The end of coral reefs as we know them

Former President Donald Trump read a series of media reports outside of the Manhattan court room Tuesday, showing there's 'no smoking gun' in the unprecedented case.

Russia has defended its veto of a U.N. resolution urging prevention of a space-based nuclear arms race, proposing their own resolution for a ban on space weapons.

Everyone, for so long, has been worried about the honeybees. Governments, celebrities, social-media users, small businesses, multinational conglomerates—in the two decades or so since news emerged that American honeybees were disappearing, all manner of entities with a platform or a wallet have taken up and abandoned countless other causes, but they can’t quit trying to save the bees.In 2022, at least 18 states enacted bee-related legislation. Last year, a cryptocurrency launched with the intention of raising “awareness and support for bee conservation.” If you search Etsy right now for “save the bees,” you’ll be rewarded with thousands of things to buy. Bees and Thank You, a food truck in suburban Boston, funds bee sanctuaries and gives out a packet of wildflower seeds—good for the bees!—with every grilled cheese sandwich it sells. A company in the United Kingdom offers a key ring containing a little bottle of chemicals that can purportedly “revive” an “exhausted bee” should you encounter one, “so it can continue its mission pollinating planet Earth.”All of the above is surprising for maybe a few different reasons, but here’s a good place to start: Though their numbers have fluctuated, honeybees are not in trouble. Other bees are. But the movement’s poster child, biggest star, and attention hound is not at risk of imminent extinction, and never has been. “There are more honeybees on the planet now than there probably ever have been in the history of honeybees,” Rich Hatfield, a biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, told me. “They are in no threat of going endangered. It’s not an issue.”The idea that honeybees need our help is one of our most curiously persistent cultural myths. It is well intended. But it is also unhelpful: a distraction from more urgent biodiversity problems, and an object lesson in the limits of modern environmentalism and the seductiveness of modern consumerism. That the misconception has survived for so long may tell us less about bees than it does about the species that has, for centuries, adored, influenced, and exploited them more than any other. “Save the bees” rhetoric has turned them into something unspoiled, a miracle of mother nature’s ingenious machinery. But everything about the modern American honeybee has been shaped by humans, including its sustained existence.A true truth about the bees: The modal American honeybee is, essentially, a farm animal—part of a $200-billion-a-year industry that’s regulated by the USDA and is as sophisticated and professionalized as any other segment of the sprawling system that gets food on our plates. The nation’s largest beekeeping operation, Adee Honey Farms, has more than 80,000 colonies, facilities in five states, and nearly 100 employees. Its bees, and those at other large-scale apiaries, do produce honey, but more and more, the real money is in what the industry calls “pollination services”: the renting-out of bees to fertilize the farms of Big Ag, which have seen their indigenous pollinators decline with urbanization and industrialization.Every February, right before the almond trees start blooming powdery and white across California’s San Joaquin Valley, bees from all over the country pack onto semitrucks and head west, where they participate in the largest supervised pollination event on Earth, doing their part to ensure that America’s most beloved nut makes its way again into snack packs and candy bars. Throughout the spring and early summer, they do the same for other crops—watermelons, pumpkins, cucumbers, alfalfas, onions—before heading home to the honey farm, where the most ambitious among them can expect to make a 12th of a teaspoon of the gooey, golden stuff over their lifetime. In the early 1990s, when Adee started renting out bees for industrial fertilization, that income accounted for about a third of its revenue, with honey making up the rest. Now the ratio is flipped.[Read: A uniquely French approach to environmentalism]As that transition was happening, another force threatened to rearrange the industry even more dramatically. Worker bees were flying away for pollen and never coming back, abandoning their hives’ queens and young like a lousy husband in an enduring cliché. No one could figure out why. Some blamed a common class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are toxic to bees. Others zeroed in on the stress incurred by all that trucking of beehives around the country for pollination. Maybe it was warmer winters, or malnutrition, or the parasitic Varroa mite, or a sign of the Rapture.This was not the first time bees had gone missing en masse. In 1869, and in 1918, and in 1965, farmers had reported similar phenomena, given names such as “spring dwindle” and “disappearing disease” in the scientific literature. But it was the first time that such an event reached full-scale public crisis, or that knowledge of it spread much beyond the insular world of farmers, beekeepers, entomologists, and agriculture regulators.In retrospect, it was a perfect moment for a predicament like this to effloresce into panic. Social media had recently birthed an immensely powerful way of both disseminating information and performing one’s values loudly and publicly. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s feature-length climate-change call to arms, had become one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Michael Pollan was at the peak of his powers, having just published The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which laid out the consequence and quantity of choices facing contemporary eaters. Americans were newly aware of the terrifying fragility of our food systems, and newly in possession of robust ways to talk about it. Brands were interested in aligning themselves with noncontroversial, blandly feel-good causes. Plus, humans were already primed to love bees; we have since biblical times. “We think of bees as being very pure,” Beth Daly, an anthrozoology professor at the University of Windsor, in Canada, told me. They are honey and flowers and sunshine, beauty and abundance, communitarianism and hard work.By 2007, the mystery thing making these lovely creatures go away had a scary-sounding new name: colony collapse disorder. Within a decade, bee panic was everywhere. A spate of nonfiction books warned of the imminent threat of a Fruitless Fall and A Spring Without Bees. The White House convened a task force. General Mills temporarily removed the cartoon-bee mascot from boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios, enacting a high-concept allegory meant, I guess, to stun Americans into action. The cosmetics company Burt’s Bees released a limited-edition lip-balm flavor (strawberry), some of whose proceeds went to one of the approximately gazillion honeybee-conservation nonprofits that had recently sprung up. Samuel L. Jackson gave Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds “10 pounds of bees” as a wedding gift. Laypeople started keeping backyard hives. Häagen-Dazs created an awareness-raising ice-cream flavor and funded a VR short film shot from the perspective of a bee; in it, Alex, our apian protagonist, warns that “something terrible is happening.”She (it?) was not entirely wrong. Colony collapse was an actual problem, a scientific whodunit with genuinely high stakes. Honeybees are responsible for pollinating roughly every third bite Americans eat. Scientists were correct to think back then that if colonies were to keep collapsing, our food system would need to change in painful, potentially catastrophic ways.Much more worrying, though, and more real: The population of wild bees—the non-honey-producing, non-hive-dwelling relatives of the species humans have been intent on saving—has been decreasing steadily, for years. Insects of all kinds are declining in record numbers, and their deaths will have repercussions we cannot even imagine.[Read: The illogical relationship Americans have with animals]Yet heads have been turned mostly toward the honeybee. That’s because, unlike so many other imperiled animals, honeybees are part of a huge industry quite literally invested in their survival. Apis mellifera are living things, but they are also revenue-generating assets; the thousands of people who rely on bees’ uncompensated labor to buy groceries and pay the cable bill had every incentive to figure out colony collapse. So they found better agrochemicals and bred mite-resistant bees. They gave their bees nutritional supplements, fats and proteins and minerals ground as fine as pollen and snuck into the food supply. They moved hives into atmospherically controlled warehouses. They adapted.All told, it was kind of the Y2K of environmental disasters. Not that colony collapse was a hoax, or that the panic surrounding it was an overreaction. Rather, it was an appropriate reaction—a big problem made smaller thanks to the difficult, somewhat unglamorous, behind-the-scenes labor of trained professionals with a vested interest in averting disaster. In 2019, an economist-entomologist team published a study analyzing the effects of colony collapse on the managed-pollinator industry; they found “cause for considerable optimism, at least for the economically dominant honey bee.” According to the most recent data from the USDA Census of Agriculture, honeybees have been the country’s fastest-growing livestock category since 2007. Also, very clearly, our food system has not fallen to pieces.This doesn’t mean honeybee keepers aren’t struggling—some are. But as Hatfield, the Xerces Society biologist, told me, that’s an issue for the business of honeybee keeping, not the moral and practical project of pollinator conservation. He finds a useful comparison in a different domesticated animal: chickens. “When we get bird flu,” he said, “we leave that up to USDA scientists to develop immunizations and other things to help these chickens that are suffering in these commercial chicken coops. We don’t enlist homeowners to help the chicken populations in their backyard.”In 2018, Seirian Sumner, a wasp scientist and fan, conducted a survey of 748 people, mostly in the United Kingdom, on their perceptions of various insects. She and her collaborators, she told me, “were absolutely flabbergasted” by their results: Bees are roughly as adored as butterflies and significantly more liked than wasps—their wilder cousins—which serve various important roles in ecosystem regulation, and which are in genuine, fairly precipitous decline.Sumner was born in 1974 and doesn’t recall much love for bees when she was growing up. You weren’t “buying your bee slippers and your bee socks and your bee scarf and your bee mug and everything else,” she told me. Today’s craze for bees, her research suggests, is a mutually reinforcing phenomenon. People love bees because they understand their importance as pollinators. People understand their importance as pollinators because it is easier to fund research and write magazine articles and publish children’s books and engage in multi-platform brand campaigns about animals that people are already fond of.Honeybees are, in point of fact, amazing. They have five eyes, two stomachs, and a sense of smell 50 times more sensitive than a dog’s. They do a little dance when they find good pollen and want to tell their friends about it. They are feminists, and obviously, they dress well. They produce a near-universally-liked substance, and they do not have to die to do it. Loving bees, and wanting more of them in our food system, is simple. Engaging meaningfully with the cruel, complicated reality of industrial food production, or the looming, life-extinguishing horror of climate change, is not.To save the bees is to participate in an especially appealing kind of environmental activism, one that makes solutions seem straightforward and buying stuff feel virtuous. Worried about vanishing biodiversity? Save the bees. Feeling powerless about your mandatory participation, via the consumption required to stay alive, in agriculture systems that produce so much wreckage, so much waste, so much suffering for so many living things? Save the bees. Tired of staring at the hyperobject? Save the bees. When we are grasping for ways to help, we tend to land on whatever is within arm’s reach.In the 17th century, when what is now called the American honeybee was imported from Europe, large-scale industrial agriculture did not exist. Farms were surrounded by wild flora and powered by non-machine labor, without pesticides and chemical fertilizers, which also did not exist. Bees lived, ate, and pollinated all in the same place; they built their nests in untilled soil and unchopped trees. Even if farmers could have trucked them in, they didn’t have to. But as farming changed, bees became livestock, then itinerant laborers—there to meet the needs of the industrial systems that created those needs in the first place. Their numbers have always oscillated based on our demands: In the 1940s, when sugar rationing made beekeeping extraordinarily profitable, the bee population swelled; as soon as the war was over, it fell again. In 2024, thanks to the efforts of professional beekeepers and (to a lesser extent) backyard hobbyists, they’re faring better than ever.Now the industrialized world that made, and saved, the honeybee as we know it is being called on to save other insects—the ones that really are in trouble. This will be trickier. When you ask experts what a layperson should do for all pollinators in 2024, they have a lot to say: Use fewer insecticides, inside and outside. Convert mowed lawn into habitat that can feed wild animals. Reconsider your efforts to save the honeybee—not just because it’s a diversion, but because honeybees take resources from wild bees. Buy organic, and look for food grown using agricultural practices that support beneficial insects. Get involved with efforts to count and conserve bees of all species. (The experts do not think you should buy a lip balm.)What they are getting at is … an inconvenient truth: America does have an insect-biodiversity crisis. It is old and big—much older and much bigger than colony collapse disorder—and so are the solutions to it. The best require returning our environment into something that looks much more like the place the first American honeybees encountered. Having a backyard beehive isn’t the answer to what’s ailing our ecosystem, because having a backyard is the problem. Buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate isn’t the answer, because buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate is the problem. The movement to save the honeybee is a small attempt at unwinding centuries of human intervention in our natural world, at undoing the harms of the modern food system, without having to sacrifice too much. No wonder so many of us wanted to believe.​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says she regrets making an offhand remark that suggested Black children in the Bronx do not know what the word “computer” means

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., urges Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate funding sources behind anti-Israel chaos on college campuses nationwide.

The U.S. has brought home 11 of its citizens from camps in northeastern Syria, housing family members of suspected Islamic State militants, officials say.

Courteney Cox, who portrayed Monica Gellar on "Friends," shared an emotional clip from the final scene of the hit show in 2004.

A string of tornadoes tore through Oklahoma overnight, devastating multiple communities. It's the second time in just over a month a twister hit the town of Barnsdall, Oklahoma, leveling homes.

A security guard for the rapper was rushed to the hospital with serious injuries, according to reports.

Shaunie Henderson, the ex-wife of basketball great Shaquille O'Neal, recalled in a new book her marriage to the former Los Angeles Lakers star and what broke them up.

Bryan Fonseca reacts to Jalen Brunson’s 43-point effort in the Knicks’ Eastern Conference semifinals Game 1 win over the Pacers, Josh Hart and Donte DiVincenzo’s big contributions and how the Bockers’ bench needs to improve against the up-tempo Pacers after eking out a big series-opening win at Madison Square Garden.

Anti-Israel protesters vandalized a World War I memorial in Central Park on May 6 and burned an American flag after a mob of more than 1,000 marchers was blocked by cops from reaching the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the star-studded Met Gala was in full swing. Some of the protesters climbed atop the infantrymen...

Thomas Peter/ReutersRussian agents plotted to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and top Ukrainian military officials as a “gift” to Vladimir Putin as he’s sworn in for a fifth term—but Ukrainian security officials caught wind of the plan and thwarted the operation.That’s according to the Security Service of Ukraine, which said Tuesday that two colonels in the State Security Administration were detained after it was discovered they’d been taking orders from Moscow. The two colonels, who have not been identified, were “leaking secret information to Moscow” as Russia’s Federal Security Service developed plans to take out Zelensky, the SBU said in a statement.The pair was reportedly part of a network of moles operating in Ukraine that was acting on behalf of the FSB. Among other things, the group was tasked with finding someone in Zelensky’s security detail who could take him hostage and then kill him, according to the SBU.Read more at The Daily Beast.

"I can tell you, easily, that the Rangers are our biggest liability these playoffs."

Tristan Snell, who worked on the Trump University fraud lawsuit, compares that case to the hush money trial.

Adam Rose/NetflixJohn Mulaney’s free-wheeling, ongoing Netflix special Everybody’s in L.A. might want to start informing their guests that they’re being recorded live. On Monday night, Mulaney’s guest Jon Stewart seemed to forget that little detail before possibly defaming the loud-dressing millionaire and Lakers superfan Jimmy Goldstein on stage. Or was it all a bit?Just like the series premiere on Friday, Monday’s sophomore episode welcomed a beloved comedian to play a notorious Angeleno. First, it was Will Ferrell playing record producer and beret aficionado Lou Adler, and on Monday night, we got Andy Samberg in a long gray wig and a fully bedazzled cowboy get-up that’s a pretty spot-on match for Goldstein’s usual court side attire.“I know I’m unconventionally handsome,” Samberg-as-Goldstein told his hosts. “Some people might even say I look like a lascivious side character in an Oliver Stone film that gets cross-cut with night footage of a snarling wolf. And people can say their jokes about me, but I think it takes great courage to dress this way.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Noam Galai/Getty for for American Society of Magazine EditorsBusiness Insider’s top editor Nicholas Carlson is stepping down.“Team!” he wrote in an email to staffers, which was obtained by The Daily Beast. “Something I hope you know about me is that I believe life is an adventure. That we only have so many heartbeats and we should use them to live life to the fullest. In that spirit, I’ve decided to make a very big change in my life: Later this summer, I will be stepping down from my position as Global Editor-in-Chief.”The news of his exit was first reported by Semafor.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Adult film actress Stormy Daniels took the stand to testify in the unprecedented criminal trial of former President Trump on Tuesday.

He probably wouldn’t even be on trial if he hadn’t been such an annoying, frugal boss.

Since 2022, Joe Biden has released about 7 million more illegal immigrants into the U.S., and we're on track to break further border-crossing records this year.

Former President Donald Trump spoke privately with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and urged her to drop her push to oust Speaker Mike Johnson, a source told ABC News.

A senior White House adviser has voiced the necessity of encouraging mining projects in countries where Western corporations might be hesitant to invest.

We need to talk about that finale fight.

Ex-Trump special prosecutor Nathan Wade told ABC News' Linsey Davis he didn't think he did anything wrong after he resigned from the election interference case.

Smart also suffered a concussion from the accident.

New York Post Sports anchor Dexter Henry and SNY’s NBA insider Ian Begley break down the Knicks’ Game 1 win of the Eastern Conference semifinals over Indiana at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night.

An Israel Defense Forces tank crushed a sign that read “I (Heart) Gaza” as the forces seized control of the vital Rafah border crossing Tuesday. The Israeli military moved into the southern Gaza city even as ceasefire negotiations with Hamas were supposedly ongoing, according to reports.

"We aren’t sliding off a cliff; we’re doing good shows and still holding our place. So I dunno," Selleck said. 

Russia released footage of a Ukrainian naval drone that appears to be armed with R-73 air-to-air anti-aircraft missiles.

Granddaughter Lara Severino told Newsweek: "The fact that she is 82 and still cooks every meal for herself every day is so incredible to me."

The "Chrissy's Court" star hasn't attended a Met Gala since walking the 2017 red carpet in a sheer, feathery gown with her husband, John Legend.

These two teams have long odds that offer value to bettors.

The model changed into an ethereal winged minidress after wearing another 1990s Givenchy style on the red carpet.

Two colonels in the State Guard of Ukraine, which protects top officials, were held on suspicion of enacting the plan.

Mica Miller, the wife of a South Carolina pastor she accused of being abusive before she was found dead, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to the local medical examiner. The 30-year-old’s death was ruled a suicide by the Robeson County Medical Examiner, Richard Johnson, ABC 15 reported on May 6.

WWE legend Shawn Michaels offered Drake and Kendrick Lamar to settle their beef at NXT on Monday as the two continued to trade barbs on tracks.

Social media had a field day creating hilarious memes from the 2024 Met Gala.

More than half a dozen nations have pledged personnel to a multinational effort to stabilize Haiti, where gangs have taken over much of the capital, setting off a major humanitarian crisis.

Togo's president has enacted a new constitution eliminating presidential elections, prompting concerns that he aims to prolong his family's longstanding rule.

Lucas Jackson/ReutersA last-ditch effort by Donald Trump to halt jurors from hearing the more salacious details of his sexual affair with porn star Stormy Daniels blew up in his face on Tuesday, as the judge used the former president’s very same reasoning to arrive at the completely opposite conclusion.With Daniels set to testify later Tuesday, Trump had his lawyers start the morning by asking Justice Juan Merchan to block prosecutors from questioning the porn star too closely about their one-night stand on July 13, 2006, during a charity event at the Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course on the Nevada state line with California.Susan Necheles, a Trump defense lawyer, argued that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office shouldn’t be allowed to ask what exactly happened at the hotel that night.Read more at The Daily Beast.

The results from the treatment weren't quite what the woman had envisioned when spending such a high amount.

A bridesmaid has recounted losing her best friend and feeling humiliated at a wedding, all over a small wardrobe malfunction.

There is a growing consensus that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are aligning into a modern Tripartite Pact.

No garlic breath on the red carpet for these A-listers!

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

If Lucy's owner leaves the door unlocked, a four-legged intruder comes into the bathroom with a gift just for her.

The "Paint The Town Red" artist rocked up to Richie Akiva’s Met Gala afterparty at Casa Cipriani wearing a Vetements sheer tights look.

Five-time Grammy winner Brittany Howard talks about how her latest album was born from a period of intense soul-searching and solitude in Nashville.