High school basketball: Friday's scores

A Ukrainian service member operates a reconnaissance drone in the area of Pokrovsk, Ukraine, on January 14, 2025. | Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu via Getty Images After nearly three years of fighting, it will take more than a day to end the war in Ukraine, as even Donald Trump now appears to acknowledge. Though the president-elect repeatedly vowed during his campaign that he would end the conflict in 24 hours after returning to the White House, Trump has more recently said he thinks six months is a realistic timetable. His nominee for special envoy for Ukraine, retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, is a bit more optimistic, believing a deal in 100 days is feasible.  News of an imminent ceasefire in Gaza, negotiated in part by representatives of both Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s diplomatic teams, may raise hopes of a similar breakthrough for Ukraine. But as even Trump himself has acknowledged, ending Europe’s first major land war in decades is likely to be much more difficult.  That’s because neither side is close to achieving its aims. For Russia, that’s the replacement of Ukraine’s pro-Western government with a more pliant one, or what President Vladimir Putin has called the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of a country he views as within Moscow’s rightful sphere of influence. For Ukraine, it’s the full removal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, including Crimea and areas in the east of the country that were already occupied before the full-scale invasion in 2022.  That’s not to say that the war won’t end until one side or the other achieves total victory — few wars do. Leaders of both countries have suggested they might settle for something less. But whether or not a deal to stop the fighting can be reached depends on the answers to three questions.  The first is whether Ukraine, and even more so Russia, is interested in pursuing a ceasefire. The second is whether an agreement exists that will allow Ukraine to feel confident about its future security, but isn’t a complete nonstarter for the Russians. The third is just what Trump, a consistent critic of US support for Ukraine, is willing to do to pressure the two sides into taking a deal — and whether it will be enough.  Jaw-jaw or war-war? As Trump prepares to take office, Russian forces, which currently control about 20 percent of Ukraine, are advancing at their fastest rate since the earliest days of the war, albeit at an enormous cost in human lives and materiel.  Russia seized more than 1,600 square miles of Ukrainian territory in 2024, according to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, while suffering around 427,000 troops killed or injured (about 40 per square mile). Ukraine’s biggest victory in 2024 was the surprise invasion of Russia’s Kursk province over the summer. But this has not slowed down Russia’s advance within Ukraine itself. In fact, it may have actually helped by stretching Ukraine’s defensive lines thin. And thanks in part to an influx of thousands of North Korean troops, the Russians are slowly taking back territory in Kursk as well.  Early in the war, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy insisted that the full return of all of the country’s internationally recognized territory was “not up to negotiations.” But the battlefield situation — as well as the result of the US presidential election — appears to have led to a slight softening, or at least a shift in emphasis.  In more recent statements, Zelenskyy has suggested that if Ukraine were given adequate security guarantees, it could agree to end the “hot phase” of the war. Kyiv would then seek to recover the rest of its territory through diplomatic means. His people largely back this shift: Polls show that this year, for the first time, more Ukrainians favor negotiations to end the war rather than fighting on until victory.   During the election, much of the conversation around Trump’s Ukraine plans focused on how he would manage to pressure the Ukrainians to agree to a deal while Russian troops were still in their territory. But today, the better question may be whether Russia is open to negotiations.  Officially, the Kremlin says it is open to talks, but is sticking to Russia’s maximalist demands. “I don’t think it’s feasible to negotiate when it’s clear the Russians aren’t interested in anything other than the full and total subjugation of Ukraine,” Ivo Daalder, former US ambassador to NATO, told Vox. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has told lawmakers that Ukraine is not ready for peace talks because it “cannot at this moment negotiate from a position of strength.” Mark Galeotti, a UK-based Russian security analyst, said Russia is likely to participate in talks “because they don’t want to be seen not to.” But with Russia making slow but steady progress on the battlefield and Putin seemingly unconcerned by the astronomically high number of casualties nor the growing damage to his country’s economy, there may be little incentive to stop. “Putin seems to feel he’s winning,” said Galeotti. “Why would he compromise?”  Franz-Stefan Gady, an Austrian military analyst who travels frequently to the battlefront in Ukraine, believes that until the front lines are stabilized in Ukraine, “any discussion regarding a potential ceasefire is academic.” In Gady’s view, this stabilization will require Ukraine to address its well-documented manpower shortage. Experts like Gady say Ukrainian forces are dangerously thin at the front. The Ukrainian military is also struggling with desertions and low morale, and due to the government’s reluctance to draft young people into combat roles, the average age of its troops is around 40. “This is not something the Trump administration really has any say in,” Gady said. Despite these complications, some argue that it’s time to at least test the waters to see if a potential deal can be found. There haven’t been serious talks aimed at ending the fighting since a round of negotiations in Istanbul in early 2022, during the first months of the war. The RAND Corporation’s Samuel Charap, an advocate for resuming peace talks, told Vox that the Russians “cannot achieve their objectives through the battlefield alone, because their objectives are fundamentally political, unless they can oust the [Ukraine] government by force. I think they’ve come to grips with the reality that this is a very low probability outcome.”  In light of this, he argues “a lot of people assume that [the Russians] aren’t willing to negotiate without having actually tested the proposition.” What would a deal actually look like? Ceding any territory to Russia, even if it’s on a temporary basis, and even if Ukraine and the international community do not formally recognize Russia’s control, would be a painful concession for Ukraine, if nothing else because of the reports of bleak human rights conditions and efforts to indoctrinate children in Russian-controlled areas.  But as Zelenskyy’s recent statements have indicated, the bigger concern is making sure Russia can’t simply rest and recover, then invade again, taking even more territory. Only a more permanent peace could prevent that. “A ceasefire is great from the Russians’ point of view, because it allows them to regroup their forces, and it gives them the initiative,” Galeotti said. “The Ukrainians are not going to be the ones to break the ceasefire if it’s Trump’s ceasefire, but that means they will never know if it’s going to be a day, a week or, a year, before Putin restarts the war.” The topic of “security guarantees” makes many Ukrainians bristle. “We’ve already been through all this before,” Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian member of parliament, told reporters during a recent visit to Washington. She pointed to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agreed to give up the nuclear weapons left on its territory after the Soviet collapse in exchange for guarantees from Russia, the US, and other countries that its sovereignty would be respected. More recently were the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Agreements, which aimed to bring an end to the fighting after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukrainian territory in 2014, but those agreements collapsed decisively in 2022 after years of violations.  “I cannot imagine our parliament voting for some big deal, if they believe that [the Russians] will be back in a few months, or in a few years, being much stronger,” said Ustinova.  The Ukrainians have always been clear about the security guarantee they want: full membership in NATO. This is what Zelenskyy said in his recent remarks could end the “hot phase” of the war. NATO members are protected by Article 5 of the alliance’s charter, which states that an attack on one is an attack on all. In other words, if Russia went to war with Ukraine again, he’d be going to war with all the alliance’s members, including the United States, and they would be treaty-bound to defend it.  In many ways, the war in Ukraine has been a demonstration of the value of NATO membership: Russia has refrained from any attacks on NATO countries like Poland, despite billions of dollars worth of weaponry from NATO countries flowing over its border into Ukraine, where they are then used to kill Russian forces. Putin may not respect international law, but so far he has shown he respects Article 5.  Ukraine was promised eventual NATO membership back in 2008, under heavy lobbying from the George W. Bush administration, albeit without any firm commitments about when it would happen. At their 2024 summit, NATO members agreed that Ukraine was on an “irreversible path” to joining. That might sound like a sure thing, but in reality, Ukraine is almost certainly not going to be admitted to NATO any time soon. This would likely have been the case had Kamala Harris won the election, but it’s even more so now. Trump has expressed sympathy for Russia’s position that Ukraine should not be admitted to the alliance. Other NATO governments are skeptical as well. And given that preventing Ukraine from joining NATO is a significant part of the reason Putin wants to oust its government, it’s hard to imagine he would go along with a ceasefire deal that included Article 5 guarantees for Kyiv. So the real question is: Could Ukraine receive some meaningful assurances outside the NATO framework? Zelenskyy recently said that the only way security guarantees could work is if the US provides them. The US has mutual defense treaties with several non-NATO countries, like Japan and the Philippines, but if there’s one thing that’s predictable about Trump’s often unpredictable foreign policy, it’s his skepticism of binding treaties like these.  There’s also the EU: Though primarily a political and economic alliance, the European Union’s charter also obliges countries to come to the aid of fellow members that are the “victim of armed aggression.” Ukraine has been formally approved as a candidate for membership, but is likely years from actually joining.  Some have argued that security guarantees could be provided by an all-European “coalition of the resolute”: This could include some combination of Poland and the Baltic countries, which have often pushed further than their Western European counterparts in their support for Ukraine. The United Kingdom and France, which have the military budgets (and nuclear weapons) to back them up, are also possibilities. The French government, in particular, has been keen on discussing the idea of deploying peacekeepers to Ukraine, though any such force would function mostly as a tripwire to deter Putin from taking on a Western military, even if it is in a non-NATO country.  Of course, European NATO members providing security guarantees raises the question of what the US will do if deterrence fails. If Russia gets into a shooting war with Britain or Poland, will the US simply sit back and watch? It’s possible to view this as a kind of backdoor way of extending Article 5 to Ukraine without the consent of all NATO’s members. “The US has consistently said we don’t want to be in a situation where an ally takes a military set of military commitments that we are not part of that could lead to the invocation of Article 5 without us having any say in that possibility,” said Daalder, the former ambassador to NATO. Given that Trump has repeatedly mused about pulling the US out of NATO, this seems like the sort of issue that could pull the alliance apart at the seams rather than strengthen its role in providing for European security. Which may be exactly what Putin would want to see. Some have also suggested that rather than a mutual defense treaty, the US could pursue a version of the “Israel model.” The US is not bound by law to come to Israel’s defense, but it is required to provide Israel with military capabilities to maintain its “qualitative military edge” over its rivals, as has been amply demonstrated during the war in Gaza.  Let’s force a deal If either or both of the sides are not interested in a deal, can Trump pressure them into one? The main leverage the United States has over the situation is military aid. Under the plan that Kellogg presented to Trump last summer, Washington will tell Ukraine that it will not get any more US support unless it enters into peace talks. At the same time, Trump would warn Russia that if it does not agree to end the war, Ukraine would get more aid.  Trump has indicated that he doesn’t plan to immediately cut off aid to Ukraine, but he could certainly restrict it if he wanted to. In the closing weeks of the Biden administration, the White House and Pentagon have been rushing to allocate aid to Ukraine as quickly as possible, anticipating that Trump might not send any more. Last week, the administration announced the final tranche of aid it will send before leaving office: a $500 million package including air defense missiles, air-to-ground munitions, and equipment for F-16 fighter jets. Many of the weapons that have been allocated to be sent to Ukraine from US stocks won’t actually reach Ukraine for months. If Trump wanted to, he could likely stop delivery on systems that have been promised, even those that are en route to the battlefield.  That wouldn’t necessarily end the war, but it would seriously hamper Ukraine’s ability to fight at a moment when it is struggling to tread water. Some in Trump’s orbit might hope that Ukraine can simply be pressured into taking what Kyiv might consider a “bad” deal, rather than fight without US weaponry.  Zelenskyy’s government has been on a major diplomatic offensive to make its case to the incoming administration, which included him appearing on tech influencer Lex Fridman’s podcast just a few days after Trump did. The message, from the Ukrainians and their advocates, is that Trump doesn’t want a Afghanistan-style collapse on his watch like Biden experienced, and that a ceasefire without real guarantees for Ukraine’s security would only kick the can down the road.       A bad deal “doesn’t mean that the Trump presidency would have four years of peace,” said Hanna Shelest, a Kyiv-based fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “It means that in a year or two, he would have a much bigger problem.” As is often the case, Russia’s incentives are harder to read. Trump, who plans to speak soon with Putin, has said he will tell the Russian president, “If you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give [Zelenskyy] a lot. We’re going to [give Ukraine] more than they ever got if we have to.” But there’s some question as to whether there’s really that much more the US can give. The slow pace of US arms deliveries to Ukraine, a source of frequent frustration to the Ukrainians, was dictated not just by the Biden administration’s concerns about escalation, but by the fact that the US is running low on its own stocks of items like Javelin missiles and air defense ammunition. As one US army general told me in 2023, referring to the ubiquitous 155-millimeter artillery shell, which American industry has raced to increase the production of since the war broke out, “We operate at the speed of steel” — and for the US, steel moves even slower than politics.   In theory, Trump could lift some of the remaining restrictions on how Ukraine uses its weapons, including targets it can strike within Russia, but given that he has blasted Biden for moving in that direction, such a course of action seems unlikely. War of exhaustion  In short, there are likely to be ceasefire talks within the next year, but finding a deal that actually ends the war, rather than just delays it, won’t be easy, whether the timeline is one day, 100 days, or longer.  Galeotti said it’s possible the Russians may engage with the negotiation process “with the expectation that they can just basically talk things out to the point where Trump loses interest.” Some of Trump’s high-ranking national security advisers — including his nominees for national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and secretary of state, Marco Rubio — seem likely to oppose simply abandoning Ukraine to its fate. But clashes between Trump and his more traditionally hawkish advisers are hardly new, and it’s impossible to predict which side would win.  Russia remains the wild card, but Putin might eventually see a ceasefire as in his interest. The Russian president hasn’t suffered much politically so far from the heavy losses in Ukraine, but there is evidence that the government is having a harder time recruiting soldiers and would prefer to avoid a politically costly mass mobilization.  It’s far from certain that Russia can continue losing 40 troops for every square mile of Ukrainian territory until the whole country is conquered, as it has been suffering so far. Russia has weathered international sanctions better than many expected, but it’s still not a given that it can continue to maintain its current level of military spending. Some commentators have suggested Putin’s overheated war economy is a house of cards, meaning time is not actually on the Russian leader’s side.  The house of cards may not tumble tomorrow, but not even Russia can keep fighting this way forever. Putin is just counting on it being able to do it longer than the Ukrainians. The final stages of the war in Ukraine are likely to be less a war of territory than a war of exhaustion, for both the soldiers on the ground and the diplomats in the conference room. Sooner or later, one side may be willing to make compromises it currently considers unacceptable — but when that happens might not be up to Trump.  .

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The image that really got me on social media this week was a faded photo of a man and woman, standing on what looks like the front steps of their home. It’s a candid shot—both are focusing their attention on an infant cradled in the mother’s arm. It is likely one of the first photos of a new family, and the caption broke my heart: “This photo was blown into our yard during the Eaton Canyon fire. Anyone from Pasadena/Altadena recognize these people?”The picture is perfectly intact, not singed or torn, yet it seems to represent an entire universe of loss. Staring at the photo, a piece of family history scattered by the same winds that fuel the Los Angeles fires, you can just begin to see the contours of what is gone. The kind of grief that cannot be inventoried in an insurance claim.And then you scroll. A satellite photo of a charred, leveled neighborhood is sandwiched next to some career news. On Instagram, I see a GoFundMe for a woman who is nine months pregnant and just lost her house; it’s followed immediately by someone else’s ebullient ski-vacation photos and a skin-care advertisement. I proceed through the “For You” feed on X and find Elon Musk replying to a video where Alex Jones claims the fires are part of a globalist plot to ruin the United States (“True,” he said), and blaming the fires on DEI initiatives; then a shitpost about Meta’s content-moderation changes (“On my way to comment ‘retard’ on every facebook post,” it reads, with 297,000 views). I scroll again: “Celebrities Reveal How They REALLY Feel About Kelly Clarkson,” another post teases. This is followed by a post about a new red-flag warning in L.A.: The fire is not relenting.[Read: The unfightable fire]To watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem is to feel acutely disoriented. The country is burning; your friends are going on vacation; next week Donald Trump will be president; the government is setting the fires to stage a “land grab”; a new cannabis-infused drink will help you “crush” Dry January. Mutual-aid posts stand alongside those from climate denialists and doomers. Stay online long enough and it’s easy to get a sense that the world is simultaneously ending and somehow indifferent to that fact. It all feels ridiculous. A viral post suggests that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” You scroll some more and learn that the author of that post wrote the line while on the toilet (though the author has since deleted the confession).Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. This is coupled with the bone-deep realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one might hope. Amanda Hess captured this distinctly modern feeling in a 2023 article about watching footage of dead Gazan children on Instagram: “I am not a survivor or a responder. I’m a witness, or a voyeur. The distress I am feeling is shame.”For those on the ground, these networks mean something different. These people do not need to bear witness: They need specific information about their circumstances, and they need help. But the chaos of our social platforms and the splintered nature of a hollowed-out media industry extend the disorientation to them as well. “This time, I’m a civilian,” Matt Pearce, a Los Angeles–based journalist, wrote last week. “And this time, the user experience of getting information about a disaster unfolding around me was dogshit.” Anna Merlan, a reporter for Mother Jones, chronicled the experience of sifting through countless conspiracy theories and false-flag posts while watching the fires encroach on her home and packing her car to evacuate.As I read these dispatches and watch helplessly from afar, the phrase time on site bangs around in my head. This is the metric that social-media companies optimize for, and it means what it sounds like: the amount of time that people spend on these apps. In recent years, there has been much handwringing over how much time users are spending on site; Tech-industry veterans such as Tristan Harris have made lucrative second careers warning of the addictive, exploitative nature of tech platforms and their algorithms. Harris’s crusade began in 2016, when he suggested a healthier metric of “time well spent,” which sought to reverse the “digital attention crisis.” This became its own kind of metric, adopted by Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 as Facebook’s north star for user satisfaction. Since then, the phrase has fallen out of favor. Harris rebranded his effort away from time well spent to a focus on “humane” technology.But the worries persist. Parents obsess over the vague metric of “screen time,” while researchers write best-selling books and debate what, exactly, phones and social media are doing to kids and how to prove it. American politicians are so worried about time on site—especially when its by-product, metadata, is being collected by foreign governments—that the United States may very well ban TikTok, an app used by roughly one-third of the country’s adults. (In protest, many users have simply started spending time on another Chinese site, Xiaohongshu.) Many people suspect that time on site can’t be good for us, yet time on site also is how many of us learn about the world, form communities, and entertain ourselves. The experience of logging on and consuming information through the algorithmic morass of our feeds has never felt more dispiriting, commoditized, chaotic, and unhelpful than it does right now.[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]It is useful, then, to juxtapose this information ecosystem—one that’s largely governed by culture-warring tech executives and populated by attention seekers—with a true technological public good. Last week, I downloaded Watch Duty, a free app that provides evacuation notices, up-to-date fire maps, and information such as wind direction and air-quality alerts. The app, which was founded in 2021 after fires ravaged Sonoma County, California, has become a crucial piece of information infrastructure for L.A. residents and first responders. It is run by a nonprofit as a public service, with volunteer reporters and full-time staff who help vet information. Millions have downloaded the app just this month.Watch Duty appears to be saving lives at a time when local-government services have been less than reliable, sending out incorrect evacuation notices to residents. It is a shining example of technology at its best and most useful, and so I was struck by something one of its co-founders, David Merritt, told to The Verge over the weekend: “We don’t want you to spend time in the app,” he said. “You get information and get out. We have the option of adding more photos, but we limit those to the ones that provide different views of a fire we have been tracking. We don’t want people doom scrolling.” This, he rightly argues, is “the antithesis of what a lot of tech does.”The contrast between Watch Duty and broad swaths of the internet feels especially stark in the early days of 2025. The toxic incentives and environments of our other apps are as visible as ever, and the men behind these services—Musk and Zuckerberg especially—seem intent on making the experience of using them worse than ever. It’s all in service of engagement, of more time on site. Musk, who has transformed X into a superfund site of conspiracy theorizing, crypto ads, hateful posts, and low-rent memes, has been vehement that he wants his users to come to the platform and never leave. He has allegedly deprioritized hyperlinks that would take people away from the platform to other sites. (Musk did not deny that this is happening when confronted by Paul Graham, a Y Combinator co-founder.) He has his own name for the metric he wants X to optimize for: unregretted user seconds.Zuckerberg recently announced his own version of the Muskian playbook, which seeks to turn his Meta platforms into a more lawless posting zone, including getting rid of fact-checkers and turning off its automated moderation systems on all content but “illegal and high-severity violations.” That system kept spam and disinformation content from flooding the platform. Make no mistake: This, too, is its own play for time on site. In an interview last month with the Financial Times, a Meta executive revealed that the company plans to experiment with introducing generative-AI-powered chatbots into its services, behaving like regular users. Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, says that this feature—which, I should add, nobody asked for—is a “priority” for the company over the next two years. This is supposed to align with another goal, which is to make its apps “more entertaining and engaging.”This should feel more than disheartening for anyone who cares about or still believes in the promise of the internet and technology to broaden our worldview, increase resilience, and expose us to the version of humanity that is always worth helping and saving. Spending time on site has arguably never felt this bad; the forecast suggests that it will only get worse.In recent days, I’ve been revisiting some of the work of the climate futurist Alex Steffen, who has a knack for putting language to our planetary crisis. The unprecedented disasters that appear now with more frequency are an example of discontinuity, where “past experience loses its value as a guide to decision-making about the future.” Steffen argues that we have no choice but to adapt to this reality and anticipate how we’ll survive it. He offers no panaceas or bromides. The climate crisis will come for each of us, but will affect us unevenly. We are not all in this together, he argues. But action is needed—specifically, proactive fixes that make our broken systems more effective and durable.Clearly our information systems are in need of such work. They feel like they were built for a world we no longer inhabit. Most of them are run by billionaires who can afford to insulate themselves from reality, at least for now. I don’t see an end to the discontinuity or brokenness of our internet. But there are glimpses of resilience. Maybe platforms like Watch Duty offer a template. “I don’t want to sell this,” John Clarke Mills, the company’s CEO, told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday. He went further: “No one should own this. The fact that I have to do this with my team is not OK. Part of this is out of spite. I’m angry that I’m here having to do this, and the government hasn’t spent the money to do this themselves.” Mills’s anger is righteous, but it could also be instructive. Instead of building things that make us feel powerless, Mills is building tools that give people information that can be turned into agency.There’s no tidy conclusion to any of this. There is loss, fear, anger, but also hope. Days later, I went to check back on the post that contained that photo of the man and woman with a child. I’d hoped that the internet would work its magic to reunite the photo with those who’d lost it. Throughout the replies are people trying to signal-boost the post. In one reply, a local news producer asks for permission to do a story about the photograph. Another person thinks they have a lead on the family. So far, there’s no happy ending. But there is hope.

Here’s a simple question: Is moderate drinking okay?Like millions of Americans, I look forward to a glass of wine—sure, occasionally two—while cooking or eating dinner. I strongly believe that an ice-cold pilsner on a hot summer day is, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, suggestive evidence that a divine spirit exists and gets a kick out of seeing us buzzed.But, like most people, I understand that booze isn’t medicine. I don’t consider a bottle of California cabernet to be the equivalent of a liquid statin. Drinking to excess is dangerous for our bodies and those around us. Having more than three or four drinks a night is strongly related to a host of diseases, including liver cirrhosis, and alcohol addiction is a scourge for those genetically predisposed to dependency.If the evidence against heavy drinking is clear, the research on my wine-with-dinner habit is a wasteland of confusion and contradiction. This month, the U.S. surgeon general published a new recommendation that all alcohol come with a warning label indicating it increases the risk of cancer. Around the same time, a meta-analysis published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that moderate alcohol drinking is associated with a longer life. Many scientists scoffed at both of these headlines, claiming that the underlying studies are so flawed that to derive strong conclusions from them would be like trying to make a fine wine out of a bunch of supermarket grapes.I’ve spent the past few weeks poring over studies, meta-analyses, and commentaries. I’ve crashed my web browser with an oversupply of research-paper tabs. I’ve spoken with researchers and then consulted with other scientists who disagreed with those researchers. And I’ve reached two conclusions. First, my seemingly simple question about moderate drinking may not have a simple answer. Second, I’m not making any plans to give up my nightly glass of wine.***Alcohol ambivalence has been with us for almost as long as alcohol. The notion that booze is enjoyable in small doses and hellish in excess was captured well by Eubulus, a Greek comic poet of the fourth century B.C.E., who wrote that although two bowls of wine brought “love and pleasure,” five led to “shouting,” nine led to “bile,” and 10 produced outright “madness, in that it makes people throw things.”In the late 20th century, however, conventional wisdom lurched strongly toward the idea that moderate drinking was healthy, especially when the beverage of choice was red wine. In 1991, Morley Safer, a correspondent for CBS, recorded a segment of 60 Minutes titled “The French Paradox,” in which he pointed out that the French filled their stomachs with meat, oil, butter, and other sources of fat, yet managed to live long lives with lower rates of cardiovascular disease than their Northern European peers. “The answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox, may lie in this inviting glass” of red wine, Safer told viewers. Following the report, demand for red wine in the U.S. surged.[Read: America has a drinking problem]The notion that a glass of red wine every night is akin to medicine wasn’t just embraced by a gullible news media. It was assumed as a matter of scientific fact by many researchers. “The evidence amassed is sufficient to bracket skeptics of alcohol’s protective effects with the doubters of manned lunar landings and members of the flat-Earth society,” the behavioral psychologist and health researcher Tim Stockwell wrote in 2000.Today, however, Stockwell is himself a flat-earther, so to speak. In the past 25 years, he has spent, he told me, “thousands and thousands of hours” reevaluating studies on alcohol and health. And now he’s convinced, as many other scientists are, that the supposed health benefits of moderate drinking were based on bad research and confounded variables.A technical term for the so-called French paradox is the “J curve.” When you plot the number of drinks people consume along an X axis and their risk of dying along the Y axis, most observational studies show a shallow dip at about one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men, suggesting protection against all-cause mortality. Then the line rises—and rises and rises—confirming the idea that excessive drinking is plainly unhealthy. The resulting graph looks like a J, hence the name.The J-curve thesis suffers from many problems, Stockwell told me. It relies on faulty comparisons between moderate drinkers and nondrinkers. Moderate drinkers tend to be richer, healthier, and more social, while nondrinkers are a motley group that includes people who have never had alcohol (who tend to be poorer), people who quit drinking alcohol because they’re sick, and even recovering alcoholics. In short, many moderate drinkers are healthy for reasons that have nothing to do with drinking, and many nondrinkers are less healthy for reasons that have nothing to do with alcohol abstention.[Read: Not just sober-curious, but neo-temperate]When Stockwell and his fellow researchers threw out the observational studies that were beyond salvation and adjusted the rest to account for some of the confounders I listed above, “the J curve disappeared,” he told me. By some interpretations, even a small amount of alcohol—as little as three drinks a week—seemed to increase the risk of cancer and death.***The demise of the J curve is profoundly affecting public-health guidance. In 2011, Canada’s public-health agencies said that men could safely enjoy up to three oversize drinks a night with two abstinent days a week—about 15 drinks a week. In 2023, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction revised its guidelines to define low-risk drinking as no more than two drinks a week.Here’s my concern: The end of the J curve has made way for a new emerging conventional wisdom—that moderate drinking is seriously risky—that is also built on flawed studies and potentially overconfident conclusions. The pendulum is swinging from flawed “red wine is basically heart medicine!” TV segments to questionable warnings about the risk of moderate drinking and cancer. After all, we’re still dealing with observational studies that struggle to account for the differences between diverse groups.[Read: Is a glass of wine harmless? Wrong question.]In a widely read breakdown of alcohol-health research, the scientist and author Vinay Prasad wrote that the observational research on which scientists are still basing their conclusions suffers from a litany of “old data, shitty data, confounded data, weak definitions, measurement error, multiplicity, time-zero problems, and illogical results.” As he memorably summarized the problem: “A meta-analysis is like a juicer, it only tastes as good as what you put in.” Even folks like Stockwell who are trying to turn the flawed data into useful reviews are like well-meaning chefs, toiling in the kitchen, doing their best to make coq au vin out of a lot of chicken droppings.***The U.S. surgeon general’s new report on alcohol recommended adding a more “prominent” warning label on all alcoholic beverages about cancer risks. The top-line findings were startling. Alcohol contributes to about 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 cancer deaths each year, the surgeon general said. The guiding motivation sounded honorable. About three-fourths of adults drink once or more a week, and fewer than half of them are aware of the relationship between alcohol and cancer risk.But many studies linking alcohol to cancer risk are bedeviled by the confounding problems facing many observational studies. For example, a study can find a relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and breast-cancer detection, but moderate consumption is correlated with income, as is access to mammograms.One of the best-established mechanisms for alcohol being related to cancer is that alcohol breaks down into acetaldehyde in the body, which binds to and damages DNA, increasing the risk that a new cell grows out of control and becomes a cancerous tumor. This mechanism has been demonstrated in animal studies. But, as Prasad points out, we don’t approve drugs based on animal studies alone; many drugs work in mice and fail in clinical trials in humans. Just because we observe a biological mechanism in mice doesn’t mean you should live your life based on the assumption that the same cellular dance is happening inside your body.[Read: The truth about breast cancer and drinking red wine—or any alcohol]I’m willing to believe, even in the absence of slam-dunk evidence, that alcohol increases the risk of developing certain types of cancer for certain people. But as the surgeon general’s report itself points out, it’s important to distinguish between “absolute” and “relative” risk. Owning a swimming pool dramatically increases the relative risk that somebody in the house will drown, but the absolute risk of drowning in your backyard swimming pool is blessedly low. In a similar way, some analyses have concluded that even moderate drinking can increase a person’s odds of getting mouth cancer by about 40 percent. But given that the lifetime absolute risk of developing mouth cancer is less than 1 percent, this means one drink a day increases the typical individual’s chance of developing mouth cancer by about 0.3 percentage points. The surgeon general reports that moderate drinking (say, one drink a night) increases the relative risk of breast cancer by 10 percent, but that merely raises the absolute lifetime risk of getting breast cancer from about 11 percent to about 13 percent. Assuming that the math is sound, I think that’s a good thing to know. But if you pass this information along to a friend, I think you can forgive them for saying: Sorry, I like my chardonnay more than I like your two percentage points with a low confidence interval. ***Where does this leave us? Not so far from our ancient-Greek friend Eubulus. Thousands of years and hundreds of studies after the Greek poet observed the dubious benefits of too much wine, we have much more data without much more certainty.In her review of the literature, the economist Emily Oster concluded that “alcohol isn’t especially good for your health.” I think she’s probably right. But life isn’t—or, at least, shouldn’t be—about avoiding every activity with a whisker of risk. Cookies are not good for your health, either, as Oster points out, but only the grouchiest doctors will instruct their healthy patients to foreswear Oreos. Even salubrious activities—trying to bench your bodyweight, getting in a car to hang out with a friend—incur the real possibility of injury.Read: A daily drink is almost certainly not going to hurt youAn appreciation for uncertainty is nice, but it’s not very memorable. I wanted a takeaway about alcohol and health that I could repeat to a friend if they ever ask me to summarize this article in a sentence. So I pressed Tim Stockwell to define his most cautious conclusions in a memorable way, even if I thought he might be overconfident in his caution.“One drink a day for men or women will reduce your life expectancy on average by about three months,” he said. Moderate drinkers should have in their mind that “every drink reduces your expected longevity by about five minutes.” (The risk compounds for heavier drinkers, he added. “If you drink at a heavier level, two or three drinks a day, that goes up to like 10, 15, 20 minutes per drink—not per drinking day, but per drink.”)Every drink takes five minutes off your life. Maybe the thought scares you. Personally, I find great comfort in it—even as I suspect it suffers from the same flaws that plague this entire field. Several months ago, I spoke with the Stanford University scientist Euan Ashley, who studies the cellular effects of exercise. He has concluded that every minute of exercise adds five extra minutes of life.When you put these two statistics together, you get this wonderful bit of rough longevity arithmetic: For moderate drinkers, every drink reduces your life by the same five minutes that one minute of exercise can add back. There’s a motto for healthy moderation: Have a drink? Have a jog. Even this kind of arithmetic can miss a bigger point. To reduce our existence to a mere game of minutes gained and lost is to squeeze the life out of life. Alcohol is not like a vitamin or pill that we swiftly consume in the solitude of our bathrooms, which can be straightforwardly evaluated in controlled laboratory testing. At best, moderate alcohol consumption is enmeshed in activities that we share with other people: cooking, dinners, parties, celebrations, rituals, get-togethers—life! It is pleasure, and it is people. It is a social mortar for our age of social isolation.[Read: The anti-social century]An underrated aspect of the surgeon general’s report is that it is following, rather than trailblazing, a national shift away from alcohol. As recently as 2005, Americans were more likely to say that alcohol was good for their health, instead of bad. Last year, they were more than five times as likely to say it was bad, instead of good. In the first seven months of 2024, alcohol sales volume declined for beer, wine, and spirits. The decline seemed especially pronounced among young people.To the extent that alcohol carries a serious risk of excess and addiction, less booze in America seems purely positive. But for those without religious or personal objections, healthy drinking is social drinking, and the decline of alcohol seems related to the fact that Americans now spend less time in face-to-face socializing than any period in modern history. That some Americans are trading the blurry haze of intoxication for the crystal clarity of sobriety is a blessing for their minds and guts. But in some cases, they may be trading an ancient drug of socialization for the novel intoxicants of isolation.

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Charred homes and burnt cars are pictured amid the rubble of the fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates in Los Angeles on January 13, 2025. | Agustin Paullier/AFP via Getty Images) As fires continue to rage in and around Los Angeles, burning more than 40,000 acres since last week, destroying more than 12,000 homes and other buildings, and killing at least 25 people, two things are becoming clear: California must rebuild quickly, and it must rebuild differently. Housing affordability and availability in Los Angeles, and California more broadly, were already at a crisis point even before the fires broke out. Since January 7, tens of thousands of families have been forced to evacuate and are now rushing to find places to live. Many were stunned to realize there are virtually no rental options available to them, even when they’d be willing to pay large sums of money to stay in the area.  The region’s rental market was already strained before the fires. An analysis by CoStar Group Inc. found that vacancy rates — meaning the percentage of rental homes sitting empty and available — bottomed out at 2.1 percent in western Los Angeles County — now affected by the Palisades Fire — and 3.8 percent in Pasadena, where the Eaton Fire burns. Los Angeles as a whole had vacancy rates of about 5 percent. For larger apartments with three or four bedrooms, the rental options are even worse. Almost all new housing developed over the last decade has been studios or one- and two-bedroom apartments, built with singles, childless couples, and adult roommates in mind. “I think the real wakeup call this is giving is it doesn’t matter how much money you have if you live in a city that has never allowed housing to be built for families,” said Matt Lewis, the communications director for California YIMBY. “The presumption all along has been that fires happen to someone else.” But the housing impact extends well beyond the immediate needs of evacuees. Facing mounting losses from increasingly severe climate disasters, insurance companies have hiked rates statewide over the last few years and declined to renew coverage for nearly 3 million homeowners in vulnerable regions. (The state updates its regulations to force more insurance companies to cover homes in fire-prone areas, but those changes took effect just before the recent fires broke out.) As a result of losing their coverage many of the newly uninsured homeowners turned to California’s FAIR plan, a last-resort option that offers limited home coverage for higher costs. FAIR plans are not publicly funded, and if their reserves and reinsurance deplete, then insured homeowners across the state help foot the bill. “All policyholders, not just FAIR plan policyholders,” could be on the hook for the fires, Dave Jones, the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment, told Vox. In other words, all Californians could face higher premiums next year, making it even more expensive to live in the already the most unaffordable state. These wildfires could be the tipping point for California’s already teetering housing ecosystem. As insurance premiums soar, both current residents and prospective homebuyers face impossible choices: absorb the skyrocketing costs, abandon their properties, or leave the state entirely. Years of warnings about this scenario have proven prescient. The next few months of policy decisions will determine whether the state can stabilize its housing market, or whether the fires will trigger a wave  of foreclosures, homelessness, and exodus unprecedented in California history. Build Back Better? While California politicians so far have taken small steps to signal they want to make it easier to rebuild homes quickly, housing advocates say the moment calls for much bolder leadership: not just for restoring homes that burned, but significantly increasing the amount of fire-resistant houses and apartments in less risky areas for people at all income levels.  On Sunday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order calling to waive permitting requirements under the landmark California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which is notorious for holding up housing development. To rebuild properties quickly, Newsom also suspended permitting requirements under the state’s Coastal Act, which ensures the protection of California’s coastal resources including its beaches and environmental wildlife. But these flashy measures were not meaningful reform. Single-family homes are already exempt from CEQA, and the Coastal Act already exempts reconstruction of homes destroyed by disasters from typical coastal permitting. Legal experts were skeptical it would lead to real change, especially as rebuilt homes would still need to become compliant with zoning and building ordinances that have changed significantly over the years.On Monday, LA Mayor Karen Bass followed suit with her own executive order calling to expedite rebuilding in Pacific Palisades, though critics note that the city’s already slow permitting is attributed partly to city understaffing, and this order doesn’t say anything about funding more staffers.  To merely restore what was lost — which will take years even with potentially rushed permitting approvals — won’t be enough to stem the mounting crisis.   As insurance companies begin to deploy artificial intelligence to assess a region’s climate risk, and as state insurance rules evolve to allow insurers to charge policyholders more for more vulnerable homes, there will be more pressure to rebuild suburban homes that can better withstand fire and other natural disasters; this will undoubtedly be more expensive to both construct and insure than they were before the fires.  These changes could force a long-overdue transformation in how and where leaders build: away from fire-prone suburban sprawl and toward denser urban neighborhoods that are naturally more fire-resistant. But without major zoning changes to allow this kind of urban development, the crisis could instead accelerate displacement as middle and working-class families — especially those who inherited their homes in communities like Altadena and Pasadena — are forced out of uninsurable areas with nowhere affordable to go. University of Southern California policy and planning professor Dowell Myers told Vox there’s no good data yet on how longtime residents who inherited their homes have been handling rising insurance premiums. The average annual cost of homeowners insurance in the state has surged to $3,100 — a 62 percent increase compared to the national average — with some California coastal and inland locations facing double-digit percentage increases. To create housing for people who can’t afford soaring insurance premiums or multimillion-dollar homes, advocates are urging policymakers to make it easier to build housing in denser, relatively fire-safe cities, places that already combine modern building codes, rapid emergency response times, mandatory sprinkler systems, and updated infrastructure to minimize risk.  Communities must build back differently — faster and with more density than they’ve traditionally allowed. A bill introduced back in 2020 by a California state representative would have exempted infill housing from CEQA, but it died in the legislature. Lawmakers could reintroduce and pass that quickly, and advocates have been urging Newsom to support such a step. “The real challenge is that we’re very late to try to do this, and so it won’t actually solve the problem for people who need housing today,” said Lewis of California YIMBY. “This crisis will absolutely spill over into other states, as people who aren’t willing to rebuild or can’t afford to rebuild will find they have nowhere left to stay.”  The mounting barriers to homeownership While the fires are devastating to homeowners, the crisis has made the situation even more stressful for renters. The ripple effects of California’s insurance crisis extend far beyond current homeowners, threatening to worsen an already severe housing affordability crisis. For renters, who make up more than half of Los Angeles County residents, the impact could be devastating.  The insurance crisis creates what National Low Income Housing Coalition disaster recovery manager Noah Patton describes as a “three-pronged impact” on housing affordability. Rising insurance costs push more potential buyers into the rental market, increasing demand. Meanwhile, landlords pass these costs onto renters via rent increases, and developers struggle to finance new affordable housing projects in disaster-prone areas that “desperately need it.” The stakes are particularly high in California, where nearly 186,000 people already live on the streets or in shelters — an 8 percent increase since 2022. Homeless people already have greater exposure to the climate crisis and wildfire smoke in particular when they cannot take shelter inside. For the many households spending over half their income on housing, even small rent increases can trigger a cascade toward eviction and homelessness.  While residents displaced by the fires may be allowed to live temporarily on their properties in recreational vehicles, tiny homes, and other modular structures, this stopgap solution does nothing to help the many Californians still struggling to become homeowners or pay their rent in the first place. “While many millennials were able to take advantage of record-low mortgage rates during the pandemic, young people are still facing a housing affordability crisis that doesn’t show many signs of improvement on the for-sale side,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. “What’s more, these devastating wildfires are in Los Angeles, which already has the least affordable housing market in the country, with the median home price exceeding $900,000.”

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A Volkswagen ID. Buzz electric microbus in the light tunnel ahead of quality control checks on the assembly line during a media tour of the Volkswagen AG (VW) multipurpose and commercial vehicle plant in Hannover, Germany, on Thursday, June 16, 2022. When I stepped up to test drive the all-electric Volkswagen ID. Buzz, the first thing I thought was that it looked as if it were grinning, almost too much. But once inside, the smug mug made sense. The Buzz is the first all-electric minivan in the United States and a leap toward luxury compared to its iconic predecessor, the VW Bus from the 1960s. It can seat up to seven people with lots of legroom, has more interior cargo space than a Suburban, and features a vast electrochromic sunroof that turns opaque at the touch of a button. With a low center of gravity thanks to its battery, the Buzz turns on a dime. A few days after my test drive, Volkswagen’s electric minivan won the 2025 North American Utility Vehicle of the Year award at the Detroit Auto Show. I’m not here to sell you a minivan. But I do think we’re witnessing a watershed moment for EVs, one that might change the way you think about our electrified future. December was the best month ever for EV sales worldwide, and the number of EVs sold in the US last year reached a record 1.3 million. Some industry analysts expect that number to climb in 2025, when there will be even more options to go electric at some of the lowest prices yet. And thanks to some simple changes to plug standards, this year should also see progress in building out the nation’s charging infrastructure, thanks to an influx of cash from the Biden administration, which has historically been terrible but is inching its way toward good. While the incoming Trump administration is poised to eliminate some tax breaks for EV buyers, experts in the sector say that the industry’s momentum is unstoppable. At the same time, EV sales growth is slowing. Yes, the industry keeps breaking records, but it’s breaking them by smaller margins. Tesla, which manufactures the top two bestselling EVs in the country and is the largest EV manufacturer in the world, actually saw its market share shrink for the first time ever in 2024. That shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. With the exception of the audacious new Cybertruck, Tesla has been selling the same four EV models for years, even as its competitors, including legacy automakers like Volkswagen and GM as well as newcomers like Rivian and Polestar, are breaking conventions and introducing completely new body types, like VW’s minivan or Rivian’s offroading vehicles. The cost of EVs is falling, too. Chevy just started selling an all-electric Equinox SUV that comes in at less than $35,000. (Chevy’s gas-powered Equinox starts at $28,600.) And, the Chinese automaker BYD has been exploding in popularity thanks in part to its ultra affordable EVs, which you can’t currently buy in the US. “People can see vehicles coming on the market that sort of fit what they want as well,” Volkswagen’s Mark Gillies told me after my test drive. “So I just think the more choice you have, and the more different variants of vehicle, the more you’ll see acceptance of EVs.” EVs used to be synonymous with the Tesla, but now almost every carmaker has an electric offering. Most of them get 200 to 300 miles per charge, which is more than enough for the daily driving needs of the average American. For those with a garage or parking spot with access to a power outlet, that means charging on the go is a non-issue, since they can plug in the vehicle overnight and then expect the battery to last them through the next day. Still, the state of charging infrastructure remains a major issue for a lot of Americans thinking about buying EVs. It’s historically been plagued by reliability problems, confused by carmakers using different types of plugs, and just less convenient than the century-old network of gas stations in the US. Taking a road trip with an EV remains a terrifying challenge for many with range anxiety, which is the fear that your EV will run out of battery and leave you stranded. “It’s not so much range anxiety, it’s infrastructure anxiety,” said Nicole Wakelin, editor-at-large of CarBuzz and a juror for the North American, Car, Truck, and Utility Vehicle of the Year Awards. “What the average person drives in a day can easily be covered just charging at home at night, and there’s no need to find a charger when you’re out and about.” But when you’re roadtripping, “chargers are still not plentiful.” But there are several good things happening on the infrastructure front this year — if some new developments manage to survive the changing political landscape. The Biden administration recently announced $635 million in grants to keep building EV charging stations and renewable fueling stations in an effort to get the country closer to its goal of having 500,000 publicly available charging stations by 2030. EV plugs are now becoming standardized as most major carmakers have signed on to adopt the North American Charging Standard (NACS) in 2025. That’s what Tesla uses, which means almost every EV will be able to plug into its Supercharger network. Convenience will get a major boost this year, too, since a new “universal Plug and Charge” standard is rolling out this year. That means no more fumbling with apps or credit cards at a charging station. As the standard’s name implies, you just plug and charge. While these investments and updates are moving us in the right direction, there’s real urgency to replace gas-powered cars with their cleaner EV counterparts. Earth’s average temperature rose by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time last year, as oil and gas production continue to increase. Los Angeles is on fire. Electrifying transportation could have an immediate impact on climate change. The transportation sector accounts for about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it’s the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the US, so electrifying every vehicle is a step closer to net zero. The effort is gaining momentum, too. EVs accounted for 4 percent of all passenger vehicles in the world in 2020, but that share had grown to 18 percent by the beginning of 2024, according to the International Energy Agency. And 2024 itself was record-breaking, with global EV sales growing by 25 percent. The majority of this growth is happening in China, where BYD has surpassed Tesla as the most popular EV maker. BYD, which sells its tiny but capable Seagull EV for the equivalent $10,000 in China, is popular in Mexico but has no plans to enter the US market in the face of tariffs on EV imports imposed by the Biden administration and even more potential tariffs coming from the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the cheapest new EVs available in the US start at about $30,000 before state and federal tax credits. Which, simple math suggests, equals about three BYD Seagulls per cheap American EV. So it should come as no surprise that the US trails other parts of the world when it comes to EV adoption. Cox Automotive expects EVs share of new vehicles to hit 10 percent in 2025, up from about 7.5 percent last year. Infrastructure anxiety explains some of the slow uptake, but affordability has historically been a problem as well. Only 3 percent of EVs cost less than $37,000, according to a Bank of America Global Research report, which might explain why more Americans are opting for cheaper hybrid options. A Gallup poll from March 2024 showed that while EV ownership is increasing in the US, the number of Americans who say they’re considering buying an EV is declining. Republicans dominated that group of naysayers by a large margin, as did those who aren’t worried about climate change. The new Trump administration has been overall cagey about what it will do with EVs, but it doesn’t look good. Trump has said he will “terminate [Biden’s] electric vehicle” mandate, a vague campaign promise that many assume means an end to the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases. This may seem counterintuitive since his biggest supporter, Elon Musk, owns Tesla, but Musk has said that ending the tax credits will actually help his EV company. While other incentive programs would still exist, like New York’s statewide program, an end to federal rebates would surely discourage some potential EV buyers. “Certainly the government incentives are helping,” said Mark Schirmer of Cox Automotive. “If those are reduced or eliminated, that might slow some sales down, but it’s not going to turn off EV sales.” It’s not clear if or how Trump will follow through on any of his campaign promises, much less one that takes on the US auto industry. Trump’s incoming press secretary Karoline Leavitt has told several news outlets in the past couple months that the president-elect will keep his promise of “stopping attacks on gas-powered cars” but will also “support the auto industry, allowing space for both gas-powered cars AND electric vehicles.” Given the number of powerful members of Congress with job-creating EV factories in their home districts, one could see why the Trump administration is keeping everything on the table for now. As I was sitting behind the wheel of the Volkswagen ID. Buzz recently, it got me thinking about another watershed moment in automotive history: When Chrysler invented the minivan in the early 1980s, it showed that you could move a lot of people in an easy-to-handle vehicle and still get good gas mileage. This completely transformed the auto industry and paved the way for the gas-guzzling SUV takeover in the 1990s and 2000s. The minivan steered us toward the future we’re living in, for better or worse. And now maybe today, it could steer us toward a future where major cities are not on fire. I’m not saying that the Volkswagen ID. Buzz will revolutionize the EV industry. At $60,000, it’s not cheap, but it is the only electric minivan you can buy right now. Volkswagen is also already testing a self-driving version, which it expects to roll out with a robotaxi service as soon as 2026. The idea of climbing into a comfy minivan with a fancy sunroof and getting dropped off safely at my destination without human intervention or a drop of gasoline sounds like a future I’d like living in. For EVs to keep their momentum through changes in policy and consumer sentiment, Americans have to believe in the future they’ll carry us to. We’ll get a better glimpse of what that looks like in 2025. In the meantime, if you are an aspiring soccer dad with passion for sustainable transportation, try test-driving the new electric minivan. It really does turn on a dime. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

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Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) speaks to reporters as he goes to vote on the Laken Riley Act at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 9, 2025. | Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images One of the first bills that could be sent to President Donald Trump after he is inaugurated Monday would vastly expand immigration detention and make it easier for states to influence immigration policy. And it has already passed one house of Congress with support from a significant number of Democrats. The bill, the Laken Riley Act, is named after a young woman who was killed last February by an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela. Her murderer was sentenced to life in prison. Riley has become a cause célèbre for Republicans, who argue that her death is the result of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies that allowed him to walk free despite a shoplifting charge. The GOP broadly backs the bill, but some Democrats, reeling from major losses in 2024, Americans’ frustration with the immigration status quo, and record-high border crossings under Biden, are backing or considering it as well: 48 of the House of Representatives’ 215 Democrats voted in favor. Two Democratic Senators, Ruben Gallego of Arizona and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, co-sponsored the Senate version, though it’s not clear if it will win the five more Senate Democrats it likely needs to pass. The bill has two major parts: It would mandate that the federal government detain all immigrants accused of theft and other related crimes.The man convicted of killing Riley had been charged with shoplifting prior to her death but had failed to appear in court; the bill’s supporters argue that if he had been detained on that charge, Riley would still be alive. It would give states a broad right to bring lawsuits against federal immigration policy. The bill’s proponents argue it will be a major step forward for public safety. But if passed, the bill could also strain existing immigration enforcement resources, infringe on immigrants’ due process rights, and create a chaotic (and potentially unconstitutional) situation in which states are allowed to dictate federal immigration policy. The Laken Riley Act would vastly expand immigration detention Right now, federal law mandates that immigrants who have committed certain serious crimes, including murder, rape, domestic violence, and some drug offenses, be detained. But beyond those categories, federal immigration officials have discretion. In 2021, the Biden administration issued policy guidance prioritizing people who were a national security threat, public safety threat, or “border security threat” (those who had recently entered the US without authorization). Otherwise, the Department of Homeland Security urged individual immigration officers to use their prosecutorial discretion — essentially, to leave everyone else alone. The rationale was that immigration agencies have limited resources for enforcement, and Biden was aiming those resources as what he viewed as key threats among the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US. “The federal government will never have enough money or manpower to deport every undocumented noncitizen,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell Law. “Courts are not equipped to delve into the details of who to prioritize for deportation.” The Laken Riley Act would essentially upend those enforcement priorities, requiring that a much larger population of undocumented immigrants be detained. The bill would require federal immigration authorities to detain undocumented immigrants accused of theft and other related crimes like shoplifting or burglary. Accusations triggering mandatory detention could be made in the US or another country. For example, if someone was charged with burglary in Venezuela and that came to the attention of US immigration officials, the accused burglar would have to be detained on that basis. This would be a major expansion of immigration detention and deportation. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement estimates that the bill would cost $83 billion over the next three years, enough to fund 118,500 additional detention beds, 40,000 more personnel, and a 25 percent increase in deportation flights. That updated estimate, reportedly circulated among Democratic leadership on Monday, is many times higher than ICE’s previous $3.2 billion estimate. These immigrants would be detained even if they weren’t convicted and without the opportunity for a bond hearing. Currently, it’s rare for anyone in the US accused of a crime to be detained without a bond hearing, even when the crime is as serious as murder. In immigrants’ cases, mandatory immigration detention can actually impede their prosecution by making it logistically harder for them to show up for proceedings in their criminal cases. Immigrants, even those without documentation, have the same rights to due process as any other individual in the US, and immigrant advocates have argued this raises serious due process concerns: It increases the risk that an innocent person could be held on a prolonged basis with limited access to legal counsel that could help them win a case challenging their deportation. “This potential provision could be unconstitutional given our Fifth Amendment right around liberty,” Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, a think tank focused on immigration policy said. “Its ramifications are so far-reaching in the human context.” The bill would expand states’ role in shaping federal immigration policy The other major prong of the bill would give states the automatic right to bring lawsuits challenging federal immigration policy on detention and visas, or decisions in individual immigration cases, if they can demonstrate they have experienced financial harm exceeding $100. This is a mechanism that Republicans say is necessary to ensure the federal government is complying with its mandate to detain immigrants under the act. But in practice, it means courts would have to rule on the merits of states’ claims rather than being able to dismiss them outright, and could potentially be inundated with such lawsuits. “You could see any number of really hostile state officials filing lawsuits to change decisions that they don’t like,” Sarah Mehta, ACLU senior border policy counsel, said. That could include, for example, challenging the issuance of visas to citizens of certain countries against which Republicans have taken a hardline stance, such as China, she said. That would have worrying implications not just for US immigration policy, but also lead to states dictating US foreign policy and having a major impact on the US relationship with both adversaries and allies. It could also make for open season on the decisions made by thousands of immigration line officers in the course of their day-to-day work. It’s possible that Democratic states could also try to use the bill to challenge federal immigration policy, perhaps to stem the tide of arrivals to blue cities — a phenomenon some state and local Democratic leaders have complained about — though it’s not clear exactly on what basis they would do so. Mehta said that the provision allowing for lawsuits is “clearly constitutional overreach” and courts might recognize it as such if the bill were to become law. She noted that the US Supreme Court already ruled in a 2023 case brought by Texas challenging the Biden administration’s immigration enforcement priorities that such policies are under the exclusive purview of the federal government based on the Constitution, recognizing the need for a unified US response to immigration. “States shouldn’t be intervening in foreign policy or any of these immigration decisions because they don’t have the expertise,” Mehta said. If the bill becomes law and survives legal scrutiny, the “result is that courts would become the final arbiters of immigration policy,” Yale-Loehr said. Some Senate Democrats are now pushing for changes to the bill, including paring back the provision about immigration lawsuits. The Senate resumed debate on those amendments Wednesday afternoon. If the legislation is passed without amendments, that could sow chaos, inviting lawsuits challenging every new regulation or policy memo without addressing broader issues in the US’s broken immigration system, which hasn’t been meaningfully reformed since 1986. Those issues include an underresourced asylum system that isn’t equipped to handle diverse populations; processing people at the border in a humane and orderly way, and expeditiously returning them to their home countries if they do not qualify for protections in the US; a lack of legal pathways to the US designed for current economic and humanitarian needs; millions of undocumented immigrants who have laid roots in the US yet have no way of achieving legal status; and factors pushing people out of their home countries that will continue to drive people to migrate. The Laken Riley Act would leave all of that unresolved.

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