Bambie Thug, Ireland’s entry to Eurovision this year, calls herself a “ouija popstar” and a witch. | Jens Büttner/Picture Alliance via Getty Images Eurovision doesn’t want to be about Israel-Palestine, but amid protests and boycotts, it might not have a choice. For taxonomic purposes, Eurovision is an international song contest. Technically, the European Broadcast Union (EBU) created the event in 1956 to foster post-WWII European unity, but has largely expanded beyond that function and Europe itself, with countries like Australia and Israel participating. The closest reference point for people in the US is American Idol, the extremely popular reality television singing contest that once crowned national treasure Kelly Clarkson. Think: polarizing and sometimes very disparate musical acts from each represented country, a public vote, and a night of live performances, but with the added elements like spooky Austrian comedy and whispers of devious Swedish sabotage. Is there any better way to symbolically present peace than getting in costume and singing a silly pop song in a lighthearted musical competition? What if I told you that there is no prize money for the winning country’s band — only bragging rights, a trophy, and national hosting duties for the next Eurovision? There is absolutely nothing like Eurovision. With nothing and seemingly everything on the line, Eurovision has become an international spectacle, perhaps the international spectacle aside from the Olympics. It’s a fantasy that both undergirds and undermines everything you think you know about Europe and pop music. But as we gear up for another chapter of ostentatious music acts sing-fighting for zero money, the biggest story heading into this week’s (May 7 to May 11) contest in Malmo, Sweden, threatens that escapist reputation. Protests over Israel’s participation have punctuated the lead-up to the event, with activists asserting that Israel should be barred, given its military assault in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands. It’s far from the first time that politics and war have made their mark on the proceedings, but now Eurovision faces a huge question over its existence, its history, and who is and isn’t allowed to take part in a competition that’s supposed to really be about European novelty. Eurovision can’t be replicated Eurovision usually bends toward more conventional, meaningful winners like last year’s Loreen (who has won twice), 2016’s Jamala, and 2021’s Måneskin. ABBA and Celine Dion have also won the competition, and are its most famous alums. This year the UK’s Olly Alexander, from the successful pop band Years & Years, seems like a ringer. But the winners only tell part of Eurovision’s story. Eurovision can feel vaguely psychedelic, which is what makes it a joy to behold. And the contest is at its best when it leans into unmitigated absurdity and the unexpected. Take, for example, Austria’s 2023 entry: “Who the Hell is Edgar?” by Teya & Salena. The female duo met on Starmania, a talent show in their native country, and wrote “Who The Hell is Edgar?” to address “an industry that all too often doesn’t give women enough credit for their hard work and expertise,” according to the official Eurovision website. So how did Teya and Salena use their talents to discuss an industry that overlooks the female experience? “Who the Hell is Edgar?” is about Teya and Salena being possessed by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, that Edgar Allan Poe. Instead of writing another short story like “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Raven,” Poe has commandeered their bodies to write a fantastic pop song that they believe will make them rich and famous. At one point in the tune, a spooky pop polka, the two wish that they could wrangle Shakespeare and get him to ghostwrite an even bigger hit. But alas, because it’s so hard to make money in the music business — they sing that they can only make “$0.003” per listen — not even these famous ghosts could make the women stars. Pop music today doesn’t usually make room for the kind of camp storytelling that characterizes “Who the hell is Edgar?” but it works in Eurovision. There, weirdness and cheekiness is celebrated. This is, after all, a competition that has had entries like DJ BoBo’s “Vampires Are Alive” (Switzerland) and Verka Serduchka’s “Dancing Lasha Tumbai” (Ukraine), a techno-inflected pop-folk number where the performers looked like someone zapped The Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man with a Liberace laser beam: How Eurovision winners are crowned As my colleague Zack Beauchamp has previously detailed, voting is split between a popular call-in vote from the public and a jury that consists of music industry professionals from each participating country. Thirty-seven participants will compete in semifinal rounds — beginning on May 7 — in hopes of qualifying for one of the 26 total spots in the grand final on May 11. Jury voting is like Olympic judging, with each country giving out a maximum of 12 points (and all the way down to one) to the twelve best of the night in the grand finale. Sometimes, the jury vote — the vote from music professionals — doesn’t exactly coincide with the televote. Last year, the judges picked Loreen from Sweden’s “Tattoo”, while the public selected Käärijä from Finland’s “Cha Cha Cha” as the best of the night. The jury placed Finland fourth, which spawned a conspiracy theory about rigging Sweden’s win so the country could host in 2024, the 50th anniversary of when ABBA won. The low-ish stakes make for a fun bit of drama, but the disconnect between the jury and the popular vote has led to questions about why the jury votes have as much sway as the millions of calls coming through. Perhaps they shouldn’t; the winner would likely be a little more out of the box if the more conventional jury votes didn’t carry equal weight. Sweden’s alleged rigging is also not unlike some previous bits of Eurovision history, like the time Switzerland picked noted Canadian Celine Dion to represent the famously neutral country in 1988. Rules at the time did not specify that a singer had to be born in the country they represented, and Dion was a burgeoning star internationally. Dion, of course, won the whole thing. That said, while Eurovision is a “competition” and a winner is crowned, megastars like ABBA and Dion are exceptional exceptions of Eurovision victors. Eurovision winners don’t usually become worldwide superstars. The list of winners — 1982’s Nicole? 2002’s Marie N? 2006’s Lordi — are probably blue Wikipedia links for normies. That should underscore the idea that Eurovision is really about the entertainment of the night, the stunts, the scintillating swing for the fences, rather than the actual score. Can Eurovision still be fun this year if the biggest story about Eurovision is Israel-Palestine? Ahead of the competition in Malmo, the lead-up to Eurovision this year has been a series of protests and proposed boycotts against Israel’s participation in this year’s competition. The gist: Israel should not be allowed to participate in Eurovision because of its continued attacks in Gaza. A country at war shouldn’t perform at an event about unity and peace. The opposition to Israel’s inclusion — Israel has participated in Eurovision since 1973 — isn’t without precedent. Critics of Israel’s participation point out that just two years ago, Eurovision disallowed Russia in a similar situation. Olafur Steinar Rye Gestsson/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images Ahead of Eurovision, protesters have called on the event to ban Israel’s participation and viewers to boycott the event entirely. On February 25, 2022, Eurovision banned Russia a day after its invasion of Ukraine. At the time state broadcasters from participating countries like Iceland, Finland, Norway, and The Netherlands called for Russia’s ban, which the EBU ultimately granted, citing Eurovision’s mission to protect “the values of a cultural competition which promotes international exchange and understanding” and saying that the event “unites Europe on one stage.” Speaking on the ban, Eurovision’s executive supervisor Martin Österdahl said that Russia’s exclusion was a decision about upholding the core values of democracy and human rights core to the event’s spirit. “When we say we are not political, what we always should stand up for are the basic and ultimate values of democracy. Everyone is right to be who they are,” he said in December 2022. Since then, Russia has suspended its EBU membership and has not returned to the competition. Earlier this year, more than 1,000 Swedish artists called for Israel’s ban. Similarly, Finnish and Icelandic musicians have also called on Eurovision to block Israel’s entry, stating that by allowing their participation “a country that commits war crimes and continues a military occupation is given a public stage to polish its image in the name of music.” Fans are also making pleas to Eurovision participants not to compete this year because of Israel’s participation, and Sweden has ramped up security in anticipation of protests. Yet, the ongoing protests and calls for action haven’t convinced the EBU or Eurovision organizers. A young singer named Eden Golan will represent Israel and sing “Hurricane.” The song’s original rejected title was “October Rain,” a not-so-veiled reference to the October 7 Hamas attacks. EBU officials rejected the title and asked Israel to alter the song before re-entry. “I think it’s important for Israel to appear in Eurovision, and this is also a statement because there are haters who try to drive us off every stage,” Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said in February. Before altering its lyrics, Israel had threatened to withdraw from the competition. According to EBU Director General Noel Curran, Eurovision is a competition between international broadcasters and not the countries themselves. “It is not a contest between governments,” he said, adding that though the EBU and Eurovision made a decision on Russia, it was not going to do so for Israel. “Comparisons between wars and conflicts are complex and difficult and, as a non-political media organization, not ours to make,” he said. While Curran insists that the contest will be apolitical, its actions might not be interpreted as such. Palestinian flags will not be allowed at the competition nor will any pro-Palestinian symbols or signs referring to Israel and Hamas’s war. The Israeli flag will be allowed because it’s a member state and only participants’ flags are permitted, with the exception being rainbow and LGBTQ flags. The rules of what’s allowed to be shown and who’s allowed to support whom make for a jumbled message. Obviously no one expected Eurovision to solve the crisis in the Middle East. But in an attempt to appear apolitical and actively not reference the bloodshed, Eurovision organizers have made their decisions difficult to ignore and this event even harder to enjoy.

AI-powered apps may be able to use your data (including selfies) to predict your current mental state. | Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images Emerging apps use AI to guess when you’ll be sad. Can they also help you feel better? If you have a sore throat, you can get tested for a host of things — Covid, RSV, strep, the flu — and receive a pretty accurate diagnosis (and maybe even treatment). Even when you’re not sick, vital signs like heart rate and blood pressure give doctors a decent sense of your physical health. But there’s no agreed-upon vital sign for mental health. There may be occasional mental health screenings at the doctor’s office, or notes left behind after a visit with a therapist. Unfortunately, people lie to their therapists all the time (one study estimated that over 90 percent of us have lied to a therapist at least once), leaving holes in their already limited mental health records. And that’s assuming someone can connect with a therapist — roughly 122 million Americans live in areas without enough mental health professionals to go around. But the vast majority of people in the US do have access to a cellphone. Over the last several years, academic researchers and startups have built AI-powered apps that use phones, smart watches, and social media to spot warning signs of depression. By collecting massive amounts of information, AI models can learn to spot subtle changes in a person’s body and behavior that may indicate mental health problems. Many digital mental health apps only exist in the research world (for now), but some are available to download — and other forms of passive data collection are already being deployed by social media platforms and health care providers to flag potential crises (it’s probably somewhere in the terms of service you didn’t read). The hope is for these platforms to help people affordably access mental health care when they need it most, and intervene quickly in times of crisis. Michael Aratow — co-founder and chief medical officer of Ellipsis Health, a company that uses AI to predict mental health from human voice samples — argues that the need for digital mental health solutions is so great, it can no longer be addressed by the health care system alone. “There’s no way that we’re going to deal with our mental health issues without technology,” he said. And those issues are significant: Rates of mental illness have skyrocketed over the past several years. Roughly 29 percent of US adults have been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lives, and the National Institute of Mental Health estimates that nearly a third of US adults will experience an anxiety disorder at some point. While phones are often framed as a cause of mental health problems, they can also be part of the solution — but only if we create tech that works reliably and mitigates the risk of unintended harm. Tech companies can misuse highly sensitive data gathered from people at their most vulnerable moments — with little regulation to stop them. Digital mental health app developers still have a lot of work to do to earn the trust of their users, but the stakes around the US mental health crisis are high enough that we shouldn’t automatically dismiss AI-powered solutions out of fear. How does AI detect depression? To be formally diagnosed with depression, someone needs to express at least five symptoms (like feeling sad, losing interest in things, or being unusually exhausted) for at least two consecutive weeks. But Nicholas Jacobson, an assistant professor in biomedical data science and psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, believes “the way that we think about depression is wrong, as a field.” By only looking for stably presenting symptoms, doctors can miss the daily ebbs and flows that people with depression experience. “These depression symptoms change really fast,” Jacobson said, “and our traditional treatments are usually very, very slow.” Even the most devoted therapy-goers typically see a therapist about once a week (and with sessions starting around $100, often not covered by insurance, once a week is already cost-prohibitive for many people). One 2022 study found that only 18.5 percent of psychiatrists sampled were accepting new patients, leading to average wait times of over two months for in-person appointments. But your smartphone (or your fitness tracker) can log your steps, heart rate, sleep patterns, and even your social media use, painting a far more comprehensive picture of your mental health than conversations with a therapist can alone. One potential mental health solution: Collect data from your smartphone and wearables as you go about your day, and use that data to train AI models to predict when your mood is about to dip. In a study co-authored by Jacobson this February, researchers built a depression detection app called MoodCapture, which harnesses a user’s front-facing camera to automatically snap selfies while they answer questions about their mood, with participants pinged to complete the survey three times a day. An AI model correlated their responses — rating in-the-moment feelings like sadness and hopelessness — with these pictures, using their facial features and other context clues like lighting and background objects to predict early signs of depression. (One example: a participant who looks as if they’re in bed almost every time they complete the survey is more likely to be depressed.) The model doesn’t try to flag certain facial features as depressive. Rather, the model looks for subtle changes within each user, like their facial expressions, or how they tend to hold their phone. MoodCapture accurately identified depression symptoms with about 75 percent accuracy (in other words, if 100 out of a million people have depression, the model should be able to identify 75 out of the 100) — the first time such candid images have been used to detect mental illness in this way. In this study, the researchers only recruited participants who were already diagnosed with depression, and each photo was tagged with the participant’s own rating of their depression symptoms. Eventually, the app aims to use photos captured when users unlock their phones using face recognition, adding up to hundreds of images per day. This data, combined with other passively gathered phone data like sleep hours, text messages, and social media posts, could evaluate the user’s unfiltered, unguarded feelings. You can tell your therapist whatever you want, but enough data could reveal the truth. The app is still far from perfect. MoodCapture was more accurate at predicting depression in white people because most study participants were white women — generally, AI models are only as good as the training data they’re provided. Research apps like MoodCapture are required to get informed consent from all of their participants, and university studies are overseen by the campus’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) But if sensitive data is collected without a user’s consent, the constant monitoring can feel creepy or violating. Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota, says that with informed consent, tools like this can be “really good because they notice things that you may not notice yourself.” What technology is already out there, and what’s on the way? Of the roughly 10,000 (and counting) digital mental health apps recognized by the mHealth Index & Navigation Database (MIND), 18 of them passively collect user data. Unlike the research app MoodCapture, none use auto-captured selfies (or any type of data, for that matter) to predict whether the user is depressed. A handful of popular, highly rated apps like Bearable — made by and for people with chronic health conditions, from bipolar disorder to fibromyalgia — track customized collections of symptoms over time, in part by passively collecting data from wearables. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Aratow said. These tracker apps are more like journals than predictors, though — they don’t do anything with the information they collect, other than show it to the user to give them a better sense of how lifestyle factors (like what they eat, or how much they sleep) affect their symptoms. Some patients take screenshots of their app data to show their doctors so they can provide more informed advice. Other tools, like the Ellipsis Health voice sensor, aren’t downloadable apps at all. Rather, they operate behind the scenes as “clinical decision support tools,” designed to predict someone’s depression and anxiety levels from the sound of their voice during, say, a routine call with their health care provider. And massive tech companies like Meta use AI to flag, and sometimes delete, posts about self-harm and suicide. Some researchers want to take passive data collection to more radical lengths. Georgios Christopoulos, a cognitive neuroscientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-led a 2021 study that predicted depression risk from Fitbit data. In a press release, he expressed his vision for more ubiquitous data collection, where “such signals could be integrated with Smart Buildings or even Smart Cities initiatives: Imagine a hospital or a military unit that could use these signals to identify people at risk.” This raises an obvious question: In this imagined future world, what happens if the all-seeing algorithm deems you sad? AI has improved so much in the last five years alone that it’s not a stretch to say that, in the next decade, mood-predicting apps will exist — and if preliminary tests continue to look promising, they might even work. Whether that comes as a relief or fills you with dread, as mood-predicting digital health tools begin to move out of academic research settings and into the app stores, developers and regulators need to seriously consider what they’ll do with the information they gather. So, your phone thinks you’re depressed — now what? It depends, said Chancellor. Interventions need to strike a careful balance: keeping the user safe, without “completely wiping out important parts of their life.” Banning someone from Instagram for posting about self-harm, for instance, could cut someone off from valuable support networks, causing more harm than good. The best way for an app to provide support that a user actually wants, Chancellor said, is to ask them. Munmun De Choudhury, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, believes that any digital mental health platform can be ethical, “to the extent that people have an ability to consent to its use.” She emphasized, “If there is no consent from the person, it doesn’t matter what the intervention is — it’s probably going to be inappropriate.” Academic researchers like Jacobson and Chancellor have to jump through a lot of regulatory hoops to test their digital mental health tools. But when it comes to tech companies, those barriers don’t really exist. Laws like the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) don’t clearly cover nonclinical data that can be used to infer something about someone’s health — like social media posts, patterns of phone usage, or selfies. Even when a company says that they treat user data as protected health information (PHI), it’s not protected by federal law — data only qualifies as PHI if it comes from a “healthcare service event,” like medical records or a hospital bill. Text conversations via platforms like Woebot and BetterHelp may feel confidential, but crucial caveats about data privacy (while companies can opt into HIPAA compliance, user data isn’t legally classified as protected health information) often wind up where users are least likely to see them — like in lengthy terms of service agreements that practically no one reads. Woebot, for example, has a particularly reader-friendly terms of service, but at a whopping 5,625 words, it’s still far more than most people are willing to engage with. “There’s not a whole lot of regulation that would prevent folks from essentially embedding all of this within the terms of service agreement,” said Jacobson. De Choudhury laughed about it. “Honestly,” she told me, “I’ve studied these platforms for almost two decades now. I still don’t understand what those terms of service are saying.” “We need to make sure that the terms of service, where we all click ‘I agree’, is actually in a form that a lay individual can understand,” De Choudhury said. Last month, Sachin Pendse, a graduate student in De Choudhury’s research group, co-authored guidance on how developers can create “consent-forward” apps that proactively earn the trust of their users. The idea is borrowed from the “Yes means yes” model for affirmative sexual consent, because FRIES applies here, too: a user’s consent to data usage should always be freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific. But when algorithms (like humans) inevitably make mistakes, even the most consent-forward app could do something a user doesn’t want. The stakes can be high. In 2018, for example, a Meta algorithm used text data from Messenger and WhatsApp to detect messages expressing suicidal intent, triggering over a thousand “wellness checks,” or nonconsensual active rescues. Few specific details about how their algorithm works are publicly available. Meta clarifies that they use pattern-recognition techniques based on lots of training examples, rather than simply flagging words relating to death or sadness — but not much else. These interventions often involve police officers (who carry weapons and don’t always receive crisis intervention training) and can make things worse for someone already in crisis (especially if they thought they were just chatting with a trusted friend, not a suicide hotline). “We will never be able to guarantee that things are always safe, but at minimum, we need to do the converse: make sure that they are not unsafe,” De Choudhury said. Some large digital mental health groups have faced lawsuits over their irresponsible handling of user data. In 2022, Crisis Text Line, one of the biggest mental health support lines (and often provided as a resource in articles like this one), got caught using data from people’s online text conversations to train customer service chatbots for their for-profit spinoff, Loris. And last year, the Federal Trade Commission ordered BetterHelp to pay a $7.8 million fine after being accused of sharing people’s personal health data with Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Criteo, an advertising company. Chancellor said that while companies like BetterHelp may not be operating in bad faith — the medical system is slow, understaffed, and expensive, and in many ways, they’re trying to help people get past these barriers — they need to more clearly communicate their data privacy policies with customers. While startups can choose to sell people’s personal information to third parties, Chancellor said, “no therapist is ever going to put your data out there for advertisers.” Someday, Chancellor hopes that mental health care will be structured more like cancer care is today, where people receive support from a team of specialists (not all doctors), including friends and family. She sees tech platforms as “an additional layer” of care — and at least for now, one of the only forms of care available to people in underserved communities. Even if all the ethical and technical kinks get ironed out, and digital health platforms work exactly as intended, they’re still powered by machines. “Human connection will remain incredibly valuable and central to helping people overcome mental health struggles,” De Choudhury told me. “I don’t think it can ever be replaced.” And when asked what the perfect mental health app would look like, she simply said, “I hope it doesn’t pretend to be a human.”

Signs hang at George Washington University’s Gaza solidarity encampment, created by students in conjunction with other DC-area universities, in Washington, DC on April 25, 2024. | Allison Bailey/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images And is it feasible? Plus three other questions about the student protesters’ demands. A core demand at the heart of the protests over the war in Gaza currently roiling college campuses across the US and around the world: that universities divest from Israel. That means withdrawing funds their endowments have invested in companies that are linked to Israel. Their demands have revived a long-running debate about whether universities should even consider ethics in their investment decisions and whether there is an ethical approach to divestment from Israel, or if these institutions should simply maximize returns. There is also a question of whether these divestment demands, which have been criticized by some pundits as overly broad, are feasible to meet or will even be effective. Their demands come as the Palestinian death toll (now over 34,000 people) only keeps rising and as full-blown famine breaks out in northern Gaza, with the rest of the territory remaining at risk. The US Student Movement for Palestinian Liberation released a statement April 21 indicative of what the protests are broadly calling for; it asked universities to “completely divest our tuition dollars from — and to cut all institutional ties to — the zionist entity as well as all companies complicit in the colonization of Palestine.” But students on some campuses have articulated more specific demands, seeking to focus their efforts on divesting from major weapons manufacturers that universities have invested in, ensuring that their universities no longer accept research funding from the Israeli military, or ending academic partnerships with Israeli institutions. Some universities, including Columbia University, have already rejected those calls and have swiftly called the police on protesters, prompting further escalation. Others — including Brown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota — have agreed to consider them. On Thursday, Evergreen State College became one of the first to approve an effort to divest. Divestment has been a tactic embraced by protesters in previous student movements opposing the South African apartheid regime and fossil fuel companies contributing to climate change. Those calls for divestment have had varying degrees of success — to what degree depends on how you define that success in terms of their financial or political impact. The movement to divest from Israel borrows from the traditions of those historical movements. But will it work the same way? What is divestment? Divestment is, essentially, reversing an investment. And the goal of divestment movements generally is “generating social and political pressure on the companies that are targets of divestment — stigmatizing behavior,” said Cutler Cleveland, a Boston University sustainability professor who was involved in the decade-long fossil fuel divestment campaign there. Current calls for divestment from Israel are an outgrowth of the broader Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which originated in 2005 among Palestinian civil society groups after several failures in the two-state peace process and was inspired by the movement to divest from South African apartheid. The BDS movement’s website argues that, since Israel’s founding in 1948 when it forced 700,000 Palestinians to flee their homes, the country has “denied Palestinians their fundamental rights and has refused to comply with international law” while maintaining a “regime of settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation over the Palestinian people.” The BDS movement has therefore called on banks, local councils, churches, pension funds, and universities to “withdraw investments from the State of Israel and all Israeli and international companies that sustain Israeli apartheid.” However, critics of BDS say that it is inherently antisemitic in that it “effectively reject[s] or ignore[s] the Jewish people’s right of self-determination” and that if implemented, it “would result in the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. Student groups behind the recent protests on college campuses have denounced antisemitism, which they do not equate with opposing Israel. But there have been incidents of antisemitism, and some Jewish students say they feel unsafe on their own campuses as the target of threatening behavior and rhetoric. The BDS movement has recently notched new wins: Evergreen State College’s announcement last week, and one from Ireland’s sovereign investment fund in April stating that it will divest from six Israeli companies, including some of its biggest banks, based on their operations in the Palestinian territories. How endowments work Understanding whether it’s feasible for universities to divest from Israel requires understanding how their endowments work. Endowments are basically large rainy day investment funds whose returns far outpace growth from new donations, allowing universities to supplement tuition dollars and fees in supporting their daily operations. Harvard University has the largest endowment, at $49.5 billion in fiscal year 2023 — bigger than the GDP of more than 120 countries — but US university endowments average about $1.6 billion. Most universities are “very wary or averse to using the endowment as a political tool,” said Georges Dyer, executive director of the Intentional Endowments Network. That’s because university endowments have both a financial interest in maximizing returns — and a legal duty to serve the financial health of their institutions. Today, the vast majority of universities manage their endowments through external investment management companies, Dyer said. They might invest in private equity funds, hedge funds, or public companies, usually via index funds where they are one of many investors putting their money into a pool that is invested in a portfolio of stocks and bonds designed to track a certain financial market index such as the S&P 500. The portfolios of these funds are not tailored to the preferences of a particular university, which may make it difficult to divest from particular causes. These funds also present challenges in terms of transparency. The companies included in index funds are publicly reported. But hedge funds or private equity funds may not even disclose to their own clients where their investments lie, which is part of their competitive advantage. Universities with larger endowments tend to allocate more of their investments to these private investments, Dyer said. And that can make divestment difficult. What we can learn from past divestment movements Two major divestment movements have laid the groundwork for the current protests. In the 1980s, student activists pushed their universities to divest from firms that supported or profited from South African apartheid. Politically, they were effective: 155 universities ultimately divested. And in 1986, the US government also bowed to pressure from protesters and enacted a divestment policy. Along with increasing protests within South Africa led by organizations including the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, and trade unions, that kind of international pressure helped force the white South African government to begin negotiations that ultimately ended apartheid, at least officially. A few things helped make this movement successful. For one, protesters faced little pushback at the time given that much of the political establishment was embarrassed by the US’s ties to apartheid. Investments in commingled funds that are now favored by universities were not as widely used back then. And the interconnected, global economy as we know it today had not yet taken shape, making it practicable to isolate companies based in South Africa or with major South African interests. Currently, there is an ongoing movement to push universities to divest from fossil fuels, popularized by climate activist and Middlebury professor Bill McKibben. About 250 universities have at least committed to do so after years of campus activism, though this has overall had a negligible impact on the finances of fossil fuel companies (with the exception of coal companies), suggesting that it may not have yet had the impact hoped. Cleveland said that part of what helped persuade his university to divest in 2021 is the undeniable fact that fossil fuel companies have driven the climate crisis, which provided “a basis to argue that the university has a responsibility to align its investment decisions with its educational research.” Practically, fossil fuel divestment was also feasible. Though there are some quibbles about what constitutes a fossil fuel company — for example, do power plants that use fossil fuels count? — it’s a generally easy-to-define group. It’s also become easier to disentangle fossil fuel investments from an endowment’s portfolio because fund managers have started to offer purportedly fossil fuel-free funds, seemingly in response to external pressure. And finally, there’s a financial argument for divestment from fossil fuels: “If and when society moves toward a low-carbon economy, those investments in the fossil fuel companies will become worth less because much of their value is based on the fossil fuel reserves that won’t be used,” Dyer said. Can divestment work in the context of Israel? Universities divesting broadly from Israeli companies or companies that do business in Israel might not have much of a financial impact. “The data suggests that, economically, anything short of official sanctions by important economic partners such as the United States or European Union would be unlikely to produce anything near the kind of economic pressure BDS supporters envision,” researchers at the Brookings Institution concluded. Broad divestment from Israel would also be practically very difficult. Israel has many research and development partnerships with US entities, and is also a major player in industries such as computer technology, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. Many major multinational companies do business in Israel or with Israel, such as Google and Cisco. To exclude them entirely would require withdrawing from many kinds of commingled investment funds. It might be more practicable for protesters to target a specific list of companies, as students at Brown University are doing. They are seeking divestment from 11 companies that Brown directly invests in, accounting for less the 10 percent of its endowment: AB Volvo, Airbus, Boeing, DXC, General Dynamics, General Electric, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Oaktree Capital, Raytheon, and United Technologies. The question, however, is where universities would draw the line. “There’s the very subjective nature of the assessment of the war in Gaza that I think puts you in a very different terrain than the fossil fuel divestment debate,” Cleveland said. “It will just be so arbitrary about who you’re going to include and not include.” And even with more piecemeal efforts to divest, universities and students would need to weigh any financial hit to the endowment that would hurt the university community and its mission. “Students need to be confronted with moral questions, such as whether Columbia being associated with defense contractors is worth the tuition discount,” Oliver Hart, an economics professor at Harvard, and Luigi Zingales, a professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, write in Compact. It’s hard to know exactly what the costs of divestment to universities might be in the context of Israel. Chris Marsicano, an assistant professor of education studies at Davidson College, told PBS that research including his own has shown that divestment in the fossil fuel context had “at worst, a negligible effect for institutions like Stanford and Dayton and Syracuse and, in many cases, may have had a positive effect.” What would make divestment successful? Calls for divestment at universities have always been a means to a greater end, whether it be bringing down an apartheid regime or reversing climate change. In the current context, what student protesters really want is an end to the fighting in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, and the end of what they see as the injustices Israel, as the biggest cumulative beneficiary of US foreign aid, has exacted on Palestinians for decades. Whether universities ultimately divest and whether that has any material financial impact on Israel might be less important to the protesters than whether their calls for divestment alone can make the status quo politically untenable. The question is whether the political impact of the protests is lining up with that goal. Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have already latched on to the protests as an example of America’s need for their brand of “law and order.” “The movements themselves become a potent symbol for the other side,” said Matthew Nisbet, a professor of communication, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern University. Both US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have publicly addressed the protests on US college campuses, suggesting that they are feeling at least some pressure to react — but are not bowing to it yet. Biden said Thursday that the protests had not caused him to reconsider his strategy in the Middle East, and his aides remain confident that the protests will not overshadow his case for reelection in 2024. But young people leading the protests represent an important constituency for Biden. “Demanding financial disclosure and asking US universities to break their financial ties has proven to be very powerful and threatening,” said Jennie Stephens, a professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern University who has written a forthcoming book about climate justice on campus. How powerful and threatening, however, remains to be seen. A version of the story appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Palestinians in eastern Rafah migrate to Khan Yunis after the Israeli army’s announcement on May 6, 2024. | Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images The Israel-Hamas war went from a potential short-term ceasefire to strikes on Rafah on Monday. Israel’s long-threatened invasion of Rafah looks like it could be imminent. Israel conducted airstrikes Monday on the southern Palestinian city, currently home to about 1.4 million people who have been displaced throughout Israel’s war on Gaza. It did so one day after ordering at least 100,000 Palestinians to evacuate from the eastern part of the city, prompting scenes of families fleeing north to areas heavily damaged by nearly eight months of fighting. The combination of the two events — plus a vote from Israel’s war Cabinet on Monday to move forward with the operation — indicates a larger operation could be on the way. Israel maintains that four Hamas battalions are operating from the southern city. Rafah is also one of the only places in Gaza that Israeli forces have not destroyed and is the site of two border crossings — critical routes for the humanitarian aid people in Gaza so desperately need. This all came as representatives from Hamas, Israel, Egypt, Qatar, and the US gathered in Cairo to discuss the terms of a potential ceasefire. Hamas reportedly agreed to a proposal by Qatari and Egyptian officials on Monday. Israel has rejected that plan, saying that the agreement is not aligned with the proposal drafted by Israeli and US negotiators. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly warned that Israel will attack Rafah, despite US admonitions not to do so without a clear and credible plan for protecting civilians — which State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the US had not yet seen during a press briefing Monday. Given the destruction of Gaza and the staggering number of deaths — at least 34,500, some 14,000 of whom were children — aid groups and international organizations like the UN are warning that an invasion could be catastrophic due to the immense crowding there and could cut off critical aid routes. However, as of Monday evening, Netanyahu’s government appears committed to its maximalist military objective of destroying Hamas. Israel has consolidated operational control of wide swaths of Gaza, including operations that razed and captured major cities like Khan Younis and Gaza City. In recent months, Rafah has become the focus of the war. Given Israel’s belief that it houses many of Hamas’s remaining fighters, the country’s right wing has been clamoring for an invasion there as the necessary step toward “total victory” and Netanyahu has framed it as an existential battle. But considering Israel’s moves to entrench its control of the north for months or years to come, the possibility of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seizing Rafah raises dire questions about the future of Gaza after the war. And as the concentration of the vast majority of Gaza’s population is there (and the fact that the city serves as the territory’s main aid hub), in the short term, a full-scale operation spells a humanitarian disaster. What’s happening in Rafah? On Monday, the prime minister’s office posted on X, “The War Cabinet unanimously decided that Israel continues the operation in Rafah to exert military pressure on Hamas in order to promote the release of our hostages and the other goals of the war” while continuing to negotiate a potential ceasefire. That announcement was followed by IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari posting on X, “IDF forces are now attacking and operating against the targets of the terrorist organization Hamas in a targeted manner” in eastern Rafah Monday night local time. According to the Jerusalem Post, Hagari said an aerial operation started Monday in preparation for a ground offensive. Israeli forces air-dropped leaflets to people in east Rafah Sunday night warning them to go to a safe zone; however, the operation in east Rafah began just hours later, according to Hagari. The tactics echo ones used in the beginning of the war, when the military urged people to leave northern Gaza, giving them 24 hours to leave the area before a proposed operation (Israel ultimately delayed the strike). As of now, there are few details about what exactly that operation entails — and how many of the 100,000 people urged to evacuate the area made it out to areas near Khan Younis, a city roughly 5 miles north of Rafah, before the operation began. Rafah was supposed to be a safe zone for the roughly 1.7 million people now sheltering there. Israeli operations in northern and central Gaza leveled about 70 percent of the housing in the region, as Abdallah al-Dardari, director of the regional bureau for Arab states at the UN Development Program, said in a press briefing last week. Israel has repeatedly engaged in strikes against Rafah, despite the risk to civilians due to population density, including one on Sunday in retaliation for a Hamas rocket attack on the Kerem Shalom border crossing, which killed four Israeli soldiers and reportedly may have helped accelerate Israel’s timeline for the Rafah operation by stoking fears of Hamas’s capabilities. The Israeli strikes killed at least 19 people, according to Palestinian health officials. The most immediate concern of any operation is humanitarian; military engagement poses a great risk to the people in Rafah, and the UN warned Friday that hundreds of thousands of people would be “at imminent risk of death” should an invasion go forward. Humanitarian supplies including food, fuel, clean water, and medical aid are already in short supply, and some medical aid groups, like MedGlobal, have opted to suspend their operations in light of the operation. “There is nowhere safe to go: for over six months, Israel has routinely killed civilians and aid workers, including in clearly marked ‘safe zones’ and ‘evacuation routes,’” Abby Maxman, the president and CEO of OxFam America, said in a statement Monday. “The notion that the 100,000 civilians being evacuated by Israel will be safe and protected is simply not credible.” It’s also unclear how safe the evacuation zones are. For example, Israel targeted al-Mawasi, a supposed humanitarian zone, in February when an IDF tank fired on a house there, killing the wife and daughter-in-law of a worker with the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders (MSF). “Six other people were injured, five of whom were women or children,” according to a news release from the group. “Bullets were also fired at the clearly marked MSF building, hitting the front gate, the building’s exterior, and the interior of the ground floor.” (The Israeli army told France 24 it had “fired at a building … where terror activity is occurring.”) What are Israel’s goals in Rafah? The ostensible goal of the operation is to go after four Hamas battalions that the government says are based in Rafah. Israel has made various claims about the number of militants the armed forces have killed during the war on Gaza, suggesting numbers as high as 12,000. Hamas does not disclose the number of its fighters killed. Though Israel claims there are six Hamas battalions left — the four in Rafah and two in central Gaza — it’s difficult to assess whether that’s true. “You’ve got the official government line saying that this is the last bastion of Hamas — whatever remains of their battalions,” Tahani Mustafa, senior Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Vox. “But then you’ve got military leaks that are coming out, with some members of the Israeli military saying, ‘Actually, Israel has been completely unsuccessful in destroying a single battalion,’ and Hamas’s 24, 25 battalions, they assume they are still very much intact.” “There’s a consensus that Hamas still has at least half of its fighters in the field,” Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox. Israel has said that its goal is the destruction of Hamas, politically and militarily. Because of that, even in the event of a ceasefire and an agreement releasing the hostages Hamas still holds from its October 7 raid, Israel would not have met its goals, perhaps leaving the door open for further actions in Rafah, and Gaza more broadly. Even a more limited incursion into Rafah — if that is even possible — creates some political risks, including the potential for Egypt to reverse a decades-long peace deal with Israel, as it threatened to do in February should Israel invade the city. France has also warned against an invasion; the foreign ministry said that forcibly displacing people from Rafah would constitute a war crime. The US has also warned Israel against launching any invasion without a plan for civilian protection, but there has been no forceful condemnation from the Biden administration, nor any threat to US military aid to Israel so far. What about the ceasefire process? Israel and Hamas have not agreed to a ceasefire since November, when a week-long pause in hostilities saw the return of some 105 hostages and 240 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. The latest round of peace talks have stalled over the past two months because the bargaining positions are fundamentally at odds. “Unfortunately, we’re in a situation where both sides — their demands are mutually exclusive,” Mustafa said. “You’ve got Hamas that’s insisting on a complete and total cessation of hostilities, a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, that is about one-fifth of its size pre-October 7. It’s demanding the return of people from the south back to the north.” According to Reuters, Hamas negotiators agreed to a three-phase plan consisting of two six-week ceasefire phases during which Hamas would release Israeli hostages in return for a phased military retreat and the release of Palestinian prisoners. The third phase would include implementing a reconstruction plan in Gaza and ending the years-long blockade on the territory. Now, Israeli leadership has said that it is using the Rafah offensive as a pressure tactic — a phased operation to pressure Hamas into accepting its demands for a ceasefire. Each side has blamed the other for the failure to reach an agreement, but fundamentally, as Mustafa said, the positions of the two sides boil down to: stop the war, and continue fighting, which cannot coexist. Netanyahu and the Israeli public see this as a multi-year war, Alterman said. “They don’t want this to end anytime soon, because they want the possibility of October 7 ever happening again to be eliminated,” he said. “Now, whether there’s a military way to get there or not, is a separate question.”

Inspectors and police are seen raiding the Al Jazeera offices in Jerusalem, Israel, on May 5, 2024, and confiscating its equipment. | Saeed Qaq/NurPhoto via Getty Images Press freedom is in a state of emergency in Israel and Gaza. Israel’s decision to shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in the country signaled an escalation in an already hostile environment for journalists covering the war in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has previously called Al Jazeera a “mouthpiece for Hamas,” accused the Qatar-based news network of threatening Israel’s national security and used powers granted under an emergency law to shutter the outlet. He has not identified what specifically about Al Jazeera’s coverage the government believed crossed that line. “The government headed by me unanimously decided: the incitement channel Al Jazeera will be closed in Israel,” Netanyahu wrote Sunday on X in Hebrew. For years, many experts in Israeli politics have been warning about the country’s gradual embrace of far-right undemocratic principles. Now, as Israel prepares for an imminent invasion of Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, the Netanyahu government is impinging on freedom of the press in a way that may limit oversight and should put the world’s liberal democracies on guard. “This move sets an extremely alarming precedent for restricting international media outlets working in Israel,” Carlos Martinez de la Serna, program director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement. “The Israeli cabinet must allow Al-Jazeera and all international media outlets to operate freely in Israel, especially during wartime.” What we know Months ago, the Israeli government adopted an emergency law to censor foreign journalists deemed threats to national security while the war in Gaza proceeds. Pro-Iranian channel Al Mayadeen was previously censored under the law, with Netanyahu’s security cabinet citing its “wartime efforts to harm [Israel’s] security interests and to serve the enemy’s goals” following the October 7 attack by Hamas, which receives funding from Iran. Two of the network’s journalists were subsequently killed in an Israeli bombing in southern Lebanon. The government has been talking about invoking the law against Al Jazeera since at least early November, when communications minister Shlomo Karhi claimed the network had “photographed and published” the positioning of IDF forces, “broadcast military announcements by Hamas,” and “distorted facts in a way which incited masses of people to riot.” On Sunday, the government finally brought down the ax, restricting the network’s ability to broadcast from Israel and to be viewed by Israelis, as well as seizing broadcast equipment. The block is in place for 45 days, with the option of a 45-day extension. In a statement, Al Jazeera called the decision a “criminal act that violates human rights and the basic right to access of information.” It’s not clear how the decision will impact the network’s ability to cover the war from Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Why does it matter? The decision to shut down Al Jazeera is the latest escalation against journalists trying to cover the war both in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories. Throughout the war, Israel has said that it cannot guarantee journalists’ safety in Gaza and has denied foreign journalists access to the region. As of May 3, at least 97 journalists and media workers have been killed over the course of the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. By some counts, that’s more than were killed during the entire two-decade Vietnam War. Journalists covering the war have also faced assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship, as well as contended with communications blackouts in Gaza. There are also multiple reports of killings of reporters’ family members in Palestine. Under international law, journalists don’t constitute a separate, protected class from civilians overall. However, because it is illegal to intentionally target civilians or launch an attack that does not distinguish between military targets and civilians, it is also illegal to intentionally target journalists. Media cannot be considered military targets even when they are being employed for propaganda purposes unless they make an “effective contribution to military action” or they “incite war crimes, genocide or acts of violence,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Nevertheless, independent investigations from Reporters Without Borders have alleged that Israel has intentionally targeted journalists on multiple occasions. For Israel, which is increasingly losing the international war of public opinion, all of this is a means of undermining independent reporting that could further damage its image abroad. It could also obscure the reality on the ground. The war has made independent reporting difficult, with dozens of outlets’ offices destroyed, in addition to journalists being killed. In that vacuum, Hamas and Israel frequently offer dueling narratives that are often impossible to verify.

It’s only the beginning of the cicada eruption. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images Trillions of these noisy insects are set to take to the skies in the first double brood event in 221 years. For the first time in 221 years, this spring will seebillions, if not trillions, of cicadas take to the skies in a rare synchronized event that will transform our ecosystems for years to come. In forests across the United States, two groups, or “broods,” of these noisy insects will crawl out from their underground dwellings to sprout wings, mate, lay eggs, and eventually die. In the Midwest, there’s Brood XIX, which pops up every 13 years, and Brood XIII, which emerges every 17 years and is concentrated in the Southeast. The mass eruption, scientists believe, is strategic, but many mysteries about cicadas remain: Why do their alarm clocks use prime numbers? For that matter, how do they keep time? We’ll explain everything we know about this spectacular double brood event here. Follow along.

Cornelia Li for Vox Why are more and more older people spending their dying years behind bars? In late 2018, Richard Washington sent a memo to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit with the subject line “Notice I am being killed.” The 64-year-old man, who decades earlier was convicted on armed robbery charges, was serving a 63-year prison sentence in Arizona. In his letter, he alleged that the Department of Corrections was refusing to give him medication for his various health issues, which included diabetes, hypertension, and hepatitis C. Because of the lack of treatment, Washington wrote, “My greatest fear is that I’m going to die more sooner than later.” About six weeks later, he was dead. In state after state, prison systems have long been plagued by inadequate health care, resulting in the spread of treatable diseases and, in many cases, preventable deaths behind bars. But a key demographic trend threatens to make that problem even worse: Over the last several decades, America’s prison population has been rapidly aging, and, as in Washington’s case, prisoners’ health needs have become more significant as a result. People who were 55 years old or older made up about 3 percent of the US prison population in 1991; by 2021, they accounted for 15 percent. The total number of older prisoners is also steadily growing, with no signs of abatement: In 2020, there were about 166,000 incarcerated people aged 55 years or older; that number grew to about 178,000 in 2021 and 186,000 in 2022. The graying of America’s incarcerated population is effectively turning the US prison system into a de facto nursing home, leaving hundreds of thousands of older people in its care each year. The result is skyrocketing costs: The Bureau of Prisons’ health care spending on federal inmates rose from $978 million in 2009 to $1.34 billion in 2016, and various state governments have seen similar increases. Still, conditions in American prisons continue to be detrimental to people’s health and often lead to accelerated aging. Prisoners, for example, are much more likely to exhibit signs of cognitive decline, including dementia, at an earlier age than the general population, and one study found that a 59-year-old in prison has the same morbidity rate — that is, how often people get a disease — as a nonincarcerated 75-year-old. “We have facilities that aren’t considered humane,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice. “They’re not places for elderly people who have dementia and diabetes and maybe walkers or wheelchairs.” All of this raises both a moral and practical policy question that lawmakers have to face: Why are we forcing older people to spend their dying years in prison when they can get better care elsewhere? People aren’t just aging behind bars; police are locking up the elderly One of the explanations for the aging prison population is simple: Since the 1970s and the age of mass incarceration — when the American prison population ballooned and gave the United States the distinction of imprisoning more people than any other country in the world — people have been aging behind bars. The other explanation, however, is less obvious: Older people have been getting arrested at higher rates than they used to. In 1991, for example, people who were 55 years of age or older made up only 2 percent of adults who were arrested; by 2021, they made up 8 percent, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that does criminal justice research and advocacy. The Marshall Project also found a similar pattern: Between 2000 and 2020, there was nearly a 30 percent increase in the number of arrests of people over 65, despite the overall number of arrests dropping by nearly 40 percent. That spike is especially surprising because people tend to age out of crime: Recidivism rates for older people are significantly lower than they are for younger people. According to a 2017 report by the United States Sentencing Commission that tracked people for eight years after they were released from prison, nearly 68 percent of people who were under 21 at the time of their release were rearrested. By contrast, just over 13 percent of people over 65 were rearrested. So why are arrests among older people suddenly on the rise? The resurging trend across many American cities and states to further criminalize poverty and impose harsher punishments for petty crimes, including things like shoplifting, is partly to blame because the groups of people who become common targets for police are getting older. “People who are unhoused and people suffering from mental health disorders and substance use disorders are also aging,” said Mike Wessler, the communications director at the Prison Policy Initiative. “If you look across the country right now, we’re obviously seeing efforts to ramp up policing of people who are unhoused, people with untreated mental health disorders, people with substance use disorder. So it’s almost a certainty that in the coming years we are probably going to see this problem get worse.” People experiencing cognitive decline, including those suffering from dementia, can also be especially vulnerable during interactions with police. Henry Hart, a 76-year-old with dementia in Maryland, for example, was arrested when he had what his daughter described as a mental breakdown. During the incident, Hart had grown agitated and hit her, and when she called for paramedics to take him to the hospital, police showed up at the scene instead. Officers ultimately arrested him for assault despite his family members’ pleas. After spending time in jail, Hart’s condition seemed to get notably worse, according to his daughter. “As Maryland’s population ages, experts fear that police will encounter people with dementia more often and without recognizing the condition or knowing how to respond to it,” Baltimore Sun reporters Angela Roberts and Cassidy Jensen wrote. “Arrest or jail time can be especially harmful to people with dementia, given their mental and physical vulnerability, experts say.” There’s also evidence that beefing up law enforcement has had a negative impact on older people. While younger people have become less likely to be arrested for drug-related crimes than in the past, arrests of older people for drug-related offenses have spiked. Between 2000 and 2018, for example, drug-related arrests of people over the age of 50 rose by 92 percent — the fastest increase out of any age group. And while substance use disorder among older people is on the rise, addressing the problem through stricter law enforcement is not a practical solution. “It’s a heck of a lot easier to order the National Guard to go stand on subway platforms than it is to figure out how to expand mental health treatment in the state; than to figure out how to address substance use disorders in the state; than to figure out how to address the housing crisis in the state,” Wessler said. The consequences of an aging prison population Studies have shown that incarcerated people have signs of aging at a faster rate than others as a result of prison conditions, and that each year in prison can shave years off of someone’s life. “Health care behind bars is bad even in the best scenarios,” Wessler said. “And that’s kind of by design in a lot of respects: Prisons are not places that are therapeutic or designed to heal; they are places that are designed to punish.” Infectious diseases tend to disproportionately affect prisoners compared to the general population, and the Covid pandemic in particular showed why prisons are especially dangerous for older people. Deaths of inmates rose by nearly 50 percent in the first year of the pandemic, and while mortality rates increased for prisoners across all ages, older people saw the highest surge in mortality. By contrast, among the general population, it was younger people who saw the highest increase in death rates. From a public policy standpoint, the aging prison population is a failure on multiple fronts. Most importantly, prisons cause people to age more quickly and die prematurely. After all, while so-called “natural” deaths — that is, death from disease or old age — make up the vast majority of deaths behind bars, they often receive little scrutiny despite the fact that many of them have been found to be the result of medical neglect. But it’s also costing states a lot of money — money that is clearly not well spent. In Texas, for example, the state’s prison health care costs increased by more than $250 million between 2012 and 2019, although the prison population actually decreased by 3 percent during that time. The state’s prison population aged 55 or older, on the other hand, had increased by 65 percent during that same period, according to data reviewed by the Texas Tribune. Some lawmakers have noted this is unsustainable. As former state Sen. John Whitmire told the Tribune, “Nobody’s tougher on crime than me, but once you’ve incarcerated a guy past the point that he’s a threat to anybody, I’d like to save that $500,000 to put him in a nursing home as a condition of parole, take that money, and spend it on either other public safety efforts or prison costs.” The system as it is, in other words, isn’t benefiting anyone. It’s both deadlier and more financially costly. And from a moral standpoint, it’s hard for a society to defend these outcomes. “Do we morally think that it is good to have people spend their dying years behind bars, especially for drug crimes from the ’80s and ’90s?” Wessler said. “That strikes me as morally wrong in addition to being bad public policy.” Tougher penalties turn into de facto death sentences In many ways, America’s aging prisons are the expected end result of the tough-on-crime approaches and surge in arrests of the 1980s and 1990s. A study by researchers at the the State University of New York at Albany, the University of Pennsylvania, and the RAND Corporation, found that young people who were locked up in the 1990s spent more time behind bars than any other generation, in large part because of tougher and longer sentences, higher recidivism rates, and escalating punishments for people who are rearrested. And that generation is now aging behind bars, unlikely to ever come out of prison. “These extreme sentence lengths paired with narrow release mechanisms — meaning fewer ways to actually leave the system — led to this huge crisis of older adults in American prisons,” Eisen, from the Brennan Center, said. “Because what you had is more people coming in, people staying for longer, and then fewer avenues for release because of mandatory minimums, because of three strikes [laws], because of life without parole.” While many older people in prison today are being sent there for petty crimes, it’s also true that many others, particularly those serving longer sentences, have been convicted of serious crimes. But regardless of what a person is guilty of, the fate of a death behind bars — which can be the result of inadequate medical care and botched treatments — could itself be seen as a cruel punishment, especially when people no longer pose a threat to society. Take, for example, the case of Walter Jordan, another elderly Arizona prisoner whose story is eerily similar to Richard Washington’s. Jordan, a 67-year-old man who was convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping, was serving a life sentence. In a memo he wrote to a federal judge in 2017, he alleged that the state’s Department of Corrections and its private health care contractor had delayed his treatment for skin cancer. The memo was, in his words, a “notice of impending death.” Jordan wrote that he was in pain and suffering from memory loss. He alleged that other prisoners were also being denied care, and he wrote that as a result of his delayed treatment, he would be “lucky to be alive for 30 days.” Jordan was right: Just over a week later, he was dead. A physician who reviewed his case found that Jordan could have survived had he received adequate care. The situation was “horrific,” the physician wrote. “He suffered excruciating needless pain from cancer that was not appropriately managed in the months prior to his death.” There are more humane approaches. States and the federal government can start, for example, by expanding eligibility for compassionate release, which truncates sentences but tends to be reserved for people with terminal illnesses. Parole — which can sometimes have unintended consequences including strict rules that often result in parolees being sent back to prison — can also be especially beneficial to elderly prisoners who can get better health care outside of prison. And yet, tough-on-crime laws like those recently passed in Louisiana are making it harder for prisoners to be eligible for parole. Governors can also make use of their pardon powers and commute sentences for older prisoners who have shown signs of rehabilitation. And instead of readopting a tough-on-crime approach that will likely result in more arrests of older people, states and the federal government can support social safety net programs that would lift older people out of poverty and homelessness, reducing their odds of being arrested in the first place. America’s jail and prison population peaked in 2008, when more than 2.3 million people were behind bars. And while it has mostly declined since then — especially during Covid, when many prisoners were released as the virus ravaged prisons — it has recently been ticking back up. “We have far too many people in our prisons,” Eisen said. One of the fastest ways to address that problem is to release older people, who generally don’t pose a public safety risk. “This is a population that shouldn’t be behind bars.” But until lawmakers acknowledge that the current prison system is failing some of the most vulnerable people in its care, cases like Washington’s or Jordan’s will become all the more common. And more and more people who are now serving time in an American prison will slowly come to learn that their punishment has morphed into a death sentence.

There’s a significant impediment to maximizing CRISPR’s potential for developing novel therapies: the lack of diversity in genetics research. | Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images The genetic data that underpins CRISPR has a big diversity problem. Medicine has entered a new era in which scientists have the tools to change human genetics directly, creating the potential to treat or even permanently cure diseases by editing a few strands of troublesome DNA. And CRISPR, the gene-editing technology whose creators won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020, is the face of this new normal. CRISPR’s novel harnessing of bacterial proteins to target disease-carrying genes has reshaped medical research over the past decade. While gene-editing itself has been around for more than 30 years, scientists can use CRISPR to edit genomes faster, cheaper, and more precisely than they could with previous gene-editing methods. The method’s novel harnessing of bacterial proteins to target disease-carrying genes has reshaped medical research over the past decade. As a result, investigators have gained far more control over where a gene gets inserted and when it gets turned on. That in turn has opened the door to a new class of better gene therapies — treatments that modify or replace people’s genes to stop a disease. Last December, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first-ever CRISPR-based therapy, designed to treat sickle cell disease. In February, the treatment, called Casgevy, gained approval from the European Commission as well. It joins the dozen or so pre-CRISPR gene therapies that are already available to patients. But there’s a significant impediment to maximizing CRISPR’s potential for developing novel therapies: the lack of diversity in genetics research. For decades, gene therapy has been defined by both its enormous therapeutic potential, and by the limitations imposed by our imprecise knowledge of human genetics. Even as gene-editing methods, including CRISPR, have become more sophisticated over the years, the data in the genetic databases and biobanks that scientists use to find and develop new treatments are still riddled with biases that could exclude communities of color from enjoying the full benefits of innovations like CRISPR. Unless that gap is closed, CRISPR’s promise won’t be fully fulfilled. Gaps in research Developing effective gene therapies depends on growing our knowledge of the human genome. Data on genes and their correlation with disease have already changed the way cancer researchers think about how to design drugs, and which patients to match with which drug. Scientists have long known that certain genetic mutations that disrupt regular cell functions can cause cancer to develop, and they have tailored drugs to neutralize those mutations. Genetic sequencing technology has sped that progress, allowing researchers to analyze the genetics of tumor samples from cancer patients after they’ve participated in clinical trials to understand why some individuals respond better than others to a drug. In a clinical trial of the colorectal cancer drug cetuximab, investigators found retrospectively that tumors with a mutation in the KRAS gene (which helps govern cell growth) did not respond to treatment. As a result, clinicians are now asked to confirm that patients do not have the mutation in the KRAS gene before they prescribe that particular drug. New drugs have been developed to target those mutations in the KRAS gene. It’s a step-by-step process from the discovery of these disease-related genes to the crafting of drugs that neutralize them. With CRISPR now available to them, many researchers believe that they can speed this process up. The technology is based on — and named after — a unique feature in the bacterial immune system that the organism uses to defend itself against viruses. CRISPR is found naturally in bacteria: It’s short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, and it functions like a mugshot database for bacteria, containing snippets of genetic code from foreign viruses that have tried to invade in the past. When new infections occur, the bacteria deploys RNA segments that scan for viral DNA that matches the mugshots. Special proteins are then dispatched to chop the virus up and neutralize it. Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images The headquarters at CRISPR Therapeutics, which received the first FDA approval for a treatment that uses the CRISPR gene-editing technology. To develop CRISPR into a biotech platform, this protein-RNA complex was adapted from bacteria and inserted into human and animal cells, where it proved similarly effective at searching for and snipping strands of DNA. Using CRISPR in humans requires a few adjustments. Scientists have to teach the system to search through human DNA, which means that it will need a different “mugshot database” than what the bacteria originally needed. Critical to harnessing this natural process is artificial RNA, known as a guide RNA. These guide RNAs are designed to match genes found in humans. In theory, these guide RNAs search for and find a specific DNA sequence associated with a specific disease. The special protein attached to the guide RNA then acts like molecular scissors to cut the problematic gene. CRISPR’s therapeutic potential was evident in the breakthrough sickle cell treatment approved by the FDA late last year. What made sickle cell such an attractive target is not just that it affects around 20 million people or more worldwide, but that it is caused by a mutation in a single gene, which makes it simpler to study than a disease caused by multiple mutations. Sickle cell is one of the most common disorders worldwide that is caused by a mutation in a single gene. It was also the first to be characterized at a genetic level, making it a promising candidate for gene therapy. In sickle cell disease, a genetic mutation distorts the shape of a person’s hemoglobin, which is the protein that helps red blood cells carry and deliver oxygen from the lungs to tissues throughout the body. For people with sickle cell disease, their red blood cells look like “sickles” instead of the normal discs. As a result, they can get caught in blood vessels, blocking blood flow and causing issues like pain, strokes, infections, and death. Since the 1990s, clinicians have observed that sickle cell patients with higher levels of fetal hemoglobin tend to live longer. A series of genome-wide association studies from 2008 pointed to the BCL11A gene as a possible target for therapeutics. These association studies establish the relationships between specific genes and diseases, identifying candidates for CRISPR gene editing. Casgevy’s new CRISPR-derived treatment targets a gene called BCL11A. Inactivating this gene stops the mutated form of hemoglobin from being made and increases the production of normal non-sickled fetal hemoglobin, which people usually stop making after birth. Out of the 45 patients who have received Casgevy since the start of the trials, 28 of the 29 eligible patients who have stayed on long enough to have their results analyzed reported that they have been free of severe pain crises. Once the treatment moves out of clinical settings, its exact effects can vary. And if the underlying data set doesn’t reflect the diversity of the patient population, the gene therapies derived from them might not work the same for every person. The nuances of genetics Sickle cell disease as the first benefactor of CRISPR therapy makes sense because it’s a relatively simple disorder that has been studied for a long time. The genetic mutation causing it was found in 1956. But ironically, the same population that could benefit most from Casgvey may miss out on the full benefits of future breakthrough treatments. Scientists developing CRISPR treatments depend on what’s known as a reference genome, which is meant to be a composite representation of a “normal” human genome that can be used to identify genes of interest to target for treating a disease. However, most of the available reference genomes are representative of white Europeans. That’s a problem because not everybody’s DNA is identical: Recent sequencing of African genomes shows that they have 10 percent more DNA than the standard reference genome available to researchers. Researchers have theorized that this is because most modern humans came out of Africa. As populations diverged and reconcentrated, genetic bottlenecks happened, which resulted in a loss of genetic variation compared to the original population. Most genome-wide association studies are also biased in the same way: They have a lot of data from white people and not a lot from people of color. So while those studies can help identify genes of importance that could lead to effective treatments for the population whose genes make up the majority of the reference data — i.e., white people — the same treatments may not work as well for other nonwhite populations. “Broadly, there’s been an issue with human genetics research — there’s been a major under-representation of people of African ancestry, both in the US and elsewhere,” said Sarah Tishkoff, professor of genetics and biology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Without including these diverse populations, we’re missing out on that knowledge that could perhaps result in better therapeutics or better diagnostics.” Even in the case of the notorious breast cancer gene BRCA1, where a single gene mutation can have a serious clinical impact and is associated with an increased risk of developing cancer, underlying mutations within the gene “tend to differ in people of different ancestries,” Tishkoff said. These differences, whether large or small, can matter. Although the vast majority of human genomes are the same, a small fraction of the letters making up our genes can differ from person to person and from population to population, with potentially significant medical implications. Sometimes during sequencing, genetic variations of “unknown significance” appear. These variants could be clinically important, but because of the lack of diversity in previous research populations, no one has studied them closely enough to understand their impact. “If all the research is being done in people of predominantly European ancestry, you’re only going to find those variants,” Tishkoff said. Tammy Ljungblad/The Kansas City Star/Tribune News Service via Getty Images A patient receives treatment for sickle-cell disease in 2018, prior to the FDA’s approval in late 2023 of a new CRISPR-based therapy for the condition. Those limitations affect scientists up and down the developmental pipeline. For researchers using CRISPR technology in preclinical work, the lack of diversity in the genome databases can make it harder to identify the possible negative effect of such genetic variation on the treatments they’re developing. Sean Misek, a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, started developing a project with the goal of investigating the differences in the genetic patterns of tumors from patients of European descent compared to patients of African descent. CRISPR has become a versatile tool. Not only can it be used for treatments, but it can also be used for diagnostics and basic research. He and his colleagues intended to use CRISPR to screen for those differences because it can evaluate the effects of multiple genes at once, as opposed to the traditional method of testing one gene at a time. “We know individuals of different ancestry groups have different overall clinical responses to cancer treatments,” Misek said. “Individuals of recent African descent, for example, have worse outcomes than individuals of European descent, which is a problem that we were interested in trying to understand more.” What they encountered instead was a roadblock. When Misek’s team tried to design CRISPR guides, they found that their guides matched the genomes in the cells of people with European and East Asian ancestry, whose samples made up most of the reference genome, but not on cells from people of South Asian or African ancestry, who are far less represented in databases. In combination with other data biases in cancer research, the guide RNA mismatch has made it more difficult to investigate the tumor biology of non-European patients. Genetic variations across ancestry groups not only affect whether CRISPR technology works at all, but they can also lead to unforeseen side effects when the tool makes cuts in places outside of the intended genetic target. Such side effects of “off-target” gene edits could theoretically include cancer. “A big part of developing CRISPR therapy is trying to figure out if there are off-targets. Where? And if they exist, do they matter?” said Daniel Bauer, an attending physician at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. To better predict potential off-target edits, Bauer collaborated with Luca Pinello, associate professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who had helped develop a tool called CRISPRme that makes projections based on personal and population-level variations in genetics. To test it, they examined the guide RNA being used for sickle cell disease treatment, and found an off-target edit almost exclusively present in cells donated by a patient of African ancestry. It is currently unclear if this off-target edit detected by the CRISPRme tool has any negative consequences. When the FDA approved the sickle-cell therapy in December 2023, regulators required a post-marketing study to look into off-target effects. Any off-target edits affecting a person’s blood should be easily detected in the blood cells, and drawing blood is easier to do than collecting cells from an internal organ, for example. The genetic variant where the off-target effect occurred can be found in approximately every 1 in 10 people with African ancestry. “The fact that we actually were able to find a donor who carried this variant was kind of luck,” Bauer said. “If the cells we were using were only of European ancestry, it would’ve been even harder to find.” “Most of these [off-target] effects probably won’t cause any problems,” he said. “But I think we also have these great technologies, so that’s part of our responsibility to look as carefully as we can.” To CRISPR or not to CRISPR These issues recur again and again as investigators hunt for novel treatments. Katalin Susztak, professor of medicine and genetics at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks one promising candidate for a future CRISPR therapy is a standout gene for kidney disease: APOL1. Researchers identified the gene when they looked into kidney disease risk in African Americans. While genome-wide association studies turned up thousands of distinct genes increasing risk for people of European ancestry, in African Americans, this single gene was responsible for “3 to 5 times higher risk of kidney disease in patients,” said Susztak. The APOL1 variant is common among African Americans because it protects people from developing African sleeping sickness, which is spread by the Tsetse fly present across much of the continent. This is similar to the story of the sickle cell mutation, which can protect people from malaria. “The variant is maybe only 5,000 years old, so this variant has not arisen in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else. Just in West Africa,” Susztak said. “But because of the slave trades, West Africans were brought to the United States, so millions of people in the United States have this variant.” The variant also predisposes people to develop cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, and COVID-related disease, “which maybe explains why there was an increased incidence of deaths in African Americans during COVID than in Europeans,” Susztak said. “APOL1 is potentially a very interesting target [for CRISPR] because the disease association is strong.” A CRISPR treatment for kidney disease is currently being investigated, but using the tool comes with complications. Cutting the APOL1 gene would set off an immune response, Susztak noted, so they will have to somehow prevent undesirable side effects, or find a related, but editable gene, like they did with sickle cell. An alternative RNA-based strategy utilizing CRISPR is also in the works. DNA needs to be transcribed into a messenger RNA sequence first before it can be turned into proteins. Instead of permanently altering the genome, RNA editing alters the sequence of RNAs, which can then change what proteins are produced. The effects are less permanent, however, lasting for a few months instead of forever — which can be advantageous for treating temporary medical conditions. And it may turn out that gene therapy is simply not the right approach to the problem. Sometimes, a more conventional approach still works best. Susztak said that a small molecule drug developed by Vertex — which works similarly to most drugs except special classes like gene therapies or biologics — to inhibit the function of the APOL1 protein has enjoyed positive results in early clinical trials. An outlook on the future of CRISPR Even with these limitations, more CRISPR treatments are coming down the pike. As of early last year, more than 200 people have been treated with experimental CRISPR therapies for cancers, blood disorders, infections, and more. In the developmental pipeline is a CRISPR-based therapeutic from Intellia Therapeutics that treats transthyretin amyloidosis, a rare condition affecting the function of the heart tissues and nerves. The drug has performed well in early trials and is now recruiting participants for a Phase III study. Another CRISPR drug from Intellia for hereditary angioedema, a condition that causes severe swelling throughout the body, is slated to enter Phase III later this year. As the CRISPR boom continues, some research groups are slowly improving the diversity of their genetic sources. The All of Us program from the National Institutes of Health, which aims to find the biological, environmental, and lifestyle factors that contribute to health, has analyzed 245,000 genomes to date, over 40 percent of which came from participants who were not of European ancestry. They found new genetic markers for diabetes that have never been identified before. Then there’s the Human Pangenome project, which aims to create a reference genome that captures more global diversity. The first draft of its proposal was released last May. Another project called the PAGE study, funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, is working to include more ancestrally diverse populations in genome-wide association studies. Getty Images/Westend61 New projects are underway to gather genetic data from underrepresented people and improve scientists’ ability to develop effective CRISPR therapies. But at the current pace, experts predict that it will take years to reach parity in our genetic databases. And the scientific community must also build trust with the communities it’s trying to help. The US has a murky history with medical ethics, especially around race. Take the Tuskegee experiment that charted the progression of syphilis in Black American men while hiding the true purpose of the study from the participants and withholding their ability to seek treatment when it became available, or the controversy over Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells, which were taken and used in research without her consent. Those are just two prominent historical abuses that have eroded trust between minority communities and the country’s medical system, Tishkoff said. That history has made it more difficult to collect samples from marginalized communities and add them to these critical data sets. Where the research is being done, where the clinical trials are being held, as well as who’s doing the research, can all have an impact on which patients participate. The Human Genetics & Genomics Workforce Survey Report published by the American Society of Human Genetics in 2022 found that 67 percent of the genomic workforce identified as white. Add in the financial burden of developing new treatments when using a reference genome, or a pre-made biobank from past efforts to collect and organize a large volume of biological samples, saves time and costs. In the race to bring CRISPR treatments to market, those shortcuts offered valuable efficiency to drug makers. What this means is that the “first-generation” of CRISPR therapeutics might therefore be blunter instruments than they might otherwise be. However, if improvements can be made to make sure the source genomes reflect a wider range of people, Pinello believes that later generations of CRISPR will be more personalized and therefore more effective for more people. Finding the genes and making drugs that work is, of course, momentous — but ultimately, that’s only half the battle. The other worry physicians like Susztak have is whether patients will be able to afford and access these innovative treatments. There is still an overwhelming racial disparity in clinical trial enrollment. Studies have found that people of color are more likely to suffer from chronic illness and underuse medications like insulin compared to their white counterparts. Gene therapies easily rack up price tags in the millions, and insurance companies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, are still trying to figure out how to pay for them. “Because it’s the pharmaceutical industry, if they don’t turn around profit, if they cannot test the drug, or if people are unwilling to take it, then this inequity is going to be worsened,” said Susztak. “We are essentially going to be creating something that makes things worse even though we are trying to help.”

Rihanna at the 2015 Met Gala. | J. Countess/FilmMagic Turns out the first Monday in May is the perfect venue for celebrity image-making. On Monday night, some of the biggest celebrities in the country, dressed in their finest and most outrageous couture, will assemble at the steps of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the biggest red carpet event of the year. They’ll enter the museum for a high-profile celebration of fashion — sponsored by TikTok this year — that remains entirely out of sight of the public’s gaze, so that all we see will be the arrival of the beautiful and wealthy. This is the Met Gala, and for an event that is theoretically just for fashion nerds and doesn’t even get televised inside, it has a remarkable cultural cachet. The Gala, which falls on the first Monday of May, purportedly celebrates the Anna Wintour Costume Center’s keystone exhibit every year. It’s overseen by the Center’s eponymous queen: Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. This year, the exhibit is called “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” and features some of the museum’s oldest and most fragile garments. Guests have accordingly been asked to follow the dress code “Garden of Time,” after a 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard, with moody florals, clock motifs, and even outstanding archival pieces all expected to fit the theme. Wintour notoriously guards the guest list, but Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, and Chris Hemsworth are all celebrity co-chairs of the party. This year, exploding protests over the war in Gaza and a possible strike by Condé Nast workers also threatens to cast a shadow on the rarefied gathering. When the Met Gala was first instituted in 1948, it would not have boasted such an A-list roster of hosts, nor such a trendy corporate sponsor (albeit one currently in crisis). The Gala has always been glamorous, but it used to be a local event, primarily a showcase for the society ladies of the Upper East Side. It took decades of careful strategizing and alliance-building with Hollywood to make the Met Gala the pop cultural phenomenon it is today. Now, the Met Gala shines because it is an unparalleled occasion for celebrity image-building. It is a showcase for both the illusion of accessibility and unreachable glamour at the heart of modern celebrity. Here’s how it got there. How the Met Gala went from midnight supper to opium-scented art show to celebrity showcase Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images Diana Vreeland with Ralph Lauren at the 1984 Met Gala. The Met’s Costume Institute was born out of the Museum of Costume Art, a library devoted to the art of theatrical costumes. In 1946, Lord & Taylor president Dorothy Shaver decided to bring the collection to the Met. Fashion, she felt, needed the cultural power that comes from allying with a major museum. It needed its history preserved and its present recognized to be respected as a major and vital art form. The Met agreed to take the collection — with the caveat that the American fashion industry would be responsible for raising the funds for the Costume Institute’s entire annual operating budget. The Met Gala was conceived out of this grim necessity. At the time, the party was planned by publicist Eleanor Lambert, and it didn’t even take place at the Met. It was a midnight breakfast hosted at Manhattan institutions like the Waldorf Astoria, Central Park, and the Rainbow Room. It was a glamorous affair, but it was for local society and fashion insiders only. In 1974, Diana Vreeland arrived at the Met as special consultant for the Costume Institute from Vogue. There, she had been editor-in-chief and was fired, according to rumor, for refusing to mind her budget. Rumor also had it that New York society royalty Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Babe Paley campaigned for her to take the new post. Vreeland brought with her a new edge. She introduced the concept of linking the gala to an Institute exhibit via a theme, the first one being “The World of Balenciaga.” Her parties were lavish and romantic. “There was evocative music and sometimes even fragrance was pumped into the air,” so that “regardless of the fashions being presented, it always felt like a delicious opium den,” recalled designer Steven Stolman in Town and Country in 2018. The opium was sometimes close to literal. New York magazine reported in 2005 that Vreeland liked to use a signature perfume in the galleries for each party, and for a 1980 exhibit on China, Vreeland scented the air with the YSL eau de toilette Opium. When guests complained, she explained that the fragrance was needed to create the appropriate air of “languor.” Along with instituting the iconic theme, Vreeland first brought celebrities to the Met Gala. Under her watch, major popular artists including Andy Warhol, Diana Ross, and Cher rubbed shoulders alongside politicians like Henry Kissinger. After Vreeland’s death in 1989, the fate of the Gala was up in the air. Wintour was brought in to host for the first time in 1995, shortly after her arrival as Vogue’s editor-in-chief. The next year, however, the honors went to Wintour’s rival Elizabeth Tilberis, fellow British expat and editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. It was Tilberis, in many ways, who created the first modern Gala. Tilberis’s Met Gala was sponsored by Dior, which had just named a newly ascendant John Galliano artistic director. Diana, Princess of Wales, attended that year, fresh off her divorce from now-King Charles, appearing in a Galliano-designed blue satin slip gown. The look caused a sensation. Richard Corkery/NY Daily News via Getty Images Princess Diana in her iconic Met Gala look in 1996. The dress, tame by the standards of today, represented Diana freeing herself from the strictures of royal life with a slinky, negligée-inspired look that surely would have been frowned upon by Queen Elizabeth. For Diana, the gown was a piece of image-making that allowed her to make a statement without having to say a word. For Galliano and Dior, it proved their cultural relevancy and their ability to make clothes that spoke for the wearer. For the Met Gala itself, the moment was a breakthrough. It showed how important the Met could be when it came to both fashion and celebrity: a place where two symbiotic institutions could meet and be celebrated in the best possible light. The Met Gala is highly public and highly exclusive. That’s a potent combination. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Anna Wintour on the Met steps, for the 2023 Met Gala in New York City. After Tilberis died of cancer in 1999, Anna Wintour took over the Met Gala on a permanent basis. And Anna Wintour understands the value of star power. Wintour has always had a canny sense of how closely fashion and celebrity are intertwined, and how much each depends upon the other. Under her reign, the cover stars of Vogue went from models to actresses. The Met Gala has followed suit. It’s become a coveted celebrity ticket — not least because going to the Met Gala and, ideally, serving as a co-host gives you a better shot of landing that Vogue cover. Wintour also makes sure that she and the Gala retain control over just how all those celebrities make their fashion statements. Frequently, she’s the one who matches celebrities with designers. You can track the slow evolution of the Met Gala brand under Wintour’s watch. In 2005, a mere six years into the Wintour era and less than a decade after Diana’s newsmaking moment, New York magazine allowed that Wintour’s camp “like[d] to think of the Costume Institute Ball, held this year on May 2, as a sort of Oscars for the East Coast.” By 2019, 20 years into Wintour’s reign, that nascent ambition was now conventional wisdom. The Sydney Morning Herald declared the Met “the fashion Oscars” without irony. Wintour was helped along in her quest for relevance by the advent of streaming video and social media, both of which helped reinvigorate red carpet coverage. It was common now for pop culture die-hards to follow along on the internet with celebrity arrivals at major award shows and events, and to share their opinions of the fashion on Twitter and Instagram. Celebrities add to the intimacy of the affair by letting viewers into their prep process in streams and Instagram stories. If modern technology is central to the Gala’s relevance, it also provides a venue for Wintour to show off the Gala as a financial powerhouse. Every year the Gala has a new heavyweight corporate sponsor, frequently from the tech sphere. (This year’s is TikTok; in the past they’ve included Instagram, Apple, and Amazon.) It still makes enough money to provide the Costume Center’s entire annual operating budget. Last year, the gala brought in almost $22 million, with tickets selling for $75,000 each and tables for brands to buy starting at $350,000. Karwai Tang/Getty Images Mike Coppola/Getty Images NDZ/Star Max/GC Images Kim Kardashian in Marilyn Monroe’s gown at the 2022 Met Gala. The Met Gala is now the event where celebrities come to reveal a new image or refine an old one, and where the public follows along on the internet with bated breath. Zendaya announced her transition from Disney star to adult actress by acting out a Cinderella transformation on the Met steps in 2019. Rihanna proved she had the fashion cred to read a theme with nuance and the charisma necessary to pull off a dramatic look when she showed up to the 2015 Met Gala, themed to the influence of Chinese fashion on the West, in an enormous imperial yellow fur cape from Chinese couturier Guo Pei. Kim Kardashian built parallels between herself and Marilyn Monroe when she arrived at the 2022 Gala in Marilyn’s iconic “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress. The Met Gala continues to fascinate in part because of the alchemy Wintour has created: an assemblage of dozens of celebrities at the height of their fame, taking full advantage of fashion as an art form for image-making. Yet at the same time, the Gala remains a highly alluring mystery. Only Vogue is allowed to take photos inside the party, with the occasional highly curated exception (many attendees have made a tradition of bathroom selfies, where we see a Mad Libs-y melange of A-listers that only add to the party’s mystique). The event itself is not televised. It is not livestreamed. It is not accessible to anyone who is not explicitly invited, which includes most of us. The Gala is thus both highly visible and still a black box — no small feat in an age of overexposure. It allows celebrities to speak to their public without words and then vanish off again into the night, unknowable and unreachable, the way almost nothing else in the social media era does. Sometimes, though, the heady, decadent fantasy of the Met Gala can become a liability. This year, protests over the war in Gaza are raging across the city as the museum prepares for the Gala, with police arresting dozens of student activists on college campuses. Meanwhile, the Condé Nast union, locked in a bitter contract dispute with company management, is threatening one of Condé’s most lavish showcases with the possibility of a strike on the day of the Gala. Since Condé Nast includes Vogue, the potential for disarray at the Gala itself is high. It remains to be seen whether the public can remain enamored with celebrity opulence when real-world concerns are just outside, waiting to crash the party.

Periodical cicadas in Takoma Park, Maryland, that emerged in 2021 as part of Brood X. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The arrival of Brood XIX and Brood XIII will send shockwaves through forest food webs. This spring is a very good time to be a bird. In forests across the Midwest and Southeast, the ground is about to erupt with billions of loud, protein-packed cicadas. They’ll buzz about for a few weeks as they search for mates, providing snacks for pretty much every living creature in the forest, from songbirds and swans to frogs and even fish. This is an especially big year for these red-eyed bugs: Brood XIX and Brood XIII — which pop up every 13 years and 17 years, respectively — are emerging at once. The last time such an event happened was the spring of 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president. It will be hundreds of years before it happens again. While the insect explosion will be brief, it will shape forests for years to come. The binge-fest that birds enjoy during these periods supersize their families and, in turn, shift the eating and hunting patterns of many other species. These effects send ripples throughout the ecosystem. As one recent study put it, pulses of periodical cicadas can “rewire” entire forest food webs. Call it the butterfly cicada effect. Why billions of cicadas erupt all at once For most of their lives — either 13 or 17 years, depending on the brood — periodical cicadas live several inches underground, slurping up sap from plant roots with their straw-like mouths. Then, when the soil temperature hits about 64 degrees Fahrenheit, they emerge, typically after sunset. Cicadas in more southern states, like Alabama, usually emerge in April or early May, whereas those in colder states like Illinois tend to appear later in the spring. The teenage insects then march up plants, trees, and fences, where they metamorphose into winged adults. That’s when giant groups of males start singing loudly to attract females (you know, lady bugs). During these events, a single acre of land can have more than 1 million cicadas on it. That’s roughly 2,700 pounds of bugs. Sean Rayford/Getty Images A Brood XIX cicada sheds its exoskeleton on a tree in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on May 1. Sean Rayford/Getty Images Here, two adult cicadas from this year’s Brood XIX are preparing to find mates. This mass eruption, scientists believe, is strategic. “They effectively satiate their predators,” Louie Yang, an entomologist at the University of California Davis, told me a few years ago, when the famous Brood X emerged. The cicada defense strategy is to flood the forests so that predators become so full they literally can’t stomach another bite. That leaves plenty of insects left to mate and lay eggs that will become the next generation of cicadas. This approach seems to work for cicadas, and it’s an absolute delight for birds. Birds lose their minds during cicada outbreaks Birds can be fussy about their food. Some prefer plants, like the trumpeter swan, while others specialize in seeds or small insects, like chickadees. Those preferences get tossed out during cicada explosions. The birds stop what they’re doing and go to town on the bug buffet. During the Brood X emergence in 2021, researchers documented more than 80 different avian species feeding on cicadas, including small birds that couldn’t fit them in their mouths. Dan Gruner A grackle eating a cicada. “We saw chickadees — tiny, tiny little birds — grab the cicada and drag it to the ground with their body weight and then peck it apart,” said Zoe Getman-Pickering, an ecologist at University of Massachusetts Amherst, who led the research. She also saw purple martins, which typically catch small insects like winged ants and flies from the air, go after loads of cicadas. “There was one family of purple martins that got 23 cicadas into their nest in three hours or so,” Getman-Pickering said. This feeding frenzy can seriously benefit some birds. Simply put, more food can lead to more babies. “Following emergences, you do tend to get an increase in a lot of the apparent avian predator populations,” Walt Koenig, an ornithologist at Cornell University and research zoologist emeritus at UC Berkeley, told me in 2021. One analysis he co-authored, based on 37 years of data, linked cicada eruptions to a population bump in a number of species including red-headed woodpeckers and common grackles. Remarkably, many of these knock-on effects lasted for years, Koenig said. The number of blue jays, for example, was significantly higher even three years after the cicada eruptions. “These results indicate that, at least in some species, the effects of cicada emergences are detectable years after the event itself,” Koenig and his co-authors wrote. Fat caterpillars, rejoice It’s not just birds that are benefitting. During big emergences, avian predators are eating so many cicadas that they eat much less of everything else — including caterpillars. That means caterpillars get a rare reprieve from the constant threat of attack, at least from birds. Researchers have actually measured this. In the years surrounding Brood X, Getman-Pickering and her collaborators filled forests in Maryland with fake caterpillars made of clay. They then measured how many of them had signs of bird strikes — beak marks indicating that birds tried to eat them. Martha Weiss A caterpillar made of clay with signs of bird strikes. In May, when Brood X was emerging, the portion of caterpillars with strike marks fell dramatically, from about 30 percent in a typical year to below 10 percent during the emergence, according to her study, published in 2023. She also looked at real caterpillars. Remarkably, the number of them roughly doubled in the forests she studied during the emergence, relative to the two following years. “It was pretty staggering how many caterpillars that we saw,” Getman-Pickering said. A lot of them were extra plump, too, like the spiny larvae of the dagger moth. When there are few cicadas, the juiciest caterpillars are often picked off first; they’re much easier for birds to spot. But during cicada eruptions, caterpillars are free to eat and grow at their leisure. “The biggest, most visible caterpillars benefited immensely from the release from predation,” she said. John Lill A plump caterpillar in the genus Acronicta that the research team found in the forest. Trees might prefer life without cicadas A surge in caterpillars, meanwhile, has effects of its own. These animals famously eat leaves. So when birds eat fewer of them, the cicadas chew their way through more of the forest canopy. Getman-Pickering’s recent study measured this too: In the summer of 2021, after Brood X debuted, oak trees experienced “a spike in cumulative leaf damage,” the paper states. A doubling of the number of caterpillars meant a doubling of the damage, she said. It’s not clear what that ultimately means for forest health. Previous studies have shown that cicadas themselves, however, can harm trees. After breeding, females carve slits into branches and lay eggs, which often damages the wood. Research by Koenig, of Cornell, found that oak trees produced fewer acorns in a year with a cicada emergence, and in the following year. Older studies have also shown that emergences can slow the rate of tree growth. The long-term picture is hazier. Unpublished data from Karin Berghardt and Kelsey McGurrin, researchers at the University of Maryland, shows that trees seem to bounce back from the harm caused by egg-laying. There’s also some research suggesting that cicada carcasses could actually fertilize the forest floor. Ultimately, what all of these studies show is that cicadas can transform entire ecosystems in just a few short weeks. Think about that the next time you walk through the woods: The birds, the butterflies, the trees themselves are all shaped, in some way, by one very weird bug.