humans. It caused far less death than expected through a stroke of luck — because the virus had similarities to strains that circulated in the first few decades of the 20th century, many older adults still had some flu immunity left over from childhood infections. If H5N1 develops the ability to spread among humans, it would be a novel infection to most immune systems, giving us much less protection from old flu infections. There are “no signs of that [ability] so far in the cattle sequences,” says Andrew Pekosz, a virologist who studies respiratory virus biology at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. “That’s a good thing.” Still, because we don’t know much about how influenza A viruses like H5N1 behave in cows, we don’t yet know what cautionary measures will do the most to slow their spread. In 2011, scientists learned that the influenza D virus causes respiratory illness in cattle. However, not all flu viruses are created equal: “I did not ever anticipate seeing an influenza A in cattle,” says Lakdawala. While influenza D infections don’t appear to cause much disease in humans, influenza A viruses very much do: All of the past global flu pandemics have been caused by influenza A viruses. Because this is such an unusual event, says Moncla, “we know very little about how flu replicates and transmits in cows.” That makes it hard to quickly design and implement precautions to prevent the virus from spreading to the people who handle them. “What would calm me down is if we started implementing interventions that would mitigate the presence of the virus and its transmission amongst cattle, and spilling over into humans,” says Lakdawala. “Say, okay: Every dairy farm worker is gonna wear a face shield,” she said. It would help to know whether cows that are infected but asymptomatic have infectious virus in their milk, and whether they can transmit virus to each other, says Pekosz. Ongoing studies by academics and federal agencies should help answer those questions. Here’s why you shouldn’t panic At the moment, there are more “coulds” than “ares” with H5N1: Although the virus is showing that it couldadapt further to spread among humans, so far it hasn’t; and while it’s reasonable to conduct studies to ensure pasteurization works against this particular strain of H5N1, there’s no reason to think it won’t. It’s also worth noting that according to the USDA spokesperson, the virus has so far not caused severe disease or death in the cows it has infected — they’ve all recovered with supportive care. In that way, this outbreak is very different from the ones we’ve seen in some other mammals. Furthermore, testing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already demonstrated that existing antiviral medications are effective at preventing human infections with this strain of H5N1 and that two existing candidate vaccines could be used to rapidly scale up mass production of human vaccines against this virus if needed. So for now, the general public shouldn’t be overly concerned about the virus, says Pekosz. “Scientists are … working extra overtime for this. But the general public should still feel safe.”

Why we keep seeing egg prices spike

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vox.com

With a new wave of bird flu affecting hens, egg prices are ticking up again. | Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg via Getty Images How corporate greed plays a role in making bird flu outbreaks — and egg prices — worse. Egg prices are rising again. The culprit, again: bird flu. At least, that’s the surface-level reason. In the current wave, according to the CDC, the H5N1 bird flu has been found in over 90 million poultry birds across almost every state since 2022, and has even spread to dairy cattle, with over 30 herds in nine states dealing with an outbreak at the time of this writing. The last time bird flu struck US farms, in early 2022, egg prices more than doubled during the year, reaching a peak of $4.82 for a dozen in January 2023. During the bird flu outbreak in 2014 to 2015, egg prices also briefly soared. While prices now are still nowhere near the peak they reached in January 2023, they’ve been creeping up again since last August, when a dozen large eggs cost $2.04. As of March, we’re bumping up against the $3 mark, which is a nearly 47 percent increase. It’s also a huge increase from the price we were used to a few years ago: In early 2020, a dozen eggs were just $1.46 on average. The H5N1 strain of bird flu is highly contagious and obviously poses a big risk to hens. But the fact that bird flu outbreaks keep battering our food system points to a deeper problem: an agriculture industry that has become brittle thanks to intense market concentration. The egg market is dominated by some major players The egg industry, like much of the agricultural sector, is commanded by a few heavyweights — the biggest, Cal-Maine Foods, controls 20 percent of the market — that leave little slack in the system to absorb and isolate shocks like disease. Hundreds of thousands of animals are packed tightly together on a single farm, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has explained, where disease can spread like wildfire. According to the government and corporate accountability group Food & Water Watch, three-quarters of the country’s hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens are crammed into just 347 factory farms. The system also uses genetically similar animals that farms believe will maximize egg production — but that lack of genetic diversity means animal populations are less resistant to disease. When a hen gets infected, stopping the spread is an ugly, cruel business; since 2022 it has led to the killing of 85 million poultry birds. For the consumer, it often means paying a lot more than usual for a carton of eggs. Preventing any outbreaks of disease from ever happening isn’t realistic, but the model of modern industrial farming is making outbreaks more disruptive. And it’s not just these disruptions driving price spikes. Egg producers also appear to be taking advantage of these moments and hiking prices beyond what they’d need to maintain their old profit margins. “It is absolutely a story of corporate profiteering,” says Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch. Cal-Maine’s net profit in 2023 was about $758 million — 471 percent higher than the year prior, according to its annual financial report. Most of this fortune was made through hoisting up prices; the number of eggs sold, measured in dozens, rose only 5.9 percent. Last year, several food conglomerates, including Kraft and General Mills, were awarded almost $18 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging that egg producers Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms had constrained the supply of eggs in the mid- to late 2000s, artificially bumping prices. A farmer advocacy group last year called on the FTC to look into whether top egg producers were price gouging consumers. Are we doomed to semi-regular price surges for eggs? Our food system didn’t become so consolidated — and fragile — by accident. We got here because of three big reasons, Wolf says: by not enforcing environmental laws, by not enforcing antitrust laws, and by giving away “tons of money” to the agriculture industry. During the New Deal era, the federal government put in place policies that would help manage food supply and protect both farmers and consumers from sharp deviations in what the former earned and the latter paid. Under Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz in the 1970s, though, those policies started getting chipped away; Butz’s famous motto was for farmers to “get big or get out.” The spread of giant factory farms is in part a product of this about-face in managing supply. Because our food system is so concentrated and intermingled, it also means any single supply chain hiccup — whether due to disease, wars, or any other reason — can have ripple effects on others, affecting prices in a vast number of essential consumer goods and services. “When we have things like E. coli outbreaks, it’s hard to know where the problem lies because the way that we process and manufacture is so hyper-industrialized that you then have a problem with millions of pounds of food,” says Wolf. Thankfully, the Biden administration has been making some strides in loosening up food industry consolidation, often by shoring up enforcement of long-existing antitrust laws. But there’s still more we could do. There are bills that have been introduced to Congress, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Price Gouging Prevention Act, that would give the FTC the authority to first define what counts as price gouging and then crack down on companies that raise prices excessively. The cycle of food chain snags and higher prices doesn’t have to keep repeating. “We are maximizing profit truly over everything else — over the welfare of the animals, over the rights and wages of people who work in the food system, for even consumers who are at the grocery store,” Wolf says. “None of this is inevitable — we shouldn’t have to be here.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

After decades of inaction, states are finally stepping up on housing

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vox.com

California Gov. Gavin Newsom at a press conference on September 28, 2022, in San Francisco, California. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The affordability crisis is forcing politicians’ hands. For years, the easiest thing to doaboutbuilding new housing was nothing. The federal government largely deferred to state and local governments on matters of land use, and states mostly deferred to local governments, which typically defer to their home-owning constituents who back restrictive zoning laws that bar new construction. That’s slowly changing as the housing supply crisis ripples across the country. Experts say the US is short somewhere between 3.8 millionand 6.8 million homes, and most renters feel priced out of the idea of homeownership altogether. The lack of affordable housing is causing homelessness to rise. In Washington, DC, Congress has held more hearings on housing affordability recently than it has in decades, and President Joe Biden has been ramping up attention on the housing crisis, promising to “build, build, build” to “bring housing costs down for good.” But it’s at the state level where some of the most consequential change is taking place. Over the last five years, Republican and Democratic legislators and governors in a slew of states have looked to update zoning codes, transform residential planning processes, and improve home-building and design requirements. Some states that have stepped up include Oregon, Florida, Montana, and California, as well as states like Utah and Washington. This year, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey passed state-level housing legislation, and Colorado may soon follow suit. Not all state-level bills have been equally ambitious in addressing the supply crisis, and not all states have been successful at passing new laws, especially on their first few tries. And some states have succeeded in passing housing reform one year, only to strike out with additional bills the next. Real housing reform requires iterative and sustained legislative attention; it almost never succeeds with just one bill signing. Trying to determine why exactly a housing reform bill passes or fails on the state level can be difficult, though advocates say it certainly helps when a governor or other powerful state lawmaker invests time and political capital in mobilizing stakeholders together. Given that housing challenges are not spread equally across a state, sometimes it can be hard to decide whether to pass statewide laws that apply equally to all communities or to pass more targeted legislation aimed only at certain areas. Partly due to pressure from voters and from more organized pro-housing activists, legislative trends are starting to emerge. More states and housing experts are thinking not only about passing laws to boost housing production, but also about how best to enforce those laws, close loopholes, and demand compliance. States can make it easier to build more housing in a wider variety of places While states typically grant local communities a lot of discretion in land use policy, more lawmakers are realizing that balance may have tilted too far. As researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis outlined last fall, some states are now looking to increase housing production by enabling more multifamily housing and accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to be built without having developers first seek approval from local planning agencies or elected boards. This accelerated construction process is known as building “by right.” For example, Oregon passed a law in 2019 allowing fourplexes (a multifamily home that typically houses four families under one roof) to be built anywhere in large cities and for duplexes to be built anywhere in mid-size cities. Before, a developer would have needed to seek special permission to build such housing. States like Utah and Massachusetts are incentivizing the construction of new multifamily housing near public transit, while states like California and Florida are making it easier to build residential housing in places zoned for retail. Other states, like Maine and Vermont, are making it easier to build ADUs, which are second (and smaller) residential units on the same plot of land as one’s primary residence, like apartments or converted garages. State lawmakers sometimes impose new rules on localities to adjust their housing planning requirements, which can mean lowering the barriers builders must go through to begin construction or incentivizing cities to set more ambitious targets for production. Sometimes it means easing requirements like minimum lot sizes or parking spot mandates. Not all state-level bills will move the needle on the housing crisis Under pressure to do something about the housing crisis, some state lawmakers are advancing bills that allow politicians to claim they’re taking action, although the legislation itself is weak and unlikely to make big dents on the various problems. Some bills may even make affordability issues worse over the long term. For example, after failing to pass housing reform last year, lawmakers in New York came together again this year to push something through. Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and her allies in the state legislature are cheering their recently agreed-upon housing package, which includes tenant protections and incentives to spur new construction,but experts and activists say it lacks real ambitious zoning and productionmeasures and will be unlikely to drive new affordability. Likewise in Maryland, Democratic politicians are cheering the passage of a new statewide housing reform package that includes renter protections and incentives to spur new affordable and dense development,though Yes-In-My-Backyard pro-housing advocates concede they do not expect the legislation to create much new housing, at least in the near term. Still, given that it was housing advocates’ first real attempt at passing statewide legislation in Maryland, they are hailing it as an impressive first step. “This is the first time the Maryland legislature overrode local zoning in a pro-housing way, and I would say this is a surprisingly drastic shift from the status quo even though it’s not enough,” said Tom Coale, a housing lobbyist in Maryland. When it comes to state-level housing reform, implementation and compliance matter Passing legislation for housing reform on the state level is often just the first step, as opponents then sometimes seek to challenge the new laws in court or localities search for loopholes or other ways to avoid compliance. Sometimes lawmakers water down housing production mandates and other enforcement mechanisms before the bills even pass through the legislature. While it’s not uncommon for local communities to try and avoid compliance when a housing law is first passed, somestates have also been firing back in subsequent sessions to close loopholes and ramp up penalties for local governments. While some statutes have strong enforcement mechanisms built in to begin with, many lawmakers are recognizing the housing reform process will just need to be dogged and responsiveto resistance and new challenges. Housing experts with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy say it’s likely to take at least three to five years after a statewide policy is passed before the public should expect to see any real changes in housing production, and they urge patience before claiming a reform has failed or succeeded. “Many of the ambitious state housing policies that have been adopted are still in the early stages of implementation, so we don’t yet have definitive evidence about what works and what doesn’t,” they wrote in September. “Without realistic expectations about this time frame, pro-housing advocates may get discouraged, while opponents claim that zoning changes are ineffective—all before the policies have kicked in.”