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Scientists just discovered a sea creature as large as two basketball courts. Here’s what it looks like.

vox.com

A view from above of the newly discovered “mega” coral in the Solomon Islands. | Seve Spence/National Geographic Pristine Seas In the warm blue waters of the Solomon Islands, an island chain in the South Pacific, lies one of the world’s largest sea creatures. Roughly the size of two basketball courts, it’s neither a whale nor a giant squid. It is a single piece of coral. On Wednesday, a team of researchers and filmmakers exploring the Solomon Islands revealed that they found what they claim is the world’s largest individual coral colony. The coral, a communal organism comprising millions of animals called polyps, is 34 meters wide and 32 meters long — and so large it can be seen from space. A typical coral reef is made of many different coral colonies, most of which are genetically distinct, whereas this is just one individual. In new photos shared by the research team, the coral, a species known as Pavona clavus, looks like a lumpy brown mound covered in knobs. Closer views reveal bits of yellow, green, and purple. Given its size and the slow speed at which corals grow, this individual is likely several centuries old. “It’s a dream to see something unique like this,” Manu San Félix, an underwater photographer and marine biologist who first saw the coral last month in the Solomon Islands, told Vox. “When Napoleon was alive, this thing was here.” San Félix discovered the coral while filming near an island called Malaulalo for an ongoing National Geographic expedition. The expedition, a collaboration with the Solomon Islands government, is part of National Geographic’s Pristine Seas project, which aims to help countries establish more marine parks, in part by documenting sea life. Malaulalo is mostly uninhabited and its waters are largely unexplored, according to Dennis Marita, a member of the Po’onapaina Tribe of Ulawa. The tribe oversees Malaulalo’s marine territory. “This is something huge for our community,” Marita, who’s also the director of culture at the Solomon Islands’s ministry of culture and tourism, said in a press conference Tuesday. No other coral in the public record is larger than this one, though it’s possible that there are bigger colonies in remote stretches of the ocean that have yet to be discovered. The previous record-holder for the world’s largest coral was a colony in American Samoa that was roughly 22 meters wide. “Many of the world’s coral reefs are remote and not well explored,” Stacy Jupiter, executive director of marine conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society, who was not involved in this expedition, told Vox. Humans have only surveyed about 5 percent of the planet’s marine realm, she mentioned. “So it is not surprising at all that we continue to make new discoveries, even of large creatures,” Jupiter said. “Beacon of hope” The discovery comes at a time when coral reefs around the world are vanishing. Climate change is warming the oceans, and warm water kills corals. Coral gets its color and much of its food from symbiotic algae that live inside polyps. When seawater gets too warm, that algae disappears, and the coral turns white — or “bleaches.” Bleached corals are essentially starving to death. Coral reefs globally are facing the most extensive bleaching crisis on record. Three-quarters of the world’s coral reefs have experienced enough ocean heat to cause bleaching since early 2023, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Many corals have died. Meanwhile, new research suggests that more than 40 percent of hard corals — those that build reefs, like the recently discovered colony in the Solomon Islands — are at risk of extinction. This is a problem, to put it lightly. Reefs dampen waves that hit the shoreline during hurricanes, they are home to a significant portion of commercial fish that people eat, and they are the engine of tourism economies in many coastal regions. Hundreds of millions of people depend on coral reefs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the National Geographic team discovered a lot of dead coral in the shallows of the Solomon Islands, likely due to excessive heat in the ocean, said Molly Timmers, a marine ecologist and the expedition’s lead scientist. That was discouraging, she said. In the face of that loss, this discovery was a “beacon of hope,” Timmers told Vox. “It’s like, holy crap! This is amazing!” Large coral colonies provide homes for marine critters like crabs, snails, and small fish. More importantly, they seed the ocean with baby corals when they spawn, or reproduce, helping damaged sections of reef recover. Plus, this particular coral may be resilient to stress, including excessive marine heat. The research team estimates that it’s between 300 and 500 years old, meaning it’s lived through multiple global bleaching events and survived. Unlike some of the coral closer to shore, this individual — which was more than 10 meters deep — appeared healthy, perhaps because it was in deeper, cooler water or because it has some built-in genetic tolerance to heat. So the spawn it produces could be resilient too. “Anything old is really good at surviving,” said Maria Beger, a marine ecologist at the University of Leeds, who was not involved in the discovery. Discovering a hulking colony of coral is not, by itself, all that impressive, said Beger. To support marine life and withstand threats like climate change, it’s more important that reefs have a diverse array of coral species in all shapes and sizes, rather than one big one. “At the same time, if a report like this gets people excited about coral reefs,” she said, “maybe that’s a good thing.” The discovery could also help the Solomon Islands conserve their waters more effectively, Marita, of the ministry of culture and tourism, told Vox. While his tribe has been informally conserving Malaulalo for a decade on its own, he said, the island would benefit from an official marine protected area recognized by the Solomon Islands government. Marita has been campaigning to make that happen. “This will certainly boost the conservation initiative that we have been working on,” he told Vox, referring to the discovery. “This mega coral will help bring much-needed visibility and recognition from the government and other stakeholders. This is really a gain for us.”

How People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” entered its flop era

8 h

vox.com

John Krasinski attends the UK premiere of “IF” on May 7, 2024, in London, England. | Karwai Tang/WireImage This week, a number of social media users were, once again, disappointed by the selection of a certain man to a coveted position. Actor John Krasinski — yes, Jim from The Office — was given the title of People’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” It’s a choice that’s less egregious than genuinely perplexing. It’s not that Krasinski isn’t an objectively handsome man. In his most recent television role — on the Prime Video show Jack Ryan, which ended in 2023 – he played a buff, butt-kicking CIA agent. It’s more that his career has rarely ever required him to display any sort of sex appeal. His most crush-worthy role to date was arguably more than a decade ago on The Office as the funny and approachable Jim Halpert. Since then, the most female attention he gets on social media is when he’s posing with his wife, actress Emily Blunt, on a red carpet. Plus, it’s not exactly his year for visible hotness: His work in 2024 was almost entirely behind the scenes, directing the children’s film IF and producing A Quiet Place: Day One. Introducing PEOPLE’s 2024 #SexiestManAlive, @JohnKrasinski. ? Pick up your issue on newsstands this week. https://t.co/H792MltVUC ?: Julian Ungano pic.twitter.com/2rLAbwpRBx— People (@people) November 13, 2024 All this to say, in a pop culture landscape practically infested with “internet boyfriends,” Krasinski was a baffling choice. Amid look-alike competitions being held for Hollywood’s hottest young men across the United States and Europe — your Timmy Chalamets, your Paul Mescals — the lack of excitement around this issue has never felt so loud. What does it even mean to be People’s sexiest man alive in 2024, if it means anything at all? And why are we still so invested? For readers who witnessed Patrick Dempsey receive this honor just last year, it must be pointed out that the “Sexiest Man Alive” issue didn’t always feel this arbitrary and untimely. From its (now-cursed) inaugural issue in 1985 with box-office star Mel Gibson up until Channing Tatum’s spread in 2012, the titular “man” felt representative of the tastes of the average (straight white) woman. Plus, it was often a star who was dominating at the box office. In the past, the cover served as the ultimate advertising vehicle for “it” guys who were either newly cementing themselves as full-fledged movie stars, like Brad Pitt in 1995 and George Clooney in 1997, or major celebs reassuring the public that they were still hot commodities, like Harrison Ford in 1998. While these selections have been overwhelmingly white, at least they once felt relevant. People is a stalwart in an industry weathering difficult times, and this special issue is arguably one of the things keeping the magazine on newsstands. According to Digiday, the sexiest man issue has “a rate base, or guaranteed circulation, of 3.7 million, compared to a regular issue of the magazine, with a rate base of 3.5 million.” Strategically published during the fourth quarter when consumers are doing Thanksgiving and Black Friday shopping, it’s proven to be a huge cash cow for People’s parent company, Dotdash Meredith. In the 2010s, though, the issue started to receive some blowback — or, more accurately, the advent of social media allowed these complaints to be expressed in a hypervisible way. It wasn’t just that only two men of color, Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves, had received the award until 2016, when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson graced the cover. The choosing of celebrities like Adam Levine, a rockstar with a reputation for being a so-called “douchebag,” raised eyebrows in 2013 and also performed relatively poorly on newsstands. His co-star on The Voice Blake Shelton has maybe done the most damage to the issue’s reputation. The unveiling of his cover in 2017 sent the internet into hysterics for days. John Legend (another judge on The Voice) in 2019 felt almost equally random. Even Benny Blanco’s appearance in the current issue as an honorable mention was strongly objected to online. Year over year, the “Sexiest Man Alive” has become less of a trusted assertion and more of a platform for debate. The details of the selection process for this issue have largely been kept under wraps. In a 2012 interview with USA Today, former editor Julie Jordan said People temperature-checks in a few ways, including asking female celebrities, consulting focus groups, and observing social media. There are constant rumors, including in the case of Krasinski, that the title can be bought or won by a convincing publicist. It’s easy to forget, though, that the selected men also have to be willing to participate in this extremely public form of objectification. The less impeachable Ryan Gosling reportedly turned down the offer twice. Even with an increasingly questionable reputation, social media has remained invested in this frivolous honor, particularly this year. Maybe it’s because People did a good job of incessantly teasing the reveal on social media with the help of dominant X accounts like FilmUpdates and PopCrave. Maybe it’s because the public needed a distraction from a much more crucial and devastating election. In the midst of political tumult, Krasinski is ultimately a “safe,” fairly inoffensive option, a celebrity that millennials obsessed with The Office have a level of affinity for. Despite questions about his political affiliation, he hasn’t been mired in any real controversy. Whatever relevance the title holds, the sport of debating and crowning famous men as “sexy” and “hot” has never really gotten old. Like awards shows, it’s one of the last examples of celebrity monoculture for consumers to collectively engage with. In an overly skeptical social media landscape, it also seems as though half of the fun of the issue is negotiating whether the awarded person is a genuine attempt to reflect consumers’ taste or some elaborate PR play being fed to us. However meaningless the issue has become these days, it’s been successful in producing two things: revenue and a good, hollow debate.

“Your body, my choice”: The misogynist MAGA attack, explained

10 h

vox.com

Donald Trump leaves a campaign event on September 17, 2024. Donald Trump is headed to the White House, again, so it’s not surprising that Americans are again contending with a rise in hate speech. This time around, one of the attack lines is “your body, my choice.” Attributed by some to an election night post on X by white supremacist Nick Fuentes that read “Your body, my choice. Forever,” the phrase transforms the longstanding feminist and abortion-rights slogan “My body, my choice” into an attack on women’s autonomy, and, at worst, a threat of rape. In the days following the election, TikTok creators have reported seeing the phrase crop up in comments on their videos, according to a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a global nonpartisan think tank that studies disinformation and extremism. One creator said she had to delete a video because commenters were “saying they couldn’t wait until I get raped or ‘your body my choice.’” Girls and young women are also hearing the line in schools, according to family members, with one mom posting on Facebook that her daughter had heard it three times on campus, and that boys told her to “sleep with one eye open tonight.” Instances of the phrase increased 4,600 percent on X between last Thursday and Friday, according to the report. Meanwhile, Fuentes’s original post has been reposted more than 35,000 times. The spike in sexist hate is a reflection of one of the dominant narratives of the election: that it was essentially a triumph of men over women. Trump tailored much of his campaign to disaffected American men — especially young men, many of whom feel they are victims of discrimination and who have expressed resentment against feminist movements like Me Too. For a lot of these men, the election feels like vindication, and for some, it’s more than that: a chance to put women back in their place. For anyone on the receiving end of the misogynist insults in the last few days, meanwhile, the phrase feels like a scary harbinger of things to come. At the same time, experts told Vox that Americans have experienced this kind of hate speech before, particularly in the aftermath of Trump’s first election in 2016 — and that history can hold lessons for navigating the present. The phrase is part of a larger pattern of misogyny The feminist phrase “my body, my choice” was used regularly in chants at rallies by 1970, though it’s not clear who originally coined it, said Laura Prieto, program director of Our Bodies Ourselves Today, a digital platform that is an iteration of the iconic reproductive health book Our Bodies, Ourselves. In the years before Roe v. Wade, it was a call for abortion rights, but it was also “a statement about women demanding their right as equal human beings to have decision-making power over what happened to them,” Prieto said. The term has become less popular on the left in recent years, especially after it was adopted by anti-vaccine activists. Now “my body, my choice” has been co-opted by Fuentes and others, who have transformed it into a tool to harass and intimidate women. Others aren’t using the phrase, but are echoing the idea that with Trump’s election, women must submit to the will of men. On social media, posts have ranged from “more coded misogyny” to “very direct threats of rape,” Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and one of the authors of the report, told Vox. Many of the sexist posts stem from “manosphere” influencers like Andrew Tate and their followers, according to the report — Tate, for example, posted on X on November 7, “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights.” “Manosphere” creators are part of a larger online ecosystem directed at men that’s lurched hard to the right in recent years, and helped carry Trump to victory, Vox’s Rebecca Jennings reported. Fifty-five percent of male voters cast their ballots for Trump this year, compared with just 45 percent of female voters, according to exit polling by the Washington Post. (Though we ought to note that exit polling is preliminary, and therefore unreliable, data.) Online, that gender divide emerged before the election. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue reports spotting a rise in misogynistic posts (including calls to repeal the 19th amendment) starting in October, apparently in response to the Harris campaign’s focus on women voters and reproductive rights. The spread of the posts “demonstrated the influence of an increasingly vindictive set of online actors, who appear to be using the election results as a permission structure to more overtly and aggressively espouse narratives about curbing women’s rights,” Frances-Wright and co-author Moustafa Ayad write in their report. A similar pattern emerged after Trump’s first election in 2016, when civil rights groups and law enforcement agencies saw a spike in hate speech and attacks on women and people perceived to be Muslim or immigrants — all groups Trump explicitly or implicitly denigrated in his first campaign. The harassment even made its way into classrooms; a BuzzFeed analysis found more than 50 incidents of a student invoking Trump’s name or message to attack a classmate during the 2016-17 school year. The fact that the attacks aren’t new doesn’t make them less scary for the people on the receiving end. “It is very traumatic, particularly the younger that you are,” Frances-Wright said. Implicit threats of rape can feel doubly frightening in a country where Trump just cruised to victory despite multiple allegations of sexual assault. How to counter post-election hate Since the harassment people are experiencing today is part of a longstanding pattern, however, there’s an existing playbook to counteract it. Some organizations, including schools and bookstores, have issued statements in recent days clarifying that they will not tolerate discrimination or harassment. How to report harassment If you or someone you know is experiencing harassment right now, help is available: The National Sexual Violence Resource Center has a list of resources for dealing with online harassment. Our Bodies, Ourselves Today maintains a list of groups fighting gender-based violence. The Anti-Violence Project works against hate directed at LGBTQ and HIV-affected communities. It’s also a time to remember the long history of “my body, my choice,” and everything it stood for — including hardships for women that must have seemed, at times, impossible to overcome, including a lack of many basic rights like the ability to open credit cards in their names or serve on juries. “A lot of things that we take for granted, just because they seem to be really powerful right now, it doesn’t mean that they always will be,” Prieto said. “The one thing you can count on is that things are going to change.”

Could Trump actually get rid of the Department of Education?

12 h

vox.com

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks to guests during a rally at Clinton Middle School on January 6, 2024, in Clinton, Iowa. | Scott Olson/Getty Images While campaigning, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to dismantle the US Department of Education (DOE), on the basis that the federal education apparatus is “indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual, and political material.” “One thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, DC, and sending all education and education work it needs back to the states,” Trump said in a 2023 video outlining his education policy goals. “We want them to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse.” Closing the department wouldn’t be easy for Trump, but it isn’t impossible — and even if the Department of Education remains open, there are certainly ways Trump could radically change education in the United States. Here’s what’s possible. Can Trump actually close the DOE? Technically, yes. However, “It would take an act of Congress to take it out,” Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told Vox. “It would take an act of Congress to radically restructure it. And so the question is whether or not there’d be appetite on the Hill for abolishing the department.” That’s not such an easy prospect, even though the Republicans look set to take narrow control of the Senate and the House. That’s because abolishing the department “would require 60 votes unless the Republicans abolish the filibuster,” Jal Mehta, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Vox. Without the filibuster rule, legislation would need a simple majority to pass, but senators have been hesitant to get rid of it in recent years. With the filibuster in place, Republicans would need some Democratic senators to join their efforts to kill the department. The likelihood of Democratic senators supporting such a move is almost nonexistent. That means the push to unwind the department is probably largely symbolic. And that is the best-case scenario, Jon Valant, director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, told Vox. According to Valant, dismantling it would simultaneously damage the US education system while also failing to accomplish Trump’s stated goals. Closing the department “would wreak havoc across the country,” Valant said. “It would cause terrible pain. It would cause terrible pain in parts of the country represented by congressional Republicans too.” Much of that pain would likely fall on the country’s most vulnerable students: poor students, students in rural areas, and students with disabilities. That’s because the department’s civil rights powers help it to support state education systems in providing specialized resources to those students. Furthermore, much of what Trump and MAGA activists claim the agency is responsible for, like teaching critical race theory and LGBTQ “ideology” isn’t actually the purview of the DOE; things like curriculum and teacher choice are already the domain of state departments of education. And only about 10 percent of federal public education funding flows to state boards of education, according to Valant. The rest comes primarily from tax sources, so states and local school districts are already controlling much of the funding structure of their specific public education systems. “I find it a little bewildering that the US Department of Education has become such a lightning rod here, in part because I don’t know how many people have any idea what the department actually does,” Valant said. Even without literally shutting the doors to the federal agency, there could be ways a Trump administration could hollow the DOE and do significant damage, Valant and Kettl said. The administration could require the agency to cut the roles of agency employees, particularly those who ideologically disagree with the administration. It could also appoint officials with limited (or no) education expertise, hampering the day-to-day work of the department. Trump officials could also attempt changes to the department’s higher education practices. The department is one of several state and nongovernmental institutions involved in college accreditation, for example — and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) has threatened to weaponize the accreditation process against universities he believes to be too “woke.” Finally, Trump could use the department’s leadership role to affect policy indirectly: “There’s power that comes from just communicating to states what you would like to see” being taught in schools, Valant said. “And there are a lot of state leaders around the country who seem ready to follow that lead.” Trump’s plans for the department will become clearer once the administration nominates a Secretary of Education. Once that person is confirmed, Kettl said, “They’re just gonna be off to the races on the issue again.”

Trump 2.0, explained

14 h

vox.com

Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 5, 2024. Donald J. Trump is headed to the White House again. He’ll have the help of a Republican Senate, almost certainly a Republican House, and a conservative Supreme Court that includes three justices he appointed the first time around. The former president made plenty of pledges on the campaign trail — now it’s time to see what’s actually possible. Vox explains the agenda for Trump’s second term. We take a look at what Trump’s victory means for reproductive freedom and antipoverty programs, how his calls for tariffs will transform the economy, the realities of a plan for mass deportations, and more. We track Trump’s promises and policies — on everything from artificial intelligence to Middle East policy — and how Americans are reacting in the wake of his historic win. We hope this coverage will cut through the chaos of the post-election months. Please keep checking back as we add stories and build out a guide to what to expect for the next four years. Trump won. So what does that mean for abortion? Following Trump’s victory, some women consider swearing off men Trump proposed big Medicaid and food stamp cuts. Can he pass them? Health care and the social safety net Following Trump’s victory, some women consider swearing off men Trump proposed big Medicaid and food stamp cuts. Can he pass them? What happens if another pandemic strikes while Trump is president? Trump won. So what does that mean for abortion? Trump’s health care plan exposes the truth about his “populism” Trump just opened the door to Social Security cuts. Take him seriously. Taxes, tariffs, and the economy Trump’s tariffs could tank the economy. Will the Supreme Court stop them? Elon Musk assures voters that Trump’s victory would deliver “temporary hardship” AI, social media, and Big Tech Trump’s techno-libertarian dream team goes to Washington AI is powerful, dangerous, and controversial. What will Donald Trump do with it? Immigration and the southern border A Trump second term could bring another family separation crisis This one chart foreshadows Trump’s immigration crackdown Would Trump’s mass deportation plan actually work? Trump’s immigration policies are his old ones — but worse Russia, China, and the Middle East Why Ukraine thinks it can still win over Donald Trump How the second Trump presidency could reshape the world The global risks of a Trump presidency will be much higher this time What Trump really thinks about the war in Gaza

The system failed us. We’ll still miss it when it’s gone.

18 h

vox.com

The enormous fireball from the “Apache” device used in Operation Redwing, which was detonated in 1956 on a barge in the crater left by a previous explosion on Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. It doesn’t take a political genius — whose ranks seem to have grown lately, based on the sheer number of very confident post-election takes over the past week — to see that many, many Americans have voted to blow up the system. Donald Trump has, if nothing else, incarnated a belief that the way America was being run was fundamentally broken and needed to be overhauled from top to bottom. That, more than any policy specifics around taxes or immigration or foreign policy, was my takeaway from November 5. A (bare) majority of Americans wants to take a wrecking ball to everything. But those feelings and the anger that feeds them runs deeper than just Trump voters. One bit of news that caught my attention this week was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) asking her Instagram followers why some of her constituents cast ballots both for her and for Trump. What I see in these answers is that frustration with the system isn’t something that can be attributed just to one party or another, even if it is currently concentrated in the GOP. An avowed leftist like AOC and President-elect Trump are about as far apart as two American politicians can be, but large segments of their supporters are united by anger at the way things are and by a thirst for radical change of some sort. I can understand their point. In the nearly 25 years that I’ve been a professional journalist, I’ve seen a catastrophic overreaction to 9/11 lead to a two-decade war on terror; thousands of dead American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; and a Middle East that remains chaotic. I’ve seen the 2008 Great Recession and the years of economic misery that followed. I’ve seen the failure to prepare for a major pandemic that many people saw coming, and I’ve seen the failure to learn from it in a way that prepares us for the next one. I’ve seen political barriers harden to economic and technological progress that could meaningfully improve people’s lives. And I’ve seen very few people in power held accountable for those failures. Depending on where you fall on the political spectrum, you can undoubtedly add your own points to this list. I may believe, as I have written repeatedly, that the long run has seen human life improve immeasurably, and I retain confidence that better days ultimately lie before us. Yet I can still understand why voters on both the right and the left would look at the wreckage of the past 20 years and pull a lever for radical change, consequences be damned. Here’s the thing, however, about radical change. It is, as our more numerate readers might say, a “high-variance strategy,” meaning that the range of possible outcomes is far wider than what we might expect from more incremental, within-the-system change. Perhaps we nail the jackpot and manage to hit upon the political choices that really can create something meaningfully better out of a broken system. But just as likely — perhaps more likely if you know anything about political revolutions in recent history — is that radical change will leave us worse off, and it will turn out that the system so many had come to despise was, in fact, our last line of defense against something much, much worse. The night is dark and full of terrors If you, like much of the electorate, think things couldn’t possibly get worse, I have some reading for you. Less than a week before the election, the pointy-heads at the RAND Corporation published a 237-page report on Global Catastrophic Risk Assessment. (I did not say it would be light reading.) The report is a response to the 2022 Global Catastrophic Risk Management Act, which required the Secretary of Homeland Security and the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assess really big risks to human survival and develop and validate a strategy to safeguard the civilian population in the face of those risks. If the ultimate purpose of government is to keep us safe in a dangerous world, that law is meant to prompt the US government to anticipate and prepare for the most dangerous risks of all.The RAND report breaks down catastrophic risk into six main possibilities: asteroids and comet impacts; supervolcanoes; major pandemics (both natural and human-made); rapid and severe climate change; nuclear conflict; and, of course, artificial intelligence. (I’d call them the Sinister Six, but I suspect that might send Marvel’s trademark office calling.) What these six have in common, the report notes, is that they could “significantly harm or set back human civilization at the global scale … or even result in human extinction.” It’s important to pause for a moment on what that really means. We just finished an election in which a majority of Americans indicated that they were very unhappy with the way things are going. They’re mad about high prices, mad about immigration, mad about Joe Biden, or mad about Donald Trump. Despite all the fury, however, these are fairly ordinary things to be mad about, ordinary political and economic problems to suffer through. Thinking about catastrophic risks helps put them in some perspective. A nuclear war — a possibility that is more likely now than it has been in decades — could kill hundreds of millions of people, and leave the planet so battered that the living would envy the dead. We already know from Covid the damage a pandemic with a relatively low death rate could do; something more virulent, especially if it were engineered, could resemble something out of dystopian fiction — except the possibility is very real. The risk from out-of-control powerful artificial intelligence is almost entirely unknowable, but we would be fools to completely dismiss the dire warnings of those in the field. And with the exception of asteroids and comets — where actual, intelligent space policy has helped us better understand the threat and even begin to develop countermeasures — the RAND report judges that the threat of all of these risks is either static or increasing. (Supervolcanoes, the one risk that remains unchanged, is largely outside human prediction or control, but thankfully we know enough to judge that the probability is very, very low.) The system matters So why are the risks from nuclear conflict, major pandemics, extreme climate change, and artificial intelligence all increasing? Because of human decisions, otherwise known as policy. Will we act as though climate change is the catastrophic threat so many of us believe it to be and engineer our society and economy to mitigate and adapt to it? Will we reverse the collapse of global arms control treaties and edge back from the brink of nuclear conflict? Will we actually learn from Covid and empower the policies and unleash the science to stop the next pandemic, wherever it comes from? Will we do anything about AI — and can we?The answers aren’t easy, and no one political party or candidate has a monopoly on all the best ways to handle catastrophic risk. Reducing the risk of extreme climate change may mean getting serious about the consequences of what we eat and what we drive, in a way sure to anger Republicans — but it may also mean taking the brakes off rapid energy development and housing construction that have too often been defended by Democrats. Minimizing the danger of future pandemics may require defending the global health system, but it may also demand cutting the red tape that often strangles science. Above all, it will demand dedication and professionalism in those we choose to lead us, here in a country where that’s still possible; men and women who have the skill and the understanding to know when caution is required and when action is inescapable. And from us, it will demand the wisdom to recognize what we need to be defended from. The system has failed us. But there are far worse things than the failure we’ve experienced. As we continue down a 21st century that is shaping up to be the most existentially dangerous one humanity has ever faced, we should temper the pull of radical change with an awareness of what can go wrong when we pull down all that we have built.

In times of defeat, turn toward each other

18 h

vox.com

Donald Trump’s election victory evoked disappointment and distress for millions across the country. Many people fear for the future of reproductive justice, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, tariffs, labor unions, the environment, and much more. Some feel so hopeless about the future that they want to give up. Others are fired up and ready to get more involved in local issues or politics, but they may have no idea how or where to start. Why I wrote this In August 2020, I moved to Washington, DC. Outside of my roommates, I didn’t know anyone there. I was feeling alone and anxious about the world, so I decided to search for local organizations and see what was around me. I ended up joining two local groups, and over the course of a couple years, I got pretty involved with community organizing. It was a lot of work, but it was also a big source of joy for me. I learned a lot about local issues and made lifelong connections. Today, I’m hearing a lot of valid concern about where our world is heading and what to do about it. I wanted to write something for those people and give them a framework I wish I’d had. I hope you find your community and that the work is as rewarding as it was for me.Have questions? Email me at samantha.delgado@voxmedia.com. All of those reactions are valid. But if people are serious about improving our flawed democracy, they must participate — and not just by voting. Voting is an important aspect of civic life, but presidential elections happen only once every four years. If we want to make a change beyond the ballot box and find meaning in these challenging times, we need to engage with the people around us. Look at the social movements of the past that created lasting impact, like the Civil Rights movement securing legislation to outlaw segregation and discrimination, or the labor movement establishing weekends and the 8-hour workday. Powering these campaigns were longstanding relationships between different people with different skills and roles, forged together into a collective by their shared values and a desire for a better world. They built communities that were able to create sustained public pressure for change outside of the presidential election cycle. Despite the need for real community networks, our country’s social fabric has been fraying. According to the US Surgeon General’s 2023 report on the “loneliness epidemic,” approximately half of US adults have reported feeling lonely. People are spending more time alone and less time with others. We’re more online than ever before, yet we feel more disconnected. We trust each other less. Belonging to a community provides the interpersonal support human beings naturally need to survive and thrive. But building a real social network doesn’t happen overnight. It requires consistently showing up, being willing to give and take, and managing uncomfortable disagreements. “There is no Amazon one-click for community,” says Katherine Goldstein, a writer who covers care and a fellow for the Better Life Lab at New America. Creating community takes time. It demands discipline. But it’s not impossible — and there are many other people out there looking for the same connections and sense of purpose. The civic, health, and practical benefits of community In 1970, American political scientist Robert Putnam was in Rome studying Italian politics when a unique research opportunity opened up. The Italian national government had relinquished some of its power and delegated a wide range of responsibilities to 20 new regional governments. These institutions were structured nearly identically, but each region had different economic, political, and cultural dynamics. For Putnam, this was a perfect situation to study what makes successful (and unsuccessful) democratic institutions. He found that the governments that were able to effectively operate internally, propose relevant policy, and implement legislation all shared a deeply embedded sense of trust and cooperation among their citizens. “Some regions of Italy, we discover, are blessed with vibrant networks and norms of civic engagement,” he wrote in his 1993 book about his research, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, “while others were cursed with vertically structured politics, a social life of fragmentation and isolation, and a culture of distrust.” Does the latter environment sound a little familiar? When Putnam came back to the US years later, he noticed a trend that disturbed him: American social life seemed to be disappearing. Membership in groups and clubs was declining. Across unions, religious groups, sports leagues, and political groups, people were reporting less time spent participating and being in these spaces. Putnam wrote the influential book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, in which he claimed that the social structures these groups provided were key to our physical and civic health. A 2023 documentary called Join or Die

Why the attempt to deplatform Trump failed so utterly

19 h

vox.com

President-elect Donald Trump takes the stage for his last rally of the election year at Van Andel Arena on November 5, 2024, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The 2024 election has conclusively proven something that we really should have known since 2016: America’s gatekeepers have failed. The premise of “gatekeeping,” as a political enterprise, is that there is a mainstream consensus that can be enforced by institutions designed to protect it. It works not by outright violent repression, but by deplatforming and shunning certain ideas, people, movements, and the like. Gatekeeping, when successful, involves a collective of recognized authority figures declaring that something is out of bounds — and then that thing actually getting consigned to the fringes. No politician will engage with it, no talk show hosts will give it a respectful hearing, and only a tiny number of citizens will have heard of it. Think of how nearly everyone agreed, after 9/11, that conspiracy theorizing about the attack deserved scorn. Trump’s wins are proof that gatekeeping doesn’t really work anymore. Immediately after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, there was a brief moment when leaders across the political spectrum agreed Trump was too dangerous to be allowed to remain in politics — and even tried to drive him out. In a January 8 email, Rupert Murdoch wrote that “Fox News [is] very busy pivoting … We want to make Trump a non person.” Yet Murdoch failed, pivoting back to pro-Trump coverage almost immediately. Every other attempt to shun Trump into political nonexistence has met with similar failure. This isn’t just a Trump phenomenon. His chief allies and messengers — like Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Steve Bannon — have all been shunned or blacklisted to varying degrees. X/Twitter suffered a post-Musk ad revenue collapse, liberal musicians pulled their music from Spotify to pressure the streaming giant to drop Rogan, and Bannon just spent four months in federal prison (for good reason). None of these tactics have durably eroded these figures’ influence. Nor is the failure of deplatforming even a famous person thing. I’ve written extensively and repeatedly about the influence of obscure radicals on the mainstream Republican Party — the way that, for example, Vice President-elect JD Vance has explicitly cited someone who openly wants to topple American democracy as a key influence in his thinking about the executive branch. I’m hardly the only one: There’s a whole cottage industry of journalism devoted to tracing the linkages between the true fringe — internet weirdos with names like Bronze Age Pervert — and the Republican mainstream. Such links are no longer hidden, but out in the open. Yet, with a few exceptions, this kind of reporting doesn’t seem to have hurt, and it sometimes even helps the targets of the gatekeepers’ ire by raising their profiles. Again and again, we’ve seen the gatekeepers’ efforts to deplatform their enemies into oblivion fail. And I think it has a lot to do with a mistaken analysis of power — specifically, a failure to appreciate just how much people with devoted followings can get away with in the 21st-century political-media environment. Trumping the gatekeepers In the past, the American mainstream consensus was enforced through bipartisan political agreement and a cultural apparatus dominated by elite institutions: a shared set of norms in those environs helping to define the rules of the political game. If you broke those rules, either by (for example) insulting the troops or particular ethnic groups, you could risk electoral defeat or even being exiled from polite public life. Trump’s 2016 rise to power and 2024 political resurrection help us see why neither political nor cultural elites can enforce their old rules anymore. Anyone who heads one of the two major parties already has a baseline floor of about 46 to 47 percent of the electorate. The most important voters in deciding the general election are swing voters. In a highly polarized country with two very different parties, swing voters tend to be people who definitionally don’t have very strong partisan preferences, seeing both parties as potential options. Candidates like Trump who enjoy unified support of a major party cannot truly be gatekept. They are definitionally part of the mainstream, and thus potentially electable thanks to the basic gravity of a two-party political system. All of this raises the question: How is it that Trump, an extremist, managed to seize control of the Republican Party in the first place? For reasons I’ve documented extensively, including in my book The Reactionary Spirit, Trump managed to build a direct bond with a critical mass of GOP primary voters rooted in shared resentments and fears. These voters, like Trump and unlike Democratic partisans, were largely disdainful of any elite attempts to gatekeep him — either from the cultural mainstream or even the alternative elites of the Republican Party, which back in 2016 tried and failed to stop his initial rise in power. In other words, Trump short-circuited the gatekeeping capacity of both the Republican Party and mainstream media. After January 6, when some Republican elites tried again to break with Trump, they faced immense backlash from their base. Three days after his “non-person” email, Murdoch was walking things back — telling his son Lachlan that “we have to lead our viewers, which is not as easy as it might seem.” Fox’s viewers actually forced its CEO to reboard the Trump train. So it’s Trump’s personal support, his mass following, that gives him and aligned Republicans the power to resist gatekeepers. The death of the old political-media order There’s something else too. Shifts in the media landscape have allowed his allies in the cultural space to survive and even thrive for similar reasons. In the past, it used to be hard enough to create a mass media enterprise that only a handful of people — the sorts who could operate television stations and mass newspaper distribution networks — could do it. Today, anyone can find fans on social media and work to monetize that following. Given direct access to a mass audience, unpopularity among cultural gatekeepers is far less of a concern than it used to be. Joe Rogan has millions of dedicated fans; those fans like him much more than the people trying to make listeners feel bad for enjoying his show. Steve Bannon’s War Room show is super popular among the Trump faithful, and remains so despite (or perhaps because of) his stint in prison. Nick Fuentes’s weird and creepy fans don’t really care if the mainstream media calls them weird and creepy for stanning a Nazi incel. All enjoy a level of influence and power because of their ties to Republicans who are unwilling to be shamed for said connections. This fragmented landscape means there’s not enough cultural unification to ever really expel anyone from the discourse. When Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, many wondered why it took them so long: it was Fox that held the power, not its popular but increasingly difficult employee. Yet Carlson’s post-Fox trajectory — a successful turn to Twitter/X broadcasting that earned him a seat next to Trump at the Republican National Convention — reveals that even the Murdoch empire couldn’t cancel someone with Carlson’s devoted following. Even if someone doesn’t have the personal draw of a Carlson or a Rogan, there are institutions dedicated to serving ever more extreme audiences that might be willing to hire you. If you get “canceled” at a mainstream outlet, you can go to Fox. If you get kicked off Fox News, NewsMax and One America News Network are out there waiting. To be clear, there are benefits to the end of gatekeeping. By concentrating power in a smaller number of people and institutions, the old consensus encouraged groupthink, resulting in, for example, widespread cheerleading for the 2003 Iraq War. The era of gatekeeping was also meaningfully less democratic, in that it gave elites far more power than the people as a collective to set the terms of public debate. The creator economy, for all its faults, gives citizens the ability to financially empower voices they believe are unfairly cut out of public life. Yet those faults are undoubtedly immense. Donald Trump, a man who literally incited a riot on the Capitol and has openly vowed to attack democratic institutions in his second term, is president-elect largely — if not primarily — because he built a following that allowed him to short-circuit elite gatekeepers in both parties. And the gatekeepers, for all their flaws, adhered to basic standards of evidence and decency that simply can’t be enforced in our new political-media environment. Does anyone really think this country is better off now that someone like Fuentes has the juice to secure dinner with the once and future president? Regardless of how you normatively evaluate these trade-offs — ones that I think point to thorny conceptual problems for liberalism itself — we need to be clear on where we’re at empirically. And the fact is that Trump and aligned Republican extremists clearly can’t be criticized into defeat. Nor can Musk be shamed into managing X more responsibly or Rogan ignored into political oblivion. Their opponents need a new tactic.

The most dangerous roads in America have one thing in common

19 h

vox.com

A pedestrian crosses Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia, a maze of chaotic traffic that passes through some of the city's most diverse and low-income neighborhoods. | Julio Cortez/AP Photo Some 110 years ago, a picturesque new road known as Roosevelt Boulevard began ferrying vehicles across the nascent but burgeoning neighborhoods of North and Northeast Philadelphia. At first, traffic was light, but it rapidly thickened as car ownership rose and the surrounding area developed. By the 1950s, when the boulevard expanded to meet the new Schuylkill Expressway, it was lined with row houses and shops. Today, what was initially a bucolic parkway has become a traffic-snarled, 12-lane thoroughfare snaking its way through neighborhoods that house 1 in 3 Philadelphians. It is, by all accounts, a mess. Dubbed the “corridor of death,” Roosevelt Boulevard has been named the most dangerous street in the city (and among the most dangerous in the nation). In 2022, 59 pedestrians were killed there. Residents “want to get across the street to the pharmacy to get their medication or get across the street to the supermarket,” Latanya Byrd, whose niece and three nephews were killed in a crash on the boulevard in 2013, said in a video produced by Smart Growth America. “It may take two, maybe three lights, for them to get all the way across.” It’s not just pedestrians who loathe Roosevelt Boulevard. “People who walk, drive, or take public transit are all pretty badly screwed,” Philadelphia’s public radio station declared in 2017. Aware of the road’s shortcomings, city officials have long sought design changes that would reduce crashes. But they are powerless to act on their own, because the boulevard is controlled by the state of Pennsylvania. That situation is common across the United States, where many of the most deadly, polluting, and generally awful urban streets are overseen by state departments of transportation (DOTs). Often they were constructed decades ago, when the surrounding areas were sparsely populated. Although only 14 percent of urban road miles nationwide are under state control, two-thirds of all crash deaths in the 101 largest metro areas occur there, according to a recent Transportation for America report. In some places, this disparity is widening: From 2016 to 2022, road fatalities in Austin, Texas, fell 20 percent on locally managed roads while soaring 98 percent on those the state oversees. “The country is littered with roads that are a legacy of the past, that don’t work very well, and that drive people crazy,” said US Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), who calls them “legacy highways.” Instead of fixing such roadways, state officials tend to keep them as they are, citing limited resources or a need to maintain traffic speeds. In doing so, they constrain the capacity of even the most comprehensive local reforms to respond to urgent problems like car crash deaths, which are far more widespread in the US than among peer countries, or unreliable bus service. Unless state DOTs recognize that a successful urban road must do more than facilitate fast car trips, that problem will persist. Why we have state highways In the early 1900s, states from coast to coast created transportation agencies to build smooth, wide roads that enabled long-distance car trips. New high-capacity roadways traversed forests and farmland, often terminating at what was then the urban edge. When Americans went on a car-buying binge after World War II, states like Michigan widened their highways with the goal of keeping traffic moving quickly, a prime directive for engineers. High-speed roadways fed rapid suburbanization, with new developments mushrooming on the city periphery. Columbus, Ohio, for instance, roughly doubled in population from 1950 and 2000, while its land area quintupled. Sprawling cities in the South and Southwest emerged seemingly overnight, while new suburbs encircled older metropolises in the North. In these newly urbanized areas, state highways that had previously meandered through the countryside were now lined with retail and housing. Their designers had initially paid little attention to transit, sidewalks, or tree cover — features that are often afterthoughts for rural roads, but crucial in more densely populated areas. As with Philadelphia’s Roosevelt Boulevard, the width and traffic speed of state roads in urban neighborhoods now frequently clash with local desires for street safety, quality transit service, and pedestrian comfort. But revising them is rarely a priority for state DOTs engaged in a Sisyphean battle against traffic congestion. “If a state agency’s primary focus is on moving vehicles, they’re looking at reducing delays and building clear zones” that remove objects such as trees next to a road, where errant drivers might strike them, said Kristina Swallow, who previously led the Nevada DOT as well as urban planning for Tucson, Arizona. “At the local level, you’re looking at a bunch of other activities. You have people walking or on a bike, so you may be okay with some congestion, because you know that’s what happens when people are coming into an economically vibrant community.” City-state tensions over state highways can take many forms. Roadway safety is often a flashpoint, since fixes frequently involve slowing traffic that state officials want to keep flowing. In San Antonio, for instance, the city negotiated for years with the Texas DOT to add sidewalks and bike lanes to Broadway, a state arterial with seven lanes. Last year the state scuttled that plan at the 11th hour, leaving Broadway’s current design in place. Local efforts to improve transit service can also face state resistance. In September, Madison, Wisconsin, launched its first bus rapid transit (BRT) line, a fast form of bus service that relies on dedicated bus lanes. But much of its route runs along East Washington, an arterial managed by Wisconsin, and the state transportation department prevented Madison from making the entire BRT lane bus-only during rush hour. That could sabotage the new service out of the gate. “These dedicated bus lanes would serve the bus best in the heaviest traffic, so it’s counterintuitive to typical BRT design,” said Chris McCahill, who leads the State Smart Transportation Initiative at the University of Wisconsin and serves on Madison’s transportation commission. Wisconsin’s DOT did not respond to a request for comment. The whole point of fast transit programs like BRT is to get more people to ride transit instead of driving, thereby increasing the total human capacity of a road since buses are much more space-efficient than cars. But that logic can escape state transportation executives oriented toward longer, intercity trips instead of shorter, intracity ones, as well as highway engineers trained to focus on maximizing the speed of all vehicles, regardless of how many people are inside them. Even sympathetic state transportation officials may not fix dysfunctional urban roadways due to limited resources and competing needs that include expensive upgrades to bridges and interstates. Critical but relatively small-dollar projects, such as street intersection adjustments that better serve pedestrians or bus riders, can get lost in the shuffle. Lacking the authority to make changes themselves, city officials are stuck. “How do you create connected networks when you don’t own the intersection, and to fix it you have to compete at the state level with 500 other projects?” said Stefanie Seskin, the director of policy and practice at the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO). As an example, Seskin cited the state-controlled St. Mary’s Street bridge in Brookline, a dense suburb adjacent to Boston. “It’s the only way to get to and from Boston that isn’t on a major, super busy arterial,” she said. “It’s not structurally deficient, but from the position of those walking, biking, and using transit, it’s just not functioning well. It requires a reconstruction” — something that Massachusetts has not done. The beginnings of a paradigm shift in transportation policy With deaths among US pedestrians and cyclists hitting a 40-year high in 2022, a growing number of state DOTs are starting to acknowledge that maximizing vehicle speed is not the only goal that matters on urban roadways. The Pennsylvania DOT, for example, is now working with Philadelphia to at last bring lane redesigns, bus lane improvements, and speed cameras to Roosevelt Boulevard. On the other side of the country, the head of the Washington state DOT has requested $150 million from the state legislature to address the shortcomings of legacy highways. “I think there are people in every single state DOT who want to be more proactive and to plan for safer streets for people who are moving, no matter what mode of transportation they use,” Seskin told me. “I don’t think that that was necessarily the case 20 years ago.” Still, fixing the deficiencies of state roadways requires a paradigm shift within state DOTs, with senior officials accepting that maximizing car speeds jeopardizes crucial local priorities like accommodating pedestrians, enabling rapid transit service, or supporting outdoor dining. Such nuance can escape state highway engineers trained with a myopic focus on vehicle speed. “Many of the people doing roadway design work for states are still stuck in the old model,” said Billy Hattaway, an engineer who previously held senior transportation roles in the Florida DOT as well as the city of Orlando. McCahill, of the State Smart Transportation Initiative, empathized with those toiling within state DOTs. “Think about their position as engineers,” he said. “They’ve got their federal highway design guidelines, they’ve got their state guidelines. They’ve been conditioned to be conservative and not try new things.” Historically, those roadway design guidelines have prioritized free-flowing traffic. Making them more malleable could empower engineers to get more creative. Instead of applying one-size-fits-all rules for elements like lane widths and traffic lights, “context-sensitive design” encourages engineers working in urban settings to add pedestrian crossings, narrow lanes, and other features that can support local transportation needs. McCahill applauded Florida’s DOT for recently “rewriting” its design guide to incorporate such context-sensitive layouts. Federal money could help finance such redesigns — if state officials know how to use it. “There’s a lack of knowledge about the flexibility of federal dollars, with misunderstandings and different interpretations,” said NACTO’s Seskin. Recognizing the issue, over the summer, the Federal Highway Administration published guidance and held a webinar highlighting dozens of federal funding programs available to upgrade legacy highways. Then there is an alternative approach: Rather than revise problematic roads themselves, states can hand them over to local officials, letting them manage improvements and maintenance. Washington state, for instance, in 2011 transferred a 2.5-mile strip of state road 522 to the Seattle suburb of Bothell. But such moves are not always financially feasible. “The risk is that when you transfer a highway to local government, you take away the capacity to properly fund it over the long term” because the city becomes responsible for upkeep, said Brittney Kohler, the legislative director of transportation and infrastructure for the National League of Cities. Unless the revamped road spurs development that creates new tax revenue, as it did in Bothell, cash-strapped cities may be unable to afford the costs of retrofits and ongoing maintenance. States and cities can work together to fix legacy highways — and federal support can help In Portland, Oregon, pretty much everyone seems to agree that 82nd Avenue, a major thoroughfare that the state manages, is a disaster. Originally a little-used roadway marking the eastern edge of the city, 82nd Avenue has developed into a bustling arterial. It’s been a dangerous eyesore for decades, with potholed pavement, insufficient pedestrian crossings, inadequate lighting, and minimal tree cover, said Art Pearce, a deputy director for the Portland Bureau of Transportation. According to city statistics, from 2012 to 2021, crashes on the thoroughfare caused 14 deaths and 122 serious injuries. At least two-thirds of crash victims were pedestrians, bicyclists, or occupants of cars turning left at intersections without traffic signals. During winter storms, Pearce said state workers would often clear nearby Interstate 205 but leave 82nd Avenue unplowed, leaving the city to do it without compensation. “Our priority in snow and ice is to keep public transit moving, and 82nd Avenue has the highest transit ridership in the whole state,” he said. Nearby residents and business owners have been begging local officials to revamp 82nd Avenue for decades, said Pearce and Blumenauer (whose congressional district includes Portland). The state was willing to transfer the roadway to the city, but the local officials wanted more than a handshake. “We were like, if you give us $500 million, the city will take over 82nd Avenue and fix it,” Pearce said. “The state officials answered, ‘We don’t have $500 million, so hey, good meeting.’” A breakthrough came in 2021, when the American Rescue Plan Act offered states and cities a one-time influx of federal funding. Matching that money with contributions of their own, the state and city negotiated a transfer of seven miles of 82nd Avenue from the Oregon DOT to Portland. Some $185 million will go toward new features including sidewalk extensions, trees, a BRT line, and curb cuts for those using a wheelchair or stroller. Blumenauer, who said that reconstructing 82nd Avenue has been a personal goal for 35 years, led US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on a tour of the roadway last year. The success story is “a bit of a one-off,” Blumenauer admits, reliant on stimulus dollars tied to the Covid-19 pandemic. But a dedicated federal funding source could enable similar roadway reboots nationwide. At the moment, President-elect Donald Trump and incoming congressional Republicans show little appetite for transportation reforms, but a golden opportunity will come during the development of the next multiyear surface transportation bill, which is expected to be passed after the 2026 midterms. Although Blumenauer did not run for reelection this month, he said he hopes the future bill will include a competitive grant program that invites state and local officials to submit joint proposals to upgrade state highways in urban areas, with federal dollars acting as a sweetener. Otherwise, these state roads will continue to obstruct urban residents’ most cherished goals of safety, clean air, and public space. Flourishing cities cannot coexist with fast, decrepit roads. Too many state officials have not yet learned that lesson.

Why libraries need librarians

20 h

vox.com

Beyond books, some public libraries offer everything from musical instruments to seeds for patrons to check out. | Ho Ming Law/Getty Images Vox reader Alexia Cherry asks: I work at a public library and I think a lot of the talk about libraries is generally uninformed about what librarians actually do. So many people that I interact with are shocked that you need to have a master’s degree to be considered a professional, and many people don’t know about the wide variety of library jobs available. People do indeed seem to find librarians oddly mysterious! In August, Western Illinois University laid off its entire librarian faculty and at the same time insisted the university would still have “adequate coverage in the library.” The school seemed to be operating under the belief that librarians are only warm bodies who exist to check books in and out, and that they only have master’s degrees in order to artificially jack their wages up. Anyone, this line of thinking goes, could keep a library running without much work. They just need to know how to scan a barcode. But then, libraries are undervalued in general, perhaps because they are such radical institutions. The truism is that if you tried to invent the public library today, the right would never let you get away with it — giving so many things to the public for free, and subsidizing them all with taxes, imagine. How many other spaces do we have left where a person can go and spend hours on end and still not be expected to buy anything? Perhaps on a subconscious level, we tend to undervalue libraries culturally in order to keep them from reaching their full potential. If we pretend that they’re bizarre federally subsidized bookstores, we don’t need to think about how they’re enormous warehouses full of knowledge available to anyone who walks in, staffed by professionals highly trained in sorting, extracting, and preserving that knowledge. What do librarians actually do? Let’s take a brief look at what libraries need and how librarians provide those needs. All libraries, from the public to the academic to the corporate, need to be cataloged in order for anyone to know what books are in them, where each kind of book is, and what those books are useful for. In the library sciences, cataloging is its own highly esoteric specialty, closer to coding than anything else, and it requires careful technical training. Catalogers describe each notable aspect of a book, then classify each aspect so it’s searchable. To do it, you have to learn not just multiple classification systems, but also get training in how to describe a book you may have not read, what parts of it are most important, and which categories will supersede others depending on the library you’re classifying for. A cataloger must make judgment calls on whether to code in spoilers (do you classify a spy novel as “double agent” even if that’s the big twist at the end?) and how far down you should keep subdividing. Cataloging is such a rigorous and precise form of information processing that it’s one of a librarian’s most lucrative skill sets in the information era. Some librarians, after grad school, go off to work in corporate archives, where they catalog and preserve information about the company’s history for internal usage. (Not a particularly glamorous job, but the private sector tends to pay better than the public.) Fresh library school graduates can use the same skill set to process papers at historical archives, but there they’ll also need to know how to handle fragile antique documents without damaging them, and potentially how to repair books at the end of their lifespans. All libraries also need acquisition specialists, who are the ones facing heavy scrutiny in our book-banning era. The acquisitions department is responsible for deciding where the holes in a library’s collection are and how to fill them. They make the call as to whether it’s a good idea to bring in a book full of errors — say, a book on creationism — if patrons are requesting it, or whether it’s worth it to keep around a book on a controversial subject — say, teen sex ed — if patrons are protesting against it. Most libraries need research specialists who can help patrons figure out how to access what they’re trying to look up. If you’re trying to flesh out your family tree, a research librarian can usually tell you what newspaper archives to consult, and get you access to those archives free of charge. If you’re trying to write an academic paper, a research librarian can walk you through the process of which databases best serve your specialty and how to navigate them. How are public libraries different? Public libraries require all these specialties, too, and more. Most public libraries have a mandate to serve the communities in which they exist, and so they offer more resources than many people are probably aware exist. Public libraries in places with a large immigrant population will frequently offer free ESL and citizenship classes. Many libraries help connect patrons to social workers, food banks, public health, and legal resources. Many others will let patrons check out things like cooking equipment, musical instruments, board games, and even seeds. Because public librarians are one of the only third spaces left that don’t charge money, librarians find themselves working as de facto social workers for unhoused people — in addition to the literal social worker that many libraries now have on staff. Many libraries train their staff in using Narcan to revive people overdosing on opiates. Some offer hygiene kits and clean clothes for unhoused people. All of that is despite the low salaries public librarians can expect. The average salary at the New York Public Library system is just around $52,000 per year, under the $69,000 estimated to be the cost of living in New York. A library is both a vast, complex technology designed to preserve and organize information and a physical space that exists in order to serve its community in whatever ways it can. The people who work there have to go through enormous amounts of training in order to do both — even if their labor is often invisible to those of us who enjoy its fruits.

How Big Toilet Paper dupes us all

2 d

vox.com

Americans are the No. 1 consumers of toilet paper in the world. | Javier Zayas Photography/Getty Images It’s a truism that everything’s bigger in America — just look at the cars and houses. But perhaps nowhere is the virtue of bigger is better more bizarrely apparent than how toilet paper is sold. Wander into the bathroom products aisle at the supermarket and you’ve entered a topsy-turvy world where numbers shape-shift. A pack of 18 mega toilet paper rolls, for example, magically transforms into 90 “regular” ones. The labeling emphasizes this greater number in large font, lest you foolishly think 18 simply equals 18. Another pack might insist that 12 even-thicker rolls of toilet paper are the equivalent of 96 normal rolls. The advertising is clear: You’re getting a lot of toilet paper. That should be good news, since if there’s one rule of thumb everyone should live by, it’s never run out of TP. We saw anxiety around this eventuality reach new heights in the early days of the pandemic, when crowds of people fought to snap up as much toilet paper as they could, leading to a shortage and extreme price gouging. Americans’ enormous vehicles and palatial abodes may in fact exist in service of conveying and storing gigantic bulk packs of this bathroom essential. There’s some irony, then, that for all the trumpeting of gargantuan sizes, toilet paper rolls are generally getting smaller. It’s a key example of the trend of manufacturers charging the same price (or even slightly more) for less product that’s been dubbed “shrinkflation.” It makes it more difficult than ever to figure out if you’re getting ripped off. None of the three major toilet paper manufacturers Vox reached out to responded to a request for comment. “I really can’t think of any other category that’s as confusing as toilet paper,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at the consulting firm GlobalData. With dubious numerical claims about how much a “mega” roll is really worth, brands can promote the perception of value without actually having to show their work. Figuring out the price per toilet paper sheet is a hassle, but it would show how much more expensive the product has become. “The consumer wouldn’t like that, so they all keep it a bit opaque,” Saunders says. Get ready for some back-of-the-toilet-paper math The most glaring issue plaguing the toilet paper industry is a lack of standardization. Double, triple, and mega rolls are imprecise descriptors that vary by brand; they are not measurement units. In fine print, toilet paper packaging will often admit that these sizes are relative to the “regular” roll — sometimes they mean their own brand’s regular size, but other times, it’s against a competitor’s one-ply regular. Unsurprisingly, the so-called standard size has no consistency, either. Charmin’s regular roll has 55 two-ply sheets, for example, but it’s often hard to even find the regular size of a brand’s toilet paper in stores. The mega roll is often advertised as having four times as many sheets as the mythical “regular” it’s being compared to, which means that Cottonelle’s idea of a regular roll contains 61 sheets, Quilted Northern’s an awkward 73.75 sheets, and Angel Soft’s 80 sheets. But even these are perplexing figures since many real-life standard toilet paper rolls contain more than 100 sheets. The sheets-per-roll ratio is also subject to change depending on whether you’re looking at single-ply, two-ply, or three-ply. (Not to make your brain hurt more, but sheet dimensions vary too.) The mega roll is just one size out of many that brands offer, all with slightly different naming conventions. Cottonelle sells mega, family mega, or super mega, while Charmin now offers the mega-XXL and even the “forever roll,” which is so big you need a standalone holder. There appears to be no limit to the jumbofication of toilet paper jargon. All this renders comparison shopping far more challenging than it is for the average household product. Making matters worse, there’s no single consistent method of unit pricing for toilet paper. Some retailers, like Walmart, Amazon, and Target, show the price per 100 sheets, but then you still have to factor in the variation in sheets per roll for each brand. Walgreens shows price per sheet, while Home Depot displays a pretty unhelpful price per roll. Irregular unit price labeling is a problem for many consumer products, according to Chuck Bell, programs director of advocacy at Consumer Reports. Unit pricing is “only mandated directly in nine states,” Bell says, while 10 others have voluntarily taken it up. “It’s hard to compare products online for value for money.” It’s no wonder people have taken matters into their own hands. In late 2018, a California man named Victor Ly launched a “Toilet Paper Value Calculator” that crunches the number of rolls, sheets per roll, and any discounts that apply. Ly told Wirecutter in 2022 that a good deal was probably around 0.253 cents per sheet. While there’s no longer a toilet paper shortage or people panic-buying pallets of them — though the impulse to do so lingers — it’s a much more expensive commodity today than before the pandemic, especially now that we’re a few years out from a period of high inflation. A report from consumer watchdog Public Interest Research Group noted that, before the pandemic, a pack of 36 Charmin Ultra Soft rolls cost $30.95 on Amazon. At time of writing, the same pack costs $59 on the site. (In December 2020, it was selling for as high as $114.99.) Most name-brand toilet paper today far exceeds Ly’s price threshold. A 30-pack of Charmin Ultra Strong mega rolls breaks down to 0.5 cents per sheet, though a 36-pack of Scott 1000 toilet paper is about 0.083 cents per sheet. Kirkland’s 30-pack of toilet paper, selling for $23.49 at time of writing, works out to 0.206 cents per sheet. The cost of making toilet paper may have gone up in recent years, according to the Los Angeles Times, due to a slowdown in lumber production (there’s less available wood pulp, which is what most toilet paper is made of). Combine that with the fact that, as journalist Will Oremus reported in a piece about the pandemic toilet paper shortage, more people are working remotely today, reducing the time spent in office bathrooms. It means that the average consumer is using more toilet paper at home, cringing at how much their budget for bathroom products has gone up. Shrinkflation strikes – again Toilet paper manufacturers have come up with a way to keep prices roughly the same, though — at least at a quick glance. The same pack of toilet paper you buy every month might only be more expensive upon close scrutiny of the fine print, when you realize each roll is made up of fewer sheets. A recent analysis by loan marketplace LendingTree showed that toilet paper was among the top offenders among products whose size or volume had shrunk since 2019 or 2020. A pack of 12 mega rolls from Angel Soft went from 429 sheets per roll to 320 — essentially shrinking by a quarter — but at least the price went down by 15 percent too. Charmin Ultra Strong mega rolls, on the other hand, shrank by 15 percent while the price increased by 11 percent. This isn’t a new strategy that only toilet paper makers are employing. People have been complaining about product shrinkage for years; a Consumer Reports article from 2015 compared toilet paper rolls from top brands, showing that some had reduced by over 20 percent. The reason, manufacturers claimed at the time, was that better paper quality meant that people could use less of it. An older Charmin regular roll had 82 sheets versus just 55 today. Edgar Dworsky, a former consumer protection lawyer, has been tracking this shady practice — which he calls “downsizing” — for decades on his websites, MousePrint.org and ConsumerWorld.org. “I remember back in the 1960s when my Mounds candy bar used to be two ounces and became one point something or other,” he tells Vox. He notes that old Charmin toilet paper had as many as 650 sheets in a single-ply roll; its mega-XXL today has just 440 sheets. An older Charmin regular roll had 82 sheets versus just 55 today. The playbook is to shrink the current roll size, then invent a new tier (with a more ridiculous name) that can be priced higher. Consumer brands “are in the business of making you think you’re getting more,” Dworsky says. “It’s all a name game, it’s all a numbers game, and if you’re just oblivious to it, you’re going to get snookered.” How to avoid flushing money down the toilet Toilet paper is marketed both as a value product, where you’re getting four rolls for the price of one, and a weirdly indulgent luxury at the same time. It’s something meant to be quickly disposed of, literally flushed away, yet commercials for toilet paper are almost always focusing on its delightful, cushiony softness or a special “quilted” or “diamond weave” texture that adds a premium feel to the product. There’s scented toilet paper, and even toilet paper with colorful patterns. One of Quilted Northern’s April Fool’s Day ads pokes fun at the excessive promotional style of its own industry, proclaiming a “return” to hand-crafted, artisanal toilet paper. Ultimately, this is because we spend so much time with it, and in such an intimate way, so such bells and whistles do matter to some of us. “There’s obviously some people [who], for medical reasons, like to have really soft toilet paper,” Saunders says. “Some people just like extra strong toilet paper.” For others, it’s a pure bang-for-buck play, where they might just gravitate toward the pack with the most rolls (which isn’t necessarily the best value). The range of options, from one-ply sparseness to lilac-scented plushness, isn’t the problem. It’s that it’s so hard to disentangle the value you’re actually getting. As Dworsky notes, consumers could bring a scale to weigh packs of toilet paper every time they go to the store, but then what can you do about it? You still have to buy one of the #ShrinkFlated options, and it’s not an area where we’re spoiled for choice. While there are plenty of different versions that a single brand offers, just three manufacturers — Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, and Georgia-Pacific — make up some 80 percent of the bathroom tissue market. One could switch to commercial-grade toilet paper, which is much cheaper but is of (ahem) crappier quality. Where consumer toilet paper is soft, perhaps infused with lotion, often embossed with a delightful little pattern, the stuff we see in public restrooms is stiff and so thin that it breaks apart if you so much as look at it. Still, a 12-pack of commercial toilet paper at Home Depot is about $34 at time of writing, and one roll is about 700 feet long. Assuming that a square of consumer-grade toilet paper is about 4 inches long, a 440-sheet Charmin mega-XXL roll would still be under 147 feet. Lawmakers and President Joe Biden have wagged their fingers at corporations for shrinkflation and have even introduced a bill attempting to ban the practice, though neither Dworsky nor Bell thinks it’s likely to become law. But more transparency around product sizes, more consistent unit price labels, or even requiring a consumer notice when there’s a change in size would go a long way to help shoppers. Last year, in the lead-up to price negotiations with suppliers, French grocery chain Carrefour started attaching labels next to packaged foods and drinks that had gotten smaller. What’s certain is that the deceptive, confusing accounting of toilet paper rolls shouldn’t be the norm — and, in fact, it appears to be mostly a North American tradition. While other countries do also sell “mega” rolls, there’s no fiddly math on the packaging insisting that a dozen rolls are somehow more than that. Toilet paper is no small matter, especially for Americans. Per capita, the US is the No. 1 consumer of it in the world, each American using about 141 rolls per year as of 2018. A Consumer Reports buying guide once compared the annual usage to the length of 23 football fields. One way to avoid the frustrating morass of counting rolls and sheets is to opt out of the game altogether. “I switched to a bidet 10 years ago,” Dworsky says.

Safe sex doesn’t just mean condoms anymore

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vox.com

Welcome to the golden age of STI prevention. Sure, condoms are still an effective strategy for lowering the risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) — but now, they’re just one of a smorgasbord of strategies for decreasing your chances of catching an infection spread by sex. That includes vaccines to lower your risk of certain STIs, and medications you can take to prevent infection — some with the ease of a morning-after pill, and many that can be mailed to your home after an online telehealth visit. It also includes new STI tests that people can take in their homes, with results available either instantly or within days to enable quick and discreet testing and treatment. In a world where getting sexual health care sometimes feels fraught with judgment, these new methods offer a level of discretion and convenience that feels nothing short of revolutionary. In-person care is still best for getting the most comprehensive and personalized evaluation and education, and we’ve got guidance on how to find that kind of care here. But even sexual health care clinicians recognize it’s annoying — or worse — to go to the doctor sometimes. “Inconvenience — whether it’s cost, or travel, or parking, or taking off work, or other competing demands — is probably a big factor in why people aren’t necessarily engaged in … sexual health care that they might otherwise benefit from,” says Douglas Krakower, an infectious disease doctor and HIV prevention researcher at Harvard Medical School. Stigma — that shameful sense that people who know you have an STI look down on you, whether real or imagined — also sometimes prevents people from getting high-quality sexual health care in person. The bottom line: People often prefer sexual health care that involves as few other humans as possible. Now, there are more ways to get that than ever. Not everyone gets to benefit equally from these advances. Some come with hefty out-of-pocket price tags or are still out of reach for pregnant or likely-to-be-pregnant people. Still, the changes represent a leap forward in an area of health care that needs as much help as it can get. Here’s what’s out there. You can greatly reduce your risk of HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and more STIs include a range of bacteria and viruses that cause unpleasant genital symptoms, threaten your ability to have pleasurable sex, and may endanger your ability to have healthy children. Barrier protections like internal and external condoms are still the best (and usually cheapest) way to protect yourself from STIs. However, if you anticipate having sex without condoms, there are now lots of other ways to prevent STIs. Vaccines have come a long way and several can prevent STIs, including HPV (a cause of genital warts and cervical cancer), mpox, and hepatitis A and B. Recent studies also suggest being vaccinated against meningitis can offer some gonorrhea protection, especially among gay men and the people they have sex with. There are also pills and injectable medications that can greatly reduce the risk a sexual partner will infect you with HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea, or chlamydia. HIV prevention is available in a few forms: as a daily oral or every-two-months injectable medication you take before sex (called PrEP, for pre-exposure prophylaxis), or as a month-long regimen of oral medicines you take immediately after sex. The latter option, called PEP, for post-exposure prophylaxis, has to be started within 72 hours of exposure to be effective. Both options work by entering the body’s cells and preventing HIV from replicating inside them. A smorgasbord of new STI prevention options PrEP, a daily oral or every-two-months injectable HIV-prevention medication you take before sex PEP, a month-long course of oral HIV-prevention medication you take after sex DoxyPEP, a morning-after pill to prevent syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia infections Home-based testing for chlamydia and gonorrhea, syphilis, HIV, and other STIs (click here for free resources; some direct-to-consumer options are listed here) Vaccines for HPV, mpox, hepatitis A and B There’s even more progress to come in this area: An every-six-months injectable drug for preventing HIV infection called lenacapavir has shown huge promise in preventing HIV infections in both women and trans and nonbinary people and could be available for US use as soon as late 2025. Krakower says an oral option isn’t far behind. Syphilis has been rising explosively in the US for the past few years, affecting gay men and the people they have sex with as well as heterosexual men and women, especially those whose sexual partners include sex workers and people who inject drugs. The trend has huge stakes: Women can spread syphilis to their pregnancies, leading to serious illness or death in their newborns. Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidelines for using doxyPEP, a morning-after pill to prevent syphilis infection. This breakthrough strategy involves taking the antibiotic doxycycline the morning after sex — and because this medication also fights other germs, doxyPEP also reduces gonorrhea and chlamydia transmission. The problem is that doxycycline’s effects on pregnancy are unclear, but there’s suspicion they’re not good. Many clinicians are therefore hesitant to prescribe it to younger patients in their care. Still, because congenital syphilis has become such a dire national emergency, scientists are seeking ways doxyPEP can protect pregnant people and their fetuses. One focus is getting more men who have sex with men and women to use doxyPEP; another approach may involve prescribing the drug to women at high risk of syphilis infection. In a Japanese study of female sex workers, this strategy led to plummeting syphilis and chlamydia rates. You can get at-home testing for a range of STIs It used to be that if you’d had unprotected sex with a new partner or had unusual genital symptoms — like painful urination, funky discharge, or skin changes like a bump, ulcer, or rash — you’d have to jump through a lot of hoops to figure out whether you had an STI. You would start by visiting a clinic or emergency room; getting your parts swabbed by a clinician (or peeing in a cup or getting blood drawn); waiting for a lab to process those results; waiting for the doctor’s office to communicate those results to you; going back to the clinic for medicine or picking it up at a pharmacy; and then potentially going back again to be retested once treatment was done. Now, a variety of new testing options allows clinics to get test results within hours for a range of STIs. Once these get adopted broadly by clinics and emergency rooms, it’ll be a lot easier for people to get testing and treatment all in the space of one health care visit. Hopefully, that will lower the number of people who get diagnosed with an STI but never get treated for it. Another huge step forward: New tests now enable people to do most or all of the STI testing and treatment process at home, online, or through the mail — without a doctor or another clinician having to get involved. “Agency is what home testing gets people,” says Yuka Manabe, an infectious disease doctor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who leads the home-based HIV and STI testing program, I Want the Kit. The FDA has only approved a handful of these tests, and they’re not perfect. For example, the only FDA-approved test that screens for chlamydia and gonorrhea with home-based sample collection is the Simple 2 test — it’s only approved to test samples from penises and vaginas. That means the test can’t be used to diagnose throat and rectal infections, which are more common in men exposed through oral or anal sex with other men. So while the Simple 2 is a great choice for people who engage only in heterosexual sex, it leaves out gay men and people they have sex with. Another important innovation is the First to Know Syphilis Test, which can detect within minutes syphilis-fighting antibodies in blood samples collected at home with a simple skin prick. The FDA approved the test in August. However, it has a catch: The test doesn’t distinguish between new syphilis infections and old, already-treated infections. That means people who’ve had syphilis before can’t use the test to rule out a new infection. It’s worth noting that home-use HIV tests have been FDA-approved for more than a decade, although they also require follow-up testing for positive results. Just because these tests are FDA-approved doesn’t guarantee they are covered by insurance; you can check with your insurer to find out what it will cost you. If it’s not covered, it’s worth checking to see if you live in a part of the country where free HIV, gonorrhea and chlamydia, or trichomonas test kits are available (the American Sexual Health Association lists free HIV and STI home test kit resources). Most of this testing would be free or low-cost if you got it in person, says Elizabeth Finley, the senior director of communications and programs at the National Coalition of STD Directors. “There’s some equity implications” in the reality that higher-income people can afford to pay out of pocket for the convenience of home-based testing, while lower-income people often cannot, she says. Choosing a test is just the beginning An array of companies have created home-based STI tests that haven’t yet been approved by the FDA, including ones for hepatitis B and C, which are often overlooked. Non-approval doesn’t mean a test is garbage — it just makes it harder to be certain that it’s effective at doing what you want it to do. “There are no real guardrails for the companies in terms of the quality they have to offer to customers,” Finley says. “The tests have to work, but I’m not sure customers are fully informed about, if they see a test available on social media, ‘Is this a good one? Is this a bad one?’” The appeal of these tests is strong for people who hate having someone else get their genital sample. Many of them have you pee in a cup, pinprick your own finger and blot blood on a card, or swab a range of body parts at home (including your vagina or penis, your butt, or your throat), then mail that sample to a lab that runs the usual tests on it, which can be retrieved in an online portal. Home testing kits also often make an end-run around the process of getting to a brick-and-mortar clinic to figure out next steps or pick up medication. Many use a telehealth platform to connect people who test positive for an STI with clinicians, who can provide counseling, suggest ways to get partners tested, and mail some medications directly to patients. Curing many STIs requires one or more antibiotic injections, and experts sometimes recommend additional evaluation after a diagnosis. Both of these scenarios require an in-person visit with a clinician. If you test positive for one of these STIs, your test company’s telehealth provider should direct you to a clinic where you can see an in-person clinician. Giving people the option of self-directed sexual health care isn’t just good for people’s sense of autonomy — it’s also a sensible response to impending health worker shortages. Out of concern for an inadequate global supply of clinicians, the World Health Organization has recently recommended a range of self-care interventions for people all over the world, among them many of the latest innovations in STI self-sampling and testing. It’s about time, Manabe says: “We’re not trusting the public enough.”

It’s not normal for the East Coast to be on fire

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vox.com

Over the weekend, a very small wildfire broke out in a hilly and densely vegetated area of Prospect Park, a swath of green space in Brooklyn. The 2-acre blaze drew about 100 firefighters as residents were warned to stay out of the park. Meanwhile, on the New York-New Jersey border, another blaze, the Jennings Creek wildfire, has burned thousands of acres, sending smoke drifting across much of New York City and killing an 18-year-old New York state forest ranger volunteer who died while responding to the fire. Is this typical? Not exactly. But the Northeast has been under severe drought conditions for weeks. These fires, and the dozens of others currently burning in the Northeast and across the Ohio River Valley, as well as the scores more in the Western US, are the consequence of months of unseasonably hot and dry weather across large swaths of the country. Okay, pause: What is a drought? Simply put, a drought is a dry period — that is, a long stretch of time without any rain or snow — that leads to a water shortage. Droughts can (and do) happen all over the world; they are not just a characteristic of a desert or a regional problem. Extreme drought can stress landscapes and water tables, regardless of whether a city is built on top of them or not. If a drought lasts long enough, people in that place can lose access to water. This story was first featured in the Today, Explained newsletter Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day. Sign up here. While the Western United States is associated with aridity, it is remarkable to see this extent of drought spread across the Northeast. And current forecasts show that the conditions will persist for weeks or even months. “It’s problematic to see drought in all parts of the country. It’s not just a regional issue,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center. “Regardless of where you’re at, drought can and will impact you.” Firefighters extinguished the Prospect Park fire. Rain mercifully moved into New York on Sunday night and snuffed much of the smoke drifting across the East Coast, obscuring the fact that a cluster of fires in New Jersey continued to burn. As the smoke fades, attention shouldn’t: Millions of people in the Northeast remain under red flag wildfire warnings, which signal conditions where anything that can generate a spark could likely lead to a fire. But we all live with drought, extreme heat, and fire now — and our relationship to water is connected to just how bad things could get. Why is the drought so severe? For much of the country, October was an extremely hot and dry month. We are currently on pace for 2024 to become the hottest year ever recorded, a declaration that forecasters from the World Meteorological Organization are making with confidence even with more than a month left. According to the US Drought Monitor, the long periods of hot and dry conditions have left every state in the country facing drought — an unprecedented statistic. There isn’t a single driver responsible for the scope of the current drought conditions. Even as our global average temperatures are rising thanks to climate change, our short-term weather patterns will shift all of the time. For example, despite Hurricane Helene bringing heaps of moisture to places like North Carolina a little more than a month ago, even western North Carolina is now abnormally dry. How can that be? Because it’s been that hot and dry in the weeks since — enough to erase any sign of a so-called thousand-year event. “When I started looking at data over the past six months, you see that places like New Jersey, the Ohio River Valley, much of the plains have 12 to 15 inches below normal precipitation for this time of the year,” Fuchs said. “New York has a deficit of 10 inches. That’s very extreme for this part of the country.” And then there are these warmer temperatures later in the year that end up amplifying the ongoing drought’s worst effects. Temperatures usually fall significantly by November. Trees will drop their leaves and go dormant. Certain critters hibernate or go into low-power mode. Snow begins accumulating in the higher elevations, banking moisture that will melt out — gradually — during the warmer periods. But when it’s 80 degrees in New York in November, trees and vegetation are still consuming water. There’s an extra period of demand on the overall water system, and that taxes water sources — lakes and streams begin to draw down and the ground holds onto less moisture. Vegetation that grew earlier in the year begins to dry out — and fuel wildfires. “It really doesn’t take much time to transition to a hot and dry environment and you all of a sudden have all of this extra fuel for wildfires,” Fuchs said. “This is the perfect mix for fires to blossom.” Should we expect more wildfires? Drought is a normal part of our climate, but it’s not normal to see this much drought across so much of the country. Resources to help you understand how drought will impact where you live There are two monitors produced by the US Drought Monitor from the Climate Prediction Center that reflect what areas in the US will be most affected by drought and water scarcity. These projections, which update regularly, give a real-time pulse on conditions across the country and are created through a partnership between the US Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). These tools are also helpful in getting a clearer picture of how the climate is impacting your local landscape and will give you the heads-up if you’re likely to face water shortages. The monthly outlook is a great snapshot for this moment in time. It provides a gradient of drought conditions, shaded by severity, impacting the country. If you live in a place where drought is persisting, conserve your water and be aware of acute wildfire risk. The seasonal outlook currently shows projection through January 2025 and will update again in mid-November to show conditions expected to the end of February. This map is helpful for getting a longer-range view of aridity and whether it’s likely to lessen or become more severe. This extreme period of dry weather is a part of the larger picture that scientists have come to expect: that our weather will become more extreme and unpredictable and that we will collectively experience more pronounced swings from incredibly dry periods to incredibly wet periods. Those dry periods, Fuchs says, are connected to warmer temperatures persisting into what should be the colder parts of the year and ramping up the demand on our water systems. That demand, by the way, includes water consumption by you and me and everyone else. Just multiply our daily showers, drawing from the tap, running our dishwashers and washing machines, washing our cars, watering our house plants (and so on) by the millions of people who live in a watershed, the area that shares a single water source for a particular region. If there’s too much demand on an already stressed landscape, the wildfire risk increases as water levels in streams and in our water table drop. To better navigate the conditions we see today and the climate we should expect in the future, we need to understand that no place is immune to drought conditions, Fuchs said. “Even if you think you’ve not been impacted by drought in the past, it’s increasingly important for people to know where their water comes from and conserve it the best you can at any time,” he said. “We’re actively experiencing severe climate change impacts,” said Aradhna Tripati, a climate scientist from UCLA who helped author the latest national climate assessment. Climate change “is no longer theoretical or a distant threat, an abstract one. It is not something that happens in the future here. It is not something only happening in places far away from where we live. All weather is now being affected.” Yes — even in New York City.

The election was a loss for Palestinians — and not just because Trump won

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vox.com

As much as this issue resonated with many voters, America’s politicians were not ready to rethink the country’s relationship with Israel. | Joshua Lott/Washington Post/Getty Images Since the war in Gaza began, the threat of a protest vote — in which voters would choose to abstain from the presidential election or vote for third-party candidates who had no shot of winning — hung over Democrats’ heads because of President Joe Biden’s unconditional support for Israel and its right-wing government. When Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee, her lack of willingness to distance herself from Biden on this issue didn’t help alleviate that threat. Meanwhile, Donald Trump accused Democrats of not being sufficiently pro-Israel. Throughout the election, pro-Palestinian voters tried to put pressure on President Biden to change course, organizing protests on college campuses across the country and forming various campaigns to punish him at the ballot box. One group, the Uncommitted National Movement, asked Democratic voters to cast their ballots for “uncommitted” instead of Biden during the primaries, and they amassed hundreds of thousands of votes — enough to secure delegates at the Democratic National Convention. But no matter how much pro-Palestinian voters pushed candidates to give them a better vision for how to end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, none were willing to meaningfully address the concerns of pro-Palestinian voters. And for Americans who regarded Gaza as one of their top concerns, their choice boiled down to either punishing Democrats or stopping Trump. The result was an election in which neither outcome would have been a win for Palestinians. While it’s impossible to point to any single issue to explain why Harris lost to Trump, it’s clear that Harris lost at least some voters because of the Biden administration’s stance on Gaza. And now Trump, who vowed to ban Palestinian refugees from entering the United States and said he would revoke visas from foreign students who are deemed antisemitic, is the president-elect. Voters wanted an actual plan to stop the war. Candidates weren’t interested. When it came to which candidate had a better vision for how to end the war in Gaza, neither Biden, Harris, nor Trump offered a compelling message. President Biden offered Israel unqualified support, sending billions of dollars in military aid. His administration defended Israel even as it committed horrific war crimes, including hospital bombings. Instead of reckoning with the rapidly rising death toll in Gaza, he cast doubt on the numbers that the Gaza Ministry of Health had put out — numbers that humanitarian groups and even the US government had deemed reliable in the past. At times, Harris, after she became the Democratic nominee, tried calling out Israel for the staggering death toll, saying that “far too many” civilians had been killed and emphasizing that how Israel conducted itself during this war mattered. She called for an end to the war, but after having served in the administration that financed Israel’s war with virtually no conditions, it wasn’t a particularly convincing message. Harris also muddied her outreach — or lack thereof — to Arab Americans by coupling any sympathetic statement about Palestinians with a staunch defense of Israel. At her DNC speech, for example, she said the death toll in Gaza was “heartbreaking” and stated that Palestinians’ right to self-determination ought to be realized — reiterating long-held US talking points — but also prefaced that statement by again justifying the war itself. When she was asked whether she was worried about losing Arab American voters because of Israel’s conduct, she said, “There are so many tragic stories coming from Gaza,” but that “the first and most tragic story is October 7.” For his part, Trump didn’t try to say that he would be any better than Biden on Gaza. Earlier this year, he said Israel should wrap up the war and “get back to peace and stop killing people.” But he said it not in the context of sympathy for Palestinians, but out of concern that Israel was making itself look bad. “And the other thing is I hate — they put out tapes all the time. Every night, they’re releasing tapes of a building falling down. They shouldn’t be releasing tapes like that,” he said. “That’s why they’re losing the PR war.” Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also seemed more concerned about the lost opportunity for development in Gaza than the human suffering, saying that the strip’s waterfront properties could be very valuable. “There was no ocean as far as that was concerned. They never took advantage of it,” Trump said. “You know, as a developer, it could be the most beautiful place — the weather, the water, the whole thing, the climate.” As to how Trump would deal with Netanyahu, he indicated that he would let the Israeli prime minister be even more unrestrained, saying that Netanyahu was “doing a good job” and that Biden was holding him back. Throughout the election, Palestinians were a target Ultimately, whether Trump would end up being worse than Biden or Harris on this issue didn’t necessarily resonate with pro-Palestinian voters. For them, what’s been happening over the last year already represented the worst. Israel, after all, has already been credibly accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. As one Georgia voter told me in the week before the election, “In no way do I imagine Trump is better for Palestine … [but] I can’t imagine it worse.” That helps explain why so many Arab Americans came out against Harris last Tuesday. In Dearborn, Michigan, an Arab-majority city, Trump won 43 percent of the vote compared to Harris’s 36 percent. In 2020, Biden won the city with 69 percent of the vote, and though Harris lost there, Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American, won her reelection to Congress with 62 percent of the vote. As much as this issue resonated with many voters, America’s politicians were not ready to rethink the country’s relationship with Israel, even as the war escalated to the point where now over 44,000 Palestinians have been killed. In July, when Netanyahu gave an address to Congress, he was met with a standing ovation. From the start, Palestinians were a target in this election. During the Republican primaries, candidates got on the debate stage and competed over who would be the most pro-Israel president. At that point, it had been a month since Hamas’s October 7 attack, and Israel’s war on Gaza had already killed over 10,000 Palestinians, 40 percent of whom were children. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would tell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job once and for all with these butchers,” referring to Hamas. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said, “You cannot negotiate with evil.” Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley repeated a line she had already tested out on the campaign trail: “Finish them.” She would later write that on an artillery shell during a visit to Israel. As for Trump, he even hurled the word “Palestinian” as an insult. At each turn, no matter how devastating the war became, Palestinians were humiliated. Pro-Palestinian protesters were denigrated. And voters who sympathized with Palestinians in Gaza were scolded. That left voters with no tangible options to improve the situation in Gaza at the ballot box, prompting many to believe that the best way to be heard is by sending a message that reckless foreign policy will cost incumbents votes. Even as some voters tried to turn the election into a referendum on Biden’s Gaza policy, the reality was that no candidate was willing to promise anything beyond the status quo. So Palestinians and their supporters found plenty of reason to believe that whatever the election outcome would be, it could only range from bad to worse. That feeling of hopelessness paved the way for a protest vote to take hold. While Biden’s Israel policy, in the end, might not have been the deciding factor for much of the electorate, in some pockets of the country, voters tried to show that they shouldn’t be ignored in the only way they could: by voting against the party that allowed Gaza to turn into a “graveyard for children.” It’s hard to know what the next few months, or next four years, will look like for Palestine. But there aren’t many signs of hope — if there are any at all. As the election drew to a close, Israelis announced that they are nearing a “full evacuation” of northern Gaza and that “there is no intention” to allow Palestinians to return. That sounds like only the beginning of a new phase in the war.