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Teletherapy can really help, and really hurt

vox.com

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

The Supreme Court decides not to trigger a second Great Depression

5 ч

vox.com

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

What young voters actually care about

10 ч

vox.com

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

Back to Black is the worst of bad musical biopics

10 ч

vox.com

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

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

11 ч

vox.com

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

Why can’t prices just stay the same?

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

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Biden’s surprise proposal to debate Trump early, explained

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vox.com

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.

Psychedelics could treat some of the worst chronic pain in the world

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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!

Why school segregation is getting worse

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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.

The crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists shows why the left needs free speech

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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.

How to prepare for another season of wildfire smoke

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vox.com

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.