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ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can’t

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Sam Altman (left), CEO of artificial intelligence company OpenAI, and the company’s co-founder and then-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, speak together at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv on June 5, 2023. | Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images Why is OpenAI’s superintelligence team imploding? On Monday, OpenAI announced exciting new product news: ChatGPT can now talk like a human. It has a cheery, slightly ingratiating feminine voice that sounds impressively non-robotic, and a bit familiar if you’ve seen a certain 2013 Spike Jonze film. “Her,” tweeted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, referencing the movie in which a man falls in love with an AI assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson. But the product release of ChatGPT 4o was quickly overshadowed by much bigger news out of OpenAI: the resignation of the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, who also led its superalignment team, as well as that of his co-team leader Jan Leike (who we put on the Future Perfect 50 list last year). The resignations didn’t come as a total surprise. Sutskever had been involved in the boardroom revolt that led to Altman’s temporary firing last year, before the CEO quickly returned to his perch. Sutskever publicly regretted his actions and backed Altman’s return, but he’s been mostly absent from the company since, even as other members of OpenAI’s policy, alignment, and safety teams have departed. But what has really stirred speculation was the radio silence from former employees. Sutskever posted a pretty typical resignation message, saying “I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial…I am excited for what comes next.” Leike ... didn’t. His resignation message was simply: “I resigned.” After several days of fervent speculation, he expanded on this on Friday morning, explaining that he was worried OpenAI had shifted away from a safety-focused culture. Questions arose immediately: Were they forced out? Is this delayed fallout of Altman’s brief firing last fall? Are they resigning in protest of some secret and dangerous new OpenAI project? Speculation filled the void because no one who had once worked at OpenAI was talking. It turns out there’s a very clear reason for that. I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it. If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars. One former employee, Daniel Kokotajlo, who posted that he quit OpenAI “due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI,” has confirmed publicly that he had to surrender what would have likely turned out to be a huge sum of money in order to quit without signing the document. While nondisclosure agreements aren’t unusual in highly competitive Silicon Valley, putting an employee’s already-vested equity at risk for declining or violating one is. For workers at startups like OpenAI, equity is a vital form of compensation, one that can dwarf the salary they make. Threatening that potentially life-changing money is a very effective way to keep former employees quiet. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.) All of this is highly ironic for a company that initially advertised itself as OpenAI — that is, as committed in its mission statements to building powerful systems in a transparent and accountable manner. OpenAI long ago abandoned the idea of open-sourcing its models, citing safety concerns. But now it has shed the most senior and respected members of its safety team, which should inspire some skepticism about whether safety is really the reason why OpenAI has become so closed. The tech company to end all tech companies OpenAI has spent a long time occupying an unusual position in tech and policy circles. Their releases, from DALL-E to ChatGPT, are often very cool, but by themselves they would hardly attract the near-religious fervor with which the company is often discussed. What sets OpenAI apart is the ambition of its mission: “to ensure that artificial general intelligence — AI systems that are generally smarter than humans — benefits all of humanity.” Many of its employees believe that this aim is within reach; that with perhaps one more decade (or even less) — and a few trillion dollars — the company will succeed at developing AI systems that make most human labor obsolete. Which, as the company itself has long said, is as risky as it is exciting. “Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems,” a recruitment page for Leike and Sutskever’s team at OpenAI states. “But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction. While superintelligence seems far off now, we believe it could arrive this decade.” Naturally, if artificial superintelligence in our lifetimes is possible (and experts are divided), it would have enormous implications for humanity. OpenAI has historically positioned itself as a responsible actor trying to transcend mere commercial incentives and bring AGI about for the benefit of all. And they’ve said they are willing to do that even if that requires slowing down development, missing out on profit opportunities, or allowing external oversight. “We don’t think that AGI should be just a Silicon Valley thing,” OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman told me in 2019, in the much calmer pre-ChatGPT days. “We’re talking about world-altering technology. And so how do you get the right representation and governance in there? This is actually a really important focus for us and something we really want broad input on.” OpenAI’s unique corporate structure — a capped-profit company ultimately controlled by a nonprofit — was supposed to increase accountability. “No one person should be trusted here. I don’t have super-voting shares. I don’t want them,” Altman assured Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in 2023. “The board can fire me. I think that’s important.” (As the board found out last November, it could fire Altman, but it couldn’t make the move stick. After his firing, Altman made a deal to effectively take the company to Microsoft, before being ultimately reinstated with most of the board resigning.) But there was no stronger sign of OpenAI’s commitment to its mission than the prominent roles of people like Sutskever and Leike, technologists with a long history of commitment to safety and an apparently genuine willingness to ask OpenAI to change course if needed. When I said to Brockman in that 2019 interview, “You guys are saying, ‘We’re going to build a general artificial intelligence,’” Sutskever cut in. “We’re going to do everything that can be done in that direction while also making sure that we do it in a way that’s safe,” he told me. Their departure doesn’t herald a change in OpenAI’s mission of building artificial general intelligence — that remains the goal. But it almost certainly heralds a change in OpenAI’s interest in safety work; the company hasn’t announced who, if anyone, will lead the superalignment team. And it makes it clear that OpenAI’s concern with external oversight and transparency couldn’t have run all that deep. If you want external oversight and opportunities for the rest of the world to play a role in what you’re doing, making former employees sign extremely restrictive NDAs doesn’t exactly follow. Changing the world behind closed doors This contradiction is at the heart of what makes OpenAI profoundly frustrating for those of us who care deeply about ensuring that AI really does go well and benefits humanity. Is OpenAI a buzzy, if midsize tech company that makes a chatty personal assistant, or a trillion-dollar effort to create an AI god? The company’s leadership says they want to transform the world, that they want to be accountable when they do so, and that they welcome the world’s input into how to do it justly and wisely. But when there’s real money at stake — and there are astounding sums of real money at stake in the race to dominate AI — it becomes clear that they probably never intended for the world to get all that much input. Their process ensures former employees — those who know the most about what’s happening inside OpenAI — can’t tell the rest of the world what’s going on. The website may have high-minded ideals, but their termination agreements are full of hard-nosed legalese. It’s hard to exercise accountability over a company whose former employees are restricted to saying “I resigned.” ChatGPT’s new cute voice may be charming, but I’m not feeling especially enamored. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

“I lost trust”: Why the OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity imploded

1 h

vox.com

Sam Altman is the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which has been losing its most safety-focused researchers. | Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images Company insiders explain why safety-conscious employees are leaving. For months, OpenAI has been losing employees who care deeply about making sure AI is safe. Now, the company is positively hemorrhaging them. Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike announced their departures from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, on Tuesday. They were the leaders of the company’s superalignment team — the team tasked with ensuring that AI stays aligned with the goals of its makers, rather than acting unpredictably and harming humanity. They’re not the only ones who’ve left. Since last November — when OpenAI’s board tried to fire CEO Sam Altman only to see him quickly claw his way back to power — at least five more of the company’s most safety-conscious employees have either quit or been pushed out. What’s going on here? If you’ve been following the saga on social media, you might think OpenAI secretly made a huge technological breakthrough. The meme “What did Ilya see?” speculates that Sutskever, the former chief scientist, left because he saw something horrifying, like an AI system that could destroy humanity. But the real answer may have less to do with pessimism about technology and more to do with pessimism about humans — and one human in particular: Altman. According to sources familiar with the company, safety-minded employees have lost faith in him. “It’s a process of trust collapsing bit by bit, like dominoes falling one by one,” a person with inside knowledge of the company told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. Not many employees are willing to speak about this publicly. That’s partly because OpenAI is known for getting its workers to sign offboarding agreements with non-disparagement provisions upon leaving. If you refuse to sign one, you give up your equity in the company, which means you potentially lose out on millions of dollars. One former employee, however, refused to sign the offboarding agreement so that he would be free to criticize the company. Daniel Kokotajlo, who joined OpenAI in 2022 with hopes of steering it toward safe deployment of AI, worked on the governance team — until he quit last month. “OpenAI is training ever-more-powerful AI systems with the goal of eventually surpassing human intelligence across the board. This could be the best thing that has ever happened to humanity, but it could also be the worst if we don’t proceed with care,” Kokotajlo told me this week. OpenAI says it wants to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical system that can perform at human or superhuman levels across many domains. “I joined with substantial hope that OpenAI would rise to the occasion and behave more responsibly as they got closer to achieving AGI. It slowly became clear to many of us that this would not happen,” Kokotajlo told me. “I gradually lost trust in OpenAI leadership and their ability to responsibly handle AGI, so I quit.” And Leike, explaining in a thread on X why he quit as co-leader of the superalignment team, painted a very similar picture Friday. “I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point,” he wrote. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. Why OpenAI’s safety team grew to distrust Sam Altman To get a handle on what happened, we need to rewind to last November. That’s when Sutskever, working together with the OpenAI board, tried to fire Altman. The board said Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications.” Translation: We don’t trust him. The ouster failed spectacularly. Altman and his ally, company president Greg Brockman, threatened to take OpenAI’s top talent to Microsoft — effectively destroying OpenAI — unless Altman was reinstated. Faced with that threat, the board gave in. Altman came back more powerful than ever, with new, more supportive board members and a freer hand to run the company. When you shoot at the king and miss, things tend to get awkward. Publicly, Sutskever and Altman gave the appearance of a continuing friendship. And when Sutskever announced his departure this week, he said he was heading off to pursue “a project that is very personally meaningful to me.” Altman posted on X two minutes later, saying that “this is very sad to me; Ilya is … a dear friend.” Yet Sutskever has not been seen at the OpenAI office in about six months — ever since the attempted coup. He has been remotely co-leading the superalignment team, tasked with making sure a future AGI would be aligned with the goals of humanity rather than going rogue. It’s a nice enough ambition, but one that’s divorced from the daily operations of the company, which has been racing to commercialize products under Altman’s leadership. And then there was this tweet, posted shortly after Altman’s reinstatement and quickly deleted: So, despite the public-facing camaraderie, there’s reason to be skeptical that Sutskever and Altman were friends after the former attempted to oust the latter. And Altman’s reaction to being fired had revealed something about his character: His threat to hollow out OpenAI unless the board rehired him, and his insistence on stacking the board with new members skewed in his favor, showed a determination to hold onto power and avoid future checks on it. Former colleagues and employees came forward to describe him as a manipulator who speaks out of both sides of his mouth — someone who claims, for instance, that he wants to prioritize safety, but contradicts that in his behaviors. For example, Altman was fundraising with autocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia so he could spin up a new AI chip-making company, which would give him a huge supply of the coveted resources needed to build cutting-edge AI. That was alarming to safety-minded employees. If Altman truly cared about building and deploying AI in the safest way possible, why did he seem to be in a mad dash to accumulate as many chips as possible, which would only accelerate the technology? For that matter, why was he taking the safety risk of working with regimes that might use AI to supercharge digital surveillance or human rights abuses? For employees, all this led to a gradual “loss of belief that when OpenAI says it’s going to do something or says that it values something, that that is actually true,” a source with inside knowledge of the company told me. That gradual process crescendoed this week. The superalignment team’s co-leader, Jan Leike, did not bother to play nice. “I resigned,” he posted on X, mere hours after Sutskever announced his departure. No warm goodbyes. No vote of confidence in the company’s leadership. Other safety-minded former employees quote-tweeted Leike’s blunt resignation, appending heart emojis. One of them was Leopold Aschenbrenner, a Sutskever ally and superalignment team member who was fired from OpenAI last month. Media reports noted that he and Pavel Izmailov, another researcher on the same team, were allegedly fired for leaking information. But OpenAI has offered no evidence of a leak. And given the strict confidentiality agreement everyone signs when they first join OpenAI, it would be easy for Altman — a deeply networked Silicon Valley veteran who is an expert at working the press — to portray sharing even the most innocuous of information as “leaking,” if he was keen to get rid of Sutskever’s allies. The same month that Aschenbrenner and Izmailov were forced out, another safety researcher, Cullen O’Keefe, also departed the company. And two weeks ago, yet another safety researcher, William Saunders, wrote a cryptic post on the EA Forum, an online gathering place for members of the effective altruism movement, who have been heavily involved in the cause of AI safety. Saunders summarized the work he’s done at OpenAI as part of the superalignment team. Then he wrote: “I resigned from OpenAI on February 15, 2024.” A commenter asked the obvious question: Why was Saunders posting this? “No comment,” Saunders replied. Commenters concluded that he is probably bound by a non-disparagement agreement. Putting all of this together with my conversations with company insiders, what we get is a picture of at least seven people who tried to push OpenAI to greater safety from within, but ultimately lost so much faith in its charismatic leader that their position became untenable. “I think a lot of people in the company who take safety and social impact seriously think of it as an open question: is working for a company like OpenAI a good thing to do?” said the person with inside knowledge of the company. “And the answer is only ‘yes’ to the extent that OpenAI is really going to be thoughtful and responsible about what it’s doing.” With the safety team gutted, who will make sure OpenAI’s work is safe? With Leike no longer there to run the superalignment team, OpenAI has replaced him with company co-founder John Schulman. But the team has been hollowed out. And Schulman already has his hands full with his preexisting full-time job ensuring the safety of OpenAI’s current products. How much serious, forward-looking safety work can we hope for at OpenAI going forward? Probably not much. “The whole point of setting up the superalignment team was that there’s actually different kinds of safety issues that arise if the company is successful in building AGI,” the person with inside knowledge told me. “So, this was a dedicated investment in that future.” Even when the team was functioning at full capacity, that “dedicated investment” was home to a tiny fraction of OpenAI’s researchers and was promised only 20 percent of its computing power — perhaps the most important resource at an AI company. Now, that computing power may be siphoned off to other OpenAI teams, and it’s unclear if there’ll be much focus on avoiding catastrophic risk from future AI models. To be clear, this does not mean the products OpenAI is releasing now — like the new version of ChatGPT, dubbed GPT-4o, which can have a natural-sounding dialogue with users — are going to destroy humanity. But what’s coming down the pike? “It’s important to distinguish between ‘Are they currently building and deploying AI systems that are unsafe?’ versus ‘Are they on track to build and deploy AGI or superintelligence safely?’” the source with inside knowledge said. “I think the answer to the second question is no.” Leike expressed that same concern in his Friday thread on X. He noted that his team had been struggling to get enough computing power to do its work and generally “sailing against the wind.” Most strikingly, Leike said, “I believe much more of our bandwidth should be spent getting ready for the next generations of models, on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety, adversarial robustness, (super)alignment, confidentiality, societal impact, and related topics. These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there.” When one of the world’s leading minds in AI safety says the world’s leading AI company isn’t on the right trajectory, we all have reason to be concerned.

When TikTok therapy is more lucrative than seeing clients

6 h

vox.com

Getty Images Why juggle 25 people a week when you can make 30-second videos instead? Dr. Julie Smith is sitting behind a rainbow of five Post-it notes, each meant to represent one of the “Top Five Signs of High-Functioning Depression.” Said signs will be familiar to anyone who has spent time scrolling through the part of social media devoted to improving one’s mental health: “You do everything the world asks of you, so no one would ever know you feel empty inside,” you don’t find pleasure in the same things anymore, social events are tiring. Perhaps you relate to No. 3: “You find yourself scrolling on social, watching hours of TV, and eating junk food to numb those feelings.” The British psychologist and author is an inescapable presence on TherapyTok, where psychologists, psychiatrists, and licensed therapists — along with a swarm of “coaches” with varying levels of credibility — make short, digestible videos educating the public about how to decode their own brains. She’s amassed a following of 4.7 million not just by distilling mental health into 60-second spoken-word listicles but by using intensely colorful gimmicks to draw in viewers who might otherwise think they’re about to watch an object being crushed in a satisfying way. Before explaining “3 Ways Past Trauma Can Show Up in Your Present” or “5 Signs of a Highly Sensitive Person,” Dr. Julie will use a visual hook — she’ll pour out a bucket of candy, flip over a giant hourglass, or pose next to a tantalizingly tall stack of dominos (like any skilled content creator, she knows not to give us the final knockdown until at least halfway through) to keep you watching. Does it matter that “high-functioning depression” and “highly sensitive person” aren’t actual diagnoses? Maybe. Or maybe not. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dr Julie Smith | Psychologist (@drjulie) That’s because these clips have less in common with actual mental-health treatment than they do with your average “get ready with me” video. At a time when people may be getting fatigued with therapy, it seems like some therapists don’t want to do it anymore, either. Hence the sheer number of them who are spending less time seeing clients and more time producing content in the hopes that millions of people will see it. While most full-time therapists whose rates are set by insurance companies max out at around $100,000 per year, therapists who are full- or part-time content creators can make much, much more. @TherapyJeff, real name Jeff Guenther, an individual and couples therapist in Portland, Oregon, says he can make eight or nine times that amount on social media in the form of brand deals, merch, and direct subscriptions. When I clarify whether he’s making nearly a million dollars, he says, “It’s been an especially good year.” Though he still sees about eight to 10 clients on Mondays and Tuesdays (a full-time therapist would see about 20 to 25 clients a week, he says), Guenther is best known for his straight-talking TikToks about dating and relationships where he’ll refer to his audience as “anxiously attached babes” or “relationship girlies” who are “still in their healing phase but horny AF.” With 2.8 million followers and a dating-advice book coming out this summer, he is perhaps the best example of how to become a therapist influencer by making people feel as though he’s on their side. Therapists have always been influencers, in a way — they may write books, do speaking gigs, or promote products — but in order to get famous on TikTok, they must play by its rules. What works on the app is simple, visually arresting videos that make you feel like they landed in your lap with a kind of cosmic destiny (the comments on these videos often repeat some version of “my For You page really said ‘FOR YOU.’”) Therapists do cute little dances next to cute little graphics about what it’s like to have both ADHD and PMDD; they’ll lip sync to trending songs in videos about how to spot a depressed client who might have made a suicide plan; they’ll hop onto memes as a way to criticize parents who haven’t gone to therapy. The most successful TikTok counselors don’t typically advertise their one-on-one therapy services; instead, they’ll sell products that establish themselves as mental-health experts but have the potential to net influencer-size salaries. Many offer digital courses similar to those of other educational influencers; they’ll promote their books, merchandise, or in the case of Dr. Kojo Sarfo, his comedy tour, where he sometimes asks the audience about their mental health diagnoses. Tracy The Truth Doctor also offers special mental-health coaching to fellow influencers. And then there’s the validating relationship they cultivate with viewers: Guenther has referred to people who call others “too sensitive” as “emotionless turds” and says he wishes he could write “psychologically lethal” texts on behalf of his clients (while acknowledging that this would be considered unprofessional). “I have been accused of being a toxic validator,” he admits. “Like, imagine that your ex-boyfriend is watching my content. Somebody might be coming across, like, a piece of my content that they can use in order to feel better about themselves, even when they should probably actually be doing some work and taking accountability.” But ultimately, who TikTok shows his videos to isn’t in his control. @therapyjeff You’re a relationship girlie but still in your healing phase but horny AF. Listen to my new podcasts: BIG DATING ENERGY & Problem Solved. Pre-order my book today! Join me on the new platform, Passes, for extended commentary on this topic! #therapy #mentalhealth #therapytiktok #datingadvice #relationshiptips #dating ♬ original sound - TherapyJeff Like many therapists on TikTok, Guenther is also extremely forthcoming about his own personal struggles in a way that previous generations of therapists might look down upon. He speaks about going no-contact with his mother, also a therapist, and his experience as the “scapegoat of the family.” (His tips for fellow scapegoats: Wear a T-shirt with the words “Official Family Scapegoat” on it; tell your mother she’s “constantly hijacked by shame” before asking her to pass the potatoes.) Elsewhere, the counselor KC Davis of “Struggle Care” recently confessed to a bout of hyperfixation with romantasy novels so intense it led her to forgo showering and basic care tasks; Therapy Jessa has filmed herself crying, while Courtney Tracy, better known as Courtney the Truth Doctor, makes intimate “get ready with me” videos and speaks about what it’s like to have borderline-personality disorder and autism as a therapist. Despite his gangbusters year as a content creator, Guenther says his career as it stands now isn’t sustainable. Spending so much time on TikTok, he tells me, has affected his own mental health. “It’s exhausting. There’s burnout. It’s a gross place to be,” he says, pointing to the endless demands of the algorithm, hate comments, and the bizarre parasocial relationships that form among audiences who feel that because they watch his content they have direct access to him. “I want to get out of here because Daddy Algorithm is my boss and I get a performance review every single day based on an algorithm that’s mysterious and doesn’t make any sense.” If the content is a little trite, and the therapists don’t enjoy making it, what good is any of it doing? You can make the case that by turning mental health into TikTok engagement bait, influencer-therapists are lowering the stigma of mental illness and encouraging people to seek treatment, or at least to provide a stopgap for those who can’t access direct care. But what it also seems to be is a stopgap for therapists who are burned out by the daily grind of seeing clients one-on-one with little opportunity for career growth, whose salaries are mostly outside their own control. And who can blame them? Even if viewers know watching therapy content isn’t the same thing as actually going to therapy, when a professional therapist comes up on your feed to tell you exactly what you most want to hear at a time when you’re most in need of hearing it — that you are good, that you will be okay, and also here’s a cute little visual hook — you’ll keep watching.

The unionization fight is coming to the South

7 h

vox.com

Volkswagen workers and labor organizers at a United Auto Workers vote watch party on April 19, 2024, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. | Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images Workers at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama are on their last day of voting for a UAW union. Here’s why it matters. It’s been another big week for the UAW. Over 5,000 auto workers at the Mercedes-Benz assembly plant in Vance, Alabama, have been holding their union election vote with the United Auto Workers (UAW); ballots will be counted when voting closes today. It’s the UAW’s second election in their campaign to organize non-union auto workers, with a particular focus on the South — a notoriously difficult region for union drives. They won their first election with Volkswagen workers last month in Tennessee with 73 percent of workers voting to form a union. What makes the UAW’s recent success compelling is that they’re finding big wins at a time when union membership rates in America are at an all-time low. But each union drive is a battle: With our current labor laws, unionizing is not an easy process — particularly when workers are up against anti-union political figures and employers, as is the case at the Alabama Mercedes plant. So if the UAW can win another union election in a region that’s struggled to realize worker power, it could mean more than just another notch in their belt. It could offer lessons on how to reinvigorate the American labor movement. What’s at stake in Vance, Alabama? Unionizing nearly anywhere in the US will require some sort of uphill battle, but this is especially true for the South. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the South had unionization rates below the national average in 2023. Alabama resides within one of those regions, at a union membership rate of 7.5 percent compared to a national rate of 10 percent. This is the result of historical realities (see: slavery and racist Jim Crow laws) that have shaped today’s legislation: Alabama is one of 26 states that have enacted a “right-to-work” law, which allows workers represented by a union to not pay union fees, thus weakening the financial stability and resources of a union to bargain on behalf of their members. Prominent political figures in Alabama have been vocal about their opposition to the UAW, too. Gov. Kay Ivey has called the UAW a “looming threat” and signed a bill that would economically disincentivize companies from voluntarily recognizing a union. Workers say Mercedes hasn’t been welcoming to the union, either. In February, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz US International held a mandatory anti-union meeting (he’s changed roles since then). Back in March, the UAW filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against Mercedes for “aggressive and illegal union-busting.” And according to a recent report from Bloomberg, the US government voiced concerns to Germany, home of Mercedes-Benz’s headquarters, about the alleged union-busting happening at the Alabama plant. The combination of weak federal labor laws, a strong anti-union political presence, and a well-resourced employer can be a lethal combination for union drives and labor activity — and have been in Alabama. Recent examples include the narrow loss to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, the nearly two-year long Warrior Met Coal strike that ended with no improved contract, and even past failed unionization drives at this Mercedes plant. Mercedes is also not the only auto plant in the state. Other foreign car manufacturers like Toyota, Honda, Mazda, and Hyundai also have factories in Alabama, and the UAW plans to unionize them too. What happens at the Mercedes plant in Vance will likely influence what happens at the other auto plants — win or lose. Where’s this momentum coming from — and where is it going? The UAW is in a strong position after a series of wins. First they won their contract battle with Detroit’s Big Three automakers last year. Then they successfully unionized the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in mid-April (the first time a non-union auto plant in the South was unionized in around 80 years). Later that month, they ratified a contract with Daimler Trucks after threatening to strike, securing a wage raise and annual cost-of-living increases among other benefits. Where are these wins coming from? A big part of the momentum comes from Shawn Fain, the president of the UAW. He’s ambitious and a hard-nosed negotiator, isn’t afraid to break from the traditions of UAW’s past, and perhaps most importantly, is also the first leader of the UAW directly elected by members. The direct election came after several high-ranking members of UAW leadership were investigated for corruption in 2017 and were later convicted. Fain was a part of a slate called “Members United” that ran on a “no corruption, no concessions, no tiers” platform, supported by the reform caucus within the UAW. By a slim margin of 483 votes, Fain ousted the incumbent in a run-off election. This new prioritization of democracy in the UAW can even be seen in its campaign to unionize Southern auto workers. In an article from Labor Notes, Mercedes workers at the Vance, Alabama, plant said that past unionization drives with the UAW failed partly because union organizers interfered too much with worker-to-worker organizing. This time, the workers say they are leading the union campaign, while the UAW supports as needed. Today’s election may seem difficult to win, considering the South’s past and present. But the UAW’s recent success shows that difficult is not impossible. Fain and his reform slate taking over the UAW, the historic contracts from striking at the Big Three, and the win in Chattanooga — all of those things seemed impossible a little over a year ago. This week, they might defy the odds again. Even if they don’t, there’s a lesson here for reviving unions in the US: be bold, and let workers lead the way. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Why movies and albums both got so long

7 h

vox.com

Getty Images Records and films are longer, but songs and scenes are shorter. What happened? When Taylor Swift’s new album dropped last month, it was greeted with one almost universal complaint. With the surprise “double album” edition clocking in at 31 tracks and a cool 122 minutes, critics lamented, the whole thing was way too lengthy. “Too long,” said the New Yorker. “Sprawling and often self-indulgent,” said the New York Times. “Its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level,” said Pitchfork. Swift is not alone in being dinged for lack of brevity. Lately, it’s come to seem as though everything, all of pop culture, is too long. Albums. Movies. It all just goes on and on forever, the complaint goes, and we don’t have the time for it. These criticisms are mostly true, with some caveats. Movie lengths on average have plateaued since the introduction of the talkie 60 years ago, but the length of the average top 10 movie is up from two hours in 1993 to 2 hours and 23 minutes in 2023. Albums, meanwhile, have been trending longer for decades, ever since the CD boom of the 1990s put an end to the space constraints of vinyl. That means they’re longer now, albeit not that much longer than they were a few years ago — an average of 80 minutes in 2022 compared to 73 in 2008. It’s normal for critics to worry that formats have been corrupted and that while art was perfectly figured out a little while ago, before our time, it’s now on the verge of ruin. That’s a familiar argument. Yet there’s a particular vehemence to the concern about how long runtimes have gotten that suggests this conversation reflects our fears about all the ways the world is changing. Albums and films used to be shorter because they had to be; the technology they existed on demanded it. With those constraints gone, they exist in a free, wide-open space — and all the rest of us are there too. What, we worry, are we going to do there? How albums got long and songs got short Albums used to be confined to the length of a vinyl record: about 45 minutes, counting both sides. Likewise, songs were about three to four minutes long because that was the length that a radio station was willing to go without an ad break. For your album to go longer than that meant that you were making a statement; you were doing something that could not be contained by the physical limitations of your form. For your single to go longer meant that you were so popular and dominant and high-minded that you could simply dare the radio stations not to play your song. You were the Beatles with The White Album, making a double record. You were Don McLean with “American Pie,” making an eight-minute single and charting at No. 1. You were a very big deal. Then CDs came, and albums started to meander. There’s a limit to how much music you can cram onto a CD, but they’re a lot more expansive than vinyl is, and the new lack of restraints showed. You were free to explore, to be playful, to experiment. Going long didn’t mean you were making some kind of genre-defining statement so much as it meant you were feeling out a way forward in the new world. Pitchfork reports that by the 2000s, at the end of the CD era, the average hip-hop album was 17 tracks and 67 minutes long. As MP3s took over, the physical constraints that kept albums short vanished completely. In their place came new, less obvious constraints. The post-Napster music industry of the 2010s was a winner-take-all economy in which it was vital to chart on Billboard if you wanted a sustainable career. Starting in 2007, Billboard incorporated streams into its ratings process, and artists quickly figured out the best way to chart was to give fans as many songs as possible to stream. The thinking went that the shorter the song, the more times people would stream it. Albums kept getting longer, but songs started to contract, from four minutes and 14 seconds in 2008 to three minutes and 8 seconds in 2022. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which went to No. 1 in 2019, was just one minute and 53 seconds long. These days, platforms like Spotify and TikTok are also putting their mark on the shape of a song. The Washington Post reports that on Spotify, a stream only counts if the listener stays for at least 30 seconds. That means that there are incentives to grab your listener immediately instead of drawing things out with a long intro. Meanwhile, the possibility of your sound going viral on TikTok places more emphasis on a quick, grabby hook. “Shorter intros, sing the chorus upfront, don’t have long, boring bits when not much happens — these are now the keys for success,” concludes the Post. How blockbuster movies got long Movies, too, have been reshaped by their technology, but in different ways than music. Movie length used to be limited to the size of a film reel, which plays about 11 minutes of footage. The standard length of a film is still, to this day, nine reels, or about 90 to 110 minutes long. Even now, when we can shoot movies on digital film and not have to worry about how much it weighs, that average length tends to hold. As a 2023 Slate article by Sam Adams shows, the outliers in film are the ones that perform well at the box office. Movies on average may be more or less the same length they always were, but it’s easy to see how it doesn’t feel that way when you’re trying to sit through Avengers: Endgame (182 minutes), Oppenheimer (180 minutes), or Killers of the Flower Moon (206 minutes). In 1989, The Little Mermaid was 83 minutes long; the 2023 remake was 135 minutes. Adams attributes these new lengths to a combination of digital film and the rise of the multiplex. “There’s no obvious penalty for making a movie that runs a little over,” he writes. “The physical constraints that used to make the exhibition and distribution of longer movies more expensive no longer apply: fewer showtimes on a given day mean fewer tickets, but that’s less of an issue when the movie is playing on multiple screens and you no longer have to factor in the cost of manufacturing and shipping larger and heavier film prints.” The other big factor is the rise of the streaming platforms. Big-time directors now always have the option to jump ship to Netflix and its fellows, where they are promised more creative freedom than ever before. As Vanity Fair reported last year, the time-slashing producers of old are less powerful, and the name-brand directors who can deliver hits for streamers are more so. That means they no longer have to kill their darlings if they don’t want to. More and more often, they don’t. Even as popular movies swell, though, they are being fed to audiences in increasingly bite-sized portions. On TikTok, accounts dedicated to sharing two-minute movie clips have hundreds of thousands of followers. Last fall, in a marketing push for the musical remake, Paramount put the full run of the original Mean Girls on TikTok in 23 separate clips. We worry about whether art is the right length because we’re worried that we don’t know how to pay attention anymore The paradox of it all is that as movies and albums swell, they are shared and sampled in ever smaller chunks. Songs are optimized for Spotify and scenes are optimized for TikTok. Art has somehow become too long and too short at once. The biggest artists and auteurs in this ecosystem are given free rein to be as self-indulgent as they want, the thinking goes, while audiences’ attention spans get even more fragmented. At the root of both these concerns is that technology has degraded the quality of our art and our consumption habits. The concern about what technology has done to our minds can become, in this system, an argument in favor of long albums and films rather than against them. When entertainment is increasingly sliced and diced to the length of a TikTok video, we have all the more reason to luxuriate in a long movie or album. They will focus our attention once again. “Movie theaters are one of the few remaining places where it’s possible, at least under ideal circumstances, to do one thing and one thing only for hours at a time,” wrote Adams in his Slate article. “It’s worth crossing your legs to keep it that way.” Popular art has always been shaped by the technology we use to distribute it; as the saying goes, the medium is the message. As the medium shifts and changes in our new era, we become more anxious and afraid. What if we simply don’t know how to pay attention any longer? How will we experience good art then? What if some artists desperately need editors, while others just need a little bit more of our time? In music, some artists are intentionally adopting shorter and more curated formats as they explore this brave new era, to the point that there are some plausible trend pieces complaining that albums are too short these days. In 2018, Pitchfork reported that the 15 albums that had reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Rap Albums chart by and large hovered around 30 to 40 minutes long. More recently, Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine was 13 tracks and 35 minutes long. In Cosmo UK, the writer Lydia Venn was perturbed by Eternal Sunshine’s comparative brevity, suspecting that studio interference forced Grande to drop her record too early, before she had generated enough material to fill a record. Eventually, though, Venn comes around to the side of the short album. “Eternal Sunshine was written primarily by Ariana, has no skips, and is some of her best work to date,” she concludes. “So maybe shorter albums can be the future if they’re done primarily because of the artists’ own creativity and authenticity, not to suit a label’s own agenda.” To make a short album now becomes an inverse of the Beatles making The White Album. You’re making a statement, bucking the trends. Venn’s argument in favor of Grande’s short album is similar to an argument Adams makes in favor of Scorsese’s decision to make Killers of the Flower Moon 206 minutes long without intermission. “The reason there’s no intermission in Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t because Scorsese wants to try his audience’s patience,” Adams writes. “It’s because the movie concerns a string of brutal, racist murders, and the violence needs to feel both mundane and unrelenting. An intermission is an escape valve, and you shouldn’t be able to escape.” In other words, it’s that long because that’s the length that it’s supposed to be. Or, more simply, it’s that long because that’s the length where it gets good. One of the ambivalences of our moment is that it can be hard to tell when art is long because that’s the length when it gets good, when it’s long because that’s how you make money now, and when it’s long simply because no one said no. We’re in a moment in which the rules around popular art are changing rapidly. There are very few physical constraints left, only the constraints of the marketplace, which fluctuate wildly with every new hit app. Is there a scenario in which we leave this era to enter one in which a work of art is only as long or as short as it has to be? If we ever make it there, will we recognize it when it happens?

The controversy over Harrison Butker’s misogynistic commencement speech, explained

20 h

vox.com

Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs arrives before Super Bowl LVIII at Allegiant Stadium on February 11, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada. | Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images Butker’s address was a textbook case of conservative sexism and homophobia. NFL kicker Harrison Butker is facing widespread backlash after giving a college commencement speech that casually dabbled in misogyny and homophobia. Butker, who has won three Super Bowls with the Kansas City Chiefs in recent years, delivered the address at Benedictine College, a private Catholic institution in Kansas, on May 11. In it, he criticizes everything from women prioritizing professional careers to Pride Month to abortion access. An outspoken conservative who is close with leading right-wing figures including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Butker’s speech closely echoed Republican rhetoric and fixated on issues that have been popular fodder for conservatives as they try to mobilize their voters ahead of the 2024 election. “I think it is you, the women who have had the most diabolical lies told to you,” Butker said in his speech. “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.” The Chiefs have not commented on Butker’s remarks and the NFL league office distanced itself from them. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger,” Jonathan Beane, the NFL’s senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, told People. Butker’s speech advances the same agenda that the GOP has been pushing not only in its rhetoric but through policy. At least 21 Republican-led state legislatures have approved laws that ban or restrict abortion access and at least 20 have approved bills that curb access to gender-affirming care for minors. Butker’s remarks — which emphasized people “staying in [their] lane” — are the latest attempt to weaponize religion to achieve the same goals. The backlash to Butker’s speech, explained Butker joined the NFL in 2017, and is considered by some analysts to be one of the best kickers in the league. In recent years, he’s also been vocal about his support for conservative causes. On his Instagram page, Butker is pictured alongside Sen. Hawley, a darling of the religious right. He was previously photographed with Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a white couple that pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. And during the Chiefs’ visit to the White House in 2023, he wore a tie expressing his opposition to abortion rights. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Harrison Butker (@buttkicker7) The Chiefs have been in the cultural spotlight not only for their on-field success but also thanks to tight end Travis Kelce’s relationship with pop star Taylor Swift. Butker referenced a Swift song lyric in his 20-minute speech and described Swift, a music mogul who is one of the most famous people on the planet as “my teammate’s girlfriend.” (For the curious, Butker cited the Swift lyric, “familiarity breeds contempt” in order to criticize priests who rely too much on parishioners for adulation and support.) In the rest of his remarks, Butker covered many of conservatives’ favorite culture war issues: from the idea that people get “silenced” for expressing unpopular opinions to the belief that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are oppressive. Below are some of the lowlights: On women’s careers: One of the sections getting the most attention is Butker’s comments about the importance of women’s roles in the home. Singling out the women in the audience, he argued that they’re likely more eager to become wives and mothers than to have successful careers. “I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother,” he said. In addition to speaking on women’s behalf, Butker also reduced the primary goal of their lives to one biological function. Being a homemaker is an important role that should be celebrated, but it’s far from the only one a woman can choose — a key reason his remarks spurred such backlash. Butker also described women’s roles very differently than he described men’s: While he touted the virtues of being a present father, he did not say that being a dad was likely the primary goal of a man’s life. On LGBTQ rights: Butker also criticized “dangerous gender ideologies” that politicians are pushing onto the “youth of America,” an oblique critique of trans rights. He lambasted LGBTQ rights more broadly, too, describing them as “the deadly sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it.” Such comments are dangerous at a time when LGBTQ people are more likely to be victims of violence, which some experts attribute to the right’s dehumanizing rhetoric. On abortion rights: Butker also decried abortion access, birth control, and IVF as violations of Catholic teachings and practices that members of the Church should abstain from. “Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for the degenerate cultural values and media all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder,” he said. He criticized President Biden directly for claiming to be both a Catholic and a supporter of abortion rights. “Our own nation is led by a man who publicly and proudly proclaims his Catholic faith, but at the same time is delusional enough to make the sign of the cross during a pro-abortion rally,” Butker said. “He has been so vocal in his support for the murder of innocent babies that I’m sure to many people it appears that you can be both Catholic and pro-choice.” Butker’s statement explicitly argues that there’s a correct way to be Catholic, even though in reality, most Catholics are supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights. “Harrison Butker got a lot wrong in his commencement speech, but one thing he did get right is that Joe Biden and pro-choice Catholics are not alone — 63% of Catholics support legal abortion,” Catholics for Choice, a Catholic group that backs abortion rights, said in a statement on X. Fifty-seven percent of Catholics in the US also favor same-sex marriage, according to a Pew poll. Since the speech, more than 100,000 people have signed a petition calling on the Chiefs to release Butker. “These dehumanizing remarks against LGBTQ+ individuals, attacks on abortion rights and racial discrimination perpetuate division and undermine human rights,” the petition reads. Taylor Swift fans dubbed him “the smallest man who ever lived,” and a recent video by the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers featured a Sims avatar of Butker working in the kitchen. Although a video of the speech at Benedictine College showed many audience members giving Butker a standing ovation, an AP report found that reviews among students were mixed. “To point this out specifically that that’s what we’re looking forward to in life seems like our four years of hard work wasn’t really important,” student Kassidy Neuner said regarding Butker’s statements about women anticipating being a wife and a mother. Butker’s speech is part of broader conservative pushback to LGBTQ and women’s rights Butker’s remarks drew from the playbook used by the religious right to rail against recent advances in LGBTQ rights while promoting traditional roles for men and women. Conservative US Evangelicals and Catholics have been at the center of global efforts to spread anti-LGBTQ ideas, the Guardian reported. In some of its most extreme forms, white supremacists and Christian nationalists like Nick Fuentes have even argued against women’s ability to work and vote. Such statements are driven by concerns about the growing political power of these groups, a worry that also previously fueled bizarre GOP conspiracy theories about Swift and her presence at Chiefs’ football games earlier this year. Butker’s speech and forceful embrace of these ideas have also underscored which professional football players are allowed to be political without repercussions and which are not. Colin Kaepernick, for example, settled with the NFL in 2019, after accusing teams of blackballing him for kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police violence against Black Americans. The Chiefs kicker’s outspoken conservative views, meanwhile, have drawn public criticism — but no consequences from his employers.

Raw milk is more dangerous than ever. So why are sales surging?

23 h

vox.com

A man processes milk fresh from a cow on a dairy farm. | Universal Images Group via Getty It has everything to do with Americans’ distrust in government. Early this spring, not long after federal agencies identified a strain of bird flu spreading among cow herds in Texas and eight other states, warnings began to emerge from US government agencies: Don’t drink raw milk. Raw milk, which hasn’t been through the pasteurization process, has always enjoyed some renegade popularity among certain corners of the US population. Most recently, wellness influencers have evangelized about its purported benefits, despite the health risks. In April, science emerged suggesting H5N1 viral concentrations were extraordinarily high in the udders of infected cows, raising concerns that their milk could cause infections in humans. Many health experts breathed a sigh of relief when studies showed the virus is killed in milk that’s been pasteurized — that is, heated to kill invisible microbial pathogens. Here’s the wild part: According to a recent report from the Associated Press, in the time since these announcements were made, weekly raw milk sales have gone up, not down — an increase of 65 percent compared to the same period last year. “It defies logic,” says Nicole Martin, a food scientist and the associate director of the Milk Quality Improvement Program at Cornell University. Does the uptick represent increased consumption among people who already drink raw milk or new interest from people now hearing about it for the first time? It’s not entirely clear, but according to a raw milk farm owner quoted in the AP story, “Anything that the FDA tells our customers to do, they do the opposite.” Pasteurization has been making the world’s milk supply dramatically safer since the late 1800s, and for just as long, a portion of milk drinkers have been rejecting that technology. Still, now is an especially important time to be aware of the risks of raw milk. It’s also an opportunity to better understand why people make certain choices even — or especially — when public health experts recommend against them. Raw milk has never been safe, but it might be especially risky right now For centuries, milk contamination was a leading cause of life-threatening diseases, accounting for dire diarrheal illness in young children and infections in people of all ages like tuberculosis, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, and diphtheria. In the 1860s, Louis Pasteur found that heating a liquid to a certain temperature killed any bacterial contaminants. He initially proved the concept using wine; it wasn’t long before the process was applied to milk. As milk production became more industrialized, pasteurization became more common, especially at larger commercial dairies. However, there was pushback from the outset: Some people complained pasteurized milk lacked flavor, and even government safety officials contended it was not as nutritious as raw milk. Although milk pasteurization became the law of the land with the 1924 federal Standard Milk Ordinance, raw milk consumption persisted, often extralegally — and with it, persistent outbreaks of infection. It’s now legal to sell raw milk for human consumption in many states. Although outbreaks of associated infections are more than three times as common in states that permit the practice, state legislatures are increasingly interested in passing laws that ease consumer access to raw milk products. There are lots of different ways germs can get into raw milk between cow and carton: They can sneak in via infected cow udders; flecks of soil, dirty water, or cow manure in a dairy farm environment; or milking equipment that’s been in contact with any or all of the above. Between 2000 and 2019, studies showed disease-causing bacteria were present, on average, in 3.6 to 6 percent of raw milk sampled as a matter of routine (in other words, these samples weren’t obtained to determine whether the milk had caused people to get sick). According to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, there were 202 disease outbreaks in the US due to drinking raw milk between 1998 and 2018, leading to 2,645 illnesses, 228 hospitalizations, and three deaths. In 2017, nearly 5 percent of Americans were thought to consume unpasteurized milk products, including raw cheese, and raw dairy products led to 840 times more illnesses than pasteurized products. Drinking raw milk can cause a variety of different infections. Most include the classic gastroenteritis symptoms of diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal cramping, and some are more likely to progress to more severe syndromes including muscle weakness or paralysis, kidney failure, and bloodstream infections. With these and many other raw milk-related infections, those at highest risk for bad outcomes are children, the elderly, and immunocompromised people. There’s no evidence yet that any humans have gotten infected with the latest strain of H5N1 as a result of drinking unpasteurized milk; the only human infection confirmed to date is in a dairy worker, who was likely infected by a splash of milk in his eye. However, during the recent outbreak, more than half of the domestic cats fed raw milk from cows on an affected farm died with flu-like symptoms, and the two who were autopsied showed signs of severe H5N1 infection. That raises concern that something similar could happen to humans. Although experts are of course worried about individual illnesses, they’re also worried about the population-wide effects of lots of H5N1 infections. Bird flu, like all influenza viruses, is notorious for its mutation abilities, which is why it’s so good at adapting to spread among different species. Every human infection is an opportunity for the virus to effectively throw a bunch of genetic mutations at the wall and see what sticks — that is, which mutations might make it spread easily among humans, potentially leading to another pandemic (although experts say we’re not there yet). Many claims about raw milk aren’t rooted in science — but not all are false Raw milk aficionados — including wellness milkfluencers who have been promoting its benefits on social media for the last several years — cite a range of reasons for preferring raw milk. The nutritional value of pasteurized milk isn’t meaningfully different from that of raw milk, as some claim without evidence. Heating milk to a high temperature for a short time — as most American pasteurization processes do — yields a minor decrease in some vitamins native to milk, says Martin. However, these vitamins, like vitamin C, aren’t ones milk is typically considered a good source of anyway. The FDA has a webpage dedicated to correcting all sorts of rumors about raw milk, like that it’s a good source of probiotics (it’s not) and that it cures lactose intolerance (it doesn’t). Still, people often repeat these misconceptions about the product on TikTok and Instagram. One difference between raw and unpasteurized milk that Martin acknowledges is real: Raw milk often has a higher fat percentage and a more distinct flavor than pasteurized milk, which can appeal to consumers. The flavor difference is largely attributable not to raw milk’s rawness, she says, but to the fact it’s from cows at one farm eating grass from one pasture rather than being pooled from cows from many farms eating different types of feed. Different diets create unique flavors in raw milk that some consumers really like. However, it’s possible to get pasteurized milk with local character from smaller, family-owned dairies that pasteurize milk from grass-fed cows who live on a single farm. Interest in raw milk may be less about milk and more about trust One of the most important reasons people may be drawn to drinking raw milk: They’re often buying it from a farmer they know and trust, says Martin, far removed from the big, industrial system that makes the processed food in most supermarkets, including pasteurized milk. They don’t trust that massive, largely invisible industrial system, and they have good reasons not to. What people see on a farm may give them a lot of confidence in its products. “People will say something along the lines of, ‘I know the farmer. I know how passionate he is. I know how much work he puts into it. I’ve seen the cows — they’re spotless,’” Martin says. Unfortunately, she adds, looks can be deceiving when it comes to ruminant biology. Immaculate cows can still transfer pathogenic bacteria into raw milk. Raw milk preferences may also stem from government distrust, says David Acheson, an infectious disease doctor and consultant who has led food safety efforts at the FDA. The Food and Drug Administration closely scrutinizes milk, he says, which is more of a negative than a positive for people suspicious of government authority. Government distrust is at a high point right now, says Acheson: “The way the government handled Covid tipped a lot of people against” having confidence in authorities. Statements decrying raw milk as unsafe remind people of the way experts arbitrarily arrived at a recommendation to distance six feet from others, closed beaches, and told people to wear masks even outdoors — all on the basis of shaky or no science, he says. Although the science on raw milk is much stronger than Covid-19 prevention science was, especially at the outset of the pandemic, “people put it all in the same bucket.” Raw milk’s appearance at the nexus of industrialized agriculture and wellness space creates opportunities for unexpected kinship. Its advocates come from all sides of the political and ideological spectrum and many different parts of American society. Acheson also wonders if some of the increase in raw milk consumption is coming from people newly raw milk-curious amid the furor of recent news coverage. Its proponents simply have savvier marketing than pasteurization advocates, he says. I can personally testify that a search for raw milk information online yields a distinct choice between pasty government websites and colorful, interactive sites created by raw milk groups. The difference is even more stark on social media, where hashtags favoring pasteurization lead to images of science projects, and those encouraging raw milk consumption lead to images of hot people with visible abs. It’s not just merchandising: Public health authorities haven’t figured out how to communicate with a skeptical public in a way that elicits trust rather than suspicion, opposition, and defiance, says Katelyn Jetelina, a San Diego-based epidemiologist who authors the popular Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter. “The trickle-down approach that we’ve always used,” says Jetelina, where health authorities communicate through official channels and expect the public to listen — “it’s just not effective.” Instead, Jetelina thinks public health experts should be equipping trusted messengers to educate the populations who already go to them for health information. That means the most effective evidence-based food safety messaging should perhaps be coming not from government agencies but from physicians and emergency medical technicians, she says — “and your fitness bros.”

Teletherapy can really help, and really hurt

23 h

vox.com

Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images From privacy breaches to bad providers, teletherapy services often come with a hidden cost. The US has a therapist shortage. Even if you can find one, good luck snagging an appointment with a therapist who is affordable or covered by your insurance. That’s where online therapy platforms like BetterHelp come in. Even if you’re not a user, you’ve almost certainly heard of them. For years, BetterHelp blanketed the online world with advertisements and enlisted an army of podcasters, influencers, and creators to produce sponsored content that promotes their service as a solution. According to podcast analytics firm Magellan AI, BetterHelp spent an estimated $24.6 million on podcast ads in the first quarter of 2024, more than any other company in the audio space. These ads, sometimes personal and direct to camera, sometimes funny, and always earnest, have turned BetterHelp into probably the most recognizable sponsor of stuff people listen to on the internet. (Disclosure: BetterHelp advertises on several Vox Media podcasts.) But the efficiency behind BetterHelp’s infinite expansion, it seems, can come at a cost to patients, as about 800,000 current or former clients are learning this week. In 2023, the FTC said that BetterHelp shared the sensitive data it collected on its users with advertisers, seemingly without their consent, or with provisions in place to limit how that data was then used. According to the AP, BetterHelp has said it was simply adhering to practices that were “standard for the industry.” BetterHelp and the FTC eventually reached a settlement, and now anyone who signed up for BetterHelp between August 1, 2017, and December 31, 2020, is being notified of their eligibility for a refund. In a recent statement, BetterHelp said that the settlement was “not an admission of wrongdoing,” and clarified that the company did not share the “private information” of its members, such as their names or clinical data from sessions, with third parties. There’s a lesson here about combining the optimization and efficiency tactics of any tech startup in order to provide something as vital and as sensitive as mental health care to people who may be in crisis. When these strategies intersect with a field that requires expertise and treats people in vulnerable moments, something’s almost bound to go awry. If you’ve been paying attention to the race to optimize therapy with technology, this is a lesson you’ve seen taught before. Mental health care goes remote The start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 caused an abrupt shift in therapy access. Regulations and insurance policies restricting the feasibility of teletherapy were loosened. Some therapists and patients found that meeting online worked better for them. As Brian Resnick wrote for Vox at the time, the onset of the pandemic was a “much-needed kick forward into the 21st century” for mental health care. For those seeking therapy, though, the new ease of finding virtual care meant sorting through waves of targeted ads on social media from companies that might not prioritize the quality of care over growing their businesses. Cerebral, founded in early 2020, enticed patients with easy, subscription-based access to virtual psychiatric treatment, including prescriptions for medication treating ADHD. But mental health professionals and patients raised worrying questions about the quality of that treatment. Underpaid providers were, according to Bloomberg, pressured to meet the expectations of patients who signed up for the service after seeing ads on social media promising quick and seamless access to medications. These concerns led to investigations. The New York attorney general’s office fined Cerebral $740,000 over its “burdensome” cancellation policies and for manipulating online reviews. Cerebral, like BetterHelp, also recently settled with the FTC, which has accused the company of disclosing sensitive user data for advertising purposes, misleading customers over its cancellation policies, and of violating the Opioid Addiction Recovery Fraud Prevention Act. As a result of the settlement, Cerebral has agreed to pay more than $7 million. The experience of being a patient through services like these will vary. Plenty of people who sign up for teletherapy through services like BetterHelp will have their needs met. I currently use a telehealth service provided by my insurance that matched me with a local practitioner in order to access medication, and I’m happy with it. But during a more acute mental health crisis in 2021, I signed up for another teletherapy and medication platform that I’d seen advertised. While it was indeed easy for me to gain access to treatments for my anxiety, I ended up dropping my practitioner, and the service, months later after she missed an emergency appointment I’d made, and then spent the majority of the make-up appointment venting to me about a personal crisis in her life. When things go wrong Mistakes happen, but when services in something as vital as mental health go wrong, people get hurt. I still think a lot about a 2022 story in the Wall Street Journal, which detailed what this can look like. Caleb Hill, a young adult who had been kicked out of his family home after coming out as gay, signed up for BetterHelp, requesting a therapist who specializes in LGBTQ+ issues. He was instead matched with a therapist whose private practice offers Christian counseling, and who told Hill that “either you sacrifice your family or you sacrifice being gay,” Hill told the paper. A former BetterHelp employee told the Journal that part of the issue was how the company’s focus on growth leads to a minimal training and oversight process for their therapists: “I felt they were treated like Uber drivers,” Sonya Bruner, BetterHelp’s first clinical director and later a consultant to the company, told the Journal. “There are a lot of good counselors on there,” she said, “but you also find counselors who aren’t, who do the minimum. They don’t get paid a lot, so they’ll phone it in.” I’ve thought a lot about the roles that technology can and can’t play in increasing access to mental health care like therapy. I’ve tried whenever possible to keep an open mind. I can see, for example, that there’s a pretty compelling argument to be made that, deployed ethically, chatbots and other implementations of AI can help improve patient access and results when seeking mental health care. Even at their best, though, these tools and services are basically patches in an expensive system that creates its own barriers to care. And when technological solutions to mental health access do go wrong, the cost is steep: private, sensitive data is sacrificed to feed growth. And people, often in vulnerable situations, get hurt.

The Supreme Court decides not to trigger a second Great Depression

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Justice Clarence Thomas takes an unexpected face turn in CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Two justices dissent. The Supreme Court delivered a firm and unambiguous rebuke to some of America’s most reckless judges on Thursday, ruling those judges were wrong to declare an entire federal agency unconstitutional in a decision that threatened to trigger a second Great Depression. In a sensible world, no judge would have taken the plaintiffs arguments in CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association seriously. Briefly, they claimed that the Constitution limits Congress’s ability to enact “perpetual funding,” meaning that the legislation funding a particular federal program does not sunset after a certain period of time. The implications of this entirely made-up theory of the Constitution are breathtaking. As Justice Elena Kagan points out in a concurring opinion in the CFPB case, “spending that does not require periodic appropriations (whether annual or longer) accounted for nearly two-thirds of the federal budget” — and that includes popular programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Nevertheless, a panel of three Trump judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — a court dominated by reactionaries who often hand down decisions that offend even the current, very conservative Supreme Court — bought the CFPB plaintiffs’ novel theory and used it to declare the entire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional. In fairness, the Fifth Circuit’s decision would not have invalidated Social Security or Medicare, but that’s because the Fifth Circuit made up some novel limits to contain its unprecedented interpretation of the Constitution. And the Fifth Circuit’s attack on the CFPB still would have had catastrophic consequences for the global economy had it actually been affirmed by the justices. That’s because the CFPB doesn’t just regulate the banking industry. It also instructs banks on how they can comply with federal lending laws without risking legal sanction — establishing “safe harbor” practices that allow banks to avoid liability so long as they comply with them. As a brief filed by the banking industry explains, without these safe harbors, the industry would not know how to lawfully issue loans — and if banks don’t know how to issue loans, the mortgage market could dry up overnight. Moreover, because home building, home sales, and other industries that depend on the mortgage market make up about 17 percent of the US economy, a decision invalidating the CFPB could trigger economic devastation unheard of since the Great Depression. Thankfully, that won’t happen. Seven justices joined a majority opinion in CFPB which rejects the Fifth Circuit’s attack on the United States economy, and restates the longstanding rule governing congressional appropriations. Congress may enact any law funding a federal institution or program, so long as that law “authorizes expenditures from a specified source of public money for designated purposes.” The law funding the CFPB clears this very low bar and is therefore constitutional. Notably, the Supreme Court’s CFPB decision was authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, who is ordinarily the Court’s most conservative member. The fact that even Thomas delivered such an unambiguous rebuke to the Fifth Circuit is a sign of just how far the lower court went off the rails in its decision. Two justices did dissent: Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s most reliable GOP partisan, and Justice Neil Gorsuch, who also dissented in a similar case that could have triggered an economic depression if Gorsuch’s view had prevailed. Alito’s dissenting opinion is difficult to parse, but it largely argues that the CFPB is unconstitutional because Congress used an unusual mechanism to fund it. Among other things, the CFPB’s funds first pass through a different federal agency, the Federal Reserve, before it lands in the CFPB’s banking account. But, as seven justices correctly conclude, the fact that CFPB’s funding mechanism is unusual does not make it unconstitutional, and judges are not supposed to simply make up new constitutional restrictions on Congress because they think that Congress acted in a way that is novel or unwise.

What young voters actually care about

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Young people pass a voting information sign on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in October 2022. | Elijah Nouvelage/AFP It’s not what you think. Long before the Israel-Hamas war broke out, young Americans were already souring on President Joe Biden. That discontent has only picked up in the last few months — registering in polls as increased support for Donald Trump and third-party candidates, and defections from the president, but not necessarily from his party. The reasons for why this is happening have become one of the defining questions of the 2024 election so far. But what if this horse race is missing the point? A new poll of young voters shared exclusively with Vox provides an important corrective: Young voters aren’t all that mystical; they’re a lot like the average American, concerned first and foremost with the state of the economy. “People tend to have a skewed perception of what young voters prioritize,” Evan Roth Smith, the lead pollster for the Democratic-aligned public opinion research group Blueprint, which conducted this polling, told me. “A large part of that is because there are ways politically that young voters are very different and very distinct in what they care about. But the places that they’re different shouldn’t be confused with the places that they care the most about.” This tracks with what my election reporting has turned up this year: Economic and affordability issues are far and away the top concern for all young voters in Blueprint’s latest poll. Progressive priorities, like climate change, student loans, and even the Israel-Palestine conflict, rank far below kitchen table issues. Notably, the poll does not ask about a match-up between Biden and Trump, or about 2024 vote preferences. Those horse-race topics are the primary way that public debates and the discourse around young voters have been conducted this year, leading to foundational and epistemic questions over how much we can trust polling and whether we’re reading too much into the crosstabs or methodology of polls. So what does this poll tell us? A lot. Here are the top four takeaways. It’s the economy — and health care Blueprint surveyed 943 registered voters between the ages of 18 and 30, recruited from an online panel from April 27 to April 29. The margin of error is 5.8 percentage points. Those participants were asked how important a variety of issues were to them, and able to choose multiple priorities. Across every kind of young voter asked — Democratic, independent, or Republican; Black or Latino or white; college-educated or not — some variation of an economic concern was a top electoral issue. As a whole, inflation and the economy were the most frequently prioritized issues, chosen by 73 percent and 70 percent of young voters, respectively. Health care was the only rival issue — cited frequently by Democrats, Black and white voters, women, and those making more than $75,000 a year — and chosen 71 percent of the time by all young voters as a top priority. The top priority for young voters is also the one where they trust Biden least When young people talk about the economy, they overwhelmingly mean lowering prices on food, gas, and services — not creating more jobs, lowering interest rates, or even earning higher wages (though that’s the second most important thing). That dynamic is nearly the inverse of the way the president has been talking about his economic record and about his plans for a second term. For most of his presidency and the campaign so far, he’s primarily talked about wage growth, cutting junk fees, and the historically low unemployment rate. And young voters see this: there’s a 37-point gap between how much they want Biden to prioritize lowering prices, and how much they think he is. Trump, meanwhile, is seen as focusing on prices. And this is the crucial conclusion: Trump is trusted more than Biden on the single most important issue: 52 percent say they trust Trump over Biden to reduce prices. “Young voters trust Joe Biden more than Donald Trump on just about everything — except lowering prices. That’s a real problem,” Roth Smith told me. “If your only bright spot is the one that matters, that’s something that worries me, as a Democrat.” The issues we associate with young voters aren’t very salient When talking about young voters today, it seems like most politicians and the journalists covering the nation seem to default to a handful of progressive priorities: climate change, student loan cancellation, identity politics, and the war in Gaza. But at least according to this poll, those don’t tend to be the issues that young voters are prioritizing the most. Among the lowest-priority issues in this survey are LGBTQ issues, student loans (both chosen 38 percent of the time), while climate change, Israel and Palestine, democracy, and race relations were chosen just about half the time. And they don’t necessarily want Biden to make a major change on some of these topics. A good chunk of young voters actually say that Biden is closer to their views on student loans (43 percent say this), and about 42 percent of independent voters say Biden is close to their views on abortion, student loans, and immigration and the border. Which leads us to… Young voters are idiosyncratic; they aren’t the progressive saviors some people want them to be As I’ve written before, the youth aren’t necessarily going to save us. “At a moment when people are sitting at home, watching campus protests or climate protests, and go ‘Wow, this new generation has totally different priorities,’ really, when you start to survey everyone, you find out that the kids are just like us,” Roth Smith said. They are almost an even ideological mix of moderate, liberal, and conservative — something many other surveys have found — but many still think Trump is not moderate enough. For example, while about half of young voters see Biden as liberal, 74 percent say that Trump is conservative. They are more divided over how much more liberal or more conservative Biden should become; 37 percent would prefer he move to the left, 31 percent would prefer he move to the right, and 32 percent prefer he stay where he is. “The difference for Trump is just about everyone who wants him to move wants him to move left,” Roth Smith said. While 39 percent want him to stay where he is, 45 percent want him to be less conservative. It’s possible to draw out one more conclusion from this state of play: though young voters are upset, these conditions and feelings about Trump don’t seem to point toward a massive shift of young Americans toward Trump. They do point to plenty of problems: the top concern for a second Biden term is that he would be too old to do the job, followed by continued price increases, and being too pro-Israel. The top Trump concerns are more personal: that he would cut funding for Social Security and Medicare and cut taxes for the rich but not the working and middle class. All this suggests there are plenty of opportunities for Biden to shore up his support, for his campaign to improve its messaging and targeting of voters, and for direct attacks on Trump that go beyond “Dobbs and Democracy.” But it would be a mistake to assume that young voters are drastically different creatures. We’re essentially normies. We’re just young. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Back to Black is the worst of bad musical biopics

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Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse in the 2024 film “Back to Black.” | Courtesy of Focus Features Thanks to this new movie about Amy Winehouse, the bar for movies about musicians remains in hell. Since the first stills of actress Marisa Abela sporting winged eyeliner and a matted beehive emerged online, the new Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black has been met with mockery, if not total dread, from fans of the late British singer. It wasn’t just that Abela bears little resemblance to Winehouse, dressed in what looks like a last-minute Halloween costume. Given the amount of shoddy musical biopics that are being released ad nauseam, it seemed like an inadequate medium to explore the musician, who died of alcohol poisoning at 27 in 2011. Since its initial release in the UK, several critics have already affirmed these hesitations. Making a biopic is always a delicate art form. By nature, these films are primed to be over-dissected and picked apart for historical inaccuracies, flawed impressions, and limited perspectives. In the case of Back to Black, though, the depiction of Winehouse rings both false and strikingly convenient for the people who were involved in her life. As Jason P. Frank and Rebecca Alter write in Vulture, the film spends too much time “trying to reclaim her as wholesome,” against the tabloids’ vilifying coverage. More significantly though, it fails to address the ways the UK’s sexist media and the people around her contributed to her demise. As a result, director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh end up placing most of the responsibility for Winehouse’s downfall on her fragile shoulders. Needless to say, any attempt to dramatize Amy Winehouse’s life was going to generate polarizing opinions. But Back to Black, along with a recent slew of biopics, makes one curious as to what extent viewers must suspend their expectations and fan knowledge to enjoy a film based on true events. Biopics can never fully encapsulate a person’s life. But Back to Black is an attempt to erase history. Courtesy of Focus Features Marisa Abela singing as Amy Winehouse in the 2024 film “Back to Black.” Winehouse’s career — hampered by addiction and bulimia — is hardly the stuff of a crowd-pleasing popcorn movie. Her story never stood a chance within the confines of the genre. Biopics, particularly from major studios, have to shrink a person’s life into a palatable enough story that will attract the largest audience and generate the most money possible. Even with its R rating and a melodramatic flair, Back to Black is shockingly sanitized, neglecting to capture just how ugly and violent her experience actually was. In Back to Black, Winehouse is strangely isolated from the media blitz that surrounded her life. Beginning with her early songwriting days as a teen, the script remains focused on the intimate familial and romantic dynamics that would make the biggest impact on her as an artist — specifically, her relationships with her grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville), her father Mitch (Eddie Marsan), and, most of all, her ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil, who would serve as the muse for her hit album, Back to Black. Somehow, her most notable musical collaborators, Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, are merely footnotes in this story. The movie isn’t really interested in Winehouse’s creative process or inspiration either, aside from name-dropping some of her favorite soul artists. Even at the height of her visibility, Winehouse spends almost all of the movie in London, specifically Camden Town, visiting loved ones, performing for small crowds in pubs, and stumbling drunkenly through the street. Aside from a notably disastrous performance at the Glastonbury Festival, you wouldn’t know that Winehouse performed shows and made public appearances outside of the UK and had many friends, including other British celebrities and musicians. Needless to say, zooming out and portraying Winehouse as a public person would require addressing the intrusive, predatory treatment she faced from the media. At the height of her insobriety — which spawned multiple drunken live performances, arrests, and paparazzi photos of her looking bloodied and disheveled or openly doing drugs — she became not just a punchline, but practically a meal ticket for journalists and paparazzi. Tabloids mocked her body without any consideration of what appeared to be an eating disorder. Meanwhile, other outlets and comedians counted down her remaining days alive. Even after her death, she continued to be a punchline. Controversially, actor Neil Patrick Harris hosted a Halloween party a few months after her death with a meat platter labeled with her name and resembling a rotting corpse. In Back to Black, though, moments of Winehouse being chased by paparazzi or publicly mocked are fleeting, or else noticeably absent from the storyline. Audio of comedian George Lopez announcing her Grammy nominations in 2008 is played in the film but cuts out before he makes a joke about her addiction struggles to the audience’s chuckles. Additionally, her rare encounters with the paparazzi in the film don’t totally represent what an invasive presence they were in her life, particularly as she began to publicly spiral. In fact, the most devastating interaction she has with the press is at the end of the film when a paparazzo provokes the recently sober singer by asking about Fielder-Civil’s newborn child with his new girlfriend. The movie is rather ham-fisted in conveying Winehouse’s unfulfilled desires to be a mother, as if it’s a compelling sign of virtue for the troubled singer. That said, she immediately becomes heartbroken at the mere mention of her ex’s offspring — so much so that the film frames the moment as the cause of her relapse, prompting her death. The men in Winehouse’s life are strangely given a pass. Another problem comes along in the film with the inaccurate portrayal of the men who had the biggest impact on Winehouse’s life — her father, Mitch, and her ex-husband, Fielder-Civil. After more than a decade of tasteless interviews and attempts to profit off Winehouse’s memory, it’s hard to view either of these men in a favorable light. Still, the movie positions them as collateral damage in Winehouse’s path of destruction. As Back to Black tells it, these men were simply trying to oblige her irrational needs, not purposely enable them. Not only do these characterizations feel funky to anyone who’s familiar with their public antics — for example, Fielder-Civil has been accused of selling details of his and Winehouse’s love story to the tabloids — their soft depictions, in comparison to hers, feel like an extension of the same sexism she experienced in the press. For instance, Winehouse’s relationship with Fielder-Civil in the film lacks some much-needed nuance regarding the troubling amount of power he held over her life. While Fielder-Civil has a large presence in the film, his contribution to her ruin — he admitted that he introduced her to heroin, crack cocaine, and self-harming — and the ways he seemed to prey on her weakness are glaringly understated. For the most part, he’s framed as an earnest and charming bad boy who dabbles in hard substances, which Winehouse just happened to fall into alongside him. Furthermore, as Little White Lies writer Rogan Graham notes, it’s questionable that Taylor-Johnson “goes out of her way to depict Amy’s first time trying hard drugs as an occasion when she’s alone.” These characterizations feel funky to anyone who’s familiar with their public antics Back to Black doesn’t have much to say about the role of her father in Winehouse’s downfall either. Despite Mitch walking out on her family as a child, Amy shared a strong bond with her father, which she commemorated with a “Daddy’s Girl” tattoo on her left arm. In the film, he’s portrayed as the biggest advocate of her singing career, protective against the other men in her life and excessively doting. While he may have been these things at certain points in her life, the 2015 documentary Amy illustrates a more complicated portrait of their relationship. In the Oscar-winning film, directed by Asif Kapadia, Winehouse’s friends recount her father rebuffing their pleas to send Winehouse to rehab. (This moment isn’t portrayed with much reflection in Back to Black, rather just an anecdote leading up to her hit single “Rehab.”) Amy also revisits the time Mitch bombarded his daughter with a camera crew while in St. Lucia, where she fled from the public eye after getting sober in 2008. The footage was for a 2010 Channel 4 documentary called My Daughter Amy, where he, in part, expressed his own frustrations and regrets in dealing with his daughter’s addiction. After the film aired, Winehouse tweeted that the documentary was “embarrassing.” Considering that Winehouse’s family didn’t authorize or have any say in Back to Black, according to Taylor-Johnson — although, they have endorsed it — it’s even more shameful that the film spares him from any sort of skepticism regarding the way he maneuvered in his daughter’s life. Instead, perfunctory scenes of Mitch inquiring about her weight and rushing her to a rehab facility (after he initially said no) feel like concerted PR. Will musical biopics ever make us happy? With all of its missteps and murky intentions, Back to Black might just be the tipping point in a prevalent conversation about the function of musical biopics and what we should demand from them. As early as 1946, when Cary Grant played legendary composer Cole Porter in Night and Day, musical biopics have been a huge profit generator for both the film and music industries. Following the Oscar-winning and box-office-breaking success of the 2018 Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, Hollywood — and musical artists looking to hike up their streaming numbers — have co-signed a sudden stream of lackluster or, in the case of Back to Black, utterly egregious biopics. In the past five years alone, movies offering conservative portrayals of Bob Marley, Elton John, Judy Garland, Whitney Houston, and Aretha Franklin have left much to be desired. As with comic-book movies as of late, it’s hard to engage with these films as much more than cash grabs coming down Hollywood’s IP conveyor belt. This barrage of big-studio biopics is emblematic of a formula that’s proven to be commercially successful and easy to replicate. The expected melodramatic flourishes and rousing moments that make up these movies have become so obvious that they’ve inspired a subgenre of biopic parodies, like This Is Spinal Tap, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping. When the projects transcend their conventions, they’re often the experimental work of arthouse directors, like Todd Haynes, who telegraphed Karen Capenter’s anorexia with Barbie dolls in The Karen Carpenter Story: Superstar and portrayed Bob Dylan with multiple actors in I’m Not There. (There’s also his equally good fake rock biopic, Velvet Goldmine.) Other times, they’re elevated by dynamic performances, like Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon playing Tammy Wynette and George Jones in Showtime miniseries George and Tammy. In general, though, there’s a seemingly impossible problem in having actors embody musical giants — like Winehouse — who we connect to because of their unique talent, personalities, and overall flair, which simply can’t be replicated. It’s hard to engage with these films as much more than cash grabs coming down Hollywood’s IP conveyor belt In a post-Me Too Hollywood, there did feel like a more obvious lane for a Winehouse biopic to occupy that would’ve at least made it feel more truthful. Many recent biographical projects outside of the musical subgenre have served the specific purpose of redeeming women from harmful public narratives and providing empathy for their experiences in the limelight. One could argue that the Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde was a (very poor) attempt to make audiences sympathize with an actress whose life was ridden with turmoil — although, the lurid fabrications in the film complicate this. The Pablo Larrain film Spencer, a similarly experimental take on Princess Diana, shed light on her eating disorder and feelings of imprisonment as a member of the royal family. Another arthouse film, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, offers a more meditative counterpiece to Baz Luhrmann’s technicolored extravaganza Elvis, which neglected to address the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s abusive treatment of his then-wife, Priscilla Presley. At this point, maybe it would’ve been reductive if Back to Black was mostly about Winehouse’s victimization. Amy already does a decent job of laying that out. Plus, these cultural reappraisals have become formulaic in their own way. However, illuminating the patriarchal forces that helped derail her life would at least provide some context for her fragility, rather than positioning her as an inevitable trainwreck destined to happen. One could easily imagine a more compelling film interested in exploring the way Winehouse’s bulimia and the insecurity she dealt with affected her life and relationships. Instead, Back to Black adds up to nothing more than Daily Mail headlines.

Bridgerton’s third season is its best yet — but not because of romance

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Nicola Coughlan and Claudia Jessie in Bridgerton. | Liam Daniel/Netflix The fractured friendship between Pen and Eloise centers the Netflix hit. Here’s a confession worthy of a scandal sheet: Bridgerton isn’t actually that great at romance. For two seasons now, the smash Netflix series has rejuvenated the tired, tricky genre, primarily by wholeheartedly embracing its pleasures while giving us modern quirks and a cast full of eye candy to make the tropes worth showing up for. Yet throughout those seasons, the series has struggled to give its romances real depth. Whether our main characters were indulging in their unrestrained sexual passions (season one) or flinging themselves into self-imposed Austenian repression (season two), Bridgerton’s focal pairings so far have felt rote and bland. Throughout those first two seasons, however, the show has steadily built the characters whose plot now fuels season three — shockingly not a romance, but rather the broken friendship between the second-eldest Bridgerton sister, Eloise (Claudia Jessie), and her longtime bestie Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan). The two fell out at the end of season two over a reveal we learned at the end of season one: the identity of Lady Whistledown, the pseudonymous gossip writer whose salacious poison pen has repeatedly meddled in the affairs of both families. This is the storyline the show has been working toward the entire time, and the resulting angst yields the best season yet. But while season three also dapples the landscape with more courtship per capita than we’ve seen yet, it also undermines each of these couples, both familiar and new, by devoting too little time to them. Instead, it saves its biggest emotional wallops for the moments when Eloise and Pen moon longingly at each other across crowded rooms. In fact, Bridgerton’s third season simultaneously reveals its biggest weakness to be its biggest strength: The show was never about the romances at all. What makes a good romance? Yes, you need to have the swoony, heady moments when fingers touch or gazes meet or bosoms heave. Yet none of that means anything if you aren’t connected to the characters enjoying those delicious moments. The best romances make us feel that these people were drawn to each other through aligned personalities and innate chemistry. The second quality isn’t always easy to deliver, but the first comes down to writing — and writing has never been Bridgerton’s strong point. The goal of season one boiled down to reinventing the bodice-ripper for modern audiences, so the characterization of our main couple, Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) and her beau Simon (Regé-Jean Page), was far less important than how utterly hot Page looked in a pair of tight Regency trousers. Additionally, the pair had a fundamental personality clash — his deep opposition to having kids — that formed the main conflict of the season, so they barely got a chance to show us how much they liked each other before their relationship derailed and had to be hastily (and problematically) amended. By contrast, season two offered what to many fans is the most beloved ship in the Bridgerton pantheon, but resorted to relying on bored Austenian tropes to get them together. The couple, Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) and his hot frenemy Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley), had the potential to form a real, well-written connection, but the show was far more interested in having them exchange sultry looks and generic banter instead of selling us on their characters being soulmates. Liam Daniel/Netflix Nicola Coughlin as Penelope, post-season 3 glowup. In between all the screen time devoted to these couples, however, Bridgerton has steadily evolved the friendship between Penelope — Pen for short — and Eloise. Each is a society misfit whose contrasts and independence from their respective families make them perfect complements as friends. For two seasons, we’ve seen them confide in each other, delight in each other, and trust one another with the pure-heartedness of a lifelong friendship — until, that is, Eloise figures out Pen’s deepest, darkest secret: She’s the scurrilous gossip-monger behind Lady Whistledown. What makes this revelation worse is that Pen, on multiple occasions, has used the scandal sheet and its influence to manipulate society’s opinion about both of their families. The end of season one saw her humiliating the love interest of Eloise’s brother Colin (Luke Newton) — Pen’s secret long-held crush — in order to save him from scandal and ruin. The end of season two saw her pulling a similar move on Eloise, mortifying her through the scandal sheet in order to save her from an even worse fate. Although her gambles paid off, they won Lady Whistledown the enmity of both Bridgertons and set the stage for Eloise’s feelings of betrayal: Her best friend not only stabbed her in the back but also withheld a huge secret from her. Their confrontation, and the resulting anger and heartbreak on all sides, carries forward into season three, which finds Pen riddled with guilt and Eloise desperately missing her but unable to forgive her. In her bitterness, Eloise has befriended Cressida Cowper (Jessica Madsen), a rich mean girl whose desperation to avoid an arranged marriage leads her to compete directly, and cruelly, with Penelope on the marriage market, much to Eloise’s chagrin. Meanwhile, Colin finally gives Penelope the love she’s always wanted; but although the two get hot and steamy, even the show seems to recognize this isn’t the relationship we’re really here for. Despite the years Pen has spent pining for Colin, the show pairs them off without much fuss to make way for the real relationship conflict between Pen and Eloise. Of course, Eloise’s conflict is also Colin’s conflict — they both hate Lady Whistledown, after all — but the storyline positions him, and even Pen’s relationship with him, as collateral damage in the showdown between our two estranged besties. In the background of this unfolding drama, no fewer than eight other couples are vying for our attention — all straight, of course. A total of four Bridgerton siblings as well as their mother have love interests this season, including last season’s Anthony, who cavorts in the background with new bride Kate. Season three saves its biggest emotional wallops for the moments when Eloise and Pen moon longingly at each other across crowded rooms The most interesting pairing of the lot involves a Bridgerton sister who barely existed on the show before this season — Francesca (Hannah Dodd), who, due to a casting change, was absent for most of season one and all of season two. She returns just in time to fall for a quiet, socially awkward earl, John Stirling (Victor Alli), whose quirks align with her own shy and retiring nature. If the series follows closely the original Bridgerton novels upon which it’s based, then it’s possible there’s a larger plot reason for this relationship being given short shrift as there may be bigger things in store for Francesca down the line. But it’s equally possible Bridgerton is trying to condense as many storylines as it can into as few seasons as it can, to avoid the Netflix curse of canceled series with too many dangling plot threads. Whatever the reason, the season has its work cut out for it, cramming so many relationships into each episode. It makes for a tightly structured plot with a loosely written confection of couples to choose from. If Pen and Colin aren’t holding your interest, perhaps Pen’s shallow sisters and their incongruously attractive new husbands, whose affections they seem blithely incapable of appreciating, will be your faves. Perhaps the still-inexplicably-straight Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson) and his fling with a mysterious widow, Lady Arnold (Hannah New) will entice you in the lead-up to the fourth season, when his storyline will probably take center stage. Or perhaps the dalliance between Lady Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell) and the dashing visitor Lord Anderson (Daniel Francis) will be what curls your petticoats. In any case, none of these people or their affairs have as much of a stranglehold over us as the longing for reconciliation between Pen and Eloise. That’s because Bridgerton, at its heart, has always shined most when it ceased being about romance and became about family and friendships. The show has always sparkled when the Bridgertons get together, showing off as a group, as only a large, robust family with hardly any actual problems can do. Penelope, by virtue of being a childhood friend and their next-door neighbor, has been an unofficial Bridgerton for so long that her estrangement from Eloise casts a shadow over all of them; through it, the whole show is, in a sense, broken. And that’s as it should be. It feels entirely fitting that a show that clings so resolutely to its straight romance tropes should find its center in the fractured platonic love between two women. Allowing a female friendship to waltz away with its emotional core feels implicitly queer, however unintended, and undermines the entire project. Of course, there are still another five episodes remaining — the season’s back half drops in June — so there’s plenty of time to unearth an actual queer relationship somewhere, anywhere, in Bridgerton’s famously race-blind universe. But given Bridgerton’s track record, any queer romance might be just as shallow as all the straight ones that have come before it. Eloise and Pen, though? That’s a love story worth several more seasons.

Why can’t prices just stay the same?

If high inflation hurts just about everyone, why can’t we have no inflation? Over the past few years, most of the world has experienced some pretty intense inflation, with prices rising as much as 10 percent in a single year. In 2024, even though inflation rates have fallen to more manageable levels, prices are still way up and are very unlikely t

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