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MTV’s nostalgia problem, explained by The Challenge

vox.com

The cast of MTV’s The Challenge: Battle of The Eras. You’d be forgiven for thinking this year’s MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) was a rebroadcast of a previous ceremony. From performances by Lenny Kravitz and Public Enemy to the archival red-carpet looks worn by many attendees and host Megan Thee Stallion, the show’s homages were as central to the celebration as the current artists who were nominated. The overall throwback vibe was supposedly in service of the awards show’s 40th anniversary. However, the ceremony didn’t look that different from last year’s VMAs, which featured a tribute to the now-disgraced Diddy or other recent ceremonies honoring Busta Rhymes, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and LL Cool J. This seems to be MTV’s playbook: force-feeding older viewers ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s nostalgia, especially now while they struggle to reel in the young people in the age of streaming and TikTok. For a brand that once represented the freshness of youth culture, it seems to be frozen in time. The cable network is at an interesting crossroads: Should it try to court an elusive Gen Z audience, or should it keep chasing the last generation that watched them? Since 2019, the network has been banking on reunion-style shows and all-star editions of iconic series like Teen Mom, Jersey Shore, Catfish, and, most recently, the former VH1 show The Surreal Life. If you’re younger than 30, there’s not much on their current schedule that would immediately draw you in, particularly when streamers — like Netflix and even Peacock — are making buzzier content for teenagers and young adults, with popular reality shows like Love Is Blind, Love Island USA, and The Traitors. The ultimate case study in MTV’s uncertain future is its Road Rules spinoff The Challenge. Now the longest-running show on the network, having started 26 years ago, the Road Rules competition series has successfully carried the legacy of MTV throughout structural changes and mergers, recently expanding with an All-Stars edition on Paramount+ and The Challenge: USA on CBS, and some international versions. However, the present iteration of The Challenge hasn’t exactly maintained the spirit of MTV. Currently, the show is attempting to conjure memories of its golden age with Battle of the Eras, the 40th season of the show, but the program falls flat without the unvarnished edge of the past. What was once a compelling clash of personalities and amateur athletes is now just a generic sports competition. To watch The Challenge from its early days to where it is now is to see how MTV has lost its way as a brand. The series might seem like an invincible force in television, but it’s only as fun as the infrastructure around it. But what’s the value of MTV nostalgia without all the weirdness and unpredictability? The Challenge represented the rowdy ethos of MTV. Now it’s something a lot safer. The Challenge has undergone several transformations since it premiered in 1998. The show ultimately became a competition between cast members of MTV’s Road Rules, where a group of attractive strangers live in a traveling RV, and Real World, where exactly seven attractive strangers share a house. (In later seasons, they added cast members of the dating show Are You The One?). Typically set in an exotic location, contestants live in what is essentially a frat house while they compete in a series of physical and mental games. These assignments range from outrageous stunts — like transferring food to a fake chicken’s mouth while dressed in a chicken suit — to brutal elimination challenges, like the Hall Brawl where players wrestle each other to reach the end of a narrow passage. Over time, the production’s budget has increased, and the show has become more physically demanding and stunt-y as a result. Die-hard fans refer to it as “America’s fifth sport,” and some competitors even undergo intense training to prepare. However, the boozy fights, romantic drama, and rivalries that span the seasons have always been as important as the actual gameplay, so much so that the premise of several previous seasons (Battle of the Exes, Rivals, etc.) rests upon personal beef and alliances. The Challenge maintains and extends these years-long storylines by reusing many of its most notorious and messiest competitors, like Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio, Chris “CT” Tamburello, Laurel Stucky, Cara Maria Sorbello, and Aneesa Ferreira. While the fighting and debauchery adds an exciting layer to an already impressive athletic showcase, these moments of chaos have often been truly ugly, coming at the expense of women, people of color, and queer people. Particularly in earlier seasons, there’s an uncomfortable amount of misogynistic language, hostility, and condescension toward female players. Black contestants have been met with similar microaggressions, if not blatant racism. Producers tried to rectify this in 2020 when they hastily suspended contestant Dee Nguyen for making an inappropriate joke on Twitter about the Black Lives Matter movement. They also made the controversial choice to edit her out of the rest of the season. This foreshadowed a more censored approach to the program, one that would completely change the feel of The Challenge. Efforts by the network to remedy a culture of poor behavior on The Challenge was well-meaning but ultimately over-corrective. For example, night-out scenes, where a fight might break out or cast members might hook up, are now used as opportunities for competitors to discuss game strategy. On podcasts dedicated to the show, cast members constantly complain about messier drama being left out of the show. “You see a sort of progress happening in terms of the show not being as problematic as it was before,” says Challenge fan Kelli Williams, who co-hosts the podcast Beyond the Blinds. “But then there’s also the [newer] problem that it takes away from the drama of the show.” In response to BLM and changing ethical standards in reality TV, The Challenge has struggled to evolve while focusing on the aspects of the show that made it fun. In newer seasons, including the current Battle of the Eras season, the tone of the show has become almost comically serious and inspirational, as though the contestants are competing in the Olympics or for some greater cause beyond winning money and being on TV. Even the show’s dry, no-nonsense host, T.J. Lavin, has a gentler manner. It hardly feels like it’s from the same network that discovered Snooki and Spencer Pratt. “You think of someone like Leroy,” says Williams, of fan-favorite Leroy Garrett, a Real World alum who first competed on The Challenge: Rivals. “When he came on the show, he was a sanitation worker, and you’re watching him jump over cars over water. You’re like, ‘Wow, he’s not trained to do this.’ Whereas now people have to prepare for The Challenge, and they call it the ‘fifth sport.’ Be real right now. This is The Challenge.” Battle of the Eras catering to Gen X and millennial fans is exciting in theory. But the neutered flagship show can’t resuscitate the original DNA of MTV. Where does MTV go from here? MTV was always going to have a difficult time sustaining itself as a cultural tastemaker, especially as a cable station in an online world. But the network has a history of reinventing itself to meet the moment. The channel, founded in 1981, was initially targeted toward white, male rock fans until it was forced by public pressure to feature music videos by Black R&B and rap artists, debuting the program Yo! MTV Raps in 1988. When MTV’s first generation of viewers started outgrowing the channel in the early ’90s, it pioneered reality programming, starting with Real World and, later, shows like The Osbournes, The Hills, and Jersey Shore. As Amanda Ann Klein writes in her book Millennials Killed the Video Star, MTV executives have always had to work hard to maintain MTV’s key demographic. “The youth audience is fickle because the moment a company figures out how to create content that pleases them, they age out of that content,” she writes. Reality shows sustained the network for nearly two decades, in addition to music-focused hits like Total Request Live (TRL) and MTV Unplugged. The early 2010s saw the final season of Jersey Shore, the surprise scripted hits like Awkward and Teen Wolf, and the last truly memorable VMAs thanks to Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke – before a few years entering the proverbial programming desert, running episodes of the clip show Ridiculousness almost 24/7. By 2019, it seemed as though MTV had found a solution by upcycling successful IP. The reunion show Jersey Shore: Family Vacation garnered big ratings and was followed by a Teen Mom reunion series and a not-as-successful reboot of The Hills. On Paramount+, MTV launched The Challenge: All Stars and Real World: Homecoming. Much of MTV’s library of ’90s and early-aughts content also became available to stream on Paramount+. In the book Television’s Streaming Wars, Florida State University professor Leigh H. Edwards writes about how MTV’s nostalgic marketing strategy cleverly (if not temporarily) reignited interest in the brand. “In effect, MTV turns existing IP into new content on streaming that targets the older streaming audience and encouraging those viewers to rewatch older content,” she tells Vox. “These series generate nostalgia by including flashback footage that encourages audiences to go watch the original episodes.” This nostalgia approach, though, is more like a life jacket than a sustainable business plan. Real World: Homecoming is no longer available to stream and was seemingly canceled. The Challenge: All Stars has become less and less distinguishable from the original series as the casts overlap. Despite all the relative star power of Battle of the Eras, the landmark season still represents a ratings decline since the highly watched 35th season, Total Madness. Last year, Variety reported that MTV was the 44th most-watched television network in 2023, an 11 percent drop in total viewers from the previous year. If there’s any hope for an MTV revival, it’s that the viewership for this year’s VMAs increased by 8 percent compared to last year’s show. One has to think this has more to do with appearances by big, next-gen artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan — as well as ratings magnet Taylor Swift — than the show’s tributes to its peak era. At a time when networks are constantly renamed, rebranded, or completely scrapped, losing MTV wouldn’t be surprising, but it would be a huge cultural blow. Unfortunately, a network can only rely on nostalgia for so long before it looks like a graveyard.

Don’t use Venmo as your checking account

4 h

vox.com

Venmo is good for sending money to friends, but it’s not necessarily the safest place to do your banking. | Vivien Killilea/Getty Images Some people collect coins or stamps. For a time, I collected debit cards. Not stolen ones! Each one of them had my name on them, right below the logo of the latest banking app I’d decided to try out: Venmo, Cash App, Chime, Varo, Current, Acorns. For the better part of a decade, I did all my banking through these apps, enjoying their slick user experience and lack of fees. The problem with every one of them, however, is that they’re not chartered banks. If the company behind the app went bankrupt, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) would not necessarily come to my rescue. This disaster scenario was a hypothetical worry when I eventually settled for Chase and its FDIC insurance. For millions of others, it became a reality earlier this year when a company called Synapse collapsed and froze them out of their accounts. Users of Yotta, a popular savings app with a built-in lottery, and other apps that relied on Synapse to help manage their accounts couldn’t access their money for months. Now, as hundreds of thousands of Synapse customers’ dollars remain in limbo, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) are calling for banking reforms, and the FDIC is proposing changes to its rules. Still, a growing number of people are embracing these financial technology, or fintech, services. More than a third of Gen Z and millennials used a fintech app or a digital bank as their primary checking account, according to a 2023 Cornerstone Advisors study. So some questions are worth asking: Is it a bad idea to use an app like Venmo as your main bank? Are digital banks like Chime trustworthy enough? The answer to both questions is yes. Venmo is not a bank, and using it as your primary checking account comes with some risks. Some fintech companies, like Chime, are just as big as traditional banks and offer some nice perks. Again, because they’re nontraditional, there are risks. “You’re not going to go back to a world where everybody works with a small bank and walks into a branch,” Shamir Karkal, co-founder of Simple, one of the first digital banks. “The future is just going to be more fintech, and I think we all just need to get better at it.” To get better at all of this, it helps to know what’s going on behind the scenes. Neobanks and money transmitters, briefly explained The term fintech can refer to a lot of things, but when you’re talking about everyday services for everyday people, it typically refers to either neobanks or money transmitters. Chime is a neobank. Venmo is a money transmitter. They’re regulated in different ways, but because most of these companies issue debit cards, many people treat them like checking accounts. Fintech apps are not the same thing as FDIC-insured banks. Neobanks are fintech companies that offer services like checking accounts in partnership with chartered banks, which are FDIC-insured. Neobanks sometimes enlist intermediaries known as banking-as-a-service, or BaaS, companies, which are not FDIC-insured. Still, you will often see the FDIC logo on neobank websites, just like you see it stuck to the glass doors of many brick-and-mortar banks. That logo instills trust, and thanks to their partnerships, neobanks can claim some FDIC protections. But because they do not have bank charters, these neobanks and BaaS companies are not directly FDIC-insured. Instead, neobank customers can be eligible for something called pass-through deposit insurance coverage. Three things to know Listen to Vox’s Adam Clark Estes break down the potential pitfalls of keeping your money in a fintech app, like Venmo or Chime. @vox Venmo or Chime aren’t as safe as you think they are. Here’s what to know. ♬ original sound – Vox – Vox Pass-through insurance is a simple concept that’s deceivingly complex in practice. Essentially, if you deposit money into an account with a neobank, like Chime, the funds get routed to a chartered bank, sometimes through one of those BaaS intermediaries. If the chartered bank fails, no problem: FDIC insurance kicks in, and you can recoup up to $250,000 of your deposits. If the intermediary fails or the neobank itself fails, you might be eligible for pass-through insurance — but you might not. In its explainer about when or if you’ll get your money back in these kinds of situations, the FDIC literally says, “It depends.” “American consumers see the FDIC logo, and they interpret that as meaning: My money is safe and I will get it back,” said Jason Mikula, who runs the popular Fintech Business Weekly newsletter. “That’s just not what FDIC does exactly.” Money transmitters, also known as money services businesses, are even further removed from the perceived safety of the FDIC. Put bluntly, if you’re keeping all your money in a Venmo or Cash App account, you don’t qualify for FDIC insurance. Money transmitters are not neobanks or banks at all but rather completely different legal entities that are regulated by individual states as well as the Department of the Treasury. There are certain protections provided by these agencies, but FDIC insurance is not one of them. So when an app like Yotta or Chime says on its website that it’s FDIC insured, it’s not a lie, but it’s not necessarily true either. Venmo, to its credit, admits in the fine print of its homepage that its parent company PayPal “is not a bank” and “is not FDIC insured.” To confuse you even more, however, certain PayPal services that enlist a chartered bank partner, like a PayPal Mastercard or savings account, might qualify for FDIC insurance. Again, it depends. The perils and perks of banking with an app Fintech companies take careful steps to make banking with them feel safe. They include the FDIC logo on the website to provide customers with some peace of mind, even though the fine print on those protections is more complicated. They issue debit cards with the Visa or Mastercard logo to suggest that these cards play by the same rules as any big bank’s debit card. These logos can act as a stamp of approval, an assurance that your money is in good hands. This is actually the heart of the problem, as far as Sen. Elizabeth Warren is concerned. This month, she and Sen. Van Hollen asked regulators to ban neobanks and fintech companies from using the FDIC name and logo if they were only offering pass-through insurance. They also called for greater supervision of these companies under the Bank Service Company Act. “The average consumer shouldn’t be expected to understand the intricacies of FDIC insurance in order to comfortably and safely save or invest their money,” Warren’s letter says. “Consumers must feel confident that they are dealing with a regulated and insured entity when they see the FDIC logo.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that all neobanks and fintech companies are untrustworthy. In some cases, the sheer size and track record of fintech companies can instill quite a bit of trust. Chime, the largest digital bank with roughly 22 million customers, scored a $25 billion valuation in its latest round of funding and is planning to go public next year. Venmo’s parent company, PayPal, is widely considered safe and trustworthy. And don’t expect Block, the $42 billion company that owns Cash App as well as its own chartered bank, to fail any time soon. The truth is, even if there is some false sense of security, fintech apps offer certain customers features that big banks can’t or won’t. One thing that’s made Chime and many other neobanks so popular, for instance, is that they don’t charge so many fees. That’s a huge boon to young people as well as people without bank accounts. If a fintech app is your only option, then you might not care so much about FDIC insurance. “If you’re poor in America and you’re banking at Chase or Wells Fargo, you’re going to get overdraft fees, minimum balance fees,” Mikula explained. “So there is a real need that [fintech] companies fulfill as a result of your establishment banks essentially not wanting to bank poor people because it’s difficult to do profitably.” As many as 6 percent of Americans were living without a bank account in 2023, according to Federal Reserve data. That share grows to 23 percent for those making less than $23,000 a year. The unbanked population, which disproportionately comprises Black, Hispanic, and undocumented people, is at a greater risk of falling victim to predatory lending practices, including payday loans. Some fintech companies also offer short-term loans, though they’ve been criticized for being predatory as well. Fraud alert Payment apps like Venmo are popular with scammers. Using a Venmo-branded debit card comes with some purchase protection. If you happen to fall for a scam, however, there’s a good chance the app will not pay you back. Venmo, Cash App, and Zelle are all clear about issuing refunds for payments to other individuals: They don’t do it. Or at least they can’t guarantee it. You should treat these peer-to-peer payments like cash. Here are some tips for spotting and avoiding scams on Venmo, Cash App, and Zelle. But if you’re more of a motivated-by-fear person, read this story about a guy who wanted a deal on a swimming pool and got “a $31,000 lesson in the downside of payment apps” instead. Still, fintech companies offer the unbanked the ability to save money and build credit. For someone who can’t open a traditional bank account, Venmo can be a lifeline, since they can add funds to their Venmo balance and then pay bills using their Venmo debit card without needing a traditional checking account. If they have access to a smartphone, getting basic banking services is simple these days. As I learned firsthand when testing out many of these services over the years, it’s very easy to sign up for and easy to deposit money into a fintech app. If you have a problem, however, help can be hard to find. Many fintech companies and neobanks, including Chime, lack brick-and-mortar locations, which means you can’t walk into a branch to get an issue resolved. In fact, poor customer service is a common complaint for these companies. That means you should always research a company before giving money to it. Read the reviews and study the fine print. Obvious red flags include hidden fee structures and reports of customers not being able to withdraw their money. You should also consider trying services out with small sums rather than your life savings. And, as always, watch out for scams and frauds. What is true in the real world is even more true in the app world: Beware of deals that look too good to be true. Only gamble with what you’d be willing to lose. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Kamala Harris’s new (old) problem at the border

18 h

vox.com

Installation of razor wire at the southern border between Texas and Mexico. | Christian Torres / Anadolu via Getty Images It’s been one of the most obvious changes since Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee: tougher talk on the border, an emphasis on enforcement and prosecuting traffickers, and renewed support for a bipartisan bill that would keep building the wall and hire more Border Patrol agents. Her convention speech and first debate performance backed that up. And for the most part, her party’s left flank fell in line — the imperative to beat Donald Trump was just too strong. But that balance is being tested. The vice president made her first visit to the southern border on Friday, heading to the small town of Douglas, Arizona. And some cracks are becoming more obvious among progressive activists, who worry that Harris is too comfortably embracing the hawkish bipartisan border bill and not doing enough for pro-immigrant policies. Progressives are caught between two maxims: They can’t give too much ground on their preferred policies, but they’re wary of hurting Harris’s campaign, in turn helping the anti-immigrant fanatic that is Donald Trump. That first priority was dominant once Harris was nominated. But now some activists worry that they’re giving up too much in the name of political expediency. There’s a “real tension that exists in our movement right now,” Vanessa Cárdenas, a longtime strategist and executive director of the pro-immigrant America’s Voice group, told me. “We are concerned about the emphasis on the border, but we also understand that [Kamala Harris] is our best conduit to move things ahead toward the goal that we all want.” So as Harris speaks about American “sovereignty,” hiring more border agents, and rolling out more fentanyl detection machines, old questions are resurfacing: Will she also embrace the growing calls for openness to immigration, for expanded asylum protections and legal pathways? And will she recommit to passing some immigration reform for those already living here? Her campaign, at least, says that she is: They point to comments supporting legal immigration, “protect[ing] our DREAMers,” and creating “pathways for people to earn citizenship” from this month. But advocates want to hear more. For a while, these pro-immigrant comments tended to come as an afterthought, after Harris made the forceful case for enforcement and blamed Trump for sabotaging the much-discussed Senate bill. Harris’s promise to revive and pass that legislation has long been worrisome to pro-immigrant organizations — so much so that 83 local, state, national, and international groups led by United We Dream and Amnesty International USA sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Harris earlier this month making clear that they would organize against the “harmful Senate border bill now and in the future.” “It is shameful that instead of investing in welcoming the most vulnerable people who seek safety and a better life, and who make our country better by every measure, we’d suggest wasting our resources in ineffectual, inefficient deterrence policies that harm and kill these same people,” the letter read. And still, less than a week later, United We Dream’s political and electoral arm officially endorsed Harris, saying they’d “do everything in our power to keep our people alive and safe so that we can organize for years to come.” “We will continue to push for immigration policies that center the lives and well-being of all immigrants,” Bruna Sollod, the senior political director of United We Dream Action, said in that endorsement. “We choose Harris as our next organizing target and are ready to hold her accountable these next four years.” At the same, some groups are hoping that Harris’s more hardline stance is temporary — rhetoric needed in changing times — and that she’ll end up being more liberal as president. “We all know and trust Harris to make the right decisions when she’s in office,” Kerri Talbot, the executive director of the liberal Immigration Hub group, told Axios earlier this month. They’re also skeptical that the border bill Harris is touting will ever, in current form, become law: “I don’t think this bill will ever come up again, as-is,” Talbot said. Some progressives on the Hill feel the same way. “When we are in the majority in the House, and hopefully keep the Senate, and keep the White House, we can scratch that Senate bill and actually create a Democratic bill that addresses the root causes at the border and that really focuses on humanitarian relief and actual solutions,” Illinois Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez told me. “But we will be in a different circumstance come from January.” For now, the truce still seems to be holding — at least mostly. Criticism remains measured. Advocates acknowledge that a visit to the border will likely focus on just that. But they hope she speaks more specifically moving forward. “We want to see a presidency that makes clear that we need to build from day one, through congressional and administrative and executive power, a modern, secure, and orderly and fair immigration system so people actually have lawful pathways. That will reduce unauthorized migration, because that is what the evidence shows will actually work,” said Todd Schulte, the president of the criminal and immigrant justice group FWD.us. And advocates acknowledge that shifting public opinion has become more hostile and suspicious of immigrants in the post-Trump era. On Friday, the Pew Research Center released its most recent survey on American voters’ views on immigration and immigration policy. It isn’t a surprise that the vast majority of Trump supporters back Trump’s plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants — but it is notable that nearly a third of Harris supporters would. Vast majorities of both Trump (96 percent) and Harris supporters (80 percent) also support better border enforcement. And perhaps more significantly for immigration activists: The share of voters who say undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country legally if “certain requirements are met,” has fallen nearly 20 points, from 77 percent in 2017 to 59 percent this year. Public sentiment may still change — and public polling shows that some share of the electorate trusts her more than they trusted Biden on immigration. The truce may yet hold, but it’s clear that, if Harris wins the White House, there’ll be no easy answer — policy-wise or politically — on immigration.

Weather radar showed a strange blue mass in the eye of Hurricane Helene. What was it?

21 h

vox.com

Dark clouds from then-tropical storm Helene over Havana, Cuba, on September 25. | Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images Birds are incredible navigators, capable of traveling thousands of miles each year to the same location. But sometimes even they end up in the wrong place at the wrong time — like inside a hurricane. Last night, as Hurricane Helene was making landfall in Florida as a powerful Category 4 storm, radar spotted a mass in the eye of the storm that experts say is likely birds and perhaps also insects. See this blue blob on radar. These are birds stuck in the eye of Hurricane Helene! pic.twitter.com/traq2BQqWD— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) September 27, 2024 Helene was a massive storm when it traveled across the Gulf of Mexico earlier this week. Seabirds likely fled the storm’s extreme winds — which reached 140 miles per hour — and ended up in the eye, where it’s calm. Once inside, they essentially got trapped, unable to pierce through the fierce gusts of the eye wall. When the storm dies down, the mass of birds will probably dissipate, Kyle Horton, a researcher at Colorado State University who studies bird migration, told Vox. Storms like Helene can blow seabirds like petrels, jaegers, and frigatebirds far inland. Exhausted, they end up in unfamiliar habitats far away from home where they can’t easily find food. “It’s a challenging situation,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a bird migration expert at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We know that birds do die in these things.” Indeed, frigate birds — large seabirds with angular wings and a forked tail — were spotted by birders in central Georgia and even Tennessee this Friday as the storm churned inland. Though remarkable, it’s not uncommon for birds and insects to get trapped inside the eye of tropical cyclones, according to research by Matthew Van Den Broeke, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Reports dating back to the 19th century — many of which come from ships — have documented this phenomenon, noting in some cases that the air was “filled with thousands of birds and insects.” One report documented an owl inside the storm. In a 2021 study, Van Den Broeke analyzed radar from 33 Atlantic hurricanes that hit the US mainland or Puerto Rico between 2011 and 2020. Each one showed signs of birds and insects inside the eye of the storm. Hurricanes like Helene can also substantially impact fall migration, when several billion birds migrate south ahead of winter. A map of migration from Thursday night, when Helene made landfall, shows that millions of birds were migrating west of the storm in places like Texas and Louisiana, but few if any were moving through Florida. When skies clear after a storm, however, birds resume their migration en masse, Farnsworth said. “After the storm passes, we see these big explosions of birds at night,” he told me. It’s also worth remembering that birds have evolved with these storms for millennia. They can likely detect a coming hurricane by sensing things like changes in atmospheric pressure and they know how to hunker down when storms arrive, such as by orienting their aerodynamic bodies toward the wind. “They’ve adapted to this, they’ve evolved with it,” Farnsworth said. “Yes, storms are getting more extreme. But birds know how to deal with these things.”

The yellow school bus is in trouble

1 d

vox.com

A school bus on the road in Boston, Massachusetts. Last year, Trisha’s morning commute was simple. She’d walk a few steps outside her door, wait with the other kids from her neighborhood, and then hop on the yellow bus that took them all to school. Trisha, now 11 and in sixth grade, enjoyed the ride to her school outside Houston, Texas. “I really liked how you could talk to your friends, and it was very easy getting to the bus because it was so close by,” she told me. This year, because of budget cuts, her school district no longer provides bus service to students who live within two miles of their school. For Trisha, who lives 1.9 miles away, walking an hour by herself each way — in a place where temperatures topped 100 degrees the first week of school — wasn’t an option. Now, she has a long wait in the sun every afternoon as her parents slowly inch through an interminable line of cars to pick her up. “It’s just a mess,” Trisha said. Her experience is part of a growing trend: the yellow school bus is becoming an endangered species as districts cut routes and more families drive their kids to school. In 2022, for the first time ever, the majority of American students got to school in a private car. In Chicago, bus service to magnet schools was canceled just before the 2023-24 school year began. And in Louisville, Kentucky, this year, students recorded a song to protest the disappearance of their bus routes. The erosion of school bus service is causing problems for parents, who have to spend hours of their workdays idling in dropoff lines — an especially difficult task for lower-income parents who are less likely to have flexible schedules or access to remote work. It might be even worse for children. Bus problems are contributing to absenteeism, experts say, as some kids literally can’t make it to school. The long lines of cars envelop schools in dangerous pollution, posing a risk to student health and even potentially lowering test scores. And the loss of the bus is changing the school experience for a generation of kids, many of whom will miss out on what some say is an important (if at times chaotic) rite of passage. The bus ride isn’t just a mode of transportation, it’s also a social and emotional education, Daniele Roberts, a long-time bus driver in Gwinnett County, Georgia, told me. Kids learn how to wait in line, how to be aware of their neighbors, and how to extend a little grace and forgiveness if, for example, the bus is a few minutes late. “I always think of it as a civics lesson on wheels,” Roberts said. The decline of the bus hurts all kids The first school “buses” were horse-drawn carriages, mobilized in the late 19th century to get far-flung rural children to newly state-mandated schools. Motorized buses followed by the 1910s, and in 1937, a group at a bus-improvement conference settled on what’s now called National School Bus Glossy Yellow as the standardized color for the vehicles. Today, more than 25 million students ride a bus to school every year. Suburban schools have gotten bigger and farther apart, making bus transportation a necessity for more students, as Kendra Hurley writes in the Atlantic. Students who attend magnet schools outside their neighborhoods, or need special education services, also often use buses. But in the last few years, America’s school bus system has been crumbling. Districts around the country have faced driver shortages in recent years, caused in part by low pay; they make an average of $20 an hour for difficult work. Out-of-control kids screeching in your ears can be not just distracting but downright dangerous when you’re trying to handle a 35,000-pound vehicle, Roberts points out. Driver shortages combined with district budget cuts have led to worse service, which has led to a decline in ridership, Slate’s Henry Grabar writes. The situation was exacerbated by the pandemic. And falling ridership, in turn, has led school districts to cut service even further. For Trisha’s dad, Arun Aravindakshan, losing bus service means spending a full hour, several times a week, waiting in his car outside his daughter’s school. “We are all working parents,” he said. “For us to find time to do this in the middle of the workday is very difficult.” While walking or biking to school used to be more common, it’s no longer a viable alternative for many kids. Many of the roads around Trisha’s school have no sidewalks, because they were never designed with a walk to school in mind, Aravindakshan said, a common problem in suburban areas. Getting to school without a bus is especially difficult for low-income students, whose parents are less likely to be able to drive them during the workday. These students are also more likely to be chronically absent from school, and some experts think declining bus service might be part of the reason why. “If we’re concerned about absenteeism — which we are — we’re literally getting rid of something whose job is to take kids to school,” economist Michael Gottfried told the Washington Post. The bus, meanwhile, is also a social and educational experience of its own, where students spend time with kids from a variety of grades and classrooms, whom they might not see during the school day. The experience isn’t always positive. Videos of fights on school buses have gone viral in recent years. Reader Teresa Bjork told me in an email that on her bus growing up, “there was an older boy who harassed me to get my attention — he would kick me, snap my bra straps (which boys loved to do back then), call me sexually explicit names. It was awful.” But a skilled driver can do a lot to influence the bus environment, says Roberts, who has been driving for 16 years. “If you’ve got a good driver, you learn how to be a good rider.” Some are working to bring buses back Buses are also an important part of American educational history. In the 1970s and ’80s, courts around the country prescribed them as a way to integrate schools, transporting Black children to schools in majority-white neighborhoods and sometimes vice versa. Busing, as it came to be called, faced intense racist backlash, said Zebulon Miletsky, a professor of Africana Studies at Stony Brook University and the author of Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle. But Nikole Hannah-Jones and others have argued that the policy was actually highly successful in the South, ensuring that Black children in the region had access to racially integrated classrooms and the resources concentrated in predominantly white schools. And for some, the school bus remains a symbol of efforts to combat school segregation and of the bravery of Black students who were at the forefront of those efforts. Today, nonprofits across the country are working to improve school bus service, and to make its benefits available to underserved students. In New York City, for example, NYC School Bus Umbrella Services is using GPS to allow parents to track their kids’ bus rides, and electric buses to reduce pollution and provide families with a tangible example of the fight against climate change, said Matt Berlin, the nonprofit’s CEO. In Los Angeles, the group Move LA is giving students transit passes so they can ride the city buses. Trisha’s parents, meanwhile, got together with several other families in the neighborhood to arrange a carpool. They made a schedule taking all the parents’ work obligations into account, and a group chat to talk through any changes. For now, it’s working, Aravindakshan said, but he worries about other families, like the parents across the street who have four kids in three different schools. Kids, too, are feeling the stress that life without the bus is putting on their families. “It’s a lot of extra work for both the parents and the kids,” Trisha said. “It’s just really hard for everyone.”

Are we underestimating global warming?

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vox.com

We know it’s getting hotter, but just how hot will it get? Last year was the hottest year on record, and this year’s temperatures may reach even higher. With so many extraordinary heat waves, floods, and storms piling up, one may wonder: Just how much warmer is the Earth going to get? The answer hinges on two main factors: how much more heat-trapping gasses humans will emit, and how the planet will respond. Whether humanity continues to dawdle or actually takes aggressive action to cut emissions is the biggest source of uncertainty in the future of the planet since the bulk of the warming we’re experiencing is due to the waste gasses from burning coal, oil, and natural gas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’s climate science team, has chalked out five scenarios with different levels of action needed from global leaders to curb climate change to plug into its climate models. On the other side of the equation, scientists have been working to narrow down the scope of possible reactions that the planet has to all of this heating. They’ve been getting better measurements of the Earth’s behavior, refining their physical models of things like rainfall and ocean currents, and designing more sophisticated computer simulations to get a better sense of what complicated reactions could happen and the kind of events that could be put into motion as the planet heats up. With these inputs, they’ve come up with a range for how much further Earth will warm for a given amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a parameter known as equilibrium climate sensitivity. If the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were to double relative to the era prior to the Industrial Revolution, the most recent major IPCC report finds the world will warm between 2 degrees Celsius and 5 degrees Celsius, with a best estimate of 3 degrees Celsius. It means that some of the more dire forecasts of warming from the past are much less likely, and so are some of the more optimistic predictions. But, in assembling this report, scientists were surprised that a subset of climate models were producing warming estimates that were much hotter than others. In response, they changed how they factor these outliers into the overall estimate, reducing their influence rather than weighing them equally. Last year, a team led by former NASA scientist James Hansen found that previous sensitivity estimates had vastly underestimated the role of aerosols, such as soot and dust, and that there may be more warming baked in than we realized. These fine particles suspended in the sky can have myriad effects on the global climate. Figuring out the future of warming is not just an academic exercise. If you’re constructing a road, a home, a power plant, or if you simply have any stake in the world decades away, you need to start planning and building now for that future. If the world does go down one of the more extreme warming scenarios, curbing greenhouse gas emissions may not be enough to keep the planet livable for humans. We could be forced to employ more extreme and controversial interventions like geoengineering to rein in runaway warming. So how exactly do we figure out whose vision of the future is most accurate before that future becomes the present? It’s an ongoing process. As scientists expand the boundaries of knowledge of the planet, they’re also coming up with ways to reconcile these diverging views. The messy truth of climate modeling The fundamental concept of climate change is fairly straightforward — more heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere cause the planet to retain more heat — but the practical ways this plays out get extraordinarily complicated very quickly. For example, warmer air can hold onto more moisture. Water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, so that can create a feedback that accelerates warming. In addition, more moisture in the air can lead to extreme rainfall in some areas and less in others. It also forms clouds, which can reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the area below, or trap even more heat. Now calculate these effects over the entire planet and over the course of decades and you end up with models that demand the most powerful supercomputers in the world just to run. Scientists are gradually filling in the blanks in these models with lab experiments and real-world measurements, but even the most sophisticated simulations have to make assumptions and judgment calls about which variables are the most important and how much they should shape the final calculations. That’s why climate researchers can come to different conclusions about how much the planet will warm. One scientist might think that cloud cooling effects offset more warming, while another might stipulate that melting ice caps will have a stronger feedback effect. One of the more confounding variables in climate models is the effect of aerosols. Like carbon dioxide, aerosols are a by-product of fossil fuel combustion, but they also come from natural sources like sand and sea spray. Aerosols have a range of impacts on the climate. “Some aerosols are light-colored and scatter more light, which means we get a cooling effect, and some aerosols, like soot, are dark and absorb light, which means we get a warming effect,” said Eliza Harris, a senior scientist at the Swiss Data Science Center. “And that effect also varies depending on how high it is in the atmosphere.” As humanity burned more fossil fuels since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the concentrations of both greenhouse gasses and aerosols rose in the atmosphere. Scientists like Hansen think that aerosols helped mask some of the warming caused by carbon dioxide and hypothesize that the global climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gasses than conventional estimates predict. Since many aerosols drive air pollution and are health hazards, efforts to limit air pollution have unintentionally reduced their cooling side effects, and further reductions will speed up warming further. Hansen has described this reduction in air pollution leading to more warming as a “Faustian bargain.” (Hansen declined to comment for this story). There have actually been a number of historical examples of aerosols cooling the global climate. Major volcanic eruptions like the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines inject so many gasses and particles into the sky that they dim the sun enough to cool the planet. After the Pinatubo eruption, global average temperatures fell by roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) for more than a year. But getting a full inventory of aerosols can be difficult. Satellite measurements can end up obscured by clouds while ground-level sensors don’t pick up what’s going on high in the atmosphere. “There’s a lot of uncertainty on the abundance of aerosols today,” said Loretta Mickley, who co-leads the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group at Harvard University. “That said, we are confident that anthropogenic aerosols certainly did increase in the late 20th century as industry ramped up in much of the developed world. There is a decline in aerosols in much of the developed world now, but increasing aerosols in places like India and China.” More recently, a new international regulation drastically limiting sulfur aerosol pollution from global shipping went into effect. That sudden drop in pollution over the busiest shipping routes in the world led to a sudden warming in those regions, contributing to record-high temperatures in waters like the Atlantic Ocean. A study this year found that a major drop in air pollution over China contributed to warming in the Pacific Ocean. How scientists reconcile their differences Of course, a number of scientists dispute Hansen’s recent findings and think his team is overestimating the role of aerosols. The question then is how do you weigh results like this in the context of all the other climate research? For the IPCC, the conventional method was to include all the major climate models and average out their findings, giving each one equal weight. Climate models are often evaluated by examining how well they match historical observations of warming using starting conditions from the past. On this front, the aggregate model tended to outperform most individual models. But in the most recent assessment, the IPCC decided to change its approach. The models that skewed hotter did a poorer job of reproducing historical temperature patterns, so the IPCC gave them less weight in the aggregate in calculating the final range of sensitivity. That makes sense if you’re mainly concerned with temperature, but that’s only one dimension of the climate. Neil Swart, a researcher at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis, developed one of the hottest models used in the latest IPCC assessment. He noted that climate models that may not be as good at predicting temperature might be better at forecasting other important variables like precipitation. By evaluating models solely on temperature, modeling groups could end up tuning their results to better fit within the selection criteria rather than letting the simulations run their course. So there is still a compelling argument for egalitarianism. The debate highlights how even with the best measurements and models, scientists have to make some subjective decisions. For people who have to make decisions now that depend on the future climate, it adds to the frustration and can fuel distrust. Still, it’s important to note that the vast majority of scientists agree on the broad contours of climate change and that it’s prudent to halt the relentless rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “Look, the climate is sensitive to greenhouse gasses. We’re not exactly sure to the right decimal place what that sensitivity is, but we have no doubt that it’s sensitive,” Mickley said. “We do know if we cut greenhouse gasses to zero today, we would vastly improve the outlook going forward.”

Why Hurricane Helene is a wake-up call

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vox.com

Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida last night as a ferocious Category 4 storm after gaining strength as it barreled across the Gulf of Mexico. According to Vox’s Benji Jones, the storm and its expected surge have the potential to wreak havoc across the Southeast, but also dump heavy rains onto Appalachia and beyond. Before summer had even begun, experts were predicting that this year’s hurricane season would be an unusually active one, with as many as 25 named storms churning across the Atlantic Ocean. The ingredients were all there: the uniquely warm ocean temperatures, lessened Atlantic trade winds and wind shear, and the La Niña conditions cooling the waters of the Pacific. But it’s impossible to look at hurricanes in 2024 without also considering the context of climate change, which has made everything from rains to drought to wildfires more extreme globally, and put more ecosystems and humans in danger in the process. The record-hot waters in the Gulf this summer, for example, have intensified storms like Helene and Beryl, a supercharged hurricane that broke the record for the earliest Category 5 in a season, making them that much more fearsome. I recently spoke with Umair Irfan, a correspondent at Vox who’s been covering climate, the environment, and environmental policy for a decade, about this hurricane season, what has changed about these massive storms in recent years amid climate change — and what role humans are playing in compounding their impact. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. —Lavanya Ramanathan Tell us how we used to think about hurricanes, in terms of categories and in terms of strength. What’s complicating that thinking now?The main way we categorize hurricanes is by wind speed. Category 1, 2, 3 — those are thresholds defined by how fast the winds from the hurricane are moving. But what we’ve found in recent decades, and with lots of recent experience, is that wind is not the most destructive element of the hurricane. It’s the water.It’s the rainfall, it’s flooding, it’s storm surge. The water is what causes the most property damage, and what also causes the most casualties and the most extensive tolls on human life. Water makes it difficult to get repair crews in and to get ambulances in and to get people out. Flooding is what blocks the roads. It’s a challenge conveying to the public that when you think about water as the big threat rather than wind, you can take different precautions: storm-proofing your house, flood prevention and mitigation, but also taking evacuation orders more seriously. What should we know about this hurricane season? You’ve written that it’s expected to be an unusually active season. To form a hurricane, you need a few things to fall into place. You need warm water at the surface of the ocean, at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter, you need limited wind shear in the air above it, and then you need another thing called atmospheric instability, where the layers of the atmosphere start to blend and merge with one another. What that does is it creates an environment where you can have a lot of evaporation, where water can move upward to a very high altitude. That’s the main engine of a hurricane.Hurricanes are a relatively rare phenomenon; we only see a couple dozen every year, whereas we see rainfall just about every day. Major hurricanes — we see maybe three or four. It doesn’t happen very often that all these ingredients align in just the right way.But last year was the hottest year on record, and we had a major El Niño, which is a major pattern in the Pacific Ocean that tends to drive up global average temperatures. So air temperatures were very high, causing the oceans to heat up. The major ingredients were there. I was in Houston after one of the big storms of this season, Hurricane Beryl, which struck in July. I saw the effects of the storm really taking their toll on the city for days afterward, in ways you wouldn’t necessarily expect. How is our understanding of the impact of hurricanes changing? Houston and Hurricane Beryl are good examples of how the ways we describe hurricanes don’t tend to reflect the risk that they can pose. It’s not simply the wind speed, or the strength, but how vulnerable the area is. Houston was hit by Hurricane Harvey years ago, which caused immense amounts of record flooding because the storm parked over the city and dropped a lot of rain. But Houston also has very little in the way of zoning. It’s also very flat, and it’s right next to the Gulf Coast, so there was not a lot of infrastructure there to cope with an immense amount of water. The main natural features that would absorb water have been paved over to support development. And so there are human-level decisions that ended up worsening the impact. With Beryl, it was also a fast-moving storm, and the wind caused a lot of damage to power lines. One of the utility companies there, Centerpoint, has a backlog of maintenance and there were well-known vulnerabilities. So when you had a major storm, it knocked out a lot of power, but also took a long time to get it back. Meanwhile, Houston had a heat wave, so there was an intense energy demand. The high heat, the not having power, all converged to compound the effects of this disaster.If you look at Beryl as just a Category 1 storm, you might brush it off. But when you look at all these other things going on, you realize this is a much more severe disaster than the category would suggest. And the impact was far broader, right? Right. Hurricanes tend to lose a lot of energy once they make landfall. But they can still be fairly devastating storms, especially if they move to an area that isn’t prepared for it, and isn’t used to getting a torrential downfall. The remnants of Tropical Storm Debby and Beryl both hit Vermont, and caused a lot of flooding and damage, and actually killed people. There was no place for that water to run off to, the people there are not necessarily well-versed in how to evacuate ahead of a storm, and the waterways, roads, and bridges are not designed to withstand sub-tropical storms.Is this something that we’re seeing more of, or are going to see more of? We see that in general with extreme weather. We had a major heat wave in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago; that was devastating because that’s the area with the least amount of air conditioning in the US. It was harmful for the people there because they’re not acclimated to the heat, and they don’t have the infrastructure to deal with it.We see the same thing with storms. A weaker storm can still be devastating in an area that does not have infrastructure that can withstand rains, or porous areas that can absorb the water. And when an event does occur, there’s more severe rainfall, because as air temperatures warm, the air can hold onto more moisture. So, while we’re focusing on the extremes, we should look at what’s typical as well, and what’s typical is also changing. Is there something people can do to protect themselves on an individual level that we’re not already doing? First, you have to start to rethink your mentality. There’s a pervasive thinking that bad things won’t happen to you. If you go for years at a time without a hurricane or a storm, or your house got flooded, and now it’s been a decade, that memory fades very quickly. But one of the concerns with climate change is that it’s bringing extremes into areas where they haven’t experienced them before. So this is a new process for some. The first step is recognizing and appreciating that you are vulnerable, that bad things can happen but you can in fact prepare for them. The big thing is you want to also get your policymakers thinking about things that can mitigate disasters over time — things like building sea walls in coastal areas, but also thinking about big changes like rethinking where we are allowed to build at all. Are we going to retreat from certain areas? Are we just going to have to give up on oceanfront areas because the risk is too high? These are much more difficult policy questions, but we’re going to have to start grappling with them because now is the best opportunity — not after a disaster.

How Democrats found a new approach to violent crime

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vox.com

Sheriff Chris Swanson of Genesee County, Michigan, speaks at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Listen to the way Democrats talk about guns, violent crime, and the criminal justice system these days, and you’ll notice that things sound different from the way they did in 2020. That year, following a national protest movement centered around the high-profile police killings of unarmed Black Americans, including Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Democrats focused their message on protecting citizens from police abuses and overhauling the criminal justice system, rather than reducing violent crime. But four years later, after a historic spike in gun homicide and an election cycle where Republicans attacked them over the issue, Democrats have found a new message. Leaders are still talking about ending gun violence — an important issue for their base, given that it’s the core reason that the United States has a homicide rate that is much higher than other comparable countries. They’re also still supportive of police reform, though it has been less prominent as a campaign issue this year. But now, with Republicans opposing nearly all of their gun control legislation, they’re highlighting their other efforts in crime prevention and public safety, too. “We made the largest investment, Kamala and I, in public safety, ever,” President Joe Biden said at the Democratic National Convention in August, referring to the $10 billion in funding committed through the American Rescue Plan to public safety efforts for cities and states. Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz touted his administration’s investment in fighting crime as Minnesota governor at the DNC, and Chris Swanson, a sheriff from Genesee County, Michigan, took to the stage to declare that “crime is down and police funding is up,” in a speech that would have been almost unthinkable at the 2020 Democratic convention, when activists and other prominent voices on the left were calling to “defund the police.” Mayors leading major cities are now highlighting increases in funding and support for programs built around more recent innovations in violence reduction, including community violence intervention and hyperlocal crime reduction programs. “Community safety is a year-round, collaborative effort,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said earlier this year, unveiling a new summer safety program for the city, which has seen a major drop in gun homicides in 2024 compared to the previous year. “Our comprehensive approach to reducing gun violence is working,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said, crediting the work of the city’s group violence reduction strategy in contributing to the city’s largest year-over-year reduction in murders last year. It’s not just that Democrats are responding to the rise in gun homicides in 2020 and 2021 and the political backlash that came with it. The change reflects a broader shift in thinking among Democrats and their nonpartisan allies who work in violence reduction, criminal justice, and police reform. It’s one that acknowledges the seriousness of preventing and reducing violent crime — the core concern of the “tough on crime” crowd — without accepting the idea that the solution is mass incarceration. There is a growing sense that increasing public safety, ending gun violence, and reducing mass incarceration, rather than being separate or even in tension, are pieces of the same pie, and that efforts to improve one should help improve the others. “These conversations had been occurring in siloes,” between policymakers focused on public safety and policymakers and activists focused on criminal justice reform, says Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice. But the conversations have been merging and becoming more interconnected as they’ve come to an important realization: “We’re not going to solve or dramatically reduce incarceration rate unless we dramatically reduce the rate of community violence,” Gelb says. The change represents an evolution of years of policymaking on crime reduction and prevention. In the 1960s and 1970s, when murder and violent crime rose dramatically in the United States, a sociologist looked at the available research about what could rehabilitate those convicted of crimes and came up with an unsettling conclusion: nothing worked. This notion gave credence to a controversial new argument, outlined by American political theorist James Q. Wilson in his 1975 book Thinking About Crime. Wilson argued that since rehabilitation was essentially futile, the criminal justice system should focus on doing what they could to make sure repeat offenders were removed from society. Wilson’s views became popular among policymakers, and the American prison population began to grow in the 1970s, through the crack epidemic and the “war on drugs” in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2009, the United States had 1.6 million people in prison and the highest incarceration rate in the world. The social science researchers, meanwhile, had improved their ability to study the impact of various violence reduction strategies, and discovered something else important: deterrence based on issuing harsh prison sentences also didn’t work. At the same time, a growing movement recognized America’s mass incarceration issue as a real problem in and of itself — one that cost the government billions annually, exacerbated racial inequality, and devastated communities and families. As researchers deepened the body of existing research on racial bias in the criminal justice system, and activists organized to press lawmakers for change, a series of police killings of Black Americans brought the issue into the public’s view. By 2020, the movement for police and criminal justice reform had already made important progress, thanks to a network of organizers and activists, and funding from foundations and bipartisan coalitions. That support had helped build momentum for drug sentencing reform during President Barack Obama’s administration as well as his administration’s creation of a task force aimed at police reform. Those efforts helped pave the way for the most significant sentencing reform bill in years, the First Step Act, signed by President Donald Trump. The bill gave judges more flexibility to avoid lengthy sentences dictated by federal mandatory minimums, allowed incarcerated people to earn time credits that could move up their release date if they participated in rehabilitative programs, and made retroactive the earlier reform passed under the Obama administration, eliminating the sentencing disparity between those convicted of possessing crack versus powdered cocaine. By the last election cycle, the Democrats’ platform included the most progressive police reform agenda in modern American history. The bill focused on greater accountability for police, but also included proposals to invest more in community-based violence reduction. But as reformers were making strides, violent crime began to rise again in cities, due to a number of factors related to the pandemic, policing after the George Floyd protests, and the ubiquity of guns. By the end of 2020, the country had seen the largest increase in its homicide rate in nearly a century, and the problem got more difficult to ignore. The following year, homicides remained high. Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans increasingly pointed their fingers at Democrats running big cities, arguing that their policies were responsible for rising violent crime and attempting to connect them with the left’s “defund the police” movement. By 2022, six in 10 registered voters listed crime as a “very important” issue for them in the midterm election cycle that November. Then, a new crop of Democrats, responding to voters’ concerns, launched campaigns for mayor across the United States. Many made violent crime reduction their primary campaign issue. Some, like New York’s Eric Adams, who won in 2021, and Philadelphia’s Cherelle Parker, who won in 2023, campaigned on more funding and support for police. (Federal prosecutors announced Thursday that they had indicted Adams on federal corruption charges, and the NYPD has been under heavy scrutiny for illegal stops on citizens, a recent subway shooting, and a separate investigation that resulted in the police commissioner’s resignation in September.) Others, like Wu and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, have focused their efforts on outreach and intervention programs, and focused on investing in community partnerships. The details of each city’s violence prevention program are different, but the broad elements are largely the same: They include more funding for both the police and for community organizations aimed at addressing the people and places most likely to suffer from high rates of violent crime, especially gun homicide. “Democratic politicians are being responsive to what voters care about,” says Jens Ludwig, professor and director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab. That’s not the only factor at play. Post-pandemic, Ludwig says, many cities were facing the challenges brought on by the emptying of cities and the rise of remote work, along with the rise in violent crime. Some feared this would result in an “urban doom loop” where people fled cities for the suburbs, making the problems worse and subsequently causing more people to flee. The stimulus funds from the federal government helped stave off the decline, but cities knew that the money wouldn’t last forever. “Every big city in the country now realizes that they aren’t going to be able to throw money at this problem forever,” Ludwig says. “There’s a need to figure out how to do more with less.” Investing in targeted initiatives that place community outreach workers in high-risk neighborhoods, or give police data to approach crime hotspots, are ultimately cost-effective methods to reduce violence. “These things are not super expensive in the grand scheme of things,” Ludwig says, and they give cities a way of reducing violence in the short-term while working on longer-term investments meant to address root causes of violence, including racial inequality and economic disinvestment. It also helps, Ludwig says, that researchers have gotten much better at understanding what works — beyond gun control — to reduce gun violence in the last few decades. Increasingly, those efforts are being championed by organizations offering resources for mayoral offices looking to reduce violence. Marc Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans, made national headlines for cutting the number of homicides in his city in half during his time in office in the 1990s. Now, as president and CEO of the National Urban League, Morial and the organization are prioritizing community safety and police reform policies, and convening mayors to discuss how to best enact the strategies that have worked in other communities. Focusing on community safety and police reform together makes sense for an organization like the National Urban League, Morial says, which has long focused on advancing economic and living conditions for Black Americans and other underserved people living in urban areas. “Quality of life in Black and brown and urban communities is a paramount issue. A community that feels victimized on the one hand by the police and on the other by crime and crooks is a very difficult community to live in,” he says. Passing better gun laws still remains a major priority for Democrats. The issue was a large theme of the DNC, with Congresswoman Lucy McBath, whose son was a victim of gun violence, sharing the stage with shooting survivors and others who’d lost loved ones to gun violence. The Democratic Party platform also devoted significant space to solving the problem. On the campaign trail, Harris and Walz, both gun owners, have talked about their support for universal background checks, banning assault weapons, and expanding red flag laws, policies that remain popular with their base. Still, the change in Democratic rhetoric — and in the policies in many cities across the United States — puts Democrats in a much different position than they were in 2022. Something else important happened too: violent crime has fallen. According to data the FBI released this week, overall violent crime fell 3 percent in 2023 over the year before, with murder dropping almost 12 percent. It’s too early to say for certain what role these programs played, and what other factors may have contributed. But the reduction in homicides means more lives were saved — the most important change of all.

The biggest joke in Ellen DeGeneres’s new Netflix special

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vox.com

Ellen DeGeneres in her new Netflix special about how she’s been kicked out of Hollywood (but not really kicked out because, hello, she’s on Netflix). | Wilson Webb/Netflix For one entire minute in Ellen DeGeneres’s new Netflix special, DeGeneres receives a standing ovation for stating, “I’m a strong woman.” DeGeneres soaks in the applause, staring into the rafters of Minneapolis’s Orpheum theater like she’s witnessing a holy miracle, and the entire audience rises to its feet. It’s one of the more absurd things happening in For Your Approval, a night of taped comedy that DeGeneres and Netflix have been promoting as the comedian’s response to being “kicked out of Hollywood.” Nabbing a comedy special on one of the biggest entertainment platforms on the planet should probably disqualify anyone from saying they were “kicked out of Hollywood,” but we do not live in a world where sentences make sense. (Netflix reportedly paid DeGeneres $20 million for her 2018 set Relatable.) Instead, we have a packed-house show by an alleged Hollywood outcast filmed for Netflix, with an audience hooting and hollering for a 2016 girlboss platitude. What the former talk show host really means by “kicked out of Hollywood” is that her brand took a hit. DeGeneres, who was blacklisted and shunned in the industry after coming out in the ’90s, should know the difference between those things better than anyone. The severity of DeGeneres’s second “cancellation” is debatable. In 2019, DeGeneres had actress Dakota Johnson on her eponymous show and that interview quickly turned into a meme. The host questioned the actress about her recent 30th birthday party, claiming she hadn’t been invited, which prompted Johnson’s famous reply: “Actually, no, that’s not the truth, Ellen” — saying in fact, DeGeneres had skipped the festivities. (It was later discovered that DeGeneres was hanging out with George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game.) The back and forth went viral, prompting a semi-playful examination of whether DeGeneres was actually a nice person, which built into more serious reports of a toxic work environment at The Ellen Show, with accusations of racism and sexism. Eventually, The Ellen Show was quite literally canceled in May of 2022. DeGeneres doesn’t get into these specifics in the special. For her applause-ready audience (at one point they cheer when DeGeneres name-drops a producer named “Andy”), she glosses over the more serious parts of the fallout, saying simply that the reason she was booted from the industry was because people didn’t realize her kindness was part of the act. “You can’t be mean and be in show business,” DeGeneres deadpans. “No mean people in show business.” DeGeneres paints herself as a less kind person than the Ellen we see on TV, recounting complaints from her wife Portia about how she’s comically impatient. She admits she’s rude at parties, saying that her talk show trained her to only pay attention in segments. When it comes to the toxic workplace allegations, she explains that she didn’t really know how to be a boss, which she chalks up to her love of playing pranks on producers. She also speaks about how complicated she is — having been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention-deficit disorder — and how that can manifest in being a bad manager. At the same time, DeGeneres asserts that she’s definitely kinder and nicer than the person we read about in the news. She can’t stop wanting to help lost animals, she says, and she finds beauty in how caterpillars liquefy themselves and turn into butterflies. That ties into what she lets on about her peaceful, post-talk-show life: She’s gardening more, surrounded presumably by butterflies, and tending to a roost of chickens. DeGeneres also reveals that she wears sweatpants in the home and cannot be pried out of them once she slips them on, not even for “Mick” (as in Jagger). “I’m 66 years old,” she tells the audience, who respond with raucous applause. DeGeneres follows that statement up with a joke about how restaurants’ menu font size makes her feel old. For all the time she’s spent imagining the thought process of a just-hatched butterfly or the seemingly brainless organization scheme of her car’s dashboard or how the width of the two “bankrupt” panels flanking the million-dollar panel in Wheel of Fortune is unfair, DeGeneres barely examines the obvious question about her “niceness.” “Nice” wasn’t simply a byproduct of being Ellen; DeGeneres ultimately turned being kind into one of the most profitable business plans in Hollywood. And she did so after gaining first-hand knowledge of what it’s actually like to be professionally blacklisted. At one point in the special, DeGeneres compares this current time in her career to the period after she came out publicly. The comedian had announced she was a lesbian on The Oprah Winfrey Show just prior to her eponymous character coming out on her sitcom, Ellen, that same year. She also famously appeared on the cover of Time magazine, with the cover line reading, “Yep, I’m Gay.” It was, undeniably, new ground for the country, and a brave claim of self. After “The Puppy Episode,” as it was called, DeGeneres says she struggled to find work — a rejection based on who she was, even if the sitcom character wasn’t exactly her. During DeGeneres’s turn as a talk show host, she became less like herself and more like a sitcom character. Her terminal niceness became her identity. All the mean, bigoted things people said about her being a lesbian didn’t have any bearing — she was showing audiences across America that she was a nice person, first and foremost, who just so happened to be gay. She rose above the prejudices. It was respectability politics, stretched and shaped into an extremely beneficial career. It must have been difficult to do what DeGeneres did, to sand down the edges and flatten the wrinkles of her whole identity, to fit into this TV host mold and appeal to people who had rejected her. But that was her business, one more crucial than being a TV show host, producer, or comedian. Behind the scenes, it seems, she dropped the ball. After many years of playing nice, DeGeneres wasn’t able to do her job. Instead of acknowledging that lapse or asserting that there’s a stark difference between being unpleasant to work for and ignoring a toxic work environment, in For Your Approval, DeGeneres pivots to talking about how society is tough on women in the workplace — holding them to impossible double standards and trapping them in roles designed to fail. While those factors were certainly at play, it’s a little obtuse — if not purposely hollow — to use those societal issues to buff out the more serious accusations that sunk her show. I’m not sure those kinds of excuses and obfuscations are what you’d hear from a nice person, but DeGeneres would concede she was never that nice to begin with.

OpenAI as we knew it is dead

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vox.com

Sam Altman. OpenAI, the company that brought you ChatGPT, just sold you out. Since its founding in 2015, its leaders have said their top priority is making sure artificial intelligence is developed safely and beneficially. They’ve touted the company’s unusual corporate structure as a way of proving the purity of its motives. OpenAI was a nonprofit controlled not by its CEO or by its shareholders, but by a board with a single mission: keep humanity safe. But this week, the news broke that OpenAI will no longer be controlled by the nonprofit board. OpenAI is turning into a full-fledged for-profit benefit corporation. Oh, and CEO Sam Altman, who had previously emphasized that he didn’t have any equity in the company, will now get equity worth billions, in addition to ultimate control over OpenAI. In an announcement that hardly seems coincidental, chief technology officer Mira Murati said shortly before that news broke that she was leaving the company. Employees were so blindsided that many of them reportedly reacted to her abrupt departure with a “WTF” emoji in Slack. WTF indeed. The whole point of OpenAI was to be nonprofit and safety-first. It began sliding away from that vision years ago when, in 2019, OpenAI created a for-profit arm so it could rake in the kind of huge investments it needed from Microsoft as the costs of building advanced AI scaled up. But some of its employees and outside admirers still held out hope that the company would stick to its principles. That hope can now be put to bed. “We can say goodbye to the original version of OpenAI that wanted to be unconstrained by financial obligations,” Jeffrey Wu, who joined the company in 2018 and worked on early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3, told me. “Restructuring around a core for-profit entity formalizes what outsiders have known for some time: that OpenAI is seeking to profit in an industry that has received an enormous influx of investment in the last few years,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell’s Tech Policy Institute. The shift departs from OpenAI’s “founding emphasis on safety, transparency and an aim of not concentrating power.” And if this week’s news is the final death knell for OpenAI’s lofty founding vision, it’s clear who killed it. How Sam Altman became an existential risk to OpenAI’s mission When OpenAI was cofounded in 2015 by Elon Musk (along with Altman and others), who was worried that AI could pose an existential risk to humanity, the budding research lab introduced itself to the world with these three sentences: OpenAI is a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. All of that is objectively false now. Since Altman took the helm of OpenAI in 2019, the company has been drifting from its mission. That year, the company — meaning the original nonprofit — created a for-profit subsidiary so it could pull in the huge investments needed to build cutting-edge AI. But it did something unprecedented in Silicon Valley: It capped how much profit investors could make. They could get up to 100 times what they put in, but beyond that, the money would go to the nonprofit, which would use it to benefit the public. For example, it could fund a universal basic income program to help people adjust to automation-induced joblessness. Over the next few years, OpenAI increasingly deprioritized its focus on safety as it rushed to commercialize products. By 2023, the nonprofit board had grown so suspicious of Altman that it tried to oust him. But he quickly clawed his way back to power, exploiting his relationship with Microsoft, with a new board stacked in his favor. And earlier this year, OpenAI’s safety team imploded as staffers lost faith in Altman and quit the company. Now, Altman has taken the final step in consolidating his power: He’s stripped the board of its control entirely. Although it will still exist, it won’t have any teeth. “It seems to me the original nonprofit has been disempowered and had its mission reinterpreted to be fully aligned with profit,” Wu said. Profit may be what Altman feels the company desperately needs. Despite a supremely confident blog post published this week, in which he claimed that AI would help with “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics,” OpenAI is actually in a jam. It’s been struggling to find a clear route to financial success for its models, which cost hundreds of millions — if not billions — to build. Restructuring the business into a for-profit could help attract investors. But the move has some observers — including Musk himself — asking: How could this possibly be legal? If OpenAI does away with the profit cap, it would be redirecting a huge amount of money — prospective billions of dollars in the future — from the nonprofit to investors. Because the nonprofit is there to represent the public, this would effectively mean shifting billions away from people like you and me. As some are noting, it feels a lot like theft. “If OpenAI were to retroactively remove profit caps from investments, this would in effect transfer billions in value from a non-profit to for-profit investors,” Jacob Hilton, a former employee of OpenAI who joined before it transitioned from a nonprofit to a capped-profit structure. “Unless the non-profit were appropriately compensated, this would be a money grab. In my view, such a thing would be incompatible with OpenAI’s charter, which states that OpenAI’s primary fiduciary duty is to humanity, and I do not understand how the law could permit it.” But because OpenAI’s structure is so unprecedented, the legality of such a shift might seem confusing to some. And that may be exactly what the company is counting on. Asked to comment on this, OpenAI said only to refer to its statement in Bloomberg. There, a company spokesperson said OpenAI remains “focused on building AI that benefits everyone,” adding that “the nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to exist.” The take-home message is clear: Regulate, regulate, regulate Advocates for AI safety have been arguing that we need to pass regulation that would provide some oversight of big AI companies — like California’s SB 1047 bill, which Gov. Gavin Newsom must either sign into law or veto in the next few days. Now, Altman has neatly made their case for them. “The general public and regulators should be aware that by default, AI companies will be incentivized to disregard some of the costs and risks of AI deployment — and there’s a chance those risks will be enormous,” Wu said. Altman is also validating the concerns of his ex-employees who published a proposal demanding that employees at major AI companies be allowed a “right to warn” about advanced AI. Per the proposal: “AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight, and we do not believe bespoke structures of corporate governance are sufficient to change this.” Obviously, they were right: OpenAI’s nonprofit was meant to reign over the for-profit arm, but Altman just flipped that structure upside down. After years of sweet-talking the press, the public, and the policymakers in Congress, assuring all that OpenAI wants regulation and cares more about safety than about money, Altman is not even bothering to play games anymore. He’s showing everyone his true colors. Governor Newsom, are you seeing this? Congress, are you seeing this? World, are you seeing this?

The ugly reality behind Tim Walz’s farm-friendly image

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vox.com

Tim Walz cuddles a piglet at a booth run by the Minnesota Pork Producers Association at the Minnesota State Fair in 2019. | Courtesy of the office of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate last month, a photograph of the Minnesota governor with an adorable piglet nestled in his arms at the 2019 Minnesota State Fair went viral, to the delight of Democratic voters, activists, and pundits alike. Earlier this month, Walz made a campaign stop at a dairy farm where he bottle-fed a baby cow, tweeting, “Made a new friend.” Many politicians come off a bit stiff at obligatory farm visits and state fairs, where they swap their suits for a flannel and a turkey leg. But Walz fits right in, seamlessly blending a genuine affection for farmed animals with a hearty enthusiasm for eating them. This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter Sign up here for Future Perfect’s biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more. Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com! At this year’s Minnesota State Fair, he declared pork on a stick to be the “breakfast of champions.” In another viral video from last year’s fair, Walz’s daughter tells him she won’t eat turkey because she’s vegetarian. Walz replies that in Minnesota — the nation’s top turkey-producing state — turkey isn’t meat. “Turkey’s special,” he quips. These images have helped shore up Walz’s wholesome vibes and “Big Dad Energy,” exuding the “Minnesota nice” charm that Democrats hope can help them lock down votes in crucial Midwest and Rust Belt states. I, too, have been swept up by the Harris-Walz fervor, so I feel like a killjoy poking a hole in Walz’s innocent sheen. But there’s a darker side to the story: Walz has a long history of providing free advertising and public funding to the meat and dairy sectors, industries that trash Minnesota’s treasured waterways, torture animals, and endanger public health and vulnerable workers. To be fair to Walz, he’s doing what every other politician, Republican or Democrat, does to survive in farm country. Minnesota is a top producer of turkey, pork, and dairy, as well as corn and soybeans, the main crops fed to livestock. Even though just around 1 percent of Minnesota households make a living from farming, agribusiness has accrued enormous influence over federal and state agricultural policy by showering candidates — including farm-state Democrats like Walz — with campaign contributions. It then uses them to sell a narrative that Big Ag is beyond criticism because it is “feeding the world.” As Democrats watch their share of the vote in farm country slip away, characters like Walz — a balance to Harris’s image as a San Francisco liberal — bring an obvious appeal to the party. But in what may ultimately be a quixotic quest to appeal to rural voters in Middle America, Democratic leaders are compromising their commitments elsewhere to environmental protection, labor rights, and public health when they go heavy on promoting the meat industry and light on regulating its harms. That the Democratic base appears to be celebrating Walz’s farm-friendly image with little scrutiny shows how far factory farming’s opponents have to go in educating the American public about the cruelties of our food system. Much like the misleading cartoons of happy, “humanely raised” pigs and cows on meat packaging — which often mean little on the farm itself — Walz’s photo-ops with baby farmed animals reinforce the false romanticized image that Big Ag has so successfully seared into the public’s consciousness. The reality, however, is anything but wholesome. Dissecting Walz’s viral farm moments — and his voting record Without context, the photo of Walz holding a piglet at the Minnesota State Fair appears innocent, even endearing. But the pork industry, and that piglet’s life? Not so much. The photo was taken at a pavilion sponsored by Christensen Farms, the ninth largest US pork company, and run by the Minnesota Pork Board. Practically all pigs raised for food in the US come from factory farms — including Christensen’s, as seen in this disturbing 2015 investigation by an animal rights group — which use a consistent set of practices. Female breeding pigs — those that give birth to piglets who are then raised for slaughter — are confined in crates so small they can hardly move for their entire lives, suffering through pregnancy after pregnancy to churn out piglets until their productivity wanes and they’re sent to slaughter. The Minnesota Pork Producers Association, a sister organization to the Minnesota Pork Board, lobbies in favor of keeping pregnant pigs in tiny cages and against basic environmental measures. It’s also common in the US pork industry to feed these breeding pigs ground-up piglet intestines to build immunity against disease. Piglets have their teeth clipped and tails chopped off, and the males’ testicles are cut out, all without pain relief. They spend their short lives in dark, unsanitary warehouses before being shipped on a grueling journey to the slaughterhouse and stunned unconscious in a carbon dioxide gas chamber, a practice that can be excruciatingly painful. Minnesota’s mammoth turkey industry — virtually all of the birds are raised on factory farms — is similarly abusive. Last year, an animal rights group found stomach-churning conditions at the state’s top turkey producer, Jennie-O: birds too weak and sick to even walk, along with live birds pecking at dead and rotting ones and birds with visible wounds — signs of cannibalism, a common problem in poultry farming (at the time, Jennie-O told Vox that it “takes the welfare of the animals under our care seriously and has robust animal care standards throughout our supply chain”). Jennie-O’s parent company, Hormel Foods, is headquartered in the congressional district Walz held before he ran for governor; Walz has promoted the company’s products and appointed its former CEO to a state economic council. And remember Walz’s photo op with the dairy calf earlier this month? It masked the dismal reality behind dairy farming, where cows have been selectively bred to pump out more and more milk, leading to more frequent leg and metabolic issues, as well as higher rates of painful udder inflammation. The campaign stop took place at a relatively small dairy farm, the kind that makes up an increasingly tiny share of the milk Americans buy at the grocery store. Most dairy cows today will never set foot on open pasture, and farms typically separate babies from mothers shortly after birth, housing them alone and feeding them through a bottle so that farmers can take their mothers’ milk. Made a new friend. pic.twitter.com/MLX5k37Ew6— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) September 5, 2024 In Minnesota — the Land of 10,000 Lakes — livestock and the synthetic fertilizer used to grow the corn they eat account for most of the state’s water nitrate pollution; 4 in 10 bodies of water are so polluted that they fail to meet basic health standards. Last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency directed Minnesota state agencies to immediately address the high nitrate levels in drinking water, which can cause a range of serious health issues, that thousands of Minnesotans had been exposed to. The EPA also encouraged the state to better monitor pollution from livestock manure. Minnesota state government is limited in its ability to crack down on these businesses because court decisions have largely exempted factory farms from Clean Water Act regulation. And Walz, of course, can’t bear the blame for a problem that began decades ago due to the unsavory realities of farm state politics. But environmental groups and even some state lawmakers argue Minnesota could be doing much more. Instead, Walz seems to have little to say about factory farming dirtying the state’s waterways. Prior to serving as Minnesota’s governor, Walz represented Minnesota in the US House of Representatives for six terms, in which he voted against two important agricultural pollution measures. As a member of the House Agriculture Committee, he played a large role in negotiating the Farm Bill — a multiyear legislative package that sets federal agricultural policy — and during his tenure, the legislation shoveled more and more money to farmers growing livestock feed. Walz has championed federal and state “conservation” funding for farmers to implement more sustainable practices, but they’ve ultimately made little to no progress in fixing the problem. And some of the federal conservation funding goes to large meat and dairy operations for environmentally dubious practices. Gov. Walz’s office declined to comment for this story and instead shared a comment from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. “The Governor has consistently advocated for and implemented programs that ensure agriculture benefits the environment while remaining profitable,” the statement reads, and points to Walz’s support for conservation funding and a rule that sets some limits on fertilizer application. What Walz in the White House might mean for the future of farming If Harris wins the presidency, Walz could be influential in setting the administration’s agricultural agenda. That would likely mean more of the same bipartisan, pro-factory farming consensus. On the other hand, Harris has a surprisingly strong track record on the environment and animal welfare, having defended California’s bans on foie gras and confining egg-laying hens in tiny cages during her time as the state’s attorney general. Walz’s rural bona fides could make him an effective messenger for reforms that a Harris administration might pursue — if he’s willing to buck Big Ag. But there’s little evidence so far that he would be ready to take that role. To call out the meat industry for its misdeeds and advocate for meaningful regulations would require courage few farm state politicians have been willing to show. Doing so in the middle of a tightly contested presidential campaign, where several of the battleground states have major agricultural sectors, could be politically disastrous. So, instead, we get photos of candidates with cute piglets and baby calves caught up in the factory farm system — images that fortify the very mythologies that make it so difficult for elected officials to stand up to Big Ag. But that political calculation has gotten us to where we are today: poisoned waters, injured workers, and abused animals. While a second Trump term would likely be even friendlier to Big Ag than a Harris-Walz administration, there’s less daylight between Republicans and Democrats on agricultural policy than you might think. “We’re not going back” has become the de facto Harris-Walz campaign slogan. But in the fight against factory farming, their administration probably wouldn’t move us forward, either.

41 years ago today, one man saved us from world-ending nuclear war

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vox.com

Former Soviet Col. Stanislav Petrov, the man who prevented a nuclear war, pictured in his home in 2004. | Scott Peterson/Getty Images On September 26, 1983, the planet came terrifyingly close to a nuclear holocaust. The Soviet Union’s missile attack early warning system displayed, in large red letters, the word “LAUNCH”; a computer screen stated to the officer on duty, Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, that it could say with “high reliability” that an American intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) had been launched and was headed toward the Soviet Union. First, it was just one missile, but then another, and another, until the system reported that a total of five Minuteman ICBMs had been launched. “Petrov had to make a decision: Would he report an incoming American strike?” my then-colleague Max Fisher explained. “If he did, Soviet nuclear doctrine called for a full nuclear retaliation; there would be no time to double-check the warning system, much less seek negotiations with the US.” Reporting it would have made a certain degree of sense. The Reagan administration had a far more hardline stance against the Soviets than the Carter, Ford, or Nixon administrations before it. Months earlier President Reagan had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (mockingly dubbed “Star Wars,” a plan to shoot down ballistic missiles before they reached the US), and his administration was in the process of deploying Pershing II nuclear-armed missiles to West Germany and Great Britain, which were capable of striking the Soviet Union. There were reasons for Petrov to think Reagan’s brinkmanship had escalated to an actual nuclear exchange. But Petrov did not report the incoming strike. He and others on his staff concluded that what they were seeing was a false alarm. And it was; the system mistook the sun’s reflection off clouds for a missile. Petrov prevented a nuclear war between the Soviets, who had 35,804 nuclear warheads in 1983, and the US, which had 23,305. A 1979 report by Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment estimated that a full-scale Soviet assault on the US would kill 35 to 77 percent of the US population — or between 82 million and 180 million people in 1983. The inevitable US counterstrike would kill 20 to 40 percent of the Soviet population, or between 54 million and 108 million people. The combined death toll there (between 136 million and 288 million) swamps the death toll of any war, genocide, or other violent catastrophe in human history. Proportional to world population, it would be rivaled only by the An Lushan rebellion in eighth-century China and the Mongol conquests of the 13th century. And it’s likely hundreds of millions more would have died once the conflict disrupted global temperatures and severely hampered agriculture. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War put the potential death toll from starvation at about 2 billion. Petrov, almost single-handedly, prevented those deaths. Preventing the deaths of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people was a costly decision for Petrov. If he had been wrong, and he somehow survived the American nuclear strike, he likely would’ve been executed for treason. Even though he was right, he was, according to the Washington Post’s David Hoffman, “relentlessly interrogated afterward [and] never rewarded for his decision.” After the Cold War, Petrov would receive a number of commendations for saving the world. He was honored at the United Nations, received the Dresden Peace Prize, and was profiled in the documentary The Man Who Saved the World. “I was just at the right place at the right time,” he told the filmmakers. He died in May 2017, at the age of 77. Two books about the Petrov incident and other nuclear close calls in 1983 (related to the NATO exercise Able Archer) came out in recent years: Taylor Downing’s 1983 and Marc Ambinder’s The Brink. Petrov isn’t the only man who’s prevented nuclear war Petrov was not the only Russian official who’s saved the world. On October 27, 1962, Vasili Arkhipov, a Soviet navy officer, was in a nuclear submarine near Cuba when US naval forces started dropping depth charges (a kind of explosive targeting submarines) on him. Two senior officers on the submarine thought that a nuclear war could’ve already begun and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo at a US vessel. But all three senior officers had to agree for the missile to fire, and Arkhipov dissented, preventing a nuclear exchange and potentially preventing the end of the world. Even more recently, on January 25, 1995, Russian early warning radars suggested that an American first strike was incoming. President Boris Yeltsin was alerted and given a suitcase with instructions for launching a nuclear strike at the US. Russian nuclear forces were given an alert to increase combat readiness. Yeltsin eventually declined to launch a counterstrike — which is good, because this was another false alarm. It turns out that Russian early warning systems had picked up a Norwegian-US joint research rocket, launched by scientists studying the northern lights. Petrov’s story means all the more at a moment when nuclear tensions globally remain uncomfortably high. China on September 25 tested an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time in decades. Vladimir Putin has ramped up Russia’s nuclear threats against Ukraine, stating that even non-nuclear states, if they’re supported by a nuclear state, could be subject to strikes. At the same time, a key US-Russia nuclear treaty is set to expire in less than two years, and the Senate Armed Services Committee has endorsed ramping up the US missile capacity and putting nukes back on B-52 bombers once it does. Meanwhile, China is seeking to substantially increase its own stockpile of warheads. The sheer threat of these weapons hanging over us creates psychological uncertainty that is inherent to nuclear brinkmanship, as Petrov himself demonstrated. Going by the book, he should have at least alerted his military superiors of the apparent US nuclear strike, even if the tiny number of missiles reported by the computer gave him reason to conclude it was a likely error. But while Petrov clearly showed admirable bravery — and everyone alive today should be thankful he did — his decision also underscores an unknowable question: When the moment seems to come, will a national leader or the officers below them actually push the button? The fate of billions could depend on the answer. Update, September 26, 2024, 11:55 am ET: This story, originally published on September 26, 2018, has been updated several times to reflect recent trends in nuclear proliferation and diplomacy.