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Why can’t prices just stay the same? If high inflation hurts just about everyone, why can’t we have no inflation? Over the past few years, most of the world has experienced some pretty intense inflation, with prices rising as much as 10 percent in a single year. In 2024, even though inflation rates have fallen to more manageable levels, prices are still way up and are very unlikely to come down. Which, understandably, continues to be a source of major stress for people all over the world. So why can’t prices just stay the same? As a consumer, steady prices and zero inflation seems like the ideal: You want your purchasing power to stay the same and for your dollar today to buy you exactly the same amount as your dollar tomorrow. But even in times of global economic health and stability, governments and their central banks actively avoid letting inflation get too low. That’s because 0 percent inflation might actually end up doing more harm than good. You can find the video above and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube. This video is presented by DCU. DCU has no editorial influence on our videos, but their support makes videos like these possible.vox.com
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Biden’s surprise proposal to debate Trump early, explained Then-US President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden during the final 2020 presidential debate. | Pavlo Conchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty The political intrigue behind the unusually early June debate date. After months of uncertainty, it looks like we’ll be getting debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump after all — and sooner than expected. On Wednesday, the Biden campaign announced a proposal to have two presidential debates, one in late June, the other in September. Trump quickly said he accepted those dates. Later Wednesday morning, Biden announced on social media that he’d received and accepted an invitation for a CNN-hosted debate on June 27 in Atlanta. Trump then told Fox News, “I’ll be there.” By midday, both Biden and Trump agreed that the second debate would be on September 10 and hosted by ABC News. So, this is apparently happening. Why this is a big deal: It had been unclear whether there would be any presidential debates this year. Trump has for months said he’d debate Biden anytime and anywhere. But Biden has been more reluctant to commit — in keeping with the White House’s strategy of tightly controlling Biden’s availability for high-stakes adversarial public questioning. (Biden gave fewer interviews and press conferences in his first two years than any president in decades.) In March, Biden said whether he’d debate Trump “depends on his behavior.” Finally, a few weeks ago, Biden said he’d be “happy to debate” Trump, but that he didn’t know when. Now, his team has put forward specifics, which means we’re closer to this actually happening. Biden’s unusually early June date is intriguing: Biden’s proposal for a June debate is surprising, since every presidential debate has been in September or October. We don’t know exactly what the campaign is thinking, but there are a few likely considerations. Biden is trailing in the polls right now, and usually, the trailing candidate wants to shake up the status quo somehow. Biden’s team wants to frame the election as a choice between him and Trump, rather than just a referendum on his job performance. A debate would clearly do that, putting them side by side and making clear that it really is either him or Trump. His team may hope that if Biden performs well, he could quiet voters’ concerns about his age and mental fitness. If a June debate does go poorly for Biden, there will still be ample time for him to recover. And even if Biden flops in September, too, the campaign would continue throughout October, giving time for voters’ attention to shift to other things. RFK Jr. likely won’t be invited to the first debate: Another big question hanging over this year’s potential debates is whether third-party or independent candidates would be included — most notably, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who neither Biden nor Trump want onstage. But CNN announced qualification rules for the June debate that would make it extremely difficult for RFK Jr. to qualify by then. The network said candidates must hit 15 percent in at least four national polls from approved outlets by June 20. That’s the traditional standard used for general election presidential debates. RFK Jr. has been polling at about 10 percent nationally, which is below the threshold but not too far below it. The catch, though, is that CNN also said the candidate must qualify for the ballot in states that added up to 270 electoral votes. According to Politico, RFK Jr. is currently on the ballot in only four states, and though his team’s effort to qualify in others has been going better than expected, it likely wouldn’t happen soon enough for the late June debate. Update, May 15, 12:18 pm ET: This article was published earlier on May 15 and has been updated to include the date for the second debate.vox.com
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Psychedelics could treat some of the worst chronic pain in the world Anton Vierietin/Getty Images Decades of citizen science are finally translating into clinical trials for psychedelic pain treatments. Here’s another strange and under-studied prospect of psychedelics: a world without severe chronic pain. For Court Wing, a former martial artist and CrossFit trainer, the most surprising thing about participating in a 2020 clinical trial at NYU for psilocybin and major depressive disorder wasn’t that his depression — which had resisted treatment for over five years — disappeared. It was that his long-standing chronic pain, something unrelated to the trial’s focus, also disappeared. “Shockingly, I was in complete remission,” he told Vox. And if you start poking around the internet or psychedelic conferences, a whole subterranean trove of similar stories opens up. An estimated 51 million Americans suffer from chronic pain — excruciating conditions like migraines, phantom limb pains, or fibromyalgia — and often go without effective treatments. But psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms and LSD seem to offer serious relief. At least, to people who have access. The Drug Enforcement Administration still considers these psychedelics as illegal Schedule I substances, which means federal law prohibits them from being prescribed as medicines (though states can move ahead anyway, as they have with marijuana). Most clinical trials in today’s psychedelic “hype bubble” prioritize mental health conditions, which will likely lead to MDMA being approved by the FDA later this year for PTSD treatment. The downside of that singular focus, however, is that those suffering from chronic pain have been left to turn to the psychedelic underground for support. Still, the rising awareness around psychedelics as potential treatments for mental health has raised their profile across the board, helping to finally generate some traction around other uses too, like pain. A major milestone in that journey is the National Institutes of Health’s announcement last month of a nearly $22 million grant for clinical trials on psychedelic-assisted therapy and chronic pain relief. The road from funding more trials to doctors being able to legally prescribe psychedelics for chronic pain will likely take years, however. That’s time a lot of people don’t have; the depth of pain in these communities is nearly impossible to imagine. “People in the general public have no reference for this type of pain,” said Wing, who recently co-founded the Psychedelics and Pain Association (PPA). “Not unless they work in the profession, or have someone close to them that has this type of chronic pain, will they get the kind of desperation that’s involved.” When a novel and relatively safe treatment like low- to moderate-dose psychedelics can alleviate that kind of desperation, it’s difficult to not want the regulatory process to move quicker. But none of the necessary steps — getting funding, clinical trials, DEA rescheduling, and designing the care infrastructure — are exactly known for being swift. “We do want to be careful. We don’t want people trying this randomly at home. But if we get this right, we could relieve the suffering of millions,” said Wing, who emphasized the value of harm reduction practices and professional guidance. “For some people, it’s the difference between a life worth living or not.” What we know about psychedelics for treating pain One condition that’s pulling a ton of attention toward psychedelic treatments for chronic pain is cluster headaches — also known as “suicide headaches.” They’re among the most painful conditions known to humankind. The title of a real study on survey responses from 493 people with cluster headaches begins: “You will eat shoe polish if you think it would help.” Most people end up going about five years before receiving a proper diagnosis. Even then, the treatment options are slim. The first FDA-approved treatment, Emgality, came in 2019, and clinical trials found that it roughly cut the number of attacks in half for 71 percent of patients. No known treatment had ever straight-up ended a cluster headache. But back in 1998, someone posted on an internet forum that LSD seemed to have negated his cluster headaches. A community of “Clusterbusters” then began to coalesce around the illicitly tinged knowledge that an effective psychedelic treatment exists, even if most doctors don’t know about it, and certainly can’t prescribe it. Today’s revival of psychedelic research is often traced to the late Roland Griffiths’s 2006 study on psilocybin and mystical experiences. But that same year, Yale psychiatrist R. Andrew Sewell also published a paper that reviewed 53 cluster headache patients who’d self-medicated with either psilocybin or LSD. Seventeen of 19 users who took psilocybin during an episode reported that it ended their attacks. More broadly, 25 of 48 psilocybin users and 7 of 8 LSD users reported that the psychedelics put an end to their cluster periods altogether. Despite the lack of attention by medical professionals, there’s a surprisingly long history of studying psychedelics for pain relief. The PPA maintains a database of research showing studies reaching all the way back to 1930, covering painful conditions from fibromyalgia to phantom limb syndrome and cancer pain. One reason that research hasn’t turned more heads is the lack of randomization or placebo controls, something that the NIH grant could help remedy (though there’s an ongoing debate as to whether randomized placebo-controlled trials are the best methods to study psychedelics in general — how do you go about “blinding” someone to whether or not they’re tripping on acid?). Research on psychedelics and pain, today, is at a tipping point. According to the PPA’s database, after the 1930 study, research dropped off until the ’60s, with a few more studies coming out per decade until the early 2020s. In 2022, that number shot up to 16, and another 10 in 2023. Now, with the NIH grant, more are poised to follow. “I cannot tell you how hard we’ve had to push in the last four years to get this into the discussion,” said Wing, who cofounded the PPA alongside Psychedelics Today CEO Joe Moore and Bob Wold, the founder of Clusterbusters. A January 2023 review of the literature by anesthesiologist Selina van der Wal and colleagues surveyed a series of potential mechanisms of action. They ranged from activating the brain’s serotonin receptors (which are known to be involved in pain processing), altering how brain regions communicate with each other and process pain perception, to the anti-inflammatory properties of psychedelics. Wing is especially interested in how psychedelics could update our understanding of how chronic pain works. Most chronic pain lasts long after the underlying tissue damage is already healed. At that point, pain may no longer be a signal stemming from damage in the body, but a stubborn prediction that the mind has learned to make about the body. In this view, chronic pain is like a haunting memory that the mind recasts into the present. This is also why psychotherapy is among the best tools we have to treat chronic pain, and may be a powerful pairing with psychedelics. “People think pain is an input, that it’s a sensation traveling from the body to the brain and signaling damage,” he explained over the phone from the Horizons psychedelic conference in New York. “But that’s just not the case. Pain is actually an output of the central nervous system. It’s a perception that’s part of this whole idea of predictive processing.” In August of last year, National Cancer Institute oncologist Farah Zia and colleagues published a review of where future research should focus. It outlines a few areas: digging into the potential mechanisms of action, whether micro- or macro-doses are more effective, whether complementary therapies should be included, expanding the search for conditions that may benefit, and the logistical thicket of treatment protocols. Though Wing emphasized the importance of best practices for risk reduction and the value of being in communication with health care providers (though not many will walk you through a psychedelic dosing protocol), he often says that we don’t need more research to prove that psychedelics can be effective treatments for chronic pain. Instead, “we have to establish that this has already been proven.” How to balance people suffering today with long FDA approval timelines For some conditions, like cluster headaches, studies, including van der Wal’s review, are already recommending that Phase 3 trials get underway in order to win FDA approval as fast as possible. But again, that will take a lot of time. And other conditions that lag behind cluster headaches will take even longer, leaving people to suffer in the interim. “There has to be a middle way,” said Wing. “In the meantime, how do we help the people suffering on the ground?” One option is to recognize that, as sociologist Joanna Kempner put it to me, “the cat’s out of the bag, so far as psychedelics are concerned … and given how much unmet need there is in pain populations, people are going to use them.” State decriminalization efforts, along with investments in harm reduction and public education, can reduce the risks around criminalizing people seeking psychedelic treatments while the FDA approval process churns along. “The debate around medicine versus decriminalization is a false binary,” said Kempner. Her forthcoming book — Psychedelic Outlaws — chronicles the journey of the Clusterbusters’ citizen-science network, which continues to fill a critical void of knowledge and support in the absence of professional guidance. She explained that among people she interviewed, “Clusterbusters’ patient network might have saved their lives, but they wanted to be able to ask their doctors for advice. Regulation would help make it easier and safer for them to obtain a standard-sized dose of their treatment. And, most importantly, they hoped that good scientific research would help others find relief, too.” “As I often witnessed,” Kempner added, “psychedelics really did save many people’s lives.” A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!vox.com
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Why school segregation is getting worse A teacher and students in a public classroom in Salmon School District in Idaho. | Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images Seventy years after the Brown decision, many students are divided by their race and socioeconomic status. Friday marks the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the “separate but equal” schools for racial minorities were inherently unequal and unconstitutional. But so many years after the watershed ruling, new research confirms a startling trend: School segregation has been getting steadily worse over the last three decades. Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Southern California found that racial segregation in the country’s 100 biggest school districts, which serve the most students of color, has increased by 64 percent since 1988. Economic segregation, or the division between students who receive free or reduced lunch and those who do not, increased by 50 percent since 1991. The study primarily focused on white-Black segregation, the groups that the Brown decision addressed, but found that white-Hispanic and white-Asian segregation both also more than doubled since the late 1980s in the large school districts. Why is history reversing itself? Residential segregation, which researchers have historically identified as the root cause, isn’t the chief driver, according to the new study. The increased segregation also isn’t due to shifting demographics nationwide, as the country becomes less white. In most of the large districts that the researchers examined, housing segregation and racial economic inequality declined. Instead, they cited two policy choices America has made: increasing school choice options and ending court oversight of integration efforts. “When we switched from a commitment to integration and equity to school choice, it’s not terribly surprising that we see rising school segregation,” said Ann Owens, a professor of sociology and public policy at USC and one of the report’s authors. “We’ve abdicated our responsibility to integration, and unfettered choice does not magically lead to integration.” And now, the steady increase means that Black and Hispanic students are more likely to be concentrated in higher-poverty schools with fewer resources, a trend that worsens academic and life outcomes. School choice, namely charter schools, has expanded School choice, the programs and policies that let families use public funding to access alternatives to traditional public schools, has grown in the past few decades. That’s particularly true of the charter school sector, which creates publicly funded schools that have greater flexibility than traditional public schools due to “charter” agreements with states. Some of the first charter schools were introduced in the 1990s to create alternative learning environments, with their own curricula and discipline policies, for example. Charters now serve 3.7 million students in 8,000 schools, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. During the 2021-22 school year, they enrolled 7.4 percent of all public school students. That might not seem like that many students — but it’s less how many are enrolling, and more who is. The study supports the idea that parents, particularly white parents, have enrolled their children in charter schools that are majority white. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, white parents have opted out of big urban district schools. There’s generally more segregation both within the charter sector and between charter and traditional public schools. “We do see that as the charter sector expands, the places where it expanded fastest from the late ’90s to today tend to be places where segregation grew the most even after we take into account lots of other things that were going on,” said Sean Reardon, the faculty director of Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project that produced the report and a new “Segregation Explorer” tool. It’s not just white families driving the change: Some charters explicitly market themselves to families of certain racial or ethnic communities or neighborhoods, which has helped increase segregation too. As school choice programs were expanding, another policy that helped integrate schools was ending. Court oversight has vanished When Brown was decided in 1954, the Court didn’t immediately require school districts to desegregate. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County that schools were mandated to develop plans to dismantle their segregated enrollment systems. The decision introduced new criteria courts could use to evaluate schools’ compliance — such as the quality of a school’s physical resources and amenities (think: the type of extracurricular activities offered or the kind of transportation they provide all students, the number of teachers, etc.) or the ratio of Black and white students and teachers. The orders had a huge impact, but by the early ’90s, districts were released from the mandates after a series of cases that gave districts local control. The new research shows that within five to eight years of districts being released from mandates, segregation increased. Since 1991, about two-thirds of school districts that were required to meet court desegregation mandates were removed from court oversight. Why this matters — and how to reverse school segregation Brown was supposed to lead to long-lasting desegregation. Though school segregation in most school districts is much lower than it was 60 years ago, it’s higher than it was 30 years ago. And today’s divisions are enough to concentrate Black and Hispanic students in higher-poverty schools. And that in turn “drives a lot of inequality and disparate outcomes that we see,” said Owens. “It’s not that sitting next to a kid of a particular racial group is on its face beneficial. It’s that resources from home, social resources, and political resources in our society are linked to race.” Achievement gaps are larger and grow faster as kids progress through school in more segregated districts than more integrated districts, Reardon said, adding that integration efforts tailored to a specific town’s issues have led to very large improvements in educational and life outcomes for students of color. Research has also shown that desegregation doesn’t worsen outcomes for white students. Given that housing segregation helped create school segregation in the first place, tackling this issue will mean taking a “a multi-sector approach because the education system alone can’t address it,” Reardon said. Barring that, there are a few solutions to at least help us counteract the slides of the last three decades. Everything from voluntary integration programs to socioeconomic-based student assignment policies — and if we’re committed to school choice policies, choosing ones that affirmatively promote integration. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.vox.com
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The crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists shows why the left needs free speech Police arrest a pro-Palestinian activists at the City College of New York on April 30. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images Protecting radical dissent requires tolerating right-wing speech. Social justice advocates spent much of the past decade fighting to constrict the bounds of permissible debate on college campuses. Such activists saw an inescapable tension between the ideal of free expression and the well-being of marginalized groups, both on campus and off. By platforming regressive ideas, universities endangered minority populations in American society while rendering their classrooms less welcoming to students from those groups. Keeping campuses safe and inclusive for all therefore required narrowing the range of acceptable speech. Sometimes, this meant blocking explicitly bigoted, far-right demagogy. But at some schools, the definition of exclusionary speech grew broad enough to encompass ideas that are not inherently hateful and are held by many people for non-prejudicial reasons. One didn’t need to directly endorse the subjugation of a minority group to disqualify oneself from speaking on campus. On some campuses, merely adopting a stance that would have adverse implications for that group — at least, in the estimation of some of its most vocal members — was sufficient. Attempts to sanction academics for speech increased dramatically over the past 10 years, according to a 2023 report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Conservative activists were responsible for 41 percent of these campaigns, but a majority came from the left. In national discourse during this period, meanwhile, conservatives often espoused a support for free speech, while some progressives forthrightly defended restricting free expression on college campuses. In recent months, however, social justice advocates have been forced to contest the very ideas about speech and inclusion that they had once popularized. Since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war and the resulting surge of pro-Palestinian activism at American colleges, the campus free speech debate has inverted. Now, it is Republican politicians who insist that college administrators must discern the bigotry implicit in non-hateful speech (such as the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”) and then silence that speech to protect a historically oppressed minority group on campus. And they have enjoyed some success. In recent months, several colleges have disciplined pro-Palestinian activists for ordinary speech acts and mobilized force against their acts of civil disobedience. Congress, meanwhile, is on the verge of enacting a law that would empower the federal government to suppress anti-Zionist advocacy on college campuses. Progressives have lamented such attempts to regulate campus speech as authoritarian attacks on academic freedom. In their estimation, the aggressive policing of free expression at US colleges since October 7 has not served the interests of the marginalized, but rather it has abetted the mass murder of a disempowered people. All of which raises a question: In light of these developments, should students concerned with social justice rethink their previous skepticism of free speech norms, for the sake of better protecting radical dissent? I think the answer is yes. The most compelling counterargument is that norms simply don’t matter. Whatever stance campus activists took toward open debate before October 7, colleges still would have cracked down on pro-Palestinian speech thereafter. The politicians and university donors who’ve pressured schools into disciplining anti-Israel advocacy would be no less intolerant of dissent in a world where the left still uniformly and unequivocally endorsed free speech. Further, in recent weeks, many universities have demonstrated that norms are not an inviolable constraint on their actions, dispensing with preexisting practices regarding student speech and protest — or even rewriting official rules — so as to discipline Pro-Palestinian advocacy. This argument has real force. It is true that progressive students’ posture toward free speech has little impact on the machinations of university patrons or Republican politicians. And the protective power of norms is surely partial, at best. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that progressives would be better equipped to resist the present crackdown on pro-Palestinian advocacy had social justice activists not previously popularized an expansive conception of harmful speech. Even if this were not the case, the campus left would still be well-advised to tolerate a wider array of political expression. Effectively advancing social justice requires a morally valid conception of what such justice entails and an empirically accurate understanding of how various policies and political tactics would function in practice. No political faction should be certain that they possess either of these things. And the more insulated any ideological orthodoxy is from critique, the more vulnerable it will be to persistent errors. How Israel hawks have coopted social justice activists’ ideas about speech and harm To appreciate how broad the conception of intolerably harmful speech has become on some campuses over the past decade, consider the case of Dorian Abbot. In 2021, MIT invited Abbot, an expert in geophysics, to deliver a lecture about climate change. Students and faculty responded by successfully agitating for that address’s cancellation. Their complaint was not with the content of Abbot’s planned remarks. Rather, they contended that his unrelated critiques of affirmative action had rendered his invitation to campus inappropriate and oppressive. Specifically, Abbot had publicly argued against racial preferences in hiring. Progressives understandably object to this position, which could allow racial prejudice to creep back into hiring processes and undermine workforce diversity. At the same time, it is entirely possible to oppose racial preferences in hiring without being motivated by racial animus. Indeed, as of 2019, 74 percent of US adults — including 54 percent of Black Americans and 69 percent of Hispanic Americans — shared Abbot’s view, according to a Pew Research survey. Nevertheless, students and faculty deemed this stance so inherently harmful to nonwhite people as to disqualify a proponent from speaking on campus about other topics. Now, opponents of pro-Palestinian speech in Congress are deploying similar modes of reasoning to stifle radical dissent against Israel. Like those who sought to deplatform Abbot, the sponsors of the Antisemitism Awareness Act conflate speech that discomforts some members of historically oppressed groups with speech that causes them intolerable harm. Unlike Abbot’s critics, they don’t aim merely to deny ideologically uncongenial academics speaking opportunities, but rather, to subject them to federal investigation. The law stipulates that the toleration of various forms of anti-Zionist speech constitutes anti-Jewish discrimination. Under the terms of the bill, universities could lose federal funding by allowing students and faculty to claim “that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” or draw “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” or apply “double standards” when criticizing Israel. As the act’s Democratic co-sponsor Josh Gottheimer summarized its contents, the bill “allows criticism of Israel” but “doesn’t allow calls for the destruction or elimination of the Jewish state.” There is no question that Jewish students on some campuses have been subject to antisemitic harassment in recent months. And some pro-Palestinian students and faculty have evinced contempt for Jewish life by celebrating the October 7 attacks, a stance that qualifies as permissible speech under civil rights law but which is nevertheless reasonably construed as antisemitic. But calling for the elimination of Israel is not inherently antisemitic. A significant number of young progressives believe that Israel should be superseded by a secular, binational state. One could reasonably argue that this ideal is unrealistic today, but that does not make it tantamount to an expression of Jew-hatred. Similarly, whether one agrees that Israel is a fundamentally “racist” project because it privileges the rights of Jews over those of Arabs — or that Israel’s actions in Gaza can be usefully analogized to the Nazi Holocaust — it’s clear that such ideas are not inherently antisemitic. Were that the case, you would not see many proudly Jewish intellectuals making those arguments. But persuading skeptics to recognize these distinctions is more difficult in a world where, just a little while ago, progressives had deemed nonwhite Americans’ majority position on affirmative action to be intolerably harmful to nonwhite students. Many of those leading the charge to suppress pro-Palestinian speech on campus have justified their actions by referring to such precedents, arguing that Jews deserve as much protection from harmful speech as any other ethnic group. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives — including some progressives — have found the logic of this position difficult to resist. The Antisemitism Awareness Act cleared the chamber by a vote of 320 to 91 earlier this month. In the current context, mobilizing opposition to a bill purportedly aimed at fighting antisemitism would always be daunting. But it is plausible that, had the left consistently defended the speech rights of moderates and conservatives, the coalition against that legislation might be a bit broader. Some social justice advocates will dismiss this possibility on the grounds that those to their right are almost invariably hypocritical and opportunistic in their support for free speech. And yet, although plenty of one-time free-speech crusaders have cheered the suppression of pro-Palestinian dissent, such hypocrisy has been far from universal. Despite the fact that it draws much of its funding from conservative donors, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has vigorously opposed attempts to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, even when such speech has taken the form of advocacy for Hamas and the October 7 attacks. The organizer of an open letter to Harper’s Magazine championing free speech, the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, has condemned France’s ban on pro-Palestinian protest marches as an infringement on fundamental rights. And even some on the farthest right flank of the pro-free-speech crowd have come out in opposition to the Antisemitism Awareness Act. The editorial board of Tablet — an online magazine militantly opposed to both “wokeness” and Palestinian nationalism — wrote a column opposing the bill, while Bari Weiss’s outlet, The Free Press, published a denunciation of it co-authored by the “antiwoke” agitator Christopher Rufo, who argues that colleges’ existing codes of conduct are sufficient to protect students against harassment. He went on to say that it’s important to “protect the rights of protesters to express their opinions, even when those opinions are abhorrent.” (Rufo’s opposition is also informed by an aversion to expanding the ambit of “DEI bureaucracies,” which he wishes to abolish.) It is therefore possible for conservatives to prioritize free speech above the suppression of radical dissent. And it seems unlikely that the number of conservatives willing to set such priorities is fixed and wholly unresponsive to changes in speech norms. In a world where right-wing thought is frequently deplatformed or investigated on grounds of antidiscrimination, conservatives may be more inclined to silence or investigate left-wing speech on the same grounds. In a world where right-of-center intellectuals had more cause for believing that their defense of leftists’ free expression would be reciprocated, by contrast, it seems plausible that opposition to the Antisemitism Awareness Act might be a bit more widespread and its prospects for clearing the Senate somewhat dimmer. At Columbia, a disciplinary process designed to promote racial equity has been turned on pro-Palestinian activists Opponents of pro-Palestinian dissent have coopted the arguments of progressive free-speech skeptics. And, in at least one case, they’ve allegedly exploited institutions informed by those arguments. Long before Columbia students pitched tents on the university’s lawn, administrators at the school and its sister college Barnard had launched a crackdown on ordinary pro-Palestinian advocacy. Last fall, a Barnard student faced disciplinary charges merely for hanging a Palestinian flag from her dorm room, on the pretense that this violated a municipal ordinance. Another student was punished for draping such a flag over the statue of Alma Mater on Columbia’s campus. The “decoration” of Alma Mater was a well-established (and heretofore generally tolerated) form of student protest. When Black Lives Matter protesters adorned the statue, they were not punished but rather celebrated by the university, which approvingly featured an image of their handiwork in its magazine. Yet the pro-Palestinian student activist received two years academic probation and 50 hours of community service for her act of self-expression. Columbia even saw fit to discipline students who had silently walked out of a talk by Hillary Clinton in protest of her support for the Israeli government. As Columbia law professor Katherine Franke has argued, the university’s aggressive policing of pro-Palestinian dissent is informed by the fact that it has been charged by two lawsuits and Congress with enabling an antisemitic environment on campus. It therefore had strong incentives to err on the side of speech suppression, for the sake of avoiding legal liability or political sanction. But the university’s over-policing of student speech has also allegedly been abetted by an unlikely force: the recently created Center for Student Success and Intervention (CSSI). As Columbia law professor David Pozen writes, the university has multiple overlapping disciplinary codes and processes. The most longstanding of these are the Rules of University Conduct. Those rules were established in the wake of the campus protests of 1968 and aimed to maximize students’ expressive freedom and preempt viewpoint discrimination by the administration. When charged for an offense under the Rules of University Conduct, students are afforded representation and other due process rights. But there is another disciplinary code administered by the CSSI, which was established in 2022 and aims to shield students from discrimination and promote the values of “Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion.” The CSSI’s disciplinary process stipulates a broader definition of discriminatory speech than either the Rules of University Conduct or federal civil rights law, while providing the accused with few procedural protections. As Pozen explained to Vox, the CSSI provides no right to counsel, bars the accused from making opening or closing statements, and allows the administration to add new charges in the middle of the process. “The spirit of the CSSI process, they describe [it] as an educational conversational process, not an adversarial one,” Pozen said. “It’s a consultative process where you talk through what happened and acknowledge, confess, and repent and work out an informal arrangement. ... It’s the kind of vision which may work well for certain lower-level infractions and where the whole machinery of an adversary process would be unnecessary and counterproductive. But as applied to much more serious cases where expulsion is threatened, a lot of people think that it’s inappropriate.” Nevertheless, according to the university Senate, Columbia administrators have routed some Palestinian activists’ cases through the CSSI process, seemingly to secure swifter and more aggressive punishments against students. This said, it is not unusual for CSSI to be given jurisdiction over harassment cases. But because its definition of harassing speech is so broad, it is easy for administrators to embrace a more expansive interpretation of the rules in response to political pressure, which is precisely what some at Columbia suspect they’ve done in cases concerning pro-Palestinian speech. Meanwhile, the university has allegedly routed violations of “time, place, and manner” restrictions on protest through CSSI, despite the fact that such cases normally fall under the jurisdiction of the Rules of University Conduct. As a result, pro-Palestinian protesters facing administrative sanction have been deprived of due process rights. In response to these developments, Pozen said that he believes there is a “growing appreciation” on campus for “the idea that we should countenance a wide range of uncomfortable speech that doesn’t rise to the level of a clear and present danger or target particular individuals.” Free speech and social justice are complementary ideals All this said, there is no guarantee that re-embracing civil libertarian speech norms would enable progressives to protect dissent against Israel’s war crimes — or any other worthwhile cause — in the face of concerted political pressure. Therefore, if adopting a permissive attitude toward campus speech entailed significant costs to progressive causes, then doing so might be unwise. And there is doubtlessly some truth to the idea that free speech and inclusivity can come into conflict. A university that routinely platforms advocacy for the innate inferiority of nonwhite people will not be a very welcoming place for nonwhite students. The question of how colleges should handle unabashedly racist or fascistic speech (that does not target any specific individual or threaten any imminent act of violence) is a thorny one. But outside of such edge cases, the idea that advancing social justice requires policing speech on campus seems plainly wrongheaded. In truth, suppressing critiques of progressive orthodoxy makes it harder to effectively aid the vulnerable in at least two ways. First, if students insulate themselves from arguments they find offensive but which enjoy significant political support in the country writ large, then they will be ill-equipped to rebut those contentions. The fact that there is considerable public opposition to affirmative action does not tell us anything in particular about the moral validity of that position. But it does mean that combating it is liable to require persuading many Americans to change their views. Progressive students may struggle at that task if they lack either familiarity with some of the ideas informing such opposition or experience in arguing against those ideas. More fundamentally, effectively advancing social justice requires a morally valid conception of what justice entails and an empirically accurate understanding of how to further it in various domains. And none of us should be fully confident that we possess either of these things. Every ideological tradition in the United States has, at one point or another, endorsed positions that it now rejects. Progressives once advocated for eugenics; campus leftists, for the glory of Maoism; liberals, for the Vietnam War. Certainty that none of our contemporary policy commitments are morally faulty or practically misguided has little foundation beyond self-flattery. If left-wing students deter their peers and professors from voicing skepticism of their ideas or pursuing lines of academic inquiry that might challenge progressive orthodoxies, then they will be more vulnerable to persistent errors. When supporters of Israel refuse to engage with the claim that it has committed atrocities in Gaza on the grounds that such charges are antisemitic, they allow motivated reasoning and historical grievance to blind them to morally vital facts. Those of us on the left should not delude ourselves into thinking we are fundamentally incapable of making similar mistakes. Defending free speech and standing up for the disempowered may sometimes be competing objectives. But as recent debates over the war in Gaza have indicated, the two endeavors are generally complementary.vox.com
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How to prepare for another season of wildfire smoke Due to the affects of Canadian wildfires, it was a hazy morning in the Twin Cities on Thursday, June 29, 2023. | Deb Pastner/Star Tribune/Getty Images Wildfire smoke can be hazardous, but there’s a lot you can do to protect yourself. Several US states are again experiencing an influx of wildfire smoke as Canada’s summer fire season gets underway. Due to the scale of the wildfires and natural weather patterns, enormous amounts of smoke are drifting southward — much like last year. North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota are among the earliest states to receive air quality warnings this week. Those alerts are a signal that it’s unhealthy for people, particularly vulnerable populations like children and the elderly, to go outside due to the pollution in the air. More US states and cities could see similar alerts over the coming months as scientists anticipate another intense Canadian wildfire season. The greatest hazards of wildfire smoke come from fine particulate matter that it carries, like soot, also known as PM 2.5 for its size. Because they’re so small, these pollutants can travel into people’s lungs and bloodstreams, making breathing more difficult and exacerbating other health conditions from asthma to chronic pulmonary problems. Hazardous gasses and chemicals in the smoke like carbon monoxide and benzene can also endanger people’s health. Health authorities encourage people to stay indoors if possible when they receive severe air quality warnings and to take serious precautions if they need to go outside. Below are some steps to keep in mind — and ways to protect yourself — while navigating this upcoming wildfire season. Check the air quality index The first step is checking the Air Quality Index, or AQI, which is run by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). People can visit AirNow.gov, and enter their location in order to see what the air quality is like in their neighborhood. The AQI rates air quality on a scale of 0 to 500, with 0 being the least hazardous and 500 being the most. It also breaks the rating down into six color categories, with green representing the healthiest level of air quality and maroon representing the most dangerous. These calculations are based on the pollutants the EPA detects in the air, including the concentrations of ozone, particulate matter (PM 2.5), carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. Any rating of 50 or below indicates that the air is good quality, while any rating higher than 300 signals that the air poses a risk to everyone, according to the agency. The various categories in between those extremes detail who is more at risk as the air quality worsens: For example, sensitive groups could experience negative health effects once the AQI is higher than 100. If an area experiences a heavy concentration of wildfire smoke, the state government typically issues an air quality warning to make people aware of the risks. In Minnesota this week, the state issued an air quality alert to signal that the air would reach the red AQI category — which is a rating between 151 to 200 — and be hazardous for all people. Purchase an indoor air filter and recirculate air When the local Air Quality Index indicates the outside air could be hazardous, people should stay indoors as much as they can. “The outdoor levels are reduced by anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent just coming indoors,” Steven Chillrud, a research professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, told NY1 in 2023. Experts urge people to close doors and windows to keep the smoke out. They should also put their air conditioning unit on the “recirculation” function if possible, so that it doesn’t bring in air from outside. People can even put wet towels under their windows and doors to provide another barrier to smoke coming in. In addition, scientists say people can purchase portable HEPA air filters for their homes, which will further clean the air of particulate matter that might get inside a house or apartment. Limit time and activity outside For people who have to go outside, including for work and other urgent reasons, experts say they should try to limit their time outdoors. (Employers can help by curbing the amount of time employees need to spend outside or reschedule tasks.) The American Lung Association encourages people to keep outdoor exposures to under 30 minutes if the AQI is high. “The chances of being affected by unhealthy levels of air pollution increase the longer a person is active outdoors and the more strenuous the activity,” the Association notes. Per a CBS News report, people are safe to go outside if the AQI is 100 or below, but ratings higher than that could require more precautions. Wear a mask When the AQI is high, people can protect themselves by wearing a mask like a well-fitted KN95 or N95. Those can filter out some particulate matter, while a P100 mask is seen as the most effective option because it can keep out the finest particles. Cloth and surgical masks, however, won’t be as effective. Individuals with heart and lung conditions should also be especially careful because they could experience the worst health effects from wildfire smoke. “People with asthma and people who already have lung disease or underlying lung problems — it can exacerbate that, it can irritate that. And if the air quality is bad enough, it can even cause some symptoms of feeling unwell and respiratory symptoms in people who are healthy,” Stephanie Widmer, a member of ABC News’ Medical Unit, previously said.vox.com
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You might have another chance to see the northern lights tonight The recent geomagnetic storm allowed auroras to be visible across a much wider area, reaching into places like California. | Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images Why we’ve been seeing such dramatic displays in our night skies. The stunning green and purple auroras that sparkled in the night across the continental United States this week are the latest entry in a rambunctious year for space weather. Forecasters expect more shimmering skies tonight as high-energy particles from the sun collide with the Earth’s magnetic field. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center issued a geomagnetic storm watch for May 14, 2024, noting that the storm could reach G2, or moderate, strength. That’s where power systems at high latitudes could set off high-voltage alarms and spacecraft may need to make adjustments to stay aloft. The wave of solar wind will also extend the reach of auroras. “The aurora may become visible over some northern and upper Midwest states from New York to Idaho,” according to the forecast. After tonight, the storm is likely to weaken over the next two days and auroras will retreat. A G2 Watch is in effect for May 14... pic.twitter.com/DU4Bo3advf— NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (@NWSSWPC) May 13, 2024 The current wave of celestial activity began last week 93 million miles away at a huge sunspot on our friendly neighborhood star. Sunspots are patches of the sun’s surface with unusually strong magnetic fields and they appear as dark spots. The boundaries of these spots are ripe for storms that trigger solar flares, large eruptions of radiation. They also foment coronal mass ejections, bursts of magnetized plasma from the sun’s corona, its outermost layer. The sunspot experienced a series of flares and coronal ejections that sprayed the solar system with high-energy particles. When they collided with the Earth’s atmosphere, these particles created a phenomenon similar to how neon lights work, exciting gasses in the atmosphere and making them glow, hence auroras. They typically cluster near the Earth’s poles, but if enough energetic solar particles charge up the sky, auroras can reach much closer to the equator, which is why we’ve been seeing them lately all over the globe. This year, the sun is at the peak of its activity cycle. Roughly every 11 years, the sun’s magnetic poles reverse and as that flip approaches, there tends to be much more magnetic activity and thus more sunspots at the surface. Anticipating how this activity will ripple toward our home planet is an important task, not just so we Earthlings can get our cameras ready and ooh and aah at the nighttime colors; space weather can create problems for communication, navigation, and the power grid. Michael Wiltberger, deputy director of the High Altitude Observatory at the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, noted that predicting space weather is a lot like forecasting terrestrial weather. The weather we typically experience on the ground is driven by heat, moisture, and wind while space weather is driven by the electromagnetism of stars and planets. But both space and terrestrial weather emerge at the confluence of short- and long-term drivers playing out over a variety of different regions. While we don’t usually experience space weather on the ground, it generates a constant burbling mix of subtle and severe influences on the tools of our modern world. “There’s stuff going on all the time that affects a wide range of things from radio communications to lifetimes of satellites to radiation risks to astronauts in space,” Wiltberger said. And like your local TV weather experts, scientists studying space weather draw on a variety of instruments and models to generate useful forecasts with bulletins and visuals. On its website, the Space Weather Prediction Center produces predictions for “essential space weather communities” like aviation, emergency management, satellites, and space weather enthusiasts. Key tools for space weather forecasting are spacecraft that monitor the flow of solar wind and the direction of the magnetic field. “It’s important because if it’s aligned in the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field, we’re not going to get a lot of energy dumped into the system,” Wiltberger said. “But if it’s in the opposite direction then the magnetic fields can interact and get more energy and more direct coupling during these geomagnetic storms.” These measurements are then coupled with readings from ground-based cameras and magnetometers and fed into models to figure out how a rowdy sun will light up the Earth. Right now, one of the main goals is to extend the lead time for forecasts of how disruptive a geomagnetic storm will be. While scientists can see coronal mass ejections days before they start to impact Earth, they can’t easily figure out the strength and direction of the magnetic field, which, again, is the key factor in how much energy the Earth suddenly absorbs. Aurora over the Grand Canyon (Navajo Point). The substorm on May 11 was much less powerful than the previous night, but still a beautiful sight over the Canyon. pic.twitter.com/Rq2OIU8f0v— Brian A. Klimowski (@Brian_Klimowski) May 14, 2024 Even small hits from the sun can be impactful. GPS, for example, relies on timing signals between satellites to pinpoint locations on the ground. A geomagnetic storm can create delays in these signals, throwing off critical measurements. “If you’re driving your car, probably not a big deal,” Wiltberger said. “But if you’re doing precision agriculture and you’re trying to use it to tell you where to put the water on the seed that you just planted and you need really good accuracy, it’s a concern.” Satellites can be vulnerable to solar storms in other ways as well. On February 3, 2022, SpaceX launched 49 Starlink internet satellites into low Earth orbit, but a geomagnetic storm struck the next day. The storm increased the density of the atmosphere, creating unexpected drag and forcing most of the satellites to re-enter and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The company said the nearly 6,000-strong Starlink satellite fleet weathered the recent storms just fine. One of the biggest concerns is what a strong solar storm could do to electricity systems. Wiltberger said one could imagine a gargantuan, fast-moving coronal mass ejection that hits the Earth just 24 hours after leaving the sun. If the magnetic field in this ejection happens to line up in the opposite direction of the Earth’s, it will create a big shift in the Earth’s magnetic field. A changing magnetic field, you may recall from your electromagnetism classes, can induce a current in a conductor, like, say, power transmission lines. That can then disrupt power delivery or cause parts of the grid to trip offline. Still, even a severe coronal mass ejection is unlikely to trigger a civilization-stopping blackout. “We’re probably not going to lose the power grid, but the power grid may actually have to take steps to bring more power generation capability online, defer maintenance, do those types of things,” Wiltberger said. And perhaps losing a few lights on the ground for a while isn’t such a bad thing when the night sky lights up.vox.com
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Meme stocks like GameStop are soaring like it’s 2021 Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images To quote Elon Musk, “Gamestonk!!” A roaring kitty, a legion of Redditors, and failing companies that are suddenly, inexplicably highly valued are making it feel like 2021 all over again. GameStop was one of the first meme stocks — stocks that go viral among retail investors, usually for reasons outside the inherent value of their businesses — and now the craze seems to have reignited because Keith Gill, an influential investor on X under the handle Roaring Kitty, posted on Sunday a drawing of a guy holding a game controller leaning forward in his seat. While cryptic to the casual internet-goer, it’s a meme familiar to gamers who know it means that things are about to go down. That was all the signal that his followers needed: it was time to buy, buy, buy their favorite meme stocks again. At the beginning of May, GameStop’s stock price was around $11. But when markets opened Tuesday morning, it was nearly $65 — higher than that of major companies including Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup. That’s quite a feat for a business that is arguably an anachronism from before the existence of digital game downloads and that has closed about a third of its stores since 2017. And GameStop isn’t the only company temporarily benefiting from Roaring Kitty’s boost. The movie theater chain AMC and Y2K smartphone maker BlackBerry also saw their shares soar Tuesday morning. The question is how long this latest craze might last and who will reap the profits — or lose out big. How this bullish run compares to the 2021 meme stock fad If this all seems familiar, it’s because Roaring Kitty, also known as “DeepF***ingValue” on Reddit, is a pivotal character in the rise of meme stocks. He’s been on a years-long hiatus from the investing game, and his post seemed to signal that he’s finally back after helping make GameStop a meme stock back in 2021. Roaring Kitty and other Redditors on the forum r/wallstreetbets propelled the price of GameStop stock from under $5 a share in January 2021 to as high as $500 by the end of the month. Their goal was to orchestrate a short squeeze — forcing institutional investors who were betting against the stock to buy it back at a higher price to cover their losses. (They also just thought it was funny.) Elon Musk even got in on the action. Gamestonk!! https://t.co/RZtkDzAewJ— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2021 The brokerage platform Robinhood eventually made the controversial decision to temporarily restrict trading of the stock, citing market volatility and regulatory requirements. Customers sued the platform, claiming that they had lost money as a result, but Robinhood won a dismissal of the lawsuit. The whole saga inspired the 2023 film Dumb Money. This time around, short-sellers are again getting squeezed, with hedge funds suffering a total loss of $838 million based on the market value of GameStop stock due to the rally. There have been interruptions to trading, too. Trading of GameStop stock was halted nine times on Monday and at least eight times so far on Tuesday due to volatility under Securities and Exchange Commission rules. It seems that the motivations are similar to last time as well. On r/wallstreetbets, declarations of “YOLO” abounded on Tuesday. Said one user who made a more than $5,000 return on AMC shares in 24 hours, “My only regret is that I didn’t buy more.” Another user claimed that, actually, BlackBerry is the “most legitimate meme stock out there,” making the case that its pivot to cybersecurity and away from selling phones meant that it was underrated. But just as the last bout of meme stock mania came crashing down by 2023, this one will likely suffer the same fate. Cole Smead, the CEO of Smead Capital Management, which manages about $6 billion in assets, told CNBC that the rally is “just gambling” and that day traders are “just taking in rat poison.” Considering the pressure of high interest rates, the market may struggle to support this kind of bubble for long.vox.com
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The silver lining in a very bad poll for Biden President Joe Biden arrives to speak at the SK Siltron CSS facility in Bay City, Michigan, on November 29, 2022. | Nic Antaya/Bloomberg via Getty Images The Sun Belt is a disaster, but the Great Lakes states offer some hope of beating Trump. If the 2024 presidential election were held today, it seems likely that Donald Trump would win the presidency. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll suggests as much, finding Trump leading President Joe Biden in five of six battleground states that will likely decide the Electoral College vote. And yet, there’s still some hope for the Biden camp — thanks to a regional division in the poll’s results. Biden’s deficits appear insurmountable in the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Arizona (Trump plus 6 among likely voters), Georgia (Trump plus 9), and Nevada (Trump plus 13). But in the Great Lakes swing states of Michigan (Biden plus 1 among likely voters), Pennsylvania (Trump plus 3), and Wisconsin (Trump plus 1), Biden is doing much better. And if he won all three of those states, plus the non-swing states he’s expected to win comfortably, he could reach the 270 Electoral College votes he needs for a second term in the White House. Why and how this is happening may provide some insights into what the Trump and Biden campaigns will have to do to win the election. But more generally, pollsters and polling analysts told me that the divide also reveals a lot about the state of the nation, of polling, and of how the electorate is changing. Younger and nonwhite voters — two bedrocks of the Democratic coalition — are especially unhappy with Biden, largely because of the state of the economy. Those voters are a more influential segment of the electorate in these Sun Belt states. They are a key part of the Democratic coalition, and they have not necessarily made peace with supporting Biden’s reelection. The opposite is largely true in the original Blue Wall states. “The interesting thing for me is to see, in the Midwest states, that Republicans are acting like Republicans, and Democrats are acting like Democrats. But if I’m looking at the [Sun Belt] states, what it boils down to is Republicans are coalesced, but Democrats aren’t yet,” the Republican pollster Amanda Iovino told me. “Biden is still having a problem with his base in these states.” In all six states, Trump receives the support of about 90 percent or more of self-identified Republicans. But the same is true for Biden only in those Great Lakes states: He gets the backing of 94 percent of Democrats in Michigan, 90 percent of Democrats in Pennsylvania, and 93 percent of Democrats in Wisconsin. In the Sun Belt, Democrats are much more divided — or defecting to Trump: 84 percent of Democrats back Biden in all three states. Here, it’s helpful to understand how differently the electorates look in the north and south: White voters make up about 84 percent of the electorate in Wisconsin, 79 percent of the electorate in Pennsylvania, and 74 percent of the electorate in Michigan. They make up just about half of the electorate in Georgia and Nevada, and about 60 percent of the electorate in Arizona. “Biden’s struggles primarily come from nonwhite voters right now. There’s a lot of those in the Sun Belt states,” Lakshya Jain, an analyst at the election modeling website Split Ticket, told me. “Add on to that the fact that in the Sun Belt, white voters are generally a little bit more conservative. Democratic strength in the Sun Belt comes from good minority margins, and if in polls, Biden is holding up well with white voters, but not necessarily super well with nonwhites, then you would expect that to be magnified in the Sun Belt, because that’s where whites are already pretty conservative and you have a very high share of minority voters.” He pointed to Georgia as a prime example: Black voters make up about 30 percent of the electorate. If Biden is struggling with Black voters, that would have a significant effect on his overall levels of support in the state, since Democrats routinely lose white voters by huge margins. Of course, this poll provides a snapshot in time. And Jain, Iovino, and other data experts I spoke to told me they’re not entirely convinced with the specific numbers in the crosstabs: Trump, for example, is supposedly leading Biden among young voters nationally and winning women in Nevada. The Times itself notes: Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are essentially tied among 18-to-29-year-olds and Hispanic voters, even though each group gave Mr. Biden more than 60 percent of their vote in 2020. Mr. Trump also wins more than 20 percent of Black voters — a tally that would be the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the data still provides signs about the direction the electorate is leaning, as well the reasons for that lean: discontent with the economy above everything else (though abortion and immigration come in as the other top issues). About 90 percent of young voters and 85 percent of Latino voters think the economy is fair or poor, and Trump is trusted better on the economy by both those groups. Those signs suggest Biden has huge room to make improvements and craft a better message if he wants to make a dent in that Trump advantage. And despite the prevalence of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the issue does not seem to be the driver of Biden’s base or electorate troubles. “Defections over Gaza make up a little over 1 percent of Biden’s 2020 vote share. That’s not nothing, but also that’s such a small share. If you want to look at why Biden is sliding, the bigger reason is obviously the economy,” Jain told me. “If you look at people defecting over Gaza, 17 percent of them think that it’s because he’s been too favorable to Palestine.” Finally, there are some additional kernels of information to watch: Democratic Senate candidates are performing better than Biden and receiving higher support from Democratic voters themselves. That suggests that 2024 could either be a banner year for split-ticket voting, or a year where these Democrats “come home” and bring themselves to vote for Biden after all. Of course, this is still not the best news for Democrats. Trump’s leads in those Sun Belt states have only increased since the last time they were polled in this Times/Siena survey. A look under the hood shows an upset and disengaged electorate — but one with many persuadable voters and Americans who may soon tune back into the political cycle. “Biden probably has a fair bit of room to grow,” Jain told me. “Right now, what it is, is the election is exceptionally low salience for a presidential election, and that’s because it’s six months out.”vox.com
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Something weird is happening with tornadoes An approaching tornado on May 20, 2013, in Moore, Oklahoma. | Vincent Deligny/AFP/Getty Images Tornado season is changing. That could have major consequences. Tornado season is here again, with twisters striking in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Florida over the past few weeks. But while severe storms in spring are nothing new, there have been subtle changes in tornado patterns in recent years that portend a more dangerous future for communities across the country. According to a preliminary count from the National Centers for Environmental Information, there have been 547 tornadoes documented from January through April 2024. That figure is higher than the year-to-date average — 338 — the organization calculated between 1991 and 2020 but in line with the number observed in 2022 and 2023 in the same time frame. And even as the number of tornadoes has stayed relatively consistent in the last few years, experts say there have been key changes in their behavior over time that could have major consequences. More tornadoes are now concentrated in fewer days, meaning they are less spread out and there’s a higher number occurring on the same day, according to a 2019 study published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology. A growing number of tornadoes are also occurring in the southeastern part of the US in addition to the Great Plains, where they have been historically most common. There’s still a lot experts don’t know about why both these trends are occurring and it’s not clear if climate change is playing a role. What is more certain is that these shifts mean people will have to prepare for these natural disasters in new ways, with some communities enduring more severe storms in rapid succession and others being forced to build infrastructure for tornadoes they had rarely experienced before. What we do — and don’t — know about why this is happening Scientists have some information about why there are more concentrated tornadoes, or clustering, and why the locations of tornadoes have shifted slightly. With clustering, it’s tied to the presence of atmospheric and wind conditions that fuel dozens of tornadoes at once. And with changes in geography, it’s related to parts of the country drying out while other areas are seeing more rain. The increase in tornado clustering has been observed since the 1980s and continues into present day, says Tyler Fricker, an author of the 2019 study on the subject. According to that study, while 11 percent of tornadoes occurred on days when there were 20 or more tornadoes from 1950 to 1970, now 29 percent of them do. The prevalence of low-pressure systems, warm moist environments, and high wind shear (changes in speed and direction of wind combined with height) all come together to fuel these clusters. “We are seeing a reduction in the total number of days where there are tornadoes, but those that do occur are almost ‘supercharged,’ producing substantially more tornadoes than what we would otherwise expect,” says Jana Houser, an atmospheric scientist at Ohio State University. What’s still unknown is whether such shifts are related to climate change as the Earth has gotten warmer due to human-generated greenhouse gases. “It’s hard to pull out the different trends — maybe the natural variations are impacting tornadoes, maybe the broader climate change, maybe it’s a combination of both,” says Jase Bernhardt, a climatologist at Hofstra University. “We want more research done to understand why it’s happening.” Experts similarly have some sense of why tornado geography has shifted, though they’re still working to untangle the factors involved. Environmental conditions in the last few decades, for instance, have made the southeastern parts of the US more conducive to tornado formation. And as the Great Plains dry out more and parts of the Midwest and Southeast experience increases in precipitation, that’s made the latter regions more susceptible to tornadoes, Bernhardt says. “Tornado Alley” is historically the corridor that runs from South Dakota south through Iowa to Oklahoma and Texas. Increasingly, scientists have noticed larger numbers of tornadoes occurring eastward in places including Tennessee, which is part of a collection of southern states known as “Dixie Alley.” According to a 2018 study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, more tornadoes were starting to emerge in the Midwest and Southeast as they simultaneously declined in the Great Plains. Concentrated tornado days could have consequences These shifts in tornado patterns could have serious consequences for the communities that they affect. When many tornadoes happen in one day, people may get buffeted with natural disasters and have to anticipate multiple events in a short period of time. That presents a challenge for forecasters, who have to put out rapid-fire alerts in a condensed window, says Fricker. People in the affected areas also have to prepare for a quick series of storms and ensure that they have shelter and supplies to endure all of them. “You might have waves of these storms coming through your area, which means you can’t just be on for an hour or two, you kind of have to be on for the entirety of that day,” says Fricker. “And so from a human and from a property perspective, outbreaks are more likely to be disruptive, and they’re more difficult to really prepare for ... because there’s so much more going on.” Changes in the geographic distribution of tornadoes could also lead to long-term effects on larger population centers, and force communities that never had to worry about tornadoes previously to shore up their infrastructure. “As tornadoes leave the great wide open of the Plains, they will encroach on places where more people live, often in mobile homes and other structures that aren’t prepared for them,” Mark Gongloff writes for Bloomberg. “Policymakers need to help vulnerable people prepare for a potentially more dangerous future and ensure that infrastructure and housing can better withstand whatever nature brings.” Broadly, scientists’ research can help new areas of the country make preparations as they anticipate more tornadoes down the line. Doing so effectively, however, could require more support for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which doles out funds for rebuilding and preparation efforts. As Scientific American reports, FEMA’s disaster relief fund is due to run out of money partway through the year, a shortfall that also existed in 2023, which led to the agency putting thousands of projects on hold. “Given the trend toward increasing tornadoes in areas outside the traditional ‘tornado alley,’” Houser says, “people need to be on their guard in areas that may not have normally expected to see tornadoes.“vox.com
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Sabrina Carpenter’s pop magic comes from being in on the joke Sabrina Carpenter performs at Coachella 2024, which is now referred to as “that’s that her Coachella.” | Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Coachella Who’s that her espresso? I must tell you that I have been Ratatouille’d. Except instead of a rodent making me cook gourmet meals, it’s a blonde 4’11” pop star named Sabrina Carpenter controlling my motor functions to make me repeat a phrase that doesn’t even make sense: “That’s that me espresso.” “We don’t have Coke, is Pepsi okay?” That’s that me espresso. “How much do you want to contribute to your 401(k)?” That’s that me espresso. “Sir, do you know why we pulled you over? Do you know how fast you were going?” That’s that me espresso. Like the man Carpenter’s singing about in “Espresso,” I am up thinking about her every night — and of course her espresso. So what does it mean? The lyric is an unconventional way to tell us that Carpenter is so hot and charming that men are obsessed with her. It just happens to be centered on a grammatically flawed phrase featuring the reduplication of the word “that” that for all its silliness has burrowed nonsensically into brains nationwide. Yes, “me espresso” sounds like a baby asking for a caffeinated beverage. Sometimes the best pop songs don’t make total sense or follow the commonly accepted rules of metaphor or syntax. Nonsense is actually what 25-year-old Carpenter does best. Whether it be sex with exes, dirty rhyme schemes, or being hot, a clown, or the other woman, Carpenter’s surprisingly long career has been seriously devoted to never taking things too seriously. With an SNL appearance on the horizon and her airy track looking to be the inescapable song of summer, there is no better time to understand the bubbly allure and sparkly lore of Sabrina Carpenter. The Olivia Rodrigo song that kickstarted Sabrina Carpenter’s adult career With the overnight success of “Espresso,” which was released in April, it might seem like Carpenter is pop music’s flavor of the month. But she didn’t just come out of nowhere. Carpenter has been releasing music since her debut album Eyes Wide Open in 2015, five albums in total. She started out honing her craft as part of the Disney machine, breaking out on Girl Meets World in 2014. But it’s her presence in one of the biggest songs in 2021, one she didn’t actually sing, that made the then-21-year-old famous. Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic Sabrina Carpenter promoting Girl Meets World at the Buca di Beppo Times Square in 2015. The devil works hard, but Sabrina Carpenter works harder. Turn the clock back a little over three years: 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo had just burst on the scene with “Drivers License,” an angsty ballad about a boy who broke her heart. In it, Rodrigo hints that the breakup involved another woman. “And you’re probably with that blonde girl,” she sings, adding: “She’s so much older than me. She’s everything I’m insecure about.” Since this is an article about Sabrina Carpenter, and Carpenter is blonde and three years older than Rodrigo, you’ve probably guessed that Carpenter is who Rodrigo might be singing about. Rodrigo acted on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a show on Disney+, and was rumored to be dating co-star Joshua Bassett. The two wrote songs together, some of which were featured on the program. The characters they played — Nini and Ricky — were a romantic pair. Disney couldn’t have asked for a better script. But in August 2020, Rodrigo hinted she was going through a breakup. Around the same time, Bassett was spotted with Carpenter, a fellow Disney star. Adding fuel to the fire, Bassett and Carpenter donned a couples costume for Halloween, going as Sharkboy and Lavagirl. Despite all these public appearances and social media clues, Rodrigo, Carpenter, and Bassett have never explicitly addressed the love triangle they may or may not have been a part of. But they haven’t explicitly denied the rumors either. Like Rodrigo, Carpenter seems to have turned it into music. Carpenter seemed to address the drama in her 2021 song “Skin.” “Maybe you didn’t mean it. Maybe blonde was the only rhyme,” Carpenter sings, telling the subject of her song — who may or may not be Rodrigo — that she’s sorry but not that sorry, and she won’t let the digs get under her, under her, under her skin. It’s a relatively plaintive track that wasn’t as big as “Drivers License” — not many songs are as big as Rodrigo’s monster hit. It wasn’t until her next album, 2022’s emails i can’t send, that Carpenter gave her final word and started to lean into her new persona. On the sneakily edged “Because I Liked a Boy,” Carpenter is even less apologetic. She declares that she is going to be herself — the other woman, the cool girl, the hot girl, the mean girl, and everything in between — because that person can’t be any worse than what’s already been said about her (“Now I’m a homewrecker, I’m a slut I got death threats filling up semi-trucks”). “Dating boys with exes. No, I wouldn’t recommend it.” Carpenter cheekily sings. It’s a poppier, more ironic take on her new bad-girl image. At first blush, the Rodrigo-Carpenter dynamic doesn’t seem to be that different from the way culture has always pitted pop princesses against each other. Whether it’s Britney and Christina, Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, Brandy and Monica, or Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, there’s always been an inclination that every female pop star needs a rival. Thanks to the alleged love triangle, Rodrigo and Carpenter have that built in. They have very thinly veiled songs about each other — a territory some of those past “rivals” have never really ventured in. But what makes the Rodrigo-Carpenter dynamic unique is that they’ve both figured out how to make the “rivalry” work in their favor, embracing their respective images even while leaving the specific rivalry behind. They’re each more famous than their supposed feud. They’re each more famous than the boy, too. Both singers make art that illustrates that liking boys is a humiliating experience. Rodrigo’s music is all about getting dumped by losers; Carpenter’s is about how all these losers are obsessed with her. Being dumped by a guy who dresses up as Sharkboy is equally as pathetic as dressing up as Lavagirl with that same guy. At the end of the day, they both come to the same realization: When it comes to men, there is no winning — unless it’s using them to make some really good pop music. Sabrina Carpenter’s unique brand of “Nonsense” Prior to “Espresso,” the biggest hit of Carpenter’s pop career was an easy, breezy pop confection called “Nonsense.” It’s not about Rodrigo or Bassett, but about how liking a boy makes Carpenter feel (hint: silly). The song has a splendid little bit in which Carpenter sings, “It feels so good, I had to jump the octave,” and she does in fact, sing up a note. Carpenter is not afraid of a gimmick, a little wordplay, or even some wink-y pandering to the audience. Her commitment to the bit was a huge part of what made “Nonsense” so popular. In live performances, Carpenter started ad-libbing the outro of the song. The original goes: This song is catchier than chickenpox is. I bet your house is where my other sock is. Woke up this morning thought I’d write a pop hit. How quickly can you take off your clothes? Pop quiz. When she toured in Europe in 2023 she gave her German audience a bespoke naughty verse: Down below the waistline is the fun zone. Baby hit me if you wanna come bone. Ich liebe dich you know I love you Cologne. Fans who came and saw her perform at Coachella this year saw Carpenter reference her boyfriend Barry Keoghan’s infamous Saltburn scene: Made his knees so weak he had to spread mine He’s drinkin’ my bath water like it’s red wine Coachella, see you back here when I headline. During a stop in Sydney: I can’t believe a plane can fly this far. I met the cutest Aussie at the bar. He said, “Are you from here?’ I said ‘Naur.’” Last year, she even created a special holiday edition, “A Nonsense Christmas” in which she somehow naughties holiday cheer and gift-giving: Look at all those presents, that’s a big sack Boy, that package is too big to gift wrap Woke up this morning, thought I’d write a “Chris-Smash” How quickly can you build a snowman? Think fast Iambic pentameter this is not, but Carpenter’s schtick of cheeky, PG-13 rhymes showed off a pop star who isn’t afraid to laugh, especially at her own expense. While these outros could easily fall into raunch or being explicit, Carpenter uses wit as her restraint. Clown humor gives her something to play her image and our expectations against. Carpenter’s interplay between humor and hotness is also evident in her video for “Feather,” a cotton candy-like kiss-off. The video has Carpenter pulling up to a church in a bubblegum pink hearse. It turns out her blush-hued deathmobile is full of the bodies of creepy men ogling her, and Carpenter is praying for their souls as she traipses through the chapel in a black veil and tulle lingerie. The video was filmed at Brooklyn’s Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church and eventually made its way to the higher-ups at the Brooklyn Archdiocese, who were extremely upset at the video’s imagery. They admonished not just Carpenter but the staffers who approved the video shoot. Carpenter was unfazed by the holy rebuke. “We got approval in advance,” she told Variety. “And Jesus was a carpenter.” According to Johnny Cash and the Gospel of Mark, Sabrina is correct. “Espresso” and the summer of Sabrina Carpenter While you could chalk “Espresso” up to luck, it’d be a disservice to Carpenter and how hard she’s worked. This is a former Disney kid who’s been playing the game for a decade. For the last few years, she’s carefully crafted a savvy, in-on-the-joke image. She’s also been putting in the work on the festival circuit and taking opportunities like the MTV VMAs pre-show (Rodrigo performed at the main show), crafting her naughty jingles and taking them on the road. This summer, she opened for Taylor Swift (who, according to certain fans, may be employing Carpenter as part of a proxy war against Rodrigo, who may or may not have written her song “Vampire” about Swift) and performed at Coachella, where she debuted “Espresso.” The song catching fire is no doubt lucky, but Carpenter put herself in the best position to make that good fortune happen. It also helps that “Espresso” effectively crystallizes the persona that Carpenter has been creating for herself: a proudly flippant ditz who is so much savvier than she seems. Like Carpenter, espresso is traditionally hot, potent, and tiny. Espresso is a bit fancier than an everyday drip — one must go out and procure it or buy one of those elaborate machines. Espresso, unlike coffee, is more of an occasion. Grammatically, the phrase “that’s that me espresso” is a train wreck with no survivors. After listening to the song hundreds of times, I still cannot figure out if the “me espresso” in question is a metaphor in which Carpenter is comparing her essence to that of espresso. Or perhaps it’s possessive and “me espresso” refers to something of hers. Maybe she is simply identifying an entirely new type of coffee beverage. The repetition emphasizes that the guy in question — perhaps her famously Irish boyfriend Barry Keoghan — is so obsessed with Carpenter that he can’t fall asleep. He just can’t stop thinking about her and she knows it. “Espresso” also mentions other objects like Mountain Dew and Nintendo that ostensibly keep men up all night. Later in the song, flanked right up against the chorus, Carpenter admits she’s up past her bedtime too. She sings that she’s “working late” because she’s a “singer,” emphasizing that final syllable in a comically exaggerated way. She stresses the “er” in singer, forcing the word to rhyme with fin-ger. I now no longer want to pronounce singer any other way. But what if this is the correct way? What if everything we thought we knew about singers is wrong? I mean, while some concerts can go till 11 pm and later, are graveyard shifts part of the singing occupation? Are singers putting in the same hours as diner waitresses and convenience store clerks? How long, exactly, did it take to create “Espresso?” Just when Carpenter seems to be post-grammar and post-terminology and communicating with us in a way so profound beyond words, she smirk-sings the word “stupid” as a tag right after a verse that goes, “That morning coffee, brewed it for ya. One touch and I brand-newed it for ya.” God, that’s so dumb. And so brilliant. That’s that me espresso.vox.com
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What the Methodist split tells us about America An LGBTQ+ flag flies over Union United Methodist Church in the South End of Boston on January 5, 2020. | Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe via Getty Images A separation of church and church. Last week, hundreds of United Methodist Church (UMC) delegates from around the world sat down to vote on whether or not to reverse a longstanding ban on the ordination of LGBTQ clergy. The decision would also determine whether or not to strike a rule that prohibited clergy from presiding over “homosexual unions.” The room was uncharacteristically hushed as delegates logged their votes. They’d gathered to participate in a quadrennial General Conference, where an elected group of clergy and laypeople review and edit the rules and social stances of the church on a variety of subjects. When the results were announced, the room erupted in loud sobs and cheering. With this vote — and several others — over 50 years of church law, doctrine, and social stances aimed at restricting the full inclusion of LGBTQ methodists were reversed. In a dramatic deviation from the staid (remarkably congressional) proceedings, the Methodists began to sing. Church historian Ashley Boggan told Today, Explained’s Noel King that the UMC’s schism should matter to Methodists and non-Methodists alike. “If you look at Methodist history within the United States, it’s a great lens for looking at American history,” she said. How did we get here? For the last five years, the United Methodist Church has been fighting over its stance on LGBTQ members. In a one-off special session in 2019, the UMC had voted to tighten its prohibitions on LGBTQ members — a decision that nearly half of all UMC congregations across the country went on to publicly reject in the following years. So, in 2022, a splinter denomination was born: the Global Methodist Church. Traditionalist congregations had seen the writing on the wall: Change was coming, and they didn’t want to be part of it. Conservative churches began leaving the denomination in droves, and by the time the General Conference convened this year, a quarter of US congregations had jumped ship. It was this newly slimmed-down UMC that voted to reverse the church’s anti-LGBTQ positions earlier this month. What Methodists say about America The Methodist church developed in tandem with the United States. Both are 18th-century experiments in democracy, and each has weathered the great challenges of the last two centuries — war, reunion, and an ever-expanding understanding of personhood — in distinct but parallel lanes. Throughout the 19th century, as the United States grappled with the notion of Black personhood and the reality of chattel slavery, so too did the Methodists. In 1844, 40 percent of Methodist congregations split off to form a pro-slavery splinter congregation. That was the last time this many Methodists split off from the main denomination. Fifteen years later, the Confederacy seceded as well, and a bloody civil war shortly followed. This parallel has not gone unnoticed. According to Boggan, in the decades that followed, this pattern repeated itself. As the post-war US reconstructed itself, the Methodist church followed suit. In a 1939 merger, the Southern and Northern Methodists were once again united. As states enacted Jim Crow laws across the country, the Methodists created a segregated system of their own. The Methodist church became a sort of bellwether for larger national sentiment, and this extended beyond racial politics, The church granted full ordination rights to women in 1956, and seven years later, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique mainstreamed “the problem with no name.” While this all might lead us to fear that the current breakup in the Methodist church is yet again a harbinger of violence, it is helpful to remember this caveat: the Civil War-era United States was extremely Methodist. According to church historian Nathan Hatch, in the runup to the Civil War, the Methodist church was “the most extensive national institution other than the Federal government.” The sheer size of the denomination meant that the political reality of the church would eventually become the political reality of the country. Today, church membership is in decline, and the institutional influence of mainline protestant churches is much diminished (although to exactly what effect is debatable). The church is not, as it was in the 19th century, a small-scale model of the country. Today, according to Boggan, the church acts more like a lens: a way to see broader national tensions work themselves out on a smaller scale. What next? At the General Conference, several traditionalists told me that their local congregations were still actively considering leaving the denomination. Dixie Brewster, a conservative delegate from Kansas, told me she feels like the UMC is no longer a big-tent denomination, and “it seems like there’s no place at the table for the conservative view of traditional marriage and family.” I’m not sure these anxieties are warranted. On paper, the church is an objectively bigger tent today than it was last year. Queer people can pursue ordination, and clergy now have the right to perform same-sex weddings. Notably, a clear majority of delegates also voted to pass a statement that formally enshrined the rights of traditional clergy to refuse to officiate a same-sex marriage. In a 479–203 vote, the UMC decided that “all clergy have the right to exercise and preserve their conscience when requested to perform any marriage, union, or blessing of any couple.” It appears that this now “more progressive” UMC is walking a sort of quasi-libertarian road toward progress. By “removing restrictions on paper,” Boggan said, the conversations about how best to love one’s neighbor must change venues. No longer enshrined in the black-and-white text of doctrine, debate is forced back inside the four walls of the church. While the Methodist church was once a reliable indicator of national sentiment, it lifted its prohibition on gay marriage nearly a decade after Obergefell v. Hodges did the same for the rest of the country. This is not to say that LGBTQ rights in the United States are set in stone. In Florida, legislators have decided that while you can say gay, you have to say it carefully. Most Republican-run states have restricted or outright banned gender-affirming care for minors, and in states where restrictions on LGBTQ people have gotten tighter, reported hate crimes against LGBTQ elementary and high school students have quadrupled. It is unclear whether or not the United Methodist Church will continue to embody these tensions. The mass exodus of conservative congregations was orchestrated by what Boggan called the “evangelical wing” of the UMC. The wing of the church most actively engaging in conservative culture wars has taken itself out of the conversation. Whether the Methodists pull back together or splinter further is still an open question. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.vox.com
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Why aren’t we vaccinating birds against bird flu? Jessica Craig for Vox It’s not as complicated as it seems, but there’s one key hurdle. The worst bird flu outbreak in US history continues with strange new developments. Bird flu is now infecting cows, the FDA found viral genetic material in milk, and a second human was recently infected. H5N1 — the strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza circulating — currently poses little threat to people as spillover from animals to humans is rare, as is human-to-human transmission. But the recent spillover from birds to cows has triggered new fears that the virus could potentially mutate and cause a deadly human pandemic. In the past two years, more than 90 million poultry birds from 48 US states have died from the virus or were killed in an attempt to slow the spread of the disease. (Wild birds and some mammals including sea lions and cats have gotten sick, too.) Historically, farmers and poultry producers have used three main strategies to slow the spread: kill entire flocks of chickens and turkeys at the earliest sign of infection, surveil the movement of the virus, and improve biosecurity measures. This approach, sometimes referred to as “stamping out,” has thus far failed to curb bird flu and has raised concerns around animal cruelty. But as the virus continues to spread among livestock animals such as cows, relying on mass culling may not be as tenable. “This virus is not going away,” said Carol Cardona, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “And I’m not sure how sustainable this approach that we’re using is.” Given the record-shattering infection rates among poultry and the unprecedented recent spillover to a wide range of other species, some bird flu experts and wildlife researchers are calling for renewed efforts to develop, test, and deploy a vaccine for poultry and potentially other species. Short of triggering a human pandemic, continued spread of bird flu among livestock could further threaten national and global food security. “The current virus is being spread by wild birds. It is evident that the biosecurity arrangements on some farms, especially chicken layer and turkey farms, are not sufficient to prevent all virus incursions,” said Leslie Sims, the director of the Asia Pacific Veterinary Information Services. “Vaccination, if used, would add an additional layer of protection.” Effective bird flu vaccines for poultry have existed for years and are even used routinely in other countries. But, in stark contrast to the Covid-19 pandemic when new vaccines were rapidly developed and rolled out, the US has yet to adopt vaccination as a disease control strategy for bird flu. The US Department of Agriculture reported promising results from clinical trials of several vaccine candidates, but despite this breakthrough, a slew of logistical, political, and economic challenges might prohibit their use. A brief history of bird flu vaccines Avian influenza vaccines have long been used around the world with varying degrees of success. In some countries, such as Egypt and China where bird flu is enzootic (meaning it is consistently present in animals), vaccination is routine. In China, several vaccines have been developed. One study found that vaccinating against H5 and H7 subtypes reduced the number of cases in poultry, but another study pointed out that China continues to suffer recurrent outbreaks while others have suggested that culling would be a more cost-effective strategy. In Egypt, vaccination efforts have largely been unsuccessful, in part because it is the only disease control method used in the country. Last year, Mexico, Guatemala, and other countries hit hard by the ongoing epidemic also started vaccinating against H5N1. In late 2022, Mexico began vaccinating broiler chickens and other birds in high-risk zones; almost one year later, the government declared the country free of influenza before reporting an outbreak in one flock on a commercial farm about a month later. Only in the past year did some Western countries begin focusing on vaccination. In March 2023, the Dutch government announced that it had developed two bird flu vaccines and that laboratory trials revealed those vaccines to be effective at preventing infection and disease transmission. Italy and the Netherlands are also testing vaccines. In October, the French government started vaccinating ducks for avian influenza and has since vaccinated more than 21 million. According to a press release from France’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, there have been only 10 outbreaks since vaccination began compared to 315 outbreaks during the same time in the previous year. (The EU is dividing research among member states.) “Vaccination has played a very important role in the prevention of avian influenza elsewhere,” Sims said, adding that widespread preventive vaccination has also been used successfully in Hong Kong since 2003. In both France and Hong Kong, “the decision was taken to vaccinate because existing strengthened measures based around biosecurity could not prevent all cases of infection,” Sims explained. Scientific, economic, and logistical challenges of mass bird flu vaccination The US government has at least considered vaccination before. During the 2014-2015 bird flu outbreak when more than 50 million chickens and turkeys died or were culled, the USDA stockpiled a bird flu vaccine. However, those vaccines were not deployed; the epidemic was instead brought under control through the stamping-out approach. Following that outbreak, the USDA developed policies and guidance regarding the use of bird flu vaccines. A 2016 policy brief stated that controlled vaccination for flocks at risk should be included in a multi-prong control strategy alongside enhanced biosecurity, an eradication plan, monitoring, and a repopulation plan. In a 2016 report, the USDA reported that the stockpiled vaccine wasn’t “well matched” to then-circulating strains. Like influenza in humans, bird flu is a quickly evolving virus. Ensuring that a vaccine is highly effective against H5N1 is the first critical step in a successful vaccination campaign. In 2023, the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service began testing five vaccine candidates. According to the USDA’s website, studies show the candidates provided near 100 percent clinical protection in chickens. (The USDA has also started to “assess the potential to develop” an H5N1 vaccine for cows.) The USDA has not released further information about the clinical trials. However, despite seemingly having an effective vaccine in hand, as of late April, the USDA is still not pursuing bird flu vaccination as a disease control strategy. “While USDA is exploring the possibility of developing a poultry H5N1 vaccine to stock and use in an emergency, we are not moving forward with a HPAI vaccination program at this time,” a USDA spokesperson told Vox. Given the scale of the ongoing outbreak, some experts feel that the lack of a vaccine push from the USDA is hamstringing disease control efforts. “I’m a poultry veterinarian, and as a veterinarian, I don’t like the idea that you tell me to go fight the biggest fight of my career and you say, here’s your gun; first, let’s unload it. Now, go,” said Cardona. “A vaccine is simply a tool, and how we use it can be very effective.” The USDA and industry stakeholders have cited a slew of various challenges that would hinder vaccination. The biggest sticking point is around trade. The US exported more than $5 billion in poultry meat and products on average every year for the past three years. The USDA enters into trade agreements with each individual country it trades with, explained Upali Galketi Aratchilage, a senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Each agreement outlines specific biosafety and production requirements that both countries agree to follow. The USDA said, in an email to Vox, that many of those agreements do not allow bird flu vaccination. “For now, biosecurity is the best defense against HPAI,” a USDA spokesperson wrote. One main reason is the potential to import infected poultry. Vaccination does not prevent infection; it prevents severe disease and death by priming the immune system to better squash pathogens upon infection. By preventing overt flu symptoms such as sneezing, coughing, or reduced egg production, infected birds might then inadvertently enter the food chain. Importing an infected bird could set off new outbreaks, threatening the local supply chain. But, Cardona explained, the industry no longer relies on diagnosing sick poultry based on visible signs and symptoms but on strict protocols that utilize molecular testing. Take eggs, for example. Before eggs can enter the food chain, the hens that laid the eggs are tested twice for influenza. Farmers collect samples from the hens the day they lay the eggs and then two days later (the virus spreads so fast that it could be detected in that time). The samples that are collected undergo molecular testing, meaning that scientists look for the genetic fingerprints of the virus in the samples which would be found even in asymptomatic chickens. Not every single hen can be tested, but a random and representative selection is tested each time. “Markets have been negotiated based on not using vaccination ... based on, frankly, older data [that] there could be a chance that you would import the virus in an animal or in a product that has vaccine in it,” Cardona said. Another concern is differentiating infected from vaccinated animals, the so-called “DIVA” problem. It’s the challenge of identifying whether a bird is actually sick or just has antibodies after vaccination, as Kenny Torrella has previously explained. Again, this seems like an outdated concern as newer technology is capable of differentiating between animals infected with flu versus those that received the vaccine. Then there’s the logistical challenge that the USDA and other stakeholders cite. The vaccines currently undergoing trials “continue to rely on a two-dose regimen, which can be impractical for distribution to flocks,” the USDA website states. This hurdle does not seem insurmountable, the experts Vox spoke with said, since poultry already receive several vaccines such as those for Newcastle disease, salmonella, and bronchitis. Some vaccines are given through the poultry’s water supply or sprayed in the air. There is even a method where the vaccine is poked through the eggshell and injected into a chicken embryo during development at the hatchery. Even with biological, technological, and logistical hurdles surpassed, the decision around vaccination seems to be a monetary one. Beyond the cost of vaccination, there’s the potential of losing key trade partners. Trade agreements, especially for meat, are notoriously delicate, in part because of the risk of introducing infectious diseases and pests into a country’s food chain but more so because governments need to protect the agricultural industry from foreign competition. The National Chicken Council is opposed to vaccination efforts. The National Turkey Federation says unilateral vaccination “would have a severe impact on exports” but that it has urged — and continues to urge — the federal government to “move as rapidly as possible to try to develop new agreements” with trading partners. “Meat is a highly politically sensitive issue for many countries, and the entire livestock industry is protected in many countries for various reasons,” said Aratchilage. Introducing bird flu vaccines is not going to be easy, he added. “It’s a political decision more than a scientific decision.”vox.com
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The child care cliff that wasn’t Children being read a story at Washington-Beech Community Day Care Center in Roslindale, Massachusetts. | Photo by Steve Liss/Getty Images We don’t need apocalyptic economic predictions to advocate for better family policy. “The writing is on the wall right now, in big, bold letters: the child care crisis is only going to get worse unless we take action — and soon!” said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray in November, following the expiration of federal Covid-19 subsidies for child care. Democrats and other child care advocates were pushing for a $16 billion bill they said was essential to save the industry. “Our nation’s child care system is on the verge of collapse,” stressed AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “Over 3 million kids are in danger of losing their child care slots, over 230,000 child care workers could lose their jobs,” added Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders was citing numbers from The Century Foundation, a liberal think tank that warned the US was headed for a disastrous “child care cliff” due to the expiring pandemic aid. Nearly every major national news organization — including the Washington Post, CNN, Bloomberg, NBC, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times — reported on this coming cliff, and its prediction that 70,000 programs “will likely close.” The warnings echoed another set of doomsday predictions during the pandemic when advocates stressed that without significant new investment in child care and paid family leave, women would be forced to leave the labor market en masse, leading to what some described as a coming “she-cession.” The “she-cession” failed to materialize beyond the first initial months of Covid-19, with female labor force participation ticking steadily upwards thereafter, especially among moms. So advocates updated their messaging, emphasizing that such workforce gains could crater if major new federal investments were not made soon. The Century Foundation predicted $9 billion annually in lost family earnings, and tax and business revenue loss for states at $10.6 billion per year. But Congress did not pass big new spending in paid leave or child care. Republicans rebuffed Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the Build Back Better fight, and the $16 billion child care stabilization bill Democrats rallied around last fall. Still, labor force participation among women ages 25-54 has continued to rise, with larger shares of moms of both preschool and school-age children working now than at any time in history. Most of the labor market gains have been driven by moms with young kids under the age of 5, with roughly 70 percent of them holding down some formal job. Jobs in the child care sector, too, have continued to expand, with more people working in the sector as of April than in any time on record. The lesson to take from all of this is not that people should stop advocating for policies that would improve the lives of parents, kids, and those who care for children. We know that paid leave boosts the health of mothers and babies and that many families struggle to find accessible and affordable child care. We know that child care workers are among the lowest paid, which can result in high turnover, and we also know that some parents wish they could stay home with their children, rather than work a formal job. We know that even among families that do cobble together child care arrangements, there is more we could be doing to lower household stress. But advocates don’t need to rely on cataclysmic economic predictions to make the case for better and more humane family policy, and continually warning of a disaster that never comes undermines their case and credibility. The fact is that not everyone agrees on what specific policies are necessary to improve child care and conditions for parents — some people would prefer direct cash support to families over funding for daycare centers, for example — but these are the real debates that the public should be having. A strong economy does a lot More women — including child care workers who are disproportionately female — are working today, and for the most part, that’s for positive reasons. The US economy is strong and growing, and workers’ wages have risen faster than prices for more than a year now. Even in child care there’s been an increase in wages, with the average wage standing at $13.31 per hour in 2021, $14.22 in 2022, and $15.42 in 2023. Average preschool teacher wages also reached $19.91 per hour last year. “As Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin taught us, one of the most important drivers of women’s labor force participation is higher wages, so we shouldn’t be too surprised that childcare workforce participation and prime-age female labor force participation are both trending upward,” said Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank. Tight labor markets can cure a lot of economic ills, added Patrick Brown, a child care policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. “The fact that low-wage workers have seen the strongest wage growth post-pandemic means that a lot of moms have seen pay increases, switched to better jobs, or work from home at higher levels — all of which make reliable child care more achievable,” he told Vox. The expansion of remote work since the pandemic is most certainly a factor in boosting female labor force participation, especially among college-educated moms and married women. Federal labor statistics show that 23 percent of women workers teleworked last month, compared to 19 percent of men. Nearly a quarter of teleworkers had children under 18. “The current tight labor market leads many employers to offer benefits like paid leave or flexible work hours and location,” said Adrienne Schweer, a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a centrist think tank. “These are the kinds of benefits that women consistently rate as important factors in their employment decisions.” More women working also leads to more demand for child care, especially as the number of children in the US continues to grow. This all helps explain growth in child care employment, said Sydney Petersen, a spokesperson with the National Women’s Law Center, a liberal advocacy group. Still, that more women are joining or staying in the labor market with young kids isn’t necessarily something to cheer about in all circumstances. Katharine Stevens, the president of the Center on Child and Family Policy, a conservative think tank, said some women are working likely because they couldn’t make ends meet on what they were earning before recent rises in inflation. “Unfortunately, that probably means that women who would have preferred to stay home full- or part-time to raise their own young children have been forced to spend more time working outside the home instead,” she said. “We should be making it easier, not harder for them to do so.” Paid leave and child care subsidies could boost labor participation more That rising wages and a strong economy have boosted employment among women doesn’t mean supportive care policy couldn’t drive those gains further. Suzanne Kahn, vice president of the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, said they’ve been focused on how to make these labor gains “sticky” even if the nation’s economic conditions decline. Advocates for public investment say there’s already evidence that states that increased their child care spending have seen better results. A new brief from the National Women’s Law Center analyzing Census Household Pulse Survey data found that the share of respondents with children under 12 who lacked child care increased by more than 5 percentage points since the fall in states that didn’t make major new investments in their child care sectors. By contrast, in the 11 states that did make significant new investments, the share of women respondents with children under 12 who wanted to work but reported not being able to because they were caring for a child decreased from 45.3 percent to 31.9 percent. Schweer, of the Bipartisan Policy Center, pointed to a poll her think tank conducted last year that found that among prime-age adults not working due to issues related to caring for children, 39 percent said they would have likely continued to work in their last job if they had paid parental leave, and 45 percent would be more likely to start or return to work if a future employer offered that benefit. “At the moment, macro policy is pushing up employment in general but that does not mean there is not still an increment of women out there who would also be employed (or at least job seeking) if there were more child care subsidies,” said Matt Bruenig, founder of People’s Policy Project, a left-wing think tank. McCabe of the Niskanen Center said policies like subsidies for child care and paid leave are probably important to boosting women’s labor force participation to similar levels in other countries because rising wages alone “aren’t enough to get us there.” Child care access could be much better Just because more women are working doesn’t mean their lives aren’t being affected by child care issues, and even remote work can be a double-edged sword for moms, as my colleague Anna North has written. “As a mom of a small child, I have to say just because it’s now possible to work from home with a kid doesn’t mean it’s not extremely challenging,” said Kahn, of the Roosevelt Institute. “They are making it work, but paying with the cost of their own health and well-being,” argued Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation. “Increasing labor force participation is only good for the individuals working more if they are also being paid enough to pay their bills and save for emergencies and the future, and if providing for their families isn’t at the expense of caring for them and spending time with them.” Diane Swonk, the chief economist at KPMG, a US audit and tax services firm, noted that child care access issues are making it harder for women who are working to stay at work. Absences from work due to family or personal obligations hit a record high in March, she said, and stayed elevated in April. Full-time workers who cut down on hours and worked part-time due to other family or personal obligations in April was the highest month since May 2008. We don’t need doomerism to advocate for families, workers, and kids Despite the ubiquity of the “child care crisis” phrase, people have different and sometimes competing ideas about what policies are needed to make balancing work and family rearing easier in America. That conversation may get hard and messy at times, but will push us closer to the truth than making sweeping-yet-thin projections about economic and societal collapse. “Boosting employment was never the best justification for supporting working parents in the first place,” said Chris Griswold, the policy director at American Compass, a conservative think tank. “Helping families afford to raise children isn’t good because it maximizes economic activity — it’s good because families matter and economic pressures hurt kids and parents alike.” “There are clearly steps we could take to improve the functioning of the child care market, but the idea that we need a massive federal overhaul to fix a ‘broken’ or ‘failed’ market has been largely disproven,” argued Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Markets are more resilient than many on the left give them credit for. The ‘sky is falling’ crowd is, yet again, overhyping the evidence to push an agenda that doesn’t fit what parents want.” There are smart people on the left and in the center who disagree with Brown, including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who argues child care in America is a “textbook example of a broken market.” These are critical questions shaping the well-being of millions, and we should continue investigating them. But the child care cliff should make everyone cautious the next time there’s a political crisis advocates don’t want to waste. Vox’s coverage of child care is supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. All content is editorially independent and produced by Vox journalists.vox.com
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The messy SCOTUS drama about Black voters in Louisiana, explained Anti-gerrymandering protesters outside of the Supreme Court’s building. | Evelyn Hockstein/Washington Post via Getty Images Multiple federal courts are fighting over Louisiana's illegal racial gerrymander. Three different federal courts are fighting among themselves over who gets to draw Louisiana’s congressional maps. In June 2022, Chief Judge Shelly Dick, an Obama appointee to the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, ruled that the state’s maps were an illegal racial gerrymander. Under the invalidated maps, Black voters made up a majority in only one of six congressional districts, despite the fact that Black people comprise about one-third of the state’s population. Dick concluded that “the appropriate remedy in this context is a remedial congressional redistricting plan that includes an additional majority-Black congressional district” — meaning that the state needed new maps with at least two Black-majority districts. There’s been a lot of litigation since Dick initially made this decision, but the most significant recent development in this case, known as Robinson v. Ardoin, came last November. That’s when a bipartisan panel of the Fifth Circuit, the federal appeals court that oversees Louisiana, rejected many of the state’s legal arguments against Dick’s decision, but also gave the state until mid-January to draw new, legal maps before Dick could step in and draw them herself. The state legislature took the Fifth Circuit up on this offer and passed a new law drawing maps that included two Black-majority districts. So it seemed like that would be the end of the litigation over Louisiana’s maps. But then an entirely different set of plaintiffs filed a new lawsuit in a different court, the Western District of Louisiana, claiming that the new maps were unconstitutional. This second case is known as Callais v. Landry. For complicated procedural reasons, Callais was heard by a panel of three judges, and two of those judges — the ones appointed by Donald Trump — agreed that the new maps are illegal. That means that Louisiana is now subject to two competing court orders. Judge Dick’s order prohibits it from using its old maps, and the Western District’s order prohibits it from using the new maps. Meanwhile, the state needs to hold a congressional election this year, and it must have maps of some kind to do that. This mess is now before the Supreme Court in a pair of cases known as Robinson v. Callais and Landry v. Callais. In these cases, both the plaintiffs in Robinson and the state ask the justices to put the lower court’s decision in Callais on hold, although for different reasons. If the justices don’t step in, it’s far from clear how, exactly, Louisiana is supposed to conduct its congressional election. What does the law actually say about Louisiana’s congressional maps? There’s no question that Louisiana’s original maps, the ones struck down by Judge Dick, are illegal. Dick initially ruled that those maps were illegal in mid-2022, but the Supreme Court stepped in almost immediately to put that decision on hold. At the time, the justices were also considering a very similar case, Allen v. Milligan, which involved a racially gerrymandered map in Alabama. The Court ultimately concluded that Alabama’s maps were an illegal racial gerrymander and ordered the state to redraw those maps to include an additional Black-majority district. Shortly after it handed down its Milligan decision, it lifted its hold on the Robinson litigation, allowing that challenge to Louisiana’s original maps to move forward. There’s been a lot of needless drama since that happened, but the Fifth Circuit ultimately rejected Louisiana’s arguments seeking to salvage its original maps, pointing out that “most of the arguments the State made here were addressed and rejected by the Supreme Court in Milligan.” The Fifth Circuit gave the state legislature until mid-January to draw new maps that include a second Black-majority district, and the legislature complied. The two judges who struck down these new maps in the Callais case, meanwhile, fixated on a line in Milligan that states that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act “never requires adoption of districts that violate traditional redistricting principles” — such as ensuring that districts are compact and that they group together communities with similar interests. The new maps are pretty ugly, and they include at least one district that snakes through the center of the state, flouting traditional norms of compactness. Plaintiff’s complaint in Callais v. Landry The most recent congressional maps drawn by the Louisiana state legislature. The reason for these oddly shaped districts is that Louisiana’s Republican legislature hoped to accomplish two goals when it drew these new maps. It knew that it must include two Black-majority districts to comply with Judge Dick’s order in the Robinson case, but it also wanted to ensure that three Republican incumbents — Speaker Mike Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and Rep. Julia Letlow — would still prevail under the new maps. Additionally, the Robinson plaintiffs claim that the state legislature wanted to ensure that the new Black-majority district would come at the expense of Rep. Garret Graves (R-LA), who they describe as a “political rival” of Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R). In any event, the two judges behind the Callais decision ultimately concluded that these new maps were too ugly to survive, ruling them invalid in large part because they do not “comply with traditional districting principles.” It’s far from clear that this decision was correct. Though Milligan did say that the Voting Rights Act does not require districts that violate these traditional principles, that line appeared in a broader paragraph emphasizing that “reapportionment remains primarily the duty and responsibility of the States, not the federal courts.” Read in context, in other words, the key line in Milligan that the Callais judges fixated upon suggests that a state legislature ordered to draw new maps under the Voting Rights Act should retain the freedom to comply with traditional principles such as drawing compact districts, not they they absolutely must do so. But there’s also no need for the Supreme Court to untangle this complicated debate about what Milligan means, at least not right now, because there’s another perfectly good reason why the Callais judges’ decision blocking the new maps must be put on hold. The “Purcell principle,” briefly explained In Purcell v. Gonzales (2006), the Supreme Court warned that “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.” The Court has often wielded this principle quite aggressively — too aggressively, I’ve argued — in cases where a lower court issued a decision in an election year that could benefit the Democratic Party. In the Milligan case, for example, Justice Brett Kavanaugh relied on Purcell to argue that Alabama could not be ordered to redraw its maps more than nine months before a general election. That meant that Alabama got to run the 2022 election using illegal maps that the Supreme Court eventually struck down, and it also meant that Republicans won an extra seat in the current, closely divided US House of Representatives. But, if Purcell was violated when a federal court ordered Alabama to redraw its maps in the January before a congressional election, then it was certainly violated in Callais, where a lower court ordered Louisiana to redraw its maps in late April of an election year. In its brief asking the Supreme Court to block the lower court’s decision in Callais, Louisiana’s lawyers argue that “this case screams for a Purcell stay,” pointing to a long line of deadlines the state’s election officials must comply with — the first deadline is this Wednesday — for the state’s congressional election to comply with state law. Even if a federal court were to delay those deadlines, moreover, the late-breaking Callais decision means that candidates for congressional seats in Louisiana now have no idea who their constituents are and where they should campaign for the 2024 election. They won’t know that until the courts stop messing around and tell them which maps the state must use in its next election. The two judges behind the Callais decision, meanwhile, are threatening to draw their own map if the state legislature does not produce a new map by June 4. But there’s no guarantee that the Callais judges’ map will comply with Judge Dick’s order in the Robinson litigation — which could potentially lead to an awkward situation where Judge Dick has to strike down maps drawn by her fellow judges. None of this confusion makes any sense, and there is an easy way to solve it, at least for now. The Supreme Court should block the lower court’s decision in Callais for violating the Purcell principle. And it should order the state to use the new, legislatively drawn maps in the 2024 election. All of the more difficult questions about whether those maps are too ugly to be used in future elections can be resolved by the Supreme Court at a later date.vox.com