Christ The Good Shepherd Church/AAP via ReutersA knife attack on a bishop and others at a church in Sydney on Monday was a religiously-motivated terrorist act, according to police in Australia. A 16-year-old boy was restrained and arrested after he allegedly stabbed Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and others at the Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd Church in the suburb of Wakeley. Footage of the alleged attack, in which at least four people sustained non-life-threatening injuries, captured by a church livestream spread rapidly online, sparking outrage and prompting an angry mob to descend on the place of worship.The suspect was held inside the church for his own safety as hundreds of worshippers assembled outside demanding vengeance. The crowd violently clashed with police, throwing bricks and bottles at officers trying to maintain order. Two officers were hurt—including one who suffered a broken jaw—and 10 police cars were destroyed in the hourslong riot, according to the BBC. Read more at The Daily Beast.

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James MacDonald/Bloomberg Creative via Getty Images How industrial meat and dairy trap us in an infectious disease cycle. H5N1, or bird flu, has hit dairy farms — but the dairy industry doesn’t want us saying so. The current, highly virulent strain of avian flu had already been ripping through chicken and turkey farms over the past two years. Since it jumped to US dairy cows for the first time last month, it’s infected more than 20 dairy herds across eight states, raising alarms among public health authorities about possible spread to humans and potential impacts on the food supply. One Texas dairy worker contracted a mild case of bird flu from one of the impacted farms — the second such case ever recorded in the US (though one of hundreds worldwide over the past two decades, most of them fatal). Whatever fear-mongering you may have seen on social media, we are not on the cusp of a human bird flu pandemic; the chances of further human spread currently remain low. But that could change. As the virus jumps among new mammal species like cows, the risk that it’ll evolve to be able to spread between humans does increase. But the American Association of Bovine Practitioners (AABP), an organization of beef and dairy veterinarians, declared in a statement (condemned by public health experts) last week that it doesn’t believe bird flu in cows should be considered bird flu at all. “The AABP will call this disease Bovine Influenza A Virus (BIAV),” the association’s executive director K. Fred Gingrich II and president Michael Capel said in a statement, encouraging federal and state regulators to do the same. “It is important for the public to understand the difference to maintain confidence in the safety and accessibility of beef and dairy products for consumers.” In other words, industry vets are trying to rebrand bird flu so that we keep calm and keep buying cheeseburgers. “They’re worried about selling products,” bovine veterinarian James Reynolds, a professor at Western University’s vet school, told me, calling the group’s statement “disease-washing.” Covering bird flu over the last two years, I’ve seen a lot of wild stuff, but this may be one of the weirdest. And it’s more than just a terminological or political spat: It reflects an inescapable paradox about how we produce food. The meat industry’s infectious disease trap Naming infectious diseases is always political. In this case, the cattle industry appears desperate to distance itself from the bird flu news cycle and avoid the perception that it’s contributing to human disease risk. But animal agriculture is one of the top drivers of zoonotic diseases — and growing global demand for meat, dairy, and eggs may be putting us at ever-greater risk of new outbreaks. To understand why, one of the most elegant models I’ve found is the “infectious disease trap,” a concept coined in a 2022 paper by New York University environmental scientist Matthew Hayek. Farming animals for food requires lots of land — much more land than it would take to grow an equivalent amount of plant-based foods. More than a third of the planet’s habitable land is devoted to animal agriculture alone, making it the world’s leading cause of deforestation as forests are cleared for farms. That in turn leads to more human and farm animal encounters with wild animals, a major source of new zoonotic diseases. Animal agriculture’s land use can be shrunk through intensification — densely packing animals into factory farms — which limits deforestation and helps reduce meat’s climate footprint. But such operations are terrible for animal welfare, and they exacerbate zoonotic disease risk in other ways, allowing viruses to rapidly tear through factory farms filled with thousands of stressed, genetically identical animals. That’s exactly what’s been happening at chicken and turkey farms across the US over the last two years — and to prevent further spread, farmers have killed more than 85 million poultry birds on farms hit with bird flu since 2022, often using a grisly method that kills them via heatstroke. Our current food system is a recipe for brewing more virulent disease strains and, many experts fear, it’s a ticking time bomb for the next pandemic. As long as global meat production expands, Hayek’s model explains, both low-density and factory farm-style animal agriculture trap us with rising disease risk. What does this mean for the future of bird flu in cows? A lot remains unknown about how bird flu has spread so rapidly among cows on dairy farms as far apart as Michigan and New Mexico. One plausible theory is that the disease is moving with cows being trucked across the country, just as a human disease might move with people. In recent years, as the dairy industry has increasingly consolidated into large factory farms, long-distance transportation of cows has become very common, Reynolds explained. Young female calves are often trucked from northern states to warmer climates in the south, then shipped back north when they’re old enough to become pregnant and produce milk. “There’s kind of a constant movement that really didn’t exist much 20 years ago,” Reynolds said. Long-distance shipment can inflict extreme suffering on farmed animals, who are treated more like cargo than sentient beings. It’s also a hallmark of intensive animal agriculture systems described in the infectious disease trap model, allowing diseases to jump to new regions. At least 18 states have restricted cow imports from states where dairy cows have tested positive for bird flu. The dairy industry recognizes the risks, Reynolds said, and is making efforts to improve biosecurity on these cross-country journeys. Meanwhile, regulators are scrambling to track the disease and stem its spread — but experts have argued those efforts don’t go nearly far enough, failing to require widespread testing. And whatever steps are being taken now to stop the spread, the infectious disease trap model shows us that if we’re chasing zoonotic diseases after they’ve infected farm animals, we’re already behind. Escaping that trap requires a much broader societal rethinking of our factory farm system. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Salman Rushdie tells us that he wrote Knife, his account of his near-murder at the hands of a 24-year-old Shia Muslim man from New Jersey, for two reasons: because he had to deal with “the elephant-in-the-room” before he could return to writing about anything else, and to understand what the attack was about. The first reason suggests something admirable, even remarkable, in Rushdie’s character, a determination to persist as a novelist and a man in the face of terror. After The Satanic Verses brought down a death sentence from Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, which sent Rushdie into hiding, he kept writing novels and refused to be defined by the fatwa. When, decades later, on August 12, 2022, the sentence was nearly executed on a stage at the Chautauqua Institution, in upstate New York, where Rushdie was about to engage in a discussion of artistic freedom, he had to will himself through an agonizing recovery—pain, depression, disfigurement, physical and mental therapy, the awful recognition that the fatwa was not behind him after all. Then, to write this book, he had to stare hard, with one eye now gone, at the crime—even, in the end, to revisit the scene—because it stood in the way of the fiction writer’s tools, memory, and imagination.“Something immense and non-fictional had happened to me,” Rushdie writes. Telling that story “would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art.” The most powerful manifestation of this art in Knife is Rushdie’s description—precise and without self-pity—of the price he pays for his words. The knife blows to his face, neck, chest, abdomen, and limbs are savage and very nearly kill him. He loses the sight in his right eye, which has to be sewn shut, and most of the use of his left hand. He is beset with nightmares and periods of profound gloom. The resilience he musters—aided by the love of his wife and family—is vulnerable, ornery, witty, self-centered, and heroic. It has made him a scarred symbol of free expression—or, as he acidly puts it, “a sort of virtuous liberty-loving Barbie doll.” He would rather be famous for his books, but he accepts his fate.The other reason for writing Knife—to understand why he came within millimeters of losing his life—is more elusive. The “suspect,” Hadi Matar, committed the crime before about 1,000 witnesses and subsequently confessed in a jailhouse interview to the New York Post; still, he has pleaded not guilty. The trial hasn’t happened yet, and in fact has been postponed by this book’s publication—Matar’s attorney argued that Rushdie’s written account constitutes evidence that his client should be able to see. Matar’s story seems to be the all-too-familiar one of a thwarted loner on a glorious mission. He travels from New Jersey to Lebanon to see his estranged father and returns changed—withdrawn and angry at his mother for not raising him as a strict Muslim. He tries learning to box and watches videos in his mother’s basement, including a few of Rushdie’s lectures. He reads a couple of pages of The Satanic Verses and decides that the author is evil. He hears that Rushdie will be speaking at Chautauqua and stalks him there. Matar is a Lee Harvey Oswald for the age of religious terrorism and YouTube.Rushdie isn’t much interested in him. He won’t name Matar, calling him only “the A.,” for assailant, ass, and a few other A words. Throughout the book, Rushdie expresses scorn for or indifference toward his attacker, calling him “simply irrelevant to me.” Still, he makes one sustained attempt to understand Matar: “I am obliged to consider the cast of mind of the man who was willing to murder me.” A journalist might have gone about the task by interviewing people who knew Matar and trying to reconstruct his life. Oddly, Rushdie doesn’t mention the names—perhaps because he never learned them—of the audience members who rushed the stage and stopped the attack, and he gives doctors in the trauma center impersonal titles such as “Dr. Staples” and “Dr. Eye.” Given that he dedicated the book to “the men and women who saved my life,” these omissions are striking and suggest a limit to Rushdie’s willingness to explore the trauma. After all, he’s a novelist, and his way of understanding is through imagination. He conjures a series of dialogues between himself and his attacker, but Rushdie’s questions—Socratic attempts to lead Matar to think more deeply about his hateful beliefs—elicit brief retorts, lengthier insults, or silence. Perhaps there really isn’t very much to say, and the conversation is inconclusive. It lasts as long as it does only because the man being questioned is trapped inside Rushdie’s mind.The novelist might have gained more insight by imagining Matar as a character in a story, seeing the event from the attacker’s point of view, the way Don DeLillo writes of the Kennedy assassination from Oswald’s in Libra. But that would have given Matar far too much presence in Rushdie’s mind. His ability to survive as a writer and a human being depends on not forever being a man who was knifed, as he had earlier insisted on not being just a novelist under a death sentence. If Rushdie’s reasons for telling this story are to move on and to understand, this first reason is more important to him than the second and, in a way, precludes it.[Read: All because Salman Rushdie wrote a book]Back in 1989, the fatwa hardly turned Rushdie into a hero. Plenty of Western politicians and writers, along with millions of Muslims around the world, put the blame on him for insensitivity if not apostasy. The knife attack was different—it drew nearly universal outrage and sympathy. Perhaps the horror of an attempted murder overcame any squeamishness about offending religious feelings. Perhaps the statute of limitations on blasphemy had run out, the fatwa too long ago to count. Perhaps there’s been too much violence since then in the name of a vengeful God and other ideologies. “This is bigger than just me,” Rushdie tells his wife in the trauma ward. “It’s about a larger subject.” The subject—the idea for which Rushdie nearly died—is the freedom to say what he wants. It’s under as much pressure today as ever—from fanatics of every type, governments, corporations, the right, the left, and the indifferent. Rushdie survived, but he has too many scars to be certain that the idea will. This book is his way of fighting back: “Language was my knife.”

When I brought my new dog, a 4-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Grace, home for the holidays last year, I was nervous. I didn’t know how she’d react to the unfamiliar environment, so I kept scanning the floor for items she might swallow. She wasn’t perfectly house-trained yet, so I was constantly watching to see if she started to walk in circles—a sign that she has to go to the bathroom.After a week with no trouble, my mom gently called me out. “You’re being a helicopter parent,” she said. “Grace might do better if you stopped hovering over her.” The comment jarred me. I’d always assumed that I’d be a good nurturer, but now that I was actually responsible for another creature, it seemed like I might not have the touch. I started to worry about what this meant not only for Grace but also for my future kids. Was I doomed to hover over them one day as well? Or, if I learned to let go a bit with Grace, could I carry those lessons forward when I had my own child?The idea of a dog as a “starter kid” is a cliché at this point—but there’s a bit of truth to it. Millennials have delayed having children, adopted dogs in droves, and frequently consider those pets to be as much a part of the family as any human, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu recently reported. Many are raising a dog before they have a baby. In fact, in a 2021 survey commissioned by a pet-food brand, four in 10 dog and cat parents said that they got their pet to test whether they were ready for a kid. Of course, raising animals is in many ways not at all comparable to raising children, and no one who doesn’t actually want a dog should get one as a practice baby. That said, pet parenting does have things to teach future parents of humans. Some connections, such as “potty” training, are obvious. But on a broader level, getting a pet requires taking responsibility for another living thing’s well-being. The experience can offer insight into your tendencies as a caregiver—and, with the right amount of self-awareness, a chance to grow.Parenting preparation is a spectrum. Reading advice books is on one end of it: You might pick up a few tips, but the learning is just theoretical. Caring for human children, perhaps by babysitting, gets you closer to the actual experience. Experts told me that it’s close to the best practice you can have, though the average person’s opportunities to do it are dwindling as teen babysitters grow rarer and families tend to be smaller, giving kids fewer opportunities to watch younger siblings and cousins. Responsibly raising pets (especially those that require more attention, such as cats and dogs) is somewhere in between; dogs are probably the most relevant, given how much work training one takes. Crucially, caring for a pet lets you learn by doing, which Susan Walker, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota who specialized in parenting education, told me is more effective than reading generic advice.[Read: Why don’t we teach people how to parent?]Both dogs and kids need help learning how to behave—though with dogs it’s of course more a matter of simple dos and don’ts than the morality of right and wrong we try to instill in children. But some of the principles of good dog training do translate to teaching young kids. Experts generally agree that for both groups, positive reinforcement should guide discipline. Whether the problem is a toddler coloring on the wall or a puppy chewing on your shoes, the parenting coach Elisabeth Stitt recommends responding with a quick correction followed by a warm distraction. You might say no and then give the dog a toy bone and the child a coloring book. Perhaps most important is to keep these expectations consistent and to repeat lessons over and over. “Parents will say to me, ‘I’ve told my kids a million times,’” Stitt told me. “Good. That’s what you need to do.” Grace still pulls on her leash at least once a day when I walk her—and each time I have to stop, wait for her to come back, and then give her a treat when we start back up again.What’s more, both dogs and infants have no choice but to communicate without words. Learning to read a dog’s cues can help strengthen the skill of “perspective taking,” or the ability to see the world through another’s point of view, Gail Melson, a professor emeritus at Purdue University studying families and animals, told me. Developing that muscle might make it easier to later interpret a child’s early attempts at self-expression. Having firsthand knowledge that what seems like misconduct could actually be a signal of fear, boredom, or frustration is helpful for developing the patience required for parenting. Rather than reacting with anger, perhaps you’ll know to think, “What’s the motivation behind that behavior, and how can we meet whatever those needs are?” Shelly Volsche, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls studying human-animal interaction, explained to me.And if you get a dog with a partner, you’ll be doing all of this learning alongside them. Think of it as a rehearsal for some of the logistics of co-parenting. “A lot of times, couples get blindsided because they don’t necessarily have a plan for who’s going to feed the baby or who’s going to diaper the baby, who’s going to get up at night,” Darby Saxbe, a University of Southern California professor studying the transition to parenthood, told me. Dogs aren’t nearly as much work, but you still have to divvy up who walks and feeds them. Doing that fairly “might set a healthy precedent” for splitting child-care duties, Saxbe said. When you do eventually have a kid, perhaps you’ll already have a framework for discussing a shared approach.[Read: Pets really can be like human family]But more than chore charts and discipline, raising a pet—and, to a far greater extent, raising a child—demands making sacrifices. No matter how tired you are in the morning, you have to get out of bed to soothe a crying baby or to take a dog out to pee, Saxbe explained. Workdays will get interrupted if your kid or pet gets sick. And you never get a break, unless you secure a sitter—but even in those cases, you’ll still want to be reachable in emergencies. “That is a really dramatic shift, I think, for people that have never had a baby or a pet,” Saxbe told me.Adjusting your schedule to the rhythms of life with a dog might help make space for an eventual baby too. Perhaps you’ll have redone your budget to afford vet bills—a decision some of Laurent-Simpson’s research subjects have made. Maybe you’ll be used to staying out late less frequently to get home for your dog. You may have lined up friends who could watch a pet or a baby in a pinch; as experts told me, building community is vital for any type of caregiving.On a deeper level, caring for a pet can spur personal reflection. You may get a window into “Who am I as a nurturer?” Volsche explained. Are you too much of a pushover? Do you dole out discipline too harshly? “The parenting styles are very similar, independent of whether we’re talking about dogs or whether we’re talking about human children, because we’re focused on the human caregiver’s behavior,” Monique Udell, a professor at Oregon State University studying human-animal interactions, told me. And, as Udell’s research has shown, the ideal parenting style—authoritative parenting—is the same for dogs and kids. Authoritative parents have high expectations—for a dog’s training or a kid’s schoolwork, say—but are caring and responsive to their dependent’s needs. Though the needs may be very different, caretakers of both pets and humans should strive for a balance of warmth and structure, Udell said.[Read: Dogs need understanding, not dominance]Of course, there’s no guarantee that people with pets will take advantage of the opportunity to start mastering that balance. Unfortunately, no one I spoke with knew of any research on the transition from pet parent to human parent. Sometimes people learn through a process of “generalization,” Melson explained, and apply what they pick up in one realm to another. But at other times, learning tends more toward “compartmentalization.” And we just don’t know whether pet parents are generalizing these lessons or compartmentalizing them. That said, nearly everyone I spoke with agreed that people could learn some parenting skills from having pets—especially if they approached the process with intention.So I’ve been trying to do that with Grace, and as I’ve grown more confident, so has she. When I first got her, she was scared of almost everything: cars, going on walks, the vacuum cleaner. My lap was her safety blanket, and I was eager to soothe her. But, with practice, I’ve gotten better at tolerating my discomfort with her discomfort. Rather than preemptively comforting her when we go somewhere new, I’ve learned to practice patience, give lots of positive reinforcement (read: treats), and gently encourage her to explore; the world really has so many things to sniff. She still recoils when motorcycles pass, but at other times, she’ll chase the leaves that drift by and pounce on pine cones. I’m there if she needs reassurance, but I’m finding that she’s turning to me, trembling, less and less.

A consortium of television networks yesterday released a joint statement inviting President Joe Biden and his presumptive opponent, Donald Trump, to debate on their platforms: “There is simply no substitute for the candidates debating with each other, and before the American people, their visions for the future of our nation.”President Biden’s spokesperson should answer like this: “The Constitution is not debatable. The president does not participate in forums with a person under criminal indictment for his attempt to overthrow the Constitution.”In their letter of invitation, the networks refer to presidential debates as a “competition of ideas.” But one of the two men they’re inviting turned the last election into a competition of violence: Trump tried to seize the presidency by force in 2021.[David Frum: The ego has crash-landed]If Trump had not occupied the presidency at the time of his attempted coup d’état, he would very likely be already serving a lengthy prison term for his alleged crimes against the 2020 election. Earlier this month, a principal figure in the January 6 attack was sentenced to seven years in prison, the latest of many such serious convictions and sentences. Fortunately for Trump, the U.S. justice system is highly cautious, deferential, and slow when dealing with persons of wealth and importance. Although the followers have been punished, the indicted leader of the plot is unlikely to face trial before Election Day 2024. Until tried and convicted, Trump must be regarded as innocent in the eyes of the law.But the political system has eyes of its own. No doubt exists about what Trump did, or why, or what his actions meant. Trump lost an election, then incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol. He hoped that the insurrectionists would terrorize, kidnap, or even kill his own vice president in order to stop the ceremony to formalize the victory of Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris. By disrupting the ceremony, Trump schemed to cast the election’s result to the House of Representatives, where Republican voting strength might proclaim him president in place of the lawful winner. Many people were badly injured by Trump’s violent plan, and some died as a result.The single most important question on the ballot for 2024 is: Does any of this matter? Is violence by losers to overturn election results an acceptable tool of politics? Is anti-constitutional violence by election losers just another political issue, like inflation or immigration or foreign policy? The television executives apparently believe that, yes, violence is just another issue. “If there is one thing Americans can agree on during this polarized time,” they write, “it is that the stakes of this election are exceptionally high.”“The stakes are high” would be a fair way to describe an election like that of 1980, when Americans faced a choice between two very different approaches to taxes and spending. It would be a fair way to describe the 2004 election, when Americans were asked to choose between an early exit from the Iraq War and staying the course. But it seems a morally trivializing way to describe an election in which one of the candidates has been criminally indicted for his part in a conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution.[Elliot Ackerman: War-gaming for democracy]Imagine such a presidential debate. “President Biden,” you could hear the moderator say, “we’ll get to Mr. Trump’s alleged violent coup in a moment, but in this segment, we are discussing food prices.”The role of the television networks here is, unfortunately, not an innocent one. “The stakes of the election are high” is a commencement-address way of phrasing the thought: We are anticipating huge ratings. Trump is box office; everybody knows that—and box office translates into revenues at a time when television is losing them. For TV executives to convince themselves that what is good for their own bottom line is good for the country seems very easy. But good for the country is radically not the case here.Imagine watching the debate with the sound off—what would you see? Two men, both identified as “president,” standing side by side, receiving equal deference from some of the most famous hosts and anchors on American television. The message: Violence to overthrow an election is not such a big deal. Some Americans disapprove of it; others have different opinions—that’s why we have debates. Coup d’état: tip of the hat? Or wag of the finger? For Biden to refuse to rub elbows with Trump won’t make Trump go away, of course. The Confederacy did not go away when Abraham Lincoln refused to concede the title of president to Jefferson Davis. That’s not why Lincoln consistently denied Davis that title. Lincoln understood how demoralizing it would be to Union-loyal Americans if he accepted the claim that Davis was a president rather than a rebel and an insurrectionist. Biden should understand how demoralizing it would be to democracy-loyal Americans if he accepted the claim that Trump is more than a January 6 defendant.Biden has engaged in many high-level television debates over the years: vice-presidential debates in 2008 and 2012; debates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1987, 2007, and 2019–20. Biden also debated then-President Trump in the fall of 2020. Biden is and was a capable television communicator, as he demonstrated again in his recent State of the Union address. Biden delivered that address with such force and skill that Trump had to imply that Biden must be relying on performance-enhancing drugs. If Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley had won the Republican nomination in 2024, Biden would, and should, have debated them.But this is different.[David Frum: The ruin that a Trump presidency would mean]Political debates exist to provide voters with relevant information about their electoral choices. The most necessary information that Biden needs to communicate is that Trump is a traitor to the U.S. Constitution. But people will not appreciate something so abnormal if it is habitually characterized as normal.Many institutions of American life have habits and incentives that lead them to treat Trump’s attempted coup as normal politics. Television and other mass media exhibit worse habits and incentives than most of those institutions. But President Biden does not need to indulge them.Trump is owed due process in a court of law. He is not owed the courtesies of the office whose oath he betrayed. Biden prefers to keep the temperature of politics low if he can. That’s a good impulse most of the time. But there are occasions when it’s the president’s job to defy the pressure and say no. This debate invitation is one such time.

On February 15, Ron Ruggless was sitting in his home office in Dallas, listening to a Wendy’s earnings call—something he does every quarter as an editor and reporter for Nation’s Restaurant News. When the new CEO of Wendy’s mentioned that the company might introduce “dynamic pricing” in 2025, Ruggless wasn’t surprised; many restaurants have started adjusting prices depending on the time of day or week. It seemed like minor news, so he wrote up a brief report. He didn’t even bother to post it on social media.About 10 days later, Ruggless saw that Wendy’s was going viral. The Daily Mail and the New York Post had picked up the story, framing the new policy as “surge pricing.” On X, Senator Elizabeth Warren called the plan “price gouging plain and simple.” Burger King trolled Wendy’s: “We don’t believe in charging people more when they’re hungry.” Wendy’s went into damage control. In a statement, it claimed that it wasn’t planning to raise prices during high-demand times, but rather to lower prices during low-demand times. That distinction was lost on most observers—including, frankly, this one—and the narrative took hold that Wendy’s was the next Uber.The anti-Wendy’s backlash made sense. Who wants to pull into a drive-through without knowing how much the food is going to cost? But it was also selective. Dynamic pricing is hardly new. Airlines have been charging flexible fares for decades. Prices on Amazon change millions of times a day. Grocery stores have begun using digital displays to adjust prices on the fly. The list grows by the week.Prices aren’t just changing more often—they’re getting more complex, too. Fees, long the specialty of banks and credit-card companies, have proliferated across industries. Previously self-contained products (toothbrushes, movies, Microsoft Word) have turned into subscriptions, while previously bundled items (Wi-Fi at hotels, meals on airplanes) are now sold separately. Buying stuff online means navigating a flurry of discount codes, often just expired. Meanwhile, prices are becoming more personalized as companies hoover up customer data.We’re used to thinking of prices as static and universal. Sure, they might rise with inflation or dip during a sale, but in general, the price is the price, and it’s the same for everyone. And we like it that way. It makes our economic lives predictable, and, perhaps more importantly, it feels fair. But that arrangement is under attack from two directions. The first is obfuscation: the breaking down of prices into components and the piling on of fees. The second is discrimination: the charging of different prices to different customers at different times.Contempt for fees is strong enough to unite even Republicans and Democrats, and price discrimination isn’t any more popular. One survey showed that half of customers think of dynamic pricing as price gouging; surge pricing in rideshare apps leads to more customer complaints; and polls show that shoppers are worried about companies collecting their data to shape prices.The battle is not just between businesses and consumers, but also between economists, who prize efficiency, and the rest of us, who care about fairness. And right now, efficiency is running away with it. For every Wendy’s, there are a thousand companies quietly implementing similar schemes, in an ongoing quest to get every last burger—or car, or ink cartridge, or hotel room—into every last hand, for every last penny. Despite the occasional outcry, the era of the single price is rapidly fading into the past. In many ways, it’s already gone.Pricing occupies a murky space between the mind and the gut. Some early philosophers thought the price of a thing should be determined by its “intrinsic” value, whatever that means, while others argued that its utility mattered most. Plato was against variable pricing. “He who sells anything in the agora shall not ask two prices for that which he sells, but he shall ask one,” he wrote in Laws. He also inveighed against the hotel fees of his day, condemning people who show hospitality to travelers but then extract “the most unjust, abominable, and extortionate ransom.”The rise of the market economy shifted the understanding of price to be whatever someone is willing to pay for it. But even then, price remained attached to our sense of right and wrong. John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia entrepreneur credited with inventing the price tag in the 1800s, was a devout Christian whose advertisements promised “no favoritism.” According to a hagiographic history of the Wanamaker empire from 1911, “One price to all was neither more nor less than the application to merchandising of the immortal note of equality sounded in the second sentence of the Declaration on Independence.” The price tag had practical benefits, too: You didn’t have to train employees to haggle.Modern pricing “innovation” took off with the airlines. From the late 1930s through the 1970s, airfares were set by the government, so airlines competed on the basis of amenities. (In 1977, the syndicated columnist George F. Will reflected on his preference for United Airlines because it offered macadamia nuts instead of peanuts. “The macadamia nut is one of God’s more successful efforts,” he wrote. “It has a cachet that the pedestrian peanut cannot match.”) That changed with the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, which preceded decades of “fare wars.” Discount carriers like People Express were soon undercutting the legacy airlines and encroaching on their routes. This forced the old-timers to revamp their pricing practices.In his book Revenue Management: Hard-Core Tactics for Market Domination, the pricing consultant Robert Cross recalls watching a Delta employee hand out discounts for the last empty seats on a flight in the early 1980s. Cross knew the plane would fill up with business travelers at the last minute, so he suggested holding those seats and charging a higher fare. This idea—selling seats for a lower price if you book early and a higher price later—transformed the airline industry, and saved the legacy airlines.[Ganesh Sitaraman: Airlines are just banks now]From there, the field of revenue management, or adjusting price and availability based on real-time shifts in supply and demand, boomed. Multitiered pricing spread to airline-adjacent industries like hotels and cruise lines, and then beyond to telecoms, manufacturing, and freight. Companies adopted sophisticated software to track real-time supply and demand, and started hiring pricing consultants or even in-house pricers.The internet, as you may have heard, changed everything. Consumer advocates hailed it as the great leveler, predicting that online shopping would facilitate price comparison and push prices down. Like many early forecasts about the internet, this one looks painfully naive in hindsight. Companies wasted little time making it harder for customers to compare prices. In 2004, the MIT economists Glenn and Sara Fisher Ellison found that online vendors were advertising the cheapest version of a product, then steering customers toward a pricier one. Websites also learned to block web crawlers that allowed their competitors to detect price changes.One of the more powerful forms of price obfuscation was the fee. Retail platforms often listed products in order of price. “So, of course, certain retailers realized they could charge one cent for a video camcorder, and shipping would be $250,” Sara Fisher Ellison told me. Fees were often obscured until the end of a transaction—a practice dubbed “drip pricing.”The airlines, having pioneered the use of dynamic pricing, now refined the art of the fee. In 2008, American Airlines began charging $15 for checked luggage. The practice spread and soon became a major driver of airline profits. In 2023, the airlines raked in $33 billion from baggage fees, and even more from other ancillary fees like seat selection, meals, and in-flight Wi-Fi. These add-on fees drove down the prices that were displayed to customers, thus making the offerings look more competitive. It was a win-win arrangement, with both wins going to the airlines.The rest of the travel and events industry followed suit. Mysterious “resort fees” appeared on hotel bills. Car renters burned time poring over “facility fees,” transponder fees, and third-party insurance. Ticketing websites charged markups as high as 78 percent for concerts. Some fees sounded like jokes. In 2014, an airport in Venezuela charged customers a fee to cover its ventilation system, a surcharge widely mocked as a “breathing tax.” And fees mingled with the broader trend of digitization-enabled unbundling. Want to “unlock” your Tesla’s full battery life? In 2016, that cost an extra $3,250.If the rise of the fee broke the expectation that prices are transparent, dynamic pricing challenged the assumption that they’re fixed. When Uber rolled out surge pricing in the 2010s, the company billed it as a way to lure more drivers when demand was high. But the phrase was perhaps too honest. It evoked a sudden price increase in response to extreme circumstances, and riders accused the company of gouging during emergencies. “It’s a term I tried to stamp out when I was at Uber,” said Robert Phillips, a pricing expert who worked there for almost two years. “It sounds like a digestive problem—I’ve got a little surge going on.”At least old-school dynamic pricing applies equally to everyone at a given moment. That’s not the case with personalized pricing, which is made possible by the explosion of customer data available to firms. Everyone knows that companies use our data to target ads and decide which products we see. But the use of that data to set prices—to charge each person a different amount based on their calculated willingness to pay—is still taboo.That doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Back in 2015, for example, The Princeton Review was caught charging higher prices to students who lived in zip codes with large Asian populations. Since then, the data that can be used to customize prices have become more fine-grained. Why do you think every brand suddenly has an app? Because if you download the Starbucks app, say, the company can access your address book, financial information, browsing history, purchase history, location—not just where you live, but everywhere you go—and “audio information” (if you use their voice-ordering function). All those data points can be fed into machine-learning algorithms to generate a portrait of you and your willingness to pay. In return, you get occasional discounts and a free drink on your birthday.“Often, personalized pricing is embedded as part of a loyalty program,” Jamie Wilkie, a partner at McKinsey & Company who advises consumer and retail firms, told me. “If there’s a high-value customer who’s price sensitive, you may be able to give them a personalized offer. If they’re a lower-value customer, you may just want to reach out to them.” The New York Times recently reported that airlines—of course—are migrating to a ticket-sales platform that allows them to target consumers “with personalized fares or bundled offers not available in the traditional systems.”Perhaps you don’t like the idea of being designated a lower-value customer, and missing out on the best deals as a result. Perhaps you don’t want companies calculating the precise amount of money they can squeeze out of you based on your personal data or a surge in demand. That’s a perfectly natural way to feel. Unless, that is, you’re an economist.In a classic 1986 study, researchers posed the following hypothetical to a random sample of people: “A hardware store has been selling snow shovels for $15. The morning after a large snowstorm, the store raises the price to $20.” Eighty-two percent said this would be unfair.Compare that with a 2012 poll that asked a group of leading economists about a proposed Connecticut law that would prohibit charging “unconscionably excessive” prices during a “severe weather event emergency.” Only three out of 32 economists said the law should pass. Much more typical was the response of MIT’s David Autor, who wrote, “It’s generally efficient to use the price mechanism to allocate scarce goods, e.g., umbrellas on a rainy day. Banning this is unwise.”The gap between economists and normies on this issue is huge. To regular people, raising the price of something precisely when we need it the most is the definition of predatory behavior. To an economist, it is the height of rationality: a signal to the market to produce more of the good or service, and a way to ensure that whoever needs it the most can pay to get it. Jean-Pierre Dubé, a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, told me the public reaction to the Wendy’s announcement amounted to “hysteria,” and that most people would support dynamic pricing if only they understood it. “It’s so obvious,” he said: If Wendy’s has the option to raise their prices when demand is high, then customers can also benefit from lower prices when demand is low.[Read: How money became the measure of everything]Economists think about this situation in terms of rationing. You can ration a scarce resource in one of two ways: by price or by time. Rationing by time—that is, first come, first served—means long lines during periods of high demand, which inconvenience everyone. Economists prefer rationing by price: Whoever is willing to pay more during peak hours gets access to the product. According to Dubé, that can benefit rich people, but it can also benefit people with greater need, like someone taking an Uber to the hospital. You can find academic studies concluding that Uber’s surge pricing actually leaves consumers better off.When you think about it, though, dynamic pricing is a pretty crude way to match supply and demand. What you really want is to know exactly how much each customer is willing to pay, and then charge them that—which is why personalized pricing is the holy grail of modern revenue management. To an economist, “perfect price discrimination,” which means charging everyone exactly what they’re willing to pay, maximizes total surplus, the economist’s measure of goodness. In a world of perfect price discrimination, everyone is spending the most money, and selling the most stuff, of all possible worlds. It just so happens that under those conditions, the entirety of the surplus goes to the company.Economists I spoke with pointed out that perfect price discrimination is all but impossible in real life. But technology-enabled personalized pricing is pulling us in that direction. Adam Elmachtoub, an associate professor of engineering at Columbia who studies pricing and fairness (he also works for Amazon), told me that personalization can be good or bad for consumers, depending on how you apply it. “I think we can agree that if personalized pricing worked in a way that people with lower incomes got lower prices, we’d be happy,” he said. “Or we’d say it’s not evil.”Elmachtoub pointed to the example of university tuition. By offering financial aid to different groups, universities engage in personalized pricing for the purpose of creating a diverse student body. “We agree it’s a good idea in this setting,” he said. Likewise, he noted, it’s good that drug companies can sell medications for lower prices in poor countries.Dubé argues that personalized pricing should benefit the poor overall, since, in theory, people with less money would exhibit lower willingness to pay. “By and large, when you personalize prices, the lowest-income consumers are getting the lowest prices,” he told me. Plus, he pointed out, there’s another, less controversial term for personalized pricing: negotiation. Consumers pay a personalized price every time they buy a car from a salesperson, who’s likely sizing them up based on the car they already drive, what they’re wearing, how they talk, and other factors. Data-driven personalized pricing merely automates that process, turning more and more transactions into miniature versions of going to a car dealership. Which, again, economists seem to believe is a point in its favor.Most economists, but not all.In a 2014 survey, prominent economists were asked whether they agreed or disagreed that surge pricing like Uber’s “raises consumer welfare” by boosting supply and allocating rides more efficiently. Out of 46 economists, only two disagreed. (Four were uncertain, and one had no opinion.)One of those two was Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for his work on poverty, and who in recent years has publicly questioned the way his discipline looks at the world. Deaton argues that when it comes to pricing, economists are too focused on maximizing efficiency, without taking fairness into account. In a world of scarce resources, perhaps rationing by time is fairer than rationing by price. We all have different amounts of money, after all, whereas time is evenly distributed. Then there’s the way economists decide what’s good. The mainstream economist thinks that the best policy is the one that maximizes total economic surplus, no matter who gets it. If that benefits some people (companies) at the expense of others (consumers), the government can compensate the latter group through transfer payments. “A lot of free marketers say you can tax the gainers and give it to the losers,” Deaton says. “But somehow, miraculously, that never seems to happen.”In other words, economics doesn’t pay enough attention to power. In the real world, corporations and consumers are rarely on equal footing. The more complex and opaque prices get, the more power shifts from buyer to seller. This helps explain why, in practice, poor people are often charged more than rich people for the same product or service. The poor pay higher rates for mortgages, bank loans, and other financial services. Wealthy Americans pay less on average for broadband internet. Neighborhoods with fewer grocery stores often have higher prices.Or take Elmachtoub’s example of college tuition. Yes, poor students who get a free ride thanks to financial aid benefit from personalized pricing. But colleges also collaborate with a thriving “enrollment management” industry that bases financial-aid offers not on students’ need, but on how much an algorithm suggests they and their parents will be willing to pay. This can have perverse effects. As the higher-education expert Kevin Carey wrote for Slate in 2022, “parents of means who themselves have finished college are often sophisticated consumers of higher education and are able to drive a hard bargain, whereas lower-income, less-educated parents feel an enormous obligation to help their children move farther up the socioeconomic ladder and blindly trust that colleges have their best financial interests at heart.” Accordingly, many colleges offer more money to wealthier admitted students than they do to poorer ones.The concept of willingness to pay contains endless potential for mischief. “I worry about a hotel website knowing that you absolutely must travel to get to a funeral that has recently been scheduled, or a situation where your kid urgently needs some medicine or supplies,” Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former FTC commissioner, told me. Improvements in AI technology make that process even easier and more opaque. When a bank denies you a loan, it has to provide a reason, Chopra pointed out. But with AI-based pricing, there’s no such transparency, as algorithms make pricing decisions that humans can’t understand. According to Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who helped lead antitrust efforts as a special assistant to President Joe Biden, opacity is the point. The explosion of complex revenue-management schemes allows companies to increase their margins by innovating on pricing, rather than by improving their products or service. The closer we get to personalized pricing, Wu told me, the more we inhabit a world in which “everything in life is like paying for beer at the Super Bowl: Everything’s at your maximum willingness to pay.” There’s a joy—or, in economic terms, a utility—in paying less for something than you might have. “In that model,” Wu said, “you get none of it.”Is there any way to reverse the march toward ever-more-vampiric pricing schemes?Tackling junk fees is the low-hanging fruit. Most people, including economists, agree that companies should not charge fees that don’t correspond to actual services, especially when those fees are hidden or disguised. Even the CATO Institute, the libertarian think tank that never saw a regulation it liked, acknowledges that consumers “shouldn’t be charged for products without their consent, and businesses should disclose mandatory fees before purchases are made.” (It still opposes the Biden administration’s anti-junk-fee initiative, which it calls “incoherent” and overbroad.)The problem is that the incentives are too powerful for companies to resist on their own. In 2014, StubHub switched to an “all-in” pricing model, in which customers saw full ticket prices up front. Revenues went down, so they switched back. “There’s a collective-action problem,” says Shelle Santana, assistant professor of marketing at Bentley University, who has studied drip pricing. If one company refuses to switch to all-in pricing, it can undercut the rest.[Read: Hotel booking is a post-truth nightmare]Such a clear, popular case for government intervention is rare, and the Biden administration has pounced. New rules and guidances have poured out of the FTC, the CFPB, and the White House over the past year, capping late fees for credit cards and limiting surprise charges at car dealerships, among other measures. Biden mentioned fees four times in his recent State of the Union.But industry groups are pushing back. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says the crackdown will make inflation worse by increasing compliance costs. (In other words, the costs of not charging excessive fees will be higher than charging excessive fees.) A lobbyist for the major airlines said the new transparency rules around add-on fees would cause “confusion and frustration” for customers. Live Nation, the company that owns Ticketmaster, promised to display the full cost of tickets up front for events at venues that it controls, but it has drawn criticism for not extending that policy to cover all events for which it sells tickets. Credit-card issuers are resisting limits on late fees, saying they’d be forced to reduce rewards for other customers, and Republicans in both chambers oppose the cap. Court battles could drag on for years.And that’s the easy stuff. “The next frontier is going to be price,” Samuel Levine, the FTC’s director of consumer protection, told me. “Because that’s the dream, if companies can actually set personalized prices to maximize profits.”Ultimately, preventing the dystopia of perfect price discrimination—or some more realistic approximation of it—means cutting off companies’ access to the data they use to determine how much to charge us. This isn’t complicated; it’s just a politically heavy lift. Getting Americans fired up about their personal data has been notoriously difficult, which helps explain why we still have no federal digital-privacy law. Perhaps if more voters understood that strong privacy protections would also protect them from price discrimination, Congress would feel more pressure to get something done. (A glimmer of hope appeared earlier this month when lawmakers announced a bipartisan bill that would limit the user data that companies can collect.)Near-term solutions might depend on the companies themselves. If prices become too complex, that creates an opening for a firm to commit itself to clear, simple pricing, Bentley University’s Shelle Santana says. For example, Southwest Airlines allows two free checked bags. Mark Cuban’s pharmaceutical wholesaler, Cost Plus Drugs, markets itself as a transparent alternative to the usual stress of buying medicine. Boring Mattress Co. promises to help customers “escape mattress hell” by offering a simple flat-rate mattress with free shipping. Santana cited JetBlue’s early marketing. “Their whole campaign was, We like our customers,” she said. “As a flier, you’re like, You don’t even have to love me. Just don’t make me feel like I’m in hell.” In a world of constantly shuffling prices, could predictability become a competitive advantage?Wendy’s might already be on it. A week after the dynamic-pricing flap, the chain announced that it would offer $1 burgers to celebrate March Madness. All you had to do was download the Wendy’s app.

In late March, months into the Free Application for Federal Student Aid–rollout debacle that has thrown millions of students’ college plans into a state of flux, the Department of Education let universities know there was yet another issue. The data that the IRS automatically fed into the form were inconsistent. In some cases, those inconsistencies led to students being awarded more aid than they are eligible for—in other cases, less. The department had begun reprocessing the applications with missing data points that it believed would result in students receiving too little aid—but stopped short of redoing all of the inaccurate forms. Those students whom they expected would receive too much aid, well, they could keep the money.“The department is essentially saying, Go ahead and award somebody financial aid based on information that is inaccurate. It just completely goes against every instinct that we have as financial-aid administrators,” Jill Desjean, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, told me. “We’re worried about risks. We’re worried about program integrity, we’re worried about taxpayer dollars and being stewards of those funds.” A week later, after fielding the complaints from administrators, the Department of Education said it would reprocess all of the incorrect applications; but if institutions did not want to wait, they could make students aid offers based on the old forms.Normally, the FAFSA is available at the beginning of October. Students fill it out and send it to Federal Student Aid, an office within the Department of Education. Then, FSA calculates how much federal aid a student can receive (through loans, grants, and work-study programs) and transmits those data to colleges, which then create a student’s financial-aid award letter, which explains to admitted students how much money—federal and from the school itself—they’ll receive to attend that college.[Read: The confusing information colleges provide students about financial aid]But for the 2024–25 academic year, the Department of Education introduced a new FAFSA. It has fewer questions and is designed to allow 1.5 million more students access to the maximum Pell Grant a year. Updating the FAFSA took longer than expected, and the form didn’t go online until the end of December. The formula for how much aid students should get was wrong—leading to a nearly $2 billion undercalculation in total. Meanwhile, the department has blown past self-imposed deadlines to fix other issues as they have arisen. This fiasco has left students unsure if they’ll have the money to pay for college, necessitated that institutions change long-set deadlines, and, to some extent, justified Republican lawmakers’ charges of government ineptitude in an election year when Democrats can least afford it.The new FAFSA rollout did not have to be this way. The Biden administration could have focused on making sure that FAFSA worked, though it would likely have had to punt on other priorities, such as student-debt relief. And that may have made a good deal of sense: After all, changing higher-education regulations and canceling debt won’t help students if they can’t figure out a way to pay for school in the first place. Interviews with several current and former Department of Education officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, as well as a review of public records reveal how the FAFSA-overhaul process was flawed from the beginning, and the ways that the administration’s ambitious agenda, plus a trail of missed deadlines, communication breakdowns, and inadequate funding, have led to a massive disruption in higher education. All of this could have been avoided, but now it must simply be managed.Ask 100 people, and you will get 100 different explanations for how and why things went wrong with this year’s FAFSA, but they all have a starting point in common.On December 27, 2020, then-President Donald Trump signed the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act into law. The omnibus package included the biggest legislative tweak to federal financial-aid policy in years. That update was the FAFSA Simplification Act, which would reduce the number of questions on the form from 108 to a maximum of 36. It threw out questions about Selective Service and drug convictions. But the changes were not only about process: The act also expanded the amount of federal aid that hundreds of thousands of students would be eligible to receive.Career government officials routinely quip that it’s harder to work for Democrats than Republicans because Democrats want to expand the government’s reach and Republicans want to limit it. Staffers I spoke with at Federal Student Aid said the past four years have been proof of the concept. When the Biden administration assumed office, they inherited a healthy workload: overhauling loan servicing, FAFSA simplification, and the return to loan repayment after the pandemic pause. But they also added to those tasks with their own ambitious agenda for the Department of Education generally and the Federal Student Aid office specifically, including student-debt cancellation (a campaign promise) and undoing several Trump-era regulations, such as the borrower-defense-to-repayment and gainful-employment rules.Yet their plans quickly confronted reality. The Department of Education’s workforce was severely depleted. In the first two years of the Trump administration alone, the department had the highest turnover—13 percent—of any federal agency, according to a Government Executive review. Now that culled workforce was trying to help colleges and students navigate the pandemic. Two sources told me that career staff warned Biden transition officials that they would be walking into a department full of dedicated workers who were, plainly, burned out.In the early days of the Biden administration, however, there wasn’t much that staff at the department, regardless of seniority, could do to slow the agenda down. Many of the directives about what to pursue—and when—came directly from the White House and the Domestic Policy office. “There are people who’ve been at FSA for nearly 30 years, and they’re like, ‘The amount of White House involvement is totally insane,’” one staffer at the organization told me.When Education Secretary Miguel Cardona was confirmed in March 2021, it was already clear that the timeline set out to revamp the FAFSA was too optimistic. Accordingly, department officials asked for additional time to complete the task. In June, Congress granted an additional year extension. But staff members at FSA had argued since early February of that year, in the weeks after the inauguration, that even that would not be enough time. Between the lack of manpower and the complexity of the rebuild, they would need at least two years to update the database, change aid formulas and tweak questions, get public comment, and test their systems to ensure everything was in order before the rollout.The architects of the FAFSA Simplification Act on Capitol Hill did not expect that the department would overhaul its back-end systems to comply with the law—and several lawmakers have argued that perhaps they didn’t have to, but once the process of rebuilding the system from the ground up began, it was difficult to stop.“The new FAFSA is, of course, more than a new form,” a senior department official told me. “But it was a complex undertaking on our side that required replacement of more than a dozen computer systems, including some that are older than the parents filling out the form now.” The system’s update was necessary, the official said, to meet the security standards around handling tax data.Lawmakers were eager to get the new FAFSA online, though, which made securing more time politically difficult. “The FAFSA simplification is two bipartisan pieces of legislation that are important accomplishments that members of Congress were rightly very proud of, and they were eager to see the benefits of FAFSA simplification reach students,” the senior department official told me. Somewhat predictably, the project encountered routine hiccups: Contractors offered deadlines that they failed to meet; staff was delayed in revamping systems written in COBOL, an archaic programming language; and important details were not fully comprehended as political staff—more skilled in policy than implementation—did not understand the severity of the issues. One former political appointee at the department told me that Biden officials stumbled because they were too confident about their ability to solve problems as they arose. “There was this perception that even though we're finding problem after problem after problem, it’s okay because we’re already solving for them in real time,” the appointee said. “They believed they didn’t have to worry about it and they could just keep focusing on other things that were more interesting, because FAFSA simplification was inherited anyway. It created a lack of urgency until it was too late.”Staffers at FSA agree. “I’ve experienced this where they would be pissed if you don’t offer a solution,” one staffer told me. “So we’d say, ‘Here are a few options to choose from, and most of these options aren’t great, because we’re out of outlets when you don’t have money and you don’t have enough staff.’” But the fact that the options weren’t great, they argued, was lost in translation.The administration went to Congress, several times over, for additional money for Federal Student Aid. They requested that lawmakers increase the organization’s budget by a third in their 2023 ask, and an additional $620 million in the 2024 budget proposal to ease the return to repayment and update FAFSA. But in each year, the organization was flat-funded. Republicans viewed additional funding as a nonstarter. “This is not a funding issue. This is a management one,” Virginia Foxx, the chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times. And Democrats, although generally inclined to help the administration’s Education Department, were unwilling to allocate the additional funding to FSA at the expense of other budget priorities, particularly because some of the more progressive members would like to move the country away from the current system of the government financing sky-high tuition—a system in which FSA plays a major part.Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s other priorities, such as the push for debt cancellation (which was later blocked at the Supreme Court and which the administration has subsequently initiated through other programs, such as the expansion of eligibility for Public Service Loan Forgiveness), required immense resources and attention. The totality of these efforts amounted to a lot for the already overworked FSA staff.If at one point the FASFA overhaul was neither a money nor a management issue, it is now both, and students will continue to suffer for it.Last Wednesday, lawmakers vented their frustrations about the process as they held dueling congressional meetings—one with Education Secretary Cardona, another featuring a panel of financial-aid experts. During a hearing about the Biden administration’s budget, Republicans criticized the administration’s focus on other priorities. “The American people want to see you focused on getting students into the classroom, not repaying loans for people who have already been there,” Representative Julia Letlow of Louisiana told Cardona.Cardona tried to repel those criticisms. “I don’t want you to think they’re not doing FAFSA because they’re working on something else,” he told the panel. “FAFSA has been a priority since day one when we got into these positions, and it will continue to be a priority until we deliver for those students.”FSA staff members agree that this was not an issue of moving people onto the wrong projects. But they remain upset that the FAFSA problems did not receive the attention they should have. “We have been saying for the last three years that we can’t get all this stuff done, this is too much, the servicers can’t do all of this … and now that the FAFSA is falling apart, there is a little bit more like, ‘Oh shit, maybe FSA wasn’t lying,’” a frustrated staffer told me. Meanwhile, political officials continue to set ambitious deadlines—ones that staffers who are working around the clock are already unsure they’ll be able to meet.Had this year’s FAFSA rollout gone according to plan, millions of students would already have their aid packages; some students would have already committed to attending college, secure that they could afford it.By now, the department would have turned its attention to next year. Staffers would already be figuring out how they could make the process smoother. They’d be revising questions, updating the form, and submitting it for public comment. But as they continue to try to amend the form and address the errors for this year, they have put themselves behind the curve.The best hope is that the FAFSA rollout turns out to be a lot like healthcare.gov: a disaster by any measure at first, but one that eventually did improve an old, broken system. By then, though, some students will have decided against college, some institutions will have struggled with enrollment dips, and faith in government will have taken another hit.

American CowardiceScot Peterson stood by as a slaughter unfolded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Jamie Thompson wrote in the March 2024 issue. Does the blame lie with him, his training—or a society in denial about what it would take to stop mass shootings?The American people relate to guns as addicts relate to drugs. Addicts change everything in their life to accommodate their drug use. They filter their relationships, alter their schedule, and change their living situation—all to facilitate their access to the substance. They blame everything and everyone for what goes wrong, but never the drug.And so it is with guns in the United States. Law-enforcement officers should alter their techniques because of shootings. Teachers should carry weapons to protect themselves and their students. Sixty-year-old men should be trained to run into the line of fire. Children should learn when to duck and when to run. Everyone attending a public event should know where the exits are. We are willing to put everything second to our need for guns.The U.S. has a gun addiction. Until the American people wake up to the fact that our drug is killing us, until we stop enabling our addiction, we will continue to see tragedies like that at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.Victoria B. DamianiMalvern, Pa.As the father of a member of law enforcement, I am keenly aware of how many local police departments are unprepared for an active-shooter situation. That said, there is no excuse for Scot Peterson’s failure to respond at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It was his duty to do what he could to protect those students, and he failed miserably. If his actions had saved even just one student, he would have performed his duties as required by the oath he took as a sworn officer. While a jury may have found him not guilty, I think he deserves the title “Coward of Broward.” He will live to enjoy his retirement pension, but his inaction sent students to their death.Gary RogBuffalo, N.Y.We seem to live in a society that has overlooked the fact that each of us is, by default, a “first responder” to any crime committed against us. One wonders how the outcome at Marjory Stoneman Douglas might have been different if at least three or four of the school employees who had a duty to care for students had been armed.Steve PawlukWrightwood, Calif.Jamie Thompson’s “American Cowardice” proves, I think, that we can’t expect even trained cops to rush in and save people from mass shootings. This being the case, can we as a country dispense with the fantasy that any random “good guy with a gun” can somehow protect us?George WimanNormal, Ill.Jamie Thompson is correct to consider the psyche of the public servants we enlist to protect us. As a first responder with 40 years of experience working across diverse organizations, I have seen friends die or suffer grievous injuries while trying to effect bold rescues: of juveniles who ventured too far out onto the delicate ice of a deep alpine lake; of comrades who fell into a collapsed snow cavern.Those who sign up for high-risk duties do so because they feel a call to serve. But attempting daring rescue operations is made easier by the knowledge that we are well equipped and regularly train as a team. We’ll retrieve a kid from a burning building because we’ve got a breathing apparatus, fire-resistant gear, a charged hose, and a trusted team behind us. We’ll drop onto unstable snowpack in a raging blizzard because we are equipped with state-of-the-art radios and avalanche airbags and probe poles, and we train constantly. We’ll crawl out onto the ice in a dry rescue suit with a rope and board to snag a struggling hypothermic swimmer, knowing that the shore team will haul us in.We answer the call because we want to be the person who goes in, but also because we know we can do it safely and successfully. Without proper equipment, relevant training, a qualified team, and confidence in your abilities, you cannot go in.Chris I. LizzaLee Vining, Calif.Like many Americans, I made a snap judgment about the “Coward of Broward” when the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas first made headlines. My judgment was twofold: First, Peterson was a coward, and second, the National Rifle Association’s oft-repeated challenge to proposed gun restrictions, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” was not true. Reading Thompson’s story dispelled my first judgment. (As for the NRA’s mantra about good guys with guns, I’d never believed that.)As a father of three, I understand the desire on the part of the victims’ parents to blame someone for their children’s deaths. But if these parents want to find the real culprit, they should look at the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, passed in 2005. This law largely shields gun dealers and manufacturers from legal liability for crimes committed with weapons they produce or sell. That law and myriad others have made assault weapons like the AR-15 ubiquitous; they are responsible, I think, for the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Once citizens can sue any gun manufacturer and dealer and possibly even put them out of business, incidents of mass gun violence will decline sharply. Why can I sue my neighbor if I’m attacked by their unleashed dog and not the gun dealer that puts an AR-15 into the hands of a teenager who shoots up my children’s school?Michael HugoMundelein, Ill.I want to thank Jamie Thompson for a deeply researched and reported article. This is such a difficult topic to tackle—and it’s been difficult for me to process. I worked for the Broward County Sheriff’s Office for more than five years. I knew and worked with some of the people in this article; I was even a school resource officer from 1989 to 1990. The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas happened not long after I retired from the Fort Lauderdale Police Department.When I worked with FLPD, after having left Broward County, I received training in active-shooter response numerous times. (Michael DiMaggio, who, Thompson writes, believes he was the first in the Broward County Sheriff’s Office to see the footage of Scot Peterson standing outside Building 12, was once one of our trainers.) The department was exemplary in those days at providing training to its officers, and I believe it still is. I recall in particular one lecture with an officer who had responded to a shooting incident that had left him disabled. He stressed that it was imperative to take action immediately, whether you were confident or not. I took this message to heart; I believe it helped me survive more than one critical incident.In the end, though, I have always believed that none of us knows what we will do in any given situation, and thus we must keep from judging others. As Stephen Willeford observes in the article, “How do you know you would be any better at it than he was?” Police are asked to do an incredible range of things; any given individual may excel at some tasks, but probably not all of them. We are, like everyone else, only human.Barbara BarrettJasper, Fla.Behind the CoverIn this month’s cover story, “The Great Serengeti Land Grab,” Stephanie McCrummen investigates how the Maasai people were evicted from their ancestral lands. To illustrate her story, we asked the Nairobi-based photographer Nichole Sobecki to travel to Arusha, Tanzania, and photograph Maasai communities. Our cover image depicts a Maasai moran grazing his cattle and sheep, an embere spear and fimbo staff resting on his shoulder. As McCrummen writes, the confiscation of land, ostensibly in the name of conservation, has left vanishingly few Maasai able to raise cattle, as had been their traditional way of life.— Bifen Xu, Senior Photo EditorCorrection: In the April 2024 issue, the “Behind the Cover” feature misidentified a photograph of Leonard Nimoy.This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

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Jennifer Pan at the time of her 2010 arrest. | Courtesy Ontario Police Jennifer Pan allegedly hired hitmen to kill her parents in 2010. But the case is in limbo. The end of Netflix’s new true crime documentary What Jennifer Did reveals a bombshell detail: After we’ve learned of the alleged culprits and the alleged motive for the horrific 2010 murder of Toronto mom Bich Pan and the attempted murder of her husband, Huei Hann Pan, we learn that the perpetrators have all had their convictions overturned. They are currently awaiting retrials. The documentary chronicles the unraveling secrets of the Pans’ daughter, Jennifer, in the aftermath of a shocking home invasion and shooting that left Bich dead and her husband blind in one eye. Over the course of the film, audiences unfamiliar with this infamous crime learn of the elaborate, enormous web of lies that Jennifer Pan wove for her parents for years — lies that began in high school and included everything from doctoring report cards to faking her high school graduation and subsequent college attendance to nonexistent internships and lies about her relationship status — all to keep up the facade of a golden child. Through taped interrogation interviews with Jennifer and more recent interviews with authorities who worked the case, we come to understand that the more her parents saw through Jennifer’s deceit and tried to rein in her behavior, the more pressure she felt to break free of their control. At age 24, while living at home under a set of strict rules as a result of all her lies, Jennifer Pan tried repeatedly to hire someone to kill her father. On November 8, 2010, she allegedly succeeded, leaving the door unlocked for three assailants, friends of her ex-boyfriend Daniel Wong, to enter the house and attack her parents. During the investigation, Jennifer’s lies rapidly collapsed, and she was convicted at trial of first-degree murder and attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison alongside three of her co-conspirators. A fourth pleaded guilty to conspiracy and received an 18-year sentence, but died in prison in 2018. These convictions, the documentary informs us, have all since been tossed out — and the film ends without explaining why or elaborating on the status of the case, beyond noting that retrials are planned. So what happened, and what’s next? Improper jury instructions led to new trials for Jennifer and her co-conspirators The overturned convictions come as a result of appeals filed by Jennifer Pan and her three remaining co-conspirators: her ex Daniel Wong and his friends Lenford Crawford and David Mylvaganam, who were both involved in the home invasion and shooting. The appeals had seven points of argument, including the argument that in the original 2014 trial, the presiding judge Justice R. Cary Boswell improperly instructed the jury. This tactic can be a strong form of appeal for defense attorneys because how a judge instructs a jury can influence how they view evidence and testimony and lead them to disregard certain verdicts. Attorneys for the Pan defendants argued that, in this case, both things happened: that Justice Boswell influenced the jury to consider only two “paths to liability” for the accused. This doesn’t mean he instructed them to consider only two verdicts, but rather that when he was advising them how to think about the facts of the case, he suggested they consider either one of two possible scenarios for how the home invasion and murder occurred: that the assailants planned to murder both of Jennifer’s parents, or that they planned to “commit a home invasion/robbery” and the murders occurred in the process. The appeal argued that these instructions significantly limited the conclusions the jurors could have drawn from the evidence presented at trial. For instance, Jennifer herself had argued as part of her defense that she had tried to hire the hitmen to kill her, not her parents — a third scenario Justice Boswell did not mention. In May 2023, a Canadian appellate panel agreed with the defense. “In my view, this is the most difficult and most consequential error that is put forward,” Justice Ian Nordheimer wrote in the panel’s decision. “If it succeeds, it requires a new trial for all the appellants on the murder charge. I have concluded that it does.” The court rejected the defendants’ appeals for their convictions for the attempted murder of Hann Pan, so they have remained in jail, still serving that sentence, while awaiting their retrials. This is, however, complicated in the Canadian court system; unlike the US, in Canada, prosecutors also have the right of appeal at this stage, so in August 2023, prosecutors for the Pan case filed their own appeal against the appellate ruling with the Canadian Supreme Court. That means we’ve entered a double limbo: We’re waiting on the Supreme Court of Canada to decide whether to hear arguments on the appeal. If they don’t, or if they do but ultimately side with the defense, then the retrial order remains, which means that then we’ll be waiting on the lower courts to decide whether to bring the case to a retrial. In the latter event, a retrial seems very likely, given what a high-profile case this is — a 2015 story by reporter Karen Ho about the case went massively viral and brought the Pan case to broader attention, after which came reporter Jeremy Grimaldi’s 2016 book on the case, which formed the basis of the documentary. There’s also still plenty of evidence against the perpetrators, in the form of texts, phone records, and their various testimonies against each other. These all add up to, well, What Jennifer Did — and what Jennifer did is already the stuff of true crime legend, whether the courts ultimately rule in her favor or not.

Welcome to Louis Vuitton’s dream house, an Upper East Side mansion filled with the house’s fabulous flights of fancy. For a limited time, VIP guests are invited to visit the seven-story Park Avenue residence for a “savoir-faire” exhibition, showcasing the maison’s most exclusive, inventive and spectacular products. The offerings include dozens of its iconic hardsided...

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